Reforming Public Education Requires Abandoning Labels and Fear of Change

If there is anything I have learned in recent weeks, it's that reforming public education in the United States requires embracing change, not fearing it.   It is amazing how people are unwilling to look at any policy papers because they label the authors as "conservative" or "anti teacher."   People will go to great lengths, and even wage personal attacks on people in order to protect the status quo.

Let me be clear.   On most social issues, I lean more towards the "left" than most people do.   Education, however, is not a "liberal" or "conservative" issue.  It's about our children, and the fact that our current system was built for a mass-standardization, Industrial Revolution era in our nation's history.  I support innovation, and that requires change.  Yet throughout the past few years, and more intensely the past several weeks, I have been branded a "right wing extremist," a supporter of "private vouchers," and someone who supports more corporations getting into the public education arena.   Why are people so keen on making judgments about my point of view?

I have been personally attacked on the most anachronistic education blog in Atlanta, called Get Schooled  It's author has a clear agenda to attack any trends that might change the system.  She is anti-digital learning, anti charter school, protector of local public school monopolies and yet the newspaper she writes for refuses to allow an additional education blog that provides an alternate perspective on education policy impacting Atlanta, and Georgia for that matter.   Why is this acceptable?  Where is the public outrage?

Again, what I support is systemic change in our education system.   Teachers need to be better trained, better evaluated, better compensated, and more flexible in how they teacher our children.   Local school boards cannot have exclusive control over charter schools - what is wrong with competition?  And how can we innovate if all innovation is stifled by the status quo?   Digital learning knows no geographic boundaries, yet how can local school boards put a walled garden around such learning opportunities?  Why are teachers, and their unions, afraid that digital learning will result in fewer jobs?  What about the positive aspects of digital learning, such as expanding the reach of the best teachers?  Or freeing teachers up from administrative tasks to focus more on differentiated instruction?    What about improving the operating efficiency of public education by allowing certain pieces of the infrastructure to be run at the state level?   Why is it ok that school systems such as Atlanta Public Schools can spend $15K per pupil, yet only graduate 52 percent of its students?   There are so many questions I have about public education?   I do not disrespect teachers, but their unions are preventing real change, and teachers need more tools to thrive in a digital world.

Our education system MUST change, for the sake of our children.   It is time that everyone starts to keep an open mind and start compromising to get things done.   The world has changed in the past century, EXCEPT public education.   Our children deserve a quality education, and there are few places that are meeting this vision.

If people have the courage to open their minds and start working together to reform public education, then maybe there will still be hope for our children.   The United States is the greatest democracy on the planet, but lets stop the partisanship and start collaborating to maintain our international competitiveness for generations to come.

Education Reform for the Digital Era

It has become increasingly clear to me that the way to reform public education is not to work within the existing system, but to rebuild it from the ground up.    Change cannot happen under the current framework.  My colleague Michael Horn at the Innosight Institute has it 100% right.   Disruptive innovation is the only way to get the system to change.   I am more convinced than ever that more money is not going to do anything for our children.   There is plenty of money; however, there is too much wasteful spending in our local monopoly-driven system.

I decided to title this blog post identical to a recent white paper I read from the Fordham Institute.   It is free to the world, and, contrary to what many people have labeled as a "conservative" point of view about education reform, it is nothing of the sort.   The extensive paper comprises well-researched policy recommendations on how we can reposition our public schools for success in a digital world.   How can our schools embrace technological innovation and digital learning?   The first paragraph of the introduction: Overcoming the Obstacles to Digital Learning,  provides an excellent lens into the objectives of the paper:

Digital learning is more than the latest addition to education reformers’ to-do lists, filed along with teacher evaluations, charter schools, tenure reform, academic standards, and the like. It’s fundamentally different: For digital learning to fulfill its enormous potential, a wholesale reshaping of the reform agenda itself is required, particularly in the realms of school finance and governance. But just as online education needs those reforms if it is to flourish, so does deep education reform need digital learning, which can provide valuable solutions to some of education’s greatest challenges—beginning with the basic obsolescence of its familiar delivery system.

