Overcoming Over-thereness: A Call to Empower Strategic Conversations Between K-12 and Higher Education

It is seductive to give ourselves permission to see bad things happening in the world and give ourselves the cold comfort of thinking, “but that is over there.” “Over there” is somewhere else. It is not where we are, and while we may care deeply, sympathize, it remains not where we are. It doesn’t seem to impact us noticeably more on a day-to-day basis than it did yesterday. 

This is a false comfort. For a small industry that uses the word “ecosystem” a lot, educators should recognize their fallacy. When the strongest brands in education globally, such as Harvard and Columbia, are under pressure to drift from their core convictions, all mission-driven educational institutions are under the same threat. And yet the components of that ecosystem barely recognize their dependence on each other. 

There is an unhelpful distance that exists between conversations regarding the challenges facing K-12 education, higher education, and graduate/professional education. While each represents its silo, many of the topics are the same: financial sustainability, ascendant student mental health issues, socio-political polarization, curricular preservation versus innovation, and more. Yet, the dialogue that exists between different arenas of educational leadership is stilted and often takes place, if at all, only tangentially to the actual decision-making within each area.

The different arenas of education may share some limited vocabulary; they may struggle against similarly recalcitrant issues, yet, they don’t share, and perhaps more poignantly, they are not prepared to hear ideas, answers and approaches that come from beyond our silo. Why?

Several answers come quickly to mind:

• Individual institutions look for answers to problems from the approaches of institutions most similar to them. There is something that makes sense about this, of course. They believe, “if an answer to a problem works for School X, and we are like School X, then it follows that the same answer will work for our school.” While there is a certain syllogistic logic to this, and it may be a viable path to follow in a number of areas, it is also limited and short-sighted if it represents our only approach to engaging our challenging issues.
• They have limited bandwidth to keep track of what is happening within their silo, thus finding a way to access and analyze beyond the confines of their area seems impossible. This is a very real issue for anyone deeply immersed in both the day-to-day running of a school, college or university and the development of its strategic direction. This is where outside voices—associations and consultants have a vital role to play.
• They have let our prejudices limit their ability to learn deeply from educators operating in areas other than their own, particularly as they become more apprehensive about the sustainability of their educational model. Strangely, as the pressure ratchets up to innovate, they tend to look more inward rather than seek solutions and approaches beyond their most familiar boundary lines.

My premise, however, is this: to create sustainable models and to best serve students, various educational institutions must find ways to create dialogue between all areas of education—public, independent, and higher, and they must put it at the center of their efforts to create positive change. 

While there are differences and nuances in each arena, they must bring to the center what they share in common. They must seek synthesis and connective tissue so that they can move forward in ways that make sense comprehensively in a student’s education. Remember: an individual student has an experience as a student that goes from early childhood to graduation from high school, college, or graduate school. To that student, connection and continuity matter.

Given the powerful and threatening tides that face education, the clock is ticking to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Some questions:

• Where is the good conversation between the various silos of education? I have perhaps made a false assumption that this dialogue doesn’t exist effectively—what have I missed? 
• How might such conversations expand? Become smarter? Get more traction?
• How might various educational associations become the glue that ties the best ideas of education together and then communicates those ideas across the boundaries that separate us?
• What human resources and financial resources would be necessary to connect successfully?
• Who should be in the room to determine the initial steps necessary to grow this thread of conversation?
• How might better connections between areas make change occur more thoughtfully and comprehensively, without slowing its processes down to a degree that the world will have moved on by the time we arrive where we wanted to go?