Politics

Anna Deveare Smith is one of my favorite American artists (and not just because she was on The West Wing.) She is a gifted actress, author and playwright, but even more importantly, her "documentary theater" style of writing and performing displays a respect for the diversity of voice and opinion that makes up the American mosaic. (See her TEDTalk which is a piece from her show "On the Road: A Search for American Character for an example.)

So it should come as no surprise that she has the ability to capture the range of the debate on health care in this country in an OpEd piece in today's New York Times. Here is her introduction:

Over the last few years, in preparation for a new play, I interviewed doctors, patients and healers about the human body, its resilience and its vulnerability. Although our conversations were not primarily about the health care debate, they do reveal many of the feelings and thoughts of the people in the audience President Obama will address tonight.

At a time when civility and rational discourse seem to be at an all-time low, her ability to listen so intently and bring across the myriad voices of the debate without irony and without judgment is so important. We all can learn from her ability to listen for the humanity in our voices.

Go read.

Tags: anna_deveare_smith, health_care

Today, President Obama nominated a very experienced center-left jurist for the Supreme Court. The nominee is a Hispanic woman. If confirmed, she will be the first Justice of Hispanic descent to serve on the Supreme Court.

Today, the Supreme Court of California ruled that Proposition 8 -- the ballot initiative that outlaws gay marriage -- was legal under the California Constitution.

Today when White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about President Obama's reaction to the California decision, he responded with a very politic non-answer:

Tags: politics, proposition 8, SCOTUS

That was one of John Wooden's credos -- Be quick, but don't hurry.

It seems to me that Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, a former former Harvard basketball player, would do well to remember. Sec. Duncan was quoted heavily in an April 17th editorial in the Chicago Tribune that suggested that unless Illinois quickly changes to his ideas on education reform, they will get none of the $5 Billion "Race to the Top" Department of Education money.

I question those folks who would say that there is one way to fix education -- or that we know what we need to know. I worry a great deal that in our hurry to change education, we are pushing "reforms" through that may not do what we want them. And I worry about a Secretary of Education who would use language such as this:

One, what is the data that suggests all of Illinois is at a mediocre level? Two, the innovations that Duncan proposes -- according to the rest of the article -- are more charter schools and merit pay based on test scores. The recent RAND study that included Philadelphia charter schools suggests that we still have a lot to learn about the efficacy of charter schools. That's not to say they shouldn't be funded, but rather that we shouldn't only look at the latest educational fads as the path to improvement.

And that's happening a lot lately. It's easy to forget, but NCLB is only eight years old. We have seen an almost complete upheaval of public education in those eight years. We are racing toward... what? What is the specific vision of those who would reauthorize NCLB, who would push for merit pay, who would push for both more charter schools and more standardized curriculum for the public schools?

There is no question that we must continue to work to fix our schools. There's no question that there is work to do. But let us be deliberate and thoughtful about the way we do it. Let us dial down the rhetoric and recognize the hard work and successes that so many educators -- and so many schools -- have achieved. Let us make choices (and spend money) in ways that help students as best we can, as opposed to changing as much as we can as fast as we can, just to say we did something.

In other words, let us be quick... but let us never hurry.

... and that's a very good thing.

In a recent post entitled "Let's Just Put Them All In Jail 24/7," David's title came from a comment a reader left in the post before about Secretary Duncan's comments in Coloardo where he called for more time in schools as he said:


David weighs in with his own opinion about this:


The whole post is worth reading -- as are the comments, but I wanted to jump in and say that what angers David most, it seems, is the whole "the beatings will continue until moral improves" mindset that seems to be prevailing these days. And yes, it's being applied to students and teachers alike. The answer to our problems in education seems to be teach more, teach harder, learn more, learn harder. More hours, more homework, etc...

... without ever questioning the validity of the time we spend -- and the work we do -- together.

