The latest example of failed leadership -- what I call “moving the chair,” an analogy I’ll explain in one second -- comes from Pennsylvania State University. This is a tragic story of sex abuse that apparently went unchecked for years, despite the fact that a fair number of university leaders -- including President Graham Spanier and legendary football coach Joe Paterno -- knew of the situation.
“Moving the chair” is my analogy for what lousy, ineffective leaders do when faced with a tough decision. Envision a man sitting in his living room watching football on a large flat-screen TV when, suddenly and unexpectedly, water begins dropping on his head. He has a problem: he’s getting wet. He “solves” the problem by moving the chair, and maybe also getting a pot from the kitchen to catch the water drops.
Obviously, the football fan has failed to define the problem, perhaps willfully -- because it was a good game, or because he’s lazy, or because it’s a rented house, or whatever. He’s willing to limit the immediate damage, a short-term “solution” that lets him watch the game.
It seems pretty clear that Penn State leaders didn’t want to disrupt their games either, because football is a huge business in Happy Valley, where Coach Paterno is revered and the economic benefits run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
For too long we have simply “moved the chair” in public education, often congratulating ourselves for having solved the problem. Here’s what I mean:
Our so-called cures for whatever is wrong in education don’t work because we haven’t diagnosed the problem correctly. Too many influential people think the problem is abysmal test scores, and those folks then design “cures” with the purpose of raising the scores.
(Unfortunately, it is possible to raise test scores with malleable third and fourth graders, and so the “cure” seems to be working. It’s a mirage, as the inevitable drop in scores in 8th grade and beyond demonstrates. Older kids are not so easy to manipulate. What that means is that the “learning” shown in 4th grade was not genuine, more akin to sleight-of-hand than the deep learning that we should want for our children.)
Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno, the president and head football coach at Penn State, seem to have simply moved the chair. Diagnosing the problem requires strong leadership, courage, and an informed electorate.
I believe that our fixation on tests and test scores is responsible for our having lost sight of the aims of education. What is the purpose of school? How about this?
“Schools and teachers are helping to raise adults.” Their job is not, contrary to conventional view to “teach children,” because that’s too narrow an aim.
But if I am right and the job is growing adults, then we need to think about what sort of adults we want children -- our own and others' -- to become.
Our founding fathers possessed great wisdom, and many today are fond of quoting Jefferson. However, I call your attention to James Madison, who wrote:
“… A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
To me, as a journalist, that means putting the best possible information in front of the public, trusting it to act wisely and in its own interests. But the public also relies on leaders (like Madison and Jefferson) to do the right thing, to identify problems and possible solutions, and to have the courage to face unpleasant choices instead of running from them.
How often in education do leaders “move the chair” instead of doing the right thing? For that matter, how often do politicians and policy makers go to the heart of the problem, instead of settling for the quick and superficial analysis? It’s a lot easier to focus on quick fixes that are not disruptive of “the way we have always done it.”
I’m not sure that courage is rewarded -- and challenging the status quo, even when it represents mediocrity, is often a sure fire way to short circuit one’s career.
This is, however, not an academic discussion, because policies based on flawed logic do substantial harm to children and youth, to teachers and administrators, and to the nation’s faith in public education.
What will it take to transform schools so that their essential question, asked about each student, becomes “How are you intelligent?” instead of the ubiquitous “How intelligent are you?”
And what can you do to make it happen?
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