eduskeptic

Ever wonder who is running the education debate in the U.S.? We hear quite a lot from Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, about the need for changing how we educate children in this country. It seems as though that is one of the key phrases for most politicians. Oddly enough, it’s a good thought. Education cannot stand still and be successful. If it doesn’t evolve, it most surely will  become less and less relevant and successful as time goes on. I doubt that there will ever be a time when we as educators, or as a nation, can quit insisting that our educational systems get better.

Who, however, is in charge of this thrust? Arne Duncan, as has been pointed out many times before, is not and never has been, a credentialed teacher. He does have a senior staff though. I have taken the time to read all of their online bios. I am very curious as to who is advising Mr. Duncan. There are 32 Senior Staff listed, Mr. Duncan included. Of those, 21 have a link to their bios. Twenty-six have links to their home pages. My theory was that, among Mr. Duncan’s advisor’s, there must surely be a solid mix of professionals, with educators well represented. It is after all, the national Department of Education. I read all the online biographies. This is what I found:

Of the 31 listed Assistants to Mr. Duncan, 1 has direct experience with k-12 education, 1 has an MA in Education, and 2 are listed as having been a teacher at the University level.

Russlyn Ali is the Assistant Secretary, Office of Civil Rights. Her bio states that she was a teacher. She has taught at USC, and UC Davis. There is no indication that she has k-12 experience, nor does it indicate what she taught and for how long.

Gabriella Gomez, is the Assistant Secretary for Legislation and Congressional Affairs. She has a Masters in Education from Harvard. There is no indication that she has taught anywhere.

Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana, is the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education. She served as an assistant and deputy superintendent and chief academic officer at Pomona Unified School District, Pomona California. She also served as Superintendent of the district. Her bio states that she was an educator, for 5 years, in the Montebello and Pasadena Unified School districts, where she held various positions, including being a teacher. There is no indication of how long she was an actual teacher in a classroom.

John Wilson is the Executive Director White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He held a position as an associate professor of education in the Graduate School of Education at George Washington University. There is no indication that he has any k-12 teaching experience.

That’s it. Four out of 32 (12.5%) has some direct connection to education, and out of that group, only one (1.3%) is listed as an actual teacher in the k-12 arena. The rest of the Assistants are predominantly lawyers, with a good showing of CEO’s, membership on various boards, trusts, and educational think tanks.

Perhaps it is because I have spent the last 34 years teaching that I think that there should be a solid core of actual teachers advising Mr. Duncan. After all, I would prefer that the person who performs a medical operation on me be a board certified surgeon, not the CFO or CEO of the hospital. I hope that the person sitting in the pilots seat of the airplane I’m riding in is a qualified pilot, and not the president of the airline company.

Maybe that’s the point here though. Perhaps the business of running the nations schools is best left to lawyers and business people. It just could be, that in the minds of the national and state “education secretary” Gliteratti, that teachers are simply irrelevant to the process of better education.

My theory, as stated at the beginning of this piece, has been proved wrong. Apparently there is no solid core of educators advising anyone. The lawyers and business people are the advisors. I don’t know if this is good or bad, as these people all have advanced degrees. That is, fundamentally, very different than being an experienced teacher. I hope that at some time, some of these people talk to actual teachers about the realities of the k-12 classroom experience. It might be helpful in the discussion of what needs to be done. Maybe.

In a recent Harpers magazine article, the thinking of several speakers and writers about education and national policy has been explored. In short, according to the article, there exists among some the stance that we educate simply for return on investment (ROI). The author, Mark Slouka, makes the point that by dehumanizing the educational process, we short change ourselves, and manage, in the process of doing so, to provide a vast disservice to the children we are educating.

Slouka makes a strong case that the business of education has become the business of business. If you have a child in school, regardless of the grade, you will by now have heard that what we have to do in the classroom is get these children ready to be productive once they leave school. The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, part of that statement about productivity is that they will be productive in the workplace. If one listens well to the news regarding the state of education in America, one could easily believe that that is the point of education: get them ready to compete in the global, national, or regional marketplace.

