Anybody that suggests we can solve our problems simply by hiring better teachers or simply by choosing better textbooks is guilty of lazy thinking. Our teachers and our texts are not what is broken.  Our methods are not what is broken.  It is our systems that are broken. By systems (not to be confused with "the education system" which is just a whipping boy) I mean systems, in the corporate governance sense of the word:

• Hardware and software networks for gathering and manipulating data as well as facilitating an optimal flow of communication between all stake holders.
• Protocols concerning who communicates to whom about what, and which decision-making powers rest with whom.
• Shared understandings concerning what is going to count as valid data.

Education in Japan and in America both have outdated systems.  Everybody recognizes this fact.  Many Undergraduate and Graduate Degree programs are viewed as overpriced, and worthless in terms of skills and knowledge learned.  We credential the wrong things in the wrong way.  We have failed to institutionalize the learning of vital skills -- research skills, numeracy, literacy, social skills -- except for the most privileged of children. If this problem doesn't exist everywhere else on earth, it is only that there are still a few places on earth where education is sheltered -- at least for a few more years -- from our radically changed technological and economic circumstances. But something is happening socioeconomically in America that suggests that we are finally at the beginning of an immense laboratory experiment, which will take 20 to 30 years to yield benefits.  The mice in this laboratory experiment -- most of whom will give their lives for the betterment of our species -- are children that presently live in "underperforming" school districts.  They will make this sacrifice because their parents lack the empowerment necessary to defend them.  They will make this sacrifice because the American ruling classes, having recognized the grave importance of preparing their own children for a rapidly evolving economy, have successfully created a reality where those less fortunate have no option other than the laboratory. The Latin word "Proletarius" is an adjective meaning "of or pertaining to offspring."  It was introduced into Roman law by emperor Servius Tullius to refer to those whose only value to society was that they produced babies.  Marx and Engles's famous work (and later the Soviet propaganda) inspired a popular image of the "Proletarian" as a muscular factory worker or in the case of John Steinbeck (whose work suffers for it) farm laborers. But with factory work and farm work becoming less and less available, decade by decade, we are returning to the Roman ideal.  This is not a population that we enslave.  We do not even consciously exclude them. Rather, we abuse them with the subtlest of devices.  We tell them that this is a race to the top.  -- a university degree being the top.  We tell them that we all can participate in this race.  We tell them that those that are sincere in their pursuit of the "top" will be given the resources that they need in order to succeed.  Families that fall short, communities that fall short, all fall short on the basis of merit. And since the top is a university degree, and since we can't think of any better, more life-relevant way to define what our aspirations are for our kids, we have a growing community of those that for generation upon generation have not been at the top. -- for whom the contribution to society that they are making is proletarius. It's an old saw that we educate them differently, but at this point, there are few incentives for those in power to alter that state of affairs.  Knowing the scarcity that is out there, we almost devoutly wish there to be few people as well educated as our own children. Working at Brick Church College Prep (a 5-8 middle school charter), every day, I stood in rooms full of the children of this new neo-Roman Proletariat.  Here is a typical breakdown of a Brick Church class.:

• 20 kids
• 8 reading at grade-level or better.
• 8 reading below grade-level, but with a clear path to bringing them up to level.

Let's stop there.  THAT is exciting.  Those numbers, there.  THAT is a rich opportunity.  THAT is the kind of thing that gets any half-way decent teacher out of bed in the morning.  But let's add a few more stats.

• 4 kids are struggling to pull together a workable reading program.  They only make progress with reading in a one-on-one context.  Otherwise, they can't, won't, or don't believe they will ever be able to read.  At this point, independent reading is too frustrating for them.
• 4 have behavioral problems that cause them to spontaneously stand up and walk around the room or shout things in class.
• 6 that are to varying degrees opportunists that will add to the disruption when things get out of control.

