Dangerously Irrelevant

Yesterday, along with thousands of other web sites, Dangerously Irrelevant shut down for the day to protest two bills, SOPA (House) and PIPA (Senate). I don't think my little blackout had any major influence, of course, but I wanted to express my solidarity with the larger concerns. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the issues, Congress is debating right now whether the Internet in America and elsewhere should be hostage to the demands of a few private companies. If SOPA, PIPA, and similar laws are passed, the Web could look like this for all of us.

Unfortunately, legislators are making policy out of ignorance. Indeed, they're even joking about it. This has to stop. The Internet is too valuable a resource to legislate stupidly or to hand over to the demands of corporations. As Josh Kopstein stated, it's no longer okay for Congress to not know how the Internet works.

Jason Gots recently articulated quite eloquently that

issues of copyright law, political control, privacy, and child protection are exciting governments around the world about stepping in to regulate cyberspace. While this may solve problems in the short-term, these regulations will be blunt, hasty, and hard to undo. And they will run the risk of extinguishing the Internet's connective power before we have the chance to realize it.

There are real dangers here. I encourage every one of you who lives in the United States to please contact your legislators to let them know of your opposition to SOPA and PIPA.

This applies to education too!

Of course all of this is true for education lawmaking too. We have a number of different education bills, particularly at the state level, that are being driven by corporate interests instead of pedagogical appropriateness. Read a bit about the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), for example (thank you, Pam Moran, for cluing me in). While you're at it, check out its list of alumni politicians. I think all of that is pretty scary. How about you?

Yesterday Senator Marco Rubio, the co-sponsor of PIPA, dropped his support for his own bill, essentially admitting that he didn't understand the issues clearly when he introduced the legislation. I don't know if he was as embarrassed as he should have been, but his turnaround highlights the fact that our lawmakers are too easily snowed by corporations and others who have interests that often run counter to the good of the people or our schools. This is true whether we're talking about corporate advocacy for self-advantaging legislation or high-profile, extremely political, special interest groups that pressure state-level policymakers to align themselves with supposedly-national movements.

My home state of Iowa is a case in point. It is quite clear that some of the educational initiatives recently put forth by our Governor, Terry Branstad, have political origins outside of the state. There is a tremendous press from outside groups to get certain legislative items passed, regardless of their known harm to children or educators. This is leading to extremely disconcerting disconnects, including the fact that Governor Branstad recognizes that certain students need less time to learn required material (thus his proposal for competency-based, rather than age- or grade-based, progression) but doesn't simultaneously recognize that other students need more time to learn required material (thus his proposal for 3rd grade retention). Genuine concerns about his inability to recognize that there are two sides to the learning time coin are deflected with accusations that critics are against 'high standards' and 'high expectations' and 'accountability.'

We have to do a better job of educating our policymakers about important issues related to the Internet and education and other critical areas of concern. We also must do a much better job of holding them accountable for educating themselves. Otherwise their lack of knowledge will continue to manifest itself in legislation that is potentially harmful and dangerous to us all.

Image credit: RIAA reminds us why we hate them with obnoxious smartass tweet

As was so aptly said just a few days ago:

It is hard to make an argument that there are many desirable post-secondary educational or career scenarios for current high school students that will not require the use of computer technology on a daily basis. The kids have known this for quite some time now. High school students know that they will almost certainly be using computers in any desirable job that they manage to get after high school. They know that a computer is a requirement for success in today's higher eduction environments. They know that, in the "real world," college students don't write papers in longhand on loose-leaf notebook paper; they know that, in the "real world," people don't create business presentations with markers and paste on poster board or tri-fold displays; they know that, "in the real world," people who engage in any type of research may still occasionally use books, but they conduct the majority of their research using online tools. They know that, "in the real world," bankers do not keep their accounts in paper ledger books, or do their financial forecasting only with the aid of a calculator. Yet high school students are regularly asked to write in longhand on notebook paper, make presentations using kindergarten tools, research mostly using books, and do their calculations on paper. Why should anyone be surprised that they don't find their high school experiences "relevant?"

Do we have the will to integrate digital technologies into students' learning in regular, frequent, and meaningful ways? Are we brave enough to cast a critical eye at the learning tasks that we assign students and ask difficult but necessary questions about their relevance in a technology-suffused, globally-interconnected society? Are we willing to look at what passes for 'learning' and 'teaching' and 'schooling' on a day-to-day basis in this country and acknowledge that the vast majority of it is mind-numbingly boring and disengaging? Can we recognize that we're infantilizing our young adults instead of enabling them to be empowered learners, thinkers, and doers?

