The art of seeing - afterthought - opening eyes

 part one      part two       part three  

I have a suspicion that, after about 30 days of any school year, most of your students could get from the bus, or the school's property line, to their seats in the morning blindfolded.

In San Francisco, abstract art gets close scrutiny

"When it comes to sleep," says Dr. Patrick Wolcott, the medical director of the Sleep Center of Southern California, "our bodies crave routine and repetition."1 Which seems both absolutely true and thus, an odd way for us to begin our children's educational days.

In a conversation from ISTE11 with @ChristianLong @BudtheTeacher and @NinaMehta I tried to sum up what we were saying about students entering a classroom in the morning: "If you're kids don't have choice of where to sit and what to sit on (or not) every day you are missing a critical educational moment in decision-making and consciousness."

Or, as I said at the TIE Colorado Leadership Event, "maybe your students should enter your school or room in a different way every day." The idea being to break routines, to stop mindless repetition, and to get the brain wondering, investigating, thinking...

Schools tend to train the opposite: Enough school, and the world becomes an absolute pattern. When the school leaders of Colorado gathered that Thursday morning, their training - in this case their "conference training," kicked right in. They grabbed coffee, sat down, worked on their own stuff, and waited for someone to give them information at the appointed time. These are great people, passionate educators, really smart people, but years of training in the captivity of schools and academic conferences have forced training upon them. Not one picked up any of the stories or pictures we had scattered on the tables - we had not, you see, created obvious packets at each place which indicated "this should be read" - and when four video screens popped to life across a sixty foot wall no one got up, and few even looked up. The "appointed time" had not yet come, and no introduction had yet been offered.

"Don't worry," a superintendent once told me when I complained about an 11-period day for fifth graders, "It just takes 60 days to form a habit." (I responded, "Great, we can have them all smoking by Thanksgiving," but, you know me...)

Do we really want to form these habits? Yes, habit makes management easier. People who follow routines are already deeply compliant, and so, perhaps fully ready to learn the checklist for the test, fully ready to not "waste time" with complex questions, even ready to give up their nights to the lectures of Salman Khan.

Harvard, where America's elite try to make the rules for all the rest of us, thinks routines are good for school ("Classrooms have routines that serve to manage student behavior and interactions, to organizing the work of learning, and to establish rules for communication and discourse. Classrooms also have routines that structure the way students go about the process of learning. These learning routines can be simple structures, such as reading from a text and answering the questions at the end of the chapter, or they may be designed to promote students' thinking, such as asking students what they know, what they want to know, and what they have learned as part of a unit of study."), but remember, Harvard's mission from its founding in 1636 to today, has been reproduction of the American social system as it exists.2

For most of our students - who'd get arrested if they walked the hallowed streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts without sufficient justification3 - the idea of preserving our system intact is a problem. The system will keep them poor, or at least struggling, forever. If they are to re-create the system, re-invent it, they must learn the art of seeing, they must gain the kind of vision skills which only come from needing to keep one's eyes open.

When most students enter a school, the institutional mission is - very clearly - safety and efficiency. Our goal is to get kids to their places without injury, and on time. And that mission is incredibly clear to our students, who see that mission as the only thing the adults think is important. But what if our mission was different? What if - not throwing safety out the window, but - our mission was to get kids thinking, wondering, exploring, and challenging.

Do anything to break visual and auditory routine as kids move through your school.
Even airports (hells on earth that they are) can do this. Example: O'Hare's United Terminal tunnel

When I worked at Grand Valley State University in Academic Computing, our "big boss," the Vice-Provost, bought one of those banner signs on stands you see at conferences. It said "Grand Valley" or something and he put it outside the Academic Computing "office maze" which sat one one side of an enormous student computer lab. After two days there I began to move it each morning, to one spot or another around the lab. About two months later I forgot to move it one morning.

By 10 am the Vice Provost was sitting on the couch in my cubicle.4 "Ira," he said, "you didn't move the sign today. You know, looking for the sign has become an important part of my morning. I have to look over the whole lab." He paused. "Go move the sign!" So I did.

