Mainstream Pundits
The Toolbelt and Universal Design - Education For Everyone
Published July 17, 2009 @ 04:00AM PT
Education may be understood in one of two broad ways. Either it is about teaching people a discrete set of facts they will be able to repeat – multiplication tables and The Lord’s Prayer are two examples – or it is about helping people learn how to function in the world – crossing the street, using the Dewey Decimal System, reading a map all fit into this category.
The first understanding is not without value. It is important to know an alphabet, basic math facts, or what “President” means. But the second is crucial to survival. Humans, from the very start, needed to know how to hunt, how to recognize safe plants from poisonous ones, how to find their way back home.
And almost as soon as humans began to function as “humans” – this process of learning to function in the world began to revolve around tools. Humans are tool makers and tool users. It truly is our most significant distinction among the species on the planet. Sure, many animals use a few basic tools, but no other creature uses as many tools, or constantly refines those tools, or continuously invents new tools. It is almost a definition of “humanity.”
Our societies are defined by our tools. Our first complex tool is our language, which allows us a huge communicative advantage over most species with which we compete. And our languages significantly define who we are and what we know. The rest of our tools tend to define where we fall in social evolution. We describe much of our history by our tool sets: The Stone Age, The Bronze Age, The Iron Age, The Age of Steam, The Information Age.
This progress explains an important idea to educators. If you are teaching your students the tools of yesterday, you are preventing society from moving forward. Rather, we must be teaching our students to use the tools of this moment, and teaching them how to learn the next set.
Toolbelt Theory
For the past four years I have talked about something I call “Toolbelt Theory.” This began as an idea for allowing students with “disabilities” to learn and choose their own Assistive Technologies. But it very quickly expanded to all students, because every human on earth needs some kind of technologies which assist them in their interactions.
It is impossible for most to climb to the second floor of a building without stairs. It is very difficult for most to get to a meeting on the 25th floor without an elevator. And it is perhaps even more difficult for most to get to work each day if work is 30 miles from home, unless we use a car.
Because we are not whales, we need some form of “assistive technology” if we are to talk to someone 3,000 miles away. We call this a telephone. Because we are not birds or Monarch Butterflies, we need other “assistive technologies” if we are to cross from one continent to another. We call these planes and boats. And because we are not Socrates, we struggle to remember everything we have ever been taught without “assistive technologies.” We call these books and paper, pens and ink.
So we create toolbelts for ourselves. We not only collect hammers, saws, screwdrivers, we load up on books or television, typewriters and newspapers.
A toolbelt for everyone
I began to discuss Toolbelt Theory in my field – for students with special educational needs. I was frustrated when some “school-based team” would pick a single technological solution for a student’s “disability” which the student was expected to use no matter the task, no matter the environment, no matter how the student was feeling that day.
For example, a student with a reading problem might be given complex, expensive literacy software for his computer but not be able to read a menu at a restaurant or a sign on a school door. Or a student without verbal communication might be given a speech-generating device too large to use on the bus as she traveled home. Or lots of students might be given tools based on their “worst day” needs – rather than allow them to use “just” the help they needed.
It was the equivalent of breaking out a chain saw every time you needed to cut wood – even if you were trying to build furniture.
But once I began to see Toolbelt Theory work, I saw that every student needs this. There’s not a human on the planet that doesn’t need to reach for a tool sometime – and knowing how to pick the right tool for the job and moment, how to use that tool well, and how to find new tools, is an essential survival skill.
Universal Design
We don’t call someone “disabled” because they can not saw 100 sheets of plywood in half by hand. We get them a table saw. We don’t call someone “disabled” because they need a power screwdriver or they’ll be exhausted after an hour of putting down deck boards. We put a bit in our drill. And we don’t call people “disabled” because they can’t walk five miles to work every morning. They take a car or a bus or a train.
This is the idea behind Universal Design Technology, and behind Toolbelt Theory. We, as humans, differ. Our tasks differ. Our environments differ. Our circumstances differ. And we pick the appropriate tool.
