A Case for Reinventing Public Schools

If I were to ask you how much time per day children and teens spend with various media – computers, televisions, video games, etc – what would you say?

Would you imagine it is more time than young people spend in a school on any given day?

In a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation called GENERATION M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds (January 2010) they found that young people spend 7.5 hours per day engaging with various media – but because of multi-tasking they pack 10.75 hours of stuff into that 7. 5 hours (and that’s every single day). And that’s the average! 11-14 year olds pack in 11:53 per day (nearly 12 hours) in total media exposure!

In addition, texting is NOT part of this study however 7th to 12th graders report spending about 1 hour and 35 minutes per day sending or receiving text messages.

Here’s a quote from a press release about that study:

With technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth, according to a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation.  Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).  And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

The amount of time spent with media increased by an hour and seventeen minutes a day over the past five years, from 6:21 in 2004 to 7:38 today.  And because of media multitasking, the total amount of media content consumed during that period has increased from 8:33 in 2004 to 10:45 today.

Assuming this is true, what do you think the implications are for schools and schooling? 

If young people spend approximately 6 hours per day in the schooling environment (not counting extra-curricular activities) doing what we might call single tasking while spending about 7.5 hours per day multi-tasking with technology what chance do schools have in getting and keeping their attention – let alone getting them to learn anything?

And, young people spend time using media 7.5 hours per day seven days per week, 365 days per year.

This blog has been attempting to explore the difference between schooling and education. One of the key models I’ve developed to explain this difference is something I call the Spheres of Influence model. The concept originated in some work we did with a school district in southern California back in the early 90s.

The model attempts to visualize several things. 1) Schools operate under a control and compliance operating principle. 2) The organizing principle is a hierarchy however that can be shown in a different way 3) All human beings want to have some control over themselves as well their environment. 4) the model attempts to show different spheres of influence from a systems perspective.

The model begins with the young person in the middle and moves out from there. The classroom is the first sphere of influence, then the school, then the school district. The school board has the most influence over the district with the state department of education influencing the boards and the federal department influencing the states.

The image above is a venn diagram showing these spheres of influence. It’s not to scale or meant to show the difference or amount of influence each sphere has over the other. This model by itself can be a catalyst for conversations about improvements and changes in the system that might be beneficial to the overall outcomes of the system.

At the same time we can also draw another model which reflects the influences in the young person’s life outside of the schooling system. These sets of influences can be considered the education environment (note: I will need to define what I mean by schooling vs education in another blog post).

This set of influences again start with the young person in the center. The family is the immediate sphere of influence around the young person, then the neighborhood and the community. Moving out from there is the city, the state, and then the nation.

The image above left is a venn diagram of these spheres of influence.

Note that the specific types of influences are not shown nor are the degrees of influence each sphere has over the other. Media of all types will show up in this sets of influences.

Again this model can serve in a number of capacities when thinking about making changes or improvements to the lives of young people.

In light of the research shown in the report mentioned above one simple way of looking at these things can be time. A young person spends more time in the model I’m calling education then they do in the model I’m calling schooling.

Research has also shown that young people spend up to 16% of their time in the schooling environment while they spend up to 84% of their time in what I’m calling the education environment.

The model at the top of the page, while not precisely to scale, attempts to show the situation described here.

These models, taken separately or together can provide a perspective and some food for thought when engaging in a process exploring influences in young people’s lives as well as changes that might be made in schools in order to be relevant in today’s world.

What do you think is most important in looking at these models? What kinds of things could you imagine schools doing in order to put them in the education business? What questions do these models raise?

What are the implications of the use and influence of technology and media on these models? and what should be changed in the system of schools and schooling to take advantage of technology and media?

Here are several links to the press release and to the report: Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds.

If you haven’t already seen it I posted a blog post on our main blog about the Future of Business Education. This post was inspired by a video interview by the McKinsey Consulting firm of Blair Sheppard, dean of Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. As the dean of the school he’s feeling like business schools need to change to provide a different and better product for a new era.

Check out the post at

http://www.innovationlabs.com/2010/01/future-of-business-education/

and let me know what you think. Will business schools be able to make the necessary changes to not only keep up with the changes in society but to lead?

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working with several clients focused on Career and Technical Education. One of the projects involved helping State Directors of CTE craft a vision and a set of principles to guide development of CTE into the future.

