Category — Public Policy

There are of course many folks who think President Barack Obama is trying to do too much too soon. Republicans, looking for every chance to assert their differences, have hammered on the president in recent days for not focusing his attention solely on the economy.

However, having run a campaign featuring the word hope and the call for a better future, the president has always insisted he would look to rebuild our country if given the chance to lead. Provided with that chance, on Tuesday Obama took a much-needed step toward a more prosperous country by addressing America’s maligned educational system.

And this time, he took a play out of the recent Republican playbook with calls for greater accountability and his endorsement of a GOP mainstay, the idea of school choice. But he did so on his terms and his steadfast focus on a long-term approach to rebuilding the country.

Pay for Teacher Performance

In direct opposition to the current position of the teachers unions, Obama called for measures to link teachers’ pay to student performance. Insisting that “the United States must drastically improve student achievement to regain lost international standing,” the president laid the groundwork for merit pay for teachers.

The concept is in direct opposition to the union position and the current trend to pay teachers according to their credentials and years of experience. While those elements could still form some basis of the pay scale in the future, Obama seeks to base raises on teacher effectiveness as measured by the performance levels of that teacher’s students.

In unveiling his push, President Obama acknowledged that he was in direct conflict with the union position. And since those unions make up a large segment of the Democratic Party, his position was also in conflict with a large segment of his own base of supporters.

But the change is remarkably consistent with his prior day’s speech regarding science and stem cell research. Instead of basing his decision on past practice or the view points of certain supporters, the president was acknowledging that all research points to higher student achievement levels in those classrooms where teachers excelled at their craft.

While some wanted to parse the president’s words regarding student performance, the tie to student achievement was not one of those areas he was willing to give in on. In clear, distinct support that student performance would be a factor in the merit pay concept, Education Secretary Arne Duncan told The Associated Press:

“What you want to do is really identify the best and brightest by a range of metrics, including student achievement.”

Expansion of Charter Schools

Obama also called for the expansion of innovative charter schools, another initiative that has long been opposed by the members of teachers unions. Charter schools are publicly funded but are operating independently of many of the constraints that current public schools face. They also are a key component of the move towards giving parents a choice as to where to send their children.

Critics insist that charter schools are being held to a different standard even as they drain precious resources from the established public schools. Those same critics believe the resource drainage come in two forms. First, there are the funds to pay for the schools. Second, there is the belief that charter schools are siphoning off the stronger, more motivated students, leaving public schools to work with the less-capable and the disinterested.

In direct opposition to those who want to see limits on the number of charter schools, Obama was unrelenting. Stating that many of the innovations in education today are taking place in charter schools, Obama insisted that placing limits on the number of such schools is not “good for our children, our economy or our country.”

Tackling Another Longstanding Issue

As if that were not enough, Obama also moved to one of the other growing criticisms of schools – the time kids spend in the classroom. In addition to the controversial proposals of merit pay and increased numbers of charter schools, the president insisted it was time for a longer school day and school years.

Ironically, while many of his positions were counter to that of the unions, the initial response of union leaders was remarkably positive. That view appeared to come primarily from Obama’s pledge to include educators in the process, a step that his predecessor is generally charged with avoiding virtually every step of the way.

In addition, the president did continue his support for at least one position not supported by the GOP, more money for early childhood education. That no doubt helped win him some additional support from educators.

While the economic stimulus bill is set to automatically provide additional funds for education over the next two years, some of those dollars are already supposed to be tied to teacher quality and on states developing better systems for tracking overall student progress.

Talking about Improving Education

While against union positions, Democrats have to be happy that Obama is putting education front and center. More importantly, Republicans and Democrats alike have to be happy that the president is willing to examine ideas from both sides of the aisle to ensure improvement in our schools.

While the economy is critical, school improvement is also one of America’s most pressing problems moving forward, especially when we consider our country’s long term viability in a global marketplace.

Flickr photos courtesy of BarackObamadotcom, Obama-Biden Transition Project and esagor.

David Brooks, the well-known op-ed columnist for the New York Times, recently gave us pause with a piece called “What Life Asks of Us.” Brooks begins by citing a Harvard faculty committee report from a few years back that offered the following purpose of education:

“The aim of a liberal education is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

Brooks goes on to summarize the report’s implications:

“The report implied an entire way of living,” noted Brooks. “Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.”

Brooks offers that this approach is “deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness.”

Institutional Thinking

Brooks contrasts this current notion with “another, older way of living” that was discussed in a book by the political scientist Hugh Heclo called “On Thinking Institutionally.” In citing such a focus, Brooks almost hearkens back to Kennedy’s call in the early sixties.

“We are not defined by what we ask of life,” writes Brooks. “We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.”

And those institutions are crucial to Brooks. They provide “certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do.

“New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of.”

Brooks then goes to Heclo directly to offer:

“In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

Reverence for Institutionalists

Brooks is no fan of our modern culture, the one described in that Harvard faculty report.

“The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations,” writes Brooks. “There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.”

And this notion is so important to the writer:

“I try to keep a list of the people in public life I admire most,” Brooks adds. “Invariably, the people who make that list have subjugated themselves to their profession, social function or institution.”

He closes with the following support for institutional thinking:

“Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity.

“But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.”

Different View

Over at Brian Barrington’s Blog, little reverence is expressed for Brooks’ thoughts. Barrington sees Brooks as offering nothing more than the traditional conservative line.

He goes on to note some of our prior institutional practices that were rightly questioned: slavery, the right of women to vote, and a time when child labor was an effective way to reduce factory costs.

Institutionalists would be “telling us that women should get back in their kitchens where they can be happy,” writes Barrington, “or else it will be the end of civilization as we know it. They would have been telling us that the women they most admire are the ones who stay in their kitchens where they do the work that gives meaning to their lives.”

Barrington makes some great points. Clearly, many of our most positive societal changes have come from times when individuals have in fact examined life from the outside and subsequently called into question some existing institutional behaviors, if not those institutions themselves.

Personal vs Societal

And yet we are reminded of the fundamental notion of institutions: “structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals …. identified with a social purpose and permanence, transcending individual human lives and intentions, and with the making and enforcing of rules governing cooperative human behavior.”

That definition, along with the premises that Brooks set forth, is precisely why his op-ed piece gave us such pause. It reminds us of Bill Bradley’s notion that the biggest challenge we face is that neither of our political parties offers a philosophy that fits our current world.

We cannot so easily dismiss what Brooks notes. It is important to ask, do we see ourselves “as debtors who owe something” or as “creditors to whom something is owed.”

There is also great merit in our young people learning that “there will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.”

