A NEW ERA DAWNSIDEA Board Meeting

Spring 2013

Kirsten Olson, IDEA Board Member@olsonkirsten

1Monday, October 21, 13

We all have our own educational stories that shape our views of the sector

• Former professor who looked at role of schools in American society

•Now global leadership coach/OD consultant•Close educational discourse watcher for over 20 years

2Monday, October 21, 13

This is my My Educational Story

WHAT’S  YOURS?3Monday, October 21, 13

The Big Story

4Monday, October 21, 13

• Old way of educating is ending

• Myths about educational system contested

• Formal sector is in collapse...which means transformation

• Transformation creates threats/opportunities

• IDEA is part of the “new” discourse of educational transformation

5Monday, October 21, 13

A Little History

6Monday, October 21, 13

Dame Schools and Harvard

• 17th and 18th century schooling only for elite white men in US

• Schooling “scattered and rare,” haphazard

• Schooling not a responsibility of the state

• Decentralized, family-based

• Largely unavailable to folks of color

7Monday, October 21, 13

Along Comes Horace Mann• Mid-19th century birth of Common School

movement

• Horace Mann proselytizer for common education

• Education to be “great engine” of equality

• Education a wealth provider

• Great Social Movements period

8Monday, October 21, 13

“EDUCATION THEN IS THE GREAT EQUALIZER OF THE CONDITIONS OF MEN,

THE BALANCE WHEEL OF THE SOCIAL MACHINERY”

-HORACE MANN, 18429Monday, October 21, 13

Shadow of the Common School Myth

• Society awash in systemic violence and racial oppression

• Enslaved African American population

• School is to be used for harsh socializing of immigrants, “Others”

10Monday, October 21, 13

The One Best System:Old Industrial Model

• 1890-1950: Rise of the Industrial System

• “One best system”

• Belief that schools create middle class

• Modeled on the factory

• Admiration of efficiency

11Monday, October 21, 13

Skills That Mattered Then • Memorization• Categorization• Compliance• Understanding of

hierarchy• Attention to

authority

12Monday, October 21, 13

Shadow of Universal Access

• Schools used to “socialize” huge waves of immigrants and “unwanteds”

• AA population/immigrants in hugely segregated society

• Schools privilege what is “normative”: white, middle-class values

13Monday, October 21, 13

Brown V. Board 1954• Schools become central

to creating equality in US

• Social institutions/courts central to achieving justice

• Schools have “both/and” responsibilities

• Schools as both democratizing and liberating and reproducing social inequality

14Monday, October 21, 13

Test-based Accountability

• 1981-present

• A Nation At Risk, 1981; No Child Left Behind 2001, Race to the Top 2011; Common Core

• America feels End-Of-Empire sense of competition

• Policy makers ask schools respond with test-based accountability

15Monday, October 21, 13

What’s the theory behind test-based

accountability?• Schools compete with each

other to get better

• Measure, test, quantify: no room to hide

• “Equality” two-edged: greater emphasis on achievement gap used to drive test-based agenda

16Monday, October 21, 13

Shadow of TBA:

• Exacerbates weaknesses of teaching practice

• Narrows effectiveness/relevance of school

• Limited effect on competitiveness

• Loss of confidence in system

17Monday, October 21, 13

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

18Monday, October 21, 13

SYSTEM WAS DESIGNED TO SORT AND TRACK KIDS

19Monday, October 21, 13

•School has historically been about inculcating and privileging middle class values

•“White Is Right” in school20Monday, October 21, 13

21Monday, October 21, 13

PRIVILEGING THE ALREADY PRIVILEGED

22Monday, October 21, 13

“JUST BE GRATEFUL YOU WERE

ABLE TO GO TO

SCHOOL.”

WHILE MAINTAINING OTHER CONFLICTING BELIEFS23Monday, October 21, 13

“I DON’T KNOW WHAT KIDS COMPLAIN ABOUT. SCHOOL WAS

MUCH TOUGHER IN MY DAY.”

24Monday, October 21, 13

“SEE, WHAT WE SEEM TO FORGET IS THAT IT’S ALL THERE FOR THE TAKING. IF YOU WANT AN EDUCATION IN THIS COUNTRY YOU CAN HAVE IT. KIDS SHOULD GET THEIR BUTTS IN GEAR.”

25Monday, October 21, 13

Education can be both liberatory, democratizing, and reproduce

social and economic inequality.

