Educational Insanity

[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.

I think I’m on to something here (of course I do; why else would I be writing this?)…

A. There have been smatterings of dissatisfaction with the recently concluded NECC, particularly among the more experienced and “followed” edubloggers (see e.g. Will and Karl)

B. Great discussions about systemic educational change have been occurring in the edublogosphere, especially over at Chris Lehmann’s blog and Will Richardson’s blog.

I think part of the reason for A is a desire for what’s being discussed in B.

I say that because NECC (the subject of A) is ALL about the micro.; it’s about pedagogy, classroom tools, projects, etc.    The subject of B is macro; it’s about changing the “system.”

So, here’s my proposal.  Let NECC (and ISTE) be what it is; a place to learn about technology integration; a VERY important place for LOTS of educators.  CoSN’s annual conference, on the other hand, is the place where learning and conversations about policy, leadership, change can happen.  Apparently, CoSN doesn’t think professors (or higher ed. more generally) are worthy of attending their shindig, but I’m likely to crash their party next year (besides, I’ve been dying to go to Austin, TX anyway!).

By now you’ve perhaps read the Time magazine article, seen the New York Times ad, and/or read/heard elsewhere about this “movement” dubbed “The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” spearheaded by Lawrence Mishel, Helen Ladd, Pedro Noguera and Tom Payzant. The list of signatories reads like a who’s who of educational and/or social policy and is notably diverse (hey, even Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch signed on together!).

If the full statement that this task force created looks familiar, it may be because these folks are clearly regular readers of my blog and ripped off almost all of my ideas from THIS POST nearly a month ago. OK, that’s probably not true, but I must admit that I feel sorta proud to have written a summary of my beliefs about education that overlaps so extensively with this “broader, bolder approach”. Consider the following comparison:

So, other than the fact that I’m a brilliant scholar of educational policy, what does this mean? Not much. And, overlap notwithstanding, I think this “bigger, bolder” approach does not go nearly far enough. For example, they write that the approach, “assigns value to the new knowledge and skills that young people need to become effective participants in a global environment, including citizenship, creativity, and the ability to respect and work with persons from different backgrounds.” Those are definitely important and worthy skills and dispositions (especially “creativity”), but what about 21st Century Skills such as digital literacy? I think it’s worth pointing out that there are no signatories that represent the ed. tech. community. No Tim Magner. No Don Knezek.

Also, I believe the approach is purposefully broad about outcomes, but I don’t see enough of an emphasis on learning.

I could go on, but I’ll stop now and wallow in my brilliance (-:

I’m sure I’m not the first to write about this, but Scott McLeod delivered his latest list of the (potentially) top 50 P-12 education blogs and he got me thinking. The list is what it is…a ranking based on one metric: how many other blogs (and blogs only) have linked to a given blog. As long as Scott’s clear about that, which he very well is, then readers can make what they want of the list.

I commented, noting first that the list overwhelmingly consists of ed. tech. focused blogs. There are many reasons for this, most notably that blogging requires some technological awareness and a little bit of tech. savvy that ed. tech. folks are most likely to have. I also noted my surprise not to see certain educational policy bloggers on the list, such as Sherman Dorn, Matthew Tabor, Alexander Russo and Gary Stager (who I see as more of a bridge blogger). Dorn’s been blogging practically since I was born, and I learn more from him than just about any of the other bloggers I read.

I’m still searching for the right metaphor, because I don’t know that “echo chambers” is quite right; maybe it is, though. According to Wikipedia, “[m]etaphorically, the term echo chamber can refer to any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an ‘enclosed’ space.” I’ve gotten myself in trouble in the past for suggesting that the edtechblogosphere is a closed space, so I have to be careful here. But, I’ve noticed that the ed. tech. folks on Scott’s list all tend to comment on each other’s blogs and they all tend to communicate with each other via Twitter and other communication media. There are LOTS of REALLY valuable reasons for that, mostly that there is lots of co-learning going on that way. [NOTE: I've noticed that the same sort of "echo chamber" exists for the ed. policy bloggers, although the echoes there are less frequent and more muted (IMHO), and I don't know that there's much electronic communication going on between them beyond the blogs].

So, maybe rather than a closed space, then, a problem as I see it is that there are very few nodes connecting the unfortunately and unnecessarily distinct networks (i.e. the ed. tech. networks and the ed. policy networks). When Gary Stager called out the ed. tech. bloggers for failing to write about the Reading First study, he (purposefully or not) served as a node/bridge but also pointed out just how little overlap there is between the tech. and policy networks. A few commenters thanked Gary for pointing out the “story”.

I’m problematizing this disconnect because, for me, it is symptomatic or an extension of the sort of compartmentalization that plagues the education sector generally. I believe that one of the reasons our public schools have not experienced rapid technological change is because the ed. tech. folks are treated as separate. Leaders and decision makers don’t really understand the issues, so they delegate it to the geeks and wireheads (I use those terms lovingly). It’s the same way with, for example, special education. Leaders and decision makers don’t really understand all of the laws, regulations, etc., so they delegate authority to THAT department and THOSE educators. We have the same problems in schools and colleges of education. For example, I work in a department of educational leadership. Separately, we have a Department of Special Education and Disability Policies. So, let’s say an educator wants to pursue a doctorate with the idea of serving as a special education policymaker or an assistant superintendent for special education. To which program does that educator apply?

We need more integration in education and less compartmentalization; fewer echo chambers. After all, everything is miscellaneous, right?