The system design is not our fault. Its perpetuation is our problem.

I often tell American educators that if we are succeeding with a third to a half of our students, it is only because our educators are trying so hard. The system, after all, was designed and built with the intent to fail 80% of students before 8th grade ended, so we are far exceeding our "design capability."

I've written lots on this... the most accessible versions here as a One, Two, Three, Four, Five part series on the history of our system. It's an ugly story of a system designed to fail most our children, designed to create compliant factory workers and miners, designed to limit the opportunities for the poor to move between socio-economic classes, and designed to ensure an unchallenged power structure. And for 180 years it has done those things with intentionality, whether the hands on the wheels were Henry Barnard and Ellwood Cubberley, or Bill Gates and Salman Khan.

From age-based grades and grade-level-expectations, to textbooks, Carnegie Units, chairs and desks, the teaching wall, and the shape of our classrooms, we were handed a set of horrible paradigms - a virtual war against childhood - and asked to somehow lead our nation into a future...

That's the basic truth, it isn't our fault that our schools are literally built from the ground up to work against us. But, if we are not fighting to change that system every day, from whatever position we hold in education, that is our fault. If we are educators, we begin that profession with a commitment to children, and that is a sacred trust.

The change needed is radical. It is essential that we redefine almost everything about our schools, which is a very difficult task to undertake, but we have a system that is somewhere between 50 and 120 years behind the curve, and that should promote some urgency.

Misunderstanding Cognition

By the time our educational system, whether in the US or the British Empire, was codified and permanized between 1890 and 1910, it was already deeply behind, locked in the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States - the arrival of the railroad, steamboat, telegraph, and mass produced print media - and in the "Second British Empire" in Englland-dominated lands - a place of simply processing the spoils of the colonies. Of course both were already history, as the Boer War had proved to the United Kingdom and the arrival of airplane, cinema, telephone, and phonograph were proving in both environments.

Whether colonial resentments and migration, or the new cognitive authority of the motion picture, the "sit and git," "same for all," step-by-step filtering system of the educational design was already failing these nations, no matter what racist apologists for the past like Woodrow Wilson might say.

We know the failure because of the willingness of all these nations to rush into war with no critical thinking from 1898 to 1914 (including the ease of media manipulation). We know the failure because it remained the "non graduates" - from Henry Ford to Frank Lloyd Wright to the Wright Brothers - who dominated the new economy of the time.

Almost 50 years ago, Polaroid introduces the Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat era.

Notice that photography is no longer about memory, but is instead an
instantaneous social connectivity tool. Kids passed dirty pictures too...

Since 1910 the divide between reality and education has grown exponentially, rushing at breakneck speed over the past fifty years. Schools missed the critical changes even in print literature - from John Dos Passos USA Trilogyin the 1930s to the Beatsin the 1950s to Tom Wolfein the 1960s - and so - contemporary language continues to elude most teachers of the English language. Schools missed the impact of film literature on culture, the impact of visual media in general. Mass media, always minimally and poorly taught, has failed us from Orson Welles' War of the Worlds (really? can't tell news from drama on the radio?) to the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Schools missed the revolution in interpersonal communications which was created by the telephone, the automobile, the urbanization of the world, and eventually the contemporary technologies of chat, mobile devices, email, Twitter, et al...

This still horrifying bit of 8mm movie film (not even yet "Super 8") represents a
key moment in the citizen journalism we all know today. 50 years ago in November...

Each of these changes, despite what many in education will tell you, alters cognition because it alters cognitive authority - that which allows someone to believe something. We know how quickly this happens too. During the Spanish American War American filmmakers understood the need for people to see "moving images" so clearly that they faked them. Thirty years earlier a "cyclorama" might have been clear truth, now, something else was essential.

Scholarly material: The Gettysburg Cyclorama seemed
definitive until film appeared.

What is truth now? We were all reminded last week that if truth once came from organizations like NBC News and CNN, that's no longer true at all. So how do our students decide if they can trust us?

If your answer remains, "because I (or the book) told them," it may be time to go, because few will believe you, even if some pretend to for grading purposes. They know that educators lie - they make up silly simplifications because they think kids are stupid. They teach stuff even a casual Google search proves untrue, whether in math or social studies. They make up rules which lack any logic. They divide up subjects and time with no regard to how humans learn. They test in ways which measure nothing important. And thus, in the cognitive authority structure of this century - our students' century - educators, "we," have proven wholly unreliable. And no amalgam of initials after your name or collected diplomas on your wall will change that.

So we need to doubt everything. Question everything. Engage in "Zero-Based Design" thinking, which imagines that we can start from the ground up, instead of inheriting a dysfunctional structure. And we need to act. As an Iowa superintendent said on Monday, "This is urgent, we can't keep doing this to kids."

The system is not our fault, but every day we continue to tolerate it is. We need a sense of urgency. For our kids' sake.

- Ira Socol

Christmas, Zombies, the Common Core, Neoliberalism, and Democratic Voice

On the F train on Christmas Eve my spousal equivalent, born and bred in the Protestant American heartland, turned to me and said, "I'm the only blond in this car." "Probably on this train," I answered.

In New York City Subway art, tourists (and odd old women) are denoted by blond hair

And I recalled how, in the decade previous to this one (when the century was new) I asked - in front of a classroom full of young teachers to be - for all those students with blond hair and blue eyes to stand up.

"You know," I then told this Midwestern grouping, "it is more common today for a child to be born with AIDS than with blond hair and blue eyes." Then I paused, let them sit down, and we began to wonder about how we define "the other" and about how we define "normal."

I do not know if it is indeed, "more common today for a child to be born with AIDS than with blond hair and blue eyes," which I later indicated to the students and asked them if they might use their phones to find an answer, but, you probably get the point.

Which brings me to stories from my niece, a New York City schools teacher in an elementary school in the Borough of Queens. She told two theologic-confusion stories from her incredibly diverse student population:

At Christmas 2011 a boy from India asked why Christmas was such a big holiday. "You do all this because one god had one baby?" "Well, we only have one God," my niece replied, and there is only one child. This didn't really help solve the boy's confusion.

*****

At Easter 2012 a boy from China tried to figure out that holiday. When my niece tried to explain the resurrection, the boy said, "So he was alive, then he was dead, then he was alive again?" "Yes," my niece replied. "Ohhh," the boy said, holding his arms out straight in front of him and waving them up and down, "Zombie Jesus."

"You can't do that anyplace else in the school," my niece told him when she stopped laughing, "people really believe this." "Grown ups too?" he asked. "Grown ups too," my niece said. "Which grown ups?" he asked, wondering, of course, who in this American school he might be able to trust.

"Our" Anglo-American-Christian "core beliefs" are, quite often, a baffling mythology for others. As are "our" (essentially) religious commitment to market capitalism, "our" belief in linear - point A to point B - storytelling, and "our" (American) ignorance of history or "our" (English) refusal to acknowledge history. These accepted "norms," these structures of thought, which lie at the heart of the American "common core" and the English "e-bacc" of Michael Gove, and the "educational reform" efforts in the US, Canada, England, and Australia, are the very things which put our "Nation[s] at Risk." They are not a solution, they are the problem, and always have been, going back to the era in which public (or, in England, "state") education was created.

"America has long been known–despite our problems–as the country of freedom, innovation, and wealth.  There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is our democratic and free public education system.  Prior to NCLB in 2002 and Race to the Top eight years later, standardization was limited to SAT and ACT tests, NAEP and PISA tests, and graduation exams for Advanced Placement courses.  We valued music, art, drama, languages and the humanities just as much as valued science, math, and English (for the most part).  We believed in the well-rounded education.

Now, the Common Core State Standards has one goal: to create common people.  The accompanying standardized tests have one purpose: to create standardized people.  Why?  Because the movers and the shakers have a vested interest in it.  It’s about money and it’s about making sure all that money stays in one place." - Kris A. Nielsen 2012

Do we want "common people"? or is this effort by those with money and power, from ALEC to Bill Gates to Eli Broad to Goldman-Sachs, "how democracy ends" as the teacher quoted just above says?

Venn Diagram by Kris A. Nielsen

Democracy, like invention, requires uncommonalities, requires difference. Invention comes from (a) discomfort, combined with (b) thesis (an idea of how to solve the discomfort) plus (c) antithesis (a challenge to the thesis based in differing views), which leads to (d) synthesis - that new idea. Democracy, of course, in order to be democracy, requires constant invention, based in constant discomfort with how things are, combined with radically differing competing world views. Democracy is essential for invention, because it allows challenge to ideas. Invention is essential to democracy, because it allows creation of new answers. And our educational reform concepts, our Common Cores and E-baccs, allow neither to exist. And those who embrace these "answers" without apology are opposing all that is good about our nations and our economies.

My Venn Diagram of forces shaping US public education in 1850, the "Prussian Model"
imported by Henry Barnard was originally developed to ensure consistent training in
obedience for future imperial troops, and to discover potential fully-compliant low level officers.

The British Empire version looks slightly different in 1860: "Democracy Doubters"
includes those preserving unequal voting and the House of Lords, and "wealth schools"
represents the English "public school" (private) system.

What these diagrams share is the commitment to compliance and a matched citizenry which is easy to sell to and easy to derive labor from. What the resulting schools share is a failure to allow human accomplishment. It is important to note that even the very "best" American institutions of education could not hold Sergei Brinn or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg - people of ambition with all the gifts of American wealth. Even the most "radical" of American colleges could not hold Steve Jobs. But this is not new, Alexander Hamilton could not gain admission to The College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and dropped out of Kings College (now Columbia University). Scott Fitzgerald could not handle more than half a day of primary school and dropped out of Princeton. Frank Lloyd Wright never graduated from either high school or university. The education systems we have inherited from that mid-19th Century have consistently, and intentionally, restricted who is allowed to succeed. We can easily build long lists of dropouts who have found great success - often because family wealth or connections allowed them alternative paths - but the biggest tragedy are the millions and millions dumped by these systems who found nothing but despair, mixed with the even greater number of millions who "succeeded" in these systems only to find the meaningless of mediocrity and powerlessness.

If American education has been successful at all, as Yong Zhaoargues, it is because teachers and building and local administrators have subverted the system, not because they have followed or embraced it.

"Dr. Zhao grew up in China and immigrated to the US in the 1990’s. From his perspective he sees that China seems to want an education that America seems eager to throw away. This is one that respects individual talents, supports divergent thinking, tolerates deviation, and encourages creativity. At the same time, the US government is pushing for the kind of education that China is moving away from. This is one that features standardization of curricula and an emphasis on preparing students for standardized tests. He wonders why Americans who hold individual rights in high regard would let the government dictate what children should learn, when they should learn it, and how they are evaluated."

Yong Zhao at ISTE 2012

It is the rule-shattering schools, from Summerhill in England to the 3Is and Parkway School of the 1970s, to low-compliance schools like SLA and Monticello High School today which have always produced the most interesting, most culturally competent, most innovative students. Those schools have/had a shared cultural commitment to freedom and democracy, to difference and synthesis. They are focused on educating all kinds of students with communal support, not focused on the neoliberal ideal of creating an all-the-same population based solely on individual resources.

"Neoliberalism is an ideology and set of policies that privilege market strategies over public institutions to redress social issues (Kumashiro, 2008). Such policies champion privatizing formerly public services, deregulating trade, and increasing efficiency while simultaneously reducing wages, deunionizing, and slashing public services (Martinez & Garcia, 2000; Tabb, 2001). Neoliberalism defends the rights of the individual and uses the ideology of individual choice to promote the idea of a meritocracy “that presumes an even playing field” (Kumashiro, p. 37). Unfortunately, within education, these policies work to challenge the legitimacy of public schooling by promoting vouchers, charters, and other quasi-private schools while privatizing services that were once the domain of public institutions, such as curriculum development and testing (Lipman, 2005). By focusing on the rights and responsibilities of individuals, neoliberal policies have resulted in increasing accountability systems that place blame and punishment on individual students and teachers rather than on the inequitable school systems that have inadequately served them. Rather than improving quality of education, this vicious circle creates school climates characterized by compliance, conformity, and fear." Bree Picower 2011

"Compliance, conformity, and fear," the toxic mix which is product of the "common core," of the directives of Michael Gove, of "educational reformers" from Wall Street to Sydney. This is "the place" where kids who sit still in chairs for three hour long exams are the norm. Where everyone finds the the same plot and the same theme in the same stories, even if the plot is irrelevant. Where every kid always raises their hand before speaking and happily stares straight at the eyes of every authority figure. Where every child dreams of growing up to be a blond, blue-eyed, straight, protestant, just like the dolls we sell them.

2006 film, "The Water is Wide" from Pat Conroy's first (originally self-published) book.

Somewhere out there we need more teachers, more administrators, more parents, and more citizens who, despite their own educations in compliance, will challenge this. Who will say that "we." like all successful human societies, need differences, need diversity of views, need creativity, need play, need imagination, need refusals to conform.

Somewhere out there we need more heroes. Educators, parents, citizens, humans, who will take the risks needed to create a better place for kids, rather than just 'going along' that path of least resistance.

Here, today, in the middle of the Twelve Days of Christmas, when we celebrate, yes, just one child of one god, is a good time to recall that building an earthly heaven requires risk and sacrifice, and not risk aversion and compliance.

- Ira Socol

The purpose of public education?

"At times of falling school budgets any surplus cash should be reinvested in schools rather than into people's bank accounts; this is irrefutable but it is not the core of the argument," Estelle Morris wrote in the Guardian recently about the need to resist any intrusion of "for profit" schools into the United Kingdom. "Profit can drive improvement. But the financial bottom line will never provide the motivation to deliver what we want and need from schools.

"There is a moral purpose that underpins education and, although by itself it is not enough, it must be the driving force. Without it, it's too easy to accept that it's not worth trying, yet again, to help a child to master a skill, or to rationalise that the social class divide is something we'll just have to live with. Understanding this moral purpose for education is not the preserve of those in the public sector; others bring the same passion and determination and share in the same joy success brings, but all this feels strikingly at odds with the drive for profit. Value for money, certainly; careful management of resources, essential; but there can only be one set of shareholders – and that is the children."

The recent drama at the University of Virginia - the "termination" and restoration of President Teresa Sullivan - should push us into a much deeper conversation about the purposes - moral, political, societal - of public education. And if it might do that, then Helen Dragas and her co-conspirators on the UVA Board of Visitors will have done us a great - if fully unintentioned - service.

US News and World Report ranks universities,
even high schools, like commodities,
feeding the worst kinds of pressures on
public education.

"It's tough to condone vandalism, but one can't help but feel a bit of satisfaction at the temporary defamation of the historic Rotunda at the University of Virginia," wrote Susan Milligan in US News and World Report, a publication whose own greed does a steady and continuous disservice to American education.

'"G-R-E-E-D," the vandal spray-painted in a message that was then speedily painted over. It's a message that the board of the university should hear, even if the mode of communication was inappropriate...

"No doubt," Milligan continues, getting to the heart of the matter, Dragas's collaboration with the mandarins of the university's Darden School of Business to force corporate profit-seeking concepts on the nation's oldest public university,  "Universities are a business, and must adhere to budget limitations. But the basic mission of a corporation is to make money for its shareholders. A university is meant to educate people—yes, even people who might run private corporations someday. If an institution of higher education were to conduct itself according to corporate principles, it would only accept students who can pay the entire cost of tuition with no help from the school or government aid. It would give "A"s to those who brought the most money into the school—perhaps by being a great athlete who attracted ticket-payers to the field—instead of to those who performed well academically. It would pay more to professors whose graduates went into higher-paying fields, instead of those who taught liberal arts or music.

Therein lies the heart of the matter best discussed by Irish President Michael D. Higgins in his book Renewing The Republic. As Higgins points out, there is a sphere of "public spaces" which must not be invaded by the greed of the private, the selfishness of the private, even the individual intention of the private. "Public Spaces" which must - if we are to be functioning societies, Irish, English, Scottish, American, whatever - remain as shared, community, unselfish spaces which put "us" ahead of "me."

Education, "Public Education," is one of the spaces, perhaps the most important of those spaces. And as such, it must never be tainted by either of the forms of selfishness prominently on display at the University of Virginia in the past two weeks. The first form was abundantly clear, the refusal of certain "capitalists" to understand the concept of "public space." The other, more obscured, the refusal of certain academics to understand that a "public space" must change with the public.

"President Teresa Sullivan has been reinstated as president of the University of Virginia. There have been a million theories about why she was asked to resign. Many think economic dynamics and political partisanship are primarily at fault. But based on my own research on trustee decision making, I see common human failings at the heart of this crisis. Understanding these failings is the key to drawing the right lessons from these events," writes Michael Bastedo, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, University of Michigan, at Huffington Post, in what I might consider to be a classic academic exercise in trying to make a major issue fit one's area of interest.

"I found many instances, both large and small, of moral and ethical transgressions by trustees. But I also found that trustees rarely intended to act unethically, instead justifying their choices as "win-win propositions" in the best interests of the university. Even the most egregious acts were often covered up by this kind of "justified reasoning." But Bastedo does then raise two key issues which relate to the universal assumption of self-possessed expertise about education: (see Lasic, Thompson, Socol: Why is everyone an expert on education?)

"This is a moral seduction - a gradual process by which people come to believe more in the fundamental rightness of their own judgements than in the organizational mission as constructed by others. It is a very human process, informed by recent developments in decision theory. As decision makers, we have a number of cognitive biases that cause us to prefer our own judgments over those made by others, and we create rationalizations to justify our desired conclusions.

"We also tend to overestimate the value of our own experiences, and to discount the value of the experiences of others, even when they have better information than we do. We tend to access information that is biased in our own favor, and to employ reasoning that suits our needs at the time. And as these decisions progress, we tend to escalate our commitment to existing actions rather than pay the price for a change in course."

Both sides in the UVA battle suffer dramatically from moral seduction. Both sides dramatically overestimate the value of their own experiences.

Student protest at the University of Virginia

We understand the absurdity of the stockbroker, hedge-fund manager, software executive, lawyer, or doctor assuming they know as much about education as "we" do - after all, they would not allow us to trade their stocks, market their software, try their cases, or do their surgeries just because we have the same experience with their field that they have with "ours." Some of us - maybe a limited number in the United States, understand what is fundamentally wrong with corporate strategies in the public sphere, especially in education, where we believe it is morally wrong to worry about profit and efficiencies when our mission is the future of all humans. But do we truly understand the limitations on our experiences which we accept? which we allow? which schools of education often actually encourage?

My experiences with "Jefferson's University" are limited, but I once spoke to a "Technology Tea" at the Curry School of Education there, a moment apparently (from what I've heard) best remembered for my use use of "the f- word" (I offer apologies, what can I say, I'm from a Land Grant University). But what I heard from the PhD students there was a steady stream of thinking based in the belief that American education consisted almost entirely of students exactly like those in the room, or those on the campus in Charlottesville. With that assumption came a belief that, if change was needed at all, the change should be slow and, to use President Sullivan's word, "incremental."

Now, both Teresa Sullivan's current institution, the University of Virginia (founded 1819 on plans by Thomas Jefferson), and her former institution, the University of Michigan (founded 1817, twenty years before Michigan achieved statehood), are "institutions" in every sense of the word. Tradition-bound "public ivies" where change comes slowly, if at all, and where education - at least this rarefied level of preparation for leadership - is primarily considered a privilege of the elite. But because both institutions see themselves as provinces of America's wealth leadership, they find that America's wealth leadership sees themselves as "stockholders" - by both contributory support and by privilege.

"There can only be one set of shareholders – and that is the children." Morris wrote, and she is right. The children, and our collective future. Every student abandoned because we seek efficiency, or seek to divert money to corporate profit, or divert money to testing which informs us not at all, has incalculable human and societal costs which all of our children will bear. And every student abandoned because schools will not change from what is comfortable and familiar to an older generation has incalculable human and societal costs which all of our children will bear.

And this is true whether the issue is how Education PhDs are given out or what a curriculum for eight-year-olds looks like. It is true whether the issue is money spent on elementary school technology or who gets admitted to the University of Virginia. It is true whether the issue in seventh grade seating or the power of the Graduate Record Exam.

Carl Anderson asked me, at EdCamp-Minnesota, what the purpose of school was, and I answered, "The purpose of school should be that everybody has the most possible choices in everything they do." And morally, politically, societally, I'm going to stick with that.

Because I want our schools to help kids get ready for an unknown future, in a way which will not just make them "good, productive citizens" but happy humans as well. Happy humans capable of making all of our worlds better, whatever the next hundred years brings.

And I'm going to tell you that doing that will cost money, lots of it. It will use up much time - very inefficiently - because the raising of the next generation has never been, and will never be, efficient (no matter what Ellwood Cubberley, Woodrow Wilson, or Bill Gates has thought). And it will require a radical re-imagining of every school, from the local kindergarten to the University of Virginia because the 18th and 19th centuries which informed the structures of both are long, long gone.

If the University of Virginia wants to be something other than a province of a pre-ordained elite, than saying "no" to the corporate interests which wanted Sullivan ousted is just a tiny part of what must happen - neither incrementally nor by top down order - but organically and everywhere in the university.

If your school or school district or division seeks to be something other than an institution of social reproduction and wealth preservation, then it must not just say "no" to corporate intentions but also "no" to teachers or administrators saying "no" to change in order to preserve their own comfort.

What is the purpose of public education? Why should any student attend our school? What is the ethos which drives us? If we can not answer these questions coherently, if we can not act on our beliefs coherently, we must step aside, as perhaps everyone in the leadership of the University of Virginia ought to do.

- Ira Socol

Changing Gears 2012: social networking beyond Zuckerbergism

(1) ending required sameness     (2) rejecting the flipped classroom     (3) re-thinking rigor     (4) its not about 1:1      (5) start to dream again     (6) learning to be a society (again)     (7) reconsidering what literature means     (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic     (9) changing rooms     (10) undoing academic time     (12) knowing less about students, seeing more     (13) why we fight

Facebook began in the toxic social environment of the Ivy League...
The Social Network as a ranking system, if I win, you lose

Mark Zuckerberg isn't really an evil guy, as I think the film The Social Network made quite clear. He is simply a guy without the social skills which would allow him to understand the impact of his work. I don't just say that because I watched the film, I know people who know Mark, surely who knew Mark growing up. He is a great success in many things, but has always been a total failure with humanity, which makes it unfortunate that he created a tool with so much impact on humanity. Ah well, that is simply not a rare thing. Mitt Romney, who seems about to be chosen by the Republican Party to run for president of the United States seems completely unaware of what a human is, despite growing up with a remarkably humane father. Our leaders, whether from the privileged economic background of David Cameron or the privileged intellectual background of Barack Obama, all seem to struggle with this. We know this, the exceptions who can actually communicate in two directions with other humans, whether Robert Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, or Tony Blair, stand out in shocking contrast against their "peers."

One of the things which comes with this lack of humanity in our leadership is a belief in human competition which is wholly at odds with actual human experience - when that competition has not been aggressively trained in to people. Most humans do not really compete in their family groups, their "tribes," their "clans," or even their workplaces. Most people try to cooperate, to build things together, to move forward together. "[T]here are theoretical reasons to suppose that mentalizing demands of cooperation and competition differ in some aspects," says an fMRI study from 2004, "In case of competition, the opponent’s upcoming behavior is less predictable than in the case of cooperation in which there is a clear expectation for the behavior of the other agent. Research ... demonstrated that one’s own actions are facilitated when actions of the other are at the disposal of the self. This is the case in the cooperation trials, but exactly the opposite during the competition trials."

In other words, though both competition and cooperation are "natural," cooperation is not just more efficient for humans - "In accordance with evidence from evolutionary psychology as well as from developmental psychology, we argue that cooperation is a socially rewarding process ... these arguments are consistent with the hypothesis that executive functions evolved to serve social planning in primates and, in humans, are applied to both physical world and the social realm" - but that we see with less prediction - we see more clearly and innovatively - in cooperative mode than in competitive mode.

Cooperation is not something foreign to the human race.

I'm certain that Mitt Romney once knew
why Mormons chose the beehive
as Utah's symbol, but life in the
culture of Harvard and Bain Capital
stripped that knowledge away.

Richerson, Boyd and Henrich (2002) call this the "tribal social instincts hypothesis," "Humans are prone to cooperate," they say, "even with strangers," yet, the enculturalization is key to these behaviors, "The elegant studies by Richard Nisbett’s group show how people’s affective and cognitive styles become intimately entwined with their social institutions. Because such complex traditions are so deeply ingrained, they are slow both to emerge and to decay. ... The slow rate of institutional change means that different populations experiencing the same environment and using the same technology often have quite different institutions."

Mark Zuckerberg, like most of our leadership, grew up in the rather anti-human confines of the wealthy, Wall Street obsessed, suburb. In these places where the institutions of the culture have embraced selfishness and competition in all things as a "good." Though, yes, "Human societies represent a spectacular outlier with respect to all other animal species because they are based on large-scale cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals" (Fehr and Fischbacher 2004), the social norming those authors describe seem to overwhelm the natural, creating places in which competition, in every single thing, is trained in from birth. My kid's Apgar score is higher than your kids, and onward and upward to 5,000 square foot homes for four people and Mercedes-Benz station wagons in the driveway, and $5,000 commercial ranges in kitchens that are turned on twice a year, and SAT test tutors and paid preparers for those Harvard applications.

In that world, as the Zuckerberg character in Aaron Sorkin's film makes clear in the first scene, being in one of the most prestigious fraternities of the most prestigious university in the nation is simply not enough, because it is not the "most of the most." Now Zuckerberg has neurological issues (I'm pretty sure) which make this especially difficult for him, but no matter the brain wiring, the world of Harvard and Harvard-like places is built on this essential set of what might be called personality disorders. A "zero-sum" world in which your success is only possible through the (relative) failure of those around you.

Able to not just speak to those different
from himself, but to hear them as well,
Robert Kennedy was a remarkably
rare type of political leader.

"It is a revolutionary world we live in. Governments repress their people; and millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich; and wealth is lavished on armaments.  For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road history has marked for us.  The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American society." - Robert Francis Kennedy, 1968

We need a different kind of leadership in education. "The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike." We need a believe in our shared capabilities as people. And it has to begin with a radically different conception of our educational social networks. We need a concept of social networking where we are not comparing schools, teachers, and students in ways little different than Mark Zuckerberg's FaceMash.

Because I simply do not want schools to compete (the goal of the profiteers of "ed reform"), teachers to compete (the goal of Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Michael Gove, and many of America's Governors), or students to compete (the goal of way, way too many adults in schools and around children), I want them to succeed in their own ways, in their own time, and mostly, cooperatively. I want them all working together, helping each other...
• Might this student do better in your school? This student with that teacher? These three students if working together?
• What can this school learn from that school? How can this teacher help that teacher? What can this student learn from that student?

FaceMash: Which school is hotter?

Not competing, not ranking, not rating, but doing something much more directly human... helping each other.

We don't really want schools fighting over the "easy to educate" students, or teachers refusing to help other teachers escape that "bottom 5%," or students refusing to help each other do better, do we? And if we do, what are we suggesting? About ourselves, about society, even about our businesses?

Now comes the hard part, rethinking our own positions. Because if step eleven of Changing Gears 2012 is going to be "un-competing" in our social networking, we need to begin with our own behaviors. We do a lot of things which, often unintentionally, send the wrong messages, and those messages not only impact our students, they impact ourselves.

I've had my fights with online colleagues/friends I respect over stuff like the EduBlog Awards, and I know they "recognize" many people, but determining quality by letting people organize "vote for me" campaigns is the essence of building competition into something in which competition serves no positive purpose. And I'm troubled when people beg for more followers on Twitter (or friends on Facebook, or...). That's competition based in the most meaningless count, quantity where you don't even know what you are counting (bots, multiple accounts from one person). (I tend the other direction, I remember blocking new followers when I approached 500 followers, for whatever reason "500" seemed like a lot, and I wondered if "a lot" of followers would change the way I was communicating.) I'm troubled when people quote stats about number of readers of blogs too often. And I know I don't want to be that person people ask for help most often.

Obviously, our "official" rankings are problems - those "Honor Rolls" (I mumble, being one of the perpetually unhonored), class rankings, the whole idea - I'm always stunned by this - that the instructor is doing something wrong if everyone does well in the course, concern about "grade inflation," or the dreaded "awards ceremony."

Perhaps I'm strange, but I always think that being at the top - in this (especially American) work - encourages you to worry about staying at the top instead of encouraging you to do what you need to do. One issue. The second - and far more important issue is this - when you rank you are turning to artificial and external motivators to replace your own heart and soul. You are no longer trying to be the best you can be, you have given away your own internal measures for some flimsy badge which represents someone else's ideas.

A top retailer, 1972. Fighting to be on top
doesn't always work.

But perhaps I'm not alone. Toyota is still trying to recover from the disastrous quality control lapses they accepted because their goal was to sell more cars than General Motors. I've seen many businesses over-expand themselves out of business. The jury is still out on what Volkwagen's desire to be number one in sales will do to their long term reputation. Sometimes, a decent slice of the pie is better than either none of it or even all of it, because "number one" can be a tough thing: If I go back forty years to 1972, the top American retailers were: Sears, A&P, Safeway, J.C. Penney, and Kroger. The top airlines were United (yes, still up there), TWA, Pan Am, American, and Eastern - with only two of those five still even existing. I couldn't find my way back to 1972, but in 1976 the top selling cars in the United States were: the Oldsmobile Cutlass, Chevrolet Caprice, Chevrolet Monte Carlo, Ford LTD, and Chevrolet Malibu. No real need to point out that the basic design of our schools, the functional engineering of our schools, is a lot older than 40 years, as is our systems management, as are our grading systems, subject structures, and most of our course materials designs.

The change, among smart businesspeople, was apparent in late 2008-early 2009 when Ford joined the rush to Washington to get help for, yes, General Motors and Chrysler. Ford put considerable muscle, and took a lot of absurd abuse from Republicans, behind efforts to not just keep their competitors in business, but to reduce their debts far below those of Ford's. Why? Ford knew that their supplier chain needed healthy customers beyond themselves. Ford also knew that a health industry would be good for the country, and Ford knew that a full-scale depression spinning out from the nation's center wouldn't do much for its sales. Plus Ford knows that a healthy multiplayer industry is good for everyone. The Big Three in the US, Volkwagen, BMW, Daimler in Germany, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mitsubishi in Japan.

It was also apparent in Google's recent conversations about Mozilla: "So it's very easy to see why Google would be willing to fund Mozilla: Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web, and they're spending their resources to make a great, open-source web browser. Chrome is not all things to all people; Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well. Mozilla's commitment to advancing the web is why I was hired at Google explicitly to work on Firefox before we built Chrome: Google was interested enough in seeing Firefox succeed to commit engineering resources to it, and we only shifted to building Chrome when we thought we might be able to cause even greater increases in the rate at which the web advanced. It's not hard to understand the roots of this strategy. Google succeeds (and makes money) when the web succeeds and people use it more to do everything they need to do. Because of this Chrome doesn't need to be a Microsoft Office, a direct money-maker, nor does it even need to directly feed users to Google. Just making the web more capable is enough."

So, the world's biggest companies know something educational reformers, and our political leaders, can't quite figure out. I know Ford would like to sell more cars in the US than General Motors, but that kind of win is not their goal. And Google, which could dominate many things, chooses not to.

The Nash Equilibrium: It is not all about competition
"Adam Smith, is wrong"

Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand that, which is why Facebook will always be about rankings and superiorities. More friends, more messages, more writings on the wall. Even Barack Obama, doesn't fully understand this, he wants America to be triumphant - whatever that may mean - in education. But we look around our schools and we see so many differing talents, so many differing personalities, so many differing skillsets, and we know that we'll always be better together.

I don't want FaceMash or SchoolMash or Students-in-MathMash. I sure do not want algorithms which will artificially rate people. I don't want counts of followers or popularity contest awards, and I don't want kids accorded an "honor" because they got one more answer right on some multiple choice test than another. I don't want teachers rated on test scores or graduation rates, and I don't want schools rated those ways either. We've tried that for generations. It sucks for just about everybody.

So let's try something different. Let's join together, in all of our learning spaces, with as little hierarchy as we overtrained animals can muster. Maybe we'll discover something.

- Ira Socol
next: knowing less about students, seeing more

The art of seeing (Part III) Visiting Delphi

part one      part two          afterthought

Bill Gates is one of the most influential people in American education, by virtue of the way US leaders worship money. It is not by virtue of what he knows about education or his ability to imagine a future - and that is the critical issue.

Real computer pioneers. My father
built a Sinclair in 1979.

Bill Gates has gotten incredibly rich, but it is essential to remember that neither he nor his company has ever invented or created anything. There were many people who imagined the Personal Computer, from IBM researchers to Steve Wozniak, but Bill Gates wasn't one of them. Gates did not even have the kind of vision which would have allowed him to see, in QDOS, something he could sell to his mother's friends at IBM, that was Paul Allen. All Gates brought to Microsoft were the accidents of birth - parental wealth and connections - which are the most important things in both American education and the American economy - but make one about as automatically reputable as Paris Hilton.

And Microsoft did not invent the office suite, that was a copy of the Smart Package and Lotus 1-2-3 of the early 1980s. They didn't invent the browser - they copied Netscape. They didn't invent Windows - they copied Apple. Today they are rushing to copy Google and Mozilla. Honestly, they are pretty damn good at copying, and sometimes even improving. But still, neither Gates nor Microsoft has ever invented or created anything new.

The fact is that Bill Gates' legacy to the American economy is the advice that the best thing you can do to get ahead is to start rich and copy the work of your smarter friends.

There are leaders who can see beyond "what is." But none of them sit at the heart of America's Orwellian "Education Reform" movement. Rather, the people determined to use education to maintain America's socio-economic status quo are like Eli Broad, who got rich by playing America's business game well - by buying other people's ideas, and paying people smarter than them less then they deserved, or people like Arne Duncan, who learned early on how to make big money off of taxpayers (you learn to do this when you grow up among "investment bankers" and others who don't pay taxes).

Now, there's nothing wrong with making money these ways, not legally anyway (at least Andrew Carnegie was afraid of hell), but this is probably not the kind of job we really want to prep most American kids for anyway - because for those who will do most of that kind of exploitive money-making, the Ivy League and its feeder academies do just fine.

What we want is a nation of problem-solvers, of inventors, creators, global citizens who can see a future beyond the next quarterly stock dividend.

Leaders looked to the future, not their own childhoods. The ruins of Delphi

And to do that we have to stop looking at the future of our children through the eyes which, say, missed the idea of the computer mouse and the problems of the housing bubble, and start looking to those who can help us 'visit Delphi' and imagine a future.

I'm not a mystic or a prophet, but some things are obvious to me when I look around. For example: the IWB - the "Interactive White Board"-Smartboard-Promethean Board - was history the moment touch screen computers and the Nintendo Wii appeared. You didn't need a crystal ball to understand that these technologies promised both more interaction and better interaction than the big white one-hand-at-a-time device bolted to the Teaching Wall as a reinforcement of the idea that classrooms have fronts. Yet schools continued - even now continue - to spend huge amounts of money to acquire these dinosaurs.

They continue to purchase IWBs not just because their leaders fail to see the future, but because the American education system is led by people who refuse to see the future. These people include Presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama, education secretaries like Rod Paige and Arne Duncan (both failed big city school leaders), and the leadership of the American Educational Research Association, which - to create an analogy - would have insisted that manned spaceflight was impossible until it had occurred. No "evidence-based research" you understand.

Augmented Reality Mirror, via Microsoft Kinect

or, if every student's handheld could also present (Samsung Android phone below)

It is a refusal to see the future rooted in the worst habits of rationalism and scientific management. Performance has meaning, but when we insist on measuring performance alone we tie ourselves irretrievably to the past - for the future is not measurable. I cannot prove to the AERA that Kinect apps will change interactivity, or that phones yet to appear will transform learning, but both are obvious if we choose to look up.

Everyone in this picture is at work... just not for the same company (JP's Coffee, Holland, Michigan)

Similarly, it seems almost impossible not to notice the dramatic shifts in the global workplace, in global knowledge creation, in global communication - at least the shifts which have occurred everywhere but the typical American school.

Information no longer has - OK, it never did have - anything to do with the "five paragraph essay" or the book report. Writing no longer involves hands holding pens. Reading takes many 'mechanical' forms - from decoding to listening to watching. Attention no longer means staring at a person in the front of the room. And work no longer always has set hours, set locations, or even set hierarchies. The publisher no longer defines cognitive authority, nor do the letters after one's name.

Where work gets done in MSU's College of Education - if you want quiet and privacy
you plug in your ear buds.

So, it does not require an oracle to look into any coffee shop in the world and realize that we must help students find their own work/study environments, rather than organize that for them. That we must help them discover what creates "privacy" for themselves, rather than enforce group silence. That we must help students learn to construct their own scheduling systems - say effective use of phones, Google Calendar, and text-messaging, as one example - rather than creating a schedule for them.

Quicken Loans new headquarters in Detroit. The future workplace doesn't look like your
high school econ classroom.

While one need not be an oracle, one does have to keep one's eyes open. If, in 2006, you did not notice that everyone on HGTV's House Hunters owed 110% of the cost of their home, you weren't paying attention. If, in 1970, you did not notice that the influence of writers like Kerouac, Dos Passos, and Ferlinghetti were putting pressure on the 500 year old idea of "the page," you weren't paying attention. If you chose to never look at what workplaces such as Digital Equipment looked like in 1980, you weren't paying attention.

Jack Kerouac wanted to write without
changing page sheets

The future belongs to those who see beyond what they saw at last year's vendor fair. The future belongs to those to dream differently. Page and Brinn saw a search engine no longer tied to the 18th century idea of shelving books. The engineers at Xerox PARC saw a way to navigate a computer screen without a keyboard. They saw/dreamed these things because they were not locked into the "I know what I see" paradigm. Henry Ford's true genius lay neither in automotive engineering (he was copying many others), nor in the assembly line (which had long existed), but in two futurist ideas - that the automobile might completely replace the horse and that you must pay your workers enough to not just keep them around - but to make them customers.

If we do not bring this Delphic Vision to our schools, we will continue to prepare students for life in the year their school leader graduated from high school - which is all too often what we do now - or, at best, do what Bill Gates does, copy the best ideas of five years ago. Gates can copy Nintendo's Wii, for example, he can even improve it, but it is up to us to figure out what Kinect can do, because even Microsoft knows that it really cannot do that with the culture Gates created.

When I say I want our students to be creators, not consumers, I mean it. I want to "graduate" students who are capable of creating their own workplaces, their own learning habits, and most importantly, their own solutions to their problems and the problems of our world. But in order to do that we must allow ourselves to see beyond the past (which is what "the present" is endlessly becoming), and we must encourage our students - every day - to do the same. We must look to leaders who have created - not those who have copied others or manipulated wealth - and we must help our students investigate what separates a Sergei Brinn from a Bill Gates. What worldview leads one to imagine that which does not yet exist, and what worldview pushes the other to copy and acquire the existing.

We must create environments which support creation of the new. If our school design remains "the shelf" - rooms lined up according to age and/or pre-determined topic... If our school schedule remains "the shelf" - time lined up by topic and pre-determined function... If our assessment measures what we expect rather than what might be imagined... we are failing to see the future and we are - very literally - blinding our students.

And we need to stop doing that. So open your eyes. Really. Open your eyes, and bring your students to Delphi, where we can imagine a new world.

- Ira Socol

The Big Lies (Part One)

George Orwell knew of what he wrote. The first step in the destruction of democracy is the destruction of language, the twisting of language in the service of disinformation. Today, the language around public education is deep in "newspeak," and it is time to challenge "the Big Lies." Here's Part One.

Competition is good for education

America is built on capitalism, so the story goes, and capitalism is built on competition. And, of course, our creativity and invention is born of capitalist competition. Thus, our educational system needs competition to improve.

Except. Wait. First, despite what we Americans are taught in our national myths, some Socialist nations succeed quite well. Germany is a close second to China in global exporting with the world's highest wages, strongest unions, with limits on executive pay, with required union participation on corporate boards, with universal health insurance, with state ownership stakes in many large businesses. And somehow, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler-Benz, Siemens, et al all seem like pretty creative companies.

