The beatings will continue until moral improves

This was written by Chris Lehmann who is the principal of The Science Leadership Academy. He blogs here and tweets here. This post was originally found here.

In today’s Philly Inquirer, there was the following editorial: Inquirer Editorial: School days are too short.

The editorial is framed around how Cherry Hill, New Jersey teachers agreed to extend their days by 30 minutes, and how, if you do the math, that adds up to 14 extra days of instructional time over the course of a year, etc… How could anyone be against that, right?

Here’s the thing: Too many kids already hate school. Why do we want to make them do more of it?

More of something that is already flawed and broken isn’t a good thing.

And moreover, when are we going to realize that kids lead pretty busy lives?

According to a 2011 National Federation of State High School Assocations study, 55% of high school students participate in athletics. And while I couldn’t find a recent study on total participation in after-school activities, it seems that number tips somewhere around the 70% – 80% mark. And the Child Trends DataBank study of youth employment in 2010-2011 shows that 17% of high school students have after-school jobs. That probably doesn’t take into account all the kids who have to help with after-school care of younger siblings, etc…

Just saying, “More school for kids,” while appealing to policy-makers for any number of reasons and appealing to the “teachers don’t work hard enough” tropesters out there, is a bad idea. The problem is that contracts and legislation are the policy tools that boards of education and legislators have, and they are more often than not bad tools.

Just making the day longer solves little to nothing, and it creates as many problems – if not more – than it solves.

I’m not against having kids and teachers in schools longer – SLA is proof of that, as teachers and students tends to spend a ridiculous number of hours there. But let’s figure out how to use the policy tools at our disposal to make the time more meaningful, if we are going to do it.

Want kids in school longer? O.k. – figure out how to create study teams of teachers and kids so that we don’t send them home to do more homework in less time without support. Or figure out how to create 80% / 20% time so that every kid has time every day to pursue their best ideas.

Better yet – before we think that just making kids be in our buildings longer, let’s take a hard look at the time we already spend there, and figure out how to make 8:00 – 3:00 more empowering, more authentic and more useful to everyone.

Best use of technology

Scott McLeod created this picture from a Chris Lehmann quote that came from a post I wrote about YouTube adding a multiple choice quiz function.

I'm nervous and afraid

Chris Lehmann tweeted:

How many of us are afraid that school will get in the way of our own children’s passions and love of learning?

My response:

I am. Kayley starts kindergarten in September. I'm nervous.

I'm still trying to formulate how I'm going to communicate my concerns about the traditional elements of school without coming across as a crazy parent.

How about you?

Khan Academy: Improving school by changing nothing

I came across Jonathon Martin's post that praised the Khan Academy:

I think Khan is a true transformer, a visionary, activist, architect and engineer of a new form for teaching and learning that will raise the educational prospects of millions, perhaps billions of students.

While Jonathon is entitled to his opinion, I whole heartedly disagree. And I was thrilled to find Will Richardson's comment:

Education will only truly be transformed when we stop trying to jam content into our kids’ heads and start allowing them to explore and learn in contexts that feed their desire to keep learning. To that end, I don’t think Khan Academy does or can change much at all.

There is nothing revolutionary or transformative about how the Khan Academy encourages educators to "shoehorn" technology in a way that merely supplements traditional, less-than-optimal teaching and learning practices which ultimately leads the classroom to revert to the way it was before.

At best, saying the Khan Academy is transformative is to admit that education reform is blind drunk on technology, and at worst, the Khan Academy is an instrument for the likes of Bill Gates implicitly and explicitly attack public education.

One might think it a stretch to accuse the Khan Academy as an attack on public education, and it is, but here's where I'm coming from:

In regards to Sal Khan, Gates has commented, "this guy is amazing" - leaving many to identify Khan as Bill Gates's favorite teacher.

At the same time, Gates has commented on the do's and dont's for policy makers faced with a financial crunch:

Gates spoke to the nation's governors mindful of the severe financial woes that many of them face as they try to bridge deficits totaling about $125 billion in the coming fiscal year. He said there are some clear do's and don'ts. Among the do's: Lift caps on class sizes and get more students in front of the very best teachers. Those teachers would get paid more with the savings generated from having fewer personnel overall.

