Dangerously Irrelevant

Biosciences will hire no dropouts

Richard Longworth says…

Men and women who carried lunch pails and spent their days on assembly lines could earn good wages, own their own homes, feed their families, and keep a cottage by the lake. It was a safe, solid way of life, and it didn’t require much book learning. One step up the ladder stood the trades, the jobs in construction and nursing and repair. The junior colleges and vocational schools taught these trades and taught them well. If they didn’t teach much science or math, that was all right, because only students going to universities needed that knowledge. . . . The Midwest has lost the knack to compete in the new economy, and the schools have lost their ability to teach it. (pp. 179–180)

Globalization may be the most egalitarian force in history. . . . If you’re good, you’ve got a chance. If you've got the education and the skills, the door is open. But if you don’t . . . you’re out of luck. . . . If the Midwest’s future contains manufacturing, it will be high-end, high-tech manufacturing, demanding two-year degrees at the least. Biosciences will hire no dropouts. (pp. 172–173)

[Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism]

They are totally unqualified for any job other than the ones they just lost

Richard Longworth says…

State officials know perfectly well that globalization will swallow their traditional industries. But they’re stuck. Workers vote, and a voter who has just lost his job will be an angry voter. . . . Every time a factory dies, its workers go from a private payroll to the public dole; . . . unemployment pay and retraining costs take money away from programs, such as education, that might offer some advantage in the new economy. And so the pressure builds to subsidize the old industries, to do anything to keep them from moving away. . . . The time and money [states] spend trying to keep twentieth-century jobs prevent them from creating twenty-first century jobs. (pp. 35–36)

The dirty little secret of Midwestern manufacturing is that many workers are high school dropouts, uneducated, some virtually illiterate. They could build refrigerators, sure. But they are totally unqualified for any job other than the ones they just lost. (p. 56)

[Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism]

Any job that does not require face-to-face contact with a customer can be outsourced

Richard Longworth says…

Most of [the] earlier outsourcing dealt with manufacturing and factory workers. . . . The newest wave is different. It’s white-collar outsourcing . . . and it can hit anyone whose job isn’t absolutely nailed down. . . . Basically, any job that does not require face-to-face contact with a customer can be outsourced. Defense attorneys who must appear in a Wisconsin court cannot be in India, but real estate lawyers searching titles can. An Indiana X-ray technician has to be in the same room with the patient; the doctors who read the X-rays can be anywhere. Barbers in Columbus, taxi drivers in Chicago, and kindergarten teachers in Des Moines are outsource-proof. Stockbrokers and tax accountants aren’t. All this is happening now. . . . ‘Anything that can be sent over a wire can be outsourced, anything fungible is up for grabs, any tradable service anywhere in the world. Fifty percent of global GDP is services, and a lot of that is tradable.' (pp. 11–12)

[Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism]

Where are the parents on this?

Two girls post a cartoon video on YouTube that depict “The Top 6 ways to Kill Piper!” Piper is an elementary school classmate of theirs at Elk Plain School in Spanaway, Washington.

The police decline to file charges, saying that “We just don’t believe it was done with any malice or hate.” The girls who made the video apparently are remorseful, although it’s unclear whether that is because they a) now realize how hurtful it was to Piper, b) have been exposed to the larger ramifications of what they did, or c) got caught. Piper and her mother are understandably upset.

And the parents of the two girls? Well, one of the fathers was apparently too busy “cooking dinner” to talk to Piper’s mother about the incident. And, of course, the girls were able to spend hours making the video at home without anyone noticing and/or objecting. Nice parenting…

It's not 'the tests.' It's us.

I often hear educators say...

We could be teaching differently if it weren't for ‘the tests.’

Or…

We could do a better job of meeting our students’ needs if it weren't for ‘the tests.’

I emphatically dispute these assertions. We must take ownership of our own culpability.

Our prevalent instructional model that emphasizes low-level, decontextualized, factual recall was dominant long before ‘the tests.’ Our challenges of providing higher-order thinking experiences, opportunities for authentic collaboration, and real-world connectedness existed long before the No Child Left Behind Act. Our inability to effectively facilitate empowered technology usage, true cultural/global awareness, and other necessary skills for a digital, global, information age is a byproduct of long-held, deeply-rooted cultural and pedagogical norms, not recently-acquired beliefs and behaviors.

Is anyone willing to argue that achievement gaps were smaller before evil NCLB came along and messed us all up? Does anyone think that we were doing a fine job of meeting the needs of underserved populations before ‘the tests?’ Have we all forgotten that school has been boring for generations?

It's not ‘the tests.’ It's our unwillingness and/or inability to do something different, something better.

It's not ‘the tests.’ It's us.

 

UPDATE: There are some phenomenal comments below. I hope you'll take a few moments to read them. Be sure to also read Greg Thompson's reaction to this post.

Why I read Tim Stahmer

If I didn’t subscribe to Assorted Stuff, I’d miss brilliant, hysterical stuff like this:

A crappy copy should work just fine

Be sure to watch the MPAA’s video and read the comments underneath it!

Equity or idiocy?

Yesterday Ben Grey highlighted an issue that often arises when educators think about technology initiatives:

If a public school teacher writes a grant for technology, but the district can’t sustain the program in other buildings or potentially refresh the equipment once it reaches end of life, should the grant be granted? Is it better to deny the students in the classroom where the grant would be in effect so as to ensure equity across the district, or is it better to afford students an opportunity to reach higher, even if it means others won’t have that experience? Would allowing the grant to go forward specifically advantage one group of students over another, and thus present ethical issues for a public entity?

The person I was talking with was adamant that we should not allow classrooms to have that which other classes in the district can’t.

Is this all-or-none mindset equity or idiocy? Head over to Ben’s blog and chime in on the conversation.

[hat tip to Kelly Hines for pointing me to Ben’s post]

The President is calling

The President is calling:

I'm calling on our nation's governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.

President Barack Obama, March 10, 2009

Alia iacta est. How will we answer the call?

The Iowa series - Wrap-up

I've had a lot of fun guest blogging over at The Des Moines Register this week. For those of you who would like to have a single link that you can forward to others, you can use this web address:

http://snipurl.com/iowaseries

Here are links to each of the five posts here at Dangerously Irrelevant:

• Iowa - 21st century curricula
• Iowa - A robust system of online learning
• Iowa - A computer in every hand
• Iowa - Invest in leadership
• Iowa - Better information

Happy reading!

Iowa - Better information

[This is Post 5 for my guest blogging stint at The Des Moines Register.]

Archimedes said “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.” This week I am blogging about 5 key levers that I think are necessary to move Iowa schools forward and help our graduates survive and thrive in this new digital, global age in which we now live. Earlier I discussed the need for 21st century curricula, a robust system of online learning, providing a computer for every student, and investing in leadership. Today’s post concerns the need for better information.

Although the Iowa Department of Education does not collect school district technology plans as many other states do, it does have other mechanisms for collecting some information about technology in K-12 schools. Much of that is reported out in the annual Iowa Condition of Education report. For example, the most recent report tells us that back in 1997–1998 Iowa school districts used to spend nearly $100 per pupil on computer software and hardware. By 2006–2007, that figure had dropped to an average of only $77. Adjusted for inflation, that figure is only $61 ($1.00 in 1998 had the same buying power as $1.27 in 2007).

In other words, our world is becoming increasingly technological but our expenditures on technology in Iowa schools have decreased substantially. Iowa public schools spent $37.3 million on technology last year. It would take a 27% increase – another $9.9 million – to get us back to the spending rates of a decade ago. Adjusted for the reduced buying power of the 2007 dollar, those figures are 48% and $17.8 million respectively.

The Iowa Condition of Education also contains other useful information, such as the state average number of pupils per computer (supposedly at 3.2) and the percentage of high schools (87%), middle schools (81%), and elementary schools (71%) that reportedly have wireless networks. The Iowa Department of Education has all of this information in its database by school and district. But as useful as these data are, there is a lot of information that the Department doesn’t collect. As a result, there are a number of questions that have no useful answers.

Here are some questions that we should be asking in Iowa:

• What percentage of Iowa schools and districts have a technology plan? For those that do, what do those plans cover?
• What percentage of Iowa schools and districts have technology teams that advise the organization on technology-related concerns? Who’s on those teams?
• What are schools purchasing with their hardware and software money? What proportion of expenditures goes to teacher-centric technologies versus student-centric technologies? What proportion goes to software that provides powerful learning opportunities for students versus software that simply focuses on drill-and-kill remediation?
• How new are the computers in Iowa schools? What percentage of Iowa hardware and software is more than 2 years old?
• How many Iowa school districts have a student information system? a data warehouse system? electronic gradebook software? electronic student assessment systems? financial, human resources, food service, special education, or other management systems?
• On average, how much time per week do students get to use digital technologies as part of their classroom learning? What proportion of that time is spent using office productivity software, doing basic Internet research, engaging in online social media environments, or utilizing other technologies?
• How many districts have a technology coordinator? Is that person also doing other jobs?
• What is the average number of technology support personnel per teacher? per student? per building or district?
• What is the average number of technology integrationists per teacher? per building or district?
• What percentage of Iowa classrooms (not buildings) have wireless access?
• What percentage of Iowa classrooms have LCD screens or projectors large enough to display a computer screen image that the entire class can see easily? speakers so that the entire class can hear audio or video easily?
• What percentage of Iowa teachers have a webcam?
• What percentage of Iowa students have ever taken an online class? For those that have, what are they taking? How many wish that they had better access to online learning opportunities? What about the same set of questions for teachers?
• What percentage of Iowa students are involved in 1:1 laptop programs?
• What percentage of Iowa schools have the Internet bandwidth and other supports to effectively implement a 1:1 laptop program?
• How do Iowa students think and feel about technology integration in their classrooms? How about teachers, administrators, parents, or school board members?
• On average, how much time per year do Iowa teachers spend in technology-related professional development activities? How do they spend that time?
• What are the technology-related training needs of Iowa teachers and administrators? the technology support needs?
• What does Internet filtering look like in Iowa schools?
• What percentage of Iowa students’ families have Internet access at home? For those that do, is it dial-up or broadband?
• What percentage of Iowa students have computers at home? cell phones? digital cameras? portable music players? video game consoles? other devices? What percentage of teachers or administrators?
• How often do students use the Internet at home and for what do they use it? How about teachers or administrators?
• and so on…

These are all questions for which I’m pretty sure we don’t have much data. Yet the answers to every one of these would be highly informative to how we think about K-12 technology policy, funding, and implementation. So we have a disconnect. And because of that disconnect, we are making purchasing, staffing, funding, and other decisions without the necessary data to inform ourselves. 

