President Bonner, my new boss at Gardner-Webb University, called a special meeting of faculty and staff today. It was a good news, bad news meeting. The good news--the freshman class is the brightest ever, and we're getting a raise! The bad news--higher education is on an unsustainable course. And the latter will ultimately impact the former. I'll tell you why.
Parents may already know that college tuition has outstripped wage increases among average Americans sixteen times over in just the last five years. Many of those costs to universities--ultimately passed on to parents and students--are brick and mortar--new buildings, including dormitories and especially student recreation and entertainment centers. Other costs are for talented teachers and administrators.
Make no mistake. Among universities of every ilk, the race for the brightest students is on. One reason is that more-capable students are statistically less likely to drop out. That was the other piece of bad news from President Bonner. Gardner-Webb is experiencing a five-year trend where fewer and fewer students either do not matriculate to the next level or fail to graduate at all.
We are not alone. Since 2008, college completion has fallen to less than 50 percent for all universities. I think we can agree that the Great Recession has hit more than home prices. So now, over one in five American families have significant college indebtedness at a level that exceeds even credit card debt, this at a time when many college graduates are underemployed or unemployed.
The problem is such that even the brightest students and their parents are questioning the value of a college degree. What is the point of a degree if a career is not part of the deal? It's a fair question, especially in an age where knowledge acquisition is a click away. Want an actual college course? Many universities are giving them away for free, just to get their foot in the door.
The pundits and trend-watchers occupy space on a continuum from "take a deep breath and stay calm" to "the system as we know it is already dead." As I become increasingly acculturated in the world of higher education, I find myself somewhere in the middle. It's like I tell my masters and doctoral students in education--learn to work on a system, not the system. The system we know may or may not be dead, but it's fair to say that it's dying.
Everything we currently do to create and disseminate knowledge at every level of education should be subject to examination and change. We need to consider new revenue streams, public-private partnerships, new business models, new ways of convening and catalyzing learning communities. And we need to consider how we hold ourselves accountable for results.
I'm glad I attended the meeting today. President Bonner could have been any university president anywhere in the United States. I would love to hear what is happening where you work and what ideas you have. Let's get the conversation started about how we're going to make the unsustainable sustainable.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Monday, September 17, 2012
Idealized Design
"If you don't know what to do if you could do anything you want, how could you possibly know what to do if you could not do anything you want."
The late Russell Ackoff, Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania, had a lot to say about the limits of our imagination. In propagating a kind of thought experiment he termed "idealized design," Professor Ackoff implied that the real constraint on our ability to change things is our own mind.
Ackoff argued that our ability to remake existing institutions, for example. might lie in a game of "Let's Pretend." Education reformers might consider the following:
Imagine that a nuclear holocaust has destroyed every infrastructure humankind has ever known. You are in charge of reconstructing an educational system. What do you do?
Students in my Gardner-Webb University School of Education doctoral course, "Change and Reform Theory in Education," are facing just such a question. To be clear, we are in the throes of designing a university laboratory school. Talk about authentic engagement.
Practicing educators in my class and that of my colleague, Dr. Steve Laws, are coming at the problem from slightly different perspectives, my students from a Curriculum and Instruction approach and his students from an Educational Leadership approach.
So what is the problem of public schools? In other words, what do we want to change and why? This is the subject of our next class. To be sure, we will trace the sorry history of educational reform, one bandwagon after another, using in part the excellent Tyack and Cuban text, Tinkering Toward Utopia.
We will examine university laboratory schools such as the famous one established at the University of Chicago. What happened to it? How do we prevent the Gardner-Webb University Laboratory School from becoming a boutique for professors' children? How do we market the school within the context of the regular public school district in Cleveland County, North Carolina? What will make our school unlike any other school that has ever come before it? Big questions, these.
I am reminded of the first class in my own doctoral program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro 20 years ago. Ironically, one of my classmates was the current superintendent in Cleveland County, Bruce Boyles. With one other then eager young student and now a research associate at Southern Regional Education Board in Atlanta, Paula Egelson, we were invited by our professors to "find a problem." That was an appropriate assignment given the title of the class, "Problem Finding Seminar," as if there were not enough already.
What our professors were hoping to do was to teach us to be creative, self-directed learners, to explore a problem we decided was important, as contrasted with a presented problem thought by someone else to be important. Akin to what painters or composers face confronted by an empty canvass or blank staff paper, respectively, the two kinds of problems could not present a greater contrast. One results in the life of the institutional tool, the other, the life of the inventor, the artist.
Idealized design provides the opportunity for educational leaders at every level, from classroom to boardroom, to bring out the best in themselves and others. Clearly, the outcome of our students' assignment to build a school will be a conversation, a result of research and collective imagination.
If we do this right, they will be telling their grandchildren about how they changed things for education in Fall 2012. I will keep readers posted on progress.
The late Russell Ackoff, Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania, had a lot to say about the limits of our imagination. In propagating a kind of thought experiment he termed "idealized design," Professor Ackoff implied that the real constraint on our ability to change things is our own mind.
Ackoff argued that our ability to remake existing institutions, for example. might lie in a game of "Let's Pretend." Education reformers might consider the following:
Imagine that a nuclear holocaust has destroyed every infrastructure humankind has ever known. You are in charge of reconstructing an educational system. What do you do?
Students in my Gardner-Webb University School of Education doctoral course, "Change and Reform Theory in Education," are facing just such a question. To be clear, we are in the throes of designing a university laboratory school. Talk about authentic engagement.
Practicing educators in my class and that of my colleague, Dr. Steve Laws, are coming at the problem from slightly different perspectives, my students from a Curriculum and Instruction approach and his students from an Educational Leadership approach.
So what is the problem of public schools? In other words, what do we want to change and why? This is the subject of our next class. To be sure, we will trace the sorry history of educational reform, one bandwagon after another, using in part the excellent Tyack and Cuban text, Tinkering Toward Utopia.
We will examine university laboratory schools such as the famous one established at the University of Chicago. What happened to it? How do we prevent the Gardner-Webb University Laboratory School from becoming a boutique for professors' children? How do we market the school within the context of the regular public school district in Cleveland County, North Carolina? What will make our school unlike any other school that has ever come before it? Big questions, these.
I am reminded of the first class in my own doctoral program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro 20 years ago. Ironically, one of my classmates was the current superintendent in Cleveland County, Bruce Boyles. With one other then eager young student and now a research associate at Southern Regional Education Board in Atlanta, Paula Egelson, we were invited by our professors to "find a problem." That was an appropriate assignment given the title of the class, "Problem Finding Seminar," as if there were not enough already.
What our professors were hoping to do was to teach us to be creative, self-directed learners, to explore a problem we decided was important, as contrasted with a presented problem thought by someone else to be important. Akin to what painters or composers face confronted by an empty canvass or blank staff paper, respectively, the two kinds of problems could not present a greater contrast. One results in the life of the institutional tool, the other, the life of the inventor, the artist.
Idealized design provides the opportunity for educational leaders at every level, from classroom to boardroom, to bring out the best in themselves and others. Clearly, the outcome of our students' assignment to build a school will be a conversation, a result of research and collective imagination.
If we do this right, they will be telling their grandchildren about how they changed things for education in Fall 2012. I will keep readers posted on progress.
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