Waiting for Union Reform

I had the privilege of seeing Davis Guggenheim’s superlative new documentary, Waiting for “Superman” last night with Iveta. The film gives powerful evidence of the unique, critical importance of great teachers in achieving globally competitive student performance, and it confronts a major sociopolitical issue, teacher’s unions, and the ways these unions now block any kind of useful reform in U.S. education. I recommend you visit the website, donate, and of course tell all your friends to see the movie.

I also recommend you think hard about real solutions to the U.S. high school education crisis, as I have below, and recommend them to your congressperson.

American HS teacher’s unions need to be reformed, as soon as possible. We could mandate the ability for new merit-rewarding unions to emerge in competition with the two existing large and corrupt ones, the NEA and the AFT, but I firmly believe that would be too little, too late. America has been falling behind educationally for 50 years now, and if we don’t do something drastic, we won’t turn around our educational system. It has too much inertia.

For more on the broad scope of this sad story, read The Teacher’s Unions, Lieberman, 1997, Power Grab, Moo, 1999, Conflicting Missions?, Loveless, 2000, The Worm in the Apple, Brimelow (most popular book of these), 2004, and most recently, The War Against Hope, Paige (former U.S. Education Secretary), 2009. No Child Left Behind in 2001 was an important step forward as it mandated comprehensive tests, which told us how poor our children’s writing and reading and arithmetic performances are, but the teacher’s unions have fought any changes in the way we teach. The only clear successes we’ve seen have emerged from the best of the charter schools, like the 80+ KIPP Schools around the country. We have the data we need. Now it’s time to act.

The only clean solution I see is a Federal one, to outlaw collective bargaining for new teachers, and replace it with a new system of contract, merit-based teaching for all incoming, next generation teachers. The current system would be maintained for the existing teachers, they could switch to the new system if they wanted, and current system teachers with the most seniority would be given economic incentives for early retirement. Poor performing “lemon” teachers that were hired under the old system wouldn’t be fired, but they wouldn’t be allowed to teach. Up to 5% of the worst could be voted out of the classroom by the principals and their teacher peers every year. Obama, are you listening?

Collective bargaining and teacher job security are in deep, fundamental conflict with our desire to recruit and reward the best teachers. We need to choose one of these priorities, we can’t have both. Teaching must become a desirable, high paid job, like we see in Korea and other countries that value education, and it must also become a short term job, where typical teachers are expected to stay for 10 years, and great teachers for a maximum of ten more, where they mentor other teachers. Perhaps 10% of the workforce can stay longer than that, and be over 50 in age, but no more, by law.

The majority of high school teachers today should be young. Teaching young kids takes a lot of energy, and keeping up with our modern, accelerating technological world requires the rapid learning of youthful teachers. Japanese culture has a phrase, Gakkyu hokai, which translates to “classroom breakdown”, where bored, tech-savvy youth, as young as elementary school, simply stop paying any attention to their teachers once they realize that they know virtually nothing about the new digital world the kids inhabit. Gakkyu hokai is a problem with all first world classes today, and it will only get worse. Young, tech-savvy teachers can solve that, and be the analytical, numerate, and literate mentors and coaches the kids need.

HS teachers should be able to start in their mid 20′s, shortly out of college. Any B.S. or higher degree, and a year of training, should be sufficient to get into the trainee pool, and teacher trainees should be aggressively weeded out in the first five years. While hiring a minority of older, second-career teachers would bring wisdom and life experience to the teaching pool, typical track teachers would finish their maximum 20 year stint by their mid-40′s, so they can easily start a second career. They would have had high salary during their time as teachers. If they made it to over 10 years, they’d get a quarter pension, and if they made it to 20, a half-pension. But they would need to get back in the workforce at that point.

Teaching isn’t a lifetime job. Learning is a lifetime job. We need teachers who are literate, numerate, lifelong learners, accomplished-in-themselves, and willing to teach for the love and challenge, not the security. If they have tech, entrepreneurship, trade, or other useful skills going in, they should get serious bonuses. We want caring, exceptional teachers who the students want to emulate, across the board.

How much longer can we wait around, and watch our next generation of children get demolished by our existing educational system, which has turned into a job security program for a very large and well funded group of untouchable, unfirable, unaccountable adults? Our nation’s future is at stake.

