Parents ‘n Schools

(GLO — March 2010 — Schoolers like to alternatively deny that theirs is a “business”, while employing at certain convenience business analogies or terminology. Generally referring to a school as a “factory” is unappreciated, but, apparently, “unit” is OK. Try doing that with each child unit… Schooling, in my opinion, is very much a business. It is also a “backward business”… focussed not on what comes out but what goes in. And focussed on the “units of improvement” that it largely serves them to improve, in the order that it serves, as well. I believe that improving the “parental units”… even just a tiny bit… will generate material improvements in the “child units”. But since there’s no money in it for the “school units” — and, in fact, less if they share in such fashion — the “schooling business” is unlikely to undertake that kind of improvement on its own.)

The superintendent of our city’s public school board published an article recently titled “The School as the Unit for Improvement in Education”. It is part of a series that began by examining the classroom or teacher as the “unit of improvement” and will follow with examining the school jurisdiction or board.

In case it’s not got around to… as it so seldom is in schooling literature… I thought I might suggest the parent as a unit of improvement in education as something also worth examining… one day… every day… and perhaps granted some meaningful consideration and some meaningful share of schooling resources. Out of every $10,000 per year that on average goes from government treasuries to fund a child’s year in government schools, about 50 cents of that finds its way to anything directly related to improving that child’s parent as an educator “unit”. A great deal more than two twenty-five-cent-pieces goes to improving and sustaining the other units in that child’s schooling.

It’s hard to accomplish much improvement with 50 pennies per day, much less 50 pennies per year.

Multiply that by ten (a good place to start), and with 500 pennies per parent per year schooling might go a considerable way to sharing many of its hard-earned and expensively-purchased “secrets” of how children learn best. Much of its wisdoms and much of its skills and lessons, which it mostly keeps to itself because it mostly can’t find sufficient reason to find sufficient resources to meaningfully share. Not with parents, at least.

Multiply by one hundred and with 5000 pennies (which sounds kinda meaningful… but is only $50 out of $10,000) per parent per year schooling might go a considerable way to sharing not only the “secrets” and the wisdoms but also the workload and the evolution. It might begin to see a glimmer of genuine partnership in co-educating children along with their families, and a thin slice of the potential for each child’s learning when parents and family are genuinely “tapped” as reservoirs of support and reserves of energy in regard to how children learn… if only parents were actually trained to be educators themselves.

Multiply by one thousand and with 50,000 pennies… well, let’s not even go there..

The truly disappointing part of the truly miniscule part of government schooling that is truly shared with parents in any truly useful fashion (useful for parents and for children… and not just useful to schools or their administration), is that the world of schooling and the industry of education has a great deal of wisdom and learning and skills and practices to share with families, and by extension through them and their volunteering and coaching and caregiving, to share with communities and with society. But by not getting that learning and that wisdom outside school walls and into the hearts and minds of parents and community volunteers, it does not get put to work in the community.

By making parents the unit of improvement in government schooling, government schooling would be making an investment in the community and an investment in the world their students live… and helping to make the world-at-large a place where children learn better, learn more safely, and learn more broadly than they otherwise might. Teach every parent… to be better teachers themselves… and the job of teaching in schools will become easier and better and more productive. By making that investment in parents and families, schooling will see returns far in excess of that investment for its own business. Continue to fail to make that investment, in any meaningful fashion, and no amount of improvement in education’s other “units” will likely amount to enough to sustain government schooling as an acceptable vehicle for education for future generations, which future generations will be increasingly hard-pressed to accept the services of an industry that struggles to meet society’s increasing demands for schooling.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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Macleans magazine in its February 22, 2010 issue surveyed Canadian university students on a variety of elements of their post-secondary schooling experience (academic challenge, student-faculty interaction, collaborative learning, enriching experience, supportive environment, student satisfaction). Basic thing I took away… smaller universities are better for all of these things. Bigger/biggest universities were well down the list in all of these categories.

Other thing I took away was an article on free online university courses that are becoming a growing resource for learning. Well worth checking out yourself and getting a feel for the quality of the learning. In particular, check out Academic Earth (academicearth.org). Lectures from Ivy League schools on all manner of subjects. Good learning, freely available, with links to resources.

