Susan

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Seriously, educators’ “must reads” include both the Gladwell canon and Catch 22. If you understand his version of “six degrees of separation” then you’ll understand why you (of all people) are right that inner city need to be taught to be students, as KIPP does. And you’ll understand why the welfare system has been unable to address the pockets of generational poverty. And you’ll understand why inner city students must be brought out of their buildings into the community, and the community must be brought in. The AFT’s recommendations on Community Schools aren’t just good ideas;they are following social science and cognitive science laws.

Similarly, you can’t understand why neighborhood schools are fundamentally different from magnet schools unless you understand the concept of the tipping point. If every teacher had three or four chronically disruptive students in class, we could stop bellyaching and handle it. But when every teacher has six or eight or ten chronically disruptive students per class, and that has been the case for the students’ entire careers, then the problem goes up geometrically.

The same applies to principals. If every school had 8 to 10% of their students on IEPs, the special ed law would not be a problem. But when a school has 35%of its students on IEPs, you cross a tipping point. When an assistant principal’s “To Do List” does not have one or two discipline problems with IEPS, but has twenty, then then are not enough hours in the day to even attempt to address the problems. Inner city principals face the Catch 22 of emotionally disturbed students who wouldn’t be victimizing others if they had not been victims themselves. But the principals, for all practical purposes, can not discipline them for behavior that stems from their disability, which makes sense. But their victims disproportionately include other vulnerable students, immigrants, children of whatever race is in the minority, gays, and other students on IEPs. So, anytime the administrator leaves his or her fingerprints on a case and regardless of how they handle it, they have assumed legal liability. So, federal laws – laws that I strongly support – become a part of the problem when a school has a critical mass of challenging populations.

My favorite Gladwell anecdote shows why data-driven accountability and data-driven decision-making are largely incompatible. During World War II, they charted all of the damage that was inflicted on bombers. The first impulse would be to up-armor the parts of the plane that received the most damage. That way, nobody could be blamed for planes being destroyed by certain damage. But, data-driven decision-making said that we should up-armor the OTHER parts of the plane. Think for a second, and you realize that the planes that RETURNED with certain types of damage RETURNED. You have to look for the other places where damage did not allow the planes to return and armor them!

In education, we shoud do the same. Analysts tour buildings that look like B-24s that barely survived a mission and see that their after-school safety nets are dysfunctional, instruction is weak, and that the signs saying “No Excuses!” and “High Expectations!” are falling apart. So schools have to place bandaids and adopt “teacher-proof” methods.

But to understand why these schools can’t fly, you must consider the things you can’t see in the building – the homes, the lack of interacion with the community, and the lack of a learning culture. So schools emulate Major Major’s approach of requiring tight bombing patterns because tight bombing patterns look good on the cover of Life Magazine. They don’t communicate honestly because that would open them up to the cardinal heresy of “low expectations.”

Which gets me back to why I love Gladwell. He’s intellectually honest. We Scotch Irish, Okies may have our problems with learnin but we don’t hide them under bushel baskets. If fact our system’s top educational researcher has a bumper sticker that reads, “My Pug Can Whip Your Honor Student.”