Posts by Ira Socol
"Evaluate that!" - Schools for Children
Published July 18, 2009 @ 04:35AM PT
As I end my week of guest blogging at change.org I realize that while I have discussed what our schools are really about, what technology really means, how to change our schools, how to find the best teachers, and how to help our students find the best technologies for themselves. I haven't yet dealt with the realities on "the ground." So, to do that, I'm offering a new version of a post from my blog earlier this year...
My son went to a great high school. Among the many things they did well was to use a grading system which combined letter grades with long narrative evaluations. At the end of his ninth grade year, this mixture allowed me to see the great problem with our evaluation of students even in the best schools.
For at the end of that year his Latin Class evaluation read (in part) this way: "[He] was the best student in the class, he completed both Latin I and Latin II this year. He will need to take future courses at [a nearby] college in order to continue his advancement. Grade C-"
"What grade," I asked the teacher, "did the second best student get?"
I was told that my son got a bad grade because he did not do his homework. "Apparently," I said, "he didn't have to." But, you see, this teacher had a rubric. Homework was 25% of the grade, and apparently there was no block in the rubric for doing two years of work in one.
I didn't really fight. I didn't care. The next year he was sitting among college students reading Ovid. That's what matters.
Except, that is not what matters.
"Can I write "Dear parent, your son has greatly improved on things not considered important by the school [reporting] system"?" Tomaz Lasic asked on Twitter today. Mr. Lasic is a teacher in Western Australia dealing with "troubled" children, and a brilliant observer of the system. He followed up: "In my 'low achievers' class: Where's the "halted [self]abuse", or the "began to smile" box to tick?" And: "Every time a particular kid (totally socially inept past) walks in our office and says please, or gives a high-five, we say: "Evaluate that!"
What is our national standard (whatever nation you are in) for getting a child to smile? For getting a child to publicly ask a question? For getting a child to confidently present an idea? For getting a child to be willing to ask for help? Or to ask to play with another child?
What is the national statistical trend line for feeling safe in school? For picking up that first book of interest? For solving an interpersonal problem for the first time? For absorbing an unfair call in athletics without going off?
I know my son did well in Latin. Not just because he was taking a college course as a high school sophomore, but because later, as he took up French, he rushed through that learning, and at one point last year, got a free trip to Algiers through his employer because he was the only French-speaking tech guy. I know he did well in Latin because I can ask him about original meanings in ancient texts, and he can give me all the possibilities. I know he did well in Latin simply because he would come home from school and talk about it, in that excited way people learning new things do.
And Mr. Lasic knows how his students are doing as well. He is a teacher - and I assume, a great teacher - and teachers know their students. They see them day by day. They watch their frustrations. They watch their triumphs and they watch their failures. These are complex things. A great writer could surely create a book out of any student's year in school. A "deep map" of that learning experience as William Least Heat-Moon might say.
But we don't ask for that. We don't encourage that. We won't pay for that. Instead we expect rubrics which lead to 'consistent grading' which lead to letter grades and tick boxes.
There are so many things we hope children get from their education, but when we discuss "data driven decision making," or "accountability," or "standards," or "merit pay" for teachers we become complete reductionists, assessing (very badly) a tiny fragment of all that expected learning - and most often - not even anything which is really important. And in doing this we tell children they are worthless, and we assure that success in school is a matter of socio-economics and playing the "those-in-power" game, and nothing else.
See, it does not matter if a child is rushing ahead or struggling to keep up. We do the same thing to anyone who doesn't measure up to our fictional "average." We crush them, demean them, and sneer at their accomplishments. And in doing so, we prove our worthlessness and lack of credibility to virtually all students.
So when people talk about measurement in education, I always get angry. First, because we can not free the curriculum until we stop our destructive assessment habits. Second, because I know that neither Arne Duncan nor any of the big "accountability" school bosses - Joel Klein, Paul Vallas, Michelle Rhee - would give a dime of merit pay to Mr. Lasic for helping that kid learn to smile, nor even to that Latin teacher for letting my son rush ahead. And I know that schools which must spend years making their children simply feel safe will always be rated below those in wealthy suburbs. Because you can not discuss "standards" or "evaluation" or even "accountability" until you adopt some kind of legitimate sense of what counts in the education of each individual child. And we are nowhere close to even having that conversation.
