HEAVY LIFTING: Underpinnings and Tent-poles

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Overview

Two years ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute came together to grade the states on school performance. In that first Leaders and Laggards report, we found much to applaud but even more that requires urgent improvement. 


In this follow-up report, we turn our attention to the future, looking not at how states are performing today, but at what they are doing to prepare themselves for the challenges that lie ahead. Thus, some states with positive academic results receive poor grades on our measures of innovation, while others with lackluster scholarly achievement nevertheless earn high marks for policies that are creating an entrepreneurial culture in their schools. We chose this focus because, regardless of current academic accomplishment in each state, we believe innovative educational practices are vital to laying the groundwork for continuous and transformational change.

And change is essential. Put bluntly, we believe our education system needs to be reinvented. After decades of political inaction and ineffective reforms, our schools consistently produce students unready for the rigors of the modern workplace. The lack of preparedness is staggering. Roughly one in three eighth graders is proficient in reading. Most high schools graduate little more than two-thirds of their students on time. And even the students who do receive a high school diploma lack adequate skills: More than 33% of first-year college students require remediation in either math or English.

We think of educational innovation not as a fad but as the prerequisite for deep, systematic change, the kind of change that is necessary--and long overdue.

But we also believe that reinvention will never be accomplished with silver bullets. Our school system needs far-reaching innovation. It is archaic and broken, a relic of a time when high school graduates could expect to live prosperous lives, when steel and auto factories formed the backbone of the American economy, and when laptop computers and the Internet were the preserve of science fiction writers. And while the challenges are many--inflexible regulations, excessive bureaucracy, a dearth of fresh thinking--the bottom line is that most education institutions simply lack the tools, incentives, and opportunities to reinvent themselves in profoundly more effective ways.

By "innovation" we do not mean blindly celebrating every nifty-sounding reform. If anything, we have had too much of such educational innovation over the years, as evidenced by the sequential embrace of fads and the hurried cycling from one new "best practice" to another that so often characterizes K-12 schooling. States and school systems, in other words, have too long confused the novel with the useful. Rather, we believe innovation to be the process of leveraging new tools, talent, and management strategies to craft solutions that were not possible or necessary in an earlier era.

Our aim is to encourage states to embrace policies that make it easier to design smart solutions that serve 21st century students and address 21st century challenges. The impulse to either dictate one-size-fits-all solutions from the top or simply to do something--anything--differently will not address our pressing needs. Instead, this report seeks to foster a flexible, performance-oriented culture that will help our schools meet educational challenges.

Today, various organizations are addressing stubborn challenges by pursuing familiar notions of good teaching and effective schooling in impressively coherent, disciplined, and strategic ways. Some are public school districts, such as Long Beach Unified School District in California and Aldine Independent School District in Texas. An array of charter school entrepreneurs are also working within the public school system and seeing encouraging results, such as the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Academies, YES Prep, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, and Achievement First. Other independent ventures have also devised promising approaches to important challenges, including Citizen Schools, EdisonLearning, The New Teacher Project, K12 Inc., Blackboard Inc., Wireless Generation, Teach for America, and New Leaders for New Schools.

Even these marquee reformers, however, struggle to sidestep entrenched practices, raise funds, find talent, and secure support. Moreover, these highly successful ventures often pale when viewed beside the larger K-12 enterprise. The 80-odd KIPP schools, approximately 130 school leaders trained annually by New Leaders for New Schools, and 2,200 teachers trained each year by The New Teacher Project are dwarfed by the nation's 14,000 school districts, 100,000 schools, and 3.2 million teachers. The challenge is to boost the chance that creative problem solvers will ultimately make a real, lasting difference for our nation and our children.

Fortunately, our report comes at a time when national attention to educational innovation is on the upswing. The new federal Race to the Top Fund has brought additional attention to the need to rethink our system, for instance, while numerous other efforts are under way at the state and local levels. It is far too early to endorse any particular plan or to say which ones will be effective. But now is the time for state leaders to show the political will to pursue reform.

Along the way, high standards, accountability, and sensible progress measures are essential. But care must be taken not to allow familiar modes of measurement to smother reform. Too often, reformers tend to embrace only those advances that we can conveniently measure with today's crude tools, such as grades three-to-eight reading and math scores. The principal virtue of the No Child Left Behind Act, for example--a much-needed focus on outcomes and transparency--has been coupled with a bureaucratic impulse and an inflexible, cookie-cutter approach to gauging teacher and school quality. We must not retreat from the promise of high standards and accountability. But we should also embrace what might be called smart quality control. That means measuring the value of various providers and solutions in terms of what they are intended to do--whether that is recruiting teachers or tutoring foreign languages--rather than merely on whether they affect the rate at which students improve their performance on middle school reading and math tests.

Improved accountability and flexibility, while vital, will not be enough to achieve the changes we seek: Capacity building is also crucial. We define this overused term to mean the need for a variety of new providers that deliver additional support to educators in answering classroom and schoolwide challenges. More broadly, however, this effort must be complemented by giving new providers the freedom and encouragement they need to promote high-quality research and development, and to develop innovative "green shoot" reform ventures that pioneer more effective tools and strategies.

Ultimately, though, the key to improving results will be to help schools not only to avoid mistakes, but to position themselves better to adopt imaginative solutions. In brief, for reform to take hold our states and schools must practice purposeful innovation.

To examine the degree to which states have developed such a culture, we focused on eight areas:

• School Management (including the strength of charter school laws and the percentage of teachers who like the way their schools are run)
• Finance (including the accessibility of state financial data)
• Staffing: Hiring & Evaluation (including alternative certification for teachers)
• Staffing: Removing Ineffective Teachers (including the percentage of principals who report barriers to the removal of poor-performing teachers)
• Data (including such measures as state-collected college student remediation data)
• Technology (including students per Internet-connected computer)
• Pipeline to Postsecondary (including the percentage of schools reporting dual-enrollment programs)
• State Reform Environment (an ungraded category that includes data on the presence of reform groups and participation in international assessments)

Our data come from a wide variety of sources, from federal education databases to our own 50-state surveys. We should note that the data limitations we encountered were a significant hindrance to our efforts, even more so than when we prepared our first Leaders and Laggards report.

