Who’s At Fault When It Comes to Faulty Execution?

I’m back at the keyboard. I hope everyone had a relaxing and enjoyable 4^th of July.

For years now, there has been a misunderstanding throughout our public school system that somehow there were policies, primarily enacted by state legislatures, that prevented the traditional school leadership across our country from inventing a better system of learning for our kids. If you talk to district administrators or building principals, they will tell you that the reason they can’t do more creative things for their young learners is because their state just won’t allow it.

But when one starts to investigate and research current state policies as they apply to creating better learning options for our young learners, it seems like state legislatures aren’t the guilty party when it comes to preventing more creative learning opportunities for our kids. True, most states packaged their creative opportunities in charter school bills years ago. But it was mainly state boards of education, local school boards, and traditional district and building leadership that has kept most of our current public school system the same over the past 150 years.

I read with interest during my time away an article written by Sarah Bishop-Root for Education Reimagined. Bishop-Root writes,

“Despite the strong headwinds generated by the conventional education system, learner-centered leaders, practitioners, and advocates are fearless explorers. They find a way to navigate obstacles while holding learners at the center. The changing dynamics of learner needs, parent demand, and evolving K-12 education policy landscapes across the United States are generating even more challenges. While there are many pieces to manage, we are surfacing the policy and conditions for stakeholders across communities to support the co-creation of community-based ecosystems of learning.”

“This work requires tilling new fields to plant seeds that can sprout an equitable learner-centered future. The power of the ecosystem vision is that it provides a new lens or design frame for how existing policy opportunities can be understood and woven together in new ways – with the ultimate aim of system transformation. In the context of the conventional system, when education policies are passed, they are at risk of not being amplified, or they are often implemented in programmatic siloes. This ultimately does not allow the intent of a learner-centered policy to come to fruition. The potential of these policy opportunities can be optimized when they are leveraged together to bring the learner-centered design elements to life: learner agency, socially embedded; personalized, relevant, and contextualized; open-walled; and competency-based.”

“After conducting a national landscape analysis of state policy and conditions from a holistic and nonpartisan view, we observed that there are states who currently have a promising mix of policies and conditions that can be leveraged as a starting place to connect policy to ecosystem design. While it may require creativity, communities can leverage the opportunities at hand and while doing so, surface the obstacles that must be addressed within states to support learner-centered ecosystems.”

“The research surfaced three categories that were explored:

Learner-driven policies that enable learner agency.

Policies that generate flexibility for learner-centered design freedom.

State conditions that could contribute to or inhibit learner-centered ecosystem design.”

When we launched a personalized learning lab school several years ago within the Houston Museum District, the Texas Legislature would have said they had passed no laws or regulations preventing a learning organization from enabling learner agency, passed no laws preventing policies that generated flexibility for learner-centered design freedom, nor endorsed any regulations that could have inhibited learner-centered ecosystem design.

The problem was never with the policy.

The problem was traditional attitude displayed by state and local decision-makers when it came to implementing new and creative practice designed to benefit each young learner as they attempted to fulfill their learning plan goals.

It wasn’t the state policymakers, as in the state legislatures, that were the problem. It was the leadership at the Texas Education Agency (the state’s department of education), the state board of education, and the numerous local school boards who looked at our pilot and its impressive reading, writing, and problem-solving achievement results and just turned the other way.

Bishop-Root would have been better served if she had looked at the decision-maker layers below state legislators and policymakers. They aren’t the ones slowing learner-based opportunity down, although their insistence to get involved with calendar decisions when it comes to learning time can be frustrating. It’s the traditional bureaucrat, both at the state and local level, that is slowing the learner-centered movement down.

Til tomorrow. SVB