Occasionally, a friend asks me to name my all-time favorite jazz CDs. That’s extremely difficult to do, especially since I own more than 1,500 of them.
Here is my Desert Island List of My Top Ten Jazz CDs of all-time. It is quite absurd that there are no CDs by Freddie Hubbard, Miles Davis, Harold Mabern, Woody Shaw, Lee Morgan, Betty Carter, Charles Tolliver, Kenny Dorham, Philly Joe Jones, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Billy Higgins, Jackie Mclean, Hank Jones, Barry Harris, Sonny Rollins, Kenny Barron, Lester Bowie, Duke Ellington, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Phil Woods, Count Basie, Ornette Coleman, Jimmy Heath or many others on the list. Many of these folks perform on the recordings listed below.
There is also no room for my current favorite musician Dianne Reeves (every one of her albums is a gem); my brilliant pals, Brian Lynch, Carl Allen or Branford Marsalis or my all-time hero Roy Haynes in the top ten.
Branford Marsalis’ recent album, Metamorphosen, will surely be remembered as one of the great recordings and bands of the early 21st Century.
I was beyond honored to work on Brian Lynch’s project with Eddie Palmieri, Simpatico, which won the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album. This record gets better with each listening.
Gary Stager’s Top 10 Favorite Jazz CDs (in no particular order)
- John Coltrane - A Love Supreme
- Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers - Buhaina’s Delight
- Bobby Hutcherson - In the Vanguard
- Herbie Hancock - Maiden Voyage
- Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra - New Life (I know I should say, “Consummation.”)
- Cannonball Adderley - Somethin’ Else
- Sarah Vaughan - Crazy and Mixed Up
- Dexter Gordon - Gettin’ Around
- Thelonious Monk - Live at the It Club
- Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil
Classical entry - Takacs Quartet - Borodin - Smetna
Pop entry = Luther Vandross - The Best of Love OR Stevie Wonder - Natural Wonder
Al Green should be on this list too!
Someday, I will list more and assemble a gallery of the photos of me and the great jazz musicians I’ve met over nearly 30 years.
In March I had the great honor of being the keynote speaker at the 3rd ICTQatar ICT in Education national conference in Doha, Qatar. That was my 3rd trip to Qatar over the past couple of years.
Following my keynote, a nice young gentleman asked if he could interview me. I was happy to oblige and we found a vacant lounge area on the college campus where the conference was being held. That’s when the hijinx began.
First of all, the interviewer didn’t have a tripod. I convinced him that going handheld was a bad idea and helped him prop the camera on top of a camera bag. Then midway through the interview, one of his colleagues inexplicably walked into the lounge, headed to the light switches and cut our lights. After we objected, the guy spent a few minutes trying to turn the lights back on. After failing to do so, he shrugged and said, “Go somewhere else.” Eventually, the lights were turned on and a tripod emerged.
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Despite these technical difficulties, I believe that the interview came out quite nicely and I was able to explore some issues in-depth. You might think of it as my “UnTED Talk.”
If you have 42 spare minutes, you might wish to watch this video. Pleae not be put-off my the incredibly unattractive poster image displayed in the static video player below.
Many thanks to ICTQatar for the terrific job of putting the video on YouTube.
National Public Radio’s terrific talk show, Talk of the Nation, interviewed US Education Secretary Arne Duncan this morning and sent out a tweet asking for questions worth posing to the Secretary. I immediately tweeted back a barrage of questions and the host asked a paraphrased version of one the most innocuous questions I submitted.
If goal is raising opportunities & achievement for all kids, isn’t RACE for the top an unfortunate metaphor? (1 winner, many losers)
Engaging in critical debates about Federal education policy in 140 characters is a challenge, but not impossible.
The following are the other questions I “tweeted” to Secretary Arne Duncan (in reverse chronological order) via NPR’s TOTN:
How would Sect. Duncan to respond to the report card given him - A for efficacy and D for policy?
Isn’t firing all of the teachers and charterizing public schools a right-wing utopian fantasy?
Where does Sect. Duncan think the magical teachers & perfect schools will come from after he fires teachers and closes pub schools?
Did you ask Duncan what he thinks of Diane Ravitch’s research disproving the basic assumptions of Obama education policies?
Given the Gates Foundation’s expensive school reform failures, why do they have so much influence within the Dept. of Education?
If you’re a parent in Harlem, should be concerned that nearly all of the local public schools have been turned into boutique charters?
Why should public school facilities be surrendered to private charter school operators?
Which is true: a) The Chicago Public Schools are a mess & failing children b) We should trust Sect. Duncan to do the same for America?
Should Americans be alarmed that most major city districts and the Dept. of Ed are now run by unqualified non-educators?
If goal is raising opportunities & achievement for all kids, isn’t RACE for the top an unfortunate metaphor? (1 winner, many losers)
Why has a “Labor” administration worked so hard to bust the teacher unions across the nation?
I’ll be a keynote speaker at the semi-annual Australian Conference on Educational Computing April 6-9, 2010 in my adopted 2nd hometown of Melbourne, Australia.
