Still digging through my stack of reading that I neglected, and this Bob Herbert column from the Times last week bubbled up.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

I think that the lack of discussion about education in this election cycle is what is depressing me most about the state of change right now. We’ll be watching reruns of Paula Abdul’s “meltdown” on Idol last night for at least another week, or wasting even more time on Rev. Wright, but the idea of having a serious sit down about education that involves the interested parties (read: EVERYONE) just can’t happen.

I will say however, that if we are going to measure the success of education in America by how many people can accurately date the Civil War or identify Adolf Hitler, we may not be ready for the real conversation that has to take place.

From the “And These Teachers Got Hired How? Department” comes this downright scary quote in a Washington Post article on teachers with Facebook/MySpace sites:

In some cases, teachers apparently didn’t mind that their Web sites were raunchy and public — at least until a reporter called. Alina Espinosa, a teacher at Clopper Mill Elementary School in Montgomery, had written on her Facebook page in the “About Me” section: “I only have two feelings: hunger and lust. Also, I slept with a hooker. Be jealous. I like to go onto Jdate [an online dating service for Jewish people] and get straight guys to agree to sleep with me.”

Asked about the page, Espinosa said: “I never thought about parents and kids [seeing it] before. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Um…that kind of says it all, I think.

So who’s to blame? The schools that hired them? Their preservice programs? Their parents? Society? Technology? Or…

A couple of moments from my short hiatus have been occupying my thoughts the last few days. The first was the opportunity to listen to and later briefly meet Sir Ken Robinson at an arts conference I presented at in New Jersey two weeks ago. The other was listening to the final presentations of my Seton Hall Ed.D. students as they talked about their technology journeys this year.

What strikes me is how little if anything seems to be changing in public schools, despite what I think are some pretty compelling cases for change that are out there. (I know, I know…back to this again.) Let me tell you a couple of stories.

A building principal at a small public school in upstate New York told us at Seton Hall that just this year, when she wanted to begin using a flash drive on the computer at her school, she was told she couldn’t by the IT person in the district who was afraid that doing so would cause all sorts of havoc on the network. Finally, after some begging, the IT person agreed to open up one computer in the library for all flash drive use in the school. And not for kids.

Another building principal read a letter that his IT person wrote to his board that included a bulleted list of reasons why the district should not pursue the purchase of laptops for the school, everything from laptops are just a craze, to laptops get stolen, to the expense of shipping and handling . Not only that, but no school in his district can move ahead of any other school when it comes to technology. So if one school wants laptops, but another school doesn’t, then neither school (or any other school in the district, for that matter) can get them.

(Of course, there is the flipside as well, the districts that have the ability (or the connections) to create media centers and mobile media labs that will immerse their kids in the content creation and media literacies that they’ll need to compete. The gulf between the two is striking.)

What’s shocking in these stories is that it’s not just about control of the technologies in the classroom with students. It’s about control of top administrators in their own personal use of technology. I mean, if we’re just now letting principals use flash drives in their schools, how long will it take to get to where kids and teachers are creating and connecting? And what, in the end, does all of this control, which no doubt washes down to the students, teach them about using self control? That’s the hardest part of this for me to get to at times. The only ways our kids will learn to navigate the world is if we give them the tools and opportunities to use them in their practice. How can they learn that self-control if we’re always controlling everything? What a horrible lesson.

In his keynote, Sir Ken said something along the lines of “we have to stop talking about school reform and start thinking about school ‘transform’.” And that transformation has a lot to do with ceding control of so much of what we currently do. He also noted that instead of an industrial model, we need an “agrarian model,” one where instead of standardizing every output, we nourish the environment to allow each to grow at it’s own, most effective pace. The picture he painted looked so different from the pictures being painted by those administrators. Hard to see when, if ever, the two become one.

