How can parents and teachers help each other?

This post will be featured in Cathy Rubin's The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Teacher Blogs.

Here are 4 understandings that help parents and teachers to educate children.

1. Teach the whole-child. Ask any parents what their long-term concerns and goals are for their children, and seldom will you hear about test scores and world rankings. Their concerns are compelling, existential and heartfelt. Parents want their kids to be happy, hard-working, motivated, responsible, honest, empathetic, intelligent, collaborative, creative and courageous. Of course we want our children to grow academically, but we also want them to grow emotionally, socially and physically, and this requires a well-rounded education.

2. Teaching and parenting is about relationships, relationships, relationships. Parents and teachers know that children do not care what you know until they know that you care about them. Good teaching and parenting is less about doing things to children and more about working with them. Because rewards and punishments are by definition manipulative and coercive, they undermine our relationships and therefore need to be tempered or even abandoned. This means teachers would not use token economies or classroom management schemes that treat children like pets and parents wouldn't use time-outs or bribes. 

3. Good parents and teachers are not born -- they are made. Parenting and teaching are the easiest jobs to get wrong and the hardest to get right. Regardless of experience and expertise, we are all human and are subject to impatience and ignorance.  The best parents and teachers don't waste their limited time, effort and resources on blaming and shaming -- instead, they see every problem as an opportunity to teach and learn.

4. Public education is not a private interest for an elite few -- it is a public good for all. Public education, like democracy, is reserved only for those who fight for it. First time parents don't realize how important sleep is until it is taken from them -- the same is true for our public schools.

The only thing that destructive education policies require to thrive is for good people to do nothing. Parents and teachers must work together as stewards for our public schools and demand that public education remain a public good for all. This requires parents and teachers to pay attention as much or more to their public schools as their favourite sports and celebrities.

MYTH: Blended Learning is the Next Ed Tech Revolution - Hype, Harm and Hope

This was written by Dr. Phil McRae who is an executive staff officer with the Alberta Teachers` Association and adjunct professor within the faculty of education at the University of Alberta. Dr. Phil McRae’s Biography, Research, Writing, Scholarship and Presentations can be found at www.philmcrae.com, and you can follow him on Twitter here. This post first appeared here.

by Dr. Phil McRae

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic." 

~ John F. Kennedy

Blended learning, where students’ face-to-face education is blended with Internet resources or online courses, has been gaining considerable attention in education reform circles. It has become entangled with the ambiguous notion of personalized learning and is being positioned as the new way to individualize learning in competency-based education systems.

Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and a key proponent of blended learning, claims that it is the “new model that is student-centric, highly personalized for each learner, and more productive, as it delivers dramatically better results at the same or lower cost” (Horn and Staker 2011, 13).

To what extent is this a new model of learning in a digital age? How are private corporations employing old rhetoric to advance new avenues into public education? Most importantly, is blended learning becoming yet another overhyped myth on the crowded road of technology-as-education-reform panacea?

ORIGINS OF A MYTH

Students blending the use of technology with face-to-face instruction as a means of collaborating and extending their learning experiences is not unusual, revolutionary or foreign to the average Canadian classroom. As a concept, blended learning is now almost two decades old, having been imported into K–12 education in the late 1990s from corporate education, business training firms and the post-secondary education sector. Although the precise origin is unclear, it has been suggested that an Atlanta-based computer training business coined the term in 1999 (Friesen 2012), as it announced the release of a new generation of online courses for adults that were to be blended with live instruction.

Many blended learning practices already fit well with a vast array of hybrid face-to-face and digital experiences that students encounter in K–12 schools, including distributed learning, distance learning, or e-learning. Dr. Norm Friesen, a key academic in this area, suggests that blended learning “designates the range of possibilities presented by combining Internet and digital media with established classroom forms that require the physical co-presence of teacher and students” (Friesen 2012). As this broad definition illustrates, it would be difficult to find any use of technology in education that does not easily fit into this boundary.

Despite this fluidity of meaning, different models of blended learning have taken shape. In particular, Staker and Horn (2012) have attempted to classify blended learning environments into four models: rotation, flex, self-blend and enriched virtual. These four combinations range from those that are more connected to people and brick-and-mortar buildings (rotation, flex) to contexts in which the students are primarily self-directed through online courses or platforms that “deliver” the curriculum (self-blend and enriched virtual). In the more self-directed models, teachers or non-certificated facilitators are conditional and only scheduled for support as deemed necessary.

Although many models have been implemented over the last 20 years, there is scant evidence of the success of blended learning. Out of 46 robust research studies conducted between 1996 and 2008, only five have focused on results for students in K–12 settings (Murphy et al. 2014). As a recent article in Education Week illustrates, when looking for strong evidence of success around this strategy for K–12 students, very little “definitive evidence” or few significant results can be directly attributed to blended learning (Sparks 2015).

HYPE

The current hype around blended learning models, especially in the United States, is that they bring to life personalized learning for each and every child. Personalized learning, as promoted under a new canopy of blended learning, is neither a pedagogic theory nor a coherent set of learning approaches, regardless of the proposed models. In fact, personalized learning is an idea struggling for an identity (McRae 2014, 2010). A description of personalization that’s tightly linked to technology-mediated individualization “anywhere, anytime” is premised on archaic ideas of teaching machines imagined early in the 20th century (McRae 2013).

Some blended learning rhetoric suggests that personalization is to be achieved through individualized self-paced computer programs (known as adaptive learning systems), combined with small-group instruction for students who have the most pressing academic needs. For those looking to specifically advance blended learning in times of severe economic constraints, a certificated teacher is optional.

Software companies selling their adaptive learning products boldly state that the “best personalized learning programs will give students millions of potential pathways to follow through curricula and end up with the desired result — true comprehension” (Green 2013). This is part of the myth of blended learning and is marketed using superficial math and reading software programs (adaptive learning systems) that make dubious claims of driving up scores on high-stakes tests. Corporate attempts to “standardize personalization” in this way are both ironic and absurd.

These adaptive learning systems (the new teaching machines) do not build more resilient, creative, entrepreneurial or empathetic citizens through their individualized, standardized, linear and mechanical software algorithms. On the contrary, they diminish the many opportunities for human relationships to flourish, which is a hallmark of high-quality learning environments.

One of the blended learning examples that has received perhaps the greatest attention is the “flipped classroom.” It is so named because it inverts classroom instruction during the day, so that students watch online video of lectures at home at their own pace, perhaps communicating with peers and teachers via online discussions in the evening, and spend their days doing homework in the classroom. Think of the popular media hype and mythical cure for math challenges sold to the public by the Khan Academy. There is nothing revolutionary or deeply engaging about pure lecture as a pedagogy, yet apparently adding hours of digitally distributed video each evening to a child’s life makes it so. In fact, research suggests that the use of this type of lecture recorded technology, as a primary approach to learning, can result in students falling behind in the curriculum (Gosper et al. 2008).

Many myths, when viewed up close, provide deep reflections of ourselves and society. Technologies in particular have amplified our North American desires for choice, flexibility and individualization, so it’s easy to be seduced by a vision of blended learning environments delivering only what we want, when and how we want it customized.

The marketing mantra from corporations as diverse as media conglomerates to banks is that of services at any time, in any place or at any pace. Many governments have in turn adopted this in an eagerness to reduce costs with businesslike customization and streamlined workforce productivity, all with the expectation that a flexible and blended education system will be more efficient and (cost) effective.

