An Internet acquaintance recently contributed a provocative piece on an IBM study that has important consequences for K-12 public schools. Jerry Eads grew up on Lopez Island and now lives in Atlanta. We have been impressed with his analytical skills and his keen interest in getting the facts straight. Jerry currently serves as an administrator of an online group that attempts to expose education disinformation as it is presented in the media. Here is Jerry’s paper. It includes a link to the IBM study of leadership characteristics of global CEOs.
At a ridiculous hour for a Saturday morning Mary Lynn and I ventured to Athens for her Ph.D. commencement. The commencement speaker was David Adelman, ambassador to Singapore, a graduate (of course) of UGA, and until his appointment, the Georgia state senator representing the 42nd district and the minority whip.
It was, as one would hope, a nice chat –focused on global relationships and competitiveness. An item that especially caught my ear was mention of the fourth and just released IBM Global CEO Study, Capitalizing on Complexity, based on interviews with 1,541 CEOs, managers and public sector leaders in 60 countries and 33 industries. They also interviewed 3,600+ students from 100 major universities around the world.
Having now read a fair amount of that report, what fascinated me was what appears to be the abject disjoint between what CEOs say they need of their leaders in the future and our past and current policy in U.S. public K-12 education. It would do a disservice to the study to attempt to summarize it here. You can follow the link below for your own copy and also work with a nicely done interactive report online (replete with a typo in the index).
The single most important characteristic CEOs say they need in their leaders is: Creativity. The need for that creativity is driven by the radically increasing complexity of the world. “Our interviews revealed that CEOs are now confronted with a “complexity gap” that poses a bigger challenge than any factor we’ve measured in eight years of CEO research. Eight in ten CEOs expect their environment to grow significantly more complex, and fewer than half believe they know how to deal with it successfully.” And “CEOs now realize that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics. Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation. To connect with and inspire a new generation, they lead and interact in entirely new ways.”
Yet what we have done in public education now for decades is enforce rote recall drill & kill through tests that focus on (roughly) the 30th percentile kid – forcing schools (the research is convincing) to ignore the bottom 20% and the top 60% of the student body. We have ensured that very few of those future leaders will come from any but the highest socioeconomic level public schools (that can essentially afford to ignore the tests).
We are embarking on a “national curriculum” literally built on constructs developed in the 18th century, pooling state resources to develop yet more tests that might enable attention on a broader range of students yet still focus primarily on “basic skills” (that’s what we know how to measure). A piece last week pointed out the criticality of kids learning to read, and that and other basic skills are without doubt necessary. But they are not sufficient. We’ve heard over and over and over that U.S. higher education is valued more than any other in the world because it produces creative graduates, yet we continue to do our best to ignore that need in K-12 policy. We by default demand the production of teachers who must know how to drill & kill to the exclusion of the broader, difficult to measure characteristics necessary for the country to prosper and on top of that, under current national policy, will evaluate teachers on their drill & kill skills.
Here’s the link to the website – IBM of course wants you to register, but keep an eye on the check boxes and you should be able to avoid emailbox stuffing.
Gerald M. Eads II, Ph.D.
Coordinator, Research & Evaluation
Professional Standards Commission
Atlanta, Georgia
