AssortedStuff

On the Washington Post web site, Diane Ravitch recommends three books that offer “some dissenting views” on the administration’s current education reform plans.

I haven’t read the books and can’t verify their quality, but this observation by Ravitch in her introduction is right on target.

Now that the Obama administration has invited the states to compete for $5 billion in stimulus funds, the winners will not be those that come up with the best reform ideas, but those that agree to do what the administration wants: create privately managed charter schools, evaluate teachers by their students’ test scores, and close low-performing schools.

Money + power = do it our way.

diane ravitch, education, race to the top, reform

For all the talk about change during the 2008 presidential campaign, one policy area in which the Obama administration differs very little from that of his predecessor is education.

In this morning’s Post, Dana Milbank discusses the similarities between the two.

Unfortunately, his focus is almost entirely on the political consequences, which, as we all know, is far more important than any impact of the policy itself.

Easier to write too since most political analysis these days seems to be based on personal opinion, the louder the better.

Anyway, Milbank does manage to make a few relevant points.

But in education, the Bush-Obama comparison is spot on. If anything, Obama has taken the worst aspect of Bush’s No Child Left Behind education law — an obsession with testing — and amplified it.

Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed — despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he’s offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives. (emphasis mine)

And…

There’s nothing wrong with testing*, but when you use tests to determine pay and job security, you inevitably induce teachers to turn children into test-taking automatons, not the creative thinkers that have been the most valuable product of American schools. Test obsession won’t help the bad schools, and it will wreck the good ones. (emphasis mine)

“The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind,” New York University education professor Diane Ravitch, an education official in George H.W. Bush’s administration, wrote of Obama’s education policy in a piece for the Huffington Post. “There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test. There will be more cheating, more gaming the system.” The tests, she said, are “simply not adequate” to separate good teachers and schools from bad.

We can only hope that “Obama’s erstwhile allies” who Milbank claims are now pushing back on his Bush-like education policies are able to alter that all-consuming effort to graduate “test-taking automatons”.

*A more accurate statement would be there’s nothing wrong with assessment.

education, obama, politics, reform, testing

I’ve always admired the creative work done by Pixar Animation Studios, going back to the short films they were making long before the first Toy Story movie was released.

Recently I ran across* a short talk (iTunesU link) by Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University (can I enroll?? :-) at the Apple Education Leadership Summit in 2008 in which he discusses four interrelated aptitudes they look for in hiring people to work at Pixar and which he believes are necessary for success in a creative world.

Mastery of subject (depth)

However, at Pixar they don’t necessarily look for mastery in the area in which a candidate will be working.  Nelson notes that anyone who is a true master at something will be “the kind of person with characteristics that you can use in your organization”.

Breadth of knowledge, experience, and interests

At Pixar, ”We want people who are more interested than interesting” because an “interested” person amplifies other people.

Communication

“Communication also involves translation.” That is, having the ability to “translate” your idea into messages that others outside your field (or perspective and experiences, etc.) can understand.

Collaboration

This, Nelson says, is the most important of the four.  But collaboration is not the same as cooperation, which is more about staying out of each others way.  Instead, ”collaboration for Pixar means amplification, the amplification you get by hooking up a bunch of human beings” who bring their mastery, breath, and communication skills to get more than the sum of the parts.

Let’s face it, very few of our kids will be working for Pixar after they graduate, as creative and fun as that might be.

But the kinds of skills Nelson outlines as being important in candidates applying to work at his company are those many other businesses in totally unrelated fields are also looking for.

Nelson says it much better than I have in this space, so go watch the whole 10 minutes or so.  This video might also make an good opening of school presentation to show your colleagues.

In closing his talk, Nelson adds this interesting, although seemingly unrelated, observation about our students.

One of the most amazing things about school is that we have this untapped resource in a sense: our students are the solution. They’re also the problem… but there is an opportunity there if we can find ways of invigorating that leadership on our campuses.

