Learning 2.0.net: A Way to Create Winners and Increase the Capacity of Public Education

Posted on | January 24, 2012 | No Comments

The Politics

Over the last two years, I have been researching and writing about Learning 2.0, the next full scale version of public education.

I started the research to find a way through the political gridlock of education politics, not because I considered myself an expert in learning theory or pedagogical practice. I think I have.

In a report to the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation, which supported my research, I called for the creation of Learning 2.0.net, a public venture that would change how students learn, how teachers work, and how students gain credit for what they do.

Learning 2.0.net is both possible and necessary because the leading schools are departing from the century-old industrial batch-processing model in two ways. First, they use a form of flexible specialization, a means of production capable of responding to the needs of individual students quickly and economically. Second, they rely on peer production, social sharing and exchange to build things of value.

In the growing world of peer production, individuals cooperate to create goods and services without the intervention of firms or government agencies, although they may be enabled by them. Individual self-identification rather than management authority determines the division of labor in ventures, such as Moodle, Wikipedia or the virtual reality system Second Life. Peer production is possible because the Internet is different from other technologies because it passes the power of production and the ability to collaborate in production into the hands of individuals. It does not mean that all the capital necessary to process, store and communicate information is under individual control. That is not necessary. But with a very modest investment, individuals gain the ability to access information, to take from it, rework it and submit it back to the commons.

Learning 2.0.net

The relevant policy question is whether California can feasibly take steps that use the new production system to bring Learning 2.0 into being and to use the new production technology to build the capacity of the state’s education system. I believe it can.

California needs to invest in a learning infrastructure for students, one that uses the new network production technology. Think of it as a combination of Facebook for school, the best computer game you ever saw, and a smart app for your mind. By thinking of the student as the end-user rather than designing educational products that will be attractive to a textbook adoption committee, the state can vastly open up learning to new participants, approaches and ideas.

Learning 2.0.net would contain information necessary for students and their parents to navigate schooling, teaching and tutoring in different modalities and styles, and the ability for students to test their knowledge and gain credit.

For students and their parents, information lights the pathway to college and career. By when should a child be redesignated as English fluent to have a good chance of getting into college? Why are class placement tests at a community college important? At a minimum, students and their parents ought to have on-line access to reliable information about where they are on a pathway, an educational GPS function.

The second part of Learning 2.0.net would offer a variety of learning experiences, or access to them. The number learning applications grows almost hourly. In fact, there is so much learning material on the Internet that Learning 2.0.net should function as an aggregator. Also, it should assist the development of particularly sophisticated applications, social or scientific simulations. And it can be the site for collaborating teachers and students.

The third part of Learning 2.0.net would allow students to take tests and get credit for learning. Students could take tests when they were ready, could pass courses when they were ready, could take tests as formative feedback. Unbundling teaching and testing also allows the whole education system to become more productive. If the financial rewards for school systems were correctly managed, it might also incentivize schools and districts to accelerate learning. And instead of drawing students away from substantive learning, substantive tests would motivate students and place the teacher in the position of a supportive tutor and coach to help them reach their goals. Read more

Category: California, Education Reform, Education Technology, Learning 2.0
Tags: John and Dora Haynes Foundatiohn

Nominate the Most Transformational Schools

Posted on | January 11, 2012 | No Comments

Blogger Sam Chaltain, former director of the Forum for Education and Democracy, is collecting nominees for the most transformational learning environments in the world. So far, there are 58 nominees, a list of which is on Sam’s site, and he invites additions.

His template for transformation comes from the QED Foundation: learning moves from classroom to community, organization from compliance to cooperation. You get the drift. If test score advancement is your singular goal, then your favorite school is unlikely to make the cut.

