Forty years ago, or forty-one perhaps, Genny and I took the long way ‘round returning from Sioux Falls, SD to Payette, ID. We drove north to Winnipeg, turned left, and followed Canada 1 clear across. We dropped south to Seattle and doubled back to home. It was quite the tour in a VW Beetle. Crossing Canada, we had the feeling that time had slipped a couple of decades to cross-country vacations we remembered from our childhoods.
This feeling was validated on the Vancouver-Nanaimo ferry. We struck up a conversation with a city planner from Edmonton, Frank Kirby, I recall. He explained thus: “In many ways, we operate a decade or two behind you folks down in the States, and that, in other ways, puts us a decade or two ahead of you. You see, we watch your mistakes and avoid them.” We were talking about city planning and how driving through Canadian cities differed from driving through U. S. cities. Some of their solutions, to urban sprawl, for example, made admirable sense to me.
Today, that conversation came back to me in another context. I came upon an article on The Atlantic’s website, “What America Can Learn from Ontario’s Education Success.” It struck me that Ontario, like Finland, is achieving results ahead of the U. S. by practices that are behind the US. Such practices are the very sort of thing that the Reformists seem bent on un-doing.
As is the case with Finland, Ontario’s school system was mediocre and stagnant until the last decade or so. Since then, improvement has been, if not dramatic, more than gratifying. Like Finland’s, Ontario’s schools are now among “the most improved and highest performing in the world.” Like Finland, Ontario seems to have laid out a rational path to school improvement and innovation (I hesitate to use the term “reform” because it has become fraught with particular ideologies and political agendas.)
The article is brief and quite general. I would like to quote and/or paraphrase some of the main points and expand on them with my comments.
Ontario public schools follow a model embraced by top-performing hospitals, businesses, and organizations worldwide. Specifically, they do five things in concert — focus, build relationships, persist, develop capacity, and spread quality implementation.
Reformists promote a business-management model for education. But businesses are one kind of organization with their own goals, methods, and measures of success that do not always translate literally to another kind of organization – schools for example. The authors of this article look to broader principles governing organizations, “five things done in concert.” With this broader focus, we can see applicable and useful business principles without treating schools as businesses, which they are not and should not try to be. We can also look to relevant medical and public health models as in “Hotspot Schools,” 5-9-2012.
Like many school systems, Ontario had too many “top” priorities. The Ministry of Education selected three–literacy, math, and high school graduation–with a commitment to raise the bar for all students and close achievement gaps between all groups. There are other goals, of course, but these three are non-negotiable and take precedence because they leverage so many other learning goals.
Public schools play a complex role in a modern democratic society, serving many purposes for a diverse constituency. Worthy goals and urgent needs are numerous. Trying to address everything, equally, all at once leads either to a kind of gridlock or to a random hit-or-miss pattern that makes it difficult to accomplish much of anything. The question is how do we prioritize? Too often, political and ideological hot buttons become the top priorities. Increasingly, priorities serve some particular test and end up being reductive, with literacy and math, for example, being seen in opposition to and detracting from other parts of the curriculum.
Rationally, top priority should be accorded to those goals which best serve the greatest number of other goals. Literacy is fundamental to every aspect of the school program. Scientific literacy is an important goal, but because science courses become increasingly math-intensive, math is key to science. It is important that the top priorities be seen as inclusive of other priorities, not exclusionary of them.
Focus and persistence ensure that these priorities are not going to be discarded along the way. The history of education innovations has generated a “this too shall pass” mindset among teachers. One of our colleagues calls this phenomenon “the law of innovation fatigue.” Any attempt to create a high-leverage priority (like the three adopted by Ontario) requires that the education system as a whole commits to them long-term.
Teachers are criticized as notional creatures, always latching on to every passing fad and discarding it just as quickly. Teachers are also criticized, by the same Reformists, it seems to me, for failing to take seriously necessary reforms, actively resisting them, and shrugging off progress with “this too shall pass.” The innovations thus resisted are almost always impositions from above by Administrators or Politicians. And indeed they do pass as political winds shift in the halls of power and new campaigns call for new slogans; as new Administrators with resumes to build replace older Administrators who have added some notches to their guns and are ready to move on. Good changes are swept away with the bad and whether they are replaced with better or worse seems not to matter. In the meantime, innovations that begin with the teachers themselves are ignored if not ruthlessly stomped upon – a matter of economics: who owns what. “Innovation fatigue” is regrettable but understandable and inevitable.
Even modest changes can be surprisingly difficult to implement and even effective changes suffer from lack of long-term commitment. In my school, attendance was a problem for years, and perhaps it still is. It was, or should have been a major priority because it is an important key to increasing graduation, among other things. You can’t teach those who are not there.