We received invaluable assistance from an outside panel of academic experts. We shared our methodology with Jack Buckley, professor of applied statistics at New York University; Dan Goldhaber, research professor at the University of Washington; Paul Herdman, president of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware; Monica Higgins, professor of education at Harvard University; and Richard Ingersoll, professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. The panel reviewed our approach and results, and provided helpful feedback. However, our research team takes full responsibility for the methodology and resulting grades.

In many respects the recent troubles of the auto and newspaper industries provide a cautionary tale for today's education policymakers. Analysts predicted structural challenges in both industries for decades. Outside consultants urged major change. Yet altering entrenched practices at businesses from General Motors to the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News proved enormously difficult. And the results of inaction for both organizations were disastrous. The same must not happen to our nation's education system. The stakes are just too high.

The findings and recommendations detailed in the following section cover everything from the need for more thoughtful use of technology to the overarching importance of giving educators flexibility in meeting shared student-achievement goals. In particular, we believe that reform requires a nondoctrinaire emphasis on overhauling the status quo and replacing it, not with some imagined one best system, but with a new performance-oriented culture that may take many forms. In the end, we think of educational innovation not as a fad but as the prerequisite for deep, systematic change, the kind of change that is necessary--and long overdue.

As we observed two years ago in our first Leaders and Laggards report, even as businesses have revolutionized their practices, "student achievement has remained stagnant and our K-12 schools have stayed remarkably unchanged--preserving, as if in amber, the routines, culture, and operations of a 1930s manufacturing plant." Now, as we look forward, our aim is nothing less than to crush the amber. That is the challenge before us.

HEAVY LIFTING "Leaders and Laggards!" (Educational Innovation-Oxymoron)

Published Online: November 9, 2009

Published in Print: November 18, 2009, as States are Lagging on Innovation Front, New Score Card Says

Updated: November 13, 2009

States Lag in Educational Innovation, Report Says

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, meet before presenting the “Leaders and Laggards” report on Nov. 9 in Washington.
—Andrew Councill for Education Week

‘Faint Pulse’ Found in Push Toward K-12 Improvement

By Michele McNeil

Washington

A new report card on state-level innovation in education by a trio of ideologically varied groups reports what they see as deeply disturbing results, with most states earning C’s, D’s, or even F’s in such key areas as technology, high school quality, and removal of ineffective teachers.

The report, “Leaders and Laggards,” uses state data and existing and original research to assign letter grades to states, based on seven indicators of innovation: school management, finance, hiring and evaluation of teachers, removal of ineffective teachers, data, “pipeline to postsecondary” (or high school quality), and technology.

Though the report released last week does not give states overall grades, the worst marks are in the category of removing ineffective teachers. But most states got C’s and D’s in the other categories.

“We found only a faint pulse of innovation,” said Thomas J. Donohue, the president and chief executive officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which co-sponsored the report and hosted a Nov. 9 event here surrounding the report’s release. “We must turn that into a strong heartbeat.”

Varied Interests

The report card is notable for its sponsorship by not only the Chamber of Commerce, which represents business interests, and the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market-oriented think tank, but also the Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress. All three groups are based in Washington.

Among the sources for the report were data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Survey, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan concludes remarks to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for a Competitive Workforce's annual education and workforce report on Nov. 9 in Washington.

—Andrew Councill for Education Week

All the sponsors agreed that the results were “deeply disturbing,” in the words of John Podesta, the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, who served as White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton.

But there were bright spots.

Massachusetts, Colorado, and Rhode Island got gold stars for their policies to promote extended learning time in schools, while Arizona, Ohio, and Florida got that designation for their aggressive charter school accountability approaches. Hawaii was singled out as the only state with a school-based funding policy. All are signals of innovation, according to the report.

Still, the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers labeled the report as full of “old-hat, top-down measures that have failed to transform our schools,” according to a statement.

“The report’s recommendations are little more than a defense of the factory model of education, which has of late turned schools from havens for learning into test-taking factories,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said in the statement.

Multiple Factors

The report card incorporates many factors into a state’s overall letter grade for each of the seven indicators.
To weigh innovation in teacher hiring and evaluation, for example, the researchers measured a state’s percentage of alternatively certified teachers (the higher the better), whether the state uses national programs (such as Teach For America) to recruit educators, and other factors.

What researchers were not doing was measuring “nifty, faddish experiments,” said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Instead, the analysis was meant to examine whether a state has created a “flexible, performance-oriented culture,” he said.

The report’s focus on innovation fits with the education agenda of the Obama administration, which last week released final rules for the Race to the Top Fund competition. The fund will award $4 billion in grants to states.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who gave opening remarks at the Nov. 9 event, said the quality of the country’s education system is as important an indicator of economic health as the “stock market, the unemployment rate, or the size of the GDP.”

The Chamber of Commerce, which is a powerful lobbying force at the federal, state, and local levels, has been at sharp odds with the Obama administration over health care and climate change.

But not on education.

“The administration is setting the right tone and putting its money where its mouth is,” Mr. Donohue said, specifically praising the Race to the Top initiative.

Secretary Duncan acknowledged the tension between the administration and the chamber, but said: “Education is the most bipartisan issue.”

The guiding principles behind Race to the Top—the so-called “four assurances” attached to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which includes money for the grants program among some $100 billion in education aid—appear to be here to stay. In exchange for receiving federal stimulus money, states have to agree to improve teacher effectiveness, data systems, academic standards, and their lowest-performing schools, according to the law.

Mr. Duncan used his remarks to emphasize that the administration wants to “embed” the four assurances into broader federal law, specifically the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which the No Child Left Behind Act is the current version.

He also highlighted his four other priorities for ESEA reauthorization, which is expected to get going next year: setting a high bar for states and districts, but allowing them to innovate; building in more competition for federal dollars; reviewing federal education spending line by line and focusing federal education aid on the programs that are most effective; and moving accountability from a “one-size-fits-all” approach to something more flexible.

HEAVY LIFTING: Dead Ahead!

Oakland Press

State schools chief says laws needed to get grants

Thursday, November 12, 2009

By TIM MARTIN
Associated Press Writer

LANSING (AP) — Michigan’s top schools official says the state Legislature will have to pass new laws for the state to have a shot at federal stimulus money set aside for innovative education programs.


States are competing for a slice of more than $4B the Obama administration will earmark for schools that make aggressive changes. Fewer than half the states are likely to win a portion of the cash when it’s doled out beginning in April.


