If I could put in a few phrases what I took away from this year’s Educon experience it was this:

Stop complaining. Be the change. Love your students and do well by them. If that includes technology, so be it.

And it was those first two that stood out, for me at least. I heard variations on those themes more in the last two days than the first two Educons combined. Maybe it was because there were more people this year. Maybe because we’re finally getting tired of talking about change, about waiting for something or someone else to change. Or maybe because when you get into a room of people who are seriously reflecting on their own practice and their own schools, getting fired up and committed to action is just easier to do. I kept thinking during the sessions I attended that if I could start a school picking my teachers from those who were in the room, it could be a pretty amazing place.

But while most in attendance want to change the classrooms and the schools they work in, that vision of change is still amorphous. Jon Becker wrote about that fact pre Educon, and I hope he follows up with more thoughts post. I mean David Warlick and others were talking about creating a new story for education like four years ago and we still don’t seem to have a handle on it. It’s the tease of having the conference at SLA where you get to spend a couple days in a school that probably comes as close to what most of want our schools to be. All sorts of tweets along the lines of “I’d kill to work here” were popping up in the stream, as if SLA were out of reach at their own schools.

But do we all want an SLA? I know that I would want the culture of learning and the singular focus on kids, something that I don’t see very much in my travels. I mean I’m sure that SLA teachers have their complaints, but their good fortune is to work in a culture of teaching and learning that represents no new vision of schooling as much as it does leadership that can successfully navigate the current minefields that work against that vision. What I’m finding more and more as I visit schools that are getting more serious about “change” is that they have someone at the top who is willing to focus on the learning and not on the other crap. And you can pick these people out in a heartbeat; they are leaders AND learners, and they’re not ashamed to share the driving questions they have about their schools with those around them. They have a passion not for making AYP or top schools lists as much as they do supporting their teachers to be learners, allowing them to look at their own teaching as a deep learning experience and share that learning with others. I see those types of leaders very rarely. But more and more this year I heard, “so what?” I heard “you [teachers] have more power than you know.” I heard “It’s too important to wait for permission.” Create your own vision for change that you think is best for your students and implement it. Love the struggle. Love your kids. Lead. What choice do you have?

One of the things that makes Educon special is the structure: these really are conversations, not presentations. I don’t go to sessions to learn as much as I do to think, to contribute, because that’s where the best learning takes place. But I’m wondering if (and I hope to talk more about this later in the context of my own session) if next year we can call the sessions “conversations/actions” or some other phrase or term that captures that “be the change” idea. We’ve been talking about this stuff for so long; maybe 2010 can be the year we really start creating a clearer 2020 vision for our schools with more of a roadmap of how to get there.

(Cross posted to the PLP Network blog)

One of my favorite things that Sheryl says when she talks about the challenges that schools face right now is that this generation of kids in our schools is the first not to have a choice about technology. Most of us grew up in a time when technology was an add on, and for many of us, we still see it as a choice, especially in education. (Just the other day I was at a meeting of about 25 school leaders and teachers to discuss how social learning tools can be infused into an inquiry based curriculum and only one person was using technology to take notes…me.) I look at my own kids and I know that technology will be a huge part of their learning lives because a) they want it to be and b) they’ll be expected to be savvy users of the devices of their day to communicate, create and collaborate (among other things.) They’re not going to be able to “opt out.”

That no choice theme is borne out by a new Kaiser Foundation report that came out this week. The title sums things up pretty well: “Daily Media Use Among Children and Teens Up Dramatically From Five Years Ago”. And here is the money quote:

Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

Anyway you slice that, kids are immersed in media, and that immersion is having huge effect on the way they see the world and on the way they learn. And while most of that media consumption is still tied to more “traditional” forms like television, the computer now takes up, on average, almost 1.5 hours and it is the fastest growing medium on the list. It lead the director of the study to say:

The bottom line is that all these advances in media technologies are making it even easier for young people to spend more and more time with media. It’s more important than ever that researchers, policymakers and parents stay on top of the impact it’s having on their lives.

It’s interesting to me that she didn’t mention educators in that list of folks who need to be paying attention, because more than parents and policymakers, we’re the ones who need to help kids make learning sense of their time with media of all types. And I emphasize that learning piece of it because all too often those opportunities and being blocked and filtered away in schools instead of made a basic part of the curriculum. Right now, most schools are making what I think is a bad choice by not immersing their students into these online learning environments which are creating all sorts of opportunities for us to learn. In doing so, they’re implicitly saying that technology is an option. It’s not.