Every few years, a building administrator would decide to do something about it, by golly. A big zero-tolerance crackdown would be announced. Truancies would result in detentions. This was good. It seems to me that having to make up truant time in detention is a natural consequence, the best kind of consequence. Problems always immediately presented, unexpected, it always seemed. First, by this time, the problem had gotten out of hand, with lots of students needing to serve lots of detentions. The numbers who showed up would be more than could be accommodated. What to do with them? Second, many students simply would not show up. What to do about them? The usual response was to assign more detentions. And if they didn’t show up for those? Detention is, by definition, usually off the school day. When teachers are asked or required to work off the clock, they usually want a little extra for doing so. But there was never any extra money allowed for this purpose, so teachers became less than enthusiastic about the whole project. Eventually, the whole initiative, lacking support, would collapse or would be so watered down as to have little effect. The initiative would not persist; the problem would.
But priorities don’t mean anything if you don’t develop the relationships necessary to enact them. The provincial government set out to develop a strong sense of two-way partnerships and collaboration, especially between administrators and teachers, and in concert with teachers’ unions. This required providing significant leeway to individual school districts to experiment with novel approaches to reaching the province’s three main educational goals, and focusing significant reform efforts on investments in staffing and teacher development.
The structure of a school system is essentially hierarchical, a chain of command: at the top, the Board of Education, then the Superintendent, who answers to the board, then the officials in the district office who answer to the Superintendent, then the Principals of various schools, etc. A control-and-command way of doing business comes naturally. But it is rigid; change can only come down from above, and each teacher can be isolated at the bottom of his organizational “silo.” Building two-way collaborations (vertically, teachers collaborating with administrators; horizontally, teachers collaborating with teachers) requires thought and effort. If patterns of collaboration already exist, they require thought and effort to build upon – and simply not to kill. As soon as we wrap our heads around the benefits of collaboration, we begin to see that teachers, individually, in small groups, in departments, teachers and their professional organizations and their unions are not the problem, but part of the solution. Teachers may resist “innovations” that they feel are being foisted upon them from above, but they are a source of innovation that should not be overlooked. Yet most Reformist schemes call for more control and command, not less.
By focusing on teacher development, Ontario was also able to raise teacher accountability. Decades of experience have taught Canadian educators that you can’t get greater accountability through direct measures of rewards and punishments. Instead, what Ontario did was to establish transparency of results and practice (anyone can find out what any school’s results are, and what they are doing to get those results) while combining this with what we call non-judgmentalism. This latter policy means that if a teacher is struggling, administrators and peers will step in to help her get better. (There are, however, steps that can be taken if a situation consistently fails to improve.)
Most Reformist schemes trumpet “teacher accountability” in a way that most teachers find insulting. On one hand, monetize every little thing, on the assumption that if you don’t pay for that specific thing, the teacher won’t do it. “If we pay you more, will you work harder?” U. S. Reformists call for direct measures of “output” – numbers. Lots of numbers, what we call “data-driven.” Reformists usually don’t care to look too deeply into how those numbers are achieved, or what, exactly, may work better.
The final element of the strategy involves identifying and spreading quality practices. Most education systems are loosely coupled to say the least — behind the classroom door, teachers are islands unto themselves. In such isolated systems, two problems emerge. The first is that good ideas do not get around; they remain trapped in individual classrooms or schools. The other problem is that poor teaching can remain entrenched, because good practices are not being disseminated. A big part of the Ontario strategy has been to break down the walls of the classroom, the school, and even the district by increasing communication, cataloging and sharing best practices, and fostering a culture of teamwork. To that end, the Ministry of Education guides local school districts in developing more collaborative professional environments, while also acting as a clearinghouse for innovation and best practices.
Teachers want to know what – if we are accountable to the public, if we are accountable to our students, if we are accountable to ourselves as professionals – we can do in our classrooms to be more effective. It all comes down to practice. What we do. A page of numbers is simple. It all lies on the surface. What lies behind those numbers is much more complex, downright messy, in fact: practice. There are best practices, of course, and, realistically, some practices that are better than others. Teachers learn from courses they take and workshops they participate in. But more, they learn formally and informally from their own experiences and the experiences of colleagues, whether at national conferences, in committee meetings, or over coffee in the faculty lounge. Some systems are very successful in encouraging this kind of ongoing dialogue. Others, intentionally or not, create barriers.
The net result of these five forces is an education system that has the characteristics of a high-performing organization: relentless focus, interactive pressure and support, a preoccupation with results and how to improve them, a culture of mutual commitment, and what we call collaborative competition, where there is no limit to what is being attempted. The fact that this strategy develops leaders at all levels — leaders who focus on results, as they help develop other leaders — means that sustainability is built into the whole enterprise. Ontario isn’t perfect. But it proves that large-scale reform can be accomplished in school systems in fairly short periods of time.
Never mind “reform,” that politically fraught term. There are no panaceas. What is wanted is substantive continuous improvement. Ontario, like Finland, seems to offer a rational model that we would do well to take seriously, to study, to adapt, and to emulate to our ultimate benefit.