All posts in Education Policy

Last weekend, we ran another open content authoring session at Lewis Elementary in Portland, OR; we'll have more details on the event in a post laster this week. During this session, we talked with several educators about ways to work around the organizational barriers they face. I'm going to list out a couple here; frequently, when we talk about the things that are absent from school learning environment, the conversation stops at blockages of YouTube and other social media sites. Really, though, there are barriers that are far more basic and pervasive than that.

Students Can't Save HTML Files

We spoke with an educator working within PPS who had set up a lesson where students were learning about the web, including some basic HTML and css. The lesson went fine until it came time for students to save their work; they were blocked from saving html files.

SSH is blocked

We have worked in schools, and worked with teachers in schools, where SSH is blocked. For anyone working in web development, SSH is a central tool to doing out work. Blocking SSH is akin to teaching carpentry without hammer and saws.

Districts Claim Ownership Over Teacher Intellectual Property

The way some district contracts are written, districts claim ownership over any work that is done during school hours, over a school network, or on a school-provided machine. So, if a teacher does planning during the school day, even if she is creating something entirely new that is her creation, the district position is that they - the district - own that work.

Why Should We Care?

In the current political climate of educational reform, teachers are under a tremendous amount of pressure. Teachers and schools have a lot of rhetoric directed at them about how they need to embrace "21st century learning" and teach web literacies and develop knowledge workers, all while meeting more time consuming reporting mandated by the unfunded mandates of NCLB, and having their performance measured by standardized tests that often don't examine what learning looks like.

And in the face of all this, there are district-level policies that directly interfere with a teachers ability to work. When a district claims ownership over creative work done during the work day, the district creates an enormous disincentive to work with peers during school time, as any result of the collaboration would be owned by the district and not the creators. This flies directly in the face of what networked, connected teaching should be, as it is predicated on sharing our work with others. Fortunately, as we discussed in our authoring event, incorporating openly licensed materials into our work makes district claims of ownership a moot point, as the district can still claim ownership but the license allows for free and universal reuse.

What is incredibly heartening is talking with teachers, and hearing the creativity, thought, and caring that they put into their work. There are some amazing educators working to help our kids learn, and it's great to see.

What is disheartening is to see the artificial, policy-driven barriers put in their way. Here in Oregon, we are hearing a lot of talk about improving our educational system. And some of these things actually sound okay. And please don't get me wrong: high level change is part of the solution too. But we also need to remove the unnecessary barriers to teachers doing their best work. The notion that a district owns a teacher's work needs to be addressed legislatively, and through contracts. If a district thinks that they are going to get rich from owning and selling content, they should go talk to their local newspaper - the one that went out of business three years ago.

Image Credit: "Contradiction" taken by sweetenough, published under an Attribution Share-Alike license.

When Beverly Hall ran the Atlanta public school system, she oversaw gains on student test scores on standardized tests throughout the city. These gains resulted in her being named the 2009 Superintendent of the Year, and collecting $580,000 in performance bonuses over 10 years.

According to an indictment handed down on Friday, Beverly Hall and 35 other people within the Atlanta school system conspired to cheat. The cheating consisted of people changing student answers on standardized tests. The gains in Atlanta - based largely in improved test scores on standardized tests - are likely not real.

While the cheating in Atlanta - and the level of cheating - is horriffic, it's not new - and there are some indicators that it could be widespread. With that in mind, it's worthwhile to look at the conditions that existed under Dr. Hall's leadership that are cited in the indictment as contributing to the scandal.

The cheating scandal also has implications for the integrity of data collected on students. Given the push to collect more data, and to use that data more widely, the actual quality and accuracy of data needs to be unquestioned. Cheating scandals like this make that seem like an unreachable goal.

The quotations in A, B, and C are from the New York Times. The quotation in section D is from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A. Merit Pay, and Fear of Job Security

Teachers and principals whose students had high test scores received tenure and thousands of dollars in performance bonuses. Otherwise, as one teacher explained, it was “low score out the door.”

Ms. Parks, a 17-year veteran, said a reason she had kept silent so long was that as a single mother, she could not afford to lose her job.

B. No Excuses Mentality

Her (Hall's) focus on test scores made her a favorite of the national education reform movement, nearly as prominent as the schools chancellors Joel I. Klein of New York City and Michelle Rhee of Washington. Like them, she was a fearsome presence who would accept no excuses when it came to educating poor children. She held yearly rallies at the Georgia Dome, rewarding principals and teachers from schools with high test scores by seating them up front, close to her, while low scorers were shunted aside to the bleachers.

C. Ruling By Fear, and Job Security

Dr. Hall was known to rule by fear. She gave principals three years to meet their testing goals. Few did; in her decade as superintendent, she replaced 90 percent of the principals.

Teachers and principals whose students had high test scores received tenure and thousands of dollars in performance bonuses. Otherwise, as one teacher explained, it was “low score out the door.”

D. Retribution Against People Who Spoke Out

When a teacher at C.W. Hill Elementary complained about cheating by a colleague in 2005, Hall suspended the accused educator for 20 days. As for the whistle-blower, Hall fired her.