In the mythical space of blended learning, class sizes apparently no longer matter and new staffing patterns begin to emerge. The amount of time students spend in schools becomes irrelevant as brick-and-mortar structures fade away. However, this myth disregards the overwhelming parental desire and societal expectation that children and youth will gather together to learn in highly relational settings with knowledgeable and mindful professionals (teachers) who understand both the art and science of learning. As John F. Kennedy (1962) so eloquently stated: “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

The U.S. Department of Education (2013) has clearly articulated a commitment to making blended learning come to life through nebulous ideas of competency-based systems and personalized learning.

“Transitioning away from seat time, in favor of a structure that creates flexibility, allows students to progress as they demonstrate mastery of academic content, regardless of time, place, or pace of learning. By enabling students to master skills at their own pace, competency-based learning systems help to save both time and money … make better use of technology, support new staffing patterns that utilize teacher skills and interests differently … Each of these presents an opportunity to achieve greater efficiency and increase productivity.”

The cost efficiency and effectiveness rhetoric must be given special attention as part of the myth of blended learning in competency based systems.

HARM

Schools and classrooms across North America are being subjected to economic volatility and severe constraints by reduced public education funding. Blended learning can be positioned as the vehicle to bring in third-party education providers to wipe out the expectations of small class sizes and certificated teachers in traditional classrooms. This idea is gaining momentum through a variety of U.S. virtual and charter schools that are radically reducing the numbers of teachers and executing increased class sizes under the banner of blended learning. As Michael Horn states when asked to give expert advice on blended learning models, “budget cuts and teacher shortages are an opportunity, not a threat” (Horn et al. 2014).

As school jurisdictions across the U.S. turn to online learning and blended models as a way to reallocate resources, the private providers are also advocating for “eradicating rules that restrict class size and student-teacher ratios” (Horn and Staker 2011, 13). To achieve this means lifting the rules around teacher certification so that schools can replace teachers at will with para-professionals or noncertificated individual learning specialists. As Christensen and Horn (2008) suggest, “Computer-based learning on a large scale is also less expensive than the current labor intensive system and could solve the financial dilemmas facing public schools” (13).

To enable this in an education system, several policies must be enshrined by governments that would allow private schools, virtual cyber-charter schools or educational technology companies direct access to students outside of a protected public system. The first is to open up multiple pathways of learning, which are more flexible in terms of time and space, and designed around technology solutions that only the company can deliver.

The Software & Information Industry Association, the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries in America, is a clear backer of redefining and expanding the role of the teacher, and advocates that “teacher contracts and other regulatory constraints may also need to be addressed to provide the flexibility in a teacher’s role needed to make this dramatic shift in instruction” (Wolf 2010, 15).

On the surface, this flexibility sounds promising, as teachers and school leaders certainly recognize that the industrial model of command and control does not fit with our hyper-connected world. Yet the flexibility of any-time, any-place learning is manifesting itself in the U.S. around adaptive learning software programs or mandatory online learning courses that are being delivered by private companies. New course access legislation (as found in Wisconsin, Texas, Utah, Florida, Michigan and Minnesota) now allows anyone to teach online courses to students regardless of jurisdiction, certification or geographic location (Dwinal 2015). In other words, every course, for every student, anywhere, anytime — and now — taught by anyone. Half the teachers, but sold as twice the fun?

In the case of K12 Inc., the United States’ largest private for-profit provider of online education for grades K–12, student-teacher ratios are as high as one teacher to 275 students (Aaronson and O’Connor 2012). As the president and CEO at McGraw-Hill Education affirms: “With this new method and capability, all of a sudden you could see a teacher handling many more students ... the productivity could double or triple” (Olster 2013).

The harsh reality, however, is that private online schooling is not about new blended learning models, flexibility or choice, it is about profit through the constant cycle of enrolment and withdrawal of students known as the “churn rate” (Gibson and Clements 2013). In contrast, our current publically funded and publically delivered online schools across Alberta reinforce the important role of certificated teachers as compassionate and empathetic architects of learning who work relentlessly to reduce the drop-out rates and increase student engagement in virtual learning environments.

Rocketship Education, one of the many rapidly growing charter schools out of the U.S., has adopted a rotation model of blended learning known as the Rocketship Hybrid School Model for kindergarten to Grade 5 students. It combines online learning on campus with traditional classroom-based activities in order to save $500,000 per charter school per year in teacher salary costs (Danner 2010).

To accomplish this, Rocketship Education has cut half its teachers, changed its scope of practice and hired low-paid adults to supervise and monitor students in computer labs. The new staffing patterns within this rotation blended learning model place the schools in a one to 100-plus student/teacher ratio, with one or two low-wage computer lab monitors. These support personnel are endowed with titles like “individual learning specialists,” “coaches” or “facilitators” (Public Broadcasting Service 2012).

Without certificated teachers present, there is a need to gather data on student performance, so the children spend a great deal of time in a computer lab with an adaptive learning program monitoring their every interaction. John Danner, former CEO of Rocketship Charter Schools and a board member of DreamBox Learning Inc., promotes increased screen time during the day for children. He thinks that as the quality of software improves, “‘Rocketeers’ could spend as much as 50 per cent of the school day with computers” (Strauss 2013). How many hours of development, in the minds and bodies of children and youth, are we willing to sacrifice for more individualized computer-human interactions under the guise of blended learning?

If blended learning through the rotation model is to be defined by reducing the number of certificated teachers in schools and placing students in computer labs to spend half of their day in front of math and reading software programs, then education in the 21st century is indeed heading down an antiquated and very dangerous path. This is not historically the way blended learning has come alive in Alberta classrooms, nor should it be our preferred future.

HOPE

The growth of digital media and the Internet has led to an explosion of resources and opportunities for teachers, students and learning communities. A constant shift is occurring with different mobile apps, blogs, video podcasts, social media tools, e-learning courses, or learning management systems in schools that all promise to help teachers create and organize student work, provide (real-time) feedback or communicate more efficiently.

With the proliferation of digital tools in our lives, many K–12 students now experience learning through a blend of face-to-face and digital or online media and are able to access new ideas and resources where student attitudes and engagement towards their education can be positively supported. If blended learning is to lead to positive outcomes for students, then it must be highly relational, active and inquiry oriented (both online and offline), and commit to empowering students with digital tools.

If done right, blended learning can be used to support more equitable access to learning resources and discipline-specific expertise. It may also engage students (and teachers) in a variety of online and offline learning activities that differentiate instruction and bring greater diversity to the learning context. Improving communication between teachers, students and parents and extending relationships across boundaries and time may also be an outcome of blended learning. It may also hold value by employing certain technologies that help teachers and students to formatively assess learning.

To make this truly hopeful, school-based technology infrastructure must be robust and up-to-date, with equitable access, and the necessary resources (human and technology) must be made available to pedagogically support the blending. It is not tenable if Internet connectivity is unreliable or limited, or if there exists inequitable access to bandwidth or technology infrastructure in the school and home. Finally, if technical glitches are pervasive, or if dependable technical support is not available for students and teachers, then it is unlikely that blended learning will be a sustainable concept.

CONCLUSION

Blended learning is not a new term nor a revolutionary concept for classrooms in this second decade of the 21st century. However, the way it is being (re)interpreted could be hopeful or harmful depending on how it is implemented. It is an increasingly ambiguous and vague notion that is growing in popularity as many groups try to claim the space and establish the models, despite a lack of evidence and research. We should therefore be skeptical around the mythos of blended learning before endorsing or lauding it as the next great reform.

Blended learning has occupied a place in discourses of educational change for well over a decade, but it cannot be co-opted into a movement that displaces the human dimension of learning with an economic imperative to reduce labour costs by cutting the teaching population in half. Of particular concern in times of severe economic restraint is that high schools may become the testing ground for policymakers looking at ways to redesign by cutting certificated teachers in favour of massive online cohorts of students tutored by “facilitators” or “individual learning specialists.”

