A Stake in the Ground

When tools and processes are borrowed from an external source—such as a book, a model that worked sometime somewhere, or an outside agency—they will usually remain separated and isolated from the original ethos. When that happens, those tools and processes lose their human pliability and become a machine (like the Great American Machine of Education). Jack Hess describes this as transactional work instead of relationship building. Projects that are transactional bring everyone together to get “it” done. But, when “it” is finished, the relationships will end.

Process is simply a proxy for the ethos behind it. However, that ethos must be examined over and over in order to keep our tools and processes in alignment with it.

At some point (early on and often throughout the project) we have to express or declare the founding ethos and our common interest (see Figure 4.1). That is our stake in the ground, our manifesto. It declares our guiding principles, our starting point, and a call to action. If we don't plant a stake in the ground, we have no foundation for advancing; we don't know where we are or where we are going. The lack of a common starting point explains a lot about our political gridlock, contentious debates, high-pressure tactics, slander, and a continuing focus on what divides us. We can build what we think is a “great” new school or implement a new model of learning, but if it is accomplished through strife, then strife becomes the ethos and that will be the product. Disagreement and conflict will be baked into the whole project. And it will fail.

Balfour Beatty, the third largest contractor of schools in the United States, is one of the leading companies in this effort. Chief Information Officer Mark Konchar shared a valuable insight from research that examined several years of successful and problematic projects: “One hundred percent of projects that start off badly end poorly!”

In full disclosure, we did not set out to write a manifesto. Our research, interviews, and continuing conversations among ourselves and nationally prominent voices simply brought us to a clear recognition of self-evident realities. We've also written this as a manifesto in order to shape and guide our process, not to impose our view on others.

For the sake of stakeholder alignment, we have tried to identify and embrace what we all have in common and what we want to accomplish together. That is so clearly missing in so much of our national, regional, and local debates. At some point we have to ask are we all trying to solve the same problem?

That may sound obvious and simple on paper but it is an art, a delicate and deep art. Like many leaders, I know that art, but it often eludes me. Finding a core beginning point often seems like trying to land an F-18 on an aircraft carrier at night in a stormy sea.

Getting Beyond Whack-a-Mole

Much of the conflict around school reform is plagued by a lack of a center, a common starting point. So it has become a game of whack-a-mole. You know, problems pop up all around us and we take a whack at them: Common core—whack. Vouchers—whack. Teacher unions—whack. Charter schools—whack. Poverty—whack. Special needs—whack. Funding—whack. Testing—whack. There is no end because there is no center.

The movie Moneyball contains a great scene in which Billy Beane, the General Manager for the Oakland A's, played by Brad Pitt, lands his scouts on that “aircraft carrier” of finding the core beginning point, the agreement about the real problem.

The A's were a low-budget secondary-market baseball team that somehow consistently outperformed other teams, despite the other teams' much higher payrolls. But then it all unraveled. After the 1992 season, when the A's fell one game short of reaching the World Series, other teams took their three best players through free agency. That represented a sea change for the A's; they were simply unable to compete financially with the other teams. During the off-season, Beane and his scouts huddled in their offices to figure out how to rebuild and pull off another miracle of fielding another winning team.

Beane was fed up with the futility of trying to pull a rabbit out of the hat every year and then losing his best players to free agency at the end of the season. His scouts, however, were still playing whack-a-mole and trying to solve the problem the same way they had for years. They were stuck (as school reform is) defining the problem the same way as every other team. They saw symptoms, not root causes.

The turning point came when Beane kept asking his scouts, “What's the problem?” They kept answering (with increasing frustration) with old and exhausted reasoning. Finally, Beane declared what I call the Beane Manifesto:

The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's 50 feet of crap, and then there's us. It's an unfair game. And now we've been gutted. We're like organ donors for the rich. Boston's taken our kidneys, Yankees have taken our heart. And you guys just sit around talking the same old “good body” nonsense like we're selling jeans . . . We've got to think differently. We are the last dog at the bowl. You see what happens to the runt of the litter? He dies.²

Suddenly, all the lights came on. Beane and his scouts found the starting point, the real problem. As a result they stopped playing whack-a-mole.