Update: I’ve since discovered that Governor Jim Gibbons (R-Nevada, whose tabloid personal life caused him to lose his primary this year) last year proposed eliminating collective bargaining for teachers. Geoffrey Lawrence of the (conservative) Nevada Policy Research Institute has a nice writeup in favor of this policy. It focuses on the big issues: tenure, which must be eliminated, the blocks against youth and experienced non-teachers joining the teaching pool and competing with traditionally-educated teachers, and problems with current teacher certification, which is irrelevant to teaching quality as presently structured. We need broad powers to create alternative forms of teacher certification, pay systems based on merit, short-term teaching contracts, and the ability to fire lemon teachers.

Meg Whitman (R-CA candidate, who I do not endorse) has also proposed eliminating collective bargaining, but for government jobs. That seems to me unsupportable. Collective bargaining should be a right for any position that lasts longer than 20 years. It doesn’t make sense for a 4-year political term, but it does for a lifelong governmental job, and every profession needs lots of such jobs.

Imagine that all the state and federal regulators of teachers, and all the public university professors studying teaching quality were also on 20-year short-term contract positions, like the H.S. teachers in our proposal. That would cause a lack of institutional memory and would seriously hamper our ability to oversee, improve, and better regulate the teaching industry. We need lots of intelligent regulations, constantly being adjusted in any modern system. There may be government jobs we are willing to restructure to than 20 years, and for those jobs, we might significantly reduce union oversight. Until our society gets significantly more productive, and AI’s get significantly more advanced, a critical core of lifetime jobs seems necessary in any industry, and such jobs form the majority of many, but not all, professions.

In summary, in critical job categories that have seen decades of poor performance, such as H.S. teaching, it seems to me our nation needs the flexibility and ability to either repeal or reform most or all collective bargaining rights, and to institute a new system. We would likely phase it back in later, but for now, it’s time to call collective bargaining for H.S. teachers what it has become: a gross obstruction to critically-needed teaching reform.

Open Innovation Future Salon: An Interactive Event

This month the SF Bay Area had a really fun Future Salon: Open Innovation and the Future of Organizations on Wed 11 August 6pm to 9pm at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. BAFS leaders Mark Finnern, Alvis Brigis, and myself worked with the speaker to make it as interactive as possible.

Cesar Castro (see his bio below), the founder and CEO of DiscoveryCast, a new collaborative ideation and innovation platform, spoke during the first half. He gave us a fascinating survey of recent trends in open innovation. One of several new things I learned about was FailCon. A conference that reviews spectacular recent failures, mostly in entrepreneurship, and what we can learn from them. An awesome innovation of Bay Area culture. Failcon 2010 is 25 October.  You might want to put that one on your calendar if you are in the area.

And U.S. salon leaders, you might consider contacting Cesar to talk at one of your salons as well, if you think your group would be interested in getting into this topic.

Cesar posted his slides to Slideshare afterward. Slideshare is a great platform I recommend to all our salon leaders. Here they are:

Cesar Castro Open Innovation Presentation

View more presentations from DiscoveryCast, Inc..

Mark also introduced SAP’s newly developed ideation platform: Idea Place, which we used to collect results of an Ideation Challenge during the second half of the salon. The group of 40 or so attendees broke out into about 8 different groups for about a half hour, and worked on expressing concise ideas for the following question:

Ideation Challenge: You are elected to the PCAST (President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Tech) advisory board. You have access to up to $500 million in Federal Funding and the ability to propose new investments, legislation, executive orders, or other actions. What is the most important thing you can advise the federal government to do or try to stimulate U.S. innovation, economic productivity or jobs in nanotech, biotech, or infotech (the technology “golden triangle”) within the next three years (Obama’s re-election horizon)?

Thirty days after the salon, we will be posting our top suggestions placed on Idea Place to the Open PCAST website, a new platform for collecting citizen feedback on federal strategy and policy in science and tech.

This salon was a great experiment, and it taught us something in how to facilitate these kind of talk + small group salons. Having a small group activity, with a minimum of 30 minutes (probably 45-60 is better), that also involves output to an online platform (wiki, idea collection system, etc.) makes for a fun, creative and personalized event. I hope all of us do more of them.

More on our speaker: Cesar Castro is Founder and CEO of DiscoveryCast, a company that has developed an online collaborative brainstorming platform. He founded DiscoveryCast based on his experience in innovation, crowdsourcing, and corporate social networking. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco School of Business, where he lectures in the area of innovation and changing the corporate culture to embrace new innovation models.

