from project50dates.blpogspot.com

“You can’t ever keep your kids from getting hurt, but you can be there for them when it happens”

Steve Yurchak, ca 1974

Happy New Year!

That quote was shared with me in a conversation with a very wise man when I was saddened by something that had hurt one of my kids. In this age of standards, high stakes testing, increasing academic and social pressures, I wonder if we’ve lost the time, freedom and commitment to “be there” for the kids we teach.

I was planning on taking a writing break for the holidays when life suddenly intervened and put an idea in my head. The idea came in the form of an article shared with me by a good friend. The author, Ted Wachtel, wrote about his journey as both a student and later as a teacher. With one sentence, he had me…

“However, not until I read “Deschooling Society”  in 1971 did I realize that the institution of school itself is the obstacle to learning for many young people.”

My reflections on this brought me back to Clark Aldrich’s book, Unschooling Rules, in which he describes the three critical types of learning that our kids need today: learning how to learn, learning how to be, and learning how to do. (For more on Aldrich and his thinking, here is a link to a YouTube presentation by him).This was a private reflection, one that I’ve been hoping will lead me to language sufficiently powerful to move readers to consider the possibility that Wachtel raises, i.e., school may be the obstacle. School may be, as Russell Ackoff asserts, an example of trying to do the wrong thing better and better.

I’ve written about this conflict previously, but something in the piece struck a new chord with me.   I connected it to observations I’ve been making recently about my youngest grandchildren, all four of whom are under the age of ten with three of them less than 5.

Each time we have the kids over or have babysitting duty (which I’ve come to realize is actually babysitting “privilege”), I’m amazed at how they much they learn, how serious they are about learning, how much fun they have doing it, etc. I don’t want to romanticize this process. There are times when they are frustrated, impatient, downright unpleasant. But they are natural learners. They are driven by curiosity and the need to find explanations for the world they are experiencing.

And then school/schooling happens. We’ve all seen it. Our kids and grandkids come home and after their first week we notice that they are raising their hands to speak. The proudly announce that they were named “line leader” for recess. Out nine year old responds to the question, “what was the best part of school today?” with one word “Recess”?

The school that happens to/for our kids reflects the need to “educate” increasing numbers of children, to insure that important information is transmitted to all and to do this efficiently. The result… kids grouped by age, kids moving in age based cohorts, kids being exposed to information organized by discrete content areas, and kids being evaluated largely based on their ability to recall pre-identified facts, etc., etc., etc.

We aimed for excellence and focused delivery of information on the average. We guaranteed the perpetuation of the system with only minor and incremental modifications by staffing the schools largely with those who had “succeeded” in such a system.

Enter the kindergartners or pre-schoolers, full of curiosity, full of questions, experienced in independent inquiry and conclusion drawing. Too often we treat this as a lack of the discipline necessary for learning. It reflects a need to impose discipline so that we can provide learning in the way we have organized it… it is about efficiency. We assume that certain kinds of environments are conducive for learning and we set about to create these conditions.

Because we have organized by age and by a preferred group size (an efficiency issue) we need to provide the environment in which kids thus grouped might be able to “learn” what we have decided they need to know, in the framework that we have determined to be best, and at a pace which is based on average not uniqueness.

Ironically, we do so, too frequently, at the expense of the very things that now, in the 21^st Century, we are hoping to see in our children, in our graduates. We recognize our failings, or perhaps more importantly, we “recognize” the failing of our students and blame them and their teachers.

And we try very hard not to accept the observation shared by Wachtel, “…the institution of school itself is the obstacle to learning for many young people.”  But what if he’s right? What kinds of things might we consider for the new year?

And so here are a few of the primary questions that I’m  hoping we can grapple with…

• How can we transform the “obstacle of school” to the “center for learning”? How can we create “circles of safety”, places dominated by the commitment to personal relationships and support for all?

• What would happen if, at the very earliest ages and thereafter, instead of training young children how to conform to the culture of school, we intentionally focused on the further development of their innate curiosity, their desire for learning, the need to seek and explore explanation for the way their world works?

• What would happen if, instead of focusing our high profile reform efforts on high school programs, we helped our youngest children understand that it’s great to follow their curiosity and decide what they would like to learn and that we can help them do that in our schools?

