Is School 2.0 a school reform pipedream?

Politicians, Edupolitians, and other education pundits who are in charge of education reform live so far from the classroom, that they are a world apart from the reality of the classroom.

Will Richardson said in
Weblogg-ed » URGENT: 21st Century Skills for Educators (and Others) First

But
here’s the thing that’s giving me the most angst. (Hey, I haven’t been
too angsty in a while, have I?) For all of the experts and scholars and
pundits who were staking out a part of the conversation about
educational reform, I couldn’t help leaving there wondering how many of
them really have a sense of the changes that are afoot here.

They all have to get their agenda into the mix.  Forget about what is best for the student.  They all have sound byte answers for what schools should do, despite what teachers know is best for kids.

Schools don’t need a vision of teaching by testing.  We need a vision for schools that involves sound pedagogy, purposeful and personalized learning through technology, and a student-centered curriculum.  The current culture of education reform in the United States excludes the terms pedagogy, technology, and student-centered.

Some of my fellow teachers say, “Oh, no.  It’s one more thing to do in an already, overflowing school day,”   I agree that it can be overwhelming.  Rather than more curriculum being piled on from on-high, we need to whittle down a bloated curriculum to allow time to do what is important - teaching our students to think.

Teaching thinking takes time.  Of which we don’t have enough.
Teaching thinking is hard.   For which we don’t have enough energy.
Teaching thinking takes courage.  To which we must go beyond the basics.
Teaching thinking is essential.  Of which we must do do for our kids.

I think Will was talking about a change beyond the everyday, to deep learning.  I think we live in great times where we will see great change, but the scholars in the ivory towers aren’t close enough to the ground to see the nature of the change.  Web 2.0 is coming and the tools will amplify the change in teaching like nothing we have seen since the industrial model of education.

Is this what School 2.0 will be, or is it just a pipedream?

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School Choice / Voucher Debate

Do you know those times when you have had a great response to a conversation you finished 1/2 an hour ago. I’m having that now. I have stopped for lunch on my way back from our Missouri Capitol, Jefferson City. I attended to an MSTA Capitol lobby day to lobby our state legislators.

I talked to my state senator, Gary Nodler. We debated a school voucher bill.

For those international readers, school choice /school vouchers refers to using the tax money that is paid to a public school for a student to pay for private school tuition if the student chooses to attend a private school.

Senator Nodler supported school choice for several reasons.

1. Competition between schools will improve the quality of the schools.
2. It will allow students to escape being “enslaved” in the failing and dysfunctional St. Louis school district (which makes up40% of the population if Missouri).
3. The money belongs to the parents, since they already paid it in taxes.
4. Parents are getting triple-taxed: paying the tax, paying private school tuition, and public schools get a windfall from getting the money for the student but not having to educate the student.

Do you find the arguments convincing? I had some answers then and have some afterthoughts now. Admitted, I did not win this lively debate, but I did enjoy the challenge.

Here are my answers:

1. There is no guarantee that the new choice will be any better than the public school. The senator’s answer was that anything had to be better than the broken St. Louis public schools. Afterthought: Competitions have winner and losers. What do public schools have that public schools do not? Better students and better parents because they do not have to deal with poverty and all the baggage that comes with it. There are excellent teachers in private schools, but there are also excellent teachers in public schools. Many times, the private and public teachers come from the same colleges. Many parents, especially poor and limited English speakers won’t understand the bureaucracy of how to choose another school or even know they have the option.
2. I acknowledged that St. Louis does have a problem with it’s schools and it’s administration. Afterthought: The problems with urban schools are complex and have more to do with cycles of poverty and it’s culture than schools not working hard enough to educate their students. My Carl Junction students are not in St. Louis and attend an excellent school district. The parents of my more affluent students would be more likely to choose a private school than my poor students. Since they would take the money with them, my class size would probably grow larger and I would be left with more poor achieving, special ed, and troublesome students. Does that make our school better? No, it just changes the population of our school. We are already doing our best to educate our students.
3. True parents did pay the money, but doesn’t paying state revenues to religious institutions violate the separation of church and state in the 1st amendment of our Constitution? He answered that our schools started as religious schools and our forefathers intended for religion to be a part of public schools. Afterthought: So the answer is Yes.
4. I oppose taking money away from my students, increasing class sizes, and cutting services our school provides to my students. Afterthoughts: Parents are entitled to their right to choose which school they attend, but they must pay. They are not entitled to take the money spent on my students and give it to religious (not necessarily Christian) schools.

