Waiting Wolves with “Innovative” Answers

Reading a couple of white papers recently about blended learning for a course I am taking has driven me to the conclusion that the term “blended learning” is virtually useless. If it can mean so many things to so many people, it really doesn’t mean much at all. Both pieces spend the majority of the effort simply outlining the parameters of their broad definitions of the term. Neither of them is particularly insightful, nor do they offer much more than brief examples they applaud with a profound paucity of details. One of them, however, got me more fired up than usual.

The publication from the Innosight Institute, a think tank spun out of Harvard Business School and the work of Clayton Christensen in Disrupting Class, is entitled The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning. However, a better title might be The Dubious Rise and Increasing Influence of Corporations and Charter Schools in America, so appallingly biased and flawed are its suppositions. Artificially pumped up by its own politically charged rhetoric and veiled contempt for education as a field, this document is little more than propaganda for their funders, the Charter School Growth Fund, as well as the commercial, for-profit content production complex of the “existing education system,” a term that contributors Hernandez, Hassel, and Ableidinger imply in the pejorative.

The “existing education system” is presented as a zero-sum operation in a “factory-like, monolithic structure” that is ripe for their prescriptive, innovative disruption. Interestingly, policy makers, superintendents, and school principals are called to act with urgency in embracing their patent brand of disruption, preventing “the cramming of online learning into the traditional system,” which leaves me utterly bemused. While I have long had my suspicions, I was unaware that policy makers, superintendents, and school principals were actually outside the “existing education system.” If this is, in fact, true, it explains so much. Wait, maybe they are onto something, after all.

While I will admit that I have not read Disrupting Class, although I have read a lot about it. Yet, after reading this white paper, I am a whole lot less likely to bother. Their brand of disruptive innovation seems exceptionally long on disruption and desperately short of innovation. In framing blended learning as the potential inoculation for revolutionizing education, they slog a lot of business-speak, the kind that seems to continually seep into every conversation about education reform. So they hard sell potential in the form of pace, productivity, and efficiency increases, which all sound remarkablly “factory-like” to me.

Even better, they highlight some solutions demanded by educators, which specifically include integrated systems and hundreds of hours of dynamic content.  Of course, this means the best possible hope for all education will undoubtedly need to come from the giant, “factory-like, monolithic structure” of the education publishing industry, read K12 Incorporated, Pearson Education, McGraw-Hill, and others scrambling to get in on the game.

Perhaps most distressing of all is that almost every alternative option proffered is still based essentially on consumption-driven models, the very kind of thing being contested with the bullseye placed on lecture-based instruction. Instead of listening to a teacher, teachers are exceptionally conspicuous in the document by the way, students can watch digital videos and follow pre-fabricated lesson plans aligned to new educational standards. In fact, in many exemplars there is even less need for teachers at all. Paraprofessionals can administer and support the turnkey solutions that will fulfill the promise of this innovative education model. After all, paraprofessionals are significantly cheaper, which undoubtedly will assist overall efficiency. Couple that with the magic solution of harnessing the power of 3x teachers, the greatest, incentivized teaching money can buy, and  all pre-selected, charter school students win, then the rest of the ”existing education system.” Right.

Essentially, there is very little true innovation offered at all. Instead it is a little more than shill job for a wing of education reformers that are currently successfully framing the debate and dubiously gaining power and momentum nationally. What bothers me most is how many people are continually taken in by the slick, easy solutions, failing to see the wolves in sheep’s clothing salivating on the sidelines waiting to sink their teeth into even more of the public money funding the “existing education system.”

Thoughts Responding to Some Recent Student Reflections

I have been reviewing a lot of student writing of late, which has definitely eaten into the time I have to spend some time investing in my own writing. I have quite a few things I am itching to pound into words but have been partially burned out, feeling behind, and letting a lot of things get in the way. All this  got me thinking a little about my relationship to the National Writing Project network.

In reading some of the self-assessments and reflections from my ninth grade students, I am finding a common thread, corroborated by the number instances and the individuals writing the same thing. While students are admittedly not the most reliable reporters, I continue to see statements that suggest my students have already written more in my class already then they have in their entire eight grade year, and we are not even through the first semester. Interestingly, many of the students reporting this I would rank a bit higher on any reliability scale. Plus, I know it is probably adolescent hyperbole. Yet with sadness I must admit, this would not shock me if it proved true.

Perhaps more curious to me is I genuinely wonder just how much writing they are asked to do and what the nature of it is. On this point, I am genuinely inquisitive and not looking to just pass judgments. Given the chance I want to have some conversations with teachers not just in the middle school where I teach, but I also feeling some compulsion to make inquiries  of other teachers in the high school, particularly outside the English department. Honestly, I have always been a bit reluctant to do this, for fear that it might seem aggressive and judgmental.

Now I know I make the kids write a lot, although I try to be careful about believing my own hype on this, not to mention “a lot” is a pretty relative term. Still, I am growing a little weary reading accounts of how minor the writing demands are, be it middle school, other departments, or even within my own department. I guess my suspicions are mounting again on this front, which happens from time to time.

Part of what may be fueling all this suspicion and concern is my steadfast feeling that many teachers simply do not consider themselves writers, which brings me back to the Writing Project. One of the core values of the Writing Project effort focuses on the teacher as a writer. Many a Writing Project teacher is likely to echo the idea that it is hard to teach anyone how to write if you are not engaged in writing yourself. Thus, if many of my colleagues just don’t think of themselves as writers how much instruction are they really able to provide?