Uncertainty, just a tiny absurd bit of uncertainty, had turned a place he never looked at before into a place he carefully observed every morning. And he knew that this made him a better administrator.

messing with the idea of "the ground" - ArtPrize 2010 Grand Rapids, MI

This is true for all of us. Uncertainty requires vision, and not just "looking," but real vision. Uncertainty forces us to depend on our very human observation skills - "what's different?" "is it an OK difference or a dangerous difference?" "should I explore further?" - which get our brains spinning.

And if this - if getting a child's brain into investigative mode - makes him 6 minutes late for something, unless it is emergency heart surgery, well, that's no cost at all.

So rethink your school's, your classes,' "morning routines." Or all your routines. Routines numb the brain. They allow our students to move through the day as if blindfolded.

That can't be what education should be about, can it?

- Ira Socol

1- Costco Connection (hows that for an academic journal) July 2011, p. 35
2- I'll note that Harvard is quite brilliant at controlling its visible reputation, the only criticism of the university allowed to stick around on Wikipedia are accusations that it is "too liberal"
3- Hell, Cambridge will attack their own if they even look like outsiders.
4- having a couch in my cubicle caused the director of Academic Computing to nickname me "Sgt Bilko" - well, maybe that wasn't the only reason

The Bad Guys: Part One - Dr. Paul Peterson

A long time ago I urged us to "look behind the curtain" in that Wizard of Oz sense in order to understand who was promoting what I'd call "the wrong things" in education - and why.

Why does Walmart want to support Michelle Rhee? Why does Rupert Murdoch want with NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg's schools chancellor? Why do those who fund George W. Bush's lifestyle want non-teachers as principals?

And who provides intellectual "cover" for these initiatives?

"Paul Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Editor-In-Chief of Education Next, a journal of opinion and research."

I asked Diane Ravitch one night why Harvard University seemed to be the source of so much anti-child, anti-teacher, anti-learning "educational theory." I think that was an important question because in America, when something says "Harvard" on it, people tend to assume validity. And so what spills from Harvard Yard these days - despite much evidence that shaky practices are common there - matters in public perception.

And Ms. Ravitch gave me one name: Paul Peterson, suggesting that he wielded significant power over Harvard's educational research agenda.

"Paul E. Peterson, the Henry Shattuck professor of government at Harvard University, is best known in education circles for his controversial studies on school voucher programs. But Peterson has also played a major role in recruiting and mentoring a new generation of scholars who are making their own mark in education debates. Most of them, like Peterson, are political scientists challenging public education's core conventions, and most of them, like Peterson, advocate choice, competition, and other market-based reforms.

'"A large percentage of the people doing research in education that I would consider outside the mainstream have a connection to Paul," says Terry Moe, a Stanford University political science professor and co-author of an influential 1990 study advocating market-based reforms in elementary and secondary education. "They are generally more critical of the existing system and more willing to challenge its basic structure."

"These include people like Moe and John Chubb, Moe's co-author of Politics, Markets and America's Schools and now a vice president of Edison Schools Inc., a for-profit school management company; Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and Marci Kanstoroom, both executive editors of Education Next, a journal critical of the educational status quo published by Stanford's Hoover Institution that Peterson edits; Jay P. Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Bryan C. Hassel, a private consultant and expert on charter schools; and Kenneth K. Wong, director of the Urban Education Policy Program at Brown University."

Now Peterson, like so many favored by today's faux "reformers" is not someone trained in education. He seems to have spent a year hanging out in Stanford University's School of Education, but, you know, I've walked around there too. Essentially he's a right wing political scientist who, after years of trying to increase inequality in America through other means, stumbled on education. He kicked around the fringes of anti-national political theory from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s (with some forays into anti-public schooling), then, if his CV is to be believed, he found his voice as a pro-school voucher, anti-public school advocate funded through grants from right-wing think tanks.

It has been a profitable endeavor for him, as it has for his fellow travellers, from Paul Vallas to Arne Duncan, from Michelle Rhee to Joel Klein. It is such a profitable path, in fact, that a highly paid publishing executive will quit the lucrative role of telling teen-age girls how to have sex in order to follow that route beginning as Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools.

And Peterson, collecting paychecks from Harvard, Stanford, and (probably) the U.S. Department of Education, is doing especially well.

