Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Please, Make it Stop

By

From the “We Just Can’t Seem to Understand How Learning Really Happens Department” I bring you Crystal Hunter, CEO of Edmodo:

From my perspective, 2013 demonstrated that teachers are more connected than ever before. These connections give teachers the ability to build relationships and share content worldwide, including app recommendations, alternative approaches to lesson plans, links to videos, and more—all of which save them time and augment student comprehension of subject material. As the industry determines how to define success in education, it’s important to allow educators to lead the dialogue. Teachers are the ones shaping today’s youth, one student at a time, and much can be learned from the ways they collaborate. In 2014, we’ll see how much these connections positively influence student success.

No need, obviously, for teachers to actually create anything with these technologies and connections. And I’ve been waiting for something to “augment” my kids’ “comprehension of subject material” for some time now. And I’m just tickled that the “industry” will define success and…wait for it… “allow” teachers to lead the dialogue. Wow! How exciting!

If this is the best that 2014 has to offer, we might as well close up shop.

(And not for nothing, but if teachers using blogs to connect  their kids to global others is “best practice” in 2013, then what was it some 12 years ago when we were doing that in my lit and journalism classrooms? Mercy.)

The Three Narratives

By

So, this is really thin, early-morning thinking, but I’m trying to describe what I think are the three competing narratives around schooling at the moment. To be honest, I think I’ve done a pretty bad job of it, but I thought I’d post it up anyway to see if some of you might help me flesh it out a bit more clearly. 

Here they are:

1. Schools are broken. The way forward is to make schools better by doubling down on traditional outcomes, state-mandated standardized tests, school choice, and test-based accountability for teachers. The state decides what will be taught and when it will be taught, and, importantly, what will be assessed. Technology’s dual role in this is first to “personalize” delivery of the curriculum to each student using adaptive learning platforms and, second, to provide all students access to “the best teachers” and “best content” available via the Web as a way to increase efficiency.  "Student learning" is defined by comparison test scores year to year and is “managed” by the system. Policy makers and businessmen who are, for the most part, not educators, are chief drivers of reforms. 

2. Schools are not broken, but can be improved. The way forward is to make schools better by reducing the emphasis on standardized tests, rethinking teacher training and assessment, and increasing local control over school decisions. Thinking about curriculum and classrooms is rooted in traditional systems and structures, and schools are still places where state-created outcomes are delivered to students. Technology’s role is to support instruction and student learning, which is measured primarily by teacher created assessments and summative evaluations. Traditional educators are the primary drivers of change thinking and reforms.

3. Schools as currently constructed are not broken but increasingly irrelevant. Abundant connections to content, knowledge and people created by the Web requires a fundamental rethinking of traditional structures and systems. The way forward is to change the emphasis on student learning from “what” to learn to, instead, “how” to learn. Technology’s role is to support both students and teachers as inquiry, discovery based learners with an emphasis on creating, connecting, collaborating, and sharing authentic, real-world work. Learning is assessed by performance, achievement of teacher-student negotiated outcomes, and contribution. Educators and connected learners are the chief drivers of these reforms.

My biggest struggle is with #2. I’m pretty clear what this group doesn’t want (see #1), but I’m not totally sure what they advocate for, especially in terms of the role of technology.

Anyway…be gentle. ;0)

Rhee on Democracy

By

David Sirota on Michelle Rhee:

That’s where Rhee’s little-noticed but incredibly revealing comments come in. As grass-roots opposition in the local community understandably rose up to oppose her destructive policies, Rhee made quite clear what she and her movement thinks of the notion of local control of schools and community involvement in education policy:

MICHELLE RHEE: People said, “Well, you didn’t listen to us.” And I said, “No, I listened to you. I’m not running this district by consensus or by committee. We’re not running this school district through the democratic process.”

FRONTLINE: [on camera] It’s not a democracy.

MICHELLE RHEE: No, it’s not a democracy.

If a statement like that about public schools isn’t offensive enough unto itself, remember that Rhee made it not as some outside observer. She made it while she was holding public office. Yes, that’s right: A person who held a democratically accountable office was making clear that the national “reform” movement she leads believes that schools are no longer and should no longer be controlled by any kind of democracy.

Pretty much sums it up. Yet this is a woman who is raising millions if not billions in support of undemocratic reforms. 

We’re Getting Rolled

By

Tom Hoffman:

Ten years ago, “school reform” at least equally applied to Deborah Meier and Ted Sizer as it did to, say, Joel Klein.

In the intervening decade, I’ve become a social software curmudgeon – you’ll pull Blogger from my cold, dead hands – and yielded the “ed reformer” tag to people and practices I hate.

Basically, in both cases, the money men started to roll in and roll over the geeks and the teachers who were building tools and schools with an eye to something other than the market, or market-based logic. We’re only just now hitting the point where it is clear the grifters are rolling into schools like Visigoths, but even when the point hasn’t been to make money directly, it has been to apply the methods of business to education.

It has taken a while to sort out, but at this point many of the leading figures in screwing up the internet are also leaders in screwing up education (reform): Gates, Zuckerberg, Jobs (RIP), etc. It isn’t hard to tease out the common thread. The earnest geeks who do things, understand how things work, and care about actual people get rolled by the big money guys. That’s it.

