All posts in Education Reform

A Better Answer

Posted January 15th, 2012 by Bill

Friday night, while walking our dog, my wife and daughter met a family of five. Of the three children, the middle girl was around seven - close to the same age as my daughter. The oldest - a boy - was ten, and the youngest - a toddler between a year and eighteen months - occupied a stroller. It was cold last night in Portland, and the toddler was bundled up with extra clothes and blankets. The father asked my wife for money.

"The shelters are full," he said. "We're on the waitlist at all the ones we called."

"And we're not going to Portland Mission," the mother said. "I don't know if you've ever seen that place, but you can't bring kids in there."

When my wife and daughter met them, they were on their way back to Safeway. "It's warm in there," the mother said. They were trying to get money for a hotel for the night.

"But even a bench outside Safeway is better than Portland Mission," the father said.

And my wife and daughter helped them out as best they could, but it wasn't enough, because really, in that context, what does enough even look like?

Afterwards, as my wife, daughter, and I talked about it, my wife was struck by the feeling that they were new to the street. "He talked about how people are really possessive of corners," she said. "He was ashamed, but he was having a hard time finding a good spot to ask for money."

And today, I read about Samantha Garvey, a kid whose family had been evicted just before New Years, and how she is a finalist in a national science fair, and how her family is getting a home - and I am really excited to read about her success, but the happiness I feel for her is leavened, because I can't get around the fact that there are thousands of families just like Samantha's who will not be written about in the national press, and who will not be getting off the street, into a shelter, or a home. They will be going precisely nowhere, at least not anytime soon.

And at some point, the three kids my family met last night will end up in school, somewhere. And my hope is that the teachers who have the opportunity to work with them to further their education will have the tools - the money, the time, the resources, and the support - to give them what they need. And I hope that the work these teachers and these students do will be judged and assessed on its own merits, against the backdrop of its own distinct context.

Within the current educational reform discussions, it's very fashionable to say that poverty is not destiny and that things would get better if we could only fire more bad teachers. And, in a very general sense, these truisms - like all truisms - are general enough to resemble something that might even be true. But these oversimplifications - like many of the "obvious" solutions to "fixing" education - break, hard, against the uniquely human conditions within which people are expected to learn. The specifics of the various educational settings are often left out of the discussion, as they don't fit neatly into a truism that makes a good sound bite.

And each day, families drift into homelessness, the distance between the very rich and the very poor continues to increase, social mobility continues to decrease - and against this backdrop, with 22 percent of the children in the US living in poverty, with just under 24 percent of children living in households that experience food insecurity, we need to drop the pretense that education, poverty, and health are separate issues.

Today, my daughter and I drove down Sandy Boulevard, and she looked for the family she met last night. We didn't see them.

She sat back in her seat. "Do you think they found a hotel?" she asked.

"I don't know," I told her. "I hope so."

She wasn't satisfied with that. She likes more precision. She likes to know.

I didn't have a better answer.

Khan Academy: Data, Design, and Open Content

Posted November 20th, 2011 by Bill

It's pretty safe to say that Khan Academy arouses strong feelings; one of the barriers in appreciating what Khan Academy actually delivers is how Khan Academy is typically described. However, the conversations about Khan Academy often get bogged down in the goals and plans for the growth of Khan Academy, as opposed to how Khan can be used. In this post, I want to start with the basics: the elements of Khan Academy that are highlighted within the user interface (UI).

The basic premise of Khan - as reflected in the UI - is all about streamlining time on task, as defined by watching videos and working through problem sets.

The dashboard that measures student progress hews closely to these defined goals. A person can see how much time they have spent watching videos, working on problem sets, and how effective they have been at working through these problem sets.

The curriculum is organized into a series of related problem sets, and people can see their progress reflected in the overall scope and sequence, or as part of the grid that ties the quizzes together within a curricular scope.

The game mechanics keep the focus on working within the confines of the site, with students being rewarded for time on task, and for getting questions right. These game mechanics are baked into a student's work on the site; as a student works on problems, windows pop up and inform them that they can move on to a new exercise, or that they have earned a badge.

From the 30,000 foot view, Khan Academy appears to have given people a means to track progress across computerized tests, with tutorial videos provided to give background on a subject. As part of the package, teachers can monitor the work of their students; in the language used within the Khan Academy UI, this is called "coaching."

What's missing, of course, is any comparable emphasis on open ended thinking, or of problem solving that goes beyond quizzes that have a clear right or wrong answer. Also, while participants have the freedom to chart their own course through the video collection, the fact that people can choose their own path through a large set of videos does not change the fact that - from the perspective of an individual learner - a video collection, no matter how large, no matter how often the videos can be rewound and rewatched, is still just a video collection.

As others have noted, the pedagogical strategy of Khan Academy isn't new, despite the energy and zeal of people proclaiming the arrival of the “flipped classroom.” The notion of providing quality resources to students for asynchronous use outside of class -- and using class time for higher level problem solving, collaboration, and student-led inquiry -- feels pretty familiar to a lot of teachers, despite the fact that many bloggers, pundits, and policymakers seem to be stumbling upon the ideas only recently.