2010 marks my twentieth anniversary of working in Australia, beginning with the introduction of laptops into schools and ACEC was the first conference I ever keynoted back in 1992, coincidentally in Melbourne.
I’ll also be presiding over a “Breakfast with Gary Stager” workshop in which we’ll explore some of the “Best Educational Ideas in the World” on April 6th. You may register at http://acec2010.info
The organizers of the conference asked me for a video advertising my participation. It ain’t Scorsese, but here it is.
Gary Stager’s ACEC 2010 Video from Gary Stager on Vimeo.
David Warlick is the latest person to go all “digital immigrant” and proclaim that we should all take a good hard look at the hugely popular YouTube video, “A Vision of Students Today.”
Fantastic. A college class with far too many students in it (200) attempts to revolutionize the educational system by whining in a five minute web video.
I’m sorry, but count me unimpressed!
Perhaps a student should hold up a sign saying, “My professor is wasting my time and money by making me participate in a piece of exploitative propaganda in which I get to insult either my generation or the one before me just to get on YouTube.”
How did bashing our own profession become such a popular sport? What possible value could demeaning educators have in a professional development setting? Are we desperate for moving pictures or are they merely a substitute for actual ideas?
Is showing these types of videos the conference speaker equivalent of the teacher running the filmstrip to eat up class time?
One valuable lesson you should learn at university is that the world is full of people smarter than you and wondrous things to learn. This video and the mindless kudos afforded it make just the opposite point. Hey kids, you have cellphones! You’ve played Halo and excerpted someone else’s blog which in summarized someone else’s blog which excerpted an article on a magazine web site. Therefore, you are master of the universe and every educational institution should abandon scholarship, discipline and any text longer than a screen.
I’ve wanted to tell the Web 2.0pians the following for some time:
- Observation is not insight.
- Factoids are not knowledge
- Talk (in this case, mime) is cheap.
A concerned competent educator might ask, “What should Ido to make learning relevant without making it dopey or trivial?” This video offers no such guidance.
The excitement and praise afforded “A Vision of Students Today” is a clear example of what Dr. Seymour Papert called, “verbal inflation.” Apparently we should all be astonished that college students used Google Docs and then conflate such a trivial mechanical act with educational innovation.
Originally published Monday, November 05, 2007 in The Pulse: Education’s Place for Debate.
Below is an article I first published in an Australian newsletter back in 2001. I cannot believe how many of the concerns raised in this article remain with us today. I hope you enjoy the first of what will be a series of articles exploring how we grow as a professional community and who we choose to learn from.
Sloppy language, sloppy thinking
Terms like school reform, change, child-centered education, professional development and authentic assessment have become meaningless in an educational climate favoring systems, buildings, ideology and processes over children. Lingo-slinging administrators, politicians eager for the quick fix and educators too beaten down and overwhelmed to take a breath and reflect upon their best practices, have irrevocably devalued the currency of such terms. Textbooks, curriculum software and high-stakes tests deprive students of experience with primary sources.
Too many teachers do not read “real stuff” either. The big ideas of Piaget, Montessori, Dewey, Vygotsky and Papert are ignored or reduced to bumper sticker slogans. To some constructivism is when a teacher pauses to pass out the next worksheet. Balance has become the watchword of educators unwilling or incapable of taking a stand.
Many of our colleagues know that schools are dysfunctional so they search for new words to describe futuristic processes rather than step-up and do the right thing. Medical science has changed constantly over the years yet the practitioners are still called doctors. If the art and science of education are living processes we should expect leadership from teachers, not facilitators or coaches.
We speak of a shift from teaching to learning, but are unwilling to give up the hierarchy of teacher and learner despite the enlightened rhetoric. I’m hard-pressed to see evidence of such a shift in practice. There are just too few examples of coequal learning in current schools.
Have you noticed that learning has become a noun rather than a verb? I have been reading a growing number of articles and advertisements saying things like: “we must increase access to learning,” “the new test measures the learning,” or “teachers must improve their students’ learning.”
Education is still something adults do to children. Perhaps we shouldadmit that verbs like training, teaching, testing, assessing, grouping and administrating describe unnatural and invasive procedures.
Where in the world is educational computing?
As a community of practice, educational computing is at best dysfunctional or at least learning-disabled. Twenty years after microcomputers, a medium with the potential to revolutionize education, entered classrooms the educational computing community continues to focus its energies on the dubious goals of curriculum integration and professional development.
Theoretically these sound like lofty aspirations while in reality they are code words for paralysis and the status quo. We are cursed by an absence of vision and expertise.
In addition to curriculum and professional development, the two unspoken goals of educational computing are fund-raising and shopping.
Despite the rhetoric about preparing kids for the digital age, schools are grossly underfunded and professional educators are continuously distracted from their primary duties to shamelessly suck-up for more hardware. Educational computing conference programs are full of sessions about grant writing and schools of education are compelled to teach grant writing in their educational computing degree programs.
