Practical Theory - General Ed

The Big Lie (Thoughts on Why School Is Not Only About Workforce Development)

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:45:40 -0700

[This post is finally finding its voice after kicking around in my brain for most of the summer because of the amazing work of Umair Haque and his post A Deeper Kind of Joblessness.]

I knew a lot of very smart, very academically successful kids when I was growing up. I went to CTY which was a rather humbling experience, and then I went to pretty high-powered college. And I knew a lot of kids who worked hard, got good grades, and got to the job market and realized that no one really cared. In the workplace, they were just the next 22 year old, and there was intro-level work to be done, and little of it really required that BA in Eastern European literature. My generation came of age with Douglas Coupland's Generation X, and Coupland's refrain of "You Are Not Your Job" made a lot of sense to me then... and I find myself reflecting on it a great deal lately.

A frequent refrain of mine is that the purpose of public education is not the creation of the 21st Century workforce, but rather, the co-creation - in conjunction with our students - of 21st Century citizens. I really believe that "work" is a subset of "citizen," and that if we aim for citizenship, we'll get the workforce we need, but aiming for creating workers won't get our society the citizens it needs.

A public education that centers first around workforce development will put a high premium on following directions and doing what you're told. A public education that centers first around citizenship development will still teach rules, but it will teach students to question the underlying ideas behind the rules. Workforce development will reinforce the hierarchies that we see in most corporate culture, while a citizenship-focus will teach students that their voice matters, regardless of station.

It's not just about what society needs, it's also about what students need. We completely change the lens of "Why do we need to study this" when the answer deals with being an informed and active citizen as opposed to what we do with our work life, because let's be honest with ourselves, most people don't need calculus, the Periodic Table of Elements or the date of the signing of the Magna Carta to be a good worker. But you do need to understand statistical analysis to read fivethirtyeight.com and make sense of the political conversations there, you do need to understand basic chemistry to understand how the oil in the Gulf disaster affects the region, and understanding how England evolved from a pure aristocracy to a constitutional monarchy which did sow the seeds of the American democracy might help to make sense of our own country's history. The goal of a citizenship-driven education exposes students to ideas that will challenge them, push them, and help them to make sense of a confusing world.

And more to the point - we don't lie to kids when we say that's what high school is for.

Our society is changing, and there are some serious warning signs that our economy be fundamentally shifting in ways that will make it harder and harder for education to be "the great equalizer." Children across the socio-economic spectrum are realizing that the economic "sell" of public education isn't ringing true. As college costs creep over $200,000 for private colleges and over $100,000 for public colleges (Penn State's costs, with room and board, this year was $27,000 / yr in-state) and as more jobs move to labor markets that do not have the high wages of the United States (seriously, read Haque's post... it reminds me of a shorter, more digestible version of Joseph Stiglitz's work,) the idea that all kids who work hard in high school will have economic success in life is more and more of a lie.

I think - I fear - that the next twenty or thirty years of American life are going to be difficult. I think we're going to have some really challenging problems to solve, and I think that we're going to be faced with hard choices about our lives, and I want our schools to help students be ready to solve those problems, to weigh-in on those problems, to vote on those problems. It's why History and Science are so important. It's why kids have to learn how to create and present their ideas in powerful ways. It's why kids have to become critical consumers and producers of information. And hopefully, along the way, they find the careers that will help them build sustainable, enjoyable, productive lives.

I want to be honest about why we teach what we teach. I'm tired of schools and politicians implicitly promising that the result of successful schooling is high wages. And I'm tired of us forgetting everything else that goes into helping people realize their potential in the process.

Teaching kids that hard work in school will mean more money is a shortcut and an example of the shoddy logic that doesn't ring true to many kids. Teaching kids that hard work in school will help them develop skills that will help them be a more fully realized citizen and person is a harder argument to make, but it stands a much better chance of being true.

Constructing Modern Knowledge Reflections

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:24:01 -0700

I spent the last four days at Constructing Modern Knowledge run by Gary Stager in Manchester, NH. It was a truly unique and powerful learning environment. As the photo to the left shows, I got to meet one of my educational heroes, Deborah Meier. (And if you aren't yet reading Bridging Differences, the blog that is really more of an old-fashioned series of letters between Deborah and Diane Ravitch, then leave this blog right now and go read. Now.) If all CMK was was a chance to listen to, talk to, break bread with people like Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Marvin Minsky and James Loewen, then it would have been an amazing four days. But that really only scratches the surface of the conference.

The whole idea of the conference is that Gary and his team have created a truly luxurious learning environment. I don't mean that in the physical sense. We were in a hotel conference room for much of the time, but what it did have was time, resources and permission to play and learn. We were encouraged to talk to one another. We were encouraged to read. We were encouraged to listen. And we were encouraged to build. As Gary put it, we didn't have a schedule, we had appointments.