When it comes to improving our education system, students are usually the last group that reformers include in the process.

Considering they are the people most directly affected by what we do, maybe we should tap into their creativity and make them a fundamental part of those efforts instead.

*Thanks to Presentation Zen for the link and to Edutopia which produced the video.

education, pixar, presentation, schools, students

I’ve just started reading Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus but in the first chapter he makes this interesting observation.

Although the internet is already forty years old, and the web half that age, some people are still astonished that individual members of society, previously happy to spend most of their free time consuming, would start voluntarily making and sharing things. This making-and-sharing is certainly a surprise compared to the previous behavior. But pure consumption of media was never a sacred tradition; it was just a set of accumulated accidents, accidents that are being undone as people start hiring new communications tools to jobs older media can’t do.

He could make the same claim about school.

Gathering hundreds of children into buildings, grouping them based on chronological age, seating them in rows, and delivering a one-way stream of information is a relatively recent structure in human history.

Learning for most people, for most of human history, was more an interactive, hands-on, practical process.

And although society for the most part treats the current education format as sacred, many of the same new communications tools Shirky refers to are starting to cause those traditions to unravel.

clay shirky, education, schools, tradition

Something to look forward to in late September.  Media giant NBC Universal* is planning a one-week event, including segments to be featured in news programming on all their networks, called “Education Nation“

According to the press release that landed in my mailbox (and, I suspect, that of many other edubloggers), things will kick off with a two-day education summit that will be a “call to action, shining a spotlight on the most pressing national issue of our time: Education in America”.

Call to action? Who’s coming? Well, pretty much the usual suspects.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Delaware Governor Jack Markell, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, Harlem Children Zone’s CEO Geoffrey Canada, President of MIT Susan Hockfield, National Superintendent of the Year Elizabeth Morgan, Civil Rights Activist Al Sharpton, and President of University of Phoenix Bill Pepicello, Ph.D., join a host of top leaders in education to open a national dialogue and address the gap between how we perceive education and the actual results we are producing today.

And don’t forget Bill Gates, whose foundation is one of the sponsoring “partners”.

Interesting. All but one of those big names lives and works less than a days drive (in traffic) from New York City, the location of this summit. Just an observation.

Anyway, later on the NBC press people mention that the overall project will include input from “more than 300 big thinkers in government, politics, business and technology — as well as school administrators, teachers, parents and students from across the country”.

Again, notice that the people most directly affected by the education process – parents and students – are thrown in almost as an afterthought.

Later the same day, by coincidence (I think), I also received a promotion for a new book from Milton Chen, former executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation (of which I’m a member), carrying the same title: “Education Nation“.

A snippet from the introduction to that book, posted on the promotional site, certainly sounds like a good starting point.

Imagine an ‘Education Nation,’ a learning society where the education of children and adults is the highest national priority, on par with a strong economy, high employment, and national security. Where resources from public and private sources fund a ‘ladder of learning’ for learners of all ages, from pre-K through ‘gray.’ Where learners take courses through the formal institutions of high-quality schools and universities and also take advantage of informal experiences offered through museums, libraries, churches, youth groups, and parks as well as via the media.

Ok, I need to dial back the skepticism a little and reserve judgement on both variations on Education Nation until after I get the chance to evaluate the ideas presented.

However, it will be very interesting to see if the nations presented by NBC and Chen have anything in common, and especially if either has any connection to reality.

*No more GE microwave programming I guess. :-)

education, edutopia, nbc, reform

Were you aware that “public education is in the midst of a quiet revolution” in the US?

I wasn’t.  And after reading this morning’s Post, it’s clear the writer’s use of the term “revolution”, quiet or otherwise, is a major overstatement at best.

It seems this particular “revolution” is being funded by the big money foundation headed by Bill Gates and his wife.

However, actually reading past the headline we find that almost all of their cash is going into a variety of experiments focused on relatively minor variations on the status quo: national standards in language arts and math, pay-for-performance systems, and charter schools.

