This explains so much.

Here’s a quick scan of the digital work going on in our classroom on #DLDay:

Over there a student is…

• Using ScriptBuddy to plan a commercial for his collectable card game. The commercial is part of his business plan. The game uses a card template programmed in Python (with the help of a parent).
• Editing a casting call for his next film in which an unnaturalized Canadian student tries to fit in with – and hide inside – an anti-immigration secret society. This film will be the last he edits in iMovie before his mentor begins teaching him Final Cut Express.
• Building a Rubik’s Cube factory in Minecraft before starting on the construction of a working Rubik’s Cube in Minecraft.
• Explaining how Twinkies (cake – and, no, I won’t tell you his secret) get made in his Minecraft Hostess factory, which is wired with a dizzying array of red stone circuits, decorated with signs explaining Hostess’s bankruptcy, and somehow full of creepers.
• Airbrushing a skateboard using a stencil cut from a design drawn on a Bamboo tablet in SketchBookPro.
• Taking screenshots of iCivics.org’s Lawcraft game to create a comic that shows how a bill becomes a law.
• Adding content to the student-run Chevro Skates company website so it can be launched sometime soon.
• Drafting the next chapter of an epic StoryBird tale about a fantasy land’s economy.
• Discussing voir dire and jury selection as they apply to the fictional prosecution of an Argonian Skyrim character trying to avoid an all-Nord jury.
• Eating a chicken nugget in a biscuit dipped in mashed potatoes.

Here’s all I’ve got: Minecraft is Scratch using blocks instead of text. Talk amongst yourselves.

Finally, I apologize for the glaring lack of links, but the post is too product-focused as it is. The point isn’t the products, but the variety of expression that they allow the students who chose to use them.

Sansing out.

The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night, goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and snowin, hard ridin. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin goin by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down, and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead.

And then I woke up.

There is a map of the future we carry inside us; for many of us, our schools’ walls mark its end, as if it’s the buildings we’re working to network and their machines, but not ourselves. As if the world is flat and there is still time to turn away from the edge.

There is a sense of place we invest in our schools and a sense of motion we see in them as if they are arks determining their own course or being buffeted by a sea, and as if our worth comes from how well we play our roles within them stoking them on or plugging their leaks.

But the cold, hard feeling of truth is that the arks have landed, and that their only courage and shortcomings are ours. They have carried us as far as they can. They were not built to last, even though their mechanics refuse to lay down their tools and their captains refuse to give the order to abandon ship.

If these arks could ever actually feel anything, it would be a jealousy directed at us and our escape. It would be a solipsism – an insistence on their importance in our lives – an unwillingness to acknowledge all the possibilities we might find outside them if only we stopped caring for them in their malaise. If our schools had feelings, the kindest would be a sad and covetous creature.

But our schools don’t have feelings. We do. And what we feel is what we teach; what we perceive is what we learn. The stories we tell are the lives we live.

I’m not sure anyone knows what new worlds exist outside the arks. No those of us in them; not those of us plotting our own courses away from them, in relation and retaliation to them; not those of us guarding the doors or calling from within: come back to us; come back; these things matter; don’t leave us alone in our past.

I would like EduCon to become an ark full of people ready to open its doors. I would like those people to reach back, but march ahead. I would like that march to be a joyful parade.

I don’t know how to make that happen or what to tell anyone to do or plan or escape. Good schools make good neighbors; are we willing to become anything more?

I feel like EduCon is maturing, but of course it can do nothing of the sort. There’s just us, and that is sublime.

I can imagine panelists ready to discomfort us about school; I can imagine a conference-wide chat, conducted in still silence by a maestro of kind inquietude like Bud Hunt; I can imagine a tear-bright catharsis at the moment we realize we never needed schools to be teachers.

If learned anything at EduCon (and I learned plenty), it came from the way a later session answered one of the first.

How do you support change? You let yourself play and you play with others.

I have this idea for a story in my head – the story of a boy kidnapped by his father and taken to the stars. He spend all his life aboard a salvage ship, wondering at the variety of human ingenuity, wastefulness, and difference. Near a debris field, something goes wrong, and this wave starts to pulse through universe, cutting every intention in half and keeping everything apart by halves. His dad turns the ship and races against the wave to bring the boy back home to his mother before he can’t. They get closer and closer, never knowing if the wave has overtaken them, if they have become stuck in a kind of galactic amber, and, still hurtling forward towards a planet’s edge, the story stops, the boy and his father silhouetted against the forward windows, standing together, beginning to hold hands as the ship begins to descend.

And although the story ends there, I very much want them to get out.

Where will our intentions go this year, and will they carry us out of our schools or ever closer to their walls?

Will the children we never meet still study inside schools, or will they approach them like canny archaeologists uncovering temples buried in the jungle?

In their future, will they dream of us carrying the fire on ahead, or will they see us only in cold ashes left at campfires far behind?

I like to stand at my classroom window, raising my hand to wave, imagining them all at play, out past the arks, at play.

EduCon 2.3 by kjarrett

I still wonder how EduCon and other learning spaces can involve parents and children as deeply as they involve educators. Nevertheless, I’m happy to rejoin many friends in Philadelphia and I’m grateful for the opportunity to make new friends at EduCon.