But Khan Academy delivers on two things, better than anything or anyone else has to date. First, the existence of the dashboard within the Khan Academy app has the potential to transform the way educators think about using and accessing data on student progress. The dashboard within Khan Academy is, at this writing, limited by what Khan Academy tracks - time on task, correct and incorrect answers on quiz problems - but even that limited info gives teachers (or "coaches," in KA-speak) the ability to help students in a more timely way. When I see the dashboard in place in KA, I imagine how much more effective a teacher could be if the dashboard was itself an opportunity for interaction between learners - what if, for example, a student could flag that they were stuck on a rough draft, or on a lab, or in using physics as a tool to improve their communities? Expanding the scope of what people can interact about is, at its core, a design issue. The data is there, but simple means to visualize and interact around that data are in short supply. The tools within Khan Academy provide a good starting point for conversations about the value of design within education.

The second thing that Khan has made more accessible is the value of openly licensed educational resources. All material on Khan Academy is licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license, which ensures that these resources, and any subsequent improvements, will remain freely available. Because of the enormous generosity of Salman Khan, and the resources he has marshalled into this effort, the world now has an enormous body of good quality material that can be used to learn about a broad range of subjects. The body of material within Khan Academy can be used to replace large sections of traditional textbooks. The support of high-visibility donors has given these resources a credibility that other openly licensed materials, for whatever reason, have never enjoyed. Salman Khan's effort and vision in building a large body of openly licensed material has shifted the way people think about open content. Partnerships with SmartHistory, and the plans to include community-created material within Khan Academy, will widen the breadth of content within Khan Academy, while ensuring that this new material remains freely available, freely modifiable, and freely reusable in perpetuity. Potentially, Khan Academy will be accessible enough that people will realize that textbooks provided by the publishing industry are an unnecessary expense we can all live without.

When We Talk About Merit Pay In Education, Is This What We're Talking About?

Posted October 24th, 2011 by Bill

From Goldman Sachs Reports $428 Million Loss

Goldman Sachs, weighed down by problems in its private equity portfolio and the broader global economic woes, reported a loss of $428 million, compared with a $1.7 billion profit a year ago.

From later in the same article:

The quarterly loss is likely to translate into smaller bonuses for Goldman's roughly 30,000 employees. So far this year, the firm set aside $10.01 billion to pay compensation and benefits, down 24 percent for the same period in 2010. Firms accrue compensation all year and pay it out in the fourth quarter.

While Goldman has set less money aside to pay employees, the ratio of compensation and benefits to net revenue in the third quarter was 44 percent, in line with previous accruals. Goldman, like most Wall Street firms, has been cutting staff in recent months. At the end of the third quarter, it had 34,200 employees, down 1,300, or nearly 4 percent, from just three months ago.

To translate: Goldman Sachs has fired a bunch of people, and, on average, those remaining are getting paid at the same rate as before.

When education "reformers" talk about merit pay, is this an example of how it should work? If a school tried to get away with this, politicians, pundits, and corporate reformers would be tripping over themselves to make an example of the wastefulness of the organization. But, when an investment bank does this, it's just another example of how the "best" and "brightest" need "incentives" to stay loyal.

Image Credit: "Bird stealing meat" taken by Tambako the Jaguar, published under an Attribution No Derivatives license.

Khan Academy Is Better Than (Most Of) The Writing About Khan Academy

Posted August 10th, 2011 by Bill

I've been spending some time recently looking at Khan Academy from a few different angles. This is something I probably should have done earlier, but I was so put off by some of the writing about Khan Academy that I almost made the mistake of discarding the subject because of the ill-formed praise directed at it. And this would have been unfortunate, because there is a lot to like about Khan Academy.

But getting into Khan Academy can be difficult if you actually read about it first, because many of the writers who attempt to cover Khan Academy invariably use Khan Academy as a vehicle for some other narrative about education.

From the Huffington Post:

Khan says his personal view is that "teachers unions don't act in the interest of most teachers. Many of the best teachers I know are being laid off because their unions value seniority over intellect, passion, creativity and drive."

Quotations like this - quotations that fetishize youth, and perpetuate the myth that an experienced teacher can't be intellectually curious, passionate, creative, or driven - really don't help. Generalizations about any profession are bound to be inaccurate. The fact that Salman Khan can make good videos shouldn't delude anyone into thinking he knows about teacher professional development, or the craft of working with kids.

We get this gem from Fast Company:

As thousands of college students graduate with no hope for employment, and the United States continues to lag behind others in math and science, citizens will be seeking some type of change. Perhaps Khan’s proposals are as likely as any.

This quotation is notable because it perpetuates the narrative that US scores are failing wholesale, and it embeds this narrative in an otherwise worthless puff piece on Khan Academy.

But, as we see here, if we actually look at the effect of socioeconomic status, the kids of rich people in the US get a great education. It's only the poor folks who get shortchanged.

One of the more notable articles about Khan comes from Clive Thompson at Wired. In the interest of brevity, I limited myself to only selecting one quotation from this article, but really, it is sufficiently bad to be worthy of several posts shredding its nearly infinite inadequacies.

