Designed to Fail - Education in America: Part Five

part one    part two    part three    part four

Conclusion:

If those who seek to follow the Arne Duncan model of school reform want to argue with me about the inherent colonialism/racism of their plans, then perhaps they should begin by discussing why they won't embrace "real reform" - the re-design of our educational system.

"America has never had an educational system worthy of itself. Why is the American high school so out of touch with American life? Is it because the boundaries of education are no longer correctly drawn."

"Our schools imagine that students learn best in a special building separated from the larger community. Teachers and administrators are included in the group of educators; parents, employers, businessmen, ministers are excluded. The year-around Parkway Program sets up new boundaries and provides a new framework in which the energy of all of us can be used in learning, not in maintaining an obsolete, inefficient system.

"There is no schoolhouse, there is no separate building; school is not a place but an activity, a process. We are indeed a school without walls. Where do students learn? In the city. Where in the city? Anywhere and everywhere." - Greenberg and Roush. A Visit to the 'School without Walls': Two Impressions (1970)

"In other words, we are assuming (1) that learning takes places best not when conceived as a preparation for life but when it occurs in the context of actually living, (2) that each learner ultimately must organize his own learning in his own way, (3) that "problems" and personal interests rather than "subjects" are a more realistic structure by which to organize learning experiences, (4) that students are capable of directly and authentically participating in the intellectual and social life of their community, (5) that they should do so, and (6) that the community badly needs them." - Neil Postman (1969)

No tests. No grading. No age-based grades. Few classrooms. Few classes. Teacher and learner agency. No core curriculum. No particular time schedule. The complete opposite of RheEducation. And yet...

"Last summer there were 10,000 applications for only 500 places - they've got a good thing going and it's a seller's market." - Greenberg and Roush. A Visit to the 'School without Walls': Two Impressions (1970)

"Ninety-seven percent of a 1980s 3I graduating class attended four-year colleges and universities, compared to a regular-school continuing-education rate that was much lower despite including vocational schools and military service." Report on the Postman-designed school above.

No, neither of these schools, Philadelphia's Parkway Program or New Rochelle (NY)'s Program for Inquiry, Involvement, and Independent Study ("3i"), nor any of the dozens of similar schools across the U.S. in the 1960s through early 1980s, were "the solution" for every student. Nor were they ever promoted that way. But these were not elite schools either, racially and academically diverse (often to extremes), sought after by those students failing in the "general" school programs, often a dumping ground for special needs students and problem behavior cases - these schools often worked with the very type of student now expected to succeed only if given a KIPP education. They were also all public schools, with unionized teachers.

The concepts were student empowerment, teacher freedom, community, and authentic assessment. Alan Shapiro (Postman's partner in the New Rochelle school): "Who or what has ever made anyone in the 3Is take more classes than he/she wants to take? First year student Richard Hobbs during his two years in the 3Is probably didn't take more than one or two and, if I remember correctly, didn't even get credit for them. He graduated. (See Ira Socol and Tom Murphy on the art of not taking classes; on the other hand, for the art of taking classes, see Kim Jones, who amassed something like 12 credits and graduated after her sophomore year.)" The New Rochelle students: "A group project is one that is usually set up and worked through by a group of students and a teacher. A good example is a project associated with Ward Acres, a tract of land of about 60 acres in the middle of a residential area of New Rochelle. On about 15 acres of it, 3I students are trying to set up an educational farm for the public schools. They are planning gardens, restoring nature study trails, and studying the ecology of the area." Greenberg and Roush: "...having found a good thing. There was a real chance to to learn for yourself here and learn what you wanted: no grades to create destructive competitiveness and external reward emphases; no rigid requirements to restrict horizons and close off philosophical inquiry." William Nelsen on a Philadelphia "Storefront School" [1]: "Sophia House could present the record of its students in terms of college acceptance, entrance exams, and high school completion. Such traditional measuring devices may not always be possible in the storefront school. Certain tests may not accurately measure the performance or progress of disadvantaged children."

