In today’s post on his Class Struggle blog, Jay Mathews disagrees with a recent column by Dana Milbank that spotlights many of the negatives to our all-testing-all-the-time educational system.

Hardly a surprise since Mathews never met a standardized test (or a charter school) he didn’t like.

So, why is Milbank wrong?

As near as I can figure Mathews’ side of the argument all boils down to politics since “…Milbank already knows that campaigning against standardized tests is a loser”.

And…

Since at least the late 1980s, the majority of Democratic and Republican legislators and executives have been reconciled to creating systems in which all children take tests and changes are made in schools that do not score well.

Still, liberals and conservatives in Congress appear to agree that test scores will remain important in any revision of the law.

So, the consensus among our politicians, most of whom have little understanding of K12 education beyond sitting in class for thirteen years, is that wrapping schools in a culture of test prep is the best policy to improve student learning and prepare them for a constantly changing world that never gives standardized tests.

Yeah, that sounds right.

When Amazon first released the Kindle late in 2007, it was supposed to save the publishing industry by having us all reading everything from periodicals to textbooks on them.  A few years later, that claim was made for the iPad.

Instead of physically delivering information on paper, these and the many other “coming soon” tablet devices would provide the material, with enhancements, in an easily distributed digital format.

Of course, I’ve been around long enough to remember when similar statements were made for laptops and before them personal computers. Anyone remember the paperless office? Anyone work in one?

While it certainly hasn’t yet replaced paper in my life*, I’ve been making a concerted effort to read more material on my iPad since it arrived six months ago.

That effort would be going much better if it wasn’t for a few obstacles placed in the way by someone. Apple? The app makers? Publishers?

The two most visible reading apps are Apple’s iBook and Amazon’s Kindle, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve only paid for a couple of ebooks due to the rather obstructionist DRM attached to most files.

Another annoying functionality road block is that neither app will allow me to copy a selection of text and paste it into an email or blog post, again limiting the usefulness of the format.

Sure, I can’t do copy and paste with an analog publication either, but wasn’t switching to a digital format supposed to make the material more useful than paper could? I seem to remember some visionary making that promise.

Anyway, if I had to make a choice between the two, iBook is the better reading app, both in terms of it’s features and the fact that it’s possible to add material other than what you buy from the attached store, a feature that’s not easily available with the Kindle app.

If you’re buying books, on the other hand, Kindle has the advantage since their store features a much bigger selection, slightly lower prices, and the ability to sync your digital files on multiple instances of the app (computer, phone, iPad, Kindle).

However, the reading app I use most often, and the one with the best overall functionality, is GoodReader.

Although sold (it’s only 99 cents) as a pdf reader, this app is a whole lot more. I get way too much stuff as Word documents and GoodReader will let me view (but not edit) them as well, generally doing a great job of retaining the original format.

The app also makes it very easy to copy materials from any computer over a wifi connection, download directly from web URLs, and get files from online storage services like Dropbox or Apple’s Mobile Me.

And the best will be getting better since the GoodReader developers say that they will be adding pdf annotations in the next version.

As to the growing collection of other iPad newspaper/magazine replacements, I’ve found very few worth raving about.

Like Flipboard, the most recent hot app. Very pretty, very slick, not especially useful.

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*For some reason, there seems to be more paper, not less, although that might be due to heightened awareness of how much stuff is needlessly printed.

For all the talk about change during the 2008 presidential campaign, one policy area in which the Obama administration differs very little from that of his predecessor is education.

In this morning’s Post, Dana Milbank discusses the similarities between the two.

Unfortunately, his focus is almost entirely on the political consequences, which, as we all know, is far more important than any impact of the policy itself.

Easier to write too since most political analysis these days seems to be based on personal opinion, the louder the better.

Anyway, Milbank does manage to make a few relevant points.

But in education, the Bush-Obama comparison is spot on. If anything, Obama has taken the worst aspect of Bush’s No Child Left Behind education law — an obsession with testing — and amplified it.

Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed — despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he’s offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives. (emphasis mine)

And…

There’s nothing wrong with testing*, but when you use tests to determine pay and job security, you inevitably induce teachers to turn children into test-taking automatons, not the creative thinkers that have been the most valuable product of American schools. Test obsession won’t help the bad schools, and it will wreck the good ones. (emphasis mine)

“The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind,” New York University education professor Diane Ravitch, an education official in George H.W. Bush’s administration, wrote of Obama’s education policy in a piece for the Huffington Post. “There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test. There will be more cheating, more gaming the system.” The tests, she said, are “simply not adequate” to separate good teachers and schools from bad.

We can only hope that “Obama’s erstwhile allies” who Milbank claims are now pushing back on his Bush-like education policies are able to alter that all-consuming effort to graduate “test-taking automatons”.

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*A more accurate statement would be there’s nothing wrong with assessment.

I’ve always admired the creative work done by Pixar Animation Studios, going back to the short films they were making long before the first Toy Story movie was released.

Recently I ran across* a short talk (iTunesU link) by Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University (can I enroll?? at the Apple Education Leadership Summit in 2008 in which he discusses four interrelated aptitudes they look for in hiring people to work at Pixar and which he believes are necessary for success in a creative world.

Mastery of subject (depth)

However, at Pixar they don’t necessarily look for mastery in the area in which a candidate will be working.  Nelson notes that anyone who is a true master at something will be “the kind of person with characteristics that you can use in your organization”.

Breadth of knowledge, experience, and interests

At Pixar, ”We want people who are more interested than interesting” because an “interested” person amplifies other people.

Communication

“Communication also involves translation.” That is, having the ability to “translate” your idea into messages that others outside your field (or perspective and experiences, etc.) can understand.

Collaboration

This, Nelson says, is the most important of the four.  But collaboration is not the same as cooperation, which is more about staying out of each others way.  Instead, ”collaboration for Pixar means amplification, the amplification you get by hooking up a bunch of human beings” who bring their mastery, breath, and communication skills to get more than the sum of the parts.

Let’s face it, very few of our kids will be working for Pixar after they graduate, as creative and fun as that might be.

But the kinds of skills Nelson outlines as being important in candidates applying to work at his company are those many other businesses in totally unrelated fields are also looking for.

Nelson says it much better than I have in this space, so go watch the whole 10 minutes or so.  This video might also make an good opening of school presentation to show your colleagues.

In closing his talk, Nelson adds this interesting, although seemingly unrelated, observation about our students.

One of the most amazing things about school is that we have this untapped resource in a sense: our students are the solution. They’re also the problem… but there is an opportunity there if we can find ways of invigorating that leadership on our campuses.

When it comes to improving our education system, students are usually the last group that reformers include in the process.

Considering they are the people most directly affected by what we do, maybe we should tap into their creativity and make them a fundamental part of those efforts instead.

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*Thanks to Presentation Zen for the link and to Edutopia which produced the video.

I’ve just started reading Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus but in the first chapter he makes this interesting observation.

Although the internet is already forty years old, and the web half that age, some people are still astonished that individual members of society, previously happy to spend most of their free time consuming, would start voluntarily making and sharing things. This making-and-sharing is certainly a surprise compared to the previous behavior. But pure consumption of media was never a sacred tradition; it was just a set of accumulated accidents, accidents that are being undone as people start hiring new communications tools to jobs older media can’t do.

He could make the same claim about school.

Gathering hundreds of children into buildings, grouping them based on chronological age, seating them in rows, and delivering a one-way stream of information is a relatively recent structure in human history.

Learning for most people, for most of human history, was more an interactive, hands-on, practical process.

And although society for the most part treats the current education format as sacred, many of the same new communications tools Shirky refers to are starting to cause those traditions to unravel.

Following up on the previous post about leadership, during the interview with Steve Jobs he discussed Apple’s approach to business.

And he made this observation about the difference between producing computing devices for consumers, in which Apple has been very successful over the past decade, and the business market.

What I love about the consumer market that I always hated about the enterprise market is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person decides for themselves.  They vote yes or no.  And if enough of them say yes, we get to come to work tomorrow.  That’s how it works.  It’s really simple.

As for the enterprise market, it’s not so simple.  The people who use the products don’t decide for themselves.  And the people who make those decisions sometimes are confused.

Confused indeed!

Here in the overly-large school district, we are regularly reminded that we are not really a school system.

We work for an “enterprise” (and that we are all “clients”).

And that last part of Jobs’ remarks may offer a clue as to why the use of instructional technology is not what it should be here in the overly-large enterprise.

