Heinlein once wrote, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
I am watching my students grapple with the standards for their individual districts and seeing that the teachable moments seem to slip by more frequently in their classes. Who could not stop a science class to discuss the energy of an 8.8 earthquake?
Perhaps more troubling is the trend to get kids in 7th grade select a career focus that will dictate their 5 year high school plan. What happened to nurturing interest and exploring diverse fields to find one that captures our attention. Our rich history of innovation is built on the shoulders of folks who were engaged with rich literature, writing, science, dance, art, music, and math. When we begin to define education by the mimimums we are on shaky ground.

Feeling Left Out

Let’s set a scene too many of us are familiar with.

A group of promising college students sit around a table, assigned to these groups by their college professor, for a group project of some nature. The first big assumption we’ll make is that somewhere along the way, some people will do their part, and some won’t. In many of these settings, one or two people are left to do the work while the other 3-4 don’t do jack.

There’s a dynamic, though, that barely gets discussed in these settings, and where I consider our roles in the dynamic too crucial. Oftentimes, a person whose characteristics are different from the others in the group (and in this sense, it’s usually someone of another gender, sex, or even perceived disability) gets his or her opinion ostracized. For many of us who consider ourselves part of the ostracized group, the stages look like the following:

1. We state an opinion enthusiastically and it’s immediately shut down.
2. We try to contribute to another’s idea, in compromise, and it’s given a shrug.
3. We look for an entryway into the conversation, but the frustration with the perceived (or intentional) ostracization has already started to settle in.
4. We’ll sit there silent and defiant, unwilling now to contribute much of anything, a reverse placement of value (”They don’t deserve what I have to say anyway.”)
5. We try to discuss this with someone who we think may have a smidgen of objectivity, and either the person tries to play peacemaker, or, as is often the case, patronizes us by saying, “That’s just in your head. Try again.”
6. He or she may either walk out, or do something abrupt and poignant, even when the group has shifted to another topic.

Here’s where it gets a little strange, but where huge misunderstandings (and sometimes, latent discrimination) occurs. The older our students are, the more we should give them space to resolve issues within themselves without the micromanaging of a powerful moderator. However, we have to develop a barometer for when things go from simple misunderstandings to blatant pushing-out. As a teacher, I have learned to trust my instincts about the group dynamics within the groups I make, continually monitoring the temperature of chemistries, hoping they all work.

And no matter how well the professor / teacher / moderator means, if he or she lets that occur, then he or she is complicit in the lack of chemistry, particularly if the offended party is acting in the appropriate code of conduct.

For instance, let’s a group of mostly conservative male professors is having a conversation about women’s health, and they decide to ignore the woman’s take in it, then they’re being latently discriminatory, especially as it pertains to a woman’s body. If the woman in the group follows those 6 steps outlined above, then the group will most likely treat her as the problem since she is not considered “the norm” in the group.

Now, if there are one or two male professors in that group who would like to hear the woman’s take on the matter see this happening and silent during this, then they are complicit in this perpetuation of ignorance.

That is to say, the future of education depends highly on how we treat all learners, whether adults or children. True diversity comes from having many opinions and many voices included and vested within the discussion. Even if there are disagreements, at least the conversations are had and the opinions are validated.As long as the participants understand the rules of engagement and bring a sense of value to the discussion, then they should be a part of what we’re doing. And if those of us who see value in another opinion don’t speak up, then we in effect agree that they shouldn’t be at the table.

Every person deserves a seat at the table, lest those who we serve get their own table.

We as humans (of any subgroup, educators included) are not a monolith. Why should our discussions be?

Jose, who thought of this while writing a post about Arne Duncan’s lame assertion (and eventual apology) in my regular blog …

Jon Becker recently skewered several arguments about the direction education “needs” to go in. He did it so well, I couldn’t help but respond in a comment to another false assumption about the direction of schools.

On Educational Insanity Kevin commented,

I think the point Mr. Becker is trying to make is that we need to first decide what we want a graduating senior to know and be able to do, before we can talk about the “how” or “why” of school change. If my analysis of his post is correct then I would agree with him. Too often I find in schools that we try to make decisions in a vacuum without ever deciding what it is we are aiming for. As educational leaders we should be asking ourselves first “Where are we headed?” It is the basic concept of backwards by design. Figure out your endpoint and then decide how to get there.