Probably my favorite quote from Seth Godin’s book Tribes is this:

Leadership is a choice. It’s the choice not to do nothing.

We may not feel comfortable in a world filled with technology. We may not like the way it’s changing things and, even more, how fast it’s changing things. We may not like the way it pushes against much of what we’ve been doing in schools for eons. But our kids don’t have a choice. And if we’re going to fulfill our roles as teachers in our kids lives, neither do we.

It’s no secret that Lawrence Lessig is one of my heroes in the way that he takes on meaningful efforts to change the world for (what I think, at least) good and his ability to articulate those efforts in compelling ways. It’s also no secret that over the past year I’ve become more disillusioned with the government here in the US. Mostly it’s a frustration about how nothing changes (or will change), how money is the motivator for everything that happens, and how much it feels like we have lost the best of our democracy to special interests. I was a huge Obama supporter; today, notsomuch. I’m totally surprised and disappointed by the whole Race to the Top agenda. I really hoped he would have done better by the kids in this country who desperately need a different vision for “education” (even though they may not know it.) But that said, this really isn’t about a party or a person as much as it is about a system that is plainly broken. Sounds familiar.

Anyway, I’ve been a supporter (both as a contributor of money and time) of Lessig’s Change Congress agenda since it was first announced a couple of years ago. And I think his latest video is worth the seven minutes it takes to watch it since it paints a compelling picture of what’s wrong and one solution, at least, that we can seriously consider supporting. My own feeling is that while we have a lot of serious challenges that we’re facing in this country, none of them are going to be fixed in the long term until we get money out of politics.

One last thing…I’m hopeful that a movement like Change Congress can actually bring together millions of people to actually create change. It would be quite an inspiration for a similar movement to change education.

Here’s the video:

So this might totally fall flat on its face, but I’m wondering how all you  out there who are deeply invested in social learning spaces might respond to this unlikely but hopefully compelling scenario:

Imagine for a moment that high schools as educational places vanish from the earth. How would you go about educating the 14-18 year olds in your lives? What resources, programs, strategies, assessments would you use? Or what would we need to create in order for them to become “educated” in the current sense? What would that world look like?

Could it even be done?

A few days ago, Gary Stager tweeted me this link in the LA Times about the demise of journalism and freelance writing primarily due to everything being, well, “free” on the Internet. The subhead read, in part, “the well-written story is in danger of becoming scarce.” Gary’s Tweet read “This is disastrous for our culture and democracy…Web 2.0 won’t solve this problem.” And to the first point, at least, I think he’s right. The loss of quality reporting and thoughtful writing has to be a concern, especially for a society that by all indications is becoming more and more disengaged intellectually. (Read this David Brooks column and the accompanying comments and any of the magazine covers at your supermarket checkout stand for evidence.) But regarding the last part of Gary’s tweet, I’m stuck with two reactions. First, who says Web 2.0 won’t solve this? And second,  what’s the alternative?

I mean sure, we can wring our hands and lament the slipping away of what many of us older types (ugh) feel are the best parts of our culture, the parts (good journalism included) that preserved and promoted democracy and citizenship and art by setting high standards and celebrating the complexity of the world. But all the hand wringing in the world is not going to slow down the train of participatory culture, this place where 4.5 years of mostly insipid YouTube video is being uploaded in the next 24 hours. Whether we see the Web as beast or feast, it’s long past the moment that anyone can argue it away on the grounds that decency and civility and intellectual engagement are being lost. And to me, at least, that leaves us with how do we make the most of it? How do we (and it’s not  “can we?” because I believe we can) take this huge disruptive force that is the Web and turn it into something that celebrates culture, promotes and supports the best of our democratic ideals, and improves the world in ways that maybe we can’t yet imagine?

Frankly, what’s our choice?

Clay Shirky writes compellingly about this in his most recent Edge piece, which, btw, is one of over 160 such pieces encompassing 130,000 words from some of the smartest folks out there that you can curl up with in front of a nice fire on a cold winter afternoon (and night.) I love this snip:

Unfortunately for us, though, the intellectual fate of our historical generation is unlikely to matter much in the long haul. It is our misfortune to live through the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race, a misfortune because surplus always breaks more things than scarcity. Scarcity means valuable things become more valuable, a conceptually easy change to integrate. Surplus, on the other hand, means previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out.

