Borderland

For people interested in technological change in educational settings, we’re going through one here. The last one on this scale was about 15 years ago when the School District gave us all email accounts. At Wednesday’s staff meeting we got a peek at the next big deal. It’s PowerSchool time now. System-wide change begins with meetings downtown. Then we hear about it at a staff meeting. And this is how technology becomes part of the institutional woodwork.

Someone from the IT department came to our meeting to show us how the new system works. We’ll begin using it right away to record grades and attendance data, and we’ll publish the next round of report cards with PowerSchool. In the beginning, we’re in training mode, and parents won’t have web access to their students’ accounts. But next Fall, students and parents will be able to see the students’ gradebook records online.

It’s a school-by-school process, and other schools are already using it. My own children, in junior high and high school, like seeing their grades, and they check their records regularly. My wife and I don’t bother because a) the kids always accurately report the information to us, and b) they’re not having problems with grades. Even still, they like to see how they’re doing. For parents whose kids are having problems, this system is a communication tool that might help.

I’m looking forward to it. It’s going to save me time. The gradebook and the report card run on the same program, so I won’t have to transfer grades to the report card at the end of the quarter. I also won’t have to prepare multiple reports each quarter to keep parents up to date on their kid’s grade status. It does other things too. I can post assignments before they’re due, and leave a note on them describing what needs to be done. This would help people who are traveling, or whose kids are absent. Anything that improves communication and saves time seems like a sure winner.

The report card has changed, also. They’ve taken Spelling away as a discreet subject, and it will be taught as a part of writing. Yes! Handwriting will not be evaluated as separate subject, either. Nor will Technology, which nobody ever understood how to grade.

Nonetheless, this isn’t real education reform. It doesn’t address any core problems. There will still be winners and losers. The curriculum remains securely in place. And this is, after all, only about grades and report cards, the currency of schooling. I don’t see these things as fundamental changes, but more efficient ways of doing the same things we’ve always done. And I’m not glad that the vision for technology seems to be limited to finding ways of doing the same old things school has always done – only better.

Jay Lemke makes a distinction between education and schooling in his article Re-Engineering Education in America:

Education, we should remember, is not the same as schooling. Education consists in what a community does to promote learning and understanding of what it values. Schooling is a particular technology for doing education in some human communities. It is a very old technology. I believe that today it is largely dysfunctional and that schooling is seriously in need of radical re-engineering if we are to succeed with education.

He believes, and I agree, that effective education requires deep understanding and critical perspective.

Deep understanding means that you have taken the time to examine a subject in depth. That you have looked at it from many points of view. That you have seen how it can be applied across a wide variety of contexts. That you have questioned its basic assumptions and identified the limitations of what is thought to be known. It means that you know a lot about it, that you know the details, and that you know where the bodies are buried. It means you know something about the history of the subject, something about the philosophical issues relevant to thinking about it, more than a little about its role in society and the economic and political interests that impinge on it or which it potentially affects. You understand it abstractly and you understand it concretely. You can talk about it in many different ways for many different audiences. You can represent it in many different ways to yourself in your own thinking. You can find ways to bring it to bear on other people’s problems and issues, in collaborations.

Critical perspective means that you think about a subject in relation to basic values and not just in relation to matters of fact or explanatory adequacy. It means not just that you question whether something is so, but also ask how particular knowledge functions to make the world a better place or a worse place, a more or a less just place. It means thinking not just about the subject, but about why that subject is studied, and why it was studied in the past, by whom, and how it contributes value and for whom. What values it contributes to and what values it may detract from.

Lemke has a list of the structural difficulties embedded in schooling as we’re doing it now, and given their fundamental nature, he sees reform as not really a tenable option. He outlines some alternatives. It’s worth reading, for people who are thinking about “the system”.

This post has gotten kind of long, so I’m going to end it here by saying that since the revolution is probably outside my sphere of influence, his article prompted me to think about implementing learning contracts in my classroom for some subjects as a way to immediately deal with a few institutional limitations I can do something about. Anyone with information about learning contracts, feel free to pass it along.