Robert Fried noted that:

We have opted not to create schools as places where children’s curiosity, sensory awareness, power, and communication can flourish, but rather to erect temples of knowledge where we sit them down, tell them a lot of stuff we think is important, try to control their restless curiosity, and test them to see how well they’ve listened to us. (pp. 58-59)

He also stated that:

[M]ost of what [our students] experience during school hours passes over them like the shadow of a cloud, or through them like an undigested seed. They may be present in the classroom, but they are not really there. Their pencils may be chugging away on the worksheets or the writing prompts or math problems laid out for them, but their intelligence is running on two cylinders at best. They pay some attention to what their teacher happens to be telling them, but their imagination has moved elsewhere. (p. 1)

We could have learning spaces that emphasize hands-on inquiry, critical thinking, collaboration, and authentic, "real world" problem solving instead of teacher lecture, rote practice, and fact regurgitation. We could have learning spaces that spark students' imaginations and enable them to be interested, engaged learners instead of dulling them into bored compliance. We could have learning spaces that students would choose rather than classrooms that we force students to attend. Shame on us that we don't.

[cross-posted at Education Recoded]

Alberta, Canada is widely recognized as having one of the best schooling systems in the world. A recent article in Alberta Views highlighted the differences between its system and America's, noting that the United States is an 'anti-model' for how to do school reform:

By contrast we can also learn what not to do from reform in the US, whose education system is in decline. Its elements, implemented over the past two decades, are largely ideological: "market-based" reforms (the application of "business insights" to the running of schools); an emphasis on standardization and narrowing of curriculum; extensive use of external standardized assessment; fostering choice and competition among schools, often with school vouchers; making judgements based on test data and closing "failing schools"; encouraging the growth of charter schools (which don't have teacher unions); "merit pay" and other incentives; faith that "technologically mediated instruction" will reduce costs; an overwhelming "top-down" approach which tells everyone what to do and holds them accountable for doing it.

This state of affairs is both depressing and harmful, particularly since it's pretty clear what we should be doing instead. As a recent book, Surpassing Shanghai, notes, school systems around the world (like Japan, Finland, Singapore, and Shanghai) that consistently outperform the U.S. on international assessments do things very differently:

1. Funding schools equitably, with additional resources for those serving needy students
2. Paying teachers competitively and comparably
3. Investing in high-quality preparation, mentoring and professional development for teachers and leaders, completely at government expense
4. Providing time in the school schedule for collaborative planning and ongoing professional learning to continually improve instruction
5. Organizing a curriculum around problem-solving and critical thinking skill
6. Testing students rarely but carefully -- with measures that require analysis, communication, and defense of ideas

Schools in the U.S. are failing miserably to prepare most students for a complex, technology-suffused world and a hyperconnected, hypercompetitive global economy. What will it take for Americans to stand up and fight not just against our schooling systems but also against educational reform efforts that take those systems in wrong directions?

Hat tip: Joe Bower (for both the quote and the post title)

[cross-posted at Education Recoded]

From Gerald Bracey (via Joe Bower), here's a great list of things that AREN'T on the bubble tests our kids are taking:

• creativity
• critical thinking
• resilience
• motivation
• persistence
• curiosity
• endurance
• reliability
• enthusiasm
• empathy
• self-awareness
• self-discipline
• leadership
• civic-mindedness
• courage
• compassion
• resourcefulness
• sense of beauty
• sense of wonder
• honesty
• integrity

Anyone want to argue that students who possess these will be less successful in life than those that don't?
Anyone want to argue that these are less important than regurgitating decontextualized fact nuggets on a standardized assessment?
Anyone want to argue that schools shouldn't be teaching these?
Anyone want to argue that these are not being crowded out in favor of increased emphases on fact nugget regurgitation?

No? No? No? No? Then why, again, are we doing what we're doing?

Image credit: Taking a test

Over the past month I've been reading and thinking about the new Education Blueprint proposed by the Iowa Governor and the Iowa Department of Education (DE) as well as various reactions to that document. If you haven't yet read Trace Pickering's insightful (and also lengthy) response to the Blueprint, be sure to do so. Another important read is school change guru Michael Fullan's recent paper, Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform.

Here are some additional thoughts of my own. These are not all-encompassing - I have additional questions and concerns - but they do constitute a few important issues that caught my attention. I'm also intentionally not commenting on topics for which I'm fairly ambivalent (e.g., charter schools) or don't know enough (e.g., teacher salary schedules and compensation tiers) and instead will leave those to others who care or know more than I do.