David is right to challenge the prevailing winds in education policy. He is right to be angry. He is right to worry that the path we're heading down does not lead to smarter, more passionate students and teachers, bur rather it leads to teachers and students thinking that school is something that is done TO students, not with or for.

If we want to see a smarter populace, let's start by making sure we find ways to make the time we spend together meaningful, and then let's continue by helping kids make all the hours of their days meaningful. That might mean letting them find their own learning from time to time, but first, we've got to make sure school doesn't take that love of learning away from them.

[I'm on the Broad, Bolder Approach mailing list. I just got this today, but I'll be in Chicago that day, otherwise, I'd be taking a day off to go down to DC for this event. BBA is one of the groups really advocating a different kind of accountability for public education. If you can go, I'd think is going to be powerfully worthwhile.]

New Directions in Accountability Policy for Education

Thursday, February 26, 3-5 PM

With the controversy surrounding No Child Left Behind, there is hunger in the policy community for a viable alternative to make schools and other institutions of youth development accountable for delivering high-quality education. But when it comes to accountability, many people know what they are against; few know what they are for.

At this forum, leaders of the campaign for A Broader Bolder Approach to Education (BBA) will present and discuss proposals for new accountability systems, recommended for consideration to the Obama administration and state governments.

BBA, as you may know, issued a consensus statement last June that has now been endorsed by more than 1,000 leaders in education and social policy.  That statement notes:

The public has a right to hold schools accountable for raising student achievement. However, test scores alone cannot describe a school's contribution to the full range of student outcomes. New accountability systems should combine appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods, and they will be considerably more expensive than the flawed accountability systems currently in use by the federal and state governments.

Presenters will include these BBA leaders:

• Christopher Cross, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education (1989-91)
  
• Daniel Koretz, author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us
  
• Susan B. Neuman, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education (2001-03)
  
• Tom Payzant, BBA co-chair, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education (1993-1995)
  
• Diane Ravitch (via video), former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education (1991-1993)
  
• Richard Rothstein, author of Grading Education, Getting Accountability Right
  
• Robert Schwarz, Academic Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and founding president, Achieve
  
• Warren Simmons, Executive Director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform
  

DATE:    Thursday, February 26, 2009, from 3:00-5:00 PM

PLACE:  Economic Policy Institute, 1333 H Street, NW, East Tower, Suite 300, Washington, DC (near McPherson Square Metro and Metro Center)

RSVP: Space is limited, so please click here to reserve your seat today.

Co-chairs of A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education
  Helen F. Ladd (Duke University)
  Pedro Noguera (New York University)
  Tom Payzant (Harvard Graduate School of Education)

Tags: edreform

"First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you
then they fight you,
then you win."
-Mahatma Gandhi

Today, in the Pennsylvania State House, Bill 363 was introduced into the Education Committee. The bill reads:

Now, the students of SLA quickly pointed out that this could easily mean no laptops, but even if you don't include laptops in the "portable electronic device" (or tape recorders...) this law just doesn't make sense. Simply put -- if we want to teach students to be 21st Century citizens, we shouldn't ban -- by state law -- the tools of the 21st Century.

Moreover, the more we ban, prohibit, regulate and legislate, the less we teach. If we want students to learn how to manage their lives, we have to let them live them. This law creates more distance between our schools and the lives our kids lead. That makes it harder for us to teach, not easier. The short-term gain of keeping distractions out of our classrooms is, in my belief, far outweighed by the long-term loss of making our schools less and less relevant to kids. Fortunately, PA educators are mobilizing against the bill. There's a Facebook group and an online petition, but we can and must do more.

The sponsors of the bill are:

• Angel Cruz (D)
• Rosita Youngblood (D)
• Mark Mustio (R)
• Thomas Caltagirone (D)
• William Kortz (D)
• Douglas Reichley (R)
• Harry Readshaw (D)
• John Sabatina (D)
• John Siptroth (D)
• Curtis Thomas (D)

Please, especially if you are a PA resident, call, write letters, sign the petition, send emails and pass the word. This bill will set back our schools. Help ensure its defeat.