"The Couch" in "The White Room" - New Rochelle, New York "school without walls"
"The whole scene oozed with activity and life and while there was no apparent order to it all, a sense of purpose seemed evident... I asked [the head teacher] if he would identify the kinds of things that were going on about us. His response - quick and unqualified - was to the effect that he had no idea what the activities consisted of, that it was furthermore not his business to know, and that the participants had defined the content, value, and details of their pursuits and were probably doing whatever it was they felt it important to do." - Greenberg and Roush. Philadelphia

Most of these schools vanished in the conservative movement which swept the United States in the years after Ronald Reagan came to power. But the success of these "counter-intuitive" schools helps to illustrate some essential truths:

• Students are smarter than we too often think, and they are great learners, just not always in the classroom.
• Disadvantaged and "troubled" students can succeed with the same freedoms as elite students.
• Student choices make a huge difference.
• Our rules often get in the way of creating effective learning environments.
• Teachers - given freedom - can be great mentors.
• There are an awful lot of learning resources outside the classroom, and the school.
• Schools can function without grading.
• Schools can function - well - without age-based grades.

Life Magazine, 1971
"We had a dirt fight in Central Park."

We know some other things as well, especially about teaching, as Gary Stager and Dave Britten brought out yesterday. Britten finds a 106-year-old British educational commission statement about what is "right" and what is "wrong" in teaching, which directly counters all that the U.S. government currently argues is true: "The American teacher thinks of his functions as a teacher and director of the studies, while the British teacher is driven by the force of circumstances to conceive and direct his work entirely in terms of examinations. As long as examinations control the teaching, whether in universities or the schools of this country, teaching will continue to be academic in the worst sense of the word, cribbed, cabined, and confined."

Stager reminds us of a more recent statement of the same: "It is this freedom of the teacher to decide and, indeed, the freedom of the children to decide, that is most horrifying to the bureaucrats who stand at the head of current education systems," said Seymour Papert in 1990.

The political problem is that embracing these known understandings of education requires abandoning the filtering system of "education" we have used in America since the Civil War. Embracing these ideas would require that we - as a society - elevate teachers in pay and respect to or above the level of lawyers, bankers, and perhaps medical doctors (something @GovChristie called "ridiculous" on Easter Sunday 2010). Embracing these concepts would threaten the power structure of our society by giving a much wider range of children the chance to succeed.

Born on the bottom and staying there. America's Caste System.

So we do not embrace these concepts, or any other form of systemic changes, because our national "leadership" is simply not interested in changing the dynamics of who succeeds (this links to one of my most controversial posts - explaining why I believe our schools do not embrace universal design). [as Anders Björklund and Markus Jäntti explained in 1997 -  Intergenerational Income Mobility in Sweden Compared to the United States - socialist Sweden shows much greater income mobility than capitalist America]

Instead, in Tyack and Cuban's words, we "tinker," and alternately blame teachers, unions, students, parents for the system's designed failure.

Larry Cuban: "There is so much chatter in an urban district when undertaking major reforms such as pay-for-performance, charters, new reading curricula, and professional development, that determining whether daily teaching has changed to mirror the reform designs gets ignored. And without reliable information, little can be said about whether students are learning (and not learning) or whether changes have occurred that might (or might not) be picked up by existing state tests."

To track this politically is essential. The period of 1960 to 1980, when Lyndon Johnson's (now much maligned) War on Poverty transformed America's poor from "third world" status to simply impoverished, America's schools aggressively unionized, school desegregation was both the law and the deed, and open classrooms and alternative schools proliferated, were the one period in US history when educational achievement of the nation as a whole improved, and the one period where the "achievement gap" closed. [2]

I will not pretend to use some form of regression analysis to parse out which of these factors contributed most, but it is important to see that all of these efforts are currently under attack from the wealthiest segments of American society. From Chris Christie to Mark Zuckerberg, from Oprah to Bill Gates Jr., from Michael Bloomberg to Eli Broad, issues of poverty and unequal opportunity are ignored while teacher unions, teacher agency, student freedoms, and desegregation are attacked, and none of these powerful figures embraces this simple call from Diane Ravitch, "as a society we have to act on the other problems, such as poverty and homelessness, which contribute to poor educational outcomes. We should not punish schools and teachers because they have a high number of kids who are poor or homeless or aren’t native English speakers. We have to do something to help those students have a better life." [3]

This is not easy stuff to consider in a society where wealth is worshipped and the wealthy are cultural heroes. We cling to our myths of social mobility and "anyone can be President" [4] and are loath to consider that there is a system working against us [5].