We are in many ways “freaking out” right now about how these things are changing. And, specifically to Gary’s point, Shirky offers this:

This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.

I won’t speak for Gary, but I would guess by his Tweets and comments over the years that that comes close to how he and others feel. But it’s the next line that I think sums up the choice we have in front of us pretty clearly:

So it falls to us to make sure that isn’t all that happens.

While the “us” there is certainly each and every one of us, there’s no doubt that’s a bar that is especially being set for educators and for parents. I’m convinced this doesn’t have to be disastrous. But I’m also convinced that we’re not working hard enough as a society to make sure that we find and promote the real intellectual value of these tools in literate ways. Because they exist, and because, like it or not, we’re the ones who in Shirky’s words have to set the norms for their use. I love the way he ends his essay:

The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of ‘comes from everyone’ and ‘goes everywhere.’) We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.

Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy.

I know, I know. I’ve sipped the Shirky Kool-Aid pretty hard. But we do have a choice here, let’s not forget that. I don’t think any of us in this network sees the Internet as a place with just “a modicum of educational material” in a sea of flotsam and jetsam. I hope we see it more as that “communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change” because if we don’t, if we don’t figure out ways to start setting those norms for our kids and others, then we surely will be on the precipice of disaster.

No pressure.

My favorite conference of the year, Educon 2.2, is only a few weeks away, and I wanted to post my “conversation” here to see if there might be some…um…conversation about how to best make the, ah, conversation valuable at the conference. (NOTE: I had originally intended to lead a conversation on “Greening Education” but I’m switching this new topic in.) So if you have any thoughts about the topic or about how to add value to the live session (which will be streamed), please let me know.

Title: The “Decoupling” of Education and School: Where do We Begin?

What does this new design look like? What are the big questions regarding learning, teaching and schooling that we need to begin to address? How will the roles of elementary schools and high schools begin to evolve? How will we address the divide issues that these opportunities outside of school create? And how do we personally plan for these changes as learners, parents and teachers? If we agree, perhaps we can create a concrete list of starting points for these conversations to begin and continue in schools.

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Ten years from now, the next decade will be drawing to a close. My daughter will be 22, my son 20. I’ll be…older. It’s setting up to be a pretty important 10 years on a lot of fronts. If you believe the science, which I do, it may be the decade that we figure out how to work together to act on climate change and save ourselves (and our kids) from some hellish scenarios. Or not. If you believe, as I do, that the American political system is broken, it may be the decade that we take money out of the picture once and for all. Or not. And, if like me you believe that the current structure of the education system in this country (and elsewhere) is fundamentally flawed in preparing students for a life of learning, then this may be the decade real change breaks out. Or not.

I can’t help feeling that if I’m lucky enough to be sitting here blogging 10 years from now and there haven’t been some really big changes in the way we look at living and learning, we’ll have wasted another 10 years talking instead of evolving. And I think if you ask most people who are currently in education what they see things looking like 10 years from now, most wouldn’t paint much of a radically different picture.

I mentioned Allan Collins and Richard Halverson’s new book Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology in my previous post, and now that I’ve finished it, I wonder even more how all of this is going to play out. If you want to get to the crux of the argument in the book, Suchi Grover’s review at Teacher’s College Record does a pretty good job. (Note: Keep in mind, the book is published by Teacher’s College Press.)

Allan Collins and Richard Halverson’s compelling argument for rethinking education may be encapsulated thus: We are not going to fix education by fixing the schools. They are a 19th century invention trying to cope in the 21st century…If schools cannot change fast enough to keep pace with the advances in learning technologies, learning will leave schooling behind. Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology urges education stakeholders to envision a new kind of education that decouples learning and schooling.

That’s obviously a huge statement, that we’re not going to fix education by fixing the schools, and I’ve scarcely stopped thinking about it since I read it. I don’t think there is much question that schools cannot keep pace with what technology affords right now. What’s changing in education is happening outside the school walls with a few exceptions. That’s not to say that schools will cease to exist; obviously they won’t. As the authors write

Schools as we know them will not disappear anytime soon…but the seeds of a new system are beginning to emerge, and they are already beginning to erode the identification of learning with schooling. As these new technologically driven seeds germinate, education will occur in many different, more adaptive venues, and schools will have a narrower role in learning.