As the CMK Flickr group suggests, people created movies, they build robots that could draw, they made claymation videos, they learned Scratch. And often times, people set goals, reached them, reset them, and tried again. But people engaged in learning without worrying about what standards they were reaching. Can we do that all the time in our classrooms, probably not, but it felt good to remind ourselves what an unfettered learning environment felt like. To a person, I believe, we all wanted to ensure that our schools and our classrooms had that feeling.

For me, I think I had a number of takeaways. One early one was something that Deborah Meier said at lunch. (Yes, I got to have lunch with Deborah Meier.) We were talking about the goals of the conference, and I remarked that I thought it was funny that at a constructivist, progressive-ed conference, my favorite parts up until that point were the lectures. Deborah said, "Who said lectures can't be part of a progressive education? Some people are worth listening to. Reading is still good education, too. You are constructing knowledge there too." Now, I know that intellectually, but I felt like I had to apologize for enjoying listening more than doing. There are many ways to learn, and lecture can -- and probably should -- be a part of a good progressive teacher's toolkit. The trick is knowing when, what, how long and how you will help students to construct meaning from it.

Another take away was perhaps different than other people's. At SLA, I see teachers and students work together to create some of the most incredible projects I've ever seen. I see SLA students tackle problems that I think most adults would struggle with. But I worry sometimes that we (the adults) underestimate how complex the work we give can be. Complexity is different than - but can be related to - hard and time-consuming. Complexity can be the where kids fall into the "gumption trap" (Thank you, Robert Pirsig.) I experienced it this week. Our group's idea was to build a bi-pedal robot... and then we quickly evolved that to building a quadraped when we realized we probably weren't going to solve the balance problem in the time we had. We made early designs, and to be honest, we struggled. And I hit my frustrating point... I didn't know why I was doing this... I had other work I could be doing... why was I on the floor playing with Legos anyway... in short, I was being a lousy student. It wasn't because I didn't want to do the project, but rather because the problems in front of us seemed too frustratingly complex. Sure, it was fun to play around on the floor, but other groups were getting much further than we were, and what was the point, anyway....

Feeling that frustration was very good for me, because it served to remind me of one of the pitfalls of problem-based / project-based learning for kids. When there isn't a recipe / obvious sequence of events, the roadblocks can feel insurmountable. I worry sometimes that kids get stuck on projects, not because they don't want to do them, but because they reach stumbling blocks that they cannot solve. It is why teaching "gumption" (to again quote Pirsig,) and teaching process, and teaching problem solving is so important. It is also why, as teachers, patience and understanding and flexibility are necessary traits.

The next, perhaps related takeaway, is the utter need for us to honor / assess / grade process. Not every project gets to the finish line, and teachers (including me when I was in the classroom) can make the mistake of not giving a lot of credit for the unfinished work. My group was very close to not having a walking robot as presentation time crept near. If Brian hadn't made the last minute adjustments, we would have gone up there with much. Would that have discounted the incredible learning we had done on design, engineering, programming PicoCrickets, collaboration, experimentation, etc? Figuring out how we make sure that we honor the journey of learning in our assessments is essential, I think. And when we play on the 100 point scale that is really a 40 point scale where 59% is the same as a zero, we make it very difficult to do so.

In the end, we did get our robot walking... and we got it to stop and start by responding to noise. More importantly, we took a project through from "Hey, I wonder if we can..." to a neat little robot. We succeeded because we never were so wed to a design that we stopped looking for the best way to get it to work. We succeeded because we actually worked together and had a lot of fun. We succeeded because Brian was smart enough to go talk to other people making robots and learn how they were using gears much more effectively than we were. We succeeded because Jen refused to quit on Wednesday until she figured out why the program wasn't working. We might have even succeeded because I provided comic relief when necessary. But we also succeeded because we were in an environment where we were encouraged to spend the time to solve the problem. We had the permission, freedom, time and resources to create something.

This week, I was reminded of how powerful -- and how frustrating -- problem-solving and building can be. I also was reminded that we can work with our hands, we can listen and engage our minds in the world of ideas, and we can speak from our hearts. A great classroom should allow us to do all those things, with teachers who recognize the highs and lows that can come with all the different ways we learn.

Thanks, Gary, for a great week.

(And here's a quick video where you can see the of the evolution of the robot. Larger versions of the videos of the robot are on my flickr set of the conference.... including me singing "Sweet Georgia Brown.")

Community Organizing and the Algebra Project

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:28:26 -0700

I'm reading The Algebra Project: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project by Robert Moses and Charles Cobb. I'm only a little more than half-way through it, but it really has me thinking. Robert Moses was/is a Civil Rights activist, working to register voters in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1960s, and (I'm skipping quite a lot of time here) later in life, founded The Algebra Project - a project dedicated to helping black -- and other disempowered -- youth learn higher level math - specifically Algebra - in middle school. His theory is that math literacy is the key to both higher education and the ability to be a fully invested citizen in today's world.

