Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1998 12:39:16 -0600 From: "Bethany M. Baxter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: The Up for Grabs Discussion List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Where the money is As someone who has spent the last thirteen years helping educational institutions in the United States and Canada develop operational plans for information technology, I have been very interested in what both Ted Koppel and the discussion group have said. I agree with all of you on many points. Let me share my observations. First, in much of the planning that I have facilitated, one of the biggest problems has been local, state and federal regulations that keep teachers and administrators from being able to optimize the use of technology. As corporate America has discovered, unless you change the way you do business you never will fully take advantage of technology. One of my real fears is that the current bad news about schools (low scores for teachers and students, etc.) will bring about an avalanche of regulations which will impede rather than assist the process. Already, the emphasis on documenting what is done in the classroom is taking valuable time away from the teaching/learning process. Teachers must develop elaborate lesson plans and are not encouraged to respond to students intuitively. More and more mandated curricula further limit the ability of teachers to experiment. It is this trend, not just low salaries, that is causing the severe brain drain in our public school teachers. We keep saying the families have changed, but we are ignoring how drastically the schools have changed. We must remember that once upon a time, our schools were staffed by women like Hilary Clinton and Janet Reno. As a former junior high school principal, I will bet any amount of money that even today's students would not talk back to either of them. When I began teaching, there were only two fields that welcomed the best and the brightest women, nursing and teaching. When other fields opened to women in the sixties, the role of nurses was enhanced in order to attract those who could master chemistry. Now we have nurses managing care and nurse practitioners, and nursing is a profession that is very attractive to both men and women. On the other hand, teaching lowered its standards and reduced the autonomy of those in the classroom. We now have teachers who did not have high enough SAT scores to play sports, and many of the best and brightest have left. Salaries are not the major reason. Private schools regularly lure outstanding public school teachers at an average cut in pay of $10,000 a year by offering them pedagogical autonomy in the classroom. In my travels, I meet many former educators who are now highly successful in other fields. Although they could no longer give up their six figure incomes to return to the classroom, none of them have ever given money as the reason for leaving teaching positions. Instead, they almost always cite being asked to do things which they considered psychologically or pedigogically unsound as the impetus for their departure. Second, until very recently, most of our colleges of education (and I have worked with many of them) did not use any technology in their own teaching and are incapable of taking a leadership role in this debate. Instead, they concentrated on traditionally presenting a myriad of courses on how to teach - how to teach reading, how to teach math, how to teach social studies, and there was usually a required class on audiovisuals that exposed the students to a bunch of software. Faculty in colleges of education seem to be searching for the magic bullet, the way to reach all children with one single method. As a result, unlike all other disciplines, education has no memory. By that, I mean that education is not a body of knowledge that has grown over the years. The search for the magic bullet precludes that, and educational theory continually reinvents itself. By continually concentrating on teaching instead of learning, research efforts have frequently concentrated on children who are not succeeding - not to understand how they learn, but to find a way to teach them. For example, over the years, we have flipped between phonics and whole language approaches to reading many times, and, each time, the new approach is presented as a new discovery. These approaches are not panaceas; they are techniques that fit different learning styles. We cannot seem to understand that the group that is not learning is always the group that will be successful in the other method. Now we are fighting over bilingual programs versus total language immersion. As a former junior high school principal in Texas, let me tell you it is hard to immerse a class of forty Hispanic students in English, when the only person in the room who speaks English is the teacher. We tried that for many years and it failed, but we have no documented history of that failure, and we will try it again. And when that fails, we will probably again mandate a less effective bilingual approach for the child who is the only one in a class who does not speak English. Because of the focus on finding the perfect way to teach, very little research has been done from a neutral point of view, and Ted Koppel is right - much of the research is flawed. In fact, most of the good research on mental development and learning theory is occurring, not in our colleges of education, but in the neurosciences, and there is frequently little collaboration or communication between the two fields. Only by concentrating on how different children learn and how children develop mentally and emotionally will we lay the framework for identifying where and how technology can be used effectively. Only then will we have the vocabulary to address and evaluate concerns. It doesn't surprise me that technology has been most successful with chldren who are not succceeding; computers can offer an approach that is different