The Church Task Believers

I watched single-taskers this morning. Stopped at an intersection in a university town, an ambulance, blaring siren and flashing lights, was trying to get through the clog of traffic, but no one in a group of 12 cars could multitask - they could not take in their surroundings, they could not assess the other traffic, they could not develop a plan, a solution, that would allow the ambulance to move toward the hospital. They were driving: single-tasking in the way too many educational "experts" want students to function.

According to "experts," this is impossible...

Multitasking at a Virginia Beach diner.

I thought of this as I read a blog post claiming to be a "Brilliant Report" a bit later:

"For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds.

"Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

'“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”' - Annie Murphy Paul

According to Rosen and Paul, there is something "scary" happening here. According to me, there is something "human" and "functional" here.

But then, I was not raised to be a dedicated Calvinist church-goer, or a dedicated "school student." Instead, I was raised to be a "learner."

"effective," "productivity," "on-task,"
attention-means-gaze, are all the inheritances
of our Puritan past

What Rosen and Paul want are churchgoers. Not just any churchgoers, but Calvinist Protestants of the New England Puritan mode. Sit up straight, stare front, all read together, don't you look out the window! This isn't a Catholic churchgoer, surrounded by images and movement, candles and scents, sculptures and varied light, movement and individual action - it is pure American Calvinism, it is behaviour control, compliance training. It is not about individual learning, but the kind of highly-structured group motion development inherent in our imported Prussian Model of education.

Dr. Rosen's problem, Annie Murphy Paul's problem, is that they are, without even knowing it, rejecting student engagement as an educational core.

"During the first meeting of his courses, Rosen makes a practice of calling on a student who is busy with his phone," Paul writes. “I ask him, ‘What was on the slide I just showed to the class?’ The student always pulls a blank,” Rosen reports. “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps drive the point home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in class.”'

The egocentrism drips here. Dr. Rosen believes his mere presence assures that students will want to stare at the bullet points on his PowerPoint. With a lecture style fully honed during the overhead projector and Kodak Carousel era, he assumes that everyone, not just a few eager teacher-pleasers in the front two rows, is paying attention. My guess is that he could have called on random students in the back ten years ago and found similar blank stares. It's an effing PowerPoint, my dear professor, its already in note form, why the hell would I be listening to you?

So here's the research question Rosen and Paul are asking: "Assuming that the best way for students to learn is to do nothing but listen to "me" and read exactly what "I" have assigned, are students listening to my every word and reading everything I have assigned?" Then they rate "learning" according to a student's ability to repeat every word they say. No, its worse, this "research" measures learning according to the metric of "seat time" - are you sitting there being "a good little white boy or girl"?

"...the promise of educational innovation is less about processing power and software code and more about the opportunity to release ourselves from general assumptions regarding how instruction is organized and delivered," Joel Rose wrote in The Atlantic last year.  "It's why our collective charge in K-12 innovation today should go beyond merely designing and producing new tools. Rather, our focus should primarily be to design new classroom models that take advantage of what these tools can do."

So, if your goal is children sitting still and "Reading, writing, listening," as Annie Paul Murphy tweeted to me, then, multitasking "disrupts" learning. But if your vision of learning looks a bit more active, then these technologies do not disrupt, they connect, engage, expand possibilities, make learning possible for those formerly labelled as "disabled."

It's not disruption, it's learning...

The sad fact here is that this is neither a question of technology, nor a question of disruption and attention. It is a question of quality teaching. In 2007 I wrote, in the Grand Rapids Press and on this blog, about the power of teaching with these tools - and of course, it isn't just a "why," but a "how." In classes I teach phones and computers are how we investigate and share information, we're not dependent on Slide Decks and bullet points. We converse on our devices via TodaysMeet and Twitter and Google Docs. We read on our devices. We use Google and Wikipedia and other search tools for discovery. We Skype with experts.

In other words, we use the communication and information tools of this century to learn, rather than bemoaning the loss of an elitist past.

We, in education, need to be better than this. While the medical profession embraces the "MTAT" - the MultiTasking Aptitude Test - because, "Emergency physicians epitomize what it's like to work in a time-pressured, interruption-based environment. Multitasking is necessary to survive in this environment where you are constantly shifting focus and addressing new tasks or problems as they arise," we have writers like Paul quoting, "David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who’s studied the effects of divided attention on learning," who, she says, "takes a firm line on the brain’s ability to multitask: “Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time."' In other words, according to these "experts" and their "research," the work of everyone in hospital emergency rooms, or in police work, or even in short-order cooking, is impossible... because, of course, their studies prove that.

Let me end by going back to this morning. I have sat in Emergency Vehicles, driving, talking on the radio, communicating with a partner, planning a series of actions on which vast knowledge of both tactics and law must underlie, figuring out a route, knowing if anyone is on the sidewalk if driving there must be an option, and I have watched single-taskers trying to figure out how to get out of the way. I'm sure Dr. Meyer thinks planning out a life-saving strategy and communication and driving fast are all "simple tasks." I'm sure Dr. Rosen thinks I was endangering lives because my brain doesn't work like his. And I'm sure Annie Murphy Paul would think I wasn't attending to what was "important."