Failing 3rd graders fails our 3rd graders

I'll pick the low-hanging fruit first. Failing 3rd graders who can't pass some reading assessment is a really, really bad idea. It doesn't matter how many safeguards and second chances there are and I understand why the policy is being proposed (both educationally and politically). The bottom line is that, regardless of the 'social promotion' rhetoric and whatever gut intuition parents or policymakers may have, the research evidence is overwhelmingly unidirectional that in-grade retention does far more harm than good. Desired test score increases often never materialize and, even if they do, they usually don't persist past a few years. One of the stronger and consistent findings in educational research is that, in the long run, in-grade retention is at best a long-term wash score-wise and the resultant negative impact on students' psyches and their likelihood to graduate is horrific. The Governor and DE don't get to advocate for research-driven practices in other parts of the Blueprint but ignore that requirement here.

Input-Process-Output

We can visualize a box that represents the day-to-day occurrences within a classroom or other learning environment. That box is the most important aspect of schooling: if what students and teachers do on a daily basis in their learning-teaching interactions doesn't change substantially, all hope of achieving 'world class schools' in Iowa vanishes. WE LEARN WHAT WE DO. There are a variety of inputs (e.g., standards, curricula, teacher quality, funding and resources, school structures, technology infrastructure, laws and policies) that hopefully impact what occurs inside the box. We also look at what comes out of the box (e.g., student knowledge, skills, and dispositions) to see if what we wanted to happen actually did happen. This is a classic Input-Process-Output systems model (that hopefully is accompanied by a recursive feedback loop that informs the system).

There are 85 main bullet points, or action ideas, in the Blueprint. As you can see in my annotated version of the Blueprint, I tried to place each action idea into one of three categories: Input, Process, or Output (coded I, P, & O in the document). You are welcome to disagree with my categorizations (and I admit I struggled with some of them), but the evidence is quite stark that the Blueprint is overwhelmingly focused on inputs and outputs and gives very little attention to the day-to-day learning and teaching processes that occur between students and teachers.

This is unsurprising. This is traditional school reform stuff:

We'll change some inputs; let's try better teachers and higher standards. Oh, and we'll also change some structures around. How about reallocating some monies, reorganizing traditional schools a bit, and allowing for charter and online schools? On the back end, we'll assess like crazy by changing our tests or using new and/or additional ones.

In the end, we change only a little and, if we're lucky, we see a little change in results. This is the way most states do it, but it's neither the only way nor the required way. Where in the Blueprint is the recognition that we need to do something DIFFERENT in our classrooms? Where's the acknowledgment, for example, that we need to invest heavily in teachers' ability to facilitate learning environments that foster higher-order thinking skills (an increasing necessity these days)? Where's extensive language about better facilitating student engagement in their courses? There's virtually nothing about students' interest in what they're supposedly learning. There's nary a bullet point about student hands-on or applied or problem-based learning or authentic intellectual work (a great program already being piloted by DE, by the way). To the extent that PBL and AIW and similar issues are addressed at all, the Blueprint does so indirectly; all hopes lie with effective implementation of the Iowa/Common Core and the Smarter Balanced assessments. Instead of just holding educators 'accountable' on the front and back ends of the process, how about directly investing in them so that they actually can be successful? The overwhelming emphasis of the Blueprint is on accountability rather than capacity-building. Go ahead and do a search in the Blueprint for the terms training or professional development or capacity; you won't find anything. If DE and the Governor are truly serious about 'world class schooling' in Iowa, they should be focusing heavily on the Process box - the day-to-day learning and teaching processes occurring in classrooms all across the state - and right now they're not.

Low-level testing

Much of the Governor's education concerns appear to be driven by NAEP scores and proficiency levels, despite the fact that most of the items are predominantly factual recall and low-level procedural knowledge AND despite the fact that the designers of NAEP freely admit that the level designations are arbitrary AND despite the fact that the American Institutes of Research notes that most of the nations to which we are comparing Iowa also wouldn't score well on NAEP. If we want our students to be gaining higher- rather than lower-order thinking skills, end-of-course assessments appear to offer us nothing better. So there's a lot of new and/or additional testing in the Blueprint that's focused on stuff you can easily find using Google - or that can be done cheaper by people elsewhere in the world - instead of on the skills and capacities necessary to really foster a world-class citizenry and workforce. We're not talking about assessments like the College and Work Readiness Assessment or what they do in Singapore. Again, when it comes to higher-order thinking skills, there's virtually no proposed investment in the Blueprint for the instructional side and all of our hopes rest on the Smarter Balanced assessments, for which right now we have no idea what they will look like and no idea how they will operate. The Blueprint essentially validates and tweaks and expands current testing schemes, despite significant warnings to the contrary from our very own National Research Council.

