Those with whom I network for learning purposes through Twitter, blogs, Nings, etc. are largely members of an amorphous educational technology community.  That community is fond of throwing around terms like “change” and “reform” connected to schools or education and most often the “change” or “reform” is largely related to advances in technology. The gist of the argument is that technology has changed the world we live in but not schools so schools need to catch up (or something to that effect).  Schools are becoming “dangerously irrelevant,” right Scott?

There are also frequent references to those other educators who do not “get it.”  Yet, it is never clear, at least to me, what the “it” is that other educators are supposed to “get.” There are references to School 2.0, Classroom 2.0,etc.  Significant technology integration is certainly implied, but even that is a loosely defined concept.

Many of the same individuals with whom I learn and interact online will be attending Educon 2.2. at the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadelphia this coming weekend.  That event will involve lots of conversations, largely around technology and the future of education. Chris Lehmann, the principal of SLA, has long been clear that Educon is not an educational technology conference.  In fact, the conference is guided by five axioms which you see below:

That’s not a bad starting point for framing the “it” that “others” are supposed to “get,” but like all standards, they are vague and high-minded.  I believe “we” (myself included) would all do well to think long and hard about what “it” is that “we” are aiming for and figure out a way to articulate “it.”

What troubles me more than an overall lack of an operationalized vision of the change that “we” want are the many flawed arguments made in favor of “it.” That is, to justify a vision that I argue is not clear from the start, there are a host of arguments being made within the amorphous ed. tech. community that are logically problematic. I summarize and briefly discuss some of those arguments below:

The “Digital Natives” Argument – yes, I’m well aware that “we” have largely denounced the digital natives-immigrants dichotomy, and I’m on board with that.  However, I see a new, related line of thinking that is equally problematic.  It has to do with the notion that kids are really comfortable with technology, they use it a lot, so we should bury them in it at schools too.  When the recent Kaiser Family Foundation report was released, it spread like wildfire among “our” networks/communities.  Here are the money lines: Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).  And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

Well, there you go. Given *that*, how can we NOT make our schools more “relevant?”  HOLD ON…what’s the logic there?  Just because that’s what kids do on their own time, that’s how we should engage them in schools?  Why is that exactly?  Maybe, actually, what we need to be doing is using that evidence to argue for maximizing face-to-face time.  In fact, this gives me even more reason to argue for the “flipped classroom” model that you see discussed here.  Let’s “disrupt” or “interrupt” kids time online by, where necessary, providing content or instruction via digital means so that when they come to school they can learn to interact with each other and learn socially while face-to-face.

The Economics Argument – this is the argument based, often, in the works of (non-economists) Daniel Pink, Richard Florida, etc.  It is a big part of presentations done by folks I admire greatly, including my friend/colleague Scott McLeod.  Watch and/or listen to Scott’s presentation to the NEA and you’ll hear a lot about the changing nature of the workforce and how we need to reform schools to meet those changing needs.

I get that, kind of.  Here’s the problem.  If you make that argument, you have to believe that one of the fundamental purposes of schooling is, in fact, to prepare kids for the workforce.  That’s not at all something I believe.  For me, first and foremost, schools are in the business of preparing kids to be active, productive citizens in a deliberative democratic society.  Schooling for citizenship and deliberation, not employment.  I want to remove all references to “workplace” or “workforce” or “economy” from any and all school mission statements.

If I argue or advocate for technology integration in schools, it is based on the idea that we need to recognize that the Web is causing us to rethink what citizenship means and is increasingly becoming a space where important deliberation happens (see e.g. the ways in which social media impacted the last presidential election in this country).  We need to help kids become deliberative  and to express their ideas and thoughts in productive ways in spaces that are digital and PUBLIC.

That said, building upon my notion of maximizing face-to-face time, let’s think about ways to use school time to foster civic engagement and deliberative habits. As far as I’m concerned, every kid should be required to take a debate class.

