Fiction Interlude: Back-to-School

Two childhood views of the classroom, as we head back to school...

Alone

He sat in the back of the classroom. Sometimes staring at the fluorescent lights flickering and humming above. Sometimes looking out the window toward the traffic flowing on the street beyond the playground. Sometimes following patterns invisible to others in the woodgrain of his desk or in the tiles of the floor or in the cotton of his jeans.

Beyond him he knew the teacher was usually talking. That other kids were reading or writing, passing notes or hitting each other, talking or rolling pencils off the desk so that they could bend down and pick them up. He knew that numbers and letters and words were being tossed around, but none of it could really touch his attention. He knew that he didn't need them anyway. He told his own stories as he watched his worlds, he added and divided his own sums as he let time wander, he found his own sciences as he watched the earth spin through its day. And he knew that the teacher knew that if she tried to force these things his way, he had very good ways to resist.

So there he sat. Holding an uneasy truce with his captors. Waiting for the best days, the rainy days, when water would streak across the window and the passing cars and trucks would toss spray in the air, and when he was finally paroled at the final bell he could walk slowly home, letting the water from the sky bathe him in its chill embrace.

Out

It's 8:17. See, I can tell time. Nobody thinks I can do anything. But that's not true. It's 8:17 and I know school's only been in for seven minutes but I also know I need to be out of here in less than forty-five minutes. Yes, time and arithmetic. Because I need to be on my way by 9:00 so I can meet Derek by 9:30 so we can catch the bus to the subway and be on the way downtown by only a little after 10:00. That's the plan and I've got less than forty-five minutes.

Sam's coming past me and here's chance number one. I stick my foot between his and trip him, he falls in a wild, uncoordinated sprawl, knocking over Tina's desk, books flying. I'm not ready to be obvious yet, so I just smile.

The smile sets Mrs. Girardi off, not that this takes much. But the key here is I can't just get sent to the Resource Room. If I get sent there I'll need to start all over and besides, you know, the standards are different there. I'll need to work much harder. So when Mrs. Girardi says, "What is the matter with you? Are you so stupid you think that's funny?" I prove my growing vocabulary skills with the response, "I'm so stupid I think it's hilarious." Which of course gets this entire class of fifth graders, except Sam who's still on the floor, and Tina, who's glaring at me, into a fit of hysterical laughter.

This teacher is beyond predictable so I can stay ahead easily. She starts to scream. I start to scream back. She tells me to come up front. I tell her to come back to me. When she actually starts to come toward me (can you believe she'd fall for that), I get up and start running around the room. The fact that the class is still laughing is making her crazy. She sure doesn't like laughter. So she actually chases me for half a lap before figuring something out.

They all say I "make bad decisions." Everybody says that. But they're wrong about that too. I make decisions they don't like, but they're not bad. Sometimes they're really carefully made decisions designed to get me exactly what I need. Right now I need to get out of this school so I can run with Derek who got suspended yesterday for the rest of the week. He did it by punching out Kenny DeMuro. I'd rather not do that. Kenny looks like he's still hurting.

Now I need to make sure. I need to give the principal no choice once he gets the phone call. I need less lecture time from him and more of that "oh my God" look because that'll only take ten minutes. He'll call home. Nobody'll be there. He'll say "go straight home" in that very intense voice, as if he thinks I think he doesn't know. Really, he knows I know he knows, but he's got to sound like he's doing his job. And if he's going to do his job, I've got to do mine. I pick a book off Carrie's desk and toss it, not hard but accurately, at Mrs. Girardi, who immediately screams, in her best psycho mode, "You're out of here you little moron, you'll be gone for at least a week." And I take off right out the door, right under the clock: 8:23.

Alone and Out are copyright 2005-2009 by Ira David Socol for use with permission only

More - but not much recent - fiction is at Ira's Narrator Blog. The Drool Room and A Certain Place of Dreams are available from Amazon.

Social Reproduction

Schools do not really "prepare our children for the future." Schools, by their very nature, tend to help society reproduce itself - passing the structures, morals, habits, customs, preferences, and even manners of one generation on to the next, or at least strongly attempting to do that.

Much of what we do in schools is designed to further the mission of "social reproduction" - one generation effectively reproducing itself in the next. We create "grade level expectations" based on the performance of children of the past and hold contemporary students to that - holding them back or trying to rush them forward - but holding them. We enforce our own technological preferences, frustrating and limiting the possible success of students most pulled toward future possibilities. We enforce a system of manners created by and for a power structure which existed two generations ago (back when administrators and legislators went to school). We grade homework which guarantees that those children with the most successful parents will do better in school. We evaluate learning using test forms and test content most familiar to the children of the ruling class. And, of course, teachers and administrators - typically among the "best" students of the previous two generations - recreate the classroom and school environments in which they succeeded. From the "old school tie" to "no baseball caps" to reading A Separate Peace, to memorizing times tables, to creating proper footnotes.

In other words - as expected - we prepare our children for our own adulthood. An adulthood in which society - with its present "winners" and "losers" - is essentially unchanged.

If that was not frustrating enough for those of us who might imagine a future of equal opportunity and equitable treatment, many of the "reforms" currently being championed in education are designed to maximize social reproduction, not reduce it.

Charter Schools, for example, whatever their positive impacts, further the divide between those with "motivated" parents and those without. If you agree that Charters provide new opportunities you must also admit that sending a child to a charter requires active parental decision-making, and often significant parental commitments in terms of transportation and costs (there are costs to getting a child to an 'out-of-district' school, both direct and collateral - time lost for working, etc). So charters, if they succeed, continue the American pattern of offering better educations to students based on the student's parents behavior - thus continuing to doom children on the basis of the accidents of their birth. You can't get more socially reproductive than that.

Standards-based Accountability, as another example. When standards are "raised" and "enforced" these are the standards of the previous generations, and the standards of those in power. As are our methods of measuring children against these standards. Our tests do not measure contemporary search or communication skills. They do not measure creativity. They do not measure social skills. Rather, they measure a stunningly narrow selection of skills and content which school leaders are good at and school leaders know. It is as if we have determined that the standard for success in our society are the test question writers at the College Board. That means that we are measuring our students based not on the skills and knowledge they will need during their lives, but rather measuring them on their personality proximity to those born to attend private schools and Ivy League colleges and born ready for good jobs in their daddy's company.

Remember, measuring is only "fair" when two things are true: First, the starting line must be the same for all those being measured. And we all know that in a nation with gigantic disparities in wealth, resources, and power - such as the United States - that this is impossible in education. Second, what is being measured must be measurable by some universally understood "code of practice." As Danish novelist Peter Høeg says, "When you assess something, you are forced to assume that a linear scale of values can be applied to it. Otherwise no assessment is possible. Every person who says of something that it is good or bad or a bit better than yesterday is declaring that a points system exists; that you can, in a reasonably clear and obvious fashion, set some sort of a number against an achievement." Think about it: Is completing a test in 60 minutes provably superior to completing the same test in 72 minutes? Is knowing the narrative behind a bad John Knowles novel from the 1950s provably superior to knowing the narrative behind World of Warcraft? Is being able to use the Dewey Decimal System provably superior to being able to conduct efficient Google searches? Is typing on a keyboard using ten fingers provably superior to typing on a keypad with your thumbs?