Tags: School2.0, politics, cell phones

I admit, I've been discouraged by Obama's early forays into education policy, but yesterday's visit by President Obama and the First Lady to Capital City Public Charter School suggests that we may have reason to hope that our new president will be supportive of progressive education.

CCPCS is a Coalition of Essential Schools school. CES is the organization founded by Ted Sizer and Deborah Meier, two outspoken critics of NCLB. CES is perhaps the most esteemed organization that advocates progressive education, small schools and project-based learning.

So my question to President Obama is this -- if CCPCS is an example of "How all our schools should be," what are the policy initiatives you are willing to support to give more schools a chance to get there?

(Thanks to Tom for calling me out to write about this.)

I was going to write a long impassioned screed about the latest Time magazine article about Michelle Rhee. But then I saw that Dean Shareski already did, so I thought I'd first link to that.

I'll add a few more points, however, but they deal with the tenor and tone of the conversation right now, both in Rhee's words and in the tone of the article.

I worry about an educational leader who would speak like this to a reporter:

Let's admit that educational ideas are controversial. Let's admit that no one side of this argument has a monopoly on "right." Let's admit that we can work as hard as we want in service of an educational idea, but that we still don't know for sure that we're doing it right way. And let's let that back-of-the-mind doubt humble us, so that we remain open to learn, because in the end that's what we want our students to do.

And to Time Magazine, if you are going to have a reporter write an editorial, call it an editorial, because when you allow reporters to write statements like this without citing any research at all, you undermine your magazine's credibility:

Mixed in with the platitudes there are some very questionable statements. (I'd argue some of the best teachers I've ever seen teach learned how to never be in a hurry. In fact, I'd argue that 'being in a hurry' can often be an impediment to great teaching, because a) that's about you, not the kids, and b) you miss a lot of details when you're in a hurry, and details tend to be important when you teach.) I'm fine with them on the editorial page -- or on a blog -- but not in a piece of reportage. And again, making those statements as blanket truths is reductive -- it makes it seem like the way to great teaching and great schools is just some magic algorithm that everyone knows already but just for some perverse reason is unwilling to implement.

We need fewer know-it-alls in education today. We need thoughtful, humble people who are willing to acknowledge their uncertainty and still do what they believe to be right. We need people who do understand that bludgeoning our way to school improvement probably isn't going to get us there. And we need people who understand, like Tom Sobol once said,

That perspective -- given near the end of a long heroic career in education -- doesn't get you in Time magazine, and it probably doesn't get you meets with both Presidential candidates during election season, but it's what's needed.

I admit... when I saw the headlines earlier this week about another $800 billion for the bailout, I started to get angry. I understood, from talking to friends I trust in the finance world and reading as much as I could get my hands on, that the first bailout was necessary. But the more I read about corporate retreats and corporate jets, the more angry I get about spending $1.8 trillion dollars on the bailout. Somewhere, somehow, the folks running these companies just flat out don't get it.

So here's my proposal -- continue the bailout because we cannot allow these markets to collapse, (and put some intelligent regulation and oversight in, please!) But any company that takes federal bailout money must put a cap on salaries. No one at any company that takes federal monies can make more than the President of the United States.

I think it's fair. That's a $400,000 salary. That's fair. That's livable. (Heck, I'd love to learn how to just get by on $400,000.) And more importantly, it sends a clear message -- the era of greed is over.

I know there are some who say that the market can bear a higher price, and that's what is necessary to get the brilliant minds we need to run these companies, but I'm unimpressed with the folks running them so far, and, honestly, President Obama is, by all accounts, a very smart man.

I know there are those who will feel that this doesn't go far enough -- that the CEOs of AIG and BearStearns should be forced to give back salary back. I think that's a fight we won't win.