And, the other folks who are screwing up education are those who stand silent and watch it happen…

Enamored by Their Own Ideology

By

Arthur Camins:

Similarly, I have been trying to understand the persistence of education reformers, especially those in federal and state government, in the light of so much contrary, well-articulated evidence. I have been trying to understand how teachers who oppose charter schools and merit pay, or who make the case that schools alone can’t undo the effects of poverty, have come to be defined by education reformers as the enemy – supporters of and apologists for the status quo. Somehow, educators who do not support the reformers’ ill-conceived version of disruptive innovation, but who have proposed myriad significant improvement, have been cast as defenders of bad teachers who supposedly believe poverty is destiny. Reformers have become so enamored by their own ideology and so invested in their own course of action that they are unable to recognize the evidence that challenges their policies and unable to recognize the damage it is causing to students.

Let’s not forget this either: Few of the “reformers” are educators. They are lawyer-politicians or businessmen who have never been in a classroom, never experienced school other than being there as a student, and have motivations other than doing schools differently instead of better. 

The Reform Formula

By

Richard Rothstein:

Klein and Rhee have recently founded an organization called StudentsFirstNY to raise millions of dollars from New York City’s wealthiest. It will support candidates in the city’s upcoming mayoral race who adopt an agenda that puts “the interests of children” over “special interests” (read: teacher unions) and commits to expanding charter schools, eliminating teacher tenure, and using student test scores to evaluate teachers. The group’s mission statement incorporates the fanciful Klein autobiographical tale, saying that “while there are many factors that influence a student’s opportunity to learn, a great teacher can help any student overcome those barriers and realize their full potential.”

Klein’s actual biography tells an important story, just not the one he imagines: It’s more evidence that student achievement mostly reflects the social and economic environment in which children are raised and that the best way to improve academic achievement is to address these conditions directly.

Great read that speaks volumes about the power of words and stories when it comes to building a movement and the money to support it. 

Let’s Make it an Even 300, OK?

By

Been doing some ciphering as to the number of state or national tests New Jersey kids starting kindergarten next year will be taking through their school careers:

Total known state and national tests in 12 years of school: 299

Really.

Some questions come to mind:

  • Does anyone think this is good for kids?
  • Does anyone not think this will increase focus on test prep?
  • Does anyone not think this will decrease a teacher’s ability to provide rich learning experiences for kids?
  • Do the standards and model curriculum attempt to prepare kids for the “new normal” of the world as it is?
  • Who are these people? 

That’s just a start.

Yours? 

UPDATE: I realized I was a bit off on the number. Really it’s at least 214. Social Studies and Science will only be tested during high school according to the NJ Model Curriculum. Still…

Valuing the Immeasurable

By

One of my new favorite bloggers, Justin Reich at Harvard, writes:

I could imagine learning environments where parts of the student experience (learning grammar, practicing math algorithms) are optimized in thoughtful ways using personalization technology, where other parts of the student experience allow for individual experimentation and research, and where time still remains for students to form learning communities devoted to the study of our shared history and civic responsibilities. I can also imagine learning environments devoted to personalization that obliterate meaningful opportunities for collaborative, connected civic learning.

My fear is that we are staring down the barrel of the latter, not just in the area of civics and history but in just about all areas of schooling. And for me it comes back to this fairly simple statement: We define an “education” by what we assess, which in turn defines the value (or lack of value) of this thing we call “school." 

Up until now, society won’t see someone as "educated” until he or she has passed some type of test or received some type of diploma. The requirements to pass that test or earn that diploma are narrowly built around a discrete body of knowledge and a few necessary skills to apply that knowledge in fairly limited ways. When Diane Ravitch or I or others create lists of what we consider to be other important, broader skills and understandings we want kids to have, we do it (in my case, at least) as a response to the continued narrowing of the current education experience to those things that can be easily measured.

As Justin puts it in his post, the tension is clear: we optimize the measurable at the risk of neglecting the immeasurable. And make no mistake, there is a lot of money out there for those who can “optimize the measurable” if we don’t change the assessment. As he writes in another entry a few months ago, the market driven “reformers” need “measurable” badly:

They view learning as the process of delivering learning objects for the individual consumption of students, and they have great faith that this delivery process can be optimized by algorithms and data mining. It is incredibly important for them that we have quantifiable outcomes of learning (standardized tests), since they can only optimize on quantitative metrics.

No question, this is the crux of the reform issue right now. When our definition of being educated can be achieved by “optimizing the measurable” via personalizing technologies, what then is the societal value of this thing we call “school”? Access point? Babysitter? Something else?

We have a case to make, I think, for valuing the immeasurable over that which can be easily measured, and that the powerful role that schools can play now is not delivering that narrow curriculum (which is now in a million places) but in developing the skills and dispositions or the “opportunity to participate in civic and deliberative discussions” which, at the end of the day, is kinda hard to machine score. It’s not an easy case to make in this world of competition and ranking and sorting. But it is where our real value is now. How we articulate that value and move it into the mainstream thinking is where our collective laser focus needs to be.

