The determination of Care for 24 to bring innovation to Tunisian schools is clear from the addition of new Board member Jojo Manai, senior associate managing director for collaborative technology at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Manai’s interview with Care for 24 founder Olfa Hamdi demonstrates his ability to inform the nonprofit’s theory of change in education.
Like Hamdi, Manai is a Tunisian native. His degrees in computer science and information technology from the Faculté des Sciences Economiques et de Gestion – Sfax University, in Sfax, Tunisia, and his award-winning achievements at the University of California, Davis, imply advanced technical knowledge. But he has moved on to improvement science, a discipline built on insights from fields like engineering, service design, and healthcare.
The Carnegie Foundation has applied improvement science to education, and Manai’s Carnegie work concentrates on equity and diversity in education. This makes him a perfect fit for Care for 24. The nonprofit has a similar focus on educational equity and diversity, which it sees as the foundation of broad social equity and diversity. Achieving this will be a challenge in a country that must contend with 100,000 school dropouts annually, massive for a population of less than 12 million.
“Education is an equalizer,” Manai observes. “People don’t get to choose the environment they’re born in. But education is an upward-mobility process.”
He notes that the effects of upward mobility don’t stop with increased wealth. A high dropout rate from the schools weakens democracy, which needs an educated citizenry to make wise choices on its own behalf. Where democracy is weak, equity and diversity are lacking, as are opportunities for upward mobility. The circle viciously consumes itself, devouring its young.
Trimming the Abundance of Ideas
Manai takes pride in Carnegie Foundation applications of improvement science to crucial education areas like student and teacher retention and mathematical literacy. Regarding math literacy, for example, the success rate of people attending community college to earn credits transferable to four-year colleges is, historically, around six percent. But where the method developed by the Carnegie Foundation, Carnegie Math Pathways, has been implemented, the success rate climbs to around seventy percent.
When Manai elaborates on the Carnegie approach to improving education, it becomes clear that improvement science is in one way deeply intuitive, and in another way radically counterintuitive.
“You begin by searching for the root cause of the problem,” he says.
Obviously. We’re tempted to think that even a child would know this.
On the other hand, if we reflect on the prevalence of “brainstorming” for ways to solve problems, we recognize—and may be startled by—how often we bypass the need to find the root causes of problems.
Manai speaks of “solutionitis,” suggesting that, paradoxically, problems may persist not where we don’t have enough ideas, but where we suffer from “an abundance of ideas.”
Yet even if we embrace the counterintuitive notion that we benefit not from more ideas but from fewer, we’re only halfway to forming the kind of “networked improvement community” (NIC) from which the Carnegie Foundation’s improvement-science innovations emerge.
Manai implies that the “community” component of a NIC is vital when he contrasts NIC culture with the “accountability culture” behind widely disparaged initiatives in American education like the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, or the Common Core State Standards from 2010. The fewer yet better ideas that can bring improvement to a community must come from the community, and not be imposed top-down. Buy-in is needed where one expects community members to work together to improve themselves.
Though Manai is Care for 24’s newest Board member, his eloquence on the benefits of NIC culture has already had a profound influence on the nonprofit. The problems with Tunisian education are pressing. Yet Manai makes a powerful case for Care for 24 to exercise patience as it does its research. Care for 24 must dig as deeply as possible into Tunisian communities, emerging with detailed pictures of those communities in which their members will recognize themselves and their needs.
Fail Often and Fail Fast
A community invested in self-improvement will be able to seize the initiative when it sees that an effort to improve has failed. Manai argues that accountability culture fools itself by claiming that a community held accountable for failure is unlikely to fail. Accountability culture claims that if failure is not okay, and if failure is not an option, then success will follow. Yet we know this doesn’t work.
Of course there will be failures, he says, but one must “fail often and fail fast.” A community bent on self-improvement must be granted the freedom of flexibility, the freedom to move on and try something else. Top-down initiatives are inflexible by nature.
Suggesting that inflexibility, or excessive standardization, may be hampering Tunisian education, Manai proposes “adaptive integrations” rather than a complete overhaul. He commends Starbucks, apparently a shining example of standardization, for adaptively integrating its infinitely repeatable model into Japanese culture, having visited a Starbucks that features tatami mats.
In other words, any NIC’s community component will possess the locality implicit in Care for 24’s name, which honors Tunisia’s twenty-four distinct governorates. The mining region of Gafsa is not as different from one of Tunisia’s agricultural regions as it is from Kyoto. But two distinct regions of Tunisia will differ from each other somewhat, and educational innovations will benefit by adapting to the differences.
Care for 24’s ambition to improve Tunisian education is bold. But one sign of the seriousness of that ambition is the nonprofit’s engagement with Jojo Manai.