Post-secondary schooling… apart from the subjective “experiences” surveyed by Macleans… is largely “self-schooling”. A buffet is laid out, and the young adult learners “feed” themselves. Increasingly, they don’t even have to attend lectures or buy books. The primary cost of schooling (K-12 or post-secondary) is “delivery cost”. In a world of advancing delivery technology, those costs fall dramatically and… over time… get closer and closer to “free”. The roles within that delivery system are compelled to change as that “free” turns into “freedom” for the consumer.

It happened with booksellers. It happened with bank clerks. It’s happening to TV. It will happen to schooling. At an accelerating pace, with accelerating economics and accelerating quality.

If you can get First Year Physics from an MIT professor on your iPod, you can and should expect to get every other kind of learning the same way. The roles in schooling will become increasingly specialized and increasingly diverse, as the delivery system changes dramatically and the costs of that system fall away toward “free”.

And what the consumer will increasingly be at liberty to seek out… and pay for… will be the “experience”.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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(GLO — March 2010 — This actually became law in Colorado last year, with its proponents heralding that now “parents didn’t have to choose between being good parents and good employees”. Heavy sigh. Government schooling cutting itself more favours… akin to how they don’t have to consider road safety when they position schools and leave out parking lanes or parking lots that would relieve daily traffic jams. There are ways for schoolers to go to parents — see KIPP — if they wish to be bothered, and there are ways to cover the distance separating parents ‘n schools via technology. Legislation of this nature basically forces business of all kinds to conform and pay in lost labour of their own for the unbudging collectivized hours and labour clauses of government schooling. It is government schooling bullying business and community, to make itself feel better and excuse itself for being unable to genuinely serve or solve on its own the problems of its own creation. Spinning deeper down its own vortex.)

On the cover of the Denver Daily News from February 10, 2009 (that I literally found lying around a friend’s house here in Calgary recently) was a headline story describing legislation moving through the Colorado state legislature that would require businesses to allow parents up to 18 hours time off from work per year so they can attend their children’s school activities. This is frightening to me on a couple different levels.

Yes, it is helpful for parents to be involved with their children’s schools. But in no way should it be mandatory, and in no way should anyone other than the multi-multi-billion-dollar government school industry have to incent or fund such involvement.

It is MUCH more important that parents be involved with their CHILDREN, and their children’s schooling. That can be done PLENTY without ever having to attend at their children’s school. Studies in the New England area established years back that parents who may never be seen around a school are very likely involving themselves in their children’s schooling in many positive ways… the simplest and most important of ways being to regularly ask “How was your day at school today? Tell me something you learned.”

But more than overstating the importance of parents actually attending at their children’s schools… overstating it to the extreme that employers should facilitate it… is the frightening inequity in what such legislation would require employers to give up relative to how little schooling gives up of its taxpayer dollars to make parent involvement happen. If similar legislation were to be dreamed up in Alberta, that 18 hours per year multiplied by about one million parents of Alberta schoolchildren multiplied by a conservative $20 per hour is an “involuntary contribution” by business of $360 million per year! That’s $360 per parent, when schooling itself invests only about 50 cents in each of them from a co-educator training point of view, and maybe two bucks overall (with the rest just aimed at helping parents be better meeting goers and fundraisers).

Holy Do As I Say, Not As I Do, Batman!

If employers are to accept any kind of mandate to support parents in their children’s schooling of that magnitude, shouldn’t government schooling itself have to match a little more than one-half of one percent?

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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Schooling in Alberta is a $6 billion per year business. That’s how much an oilsands plant costs to build. That’s about half or a third of a pipeline to the Arctic Ocean.

Schooling across North America is a $600 billion-plus enterprise. Perhaps only armed forces is bigger….

I have written before that it is an act of courage for parents or community members (or even politicians) to just walk alongside such a “beast”… let alone stand in front of it and say “Halt!” With no resources available, really… certainly no resources equal to the resources of that $6 billion enterprise. No lawyers (every other “partner” has lawyers). No one even whose full-time job is “parents” or “parent advocacy”.

Running with the bulls has nothing on running with government schools.

Even for experienced parents. Even for experienced volunteers. Quite simply, their role in schooling… their place as reformers or questioners or “traffic cops”… never feels welcome, never feels comfortable and never feels appreciated (”It sure would be nice if you weren’t here.” — Charles Grodin).