Applications are due in January.


Michigan schools superintendent Mike Flanagan says Thursday the changes would have to include tying student data and achievement to teacher performance.


States are being urged to pursue tougher academic and student performance standards, better teacher recruitment methods and plans to turn around failing schools.

The "Vacuous Absence" of any HEAVY LIFTING!

THAT'S WHAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT!

Posted: Sunday, 08 November 2009 3:52PM Grant To Boost Michigan Science, Math Teachers

Addressing the shortage of math and science teachers who will equip Michigan's vulnerable students with the skills they need to compete in the work force, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation has awarded the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation with a $16.7 million grant to establish a new statewide teaching fellowship program. The new W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Woodrow Wilson Michigan Teaching Fellowship will provide 240 future teachers with an exemplary intensive master's program in education and place those Fellows in hard-to-staff middle and high schools. Over the five-year timeline, almost 20,000 public school students in Mich. will receive high quality instruction in the critical subject areas of science, technology, engineering and math. Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm joined the Kellogg Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at the announcement made last week at the Detroit Science Center. "This grant is an investment in Michigan's future, in the future of our workforce, and in the future of our children," Granholm said. "We must develop a workforce that is prepared for the high-tech careers of tomorrow. The new math and science teachers who emerge from this fellowship will inspire our kids to be excited about careers in science, math and technology." The W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Woodrow Wilson Michigan Teaching Fellowship will recruit a diverse mix of high-achieving candidates who show promise as future teachers. Fellows can be college seniors, recent graduates or career changers. The current market downturn in Michigan has forced many experienced engineers and professionals out of the workforce, making available a talented pool of workers who can share their knowledge and depth of experience with students. "The Kellogg Foundation has worked across the country to improve educational opportunities for vulnerable children from the early years through high school," said Sterling Speirn, president and CEO of the Kellogg Foundation. "But it's especially important to invest in a promising initiative in our home state that will match well-qualified teachers with students most in need." The Fellows, who will be announced in Spring 2011 and receive a $30,000 stipend to complete the master's program, commit to teach for at least three years in a high-need school after they complete their teacher education program. The Fellows also are placed in their schools in cohorts and receive intensive support and mentoring to encourage them to continue teaching as a long-term career instead of making it a brief assignment. As integral partners in the Fellowship, several Michigan universities also will undergo important changes. The adjustments will be necessary to provide the Fellows with the best combination of content knowledge and classroom expertise to most effectively address the challenges of their specific student populations. "Research has shown again and again that the most important element in a student's success is the teacher," said Arthur Levine, the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a respected expert on teacher education. "America's schools of education are facing the extraordinary challenge of having to prepare a new breed of teacher, ready to teach the most diverse population of students in our history to the highest levels of skills and knowledge ever required -- all in an outcomes-based system of education. This Fellowship emphasizes intensive practical preparation, rigorous grounding in the subject matter, and extensive supervised teaching experience in the same kind of high-need urban and rural schools where Fellows will later teach." "Having enough great teachers, especially in the math and sciences, shouldn't depend on where a child lives," said Mike Flanagan, Michigan's state superintendent of public instruction. "This program will help heal that disparity." The first statewide Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship, inspired by Levine's research, is already under way in Indiana. The four participating universities are Ball State University, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Purdue University and the University of Indianapolis. The first group of Fellows began their studies this past summer, and the project is being independently evaluated by the Urban Institute. Like Indiana's Fellowship, the Michigan Fellowship will serve as a model for improving teacher education across the country. Universities that participate must match a $500,000 grant and redesign their teacher education programs in science and math within a 21-month time frame by creating a collaborative relationship between the schools of arts and sciences and education. Instead of simply adding a pilot project, these model math and science teacher education programs completely replace the existing programs and are sustained for years to come. Field experience for the Fellows also starts early in the process, as they begin work in high-need schools and gradually take on more teaching responsibilities, similar to the training a medical student would receive in a teaching hospital. Mentoring support for the Fellows continues throughout their first three years in the classroom. The success of the program will be judged by the learning of the students in the Fellows' classrooms, the retention of the teachers and the changes at the university. Targeting the initiative to middle school students as well as to high school students is a key strategy for improving student performance in these subjects. The recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress mathematics results show that 8th graders have made slight gains since 2007, from an average of 281 to 283. But still, just 34 percent of students are scoring at or above the proficient level. In addition, students eligible for the federal student lunch program gained just one point over 2007 and the average score for English learners dropped this year by three points. Based in Battle Creek, the Kellogg Foundation focuses its grants on programs that improve the lives of vulnerable children. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Woodrow Wilson Michigan Teaching Fellowship matches the Foundation's goals of building innovative partnerships that create stronger conditions for learning and increasing students' ability to become productive members of society. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has a history of administering successful fellowship programs and preparing new generations of leaders. It is respected within and beyond the higher education community. Since the 1980s, the Foundation also has forged partnerships between schools and universities in order to improve professional development for teachers. Interested applicants should contact wwteachingfellowships@woodrow.org. More at www.wkkf.org,

© MMIX WWJ Radio, All Rights Reserved.

DETROIT HEAVY LIFTERS!

MISSED BY TIME: Dan Varner of Think Detroit PAL, left, Detroit Public Schools’ Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb and Jamieson Elementary’s Kimberly Kyff, the 2006 Michigan Teacher of the Year. Not pictured: musician Kid Rock. Detroit Free Press 11/08/2009, Page A27