At the same time, we have great concern that the emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness is in fact undermining our fundamental need for cooperative human behavior.

Somehow, we must find a proper balance between the two notions.

Which leads back to the fundamental question, what should be the aim of education, liberal or otherwise?

Flickr photo courtesy of DoubleSpeakShow.

John Robb, the author of Brave New War, recently speculated on the future of American education at Global Guerillas.

His first noteworthy point centers upon his assessment of the current educational process. Referring to our current form as an admixture of industrial and artisan processes, Robb correctly notes that “the quantities of product (graduates) produced and the facilities resemble industrial processes” even as the “actual production is most closely akin to artisanship (with guilds, no less!).”

Such a reference mirrors one of the age-old questions for educators. Is teaching a science or an art? It also raises one of the ongoing and legitimate criticisms of the current educational structure, one that actually follows the factory assembly line model.

Higher Education
Robb spends little time on that notion, instead shifting immediately to the costs of education and the failure of schools, at all levels, to significantly increase student performances despite enormous funding increases. Here again, Robb is dead on, and his description of the process as “an albatross of cost and stagnating quality” is certainly consistent with those who are concerned with the failure of public schools to significantly improve student performance.  

But Robb saves his strongest criticisms for higher education. Beginning with the costs for collegiate education, expenses that have increased 4.39 times faster than inflation over the last three decades, Robb indicates that higher education is no longer affordable for most households, especially as median family incomes stagnate.

Robb offers the following interesting assertion:

“Worse, there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree.  Since nearly all of the value of an education has been extracted by the producer, to the detriment of the customer, this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble.”

Unlike the Housing Bubble
While the current situation involving higher education has all the makings of matching the recent housing bubble, instead of the downturn facing the housing sector Robb sees the higher education bubble as offering immense opportunity to introduce educational improvements.  

At the heart of those improvements is the greater use of technology and the “ability of collaborative online education to replace much, if not most of in person teaching.” As many others have noted, there are some specific improvements afforded by greater use of technology in education:

• Lectures – Robb notes that video lecture series, along with associated learning materials, for many courses at some of the best universities in the world are now available online. He rightly notes that such an option allows students to get the very best lecture available (“There is no need to recreate the lecture with tens of thousands of less qualified/exceptional teachers”). Why attend another university when the very best lectures are available free.
• Application – Robb adds the push towards just-in-time information processes. Operating online with a JIT focus, we “can train kids to adults in complicated and complex tasks in a fraction of the time other methods require.” Such an approach is the complete antithesis of our current approach, one that features a broad array of subjects and concepts with the idea that students learn certain materials just-in-case there may be a need to know sometime in the future.  
• Collaboration – Robb notes the shifting of the business world from in-person work to a greater emphasis in online collaboration. Instead, at the university level, we continue the age old push to have face-to-face contact, with all students and the professor being present at the same time and in the same place. The idea of moving aspects online still is not “central to the educational world.”

We have discussed many of these notions in our prior work, including a lecture repository, just-in-time learning, and the need for education to begin to embrace the concept of social networking. We have also shared with readers David Wiley’s assessment that higher education as it currently is structured is “Dangerously Close to Becoming Irrelevant.”

Education’s Shift to a Fully Online Environment
While some may see his suggestions as radical, Robb is unequivocal as to the future of education.

“The shift towards online education as the norm and in-person as the exception will arrive,” he writes, “however, the path is unclear.  It is currently blocked by guilds/unions, inertia, credentialism, and romantic notions.” 

As noted, if we are indeed in a higher education bubble, the current economic downturn could well become one of the key catalysts for a radical shift in educational delivery. Robb suggests that the need for local governments to balance their budgets in the face of dwindling revenues will demand extensive cost-cutting measures. Those cost-cutting steps will have to include reduced monies for education, often the single biggest local expense, forcing higher education to pursue more cost-effective delivery methods (online courses).

If we are in the midst of a real higher education bubble, schools will likely see a dwindling student population. Here, Robb speculates on a amazing option. What if MIT or Harvard decided to “offer full credentials to online students at a tiny fraction of the cost of being in attendance.”  He postulates that the result just might be “ten million students enroll in the first year to attend Harvard’s virtual world.”

Of course, yet another option involves an entirely different take, one that features the opensource movement. If in-person education continues to be too expensive but no institution is able to step forward to create a major online brand, the entire world of education shifts. “A massive open source effort develops,” writes Robb, leading to the creation of “virtual worlds and other online courseware that rivals the best universities.”

In the third scenario there would be a need for a new credentialing agency. Of course one quick answer could be a continued move towards standardized testing and students demonstrating, by their performance on such tests, that their education in fact does match what one might have received in the more traditional college setting.  

The Future of Education
At the heart of Robb’s notions is the need for a “productive educational system that produces high quality graduates” but does so “at a small fraction (an order of magnitude less) of the current costs.” In addition, moving to online, just-in-time formats, would perhaps offer the kind of flexibility that is needed if workers, and our educational systems, are “to meet the challenges of a rapidly mutating global economy.”  

Robb even goes so far as to toss around a potential cost of $20.00 a month. While that seems a bit beyond the realm of possibility, the rest offers strong food for thought.

In fact, he might have hit one more proverbial nail on the head. While his ideas as to where education could head have been speculated by others before, his idea that the current higher ed financial crisis could be a catalyst for major change seems dead on.

In fact, in our history, once it has become clear that we can do something as well if not better at far less cost, the entrepreneurial spirit has taken off. Tougher financial times always place a demand on innovation, making us wonder:

Will education continue to be immune?

Or will technology finally intercede and lead one of the last bastions of our society to finally consider new, more cost-effective models?

Flickr photos courtesy of mrplough and metaweb.

In May of last year, writing for the Journal of Cell Science, Martin A. Schwartz penned a very interesting essay The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research.

Schwartz, a Professor of Microbiology and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia, revealed an interesting anecdote about a fellow Ph.D. student. Unlike Schwartz, it seems that she had not completed her graduate science program. Instead, she had dropped out of graduate school and gone on to pursue a law degree at Harvard. The one-time science graduate school drop out was now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization.

Making One Feel Stupid

In telling his tale, Schwartz acknowledges asking her why it was she left graduate school. To his astonishment, she informed him that her graduate science program had made her feel stupid.

In fact, it seems that the program made her feel stupid on a daily basis. And not too surprisingly when one thinks about it, after about two years of feeling stupid, the one time science student was ready to do something else.

However, in telling his tale Schwartz indicates surprise, but his thoughts centered upon a rather unique fact. He writes:

“I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it.

So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling. I even think it’s supposed to be this way.”