Who would collect this information? Well, the Iowa Department of Education could take on more of this. Or perhaps the Iowa State Education Association, the School Administrators of Iowa, and/or the Iowa Association of School Boards. Or even a university research center like CASTLE. But the will and the funding for this has to come from somewhere.

So, like everything else, there is a cost involved. But the bigger cost is that we’re navigating blindly because we don’t have the critical information that we need to adequately and appropriately make instructional, operational, and policy decisions. Some money and effort expended now on gathering better information could save a lot of money and effort later on…

Iowa - Invest in leadership

[This is post 4 for my guest blogging stint at The Des Moines Register.]

Archimedes said “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.” This week I am blogging about 5 key levers that I think are necessary to move Iowa schools forward and help our graduates survive and thrive in this new digital, global age in which we now live. Earlier I discussed the need for 21st century curricula, a robust system of online learning, and providing a computer for every student. Today’s post concerns the need to invest in leadership.

Leadership is absolutely critical to the success of any organization. Whether it be a school, corporation, government, faith institution, non-profit agency, or local community group, every organization lives and dies by its leadership. Organizations with effective, visionary leaders thrive. Organizations with lackluster, ineffective leaders muddle along or decline.

Adapting our K-12 school organizations to the workforce and citizenship demands of a digital, global age is extremely difficult, complex work. We must have leaders in place who can facilitate this transition. Here’s the problem:

That’s right. The people in charge of leading Iowa’s school organizations into the digital, global era don’t know very much about either the digital or the global aspects of the world in which we’re now living. They didn’t grow up in this kind of world, they weren’t prepared for it by their university licensure programs, and, for the most part, they are not receiving adequate training or professional development for it from their school districts, area educational agencies, professional associations, or the Iowa Department of Education. As a result, they’re not active technology users, they’re not immersed in electronic learning environments, and they’re not cognizant of the radical shifts that are occuring in the American workforce.

So we have a critical problem. Iowa principals and superintendents – the folks who are in formal leadership positions in K-12 schools – are the ones who have the responsibility for creating a vision and community buy-in. They’re the ones who have the power to reallocate budgets and other resources. They’re the ones who have the ability to reassign and retrain personnel. They’re the ones who have the authority to realign the various aspects of the organization to meet the demands of a rapidly changing environment. But because most of them don’t understand what it means to prepare kids for this new technology-suffused, globally-interconnected world, the end result is preservation of the status quo or, at best, minor tweaking of our current system of schooling.

It’s important to emphasize that it’s not the leaders’ fault that this is the current situation. There’s no blame to assign here. We just need to recognize that our leaders need a better system of ongoing training and a different kind of preparation in their licensing programs. Unfortunately, we’re lacking in this area as well. In the world of K-12 educational technology, virtually all of the money and attention from the Iowa and federal governments, foundations, corporations, and other entities has gone to teachers and students. Admirable and necessary as this is, we must set aside some of that attention and training money to enable the leadership that will be necessary to initiate and sustain the changes that we need in our school system. 

We pour large sums of money into teacher training, student programs, equipment, and other infrastructure. These are all good. However, we continue to see few tangible, sustainable benefits of technological and curricular reform initiatives in most school organizations. Why? Because even our most innovative, technology-using educators continue to run smack into the brick wall of their administrators' lack of knowledge and/or training. Superintendents and principals are making decisions based on ignorance or fear of the unknown. They don’t know what it means to effectively facilitate rich, deep, technology-enabled learning experiences for students. In this kind of unsupportive administrative environment, it is illogical to expect that major changes will occur in our teachers’ classrooms.

The preference of most Iowa legislators, school board members, and funding entities is to get monies directly to students. If that’s not feasible, then allocating monies to teachers is the next most desirable option. Over time, these preferences have led to our current situation in which we are systematically underinvesting in our leadership. Until we recognize that long-term, systemic change never occurs without good leadership – and invest accordingly – we never are going to see the changes that we say we want to occur.

Iowa - A computer in every hand

[This is Post 3 for my guest blogging stint at The Des Moines Register.]

Archimedes said “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.” This week I am blogging about 5 key levers that I think are necessary to move Iowa schools forward and help our graduates survive and thrive in this new digital, global age in which we now live. Yesterday I discussed online learning opportunties for students. Today’s post concerns providing a computer for every student.

It is hard to believe that the personal computer is nearly three decades old. Our computing devices have come a long way in that time and they now permeate nearly every aspect of our personal and professional lives. At the individual level, this movement has been driven by mobile computers and phones, wireless access, and the rise of the Internet. Every generation of computers seems to be smaller, cheaper, faster, and more powerful than the one before. Every new device or online service allows us to do things more efficiently, more effectively, or that we never could do before. And of course the pace of change is quite brisk.

As a result, it’s extremely difficult to find a well-paying job in America these days that doesn’t involve significant use of digital technologies. Unlike other sectors of our society, however, our schools still view the use of computers as a marginal add-on, as something that’s optional rather than essential to the everyday core of teaching and learning. Our schools still pretend that it’s an analog paper world rather than a networked digital world.

This has got to stop. We have to stop believing that we can adequately prepare graduates for a technology-suffused world by immersing them in paper-suffused learning environments. We have to look critically at student-computer ratios in schools – which mask the reality that most computers belong to teachers or are in labs – and ask a different question instead: On average, how much time per week do students get to use digital technologies as part of their classroom learning? The answer to this question is dismally low in almost every Iowa classroom.

There are a number of reasons for the lack of technology-facilitated learning opportunities in our K-12 schools. One is funding, of course. I recently did some back-of-the-envelope calculations for Iowa’s Institute for Tomorrow’s Workforce. At $300/year, the costs each year to provide a laptop to the 480,000 students in Iowa would be:

213,000 K-5 students = $63.9 million
114,000 6–8 students = $34.2 million
153,000 9–12 students = $45.9 million

These numbers look daunting, particularly given difficult economic times. But it is possible to do this by sharing the cost between state monies and school districts’ general funds, levies, and referenda. Other potential ways to reduce costs include, but are not limited to:

• utilizing federal or grant monies,
• leasing instead of buying,
• purchasing netbooks instead of laptops,
• allowing students to bring in their own laptops,
• making use of the mobile computers that most students bring to school every day (i.e., their cell phones), and/or
• only purchasing laptops for economically-disadvantaged students.

In the end, we have to balance the costs of doing this versus the costs of NOT doing this.

In addition to funding, numerous other challenges exist as well. One of the biggest is the current predisposition of schools to invest in teacher-centric technologies like televisions, DVD/VCR players, projectors, electronic whiteboards, and document cameras. They’re important and useful but they’re also primarily used as yet another way for teachers to push out information to students. In contrast, laptops, netbooks, digital cameras, small high-definition camcorders, digital voice recorders, webcams, digital scientific probes or sensors, and other devices are primarily used by students to facilitate their own academic learning. If we want Iowa students to gain the technology skills they will need to be productive citizens and workers, schools should be making as many investments in these latter, student-centric devices as possible. There also are a number of free or low-cost online software and tools that students and teachers can use in creative and productive ways.

Another large barrier to students’ technology usage is teachers’ inability to effectively implement digital tools into their instruction. One of the dirty secrets of K-12 educational technology is that many of the computing devices that already have been purchased are rarely used. This may occur because of teachers’ lack of training; most educators need a lot more help in this area. Or it may occur because of a lack of adequate technology support, which results in teachers inability to rely on the technology actually working when they do decide to use it. Or it may occur because of teachers’ outright refusal to integrate technology because of lack of interest or comfort.

Other barriers include the often-draconian Internet filtering systems that are in place in most schools, the increased pressure on schools’ Internet bandwidth capacity from additional computing devices, and the lack of adequate wireless and/or electrical capacity in many of Iowa’s school buildings.

The state of Maine provides laptops to 36,000 students and 11,000 educators (at a cost of just under $300/head, which is the basis of my calculations above). The New South Wales province in Australia has announced that it will be purchasing 197,000 laptops for its secondary students. A number of schools and districts across the country (and a few in Iowa) are piloting or implementing 1:1 laptop programs for students. It is these graduates, who have had the opportunity to regularly utilize in productive ways the same technologies that the adult world uses, who will be best prepared for a digital society.

Chris Lehmann, Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, notes that technology in schools should be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible. This is how technology is in adult workplaces. Can you imagine how unproductive you would be in your job if you had to schedule a time next Thursday for 45 minutes in order to use the computer (as teachers now have to do for students to use the lab(s) in their schools)?

There will be a day when we look back and realize how foolish it was that we waited so long to get a computing device into every student’s hands 24–7. Until that day, however - until we find the collective will to enable Iowa students to productively utilize in their schools the technologies that are transforming our society - they will continue to be disadvantaged compared to their more fortunate counterparts in other states or countries.

Recommended reading

• Rethinking Computers in the Classroom
• Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger
• Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky
• Wikinomics, Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams

Recommended viewing 

Iowa - A robust system of online learning

[This is Post 2 for my guest blogging stint at The Des Moines Register.]

Archimedes said “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.” This week I am blogging about 5 key levers that I think are necessary to move Iowa schools forward and help our graduates survive and thrive in this new digital, global age in which we now live. Yesterday I discussed 21st century curricula. Today’s post concerns online learning opportunities for students.

When most people think about online learning, they think about adults taking online university classes. Or they might think about the online training that occurs in many workplaces. But online learning opportunities occur in the K-12 sector as well and are increasingly popular with students and their families.

The Sloan Consortium estimates that at least 1 million K-12 public school students took an online course last year. This represents approximately 2% of the national K-12 public school student population and is a 22–fold increase since 2000. About 20 states have statewide virtual high schools that deliver online courses to students across the state. Others, like Iowa, have state-led programs that help deliver some online courses to students.

Florida appears to be the model for the rest of the country. The Florida Virtual School offers almost 100 online courses and is expected to serve more than 80,000 students this year. Its enrolllment is growing at a pace of 50% per year. North Carolina, Utah, and Alabama also have very robust statewide virtual schools.

In addition to creating statewide virtual schools, states are enacting a number of other policies to facilitate online learning. For example, both Michigan and Alabama now have state laws requiring that students have an online learning experience before they graduate. Florida recently passed a law requiring every school district to provide online courses (either itself or by contracting with others) for its K-8 students.