The hype regarding the rate of change spurred by computing causes educators to equate innovation with the purchase of a new software package. Educational computing conferences have become flea-markets rather than incubators of knowledge. It is much easier to buy a new software package than to change the goals, practices and outcomes of schooling - even if the society is demanding such growth.
The mantra of curriculum integration is really a call to limit the enormous potential of computational technology in order to support questionable educational content and pedagogy. Curriculum integration is offered as an alternative to the previously dopey goal of computer literacy instruction. Imagination-impaired educators can now say, “we can teach kids about hanging indents while preparing boring assignments they have no interest in writing rather than the old-fashioned way when we just taught about hanging indents without the exciting context of writing a book report. We’re motivating the kids to learn by connecting tech skills to the curriculum.”
This phenomenon may be more dangerous than the old-fashioned ways in which we use to lie to children in the name of curriculum. Contemporary children live in a computer-rich world in which personal computers and the Internet are natural extensions of their environment. Using these technologies in a dumbed- down way to impose inauthentic learning objectives on children is asking for trouble. They will undoubtedly react badly to the use of their beloved computers as tools of their own oppression. This is especially true when the offending adults have less fluency with the medium than do their students.
Make no mistake; kids can do marvelous things with computers. They may delight and impress us with their abilities. However, the learning potential of children is severely limited by the talents, curiosity, knowledge and expertise of the adults in their care. Most kids do not discover computer science, nor even know what might be within the realm of possibility without access to accomplished adults.
Professional development has become an obsession of schools and for-profit corporations desperate to develop expensive strategies for begging, bribing, cajoling, tricking, enticing, bullying, inspiring and threatening teachers to touch computers. While kids are widely believed to have more natural fluency with computers and the net, there is still much they could learn and be inspired to construct if led by imaginative modern educators. A quick survey of American culture would show that toddlers recognize www before the golden arches and senior citizens represent the fastest growing segment of the Internet-using public.
No after school workshops, technology coordinators, philanthropy or acts of Parliament were required to get Grandma online. She just wanted to talk with her children and grandchildren more regularly [and perhaps check on her prescription drugs].
So, let’s review the evidence Kids get the stuff; seniors get it and folks working in most professional and even blue-collar jobs use computers. The last group of professionals to embrace computers as a useful tool
is teachers. Henry Becker’s research tells us that being a school math teacher is a statistically significant predictor that a person DOES NOT use the Internet. One would hope that workers charged with the development of intellectual capital would embrace the most powerful medium for the development of ideas and creative expression in history.
The current state-of-affairs is the result of low expectations, educational leaders without vision, false prophets/profits and an anti-intellectual society in which powerful ideas are rejected in favor of expediency. All of these problems have to do with expertise. Let’s explore them.
Low Expectations
I often joke that the difference between a novice computer-using educator and an expert is a two-hour workshop. Our expectations for what teachers might actually do with computers are so low that those goals are easily achieved. Well, one would think so. Human nature suggests that the less we expect of others, the less they will actually achieve. The goals of simple word processing, web surfing and strapping kids to a drill and practice program seem hardly beyond the reach of a living-breathing teacher, yet even these modest goals remain elusive. One look at a state or national educational computing conference and you would have to conclude that ‘cutting and pasting’ represents the post-doctoral level of the field. The banality of most conference programs would suggest that the ceiling for learning with and about learning with computers is low indeed.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that we should not expect teachers to use computers in more creative intellectually empowering ways if they are incapable of achieving the most pedestrian of objectives. This line of reasoning misses two fundamental variables - motivation and scarcity of resources. Inspiring teachers by the limitless potential of computers to empower students to learn and express themselves in previously unimaginable ways requires a different manifestation of expertise, leadership, and a community’s desire to embrace the construction what’s new. Experience would suggest that schools excited by the potential to engage more kids in rich learning adventures would challenge teachers to ‘think different’ and provide the support necessary to support such motivation.
The organizations charged with promoting educational computing are often guilty of contributing to the imagination gap by failing to create, sustain, recognize and promote outstanding models of 21st century learning. When I heard Board members of the California Computer-Using Educators (CUE) sharing their horror at the new state mathematics standards in which computer-use is strongly discouraged, I was outraged by their reaction. CUE after all has tens of thousands of members, commands a substantial budget and employs a lobbyist. “How could this be a surprise?” I thought.
I later realized that the problem was much deeper than if they failed to speak-up at a meeting. If that organization had been offered an opportunity to advocate a different policy direction, would they have been able to present models compelling enough to change policy? If not, then we must work harder to close the imagination gap by taking bolder actions and celebrating new ways of teaching and learning with great clarity.
Expecting teachers to support all kids in the use of computers as an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression requires different kinds of fluency and old- fashioned ideas of creating a rich learning environment. While schools focus on teaching word processing and the use of scroll bars over a 4-year scope and sequence, we forget that the existing technology allows even the youngest kids to produce movies, engineer robots, program video games, build simulations, conduct sophisticated scientific explorations and compose symphonies.
The dirty little secret of educational computing is that it has failed to make a significant impact on learning not because there are too many computers in schools, but rather too few. What good does it do to motivate teachers to think about teaching and learning in new ways if their students get only minutes of computer access per week or if the computers are stored in a bunker down the hall? (My kids in a southern California public school system have not used a school computer in at least six years.)