Interestingly, he also believes that the key to doing this is through experiential learning and community organizing. The first third of the book is about the struggle for civil rights, primarily through the struggle of registering voters, in Mississippi in the early 1960s. It is a fascinating and compelling read about that differs from much of the traditional narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, in that this is not a "great person" narrative, but a "great people" narrative. (And he discusses the differing opinions between SCLC and SNCC around that very idea.) His is the story of Ella Baker and Amzie Moore and of hundreds of students and sharecroppers who came together to create change in the face of overwhelming opposition. He writes about how a good deal of the most daring work of the Civil Rights Movement was done by students who had the energy and unwillingness to compromise that older activists did not always possess.

This is important, both because the story of the Civil Rights movement should not be forgotten, but also because of the lessons he learned as a community organizer who was deeply invested - even as an initial "outsider" from the North - in the communities and people he encountered. He was changed by the experiences he had, not just because of the dangers he faced, but because he saw thousands of "ordinary" African-Americans in Mississippi find their voices and work to challenge and change the injustices they saw. He speaks to the need to listen as deeply as we talk, and he speaks to a humility that allows all voices to be valued.

That is important, because nearly twenty years later, that formed the core beliefs around math education. What is so powerful about the first 120 pages of the book -- and about the second part of the book -- the formation of the Algebra Project, is that it is not the telling of a proscribed curriculum, but rather presents the challenge of creating a project that can be scaled beyond its original walls while still being a project dedicated to listening. Moses and his organization empower students and parents and teachers to talk and listen to each other as they learn together. They listen to the needs of the communities they serve while also working to further the idea that math literacy is a language everyone can speak when the conceptual ideas - not just the rules of math - are communicated in a way that resonates with our day to day lives.

Beyond math, the other voice that is resonating with me in this text is how important it is to empower students and parents to have a say in their schools. I just had a meeting with a parent who wants to do more strategic planning about how to strengthen SLA within the larger community. How many parents have ideas about the school that remain untapped because they don't think they can call me to just schedule a time to talk? What are we losing because we haven't figured out how to get more and more parents to come into school to talk about their visions for the school community? And yes, I am proud of the level of parent involvement and parent input at SLA, but I want it to be greater. I want to figure out - as Bob Moses has - how to listen more deeply to the ideas of the parents. (As an aside, yes, I want to make sure we are listening to students deeply. I think, currently, we do that better than we do with parents.)

We are already planning a 9th grade tech workshop that will coincide with the handing out of the laptops. I think we need monthly - if not more often - meetings with me where parents can come to talk, not in a formal setting, but in the library.... and not to talk just to me, but to talk to each other. Much like the session at ISTE, where I was reminded of how much expertise is in our schools that remains untapped because schools don't always ask teachers what they dream for their schools, so should we remember to ask parents what their ideas are. We've been moving more and more in that direction at SLA, reading The Algebra Project is reminding me of how imperative that goal really is.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Why School?

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:22:49 -0700

One of my frustrations right now is what I feel is a thin and destructive dialogue about public education in our country. Much of the dialogue is from a deficit model -- "How do we fix broken schools?" -- without ever recognizing the incredible work that happens in schools all over the country every day. Worse, the "fix" that is being advocated is often more reductive than what we currently offer - a focus on tested subjects, a focus on "work-ready" skills that ignores the civic needs of a nation. We look to the edu-capitalists to solve our problem at a time when, dare we suggest, the morality of the market should not be the model for school.

It is in that context that I read Why School by Mike Rose. There are moments in reading when I engage in what I call "Cheer Reading." Rose speaks the words of the rich power of schooling while recognizing how far we have to go to reach the potential of education in this country. More than that, he dares us to imagine a vision of school that enriches students and teachers alike... that sees the civic value of teaching all students... that sees the worth of all who inhabit our schools. He does it while urging us toward a better dialogue about school in this country... as he writes:

If we are a nation divided, we are also a nation yearning for new ways to frame old issues, for a robust language of schooling and civic life. Public education demands a capacious critique, one that encourages both dissent and invention, anger and hope. We need an expanded vocabulary, adequate to the daily joy and daily sorrow of our public schools. And we are in desperate need of rich, detailed imagines of possibility.

I could not agree more -- we need an open and honest discussion of what we dream of school... of where we succeed and where we fail. Rose's book - Why School - is a fantastic and necessary frame for the discussion.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

A Radical Notion

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 21:42:39 -0700

I tweeted this idea out earlier today:

Radical Notion: National standards should be written by successful people not of that field. Poets writing math standards, etc...

Think about it for a moment. It makes more sense than it seems at first.

Here's my thoughts that get me there... in a somewhat logical progression:

Standards are currently made by the people who work in the field and care deeply about the standards.

Those folks are going to have a somewhat skewed view of what everyone should know about the subject.

This contributes to the problem we have where high school teachers teach subjects before they teach kids... which in practice often looks like teaching to the 10-20% of the class who do love the subject and may major in it.