I do acknowledge and admit that I did not press firmly enough to bring parents and students with me this year, but the ways in which I failed to do so give me a good idea of how to make it happen next year.

In the meantime, I hope to be helpful to everyone who attends the conference physically or virtually.

On Saturday, January 28th – during session 2 – Christina Cantrill, Paul Oh, Kirsten Olsen, and I will facilitate a conversation called “Permission to Speak: Creating Communities of Advocacy in Education.”

Here’s the pitch: We all get together and talk about how we can support and network local and virtual communities of children, parents, and teachers striving to make learning more democratic, equitable, and relevant for everyone. Then we leave the conversation with some kind of plan and/or online space that keeps us all in touch and working together toward that goal.

On Sunday, January 29th – during session 4 – Meenoo Rami and I will host a conversation called “Hacking School: The EduCon 2.4 Hackjam.” This is the second Hackasaurus-inspired hack jam that Meenoo and I have facilitated together, and I’m looking forward to seeing how different it is from the last – participants really give each of these events a unique shape and feel. You can see products from several previous National Writing Project-flavored hack jams here.

The hack jam pitch [spoiler alert]: We all get together to play Monopoly and somehow wind up using web-authorship as a metaphor for reinventing school. Playfulness and provocation abound in equal measure, and we publish our products as we make them.

As part of what EduCon calls our “conversational practice,” I will livecast a Google+ hangout for each event. I’ve learned a lot in the last few days from Jeff Lebow and Lorna Costantini’s posts on the matter, and I’ve certainly drawn inspiration here from the can-do ed tech ethic of Wes Fryer.

What does this mean?

Well, first, Paul Oh won’t be the only virtual participant in Saturday’s session. Everyone is invited to drop into and out of the “Permission to Speak” hangout at will. One of the facilitators will follow the hangout and #educon backchannel to make sure that virtual participants who want to join the conversation can do so. Folks who would like to listen in without speaking up can follow the conversation on UStream on a new CoöpCatalyst channel.

Folks will also be able to participate in the hack jam via hangout and UStream. If you would like to attend the hack jam virtually, just gather together 4-6 tweeps or local pals (and ask them to bring their computers), serve some snacks, grab a Monopoly set, and put out a bunch of sticky notes, pipe cleaners, pom poms, goggly eyes, glue sticks, bouncy balls, action figures, building blocks, and other assorted bric-a-brac for light tinkering. We’ll handle the rest together, and, again, you can watch on UStream or participate more directly through the hangout.

If either hangout interests you, send me a message or DM me @chadsansing so we can connect on Google+ before the sessions. I can’t “save any seats” (I should be so lucky), but I can make sure anyone that anyone who wants to see the hangout notice can see it. I’m keen to hear feedback about how our “conversational practice” works for viewers at home so I can get better at helping people set up broadcasts like this in the future.

I also plan to walk around with a small whiteboard and a few dry-erase markers so that anyone who wants to can contribute to the Occupy Education tumblr. If you have a message for the world about the ways in which you and your communities are changing education for the better, please share it!

Regardless, be sure to say hey. I’m happy to be seeing all of you soon.

On the agenda for 2013: Coöp & #occupyedu buttons and stickers. Or is there any chance we can make some this weekend and maybe skip to wearable edu-circuity next year?

However, as usual, I offer this disclaimer: I don’t always teach to my ideals. Sometimes I give in to the instincts I developed as a school-successful student and teacher. I deliver content and look for short cuts that prove there’s enough “achievement” going on in my classroom to give cover to the real learning students want to pursue. I fall back on traditional instruction sometimes when it’s easier and more expedient to do so than it is to work through the weeks or months of patience it takes students to become comfortable with self-directed learning.

Given the state of schooling, I could blame the system, but I am the system’s branch manager in my classroom, so I acknowledge that I am frequently impatient (and factual knowledge comes quickly with the right kind of access) and I am sometimes afraid of not producing enough passing scores to earn me the right to “indulge” students in more authentic learning than our common assessment – the state’s standardized civics & economics course – asks of us.

Frankly, I wonder what kind of school, classroom, and learning I facilitate for students if I got over myself. I am my own worst status quo as an educator.

Every once in a while, despite the vagaries of my teaching, my students show me what I’m after.

This year it took a while for once class to find what it wanted to do. At this point, over 80% of its students have formed a skateboard design “company” in response to their economics unit. I invested in some blank decks and the kids formed a kind of board that governs the company by consensus in everything from taking on new “workers” to deciding on the final designs we will use as stencils and decals.

The Money Chevro design

[By "company" I mean an on-going project that takes advantage of school fund-raising precedent set by students' donation of work to
the non-profit that supports our school and uses such work to support our school.]

Kids are critiquing one another’s art on a regular basis without taking offense. A typical critique has students spreading out all their designs on the floor and walking around them until they find consensus on a design for each student to revise. As part of the revision process, kids are teaching one another about how to build stable, re-usable stencils with gates that keep interior details from getting lost.

Critiquing our designs

We’ve begun taking our many prototyped designs and digitizing them using a Wacom tablet and SketchBookPro – a program students are teaching themselves and one another to use.

Digitizing our designs

We’ve just gotten an airbrush into class for the first time thanks to a class parent and a student willing to demo the tool and “certify” classmates on it.