“We Love Schools.” Say it.

By

I’ve long said that few people have inspired and motivated me more than Lawrence Lessig, author, law professor, scholar, father, advocate, and speaker. I’ve had the honor of seeing Lessig present a number of times, and I’ve had some brief conversations with him that have left me motivated and have pushed in my thinking. When I first started speaking, I blatantly ripped off his presentation style even though I never came close to doing it justice. He’s had a huge influence in my thinking about the world.

So when John Pederson sent me a link to this audio snip from a recent presentation that John asked Lessig to make at the WiscNet conference, I dove in. He’s answering a question  about the huge challenge that lies ahead in fixing our dysfunctional government and eliminating money from politics. And now that I’ve listened to it a half a dozen times, I feel changed. Take a listen:

I know that Lessig isn’t talking about education when he discusses this feeling of “hopelessness.”  But there are times when I (and I know many others) feel that sense of hopelessness when it comes to fighting the money and political power that is pushing the education reform conversation in this country right now. I sometimes look at that mountain of dysfunction and wonder “why bother? There’s nothing we can do. There’s no way we win this fight.”

But there is this: I love schools. We love schools. We love schools because they are places where children and adults come together to make sense of the world, to develop together the dispositions and perspectives that will carry them throughout their lives. We love schools because they are places of play and of beauty, of social connections and citizenship. We love schools because they are at times filled with magic that only happens when we share a common desire to create and learn and contribute. And we love schools because of the potential every child and every teacher brings with them to the interaction.

You know where this is going. What I hear Lessig saying is this:

If we love schools, right now, we have to fight for schools.

And whether we like it or not, this is what we are in: a fight for our schools. Like Lessig, I’m convinced that we’re making public policy around education that is driven by corporate profits, not the best interests of kids. I’ve written about that here and here and here and lots of other places. But if you don’t believe me, read Alfie Kohn. Read Yong Zhao. Read Gary Stager. Read Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier. You need only listen to the first few minutes of Jeb Bush to understand that whether we like it or not, we are in this moment when the future of our schools is being decided and we all have a part to play. You might call that hyperbolic, but I don’t think I’m overstating it.  

But Lessig provides some powerful context, doesn’t he?

“Love means in the face of absolute improbability, you don’t care about the improbability, you do what it takes even knowing there is nothing you can do. You act as strongly as you possibly can…It might be impossible. It might be we’re past the stage when we as a people can rally together to do anything about this. It’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. We still as a people have absolutely every single purpose and obligation to do what we can to do about this. And that starts in this very tenuous, obscure way which is just getting more of us to understand the problem. And once more of us understand that problem, then at least we have an army that recognizes what they have to fight against, whether we can win or not.”

So let’s say it: We love schools. And we have an obligation to fight, to educate, to advocate in whatever way we can to make sure more people fully understand the problem that corporate driven, narrowly framed, assessment driven “reform” is not what is in the best interest of our children or our society. And it doesn’t matter that we sometimes feel hopelessness in the moment. We can’t change it with inaction and acceptance. That’s just not a valid choice. 

The Rise of State Schools

By

So this pretty much sums it up as well it can be summed up right now:

U.S. schools under the jurisdiction of state and federal governments are now scripted processes that view knowledge as static capital, students as passive and empty vessels, and teachers as compliant conduits for state-approved content. The accountability paradigm is antithetical to human agency and autonomy and thus to democracy, but it serves the needs of the status quo and the ruling elite; in effect, accountability paradigms driving compulsory education are oppressive.

Amen.

“It’s All About Distrust”

By

The scariest part of this story about how the new teacher evaluation policies in Tennessee are sending “morale into the toilet” is not that the framework is broken. It’s that someone actually created this stupidity in the first place. I mean, just read this:

Teachers have it worse. Half of their assessment is based on their students’ results on state test scores, a serious problem for those who teach subjects with no state test.

To solve that, the state is requiring teachers without test results to be evaluated based on the scores of teachers at their school with test results. So Emily Mitchell, a first-grade teacher at David Youree Elementary, will be evaluated using the school’s fifth-grade writing scores.

“How stupid is that?” said Michelle Pheneger, who teaches ACT math prep at Blackman High and is also being evaluated in part based on writing scores. “My job can be at risk, and I’m not even being evaluated by my own work.”

For 15 percent of their testing evaluation, teachers without scores are permitted to choose which subject test they want to be judged on. Few pick something related to their expertise; instead, they try to anticipate the subject that their school is likely to score well on in the state exams next spring.

Several teachers without scores at Oakland Middle School conferred. “The P. E. teacher got information that the writing score was the best to pick,” said Jeff Jennings, the art teacher. “He informed the home ec teacher, who passed it on to me, and I told the career development teacher.”

It’s a bit like Vegas, and if you pick the wrong academic subject, you lose and get a bad evaluation. While this may have nothing to do with academic performance, it does measure a teacher’s ability to play the odds. There’s also the question of how a principal can do a classroom observation of someone who doesn’t teach a classroom subject.

My. Goodness. Who in their right mind would create and impose something as asinine as this? Really?

These are scary times.

