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.