THEY DO THE CITY PROUD  Magazine’s ‘Committee to Save Detroit’ photo left out these proven leaders As part of its inaugural coverage of what’s happening to Motown, Time magazine published a photo of eight people it dubbed “The Committee to Save Detroit.” The group did not include any black males, and I wondered aloud: Why? In more than 1,100 e-mails, readers wondered, too, and said that Time missed an opportunity to salute a black man (besides Mayor Dave Bing, who had his own profile in the issue) who wasn’t dealing drugs, jacking cars or robbing people. (Yes, there were those expected few who said there were no black men in the picture because there are no black male leaders in Detroit. But let’s move on.) Based on reader suggestions and my own reporting, here’s who else could have been in the photo: Robert Bobb, who is cleaning up the Detroit Public Schools as the district’s emergency financial manager, was suggested four times more than anyone else named in your e-mails. Second to Bobb was Dan Varner, chief executive o fficer of Think Detroit PAL. I added a third committee member, without whom Detroit will surely fail. And that is the Detroit teacher — the instructor, counselor, nurturer, nurse, even bank — for thousands of children. With a hearty endorsement from Detroit Federation of Teachers President Keith Johnson, I chose Kimberly Kyff, Michigan’s Teacher of the Year in 2006 and the first Detroit teacher to receive the award in 21 years. Here’s more about them:  ROBERT BOBB: He’s gotten plenty of attention for his work to clean up the corruption at DPS. Robert Bobb, 64, has overseen more than 84 financial audits, held hearings on bad realestate deals and successfully convinced Detroiters, one neighborhood at a time, to pass a $500.5million bond issue for new and better schools. “Robert Bobb is doing an incredible job,” Mayor Bing said in a statement. “He is the change agent needed to help make education and our children a priority.” Gov. Jennifer Granholm extended his contract through 2011. By then, perhaps Bing will have appointed him the city’s permanent schools czar.  DAN VARNER: The headline on the Feb. 2, 2005, New York Times story read: “Shrinking, Detroit Faces Fiscal Nightmare.” The story was about black middle-class flight from a dying city, and its poster child was Dan Varner, who had relocated his family to Ypsilanti Township. It didn’t stick. Varner moved back to Detroit, heeding the call felt by so many of us who haven’t given up on the city. Now the 40-year-old is CEO of Think Detroit PAL, a merger of a mentoring agency and the former Police Athletic League, that reaches 13,000 children every year through learning and sports programs and teaches children that, with hard work, they can be everything they want to be. “I’m so committed to this city,” said Varner. “The fact that people were e-mailing you and saying I should be there moves me personally. It reflects my renewed commitment and return to the roots of my work.”  KIMBERLY KYFF: Kimberly Kyff, 51, grew up in Orchard Lake Village and attended the University of Michigan. She began teaching at DPS’ Jamieson Elementary 14 years ago. By special arrangement, she follows her students from second through fifth grade. Teaching in an urban school is not for the faint of heart, Kyff said. “My philosophy is all children can learn and they can learn at very high levels, provided they are taken from where they are, accepted how they are and nurtured,” she said. Kyff also mentors younger teachers, telling them: “When you don’t enjoy teaching anymore and aren’t excited and looking forward to going to school, you need to find other options.” Time magazine couldn’t pick everyone. Neither could I. But Detroit should know who its leaders are. They aren’t always on the front page of the newspaper. They don’t all have one foot in or out of jail. Sometimes, they work in silence, saving lives and improving Detroit. But always, they deserve our recognition and support.

State of Michigan "Race to the Top" Heavy Lifting (Compliance Issues)

OUR EDITORIAL

School sabotage 

Michigan Education Association works to keep reforms, federal money at bay while school districts struggle

With Michigan schools facing an enormous funding gap, the Mi chigan Education Association is attempting to sabotage an effort that could bring in more than $600 million in federal education money.

State policymakers are working to put together one of the essential pieces of legislation required to win federal “Race to the Top” grant money. President Barack Obama is using the money to give states an incentive to enact long overdue education reforms.

Next month state school Superintendent Mike Flana gan must turn in the applica tion for the competition, now being watched by U.S. foun dations for signals about which states are serious about education reform and merit even more funding.

But the prospects for Michigan aren’t good. The MEA, the state’s largest teacher union, is pressuring cowardly lawmakers to block the Race to the Top legisla tion,  which includes provisions making it easier for nonteachers to secure classroom positions, if they have critical skills.

This seemingly innocuous change has stirred up intense political fighting, pitting teacher unions against Gov. Jennifer Granholm and others, such as the United Way of South eastern Michigan,  who want the Race to the Top funds for Michigan.

Teach for America — the heralded non profit  that prepares and places highly talented educators in struggling schools — says it must have an alternative certification pathway for its members to become full-time teachers in Mi chigan.

MEA leaders say they oppose alternative teacher certification because they believe teacher training is essential to properly instruct students. “This is not an union issue,” MEA spokesman Doug Pratt says. “This is a funda mental belief … that teachers who go through a traditional teacher prep process are going to be better for stu dents in the long run.”

But urban districts are having trouble finding highly qualified math and science teachers, in no small part because of the failure of traditional teacher training programs in the state.

That was one of the driv ing forces behind a Friday announcement by the W.K.

Kellogg Foundation that it is investing $16.7 million to establish a new statewide fellowship program to provide 240 teachers for hard-to staff schools.

If the MEA is allowed to sabotage Michi gan’s Race to the Top effort, it will mean the loss of about $600 million in federal money at a time when every classroom is facing an un precedented budget cut. Ultimately, that will mean fewer jobs for teachers, hurting the union’s own members.

It is absolutely essential that Michigan gets this money, and the education reforms that come with it .

VIRTUAL HEAVY LIFTING! (Second Life on the U.S. National Educational Technology Plan ISTE))

"Design Thinking" to Leverage the Heavy Lifting

What's Thwarting American Innovation? Too Much Science, Says Roger Martin

BY Linda TischlerWed Nov 4, 2009 at 3:18 PM

By pushing the principles of scientific management too far, corporations are short-circuiting their own futures, says the designiest dean of all the business schools. "The enemy of innovation is the phrase 'prove it,'" Roger Martin says.

The folks at McKinsey, Bain, and BCG should be happy that Roger Martin likes his job. Otherwise, he could cause them a heap of trouble.

As it is, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto is traveling the country, throwing down the gauntlet to companies who hope to analyze and strategize their way out of a recession by bringing in armies of management consultants. You'll get what you pay for, he warns, and it won't be innovation.

"The business world is tired of having armies of analysts descend on their companies," he says. "You can't send a 28-year-old with a calculator to solve your problems."



The problem, says Martin, author of a new book, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, is that corporations have pushed analytical thinking so far that it's unproductive. "No idea in the world has been proved in advance with inductive or deductive reasoning," he says.

The answer? Bring in the folks whose job it is to imagine the future, and who are experts in intuitive thinking.
That's where design thinking comes in, he says.

