I feel like I should do some fun tool blogging or great classroom blogging or something before heading down the depressing road of writing more about change in schools, but I guess I can’t help myself. Especially after taking pictures like the one at right at a school I visited a couple of weeks ago and after reading quotes like this one:
“Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.â€
That’s Stan Karp of the New Jersey Education Law Center lamenting the cuts and “reforms” here in my great state and elsewhere in a blog post in the Washington Post. (If you want to see a video of Karp giving basically the same riff on the topic, check out his YouTube video and there is a transcript here.) It’s a really powerful exploration of the current conversation around change and the many problems surrounding it.
The critical point to me, however, is this: all of this orchestrated bashing of teachers and schools is opening the door for folks outside of education to come in and “save the day” Superman style, a fact that, as Karp suggests, could undermine the whole democratic ideal that we built schools upon. You can catch whiffs of it everywhere, when people say that “competition” is what will save education, to the “approved providers” the Jeb Bush and his Excellence for Education crew are promoting in their reforms to the growing number of personalized and customized tutoring programs that are cropping up all over the place. It may not be on a lot of folks’ radar at the moment, but rest assured, we’re going to see more and more corporate attempts to not just provide content (as they’ve done forever with textbooks) but, increasingly, to provide instruction as well. And, as Karp suggests in the quote above, that reality will surely make worse the already growing educational divide for our kids.
There is no question that businesses will play a part in the “reforms” or “transforms” that we so often talk about in this community. And there is also no question that we need to promote a different vision for what teaching and learning look like. But there is a big difference between the vision we have for students having equitable, thoughtful access to technology and teachers as opposed to the vision where only a few do. I’ll once again quote Allan Collins and Richard Halverson:
For education to embrace both equity and economic development, we believe that our leaders will have to stretch the traditional practices to embrace the capacity of new information technologies. This will require schools to forfeit some control over the learning processes, but will once again put the latest tools for improving learning in the hands of public institutions (as opposed to the hands of families and learners who can afford access.) (145)
As schools, we are going to have to “forfeit some control,” as we well should as the learning opportunities outside the classroom become more ubiquitous and effective. But we have to make sure that those opportunities are equitable and open as much as we can. That’s the real urgency of the debate right now, how do we use these new (and old) technologies to lift everyone up instead of just a few.
Will, this is a very real trend. I see it happening right around me. Determining that the outsourced content is equitable is as daunting of a task as internally generating the content through controlled technology. However, the former relinquishes control of the instruction to the corporation. I fear that many schools will see the need to act immediately and bypass the verification of content parity and simply put it in place. This process will remove the teacher from the teaching experience. It is a very dangerous slope.
The shared content capabilities of Moodle 2.0’s community hub allow a crowd source approach to content development and delivery versus an outsourced approach. This angle further enriches the districts’ internal resources to develop individualized instruction allowing for greater flexibility and adaptability.
I hope that administrators, even state and federal regulators, will see the value in a public and shared content development versus acquisition of privately developed content. Is it difficult? Damn right it’s difficult. We are educators. That’s what we signed up to do.
Another issue is the “orchestrated bashing” of folks “outside of education” coming in to save the day.
Face it – this wouldn’t be happening if there wasn’t a problem that hasn’t been fixed. And is in fact getting worse.
There are successes in education. There are successes in business. There is nothing wrong with the two getting together.
But as an elected leader in our own school board, when I see directors, administrators, teachers resisting every level of measure that I attempt to look at?
I see massive obfuscation. And that is typically caused by major problems trying desperately not to be found out.
Grade the teachers. Grade the administrators. Grade the parents. Grade the socio-economic state. Grade the elected officials (PLEASE!). Grade the students, but grade them on real learning. Grade ’em all.
Require that teaching methods adapt as the world changes. Require a certain level of respect and behavior. Redefine success and target that definition to individual capacities – and truly expect that success; nothing less.
As sick as many teachers are of “outsiders” trying to be “Superman”, well, some of us are equally sick of some of you guys whining about it.
The fact is: It’s broken. And you didn’t fix it. What do you expect the rest of us to do?!
Thanks for the thoughts, Steve. Sorry you see it as whining without solutions. I agree, we need to do a better job of articulating what needs to change, but I know it’s not what current reformists are calling for. No doubt, the system is broken, and there is resistance to change, and there are things going on in schools that barely reach the level of mediocre (if not damaging to kids.) But no amount of “grading” all of the players is ever going to make a difference until we start having some serious conversations about what exactly it is we’re assessing. I find it hard to see how current attempts at “improving student achievement” have anything to do with learning. You allude to that but don’t articulate what exactly that looks like. Would love to hear your thoughts on that…sincerely.
What I expect is that we educate ourselves to a solution, not buy ourselves there. We don’t need business to fix this. We need vision, one that keeps kids, not profits, in the forefront. By their very nature, businesses do not have students’ best interests at heart, no matter how much they might say it. Their bottom line is not learning, unless it’s defined and measured in a way that can be used to sell more product.
So I agree, we need to get on with it. But, with respect, we’ll just have to disagree as to how best to do that.
I am a teacher in a classroom. I have ideas about how to improve education. Rarely have I been asked how education can be improved. When I have been asked, my suggestions have been ignored. I’ve even taken the first step and suggested ways to improve education (without being asked). Once again, my suggestions were ignored.
Most of my suggestions have been ignored due to financial constraints or scheduling issues. Never was I turned down due to the ineffectiveness, uselessness or ridiculousness of a suggestion.
I believe the solutions are right in our hands waiting to be tapped. However, these soultions will never be tapped until the notion of what a school should look like is updated to reflect our world today.
Quite frankly, I’m surprised the educaitonal system in the U.S. works as well as it does. I think the only reason it works at all is due to the tireless efforts of the teachers in the classrooms across the U.S. making it work or at least trying to make it work in spite of all the hurdles placed in front of them.
When you take a close look at the “reforms” being proposed, whether coming from business leaders or even many educators, they don’t look all that different from what we have now. It’s the same curriculum delivered in the same way, with the same ultimate goal (college) for all students.
There is plenty of talk about “21st century skills” and teaching kids to be innovative, creative, collaborative (as in the presentation to our upper administration I watched this morning), but at the end of the day, most people, teachers and parents included, have a vision of school in their heads which looks little different from the one they lived through.
If we truly believe that our education system is failing, that it does a poor job of educating our children, which is something we hear over and over from all corners, then the first step in the reform process must be to start the discussion back at square one. We, as in the American society, need to establish exactly what it is we want schools to be and do. And how much we are willing to commit, in terms of both money and social capital, to make it happen.
Without that starting point, reform efforts will be, to use the old cliche, nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship.
The points raised in this post have profound implications for us in Alberta as we look at changes to our Education system. What he is talking about is becoming more pervasive in many aspects of our lives. From education, to health care to our usage of the internet market forces are the driver of change. We should also consider the bigger picture.