Sometimes the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Our experience tells us that the education industry keeps making the same mistakes, dodging the same bullets, and asking the wrong questions about their influence, sustainability, and resiliency. And, from the looks of things, it appears that the industry is at their old tricks again.
One year ago I wrote a post here called “The Reckoning Begins”. It was on the backside of the pandemic, as educators were just starting to lift their sights to the future. An excerpt from that post a year ago:
Educators and economists alike have been predicting a reset of education for years. They have warned that the occurrence of one or two catastrophic events could reshape the entire education landscape. They have argued that tuition was too high, expense structures were too bloated, and private schools and colleges were not centered on the needs of the market, just the needs of a minority.
Our industry has been plagued with seeking solutions to the wrong problems for some time. That time is over and we will see the innovative, strategic schools and colleges rethink their role, programs, learning systems, and expense structures. The smart ones will start now, or have already started.
So, here we are, about to start the second quarter of 2022, and I have to ask myself an honest question:
Have we made any real progress toward solving some of our systemic issues?
From my vantage point, we have made some progress, but it has been incremental at best. There are a handful of schools and colleges that have learned mightily from their pandemic experience and pivoted wisely and courageously as a result. But, to be honest with the you about the industry, from my view, most schools and colleges have not made those choices. They continue to live in the incremental world, working around the edges of innovation and redesign, not doing the real work at tackling the hard issues.
So, what are the mistakes that schools and colleges continue to repeat? This will be our focus in the spring and summer of 2022 through a series we are calling #Edufails. We hope you join us on this journey of uncovering the mistakes that, if we are not intentional, we are doomed to repeat.
A final note on this series. The point of #edufails is not to dig on the education industry. Ok, maybe a little bit, as we deserve it. But, the real point of this series is to highlight the obvious mistakes we continue to make so that we do not repeat them again in this moment of rebirth after the pandemic. I am hoping we will raise awareness of these issues so that our future behavior breaks the cycle of our past behavior.
The series will always be under the hashtag #edufails and will be posted here, on our Twitter feeds and on our podcast on Spotify.