Reading this extended essay on the significance of checklists in medicine, and I’m struck by how education policy makers seem to have completely misunderstood Gawande’s message.

The real lesson is that under conditions of true complexity–where the knowledge required exceeds that of any individual and unpredictability reigns–efforts to dictate every step from the center will fail. People need room to act and adapt. (p.79)

Most educational reform these days is about stripping away the power from teachers and individuals, as if the situations they face in their classrooms can be simplified to a checklist. But…Gawande continues:

Yet they cannot succeed as isolated individuals either–that is anarchy. Instead, they require a seemingly contradictory mix of freedom and expectation–expectation to coordinate, for example, and also to measure progress toward common goals.

This is where empowering teachers (or at least acknowledging that they’re not interchangeable) becomes so important. Teachers cannot do it alone, but that does not mean that each move ought to be scripted…

At a school today, watching a day unfold, and got to thinking:

which is worse, back to basics, where kids are skilled and drilled, where scripted lessons ensure a scary homogeneity, where imagination and creativity are irrelevant? Or empty progressive pedagogy, where kids are given freedom to choose, projects to do, things to play with, but without any follow-up, such that they’re just messing around and not learning anything?

A few years ago I might’ve argued for the latter — choice and creativity trump scripts — but now I’m not so sure. Turning kids lose, even kids getting a ton of help from home, completely undermines what school should be about. And it sets up all sorts of problems for later — you’ve played but you haven’t learned — which will undermine your next academic experience from the beginning.

I like this editorial and I like this approach: let’s build a system so that in five years, every child will have a viable public option.

I particularly respect the honesty necessary to write this paragraph:

If faith and commitment had nothing to do with our Catholic-school choice, we still would have gone that way because, above all, we have no confidence in the district’s ability to deal with the kids that it must educate who would be negatively affecting our child’s learning.