Superintendents need a required course

I was giving a workshop for superintendents about technology costs in 2002, and had just outlined a ballpark figure for core technology (hardware, networks and personnel.)  I still remember John, a rural superintendent, who replied with visible disbelief when I said it would take 3.5 % of his operating budget, plus hardware.  "Are you saying that I would need to spend $350,000 per year out of my $10,000,000 budget for technology?" For John, this was an impossible figure, yet it had been the national average for years, (and it did not include one-one laptops.) "It's just an operating budget...mostly personnel, services, etc.," I said. "It doesn't include construction, facilities, capitol projects, etc.)" 

"We don't have any of that now," he said, "the teachers do it." John was experiencing something the TCO people call " indirect costs."

For years, we have discussed the idea of having a university course in technology required for Maine certification (like school law, school finance, and exceptionality) which would facilitate conversations like the one above. 

The enGauge Framework on funding: 

• Reprioritize budgets to ensure ongoing, sustainable funding for wide-scale initiatives.
• Analyze the total cost of ownership and programmatic implementation to predict costs into the future.
• Provide funding for targeted R&D as well as for basic technology infrastructure, administrative and management-software solutions, e-mail and file transfer communications, and proven learning solutions for entire student populations.

The National Standards for administrators

Section IV C: "allocate financial and human resources to ensure complete and sustained implementation of the technology plan." 

These bullets say a lot, but they don't say how much.  Superintendents want to know how much.  I remember saying to Michael, a super from midcoast Maine, that core technology would have to grow to 2% in the budget if he wanted to deploy the Internet to every desktop. "You wanna bet?" he answered with a smile.  It's his budget, you see.  He later became famous for sayng that technology was a "black hole" in the budget.

The Gartner TCO tool offers a few case histories of different sized districts, so there is a chance to get a picture of actual costs.  And it's one good analytical piece; a way of trying to get at your own costs, especially identifying hidden costs. 

The cost issues are only one small component. Staffing levels, roles and responsibilities, etc. are another. The course would carry its weight if it addressed these two pieces, and it could accomplish much more. Courses already exist that cover this material, in the UMaine system and at Lesley. They are available in the degree programs, at least as electives.   I believe we need to require one for Maine certification as a K-12 administrator.  JM

Platitudes and Orthodoxy in Web 2.0

I was re-reading the December 2006 Time Magazine article "How to Bring Our School Out of the 20th Century," by Cladia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe. It's a very good overview of the "new literacies," but it has one quote that worries me:

“Learn the names of all the rivers in South America. That was the assignment given To Deborah Stipek’s daughter, Meredith, in school, and her mom, who’s dean of the Stanford University School of Education, was not impressed. “That’s silly,” Stipek told her daughter. “Tell your teacher that if you need to know anything besides the Amazon, you can look it up on Google.”

     The authors present this incident in defense of the mother. Their point, of course, is that our propensity for memorizing lists of facts has less value than deeper learning, and that there are too many facts today to memorize, so we need the skills to find them. While these are both true, I am not at peace with the example given, especially not with the trivialization of the assignment by a parent. How much trouble would it have been to memorize a group of South American Rivers.? Does Dean Stipek really believe that the Parana is not important enough to remember? The Rio Negro? Even the Orinoco? If my daughter, Grace, had come home with such an assignment and requested assistance, I would probably have put on some Bolivian Fair Trade hot chocolate, and made every effort to share with her (before it is too late) the wonders of the South American land mass. Does she know that the watersheds contain four hundred pound snakes that still occasionally eat people? That these rivers never have winter or summer, just high and low water? That scientists go to the fish markets to discover unnamed fish and still do? That the water is as clean, biologically, as Moosehead lake, and is still fresh a hundred miles out to sea? Is Iguasu Falls not important? The Pantanal or the Hyacynth Macaw? Has she never read the story of Jimmie Angel, and his landing atop Auyan-tepui at Angel Falls? Of course, I would also (as a dad) have taken pride in how many of the rivers she could name when we had finished. We would have used GoogleEarth, Wikipedia, personal travelogues, and other tools. It would have been a very technologically savvy evening, but it would have honored the teacher, and the assignment, (and been a good introduction to the "21st Century themes" of indigenous peoples, deforestation, etc.) I say this because as proponents of the shift toward 21st Century skills, we need to think before we repeat these platitudes. "Knowledge doubles every millisecond! We can look everything up... so we no longer need to remember anything!" I know we don't mean that exactly, but that's the way it can sound to regular people. 

