MLK and the Purpose of Education

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in 1948 at Morehouse College on the importance of education, fifteen years before his most memorable and oft-quoted "I Have a Dream" speech. It's worth repeating here in its entirety:

As I engage in the so-called "bull sessions" around and about the school, I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the "brethren" think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end.

It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the ligitimate goals of his life.

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one's self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

The late Eugene Talmadge, in my opinion, possessed one of the better minds of Georgia, or even America. Moreover, he wore the Phi Beta Kappa key. By all measuring rods, Mr. Talmadge could think critically and intensively; yet he contends that I am an inferior being. Are those the types of men we call educated?

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, "brethren!" Be careful, teachers!

On this annual observance of Dr. King's birthday, given the continuing debate centered on the the effectiveness of our school system, it's fitting to we remind ourselves there is a noble and moral purpose to education.

Taking Action During a Storm

“If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”

Over the past few weeks I've been blogging on the effects that the deepening educational funding crisis can have on our traditional school model, especially when you combine it with the force of evolving technologies and political pressures. My earlier posts include Riding into the Perfect Storm of Reform and For the times they are a changin', contributions to an ongoing grassroots effort titled Blog 4 Real Education Reform. One might successfully argue that you don't wait for a storm to fix or replace your roof. And while that makes perfect sense when it comes to roofs, the urgency being created by the convergence of current forces impacting public education not only require that we rebuild in the midst of the storm but that it's the perfect time to do so.

My primary point is to prepare the Godfrey-Lee Public Schools district for a tsunami of change that will no doubt be rooted in this year's budget cycle. Michigan's economy continues to be in the tank and doesn't promise to get well for another two to three years despite the recent political changes in Lansing. Governor Rick Snyder and our new legislative leadership will be looking to public schools for help in reducing the overall state deficit which in the short term will add to our budget woes. Governor Snyder has called for “shared pain” in pulling Michigan out of the muck by rebuilding our economy and within the next month he'll be outlining his plan in greater detail.

In the coming weeks, our district's Board of Education, administrative cabinet, and labor association leaders will be teaming together to begin reducing a projected deficit that could reach as high as $1.2 million dollars. While we are engaged in this difficult process, it will be important that as a district team we all work together to continue improving student learning in and out of the classroom. We cannot afford to let our students down by using the condition of our state's economy and public education's fiscal crisis as an excuse for not making substantial progress with 21st century reform. It is my intent that we forge ahead with our one-to-one technology initiative as we navigate through this “perfect storm.”

 

I came across the following excerpt we should all keep in mind as we work together to streamline our programs, expand the availability and use of technology, and at the same time focus on a more efficient, economical, and effective learning system:

“...ed reform is not technology reform and...embedded, transformative technology is not simply digitizing what we’ve already been doing . Ed reform is about learning and the instructional practices and environments we need to create for students functioning in a world vastly different from the one we grew up in. This brings to mind the quote we often hear, 'We are educating students for the future they will grow up in, not our future.' As educators we need to take on the role of learners, risk takers, and innovators and gather as much information about learning, innovations, and future skills that our students will need and begin to reform education and work toward change at the grass roots level – our classrooms.” ~ Innovation, Change and Ed Reform For The Future Of Our Children

To help us focus our district-wide reform efforts that will keep us on target for a new and more effective system of learning, I suggest the following action steps as a basis for our work in the coming year. Let's begin by taking full advantage of the current economic and political situation to re-imagine and reform our entire preK-12 system by rapidly phasing out our industrial model of schooling, replacing it with an individually-focused, collaborative learning model. From there, let's work together to:

• restructure our system from one that centers on an age-based graded structure to a system modeled on demonstration of learning;

• reduce the amount of large-group, teacher-delivered, control-based instruction;

• integrate core and encore learning at the elementary level; move teacher planning/collaboration time to outside student day;

• employ a “School of One” concept or similar structure that provides customized lesson planning to meet the needs of each student and engage them in the labor of learning using multiple delivery modes:

•  

  • a large base group with multiple adults

  • variety of learning stations

    • teacher instruction (seminars)

    • technology-mediated instruction (pods)

    • virtual large group instruction (traditional online learning and assessment)

    • personal tutoring (peers)

    • intensive small group tutoring/relearning (adults)

  • mastery-based rather than age-dependent

  • integrated technology tools providing for blended as well as independent learning;

• provide dual language learning for all students starting at the early ages as a literacy component of a re-purposed Title I program;

• require that all students complete at least one online documented learning experience and one college-credit course for graduation;

• rapidly phase out “cafeteria-style” secondary system of independent courses and replace with project-based, collaborative learning that integrates core and encore content;

• substantially increase learning time for all using one or more methods:

•  

  • expanding the traditional school day and calendar

  • using technology to expand learning beyond the traditional school day

  • opening media centers and access to computers/wifi after school, evenings, weekends, and summers

  • increasing teacher collaboration and professional learning time;

• design and provide intensive education and support to parents of children ages 0-3 in the art of home-based literacy (e.g.,“language dancing”) in their native language;

• reduce staffing and overall labor-related costs maintaining a “just-in-time” level of fund equity to avoid additional costs for payroll loans, etc;

• design and implement a merit-based compensation system that rewards the most effective teachers, administrators, and support staff;

• and, promote city-wide dialogue on the concept of community-based, extra-curricular activities that remove a significant financial burden from the backs of school districts and broadens opportunities for students.

Perhaps after reading through this list, and my earlier blogs, you have more questions than when you began. If this is true, great! My primary purpose is to generate a productive dialogue centered around on reform in our district as we work through our upcoming budget concerns and negotiate new labor contracts. We can no longer afford simply to adjust to the demands for higher achievement with incremental changes. The time for disruptive change is here.

 

“Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved."

~ William Jennings Bryan

 

No Office Day!

As a superintendent, even in a small district like ours, it gets very easy to bunker in at the administration office, particularly when dealing with perennial budget deficits and other administrative matters. I use technology quite a bit to create a transparent leadership style and provide staff, students and parents with real-time communications, but technology cannot adequately substitute for personal contact and live experiences in the classroom.

I decided to set aside at least one full day each week to being out of the office and in the schools. Calling it "no office day," I have tried setting time aside before but usually it wound up being squeezed and crowded out by "important" meetings and other emergencies.  The difference this time is that I've locked out the ability of anyone to schedule any appointments during "no office day," and I've given specific instructions to my executive assistant not to tamper with this schedule.  In addition, my iPad provides me with an adequate but non-intrusive way of staying connected with the most critical of my administrative duties.  Otherwise, on "no office day," the central office staff is in charge of the district while I re-connect with the very reasons I retired from military service and took up a career in educational leadership in the first place: students, teachers, and learning.

For the times they are a-changin'

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

~ Bob Dylan, Times They Are A Changing

 

As I've stated in previous blog posting Riding into the Perfect Storm of Reform, we are at the convergence of a perfect storm when it comes to public education in the United States. The devastating effects of a depressed economy that shows no end in sight will link with expanding mobile, digital technologies and mounting political pressures to force disruptive changes in K-12 teaching and learning. Talk about technology integration in the classroom and 21st century learning has been going on for at least the past fifteen years (actually, much longer than that but I'll stick with the time period wrapped around public availability of the internet) but resistance to change has been relentless. The excuses run the gamut and typically center on fear of change and the unknown results it can bring. Nick Bilton (2010) describes this fear and provides a litany of examples taken from key moments in technological change:

“Time and again, new technologies have been seen as frightening, intimidating, and a sure road to ruin ... When a development is new and just catching on, we rarely have a clear vision of the future, an understanding of the effects. We don't know how to integrate the innovation into our current habits and norms, and we also fear that adopting the new will affect our old ways of doing things. The tension, fear, and anxiety resolve only over long periods of time...”

