Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

"Race to the Top" Needs Another "T"

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The New York Times is running a piece in the Sunday magazine this week titled “The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand” and I think it’s a must read for anyone wanting a compelling albeit starry-eyed look at the President’s education “reform” proposals. While the long version is worth the read, here’s the short version: More money and more tests will make better teachers and smarter kids. A small bunch of “reformists” armed with a boatload of money are in the process of buying off the media, unions, and parents to move schools toward greater “accountability” and “achievement” in ways that more resemble fixing the leaks in the hull instead of building a better boat. Chew on this for a second:

“It’s all about the talent,” Secretary Duncan told me. Thus, the highest number of points — 138 of the 500-point scale that Duncan and his staff created for the Race — would be awarded based on a commitment to eliminate what teachers’ union leaders consider the most important protections enjoyed by their members: seniority-based compensation and permanent job security. To win the contest, the states had to present new laws, contracts and data systems making teachers individually responsible for what their students achieve, and demonstrating, for example, that budget-forced teacher layoffs will be based on the quality of the teacher, not simply on seniority…To enable teacher evaluations, another 47 points would be allocated based on the quality of a state’s “data systems” for tracking student performance in all grades — which is a euphemism for the kind of full-bore testing regime that makes many parents and children cringe but that the reformers argue is necessary for any serious attempt to track not only student progress but also teacher effectiveness. [Emphasis mine.]

Now, I know that in many ways my evolving picture of learning in the 21st Century keeps moving toward the edges, away from schools as we know them, far away from the rhetoric being floated in this article. I know that there are times when I see a learning future for our kids that doesn’t necessarily involve “school” or college as we think of it, one that they design and take ownership of, one that connects them to other learners and teachers and ultimately, to success on their own terms. And then there are other times I think that’s just a total fantasy, that as much as I’d like to believe, as a growing number of folks suggest, that the world has changed in ways that frees learning from the shackles of outdated systems and creates all sorts of new paths for our kids, they’d be better off just playing the game as we know it, going to the good college, getting the degree, and finding success as it’s always been defined.

And I think that’s the part that has been bothering me most about the turn in the larger education conversation, that retrenchment of the typical path to “success.” We’re not changing our definition of “the top” at all. It’s just more of the same, as if the world is the same as it was 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. Which is why, I think, Race to the Top needs another  “T” word in there, as in “Race to the Traditional Top.” My problem is, I don’t think I want my kids to win that race anymore.

I think that redefinition of “the top” is what we here in the small lunatic fringe are trying to create. It’s not about knowledge as much as it is about learning, about a passion for learning, and about a self-motivation that “traditional” schooling drives out of kids. In a nutshell, it’s a pretty different picture of what schools and teachers should be doing, and a totally different view on what and how to assess it. The learning world that many of us are now living in, at least, just isn’t the same as it ever was.

Two quotes. First, the last sentence of the Times article:

“That President Obama did this is a total game changer,” says Pastorek, the Louisiana schools superintendent, who is a Republican working for a Republican governor, Bobby Jindal. “If he really sticks to this, education will never be the same.”

And the last sentences from Diane Ravitch in her latest post, “Schools 4 $Sale: Inquire at U.S. DOE” over at Bridging Differences:

We have a public school system that needs improvement. Nothing coming from Race to the Top will help. It may even do untold harm to the system on which our nation has relied for more than 150 years.

Problem is, as directly opposite as both of these views are, neither one is talking about anything really different. That “build a new, better boat” conversation is yet to begin.

Meet the New Story, Same as the Old Story

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So I’m still happy that in a few weeks Barack Obama will become president, but I have to admit I’m not as happy today as I was yesterday. I was hoping for the bold stroke, the real vision when it came to choosing a Secretary of Education, but alas, it doesn’t appear that’s what happened. And to be honest, I was really amazed at the tenor of the debate in the weeks leading up to the choice yesterday of Arne Duncan and the lack of any substantive discussion of change. We can wait and see if anything truly progressive comes out of this selection in terms of standardized tests, teacher accountability and equality of access among the many other things challenging our kids’s education right now, but looking at the track record, I’m skeptical.

It may just be that Obama looked at the landscape and sensed the time wasn’t right for a change agenda in education. Or perhaps, as Gary Stager would suggest, he doesn’t have a broad vision for how to educate students more effectively and compellingly than what we’ve already got. Or maybe it’s a combination of both (and more.) But I have to say, between his practical embrace of technology, the fact that he has two school age kids, and a mantra for change, I was primed for something great.

And here is the thing: I am so tired of waiting for something, at this point almost anything to meaningfully change in our collective story of education. I look at my own kids every day and grow more and more frustrated with their education, one that is not unlike millions of other kids in this country and one that is no doubt degrees better than millions more. And the world as it is is not helping out either. Huge budget cuts are looming almost everywhere you look. In our state, budgets will no doubt fail in April, and more cuts will ensue. And rest assured, there will be no bailout for education.

