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The Taming of the School: How System Dynamics Can Aid Underachieving African-American Students

By Kas Salawu CE '78

Photo: iStockphoto.com/Bonnie Jacobs

In 1986, the Prime Minister of Japan Yasuhiro Nakasone casually mentioned to a group of journalists that large numbers of blacks and Hispanics were a drag on the American economy and made the U.S. less competitive globally. That comment earned Nakasone instant notoriety in the U.S. and led to his resignation in Japan. However, the fact remains that African-Americans continue to score significantly lower than their white counterparts on the three Rs and on standardized tests at all levels of formal education.

In September, I attended an open house in Atlanta sponsored by the Admissions Office for prospective MIT students. The relatively meager attendance by African-Americans invoked the ghost of Yasuhiro. Since then, the idea of writing an essay to explore the reasons for this disinterest has been gnawing at me, especially because the underlying causes are addressed in a book I am preparing. I want to believe, as do evolutionary biologists like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jared Diamond, that environment, not genes, influence IQ as measured today. If the environment is the cause of academic failure, then a transformation of that environment can change the fate of young African-American students.

President Bush praised the educational advancement made by the "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law on October 5, 2006, at the Woodridge Elementary and Middle Campus in Washington, DC. When he signed the act into law in 2002, he noted that NCLB was a historic law and here to stay. At the October 5 event, he repeated his claims and introduced ideas to strengthen the law in the future. All the platitudes were in attendance: hold school districts accountable for tested performance, improve teacher quality, improve options for parents, narrow the gap, etc. However, almost all scorekeepers, except the makers of the NCLB law, acknowledge that the gap is widening.

I am dismayed that the same questions about the collective lot of African-Americans asked when I arrived here from Africa in 1964 are still being asked. For more than ten years, I have published articles in newspapers around this country warning that it is futile for policymakers to keep introducing interventions that focus on obvious symptoms yet neglect the underlying causes. Particularly during Lyndon Johnson's Great Society era, money was continuously thrown at correcting observed problems, but there have been no lasting solutions because their causes are ignored and the difficulties remain policy resistant. I maintain that a lasting solution will take 18 to 20 years (a child's K-12 educational span) to craft and refine, but almost no politician has the patience to wait that long for any educational policy to work.

Looking beyond the heat generated by some passionate debates on African-American education to the light of robust analysis, one confronts a web of causes and effects that are often not closely linked in time and space. It surprises many people that I, a sometimes professor of engineering, choose to discuss this problem. However, system thinkers are equipped to analyze, model, and simulate complexity and component interactions, especially in socio-economic situations where circular causal loops abound. Methods of system dynamics, developed in the sixties at MIT by Jay Forrester EE '45, as well as the techniques of learning organizations articulated by MIT's Peter Senge GM '78, are equal to the task of modeling and simulating these social problems. As indicated, they employ concepts of engineering feedback systems—self-correcting negative feedback to maintain balance and self-reinforcing positive feedback to effect amplification. If we truly wish to solve this heretofore policy-resistant problem, we must allow time and involve a cadre of interdisciplinary experts, not only professional educators.

MIT's John Sterman GM '82 explains that policy resistance begins with an event-oriented approach to problem-solving and continues with a misunderstanding of feedback operating in the system. For instance, in response to missing sales goals, a company cuts its prices and increases its market share as well as sales. However, competitors also cut their prices and the company's market share and sales fall again—yesterday's solution becomes today's problem. This is feedback: the company's action altered the state of the system in which it is embedded and opposing forces reacted to restore the balance. "To avoid policy resistance and find high leverage policies," writes Sterman, "requires us to expand the boundaries of our mental model so that we become aware of and understand the implications of the feedbacks created by the decisions we make."

Matters get more complicated because results of studies with system dynamics are often counterintuitive, as illustrated by this passage from Jay Forrester's recollection of The Beginning of System Dynamics: "Urban Dynamics was the first of my modeling work that produced strong, emotional reactions. As you know, it suggested that all the major urban policies that the United States was following lay somewhere between neutral and highly detrimental, from the viewpoint either of the city as an institution, or from the viewpoint of the low-income, unemployed residents."