The reasons are numerous for the popularity of online courses with schools, students, and parents. For many school districts, online courses are the only way to provide high-level classes such as Advanced Placement, foreign language, advanced science or math, and other courses. Other districts are finding that online coursework can be an excellent option for at-risk students or credit recovery; for homebound, incarcerated, or home-schooled students; or for meeting the needs of students who simply may not be successful in a more traditional classroom environment. Meta-analyses of existing research show that student achievement in face-to-face and online courses is approximately equivalent. Students and parents value the flexibility, accessibility, and convenience of online coursework. Many online courses also allow students to proceed at their own pace; collaborate with students from other schools or countries; and/or incorporate digital technologies into their learning.

Online learning opportunities for K-12 students are exploding across America. The United States Department of Education found that four years ago over a third of school districts already had students taking online courses. Unfortunately, here in Iowa we are NOT keeping pace. The most recent data from the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) show that only a few hundred of the 480,000 K-12 students in Iowa are enrolled in online courses. Entities such as Iowa Learning Online, the Iowa Online AP Academy, and Kirkwood Community College’s High School Distance Learning Program all are delivering courses to students. The Des Moines Public Schools also are exploring some online learning options. However, even if online enrollments in Iowa soon will number in the low thousands, the overall availability of online learning opportunities for Iowa students still is extremely low.

A robust online learning infrastructure for students makes a lot of sense for the state of Iowa (and I’m glad there’s a bill in the Iowa House to consider it). If we’re honest with ourselves, we will recognize that most of our school districts will NEVER be able to provide the curricular diversity that most of our graduates need to be effective digital, global workers and citizens. If we’re truly honest, we also will recognize that the Iowa Communications Network (ICN) is not a viable future option. The ICN is a closed, aging network and the course offerings (and monies) there, like everything else in the world, must move to the Web. Whether it’s a statewide virtual school or some other model, we must significantly increase the number of online courses available to Iowa students if we are to provide them access to the high-quality learning opportunities envisioned in the Iowa Core Curriculum. 

Recommended reading

• Learning Virtually: Expanding Opportunities
• iNACOL’s resources page
• University of Florida Virtual School Clearinghouse

Recommended viewing 

Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and coordinator of the Educational Administration program at Iowa State University. He also is Director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE). He blogs regularly at www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org.

It's time to play... Spot that holiday violation 2008!

Christmas 2008 is right around the corner and that means it’s time to play…

SPOT THAT HOLIDAY VIOLATION!

Here are the rules:

1. Only American public schools are eligible. [sorry, international readers]
2. Identify a possible violation of the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution in your local school system. The Establishment Clause requires that schools not favor a) one religion (e.g., Christianity) over another religion, or b) religion over no religion. Government-sponsored religious displays or activities are pretty much always unconstitutional.
3. Leave your description of the possible violation in the comments section of this post. If you’re not sure if it’s a violation or not, leave it anyway and we’ll chime in as needed. Possible violations may include teacher- or school-sponsored activities, displays, or other actions.
4. The most egregious violation [as judged by myself, Justin Bathon (at CASTLE’s brother blog, EdJurist), and Jon Becker (of Educational Insanity)] wins a yet-to-be-determined prize!
5. Deadline for entries is December 23, 2008.

Good luck!

Alfie Kohn on the next U.S. Secretary of Education

Alfie Kohn’s new article in The Nation comes out in print next week. You can read it early online and get his perspectives on the next U.S. Secretary of Education. Here’s a quote:

Almost never questioned ... are the core elements of traditional schooling, such as lectures, worksheets, quizzes, grades, homework, punitive discipline and competition. That would require real reform, which of course is off the table.

I’m sure that many of you are unsurprised that Kohn is one of my favorite education writers. My all-time favorite education book is Beyond Discipline. I like how Kohn speaks truth to power and is willing to hold topics up to the light that are given little thought by most educators because they’re so deeply ingrained in the system.

Update: if the link at The Nation doesn't work for you, this one should.

Generation We

I love both these videos. Will you join them? 

Generation WE: The Movement Begins... from Generation We on Vimeo.



Generation We: The Movement is Spreading! from Generation We on Vimeo.

ITEC 2008 - Alan November

Here are my notes from Alan November’s keynote today at ITEC 2008 in Des Moines. ITEC is Iowa’s statewide educational technology conference so it’s always a good time. I actually had never seen Alan present before so that was fun for me. He was extremely entertaining and I got to go up and meet him afterward. He said that I was younger than he would have guessed!

• There is a gap between what we teach children and what is needed in the global workplace, and the gap is growing.
• Students need to be able to do three key things
• Have the capacity to do good research on the Web
• Have good global communication skills
• We should evaluate teachers on their ability to directly engage children with people all around the world
• Be self-directed
• Our system is based on the concept that teachers own the learning
• Corporations need people who don’t need a boss to tell them what to do
• The top skill learned in school is to learn how to be taught
• West Point is requiring its instructors to teach Islam across the curriculum
• The Internet, rather than being a tool that will expose you to other beliefs and perspectives, is instead becoming a place to simply validate one’s own beliefs.
• We need to teach teachers good assignment design when teaching them technology.
• Why not teach students how to debate kids in Britain regarding their perspectives on the Revolutionary War?
• We vastly underestimate kids’ ability to create rich academic content that contributes to the learning of the rest of their class.
• We need to teach children to have a global voice that people all around the world can hear.
• Paper gives you a little voice – paper stays in the classroom.
• Bob Sprankle has 2nd graders asking for their own writing / math podcast shows. A sign of a good classroom is kids asking to do more.
• The Internet has made people realize that they are really, really poor and their work ethic is almost scary to watch because they think education is the ticket out of poverty.
• Showed part of the Digital Kids @ Analog Schools video.
• Check out Screencast.com: MarcosMath’s Library, Mathtrain Podcast, bob.primefactor?
• Have the kids help you build learning objects (using, e.g., Jing)! This is a “shift in control” problem, not a technology problem.
• Demonstrated how to set up a custom Google search engine. Can set one up so that students only search the sites that the teachers select (e.g., FunBrain, BrainPop, IKnowthat). High school students can help create the sites that go into the custom search engine.
• Have an official researcher every day at the one computer the teacher has in the classroom. That person is in charge of finding answers to questions that pop up and also in charge of adding relevant sites to the class search engine.
• You can create a search engine for just a particular topic (e.g., Revolutionary War). Have your class’ British ePals contribute to the search engine too!
• You can access other people’s custom search engines.
• Showed TinyURL.com
• Too many “technology-enabled” assignments involve using the computer as a $1,000 pencil.
• Collaborative class notes in Google Docs are even better than presentation notes because students can add on extra resources, etc.
• Google Docs gives you a running history of the flow of writers’ thinking through version control. About 4 people can write concurrently.
• Google Docs is ideal for collaborative writing. We should be teaching kids collaborative tools. The content should add up to something greater than the sum of the individual parts.
• Kiva – a great web site to teach children how to make a contribution to other parts of the world. A community of contributors invests in a person / project. If the Web needed a reason to be invented, this is it. Linking people around the world to help people.
• Three elements of video game design that are not present in schools
• Students go to the most challenging level – they don’t want to be bored
• Students get instant feedback (less than a second) – hard to reproduce in class
• Third? [never got to it; we went off in a different direction]
• If blocking is your only strategy for protecting children, you’re setting them up for failure in the real world. This is immoral. It’s a manipulative world out there. We have to teach kids how to navigate it.
• Kids think they can take down their MySpace / Facebook content when it’s time. Show them the Wayback Machine!
• We’re blocking them instead of teaching them. This is not the way to prepare kids for a web-based world.

I sat next to Angela Maiers. Vic Jaras, Evan Abbey, Carl Anderson, Leigh Zeitz, Rob and Magda Galloway, and bunch of other fun people also were there (including a good showing by Iowa State folks!). Iowa may not be where we’d like it to be but there are some fantastic educators here who are trying hard to make it happen!

Update: I added a picture of Alan to this post. It's not the greatest picture in the world but it's hard to get him to stand still!

All NECC content should be shareable

There is a lively conversation occurring on the NECC 2008 Ning regarding fair use of NECC sessions. My reply to the original post is below. As you can see, I’m afraid we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture…

ALL CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS SHOULD BE SHAREABLE

I would like to see ISTE take a different stance on this. I thought ISTE was in the business of trying to make change in education, specifically around the utilization of technology in K-12 schools. How are we going to make that happen if we allow folks at the ISTE-sponsored conference to lock down content? How are we going to help facilitate true, meaningful technology-related reform if we aren't making important resources like NECC presentations available to the teaching public at large?

Instead of ISTE saying:

"Written permission from the session or workshop presenter is required prior to capturing a video or audio recording."

ISTE should be saying at the time of proposal submission (and when inviting keynote speakers):

"Any presentation given at NECC falls under a Creative Commons and/or other open use license. We encourage you to share this content with educators to enhance their knowledge and facilitate change in K-12 school organizations. Here is a publicly-editable wiki for web addresses of public repositories (such as ISTE recordings, Technorati tags, uStream archives, etc.) that may be useful to you."

All presenters - even the expensive ones - should fall under this rule. If they don't like it, they don't present.

If necessary, ISTE could help speakers understand that their own visibility, reputation, and potential income are enhanced, not hurt, by this policy. Think about the recordings of Clay Shirky, Seth Godin, and others that are out on the Web. Think about all of the TED videos. Are those individuals losing income because their presentations are available on the Web? Absolutely not. Instead, they are gaining bigger audiences and more customers precisely because they're more visible than they would be otherwise.

Charles Leadbeater says in his 'We Think' video that we now are what we share. He's absolutely right.

Given its larger mission, ISTE should be thinking more outside the box on this one.

To sum up: Instead of requiring participants to get permission to record, ISTE should be requiring presenters to give up their copyright for the good of the larger cause.

Do you think I’m right or completely off-base? Head on over to the Ning discussion and participate in the conversation!

DRAFT - Statewide 21st century learning system

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to outline what it takes to get your state or province from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ In other words, what would it take to get from our current system of schooling to a robust, province- or statewide system of 21st century learning? Here’s my first attempt at this task (click on the images for larger versions)…

PART 1

What needs to be done

The first step is to figure out what needs to happen…

1. Curricula that emphasize 21st century skills. Instead of simply adding on 21st century skills to our existing content-based standards, put them at the core of new, more focused curricula.
2. Preservice and inservice training for teachers and administrators. Training in colleges and universities. Training on the job. Regular, frequent, strategic, and ongoing.
3. Robust statewide online learning infrastructure for students and teachers. Because of resources or geography, high-level and credit recovery courses aren’t available to many students. Training opportunities aren’t available to educators. A vibrant system of online courses can help.
4. Computing device in every student’s hands. Laptops. Netbooks. Smartphones. Devices that have some power, are mobile, allow students to type, and can access the Internet.
5. Statewide no-cost or low-cost broadband wireless access. High-speed wireless in every corner of the state.
6. P-20 coordination, cooperation, and vertical articulation. Curricular, programmatic, workforce development, and other alignment across the P-20 spectrum.

