Dangerously Irrelevant

In a previous post, I commented on the perceptions of many K-12 educators that their school’s academic success is hostage to their student demographics.

There’s another angle to this – the belief by some (but, thankfully, not most) educators that current achievement levels are just fine. I ran across this again recently when I spoke to a school district’s entire teaching staff about utilizing formative assessment data to improve overall learning outcomes and close existing achievement gaps. Frequent formative assessment has been shown by countless research studies, and by successful data-driven schools across the country, to have powerful impacts on student achievement, particularly that of low achievers.

One of the teachers left this comment on her anonymous index card at the end of my presentation:

I’m glad that my children don’t attend a school where it’s okay for a teacher to believe that leaving 1 in 5 kids behind is just fine. The sad and scary fact is that there are entire communities that have expectations this low (or even lower) for their children.

Even though I’ve been a NASSP member for years, it took me until yesterday to run across the Principal’s Policy Blog – definitely a source I’ll start tracking from now on. It’s amazing what’s out there if you start looking. It just verifies my belief that everything’s on the Internet somewhere – you just need to be able to find it!

In her post about proposed bonuses for principals, Shana Kemp says:

While I agree wholeheartedly with her statement that quality leadership is desperately needed, I would respectfully argue that instead of turning our education system around (which implies back toward what was being done successfully before) we need to be turning our education system in a new direction.

One of the contributing factors to schools’ increasing dropout rates and students’ stagnant performance on standardized tests is that an ever-growing number of students are recognizing that much (most?) of what they are learning in schools is unrelated to the knowledge and skills necessary to thrive in the technology-infused, globally-interconnected world at large. This disconnect contributes to student apathy and disinterest in current schooling approaches.

A new conceptualization of schools that was more cognizant of their obligations to prepare future digital citizens might make them less irrelevant for today’s schoolchildren. As David Warlick and others have so aptly noted, the issue is not whether students are successful regarding 19th century skills but whether they are being adequately prepared to be productive members of our increasingly technological future.

I would love to hear more about what NASSP and others are doing to prepare secondary school administrators to be better technology leaders.

As Jim Collins has noted, good is the enemy of great. In other words, organizations that are viewed internally or externally as being good rarely have any incentive to do something different, maybe even something that might make them move toward being great.

As the latest Phi Delta Kappa / Gallup poll indicates for the umpteenth year in a row, the majority of Americans believe that their local schools are good. Moreover, Americans believe that the top problems facing public schools are lack of funding, overcrowding, and lack of discipline. They also believe that any problems that exist with public education are due more to general societal problems than to the performance of local schools.

The concern that schools are failing to adequately prepare students for their technology-suffused futures is represented nowhere in the poll. PDK / Gallup didn’t ask any questions related to this issue and the participants themselves didn’t raise it as one of the top problems facing public schools.

• When are we going to start paying attention to the issue of preparing children adequately for their future?
• What will it take to create a critical mass of Americans that believes that what schools  currently are doing is insufficient (and, arguably, largely irrelevant) for our nation’s future needs?
• When will Americans begain basing their beliefs about whether or not schools are good (or even adequate or relevant) on whether or not children are learning 21st-century skills?
• How would Americans respond if asked whether or not schools were preparing children adequately to participate in a technology-suffused society?

I’m not an alarmist, but it’s pretty obvious that right now Americans seem satisfied with the status quo while other nations are making strategic technology-related investments in their societal and educational infrastructures.

Good is the enemy of great, but perceived good may be the enemy of relevance. Dare I say that Americans are complacent? Or are we just uninformed?

In conjunction with its fabulous annual conference, the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) is hosting its first-ever educational technology research symposium. Accepted papers will be published on CD-ROM and in the conference proceedings book. Check it out!

Most educators have a national association that advocates for the educational, work, and political interests related to their particular role in schools. For example,

• teachers have NEA and AFT,
• counselors have ASCA,
• elementary principals have NAESP,
• secondary principals have NASSP,
• school business officials have ASBO,
• superintendents have AASA, and
• school board members have NSBA.

Similarly, there are national organizations for state ed tech directors, chief state school officers, state boards of education, public relations officers, school personnel administrators, and so on.

Who advocates for technology coordinators? CoSN has about 500 school district / state / intermediate unit institutional members and another 2,000 or so individual members. However, although CoSN has a wealth of resources that are applicable to smaller settings, it self-admittedly focuses primarily on the concerns of districts large enough to have a CTO or CIO. ISTE sponsors a technology coordinator special interest group (SIGTC) that has about 3,500 members. NSBA sponsors the Technology Leadership Network (TLN), which represents almost 400 school districts. As a point of reference, there are over 14,000 school districts and about 90,000 public schools in this country. Obviously not all of the technology coordinators who work in these organizations are members of CoSN, ISTE, or NSBA.

