It’s Time to Draw a Line in the Sand

The traditional urban school district is broken, can’t be fixed, and must be replaced.

• Andy Smarick, Urban School Systems of the Future, 2012

People were shocked when Andy Smarick wrote this about America’s urban school districts 10 years ago. But today, very few urban school districts have shown any noticeable progress in getting black, brown, and poor kids to learn at higher levels. Instead, many of these schools, and other schools not located in America’s cities, are encountering even greater struggles when it comes to providing a quality learning environment for our kids. It seems Smarick was right, not just about our urban schools but many, many more across the country.

Around the time Smarick was issuing his battle cry of broke, can’t be fixed, must be replaced, I was serving as the executive director of a Houston-based educational non-profit. A group of charter school operators, along with several education-focused non-profits began meeting to discuss the possibility of our organizations forming an alternate learning system to compete with the Houston Independent School District for enrollment. We had convinced ourselves that too many Houston families needed a better option and that we were the ones to take on the current school district when it came to a better learning environment for kids and families looking for options other than HISD. We even had a name for the new learning organization. It was going to be called the Houston Public School System.

The story of what happened next demonstrates the power of the traditional school system and the paradigm of school in general. When it came to the 11^th hour, time for the charter school operators and the non-profits to form the Houston Public School System, organizations started to bail like the passengers on the Titanic. The charter school operators bailed because they were afraid their reputation would be damaged working with others they thought might not be up to their level in terms of commitment or performance. Most of the non-profits backed away because their budgets would be directly impacted if HISD decided not to do work with a newfound competitor. You see most of these non-profits received money from HISD and were afraid they might have to close their doors if they lost HISD’s support. Luckily, or not so lucky, my non-profit wasn’t doing any work with HISD at the time because of the then superintendent didn’t like me or my organization because we didn’t seem to get in line with his agenda. In the end, with only two non-profits left standing, mine and another, the Houston Public School System never materialized, and thousands of families were forced to stay with the Houston Independent School District, for better or worse.

A Washington D.C.-based group called Education Reimagined launched several years ago. Education Reimagined represents hundreds of organizations around today that are convinced we need to do something different when it comes to our children’s learning. While forming, they convened a group of divergent thinkers who developed a lexicon intended to provide practitioners with access to a common language for acting on and sharing the future. Included in this lexicon were lessons on learner-centered paradigms, learner agency, socially embedded learning, personalized, relevant, and contextualized learning, open-walled learning, and competency-based learning. All of it sounded, and still sounds, wonderful for those of us who were looking for a very different way to achieve deeper learning for our kids. The problem with Education Reimagined, and many others like them, is that they convinced themselves early on that schools and school districts were able to do this type of transformation work large scale. Turns out after years of working with schools, Education Reimagined has gone a different route. They now emphasize community-based learning, but still seem to want to work with schools and school districts within a community landscape to introduce better learning practices. The Big Questions Institute, co-founded by Will Richardson and Homa Tavangar, seems to be even more confusing when it comes to figuring out what their end game looks like. Richardson has shared some great thinking on learner-based practice over the years (his book Freedom to Learn is definitely worth a read,) but he and Tavangar seem overly interested today in working with schools and school districts to make them into learner-centered places. They appear to think current school people like teachers and principals can make this shift. I think they are wrong.

I worked in schools for 35 years and I’ve got news for groups like Education Reimagined and the Big Questions Institute. Most schools and districts aren’t interested in changing, or they are interested in changing on their own terms. Schools and districts are bureaucracies, and what we know about bureaucracies is that they try to live in their current state to another day without change. Furthermore, bureaucracies like schools will attempt to coop the best new ideas out there to fit into their current practice so that the bureaucracy can live to another day, month, year, decade, century.

It’s time for an ultimatum. It’s time to draw a line in the sand. You are either on the side of traditional schools and committed to fixing them, or you aren’t. We can’t behave like the Houston non-profits who walked away from the Houston Public School idea because they were frightened they would lose funding and have to close their doors. We can’t behave like Education Reimagined, the Big Questions Institute, or the hundreds of groups out there like them, who have convinced themselves schools are interested in becoming learner-centered places. Most aren’t, and I would argue never will be.

It pains me to say it, since I worked in public education for my entire career, but I’m going to say it anyway. There’s no 50/50 here. The stakes are too high. Too many schools are failing miserably, yet we continue to give them a pass when they say, pretty much every year, that this year will be different and kids will learn. It’s time to walk away from supporting failure and excuses if we are determined to help our kids, especially those black, brown, and poor ones, to gain skills, achieve their goals, and become productive, positive citizens of our world. It’s time to invest in a new learning system, and we can’t do that if we are trying to resuscitate the old system.

We can’t have it both ways. Sorry.

Til tomorrow. SVB