Gadfly

GADFLY

The Value Of Seeing the Same Reform Lessons and Patterns

in Education, Aging, and Healthcare

Copyright © 2021 Jim Shon

All rights reserved. This book was written to be freely downloaded and shared. No part of this book may be used or reproduced for sale or to charge a fee or gain a profit, by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Gadfly:a person who stimulates or annoys other people especially by persistent criticism.

A Gadfly is a person who interferes with the status quo of a society or community by posing novel, potentially upsetting questions, usually directed at authorities. The term is originally associated with the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, in his defense when on trial for his life.

It’s a world of specialization, when expertise is often confined to Silos, and when bureaucracies channel and separate information needed for policy makers. This book makes the case that the ability to understand many aspects of any segment of society, can benefit from understanding all aspects.

For the specialists, experts, and technicians to be most successful, the system and its power centers has to accept a broader range of ideas and reforms. It has to embrace future trends and patterns, or it will be forever behind. Better ideas cannot be rejected because of petty tribalism, where we as WHO before we know WHAT.

This pandemic has emphasized and accelerated the technical, economic and social mega trends impacting every aspect of our lives. The walls between government and policy areas cry out for penetration if not destruction. We are finding it almost impossible to separate the wellbeing of seniors, preschool and K-12 learning from releasing parents back into the workforce from all the myriad health and safety concerns of all places where citizens gather and work.

The centers of objective research and analysis to help us understand these contexts and connections are underfunded, underappreciated, and under used. The University, and its products of analysis and research, once a center of new ideas and guidance for a new state on the move, is often relegated to a retail operation educating local high school graduates. Policy expertise with no skin in the game is needed but often not found.

Pockets & Islands

There have always been pockets, nodes, and islands of multidisciplinary people and roles. A greatchief of staff for an executive like a governor or mayor needs to be aware of and able to integrate manyarenas of activity. Indeed, chief executives themselves, a president, a governor, a mayor, a superintendentof schools, a university president, a chair of a legislative finance committee – these all see much and aretasked to integrate into a coherent whole. They are almost by definition, Gadflies of policy. Yet, typicallytheir units of mobilization, their organizations with unique hierarchies, offices, specialized functions suchas budgeting, personnel, program development, etc. often inhibit their broad-band policy roles. Theseexecutives themselves will struggle to overcome their own internal short cuts, biases, and preconceivednotions of who they are and what they must accomplish. In the ever changing world of competition for fame and fortune, the ability to understand that an oil company should become an energy company willmake or break their pathway to economic halls of fame.

So, we must acknowledge these islands and people who are called on to straddle, to dabble, to sampleeverything on the buffet to make a better meal.

The Big Three

There is always the temptation to dump all our activities into the large bin called The Economy. Butthe economy is perhaps just a metaphor for society as a whole, with a strong bias to narrow metrics ofmoney, wealth, income gaps, and life styles. The economy is all about life in general with a very narrow setof values. If there is a natural disaster, the GNP goes up. But we don’t yearn for hurricanes or earthquakes.Arguably, as tempting as it may be, economics is too slick a default, and it allows us to perpetuate fictionsof silos that constrain better policy making.

If we look at three complex and consequential areas of our society: aging, education, and health care, wecan begin to see common patterns, trends, and impacts of technology and social change. Connecting whatwe know, or ought to know, about reforming and improving government programs, seems often beyond theability of our decision makers and institutions.

If there is anything we have learned through the COVID crisis, is how so many aspects of our lives areinterconnected: wages, restaurants, taxes, child care, science, communication, research, health insurance,hospital capacity, the National Guard, senior care come inspections, government computer systems, technicalsupport, union contracts, school custodians, the ability to move health personnel from one location toanother, safe travel restrictions, development of a travel passport, targeting vulnerability communities, ourfaith in science, and notions of personal freedom.

President Biden’s America Recovery Act, signed into law on March 11, 2021, illustrates theinterconnectivity of our social systems and lives.

There is a role to be played by generalists and specialists who can sit together at the hub of the socialwheel and connect the dots. It is the role of a constructive critic, pointing out how decisions are often madewithout the best broad band understanding of where we are and where we need to go.

Advocacy for the relevance and effectiveness is validated by four experiences: the Peace Corps, theLegislature, Charter Schools, and Educational Policy.

The chapters seek to point out what knowledge, research and innovation is still missing, and to suggestthat a good part of the problem is that the constructive critic, the Gadfly, is not taken seriously.

Major Intentional Takeaways:

1. The centrifugal decentralization of all institutions, the mega trends hyped by the Internet andtechnology, have to be taken into consideration at all times. We can’t continue to live in the analogindustrial factory of society when we live in a digital information age.

2. Education at all levels screams for a new model and definition. Can decision makers embrace theUniversity, and its many experts in fields of direct relevance for their policy making, and fund and utilize policy centers? Can the University recognize it has a larger role than retail undergraduateeducation, including the larger purpose of citizenship education? Can a Board of Education find away to incorporate newer knowledge, not only about the content of the curriculum, but the structure,scheduling, age segregation and seat time in school factories? Students and all of society find waysto become more familiar and competent in the clusters of literacy: Financial and Economic Literacy,Civic and Citizen Literacy, Ecological and Environmental Literacy, Health and Insurance Literacy,and many more?

3. Addressing the needs of an entire generation, a growing senior population, along with overlappinghealth care transformational reforms, illustrate persistent lack of interest in what we already knowabout competent, effective programs and policies. Can the complexities of aging and health care betaken into account at the same time? And the links between aging issues and freeing parents to enterthe workforce?

4. Common sense standards and check lists for competent, knowledgeable and successful governmentalpolicy making are out there, waiting to be adopted to ensure that every new law, every new rule, areimplemented in the most effective and intelligent way.

5. The role of the Gadfly perspective, a special type of wisdom, a person who interferes with the status quoof a society or community by posing novel, potentially upsetting questions in its most positive constructivesense, needs to be integrated into government and policy making in order to help us remake societyand government that works better. The master of the hub.

The Chapters are as follows:Chapter 1. Background and The Origins of the GadflyChapter2. Changing EducationChapter 3. Toward an Aging Friendly SocietyChapter4. The Unfinished health AgendaChapter5. Gadfly Political Science Test and Broadband PolicyChapter6. Towards a Gadfly Mindset and Theory of Change

No doubt for most, the very term Gadfly has a decidedly negative connotation. To be a Gadfly is notwhat you want to be known for, and labels you as not worth serious interest, someone to be pretty muchignored.

Yet it is because of its pejorative meaning that demands a second look. Ideas, solutions, innovations ofall sorts are dead on arrival IF the source is a bit of a Gadfly. Society suffers.

Let me know what you think.