I began this week of blogging with the question of what we want our schools to do. And I end the week here - asking that we evaluate our students as humans. Asking that we meet their needs. Asking that we give them the supports they require to grow into successful adults.
Because when it comes down to it, we must remember that children are the "customers" in education. Not America's corporate elite. Not even the parents. We do not want our children limited by the hiring needs of General Electric, nor by the expectations of parents who have themselves been victimized by the education system.
So our schools need to be student centered, they must embrace student choice, and they must measure in human terms.
Please, let us stop tinkering around the edges, and let us begin the real work of fundamental change.
- Ira Socol
To Clay Burell - thank you for this opportunity, and thank you for all the work you do to keep education's real issues at the forefront. To Shelly Blake-Plock who preceded me here and Jon Becker who will follow, I am delighted to be in such illustrious company, to share this conversation.
You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs" education at SpeEdChange . You can find my books on Amazon.com.
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.
Today’s “School Reformers” vs Real Change for Education - II
Published July 16, 2009 @ 06:54AM PT
Yesterday I described my ideas for investigating fundamental change in how American schools function, but a big part of this change must come in how we find, recruit, train, and support our teachers.
Teachers are the least respected professionals in America. Oh, lawyers get all the jokes. And doctors - whose professional organization keeps trying to block universal health insurance for the U.S. - are seen as greedy. But George W. Bush's first Secretary of Education called teachers "terrorists," Obama's Secretary of Education lectures teachers on blocking change, and a whole bunch of rich and powerful people think that the teaching profession is so easy that any reasonably smart graduate of college can do it after listening to five weeks of lectures. And then, it sure seems like most of the U.S. population thinks teachers are overpaid and underworked.
I just want to remind everyone that these are the people we have placed in charge of our future. These are the people who change the lives and save the lives of our most vulnerable children.
There's history here. In the years after the American Civil War, as public education spread through the unique U.S. "local pay" system, school boards did not want to pay male salaries to teachers. So teaching switched from a male profession to a female profession at a time when pay for females was deplorably low. Of course, so were rates of female higher education. So teachers, at the beginning of the American system, were disrespected women, paid incredibly poorly, and virtually untrained.
This contrasts, for example, with Europe, where schoolmasters were clergy, and deeply respected members of the community.
As the 19th Century ended, "Normal Schools" (teacher training colleges) were appearing everywhere, and the march toward professionalism had begun. But in the early 20th Century, when doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers - all almost exclusively male - organized themselves as "professional organizations" with real public policy and public relations clout, female teachers were left out.
So today, no matter how much money the friends of Wendy Kopp have, no one like her could get away with suggesting that she could train people to perform surgery with five weeks of summer camp training, or build bridges, or design the new World Trade Center, or even take on a death penalty case in court (she has as much experience with those four skill sets as she has with teaching). But she can put completely untrained young people into life or death control of poor people's children, and can be treated as a national expert on teacher certification and education policy.
A profession, not a temp job
I think many teachers are doing a lousy job. I think much of our teacher training is hopelessly disconnected from the needs of our students. I think students lack a diversity of role models among their educators - African-American males, people with learning and attention "issues" especially.
But I can not imagine that "less training" is the solution - because I understand all which anyone must learn to become good at teaching.
On Twitter one day, a "charter school advocate" wondered why Michigan would not certify Civil War filmmaker Ken Burns to teach history. I asked, "What does Ken Burns know about LD, ADHD, EBD, ELL, AAC, UDL?" Because teaching, as anyone who has attended university and slept through the horrid lectures of an expert knows, is about a great deal more than content knowledge. All "human professions" are - which is why, though I might know much less about the law than many Law School professors, I was probably a better New York City cop than most of them could be.