This makes sense to me -- if you take bailout money, you pay anyone in your company more money than the highest paid federal employee -- the President of the United States -- and that includes stock options and such -- for the next ten years.

To me, this sends a message to the American people that the executives at these companies are willing to sacrifice like so many Americans are right now. And that's important, since we are bailing them out with enough money to insure every American, fully fund every school or invest in Social Security so that it's there when my generation retires. These are all things we were told that the American government couldn't afford, but now the money is there. It's only right that everyone takes their share of the hit on this one -- and that should certainly include the business folks who oversaw this disaster in the first place.

And if the executives don't want to do that, well, no one is making them take the federal dollars, are they?

Tags: bailout

The words of my students:
"I feel as if I can really do anything in the world now."
"Lehmann!!! We did it! President Obama!"
"We did it!"

But as President-Elect Obama said, it's not over now. The real work begins tomorrow... o.k., maybe Thursday.





And Theo gets his piece of history too... look at the screenshot of tonight's Philly.com:



And look at upper right hand of the frame. We're so proud.

Tags: politics

[A note -- I used to blog much more about my personal political views when I was a teacher, not a principal. As a principal, I blog much less about my personal beliefs outside of education for a lot of reasons. But in the end, this blog isn't a school blog, it's my personal blog, and I asked myself tonight why I had no ideas to blog about this week, and it's because I, like most of America, have been watching this election so closely. I respect that not everyone thinks that I should write publicly about my political views, and I respect that not everyone shares those views -- and not everyone at SLA shares those views. That's o.k., but I need to write this anyway.]

The McCain commercials that have been airing in Pennsylvania this week have been about fear. I saw my first 527 Reverend Wright ad tonight. I watched McCain surrogate "Joe the Plumber" question Obama's patriotism. And I've been offended and frightened. Offended because I cannot believe that John McCain has been willing to stoop so low, and frightened because it has worked before.

So I watched Obama's speech in Ohio last week. If you can't watch the whole thing, watch the last seven minutes.



And then read this -- My Wife Made Me Canvass for Obama.

And remember, that we as Americans have a choice about our nation. We can make a choice this week to believe in the best that we can be. I believe that this election has the chance to revitalize our political process. I believe that if Obama wins, we will have invited a generation of young people to the political process. I believe that if Obama wins, we will have invigorated people all over the demographic map - people like my mother who has spent hundreds of hours volunteering for the campaign. I believe that these people have worked for Obama because they were inspired by him.

And that's the thing. I want a political who inspires. I am envious when I hear my mother and father talk about what it was like to listen to JFK's inaugural speech. I remember the hope I had for Clinton.

And I remember watching Obama's speech in Philadelphia and thinking that I was hearing something truly different than I had ever heard from a politican in my lifetime.

We have the chance to vote for someone who believes in the best of what we can be. We have the chance to vote for someone who believes that the American Dream must be open to all who are willing to work for it. We have the chance to vote for someone who believes that politicans of either party have an obligation to work for all Americans.

On Tuesday morning, I'm going to take Jakob by the hand, down to my polling place, and I'm going to take him into the ballot booth with me as I vote for Barack Obama. I hope that, years from now, he remembers the moment as a powerful piece of his own and our country's history.

Tags: politics

[Forgive me if this is a post that isn't about the stuff I usually write about, but the idea was rumbling around, and here's where I put ideas that rumble around. -- Chris]

This post comes from thinking about the financial crisis of the past week (and next decade) and spending time with some old college friends of mine this weekend. Both are Wharton grads and both still are in the world of business. One is high ranking executive at a Fortune 50 company, and I always am intrigued to talk to them because their view on the world is very different than mine, even when our ethical values are often very similar.

This post comes at the intersection of two conversations we were having. On one level, I was listening to them discuss the financial realities of their businesses in the wake of everything going on. At another point, we were talking about the environment and issues of sustainability. What concerns me, and what I want to write about, is my creeping feeling that our current economic system is uniquely unsuitable to the need for a sustainable society.