The paper is comprised of five detailed, research-driven sections:

Chapter 1: Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction
Chapter 2: Quality Control in K–12 Digital Learning:
Chapter 3: The Costs of Online Learning
Chapter 4: School Finance in the Digital-Learning Era
Chapter 5: Overcoming the Governance Challenge in
                   K–12 Online Learning

There is some excellent guidance in the material about the promise of digital learning and why teachers should embrace it, not fear it.   However, the paper does a fine job at framing three significant barriers to successful implementation of digital learning in public education:

• Self-absorbed and self-serving groups that do their utmost either to capture the potential of technology to advance their own interests or to shackle it in ways that keep it from harming those interests.
• Issues of organizational capacity within our public education system, a system that has enormous
  difficulty accommodating and assimilating change—and the more wrenching the change the greater the difficulty.
• Core governance and financing structures of our K–12 system itself.

Teachers fear the "unbundling" of learning that digital learning promises.   Education is not bound by the walls of one classroom and one teacher.   How you train teachers and measure their effectiveness when they do not have full control over a child's academic development poses material challenges in our current education system that is run by local monopolies and teachers unions.   That is NOT a conservative or liberal perspective - that is REALITY.    You cannot leave local school districts in control of online learning, as it will retard innovation.  Let me leave you with one final excerpt from the paper, which again, I encourage all of you to take the time and read:

Now consider our agricultural-era devotion to “local control” of public education and ask how this arrangement can possibly work well—indeed, what it even means—when the delivery system itself is unbound by district, municipal, or even state borders. Who is really “in charge” when students assemble their education from multiple providers based in many locations, some likely on the other side of
the planet? Digital learning, like digital communications, lives on the Internet—often “in the cloud”—and knows no natural geographic or political boundaries. Sure, it can be inhibited by totalitarian regimes that fear websites or any communications that may loosen their grip. When left to flourish in the marketplace, however, digital learning will yield innovation, competition (affecting content, quality, delivery mechanisms, and price), and eventual economies of scale. And those will—and ought to—develop without regard to municipal boundaries.

I could write pages and pages of material about this work, so I ask you all to read it for yourselves.   Keep an open mind, and please share your insights with me after you've had a chance to read it.  

The road map is there, my friends - we just require the courage to change.  Lets do it for the sake of our children's generation.

Putting Georgia Public Education on Notice

I have finally had enough.

Every citizen of the state of Georgia - in fact, every citizen in the United States - should be OUTRAGED at the rapid deterioration of our public education system.    I will lump it into the same category as AMTRAK and the US Postal Service.  

You might say I'm not telling you what you don't already know.   Well, at a briefing last week of the GA Public Policy Foundation, attendees were given a very detailed spreadsheet.   It contained ALL expenditures, by category and graduation rates for every school system in the state of Georgia.  And I was totally mortified at what I saw.  A few tidbits:

• Atlanta Public Schools:   $15,239 per pupil, with a 52% graduation rate!  And they spend nearly $3K per pupil for central admin costs!
• Gwinnett County (received a Broad Foundation grant - 162K+ students):  1 in 3 students NOT graduating!
• One small district has a 40% graduation rate!

Educators, parents and policy-makers - you should be ashamed of yourselves.   How and why did we allow public education to stay stagnant while the entire world has changed around it?  And how many of these graduates are truly ready for college, when professors complain about the significant amount of remedial work they need to teach their students?

When will our electorate realize that public education is NOT a democrat or republican issue?  It's about our children, and we are failing them.  It's not about the money.   Heck, for $15K a year, you could almost send your child to private school!  As you can see, this is what happens when you allow local monopoly power in education.   Redundancy, wasteful spending, and lack of innovation.  

And yet, our teachers unions and other factions are afraid of any kind of change.   Charter schools are not the magic bullet, but they offer a chance at innovative approaches to education.   Digital learning needs to be given a chance to flourish.  Recently, the Fordham Institute released a free white paper entitled, "Education Reform for the Digital Era."   While I am still reading the content, it is very interesting and an invaluable resource for anyone who wishes to reform our education system.   Having looked at the data, I am now more convinced than ever that money is not the problem.  We need to rebuild our education system from the ground up, for the sake of our children!

The status quo is unacceptable, so those of you who are complacent and passing the buck to others, it's time you spoke up!   Let's reinvent education in America, before it's too late!

