The Green Cup

Yesterday I mentioned Hillary Goldman’s piece in the December/January 2009-10 issue of Learning and Leading with Technology. If you have access to that journal there’s also an excellent piece on Cloud Computing in it, spelling out the potential cloud computing has for school systems.

The piece is by Doug Johnson (Mankato Public Schools, MN), and he manages to be pretty explicit about the cost benefits cloud computer could have for public schools. Johnson envisions a wireless school environment where students are equipped with fairly inexpensive netbooks. That environment would let students connect to cloud-based email, and document and presentation programs like Google Docs and Google Sites.

Johnson gives a good analysis of the issues surrounding cloud computing – like connectivity, the potential future costs of services that are free now, and privacy and security. He also has a nice cloud computing glossary of terms in case you’re new to the topic.

In my experience, cloud computing can be a powerful way to extend the learning environment beyond the classroom. Students at my school get a state-issued email account in second grade; the account can be downloaded to a program like Outlook, but the majority of students use it entirely in a web/cloud-based format. Then in third grade students begin using a cloud-based writing program. I use a combination of email and individual conferencing to provide student feedback on their writing. Many students use both their email and the writing software at home – outside normal class hours.

Hillary Goldman, director of government affairs for ISTE, had a column in the December/January 2009-10 issue of Learning and Leading with Technology. Her piece was on the renewed effort to reauthorize No Child Left Behind.

Goldman reference a recent speech by the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Duncan give NCLB a certain amount of credit for moving our focus from education inputs to educational outcomes. But the time has come, according to Duncan, to “move away from a policy of compliance to one of innovation.”

I couldn’t agree more. And I especially enjoyed Goldman’s observation that many in education have begun using the acronym ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) again, instead of NCLB. ESEA, of course, was the original name of the law when it was first passed in 1965.

I hope the trend continues…

Everyone has gone to bed, worn out from Black Friday shopping and a belated Thanksgiving dinner this evening with a dozen people (five of whom work for public schools, plus at least one education major home from college). So here I sit, listening to Van Morrison sing Rave On John Donne on my iPod and contemplating the words of Greg Thompson on school reform – the incompatibility of an “innovative, creative, vibrant learning environment” and “common standards supported by textbooks and assessed by standardized tests.”

I read a blog by Wesley Fryer (Moving at the Speed of Creativity) and he pointed Thompson’s words out to me a little over a week ago. Since then they’ve haunted me. Frankly, I’ve been scared he’s right. But maybe not.

Part of the problem is how the ideas involved in Thompson’s thesis are grouped. I’m not sure common standards are a problem. Sometimes, the textbooks and curricula that support those standards present issues and provide controversy – especially when placed in the hands of a workforce that isn’t always as well trained or as well motivated as it could be. I really don’t see the administration of tests as a hindrance to the educational process. I suspect that Thompson has a problem with what we are currently looking for in such assessment, not with assessment itself.

Of course, that’s the issue. What are we testing for? It’s a question of defining what we value. Often I get the impression that we’re not sure what we value. If there’s a consensus, it’s not clear to me. Several years of No Child Left Behind seems to have left us able only to say something like this: We want kids to be able to read well and be good at math (things we already wanted long before NCLB came along); and beyond that we’re not sure what we want kids to be able to do, but we want them to be able to do it really well.

Teachers often feel forced into being preoccupied with relatively constant, incremental change. Reading groups that were heterogeneous will be homogeneous this year and the groups that were homogeneous will now be heterogeneous. Math blocks will be expanded by 30 minutes this year. Student progress (grades) will be documented differently. And there’s a new system for tracking the time students spend in intervention sessions.

At the same time, someplace in the background someone is asking this: If we didn’t have any schools and had to start from scratch, are these the schools we’d build? And everyone knows that the question is supposed to be rhetorical. The obvious answer is, “Of course not.”