Not only do researchers find that multitasking is possible,
they are starting to list the advantages.

But those of us in the real world understand that humans multitask every minute. We are not sharks. We can be in love and eat at the same time. We can read and feel the sun on our skin. We can listen to complex music and still be aware of our surroundings. We can talk on the phone and work on the computer.  I can even type this post while observing a brilliant example of kids proving out a new paradigm of education.

We are multitaskers, or someone has trained us not to be.

- Ira Socol

The system design is not our fault. Its perpetuation is our problem.

I often tell American educators that if we are succeeding with a third to a half of our students, it is only because our educators are trying so hard. The system, after all, was designed and built with the intent to fail 80% of students before 8th grade ended, so we are far exceeding our "design capability."

I've written lots on this... the most accessible versions here as a One, Two, Three, Four, Five part series on the history of our system. It's an ugly story of a system designed to fail most our children, designed to create compliant factory workers and miners, designed to limit the opportunities for the poor to move between socio-economic classes, and designed to ensure an unchallenged power structure. And for 180 years it has done those things with intentionality, whether the hands on the wheels were Henry Barnard and Ellwood Cubberley, or Bill Gates and Salman Khan.

From age-based grades and grade-level-expectations, to textbooks, Carnegie Units, chairs and desks, the teaching wall, and the shape of our classrooms, we were handed a set of horrible paradigms - a virtual war against childhood - and asked to somehow lead our nation into a future...

That's the basic truth, it isn't our fault that our schools are literally built from the ground up to work against us. But, if we are not fighting to change that system every day, from whatever position we hold in education, that is our fault. If we are educators, we begin that profession with a commitment to children, and that is a sacred trust.

The change needed is radical. It is essential that we redefine almost everything about our schools, which is a very difficult task to undertake, but we have a system that is somewhere between 50 and 120 years behind the curve, and that should promote some urgency.

Misunderstanding Cognition

By the time our educational system, whether in the US or the British Empire, was codified and permanized between 1890 and 1910, it was already deeply behind, locked in the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States - the arrival of the railroad, steamboat, telegraph, and mass produced print media - and in the "Second British Empire" in Englland-dominated lands - a place of simply processing the spoils of the colonies. Of course both were already history, as the Boer War had proved to the United Kingdom and the arrival of airplane, cinema, telephone, and phonograph were proving in both environments.

Whether colonial resentments and migration, or the new cognitive authority of the motion picture, the "sit and git," "same for all," step-by-step filtering system of the educational design was already failing these nations, no matter what racist apologists for the past like Woodrow Wilson might say.

We know the failure because of the willingness of all these nations to rush into war with no critical thinking from 1898 to 1914 (including the ease of media manipulation). We know the failure because it remained the "non graduates" - from Henry Ford to Frank Lloyd Wright to the Wright Brothers - who dominated the new economy of the time.

Almost 50 years ago, Polaroid introduces the Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat era.

Notice that photography is no longer about memory, but is instead an
instantaneous social connectivity tool. Kids passed dirty pictures too...

Since 1910 the divide between reality and education has grown exponentially, rushing at breakneck speed over the past fifty years. Schools missed the critical changes even in print literature - from John Dos Passos USA Trilogyin the 1930s to the Beatsin the 1950s to Tom Wolfein the 1960s - and so - contemporary language continues to elude most teachers of the English language. Schools missed the impact of film literature on culture, the impact of visual media in general. Mass media, always minimally and poorly taught, has failed us from Orson Welles' War of the Worlds (really? can't tell news from drama on the radio?) to the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Schools missed the revolution in interpersonal communications which was created by the telephone, the automobile, the urbanization of the world, and eventually the contemporary technologies of chat, mobile devices, email, Twitter, et al...

This still horrifying bit of 8mm movie film (not even yet "Super 8") represents a
key moment in the citizen journalism we all know today. 50 years ago in November...

Each of these changes, despite what many in education will tell you, alters cognition because it alters cognitive authority - that which allows someone to believe something. We know how quickly this happens too. During the Spanish American War American filmmakers understood the need for people to see "moving images" so clearly that they faked them. Thirty years earlier a "cyclorama" might have been clear truth, now, something else was essential.

Scholarly material: The Gettysburg Cyclorama seemed
definitive until film appeared.

What is truth now? We were all reminded last week that if truth once came from organizations like NBC News and CNN, that's no longer true at all. So how do our students decide if they can trust us?

If your answer remains, "because I (or the book) told them," it may be time to go, because few will believe you, even if some pretend to for grading purposes. They know that educators lie - they make up silly simplifications because they think kids are stupid. They teach stuff even a casual Google search proves untrue, whether in math or social studies. They make up rules which lack any logic. They divide up subjects and time with no regard to how humans learn. They test in ways which measure nothing important. And thus, in the cognitive authority structure of this century - our students' century - educators, "we," have proven wholly unreliable. And no amalgam of initials after your name or collected diplomas on your wall will change that.

So we need to doubt everything. Question everything. Engage in "Zero-Based Design" thinking, which imagines that we can start from the ground up, instead of inheriting a dysfunctional structure. And we need to act. As an Iowa superintendent said on Monday, "This is urgent, we can't keep doing this to kids."

