brownelearning

In the 1995 film, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Richard Dreyfuss played a high school orchestra teacher. When his program was cut, the PE teacher/football coach visited him to offer his condolences. The coach sincerely speculated that any program could get the axe. The former music teacher replied:

The day they cut the football budget in this state, that will be the end of Western Civilization as we know it!

Well, that day may be getting closer, especially for my former district in San Jose, California. According to the Mercury News (who predictably only interview students from their favorite one out of the eleven high schools in the district), the superintendent has pushed forward a proposal to eliminate all interscholastic sports to save money for classrooms.

The article focuses on students who claim that sports are the only reason they stay in school and that the GPA requirement for competition motivates them to do well. The harsh reality is that administrators in America today aren’t celebrated for having students with C averages; they are fired for not having enough students pass the state tests. It would be better for the superintendent if those students didn’t come to school.

Unless school acountability measures take into account the dropout factors, programs that support low-scoring students will continue to be threatened.

I remember when Lou Gerstner came to IBM. I was only in high school, but my father was a senior engineer at the Cottle Road facility in Silicon Valley. I was a co-op student at that same campus the last three summers of Gerstner’s reign.

Gerstner has a op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal wherein he offers the president-elect several suggestions for transforming education. Among others, he recommends that states dissolve local school districts and buy wholly into a national standards system.

These suggestions will fail miserably.

How do I know? Besides (as Gerstner points out) the last 40 years of educational reforms as evidence of their futility, I also have nature as an example. As Linus Torvalds (in whose operating system the post-Gertner IBM invested $1,000,000,000) rightly pointed out, an organic evolutionary approach is preferable to a single-decision-maker configuration:

I’m deadly serious: we humans have never been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking.

Don’t underestimate the power of survival of the fittest.

And don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence much too much credit.

Reforms delivered from an ivory tower or a think tank are analogous to single mutations in natural selection. Just as the survival of a species does not depend on a single mutation, but on thousands of parallel mutations, the chance that a single reform (or a finite set of them) will fundamentally improve American education is suicidal. Curtailing local interests in favor of further national governance is contrapositive to evolving education.

The last four decades of attempted reformation have recursively moved more and more educational authority to Washington DC, at the expense of local priorities. Each iteration of failed reform required more power consolidated into the federal government.

What is the solution? I don’t know. I do not think as highly of my own intellect as Gerstner does of his own, but I do know that none of us has the answer to our educational challenges. What I do know is that endowing local educational agencies with the authority to innovate is more likely to reveal useful reforms than are the opinings of ex-CEOs and establishmentarian academics.