Technologies should be employed to help students become empowered citizens rather than passive consumers. Innovations are needed in education that will help to create a society where people can flourish within culturally rich, informed, democratic, digitally connected and diverse communities. We should not descend into a culture of individualism through technology where our students are fragmented by continuous partial attention.

For the vast majority of students within Alberta’s K–12 public education system, we must achieve a more nuanced balance that combines both digital technologies and the physical presence of a caring, knowledgeable and pedagogically thoughtful teacher. This is not an optional “nice to have,” but a “must have” if children and youth are to build resilience for the future. Blended learning may be (re)shaped by privatization myths, with adaptive learning systems as their voice, but in Alberta, our teachers still remain the quintessence of the human enterprise of paying it forward for our next generation. It is time for Alberta teachers to claim the space of blended learning and push back at the myths and questionable rhetoric.

Citation:
McRae, P. (2015). Myth: Blended learning is the next ed-tech revolution – hype, harm and hope. Alberta Teachers' Association Magazine 4 (95). Edmonton, AB: Barnett House Press p. 19-27.


REFERENCES

Aaronson , T., and J. O'Connor. 2012. “In K12 courses, 275 students to a single teacher.” Miami Herald, September 16. http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/16/3005122/in-k12-courses-275-students-to.html.

Christensen, C. M., and M.B. Horn. 2008. “How Do We Transform Our Schools?”Education Next 8, no. 3 (Summer), 13–19.

Danner, J. 2010. “Rocketship Hybrid School Model — Half The Teachers and Twice the Pay.” Donnell-Kay Foundation website. http://dkfoundation.org/news/rocketship-hybrid-school-model-half-teachers-and-twice-pay (accessed May 4, 2015).

Dwinal, M. 2015. “Solving the Nation's Teacher Shortage: How online leanrning can fix the broken teacher labor market.” Clayton Christensen Institute website. http://www.christenseninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Solving-the-nations-teacher-shortage.pdf (accessed May 4, 2015).

Friesen, N. 2012. “Defining Blended Learning.” Learning Spaces, August. http://learningspaces.org/papers/Defining_Blended_Learning_NF.pdf (accessed May 4, 2015).

Gibson, D., and J. Clements. 2013. Delivery Matters: Cyber Charter Schools and K–12 Education in Alberta. Edmonton, AB: Parkland Institute.

Gosper, M., D. Green, M. McNeill, R. Phillips, G. Preston and K. Woo. 2008. Final Report: The Impact of Web-Based Lecture Technologies on Current and Future Practices in Learning and Teaching. Sydney: Macquarie University.

Green, N. 2013. “What to look for in a personalized learning plan.” DreamBox Learning website. http://www.dreambox.com/blog/personalized-learning-plan#sthash.ubJ00yA3.dpuf (accessed May 5, 2015).

Horn, M. B., and H. Staker. 2011. “The Rise of K–12 Blended Learning.” Clayton Christensen Institute website. http://www.christenseninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/The-rise-of-K-12-blended-learning.pdf (accessed May 5, 2015).

Horn, M. B., C. Christensen and C.W. Johnson. 2010. Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Horn, M. B., T. Hudson and J. Everly. 2014. “Blended Learning in K8 Schools: Expert Advice from Michael Horn.” DreamBox Learning website: http://www.dreambox.com/webinar/blended-learning-k8-schools-expert-advice-michael-horn (accessed May 5, 2015).

Kennedy, J. F. 1962. “Yale University Commencement Address.” Transcript of speech given at Yale University, New Haven, CT, June 11, 1962. Miller Center, University of Virginia website. http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/speech-3370 (accessed May 5, 2015).

McRae, P. A. 2010. “The Politics of Personalization in the 21st Century.” Alberta Teachers' Association Magazine 91, no. 1: 8–11.

McRae, P. A. 2013. “Rebirth of the Teaching Machine through the Seduction of Data Analytics.” Alberta Teachers' Association Magazine 93, no. 4. Also available at http://philmcrae.com/2/post/2013/04/rebirth-of-the-teaching-maching-through-the-seduction-of-data-analytics-this-time-its-personal1.html (accessed May 5, 2015).

McRae, P. A. 2014. “[Debate] Challenging the Promise of Personalized Learning — WISE 2014.” World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwI4oC_A0IM (accessed May 5, 2015).

Murphy, R., E. Snow, J. Mislevy, L. Gallagher, A. Krumm and X. Wei. 2014. Blended Learning Report. Austin, TX: Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.

Olster, S. 2013. “Better Technology and More Productive Teachers are Just Around the Corner.” Fortune website. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/10/the-future-of-the-classroom (accessed May 5, 2015).

Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). 2012. “Can 'Rocketship' Launch a Fleet of Successful, Mass-Produced Schools?” PBS Newshour, December 28. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education-july-dec12-rocket_12-28/ (accessed May 5, 2015).

Sparks, S. D. 2015. “Blended Learning Research Yields Limited Results.” Education Week, April 13. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/04/15/blended-learning-research-yields-limited-results.html (accessed May 5, 2015).

Staker, H., and M.B. Horn. 2012. “Classifying K-12 Blended Learning.” Clayton Christensen Institute website. http://www.christenseninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Classifying-K-12-blended-learning.pdf (accessed May 5, 2015).

Strauss, V. 2013. “Rocketship Charter Schools Revamping Signature ‘Learning Lab’.”The Answer Sheet blog, Washington Post, January 25. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/25/rocketship-charter-schools-revamping-signature-learning-lab (accessed May 5, 2025).

U.S. Department of Education. 2013. “Competency-Based Learning or Personalized Learning.” U.S. Department of Education website. http://www.ed.gov/oii-news/competency-based-learning-or-personalized-learning (accessed May 5, 2015).

Wolf, M. A. 2010. Innovate to Educate: System [Re]design for Personalized Learning, A Report from the 2010 Symposium. Software & Information Industry Association. http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD6181.pdf (accessed May 5, 2015).

Alberta needs a strong public sector

This post first appeared on Krystal Kromm and Serge Gingras's Red Deer Alberta Party blog here.

Do you care about our public services like health, education, fire and police protection?

Take 5 and a half minutes and watch this video.

Creating and protecting public services require a strong government that represents the people and our values of fairness, empathy, responsibility and equality.

The private marketplace filled with ethical entrepreneurs is an important part of a strong economy. Public education, universal health care, fire and police services are not markets -- they occupy a public, not private, space that is driven not by private profits but by public service.

Some corporations and their political friends want to turn our public goods that are for everyone into private interests that profit an elite and wealthy few.

Here is how they are doing it:

1. Deliberately underfund public services.

2. Taxes for the wealthiest people and corporations are cut in a way that government claims that we spend too much and as a result, we “all” must address the deficit together with higher fees and new health care premiums.

3. Lack of funding erodes the quality, availability and accessibility of services.

4. People get more frustrated and lose confidence in the services.

5. Corporations and their political friends say that privatization is the answer.

In many cases, privatization of public goods has a proven track record of lower quality, less service, higher costs and greater risks to public safety. Too often, privatization means that Albertans pay more and get less.

Privatizing our health, education and services for seniors often changes the bottom line. When a service remains public, people remain the bottom line. When we privatize and corporations take over the delivery of services, there is a shift and the bottom line becomes more focused on profits and less on the needs of people.

Some private-public partnerships may work but they can not only be held accountable to shareholders whose interest is on profits. A transparent government should be truly accountable to all Albertans and provide the best care for our health, education and seniors, without the threat of privatizing our public services.

The Alberta Party understands that Alberta's health and wealth requires a diversified economy, a commitment to the environment, a strong public sector, a balanced budget and a strong social conscience.

Learn about the Alberta Party's Better Way here.

Classroom Technology: Nightmare or Dream?

Technological advances in our schools in the last 10 years have been remarkable, and there is no doubt that technology will continue to disrupt our schools in both helpful and harmful ways. To be clear, I love technology and use it every single day. I teach with it and learn with it. It's important to remember, however, that technology cannot be allowed to have a monopoly on innovation in our schools. If public education is to survive the next 10 years, we need to see how technology and personalization can be read as either a dream or a nightmare, depending on who is writing the story.

If Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Arne Duncan, and Michelle Rhee are writing the plot, then personalization in learning is about using technology for union busting, test score analytics and the marketization of our children's minds. In this story, the rich get a computer and a teacher but the poor get just a computer. Herein, technology and personalization isn't about learning – it’s about money. In this story’s final chapter technology functions as a Trojan horse, sneakily shouldering an army of economists and shadow industries that have been stalking public education for a very long time, waiting for an in.

If Sir Ken Robinson, Pasi Sahlberg, Alfie Kohn, Yong Zhao, Linda Darling-Hammond, Will Richardson and Diane Ravitch are writing the plot, then personalization is about student excitement, creativity, intrinsic motivation, curiosity and citizenship. In this story, all children are given computers and teachers, even when it’s cheaper to deny some students the latter. Herein, personalization and technology is used for the purposes of universal education not subordinated to the interests of big business.

Personalization and technology can be about collaborating to discover our passions (the dream) but it can also be about competing over profits (the nightmare). Worse still, personalization can turn into a kind of hyper-personalization, where computers are given to students with zero facilitation from real life teachers. This is akin to pilotless flying and surgeonless surgery and yet this is precisely the vision of many in power, a vision where technology uses the learner, instead of the learner using the technology. However, this can only become a reality if good people remain silent. Classroom innovators and public educators must speak out against the nightmare narrative of technological implementation (of Gates and Murdoch) so that technology and personalization can assist the dream of learning for all.

A teacher who quit is used to show that teachers stay

We know that too many teachers quit. 

Gabrielle Wooden taught for 2 years and quit and is featured
in an article about how teachers don't quit.

We know that between 40 and 50 percent of teachers in the US quit inside their first 5 years.

In Alberta, we estimate that 1 in 4 teachers quit in their first 4 years.

So when I saw an article titled "Despite Reports to the Contrary, New Teachers Are Staying in Their Jobs Longer", I was more than a little suspicious.

The article featured the picture to the right of Gabrielle Wooden. She taught in Mississippi for a whopping two years before quitting to become an account manager for Insight Global in St. Louis.

Wooden belonged to Teach for America which is an organization that undermines children's basic needs and is an accomplice to the corporate take over and privatization of public education.

This article from the Center for American Progress is yet another example of the shameful spin that corporate spin doctors spew on the public.

We treat teachers so badly they leave. This is true for many reasons. In the US, teachers are paid poorly and treated even worse by having their priceless work reduced to meaningless scores on bad tests. In Alberta, teachers are paid well, but workload is a problem.

That Gabrielle Wooden was used to show how teachers don't quit in an article that readily admits its own narrow focus when she taught for only two years highlights another glaring problem. Education is desperate for professional, honest and genuine journalism.

Province shouldn't pay for Private Schools

This was written by Kent Hehr who is MLA for Calgary-Buffalo and Liberal education critic in the Alberta Legislature.

by Kent Hehr

The public school system takes all types: it does not exclude on the basis of race, creed, background, language, origin or religion. No one is turned away. No one has to take an intelligence test. No one is refused admittance if they have a disability — unlike what happens in too many private schools.

The public school system is not exclusionary like Strathcona Tweedsmuir, charging their students $20,000 a year to attend high school. Of all the private schools funded in Alberta, roughly 39 per cent are based on elitism (i.e., they charge tuition), while 43 per cent are religious. This supports my position that, in the main, private schools separate children on the basis of wealth and the religion of their parents.

Furthermore, the stats used to support private school choice are questionable at best. If anyone bothered to do their research, they would know there are a wide variety of studies that show public education leads to both better outcomes for individuals and societies.

It is also ludicrous to cite Finland’s education system in support of the position that funding private schools is a good thing. Faith-based schools outside of the public system in Finland are extremely limited, because every school is required to be approved by a vote in their national assembly. Finnish schools cannot charge tuition, and they must accept everyone regardless of ability or faith. Let’s also remember that 97 per cent of the Finnish population are either Lutheran or have no religious affiliation at all — which is quite different compared to the multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious makeup of Alberta.

The Finland voucher system is based upon parents’ ability to select any public school that they want their children to attend in that country. We have the same thing here in Alberta. Parents are allowed to send their children to any public school that they would like (space permitting).

Government resources should be spent on services that move a society forward. A fully funded and properly managed public education system can, does and will provide Albertans with ample amounts of choice to accomplish this goal. Accordingly, there is no need to subsidize elitist education for the wealthy, religious schooling for myriad different belief systems, or any other reason individuals may feel that the public system is not for them.

It is time Albertans decide whether we want to separate our children on the basis of wealth and religion by subsidizing private schools or commit ourselves to the principle of equality of opportunity, which recognizes that whether you were born of a rich family or one that struggles, whether you are Christian or Muslim, whether your child has a physical or learning disability or is the next Albert Einstein, your child is going to get a fair chance to succeed in this province through government-funded world-class public education.

If parents do not feel that the public system is good enough for their children, well, that is in fact their choice — but let them pay for their choice at a private school. Don’t ask other Albertans to fund it.

Bill Moyers interviews Diane Ravitch

The high cost of turning our schools into profit centres:

• Public education is one of the foundations of a democracy, and America's public education is under assault.
• Charter schools are booming and controversial. There are 6000 in the United States -- double from a decade ago. They are publicly funded and privately run.
• Wall Street is drooling over investing in for-profit education companies.
• Profit$ not pupils are driving Corporate School Reform.
• Profiteers and privatizers see a gold rush in American K-12 Public Education which pulls in over $500 billion in taxpayers revenue.
• Diane Ravitch's book Reign of Error is a must read. 
• The Department of Education, led by Arne Duncan, has become an enemy of American public education.
• If we continue down this path, many cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia, etc. will have no public schools. And if there are any, they will become a dumping ground for the children that the charter schools deem inconvenient or too expensive to educate. 
• American public schools are not broken and they are not failing. American public schools are dealing with some major challenges, including the fact that 1 in 4 children in the US live in poverty. Where there are public schools that are in trouble, there are communities that are in trouble.
• Charter schools were suppose to collaborate with public schools by seeking out innovations that the public schools could learn from but charter schools have become cut throat competitors, poaching public funds.
• If you make test scores the purpose of education, you don't want the children with disabilities,
  
  you don't want the children who don't speak English, you don't want the trouble makers, you don't want the children with low scores. You want to keep those kids out of your school.
• Not all charters are bad, but even the non-profit charters are typically owned by for-profit corporations. 
• Charter schools are not public schools, and in many states, charter schools are not required to hire credentialed teachers.
• The problem with turning over public education to the private sector is that they don't know anything about education.
• The American Legislative Exchange Council creates model legislation that states legislators copy to privatize public education, end collective bargaining, end due process for teachers, and merit pay for teachers.
• The assault on public education is a bipartisan effort.
• The Network for Public Education is a network of people who are fighting back against Corporate School Reform.
• Judging teachers via standardized test scores is wrong -- so there is now a mass exodus of people from the teaching profession.
• The Opt-out movement from standardized testing is growing and becoming main stream.

PART II

• The American Indian Model Charter School has been praised as one of the best charter schools in the country. In 2000, the school changed its demographics from predominantly Native American to Asian American. The change allowed the school to now brag about its test scores, which are some of the highest in California. They changed their student population to chase high scores.
• Some of the charter schools have CEO who are making $400,000 per year. 
• We are abandoning civic responsibility for consumerism. 
• Charter schools have select and conditional admissions which means they choose which children to admit or deny and which children to keep and expel.
• We should take billionaires advice for how to invest our money, and ignore their advice for how to teach and how to manage public education.
•  When Americans are asked about public education in general, they recite what corporate billionaires and corporate media tell them -- it's terrible. But when Americans are asked about their own public school, they say their public school is great.
• School choice is a synonym for segregation. The Charter movement is rolling back Brown vs Board of Education which led to the de-segregation of schools.
•  If we never change our mind, why have one? 

3 Things I learned from Network for Public Education Conference

I spent the weekend in Austin, Texas at the first Network for Public Education (NPE) and it was fantastic. You can find my day 1 post here and my day 2 post here.

Here are 3 things I learned from The Network for Public Education Conference:

1. Relationships. I was so happy to get a chance to meet some very cool people that, until this weekend, I had only known as avatars on Twitter. Don't get me wrong, I love social media -- while social media can help connect people by removing the obstacles of time and place, it is no substitute for real life, face to face relationships. I was so happy to meet and spend time with Kirsten Hill, Adam Holman, Jose Vilson, Stephanie Cerda, Xian Barrett, Audrey Watters, Sabrina Stevens, Katie Osgood and Phil Cantor.

I got to briefly meet Deb Meier, Anthony Cody, Diane Ravitch, and Chris Lehmann.

2. Assault on Public Education. As the token Canadian at the conference, I was struck by the raw emotion that dominated the conference -- teachers are saddened and angered by the assault on public education lead by profiteers, politicians and privatizers.

The politics and problems killing American Education is complex, but here's my Wikipedia version: For a long time, public schools in the United States had been a public good. Schools were about pupils. However, Corporate School Reform has become the status quo -- public education is being bastardized into a private interest where schools are about profits.

Essentially Corporate School Reform is led by three foundations: Gates, Walton and Broad -- who have allied with the Federal Government, effectively making the United States Department of Education an enemy of public education.

Common Core, high-stakes standardized tests and Teach for America are a money grab for Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. Democratically elected school boards are replaced with Charter CEOs who have absolutely no accountability to the public. Public schools who have a responsibility to take all children who show up are closed and turned into private charters with select admissions. Every dollar from tax payers for public education should go to public schools not into the pockets of CEOs and investors. Private schools should not be publicly funded.

The Charter school movement in the US is re-segregating America and rolling back whatever gains were made from Brown vs Board of Education. Experienced and educated teachers are fired in exchange for well-intentioned but grossly ill-prepared youngsters whose effectiveness have been grossly overstated. Public Education is being strangled to death by Corporate School Reformers who provide an opportunity-rich education for their own children while imposing other people's children with schools that are marinated in acquiescence and testing. Education excellence requires equity.

The Corporate School Reform is a part of the Global Education Reform Movement which is built on a contradiction:

Use PISA scores to show that public education in the United States is failing but then implement market-based reforms that are almost entirely contradictory to the reforms and policies found in high achieving countries.

3. There is hope. The only thing necessary for destructive mandates and cancerous education policies to succeed is for good teachers, parents and students to say and do nothing. When distant authorities invoke their ignorance with the force of law, remember that your silence is read as assent -- and at some point your silence is betrayal to those who do speak up and take action.

The Network for Public Education is the loud speaker for people who support public education. Rather than remain as individual pockets of resistance to Corporate School Reform and GERM, NPE is a way to organize and mobilize a movement that will save public education.

NPE concluded its first National Conference with a call for Congressional hearings to investigate the over-emphasis, misapplication, costs, and poor implementation of high-stakes standardized testing in the nation's K-12 public schools. The consequence of all this is that testing has become the purpose of education, rather than a way of measuring education.

NPE is encouraging everyone, including Congress to ask some tough questions:

• Do the tests promote skills our children and our economy need?

• What is the purpose of these tests?

• How good are the tests?

• Are tests being given to children who are too young?

• Are tests culturally biased?

• Are tests harmful to students with disabilities?

• How has the frequency and quantity of testing increased?

• Does testing harm teaching?

• How much money does it cost?

• Are there conflicts of interest in testing policies?

• Was it legal for the U.S. Department of Education to fund two testing consortia for the Common Core State Standards?

If Congress has the time, effort and resources to investigate baseball players using steroids, they can surely find the time, effort and resources to investigate the misuse and abuse of testing.

Lessons Of Chile's Voucher Reform Movement

This was written by Martin Carnoy who is a professor of education and economics at Stanford University. He is the author of two books: Faded Dreams: The Economics and Politics of Race in America and Fathers of a Certain Age. This article is adapted from an essay that originally appeared in Education Week. This post was originally found here.

by Martin Carnoy

Voucher plans have been in place for many years in other countries. Contrary to the claims of pro-voucher advocates in the United States, the experience internationally suggests that voucher plans promise a lot but may actually be worse for children from low-income families, for whom the gains are supposed to be the greatest.

"The primary negative effect of school choice is its natural tendency to increase the educational gap between the privileged and the underprivileged," John Ambler, referring to voucher plans in Britain, France, and the Netherlands, wrote in the "Journal of Policy Analysis and Management" (1994).

The most interesting comparison is from Chile, which has a long-standing voucher plan where pupils have been assessed regularly. The Chilean plan began in 1980 under the Pinochet military government as part of an overall "de-governmentalization" free-market package. It meets almost all the conditions of those in the United States who advocate "choice with equity," including fully subsidized, deregulated private schools competing head-on for pupils with deregulated municipality-run public schools in all metropolitan neighborhoods, from middle-class suburbs to low-income barrios.

One key feature of the Chilean plan was privatizing teacher contracts and eliminating the teachers' union as a bargaining unit. Teachers were transferred from the public employee system to the private sector. By 1983, even public schools, meaning those schools run by municipalities, could hire and fire teachers without regard to tenure or a union contract, just like any un-unionized private company. Another feature was to release all schools from the previously strictly-defined structure of the national curriculum and from national standards.

What were the results of this reform? The first was that even when parents' contributions are included, total spending on education fell quite sharply after increasing in the early 1980s when the central government was paying thousands of teachers severance pay as part of privatizing their contracts. In 1985, the federal contribution was 80% of total educational spending, and total spending was 5.3% of Gross National Product (GNP). Five years later, the federal portion was 68% of the total, and the total had fallen to 3.7% of GNP. Private spending rose, but not quickly enough to offset the drop in real federal contributions. Most of the decrease in federal subsidies to education came at the secondary and university levels, where per student public spending dropped drastically.

The second result was that in Chile, as in Europe, those who took advantage of the subsidized private schools were predominantly middle- and higher-income families.

Who Goes to Private Schools?

Chile offers a voucher to all students. "Fees" often are charged at the private schools on top of the voucher, and private schools are allowed to screen students. (There are also elite private schools which do not take part in the voucher plan, where students' families pay the complete tuition.) As a result of the voucher reform, there was a massive shift of students into private schools, in particular middle-class and upper-middle-class children. By 1990, of families in the lower 40% of the income distribution, 72% attended municipal public schools. In the next highest 40% income bracket, only 51% of the families sent their children to public schools, with 43% in subsidized private schools and 6% in elite private schools where parents paid the full tuition. And in the top 20% income bracket, only 25% had their children in public schools, with 32% in subsidized private schools and 43% in elite private schools.