The corporate structure -- by definition -- is designed for growth. That's where the shareholder profit comes in. Because there is a need to always take money out of the system to reward investment, a zero growth sustainable corporation -- by my definition, the ability to reach a stable presence in the market -- is a losing proposition.

Now, on any micro-economic level, that's fine. Companies come and go, but it strikes me that on the whole, we are reaching an end-game with a growth economy, as there is a limit how much markets can grow, and much of the growth we have seen of the past twenty years (the dot-com boom, the housing boom) has -- it seems to me -- been built on parlor games and mathematical tricks. We hope that new technologies, new innovations, will grow new markets. We hope that increased wealth of developing nations will mean growth for old corporations. But all of this also comes at a point where we are seeing a growing environmental crisis, as there are serious questions about the degree to which our planet can sustain our current environmental pace without serious repercussions.

Much of the current mainstream political debate deals with the need to tweak the current economic / environmental model. Do we regulate more? Do we bail out? Do we use market forces to encourage a reduced carbon footprint? It was fascinating for me to listen to two business executives agree that there should have been a massive gas tax years ago to a) change American behavior around gas consumption, b) raise necessary funds to fund alternative energy research and c) alter the market so that the the price of gasoline reflected the actual price of gas once the externality of pollution was factor in so that alternative energies became cheaper alternatives more quickly. Certainly, those are all important questions, and the need to question and alter the role of government in the coming years to deal with the realities of our changing world will be one of the fundamental question of the coming decade.

But at the root is the legal organism of the capitalist corporation. Has it outlived its usefulness? Have we, as a society - a world - reached a point in our evolution where the growth model of the market organism is more harmful than helpful? The sole proprietorship, the "mom and pop" did not have the need for growth that the corporation -- by definition -- has. I'm not suggesting that we can go back to an atomized capitalism - to the days of Adam Smith, nor am I arguing for a state-sponsored socialism (although is it just me or did we just nationalize a massive section of the banking industry last week?). Instead I am questioning our ability to imagine a new model of economics -- one that harnesses the best notions of the marketplace while recognizing the limits of growth as the altar at which business must worship? Can we imagine a model of economics where sustainability is the goal of business? Where the idea of "enough" at the macro level was considered? Is there a model of a market economy that does not have to include macro-economic growth?

Because I am concerned that without a new model, the macro-level rapaciousness of a corporate capitalism as that legal organism is currently constructed will lead us into a need for more and more where we must hope that technological innovations stretch ever-dwindling resources and increase the efficiency with which humans interact with their environment outpace the need for the market to grow. And that is a frightening end-game that, to me, we are destined some day to lose.

[Cross-posted at LeaderTalk.]



I had the opportunity to be on a panel of education experts speaking to college class. On our panel was an PA Department of Education official, and one of the new topics she spoke about the new graduation competency tests that the state is considering. I've been pretty outspoken on my blog and in my presentations about my opposition to high-stakes graduation tests. That comes into play later.

The topic was "How can Philadelphia improve its public education system?"

What I spoke about was how we need a new vision of our schools. We can talk about all of the issues facing public education, but we have to fundamentally ask ourselves first what we want our schools to be. We have to be able to articulate a strong vision of what we want our schools to be or other people are going to tell us what our schools have to be.

Right now, there are too many people who want to put too much of the fault on the people in the system. That's the biggest legacy of NCLB -- the erosion of trust in educators. And that's criminal because we are squandering the good will and hard work of a generation of teachers.

In the 1980 Presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan used the myth of the "Welfare Queen" as a major part of his campaign. Today, under NCLB, we have created the myth of the lazy teacher who, if only there was something to hold them accountable for the way they teach. The myth of that lazy teacher who could get students to achieve if only they worked harder is just that -- a myth. Are there bad, lazy teachers? Of course, but they are the vast, vast minority. Most teachers went into the profession because they wanted to make a difference. But our system is broken, and if you put good people in bad systems, the system will win more often than not. And as a result, we have lost the ability to negotiate the terms of our own profession.