So after a couple of weeks of info-learning fatigue, I’m feeling like I’m on the verge of crawling my way up out of the pit. Not sure I’m fully there yet, and the fact that I’m staring at one night at home in the next two weeks in the face (10 days in Australia upcoming), I’m not sure when I’ll be fully healed. But taking a couple of weeks basically “off” has helped.

Funny thing is, I didn’t miss it. In fact, it was pretty peaceful to not be a part of the conversation, to not really care what I was wasn’t learning. I’d echo a lot of the reflection that Jeff gives to his most recent purposeful unplugging, even though I just lapsed into mine. (He scheduled his; my brain felt like jello.) As Jeff says, “There are days I’m tired of being tied to technology.” And I would add, there are days I’m tired of learning. I used to feel more guilt about that. These days, much less. And I’ve been thinking about this classroom a bit differently of late. It’s been feeling a bit competitive, and in a weird (and somewhat ironic) way, a bit too friendly. It’s a much more intense place than it was seven years ago.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t stop learning. Not at all. It’s just that my learning times were scheduled. A couple of day long sessions with teachers learning their fears. Teaching two days at Seton Hall to school administrators, learning how difficult their technology lives at school are. Twelve basketball games in two weekends, learning a lot about my kids, about how resilient they are, about how hard they’re willing to work, and how different it is to watch my own children compete as opposed to the thousands that I had coached over the years. A day at the Global Green Expo (Wendy’s site design, btw) learning how dire things really are. And much more stuff that the network simply cannot provide.

But that scheduled-ness was the key. (Funny how opposite that sounds from Jeff.) It felt soooo goooooood to be out of the “grab-15-minutes-here-and-there” mode of learning that my life has become these days. To some extent, it’s hard to avoid that these days. But the problem is there are never enough 15 or 30 or 60 minute chunks these days, are there?

I did manage a Tweet about this a couple of days ago, something along the lines of “how long has it been since you totally turned off for a week?” I got about 30 replies. Most couldn’t remember when. Many were wistful of such an occurrence.

So yeah, learning can happen 24/7/365 these days. Don’t have to be connected to do it though. No news there I know, just a friendly reminder to myself.

Before I pull myself the last couple of steps up from my recent blogging funk, a quick item from the “Things I Wished I’d Known for the Last Two Years Department.” My major, major, major frustration with Google Reader has always been what I thought was the inability for me to mark a post “unread.” As with my practice in Firefox when I leave like 87 tabs open, by work flow is such that I just like to keep alive all the potentially good stuff I scan through when I don’t really have time to read it. The “Add a Star” feature in Reader has never done the job, and I have been staring at the stupid “Mark as Read” button (which I have never understood the purpose of) wishing I could turn it into “Mark as UNread.” No amount of staring helped.

So today, I find out all you have to do is hit the “M” key on a post to keep it active in Google Reader. I know, I know…I should have spent more time on the shortcuts page.

Not sure what it says that my life suddenly feels a whole bunch better right now. Sad, I know.

From CNN:

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. “Arrested.”

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted that he was being held.

No wonder we take kids’ cell phones away from them in school…

From “Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace” (600+ page .pdf) comes this passage by Robert Steele in his essay “Creating a Smart Nation:”

Published knowledge is old knowledge: The art of intelligence in the 21st Century will be less concerned with integrating old knowledge and more concerned with using published knowledge as a path to exactly the right source or sources that can create new knowledege tailored to a new situation, in real time.”

While this is in the context of national security and intelligence, I think it’s applicable to the ways in which we think about networked learning, which is why we need to publish what we know and share it widely.

I’m in one of those phases where I’m reading about six books at once, just grazing through ideas that catch me, diving into chapters out of order, etc. Might be an indication of just how much the online world has affected my reading habits. Sometimes I feel like my brain starts to twitch if I turn too many pages in a row. Sometimes.