Our airbrush station

The company has become a spiraling review of our economics content, as well as an ongoing arts- and technology-infused project.

We sourced our boards after researching and pricing them online – we bought Canadian boards, but once we make a profit, we plan to consume slightly more expensive boards produced in the United States. We set our price per board based on pre-order demand from friends and family and on the cost of replacing the boards and paints we’ll use in detailing our first batch of goods.

We’ve begun conversations about copyright and trademark in anticipation of the kids one day taking the company with them after they leave school.

And we got here because students suggested starting a skateboard company after learning enough economics content to realize that they could do something more with it than I asked of them. And because the class was kind of obsessed with mouse deer (a.k.a. chevrotains) for a few weeks. Hence the name of our company, Chevro Skates (or Chevro Sk8s – I don’t really know which one it is – or that we have to pick one or the other).

Our mascot, Sarge, in progress

We are doing stuff, not just talking about it.

We could do this all day – we could keep super-detailed books; we could get really wonky about the proportion and ratio of surface area, skate designs, and whitespace. We could write ad copy and script promotional videos. We could build a website. We could research all kinds of inquiry-based questions about the human condition and draft social-justice murals fit to the dimensions of our boards. We could pursue flow and cash flow in support of arts materials for our school and treat our classroom more like a member-supported hack space than a holding cell.

We could, but I would have a lot of persuading to do and I wonder if I am up to it. This is not what Virginia is after. This is not what the United States is after – not for kids in school. Sometimes, this is not what I am after. However, not to be glib, when I look at this project and think about my work, I feel like it is indeed time for my teaching to skate or die.

Our skate company is the future of education. It is a learning space that could sustain itself all day if we – or, in this case, I – let go of our teacher-space conventions of movie-theater scheduling, race-track pacing, certified delivery, demand performance, and arbitrary judgment. A learning space is defined by its people, relationships, and learning; a teaching space is defined by a teacher’s presumptions about people, relationships, and learning.

Spaces like the skate company already exist for learners of all ages; what remains to be seen is whether or not we teachers, in our role as the system, acknowledge these spaces and allow students to build them in our classrooms before we – and our classrooms – go the way of the dinosaurs.

Trogdor v. Wexter: the way of the dinosaurs

Pretty scary, right?

This week Governor Bob McDonnell unveils his plans for public education in Virginia’s next two-year budget. In anticipation of Wednesday night’s State of the Commonwealth address, I’ve been re-reading the education blueprint McDonnell put forth during his candidacy.

It’s typical education budget double-speak. For example:

McDonnell’s blueprint promises “a bold education proposal that will dramatically increase money for Virginia’s teachers and students by $480 million a year.” Meanwhile, his budget plans also include “hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts, including to child-care subsidies for low-income families and to health and parent-education programs for poor pregnant women.” Families who need social and support services to help their kids attend school and access curriculum won’t benefit from McDonnell’s cuts.

Furthermore, more than a fifth of McDonnell’s proposed bump will go to higher education. Part of the bump will also come from McDonnell’s mandate that districts spend 65% of their budgets on instruction. Other bits and pieces will likely come from double-dipping and cross-promoting of economic development as education spending.

At the same time those in college and business benefit, kids struggling to make it through school lose out: K-12 public education will actually suffer cuts to support staff funding, putting a double-whammy on positions like teachers-aides. As salaries for such positions go down, qualified and motivated aides will have to find more or other work, and it will be difficult to attract equally strong candidates to those positions. Teachers aides absolutely make a difference in the lives of the children whom they serve because they more often act as students’ aides and advocates who know their clients better than teachers do and who form the kinds of selfless relationships with kids teachers struggle with because of their “authority” and responsibility to “discipline” children who act and learn outside the norm. So $480 million doesn’t buy those kids jack in their classrooms.

To put it another way, neither 4% of the money I spend on materials in my classroom nor 4% of the money I make as a classroom teacher would buy 1 site license for a reading intervention program like Read 180. (For comparison, look here and here). I can’t imagine that the money school shifts into instruction will be given to teachers, but if it is, it will be used to save positions, not to boost salaries. Instead, I predict McDonnell’s reallocated millions will be used to buy stuff. When faced with the kind of on-going budget crunch out schools face – the kind that freezes salaries and cuts positions – it’s easier to buy programs that promise results than it is to recruit teachers who live and breathe to teach past the tests. The money will go right out schools’ doors into private coffers.

Moreover, the pressure to keep instructional spending at 65% could accelerate another piece of the governor’s agenda – making the Virginia Retirement System (VRS) a defined-contribution system It should be noted that before that can happen, McDonnell is shoring up the VRS. By mandating 65% spending on instruction, McDonnell can begin to hamstring divisions into a accepting defined contribution systems.

If schools systems have to spend a set percentage on instruction, it would help them budget if they had a defined contribution to make to employees’ retirements each year. Given our whirly-gig economy, that might not be a bad thing for the fiscal health of the commonwealth or of many school divisions. However, the bigger issue here is the continued miscommunication between pop culture and school culture. Educators remember the unspoken social contract between them and society – we will educate your children and take on all the intellectual, emotional, and manual labor that requires in exchange for an arguably low salary, benefits that keep us from having to work other jobs, and time away from school to let go of last year and prepare for the next. (And let’s remember that school is stuck with an agrarian calendar – teachers didn’t ask for the summer off; society told them to take it; let communities support year-long schooling and it will happen; teacher salary and summer vacation should be a non-issue).