This Wednesday I could walk much further, cane and all, in the 64 F degree weather in San Francisco than in the 98 F degree weather just south of there in Mountain View. I could decide if I wanted to drive between those two cities, or take the train. Get off early and take BART to my destination, or ride to the station by AT&T Park and walk to the streetcar – What’s the weather? Is time an urgent factor? How does my leg feel?
But without education, I can’t make these choices. I need to know how to know the temperatures. I need to know what transit options are open to me. I need to know how to drive and how to read a timetable. How to operate parking and train ticket machines. I need to know which way the streetcars run, and how to ask for help.
When I read I need to make similar choices. I read really slowly, really badly. But for short things I just tough it out with “ink-on-paper” (or paint-on-signs), though I have a Reading Pen with me if I’m having a very bad day - a day when no alphabetical system connects correctly in my brain. But I also use Click-Speak in Firefox for reading web pages. I use WYNN for big academic reading, and Read-and-Write-Gold – all of which convert text to audio (WYNN and Read-and-Write both highlight each word visually as it is being read aloud). Sometimes I use audiobooks – especially for novels, poetry, or great historical stuff, or I let WYNN, Read-and-Write, or WordTalk convert the text to an mp3 I can listen to in my car.
Without education I could not make these choices either. I need to know how to use those different tools. I need to know how to work with them – say, how to take notes effectively. I need to understand what the purpose of my reading is. And yes, I need to know about these tools, and where to get them.
Are you teaching your students those things?
Suppose your wealthy, white, typically-abled child is heading off to Europe. Can they read maps effectively? Can they read maps on their iPhone or Blackberry so they aren’t “screaming” “I’m an unfamiliar tourist” as they walk down the street? Can they translate information quickly from unfamiliar languages? Can they use Google to convert currency? Or to know if they’re being ripped off? Are they able to figure out the transit system maps when they arrive in a city?
Oh yeah, they’ll probably need all of those tools simply to start college in a new place or to go to that first big job interview in New York or Chicago or San Francisco.
Can they get through that last hundred pages of reading when their eyes hurt? When they need to finish as they drive to work? Can they dictate a text message or email to their boss while driving a 50 mph on the Eisenhower Expressway toward Chicago’s Loop? Can they switch their Firefox spellcheck when they communicate with that job possibility in London? Do they know if it will be better for them to buy the print version of that textbook or the digital?
Or have you left them clueless in the tool store via an education continuously committed to one way of doing things?
T.E.S.T.
Toolbelt Theory, and Universal Design, means there aren’t “disability solutions” and there aren’t “normal ways to do things.” There are just humans and the tools they need. And so we don’t write IEPs for some and insist on conformity for others, but we make the tools of the world available to all, and teach them to evaluate on their own.
We do this because we know, we know, that across everyone’s lives their tasks will change, their environments will change, their skills and capabilities will change, and the available tools will change. Or quick, grab your fountain pen, fill it with ink, look up the number you need in your Manhattan White Pages directory, and dial it via your rotary phone.
So: Task – Environment – Skills – Tools (a specifically ordered re-design of Joy Zabala’s SETT Framework for those educators playing along at home). When students begin a task they need to consider what that task really is – the essential purpose. They need to know where, when, for whom that task must be completed. They must understand their own skill set and capability position (which might vary throughout even the day as they tire). And they must know the range of tools available to them – and how to use those tools.
None of this is automatic. Don’t give me your “digital native” nonsense. People even need to learn to properly hold a hammer – tool skills are not natural. Nor is tool knowledge. Every day I go into schools where students struggling with reading are left in the dark – as if we denied wheelchairs to students who couldn’t walk on the theory that being left on the floor would motivate their legs to work. Every day I go into schools where the vast majority of students struggle – and often give up – as they are forced to use antiquated tools which fit their needs badly.
Teach your children well
We are humans. We are tool users. We are defined as humans by our constantly changing tools. Those tools, in turn, actually change who we are, as they alter our capabilities.