And that's what our current testing mania is at its root. It's a political tool. It gives politicians a number that they can use to compare schools to each other, and claim that one number can encapsulate all that a student have learned. And these tests now are determining student, teacher and administrator lives, when we know that the tests -- at best -- tell only a small part of a student's -- and a school's -- learning.

We need to tell a new story -- we need to articulate a vision of caring, student-centered schools where students are judged by the work of their own head, heart and hands. We need to talk about how the technological tools at our disposal allow us to fundamentally change the structures of our schools so that we can prepare students for the world they will inherit, but we can't do that as long as our assessment system is firmly placed in the past.

And that's what I told the State Education representative in front of one hundred Drexel students. Were my knees shaking when I said it? You bet. But I felt like I could say it after a 20 minute presentation of a different vision of school where the test no longer made sense.

It's not enough for educators to be against NCLB, we've got to be for something else.

... And the limits of "Here Comes Everybody" for schools.

(I've been thinking about NECC / EduBloggerCon / EduCon and Will's post: NECC '08 / NECC '09, and I just finished reading Here Comes Everybody, the edublog book of the Summer of 2008. That's what's was ruminating around in my head as I wrote this.)

There's a lot of frustration about NECC, the EduBloggerCon and where this community of edubloggers is going right now. Will is "thinking hard about change, about what is and isn’t changing, and how maddeningly slow it all seems," and I'm sure some of the frustration about change is when you compare it to the blinding speed of change in so many other facets of our society right now.

So there are a couple of questions that we can examine through Shirkey's lens, then... first, why is it that schools are so hard to transform using these tools when commerce (for instance) has been so easy to change? And second, what has to happen within the community of folks -- loose as it may be -- who care about the notion of 21st Century schools.

So why is it that the changes that are taking root in so many other aspects are not changing education as quickly as we'd like? One of the things that Shirkey writes about is how the new social tools and the powerline graph of user use / success / downloads / etc... has meant that there is no longer a high cost of failure. He uses SourceForge and MeetUp as two examples where if a software project or a meeting fails, there's no real loss, because there is no institutional infrastructure that is lost along with it. On an institutional level, schools have an incredible infrastructure that makes them hard to change, but that's really not the big problem when we question the change through this lens.

The big problem is that we never, ever have a low cost of failure. When schools fail, kids lose. Shirky writes in Chapter 10 about how in a traditional business infrastructure, there is a natural disincentive to innovate because "more people will remember you saying yes to a failure than no to a radical but promising idea." (p. 246) I'd argue this is more true in education than in traditional businesses, again because the stakes are so high. So the educational establishment sticks to safe ideas and traditional schooling because we know that while the outcomes may not be amazing, they are predictably mediocre at worst.

(By the way, and this is an aside, what is going to happen as charter schools fail? So many of these have five year charters, and a certain percentage of them are not going to get renewed. It's already happening in Philly. What is the educational / emotional costs for the kids who go to schools that get closed down after five years? Is anyone other than Mike Klonsky writing about issues like this?)

This is a real issue, and it's not one we can wish away. We have to understand, in ways that Shirky describes, why low-risk mediocrity is almost predictably a better outcome than high-risk success. Until we find ways to bring down the risk of school change / school reform, either by being able to point to enough successful examples of 21st century schools that there is sensible road map to follow or by changing the way schools are assessed to make what we're talking about more a part of that equation. (And for the record, I'm REALLY uneasy about what I just wrote.)

Which is a great reason to transition to the second part of this question -- why can't the edubloggersphere -- why can't all the educators who want to see change happen leverage all these tools to do something positive?

