New Blog - Please Visit

I'm decommissioning this blog as of 6/2011 and am moving to a new location. Please visit http://practicallyprogressive.com/.
Thanks,
-ndh

Schools should learn from business: avoid competition

No business deliberately seeks competition; quite the opposite, businesses often spend lavishly to avoid it altogether. In nearly three decades of business management, twelve years as a strategy consultant to the Fortune 100, I’ve only seen one case where a business induced competition, and it backfired terribly. So why do we want to create competition for public schools? First let’s look at how businesses address it.

Indeed, one of the primary activities in business is the hard work of finding markets or niches where there is little or no competition. Some call it differentiation. This free-from-competition nirvana is usually measured in large market share, like that enjoyed by Microsoft’s Windows software among operating systems in the 90s, and it yields massive profits. Ultimately the goal is monopoly, although few that approach or achieve it will call it that for fear of reprisal. Whatever it’s called, it’s always found through smart investment strategies like acquisition, training, new technologies, hiring, lobbying, and research and development (R&D). The less that a business invests to get it, the more competition it will encounter. The more it invests, the less competition will matter and the greater the return on investment. While there are points of diminishing return, it’s generally that simple.

So why are we asking schools to act more like businesses and force them into conjured competition, when this is precisely not how businesses act? Wouldn’t it be better if schools were able to truly emulate the successful business?

If smart, capable kids are our objective (akin to profits in business), then why, pray tell, are we taking an already insufficient investment in public education and splitting it to create new schools in an effort to induce competition, when we should be doing precisely the opposite? And why, pray tell, would we measure and reward public school teachers based on centralized standardized tests -- the ultimate homogenizer? Here the only thing we create is sameness. Combined with vouchers that funnel public money into private schools, we’re paying for mediocrity twice, because we have more schools than we need, but none that do outstanding work. And in Wisconsin, a so-called business-friendly administration and legislature is forcing an agenda of sharply reduced investment at precisely the worst moment.

This is not what a good business would do. A good business would invest to reduce the threat of competition, knowing that the alternative is to lose its best talent and ideas and its position. A good business would take stock of its performing assets and would work to put its non-performers to better use. A good business would set new goals to take a new place of importance and value in its market. A good business would ask its employees to assist in the change. A good business, if unionized, would ask the union to help, and a good union would provide it.

For Wisconsin’s schools, this would mean protecting our world-class public schools and providing sufficient turnaround attention to the weak ones. Our objective should be to set the mark for academic achievement worldwide. For Wisconsin’s teacher’s unions, this would be an opportunity to gain international stature as a flexible and forward-thinking enterprise. Of course in due time, we could expect Wisconsin’s children to become role-model global and local citizens. Only then would we be truly open for business.

So as citizens, we must ask ourselves; do we want to increase the potential of our kids to do well in our community, the nation and the planet and give them a chance at a better life? If this is our goal, then we should do as a good business would: we should minimize competition and maximize investment.

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Copyright, Nicholas Hayes 2011, All rights reserved.

Note: This article (thanks Lori D) postulates that the rush to create competition for public schools might better be viewed as a lobby-fueled investment to reduce competition for education privateers. Follow the money. http://www.progressive.org/rc051111.html

Did Bin Laden just win?

By Bin Laden's publicly stated measures, he won the last ten years, we did not. It's plausible that in death, he'll continue to win.

He set out to put us into self-destruct mode and we took the bait. With "market forces" as our only moral compass, we have blown our savings and then borrowed more from the Chinese, we've wasted ten years measuring only our own talent for consuming, we have traded no bid contracting for legitimate political capital, and we have erased any serious western influence in the global conversation, in order to get here: a killing turned public relations event complete with teasers, back-stories and a flash-mob celebration. We've demoted ourselves from super power to also ran. Democracy is bankrupt.

This is precisely what Bin Laden intended to put in play with 9/11.

In the meantime, Obama needed Bin Laden dead as badly as Bush needed him alive, at least to win elections. Whether he is or isn't is irrelevant on a historical scale.

But we must now focus on the core issues: resources, environment, education and civility. Doing this is the only way to start winning again.

- Nicholas Hayes, 2011

Between Guns and Voices

In the battle between guns and voices, the voices always win.

-Nicholas Hayes, 2011

Gaming the Schools | How zero-sum thinking threatens business and education

"We use competition when someone must lose. We use cooperation when many stand to gain."

“Starting today, we’re competing with you. Let’s see who wins.” the company president said, fist on desk, at a pivotal meeting with dealers.

Facing free trade agreements that were opening its markets to foreign competitors undercutting price and profits, his decision to initiate competition with long-time friendly advocates inadvertently tipped the balance of power and started the company on a downward spiral from which it has not yet fully recovered.

Twenty years later, the same dealers, once a frayed network of local independent small businesses, have consolidated, forming a powerful buying group that dictates terms and outperforms the company on every measure: sales, profits and growth. The former president, forced out ten years ago, is talked about in “what not to do” meetings. Once an undisputed leader in its market, the company hasn’t had the wherewithal to modernize itself or its products. I’m aware of them because my firm has been hired to help guide recovery, decades later.

Such is a common story in zero-sum thinking.

Lacking new ideas with which to counter a flood of decent goods from countries with lower labor costs, this president chose to turn away from the actual battle, initiating a new, riskier one. Prior to the meeting, the company’s dealers had been vital partners and contributors to the company’s business. He underestimated how well they understood the market, how it behaved, and how it could be improved. They knew things that he was never able to learn, having shut the door.

His was a panicky response, precisely the kind that we are seeing in the debate over education in the United States today. We know we have problems with performance, but we jump to conjured competition as the only solution.

Good leaders choose when to compete or cooperate.
Clearer heads in business often see that the key to survival and growth is cooperation, not competition. They follow a proven logic; positive change is a creative process while competition is a destructive one. This isn’t to say that competition is always bad; it’s not. Competition is one of many tools for meeting goals. Both competition and cooperation are useful, but at different times, and for different reasons. We use competition when someone must lose. We use cooperation when many stand to gain.

Clearer heads in education may eventually come to a similar conclusion based on the realities of costs and performance. But to date, they have not.

How are we gaming schools?
Panicking and hellbent for privatization, short-sighted policymakers are effectively doubling the cost of education with school choice vouchers to create artificial demand-side competition in the hope that it will force improvements in public schools. It’s quite the opposite: data show that vouchers for private schools have not improved teaching or test scores and may be reducing them while costing much more. Communities and states now often have twice as many underfunded schools as they need, but lack the political will to select or shutter any of them.

Believing teacher behaviors to be rooted in Machiavellian economics, many want to reward individual teachers based on the test scores of their students. In a world where teams of specialists can be anywhere, and where solutions to complex problems are found by combining principles like physics, chemistry, computing, sociology and history, it is easy to see that education should reflect the global community and its interactions, not one teacher’s composite student test scores. The best schools mirror the real world model; they are cooperative teams of interdisciplinary specialists who tag-team, back each other up and who marry lessons contextually and experientially. Merit pay drives a wedge between the real world and the teaching world by pitting teachers against each other, so the deep learning never has a chance to start.

What would work better?
Better than top down policy and payroll trickery, education reform is something that must be started and executed locally, at the very grassroots, and with every stakeholder participating, and with a keen awareness to global trends and conditions. If a school will provide a world-class education, then the principals and trustees, teachers and parents, businesses and community leaders (the recipients of the smart people it spins out) will cooperate and agree on goals and methods and on how they will measure local success. In charrette, they’ll identify challenges, discuss opportunities, settle disputes, set goals and influence designs, and agree to long range investments.


We’ll know better when we see it.
When we learn to cooperate on education, teachers won’t be baby-sitters. Tests will be something between a teacher, a parent and a student to measure individual progress, not a system auditor’s yardstick. Unions won’t protect bad teachers or funnel more money to retired teachers than working teachers. Master teachers will be easy to spot as the key role models within the community. Competitions that are created will be fun and useful, designed (by the teachers and students) to refine skills and motivate. Parents will contribute in real ways and offset infrastructural and administrative costs, volunteering time to serve meals, stuff envelopes, chaperone, or coach, for example. School board meetings won’t be bitch sessions, they’ll be a time to share ideas. Classrooms won’t feel like boxes of books encircled in chalkboards, but infinite spaces of imagination and discovery, with context and connections. Cooperation will be a springboard for new, unimagined ideas.

These changes will be hard work, requiring a longer view, bold leadership, smaller central governments and more flexible unions. But they are absolutely necessary.

Imagine the company president had made a different move twenty years ago. Instead of responding to an outside threat by initiating an internal skirmish, what if he had enlisted his dealers to become part of his R&D team? What if he had called an innovation meeting, instead of a confrontational one? What if he had used the time from then to now to listen and learn about what the dealers knew, and where they needed to go in order to matter in the new market? What if he’d asked them to help and offered some of his own in return?

The company might have seen twenty years of progress towards better technologies, built on closer cooperation and more fluid communication between its stakeholders. It’s plausible to assume that it would still be in the lead, and he’d still be leading it, and they wouldn’t need us.

The fact is, cooperation can usually be shown to be a better, more effective tool than competition, at least in the hard work of finding new ideas and common good, so it happens all the time in good business.

Who will lose if we don't cooperate?
A zero-sum world view pre-ordains a zero-sum destiny. In this president’s mind, someone had to lose. His fear of foreign competition blinded him to the possibility that he might be the loser in his newly picked fight.

Privatization and merit pay in education spring from a zero-sum worldview. In it, there must be winners and losers, and the losers are American children and American taxpayers.

There is no true mathematical opposite for a zero-sum game. There is, however, an obvious strategic alternative. We can isolate and remove the practice of gaming altogether in our approach to education, and it is in our mutual interest to do so.

This is, of course, what good public education has done all along. Education is about more people knowing what a few people know, leading to better ideas. It is the only tide that lifts all boats.

It’s not the time to panic. It is the time to face the truth about public education: competition for competition’s sake will destroy it. Only cooperation will fix it, because at the core, education is cooperation.

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Copyright, Nicholas Hayes 2011, All rights reserved.

Teachers are the New Jews

If a year ago you had asked two friends, one a teacher and another not, if they would be pitted against each other, or worse, breaking years of bonds over this issue, neither would've imagined it. Not many on either side of the debate in Wisconsin are sleeping well lately. Here is why.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his entourage are working from a script that UW Professor William Cronon says was penned thirty years ago in part by Paul Weyrich at the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative think tank. I suggest looking back forty years earlier, to the apolitical Edward Bernays and his 1928 book “Propaganda”.

Bernays begins: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Bernays’ central concept was to control the message in order to influence behavior. He did it so well that he is widely considered the father of the field of Public Relations. His portfolio of industrial and government clients included President Calvin Coolidge, Proctor & Gamble, CBS and General Motors. Bernays helped make women into smokers. He helped topple governments. He fueled coups. He helped subscribe Americans to the automobile and to the credit card. He called his Sigmund Freud-inspired technique the "engineering of consent." (Freud was his Uncle.)

Among other tricks, he created false crises. He used fear and anger to his client’s advantage. When he didn’t have fear or anger, he created it, by labeling some groups enemies.

The technique was noted by Joseph Goebbels, and became central in the development of the Third Reich.

Goebbels sidestepped Bernays’ Judaism and enlisted Bernays’ ideas to create a power vacuum into which Hitler stepped. He started by making Jews the enemy. Using all media and social outlets, they spewed vitriol and false claims, calling Jews greedy, subversive, well-organized, selfish and incompetent. It only took a few years to recruit a vast army and a nation’s full backing to commit mass murder.

But here we are, in 2011, calling public school teachers greedy, subversive, well-organized, selfish and incompetent.

(Image Source: http://conservativeviewsforthegrassroots.blogspot.com/2011/02/wisconsin-teachers-are-damn-greedy.html)

Ron Paul told a boisterous tea party crowd that government, through teachers, “indoctrinates” kids. He said, ”They start with our kids even in kindergarten, teaching them about family values, sexual education, gun rights, environmentalism - and they condition them to believe in so much which is totally un-American."

If Paul’s assertion is correct, then how does he explain that America’s 100 year old public school system has consistently produced a population that is about a third leaning right, a third leaning left and a third proudly independent?

Michelle Bachman adds "I am so tired of the establishment telling us that they know best. We know best." How does Bachman, a tax attorney, propose to teach chemical engineering, medical science or Chinese, should her kids need it?

And Tennessee Senator Jim Summerville reportedly told cheering tea partiers that “We will bend public education to our awe, or break it all to pieces.” I'm wondering if he'll be returning his two degrees from public universities in Iowa and Tennessee.

Vilifying people who have committed their lives to the betterment of the children of the nation isn’t just Orwellian, it’s Goebbelescque. Attacking the establishment of public instruction, without question a primary feeder for our great military and our innovations, our strong markets and our global leadership, is a bit like attacking our own bodies.

Wisconsin’s Walker administration is in lock step with Paul, Bachman and Summerville ideologically, while using Bernays’ process as well as Goebbels did.

The campaign began with lies to make enemies of friends. It drums on with endless provocation: on-again, off-again threats of pink slips, military interventions, disregard for laws, newly imposed rules and financial penalties to create panic and increase stress. It intimidates those who disagree or stand in the way, like Professor Cronon and now, a Wisconsin judge doing her work.

And by blatantly ignoring open meetings rules to force through the law against collective bargaining, Republican Senators working with the administration appear to have deliberately started a series of controversial legal maneuvers to grab and hold headlines in order to fuel more public anger and frustration, drawing neighbors to school board meetings and hearings to shout at each other over what amounts to about 32 cents a day per person, if you consider $900M in pending cuts to education in the proposed biannual.

While neighbors, friends and family viciously attack each other, the Republican legislature fills the void with new rules that centralize major decisions with the office of the Governor, even as local leaders in both parties protest.

We’re fighting about pittances like small health care contributions and tiny tax consequences, instead of working on real solutions. Attacking teachers is part of a modern plan to consolidate power in Wisconsin. And teachers are the new Jews.

That we're fighting in this way speaks to the power of Bernays' ideas and Walker's ability to exploit them. But there is an antidote to Propaganda, and it is Truth:

• Literacy is the tap-root of the American Dream. Teachers are the creators of freedom and prosperity, not its enemies.
• If we expect to attract talented teachers, then the profession needs to be attractive to talented people.
• People move to places where there are great schools. If we can build great schools with current tax revenues, fine, but if we have to tax more to make great schools, we should.
• We invest less in our children’s education than nations whose children are better educated and where economies are more resilient. We should invest more, not less, if we want to matter on the world stage again.

What are we going to do next, Wisconsin?


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Copyright, Nicholas Hayes 2011, All rights reserved.

Good war and bad

War executed competently is barely better than war executed incompetently. Until we find the moral fiber to treat earth as heaven, we face endless war.

About Friends in Wisconsin

That lifelong friends and neighbors have become bloodthirsty enemies over pittances is a testament to the power of propaganda. Truth, cooperation and compromise are the only antidotes to lies, deception and unilateralism.

Tree Hugging - Who is really nuts?

... to the Buddhist, the tree is God. Expect to be hugged back.

... to the Monotheist, God gave the tree to good people to hug as they see fit. But watch out for the apple.

... to the Polytheist, the tree is one of many Gods. You have much more hugging to do.

... to the Preservationist: You may look at the tree, but don’t hug it, you might harm it.

... to the Naturalist: Hug the tree, and the birds, and the bugs, and the squirrels, and the worms, and the...

... to the Scientist, hugging does nothing to change the energy transfer potential of a tree.

... to the Economist: It’s only a market as long as huggers outnumber huggable trees.

... to the Socialist: It’s about the forest, not the tree, so link arms and hug everything in solidarity.

... to the Communist, the tree is for everyone. Wait in line and then hug one leaf. (Two with cash under the table.)

... to the Fascist: You will hug when I tell you to.

... to the Capitalist: Make money on trees, until they are in short supply. Then make money on the hugging.

... to the Tree hugger: the tree is important and deserves a bit of care.

Not with Tea

That anyone could think last night's stunt to be good for WI is beyond reason. There are and were many better alternatives: a fairer tax policy, laser focus on corruption, an honest debate of priorities (do we want public schools or public prisons?) Eventually, these things must happen - just not with the incompetent tea party in charge.

Mass Literacy IS the American Dream

Mass literacy gave this country its strong military, its free markets, low crime, long life expectancy, vast technology, its highways, farms, cities, cars, games, and made it a global superpower. Mass literacy IS the American Dream. Mass illiteracy is destroying it. I'm with Wisconsin's teachers.