Out of Kilter - The Extreme Polarities Exposed by Covid-19

The author with Lily Eskildsen Garcia
and Randi Weingarten delivering
DeVos report cards

                  

Yesterday morning I saw the notice for the upcoming live stream unveiling of the National Assessment Governing Board’s National Report Card on Civics, Geography and US History. Another sign that not much has changed, in spite of the daily reality that everything has changed.

The data in this report card will be like the report cards students receive this year, an incomplete rating due to circumstances beyond control, yet still a reflection of a society wildly out of equilibrium.

Educators have become accustomed in the last 20 years to collecting data on a myriad of minutia about their students and their practice, and having it used to competitively measure their students, their professional lives, and their communities.  It is mandated. Even the educational resistance got in the spirit of measurement, facetiously giving Betsy DeVos her F report cards from teachers across the country at the end of her first year in office.

Then came 2020 and Covid-19, which turned everything we had been told was “best practice” on its head. All the meticulously developed standards, tests, and step-by-step delivery methods have become suddenly impossible to implement.  The measurements which revealed children and families were in widespread poverty and deeply distressed no longer needed standardized tests to expose the situation. 

Even if we could by some amazing stretch of effort develop testing capabilities in the middle of a pandemic, there is no way to deliver the instruction in a way that would allow our students and us to be safe, and no way to compare the wildly variant conditions of student trauma or student exposure to learning, much less create uniform testing conditions. Literally, abandoning competitiveness has become a life or death choice.

Everything we were told was required is no longer possible. 

Simultaneously, the economic system we had all come to rely on as the condition for daily life, and the standards and measurements related to free-market-capitalism began a free-fall which all the king's horses and all the king's men could not prevent or stop. 

Everything we believed about how life ran is no longer how things are. 

Policy makers across all sectors of society are scampering to figure out how to recover from a total disruption of the status quo. Yet, others are recognizing that a return to the status quo is both impossible and unwise because it would leave us all vulnerable to the next disaster. 

So, this morning I was struck, not just by how hollow National Report Cards are at this point, but by their connection to all the other competition driven components/sectors of our society. 

Education reform and how we conduct our society has long been driven by two complementary opposites: Collaboration and Competition. 

A complementary opposite is also often called a polarity. They are two ideas that appear to be opposites, and in either/or thinking one solves the problem and the other is the problem, depending on which pole you prefer. 

To those who prefer competition, collaboration is often seen from it’s weaknesses as ineffectual and less productive. To those who prefer collaboration, competition is viewed from its negative traits, and seen as destructive and elitist. Yet when both sides of a complementary pair are exercised in punctuated equilibrium from their strengths, the deep dives into dysfunction can be mostly avoided, and timely response to problems are more possible.  When we move from an either/or dichotomy to a both/and view, the pair can create a dynamic energy flow that is more successful. 

The standardized tests and school report cards of our recent education policies have been based heavily on the competition side of this particular polarity or c-pair. Those who have promoted standardization and assessment consistently maintain that it is about global competitiveness of our children. Just as radical free-market capitalism is about an intense competitiveness dependent on competing against and defeating other vendors or providers. Indeed we have reached the point that we use the competition model of free market capitalism as the basis for most of our sectors of society, including education, government, and even religious organizations.

Those who have resisted the education “reform” movement have often done so based on an argument for the other side of this c-pair- Collaboration or cooperation. As competition measures participants in an activity against one another, collaboration approaches endeavors as a mutual effort among participants with the goal being for all to achieve as much as possible without it becoming an extreme win-lose scenario. What measurement there is becomes more concerned with progress for all than winning for one or a few. 

The irony about polarities is that while they are often seen as exclusive opposites, in reality they are both necessary. Neither can function without the other. Each is positive and useful when functioning at positive levels, and when both sides of the pair are in dynamic equilibrium, functioning in their healthy ranges, both are effective.  Similarly, when either is over emphasized, it becomes dominant, and swings into it’s unhealthy range. When that happens, that side of the pole can create a world of problems, including a collapse of the system. 

All dictators and empires are based on an extreme form of competitiveness. The leader or country must have ultimate control of all others. Communes and Kibbutzes are based on collaborative ideas, and old fashioned communism as practiced in the 20th century was a failed attempt at collaborative economics and government. Neither of the extremes - either dictatorships or communism were the positive iterations of their side of the polarity, but both sides of the polarity are required to develop a functioning system. 

I am watching as those in decision making positions try frantically to figure out how we can return our systems to the way they were, even doubling down on more of what was. This week Michael Petrilli from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Stanford was making the case in the Washington Post that we should hold children back, and double down on increased seat time and do double testing to make up for the measurements missed to re-establish who is ahead and who is behind. There have been others suggesting that we abandon students deemed less able to focus on the ones whom we expect to be successful.  Paul Reville of the Harvard Graduate School of Education has been writing for The74 and Boston Globe, quickly trying to recover dominance of influence by acknowledging poverty and systemic failures without acknowledging HGSE and its promotion of competitiveness as having contributed to the entrenched dysfunctional competitiveness that created those failures.

But, if we are to survive this crisis with the least damage possible, and be ready to meet the accelerating next crises- whether it be a pandemic, food or water shortages, or intense weather patterns, or wildfires, or rising seas- we will have to recalibrate our emphasis about this polarity. 

Collaboration does not preclude knowledge of the variables and conditions in a situation; in fact, it may involve incorporating more details, just not in the same way and not for the same purposes. Nor does recalibration involve a total abandonment of healthy competition. It just avoids the dysfunctional by-any-means mentality that has us on the brink of collapse.

When Covid-19 arrived, we were already crippled by our own deep dive into the competitiveness side of this polarity, and our win-at-all-costs mentality continues to deepen the crisis.  We were receiving multiple signals that we were too far in dysfunctional overemphasis on competition. Yet, we were insistently ignoring those signals. Even our outrageous salaries for CEOs and professional athletes is a symptom of that disequilibrium. Now we realize the effects of that lopsided emphasis has much deeper and more damaging effects than a few out of whack salaries.

The time when we can ignore those signals is past. The stakes have gone up, and societal survival is at stake.  More measurement, whether by national or local report cards or digital tracking may give us a false sense of understanding, but will not solve the failures of our societal disequilibrium.

For more information about Managing Polarities or Both/And Thinking see the work of Barry Johnson, Cliff Kyser, Beena Sharma, or Michael DePass at the Center for Creative Leadership