Thoughtworld

I had just dipped back into Hirsch's The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them when Lisa J. posted a link to a lecture by Terrence Moore, whose book The Story-Killers: A Common-Sense Case Against the Common Core turns out to be a barn burner: a barn burner and a tour de force, take your pick.

Reading Moore, I have the recurring perception that "real" conservatives, conservatives of the heart, simply have to leave the public schools because the gap between Pearson and a "conservative of the heart" can't be bridged. Not on the ELA side. (I say "Pearson" because the most appalling section of Moore's book is  Chapter 7, a lengthy analysis of Pearson's Common Core literature textbook for high school juniors.)

My sense of "liberals of the heart," at least where Pearson is concerned, is much less clear. Any liberal who is well-educated in history or literature would be appalled by The American Experience Common Core Edition, but how many Americans are well-educated in history and literature these days? Certainly not me. If you don't know anything about the Declaration of Independence, you also don't know why it's so wrong to base an entire discussion of the Declaration of Independence on the breezy assertion that when Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal," he really meant all white men are created equal. (I didn't know.)

So I'm guessing that, for many politically liberal parents, textbooks like Pearson's will seem not-completely-horrible, superficially at least.

Then again, Moore's sobriquet for the powers behind Common Core is "the arch testers." He is no slouch in the anti-testing department, which I had heretofore assumed was the province of parents voting for Democrats. And here in New York, of course, the parents who actually are "opting out" are largely left of center (I assume), if only because the population is largely left of center. The gap between liberal and conservative parents looks pretty small to me.

But who knows? I can't get a clear read on the politics of Common Core. But, more importantly, I can't get a read on what is happening inside the institution of public education. All I can come up with is that someone, at some level of decision making, has messed up very badly. Very badly.

Which brings me to the reason I opened up my Blogger window in the first place, which was to post a quote from sociologist Diane Vaughn in the Times video on the Challenger explosion:

"We can never resolve the problem of complexity, but you have to be sensitive to your organization and how it works. While a lot of us work in complex organizations, we don't really realize the way the organizations that we inhabit completely inhabit us."

Diane Vaunghn (The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA)
Major Malfunction: Revisiting Challenger | New York Times

"The way the organizations we inhabit completely inhabit us": Exactly!

She could be speaking of Hirsch's thoughtworld:

Why do educators persist in advocating the very artifact, anti-rote-learning, antiverbal practices that have led to poor results--persist in urging them, indeed, even more intensively than before?

The basic answer is this: Within the educational community, there is currently no thinkable alternative. Part of essential American educational doctrine has consisted of the disparagement of so-called "traditional" education. The long dominance of antitraditional rhetoric in our teacher-training institutions has ensured that competing, nonprogressive principles are not readily available within their walls. No professor at an American education school is going to advocate pro-rote-learning, profact, or proverbal pedagogy. Since there is only one true belief, expressed in one constantly repeated catechism, the heretical suggestion that the creed itself might be faulty cannot be uttered. To question progressive doctrine would be to put in doubt the identity of the education profession itself. Its foundational premise is that progressive principles are right. Being right, they cannot possibly be the cause of educational ineffectiveness.

[snip]

In sum, since progressive doctrine cannot be at fault, the only proper cure for our ailing schools is homeopathic "reform," that is, even stronger doses of progressive principles administered even more intensely. E.D. Hirsch 

There it is. There is the explanation for why the Common Core reading standards, in spite of their references to the importance of knowledge, are turning English into social studies.

Review of The Challenger Launch Decision by Samudra Vijay

"it's the culture, stupid" part 2

Deborah Kenny on Harlem Village Academies

the sorting machine

the sorting machine

I'm sick as a dog^* -- who knew stress had anything to do with the immune system? 

And, on a directly related subject: Who Killed Health Care? by Regina Herzlinger is great. Wonderful! Especially the chapter on 'dysfunctional culture.' 

I've been planning for months now to write a post called "It's the culture, stupid," a concept that came to me after re-reading Richard DuFour's "Restructuring Isn't Enough." Turns out Herzlinger has a section titled exactly that: It's the culture, stupid. 

