It Doesn’t Have to be Mysterious: A Case for Systems Theory in Higher Education
Marc Dones & Brittani Manzo
Systems Without Systems
Recently, there's been a great deal of attention paid to the idea of "systems thinking" or "systemic responses" in the human services sectors (Belue, Carmack, Myers, Weinreb-Welch, Lengerich, Allegrante, and Barry, 2012; Hernández, Ruano, Marchal, San Sebastián, and Flores, 2017). This focus has been the result of a broad recognition that the nature of the problems to be solved are not at the level of the individual but rather should be seen as the products of system-level performance (Senge, 2006). However, this shift to "systems" thinking has been remarkably shallow with regard to any real engagement with the existing literature on systems design or evaluation (Arnold and Wade, 2015). The result has been a conversation that often posits systems as nebulous or poorly defined when a great deal of work has been done to construct a clear definition to build from. That said, we will not be rehashing the totality of that literature here. Rather, we will attempt to make a case for why our current approach to transforming the educational system fundamentally lacks a true systems-thinking approach and to begin to outline how a systems approach might be applied.
If we want to approach higher education with a firmer rooting in systems theory, it might make sense then to think through what the relevant baseline knowledge is. With that in mind, in order to proceed, we might first define a few of our most relevant terms. These are:
Systems;
Transformation; and
Equity.
Systems
A system is a set of elements (molecules, people, whatever) that are interconnected in such a way that they produce their own behavior over to me (Meadows, 2008). The critical point here is that, absent these interconnections, these elements would not produce the same behavior. A system then is conceptualized as something where the connections between things are just as important as the things themselves. To conceptualize education as a system (and to think of any action as systemic in nature), there needs to be an explicit focus on how the integration of various elements that are currently producing one behavior (e.g., closures) can be reconfigured to produce different behavior.
Transformation
Perhaps there are few other words as aggressively misapplied as “transformation.” If a system is truly to be transformed, we have to consider whether or not two critical and connected things have taken place. First, has the actual structure of the system changed, that is to say, have the interconnections between the elements which give rise to its fundamental behavior(s) been reorganized? Second, has the system’s articulated goal (and commonly understood reason for existing) been changed accordingly? Transformation cannot be accomplished without both of these elements. Importantly, evaluating the shift in goals allows for a far more nuanced approach to systems transformation than a reactive analysis focused on evaluating the pathologies arising in a system’s behavior. That is to say, a focus on the closures of higher education institutions (HEIs) creates a set of concerns around a pathology that, in turn, gives rise to a movement towards a restructuring that would prioritize keeping HEIs open, when perhaps this is not actually the appropriate goal. In fact, one could easily imagine a set of actions arising from this goal that, even as it produces relatively stable institutions, could produce a set of system-wide behaviors that have a deleterious effect on students and learners.
Equity
History
Pathway
Opportunity
Experience
Outcome
By approaching the evaluation (and creation) of equitable systems through this framework, we can ensure we are accounting not only for access but also ensure that thriving is both articulated within the model and understood clearly as cumulative. The result here then is that we understand more about the pathway one traverses within the system and not simply their level of access to the system.
Programs vs. Systems
When we approach our work through a true systems analysis, then what we see is that most of the work that we’ve done over the last 10–20 years amounts less to systems change work and is more accurately described as programmatic. What these approaches have lacked is a systems orientation. Rather than looking at the whole, we’ve focused on individual elements, maybe at best focusing on two or three related elements at once. “Systemic responses” have often taken one element and reshaped it from start to finish but have not focused substantively on how it interacts with other elements of the system and are therefore systemic in name only. That is to say, the difference between a system and a program is not simply about scale, but it’s capacity to reorganize other system components. All system-level outcomes are the result of complex cause and effect networks that can be difficult to tease apart when isolated from each other (Dunnion & O’Donovan). Because most programs are, by definition, embedded within systems, they lack the capacity to shift the connections between other system components in meaningful ways. Because of our fundamentally programmatic approach, what we’ve gotten instead is outcomes that reflect roughly the same trends as the ones before—slightly modified system dynamics through the introduction of new system components that don’t make fundamental shifts and so produce similar results. These outcomes should serve as evidence that, in order to achieve equitable outcomes for people of color and marginalized communities within our education systems, we need to fundamentally rethink the way we approach undertaking efforts to produce lasting change.