The system is not our fault, but every day we continue to tolerate it is. We need a sense of urgency. For our kids' sake.

- Ira Socol

All the "good people"

"And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take." - Ta-Nehisi Coates

What are we willing to tolerate in our schools? Which behaviors are we willing to "accept" because otherwise, it gets too hard?

I'm not talking about kids. I'm talking about the adults that we employ. What guides our decisions when we consider teachers and other educators? And what does that choice of guides tell us about how we value children?

I am a huge supporter of American educators... teachers, principals, librarians, counselors, bus drivers, the people in the cafeteria, custodians, everyone. I believe in paying these people well, treating them like the incredibly valuable professionals they are, in tenure, in due process, in unions - all of that. It makes me sick that we live in societies in which stock brokers - who are nothing more than bookies in better suits - get paid more than teachers - who are in charge of our future. It speaks to a level of warped priorities that is hard to fathom, but...

Not everyone belongs in our schools. Not everyone who currently works in our schools should be in our schools. Not everyone who can graduate from a teacher education program is capable of being a teacher, nor is everyone who can write a cute essay and be accepted into Teach for America. These jobs are too difficult, and they are far too important.

We know that certain school paradigms (like KIPP - above) are racist and based on
false assumptions instead of research and knowledge, but too often we allow similar
nonsense to go on down the corridor.

Over the past two months I've listened very carefully to what educators, challenged to change, say. I've listened carefully because (a) that is my job, (b) this is my research question of the moment, and (c) because I am fascinated. And quite often I hear educators who deeply wrestle with how to make schools better for kids, and who wrestle with that every day. But sometimes I hear others. I hear the "yeah, buts..." as I've come to call them.

The "yeah but" response sounds like this, "I know this teacher is a problem, but she's really nice and she's been here a long time." Or this, "I know I should learn that, but its just easier to do what I've always done." Or this, "You know, you're right but we can't make our teachers uncomfortable." Or this, "Well, we're really trying to work on this, and he is trying to change a little."

What the "yeah but" response means is that the educator saying that has chosen to value the adults more highly than the children they work for. It might be themselves - their own comfort, their own laziness, their own lack of professional commitment - or it might be their "adult community" that they value more than kids - workplace harmony, an easier job as an administrator, the desire not to have the really difficult conversations. But whatever, the "yeah but" response indicates that the person giving it has divided the world into first and second class citizens, and then has placed the children in the "second class" position.

"I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people," Coates writes in the Op-Ed piece quoted at the start, and I want to ask the same questions in education. How often is it acceptable for students to say, as I've heard teachers say, "its easier for me if I don't learn that"? How often is it acceptable for students to say, as I've heard a few school librarians say, "its better for me if I have a few hours of quiet time by myself each day"? How often is it that an individual student gets to set the noise level in a classroom, a corridor, a cafeteria? How often do we accept children who, not doing anything near what we think is their best work, choose to continue to do that completely unchallenged?

Simple answer is, "we don't." Which means that if we "tolerate" answers like that from our adults, we have made a choice not to value our kids as what is most important. Often, yes, we are actually "saying" that a school employee's right to be lazy is more important than a child's right to the best education we can offer. Is that a sign we're ready to put up over our schools' entries?

If not, maybe we need to start saying something else...

One thing which must be unacceptable among adults in our schools is an unwillingness to be not just active learners but professionals who adapt their practices based on new learning. We literally know a million times more about the human brain and the universe than we did a generation ago, and it is incomprehensible to me that anyone involved in the education of children has not changed what they do and how they do it.

glia cells, ignored a decade ago, now show us remarkable things about learning
and FMRIs have revealed the teenage brain in incredible new light

Ten years ago, for example, most of the cells of the brain - how our brains work - was completely ignored. Five years ago we were only beginning to understand how playing video games not only boosts learning, but boosts "traditional" reading. If you attended college even this year, your understanding of the teenage brain is probably completely wrong, based in outdated, non-evidence-based assumptions which live on in textbooks written based on decade-old knowledge bases. Imagine going to your doctor and having her or him treat you based solely on knowledge and opinion gained in medical school in 1975.

That  "old doctor," the one who might not believe in MRIs and contemporary medications, might be a hell of a nice guy. He might have coached Little League for years, helped his neighbors, been a pillar of his church. He might be helping grandchildren get through college. But still, I don't want him in my hospital, I don't want him treating my family, or anyone else.

Coates builds his argument against "good people" around the racist incident at a New York City delicatessen involving actor Forrest Whitaker, "The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a nigger, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked." Well, I'd ask the same question. If this was your child, would you want this "professional" teaching them? leading them? working in their school?

If your answer is "no," then, you have a responsibility to act, from whatever position you are in. And you have a responsibility to act with just one guiding question, "What is the right thing to do for our kids - all of our kids?" All the other questions? Those are just excuse-makers.

- Ira Socol

Kurt Eisner and Aaron Swartz and the Freedom of Information

There's a famous bit of history from 1914. It's called "the blank cheque telegram," and it was sent by the German Imperial Chancellor,  Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to the Austrian ambassador in Berlin on the sixth of July.