Before I retire to my bedroom, here's an excerpt from her book:

"You won't believe what happened to me this week. I checked an elderly diabetic into my hospital. The guy had a lot of troubles. A great guy, but he just can't manage his diabetes. I had operated on his foot a few weeks ago. And what do you know? As soon as he heals, he goes on a bender. His sugar goes out of control. He was in terrible shape. I checked him into the hospital because I suspected he had an aneurysm ... If he tested positive, I knew I had to operate immediately, the next day. That baby could blow any minute and he would bleed to death.

"Well, the PCP (primary care physician) who is my patient's gatekeeper just called me. Because he represents the HMO, the gatekeeper has to approve the bill. He thinks I should not have admitted my patient into the hospital for the tests. He questioned my judgment. He told me I was practicing bad, wasteful medicine. He threatened to throw me out of the insurer's network of doctors if I kept this up. I lost my temper. I told him in no uncertain terms that he just does not understand my kind of medicine. He's out of his league-out of his depth."

[snip]

I have heard Paul's plaint many times in the course of the research I've conducted for my Harvard Business School case studies and after the lectures I've delivered to hundreds of health care groups. I know from decades of interactions with business organizations that when colleagues cannot communicate with each other without rancor and misunderstandings, when competence and motives are questioned without cause, the organizational culture has gone terribly wrong. In successful organizations, confrontations of this sort lead to intervention and analysis by upper managers, and ultimately to a plan to correct the problem ... but in most managed care organizations, this kind of culture does not exist.

[snip]

Here's how a successful health care organization handled a similar problem.

Joan is the Oklahoma-based technical specialist for a firm that manufactures life-support equipment. She is notified that the device in a Louisiana hospital is not working properly. The hospital has no backup and has tried all the usual remedies to no avail. This too is a life-or-death situation that calls for immediate action. But, unlike Paul, who had to "consult" the PCP before he could act, Joan can proceed to do what she knows to do: she e-mails a request to her manager for permission to ship an expensive replacement device ASAP. Permission is expeditiously granted. She also knows that if she does not receive a response within 15 minutes, she is authorized to proceed on her own. Here, everyone cooperates: all efforts are properly focused on the right and expeditious thing to do for the patient's well-being.

Why are these two situations so glaringly different? It is not the existence of clear procedures in one case and not the other. They could have made a difference, of course. But the core difference is that Joan's organization has a culture that lends itself to the development of such protocols and Paul's does not.

People in an organization whose culture relies on a shared vision are positive and action oriented rather than negative and blame oriented. They want to work things out, find solutions, and serve their customers. ... The culture helps them realize that a confrontation is not a clash of personalities, but rather a sign that something deeper is going wrong and a signal that it must be fixed to preserve the organization's ability to perform its mission.

In health care, a productive organizational culture means finding ways to help patients. But such cultures have become rarer and rarer in managed care organizations and hospitals for reason that we will explore....

Who Killed Health Care?

pp. 29-32

That's what we're missing in so many public schools: a culture focused on making sure all students succeed. 

Here's DuFour, writing in 1995:

Ten years ago both the structure and the culture of Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, reflected it commitment to the traditional task of sorting and selecting students. 

[snip]

In this structure, teachers saw themselves as quality control inspectors. Their job was to present information as clearly as possible, assess the aptitude of each student, and promote student success by placing students at the appropriate ability level. Assigning grades according to a bell-shaped curve was a common practice that, by definition, limited the number of students who could achieve at a high level and ensured that a certain percentage were destined to fail. The “teacher as quality control inspector” had little need to collaborate with others. There was no compelling reason to coordinate curriculum, instruction, or assessment with colleagues teaching the same course.

Teachers were not only isolated from one another but from parents as well. No active parent organization existed other than booster groups for specific student activities. Teachers were required to communicate with parents only when a student was in danger of failing. Further, the primary means available to communicate student failure was an individual letter to each parent. Thus, parents received a progress report only if failure was imminent. The majority of parents had no idea how their child was doing until they received a repot card in the 10^th week of the semester. 

“Restructuring Isn’t Enough by Richard DuFour

Educational Leadership April 1995 p. 33-24

^* How sick is that, anyway? I've never seen my dogs take to their beds with fever & sore throat.

All Things PLC (Richard DuFour)

If Health Care Were Run Like Retail by Regina Herzlinger