But more than anything, why this choice depresses me so was articulated in an Ira Socol post from a couple of days ago that just resonated deeply with what I’ve been witnessing the last few years: we generally seem to have lost our imagination when we think about education. And to me, that’s just such a huge irony right now. In the twenty-five years since I entered public schools as a teacher there has never been a time with so much reason to dream, to imagine the possibilities. One of the strongest pulls of this network is that we get to see snippets of what’s possible in classrooms from around the world, places where kids are truly excited about learning, where they are empowered by technology and vision to do things differently.  The world is literally a few mouse clicks or phone taps away, people, information, shared knowledge, tools…learning. The passion of these teachers and students is palpable. And this is not to suggest, btw, that there aren’t many of those experiences happening in classrooms offline, without technology. But the scope and scale of what we could do right now are, I think, unprecedented.

But my problem, our problem, is that this is not reality. It’s not reality for 90% of teachers in classrooms (if not more.) As Socol says:

But in schools, we go backwards. We even declare it, saying, we’re going “back”wards “to basics.” When we let a few new things trickle in, we control them so fiercely that they change almost nothing. Rather than tearing down classroom walls our kids now spend more time in school and even take fewer field trips. Rather than alternative evaluations we now have standardized tests for all ages. Rather than project-based learning we now have Core Curriculum. Rather than social justice we have “zero tolerance.” And rather than the freedom of mobiles in the classroom we have the coercive control of clickers. Rather than the freedom of the internet we have filters and blocks. Rather than the interaction of messaging and blogs and Twitter and Skype we have rules against these technologies. Rather than pushing past Wikipedia and print-based knowledge design, we don’t even allow Wikipedia in so that we can discover its limits. Rather than computers allowing for individualization, we “lock them down.”

And with all of that, is it any wonder that we’ve stopped dreaming of what can be? Of all the teachers I’ve had the privilege of speaking and working with in the last few years, I doubt that many of them can even now really dream of a different way, one that celebrates learning and connections and independence in the ways that many of those networked classrooms we see. They might be able to visualize it, but I don’t think many see it as a potential reality in their classrooms, in their schools. There are too many reasons why it can’t happen. Too many obstacles. Too little vision. (I would be happy to be proven wrong, btw.)

And that’s why when I heard the Duncan choice, I drifted back to this, to what Ira Socol blogged, to what I would have loved for Obama to read and take to heart:

It is time to stop hiding and start dreaming. It is time to reject what we are doing now: hell, that’s easy, we know it does not work. And it is time to reject all the “tinkering around the edges” which wastes our energy and accomplishes nothing. We have to say no to everything that is not sufficiently transformative, which does not change what education is, and put all of our energies into ideas which will transform.

This appointment does not fit that bill, unfortunately. And in a moment when we really, really, really could have used some vision for transformative change, I don’t think we got it.

So, we’ll have to continue changing one parent at a time, one teacher at a time, one classroom at a time, one school at a time, connecting the good works and finding a wider and wider audience for the conversation. And we have to continue to create that compelling new reality of what’s possible, post by post, tweet by tweet. And, we have to continue to dream it.

(Photo by PeterDuke.)

Obama

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Doesn’t matter who you voted for, history was made last night. I, for one, am happy for my kids.

No matter how the impact of paper newspapers is declining, at moments like these, there’s still nothing like the front page of the paper, not the website, that gives me goosebumps. And in that vein, I’m cruising through the hundreds of covers from around the world at Newseum. Amazing.

Dealing With the "Skills Slowdown"

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New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks writes about the pretty dire state of education in this country in his piece “The Biggest Issue” which ran yesterday, and it cites some interesting research about the relationship between education and technology. Namely, not so great things happen when the pace of educational progress slips behind that of technological progress, which is what is occurring right now.

The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.

Now I know that “educational progress” in this instance is being measured by how much of an education most people get, a rate that peaked (in graduation terms) in the late 1960s and continue to decline. But can we really measure educational progress on the basis of graduation rates these days?

Two other points from the essay: First, the bottom line is that family environments, “which have deteriorated over the last 40 years,” have a great deal to do with the potential success of any given student. Second, it appears, at least, that the candidate better positioned to deal with this situation is Obama, given his emphasis on early childhood education.

Here’s another nugget to chew on:

It’s not globalization or immigration or computers per se that widen inequality. It’s the skills gap. Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy.

I’m still doubtful that either campaign will push these conversations to the forefront even though, as Brooks suggests, they represent “the biggest issue facing the country.”

Blogging's Impact on Politics and Teaching Politics

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I’m extremely interested in watching the impact of social media on the current presidential election cycle, and I’m wondering if we really are at the point where, as the author of this post suggests:

Facebook and MySpace are as important as New Hampshire and Iowa.

I don’t think there is any doubt that the Obama campaign has gotten that message sooner than the rest. Their very savvy use of social tools on their Website has been an incredible boon to their fund raising and, in turn, their ability to capture delegates. Some of the deconstructions of the impact have already begun, as in this great piece in Rolling Stone. This quote sums up what’s happening:

“They’ve married the incredibly powerful online community they built with real on-the-ground field operations. We’ve never seen anything like this before in American political history.” In the process, the Obama campaign has shattered the top-down, command-and-control, broadcast-TV model that has dominated American politics since the early 1960s.