Sam’s list contains some of the places I would nominate, and I would add these three:

The Avalon School in St. Paul, Minnesota. The 187 students in this charter school learn through projects they design. Their Congress devises the school’s rules, and their restorative justice system handles infractions and disputes. The faculty (the executive branch of government) divides leadership roles including hiring, budgeting, and employee evaluation and discharge.
High Tech High in San Diego County, California. Another deeply project-based set of schools in which learning is based on the integration of head and hands, school and community, race and class. Teachers design the curriculum. Lots of highly engaged students, and a leadership team of education evangelicals.
Scotland, the first country in the world to develop an educational intranet (a closed internet) for its schools, families, teachers, and students. But the purpose of Glow, as the connectivity system is called, is to foster collaboration and the development of great learning experiences that fulfill the aims of that country’s national curriculum. Rather than turn to publishers, the Scots turned to their teachers.

Jumping from One Reform Horse to Another

Posted on | December 12, 2011 | No Comments

I penned this last week in advance of the trigger budget cuts that are likely to hit the Los Angeles Unified School District later this week. Some Christmas present, kids.

In a new labor agreement that embraces local school autonomy, Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent John Deasy has jumped from one school reform horse to another.

He dismounted from the Public School Choice horse, thus ending the era when the school district sought to improve schools through robust competition between district-run school management teams, charters, and other complex operating arrangements. Under what has been called “portfolio” logic, the school district would assemble the best collection of schools it could, putting underperforming ones up for competitive bids while encouraging the ones that were doing well.

The labor agreement now being voted on virtually ends Public School Choice. For the next three years, no charters or external school management organizations can apply, and the district is forbidden to reconstitute a school making what the agreement calls but does not define as “reasonable progress.”

Deasy and United Teachers Los Angeles president Warren Fletcher saddled up a new filly—the daughter of school reforms past—called decentralization. The underlying logic is that diversity in approach to schooling is good, that many different models of instruction are needed, and that teachers and administrators know best how to design schooling and to self-regulate their jobs.

They were right to get off the old horse. It was dead or at least hobbled. The 2009 Public School Choice resolution offered by former board member Yolie Flores was an audacious idea, but political push back tied its legs from the beginning. Its racing life was short. In the first round of applications, the school board rejected Superintendent Ray Cortines’ recommendations and awarded none of the newly constructed schools to charters. The persistently underperforming schools, which had been ordered to write competitive proposals, largely competed against themselves. Few charter or external organizations sought to run them. Conventional wisdom in the charter world is that taking over existing public schools is too fraught with pain and difficulty to be worth the effort; better to start new.

However, the new decentralization horse does not have a good track record. LAUSD rode this horse hard during the 1990s, and both Deasy and Fletcher could learn from that trial. Read more

Category: Uncategorized

CAVA: Learning at Home, Not Home Schooling

Posted on | November 7, 2011 | No Comments

The California Virtual Academy has grown to become a mid-sized school district, enrolling more than 10,700 students who study at home. But CAVA officials are quick to disclaim that the organization is in the home schooling business. As traditionally understood, home schooling is a vehicle for parents to gain virtually complete control over what and how their children learn. CAVA, in contrast, is a highly developed curriculum linked to its own pedagogy, testing, and monitoring systems. Students learn at home, usually with mom as a teacher, but the learning system is highly engineered.

Indeed, CAVA is the largest existing test bed for the learning systems devised by the for-profit firm K-12, which actively markets its products to school districts and individuals. Rather than being understood as a vehicle for home schooling, CAVA is better thought of as a new production system for learning, highly designed yet flexible. It provides a substantial amount of agency for students and parents to tailor their learning, but it requires much more active engagement from them than attending a brick and mortar school.

In a case study just published on this site, Laura Mulfinger and I describe the development of virtual education and visit with CAVA teachers and families.

Category: California, Education Reform, Learning 2.0, Uncategorized

Adding a Third Chair to the Bargaining Table

Posted on | October 18, 2011 | 1 Comment

Image from ad published in the Los Angeles Times

[This post can also be found on the Huffington Post and at Thoughts on Public Education.]

Sometimes the most interesting political commentary is found in the comics…or in the ads.

Monday’s editions of the Los Angeles Times, Daily News and La Opinion carried a full-page ad from a coalition of civic and community organizations aimed at influencing the negotiations between the Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers, represented by United Teachers Los Angeles.

The ad itself is pretty bland. “Don’t hold us back,” is not exactly a searing catch phrase. But the underlying issues are explosive: teacher evaluation, employment security, and school-site determination of work rules.

