Cranky Blogger Warning: From time to time here on the Radical, I feel like a ranting lunatic driven by emotion rather than solution-oriented blogger driven by reason.  Now might just be one of those times.  Take what I write tonight with a grain of salt -- or a gallon of gin.  Dealer's choice.

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Poke through my thoughts about technology's role in public education and you'll hear me preach over and over again about the importance of working to transform teaching REGARDLESS of the number of computers you have in your classroom.

That's a very personal message simply because I don't live in a 1:1 world. 

Heck, I don't even live in a 10:1 world.

Like most teachers, I've spent the better part of the past decade making due with limited access to labs with dozens of computers in need of Flash updates.  Sure, we've got a few laptop carts -- but they've sadly become dilapidated wrecks that we can't afford to replace. 

#soundfamiliar?

For the most part, I've tried to be tolerant of that reality. More importantly, I've consistently encouraged anyone who bothers to listen to be tolerant of that reality, too.

"It's not like your schools and districts don't WANT to provide you with access to the kinds of digital tools that you need in order to change teaching and learning in your classroom," I preach.  "It's just darn near impossible to appropriately outfit classrooms given the limits of district budgets."

There's some truth in there, right?

Times HAVE been unusually tight.  Geez - here in North Carolina there hasn't even been money to give teachers cost-of-living adjustments in the past 4 years.  Where ARE we supposed to get the cash to invest in classroom technology.

#soundfamiliar?

But I'm sick of being tolerant, y'all. 

I'm sick of hearing critics hammer teachers for being resistant to change while I'm STILL sitting in cut-and-paste classrooms full of textbooks, glue sticks and safety scissors.  I'm sick of educational soothsayers conjuring up visions of 21st Century learning environments that I'll NEVER be able to create with the three working computers plugged into the corner of my classroom. 

I'm sick of telling my students that they'll have to wait until they get home to answer the questions that they care the most about.  I'm sick of standing in line behind twelve other teachers waiting to make photocopies because handouts are the only instructional resource that we have consistent access to. 

#soundfamiliar?

Most importantly, I'm sick of pretending that I stand a chance of convincing kids who understand just how personalized and engaging learning can be that my ridiculously quaint, completely unplugged, intellectually standardized classroom is anything OTHER than a big, fat waste of time.

The genie's out of the bottle, y'all. 

Like Scott McLeod recently argued, our kids KNOW that traditional learning environments are irrelevant -- and pretty much everyone with a pulse KNOWS that our schools need to change, but NO ONE is willing to put their money where their mouths are. 

You (and I don't care if "you" are a pundit, a parent or a politician) want to see my instruction change?

Find a way to give me some new tools to experiment with. 

I don't care how you do it. Force through some ridiculously sick bond referendum earmarked for technology and technology only.  Figure out a way to make Bring Your Own Device Programs work in your communities.  Pass the hat at Chamber of Commerce meetings. 

But whatever you do, quit ranting about the crappy job I'M doing until YOU'RE actually willing to pony up some cabbage or to help cut through red tape to create solutions that give me a fighting chance of actually doing my job well.

Quit crying about the dioramas my kids are making when the supply closet is chock-a-block full of crayolas.  Quit acting so surprised that my kids aren't networking with the world when the only lenses that we have to look through are dated textbooks.  Quit asking for "timely feedback" when I'm collecting data by hand with clipboards and post-it notes.  

I guess what I'm saying is quit asking me to perform instructional miracles.

My well of professional tolerance has run dry. 

#soundfamiliar?

(Glad I got that off my chest.  I almost feel better already.  Now where's my red checking pen? I have essays to grade.)

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Related Radical Reads:

How Limited Technology Budgets Failed My Students

More on the Challenges of Wondering in Schools

Your Data Dream. My Data Nightmare

Good question, isn't it?  And a question that I've asked myself about a million times as I've proctored my state's sixth grade reading and math tests considering how FEW of the questions on the math test -- my personal weakness -- I'm ever able to figure out.

More importantly, it's a question that I've wanted to see state policymakers -- who seem hell-bent on tying test scores to systems of teacher and student evaluation -- answer publicly. 

I mean, seriously:  If you are so flippin' confident that tests are a reliable tool for failing students and canning teachers, shouldn't you be willing to take those same tests and have YOUR results made public to the world?

Well, that's EXACTLY what Rick Roach -- a successful businessman and current school board member in Orange County, Florida -- did this year, and his results may surprise you:  He earned a 62% on the 10th grade reading exam and literally had to guess at every question on the math test, eventually getting 10 out of 60 questions right. 

What Rick learned from the experience ought to be tattooed onto the foreheads of every single elected official in the nation.  He writes:

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning.

Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict?

Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”

“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

Thank you, Rick -- for going out on a limb and for speaking the truth about end of grade exams.  Not only do they carry incredibly high stakes, they test skills that no one really cares about. 

Now if only your peers in the #edpolicy world had half of your guts. 

#unlikely

#cowards

After swinging through Target and dropping another $10 bucks on supplies that I need for an upcoming science lab, I decided to pull out my envelope o' receipts and see how much I've spent on school purchases so far this year. 

Grand total: $875 -- and that only includes the stuff I remembered to save receipts for.

It also doesn't include the money that I've spent on registrations and travel to conferences -- another $535 that had to come out of my own pocket after the state of North Carolina gutted the teacher professional development budget to pay the bills.

Here are five spending highlights I thought you might get a kick out of:

The most expensive single purchases: A Livescribe pen ($122), a subscription to Poll Everywhere ($50), and a wired router to get my classroom's three computers up and running ($42.46). 

The most common purchases: Science lab materials including 9 thermometers ($57), mineral oil ($19), milk ($4.82) and spaghetti ($10.58).

The purchases that I probably could have lived without: New books for my classroom bookshelf ($113).

The purchases that are the most direct result of slashed #edbudgets: Cleaning supplies including a mop and mop bucket to clean my lab floors ($42.48) and the rental of a carpet cleaner to clean the carpets in our team's other classrooms ($36.91).  

The cheapest purchase: A kickball ($6.53)

What's REALLY CRAZY is that the $875 that I've spent so far -- which works out to roughly $73 per month, y'all -- is actually LESS than I've spent in the past few years. I've intentionally cut back on my school spending because I'm as broke as everyone else!

Now let me be perfectly honest with you:  If I worked hard enough at it, I probably could have gotten SOME of my purchases covered in other ways. 

The parents of my students, for example, are pretty terrific at sending in lab supplies when I remember to ask for them with enough advance warning -- and my principal can be pretty creative at finding spare change to squeeze out of his budgets.

I need all y'all to know, though, that teachers ARE subsidizing public education in America by purchasing needed supplies for their classrooms out of their own pockets-- and those subsidies are becoming more and more important as districts struggle to find ways to balance budgets in difficult economic times.

Are we okay with that?

#uncomfortabletruth

#myreality

Let’s start with a simple truth that everyone seems to like to wave in the faces of public school teachers: Our schools are struggling to prepare graduates for the increasingly complex workplaces that they are going to inherit.

As Tony Wagner writes in The Global Achievement Gap, the results of this failure have the potential to be catastrophic:

“In short, our young people are now in direct competition with youth from developing countries for many of what traditionally have been considered our ‘good middle-class white-collar” jobs.

While some of our students are learning skills that enable them to interpret and manipulate information and data, the sheer numbers of students who are learning these skills in other countries and the fact that they will work for much less put our students at an extreme competitive disadvantage.”

(Kindle Location 223-226)

That’s not a new message, right? People – including Thomas Friedman – have have been writing about the consequences of an increasingly connected and knowledge-driven globe for years.

Here’s the hitch, though: Despite repeated warnings about the urgent need to rethink the kinds of skills that we spend our time on in schools, education looks no different today than it did a decade ago.

Worse yet, in an effort to “hold schools accountable,” our #edpolicy leaders – including Bam and Arne – continue to push policies on schools that reward a strict adherence to the kinds of simple skills that can be measured by standardized tests.

But Bam and Arne aren’t the only ones to blame.

Our communities are responsible, too. After all, we simultaneously bemoan the sad state of education in America while electing leaders who make easy choices that perpetuate the status quo.

When we finally realize that standardized test scores are a failed indicator – of our children’s workforce readiness AND of the success or failure of schools and teachers – we might just be ready to move towards more meaningful work in our classrooms.

What would that “more meaningful work” look like?

Here’s what global education expert Matt Friedrick* has to say about the kind of skills that students should be learning in our classrooms:

Leading in today’s conceptual, global age requires entirely new skills for our students, and an education system that delivers these skills.

Today’s students will inherit a world that is fundamentally different from the past – one where leadership means communicating effectively in more than one language, confronting challenges in new and innovative ways, adjusting as the world around them changes, and collaborating with a wide range of people.

Friedrick breaks these essential behaviors into a set of five LEAD skills that he believes should be defining the work that we are doing with the students in our schools:

Language : Communicating in English and in at least one strategic foreign language.

Entrepreneurship : Devising new ways to respond to local, national, and global needs.

Adaptability : Adjusting to new information and media; continually learning new knowledge and skills.

Diplomacy : Collaborating effectively with increasingly diverse groups of people.

Good stuff, isn’t it? If you are a parent, wouldn’t you feel better if your child mastered these skills before graduation?