Environmental supports

Some supports need to be in place to facilitate effective implementation…

1. Federal, state, and local laws, policies, and funding support. A thoughtful, helpful array of legal, policy, and funding supports for what needs to be done.
2. Monitoring, assessment, and evaluation. Regular, frequent, ongoing. To inform practice, not just for accountability.
3. Mindset shift. The digital, global age is here. It’s time to learn how to survive and thrive in it rather than being afraid of it or ignoring it.

PART 2

Marketing

There’s also a marketing piece to this. Who needs to be informed about what needs to be done in order to facilitate a broad base of support and buy-in?

1. Parents and community members
2. School board members and P-12 educators
3. Postsecondary faculty and officials
4. Employers
5. Legislators and policymakers
6. Media

PART 3

Cost

I’m working on this part…

YOUR INPUT IS DESIRED

I could use some help on this not-so-theoretical assignment. This is a draft. I need a final version by November 5.

• What would your system look like? How would you organize things differently? What did I leave out?
• How can we calculate some rough, back-of-the-envelope costs of these activities (e.g., just how much would it cost to get wireless broadband across the state)? I could really use some assistance costing this out.
• How is my thinking flawed? What am I forgetting? What is particularly important to emphasize? What else should I be considering?

Angela Maiers and Mike Sansone have been of great assistance with this first draft (any mistakes or logic flaws are mine alone!). I hope you will be willing to lend your thoughts as well. Thanks in advance!

[Feel free to download and play around with these files: png1 png2 ppt pptx]

Help wanted: Digital citizenship resources?

I recently got this message from an international school:

I've organized [our] Tech Leadership Team to discuss and develop a Digital Citizenship program for our school. There are 27 members of the TLT and they will be exploring 6 elements, identifying issues associated with the element, brainstorming examples of appropriate and inappropriate use, developing guidelines for use (e.g., guidelines for e-mail, cyberbullying, social networks, piracy, health), and identifying how the concept and guidelines should be shared with the community.

1. Digital Communication
2. Digital Etiquette
3. Digital Law
4. Digital Rights & Responsibilities
5. Digital Health and Wellness
6. Digital Security

I'm looking for a good book for them to read -- any recommendations?

What resources have you found valuable regarding digital citizenship? Here’s my contribution…

• Darren Draper’s edublogger etiquette series

Slide - Should teachers get to choose?

[Download this file: png ppt pptx]

[a remake of an earlier post]

Introducing The Edjurist

Gawker Media has Gizmodo, Lifehacker, The Consumerist, Valleywag, Gawker, and seven others.

Weblogs, Inc. has Engadget, Autoblog, Joystiq, Luxist, Download Squad, and too many others to count.

Education Week and Teacher Magazine have eduwonkette, Bridging Differences, Web Watch, edbizbuzz, Digital Education, and a host of others.

CASTLE has Dangerously Irrelevant, LeaderTalk, and – now – The Edjurist!

Along with The School Law Blog, The Edjurist is a MUST-READ for anyone interested in K-12 school legal issues. We are absolutely delighted to welcome Dr. Justin Bathon (U. Kentucky) and The Edjurist to the stable of CASTLE blogs.

Here are a few of Justin’s recent posts:

• Finding free educational law information
• Johnson v. Poway shows why Garcetti doesn’t work for schools
• More on why Garcetti was wrong for schools
• Catching up … some weird dress code stories
• Thoughts on the California home schooling decision

Be sure to also see guest blogger Scott Bauries’ posts on the applicability of federal e-discovery rules to K-12 education:

• Intro
• Document retention systems

There’s no better way to stay on top of the latest educational law cases, news, and odd stories than to catch Justin’s Friday Snippets. Check him out!

Now, if I can only talk eduwonkette into being CASTLE’s education policy blog, then we’ll have some pretty good coverage of educational leadership topics (anyone interested in blogging on social justice, staff development, or school finance?!).

Note

CASTLE’s previous school law blog, At the Schoolhouse Gate, is being replaced by The Edjurist. If you were a loyal reader, thanks!

Publicly available v. readily accessible

The authors of Blown to Bits, an absolutely superb book on life ‘after the digital explosion,’ note that

There is a difference … between ‘public’ and ‘readily accessible.’

Public records such as real estate transfers, birth records, and business transactions often contain sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, mother’s health information, credit card numbers, voter registration, fingerprints, professional occupations, and the like. While these data technically always have been available to the public, the difficulty of sifting through the paper records made large-scale aggregation and use nearly impossible.

What happens when those public records get digitized, however? What happens when public databases become easily accessible? What happens when paper records are turned into searchable text via optical character recognition and/or tagging? Or, as the authors, note, what happens when all of this public information gets merged with commercial marketing databases?

As the IowaLandRecords.org controversy here in Iowa shows, we need to do some tough thinking on this topic. Just how ‘public’ do we want our public records to be?

A few useful resources

• Arias, M. (2007). Internet access to public records v. privacy: What a complex clash to unravel.
• Bermann, S. (2006). Privacy and access to public records in the digital age.
• Center for Democracy and Technology. (1995). Public records: Access, privacy, and public policy.
• Electronic Privacy Information Center. (2007). Privacy and public records.
• Levitt, C. (2002). Regulating the availability of public records online.
• Levitt, C. (2005). How public are public records?
• Neave, M. (2003). International regulation of the publication of publicly accessible personal information.
• Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. (2006). Public records on the Internet: The privacy dilemma.

Not so irrelevant 012

Three great questions

I especially like the last of these three questions from Rodney Trice. We should be asking teachers and principals that question more often (and just that directly).

• How do you intend to bring the global community into your classroom?
• How will you prepare students for a future that is relatively unknown?
• How you will eliminate the racial predictability of achievement outcomes in your classroom?

This just in: Teenagers play video games!

All kidding aside, the latest report from the amazing Pew Internet & American Life Project confirms that kids - even girls! – are up to their eyeballs in video games.

We’ll stick to the tried and (not) true

Nope, sorry. iPods are not allowed. Back to the old way. Too bad it doesn’t work as well. Gotta do it anyway. Oh, and I love how the music players are categorically, by definition, a ‘distraction’ (if not in actuality). Who needs reality when we have these little educational policy fantasy worlds that we can create for ourselves?

Throw da bums out!

After attempts to bring in turnaround experts didn’t work, the state of Maryland is increasingly leaning toward completely restructuring schools that are academically unsuccessful. State schools Superintendent Nancy Grasmick says:

We are very comfortable being more aggressive about this. We have seen much better results [when the staff is replaced].

Blog like a farmer

I ran across an old post by Mike Sansone, one of my Iowa blogging buddies. I really like his metaphor that blogging should be like farming.

Scorecards

I bet parents and community members would really like to see scorecards like this one (maybe with different data) for their local schools. I know some schools and districts already do this. Hopefully they use line graphs rather than tables of numbers. Could you tell the essential story of a school district with 10 key, well-done graphs? I bet you could!

No writing in journalism class?

Check out this excellent article about the NYU journalism student who got in trouble for blogging about her class. [hat tip to Tim Stahmer]

I got no money, honey

Did you catch Edutopia’s advice on how to innovate without extra money or support?

Spend hours on content you can find with Google in 3 seconds!

One of my favorite things about Wes Fryer is his ability to highlight the ridiculous. I also enjoy his irreverance (“Behold! I hold aloft the holy words!”), particularly when I have the same experience at my kids’ school.

Speaking of Google…

Finally, I’m digging Google Chrome. it’s now my default browser and I’m using Firefox less and less (and I love Firefox). Chrome is much faster. I also like that each tab is a separate process; I have yet to have a browser hang…

Sparking some school board discussion

Apparently I sparked a little discussion by a local school board! You've got to give them credit for asking the right questions and also being willing to experiment publicly with what to them were new technologies...

Not so irrelevant 011

My latest roundup of links and tools…

The critics need a reboot

David Wolman’s article in Wired Magazine is a quick and effective rebuttal of those who claim that technology is making us stupid.

Social networking for babies

Yep, that’s right. Social networking for babies: Made a mess in my pants today. Slept. Made a mess in my pants today. Slept…

The $70 PC

Using a thin client model for school computers seems like an idea that has promise. And of course a $70 price tag per computer sounds great. Does anyone know a school organization that’s working with NComputing?

Should kids learn about 9/11 via cartoons?

Gary Stager’s got a vein pop about BrainPop…

Handheld learning

Thanks to Dean Shareski, I now know about the Handheld Learning web site. Thanks, Dean!

Youth, porn, and violence

Want the latest facts on youth exposure to pornography and violent web sites? Head to Harvard’s Berkman Center!

Speaking of the Berkman Center…

There is a LOT going on at the Center. Check out its list of projects (the list is clickable thanks to Kwout) and sign up for its news feed!

Karl Fisch is big in Germany

If you didn’t catch it, Karl recently posted about a German magazine’s story about his school and the Did You Know? video. Anybody read German?

Snow in the bathroom

And, finally, here’s a good rule of thumb: don’t read Doug Johnson while you’re supposedly participating in a serious meeting. Thy guffaw mayest disrupt…

Innovation monies by state

[hat tip to Richard Florida]

UNESCO defines research and development (R&D) as:

Any creative systematic activity undertaken in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture, and society, and the use of this knowledge to devise new applications. Includes fundamental research, applied research in such fields as agriculture, medicine, industrial chemistry, and experimental development work leading to new devices, products, or processes.

Greater investment in R&D activity is more likely to result in greater innovation. Sure, you might get lucky; every dog gets thrown a bone sometimes. But more often than not, greater payoffs come to those who invest more in R&D.

Using data from the National Science Foundation and the United States Census, I compiled the following table. Industrial R&D includes all monies spent on R&D activities by the federal government, corporations, and other entities.

Iowa is 31st on the list when it comes to R&D expenditure per capita. We’re not exactly a hotbed of innovation compared to other states, primarily because the only areas that attract significant numbers of creative talent are Des Moines (state capital), Ames (Iowa State University), and Iowa City (University of Iowa).

What’s the situation in your state? Do the numbers surprise you?

I don't like my district's AUP

Last night was Family Night at my kids’ elementary school. You know, that night when you visit your kid’s class with the other parents, learn about the curriculum and teacher expectations for the year, sit in little tiny chairs, etc.

