The 10 most critical reasons why we can’t go "back to basics"

The "Back to Basics" cry among education reformers comes from a frustration with the growing failure of public education. All these new innovative methods that have been tried and failed over the past few decades seem to point to that simple solution. People latch onto it as a rallying cry.

I don't want to poke fun at it, but I do have this image that keeps coming back to me. When I think of the nostalgic call for educational days gone by, I see “Happy Days.”

Richie and Potsy and What’shisname, with their books under their arms, coping with school, whining about homework but cooperatively going to their rooms to do it at a warning glance from Mom.

Fonzie was the cool dropout — it’s acceptable in this idealized vision for motorcycling leather-jacketed greasers to drop out. Fonzie was, literally, too cool for school. Guys like him had jobs in motorcycle repair shops.

People seem to think everything was fine back then, so why all the hand-wringing about wanting engaged kids who follow their passions?  According to educator and writer Ira Socol, public education has undergone many changes, but the structures and priorities of the system would seem very familiar to those educators who originally conceived it. The education we accept as "normal" now was not created for children as individuals who were all capable of critical thinking and creativity.

Recently I received a Tweet from someone who believes that since traditional education sent men to the moon, we should stick to it. I've been thinking about it, and talking with others and pondering what seems to me at first blush an entirely wrong statement, and gets worse when you start to pick it apart.

Here are 10 reasons why we need to move ahead, away from the idealized "Good old days" of education.

1. It was bad back then, too. The Happy Days version of the past gives us pictures of happy car mechanics and factory workers, having everything they needed in life. You don’t have to scratch the surface very hard to find the frustration of those who wanted something else but could not jump the roadblocks. Public education was never designed to develop creativity and critical thinking in all children; its just that in the old days, more people could make a living without those things.

2. “Tracking” of children labeled and dismissed them. In the name of teaching kids at the level that they were best able to cope, schools made choices about them, stuck labels on them that stayed throughout a student’s career. Tracking left kids no mobility, and no doubt about the educational contempt that was felt for them.  (This kind of tracking still exists in many, many school districts. Often this sorting of kids is covert.)

3.  Segregation. I don’t remember any African-American faces in Richie’s and Potsie's classes. Let’s not idealize a system that separated out the darker-skinned among us, and sent them to second-class schools.

4. Gender role stereotyping. In that grand period of human innovation, the Apollo Space Program, where were the women? Should we go “back to basics” so girls can go back to home economics and the boys to woodshop?.

5. There are no more factories. We can no longer support a system designed to find the 10% of people who respond to the top-down, verbal/logical/mathematical style of teaching and learning. Those students could rise to the top and run the world, while the rest can find factory or service work. This is 2012...what factory work? (In the autobiography of Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, his father supported his family as the manager of the produce section of a local grocery store. His mother was a stay-at-home Mom and their house had a nice yard).

Kids simply need to be better educated now than they did then. Cherry-picking those students who thrive in the traditional model isn’t enough. We need our schools to operate under the assumption that every child is capable of becoming educated — not just trained to make do.

6. Families are under more stress.  Middle-class wages have been flat or falling since the 1970s. There are women in the workforce now, with families needing two full-time wage-earners to get by.  Then in the boom of the 2000s, income disparity between rich and poor became much greater. The rising tide was lifting the yachts but the going was rougher for the rowboats. Then, the Great Recession took place, and lots of families lost their homes and their jobs.

We hear a lot of blame put on parents and families for the fact that many children are not prepared for school in the way that school is prepared to teach. Financial stress, generational poverty and ignorance all contribute. In his book, “Stop Stealing Dreams, Seth Godin says, “I can’t think of anything more cynical and selfish...than telling kids who didn’t win the parent lottery that they’ve lost the entire game.”

7. We’ve undergone an information revolution. Teachers and textbooks no longer hold the monopoly on information. Kids today are fully aware of the free-floating availability of the answer to almost any question, while their teachers are still teaching them facts and our classrooms are still structured around the dissemination of information.

The Internet explosion and rise in cellular telephony has made it nearly impossible for teachers to compete for their students' attention. They must go where students are, and teach in ways that are equally exciting and engaging. In fact, kids could take the lead, and show teachers how to use the tools of interactivity to open their classrooms up and let in the world.

The “back to basics” strategy, operating with kids' full attention, teaches small skills first, and brings the big picture into focus later. This is the topsy-turvy pedagogy of most American classrooms: we teach kids to hit, throw and run before they ever get to see a game of baseball.  But outside of school, kids are seeing the big picture. It's there for them to see and experience. The genie is out of the bottle, and education has to catch up.

8. The world is changing too fast to NOT educate for innovation.  The job title, “Website Producer” didn’t exist twenty years ago. Neither did hundreds of other job titles. The world of work is changing faster than it ever has, and yet the K-12 curriculum has barely moved. How can we prepare kids for job requirements that don’t exist today?

We can’t.  Rather, we need to develop a course of study for kids that develops their ability to innovate.  Tony Wagner’s new book, Creating Innovators, gives us some surprising insights into how this is done. Through interviews with young innovators, their teachers and their parents, he has developed a formula for creating innovators: Play, Passion and Purpose. (For Wagner, people who say, “It’s not supposed to be fun” are dead wrong. Fun is important.)

9. "Engage me or enrage me". When I was growing up, television was the enemy of education. We knew that TV existed to sell products; we knew that it dulled the mind and wasted our brain power. Ah, things were so simple then!

Add video games to the mix. It was only in my last year of high school that I encountered Space Invaders, the first really popular video game. A lucky friend had stuff like Breakout Blocks and Tennis on their TVs. Good times.

What we call “distractions”-- video games, television, smartphones, YouTube -- are central to the  lives of most of our kids. The educational value of the endless ability to explore the information available to kids is plain to them, if it isn't to us. Are kids bored when they are surfing, downloading music, talking on gaming message boards?

The educational value of the more complex, sophisticated video games is entirely lost on my generation as well, because we don't play them. We see the surface of them, the images, the fighting, the crime, and we don't look at the back-end, the complex and demanding nature of the games. A mantra of hard-core video gamers is, "If I ain't learnin', it ain't fun."

School is not. Whatever your feelings about video games are, whatever emotions we have when we see a kid who spent the whole weekend trying to level up, whether you see games as wasted time or intensive learning, the solution is clear: we must make school a place where kids can pursue the learning they want and need the most, in the way that they choose.


The above leads us to this point: we must ensure every child has an internet enabled device for use at school and away from school. Schools don't need to provide it for all, just those who don't have it. Knowledge is power and this is 21st century knowledge.

10. Advances in our knowledge of the human mind make top-down teaching obsolete.  There have been huge advances in our understanding of the brain since I was a child in school. The one I want to focus on has to do with the development of mastery. The brain is a lazy organ; before it works, it needs to understand why.  Students push themselves through learning and acquiring new skills when they are motivated, or ignited, fully understanding what they will gain.
According to Dan Coyle in The Talent Code, developing mastery in any area has three components: ignition, master coaching and deep practice. Deep practice is the component that actually makes the skill happen. It is defined as practice that pushes the learner against the edges of their abilities. It is marked by frustration, a feeling of being out of your depth and control. But it is this action that physically creates stronger and faster neural circuitry. Because it is an unpleasant process, the ignition that drives one through the hard parts is absolutely essential.

This is a fact that is absolutely ignored by the traditional education system. We are so concerned that kids learn what we regard as important that many of us believe that the the most critical learning takes place when the student is unwilling. But the wiring of the brain tells us that the unwillingness to learn actually prevents the learning from happening.

Those who can’t see the success of a passion-driven education often cite instances where this pushing was beneficial. There might be circumstances when a parent or caring teacher, one who thoroughly knows and understands a student, can successfully push a child to learn something that he is unwilling to learn. But pushing kids to do work that isn’t meaningful to them should not be the foundation of the public education system.



In any system, there will be outliers; those individuals who transcend time and place and circumstances to rise above with tremendous success. It is a statistical mistake to focus on those outliers as proof that a system is working...but that's what those who call for "back to basics" are doing.

Instead, we must pay attention to ordinary children of ordinary parents and ask, how can we design for them the best education we can? We can do it when we let go of nostalgia and mistaken pictures of better times, and create a system designed to allow joyful success for all students, no matter who they are.

Ask your kids, "Do you feel respected?"

I'd like to involve parents and kids in a little project. Parents, ask your kids, "Do you feel that the adults in school respect you?"

There is no right or wrong answer. If kids feel respected, I'd like to know more. If they don't, I'd like to know how it makes them feel about learning.

Here are some ideas for figuring out if you are really being respected:

• Do your teachers know you well? Do they honor you for your abilities, your interests, even your passions?
• Do they allow you to be comfortable, i.e. go to the bathroom, stand or sit or walk around when you need to?
• Are you doing work that satisfies you, and keeps you wanting more?
• Do you sit in rooms that you'd rather leave and do something else?
• Do you or your classmates get yelled at?
• Do you feel trusted?
• Do you have rights over your possessions?
• Is your voice heard when you have something to say?

Share the answers with your school board and your school principal, but if you like, sent them to me, as well. I'd like to compile a post of kids' answers.

So don't be content with a yes or no answer. Ask them why. Ask them how they'd like to be treated. Write it down or have your kids write their answers, and send them to me. (I won't publish any names, of course!)

Let me hear from you!

8 Ways to Assess without Standardized Tests

Guest Post by Lisa Nielsen

(Cross-Posted from The Innovative Educator)

Caine's Arcade
You don't assess innovation with bubbletests

Okay.  
You got the message.

Standardized tests are not what's best for learning. 
Not only are they not best for learning, but they have become an insurmountable obstacle for innovative educators like me to do my work in schools because helping kids become good and filling in bubbles on a piece of paper is anything but innovative!

 
Unfortunately, many politicians, parents, and even students don’t know a world without testing and wonder...

“If we don't use standardized tests how will we measure learning, teacher effectiveness, or school effectiveness?”

When people ask me that question, I usually respond with this question:

“How do we assess learning in real life?”

Think about it, learning is rarely measured via a test in real life. For instance, as a educator I had to take a few meaningless tests that no one bothers studying for more than a decade ago but that's it. A few tests 15 years ago and not another test is required the rest of my career. Our elected officials who often impose these tests upon children so they can claim they care about learning don't take tests. My Dad who was a cinematographer never took a test. My boyfriend who is in sales doesn't take tests. My girlfriend who is a professional photographer doesn’t take tests. My best friend who owns a successful fundraising business doesn’t take tests. The reality is that for most of us, success in life has little to do with how well we can fill in bubbles.

School life, needs to take a look at real life measurement tools and consider making the school world, look more like the real world with meaningful and authentic assessment. In short, we should measure individuals by how well they do stuff rather than how well they do the meaningless work of memorize, regurgitate, and fill in bubbles on demand.

8 Ways to Assess Students without Standardized Tests

1. Look at student’s school work -Students are doing work across the year. Let's assess that, rather than a bubbletest. For instance, we can look at a piece of writing and use a standardized rubric to measure that. We can listen to a recording of a student's reading and retelling and use a standardized measure to assess their readIng and comprehension level. The great thing is that teachers already do this. No need to fork over millions to a publisher and grading staff.
2. Games -More and more games are being created that allow us to determine a student’s level mastery by their ability to progress in a game. Simulation games/contests and games like Tabula Digita, Manga High are examples.  
3. Challenges -In real life we’re assessed by how well we do, not how well we fill in bubbles. Instead of bubble tests, support young people in in tackling real challenges to demonstrate their capabilities and get scouted for awesome apprenticeship/internship/career opportunities.  This is exactly what companies like Rad Matter (life is rad, make it matter) do.  
4. Badges and Points -Folks like Tom Vander Ark (Author, Getting Smart) predict badges will be big in education and I agree. A badge (think boy/girl scouts) is an award for demonstrated mastery of a skill that has become popular as a reward mechanism in games and social networks like foursquare.com. In education a badge could be awarded for successful completion of an activity. An example of this is Code Academy co-founded by Columbia U dropout (school got in the way of learning) Zach Sims. Code Academy is a site where you learn to program by actually coding and as you do you receive points and badges as you complete each exercise. I'm a newbie learning Java and html. I have 22 points and 2 badges.
5. Real World Work -Encourage students to get out of the classroom and into the world doing work in an area of interest. The iSchool is an example of a school that does this well with their Areas of focus Program. Staff supports students in figuring out what it is that interest them and them helps them go out into the world and do it via an internship, apprenticeship, job. Just like in the real world, their work is assessed by their supervisor.
6. Real World Projects -I talk to so many students who are doing amazing work...just not in school. They're making viral videos, writing for publications or publishing their own blogs, engaging in public speaking, etc. The problem is, in today's paradigm of school, when we do work worthy of the world, this just doesn't matter. Let's change that! When kids are doing amazing things in the world, let's give them credit for it.
7. Personal Success Plans -Assessment should be customized to the student, not standardized to the system. This is exactly what happens with a personalized success plan with measurable goals. Teachers work with students to help them identify their goals then develop a real plan to achieve them. This involves input from teachers, mentors, family, friends, and community. The teacher, students, family. mentors, etc. can see at any time the student’s progress at anytime and provide scaffolded support as necessary.
8. ePortfolios -ePortfolios provide a great way to capture, document, make meaning, and share with others what we learn. They are a wonderful assessment tool that tells much more about a child than a letter or number on a piece of paper.  Not only that, they form the basis of what can lead to academic and career success.  There are numerous ways to create free, student-owned ePortfolios. Knowit App is a new site that is helping students do this work, but as ePortfolio guru Helen Barrett explains, Google Sites and Wikispaces are also great resources.
   

This isn't that hard and it's better for everyone (students, parents, teachers, school leaders) except the mega-billion dollar testing industry. Now that we've saved millions of dollars and saved countless hours wasted on testing and prepping, how do you think we can better serve students? I have my ideas!

Let's Get Organized

As I observe the debates in education in the Great State of Maine, I think the time is ripe to present a coherent alternative viewpoint to that presented by Steve Bowen et.al. He is positioning himself as the great reformer and those who don't get on the Common Core/Proficiency-Based Education train are gonna get left behind.

Have we accepted the Common Core as the blueprint of all necessary learning? Is PBE the way to the Promised land of those critical thinkers and innovative problem-solvers we all agree we need so badly? Those of us who believe in education transformation need an organization in this state that is presenting a radically different view of the failure of education and the remedies that are needed.

Opposition to high-stakes testing is our rallying cry, but there is much more to talk about. There are people throughout the state who are dissatisfied with the education their children and grandchildren and neighbors are receiving. There is common ground between us, even if we disagree on points of pedagogy or finance.

I think a conference on education change would help galvanize our side. The meeting and greeting and rubbing shoulders with those who agree with us...it's not something I've ever done anywhere, let alone with people from my own state.

You know what I mean; one of those big ol' conferences with concurrent workshops and plenary sessions and hobnobbing in hallways and getting excited about creating an education system that truly puts the value of each child at the center, relegating all else to the back seat.

Do we think we can make something like this happen?

Grading kids on how much they care?

Behavior, cooperation, participation and homework.

These are the factors that go into a grade in our middle school, evaluating a student's "work ethic."

It is an effort to separate the grade on an end product from the effort that went into it. Maybe it's an attempt to give kids who "under-perform" a chance to get credit for how hard they try. Maybe it's just a way of factoring in how seriously a student took the work, whether he/she was "mailing it in" or really working.

But I think it's a way of grading kids on how much they care.

So here's the irony: maintain schools that institutionally disregard who kids are when determining their course of study. Cope with the resulting disengagement by providing a grade system on how much/little they seem to care about the learning.

Kids work hard when the work matters to them. Since they are not choosing what they learn, with this system they not only have to learn stuff they don't care about, but receive a grade on how much they don't care about it.

Insult to injury.

Whose fault is it when a kid doesn't care? It's nobody's fault. The kid just doesn't care. Find out what matters to kids, what they know, what they love, what they are "experts" in, and let them direct their learning.

Stop worrying about whether kids are going to learn to read, write or do math if we allow them to pursue the learning that is most meaningful to them. A student who is engaged with the world around them in a way that matters to them is going to learn to read, write and do math.

Stop worrying that kids will not be able to hold down a job unless we teach them work ethic. The work world and school are two entirely different arenas. Adults have choice, even if choice is limited; and adults get a paycheck. I can't tell you how many times that has inspired me to learn what I didn't care about. But what the reward for kids when they are asked to do it?

Self-respect is what enables people to function in the work world. Self-respect comes in part from accomplishment. Accomplishment comes from doing work that truly matters.

Kids are powerless in the school system. We uphold this, then hand them our judgment.

Is anyone else seeing the irony here?

If it's broke, fix it!

Let's think about those school practices that have actually been proven to be harmful to kids. Not big-picture issues this time; let's think of the littler stuff that is very big in the eyes of the kids who are subjected to it.

1. Homework. Get rid of it. Elementary grades: we should be giving none at all. Middle and high grades: only stuff that is supported by research. Don't make kids work a second shift. Do we really have any idea the happiness this would bring to so many kids? Instant good will on the part of children, with accompanying positive impact on learning.

2. Extrinsic motivation. Snuff it out. No more lollipops for "good behavior," no more rewards for conforming to adults' expectations. Again, check out the research. All negative. Dump it.

3. Early start times for adolescents. Do you need to see any more research? Our high schools are full of zombies half asleep, half awake, all miserable. Let them sleep. It won't kill us.