Sure you would – and you wouldn’t be alone. Business leaders surveyed regularly report wanting workers who are experts at seemingly soft skills like adapting, imagining and collaborating.

Now there’s nothing inherently new about Friedrick’s LEAD skills. They are similar to the seven survival skills laid out by Wagner in The Global Achievement Gap and to the ten skills and behaviors that The Partnership for 21st Century Skills believes in.

But I honestly believe that the LEAD skills framework has the ability to have a far greater impact on American education than Wagner’s work or the work of the P21 team.

Here’s why: The LEAD framework takes a complex concept and makes it approachable to the general public.

Think about it – Wagner’s book has been out since 2008 and the P21 folks have been working in this space since 2002 yet nothing has really changed about the way that we do business in schools.

Why would such good thinking – thinking that forms the foundation of the most progressive conversations we have about teaching and learning in today’s world – go largely unnoticed?

My guess is that parents – the stakeholder that we most need to start pushing for positive change in schools – can’t get their heads wrapped around the language used by individuals like Wagner and the P21 team.

It’s not that the concepts don’t resonate. It’s that the concepts haven’t been delivered in approachable language that parents can embrace.

And that’s what Friedrick has delivered with his LEAD framework.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the only way we’re going to get schools to shift towards the kinds of learning spaces that are necessary for truly leaving today’s kids prepared for tomorrow’s world is to start to develop partnerships with parents.

We need discerning voters. We need intellectual advocates that are willing to push back against the simplistic attempts of #edpolicy wonks to define “mastery.” We need critics who are vocal AND able to articulate a vision for something better than we currently have.

I believe parents WANT to be those partners.

Developing advocacy partnerships, however, depends on dejargonizing the language that we’re using to describe the changes that we believe in.

I believe that Friedrick’s LEAD framework might just be the first step in the right direction that we’ve taken in a long, long time towards getting parents back on our side in the fight for an educational program that matters.

Any of this making sense?

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Related Radical Reads:

Is Racing to the Top Even POSSIBLE, Arne?

Arne’s Half-Baked Plan for Fixing Schools

Are we REALLY Preparing Kids for the Global Economy?

*Full Disclosure: I know Matt Friedrick well – and few people have had more of an impact on my thinking as he has. He challenges me regularly and I almost always am thankful for the opportunity to learn from him.

He’s got this right, y’all. And I would say it even if I didn’t know him.

And he’s just started Tweeting. I’d recommend you follow him if you’re interested in learning more about how LEAD skills can change our schools for the better.

He hasn’t posted a ton yet – but I’m sure that over time, his stream will be a valuable resource.

I've read a ton of reviews lately of The Mitchell 20 -- a remarkable education documentary film driven by my good friend Kathy Wiebke that details the efforts of a group of 20 teachers in a high-poverty Phoenix elementary school to change the lives of their students by changing their own practice.

I guess I'm struggling to find the right words to explain how powerful the film is.

That's why I was so jazzed to find a comment from a teacher named Jill Saia on Nancy Flanagan's review of The Mitchell 20. 

Jill wrote:

My faculty and I can't wait to see The Mitchell 20; for some reason we feel that we are living the same story right now.

Like Mitchell, we are NOT waiting for superman; we are digging in, collborating, and working very long hours to improve our students and ourselves.

In the end, that's the BEST summary for The Mitchell 20:  It is the story of a group of teachers who collectively recognize that waiting for superman is a strategy that is failing our poorest students.

 It is the story of a group of teachers who recognize that super powers really do rest somewhere deep within every teacher who takes up the challenge of working in our highest needs communities.

It is the story of what one group of colleagues can do when they decide to fight back by studying their practice collectively with one another---even when their backs are against the wall and they're working in forgotten communities.

I won't lie: The Mitchell 20 made me wet in the eyes more than once simply because it is the story of passion and service and professionalism and need and hope all wrapped into one.

And I needed that. 

Surrounded by failed policies, destructive policymakers, and constant attacks, I've started to doubt that our public schools -- and more importantly, children in our poorest communities -- REALLY have a chance.

What The Mitchell 20 reminded me is that as long as there are teachers with a heart for children and a determination to study their craft together -- and as long as we are politically willing to get out of their way -- there is ALWAYS a chance for EVERY child in EVERY community.

That's a message we ALL need to hear.

Here's the trailer:

When are YOU going to see the whole film?

More importantly, when are YOU going to forward the trailer to YOUR local school board members, state representives, or federal legislators?

This isn't a film that they can afford to miss if we really care about EVERY child.

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Related Radical Reads:

Are YOUR Kids Living a Silent War?

Are High-Poverty Schools Just Another Debate?

Does ANYONE Love Public Schools?

Lessons Learned from the LeBronathon