Reformers today, by and large, believe student success should be carefully tested, with teachers and principals receiving better pay if their students advance more quickly and getting canned if they fall behind. They’re generally in favor of privately run charter schools and hotly opposed to the seniority rules of the teachers’ unions, if not the existence of unions altogether.

This quotation perpetuates the falsehood that all people looking to improve schools see unions as the problem, and more testing, more charter schools, and merit pay as the solution. It's unclear whether this fallacy is executed due to bad writing, intellectual laziness, or utter cluelessness about the educational landscape, but, for example, the folks at the Save Our Schools March are clearly interested in reform, yet share none of the attributes cited by Mr. Thompson.

But here's the thing: despite the hype machine in place behind Sal Khan, what he has created is actually better than the hype lets on. It's also different than the hype; the people hyping it are missing some of the better aspects of Khan Academy.

Over the next few days, I'll be putting out some additional posts looking at other aspects of Khan Academy. As I said earlier, the low quality of much of the writing about Khan Academy almost dissuaded me from looking at it altogether, and that would have been a mistake.

For those of you looking for examples of good writing about Khan Academy, look no further than Audrey Watters over at Hack Education. Her recent post, as well as her past writings on Khan, provide a good overview.

Image Credit: "Facepalm" taken by Santiago García Pimentel, published under an Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike license.

Unconferences! For All My Friends! Or, Putting the You in Unconference

Posted June 6th, 2011 by Bill

Unconferences, peer-driven professional development, and teacher-centered professional development are all things I would like to see become more widely adopted. With the process of meeting and having an unconference becoming more familiar, and with EdCamp, a new flavor of unconference gaining visibility in the space, I've been thinking about ways that unconferences could become more prevalent as a recognized, even mainstream, form of professional development.

As luck would have it, I tend to think when I cook, and this last weekend was prime grilling weather. So, here are some reasonably well-charred thoughts about how I would love to see K12-focused unconferences grow and develop.

Reach out to union leaders and district officials

EdCamp appears to be more popular among the educators already active on Twitter or other social networks, and they occur largely outside the structure of the organizations in which the participants work. As part of an excellent broader post, Dan Callahan provides a brief explanation of the thought process:

[E]arly on in the planning process, we made some serious decisions in support of our vision of what Edcamp is and should be. Foremost among those was the decision to not pursue PD credits for Edcamp. In these early stages that we’re working in, Edcamp needs the high-energy, hungry for participation crowd. Without those kinds of participants, Edcamp falls flat on its face.

While I understand some of the concerns here, I disagree with the conclusions for an unconference at this stage. To start, the "high energy, hungry for participation crowd" will come regardless, because they want what the camp offers. For the first EdCamp Philadelphia, pursuing PD credits would have been premature, as the nature and value of the event were unproven. However, now that there have been two of these events in Philadelphia, and people can articulate the value of the event, it is time to rethink the value of PD credits.

PD credits would help get more teachers into the mix, and if we have confidence in the model we need to welcome other voices with different viewpoints, and different concerns and needs. If what we want is a face to face meeting of people we know via twitter, then PD credits aren't needed - let's just have a tweetup and call it a day. If, however, we want to move beyond a small portion of professional educators, PD credits would help.

Having PD credits available for unconference-style events creates some additional opportunities that would not exist otherwise. As just one example, if an EdCamp was available to teachers within selected districts on a district-wide teacher professional development workday, teachers could opt to attend the EdCamp as one of several choices.

Also, to be clear: the main reason I am advocating for increased outreach to unions and district administrators is not because their approval or sanction is critical to running a successful K12 centered unconference, or even for current models of K12 unconferences to gain increased popularity. The main reason that union leaders and district admins need to get included into the conversation is to educate them about how unconferences work, and how they are an effective form of professional development. A smart union leader would do well to look at the unconference model, as it provides a clear way for more people to understand the value of an experienced teacher. Veteran teachers have a wealth of experience to share, and the unconference format is an ideal way to do it.

And, if reaching out to district admins and unions can save just one school from the drive-by intellectual mugging of a Willard Daggett, then our work is done.

Encourage more sharing of immediately usable knowledge

Gerald Aungst sums it up nicely:

I seem to be missing the steak, and I’ve been wondering why. It got me thinking about why edcamp still feels powerful and important to me, even though I walk away from many sessions feeling as though nothing of substance actually took place.

Given that unconferences are driven by the needs and desires of the participants, this is an easy one to address: if you want to learn about something, run a session on it. Use the session as an excuse to push your own mastery and exploration of a topic you want to know better. A session designed for teachers to share insights on how they structure their classrooms would be incredibly useful, and it would be made more useful by having students join the conversation.

Another way to help get more immediately useful information would be to give every participant a piece of paper on the way in with the question, "What is the single most useful classroom technique you have ever used?" The sheets could be collected after lunch, and conference organizers could collate and blog the responses. At the risk of stating the obvious, if you want different information, ask a different question.

Or, teachers could just blog about the techniques that they have used in the class, with no EdCamp necessary. If EdCamp attendees interested in gleaning practical tips made a point of asking fellow attendees about ideas and tools that could be implemented immediately - and then blogging these ideas - a body of classroom-tested practices would emerge out of an unconference format.