Like all professions, teaching requires a vast amount of both factual and operational knowledge. It requires a constant update of both of those knowledge bases. And it requires an effective peer mentoring and peer review structure. A teacher needs subject knowledge, needs to know the DSM-IV, needs to know brain research, education research, communications technology research. A teacher needs to be a critical thinker, a creative developer of tools of engagement for a wildly diverse audience, and needs a rather stunning level of observational skills and people skills.
How do we find those people? recruit them? train them? support them? reward them? retain them?
Diversities
I want to find more new teachers from a few under-represented populations. I want more who have done poorly in K-12 schools, more survivors of special education, more from chronically failing groups. I want more who grew up in, who live in and are committed to, impoverished communities. And I want more teachers who arrive later in life, having collected big world experiences.
So step one is creating alternate certification routes which make sense in the building of diversity. This means we stop diverting resources to programs like Teach for America, and invest instead in the following:
Community-based Teacher Certification - A decade ago I ran a project in an inner city school, the kind of place which really struggles to hire teachers - especially at the secondary level. The community was impoverished and the tax base shattered. There were great teachers, but many others had checked out.
But there was a group of adults who held the school together. They were para-pros and bus drivers, cafeteria workers and custodians. They lived in the community. They were committed to the school. They knew the kids, in school and on the street. In many ways they were teachers in every way except content knowledge.
Of course they lacked much of that content knowledge, and they all lacked any kind of post-secondary degree. But I thought then what I think now - I'd rather try to teach community-committed, kid-committed adults the content knowledge they need to teach than try to turn uninterested content experts into teachers.
So let's fund in-community evening teacher-training in all those places which now hire those bright Teach for America corps members. Let's pay community members to get fast-tracked degrees and relevant educational training. And let's create life-long teachers who'll be legitimate role models in their communities.
Second Careers - I'm not interested in finding suddenly unemployed investment bankers who want to hide out in education until Wall Street recovers. But there are a ton of people out there who could make fabulous teachers if they could pause, and train. But America is hard: you quit your job, you lose your health insurance; you go to school, you get charged.
There are alternative certification programs for people like these in certain places, but too many are "district quickies" where the teaching is rote, the curriculum scripted, and the time to grow extremely limited. We need a national program to pay (and insure) these career changers for as long as two years, as they learn about education and spend time every week in schools working directly with students. Only then can they see if this is really the job for them, and only then can "we" see if they've got the people skills to do this complicated job.
The best undergrads - How do we bring our best and brightest to education? And how do we know if those "best and brightest" will be good teachers?
We encourage commitment from freshman year and we insist on time in schools/time with students from the very start.
Now at Michigan State we require time working with "urban" students from the very first education course - at the freshman level. And before our pre-service teachers enter their internship year, they will have probably interacted with more diverse students than a TFA member will during his or her "career" - and so we know who's got the stuff to be a teacher. But we don't have the incentives.
I want to nationalize that kind of time-in-school teacher education while offering tuition and room and board pay-backs for those who become teachers - with those pay-backs starting from the year an undergraduate student began education courses. In other words, try out teaching from the start, and if it works for you, and you work for it - college is free. If we build great teacher education programs, and we get great students to sample them, we'll find our share of great teachers. And if we find and train great teachers, paying for four years of college is a very small price for a nation committed to its children.
Supporting and Keeping Teachers
Finding great teachers, training great teachers, isn't the end. We need to support great teachers. I won't even discuss "merit pay" now, because it remains a ridiculous idea until we decide what "merits" bonuses. America lacks a reasonable track record on that issue.
But we know that teachers cannot continue to be paid the most for working with the easiest students. Teachers in the Bronx cannot earn less than teachers in Scarsdale. Teachers in Los Angeles cannot earn less than teachers in Beverly Hills. Teachers in Gary, Indiana cannot earn less than teachers in River Forest, Illinois. If they do, America's economic system will bring a different set of teachers to those poor communities. We know that.
And we know that we cannot let teachers continue to try to solve their on-the-job problems in isolation. We need to pay them to attend summer institutes and conferences. We need to increase pay to cover more days of in-service training, and we need to make that training excellent, make it differentiated by teacher need, and make it engaging and relevant.