"Finally, as far as concerns Serbia, His Majesty, of course, cannot interfere in the dispute now going on between Austria-Hungary and that country, as it is a matter not within his competence.

"The Emperor Francis Joseph may, however, rest assured that His Majesty will faithfully stand by Austria-Hungary, as is required by the obligations of his alliance and of his ancient friendship. - Bethmann-Hollweg

Historians suggest this communication allowed the Austro-Hungarian Empire to begin the Great War (World War I). And this telegram did much to "establish" - in British, French, and American eyes, the "German War Guilt" which would explain the massive reparations Germany was asked to pay in order to have peace.

This telegram was in public hands in 1919 because of an obscure political leader, Kurt Eisner, briefly, in 1918-1919, Minister-President of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Minister-President Eisner believed in many freedoms, including the freedom of information and the call by the American President Woodrow Wilson that, "there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view." And believing thusly, he dumped the entirety of files of the Bavarian Foreign Office into public view.

Though Bavaria was part of the German Empire, and would be part of the German Republic, it functioned in many ways as the separate kingdom it had been before 1870. It had its own army, its own post office, and though it did not act separately from Germany, its own foreign office. All of Germany's diplomatic correspondence had thus been copied to Bavaria, and thus this Berlin telegram was there...

Eisner is kind of a hero of mine. He believed in democracy deeply, including democracy of the arts and education (he thought new and more diverse playwrites, composers, artists, and authors deserved more exposure), and he believed in a world of open communication.

In the end he was shot, murdered in the street. Diplomacy went back into secrecy.

Ah well.

Here we are in the "now," in the period of Bradley Manning and Aaron Swartz. Of pay walls and locked down internet sites and government prosecutions and the classic midwestern mother bankrupted by the RIAA.

Eisner may have gotten off easy.

In this week after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, about to be tried for freeing publicly-funded research from behind pay walls maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we all need to wonder where we stand, and perhaps we need to take action.

'"Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT," [Leo Rafael Reif, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] wrote. "I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took."
"Rief added that he will share the report publicly once it has been completed."

Aaron Swartz

Swartz was facing, "a sentence of up to 35 years in jail and $1 million in fines." Which is far more than many killers get, and incredibly severe considering no one from Wall Street in 2008 even was put on trial. Yup. 

Tweet from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web:
Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.

Swartz may not be the "inventor of the internet" that CNN called him, "but he was a factor in fashioning some of the Web's upper floors. With his contributions to RSS coding and the Web application framework, Swartz made some of today's more expansive Internet possible. But what Swartz also helped create was a philosophy of the Internet, one that remains the subject of great controversy almost 20 years into its life: the libertarian idea that information wants to be free."

Bradley Manning

Meanwhile, Bradley Manning remains under prison conditions close to torture for, like Kurt Eisner, following Woodrow Wilson's advice.  Because in this country it is the legacy of Michael Eisner, not Kurt, which rules. The Michael Eisner legacy is simple: If you are powerful, you get to profit from the work of others for all time. If you are not, life sucks. Eisner built the Disney empire (ABC, ESPN, etc) by leveraging the copyrights on the work of the long-dead Walt Disney.

"Invent a drug that's a cure for cancer," I tell kids who wonder about copyright law, "and the government will let you own it for a dozen years. Draw a mouse and you've got protection for more than a century."

It's not a system written to encourage the development of intellectual property, and its not a law designed to serve our nation or or world. It is a law written by greedy slobs who've never invented anything, but want to live well in perpetuity off the labors of others.

In the Manning and Swartz cases the issues are particularly absurd. Bradley Manning blew the whistle on horrific military and diplomatic practices. Aaron Swartz freed intellectual content, not from the author/researchers, but from companies like Elsevier who profit simply because moronic university tenure committees prefer pay-walled journals to open sourced journals and blogs.

There is plenty of blame to go around. The United States Justice Department, United States Attorney General Eric Holder, President Barack Obama, the administration of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Disney Corporation (ABC/ESPN/Miramax/et al), The RIAA, Elsevier and other journal publishers, the members of the Authors' Guild of America, and many more people and organizations who should be held accountable. This group includes the faculties of our research universities who encourage paywalled publishing which benefits only the egos of those who grant PhDs and faculty tenure.

But there are also plenty of fixes possible. Some require new laws, some require personal efforts:

1. Limit copyright protection to 35 years - or less (sign White House petition here)
2. Require that academic research resulting from any form of public funding be published openly and remain freely available (sign White House petition here). This does not suggest that academics cannot create books which are paid for, simply that their research findings must be available.
3. Limit any court judgment for online copyright "theft" (downloading content) to double the retail cost of that content.
4. Fire US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, the prosecutor of Aaron Swartz (sign White House petition here).
5. If you are an academic, stop citing any article not freely available. This is not only the "right thing to do" on this issue, but it is the only way that allows most people to vet your work.
6. If you are an academic, post everything you've written to free sites.
7. If you are an academic, require open publishing for both hiring and tenure.
8. Refuse to purchase books written by members of the Authors' Guild - singled out for the viciousness of their attacks on even disability access.
9. Consider whether you really want to support musicians whose work is protected by the RIAA.
10. Extend full legal protection to military - and other government - whistle blowers.