from the teacher's. However, in reality, many teachers, given little guidance and knowing little about how children learn, choose software that clones their own teaching style, and this software may even reinforce poor teaching practices. Furthermore, the inability of colleges of education to present a developed body of knowledge and take a leadership role in this debate is causing some very bad decisions to be made. We know from the research of the neuroscientists that studying music is very important to the brain development necessary for math and science. To remove music teachers to pay for computers is a very bad choice. Yet, superintendents trained in how to teach, rather than being grounded in how children learn, make this determination every day. I believe that technology is a tool that can enhance education for all students. However, this will only occur when we can begin with a blank sheet of paper and concentrate on how children develop and learn. If we do that, the money is available. Let's start with when school should occur. Our school calendar was designed for farm children in the eighteenth century. We let them out at three o'clock to go home to do the chores and give them the summer off to bring in the crops. At the time this calendar was developed, 75% of our children lived on farms and went home to both parents. Now only 2% of our children live on farms, and, at 2:30, in most urban areas, our adolescents are sent to homes where there will be no parent until 6 o'clock. As a result, unsupervised children are getting into trouble. It has been estimated that over fifty percent of juvenile crime, teenage pregnancy, and drug and alcohol experimentation is occurring during those hours. Starting high schools and middle schools at 10 o'clock, instead of seven, and ending at 5:30 instead of 2:30, would cut (by at least fifty percent) drug usage, juvenile crime, and teenage pregnancy (and we could immediately move money from welfare and criminal justice programs to education). The initial change could be done today at no cost to the school systems and in existing facilites. Furthermore, those in the neurosciences have discovered that most teenagers have more energy later in the day, and that they learn better at that time. Teenagers, especially boys, need more sleep and will not get in trouble in the early morning hours. The long summer vacation (once meant to bring in crops) seriously detracts from a school year already shorter than in most countries. Each year, approximately two months are spent in each classroom reviewing what was forgotten over the summer. Keeping the same number of school days and staggering vacations would add a full twenty-four months of school over a twelve year period, again, at no extra cost to the public. Thus, changing the school calendar, at no extra initial investment, could immediately bring in more dollars, provide more time to teach, and make the teaching more apt to be effective, because the students will be more responsive. As far as I am concerned this is a no-brainer, but there is no leadership for this approach. Instead, speaking for our children are prosecutors, who receive high credibility in legislatures loaded with attorneys. The prosecutors are telling us to hold the children responsible for their choices, and those in the neurosciences, who know something about adolescent development (especially the ineffectiveness of deterrents on adolescents who are not yet able to fully anticipate the outcomes of their behavior), are ignored, and more and more money is being transferred to correctional facilities at the expense of schools. Meanwhile, our educators, who often know as little about how children develop paychologically as they do about how they learn, remain silent. Children do need to learn about the consequences of choices, but, when I was growing up, the choices I was given were between chocolate and vanilla, and it was very clear to me that I was not responsible for anything. Instead, the community was responsible for me. Children who did not do their work or misbehaved were not failed or suspended. They were kept after school, and children who needed more attention received it. I did not have the choice of whether or not to do home or school work. I had only the choice of doing the work now or after school while the other children were playing. As a country of immigrants, we did not expect parents to supervise or help with homework. Teachers were expected to work with children after school, and high schools had study halls with teachers available to assist any student who needed help. Schools were held responsible for children learning. We once designed a bizarre school year to meet the needs of parents, but today we are ignoring their needs and blaming them when their unsupervised children make bad choices. We are spending 30-60 thousand dollars a year per inmate to incarcerate up to 20% of our young adult males. This sum would buy 30 to 60 computers each year for every young person incarcerated.. Corporate America, following Total Quality Management (TQM) principles, considers a failure rate above one in a thousand intolerable. Why are we accepting and funding a societal failure rate of one in five? We are in effect buying more landfill to bury the defective products and making no effort to reduce the failure rate or to find a way to retool the failures. The money is available if we stand back and look at how children develop and learn, and respond appropriately. Furthermore, such an approach would allow us to redesign the way we teach children, to build learning environments that would accommodate the unique individual differences of our children, to attract and retain bright men and women in the field of teaching, and to fully justify our investment in the technology that would support these initiatives. Beth Baxter "You can solve everyone's problems, but you can't implement everyone's solutions." Bethany M. 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