An Explanation

Schwartz notes that one of the reasons he liked science in high school and college was that he was good at it. He goes on to assume, quite correctly I think, that almost everyone who likes science is because they too are good at it.

He acknowledges that can’t be the only reason. But he goes on to add:

“High-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.”

It is only later that Schwartz acknowledges he started to begin feeling stupid about science. Those feelings came when it was time to posture potential hypotheses and do some true scientific research.

At first, the feeling was overwhelming. There was so much he did not know. And doing important research was hard, “a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses.”

But armed with a certain amount of maturity, he soon had a realization:

“The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.”

And then in a moment of enormous insight he offers this extraordinary assessment:

“We don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don’t feel stupid it means we’re not really trying. I’m not talking about `relative stupidity’, in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don’t.

“Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.

“No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right.”

Two Important Points

Of course, there are two rather interesting, but disparate points being made. The first is the case of his female colleague, exceedingly brilliant in Schwartz’s mind, who dropped out of graduate school.

Anyone seeking to understand the major reason that kids drop out of school at any level, be it middle school, high school, college or graduate, need not look any further than this simple story. In our schools, value is placed upon getting the right answers. In our schools, a person’s place in the pecking order comes from how they perform relative to specific academic standards.

If you cannot measure up to those academic standards, you will eventually become frustrated and angry. You will feel stupid. And if you are made to feel stupid repeatedly, day after day, year after year, well they are very likely to do what the attorney did, drop out.

The second, of course, is that all of us at some point will feel stupid. It may not happen until we are much older, but it will happen. Even those for which school was a breeze.

And it is interesting to note how strongly Schwartz contrasts with the proponents of NCLB and the high stakes testing movement that has swept our country in recent years. Instead , the professor suggests that our schools should focus on big important questions and that teachers should help students feel perfectly fine as long as they learned something each time.

That is certainly a direct contrast to our current structure which offers accolades only to those “students who are accustomed to getting the answers right.”

Flickr photos courtesy of artbandito, Jeremy Wilburn, and Radioflyer007.

Lawrence Lessig is the man most turn to when discussing the open source internet era. Lessig, of course, is the author of “Free Culture” and the founder of the Creative Commons.

The brilliant legal mind spent years pushing the intellectual-property envelope, seeking to break down the barriers that might limit current internet innovations by rethinking copyright laws as they exist today. The lawyer had the audacity to insist that the current concerns surrounding copyright infringements in the new media arena was not one debating artistic freedom and protection. Instead it was about control.

But with brilliance clearly comes the desire for new challenges. And so Lessig has taken on a new focus as he moves from the West Coast where he served as a professor of law at Stanford University to the East and in his new position at Harvard University.

Emphasis on Corruption
Having previously taught at Harvard Law, the move to the Stanford of the East (as Harvard is often dubbed by left-coasters) was not the real surprise. The biggest shock with Lessig has come from his shift in intellectual pursuits, to a new topic based on an age-old problem, corruption.

Lessig has begun a five-year commitment to examine corruption in government and academia. In his role, he will head Harvard University’s Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.

In an interview with Samuel P. Jacobs of the Boston Globe,
Lessig notes that both politics and academics have lost independence. The new emerging field of consulting creates a situation where professors and/or advocates receive funds from corporations for advice.

However, by virtue of taking funds, these individuals, once thought to be independent thinkers, create a situation where the public begins to assume that money is behind all public policy. The result is that those people once-deemed independent are no longer seen in such a light.

The key of course is that public trust disappears when such independence is lost.

Corrupt System vs. Corrupt Individuals

One of the more interesting points Lessig makes in his interview centers upon the fundamental question of responsibility. The legal scholar believes it is time to shift the focus from the notion of corrupt individuals and examine the larger issue of how society creates corruption opportunities.

Lessig explains to Jacobs:

“There are some people who think about the word “corruption” and they are thinking about it as if it is speaking about something evil. . . . Evil brings to mind images like Hitler or Pol Pot. I’m very much of the view that that is not an interesting way to think about this problem. We have enough attention and understanding about why people like Hitler or Pol Pot or the bad guys in the financial crisis are bad guys. I don’t think we’re actually going to make much progress focusing more of our attention on those bad guys.

What we need to do is to recognize the bad guys in all of us. All of us who don’t take small steps that actually would have a significant chance to eliminate problems. In the academic context, when you don’t raise a question about colleagues who are accepting money to do policy research, making policy recommendations that are directly connected to the money that they are receiving, what you are doing is nothing evil in the Hitler sense. You are just being weak. You’re not asserting an ethical position that, if asserted, might actually help keep the integrity of the institution.”

Great Example

As but one example as to why the entire system must be looked at Lessig offers a story of a situation involving former New Hampshire Senator John Sununu.

“I tell this story in one of my talks about Senator Sununu sending me a nasty note, after I was down in D.C. talking about network neutrality, saying that I ought not to be shilling for these companies. It struck me that he couldn’t imagine that while I was down there doing public policy work, I might just be down there not because somebody was paying me to do it, but because I thought it was the right answer.”

In simplest terms, because other intellectual scholars have sold out, there becomes the assumption that all have done so. Of course the need for public trust in certain institutions goes without saying, but currently there seem to be fewer and fewer such institutions that the public can count on as being independent.

Lessig goes on to note the challenges we now face.

He first notes “the domains of public life where trust is a central part of the success of the mission of those domains: medical research or the legal profession or the media . . . or what Congress does” then adds, “trust is at the center of those institutions …

“If you want people to listen to you when you tell them that they should vaccinate their children against malaria, people need to trust that when you say the vaccines are safe, they are safe.”

Building Trust

Clearly, one key component to rebuilding trust will be to examine the current practice of business funding university research. While many schools have come to see funds from the business sector as necessary to their survival as research institutions, under Lessig’s model any school that accepts such funds is likely no longer able to assert its independence.

And if the school cannot assert independence, then all respective faculty members likewise lose their ability to insist they are independent.

Lessig’s ability to get us all to rethink intellectual property has served the Opensource movement well. We truly hope that he can have a similar impact on the political and academic world.

Because restoring public trust in our political and academic institutions is essential to our society meeting the enormous challenges of the 21st century.

Flickr photos courtesy of DSearls, DSearls, and SimSullen.

In both 2006 and 2008, Republicans took a sound beating, seemingly losing every close election contest. While many linked this phenomena to an unpopular president and his failed administration, it must be said that some perennial Republican party positions are also at the root of the party’s demise.

Funds for Abstinence Education
One such party position involves funding for abstinence education. Our outgoing president made increased funding for abstinence education a centerpiece of his campaign in 2000. During the Bush era funding nearly tripled, from $73 million per year in 2001 to $204 million per year in 2008.