    Our kids fail to learn for many reasons, but the assumption that facts are to blame (that memorization of facts in schools exists at the cost of in-depth learning) is an oversimplification. What we all need most in the “information storm” are concentration skills… strategies for keeping an idea in our heads long enough to make meaning out of what we are finding, and finishing what we started to do. Memorization goes along with that, and is thus a skill for any century, including the 21st. (Next time, the teacher should send home a nice paper-and-pencil crossword puzzle (generated by a web applet, of course) to help children memorize the rivers so as not to anger the professor mom. :)

Misconception alert! Please don't accuse me of saying that all people should memorize some huge list like Hirsch's, or that rote memorization is the best way to learn anything, or that we don't need to transform the learning environment. We shouldn't, it isn't, and we do.   In the scenario above, it would be a better lesson to have a study of the malaria problem in the Western Amazon, one that involved role setting, real projects, and live interactions with people living in the river basin.  We all know this.

My point:

If the curriculum in a certain year demands the recall of some geographic features from memory, it's not an opportunity for high-hatting the teacher. When proposing technology-based reforms, it isn't always necessary to define "bad" practice, and it is always risky to repeat slogans.  "No sage on the stage, just a guide on the side" "Feed the rabbits, starve the snails" "They don't have to know information, just know how to find it"  All of these are oversimplifications, and can appear suspicious to traditional people (many of whom provide our funding.)

By the way, here are the rivers in Wikipedia. Click a few of those and tell me they are unworthy as items of recall.

Also, as this is a Maine-based forum, I should include a reference to the Maine Counties memorization tool:

Sixteen County Song (To the tune of Yankee Doodle)

Sixteen counties in our state are [Yankee Doodle came to town a']

Cumberland and Franklin,      [Riding on a pony]

Piscataquis and Kennebec,     [Stuck a feather in his cap and]

Oxford, Androscoggin,        [Called it macaroni!]

Sagadahoc, and Somerset, [Yankee Doodle keep it up]

Lincoln, Knox, and Hancock,     [Yankee Doodle dandy]

Waldo, Washington, and York, [Mind the music and the step]

Aroostook, and Penobscot!     [And with the girls be handy]

Constancy and Change

I think educational leaders should approach rapid change from the inner strength that comes from their "universal bones." For instance, those who think change should drive a new understanding of ethics or democracy should instead, let their understanding of ethics and democracy drive their approach to new technologies. I can think of no better example than the confrontation last year between Elliot Schrage, of Google, and a group of congressmen over his defense of Google's practice of helping the Chinese government to oppress its people. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/15/eveningnews/main1321785.shtml
Schrage is a "Corporate ethicist," a lawyer and consultant with a huge resume (and real achievements) on issues where human rights and global commerce meet. With a very agile mind, he attempts to defend Google's actions as working toward the greater good in a complex world. The congressmen had a simpler understanding, and typically expressed outrage at what Google was doing. They were informed not by the "new technological landscape," but by their own sense of democracy and right and wrong. I am saying they were on firmer ground, and Schrage, in this case, was wrong. No matter what the "greater good," it was wrong to participate in oppressing China's people, regardless of whether this was legal in China. I think as teachers we are stronger when we rely on an armature of truths about democracy, morality, human rights, etc., and I am not comfortable with the relativism so many pundits seem to be expressing. Rapid technological change is here, yes. It needs educational leaders with backbone and purpose!