Educators remember that contract; money does not. Populist political memory is short and focused on survival. Therefore, a responsible education proposal for Virginia would table retirement and spending mandates until the commonwealth is in better fiscal health and can have a reasonable discussion about how to change school for the better. Teachers don’t want to lose benefits they have been given since the 1940s. If teachers do lose their current benefits, not only do they lose the value of those benefits, but teachers’ unions have one less cause to champion – one less cause around which to rally their members and collect their dues.

Retirement costs need to be addressed; they should be negotiated in good faith, not legislated under fiscal duress. And, frankly, unions should champion exceptional teaching and learning – not labor issues. If society valued teachers’ work more, compensation would be less of an issue. Because the unions and their right-to-work-state equivalents concentrate on labor, they are letting neighborhood schools lose market share in the public imagination.

I look at it this way:

Educators look back. Politicians look at the present. The people want something – anything – better for the future. Until educators leap-frog politicians, politicians’ proposals will be closer to the hearts of the people than teacher are, even though the plight of our teachers is the plight of our students.

So where does all of that leave us?

Right here in Virginia with a likely education budget that does more harm than good to us. The big us. The Commonwealth of Virginia us.

And I get it.

We all want something more – more money, more stability, more assurances, more results. We especially want all of these things during times of crisis. We can afford more ambiguity when we can all afford more, period.

But at some point, we in Virginia have to decide if we want something more or if we want something else.

Are we schooling for higher scores? Higher graduation rates? More students enrolled in the commonwealth’s university system? More revenue, more earnings, more stuff? On one hand, we should be schooling for these things foe our students’ sakes – the more students we help access higher earnings, the more graduates will be able to afford material comfort. The more material comfort our graduates enjoy, the better able they will be to support their schools and communities.

On the other hand, what does any of that buy us that we don’t already have? Another generation sold on a an obsolete industrial model of education? Under-funded, over-mandated public schools staffed by embattled employees in competition with extra-local corporations – and I’m not even talking about charter management organization here (CMOs). I’m talking about the companies that sell the products we buy with tax-payer money that we tell salaried teachers to use in place of their own plans in traditional public schools and the products that bankroll travel for public education officials, including our Virginia superintendent.

More spendings and more savings won’t change our schools for the better. The money is a red herring – McDonnell, for example, is harping on allegedly questionable spending that amounts in nearly each case to tenths of a percent of the money he proposes to spend on education. He’s also belaboring a 59% increase in the state department of education’s budget from 2000 to 2008 – which is the same window of time during which we instituted a battery of SOL tests, the student information system products needed to keep track of test results, and the offices and services necessary to administer sanctions to schools put into “improvement” by failing to meet Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind. The governor’s rhetoric here is not big on causality.

The money is an uncritical mess; it’s a blunt political construct – shaped by special interests and the exigencies of our election cycles – that doesn’t quite fit through the classroom door. We can’t talk over coffee with our kids’ teachers – or over cocoa with our kids – about hundreds of millions of dollars. However, we can talk about something else.

We can talk about teaching and learning. We can talk about the kinds of schools we see out past the event horizon of standardized testing. We can talk about what’s possible right now and how our choices shape the future.

Our talk about education has to stop being about what to count; it has to be about what to do.

For a fraction of what the commonwealth requires a school to spend, we could open community learning centers – or call them “schools” – that

• Put kids in contact with expert practitioners in every field.
• Teach kids to learn in their communities, instead of apart from them.
• Acknowledge and advance all kinds of learning.
• Put reading, writing, and math into the service of kids who are learning how to make real things and solve real problems.
• Partner meaningfully with parents.
• Serve all students in innovative ways.

What value do we add to our schools by tracking dozens of test scores per child for, give or take, a dozen years? What value do we add to our schools by taking up weeks – if not months – of the instructional time McDonnell wants to bolster with test preparation and administration? What value do our schools add to the lives of students who are assigned to class after class of test-preparation for fear that their scores might cost a school and its division their accreditation?

Because of the way we run our schools and validate our tests, we will always need kids to “fail” so that other can “succeed.” The money, despite its amount, as poorly as we’re spending it, won’t change that fact. I don’t mean to suggest that we can magic up all the resources we’ll ever need so that everyone lives like royalty. I mean to say that we could be spending what we do have in different ways and that – if we wanted to – we could get rid of the artificial scarcities created by zero-sum games like class rank (but maybe not state budgeting) by using government to support a broader range of educational opportunities than traditional school. Outstanding educations abound outside, as well as inside, traditional schools and universities.

Education in Virginia doesn’t need a new budget; it needs a new vision. Instead of something more, it needs something else – it needs us, not the commonwealth, to dare something worthy of in education reform so that our kids have can pursue a real-world education of obvious and lasting value to them to and their communities. We need schools – or learning spaces – that will help our kids manage their future better than we managed ours. The schools we have now are driven by the policies of people who were good at counting in school.

We need to send a mandate to our leaders to transform education. We need to stop accepting our leaders’ mandates to transform kids into scores.