 

“...the telephone, by bringing music and ministers into every home, will empty the concert halls and the churches (1876).”

 

“There is good reason to believe that if the phonograph proves to be what its inventor claims that it is, both book-making and reading will fall into disuse (1877).”

“Even the arrival of train transportation (in the mid-1800's) came with a railcar full of fears that left some holding on tightly to their horses....Many saw the railway as a threat to the social order, allowing the lower classes to travel too freely, weakening moral standards and dissolving the traditional bonds of community.”

“The printing press (in 1424) was subject to the same kind of narrow thinking....(It) allowed the spread of information that couldn't be controlled by the clergy, kings, politicians, or the religious elite.”

 

Publication of Reader's Digest convinced many in the 1920's that “Americans were losing their ability to swallow a long, thoughtful novel or even a detailed magazine piece.”

“Television (in 1929) was expected to have devastating effects on the printed word and even the arts.”

 

Kenneth H. Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, “didn't really see a place for computers in the home (1976).”

 

The problem is that without the kinds of changes that a sour economy and new technology can offer public education, our students will continue to attend schools designed for a bygone era and lose out on new opportunities. Worse case, they may disengage completely and join the growing numbers of people who have become financial burdens on society. The new year – the first year in the second decade of the 21st century – will offer us one of the best opportunities we've had yet to grasp change and remake our classrooms and schools. But only if we accept it.

“You can lament the changes that are happening today – tomorrow's history – convincing yourselves of the negatives and refusing to be a part of a constantly changing culture. Or you can shake off your technochondria and embrace and accept that the positive metamorphosis will continue to happen, as it has so many times before.”

The excerpts above are from Nick Bilton's book, I live in the future & here's how it works: why your world, work, and brains are being creatively disrupted. Crown Business, New York, 2010. Nick is lead writer and technology reporter for the New York Times Bits Blog. I highly recommend that all school leaders put it on your reading list to start out this new year and share it vociferously with your staffs and communities. For those of you with a new Kindle, it's available from Amazon.com.

Happy new year, happy new decade!  The future has yet to be written.

 

Riding into the Perfect Storm of Reform

NOTE:  This post is part of the December 26-January 1 "Blog 4 Real Education Reform - The (Action) Sequel." Blog links are being posted at Paula White's Cooperative Catalyst

It's here. We're in the middle of it. And when it ends, the landscape will look very, very different.

Not much changes in your neighborhood over time. If you don't believe me, step outside your door and look around. What you see for the most part is the same thing you would have seen yesterday, last week, and most likely last year. I live in an older neighborhood and with the exception of a few cosmetic changes to some of the homes, along with a couple of new ones built in vacant lots, it still resembles what it looked like fifty years ago. And I dare suggest that it will look the same fifty years from now. Unless nature has something to say about it. In my town, as in many others across the mid-west, straight-line winds and the occasional tornado can alter a neighborhood with suddenness and finality. In other regions, it might be fires, twisters, hurricanes, floods and other catastrophes that do the same. Often, when it's over, what gets built in the wake of the destruction looks and feels very different from the past. A new vision takes its place.

Economic storms quite often produce similar results. One only needs to look back to the progressive era born out of the growing gap between the super wealthy and poor at the turn of the 20^th century. Thirty years later, the Great Depression spawned a move towards liberal socialism and eventual rise of the middle class. There are many other examples from the post-Civil War economic collapse to the oil embargo and double-digit inflation of the 1970's.

Public education is in the middle of a perfect storm and its giving us the opportunity to finally – and belatedly - re-vision and reshape our teaching and learning systems to meet the needs of 21^st century students. Not just talking about change, but doing it! The landscape of education is being buffeted like never before by a combination of growing political forces, flat-world economic pressures, expanding technologies, public discontent, and declining financial resources. Resistance is futile (sorry, but I've always wanted to use that line), change is imminent, denial is a complete waste of time. And, we don't have time. The question then is, “will you be the change, or will you be changed?”