Whitney Tilson’s blog captured that feeling recently in this quote from Natasha Kamrani regarding attendance at a Houston authority meeting where significant changes were enacted:

“It was an emotional and action packed evening with a packed house at HISD.  Houston Federation of Teachers members made a strong showing, filling many seats and identifying themselves with buttons on their jackets.  However, when it came to speakers to the agenda item, and I believe there were approximately 64 speakers registered, supporters appeared to out-number those opposed with most support coming from parents, community activists and business leaders.  Union members made up the opposition.

The auditorium was so packed that folks were ushered in to watch the proceedings on TVs inside the administration building lobby and cafeteria and the crowd in opposition was often times openly hostile, booing speakers for daring to state their opinions.  A real debt of gratitude is owed to those who showed the courage to stand up in front of such open aggression to speak their mind.  I have been on the receiving end of it and I know, regardless of how passionate, determined and committed you are to an ideal, it NEVER feels good to put yourself so far out there.  It is downright scary and it is often hard to negotiate the wisdom in doing something so scary.  I am so thankful to the many brave men and women who took a stand.  We were lucky tonight to have so many supporters present to not only speak, but to support one another.”

Parents deserve support for their courage. A $6 billion per year government enterprise in Alberta has a duty to provide strong support and a legitimate place for “other voices”, with a share of lawyers and a share of resources to legitimize and embed their role and place in that “oilsands plant” or pipeline. It should not be taken for granted. It should not be neglected. It should be a priority.

It is, quite possibly, the only way such large government enterprises learns. That such strong, independent, legitimate entities do not exist… shows how eager schoolers are to learn themselves, from anybody who is not them. Ironic.

And unjust.

And more than a little scary.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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(GLO — Feb/10 — I continue to play at editting these posts into something more “book-like”… but it is a process that gets interrupted often. My mental model of such an effort is Seth Godin’s “Small is the New Big”… an excellent book capturing his many essays from his blog. My image of the model PnS reader remains the same. And as readership of this blog grows, it pleases me to believe that there are more and more such Gentle Parents out there sharing this conversation.)

In sitting down recently to explore the possibility of maybe, if fate allows, one day, perhaps, depending on the stars and their alignment, in some fashion… turn these writings into a book, I was led to ponder who such a book might be “written for”.

What I came up with was:

“The parent with some exposure to schooling (government or otherwise), who refers these writings along to fellow parents with the comment ‘You should read this guy… I don’t always agree with what he writes, but I generally enjoy how he writes it… and he’ll make you think about things.’”

The working title of said possible, maybe, kinda, sorta book is:

“In Case of Emergency (or A Child In School) — Read This Book!”

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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In the $600 BILLION per year enterprise that is government schooling in North America, if next to nothing is spent on parents as co-educators of their children, the “next to next to nothing” line item in those budgets is “research”. I am pretty sure that more is spent tracking prospects in baseball’s farm system than is spent researching, understanding and objectively measuring and assessing how kids actually learn in the big business of government schooling.

The number one reason nothing gets spent is, quite simply, they don’t have to. There ain’t no competition. So there.

The number two reason nothing gets spent on objective research is that, quite simply, they are under no obligation to be objective. While schoolers are under certain fiduciary duties to children, they are under none to themselves or to government or to the public at large. There is no “duty of fairness”, or no “officer of the court” obligation among adults in government schooling. It is a profession, but in this regard, it is a profession akin to professional poker.

The number three reason next to next to nothing gets spent on objective, critical, both-sides-of-the-coin research in government schooling is that there are no independent agencies, ombudsmen, “watchdog” type agencies set up to independently conduct such research. No real “audit” control. Nothing that is not at liberty to be selective in its memory or self-serving in its focus.

Remember this, Gentle Parent, when you are served up by your school or schooling authority as “proof” of one thing or another (class size… homework… school hours… curricula…) “research” that, if handed in as a Grade 9 paper, would be given a “D-” for completeness and diligence. Nobody’s marking them. Nobody’s checking their work. Nobody’s on the other side of the debate.

At least, nobody they’re going to tell you about. Because they don’t have to.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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(GLO — Feb/10 — From a year ago… more musing on homework dynamics…)

A friend recently shared the contents of a message home from school, where his child’s teacher was appealing for help at home reminding students where homework assignments can be found online and reminding them to get that work done in a timely fashion.

Innocent enough.

But the reaction at home was… unwelcome.

Home is already a very busy place.
Parents already have a lot to “nag” their children about.