The idea of backwards design, when it comes to the purposes of education is one of those ideas that sounds good on the surface but, I believe would fly apart upon implementation. Backwards design assumes that we are able to know where we want to go based on the information we have now.

Most of the jobs young students will have in the future haven’t been invented yet.

Just watch, as we try to come up with national standards, how narrow we get with the purposes of school. If you try to make everybody (including the USED) happy all the time, it is hard to say anything meaningful beyond common sense ideas like, everybody should be able to read, everybody should have some ideas about probability. These ideas have already been put forward by various national organizations. The national standards will be nothing new, they will only make what we need to teach kids more specific, and less meaningful.

Kevin, I don’t think we need to incorporate backwards design at this point. When we throw the purposes of education up for delineation it actually makes the purposes of school less democratic in our current society. There are so many “influencers” out there that do not have students’ success and welfare at the center of their arguments that by clarifying the goals of schooling we would defacto narrow those goals. The loudest voices in a backwards design would the ones with the most to gain in the process, industry. At least the way it is now, teachers have the opportunity to squeeze in some Plato, or Joyce, Jack Kerouac, or Abbot and Costello into a discussion on language and meaning. In a backwards designed classroom we will always be chasing the lion’s tail, trying to catch up with a changing society. Students will be doing this because of what some policy maker or eduwonk has deemed important instead of what they have decided for themselves. The more specific we make our goals, the less meaningful they will be. The less specific we make our goals, the more opportunities there will be for students to find meaning. Maybe we should start thinking about the shape of the pegs, when we design the holes, instead of the other way around.

Image: http://www.josephnolen.com/images/monk-riding-backwards.jpg

Hope you enjoy this video about our work and share it with your various networks and communities. The future is now.

The 10 principles reproduced here are from a 2009 report sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.” Emily Vickery suggested this report to the TS2030 team a few months ago. Here’s a quote:

We argue that the single most important characteristic of the Internet is its capacity to allow for a worldwide community and its endlessly myriad subsets to exchange ideas, to learn from one another in a way not previously available. We contend that the future of learning institutions demands a deep, epistemological appreciation of the profundity of what the Internet offers humanity as a model of a learning institution.

These are principles the authors believe “are foundational to rethinking the future of learning institutions. We see these principles as riders, both as challenges and as the general grounds on which to develop creative learning practices, both transformative and transforming as new challenges emerge and new technological possibilities are fashioned.”

What do you think? Which principles ring true? Which would you challenge? What other principles would you add?

[Quoted directly from this document - free download]

1. Self-Learning

Self-learning has bloomed; discovering online possibilities is a skill now developed from early childhood through advanced adult life. Even online reading, as Alan Liu reminds us, has become collaborative, interactive, nonlinear and relational, engaging multiple voices.25 We browse, scan, connect in midparagraph if not mid-sentence to related material, look up information relevant or related to what we are reading. Sometimes this mode of relational reading might draw us completely away from the original text, hypertextually streaming us into completely new threads and pathways across the information highways and byways. It is not for nothing that the Internet is called the “Web,” sometimes resembling a maze but more often than not serving as a productive if complex and challenging switchboard.

2. Horizontal Structures

Relatedly, an increasingly horizontal structure of learning puts pressure on how learning institutions—schools, colleges, universities, and their surrounding support apparatuses—enable learning. Institutional education has tended to be authoritative, top-down, standardized, and predicated on individuated assessment measured on standard tests. Increasingly today, work regimes involve collaboration with colleagues in teams. Multitasking and overlapping but not discrete strengths and skills reinforce capacities to work around problems, work out solutions, and work together to complete projects. Given the range and volume of information available and the ubiquity of access to information sources and resources, learning strategy shifts from a focus on information as such to judgment concerning reliable information, from memorizing information to how to find reliable sources. In short, from learning that to learning how, from content to process.

3. From Presumed Authority to Collective Credibility

Learning is shifting from issues of authoritativeness to issues of credibility. A major part of the future of learning is in developing methods, often communal, for distinguishing good knowledge sources from those that are questionable. Increasingly, learning is about how to make wise choices—epistemologically, methodologically, concerning productive collaborative partnerships to broach complex challenges and problems. Learning increasingly concerns not only how to resolve issues regarding information architecture, interoperability and compatibility, scalability and sustainability, but also how to address ethical dilemmas. It concerns, in addition, issues of judgment in resolving tensions between different points of view in increasingly interdisciplinary environments.

We find ourselves increasingly being moved to interdisciplinary and collaborative knowledge creating and learning environments in order to address objects of analysis and research problems that are multidimensional and complex, and the resolution of which cannot be fashioned by any single discipline. Knowledge formation and learning today thus pose more acute challenges of trust. If older, more traditional learning environments were about trusting knowledge authorities or certified experts, that model can no longer withstand the growing complexities—the relational constitution of knowledge domains and the problems they pose.

4. A De-Centered Pedagogy

In secondary schools and higher education, many administrators and individual teachers have been moved to limit use of collectively and collaboratively crafted knowledge sources, most notably Wikipedia, for course assignments or to issue quite stringent guidelines for their consultation and reference.26 This is a catastrophically anti-intellectual reaction to a knowledgemaking, global phenomenon of epic proportions.

To ban sources such as Wikipedia is to miss the importance of a collaborative, knowledge-making impulse in humans who are willing to contribute, correct, and collect information without remuneration: by definition, this is education. To miss how much such collaborative, participatory learning underscores the foundations of learning is defeatist, unimaginative, even self destructive.

Instead, leaders at learning institutions need to adopt a more inductive, collective pedagogy that takes advantage of our era. John Seely Brown has noted that it took professional astronomers many years to realize that the benefits to their field of having tens of thousands of amateur stargazers reporting on celestial activity far outweighed the disadvantages of unreliability.

This was a colossal observation, given that among the cohort of amateur astronomers were some who believed it was their duty to save the earth from Martians. In other words, professional astronomers had large issues of credibility that had to be counterpoised to the compelling issue of wanting to expand the knowledge base of observed celestial activity. In the end, it was thought that “kooks” would be sorted out through Web 2.0 participatory and corrective learning. The result has been a far greater knowledge, amassed in this participatory method, than anyone had ever dreamed possible, balanced by collective and professional procedures for sorting through the data for obviously wrong or misguided reportings.

If professional astronomers can adopt such a de-centered method for assembling information, certainly college and high school teachers can develop a pedagogical method also based on collective checking, inquisitive skepticism, and group assessment.28

5. Networked Learning

Socially networked collaborative learning extends some of the most established practices, virtues, and dispositional habits of individualized learning. These include taking turns in speaking, posing questions, listening to and hearing others out. Networked learning, however, goes beyond these conversational rules to include correcting others, being open to being corrected oneself, and working together to fashion workarounds when straightforward solutions to problems or learning challenges are not forthcoming. It is not that individualized learning cannot end up encouraging such habits and practices. But they are not natural to individual learning, which leans on a social framework that stresses competition and hierarchy rather than cooperation, partnering, and mediation.

If individualized learning is chained to a social vision prompted by “prisoner dilemma” rationality in which one cooperates only if it maximizes narrow self-interest, networked learning is committed to a vision of the social stressing cooperation, interactivity, mutuality, and social engagement for their own sakes and for the powerful productivity to which it more often than not leads. The power of ten working interactively will almost invariably outstrip the power of one looking to beat out the other nine.

6. Open Source Education

Networked learning is predicated on and deeply interwoven into the fabric of open source culture.29 Open source culture seeks to share openly and freely in the creation of culture, in its production processes, and in its product, its content. It looks to have its processes and products improved through the contributions of others by being made freely available to all. If individualized learning is largely tethered to a social regime of copyright-protected intellectual property and privatized ownership, networked learning is committed in the end to an open source and open content social regime. Individualized learning tends overwhelmingly to be hierarchical: one learns from the teacher or expert, on the basis overwhelmingly of copyrightprotected publications bearing the current status of knowledge.

Networked learning is at least peer-to-peer and more robustly many-to-many. In some circumstances, where resources are unevenly distributed, the network operates according to what we call a many-tomultitudes model. That is, a group that has access to resources sustains and supports the infrastructure required to engage in what are equitable intellectual exchanges with those who do not have the financial resources to sustain digital connection. Many international social movements—such as those focused on Darfur or Tibet—operate from this many-to-multitudes interactivity where financial resources on one end are balanced by local expertise and human investment and labor on the other for interchanges that are rich and socially valuable for all participants.

Many-to-multitudes does not erase the digital divide but, rather, acknowledges its material reality and provides a more collective model of capital (monetary capital and human capital) to promote interchange. The desire (on all sides) for interactivity fuels this digitally driven form of social networking, as much in learning as in economic practices. It provides the circuits and nodes, the combustion energy and driving force for engaged and sustained innovative activity, sparking creativity, extending the circulation of ideas and practices, making available the test sites for innovative developments, even the laboratory for the valuable if sometimes painful lessons to be learned from failure.

7. Learning as Connectivity and Interactivity

The connectivities and interactivities made possible by digitally enabled social networking in its best outcomes produce learning ensembles in which the members both support and sustain, elicit from and expand on each other’s learning inputs, contributions, and products. Challenges are not simply individually faced frustrations, Promethean mountains to climb alone, but mutually shared, to be redefined, solved, resolved, or worked around—together.

An application such as Live Mesh allows one to unite and synchronize one’s entire range of devices and applications into a seamless web of interactivity. It enables instantaneous fileand data-sharing with other users with whom the user is remotely connected, thus allowing at least potentially for seamless and more or less instant communication across work and recreational environments. Our technological architecture thus is fast making net-working—in contrast with isolated, individualized working—the default. Slower to adapt, the organizational architecture of our educational institutions and pedagogical delivery are just starting to catch on and catch up.

8. Lifelong Learning

It has become obvious that from the point of view of participatory learning there is no finality. Learning is lifelong. It is lifelong not simply in the Socratic sense of it taking that long to realize that the more one knows the more one realizes how little one knows. It is lifelong in the sense also, perhaps anti-Platonically, that the increasingly rapid changes in the world’s makeup mean that we must necessarily learn anew, acquiring new knowledge to face up to the challenges of novel conditions as we bear with us the lessons of adaptability, of applying lessons to unprecedented situations and challenges. It is not just that economic prospects demand it; increasingly “our” sociality and culture now do, too.

It remains an open question still whether connected, open source, interactive, networked, horizontal, lifelong learning will have a transformative epistemological impact on what we learn at our educational institutions. But what is certain is that the pedagogical changes we have enumerated have radically changed how we know how we know.30

9. Learning Institutions as Mobilizing Networks

Collaborative, networked learning alters also how we think about learning institutions, and network culture about how to conceive of institutions more generally. Traditionally, institutions have been thought about in terms of rules, regulations, norms governing interactivity, production, and distribution within the institutional structure. Network culture and associated learning practices and arrangements suggest that we think of institutions, especially those promoting learning, as mobilizing networks.

The networks enable a mobilizing that stresses flexibility, interactivity, and outcome. And the mobilizing in turn encourages and enables networking interactivity that lasts as long as it is productive, opening up or giving way to new interacting networks as older ones ossify or newly emergent ones signal new possibilities. Institutional culture thus shifts from the weighty to the light, from the assertive to the enabling. With this new formation of institutional understanding and practice, the challenges we face concern such considerations as reliability and predictability alongside flexibility and innovation.

10. Flexible Scalability and Simulation

Networked learning both facilitates and must remain open to various scales of learning possibility, from the small and local to the widest and most far-reaching constituencies capable of productively contributing to a domain, subject matter, knowledge formation and creation. New technologies allow for small groups whose members are at physical distance to each other to learn collaboratively together and from each other; but they also enable larger, more anonymous yet equally productive interactions. They make it possible, through virtual simulations, to learn about large-scale processes, life systems, and social structures without either having to observe or recreate them in real life. The scale will be driven by the nature of the project or knowledge base, ranging from a small group of students working on a specific topic together to open-ended and open-sourced contributions to the Encyclopedia of Life or to Wikipedia.

Learning institutions must be open to flexibility of scale at both ends of the spectrum, devising ways of acknowledging and rewarding appropriate participation in and contributions to such collective and collaborative efforts rather than too quickly dismissing them as easy or secondary or insufficiently individualistic to warrant merit.

This is a response to Jose’s post about dis-”Abilities”. It really informs what he was getting at.

“part of our job as educators is to look at the word “disability” as a description for only a part of any human being we seek to teach, whereas “unable” denotes that they’ve been incapacitated from any meaningful task or purpose. Thus, we need to focus on students’ abilities even when they’re disabled in one part of their live.

But, here is another idea… and don’t let this idea distract you from the sheer human feeling of this video or the great act of empathy that the coach showed in this video. What if it wasn’t the last game? What if J-Mac had been playing since he was a freshman? What if he had been on the court instead of the sidelines? What if we had seen his potential in him from the very beginning of his educational career? In the future we will. As Jose said, “In the future, we should keep in mind and do more to study about persons with disabilities in the hopes that they too can participate in the building of this society and the next one. Without you knowing, they may already have …”

Photo by Andy Gray

A former state superintendent will be coming to my Politics of Education class next week. I feel like I have gotten to know her well enough to know that she will ask more than one tough question. I think I know one she will ask.

Virginia was a leader early in the standards based education reform movement. It’s infrastructure for developing and administering effective accountability measures is strong. Currently our third grade reading pass rate is hovering in the 80% range through out the state. The advanced pass rate, students who answered more than 31 out of 35 questions correctly, has been steadily increasing since 2005 from 18.8% to 38.9% in 2008.

I can just hear it now. Dr. Demary will ask us, “So, almost everybody is passing. Isn’t it a good time to raise the bar?”

Every fiber of my teacher being wants to say no, but all of my learning in educational leadership says yes. I am torn. I believe in high standards but, I am not convinced that raising the bar is the best way to get teachers, and more importantly kids, to jump higher.

I think the reason for this internal struggle is that I am not sure that the bar is worth jumping over. It is not what we should be teaching kids to do to prepare them for their future. I think we need them to build their own obstacle courses, not just master hoop jumping. As it stands now, on reading tests kids are asked to identify characters, setting, conflict, etc. They are required to read for comprehension, all worthy goals. We are not asking them to write their own stories, to tell the story where they are the main character. It is as if they are the actors in someone else’s play.

If we buy into the post-modern perspective, that there is no single over arching story, then the reasons for assessment change a little. Our nation is a teaming tangle of stories. Maybe this is why fame has become such a fascination for our young people. The goal is not to help move the plot of the greater human story along but to be famous enough to be featured in the individual stories of the nation.

So what would I do? If it were my decision I would start evaluating beyond basic skills in areas closer to 21st century skills. Maybe it is a voluntary assessment for an additional ribbon on a degree. Maybe it is the certification movement pushed down into high school. Maybe a kid runs track, is in the debate club and earns a social media certification in order to make himself more competitive in college.

When Dr. Demary, (one of my education heroes) asks what do we do now that most of our students are passing the SOL tests, this is what I will say. “When students in your class pass a test you have prepared them for you don’t give them the same test but raise the number of correct answers needed to pass. You teach new content, you expand on their solid foundation evidenced by their test scores. You start teaching them something new, something that might be even more important than what they mastered already, like critical thinking, creativity, and team work. There is only one problem though, it is hard to test those kinds of skills. Maybe the tests have outlived their usefulness? Maybe the kids could help build their own obstacle course to test their learning.”
Image: http://www.japanwindow.com/images/20051012002715_051008_undoukai_041.jpg

Autistic Kid Stacking Cans

Last week, during my usual Facebook perusals, I came across an interesting article by Wired about 12 rather shocking / radical ideas that may shape the future. While I didn’t agree with every piece there, I found myself enamored with an article entitled, “Recruit Autistics” by Drake Bennett. In this article, Thorkil Sonne proposes that people hire more autistics for certain types of jobs. He continues:

“In Sonne’s native Denmark, as elsewhere, autistics are typically considered unemployable. But Sonne worked in IT, a field more suited to people with autism and related conditions like Asperger’s syndrome. “As a general view, they have excellent memory and strong attention to detail. They are persistent and good at following structures and routines,” he says. In other words, they’re born software engineers.”

That’s powerful. Not only does Sonne insist that the returns on this lofty investment are grand, it also debunks the commonly-held practice that those with disabilities are unable. It’s tricky wording, but part of our job as educators is to look at the word “disability” as a description for only a part of any human being we seek to teach, whereas “unable” denotes that they’ve been incapacitated from any meaningful task or purpose. Thus, we need to focus on students’ abilities even when they’re disabled in one part of their lives.