And, of course, if you are in a session and are at a loss about how to connect the abstract to the practical, ask the room to help you do just that. And then blog about it, so other people can share the knowledge.

Don't drink your own kool aid

People are excited about EdCamp, and that's great, but let's not get carried away.

[T]he edcamp philly crew met at a similar venue, Barcamp Philly. I can not say that I directly learned a single usable thing at that conference but going changed my life. It was meeting Dan, MaryBeth, Kevin, Hadley, Kim, Kristen, Rob and introducing them to my sister Chrissi and Collegaue Nicolae that spawned a international movement in education (emphasis added).

As I said earlier, I'm really glad to see people using the unconference model within education. These concepts have been developed and honed within open source, blogging, design, and software development communities, and they receive continual use within these communities because they work. People within education can learn from this pre-existing practice. The EdCamp organizers reference Barcamp as an inspiration, but current barcamps borrow liberally from practices used in Lightning Talks, Pecha Kucha, Ignite, and Birds of a Feather sessions, to name a few. And this is all good, as we all benefit from using different ways of working and communicating with our peers. But it would be myopic to imagine that unconferences would be as accepted within the education world if these other types of unconferences hadn't been happening in other areas.

It's also worth noting that education-related unconferences are nothing new either. Bloggercon, in 2003, addressed education and included a full unconference day. Since at least 2003, the open source labs and meetups that Paul Nelson, Jeff Elkner, Paul Flint, and (starting in 2006) Steve Hargadon, ran at NECC were unconference-like, with the potential for people to engage in inquiry-driven/peer-driven learning. The EduBloggerCons that Steve Hargadon started running - beginning in Atlanta in 2007, and continuing in different forms to the present day - are education-focused unconferences. It's also worth noting that the National Writing Project has been doing unconference-like professional development since the late 70's. Northern Voice has been running strong since 2005.

In short, there's a lot of prior art here. It's all - including EdCamp - good work. But branding something that is both relatively new on the scene, and relatively similar to past and present endeavors an "international movement" is the type of hyperbolic overreach we can do without. Education doesn't need Don King or Don Trump; we need smart people doing good work. Leave the marketing copy for the people who don't have real skills.

Overblown claims diminish credibility. Let the work speak for itself.

Strive for jargon-free zones

I recognize that this is a tall order, but we need to move away from jargon when we describe what we do. We don't need to talk about how we collaborate within our PLN's; we need to describe how we connect and learn from people in informal settings. Retreating into jargon obscures the work and the process that makes the experience valuable.

Along these same lines, any discussion of tools (I love site X or software Y! It's shiny!) needs to be grounded in specific learning opportunities that wouldn't be possible (or as accessible) otherwise. Chasing the horizon is fun, but the run needs to be worth it.

Eliminating jargon and eliminating an initial focus on the tools acts as a sanity check. This also helps make the ideas we are discussing more accessible to a broader audience.

Conclusions

Unconferences will continue to increase in popularity for two simple reasons: they work, and more people are getting comfortable participating within them. With small, targeted adjustments, the current reach of education-focused unconferences can be extended. But, given that the power of the unconference is within the participants, we all have a role and responsibility here. If there is something you want to see happen, step up.

The Disingenuous Arguments Against Experience

Posted June 6th, 2011 by Bill

There are a few different wrinkles in the arguments against seniority-based layoffs, but the point people lead with most frequently is that we need to do everything possible to make sure we keep the best teachers in the classroom.

The argument comes in many flavors, but the quotation below is a fair representation:

I assumed that because my students were proficient or advanced in all subject areas that I would remain in the classroom. Don't school districts want to retain passionate and effective teachers?

However, meeting the stated goal - keeping as many effective teachers in the classroom as possible - does not come directly from ending the use of experience as a criteria in determining how teachers are retained.

People who want to end using experience as a criteria for retaining teachers attempt to make this issue appear simple. However, this oversimplification comes with some baggage. Let's unpack.

Last In First Out versus Teachers as Professionals

The people who advocate ending the use of experience as a factor in how teachers are retained have come up with a catchphrase to identify what they see as the problem: Last In First Out. Renaming the issue is a key factor in all PR/Marketing campaigns, but it attempts to mask the reality that teaching, like most skilled jobs, requires experience as a means to mastery. The publicity campaign against experience is designed to convince people that firing experienced teachers will help us keep better, less experienced teachers.

In other words, they want us to believe that teaching is a job where one doesn't get better over time. However, it's difficult to see where attacking the professionalism and organizational worth of people who have made teaching a career helps improve education, or the lives of the kids who depend on it.

Ending Last In First Out is not the same as keeping the most effective teachers

When teachers are getting laid off, effective teachers are losing their job, no matter what criteria is being used. Any time we are talking about firing a teacher for anything except poor performance, we are talking about removing effective teachers from the classroom. This has nothing to do with Last In First Out, nothing to do with doing right by kids, and everything to do with economics.