We need to connect our teachers to the information and communication technologies of our times, so they can be comfortable with them and work with them in the classroom. Basic teacher perks must include anywhere broadband access, new computers, and smartphones - and support to learn what they can do.
But we need to do something more. We need to make the teacher workplace a safe place in every way possible. Physically safe and safe for professional experimentation. Because we cannot have teachers who come to work afraid - of students, of administrators, of parents, of tests scores. Just as with students, we can demand more from teachers only if we create high expectations and the kind of space which allows any human to reach their potential.
The role of teachers
If our schools are to be anything better than they are today, the role of teaching must radically change. Teachers will be "guides" rather than an information delivery system. They will function more like librarians than lecturers, helping students find both information and tools. They will need to operate on a critical thinking/creative plane all the time, if we are to get our students to do the same.
That change is going to be difficult. And we need great people, backed by great training and great resources, if we're going to do it.
- Ira Socol
You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs" education at SpeEdChange. You can find my books on Amazon.com
Teachable Moment a critical resource for new kinds of teaching
Today's "School Reformers" vs Real Change for Education - I
Published July 15, 2009 @ 07:26AM PT
I hear four things consistently in the American national media when people are speaking about education.
These are calls for "higher standards," "charter schools," "merit pay," and "alternative teacher certification." And all four, from PBS to The New York Times to the Secretary of Education, are promoted as panaceas for all which ails our schools.
"Higher standards" sounds so good. Who would want "lower standards"? Arne Duncan wants a "race to the top."
"Charter Schools," the "market solution," will bring competitive fervor to education. Hasn't the marketplace built America's greatness?
"Merit pay" has such a simple charm. We all know that there are great teachers, good teachers, all right teachers, and lousy teachers. How can we create incentives to be "great" if all are paid the same?
And teacher training? Well teacher training must be terrible. If our schools are bad, it must be the fault of those who work there, right? And if teachers are bad, it must be the fault of those training them and organizing them. Union bashing is a common sport these days from the top down. The bashing of teacher education programs reached its highest level of absurdist fever pitch in a New York Times editorial in May 2008 which suggested that Teach for America was the solution because "traditional teacher education programs... are often little more than diploma mills."
Let me agree as I disagree.
We surely do need national expectations for what schools do for their students. We desperately need experiments with new kinds of schools. We do need better ways to reward great teachers, and reward teachers for taking chances which will help their students. And we do need much better teacher training.
But...
All of the "reforms" of the current high profile "reformer" crop are steps in the wrong direction. The toxic mix of "high standards" and "merit pay" will guarantee that many teachers become nothing but test prep machines in pursuit of bonuses for Lehman Brothers-style short term illusions in student achievement. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is possibly the only person in President Obama's cabinet who deeply admires the Wall Street notion that you get paid for today's score no matter what happens in the long run.
The very notion that schools (and teachers) should be "competing" for students suggests that we are in favor of a system where some get fabulous educations, some get terrible educations, and most get something mediocre. Look at the American marketplace in any field. The "competitive" US health care system is an instructive model: costs a fortune for everyone, gets worse than mediocre - and wildly varying - results.
Teacher training must be overhauled. But those who favor non-training - the Teach for America model - or industrial robot training - teaching teachers to read scripted instruction, are clueless as to the importance and power of teachers - and education. I'm different. I think of teachers as I think of doctors. I think that what they do is vitally important, as often a matter of something close to life and death for many impacted by their work, and as an incredibly difficult profession to be good at. I still celebrate the very best teacher I had in my primary/secondary career as a "lifesaver" in the most true sense of that term, and I still thank of him for what he gave me whenever a learning task gets really difficult.
Maria Montessori's "Glass Classroom" at the 1915 World's Fair in San Francisco - real experimentation, really visible
New Expectations, New Schools, New Training, New Rewards
I believe in high expectations, but I'm against standards. Standards are for industrial products. We measure a certain set of dimensions, and assess our tolerance for difference. Expectations are for humans. We want humans to reach their maximum potential along a wide range of difficult to measure paths. Not just can you remember a mathematical formula, but are you going to be a good parent. Not just have you read The Great Gatsby, but can you assess political argument. Not just do you understand what atomic particles do, but can you be creative enough in a career to succeed when things get complicated.