Just recently, a Twitter friend announced that her doctor believed her son had Asperger’s Syndrome. After carefully trying to understand her trepidations about this syndrome, I went and did a little research on it and there’s a slew of some of the greatest mathematicians, scientists, and engineers with said syndrome. For some, it was hard to discern whether or not they did, but they showed the characteristics. In other words, they functioned in the same environments that others did with no noticeable difference, other than their genius.

This doesn’t just go for Asperger’s Syndrome, either. Many people with disabilities have helped transform the world as we know it, yet we haven’t gotten out of the system of ostracism of those who don’t function “normally,” whatever that means. In our schools, we figuratively throw children into self-contained classes just because we perceive something wrong with a student behaviorally rather than actually finding out if said qualification is true. A student having a bad day or not getting along with a teacher does not qualify for these type of classes, much like adults can’t apply for “disability” for forgetting their bus fare or their lunches at home that day. It’s rather inappropriate.

In the future, we should keep in mind and do more to study about persons with disabilities in the hopes that they too can participate in the building of this society and the next one. Without you knowing, they may already have …

In its recent newsletter, the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) highlights the Springfield (Mass.) school district which has implemented a new teacher compensation system that rewards teachers for assuming leadership roles without their having to leave the classroom.

When our Teacher Solutions team looked at the potential and challenges of performance-based teacher compensation systems, we determined that teachers should be paid based on whether and how well we do those things that actually help students and advance the teaching profession, rather than on how many years we work or how many degrees we’ve earned (or at least not just on those things).

One aspect of the Springfield system emphasized by SEA President Tim Collins is that these teacher leaders and instructional specialists are serving in “non-evaluative roles” in relation to their peers. Collins notes, “People will not share their weaknesses (with a teacher leader or instructional specialist) unless they are confident it is not going to hurt them.”

Some of us may disagree on whether teacher leaders should or should not help evaluate their peers. There are school districts, Toledo for example, where teachers have evaluated and made personnel decisions about the work of peers since 1981. Yet, consistently we find that the one of the main reasons teachers resist the idea of performance pay is their lack of confidence in the idiosyncratic, feeble [I'm being nice] teacher evaluation processes in most places.

Developing effective performance-based compensation systems will almost certainly look different in different places. But surely, the potential benefits of bringing the teaching profession out of the 19^th century industrial model and positioning it for 21^st Century possibilities is worth the patient efforts such change will require.

Cross-posted at TeachMoore

At a recent trip to my primary care physician I am struck by how much his world and my care has changed in 10 years. Only a decade ago my Dr. had a manageable number of patients and spent about 30 to 45 minutes with me every time I came to her office. She retired. My new Dr. has 5 times as many patients and can barely let his feet settle on the floor of the exam room before he is off to the next patient. My care has become less personal and less effective.  In classrooms all across America the number of students a teacher must teach is expanding. I began my career with a 5 period day and under 20 students in each section. My last year of face to face teaching was an 8 period day with 25 + students per class. My largest load was 195 students each day. That is strikingly similar to my current doctor’s plight. My diagnosis of educational needs was less sharp. My daily interactions were more group oriented and my time with each student was reduced. I still did a good job. However, it took a huge emotional toll.

As in current medicine, we need better diagnostics and that takes more time. We need more focused feedback and more time to meet the exceptionally individual needs of our students if we are to increase achievement and develop well educated citizens capable of developing their abilities to the fullest. We cannot do that with more students. We can get creative, as my physician has, and use para-professionals, digital record organizers and time management systems. However, those interventions only help with the short term stress on the system. Kids need teachers. They need the gift of our rapt attention to their educational needs.

My Doctor says that he could increase the quality of his health care 100% with another Dr. in the practice and cut his patient load in half. We can do the same in education. Are we as a profession strong enough to call for a doubling of the teaching force by 2030? The system says we cannot educate enough doctors to meet demand. Are we capable of educating enough teachers? I think we are. The fly in the ointment is the cost of employing all of the new teachers.

NCLB had a fragment of a good idea in that it mandated that all students have access to highly qualified teachers. There was some craziness in how they defined that. It is time to refine our priorities and give every child access to educators with enough time to teach well. I recently was at a school board meeting where they were deciding not to fill a teaching position when a teacher retired. The class size projections only went up by 5 students per class. I argued vehemently against the move and lost the argument. In the next half hour the board added 2 new assistant football coaches to make sure the team was competitive in the conference. Let’s focus on being competitive on a global scale.

Shannon