Scarcity is a major obstacle to use!
How many after school workshops should a teacher attend before they can get a printer ribbon (yes, many schools still need ribbons) or a few extra minutes of time in the computer lab? The ‘one computer classroom’ may have been not only a cute marketing slogan, but perhaps even a useful set of classroom strategies in the mid-eighties when microcomputers were less ubiquitous. However, it now represents a most cynical corporate strategy to maintain the status quo and support the supremacy of externally imposed curriculum at the expense of children.
Equally virulent ideas include the often touted 30/50% rule that suggests we spend 30-50% of our technology budget on professional development and the latest excuse for inaction, total cost of ownership. Spending even one penny of the hardware budget on professional development is a cheap accounting trick. We don’t pay for art teachers out of the crayon budget, not should we pay for teacher education out of the computer budget. This only devalues the importance of computers as instruments for the construction of knowledge and avoids the cold hard truth that the obstacles to successful computer use may have much more to do with issues associated with good teaching than computers themselves. The idea total cost of ownership, (TCO) has been recently introduced into the educational debate. While fiscal responsibility requires schools to plan for all of the costs associated with computing, the high costs presented by TCO advocates are unrealistic and will scare schools away from investing in computing.
The Leadership Abyss
It is not only school leaders who fail to realize, articulate and nurture the potential of digital technology. Elected and self-appointed leaders of the educational computing community appear to be as ineffective. School leaders without personal computer fluency can not possibly understand the power and possibilities of computing. The confluence of the insane demands being made on school administrators and the above mentioned imagination gap is causing an alarming number of school leaders to abdicate their leadership to others. The need for someone to ‘understand this stuff’ and ‘go shopping’ has created a new profession, school computer coordinator. In many districts, excellent educators are removed from the classroom in order to supervise the purchasing, inventory and installation of computer. The boom in the number of technology/computer coordinators is unprecedented and institutionalizes the notion that computers are precious, mysterious and beyond the comprehension of school administrators. (It would be fantastic if great educators could be rewarded for continuing to work with children and create inspirational models of great teaching with computers.)
The increasing complexities caused by the hysterical pace and paranoia regarding school networking has led to an even more dangerous trend than the creation of computer coordinators. Schools anxious to bulldoze their lawns and pull cat-5 cable through their walls are not only hiring seventeen year-olds with Lee Harvey Oswald personalities to manage the process, but are making these non-educators network administrators.
Since qualified networking professionals are a rare commodity, schools can only afford to pay the least experienced candidates. If they do a poor enough job, they may be rewarded by hiring all of their low-skilled friends. In far too many schools the network administrator has consolidated power and holds the entire educational process hostage.
This is especially ironic since many schools require highly qualified computer-using educators to earn administrative credentials before they can be a computer coordinator, yet place unprecedented power in the hands of non-educators. School administrators place unprecedented budgetary discretion, policy-making and curricular influence in the hands of these folks due a different type of perceived technical expertise. This is a worrisome trend that must be slowed. Alternatives may be explored at http://www.stager.org/articles/takingbackthenet1.html
False Prophets/Profits
The low-regard in which our society holds education requires school leaders to seek the wisdom of non-educators. Rather than work hard to realize the dreams of Dewey, Piaget, Papert and Holt, school leaders are forced to memorize the simplistic decontextualized platitudes of ‘experts’ from the business world. In many cases the only accomplishment of these men and women is measured by the wealth they accumulate in the act of selling clichés to those craving simple solutions to complex problems. I am tempted to write an academic paper in which I seamlessly intersperse the accumulated wisdom of Peter Senge, Don Tapscott and Suzanne Somers. There isn’t a dime’s bit of difference in substance (or lack thereof) between Tom Peters, Anthony Roberts or Richard Simmons. None offer constructive advice for making schools better places for kids and teachers to learn. I expect that we will soon be sending school principals to football arenas in which they can channel the spirit of Madeline Hunter.
Like any other industry, educational computing is full of ‘experts.’ Some of us may lead us to a brighter future. Others may just make us feel good or bad for an hour.
We should celebrate the visionaries, like Seymour Papert, who paint bold loving portraits of learning in a digital world as well as the classroom teachers who heroically work miracles every day and have great stories to tell. However, these folks are often marginalized for causing trouble, challenging us to do better, requiring additional resources or for offering complex solutions to timeless dilemmas. (Find books by thoughtful educators here)
Our anti-intellectual culture favors sound bites over powerful ideas and messy problems. As a result, the educational computing literature and conferences promotes different kinds of experts. I often think of these experts as vaudevillians traveling from town-to-town on a modern high-tech chitlin’ circuit. The following is a guide for spotting some latter-day experts. Some may be tricky and combine elements of different species.
The Flaky Futurist
Tell teachers that some day they will have computers in their corneas and suggest that they are on the verge of disintermediation. The strategy is to overwhelm audiences with predictions about the future and invoke inaction due to fear and a lack of specific suggestions for preparing for that future. Many flaky futurists have a decidely 19th- century technology, the workbook, for sale at the end of their presentation.