The Business Argument – this argument was bolstered by the publishing of Disruptive Class which is based on the theory of disruptive innovation developed by of one of the book’s authors, Clayton Christensen.  The general premise there is that technology will increasingly allow us to individualize/customize learning and makes learning possible anywhere/anytime and that is an innovation that will disrupt the model of formal schooling as we know it here…unless, of course, schools figure out a way to head off that disruption at the pass.

Let’s say we accept the book’s premise. Then what?  It was NEVER clear to me in reading the book what it is that schools need to do in order to not get “disrupted.”  Are student-centric learning technologies that customize learning the disruption or the prescription against disruption? I may be missing that, and if so, I’m willing to listen.  But, if “we” include the “Disrupting Class” thinking in “our” arguments, “we” need to be prepared to then tie the vision of the “it” that “they” are supposed to “get” to the logic of disruptive innovation.  In other words, it’s not enough just to say that the current model of schooling is going to be disrupted.

That said, I’m not accepting the book’s premise, largely because I’m missing the last link  in the chain of logic.  I also still don’t understand why the author’s went after K-12 education and not higher education.  Higher education is a choice (to a degree). Up to a certain age, though, public schooling is mandatory.  It’s also, for most people, a public enterprise and not a profit-driven one, and I don’t think the theory of disruptive innovation works in that context.  For a more thoughtful critique of Disrupting Class, I encourage you to read this critique by Andy Zucker of the Concord Consortium.

The “Bored Kid” Anecdote – OK, @bengrey, your turn under the bus. So, lots of attention was given to the story of Aaron Iba, the now former CEO of AppJet, the company that created EtherPad.  Ben wrote about Aaron’s story here.  Lisa Nielsen wrote about it here and here.  Aaron’s story is not a new one.  And, I know Ben and Lisa and others know that.  In fact, that was pretty much their point.  Since forever, kids have been bored in schools.

Well, guess what?  For all of the Aaron’s out there, I can point to a…well…me. School worked beautifully for me.  I’m the perfect anecdote for maintaining the status quo in schools.  I loved school. I got to learn, largely by myself, and that’s what I liked.  Teachers soothed my ego and made me feel smart and great and I achieved at high levels. So, why isn’t anyone blogging about me and how schools work?

Additionally, the Gladwellian tactic of finding a case to fit an a priori belief is not compelling to me.  I think case studies can be immensely interesting and meaningful, but only if done thoroughly and systematically.  Gladwell gives us bits and pieces of his cases and, as a result, we can’t know how well that case “fits” his theory because we don’t know enough about the case.  Same with Aaron Iba. Do we really have enough information here to know the whole story? To conclude that the schooling system failed Aaron? Writing a good case study is hard to do.  When done well, though, they are deep, rich narratives that are full of meaning; they aren’t meant to be “generalizable” though.

One last question about the “bored kid” anecdote: what makes you think the “it,” the “new” school or modes of learning that you apparently have in mind though haven’t quite fully articulated will be not boring for everyone?

In sum, then, I think “we” are putting broken carts before the horses. “We” are concentrating too much on the “why change” argument without first fully and clearly articulating what it is “we” want from schools.  Furthermore, the “why change” arguments, I argue (meta?), are fundamentally flawed.

There are lots of reasons for the institution of schooling to be transformed.  Likewise, there are lots of reasons to consider the affordances of ubiquitous computing for learning.  I ask you to help me think through those reasons in ways that are well-informed and logical…especially those of you with whom I hope to have fully maximized face-to-face experiences this weekend at Educon. I look forward to deliberating with many of you there!

]]> http://edinsanity.com/2010/01/29/the-logic-of-our-arguments/feed/ 22 http://edinsanity.com/2009/09/30/the-politics-of-education-blogging-tagging-etc/ http://edinsanity.com/2009/09/30/the-politics-of-education-blogging-tagging-etc/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:32:15 +0000 Jon Becker http://edinsanity.com/?p=388 I’m teaching a course called The Politics of Education to an awesome group of our doctoral students this semester. The wiki/syllabus (a living, breathing document) is located HERE. You can participate and help my students’ (and my own) learning in a couple of ways. First, tagging…anything that you think might be related to what the [...]]]>

I’m teaching a course called The Politics of Education to an awesome group of our doctoral students this semester.