So I don't want any measurement which - as all proposed by the Obama Administration do - assumes that students learn all things at the same rate. Instead I want an education system ready to find a way to success for every student. And this can not be done without highly - and continuously - trained teachers who have the time and freedom to work effectively with their students. It can not be done without technology which allows individualization of student access and inquiry. It can not be done without a redefinition of student choice.
I know that we can not build that entirely new system overnight. But I also know that we can never build it if we do not start. Today, Arne Duncan and Barack Obama think the solution is taking our worst schools - 5% in their understanding - and changing the management structure. In part they think this because they believe that the other 95% are "good enough." In part they think this because they have never deeply thought about the system of American education. So, they think Charter Schools are "the" answer - the one thing they will threaten states on.
My 5% plan
I have a 5% plan too. But my plan is to try something different. It is to take 5% of US public schools, spread across every congressional district, and eliminate age-based grades, subject-area divisions, expectations about "highly qualified [subject area]" teachers, absolute rules on days and hours of attendance, artificial divisions such as Special Education, Gifted and Talented, and Advanced Placement, and, of course, all "high-stakes" tests except for the NAEP.
In place of all that I want 1:1 wireless access. I want school buildings open many hours of the day (if not 24), with public libraries, computers, classrooms, and gymnasia in the evening. I want teachers committed to personal professional development, and teachers with time to gather and learn from each other. I want universally designed instruction and universally designed furniture and universally designed technology. I want continuous use of the community and the world in the classrooms.
In short, I want a counter-model to all we do now - on a scale large enough to begin to collect the kind of data we might learn from. The federal government should fund that. The federal government should pay teachers more for being part of this experiment, or for conducting smaller scale experiments with these principles on their own.
And then I want our teachers-in-training to intern in those schools as well as in traditional ones, so they can assess the differences themselves.
Lab Schools
Those are not the only new schools I want. Teacher educators often talk about how much of the in-college learning - differentiated instruction, technology, whole child learning - is undone by the culture of the schools where new teachers intern and begin teaching. And administrators claim that teacher educators are clueless when it comes to what schools are actually like.
So let us bring these together.
Right now only about 85 teacher training institutions have "laboratory schools," an idea begun almost 120 years ago by John Dewey at the University of Chicago. We need these schools at every institution which prepares teachers, administrators, or educational policy makers.
We need these "lab schools" as places for experimenting with theory, for research, for actual experience. We need education faculties who must struggle with implementing their own ideas, and we need working models of what the newest ideas look like. And we need these run, not by the kind of profit-making corporations "reformers" are often so enamored of, but by the academic institutions which have the ability to analyze, and to intelligently propose the scaling up of solutions.
Systemic Thinking
What I'm proposing is a systemic way of looking at fundamental change in how schools are designed, in how they function. A way of looking at these changes in a way which actually informs our decision making. Is that too much to ask?
Tomorrow - New Teachers
- Ira Socol
You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs" education at SpeEdChange. You can find my books on Amazon.com
Moen, B. Multiage Education: Time for a Change
MultiAge Institute at Northern Arizona University
Choosing Multiage
Southern University Lab Schools
Florida Atlantic University Lab School
Why did this lab school close in the Reagan era?
Technology: The Wrong Questions and the Right Questions
Published July 14, 2009 @ 08:04AM PT
"A black board, in every school house, is as indispensably necessary as a stove or fireplace; and in large schools several of them might be useful."
"Slates are as necessary as black boards, and even more so. But they are liable to be broken, it will be said, as to render it expensive to parents to keep their children supplied with them."
"But are not books necessary at all, when the pupils are furnished with slates? I may be asked. Not for a large proportion of the children who attend our summer schools, nor for some of them who attend in the winter. To such I believe books are not only useless, but on the whole, worse than useless. As they advance in years, however, they may be indulged with a book, now and then, as a favor. Such favor will not be esteemed a light thing; and will come in time, to be sought more frequently, and with more and more earnestness."