While CoSN, ISTE SIGTC, and NSBA TLN all do good work, none of them can be said to represent the interests of the profession on a wide scale and/or in large numbers. I believe that this fractured organizational landscape reduces the efficacy of advocacy efforts for those individuals who are primarily responsible for supporting information technology in their districts and/or schools.

Some states and/or regions have organizations that facilitate meetings of, information sharing between, and advocacy for technology coordinators (see, e.g., the MEMO Tech SID and WKATC). We need to find a way to scale this up to a national level – somehow combining and building upon the efforts of CoSN, ISTE, and NSBA while simultaneously recognizing the need for a larger, nationwide organization. Policy, political, and workplace advocacy all stem from strength in numbers.

A few years back I did a nationwide study of district technology coordinators for NCREL, with help from CoSN and QED. Although our response rates were much lower than we hoped, those we did get were fairly representative of our sample and the nation at large. Some of the key findings of the study (360 respondents) were that:

• nearly a fifth of the respondents had more than one formal title in their district (can you effectively do the job of tech coordinator as a part-time job?);
• nearly a third of the respondents said that they were the only person providing technology support for their district (even in a small district, can one person effectively do the job of tech coordinator?);
• although nearly all of the respondents were considered to be district-level employees, barely half were on an administrative contract (which raises issues related to power and authority);
• rural technology coordinators made significantly less than their urban and suburban counterparts (thus raising recruitment and retention issues);
• average salaries were lower than those paid by business and industry (again raising issues of recruitment and retention when competing against the corporate world for talented people);
• respondents received, on average, a paltry 35 hours of training per year (and most of that was likely technical in nature, not leadership-oriented); and
• large proportions said that they probably would leave for a job with the same responsibilites but better pay (59%) or a job with the same pay but fewer responsibilities (34%) (again raising recruitment and retention issues).

In addition to the report, I also wrote up a short article on this for Scholastic Administr@tor.

Although the results are from 2003, my personal experience is that things haven’t changed much. We have seen a trend, particularly in larger districts, toward more CTO-/CIO-like positions and/or hiring people with experience in business and industry.

What do you think? Are these findings still relevant and/or important today?

In a previous post I noted that our technology leaders are rarely superintendents or principals, the individuals in formal positions of authority within school districts. So if our technology leaders are not our formal leaders, who are they?

Well, in larger districts we see chief technology officers or chief information officers who have many of the powers that we associate with formal leaders: decision-making, spending, personnel assignment, resource allocation, etc. These individuals often sit on the superintendents’ cabinet and are integral members of the district leadership team. Sometimes this role is filled by an assistant or associate superintendent, who also may have responsibilities in other areas (e.g., curriculum, transportation).

In contrast, smaller districts have technology coordinators and, sometimes, district-level technology integrationists. These individuals often have few, if any, of the powers possessed by formal leaders.

In some small districts and/or individual schools, the de facto technology leaders are media specialists, building-level technology integrationists, and/or teachers.

Here’s the bad news: with the exception of the assistant superintendents and/or those few principals or superintendents who are the technology leaders in their organizations, nearly all of the rest of these people probably have no leadership training. You don’t need an administrative credential to be a teacher / media specialist / technology coordinator in most places – the tech coordinators / CTOs / CIOs may not even have an education degree.

There are reasons that we require leadership training for our formal leaders – they have to do with learning how to effectively facilitate change, provide appropriate support, mobilize stakeholder buy-in and involvement, operate within political and legal parameters, etc. One of the reasons that technology is marginalized and viewed as a non-essential component of most K-12 school systems is because the vast majority of our de facto technology leaders lack the background training and knowledge to effectively lead, advocate, make change, garner buy-in, and so on. All they have is whatever they’ve gained through the hard knocks of day-to-day experience and we all know how variable that can be.

Tech folks need more general leadership training and/or leaders need more technology-related leadership training. If we’re serious about our digital future, we need to figure this out.

A recent post by Kevin Carey at The Quick and the Ed highlights one of the essential dilemmas faced by those of us who are working desperately to improve students’ academic and life success: there is a pervasive attitude in K-12 organizations that outputs are dependent on inputs. You routinely hear comments from educators such as "You can’t expect us to do any better than we already are with these kids" or "The reason that [school / district] is doing better than we are is because they serve those kids."

"We believe that we have no meaningful impact on the children that we serve. We are hostage to our demographics. Whatever comes in the door is essentially what’s going to go out at the other end." Those are chilling words to hear, both as an educational leader and as a citizen of the most affluent and powerful nation in the world.