If we are to believe that national standards are important, then it should contribute to a body of skills and knowledge that are important enough that people should be able to know / do those things long after they graduate.

And yet, most successful adults would struggle greatly with passing many of our high school standardized tests.

Which suggests that the standards (or at the very least the way we measure the standards) are off.

So how do we discover what every American needs to know about history? About science? About math? About reading and writing?

I don't believe it is by asking the experts of the field.

I want to know what math the CEO of NBC uses every day. I want to know what math a state senator uses. I want to know what science a writer for the New York Times feels is important to her to do her job. I want to know what history a surgeon finds is important to know. Let's convene those panels and try to come up with the standards that a fully-realized citizen needs to know to take an active role in their world.

Of course the mathematician wants every to understand sine and cosine, but if the overwhelming majority of citizens have no need for trig functions, then why is it on the graduation test? Of course the scientist wants us all to be able to balance equations, but I haven't used that specific information since high school. Why are assessing it for proficiency?

Let's let the successful people of the world, with the benefit of hindsight about their own schooling, sit down with the teachers. Let's all listen to each other and remember that what we want the standards to do is to create a floor under which no child falls. We have to keep in mind that these standards do not live in isolation, instead being obviously linked to a participatory life. Listening to the people who didn't make the subject area their life work but still lived a productive, successful life is probably is a good place to start.

Urban Prep and The Whole Story

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:17:00 -0700

Urban Prep Charter Academy is a charter school in Chicago that serves young black men and serves them very well. Their success with getting their first class into college is outstanding.

So let me be perfectly clear -- I applaud Urban Prep's work in getting all 107 of their seniors into college, but according to their Wikipedia page, they started with 150 freshmen.

So what happened to the other 43 students?

Now, I'm guessing there was some student mobility, but not 43 kids. That means that 30% of the kids that started there didn't graduate from there.

I say this for a few reasons...

1) I am skeptical of any education organization that says 100% of their students do anything.

(Full disclosure - SLA will graduate ~90% of the students who started with us and approximately 96% of the kids will go to college, and of those, between 90-95% of them will go to a four year college right away.)

2) I am doubly skeptical of that kind of publicity when it is made by a charter organization that is replicating the model with six new schools, because they - I believe - are under a moral obligation to be powerfully up front about their successes and failures.

3) This is a danger of the "market-driven" forces when applied to education, because a charter management organization like Urban Prep has a powerful incentive to frame the numbers in the best possible light so that they can continue to grow their brand.

4) That's a shame for a number of reasons, but here are two -- a) Urban Prep should be incredibly proud of a 70% graduation rate and a 100% college attendance rate of their graduates. It blows the city average away, and that's incredibly hard to do. but b) it would force all of us to admit that no one -- NO ONE -- has figured out how to serve every student. Not Urban Prep, not KIPP, not SLA. And as sooner as we admit that, the sooner we can start to have a real discussion about what needs to happen in our cities and our schools without thinking that the martyr myth (longer days, longer weeks, etc....) is all that is necessary.

What if the articles actually said, "For the kids who made it through Urban Prep's program, they are all going to a four-year college." What if KIPP said, "Yes, not every kid can handle our program, but the ones who do, do amazingly well after they leave us?" We can assume why some of these organizations don't frame their stories that way. It's a lot harder to get Oprah to give you millions with that statement, and it might be a lot harder to get the monies needed for replication. But that's the conversation we need in this country.

And I hold schools to a much higher standard of disclosure. When schools allow the impression to be that they have solved all the problems, they make it harder to have a real conversation about what we need to do. And again, no one has figured out how to help every kid. The Urban Prep articles makes it seem like if we just taught longer and harder, we'd help all the kids get to college.

5) Michael Klonsky makes a very good point, especially in light of the recent mass-firings in Central Falls. Urban Prep, despite all their work, has ACT scores below the average black male in Chicago and state test scores that are only a few points above the rest of the black male population in Chicago. Now, as someone who thinks that test scores tell an incomplete (at best) story and an inaccurate story at worst, I don't really care that much about their test scores if these kids can go to and thrive at college, but that too needs to be part of the story, because if Urban Prep is a success (and I'd argue that it very much is), then it is yet another data point that should force us to question the validity of the test.

Let me be clear -- I applaud Urban Prep -- they are doing amazing work for an under-served population. They should be celebrated, and we all should study at their successes for what we can learn from their story.

But let's make sure we tell the whole story.

Bring Your Own Epiphany

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:40:08 -0700

So I was lucky enough to present at TEDxNYED last Saturday, and I've been a bit baffled by some of the negative commentary that I've seen ever since. (For the record, I think my favorite reflection has been Pat Higgins' post "Wherever You Go, There You Are.") The TEDxNYED folks did a really good job of faithfully working within the TED format to create a thought-provoking, interesting day that was aimed at education. What I don't understand is how people thought it was supposed to be something more than that.

