A Strategic Plan for Educational Leadership
January 2000 through December 2004

Tangible Institutional Leverage

Institutional leverage helps advance innovation in education. To move new possibilities from potentiality to actuality, educators need powerful leverage on working institutions. Schools and colleges are remarkably resistant to change. One can demonstrate the power of new practices; one can link them with material forces restructuring the practical use of information and ideas; one can imbue them with a compelling sense of public purpose; but without gaining institutional leverage on the educational system, the effort will remain peripheral.

Institutional leverage must be substantive; it must comprise significant changes in specific, active institutions and experiential realities in the life and work of individual students and teachers, parents and administrators, professors and researchers. In addition, institutional leverage arises when innovations become contagious, spreading infectiously from school to school, from college to college, from level to level, from locality to locality. When that happens for a sustained period, systemic change will result.

How? One requisite is an alert attention, an open mind, a willingness to observe, hypothesize, and test. Another is to look for the deep diagnoses, insights into pervasive etiologies that go almost unquestioned because they seem to be a necessary part of the order of things. The Institute is working with two such deep diagnoses, one pertaining to assumptions about the relationship between the size and the quality of schools and the other to assumptions about the relationship between the transmission of knowledge and its generation. Both sets of assumptions involve defining a dilemma, a key trade-off that seemingly must be made and that, in being made, appears to set the leading characteristics of most educational efforts. By developing the educational uses of digital resources through networked multimedia, educators can restructure these trade-offs in hitherto impossible ways, generating leverage for change.

Consider first the relationship between school size and school quality. The twentieth century has been the era of school consolidation and common sense long held that the good school was a large school, one able to accommodate students of different needs with the services of specialists with different skills. The mid-century vision pointed to the comprehensive school as the school of choice, able to serve at once the academically gifted, the remedially needful, and the vocationally minded. This vision, which seemed so reasonable with respect to the aggregate, has not necessarily served well with respect to the person. Individual children, their parents and friends, teachers, coaches, and counselors, all need a place of bonding, one in which each can engage with others in the creation of shared meaning. Increasingly, late-century research shows students in small schools doing better than in large, learning more and coping more effectively with the stresses of coming to age. As an alternative to the comprehensive school, reformers increasingly turn to the essential school, the school that respects the essentials of interpersonal relationships, of the human dignity and thoughtful values common across all the cultural diversities of our heterogeneous society.

Yet the dilemma remains -- people differ in their needs, interests, and abilities. The small school caters to these differences only at great expense; the large school nurtures a sense of meaningful place only through heroic exceptionality. Here is where digital technologies can alter the traditional trade-off. Small schools supported by powerful, wide-area networks can provide students with effective access to a great diversity of experiences, resources, and specialists, yet they can do so on an engaging, personal scale in their immediate surroundings. Essential, intensely inter-personal schools, supported by comprehensive digital networks will transform the twentieth-century either-or into a twenty-first century both-and. The Institute believes that this combination can develop into a thorough-going structural reconfiguration of educational institutions of immense cultural and social import.

Consider second the relationship between advancing and transmitting knowledge. Since the Renaissance, scholarship and science have become increasingly esoteric. To advance knowledge in virtually any field, scholars and scientists required access to costly, sensitive instruments and painstaking, exhaustive collections. These have been assembled with great patience and diligence and they have been difficult to use, requiring subtle skill and careful interpretation. Materials have been hard to acquire, experiments hard to conduct, results have been transient and difficult to record.

Great strides have been made through printing and related techniques, through photography and the like, in making the results of systematic inquiry accessible to the general public and to discerning specialists. But access to the conduct of inquiry itself has been severely limited. How many have worked directly from a papyrus fragment of Homer or prepared a metallurgical sample for scanning by an electron microscope? In field after field, the working laboratory and academic archive are special places reserved for initiates, who gain access only after arduous preparation. They are not places for educating raw youth and bumbling novices.

Throughout the era of print, education has rarely been empirical, understanding empirical education as a process by which students master fields of inquiry and practice by using the data and tools of the different disciplines and professions to solve substantive problems and to answer challenging questions. Instead, education has been dogmatic and derivative, based on digests, authoritative at best. Even school laboratories are stylized simplifications having little resemblance to the working laboratories of the subjects they represent. Too often, the laboratory becomes a place where students go through the motions that an authoritative menu prescribes.

Traditional limitations are changing. Nearly all the data acquired in working laboratories is fast becoming digitized and it moves rapidly across networks from lab to lab and researcher to researcher. More and more, scholars capture, observe, analyze, and interpret all this material with computer-based tools, many of which are not difficult to use. The emerging information infrastructure can transport all these observations, measurements, collections, and models to virtually anyone anywhere, along with control over powerful tools of rendering, calculation, comparison, selection, organization, and expression. Collaboratories spring up, providing electronic linkages for sharing findings and discussing implications. These are the developments restructuring the relationship between the production and dissemination of knowledge. These developments make empirical education a general possibility and change the relation ordinary people can have to the work of producing knowledge.

To make empirical education work well, educators need two key elements: fast, flexible, easy access to advanced digital libraries of data and tools, and powerful challenges and questions that will activate curious minds. When educators put such challenges to students, the students in turn will engage themselves, individually and as groups, in the work of empirical inquiry and reflection. A significant part of the funding for the national information infrastructure can support such work. It is in this sense that the idea of empirical education is commensurate with the emerging information infrastructure. As more and more resources and activities pour into the information infrastructure, empirical education becomes more and more feasible, more and more powerful.

Through a University-wide initiative to promote empirical education, the Institute will help shape and deploy these developments, in which efforts to advance research and to improve education converge. The more research and education converge in practice, the more leverage there will be for the use of advanced technologies in education.

Action through technical innovation is too contingent to have the foreknowledge that chosen strategies will lead decisively to desired destinies. History is always rich in ironies. Despite such imponderables, however, educators should seek to shape the processes of change to reflect their deep-felt purposes. With that intent, the Institute affirms a strategic vision. Guided by this vision, the Institute seeks to achieve historical effects of humane significance through a sustained effort to develop proposals, and through them projects, that provide:

• a proof of concept, showing that information technology can enable the progressive educational tradition to flourish as never before;
• a driving force, enabling the stream of innovation in information technology to work as a sustaining means to effect educational reform;
• a moving social vision, rekindling the expectation that educational reform can advance ideals of equality and engage public action on global complexities; and
• a tangible institutional leverage, changing every-day practice, making schools more intimate and compelling, and bringing the work of educators and researchers into a close, synergistic relation.

The Institute is working towards this strategic vision in a sustained way. To facilitate this work, the Institute has identified a few imperatives of implementation, practical goals to pursue while engaged in the diversity of its activities.

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