If your "code of conduct" is solely based in personal - or even generational - preference, you are being unbearably socially reproductive.

Homework and Zero-Tolerance are a third example. Three students bring the same third grade (8-year-old) homework home from school. Student "A" come home to a college-educated parent, who sits down with the student and works through the assignment with him. Student "B" leaves school and walks her kindergarten brother home, then takes care of him until bedtime. Single mom comes home at 10 pm from her job at Walmart. Student "C" brings the homework back to a home where no one speaks or reads English. Whose homework is likely to look "better" to the teacher?

Many "reformers" argue for things like "more homework" and stricter behavior policies as a way of improving schools. These "increased standards" are somehow supposed to solve all the social and economic problems of the last generation which our schools and our societies have failed. Forcing parents with few skills, no resources, and no time, to become instantly "responsible" as the US President hopes (imagines?).

Student "A" comes from a loving, middle-class home where both parents have more than a month of vacation time per year. Student "B" has an alcoholic parent who beats him. Student "C" is part of a homeless family, sleeping in various shelters each cold night and in the car on warm nights. Which student is more likely to run afoul of school rules each day?
Back when he was mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani promoted a theory of policing called "One City" - an idea, which holds great appeal to many Americans, that everyone be treated "equally." But "equal" isn't always fair, or reasonable, or moral. As a previous - and far more moral -New York mayor once said, "Suppose I have two children, and one is very, very sick and the other is perfectly healthy, is it reasonable if I treat them as if there is no difference?" (I paraphrase the late John V. Lindsay here. Mr. Lindsay also promoted the classic phrase for improving our communal society, "Give a damn.")

"Equal" is not "equitable." "One standard" is not fair, neither is one set of requirements or assignments. Treating children "equally" guarantees that the results for this generation will pretty much match the results for the last generation.

This is political.

"School reformers" who find themselves allied with the American right-wing - whether Ted Kennedy who found common cause with George W. Bush on "No Child Left Behind" or economically left-wing minorities who jump on the Charter School, KIPP, and Michelle Rhee bandwagons - need to look around and wonder why these people are marching alongside them.

Because education is the most political of all issues, and if a person identifies themselves as a "conservative" - that is as someone who either does not want society to change or wants society to revert to a previous state of existence - then an inherent part of that is ensuring the current status of groups within that society - especially the poor (think America before the Great Society or before the New Deal), minorities (think America before the Civil Rights Act), and the "disabled" (think America before the ADA and Section 504). Let's face it - the past was only a sweet memory if you were white, middle-class or better, and typically-abled.

In order to change relative status within a society that society must actually change in significant ways. In order to change relative status within a society education must be the least socially reproductive that is possible. In order to change relative status within a society people must be treated according to their needs, not according to the pronouncements of those seeking to maintain their own power.

So consider this, in everything you do in education - are you measuring students and their learning, or are you measuring parents and their status. If you keep that question in mind at every decision-point, you will probably find that you need to change most of what you do.

Which, as you know, is my target.

- Ira Socol

Ten Years After

In August of 1999 in Mackinac Hall on the campus of Grand Valley State University, a small group of professors, students, and tech people - the Center for Research in Educational and Adaptive Technology-assisted Environments (create@gvsu) - hosted two large seminars. One for interested area K-12 teachers and school librarians, the other for all those faculty members teaching Freshman English courses.

In both day-long seminars we introduced people to the tools of the new century. We discussed new curricular needs, such as helping students distinguish between the already familiar Yahoo! web directory (a library catalogued with the Library of Congress system) and the year-or-so old Google idea - a true search engine. Understanding the differences, we suggested, was an essential new research and life skill. We also demonstrated how to get students to benefit most from built in computer tools - spellcheck and grammar check in Microsoft Word - organizing themselves with Outlook - using outlining tools to help notetaking on laptop computers.

And in both we demonstrated new "Assistive Technologies" to support the needs of differing students. We had just installed - on at least two computers in every university computer lab - WYNN for text-to-speech, ViaVoice for speech recognition, Zoom-Text for screen magnification and screen reading, IBM's original talking web browser, and Graph-Link - which connected your Texas Instruments calculators to the computer - allowing screen enlargement and copying of information.

Then we brought out our new hardware. Sophisticated headsets with noise-reducing microphones. Scanners capable of converting printed text into digital - readable - text. BigKey keyboards and Dvorak keyboards. Trackballs and alternative "mouse" devices. Laptops with infrared communications systems.

We talked about how we felt that tools such as these were going to revolutionize our ideas about ability and who might succeed in post-secondary education.

And so for the GVSU Freshman English faculty we discussed how a teacher might see a student struggling - what to look for - and what to recommend. For our K-12 participants we discussed how IEPs might be re-written to introduce this technology to students so that access to curriculum didn't slip away.

And I remember that we went further - suggesting that the days of "computer labs" in schools were already past, and that standard machine set-ups made no sense. Our university Academic Computing director talked about "laptops for everyone," or at least student network log-ons which allowed personalized software for every student. He pointed out that we had learned that computers were not just the "fantastic notebooks" we had envisioned when we began our research a year before, but also, "the textbook and library of the future."

People were dazzled. The buzz in the rooms was amazing. Oh yes, people were legitimately concerned about costs - legitimately because, in 1999, these were expensive things. Expensive memory, expensive sound cards, $120 a piece headsets, massive CRT monitors, even special attachments which allowed for front-side computer audio connections and multiple keyboard plug-ins. Wireless networking wasn't yet available, T3 lines were extravagances, laptops easily cost $2,000 or more.

Dr. Michael Wesch and K-State state the obvious

But still, people saw a future, and they were excited.

Now it is August 2009. And I'm not reminiscing for old times' sake.

In the ten years since we held those summer events everything we talked about has become easy. Under $200 netbooks and mobile phones can now do most or all of what we were discussing back then. Wireless systems have cut the cost of networking classrooms by 90%. Broadband has become stunningly cheap. Microsoft Vista (and Windows7) computers come with speech recognition included. Click-Speak and WordTalk offer Text-To-Speech for free. Ctrl-+ magnifies your Firefox screen. We have proven research into the advantages of 1:1 computing and simple text-messaging plans can deliver educational content to cheap mobile phones anywhere on the planet.

And yet - the transformation has not occurred. In fact, education has, in too many situations, dug in its heels, screaming that it will not be dragged into this future.

Schools still depend on "computer labs" and resist 1:1 computing, hand-helds, and mobiles as "distracting." Schools still install computers - tens of thousands this summer alone - which are not equipped with even the free access technologies - the moral equivalent of building inaccessible school entrances and school toilets. Schools continue to deny students access to curricular content and school success because they refuse to suggest and/or offer proven technology solutions.

We weren't genius futurists back in the summer of 1999.

We were just a group of curious people who were paying attention to what was already going on. We read the work of Lynne Anderson-Inman extensively, we read court cases and Office of Civil Rights opinions, we used the phone to call the Liberated Learning people at IBM, the TTS folks at Arkenstone, the people installing student computers at UCLA. We saw the future emerging because we had decided to open our eyes.

