I’m running for the International Society for Technology in Education General Board elections. Their objective is to promote and support the use of technology in education which is one I support largely because I personally support the appropriate use of technology in schools.

When I saw the board elections coming up, I decided to submit an application and nominate myself to the board. My application was accepted, and I’m now on the ballot for the upcoming elections for the position of the International Representative of ISTE. I’m running because I’d like to see some Canadian representation on the board, and because I want to get more involved in the educational technology community.

People who have strong opinions about educational technology should get involved with advocacy groups like ISTE. It is important that we get involved or we risk letting these organizations disappear, which means that educational policy on the use of technology will end up being shaped solely by business interests.

The opposition for my position is Julie Lindsay, who I think would also make an excellent representative for the International Representative of ISTE. Just make sure you log into the ISTE website (if you are an ISTE member) and vote for either of us before April 11th.

Howard Kellogg suggested over on the Edutopia assessment forum that "While the "test" may represent the "bar" we have to clear, it is not the "bar" that must occupy our total attention." I think the analogy of clearing the bar is a good one for a number of reasons.

(image credit:Jeanine Besemer)

Imagine you are back in school at a track meet (which by the way don’t happen anymore in a lot of schools because of budget cuts, safety issues, and a narrow focus on math and reading skills) and you have a high jump set up. The bar for the high jump is initially set so that every student has an opportunity to jump over the bar. Students who cannot jump, for whatever reason, do not participate. Over time, the bar is raised until only a few top students manage to make it over, and eventually a tie occurs, or there is a winner of the competition declared. Every child gets to experience some level of success, although for many children this success will still be a relative success as they will naturally compare their ability. In many cases, students actually choose which events they will compete in, and so not every student will even try the high jump event, prefering to focus on events in which they feel more capable, or have more interest in.

If the high jump was like how we run standardized tests, every child would be expected to be able to jump over the same bar and labelled a failure if they don’t succeed. For some children the bar would be set too low, and they would set lower expectations for themselves in the future. For other children the bar is set too high, and they will label themselves a failure. Many of them would not participate in future competitions simply by dropping out of the track and field event. For some children, the entire exercise would be ridiculous because they couldn’t possibly jump over the bar, no matter where we set it. Further, we would judge schools and teachers based on their ability to make kids jump over the bar, without concern about who they are working with. As an aside, some school districts (like NYC for example) would be using a special rubber bar that they can bend and flex to ensure that the "right" number of kids are able to pass it.

Here are the top 10 TIMMS rankings for 2010 according to Wikipedia for math, science, and reading.

Programme for International Student Assessment (2009)[1] (Top 10; OECD members as of the time of the study in boldface)
Maths	Sciences	Reading
1. Shanghai, China 600 2.  Singapore 562 3.  Hong Kong, China 555 4.  South Korea 546 5.  Taiwan 543 6.  Finland 541 7.  Liechtenstein 536 8.  Switzerland 534 9.  Japan 529 10.  Canada 527	1. Shanghai, China 575 2.  Finland 554 3.  Hong Kong, China 549 4.  Singapore 542 5.  Japan 539 6.  South Korea 538 7.  New Zealand 532 8.  Canada 529 9.  Estonia 528 10.  Australia 527	1. Shanghai, China 556 2.  South Korea 539 3.  Finland 536 4.  Hong Kong, China 533 5.  Singapore 526 6.  Canada 524 7.  New Zealand 521 8.  Japan 520 9.  Australia 515 10.  Netherlands 508

The countries highlighted in green have some sort of public health care system, either with or with-out a co-pay. Not all of the health care systems are of equal quality, and in New Zealand only hospitals are free (hence the light green shading), not necessarily all of the medical services.

Draw whatever conclusions you like, but at some stage analyzing the data just gets a bit ridiculous.

We had our mock exams today for math. There are a pair of exams students take so that they get a feel for what their real exams will be like in May. At the end of the first exam, we had a break, and during this break, one of the students came up to me as I set up the room for the next set of exams.

“Mr. Wees, I left a note on the test paper I want my teacher to read,” she said tears in her eyes.

I looked at her and could see how upset she was so I asked her how she felt.

More tears came to her eyes as she said, “Not so good. I’m sure I totally failed that exam.”

“Well, it is a mock exam,” I started, but she cut me off.

“But the universities will look at my results from this exam!” she complained.

And there it was, the concern that her lack of preparation for this one exam was going to ruin her life.

I wanted to give her a hug and reassure her, which is what I would have done had she’d been my child. However, I decided a hug would be imprudent and chose to reassure her with my words instead.

“It is going to be okay. You will get into university,” I started. I consoled her and tried to make her feel better about her future. “Remember,” I continued, “universities don’t just look at grades, they look at the whole person. You helped plan a conference! I’m sure that has to count for something.”

“But everyone plans a conference!” she nearly yelled. In her eyes I could see her thinking, Everyone I know is doing such amazing things. How do I stand out?

I challenged her on this statement, “How many people really?” remembering that people often believe their own hyperbole. “How many kids your age have planned a conference?”

“40 or 50,” she said quietly, realizing the ridiculousness of her earlier assertion.

“Out of thousands of students.” I responded, “What you have done is amazing, don’t sell yourself short.”

She seemed a little bit better. “Yah okay, you are right.”

I talked about my own history of being accepted to university late. It wasn’t until June that I received my original UBC acceptance, and not until August 9th that I received acceptance to my teaching degree. I remember the day exactly because it was the same day I went into work and quit my warehouse job.

What I wanted to say was that it doesn’t matter, that she should judge her personal success by her ability to get into university. That there are other ways to be successful, and that many people survive happily in life having never stepped foot in a university. 

Our students today put so much of their focus on being successful, and on standing out from the crowd. Students compete to try and outdo each other, always feeling like it is never enough. Just today one of my students complained that his parents had it easy. “They only had a C average and got into university!” he said.

I watched the movie Race to Nowhere recently. It was a very powerful experience, and it spoke to me on many levels. Here’s a trailer which describes the movie.

The movie shows lots of examples of how US students are over-worked, and most of those examples speak to the Canadian experience of school as well. Kids are developing symptoms of stress very early in life. They lack the time to actually do everything they are expected to do because they are being over-scheduled, and over-burdened with work early in life.

When will it be enough? When will we decide that our emphasis on competition for limited college seats is unacceptable? When we allow our children to just be, and not have to worry about competing for their future?

We need to tell our students that the notion that there are limited pathways to their future success is a myth. We need to show them that success comes in many forms. We need to give them the opportunity to live their lives, rather than our failed dreams.

There are some things we can do we can do as educators and as parents.

• We can give less homework or end the practice completely. Homework at the elementary and middle school levels is fairly pointless anyway, and at the high school level only shows a modest correlation with success (at least how we measure success in schools currently). Parents can talk to other parents about the harmful effects of homework and take back their family time.
   
• Governments can scale back our bloated curriculums. Rushing through content a “mile wide and an inch deep” does no one any good. You cannot learn deeply about that which you are rushed through. Our children are being force-fed content, but are often intellectually malnourished.
   
• We can recognize our kids for who they are, rather than for who we would like them to be. Instead of asking your child about school, ask them to join you in doing something, ask them to talk to you about the world. Find out how they feel, and really listen to them.
   
• It is crucial that we end the competition. Educators can do this by abandoning failed metrics like traditional grading systems, and parents can do this by advocating for their students. Grades don’t measure what we think they measure in most cases anyway.
   
• We need to stop over-scheduling our children. Find a couple of things they really like to do, and give them more free time to just play. Play outside with your children, and learn how to be a kid again. Go camping, ride a bicycle, have some fun. We should not abdicate our responsibility to raise our children to a worksheet or a computer.
   
• We should fight for more arts and experiential learning opportunities in schools. It is unreasonable to expect every child to become a scientist or engineer when they grow up. Artistic and creative people are exceptionally important to our well-being as a society. Without the arts, life would be very bland and not really worth living. Imagine if the next generation had no music, no theatre, no movies, no art of any kind? Can you imagine living in a world without art? We need to recognize that for many children, this is very nearly their reality.

What other specific suggestions do you have?

The Whitehouse has posted a form to gather feedback from parents, teachers, and students. I recommend adding your opinion about education in the United States here. Here is the letter I sent in through the form.

Dear President Obama,

The first suggestion I have is to abandon the notion that every child is going to succeed at college until we solve the problem of poverty at home. If you really want to increase the number of college graduates, and give everyone equal opportunities, your nation’s children need to enter kindergarten at the same stage of development. Some children enter school with absolutely no academic readiness skills.

The second suggestion I have is to find a way to funnel funds from the penal system into education. A high school drop-out costs the US $260,000 over the course of their life-time in additional services, and for this cost, you could send every child in danger of dropping out to private schools from k to 12, or even better, fund public schools at the same levels as private schools.

You need to stop focusing on a bipartisan approach to education. Your Republican libertarian counterparts want nothing less than a complete dismantling of public education, and you cannot compromise on this point. If you lose public education, you lose the ability to transmit American culture from one generation to the next, except through the consumption of media. Given the track record of the media in the US especially, I would not trust them to do anything but control the minds of the youth for corporate interests. Public education is therefore essential, everyone must have an opportunity to absorb culture, and to think and discuss it critically.

College readiness is not going to be done by making kids study on math and reading. NCLB, RTTT are both forcing schools to reduce the amount of time kids spend learning real things, and focus on rote learning. Please don’t try to claim otherwise, this particular message is easy to find in nearly every school in the US. College readiness requires critical thinking skills, which can be found in any subject area, but especially science, humanities, and the arts.

In a nation whose people are the most overweight on the planet, cutting back on physical fitness and other activity programs in schools will lead to greater health-care costs in the long run, as your population’s health degenerates.

Finally, socialism is not a four letter word. The countries with the strongest education systems in the world are all socialist.

Thank you for your time,

David Wees

(A reminder: If you aren’t sure why a Canadian is at all interested in public school education in the United States, remember that my son and wife have US citizenship, and that our local politicians have a habit of watching US education reforms too closely for my comfort.)

I asked a really stupid question, and as the list of responses and suggestions came in, I started to feel more and more embarrassed. My question was, who are the female educational theorists. In my head, I was thinking of Dewey,  Piaget, Gardner, Gatto, Holt, Friero, and other male educational theorists and wondering where all the women were.

The problem of course is that there are lots of female educational theorists but I over-looked all of them. The reason why? Sexism. Yep, I admit it, I had a sexist moment and for some reason didn’t connect what these marvelous women do with educational theory. How that is a reasonable thing to do, I don’t know, and I feel ashamed and embarrassed.

In no particular order, here are some examples of female educational theorists, all of whom are inspirations in their field.

• Magdalene Lampert wrote Teaching Problems and The Problems Of Teaching and has been instrumental in the recent movement in mathematics education to adopt instructional activity structures or routines to improve student (and teacher) learning.
• Deborah Loewenberg Ball was Dean of the University of Michigan School of Education for more than ten years and is currently the William H. Payne Collegiate Professor of Education at the same university. She is a major figure in a movement to answer the question, “What do educators need to know in order to be successful at teaching?”
• Diane Ravitch (@DianeRavitch) wrote The Death and Life of the Great American School System and many other articles and publications. She tours the US doing speaking engagements.
• Deborah Meier (@DebMeier) wrote Playing for keeps: Life and learning on a public school playground. She tours the world talking about education.
• Linda Darling-Hammond teaches at Stanford University and her various publications are available to read here.
• Melahnie McBride (@melaniemcbride) “is a Canadian educator, researcher and writer focused on situated emergent learning, transmedia and affinity culture in virtual environments and gaming spaces.” (from her website)
• Mary Ann Reilly (@maryannreilly) wrote Deepening Literacy Learning; Art and Literature Engagements in K-8 Classrooms and is also a photographer and educational researcher.
• Clare Brett is a faculty member at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Her research “lie[s] in the areas of teaching and learning in online and distance contexts; the social and cultural implications of technology use and the affordances of online environments for learning.” (from her website)
• Marlene Scardamalia is a researcher at OISE and is also the director of the Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology.
• Jean Lave “is a social anthropologist with a strong interest in social theory. Much of her ethnographically-based research concentrates on the re-conceiving of learning, learners, and everyday life in terms of social practice.” (from her faculty profile)
• Brigid Barron researches about ways “to advance scientific understanding of social aspects of learning while contributing to the design of learning environments that lead to high levels of engagement in subject matter for all learners in educational systems.” (from her faculty profile).
• Ricki Goldman is “Professor & Director of the Digital Media Design for Learning Program & the Educational Communication & Technology Program at NYU.” (from her faculty profile)
• Sherry Turkle “is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.” (from her faculty profile)
• Amy Bruckman is an Associate Professor at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and does research on “applying the constructivist philosophy of education to online communities.” (from her faculty profile)
• Margaret Mead introduced the idea of culture into education, suggesting that you can’t teach students without either appealing to their culture or recognizing its value.
• Maria Montessori developed a method for teaching children by giving them self-direction in their learning, and the freedom to choose their own activities. For more information, see the Wikipedia article.
• C. Steinkuelher “investigates the intellectual work that goes on within such games and the cultures of participation that emerge both within their virtual worlds (between login & logoff) and beyond (in the online fandom spaces around them).” (from her faculty page)
• Lillian Katz wrote the book “Engaging student’s minds” and “is a Professor Emerita of early childhood education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is also principal investigator for the Illinois Early Learning Project,[1] a contributor to the Early Childhood and Parenting Collaborative, and editor of the first on-line peer-reviewed early-childhood journal, Early Childhood Research & Practice.” (from a Wikipedia article)
• Shirley R. Steinberg is an Associate Professor and “is the co-founder and director of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy.” (from her faculty page)
• Nel Noddings “is an American feminist, educationalist, and philosopher best known for her work in philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care.” (from her entry on Wikipedia)
• Maxine Greene founded the Maxine Greene foundation which “directs its primary attention to the intersections among various modes of social action and engagements with the arts. Social imagination most often finds expression in diverse art forms: film, literature, theatre, and dance.” (according to the Foundation’s about page)
• Madeleine Grumet “is a professor in the School of Education and in the Department of Communication Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.” (from her faculty page)
• Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach (@snbeach) “is a 20-year educator who has been a classroom teacher, technology coach, charter school principal, district administrator, university instructor and digital learning consultant. She is also CEO and co-founder of Powerful Learning Practice, an organization dedicated to empowering schools and districts from across the world to re-envision their learning cultures and communities.” (from her website)
• Angela Maiers (@AngelaMaiers) “is the founder and President of Maiers Education Services, a consulting firm headquartered in Clive, Iowa. Her company provides just-in-time consultation services to schools, organizations, and individuals seeking to use technology and social media to leverage human capital and production goals.” (from her website)
• Cynthia Chambers “is a mother and grandmother — as well as a writer — and a Professor of Education. She teaches curriculum studies, research methods, language, literacy and indigenous education to pre-service teachers and graduate students.” (from her faculty page)
• Cathy Vatterott is “an education professor at University of Missouri-St. Louis who has been researching, writing, and speaking about homework for the last several years. [She has published] Rethinking Homework: Best practices that support diverse needs.” (from her website)
• danah boyd (@zephoria) is “a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society.“(from her website)