The third result was that the increase in pupil achievement predicted by voucher proponents appears to have never occurred. Scores in Spanish and mathematics from two nationally standardized cognitive achievement tests implemented in 1982 and 1988 for fourth graders registered a national decline of 14% and 6%, respectively. According to World Bank economist Juan Prawda, the test scores fell most for low-income students in public schools, but they also fell for low-income students in subsidized private schools. Middle-income students had small increases in test scores whether they were in public or subsidized private schools. Subsequent tests in 1990 showed increases of 9% in Spanish and 11% in math, but this still left scores about the same as in 1982. Middle-income students averaged higher scores on these tests in private schools than in public, but lowest-income students tended to do better in public schools. University of Georgia political scientist Taryn Rounds' estimates of pupil achievement as a function of type of school, location, parents education, and students' socio-economic class using the 1990 test results confirm that lower-social-class students did better in public schools on both the Spanish and math tests, and middle-class students did better in subsidized private schools.

Because low-income parents were less able to add private contributions to the voucher amounts, private schools in Chile were apparently not that interested in doing any better than public schools with lower-income pupils. If the declining scores in Chile's municipal public schools mean anything, it is that increased competition had a negative effect on student achievement, and that the Chilean voucher plan contributed to greater inequality in pupil achievement without improving the overall quality of education.

Some analysts in Chile claim that subsidized private schools cost less because they have somewhat higher pupil-teacher ratios and pay their teachers lower salaries. But there is no evidence that this means that private schools are becoming more "efficient" while public schools lag behind. Indeed, if private schools are consistently "creaming off" easier-to-teach students, municipal schools may have to maintain smaller classes with more highly paid teachers just to stay even academically.

The fourth result was the need to recentralize influence over the educational system once a democratic government was elected in 1990. Under the Pinochet reform, government made no effort to improve the curriculum, the quality of teaching, or the management of education, since this was supposed to happen spontaneously through increased competition among schools vying for students. It did not. Neither did municipalities or most private schools come up with incentives for improving pupil performance. Low-income municipalities were at a special disadvantage because they, even more than other municipalities, lacked the fiscal capacity and resources for school improvement. And as soon as unions were legal again, teachers reorganized themselves, fought for higher salaries, and for the right to representation. Not surprisingly, they focused their demands on the central government, which oversees minimum salaries for both public and private schools.

Lessons for the United States

The lessons for us here in the United States are obvious, but they are not the one that privatization advocates want known. Voucher plans increase inequality without making schools better. Even more significantly, privatization reduces the public effort to improve schooling since it relies on the free market to increase achievement. But the increase never occurs. Private schools may end up producing higher achievement than public schools, but they generally do this by keeping out hard-to-manage pupils, who get concentrated in "last-resort" public schools.

There is another lesson to learn from the Chilean case. At the end of the voucher road, the case for public schools becomes more, not less, difficult. The new democratically elected government, which by U.S. standards would be considered center/left, continues to blame public school bureaucracy and lack of market incentives for the low level of achievement in municipal schools. Once a voucher plan is implemented, many middle-class parents find that they like their children being separated from low-income students. Furthermore, teachers in public schools find that given the worsening conditions and lack of support, it is even more difficult to be innovative. This last lesson should spur public school advocates to support rapid and radical reforms of schools in inner cities now, and to emulate, sooner rather than later, those reforms that seem to be working for at-risk students.

Chile had a military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s that could impose vouchers from above and suppress opposition by force. In a democracy, it takes highly dissatisfied constituencies to produce reforms, even if they are not the ones who ultimately benefit from them. Conservatives have figured out that the most dissatisfied educational constituencies are the poor, and will use them to dismantle public education.

Ironically, the privatization movement in the United States is gaining ground just when pupils from all groups, especially those most at risk, are making significant achievement gains and just when public school reform movements are reaching into inner cities to produce real change. To cite one example: between 1975 and 1989, the difference in average reading proficiency scores between African-American and white 17-year-olds went from 50 points to 21 points, or a gain of about half a standard deviation.

The best antidote to vouchers is to spread public school reform - fast.

Teach for America looks to infect Canada

"Teach for America is no substitute for thoughtful, long-term federal and state policies to transform the recruitment, preparation, and retention of career teachers." 

~Diane Ravitch

I've been following the train wreck that is American education reform for a few years now.

I've learned that when a strategy for dismantling public education is born in the US, Canada need only wait a year or two before those same ideas look to contaminate the north. In the past, it's been standardized testing, school choice, replacing teachers with technology and/or merit pay.

Now Teach for America looks to infect Canada.

Here are some facts about Teach for America (TFA):

• Wendy Kopp created Teach for America in 1989 and since then has created an alumni of almost 30,000. 
• TFA attracts America's top college graduates and trains them for five weeks before placing them as full-time instructors in low-income, high-need classrooms across America.
• School districts agree to pay $2000-$5000 for each TFA instructor.
• TFA instructors are required to agree to a two-year commitment at their school. More than 50% of TFA teachers leave after two years, and more than 80% leave after three years.
• Check out a summary of the research on Teach for America here.

So why bring TFA to Canada?

Only 40% of First Nations students living on reserves graduate from high school. In Alberta, for example, there are many education initiatives around supporting First Nations, Metis and Inuit (FNMI) students. Canadians know that too many FNMI students are underserved and underprivileged. On a personal note, I teach in a children's inpatient psychiatric unit, and I am disheartened and disturbed by the number of FNMI children who present with a wide variety of mental health problems, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and or live in abject poverty. 

Canadians also know that attracting qualified teachers to work in native and rural communities can be very difficult. Sometimes the problem isn't just low-quality teachers -- sometimes the problem is that there is no teacher at all. 

At first glance, it would appear that importing Teach for America might be a great solution to Canada's challenges and inequities for FNMI students.

However, if this is an important problem, and it is, than we better be incredibly mindful about the solutions we employ.

So let's take a closer look at Teach for America.

In her book Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, Diane Ravitch devotes an entire chapter titled The Problem with Teach for America. She writes:

It's hard to be critical of Teach for America (TFA) because the idea is so positive and the young people it attracts are so terrific. Who could possibly object to an organization that recruits thousands of smart young college graduates to teach for two years in some of our nation's most distressed urban and rural schools? Who could question the sincerity and idealism of these young men and women? 

It is necessary, however, to distinguish between the young people who join TFA and the organization itself.

Let's examine Teach for America's grand ambition. Ravitch continues:

TFA is not content to send out young people to do useful work in the schools. Flush with media acclaim and corporate largesse, TFA sells its brand as the best means of changing American education and ending educational inequity. It maintains that its teachers are singularly equipped to save children's lives, because TFA teachers have high expectations, clear goals, and a sense of purpose. It portrays itself as a prominent actor in the new civil rights movement, a force to abolish inequality and establish a new civil justice. It is as though the Peace Corps claimed that its young volunteers are more successful than seasoned diplomats, know how to bring about world peace, and should be making foreign policy. 

On the face of it, such claims should have been laughable. No first year teacher, especially one with only five weeks of training, is fully prepared for the challenges of a classroom filled with boisterous students in the nation's poorest communities. How can these young people expect to close the achievement gap and establish equality across the land when they agree to remain only for two years? Even though some stay for three or four years and a few decide to become career teachers or move into administrative roles, this makes no sense. 