“Our system of public education – our curricula, teaching methods, and the tests we require students to take – were created in a different century for the needs of another era. They are hopelessly outdated.” ~ Wagner (2008, p. 9)

“Indeed, most educators labor in bureaucratic, rule-driven school systems that owe more credit to the practices of early 20^th century factory management than to any notion of how to foster great teaching and learning in the 21^st century.” ~ Hess (2010, p. 1)

As superintendent, I see my primary role in the areas of budgeting and reform as helping to develop and guide a leadership core that can move us through this storm and use the powerful forces created to substantially alter our outdated, over-regulated, teacher-centric, control-oriented form of K-12 education. We have the opportunity to achieve a whole new vision for adult and student learning that capitalizes on a lean budget and emerging new technologies. By the end of 2011, our goal should be to have taken the steps necessary to move through and beyond these creatively destructive forces, emerging on the other side with a whole new design for learning.

Alison Zmuda (2010) talks about moving to action starting with the following reflective question: “How committed are we to actually doing something to realize our hopes?”

“We cannot wait for the day when the stars align, when budgets are flush, or when colleagues are willing. We must begin with being the change we wish to see in our classrooms and our schools. … The largest obstacle to this process can be the shackles we place on our own thinking.” (p. 82-83)

Working our way through what is collectively one of public education's most significant budget challenges in recent history will certainly not be easy, but it can provide all of us with the unprecedented opportunity to re-imagine and redesign our entire system of administration, teaching, learning and support. To begin this new year, I propose ten essential questions that can help frame our conversations which form the basis for ours action on a 2011-12 budget and beyond:

• How should we redesign our district and building administrations to maximize efficiency and economy while providing sufficient leadership and support for a 21^st century learning system? What new leadership structure based on a 21^st century organizational model could effectively replace the costly industrial hierarchical structure employed in most school districts today?

• From a point of view of each student, how should we redesign our teaching and learning environments to move away from19^th and 20^th century industrial models of education to one that goes beyond the basic accumulation of knowledge and skills, incorporating 21^st century learning styles and goals? (One note here: putting lipstick on a pig doesn't change it from being a pig. Many schools that call themselves 21^st century learning environments mainly have resorted to wearing lipstick. The basic out-dated model of schooling is still prevalent.)

• What should a team of adult and student learners look like in a 21^st century school house? How should the team strive to replicate the environmental, political, and economical changes currently being experienced world-wide while anticipating the unknown future?

• How do we move away from a costly educational model “that prizes efficiency over development of learners' intelligence?” (Zmuda, p. 10)

• What evidence can we produce or have we explored that supports the continuation of any instructional, administrative, and support programs we currently employ now in our district, in our schools, and in our individual classrooms? How does the evidence connect with our vision, mission and goals, and what might it suggest regarding the continuation, expansion, reduction or elimination of these programs?

• What student supports (remedial and accelerated) are absolutely necessary given the goal for all students to graduate college- and career-ready despite the changing structures of the family and surrounding communities? How do we efficiently and economically incorporate those supports into a new 21^st century learning system?

• How do we redesign our personnel contracts, compensation, and instructional staffing models to move our educational profession out of the current industrial labor era based primarily on seniority and protectionism, into a 21^st century model that values and rewards pre-teacher preparation, creativity, innovation, collaboration, leadership, life-long learning, results, and new ideas free from the constraints of current practice?

• How do we convince our legislative leaders that less is more when it comes to the growing and costly administrative burden of state and federal regulations and statutes? What evidence will we need to produce to support our contention that we can be successful at significantly raising student achievement for every child if they acquiesce to our requests?

• How can we utilize limited and declining resources most efficiently to redesign our traditional school houses into spaces that are more flexible and supportive of 21^st century learning, as well as cost-efficient and economical to maintain?

References:

Hess, Frederick M., Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling. ASCD, 2010

Wagner, Tony, The Global Achievement Gap. Basic Books, 2008

Zmuda, Allison, breaking free from myths about teaching and learning. ASCD, 2010