• What would happen if we built primary and elementary learning experiences for children around what we now know about learning and worked on the development of metacognitive and self-reflective dispositions to enhance their natural inclinations?

• What would happen if we removed obstacles to us “being there” for our children by focusing less at how to score higher on tests of content increasingly removed from the life needs of our students?

• What would school look like if we acknowledged that Dewey was right and focused on the creation of learning experiences that extend well beyond thee walls of the school?

• Would school still be an obstacle? Would schooling and learning still be in conflict?

Please feel free to use the comment option to share some questions of your own and if you know an elementary educator who might like this, please pass it along and suggest that they subscribe.

.Disclaimer: This is not an anti-charter school piece. In my work in the NJ Department of Education and as a consultant for the International Center for Leadership In Education, I have seen both exemplary and horrible charter schools. In the Department of Education my division approved more than a few and closed several. This is about our need as educators to be able to discuss with parents, friends, and colleagues the ways in which new policies can advance or stifle learning opportunities for our children.

For a while now I’ve been following the work of Jan Resseger and have referred to her blog several times here. Jan is a tireless defender of the concept of free public education as the backbone of our democracy and the right of every child to have equitable access to high quality learning opportunities. She has written extensively on the charter school funding issues in her home state of Ohio and, most recently, on the impact of the expansion of privatized, for profit charters in Michigan.

Why should you care about this?

This heavily subsidized agenda is coming to your state, to your town. We’ve seen this movie before. We’ve lived through at least 3 decades of “school reform” driven by the belief that ever more rigorous standards and an increasing reliance on large-scale assessment would be the solution to unsatisfactory student achievement. After all, who would ever argue for lower standards (excuse me for stealing a thought from Ken Robinson)? But did any of us foresee that these reform efforts would develop into 3 decades of No Child Left Behind, the Race to the Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act?

And here we are again faced with the next great idea… expansion of charter schools, expanded vouchers programs, and re-toolrd versions of school choice. After all, who would argue that all kids shouldn’t have access to a quality school? But this is not about the validity of an idea.  Like school reform, it’s about the implementation.  It’s about what this idea has that looked like in those states that have been at the forefront of the school choice, charter schools, vouchers, and the privatization movement?

I suspect that many of us have been following the unfolding story of the ways in which our government may be changed as a consequence of the election. One of the more troubling proposed appointments has been that for the position of Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.

I first encountered the DeVos family in Jane Mayer’s fascinating book, “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right”. Mayer is an award winning investigative journalist and has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1995. In her book, she describes and documents the ways in which billionaire philanthropists have used their fortunes to advance (aided significantly by the Citizens United decision) their own radically conservative, and often self-serving, agendas. While DeVos has no experience that involves working in public schools, she has extensive experience in promoting the expansion of privatized, for-profit charter schools, vouchers, school choice, and the advance of her very conservative Christian beliefs in publicly funded schools. If you’d like additional background on Betsy DeVos, I recommend a recent New Yorker article by Mayer.

As I have written previously, I believe that this is a time when we, as educators, must become more actively involved in what the future of learning looks like for our children. Most of us can relate stories of having been called upon to explain and/or defend either our profession or the direction of schooling. I write this in the belief that we must become informed and be able to serve as sources of objective and accurate information for our parents, for our community members, and our colleagues. To this end, I urge you to read Jan’s two-part blog on the history and implications of the DeVos appointment. You can read the first piece here and the second piece here. Jan also includes links to a number of her previous pieces that provide fascinating detail about the underbelly of the for-profit charter school business.

I offer the comment section of this blog as a starting point for an exchange of questions and thoughts. I encourage you to take the time to begin a conversation with me, but more importantly, with your fellow educators.

I decided this year to make a list of the things that I would really like. Unfortunately, as soon as I thought about that and thought it might be fun to put them here, I realized that I probably also had to give some thought to how I might nudge them along. Why do I always do that?

I like being loved and cared about so I decided I wanted that to continue. I didn’t want to be greedy so I decided not to ask for more…

So I guess I’d better think about how I can be better at loving and caring.

I don’t much like living in such a wealthy country with so much poverty. I want that poverty to go away…

I need to ramp up sharing all that I have with those less fortunate and be better at giving back.