K–12: “What's the Problem?”

When our MindShift team had been working on the K–12 project for six months, we went to Columbus, Indiana (see Figure 4.2). I wanted the group to touch the uniqueness of that place and its ethos. On our second day, I wanted to hear what every person in the group saw. After six months, I needed to know if we were in agreement about the true problem. Had we struck a common chord or were we still in the whack-a-mole phase?

To my surprise, the group voiced common and harmonic chords about education as a kid-centered learning experience. That turned out to be a major pillar of our collective view. Public education can so easily become about anything and anyone except the kids! We build programs and structures and we choose curricula and hire teachers and build great bureaucracies, but, dammit, we forgot those at the very core of the venture.

The MindShift group saw learning in the context of a community, not an isolated place called “school.” In the following summits we built upon our experience in Columbus; we finally were able to craft a preamble that could set the stage for a conversation about education in a Post-Gutenberg era.

Preamble: A Case for Change

Our free public education system, a revolution of innovation in the mid-1800s, propelled our nation to heights never before imagined, and did so for the next 100 years. That system has been an integral pillar of that American promise: Our kids will all have an equal opportunity to grow beyond their parents and make the world better.

However, the success of the past now threatens our future. Education as an institution is attempting to compete in a race that is moving at the speed of thought. And we are driving a 575-year-old Gutenberg-powered buggy. Adding horses, improving the wheels, changing drivers, making stricter inspections, ejecting passengers who slow down the buggy, and brutally beating the horses only disguises the fact that the buggy is obsolete.

Google (and a vast constellation of virtual “tribes and nations”) now power our travel and reach. These new forces have eclipsed the Gutenberg realm with new rules and tools. It is painfully clear that attempting to run a Google race in a Gutenberg buggy is a futile strategy. We won't be able to spend enough, test enough, train enough, hire enough or hype enough. We can no longer keep our promise to the kids, for whom we ostensibly built the system. This generation and future generations have been scammed.

That's why 60 percent of kids have checked out and don't care by graduation. Their school experience is killing their creativity and crushing their hope. This “Oh, my God” level of disengagement, the rising achievement gap, dramatically low test performance, 60 percent college graduation rate, mounting debt, and other pathologies reveal a system beyond reform.

The conditions are so bad that in April 1983 (almost 35 years ago) a presidential commission report, “A Nation at Risk,” stated:

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.³

What was true then is worse today and rapidly declining. But now, the level of the crisis, the burning platform, means that it's time to declare the model and system obsolete, not simply broken. Unless we let go of the Gutenberg-powered Education Machine, its thinking, structures and culture, in order to embrace an open, distributed, collaborative, tailored, on-demand platform then we will simply continue to whack the most visible, urgent, or frightening mole. We will tackle one isolated symptom after another and never address the truth about the Great Machine.

Of course, we need a revolution, a transformation that is only capable at a local level through local stakeholders. And it has already started.

Self-Evident Truths

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.

—Albert Einstein

Certain turning points in history have signaled breaks from the prevailing insanity. At those points, certain individuals or groups have issued manifestos or declarations announcing, “We've had enough! Here is what we believe to be true and what we are committed to do.”

On October 31, 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the cathedral door, he captured what so many people instinctively knew, but had forgotten, about religious abuses. Coming approximately 75 years after Gutenberg converted a winepress into a printing press, Luther's manifesto has long been credited with launching the Protestant Reformation. But the ramifications of the theses spilled far beyond religion. They sparked a time of disruption, war, and (150 years later) a new form of governance called the nation-state was born.

Throughout history, others (like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, Steve Jobs, and Henry Ford) have also announced the end of one era and set a vision for a new one.

But, in 1999, four Internet pioneers and visionaries, Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger posted their “95 theses” on a website and later published them in a book (The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, Basic Books, 2001).