"At first, it will be well for the small portion of each day in which very young pupils are allowed to have slates, to let them use them much in the way they please. Some will make one thing, some another. What they make is of comparatively little consequence, provided they attend, each to his own business, and do not interfere with that of others."
In 1842 William A. Alcott, a now forgotten member of that legendary American family of letters, wrote a series of articles for the Connecticut Common School Journal, asking teachers across America to make use of the newest educational technology - the black board and the student slate. Well, it wasn't really new. West Point had been using these for instruction since at least 1820, but then, as now, schools were slow to adopt new ideas.
But in the 1840s everything in communication was changing. Wood pulp based paper and the rotary printing press had created the penny newspaper, an entirely new way of spreading news - and often gossip. The telegraph had arrived creating the revolutionary concept of instantaneous communication across great distances. And the world itself was shrinking as steamboats and railroads rushed humans from place to place at unheard of speeds.
These new technologies spawned new forms of writing. Authors such as Charles Dickens began serializing fiction for the masses - one no longer needed to buy expensive books and sit in that big leather chair. Writers even created the first blogs - think of American Notes. Others, people like Horace Greeley, were redefining journalism.
The world was changing, and certain people, led by Alcott, were desperately trying to drag the schoolhouse into the present.
The Question
Then, as now, there was furious opposition. Alcott admitted that he was seen as being "against books." He was perceived as disruptive. He was already forcing schools to buy costly new furnishings (individual student desks and chairs, to replace tables and benches), and now he was advocating a radical change in how teaching took place.
Then, as now, the wrong question was being asked. In 1842 the doubters wondered what these new technologies could do for schools as they existed. Today, educators and policy makers constantly wonder what computers, mobile phones, and social networking will do for a curriculum largely unchanged since 1910.
That was the wrong question then, and it is the wrong question now. The right question is, what can schools, what can education, contribute to these new technologies?
Just as in 1842, just as in Socrates' time when literacy appeared, the technologies of information and communication have changed radically this decade - the ways in which humans learn about their world have changed radically, and schools will either help their students learn to navigate that new world, or they will become completely irrelevant.
How you learned doesn't matter at all
If you are a teacher, a parent, an administrator, or the President of the United States, I do not care how or what you learned in school. Or, let me put it this way, your experience in school, or in sitting with your mom studying books in the wee hours of the morning, is completely irrelevant to any discussion of the education of today's students.
Maybe worse than irrelevant. Maybe dangerous. The belief that "your" experience is relevant leads to a nightmare loop. Students who behave, and learn, most like their teachers do the best in classrooms. Teachers see this reflection as proof of their own competence - "The best students are just like me." And thus all who are "different" in any way - race, class, ability, temperament, preferences - are left out of the success story.
The majority of our students do "poorly" in school, do not achieve their potential in school, do not enjoy education. Doing it "the old way," utilizing the old tools, ensures that they never will.
Mobile phones, computers everywhere, hypertext, social networking, collaborative cognition (from Wikipedia on up), Google, text-messaging, Twitter, audiobooks, digital texts, text-to-speech, speech recognition, flexible formatting - these are not "add ons" to the world of education, they are the world of education. This is how humans in this century talk, read, communicate, learn. And learning to use these technologies effectively, efficiently, and intelligently must be at the heart of our educational strategies. These technologies do something else - by creating a flexibility and set of choices unprecedented in human communication - they "enable" a vast part of the population which earlier media forms disabled.
Back in Socrates' time it was all about the information you could remember. With this system very, very few could become "educated." In the ‘Gutenberg era' it was all about how many books you could read and how fast you could decode alphabetical text; this let a few more reach that ‘educated' status - about 35% if you trust all those standardized tests to measure "proficiency."
But now it is all about how you learn to find information, how you build your professional and personal networks, how you learn, how to learn - because learning must be continuous. None of this eliminates the need for a base of knowledge - the ability to search, to ask questions, requires a knowledge base, but it dramatically alters both how that knowledge base is developed, and what you need to do with it. This paradigm opens up the ranks of the "educated" in ways inconceivable previously.