Essentially, the ad’s sponsors are drawing up a third chair to the bargaining table. They are attempting to influence both labor and management, but clearly they are in line with the positions and issues articulated by Superintendent John Deasy last summer. The increasingly bold and strident parent and community voice, amplified and modulated with foundation money, changes the politics of collective bargaining and challenges the union’s historic claim on parent loyalty.

In terms of Los Angeles politics, Monday’s ads are at least a semi big deal. Usually, collective bargaining holds little interest for parents and their organizations. It’s thought to be too boring and technical, something best left to the experts to sort through. But historically, when parent and community voice is activated, it tips the political balance. Decades ago, in The Changing Idea of A Teachers Union, my research colleagues and I examined scores of contract negotiations. We found that the usually silent parents were powerful when they got riled up. Thus, the admonition of political analysis: “when a fight starts, watch the crowd.” Read more

Category: Uncategorized

Finding the Intersection of “Be Nice” and “Know a Lot”

Posted on | September 28, 2011 | Comments Off

No Child Left Behind is apparently disappearing with a whimper, or at least a waiver. The originally bipartisan law has become a bad brand.

The pragmatics of the law’s demise rest in its rather silly calculation of test scores, and the backloading of expectations so that in the final years of the law the majority of schools in the United States would be labeled as failures, something that no state, governor, or education secretary could stand politically.

But the problem with the whimpering exit is that we haven’t gotten to the root of the matter or had the political debate about what we want from the schools.

In a recent column Jeff Camp raises the question of the content of student character: whether and how it should be taught and evaluated. “A simple ‘character score’ would be of little use,” he writes, “the true point of this kind of evaluation would be to drive conversations and self-reflection about things that actually matter.”

But even reflecting on things that matter or engaging in “performance character,” does not take place without context. One needs to know how to connect personal niceness with the nation’s history and struggles. We are not doing such a good job at that.

A recent Southern Poverty Law Center study written by Kate Shuster with a forward by Julian Bond found that academic standards virtually ignore our civil rights history. Or when taught it turns into a fable: there used to be segregation, then Dr. King came along, and now everything is alright.

The ability to make sense of history, and thus to ‘act nice’ in a social sense, rests, on knowledge coupled with schooled training in public action. Action without knowledge is simply gut-level response and no-nothing politics. Knowledge without action is a waste: test scores without a purposeful anchor. (Shuster, whose doctoral research at Claremont Graduate University finds a lack of efficacy in state minimum competency tests, illustrates that point in her dissertation.)

As California looks hard at how it assesses schools and students, it needs to look at the intersection of nice and knowledgeable.

(As to my own education in context, read below.)

Category: California, Education Reform, Linked Learning
Tags: Civil Rights > Kate Shuster > Southern Poverty Law Center

Re-Bundling Teaching, Testing, and Growing Up

Posted on | September 7, 2011 | Comments Off

The Essential Elements

We need to rebundle.

For the past century, teaching, testing, and growing up have been tied into a bundle called school. My schooling—like that of every other student—was a mixture of maturation and mental exercise, of intense bonding among peers under the watchful eyes of adults, who understood more than we thought they did.

An illustration in the form of a short personal story:

When I was in high school, I had a history teacher named Annette Sheel. I am sure Miss Sheel, which was the proper form of address in those days, marched through the curriculum: I remember a thick book by Henry Steele Commager. But Miss Sheel changed my life, not because of the official course of study, but by saying, “I would like you to go with me tonight to hear a speech in Chicago.” I appeared disinterested. “Mary is going,” said Miss Sheel. The thought of riding to the city in the back seat of Miss Sheel’s Oldsmobile with a person of great interest sold the deal. We arrived a little late at Orchestra Hall and were ushered to an upper balcony. I quickly realized that we were nearly the only white people in the auditorium, and way down on the stage was a Black man, a preacher from Alabama, who began to speak in a voice and with authority I had never heard before.