And when we saw that future we also looked around our own campus. We saw that students wanted internet everywhere - so, back in those pre-wireless days - we put dozens of data drops in every public area and made sure that there was one dorm room drop for every bed. We saw that students wanted personalization so when you logged on to our network, you got your desktop, not anyone else's. We saw that "disabled" students were tired of going to "resource centers" and so we put access everywhere we had computers. And we already knew that few students typed with ten fingers or wanted to study in "clean rooms" devoid of food, drink, or music, or knew how to effectively search. None of this information was hidden either. It was as obvious as walking across the campus.

I understand that progress comes slowly.

But as I lie in bed here, recovering from knee surgery, I look back on a decade of arguments which seem to get increasingly disconnected from the emerging realities. Back in 1999 the cost was a factor, but now it is truly not. Schools actually ban students from bringing their own technologies, and spend a fortune on blocking software and on email systems they could have for free. Back in 1999 ideas like Google were new and confusing - now ignorance of these systems requires willful intent. Back in 1999 one might have been unsure of where this information revolution was leading - now we know our students will not survive - academically or economically - without the skillsets which support these technologies.

These realities have pushed most education beyond the point of irrelevance. Our economic stars are now all dropouts - at one level of schooling or another. Our inventors are all self-taught. And we have made no actual progress on closing achievement or salary gaps, or on getting more students through post-secondary training or education.

In the summer of 1999 we were talking about the future. Now that future is the present. Next summer it will be the second decade of the 21st Century... is it time to move out of the past yet?

- Ira Socol

It is all technology. Which century are you in?

Let us begin with the obvious (thanks to @tseale via Twitter):

And then bring in Kevin Jennings of Trinity College - The University of Dublin:

"Lets imagine a country which we will call Foobar, where reading and writing don’t exist, but which despite this has managed to develop a sophisticated culture of science, the arts, philosophy and commerce. A bit of a stretch I know, but not entirely inconceivable. All cultural transmission in such a society would take place by oral means and a good memory would undoubtedly be an invaluable asset. Education would probably consist of much rote learning and place a high value on memory work. Now imagine what the impact on such a society and in particular on its education system might be when someone finally invents the pen. Well, undoubtedly a politician somewhere will pound a table and insist that we need a ‘pen in every classroom’. An education administrator will say ‘no, we should have a pen room where children can go once a week to learn how to use these pens’. So, eventually schools will all have pens and teachers will have to figure out how to make use of them. The Foobarian Department of Education will ponder the issue. They will eventually write a ‘pen’ curriculum and issue guidelines on how the ‘pen’ may be used to support memory work and rote-learning in schools……"

There are really no "natural technologies." Even if your method of survival is climbing a tree, it becomes vital to learn how to best use that tree. Do you climb high enough to escape one predator from the ground only to expose yourself to a predator from the sky or a deadly fall? But there is something else - the nature of having that tree transforms you, and transforms your understanding of the world. Once you've climbed that tree, things will never be the same for you, and if someone insists that you may not use the tree, or the tree is taken away, you will be more limited than you were.

I say all this to every educator who says something like this quote from Steven D. Krause's history of educational technology, "All you need to teach English are books, desks, paper, pens, and a chalkboard. You don't need any technology-just use what's there." Krause, of course, responds, "Of course, all of these items "just there" in elementary, secondary, and higher education classrooms are in fact technologies that have had profound influences on how and what we teach, just as profound as contemporary technologies like the World Wide Web."

It is all technology. All "information and communications technology," and if you truly think that there is a significant conceptual difference between (a) paper, pencils, pens, books, and (b) a smartphone or an internet-linked computer, you may really need to go back for a refresher course in human history.

Not only are all of these simply personal information and communication technology choices, they can all be used well, they can all be used badly. They all must be learned - yes - there was a time when dialing a phone needed to be taught...

...though today most of that advice (except the admonition that the "hyphen is not dialed") has become historical trivia.

The chalkboard, the pencil, the affordable mass-produced book - these are the best technologies of 1840. They needed to be learned back then. They were considered disruptive back then. But schools adapted we no longer insist on papyrus-making or quill-cutting in our classrooms.

We've had this conversation before, but let us repeat - rules against specific technology uses in the classroom are simply expressions of social-reproduction power. They never have anything to do with education, simply the 'comfort' of the teacher and the teacher's desire to remain comfortable by insisting that all around them behave as the teacher wishes to behave. That's a power play which ensures that the further the student is from the teacher (or administrator) socio-culturally, the worse they will do in school.

Which might be fine for the off-spring of the teacher, who them have an easier path to inherited elite status. But which does little to make us a fairer, or more successful society.

- Ira Socol

Argument and Belief

What's wrong with this statement?

"Cell phones baffle me. I don't own one. I recognize that they have practical uses, but their ubiquity in the classroom is one thing that almost drove me to quit teaching a few years ago. I wanted them GONE, and pined for the days when the rare student who had one would have been embarrassed if it had rung in public.

"My college has a cell phone policy similar to yours, and the enforcement of it is similarly uneven. What's more, I'm one of the few teachers who refuses to allow laptops unless the student has a certified medical reason for needing one. The laptops are rarely an issue - once they're put away, they're gone - but the cell phones are still a scourge.

"I've also encountered the arguments you mention about how we should really all move into the 21st century and embrace all forms of communication technology in our schools. I have no problem with a teacher who holds these views and applies them in his/her own classroom, but I feel there are many valid reasons not to apply them in mine.

"Some argue that in contemporary society, our students need to learn how to multitask effectively. I would argue just the opposite: that today's young people - and adults, for that matter, myself included - need to learn to STOP multitasking, and to focus on one task, with concentration, for an extended period of time. My classroom may be one of the only places that students have the chance, and the obligation, to do that. By forcing them to put their phones and laptops away, I am giving them the opportunity to stop the random, jittery stimulation and instant information that surrounds them at all times, and instead turn their attention to a deep and slow understanding of one specific text, idea or question."

The author of the above is not some change resistant throwback, but an arguably "left-wing" educator blogging, in this case, at Change.org. She was responding to another teacher's complaint about rude student use of mobile phones in the classroom.

A huge argument broke out - please do read it all - but I realize the cause of the battle was all in these four paragraphs, because they reveal so much about how this educator, and many others, view the roles of schools, of students, and of teachers - and thus reveals why educational success remains elusive for most students.

"Cell phones baffle me. I don't own one. I recognize that they have practical uses, but their ubiquity in the classroom is one thing that almost drove me to quit teaching a few years ago. I wanted them GONE, and pined for the days when the rare student who had one would have been embarrassed if it had rung in public."

Perhaps we know right now that the mobiles-in-education movement is not really going to get a fair hearing. The author refuses to even possess the dominant communication device of the age her students live in. She states at the start how she wants then "GONE." She goes on to suggest that she might consider letting a student use a laptop if he/she could prove some kind of medical necessity, but think about it - knowing this attitude would you approach her about this?