The "Old" Customs House at Bowling Green in New York (now the National Museum of the American Indian).
The facade has the 12 races of mankind represented as faces above the windows. (copyright Dave Pear)

It is also not easy to fully understand when I have too often, in this series, used the term "white" in a way unfamiliar to many. These are the dangers of becoming too comfortable with academic discourse, as my friend Chad Ratliff has helped me understand. So I need to pause here, at the end, and note that "White" as it has been used here is a concept of power. "White" is a skin color - and that skin color does come with privileges in certain situations. But "white" is also a position in society groups must strive to achieve. (See How the Irish Became White, by Noel Ignatiev. Remember that in 19th Century America, Irish Catholics - despite typically having extraordinarily low levels of melanin - were routinely compared to apes and considered - racially - essentially the same as African-Americans.)

But who is making these decisions for us - in government, in business, in philanthropy, in media - and why are critical questions we must ask. The nature and design of the system is what we must investigate.

The systems designed in 1840 - 1860 are rarely with us anymore, in fact - except for our schools and our balky federal government - they are long gone. We do not manufacture like that, we do not bank like that, we do not communicate like that, but our classrooms, schools, districts, and grade-level systems are still largely as Henry Barnard left them, our curriculum has been static in form since the 1890s, our learning technologies would pretty much be recognized easily by William Alcott. At least this is true for poor kids. Rich kids get something very different - Great Neck, NY still has it's "Parkway Program" clone, so does Ann Arbor, MI, but kids in Philadelphia and New Rochelle are out of luck.

That split in education echoes the national income split: "The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its widest amount on record. The top-earning 20 percent of Americans — those making more than $100,000 each year — received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4 percent earned by those below the poverty line, according to newly released census figures. That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968."

Why do schools for the 'falling middle' and poor of America stay the same - or go backwards - while those for the wealthy transform? Who does this division benefit?

We can continue to allow the wealthy and powerful to watch education from their corporate suites - with eyes on future profits - and belittle teachers, insist that students "work harder," and complain that parents are lazy and that voters in Washington are stupid, but that will leave the kids we see every day at the mercy of a class that wants them to remain exactly where they are. And the facts - and we know these facts from our positions working with kids in schools - demonstrate that most teachers are trying incredibly hard with almost no support, that most kids are working their butts off in an environment which works against all their learning instincts and patterns, and that America's middle class and poor parents are overwhelmed, with none of the parenting supports which more 'pro-family' European nations provide (living wages, parenting time, vacation time, health care, free or very inexpensive universities).

So instead, we must bring a national focus to a system designed - in funding inequity, in test regimes, in its very structure - to fail our students. We must force a true national debate - about learning, about opportunity, about poverty, about childhood, about support for parenting - and ultimately about creating "schools" - or "learning spaces" which will offer all of our children a real chance to succeed.

This true debate will not come from those looking down on education and seeing it simply as a system of worker creation, or as a system of keeping America "on top," or as system of engineering new kinds of citizens. It can only come - as William Alcott saw more than 170 years ago - from those who understand students as human learners, those who understand, through observation and contact, that students are individuals, and not value-added industrial parts.

This true debate will not, can not, start with GE/Comcast/NBC, nor Bill Gates, nor Oprah, nor Arne Duncan and Barack Obama, surely not with a guilt-racked rich kid filmmaker [6]. They all have different agendas. The debate, the movement, must begin, from the ground up, with us.

- Ira Socol
who wants to thank you all for reading

with a special thanks to Will Richardson for asking the question which got me to bring this research out into the blogosphere.


[1] in The Journal of Negro Education, 1971.

[2] I am not using radical theorists to support these conclusions, but the Educational Testing Service and the Harvard School of Economics.


[3] See also Diane Ravitch Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform and The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

[4] "Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic President," says whitehouse.gov as if there might have been a second (The Republican Party has never even nominated anyone for President who was not White, Male, and Protestant). Only two African-Americans have ever been elected as governors in the United States (Douglas Wilder in Virginia and Deval Patrick in Massachusetts). Only three African-Americans have ever been elected (by statewide vote) to the United States Senate (Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, Carol Moseley-Braun and Barack Obama from Illinois).

[5] Europeans, who seem to worship other heroes - authors in Ireland, soldiers in Britain, scientists in France (to use stereotypes) - have a fairly easy time seeing the system as unfair by nature, which may explain the higher levels of political participation as they attempt to change that.

[6] Davis Guggenheim, director of Michelle Rhee's favorite movie, Waiting for Superman, is one more Sidwell Friends expensive private school graduate (and private school parent) who is telling public school kids how they must learn.

Designed to Fail - Education in America: Part One

part two    part three    part four    part five 

"Schools should be factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." - Elwood Cubberley's dissertation 1905, Teachers College, Columbia University

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." - Woodrow Wilson

In a time when our experts in education range from the operator of a software company, to a talk show host, to a Chicago businessman of no great success, to a woman from a wealthy family who went to an Ivy League school and met powerful friends, it is important to understand what the educational system in the United States was designed to do, and why it was designed to do that.

In the beginning there were two voices. As the 1840s began, a period when information and communications would revolutionize American society (the railroad, the telegraph, the steam-powered rotary printing press, machine made paper, penny newspapers with mass circulations, steamships), William Alcott and Horace Mann were the two people talking to the young United States about school.

Alcott, author of Confessions of a School Master (1839), was a close observer of students and children. He watched students and teachers and saw what was working for them, what made them uncomfortable, what seemed to make learning go, and what seemed to block it. In the 1830s and 1840s Alcott would re-design the American schoolroom, replacing benches and tables (where children squirmed and fatigued because they could not sit back) with desks and chairs, and he would blow apart the instructional model in use by bringing the "Black Board" and slate into the room, changing the presentation scheme and allowing students to make and correct mistakes.

Alcott saw student needs as central - "That the general arrangement and appearance of even inanimate things around us, have an extensive influence in forming our character, will hardly be questioned. Every object, and every individual we see, either renders us more cheerful and happy, or the contrary. The condition of those objects, therefore, which surround a collection of children, whether the number of those children be five, fifty, or one hundred, must of necessity have a very considerable influence in forming their dispositions, and giving a determination to their future character," he wrote in an 1831 essay on school design.  "Even the slate, if it were at their command continually, would become tiresome. To sit still, at times—entirely still—if not continued too long, is one form of doing something ; and I consider it as much a part of the teacher's duty to form his pupils to the habit of sitting still, as to teach them spelling and reading. Not of course an hour at a time, or half an hour, or a quarter, even. To some children, five minutes would be long enough; and to most, ten minutes would he the full extent of what would be useful," he  added in his book Slate and Black Board Exercises (pg. 11) - because he was working with a view from the ground.

Horace Mann, social reformer and historically proclaimed, "father of the American public school," looked at education from a different vantage point.

Mann looked down from heaven and saw a nation, and a human race, in need of perfection. I like Horace Mann, he's an incredibly eloquent believer in the potential of our children, and our potential to be "better."

“Had God, then, provided no means by which this part of our nature can be controlled, we should indeed say, that we had been lifted up to heaven in point of privileges, that we might, so much the more certainly, be dashed in pieces by our inevitable fall. But we have not been inexorably subjected to such a doom. If it befalls us, it befalls us with our own consent. Means of escape are vouchsafed; and not of escape only, but of infinite peace and joy.

“The world is to be rescued through physical, intellectual, moral and religious action upon the young.” - Horace Mann,  What God Does, and What He Leaves for Man to Do, in the Work of Education (1840) 

Mann saw education from that vast societal view. It was charitable, and of course, missionary in style and substance. He would bring education to all in America in an attempt to correct the social problems of the generations which separated post-revolutionary America from perfection. Yet he remains a humanist, a believer in human agency: "But it is not every child, nor even a majority of children, who, with any propriety, can be compared to mechanical structures, or to those pliant and ductile materials that are wrought into beautiful forms by the skill of the artisan. Children formed in the prodigality of nature, gifted to exert strong influences upon the race, are not passive; —they are endued with vital and efficient forces of their own. Their capacious and fervid souls were created to melt and re-cast opinions, codes, communities, as crude ores are melted and purified in the furnace. To the sensitive and resilient natures of such children, an ungentle touch is a sting; a hot word is a living coal," he says in that early lecture.

Mann is the successor to Jefferson on schools. He is the person who begins to convince the United States that education must be both a birthright and a societal commitment. Yet, almost as soon as he begins to move about the nation lecturing, another voice appears - that of Henry Barnard. 

Before Barnard saw schools as a path to fame and eventual fortune, he was a mercantile-oriented state legislator in Rhode Island with no interest in education. And yet before the 1840s would end he had seized the Public School Movement from Mann and had twisted that father of public education's words into something quite different. In the end Horace Mann became the Geoffrey Canada of the 19th Century. A man who set out to make a real difference, but whose image ended up licensed to people with an entirely different agenda.

Barnard, like Mann, looked at schools, education, and childhood from 'way above.' But his was not the view from heaven of Horace Mann. Rather, his view was from the banker's office and the factory foreman's post, and the mine supervisor.

At first, he sounds a bit like Mann - without the learning. "The primary object in securing the early school attendance of children, is not so much their intellectual culture, as the regulation of the feelings and dispositions, the extirpation of vicious propensities, the pre-occupation of the wildeiness of the young heart with the seeds and germs of moral beauty, and the formation of a lovely and virtuous character by the habitual practice of cleanliness, delicacy, refinement, good temper, gentleness, kindness, justice and truth." But quickly the purposes behind this desired docility are apparent. "By means of such schools, the defective education of many of the youth of our manufacturing population would be remedied, and their various trades and employments be converted into the most efficient instruments of self-culture."

In Barnard's world education was training, not learning. And in pursuit of this he imports the Prussian Model of education to simulate the assembly-line (recently appearing in the gun factories of his native New England) with age-based grades. He introduces rigid time schedules to schools in order to prepare the students for the emerging shift-work of textile mills. He also pushed to lower teacher pay (through replacing male teachers with women) and status, and to standardize both school buildings and instruction. (Mann had brought a dualism to the "women teacher issue" - "That females are better fitted by nature than males to train and educate young children is a position, which the public mind is fast maturing into an axiom. With economical habits in regard to all school expenditures, it is a material fact, that the services of females can be commanded for half the price usually paid to males. But what is of far higher moment is, that they are endowed by nature with a stronger affection for children; they have quicker sympathies, livelier sensibilities, and more vivid and enduring parental instincts." - Common School Journal (Boston), vol. 1, no. 6 (March 15, 1839), p. 85 - Barnard would use Mann's words while emphasizing the savings and ensuring that women never held decision-making positions within the system.)

Why this matters

From this beginning with see two fundamentally different ways of viewing the purpose of education, or, perhaps, two and a half. And these visions persist today and explain our current battles over schools.

This weekend this exchange appeared among friends of mine on Twitter:

"Spent last night with cousins, three of whom are teachers - never heard of KIPP, Rhee, or Waiting for Superman. Surprising conversation." Karen Janowski on Twitter

"@KarenJan doesn't surprise me one bit. The vast majority of teachers, for better or worse, are blindly focused on their classroom and kids." Jonathan Becker on Twitter

Teachers, and most teacher educators, are, as Dr. Becker says, "blindly focused on their classroom and kids." From Linda Darling-Hammond to Lisa Parisi, Dan McGuire, Patrick Shuler, Punya Mishra, Pam Moran, Dave Britten, Dave Doty, and tens of thousands more, are working with students every day, trying to make the changes we can in the lives and learning of our students. "We" are the William Alcotts of today, the Maria Montessoris of today.

At the other end are today's Henry Barnards (or Andrew Carnegies). Those building careers or reputations by making education work for American capitalism. Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, Eli Broad - they look down from corporate suites and see that education is not producing the kinds of compliant worker/citizens their businesses need. These are education's industrialists, with absolutely no sense that a student is different than any other industrially processed part, and no sense that a teacher is any different than any industrial worker. For this group, education is measured as industrial processing is measured, parts (students) which are not successfully processed in any industrial step (grade) are re-processed (retained), and unions for the line workers (teachers) interfere with cost structure.

These two groups cannot conceivably understand each other because they simply do not see the same thing when they look at "school."

That half step - Horace Mann or Geoffrey Canada or Cory Booker or African-American leaders who sign-on with the industrialists - are the missionaries. Their heavenly view, however well meaning, plays into the industrialists hands, giving moral cover to brutal capitalism.

And brutal it is. We cannot really understand why American schools use age-based grades and standardized tests, and why two-thirds of students do badly - consistently - unless we understand why Barnard and his successors built the system they did. Because the system they built endures, operating, as Cubberley noted, "factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products," and discarding "defective" raw materials along the way.

Next: How Barnard's system became an unchangeable institution... Part Two

- Ira Socol

Architectural Assistive Technology

A recent New York Times article on adjustable classroom desks which allow students to choose whether to stand or sit, ends with this teacher quote: “We’re talking about furniture here,” she said, “plain old furniture. If it’s that simple, if it turns out to have the positive impacts everyone hopes for, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?”

But it isn't "plain old furniture." Every bit of furniture in every classroom, along with every light-fixture, every bit of wall, floor, and ceiling covering, every window, the room shape itself, the hall outside... these are all educational decisions which we have made, and like every educational decision we make, these enable some and disable others, favor some and damage others, and help to create specific educational outcomes.

The classroom did not "just happen." In fact, it was quite directly designed. In 1832 William Alcott (yes, of those Alcotts) began a campaign to re-design the American schoolroom. He wanted to replace benches and long tables with individual desks and chairs with backs. He wanted a certain amount of windows providing a certain quality of light. In the early 1840s he became the leading proponent of the biggest changes in classroom technology, introducing teachers to the idea of using the new "chalkboard" and having the students use handheld slates because it allowed them to try writing, and to make mistakes, without wasting precious paper.

He was quite specific. In one article he discussed the feelings of some that, for maximum flexibility, at least one whole classroom wall should be painted as a chalkboard. But he warned against this, suggesting that would be "too distracting," and that it would be better if a neutral wall color was used "above and below the chalkboard in order to focus attention."

Are you reading this in school? Look around? See any changes?

Later in the 1840s Henry Barnard joined in, basically designing the American multi-classroom school in his book School Architecture (download and read away my friends).

These educational reformers were responding to very specific ideas of education at a very specific moment in time, as the United States attempted convert a large group of foreign-language speaking Catholic immigrants into Protestant thinking Americans who could begin to work effectively in the ever enlarging mills which were just starting to make America a nation which could largely depend on its own manufacture. These ideas were not aimed at the children of the nation's elite, who continued to either be privately tutored or to attend English style private academies, thus the architecture was not aimed at creating leaders or a creative class. Instead they were heavily influenced by the design language of the Protestant churches of America. Barnard's exteriors might suggest Catholic cathedrals, but inside the walls were straight (and usually white), the distractions minimal, movement limited, and all attention directed straight ahead.

So, what we often consider "natural," or "unquestionable," was once a decision based on pedagogical assumptions. It is not “plain old furniture," it is a designed learning environment.

So, should children sit in chairs to learn? Alcott thought so, but most kids I know would rather be standing or on the floor, depending on mood and task. Should display systems cover the walls? Alcott thought not, but lots of museums are starting to think differently. Should students file into school hallways so that they know they are 'in control'? Barnard thought so, though some school designers in the 1950s (and Californians) thought students might enter classrooms directly from outside. Should classrooms have uniform lighting? Early 20th Century school designers believed this, though most other interior environments show an understanding of the value of letting the human eye shift from dimmer to brighter and back fairly often.

I was once invited to speak to a class of high school students with learning, attention, and emotional "issues." We met in one of the school's Special Education rooms. Overhead ancient fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed. There were no windows. Instead every wall surface was covered with what seemed liked thousands of pictures and blocks of text in a hundred different fonts. The seats were in rows, but placed so that one group of students faced the side of the other students. Therewere four computers and and a television set. The TV was on, the computer screens all flashed multi-colored moving screen savers. "I just can't get their attention, they are all crazy ADHD," the teacher confided.

Outside that classroom the sounds of the cafeteria and slamming lockers echoed through uncarpeted, hard-surfaced corridors. The paint was old, the lighting grim. Further outside the building was an uninspiring series of brick blocks, surrounded by fencing and guard shacks at parking lot entries. Creative grafitti at one of those entry points had converted "West BlahBlah High School" to "West BlahBlah Correctional Center."

Now, I don't want the schools Henry Barnard wanted, but he was right: Everything about your school impacts your students - from when they approach the grounds to how they enter the building. From how they get to their locker to where they sit and eat lunch. From the light in your classroom to the desk to the carpet or lack of it. The sounds, the windows, the schedule - the fencing, the trees, the PA announcements. Everything about your schools impacts the students and helps to decide which students succeed and which students fail.

I am an absolute believer in classroom technology, you who read me know that, but remember, the first technology, the biggest technology, is the classroom itself, the school building itself. When we think of technology solutions, perhaps we need to start right there.

- Ira Socol