He spoke of a bus boycott, and of being in jail in Birmingham, of the struggle to end a system of segregation that ruled the South by law and Chicago neighborhoods by practice and tradition. My worldview changed in the passage of an hour.

There were other teachers, too. Some told me I was stupid because I couldn’t spell. Still can’t. Letters move around in my head a little. I had to get over those teachers and those issues to get on with life. (I had a personal method of test prep for essay questions where dictionaries were not allowed and handwritten responses were required. I’d write three or four essays beforehand on topics that I thought related to questions that might be asked. I’d memorize the key words. I’d write it all out longhand to get into the practice of making it legible. My cursive is terrible, so I needed to train my hand as well as my spelling memory. Then, in the exam room, I’d tweak the essays just enough so that they answered the question the test asked.) Never got good grades until graduate school, when thinking and synthesis counted more than recounting facts and spelling.

Miss Sheel, it should be reported, was amazed at how we all turned out. At a class reunion 35 years later, my friends and I encountered her for the first time since we left high school. She stood ramrod straight, walking stick in one hand, with a straight-up Manhattan in the other. “My God, you all survived,” she said, essentially giving us a lifetime grade of “exceeds expectations.” Then she took a sip.

In Miss Sheel’s classroom, growing up, teaching, and testing were tightly bundled, as they were throughout most of public education. In the high-trust education institution that existed for the first six decades of the past century, a teacher’s grade book and periodic report cards were the definitive and authoritative statements about a student’s achievement. External testing was relatively unimportant, except for the relatively few students headed toward selective colleges and universities for whom scores on the SAT or the ACT were weighty. Teachers also became gatekeepers and sorters of students in formal and informal ways, pointing students toward college or toward the schoolhouse door. Even the teenager in Miss Sheel’s class knew race and social class coded that student sorting.

In the intervening decades, public education has moved from a high-trust and organizationally closed institution to one that is low trust and externally examined. Read more

Category: California, Demographics, Education Reform, Education Technology, Learning 2.0
Tags: Growing Up > Maturation > Teaching > Testing

The Elements of Learning 2.0: Developing the New Basic Skills

Posted on | August 6, 2011 | Comments Off

The Essential Elements

Learning to collaborate and to solve ill-defined problems are to the 21^st Century what industrial discipline was to the last hundred years, according to those who have studied what employers and society need. They need to be considered basic skills just as are reading, math, and science, and they are one of the key elements of Learning 2.0.

By the turn of the millennium, it was clear that jobs requiring routine thinking and skills were giving way to those involving both higher levels of knowledge and also some applied skills, such as expert thinking and complex communicating that are not well captured by most current educational standards or taught in the conventional curriculum. Teamwork, for example, is taught mostly in extra curricular activities.

But how to do this? If we as a society want creativity, if we want working together where do we teach it? How do we assess it? The current policy path links new basic skills with a new generation of tests that will be a part of the Common Core of Standards.

But the tests and the Common Core face a very long developmental chain and growing political opposition. A whole series of decisions has to fall the right way for tests and curriculum to emerge and be adopted. And all that happens before classrooms start to change.

Consider, for a moment, a parallel policy pathway. Instead of using educational policy to produce new tests that are to drive instruction, why not turn the process upside down and create accessible forms of learning that involve the new basic skills? Let changes in learning drive the tests.

By reversing the process, we would adopt the developmental strategy of “permanent Beta testing” made famous at Google. Get changes in learning and on-the-ground evaluation first, and build tests and curriculum based on the experience of thousands of users. Start from the bottom, not from the top. Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, whose Why Don’t Students Like School? should be on everyone’s reading list, argues that seeing what works requires some kind of assessment plan be in place and that measuring 21^st Century Skills is extremely difficult. Yet, there exist demonstration projects that carry with them both the capacity to evaluate and some experience developing instrumentation and professional practice. (In a longer essay, I discuss the potential of study groups, project-based learning, and rethinking subject matter teaching to introduce 21^st Century skills.)

We can probably advance 21^st Century skills as much through grounded experimentation as we can through explicit public policy.