Despite the ritualistic mantra of educators that "all children can learn," there are large numbers of teachers and principals who don’t truly believe it. If they did, they would act in ways much differently than they do now.

Luckily we have (increasingly numerous) examples of schools where this belief has been challenged at its very core, where educators have come together and said "Collectively we can make a difference!" These schools are finding ways to make it happen, despite their challenging demographics. It starts with a belief that it can be done. As Dr. Douglas Reeves notes in The Learning Leader:

Norfolk Public Schools in Virginia has the following demographic characteristics:

• 80 percent of students receive free or reduced-priced lunch
• 68 percent minority student enrollment
• 40+ languages

Between 1998 and 2005 not a single child in the school system, to the best of my knowledge, has changed his or her ethnic identity. Not a single child has won the lottery. Few if any children have adopted different languages at home. In other words, this story is not about changes in children or their families, nor is it a story about changes in demographic characteristics. This is a story about changes in teaching, leadership, and learning. While demographic characteristics remained the same, student achievement rose dramatically.

In 1998, only 11 percent of the elementary schools in Norfolk contained more than 50 percent of students who scored proficient or higher on the state’s English/Language Arts assessments. In 2004, 84 percent of the elementary schools achieved that distinction, and in 2005, 100 percent of the elementary schools in the district were fully accredited. They not only had 50 percent of students meeting or exceeding state standards in English / Language Arts, but these students also met state requirements in math, science, writing, and social studies. In 1998, none of the middle schools in this district had more than 50 percent of students meeting state English / Language Arts requirements, and six years later all the middle schools met this requirement. In addition, the district more than tripled the number of middle school students taking advanced math courses in middle school. In 1998, only one out of six high schools had more than 80 percent of students passing state English graduation requirements, and six years later every high school in the system achieved this distinction. Moreover, some high schools had more than 90 percent of students passing external exams in chemistry and biology, while the dropout rate remained an astonishingly low 0.5 percent for the district – one of the lowest high school dropout rates of any urban system in the nation. The students didn’t change. They were still ethnically, linguistically, and economically diverse. But something profound did change – the commitment of the leaders and teachers in this district to make a difference in the lives of students.

Yes, we absolutely need to be sensitive to overall contexts and larger societal issues. I, too, am concerned about the increasing gaps between the top and bottom income brackets of our society. I, too, am gravely worried that our political and educational policies may be causing increasing harm to our most disadvantaged populations. We must seek to understand the complex contexts in which our students live and we must fight and advocate and cooperate until progress is made. But we must never, ever give up, even mentally. For then the battle, and all hope, is lost.

While browsing in Barnes & Noble last night, I ran across this quote from Joy at Work:

The idea of servant leadership in K-12 education is nothing new. As with anything else, there are even institutes on the topic. However, this quote got me thinking…

Not only are many administrators failing to provide school environments that adequately prepare students for their digital futures, they don’t even seem to care. Even if they do care or say they care, they don’t act as if they do (examples of this would include 1) insisting that they get better trained in technology leadership concepts, or 2) initiating conversations around topics like What does our school organization need to look like for the 21st century?). Instead, our formal leaders are either still locked in traditional mental paradigms about schooling or are simply reactive to the latest fad and/or directive from state or federal governments.

This seems to violate the very core of the idea that administrators and schools should be serving the needs of students and society. The root word of administrator is minister, or servant. This seems to have been lost somewhere along the way.

By the way, our educational leadership preparation programs aren’t fulfilling their obligations either. I’m not trying to pick on just K-12 folks.

Superintendents and principals are rarely the technology leaders in their organizations. As Director of CASTLE, I say this with both confidence and dismay.

Here are a couple of quick examples (please add your own as comments to this post!):

1. Attendance by superintendents and principals at educational technology conferences is rare. Even when sessions or strands at those conferences are specifically designed for administrators, the individuals who are the formal leaders in their school organizations aren’t often there (see, e.g., ISTE’s annual Technology Leadership Forum at NECC, which is attended mostly by CTOs / technology coordinators).
2. Last summer I asked the members of our nationwide School Technology Leadership graduate certificate cohort to name the individuals in their school organizations who others would view as leaders in the area of technology. Out of 53 named individuals in 11 different schools / districts, only 5 were in formal positions of authority. The rest were technology coordinators, media specialists, technology integrationists, teachers, etc. with little to no decision-making authority and/or spending power.

There are other examples I could provide but I’ll stop here since it’s late and I need to go to bed. I will add to this, though, the ongoing commentary from the hundreds of students who have taken at least one of our School Technology Leadership courses to date that their school leaders just don’t get this technology stuff.

So who are our technology leaders if they’re not superintendents and/or principals? I’ll cover that in Part 2…