We Need To Teach Ethics In K-12 Education Before It Is Too Late

Something has been really bothering me recently.   I had this epiphany after observing the salacious material being cirulated through social media regarding the scandal surrounding former Arkansas Head Football Coach Bobby Petrino.    It seems to me we have a growing ethics problem in the United States, and here's why:

• The Petrino scandal demonstrated that winning football games is more important than setting the right example for our students.    The University of Arkansas knew full well that they were getting a coach who cared more about himself, and winning, than teaching his students how to conduct themselves responsibly.  Even before this scandal broke, why would you have sent your son to play for a coach whose past behavior was reprehensible, especially how he walked out of a contractual commitment with the Atlanta Falcons.
• Technological innovation has always been a double-edged sword.  In the case of Petrino, reporters were leaking tons of text messages and other material, that, quite frankly, should not have been made available to the public.   How do we explain this situation to our children, and in this case, were we really using social media for the right reasons?    Unfortunately, there is something called "free will," and inventions will be used for both good and evil purposes, sad to say.
• What are we teaching our children when we see college coaches pick themselves up and leave to go to other schools, even when they're under contract?  We saw shameful behavior from USC Coach Lane Kiffin and former Pitt CoachTodd Graham who let their student-athletes down, one who sent them a note via Twitter!   Why does the NCAAA allow college coaches to be poached from schools when they're under employment agreements?  What does this tell our students about the importance of commitment?
• I have this running debate with a friend of mine about this "One and Done" situation with college basketball players.   Why should we allow college Freshmen to leave school three years early?   This sullies the definitation of a student-athlete - in this case, maybe the terms should be flip-flopped?  Should the NBA create a developmental league for basketball players, rather than creating a situation where a student is really not attending college to get a degree, only to get drafted in one year.   These students have no intention of staying to complete a degree, and it is far less likely these athletes will go back to complete 3 years of college versus one year.   Maybe MLB has it right when they say you either get drafted out of high school, or you stay at college three years?

I feel like our country, to some degree, is losing its "moral compass."   Contrary to what former NBA Star Charles Barkley thinks about role models - public figures ARE fole models.   Thus, I truly believe that a partnership between parents and teachers must be forged to ensure that we are teaching ethics as early in a child's development as possible.    I'm really afraid that we are letting this ominous legendary quote from Vince Lombardi rule the day:

"Winning isn't everything.   It's the ONLY thing."

Lets reinvent education by ensuring we teach ethics to our students as part of their academic requirements.   This may be the most important life skill they receive.    I, for one, try and live by the ideals of the following quote from famous author C.S. Lewis:

"Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching"

What an Atlanta Newspaper Has Taught Us About Data Reliability

I am done with my public bashing of the Atlanta newspaper that spread misleading research about standardized test scores around the nation.  However, what we have seen as a result of this debacle is that as part of "Reinventing Public Education," we need to do some serious reinventing of data analysis generated by our public school system.  

The Georgia Department of Education released a statement yesterday that disclosed a new formula for calculating the state's graduation rate.  Amazingly, but not surprisingly, the restatement brought last year's graduation rate down nearly 14 points, from nearly 81 percent to just over 67 percent.  No one really thought the 81 percent figure was a reliable figure.   So what does this all mean?

This indicates the great challenge in researchers trying to compare data across states and localities.   It is common knowledge that the public school system is the last bastion of society mired in the analog age, and for public education to be able to be reinvented to succeed in a digital world, the entire infrastructure needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.  This is EXACTLY why you can't "cram" technology into schools, as my friend Michael Horn (co-author of Disrupting Class) has pointed out so eloquently.  The challenge of obtaining data that is comparable across states is laborious and tedious at best, if not impossible to complete.   As you saw in Georgia, what appears simple as asking for a "graduate rate" is clearly not so simple.

This is symptomatic of the inherent conflict between Hamiltonian Federalism and Jeffersonian Republicanism.  We need the federal resources to compel states to report data using the same formula, but even in this case, Georgia obtain a waiver to calculate the graduation rate using a 5-year, not 4-year cohort.   I am not lobbying for one methodology over another, but think about all of the disclaimers a researcher will have to annotate because states are not calculating a graduation rate the same way.

What this example has shown this blogger is that we need to be VERY skeptical of education data in the public domain.   How un-nerving for citizens to know that reported data may not be what it seems.   This is one of the many challenges faced in education reform efforts. 

We should all be worried about this one.