Ready for some good news out of Congress?

A few senators on both sides of the aisle spoke some sense about education in a Senate Appropriations Committee meeting, today, where Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appealed for an education budget increase. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) agreed in principle, saying, "It is wishful thinking to expect improvements in school quality when we are laying off teachers."

In the same meeting, Senators Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Jack Reed (D-RI) criticized competitive grant programs including Race to the Top (RTTT) and Promise Neighborhood (PN) grants. Shelby expressed concern that RTTT ensures inequitable funding and threatens states' rights by introducing a de facto requirement for states to support charter schools. Reed cautioned that funding should not be allocated to "untested" competitive grants, while being stripped from research-based programs.

The senators gently couched their concerns in party rhetoric, but my hope is that this is a sign of a larger political shift away from trying to apply competition-based business strategies to an education system that is supposed to provide equitable education to all. With increasing attention to the way this country educates its children, it seems more folks are starting to understand that the economic purpose of schools is not to turn a profit, but to ensure strong profits, over time, across all industries, by providing a skilled, knowledgeable, creative, and capable national workforce.

Links:

Reuters on the Senate Committee Meeting

HuffPo on the Senate Committee Meeting

Tech yourself before you wreck yourself

Today was the first day of the Education Summit in Iowa. Most of the events were streamed live, and I'm hoping the Department of Education will also post the videos for anyone who missed them today. For now, I want to focus on the afternoon's opening remarks by Scott McLeod, professor at Iowa State University and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Technology in Leadership (CASTLE).

McLeod is an educator who understands the digital age, the 'Net Generation, and the possibilities and challenges our increasingly tech-based world presents to educators. In his remarks, he named a dozen things (including a catch-all "And so on...") educators would do "[i]f we were REALLY serious about educational technology." As a fairly regular ad hoc Wiki* contributor and editor, I particularly enjoyed item four: "we'd teach students to understand and contribute to the online information commons rather than 'just saying no' to Wikipedia." All of McLeod's suggestions focus on involving students (and ourselves) in learning and using technology to engage with the digital world in which our students already exist and for which they must be prepared by the time they graduate.

To McLeod's list I would add that we should involve students in developing the software and technology of the future. I know from personal experience that technology development is within reach for our students; I was eight or nine when I wrote my first DOS-based computer program on an IBM PC and saved it to a floppy disk before the end of class time. My school was a technology leader of its time, with a computer lab, weekly computer classes for all students, and one or two computers in each classroom. Nearly two decades later, not much has changed in the schools where my teacher peers and I have taught and are teaching. Each is equipped with a computer lab, weekly computer classes for all students, and one or two computers in each classroom. And cell phones and other hand-held digital devices are banned.

Even SMART Boards, truly revolutionary tools in the hands of tech-savvy educators, are often reduced to their lowest-tech function when time-pressured classroom teachers become stuck using the digital markers to jot down test-prep lessons, just as they would use dry-erase markers on a non-interactive whiteboard. It doesn't have to be this way. With tech knowledge, computers for students, and the freedom to teach, today's teachers can and should be pushing students to develop new computer programs -- call them apps, if you will -- along with written, oral, and digital presentations to "pitch" their initial ideas to peer-collaborators and, later, "market" their final products to classmates. If we teach them, these are skills our students can use today, as they prepare themselves for the future.

A business leader, a university president, and a teacher walk into Iowa....

Interesting news out of Iowa today as Governor Branstad prepares for his July 25-26 Education Summit. Today's roundtable discussions with business leaders, college and university presidents, and teachers were made available for live streaming and the videos of each roundtable are to be posted after the events. It looks like the Iowa Department of education will also make the summit presentations widely available during that event in a couple of weeks.

Just one comment for now, about integrating a few of these ideas. Business leaders rightly pointed out that teachers need to be appropriately compensated for their work, just as employees in the private sector are. The group focused on increasing pay for teachers in higher-demand positions (challenging schools, math and science instruction, special education) as well as performance-based pay. Later, in the teacher roundtable, teachers pointed out that one stellar teacher in a mediocre school cannot independently raise the field of education or the even the function of the school where they teach; great schools are the result of great coordination.

This is why any serious performance-based pay system must be implemented at the school level, rather than at the level of individual teachers. Whole schools must be accountable for rising or sinking together, just as whole businesses are. John Bloomhall, president and CEO of Diamond Mills (an animal feed company) suggested during the business leaders' roundtable, "If I had a classroom, I'd put the [students] in charge of being successful: 'Your job is to make sure every kid gets a passing grade." This is the strategy we need for schools: we need to tell school communities that it is their responsibility to make sure every teacher succeeds, and we need to give them the resources to do it.

You can access the videos here: https://educateiowa.eduvision.tv/default.aspx

Raise up your staff, part 1

As efforts continue to make schools run more like businesses, the job of principals is becoming more like the job of CEOs. Balancing school budgets and making large purchasing decisions used to be the purview of school boards and school districts, but principals are increasingly expected to make the short- and long-term decisions about the business aspects of the schools they head. In response to this shift, some new preparation programs are focusing heavily on the business and management side of running a school.

In 2008, Rice University, an elite private school with no education department, introduced an MBA program for aspiring school leaders. The program focuses on developing the business skills of principals, while de-emphasizing the role of principal as instructional leader. The directors of the Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program (REEP) are explicit about thinking of principals as CEOs. Being a good principal means being a good manager -- of employees, data, and financials.

According to REEP, it also means bringing new ideas to the field of education. Traditional preparation programs focus on developing instructional leaders who are well-versed in education theory and history, like super-teachers who can help their faculty develop as educational professionals. In contrast, programs like REEP seek to develop leaders who challenge accepted education theory and are willing to try new approaches to get better results.

I respect the efforts of programs like REEP (including the New York City Leadership Academy) to prepare principals for a job that increasingly requires business management skills. I also agree that the public education world needs big thinkers and innovators to face the challenges of educating an increasingly under-resourced student population to participate in an increasingly technology-driven business world. But I think it is a mistake (and such an easy mistake for people coming from a business paradigm) for the directors of these programs to position themselves as competition for traditional principal preparation programs.

The reality is that today's schools need brilliant instructional leaders, capable of connecting with and supporting students and teachers, and excellent business managers, able to collect, analyze, and utilize data to make decisions about staffing and budgets. I wonder if it's possible, or wise, to expect principals to handle a job that big and varied. According to a 2009 NY Times article on the uncertain success of the NYC Leadership academy, Amy Ellen Schwartz, director of the only independent study of the Academy so far, has her doubts. The article quotes Schwartz saying, "It may be that it's an impossible job.... You're asking for things that don't often come in the same person."

Next Monday is Independence Day; tune in for Celebrating independence, Ed Nerd style.