While many educators have lost the capacity to be outraged by the outrageous, Gary Stager has not:

You would think that nothing else could surprise me, but now, Bill Gates has descended into the delusional world of Charlie Sheen. Gates told the nation's governors (they seem to speak with Bill more than their caddies) that the critical cuts to public schools could actually improve education if class sizes were increased so that we can "get more students in front of the very best teachers." That's right, Bill Gates is now advocating for larger class size! Since when do philanthropists call for the deprivation of children?

Gates' crazy plan to raise class sizes FOR THE CHILDREN is one thing, but his desire to get more students "in front of the very best teachers" reveals his ignorance on how learning occurs. Learning is an active process constructed by each learner. It is not simply the immediate result of being taught.

If Bill Gates's favorite teacher is Sal Khan, and he is encouraging policy makers to "save money" by "lifting cap sizes and get more students in front of the very best teachers", I can't help but see a disturbing connection.

Look, the Kahn Academy is not a direct threat to public education, but Sal Kahn, perhaps inadvertently, has become an accomplice to those like Bill Gates who very much are a threat.

Chris Lehmann puts it this way:

What concerns me when I listen to folks like Bill Gates wax rhapsodic about Khan Academy is that it seems to me to be one more moment when people who should know better are, essentially, saying, "See! We don't need teachers anymore!" As if every student could learn from a pre-packaged delivery model of content. 

It doesn't work that way. 

Khan Academy is great if you need a refresher... or if you need another look at an idea. But watching a video about a concept isn't the way you necessarily learn it... even when you have a somewhat drill-and-kill quiz system behind it. Khan Academy will work well for the kids whose teachers still spend 80% of the time lecturing at the front of the room. But it won't do that much anywhere where teachers have learned how to present ideas concisely and then spend their class time working with kids.

Sixty years of research tells us that we don't internalize knowledge by simply being told to do so. Real learning is constructed from the inside while interacting with others. While examining technology with a constructivist's lens, we must discriminate between the prolific and poor uses of technology.

Far from being transformative or revolutionary, the Khan Academy is an ingenious way of improving school without changing a thing.

Poor Pedagogy + Technology = Accelerated Malpractice

A couple days ago, I wrote a post that was critical of how some people use technology in education. It turns out that my critical words for Richard Byrne and his post on how to create self-graded quizzes in Google Docs were not well received by some.

Essentially, my point is this:

TECHNOLOGY + POOR PEDAGOGY = ACCELERATED MALPRACTICE

I often see teachers so enamored over technology that the appeal for it often trumps pedagogy, and so I think teachers who choose to share their resources have an obligation to share it mindfully. Alfie Kohn offers this:

Seymour Papert, known for his work on artificial intelligence, began one of his books by inviting us to imagine a group of surgeons and a group of teachers, both from a century ago, who are magically transported to the present day. The surgeons visit a modern operating room and struggle to understand what's going on, but the teachers feel right at home in today's schools. Kids, they discover, are still segregated by age in rows of classrooms; are still made to sit passively and listen (or practice skills) most of the time; are still tested and graded, rewarded or punished; still set against one another in contests and deprived of any real say about what they're doing.

Those tempted to point defensively to updates in the delivery system only end up underscoring how education is still about delivering knowledge to empty receptacles. In fact, snazzier technology -- say, posting grades or homework assignments on-line -- mostly serves to distract us from rethinking the pedagogy. Interactive whiteboards in classrooms amount to a 21st-century veneer on old-fashioned, teacher-centered instruction.

Take a look at Richard Byrne's YouTube video below on self-graded quizzes. Can you see how this is an example of what Kohn and Papert speak of? Can you see that using Google Docs in this manner is simply a 21st century veneer on sit-and-get-spit-and-forget, select a response assessments? Isn't this still about delivering knowledge to empty receptacles packaged as snazzy technology? I wonder what Seymour Papert would say about this video? Take a look for yourself...



Before I go into my pedagogical objections to such an assessment practice, let's read this comment left by Richard Byrne...

...preaching is not the intent of my blog. I'll leave that to others that I think are more qualified for that and to those who think they are qualified to preach. The ones that I think are qualified, I refer others to (some of those include Scott McLeod, Gary Stager, Chris Lehmann). Those that I don't think are qualified, I ignore.

