Luxury goods and non-negotiable values
I’ve been very much into the Acquired podcast lately. The premise of the podcast is that each episode describes a single company, usually beginning at some pivotal pre-company occurrence (the birth of the founder, the invention of some critical piece of technology that enables the company, etc) and proceeding to chart the trajectory of the company through to today. The hosts, David and Ben, are these kinda dweeby but ultimately endearing dudes with backgrounds in venture capital but who now just do their podcast full-time. Given this, it’s probably not surprising that the episodes tend to have a finance bent to them. Even so, as someone who has never worked in finance or even in a finance-adjacent industry, I still find the episodes appealing companions during dog walks, commutes to work, laundry folding, and other tasks that allow for auditory entertainment.
One of my favorite episodes describes the history and strategy of Hermes, the uber-elite French luxury goods company. Even if you’re not interested in high fashion or business operations or finance, the Hermes episode of Acquired is still a fascinating listen. There’s business intrigue and encounters with French (and Russian!) royalty and inter-generational succession conflicts and attempted hostile takeovers, and these are all obviously compelling. But maybe the most compelling aspect of the whole Hermes story is that the company has somehow, over nearly 2 centuries, insisted on creating only the highest-quality goods, adhering to their ethos of craftsmanship and quality above all else, even when other luxury brands moved more toward mass production and a reliance on their brands/logos to confer some illusion of quality regardless of the actual physical quality of the goods themselves.
Hermes starts with their non-negotiables, and then figures out how their business has to operate given these non-negotiables. Namely, they’re committed to producing only the highest quality goods. In many cases, this means their products are handmade by expert craftspeople. So the company then builds its business around this constraint. To ensure they have expert craftspeople who can create a silk scarf or a Birkin bag or a mechanical watch by hand, they opened their own school where they train their own artisans to make exactly the high-quality hand-crafted goods they want to sell. They open lots of workshops (rather than a handful of factories) to create working conditions conducive for the creation of these high-quality goods. And yeah, they sell their stuff at eye-popping prices, but they also commit to repairing and maintaining anything they sell you, and I think this commitment is basically forever.
My thesis here is that educators should probably approach our work similarly – starting with a very small number of non-negotiables and building the system out from there.
Some of these non-negotiables already exists due to federal and state legislation. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) guaranteeing a free appropriate public education (FAPE) for any children with disabilities is maybe the best example in that it legally defines a non-negotiable constraint – schools must provide things like speech therapy, targeted instructional supports, and other related services to students who need them. And then schools and school divisions have to operate around this constraint. There are plenty of other legal examples we could dig into here – for instance, Virginia recently passed the Virginia Literacy Act, which puts some legislative teeth on literacy instruction in Virginia’s schools.
Federal and state governments can’t (or shouldn’t, at least) legislate all of the details of school operations, though, and so school divisions and schools and individual teachers all have plenty of degrees of freedom with which to operate when making decisions. Which is a good thing! But being presented with lots of decisions also means that superintendents and principals and classroom teachers and everyone in between have plenty of opportunities to be pulled in lots of different directions.
The proliferation of data exacerbates this problem. Students take multiple state-mandated performance- and growth-assessments every year, plus they also probably take several division-mandated benchmark assessments, plus every learning app they use collects gobs of data and provides teachers and administrators with more bar charts and Excel exports than they can possibly manage. And then there’s all of the non-academic data that schools collect – attendance, discipline, climate surveys, course enrollment, etc etc. Although I fully endorse the stance that we should, where possible, use relevant data to make instructional decisions, I also totally acknowledge how inundated educators are with data and how this inundation leads to powerlessness and the urge to chase some (potentially arbitrary) metrics simply because they’re quantifiable and we have access to them and it feels good to make some number go higher (or lower).
We’re hoping that, if we surrender to this torrent of data, the storm will eventually spit us out on a tropical beach somewhere.
(Yes, I realize I’m mixing metaphors here. Oh well).
A better approach is to operate like Hermes. Start with a few non-negotiable beliefs and design a system that prioritizes these beliefs. To be fair, many schools and school divisions to this! I'm not trying to pitch this as some novel concept. But so maybe this belief is something like “students learn best through spacing and retrieval practice.” If that’s your non-negotiable belief, then you ought to set up your instruction to emphasize these practices. And you probably want to plan some data collections (e.g. observations, lesson plan reviews, etc.) to ensure that this is happening. But it also means you will want to forego a lot of other stuff. If emphasizing spacing and retrieval practice are your highest-leverage practices, then you can ignore any data that doesn't tell you about the implementation or effectiveness of those strategies. Rather than letting the data lead what you do, you’re letting your belief lead what you do, and using data to ensure it’s 1) actually being implemented, and 2) working as you hope.
Or maybe your belief is something like “teachers will grow best with frequent, low-stakes observation-and-feedback cycles.” If you’re an administrator, then you need to structure your day to prioritize these observations, which means ignoring less-important things.
I realize this is all easier said than done, and external pressures are real, and the autonomy to set priorities and ignore non-priorities is scant for some folks. But if we don’t let non-negotiable values be the primary driver of decisions, then we’ll just be adrift, hoping that some dashboard tells us what we should believe in.