The Salesman
The salesman is often former president of a tire company, but now CEO of an educational software or hardware company. The notes written by subordinates on their teleprompter reassures them that they are indeed educational visionaries - especially since they sponsored the rental of projectors at this conference.
The Counter
Counters are academics anxious to demonstrate their counting abilities by reviewing tables of data regarding the number of computers in schools and percentage of teachers who do this and that with them.
The Whiner
The whiners enjoy great applause for complaining that the government pays $500 for a toilet seat and yet you can’t afford a district-license for Dipthong Bomber or Gerund Blaster.
The Human Interface Guy
These folks assure the audience that educational software is all crap, except for the stuff their graduate students have been working on for eleven years. All of our educational problems will be solved as soon as they figure out just the right place to place the button on the screen or they receive more NSF funding - whichever comes first.
The Hipster
These folks met actual kids and have spoken with several of them. Now they want us to hear their message.
The Yuckster
These presenters have a million and one Microsoft jokes!
The Populist
The populist is a non-educators who make a big splash by attacking the use of computers in schools by setting up false arguments between funding priorities or by making simplistic arguments that computers retard learning. Their observations are often accurate, yet they lack any sense of a brighter alternative.
The Teacher Basher
With the passing of Al Shanker it is up to Alfred Bork and a handful of governors to entertain a room full of educators by telling them how incompetent he believes them to be.
© 2001 Gary S. Stager
Three-time Olympic skier, Bode Miller of the USA won three medals at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics - a Gold, Silver and Bronze. When added to the two silver medals he earned in the 2002 Winter Olympics, Miller is the most decorated Olympic Alpine skier in United States history. He is also controversial based on legendary media interviews (apology here) and a failure to win any medals during the 2006 Winter Olympics when some predicted he would win five events.
There are countless things I learned over twenty years of working with my friend and mentor Professor Seymour Papert. This week, I remembered that I first learned about Bode Miller from Dr. Papert way back in 2002. Papert had published a newspaper column Bode Miller: World’s Most Creative Skier, for the Bangor Daily News.
This isn’t the first time Papert wrote about skiing in the context of learning. His seminal book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas (1980), features a discussion of how technology has changed skiing.
In the 2002 column, Papert shared his enthusiasm for Bode’s fearless style, unconventional education and sense of independence. Bode Miller’s skiing is offered as a metaphor for the tough choices parents and teachers must make in educating children in the 21st Century. (This column was written near the end of a several year period during which Dr. Papert worked tirelessly to convince the citizens of Maine to provide a laptop computer for every 7th and 8th grader in the state.)
Many aspects of Bode would serve well for practicing the art of seeing the world through a lens focused on learning…
…We want our children to have Bode’s kind of independence. But we don’t want them to fall for lack of mastery of well-tried ways of doing things.
Re-reading this article by my old friend Seymour reminded me of the many characteristics that make him special. First of all, your average MIT professor doesn’t write local newspaper columns in praise of a renegade skier - many may not have heard of Bode Miller, fewer still eight years ago. What struck me is how much Dr. Papert and Bode Miller have in common. They are both driven by a desire to revolutionize their domain through a fearless combination of high-risk and high-reward.
That’s right, MIT Professor Seymour Papert is a bad-ass!
Over the course of his life he has been a South African dissident forced to flee his country due to his anti-Apartheid activities, earned two mathematics Ph.Ds, worked with Jean Piaget, was a co-founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, inspired Alan Kay to invent what became known as the personal computer, created Logo (with Cynthia Solomon and Wally Feurzig) was a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, led the effort to help Maine be the first state in the world with a laptop computer for every student, has been a leading voice in school reform and was a driving force behind the creation of One Laptop Per Child and their effort to create the “$100 laptop.” Papert began talking about the potential high reward reward for learners if every one of them were to be provided a personal computer with constructive open-ended software more than forty years ago and worked tirelessly to realize that dream across the globe.
- You can learn more about Dr. Papert and his work at this web site.
- Listen to Bode Miller’s remarkable profile and interview from the HBO series, Real Sports.
I was inspired to write this article when an old friend sent me an email saying that “Bode Miller is the Lee Morgan of slalom skiing.” If you don’t get the reference, you’ve got some shedding to do!
The following opinion column from the October issue of District Administration Magazine caused the owner (and Editor-in-Chief) of the magazine to publish an apology in the very next issue. The mea culpa was published before any reader or advertiser complained. None did. This column never appeared on the magazine’s web site, so it is published here.
In August 2004, District Administration Magazine published my critique of Senator John Kerry’s education plan. It may be read here.
In other words, the following fact-checked article was deemed unfair when an article critical of the political opponent two months earlier was fair game.
I remain incredibly proud of this article because it was timely, witty and predicted the ultimate disaster caused by the policies I criticized.
Gary Stager on Direct Instruction
Perhaps it’s time to end political social promotion
From the October 2004 issue of District Administration Magazine
Michael Moore got it wrong.
