Digital Natives and Analogue Missionaries (6/6)

So there are a lot of points in this whole debate that are nothing to do with state funded public schools, and are to do with education.  What about the first two headlines on the list?

• Destiny Church might set up a school!
• Transcendental Meditation Groups might set up schools!

In the United Kingdom an already extant private school changed status to become publically funded. It has a strong meditation focus. Frankly it looks like a lovely place. There have also been quite a few schools set up with a religious or ethnic focus. Schools for Muslim, Hindu or Sikh students. These sit alongside schools set up by individual teachers, or chain schools (like some of the chain day care centres we see in New Zealand). Case by case most of these schools look good, but I believe they are wrong for one overarching reason: they divide community.

A good state school is where you go to learn how to live with other people. You meet people the same as you and you probably hang out with them most of the time, but you also meet, work with, and listen to people who are different from you because of their race, ethnicity, income, politics, and so on. You also meet people who are physically or mentally disabled. You see hijabs, and lavalava, and Christian choirs, and hip hop, and haka. You rub shoulders with students who travel Europe in the holidays, and those who lived rough in the weekend.

We don’t need to overdo this. We’re not talking about some kind of vague notion of multi-cultural paradise at a state school. Let’s face it, at school some students simply live in a bubble and seem to notice nothing, and I’m not talking about all the students holding hands and connecting on a spiritual plane of love. You rub shoulders with your community. That’s all. Sometimes parts of the community do a show at assembly. Sometimes a representative of another group does something surprising that you have to process. Sometimes bad things happen. All of the ill and all of the good in a community comes into a state school (often in the same students).

At a state funded private school – a partnership school –  there will be very little diversity. It will focus on one group. It will say that it is open to everyone, and some everyones will go, but not many. There won’t be many new schools that are interested in having students with special needs in their school, and they won’t build facilities for them. It will also reduce the diversity in the state schools.

Long term it reduces the capacity of people living along-side each other to get along. Not that I am suggesting that state schools encourage people to have street parties and declare undying love for each other, but I think they can, if they are run right, teach us to pass each other on the street in tolerant, comfortable indifference, or – better – to nod and say hello.

When you look at what Hekia Parata and John Banks said when they  announced some detail around how New Zealand’s state funded private schools would work you find one big gap. 

While it’s good that the plan says schools won’t be able to say no to any student, in fact how you set up the school takes care of that problem.  By the way a school is set up and marketed it will attract a certain group to it and not another.  Will all schools be made to set up Special Needs Units?  Marae?  Pasifika centres?  Prayer rooms?  No.  You set up a school with a Muslim prayer room, and Muslims will be interested.  You set up a school with a Marae and a Kapa Haka programme and Maori will go.  You don’t need to pick and choose.  The parents will self-select into mostly homogenous groups.

Alongside this problem is the problem of the attack that these schools represent on the national curriculum.  The curriculum in New Zealand is fantastic.  It is broad, well thought out and flexible.  It was worked out over a long time by teachers and other educators based in New Zealand.  It is already a major problem that some schools have abandoned both the curriculum and NCEA in pursuit of other outside curriculums or assessment programmes that have a flavour of elitism.  Now this will be further diminished.  This is appalling.  Again, it divides and segregates.

But worst of all is the failure of these new schools to address the issue they were purportedly set up for: finding a way to help that group that is always over-represented in those “failing schools” (=brown students, especially boys, generally living in lower socio-economic areas).  If you read through the plans for the new schools there is nothing in those plans about capturing these students.  Probably this is because you can’t do this without making certain people go, and this doesn’t sound like more choice for parents.

What does this mean?  It means something very similar to England (The National government hired the person who ran the programme in England to work for them).  What will we see?  We might see some struggling private schools move to the new model.  Private schools are already good to go on all the criteria.  We might see some new ethnic/religious schools in larger population areas like Auckland, we might see some schools set up by iwi, and some by people who want to make a difference for the “troubled youth”.

Not many of these help those students at the end of the “long tail”, and almost all of them diminish a sense of a diverse community working together with a flexible but consistent national curriculum at a school that is the centre of a neighbourhood.

This is not an extreme situation now.  The world does not end tomorrow.  Because the state system is so good for so many people, and most people can’t afford private schools, the number of people going to state funded private schools will be very low.  But I believe it is wrong to introduce state funded public schools.  It reduces the richness of community for everyone.  I expect you will be able to see the effects of this in ten years.  Politicians of course don’t think in time cycles this long.

On the other hand I do believe it is time to shift education on again.  Conventional classrooms can largely be changed into workspaces; school books and textbooks will be changed into tablets; the hours that schools operate and who works there can alter; dedicated and effective life-long teachers should be given more; money should be given to ensure schools promote lively and meaningful cultural groups within their schools; and, above all of this, far above all of this, funding needs to go to schools with low academic results to increase their resources: they need money to significantly reduce class sizes, to pay for school-wide literacy and numeracy planning, and to support in-school social services.