“Blowing Up” Education

By

So, regardless of whether you think Khan Academy adds real value to the learning conversation, don’t miss the shift in rhetoric around the potential:

In case you haven’t noticed, lots of people want to “blow up education” right now. And the monied interests are going to have much to say about which direction education takes from here. I know I’m sounding like a broken MP3 here, but the question once again is whether or not the focus moving forward will be on learning or test taking. 

We do have a voice in this, obviously. We need to start using it. 

What if we Did School for Kids, Not Adults?

By

(UPDATE: After a post-posting Twitter exchange with Chris Lehmann, I’m thinking a better title might be “…for Kids AND Adults.”) 

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the education issue here in the states, lots of mostly white middle-aged “experts” meeting and pontificating about change at venues like NBC’s “Education Nation” and the New York Times “Schools for Tomorrow” conference. At the latter, they actually had two panels about students without inviting…wait for it…any students to participate. And Ed Nation felt more like a roll call for the biggest spenders and businesses with a financial stake in education moving forward.

You can’t help but walk away thinking that we’re going to be hellbent on keeping the system manageable for the adults regardless of what my be best for the kids. I know I’ve offered up this Clay Shirky quote before, but let’s not forget that “Institutions will always try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution,” and that is certainly the case right now in education. John Merrow wrote a summary piece about Ed Nation that can’t escape that “let’s do what we’ve been doing better” lens, but one of his commentors, Ken Bernstein, gets it right:

Our schools are now, and have for more than a century, largely been structured for the convenience of the adults involved with them than for the real benefit and learning of the students whom somehow we seem to want to treat as interchangeable parts.

Amen. It’s offensive the way we talk about kids as if they are numbers to be managed and improved, that success has less to do with the types of human beings they become than the scores they “achieve,” and that their desire and ability to continue to learn really doesn’t factor that much into the equation. The current conversation is steeped in tweaking the system, not fundamentally changing it, even though fundamentally changing it would serve our children and, frankly, our nation. I totally understand the magnitude of the articulated “problem” which is to provide every child with an adequate education. But the real problem is that the system is not working for our kids or for us.

Let’s be honest…we are not the most intellectually curious society these days. We routinely ignore science, we’re addicted to Jersey Shore and American Idol, and we disregard our own health to a frightening degree. We don’t know much about the way the world works, and worse, we have no real curiosity about it anyway. We lack energy and inspiration. We act is if we are helpless to do anything to solve our problems or change our world, and our leaders show us no different.

Is it a stretch to suggest that much of what we’re struggling with right now is because of the education system we’ve built and the emphasis we’ve placed on the test? We’ve been taught to hate ambiguity, that only one answer exists, that if we have enough money, we can game the test. We’ve been taught that learning ends once the test is mastered, that our passions don’t matter, and that numbers rather than goods tell our educational story. 

Yet, this is what we perpetuate because for the adults, it’s the easiest path. It’s easier to define success in numbers, easier to manage kids as groups, and easier to tweak than to reimagine, none of which serves our students as well as they deserve.

Kids are not interchangeable parts. If we sincerely valued what was best for them, we’d start talking about change in meaningful ways, not just in ways that support the status quo. 

“We Prepare Children to Learn How to Learn”

By

Fascinating piece in Smithsonian this month on the “success” of Finnish schools. And I put “success” in quotes because for most American observers, Finland’s school system works because they score near the top on PISA tests. When you read the article, however, you see that test scores have little to do with it from a Finnish perspective. 

There’s a lot to learn from what the Finns do, but more than anything, it’s an attitude toward learning that makes the difference. They’ll do “whatever it takes” to help a child be successful, whether that’s extra time, providing nourishing food and health care, or making play a focal point of the school day. School isn’t high stakes; as one principal said, “We are interested in what will become of them in life,” which is why 43 percent of Finnish kids go to vocational high schools and why there’s only one test in their senior years that they have to take.

But here are the three snips that really jumped out at me. First, the goal of the system:

“We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,” said Pasi Sahlberg, a former math and physics teacher who is now in Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture.

What a concept, right? What they seem to understand that we here in the States can’t seem to get is that high test scores do not equal learning. That you can’t create a learning disposition if the focus is on content, Common Core or otherwise. That it’s about being a learner rather than being learned.

And this:

Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests. “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts,” Louhivuori teased, as he rummaged through his closet looking for past years’ results. “Looks like we did better than average two years ago,” he said after he found the reports. “It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”

We’ve become so dependent on the test to tell us about our students that we know less and less about who they really are. And without really knowing them, how can we help them reach their individual potentials?

And finally:

In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on competition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

Why is it we have such a hard time in this country seeing this “human aspect” of education? Is that something only understood by socialist cultures who see government as a way of lifting everyone up, of providing an equal starting point for all kids, as opposed to countries like ours that are so hell bent on competition that we’ll let millions of kids suffer a mediocre education just so we can have winners and losers?

I don’t buy the argument that we can’t learn from Finland because it’s smaller and doesn’t have such a big system or that it’s different from our culture. At the core, it’s about caring for kids, doing what’s right by them not what’s easy for us. That’s the piece we seem to be missing, and that’s the piece that should be motivating all of us start screaming about a meaningful overhaul of the system. 