This is important. Information wants to be free. And it is up to us to make that so.

The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning

- Ira Socol

Who will bring the fight for children to the here and now?

Perhaps I was born to be a revolutionary. Perhaps.

At least I know I was born to be uncomfortable with the world as it is, and that is where revolutions begin - discomfort, dissatisfaction, perhaps distrust.

It is just past Christmas and the Solstice, Hanukkah and the New Year. It is that moment when we are at the darkest hour that the days begin to lengthen and hope begins to spring forth again. This is why, though Jesus was pretty assuredly born in July, and Hanukkah commemorates religious lunatics who would make the Taliban look reasonable, and the New Year might find itself at any point of our orbital ellipse, we bring our candles to this northern hemisphere moment of darkness and celebrate re-birth and re-commitment.

And so, in January 2013 I look at the world many of us live in, that world of public education. Those places where we say to every child, "come on in, we'll do our best for you." And as I look I wonder what it is that we must do next.

Revolutions are dangerous things. They can surely run way off the rails... see the French Reign of Terror, or the Soviet Union under Stalin, or even, in some ways, Cuba. But revolutions remain necessary, in those just mentioned cases, France's Ancien Régime, the Russian Empire, or the Cuba of dictator Batista that many (including the parents of Florida Senator Marco Rubio) fled, were all nightmarish places of hunger and poverty and vicious assaults on the most basic human rights. It's not like following the status quo in any of those places would have represented a more acceptable outcome.

Even Velvet Revolutions have
their cost. Prague Spring, 1968

So revolutions are dangerous, but revolutions are essential. "God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion," Thomas Jefferson said. (later noting, "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.")

And revolutions can be "velvet," they need not be violent and highly destructive... though destruction of accepted practice is what separates a true revolution from a rebellion/civil war like the "American Revolution." (The American Revolution simply separated 13 British North American colonies from the nation of Great Britain, in almost every case, government forms, practices (such as voting), economic life, and citizen rights carried over intact.) Velvet or not, revolutions have very high costs, and require participants to take very high risks, which is why they are rare things.

Do we need an educational revolution? I surely believe so, whether it is led by a heroic leader in place like Alexander Dubcek or by a charismatic outsider like Nelson Mandela or Mohandas Ghandi. We can do without the Lenin-types I'd imagine, but I am not sure that another 20 years of children can afford to live with the system we've inherited from Henry Barnard, the Carnegie Corporation, and Benjamin Disraeli, any more than another generation of Chinese could have survived under the abusive chaos and poverty of Chang Kai-shek's Republic of China in 1949.

We need child-centered schools which allow children real choices so that they can learn to make choices. We need schools which embrace holistic, human assessment of where children are and where they need to go. We need schools which allow children and adolescents to be children and adolescents, and universities which embrace exploration and not regurgitation. We need schools which celebrate challenge instead of conformity. We need schools devoted to every child's needs rather than being devoted to systems and adult needs.

And to get there we must take risks, we must challenge what we can, we must subvert when necessary. More than anything, we need passionate commitment to change.

Passionate commitment to jumping off of our comfort zones, whatever those comfort zones are, and however far that jump can carry you as a differing human. Your jump may not be like mine. Mine may not be like someone else's. We jump differently at 23 than we do at 35 than we do at 50 than we do at 70, but we can all still intellectually leap. And so we must.

Passion commitment also means accepting risk, and challenge, and doubt. That is, after all, what we ask of our students every day, and that must be what we ask of ourselves.

So, wherever you are now, this new year is a great moment to leap. And with that in mind, I leave you with the music of revolutionary passion...

- Ira Socol

Enjolras
Do you hear the people sing?  
Singing a song of angry men?  
It is the music of a people  
Who will not be slaves again!  
When the beating of your heart 
Echoes the beating of the drums  
There is a life about to start  
When tomorrow comes!
Combeferre  
Will you join in our crusade?  
Who will be strong and stand with me? 
Somewhere beyond the barricade  
Is there a world you long to see?
Courfeyrac  
Then join in the fight  
That will give you the right to be free!!
All  
Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men? It is the music of a people 
Who will not be slaves again!  
When the beating of your heart 
Echoes the beating of the drums  
There is a life about to start  
When tomorrow comes! 
Feuilly  
Will you give all you can give  
So that our banner may advance 
Some will fall and some will live  
Will you stand up and take your chance?  
The blood of the martyrs  
Will water the meadows of France!
All  
Do you hear the people sing?  
Singing a song of angry men? 
It is the music of a people  
Who will not be slaves again! 
When the beating of your heart 
Echoes the beating of the drums  
There is a life about to start  
When tomorrow comes

 

I sat within the valley green, I sat me with my true love
My sad heart strove the two between, the old love and the new love
The old for her, the new that made me think on Ireland dearly
While soft the wind blew down the glen and shook the golden barley

'Twas hard the woeful words to frame to break the ties that bound us
But harder still to bear the shame of foreign chains around us
And so I said, "The mountain glen I'll seek at morning early
And join the bold united men, while soft winds shake the barley"

While sad I kissed away her tears, my fond arms round her flinging
The foeman's shot burst on our ears from out the wildwood ringing
A bullet pierced my true love's side in life's young spring so early
And on my breast in blood she died while soft winds shook the barley

But blood for blood without remorse I've taken at Oulart Hollow
And laid my true love's clay cold corpse where I full soon may follow
As round her grave I wander drear, noon, night and morning early
With breaking heart when e'er I hear the wind that shakes the barley

Stand up, damned of the Earth
Stand up, prisoners of starvation
Reason thunders in its volcano
This is the eruption of the end.
Of the past let us make a clean slate
Enslaved masses, stand up, stand up.
The world is about to change its foundation
We are nothing, let us be all.
This is the final struggle,
Let us group together, and tomorrow 
The Internationale
Will be the human race.