That is what you need to do.  Community schools teaching a national curriculum are maintained and strengthened, while money, time and resources are aimed straight at the tail.

Don’t pay working groups to create rules for partnership schools, don’t pay money to interest groups to set up pet project schools that don’t help the tail, don’t erode a well designed curriculum and assessment system, and don’t waste money on reports on digital learning.

Digital Natives and Analogue Missionaries (5/6)

So, on theat list of headline grabbers I gave before let’s start with the ones on the bottom of the list. 

• Unregistered teachers might be teaching your kids!
• These schools can set up their own pay scales, hours and terms!

Frankly I have time for all of these debates. These are debates about education in general and they do not need to be connected to state funded private schools. 

Anyone who has or has had kids at school knows that the school holidays and the duration of the school day is a real problem in a society of solo parents, or double incomes, or shift work.  The school day has stayed the same while the culture of work has gone through revolutions.  Why?  To me this has nothing to do with state and private schools.  If schools were able to talk to their communities about their hours of operation I’m sure we could work something out.  Schools, at the moment, aren’t allowed to do this.

The same with performance pay.  This doesn’t have to have anything to do with the type of school, but about how you reward master teachers.  We should look at it.  Why not?  In its cleanest form I can see that it must be possible to create a pathway in the teaching career that keeps good teachers in the classroom, but can continue to reward them rather than having them reaching a pay ceiling very early on, and then force them to consider moving out of the classroom into a deputy principal role to make more money.

Even the point about the registration of teachers could do with a look.  At the core of a school you need trained, career teachers who are registered and driving the whole programme.  On the edges of the core where industry or professional practice intersect with the classroom there can’t be any real reason why outside people can’t come in and teach.  I mean in the fields of art, dance, drama, hard materials, textiles, cooking, computers, PE, languages and so on.  A gifted teacher needs to be a person with experience, insight and a little charisma held accountable to a system and results.  I’d be happy for my kids to be taught by anyone with those three things (after the police check of course).  I wouldn’t be so cool with this concept in the core subjects from Year 1 to Year 10.

But here’s the problem.  It sounded pretty sexy when I said “where industry or professional practice intersect with the classroom” didn’t it?  Imagine that.  All these cool artists and designers and stuff coming to work with the kids?  Sure, but nobody wants to do it.  I mean for a whole year at a time on what a school can afford to pay following a curriculum.  So you are left with what currently happens and works fine.  Outside providers coming in and out, or working with schools on particular projects.  Actually quite a good system for all sides. 

Strangely, the government has not mentioned the idea of having most of these ideas in state schools.  They have raised performance pay.  That’s good.  If the union can get off its high horse it would be nice to have a sensible discussion about that.

Digital Natives and Analogue Missionaries (4/6)

Since the government announced that they were going to open up education to include charter schools there has been a lot written and said about the idea on both sides.  I wrote about it too, but I never felt like I had gotten at what bothered me most about the schools.  It has taken me a long time to come down to the conclusion I am going to write now.

As I said, there is a lot written about charter schools.  They get called a lot of different names.  Let’s call them state funded private schools.  It’s not catchy, but anything else is branding either by those for them, or those against.

In New Zealand we all roughly know how schools get money.  State schools get it from the government, which means from taxes.  It gets more money by asking for money for trips from parents, and fundraising, and making deals with sponsors, and having international students, but on the whole their money comes from the state.  Private schools get their money from the fees the parents pay to send their children to the school.  They also get money from the government, and fundraising, and sponsorship, and so on, but most of the money comes from fees.

In return for money a state school follows a national curriculum and offers a good quality affordable education to everyone who lives in the area around that school.  In return for not taking as much money from the state, private schools follow an approved curriculum and offer a good quality education, often with a specific character or set of beliefs attached, to those who can pay to go there.

The change then is that this new category of school will have the limited freedoms of a private school (and a few more), but will be funded by the state.  This category of school has been around for a while in America, and has recently been permitted in the UK.  People on both sides of the debate say that lessons can be learnt from these countries (completely different lessons of course).

It has taken me a really long time to decide what I truly think about this new type of school for New Zealand, because it touches on so many other things to do with education, and these things tend to distract me.  With the release this week of detail around what New Zealand’s version of a state funded private school would be like we got the following headlines in various media:

• Destiny Church might set up a school!
• Transcendental Meditation Groups might set up schools!
• Unregistered teachers might be teaching your kids!
• These schools can set up their own pay scales, hours and terms!
• These schools will be out to make a buck!

In my head there are two clear issues that are present in this list:  Who can run a school, and how schools can be run.

Digital Natives and Analogue Missionaries (3/6)

In the first post I mentioned a report called 21stcentury learning environments and digital literacy written by Sir Peter Gluckman who is, amongst many things, the government’s chief science advisor.

I have two things to say about this “report”.

The first thing I would like to say:

If you hear the words “report” and “Sir” you might expect a substantial piece of well-researched work.  In fact it is four pages of unsourced generalisations, about a page of which is made up of quotes from Gluckman’s previous report.  I feel like the headline for this could equally well have read: How much money is the chief science advisor paid to waste our time?

