The Power to Fail

Comments to follow soon.

Stewart:
Why is it so difficult to get change in the educational system in our country? That seems to be one of the most intractable systems, either because of the boards that are there or the unions or the—what is it about our education system that makes it so difficult to reform?

Gates:
Well, until recently there was no room for experimentation. And charter schools came in—although they're only a few percent of the schools—and they tried out new models. And a lot of those have worked. Not all of them. But that format showed us some very good ideas, and among those ideas is that you measure teachers, you give them more feedback. And--but people are afraid you'd put in a system that will fire the wrong person or have high overhead, and that's a legitimate fear. So actually having some districts where it works and then getting the 90% of the teachers who liked it, who thrived, who did improve to share that might allow us to switch—not have capricious things but really help people get better.

Stewart:
But don't public things like schools and medical care need to have the power to fail, need to fire the wrong person every now and again? It's never going to be perfect. Aren't people's expectations of what it's supposed to be so precious that you never get change in the positive direction?

Gates:
That's right. But you have to have a measure. And it's very tough to agree on a measure. You know, right now the health system rewards the person who just does more treatment, so it's quantity of output, not the kind of preventative care and measuring and saying, "Okay, you do that well." Or, "You teach this kid really well." We haven't been able to agree on that. And without that it's a problem.

Jon's comment—or question, rather—about the education system's lacking the power to fail struck me as being similar to what I said in this post:

Education seems unable to help but vacillate between its skepticism, which holds every idea (or none of them) to be right, and its particularism, which holds all of its own ideas to be right. This inability, in the end, makes it nearly impossible for education to decide before the fact that something can be wrong. And that is precisely what is wrong with education.

To make the similarity less philosophical (clearer, I hope), I've drawn two dartboards below. Take a look at these two dartboards. Using the dartboard on the right—a typical dartboard—we obviously do have the power to fail if our goal is to hit the bullseye. Using the dartboard on the left, we don't really have the power to fail—not because every throw will be considered a bullseye, but because we have not set out ahead of time what failure and success mean.


An important question we wrestle with in education, specifically with regard to instruction, is What kind of dartboard are we throwing at? Can we explain, before ever throwing a dart, what it means to hit the bullseye and how to get closer to it? If so, then we're throwing to the right; if not, then we're throwing to the left.

It seems right—er, correct—to say no, we can't really describe "bullseye" instruction before we deliver it (particularism) or at all (skepticism), because every student learns differently, there are multiple ways of delivering the same content, etc. For what seems like the same reasons, we can't really describe "bullseye" ice cream flavors or "bullseye" back massages. In other words, when it comes to instruction, the dartboard on the left seems to be the most appropriate.

Jon challenges this notion by asking, "But don't public things like schools and medical care need to have the power to fail, . . .? It's never going to be perfect. Aren't people's expectations of what it's supposed to be so precious that you never get change in the positive direction?"

For education—specifically, for instruction—shouldn't we be using the dart board on the right, not the one on the left? Shouldn't we have the courage to draw the bullseye somewhere, even if we know that we will sometimes unfairly exclude some good instruction and unfairly include some bad instruction? I would say yes.

Gates responds: "That's right. But you have to have a measure. And it's very tough to agree on a measure." Or, using the dart board analogy, we must have a way to decide exactly where to draw the circles, including the bullseye. The same sentiment was registered as a comment to an article I wrote here:

Difficult politically and otherwise to implement, because quality of instruction is non-quantifiable and seemingly unrelated to issues like teacher compensation.

I agree that it is difficult to agree on a measure and that quality of instruction is non-quantifiable, but I disagree that we should be looking for something so narrow as a measure (or even group of measures) or something necessarily quantifiable in the first place. What we should be looking for first are, as I stated in the post referenced above, clear, specific, acceptable principles of instructional quality.