My name is John Riley
Ill have your ear only a while
I left my dear home in Ireland
It was death, starvation or exile
And when I got to America
It was my duty to go
Enter the Army and slog across Texas
To join in the war against Mexico
It was there in the pueblos and hillsides
That I saw the mistake I had made
Part of a conquering army
With the morals of a bayonet blade
So in the midst of these poor, dying Catholics
Screaming children, the burning stench of it all
Myself and two hundred Irishmen
Decided to rise to the call
(Chorus)
From Dublin City to San Diego
We witnessed freedom denied
So we formed the Saint Patrick Battalion
And we fought on the Mexican side
We marched neath the green flag of Saint Patrick
Emblazoned with Erin Go Bragh
Bright with the harp and the shamrock
And Libertad pala Republica
Just fifty years after Wolftone
Five thousand miles away
The Yanks called us a Legion of Strangers
And they can talk as they may
(Chorus)
From Dublin City to San Diego
We witnessed freedom denied
So we formed the Saint Patrick Battalion
And we fought on the Mexican side
We fought them in Matamoros
While their volunteers were raping the nuns
In Monterey and Cerro Gordo
We fought on as Irelands sons
We were the red-headed fighters for freedom
Amidst these brown-skinned women and men
Side by side we fought against tyranny
And I daresay wed do it again
(Chorus)
From Dublin City to San Diego
We witnessed freedom denied
So we formed the Saint Patrick Battalion
And we fought on the Mexican side
We fought them in five major battles
Churobusco was the last
Overwhelmed by the cannons from Boston
We fell after each mortar blast
Most of us died on that hillside
In the service of the Mexican state
So far from our occupied homeland
We were heroes and victims of fate

Must IRBs Crack Down on Educational Researchers?

Where is the look at “side effects” so essential to the “medical model?”

“There really is no “science” in educational research, nor should there be. To do scientific studies we need to be able to actually control the variables – and we can’t in education. There are just too many of them. Also, to do stats we need numbers – volume. There are few studies where N is large enough to warrant statistical analysis, but they do them anyways and the results get used as though they have some validity.

“Academia and formal education have subscribed to the notion that anything “scientific” is better than anything that isn’t, so we bend and stretch the notion of the scientific process to the point that it becomes meaningless. Adding the word “Science” to something doesn’t make it so. Very few things are actually sciences. Social Science is NOT a science. Nor is computer science (or math), for that matter.

“So long as we keep pretending that we are doing ‘science’ in Ed Research, we will not make any real progress.” - Katrin Becker

If educational research is a “science,” what does that mean? What, specifically, does it mean for those who conduct educational research? And if educational research is science, must it not carry the same obligations which bedeviled, say, Einstein and Oppenheimer?

What are the rules? What are the ethics? What are those obligations?

IRB training always refers to the lack of informed
consent in the infamous Tuskegee Experiment

For now, what does “informed consent” look like in educational research? What do ethics suggest about the possible “side effects” of research on children?

What should, for example, a university IRB (Institutional Review Board, the way universities approve research projects and oversee ethical treatment of human - and other - research subjects) demand from a faculty member or student researcher in terms of information and ethical expectations before that researcher can participate in studies which have the potential to harm young people? And what kinds of research must be evaluated for that potential harm?

The lack of “package inserts” and nationally advertised side effect warnings haunts the field of educational research and, along with the inability to create “double-blind” trials, makes a joke of that field’s pretenses towards the “gold standard” “medical model” of research imagined by 2002’s troublesome guide, Scientific Research in Education.

In the United States, the faux “medical model” of research in education has been the ‘law of the land’ since 2001. According to the US Department of Education, through both the No Child Left Behind legislation and the “What Works Clearinghouse,” educational research is defined by:

“Randomized, controlled, experimental studies, using the medical model of research.
“Not matched comparisons.
“Not quasi-experimental designs.
“Must establish causality, ruling out plausible explanations.
“Small, focused “interventions.”
“Limited teacher professional development components.
“Short-term.
“School patterns are not changed.
“Students are the unit of assignment, not classrooms or schools.
“No contextualization.” - Ellen B. Mandinach and Naomi Hupert (powerpoint download) EDC Center for Children and Technology edc.org/CCT 

But this is one of those conundrums. The “Medical Model” being defined by one impossibility in education, that double-blind trial, and one thing educational researchers traditionally refuse to acknowledge, the side effect.