Digital, global world. Analog, local schools.

It's a globally-connected world out there, but the Blueprint primarily focuses on globalization as an economic force to which we must respond, not a societal / learning / citizenship issue to which we should attend for mutual benefit and empowerment. The Blueprint also says that Iowa students and graduates need to be internationally competitive but most of what it proposes is vastly different from what other countries are doing to achieve better results. The Blueprint contains no significant investment in teacher capacity-building, no emphasis on early childhood education, no amelioration of the impacts of family and neighborhood poverty on learning, and no recognition of the importance of strategic foreign language learning (particularly at younger ages), just to name a few.

It's also a digital world out there, but you wouldn't know it given the lack of emphasis placed on technology in the Blueprint. For example, only nominal attention is paid to online learning, despite the fact that it's booming nationwide and despite Iowa's meager offerings compared to other states. Even though Iowa ranks abysmally low when it comes to Internet speed and access, there's nothing regarding the importance of universal statewide broadband Internet access for both educational and economic development purposes. Most damning, there's absolutely no recognition of the power and potential of digital technologies to transform learning, teaching, and schooling, despite the rapid and radical reshaping of every other information-oriented societal sector by digital tools and the Web. In the world of the Blueprint, it's as if computers and the Internet essentially didn't exist. Go ahead and do a search in the Blueprint for the terms Internet or digital or technology; the omissions are quite alarming, actually. There's one meager shout-out to the rapid growth in 1:1 laptop initiatives across the state, but no support for giving every Iowa child a powerful digital learning device, for providing technology integration assistance for educators, for upgrading woeful infrastructures, for rethinking policies, or for anything else of substance when it comes to educational technology. It's 2011. Personal computers have been around for three decades and the Internet has been around for at least a dozen years for most of us. Digital technologies are transforming how Iowans and the world connect, collaborate, and LEARN; this omission is both sad and shameful.

A lost opportunity

There are a few things that I'm glad the Blueprint included. Although there is only a single bullet point referencing competency-based (rather than age-based) student progression, if done well that one thing alone has the potential to significantly and positively reshape much of how we do education in Iowa. I also like the willingness to invest in district-level innovation and to give districts some flexibility. The proof of most of this, like everything else, will depend on the legislative language and the resources committed.

As I think about the Blueprint as a whole (and we are encouraged by the document to treat it as 'a set of changes designed to work together'), it feels like a lost opportunity. The Governor and DE had the chance to dream big and swing for the fences. They had the chance to propose impactful, sweeping changes to the current system. They had the chance to create learning and teaching environments that prepare students for the next 50 years rather than the last 50 and to educate the public as to why those changes are necessary. The Blueprint rhetoric is right but the action items fall far short. I don't know if it's a lack of knowledge or vision or courage that's holding them back, and of course there are political considerations with all of this. But the result is a a tweak of the current system, a tinkering at the edges rather than a rethinking of the core. Perhaps it's foolish of me to wish for more.

I welcome all feedback. Thanks.

Dear educator, parent, community member, or policymaker:

The fact that your world hasn't changed doesn't mean that the world hasn't changed.

Anecdotal experience or stories - or willful blindness - don't trump reality.

I just ran across this series of posts from Mickey Muldoon, in which he describes some competing visions of educational technology from the Aspen Ideas Festival:

• Overview
• Vision 1: Stay the course
• Vision 2: Wholesale transformation
• Vision 3: Free access to technology and content
• Vision 4: Technology as an enabler of project-based learning

Happy reading!

Linda Fandel, Special Assistant for Education to Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, wrote:

Gov. Terry Branstad and Lt. Governor Kim Reynolds will make draft recommendations for how to give all Iowa students a world-class education by Oct. 1.

The draft recommendations will focus on the three key areas addressed at the Iowa Education Summit in late July: (1) getting a great teacher in every classroom, a great principal in every building, and providing the support they need to do their jobs well; (2) raising academic standards and putting in place strong matching assessments; and (3) innovation that boosts learning.