Most approaches to pursuing equity within our education systems focus on the connections between elements, or progress from one point to another, from elementary to secondary school, secondary school to institutions of higher education (Orfield, Marín, and Horn). This quantitative focus on access points obfuscates the many other far-reaching and deep connections that determine students’ outcomes (Meadows and Wright, 2013). Measuring and improving access tells but one small part of the story that impacts progress toward equity. The various and unexpected ways that other dynamics (within and external to our education systems) impact students’ experiences and outcomes are completely lost in the current frameworks used for education reform.
To this point, much of the work in the educational system, with regard to transformation, has been focused primarily on modernization and equity (Darling-Hammond, 2012). Specifically, one focus has been on the digitization (if we can speak in reductionist terms) of educational offerings (Castañeda and Selwyn, 2018; Warschauer and Matuchniak, 2010). and the other focus has primarily been on who education is offered to, and who has access to education (Gottfried and Johnson, 2014). Both of these have received renewed attention lately as a result of a spate of closures of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and predictive analysis that projects these closures to accelerate over the coming decade (Grawe, 2018) and will have a disproportionate impact on historically marginalized communities. The response has been to discuss more aggressively “transforming” the system through consolidating (typically through a merger or acquisition) (Kelderman, 2012) or through (more radically) allowing institutions to fail when sustaining them is not to the benefit of students or the surrounding community (Adams, 2018; Hawkins, 1995). The function of this effort might best be likened to surgery: what has to be excised so that the larger body, the larger higher education system, can survive overall?
However, that is not transformation. It is, at best, an attempt to rethink the delivery mechanism, but not necessarily a transformation of the system itself. Meadows and Wright (2008) posit that the goals of a system and the paradigms out of which the system arises are among the most effective leverage points to prompt systems-level change. Goals, in this framework, are not the strategic goals approved by boards or policy priorities set by governments. Goals are what the system is already doing, the behaviors of the system as-is. As Dr. Maya Angelou taught Oprah, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” systems thinking posits that when a system shows you what it does, believe it. We all too often take the negative outcomes of our system and label them as anomalies or evidence of a malfunction, when, in reality, the system is perpetuating itself with intention.
The Miseducation of Higher Education
Here’s a snapshot of data from American institutions of higher education:
Black students owed 15 percent more in college debt than other students after graduation;
Black students had higher dropout rates and lower six-year completion rates than any other racial group; and
One-fifth of full-time professors are people of color, while 45% of undergraduate college students are people of color (American Council on Higher Education).
If higher education has approached this current moment through the lens of systems thinking at all, it has only just begun to ask about the reordering of the elements—it has not yet taken an in-depth look at the goals of the system, how those goals may, in fact, be producing current outcomes, and what fundamental changes in a system’s architecture may prompt a change in goal(s) as well.
America’s public systems have arisen primarily out of goals rooted in inequity, particularly white supremacy (King and Tuck, 2007). Colonialism, the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, slavery, racial animus, misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia fertilize the landscape on which our public systems have grown (Kendi, 2016; Lepore, 2018). The higher education data delineated above illustrates why the goals of the American education system are a byproduct of the violent history from which the current system has evolved.
This history not only shapes the contours of America’s public systems but also animates them as well. The hegemonic norms of White culture are often regarded as America’s accepted social norms ever since this country’s inception (Okon, 2010). Colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and slaveholding all positioned White people in positions of social power, and White cultural norms have been used to entrench that power, amounting to White supremacy (Brannan, 2019). While not as inherently problematic as supremacism, the privileging of White cultural norms were (and still are) used to shape the formal and informal laws and expectations of American society, thereby cementing white cultural norms as “correct” and other approaches to society, community, work, education, land, and animals as wrong (Gulati-Partee & Potapchuk, 2014). People of color and other marginalized communities cannot thrive in environments where their cultural orientation is suppressed or outlawed (Gulati-Partee & Potapchuk, 2014).
As a result, the history of higher education shows a multiplicity of goals with regard to what the system is supposed to produce. These goals vary not just by time period but also by population. For example, the early approach to education for Black people had a heavy emphasis on semi-skilled labor with a fairly explicit focus on installing Black people as a permanent lower-class source of cheap labor for the national market, particularly the South (Spivy, 1978). Northern philanthropists, who in the past had mainly supported primary and secondary schools, seized the opportunity presented at the turn of the century to fund the creation of HBCUs and shifted their emphasis toward industrial education (Bullock, 1967). These philanthropists saw industrial education as a way to solidify the Southern economy and to create a semi-educated Black workforce (Anderson, 1980,1988; Berman, 1983; Brown, 2001; Brown et al., 2001; Bullock, 1967; Fleming, 1976; Peeps, 1981; Watkins, 1990; Williams & Ashley, 2004; Gasman & Hilton, 2012; Freeman, 2010). According to William Baldwin (1899), a member of Rockefeller’s General Education Board:
The potential economic value of the Negro population properly educated is infinite and incalculable. In the Negro is the opportunity of the South. Time has proven that he is best fitted to perform the heavy labor in the Southern states. “The Negro and the mule is the only combination so far to grow cotton.” The South needs him; but the South needs him educated to be a suitable citizen. Properly directed he is the best possible laborer to meet the climatic conditions of the South. He will willingly fill the more menial positions, and do the heavy work, at less wages, than the American white man or any foreign race which has yet come to our shores. This will permit the Southern white laborer to perform the more expert labor, and to leave the fields, the mines, and the simpler trades for the Negro. (p. 52)
The expansion of higher education options for Black people was painfully advanced, lawsuit by lawsuit, state by state. This pathway forward had the inevitable byproduct of creating two very different educational systems— not necessarily in its structure, but absolutely in its purpose. We raise this point here precisely because many of the institutions identified as threatened by the current decline in enrollment are HBCUs and other institutions that serve marginalized communities (Baylor, 2010; Hamlin, 2016). The current conversation about the best path forward is frequently described as being in search of a systems-level response that's equitable in nature. However, there has not been a corresponding recognition of this matter that has successfully engaged in this moment of transformation. We would have to clarify and reconcile the goals of not one system but at least two (this does not properly account for the questions raised by HEIs or the higher education goals of indigenous/me populations). In some ways, this represents a fundamental misapprehension of what the creation of access to predominantly white institutions would do for historically marginalized communities.
The prevailing narrative about the irrefutable goodness of that access has largely gone unexamined, which has allowed the field to sidestep a set of critical conversations about whose voice has been historically centered in the creation of educational opportunity. Like all U. S. policy, the education space has not as aggressively confronted the historical antecedents of our present systems. The result is that history is still with us, roaming the hallways. Ghosts in desperate need of banishment that can only come from our finally having the willingness to look at them directly.
Conclusion
To pursue equity in higher education, the field will need to turn its attention to the complexity of its systems and goals. It likely needs to blow up the idea of transformation, reform, and even strategic goals that have been used to shape change efforts to-date. They’ve undermined the idea of true transformation by focusing not on the system as a whole, but on tinkering within its existing paradigms.
But in her literature on systems change, Meadows outlines one leverage point that surpasses them all in its effectiveness. It’s neither the rules of the system nor its positive or negative feedback loops within the system. And it’s not information or access to information about the system that is most useful in change. According to Meadows, its ability to transcend paradigms is what is paramount. There is no natural, inherent, nor undeniable truth at the center of our human-manufactured systems. Meadows wrote, “If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose” (Meadows, 2008, p. 64). And so, if we earnestly harness the mounting momentum for undoing structural racism in institutions of higher education—and in American society more broadly— in addition to racial equity, what other paradigms would we begin to take on so as to begin building a truly anti-racist system?
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