While it’s hard to lose sight of money in a budget season, it’s tragic to lose sight of what matters – of what stays possible out past Wednesday night.

To set the stage for charter school growth in Virginia in 2012, Governor Bob McDonnell hosted a meeting of state “charter school leaders” and “representatives from high-performing charter programs around the country.” While not highly attended by legislators, the number of charter management organizations (CMOs) represented at the meeting sent a clear message: it’s the governor’s intent to establish a beachhead of “high-performing” charter schools in Virginia run by CMOs that can provide a quick return on his political investment in the form of high pass rates on standardized tests.

The governor’s intent is to bring CMOs into Virginia to create a politically viable network of charter schools that will bear up under immediate scrutiny and clearly demonstrate a correlation between the money invested in the schools and their test scores.

This is a new turn in the reality of Virginia charter schools because the state’s four existing charter schools – while beholden to the SOL – didn’t open to increase student achievement as measured by standardized tests. (The following excerpts from school mission statements are taken from the state department of education website.)

The mission of Murray High School, which converted to charter status in 2001, “is to facilitate intensive, experiential learning opportunities in order to provide academic and personal success for students who are at-risk to leave school or to graduate below potential.”

York River Academy, opened in 2002, aims to provide “an academic, social, and career preparatory education in computer and web-based technology for students who may not graduate or graduate below potential.”

The Community Public Charter School, opened in 2008, is an “alternative and innovative learning environment using the arts to help children learn in ways that match their learning styles” with an “emphasis…on individual learning styles and developing the whole child, intellectually, emotionally, physically, and socially” because “it is the belief of the school that the arts are essential to human development, empowering people and enhancing learning.”

Virginia’s newest charter school, the Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts – which opened in 2010 – seeks “to establish a school based on parent, educator, and community involvement” that offers “the children of the ethnically and socio-economically diverse Richmond community with an academically rigorous science and liberal arts curriculum that emphasizes environmental awareness and social responsibility.”

Despite the schools’ disparate and student-centric (rather than achievement-centric) missions, they survive.

The start-up difficulties experienced by both Murray High School and the Community Public Charter are well known in Albemarle County, but their successes – both immediate and eventual – are testament to the division’s determination to incubate and safeguard programs that meet students’ needs without undue consideration for bureaucracy.

York River Academy continues operation and recently moved into new facilities shared with the Boys & Girls Club.

Patrick Henry perseveres despite fiscal growing pains and the apparent hostility of the school board that approved it.

These schools matter to their students and communities and serve as examples of grass roots start-up efforts in Virginia schools. Because of their local origins and capacities to address local needs, these schools might not “scale up”, but the community-based processes used in their development are definitely replicable.

In fact, Virginia could have spent the last dozen years building a thriving network of locally-accountable charter schools, especially if the state had begun doing so before No Child Left Behind. Instead, the state’s schooling apparatus – including its state department of education, its state school board, its state teachers’ organization (the VEA), and most local school boards – has made the charter movement into a boogey man.

This strategy has completely backfired.

Charter opponents in Virginia had the chance to open dozens of Murray High Schools and York River Academies and Community Public Charter Schools and Patrick Henry Schools for Science and the Arts. Charter opponents could have called these places magnet schools or speciality centers or schools within schools. However, charter opponents did nothing to support school choice in Virginia – they did nothing to diversify the educational opportunities open to Virginia students growing up in a new, information-rich, innovation-hungry world.

Instead they opposed charter schools. They insisted that school remain a monoculture.

And now it’s time to reap what our fractious institutions have sown – school choice as a kill event for traditional public schools, rather than school choice as an evolution of them.

Because Virginia did not embrace local control of diverse charter schools when it could, Virginia’s public schools – including its charter schools – now face a cataclysm of lost opportunity.

Here we are with a Republican governor, a Republican legislature, and charter school legislation that will let a coalition of the willing open new CMO-operated charter schools with or without approval of any single local school board. These schools will be focused on student achievement – which means they will focus on high pass rates on standardized tests. They will be schools controlled by extra-local organizations pursuing state performance goals in a state that hasn’t signed on to the Common Core standards or pursued federal Race to the Top funding. The state and the CMOs will be financially beholden to one another without being accountable to parents, children, or federal oversight, however dubious its current value.

What does that mean?

It means that Virginia will be largely alone in American public education, pursuing high pass rates on standards unique to the state through the cooperation of a superintendent who likes the tests and CMOs that like to profit of test results. Traditional public schools will face increasing pressure to match the results of the CMO charter schools by adopting test-aligned teaching strategies that have already gutted arts programs and made learning a cut-and-dry matter of memorizing old facts rather than a vital process of discovering and applying new concepts and ideas.

The public schools our children attend will become isolated outposts on an island of academic grind. Virginia will ask its children to take test after test – and these tests will be aligned with standards written by Virginia policy makers according to Virginia politics. Our tests won’t speak to the Common Core standards adopted by dozens of other states. Thus our educational system will have little in common with those of other states, and that disparity could eventually impact our kids’ chances of admission to the colleges and careers they desire if admissions decisions come down to the quality and utility of standards underlying any two candidates’ educations.

How can we stand up to this onslaught of standardization? How can we save Virginia’s schools from the faint praise of having good test scores on Virginia tests?