The Republican party also took a similar position in 2008, a position that was certainly reinforced by the choice of Sarah Palin, an abstinence-only proponent for vice-president. That stance appeared as a plank in the platform alongside another party position, support for programs demonstrating a track record of success.

This stance came in spite of growing concerns over the effectiveness of abstinence education programs. We noted in a prior article that “abstinence-only education has been losing steam in recent years.” The web site WebMD Health News indicated that “Seventeen states, including California, have opted out of the programs, choosing to forgo federal funds and instead teach about abstinence along with contraception, including condom use.”

We also referenced an Associated Press article that confirmed the data noting “that participation in the program is down 40 percent over two years.” States opting not to partake in the program meant that nearly half of all funds for such programming remained unclaimed, this despite the fact that most states were experiencing enormous funding shortfalls.

Effectiveness of Program
Previously, when discussing abstinence-only education, most people would reference a recent summary by the Cochrane Collaboration. The Cochrane folks studied 13 abstinence-only education programs – they could not find one that showed an “enduring effect” on teen’s sexual behavior.

In addition to the Cochrane study, another federally funded study of four abstinence-only programs by the Mathematica Policy Research Inc., published in April of 2007, revealed similar results. The research group found that “participants had just as many sexual partners as nonparticipants and had sex at the same median age as nonparticipants.” In other words, abstinence education programs did nothing favorable – the result was the same as if there were no program being offered at all.

Now a third study, this by Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, revealed some of the most troubling data of all. A national longitudinal study of adolescents, specifically 934 high school students, examined one of the factors used as a measurement of success for abstinence-only education programs, the virginity pledge.

Final Nail in the Coffin
In the most recent study, researchers compared teens who had taken the virginity pledge to those who had not taken a pledge. The researchers found results similar to the aforementioned studies.

First, the rate of the teens taking part in sex was the same. Those taking the virginity pledge were just as likely to have intercourse. The only positive, statistically small, was that those taking the pledge had 0.1 fewer sex partners over the five year study than did those who did not take such a pledge.

However, two other findings were most damning. First, those taking the virginity pledge were less likely to protect themselves. Pledge takers were found to be less frequent users of condoms and other forms of birth control.

Therefore, those youngsters who took the virginity pledge were not only just as likely to have intercourse, they ultimately were more likely to take part in sex in an unsafe manner. This has led experts to conclude that the lessons students take from their abstinence-only education programs is a negative and/or faulty view of contraception.

Second, and most importantly, virginity pledges are one of the measurement tools for determining if the abstinence education program is effective. For these federal funded programs, the government has counted pledges as data that the program is effective.

Rosenbaum summarizes the data succinctly, “Abstinence-only education is required to give inaccurate information. Teens are savvy consumers of information and know what they are getting.”

Time to Put an End to Program Funding
Ellen Goodman, a national columnist, offered this assessment of the entire abstinence-only education movement.

“Our investment in abstinence-only may not be a scam on the scale of Bernie Madoff. But this industry has had standards for truth as loose as some mortgage lenders. All in all, abstinence-only education has become emblematic of the rule of ideology over science.”

While Goodman points to our current president as the source of ideology over science, it is important to recognize that it is not a Bush position, but a Republican position. It is one that may well find its way into the next presidential party platform if certain constituents have their way.

If it does, then people must speak up once again – as Goodman writes: “What the overwhelming majority of protective parents actually want is not a political battle. They want teens to delay sex and to have honest information about sexuality, including contraception.”

Recent data makes it clear – the only way forward towards these objectives is through programs that combine comprehensive sex education lessons.

Flickr photos courtesy of Anqa and Heather Corinna.

Eliminating Control – Mark Pesce on the potential of a shared and connected, opensource educational environment.

In the process of web surfing, there are times you stumble on some gems – some material so transcendent you find yourself spellbound.

Such is the case with the work of Mark Pesce at The Human Network. David Parry, assistant professor of Emergent Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, offers his assessment of Pesce’s work on his AcademHack blog:

“I find Pesce to be one of the more provocative thinkers on the internet and matters of cultural transformation. I am not sure I always agree with what he suggests, but this is also one of the reasons I find him worth reading.”

Parry also notes the recent Pesce posts, all of which are connected, are the rarest of internet materials.

“In this series I read each piece at least twice,” states Parry, “some three times. They are that good.”

Fluid Learning
To fully grasp how education can be transformed by technology, we begin by taking a peek at Pesce’s Fluid Learning. But before we do so we turn back to our trilogy from last February, our review of the digital commons.

We noted the Committee on Economic Development’s report, Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness, that touts the success of the “Digital Commons” approach. The report notes the “benefits of openness” and insists that continued openness is critical for further growth.

Most importantly, the report challenges the thinking of those who view the digital world in the same manner as that of the physical world. And if one can begin to think about how we might replace the current physical construct for education amongst this new digital age, we perhaps finally see where a new learning model emerges.

Pesce writes:

“It’s all about control.

“What’s most interesting about the computer is how it puts paid to all of our cherished fantasies of control. The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning. And if you believe this to be hyperbolic, this story will help to convince you.

“Flexibility and fluidity are the hallmark qualities of the 21st century educational institution. An analysis of the atomic features of the educational process shows that the course is a series of readings, assignments and lectures that happen in a given room on a given schedule over a specific duration. In our drive to flexibility how can we reduce the class into essential, indivisible elements? How can we capture those elements? Once captured, how can we get these elements to the students? And how can the students share elements which they’ve found in their own studies?”

Pesce offers four recommendations:

Capture Everything
When it comes to traditional college settings, Pesce notes succinctly: “Lecturers are expensive.” But the process of “recording is cheap.”

Of course, recording everything creates enormous new challenges. It “means you end up with a wealth of media that must be tracked, stored, archived, referenced and so forth.”

In Pesce’s eyes capturing everything means no front-end decisions as to the worthiness of any material. Just capture and let the natural course of events determine its value.

Share Everything
In a move analogous to the recent open courseware available from Stanford and MIT, Pesce also notes, “While education definitely has value – teachers are paid for the work – that does not mean that resources, once captured, should be tightly restricted to authorized users only. In fact, the opposite is the case: the resources you capture should be shared as broadly as can possibly be managed.”

In making this mindset shift, Pesce explains:

“The center of this argument is simple, though subtle: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. You extend your brand with every resource you share. You extend the knowledge of your institution throughout the Internet. Whatever you have – if it’s good enough – will bring people to your front door, first virtually, then physically.”

Open Everything
Next instead of commercializing, Pesce suggests a look at the open-source solutions.