So what will that narrower role in learning look like? I think the big question for the next decade is this: In 2020, will schools be seen as just one of many important ways that our kids can become educated? And as a follow up, will there be other ways of “credentialing” what it means to be “educated”? Obviously, there are going to be huge disruptions that go along with a reduced importance of the traditional school model, and there are huge issues around equity and access that will have to be addressed among many others.

I think we’ve spent the last 10 years “tinkering on the edges” with these shifts. No doubt, the next 10 years are going to be pretty painful for schools in particular as we begin to really wake up to what all of this means for our kids’ learning lives. Or not. But even more, i the last 10 years are any indication, I think it’s going to be simply an amazing decade for learning in general.

Can’t wait to wade through it with you.

I always get in this reflective mood at the end of the year. I mean, I tend to do a lot of reflecting throughout the year (especially on planes), but at this point when the pace finally slows down a bit, I get to thinking about what I’ve seen, what I’ve learned, and what it means, if anything. So much of this year has been a blur that it’s probably folly to try to capture it in some understandable way. But I’ve been trying to put some form to what’s changed, both in my own practice and in the larger conversation about schools.

My year can be summed up with less blogging, less online reading, more Tweeting, more PLP, more traveling. I’m feeling less connected to the online conversation, more connected to the on the ground conversation. I’ve met amazing people this year who have shared their successes and struggles, excitement and fears in profound ways. That coupled with our ongoing work with the 800 or so teachers in our PLP cohorts has really led me to a deeper understanding of how difficult these changes are and how ingrained traditional practice continues to be in schools. On balance, for me, it’s been a healthy, albeit difficult shift at times. It’s been a very good year.

But more on my mind for this space right now is what’s changed in terms of the larger conversation in 2009. And I mean changed, not just talked about. I’m in the midst of a great book by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson titled Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology, and they spend about 20 pages writing about why the system is so resistant to change. The bottom line, they say, is that “teaching is an inevitably conservative practice.”

When embedded in institutions that protect instruction from systemic change, a conservative practice is reinforced by a conserving institution. It is difficult for teachers to implement substantially changed programs when they already have dedicated years adapting to what the traditional system of school offers (36).

They discuss three ways that schools deal with innovative technologies. First, they condemn them (see your local AUP), they co-opt them to support tried and true methods and curriculum, and, finally, they marginalize them, creating all of those “tinkering on the edges” initiatives to keep the reform minded happy. All of that resonates in the conversations I’ve had with folks this year. As much as people talk of change, the only stories that really get over the “transform” bar are what’s happening at my old school and from a superintendent in Iowa who told me he was in the process of “Napsterizing” education in his district. (I’m going to write more about both of those after the first of the year.)

So, as a way of taking stock, I’m asking, what’s changed?

I mean really changed in your school? What stories are there of moving wholesale to an inquiry-based curriculum, of real reinvention of assessments, of students participating in global learning networks, learning how to create their own personal networks around their own passions? Or even moving off of paper into a digital reading and writing space? Or moving from a teaching community to a learning community? Or other changes? My sense is that once again, there’s not all that much different today than a year ago.

Love to be proven wrong.

I’ve been thinking a lot again about phones and about the disruption they are already creating for most schools (high schools at least) and about the huge brain shift we’re going to have to through collectively to capture the potential for learning in our kids’ pockets. A few particular items have kind of come together of late that have been pushing the conversation in my head pretty hard.

First, this kinda cute little YouTube video titled “Phone Book.” Not sure who or what it was that led me to it, but it’s worth a quick couple of minutes to watch it.

Now take that concept and mix it with these four ideas:

• Apple’s next iTouch is coming out with 64GB of memory, and the iPhone won’t be too far behind that.
• In the next five years, every phone will be an iPhone. (And let’s not forget that there are already over 100,000 apps for that little sucker, many of them with relevance to the classroom.)
• We’ll soon be seeing what Steve Rubel is calling a “dumb shell” that takes the book idea in that video and creates a netbook sized (at least) keyboard and screen that your phone simply plugs into.
• According to NPR, the Pew Hispanic Center says that there is a definite trend toward phones being chosen over computers as computing devices, especially for those on the wrong end of the current digital divide. (The article makes more sense of that than I just did.)