Second, many of America's great achievements come from quite non-competitive government-sponsored efforts, from the Erie Canal (built by New York State), to the Trans-Continental Railroad (a Lincoln Administration government funded monopoly effort), to the development of computers (Bell Labs as part of a government protected monopoly), to the defense and space contracts which made America number one in aerospace capabilities.

Early New York State Democratic Party Socialism, the Erie Canal,
made the "upper Midwest" possible

But the biggest problem with this lie is not in the "D-student" misreading of history and/or economics, it is in the bizarre acceptance that education, or health care, or fire protection, or police protection, is somehow "like a business."

You know that "demand curve" from Econ 101? What happens when the demand is pegged at 100% of the market, and must remain there for the basic health of society?

Apple Corporation can get rich with 5% of the market. Microsoft survives and does quite well even if a product or two flop badly, like Internet Explorer or Windows Mobile. FoxNews still makes a ton of money despite a peak viewership equal to less than 1% of the population (advertisers will pay a lot to reach the kind of consumer which uncritically accepts FoxNews type arguments).

But our society needs fire protection for all. Otherwise the community is at risk for burning down. It needs police protection for all. Otherwise the chaos grows and spreads and engulfs the community. It needs individual health, or diseases spread. And it needs an agreed upon level of education for all, or some will need to carry the burden for the many, because we will not be maximizing our human potential.

So these are "100%" operations, and 100% operations are inefficient when they compete. Resources are poured into marketing and repetition - in my little community one "community" hospital built a new clinic across the street from where a "competing" "community" hospital had just built a new building. Down the road, three hospitals compete with new facilities along a new highway. Meanwhile, vast areas of all surrounding communities go unserved. As all across America, our "competitive" health care system chases the rich and insured and ignores the rest. The result is third-rate health outcomes and the highest possible cost.

So competition in education, by design, is intended to "leave children behind." Competition, by design, creates winners and losers. This is the dirty little secret of the "charter school advocates," that the goal is "good schools for some," just as we have "good health care for some," "good housing for some," and "good food for some."

But I, "we," want "education for all," and that requires not competition, but a collaborative system which re-distributes both resources and opportunities in a way which makes 'what matters' equally available to all.

So when people talk to you about "competition," ask them who gets to lose in that competitive environment. Then ask them why distributing resources equitably within public education wouldn't be better. Then ask them to send their children to whatever schools they advocate for other people's children.

Standardized testing is necessary to measure student achievement

Standardized testing is that "gold standard" of "accountability," but what is being measured by standardized testing?

Whose world is judged by a standardized test?

By definition, standardized testing measures compliance. This is why we evaluate our standardized statistics with the tools developed by Guinness to ensure that every batch of beer was identical.

In order to have a standardized test, you must have a single view of what something means - whether that is "what reading means," or "how a sentence is constructed," or whether physics is Newtonian or not. Not only that, you must have a single idea of what human development means at a fixed point.

What standardized testing measures is how a student complies with a fictional human "average" built according to the expectations of a societal elite (those who write and require the test).

Thus, when Barack Obama wants standardized testing, what he wants is for all the children in your classroom to be measured against his daughters at the same point in life. This sounds nice, a single standard, that "high expectations for all" newspeak phrase. But what it means is that your children - not born rich to two parents with doctorates from Ivy League schools, raised with multigenerational support and in small-class-size private schools - will never be able to catch up or keep up.

Measuring human growth and development is not like measuring the reproduction of a single prototype on an assembly line. It is a complex system of helping to figure out where a student is, and how to help them get where they are going.

And you can not do that with multiple choice questions, simplistically-scored essays, number two pencils, or bubble answer sheets.

Bill Gates, Jr. is a smart guy worth listening to

Bill Gates is a smart guy, no doubt about it, but we need to begin by understanding that his success is 75% birth situation, 20% luck, and maybe 5% accomplishment. Born rich, to a highly educated and highly connected family, Gates had every possible advantage, from private schools (unlike any he suggests for the poor), to a fully-paid seat at Harvard, to a dad who could link him to the highest echelons of the [then] world's largest computer company. He also had a brilliant partner in Paul Allen who (a) knew how to write code in ways Gates never knew, and (b) could track down a little program called QDOS and buy it cheap so the two could re-sell it and become very rich.

None of this makes Bill Gates a bad guy. There are lots of rich kids, obviously, who've done worse with big inheritances. But Gates is, essentially, a lucky guy who got rich off of turning in a purchased thesis. He then leveraged that well. I like many Microsoft products. I always have, even if they've often been clever copies of other people's work, from Windows (Mac OS), to Office (Smart from Innovative Software), to IE9 (Firefox), but Microsoft has never invented anything. They've never, not once, had "the big idea."

The integrated office suite did not begin with Microsoft

That says something about the leadership of the company. They are master marketers. They are good at watching the marketplace, but they are not original thinkers. So when Bill Gates, Jr. turns his eyes toward education, he resists real innovation as well, preferring to grab for ideas from among those he allows into his inner circle.

And like many of today's "corporate reformers," from Wendy Kopp to Michelle Rhee, the circle of "advisors" is the type of small echo chamber which rich kids are used to living in. The kind of people who convince them that "being born on third base means they hit a triple" to use the classic baseball metaphor. Worse, this echo chamber is filled with those who know how to sell to the rich - remember - Gates is not rich because he had a product the public wanted, he is rich because his father could link him to IBM executives - Kopp isn't famous because she had a great idea everyone wanted in on, she's famous because her parental connections could link her to rich people who found her childish missionary zeal useful - so Bill Gates, Jr. primarily listens to capitalists to have an agenda to sell him.

What this all means is that Bill Gates, Jr. is a rich guy, who's lived an incredibly isolated life, who has no actual knowledge of the public education system he discusses, nor knowledge of teaching in public schools, nor knowledge of the effort it takes to overcome the problems of being born poor or unlucky.

That's not a felony, but neither is it a reason to listen to anything he says outside of "how to run a large company."

- Ira Socol

next, Teach for America, Core Curriculum, Core Subjects