Parents ‘n Schools

(GLO — March 2010 — Reflecting  back on this entry of a year ago, “Inspiring Education” has mostly come and gone. I participated at a local “community conversation”, and I attended two days of the fall provincial conference. I don’t believe the conversation engaged Albertans, en masse… I would say it engaged “the usual Albertans”, being the usual educators… the “usual suspects”. But, upon reflection, it was not… as I wrote initially… a mere rehash of the excellent Learning Commission. Inspiring Education was a genuine attempt to jump 20 years out into the future… out past the politics and the labour dynamics and the cesspool of self-interest that is government schooling day by day… and freely imagine what schooling the generation-after-this ought to be and will need to be for their optimum service (and our optimum preservation). This conversation, in a no-doubt painful, sausage-manufacturing way, will turn into “policy” and ultimately into “practice” within Alberta schools… possibly even before that next-next generation goes to school. If they “go” to school at all, that is… and schooling does not more often come to them. Whatever may come to pass, the impression I got from my participation in “Inspiring Education” is that the world of government schooling which has mostly stayed the same for the past century-plus, will mostly change over the next two decades, and change in ways that the “usual suspects” really cannot yet embrace. And I believe that those changes will be good things.) 

Here in Alberta… for no particular reason given the excellent work of the Learning Commission a short few years ago… the government’s education department has announced a schedule for widespread community discussion about the future of government schooling hereabouts.

Entitled “Inspiring Education: A Dialogue With Albertans”, the work was introduced as follows:

“The Inspiring Education dialogue is about our hopes, dreams and aspirations for the children of Alberta, and the future of our province,” said Minister Hancock. “It will examine how education in Alberta can help tomorrow’s students find their passions and prepare for success in the future.”
Using an innovative generative dialogue approach, Inspiring Education will engage Albertans in extensive discussions about education as a foundation for the future societal and economic success of the province.  The perspectives and ideas gathered through this process will be used to develop a policy framework which describes the overall direction, principles and long-term goals for education in Alberta over the next two decades.

Not sure why they have to go to all this trouble… they already have all my letters…

And in addition to my helpful advice and direction, they also have the Report of the Learning Commission from a short few years ago. I described the good work of that commission as “the best million dollars ever spent on public education in Alberta”. It generated just under 100 (about 93, if memory serves) recommendations crafted to be both visionary AND practical in their application. It was a Commission dedicated to having its work not just sit on a shelf and be ignored, and their recommendations were wholeheartedly accepted by the Government of the day (which was basically the government of today).

Those recommendations were costed out and scheduled for adoption and incorporation, generally with the “renovation work” intended to be completed within a short few years after the Commission’s Report. Nobody really publicly objected to any of the Commission’s initiatives or proposals. Funding was even earmarked and added to budgets to accommodate a goodly amount of the work that needed to be done.

I’m thinking maybe the effort met with some resistance after all. I’m thinking the Commission’s recommended renovations haven’t quite been completed yet. And the discussion, apparently, is going to begin again.

Renovation work in government schooling is a lot like the renovation work at Candace Bergen’s home in the old TV series “Murphy Brown”. Her resident painter/contractor never actually finished. He was easily distracted. He had ideas of his own. Murphy was always pretty busy with other things herself.

How are children supposed to be expected to apply themselves to their schooling, when schoolers themselves are so easily distracted and redirected in their efforts? Wouldn’t it be nice to complete the work of the Learning Commission before embarking on further “inspiration”? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to SAY that work has been attended to?

Check the government of Alberta’s website for information on where, when and how you might participate in that innovative dialogue.

I expect I’ll send them all my ideas. (Just try and stop me….)

And, if I can dig up a spare copy around here somewhere, maybe give them their Learning Commission report from a short few years ago. I thought that was pretty darned inspiring at the time.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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Fast Company magazine online recently highlighted a new philanthropreneurial venture aimed at providing “mezzanine financing” for start-up schooling ventures that government schooling in its big “blobness” otherwise fails to serve.

The interview… editted below… rings with the sounds of similar Parents ‘n Schools sensibilities.

What would happen if you took the principles of a startup incubator… and applied it to improving education? A new philanthropic venture called Startl aims to find out… Startl is entirely focused on educational entrepreneurs… Fast Company caught up with Co-founder and Managing director Phoenix Wang to learn more and find out what’s coming next.

FC: … it’s a huge market, it’s a real opportunity, but so much of the investment is locked down by the fact that governments are the biggest buyers.
PW: Exactly. There are $600 billion in public dollar investments in education around schools. But there’s a disconnect between the school districts who make the purchases and the students who are supposed to use it. So oftentimes what gets pushed down to students is not really aligned with their interests.
… I think a lot of times government money is about the codification of innovations–that is, institutionalizing things that already work–and they’re concerned about making the existing system better. We’re interested in leveraging what’s coming from the outside: how technology can improve people’s lives and how it can play a role in shifting the culture of education to a more learner-centric model as opposed to institutional efficiency…
And for that reason, our whole focus is operating on the edge between school and non-school, formal and non-formal; placing the learner in the middle.
FC: At the “hacking education” summit at Union Square Ventures last spring, one of the most frequently re-tweeted lines was about classroom teachers today being like bank tellers of the 1970s. Do you think that’s true?
PW: I was a management consultant with Accenture in the mid-90s when the Internet first came out. Every financial services client we had was panicking about disintermediation: that banks, travel agents, brokers would all go away. You know what? It’s not so much they’re all gone today but their roles have changed. They have to be better at what they do, redefine roles or add different kinds of value. I think likely that some level of that is going to happen to what we call schooling. It will be part of a whole ecology of institutions or modalities of access available to learners to enable them to develop an interest, engage, deepen and extend their learning.

GLO

gordotto@parentsnschools.com

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(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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