Standards in Chugach

I am always looking for working examples of a standards-based K-12 educational system. For me, this means getting away from the traditional “time-in-grade” system, where time is fixed by semesters, grading periods, etc. according to a group pace for learning. In a real standards-based system, time becomes the variable. You only pass when you complete the work. A “course” is determined by a body of work or a set of “performances” that demonstrate the skills or knowledge needed to pass. You don’t pass or fail when the course is over. Instead, the course is over for you when you complete the work. To me this is common sense. I am sure it would be for anyone who, like me, did not connect well with school. But each day I work with educators who loved school, who loved the way it worked for them, and who think of every change as another hula hoop. Most principals I know also don’t really have a practical understanding of (or frankly much interest in) changing the system. That’s why I think places like Chugach, Alaska, are important:
http://www.chugachschools.com/standards_based_system/index.html
Read this article and tell me again why standards can’t work.

Leadership is still a barrier to "Integration."

I believe the biggest barrier to teachers' use of technology is not their oft' bemoaned inability or unwillingness.

I think it is the inability of the leadership, to:
1. Provide solid, reliable, technology with support levels that don't leave teachers hanging for days with a problem.
2. Show the teachers clearly what they are expected to do with the technology provided.
3. Have an accountability structure, to make sure they do it.

I believe it's fundamentally a challenge for leadership. This includes state agencies, superintendents, principals, school boards, politicians, etc. We should stop blaming "reluctant teachers." Where are their supervisors? Step #1 above is not cheap, and most leaders would say we are already spending sufficient funds. We aren't. Also, many school leaders would say the technology works, yet they almost never assess whether it works. Is 90% up time OK? Many public schools don't even have that. Most schools lack support levels that industry takes for granted. There aren't many Bartlebies at L.L. Bean who "prefer not to" use the technology. Industry gets tech done (at a much higher cost than K-12) or fails. We have trouble getting it done, because if we don't, everyone keeps showing up and paying for it. At least for now.

Boomers multi-tasking for mental health

I am at David Warlick’s Web 2.0 session in Castine, Maine today. A lot of interesting things are being said. Everyone has a laptop open, and David has invited us to chat during the presentation. Comments are quite relevant to the discussion, but some… well. One participant polled the group on how many windows (separate tasks) each person had open. Some had more than 10. (Not a surprise, I know.) Most were doing their email, and several were watching the baseball game. Cut to the classroom of today. “OK, kids, I want you all to start multi-tasking and we’ll see how we can keep this learning thread together!” Besides the pedagogical concerns, it raises another question for me. Does this help stretch the baby boomers’ brains and keep off senility, or is the pressure to keep up leaving us exhausted? I think it's time for another technology maxim, and I'll borrow it from a meditation instructor I heard on TV last night. The secret to productivity is: "Do one thing at a time."

Bill Gates' "Rules of Life:" some clarifications...

For years I’ve listened with trepidation as lazy guest speakers grabbed this off the Internet and used it to insult the morals and motives of educators and the young. My New Year’s resolution is to do something positive about everything I complain about. Here’s the first shot...

By now everyone has heard of “Bill Gates’ Rules for Life” in some form. Gates’ attribution is an urban legend. The source is an editorial by a conservative columnist, Charles J. Sykes, in San Diego Union Tribune, September 19, 1996. Sykes may be misquoted here, as these have become “urban maxims.” Anyway, I felt like some of them needed comments or clarification…


“Rule No. 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it.”

Clarification: Our sense of fairness underpins the concept of justice that our laws and our society are built on. Justice is an ideal, but one worth dying for. Many have. You should believe in fairness, even when it is not evident. Your struggle for fairness makes a better world.


“Rule No. 2: The real world won't care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It'll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. “

Clarification: The real world is in many cases much kinder than school. Most people in the real world have something to do, and won’t torment you for amusement. At work, they often train you for something you’ll use right away, instead of spraying information at you like fertilizer. If you don’t like your company or your boss, you can try to change jobs. Real life has pain and suffering, but most people prefer it to high school. If you’re like me, you’ll find it much more rewarding of your efforts, and that's better for your self esteem.


“Rule No. 3: Sorry, you won't make $40,000 a year right out of high school.”