The other project focused on helping one state understand and define for themselves what it means to be ‘college and career ready’ (a new jargon that is getting more and more focus and will possibly be made into policy nationwide.

During these sessions, as has been the case for more than 10 years now, there was considerable conversation about the need for, and value of, digital learning portfolios.

As I listened to these conversations it became clearer and clearer to me that the perfect platform for wide spread adoption of a digital online portfolio for schools and learning already exists and is used by more than 300 million people. It’s called Facebook.

It’s so obvious to me that every person that has a profile is already used to creating and sharing some part of themselves with other people – mostly friends – but that this platform can easily be morphed into one that will support digital files and media of all types – allowing people of all ages to share and show-off what they have produced in the context of learning.

Facebook was originally conceived as a tool for people involved in a school to stay in touch with other people they knew from that school. As it has morphed into a social media platform for people of all walks of life the concept is very well accepted and well used (people spend more time on Facebook than they do on just about any other web site).

It makes perfect sense to me that every profile can have an option to add a section specifically designed to ’show-off’ all forms of self-expression and learning.

If I was an app developer I’d develop that app immediately!

It might seem that I have a negative attitude about schools and schooling. I can understand how it might seem that way since much of what I write about seems to lean in a specific direction. I’d like to offer another perspective or another possible way of seeing the things I write about.

In much of what I write about I am advocating for examining our thinking about why schools exist and trying to understand a little more about what we do in schools and schooling. I am not doing this from an academic perspective. I am a concerned citizen that would like the best for each and every young person in the world – no matter what their background, nationality, religious upbringing, or socio-economic status.

I am inspired by the fact that schools and schooling touch each and every young person at some point in their lives. As such schools and schooling would seem to have a huge potential for making positive changes in the world.

That said, the art an article a colleague of mine sent me earlier today reminded me that there are many places throughout this country where young people are not getting anything close to what could be an amazingly wonderful opportunity to learn and grow and be successful in their lives.

This article reminded me of often heard rhetoric about zero tolerance for violence and gang related activities in schools. This rhetoric often results in perpetuating and increasing violence – it doesn’t reduce violence. Our actions – the actions and behaviors demonstrated by adults – in school settings (which include policies and practices) betray our real underlying philosophies. The results speak for themselves.<

Personally I have zero tolerance for anything that is harmful, disrespectful, or violence perpetrated on or at young people.

For several years now I have been scanning the school oriented press and have found several subjects continually discussed which I feel deserve further exploration and/or understanding. I am often surprised by what passes as news or passes as thoughtful considerations about what to do to improve the schooling process. The amount of violence that young people are exposed to and subjected to does not decrease. Bullying is rampant – both in face to face situations and in online communities.

Most of the strategies being employed to address bullying and violence focus on reducing freedoms, reducing choices, limiting options, and controlling behavior. These strategies are not productive and actually harm young people.

The article referred to above has some pretty strong language in it about this situation. Here’s a quote from the article:

Students being miseducated, mistreated, criminalized and arrested through a form of penal pedagogy in locked down schools that resemble prisons is a vicious and incredibly visible index of the degree to which mainstream politicians and the American public have turned their backs on young people in general and poor minority youth in particular. As schools are reconfigured to resemble prisons, crime becomes the central metaphor used to define the school environment while criminalizing the behavior of young people becomes the most valued strategy in mediating the relationship between educators and students. The consequences of these policies for young people suggest not only an egregious abdication of responsibility – as well as reason, judgment and restraint – on the part of administrators, teachers and parents, but also a new role for schools as they become more prison-like and more segregated as a consequence, eagerly adapting to their role as an adjunct of the punishing state. One wonders how many more kids have to be brutalized in their schools and killed outside of schools before the American public wakes up and takes seriously not only their responsibility to young people, but also their commitment to a mode of politics and a future that is on the side of young people rather than a vision shaped largely by the values of the corporate state and the disciplinary apparatuses of the punishing criminal justice system.

Here’s the link to the whole article.

I know this isn’t the experience at every school – but if it’s happening at one school that is one school too many.

Some friends of mine are engaged in instigating a really important conversation in their community. Minority parents and students have been attempting to show how the schools are profiling certain young people as potential gang members and forcing them in one way or another to leave school – primarily to improve their drop-out and graduation numbers.