In his film, Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore shows President Bush in a Florida classroom on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The film’s narration said that while America was being attacked, the president read the book, My Pet Goat, to a room full of young children. This is factually inaccurate in three important ways.
- The story is actually titled, The Pet Goat.
- It is not a book, but an exercise in a heavily scripted basal.
- The president did not read the story to the children.
Any perceptive educator watching this would quickly realize what was going on. The president was not in that 
classroom to demonstrate his love of reading. Being read to is a powerful literacy experience. Having a wonderful story read to you by the president of the United States could create a memory to last a lifetime.
Unlike his wife, mother and Oval Office predecessors, this president had a more important agenda than demonstrating affection for children or for reading. The trip was part of a calculated campaign to sell No Child Left Behind. In what Michael Moore rightly observed as a photo opportunity, young children were used as props to advance the administration’s radical attack on public education.
The Pet Goat is an exercise from a literary classic called, Reading Mastery 2, by the father of Direct Instruction, Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann. In the 1960s, Engelmann invented a controversial pedagogical approach that reduces knowledge to bite-]sized chunks presented in a prescribed sequence enforced by a scripted lesson the teacher is to recite to a classroom of pupils chanting predetermined responses. Every single word the teacher is to utter, including permissible and prohibited words of encouragement, are provided. There is no room for individuality. The Direct Instruction Web site states, “The popular valuing of teacher creativity and autonomy as high priorities must give way to a willingness to follow certain carefully prescribed instructional practices.”
Engelmann told The New Yorker in its July 26, 2004 issue, “We don’t give a damn what the teacher thinks, what the teacher feels. On the teachers’ own time they can hate it. We don’t care, as long as they do it. Traditionalists die over this, but in terms of data we whump the daylights out of them.” It is easy to see how a man of such sensitive temperament could author more than 1,000 literary masterpieces such as The Pet Goat.
While I am sure the Florida school visited is a fine one and the classroom teacher loves children, educational excellence was not being celebrated. This was a party on behalf of Direct Instruction. While Moore made a documentary [some suggest artful propaganda] about the Iraq war, he could have made a movie about the United States government’s ideological attack on the public schools.
The War on Public Education
Engelmann’s publisher is a textbook giant with ties to the Bush family dating back to the 1930s. Company namesakes served on George W. Bush’s transition team and the board of his mother’s literacy foundation. The publishers have received honors from two Bush administrations and they in turn have bestowed awards on Secretary Rod Paige, who then keynoted their business conference. The same company’s former executive vice president is the new U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. Direct instruction has become synonymous with the “scientifically based methods” required by No Child Left Behind.
The War on Public Education has ratcheted up parental fear with cleverly designed rhetoric of failing schools, data desegregation, underperforming students, unqualified teachers and clever slogans like, “no excuses.” If you turn public schools, even the best ones, into single-]minded test-]prep factories where teachers drone on from scripted lessons then more people will want that magical voucher. Repeatedly demonize teachers arid the public will lose confidence regardless of their personal experiences with their local school.
So, how are you doing? Is your job now more about compliance than kids? Are sound educational experiences being sacrificed for test preparation? Has fear replaced joy in your classrooms? President Reagan might suggest we ask ourselves, “Is your school better off than it was four years ago?”
Note: As time permits, I’m republishing articles I’ve written in the past so they may reach a fresh new audience via my blog. I’m particularly proud of this paper about teacher professional development, originally published in 1992. I wrote this after spending more than two years working in “1:1 schools.” You may just find it timely today!
COMBATTING THE OSMOSIS MYTH - A REALISTIC APPROACH TO STAFF DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATIONAL CHANGE
© 1992 Gary S. Stager*
Many educational leaders and policy makers have grand visions of how computer technology will lead to educational innovation and restructuring. Unfortunately, in 1993 far too many of these people believe that the technology will do the job alone.
If staff development is provided, it is too often superficial and unsuccessful. Teachers and their students may be “using computers” but to what end? What has the computer’s impact been on the learning culture of a school? Is the school any closer to their goal of improving education and institutional change or has the introduction of technology created a foggy detour on the road to innovation? The hard part of this process is not the learning the technology, but thinking about thinking and learning; reflecting on the nature of the curricula; and clearly articulating a collegial strategy for implementing change. Computer-based staff development efforts often assume that teachers need to be only computer literate enough to unjam the printer or to use one piece of “canned software” with their students. This line of reasoning deprives teachers of the types of intellectual empowerment, which their students experience when using the computer as a vehicle for constructing knowledge.
School districts often believe that teachers will begin making computers important well-integrated tools in their classrooms if they attend a two-hour workshop or stand in the computer lab while the computer teacher instructs their class. This is part of what I call “the osmosis effect” Just touch a computer and education will improve. Educational reform is too often equated with plugging students into anything that happens to plug in.
Even in more thoughtful school districts, staff development efforts too often go for the “quick fix.” Speakers and authors like Tom Snyder argue that no significant innovation will succeed in a school without directly benefiting the central group of adults first. I was always troubled by this view and have recently become convinced of how profoundly misguided this view is.