Each parent was asked to sign the district’s Digital Resources Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) for the 2008-2009 school year. Not a single parent read over the AUP; everyone just signed it blindly. Except me, of course. I combed through it because, as a former attorney and technology guy, I want to know what I’m signing on behalf of my fifth-grade daughter. Here’s the part that troubled me:

The following guidelines for digital citizenship apply for all students in grades 3-12:

Inappropriate use includes but is not limited to online chatting, shopping, social networking sites (myspace.com, facebook.com, etc.), games, youtube.com, viewing of inappropriate material, bypassing school filters, downloading and installation of software, and harming the District’s digital resources in any way.

A categorical determination that computer games are ‘inappropriate use?’ A without-exception policy against YouTube, social networking sites, and online chats? I don’t agree! Now what? Do I make a stink with my daughter’s teacher? No, of course not. Do I refuse to sign it, thus preventing my daugher from using the computer in school next week for her class project? No, of course not [she’s already tired of me encouraging her to ask her teacher why she has to practice cursive writing!].

My uneasy compromise was to sign the form and then write under my signature:

I strenuously object to the District’s definition of ‘inappropriate use.’ Although I am signing this so that my daughter can use the computer at school, I reserve the right to contest at any time the District’s definition and this policy.

What do you think? What do you do as a parent when you’re confronted with a district AUP that you think is unnecessarily restrictive? How would you have handled this situation?

[Recently I was invited to serve on the district technology committee. Hopefully I can persuade them to rethink the AUP a little bit…]

Say no to Senate Bill 3325

Senators Grassley and Harkin,

I am writing to you as a citizen of Iowa. Senate Bill 3325, The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008, recently was introduced in the Senate Judiciary Committee. I strongly encourage you to vote against this bill if it comes to a vote.

This bill is a thinly-disguised attempt by big media companies to preserve their monopoly on media generation and dissemination. They’re so desperate to hang onto an old paradigm, they’re now trying to get the United States Attorney General involved rather than adapt to the new world in which we now live, work, and play. Media companies and policymakers should be working to figure out how to tap into the transformative power and potential of the Internet rather than trying so hard to preserve a past that will never return.

As the saying goes, “It’s not a revolution if someone doesn’t get hurt.” As Iowans and other American citizens realize that they now have voice and power, existing monopolies often get in the way of societal progress. This is one of those situations where we have to decide if we favor the people or change-averse corporations.

This bill does not serve the interests of Iowans or other Americans. Please say no to Senate Bill 3325 if it comes to a vote. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Iowa State University
Coordinator, Educational Administration Program
Director, UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education

[hat tip to Tim Stahmer and the EFF]

Recommended reading - Mindblowing

I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books about stuff that just blows my mind. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list.

[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]

Recommended reading - Demographic shifts

I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on demographic shifts. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list.

[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]

Apathy, distrust, and nonparticipation

Linda Fandel’s blog at The Des Moines Register is focused on “world class schools for Iowa.” Kudos to her and the Register for devoting time and attention to this issue.

In a recent guest post advocating better civics instruction, former U.S. Senator John Culver said:

Many young people leave school lacking even a rudimentary understanding of how their government works and how it affects their lives. This lack of understanding leads to a lack of interest, a lack of trust and a lack of participation.

In my comment to his post, I said:

Another reason that students lack interest, trust, or participation in governmental affairs is that many of them are quite cynical about whether Constitutional freedoms even exist. As a 2003 report from the First Amendment Center noted, “Students will not learn the lessons of democracy if they cannot experience firsthand the freedom to make their own choices.” And yet so much of school (and, let’s be honest, home) is about control and lack of trust. Few students get a chance to meaningfully participate in decision-making about their own learning. School restrictions (and accompanying lawsuits) regarding student speech, expression, and behavior have escalated over the past few decades.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, ruling for the majority in West Virginia v. Barnette, said that the Court must ensure “scrupulous protection of constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.” Why would we expect young people to be active, engaged citizens upon graduation when they rarely, if ever, get to see their supposed 'freedoms' at work? Are we surprised that young adults are apathetic (or is it just realistic?) when their primary interaction with government - school - is in a limiting, suppressive environment that, at every turn, tells them that their voice doesn’t matter? Unlike Athena, who was supposedly born fully-formed from the head of Zeus, our students need practice with both the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship before they graduate if we are to accomplish our desire to have an interested, involved citizenry.

What do you think? Do students get adequate opportunities in schools to see their Constitutional rights and responsibilities at work?

Stone Age Administrator award?

Sometimes a story is just so egregiously stupid that you not only have to post about it but encourage others to spread the word too. This might be one of those situations (hat tip to Jon Becker)...

This picture is of a 5-year-old kid named Adriel Arocha. His family wants to move to Needville, Texas. Adriel is of Native American heritage and has never cut his hair in his life. No big deal, right? Well, apparently it is because the superintendent of the Needville Schools, Curtis Rhodes, won't allow Adriel to enroll in kindergarten unless he cuts his hair. Why? Because - unbelievably in 2008 - the district doesn't allow boys to have long hair. Really.

Read the article in the Houston Press, particularly the part where the superintendent defends the school district's backwardness. Check out Adriel's family's blog about the situation. Feel free to publicly ridicule this school district because Curtis Rhodes is giving administrators everywhere a bad name. What university trained this guy?

Maybe it's time to create a Stone Age Administrator award...

Photo credit: Houston Press

Tracy Rosen is revisiting digital literacy

Head on over to Leading From the Heart and leave Tracy Rosen a comment on her thought-provoking post about revisiting digital literacy. Here’s the comment I just left her:

I am by no means a ‘literacy’ expert. For me, the idea of literacy means something like ‘fluency in the dominant information landscape(s) of your time, both as a consumer and as a producer.’ In the past, that has meant being an adequate reader and an adequate writer. It is increasingly clear that the dominant information landscape of our present and future is one that is digital, networked, interactive, hyperconnected, dispersed, rapidly-changing, multimedia, and so on. This new information landscape requires additional fluencies beyond those needed for a paper-based world.

Fluency in paper-bound text and graphics is still a necessary skill today. The need to be a high-level reader and writer is going to be around for a long while. But the dominance of the written word slowly will be eroded by other forms of audio/video expression. For me, the exciting thing about many of these new ‘literacies’ is that students and educators now have unprecedented opportunities to create things of value to the larger world, to have a legitimate voice, and to reach authentic audiences.

Like any good progressive, Chris Lehmann advocates emphasis on facilitation of students as digital citizens rather than emphasis on preparing students to be digital workers. I too am very much in favor of empowering students personally and on the citizenship front. But I also want my kids to have a meaningful, rewarding career (that, hopefully, also contributes to society in some way). And that means getting what Richard Florida calls a ‘creative class’ job – one that requires autonomy, independent judgment, creativity, innovation, creative problem-solving, and, yes, fluency with digital technologies. Creative class jobs are facilitated and enhanced by digital technologies, not replaced by them (as often happens with service or working class jobs).

So I empathize with your concern, Tracy, about respecting others’ approaches to sense-making. And I too am concerned with the differential access that developing countries and underserved student populations have. But I think the task for all of us is to bring them into the digital, global 21st century, not to define ‘literacy’ in ways that continue to disempower them socially and/or economically for decades to come (note: I’m not saying you’re doing this).

Here’s an old post of mine on social justice that might be of interest:

  http://snipurl.com/35ivk

Thanks for a thoughtful, thought-provoking post. I look forward to reading others’ comments!

No Facebook for you!

Over at the On Our Minds @ Scholastic blog, Tyler Reed is pondering the recent announcement by the Lamar (MS) County School District that it will prohibit teachers from communicating with students via social networking tools such as Facebook or MySpace.

The question in my mind is:

Why treat social networking spaces differently than any other means of teacher communication?

The issue is actual inappropriate teacher communication and/or behavior (which I'm guessing is already covered by board policy), not the method by which teachers communicate with students. A prohibition on use of social networking tools does absolutely nothing to prevent inappropriate teacher communication with students via other channels. So the district either needs to implement similar policies for telephones, snail mail, written notes, instant messaging, cell phone text messaging, e-mail, online video, blogs, wikis, podcasts, and the like or it needs to justify why social networking sites are so evil compared to all the other ways that teachers and students can communicate.

If the district is going to ban social networking and other 21st century communication tools, it's going to be awfully busy making policies since new tools pop up every week. Also, one of the first things you learn in law school is that you should never make a rule you can't enforce. How on earth would the district ever monitor this?

Facebook and MySpace are the 5th and 7th most popular sites on the Internet, respectively. Instead of exploring how teachers, students, and parents can use these sites productively, the district instead has turned into the social networking Nazi: no Facebook for you! Just for kicks, I took a look at the performance of the Lamar County schools. My suggestion for the school board is that perhaps its time and energy would be better spent raising the low academic performance of the students in the poorest school in the district rather than passing unnecessary and unenforceable policies.

This whole thing is just goofy...

Our policies have to shift

Al Gore said:

We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift.

He was talking about global climate change but he might as well have been talking about our attempts to transition schools into the 21st century…

The personalization - and polarization - of America

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

The personalization movement, enabled significantly by communication and design technologies as well as global manufacturing supply chains, is well under way…

If I want to, I can personalize – and often even custom design – my shoes, my clothes, my jewelry, my car, my house, my computer, my soda, my candy, my cell phone ringtone, and so on. Even when I can’t design myself what I purchase, the seemingly limitless choices that I have allow me to customize my lifestyle in infinite variations (how many kinds of toothpaste or dog food are there?). Sites like CafePress even allow me to custom brand my own goods if the current range of choices isn’t satisfactory.

The personalization movement applies to where we work as well. Richard Florida has written extensively about how we are sorting ourselves into communities of talent. Creative, talented people are migrating to certain cities and college towns. Companies are following people rather than the other way around. As a result, the vast majority of economic productivity and growth is coming from these ‘creative communities’ while smaller communities or non-creative cities are left behind.

Not only does the personalization movement extend to our jobs, it also applies to our homes. As The Big Sort describes, even within our communities we are clustering with other like-minded people. Whole neighborhoods reflect particular lifestyles and exhibit little ideological or lifestyle diversity. Finding someone in your neighborhood that doesn’t look, act, or think like you is becoming increasingly difficult.

Never before have our politics been so polarized. The so-called ‘independent voter’ is all but nonexistent. Voters that actually listen to both sides and then make a decision comprise less than 10% of the voting population. The rest of us already have sorted ourselves out on one side or the other. The key to politics today is mobilizing the voter base on your side, not persuading independents. The key to the 2008 Presidential election will be the Right’s mobilization of church groups, civic organizations, and other groups that traditionally exhibit stronger ties versus the Left’s mobilization of younger voters, urban areas, and other groups that traditionally exhibit looser ties.

