What if the secret to success is failure?

Paul Tough of the New York Times has published a rather interesting article, entitled, "What if the secret to success is failure?" that considers failure much more important that succeeding. Stanford Design School, arguably the worlds leading design institution, encourages their designers that the most important part of finding the most accurate solution to their partners needs is to "fail early and often." Its a mind-state that runs completely against how students are taught in schools. Furthermore, how do we train our teachers to help students to use their mistakes as a path towards the right solution or even better, the "answer" that best meets the needs of the users or community? Its important that if we were to embrace this idea of failing early and often, then we must model that behavior. What does that look like to fail early and then to use our mistakes to redesign our learning, our schools, or even our lives? Most of our educational policies are designed to punish schools for failing to make Annual Yearly Progress or if you are a Detroit school, you end up getting shut down. Encouraging failure is only going to work if this mindset has the proper environment. In some schools, failure is an act of being "cool" especially when acting "white" is often associated with doing well in school. So rather than take a position of embracing failure lets make sure that is properly supported with strong teaching that helps students to take those "failures" as opportunities to redesign and assign new directions for learning experiences. This involves proper discourse and healthy mindsets that insist that our work has only just begun towards finding the "right" solution.