Ahead of the Curve and Out of the Box
Presentation to Statewide Teacher Training Conference for Higher Education

Karen Hill-Scott, Ed.D.
March 3, 2006

page 6

BARRIERS TO IMPLEMENTATION
If we are successful in getting ahead of the curve and the "talented tenth" can get out of the box, what will be the barriers to implementation?

We are all familiar with the top three: territoriality, intransigence, and complexity.

Territoriality is manifested in political maneuvering, guerilla tactics, lying and obfuscation of the issues in order to stall progress and preserve the status quo. One tension that will be immediately obvious is the long standing debate between access for all and preservation of standards. As the community college leadership can tell anyone, there is a lot of talent and potential residing among the many students whose point of access is restricted by poverty, work and family obligations, and mistrust of academic institutions. That does not mean the purpose of "higher" education is exclusion but to identify and cultivate that talent, even through unconventional programs, to its full potential.

Intransigence is a common characteristic of a mature organization which wants to protect and insulate its structure, thus taking it out to another level will be a challenge. Huge leaps in growth, new domains of responsibility, and new ways of doing things, all threaten the equilibrium of a tested and enduring institution. Training 15,000 new teachers certainly will threaten that equilibrium. But there is an over-arching protection created by the legislation to depressurize the tension with good planning and adequate resources to do the job, which can be well managed by the addition of staff and resources.

It pains me to think that complexity could be the downfall of the teacher training effort, when, after all, we are talking about the state's leading minds coming together to develop this system. But when you have to move thousands of people from one point of knowledge to another, maybe we need to sort out the complexity so the charge can be explicated with simplicity. Let's focus on a complex distillation of the many variables that are in this organizational equation. A good metaphor would be performing a giant regression analysis that produces the best fit line for predicting how to get from a teacher deficit to a fully deployed system in less than ten years.

There is a final caveat. A vacuum in leadership will have dire consequences. One downside of delay and disinterest is negative exposure on equity. Teacher training has been framed as a social investment that should be available in our public higher education system. If students, particularly those who plan to teach in areas of low achievement, do not have access to a program that is supposed to be available at the public institutions, there will be legal action. Another problem is that lagging behind on development of programs when students are trying to get ahead means they will not and cannot wait for programs to be established. Student financial aid, which is in a separate pool, will be rapidly consumed by tuition and fees as ambitious proprietary or private institutions will seize the opportunity to step into the teacher training breech. The financial aid will be exhausted before our targets are reached because the student aid will have been spent on private infrastructure development. And the public investment to finance that infrastructure development in our state higher education system will be seriously compromised.

That gets me to my concluding statement: Marcy Whitebook compares workforce development to traveling down a multi-lane highway with on ramps and off ramps for students who are in a process that has options and supports to guide them to their destination.

My main concern is that we not get so overwhelmed and bogged down by the scale of this endeavor that our workforce ends up in a parking lot. That is what happens to them today—where recent research shows that staff quality has gone down and wages have stagnated in real dollars during the past 20 years. Teachers who would like to move forward are stuck in dead end jobs with no career ladder. The opportunity in the Preschool for All effort is to create a major turnaround with a tough but doable timeline; with ample venture capital to invest wisely in both institutional development, but also career development of thousands of people who never dreamed teaching four-year-olds would ever be a self-respecting and important career in this society.

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