Personalization even extends to education. Between private schools, charter schools, magnet schools, online schools, and home schools, the options for parents to customize their children’s education have never been greater. The same goes for our religious institutions, as churches, temples, mosques, and other places of worship increasingly segment their services to target particular groups.

As I noted in my earlier post about narrowcasting, we also are personalizing our information streams. Our magazines, music sources, television stations, Internet sites, and news channels all are more customizable and individualized than ever before. The likelihood that we might run into information that runs counter to our existing beliefs is less and less probable with each passing day.

So where’s our common ground? As we increasingly utilize digital technologies, employment choices, neighborhood selection, and other lifestyle decisions to segment ourselves, where will we find the glue that holds our country together? Shouldn’t we be talking about this as a society? Doesn’t this need to be discussed somewhere in our educational system?

Collaborative action? Not yet.

Chris Lehmann’s post last week regarding Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and educational change was particularly thought-provoking for me. If you haven’t yet read Chris’ post or the book, move them both closer to the top of your reading list. I thought Chris did an especially nice job of describing how the edublogosphere has been good at the task of sharing and is doing pretty well at community production (thanks, everyone, who’s contributed to the Moving Forward wiki) but has not yet done so well at collaborative action. Why? Because it’s hard to do, as Chris and Shirky note, particularly within communities that have loose ties like we edubloggers do.

Chris feels, however, that we possess the capacity to engage in collaborative action and that we maybe, probably, should be thinking in this direction:

The hardest challenge facing our community is that we've done a very good job at going after the low-hanging fruit. We've done what was easiest to do... and most of us would agree that it hasn't been easy so far. To take things to the next level is going to be hard. Not impossible... and a lot easier because of the tools we have at our disposal today, but hard none-the-less. 

But "hard" shouldn't be the reason we don't do it.

While I admire (as always) Chris’ good cheer and ‘we can do it even though it’s hard!’ attitude - and even usually possess a high concentration of those myself - right now I’m a bit more skeptical that our loosely-knit ‘community’ has the capacity, time, or even desire to begin engaging in collective action, at least at the level that Chris describes. I say this despite all of the incredible value that I gain from the edublogosphere.

At the very least, collective action is going to require a very focused target outcome and some folks who are willing to shoulder the heavy load of visioning / coordinating / re-centering focus. And I just don’t see that happening right now. I see a lot of good people who care a lot and are even willing to do numerous great things for kids, schools, and/or fellow bloggers. But I don’t see us as being in a place yet where collaborative action can occur on any meaningful and important scale (and I’m also not sure what that place would look like so I’d know that we were there).

Of course I’d love to be proved wrong…

[I confess that I’m also feeling a bit despondent today about the whole prospect of influencing American policymakers regarding K-12 education. After all, if an initiative with a $60 million budget and the backing of billion-dollar foundations isn’t getting much traction in terms of putting educational issues on the political radar screen, what the heck are our chances?]

NECC 2008 - Other notes from the ISTE Digital Equity Summit

Here are the rest of my notes from ISTE’s annual digital equity summit at NECC…

Discussions

• Wyatt Sledge, Forth Worth (TX) ISD, told me that the district just hired a dedicated technology trainer for its administrators. Awesome!

Expert panel

Lara Sujo de Montes, New Mexico State University

• Digital divide v. digital equity
• Divide = lack of access to equipment
• Inequity = lack of access to benefits of learning and using that equipment
• Digital inequity reproduces existing social and socieconomic inequities
• The Internet is 2/3 in English but only 10% of world population speaks English
• Developing countries: rural, unemployed, uneducated farmers or unskilled wage laborers, subsisting on $1 or $2 per day, ethnolinguistic minorities
• Request distance learning courses for high school students, develop online materials yourself (even for a traditional course), install Moodle
  

David Thornburg, Thornburg Center

• Digital equity and space exploration as a STEM curriculum
• Half of workers at Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman will retire in the next decade; 15% of Boeing engineers are eligible to retire right now; we don’t have enough new people to replace them
• We need to go beyond teaching about STEM and help students see themselves in those jobs
• There is a lot of beauty and joy in STEM
• In prison they let you out early for good behavior. Schools don’t do that.
• I’m tired of corporations thinking of children as wallets with bodies.

Ashanti Jefferson, Chicago Public Schools

• Described some of the work CPS is doing with its kids

Al Byers, National Science Teachers Association

• NSTA Learning Center: significant gains in the learning of science teachers who participate in its online learning modules
• Teachers must have a voice in their own professional development if we want to see positive results
• If you include elementary and middle school teaches (who teach science but don’t think of themselves as science teachers), there are 2.1 million science teachers in the USA

Discussion

• Thornburg: Students in affluent schools use technology in creative, innovative ways. Students in disadvantaged schools use computers for decontextualized drill-and-kill exercises.

NECC 2008 - From digital divide to digital opportunities

Here are my notes from ISTE’s annual digital equity summit at NECC. There is too much information to fit in one post so I’m breaking it up…

From Digital Divide to Digital Opportunities
Dr. Paul Resta, U. Texas-Austin

• Current estimate of world repository of pictures/words/movies = 7 exabytes (Library of Congress is largest in world = 20 terabytes)
• It’s not just more information. More is now different.
• UNESCO Digital Opportunity Index allows the tracking and comparison of countries in different aspects of the information society
• Essential conditions – access to…
• Basic literacy skills
• 26% of world adult population (1 billion people) is non-literate (2/3 are women)
• ICT devices, software, and sufficient bandwidth for Internet connectivity
• Most of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East has less than 10% of the population with personal computers
• High-income economies are far ahead (International Telecommunications Union, World Information Society 2007 Report)
• The top 1,000 companies in the world have over 70 million computers to dispose of
• Low-cost laptops: OLPC (600,000 orders from Birmingham (AL), Peru, Haiti, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Mexico, Uruguay, Mongolia), EeePC, Intel Classmate (150,000 orders from Nigeria, Libya)
• Cloud computing (virtual servers) means not much power has to reside on the computers themselves
• Asia and Europe both have more Internet users than North America; a near-perfect relationship between Internet use and income
• Broadband access takes up 2.1% of high-income (and 909% of low-income) yearly wages
• USA is now 15th in broadband penetration (see www.itif.org)
• Wireless access is increasing exponentially in many developing countries
• Meaningful, high-quality, culturally-relevant content in local languages
• 68% of Internet content is in English; next highest is Japanese (6%)
• 4Directions project is an indigenous model of education to create culturally-relevant curriculum resources
• Virtual museum partnerships
• Creating, sharing, and exchanging digital content
• The majority of the 7 billion videos streamed on the Internet each month are user-generated
• The number of blogs has roughly doubled every 6 months
• We need to enable indigenous voices and to use the Internat to foster cross-cultural understandings and share knowledge
• Educators who know how to use digital tools and resources in pedagogically-sound, culturally-responsible ways
• UNESCO ICT Competency Standards for Teachers
• Development of National Plans for ICT in Teacher Education
• Teacher Learning in E-Learning Age (UNESCO, forthcoming)
• Effective leadership in policy and planning
• Removing policy barriers and formulating new policy frameworks
• Broadband challenges require new thinking
• There is a need for ICTs customized to the needs of the poor in the developing world
• How do we ensure that the USA stays competitive?
• What is our role as educators to help address the global digital divide?
• From the Digital Divide to Digital Opportunities

NECC 2008 - SETDA PD Roundtable

Here are my notes from Tuesday’s Professional Development Roundtable sponsored by the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). This was an EXCELLENT conversation.

Effective professional development for educators

• Peer-to-peer training is particularly effective for teachers and administrators. Training also should be job-embedded. The focus should be the project or task, not the technology.
• Alabama has found that the graduates of their Gates grant initiative constitute the bulk of the innovative school- and district-level technology leaders in the state.
• Dr. Mary Ann Wolf, Executive Director of SETDA, asked me to talk about CASTLE! Administrators need dedicated funding, training, and TIME to learn.
• Coaching models for professional development (PD) work extremely well.
• New York City has a comprehensive PD model that includes principals, teachers, etc. Principals want to see best practices and what’s working in other schools. In contrast, teachers want people to come to their classroom, to discuss ‘what works here.’ Having an in-school professional developer works really well for teachers. It’s important to have both the in-class and the off-campus components.
• A lot of people don’t really know what high-quality PD looks like.
• Brenda Williams, West Virginia Department of Education: If you get professional development right, student learning will improve.
• Steve Andrews, Intel: The politics of cost is incredible. EDC has found that If you can get one PD coach per building, the results and progress are amazing.
• Project-based administrator training needs to involve the team, not just individuals. The principals need their assistant principals, teacher leaders, etc.
• We need to get teachers into other classroom via learning walks, observations, lesson study, etc.
• Principals need to have an actionable theory of change.
• There are a number of strong PD models in existence. SETDA is going to try to collect and then disseminate some of these models.

Barriers to effective, scalable professional development

• Lack of adequate, large-scale Internet access in training facilities. The West Virginia Department of Education forced state hotels to step up or risk losing all of its workshops!
• IT people still aren’t talking to curriculum people, assessment people, etc.
• There is a fairly large number of obstructionist teachers.
• Time, perceptions of endurance, perceptions of efficiency. Teachers wonder if it’s worth investing in a technology because it is changing so fast. Teachers have seen a number of technologies come and go [and they have resisted all of them!].
• Lack of exposure to effective models for technology-related PD.
• Many teachers view technology as a classroom distraction rather than as a meaningful learning tool.
• We don’t bring IT people into the process soon enough. They need more lead time and more involvement.
• Statewide programs have trouble ensuring consistency and implementation fidelity.
• Intentionality is important. Technology training that’s driven by subject learning goals (e.g., we need to get our math scores up) is more successful. Dedicated time and focused assessment also are necessary.
• Leadership turnover and program sustainability are issues.
• Leaders need help translating models of effective PD and time reallocation to their local implementation context.
• Content area people need to be involved in the tech training. Instruction first.
• Tom Carroll, NCTAF: Are we applying the right treatment to the right teachers? One technology PD model does not fit the learning needs of all teachers (just like students).
• Students need to be the ultimate focus of teacher PD efforts. It’s not about the tools, it’s about how it benefits the students. Having students demonstrate and discuss can be a powerful motivator to teachers. Clayton Christenson: The disruptive innovation in education is not charter schools or online schools. It’s student-centered learning.
• New teachers are effective users of personal technologies and are comfortable with instructional technologies. However, they have few models of good technology integration in their schools and they also probably had instructional technology courses in their pre-service program that were separate from their content methods courses.
• Preservice teachers do not come out of college as instructional designers.
• Steve Andrews, Intel: One of the most incredible opportunities of our lifetimes is before us.
• We need to use pride, greed, hope, love, and guilt to get teachers moving.
• Schools’ poor use of technology is having negative impacts on the retention of young teachers.