Since I didn't see my name on Richard Byrne's Pedagogy VIP list, I get the feeling that I, like many other people who are just teachers, will likely be ignored; so let's look at what some of these Pedagogical Heavy Hitters have to say about using technology in this manner:


We have to be careful not to let what should be a discussion centered around education become hijacked into a discussion about technology. Chris Lehman writes:

We should have a great debate in this country about education. Educational ideas are -- and should be -- controversial. The space between people like Alfie Kohn and Robert Marzano, between Deborah Meier and Ed Hirsch, could fill volumes. How we teach, what we teach, how we assess students... these ideas should be debated and discussed at dinner tables and PTA meetings across this country.

That's not the discussion we're having.

What is going on right now has little to do with education. We are having a labor debate masquerading as an education debate. And that's an important debate to have, but it's not really about education, and we should recognize that.

The conversation we should have is actually about education. Most high schools in this country are still structured off of the Taylor Scientific Method decades after business moved on. We still, in so many classrooms, put the desks in rows and put textbooks on the desks and expect learning to happen. In too many schools the innovations that have touched every other aspect of our society are absent. And in too many schools, the only thing that matters is how well students perform on someone else's test.

I say as both an educator and a parent -- we need a great debate about education in this country. 

Rather than talk about how Google Documents can save teachers time in perpetuating the status quo (creating and delivering select-a-response quizzes, then grading them based on one right answer and averaging the scores into percentages or letter grades) I would rather talk about how Google Docs can be used for real learning.


But that's hard to do if teachers wash their hands of their responsibility for being mindful of their pedagogical practices. Teachers can choose to blog or not to blog; they can choose to share or not to share, but I don't believe they can choose to ignore pedagogy. And because pedagogy should never be reserved for the elite, all teachers and all parents should engage in this discussion. If someone wants to create a blog that shares free technology with teachers and manages to get a Google Readership of 7,000 subscribers, and 11,000 followers on Twitter, they have a glorious opportunity to initiate and influence the education debate that Chris Lehmann speaks of above. However, such an opportunity can also become a crisis. In other words, Alfie Kohn puts it this way:

To paraphrase a famous quotation, all that is necessary for the triumph of damaging educational policies is that good educators keep silent.

So why do so many educators opt out of this discussion? Why are we having a technology debate masquerading as an education debate?  And why can't we recognize the difference? 


Gary Stager offers this insight:

I often joke that the difference between a novice computer-using educator and an expert is a two-hour workshop. Our expectations for what teachers might actually do with computers are so low that those goals are easily achieved. Well, one would think so. Human nature suggests that the less we expect of others, the less they will actually achieve. The goals of simple word processing, web surfing and strapping kids to a drill and practice program seem hardly beyond the reach of a living-breathing teacher, yet even these modest goals remain elusive. One look at a state or national educational computing conference and you would have to conclude that ‘cutting and pasting’ represents the post-doctoral level of the field. The banality of most conference programs would suggest that the ceiling for learning with and about learning with computers is low indeed.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that we should not expect teachers to use computers in more creative intellectually empowering ways if they are incapable of achieving the most pedestrian of objectives. This line of reasoning misses two fundamental variables – motivation and scarcity of resources. Inspiring teachers by the limitless potential of computers to empower students to learn and express themselves in previously unimaginable ways requires a different manifestation of expertise, leadership, and a community’s desire to embrace the construction what’s new. Experience would suggest that schools excited by the potential to engage more kids in rich learning adventures would challenge teachers to ‘think different’ and provide the support necessary to support such motivation.

Using cool technology to efficiently facilitate bad assessments won't help Chris Lehmann spark the education debate he wants us to have, and it sure won't dispel the ill-conceived conventional wisdom Gary Stager warns us of.

Despite all I've just put before you, perhaps Richard Byrne has a point when he commented:

Over the last three year I've helped tens of thousands of educators do the jobs that they're required to do more efficiently thereby giving them more time to do the things that make teaching the best profession in the world. The fact of the matter is that many many teachers are required to show administrators test and quiz scores. I'm not saying that is a good thing, I'm simply stating it as a part of the profession. Should that change? Probably, however while we work toward that change we also need to work with requirements of our employers. 

At no point in my blog post that you criticize did I say that giving quizzes was a good educational practice (although I do tend to agree with Dave's comment about the use of quizzes). The point that I intimated at the end is if an educator can spend less time doing the tedious task of grading formal tests and quizzes, he or she can spend more time developing engaging learning experiences for their students.