Your school must be a tool shop, where tools are demonstrated, taught, considered, respected, used, and deliberately chosen. Because we can not afford to send our students out without the toolbelts they need to function in their future world.
- Ira Socol
You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs" education at SpeEdChange . You can find my books on Amazon.com.
Hell Freezes: Defending Meghan McCain v. Paul Begala
Published June 29, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
Democratic strategist and pundit Paul Begala gives Republican Daddy's girl and instapundit Meghan McCain a smackdown on Bill Maher's Real Time that, on the face of it, is deserved (and delicious). Watch the two-minute clip:
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You're not going to hear me say McCain didn't deserve the schooling: she's posing as an expert all over cable news and the web, so she'd damn well better know whereof she speaks, and in this case clearly doesn't. To cover her rear, she hits Begala below the belt by playing the "I'm young and you're old" card, fully justifying the spanking Begala gives her backside.
But. Begala's response to McCain's ignorance about the Reagan years still makes this history teacher call foul: "I wasn't alive during the French Revolution, but I still know about that."
McCain probably knows a good bit about the French Revolution too. I'm sure she got that in high school, maybe even college. Schools are great at teaching stuff that happened long before the students' parents were born. But they're dismal at teaching all students -- not just the minority who take a "current events" elective -- about the world of their own, and their parents', generation. (This is old news to those of us who have read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your U.S. History Textbook Got Wrong.)
I'd put money on the fact that Begala learned next to squat, in high school, about the two or three decades preceding his graduation year.
So rather than celebrating the spanking, we should be decrying the curricular reality this little brouhaha points to: we're graduating politically illiterate youths into adulthood.
You've heard of studies like this:
According to a 2006 survey of Americans aged 18 to 24, less than four in ten can identify Iraq on a map of the Middle East; one-third of young Americans cannot calculate time-zone differences; even after Hurricane Katrina, two-thirds cannot find Louisiana on map; almost one-third think that the United States has between 1 and 2 billion, and two in ten, amazingly, cannot point to the Pacific Ocean on a world map.
So sure, as an astute commenter on another blog notes, Meghan McCain might be "the political Paris Hilton: Famous daughter of a rich man and she likes the attention." But worse than that, she's one of our "elite best and brightest" -- you know, the Teach for America talent pool. And by her own admission she knows little about the recent political history of the country her father helps to -- I want to say "serve," but I'm not talking about health insurance and oil corporations here, so I'll choose -- rule.
It's less scary coming from Miss South (or was it "East"?) Carolina. It's full-on disturbing coming from McCain.
And since school history classrooms are every bit as fearful of provoking "partisanship" as it seems our current president is, it's hard to see how this is going to change any time soon. Especially since that president's ed reform seems mostly determined to equate "education" with "workplace readiness," and to hell with citizenship.
Newsweek high school rankings: invalid money-makers
Published June 11, 2009 @ 02:43PM PT
Newsweek Magazine has once again compromised both credibility and ethics by releasing its annual high school rankings feature. The "rankings" are based on one single measure - one that is invalid as a gauge of quality and simply does not measure how "good" a high school is. They also violate journalistic ethics, as the gauge is one that directly promotes increased profits for an enterprise run by Newsweek's parent company.
The rankings are based entirely on the single criterion of how many AP (or two other similar) tests are taken by the students in the school. That's it. How the students perform on the tests is not part of the equation.
Newsweek's description: "Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by [reporter/editor] Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate (IB) and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2008 divided by the number of graduating seniors."
This is so clearly not a valid gauge of a school's quality that it's hardly worth wasting words explaining. The criterion is also subject to easy manipulation, needless to say.
Here's why this feature compromises Newsweek's ethics. Newsweek's parent company, the Washington Post, also owns Kaplan, the test prep powerhouse. It's also hardly necessary to explain that encouraging more students to take AP tests directly correlates with increasing Kaplan's business.
Standard journalistic ethics call for avoiding the appearance of conflict of interest. The Newsweek high school rankings emblazon the appearance of conflict of interest across the heavens.