TEDTalks are a funny thing... some are amazing, some are not so amazing, some are somewhere in between. And chances are, with a few exceptions, you wouldn't necessarily find universal agreement on which talks were which. "Amazing" is in the eye of the beholder, especially when you are talking about 18 minute talks about esoteric stuff.

What I love about the TED format is that it is a chance to learn about something you may not know a lot about. The trap is thinking that you've learned a lot about that topic, because you haven't. But I know that there are a bunch of TED Talks that have caused me to go explore new ideas. And that's what it should do. It should cause you to think. On Boone Gorges' reflection, I left this idea in the comments:

I think about TED as a modern take on the old-time Chautauqua. It is a day of short talks, with opportunities to talk about them in between.

When we at SLA took the opportunity to design a conference, we did EduCon which has a decidedly different format. (Conversation-based, 90 minute long sessions.)

And I love doing discursive workshops a lot. But I also recognize the power that a good speech can have. I didn’t love every talk, but I took something from every talk, and I loved several of them.

I think the TED format is the TED format. There are times when it’s the way I want to learn (and I’ve watched dozens of TED talks… and some have been amazing and some haven’t) and there are times it’s not. What I thought was amazing about what the TEDxNYED folks did was that they created an event that really had the feel of what I imagine “the” TED must have. And they did it around education, which I thought was also wonderful.

I admit, running a TEDx isn't something I want to do. When left to our own devices, the SLA-ers created something very different in format. But that doesn't mean that that I can't appreciate the power of the TED format. It's just different.

And I don't think that the TED format lends itself to collective action then and there. But that's o.k. -- I'm not sure that's what conferences do.

If the ideas at TEDx pushed you.. opened you up to a new idea... deepened an understanding of an idea you already had... or challenged you to learn more about something... just gave you a bunch of things to think about... or just gave you a new lens or a new language about something you already thought, then the conference was a success. For some folks, ideas they heard were epiphanies, for others, they were things they'd heard. For some, I'm sure, hearing what I talked about was hearing an evolution of ideas they'd heard from me in the past. For others, it might have been a chance to hear SLA's story and our ideas for changing education for the first time. Either way, I hope everyone got some small piece new out of it.

There are some hard things about a TEDx event about changing education, not the least of which is that the practical solutions to combating the current movement of public education are complex and hard to see, and the mechanism to fight the battle isn't in place. So we are left with "Ideas Worth Spreading" and some ideas for change (and for the record, I would love it if every teacher who heard my talk started using the language of "I teach kids <subject>," rather than "I teach <subject.>" I do think that is the kind of small change that can make a difference, and it's not a bad place to start.

So what's the point of this post... I think we have to stop thinking that every experience has to be transformative. It's why school could never be as powerful as a one-day or three-day conference. School happens every day. It is the routine, and the trick is to make the routine meaningful, but that doesn't mean that you can achieve the level of engagement that you had on your best day every day. The trick is to find the value in everything you do, even when you don't walk out of a classroom (or a conference) transformed. Many of the twitter/blogger/conference attendee/speaker folks may have to realize that the epiphanies will be smaller now... that we've heard many of the ideas, and now we have to work harder to find the powerful ideas... or we have to work harder to figure out how to make change... and we can't expect one day to change the world. And I do think we do have to change the world. And this, to me, could be a place to start... (and I first wrote this as a comment on Dan Meyer's blog entry about the conference:)

This may be idealistic, but if I could talk about what I’d want for a TED Prize, it’d be to spend a year getting a 1,000 conversations going about what we dream education could be all over the country… and to record them all… and catalogue parents and students and teachers best hopes for school, so that we could have an action plan about where we need to go, because I don’t know that we, as a nation, know what we want or how to get there. But I’d love to find out what it might look like, and I’d love to think that the folks at TEDxNYED would have something to add to the discussion.

Thanks to TEDxNYED for making me think and pushing me to continue to refine what I believe and how I present my idea. You all did an amazing job of creating a great day of what Dan Cohen called "Academic Theater."

What is the agenda?

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:44:05 -0700

At some point in time, I think we have to start asking ourselves what is going on at the US Department of Education. Just this week, Secretary Duncan (and his PR people via twitter) said ""We have to stop lying to children," in reference to the levels of achievement students reach. And then he supported a school district's decision to fire all its teachers at a high school. This is after he slammed teacher prep programs back in the fall.

(He did take time to praise a charter school organization recently, though.)

So what is the end game?

What is the point of attacking educators as liars, praising leaders who fire entire faculties and calling into question the way we teach teachers?

Can you imagine if another cabinet member did this? Could you imagine if the Secretary of Defense talked this way about the soldiers?

What is the point?

There's only one reason to erode public trust in public education -- to destroy it.

Seriously.

It was the the "we have to stop lying to children" line. Not "we need to do better." Not "we need to find better ways." Not "we need to change."

"We need to stop lying to children."