DIFFICULT FOR US TO HOLD BOTH REALITIES

26Monday, October 21, 13

Our culture has difficulty with this complexity

27Monday, October 21, 13

“COUNTER PRODUCTIVITY”

“Once our institutions develop beyond a certain scale, they became perverse, counterproductive to the beneficial ends for which they were originally conceived. The end result of this paradoxical counter-productivity was schools which make people dumb, complacent and unquestioning; hospitals which produce disease; prisons which make people violent; travel at high speed which creates traffic jams; and ‘aid and development’ agencies which create more and more ‘needy’ and ‘underconsuming’ people.”

-Ivan Ilich, author of Deschooling Society (1971)

28Monday, October 21, 13

Where Are We Now?

29Monday, October 21, 13

Learning Has Left The Building

30Monday, October 21, 13

WE ARE AT THE END OF ERA• End of test-based accountability

• Discourse has run out of gas (Common Core will too)

• More successful systems...

• Invest heavily in skills/knowledge of teachers

• Broaden definitions of “good” education

• Focus on equalizing access and resources31Monday, October 21, 13

32Monday, October 21, 13

Traditional Sector is in free fall

33Monday, October 21, 13

TEACHERS FEEL EMBATTLED AND UNAPPRECIATED

• 3 million teachers trying to “save” a life way

• 50% of young teachers will leave sector within 5 years

• Teachers feel busted, angry, hurt

• Trapped within incredibly bureaucratic, unresponsive system

34Monday, October 21, 13

Teachers need to grieve a lost lifeway

35Monday, October 21, 13

SYSTEM’S DIFFICULTY ADAPTING THE THE NEW

CONDITIONS OF LEARNING

36Monday, October 21, 13

NOW 2 CRITICAL CONDITIONS HAVE

CHANGED THE WORLD

37Monday, October 21, 13

We must ask the fundamental question...

38Monday, October 21, 13

Internet changes all

• Education system based on information scarcity

• Schools as purveyors and certifiers of knowledge

• Active choosers already leaving system

39Monday, October 21, 13

•Three quarters of million K-12 students enrolled in virtual school

40Monday, October 21, 13

HARVARD’S ED X HAS 1.4 MILLION USERS, AND WAS

LAUNCHED 9 MONTHS AGO

It aims to have a billion...41Monday, October 21, 13

Power of Least-Invasive Education

Teachers on the ‘granny cloud’

42Monday, October 21, 13

•Virtual school

•Homeschool

•MOOCs

•DIY School

•PBS series Is School Enough?

43Monday, October 21, 13

RISE OF NEUROBIOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

We have learned more about how the human brain in the last 20 years than we did in the last 200

44Monday, October 21, 13

Fundamental model of “how we do learning” flawed

45Monday, October 21, 13

“Old School” teaching attitudes that no longer serve

46Monday, October 21, 13

• Barely  half  of  minority  students  complete  high  school  in  four  years      

• Only  15%  of  low-­‐income  students  earn  a  college  degree  within  nine  years  of  starEng  high  school

Text

System  sEll  based  on  shame  and  hierarchy,  where  non  middle-­‐class  kids  are  ‘less  than’

47Monday, October 21, 13

“School is like the meat packing business, designed to teach

children what grade of meat they are, and to send

them off to the right market--but make sure they

believe it.”-John Holt,

What Do I Do Monday, 1970

48Monday, October 21, 13

“IF YOU HAD TO DESIGN AN ENVIRONMENT THAT WAS GOING TO EFFECTIVELY TURN OFF THE HUMAN BRAIN,

IT WOULD BE THE CONTEMPORARY CLASSROOM.”-JOHN MEDINA, BRAIN RULES

49Monday, October 21, 13

SKILLS TAUGHT FOR AN ECONOMY THAT NO

LONGER EXISTS

• Following the rules

• Respect for hierarchy

• Narrow slice of ability is “excellence”50Monday, October 21, 13

Skills that matter now...

Creativity, teaming, capacity to see patterns in huge swaths of information

51Monday, October 21, 13

CAN WE HOLD THAT OUR SYSTEM OF EDUCATION,

THAT HAS DONE SOMUCH FOR US, TIME IS OVER?

52Monday, October 21, 13

CURIOSITY, WONDERINGDesire to hear in new ways

OTHER IMPORTANT SOCIOECONOMICS...