Consider this statement by District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee: “This is exactly what life is about. You get a paycheck every two weeks. We’re preparing children for life.” Really? That’s what education is all about? There’s more. Brent Staples, a New York Times editorialist wrote that the the system is failing “to produce the fluent writers required by the new economy.” It just may be that good writing has more value than that. Slouka goes on to quote Thomas Friedman, who wrote about a speech given by Bill Gates, in which Gates says that our high schools are obsolete, that even when doing what they are designed to do, they “cannot teach our kids what they need to know today”. Friedman goes on to further quote Gates, “If we don’t fix American education, I won’t be able to hire your kids.” Slouka has an entire article full of this kind of corporate view of what American education is doing, or not doing.

What are these people thinking? This writer teaches with the idea that his Kindergartners will leave his classroom at the end of the year with a better understanding of the world around them. This writer, a Kindergarten teacher for the last 23 of 34 years teaching, isn’t, by any stretch of the corporate imagination, preparing his students to be pay-check-every-two-weeks robots. With such an outlook on education, why is Michelle Rhee still employed by the District of Columbia School District? Has Bill Gates lost his billions of marbles? Thomas Friedman, whose writing I admire, seems to have adopted the company line as well. Evidently, so has President Obama. Arne Duncan is not an educator, never has been, and probably has no plans to become one. He played a bit of professional basketball in Australia, and is a business man. These are probably the skills he needs to be the Secretary of Education. Would a deep background in education, in the classroom, make a difference in his outlook? It couldn’t hurt.

The purpose of education must be much more broad than this twisted corporate view. If our children are to be leaders and innovators, now and in the completely unknown future, they have to be able to work together, understand history (let’s see–Viet Nam/Afgahnistan/Russia, hmmm), create things that don’t yet exist, engage in civil discourse, and be ready and able to stand up for their reasoned, researched positions. Democracy isn’t an easy road to be on. One can only hope that a well rounded education, strenuously applied, will keep it alive. Narrowing the focus to a paycheck every two weeks ignores the care that a functioning democracy demands. What are these people thinking about?

Some Facts

Arne Duncan is the Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. The education department has4,200 employees and a $68.6 billion budget. Who is he, and what qualifies him for this position?  From June 2001 through December 2008 Duncan ran the Chicago School District. It is the third largest in the country with over 600 schools, and he was tasked with transforming  its weak schools into strong ones, closing the ones that were not performing, and improving the overall quality of teachers and teaching. His title, which will become pertinent to this post in a paragraph or two, was Chief Executive Officer. Most school district heads are known as Superintendents.  According to his biography, he has done a  quite a few things over the years (Ariel Education Initiative, Inc.), none of which involved or included teaching. He does not hold a teaching credential from anywhere, and he has never taught anywhere. He did, however, play professional basketball in Australia. He holds a degree in sociology from Harvard. Where in all of this does it become apparent that he is qualified to be the Secretary of Education for the United States?

What Does it Take?

In an earlier post on this blog, I pointed out the difference between the jobs of teacher and principal. I made the point that educational leaders are in the classrooms. Good principals make it possible for teachers to teach, and good teachers make it possible for principals to run the school well. The job of principal is wildly different from that of superintendent, and because of sheer scale, superintendent positions are different from chief executive officer positions. Superintendents are responsible to school boards for everything in the district: education, facilities, transportation, legal matters, everything. Principals are responsible to the superintendents for everything at their school. What does a chief executive office of a school district do? About the same thing that a superintendent does, except on a much, much larger scale. Running a district with over 600 schools, k-12, with an overall budget in excess of $500 million, just might be a bit different than running a district with 100 or fewer schools, with a budget in the $100 million range, or a small district with a few schools and a $10 million budget.

Does It Take An Educator?