The conventional wisdom is too often, “If I teach the teacher to put the students’ arithmetic problems into Math Blaster, then they will learn to assist their students in creating collaborative inter-disciplinary multimedia reports in LogoWriter…” If the teacher can write parental letters using a word processor, then they will fall in love with the writing process and change their language arts curriculum to a whole language process…” “If I teach a math teacher to use a gradebook program, he/she will begin to use manipulatives and symbol manipulators as an integral part of the math curriculum…”
There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that this all too prevalent strategy of pandering has any positive impact on the growth process of teachers or schools. In fact, I have seen this approach to staff development degrade teachers by assuming that they were not capable of learning new skills or sharing powerful ideas. It is incredibly insulting to believe that teachers are so selfish that the only way in which to get them to appropriate new technologies and methodologies is to “train” them to do trivial administrative tasks. The implication is that teachers are too “burnt-out” or detached to care about the exciting educational potential of new technologies. Too often elementary school teachers are sentenced to a lifetime of . word processing and word processing only because of a lack of respect for teachers and a subtle gender bias towards female teachers.
The way in which you directly benefit teachers is by helping them directly benefit kids. You improve the lives of teachers by helping them become better teachers.
Even the “bad” teachers our society is so fond of discussing will be inspired by seeing students engaged in exciting new ways - with no materials, ideas, processes, and content. After all, is that not the reason for ongoing staff development? It seems ridiculous to suggest that teachers are the only group of professionals incapable of using computers in meaningful ways. This view is a result of the way in which schools often approach the use of computers by students.
Over the past decade schools sought to make computers, which are transparent in the world and the life of the child, into a discipline - hard and worthy of study. Terms such as computer literacy, computer lab, computer coordinator, and courses in information technology have become commonplace in primary and secondary schools. These ideas, at best, are rooted in the educational bureaucracy’s deeply-held paranoia about only teaching what is testable and at worst is designed to create an artificial range (bell curve) of good computer users and bad computer users.
Neither case respects what students already know. It seems as ridiculous to think that a sixteen year-old student in an information technology class needs to be taught what a mouse is as it is to assume that a professional educator is incapable of using technology used routinely by Burger King employees.
So, what should we do? I would argue that computer-based staff development activities should focus on the change process and immerse teachers in meaningful, educationally relevant activities, in which he/she will be encouraged to reflect on powerful ideas and share their educational visions in order to create a culture of learners for their students.
SUGGESTIONS FOR SUCCESS
• Work With the Living
Schools have limited technological and teacher development resources and they should be allocated prudently. Good teachers who have yet to recognize how computer technology may enhance their teaching are not evil. If a school focuses its energy and resources on creating a few successful models of classroom computing each year, then the enthusiasm among the teaching staff will be infectious. When fifteen teachers in a school or district joyfully use technology more teachers are likely to have found a comfortable path towards implementation. Within a few years the most recalcitrant of teachers will recognize that they are in the minority and may seek other employment. It is important that a variety of models be created for teachers of differing backgrounds and subject areas to choose from. The school should be cautious not to create negative models of computing use.
• Work On Teachers’ Turf
Educators responsible for staff development should be skilled in classroom implementation and should work along-side the teacher in his/her classroom to create models of constructive computer use. It is important for teachers to see what students are capable of and this is difficult to do in brief workshop at the end of a long workday.
• Off-site Institutes
Schools must ensure that teachers not only understand the concepts of collaborative problem solving, cooperative learning, and constructionism - they must be given the opportunity to leave behind the pressures of family and school for several days in order to actually re-experience the art of learning with their colleagues. Off-site residential “whole learning” workshops can have a profoundly positive effect on a large number of teachers in a short period of time.
• Provide Adequate Support
Nothing dooms the use of technology in the classroom quicker than not supporting the teacher who worked hard to develop new skills. Be sure that the school does eveiything humanly possible to support the teacher’s efforts by providing the technology requested, maintaining it, and by having access to a working printer and a supply of blank disks.
• Practice What You Preach
Staff development experiences should be engaging, interdisciplinary, collaborative, heterogeneous, and models of constructionist learning.
• Share Learning Stories
Teachers should be encouraged to reflect on personal significant learning experiences from their lives and the staff development experience. They should share these experiences with their colleagues and discuss the relationship between their profound learning experiences and their classroom practices.
• Celebrate Initiative
Teachers who have made a demonstrative commitment to educational computing should be recognized by being freed of some duties in order to assist colleagues in their classrooms, encouraged to lead workshops, and given access to additional hardware.
• In-School Sabbaticals
Innovative teachers should be provided with the school time and resources necessary to develop curricula and conduct action research in her/his school.
• Assist Teacher Purchases of Technology
Schools should help fund 50- 80% of a teacher’s purchase of a personal computer for use in school and home. This act demonstrates to teachers that you value computers as an important aspect of the school and that they should share this commitment. Partial funding also provides teachers with the flexibility to purchase the right personal computer configuration. The school may offer an annual stipend for upgrades and peripherals.