Closing Thoughts

Richard Hyde, one of the investigators whose work led to the indictment, made the following observation after listening to secretly taped recordings of the people cheating:

As he listened to the hours of secretly recorded conversations of cheating teachers and principals, he was surprised. “I heard them in unguarded moments,” Mr. Hyde said. “You listen, they’re good people. Their tone was of men and women who cared about kids.”

When we talk about improving our educational system, how do we ensure that the structure around teachers and students support and reward our best work? How many more cheating scandals do our students need to endure before we begin to look at - and jettison - the failed experiments of merit pay, no excuses, and ruling by fear?

Image Credit: Picture of Beverly Hall and Arne Duncan at the White House found at http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1866

At the outset, I want to make it clear that this blog post is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of all things related to Open Educational Resources at the US Federal level.

But with that said, from a high level, it's interesting seeing the move toward Open Educational Resources, and how they are referenced more frequently as both criteria for grants and as a deliverable of these grants.

At http://whyopenedmatters.org/ the Federal Department of Education is helping with outreach to articulate why OER's work.

In 2011, in a joint program between the Departments of Labor and Education, 2 Billion dollars were put toward a program that explicitly required materials produced be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. In February, 2012, a second wave of funding was announced for the program.

And, in a related note, the inclusion of OERs is now listed as a priority for the Discretionary Grant Programs - broadly speaking, this means that Federal grant applications that explicitly reference OERs as part of the grant deliverables mayhave a better chance than other proposals.

Given this general trend at the Federal level, I wonder if/when this will translate into changes at the local level. For example, given the amount of public money being given each year to textbook companies to get proprietary content, why shouldn't there be a directive stating that public money should be spent on acquiring openly licensed content?

At the very least, the trend toward a broader support and use of OER should diminish support for school districts trying to claim copyright over teacher's work.

Over the last couple weeks, This American Life has had a couple of amazing episodes looking at Harper High School in Chicago.

This excerpt from the second episode - where a hungry kid gets some food - stuck with me. Ben Calhoun is the journalist reporting the story, and Marcel Smith is a staff member at Harper.

Ben Calhoun: ...I spend a couple mornings with a staff member named Marcel Smith. Marcel works on a program that tries to rescue kids who are failing out. Harper has a lot of initiatives like that. There's mentoring programs and enrichment programs, all boosted by turnaround.

So on paper, that's what Marcel does. But if you walk around with him, you see what Sanders sees, all the little things that would never be considered part of his job. The day I was with him, in the morning, Marcel came across a young man standing in the hallway.

Marcel Smith: What's going on, son? How you feeling?

Ben Calhoun: The kid was keeping a straight face. But he was clearly upset. It turned out he'd been asked to leave his class. As Marcel turned to deal with him, he asked me to turn off the recorder, so I did.

They talked for a minute. Marcel took the kid to his office, sat him down, told him to wait. And we walked away. He didn't want to use the student's name. But he explained what was going on.

Marcel Smith: Apparently, the students were given an incentive for being on time. And it was food.

Ben Calhoun: Cookies. It was cookies. And this student, along with everyone who'd gotten to class on time that day, was allowed to go up and take a cookie. But this particular student was dealing with a difficult and maybe dangerous situation at his house. So he hadn't gone home the night before. And because of that, he hadn't eaten.

So when he went up to take his cookie, he took two. The teacher told them to put one back. Not wanting to reveal his situation to the rest of the class, he didn't say anything. He just refused.

He told Marcel he was just so hungry. That's why he'd been kicked out. Marcel had a box of cereal in his office. And I walked with him as he zipped down to the cafeteria. They were out of regular milk.

Marcel Smith: Ladies? Ladies, how y'all doing? Can I get two chocolate milks, please? Thank you.

Ben Calhoun: Back in Marcel's office, the student sat quietly, staring down, and ate a plastic bowl filled with Honey Nut Cheerios and chocolate milk. Then he got up, politely washed the bowl and spoon, said thank you to Marcel, and the two went back to his classroom. You see situations like this all the time at Harper, situations that could so easily unravel.

And without thinking anything of it, they get addressed because someone is there and makes the effort to figure out what's going on. It's stuff that'll never show up in a school budget. But it can be the difference between a kid going back to class or getting suspended.

And it's these small, quiet successes - like getting a kid some food so he can go back to class - these are the things that adequate staffing makes possible. This is one of the ways that success in schools, and successful schools, get started.

Staffing matters, in large part because as a teacher you can't predict when you will be needed. Relationships can't be built without time, and without the time to spend with students when there is nothing wrong you will not be able to be as effective during times of stress.

And when I read about DC allowing Rocketship Education to open eight new schools against a backdrop of three existing charter schools failing, I think of the fragmented learning experience of the students within those schools. It's also worth noting that a central piece of RocketShip's model involves students spending a significant amount of time in front of a screen taking computerized adaptive tests, with limited staff contact.

According to Brian Jones, the outgoing chairman of DC's charter board:

Part of the genius of the charter model is it does allow for a certain innovative churn, where you close low performers and thereby create space for new innovators to come in and try new models

Unfortunately, "innovative churn" - here celebrated as "genius" - sounds a lot like anticipated failure. Innovative churn means closing schools that some kids likely see as an extension of their home. The low performers here are the people selling innovation that fails kids, and leaves kids taking the brunt of the consequences. I'm not going to hold my breath that these low performers will ever be held accountable.