"If I didn't like my job, I'd go out and create a killer firm that would take on McKinsey head-to-head in their own market. A company would get better results, at a fraction of the price." McKinsey, a $5B company, bills out freshly minted MBAs at $1M a year, Martin says. Their billing structure is 10 times what a design firm typically gets.

We spoke to Martin about why MBAs and designers should learn to get along prior to his coming to New York for the Rotman School of Management Design Thinking Experts series with IDEO's Tim Brown and Target's Will Setliffe.

Fast Company: As we slowly climb out of the recession, everybody's looking for where the next innovation will come from. Why does our pace of innovation seem to be slowing?

Martin: Most companies try to be innovative, but the enemy of innovation is the mandate to "prove it." You cannot prove a new idea in advance by inductive or deductive reasoning.

Fast Company: Are you saying that the regression analysis jockeys and Six Sigma black belts have got it all wrong?

Martin: Well, yes. With every good thing in life, there's often a dark shadow. The march of science is good, and corporations are being run more scientifically. But what they analyze is the past. And if the future is not exactly like the past, or there are things happening that are hard to measure scientifically, they get ignored. Corporations are pushing analytical thinking so far that it's become unproductive. The future has no legitimacy for analytical thinkers.

Fast Company: What's the alternative?

Martin: New ideas must come from a new kind of thinking. The American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce called it abductive logic. It's a logical leap of the mind that you can't prove from past data.

Fast Company: I can't see many CEOs being comfortable with that!

Martin: Why not? The scientific method starts with a hypothesis. It's often what happens in the shower or when an apple hits you on the head. It's what we call 'intuitive thinking.' Its purpose is to know without explicit reasoning.

Fast Company: So, if you're not getting these Newtonian moments from your management consultants, where are they likely to come from?

Martin: In a knowledge-intensive world, design thinking is critical to overcoming the biggest block: overcoming analytical thinking and fear of intuitive thinking. The design thinker enables the organization to balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and administration of business, originality and mastery.

Fast Company: Who's been brave enough to embrace that idea in this market?

Martin: When he first took over, A.G. Lafley at P&G was brilliant enough to realize they were missing a lot about the holistic consumer experience by sticking to things that were rigorously quantified. For example, when the company moved into beauty products, they were looking at face cream. And the scientists decided it must be about pore coverage. So they analyzed the hell out of pores and said 'We can cover pores better than anybody.' So when women in their research started talking about wanting to feel beautiful and desirable, they'd say, 'Don't talk about that. We don't know how to quantify that!' And they couldn't understand why stupid women would go off to department stores and pay ten times more when they could cover pores just as well. Ten years ago, P&G couldn't prove they could sell women billions of dollars of Oil of Olay face cream at $30-$60. They could imagine it, but not prove it. Lafley took it as a management challenge to see across the divide.

Fast Company: If you don't have A.G. Lafley or Steve Jobs at the helm, how can you sell your organization on the idea of an intuitive leap instead of a scientific leap?

Martin: You don't have to convert the whole organization to design thinking. Propose a little experiment--say, three months in length--where you test out a bite-sized chunk of a problem using this method. If you have a little success, be sure to then attach metrics to it. In that way, you turn the future into the past in a way they understand.

Fast Company: We're a little biased toward the designers here. Don't they bear some of the responsibility for the gap in understanding?

Martin: Absolutely. Like anybody who takes a job in another country, and needs to learn the local language in order to function, design thinkers need to learn the language of reliability, terms such as proof, regression analysis, and best practices.

Fast Company: Sounds like there's a promising future for somebody who's bilingual and can combine both approaches.

Martin: This is a fascinating time, and there's an interesting battle coming. One of these smallish design firms might combine the best of the analytical from the business world and the best intuitive thinking from the design world and become gigantic. There would be massive traction for it. It wouldn't be the first time that a little company in a garage saw things differently.

BRING on the GREEN!

Metro may get lottery games, turbines

By KATHERINE YUNG

FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

Detroit Metro Airport may soon gain two new features: lottery games and small wind turbines.

On Nov. 17, the Wayne County Airport Authority board is likely to approve a licensing agreement with the Michigan Bureau of State Lot tery that would enable travel ers at Metro to play a number of state lottery games, such as instant tickets, Mega Millions and Club Keno.

The games would be avail able at gates, baggage claim areas, sit-down bars and other locations throughout the Mc Namara and North Terminals, with staffed lottery redemption points of service provided by selected airport retailers.

Airport officials estimate the lottery agreement will gen erate $360,000 annually or $1.8 million over the initial 5 year contract term, as well as revenues for the state. Lottery games are already offered by a few other airports, including Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta In ternational Airport.

Metro could also soon start generating its own wind power.

Airport officials are seeking approval from the authority board to purchase five Windspire wind turbines.

Three of the 30-foot-tall turbines would be installed at the airport’s north entrance, near the intersection of Rogell Drive and Burton Drive.

Two others would be at the airport’s south entrance, near the south cell phone lot off of Eureka Road.

The small turbines, which are made in Manistee by Mas Tech Manufacturing, would not violate Metro’s airspace regulations.

Critical THINKING Critical: Some REAL-HEAVY Lifting!

EDGE (Food for Thought)
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schirrmacher09/schirrmacher09_index.html

THE HEAVY LIFTING: WHAT he SAID! (Alignment to OUR Purpose)

PREPARE for the HEAVY LIFTING!

Cliff-Notes on the "One-Two Punch!"

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'Funding Cliff' Looms Large for States

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm talks about school funding cuts along with state budget director Bob Emerson, left, during a press conference in Lansing, Mich., Oct. 22. Gov. Granholm said that school funding would be slashed by $127 per student and would take effect in 30 days unless revenue is found to avoid the cuts.
—Al Goldis/AP

By Erik W. Robelen

Premium article access courtesy of Edweek.org.

Amid a still-shaky economy, a troubling reality is starting to set in for states and school districts: The budget situation may get a lot worse when the federal economic-stimulus spigot runs dry.

The hope of the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress has been that the $787 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—including some $100 billion for education—would soften the pain of the recession and help drive a recovery.

But as helpful as many state and local officials have found the once-only stimulus aid in coping with current and anticipated revenue shortfalls, it creates some awfully big holes to fill when the money begins to run out late next year in what’s widely known as the “funding cliff.”

Experts also caution that the recovery of state and local coffers is likely to significantly lag behind any progress in the national economy generally. For one thing, state budgets are largely supported by individual income and sales taxes, which will likely be slower to catch up.

