I had a meeting today with a few other district principals, some higher-ed folks and district personnel. The purpose of the meeting was to examine the budget formulas to create an ideal high school budget for a Philadelphia school. We were told to dream big, to imagine having what we needed to really meet the state standards. What we were doing was to used as part of the conversations going on about school finance reform in PA. A decidedly worthy exercise for a few hours over an evening.

I was the least experienced principal in the room. And — and let me be perfectly and powerfully clear here — the other principals in the room are colleagues I respect and admire. One of them is someone I’ve called on many times for counsel. But I’ve also been lucky enough, through my experiences in educational technology, to work with an incredibly diverse group of educators from public to private, urban to suburban and of a wide geographic range as well. That perspective is invaluable.

Because what struck me about this meeting was how hard it was for these bright, dedicated career Philadelphia educators to dream about having the necessary resources to really teach.

Let me say that again: These excellent principals who have, for their entire careers, figured out how to bring value from every dollar in their budget, when given permission to dream had a hard time even imagining what that would look like.

That lasted for a good portion of the meeting, although once you offer a starving man food, stand back when he starts to eat, as we all did get into the spirit of the exercise. (And for the record, there were definitely times when my own lack of vision about what is possible in school funding hit me as well. So by no means was I immune, either, even as I talking about making sure we could dream.) But even once we could get there, I could see them, with almost every line-item we went through, thinking immediately about every way they’ve been made to stretch a dollar. And I can’t count how many times, as we created our ideal budget, one of the principals laughed and said, "I can’t even imagine having this much."

And for the record, we didn’t dream that big. By my rough guess, our ideally funded school would spend roughly the same as the wealthy Philadelphia suburban districts — and the only reason we would spend that much is because we actually factored in what a fully funded special education program for Philadelphia would look like.

Why bring this up? Because it speaks to what has been gnawing at me of late — we have to ask ourselves what our system of education — especially urban education — is doing to the good people within it. And for those of us in ed-tech, we have to ask ourselves why others may not be as quick to embrace what we have. It may not be reluctance or even an unwillingness to dream. It may be that we have to help the very good people in all of our systems take the first steps to be able to do so.

Things Influencing this Post:
Karl Fisch — Is It O.k. To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher?
David Warlick: Teachers and Technology – A Rant
The Responsibility For Effective Staff Development
A Whole Bunch of Other Posts Out There…

"..someone told me they didn’t want to learn one more new thing, they didn’t like new things.."

There’s a lot of writing going on about how teachers don’t have the right to be technologically illiterate today, that they can’t, won’t shaltn’t… And, and I don’t mean to be picking on David or Karl, two voices I deeply, deeply respect, there seems to be a sense that, if it weren’t for those darned teachers who won’t learn, we’d have the schools we need.

I don’t doubt that there are those teachers who refuse to learn. I powerfully, powerfully doubt that those teachers are our biggest problem.

Our problem is that there is little about our current educational system that encourages innovation.

(Here’s where I admit my bias. I’m talking about urban education here. I am sure there is a lot about what I’m going to say here that is comparable to suburban schools, but my experience is in urban schools.)

So here are some things I think we want to consider when we question why teachers don’t embrace new literacy wholeheartedly:

• 50% of teachers leave the profession within five years. Something is wrong with our system.
• The average urban superintendent stays in the job 2.8 years, which — having lived through times of change in NYC and Philadelphia — means incredible instability in schools, even in the best of transitions.
• In NYC, class size tops out at 34. In Philadelphia, class size tops out at 33.
• This means that teachers often have over 150 kids on their roster — how do you authentically grade 150 essays in a timely fashion, let alone find the time to innovate?
• Most urban schools still do not have dedicated techies / systems administrators in their buildings to ensure trouble-shooting, just-in-time service and frequent care. Expecting that one teacher to teach a full-day and then fix the computers doesn’t work.
• To my knowledge, there is not one state NCLB-compliant test that requires digital/new/contemporary literacy, therefore, no matter how much rhetoric is spent on "21st Century Skills," while we live under a system that punishes schools for their scores on tests, it is wholly unrealistic to expect the public school system to evolve in a direction that runs counter to the "accountability" structures currently in place.

Let’s ask the next questions…

When will administrators create systems in their schools to encourage innovation, technological and otherwise? We give up a lot at SLA so that we can prioritize making the teaching life as livable as possible. We don’t have Assistant Principals. We don’t have a full-time nurse. We don’t have after-school security, we don’t have any non-teaching assistants, we have one secretary, but everyone teaches four classes (or its equivalent,) not five.

When will we reform NCLB so that we do not encourage teaching 1950s tools?

With the move toward more and more corporate, store-bought curriculum, what is the incentive to view teaching as a creative process?

How many hours a week is enough? Is it fair to ask our teachers to work 50 hours a week? 60 hours a week? 70 hours a week? When is it too much?

Robert Pirsig wrote, "If you put a good person in a corrupt system, the system will win every time." We must create school systems that embrace a sense of play… that give teachers and students the time and space to pursue the streams of thought that aren’t tested… we must make our schools humane places so that people feel safe to explore and take risks and, yes, learn.

My biggest worry with SLA is sustainability. I know how much I ask of my teachers, but I try to balance that with doing everything I can to make the teaching life at SLA more than just livable, but life-affirming. I don’t think I succeed every day. We know there’s a stretch in Nov-Dec that is beyond brutal. (Think Open House, Parent-Advisor conferences, and 1,000 interviews all in a six week stretch.) But I also make sure people leave at normal hours, and I try to respect people’s time, and I try to keep our the care of our shared humanity — students, teachers, parents… (even the principal) — the most important part of my job.

But I also know that whenever Marcie and I think about introducing a new technological tool or idea to the faculty, we ask ourselves, "Is it fair for us to introduce this? Will this put people on overload? Can people take one more thing?" And yes, this is with an incredibly savvy staff that blogs and journals and podcasts, etc… but even with amazing, dedicated, digitally aware teachers in a system that — hopefully — encourages innovation, we have to ask ourselves how to manage all this without shutting teachers down.

So my challenge for all of us is this… let’s make sure that, in our frustrated moments, we remember to look at the structures that prevent innovation rather than allowing ourselves to get frustrated by the good people in our schools who are working as well as they can within a very flawed system.

… a topic guaranteed to elicit groans from all over the edu-bloggersphere. One of my mentors told the story the other day of when he was a first year teacher in one of his first staff meetings, and a veteran teacher pulled him aside and said, "I hope I die in a faculty meeting so that I won’t be able to tell the difference." And certainly, almost every teacher (and most administrators) can speak about the staff meeting That.Would.Not.End. They aren’t fun. They aren’t useful, and they often make us feel like we’re losing time off of the end of our lives.

But we’re in the middle of two weeks of faculty workshops (our term for staff meetings… feels more like what we do,) and as much as anything else, we’re finding that we’re running out of time to discuss everything we want to. Some of that is because we’re still building, but it’s also an atmosphere that I hope we can foster over the long-haul.

So what should a culture of "faculty workshops" do? Simply put — it should mean that a faculty is greater than the sum of its parts.

That’s why it’s important to constantly look at the way you live your mission statement in your classes. That’s why it’s important to talk about how we assess. That’s why it’s important to read articles together, build wikis together, agree on school policies together. That’s why it’s important to take the time to set goals together. And that’s why it’s important that we find ways for all faculty members to have a chance to speak to these ideas.