PILOTed

Ednet 2010 Keynote

This is typed on my phone. Forgive any typos.

Ednet keynote speaker: Bob Wise, alliance for excellent education, former governor of West Virginia.

The big challenge for education is that at end of high school years, 6 of 10 ninth graders will not be prepared to function in society, dropouts or lack of schools, this skills gap is growing. We can't change that picture until we change what we are doing.

In 1972, 70% of our workforce had a HS education or less and the. Economy was humming. Today, 60% of our population has at least some postsecondary education, and we know that's not enough.

We are at a GM moment: for a long time, their product wasn't that good, but they were still okay until they ran out of money a year or two ago. That's what we face in education today.

We don't have the pipeline, we don't have the infrastructure for what education needs.

State revenues will stagnate for education for the next several years. It will take several years to get back to where we were 3 years ago.

50% of teachers are over 50 years old. We're not going to get enough qualified teachers in the country.

Opportunity
80% of people will be under new governors, they will be appointing new education directors, how will they find put what they should be doing, how are you going to communicate with them.

Adoption of common core standards. That's the beginning: what do we do about curriculum development, teacher development, assessment?

Massive congressional turnover at a time with massive education policy decisions, how are you going to inform them? ESEA has to reauthorized and will be changed. NCLB does not meet today's needs, one big debate is going to be over guaranteed or competitive funding. 22 happy senators (winners of tttt) and 78 grumpy ones, which ones are more likely to vote for competitive funding?

Congressmen will react to what they've actually seen and who they've met.

The big focus on statewide data systems is going to be crucial to change and improvement.

Strategies

70% of public has no connection to school system, the challenge is to let them know that the local hs or school system has a direct effect on their lives.

Three Maxims
1 at end of day, 10 PhDs are trumped by one state legislator. Make sure that state person understands enough to make a good decision

2 There are two places where most operant decisions for educations are made. In the Classroom, teachers are making millions of decisions every day. Ultimately major decisions are made by elected officials: budget, policy, funding, etc.

3 tech development always outpaces policy development.

The Secret of Life

Tomorrow is the official start of Ednet 2010, an education networking event, primarily for education publishers, run by MDR.

Even before the event started, today I learned the secret of life.

I took Amtrak from Stamford to Boston, and sat next to a psychotherapist. I don’t remember if I asked him to tell me what lessons he'd learned from his patients, or if the conversation just naturally went that way, but there were three fascinating stories and lessons.

Story 1: He was treating a man in his early twenties for a few months. The man's parents had separated or divorced and gotten back together or remarried five times. One day, the patient came in, and his whole demeanor had changed. "I was out with a friend of mine, and he asked why I'd let this wild back-and-forth of my parents drive me crazy. He told me, 'Why are you so invested in it? It's their lives, not yours. You know what the difference between old people and us is? They're just older than us. You think they should be experts, but they're just living out their lives; they don't have a manual. There is no manual. They're not experts; they're just older.' And it just hit me, and I'm okay."

Lesson 1: There is no manual to life, we're all doing the best we can, and the biggest difference between older people and younger ones is that the older ones are older.

Story 2: About 20 years ago, he was treating a 60-65 year old man. The man was a genius: MIT graduate, researcher, university professor, author, the whole works. But, as we all get older, we all think about the meaning of life, we all need to come to grips with the end: when we're gone, what are we going to hang our hat on, what was the meaning of our lives. And this depressed that individual to the point he needed treatment, for about a year. One day, he came into the office and announced, "I've found the meaning of life."

Shrink: "And?"

Patient: "There isn't any."

Shrink, to himself, "Now he's really depressed, what do I do now?"

Patient, continuing: "I understand and I'm fine. When my time comes, I need to ask myself, 'Were you open to the rapture of living?' And I have been, and I will be, and I'm content."

Lesson 2: Be open to the rapture of living.

Story 3: He was treating another 60 year old man, a widower. The man's wife died about ten years earlier, and he was lonely and depressed.

The trouble is, the rest of the story, and the lesson learned, are a little too obscene to publish in a blog. You'll have to ask me about it next time you see me.

Leading for Learning

Your vision for how to fix schools depends on your metaphors.

I've just finished reading Phillip Schlechty's Leading for Learning.

At different times we imagine schools as factories, suppliers of learning, warehouses, or prisons. Factories take uniform raw materials (students) and transform them into end-products (workers or taxpayers). If we look at schools as factories, we want use statistical process techniques to become more efficient; we want to come up with the one best technique for any situation, and replicate it, until we scientifically determine that something else works better.

Suppliers of learning seek to meet the needs (content, entertainment) of customers (students). Thus, schools as professional learning organizations will want to find the best content, and economically deliver it to students.

Warehouses are places to store things (students) while other things get done; school here is a service that allows parents to work without worrying about their kids. Prisons prevent potentially dangerous people from inflicting harm on society while hopefully teaching them not to do it in the future.

To a certain extent, schools are all of these things, they all touch on different aspects of what we want schools to be. But all lead to centralization, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and stagnation. And eventually, according to Schlechtly, they lead to the alienation of schools from society, as those who bridle against the educational rigidity and who can afford to send their kids into better environments while resenting paying for the schooling of other people's kids.

Schlechtly cogently argues against national standards. National standards further remove education from the community, lead to narrowly focused testing, and add further support to the entrenched bureaucracy and power structures.

He argues that we must envision schools as learning organizations. Teachers learn to provide students with engaging work that helps them learn, students become better learners, both in groups and as individuals, and communities actively participate in the education of their youth. Only when the community becomes a real part of the educational process will they commit the resources necessary to guide students to become citizens of the 21^st century.

It's an interesting perspective, and meshes with what Project Tomorrow calls free agent learners. Wouldn't it be great if schools could ignite kids to want to learn while teaching them how?