Think about that... Duncan is claiming that public educators are deliberately lying to children.

You only do that if you want to tear something down.

I think the Race to the Top push to expand charter law is only a first step. I think we're going to see a federal push for vouchers before the end of the Obama administration.

And lest you think I've got the tin-foil hat on, the email blast from EdWeek had as its lead a story about how Florida is expanding its voucher program and that Illinois and New Jersey may be soon to follow suit with more and more bi-partisan support for vouchers. (The article claims that Obama will not expand the DC voucher program, but we'll see.)

What I worry will happen over the next ten years, unless there's a movement to stop it, will be a federal push for state voucher programs followed by a massive explosion of publicly subsidized private and parochial schools where parents will be able to supplement the public voucher with their own monies. I think there will still be a "public option" for families, but they will probably be more underfunded and needy than ever before. There will always be a need for schools for the kids who can't take advantage of the new market-driven system, but in many places -- especially in our cities -- they will become the schools of last resort.

There is a lot of money and power lining up behind voucher programs, and make no mistake, vouchers will mark the end of public schools as the hallmark of the American democratic experiment.

And here's the thing... if this is what Obama and Duncan want, why aren't they saying so?

If we want something different, we are going to need to fight for what we believe in. We cannot expect the usual allies. We are going to have to retake the language of school reform from those who would tear down our work. We are going to have to partner with students and parents. We are going to have to listen deeply and create a new language of reform that is authentic... one that puts the best of what our schools can be at the front of every message.

We are going to have to lead.

I'll be there. Will you?

Good v. True

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:34:10 -0700

I've been reading RTTT stuff and NCLB stuff and Ted Hirschberg's stuff and value added / growth model stuff...

And what I don't understand is this:

Where does the certainty that these tests measure what the testers think they do come from?

I'm not being facetious here. I'm really not.

I don't understand that certainty. I wish I had it about my own ideas. Or maybe I don't.

I think there's a danger when you stop thinking that your idea is good and start thinking that it's True.

I think these people believe that their tests are True. Or that if they keep working on them, they will be.

Education itself is often good, but it's rarely True.

As my favorite TV president once said, "There are few days with absolute rights and absolute wrongs, and they usually involve body counts."

I fear the body counts that are coming -- and are already here -- if the current educational leaders in this country don't stop and realize that what they have are ideas, not truisms.

Slowness, Wisdom and Change

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:21:52 -0700

[The juxtaposition that inspired this post is our current educational situation as typified by Race to the Top and the loss of a generation of wise educational leaders including, this weekend, David Mallery.]

This idea is not my own, but if intelligence is speed, then wisdom is slowness.

I write this after reading about the death of David Mallery from Christian Long who tweeted out:

Lost 3 edu-mentors (& friends) in last few months: Ted Sizer, Jeff Lackney, and David Mallery. Will others replace their wisdom/spirit?

I worry a lot about that these days. I worry that we are losing wisdom. Wisdom is a funny thing, because it isn't something you are born with, and it isn't something you can acquire quickly and easily. It is hard-fought, path paved with mistakes and regret and reflection. Those folks who acquire the term "Wise Beyond Their Years" often have had to get there the hard way.

The people we are losing understood the balance of intelligence and wisdom. Ted Sizer understood that listening is as important as speaking. What we have instead is a "Race to the Top" with goals that are completely unproven, and many states falling all over themselves to change their long-term policies for a short-term influx of money.

As John Wooden has long said, "Be quick, but don't hurry."

Let us be clear, the problems facing schools are serious, and they demand that we work diligently and quickly to make our schools better.

But let us be wise in our changes. Let us listen to the people who must enact the changes. Let us consider what we do and how well we can do it. Let us not demonize those who oppose is by turning their arguments into strawmen. Let us, instead, do things wisely and well. If for no other reason than we want our students to do so as well. If that means that we must slow down to listen, to reflect, to come to consensus, so be it. Better we make the wise decision than the expedient one.

Read the older educators... Read Ted Sizer and Deborah Meier and Herb Kohl... and feel the wisdom in their words. They write without hubris, but instead with an acknowledgment of their own flawed humanity. They write with an understand that they cannot be all things to all children, but with the knowledge that they must come as close as they can.

I am far from religious, but I am reminded a lot these days of the serenity prayer:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

I worry that our inability to have the wisdom to know the difference is going to do a lot of damage. In the days of hyper-culture, this isn't just a problem in education, of course. But when we lose sight of the value of wisdom in education, how can we expect it to surface on any large scale anywhere else?

Engagement v. Empowerment -- Some Early Thoughts...

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 20:47:09 -0700

[I've written about this in a roundabout way before... I'm hoping this blog post is the beginning of me hashing out -- in writing -- the evolution of my thoughts on this topic.]

In my recent article in Principal Leadership magazine, I wrote this:

Those of us who work in education talk a lot about student engagement, but I dont think that goes far enough. Engagement is certainly better than boredom, but schools should set the bar for themselves is much higher. What schools should strive for is student empowerment.