We have meetings and talk about how we could take what we’re doing, and do it better. And at the end of the day it’s still what we’re doing. Someone says that next week we’re going to try small groups instead of whole groups for this or that part of the reading block. No one ever says that next week we’re going to take the kids outside and have them lie face down in the grass before the dew lifts off and then encourage them to describe the experience (and perhaps read Whitman to them afterwards). If we did that, we’d no longer be doing what we are doing (and we’d probably get phone calls).

I’ve talked about the metaphor before. We’re building an airplane while we’re flying it. The administrators are our engineers, directing us to pop the little rivets into place and screw on a bolt here or there. Small changes. The image (flying in an unfinished plane) mostly inspires fear in me. But that’s not my main complaint. My main complaint is that I don’t want to arrive at my destination in a plane. I’d rather ride a unicorn, or perhaps saddle Pegasus if I simply must fly…

Everyone seems to agree that the system we have in place now needs to be tinkered with in order to make it better, assuming that we’re going to keep it. Most people also seems to agree that profound, radical change needs to occur and that the current system needs to be replaced. But we’re stuck there, because no one seems to know exactly what should replace the current system. And if you really want to create chaos in the room, step up to the microphone and whisper the idea that perhaps the new system could be systems, and that maybe a new uniformed whole isn’t what we need. Maybe alternatives and diversity of educational choices would best serve society. There could be room for more than one idea…

I’m rambling. I think I’ll go stand outside in the snow for a few minutes and then go on to bed like everyone else.

I answered a question for myself this week. It was a longstanding, nagging question that cut to the core of what I do as a special ed teacher. I can’t remember exactly how it was phrased, but in my own words it was something like this:

Under what circumstances is it justified to remove a special education student from inclusion in the general education classroom?

One of the teachers at my school has a daughter who is majoring in education in college. The daughter volunteers at our school occasionally. The kids love her; she loves the kids. One day last week she asked me if I’d answer some questions for her for a class. And question number four (I think) out of six was this question.

Out of the mouth of babes…, I thought.

The question is a controversial one. There are plenty of patronizing people around who think that most children with disabilities are better off, socially and educationally, in a separate room. Someplace where they can get more attention. Someplace where they can be with other kids “like themselves.” Someplace where the risk of failure and frustration isn’t so great.

There are also people out there who advocate for the rights of those who aren’t disabled in some way. They say that special education children can be a distraction to the class. Their needs, their immaturity (or developmental delays) can be disruptive, they say. Some go so far as to say that exposing “normal” children to kids with disabilities can be traumatic for the normal children. Normal kids should learn about Down Syndrome in their early 20’s from a doctor who’s caring for them or their spouse during a pregnancy, not by having a Down Syndrome child in their kindergarten or first grade class.

So there I sat, shuffling through my brain in the back of a classroom where a student with a profound disability is well accepted by peers and achieving academically better than some of the “normal” kids in the room, trying to come up with a good answer for a 20ish year old college student with a servant’s heart and a few freckles.

I started my career as a special education teacher sincerely believing that kids who where mentally impaired or had learning disabilities were better off outside the general education setting. They were mine. I understood their needs. But now I have a few years’ experience…

Kids in America have a right to a free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment possible. – whether they have a disability or not. “Normal” kids don’t have a right to be sheltered from real life.

My answer: It’s justified to remove a child with a disability from the general education classroom (from “inclusion”) when the general education environment itself becomes an impediment to meeting the child’s needs. Students with disabilities have a legal right to be in the general education classroom.

And if someone asked me. “What about the rights of the ‘normal’ kids?” Well, they have a right to be there, too…

I’ve heard it a few times from people in educational leadership: we’re building a plane while we’re flying it. Usually, I get the urge to get off when I hear that. It doesn’t strike me as inspirational – unless the goal is to inspire fear…

Brian Eno recently talked about the nature of the coming change:

We’re either at the start of a renaissance, or at the end of civilisation. Increasingly, from facts and figures and arithmetic, we’re building the intellectual tools to decide which it will be. While some shrill conservatives cling to the past, the rest of us are moving forward to something still in the process of being defined. That’s why, compared to them, we look a bit untogether. They know precisely what they don’t want, but we can’t yet clearly articulate what we do want. That’s the nature of the future—it’s a collective act of informed imagination. And the quality of information is improving. (Emphasis added.)

