Imagine being on a commercial airliner
midway over the ocean, returning from a family celebration.
You're at cruising altitude,
and outside the window is the most serene, crystal blue sky you've ever seen.
Then you feel the panicked clutch of your spouse's hand.
Your pulse rate quickens as you realize that at 7 months pregnant,
she's having contractions.
Within hours of landing,
you find yourself the parent of a child fighting for their life
in a neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU.
In our day to day lives, thinking we know what's going to happen next,
what a difference a few hours can make.
In 2006, my wife and I found ourselves exactly in this situation.
For the next few months, we took up residence in the NICU,
where we had an up close, firsthand, daily role in a battle for life and death.
Our NICU was a vast and versatile space,
where care and services were conducted out in the open.
One morning, I remember doctors walking through.
They were on morning rounds.
Using statistical language, they spoke about the likelihood and probability
of the various medical and developmental risks associated with premature birth.
I immediately projected the gravity of what they were saying onto our child.
and our family.
And I was crushed. I felt inept.
Perhaps seeing how disturbed I was, one of the doctors approached me and said,
"Don't let anyone tell you that we know what's going to happen next,
because we don't. The future is not known to us."
Before that moment, with our family's future hanging in the balance,
I thought this was something I understood, but I was entirely wrong.
That was the beginning of my journey
towards understanding the importance of uncertainty;
that statistical probability is a means of understanding the past,
and need not be a predictor of the future.
In short, that ambiguity? It's also a gift of possibility.
As a social scientist and educator,
I've been charged with working on complex problems
associated with our communities and schools.
Economic status and opportunity gaps biased towards race, gender,
or sexual orientation, community safety and security,
access to healthcare, nutrition, technology, and transportation.
These are just a few of the socially embedded issues
that have profound implications on our educational institution, and our children
I've found that many of us feel a deep connection to learning from children.
As the father of four, I love learning from them on a daily basis.
And as an educator?
It's not an overstatement to say that my students have taught me
far more than I've ever imparted upon them.
And I'm speaking about profound lessons about love, desire, hope, and resillience,
all of which seem to spring to life in the face of adversity.
However, of all the lessons,
the one that has and continues to irreversibly change me at my core
came form my child's time in the NICU.
That lesson was to embrace ambiguity as an actionable disposition and approach
to developing a more ideal future.
In 1948, sociologist Robert K. Mertons wrote of "the self-fulfilling prophecy."
This happens when we start with a preconceived definition
of what we think should be,
and then we change our behavior to make it happen.
Both positive and negative prophecies can occur,
and even if they are not meant to be on their own,
we have a way of willing them into being.
This is how powerful Mertons believed we were as humans,
and I believe he's right.
To introduce us to how we collect data from the world around us,
renowned business theorist Chris Argyris
proposed the concept of "the ladder of inference."
This is a belief system that suggests that we self-select data
that tends to justify our actions or inactions,
or what is commonly referred to now as "confirmation bias."
The danger here is that
if we do not learn to move off the steps of our ladder of inference
and examine all of the data,
we are engaged in a process of simply affirming that we are living
the best versions of ourselves in society possible.
We live in an era of big data and statistical analysis,
where we've come to embrace something called a predictive metric.
This is a measurement of process
that seeks to predict a future outcome or result.
This is a shift from using statistical analysis to understand the past,
to the belief that statistical analysis will predict the future.
There is a seductively powerful feeling of security
that comes with believing we can predict the future.
I know that I've been guilty of this.
However, with the shift of predictive metrics,
I believe we may have weaponized statistics.
I believe it is dangerous, limiting, and misleading, as it deprives us
of thinking about the possibilities that reside within ambiguity itself.
It transforms statistics into a toxic fuel
that can rationalize or even expand complex problems
by encouraging us to quickly move up the steps of our ladders of inference,
to affirm that we think we already know what should be.
It may force us to react and proceed
rather than to pause, interact, and engage.