And that gets to the other great lens in Shirky's book -- the way to look at the how groups form and what they can do easily and well, and what is much harder. Shirky spends much of the beginning of the text talking about how the new collaborative tools make sharing easy -- sites like flickr and LiveJournal do sharing well. Collective production -- what it took to make Wikipedia is an example -- where lots of people can come together around some kind of large common goal and all play a role to produce something is harder, but still doable given the flexibility and power of the tool. Collective action, where everyone pulls in the same direction to achieve a common goal, that's harder and harder to do without a lot of the traditional organizational structures.

And our community doesn't have those yet. We've done a great job of sharing a lot over the past few years... and that's valuable and worthwhile and it's changed the way many of us -- if not all of us -- go about our professional and personal lives. Let's not sell that short. Because it's important to remember, even as we question and push about why we haven't done more, that we have done a lot already. We've even done a lot of community production... the EduCon wiki was probably a great example of a group of folks coming together and building something together. Certainly all the collaborative projects we've seen between schools are examples of that.

The next step -- the idea of collaborative action -- is where it gets really hard. If Will is serious about trying to use these tools to affect change -- and certainly, it's not a bad idea -- we need to start to think about organizational structure, philosophy, shared decision-making, goals, action plans, etc... it's the more mundane kind of organization building that gets hard and tiring and frustrating and often fails.

So what could we do? What might it look like? Here's a thought: We could use the tools we have to start a call for change. We could look to set up a core set of principles for school reform that harnesses the best pedagogies and the new tools. We could look to build a coalition of administrators, teachers, parents and students to take action in the upcoming campaign. What might it look like? Shirky points out that for collective action to work, the action must require enough effort on the part of those taking action that decision-makers take notice. We could all go to used bookstores and look for old, beat-up textbooks and send them to our Congressmen with a flyer saying, "Is this how students should learn in 2008?" and a list of our core principles and goals. We could coordinate it all with Web 2.0 tools. We could follow up with an online petition to the McCain and Obama campaigns asking for a presidental debate on educational issues.

Then, we could set up workshops and conferences around our core principles, encouraging like-minded schools to come. If we wanted to go the route of the Coalition for Essential Schools, there could be fees for schools who are member schools who abide by the philosophy of the group. We could combine the on-line and off-line tools to set up an organization that was both an advocacy / policy group and a clearinghouse / resource center to help teachers, students, parents and administrators create the change we want to see.

I'm not saying this is what we should do. Lord knows, there's a lot of work contained in those last two paragraphs, but that is what collective action toward positive change could look like for us. And Shirky is 100% right -- that would be easier to do today than it was ten years ago. Without question. Everything I wrote up there could be done quickly and in such a way as to have an effect -- because of the new tools. But Shirky is also right when he writes about how the big things are still hard. A group of hard-core folks would have to work their tails off and be very saavy about the setting up the structures (both human and technological) to pull it off.

The point of all this is just this: The hardest challenge facing our community is that we've done a very good job at going after the low-hanging fruit. We've done what was easiest to do... and most of us would agree that it hasn't been easy so far. To take things to the next level is going to be hard. Not impossible... and a lot easier because of the tools we have at our disposal today, but hard none-the-less. 

But "hard" shouldn't be the reason we don't do it.

Tags: schoolreform, clay shirky

Watching this speech, I was reminded again and again why I love the ideals of this country. I was reminded of why my lefty, hippie parents taught me to sing patriotic songs. It was a speech that I will tell my children about when I explain what why I love my country and why I spend so much time working in the most grass-roots way I know to make this country a better place.

And I don't think we can under-estimate this -- I had iChat on during the speech, and I had a number of African-American students who were just over-the-moon with excitement... watching the speech with families... viewing a moment they never believed possible.

This is going to be an incredible next few months. On a fun SLA note, next year is the first time we teach American History. Think Diana will have fun with all this?

Tags: Obama, politics