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Perfectly Designed to Produce Failure

by Richard Cole
September 16, 2010

It was 8:15 on a Thursday night. I called my daughter Rachel, 25, a third-year elementary school teacher living and working in rural Atlanta. She was in her car after having left a lengthy teachers’ meeting. I just wanted to talk. She was going through a difficult period in her life.

On the first day of classes this year, she had been called into the principal’s office, normally not a good sign. Her second grade class was being split up and combined with other second grade classes in the school. Her kids were being assigned to other classrooms. Why her kids? Budget cuts call for drastic measures, and Rachel was being told she had been picked to teach a fifth grade class. I am sure there was more to it than that, but the long and the short of it was the principal recognized Rachel’s spark and her skills and her willingness to do whatever is needed. The school needed a new fifth-grade teacher. Rachel was it.

She takes home about $2,500 a month. Almost half of that goes directly to paying rent and heat and electric. What’s left goes for living expenses — gas to get to and from the school, car repairs on her seven-year-old Saab, food, and other basics like the fast-food dinners she has to squeeze in between the teaching, planning, grading, meetings and parent conferences. Once she pays the bills, there’s not much left over for school supplies. But she manages.

She doesn’t complain much. She’s a trooper — always has been. But she struggles. She takes her work seriously. She shutters that she has to compromise on what she can give to her highly capable students to accommodate the kids with special needs. She’s special, too. And in that respect she is no different from a lot of other teachers, including another daughter, Angela, who teaches in suburban Detroit.

I have known and admired many dedicated teachers throughout my life. I encouraged my kids to take up the profession despite the fact that the best teachers are overworked, underpaid, and substantially underappreciated by their friends who tell them what a cushy job they have. I never say that.

The buzz is beginning to build around Davis Guggenheim’s next documentary, Waiting for Superman. Writing in the Huffington Post, Guggenheim describes his motivation to produce what some say, and many hope, will be a life-changing experience for America.

“When I made my very first documentary in 1999 called The First Year, I followed five teachers through their first year teaching in some of L.A.’s toughest schools. I was with these young teachers all the time. I was there with them on their first day, driving to school, where they declared proudly their mission to change kids’ lives. I was there in the middle of the year, when exhaustion was taking over, and the hard and cold reality of what it takes to be a great teacher was feeling impossible. And I was there seeing the relief of the last day of school and witnessing the bittersweet hugs from kids whom they would miss — and whose lives they had changed forever.” That’s what motivates Guggenheim.

A new friend, Bob Wehling, retired nearly 10 years ago as the global marketing director for Proctor and Gamble. Shortly after he retired from this job, arguably the biggest brand management job in American marketing, Bob took up another challenge. One biographer said in 2002: “Looming largest within Bob’s post-P&G life is his role as senior advisor to the Hunt Institute, an effort in association with the University of North Carolina and former Governor Jim Hunt. The idea is to create a national institute that will do a couple of things. It will educate politicians and policy makers at the local, state, and national levels on education and early childhood issues. Research, policies — that sort of thing.”

A few years into this new role, Bob took it upon himself to put together a book that should be required reading for anyone who stands up and puts his/her hand on the heart when the national anthem is played. The book, Building a 21st Century U.S. Education System, is designed to give America a close-up look at the reality of our education system, and to offer advice on how to change it.

Wehling had won the right to take on this challenge the old fashioned way — he earned it. All the while he was working his way up 18 rungs on one of the tallest of all American corporate ladders, Bob had done his best to build up his local school district as a board member and school district president. And then, using the power of the position he held in American industry, and with the support of his boss at P&G, he became an outspoken advocate for education reform. It was almost as if he could see, even as a young marketing executive, where America, and his beloved P&G, would end up in the global competition without the support of a world class education system.

In the opening chapter of the book, which is a compilation of the best advice of many of the nation’s greatest experts on education, Bob describes working with “thousands of school board members, superintendents, principals and teachers over the last forty years.” And he describes his Gestalt — his big idea — about American education.

American education, like any other system, “is perfectly designed to get the results it gets: 16,000 districts each doing its own thing; thousands of school levies, failing in some districts and passing in others; uneven standards across our 50 states for both teachers and students; appalling levels of teacher turnover; insufficient attention to school readiness and other similar issues.”

“Until we adequately address these issues,” Bob says, “we are doomed to continue generating over 1,000,000 dropouts per year and an equal number of high school graduates who are insufficiently prepared to succeed in higher education or the adult workforce.”

Unless we move fast, we are doomed. The education system we have is perfectly designed to get the failing results it gets. So why should we be surprised?