With that somber counsel, we turn to this philosophical yet practical question: "What private difficulties should be elevated to the level of public problems and hence legitimately deserve correction with public resources?" Leading policy analysts, like Eugene Bardach, submit that, in situations where market failures do not occur, people's private troubles cannot typically be ameliorated by even the most well-intentioned governmental interventions. Could it be then that African-Americans must sooner than later take the lead in coming to grips with this problem of poor academic performance and that the days of seeking handouts are over?

Delightfully, to the rescue comes an African-American, Geoffrey Canada, who led a grassroots effort within the Harlem Children's Zone to found and fund The Promise Academy where stunning successes are achieved everyday right in the heart of Harlem. Delegations from school districts across the country have visited The Promise Academy to learn about its ingenious methods. The interested reader should please visit the CBS News Web site to read about the school and its near miracles.

Experienced K-12 teachers in inner city schools overwhelmingly agree that the critical determinant of a child's success in education is the active involvement of the parents or surrogates in the child's school work. If the child's guardians are unable to participate for any reason—acute poverty, illiteracy, substance abuse, absentee father, etc.—that child is not only most likely doomed academically but is also a good bet to be disruptive in usually overcrowded classes. Overwhelmed teachers grow indifferent; guidance counselors avoid these children in distress who may be sedated with Ritalin. How can the behavior of such children be changed without changing their homes? Sometimes, idealistic new teachers are assigned para-professional teachers to help them cope. If the grades in those classes improve appreciably, these assistants are withdrawn and reassigned elsewhere by the school district. Then, things fall apart; the teacher may quit, and the grades plummet. If these yo-yo problems must be tackled repeatedly, when would the children get to high-level learning such as systems thinking and Logo programming language, with all its spatial appreciation lessons using Turtle Graphics (developed by MIT's Seymour Papert), both of which are taught at the best elementary schools?

A key element in every system dynamics modeling exercise, Causal Loop Diagrams, (CLDs), would work well here to illustrate why grades almost always return to low levels. CLDs are primarily used to achieve three things: illustrate cause-and-effect relationships in a situation under study, focus on the feedback linkages among components of a system, and determine the appropriate boundaries for defining what is to be included within a system. As one might imagine, a common failing of policymakers in education is to narrow the boundaries of problems to include only situations under their control, but that doesn't solve the toughest problems.

Jack Homer and Bobby Milstein coined the term 'syndemic', which is "the spread and persistence of mutually reinforcing health problems such as substance abuse, violence, and AIDS, typically found in inner city neighborhoods burdened by economic hardship, deteriorated infrastructure, social disruption, malnutrition, and inadequate healthcare." This definition pinpointed an issue that Geoffrey Canada is tackling. He is succeeding, in part, because he is steering clear of most of the deleterious effects in his environment: the students pay almost nothing; extended school hours and proposed year-round schooling will minimize neighborhood influence; all his facilities are world class; and the students are fed healthy foods and provided with the best healthcare in New York City. Not only did the students who did not make the selection by lottery weep openly but so did their parents and grandparents and Canada, himself, for not being able to help more children.

Society must use a systemic approach to tackle this policy-resistant socio-economic problem that afflicts African-Americans the most. A verse from the New Testament, Luke 8:6, part of the parable of four soils, is a good analogy for the futility of treating surface wounds: "Other seed fell on shallow soil with underlying rock. This seed began to grow, but soon withered and died for lack of moisture."

About the Author Kas Salawu CE '78 arrived in America from Nigeria in 1964 at the age of 18. He received engineering degrees from Cornell (BS) and Columbia (MS, ScD) before earning an SM in civil engineering from MIT and is writing a book about the achievements of African-Americans since the days of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1988. He has consulted at numerous multinational corporations and conducts industrial courses on digital simulation, multidimensional data modeling, rule-based expert systems, and data mining. View his curriculum vitae online.

Published December 2006

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