People who advocate for ending the use of experience as a factor in hiring and firing decisions often select an individual that appears to prove their point. Of course, a sample size of 1 makes for an emotional story, but that emotional story should not actually be confused with system-wide truth.

Inexperience is not more valuable than Experience

In these simple discussions, the subtext is that the inexperienced teachers are worth keeping, and that the experienced teachers are burnt out and wasting student time. This facet of the conversation reduces both new teachers (young, idealistic, exuberant, energetic, untouched by the system) and experienced teachers (bitter, burnt out, unimaginative, counting days until retirement) to caricatures, but the overall gist is that experience in teaching is not an important asset. And the subtext here is that anyone who has spent more than twenty years teaching must have only done so because they weren't talented enough to do anything else because everyone knows that anyone with any talent either becomes an administrator or changes careers because really, teaching is thankless and the pay sucks.

No other profession treats its most experienced professionals with such callous disregard. Experience matters; an experienced educator teaches more than just the students in his or her classroom. An experienced educator can help shape the practice of new teachers, can help train new administrators, and can provide a poise and balance and perspective that comes from living through decades of transformation in the educational world. These assets help students, and they help shape a school culture.

An additional subtext of this facet of the conversation is that a smart, energetic, untrained person is more effective than an experienced, trained professional. This ties into the ongoing efforts and funding of organizations like Teach For America.

Ending Last In First Out will have a negligible affect on recruiting new talent

Another argument against the value of experience is that new teachers won't join the profession because they are afraid they will be fired:

I consistently see newly credentialed teachers obtaining positions but then losing them after just a year or two. After spending countless hours and dollars in graduate school, they wind up working as instructional assistants, leaving California to teach elsewhere or abandoning the profession altogether.

This line of reasoning reveals the divide between the reality of how education is funded and our rhetoric about how education matters. As people are quick to point out, these are difficult economic times. However, they are less quick to point out that, unless you work for one of the companies that helped destroy our economy in the first place, job security isn't that good anywhere. If our goal is to retain dedicated teachers, it seems to make sense to retain the ones who have shown a commitment to the profession, and can in turn pass down what they know to their younger, less experienced colleagues.

If we want to retain new teachers, we need to pay them well, provide them with opportunities for meaningful professional development, and create a legal and social framework that acknowledges that teachers are professionals.

Occasionally, the language around the importance of a talented teacher circles around to how not valuing experience will somehow increase professionalism:

Educators are able to change kids' lives. We need our laws to reflect the reality that teachers are, in fact, those who can.

This is true. Teachers change lives, and the laws passed need to reflect this. But, rather than simplifying the process of firing teachers (at any level of experience) the laws we need to examine are the laws that fund our schools, pay for teachers, pay for ongoing professional development, and pay for meaningful assessments of student, teacher, and administrative growth. These are the laws that need the greatest adjustment. We should focus our efforts on means that allow us to put more teachers in the classroom, not get rid of more teachers with less effort.

This argument is doubly pernicious because it brings the connotation that the current group of teachers are not professional, and that their professionalism needs to be elevated via legislative intervention.

Ending Last In First Out is predicated on the notion that current methods of determining teacher effectiveness actually work

Even the proponents of Last In First Out acknowledge that they have no current method of evaluating teachers. This proponent of ending Last In First Out in Georgia freely admits this fact:

I hope that after this important step, now Georgia will go even one step further to adopt a process that rewards excellence in teaching, borrowing successful performance and evaluation models from other industries. School systems should determine teacher effectiveness through a combination of performance evaluation, attendance, classroom management, experience and extra school responsibilities.

The irony is, the methods that "reformers" want to "borrow" are often of dubious merit. We know how to evaluate teachers, just as we know how to evaluate students. A blended approach that included peer review, self review, teacher-driven learning goals, formative assessment of student progress, summative assessment of student progress, and administrative review would give us a great idea of what constituted effective teaching.

Conversations we are not having

Unfortunately, when we are talking about whether or not experience should be valued, there are more important conversations that are not taking place.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about the effects of poverty, hunger, and health on learning.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about the folly of slashing spending on education.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about methods of evaluation that work for and empower students.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about more effective means of teacher professional development.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about the difficulty of teaching a curriculum you had no role in choosing within an evaluative framework designed by politicians who have little to no classroom experience.

For the reform advocates who want to devalue professional experience, Last In First Out is a great wedge issue because it weakens unions, pits teachers against one another, and gives implicit value to unproven standardized tests - and it can achieve these goals "for the good of the children." However, learning is more complex than that, and the attempts to shoehorn important arguments into talking points and videos does everyone a disservice.

Image Credit: "you're out" taken by .sanden, published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Educational Programs That Work: Funding the National Writing Project

Posted April 10th, 2011 by Bill

On March 2, Congress removed funding for the National Writing Project.

The National Writing Project has a nearly 40 year track record of success. The program costs 25.6 million dollars, and reaches 130,000 teachers and more than 1.4 million students in over 3,000 districts. It also provides a great model of how a national program can provide structure and assistance for local programs without eroding local control. More importantly, it's a model of teacher professional development that scales, and National Writing Project programs help students learn.