Here’s what the report says (I paraphrase):

• Page One: Kids use heaps of digital stuff and it may or may not be affecting how their brains are getting wired up, but we’re not really sure. 
• Page Two: Now that we can scan brains while kids play with things we can design better education or maybe not, but anyway we should plan schools for stuff we don’t even know about yet
• Page Three: Teaching should not be about imparting facts, it should be about helping learners to critically evaluate information and organise it.  (Stuff about teaching Science.)
• Page Four: The better off get a better deal than the poor in all of this.  We should probably address this.

Concluding Remarks:

…if the ‘digital native’ indeed has different forms of brain development and learning, and whose social skills develop differently as a result of the very different ways in which children interact with each other in the digital world, then even more fundamental changes in education will be required (I can’t get into that here though).

Without the slightest bit of arrogance I would like to tell you that if the government had paid me $100 I could have gone on the internet and then written this report for them in one day so generalised and vague it is.

The second thing I would like to say:

The future will need a different type of teacher? 

That teacher is already here.  They were born in 1990 and they are completely comfortable with the digital world.  Even someone like me – born in the 70s – can cope. 

Teachers will still need to impart facts because  – and this may shock you – some teenagers don’t like cruising the internet for information about chemistry.  On the upside teachers are already heavily focused on the idea of helping students to evaluate and organise information.

Another academic commentator in the article states of the little children:

“Multi-tasking, for example playing on the internet, texting, listening to music and watching a YouTube video all at once . . . these things influence the way and speed in which you process information.”

All at once?  That’s not multi-tasking – that’s doing four things badly.

Let’s face it.  Schools can’t really plan for the future of technology.  When I was at primary school there was not a single personal computer or cellphone or internet site in existence for the general public.  In 2050 nobody has the slightest notion what kind of world we will be dealing with.  Of course we should use the tools technology gives us as we move toward 2050, but the important skills are going to be: how to get good information, how to evaluate and organise that information, and how to be flexible and creative.

Of course, most of this report is about the 4 in 5 students who will be fine anyway.

Here I raise the issue of the ‘digital divide’, the gap between those who can benefit from digital technology and those who cannot. This is not simply an issue of being able to afford a computer and internet access – digital disadvantage can arise from low literacy and interpretative skills that prevent proper use or evaluation of the opportunities that the technology can provide.

Which would be the problem of the one in five students the government tells us are being failed by their schools.  One solution to this problem will be the arrival of a new kind of school in New Zealand in 2014.

Digital Natives and Analogue Missionaries (2/6)

I’m a teacher. 

Funnily enough I didn’t want to be when I was growing up.  I wanted to be an architect.  I’ve always liked buildings.  Someone, at some point, told me that you needed to be great at Maths to be an architect.  Because I have always hated Maths, I stopped planning to be an architect, and entered about twenty years of bumbling along with no clear direction.  I do remember that during this time of bumbling I definitely didn’t want to be a teacher.  My mother was a teacher and she didn’t particularly like it.  That put me off.  Also, as a kid and teenager I wasn’t really a fan of school.  I preferred being by myself or living in a fantasy world populated by rock guitarists, dungeons, dragons and notions of being a writer.  In the end being in debt, and over-educated and adrift I went to Japan with Cathy to teach English. 

Why Japan?  It was there, and it was offering a job.

Cathy and I were in Japan for five and a half years.  It was a very influential experience in my growing up.  One thing I found was that I liked teaching.  I should have gone straight to teachers’ college when we came back to New Zealand but I didn’t.  When we came back to New Zealand it rained a lot.  I was depressed and culture shocked.  I got a job teaching English at an English Language School but one morning I walked out without telling anyone, went home and lay down on the bedroom floor.  Figuratively it took me a long, long time to get back up off the bedroom floor.

Too much drinking, too much self-pity, and a dreadful draft novel later, Cathy convinced me to go to Teacher’s College.  What I should probably write now is: “and I never looked back”.  Except, of course, that this is not true.  I look back constantly.  Even now, as a fairly experienced and happy teacher, I look back.

My first five years out of Teacher’s College were spent at what is known euphemistically as a “challenging” school.  It certainly was challenging.  There were times in that first year where I found myself back on the bedroom floor wondering how or if I would ever get back up again.  I did a lot of stupid things.  Sometimes I wasn’t a very good person or a very good teacher.  All I can say is that I think in the end I got bit better at being both, and that I learned a lot about myself and about other people.  Life is a lot harder for a lot of people in New Zealand than I had ever realised.

Now I am in my second year at quite a different school.

Cathy and I went to Japan in 1998.  In 2012 then I find that I have been teaching, taking into account a couple of gaps, for about twelve years.  Which is all really just a long preamble to show my credentials before I carry on.  Essentially I am saying that my credentials in education boil down to experience as a teacher and thoughtfulness. 

I think that’s all you need though.  Sometimes, but not always (there’s no always about anything), it’s a good idea to stay away from experts.  Even if they are prefixed Sir.