mentioned?
Sure, Fred. "Brief"? How's two paragraphs per book, with an intro and
a conclusion, since it's Saturday?
You seemed to be proposing some sort of "constitutional convention" on
educational policy (not just building a blueprint for some new charter
school). I present the three books as views of how change does or does
not take place in schools, school systems, and the society that provides
the inputs and supports for these. I am presuming that there's no
shortage of great ideas, but that there are realities on the ground
these new ideas would need to survive.
"The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies" by Seymour Sarason -
Dr. Lieberman had us read this in our study of school reform so we would
appreciate difficult it is to try and create a new setting (whether a
mental health clinic or a school) without replicating the old ones we've
known. How we bring so much from our personal past (patterns of
relationships) and our institutional past (how institutions framed,
valued and empowered/constrained authority, teachers, and students).
Basically: intentions and visions may start the discussion, books and
models may inform it, but the people who show up in the space are
holograms of their personal, social, and educational pasts. I loved
Sarason's very personal, reflective style of writing - he was a Truly
Wise Man with great depth and awareness, and the more deeply I read, the
more I wished him wrong - that he was conveying his experiences to me
which I could bring as my own to new settings.
"Images of Organization" by Gareth Morgan fleshed out "institutional
memory" more - it articulated various cultures and structures of
organization, from the democratic (read: teacher governance, student
empowerment, CES) - to the autocratic (read: charismatic principals),
how these organizations change the people within them, and how VERY
difficult it is for an organization to change it's own model of
organization.
It ended with learning organizations and other hopeful categories - and
foretold the trouble all us Teachers College graduates would face as we
brought our progressive values and visions into traditional, hierarchic,
factory-farming public schools. I remember one thing we talked about in
class when we discussed this book in relation to school: "as above, so
below" - if the superintendent dominates the principals, the principals
dominate the teachers, and the teachers dominate the students.
"Speaking Truth to Power" by Aaron Wildavsky also had a "transcendant"
view - looking at underlying patterns and the range of discourse, rather
than individual positions, and how society is much harder to change than
policy. Wildavsky focussed on national policy and tracked the swings in
position of major policy questions. The chapter "Learning from
Education" hits the school reform discourse with cold water: if the
inputs - social and economic inequality - don't change, and the process
for educational policy formulation - politicians in a two-party system -
does not change, why would we expect the outputs to change?
Shifts from right to left do not result in evolutionary spirals.
Tracking progressive <-> traditional educational policy, Wildavsky
reflects: "There can be no one optimal policy: there must be a range
whose acceptability is born of the ability of social forces to make and
keep bargains."
Of course, if you limit the re-thinking to 100%-tuition-funded private
schools, public policy is less a concern; yet those who pay tuition have
positions informed by public policy debates, and expectations that may
have more to do with social economy than the fulfillment of human
potentials.
-Bram
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