The Truly Flipped Classroom…and Conversation

By

I think Sarah Thorneycroft gets it right. In commenting about a student-led Minecraft workshop held online last week, she writes:

Perhaps the best aspect of the session today was that it was truly a ‘flipped classroom’ – not through swapping homework with classwork, but through reversing the roles of teacher and learner and turning learning heirarchy on its head. Learning led by kids is challenging and valuable – it’s learning by exploration and questioning, not rote process memorisation. Kids innovate and create first and think later.

Those who have been reading here for a while know my thinking on teachers needing to be learners first, needing to be the learning experts in our communities, not just the subject matter experts. In a world where knowledge and information are changing so fast, where there is so much to know, education has to be more about preparing kids to be learners rather than learned. Unfortunately, I still get the sense that most educators struggle with that shift. Sure, they continue to learn about what they teach, but few see themselves as master learners. In fact, for many, the idea of being a learning “expert” them uncomfortable.

That’s dangerous, especially right now when so many people outside of education are driving the conversation around reform. We’re ceding the debate to non-educators when we are the ones who should be driving it. We need to reframe the conversation, we need to redefine what education looks like, make it something where “success” isn’t measured by test scores or the number of AP courses we offer or the percentage of kids that go on to college but, instead, whether or not the kids that leave us are true learners, kids who have the skills and dispositions to edit their world, create complex work of quality and beauty and significance, work with one another to change the world for good, and tackle any problem that comes their way.

That is not a place we’ll arrive at if we let Bill Gates or Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or Arne Duncan continue to drive the reform bus. And as more moneyed interests become invested in maintaining the status quo, we’ll get farther and farther from that goal.

WE are the learning experts in our communities. (Right?) WE need to lead. And WE need to dive into learning right now, just like those kids in Sarah’s Minecraft class. Flipping that lens, I think, will have a lot to do with flipping the larger conversation around change. 

The Truly Flipped Classroom…and Conversation

By

I think Sarah Thorneycroft gets it right. In commenting about a student-led Minecraft workshop held online last week, she writes:

Perhaps the best aspect of the session today was that it was truly a ‘flipped classroom’ – not through swapping homework with classwork, but through reversing the roles of teacher and learner and turning learning heirarchy on its head. Learning led by kids is challenging and valuable – it’s learning by exploration and questioning, not rote process memorisation. Kids innovate and create first and think later.

Those who have been reading here for a while know my thinking on teachers needing to be learners first, needing to be the learning experts in our communities, not just the subject matter experts. In a world where knowledge and information are changing so fast, where there is so much to know, education has to be more about preparing kids to be learners rather than learned. Unfortunately, I still get the sense that most educators struggle with that shift. Sure, they continue to learn about what they teach, but few see themselves as master learners. In fact, for many, the idea of being a learning “expert” them uncomfortable.

That’s dangerous, especially right now when so many people outside of education are driving the conversation around reform. We’re ceding the debate to non-educators when we are the ones who should be driving it. We need to reframe the conversation, we need to redefine what education looks like, make it something where “success” isn’t measured by test scores or the number of AP courses we offer or the percentage of kids that go on to college but, instead, whether or not the kids that leave us are true learners, kids who have the skills and dispositions to edit their world, create complex work of quality and beauty and significance, work with one another to change the world for good, and tackle any problem that comes their way.

That is not a place we’ll arrive at if we let Bill Gates or Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or Arne Duncan continue to drive the reform bus. And as more moneyed interests become invested in maintaining the status quo, we’ll get farther and farther from that goal.

WE are the learning experts in our communities. (Right?) WE need to lead. And WE need to dive into learning right now, just like those kids in Sarah’s Minecraft class. Flipping that lens, I think, will have a lot to do with flipping the larger conversation around change. 

How Can You Not Be Angry?

By

<rant>

In over 10 years of using social media I can say with almost absolute certainty that I have never used the “F-word” in any public post, Tweet, bookmark, note or whatever else…until today. It took me a few minutes to push “publish” on that Tweet, but in the end, the anger I’m feeling about what’s being done to public education in this country coupled with our growing political dysfunction drove me to it. That and the fact that 40,000 other Tweets with that hashtag had been posted in the last day or so, not one of which I could find on a quick search that dealt with schools or learning or kids. The anger is building everywhere it seems, but around education.

I know, I know. As Wes suggests, on some level it probably wasn’t appropriate, and were I still in the classroom, I doubt I would have done it. And I know there are other people besides me who are angry about what has happened to the profession and to the system who are voicing it in more “productive” ways. There are lots of educators taking to the streets this week in Washington, DC, and there are others writing letters to the editor and op-ed pieces and more. I commend all of those folks for doing what they can do to articulate the many complex sides to the education debate.

But here’s the thing: If you’re a public school educator in the U.S. right now, how can you not be angry? How can you not be doing something, even if it is just a profanity laced Tweet? The profession is being trampled. Politicians and businessmen with no background in education are driving reform. And our students are stuck in a system that still thinks it’s the 19th Century. By any standard, including the tests, our kids are not being well served, especially those who live in poverty. As a community, we’re in a fight, whether we like it or not, yet we seem more inclined to figure out Google+ than to make our voices heard to the policy makers who seem to have no desire to figure out what’s best for our children and care more about their re-election campaigns. 