The wiki/syllabus (a living, breathing document) is located HERE.

You can participate and help my students’ (and my own) learning in a couple of ways.

First, tagging…anything that you think might be related to what the course is about (see e.g. http://sites.google.com/site/edpolitics/syllabus) can be tagged with “adms707“.  I know, just about everything education-related is also about the politics of education, but that’s OK. Tag away. We will all be feeding Google Reader with a subscription to the tag and we can filter out what’s useful or not.

Second, please consider subscribing to and/or reading the blogs my students are using as reflection spaces.  You can get to individual blog posts HERE.  Or, you can see the blog URLs HERE.  Of course, comments are helpful as I want this blogging endeavor to be meaningful in a connectivist sort of way.

Thanks for considering being a part of our learning experiences this semester!

photo credit: helgasms!

A picture is worth…

SOURCE: Tyack, David (1974). The One Best System. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Page 286

I blogged.

For Wes Fryer.

Because I’m trying to steal the attention of his vast audience.

Click here to see the post if you’d like.

photo credit: AchimH

[NOTE: thanks to Scott McLeod for dreaming up this idea three years ago.  This is my contribution to Leadership Day 2009.  The Leadership posts I've already seen are great, and the collection of posts will ultimately make for an important and interesting contribution to the field of educational leadership.]

I have a doctorate in Politics and Education and when I’m asked what that means, I usually speak to a definition of politics I’ve “borrowed” (re-mixed?) from an adjunct professor with whom I took a course while in graduate school.  Dr. Dale Snauwaert, an adjunct professor at TC at the time, wrote about politics as the intersection of power and justice.  Combining my interests in the politics of education and educational technology, I’ve written much about justice and educational technology (see e.g. this article).  I have not, however, written much about power and educational technology…until now.

In my courses on the politics of education, I guide our exploration of power with two questions: (1) who has power? and (2) how is power organized/distributed?  Much has been written about who has power in the area of educational technology, though there’s more that needs to be written.  Today, though, I explore what I believe to be a major obstacle to school reform through the lens of educational technology: how power is distributed around educational technology.

Educational governance is ultimately about control and how that control is (or is not) partitioned among the various stakeholders matters immensely. I argue that in education, the system is multi-layered and overly partitioned.  I compare our educational system to onions and silos.

“The way authority is structured and exercised shapes the intellectual and moral character of the school, thereby profoundly influencing student development” (Snauwaert, 1993).

ONIONS

The U.S. education system is like an onion in that it has many levels and the more you try to peel away at those layers, the more you start to tear up.

Policy decisions are made by federal, state, and local education agencies.  Even locally, decisions are made at the district, school, department and classroom level.

In addition to aiding or hindering quality education, there are many consequences to the multilayered system, including the phenomenon of mutual adaptation (which I’ve written about here).  As McLaughlin wrote in an article in 1990 about school reform, “…it is exceedingly difficult for policy to change practice, especially across levels of government” (p. 12).

I was reminded of the onion last week at NECC, and my reflections from the conference reinforced my thinking.  The largest ed. tech. conference in the U.S. is nearly entirely classroom-focused and the conversations are nearly totally absent of policy context.  Yet, alongside NECC proper, SETDA (the umbrella organization of state education technology officers) was holding their Emerging Technologies Forum & Annual Convocation.  There was some overlap between the two events, but from my perspective, the state-level policy makers were meeting in parallel with the school and district-level folks at NECC.  Similarly, shortly after NECC, the Education Commission of the States held their annual National Forum on Educational Policy.

This sort of parellel play doesn’t advance anyone’s cause.

SILOS

Even within the same levels of decision making in education, we have a serious silo problem.  Like policymakers across levels of governance, educators within any given level exist and work within separate silos; i.e. they play in parellel.  Think of all the silos: subjects, grades, departments, etc.