Of course, this is the same Gates Foundation that over the past ten years has already dumped $2 billion into their failed program to develop a small high school concept.

Which in most cases resulted in a shrunken version of the standard educational structure used in most high schools and little improvement student learning.

But that piece of history gets only a brief mention in this glowing assessment of Gates’ education current funding of reform efforts.

The other side of the issue gets only slightly more space.

Skeptics say the Microsoft founder is foisting a business-driven agenda on schools without understanding the challenges of public education. “I suspect that eight years from now, the Gates Foundation will say, ‘Whoops, we made another big boo-boo. What should we do now?’ ” education historian Diane Ravitch said.

And then there’s this little bit of information from the second half of the story, providing one likely reason for this puff piece to be published at all.

(Melinda Gates, wife of the Microsoft chairman, and investor Warren E. Buffett, a major donor to the foundation, are both on The Washington Post Co. board of directors.)

The price of having a major newspaper declare what you’re doing a “revolution”?

bill gates, education, foundation, reform, washington post

In parts one and two of a multipart post, Larry Cuban looks at why school districts buy new technologies when there is little or no evidence they do anything to improve student learning, especially when most are having major budget problems.

From part one, he notes that consumer spending on electronics in the US is up despite the continuing recession.

At the same time schools are purchasing more technology products while also laying off teachers, increasing class size, and cutting program.

Economists can probably tell you why families are devoting scarce resources to new and better technology devices but why are schools doing the same thing?

The reasons public officials most often give for these purchases, past and present, is that the electronic devices will transform classroom practices, student learning, and prepare students for jobs in a competitive global economy. So, school boards need to back up these reasons with solid evidence for spending public dollars on new (and replacement) technologies that promise significant changes in teaching, learning, and administrative practice.

Where is that “solid evidence”?

The evidence for these electronic devices doing what is expected both in the U.S. and abroad is—as I read the research–at best, spotty—at worst, weak. Few careful and impartial observers of U.S., Europe, and Asia where governments have committed themselves to infusing technology into schools can say with confidence that the use of new technologies has led to increases in student academic achievement (as measured on either U.S. or international tests), altered substantially how teachers teach, or prepared students for to compete in an ever-changing labor market.

In part two, Cuban offers two reasons for this blind devotion to tech “solutions” that solve nothing: political and psychological.

This political explanation helps to make sense of why policymakers effortlessly skip over the lack of evidence to support major high tech expenditures. They figure that media photos of students happily clicking away on laptops–visible symbols–will trump the few research studies or critics who question purchases.

Turning from a political to a psychological explanation, districts buy technology because they suffer from “inattentional blindness”: They are too focused on a specific problem and lose sight of the big picture.

Or they suffer from some kind of blindness caused by salespeople promising tech-based “solutions” to whatever problem their schools might be facing without seeing if it fits in that big picture.

Of course, if the stuff looks good when photographed next to the superintendent, mayor, governor, and/or congressional candidate, so much the better.

Cuban, as always, makes some excellent points about our educational obsession with gimmicks.  Take the time to read both posts.

edtech, education, larry cuban, reform, technology

A British “professor of the public understanding of technology” writing in The Guardian offers nine things everyone needs to know about the internet.

For anyone who’s been connected and paying attention, which I suspect includes many people who read blogs like this one, this is a review of what you already know.

However, it’s still a great read, detailing some important concepts about the web that many people still don’t get.

Three of them stand out for me as an educator.

DISRUPTION IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG

One of the things that most baffles (and troubles) people about the net is its capacity for disruption. One moment you’ve got a stable, profitable business – say, as the CEO of a music label; the next minute your industry is struggling for survival, and you’re paying a king’s ransom to intellectual property lawyers in a losing struggle to stem the tide. Or you’re a newspaper group, wondering how a solid revenue stream from classified ads could suddenly have vaporised; or a university librarian wondering why students use only Google nowadays. How can this stuff happen? And how does it happen so fast?