“Rather than buying a solution,” states Pesce, “use Moodle, the open-source, Australian answer to digital courseware. Going open means that as your needs change, the software can change to meet those needs. Given the extraordinary pressures education will be under over the next few years, openness is a necessary component of flexibility.

“Openness is also about achieving a certain level of device-independence. Education happens everywhere, not just with your nose down in a book, or stuck into a computer screen.”

And Pesce means open, fully open – thus filtering must be eliminated.

“The classroom does not exist in isolation, nor can it continue to exist in opposition to the Internet. Filtering, while providing a stopgap, only leaves students painfully aware of how disconnected the classroom is from the real world. Filtering makes the classroom less flexible and less responsive. Filtering is lazy.”

Only Connect
As for the most transformative element, Pesce indicates it might well be the connective elements we now have available. His words mirror those of the recent Digital Youth Project survey, one that insists that social networking is fundamental to students using the computer and the internet as educational tools.

“Mind the maxim of the 21st century: connection is king. Students must be free to connect with instructors, almost at whim. This becomes difficult for instructors to manage, but it is vital. Mentorship has exploded out of the classroom and, through connectivity, entered everyday life.

“Finally, students must be free to (and encouraged to) connect with their peers,” adds Pesce. “Part of the reason we worry about lecturers being overburdened by all this connectivity is because we have yet to realize that this is a multi-lateral, multi-way affair.

“Students can instruct one another, can mentor one another, can teach one another. All of this happens already in every classroom; it’s long past time to provide the tools to accelerate this natural and effective form of education.

The Universal Solvent
As for how it all might work, take a trip down the “what if” of universal connectivity and sharing, of opening and capturing everything.

As one school places materials online, Pesce believes that a natural altruistic nature will prevail causing others to begin to follow.

“It’s outstanding when even one school provides a wealth of material, but as other schools provide their own material, then we get to see some of the virtues of crowdsourcing. First, you have a virtuous cycle: as more material is shared, more material will be made available to share. After the virtuous cycle gets going, it’s all about a flight to quality.”

Then comes a new frontier:

“When you have half a dozen or have a hundred lectures on calculus, which one do you choose? The one featuring the best lecturer with the best presentation skills, the best examples, and the best math jokes – of course.”

Of course, there would be a need to obtain student input to reach that level of information. We also would need a cataloging type site.

“Why not create RateMyLectures.com, a website designed to sit right alongside iTunes University?” asks Pesce. “If Apple can’t or won’t rate their offerings, someone has to create the one-stop-shop for ratings. ”

And the real possibility for transcending education as we currently know it?

“When broken down to its atomic components, the classroom is an agreement between an instructor and a set of students,” writes Pesce. “The instructor agrees to offer expertise and mentorship, while the students offer their attention and dedication.”

But schools as we know them – are they necessary?

“The question now becomes what role, if any, the educational institution plays in coordinating any of these components. Students can share their ratings online – why wouldn’t they also share their educational goals? Once they’ve pooled their goals, what keeps them from recruiting their own instructor, booking their own classroom, indeed, just doing it all themselves?”

Currently, students do not have “the same facilities or coordination tools.” Our structures mean that at this moment “the educational institution has an advantage over the singular student.”

In fact, that is what our current institutions offer for a strength, they exist “to coordinate the various functions of education.” But in the future, when we truly have an open school concept, we could well see a heretofore unheard of paradigm shift.

“In this near future world, students are the administrators,” writes Pesce. “All of the administrative functions have been ‘pushed down’ into a substrate of software. Education has evolved into something like a marketplace, where instructors ‘bid’ to work with students.

All About Control
When it comes to knowledge, the opensource, opencourseware movement is gaining ground. For Pesce, the rationale is clear and the benefits without limit.

Of technology and the internet, “The challenge of connectivity is nowhere near as daunting as the capabilities it delivers,” states Pesce. “Yet we know already that everyone will be looking to maintain control and stability, even as everything everywhere becomes progressively reshaped by all this connectivity.

“We need to let go, we need to trust ourselves enough to recognize that what we have now, though it worked for a while, is no longer fit for the times. If we can do that, we can make this transition seamless and pleasant.

“So we must embrace sharing and openness and connectivity; in these there’s the fluidity we need for the future.”

Some Thought-Provoking Work
We noted earlier that the recent Pesce posts, all of which are connected, represent the rarest of internet materials.

Like David Parry, we have read each piece at least twice. As a suggested order, we turn back to David for his suggestion for those interested in reading further:

“Start with Fluid Learning the first in the series, then check out The Alexandrine Dilemma and Crowdsource Yourself, ending with Inflection Points.”

Flickr photos courtesy of ottonassar, nathanaelb, tujiguoman, and KK+.

On Tuesday Barack Obama ended months of speculation by announcing Arne Duncan as his nominee for Secretary of Education. Duncan, 44, will bring seven years of experience as the chief executive of the Chicago Public School system, the third-largest school district in the nation.

Solid Reputation in Education
Experts agree that Duncan brings with him a solid reputation as a leader willing to confront the major issues facing public education. Duncan has a record of addressing teacher quality and inferior schools, having closed several deemed as poor performers within the city.

As the CEO of the Chicago system, Duncan created a panel that crafted curriculum-based assessments to guide teaching. He also increased spending on anti-violence prevention measures and implemented the basics of a program that allowed teachers to evaluate one another.

He has also spoken strongly in favor of the accountability aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act. He is on record as stating that lawmakers should “maintain the law’s high expectations and accountability” but the law should be dramatically reshaped so as “to give schools, districts, and states the maximum amount of flexibility possible.”

Some Criticisms Emerge
Because Duncan is a personal friend of the president-elect, some conservative pundits immediately asserted the appointment speaks of cronyism. Duncan first met Obama in the 1990s, making the acquaintance through wife Michelle. Duncan is also a fellow Harvard grad and routinely plays pickup basketball with Obama.

Other conservative bloggers have expressed disappointment that Duncan is neither a union buster nor a full-fledged accountability hawk. In simplest terms, the choice of Duncan was a choice against the likes of Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, two more hard-nosed big city educational leaders.

A more legitimate concern centers upon Duncan’s lack of national political experience and his background centering solely upon K-12 education. Revamping America’s school systems will take ample political skill. In addition, with many folks calling for sweeping changes in post-secondary education, Duncan will bring little to no experience to the higher-education arena.

A Solid Choice
Duncan clearly has considerable expertise in the issues facing K-12 education. He is also from a family of educators – his late father was a psychology professor at the University of Chicago while his mother founded and has run a well-respected Chicago tutorial program for more than 40 years.