Although Cluetrain was less monumental and stately than other historical examples, it was a stunning cultural barometer; it detected an historic storm bearing down on the old ways. Much of what we see in the Education Machine versus learning revolution was signaled in Cluetrain. For example, it rejected the contrived corporate rhetoric that beeps and burps from the official versions. And it issued a clarion call for authenticity and humanness. As such, it spoke for millions of people; they all felt like the authors had wiretapped their brains—these guys were saying what so many had said or thought privately. For example, they saw:

1. Markets as conversations.
2. Organizations can no longer hide behind walls.
3. They must speak individually and with a human voice.
4. Their customers want conversations, not messages.
5. Speaking in a human voice is not some gimmick.
6. Companies that speak in “the pitch, or the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone”
7. Companies and other organizations must belong to a real community.
8. “Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping, and an overall culture of paranoia.”
9. If companies want their customers to pay, then the company must pay attention!
10. “We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with.”⁴

These were radical ideas in 1999, but they also spoke truths that had been emerging for a long time. The four understood the cataclysmic nature of the sea change in their time. Foreseeing the disruptive force unleashed by the Internet on traditional hierarchical organizations, they predicted a new order.

In our work on K–12 education, we could clearly see that virtually everything in The Cluetrain Manifesto applies to public education. Artifice is dead; authenticity is essential.

We have done our best to capture the sea change in education and learning, and we have attempted to state it as simply and clearly as possible. We have no illusions that our efforts compare to the great historical examples (or even to Cluetrain). We are just trying to build on what others saw in order to find common ground and commitment in our journey to unlock the joy of learning and true engagement.

Our stake in the ground or starting point revolves around a particular set of presuppositions. We don't claim these are the only ones or even the right ones. These simply came out of our deeper conversations during our summits around the country. They have served to align us around a common set of beliefs about the current state of the Education Machine and our understanding of the human nature of learning. Here is our manifesto. We have organized our beliefs into specific and coherent themes.

The Learning Manifesto

The Heart of Learning

1. Learning is a uniquely human experience.
2. Individuals are unique and learning engages that uniqueness.
3. Curiosity is the gyroscope of learning and creativity.
4. Life application is far more valuable than memorization and testing.
5. The seed of learning requires care and hope.
6. Learning is naturally valuable and intrinsically rewarding.
7. Personal initiative supersedes compliance.

The Education Machine

8. Prefers and prioritizes achievement over character.
9. When institutions exceed human scale they drive toward efficiency.
10. The obsession with high stakes testing often denies students the safety to fail.
11. Efficiency removes agency and common sense.
12. Efficient systems can deliver good service but can no longer care.
13. Every system has a perverse logic. When it exceeds human scale it begins to create the opposite of what it was originally designed for.
14. Public education is a monopoly and no monopoly has ever reformed itself.

The Fallout

15. Well-schooled does not equal well-educated.
16. Fifty percent of kids are at risk. That is a crushing indictment.
17. Zip code outweighs funding and programs in predicting success.
18. Teacher and student disengagement is the product of the Education Machine.
19. Kids know the difference between care and detachment. If both students and teachers are disengaged, then what's the point of maintaining business as usual?

The New World of Learning

20. We have departed from high content and are now in a high concept and context volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA)⁵ world. That new world requires new skills of critical thinking, communication, creativity, and collaboration.
21. We believe that inquiry—teams, projects, and life relevance—define the context for learning.
22. We should restore character and virtue by weaving it into the context of our learning, not viewing them as isolated subjects.
23. We believe that learning will have to begin at the cradle to extend to competency in order to reflect world realities and deliver social justice.
24. Technology, as it continues to lower costs and expand access, will continue to shift learning from the teacher at the front of the class to collaborative student-centered patterns.

The “What Works” Revolution

25. Holistic and locally led initiatives will resolve our program-rich and system-poor approaches to reform.
26. The answers to providing enriched learning reside in the community and among its stakeholders.
27. Creating social capital is the least expensive and most powerful lever for transformation.
28. Millions spent in early education saves billions in later intervention.