As are his disciples, now spread through right-wing publicity mills and for-profit educational groups.

What is Peterson's agenda? Who pays for it? Why is Harvard joined to the Hoover Institution on this and not, for example, the Stanford School of Education or Columbia University's Teachers College?

After all, we know that students have no money, poor parents have no money, but that the people funding Peterson and pals have a lot of cash. And when people pay for research... well, you've heard of Vioxx, right?

- Ira Socol

The Carnegie Unit

"Thus, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching encouraged the adoption of what came to be known as the Carnegie unit, which equates seat-time with learning. Each unit represented about 130 instructional hours. The Carnegie Foundation defined a unit as a course that met for a period each school day for about 50 to 55 minutes. The Carnegie unit continues to influence much that is crucial to teaching and learning in high schools–the length of the class period, the school day and the school year, as well as the time expended to receive a diploma." - StateUniversity.com

Does "time in seat" equal learning? Few have ever been sure, and I need to say, those who spurred the development of Carnegie Units between 1885 and 1915 were not sure.

Sitting in a chair and staring straight ahead is learning. The more we do do that, the more we learn. If that seems to be the underlying theory in your school, it is neither an accident of history nor a natural development. Rather, it is the result of a deliberate set of decisions made by business and educational leaders beginning about 120 years ago.

Back at the turn of the last century The Carnegie Foundation took standardization seriously. America's education system was already an oddly configured one, funded and operated locally - usually very locally - in often tiny school districts operating according to the cultural norms of wildly disparate population groups: America never quite embracing "nation" status within (a "single people") no matter how much "America" looked like an "idea" from abroad. As vast the differences which might lie between educational aspirations in Cornwall, Newcastle, and London (in England - which remained America's cultural model), or Bonn, Konigsberg, and Berlin (in Prussia - which was perceived as the model of modernity and efficiency), they paled beside the differences separating Salt Lake, Montgomery, and Boston - much less the thousands of miniscule towns hosting one-room schoolhouses across the vast North American continent.

Schoolhouses in Lincoln County, Kansas circa 1900

So for more than half a century, since the 1840s, the US had wrestled with the problem: They wanted the Prussian model - an efficient, universal, education system which would both knit a diverse "empire" together (as in historically separate and religiously diverse "Germany") and properly prepare the lower classes for compliant citizenship and labor - but - they lacked the central control authorities of European nations.

If schools were to develop American citizens and workers and, in Jefferson's theories, discover who was deserving of publicly funded advanced training, could all decisions really be left to local school boards?

"A bill for the more general diffusion of learning... proposed to divide every county into wards of five or six miles square;... to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools, who might receive at the public expense a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects, to be completed at an University where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts." - Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:399

The first attempts to create standardization were, naturally, through education. Educational journals appeared - almost always containing at least one monthly study of Prussian methods - to disseminate "best practices." "Normal Schools" were established to train teachers in those "common norms" of instruction, behavior management, and content knowledge. Some states went further: by the late 1860s New York State already had standardized exams for secondary knowledge based in European models, though in most places curriculum remained a purely local decision.

Thus, defeating Jefferson, universities were left to find the "genius" through very imperfect methods - or through wealth and birth. Post-secondary institutions devised their own admissions tests or strategies for those available spaces not given to the children of wealth and power. Who deserved the ultimate in education? In an age increasingly dominated by complex technologies, in which nations competed in inventiveness and creativeness (think Marconi, Tesla, Wright, etc.), how would genius be uncovered, trained, encouraged?

At Harvard the issues began to be raised to a new level. Charles W. Eliot, Harvard's President for 40 years (1869-1909), didn't think much of his institution's oral comprehensive admissions examinations. He also thought that education, like manufacturing, would benefit from standardization. Why might Student A, studying with Professor X, read twice as much as Student B, studying with Professor Y? How could either the newly appearing post-graduate schools, or employers, judge that?

So Eliot pioneered both the "contact hour" and the idea of "credit distribution." The former was seen as a way of proving work - work in America (outside of agricultural labor and women's piecework) was now routinely judged in hourly terms rather than accomplishment. The latter meant that students would be exposed to both the "classics" (which had dominated universities) and the contemporary mechanics and sciences (which had risen in importance since the appearance of the Land Grant College).

Michigan Agricultural College's "Laboratory Row" in 1912

And then, as now, industry and big business joined in. For business, consumed with standardization, industrialization, efficiency, and preparation of future workers, creating an effective training structure - replicated across the nation as, say, time zones had been, was essential. So, into the fray came the Carnegie Foundation, funded by the biggest businessman of them all, Andrew Carnegie.

That is not to say that all the goals of the Carnegie Foundation were evil. As in most things, there was a mix of limited world view and good intentions. The people surrounding Carnegie were envisioning a meritocracy based firmly in the Protestant work ethic. They saw themselves as creating a Horatio Alger-esque path to success through doing well in school via "objective" standards. Exactly the same motivations which lie behind No Child Left Behind legislation and much of the American charter schools movement.

A student in western Nebraska would, under the Carnegie formula, have the same four years of high school with essentially the same seat time on various subjects as a student in New York's leafy suburbs. A student studying chemistry at a university in Iowa would have the same four years of study with essentially the same seat time as a student studying chemistry at Harvard. It was all democratic and scientific. We would measure what was measurable.

A key Carnegie Foundation key report of the time, written by publishing executive Morris L. Cooke, was titled Academic and Industrial Efficiency, if we needed further evidence of the point. Education would be structured by time card. Education would be standardized. Education would be national.

Today

The Carnegie Unit lives with us today - truly, nothing structural has changed in US education since 1910. We still measure academics via seat time. We count our credits - both at the secondary and post-secondary level - by hours spent "in instruction" on specified subjects. Does it cripple us? Does it truly block reform? Does it prevent interdisciplinary instruction or open schooling?

"The unit affects the very way that knowledge is organized for instructional purposes, discouraging interdisciplinary teaching because of the difficult question of deciding how many units to attribute to each discipline. Those who would organize and convey knowledge differently inveigh against the "tyranny" of the Carnegie unit, asserting that seat-time is not a proxy for learning and that secondary schools must be flexible to engage students and to heighten learning." StateUniversity.com

The Carnegie Unit is a tyrant, but its tyranny is felt through attitude, not really through force of law. We see the power of the Carnegie divisions of knowledge because that is all most of us know. There are lots of ways around this.

My tenth grade "English class" and my tenth grade "Social Studies class" were one internship with the late night radio guy on WVOX-AM. Two nights a week I'd walk over to the "K" building in New Rochelle, NY and head down to the basement studios. There, I'd spend for 2 or 3 or 4 hours with the crazy overnight news guy. We'd ride around in the station's Vista Cruiser looking for news, or sit at the tape machines editing interviews, or grab stuff off the AP and UPI teletype machines. What did I learn? I learned editing (though not in print). I learned writing (though orally). I learned how news was constructed. I learned how radio actually worked. I learned how politicians spoke, and what news readers did not report from those conversations. I learned the structure of my "home town" in a whole new way. It was powerful stuff.

And in the end I signed off on my hours - more than enough, and claimed the two Carnegie Units. Yes, I had to take Regents Exams to complete the credits, but that simply involved a couple of weeks of nonsense fact cramming. I passed both - barely - but who cared? But if I hadn't, the problem would have been the standardized test, not the Carnegie Unit. Students in my high school picked up biology Carnegie Units working in the hospital or the city greenhouse, math Carnegie Units working with surveyors or architects, English Carnegie Units reading on their own or writing for the school newspaper - often two or even 3 to a year-long project or independent study. Even the courses we had challenged the Carnegie structure while operating within it.

In other words, Carnegie Units are a bad idea in practice, but they are not the real problem. Our problem is our lack of imagination - and our unwillingness to take real risks in changing a broken system.

Kill NCLB, kill the standardized test, kill the Carnegian/Bushian/Obamaesque belief in all children learning at the same rate, and you will break the essential chains holding back education.

But the Carnegie Unit - yes, it is an unfortunate remnant of good intentions run amok - but it is also a very easy roadblock to walk around.

- Ira Socol