It creates an ideal environment for self-fulfilling prophecies
made true by the acceptance of a false set of assumptions.
In education, predictive metrics come in a variety of forms.
A common one is known as the norm-referenced test score.
In essence, this is a statement that says that for someone with your label,
this is where you stand in your trajectory.
But we also give all of our children labels,
such as those associated with poverty, race, gender, height,
intelligence, and so on.
And these labels are used as variables for statistical analysis,
and have predictive metrics associated with them:
standardized test scores and school performance,
cognitive aptitude tests and college preparedness,
high school graduation rates and the school-to-prison pipeline,
behavioral risk scales and home community environments,
and the list goes on and on.
However, I also have found this to be the case
in other fields that I've collaborated in.
Just think of your own line of work.
Whatever your topic, field, subject, or problem,
whatever social issue you're taking on,
your approach and how you deal with it, you're probably labeling,
and with those labels, you may find your own cultural norm predictive metric.
But my NICU experience, it gave me the gift of understanding things differently.
You see my child had several diagnoses, and with each diagnosis came a label,
and with that label came a predictive metric for my child's future.
Let me share with you, based upon our own beliefs and understandings as a family,
more times than not, that predictive metric has been wrong.
I believe we have to be careful about those predictive metrics
as we're framing our narratives, guiding our actions,
and rationalizing our social and cultural norms.
They're directing our solutions orientation,
for we are far less likely to feel compelled to examine if we're
even asking the right question,
when we think we already know what will happen.
Yes, statistical probability tells us what has happened,
but it's devoid of how it happened, the specific who, the context of where,
and the most important details of why it happened.
That requires a separate exploration.
I, like so many other educators, consider myself a champion of children's rights.
In education we use phrases such as "all students" or "each child,"
and discuss equity to achieve a more equal, inclusive, and just system.
I believe that the vast majority of educators truly believe in these concepts.
Trust me when I say that within my given field of work,
there's no shortage of good intentions and discussions
about the needs of our students.
However, there continues to be a lack of effective action on behalf of our children
and communities that are the most in need.
We continue to seek out off-the-shelf solutions born of statistical analysis,
focused with that promise of a better future
that came with the association of a predictive metric,
and then we wonder why we fail.
We fail because we do not recognize
that social innovations involve changing individual lives and experiences,
while trying to implement solutions that are born of generalized ability,
and are not designed for this purpose.
This is one of the reasons why I've argued
that rather than simply retooling existing educational institutions,
we need to engage in innovations that may blur
our very traditional concepts and notions of what schools are:
a broader discussion of redesigning toward human-centered social service centers,
where education and community transformation
are understood to be one and the same.
Rather than large rigid bureaucracies
that may be expensive, impersonal and dehumanizing,
we might need to seek out contextually-bound solutions
that span individual disciplines.
After all, no one wants to be a statistic,
as we are all individuals.
So I wanted to take this opportunity
to invite you to embrace the ambiguity that the future ought to represent.
Embracing ambiguity is an important part of getting outside of ourselves,
stepping off of our ladders of inference,
and ceasing the process of a limited self-fulfilling prophecy
that continues to serve too few too well,
leaving so many marginalized and oppressed.
Embracing ambiguity, it invites us to engage with our past
with a healthy reflective practice,
marvel at our future as one that is filled with possibilities,
and live in this moment of one of solace, where we should get down to the task
of designing a more ideal and inclusive future.
I believe that in doing so, we can focus on what philosopher Paulo Freire called
our first true vocation: that of becoming more human.
And just think of what a gift that would be for our children,
our professions, and our communities,
and even for the promise of what should be a more just society.
We rarely grow up to be who our parents thought we would be
as they held us as infants,
but for most parents this happens in incremental steps
over the course of years or decades.
However, for many of the NICU families,
this change seems to happen in an earth-shattering instant.
That is, until you are reminded that we can never give up hope,
humans are resillient, and the future is not known to us.
It's time to embrace ambiguity,
and remind ourselves that anything can lay just around the corner.