Nathan Siebenga, Principal at Hamilton District Christian High, succinctly summarizes what we have to leave and embrace to fulfill the manifesto:

1. To Thingify: Students + numbers/metrics + degrees + titles = school today.
2. To Humanize: Students + character development + societal integration + competency + inspired hope = the schools we desire.

Exposing Hidden Things

There was once an entire hidden universe, a shadow banking system, just below the visible and official banking system. It comprised an entire new language and had created (and concealed) strange financial instruments with acronyms like CDOs, CDSs, and SIVs. They fell outside of banking because insurance companies and hedge funds created them. The experts called them derivatives, but no one had a clue what that meant.

Fast-forward to August of 2007 when tremors of a major financial earthquake sent economists into a frenzy. When the Federal Reserve held its annual Economic Policy Symposium Proceedings in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, an odd economist and former managing director for PIMCO by the name of Paul McCulley, made a comment during the second day that detailed the looming and inevitable threat.

“The real issue,” according to McCulley, “going on right now is a run on [the] shadow banking system . . . It is the shadow banking system which is about $1.3 trillion in assets. . . .” Until then, most economist and policy makers had never pondered what lay outside the “known” world of banks or hedge funds.

It would turn out that the $1.3 trillion exposure was only the tip of the iceberg (the full size of the iceberg was about $27 trillion, double the U.S. GDP).⁶

That story revealed a profound reality: names serve to expose hidden things.

One of the challenges we faced tackling the Education Machine was that very few of us had any knowledge of the special language spoken within the catacombs of public education. Like the banking system, the Great Education Machine uses state assessments, ACT and SAT scores, grade point averages, AP classes, and college acceptance rates as measures for health. But that also built a very elite and esoteric language that outsiders cannot understand with acronyms like NCLB, ESSA, STEM, STEAM, ABA, AHEAD, IEP, LRE, and more than a hundred others I gleaned from just one website.⁷

The Cluetrain Manifesto identified that con game back in the 1990s: “Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice . . . In just a few more years, the current homogenized “voice” of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th-century French court . . .”⁸

To insist on clear language—especially about learning—seems like a critical starting point. As Confucius is quoted as saying, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.”

The following categories provide a different lens for classifying schools. We asked, “What are kids actually walking away with at the end of their K-12 experience?” When we looked at schools through this lens we discovered a clear ladder and a new sense of urgency for the mission ahead. But classifying schools by test scores, rankings, or grading systems strips them away from the context. We wanted a system that would better paint a picture of what life and learning looked like in different schools. These are not tested or meant as universal metrics. We did share them with administrators for several large districts and found that they opened up entirely new insights and conversations. You might find them helpful for comparing the landscape of schools in your community.

Future-Ready Schools

Our kids will graduate into a world where, according to some estimates, 65 percent of jobs have yet to be invented.⁹ This is a major issue. We are just beginning to grasp the skills and competencies needed for the world of the twenty-first century. Furthermore, we estimate that less than 10 percent of schools qualify as future-ready. Here is a quick-reference guide to those schools:

1. Learning communities: The engaged public, private partnership relationship with continual learning as a community mission.
   1. Examples: East Lake Meadows, the Purpose-Built Communities, Columbus, Indiana, and KIPP Connect
2. Engaged schools: The active learning models in the form of inquiry, teams, projects, and teacher-facilitator roles.
   1. Examples: PBL schools, Expeditionary Learning, Entrepreneurship, Design Thinking modeled learning, High-Tech Highs, NuTech, Code Academies
3. Blended schools: Schools that provide strategic use of technology to enable as much independent learning as possible and allowing teacher to provide more coaching and facilitation.
   1. Examples: Achievement First, Big Picture, Actin, Alt.school, High Tech High, Kent Innovation High¹⁰
4. Career and technology education: These are the new generation of what used to be vocational and technical schools. Many are state-of-the-art facilities offering forensic science, culinary arts, film and production, robotics, aerospace, computer network engineering, coding, and the list goes on. Many offer employment level certifications and college credits. Many students graduate and chose to go to college.
   1. Examples: Birdville Center of Technology and Advanced Learning, IBM's P-Tech, and Mercy Vocational High