"I've also encountered the arguments you mention about how we should really all move into the 21st century and embrace all forms of communication technology in our schools. I have no problem with a teacher who holds these views and applies them in his/her own classroom, but I feel there are many valid reasons not to apply them in mine."

What exactly should education be about? Is it nothing more than a system of social reproduction recreating the society we knew in the past? Let's look at the author's attitude. She wants the right to determine which century's communication tools will be used in her classroom. OK, can I do the same? Can I require that no students use paper for notes and that no students read paper copies of anything? There are, after all, good environmental reasons to do this. Can I go the other way, insisting that students create papyrus from reeds and make their own ink? And if I could require either - would I have any legitimate educational reason to do so?

But this teacher has determined that her mid-20th Century communications tool set is something which she has a right to enforce on her students. I can surely understand this as "project learning" in a 20th Century History course, otherwise - picking your tool century and enforcing it is simply pre-deciding that those students most like the teacher will do best in the course.

"Some argue that in contemporary society, our students need to learn how to multitask effectively. I would argue just the opposite: that today's young people - and adults, for that matter, myself included - need to learn to STOP multitasking, and to focus on one task, with concentration, for an extended period of time. My classroom may be one of the only places that students have the chance, and the obligation, to do that. By forcing them to put their phones and laptops away, I am giving them the opportunity to stop the random, jittery stimulation and instant information that surrounds them at all times, and instead turn their attention to a deep and slow understanding of one specific text, idea or question."

Now we've turned religious. This is not uncommon. Our education system derives from a church-based (a Luther/Calvin-based) origin, and the "missionary position" (I am here to convert these young heathens) is still a dominant thought pattern among too many teachers.

This teacher is talking about nothing here but her own comfort and belief system. She thinks best when it is quiet. She thinks best when focused on one thing. She believes there is a specific way to study a text. And it is her job to bring these students to her beliefs.

The fact that some of us might function best in other ways, that some of us might need other structures, does not occur to her. If we would only "come to the light" - we would understand.

What's wrong?

My goal here is not to pick on this teacher/blogger. I assume, from much that she has written, that she is a great teacher. Nor is it my goal to re-argue this "case" extensively. My goal is to understand how our belief systems impact our view of education, and how we structure education. If we, for example, firmly believe in capitalism, we will design competitive classroom environments in which failure is as sure for some as success is for others. If we believe in evangelism and religious conversion we are likely to design a classroom environment which attempts to "save" the outliers. If we are sure that our learning system is best, any other will be seen as an invader, unwelcome in our classroom environment. If we perceive ourselves as "masters" of the classroom, we will act like "masters."If we see schools as failing the majority of kids - as I do - we will doubt the value of all traditional practices.

So when we watch a debate like the one at change.org unfold, look for arguments which are logical and those which are not. Always try to make a similar argument from the opposite side, and see if logic holds or disappears, but most importantly, always search for the clues to where people are coming from. No one makes neutral arguments. It isn't possible.

We can only see out of our own eyes.

- Ira Socol

PoliceGate

I have a good friend who teaches Criminal Justice courses at a university near my home, and sometimes she brings me in to give a "lecture" to her "Police Ethics" course.

I pass some questions out to these 'cops-to-be.' Some of those questions are: "Who is driving faster: the white woman in the minivan doing 85 or the black teen in the Honda doing 75?" "Why shouldn't any African-American male run from the cops, even if they've done nothing wrong?" and "Does a police officer ever have the moral authority to arrest someone for something they themselves have done and gotten away with?"

Which brings me to the affair of Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Harvard professor arrested on his own front porch by a Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer for "disorderly conduct."

Let me bring in an extended quote from Ralph Richard Banks, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School in The New York Times - and let me "mark it up" as I might if I was teaching in a Police Academy:

"The officer approached Professor Gates not as a result of a racial profile, but based on a witness’s account of a specific suspect engaged in suspicious behavior, just as we should expect him to. [This is fine, to an extent. "Behavioral profiling" is good police work. Except that there are all sorts of reasons for people to seem "suspicious" around their home. as I cop I would have approached, certainly with caution, but also with the question, "Some neighbors thought you might need help?" This allows the conversation to go in a good direction. "No thanks, just got back from a long trip and the door is stuck, but we've got it now." "Fine, just so I can say I checked when I report back, can I see some ID so I know it's your house?"]

"What happened next illustrates the complicated dynamics of race, crime and policing. Professor Gates would not have been arrested had he been a white Harvard professor, but for reasons that have as much to do with him as with the officer. [This is absolutely true, but it must always be remembered that we should not be giving legal advantage to those "acting white."]

"Did Professor Gates exhausted after his long flight from China and perhaps irritable after being unable to gain entry to his own home, become outraged when he was questioned by Officer Crowley and ordered to step outside? Maybe. Did the police officer overreact to the professor’s outburst? Certainly. Did race shape their responses? Most likely. [If police want to be seen as human, and thus supported by the citizenry, they must understand that we are all human - we all make mistakes, we all do dumb things, we all get frustrated, and we all get angry. Cops need to cut all of us slack in those situations - and if they don't, they should be fired for any minor mistake.]

"The officer, rather than treat Professor Gates as a respected member of the Harvard faculty, probably expected more deference from him because he was black. Professor Gates, in turn, probably offered more defiance because the officer was white. Just as the officer may have presumed that Professor Gates did not belong in the upscale neighborhood, Professor Gates may have presumed that Crowley was a racist, intent on harassing him. [When races come together in the US under conditions of "authority" things are primed to explode. This is the result of the colonial nature of our society. Blacks are no more expected to contradict white police officers in 2009 America than they were in South Africa of 1970. You can watch, with the naked eye, the attitudinal differences between a police officer-white suburbanite interaction and a police officer-black male interaction. This is true even if the police officer is working in the absolute center of American liberalism - Cambridge, Massachusetts - and the black male is a middle-aged Harvard professor called "Skip."]

"There is no question that the officer overreacted. Professor Gates should never have been handcuffed and taken to jail. But if we are to understand not only this disturbing incident but more tragic interactions as well, we need to look beyond the question of racial profiling. We need to appreciate the myriad historical and contemporary factors that too often poison relations between African Americans and law enforcement agencies."

As President Obama said, the police "acted stupidly." As he inferred, the also acted predictably, and therein lies the problem.

Like the business of education, the business of police work is operated as a system of control. Like education, it is designed to enforce certain "norms" - norms which align with White, Protestant, Middle-Income-or-better, Straight, Typically-abled lifestyles. Like education, when people talk about "standards" in police work, they are not the standards of the mass of people being "policed," but the standards of those in power - who wish to remain in power.

As in education, African-American culture is perceived by the "typical" police officer as too loud, too irresponsible, too 'truth-challenged,' too illegitimate to be the basis of any actual "community standard." Just as in the KIPP School theory that black youth must be drilled in white culture, and the Teach for America theory that all minority youth need are white role models, when police bosses talk of "enforcing community standards" they mean the behavior which solidifies the societal structure. When Rudy Giuliani talked about "One City" policing - what he meant was that anyone who wouldn't/couldn't behave like his rich friends on the Upper East Side of Manhattan would be running afoul of the law.