The National Writing Project makes an easy target because it is a relatively quiet, modest program. Despite nearly 4 decades of success, they don't use the hyperbolic rhetoric that marks much of the current discussion around education reform. They don't oversell what they do, or oversimplify the amount of work required to enact meaningful change. And unlike many of the newer crop of educational reformers, when they talk about helping kids learn, their conversation is shaped by people who have direct experience working with kids. People working with the National Writing Project tend to focus less on marketing their work, and more on actually doing the work of transforming classrooms through day after day of thoughtful, reflective practice.

By not funding the National Writing Project, Congress and the Obama administration are destroying the kind of programs they they claim they want to support.

The US Department of Education says it wants to fund programs with "the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of students." They want organizations that "have a strong base of evidence that their program has had a significant effect on improving student achievement." They are looking for "(e)xisting, promising programs that have good evidence of their impact and are ready to improve their evidence base while expanding in their own and other communities."

By unfunding the National Writing Project, the US Department of Education is working against its stated goals.

The work of the National Writing Project is subtle. Much of the success of the Writing Project, and the success of the individual teachers whose hard work has shaped the Writing Project over the last 37 years, is predicated on the idea that deliberate, repeated, thoughtful reflection helps improve learning. This idea is not flashy; the benefits of this work unfold slowly over time. The work of the National Writing Project lacks the silver bullet mystique of some of the other "reforms" now currently in vogue. The National Writing Project helps learners at all levels find their voice. It is a stark contrast to programs that believe that developing teacher expertise requires filling their head with an external voice.

The skills developed within teachers and students who work in the local Writing Projects cut across traditional curricular boundaries. Writing Project sites and teachers flourish in urban and rural settings, and in public and private schools. The skills developed through programs supported by the National Writing Project work to support learners of all ages. If we are serious about improving education, the National Writing Project is a program we should expand, not eliminate.

But for now, funding from this program has been cut. For next steps, you can contribute. Contact your representatives in Congress. Get involved in a local Writing Project. And: write.

Bad Education Coverage, NY Times Edition

Posted April 10th, 2011 by Bill

A NY Times piece, published April 9th, titled The Deadlocked Debate Over Education Reform, provides today's example of bad education journalism. The premise of the piece is solid, if a bit clichéed: discussions around education reform have become polarized to the point where progress is difficult to achieve. This is not inaccurate, and similar claims could be made for many other political issues.

This story, however, is weakened because the author attemts to reduce the topic into manageable chunks by creating a false frame around the issue.

False frame: there are reformers, and there are those who are against reform.

Once a false frame is dropped around a story, people can be neatly defined by the terms of the frame, and it will sound coherent, and logical. However, it will be false and misleading, because the terms of the frame are inaccurate, incomplete, and/or misrepresent the beliefs of people.

Within education, people want different things. There are people and organizations who are pro-charter schools. There are people who believe that non-unionized teachers will provide school administrators more flexibility to solve problems. There are people and orgnizations who believe that measuring teacher performance against standardized tests, and issuing merit pay based on those tests, will improve education. There are people and organizations who want assessments of student learning to look at more than just standardized tests, and at the development of higher level skills that are difficult to measure with standardized testing instruments. There are people and organizations who believe that social issues like poverty and the growing gap between the rich and the poor have an outsized and measurable impact on learning outcomes.

And the list goes on. All of these people are working for reform and change. They define this reform and change differently, but there are no "reformers" or "critics of the reform movement." - the author of the NY Times piece actually calls Diane Ravitch a "critic of the reform movement", a stunning misrepresentation of her viewpoints.

Most importantly, though: people with these differing viewpoints all actually care about kids. People with these differing viewpoints all want our educational system to improve. Using a false frame frees a writer from exploring the depths of an issue, and misses the actual key to how we can move through gridlock: once we start to respect the basis of other points of view, we can work together to find islands of common ground, and craft solutions from disagreements.

However, with a false frame, one viewpoint is elevated above others, and given a greater legitimacy. Via the magic of the false frame, one vision of school change is granted the status of true reform, and differing viewpoints can only be defined relative to the one "true" viewpoint. By falsely reducing the intellectual playing field to one viewpoint defending itself against counter-positions, the shape of the actual discussion changes. Differing opinions become "counter-narratives." Jon Stewart's deconstruction of some of these arguments can now be relegated to a corner of the partisan fray.

The Daily Show - Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer - Teachers and Wall Street
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Fortunately, the actual discussion is richer than what the media understands, or at least what the media writes about. It would be nice, however, to see journalists covering education who actually understood education, or who made the time to tell the complete story.

Image Credit: "Framed Sunset" taken by Sudhamshu Hebbar, published under an Attribution license.

Notes From Educon Session: Crowdsourcing The Death Of The Textbook

Posted January 29th, 2011 by Bill

These are the notes from my Educon session earlier today.

A. What Problem Are We Trying To Solve?

Using textbooks built from open content mitigates common issues with traditional texbooks.

Cost

Accurate and reliable numbers for K12 education are hard to come by, but according to the College Board the average yearly cost for textbooks for an undergraduate student in a 4 year college is $1,137.