What’s more, it seems to me that as I informally look around writing is almost synonymous with assessment. Is it any wonder that I encounter so many fourteen year-olds that are reluctant or weak writers? Almost every time students put pen to paper it is to produce work destined to become fodder for teacher’s judgments, teachers who do not consider themselves writers but seem to believe they know good writing when they see it. Even more disconcerting is when the only real value of student writing has is merely a means for extracting some knowledge that they should have obtained. Talk about a recipe that would make anybody gag, not to mention a mess of mixed messages.

I certainly don’t feel like I am breaking any new ground here, but I guess I have been feeling some of this more acutely as of late. This seemed as good a place as any to show it. It all makes me want to stop reading student writing and get to writing some more of my own.

On Collections

Note: This is a cross-post from a prompt that caught my eye recently at the iAnthology, a small community of pretty committed National Writing Project teachers. In true Writing Project fashion, every week begins with a prompt open to all participants. This week’s Writing into the Week had to do with collections.

I have been feeling more compulsion to write a lot lately, more than normal. Some of it is even making it to online spaces.

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When I was a kid my mother used to always declare, with a certain degree of ironic exasperation, that I collected collections. I suppose there was a grain of truth in that, although I am not sure how much complicity that she had in that observation.

As a child, I was very much into complete sets or series, action figures, Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, trading cards, comic books, and more were to my liking. It was as if some advertising executive was thinking of me when the phrase “collect them all” was coined. I even remember trying to convince my parents to keep going to Burger King, just to get all of the Star Wars collectable glasses with each film release.

As I grew older, my tastes changed, but my urge to assemble sets did not. I still have a few sets from my youth, stored somewhere in boxes. All of my the toy cars are packed neatly into two of those carrying cases with the plastic mesh trays, with a slot for each car. I even have a few boxes of comic books, each individually packaged in a plastic sleeve with an acid-free cardboard backer.

I often wonder why I hang onto all of it, especially after having purged all kinds of stuff each time I have moved. Every once in a while, I still marvel at how much crap kind of naturally collects while I wasn’t paying very close attention.

Now while it might seem as though there still are a few collections of collections in my house, it really all comes down to books and music. I have a lot of books and CDs, too many really. My penchant for sets has never really ebbed, I guess. Amidst the overflowing shelves I have accumulated, are some revealing runs of musicians and authors.

There is every novel by Hemingway, from my post high school binge, between ages eighteen and nineteen, after I read The Sun Also Rises in a senior humanities class and fell in love with it. To this day A Farewell to Arms remains one of my favorite novels of all time. It is a book that so much affected me it took threats from my wife to ensure I would be present for the delivery of our first child. Of course, I am glad she insisted.

There is every CD that Paul Weller has ever made, another adolescent affair. Aren’t nearly all of our great musical love affairs sparked when we are our teens? The British Modfather has never really caught on Stateside, but he started banging out music as a nineteen year-old in 1977 with The Jam and has kept making music ever since. Last count that meant over 30 discs bought by this fan.

There is every novel written by Neil Gaiman, the cult fantasy writer, who I discovered in the aftermath of his Sandman success, despite vaguely recognizing the name. While that collection didn’t start until I was already well into adulthood, it still draws heavily on my young connection to the comic book genre, which where he made his name first. Of course, I have very slowly endeavored to go back and read those early Sandman stories in trade paperback, although I don’t have all of them just yet.

Then there is the many near sets that litter my house’s office space. They include runs from names that I have most but not quite every single title.

In music, these are the likes of Steve Earle, Bruce Springsteen, John Hiatt, Lyle Lovett, Elvis Costello, Peter Gabriel, and Eric Clapton, just to name a few. My wife laments that we cannot ever simply shuffle my iPod on long trips because every third song is likely going to be a Weller, Earle, or Springsteen single.

Amongst the bookshelves, that now overflow into almost every room in the house, are mainly subject sets, including double-digit counts on soccer, teaching, and increasingly dated web development books. In fact, I also have so many theatre books form my undergraduate days that I would need to have an entire, exclusively devoted  shelf system if I wanted to display them all. This is on top of Narnia, Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, and more series that I look forward to rereading with my kids when they get a bit older.

By the way, my less-than-guiltless mother, who complained of the mess from all the collections, would later buy me a complete set of Star Wars figures when they were re-released with the second set of movies, all because she forced me to get rid of it all as a kid. This was when I was in my thirties. I still don’t even know where to put it all.

Interestingly, it all goes back to childhood and adolescence for me. It may have started with toy cars and Star Wars figures but it morphed into music and books. You can tell so much about people by what they collect. Perhaps, in writing this I am frightfully learning that I have never really grown up. Although I am not sure that’s true, it probably lets on more of a wistful need for nostalgia.

One revealing moment does still remain in my mind, however. I still vividly recall attending a party when I was in high school. It was a birthday party for a girl whose name has long vanished. She lived in a beautiful, large, old house with far more rooms than my parent’s tiny Cape Cod. Most amazing to me was the fact that this house had a library. I got lost in that library, away from the party, for most of the evening, staring at the leather-bound series of Great Books, as well as the hundreds of other titles packed on exquisite, cherry built-in shelves. There was even a small section of music, vinyl, cassettes, and an impressive number of CDs for all of their newness at the time. I was mesmerized by it all.

The nameless birthday girl, whose face eludes me too, found me in that room surrounded by all those books at one point. Before beckoning me back to the action, she commented, “Yeah, my dad reads a lot,” with a leaden heaviness emphasizing “a lot.” Literally, it was at that party, a prescient moment occurred. It was then that I thought, “I want to have library when I grow up,” and I began saving my books and music ever since. My grandest of collections was born right then.