I don’t think so.  While it is possible that some very large districts have CEO’s or Superintendents who once were teachers, and may have empathy for the every day classroom situation, the necessary skills to be successful as the head of a very large school system are more likely to be business skills, not educational skills. The complicated web of laws that pertain to schools, the mountains of paperwork, the politics and the fiscal complexity of the entire thing need management expertise. The heads of these very large school systems have assistants for just about everything. They rarely see the inside of a classroom, talk to teachers, or union/association people either. They delegate that sort of thing to the assistants, who in turn report back to them. Management meetings rule the day, and probably necessarily so. Arne Duncan is a manager, not an educator, which is what the Secretary of Education needs to be.

Is He The Right Person?

Not everyone in Chicago will think so. Duncan closed some schools, and everyone at those schools had to reapply for their jobs. Not everyone was successful at being re-hired when the schools re-opened. The schools he closed were in dismal shape. Most of those schools are doing better now. Google it and find out for yourself what happened in Chicago. I heard him on NPR the other day, and he sounded every bit like a CEO on a mission. He’d better be. The President is expecting him to accomplish a great deal, and I doubt that it will get accomplished without an enormous personality, energy, and sense of urgency. Not everyone is going to agree with his approach. My personal position is that our educational system isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, and absolutely needs to be better than it is. Re-inventing how we educate children is not an activity for the faint of heart or risk averse types. I don’t think Arne Duncan fits either of those descriptions. He doesn’t have unlimited time or funds available to him. Judging from what he did in Chicago, he may actually make some headway. I am looking forward to what happens next. Time will tell if he is the right person, at the right time, to foster needed changes. In the meantime, assume nothing, verify everything. Check it out for yourself.

It is a magical time of year for everyone in school. It doesn’t matter where you are in the system: head start, pre-school, all the way up to grad school. It’s magical. All of the work that students have done finally pays off. Another crop of grads is on the way to the next step. For the younger grads, the next step is a nice summer break, followed by the next grade level and the new experiences that go along with it. For the University level grads, the next step is into the unknown. About the only thing known for sure is the amount of debt that they are carrying. Perhaps the biggest question is whether the grads are ready for the profession that they have chosen. The hue and cry from the business world, at least according to the yearly outpouring of words in the national press, is that the grads aren’t ready. Oddly though, business hires new grads all the time. Ready or not. It is difficult in the extreme for any educational enterprise to provide educational experiences that are specific enough for any business block, or public sector group, to use without further work. It is a ridiculous demand to make. There is always further learning and education about the work to be done in any job situation.

The System

The main job of the educational system is to build a solid base of some skills: reading, writing, math, art, science. Depending on the chosen field, one of those five will have greater focus. More importantly, the educational system, at least here in the United States, teaches exploration, critical thought, the importance of continuing to learn, and how to continue to learn. Learning doesn’t stop with the cap and gown experience. Graduation from University, Trade School, or Tech School, is the beginning. Stepping into a new job with the confidence that comes from a solid background is always a plus. It is, still, a beginning. Employers actually expect employees to show up and work and to do what is required. The halcyon days of school, the protected bubble of the campus, are over at this point. If the educational establishment has done its job, over the span of the last18 to 20 years, the transition to the work force, in whatever form it takes, will work well.

Into the Wild

As the graduations continue throughout June, the excitement of grads and parents, and all those connected to the grads, is replayed from town to town, across the nation. It is well earned excitement. Eduskeptic sends out congratulations to all who have persevered and made it to the end. Good for you all. You did it, and should be proud that you did. Take a moment and savor the people who helped you get here, the friends you made along the way, and the brief moment that exists before reality kicks in. Best of luck to all of you!