Restoring Teacher Autonomy and Learner Control

Sometimes, educational organizations make bad choices. If and when this occurs, the traditional textbook model can leave schools, teachers, and learners with some flawed choices. Traditional textbooks offer little recourse aside from buying a completely new text. A textbook model that allowed schools, teachers, and learners more control over the content they used in their learning would allow people the autonomy they needed to shape their learning to meet their needs.

Greater Quality and Accuracy

Textbooks contain mistakes. Sometimes we change our definitions, or learn new things.

Paper texts - and textbooks controlled and distributed by traditional publishers - are cumbersome to update, and often require repurchasing the updated book as a "revised" copy.

More Equitable Distribution of Resources

If the costs of acquiring high quality learning materials decreases, more people will be able to access them.

B. This Is A Political Issue

Publishing companies spend millions on lobbyists for our federal government.

For extra fun, search this Federal Lobbying Database for the Common Core Endorsing Partners.

The data on lobbying spent at the state level is more difficult to come by. If anyone has a source for getting this information at the state level, especially for Texas and California, please let me know.

C. What Isn't The Problem?

Availability.

Curriki, MIT's Open Courseware, OER Commons, Flexbooks, and Flat World Knowledge are providing content that is (in most cases) licensed under a Creative Commons license.

D. However

This open content languishes within content silos. Some courses provide the source materials as html downloads, but in many cases the material requires a level of technical expertise to copy in bulk that is beyond the reach of most educators.

From a technical place, these barriers are completely unnecessary. The only reason they exist is to defend a business model and/or a distribution model predicated on controlling access to content.

How's that working out for the music industry? Newspapers? Print in general?

E. But What About The Learning?

The problems laid out above would be less critical if the traditional textbook wasn't so intertwined with issues related to curriculum and assessment.

In VERY general terms:

Curriculum - which is aligned to standards - determines the scope and sequence of what gets taught.
Textbooks get written to address the needs defined by the curriculum.
Depending on the curriculum, and/or what gets purchased, the textbook package can include just introductory texts, or a full complement of lesson plans, test and quiz banks, and other ancillary materials.
Learning is reduced to student progress through the curriculum. It's important to note that this is not a necessity, but that this result is frequently an organizational decision, because:
Assessment focuses on measuring mastery of content to the exclusion of higher level skills.

In an educational landscape where people are attempting to measure school and teacher effectiveness based on student test scores, strange things can happen. Administrators can cook the numbers. Teachers alter tests of students. Administrators reinstate segregation based on race and gender.

F. The Problem Isn't The Textbook

Really.

The problem is how learning is assessed, and the role that the textbook plays within that context.

G. Moving Along

Breaking down the process of informal learning, we usually start with:

Base knowledge, or pre-existing knowledge. To do advanced chemistry, one must know how to balance equations. To discuss how Napoleon influenced 19th Century Europe, one must understand the French Revolution. Base knowledge can come from many sources, and textbooks are one of them.
Questions that frame the subject. In informal learning, these questions come from specific needs we have. The phrase "passion-based learning" has garnered attention of late, and as much as I despise perpetuating jargon, it's a decent image. But in any case, in a school setting, these framing questions can come from teachers, students, or other sources. Ideally, the people creating these framing questions are as close to the learners as possible, if they aren't the learners themselves.
Process. In this step, students create. The framing questions, on top of base knowledge, provide a scaffolding to support student inquiry. In an ideal world, this inquiry results in two distinct artifacts: first, student-created texts that show what they learned; and second, an analysis describing how they learned. Over time, these texts form a roadmap that demonstrate mastery of content and the processes through which mastery is obtained. These artifacts also provide concrete points for teacher or peer feedback.
Student created work can then be used as an additional means of assessing student growth over time.

H. And This Is Our New Open Textbook

Much of the existing work "reinventing" the textbook focuses on the device (iPad, anyone?). Efforts that are device centric will fail. They will probably get a lot of VC and grant money in the process, because they are shiny and can be used to create exciting marketing copy, but they will fail nonetheless, because they are trying to stuff a flawed model (both business and learning) into a new device.

There will always be a market for books that do a good job providing this base knowledge. Possibly, some of these "reinvented" textbooks will do a good job delivering this solid base material.

However, many texts that deliver base knowledge should be assembled from content that is freely available, easily remixable, and published under a Creative Commons license. Here, I'm specifically thinking of any introductory text to a core discipline, general history texts, grammar manuals, etc. This content already exists, and is already licensed under a Creative Commons license. Transforming it into a reusable form requires time and work, but once that work is done, we can all reap the benefits - and when I say "we" I'm thinking primarily about students, schools, and communities that would be able to access accurate, current information and adapt it to their local environment.

The second piece of the equation involves the framing questions and lessons we design around content. Teachers create these supporting materials regularly, yet few get shared even within schools, let alone with the greater world. All that is required to make this sharing happen is to publish them under a Creative Commons license on a blog that has an RSS feed.

I. People and Time

As noted earlier, the content exists. Good, accurate base content needs to be collected and edited by domain area experts. And yes, teachers are domain area experts.

People need to publish lessons on their blogs. Ideally, these lessons will be tagged with a subject and/or keywords.