Richard Byrne does have some very valid points here. Indeed, he has helped tens of thousands of educators do the jobs that they're required to do more efficiently (and I'm one of them)... but this is true in two very different senses. Alfie Kohn describes this situation better than I could:

Whenever something in the schools is amiss, it makes sense for us to work on two tracks at once. We must do our best in the short term to protect students from the worst effects of a given policy, but we must also work to change or eliminate that policy. If we overlook the former – the need to minimize the harm of what is currently taking place, to devise effective coping strategies -- then we do a disservice to children in the here and now. But (and this is by far the more common error) if we overlook the latter – the need to alter the current reality -- then we are condemning our children’s children to having to make the best of the same unacceptable situation because it will still exist.

Too often technology has been less about creating more meaningful assessments and more about online grading that has simply led to more data - therefore amplifying the already less-than optimal assessment practices. It is very true that, "by saving time on grading you can give students feedback quicker than before." But we have to ask ourselves what kind of feedback are we providing? In Byrne's video, I saw children and their learning being efficiently reduced to numbers and averages... it sounds like a case of an assessment road-trip where we are lost while making good time. This really does give insight into what Gerald Bracey meant when he said:

"There is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all."

While I provided a critique of Richard Byrne's use of Google Docs, I too received critiques on the tone of my post. There were two comments I found most notable:

From Scott:

I don't agree, at all, with your final statement nor the tone of the post. It exemplifies the divide between those who are trying to make the shift and those sorting through many of the realities of a flawed system. It is a remark that I would not expect from someone trying to demonstrate the evolution of education and teaching. It shows one-mindedness and definitely not the tone that would encourage these educators to re-think their practice.

From Joanne:

If you wish to see change take place in education, perhaps it would help to model the behavior you'd like to see. How does attempting to shame practicing teachers fit into your philosophy?

To quote one of my favorite bloggers (dy/dan - google it): You have seriously overestimated the effectiveness of contempt as a precondition of reform.

Scott and Joanne both make good points. Dan Meyer's quote is very powerful and I can see myself using it in the future.

While my intent was to draw attention to this topic, even at the cost of a heated debate and even bruised egos, my intent was never to polarize the discussion to a halt (Richard has chosen to block me on Twitter).

Again, I will draw from Alfie Kohn's wisdom. Here is how Kohn begins Chapter 5: The Questions left Unasked in his book The Homework Myth. I believe it outlines why I was outraged by all this:

Too many of us sound like Robert Frost's neighbor, the man who "will not go behind his father's saying." Too many of us, when pressed about some habit or belief we've adopted, are apt to reply, " Well, that's just the way I was raised," as if it were impossible to critically examine the values one was taught. Too many of us, including some who work in the field of education, seem to have lost our capacity to be outraged by the outrageous; when handed foolish and destructive mandates, we respond by asking for guidance on how best to carry them out.

Even when we do regard something as objectionable, that doesn't mean we will object to it. Indeed, We're apt to see the situation like the weather - something you just learn to live with. We may not "accept" (that is, believe) everything we're told by public officials and professionals, but in the other sense of that world, we tend to accept (that is, put up with) what they do.

If we simply resign ourselves to the status quo, and find ways to more efficiently comply and cope with the way things are now, nothing will ever change and our children will grow into adults who will do the same to their own children.

At the very least, we need to be able to ask these tough questions that challenge the pedagogical fabric our everyday classroom activities are built upon.

The Culture of Public Education

In their book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson offer this on culture:

Instant cultures are artificial cultures. They're big bangs made of mission statements, declarations, and rules. They are obvious, ugly and plastic. Artificial culture is paint. Real culture is patina.

You don't create culture. It happens. This is why new companies don't have a culture. Culture is the by-product of consistent behavior If you encourage people to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust, then trust will be built in. If you treat customers right, then treating customers right becomes your culture.

Today's high-stakes test and punish accountability is bastardizing our school's culture. In a queer attempt to count and measure our way to better learning, we are poisoning our classrooms.

Alfie Kohn puts it this way:

A school that is about raising test scores is not a school that is about excellence and love of learning.

Kohn's words are strong and rightfully so. Test scores are a fraudulent fabrication that are fatally undermining education.

Want proof?

Stop giving tests. Stop talking about the results. Stop discussing this 'need' to raise them.