But the impact of blogger/observers is turning out to be pretty huge as well. According to the Technorati article, almost 30,000 blogs are parsing every word the candidates utter, every policy, every interaction (which is a good thing, right?) If 51% of Internet users are not turning to blogs to “gather information and communicate about politics,” and every indication is that the number will continue to grow, it’s pretty obvious that realities of being an engaged, informed voter are becoming more and more complex, and that our students are going to be stepping into that reality without a great deal of navigational skills unless we begin to bring these shifts into our curriculum.

So how are we doing that?

An Education President

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Like him or not, what Barack Obama did yesterday, in my opinion at least, epitomizes what we need our next president to be, namely a teacher. Agree with him or not, can there be any doubt that anyone listening to that speech yesterday is not thinking harder and more expansively about race in this country and in our lives today? Trust him or not, is there any question that he articulated a real truth about the state of race relations from both a black and a white perspective?

Right now, we are having a “teachable moment” about race in America. If you listen to conservative talk radio as I have been for the past few weeks, the issue is, no pun intended, black or white. If the candidate does not distance himself from his pastor and his church, then he is guilty by association of believing the invective that’s being dragged in front of us by the media or which we are choosing to consume on YouTube. If he does distance himself, then it’s simply politics as usual. It’s a simple equation.

But the reality is that this conversation, like most, is more nuanced. And it’s our collective lack of understanding of that nuance which bogs us down. We have little empathy for the experiences of those unlike us, and too many of us are afraid to ask. We need an education in this country about race. We need a starting point for the conversation, and we need someone to take on a teacherly role to guide it.

Seventy-five years ago, FDR gave the first of his “Fireside Chats” intended to educate (as well as sway) the American public about the issues of the day. By every measure, they were hugely successful in moving people to act in informed and collective ways. And the feedback that Roosevelt received in the form of millions of letters allowed him to tap into the pulse of the people and the nation in ways that few other presidents before or since have been able to. He guided, he taught my father’s generation about the realities of the world, enabling them to have more informed conversations about the state of their lives. Yes, I know, these were not balanced presentations, but at minimum they made the country think about the proposed solutions to the complexities of the time.

And while the world by its very nature is complex, this moment seems decidedly so. Not just because of race, but because of the litany of problems that Obama articulated and the fact that no one no matter what color or heritage is immune from them. (I don’t think climate change cares much about the color of your skin or your family heritage.) We need someone who will encourage and facilitate a broad ranging conversation about these issues. We need someone who can create some lesson plans for the millions of us who want to engage, want to contribute, want to work to solve the problems together. We need someone who I can hold up as a role model for my own children as a steward for the environment, as a peace maker, as a listener, as a deep thinker.

We need a teacher.

This is just one of many teachable moments that this world and this society will continue to throw at us. Rare has been the occasion when we as a country have been led to a deeper understanding of events. In what was without question the most teachable moment of my life six-and-a-half years ago, I was told to go to the mall and keep spending my money. That’s not what a teacher would have done.

To steal from the inimitable Chris Lehmann, yesterday, I saw a teacher.

Yet Another Reason We Should Be Teaching, Not Blocking, Wikipedia

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In three weeks of February, the Barack Obama entry in Wikipedia had almost 2 million views and was the seventh most visited (and, really, second most visited in terms of content) article on the site. John McCain‘s had 1.1 million. Hillary Clinton, who apparently more people “know” about, had about 422,000. In those same three weeks, the Wikipedia home page got over 140 million views.

The point? People are turning to Wikipedia in large numbers to learn about the topics that are of interest and importance to them. Many of them, no doubt, are kids. Go figure.

Now look, I know as people read down the entire list, there are entries that might make some uncomfortable. Sites that will make some say “See! We can’t let our kids be getting wrong information about THAT!” or in some cases, any information at all. I hear that.

But those kids who go to schools where Wikipedia is blocked or passed off as a non-credible resource or not in any way addressed in the curriculum are no doubt reading Wikipedia anyway without any context from us as to what it is and without any guidance from us as to how to use it well. And so, instead of seizing an opportunity to model for them the power of participation, to help them understand the importance of editing, and to give them a real sense of how the collaborative world works by involving them in the negotiation of the “truth” that those articles represent, we’re simply enabling our kids to use Wikipedia badly.

I’ll say it again. Errors are everywhere. You might as well shut down the Internet, unsubscribe to every newspaper and magazine your library gets, and turn off the television set if the concern is that kids might be getting inaccurate or biased information. If we’re not raising a generation of reader/editors, we’re not doing our jobs. Wikipedia can help in that work.

And, just in case you haven’t seen me ref this before, here’s hoping you’re not using this Physics textbook from the venerable Oxford University Press in your school if you have a problem with Wikipedia.