November 2003 — Making Life Easier
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Achieving Education's 'Tipping Point'
How d'es a movement of broad and significant change happen from individual and random acts of innovation? This is a question being pondered by those who value the importance of implementing educational technology into our schools.
I recently read The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. The essential thesis of the book is that to make a significant, broadly effective change in how people behave, what they value or in the dissemination of ideas, there is a "tipping point" where a small, precisely targeted approach causes this to happen. Though I do not agree with some of his explanations as to why this phenomenon occurs, I do agree with the book's concept.
I was particularly interested in the section of the book where Gladwell discusses the dramatic decrease in New York City's crime rate during the 1990s. William Bratton, current police chief of Los Angeles, was the New York City police commissioner at the time of the decline. On a recent radio show, Bratton commented about his belief in The Tipping Point 's concept and how he applied it to his work in New York City. For example, he helped reduce serious crimes in the subways by focusing on stopping those people who cheated the system by not paying their fares. He believed that putting in this small level of order would be a signal to help prevent more serious crimes from occurring. Bratton also instructed his New York City department to concentrate on quality-of-life crimes such as public drunkenness and people demanding money for cleaning a car's windshield. His belief was that by handling these small and seemingly insignificant types of crimes, an environment would be created to help prevent the more major types of crimes from taking place. The results speak for themselves - it worked.
In a forthcoming book by Mark Gura, the former director of The New York City Department of Education's Office of Instructional Technology writes about how the personal computer, the Web and related technologies have made a vast difference in how businesses, governmental agencies and libraries function; yet, the one institution that remains largely unaffected is the nation's schools. Gura writes that though there is a transformation happening in every district in the nation, "the problem is that it has not happened systematically, not happened as a cultural shift. ... We haven't seen the critical mass of understanding that will drive this change, regardless of budgets, politics or conditions." That is, we have not yet achieved the tipping point.
How do we create that tipping point where the use of technology becomes an inherent part of all our educational programs? How do we achieve this for individual classrooms, schools, districts, etc., so that the change becomes truly systemic? What is the educational equivalent of stopping littering, car window washing or fare beating? Perhaps it is:
