Triple Helix

Bureaucracy.  Its a nasty word that has moved to the center of political discourse.  We are always looking for ways to cut,circumvent, or reinvent the managerial apparatus that has come to define our interaction with government.  Stacks of confusing forms, hidden rules, and disinterested paper-pushers are the components of an imagined boogeyman that political candidates rail against. When it comes to schools, we talk about stubborn teachers’ unions, incompetent administrators, and out-of-touch school board members.  In times of economic strife the people who make up these institutions are the targets of fear and anger.  Its a particularly potent kind of anger, because these institutions are meant to disseminate the collective knowledge and information of our society.  When things go wrong, we turn to our schools for reassurance that they are giving our children the skills to out-maneuver such catastrophes.  The public’s relationship to its schools can range from constructive criticism, to physical violence, as the School Board in Panama City, Florida witnessed first-hand last month.

19th Century sociologist Max Weber noted that in economically advanced societies, bureaucracy is a necessary organizational tool that lends robustness to critical institutions.  We write down rules and regulations and assign certain people to execute them in such a way that we are not beholden to any one person’s expertise.  The system can carry on without any given individual because no one has proprietary knowledge.  It is all shared and accessible to those given certain responsibilities.

The bureaucracy of schools are a peculiar kind of problem.  Weber’s theory of bureaucracy (and America’s schools) are from a different time.  Maybe its time we rethink the hierarchy of our educational system.

Starting at the bottom, the organization of teachers and students seems outdated.  Most of our workplaces don’t operate on a rigid time frame coordinated by bells.  We solve open-ended problems using a multitude of skill sets organized by project.  We enter field sites and perform our craft.

Teachers’ efforts and students’ progress need to be organized to a certain degree.  Its important that the “big picture” is considered.  Currently, this task falls to administrators, deans, and counselors that perform a wide variety of oversight, from multiple points of view.  The principal is concerned with the overall operating efficiency, the deans are looking after the student’s behavior and safety, and the counselors monitor student achievement across classrooms.  Without getting too specific, I just want to offer the possibility that these functions need not be organized in this top-down manner.  Careers with the highest job-satisfaction ratings are often those that allow for flexibility and true creativity in everyday work.  Giving teachers more administrative power is a good way to foster such creativity.

Finally, at the very top of the food chain, are the superintendents and district school boards.  These are usually elected positions that set broad goals for many different schools.  Someone with a better political science background could provide a better alternative to the current schema, but I think reform needs to start with the scale of things.

We take the current form of bureaucracy for granted.  Nothing about education inherently demands school principals, or county school boards.  When we look at options for reform, consider simple (but fundamental) changes could be the answer.  Finland’s reform did not involve deep pedagogical debates about what it means to say 2+2=4.  They paid teachers well, gave them autonomy in the classroom, and respected their bosses because they had been teachers in the past.  Just remember to sharpen your Occam’s razor every once in a while.

I forgot how easy it is to loose track of the audience is when you are trying to teach a lesson. It’s funny because I recall being in a similar kind of desk in at a middle school  years ago and the Urge to shoot paper spit wads is unforgettable. What I also remember thinking that I actually wanted to care about science class, but just couldn’t. It would be years later that I learned to channel my energies into social science.  So, when explaining air masses to middle school students, I caught myself doing the internal “why aren’t they fascinated by this” rhetorical game and managed to stop for a second. Why didn’t they care about weather fronts and storm fronts? To me, it conjured up images of powerful storms, exciting rain clouds and lightening arcing through the clouds like the backbone of some terrible beast. More practically, it was useful for figuring out how to decide where to live and what kind of weather would likely be there.

These are all thoughts that I have because of my background. I’m a grad student. I’ve done the transformation from lay person into scientist that education expects. I have had the opportunity to make these choices about where to live and how I was going to spend my money on clothing that combats weather because I’m in that part of my life. What do they care about?

“Hey. You wanna know why it was raining last week instead of snowing?”

I find more and more that this is the best way to start a conversation that goes somewhere useful. While underlying the question is some science concept that I think is important, I think just expressing knowledge to the kids as something that they can have if they want makes a big difference. Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter if they fully grasp what you were talking about. I explained to an honors student today about bell curves in statistics in relationship to flipping coins and averages. I think she sorta got what I was implying, but I could see her really get it when the class gathered all their data together and it came closer to fitting the bell curve than her individual data had. “See? As you gather more and more data, it comes closer to the average we talked about”. I don’t know if I changed her life, but I know she understood that she was given a peek into the world of something bigger than the 8^th grade.

The next question comes up about how I can translate that into a teaching method for more kids. To begin talking about bell curves, I had to ask her if she was decent in algebra. What about the kids who aren’t decent in algebra yet or have a hard time connecting these two abstracts together? The route I’ve taken thus far is to relate something that we’re learning to something that they might want. Thus, the importance of learning about mineral identification becomes the search for gold through minerals found in close proximity. The understanding of the earth’s crust and layers becomes a talk on why the earth spins the way it does. A life science discussion moves from the idea of mitosis and meiosis to why these forms of reproduction enabled life to emerge victorious on our planet during periods of great change.

More and more, I’m learning that the best way to begin talking about science is not with what they need to know or what they should know, but a simple question:

“Hey. Do you guys want to learn something cool?”