• Have Abundant Technology Available
A teacher in a school with hundreds of computers quickly recognizes that the school values classroom computing.
• Cast a Wide Net
No one method of staff development works for all teachers. A combination of traditional workshops, in-classroom collaborations, mentoring, conference participation, and whole learning residential workshops must be available for teachers to choose from at their own pace. Teachers should be made to feel comfortable growing at their own rate. Therefore, a variety of staff development options may need to be offered regularly.
• Avoid Software Dujour
The people responsible for paying for school computing are made to feel guilty by the media and other administrators if they do not constantly do something “new” with their computers. Unfortunately newness is equated with lots of software. It is reckless and expensive to jump on every software bandwagon. Using narrow skill-specific software has little benefit to students and undermines staff comfort with computing. Choose an open-ended environment, such as LogoWriter, [now MicroWorlds] in which students express themselves in many ways that may also converge with the curriculum.
• Never Satisfied - Only Gratified
Staff development must always be dedicated to continuing educational excellence. If we desire to restructure schools then we must recognize that the only constant we can depend on is teachers. Our schools will only be as good as the least professional teacher. Staff development must enhance that professionalism and empower teachers to improve the lives of their students. Our children deserve no less.
• A version of this article will appear in the Proceedings of the 1993 International Conference on
Technology and Education at MIT
A variation on the old joke goes,
Question: “How do you get to perform for the President of the United States?
Answer: Don’t ask Jessica Simpson. She has no idea.
According to “news” reports Jessica Simpson was a performer in this year’s Kennedy Center Honors program attended by President Bush and countless other dignitaries. Ms. Simpson was to sing the operatic classic, “Nine-to-Five,” as a tribute to Dolly Parton, but ended the song abruptly, muttered, “nervous,” and burst off the stage in tears.
While hardly cause for indefinite detention in Guantanamo, this sorry incident offers lessons for educators.
James Carville once said, “In America the last job you ever have is being famous.” Too many young people in our country see fame, the quicker the better, as their goal. Yet, Jessica Simpson has proven that fame doesn’t prepare you to perform in front of music legends, millions of viewers and the leader of the free world. Maybe she just had a bad night, but I don’t think so.
Once your failed reality TV marriage and B-movie career fades from the spotlight you are sustained by what musicians call “chops.” You develop chops by paying dues, studying and practicing for hours and hours each day for years. You don’t pay your dues by being photographed exiting a nightclub with your BFFs or by dating musicians. You are not entitled to be rich and famous just because you want to be.
Every great artist knows this. Even successful pop stars learned it along the road to fame. Motown artists spent countless hours studying music, dance and comportment before they left the studio. They spent weeks on the road honing each song before appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show. Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and yes, even Britney Spears developed a similar work ethic from working on The Mickey Mouse Club. Like the pop-stars of yore, they come “ready to play” regardless of the venue - in concert or in a variety show skit. I can see you wince when I say this, but they may be this generation’s Sammy, Dean, Frank, Diana Ross or Dolly Parton. Ask any musician in the know and they will tell you that Dolly Parton can play her…. uh, butt off.
This isn’t the first public meltdown in the Simpson family. Remember that little sister, Ashley, (the “punk” one) stunk up Saturday Night Live last year when she began lip-synching to the wrong recorded music track. She too ran off the stage in tears. Ashley was quick to blame everyone, but Milli Vanilli for her humiliation, but after a quick makeover came back for what was left of her fifteen minutes of fame.
Memo to Daddy Simpson…. No amount of reconstructive surgery or blonde/brunette ambition is a substitute for talent. Talent is the result of effort. Doh!
So, what does this have to do with school?
My nine year-old nephew has played the trumpet for about six weeks. He recently came home with four pieces of music to learn in order to perform in a public concert a week later. Without any instruction he had to figure out several unfamiliar notes and practice the new songs. Nobody taught him what “practice” means. After one short rehearsal he was to join a group of other children in concert.
While I fully appreciate the power of audience and the inspiration it provides for children, why do we indulge kids by offering the fame of the concert before the requisite investment of effort? I love my nephew and there is nothing cuter than seeing little kids in concert but what message are we sending? IS it true that we should have to sit in an uncomfortable gymnasium and listen to anything they play, regardless of the quality or effort just because the children want us to? Concerts are not rehearsals. They are special and should be held to a higher standard.
During the week preceding my nephew’s inaugural concert, I helped him practice the new songs – something his teacher left to chance. He plays OK for a beginner. He knows around six notes, some of which he manages to string together in a sequence. After playing four or five consecutive notes in a fashion only an uncle could love, he proclaimed, “I really nailed it!”
How does a kid develop such a false sense of triumph? The media is partially responsible, but the gold star, instant gratification of our school’s worksheet culture is culpable as well.
Every student should be made to watch Dolly Parton perform and then Jessica Simpson’s Kennedy Center disaster. They could then write a five-paragraph essay in which they compare and contrast the two performances.
Originally published December 04, 2006 in The Pulse: Education’s Pace for Debate