Clarification: What he's saying is... you should go to college or a technical institute after high school. He's right. It’s usually the surest way to increase your income. But remember the big picture, too. Satisfaction comes from working hard and getting good at something you like. It’s not a dollar figure. And your income is nobody's business, as long as you are not a burden on the state or your relatives. :)


“Rule No. 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity.”
Comment: Did you think it was? He must know some really spoiled kids.


“Rule No. 6: It's not your parents' fault. If you screw up, you are responsible.”

Clarification: When (not if) you screw up, you'll have to forgive yourself before you can move on. It isn’t easy. If it’s something really bad, it’s OK to get help. There's a saying: “The only way out… is through.”


“Rule No. 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are.”

Clarification: This was directed at me, (born 1952) not at you. (It’s pretty heavy, man, but I deserve it. I’ll take the heat.)


“Rule No. 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn't…”

Clarification: A lot of life’s winners were losers in school. They weren’t really losers, but the school system made them feel that way. Don’t look at every improvement in schools as a fad. School doesn’t have to be the same as it used to be.


“Rule No. 9: Life is not divided into semesters, and you don't get summers off. Not even Easter break. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don't get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on.”

Clarification: In real life, there are changes all the time. You can initiate them, and sometimes they happen to you, and sometimes it’s really awful, but it’s not boring. For most people, it’s way better than high school (as long as you've got your diploma. Without that, Sykes' rule #9 could be spot on.)

“Rule No. 10: Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your
problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials.
In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs…”

Comment: Duh.


“Rule No. 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for one”

Clarification: Everyone is a nerd. Everyone is a potential ally. Just be nice. Radiate it… like the sun.
____________________________________________________________________________


And here's a maxim of my own:
“If you have kids, you’ll need quite a bit more money.”

Staff Development Heresy

When it comes to staff development costs for technology, there is a lot of agreement, but almost no clarity for school leaders.  Here's a typical statement, offered by the (National Staff Development Council:) "NSDC advocates that at least 30 percent of the technology budget be devoted to teacher development."   Nearly every credible expert says something similar.  These figures have no meaning, because they don't break out the factors that impact adult learning in technology. Each expert will say in his next breath, "be sure to include tech support," without defining that, or telling you how much to budget for it.  It's generally not part of their 30%.  First, let's make one thing clear.  If you fund the time teachers spend learning about technology, (per diem salaries and release days) you'll pass 30% of the tech budget easily, so it's not about budgeting all that money for trainers, or expert presentations, or conferences.   But... Formal training may be less necessary than you think, depending on the application and the support structure.  Certain factors can minimize the costs and need for training.  I designed the pyramid below almost ten years ago, and if anything it's more topical today:



1. Are the systems reliable? (In many K-12 situations, people are trying to "integrate" technology that only works 80% of the time or less. This would cause "technology reluctance" in anyone!)
2. Are the systems easy to use? (Violations of this cardinal rule are still commonplace. If you can't use it, If the principal can't use it, your staff probably can't either.)
3. Is there a compellng reason to use the technology? (You can't just tell them it's good for them, like eating your spinach. It has to be a part of their job expectation, clearly articulated, with some kind of accountability structure. Can you picture some Bartleby at a call center "preferring not" to use the technology? It has to be like that for your teachers. You have to be able to tell them, "This is how we use the technology, and this is why we use it.")
4. Is there someone in the building who can reasonably be expected to assist on the same day when there are problems? (Help desks aren't worth much if no one is sent until a day or two later.) Support staff are the missing link in most technology budgets. If you don't have them, why waste the money on training?

Please don't misunderstand. Training for teachers in the application of educational technology is necessary, and useful, and good. The point I am making is that simply budgeting a huge dollar figure for "staff development" as a part of the project, is no way of ensuring a positive implementation. Training isn't the only factor in changing teachers' practice. If it's a very reliable system that achieves something new or better, and it's communicated to them that it's important and there's someone to pick up stragglers and help people when they are stuck, your training sessions will be fewer and shorter and you'll get a much better result for the expense.