Thank you to @gcouros, @shannoninottawa and @stephen_hurley for sharing this fantastic TED talk with us on Twitter. It is definitely worth the watch.

So how does this talk apply to education? 

There is a growing group of educators who believe that there is a problem with the US education system. There is also a growing group of people who are not educators who believe there is a problem. The US public, caught in the middle, has to make a choice between these two groups since the message they are sending out is quite different.

One group believes that students deserve good schools with good teachers, and that the best way to accomplish this is by making teachers more accountable for what they do, and applying free market philosophies to both schools as a whole, and specifically to teachers. The invisible hand of Adam Smith’s economic model will force schools into innovation and improvement, provided we remove the barriers of unionization and past "bad" contracts from schools. Merit pay will allow teachers to work harder to achieve better goals for students, and Race to the Top will make states compete for money, which will force them into a marketplace of a kind.

The other group believes that schools are becoming overly regimented and that there are too many rules on how they are supposed to be run, and too many accountability measures. They believe that these accountability measures, generally standardized tests, are slowly forcing schools to teach to the test in order to keep their funding. They believe that there is a wider experience that schools can offer than what can be measured on a standardized test. They also believe that the issue of failing schools comes to inequality in funding of schools, and more importantly the desperate inequality that exists in the US economic model. While the US is considerably richer than the rest of the world, the vast majority of that wealth is held within just a few people’s hands.

The problem is, if you belong to the second group anyway, is that the first message is gaining in strength. I believe that this is because the non-educator reformers have answered the why question with the parents of the US. They can point to a perceived failure in the system and then explain from the why, their how, and their what. They have a message which is compelling to many people but I believe that their solutions won’t work. The second group of people has suggestions for what, and for how, but their why is for some reason less compelling.

The solution the second group is offering is not going to work. They want to turn education system into a free market, but the market isn’t free if it is regulated, which is what the accountability measures they introduced with NCLB do. Maybe the premise that you can apply economic principles effectively to schools is flawed? 

Suppose we did apply a true free market approach to schools. We’d remove all regulations which would hamper schools and then fund schools based on market principles. Good quality schools would cost more, poor quality schools would cost less. Families would sue schools which were too unsafe, and schools would naturally tend toward offering choices that encouraged kids to attend. Some schools would look for corporate sponsorship to help them. McSchools anyone? Each family would have to decide for themselves what constituted a quality school and make decisions about where they would send their children.

The problem is that we would see legions of schools do things which look good, and are easy for parents to measure, but which are pedagogically unsound. Deciding on how effective a school is a difficult task, one most parents would find daunting if not impossible. They would have to rely on visiting schools and taking a look around to see what the school is doing. In any case, I think it would fail, and lots of kids would be harmed in the process.

The real question is, how can that first group of people change our approach and sell our (I think you know by now which group I support) vision of what schools can be? How can we find a reason why schools need to change which will resonate with parents? I think too often we focus on how we would like schools to change, and what steps we would take to make those changes, and that the important reason why those changes need to happen is lost. We are being beaten badly in the US court of public opinion, and we need to step up our game.

For those of you who wonder why I, as a Canadian educator, am so passionate about the education debate in the US, you just need to remember how often our politicians have looked south of our border for solutions. I’m not interested in any of the current US style of reforms taking root here in Canada.