To which I commented:

‘Great’ in the sense of quality (i.e., “really good” or perhaps “better than what we have now”) or ‘great’ in the sense of ‘exceptional’ (rare, unique)? Because the former is much more achievable than the latter. ‘Exceptional’ is exceptional for a reason; this is not Lake Wobegon (where every educator is above average). In every profession, there will be a continuum and there’s a natural curve under which only a certain percentage can ever be deemed to be ‘great.’ Unless we are going to have fewer educators overall (allowing us to dip less deep into the available talent pool), we are going to have a hard time meeting this goal without focusing heavily on talent recruitment, preservice and inservice training, and talent induction/support/retention. Education traditionally has a very poor record of doing these things because they’re quite difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.

I’ll also note that many current educators are going to be offended that the Governor doesn’t think they’re already ‘great.’ Deming noted that nearly all of the problems that we have with individuals is due to the systems in which they’re embedded. We’re going to have to decide if we are just going to focus on educators (and maybe colleges of education), which will be perceived by many as blaming and shaming, or we also going to recognize (and emphasize) the far greater (and thorny) problem of the systems in which they’re embedded. I hope the latter. Question: how do we know we don’t already have ‘great’ educators who are simply trapped in dysfunctional systems?

We’re also going to have to decide just how much we care that our state ranking has declined on national tests that emphasize low-level factual recall and procedural knowledge. Personally, I’m much less concerned by this than I am the fact that the overwhelming majority of Iowa schools – even our supposedly best ones – still aren’t adequately focusing on the higher-order thinking skills, technological competencies, intra- and interpersonal competencies, and other skill sets that will make our graduates truly ‘globally competitive.’

Final thought: If our proposed reforms don’t dramatically change what kids do on a day-to-day basis in the classroom, they’re going to be political theater rather than substantive change initiatives. So we need to think and talk robustly about what we want our kids to be DOING, not just what we want them to be learning. In other words, the HOW is just as important as the WHAT.

Please come join the conversation and take the opportunity to chime in BEFORE the blueprint comes out. The Iowa Department of Education is a little slow when it comes to approving comments but yours should show up eventually!

Image credit: Iowa Department of Education

Who says you can't have a good conversation on Twitter? [be patient; this might take a few seconds to load]

Image credit: toe touch

I’ve spent the last two days at the Iowa Education Summit. Now that it’s over, I have a multitude of thoughts and observations swirling around in my head. Here are eight…

1. Politics over substance?

From the anti-Governor Christie flyers distributed at the entrances to the invited guests who appeared to be there for political reasons rather than their possible contributions to Iowa education, there was a great deal of political theater at the Summit. I’ll leave it at that. You can decide for yourself who was invited for what reasons.

On a related note, many participants left the Summit saying that they didn’t learn much that was new and that they wished that there was more discussion about solutions rather than repeated reminders of how much Iowa education sucks. Personally, I enjoyed hearing from the various experts that were invited. There was a lot of brainpower at the Summit and I enjoyed hearing perspectives from other places during our two days together. We’ll need equal brainpower, however, to sift through all of the commentary and determine what to do next in terms of policy and implementation.

2. The ascendance of Twitter

The backchannel on Twitter was phenomenal. I have the very naive wish that Iowa policymakers would spend some time going through the tweets. The backchannel conversation was witty, passionate, insightful, both challenging AND supportive, and, most of all, real. Whatever political points were being attempted on stage were dissected in depth and filtered through the honest reality of learning, teaching, and living in Iowa. The very best barometers of how crowd members were receiving the intended message(s) were the tweets at #iaedsummit.

The Summit was the first event I’ve attended in Iowa where the Twitter backchannel was so robust that I had trouble keeping up. I don’t know how many of the 1,600 attendees actually were on Twitter, but the sheer volume of tweets was astounding. I know several people who signed up for Twitter there at the Summit so that they wouldn’t miss the side discussion.

3. ‘Sit and get’ and clickers do not a conversation make

There was extremely limited opportunity for interaction and dialogue at the Summit. Thank goodness for the Twitter stream. The Summit consisted primarily of smart ‘experts,’ either individually or on panels, talking down at the audience (literally down, from a raised dais). Occasionally we got to answer a multiple choice question using Promethean ‘clickers.’ Occasionally we got to ask a question during a breakout panel. If we were really lucky, perhaps a question we wrote on an index card would be read out loud to solicit a speaker response. This does not constitute a conversation any more than a teacher lecture with a few clicker questions and a brief opportunity for student questions constitutes a classroom discussion.