He is a former Research Director at the Institute For The Future (IFTF) where he led the Signtific Project, the Institute’s study of the future of science and technology. Before joining IFTF, Cesar served as Vice President of Business Development at InnoCentive from 2001 – 2006, one of the leading open innovation platforms. As VP Business Development, he was responsible for recruiting innovative companies from around the world to join and post their R&D challenges on the InnoCentive platform. He worked with organizations in the life sciences, defense, manufacturing, food, and chemical sectors. He also worked at the Industrial Research Institute, Shell Chemical Company, and MBA Polymers (a Bay Area clean-tech company). Cesar has conducted projects on the future of science and technology, open innovation, crowdsourcing strategies for corporations, and network-centric innovation. He has written forecasts and given speeches on open innovation in heath care, the future of science and technology, trends in global health, and using networks (and crowdsourcing) to enhance innovation practices.

He holds a B.S. in Chemistry from Loyola College in Maryland and an M.S. in Macromolecular Science from Case Western Reserve University. He can be reached via email at cesar@discoverycast.com or via his Open Innovation blog.

Three questions of Dino Karabeg

Anticipating our Wednesday Future Salon, I asked our speaker Dino
Karabeg three questions. Here are his answers:

1. What is the single thing that everyone can do that has the greatest
lever for change into a positive direction?

Create trimtabs for systemic change. I will take one half hour to
explain what this means and to plead my case, then I will give the
participants a chance to either challenge it, or to roll up our sleeves
and begin doing it.

2. What is the greatest danger you see for us?

I believe that our greatest danger is that we may be engaging in
contemporary problematique in a symbolic way, to use Murray Edelman’s
expressive term. What if we may be recycling our trash and perhaps even
riding bicycles (as I myself do), and as result receiving all the
biochemical rewards of right-doing, while at the same time avoiding to
raise to the challenges that are presented to us? I will invite the
Future Salon members to a bit of meta-thinking and meta-design –
What can you and I do that really can lead to a radical positive shift?
I will raise this question by proposing a candidate answer.

3. What is your greatest hope?

My motivation is an anticipation of the next Renaissance. I even dare
believe that I can see how this might happen in some detail. But I have
ethical qualms about focusing my speech on this enticing vision,
because there is still some work that we need to do to make it possible.
This is why I chose this rather technical title.

Join us this Wednesday, 6:00 PM, at SAP Palo Alto. Please RSVP.

Bay Area Future Salon: Trimtabs for Systemic Change

Trimtabs for Systemic Change. Bay Area Future Salon, Wednesday May 26th. Please RSVP http://bit.ly/fstrimtab

BAFS leader Mark Finnern offered me, Miguel F. Aznar, a chance to host the Future Salon because I met someone (speaking at the May 1 BIL conference @ UCSC) whose ideas call for a Future Salon.  Join us Wednesday, May 26, to listen and share.  Dino Karabeg, professor of Informatics at the University of Oslo, describes his presentation this way:

“When we shift focus from symptoms of systemic dysfunction to systemic change, an uncommonly rich and inspiring action space becomes available. ‘Trimtabs for systemic change’ are acts that are small enough to be feasible, which can add up to make our civilization change course and guide us along a new and different direction of progress.

In this talk I will present nine prototype trimtabs in key areas including corporate business, informing, scientific research, education, healthcare, and design. Those examples have been developed at the  University of Oslo with external collaborators during the past fifteen years and implemented in practice in varying degrees. Part of the presentation will focus on a strategy for worldview and value change. This thirty-minute lecture will set a stage for further development of these ideas through dialogue.”

We catch him the evening before he returns to Oslo, so don’t miss this salon.

Dino Karabeg has been at the University of Oslo since 1992, where he is a professor in the Institute of Informatics.  See more information: Invitation to Self-Organizing Collective Mind workshop, Knowledge Federation Elevator Pitches, blog  Holoscope for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, blog Trimtabs for systemic change, and introduction to book manuscript.

Bay Area Future Salons have the following structure: 6-7pm is networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP; 7-9+pm is the presentation followed by questions and discussion. Please RSVP http://bit.ly/fstrimtab

SAP Labs North America, Building D, COIL (Co-Innovation Lab). SAP is located at 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304[map]. Free and open to the public. Please spread the word and invite others, but be sure to RSVP so we know how many people to expect.