Homework is where the rubber meets the road in the home/school “partnership”, and where everyday the home is reminded what a one-sided relationship that actually is. And “you do this instead of me”-type delegation can get old fast when the parent as co-educator is given no resources, no warning, no scheduling coordination and no training or understanding in what the value of that “do-ing” holds.

The reality is that in the increasingly demanding and competitive world of schooling that represents only 15% of a child’s time before adulthood, work at home and in the world during the other 85% is both unavoidable and necessary for success. but when 99.99% of the resources are hoarded by schools, and barely 0.01% are shared meaningfully with their “co-educator partners” at home… it’s hard for those parent co-educators to “get it”.

And really hard for them to care.

And really hard for them to keep plodding along for 13 years from K-12.

Sure, in theory, it’s all about the kids.

But when the money goes 99.99% to the school, and time and reality go 85% to the home, it’s hard to remember who it’s all really for.

GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com

P.S.    I occasionally refer to schools as “government learning facilities”. But they could also be characterized as “government teaching facilities”. Because while the learning is oft times hit and miss, what is assured is the teaching… the employment, the benefits, the pensions, the management, the scheduling and the structure. Government schooling is in many respects about delivery of teaching. If it were entirely about delivery of learning, a great deal else would enter into its operations… including resources for the home and that “other 85%” of children’s life and learning.

Homework is where that uncomfortable reality rubs and chafes.

When schoolers deliver up studies or statistics suggesting homework in any small or large amount is not helpful to children’s learning, my spidey senses tingle. The paranoid, suspicious side of me (yeah, I got one, perhaps) tends to think it is a way of appeasing that part of the parent population who feel their children don’t have enough time in their evenings for the rest of their life. And if not that, then a way of managing expectations (downward) for to better get through days and years in the world of government schooling.

But mostly my spidey senses tingle because very few things of any kind in government schooling are done or decided solely based on “what’s best for children’s learning”… last of all the amount of work that is done or gets done in the course of the very regimented, very much labour-negotiated school day. School hours are designed more to accommodate suburban commutes than “what’s best for kids” (which is why in our town schools on the edge of the city start their day at 8 a.m. while schools in the centre of the city start at 9 a.m…. has nothing to do with the kids, and everything to do with the adults). How long school lasts is more a function of labour negotiations than “what’s best for kids”, with hours of instruction negotiated down to the quarter-hour and school buzzers synchronized down to the minute. What gets included or not included in school curriculum and mandated programming has more to do with politics and preferences than “what’s best for kids”, as what is required, what is optional and what is available vary with administrators, budgets and societal fancies.

With all of that (and more) in play, homework is more a function of “what fits” than “what’s best”. And in a government schooling world whose bottom line of “timely completion” enjoys rates of 70% or less… any study that rationalizes doing LESS instruction or homework or practice… would seem to me to make little sense, is suspiciously convenient, and is immensely beside-the-point as far as how government school days are actually structured or how learning does or does not actually happen on any day given substitute teachers, children’s “unreadiness to learn”, multiple distractions in an increasingly distractable student population and a general disinterest on the part of the “public” as far as what public education is actually about.

Faced also with insights like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours to mastery (“Outliers”), studies revealing “time on task” is possibly the number one factor in children’s learning, and the success in the U.S. of programs like KIPP which features materially longer school days and schooling on every second Saturday… arguments against homework in some amount are unlikely to be based on “what’s best for kids’ learning” than what may be best for adults or families or other aspects of their lives. It is undeniably “nice” not to have homework assigned… but is it “best” for learning over a K-12 career? My spidey senses tingle at the notion. There are just too many moving parts, and too much swirling self-interest at play, for such a convenient “truth” as that.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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(GLO — Feb/10 — I think the Heath boys have a new book out soon. I recommend their writing and thinking to you.)

In Chip and Dan Heath’s bestseller “Made to Stick”, they talk about the “Curse of Knowledge”, or what happens to our human thinking after we know something and how hard it becomes to imagine what it was like not to know it. That knowledge has “cursed” us, and “it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.”

Schoolers suffer from that Curse of Knowledge. It shows in every attempt at communicating with parents. Their ongoing attempts at communication suffer from enormous information imbalances. “You can’t unlearn what you already know,” Chip and Dan write. But fighting back against that Knowledge is absolutely vital in making the message live for those who do not already possess it.