“States are bracing themselves for prolonged fiscal difficulties,” said Todd Haggerty, a research analyst at the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures. “When you couple the absence of federal ARRA funds with still-declining revenues, it puts states in a difficult situation.”

An October report issued by the White House in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Education highlighted the extent to which ARRA money in the $48.6 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund has already “restored” significant shares of K-12 education funding in states.

But a close look by Education Week at data submitted to the department by the states about how they planned to spend the money shows that 36 states will have to fill a collective gap of at least $16.5 billion to return to fiscal 2008 state spending levels for K-12 education.

And that figure does not reflect the more recent revenue shortfalls many states have since encountered.

The Education Department has urged states and districts to be careful to “minimize the funding cliff” when the stimulus aid ends by using the money for purposes “that do not result in unsustainable continuing commitments.”

But some analysts say that idea runs counter to the stimulus law’s emphasis on using the money to save and create jobs. Indeed, the White House announced Oct. 19 that states had already reported saving or creating at least 250,000 jobs in education with the federal aid.

“Saving and creating jobs implies expenditures on salaries, and salaries are inherently ongoing expenses,” said Jennifer S. Cohen, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. “They create funding cliffs, because once the money runs out, you’ll have to continue funding them.”

Spending Pace Varies

The pace at which states are allocating money under the state-stabilization fund varies widely, Ms. Cohen noted.

“States that are in worse fiscal trouble are front-loading the spending,” she said, citing Arizona, California, and Illinois among those that planned to use all of the money to shore up their budgets for the current fiscal year and for the prior year.

In Alaska, meanwhile, none of that aid is expected to go out until fiscal 2011.

Illinois used about $1 billion in state-stabilization aid to bolster its budget for the fiscal year that ended June 30, and plans to use the remainder, approximately $1 billion, for the current budget year, fiscal 2010, according to Matthew E. Vanover, a spokesman for the Illinois state board of education.

“Certainly, there is some major concern at this point in time because next fiscal year, beginning July 1, in order to just remain the same, we have to come up with an additional $1 billion for education,” he said. That’s out of a total of more than $7 billion in state aid for schools, he said.

Benjamin S. Schwarm, an associate executive director of the Illinois Association of School Boards, said: “The question is, what happens after this, when you don’t have that [money] coming in. ... Everybody around here keeps referring to it as the ‘cliff,’ and I don’t think it’s good.”

By contrast, in South Carolina, the legislature opted not to release any of the state-stabilization money for last fiscal year. The state is allocating about half its expected total of $359 million in such funds this fiscal year, and the second half the following year, said Betsy Carpentier, a deputy superintendent in the South Carolina Department of Education.

At the same time, she said, virtually all of the additional dollars districts are getting in other parts of the stimulus package—such as from the Title I program for disadvantaged students and under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—are going out this fiscal year. In all, South Carolina districts are receiving $335 million in preK-12 stimulus support beyond the state-stabilization aid, Ms. Carpentier said.

Deborah L. Elmore, a spokeswoman for the South Carolina School Boards Association, said that while the stimulus aid has been a huge help, it has taken the state only so far, given that South Carolina has suffered through several recent rounds of midyear budget cuts.

“It helped to keep the hole in the bottom from being a lot wider,” she said. “Unless the economy turns around, we’re left with falling through the bottom again.”

Maryland state schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick said that, in her state, the stabilization money is being used both for this fiscal year and the following one.

“I think we’ve tried to structure something that would prevent us from really experiencing this cliff that we know will ultimately occur when the money runs out,” she said. Ms. Grasmick said she and Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, have told districts, “Please do not use this money to hire new positions, because when the money runs out, we don’t want to be in a position of having to terminate people.”

Instead, they have urged districts to think of the funds as onetime expenses, she said, such as to investments in technology or new instructional materials “that will yield some long-term benefit.”

‘A Lagging Indicator’

Meanwhile, a new report from the American Association of School Administrators, based in Arlington, Va., suggests that in many school districts around the country, federal stimulus aid has not been able to avert cuts to programs and staffing levels.

The AASA surveyed 875 school administrators from 49 states and the District of Columbia. More than one-third of the respondents said they were unable to save any core teaching jobs as a result of the stimulus money.

In addition, the percentage of districts increasing class sizes grew almost sixfold between the 2008-09 academic year and the current school year, to 34 percent from 6 percent, the survey data showed. The percentage of districts reporting cuts to their school bus transportation routes and availability doubled to 20 percent this school year, from 10 percent last academic year.

The AASA report suggests the worst may still lie ahead for many districts.

“Unfortunately, school districts’ economic welfare appears to be a lagging indicator, even further behind the still less-than-stable remainder of the economy,” the report says. “There is an unmistakable ‘one-two punch’ school districts are bracing themselves for as they budget for the 2010-11 school year. Not only is that when the [stimulus] funds are expected to end, it is also the likely low point for state and local budgets.”

A new report from the NCSL offers some grim budget news, too. It says the “steep revenue falloff in FY 2009 will not be the bottom for many states.” More than half the states expect a further decline in fiscal 2010, the report says.

On top of that, Mr. Haggerty of the state legislatures’ group said, at least 21 states have already reported midyear budget gaps.

“So you’re looking at a good number of states [with] some pretty large and significant budget gaps just a few months into the new fiscal year,” he said.

Concerns about the looming end to the stimulus program have raised questions about whether there might be a second round of federal legislation to extend the aid. The White House has been careful to avoid any suggestions that it’s planning to seek additional assistance.

But Jack O’Connell, the state superintendent in California, suggested that more aid should be on the table.

“While we have been told, count on this as one-time money, ... I don’t think it’s inappropriate [to have a second round],” he said, “absent economic recovery.”

Mid-Course SUMMARY of OUR Conversations and Intentions (The VALUE of the Self-Examined Life!)

Parker Palmer: Know Yourself, Change Your World

In the work you do each day, how do you distinguish truth from fraud, build community, and speak up for what’s right? 