He has demonstrated a strong willingness to focus on accountability even if he falls short on the conservative stump-meter on this issue. Chicago is one of the very few school districts to employ the concept of school reconstitution – the closing of under-performing schools and the subsequent termination of school staff at the school.

Accordingly, the strategy has demonstrated the importance of leadership and teacher quality; those once-shuttered, low-performing schools have since doubled and tripled test scores.

Perhaps more importantly, as achievement has increased, the city dropout rate has decreased every year Duncan has been in charge of the district. During the announcement, Obama also noted that “the gains of Chicago students have been twice as big as those for students in the rest of the state.”

Typical of Obama
The choice of Duncan certainly appeases the advocates seeking accountability. However, the nomination will also please the teacher unions as Duncan has been seen as someone who is willing to work within current structures to improve schools.

Randi Weingarten, head of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers, reportedly offered this assessment during the lengthy debate leading up to the choice: “Arne Duncan actually reaches out and tries to do things in a collaborative way.”

Duncan’s focus on a middle ground and his willingness to collaborate with various constituencies had the Democrats for Education Reform pushing hard for his appointment. The DFER offered the following assessment of Duncan.

“In his seven years at the head of the nation’s third largest school district, Chicago Public Schools has demonstrated sustained improvements in student achievement, graduation rates, and college-going rates. Duncan has credibility with various factions in the education policy debate and would allow President Obama to avoid publicly choosing sides in that debate in his most high-profile education nomination.”

Ultimately, in making his choice, Obama again sought the exact opposite approach of his office predecessor. The “my way or the highway” tone President Bush set with his nominees included the selection of the confrontational Rod Paige to the education secretary position during the president’s first term in office.

Flickr photos courtesy of Mr. Wright and jmtimages.

Ben Grey at The Edge of Tomorrow represents yet another of those educators rightfully questioning the system at hand. Offering some very interesting and heartfelt dialogue, Grey’s work immediately struck a cord with this writer.

Skill Limitations
A piece that essentially addresses the insidiousness of NCLB, “The Ability Paradigm,” resonated beginning with the very first sentence.

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional baseball pitcher more than anything in the world.”

Let me start by saying simply, “Me too.” One day I wanted to be the next Mickey Mantle. Another day, it was Willie Mays. But the desire to be a great baseball player and compete at the pro level was a constant for many years.

There was little league, Babe Ruth, middle school and high school. But unlike Ben, my career would come to an end at the high school level.

It wasn’t for a lack of trying. And it wasn’t because of poor coaching.

It was because I had physical limitations. Occasionally it would all come together – like during an at bat when I would put a good swing on the ball and crank one into the alley for extra bases – or a time in the field when I would get a great jump on a line drive to left center, reel it in with an out-stretched glove, then turn and make an accurate throw to the cutoff man.

But more often than not, the at bats would end in Ks and the drives to the outer-reaches of the outfield would fall beyond my grasp. And though I possessed a reasonably accurate arm, the subsequent throw to the cut off man, well let’s say he would have to give up his infield position if the ball were to reach him on the fly.

However, I must state that my lack of success on the athletic field did not go for naught – it taught me that with hard work I could in fact improve my skills. In fact, I learned quickly how hard I had to work to accomplish things with a ball and bat. And it also taught me humility – that is one benefit of learning one’s limitations.

In a positive twist for me, the opposite was true in the classroom. There I found that if I put my mind to things I could truly excel. But there in lies the real rub, at the time I could have cared less about academic excellence. I wanted to be an athlete.

Yet I know now, that my physical limitations helped me to become a much better teacher. I understood that one could try really hard and still not master something. I also understood that could very well happen even if a person was motivated to master a specific task.

At the risk of upsetting a few folks, I have learned there are some students in classrooms with intellectual limitations. That is not to say they cannot learn, they can – but it does mean there are limitations to what they can ultimately accomplish.

I have learned that no matter how hard they try, they may still not be able to handle every test question that comes their way. I also recognized how important motivation is in the equation. Without it, those intellectual challenges become even more of an issue.

So I too rail against NCLB and the notion of “Proficiency for All.” And I turn back to Ben, who writes:

“I believe we need to be very wary of setting up expectations that all students should be expected to perform and strive for the same goals. If we do, too many students will think themselves complete failures, and they will grow to resent learning.”

Thought-Provoking
As to Grey’s ongoing look at education, we turn to a recent post, What If.

“What if we stopped for just a moment, took a step back, and asked why?” asks Grey. “Why are we engaging in education the way we are right now? Why is it that the modern construct of education not only looks the way that it does, but why are we using it?

“Maybe a better way to frame this would be, if we were to stop and start over entirely, what would that look like?”

Coming on the heels of our recent interview with Ira David Socol we would answer: it would look nothing like what it does right now. The idea of assigning a student to a grade would hopefully end as would the simplistic notion that every child would progress equally over the course of a school year.

The concept of subjects would also get tossed, because in creating our subjects, we wrongfully insinuate that life can be broken into categories easily. Real learning is messy with topics overlapping one another.

And then there is this thing called technology. As Socol states, “Technology liberates, it breaks boundaries. You have a non-reader? They can still grab the world of literature, and do it independently.”

Technology would become our common thread – the machines helping students overcome limitations in one arena while allowing them to utilize strengths in another.

But as both Socol and Grey offer, we are stuck in our old paradigm of what education looked like in the past and continue to seek ways to mold our new orders into the structures we have held onto over the years.

Perhaps nothing speaks to this issue more than another Grey post, one on “Backchannels.”

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, Grey offers this:

“A backchannel is ‘the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside live spoken remarks.’ In practice, it is simply a chat room established to carry on conversation during a presentation.”

A conversation during a presentation?

In the teacher training models of yesteryear we had a different name for this – off-task behavior. The view at the time is that students should sit quietly with unaltered focus so as to absorb all that was being offered.

Yet today everything points to the notion of collaboration – in fact, put adults in the same setting and they will often interact in some manner as they react to and raise questions about the material being presented.

Grey immediately acknowledges inherent risks in allowing students to use backchannels without providing some structure to the process.

“The concept of a backchannel has an inherent dual-edge sword nature to it. There is a distinct danger to utilizing a backchannel – if not executed in the right fashion, the distraction and bifurcation of attention can potentially lead to a complete dismissal of the content being presented at a given venue.”

In other words, the process can lead to what we were taught, off-task behavior.

Yet, there is also a different possibility.

“Allowing people to interact with each other and the information in a focused way affords participants the opportunity to learn more and focus more on the content,” states Grey. “Instead of sitting passively, succumbing to the temptation to take mental meanders, participating in a backchannel brings a collaborative element that actually increases mental attentiveness.”