I had more afterthoughts than answers to the debate. Some are along MSTA party lines and some are my own. I found the senator’s reasoning well thought out and convincing. I will have to ponder on this more. Are you convinced? Are your beliefs challenged? I welcome your input.

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Reflection on full day school workshop

    The kids were off for Martin Luther King. Jr.’s birthday, but the teachers had an all-day inservice.  I was kind of look forward to it because our speakers were supposed to tell us about how Ruby Paine’s Framework for Understanding Children in Poverty  would help our kids.  Nearly half the kids in my class are on Free/Reduced lunch, so I was very interested in how I could help them to achieve better.

The people who showed up were 3 administrators from Hutchinson, KS USD 308 school district.  The proceeded to tell us about the impressive gains their district had made on No Child Left Behind’s Adequate Yearly Progress.   Over half their students live in poverty, but they pulled their students’ achievement above the ever-rising AYP proficiency bar.  It’s impressive, and I wondered how they did it.  They credited it to 5 things:

1. Ruby Paine’s program  $$$
2. Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures program $$$
   
3. Koality Kids / Quality Keys program  $$$
4. Data driven curriculum alignment and assessment analysis
5. Technology integration

They spent some bucks on the first three training programs.

They spent the rest of the day telling us about what the Ruby Paine program, Koality Kids program, and data were, but very little about how we could use it in our classroom.   I was excited to hear that they had successfully implemented Cooperative Learning and Technology integration into their district.  That’s what I wanted to hear.  Nada.

Instead we got cramped points full of lists and words too small to see.  We got a birds-eye, administrator overview. Each presentation, Koality Kids, Ruby Payne, and data, was abstract.  Each presentation had 5 minutes of sunshine that gave me an activity or graphic organizer I could use.  I could have gone without the other 55 minutes from each.  I guess it’s par for the course for full-day inservices.  I guess I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.

I still would like to know more about Cooperative Learning structures, address the needs of students in poverty, and technology integration.  I guess I will still have to search for it on my own.  Do you have some good ideas for resources?  I’ll include here ones I find useful in my classroom.

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Barriers to Technology Change

I posted this comment to the article It’s the Technology, Stupid… on Steve Hargadon’s blog.

There are a lot of barriers working for hindering change in schools.  The primary barrier is time in the classroom.  The curriculum is so wide, that teachers are too stressed and pressed about teaching to worry about change.  The best teaching practices require extra preparation time and energy, and many teachers just don’t have enough left.  There is just not enough time in the day to fit it all in.

Second is lack of administrative vision for technology.  Again, they are busy, too.  However, they are the instruction leaders in their schools and districts, and they should be putting resources toward best teaching practices to facilitate a high quality, student-centered school.

Finally, profession development is lacking in both quantity and quality.  We teach the way we are taught.  Lecture is the fastest, easiest, most efficient, most used, and least effective teaching technique used everywhere.  Professional Development and beginning teacher training needs to be taught with the best teaching practices the teachers should be using in their classrooms.  It needs to be long-term, ongoing, individualized, small-group, collaborative, project-based, just-in-time learning.

Time, vision, and training are just the beginning of integrating technology with learning, but won’t happen without it.

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What would you change about NCLB

I posted this comment in an eSchool News Talkback discussion forum, Rethinking Accountability
The question was this:

What changes would you make to the law’s accountability system?

I would offer up instead of NCLB, my state’s rigorous Missouri School Improvement Program.

Instead of looking exclusively at achievement, MSIP uses 3 overall areas.

First, Resource standards look at things like a well rounded curriculum with fine arts and electives, staffing, and class sizes. Second, Process standards look at the instructional design and practices, differentiation, and instructional support. Finally, Performance standards focus on student achievement and dropout rates.

Schools are complex institutions made of individuals. Simplistically focusing only on test scores in reading and math, while important, miss es the point. The test currently drives the curriculum. While inextricably linked, this is topsy-turvy. Curriculum should drive the test. The cart and the horse are closely linked, but NCLB has the cart pulling the horse.

The purpose of schools to teach students how to learn, not to teach them how to take an achievement test. Evaluate a school upon its purpose, learning. Evaluating it on something other than it’s purpose, derails it from it’s mission.

If you evaluate using achievement test scores, then the purpose of the school will become test scores. Rich schools will do well. Poor schools will not.

If you evaluate the teaching methods, support, climate, achievement, and resulting graduations, then these will again become the schools missions. Teaching students to learn is the mission of schools, not test scores.

There is more on my blog What is School 2.0?

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