I want my family to know that I love them.

I need to spend at least as much time with them as I do thinking about and working on my professional stuff.

I want well-intentioned philanthropists to spend at least as much time thinking about the impact and consequences of their generosity as they do insuring publicity about their contributions.

I need to continue to support the small circle of writers who are voices in the wilderness trying to improve understanding of complex issues in a world that values 140 character explanations.

I want the words “school reform” to be stricken from the world’s vocabulary. Along with that I want the standards, assessment, accountability movement to go away.

I need to ramp up my commitment to exploiting opportunities for testimony and op ed writing aimed at exposing the problem of trying to do the wrong thing better.

I want to see schools become centers for learning, recognizing and facilitating learning that extends beyond the walls of the school and acknowledges that learning which is learner defined and learner driven is a critical part of education for our country.

I need to learn more about opportunities that exist for such learning and can be shared. I need to work more with parent groups to create awareness of existing, but untapped opportunities for their children.

I want people who see children, schools, education, etc. as profit centers and callously use the best intentions of parents for their own selfish advantage to simply go away.

I need to be more aggressive in my support for those whose courage and mission drives them to bring such reprehensible activity to light.

I want those in our country who have endured and continue to endure poverty, racism, government and community neglect, bigotry, and hopelessness to see evidence of a commitment to reduce their suffering.

I must be better at acting on my beliefs. I need to discuss with my family what we can do.

I want peace, joy, and love for all those people that I’ve encountered on my life’s journey, especially those who have shared their gifts and wisdom with me.

Thank you to all.  Merry Christmas and blessings in this holy season.

Rich

– Fixing the problems of school accountability, property tax equity, fair distribution of resources, and charter school expansion may be necessary but is not sufficient.

NOTE:  This post is a reprint of a response submitted to an article NJ Spotlight.com

Reprinted from Joe Browen

A recent article that appeared here reporting on the release of school-by-school PARCC results generated a number of comments. As usual, the responses represented a cross-section of perspectives, demonstrating that we continue to get drawn into discussions and debates about doing the wrong thing better.

We are focused on test scores and accept without question the fallacy that they have importance beyond the system that rewards and punishes those forced to use them. The results may serve to allow us to extol/defend the wisdom of our own views of racial equality or inferiority, of sufficient/insufficient moral fiber, of tax equity or burden, etc. but they tell us nothing about the impact of schooling that we didn’t know 30 years ago.

Since the publication of A Nation At Risk (1983) we have accepted the commitment to ever more rigorous standards and accompanying assessments. We’ve been doing this now for 30+ years. And the result? Flat NAEP scores, precipitous declines in student engagement, and persistent achievement gaps. And this year the Department of Education discovered that rich kids outperform poor kids and defined it as a civil rights issue. I suspect many of us could have provided that bit of wisdom without adding a penny to Pearson’s bottom line.

What the policy folks seem to be trying hard not to hear is that human resources departments, business leaders and employers, higher ed officials, etc. are saying that the areas of current instructional focus and assessment are NOT the things they need to see. We need (as defined by the consumers of the educational “product”) graduates who possess skills of cross-cultural tolerance, perseverance, ability to function as members of a team, resourcefulness, resilience, creativity, etc.

These are not tested and are rarely taught with the same level of intentionality as those things that are tested. We continue to teach and test the things that are most easily assessed, expending huge amounts of money to tell what have known for decades. Students perform on these tests by zip code.

But perhaps it is the comments offered in response to the article that provide us with insight. It’s apparent that we are living in a time when facts and truths are only valid if we choose to believe them.  We can choose to act on these facts or we can choose not to believe them. A few examples…

• We know far more about learning than we did in the 1890’s when the basic structure of our schools was developed.
• We know that kids no longer need schools to provide them with information that is now available 24/7 to the vast majority of our children. In the battle for the dissemination of information between teachers and Google, Google wins every time.
• We know that kids do not learn at the same pace and in the same way… they persist in being different.
• We know that “carrot and stick” approaches work better for lab rats than humans.
• We know that the approaches based on standards and high stakes assessment lead to standardization, not the best performance in each kid.