And you will find that learning will persevere. Tests could cease today and learning would prevail tomorrow.

You see, learning is natural. And so can assessment, if done correctly. Let's simplify; two things must happen to conduct summative assessment:

1. Gather

2. Share

What may surprise you is that a teacher need not ever use tests to properly gather nor do they ever need to use grades to share.

In his classic book The Schools Our Children Deserve, Alfie Kohn explains:

There's good reason to think that the best teachers do not rely much on pencil-and-paper tests because they rarely need them to know how their students are doing. Teachers who base their practice on a constructivist theory of learning are always watching and listening. Everything from the kinds of tasks assigned to the way the classroom is organized has been designed to help the teacher know as much as possible about how the students are making sense of things. This kind of informal assessment is continuous, making things like quizzes very nearly superfluous. We might even say that the more a teacher needs formal tests to guage student achievement, the  more something is wrong. (With direct instruction, of course, the teacher is talking more than listening, so traditional exams would be seen as necessary.) As parents, we shouldn't be worried about those who need to give frequent tests because they may have no feel for how their students' minds work.

Kohn then provides this powerful classroom teacher's testimony:

In the real world of learning, tests, and reports and worksheets aren't the most meaningful way to understand a person's growth, they're just convenient ways in a system of schooling that's based on mass produciton... I assess my students by looking at their work, by talking with them, by making informal observations along the way. I don't need any means of appraisal outside my own observations and the student's work, which is demonstration enough of thinking, their growth, their knowledge, and their attitudes over time.

This might all seem quite counter-intuitive. I know it flies in the face of the way I was educated and the pedagogy I practiced at the start of my teaching career, but good teachers understand what Chris Lehmann meant when he spoke at TEDxNYED and said,

What we see with our eyes daily is more important than what students bubble in on one day of the year.

In his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Sir Ken Robinson explains further how the public education culture is in trouble:

Most of us can look back to particular teachers who inspired us and changed our lives. These teachers excelled and reached us, but they did this in spite of the basic culture and mindset of public education. There are significant problems with that culture, and I don't see nearly enough improvements. In many systems, the problems are getting worse. This is true just about everywhere...

Children everywhere are under intense pressure to perform at higher and higher levels on a narrow range of standardized tests...

The result is that school systems everywhere inculcate us with a very narrow view of intelligence and capacity and overvalue particular sorts of talent and ability. In doing so, they neglect others that are just as important, and they disregard the relationships between them in sustaining the vitality of our lives and communities. This stratified, one-size-fits-all approach to education marginalizes all of those who do not take naturally to learning this way...

These approaches to education are also stifling some of the most important capacities that young people now need to make their way in the increasingly demanding world of the twenty-first century - the powers of creative thinking. Our systems of education put a high premium on knowing the single right answer to a question. In fact, with programs like No Child Left Behind (a federal program that seeks to improve the performance of American public schools by making schools more accountable for meeting mandated performance levels) and its insistance that all children form every part of the country hew to the same standards, we're putting a greater emphasis than ever before on conformity and finding the "right" answer.

Alfie Kohn, Chris Lehmann, Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson and Sir Ken Robinson's comments all share a common theme - and that theme is trust. The case against high-stakes tests, grades and standardized curriculums is built on the notion that we must entrust teachers to make professional decisions.

Just as you can't test your way to better learning, you also can't mandate standardized curriculums and bully your way to student engagement without marginalizing a great number of students (and teachers).

A school that is more concerned with raising test scores than raising children has corrupted their culture. Sir Ken Robinson summarizes the sad state of affairs the culture of public education has found itself in:

Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests. Those students whose minds work differently - and we're talking about many students here; perhaps even the majority of them - can feel alienated from the whole culture of education. This is exactly why some of the most successful people you'll ever meet didn't do well in school. Education is the system that's supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There's a huge irony in the middle of all of this.

We must provide students with both differentiated instruction and differentiated assessment. Rather than forcing students to learn the way we teach, we must teach the way students learn. And equally important - rather than forcing our students to conform to our narrow range of high-stakes assessment demands, we must enlist a broader range of authentic assessments that fit our students' needs.

To continue educational reforms that simply double the dose of high-stakes testing and further narrows, standardized curriculums is intellectually indefensible and morally bankrupt. Because policy makers have proven so inept at understanding this, teachers must lead the way in advocating for the schools our children deserve.