An increasing chorus of dissenters complains each year about this feature - including some of the "winners." In May 2008, the superintendents of 38 high-performing school districts signed a letter to Newsweek protesting the feature and requesting that their districts be excluded (a toothless request, but a meaningful gesture). This year, a top education reporter in Dallas - the location of two of the top-ranked schools - questioned the rankings' credibility.
It's not just time-wasting but also harmful to pass authoritative-looking judgments on schools based on invalid criteria. Meanwhile, with the very survival of the news media under threat, journalistic credibility is one asset the media should struggle to keep. Newsweek is making a big mistake to compromise its ethics so shamelessly. The magazine needs to eliminate and renounce this corrupt and damaging feature.
L.A. Times v. L.A. Teachers: America Writ Small
Published May 23, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
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Fred and Mike Klonsky ask why edblogs have remained silent on the L.A. teachers' and students' walkout last week in protest of education budget cuts and the issuing of thousands of teacher pink-slips.
In "R.I.P. 'Mainstream' Media," Mike points out the role of the L.A. Times in the debacle:
The L.A. Times ran a piece a week before the arrests, quoting schools chief Cortines accusing teachers of "milking the system" and then one on Friday, just before the arrests, claiming that teachers were going to "storm district headquarters" and "jump on some desks." Then they trailed way behind the blogs and Twitter in covering the protest and the arrests. I found this story about the student protests, on Saturday but nothing else. I looked again on Sunday. Nothing. I looked again this morning. Nothing. I combed the national press again today. Nothing.
Actually more people in China know about the L.A. struggle, than do folks here in the U.S.A. I found this story about teachers in Queensland (that's in Australia) going on strike, but nary a word about L.A. Thank goodness for the blogs and Twitter. RIP L.A. Times and the Tribune Company.
Kevin Martinez offers a good analysis of the insidious effects of the L.A. Times' recent education coverage here:
Under the cover of a “special investigation” into incompetence and wrongdoing in the classroom, the Los Angeles Times has launched a vicious attack on schoolteachers in the Los Angeles public education system.
[...] Teachers in Los Angeles, and throughout California, are confronting a brutal assault on their jobs, living standards and working conditions as the result of multibillion-dollar budget cuts pushed through by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic Party-controlled state legislature.
The decision of the LA Times to publish the series in this context reveals that the newspaper is making a concerted effort to turn public opinion against teachers, to pit newly hired educators against classroom veterans, and to divert blame for the crisis in the public education system away from the political establishment. Read more...
"To divert blame for the crisis in the public education system away from the political establishment": that analysis isn't limited to L.A. I'd say it applies to the entire country.
Stephen Colbert Should Replace David Brooks at NYTimes
Published May 13, 2009 @ 02:04PM PT
[Update: Aaron Pallas gives a good critical response to the Fryer/Dobbie research here. All that glitters.]
More on NYTimes columnist David Brooks and the generally rampant stenography posing as thinking in the NYTimes op-ed columns these days (see the Thomas Friedman posts for more).
Brooks begins his much-panned mis-reading of the Harlem Children's Zone "miracle" with this:
I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.”
Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone.
"Meticulous." "It changed my life as a scientist." Isn't this all a bit grandiose? Especially when it didn't change a lot of people's minds? And shouldn't Fryer have written "social scientist," anyway? Or has economics become a hard science due to the success of the free marketeers in economic science over the last few decades?
"A scientist." Kill me.
A 21st Century Rule of Thumb: Whenever a pundit drops a name, google it. I did so, and learned that Fryer is perhaps best known for his questionable idea that the way to raise the achievement gap was - hold on - to pay kids cash for grades.
Better still, google led me to Stephen Colbert's beautifully common-sensical fun with the idea in this classic interview:
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| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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I hope reading Ravitch "changed Fryer's life as a scientist" back to whatever it was before he wrote his report.
For a straight criticism of the "pay-for-grades" idea, see Rethinking Schools: "Children as Guinea Pigs: Washington, D.C., bribes its students to perform."
