nonconsumers and the schools

The Crimson Avenger has another terrific post up about the permanent struggle to reform the public schools.

It seems to me that the education reform work of the past few decades has all focused on combat strategies. We “attack”, so to speak, by instituting new requirements – standards, assessments, etc. – and by pushing for new models of public schooling (charters).

But what we’ve seen is that our pushes have all been blunted, subverted, and ultimately used to reinforce the status quo. Set academic standards, and what was meant to be a baseline floor becomes a ceiling. Require assessments, and the cut scores are set so low that almost every school looks like a high performer. Insist on charters, and then allow the state department of education to act as the authorizing body, ensuring that nothing markedly different gets through. (And then reduce the funding those charters get just to make it interesting.)

[snip]

What if we stopped trying to fight? What if we realized that we can’t reform a monopoly from the outside, and that there’s no incentive to do it from the inside? What if we tried a different approach?

What if we shifted our focus to a war of attrition?

Imagine what would happen if we stopped trying to reform the system, and instead just said, “Clearly, we have different ideas about education. So we’re dropping out. If there are parents who want what you offer, that’s fine. I don’t, so I’m sending my kid elsewhere – which means you won’t be seeing the money he represents any more.”

I personally have reached the conclusion that the system can't be reformed. I say "personally" because I'm not sure I'm right, though I think I probably am. The schools aren't going to change. Individual schools, yes. But the system? No. I don't see it happening.

I had this revelation as the result of an email exchange with a longtime veteran of the schools here. She made me see the reality of what Crimson is saying: when parents have "won" -- when the programs parents put weeks, months, and years of their lives into making happen finally happened -- they weren't what parents had worked for.

They were something else.

Exhibit A: foreign language instruction in the grade school. A group of parents here spent 8 years lobbying for foreign language instruction in K-5.

The administration, backed by the school board, blocked them all the way.

Ultimately, though, the parents prevailed, and foreign language instruction was "implemented" in grades 4-5.

What did that mean?

That meant French and Spanish were both taught to all kids: French one semester, Spanish the next. Or vice versa. Your child couldn't take just one language and develop proficiency. He had to take one language for half the school year and then drop that language and start taking a whole other language the next semester, pretty much guaranteeing he would retain neither.

Also, the school didn't teach spoken French or Spanish. There were no language labs, no language CDs, no use of the school laptops to help kids acquire a native accent before the window closed at puberty a year or two later.

The school didn't teach very much in the way of French or Spanish vocabulary or grammer, either (this wasn't the teachers' fault). Instead, the school taught "the culture." Songs, cooking projects, things of that nature.

That was the beginning, and the district has been chipping away at the program ever since. This year they may be down to just one day of foreign language culture instruction a week.

Now the town is asked to vote in an 8% tax increase which will go, in part, to funding "enhancements" to the program.

Meanwhile there probably isn't a parent in town who does not want real foreign language instruction offered in K-3, but the school isn't going to be teaching foreign language in the early grades. It's out of the question.

Well, it's not quite out of the question. The superintendent says she wants to offer Chinese. A regular 21st century language, Chinese.

That's not going to happen.

The Avenger is right. The public can't win, and whenever the public does win, the win ends up being a loss. Another one.

That's why I was blown away when I read this prediction at the new Fordham blog, Flypaper:

[B]y 2019, half of all high school classes will be taught online.

How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

from the article in Education Week:

Clayton M. Christensen, the book’s lead author and a business professor at Harvard University, is well respected in the business world for his best-sellers The Innovator’s Dilemma, published in 1997, and The Innovator’s Solution, published in 2003.

Those books analyze why leading companies in various industries—computers, electronics, retail, and others—were knocked off by upstarts that were better able to take advantage of innovations based on new technology and changing conditions.

School organizations are similarly vulnerable, Mr. Christensen contends.
“The schools as they are now structured cannot do it,” he said in an interview, referring to adapting successfully to coming computer-based innovations. “Even the best managers in the world, if they were heads of departments in schools and the administrators of schools, could not do it.”

Under Mr. Christensen’s analytical model, the tables typically turn in an industry even when the dominant companies are well aware of a disruptive innovation and try to use it to transform themselves.

[snip]

With the advent of new technologies, companies usually resort to “cramming down” the innovations onto their existing systems, an approach that generates only incremental improvement, he says.

Upstart organizations—though they cannot at first compete head to head with the leaders—find markets for innovative products and services among “nonconsuming” groups who are are priced out of the main market or are seen as peripheral by the leaders. The nonconsuming groups embrace the innovations, which gradually improve until they are better than the top products—and sweep to dominance, according to the book.

[snip]

Like the leaders in other industries, the education establishment has crammed down technology onto its existing architecture, which is dominated by the “monolithic” processes of textbook creation and adoption, teaching practices and training, and standardized assessment—which, despite some efforts at individualization, by and large treat students the same, the book says.

But new providers are stepping forward to serve students that mainline education does not serve, or serve well, the authors write. Those students, which the book describes as K-12 education’s version of “nonconsumers,” include those lacking access to Advanced Placement courses, needing alternatives to standard classroom instruction, homebound or home-schooled students, those needing to make up course credits to graduate—and even prekindergarten children.

[snip]

Those providers will gradually improve their tools to offer instruction that is more student-centered, in part by breaking courses into modules that can be recombined specifically for each student, the authors predict.

Such providers’ approaches, the authors argue, will also become more affordable, and they will start attracting more and more students from regular schools.