Category: Education Reform, Education Technology, Learning 2.0, Linked Learning
Tags: 21st Century Skills > ConnectED > Daniel Willingham > Irvine Foundation > New Basic Skills > New Tech Network > Uri Trisman

Learning 2.0 So Far: Breakthrough Ideas and Political Deadlock

Posted on | July 18, 2011 | Comments Off

This spring, I posted Learning 2.0, a short essay on how we might reshape school reform to recognize the tremendous changes in information processing and their implications for teaching and learning.

I’ve been gratified by the response. The original post has been reprinted and passed along, which is what I had hoped, and over the past several weeks I have worked to amplify it. Learning 2.0 is built around the notion that it is possible for us to replace the batch-processing mode of education that has been in place for a century. Both our norms about “the grammar of schooling” and the statutory foundations of public education reinforce age-graded instruction, labeling students as ahead or behind, and the firm belief that it should take exactly nine months to learn Algebra I. Moreover, students should learn it in eighth grade to get ahead of the Japanese Chinese.

Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown write about A New Culture of Learning, which I compare with John Dewey’s classic School and Society written more than a century ago, and the new culture faces some of the same possibilities of defeat and distortion as Dewey’s did.

Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson make the case that computer aided, Internet delivered instruction is a disruptive technology, like the transistor or digital photography. I believe they are partly right, but only partly. Technology adoption in education is not like technology adoption in the consumer or commercial marketplace; it’s a political battle with existing and emerging interests.

Part of the political battle will come over the creation of a new production system for education. Yochai Benkler, in The Wealth of Networks, makes the case that peer production—building knowledge through a wide-spread cooperative network—is an important new mode of knowledge delivery that challenges the existing, capital intensive, media and knowledge production oligarchy. Society will witness a massive political fight over access and copyright. And unless educators cede the battle before it’s begun, there will be another fight over whether educators or corporations design learning.

Teachers and their unions are particularly vulnerable in this battle. Unions are always vulnerable when a production technology changes, and neither national union seems to realize that changes in teaching and learning pose an elemental challenge to their existence. These changes also offer unions the greatest opportunity they have had since winning collective bargaining rights.

In other published pieces, and some more to come, I amplify on the elements of Learning 2.0. Remix makes the case for combining head and hands learning, and examines the potential of Linked Learning. In Student as Worker, I expand on the idea that students are the real workers in the education system, and that we should build on that reality. In the post below, I advocate amending our idea of basic skills, recognizing the ability to solve difficult, ambiguous problems and to collaborate with others as essential 21^st Century skills, and we should find ways to build them into our designs for instruction and evaluation.

In future posts, I write about the need to customize education, essentially developing an individual education plan for all. Second, we should unbundle the relationship between teaching and testing.

The converging trends of technology, the demands on public education for high standards for all, and the fiscal crisis sweeping California make this the best of all times to design Learning 2.0, to create law, structure, and financial mechanisms to bring it about. I argue that it is the best of times. But to paraphrase Dickens, it’s also the worst. The politics we have now will not get us to Learning 2.0. Unless we can make our political system more productive, we will continue to have auditions of ideas without opera that brings them together.

I am drafting a piece about a new educational infrastructure that might help.

Category: Budget Crisis, California, Education Reform, Learning 2.0, Linked Learning, teacher unions

Aging Boomers and Young Latinos: Max Benavidez to Lead Panel at Capitol

Posted on | June 23, 2011 | Comments Off

Two demographic trends will define much of the next quarter-century: aging Baby Boomers and the coming of age of young Latinos. CGU alum, Dr. Max Benavidez, has organized a fascinating conference in Washington, DC on July 7. The conference description asks: Are they on an economic collision course, or can they establish a new social contract that strengthens American society and its economic security? This is the trillion dollar question as experts from the UCLA-USC Latinos and Economic Security Project assess the economic consequences for the nation, demonstrate the need to re-frame this debate, and seek a solution-oriented approach to the greatest inter-generational and inter-ethnic challenge of this century. More here including how to register.

Category: Demographics, Latinos

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Charles Taylor Kerchner is a Research Professor in the School Educational Studies at the Claremont Graduate University and a specialist in educational organizations, educational policy, and teacher unions.