We can look to our four charter schools. These schools have demonstrated a willingness to correct mistakes and to stay the course in fulfilling their missions. They have done so by serving their students before the state. They have put the whole child before a dissection of facts. They have undertaken new teaching and learning in a new world. They have taken care of the children entrusted to them.

We don’t need to recreate these schools, but we need to recapture the will to update local schools to address local needs in preparing kids for their future.

To make CMOs stakeholders in this uprising of community-based schooling, I propose the inclusion of charter school covenants in any deal made with a CMO looking to operate a nationally branded charter school in Virginia.

1. First, any CMO opening a new charter school in Virginia should build and operate its own facility and agree to transfer the facility’s deed to the surrounding school division in case the CMO-run school closes.
2. Furthermore, any CMO opening a new charter school in Virginia should fund the work of a local committee – made up of educators, students, parents, and community members – to develop a new, grass-roots charter school, magnet school, specialty center, or school within a school to serve the surrounding division.
3. Finally, any CMO opening a new charter school in Virginia should be required to adopt and enact a mission that goes bend promoting student achievement on standardized tests and calls for some kind of juried portfolio or presentation of student work that demonstrates engagement with this mission as an exit requirement from the charter school. CMOs should retain students whose portfolios don’t demonstrate such engagement and absorb the cost of offering them an optional “post-graduate” year of studies in the area of the school’s mission.

CMOs are coming to Virginia, but we can’t confuse their work with the work of our grass-roots charter schools or let the CMOs overshadow the work our charter schools have done to serve their students and spur innovation in Virginia public education.

CMOs coming to Virginia should face a clear obligation to improve our kids’ quality of life, our kids’ quality of learning, and our communities’ futures – not just test scores. An outstanding education is an asset of human capital; SOL scores are not.

If CMOs aren’t willing to strike those deals and abide by those covenants, well, then, we should develop more schools of our own that will. We already know what to do.

This year, we also included a short bell choir performance and the world debut of a student-composed song. It seems like each time we hold an expo, the kids have deeper appreciations of what it means to engage in project-based learning, what it means to develop quality work, and what it means to share their learning with our school community.

We held our Fall expo this week, and it was amazing – every child had someone come to school to see his or her work. There were documentaries and animations and posters and paintings and sculptures and businesses – intensely personal work tackled, shared, and appreciated with intense interest from all involved.

It was amazing, and it made me think of symphony.

What if our school was just in the business of Expo Nights? What if every four weeks the school community came together for a meal and a walkthrough of the learning that mattered most to students? What if we treated learning like a performance and scheduled a concert every month? How would instruction change to accommodate inquiry? How would writing across the curriculum develop to accommodate student reflection? How would technology be integrated throughout the school to accommodate different styles of research, production, and reflection? To keep students’ work accessible wherever they wanted or needed access to it?

I think our school comes closest to fulfilling its mission on Expo Nights. As those special events draw near, we give over our schedule and open our school to its students. We say, “Go where you need to be for as long as you need to be there,” and it all gets done. The learning happens; the work happens; the reflection happens. It’s a big undertaking, and plenty of adult support goes into helping students achieve what they want to achieve, but its a community-wide effort. There’s busyness without busy work – bustle without chaos.

I love our Expo Nights; I thank each student and colleague for them.

And I wonder if we couldn’t get rid of everything else.

Let’s call this proposal “Operation: Negative Zebra.”

Operation: Negative Zebra

Phase 1 – Merit pay by commission

In this phase, teachers earn their pay by commission based on the income of adults who were once the teachers’ students. A teacher gets a percentage of each former-student’s income. The percentage a former-student pays into this “teacher tax” depends on the former-student’s income. The “teacher tax” is only levied against a former-student for his or her teachers from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Former-students who dropout pay the same amount of tax per school-year missed.

When this phase becomes tax law, each teacher is paid according to the incomes of the last five years’ worth of graduates who have entered the workforce who had the teacher for any grade between kindergarten and twelfth grade. Each of those 5 years of students is replaced as a new class graduates, and after the tenth year – once the classes granted retroactively to each teacher have been fully replaced by recent graduates – the teacher continues to earn against the first five replacement years and all subsequent tears of graduating former-students until the teacher’s death. This grandfathers out recently graduated former-students and former-students from past generations, it encourages teachers to stay in the classroom longer to earn more and more over time, and it obviates any need for state teacher retirement systems. This should also allow local politicians to dramatically lower property taxes and to claim credit for doing so.

School divisions stop paying salaries and benefits and instead use finance departments and student-information services to partner with the IRS in ensuring proper collection and disbursement of the “teacher tax.”

Former-students in the middle class should pay on a sliding scale commensurate with their income in such a way that that 13% of their income ever goes into the “teacher tax.” Upper-class former-students should pay back 26% annually. Thus, contributions to former teachers should be itemized to pay back 1% or 2% by school year and contributions to each year should be split amongst all the former-teachers-of-record for any given former-student during that year.

Teachers should not pay any tax on this income. Each school should be a coöperative of like-minded teachers who pay a subscription fee to use the school’s spaces and to support its upkeep, and teachers should purchase the materials they want to use. Local communities might vote to sustain school technology and materials budgets to attract teachers by providing some share of equipment. Schools should implement policies that attract popular teachers who help students find sustainable fiscal life-outcomes.