I mean really…what’s it going to take?

</rant>

Standardizing Creativity and Innovation. Really?

By

From a lengthy .pdf titled “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants” by Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy, this snip jumped out at me as one that captures the challenges that our testing mindset is bringing us:

The new Common Core State Standards for mathematics and English and the work being done by the two assessment consortia will begin to address some of these issues, but, even when that work is done, the United States will still be at an enormous disadvantage relative to our competitors. We will have tests in these two subjects that are still not squarely based on clearly drawn curricula. The two consortia are betting heavily on the ability of computer-scored tests to measure the more complex skills and the creativity and capacity for innovation on which the future of our economy is likely to depend. No country that is currently out-performing the United States is doing that or is even considering doing that, because they are deeply skeptical that computer-scored tests or examinations can adequately measure the acquisition of the skills and knowledge they are most interested in. If the United States is right about this, we will wind up with a significant advantage over our competitors in the accuracy, timeliness and cost of scoring. If we are wrong, we will significantly hamper our capacity to measure the things we are most interested in measuring and will probably drive our curricula in directions we will ultimately regret.

What kills me is that we are even attempting to measure creativity and innovation by a “computer scored test” when we have this thing called a teacher already in the room and the potential of many other human assessors via the network who could do a much better job. Inherent in all of this is a deep distrust of the ability of humans to do the work of preparing our children for their worlds. On some level, I get that…we have a lot of work to do to bring the profession to a different, more effective place when it comes to developing the learning dispositions we want in both teachers and students. But surely, investing in that process, creating a new normal of teaching and learning will better serve our kids than attempting to standardize creativity. 

Right?

Our policy makers have this deep love of the test for lots of reasons: money, power, politics. But at it’s root, it’s because they are not educators. They can’t define and communicate what real learning is and looks like to their constituents, people who have all formed their own views of learning in test centric schools (for the most part.) They crave the easy answer. They can’t lead on this, but neither are they willing to let others, the real experts on learning, the educators in our schools, take the reins. That, ultimately, is what we will come to regret most of all.

The State of American Education Today

By

Provocative essay by NYC librarian Joseph Grasso that captures the moment in ed in a nutshell. Would love to be able to hand this out at the exhibit floor at ISTE today, especially those making millions on test prep and a NCLB assessment garbage. 

It is an easy truism that when simplistic numbers become the end-all corruption is an inevitable result. Thus, this is what the education revolutionaries have sowed: dumbed-down standards, narrow curriculums, meaningless test drilling, and union busting. Yet this shallow revolution is backed by deep pockets, mainly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, by far the largest foundation in the U.S., six times wealthier than the next largest, and the Walton Family Foundation (according to the foundation’s website it’s ‘more focused than ever on sustaining the Walton’s timeless small-town values’). Through large grants to cash strapped states, dependent on such stipulations as not granting teacher tenure in less than three years and ‘ensuring successful conditions for high performing charter schools and other innovative schools’, large donations to both political parties, and hundreds of millions of dollars in media advocacy (including Gates sponsoring the documentary Waiting for Superman), big money philanthropists have been able to shape the education debate and be fawned upon by the national media. Indeed one study cited by Frederick Hess in “With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy is Reshaping K-12 Education“ revealed that from 1995-2005 there were thirteen positive articles about education initiatives of major foundations for every single negative one in national news outlets.

Still all is not yet lost. For all the hyped despair about U.S. students falling behind their international counterparts this claim can be put into context. Joann Barkan, writing in Dissent Magazine (“Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools”), cites the results of two of the three major international tests- the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study. Both are given every five years. She explains the results:

“The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent rankedfirst in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty ratewas 10 to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose higher still, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.”

It is the poverty rate, along with the incarceration rate, that has long separated the U.S. from other industrial countries. Mechanized test prepping, schools closing, and cheapened diplomas won’t make a dent in either, that self-reinforcing loop, in the absence of real reform and commitment to communities as a whole, figures only keep on churning.

Have Schools Reached Their Limits?

By

(Cross posted to Huffington Post)

The last couple of days I’ve been soaking in a new white paper “Right to Learn: Identifying Precedents for Sustainable Change,” a document that I think nudges the serious conversation about real change in learning down the road a few steps if not more. The paper, written by Bruce Dixon and Susan Einhorn of the Anytime, Anywhere Learning Foundation, is the result of the discussions held at the Big Ideas Global Summit in June of 2010 (which was attended by the likes of Christopher Dede, Sugata Mitra, Karen Cator, Milton Chen, Angus King and many others,) and it poses one compelling question to frame the debate as we think about the future of learning:

Have we reached the limits of our traditional school system’s capacity to deal with the diversity of learners that come into our schools today?

I’m really intrigued by fundamental shift articulated in the paper, a move away from a “right to an education” towards a “right to learn,” a shift that is only made possible by the advent of new technologies to connect us to the resources and people who can help us learn.