It seems even more improbable to say that TFA is leading the new civil rights movement when Wendy Kopp often says that we don't have to fix poverty, we have to fix schools. What civil rights leader would say that? What civil rights leader would assert that we can "fix" the schools instead of improving jobs, healthcare and housing?

In her book A Chance to Make History, Kopp writes that when she started, "many assumed that fixing education would require fixing poverty first." She is now convinced, however, that TFA teachers, "even in their first and second years of teaching, are proving it is possible for economically disadvantaged children to compete academically with their higher-income peers." This actually isn't true, but no matter. She asserts there is "hard evidence that we can ensure all of our children in urban and rural communities have the opportunity to attain an excellent education." She maintains that "over the last twenty years we in the United States have discovered that we don't have to wait to fix poverty to dramatically improve educational outcomes for underprivileged students." When she appeared at Harvard in 2012, Harvard Magazine summed up her presentation: "Two decades ago, many educators thought urban schools could improve only if progress was made against poverty. Wendy Kopp thought there was another way to make a difference." 

But Kopp was wrong. The educators who thought we could improve schools by making progress against poverty were right. We must work both to improve schools and to reduce poverty, not to prioritize one over the other or say that schools come first, poverty later. Children are more likely to do well in school if they arrive in school healthy and ready to learn. TFA teachers are no substitute for jobs, nutrition, good housing, and healthcare. Poverty rises and falls in response to the economy, not in response to smart young people who teach for two or three years in poor communities or work in the state department of education, even state commissioner. 

It's important to note the most prominent alumni of Teach for America:

• Michelle Rhee who is a prominent opponent of teachers' unions and teachers' tenure and an outspoken advocate of high-stakes testing and privatization.

• John White who is the state superintendent of education in Luisiana and graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy who helped launch an effort to privatize education by diverting money from public education to charters and vouchers and for-profit online businesses and private vendors. 

• Michael Johnston is a member of Colorado's state legislature who wrote legislation that made student standardized test scores count for 50% of every teacher's and principal's evaluation -- despite evidence that this is a very bad idea.

Wendy Kopp brought TFA to America, but it is Kyle Hill and Adam Goldenberg who are co-founders of Teach for Canada. When I visited their website, they name a four-member board of directors (which includes Hill and Goldenberg) and mentions, but does not name, a "core group of two dozen volunteers from across the country". Of the four named to the board, only two biographies hint towards anything that resembles teaching experience, and that is limited to Hill who "volunteered as a summer teacher in Jamaica and Ukraine" and Christie Kneteman who was a "former volunteer teacher in Ghana".

While Kyle assured me via twitter that Teach for Canada is "working with educators to build our program", I have a hard time finding confidence in such a vague and hollow statement. If Teach for Canada was working with an impressive list of teachers, why not make that known on their front page? I don't know too many organizations that are humble or bashful about the impressive people they are working with.

It's also important to note that Kyle Hill is a Strategy Consultant at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). So who is the Boston Consulting Group and what do they have to do with education?

BCG is one of those companies that helps corporations do strategic planning -- and when it comes to education, they have an agenda that includes:

• closing public schools
• recommending privately managed charter schools
• eliminating collective bargaining for teachers and due process (tenure)
• merit pay that links teacher pay to students standardized test scores
• heavily promoting online learning

BCG has done this in Delaware, North Carolina, Dallas, Arizona, Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Memphis. Consultant groups like BCG have immense influence in the US, which is why some have dubbed No Child Left Behind as No Consultant Left Behind -- one analysis concluded that 25-35% of federal funding for School Improvement Grants went not to the schools but to consultants. And Kyle Hill, co-founder of Teach for Canada, is a consultant with BCG.

Any Canadian who is proud of our public education system and our efforts to make education more equitable for everyone should be at the very least concerned that the alumni of Teach for America are such advocates for reducing education to standardized test scores and privatizing public education.

More specifically, I enjoyed Alex Usher post where he pointed out that:

The idea that what First Nations need are a lot of well-meaning but inexperienced white kids showing up in their communities saying, “we’re here to help!” is plain ludicrous. There’s no doubt that education for First Nations, particularly those from more remote communities, is in a desperate state, and deserving of vastly more money and policy attention than it currently receives. But youthful enthusiasm just isn't a substitute for money and teaching experience.

With all the baggage that Teach for America carries around, it makes sense that Hill is trying to show how Teach for Canada is different from Teach for America. The first example comes from an e-mail Hill sent me. Hill writes:

We have many reservations about the Teach For America model. The big one is that Teach For America sees its mission as addressing teacher quality, while we're focused on teacher supply.

The second example is from Teach for Canada's FAQ:

Will you be doing the Teach for America five-week summer training model? 

No. 

We will equip our teachers with the very best pedagogical techniques, taught in an intense setting over an entire summer.

If these are differences from Teach for America, they are differences without distinctions.

Firstly, Teach for America's original mission was to address teacher supply, but a bad case of mission creep has twisted and bastardized Teach for America into thinking they can address teacher quality.

Secondly, let's be crystal clear, an "entire summer" is 8 weeks of training. That's a whopping 3 weeks more than Teach for America. That's hardly something to brag about especially when Canada's already strong teacher workforce comes from Universities with 4 or 5 year Bachelor of Education programs, and that doesn't count another 1 or 2 more years to get a Masters.

The Alberta Teachers' Association's Research tells us that one of the major causes of early-career teacher attrition is inadequate pre-service preparation (which traditionally has been a greater concern in the US than in Canada) and difficult working conditions (particularly in under resourced schools) and professional isolation. Canada doesn't necessarily have a teacher shortage problem -- we have a teacher leakage problem. Because of systemic problems, anywhere between 25-50% of teachers leave inside of before five years on the job.

Many beginning teachers experience what some call "praxis shock" which describes the challenge of coping with classroom realities for which pre-service training has not adequately prepared them. Many beginning teachers may come to feel betrayed by their professional preparation after being faced with the hard realities and complexities of teaching.

Programs like Teach for America and Teach for Canada are at best unhelpful and at worst harmful because they misidentify the problem (teacher supply vs teacher attrition) and employ solutions that ignore and exacerbate the real problems.

We need a stable and well-educated teaching profession, not a revolving door of graduates who see teaching as a bullet on their resume before they move on to bigger and better things. When it comes to complex problems like educating Canada's First Nations, Metis and Inuit children, there are solutions like Teach for Canada that are clear, simple and wrong.

My response to Grant Wiggins and his open letter to Diane Ravitch (and like minded educators)

Grant Wiggins wrote an open letter to Diane Ravitch titled Is significant school reform needed or not?: an open letter to Diane Ravitch (and like minded educators).

Wiggins takes issue with Ravitch's stance against privatization and poverty because he thinks she is avoiding "the elephant in the room" which is "to what extent today's teachers are doing an adequate job." Wiggins goes on to make the argument that "merely undoing harmful privatization is thus nowhere near sufficient to make schools serve our students properly." Wiggins punches home the point that, "we face a complete lack of quality control in teaching in most schools, in most districts. Unlike poverty, this is in our control as educators."

Is there common ground?

Even though I am a staunch supporter of Public Education, I am very aware of the problems that plague traditional schooling. I believe that school needs to look a lot less like school.

Like Wiggins, I am very critical of traditional-formal education that makes school something done to children while they play a passive role, and compliance and obedience are the gold-standard. Like Wiggins, I object to the idea that if a child can sit quietly through a morning's worth of lecture followed up with an afternoon of filling in worksheets, then students are receiving a good education and teachers are doing their jobs.