A recent study put out by the Department of Education shows that students using online methods of learning actually perform better than those who just learn in the classroom. That shouldn’t come as any surprise if we really understood what’s happening in the classroom – or paid any attention to the rise in the number of users of computers and other devices accessing the internet.

On December 11, 2008 I posted an article written by David Langford about paying students to learn.

An anonymous person commented that there is research that says there are positive effects of incentive based programs. I forwarded that response to David and asked him if he was interested in responded. He sent me the following:

Thanks for passing along my article to those who might listen. Unfortunately we are fighting a losing battle with extrinsic manipulation. It is so easy to implement these programs it is hard to stop politians and administrators. The new pick for Education Secretary Arne Duncan is also an advocate of pay-for-grades and implemented such a program in Chicago. I am fearful we may see an escalation of this thinking during the Obama administration.

I read through each of the studies the person who responded offered. None were credible comparisons of the blatant manipulation offered in the Chicago Public Schools or in Washington D.C.

Offering girls in Kenya scholarships to continue to go to school if they work hard does not compare to throwing money at kids who get A’s, in a fabricated rating system, when they are already guarenteed a free education: Apples and Oranges comparisons. The study from Texas cited on paying students to take AP courses I believe lacks credibility since in order to get the predicted results they wanted they changed systemic factors such as opening AP courses to anyone interested instead of doing what they had always done by limiting class size to class rank. This is only one of a multitude of problems in this study.

The real problem is not how to make a better buggy whip, but should we be making them to begin with. I know I could produce the same positive correlation to improved work by beating children if they do not work hard. But, should we adopt that as a program and then start improving it? Automating or improving a bad process just means you can do something very bad quickly and to a larger number of people. Maybe Harvard would like to promote that study since they seem to be the source of promoting these pay-for-performance programs. I like the line in the movie Jurassic park that goes something like this, “You were so busy trying to see if you could you forgot to think about if you should!”

All of these types of programs and studies take time away from studying and fixing the real problems. No child will say I don’t work hard at school because they do not pay me enough, but they will say it’s boring or my teacher dosn’t care. Who will work on these problems? Let’s work on the real problems preventing high quality work and effort instead manufacturing new problems.

I’m interested in hearing from others about this very important topic.

One of the arguments I have for re-inventing public schooling is the rapid rate of changes taking place in society. Schools and schooling are the most disconnected institutions we have on the planet. By disconnected I mean, what is taking place inside of schools is disconnected from what is taking place outside of schools.

Sure there has been a push to get technology into schools – but that technology has been viewed and used under the same fundamental operating principle that is driving all schooling (control and compliance) and the methodologies technology has been applied to are the same fundamental concepts as traditional teaching (sit and get; drill and practice).

There is a large amount of data from many sectors of our economy and society that demonstrates increasing rates of change moving towards exponential rates of change. We see increasing rates of change in global population, in consumption of resources, and increasing pollution. We see the same types of changes in the use of technologies like fax machines, cell phones, computers, and the internet. The amount of data being digitized and stored on computers somewhere in the world has followed a similar curve.

Over the last 100 years the system of public schooling (including colleges and universities) has changed some but very little compared to the rest of society. This gap, which we can call an Opportunity Gap, continues to grow. The longer we wait to make necessary changes the worse it will get. And this gap actually explains a lot of what people are experiencing today in public schooling.

Every organization in the world is facing the challenge of managing within this environment of rapid change. In the competitive environment the amount of pressure on companies to adopt and stay competitive is quite significant. Product life cycles for consumer electronics companies in some competitive markets have shrunk from 18 – 24 months to around 6 months and some companies complete the entire cycle from concept, through development, through to the end of a products life in that time period.

More significant for leaders and managers of organizations (especially large ones) is having an understanding of the impact this kind of environment has on ‘how they manage.’ How you manage in an organization that is moving fast – staying up to speed with the rate of change – is different from how you manage in an organization that is moving slower. And managing a slower moving organization that is attempting to close the Opportunity Gap is different still.

Partly because of the fact that schools have been kept separate from the rest of society, and partly because of the slow moving changes within the schooling system, the managers and leaders in that environment have not felt the same kinds of pressures as business leaders. Until recently society has not demanded these leaders to have the same kind of competence. But that luxury is quickly being eroded. Pressure from the outside is growing and the skill sets of school leaders will be challenged significantly.

Here’s a short video that makes the argument for re-inventing schools better than I could with pages or writing: