Great Schools: 3. Profession without Competition

I'm going to discuss two schools here, post-secondary schools. Intense, professional training schools. Radically different schools.

These two schools both had incredibly high standards, both had very demanding professions, both needed to train an amazingly level of personal responsibility because doing either profession irresponsibly created a real risk to the lives of others.

Both also had no interest in fostering traditional academic competition among students.

The New York City Police Academy and the Pratt Institute School of Architecture might seem like odd institutions to link together, but since I attended both, I can, and will...

They did things very differently. At the Police Academy we all wore uniforms. At Pratt we wore anything and on occasion nothing. At the Police Academy punctuality was a big issue. At Pratt, ummm, not really. At the Police Academy we called instructors "Sir." At Pratt we called them whatever we wanted to. At the Police Academy we had a rigid exam schedule. At Pratt, the one time I remember an exam being given, a friend of mine locked the prof out of the room and we did it together. And, counterintuitively, at the Police Academy we went to school is a beautiful Manhattan neighborhood, on a block shared with the School of Visual Arts. At Pratt we lived in a despairing neighborhood that would later be immortalized by Spike Lee in his film, Do The Right Thing.

Perhaps most dramatically, at the Police Academy we were constantly aware of our grades, while at Pratt's School of Architecture we had none. Yet, I will argue here, that both had excellent assessment systems.

But that's just part of the story. Both excelled by being radically different than most US post-secondary institutions. Both really worked to bring out the best in diverse people. Both utilized surprising faculties, which were highly effective. Both combined comraderie and very high expectations, in a way which created communities of learners.

What Worked (Police Academy)

The New York City Police Academy is an unusual program in this field. It is worth a ton of SUNY credits, all earned in six months, including three hours of law, five days a week, for those six months, half of it Constitutional Law (yes, I know it does not seem like that from, say, actions during the Republican National Convention in 2004, or during Critical Mass bike rides, but NYPD cops have every reason to be a lot closer than most to being 'constitutional scholars'). There is a lot of psychology and sociology, and diversity training, in addition to what you'd expect - procedures, physical fitness, weapons training, self-defense, etc.

That's a wildly demanding academic program for a very diverse group of students, and yet, almost every incoming cadet graduates. It is a stunningly successful operation.

Why? First, think, "whatever help you needed" was always there. I needed books on tape, and they instantly provided me cassettes which, dumped into an early generation Walkman, read me to the Academy on the subway every morning and back every night, read me through lunches, and read me to sleep every night. If you needed tutoring, you got it, from peers or faculty, you just had to ask. I know I ran remedial swimming sessions and second, third, and fourth chance CPR certification testing - the stuff I was good at. If you failed something the first time, you got a chance - or two - to do it over. Most people there had never studied law before, or used a gun, some had really never driven before. Which is second, they seemed to understand that we might not all learn all of this at the same rate.

Third, no one seemed 'ahead at the start.' One of my good friends at the Academy had a father who was the Chief of Bronx Detectives. This meant nothing in terms of how he was treated. Others came with significant knowledge, they might have worked for the department in 'civilian' capacities. That made no difference either. It was not just the sameness of the uniforms, it was a sense that we all had a way to go.

But fourth, and maybe most importantly, it was a community of learners. I did extremely well there - I finished second in my class (why didn't I finish first? funny story) - but that was never a focus of anything. The guy who barely passed the exams had no less status. He was a really good friend too. Our goal, company by company of cadets, was to make sure everyone succeeded. Competition did not exist.

None of this is to imply that standards were ever lowered. They weren't. But different things had different standards. You could pass most exams with a 75% mark. Except for one, on the use of deadly physical force. Passing for that was 100%, as it damn well should be.

What Worked (Pratt)

"How can you have an engineering course without grades?" an anxious parent asked at a School of Architecture information night. He was addressing the question to Y.S. Lee, who taught the steel structures and concrete structures courses, and not an engineer to mess with - among his works, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and Madison Square Garden in New York. "It is simple," Lee responded. "No one leaves my class knowing 95% of what makes a building stand up."

There were no grades in design studios either, how, exactly, do you grade a design?

Yes, Pratt's Architecture School now has grades, but it didn't then. Everything was pass/fail and that worked, one way or another, for all courses.

There was also a lovely flexibility. On the first day of a landscape design course I decided that I could not handle the mix of students, professor, and room. And I never came back. But I had the syllabus, and I worked with the course information, and I did the final project. I did it big, and left it in the professor's mailbox. My evaluation said, "I have no idea who this student is as he never came to class, but he did hand in a magnificent design as his final project which clearly indicates that he has mastered the content of this course. Pass." Thank you.

And in a Concrete Materials course, fed up with books, we, as a class, decided instead to build a pre-cast concrete structure. We designed panels which could be used vertically (for walls) or horizontally (floors/roofs), designed connector systems, created forms in a basement storeroom, where we tried and rejected a number of reinforcing schemes before settling on one which provided sufficient strength. We scaled the 8'x24' panel design down to 1/3 size, and went to work, casting about 48 of these things. Then we carried the panels out to a sunny campus lawn, and assembled a gigantic structure. Believe me - I know concrete. And as I watch a classmate spec a massive concrete building in New York, I know he does as well.

And in design studios we went wherever we wanted. I tended to craft either Prairie designs based on the work of Marion Mahony or Beaux Arts work, which I illustrated with vast drawings in which the building was inevitably presented against a storm sky. People admired the contextualist approach and the craftsmanship even if they knew I was making myself unemployable. Others were modernists, still others post-modernist followers of architects like Robert Venturi. Didn't matter. We all sat and drew and argued together, and pulled inspiration from each others work.

The other component was that almost all "instruction" was via projects. You worked on buildings which taught you skills. You didn't learn skills, and then work on buildings.

In Common

In professional training the relevance is easy. And these schools kept learners engaged through relevant experiences. But, the key things, the comraderie, that creation of the learning community, was every bit as strong at Pratt as it was at the NYCPA. And that is what ultimately brings these stories together. Both gave students what they needed. Both treated students equitably, not equally, and both developed intelligent assessment structures designed to support, rather than rank.

- Ira Socol

Some of the colleges I think are America's best...
St. John's (Annapolis and Santa Fe)
Evergreen State College
Bard College at Simon's Rock
Landmark College
College of the Atlantic
Prescott College
University of California Santa Cruz
Empire State College
Hampshire College

Finding the Learning Network

For a few years at the start of my doctoral level education I attempted to engage the widest range of conversations with the widest range of people in my College of Education.

On both my course websites, and on college-wide lists - Education Grad Students, and International Education Students - I posted links (or full copies) to (of) interesting articles I had found. I asked provocative questions. Eventually I began making outrageous statements, all in a series of increasingly desperate attempts to get the conversations to expand beyond the narrow limits of our classrooms.

It did not work at all. Oh sure, people would whisper to me in the hallways or men's rooms that they loved what I posted. A few times conversations began, but were quickly silenced when some wondered if we "should be talking about this." Most often I was admonished for (a) being controversial, (b) wasting people's in-box space, and (c) using a list designed for announcements in the "wrong" way.

I haven't posted to either college-wide list in more than year. In the few remaining courses I have taken, I am much more reluctant to bother to begin online discussions. My personal learning network has shifted.

Harnessing the Power of Social Networks in Teaching & Learning

View more Microsoft Word documents from Alec Couros.

Social Networking in Education from Dr. Alec Couros

Now that network stretches from Israel to Ireland, from Australia to Saskatchewan, from The Bronx to British Columbia, from Virginia to Scotland. It does indeed include many grad students and education professors, but they are no longer principally (or even significantly) at the university I attend. These vaunted "face-to-face" relationships failed me, and the world stepped in to solve my problem.

Now I debate my big questions, collect my reading lists, struggle with research issues, with a world of people similarly interested and similarly passionate. They might disagree with me 90% of the time, they often call me on my language or extreme conclusions, they may be in education or another field entirely, but they are engaging with me, and my intellectual development.

This network leads me to fabulous online conference presentations, to books I need to read, to research I must evaluate, to opinions and actualities that I have to struggle with. they challenge, inform, inspire, doubt, demand, ask, and answer.

Twitter and blogging, UStream and SlideShare, Elluminate and Skype, Google Docs, and Diigo, have opened my education, allowed it to stretch much further than even the very best doctoral program possibly could.

Consider that when you wonder if you should bring social networking into your classroom.

- Ira Socol

Summer Reading

Summer book lists are always interesting. I could recommend books in many different interest areas, but for this blog, I'll make them "education important" titles:

Fiction

Peter Høeg's incredible novel of inclusion gone wrong Borderliners is equally fascinating and terrifying. It is also a must read for every teacher who works with students, "on the borderline."

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon's novel of Asperger's and aspiration is the kind of stunning view of a difference I think only fiction can offer.

I'm "probably" biased, but I think The Drool Roomhas a lot to say about special needs education, dyslexia, and attention issues. Plus, it's a pretty easy read.

Education

Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Cultureis a truly essential book, which won me over in the introduction when the author talks about, "Somewhat counterintuitively, I enrolled in graduate school i education. I was trying to crack - at least in my own mind - the genetic code of the institution, one that seemed so stubbornly, intractably resistant to change..."

Surely the recent book most quoted (the title) without being read, James Gee's brilliant What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacyexplores how games teach vs how schools teach, and why one method engages why the other typical chases students away. (You could also read my blog on this, but Gee has much more to say)

More than a debate about a single technology, David Crystal's Txtng: The Gr8 Db8is a fascinating look at technology, communications, politics, and generational battles. Plus, he explores the structure of texting linguistically, in English and other languages.

John Willinsky's Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's Endis that kind of essential look at the purposes of education in a capitalist/imperialist world.

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorderby David Weinberger is one of the best descriptions of how learning is changing.

And Clay Shirky will tell you why those changes are so important in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Theories

Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (October Books)might make you re-think many things: how you see, your understanding of history, among them. Not an easy read, but well worth it.

Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disabilityseems like important stuff to me. Great essays on difference and what that means.

Challenging everything about education, Teaching As a Subversive Activityby Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner remains the crucial manifesto about changing schools, 40 years later.

Free

Finally, free downloads:

Norbert Pachler and the University of London assembled this fabulous look at Mobile Learning: Towards a Research Agenda. A must read for educators.

And from FutureLab

Transforming Schools for the Future

Designing for Social Justice: People, Technology, Learning

Perspectives on Early Years and Digital Technologies

Social Software and Learning

- Ira Socol

Great Schools: 2. Environment and Choice

The little Lincoln Park neighborhood of Michigan's City of Norton Shores is known for two amazing things - Marcel Breuer's brilliant Saint Francis de Sales church, and Lincoln Park Elementary School.

Now, I have not checked in on Lincoln Park in a few years, but I want to describe the school I knew.

The school serves a strange neighborhood. Million dollar Lake Michigan homes, small postwar tract homes, and a couple of the poorest trailer park communities I have seen. It is located just south of Muskegon, Michigan, a community whose economy has never recovered from the collapse of the auto industry in 1973. (The county once had two of the three largest auto parts foundries in the world, and built tanks until Vietnam ended.) It is just one public school in a district which spans urban, suburban, and rural communities. The students are racially and ethnically diverse. There is even a Catholic elementary, a very good Catholic elementary, about five blocks away, competing for students.

But Lincoln Park Elementary was (I'll use past tense for academic certainty, but I'm guessing things haven't changed much) a great school. It is great for the students, and it tends to score as well as any primary school in the state on standardized tests.

Environment and Choice

Lincoln Park did two things right from the very start. First, it controlled the school environment long before any student entered the building, and created a very safe, controlled building in which student academic freedom could be maximized. Second, it created different options for students beginning in first grade. Traditional age-based grade classrooms, two-year looping classrooms, and a 1-5 multi-age program.

Environment

I can go all the way back to Henry Barnard's 1848 book describing multi-classroom school design to see that observant educators understand that the school environment starts long before a student reaches the classroom, and Lincoln Park Elementary made this obvious. Clothes which indicated the great wealth disparities among students were not allowed. No student could ride a bicycle to school without a helmet. Behavior on the sidewalks surrounding the school was monitored by the principal and teaching staff every morning and every afternoon.

This matters. At Lincoln Park students were getting into "school mode" from the moment they dressed in the morning. I find it hard to believe that I am about to say this - given my childhood attitudes - but this is one reason I have come to favor school uniforms, it establishes the school day from the time you walk out of your bedroom. Now, Lincoln Park didn't have uniforms, but it enforced a pretty comprehensive dress code, and yet, never made that dress code Anglo-Centric or the enforcement abusive (I was in a high school two weeks ago when girls with "skirts too short" were called down to the office by PA announcement, to show the other side).

Behavior in general was expected to be really good. And this was so consistently maintained, with all students regardless of social status, that the school simply functioned really well. No, it was not at all silent. All through the building you'd find groups of students working on projects in the halls. Students went to the library whenever they needed to. At first glance, in fact, it appeared noisy and chaotic, but it could be that because the social structure, by being clear, allowed freedom.

Choice

I always know a terrible school when I see classes which seem to be the same. Why, if you had two third grade classrooms, or two 11th grade English courses, would these be, in any way, similar? The only reason would be that you have bought in completely to the idea of education as industrial processing, and the idea of students as interchangeable raw material waiting to be stamped into pre-ordained form.

If you have more than one of anything in a school, you should be creating choices for students and parents. Meaningful choices. And helping students make those choices. Would this child be better with this teacher? or that? With this reading approach? or that? With this classroom environment? or that? With this syllabus? or that?

Lincoln Park created those choices, and helped students and parents make intelligent decisions. The wildness of the MultiAge room, 120 students and five teachers in an immense open space, was fabulous for many, but surely not for all. So students could be in relatively traditional environments, or in fully "open classroom" environments, with teachers who had also chosen their environments. It was quite amazing how well all these rooms seemed to run.

Multi-Age

The school's "star" was the multi-age room, with it's fully inclusive, grow-at-your-own-rate structure. But the whole school embraced flexibility and peer mentoring. Literacy projects, such as plays based on books, were created and performed by teams which included students from every grade. Fifth graders provided math help for younger students, playground times allowed different age groups to mix. In that situation far fewer students are ever "behind."

Celebrating all kinds of achievement

You played on the basketball team? That was very exciting and celebrated. You played in the orchestra? That was very exciting and celebrated. You were part of one of the 20 or so Odyssey of the Mind teams? You got a giant pep rally to send you off to the event. Whatever you did well, Lincoln Park was behind you, whether a school thing or something else. This created a sense that everyone could learn from everyone in this building.

A Model

Lincoln Park Elementary had no more money than any nearby school. It was not a charter, "freed from bureaucracy." It did not pay teachers more. It did not screen out any students - directly or indirectly. It was not at all without competition. It succeeded, succeeds, because it created an effective and open place which welcomed all students and encouraged them in their differing paths to learning.

As I always say, great schools are hardly impossible. They exist all over the place. We just need to expect more. Everywhere.

- Ira Socol

Great Schools 1: Changing Everything

Great Schools: 1. Changing Everything

People ask this all the time, “What would a great school look like?” They do exist you know. All over the place there are isolated schools doing fabulous things. This is why listening to fake reformers like Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and the KIPP/TFA folks is so maddening. We actually do know what works, we just have to be brave enough to embrace real, systemic, change.

This is a story about one great school, one I was lucky enough to attend.

“The Program for Inquiry, Involvement, and Independent Study,” the “3Is” sprung from the minds of three brilliant educators: Neil Postman, Charlie Weingartner, and Alan Shapiro. Postman and Weingartner were the authors of the book on radical educational reconceptualization, Teaching As a Subversive Activity. Shapiro was a frustrated junior high school English teacher and leader of the local American Federation of Teachers. They came together in a struggling old “inner suburb” of New York City called New Rochelle.

New Rochelle, about 75,000 people in 10 square miles, might be best known as Rob Petrie’s home on The Dick Van Dyke Show, but it was (and is) a complex old east coast city, with vast wealth disparities, a troubled core, and an extremely diverse population. It had, in the mid-1960s, been the first northern US city to experience court ordered school desegregation.

It did have some unique advantages at the time. It did not, for example, have an elected school board and it did not have public votes on taxation. Schools were a part of the city government, the board was appointed by the mayor (the state legislature later changed this). It also fed all students, rich, poor, black, white, etc., into one enormous public high school, meaning the school had much of the full diversity of the city, despite the existence of four Catholic High Schools and two private high schools within the city’s borders. And it had a brilliantly enlightened union.

So, when the schools seemed in crisis, the union fought for educational change – briefly went on strike for educational change – and the board, not having to face voters, decided to go along with teacher demands. This meant a vast increase in open classroom and multi-age efforts in elementary schools. In the high school it meant the creation of separate schools-of-choice (or, yes, perhaps recommended choice would be a better description, this was somewhat European in strategy) within the building – including nursing, cosmetology, construction trades, performing arts, and, the “3Is.”

The 3Is was designed as the alternative school, the place for the kids who were not functioning within the standard school environment. But the first brilliance lay in the idea that "not fitting in" could be described as almost anything. There were geniuses. There were crazy dyslexics. There were those with "behavioral issues." There were those who'd been suspended, etc. There were those who had simply been bored. this was true inclusion. There was no special ed at all, or rather, it was special ed for everyone.

The second brilliance was in the overall rejection of standard educational assumptions:

"Most school curricula are based on a set of assumptions which the experimental program rejects. For example, most school programs assume (1) that knowledge is best presented and comprehended when organized into "subjects," (2) that there are "major" subjects and "minor" ones, (3) that subjects are things you "take," and that once you have "had" them, you need not take them again, (4) that most subjects have a specific "content," (5) that the content of these subjects is more or less stable, (6) that a major function of the teacher is to "transmit" this content (7), that the practical place to do this is in a room within a centrally located building, (8) that students learn best in 45-minute periods which are held five times a week, (9) that students are functioning well (i.e., learning) when they are listening to their teacher, reading their texts, doing their assignments, and otherwise "paying attention" to the content being transmitted, and (10) that all of this must go on as a preparation for life. "This memorandum is not the forum for a serious and thorough critique of these assumptions. Hopefully, it is sufficient to say that contemporary educational philosophy disputes most of them, in part or whole, and that few teachers would deny the merit of experimenting with programs based on an entirely different set of beliefs."

A quote from Thoreau and the authors are off...

"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."

Let me describe the school they created. Most students were rarely there. If you were studying science you were probably at the City's greenhouses or the local hospital or at the heritage farm we created in a City Park. If you were studying journalism you were creating the school's weekly newspaper or maybe, spending nights chasing news with a local radio station's overnight news guy. If you were studying urban design you might be in the planning department at City Hall. Psychology? How about interviewing Grand Central's homeless population after midnight. Great literature? Sitting around a teacher's living room one night a week sharing tea and ideas. There were, of course, classes - but they were different kinds of classes.

UP THE HIGH SCHOOL AND DOWN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL An analysis of current responses to recent problems in education.
ENCOUNTER Survey of group technique with particular reference to methods of small-group therapy.
SCAPEGOAT: STUDY OF THE NATURE OF PREDJUDICE Psychological study of causes and impact of racial prejudice.
LANGUAGE AND REALITY To study how language influences our perception of the world and to determine the language "environments" of politics, black-white relationship, science, (etc.)
MATH SEMINAR Advanced math curriculum, including theory of functions, logic, calculus, non-Euclidean geometry, set theory, probability.

There was no required schedule, no required classes, no sense that you were in one "grade" or another. There were no grades, and there were no "failures." The grading system was "pass/no-record." You either got credit or the "course" or project did no exist anymore. At the end of each course or project the student wrote an evaluation of their own work, then a teacher wrote their comments.

There were no real administrators. Decisions were made in "Big Meetings" or by a student steering committee. Students interviewed potential teachers and voted on hiring. Students called teachers by their first names, argued with them, ate with them, played with them, helped them.

Yes, this was New York State, so your credits had to somehow (often quite creatively) match up with the required high school curriculum. You had to take the Regents Exams. Which we did, and which we passed, if not always with flying colors.

But the key thing was, students were known, in every way, by what they were good at. There was no deficit model at work. Not that most of us didn't really struggle with some things, but in this environment you led from your strengths. Everyone pretty much helped everyone in one direction or another.

Despite that we didn't just focus on our own stuff. You couldn't. You were around other influences. Did I, for example, read a book in high school? Well, part of Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's, for a history seminar remembered mostly for our field trip to see The Last Picture Show- which had something to do with a conversation about the 1950s.

Despite that, I played basketball with guys in Great Books and listened to conversations about Siddharthaand other masterpieces. I hung out at breakfast with musicians and learned both music and math. I got lectures about history and art in evening "social situations." We were told to engage in the world, and we did, and thus the world came at us at full speed.

The school changed "everything," and in doing so liberated us to learn. Stripped away our excuses. And turned us loose to make the world our classroom.

How did this school do by traditional measures? Very, very well. A 99% graduation rate with a wildly diverse population. Most went to four year colleges, including every SUNY campus, but also places like MIT, Brown, University of Michigan, Kenyon, Hampshire (of course). Years later we are lawyers and teachers, museum administrators and scientists, diplomats and artists. All from a group which might have seen a stunning drop out rate without this program.

It lasted over 15 years, and fell to conservative trends in education and budget cutting. Where once schools like this filled cities from Philadelphia to, at least, Ann Arbor, few now exist. Of our "Alternative School Basketball League" only one survives, the Village School in Great Neck, NY.

What made it work? First, choice. New Rochelle High School offered students real choices at the time. Vocational programs, traditional academic programs, arts programs, and this. Sure, paths were strongly suggested, but ultimately there were options. Students began each day knowing they had some level of control, they had put themselves into their situation. Second, a real belief in students. No 3I teacher ever looked at a student and saw "failure." They might have seen problems, but they also saw opportunities. Third, a belief in the power of adolescence. These adults knew kids would screw up, but they also knew that failure is how people learn - and that teenagers want to learn. So they dropped the cost of failure to almost zero. And people tried just about everything. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. But things were always learned along the way. Fourth, they embraced universal design before the idea had been described. "Do it the way that works for you," was the idea. If I sat in a chair and talked while my friend John typed newspaper articles for me, that was fine. If I didn't function well in the morning, I didn't do much until after lunch.

So, did I actually "cut" school every morning from ten to noon to have breakfast with my friend Bob? No, because no one cared that I wasn't "there," so we weren't really cutting. Did Glenn and I really design a massive idea for downtown reconstruction? Yes, we did, and now he's one of the world's leading experts in architectural restoration. Did we really spend all night in Grand Central interviewing the homeless? Yes, and while I became a cop others became psychologists. Did I really take a course called "Monday Morning Quarterback" and bet on football games? I did. I think I called it "Math." Debbie though, took it and became a sportswriter.

- Ira Socol

Merit Pay?

A decade and so ago I was a member of a sports club. We had a lot of football (soccer) teams. I coached youth teams for years and years. And I was thinking about this experience as I listened to one more sad attempt by one more US Secretary of Education to insist that merit pay for teachers is the most critical change we need in our education system.

When I was coaching we usually had enough kids to create two, three, or four teams at any given age class. Unlike many other clubs we did not try to create A, B, and C teams. Rather, we tried to create somewhat even teams where the "better" players might demonstrate their leadership.

Each year we'd split up these boys, and each year we'd end up with one team that seemed, ummm, "challenging." These kids were in special education services at school, or had families in trouble, or somehow just didn't fit in. We ended up with that team because every year I'd just say, when others complained about trying to coach "kids like that," I'd say, "put him on my team."

You know, usually, the other teams would do better in the league than we did. Sure we kept getting better, yes, we had a lot of fun, but problems perpetually struck, and we lost many, many games.

Now, none of us got paid, but in Arne Duncan's world, if we had been paid, I would have been paid less. This is because Duncan combines a terrible assessment system (the standardized test) with a terrible assessment period (a school year) to come up with a terrible way to assess. As if I would have been paid based on games won in a U-12 season.

See, in Duncan's world it would not matter that when they got to high school it was "my" kids who led the team to a conference championship. Nor that they stayed in school. Nor that they learned to work with other kids around them. Just as Lehman Brothers brokers walked away with massive bonuses without a thought regarding long-term results, my fellow coaches would have been rewarded, and I punished, based on short term nonsense.

And maybe I would have chosen not to coach "those" kids. Maybe "those" kids would have gotten scattered among other teams and forgotten. Maybe "those" kids would have gotten the least experienced coach every year. Maybe... because that is what is being incentivized if you create merit pay for teachers without completely re-thinking educational assessment.

We can laugh at Arne Duncan. Yes, he is the only person in Obama's cabinet who thinks that bonuses based on short-term results are a desirable "reform." But it is not funny. Merit pay creates all the wrong incentives. It will ensure that the kids who need the most help get the least.

I supported Barack Obama, and continue to. But he never indicated any real sense of what education in America needs, and his choice of a Secretary of Education has proven disastrous. Please email the White House and ask that Arne Duncan be fired. Please. Or we will remake our schools in the image of George W. Bush's Wall Street. And that is something America can not afford.

- Ira Socol

The Width of the World

Do new forms of social networking help us or hurt us as humans?

Larry Sanger wrote a blog on this, and sent out the link on Twitter. Larry notes his disillusionment with "web 2.0," with his concerns being (a) "Facelessness. Frequently, we find ourselves in conversation with people we don’t know. We have nothing invested with them socially", (b) "Groupthink. The second reason Web 2.0 is becoming obnoxious to me is that I really, really hate groupthink," and (c) "Such a godawful waste of time. The first time we see a shiny new Internet toy, we are all oohs and aahs. But, OK…isn’t it time to stop it with the “Which Star Trek character are you?” quizzes on Facebook? ... Seriously, to my way of thinking, there are worthwhile Web 2.0 projects — like, of course, the Citizendium and WatchKnow (not launched yet) — but it seems like the vast majority of the websites, and many attractive and popular features within more worthwhile sites, are a waste of time."

Larry sees the creep of technology as the essential problem. When I challenged him on this, suggesting a much longer term historical arc, he said he was dating his concerns back to the early 1990s.

Now Larry, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is no Luddite, but I suspect that Larry misunderstands the role of communications technology in humanity. He told me to answer him in a blog post, and so here I go...

Socrates was right

Socrates was right. When you start to write things down, when humans embraced literacy, they moved away from the natural forms of human connection. Literacy not only limited the need for memory, as Socrates suggested, it debased human learning by separating the content from the person transmitting that content, as he also suggested. [Orality and Literacy. Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. The Consequences of Literacy.]

In Socrates' world human communication was directly humane. You knew the speaker and you knew the listener. You had known them, most likely, forever. You looked in their eyes, you smelled their breath and their sweat. Your informational (and social) trust was built on a very complex, and very ancient, system of clues. Think of it this way, you know a lover is lying in ways very different than you know an author is lying. Socrates opposed writing and literacy because he didn't want to lose that intimacy.

This is a crucial human question, going back to the very beginning. The first time humans drew on cave walls, and thus created the possibility that some might see this description of the hunt who had not heard the first hand account, technology began to both support, and intrude on, human communication. Is looking at the description of an unknown person's hunting party a waste of time? Is it disconnected trivia or a way of understanding yourself as part of the world?

Today in History

165 years ago today Samuel F.B. Morse sent the first public telegram. And today when I woke up I sent this Twitter message, "Something remarkable, almost tidal, watching the flow of tweets from my friends around the world, as some wake while others sleep."

Morse's invention appeared at one of those moments in time when technologies were radically reshaping human communication. His telegraph, for example, combined with the new technology of the steam-powered rotary press and machine-made wood-pulp-based paper, to completely alter how humans received information.

Suddenly news of the world, and eventually - via Steam Ships and less expensive telegrams and trans-Oceanic cables - personal news, could move rapidly around the globe unfiltered by the elites who had controlled this since the end of the 15th Century. Other things happened as well: photography began to appear. The railroads began to enable travel. The world, or, as Socrates might have suggested, a disconnected, unreliable, undefined sense of the world, was now available whenever people walked out of their doors, or opened their mail.

Something else was happening as well. People were flocking to cities. Suddenly people were surrounded by others they had not known all of their lives, by people they might never know. This altered social networks dramatically, and people began to organize themselves along somewhat superficial lines. The sports club and football club began to arise in England, for example, fraternal and service clubs in the United States. And social information thus began to spread differently, with a new communication level created between "back fence" and pub communication (on one hand) and news from the pulpit (on the other). People began to desire crime news and odd tales of strangers, things which would never have been deemed worthy of publication when publication was expensive. The first version of "blogging" began as writers penned serial stories or experiences which masses of people could waste time on, day after day.

All of these activities - all of these things - separated humans from the most "natural" communications experiences. Yet all of them also created new forms of human connectivity.

The Bookworm

When I was a child "the bookworm" was a commonly derided child. Why waste your whole day with your nose in a book? "they'd" ask, instead of going out into the world and living? Yes, parents - back then - told kids to put down their books and go out and play. Yes, they did.

This was one end of the spectrum. The other, as an historic echo of Larry's complaint about Star Trek quizzes (which I have actually never participated in), was the concern that students were wasting their time and their minds on inappropriate reading. "A closer look demonstrates that the concern was not so much to interest children in reading as to interest children in reading the books that parents, teachers, and librarians wanted them to read, books that would provide class- and gender-appropriate role models and instill socially acceptable values in both boys and girls," Suzanne Stauffer writes of the 1880s-1920s period when "sensational fiction" was seen as a critical danger.

The wrong reading could cause groupthink, apparently, "then" as now. In the 1940s Comic Books were blamed for juvenile delinquency. Stauffer again, "Again, librarians and others proclaimed that this type of reading was not only inferior to reading “good books” but was a corrupting and degrading influence."

So the media forms which arose between 1840 and 1950 were (a) disconnecting people from actual human touch experience, (b) creating groupthink in dangerous ways (think about the United States and the Spanish-American War), and (c) creating massive wastes of time - reading comics, watching movies, listening to crappy radio shows, reading true crime stories and trashy novels, sitting around playing records.

Of course that was also true of the media forms which arose before 1840, and those which came after 1950. As soon as Gutenberg created movable type it was being used to provide sensational stories of strangersto the public. And speeches in ancient Rome may have created groupthink on occasion.

The Flip Side

I don't really need to go all Clay Shirkyon Larry to make my point. Each revolution in communication technologies moves humans in two directions - away from the tactile human, yes, but also towards a global understanding, a global connection, a global knowledge.

So, no, I will not tell Larry about the people I've met online who've become close, personal friends in person. I don't really think this has happened for me. Most of my closest friends I knew as a teenager - in person. Yes, we connect constantly via online tools, yes, our relationships are stronger now than they have been in decades because of those tools, but that's not the point.

But I will tell Larry that my blog, Twitter, and list-serve relationships are not faceless, they do not create groupthink, and they do not waste my time.

"Something remarkable, almost tidal, watching the flow of tweets from my friends around the world, as some wake while others sleep."

These are real people. We agree and disagree. We share and we argue. I may learn their "group identities" first - teacher, technologist, politico - but then I discover more, be it their poetry, their children, their eating habits, their fears. It is a fully human thing that I help @jonbecker find a parking spot in Park Slope at 1230 one morning, and that I worry about his car parked in the dark alongside Prospect Park. It is fully human frustration when I can not get @chadratliff to understand my argument. It is fully human fun I have with @damian613 over the plight of Newcastle United. And it is fully human friendship which I feel for bloggers from Karen Janowski to Enda Guinan. Bill Genereux has become an important "classmate" though we've never physically met, and I worry about Goldfish's health. They are only "faceless" if we think it is impossible for, say, a blind person to know faces.

Power

More critically, we are a group - or groups. We have powers that humans have not had before. And we've been waiting for these technologies to offer us these powers for a long time. Humans have been trying to lower the costs of collaboration and knowledge transfer since time began. And now we can do that. Sure we waste time. Humans always "waste time." Sure we become "gangs." Humans always have. But we now have social choices - powerful social choices, which are shifting power in dramatic ways. Democracy could not have spread as it did in the past two centuries without the communications technologies of those times. And neither could knowledge. Both will spread further, faster - are spreading further, faster, even in the United States - because of Web 2.0.

Learning

But technologies take learning. It isn't easy. Early adopters look kind of crazy. "Really, you strung wire from Washington to Baltimore to send a Bible quote faster?"

So we need to learn these communication tools, and make them our own. And we need to help others, especially our children, find their own paths within these structures. Because it is indeed human, and is indeed humane.

I woke up this morning to birdsong outside the window and the smell of encroaching summer. And that tells me about the the preciousness of the planet. And I woke up with the Tweets of Aussies saying good night and Brits eating lunch and getting ready for the last day of the Premier League season. And that tells me about the width of the world.

I'm not wasting time. I'm as fully human as the people who came to read the cave paintings at Lascaux 20 years after they were drawn. I am engaged in humanity.

-Ira Socol

Solution Sunday

On Twitter this morning, I just started reacting to "overnight posts" and found myself making ten statements about truly changing schools. Please, add your own, agree, disagree...

I've linked these to SpeEdChange posts.

Solution Sunday: (1) Grade level expectations fail all who develop at different rates (almost everyone) Multiage is way to go.

Solution Sunday: (2) Subject divisions kill natural learning instincts. All subjects need to be integrated.

Solution Sunday: (3) School time schedules prevent education. Flex time according to student needs.

Solution Sunday: (4) Individualized Education for all. All Students are gifted, all have special needs.

Solution Sunday: (5) All students need to start learning contemporary technology from the start. Especially those from less rich communities.

Solution Sunday: (6) Treat your students equitably and bullying will drop. It's a fact - schools encourage bullying through of adult actions.

Solution Sunday: (7) Text-To-Speech systems help all readers, should be in use right from the start (build sightword recognition, teach the value of what reading offers by providing access to content).

Solution Sunday: (8) Teacher training needs to change. Probably via interning in University Lab Schools. Learning better ways, not old ways. (and unlearning the systems of social reproduction)

Solution Sunday: (9) As long as there are high-stakes Standardized Tests, differentiated instruction is a fraud.

Solution Sunday: (10) More learning opportunities, less explicit instruction before age 8. Don't make young kids hate books and math. Stay flexible and tolerant, and natural curiousity will lead to learning.

- Ira Socol

The "People First" Conundrum

That old question of language - who it empowers, who it injures, who makes the decisions: Amy Bowllan, school librarian in New York City, Twitter-pal, and blogger for School Library Journal did an e-interview with me recently for her blog.

Is people first language a positive step? Should we continue to encourage it? Read the interview, and for a balanced view read Goldfish (a favorite/favourite blogger) on The Language of Disability.

All your thoughts are welcomed. At Amy's blog or here.

- Ira Socol

Information Literacy

A couple of Twitter conversations merged. With @gippopippo I was discussing ink-on-paper v. digital. With @derrallg I was discussing teaching kids the media skills they will need to survive.

@gippopippo bemoaned the loss of the ability of students to read books and newspapers. @derrallg noted how colleges search FaceBook as part of the admissions process, but schools rarely teach this (see @willrich45).

Another issue from that day, if you teach students that they can not blindly "trust" the internet, must you not also teach them that they can not blindly trust textbooks, libraries, books of any kind, newspapers, teachers?

A bit of history: In the lead up to America's invasion of Iraq, The New York Times unleashed a torrent of false information. Fiction spun from the mouth of Dick Cheney as effortlessly as if his wife was writing her soft-core porn. Now, many blogs were telling the truth. But if, thirty years from now, a historian were to go back to "the newspaper of record" from that time, they would find almost nothing true.

Other things The New York Times has gotten wrong? A couple of years ago they repeated a joke from a cartoon on The New Yorker's cover as a front page news story. Just this week they declared a big difference between "practicing" and "non-practicing" Catholics on the issue of President Obama addressing the commencement at the University of Notre Dame. 46% of "practicing Catholics," The Times said, opposed Mr. Obama speaking. 55% of "non-practicing" Catholics favored his giving the address. Now, I'm no math major, but...

In other words, The New York Times can be wrong. Yes. Print can be wrong, despite John Calvin's firm belief in the societal value of fixed text. We all know that information on the "internet" can be wrong, and we warn our students about this. If we are good, we tell them to check authorship, credentials, the source of the website, the motivations, and we ask them to find corroboration and/or dissent. But do we do this as actively when a student pulls a book or newspaper off our school library shelf? What about when a student reads a textbook? What about when a student listens to a teacher?

The technology of communications and the forms of communication are symbiotic. Without the development of charcoal and ink writing would never have taken off. Stone carving being very slow and difficult and writing in the sand is, well, writing in the sand. Without various paper technologies (be it papyrus, sheepskin, or paper), reading would not have taken off, since only so many people can crowd around a single temple reading hieroglyphics.

Similarly, the novel is a development which could only have followed the technology of Gutenberg. Prior to this easing of publication problems, stories had to be in memorable form for oral transmission - thus poetry or song or drama. And without the popularity of the novel, press technology and paper technology would not have advanced to a point where journalism could begin. No Ben Franklin or Thomas Paine without Thomas Malory and Daniel Defoe. And without the growing popularity of journalism there might never have been the call for steam-powered rotary presses and machine-made wood-pulp paper which allowed the "penny newspaper" to become both popular and highly profitable, and thus allow journalism to reach the masses.

In each case, an emerging communication form creates a demand for a new medium or method of publication. The new medium or method of publication, in turn, creates an opportunity for new communication forms. When Samuel Morse introduced the telegraph with "What hath God wrought?" he was using new technology to send an old phrase. But his technology, and the way in which it was paid for, quickly created, "Meet in Phila Tue Noon at Sta Stop" - and how far away are we then from "C U 2nite"

Still, at every point, old forms adapted. When literacy was introduced to Greece Homer's tales were written down. Yes, this changed them. They no longer flexed with the time and place, the armaments described became set at the moment of writing - they are completely inaccurate for the time of the Trojan War - and the vast library of locally associated characters - what my son describes as the 8th Century BC's equivalent of the "How you doing Pittsburgh?" in today's concerts or political speeches - also became locked in. But the stories spread more widely than the original poets ever might have imagined.

All these technologies give and take. Gutenberg's destroyed many European languages, and enforced all sort of evils. But it also spread knowledge and literacy and allowed thought to flow in remarkable ways. We can imagine that post-Gutenberg technologies will do the same.

What has not changed is the key question of cognitive authority. What allows us to begin to trust a source? This is essential for every level of education. But we are handicapped here, especially in northern Europe and the United States. As Protestant societies we have inherited a belief in "the book." Not just the Bible, but "the book" in general. Because Calvinists and Lutherans controlled the printing and distribution of books, it was logical that they would promote the notion of the truth of ink-on-paper. Catholic culture, of course, did something similar where they "reigned," but with a critical difference. Texts in Catholicism were not intended for the masses, and were always considered open to interpretation through localized debate and retelling.

So it is indeed, in the U.S., in Protestant Europe, an "article of faith" that text is true, "If we agree with this premise, (that the Bible is divinely inspired) we must then consider the fact that ‘these writers themselves, with considerable unanimity, agree in ascribing their religious insight to the grace of God’."

Over the half millennia since Gutenberg the imprimatur of authority has expanded from the church to the crown, and then to "crown authorities" - authorized publishers - and then to publishers which carried various forms of perceived authority - whether academic - Cambridge University Press - economic - think Pearson or Bertlesmann AG - or, and here we see the beginnings of our present world - those who have won their authority by being reliable - think The New York Times. The Times did indeed win its authority in a chaotic environment. Turn of the 20th Century print journalism was as wild as the internet seems now, but the giants fell because because they were not very good - consider The New York World and The Journal competing over fabricated Spanish threat stories - and The Times was better (there are those who will argue that the turning point was the sinking of RMS Titanic - only the NYT, of New York dailies - got the story right).

In other words, The Times built its reputation, its authority, as bloggers do today, as members of social networks do. They gave accurate, useful information when more "important" rivals did not. Then they re-inforced that authority, through years and years of "being better than..." But then, because of the nature of that Protestant culture, "we" began to think of them as right not because they were right, but because they were The New York Times. They had that imprimatur.

But now we have other choices. We need to know, for example, that when the government speaks, we still should have doubts. When our most "authoritative" newspapers speak, we still should have doubts. Say, the London Metropolitan Police declare that a man has died of a heart-attack during a G20 protest. Say, that is reported as true by The Times of London, The Telegraph, even The Guardian. Now, line that up against the word of one anonymous American businessman. Yes, an American businessman who decides to communicate through the left-wing newspaper.

According to all our traditional understandings of cognitive authority, Ian Tomlinson died of a heart attack. Except, of course, he did not. He was killed in a random, unprovoked, police assault.

And non-traditional "citizen-journalists," and less authoritative sources, proved that. This is vital. If you fully subscribed to the traditional, the taught-in-school" understanding of cognitive authority - that is that reputations are won through approval of those who already hold authority (the PhD system, as an example), Ian Tomlinson would have died of a heart attack and The New York Post of Alexander Hamilton would be New York City's dominant information source - no matter who might manage to own that brand.

So what do students need to know? They need to know that cognitive authority does not come with a job title, or a publisher's mark. Just as they need to know that the actor wearing the white coat in a TV commercial may not be a medical authority. They need to be able to discover, in the non-linear form of real life (and the web) how to assess information - no matter the source. You can start in your classroom. If you aren't lying to your students, give them laptops or mobiles and let them look up what you tell them. True? Sometimes true? Debatable? Biased? Help them make the arguments.

You can do this with books, even novels. What can they discover about the world in which Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby? Why would he have described himself as "a member of the lost generation"? Why did he write a novel proving both the allure, and the fallacy, of what we call "The American Dream"? What did other writers of the time say? Was Fitzgerald particularly popular? A best selling author? Were English teachers requiring this novel in 1927 classrooms? Why not?

Need to build Fitzgerald's authority? Perhaps do this via his short stories. Build up his "street cred" for your students, just as he built it up with America's literati of the 1920s. No, let your students build up his reputation, by giving different stories to different students and letting them recommend them around the room. Don't think of this as "chaos." It is not. It is how humans construct both knowledge and society outside of imposed hierarchies.

You can do this with newspapers. Why would a story about the same thing read differently in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New York Post, The Daily Mail? Why might a search with Google's blog search produce differing things? How might they decide what's accurate? Listen, if you are not training this kind of information literacy, all your talk of an "educated citizenry" rings hollow. Without these skills, your students are in trouble.

Along the way, of course, you get to introduce your students to the wide world of literary forms. Every one has its purposes, its truths, its fictions, its powers, and its flaws. Why did Homer create the poetry he did? Who was he serving? Why? What counter narratives might exist? Aeschylus? Virgil? Ovid? Scott? Dickens? (Dickens, of course, was a blogger when it comes down to it). Who publishes Toni Morrison? And why? Why would that same company sell you Tom Clancy's books? Why would they hide that fact from you by using a different name?

And certainly, who is writing right now? And how? Can they find new fiction on line that they love? Can they share it? Why do they like it? Is it being "sold" to them in a variety of ways? Or are they discovering it? Novel, history, textbook, newspaper, blog... what motivates the author, the publisher? And what does that mean to them as readers, as consumers?

What this all means is that we're honest with our students, and that by being honest we create better readers, more engaged readers, more critical readers, and readers more appreciative of the best work of the writer's art. They'll know why, faced with same series of events, one writes poetry, another a novel, a third a news story, and how those all contribute to our knowing.



And I think they just might learn to love them all.

- Ira Socol