Policing can be a community service, or policing can be a colonial project which maintains the control of the many by the few. Just as schools can be a community learning environment or a colonial system which establishes which few of the many will get to don the powdered wig, show up in the Queen's Court, and live like "white folks."

Back to my questions - when I ask, "Why shouldn't any African-American male run from the cops, even if they've done nothing wrong?" it is inevitable. The whites in the room are outraged. They are becoming police officers to save society. They are heroes. They are good people. Why would anyone feel the need to run.

The blacks in the room react differently. Sometimes they just nod. But as one student said one time, "F*** yes, I'd run tonight." Because he knew who makes the rules. And why they make them.

- Ira Socol

Walter Cronkite and "the way it [was]"

Would Walter Cronkite be happy with the way Walter Cronkite's death has been reported?

And what does that say about the way in which we understand history?

Don't get me wrong. I think anyone would recall Cronkite as a fabulous journalist, one of the greatest ever. The man covered the great moments of history from the London Blitz through the tumultuous end of the 1970s. And he did it magnificently. But was he the most watched newsman in America?

Only after he waited for the most watched newsmen in America to retire.

Anyone remember Chet Huntley and David Brinkley this weekend?

NBC's Huntley-Brinkley report competed with Cronkite's CBS Evening News for eight years - a period covering the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, the riots convulsing America's cities and campuses, the Vietnam War, the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the moon landing. More Americans watched Cronkite than Huntley-Brinkley for one of those events - the moon landing. NBC won the ratings war for more than six of those eight years.

None of this is to take anything away from Cronkite or his memory. But it is to say that "history" is usually a construction of the present, not a window on the past. Whether Cronkite was the most trusted man in America on that awful day in November 1963 is arguable, but we know more in the nation turned to NBC News that day. The best seller lists of the 1920s were not dominated by Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, or Ernest Hemingway. Lincoln couldn't get 40% of the vote in 1860. The U.S. did not really practice "precision bombing" during World War II.

History is recalled as we wish it had been.

Of course there is no excuse for this kind of history anymore. If your students all had computers or netbooks or smartphones in their hands, every one might look up a different facet of a historical event, might even translate foreign language sources, might watch YouTube or visit museums around the globe, and might share all this via Google Doc or VoiceThread or Wiki, and the community cognition resulting would be something to see.

We might even get away from myth a bit, and toward a reality which really explains things (why were Huntley and Brinkley more popular? what does that suggest about viewing habits?).

So you can surely watch this... and you should

But your students should also be listening to wechoosethemoon with the full, real-time, minute-by-minute record of Apollo 11 communications - because - that's the way it really was.

- Ira Socol

International Space University
Museum of Broadcasting
NASA

Posts at Change.org

My guest blogging week at Change.org/Education continues

1. Counting the Origins of Failure
2. Technology: The Wrong Questions and the Right Questions
3. Today's "School Reformers" vs Real Change for Education - I - Rethinking Schools
4. Today's "School Reformers" vs Real Change for Education - II - Finding Great Teachers

Please join the conversation there, don't miss the previous week's posts from Shelly Blake-Plock, and join the cause!

- Ira Socol

blogging at change.org this week

change.org is a national conversation about the American future, and thanks to Clay Burell, who leads the site's education policy blog, I'll be part of the conversation this week.

My first post there Counting the Origins of Failure looks at the basic need to completely re-think the American educational system (why start small?).

"Our American public education system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It is separating “winners” from “losers” and it is reinforcing our economic gap. The system was designed in the 1840s and at the turn of the 20th Century to separate society into a vast majority of minimally trained industrial workers and a small, educated elite. It was designed to enforce White, Protestant, Middle-Class, “Typically-abled” standards on an increasingly diverse American population."

Please come join the conversation.

- Ira Socol

Refusing Free, Depriving Students

On one of the Becta lists a conversation broke out regarding solutions for visually impaired students who use Microsoft's Internet Explorer. CleanPage was suggested, and Keyboard Shortcuts noted. And this was all good to see, good to know.

But I commented to a teacher on the list that I still thought FireVox, the 'blind browser' add on to Firefox, would be a more effective solution for her students, because it is a full, robust browser which can be operated without sight, and with the many other supports available in Firefox.

"Yes," others told me, "but Firefox just isn't available in many schools, libraries, etc."

This is undeniably true. True in the United Kingdom, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand (to name a few English-speaking nations), and even 'more true' in the United States (to name another).

Firefox - entirely free, totally accessible, far 'safer' in terms of web browsing, far more supportive of differentiated instruction - remains a rarity on the computers used in schools, in public libraries, in adult education programs. And thus students, and others, are denied the ability to learn and use essential tools such as FireVox (the blind browser), Click-Speak (FireVox's cousin for dyslexia and other print disabilities), gTranslate (right-click translation), Dictionary Switcher (a fabulous tool for ELL students, Second Language Acquisition, and all those who communicate outside their home nation), and many more.

The result? Students do worse in school than they need do, they struggle more, they even drop out more. All because schools won't take the two minutes to download something free.

Google Apps for Education - entirely free, with no advertising - is available to every primary, secondary, and post-secondary school. It provides a highly accessible and organizable email system, student calendars which teachers may share, word processing which can be used singly or collaboratively, spreadsheets, presentations, and much more. Combined with, say, Click-Speak (above) it provides reading and writing support for a wide range of struggling students. But most schools refuse to use it, choosing to spend (at least) cumulative hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars (quid, Euros) operating third rate email systems.

The result? Less money for the important technology investments - netbooks and wireless, high-level disability supports and alternate keyboards, tablet PCs and polleverywhere licensing. And thus, higher rates of student failure and disengagement, all because schools won't send an email to Google.

From Ghotit (the world's best English-language context-based, text-to-speech Spell Check system) to WordTalk (turns Microsoft Word into a talking word processor), from OpenOffice to Linux (stop paying for Microsoft licenses), from Google Earth to GraphCalc (free complete graphing calculator), from Click-N-Type (the best virtual on-screen keyboard) to PowerTalk (reads presentations outloud), schools could be providing their students with a world of software and supports at zero cost, but are refusing.

The result? Rich, white, Protestant, normally-abled students get what they need at home, and vulnerable students fail.

Why?

I keep struggling with this. I can really no longer accept the answer, "ignorance." At some point being completely ignorant of the tools of your trade becomes either "willful ignorance" or simple "stupidity." These tools have now been available for too long, are too easily 'discoverable' for this excuse to hold water anymore.

And I won't accept the answer, "fear" anymore either. If an electrician was too afraid of electricity to touch a wire, he'd be an electrician no more. So if an educator is afraid of the information and communication technologies of his/her age, then he/she can no longer be an "educator" in any meaningful way.

I have come to suggest that the answer is actually political, that too many in charge of education do not want universal success, do not want the increased economic competition which might come from those who are currently excluded from educational success. Many people have been shocked when I suggest this, but few have offered a coherent alternate theory.

So, why?

Why, when schools cry about a lack of funding do they spend more to exclude students? What is it about administrators, policy-makers, educational technology workers, which causes this bizarre, and socially destructive, behavior?

Not a rhetorical question - I'm getting desperate to begin to find an answer to this question, so we can start to work on a solution...

- Ira Socol

next up: Why would schools purchase the iPod Touch rather than (less expensive) netbooks? Why would schools propose Apple-based handheld solutions rather than universal solutions which could be used on the students' own phones in school and at home? (a related question)

Social Change and the American School

With the NECC Conference running in Washington, I've been inundated with thoughts on Twitter. But this morning a couple of things ran together. UrbanEducation sent me a question: "@ShaySzu I teach in an urban school [without] much technology. How do you use technology in your classrooms without breaking the bank?" Then Greg Casperson, a colleague at MSU said, "Arguments for public online schools dismiss issues of working families that rely on schools for places of learning and child rearing." Asked regarding the question of "bricks and mortar" schools v online learning.

And once again I thought, "Damn, the United States is one very weird nation."

Americans really do not believe in their government as competent or capable. It is not just that they've elected anti-government capitalists to the Presidency, Governorships, positions in Congress consistently over the past generation+ - America's election system is so flawed and antiquated that this could mean almost anything. Rather, it is a deep seated set of beliefs - "Well, I wouldn't really want just a government health insurance system." "I'm not sure the government is the best group to try to run - the trains, the power system, the universities, whatever." It is a belief that government in the United States is clearly less competent than that of most other "developed" nations - France, the UK, Canada, Germany, Italy...

But then we get to schools. Schools, we believe, can do everything.

I've seen many tweets, for example, spreading the "gospel" that only education can solve poverty. I find this odd because if there is one overwhelming predictor of school failure in the US, it is poverty.

But we expect it. As Greg points out, people depend on schools to feed their children, to control their children, to babysit their children so American parents can work longer hours than almost anyone. We even expect our schools to provide athletic recreation and sport training. In other words, we've invested most of the American social safety net in one poorly funded set of government institutions, and insisted that they solve all of our problems.

And when this absurd plan inevitably fails, we blame our teachers, our administrators, our parents, our students, and often, we begin to argue that only privatization can solve this.

And now we bring the next issue into play: Schools must solve the digital divide. They must reinvigorate American creativity as well. All righty then.

I want to take you back in time for a minute, to the United States at the turn of the 20th Century.

At this point in history the US had an almost unparalleled wealth divide. It was filled with students from non-English speaking homes. Communications technology was changing rapidly - people were getting their information from films, and from a vast collection of new and unreliable newspapers. Too many parents of impoverished children were both working long hours. Schools were physically in no condition to handle the flood of students. There was insufficient teacher training.

There was a vast response to this at the time. No, very unfortunately, nothing changed the basic pedagogical or physical forms of the classroom that had been established a half century before, that was the missed opportunity, but let's look at what was tried:

1. Libraries were built across the United States, by both governments and capitalist philanthropists. There was one in every neighborhood in New York City, for example, and Andrew Carnegie fitted out almost every town in America with this 19th Century equivalent of free broadband access.
2. New schools were built everywhere, equipped with unheard of things like auditoriums and gymnasiums to both help engage student learning and to make schools true community centers.
3. Teacher Training colleges - "Normal Schools" - spread across the country.
4. In New York City and California universities were made free.
5. School nurses were introduced to support child health in poor communities.
6. U.S. Labor Law was changed to protect workers - and thus parents and children.
   
7. The curriculum was radically revamped in an attempt to make school relevant to the needs and technologies of the new century.

Now, what are we doing today?

1. Consider what might change if those who spend a fortune daily promoting charter schools and Teach for America were to instead fund - Andrew Carnegie-style - free broadband access across America?
2. Or if our governments poured money into finally constructing schools NOT based in Henry Barnard's 1848 advice?
3. Or if teacher training institutions became completely free? And were completely re-thought?
4. Or if graduates of our public schools were guaranteed free post-secondary training?
5. Or if every school was paired with a local health system to help students get and stay healthy?
6. Or if U.S. Labor laws were changed to require "Family Living Wages" and paid time off so parents might spend time with their children.
7. Or if we finally threw out that "Committee of Ten" curriculum and adopted a project and interest based approach to education?

The problems plaguing American society are very deep. These problems stem from a mix of an awful economic system (which leaves tens of millions in poverty), an awful health care system (which strangles innovation by making business start ups prohibitively risky and expensive for most), a bizarre education funding system (which gives the most money to the wealthiest students), incoherent transportation and communications policies (which blocks movement of people to jobs and information to students), and a completely antiquated government system (modeled on 18th Century Britain).

So schools can be a part of this solution - if properly funded and supported, but they cannot be the solution. Without the other changes, the change in education will have just minimal impact.

However, let me get back to Greg Casperson and Shayna Szumach. I'm going to suggest two paradigm switches, one as to what a "learning place" means and the other as to what "educational technology" means.

For Greg, I want schools open 24/7. I want their libraries, their gyms, their auditoriums, their computers open round the clock. It baffles me that I can buy liquor, or marijuana for that matter, almost anytime in most American cities but getting into a library is much more doubtful. In the town I live now, and this is not unusual, the library is open less when students are out of school during the summer!

Schools need to be learning places that are the heart of every community in America, offering adult ed in the evenings, community ed, yes of course, but mostly offering access to information, ideas, knowledge, and socialization.

And so, perhaps, kids should be attending school on flexible schedules as well. Why is education the last "fixed time" service in America? Why can't high school schedules, even primary school schedules, look more like those in universities?

For Shayna, well, technology surrounds you. I can link you to the ideas of used computers (or cheap netbooks) and free software, or I can suggest that most kids carry great tech tools in their pockets - maybe the solution is Blackberries for all? (costly, but still cheaper than what most schools throw away on bad networks and hardware.) I can tell you that schools buy the most expensive solutions (from Apple computers to Clickers to Kurzweil3000) for everything when cheaper is often better. I can ask if your school still pays for an email system when Google Apps for Education is free?

But mostly I can tell you that you need to start where you can. One good tablet PC with a mobile internet card can light up your classroom even with zero building tech support. Polleverywhere can turn any group of cell-phone toting American kids into an interactive classroom experience. A bunch of downloadable and online software, from Firefox with Click-Speak and gTranslate to Ghotit, to WordTalk to Google Earth to Diigo, will make those couple of classroom computers into universal design workstations.

But I'll repeat. We can make schools better, but schools will not fix American society. And individuals crying in the dark won't fix it either. Americans, as a group, must start to believe that they, through their own government, can improve life in these United States.

And in the hope that will happen, schools need to get better as best they can, so they can ride that new wave.

-Ira Socol

My best teacher

By the time I reached Alan Shapiro's ninth grade English class, I was ready to be done with school. Yes, I enjoyed the lunch periods. Sure, I had lots of friends. And no question - I had loved learning to arc weld in eighth grade. But there was nothing going on for me in any class. I usually managed, after just a few weeks, to pull a desk away from other students into a back corner by the window, and just sit there staring out toward Long Island Sound or drawing in the big sketch pad my art teacher had given me in exchange for no longer coming to his class.

By the time I reached Alan Shapiro's ninth grade English class he had plenty of reasons to have given up. He had already taught for 15 years in an urban Junior High, had risen to become head of the English Department there, then lost that job after leading his AFT local out on a strike the year before - a strike primarily based in the teachers' desire to innovate.

Now he was teaching lots of classes of kids like me.

But Alan Shapiro did not give up. In fact, he became the "teacher who saved my life" by convincing me that there were all sorts of things I could do well, and giving me the chance to do those things. I came into his class a couple of weeks into the school year after I was thrown out of another teacher's English class. I came in sullen and angry. I left in June with an entirely different view of education, of writing, of books, and with a note from my teacher I'll never forget: "To my No. 1 crap detector," he had written, "just go out there and do it."

I've written about Alan Shapiro before, in terms of the alternative high school he began the next year with his friends Neil Postman and Charlie Weingartner (please read the comments there), but as an old classmate pointed out there, Alan knew how to change school wherever he was.

That old classmate put it this way, '"Shapiro always said that "regular" schools didn't allow students to fail - that they always had someone else to blame - bad teachers, bad schedule, bad books, bad assignments, boring classes, etc. He said that thus they never owned their failures and thus didn't own their successes either. When all those typical student issues have become student choices - failure is the student's."

"Shapiro had used this in his regular English class before the 3Is. In our 9th grade class, we voted on a grade for the report card, but he supplemented that grade with an individual evaluation. I'll always remember the final he gave us. True/False; multiple choice; short essay and the part where he gave us the 'answer' and we had to come up with the question: Answer:'I didn't do it" question: 'Where's your Romeo and Juliet paper? Shapiro's comment was, "Feeling guilty?" That made an impact on me years later. I got a "w" on the test." [just for the record, I received an "11" - all grades were random symbols]

But there was much more to the class than that. Every book we read was presented multiple ways. The reading list was those dystopia novels, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, etc, and in every case we watched the movie, we listened to him read it (or to albums from the early audiobook creator Spoken Arts) and we had the books to read on paper. Every concept was presented multiple ways as well - none of us in that class can forget him skipping around our desktops singing "death is here, death is there, death is around us everywhere" to illustrate how the rhythm of a poem could be opposite the textual content emotionally.

And we could always respond any way we wanted - writing things, speaking to the class, drawing pictures, or just talking with him. He never cared how we expressed ourselves as long as we did express ourselves.

There was something else - the class was this comfortable oasis in a miserable school. We sat where we wanted, or didn't sit. We talked or didn't talk. We drifted off without that being viewed as a crisis. Entering that classroom was like being able to breath.

And so something remarkable happened in that room that year. With the risk of failing grades removed, with any competition for grades removed, with all the typical classroom absolutes removed, this strange group of academic losers became the most productive secondary English class I have ever seen. We wrote so many poems and short stories across the year that our "best of" collection, printed out via dittos for us to share, was 100 pages huge.

Something remarkable happened to me in that room that year as well. Oh sure, all the other classes were awful, save for the aforementioned art, which consisted of me wandering around with a sketchpad, but in Mr. Shapiro's room I came alive. I began to think then that writing was something I could really do, and I began to think that all those books might have things in them that I really wanted to know. Hope and possibility.

I remember him sitting with me that year, listening to me talk about 1984, hearing me compare it to the school itself, and letting me know, in a way I had never known in that school, that I was all right, that my thoughts mattered, that I had things to contribute.

No grades, multiple representations, multiple ways to express knowledge, no competition, the chance to be who you were as a student and a person.

Later, in his alternative school, he would carry me through high school, and let me glimpse a real future. And I can say absolutely, whenever I have considered giving up on education, he has been the person I've thought about.

He remains a force in educational thinking through the essays and curricula he writes for the Teachable Moment website. He is an educational thinker who respects teachers and students and public education and knows how to bring these things together in ways which really, really work.

So, I've written of Junior High School horrors, but now I'm glad to talk about a Junior High School wonder. And to say that it is from this experience that my view of teachers being as life-or-death important as doctors comes, as well as my belief that great public education is possible anywhere and everywhere.

Thanks Alan, and thanks to all the Alan Shapiros out there, who carve out these places of excellence and opportunity despite it all.

- Ira Socol

Hey, I struggle with Wikipedia. If anyone out there can help me edit the Alan Shapiro page to make it effective, findable, and create disambiguation from other Alan Shapiros.

MITS Summer Institute 2009

On the shores of Grand Traverse Bay, Michigan teachers gather for the Summer Institute put on by Michigan's Integrated Technology Supports.

I'll be presenting three sessions today, and the SlideShares are right here...

First, a session on evaluation for technology, which begins with a redefination of technology to bring the use of the term in education in line with the actual definition:

Evaluation for Assistive Technology

View more OpenOffice presentations from Ira david Socol.

Second, a look at the use of free, ubiquitous tools to create a Universal Design for Learning environment in your classroom:

Free Tech Universal Tools

View more OpenOffice presentations from Ira david Socol.

And third, a workshop on Toolbelt Theory:

Toolbelt Theory

View more OpenOffice presentations from Ira david Socol.

- Ira Socol

What Teacher Education needs to be?

More "laboratory" work, more doubt, more diverse, more complex, and more flexible.

Chad Ratliff, a twitter colleague from Virginia, routinely challenges my thinking (a direct refutation of Larry Sanger's claims about web 2.0). Chad believes in Charter Schools (a rare thing in the Old Dominion), and Chad believes in alternative teacher certification, and I think Chad believes that at least some market forces can improve education. As an ex-teacher from a very high-needs impoverished community, and as a guy who studies education closely, I don't take his stances lightly.

First, let me say that I am not against Charter Schools. I believe charters and university lab schools are critical to educational invention in the public sector. My kid attended a great charter school. What I oppose are for profit chain-charters which steal money from children and do nothing to re-invent anything except, too often, racial and disability segregation.

Nor am I against alternative teacher certification. I am desperate to find effective ways to take experienced adults and convert them into great teachers, and equally desperate to develop strategies which turn committed adults from high-needs communities into lifelong teachers and community role models. What I'm against is Teach for America - a program that gives poor kids untrained, non-experienced teachers, while giving rich kids a resume boost.

Yes, I am pretty much against market solutions for public service. In my view market-based strategies have, for example, made American health care the most expensive in the world while also making it clearly less effective than the systems of other nations. And market-based strategies in the US military have given us Halliburton profits and Blackwater murders. I hope for better for our kids.

But let's go back to Teach for America. What's the problem? Well, it starts with a bit of cognitive dissonance. Teach for America claims that going to school to learn something is not just completely unimportant, it might be a negative. This is the heart of their argument (and the arguments of TFA fans like Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and The New York Times), that there is not just no difference between teachers who have attended education schools and those who have not, but that those who have not might even be better. This seems a story I wouldn't want presented to any child who I hoped to keep in school. "My teacher says school is worthless," is what I'd say if I had a TFA teacher.

But the bigger problem, even skipping my opinion of TFA as a classic colonial project designed to oppress, is that I see no reason why if rich kids get only "trained, certified" teachers, poor kids deserve something less. That's not, in my opinion, a gap-closing path.