One silo problem that is particularly problematic is the curriculum vs. technology distinction.  I’ve long wanted to do an examination of school district organizational charts to see how technology is related to curriculum.  I know that in some districts, they are separate departments, each with its own director.  In some districts, there is an IT department (hardware, networking, etc.) that is separate from the instructional technology folks who may or may not live/exist under the direction of the curriculum folks.

I used to do evaluation research for education technology vendors who would often tell me stories about the “curriculum witch.”  They would usually pitch their solution(s) to the technology department and come very close to making a sale only to have the “curriculum witch” show up at the 11th hour and declare the program/software/etc. inconsistent with the curriculum goals of the district.  I’m certain there has been wasteful spending across numerous districts because the “curriculum witch” never did intervene.

In Virginia, our ISTE affiliate is VSTE.  They recently moved their annual conference to an early December date.  In fact, their conference is November 30-December 2.  From December 2-December 4 is the annual conference of VAASCD, the Virginia affiliate of ASCD.  That organization is focused mostly on issues of curriculum and professional development.  That these conferences are back-to-back in different parts of the state makes it nearly impossible for anyone (myself included) to be able to attend both.  So, the technology people will meet with the technology people and the teaching/curriculum people will meet amongst themselves.  I know people who I respect greatly that lead each of these organizations and I’m not at all blaming anyone for this situation.  I’m only pointing this out as a situation that reinforces the silo problem about which I am writing.

I could go on, but I need to bring this around to Leadership Day 2009.  For me, true school reform will not happen until leaders at all levels and across the many silos get together to think about governance arrangements. Especially at a time when collaboration and communication are easier than ever, we need to work together across levels of government and annihilate the silos in our education agencies.  Tha t is a huge leadership challenge.

“The real work of learning happens in the classroom, in the interaction between teacher and student.  This interaction is affected by innumerable large and small decisions made by principals, school boards, superintendents, state legislatures, education department officials, and the federal government.  These decisions and their implementation can either aid or hinder quality education in the classroom.” (Committee for Economic Development, 1994, p. 2)

Photo Attributions:

• Leadership Day: Scott McLeod
• Onions: Darwin Bell
• Silo: Chris Knight

You couldn’t expect a guy with a doctorate in the politics of education to let the education portion of Wednesday night’s presidential debate go unchecked, could you?

Apparently, both candidates support charter schools.  No surprise from McCain; the Republican party tends to support most forms of school choice (that’s a gross generalization, but I’ll live with that for now). That Obama supports charter schools signals an interesting policy shift, assuming that Obama’s stance is representative of the Democraticy party as a whole (which it may very well not be).  I’m personally pretty mixed on charter schools.  On one hand, I think any policy or set of policies based in free market principles where perfect information on the part of consumers is assumed is highly problematic in the field of education.  On the other hand, these days I’m for anything that attempts to disrupt the status quo in public education.

And, speaking of “perfect information,” both candidates at least implied that charter schools “work” or that they are “effective” in some way (as opposed to voucher programs, where there seemed to be some disagreement).  Well, that’s less than perfect information.  Consider this study conducted as part of NAEP’s pilot study of charter school performance in 2003.  According to the executive summary for the report, “After adjusting for student characteristics, charter school mean scores in reading and mathematics were lower, on average, than those for public noncharter schools.”

I also bring your attention to more recent research conducted by colleagues and “social associates” (I’m not sure I can call them “friends,” but I have been out socially with them on multiple occasions) Sarah and Chris Lubienski.  Based on their analyses of NAEP data, Sarah and Chris concluded that “charter schools, privately operated and publicly financed, did significantly worse than public schools in the fourth grade, once student populations were taken into account.”

(BTW, teachable moment…the next sentence in the NYT article is as follows: “In the eighth grade, it found, students in charters did slightly better than those in public schools, though the sample size was small and the difference was not statistically significant.”  That’s a nonsensical statement.  If the differences were not statistically significant, then nobody did better than anybody else; not even slightly better.  So, the first part of the sentence cannot logically precede the second part.  This bugs me!)