My friend John Connell commented on Eno’s idea of how data impacts our decision making. Here’s Eno’s quote:

In the absence of data, you theorise. In an abundance, you just need to do the maths. And, because of all those super-efficient search engines, we share more and more data. Data dissolves ideology.

Connell disagrees; and so do I. Connell points out that not only do we still have to make assumptions, but the energy in the current debate about the future comes about because we’re not able to agree on those assumptions – assumptions that Eno thinks are so obvious (in light of all the data available), they’re inescapable (just a matter of doing the math).

I like the metaphor of a coming Renaissance when we talk about change and about new direction. Airplanes are, well, mechanical; and if they don’t work, we crash and burn. The Renaissance was a more productive form of chaos.

Eno has muddied an important distinction. There’s a difference between facts and truth. Truth is more real, but less tangible. And while it might seem like an abundance of facts would lead to obvious conclusions, the truth is that facts are manipulable. Individual facts may not be malleable, but a collection of fact usually is manipulable. And people manipulate them to draw conclusions they’d already suspected (or hoped) to be true…

The National Journal published a short piece recently and asked that question: How should teacher effectiveness be measured? They start by referring to a recent study on teacher effectiveness measures (or the lack of them):

In a report titled “The Widget Effect,” the nonprofit New Teacher Project found that in public schools nationwide, teacher effectiveness is not measured, recorded or used to inform decision-making in any meaningful way. The result, according to the study, is a system where teachers are treated as interchangeable parts.

My first thought is that the answer can’t be a binary one. We can’t confine ourselves to the narrow box of saying that a teacher is either effective or not effective. It’s more complicated than that.

Neither can the answer be related solely to student achievement measured in a single year.

The National Journal’s blog post had 25 comments on it when last I looked at it…

I’m not really an advocate of school choice for the simple reason that in my sparsely populated, physically rugged part of Appalachia it is a somewhat impractical approach to providing students with improved education environments. If little my school (about 110 students this year in 7 grades with 10.4 teachers) doesn’t adequately serve the kids in Jenkinjones and Anawalt, it’s a hour or so on the bus to the next closest school (which probably doesn’t have room for them).

Simply closing “bad” schools might be a marvelous idea in Chicago (we’ll come back to that idea), but in rural America it takes a few years of planning and usually requires that districts find outside resources. It’s also a gamble in the sense that you can close an old school if it’s “bad,” but if you decide in six or eight years that the new school is just as bad, academically, you’re pretty much done with the school closure option. No district in my part of rural Appalachia is going to close a 10 year old building for any reason short of a natural disaster. Closing an old school and reopening it with new staff is also problematic because we are chronically short of teachers in key areas.

The Chicago Tribune looked recently at a study of school closures in Chicago. The study concluded that the effort to close poorly performing schools in Chicago between 2001 and 2006 resulted in only 6% of the students from closed schools ending up “at top schools, as measured by standardized test scores.” The study also concluded that students at closed schools regressed during the period of time between the announcement that their school would be closed and the time it was actually shut down. Then they showed no change in educational performance at their new school.

The Special Education Law Blog draws a fascinating conclusion in a post on the topic: Closing really bad schools doesn’t accomplish much of anything if you don’t have room for those kids at good schools (of if you don’t have good schools at all). School choice puts the cart before the horse. Step one is not closing bad schools, it’s building good schools. When a district succeeds at that, then it can argue about whether to close the “bad” schools or apply what they’ve learned from building the good schools to the bad schools in the hope that they’ll improve.

The Associated Press made news this week by warming up an old (and undated) quote from President Obama:

Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas. Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.

The lengthy article quoted Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, saying that we are no longer an agrarian economy. The idea is that parents in Chicago (and even in rural Georgia) don’t need their kids to help harvest the corn these days. So why shouldn’t they be in school if they’re not in the fields?

The story quotes a couple of students who, predictably, are against the idea. It also cites statstics on class time in countries like Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan – places that are evidently “beating us” on tests in core subject areas. The irony is that in those countries kids spend less time in school than we do – not more. They go more days, but fewer hours.

The article also talks about charter schools – and uses the example of a single charter school as evidence that longer school days and school years can result in better test scores. But the fact that charter schools generally receive mixed reviews makes news on a regular basis.

I think there’s pretty good research to support the idea that students do better in a “year round” school year, where the normal summer break gets divided up into two or three week vacations at then end of a nine week school term. The tradition school year with it’s large chunk of down time results in regression. Students lose skills and knowledge over the summer; year round school prevents that.

Longer school days and longer school years mean more money for teachers and probably more teachers. I’m skeptical that keeping primary school kids in class longer would have positive effects. I’d consider the issue, if there were research to look at. There might be, but I don’t know about it if there is.

The obvious first step would be to go to a year round school calendar. That wouldn’t require increased funding or staffing changes. Yet it’s a step no one is really talking about – despite the fact that the idea seems to be supported by research. That puzzles me…

One of my colleagues watched President Obama’s speech to students on Tuesday – during her lunch hour. Her students were at lunch, as well. IN fact, every student at my small school was at lunch. So none of them saw the speech live.

I had planned to show the canned version of the speech in the afternoon. Whitehouse.gov said it would be available at 1pm. It wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t available at all as a recording on Tuesday afternoon.

This morning I discovered that the speech was available as an Mp4 file and as a flash video from YouTube. Of course, YouTube is blocked at our school (and statewide, I think), so I downloaded the file. The result was frustrating. It took an hour on the first attempt. I left the computer working and came back to discover that Windows had decided to update in the middle of the download and the computer had restarted. I tried again and succeed. But then I figured out that most of the older XP computers in our building couldn’t play the MP4 file.

I succeed in playing it for a group of third graders. Their classroom has the school’s newest computers – and. thus, had the software needed to play an MP4 file. For other classes I’m going to have to take my laptop in to the school tomorrow.

Reaction from the third graders? The sat gathered around a PC and watched the video on a normal-sized screen. The general ed teacher an I kept our distance and watched from a distance. When it was over the third graders applauded spontaneously. It wasn’t a reaction we expected from third graders. A pleasant surprise…

My issue of Educational Leadership arrived a few days ago. It included an intriguing piece (What Would Socrates Say?) that contrasts the view of Socrates with the pop culture of today’s digital generation.

The author, Peter W. Cookson Jr., sums up his worry for today:

My greatest fear about 21st century education is that Socrates’ humility will be turned on its head. The noted philosopher once said, “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” My fear is that instead of knowing nothing except the fact of our own ignorance, we will know everything except the fact of our own ignorance. Google has given us the world at our fingertips, but speed and ubiquity are not the same as actually knowing something.

I share some of his concern. We stand surrounded by a fog of information, a mist of data and opinions that often does more to obscure the truth than to help us discern it.

I liked the article in part because it gives me a chance to use one of my favorite words: epistemology. I’m not quite as humble as Socrates. I know a few things – and I know how I know them.

I Google. I Twitter. I blog. Those tools serve their purpose. But the idea that I found something on Google (and that that somehow makes it true) is a pitiful epistemology.

Cookson’s article reaffirms for me the need to teach digital literacy as an essential 21st Century skill. I agree with him that critical thinking skills (even when they are not used in a technological context) are more important than ever today. And I think Cookson’s has an insightful point when he argues that metacognition (or ability to monitor our own learning) is growing in importance.

You can read What Would Socrates Say? here.