To do this we need to shift our thinking from a goal that focuses on the delivery of something—a primary education—to a goal that is about empowering our young people to leverage their innate and natural curiosity to learn whatever and whenever they need to. The goal is about eliminating obstacles to the exercise of this right—whether the obstacle is the structure and scheduling of the school day, the narrow divisions of subject, the arbitrary separation of learners by age, or others—rather than supplying or rearranging resources. The shift is extremely powerful…

I agree. It’s huge. And it challenges the very basic assumptions that we have about this thing we call school.

On many levels, this is scary territory to enter. But it articulates an important choice that has been niggling at me for quite some time in terms of where we should be spending our time and effort at this moment of huge disruption and challenge:

We can see an emerging crisis in our schools, while, on the other hand, we see a renaissance for learning. The question then simply becomes: would a completely different perspective that builds on the latter, be a more productive focus for us than the continued, largely unproductive, public debate around the former?…

Instead of thinking about buildings and budgets, we think about what learning might be possible. Instead of thinking about student teacher ratios, and high stakes tests, we think about the impact that a child taking more responsibility for his or her learning might have on a child’s life choices. It simply shifts our emphasis, and most importantly, our perspective.

As a parent and a former classroom teacher, I for one hope all of the current ideas for “reform” fail, because few if any of them put our kids’ learning lives first. It’s about more standardization in our classrooms, more competition between our schools, and whatever is easiest and cheapest to implement. In many ways, it’s embarrassing the depth to which the conversation has sunk. And I agree with the premise of the report; if we continue to place our energy toward “fixing the system” literally millions of kids will be underserved at best in the process. Instead, what if we put a laser like focus on improving real student learning, not test scores? (And yes, the two are decidedly different.) Let’s start talking about how we can begin to deliver more personalized, relevant learning to kids right now, by rethinking our definitions of teacher and classroom and school in some profound albeit radical ways, and by starting to deeply consider the affordances that technologies bring to the learning equation, despite being made decidedly uncomfortable by those potentials in some big ways.

Instead of seeing the non-face-to-face learning space as one of a compromised experience, we surely need to recognize and explore without fear the new and, in many ways, more profound pedagogical opportunities the virtual space opens; opportunities that will challenge and possibly even undermine our traditional perspectives around effective teaching and learning.

The pedagogical opportunities are much more than just taking “online courses” the way we currently define them, more than just moving content online and trying to create communities around it. It speaks to the vast potential of individualization and personalization within the learning process that are possible now but that we haven’t even begun to explore as fully as we need to. I don’t read this as an end to physical space, but as a switch around what supports what. It’s not virtual that supports physical, as we think of it now. It’s where we use the physical spaces to help young learners make deeper sense of the interactions they pursue to a growing extent online. Again, that’s a profound switch, but it’s inevitable, I think.

There’s more, much more about learning and literacy and the like, and I urge you to read the entire paper. But I would love to hear your thoughts on those two “big” questions: Have schools as we know them reached their limits in terms of real student learning? And should we be shifting our focus away from how best to “deliver an education” to our students to, instead, building a new framework around each child’s inherent “right to learn” from cradle to grave?

"Online Learning" Isn't "Learning Online"

By

(Cross posted to the Powerful Learning Practice blog.)

So what does the following list suggest to you about the value of “online learning”:

1. I can work ahead if I’m able to
2. I get nearly instant responses from my teachers
3. I get personalized support when I need it
4. My teachers are just as excited about online learning as I am
5. I can do all my math for the week on one day if I want to
6. I know how I’m doing, my grades are right on the screen
7. My parents can see my work and grades
8. My courses are more challenging
9. I can keep up with my work when my family travels
10. I can work around a busy schedule

Those are the “benefits” touted by a group of Utah sophomores in this Huffington Post piece by Tom Vander Ark, ones that apparently impressed senators, representatives and school board members. I’m not as impressed.

Sure, taking a course online may offer more individuation and student choice in how to manage the process, but at the end of the day, I wonder what those online students have learned more or better than the ones who took the course in a classroom. And if we’re touting the online experience has superior because kids can take trips and still do the work or because their teachers are excited, that speaks to bigger, more fundamental issues that aren’t being addressed. This is still all about content delivery,  old wine in a new bottle that’s being motivated more by economics and convenience than good or better design. And it’s about, as I mentioned yesterday, a growing business interest that sees an opportunity to make inroads into education as “approved providers.” Hmmmm.

Learning online is not about finishing the course requirements a few days early or answering the questions that the text or the teacher dictate. It’s about finding our own path through the material.  As I asked in a comment on the post, do students practice inquiry in these settings? Are they able to ask their own questions? Are they assessed any differently? Do they create any new knowledge in the process and, if so, is that knowledge shared anywhere? Does their experience in the course replicate real life in any new way? Does it teach them how to learn on their own? To go deep? Not that any of that shouldn’t be taking place in face to face classrooms as well, but if you’re going to suggest something as different…

My point is that if this vision of online learning is being touted as reform, why? What’s really different here? Obviously, I’m a big believer in the value of online networks and communities to support lifelong and lifewide learning. The work that Sheryl and I and our amazing colleagues have been doing with PLP attests to fact that there is another way to learn online aside from digitizing a curriculum. We have goals and outcomes for our participants, but we don’t say to them “here is the path, work ahead if you like, and your grades will be posted online.” We let them find their own way, supporting and prodding as needed, trying to keep them moving in the general direction of shift. With any luck, they experience the change in their own way, on their own terms.