Technology is NOT something invented after you were born
Technology is everything humans have created. Books are technology - a rather complex and expensive one actually, for holding and transmitting human knowledge. The schoolroom is technology - the desks, chairs, blackboards, schedule, calendar, paper, pens, and pencils. These are not "good" or "bad," but at this point, they are simply outdated.
Yes, we still have stone carvers. Yes, we still have calligraphers. But we no longer teach students to chase the duck, pluck the feather, and cut the quill. We no longer teach Morse Code. We no longer teach the creation of illuminated manuscripts.
Now we must give up teaching that ink-on-paper is the primary information source. It is not. We must give up insisting that students learn "cursive" writing. Instead, they must learn to text on a Blackberry and dictate intelligibly to their computer. We must toss out our "keyboarding" classes and encourage students to discover their own best ways to input data. We must abandon much of Socrates' memorization and switch to engagement with where data is stored. We must abandon the one-way classroom communication system, be it the lecture or use of the "clicker," and teach with conversation and through modeling learning itself. We must lose the idea that "attention" means students staring at a teacher, or that "attendance" means being in the room, and understand all the differing ways humans learn best. We must stop separating subjects rigidly and adopt the contemporary notion of following knowledge where it leads us.
And we need to start by understanding that we are preparing students for the world that is their future, not the world that is our past.
- Ira Socol
essential related reading from Dr. Jonathan Becker of Virginia Commonwealth University on technology and leadership in education.
You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs" education at SpeEdChange. You can find my books on Amazon.com
Counting the Origins of Failure
Published July 13, 2009 @ 12:05AM PT
If education in the United States of the 21st Century is failing, that failure has been built over a very long time. And I do not think that it can be “fixed” in any meaningful way unless people understand that the failures we see today are our system working exactly as it was intended to.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Our American public education system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It is separating “winners” from “losers” and it is reinforcing our economic gap. The system was designed in the 1840s and at the turn of the 20th Century to separate society into a vast majority of minimally trained industrial workers and a small, educated elite. It was designed to enforce White, Protestant, Middle-Class, “Typically-abled” standards on an increasingly diverse American population. A few blessed children in each generation who met those standards might move up in society. The rest would be consigned to low wage manual labor. It was designed to ensure that the children of the elites had the opportunities they needed to remain the elite. Everything about the system – from the way schools are funded, to the way standards are created, to the system of tests, to our peculiar form of college admissions, to our notions of disability – was created to meet the employment goals of the United States from the mid 19th Century to the mid 20th Century.
Unfortunately we are 50 years past that historic moment, and we are no longer happy with the results.
But if you want different results you will not get there through changing teachers, or changing managers, or expecting more from students. You can only change the results by changing the system itself.
That means changing everything, from the buildings to the timetable, from the calendar to the notion of age-based grades, from the idea of classroom competition to the furniture, from the accepted sense of “paying attention” to the purpose of teachers. All of that contributes to the “failures” we see today because all of that was designed from the start to create those failures.
The design
American education was largely designed in two bursts of change. In the 20 years before the American Civil War writers such as William Alcott and Henry Barnard largely defined the classroom and the school. Alcott swapped out benches and long tables for desks and chairs with backs, and introduced reluctant American teachers to the newest information technology – the chalkboard and individual student slateboard. Barnard, jumping on the “Prussian Model” bandwagon (industrializing America was deeply enamored at the time of all the efficiency ideas coming from Berlin, including school* and university design), designed the multi-classroom school building for the new idea of age-based grades. He told teachers to put the alphabet charts above those new chalkboards, to put the flag to “stage right” of the teacher’s desk, and pointed out that the design of the school’s grounds, entrances, and corridors, should control student behavior.
In the 20 years beginning in 1890, the systems of the 1840s were made efficient. Now there were not just age-based grades but discrete subjects. Not just days in school but specific moments devoted to single subjects. Not just assessments but state-wide tests which enforced classroom conformity. American education was no longer viewed as craft or social responsibility, but as one more example of mass production.