Davis Guggenheim’s newest documentary (he won an Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth) promises to lay bare the facts on what is causing an increasing number of intelligent observers (besides Ariana Huffington) to recognize that America, in many key respects, is becoming “Third World.” The question is, what can we do about it?

As I read through Wehling’s book, I was stricken by one observation more than any other. The observation wasn’t the “No Silver Bullets” refrain of Arlene Ackerman or the call of David Hornbeck for a political movement to support education or the chant for reinventing teaching or redefining education of Thomas Carrol or Linda Darling-Hammond. There is truth in much of what they say, for sure.

But there is a compelling elegance in the simplicity of Bob Wehling’s solution. All of the reforms needed to put America back into the position of having a chance of saving this democratic dream of ours stems from one simple observation. The single-most significant difference between our system, perfectly designed to produce failure, and that of the tens of countries that are beating us in the world-wide knowledge competition, can be summed up in one statement.

“While I once fought for local control as a school board member and president, I’m now convinced local control is the foundation of an uneven system which does not offer all children a world-class opportunity. Only by moving from local control to local support can we begin to make progress toward educational equity.”

Our rabid insistence on the local control of education, more than any other single thing, is producing the result we should expect. We are winning the race to the bottom.

Wehling explains it this way. “While I believe a truly national system is the answer, I want to be totally clear that I am not advocating a government system which is heavily influenced by political considerations. Rather, I envision a system in which our best educators are commissioned to develop and enact national standards (not voluntary); a national curricula framework for at least the most important core subjects; a national assessment system which is fully aligned with the standards and curricula; modern technology to help meet the differing needs and interests of students; a compensation system which rewards excellence and which will help attract our best students into teaching; a national framework for teacher training, licensure, certification and professional development; and a funding system which ensures that all of this is accessible to all students.”

Every other developed country seems to be doing these things, so what’s holding us back?

Wehling, hardly a radical, says it’s “our connection to old ideas that no longer serve the diverse needs of America’s students. Although it won’t be easy, we must be willing to shed these outdated beliefs to make way for innovative new approaches.”

What’s holding us back starts and ends with an anachronistic obsession with “local control.”

I sent Bob Wehling a note a few nights ago referencing the release of Guggenheim’s new documentary and pleading with him to tune into the buzz. This may be Wehling’s moment.

“I hope you are following what’s about to happen (as a result of Waiting for Superman) and positioning yourself, Bob, to become a spokesman for bringing some sanity to the U.S. education system. We need a Marshall Plan for American schools, and I believe your Preface (and opening chapter) in Building a 21st Century U.S. Education System is the summary that might just help us see the way…

“So do whatever you can to get your publicity apparatus in place and make sure that you are presented to the talk shows, traditional news media, social media — whatever — as having the right answer to this question: ‘What can we do to get our country’s educational system on the right road?’

“Ariana Huffington put out a book just today that makes the case that in many ways we have become a Third World nation. The best evidence of this is the state of the schools of America. Davis Guggenheim talks about his documentary in today’s Huffington Post. You need to send your chapter to both of them. Maybe this Guggenheim documentary, and the support it is being given by guys like Bill Gates, will stir the kind of political juices needed to start a movement like Hornbeck describes in the third chapter of your book. Go to the Waiting for Superman website and post some comments. Call upon your friends in the marketing business to help you out. Don’t be bashful…

“I think this might be your moment to achieve the impact you deserve — the impact that we so desperately need…

“As FDR might have said: If not you, who? If not now, when?”

I had an electronic discussion with Bob to make sure I got it right. As I would have expected, Bob’s comments began with this: “You give me too much credit. Everything I am saying should be obvious to anyone who really looks at the system closely.

“I would say that local control and local funding are the second biggest problem. The number one problem is that education simply doesn’t have the priority in this country it deserves. In dozens of other countries, including our biggest competitors like China, education is clearly the number one national priority. It is also the number one issue for the media, and when results are not good, the media shine a spotlight on it until things get fixed.

“Yes, I know we need to focus on jobs, the economy, energy, Social Security, the environment, terrorism, etc., but China, India, Japan, Germany and others face the same issues we do, yet they put education at the top because they know it’s the long-term solution.”

“Finally,” Bob said, “I really appreciate you and others like you who can help call attention to what we need to do.”

Godspeed, Bob Wehling.

Note: Building a 21st Century U.S. Education System was published by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF), 2100 M. Street, NW, Suite 660, Washington, DC, 20037. Copies of the book may be downloaded at www.nctaf.org.

In addition to serving as professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University, Richard Cole is co-founder of Michigan’s Next Governor Project (see August 2009 Dome feature).The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.