We also know that schooling as it exists in our country is not meeting the needs of far too many customers and clients. But according to the “reformers” we don’t have a system problem. We have a teacher problem. We have a standards problem. We have an accountability problem.

Enough already. The structure of schooling that was designed in the 1890’s and worked for many of us in the 1900’s no longer works. It doesn’t work as well as it should for kids in the suburbs and it certainly doesn’t work for kids living in poverty. It is precisely these conclusions, facts, and truths that drove, and continues to drive, the school improvement/reform movement.

But here’s another, less convenient truth. Using the standards and assessment model to get closer to a good school for the 1980’s isn’t gong to cut it. Creating increasing the number of charters that, under the banner of incubators of innovation, more and more resemble the schools we remember with nostalgic fondness isn’t going to cut it. We decry the results of comparisons of academic performance between our country and other countries of the world. And while we want those results, we reject their systems as impossible to implement. We use the words “we can’t” and “we won’t” interchangeably.

Some of the most successful schools in the country are those designed to meet the needs of students who have not found success in the traditional structure. They involve learning in the community, strong internship/apprenticeship opportunities, highly relevant experiences, intentional levels of attention to the connection between relationships and motivation, days and years which do not follow structured bell schedules or calendars.   And, ironically, we name them alternate schools.

In this campaign season it seems excusable and appropriate to hijack the title of a book by former presidential candidate, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Could we consider the possibility that we are dealing with our own “Inconvenient Truth” – that the mission of providing each and every child with the kind of education that enables her/him to become a positively contributing member of our society and to have the chance to lead a full, safe, and satisfying life will not be contingent on who wins the argument over the relative moral fiber of the rich, the poor, the black, brown or white? Could we consider that it will not be based on who argues most forcefully for the equity of tax burdens? Could we consider that it will not be based on the quest for the perfect metric for accountability?

Finding new and more expensive ways to highlight performance that is disappointing is not a plan. Continuing to promote the improvement of schooling, with its focus on compliance, structure, and standardization is not a plan. We have demonstrated repeatedly that we do not do large scale problem solving and solution development well. See War on Drugs, War on Poverty, War on Terrorism, etc.

WWWD – (What Would Walmart Do?) If Walmart were faced with 30+ years of flat sales and 30% drop in customer satisfaction (the actual drop in student engagement between elementary and the end high school), do any of us think they’d double down and do more of what they had been doing?

So what should we do?

• We can expect/demand that the state’s Department of Education and members of the state Board of Education accept the responsibility of leadership, reject ideologically driven initiatives, move beyond the command and control mentality, and own the meaningful exploration of options.

• We can act in our communities to empower local boards of education to reject a continuation of mandated programs which have been ineffective at best, costly and harmful to children at worst.

• We can expect school leaders to accept the responsibility to inform their communities and their boards of education about the evidence and options for change.

• We can suggest that professional educator organizations end their participation in department of education work sessions designed to insure the implementation of increasingly mindless initiatives.

We can remember that not one of the children in our schools asked to be born, whether they are rich or poor, black, brown or white, in a traditional family or not. They should not be held hostage by our disagreements over moral fiber, life choices, tax burdens, and ideological differences.

The poem on one of our most revered and treasured landmarks reads…

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Author: Emma Lazarus, Statue Of Liberty

It doesn’t read, “…And I will blame them.”

“We have met the enemy and he is us”

Pogo, the possum’s quote for earth Day = April 1970 – Walt Kelly 

I ended a recent piece with a quote from Bruce Dixon – “the biggest myth about school change is the possibility of change.”

At the time I mentioned that I’d be returning to that piece with some thoughts about the change process in schools and, specifically, why it’s so hard. I’ve been reflecting a lot on several ideas and experiences that I’m going to try to weave into some kind of sensible fabric here.

• Susan Scott, in her book, Fierce Conversations, shares an explanation of the Pacific Islander term “mokita” – the things that everyone in an organization/group tacitly agrees not to discuss.
•  Simon Sine’s TEDTalk on what makes people follow leaders and his description of the “circle of safety”

• The notion that people don’t quit jobs as much as they quit bosses.

• Piaget’s theory that children enter school with explanations for how the world works and the majority of these explanations are wrong, frequently requiring that unlearning must precede new learning.

• The idea that leadership is actually the ability/capacity to build followership.