Policy and practice recommendations

• Specific guidelines of 1 instructional coach per 1,000 students.
• Concrete strategies for changing how we do business (at all levels), maybe differentiated by setting, size, and locale.
• Strategies for informing and engaging parents / community members.
• A comprehensive K-20 vision and agenda – state level and/or national level – that drives forward movement.
• Mandatory interactions between K-12 and higher education. [NCATE requires that colleges work with schools?]
• We need to pay more attention to our leaders!
• Colleges of education are not going to accept any responsibility (for technology training, outreach, service, PD) until legislatures, departments of education, and/or accrediting agencies make them do so. [U. Minnesota performance review: ‘Dr. McLeod’s work with schools is exemplary but inappropriate.’]
• We need to follow up statements of ‘It’s so expensive to do this’ with the reply ‘What is the cost of not doing this?’ We need to think more in terms of investment (not cost) and return on investment.
• We have to figure out what to take off educators’ plates (the idea of prioritized abandonment).
• Most high-functioning companies spend about 4% of their budgets on employee training. We come nowhere close to this in K-12 education.
• We need to remember the interconnectedness of the success of the whole. We don’t want others to cherry pick components of what should be a comprehensive approach to systemic school reform.

So what if schools don’t prepare kids for the 21st century?

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

I’m going to do something I’ve never done before as a blogger: resurrect an old post. Over the past few months I’ve read all or some of Innovation Nation, Five Regions of the Future, Sixteen Trends, and The 2010 Meltdown. I then decided it was time to finally read Teaching as a Subversive Activity and The End of Education. So I started on the former and then today I picked up the latest issue of Educational Leadership, which is focused on reshaping high schools. As the echoes of K-12 naysayers reverberated through my head, I found myself asking once again:

So what if schools don’t adjust to the demands of the digital, global economy? So what if schools don’t prepare kids for the 21st century?

As McLuhan stated, school may be irrelevant. As Wiener noted, schools may shield children from reality. As Gardner said, schools may educate for obsolescence. As Bruner stated, schools may not develop intelligence. As Rogers noted, schools may not promote significant learnings. As Friedenberg said, schools may punish creativity and independence [all closely quoted from Postman & Weingartner, 1968, p. xiv). And yet the economy chugs along, sometimes up, sometimes down, but mostly up. And the overall well-being of most citizens continues to improve by most historical measures.

So, without further ado, below is my post from March 2007, which I’m hoping will spark some additional conversation 14 months later, particularly now that both the TechLearning blog and Dangerously Irrelevant have larger audiences. I hope you find the post to still be as challenging and relevant today as I do.

– – – – –

Overblown alarmism and empty rhetoric

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

[Law students learn to argue both sides of any issue because as attorneys they may be hired for either side of a case. Knowledge of the other side’s arguments also allows attorneys to counter those arguments and thus strengthen their own side. So with that in mind, here’s a little contrarian perspective on School 2.0. As technology advocates, we must be able to offer real solutions, not just empty rhetoric.]

Dear School 2.0 advocates,

We’ve heard it all before. The sky is falling. America is in danger of losing its role as lead actor on the global stage. What else is new?

National commissions? Esteemed task forces? Corporate leaders as education critics? We’ll see your Bill Gates and raise you a Sputnik.

We heard it in the 1950s:

We are engaged in a grim duel. We are beginning to recognize the threat to American technical supremacy which could materialize if Russia succeeds in her ambitious program of achieving world scientific and engineering supremacy by turning out vast numbers of well-trained scientists and engineers. . . We have let our educational problem grow much too big for comfort and safety. We are beginning to see now that we must solve it without delay. - Admiral Hyman Rickover, 1959

We heard it in the 1980s:

The risk is not only that the Japanese make automobiles more efficiently than Americans and have government subsidies for development and export. It is not just that the South Koreans recently built the world's most efficient steel mill, or that American machine tools, once the pride of the world, are being displaced by German products. It is also that these developments signify a redistribution of trained capability throughout the globe. . . If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all--old and young alike, affluent and poor, majority and minority. Learning is the indispensable investment required for success in the "information age" we are entering. - A Nation at Risk, 1983

We heard it in the 1990s:

America’s education system is broken. - IBM CEO Louis Gerstner, 1994

And we’re hearing it again today:

Whereas for most of the 20th century the United States could take pride in having the best-educated workforce in the world, that is no longer true. Over the past 30 years, one country after another has surpassed us. . . . While our international counterparts are increasingly getting more education, their young people are getting a better education as well. . . . Our relative position in the world's education league tables [continues] its long slow decline. - The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, 2006

America’s high schools are obsolete. - Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, 2005

And yet, somehow, despite our educational system’s long history of alleged mediocrity, our country and our economy keep chugging along quite nicely. Our standard of living is the envy of most of the world. Our gross domestic product per capita literally dwarfs those of China or India, the latest international competition du jour. Despite our country’s creativity-stifling schools, our citizens and workers continue, quite astonishingly, to build upon our nation’s well recognized and long-standing traditions of innovation and excellence to create new products, new systems, and new markets.

We’ve heard it all before. Creative thinking. Problem solving. Independent, self-directed learning. Daniel Pink, Richard Florida, John Seely Brown…

Ho hum. Ever heard of progressive education? The turn of the LAST century? Summerhill? John Dewey? Neil Postman? The 1960s? Been there, done that. Why is THIS time any different? Why is it that THIS time we should replace the entire system?

Yes, we get it. Most kids think schools are boring. Big surprise. John Goodlad told us that long ago. As if we needed ANYONE to tell us that. Isn’t that just the way school is?

Fine. School 2.0 is the “right” thing to do. Technology has the potential to transform education. Our educational institutions could be doing so much more. Educators should feel more of a moral imperative to do things differently. Blah blah blah… Let’s be honest: isn’t this true for ANY bureaucratic government entity? Do we really expect our public schools to be any different?

We’ve heard it all before. The status quo is inadequate. Too many kids drop out, our assessment systems are all wrong, and we’re squandering our children’s future. The problem is that you offer no concrete, tangible, publicly- and politically-viable alternatives.

It’s easy to throw stones at glass houses. It’s much harder to replace a venerable system that’s served us well for a century with something else. The old saw, “Never make a complaint without offering potential solutions” applies here in spades. Just for argument’s sake, let’s say that we “tore down the walls” tomorrow. What would education look like instead? How would we ever get there from where we are now? How are you going to persuade educators, and politicians, and your local community members that this is worth moving toward? That it’s not just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking?

What’s your plan? We mean a real plan. Not just “kids learning independently on matters of personal interest, taking advantage of the power of digital technology to help them do so.” What will the structures look like? Policies? Laws? Funding streams? How will we know if kids have learned anything important? How will we handle parents’ very real needs for someone to take their kids while they go to work?

Quit offering us wishes. Quit offering us dreams. Quit preaching to us about what is morally right and educationally appropriate. Help us realize, in terms we can understand, what this new thing might actually look like AT SCALE and how we might reasonably get here. Even if we agree with you that this is important, without a vision AND a plan we’re just as stuck as you are.

We’ve heard it all before. What else you got?

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

[Law students learn to argue both sides of any issue because as attorneys they may be hired for either side of a case. Knowledge of the other side’s arguments also allows attorneys to counter those arguments and thus strengthen their own side. So with that in mind, here’s a little contrarian perspective on School 2.0. As technology advocates, we must be able to offer real solutions, not just empty rhetoric.]

Dear School 2.0 advocates,

We’ve heard it all before. The sky is falling. America is in danger of losing its role as lead actor on the global stage. What else is new?

National commissions? Esteemed task forces? Corporate leaders as education critics? We’ll see your Bill Gates and raise you a Sputnik.

We heard it in the 1950s:

We are engaged in a grim duel. We are beginning to recognize the threat to American technical supremacy which could materialize if Russia succeeds in her ambitious program of achieving world scientific and engineering supremacy by turning out vast numbers of well-trained scientists and engineers. . . We have let our educational problem grow much too big for comfort and safety. We are beginning to see now that we must solve it without delay. - Admiral Hyman Rickover, 1959

We heard it in the 1980s:

The risk is not only that the Japanese make automobiles more efficiently than Americans and have government subsidies for development and export. It is not just that the South Koreans recently built the world's most efficient steel mill, or that American machine tools, once the pride of the world, are being displaced by German products. It is also that these developments signify a redistribution of trained capability throughout the globe. . . If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all--old and young alike, affluent and poor, majority and minority. Learning is the indispensable investment required for success in the "information age" we are entering. - A Nation at Risk, 1983

We heard it in the 1990s:

America’s education system is broken. - IBM CEO Louis Gerstner, 1994

And we’re hearing it again today:

Whereas for most of the 20th century the United States could take pride in having the best-educated workforce in the world, that is no longer true. Over the past 30 years, one country after another has surpassed us. . . . While our international counterparts are increasingly getting more education, their young people are getting a better education as well. . . . Our relative position in the world's education league tables [continues] its long slow decline. - The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, 2006

America’s high schools are obsolete. - Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, 2005

And yet, somehow, despite our educational system’s long history of alleged mediocrity, our country and our economy keep chugging along quite nicely. Our standard of living is the envy of most of the world. Our gross domestic product per capita literally dwarfs those of China or India, the latest international competition du jour. Despite our country’s creativity-stifling schools, our citizens and workers continue, quite astonishingly, to build upon our nation’s well recognized and long-standing traditions of innovation and excellence to create new products, new systems, and new markets.

We’ve heard it all before. Creative thinking. Problem solving. Independent, self-directed learning. Daniel Pink, Richard Florida, John Seely Brown…

Ho hum. Ever heard of progressive education? The turn of the LAST century? Summerhill? John Dewey? Neil Postman? The 1960s? Been there, done that. Why is THIS time any different? Why is it that THIS time we should replace the entire system?

Yes, we get it. Most kids think schools are boring. Big surprise. John Goodlad told us that long ago. As if we needed ANYONE to tell us that. Isn’t that just the way school is?

Fine. School 2.0 is the “right” thing to do. Technology has the potential to transform education. Our educational institutions could be doing so much more. Educators should feel more of a moral imperative to do things differently. Blah blah blah… Let’s be honest: isn’t this true for ANY bureaucratic government entity? Do we really expect our public schools to be any different?

We’ve heard it all before. The status quo is inadequate. Too many kids drop out, our assessment systems are all wrong, and we’re squandering our children’s future. The problem is that you offer no concrete, tangible, publicly- and politically-viable alternatives.

