Addiction to one’s solution doesn’t solve the problem
In many communities across the United States, the war between traditional public school and charter public school advocates wages on — spanning decades. It’s exhausting to see these conversations go back and forth, vilifying well-meaning citizens on both sides and dividing communities — without really addressing the needs that reforms were meant to solve for students and their families.
Unfortunately, this conversation is an example of a system where one’s solution to a problem becomes an addiction. The solution to traditional school district challenges were charters — more autonomy, less bureaucracy, increased innovation — those were the promises of these structures. Charters, however, have demonstrated widely variable impact (even detrimental in many cases) on educational environments and outcomes for kids. However, some are addicted to the idea that this pathway to educational reform will make education better for children.
On the flipside, anti-charter advocates propose that the challenges endured by traditional district schools — budget constraints, student attrition and, lagging teacher retention — will be solved if we get rid of charters, or at least regulate them better.
Both anti-charter and charter advocates spend so much energy and space making these claims that there is little time and resource to explore solutions to address the reason we’re fighting about them in the first place.
In the end, neither solution is actually going to work because they’re focused on the wrong problem.
Both address surface-level symptoms of deeper challenges experienced by students and families in high-poverty communities: Hunger. Reading curriculum (or lack thereof). Family stress. Teacher burnout. Resource depletion. Disorganization. Housing insecurity. The list goes on.
Until we can break from our addiction to cherished solutions and focus on the deeper problem at hand, these arguments will continue to distract and divide us from doing better for our kids and educators.
An article by Dennis Meadows in the Systems Thinker says it nicely:
Adaptation and addiction differ in subtle ways. Adaptation takes place when we observe the symptoms of a problem and then take an action that counteracts the problem. Addiction occurs when we observe the symptoms of a problem and then take an action that suppresses the symptoms of the problem but makes the actual problem worse.
We must spend our limited time and cognitive resources focusing on the deeper issue at hand — the one that started this debate in the first place. Rather than divide against one another, we should be considering how to work together to address that deeper challenge, acknowledging the flaws in our current system while hoping and dreaming for a better one.
Both systems serve kids that migrate between the two. In other words — their kids are our kids and our kids are theirs. Without changing the way we address these issues, this debate will rage on for yet another decade or so. And in the end, yet another generation of children will lose out.
I’m willing to be wrong on this. Teach me something new.