• Followership is based on relationships and trust.

When Susan Scott introduces us to the concept of “mokitas”, she notes that often people in work, in families, in organizations tacitly agree never to discuss things in the name of group or organizational harmony… most frequently, at the cost of honesty and, all too frequently, at the cost of trusting relationships.

Quality relationships are not based on the shaky ground of mokitas. Add Simon Sinek’s work on what makes people follow leaders to this mix and you get the notion of organizational safety. Sinek offers that good leaders provide a “circle of safety” for the members of the organization, a safety built on trusting relationships. We rarely have strong and positive relationships with folks whom we cannot and do not trust.

Closely related to these two concepts is the notion that Piaget offers, and while developed around the learning of children, it can easily be applied to adults and adult learning.

During a normal career in teaching, most of us have experienced some times when we perceived that there was no “circle of safety”, where there were obvious of mokitas, too little trust and little risk taking.

We learned that there were some “truths” that no one talked about. One such truth was that it didn’t pay to get too invested in the latest change initiative because, like many others, it would soon be replaced by the next “new, better” thing.

We learned that most of our best relationships were with the people with whom we felt safe. People we learned to trust. People we deemed to be “trustworthy”.

We also learned that much of the leadership in the school/district was based more on compliance than the creation of followership.

And so we learned an explanation of how our organization worked. Sometimes our learning was accurate. Some times it was less so. But it made little difference. We had explanations about the way our world worked and we made decisions based on that reality… regardless of their accuracy.

In too many instances in school cultures, that reality told us that change is can be dangerous. Change can be painful. Change can be frustrating. Change can be hard work. Rarely did we see examples of change being good, with the exception of the occasional changes in ”leadership”… that is, until we learned that changing the person but not the culture was just a different kind of “not so good”. For many of us, it became our reality to distrust even the change in leadership.

And here’s the Pogo Mokita…

Most of us who have spent significant time as teachers can admit that every now and then we would have a class where “the chemistry just wasn’t right”. Things never quite came together. Teaching that group became like swimming through mud.

After experiencing that a couple of times, I came to recognize the part I played in that dynamic and it had to do with the lens through which I was seeing that group. I didn’t “own” who they were, but I certainly owned how I saw and responded to them. It wasn’t an easy “learning” for me. I was able to have that conversation with myself but I certainly wouldn’t have tried to extend the idea to my colleagues that we were responsible for how we saw and responded to kids in our class or the class as a whole. Circle of safety? Hardly.

For the chemistry to change I had to change my lens. It is the same with change. If we don’t begin to change the lens through which we see schooling and learning we prove Pogo’s point that we have met the enemy and he is us. We have not had an easy time changing lenses. As I traveled around the country visiting schools, I saw this pattern much too frequently.

Too frequently, we have allowed experiences to form explanations that cause us to reject change and that excuse our unwillingness to change. We’ve said “we can’t” when we really meant “we won’t”. We have focused on “other-directed” explanations. If only the state wouldn’t be so prescriptive, if only the board would give us more time, if only these kids were more like they used to be, etc., etc., etc. Feel free to fill in the blank here.

But here’s an “inconvenient truth”. We are working in a system in which the engagement of level of children drops from well over 70% in elementary school to barely more than 40% by the end of high school. We are working in a system that as designed and structured around the ideas and recommendations of the Committee of Ten in the 1890’s. At he same time we are systematically ignoring what we can find in research and what we intuitively know about the ways in which children learn best and, by doing so, we are yielding responsibility for “reform” to people poorly equipped to have such power.

We are not the architects of that system but we are the keepers and we are continuing to ‘keep’ the “wrong” system. We do this by bridling at the mention of a change in the school day structure, a change in the grading policies of our school, a transfer to a new grade level, a change in student grouping patterns or curriculum. We are promoting the development of a ‘growth mindset” in students while ignoring the consequences of adhering to our own “fixed mindset”.

Gandhi suggested, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

The possibilities for meaningful change in our schools, the potential unlocked by the creation of circles of safety, the potential of trust and honest conversations, rest in no small degree on our willingness to expose our mokitas and to create circles of safety where we can begin the process of unlearning and relearning.

The last thing I want on my gravestone is “Pogo was right.”