As a matter of professional development, as an edifying exercise, I got a lot out of this experience.  Every day, I could feel my repertoire of teacher moves improving.  Every day, I added more nuance to my planning. Good for me, but we failed these kids in the most brutal way.  Every single one of the non-readers should have been assaulted with one-on-one reading opportunities.  I did learn all sorts of strategies for dealing with the behavior problems.  One kid was such a problem, I made a deal with the librarian to allow me to send him down there to "find a good book."  But strategies were optimized for controlling the room, not for learning. What remains most exasperating to me upon reflection is the fact that most of these 20 kids were as mentally capable as any other kids you might know.  With the exception of perhaps one or two, I could imagine ideal circumstances under which I WOULD be able to help them to experience success in school.  They were witty.  They were fun.  They were enlightening company. Whatever else might be said, in looking at this school, what is undeniable is that this species is not allocating resources where they need to be allocated.  My bicycle ride home took me to an intersection less than a quarter mile away with two gasoline-stand-convenience-stores; both of which have dumpsters close to the road where homeless men slept in clear view.  From there, I biked through one of the neighborhoods where my kids lived.  These were patrolled not by police officers, but by shirtless men in their twenties. Next stop, the new NFL football stadium by the river.  Cross the river, through a honkey-tonk downtown -- which is actually looking pretty good because the economy of Nashville is experiencing a boom.  Heading towards Vanderbilt University, I pass the snug little campus of a K-12 private school called University School of Nashville.  I probably don't need to say that the contrast between Vanderbilt campus and Brick Church College Prep was staggering.  (Here is what the kids at the University School of Nashville have for a Library, and here is an image of Rachael Sherbakov, our talented Dean of Instruction, at Brick Church giving a talk to the parents about academic standards for the coming year).  Let's just say the Vanderbilt Campus is a GREAT place to get off of your bicycle and have a good teacher cry. Any institution -- such as LEAD Public Schools in Nashville, TN  -- that runs headlong at the question of how to upgrade our systems  is fighting the right fight. But the rest of us  (and LEAD Public Schools Administrators as well) need to be aware they they are engaged in experimental medicine.  More than 50% of the patients die on the table.  If the teaching profession were truly exalted, we would celebrate this enterprise in the same way that we celebrate researchers and physicians at Johns Hopkins.  We would mourn the thousands of lost opportunities that every school year represents, but celebrate the work of those tasked with cultivating and improving the craft.  Those we lost, HOW did we lose them?  Those we saved, HOW did we save them?  Where we lost two, how can we lose one instead next year?  Where we saved one, how can we save two next year.  Year after year.  We would celebrate ingenuity in the face of tragedy in education in the same way that we do in medicine, engineering, even in the legal profession at its best. We would take more interest in the systems within which these teachers are forced to operate.  We wouldn't simply corral into Brick Church those whose parents failed to reach the "top" and seek Vanderbilt degrees for our own kids. And we would continuously ask ourselves to define our terms better.  What do we mean by "save?"  If we send an African American girl from with no parents, from an impoverished neighborhood -- who was illiterate in the 6th grade, but was finally reading "on grade level" by the 12th grade -- off to college in rural Wisconsin with a scholarship, do we know that we have saved her?  How do we know?  And do we care?  And if we have, what have we learned from this one event that might help us to increase the incidence of salvation? We would gather data for the right reasons.  We would gather data so as to aid a deeper inquiry into what is working and why it is working.  When data gathering reveals that a target is not being met, we would reassess our strategies for pursuing the target, but we would also look into whether or not we are defining the target in the right way.  Even the method of gathering the data would be an evolving system. It would not be good enough -- and I have had some long hard fights with some OTHERWISE good Project GENIUS teachers on this very point -- for one teacher to be doing a decent job in the room with his/her kids. -- or for one teacher team to be doing well. -- or for one school. -- or for one community of teachers to be doing well.  If we are to survive as a species, this is one point on which we are going to have to find a way to transcend tribalism. Brick Church College Prep as an institution was in awkward situation while I was there.  This was their first year having completed the "turn around" (converting year-by-year from public to charter).  This conversion was an accomplishment.  But state assessments over the summer had placed Brick Church close to the bottom of the Nashville Metropolitan Public School district.  In order to continue as a charter school, Brick Church would need to present hard test data as justification.  In order to prove that they were teaching in accordance with the Common Core Standards (which I am looking forward to discussing in a future blog) all of the teachers needed to document not just their procedures (something that my employees at ProGEN know I am a big fan of) but exactly what standards were being covered and exactly what assessments were being used in class to determine whether those standards were being met.  And then because so many of our discipline problems regularly escalated to the level where administrators and parents needed to be involved, each of these incidents needed to be carefully documented. So we had become data gathering machines, and the primary motivation for gathering was not to deepen our understanding of the problems we were trying to solve, but rather to "comply" (an unselfconsciously intransitive verb).  The supporting systems did not always fit our particular pedagogical imperatives, which in and of itself is fine, but the systems failed to evolve accordingly and inefficiencies compounded, and we became less and less effective.  We stressed each other.  We stressed the students.  We became less humane. Systems need to have built into them the mechanisms by which they can evolve in response to the naturally occurring stresses of a learning community.  Facilitating that evolution demands that we respect the custodians of that system enough to empower them to shape the system.  This was a status to which we had not yet been exalted as teachers at Brick. But to be fair, I rarely see them exalted to that status anywhere.  This, incidentally, is the kind of evolving, self-perfecting system that we are working to build at Project GENIUS. ... to be continued.