Former students living below the poverty line or in low-income bands of the economy should not have to pay back into a system that did not help secure them a more financially sound future.

Because schools would become teacher-led cooperatives, the most successful schools will the ones that best partner with parents, students, and communities to provide the best services according to local needs and to attract the most students to bankroll its teachers work and pay.

Phase 2 – Student futures trading

After the successful implementation of phase 1, Operation: Negative Zebra becomes a kind of educational stock-market. Teachers can apply to become brokers for their schools and offer to trade their school’s “dropout credits” – the units of flat tax paid by an individual who chooses to drop out of school – to other schools in return for “student futures” – a combination of the academic record and physical presence of a struggling student. The school trading away its “dropout credits” for “student futures” would be gambling that it could better educate and therefore gain better employment for the struggling students it adopts than could those students’ home schools.

This would let struggling schools try to adopt more struggling students, motivate those schools to improve (except in the most cynical sacs), and motivate those schools to positively impact students’ future earnings and therefore stay open longer than the schools would if they suffered constant attrition by dropout. As a struggling school’s dropout rate decreased, theoretically, its income would increase, slowly lessening the need for it to depend on the trade of “dropout credits” for “student futures.”

This might also encourage the creation of specialty schools funded additionally through corporate partnerships with companies willing to employ brokerage-schools’ graduates leaving those schools with specialized skills.

Frankly, phase 2 instinctively horrifies me in ways that phase 1 does not, but I wanted to share both ideas because I think the war over teacher pay has already been lost. The institution of schooling is not a new economy; therefore, I don’t expect it to be able to innovate enough to find alternative revenues streams to pay teachers “professional” salaries, let alone the kinds of pay earned by the brokers, bankers, and executives who use tax-payers’ businesses and savings and investments, as well as federal bail-outs and secret loans, like slush-funds. I think salaries will be capped by economic crises and the policies politicians sell voters during such times. I think teacher labor unions are fighting a rear-guard action against political expediency and the unwelcome realization that their product – teacher job security – is not popular outside the profession. When the storm is over, the beach will be gone.

If we want schools funded and teachers protected and sustained like the executives and institutions that somehow thrive under our collective derision, it’s worth asking ourselves how information-age, new-economy, and debt-trading we want to get as a profession. As much as phase 2 frightens me, I think that as a system we’re pretty close to it already. Does a community fighting (or embracing) corporate take-over of its schools or corporate charter school co-location see any difference between what we have now and phase 2?

Can any of us discern the negative zebra from its positive ilk? For example, how many of us know the extent of grade- and scoring-inflation across the country? In our home schools? How do K12 results stack up against post-secondary expectations? How do K12 participants’ skills stack up against those same expectations? Do we all understand how test companies validate their standardized tests into normative measures question-by-question? That a certain number of students must fail each item and test for it to be of market value? Are we convinced our public education sector isn’t headed for its own scandal and collapse?

It’s not tenable to keep going as we’ve gone; it’s not moral to follow in the footsteps of financial robber-barons. It will take money, influence, and a huge number of free alternative schools to shift public education, students, parents, and communities into embracing more democratic, inquiry-driven education.

What compromises are we going to make as educators? Are we going to deliver scripts meekly for less money? Focus aggressively on the tests for more? Develop new models of free teaching and learning that somehow generate sponsorship or optional subscription-based income? With whom will we partner?

I am a proponent of local change in the classroom. That means I believe that individual teachers can change what they do in public school classrooms to subvert the autocratic, punitive school culture of standardization and testing and to replace it with a compelling, inquiry-, community-, and democratically-driven education. That means I also believe we’re going to need to find new ways to fund this work so we can continue it unabated once we get to that crisis point at which the public school system – to preserve itself – cannot stand the presence of non-conformists in its midst.

Public school will punch progressives’ tickets before it gets its own ticket punched. It’s time to figure out how we can save up in order to strike out in new directions. This is going to be part of our work, or we are going to be locked out from it.

Dear Albemarle County School Board Members,

I understand that we as a community we face lean times. Given our on-going economic downturn, it’s judicious to look for creative solutions to our school division’s funding challenges. Moreover, as I’m sure you know, throughout the division we frequently face difficult decisions between expedient budgetary solutions and painful ones, and even the expedient solutions can call on us to sacrifice more than we’d like to in the future. Therefore, I wholeheartedly write to encourage you to protect and sustain our division’s investment in school technology that promotes student learning. Cutting, eliminating, or taking a holiday from our investment in technology that promotes learning will hurt innovation in our classrooms, increase digital inequality amongst our students, and signal that we as a division have turned our back on the strategic goals we’ve held ourselves to fulfill since 2005.

First, cutting, eliminating, or taking a holiday from our technology budget will hurt innovation in our classrooms by putting us into a kind of digital stasis. So much of the innovative work in our division – in classrooms and media centers alike – is supported by technology. Students write wikis to publish and receive feedback on their writing and questions. Students videoconference with peers and experts from around the world. Students program models, animations, and games that show clear mastery of the content we ask them to learn. Teachers write seed grants that allow students to use new technologies in innovative ways that they develop in their own learning spaces. Students are discovering new ways to learn with new technologies. To accomplish such innovation and learning, students are using the same state-of-the-art and emergent communications and productions technologies we adults use in our workplaces. Moreover, we have tasked ourselves with the development of performance assessments that will prepare students to contribute to 21st century economies and communities. Our economies and communities are not cut off from the technologies that support them, nor should our students (or their assessments) be cut off from the technological tools that can allow them access to authentic school work and the new economies and global communities they will enter as young men and women and adults.