Well-Schooled but Poorly Educated

These schools may best be described as “college-ready factories.” These schools fall in the crosshairs of Ken Robinson, John Gatto, Tony Wagner, Diane Ravitch, Yong Zhao, and a wide list of educators who criticize testing, the stress of high-stakes everything, and a hypercompetitive pursuit of grade points for college. The underlying questions for these schools are:

1. “What's the point of these narrow pursuits?”
2. “Are kids learning what they need for life success and happiness?”
3. “Are we really just teaching our students how to game the system?”
4. “Can the system accommodate the “one-off” kid, the one with ADHD, Asperger's, OCD, dyslexia, depression, anxiety, and so forth?”

We estimate that about 40 percent of our kids are stuck in this model of Education Machine.

5. Enhanced traditional schools: Traditional teaching models of content and comprehension with a focus on advanced subjects and enriched extracurricular activities
   1. Examples: AP, STEM, Baccalaureate, and so forth
6. Traditional schools: Our common image of the classroom experience with a teacher at the front of the class, lecturing or reading out of a textbook with the objective to prepare kids for taking the next test.
7. Ladder-up schools: Schools that give at-risk and underserved kids the resources, time, talent, and structure to compensate for the race they were never meant to compete in. They enhance any of the learning models with extended hours, higher expectations, parent-student-teacher partnerships, strict discipline, and extracurricular activities.
   1. Examples: KIPP, One Goal, Private School (especially Parochial), AVID, Momentous Institute, The Shelton School

Left Behind

The “left behind” category of students is the one that should keep us up at night. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the (inflation-adjusted) median income for a household in America is $52,000 (2014).¹¹ The “left behind” kids come from homes that live on half and less than half of that figure. Some estimate that about 50 percent of our kids fall into the pit. About 10 percent beat the odds and climb out to succeed.

A few years ago, I witnessed the aftermath of a shooting at the LAX airport. I had a vantage point in the administration tower to see all of the activity unfold. The emergency team placed three large, brightly colored tarps—green, yellow, and red—on the road just outside one of the terminals. Mike Feldman, then Deputy Executive Director, explained: “These are triage tarps. Those alive and who will live get taken to the green. Those wounded and who need immediate care get taken to the yellow. Those who are either dead or will likely die are placed on the red. During an emergency there is confusion, limited personnel, and time is precious. This system guides those available to where to go first. Those on the red tarp get checked first.”

So, the following is our attempt at describing a triage system for the Education Machine.

8. Green: Community and vocational colleges: These schools offer hope (but too often that is an illusory bridge to careers or college) for those who graduate out of a left behind school. The hard reality is that 86 percent of these kids were told that they were ready for college. Yet, over 60 percent need remedial classes before they can start. Sixty percent think it will take two years to get through community and vocational college, but after six years only 38 percent finish their two-year program.¹²
9. Yellow: Custodial schools: The schools most common in underserved communities have a high percentage of students on free and reduced lunch programs. The primary goal of these schools is to provide basic education and move kids forward as best as possible.
10. Red: Survival schools: They are exactly what the description means. Teachers and students try to survive a school in impoverished and often violent neighborhoods. Because the kids live with poverty and danger, they come to school stressed and far behind everyone else.
    1. Examples: Normandy High in Ferguson, Missouri, Detroit, the South Side of Chicago, Baltimore, and so on. These schools are often depicted in shows like The Wired and movies like Dangerous Minds.

The Tale of Two Communities

The early 1970s became a watershed period for our economy, culture, and schools. The next chapter describes how two similar Rust Belt communities responded to their dramatic reversal in fortune. For Clinton, Ohio, economic prosperity determined its social capital and vulnerability, and led to declining schools. For Columbus, Indiana, faced with the same economic crisis, social capital led to prosperity and resilience. We were fascinated to learn how schools became the catalyst to a process for maintaining that resilience.