How that Curse of Knowledge operates to hamper communications is illustrated by the authors by reference to psychological research conducted between “tappers” and “listeners”. The tappers were asked to tap out one of 25 well-known tunes (like “Happy Birthday to You”) by simply knocking on a table. The listeners job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. (You can try this at home, Gentle Parent.)

In the psychological research, listeners guessed only 2.5% of the songs. Listening is hard.

But here is part of why it is hard.

Before the listeners guessed, the researchers asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted the odds were 50%.

Why did the tappers BELIEVE they were getting their message across 1 out of every 2 times, but the message only GOT ACROSS 1 time out of every 40? Because the tappers knew the song they were tapping. It was playing in their heads. All the listeners could hear were taps on a table.

The tappers could not understand how the listeners could be so dumb.

Schoolers can’t understand how parents can be so dumb sometimes, too.

What don’t parents get about “readiness to learn”?
Why is it so easy for parents to get children to 3 hours of hockey practice per week, but so hard to get 15 minutes of reading practice?
What’s so hard for parents to hear about “don’t drop off children in school parking lots”? (Actually, that one SHOULDN’T BE hard to hear at all…)

“Curse” parents with even just a little bit of the knowledge schoolers have, and the tunes might be more readily picked up.

But as long as government schools trouble to invest in parent knowledge only a single penny out of every 10,000 pennies, schooler songs will continue to just be noise to parents.

And it will continue to be children who are genuinely cursed by this tone-deaf partnership.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

“… despite all the rhetoric about “parental involvement,” you don’t see a lot  of people within education tripping over themselves to encourage it.”

This is a very true comment on Andy Rotherham’s www.eduwonk.com blog recently (in regard to policy in California that empowers parents in regard to school staffing changes for failing schools).

“Parental involvement” is one of those things in schooling that are easy to say, but hard to do. Easy to jump on the bandwagon, but hard to share your piece of the pie. And since very little about government schooling is about “making the pie bigger” (which is the primary driver underlying the rest of our society), almost nothing… really… gets shared by entrenched interests with anything to do with genuine parental involvement. (My estimates are one to maybe two to maybe three “basis points”… percentages of percentages…)

I’m pretty sure that if you checked any audited financial statement of any government schooling jurisdiction, board, authority or school… anywhere… no line item would appear titled “parental involvement”. It just isn’t material. It is just never enough to matter.

But the rhetoric is maintained. Because it is “harmless” to do so. What harm does a masquerade do? What harm from a “facade”? Well… imagine if fire extinguishers in schools weren’t real… they were just painted on. Imagine if schoolers were paid in play money. Imagine if children were just told stories, instead of science (like THAT would ever happen…).

“Parental involvement” is one of the facades that is really never looked behind in government schooling. It is in nobody’s interests, really, to lift the veil. There is no authoritative consumer protection agency at work in government schooling. If it is scrutinized, it is scrutinized from very high altitude. Like spy satellites. That observe movements on the ground. And can’t distinguish between real tanks… or cardboard ones. Parental involvement in schooling is mostly cardboard.

In Alberta there is a program called AISI (Alberta Initiative for School Improvement), which garners many tens of millions of dollars per year in funding (over half a billion dollars so far in the course of its decade long history). That program includes requirement for initiatives to have an element of “parental involvement”. A review by scholars not long ago of what actually constituted parental involvement in AISI programming… struggled to really find any genuine involvement. In my opinion, it’s just a “check the box” dynamic. My own less scientific study of AISI involved the extent to which I was ever involved personally in any programs impacting my children in their schooling… in a school jurisdication that… being the largest in the province… garnered the lion’s share of AISI funding. All I ever noticed was every few years receiving a questionnaire with a few multiple choice questions generally asking how impressed I was with the program. My question in return is if that is what “parental involvement” means to schoolers, then surely any parent who troubles once every few years to ask their child how their day went at school is equally “involved”.

GLO

www.parentsnschools.com

P.S.   I served on the AISI steering committee for two years as a volunteer parent appointee. One of two volunteer parents on a committee of a dozen or more paid schoolers. Good learning. Quality stuff. Good opportunity to contribute. But, I daresay, those many hours of travel and attendance at meetings and conferences by us two parents amounted to the greater part of any genuine “parental involvement” that the half billion dollars generated. From high enough altitude, however, I’m sure it looked real.