If indeed that “double-blind” trial - where neither subject nor experimenter knows who is receiving an intervention - is even possible in medicine. To quote Michael Barbour (responding to a Newsweek article):

“This article is a crock – as it continues the myth of the double-blind, quasi-experimental model as the gold standard. Unfortunately educational research has often been driven by what will be funded or, in the case of unfunded research, what is easy to accomplish. In both instances this has resulted in poor research – and as long as the method of medical research is used as the measure of what we consider good or what we consider as working (as evidenced by the “What Works Clearinghouse” – another laughable initiative), educational research will get no better.

“What folks won’t tell you is that the double-blind quasi-experiment model isn’t blind. Real medications have side effects, sugar pills don’t. Real medications often have scents or textures that placebos don’t, to the point that in most instances those administering the treatments know whether a patient is getting the medication or the placebo.

“Let’s also not forget that most medications work with the body and in randomized instances, most differences in bodies will be a wash. This is not the case with educational research, as while a randomly selected group of students has the same chance of having a higher percentage of free or reduced lunch students in both the treatment and the control groups, it doesn’t guarantee it. But any noticeable difference in the percentage of this population in your two groups should yield widely differing results, regardless of the instructional intervention.

“This is why many folks have begun to argue that design-based research (also called developmental research) is the direction we should be heading. The problem is that no one will fund a study that is designed to address local situations, and not designed to be generalizable.”

That other issue? The warnings? Those “package inserts”? “All ideas are dangerous,” said my friend and collaborator Dr. Greg Thompson on Twitter the other night as we discussed this, but maybe certain ideas and experiments present greater immediate risks than do others. If scientists genetically modify animals or plants, can they control the spread of that invented mutation before they understand the risks fully? If a pill will put the user to sleep don’t we generally advise that, “this formula may cause drowsiness, if affected do not operate heavy machinery or drive a vehicle"?

In a first-year doctoral program course Dr. Robert Floden of Michigan State University presented us with a study he seemed to think was really good. It was a study by Dr. Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University and his collaborators of their Success for All reading program, one of those “gold standard,” “medical model” programs endorsed by the US Department of Education. Floden was upset when we challenged the report’s validity, but challenge it many of us did. One woman wondered if the effects seen were not a result of providing food to students throughout the day, or of increased time devoted to reading (effects not ruled out in the study). Others, including me, wondered about long-term interest in reading after being trained to read via chanting. Many of us wondered about the “pharma model” of research being conducted by those with a financial stake in the product’s success (Stockton, California spent between $4.6 million and $6 million to implement Success for All for one year). Still others wondered about psychological impacts, and I perhaps heightened tension in the room by suggesting that a program like this might, in a classroom of thirty kids, “improve reading scores for eight and cause two to kill themselves.” Inelegant, but a valid question even though my professor dismissed it. (Success for All, and its research base, has been challenged by others)

This week Macgregor Campbell, a New Scientist researcher and writer, brought this issue back to the fore for me, as I received a link to his article on TIMSS testing, West vs Asia education rankings are misleading, on the same day I received an email from a former professor and globetrotting TIMSS researcher.

If, as Campbell writes, those nations focusing on TIMSS results created demonstrably worse outcomes for children, what potential damage are TIMSS researchers doing to the children I work with in the United States and Ireland - two nations with political leaders deeply concerned about TIMSS results - or to hundreds of millions of children around the world?

“In 2007, Keith Baker of the US Department of Education made a rough comparison of long-term correlations between the 1964 mathematics scores and several measures of national success decades later.

“Baker found negative relationships between mathematics rankings and numerous measures of prosperity and well-being: 2002 per-capita wealth, economic growth from 1992 to 2002 and the UN's Quality of Life Index. Countries scoring well on the tests were also less democratic. Baker concluded that league tables of international success are "worthless" (Phi Delta Kappan, vol 89, p 101).”

Lower prosperity, lower measures of well-being, less economic growth potential, less likely to live as citizens of a democracy. I considered this alongside the warnings I often laugh at in televised pharmaceutical advertisements. Will a focus on the skills necessary for TIMSS success cause democracy to fail? Most likely not. Nor have many meds with dangerous side effects hurt me when I have taken them. But other side effects may be far more common.

Anti-Depressive television advertisement. Which "sexual side effect" will help cure depression?

“The 2012 TIMSS report immediately identifies East Asian countries among the top performers in TIMSS 2011. Also high percentages of East Asian students reach TIMSS international benchmarks. Benchmarks are classified by score as low, intermediate, high, and advanced. These are arbitrary and do not have any basis in research. They are simply a way to differentiate and classify test ranges. The media focus on findings such as these, and leaves the impression that comparisons across countries are valid, and helpful. They are not,” writes Dr. Jack Hassard of Georgia State University. If these measures lack validity, and they are used to help set local and national educational policies, are they potentially dangerous?

If an Irish 5th grader finds her school day more devoted to mathematics computation because her nation fared poorly on a TIMSS test, and has less time for questions of passionate interest - including non-computational maths - might there be damage? And if there is damage, who is responsible? Who has sought the “informed consent” of this student? Who will be held accountable if she abandons an interest in conceptual mathematics and thus limits her future earning potential?