 

by Sarah van Gelder

posted Sep 09, 2009

Why do bankers make unethical investments, and what makes teachers burn out after a year on the job? Acclaimed educator and author Parker J. Palmer says most of us lack an understanding of our inner lives. If we learned in school how to navigate the inner landscapes of our lives, we might gain the tools to make it through difficult times, and clarify and act on our deepest values. Palmer is the author of A Hidden Wholeness, Let Your Life Speak, and The Courage to Teach, and a founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal. YES! Executive Editor Sarah van Gelder spoke with him about why “reflection” should be the fourth “R” of education.

Parker Palmer

Photo by Dan Kowalski

Sarah: Why does learning about the inner life make you a better teacher, or doctor, or carpenter, or citizen?

Parker: Every line of work is deepened by bringing all of our human capacities to bear on whatever we are doing, and that includes our inner sensibilities as well as our externally oriented knowledge and skill.

Doctors who are acquainted with their inner landscapes are better able to help their patients draw on the healing power of their own psyches and spirits. The relation between a doctor’s emotional self-awareness and a patient’s well-being is so well-grounded in clinical evidence that many medical schools are now making doctor-patient relationships a regular part of a physician’s preparation.

Sarah: What exactly do you mean by the inner life?

Parker: The inner landscape has at least three dimensions: a cognitive and intellectual dimension; an emotional, psychological dimension; and a spiritual dimension. My definition of spiritual is that it involves the eternal human yearning to be connected with something larger than my own ego.

Engaging the inner life also makes for a more ethical professional practice. As we look around the professions today—not least in the world of business and accounting—we see why we need people who have an examined inner life to strengthen the ethics of those professions.

So, for example, if you’re a great historian, you may be seeking to be connected with the massive story of human development over time, which rescues you from the smallness of your own story. An astronomer or a physicist may likewise find meaning and purpose in the larger story of their discipline’s contribution to human knowledge. If you’re a seeker on a more traditional religious path, you may find that larger connection beyond your own ego in Allah or Yahweh or God or in the void, in the Godhead, the Buddha, and so on.

My definition of spirituality doesn’t prescribe any particular path. Instead, it opens up an inquiry. We need such an inquiry in education because sometimes the answer people come up with in response to their spiritual yearning is the Third Reich, Aryan supremacy, or some other form of racism, sexism, or homophobia. We have all kinds of ways of saying, “My group is superior to your group,” and that’s the pathological way we get connected to something larger than our own egos.

So putting these questions on the table educationally is not only acceptable, it’s critical. When we leave them unexamined, we get a lot of darkness in the world as people fail to examine their underlying spiritual dynamics in relation to their work and other responsibilities.

You mentioned carpenters. My grandfather was a master carpenter. He had a sixth-grade education, but he had Einstein in his fingertips. His inner guidance was so strong that he could build a circular staircase in the middle of a house without using a miter box to cut the complex angles required. He’d cut them freehand and perfectly join that wood in a spiral.

My grandfather’s feeling for wood was parallel to the way geneticist Barbara McClintock worked with the biotic materials that led her to breakthrough discoveries in genetic transposition more than 50 years ago, long before we had the scientific instrumentation we have today. Of course, she had all the logical and observational powers you need to win a Nobel Prize in medicine. But she also had a relationship with the maize she studied that she called “a feeling for the organism.”

When we bring our inner lives into our work, whatever we’re working with ceases to be an object to be manipulated and becomes instead a partner to co-create with. That’s what good teachers do with students, good doctors do with patients, good writers do with words, good potters do with clay.

Sarah: What role does an inner practice have in educational settings?

Parker: For starters, if we helped would-be teachers understand their inner lives, we’d have less teacher burnout. Fifty percent of those who enter public school teaching will be gone at the end of five years. Schools are too often places that don’t sustain human growth and development. And if you’re not supporting that growth in teachers, then you’re not doing that for students, because adults who don’t develop their own inner lives can’t pass those capacities on to the young.

If you want evidence of the importance of the inner life in institutional reform, look at the study of school reform in Chicago in the 1990s, done by Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider. [1]

The study asked why some schools do better than others at teaching reading, writing, and math. They found that none of the “usual suspects” made much of a difference in improving kids’ learning: not money, models of governance, state-of-the-art curriculum, in-service training, or technology.

But one variable made a huge difference, a variable the researchers called “relational trust.” If your school had high levels of relational trust—among teachers and between teachers and administrators, and teachers and parents—and/or a leadership team that cared about trust, then over 10 years, your chance of raising student performance in basic skills was five out of seven. If not, your chances dropped to two out of seven.

So, what goes into relational trust? I’d argue that it relies on the capacity to do inner work, to go beyond the ego into something larger—in this case, into the shared desire to help children grow up in a way that will give them a chance at good lives.

Doing inner work means grappling with questions such as, “How do I get my own ego out of the way enough to regard you as a collaborator rather than as a competitor? If you step on my toes, how can I forgive you and move on? And if I step on your toes, how do I forgive myself and ask for your forgiveness so we can move on together?”

Engaging the inner life also makes for a more ethical professional practice. As we look around the professions today—not least in the world of business and accounting—we see why we need people who have an examined inner life to strengthen the ethics of those professions.

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I’d add, if you choose to live an unexamined life, please do not take a job that involves other people! You’re likely to cause real damage if you do.

Sarah: When people get clear on their values, don’t they tend to change the institutions they work with?

Parker: Yes, the inner life is subversive! When you develop an awareness of your inner life, you became aware of the disparity between your integrity and the way the institutions around you operate. And you may become aware that you are part of the problem—that you live a divided life, that the actions your institutions demand of you conflict with your inner values.

Institutions are projections of our own inner lives. Yes, they appear to have superhuman powers. But we can call them back to some semblance of humanity by reinventing them, because we invented them in the first place.

For example, a doctor at one of our Center for Courage and Renewal retreats said that the HMO where he works has him on the edge of violating his Hippocratic Oath two or three times a week. And under No Child Left Behind, many teachers are struggling with the demands of a testing system that threatens their commitment to serve the best interests of kids.

At that point, you have to reach deep and ask yourself, “Am I going to continue to live a divided life? Am I going to tuck this under the rug and pretend that I don’t know what’s going on? Or am I going to become a moral change agent within my institution and rally like-minded people around me, coalescing our power to bring about institutional change?”

Part of our problem is that our major institutions are often so complex that outsiders who want to hold them accountable have little access. Wall Street is a horrific example. We all know what happened when so very few insiders were willing to say what they knew—that our markets and financial system had become a house of cards. We need people within these institutions to act as moral agents, watching out for the best interests of those who are supposed to be served and of society at large.