Anyway, picked up True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo and got pulled in right away. The thesis here is that Stephen Colbert’s idea of “truthiness” isn’t that far off, that “new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact.” (Does that scare you as much as it does me?) Manjoo, a blogger at Salon, dives into the whole “Swift Boat” story at the outset, and he provides some really fascinating research that suggests that liberals and conservatives have very different tendencies when it comes to believing what they see and hear. (The short version: conservatives are much more willing to consume media that “toes the ideological line” (19), and they are more apt to “steer clear of information that contradicts what [they] think [they] know” (30). Guess you’ll believe that if you want to, huh?)

For as much as I love what’s happening now in terms of our ability to produce and share information, I keep reminding myself to pay good attention to the huge challenges here as well. As Manjoo says,

While new technology eases connections between people, it also, paradoxically, facilitates a closeted view of the world, keeping us coiled tightly with those that share our ideas.

Nothing really new in that statement; we talk about the echo chamber all the time. But the stories he tells here are on some level pretty scary in terms of the much more entrenching impact the chamber has on us all, and I have to say the challenges we face as educators to prepare our kids for it all feel really daunting.

Anyway, to the money quote, so far at least. While Manjoo discusses the reams of research that suggest that our own ideas of truth are defined through our interactions with other people, what’s interesting is the role that physical proximity, or propinquity has played in those interactions. We become friends with, and in large measure, marry people who at some point share our physical space, whether in an office or an apartment building or even classroom. But now, the fact that these technologies are freeing us from propinquity is what we find to be so exhilarating about it. And, what is so problematic about it.

The Web, talk radio, cable news–they connect us to others who are like us but are far away. They provide a haven from the oppressiveness of the nearby. Instead of getting together with people who are close to us physically, now we can get together with people who are close to us ideologically, psychically, emotionally, aesthetically. In other words, rather than through propinquity, we find our social groups nowadays through selective exposure. And it’s in that fact that the world splits apart: it’s here that you see why new possibilities to choose what you read, what you watch, and what you listen to can fracture the culture’s sense of what’s real and what’s not. Selective exposure is not important only because it lets you choose the information that suits you; it’s important because it lets you choose people who suit you (54).

A lot of this connects directly with what Ulises Mejias has been saying in terms of how our concepts of nearness and farness are changing. Both point to something that is obviously worth our attention as educators. It’s a huge shift that has huge ramifications, and it’s not hard to see a number of examples playing out in this current election cycle. The “debate” about human activity contributing to global warming is a great example. The truth is there, if we want to believe it, yet it feels like a whole heck of a lot of people choose not to.

So, how do we guard ourselves against the real dangers of “selective exposure?” And, more importantly, how do we address these issues as a part of the the literacies we teach our kids in the curriculum so they can accurately assess what is real and what is not?

I’ve been doing some informal research of late in my travels, asking some of the principals and administrators that I meet the following question: When you have some applicants lined up for a teaching vacancy, do you “Google” them? Seems a pretty large majority say that yes, they do take some time to see what a standard Google search might pull up about a potential hire. And some even admit to doing a cursory MySpace search to see what comes up. In most cases, they say that the intent is primarily to find out if there is anything negative that surfaces. Almost all of them admit, however, that finding positive things about their applicants, as in portfolios or collaborations or even social sites, does or could make a positive difference in the process.

But then I ask them something along these lines: So if you are Googling people who you might want to teach at your school, what are you doing to insure the kids in your classrooms are “Googled well” when they go for their own interviews? And I don’t just mean telling them NOT to post certain things online. I mean what are you doing to help students shape their online portfolios so that when their future employers or future mates run the search, what they find is not just a lack of negatives but a potential plethora of positives? Not surprisingly, the answer is basically “not much.”

If we know that it’s becoming more and more commonplace to use the Web to assess backgrounds and “social capital,” and we’re doing it in our own hiring processes, when are we going to make that connection in terms of how it relates to our kids’ futures?

Would love to hear what your schools do in terms of doing “background” searches on potential teachers.

(Photo “Just Expressing Her Opinion” by Cayusa.)

I have a good friend who teaches in a graduate preservice program at a nearby university. He related this story from one of his students. The names have been changed to protect the, um…well, you know.