An Achievement Gap Report Unreported by the Mainstream Media
Published May 13, 2009 @ 06:15AM PT
Scott McLeod over at Dangerously Irrelevant tipped me off to this EdWeek article on a study from the Educational Testing Service (ETS), "Parsing the Achievement Gap II." You'd think that our pundits at the New York Times and Washington Post would greet the study with as much fanfare as they have those by mere economists - "mere" in the sense that economists are not experts in education any more than educators are experts in economics. The ETS, after all and warts and all, is in the education business.
But no such luck. Robert Brooks is playing (bad) stenographer* for economist Roland Fryer - of "pay students for good grades" fame - and his myopic study of Harlem Promise Academy, while Thomas Friedman is playing ditto for the McKinsey and Company consultancy group's splashy "low grades create a lasting recession" report based on free-market evangelist-economist Eric Hanushek (and then stenographically plugging Wendy Kopp's Teach for America as the solution, which must have made her as happy as Arne Duncan's recent $15 million grant of our tax dollars to her organization).
But the ETS study? I haven't seen any serious reporting on it in our nation's top presses - nothing from the NYTimes or WaPo. (The Huffington Post did cover it, by the way - an interesting commentary on the shifting landscape of journalism today. HuffPo's Mike Smith covered the National Press Corp press conference in which the report was unveiled, and provides some interesting glimpses of resistance from a Department of Education spokesman to the report's findings about the desirability of experienced teachers and other things.)
Maybe the mainstream pundits passed it by because it doesn't fit so well into Joel Klein's and Eli Broad's "tough love" view that schools should be shouldered with erasing poverty's effects on student achievement, and teachers blamed for not pulling it off. The ETA report, after covering "school factors" in the achievement gap, shines its lights on other factors that the media- (and Arne Duncan-) dazzling Education Equality Project prefers to keep dark: "The Home-School Connection" and "Before and Beyond School."
So let the blogosphere fill the gaps left by the mainstream media.
First, the non-school factors:
The Home and School Connection
• Parent participation – White students’ parents are more likely to attend a school event or to volunteer at school. The gap in parents volunteering in schools remained unchanged; the gap in parents attending school events narrowed.
Before and Beyond School
• Frequent changing of schools – Minority students are more likely to change schools frequently, although there has been improvement. There was little change in the gap.
• Low birth weight – The percentage of Black infants born with low birth weight is higher than that for White and Hispanic infants. The rate of low birth weight increased among all groups.
• Environmental damage – Minority and low-income children were more likely to be exposed to environmental hazards.
Exposure to lead – The gaps were unchanged but levels of exposure were down.
Exposure to mercury – There were gaps in exposure to mercury, but no trend data were available.
• Hunger and nutrition – Minority and low-income children were more likely to be food insecure. The White-Black gap was unchanged; the White-Hispanic gap narrowed.
• Talking and reading to babies and young children –.Minority and low-income children were less likely to be read to daily. The gaps were unchanged.
• Excessive television watching – Minority and lower-SES children watch more television. The gap was unchanged between White and Black students; the gap widened among students whose parents have different education levels.
• Parent-pupil ratio – Minority students were less likely to live with two parents. The gaps were unchanged.
• Summer achievement gain/loss – Minority and low-SES students grow less academically over the summer. Trend data were unavailable.
Finally, most of the "School Factors" in the report are inconvenient supplements to the standard fare of low standards and bad teachers served up by the mainstream. Here they are:
• Teacher preparation – Minority and low-income students are less likely to be taught by certified teachers and more likely to be taught by math teachers with neither a major nor minor in mathematics. The gap in students having teachers prepared in the subjects they teach widened between White and Hispanic students and remained about the same for the other populations.
• Teacher experience – Minority and low-income students are more likely to be taught by inexperienced teachers. These gaps have not changed.
• Teacher absence and turnover – Minority and low-income students are more likely to attend schools with high levels of teacher absence and teacher turnover. There was little change in the gaps.
• Class size – Teachers in high-minority schools are more likely to have large classes. The gap has widened between high-minority and low-minority schools.