In a recent article I wrote for Change Magazine [2], I argued that professional education must include the competencies individuals need to work toward change in our very dysfunctional institutions. In other words, all professionals ought to have some of the skills of a community organizer.

Sarah: In the new edition of your book, The Courage to Teach, you talk about debunking the myth that institutions possess autonomous power over our lives.

Parker: I tell a true story in The Courage to Teach about a medical resident who was given an impossible load of critical care patients to look after all by herself. She was unable to cope, and one of her patients died.

What do medical schools teach would-be doctors about their responsibilities and powers when they are asked to participate in wrongdoing? Do they teach them to blow the whistle on a system that puts them in an impossible situation? Or do they condition them to avoid getting crosswise with their superiors, and to just hope they make it through the day without anyone dying?

Institutions are projections of our own inner lives. Yes, they get large and complicated and appear to have superhuman powers. But we can call them back to some semblance of humanity by reinventing them, because we invented them in the first place. I think students don’t understand this. They believe that institutions have slots that you must fit into. But those slots are malleable, and those institutions can be rearranged. We have to help empower students to learn how to do that.

Sarah: Successful students are often the ones who did fit themselves into the slots within the educational institution that they graduated from.

Parker: That’s an important point. For generations, our schools have replicated the problems of our institutions. If you drive around small towns that haven’t rebuilt their high schools for the last 80 or 90 years, you see schools that were built to look like the factories that their graduates were going to work in. A lot of them look like those deadening assembly plant buildings that General Motors used to have, because the whole idea was to condition people to live and work under those circumstances.

But clearly that’s not education. Education was meant to be liberating for free men and women, which is where the name “liberal education” comes from.

Sarah: In Change Magazine, you proposed that we teach students how to “mine their emotions for knowledge.” What does that mean?

Parker: Fear can be like the canary in the mine. It’s trying to tell us that danger is coming and we need to do something about it. But people need help discerning their emotions, just as they need help discerning facts. We need to help students understand that some emotions come out of neurotic fears that can and must be overcome. But other emotions are pointing them toward external problems that they need to confront.

More from Parker J. Palmer

Now I Become Myself
How do you find the right work, the work that you alone are called to do? The first step is to ask a different question...

Integral Life, Integral Teacher
How can an inner decision to live and work with integrity spark a social movement?

We do our best discernment in community, where many eyes, ears, sets of experiences, and voices can sort out the wheat from the chaff. That’s how every mode of human knowing proceeds, including science. All of us together are smarter than any one of us alone—especially if we listen to the dissenters and to the people raising critical questions.

When students work together, they can learn how to move toward provisional conclusions about what’s true and false, what’s right and wrong, which leads are worth following, and which of them can be laid down and forgotten. If our schools would do that, we would have more community in our lives, better results in the world of work, and deeper discernment by citizens in our political life.

Likewise, institutional change doesn’t come about simply through the actions of courageous whistle-blowers. It happens through the formation of communities of people who have a shared moral concern and who can provide encouragement, resources, and protection for each other. That way, the whistle-blower isn’t so easily picked off and hung out to dry.

I don’t know of any great movement that hasn’t depended on base communities to sustain individuals in the demanding work of social change.

Sarah: You ended your new edition of The Courage to Teach by saying, “Let us resist the temptation to respond with a fearful ‘no’ or an elusive ‘maybe,’ and allow our lives to speak a clear and heartfelt ‘yes.’” What does it mean to do that in the times we’re in today?

Parker: For the past eight years, we had political leaders who lied to us. They pumped up our fear of terrorism to persuade us to agree to subverting our Constitution and disempowering citizens—strategies that we’ve seen before in fascist and totalitarian societies.

Now, of course, we have the fear that the American economy has been, and continues to be, a house of cards. A lot of people are suffering, and there is more suffering to come.

Rebuilding is going to require lots of Americans to re-envision what abundance means. I experienced more abundance in the Quaker community called Pendle Hill—where I spent 11 years living on $2,400 a year (beginning in 1975) plus room and board—than I have at many other times of my life. This abundance comes from knowing that we’re there for one another. If the bottom falls out of my life, I have a support net, and if the bottom falls out of your life, I can be part of the support net for you. That’s abundance.

There are not many Americans who live in that kind of milieu, so we’re surrounded by fear. And yet, I don’t think there’s any more important time than this to say a heartfelt “yes” to the human possibility. That sense of possibility disappears when we say “no” or “If I can’t have my illusions about the economy and about America’s inherent greatness, then I’ll give up. I’ll hunker down, get what I can for me and my kind, and let the devil take the hindmost.” That can very quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, we need to make “yes” a self-­fulfilling prophecy. But it has to be a “yes” tempered by a clear-eyed knowledge of both what is going on and what we know to be possible.

The challenge is to stand and act in what I call “the tragic gap.” This is the gap between the hard facts that surround us and what we know to be possible—not our dreams or fantasies, but what we know to be possible because we’ve seen the evidence with our own eyes, just as I saw evidence of communal abundance during my years at Pendle Hill.

It’s an ongoing journey to stand in the tragic gap and keep acting in hopeful ways, holding the tension between what is and what could be. It’s so easy to flip out either into cynicism—­because the latest wave of bad news has just washed over you—or into a kind of idealism, because something has gone well and you allow yourself to imagine that it will be this way forever. A good example might be the people who thought Barack Obama would get everything right, who are now tempted to drop out of the political process as Obama proves to have feet of clay, the kind that come with being human.

When I think of the great leaders whom I admire—whether it’s Nelson Mandela, or Dorothy Day, who started the Catholic worker movement, or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar—I think of people who stood in the tragic gap for a long, long time, people who kept moving forward saying “yes” in full awareness of the hard realities around them while never abandoning their vision of possibility.

If more and more of us can hold that tension and keep moving forward by saying “yes, yes, yes” to each incremental step toward the possible, no matter how small, then I think all kinds of good things can happen.

21st Century Digital Learning Environments (REAL-WORLD Stimulations for OUR Imaginations, Creativity & Innovations)

Mobile Learning Institute (A 21st Century Education / Film Series)
http://www.mobilelearninginstitute.org/21stcenturyeducation/