53Monday, October 21, 13

•84 % of teachers in US are white

•79% are female

•National Center for Education Information, 2011

54Monday, October 21, 13

CATHEDRAL SOUP KITCHEN, CAMDEN NJ

2012

Income Inequality in US has not been greater since 1920s

55Monday, October 21, 13

Chances of rising out of poverty have radicallydiminished over 3 generations

“We are more unequal in terms of political power, income, and opportunity than we have been in 80 years.” -Robert Reich

56Monday, October 21, 13

Boston Mother’s Day March 2013organized to mourn young men lost to violence in the City of Boston

“We are losing equal opportunity in this country.”-Cornell West

57Monday, October 21, 13

MINORITY MAJORITY NATION WITHIN 25-30 YEARS

US Will Be A...

58Monday, October 21, 13

• 40% of students expelled from school are African American

• 68% of all inmates do not have a high school diploma

SCHOOL TO PRISON PIPELINE

59Monday, October 21, 13

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

60Monday, October 21, 13

IDEA’S STORY....

DURING THE LAST 20 YEARS PROGRESSIVE EDUCATORS HAVE GONE INTO HIDING

61Monday, October 21, 13

IN OUTPOSTS, IN ISOLATION,BUT DOING GREAT WORK

62Monday, October 21, 13

IDEA puts these people together in a coherent, politically powerful ways

63Monday, October 21, 13

There is great education going on all over the country

64Monday, October 21, 13

We challenge the main story of the media

65Monday, October 21, 13

IDEA IS BUILDING A POWERFULNETWORK FOR POLITICALAND SOCIAL INFLUENCE

66Monday, October 21, 13

WE CREATE A“VALUE NETWORK”

A value network is a business analysis perspective that describes social and technical resources within and between businesses. The nodes in a value network represent people (or roles). The nodes are connected by interactions that

represent tangible and intangible deliverables. These deliverables take the form of knowledge or other intangibles and/or financial value.

Value networks exhibit interdependence. They account for the overall worth of products and services. Companies have both internal and external value networks.-Value Network Basics, openvaluenetworks.com

67Monday, October 21, 13

CLAIM YOUR OWN EDUCATIONAL

STORY

And ask people to...

68Monday, October 21, 13

HOW MUCH YOU MATTER

TO KNOW

69Monday, October 21, 13

WE DENY OUR POWER THROUGH A

“NOT ENOUGH”DIALOG

TO OBSERVE

70Monday, October 21, 13

TO CHANGE THE WORLD YOU HAVE TO CHANGE WHAT YOU

THINK IS REAL

71Monday, October 21, 13

WHERE WE’RE GOING

72Monday, October 21, 13

COMMUNITIES TOGETHER CREATING A RANGE OF

EDUCATIONAL OPTIONS73Monday, October 21, 13

EDUCATIONAL CENTERS AS “HEARTHS”

El Puente Academy of Peace and Justice, Brooklyn, NY74Monday, October 21, 13

THE POINT, SOUTH BRONX

• Justice and art-based after school programs grades 1-12

• Activism around urban farming, habitat restoration, transportation equity

• “At risk children and teens are not bundles of problems, but well-springs of solutions

75Monday, October 21, 13

NORTH STAR SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING CENTER,

AMHERST MA

• “Learning is natural. Schooling is optional.”

• Flexible self-designed learning programs for students 11-18

• Teacher as guide, coach76Monday, October 21, 13

MINNESOTA NEW COUNTRY SCHOOL,

HENDERSON, MN

• “Farm kids with attitude”

• “The way we’ve done learning in the past isn’t good enough”

77Monday, October 21, 13

WAY ACADEMY,DETROIT MI

• Personalized learning for high school students

• 80% online; 20% in person

• Online learning available 24 hours, 365 days year ; staff available 24 hours a day

• Team leader (adult mentor) provides one on one support, home visits

• 11 sites, classrooms called “labs”

78Monday, October 21, 13

“NAMING OUR REALITY IS THE ONLY WAY TO BE FREE.”

79Monday, October 21, 13

“IF YOU’RE NOT MAKING TROUBLE

YOU’RE NOT WORKING ON THE RIGHT PROBLEMS.”-HERB KOHL TO ME,

2006

80Monday, October 21, 13

DO A BETTER JOB THAN YOUR PARENTS

81Monday, October 21, 13

http://www.democraticeducation.org

82Monday, October 21, 13