The body of research on charter schools and school choice policies more generally has become overly politicized.  There are too many researchers with agendas dabbling in that field, and too many policy advocates who cherrypick a single study to support their argument.  However, in my reasonably well-informed opinion, the two studies above are as “independent” as they come.

So, Senators Obama and McCain, I’m in favor of exploring any and all educational policy options, including choice-based alternatives.  But, let’s please not mislead the American public.

On April 16 of this year, I wrote a post entitled “You say you want a revolution?“  In it, I wrote of true visions of the future of education, with particular reference to writing by Dale Mann and a white paper by Roger Schank and Kemi Jona.  I often ask my students to read the Schank/Jona paper to get them thinking about the possibilities for the future of education.  Mostly, my students have visceral reactions and think the ideas in the paper are outlandish and unrealistic.

Outlandish?  Maybe.  Unrealistic?  Nope.  In fact, I just learned that the VOISE Academy opened a week or so ago in Chicago.  It’s billed as a hybrid school, combining computer-based learning with face-to-face socialization opportunities.  As described, the school sounds a lot like what Schank and Jona suggest.

Well, as it turns out, one of the board members of VOISE Academy is…Kemi Jona!

It will be interesting to see how things go in that school.  I’m sure someone will be studying the school; nothing happens in Chicago without somebody studying it.  Some academic colleagues of mine have built entire research agendas around Chicago school reform.  For now, though, I wish VOISE had a better website. It’s a little hard to believe that this particular school launched with such a basic and incomplete website.

As the result of a quick Twitter back-and-forth, I told @JeffNugent and @mcglaysia that I would write a blog post about the research linking technology integration and student achievement.  A couple of points before I get into it:

• I have been the lead investigator on many (maybe a dozen or so?) studies aimed at examining the relationship between technology integration and student achievement.  These studies ranged from small studies (one or two schools) to federally-funded, statewide investigations.  So, I have a pretty decent practical understanding of this body of research and how the work gets done.  Some day I’ll write about the politics and the nitty gritty of this sort of work.  For now, though, I’ll just say that the old joke is more true than it is funny: “educational research is like sausage.  If you like to consume either one, you don’t want to watch it being made.”
• This pool of literature is deep and getting deeper all the time.  I can’t possibly get to everything.  In fact, I’m only going to cover those with which I am most familiar.  That means, I’m not necessarily presenting the “best” research; just those that I know of and that I think are reasonably respectable.
• The Ed. Tech. Action Network (ETAN) has done a decent job of summarizing some of the research.  You can find their page with lots of links here.
• Finally, I’m not terribly proud of my work in this area.  I know that advocates of ed. tech. say that we MUST show positive student achievement effects to move the policy agenda forward.  But, for me, student achievement, especially as typically measured in these studies, is not even close to the most important outcome we need to be considering when evaluating the impact of technology in education.  I’m much more interested in outcomes such as student engagement and student learning (as distinct from student achievement).

Anyway, onward…

*The study that’s getting the most attention and that is politically loaded is one that is still being undertaken.  Mathematica, Inc., along with SRI, two of the major independent research firms in the country, have been contracted to conduct The National Study of the Effectiveness of Educational Technology Interventions.  The project’s website contains all the information you need to know about the study, including the first report which was issued last year.  So far, after one year, according to the press release issued at the time of the release of the report, “On average, after one year, products did not increase or decrease test scores by amounts that were statistically different from zero.”  So, no link between tech. and achievement.  But, that was after one year. The next report should be out soon.

*I’ve been pleased with the amount of attention the West Virginia study I co-lead in 1998-99 has received over the last decade.  The report from that study documents fairly significant positive relationships between the use of computers and student achievement.

*Harold Wenglinsky has done some significant work in this field.  His first major study, conducted in 1998 while he was at ETS, demonstrated that under the right conditions, the use of computers in schools was positively related to math achievement.  More specifically, “higher mathematics scores were related to adequate access to computer technology (hardware, software, and overall infrastructure) in conjunction with teachers trained in technology use and the use of computers to learn new, higher-order concepts.”

