To give them their dues, programmatic responses to and committee consideration of problems can be helpful in maintaining and incrementally updating progress and support in already-established institutional processes and protocols. However, I have found few people who believe they yield a benefit greater than the time they waste. There is a reason for this. Often very quickly, committees, programs, and even organizations become ends in themselves. The purpose of a committee, becomes to meet regularly to fulfill the service requirement in the organization or fulfill an obligation to have met to address a problem (forget whether one actually substantively addresses the problem). In academia (from personal experience) they can be excruciating exercises in posturing, with almost no practical content and even lesser relevance to executing the functions necessary to ensure learning or education.
They are, for all their huffing and puffing, extraordinarily inefficient. This is ironic given their origin within an industrial habit which idolized efficiency, which sought to compartmentalize and break down all complexities into various assignments, specialties, and environments where they could be handled without distraction or context. Unfortunately, especially in an increasingly interconnected world, that has meant producing many, many little boxes, none of which have a holistic picture or language to communicate effectively with the other boxes, or coordinate with them to take on a complex opportunity/challenge. Context is becoming ever more important and these organizational forms are just not equipped to deal with changing and complex contexts.
This has led to a fracturing of the educational system into tribes of classroom practice, school administration, central administration, teacher certification, teacher education, educational research, education reform, education policy, some of which have very little contact or even apparent concern with actual learning. Each box gets constructed to enact their own abstracted proprietary policies and missions. We thus have nonsensical results: teacher education with very little integrated and developmental contact with schools or the teaching profession, education policy in which almost no policy-makers actually have any significant recent experience in the field, self-esteem education which gathers no information on what students value, testing which emphasizes lower-level literacy and neglects all the crucial skills of the emerging world-- creativity, analysis, communication, environmental literacy, and so on. This has to change, and it will not be changed by adding another program or committee.
I recently went on an informational interview with an organization that does university-school partnerships. I was struck by how many programs there were, many of them successful in their own ways. However, I could not help thinking this could be all drastically simplified and the services integrated to increase value and communication and save resources. Many of these programs have the same general mission but work in different locations, for instance. Often the programs have their own staffs, a throwback to the industrial misperception that specialization = excellence. Especially in an age of budget cuts, it would seem imperative to do a radical simplification, integration, and translation of what one is trying to develop (not just deliver) in terms of outcomes.
An effective process of transforming institutions must take into account and actively include those who are being "administered to." I was pleased to note that one of the charter schools I may be working more closely with, BASE (Bay Area School of Empowerment), had students integrally involved in writing the actual charter.
Basically, we need to move from a technocracy to a democracy. Programs should not be ends. In fact, they should actively attempt to make themselves obsolete, by their very effectiveness in getting the ball rolling, getting people involved, providing training, best practices, skills, and evaluation, so that these things are taken up and the program is no longer necessary.
I learned this lesson in the late 1980's, when I was working as a math tutor at Ohio State University for a woman who had been in a coma for six weeks (due to a car accident) only a half year earlier. She had received a D on her first midterm, and many were advising her that she had returned to school too early. I used some self-developed math diagnostics with her, playing with negative, positives, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, number line movement, and pictures of mathematical relationships. I found nothing wrong with her and concluded the problem was the teaching and not her brain's ability to process. I teach dialogically, helping the student to develop a way of speaking to the problem, with me as instructor, and with their own thinking. I use pictures and number lines to translate between mathematical concepts and verbal language. This seems to work well with many math phobes. Anyway, she received a B+ on her second midterm, an A- on her third midterm, and I was excited for her to finish strong in our summary preparations for the final. Instead, she called me up, and told me my services weren't needed because she believed she "got it."
It took me a couple of weeks to fully absorb the miracle that had just happened. I initially felt somewhat betrayed. All this successful work results in less paid work, less time with my student, whom I am developing a nice learning relationship with, and no opportunity to glory in the credit. But that is exactly what we need to be headed for as a system and as individuals and organizations-- to create such abundance and skill that our remediation is unnecessary (and then to move on to greater challenges). Otherwise, we become vested in their dependence and our own lack of growth.
That woman taught me something that day, and it is something I think we should all stand to remember-- true service means enabling those you guide to succeed so well, that they no longer need you guidance, but can offer their own genius, contribution, and leadership into the world.
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