Asthma drug possible side effects. What warnings might appear with educational policy interventions?

This is not an idle, hypothetical question. Research on TIMSS often quoted by Yong Zhao suggests that “there is a negative correlation between TIMSS scores and how much children enjoy mathematics and how confident they are in their abilities.” Thus, if Ireland’s education minister Ruari Quinn encourages his teachers to push to raise TIMSS scores, that result may be likely to occur.

A Brookings Institution report on PISA test results notes that soon after that 2006 international comparative reading test’s results were reported the World Bank began pressing for nations to alter their educational programs. “Soon after, a World Bank study pressed harder on the theme of causality, “Poland’s reading score was below the OECD average in 2000, at the OECD average in 2003, and above the OECD average in 2006, ranking 9th among all countries in the world…. With regard to the factors responsible for the improvement, the delayed tracking into vocational streams appears to be the most critical factor.”

But the causality suggested by the World Bank is simply not a truth. The Brookings report goes on to note that many of the nations involved in the PISA test showed similar gains among similar populations, though none of the World Bank’s causal interventions (which involved tracking) were involved in those other cases. In fact, other research indicated the issues created for many students by Poland’s particular approach to tracking. Now, the World Bank is a political organization, not an academic institution nor a research organization, but what of the academics who work for this organization? These researchers often are affiliated with major American and British universities, from Harvard “on down.” What, exactly, did they disclose about their research?

The issues for educational researchers stretch far deeper. Those involved in the development of America’s No Child Left Behind, and those involved in the work of organizations such as the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation which support government testing schemes, should have their own ethical concerns. Testing, specifically standardized, high-stakes testing, has serious and significant side effects which threaten the health and safety of children, and which routinely go undisclosed by the educational faculties of US universities.

“Much of the debate surrounding standardized testing is focused on the effects the testing atmosphere has on teachers and students. Negative side effects are associated with teacher decision making, instruction, student learning, school climate, and teacher and student self-concept and motivation. The tests have turned into the objective of classroom instruction rather than the measure of teaching and learning. Gilman and Reynolds (1991) reported sixteen side effects associated with Indiana’s statewide test, including indirect control of local curriculum and instruction, lowering of faculty morale, cheating by administrations and teachers, unhealthy competition between schools, negative effects on school-community relations, negative psychological and physical effects on students, and loss of school time.

“Testing anxiety related to these assessments affects all populations associated with the institution of education, such as students, teachers, administrators, and parents. Research reports that elementary students experience high levels of anxiety, concern, and angst about high-stakes testing (Barksdale-Ladd and Thomas 2000; Triplett, Barksdale, and Leftwich 2003). Triplett and Barksdale (2005) investigated students’ perceptions of testing. They concluded that elementary students were anxious and angry about aspects of the testing culture, including the length of the tests, extended testing periods, and not being able to talk for long periods of time.

“Student anxiety increases when teachers are apprehensive about the exams (Triplett, Barksdale, and Leftwich 2003). When students are drilled every day about testing procedures and consequences, the fear of failure prevails.” - Dr. Theoni Soublis Smyth, University of Tampa

My goal here is not to halt this kind of research, but to ask “educational researchers” and the review boards which monitor them, to own their responsibilities. I believe this begins with self-acknowledgement. We work in a field which involves the most vulnerable members of our human population, but we do not behave as if that is true. We constantly perform experiments on children with very, very little information given to the children, their parents, or even their teachers. We speak as if we “know,” when we usually do not. And in doing so we suggest to leaders - people like Barack Obama and Michael Gove along with thousands of local school administrators - that there are simple and definitive answers - that, for example, we might build a national database called “what works.”

Children are hurt daily by the actions of educational researchers. A child made miserable in classes with Success for All - perhaps a reasonably “achieving” student for whom SFA has never been shown to have any benefit (pdf download) - may find reading a ‘waste of his time,’ or may end up feeling that way about school in general, and that is a child harmed. A student made miserable by a testing regime, or who has their self-image redefined by a test, is harmed. A student whose teachers and administrators are panicked by potential test results is harmed. These are real dangers. Real threats to real kids, and at the very least, “we,” those of us in this field, must be much better at disclosing these facts to everyone impacted by “our” work.

Alain Resnais, 1959, Hiroshima Mon Amour, where Einstein and Oppenheimer
carried us?

All ideas, as Dr. Thompson noted, are dangerous. And all research is dangerous as well. Albert Einstein set about discovering the forces at the root of our universe - powerful, brilliant, positive research, but research which somehow found a conclusion at Hiroshima. A real attempt to help solve the horrors of severe arthritis pain led to the Vioxx nightmare. Many American university researchers contributed to the disasters created by No Child Left Behind and Scientific Research in Education, a legacy only Diane Ravitch seems to have struggled with. My early work - back in the last century - which often suggested single “best assistive technology solutions” was flawed, and, I am sure, hurt students who had needs other than those I had considered. And so, perhaps, we all had responsibilities to warn people about the potential for harm, but none of us did.

This should not stop ideas, and it should not stop research. But it should give us all pause, and perhaps those overseeing our research should demand more significant, and more reflective pauses. These are children, and they are our responsibility.

- Ira Socol