Age-based grades were the perfect fit for the new industrial age. The raw material (students) would be pulled in at one end, and through repeated “stampings” would emerge eight years later as compliant workers and citizens. Quality checks at the end of each year would assess whether that raw material was defective or not. If detective, a stamping would be repeated, if that did not work, the student would be discarded. This filtered the population effectively for the employment needs of the 19th Century. Most never made it through the whole process, and very, very few would emerge at the end of eight years considered ready for further polishing (high school completion was rare well into the 20th Century). Premium “raw materials” – the children of the elite – were obviously not treated this way. They were hand-formed by tutors or the teachers at private academies. This assured that the American aristocracy would maintain their position.
We’re still there
This theory of education, as the equivalent of industrial processing, remains dominant. Everything about “accountability” – the chant of both the left and the right these days, is based in this. Yes, it has always been controversial. Many in 19th Century America resisted giving up the “One Room Schoolhouse” with its multiage grouping of students, its individualized instruction, its peer-to-peer instruction, and its acceptance of students who entered at any point and moved at their own pace. And before the Reagan era washed in a new age of educational conservatism, many public schools were experimenting with less emphasis on age as the determiner of what should be learned. But if any experiments survived Reagan, No Child Left Behind, with its insistence that every student learn at the exact same rate, cemented the industrial process legally as national policy.
And this is the source of most of our failure. Age-based grades and the industrial model ensure that in every classroom, at least one-third of students will be bored, and one-third will be behind. Age-based grades create disabilities, by insisting that there is a “norm” for every age, and labeling those not “there” yet with pathological descriptions. Call it whatever euphemism you desire, but the idea is always “retardation” – by very definition. Age-based grades – by creating rigid “norms” – damage those from differing ethnic groups and cultures. Age-based grades destroy those entering school from below middle-class backgrounds, since we are all well aware that poverty is the number one predictor of “starting behind” – and if you start behind, even if all schools were equal, age-based grades all but guarantee that you will fail at every step.
And every “grade level expectation” published by every state, and every achievement test, reinforces this system of failure.
So we continue to stamp, and we continue to filter. Oh, we’ve put in many more inspection points, and we’ve put in many more stages of remedial processing, but nothing has changed. And when the failure inevitably occurs, we do what every industrial manager does, we blame the raw material (“our students are not prepared for school”) or we blame the industrial workers (“the problem,” as Bill Gates, Sr. put it on NPR, “is the teachers.”).
America needs to decide
Our complaint now, wrongly, whether the education secretary is appointed by a right-wing ideologue like George W. Bush or a liberal former community organizer like Barack Obama, is a complaint about a system which we think does not work well enough. If you believe that then you will look at management (Charter Schools), or inspection (high-stakes testing), or replacing workers with industrial robots (scripted instruction, Teach for America).
The problem is that the system is doing what it was designed to do: sending the children of our elite to Ivy League universities and sending the children of our poor out to the streets. We see it as a “problem” only because the employment profile has changed, so instead of dumping those filtered out into factories and mines, we dump them into crime and nothingness.
If we want a different result, it is the system – not the students, not the teachers – not even really the management – which must change. These groups, after all, are just humans, humans responding to the system they are forced to survive in.
The educational system, and all the structures created to support that system – the buildings, furniture, time schedules, tests – are the problem. Decades of tinkering with the details have not altered the results at all, because those results are a creation of the system itself. So if Americans want change, it is time for them to insist on real change.
- Ira Socol
Over the next few days I’ll be looking at the structures of this system. Please share your thoughts along the way. And many thanks to Clay Burell for this opportunity to speak to all of you at change.org
You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs" education at SpeEdChange. You can find my books on Amazon.com
* - "The adoption of the Prussian model required the creation of a vast hierarchical bureaucracy of administrators, which in turn led to the abandonment of the one-room schoolhouses, the consolidation of the public schools, and the strict segregation of children according to age." Hardaway, R. (1995). America Goes to School: Law, Reform, and Crisis in Public Education