*The USEiT (Use, Support, and Effect of Instuctional Technology) study, stands out to me for its high quality and for the quality of the many reports that have been disseminated from that one study.  Take a look, particularly, at Reports 10 and 13.  Of the many findings coming from that study, the researchers discovered that “students who reported greater frequency of technology use at school to edit papers were likely to have higher total English/language arts test scores and higher writing scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) than students who did not.”  I still use some of the scales that the USEiT researchers developed for my own work.

*Finally, and more recently, Missouri’s eMints program has been well-documented and thoroughly studied.  There’s an entire page of research reports, including the most recent analysis of student achievement.  eMints has been consistently positively associated with student achievement.

There’s more; gobs more.  If you cross-reference the works I’ve pointed to, you’ll be well on your way to collecting a critical mass of the work that’s been done in this area.

There’s quite a bit of really good edublogging and commenting that lies at the intersection of “change” and “21st Century Schools” (see e.g. Chris Lehmann’s blog and Will Richardson’s blog).  As one who has studied extensively the research and literature on school reform, school change, policy implementation, etc., I’m having a hard time with a few aspects of the conversations that are going on.

First of all, what are we changing?  Are we talking about a classroom (i.e. changing one teacher’s pedagogy?)?  Are we talking about changing multiple classrooms?  Are we talking about changing a whole school?  Are we talking about changing the whole institution of public schooling?  Those are all very different scenarios and require very different approaches.  And, it gets back to the macro vs. micro distinction I made in my last blog post.

More importantly, though, let’s please consider that there is a HUGE, DEEP pool of research and literature on school change. There’s not a huge need to re-think this stuff; there’s a lot to be learned from what has already been learned.

In the mid 1970′s, the Rand Corporation conducted a national study of four federally funded programs “intended to introduce and support innovative practices in the public schools.”  The Rand researchers examined a sample of 293 local projects funded by these four federal programs in 18 states.  This so-called “Change Agent” study remains the paragon of all “implementation” studies.  According to Milbrey McLaughlin (1990), one of the principal investigators on the Change Agent study:

“…the following strategies generally were seen to be ineffective:

• reliance on outside consultants
• packaged management approaches
• one-shot, pre-implementation training
• pay for training
• formal, summative evaluation
• comprehensive, system-wide projects

The following strategies generally were effective, especially when applied in concert:

• concrete, teacher-specific and extended training
• classroom assistance from local staff
• teacher observation of similar projects in other classrooms, schools, or districts
• regular project meetings that focused on practical issues
• teacher participation in project decisions
• local development of project materials
• principals’ participation in training (p. 12)”

Since the 1970′s we’ve learned even more about change and policy implementation.  McLaughlin revisited the study in an article in 1990.  Her main conclusion there was that some of the findings of the original study needed to be reconsidered, but mostly, things remained the same.  “A general finding of the Change Agent study that has become almost a truism is that it is exceedingly difficult for policy to change practice, especially across levels of government (p. 12)”  In one study I conducted, I was able to determine that of all the variance in student computer use across the country, less than 2% could be accounted for by differences in state-level policies.  An additional study of the effects of state-level policies on pedagogy showed that 3% of the variance in teaching practices could be attributed to state-level polcies.  As the Change Agent study taught us, effective change in schools doesn’t happen by “adoption,” it happens by mutual adaptation; the adaptation of a project or policy and the organizational setting to each other.

So, what does this all mean?  Well, I think we’d all to well to internalize the bullets above as a list of what works.  First, one-and-done, sit-and-git PD doesn’t work; it has to be ongoing and as close to the classrooms/teachers as possible.  Second, teachers must be included in the change process, especially as learners.  Third, leadership must be involved at all stages and at all levels.  Finally, change is interpreted locally and the context of the institution adapts along with the change.

I also want to bring our attention to the final bullet in the list of ineffective strategies: comprehensive, system-wide projects don’t work.  We can’t change the system all at once.  So, it seems to me that School 2.0 is going to have to come about in one of two ways.  Either we get enough teachers and leaders to understand why change needs to happen in their schools and HOW that happens effectively (and what not to do).  Or, we go outside the “system.”