It’s easy to throw stones at glass houses. It’s much harder to replace a venerable system that’s served us well for a century with something else. The old saw, “Never make a complaint without offering potential solutions” applies here in spades. Just for argument’s sake, let’s say that we “tore down the walls” tomorrow. What would education look like instead? How would we ever get there from where we are now? How are you going to persuade educators, and politicians, and your local community members that this is worth moving toward? That it’s not just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking?

What’s your plan? We mean a real plan. Not just “kids learning independently on matters of personal interest, taking advantage of the power of digital technology to help them do so.” What will the structures look like? Policies? Laws? Funding streams? How will we know if kids have learned anything important? How will we handle parents’ very real needs for someone to take their kids while they go to work?

Quit offering us wishes. Quit offering us dreams. Quit preaching to us about what is morally right and educationally appropriate. Help us realize, in terms we can understand, what this new thing might actually look like AT SCALE and how we might reasonably get here. Even if we agree with you that this is important, without a vision AND a plan we’re just as stuck as you are.

We’ve heard it all before. What else you got?

Painters ... pipefitters ... principals?

Why does it bother me so much to see principals on this list?

• St. Paul (MN) Public Schools Labor Agreements

Blocking the future

My latest article for the American Association of School Administrators is now online. Titled Blocking the Future, it’s only a page long but I’m really excited about it. Here’s an excerpt:

[S]chool district leaders have a critical choice to make: Will their schools pro-actively model and teach the safe and appropriate use of these digital tools or will they reactively block them out and leave students and families to fend for themselves? Unfortunately, many schools are choosing to do the latter. . . . I can think of no better way to highlight organizational unimportance than to block out the tools that are transforming the rest of society. Schools whose default stance is to prohibit rather than enable might as well plant a sign in front of their buildings that says, “Irrelevant to children’s futures.”

I’ve also made a handy SnipURL:

• http://snipurl.com/blockingthefuture

Hopefully this will be a useful reading for your administrators and teachers. Feel free to distribute liberally!

Low ability teachers, low ability students?

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

Here are some research findings for you…

Smart people leave teaching?

Of the teachers who had high college entrance exam scores, almost a fourth of them leave the profession within a decade. In contrast, only about 11% of the individuals with low scores leave the teaching profession within 10 years. Similarly, more than a third of the teachers with low college entrance exam scores are still teaching a decade after they started, while only 15% of the teachers with high scores are still teaching ten years after they began (Anderson & Carroll, 2008; see also Guarino, Santibanez, & Daley (2006), who note similar results for university selectiveness and certification exam scores). In other words, the percentage of teachers with lower academic ability increases in schools over time. The brightest go elsewhere.

Teacher smarts matter?

• Higher teacher ACT scores positively influences student reading scores (Ferguson & Ladd, 1996)
• Teachers’ verbal ability influences student performance (Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine, 1996)
• [S]tudents learn more from teachers with higher test scores. Test scores matter…” (Wayne & Youngs, 2003)
  

Discuss among yourselves

Let’s assume that, generally speaking, these studies are correct: 1) smart people are less likely to stay in teaching (thus resulting in a concentration of teachers with lower academic ability), and 2) the academic ability of teachers impacts student learning outcomes. Now what?

References

• Anderson, S. E., & Carroll, C. D. (2008). Teacher career choices: Timing of teacher careers among 1992-1993 Bachelor’s degree recipients (NCES 2008-153). Washington, DC: United States Department of Education.
• Ferguson, R.F., & Ladd, H.F. (1996). How and why money matters: An analysis of Alabama schools. In H.F. Ladd (Ed.), Holding schools accountable. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 265-298.
  
• Greenwald, R., Hedges, L.V., & Laine, R.D. (1996, Autumn). The effect of school resources on student achievement. Review of Educational Research, 66(3), 361-396.
  
• Guarino, C. M., Santibanez, L., & Daley, G. A. (2006). Teacher recruitment and retention: A review of the recent empirical literature. Review of Educational Research, 76(2), 173-208.
  
• Wayne, A. J., & Youngs, P. (2003). Teacher characteristics and student achievement gains: A review. Review of Educational Research, 73(1), 89-122.

Not so irrelevant 008

My latest roundup of links and tools…

I read blocked blogs

• I’m gettin’ me some of these super-cool buttons (made by Stephanie Sandifer; inspired by Bud Hunt). What a great thing to hand out to administrators!

Are you up to the challenge?

• The 2008 Comment Challenge is now on (and, hey, recognize a fantastic commenter!)

Why K-12 educators shake their heads at academia

• Rick Hess perfectly captures one of my primary complaints about academia, which is that much of what we do is completely inaccessible (and/or meaningless) to K-12 educators

No hand-held electronics in front of the kids!

I was incredulous to read ... the decision by the London Catholic School Board in Ontario banning hand held electronic devices in schools. . . . Even more bizarrely ... school board employees are only allowed to use these devices "in areas from which students are excluded." Taken to its logical extent then this includes staff also being unable to use digital cameras to record student work or projects, create and listen to podcasts and so on.
– Gareth Long

Like Alfie Kohn, Dan Meyer forces us to rethink / justify

• Who do we think we are?
• The difference between us and them
• Sobriety

New tools I’m finding quite useful

• Taboo Firefox extension
• FeedDemon RSS reader

The impetus is on us, not them

Help a teacher develop an integrated lesson [that] ... focuses on a local issue of real importance, in which they, their families, and/or others in their community have a genuine stake and interest. If their learning is situated in that type of context, I think you’ll find the impact of their learning experiences will be far greater, and many more of them will learn digital literacy skills alongside traditional literacy skills. Teaching in a problem-based learning environment is a lot more work than simply lecturing and delivering content to students, but it is the type of learning environment our students need to remain engaged in school work. Too many kids today are BORED by school. As the adults running our schools, it is our responsibility to remedy this situation.
– Wesley Fryer

A couple of gems from Clay Burell…

• Muhammad Ali: A D- student or an F- school?
• Education as pretense: Schooly “speeches” versus real “talks”

And a couple more from Gerald Bracey

• Proficient readers: Dear Strong American Schools (be wary of those NAEP proficiency levels!)
• A test everyone will fail

We are a little egocentric, aren’t we?

• Fujitsu’s world map (thanks, Brett!)

And, finally, a reminder from John Pederson

• Don’t count your Twitter followers

One year ago: Well, what's your answer? and Principal blogging not allowed

Questions for Michael Vitelli, CEO of The Gaming Krib?

Lately there's been a bunch of conversation on this blog about The Gaming Krib, a service designed to help parents and children 'balance ... playing time and learning time.' Most of the comments (both here and on Twitter) about the company and/or its underlying paradigm have been pretty negative. Michael Vitelli, President and CEO, has kindly agreed to do a podcast interview with me on May 9 to talk about the need his company is addressing as well as its approach to solving that need.

Check out my previous post and The Gaming Krib web site. Then, in the comments area for this post, please submit some questions that you'd like me to consider for the interview. Rather than answering them here, Michael and I will save them for when we chat. Thanks!

The Gaming Krib

Bud Hunt posted in Twitter about The Gaming Krib. Here’s the basic premise of the service this company’s trying to sell:

1. It has the ability to shut off families’ electronic media (television, computer, cell phone, etc.). [I’m not clear how it does this]
2. Parents sign up for the service for their wayward children who’d rather play than do schoolwork.
3. If a kid tries to play a game or watch TV, he is told "Sorry, you cannot run game, go online, turn on TV, or use phone until math questions are answered."
4. Kid does math problems and earns time credits for use of electronic media.
5. “Both parent and child happy.”

Check it out, particularly the endorsements (Daniel Pink saying “good luck” is an endorsement?). Also be sure to see the hilarious pictures for Steps 1–3 on the home page.

I like the idea… but for adults. Sorry, Mom or Dad. Too bad that you had a tough day at the office today. You can earn 10–minute allotments of time to watch TV or use the phone, though. You just have to first do the dishes, scrub the toilet, clean out the garage, run your errands, wax the floor, fold the laundry…

Some thoughts on math

From Roger Schank at The Pulse:

[T]there is no evidence whatsoever, that accumulation of facts and background knowledge are the same thing. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Facts learned out of context and apart from actual real world experience that is repeated over and over are not retained. . . .

[K]ids don’t like math much and it is clear why. They find it boring and irrelevant to anything they care about doing. If you think math is so important, then why not teach it within a meaningful context, like business, or running a school doing the kind of math you had to do to do that – which certainly wasn’t algebra II. There is plenty of evidence that shows that teaching math within a real and meaningful context works a whole lot better than shoving it down their throats and following that with a multiple choice test. . . .

[T]here is no evidence whosoever that says that a nation that is trailing in math test scores will somehow trail in GDP or whatever it is you really care about. This is just plain silly, but we keep repeating the mantra  that we are behind Korea in math as if it has been proven that this matters in some way. . . .

[N]early every grown adult has forgotten whatever algebra he or she ever learned to pass those silly tests, so it is clear that algebra is meaningless for adult life. I ask every important person in public life that I meet to tell me The Quadratic Formula. No one has ever been able to do so.

From David Thornburg at The Pulse:

Recent pronouncements from Washington regarding math education have suggested that pedagogical points of view don't matter in the teaching of mathematics. For example: "There is no basis in research for favoring teacher-based or student-centered instruction," Dr. Larry R. Faulkner, the chairman of the panel, said at a briefing last Wednesday. "People may retain their strongly held philosophical inclinations, but the research does not show that either is better than the other."

Well, actually, Larry, if you read the “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” document (National Academies Press, 2007) you will likely be shocked to learn that, in fact, there are two methodologies proven to improve math proficiency: Statewide specialty high schools (e.g., IMSA) and inquiry-driven project-based learning (e.g., constructionism.) Now it may well be that Dr. Faulkner has more reliable sources than those at the National Academy of Science and other groups that contributed to this 591 page report on the challenge faced by the US in the areas of science and math education. However, let's assume for the moment that the National Academies tend to use fairly reliable folks to generate their reports. In this case, then Faulkner is simply flat out wrong. There IS research showing that one methodology is better than another, and I just cited it. The fact that this research was reported by the same government that claims it does not exist is a puzzlement at best, and an example of the “big lie” at worst. Faulkner's strategy seems to be that, if you lie to the American public loudly enough, it will believe you.

Cell phone cameras in the K-12 classroom: Punishable offenses or student-citizen journalism?

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

Take a look at the seven YouTube videos below, all taken by student cell phone cameras in classrooms. Do we want students bringing to public attention these types of classroom incidents? Should students be punished or applauded for filming and posting these?