Appetite for Change?

The pace of change in the education field is glacial compared with most other industries. A person from the 18th Century reanimated in the early 21st would instantly recognize today’s elementary and secondary schools as schools. This is largely because the field has remained laminated to a production model that involves a formula something like X teachers + Y students + Z classrooms = school. We can fiddle with the ratios, but the underlying technology of production remains essentially unchanged. Education is something that adults do to/with students inside classrooms and laboratories.One (among several) reasons for the failure or technology (or much of anything else, really) to disrupt the model is the field’s historical antipathy to experimentation and risk. Over and over we see that Tom Peter’s maxim that “whoever tries the most stuff wins” works in business, because while many experiments fail, others pay off spectacularly. Indeed, this is how business model innovation has worked in most other fields. Companies try new things and discover cheaper/faster/better ways of delivering a service or producing a product.Kaihan Krippendorf’s blog post today got me thinking about whether our allergy to experimentation and risk is an immutable characteristic of the education field, or if it is a mindset that invites modification. To be sure, education is an inherently conservative endeavor, and few educators (and even fewer parents) would embrace rampant experimentation on their children. Part of the problem is that education has become an increasingly high stakes game, widely seen as the gateway to a successful life. As the real or perceived stakes rise, governing boards at private, independent and international schools insist ever more stridently that every new “bet” (read experiment) made by administration pay off. The notion that some bets will necessarily fail while others will succeed beyond our wildest hopes seems like just too big a risk given the stakes.So, is our industry frozen? Will we see at best only incremental change? Maybe, but I can see two paths out of this trap. One way is to call the question of whether the stakes really are as high as people believe. Assumptions elevated to perceived truisms drive much of the conservatism of the field. Does the brand of preschool really drive the quality of medical school one attends later in life? Does middle school really predict lifetime earnings? Does attending an elite high school, by itself, make someone a better person in adulthood?A second way out is to learn from (real) high stakes fields that have somehow found ways to experiment and innovate. Surgery seems like a good example. The stakes are high—literally life or death—and yet to progress surgeons have to try new things, otherwise they would still be doing surgery without anesthetic. To be fair, medicine co-opted the animal model, wherein procedures and medicines are first tested on non-human species, and education has no such thing. Nonetheless, the stakes are not as high (parent opinion notwithstanding), plus educators have the “gift of time” with their students, so some educational experiments seem both doable and safe.What is your board’s appetite for risk? Are they willing to support multiple, small-scale experiments to test what ideas might bear fruit?