Furthermore, a significant decrease in technology budgeting or elimination of technology replacement funds through a technology holiday would increase digital inequality amongst our students. We have made great strides in achieving a computer to student ratio that provides all students with regular access to up-to-date technologies that support learning. We have made connections with other classrooms whose students have shown Albemarle County children distant parts of our country and world. We have built a school system dedicated to providing digital equity for all students, not just those who can bring their own computing devices to school. When we cut technology indiscriminately, we cut digital access and equity indiscriminately, which means we disadvantage students indiscriminately. When we preserve budgeting for technology that promotes innovation in learning, we at least stand a chance of helping every student imagine for him or herself a place in higher education and/or the workforce wherein technology permeates life, work, and citizenship. At the moment, we face tough times as a division; however, our most impoverished students very often face generational cycles of poverty. The access our schools provide to technology can help these students gain access to futures that their circumstances might otherwise keep from them.

Ultimately, taking a break from technology also equates to taking a break from our strategic goals. The more we defund technology that promotes innovation and learning in the classroom, the further we get from achieving our stated goals. I served with pride on the division’s Strategic Planning Committee and I don’t see a way to meet any of our goals if we grossly diminish our spending on learning technology. Limiting access to technology does not prepare our students to participate in a global economy or community. Impairing dependable access to technology-based interventions and innovations does not help us eliminate the achievement gap. Taking technology away from a teachers’ tool box does not help us recruit, retain, or develop the highest quality teachers our students deserve. Devaluing the role of technology in communication and production for learning does not elevate us to the level of a world-class school system. Minimizing the impact of technology budget cuts on learning can help us establish efficient systems for the development, allocation and alignment of resources to support the division’s vision, mission, and goals, but taking a break from technology most certainly does not. It’s not efficient to go backwards while pursuing our goals.

It is right to ask if we are using technology as best we can. It is right to evaluate how we spend money on learning technology – are we buying computers for typing or for programming? For students completing digital worksheets, or for students creating digital masterpieces? It may be, that in using a model like the seed grant program, we can realign how we spend technology money with how its used in the classroom. However, it is not right to do away with the technology budget or to cut it to the point that inadequate technology spending keeps us from innovating or stops technology from being part of what helps our division ensure equity and meet its strategic goals.

I am sorry that I cannot join you tonight in-person to communicate to you how passionately I believe in our shared work and technology’s importance to it. Please take this letter as a heartfelt token of my personal and professional commitment to our children and their futures. Protect our technology budget in pursuit of the innovation, equity, and strategic goals that distinguish Albemarle County Public Schools as a division committed to learners who believe in their power to embrace learning, to excel, and to own their future

Sincerely,

Chad Sansing
Humanities Teacher, Community Public Charter School
NBCT Early Adolescence English/Language Arts
NETS*T Certified Teacher

Waterfall

Part of the day consisted of a “mindful lunch” – an opportunity to spend time in quiet attentiveness to the food and surroundings with which were gifted. I trundled off to find a thinking spot and settled on to a cool stone overlooking a waterfall.

I tried to cycle my attention through my food and the environment. I was struck by two kinds of motion.

At first, I stared at the waterfall and listened to the rush of water dropping white down the ledge. As I tried to maintain my focus on the water, I got distracted by the leaves falling in the woods around the river. I started thinking about the waterfall and the falling leaves as two ways of eating, and then as two ways of teaching and learning.

The waterfall seems like school to me – gravity pulls the water ceaselessly downstream, shoves it off the ledge, and says, “Land here.” As a system of public education, we push kids through the grades, shove them off a series of ledges, and tell them to “land here” with their scores and behaviors. The molecules and gallons of water arriving at the edge all go over it together – it’s difficult to see or imagine water as a singular noun at a waterfall. It’s difficult to see kids’ needs in a school as they compete – sometimes powerlessly, silently – with the needs of the adults around them. The water is a medium, not a community. Our system is the same.

The leaves – to me – seem like children learning. Each is part of single tree; each tree is part of a forest or other ecology – there is a sense of life and community and organicism to them that I don’t see in the rush of a waterfall. The leaves are born of and grown from the tree; they also give back to it. When I think of what a school could be – when I think of school as a community of learners – I think more of the leaves on a tree than of a waterfall. I think of a community of people contributing to one another and to the whole. When the leaf falls, it has its own path and pace, and it continues to contribute to the forest floor – to a broader community than its tree. I think of students leaving a school with a path and pace and humble purpose to keep giving to their schools’ community.

None of this is to say that those metaphors should bear up under scrutiny or give us the answer to our systemic problems. None of it is to say my impressions of the waterfall and falling leaves are correct. All of it is only to say that paying attention to the moment can sometimes lead us to pay attention to ourselves, our beliefs, our surroundings, and our shared work with kids.

I think maybe Bud would have loved the day.