Which kind of school do you want for your child?
Which kind of school is good enough for other
people's children?

For too many people, the game of school sounds all too familiar. It's like the learners and teachers exchange winks that say: I will pretend to teach and you will pretend to learn; it won't be all that enjoyable, but it will be easy.

While I agree that undoing privatization is not sufficient in improving our schools, it is necessary.

Where do we differ?

After I read Grant's open letter, I tweeted him:

If Wiggins believes that Ravitch's fight against privatization is distracting us from improving school, might it be said that Wiggins' fight to improve schools is blinding us from the dangers of privatization and poverty?

No where in Wiggins' open letter does he address privatization -- instead he focuses with laser like proficiency on teacher quality. (For the record, the book I co-edited on De-Testing and De-Grading Schools is strong evidence that I agree with some of what Wiggins writes about.)

I'm the first to criticize elements of traditional schooling but you don't fix public education by destroying it, abandoning it or throwing it to the free market.

Wiggins wants teachers to focus less on things he perceives as out of our control (poverty and privatization) and more on things that are in our control (teacher quality). But who benefits from encouraging teachers to see poverty and privatization as things outside of their locus of control? Do we really want one of public education's greatest advocates, teachers, to see poverty and privatization as none of their business or a distraction to be avoided?

It's important not to talk ourselves into believing that poverty and privatization are out of our control. Poverty and privatization are no more or less out of our control than teacher quality. Inequality is a choice and our social policy choices have an indelible mark on our school's successes and failures. (I consider addressing inequality and poverty more like the civil rights issue of the 60s than choice)

The good news is that we don't need to choose between addressing poverty, reversing privatization and improving our schools, and I think this is why Diane Ravitch's most recent work is so important. She's helping us understand that we must stop going in the wrong direction before we can go in the right direction.

I see Diane Ravitch as someone leading the charge on all three fronts: address poverty, reverse privatization and improve our schools.

Jeff Johnson is confusing innovation with privatization

On Alberta Prime Time, Alberta's Education Minister Jeff Johnson was asked to respond to the Parkland Institutes recent research on for-profit Cyber Charter Schools in K-12 education:

"One of the reasons Alberta has one of the best education systems in the world is that there is a choice of different types of schools and programs in which students can enroll... I'm open to options that create excellent learning opportunities for our kids."

As a parent, teacher and Albertan, I object to Johnson's response in four ways:

1. This is not a thoughtful response at all -- this is a shrug. This is indifference towards privatizing public education. Albertans should be immensely proud of our world-class public education system -- simultaneously, Albertans should be appalled when our elected officials consider for-profit, private schools as a way of improving our education system. I've written a post here about why Cyber Charter schools are such a bad idea. It's one thing to suggest that students should be encouraged to become entrepreneurial but it is quite another to unleash entrepreneurs to profit off of children and public education. To be clear, this is not about pedagogy -- it's about privatizing public education which is ultimately wrong.

2. I am in my fourth year of teaching in a children's inpatient psychiatric assessment unit in a hospital. I work with children that present with a variety of different mental health problems -- while some do well in school, many do not. I fear that too many of these children may be seen as candidates for cyber school. Too many of the children I work with already isolate themselves and cyber schools double-down on an already failed strategy.

3. While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that choice via privatization undermines education equity and excellence, this is precisely what the research has been showing us. The assault on public education is not just an agenda pursued by Americans; Alberta would be wise to see American education reform and privatization as a cautionary tale and a model for how not to improve our schools. Johnson's use of school choice reflects a neo-liberal agenda that confuses public education as a private interest -- when in reality it is a public good. For a brilliant take down of the hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to our public schools, check out Diane Ravitch's latest book Reign of Error where she has an entire chapter on the folly of cyber schools.

4. Being open-minded is one thing but Johnson's response is growing old and tired. Every time someone asks him about a potential idea in education, regardless of its quality, he fires back with this hollow political boilerplate. Inspiring Education is a wonderful initiative that Johnson's predecessor Dave Hancock had the foresight and wisdom to start. However, Inspiring Education is not a blank cheque for the Alberta Government to do whatever they want.  Phil McRae from the Alberta Teachers' Association may have said it best on Alberta Prime Time, "What Albertans should be concerned about when I hear [Jeff Johnson's statement] is that when the minister speaks about innovation, he is actually speaking about privatization. These corporations exist essentially to extract a profit."

Inspiring Education was never about privatizing public education, so it's time for the Alberta Education and Jeff Johnson to stop confusing innovation with privatization.

Cyber Charter Schools: a wrecking ball for public education

Albertans place a premium on public education.

This is precisely why it is important for Alberta to see the United States and their education reforms as a cautionary tale and that the border offers zero insulation from policies that undermine and privatize public education.

This is why the Parkland Institute's most recent research Delivery Matters: Cyber Charter Schools and K-12 Education in Alberta is so important. I blog almost daily about how and why school needs to be a little less like school, and I am an advocate for substantial improvements to public education, teacher quality and equity.

However, I don't want my criticisms for school to come across like I don't like public education or that I want to destroy it. Unfortunately, too much of what is sold as education reform amounts to nothing more than a wrecking ball for public education which is precisely what Cyber Charters represent.

The report states:

While research on student outcomes remains preliminary, cyber charter schools have a patchy record, including significant risk of poorer education outcomes and very high rates of withdrawal. They also fail to address what the public school system has long taught as the skills of citizenship — how to get along with others, how to reason and deliberate, how to tolerate differences. From this perspective, cyber charter schools risk leaving large gaps in the education of young people. 

The US experience with cyber charter schools makes clear that the private delivery of public education is a risky path. There is little evidence to demonstrate that corporate interests add value in training the compassionate, skilled, and technically savvy citizens of the future. Instead, the cyber charter schools model encourages profiteering and mismanagement at public expense and at significant risk to students.

Alberta Teachers' Association Mark Ramsankar agrees with the report and states, "Cyber charter schools undermine the critical role of the student-teacher relationship in child development and socialization." 

In a statement, the Alberta Teachers' Association rightfully identifies that "the Parkland report demonstrates that the vision of Inspiring Education would be compromised by introducing cyber charter schools, where students rarely hear from their teachers and only occasionally interact face-to-face."

In her best-selling book Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, Diane Ravitch dedicates an entire chapter on busting the myth that "virtual schools will bring the promise of personalized, customised learning to every student and usher in an age of educational excellence for all." Ravitch begins her chapter by rightfully outlining, however briefly, the promise of technology, but then warns:

Yet with all its great potential, technology can never substitute for inspired teaching. Students will respond with greater enthusiasm to a gifted teacher than to a computer with the world's best software. Electronic technology has its charms, but it can't compete with the lively interchange of ideas that happens when students discuss a book they read or a math problem they wrestled with or a play they saw or an unsolved mystery in history or the most recent elections. Ultimately, it is imagination, joy, and disciplined inquiry that makes education valuable, that distinguish real education from seat time, that constitute the difference between learning and a credential. 

Closer to home, the Alberta Teachers' Association's Phil McRae wrote a profound piece on the Rebirth of the Teaching Machine through the Seduction of Data Analytics where he outlines how the move to personalize learning with "any time, any place and any pace" is anything but new. His concluding paragraph speaks volumes:

Emerging technologies and smart data certainly have a place in educational transformation, but they must be employed to enhance what research in the learning sciences continues to reinforce as the foundation of learning: the pedagogical relationships between students, teachers, parents and community. Attempts to displace this human dimension of learning with the teaching machine (whatever you imagine this to be) is a distraction to the most important support great schools can offer students each and every day – relationships, relationships, relationships.