The Missing Link in School – Or Any – Reform
I highly recommend the article, The Missing Link in School Reform, from the Stanford Social Innovation Review to educators and parents and also to leaders in any organization.
This simple graphic highlights the contrast between the predominant rhetoric about how to reform public schools and the reality the authors found as a result of their study.
In any organization it’s easy to overfocus on improving or correcting individual performance and underfocus on the work in the white space to build collective performance.
In any organization it’s easy to fall into thinking an “outsider” has the answer and forget that more often than not the best answers come from within.
In any organization it’s easy for the leader to spend too much time leading the specific work they excel at and too little time protecting the teams’ ability and space to collaborate and too little time supporting the team by forging the right connections outside the team.
Schools are no different. Chances are your organization is no different either.
~ Kristin Maschka
What is so interesting about this reform dialogue is the meaning of reform. The current system makes no one look good so why reform a system that by its very nature is bad? Why not scrap it and then build fresh? The current systems is based upon an Agrarian economy and culture. It is about 100 years behind the times if not more. Our educational systems should be ahead of the flow not behind it. The best analogy I can use is that we still have a one horse pony pulling a cart that has been hidden underneath the body of a corvette. Changes are made to the fiberglass body, but none to the pony or cart.