Just how should educators be held responsible?

Financiers send the world into recession and don’t seem to suffer. Neighbors take on huge mortgages and then just walk away when they go underwater. Washington politicians avoid living within their means. Federal agencies fail and get rewarded with more responsibilities.

What the country is really looking for is a restoration of responsibility. David Brooks

I dislike intensely the current political emphasis on testing. Current tests are at best a crude measurement of minimal skills. They are used for discrediting public education, especially teachers - not for helping students grow. Teachers' effectiveness should not be judged on test scores - period.

Yet...

Parents, school boards, the larger community, and, I would argue, students themselves want and have a right to accountability by their districts, buildings and individual teachers. We rely on test scores because without them there would an accountability vacuum. We as professional educators have not produced alternative means of assessing educational effectiveness that are viewed as reliable, objective and meaningful.

As a parent, test scores didn't mean nearly as much to me as other factors including climate, extra-curricular offerings and good library/tech programs. And of course my own children's attitude toward school. of course. But as a citizen, I do have an interest in knowing how my country's, our state's, my district's and my children's "schools are doing."

Tests are crude and we all know PR is, well, usually just PR, so what is the alternative?

I have always been a big fan of authentic assessment tools to measure student performance. Checklists, rubrics, conferences, etc. help kids improve and achieve mastery. Correctly designed, they can be objective and result in some form of numerical data.

What I've not seen is a classroom, building or district aggregate this data to produce a score for groups of students. Such aggregation would result in both meaning and reliability.

Were you made the education emperor how would you have schools and teachers to demonstrate their effectiveness? Remember, you have to satisfy this demanding grandfather.

BFTP: Do we need national technology standards?

A Saturday Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post, Sept 26, 2005.  Given the proposed changes in E-rate in the new lately ...

The original goals of E-Rate – that all schools be connected to the Internet has by and large been accomplished nationally. But as we all know, connectivity alone does not an effective school make.

It will be up to ISTE or similar national organization to create new national infrastructure goals if they are going to be created at all. The chance for creating a strong vision by the federal government was fumbled by the Department of Education with its National Education Technology Plan – a largely worthless document. See my ”Directionless Dictates” column from the May 2005 Teacher Magazine.

Well written national standards are both useful and necessary for a number of reasons, and given ISTE’s success with its student, teacher and administrative NETS standards, it is the logical organization to tackle this job.

We have used ISTE’s NETS Standards for Students as a guide to writing both our state information literacy and technology student guidelines and our own local guidelines. In other words, good national standards for technology infrastructure would do more than simply provide a rationale for continued E-rate funding.

My experience is that few districts:

• Know how they compare to other districts in their technology implementation efforts;
• Can determine the direction they should be moving to improve technology utilization;
• Can visualize a technology infrastructure that fully supports learning, teaching and managing.

A good set of technology standards - simple, quantitative, and research-supported - could be an authoritative voice that would help remedy these shortcomings.

The standards I most appreciate tend to take a rubric-like approach. In multiple categories, a district might judge itself as minimum, standard or exemplary in each category. And if the rubrics are concretely written, it would be readily apparent how a district could move from, say, a minimum to standard level in any category.

I would find standards in the following areas extremely helpful as I try to evaluate our district’s technology infrastructure and plan for improvement :

1. Connectivity (LAN, WAN, and Internet I & II capacities)
2. Security (firewalls, filters, policies)
3. Tech support (technicians per computer, tech support response time, reliability rates, policies about technology replacement,)
4. Administrative applications (student information systems, transportation, personnel systems, payroll systems, data mining systems, home-school communication systems, online testing)
5. Information resources (e-mail, mailing lists, blogging software, online learning software, commercial databases, library automation systems)
6. Staff training resources, requirements and opportunities
7. Staff/computer rations and student/computer ratios (exemplary here might be the one-to-one initiatives)
8. Technology/content area curricula integration (articulated student technology skills embedded in the content areas, assessments)

Each rubric, of course, would need to be accompanied by the research/rationale that supports its inclusion.

What do you think ISTE? Are you up to the challenge? In what other areas might standards be written to help guide districts and power the argument for continued E-rate funding?

Note: After five years, I have seen nothing written that is concrete, measurable or useful. I believe it stems from schools really not wanting to answer the uncomfortable questions that arise from being compared to other schools.