For the longest time, the idea of engagement has dominated the conversation in ed-tech, and it's never quite sat right with me. There are a couple of reasons for this... first and perhaps most disconcerting, is that engagement too often got translated to "fun." And that put us in competition with video games and and Facebook and movies and hanging out after school and everything kids do for fun that isn't school. We lose that battle most of the time almost by definition. (And that's not because kids are kids... it's because kids are people. I love my job, but in any isolated moment, would I rather be hanging out with my kids or my wife or my friends or playing Ultimate or basketball or reading a book of my own choosing? Easy choice.)

We chose engagement because it beats boring. But it's not a goal. And in fact, I think it's created some weird developments in education because too many folks have set it up as a goal, because teachers have been placed in a position where the engagement of the student created a performance aspect to class that, in the end, didn't serve the goal of student learning.

Empowerment feels better to me. It, in the end, is the word -- the idea -- that sets us up for a more student-centered classroom because it is about what the students get from the experience once the class is done, not what happens during the class. It also allows us to do away with the notion that the classroom is always fun. It's not. Let's look at coaching for a moment... a coach who is worried about engagement as the goal lets the kids scrimmage most practices because it is engaging and fun. But an empowering coach puts the kids through smart drills that allows them to play their best basketball during the games. Those days when you walk through the offenses and the defenses 100 times aren't always engaging... in fact, they can feel like a lot of work. But they pay off. And that's what we want in our classes. It's o.k. if there are days when the work that kids do feels like work. We have to be o.k. with that. And we have to understand that school is work... but that it can be meaningful, powerful, empowering (and even engaging) work. And that the work we do together in school means that kids can apply that work to their own lives in ways they see fit and that allow them to thrive.

So yeah, I'm thinking a lot about empowerment these days.

Gary Stager: First We Kill All The Teacher's Unions

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:36:00 -0700

[No... he doesn't really mean it.]

A little over a year ago, Gary Stager wrote an article for the Huffington Post about the new-found Democractic fascination with bashing teacher's unions -- and why that is about as counter to Democratic ideals as one could imagine. Today, his words are all the more true.

Blaming educational problems on teacher unions is even more absurd when you consider that states like Texas have no teacher unions. Is Texas immune from student achievement challenges? Hardly.

The larger question is a matter of leadership and employee relations. How does reducing teacher creativity, independence and responsibility for decision-making help instill those qualities in the children they teach? How does alienating teachers, placing them in rubber rooms or attacking their motives make them a partner in school reform? How does insulting your base and violating a fundamental American liberty create a wise and more just society?

Do you want your children taught by defensive or depressed teachers who feel assaulted by the community they serve? How does that state of affairs contribute to educational excellence?

If the educational neocons succeed and break the backs of teacher unions, what do they think would happen? What would magically occur the next day? How are schools expected to improve? I demand that these Democratic tough guys and gals tell me what they will do next.

Go read.

The Other Thirteen

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:43:00 -0700

There is an inspiring article in today's New York Times about the Ted Ginn Academy -- a school started by a security guard / football coach. It is a story about an unlikely, non-traditional educator who built a school that is succeeding for students where others have failed. It is not unlike the stories being told about KIPP and Mastery Charter... a group of dedicated educators going above and beyond and saving every child.

And that's where I have a problem.

They aren't... and papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post are so excited for this narrative, that they are perpetuating the myth.

From the article:

Even as the city's graduation rate has fallen to 54 percent, Ginn Academy, now in its third year, has grown to 300 students, and no one has dropped out. Of the 37 students in its first senior class, 32 have already passed Ohio's mandatory graduation exam.

And later in the article:

Ginn Academy, which opened in September 2007 with 100 freshmen and 50 sophomores, now occupies a former middle school with more than 100,000 square feet of space. It has attracted top educators and visitors from outside the district who come to see the innovative school in action.

And I'm left with only one question:

What about the other thirteen kids?

Maybe some moved... maybe some decided that the Ginn Academy wasn't for them... but did any of them struggle so much that they transferred back to the "traditional" schools they left? Were any of them encouraged to leave by administration who saw that the kids were not on board with the school? What are the stories of the other thirteen students? The article reads as if everyone is going to graduate from Ginn, but clearly, not every student made it through the school.

Lest people think I'm beating up on the school, I'm not. If they average a 76% on-time graduation rate in their first year in a district that averages 54%, that's a huge victory. Your first year, you figure everything out, and inevitably, some students leave the school as you shake out what the school really is. To do as well as they've done is awesome and important and noteworthy -- it just doesn't sound as good to the New York Times.

[Full disclosure -- SLA is on track to graduate 90% of the original students in our starting class from our school (and all the students who have transferred in) -- and I'm amazed by those numbers and the incredible work our students and teachers have put in to get there... and yes, we chose our kids.]