Yet we think this is a possibility most educators are not yet ready to accept.

Rethinking Education
Real structural changes in education, ones that will truly jump start teaching and learning will not be obtained by tinkering around the edges. And real, deep improvements in the system certainly won’t be accomplished by silly slogans like No Child Left Behind, sound-bites masquerading as educational reform.

But true education reform could come about if people begin paying attention to educators like Grey and Socol, educators who understand the power of technology to enhance learning for students. Educators who dare to dream of what is possible yet understand that flexibility and student-centered learning is the real way to move to forward.

Ben insists, he is “one of the many. The many who are looking for change. The many who are engaging in dynamic discussions. The many who think there could be more to the way we engage education.”

On behalf of the students of tomorrow, we truly hope Ben is not alone.

Flickr photos courtesy of Billie / PartsnPieces, Bisonblog, and Wesley Fryer.

Today we present readers an in-depth interview with Ira David Socol, author of “The Drool Room” and the web site “SpeEdChange.” Our interest in talking with Ira centered upon three critical factors.

First, there is little doubt that Ira is passionate about education and the process of learning. More importantly, that passion is relentlessly focused on creating a learning process that is responsive to the needs of learners.

Second, to be frank, Ira shares some of our views on how best to reform education. He notes that there are a multitude of ways to create positive learning opportunities for students but our current school structures prevent the flexibility necessary to provide alternate paths. Like OpenEducation.net, he is also a strong proponent of the use of technology yet does not buy into the “digital natives” nonsense.

Third and perhaps most importantly, Ira is extremely courageous. He is unwavering in his support for students and is willing to step out on a limb if it means questioning the system. He is one of the rare individuals we have seen who has been willing to speak out about what he sees as fundamental flaws in programs like Teach for America and the KIPP school concept (Knowledge is Power Program).

Ultimately, we believe it is important that everyone involved in education is familiar with his work.

Can you give our readers a brief introduction to the key elements of your personal bio?

I come to the field of education from an interesting direction. I know that most in the field, be they teachers, administrators, teacher education faculty, are there because they liked school, and so they wanted to stay. School worked for them – at least on some significant level – and school made sense to them.

The key part of my bio for this interview is that none of that was true for me. From the beginning I hated school, and struggled with it. I have never seen school as a place for education, but rather as a place of compliance with nonsensical rules which have stopped me from learning.

But luckily I was shown alternatives. Early in my school life I discovered what were then “books on LP” – audio books – and I always preferred listening to reading. I had the good fortune to attend a Neil Postman designed alternative high school led by the best educator I know in America, a teacher named Alan Shapiro, and in that “school without walls” (or grades, time schedules, or requirements) I found the freedom to actually learn. I also saw, at Pratt Institute, that every subject (even concrete engineering) could benefit from flexibility, and project-based learning.

Mostly, I’ve had the chance to do many things. I’ve designed houses and been a police officer. I’ve worked on newspapers and pulled thousands of miles of network cables. I’ve programmed computers and worked for a homeless support agency. I’ve coached soccer and taught art classes. I’ve seen this very wide variety of humans learn and communicate in a very wide variety of ways. And in seeing this world, I have learned that the rules, the strategies, the technologies, and the methods typically taught in school do not match what actual humans need.

So, to educators, I’m a bundle of contradictions: the book author who seems to argue against books, for example. But outside of school, as we drive down the road listening to our audiobooks, or download our reading to our phones, people do understand what I’m talking about.

Can you talk a little bit about your book, The Drool Room? The visual with the reversed Rs in the title certainly creates a lasting impression. I am also not clear as to what is meant by a “novel in stories?”

I really worried about the reversed Rs. I fought the design at first. “Generic dyslexic humor,” as The Simpsons put it. But it does generate impact, and it tells a story in a very effective shorthand. As someone who does reverse and otherwise twist letters at times, I know the image well. “I have a kid brother, he’s six, he writes just like you.”

The Drool Room is fiction, but, yes, many parts are “autobiographically informed.” I’m not going to say which. It is not a memoir. It has experiences of mine and experiences of others assembled, tracking a – shall we say – “challenging student” through school and through life. There’s a thread – “seeing differently” is a lifespan kind of thing.

It is told as a series of short stories and microfictions which alternate through a non-linear story line. That’s a literary style: Joyce, Dos Passos, Seamus Deane, that I think really works. The straight-line novel, you know, see climax on page 312, doesn’t hold a great deal of interest for me.

Your blog SpeEdChange offers the sub-header, “The future of education for all the different students in democratic societies.” Can you provide greater insight as to what you mean by that sub-heading as well as what tends to be your focus on the site?

Let me take you back to the origins. When I began my graduate degree program many advised me to join a list-serve called “SpEdPro,” for special education academics, and I did. A month later I posted a response to some question, and in my response I suppose I betrayed my postmodern thought patterns. That is, I doubted the idea that quantitative research of groups could “prove” the best solutions for individual students. And I was immediately hammered – just flat out attacked – as if I was threatening the entire structure of society. The battle ranged across almost 100 posts, but I had, essentially, no defenders.

So, I quit that, and created SpeEdChange, a place where I might doubt, and find others who doubt. And where we might “Speed Change in Education,” especially for those labeled as “different” in our societies. It remains significantly a “special needs education” site in some ways – now, I don’t actually believe in special education, because I firmly believe that every student, every human, has “special needs” in some ways and is “gifted” in some ways – but I do believe in protecting our most vulnerable first.

The spirit of the blog lies in a couple of ideas. “Democracy” – not “majority rule” faux democracy, but actual “protection from majority tyranny” democracy, is essential for society and education. If we do not have that, we will never grant our students the right to control their own learning, and thus, we will never allow them to become effective lifespan learners. “Universal Design,” the idea that solutions in the classroom (or workplace) not be “prescribed” as if as cures for pathologies, but be offered freely to all, so that we learn to make effective choices. And “Liberation Technology,” the idea that using tools effectively is how humans free themselves from their individual and group limitations.

From your writings readers can clearly discern your strong opposition to the tenets of the Teach for America program. Can you highlight for our readers your thoughts on TFA?

Teach for America is a “colonial project.” It is a “missionary project.” It begins with the basic premise that the solution for the underclass in America is to make them ‘as much like’ rich white folks as possible. When you listen to the TFA leadership, they don’t really talk about “education,” probably because they don’t really believe in education. They talk about “leadership” instead. If they believed in education they would see education as important on the path to effective teaching, an idea they specifically reject, replacing it with the thought that since TFA corps members represent the elites (or, religiously, the “elect”), all they have to do is “lead” the downtrodden out of poverty.