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The disconnect

…technology is an accelerator of greatness already in place, never the principal cause of greatness or decline. Newsweek, April 29, 2002.

My grandfather was an Iowa farmer. And he drove like one. His cars were large, American made and floated down the road like barges. And true to the Iowa farmer spirit of his day, he always drove at least ten miles an hour below the speed limit with one eye on the crops. To the best of my knowledge, he never had a driving accident and always wound up where he wanted to go, when he wanted to be there.

My guess is that if you had replaced Grandpa's Olds with a Ferrari, he would still have driven to the same places at the same pace checking how the beans were doing along the way. The new "technology" that may have gotten my grandfather excited would have been a new manure spreader or combine. And being a fiscal conservative, he would have questioned the need for those technologies.

I thought about Grandpa as I read Anthony VonBank's guest post on Scott McLeod's Dangerously Irrelevant blog. VonBank extols the virtues of GoogleApps* and has high expectations of its impact on education:

The addition of collaborative software, standardized mail and electronic calendars (not to mention the auxiliary tools Google provides like Maps, Blogger, Sites), should pave the way for a new consciousness that leaps the school, district, or (in the case of Oregon) whole state firmly into the 21st century. It should open faculty and administrators to the richness and accessibility of Web 2.0 and cloud-based tools so they can build up to much more data-driven techniques that embed the desired outcomes in a wealth of industry-current technology. Google Apps has the ability to bring students from all over the planet into collaborative work that utilizes higher-order thinking and yet builds upon the benchmarks provided for in the curriculum.

But then he laments:

When I have asked teachers and administrators in nearby districts who have gone to Google Apps for Education how they are using it as part of their overall mission or goals [emphasis mine], I get blank looks. Many don’t even really know what they have. There are plenty of individual teachers making great use of the Google Apps suite, and some districts are farther along than others, but the overall lack of a cohesive plan to leverage the power of these tools is generally not clear, in its infancy, or just plain absent. ... We have a new tool, with no real plans as to how specifically it will lead us to our 21st century goals.

And concludes: "The problem is that even when offered the keys to a brand new shiny red sports car, it seems as if the inclination is to just let it sit in the driveway."

Just like my grandpa above.

VonBank's post is a poster child for the blogosphere pundit/school-based practitioner disconnect. Technology advocates' passions too often are not recognized or do not align with the goals of administration in real schools. (A similar theme is school librarians lamenting that principals "just don't get it" when it comes to the need for their programs.)

The chance of this changing in my life time is, uh, remote. When my own district "strategic plan" was constructed a couple years ago, technology wasn't a top priority mentioned. So what's a tech director to do who wants to see what his/her department have to offer used to benefit kids? Leave the shiny new car just sitting in the driveway?

I'm here to tell you that you can successfully do technology implementation when there are no district goals addressing the use of technology. Technology planners developing a separate, hopefully parallel, set of goals and objectives should consider:

1. Technology as infrastructure. We don't insist that the custodial staff, the bussing companies or the business office tie into the strategic plan. Lights, buses and payroll are fundamental to the educational system. So are networks, servers, student information systems and teacher computers. It's not glam, but it's accurate.

2. Technology as a means to an end. Computers can be used to support just about any methodology or philosophy that exists in education. You love testing (or fear those who do love testing), tech has got your back. You like constructism and authentic learning and hands-on, we're here for you, baby. (See A Better Question.)

3. Technology as subversion. Good educators have always done what's in the best interest of kids, not always the party line. It's fun and good for one's karma. The technology department should have this mentality as well. I might not spell this out in the written tech plan, however.

4. Technology as supporting prima facie objectives. One has to love nebulous positives in education such as:
     - improved communication
     - increased collaboration
     - 21st century skills
     - increased accountability
     - data-driven decision-making
     - differentiated instruction
     - global citizenship, digital citizenship, yada, yada, yada
There's got to be something in that list that your pet tech project supports.

I am not to sure I even like "technology" as a goal for a school district. I want happy kids who will be prepared for a productive life attending a well-managed, fiscally-prudent district. If technology helps bring this about, I'll sleep well at night.

VonBank is in a hurry with his technology as sports car analogy. Personally, I think technology makes a better tractor - slow, deliberate, and productive.

*We are one of the districts that is implementing GoogleDocs and I share Anthony's excitement about its potential. But it is no more a silver bullet than, well, a silver bullet.

Image source: http://www.sodahead.com