If there is a teacher shortage in certain places, then maybe we do need a small "market solution." Would those districts attract top teachers if the pay was $150,000 or $200,000 a year? If the schools were properly equipped and maintained? If the necessary supports for student achievement were in place? I think the TFA Foundation should be raising cash to try that set of solutions out.

But yes, we all know that Teacher Education across America is not what it should be, and Chad wants to know where and how to start. And its a great question. And in trying to answer, I start outside the field.

Back when I was an NYPD cop, we used to describe certain rookies as suffering from "Starsky and Hutch Syndrome" (I believe the term now might be "Jack Bauer Syndrome"). "Starsky and Hutch Syndrome" cops inevitably came from the distant exurbs of New York, Suffolk County, Rockland County, Putnam County, and beyond. They had led these white bread kind of lives, and all they knew about the City of New York and its diverse population were the "horror" stories told by older cop relatives who had moved their families as far east or north as permissable to escape the "nightmare" of the city, which in their minds looked a lot like the film, Escape from New York. These cops arrived as crusaders who would "clean up" the city. They were totally earnest and sincere, determined to recreate the mythic New York City of their parents' childhoods'. They were also unbelievably dangerous. They could not understand street dynamics, our community standards. They could not comprehend that different people might behave differently on a hot summer Saturday night. They got into endless fights, they made stupid, worthless arrests, they damaged police community relationships, and they hurt members of the public and other cops through turning small problems into huge crises.

Here's an example of typical "Starsky and Hutch" behavior - from a much more recent time - thankfully captured on video:

The moral is, beware saviors, beware crusaders, and go for training.

The reason I start here is that for 6 months, that is, 26 weeks, the NYPD worked diligently in Police Academy courses to eliminate this syndrome. Through sociology and psychology courses, through Constitutional Law courses, through simulations and role play, through awareness training. New York cops learned all sorts of things during those 26 weeks, but the hardest thing to get across, almost every instructor said, was the notion that nothing in the past lives of these suburban 'pre-cops' or their educations (which were often quite impressive), was of any real value in terms of helping those in New York's struggling neighborhoods.

And so, after 26 weeks of 45 hours per wek training, New York's rookie cops are typically supervised heavily on the street for another six months - that's all considered part of their training. And still, more than a few Starsky and Hutches slipped through.

We compare that to the guy on the left, who now runs Teach for America in the San Francisco Bay area. He went through TFA's five week training program, and then taught for two years. I'm just saying...

So, issue one is that it takes a lot of training, and a lot of actual time, to make people effective public servants when dealing with people unlike themselves.

You know I tend to make fun of, and even to bash, my school, Michigan State University, but honestly we do do somethings quite well, and here's one: Our future teachers have typically spent time with as many high-needs diverse students before they begin their internship year than TFA corps members will in their entire "career." And we use that. From the first 100-level ed course on our students work in high needs classrooms. They do this in almost every course. And they come back and we - the instructors - get to work with their reactions. We do that for most of four years, and that makes a difference, because this is very difficult stuff to learn. We don't want missionaries, we don't want crusaders, we don't want saviors - we want teachers who, before they begin "student teaching" are starting to understand that their experience is not their students' experience, and that they are not superior humans for having had better luck in the birth lottery.

Now, Michigan State is no Ivy League institution. It is a Land Grant University (the very first Land Grant University) in a desperately struggling state. Yet our students are the elite, they have made it to one of our top universities in a place where attending any post-secondary school is a minority position. Their knowledge of the struggles of underclass children or children who struggle in school is typically highly limited. And if we, in the College of Education, did not push them out into the City of Lansing's schools or poor rural districts, well, the only times they'd actually get into Lansing itself is going to World Market in the Frandor Shopping Center for beer (sorry Spartans, MAC's Bar doesn't count, it is technically in Lansing Township). In other words, if they were not education majors, they would likely know little of this - even on a campus far more diverse in economic origin than those East Coast elite campuses.

We do something else pretty well at MSU, which is deal with issue two, creating and understanding doubt, which is essential to developing teachers who can differentiate instruction. We do not teach students "one way" to do anything. Our faculty could hardly agree on a group of five or six ways. I say to those in my team-taught course, that even in that single course they will hear three views, often at odds. If you take any sequence of MSU College of Ed courses you will hear lots of ideas, lots of possibilities, lots of suggestions - and as you go out into the a real classroom, and meet any collection of students - you will need every one of them.

Obviously, this also takes time. You cannot dump 50 strategies on a bunch of pre-service teachers in a semester. You can only offer that variety if you give everyone the time to process and compare, to test in actual teaching moments, then process and compare again.

We also have a highly diverse group of instructors at MSU, which is issue three, getting fully comfortable with diverse perspectives on the notion of education itself. I don't mean diverse in skin color, though we do have lots of people from lots of continents. I mean diverse by economic origin, by family origin, by systems of primary and secondary education. The "Brit" group comes with a set of views, as does our "East Asian" group, our "South Asian," and "African" groups have a "Brit plus" view set. Then we have our Americans. There are instructors wth every "disability," and instructors with every kind of language issue, and instructors with every type of political stance. This really does make a difference as new teachers learn to navigate communities which do not share their values or histories.

Issue four is all about complexity. In any class of students, but especially among "high needs" students, there will be real issues you must deal with. In Linda Darling-Hammond's study of TFA this is the place where the untrained teachers really fell apart, they had no exposure to any of this, and it showed. What, I recently asked a man on Twitter who seemed to be suggesting that anyone with good content knowledge would be a good teacher, does (his example) film maker and history buff Ken Burns know about dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, ELL, AAC, CAPD, ADHD, EI, Autism, Aspergers - to name a few issues likely to confront every teacher. These are complex issues with no set formulas for answer. These take time too. You must move past the labels, past your "declarative knowledge," to true "operational knowledge," or you will not only not help these students, you will injure them.

My fifth issue though is about flexibility. Because I am a fan of alternative certification. When someone like @spedteacher chooses, after a lifetime of diverse experiences with people, to become a teacher, that is a fabulous thing. And so I want to be able to entice great people, in their 30s, 40s, 50s into education, and I want to leverage the human skills they already have. I want them to be able to study to be teachers while being paid. I want them to have shorter, year round courses, that fit their lifestyle needs. I want them to be merging their past experiences with the curriculum, and I want them in classrooms in a secondary role almost immediately. I especially want these people if they come from the kinds of communities which suffer teacher shortages, because I want to develop a community-based faculty which is lifespan dedicated to that community and its children.

In my battle over teacher training I surprise myself. I have a ton of problems with how we train teachers, just as I have a ton of problems with how we train doctors. So, I might think I'd be on the TFA "No Training" side. But I'm not. I consider these both to be critical, life and death professions. Who kills more in a year? I'd guess bad teachers over bad doctors, really. A disastrous education too often leads to a disastrous - and short - life.

So my solution to bad teachers and bad doctors is not to minimize training, it's to reconstruct it. To make it really work the way it should. That's my start - let the conversation begin...

- Ira Socol