Mr. Christensen and his co-authors apply an S-shaped curve, accepted in the business-research literature as a mathematical model of disruptive change in industry, to data from 2000 to 2007 to predict that by 2019, online learning will account for 50 percent of high school course enrollments.

The prediction is based on current projections of the supply of qualified teachers and of the costs of traditional and computer-based learning. “As long as that ratio stays the same, we’ll see that happen,” Mr. Christensen said. “Who knows if it is 2019, 2017, or 2020, but sometime around there, it should hit 50 percent.”

[snip]

He underscored that the book does not aim to frighten school leaders, but to urge them to treat the approaching changes as an opportunity rather than a threat.

“If they will set up heavyweight teams and create the new architecture for the curriculum in a new space—so they have a school within a school, or a different school underneath the umbrella of the district—at that level the school can truly transform itself,” he said.

Online Education Cast as 'Disruptive Innovation'
by Andrew Totter
Education Week
Vol. 27, Issue 36, Pages 1,12-13

I find Christensen's argument utterly compelling.

nonconsumers

Look at the pitch for K12:

James is reading over 130 wpm and is only a second grader.

Sophie’s brain seems to have undergone somewhat of a mental explosion.

I hope you go to bed each and every night knowing what a HUGE difference your work makes for some of these precious children.

Both girls are superior cognitive gifted. The private school taught to the middle. Now, both children are able to work at their own pace.

No more phone calls from the school to tell me how Bruce “didn’t get anything done today.” No more wasted days where Bruce just killed time at the school.

She was getting C’s and D’s at her public school and was being bullied. She entered last year, two years behind. In one year she completed two math courses 100%.

The other day my son said, “You know mom, three years ago I thought I was dead fish on the wayside of the beach and now I feel like I am an eagle in the sky looking down and know I can soar.

That's a whole lot of nonconsumers ripe for the plucking.

And check out Bror's Blog: Middle School Changes Afoot in the Brick and Mortar World.

Brick and mortar world.

Sounds creepy. Makes me feel like enrolling my kid in the wholesome high-tech online learning world where I can keep an eye on him.

I'm serious. The K12 pitch works for me. Really works. This is some of the most effective advertising I've ever seen, possibly because I am, relatively speaking, a nonconsumer who's just been alerted to a whole new world of possible fun consumption. A nonconsumer being captured by a disruptive innovator.

Here's the high school pitch. It works, too. Sign me up!

Of course, part of what makes this material so effective is the fact that it's a pitch at all.


don't try this at home

Let's watch what happens as a nonconsumer begins the process of becoming a consumer:

find your path

vs.

"If students need distributed practice, parents can find worksheets online."

Oh, and here's Bror.

Up the administration

I’m new here as a writer (though I’m a longtime reader), and would like to thank Catherine for allowing me to post anonymously when I feel I have something to say. I work in the education industry, and blogging under cover gives me an opportunity to share thoughts and observations that I otherwise could not share.

I’d like to start my blogging career here by pointing to an issue that doesn’t seem to get much play. And that’s the role of school leadership in the problems we see today.

Teachers, and policies related to teaching, seem to get all the attention. There’s a lot of talk about teaching methods, certification, retention, unions, class sizes, and more. And certainly those are important issues: I’m we’ll aware of the research showing what effect a good teacher can have on the life of a child (or on the flip side, the effect a bad teacher can have).

But in all this talk about what happens in the classrooms, it really seems as if school leadership gets to cop a walk. We’re all talking about the crisis in teaching and learning, but no one’s talking about the crisis in leadership, which could absolutely have an impact on teaching practices and on many other factors involved in good schooling.

Principals have the authority to direct resources (staff, funds, and other resources) as they see fit. They set expectations and lay out the ways in which teachers will operate. If there are problems in education today, I believe that school leadership is just as responsible for them as are teachers, and I’d personally say that the school leaders are more responsible for any other group.

Do school leaders share this point of view? Oh lord no.

A few weeks ago I attended a conference for the state chapter of a national school leadership association. Despite all the problems the rest of us see in public education, this group of school and district leaders clearly felt that they had the bull by the horns: they were the solution, not the problem, and they were doing a pretty darn good job of things in their own eyes. And things would be just perfect if just a few things would happen, like eliminating NCLB or giving them a “better” (assumedly richer) group of students to work with.

It’s frightening to hear the leader of any organization saying that things are actually really good in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary, and also believing that anything that’s not good is out of their hands. To see that this thinking isn’t isolated, but is instead the norm, is alarming indeed.

I did some checking after the conference to follow up on what I heard, and came across a fascinating survey report by Public Agenda titled “The Insiders: How Principals and Superintendents See Public Education Today.” Here’s the blurb from the site:

The fourth in a series of Reality Check reports finds that most public school superintendents -– and principals to a lesser extent -– think local schools are already in pretty good shape. In fact, more than half of the nation's superintendents consider local schools to be "excellent." Most superintendents (77%) and principals (79%) say low academic standards are not a serious problem where they work. Superintendents are substantially less likely than classroom teachers to believe that too many students get passed through the system without learning. While 62 percent of teachers say this is a "very" or "somewhat serious" problem in local schools, just 27 percent of superintendents say the same.

So yes, I think it’s worth talking about effective teaching methods and materials, and also talking about how we can get individual teachers to change their ways for the better. But until we address the leadership issue, from which many of these problems originate, we’re going to be treating the symptoms and not the real problem.