I was working on SLA’s School Improvement Plan today. For folks who don’t know, under NCLB, any school not making AYP must make a two year School Improvement Plan. In Philadelphia, all schools must complete the plan. (That may be because the district does not make AYP, or it may be a result of the School Reform Commission takeover of the district, or something else… I don’t know, although I am researching it.)

In any event, the document is pretty extensive. There’s a template for filling it out, and, as it is in most states, it deals with many of the different pieces of school with many boxes that must be filled in and such. It is the kind of thing that short-circuts my brain — not because I can’t answer the questions asked, but because I find the method by which I have to answer them incompatible to the way I think about my school. I’ve written a few hundred pages (even if you don’t include this blog, I think) about what I think SLA is, what SLA learning looks like, how SLA plans, etc… but just not that way.

And it was bothering me. It brought out the worst habits of the recalcitrant student I have. We worked on the document on two Wednesdays as a staff, and I sat down to write my pieces a few dozen times, but the writing was slow. I was frustrated with the process, frustrated with the document and frustrated with myself.

For a few weeks, I was willing to chalk up my frustration to having to create a school improvement plan for a new school — the document didn’t fit SLA because we weren’t looking at improvement in that sense yet. We had no past to improve. We were just looking to start strong. How do you fit that into an NCLB-compliance document?

But it was more than that. With every checkbox I filled out, with every attempt I made to atomize the teaching and learning down to deliverables and due dates, I got more frustrated, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought about Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and how our focus on minutia details and attempts to quantify and qualify and overexamine may not be, in the end, the way to the best answers, but rather letting experts be expert might be better. That got me part of the way there. (And yes, I know to write about the lessons I learned from Blink this summer and never did.) But it still didn’t seem to crystalize the problem.

I kept digging. And I know that School Improvement Plans were designed for schools not making AYP, but even so, the document template seemed to be written completely from a deficit model (this, as I recall, was true of New York’s model as well, so this isn’t a PA thing), and while a lot of schools use the SIP to talk about what they are doing right, it feels like a negative document.

And it’s funny, I don’t think I’ve ever met a principal from any district who felt that a School Improvement Plan was an accurate representation of their school. Not one. At worst, principals have felt it’s a huge pain, and at best, folks seem to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and attempt to make it useful to them in some way. But I don’t think I have ever met someone who thought it was an authentic document, and I know a lot of people who have tried to make it an authentic process.

And then, I found something that allowed me to get my head around my own issues. I think much of the problem of NCLB and SIPs can be found in the idea that NCLB and the SIP process are fundamentally Freudian in nature. They atomize, seeking meaning in the small detail. They are negative documents, seeking the small pieces of repression and wrong and attempting to solve them piece by piece.

But schools should be Jungian — we should look at the whole. We should, yes, recognize that which needs to be fixed, but we must also represent a more positive, less bleak look.

And yes, this might be an overly simplistic look at the way we look at schools and Freudian and Jungian philosophies, but it always felt true to me. So much of what we read and are told about our schools is so bleak, focuses on every mistake. And we rarely look at the whole… what we accomplish… what works. And the national mindset, post-NCLB has gotten worse not better. And it’s my contention that the School Improvement Plans are a manifestation of that Freudian outlook.

And once I came to that lens for what I was doing, it was a lot easier to work on the document because I recognized it for what it was, and I found myself attemping to make the document more represent the education world-view I wanted to represent.

I’ll let you know how that goes.