But the bigger question is -- why does the media insist on perpetuating this storyline? Let's take the KIPP schools as an example... there is now enough evidence to suggest that KIPP schools have a high level of attrition... and while there doesn't yet seem to be research to define exactly why that is happening, we can assume that not every student who left KIPP or Ginn Academy (or SLA, for that matter) left because their families moved... some students left because they weren't having success.

How different would the current educational conversation be if the KIPP folks said, "Yes... in some of our schools, 25-40% of the families choose to leave KIPP, but KIPP isn't for everyone, and for the students who stay, we do right by them?" What if these schools admitted that it would be much harder to have the success they have if they didn't have the traditional schools to send kids back to when it didn't work out? What if these schools admitted they didn't have all the answers, and instead had to admit that, yes, they do amazing things for many students, but they haven't figured out how to get to a significant percentage of their population, despite Herculean efforts?

Why isn't that the dialogue right now? Because it's not as easy to raise millions of dollars on "We're figuring it out too?" But that would only explain one piece of that puzzle... why is it that Jay Matthews, the New York Times, the Education Empowerment Project, the US DoE and so many others so willing to promote a myth?

Because it is easier... because if we could only believe that we could solve all the problems of educating students in poverty with charismatic school leaders and hard working teachers... and that all the kids who don't get the education they need are simply being underserved by those lazy teachers... that would absolve our society for not being more just, more equitable, more fair. We could point to those schools that succeed against all odds and say, "See... if they do it, every school should be able to do it." It is a myth that keeps us from really understanding what is necessary to solve the problems for the children of our cities. It is the myth of the schools that have solved the problems.

Except those schools haven't.

Not completely. Not for every student. In the end, those schools -- like all our schools -- struggle and fail to reach every kid.

Just ask the other thirteen.

Core Standards - Sound Bites and Standardization

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:40:00 -0700

[Tom Hoffman has been carrying the water for the ed-tech crew on this issue for the past few weeks -- if you haven't been reading him lately, do.]

The Common Core State Standards Initiative has released its English standards, and the standards are open for comment until October 21st. I strongly encourage you to look at the standards and make comment - I find them hard to read, because I think they are poorly written, but standards often are.

The National Standards movement obviously has its seeds in No Child Left Behind, but not just in the obvious ways. National Standards is an idea that sounds great on paper. It, like NCLB, sounds like a great idea, but of course, like NCLB, it's a better sound bite than it is policy.

There are plenty of reasons to question this movement, but here's the scariest part for me. 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.

What has kept many of the major players in that industry to commit completely to the on-line education / "content delivery" game is that with 50 different state tests and standards, there is a reasonably high barrier to entry to the market. Once there is a national curriculum and a national test, we will see a further blurring of the line between "education" and "training" where kids are given online instruction and online assessment that can be delivered to any student, regardless of geography.

When I was at the FCC this summer, Jim Shelton of the Department of Education expressed a vision of education where we could find the best math lecturer in the country and deliver that lecture online to all students everywhere. That is the vision of educational technology that is behind these standards. It has the risk of the ultimate deprofessionalization of teachers and depersonalization of education.

There are billions of dollars at stake on these standards and the money and the access to power is on the side of the folks who want to create the standards and the tests that assess them, and the avenues available to teachers and parents (unions, PTAs, etc...) have largely been asleep at the switch. This is a movement that will profoundly change how schools are run and governed and profoundly change the way students will learn. This isn't about whether or not people think that all students should be able to write a thesis statement. This is about how students are taught that information, how they are assessed on that information, and on the role of big business in teaching and assessing them.

If we want a say in the future of school -- the time is now... if it is not already too late.

My Intro Letter for Modern Educational Theory

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:41:58 -0700

[I'm teaching a twice-a-week class on Modern Educational Theory this year to a (mostly) senior class. Here's my intro letter....]

To the students of Modern Educational Theory,

The American student spends approximately 16,000 hours in compulsory schooling from Kindergarten to 12th Grade, and while students can learn an incredible amount about the subjects we study, there is very little learned about the institution of school itself. So this class, then, is an attempt to turn the lens inward and study the societal construct that is school itself.

We will look at the educational movements of the 20th Century and early 21st Century in an attempt both to understand how we have gotten to this moment in time and how we may move forward to create the schools our society needs -- whatever we may decide that to be.

The class will feature a fair amount of shared readings of educational theory, and we will also look at the mass media portrayal of the American high school as well as following how the blogosphere has changed the way students, parents and educators talk about school. I'm hoping to line up guest speakers from a variety of educational perspectives to talk to us about their ideas as well. My expectations for you are that you do the pre-readings so that our discussions can be lively and spirited, and that you come to class willing to engage with the ideas of the other members of class, even when (especially when?) they challenge your own ideas. My goals for this course are for us to challenge the assumptions we come to school with and for all of us to deepen our understanding of what school can be.

Yours truly,

Mr. Lehmann

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