Chasing Failure

Policymakers are always looking for models and best practices that work. Building on the successful work of others in trying to address top priorities is sensible and pragmatic. Experimentation is dangerous, particularly when members of the community are the guinea pigs. And why “reinvent the wheel” as so many people like to say, though I think of this as the second most over- and misused expression in America, right behind “thinking outside the box.” While looking for successful models for adaptation, one must, of course, seriously consider the social, political and economic differences between the model environment and the one it will be adapted into. And one should, of course, make sure it works.

One of the most baffling, and yet pervasive trends among policymakers in recent years is attempting to take ideas that don’t work and simply replicate them in another environment. This is particularly true in education, where bad ideas are among the most popular in the world. Take the example of Cincinnati, which has become a hot bed for New York Mayoral candidates to laud as a model for success (together with representatives from around the world). The problem? Many of the system’s “model” community schools are still in dire academic straits, even after years and millions of dollars spent (NY Times). Just as with Charter Schools, the hype is enough to erase any attempt to test whether the results actually match the rhetoric.

The great irony with education is the well-research and founded argument that “importing” effective policies from one environment or country to another is wrought with problems … and rarely successful. As just one example, from the late 80s many were arguing that the U.S. should adapt the Japanese approach to teaching math and science, as the former does substantially better than the later in both subjects. Yet is this an easy transition? The answer is a resounding no, mainly because the culturally differences between the average Japanese and average American student are so profound. While discipline and hard work define the Japanese student today, the opposite can be said of many American students. On top of this, America has no foundation for the cram schools so central to Japan’s success and have a much more diverse, and unequal, system. This is but one of countless examples of failed attempts to simply replicate effective programs from abroad.

But here we have something even more insidious. A dramatic change to New York City schools being advocated by the Mayoral candidates when the system isn’t even working that well in Cincinnati, itself quite different in composition and cultural characteristics than NYC. And so wrong follows wrong and the children bear the cost of this blind allegiance to hype. And we can certainly move beyond education to economic policy in general, with failed neoliberal policies (often labeled austerity packages these days) pushed on not only the underdeveloped and developing countries that have not sufficiently protected themselves from the IMF and World Bank, but also on the populations of the richer West countries, even as they see profits rising, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, the middle class squeezed and the general quality of life declines. This is particularly true of the youth of Europe and America today, destined to dislodge Hemingway, Stein and Fitzgerald as the latest “Lost Generation” if something dramatic doesn’t change.

It seems in an anti-intellectual world where critical thinking merely means following directions and creativity has been stifled in pursuit of proficient reading and math scores, even our best and brightest are suffering through a vacuum of new ideas and novel solutions to the key problems that ail us. Maybe we should follow the advice of the company that is now the most valuable in the world and actually “think different.”