"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.
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