This week I subbed at “Normal” High School where I did my student teaching. I was in the room with my cooperating teacher and we were catching up. She was checking her email and received this message from one of her students. It read: “Hi Mrs. Smith. This is John. I had a question about the Hamlet homework you assigned. I am texting you from my cell phone in [in-school suspension].” The school has a simple cell phone policy: “No cell phones or text messaging during class.” The policy holds true when you are in [in-school suspension] because it is on school grounds. You are in [in-school suspension] to do school work, that is it; no socializing, no talking, no sleeping, no listening to I-pods, and no texting. Anyway, my cooperating teacher was appalled. She printed out the email, brought it to her supervisor, and apparently someone went to the [in-school suspension] room to retrieve John’s phone. He refused to give it to the teacher, which landed him in [in-school suspension] for another 2 days for insubordination. In the end, what does this all mean? John never received the help he needed for his homework.

Oy.

What, me worry?

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

Oy.

I’m reading another book that I want to blog more about at some point, but I thought I’d throw out a snip that might start some discussion. (Watch…it won’t.) Axel Bruns just published Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, and while I just can’t get comfortable with that word he assigns to the concept of creating and consuming all at the same time, he frames a lot of his points just differently enough to make it pretty compelling reading. Like here:

…teachers are now no longer positioned as experts simply by virtue of their accredidation as experts, outside of the pordusage process itself; instead they come to be seen as experts because of their role as leaders of the produsage community. In other words, the argument that they should be respected by their students is made no longer on the basis of their role in the academic hierarchy, their positions and titles, but by their established track record as produsers themselves.

Again, for some reason, that word doesn’t work for me, but the concept that we might at some point begin to value and respect the ability to model the participatory literacies that these tools require as much if not more than the degree on the wall is worth considering, I think. What if we assessed teachers in large part on their abilities to create and consume content effectively as co-learners and co-creators with their students, and to share that work in transparent ways?

This month’s Edutopia magazine has a pretty comprehensive series on rethinking assessment written by Grace Rubenstein that picks up on my question here yesterday in some provocative ways. (Full disclosure: I sit on the national advisory board for Edutopia’s parent organization, the George Lucas Education Foundation.) It’s heartening to read passages like this:

“What we want to assess is how well prepared people are to learn new things in a nonsequestered environment where they have access to technology tools and social networks,” says Bransford. Compared to typical standardized tests, for which seeking new information would be considered cheating, he says this model is “way more motivating, much more interesting for students, and much more valid in terms of what people really need to do when they get out of school.”

That phrase “nonsequestered environment” really catches me. We don’t stay in classrooms all of our lives, do we? How do kids do when the curriculum isn’t delivered, the homework isn’t assigned, and the work is for real purposes? What will they do when they are faced with a question they don’t know the answer to? How will they work it? How will they tap into their networks, if they have them? How will they assess the information they get back and assess their own process?

That would be some amazingly important work to watch and evaluate, wouldn’t it?

A new report about inner city graduation rates (.pdf) paints a pretty sobering picture, to put it mildly:

Our analysis finds that graduating from high school in the America’s largest cities amounts, essentially, to a coin toss. Only about one-half (52 percent) of students in the principal school systems of the 50 largest cities complete high school with a diploma.

In Cleveland, Indianapolis and Detroit, the numbers are 35%, 31% and 25% respectively.

Amazing.

I worked for almost 22 years in a district that graduated over 90% of its students, sent over three-quarters to college, and by just about every measure was and is an amazing school by traditional standards. I’ve worked for the last two years going around the country speaking at over 200 schools and districts and conferences and I have come to realize very quickly just how much of an outlier my former career was. While I haven’t done a lot of work with inner city schools, I’ve done enough to see that without question, there remains an incredible degree of inequity between the haves and have nots in this country that has little to do with technology. This latest report is just one more indication: the system is broken.

We’re failing millions of kids.