The stated purpose of the Summit was ‘to build a consensus for how to give all [Iowa] students a world-class education.’ I don’t see how Iowans can build a consensus when we’re not allowed to talk and argue and share and collaborate. We need a different structure if we’re truly going to have a dialogue about the future of Iowa education.

4. What could have been

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gives a good speech (and really shines during Q & A). So do current and/or past Governors Chris Christie, Jim Hunt, and our very own Terry Branstad. But the crowd favorite by far was Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond. In a concise, focused talk replete with research and evidence instead of political talking points, she spelled out what high-achieving nations do (and don’t do) in order to achieve high and equitable levels of student learning. Dr. Darling-Hammond was in the running for U.S. Secretary of Education. After hearing her speak, many in the crowd found themselves wishing that she had been selected.

5. NAEP or nope?

One of the driving statistics for the Summit – which was cited repeatedly – was Iowa’s alarming drop in national rank on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). I confess that I found it humorous when Dr. Darling-Hammond began discussing higher-order versus lower-level thinking skills. To illustrate her point, she showed an example of a shoddy multiple-choice assessment question for high-schoolers, which just so happened(?) to come from NAEP. Given the consistent emphasis throughout the conference by all of the presenters on the need for more students to be proficient in higher-order thinking skills, I know I wasn’t the only one in the audience wondering why we’re so concerned about results on an assessment rife with lower-level items.

Secretary Duncan and other speakers highlighted federal and other initiatives that are aimed at creating assessments that get at higher-level student work. So should we really care about Iowa’s rank on NAEP since most of the assessment doesn’t get at what we really need to get at?

6. Technology was largely absent

Although there were a few quick shout-outs to the power of technology to transform student learning, there weren’t many specifics given. Secretary Duncan, for example, cited the power of technology to better ‘deliver information’ [emphasis added] during his Q & A time (and mentioned technology not a whit during his main speech). For those of us who are used to talking about the power and potential of digital technologies to empower student voice and engagement, facilitate authentic work, and connect learners to the global information commons and its participants (just to name a few affordances), the lack of specificity was dismaying. I suspect that the very basic treatment of technology stemmed from folks’ fairly basic understandings of what is possible these days. An exception was Max Phillips, who serves on the Iowa State Board of Education and who is thinking big. Very big. I wish we had more policymakers in Iowa who were ready to join him.

As I said on Monday, it’s time for us to get serious about school technology in this state (we can start by having wireless Internet access at every public Department of Education function like this one).

7. We’re ready for something different

Iowa is ready for something different. It’s ready for the things that Dr. Darling-Hammond described. If you look at what high-achieving nations actually do to achieve their learning outcomes – the outcomes that Iowa says it also wants to achieve – their efforts are not in the domains of:

1. greater test-based accountability,
2. improvement of teacher quality through implementation of alternative certification routes,
3. charter schools, or
4. reexamination of teacher compensation structures.

Instead, they are:

5. creating assessments of higher-order thinking skills,
6. reducing the frequency of student testing,
7. empowering and trusting teachers,
8. providing adequate social supports for children and families,
9. substantially investing in better initial teacher and administrator preparation,
10. increasing opportunities for educators to collaborate and share expertise, and
11. equalizing educational resources across schools. 

The panel members generally were closer to what Dr. Darling-Hammond shared with us. The Summit’s main speakers, however, placed great emphasis on the first four items. Which brings me to my last thought…

8. Genuine dialogue or political cover?

The great unknown is whether Governor Branstad and the Iowa Department of Education truly intended the Summit to initiate a statewide dialogue about what effective learning, teaching, and schooling should look like in the state or whether the Summit was just to give cover for implementation of an already-determined political / educational agenda. Only time will tell. Right now I’m willing to take Iowa Education Director Dr. Jason Glass (whom I like more and more every time I interact with him) at his word when he says that he wants us to build the solution together. He’s not the political boss, however, and there was a lot of cynicism regarding this issue in the crowd. If we see policy proposals that heavily emphasize items 1–4 above and deemphasize items 5–11, for example, those skeptics will feel vindicated.

Despite what may seem like an overly-critical tone for this post, I enjoyed the Summit and am glad I attended and participated. Like many of the other speakers there, I believe that we have an opportunity to do – and already are doing – great things in Iowa education. In some areas, we have promising initiatives (like the Authentic Intellectual Work, 1:1 laptop, VREP, and instructional rounds movements) that just need scaling up. In other areas, we have much more to do.

Let the real work begin.

Image credit: spartannielsen