All the World is Becoming a Game

Here is a must-see 28 min. video (3 parts), Is Your Life Just One Big RPG?, by futurist Jesse Schell, head of a 60-person game company (Schell Games), author, The Art of Game Design, CMU Professor, and former Disney Imagineer.

Schell introduces some epic themes, among them:

• Games as psychology experiments. Successful games are in fact clever experiments in creating positive sum mental transactions (real or imagined). In this highly connected world, good psychology will blow up in size and economic value far, far faster than we’ve ever seen before, yet much slower than we’ll see tomorrow. How few of us realized that Facebook, Zynga, etc. would grow as quickly as they have? Only those who knew how many bored and underutilized folks are waiting to have their free time taken over by something better than cable TV, and who are now just a click away from engagement in a game.
• Game architectures moving into physical reality. We will learn to use the better tricks of virtual world games in all our important physical world activities, governance, work, education, etc. Schell cites fellow game designer Lee Sheldon’s classes at Indiana University, which use experience points (class and online discussions, homework, tests, outside experience gained and written up during the course) rather than peer-relative curves to “level up” students through the course and assign the ultimate grade. Presumably this is more fun and engaging for today’s student, and it has been increasing student participation as well.
• The hunger for the real. As Pine and Gilmore noted in their prescient The Experience Economy, 1999, the more the world becomes a game, the more we want to feel connected to something real. Schell’s best quote of many great ones: “We live in a bubble of fake bullshit.” Amen. We can expect this bubble to keep accelerating in pervasiveness and allure, too.
• Technology divergence versus convergence. As with biological species and subcultures, divergence is far more the rule. Convergence is the exception. Those who’ve read my speculative works know I argue this as a 95/5 Rule (95% of the time, complex systems look divergent, 5%, they look convergent). The tree of technology differentiation continues to grow, though once any tree gets big enough, the rate and importance of new divergence slows (new variety becomes just twigs on the end of the tree, rather than big trunks lower down on the tree).
• The near and farther future effects of games on society. Many of the social effects of virtual games may get worse before they get better, but they should be much more positive forces in the longer run. I’ve written about this as a possible fourth law of technology, one that seems generalizable to most disruptive new technologies, from cities to cellphones. Schell essentially scares the bejeezus out of you in the last five minutes of this talk, talking about the coming dehumanization we may see with first generation effects of these games. Perhaps without knowing it, Schell is channeling young-adult fiction writer M.T. Anderson and his brilliant dystopia, Feed, 2004, which eloquently describes a soon-emerging world where kids get internet implants in their heads at birth and as a result, have degenerated to something resembling futurist H.G. Wells Eloi, passive units to be manipulated by near-Singularity corporations. Fortunately, Schell opens the door at the end to recognizing that these technologies will also be powerful forces for positive behavior change, personal growth and intellectual advancement as well. I’d like to hear a lot more about all that, frankly.

Futurists, if you have ideas about that or anything else, feel free to share them, thanks!

Welcome!

Welcome to the community blog of the ASF Future Salon Network!

If you are a Salon leader, or a thoughtful future-thinker interested in posting here for the benefit of our community, please email FS Network Director Brian Hill or ASF President John Smart to talk about blogging here.

Future Salons are free monthly educational, activist, and social foresight events, presently in 15 locations around the world. Salons are fun, discussion oriented events, created by volunteer Salon leaders (perhaps you?) to make our rapidly changing world more fascinating, manageable, profitable, and positive-sum for all of us. We strive to be both doing-action-project oriented, and thinking-idea-prioritizing oriented.

Our first Future Salon started in Los Angeles in 2001. Our fifteenth opened in Singapore late last year. Some Salons are very active, others are semi-active, and a few have been inactive for years, with Salon members in those cities waiting for new leadership (you?).

Salons currently exist in the following cities: Bejing, Boulder, D.C., Honolulu, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Manila, New York, Palo Alto, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Second Life, Singapore, and Tuscon.

Do you live in one of these cities? Visit the Future Salon Network Page and join their Facebook, Google, Meetup, or Yahoo Group to get event notifications. If you want to help run the Salon, email the moderator and see if you can join the moderator team. Or start your own (with a different name of course) so your city has more than one! Future Salons are affiliated with the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF), a nonprofit engaged in outreach, education, research, and selective advocacy with respect to issues of accelerating change.

Finally, we’ve created a Facebook Page for the Future Salon Network, to which blog posts here will flow.

We have 395 fans over at the page already. Become a fan if you haven’t already. Thanks for reading, and Come Back Soon!