• Availability of instructional technology – Minority and low-income students have less access to technology in school, although there is improvement in access across the board, and the gap has narrowed.
• Fear and safety at school – Minority students are more likely to report issues of fear and safety at school. The gaps widened for students reporting the presence of street gangs and fights in school, and remained unchanged for students reporting feeling fearful in school.
What a different picture: large classes, revolving-door and less-qualified teachers, unsafe and technology-poor schools, and communities that don't foster learning at home or outside of school.
While we might give credit to Ed. Sec. Duncan's push to improve teacher quality and "incent" a more equitable distribution of high-quality teachers in under-privileged schools - and the devil is in the details here - this report underlines factors that receive little to no attention (and funding) in his approach.
On a positive note, it was nice to see Jay Mathews at the Washington Post giving long-overdue recognition to the studies and writings of Gerald Bracey, from whose works I quote liberally on these pages. Let's hope we see more such broadening of horizons on the mainstream media's part.
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*Robert at Core Knowledge takes the pin to Brooks' zeppelin in a nice post. [Update: So does Corey Bower, extensively.]
"The Class": A Film Review for (the Other) Mothers' Day
Published May 10, 2009 @ 11:23AM PT
A few days ago, I finally got around to watching The Class (Entre les Murs), winner of the Palm d'Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Written by François Bégaudeau, a teacher who is also a novelist, The Class is a small film with a documentary feel that thankfully avoids the "teacher as hero" clichés typical of most Hollywood films in the school genre (think Stand by Me, Mr. Holland's Opus, etc.); instead, it delivers a number of nuanced and ambiguous lessons on how difficult school life can be for all players involved: teachers, administrators, parents, and students.
In contrast to the simplistic accounts of "bad teachers," "bad students," "bad parents," and "bad administrators" we see in the mainstream U.S. media, The Class lets viewers see an urban Parisian classroom in which representatives of each of these roles resist such easy labels. Well-intentioned teachers and administrators have bad days; by the end, their best efforts fall victim to disastrously unintended consequences for a "bad" student they were trying to help.
In newspapers and in TV news, the event would get snapshot coverage enabling the too-quick-to-judge world to practice the scapegoating-du-jour we call teacher-bashing. But the film turns the two-dimensional "bad teacher" caricature into a "round" one by showing us that teacher, day in and day out, over a full school year. Watching him contend with classrooms full of indifferent and typically rude students day after day, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing, but never quitting at his overall thankless and solitary task to break through their walls and find a way to make them want to learn, gives us a different perspective. He's not a hero, he doesn't fight through to a happy Hollywood ending. In the end, he's merely, like most of us, well-meaning, reasonably competent, and guilty, like all of us, of imperfection.
It's an interesting film to write about on Mother's Day. Teachers obviously have much in common with mothers: they're responsible for the well-being of not one or two or three youths, but closer to 100; their job demands the patience of Job, without Job's mythic and larger-than-life ability to meet those demands. Sometimes, like mothers everywhere, they have a bad day and do things no mother would want to be seen doing: they show anger, they make bad judgments, they fall and fail.
A moment's honesty tells us this must be true of all mothers everywhere: none of them are perfect, and for most, the best they're capable of is usually good enough.
Yet we revere our mothers, and willingly forgive them their shortcomings. Why we aren't equally forgiving of the adults who teach almost every mother's child how to read, write, think, calculate, wonder, create, express, socialize, how to be confident and curious and able to grow into the world - why we find it so much easier to attack and resent them for demanding they be treated and rewarded like the imperfect professionals they are - is beyond me.
Anyway, watch the film if you get the chance. And while you're taking time today to thank your mother for the imperfect job she did while sacrificing 20 years of her life to raise you, think of the teachers who also raised you, and helped you develop the very ability to read that you're practicing right now. And consider thanking them - and your local teachers too. God knows they get enough of the opposite of thanks from American society today.
Happy Mother's Day, teachers. (And an early Happy Father's Day, too.)