All of which leads me to ask a whole bunch of questions:

• If at some point in the fairly near future just about every high school kid is going to have a device that connects to the Internet, how much longer can we ask them to stuff it in their lockers at the beginning of the day?
• How are we going to have to rethink the idea that we have to provide our kids a connection? Can we even somewhat get our brains around the idea of letting them use their own?
• At what point do we get out of the business of troubleshooting and fixing technology? Isn’t “fixing your own stuff” a 21st Century skill?
• How are we helping our teachers understand the potentials of phones and all of these shifts in general?

And finally, the big kahuna, are we in the process of transforming (not just revising) our curriculum to work in a world that looks (metaphorically, at least) like this:

I wonder how many educators look at that picture and think “OMG, puhleeeese let me teach in that classroom!” (I suspect not many.) I wonder how many of them already do teach in classrooms that look like that if we consider the technology in kids pockets (or lockers) as the access point. (I suspect, more than you think.) The problem is, and I can guarantee you this, 95% of the curriculum currently being delivered in those classrooms would waste 95% of the potential in the room that we could glean from that access.

All too often we get hung up on the technology question, not the curriculum question. Here in New Jersey, every district has to submit a three year “Technology Plan” and as you can guess, most of them are about how many Smart Boards to install or how wireless access will be expanded. Very, very little of it is about how curriculum changes when we have anytime, anywhere learning with anyone in the world. Why aren’t we planning for that?

So I’m asking. When do we stop trying to fight the inevitable and start thinking about how to embrace it? Or, as Doug Johnson so eloquently suggests, when are we gonna saddle this horse and ride it?

While my trip to Australia this last week and a half was primarily pleasure with my family, I did get a few days to work with teachers in Brisbane and throughout Victoria (a la our PLP cohort there), and I had some great conversations about the state of the education world with some good friends. Since the trip also came on the heels of my annual two-day visit to Skywalker Ranch as a GLEF board member, these last couple of weeks have provided a lot to think about, but between travel and exorbitant internet fees and surfing expeditions, not a lot of time to write. (As usual, these days.)

One thread that seemed to pop up almost regularly throughout those conversations was the idea of “getting it,” as in how do we help school leaders or teachers or parents “get it” when it comes to understanding the shifts that social learning technologies are bringing about, and which group needs to “get it” most, etc. And while there is no doubt that there are still a lot of folks out there who haven’t wrapped their brains around what’s changing and what going to change when it comes to learning and education, what I’ve noticed is different definitions of what “getting it” mean depending on the conversation.

Level 1 seems to be “getting” that there are all these new tools and technologies out there and that we can now publish all sorts of content really easily. And that kids are already using social networks and that these tools are cropping up more and more in classrooms around the world. When I hear the question “How do we help other teachers to “get it?” I think this is what most people are asking. How can they get their colleagues to start incorporating some of these tools in the classroom?

Level 2 takes it a step further and implies that “getting it” means that there is some real change involved in what’s happening right now, that it’s not just about tools, but about connections and building learning networks for ourselves and for our students. I hear this most often in the context of leadership and vision, that the people steering the ship need to “get” that this is more than budgeting for a few more computers and revising the AUP.

Those two levels account for about 95% of the “getting it” conversations I hear. But I wonder if that’s what “getting it” really means? I’m not in any way suggesting that I completely “get it” myself, but there is much to suggest that the talk about tools and even learning networks is not really the end game here at all. That to really “get” what the implications of all of this might be, you have to really be willing to really think differently. That Level 3 is not so much about what happens in our practice or in our classrooms but what happens to our schools. That at a time when learning can be individualized and where creativity and passion are just as important as reading and math, our expectations for the roles of schools in educating our kids have to be more than just playing on the edges.

Each year at the GLEF meeting, George Lucas spends about 45 minutes with us talking about education and answering our questions. What he said this year was in that Level 3 area. To paraphrase, schools as we know them are going away. Not that we won’t still have physical spaces and teachers, but that the way we do school is going to have to change, will be actually forced to change by the Web and other technologies. That the questions we should be asking (and these are the ones I got listening to him talk, not words out of his mouth) are should we still be sorting kids by age or by discipline? How do we truly individualize instruction around kids’ interests and passions? How do we redefine the school day? What do we really want to assess and how do we assess it? Why should we bring kids together for physical space learning when much of what they can now learn doesn’t require it? As he describes the role of Edutopia.org in that context, the whole point is to keep finding schools who are grappling with those types of questions and share their stories with the world.

All of which leads me to wonder, when we talk about leaders and parents and teachers “getting it,” what are we really talking about when it comes to social learning technologies? What should we be talking about?

Recently at the beginning of a day long workshop, I used a Google form to get feedback on this question:

If there was one part of your personal learning practice that you wanted to focus on today, what would it be? What questions would you seek to answer?

Now I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a perfect question in terms of trying to get some sense of the personal learning lives from the teachers who were participating. But in the context of a discussion we’d been having about the passion-based learning opportunities that the Web now affords, I was hoping to learn what they wanted to think more deeply about when it came to their own interests and their own learning. Unfortunately, most of what I got back (on the first go round at least; I asked them to do it again) was about how to use the tools in the classroom, and very little about what they wanted to learn about learining around their own passions with others who share them.

I know that over the years, I’ve thought about and written about this quite a bit here and elsewhere, this idea that teachers need to see themselves as learners first. In our PLP cohorts, Sheryl and I are constantly working to get teachers to be selfish about the learning at the outset, to not see the experience as simply a way to learn tools that they can then bring into their classrooms. (We didn’t call it “Powerful Tools Practice” for a reason.) And I usually end most of my presentations with that plea as well, most times only to get asked a question about how to overcome the difficulties of making this work in the classroom. It’s always a struggle.

Anyway, it’s interesting to review some of these responses that did attempt to reach beyond tools:

• How to take the learning practices that I’ve been taught by senior teachers, as I am a new teacher, and make them work in concert with the needs of my students when in the face of so much negative energy from my coworkers?
• We are dealing with numerous “tools” that help us find, sort and use information in a directed manner. Is there a “best” approach to pulling these together to enable us to better deal with and share these in one place.
• Interested in gathering ideas about how to motivate groups of teacher to value the importance of developing their own PLN. Often educators understand the idea of developing a PLN but they are not consistent about maintaining it. The shift from sit n’ git to planning a goal and following a custom path seems foreign.
• I really like having ammunition for the folks who say learning 2.0 is eeeeviiiil, that the state of education is going to pot and literacy is at an all time low.

Obviously, these reflect a lot of the messiness that exists right now around technology and the Web in learning practice. (That’s why I picked them.) But it still leaves me wondering why it’s so hard to get educators in particular to be selfish about this stuff. Maybe it’s not in our DNA?

It’s no secret that many of us who had high hopes that the Obama administration would start a meaningful conversation on re-envisioning education are feeling sorely disappointed these days. All of the hoopla over “The Race to the Top” as a catalyst of real “reform” is getting a bit much to take, and to be honest, I’m surprised that more educators aren’t voicing their displeasure at the idea of being paid based on the scores their students make on standardized tests (among other things.)

But I have to tell you, David Brooks’ column in the Times today literally sent a chill down my spine when I read the following paragraph:

The changes also will mean student performance will increasingly be a factor in how much teachers get paid and whether they keep their jobs. There is no consensus on exactly how to do this, but there is clear evidence that good teachers produce consistently better student test scores, and that teachers who do not need to be identified and counseled. Cracking the barrier that has been erected between student outcomes and teacher pay would be a huge gain.

Ok, there is just so much wrong with that sentiment that it’s hard to know where to start. How about the “there is no consensus on exactly how to do this” part. Why is that, do you think? Could it be that there might be, oh, I don’t know, a few dozen factors that impact a student’s performance on tests that have nothing to do with the teacher? And where exactly is this “barrier that has been erected between student outcomes and teacher pay”?

But if you’re a teacher and you read the part where teachers whose kids don’t get good test scores “need to be identified and counseled,” I can’t imagine how you could be feeling very good about your profession right now. Forget the relationships you build with those kids. Forget the love you give many of them that they may not be getting at home. Forget the way you try to help them navigate the complexity of their lives or their families or their relationships. Your kids don’t measure up on the test, you will be “identified” and “counseled.”

Whoa.

It’s a bit ironic that on the same page a day before, Thomas Friedman was espousing the idea that to fix the economy we have to fix the education system, and to fix the education system, we have to do more than focus on reading, writing and arithmetic. We also have to consider “entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.” Not that Friedman isn’t at times as much asea about education as Brooks, but seriously, is there a test for that? ‘Cause if there isn’t, and I’m a teacher trying to win the “race to the top,” how am I supposed to get my raise?

Is it me, or are we just sinking deeper into this dark, confined educational pit where every national conversation about “reform” lacks the “creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship” that we’re supposed to be teaching to and modeling for our kids?

Mercy.

So without bemoaning in the fact that I haven’t been able to find any time of late to get to this space to do some reading and thinking and synthesizing and extended writing and that I feel like a truly important part of my life is being slowly and painfully left behind and that there is a post that I really need to write about that at some point sooner rather than later…

Tom Hoffman has been bugging many of us to blog about the English Language Arts Standards that are being written by Core Standards group as an attempt to provide some national standardization for ELA (and Mathematics skills), standards which are open for comment for another five days or so, and ones that it appears will ultimately lead to the creation of a national assessment. Forty-eight states are participating in this effort, and Tom created a  must-read FAQ on the initiative and has been doing some really thoughtful analysis in the past few weeks about what all of it means. I’m sorry to say that the whole process has been flying under my radar of late (as have many of the important conversations going on out there.) I’ll admit to a certain sense of “whatever” about these standards; there’s little doubt at this point they will be adopted pretty much as is, and they reflect even more a continuing, frustrating retrenchment of traditional thinking about education that seems to be permeating the conversation right now. When we hear that our kids’ performance on the Math NAEP is essentially flat, and the Secretary of Education’s response is that the results “underscore the need for “reforms that will accelerate student achievement,” and that those “reforms” include “opening more charter schools and linking teacher pay to performance,” you know that the way we assess kids isn’t going to change any time soon. At the end of the day, it still feels like the battle for sanity when it comes to the future of education won’t be won until there are enough people who understand that many of the traditional standards and assessments that “worked” for us won’t work for our kids. In other words, no time soon.

The Common Core ELA standards narrow the definition of what kids should know, and they do nothing to take into account the changing nature of reading and writing that this moment brings us. While the National Council Teachers of English espouses all sorts of new definitions for literate readers and writers in the 21st Century, very little of that shows up in any clear way in the proposed national standards. One look at the reading standards and you can’t help but be left with the impression that the authors have never “read” anything much beyond words on paper and that the idea of “remix” and even links are outside of their experience. There is nothing here about how reading and writing in online and digital spaces changes the interaction, nothing about the social interactions that readers and writers will have around texts that are changing rapidly and substantially. (Yet, it appears that NCTE hasn’t made much of a push against the initiative.) To that point, a really interesting “debate” in the New York Times appeared a couple of days ago “Does the Brain Look Like E-Books?” including this observation by Alan Liu, the chairman of English at U. C. Santa Barbara on how all of this is shifting:

My group thinks that Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate. The future of peripheral attention is social networking, and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.

The debate is a lively one, and the comments are worth reading through as well, but regardless of how you view the current landscape from a reading and writing literacy standpoint, it’s hard to see how the core standards being proposed come even close to capturing the complexity of the moment and, more importantly, reflect the flexibility needed to understand the moment. I doubt there was any of that much discussed.

Even more importantly, Chris Lehmann captures the reason why we should all feel unsettled by this, regardless of how we think about reading and writing:

This Core Standards movement should scare everyone who believes that meaning and learning is still most powerfully made in the spaces that students and teachers share. More than teachers, students, state administrators, the group that stands most to gain from national standards and a national test is the education-industrial complex.

In all of this, the thing that most frustrates me both in the talk about national standards and national assessments and the whole “Race to the Top” bunk that is coming out of the administration is just a total lack of vision, this sense that nothing has fundamentally changed, that this is the same old classroom with the same old expectations and the same old ways of proving them that we’ve had forever. I’m not saying we don’t need assessments, but there’s a lot of required learning right now that few if any standards are addressing.

Recently, I presented at a school on an opening day for teachers where the first thing that greeted everyone on the table in the lobby was an 8-page Acceptable Use Policy which staff members were picking up as they filed into the school. I picked one up too, and when I had a moment I started paging through it, looking at all the ways in which students (and teachers) could get themselves in trouble on the school network. The middle three pages were filled with an A-Y double spaced list (guess they were saving room for one more rule next year) which spelled out the many transgressions that were not going to be tolerated, things like people shouldn’t be harassing one another, going around the filter, accessing shopping sites, accessing any sites that were “social in nature” and, the big one, downloading software to school computers for personal use. And much, much more.

Frankly, I couldn’t help thinking that if I was a student in this district, I think I would actually beg NOT to get a computer. Between the filters and the restrictions, I had a hard time imagining what I would be able to use them for in ways that would actually stimulate my learning. I’d rather take my chances with my phone and my computer at home. (About 90% of students in this district had access from home.)

But the other part that struck me was what this policy said about the curriculum in that district. I wondered aloud to some administrators and teachers later if the stiff policies spoke volumes about what they weren’t teaching in their classrooms K-12 as their students went through the system. I mean wouldn’t it seem that if kids were taught throughout the curriculum about the ethical and appropriate use of computers and the Internet that much more of that policy could be spent going over what students could actually do with the computer rather than the “don’t dos” that were listed? At that point, we’d probably have to change the name to an “Admirable Use Policy” or something, but imagine if students walked in on the first day of class, picked up that policy and read things like:

“Do use our network to connect to other students and adults who share your passions with whom you can learn.”

“Do use our network to help your teachers find experts and other teachers from around the world.”

“Do use our network to publish your best work in text and multimedia for a global audience.”

“Do use our network to explore your own creativity and passions, to ask questions and seek answers from other teachers online.”

“Do use our network to download resources that you can use to remix and republish your own learning online.”

“Do use our network to collaborate with others to change the world in meaningful, positive ways.”

Etc. (Add your own below.)

Now, obviously, that would mean that the curriculum would be preparing students to do that all along, But I’m thinking that if I was a student and I read those “dos”  on the first day of school, I’d be itching to get to class.

(Photo by Checlap.)

In the midst of all of the “uproar” over the President’s planned speech to school kids on Tuesday, I keep thinking about what all of this says about schools, about what they are for, and about the perception that a lot of people in this country have of them.

It would seem to me that there should be no better place for my children to watch that speech (or any other, for that matter) than in a place where ideas are encouraged, where critical thinking about those ideas is a natural part of the conversation, and where appropriate response and debate can flourish. Where the adults in the room lead my kids to dig deeper, to validate facts, and consider the many levels of context in which every speech and every debate takes place. Where the discussion around it is such that it lays to rest the concern that many seem to have about this particular speech in general, that in some way the President will be able to “indoctrinate” our kids into some socialist mindset. If schools are the fully functioning learning communities that we hope they are, they should be the place where our kids learn to make sense of ideas, not to fear them. That, however, is not the message we are sending.

All of this speaks to the ever narrowing role we as a society have assigned to our schools. And that is truly something to fear. School is the place kids go to learn the stuff they need to pass all of the tests, not the place that they go to engage the diversity and complexity and beauty of the world. If we cannot offer our students wide ranging opportunities to examine the world from many sides and teach them how to do that with rigor and respect, then we subvert the very idea of school.

I keep thinking of how much could be taught in this moment: oratory, research skills, statistics (drop-out rates, etc.), history, media, analysis, debate, composition, social justice, and on and on and on.

I keep thinking of those teachers out there right now who have had a level of confidence and professionalism stripped away by school districts who have ceded to parents wishes to avoid rather than to trust them to teach.

I keep thinking about what kids are learning by the way their schools are reacting, what it says to them about what school is and its value in their lives.

I keep thinking what this says about a public school system that has “educated” the people at the front of all of the screaming and yelling.

My kids both start school on Wednesday, so our schools have avoided all of this. Still, I hope they play the president’s message, regardless of whether it’s a motivational speech to work hard and pursue a love of learning or whether it’s a paean to Stalin, and then engage my kids in conversation about its merits, its flaws and its omissions. And better yet, I hope they take a step back and look at this “controversy” in the context of media analysis, information literacy, political dialogue and debate. Talk about a teachable moment.

But without that, any way you look at it, this is not a great moment for schools.