What is The Open System?
The school in downtown Denver that doesn’t partner with families across the street. The library in rural Oregon that doesn’t work with it’s community to understand what books to put on the shelf. The curriculum and books don't reflect the cultural context of the small town on the Navajo Nation. The community organizing group that takes orders from Washington, D.C. instead of the state where it works. A police system disconnected from communities they serve. Food systems that operate far from those they feed. A democracy increasingly isolated from the citizens of the country, with increasing barriers to entry and challenges to access the franchise.
These are the closed systems that make up our daily life. For years, it has been clear to many that our public institutions, including education, were too unresponsive to the communities and people they serve. For many of our American communities, especially those communities furthest from opportunity, institutional decline and relevance had reached a breaking point.
That provocation is at the heart of The Open System: education is our greatest democracy-building endeavor and through opening it up to the communities it serves and redesigning public systems, we can reimagine and reinvigorate our democracy and countless other shared pursuits of our society.
It is our belief that we are beyond "education reform" and into a world of "open vs closed." Closed systems have struggled with the communities they serve by failing to design alongside their communities, calcifying decades of institutional oppression into legacy school systems, reducing trust and limiting democratic energy. In contrast, we define “open systems” as those that are designed to co-create, co-produce, and redesign public education through the voices of families and communities. Open systems foster a sense of responsiveness and reciprocity with the communities in which they are embedded.
We must move beyond "family engagement", "stakeholder engagement" and "community feedback" and begin to open systems across the education sector. Across this country there is a movement to mobilize, organize, partner and create shared power in solidarity with families and communities.
Once we take on this frame, we can see closed systems everywhere. They are the ones creating walls, barriers and structures to keep parents, families and communities out. Indeed, the idea of "open" vs "closed" is bigger than education and represents a broader societal movement in our politics, business and organizations.
For too long, closed systems represent too much of education. Closed systems lock in the various systemic oppressions of their time, encasing them in the amber of bureaucracy. Institutional distrust is a hallmark of our time not just because systems are old - but because they have become unresponsive to the communities they serve.
The Open System asks us to move beyond basic notions of “equity” into the actual systemic liberatory shift that re-energizes our local democracy so that all families, regardless of race or background, can secure a future for their children. Through opening the system and confronting the immoral contradictions in our local democracy, we can address institutional bias and injustices baked into our legacy of closed education systems. Co-creating with families and communities allows districts and schools to confront the real systemic biases with an action orientation. We have seen firsthand how communities that are committed to an ongoing journey of equity-seeking behavior can address decades of mistrust and systemic oppression. We believe these stories, and the approaches they yielded, point a path forward for a field deadlocked by national debates and local fear of failure.
Our emergent Open Principles co-created with our community shared the questions, ideas and practices to bring families, communities and educators together for co-creation and co-production in our public education system. They have the potential to open the potential energy of the bureaucracy and charge systems with new thinking and community ownership. This sometime can be radical restructuring of the system or could also be simple shifts in practice.
Too many of the current organizations in our education discourse are monomaniacally focused on what was and on the battles of the past. While we must never stop learning from the past, we cannot stop building and creating a different future. Across this country we are seeing more and more evidence of open systems in action.
What is The Open System Institute?
The Open System Institute seeks to grow community and shared discipline amongst the diverse leaders fighting to open up education systems across the country to the communities they serve. We began convenings as an open system community in 2019 to create breakthrough learning opportunities for Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latino, and other leaders leading change across districts and communities. The momentum to date from the group is inspiring and we are ready to expand to support more leaders working to open systems across the country. Learn more about our community.
Our institute brings practitioners and policymakers together to learn the art of co-creation and co-production, and create awareness to bring the public back into public education. It is our belief that we are beyond "education reform" and into a world of "open vs closed." Closed systems have failed to design with the communities they serve, calcifying decades of institutional oppression into legacy school systems. Open systems co-create, co-produce, and redesign public education through the voices of families and communities. Are you an Opener?
Our vision is a transformed education sector that shifts from closed systems to open systems centered on those furthest from opportunity to redesign education, build trust, and restore faith in local democracy. Our education system demands redesign after COVID and must be built by those who never had a hand at building it.
The mission of The Open System Institute is to build an emergent discipline of practice and policies that leaders across organizations can leverage to challenge the closed legacy systems that have failed our communities. Interested in working with us?