Or you’re an educational institution and the traditional structure where all information flows through one teacher makes no sense in this age of instant connection to many teachers.

THE NETWORK IS NOW THE COMPUTER

For baby-boomers, a computer was a standalone PC running Microsoft software. Eventually, these devices were networked, first locally (via office networks) and then globally (via the internet). But as broadband connections to the net became commonplace, something strange happened: if you had a fast enough connection to the network, you became less concerned about the precise location of either your stored data or the processor that was performing computational tasks for you.

We in the education business also need to recognize that the network is also the classroom. And vice versa.

OUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REGIME IS NO LONGER FIT FOR PURPOSE

Since our current intellectual property regime was conceived in an era when copying was difficult and imperfect, it’s not surprising that it seems increasingly out of sync with the networked world. To make matters worse (or better, depending on your point of view), digital technology has provided internet users with software tools which make it trivially easy to copy, edit, remix and publish anything that is available in digital form – which means nearly everything, nowadays. As a result, millions of people have become “publishers” in the sense that their creations are globally published on platforms such as Blogger, Flickr and YouTube. So everywhere one looks, one finds things that infringe copyright in one way or another.

Which has incredible implications for teaching and learning.  We need to spend more time teaching kids how to be responsible producers as well as smart consumers.

In the end the writer notes that it “would be ridiculous to pretend that these nine ideas encapsulate everything that there is to be known about the net”.

Still his excellent points are well worth the read.

education, internet, technology, web

In this morning’s Post, a first-year teacher, laid off due to the economic mess, discusses the growing number of proposals to link teacher pay directly with the test scores of their students.

She’s willing to give the idea a try, if certain conditions are met.

1. Teachers be assessed based on only those students with 90 percent or higher attendance.

2. Teachers be allowed to remove disruptive students from their classroom on a day-to-day basis.

3. Students who don’t achieve “basic” proficiency in a state test be prohibited from moving forward to the next class in the progression.

4. That teachers be assessed on student improvement, not an absolute standard — the so-called value-added assessment.

All honest, very reasonable ideas, recognizing the realities and complexities of being an educator in this country.

And none of it will ever happen.

Most of the politicians proposing “pay for performance” programs only want the simplest approach possible.

They don’t understand, or want to acknowledge, the many, many factors that affect student learning and the teaching process.

education, reform, teaching

I’m sure lots of interesting stuff came through the data stream while I was gone but catching up with all, or even most, of it is not worth the effort.

However, one item that several friends and colleagues brought to my attention is a short article from the Post on one of my favorite topics, interactive whiteboards.

Even in these rotten economic times, schools in our area are spending lots of money on these devices, despite little or no evidence they do anything to improve education.

Increasingly, though, another view is emerging: that the money schools spend on instructional gizmos isn’t necessarily making things better, just different. Many academics question industry-backed studies linking improved test scores to their products. And some go further. They argue that the most ubiquitous device-of-the-future, the whiteboard — essentially a giant interactive computer screen that is usurping blackboards in classrooms across America — locks teachers into a 19th-century lecture style of instruction counter to the more collaborative small-group models that many reformers favor.

“There is hardly any research that will show clearly that any of these machines will improve academic achievement,” said Larry Cuban, education professor emeritus at Stanford University. “But the value of novelty, that’s highly prized in American society, period. And one way schools can say they are ‘innovative’ is to pick up the latest device.”

Innovative?  I’m still waiting to see an IWB being used for anything other than traditional teacher-directed instruction.

And for some research (other than the highly suspect Marzano study, paid for by Promethean) showing any significant, long-term effect on student learning, something commensurate with the high costs.

Update: As an added bonus, Sylvia shows you how to save most of the $6500 cost for the next big thing, the touch table, by using some of the original interactive classroom tools: finger paints and blocks.

edtech, education, interactive whiteboards, teaching