I had the opportunity to attend the west coast Government Technology Conference in Sacramento, CA, last Wed and Thurs, May 13&14. I have enjoyed this conference over the years for a number of reasons. I get to meet vendors of just about everything that I use or might use, talk to different company reps and specialists about trends, what’s working and what is vapor ware, and what’s toast already, what changes have taken place in the market place since last year, and pick up a pen or two with cool logos on them. I get to experience talking with adults all day too, which is vastly different than my normal day. I also get to sit in on various presentations and discussions that are of interest to me, or that I think will be of interest to my district and our technology needs and dreams. Last year I watched a fantastic presentation on interactive white boards, and a system that basically puts a fully functional computer desktop on the white board at the front of the classroom. For those of you of a certain age, blackboards all but disappeared some years ago, along with chalk. They are now whiteboards, and one uses non-permanent markers on them. I got to see the system in action when I talked with a rep at the Western Blue booth. He was using a system that put the desktop on his rather large screen, about the size of a classroom white board, fully connected to the Internet, fully functional, while he looked up some information on it for me. Very impressive. Expensive, but impressive nonetheless. This was very interesting to me, as the subject of interactive whiteboards has been spoken of, and dreamed about, by some teachers in our district, over the last few years. I was able to bring a great deal of information, and enthusiasm, back to school with me. This year I attended a session on “Demystifying the Stimulus Package”. It was presented by Paul W. Taylor, Phd. of  Converge Magazine, with a number of vendors co-hosting the event. During a rather nice lunch we were able to meet other educators, vendors, and administrators. I sat a table with one of the head IT people at San Francisco State, two reps from Cisco, and two from Elluminate. While the seating was completely at random, I couldn’t have chosen better had I been given a list. First, the Cisco guys are experts at networked systems. Second, the Elluminate reps were experts at putting together distance learning for school districts. The San Francisco State guy uses Elluminate all the time for various projects at SFS. We had a good working lunch. The main topic of the session, the stimulus package and what it means for education, included quite a few participants who spoke of the need, in addition to saving jobs, to begin using the technology tools we have today, in the classroom. It is not a given that school districts are using any of the technology that is available to the private sector. We do have computers, the age of which may be shocking to anyone who hasn’t been in a classroom lately. We do have high speed internet pipelines to our sites. Whether we have a good enough infrastructure to carry the highspeed past the entry point is different from district to district, state to state. We don’t have enough computers for all classrooms to have them. A computer lab may have, and may not have as well, current edition computers, and may or may not have a lab person who actually knows not only the machines, but who is able to work with children as well. Printers, ink, and anything more exotic than that may or may not either exist, work, or be available to all classrooms. What does all of this have to do with demystifying anything? Read on. There was quite a bit of talk about online education, online textbooks, either instead of or in addition to, hard copy texts, distance learning, and a constant ability of any student to connect on line to access school curricula, any time, from anywhere. Exciting stuff, to be sure. I think that having the ability to access curricula, assignments, and assistance, over the internet is one of the parts that will help students succeed. Children come to school, in Kindergarten, with greater technological knowledge and skills, than one can imagine. Their knowledge and use of technology grows from there, and it grows in leaps and bounds. If we aren’t able to keep up with what they have outside the classroom, we may just lose them. The enthusiasm from the private sector, the vendors and company representatives, is truly great, as it should be. They have some really cool things to offer. Maybe the stimulus package for education will help districts participate with some of it. One participant spoke about all students having an iPhone or Blackberry, and how they could then connect anytime, anywhere to the good old World Wide Web to access education. Doesn’t that sound good? After I left the session I headed to the ATT booth on the expo floor. I wanted to know how much it might cost, per person, for a level of connectivity that would allow web access from a hand held of any kind. Rough guess: $60-$70 US per person, per month. That is in addition to the cost of the hand-held device. Do the math for your district. The stimulus package seeks, in one small part of the education section, to erase the digital divide, that is, the discrepancy between those who have and use technology and those who do not. The cost is simply staggering. The digital divide is just as likely to widen as it is to shorten. In a catch-22 twist, the very people who are most likely to help with erasing the technology chasm, the good, enthusiastic, up to their ears in technology since they were born, young teachers, are the very ones who are losing their jobs due to the lack of funds for school districts. While the demystification of the stimulus is somewhat complicated, and the session offered good information about a broad range of monies coming to education, what remains a mystery is how, especially in the economic times we are experiencing now, are we going to pay for what the enthusiastic company reps have available. There is definitely another divide out there. It’s the divide between private business and public schools, how they are funded and run, and how the private sector has no clue about the Alice in Wonderland experience of school finance, which may never be demystified. Maybe next year we can have a session about demystifying school finance.