[NOTE: please excuse the lack of gender neutral language in the title of the post. Despite my nausea, I thought making the language gender neutral would render the title meaningless to most.]

There has been no shortage of efforts to compare the institution of public schooling to other disciplines or industries. Business and medicine are the two that I’ve encountered most often. Well, today, I read an article in the New York Times magazine about the music industry that had me thinking quite a bit about public school educators. The article is called “The Return of the One Man Band” (probably requires login) and focuses largely on how solo artists can make great and sophisticated music thanks to technological advances. As the author writes, “advances in recording and performance technology now make it possible for musicians not only to fire the drummer but also — if so inclined — to do away with accompaniment altogether without losing the richness, or seemingly the spontaneity, of a full-size band.”

I don’t know that there’s a perfect analogy to education, but I have noticed that high-end technology using educators do tend to operate as solo artists. That is, often with no other choice, they perform their artistry on their own without support from others. My own research demonstrates that the vast majority of all of the variance in technology use is within schools and not between schools. And, though I don’t have the data to support this argument, I would hypothesize that if we looked at the use of technology by school leaders, we would see that the vast majority of all of the variance in technology use is between schools, not within districts. A district technology coordinator, in a recent conversation, told me that the early adopters of technology in the classrooms were considered “the lunatic fringe;” and that hasn’t changed.

The musician featured in the NYT magazine piece, Owen Pallett, is quoted as saying, “I think one-man bands are a rising trend. The era of solo performers…is pretty much done. There aren’t any new solo performers out there that are interesting; now it’s all this assisted-performance type of thing.” Assisted-performance type of thing, huh? For those of you lunatic fringe who read my blog, do you think of yourself as a one-person band doing an assisted-performance type of thing?

Tags: education, music, performance, technology