More importantly, though, schools and administrators need to see this as an important worthwhile activity. Administrators need to advocate for the increased use of open texts within their schools. Parents need to ask their school boards why money is still being sent to textbooks companies unnecessarily. Teachers need to advocate for greater autonomy within the classroom. Unions need to negotiate for the creation and remixing of open content counting as ongoing teacher professional development. Schools of education need to educate students about the positive shifts that can occur in classrooms built around open content.

This is a lot of work. But the good news is that all of the content exists. The technological tools required to publish, collect, remix, and republish already exist. All we need now are people and time.

Help Me Understand The Buzz Around Learning Analytics

Posted January 17th, 2011 by Bill

I'm trying to understand the buzz behind Learning Analytics.

The syllabus for the Learning Analytics Online Course contains some useful links and resources that provide background on the subject. According to the syllabus, the course lays "a foundation for the upcoming 1st International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference held in February, 2011 in Banff, Canada.

From the syllabus

The growth of data surpasses the ability of organizations or individuals to make sense of it.

This isn't really new. It also begs the question: what data points (aka, individual human behaviors) are actually valuable to measure? And are the same behaviors predictably and/or uniformly valuable to all individuals across all contexts? I suspect that the answer is "no."

Also from the syllabus

In an age where educational institutions are under growing pressure to reduce costs and increase efficiency, analytics promises to be an important lens through which to view and plan for change at course and institutions levels.

Money is certainly tight everywhere. However, the claim that crunching data will improve the process of learning to the point where it saves a significant amount of money and time feels analogous to a personal jet pack: it could happen eventually, but claims of a straight line from from where we are now to that promised land seem hyperbolic. What specific data points are needed to actually make this valuable to a school or company? More importantly, why should learning require a significant loss of privacy, as embodied by a third party collecting, storing, and analyzing a person's behavior over weeks, months, or even years?

As a side note, it's interesting that Google is probably in the best position to do this type of analysis, as school districts, universities, governments, and companies are all tripping over each other in their rush to throw their user data into the data abyss that is Google Apps.

From Mining Social Networks: Untangling the Social Web

Of course, companies have long mined their data to improve sales and productivity. But broadening data mining to include analysis of social networks makes new things possible. Modelling social relationships is akin to creating an “index of power”, says Stephen Borgatti, a network-analysis expert at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. In some companies, e-mails are analysed automatically to help bosses manage their workers. Employees who are often asked for advice may be good candidates for promotion, for example.

In this use of data mining, the analysis helps highlight individuals who are, in some way, effective. I'm assuming that the learning/productivity patterns of these individuals can then be mined and compared to discover common patterns. However, the level of detail required for meaningful analysis could quickly run up against privacy concerns. From the perspective of a company, knowing what their top performers are doing every minute of every day would be valuable information, but I suspect that the level of scrutiny needed to make this data valuable would be pretty intolerable to the people being scrutinized.

It's also worth noting that the information returned by this initial analysis is a person, which has some interesting implications for teacher professional development:

"Well, Ms. Jones, your students all did well on their tests, parents report positive interactions, your classroom observations were flawless, but your social graph was quiet between November and January."

Learner Control

Leigh Blackall encapsulates some of what I'm thinking about learner control in this comment:

When the method for analysis is usable, it will compliment existing processes inside formal education, such as Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL), or assessment of prior learning (APL) that theoretically help people find accelerated pathways through curriculum. This really only works where assessment is standardised, such as the national unit standards used in Australia or New Zealand. HE resist this standardisation, making RPL and APL impossibly inefficient.

The ultimate would be a method that assists people to do their own LA and develop evidence for arguing for more precise RPL or APL.

I imagine this tool as a browser add on, something that could collect, track and save communicative and informative activity.

Learning Analytics, at least from the definitions I have been able to find, makes the most sense for and is most useful to organizations. Learner control, and ensuring that learners reap the benefit of being hyper-observed, deserves greater consideration.

It's also worth noting that putting time into analyzing how people learn does nothing to improve a more fundamental problem that could help improve questions asked via better data analysis: how can informal/non-traditional learning be assessed and credited within formal education/professional development? Weaknesses in how competency and knowledge are assessed need to be part of any comprehensive system that examines how learning can be more effective. It's difficult to make the case that we need to make the processes by which we learn more effective when we haven't yet mastered how to assess how people are learning now. If people have some examples of meaningful assessment of informal learning within traditional environments, please let me know about them in the comments.

Existing Practice, New Branding

Learning Analytics seems like a blend of:

Traditional forms of data and behavioral analysis; combined with
Making use of the increased processing power of the cloud; combined with
An increased understanding of what the semantic web is, and how it works; combined with
Better search tools, allowing less tech-savvy users to craft more sophisticated queries through larger data sets stored in the cloud, combined with
Better visualization tools to make interpretations of these data sets more intuitive.

It's a powerful set of tools, and as a construct it's interesting, but I'm definitely missing what makes it novel. However, there are a lot of smart people who are interested in it. Please feel free to tell me what I'm missing in the comments.

Image Credit: "Crow" taken by Lucina M, published under an Attribution-NonCommercial license.