4. Ban on cell phones. If you can't hold their attention in competition with a cell, that's not their problem.

5. Ban on social media. Kids have the world at their fingertips...except in school. Figure out how to connect your classes to the world. Better still, let kids do it.

6. Stop making them wait to go to the bathroom when they have to go.

7. Stop the ban on food in the classroom. When kids are hungry, they should eat.

8. Let them play. Let them hang out. Let them socialize.

9. Better lunch food, with kids playing a role in researching and deciding on menus.

Easy peasy, right? Send me your ideas on ways to make kids happier in school, starting right now.

Thanks to Lisa Nielson for her ideas!

The Shoe Doesn't Fit

I hate listening to politicians speak. I find it frustrating and almost embarrassing. I avoid it at all costs. The last State of the Union I watched was given by Jed Bartlet. I don't even like watching Jon Stewart skewer Mitt Romney with clips from his stump speeches. It often angers and disgusts me to watch these men and women act like they know what they're talking about, so I avoid it.

But I watched Maine's Education Commissioner Steve Bowen's presentation at the Samoset this past week anyway. What I expected was that this presentation will sound good enough and exciting enough that people will hop on board the good ship Standards-Based Education.

The opposers will be on the other side of the argument from me: "there's nothing wrong with traditional education." For people like me who want the power and control over education to be in the hands of children, it will not go nearly far enough.

What I expected to see was the self-congratulation of a guy who has been touted as Maine's leader of great educational changes that are so crucial to our children. What I will see is change that is no change at all.

My thoughts while watching the video:

He's critical of NCLB, and I guess we can be grateful for that; but who, in this day and age, is still publicly in favor of it? Our President is critical, but his Administration has re-released it with new cover art, and we're still waiting for new music.

He speaks of the Committee of Ten, that "working group of educators that, in 1892, recommended the standardization of American high school curriculum." I am very skeptical that we are moving away from the K-12 course of study as designed by them. The Common Core State Standards and the Maine Learning Results repackages it. The needed refocusing of education is still nowhere to be found.

He has my attention when he talks about customized systems. But what this leads to is a discussion of narrowing in on ways kids can be made to learn stuff they don't care about, though. His segue to School of One reveals that he is NOT talking about narrowing in on who kids are, but how they can best be made to learn what we tell them to learn

Focus on the kids! Restructure school so the first duty is to RECOGNIZE and HONOR them for who they are. Then provide the support, time and resources to guide them to becoming the people they want to be.

When I make this argument, people generally object, thinking that I don't think kids should learn to read and write or do math unless they want to. But you don't need to use silverware to eat food. You can be nourished without it. But if you are around other people much, you'll learn to eat with silverware. You'll want to; your exposure to the world of other folks eating food will make you want to.

Kids will want to learn to read when they are engaged with the world around them. They'll enjoy math when they see that life is full of math.

We are still focused with a kind of panicky anxiety to making sure we control what kids are learning. Adults have learned a lot over the past ten years, and our education has yielded this: If you can't force kids feet into the small shoes of our education system, provide a shoehorn.

But the shoe is still too tight. Nothing will make it larger. Nothing will make it work. Nothing about the mandated K-12 curriculum will replace the need to discover who these kids are, and center their educations around that. I call it the identity imperative in our schools.

I might be faced with this argument, "But Lisa, it works. It's working. Kids ARE more engaged, they are happier, they are pursuing their educations with vigor and zeal!"

In an institution where real choice and freedom to learn is not even part of the conversation, kids will respond to any offer of options. What they won't do, because they haven't been asked, is look inside themselves for what most energizes them. They will take the opportunities we provide.

We lose something in this system, and it is not a small thing. We teach kids that what they need to learn does not come from inside them. We teach them to gain self-respect by complying with adult values. We teach them that to gain our approval, they should become passionate about what we tell them to value. What we lose is the newness of young thoughts, wonderful ideas, originality, creativity, great innovations.

Student Voice and Choice is the biggest lie in this system. What kids are choosing is how they can demonstrate learning of something they have been manipulated to care about. But who they actually are and what they'd really choose is entirely left out in the cold.

All this effort does is create a structure wherein a central focus is co-opted by the manipulation of kids instead of holding genuine value for them. There can only be one central focus in an institution. For my money, it should be those human beings who are shorter than we are in stature, powerless to control their lives, handed only those responsibilities that we impose and without any rights at all.

The standards-based system does not, as advertised, put children in the center. What we need is a true revolution in education, one that gives children rights over the education they create for themselves.