Search Institute

My friend Nels is a cellular biologist. He’s wicked smart. He tells me what he’s working on and I’m able to track what he’s up to for about the first two minutes and then he loses me. I started college as a biology major before switching to English. All that means is that I’m able to understand what he researches in the most dangerous way possible – just enough to think I get it but not well enough to actually get it.

There’s one chapter of Nels’s career, however, that I’ve been reflecting on quite a bit lately. In fact, I called him a few weeks ago and exclaimed, “I did it! I found the intersection of our work!”

When Nels was fresh out of college and before he went on to get his PhD at the University of Chicago, he worked at Medtronic, a Minnesota-based company that creates medical technologies, most notably the pacemakers used to regulate heartbeats to avoid heart attacks. The pacemaker is a remarkable device that has saved thousands of lives. But there’s a problem with pacemakers. Actually, the problem isn’t with the pacemaker. It’s with the human body.

When a pacemaker is implanted into human tissue, the body immediately and aggressively begins attacking it. Over time the pacemaker can get so consumed by scar tissue that the effectiveness of the pacemaker itself is jeopardized. After exploring different modifications to the pacemaker itself, it became clear that what truly needed attention was actually modifying the tissue around the pacemaker at the genetic level in order to make sure that the device was going to be implanted in tissue that was more likely to be receptive and less like to reject the implant. So Nels worked for years at Medtronic to improve the genetic likelihood of success.

Quite simply, this amazingly valuable and lifesaving device wasn’t the problem and never was going to be. It was the body that needed help.

The same holds remarkably true for our present conversations about education reform and improvement. The federal government and foundations are investing millions upon millions of dollars to work on sweeping innovations in the ways schools deliver content or train teachers or just about anything else having to do with education. Within this body of innovations will inevitably be some remarkable new strategies and tools. And like the pacemaker, the value of many of these innovations will be beyond question.

But lost in all of this conversation about reform and innovation is any truly meaningful dialogue about the school conditions into which these reforms will be implanted. We’re losing one of the great opportunities in recent history to bring sustainable and successful reform to schools if we continue to fail to recognize the absolutely, no questions asked importance of school working and learning conditions as it pertains to reform.

Case in point: I met last week with some student teachers who had just completed their student teaching experiences. I asked them the most basic of questions – do you like teaching? Resoundingly they reported loving teaching. They loved the students. They liked themselves in the role of a teacher. But what they weren’t so sure about is whether or not they liked the job of teaching. Stress with colleagues, poor working conditions, and untenable demands on personal time all led them to a sense of doubt about whether or not the career of teaching was going to work for them.

So here is this room of young educators. Grown in a Petri dish outside of school contexts. Then they’re placed into the schools and their value and longevity is immediately covered in the scar tissue of poor organizational conditions. That’s the human story here. But it’s the same story many of the emerging innovations face.

Until we pay attention to the schools as organizations, the likelihood of the present reform movement is at risk. I’m tired and saddened that we continue to obsess about making the new “pacemakers” for education while the bodies into which we’re going to place them receive little attention.

We can do better than this. We better. If we don’t, this golden age will go for naught.