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Picture from Wikipedia and I’m only guessing that it’s legal to link to it and not get sued by Paramount.

In this morning’s Post, more examples of the conflict between photographers and security people who don’t understand that yes, they can take pictures here.

The situation is especially bad here in the DC area where we have a higher than average number of the paranoid who also don’t know what they’re talking about.

However, one specific sentence in the story pretty much says it all.

Photographers say police need to be told explicitly not to prohibit photography, because officers often don’t respond well to impromptu citizen lectures on constitutional law.

Ain’t that the truth!

After months of relative silence, Chancellor Rhee has gotten busy again. First, she trims some fat from the school system then she announces some voucher changes. Now, I’m not saying that she’s tying up loose ends but one can’t help but wonder if she’s pushing toward a deadline.

Something to look forward to in late September.  Media giant NBC Universal* is planning a one-week event, including segments to be featured in news programming on all their networks, called “Education Nation“

According to the press release that landed in my mailbox (and, I suspect, that of many other edubloggers), things will kick off with a two-day education summit that will be a “call to action, shining a spotlight on the most pressing national issue of our time: Education in America”.

Call to action? Who’s coming? Well, pretty much the usual suspects.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Delaware Governor Jack Markell, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, Harlem Children Zone’s CEO Geoffrey Canada, President of MIT Susan Hockfield, National Superintendent of the Year Elizabeth Morgan, Civil Rights Activist Al Sharpton, and President of University of Phoenix Bill Pepicello, Ph.D., join a host of top leaders in education to open a national dialogue and address the gap between how we perceive education and the actual results we are producing today.

And don’t forget Bill Gates, whose foundation is one of the sponsoring “partners”.

Interesting. All but one of those big names lives and works less than a days drive (in traffic) from New York City, the location of this summit. Just an observation.

Anyway, later on the NBC press people mention that the overall project will include input from “more than 300 big thinkers in government, politics, business and technology — as well as school administrators, teachers, parents and students from across the country”.

Again, notice that the people most directly affected by the education process – parents and students – are thrown in almost as an afterthought.

Later the same day, by coincidence (I think), I also received a promotion for a new book from Milton Chen, former executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation (of which I’m a member), carrying the same title: “Education Nation“.

A snippet from the introduction to that book, posted on the promotional site, certainly sounds like a good starting point.

Imagine an ‘Education Nation,’ a learning society where the education of children and adults is the highest national priority, on par with a strong economy, high employment, and national security. Where resources from public and private sources fund a ‘ladder of learning’ for learners of all ages, from pre-K through ‘gray.’ Where learners take courses through the formal institutions of high-quality schools and universities and also take advantage of informal experiences offered through museums, libraries, churches, youth groups, and parks as well as via the media.

Ok, I need to dial back the skepticism a little and reserve judgement on both variations on Education Nation until after I get the chance to evaluate the ideas presented.

However, it will be very interesting to see if the nations presented by NBC and Chen have anything in common, and especially if either has any connection to reality.

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*No more GE microwave programming I guess.

A major story in a recent edition of Newsweek* declares we have a creativity crisis is the US.

The authors base that screaming headline on the fact that scores on an assessment that seems to accurately predict kids “creative accomplishments as adults”, have been declining since 1990, after rising steadily since the test was first administered in the 50′s.

The fall in creativity scores has been “most serious” in younger children, kindergarden through 6th grade.

Why is this happening?

One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children. (emphasis mine)

The writers correctly spotlight as one of the educational causes the testing culture in most schools that squeezes out any thought of teaching art, music, dance, or other activities thought of as “creative”.

However, they also make the even more valid point that there’s very little creative about how students are taught in their “core” subjects.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way. (emphasis mine)

I would go even farther and say that, for the most part, “current curriculum standards” are crap and should be junked… but this is a good start.

The whole article is actually worth reading for some interesting information about current research into creativity and children.

However, for an even better perspective on the matter, go rewatch Ken Robinson’s classic 2006 TED talk on how school are killing creativity in children or his return to TED from earlier this year (not quite as good) on the learning revolution.

Or read some of what Mitch Resnick has written on the subject of how children learn, especially Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society (pdf).

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*I can’t tell you if it was the cover story since I haven’t seen a paper copy of the magazine in years.