Not saying there isn’t any value to offering classes online. But if we do, let’s make sure they take advantage of the online piece to let participants develop the connections that will sustain them far beyond the class. Or, if not, let’s call it what it is…online coursework, not learning.

"Race to the Top" Needs Another "T"

By

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.

Transforming Learning…No, Really

By

From the “Must Read 2010 Department” comes this most excellent report I just came across (released a few months ago) from Charles Leadbetter and Annika Wong writing for Cisco about “Learning from the Extremes” (.pdf warning.) It’s an instructive look (at least to me) at what options we face when it comes to the new story we are building about learning. In a nutshell, the authors suggest four strategies: Improve the schools we already have, supplement the learning our kids already do, reinvent schools to make education more relevant, or transform “learning by making it available in radically new ways.” Here’s a graphic that sums it up pretty neatly.

While the first three efforts can have a positive effect, the authors make the compelling case that the bottom right is where the most of our efforts should be spent. Obviously, I’m suggesting you read the whole thing (about 40 pages), but here’s the gist of the argument:

• Improvement in our current schools, on its own, will not be enough to meet the growing and changing demands of governments, parents, and children.
• That is true in the established school systems of the developed world and in the much more recently created mass school systems in the developing world.
• Strategies that supplement and support learning at school by working with families and in communities—to change habits, culture, values and aspirations —will become increasingly important.
• However, in addition, education needs more powerful sources of disruptive innovation, to create different kinds of schools and to create alternatives to school—in other words, to create entirely new ways to learn.
• Disruptive innovation in education is too weak because state regulation, teacher union power, parental conservatism, and political micromanagement create high barriers to new entry. Creating diverse new ways for people to learn is still too difficult. Disruptive innovation needs more support and encouragement.
• A band of disruptive innovators is emerging from within school systems in many parts of the developing world. Yet radical innovation rarely comes from the mainstream. Most often it comes from renegades, mavericks, and outsiders working in the margins. This report focuses on a potent source of such innovation: social entrepreneurs promoting learning in the slums of the fast-growing cities of the developing world.
• These disruptive innovators are creating a new logic to learning that often does without traditional teachers, schools, classes, timetables, and exams.
• These approaches may emerge from the developing world, and may apply just as much in the developed world, especially where schools seem to be failing to crack ingrained cultures of low aspiration, ambition, and achievement, which are main causes of the underperformance of whole education systems.

Certainly, there are echoes of Clayton Christensen in terms of the disruptive innovation piece, and Jay Cross’s great thinking about informal learning, but Leadbetter and Wong take it all a step or ten further by suggesting that at the end of the day, transformation is more, a lot more, than having students take coursework online or pursue their own passions. They say that “transformational learning” will require “transformational innovation” to create “new ways to learn, new skills, in new ways, outside formal school.” I know what you’re thinking; that “transformation” word is way overused and watered down at this point. But I have to say, I don’t think they use the word lightly.

According to the authors, we face two huge challenges right now, one very few of us have a real context for, the other most of us can relate to.

Our biggest challenge is how to provide learning at scale to millions of poor people in places that are ill-served by traditional public services, including schools.

Perhaps the most intractable challenge is the failure of mass schooling to deliver on its promise of social mobility and economic improvement for significant numbers of children. After investing huge hopes in schools in the first half of the 20th century, educational under performance has become a perpetual source of anxiety in many advanced societies.

What I love about this piece is that they wade through a bevy of examples as they walk readers through each of the quadrants above, giving a clear vision of what improvement, reinvention, supplementing and transformation look like already in the world. And for me at least, the diversity of the examples, coming from third world as well as developed countries, is an eye opener. But I have to admit that I am most drawn to the discussion of how disruptive innovation can reinvent informal learning. They go into great depth about “social entrepreneurs” who are looking at ways to reframe learning, as in “learning as problem solving” (like real life problems) or “many places for learning,” “learning without teachers,” and “learning as production. This “new logic for learning” that these social entrepreneurs are compelling, for instance, making learning compelling and attractive instead of compulsory, promoting learning outside of schools, getting relevant information to learners so they can tackle the real problems in their lives instead of imparting a set curriculum, and using play as an organizational tool for learning instead of a respite from it. Really interesting stuff.

And here is the upshot: while much of this radical innovation is happening in the third world, the authors clearly suggest that transformation in the developed world with most likely stem from these efforts. Personally, I love the creativity, the flexibility, the passion and the relevance of many of the examples included. And while technology isn’t found in every example, it is an important piece.

To bring to life technology’s potential to enable learning, however, we will need a massive wave of social entrepreneurship, in both the developed and developing world. Without that, new technologies will remain trapped inside old institutions, the learning potentially untapped.

Definitely worth the read. As always, would love to hear your thoughts.

Teaching, Testing and Counseling

By

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.

On Common Standards

By

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.