This is essentially the British Colonial conversion concept. “We’ll fix Nigeria/Ireland/South Africa/India. We’ll just teach them to speak the Queen’s English, give them a Parliament, and make them wear powdered wigs in court. Then they’ll be civilized. And like the British Empire, this strategy is adopted because TFA’s board and supporters have no desire to ever relinquish power to a rising colonial population. If it’s all about “follow the leader,” the leader never changes.

Beyond that, TFA is a “cover up.” Rather than enlist our elite universities in the fight to reallocate resources, or improve democracy, or build equality of opportunity, or even simply to improve teacher pay, support, and status, we use them to offer the fig leaf of charity to deflect any actual movement within society.

And beyond that, TFA is a “good enough for those kids” effort. I say, over and over, that if TFA wants to prove itself, replace the faculties of the schools in Scarsdale, NY or Greenwich, CT, or at Groton and St. Bernard’s, with TFA corps members. And let those teachers – holding their current salaries – go to the TFA placements. If TFA improves the education in those wealthy places, it will have proved itself. If the teachers from those top schools have better impacts than TFA teachers do in the impoverished districts, we’ll know that better teacher training, better teacher pay, and redistributing resources is the way to go.

By most accounts, the TFA program seems to be immensely popular. According to what we have read, the program is turning away large numbers of applicants. In your estimation, why is the TFA program so popular?

Of course it is popular. It is marketed as a great way to build your resume while assuaging liberal guilt at the same time. It offers the perfect entitlement, a job without the need for real commitment or the effort which goes into real training. As banking jobs shrink, this seems the perfect two or three year placeholder.

You also have frequently shared your opposition to the Knowledge is Power Program (the network of free, open-enrollment, college-preparatory public schools, called KIPP). Can you share with readers your position and why you have taken such a stance regarding this program?

Let me put it this way. Let’s go to those “best schools in America” in the wealthiest suburbs of New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles. Why aren’t they run like KIPP Academies? Always ask this when rich people offer “solutions” for poor people which those rich people would never accept for themselves.

Oh yeah, the rich parents want creativity and flexibility and diverse curricula. They want individualized discipline (if they want discipline at all). They’d have very little patience for chanting in classes and being told what to do with their children at home. But, you know, “those people,” they’re not “like us.”

Again, we’re back at the brutally low expectations, and the inherent racism and classism of colonialism. So, sure, convert Scarsdale High into a KIPP Academy, show me how it works there, and then offer it to those “less fortunate.”

Today, everyone is interested in improving education, there just seems to be real disagreement as how to best do so in our country. If you were to advise the incoming Secretary of Education on a couple of must areas to consider, what would be the two aspects of education you would most want to see reformed moving forward?

I’ll start with two words: Technology and Flexibility. We need to rethink the technology of our schools, from the shape of our classrooms to the schedules of our days, weeks, and year, to our text systems. Right now we are stuck in buildings quite literally designed in the 1840s (when chalkboards, desks, chairs, and books printed on rotary presses were all “scientifically” introduced). We are stuck with quasi industrial timing, and the industrial processing notions of “grades” (not marks, but the years in school). Only when we break those bonds, and use the technologies of our time to break through our geographical and knowledge boundaries, can we begin to find the flexibility we need to create education which finally works for more than one third of the population.

That flexibility means not assessing for “expected” (based on group averages) progress. It means teachers having “instructional tolerance” for differences in student learning styles and behaviors. It means project-based, interest-based learning which responds to learner needs. It means Universal Design in both technology and practice so that students learn to access and work with information in the ways most effective for them. It means accepting – finally – that “what you learn” is far more important than doing it in any exactly prescribed way.

That is “the change we need.” If we do not begin there, it is all tinkering around the edges, and honestly, that is worthless.

In your two posts last April on teachers and technology, you clearly took a strong position on the issue of technology in education. Could you highlight for our readers your general view of where technology fits in the 21st century classroom?

I believe that, in many ways, we define our human cultures by our technologies. This is because we are, above all else, tool users. Without tools, humans as we know them could simply not exist. So we say, “The Bronze Age,” “The Iron Age,” “The Stone Age,” now, “The Information Age,” because that is who we are.

Right now our classrooms are based in “Age of Steam” technologies. From the desk, to the time schedule, to the mass-printed ink-on-paper book, to the machine made pens and pencils. It is as if we are running “heritage academies,” producing people ready for the jobs, and the higher learning, of 1890.

That is disastrous on so many levels, not just as job prep. In my PhD program the ink-on-paper book is stunningly rare. Research is on line, communication is on line. I need to know how to Skype or Google Chat with distant colleagues, to glean data from blogs and list-serves around the world. I read many newspapers, but none are on paper. I convert reading which is difficult for me from text-to-speech, and my phone converts voice mails from voice-to-text. In every place I go, if I look around, the communication devices and “learning containers” are different from those we focus on in schools.

More important, technology liberates, it breaks boundaries. You have a non-reader? They can still grab the world of literature, and do it independently. Someone who can’t hold a pen? They can still express themselves to the world, without waiting for a scribe to help. Have a child in a distant rural area? They can access every one of the world’s greatest libraries. Have two communities separated by issues of the past? Join them digitally first, and let them build connections.

More practically, students need to know how to use email, Google, mobile phones, texting, blogs, online newspapers, and how to use them appropriately and effectively simply in order to survive. Don’t buy the “digital natives” nonsense. These are skills like any other skills, and they have to be learned. We are either teaching them, or we are not giving our kids the tools they need.

Schools which fail to embrace these technologies leave their students behind. No, their rich, majority group students will be fine, those technologies (and, say, Blackberry strategies) will be there at home. But the vulnerable students will be left in the dark.

So, any insight as to what is next for education?

Education ‘as we know it’ is about social reproduction. We are trying to produce students who are “just like the teachers.” And there is a sad feedback loop in this, educators see, in the students who succeed in these reproductive schools, people just like themselves.

But we need to be better than that – not because our standardized tests “prove” that only about one third of our students “achieve proficiency” (or ever have, you can look back at the stats at least to 1867) – but because our society needs to change, because it is changing, and schools need to support that.

But it is very hard for teachers to support learning which does not look like their own learning. Very hard. It requires levels of tolerance, of empathy, which are rare. It requires flexibility and a dramatic change in the role of the teacher. And it requires information and communication technologies which can offer pathways that the teacher can not.

It also requires more respect for teachers, more freedom for teachers, and much more support, in terms of ongoing educational opportunities and much better initial teacher training.

It isn’t easy, but I think it is essential.

Flickr photo courtesy of LGagnon.