Dangerously Irrelevant

NACOL, UCCP, and Pepperdine University are co-sponsoring a regional online learning symposium in Los Angeles, California on October 11, 2006. The web site for the symposium states that the presentations, workshops, lunch, and discussions will explore and inspire strategies about online learning, including math and science, credit recovery, meeting the needs of gifted students, alternative students, remedial education, and increasing access to advanced courses and college prep. I like how they included a panel session for symposium participants to hear from virtual high school students.

Registration is limited to 150 participants. Sign up soon!

I was delighted to see Miguel Guhlin’s fictional response last week to Anne Davis’ draft letter requesting permission to use Flickr in a hypothetical school district. The brilliant part of Miguel’s letter was not his reasoned iteration of Flickr’s weaknesses. Rather, it was the list of alternatives that Miguel provided that might possibly satisfy both the teacher’s desires as well as the district’s concerns.

As noted in the comments to Miguel’s blog post, most administrators would be hard-pressed to craft such a thoughtful response. Most leaders in formal positions of authority (i.e., superintendents and/or principals) are not familiar enough with technology in general and with Web 2.0 tools specifically. Many of the folks who may have the requisite technology knowledge, such as technology coordinators or CTOs, either don’t have enough the educational background to effectively respond to the teacher’s instructional concerns or are so busy that they’re likely to just dash off a quick note of denial without further explanation.

We need more model communications like this. We also need to expose our school leaders to such models so that they can get a sense of what is out there and how they can effectively and appropriately respond to the technology tool issues that are arising in our schools.

Does anyone know of other exchanges like this one that would be good models for preservice and/or practicing administrators?

Here’s a not-so-secret tidbit for you… If you think states and school districts are doing a poor job of preparing administrators to lead in this digital century, university educational administration programs are doing even worse.

Few preservice educational administration programs even have a course dedicated to technology leadership issues. When they do, the course is often focused on teaching computer skills to preservice administrators (i.e., PowerPoint, spreadsheets) rather than leadership skills (e.g., how to create an effective and sustainable technology plan; how to facilitate good technology integration by teachers and students). Programs that don’t have a dedicated course sometimes integrate a few technology-related issues into other classes (e.g., staff development, school finance) but the predominant pattern in most programs is to do little if anything. Why? Because most faculty are less proficient with, and less grounded in, digital technologies than K-12 administrators.

A few places across the country are trying to do more when it comes to preparing technology-savvy school leaders:

1. Our own School Technology Leadership graduate certificate program here at the University of Minnesota was the nation’s first graduate program based on ISTE’s NETS-A and, as far as we know, is still the only program found (by the American Institutes of Research) to have positive, statistically significant impacts on participants’ technology leadership knowledge, skills, and abilities.
2. In addition to our own program, we also give our curriculum away, including all activities, readings, etc., to fifteen other universities through our Postsecondary Partnership Program (P3). Those universities are doing a great deal on the technology front, including creating new programs, integrating technology leadership activities into existing courses, and providing workshops and institutes for local administrators.
3. Last year ISTE began an innovative joint leadership preparation program with Johns Hopkins University that has an emphasis on technology integration.
4. Other universities with emphases on K-12 technology leadership issues include the University of Oklahoma, Pepperdine University, and Kennesaw State University.

Finally, CoSN and NSBA provide online courses related to technology leadership issues that can be taken for graduate credit.

Anyone know of any others out there?

Is anyone else tired of the constant struggle to get the federal government to invest in our nation’s future (hello, there’s a T in STEM!). I confess that I’m getting tired of hearing them talk out of both sides of their mouth simultaneously (see exhibits below). Aren’t you?

Technology is important!

Technology is not important!

Or, in graphical form…

[FYI, $272 million is the amount a single state, Pennsylvania, spent on child care two years ago. It's also a little less than the movie Meet the Fockers grossed in the U.S. Divided by about 54.7 million public school students, it's about $5 per public school student. Some national investment, huh?]

Maybe Tim Magner, our new director of the Office of Educational Technology, can do something positive. I heard his talk from the AALF conference (thanks for the podcast, Andy!) and it sounded like he was on the right track (now if only he and his office had more power and influence…).

In the meantime, please keep fighting the good fight:

• Ed Tech Action Network
• Mission Critical Campaign

One of the most important issues in K-12 technology right now is the lack of engagement of administrators who are in formal positions of authority. For example, you can go to any educational technology conference in the country – NECC, CoSN, NSBA T+L, any state or regional conference – and the percentage of administrators in attendance is usually abysmally low. As I said in my previous post, without significant involvement by the individuals who have the power to make decisions, set organizational priorities, spend money, assign personnel, coordinate activities, initiate staff training, etc., the long-term prospects of technology in schools remain extremely dismal. Schools’ marginalization of technology as a non-essential activity, in contrast to every other sector of society, occurs because their leaders allow and facilitate it.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation State Challenge Grants for Leadership Development have been the only large-scale administrator technology training initiative to date. These grants were a good start. They were wildly successful from a coverage perspective – 75% to 100% of administrators in every state received some kind of technology training (as well as some participation incentive like a laptop or handheld computer). Many, if not most, of the participants came away from their training not only more knowledgeable but also energized about the potential and promise of technology. Unfortunately…

1. The depth of administrators’ involvement was very shallow. In nearly every state, administrators received a maximum of three to six days of training, typically over the course of a single year.
2. Even assuming that individual participants became better technology leaders over the long term as a result of the program (a big assumption despite what the final evaluation said), a tremendous number of those participants have retired or will do so soon (see, e.g., reports from NAESP and Stateline.org). Because participation in the program was usually limited to practicing principals and/or superintendents, educators who represented the future pipeline of school administrators (e.g., assistant principals, technology coordinators, media specialists, teachers) received none of the Gates training.
3. Few states did anything to build upon the momentum gained by the Gates grants. Most states stopped providing large-scale technology-related training opportunities for administrators once the foundation monies disappeared.

As a result, the $250 million initiative (half from the foundation, half from the states) made a big splash, got some good media attention, and then fizzled out in terms of long-term sustainability and impact.

It is time for our states to step up. Every state wants to graduate students who can be part of the creative, digital workforce of the future. One way to ensure that this happens is to quit relying primarily on school districts to train administrators in the technology arena because it is quite clear that they’re not doing so. We have a few notable school districts that are providing substantive technology-related training opportunities for their administrators (see, e.g., the ISTE / Chicago Public Schools’ Principal Technology Leadership Institutes). Most school districts are not, however, and we all will pay the price of states’ reliance on the variable patchwork of district-level initiatives.

SETDA, where is your programming for principals and superintendents (both current and future)? CoSN? ISTE? Corporations? Educational leadership associations (NSBA, AASA, NASSP, NAESP)? Others? Where’s the recognition that administrators, not students or teachers, hold the keys to making this technology stuff happen successfully? Does anyone not believe that technology is only going to become even more important than it already is?

We know – we know! – that sustainable success in schools never occurs without effective leadership. And yet, when it comes to digital technologies, our nation’s school leaders are sorely lacking.

Yes, we have a few visionary principals and superintendents. Yes, we have some creative tech coordinator / CTO types that also understand the leadership aspects of their position. And yet, at ed tech conferences and in the literature, we hear about the same dozen or so school organizations time after time. Why? Because they are the ones that have leaders that "get it." Most of the rest of our schools have innovative, technology-using educators whose potential impact runs smack into the brick wall of their administrators’ lack of knowledge and/or training.

I have the highest respect for districts like Plano, TX and Lemon Grove, CA and Montgomery Count, MD. They are doing wonderful things and are providing exemplary models for the rest of us. But it sure would be nice to feel like the other 14,000 school districts in the country were doing something noteworthy too. I’m sure a few are and we just don’t hear about them. As Director of CASTLE, however, I know that most school organizations struggle with the technology side of things.

This blog is intended to highlight and help with the leadership issues related to K-12 technology. We can (and do) pour ungodly sums of money into teacher training, student programs, and infrastructure – these are all good. However, we will see few tangible, sustainable benefits in most places until they have leaders who know how to effectively implement, build upon, and sustain those initiatives. We need more effective technology leaders. We need them in formal leadership positions like principal and superintendent rather than informal, often powerless positions like media specialist or technology coordinator. We need them now.

As David Warlick has noted here and here, we are failing to prepare our nation’s students for their technology-suffused futures. Principals and superintendents have ceded the field to technology companies and students, and our schools are increasingly at risk of being dangerously (and ludicrously) irrelevant to the future in which our children will live.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Thanks for joining me in this wild and wonderful ride.