Schools wound kids and adults. Our answer: more of the same.

Executive power over schools is expanding without checks and balances from teachers, parents, or students. Democracy is virtually extinct within schools outside of civics and government standards. It’s not impossible that scripted instruction and instructional designs from virtual and F2F content providers will abrogate teachers’ authority and moral imperative to plan instruction for their students. If Texas subscribes wholly to canned curricula, so goes the nation – “teacherproof.”

There are administrators and teachers out there so hamstrung by policy and the economy that they’re compromising their beliefs about kids and learning. They don’t even feel like they can speak out or support one another in doing the right thing. Those who do speak up or act out feel like they’re competing against the system rather than working with it.

While there are schools that succeed by every measure, including and apart from standardized testing, we’re scaling up accountability for testing, rather than for the other factors that make these schools successful.

The Fed, media, charter companies, and unscrupulous charter operators are stealing the charter movement and school choice from kids and parents who need niche schools to meet their needs and wants. School choice is about meeting kids’ needs, not about adults’ failings and power struggles.

Some Possibilities

Ad-hoc schools. An on-going Twitter conversation tagged #revolutioned hopes to create an alliance of teachers who link their classrooms into a cloud-school. Students in participating classrooms will have access to one another’s teachers, talents, and visiting experts. This nascent movement is also called the Rebel Education Alliance (#REA), a possible teachers’ rapid-response force to students’ needs and an un-union alternative to the NEA.

The Race Back Home initiative. School choice, the Race to the Top initiative (RttT), and the economy inspire school boards to charter their divisions into portfolio school systems, awarding the governance and accountability for each school to the team of educators, parents, and students that presents the most compelling and likely-to-succeed curriculum, instructional model, and assessment plan for each school and community. School boards and central offices assess the plans transparently, but also reserve the right to balance division-wide student needs via final differentiation of schools.

DIY classrooms, charters, learning centers and networks. Home-schooling, charter schools, virtual schools, project-based learning, self-directed learning, unschooling, open-source education, the maker aesthetic and ethic, student entrepreneurship, and drop-out education are all coming into play as alternatives to traditional public education. Thanks to social media, determined public school students and teachers can find expert support and models for the authentic learning made possible with each approach. Divisions should formalize their support for these options by publicly supporting teachers and chartering schools to take advantage of DIY resources in pursuit of achievement benchmarks.

Collaborating with – and profiting from – the competition. Local school divisions augment part-time enrollment options for students and educational organizations outside the system via multiple portals to exceptional teachers and courses. Divisions raise revenues and increase enrollment for state and federal funding formulas through virtual schools, teacher and course subscriptions, and second-shift leases of schools’ physical spaces and resources to educational organizations including home-school coöps.

Lateral pressure. Unopposed students and teachers engage in project-based, inquiry-driven, grade-free, service and entrepreneurship learning. They joyfully share learning in safe classrooms that have a real, positive impact on their communities’ well-being. Colleagues, other students, and other parents take note and ask administrators why such schooling isn’t the norm. Dissatisfied with answers about the importance of standardized testing, stake-holders agitate against test-driven instruction.

Which of these can you support? Which of these can you enact? With which of these do you disagree and on what grounds? Let’s puzzle it out together. To retweet Rob Lyons, “Viva la #revolutioned!!“

Dandelion Invasion by ®DS

Social reading

I want synched e-readers with color screens and robust tablet features for annotation and audio/visual mark-up, and I want them licensed to download the latest young adult lit. I want to pay smart phone prices for the devices and download prices for the books. The trouble with marking up a class set of books is that the books have to be used again by the next class. I want to invest in one social reader per student that follows him or her throughout an elementary, middle, high school, or K12 career. I want each student to leave school with not only a record of their reading, but also an archive of the connections they’ve made between texts, their lives, and the teachers and classmates learning with them. I want interactions with the text and between readers to appear synchronously across a synched set of readers. I want publishers to host databases of who’s reading what when so that connecting with another class or reader near the same page is a search-and-click away on the reader. I want new networks of readers to revisit texts after a unit or course. I want to be able to tag and rate pages, passages, and characters, and to be able to upload those tags and ratings to publishers’ databases. Let’s go, Bezos; make it happen: evolving humanities flexbooks with site-based social licensing of new works available on demand.

Webpage Challenge Policies

No more social media firewalls. Take best-practice book challenge practices and apply them to classroom use of the Internet. Trust teachers and students to use good judgment; expect teachers to manage behavior and provide engaging instruction that’s augmented – and not replaced – by technology. If a student objects to a particular website, have alternatives ready. If a parent objects to a webpage after an alternative assignment is made available, invite the parent to review the page thoroughly and fill out a complaint to be reviewed by a committee including the parent, a subject-area coordinator, a subject-area teacher, and a representative from tech support. Require students and parents to object to single instances or pages of defensible sites or services so a school or system doesn’t lose access to an entire, appropriately used product with proven educational value.

Social media goes local

I have a folderful of shared papers and proposals on Google Docs co-authored by educators in a half-dozen states. This year our humanities class has tweeted Tanzania, begun a whole-class Edmodo book club with @engltchrleo’s class in New Mexico, and started another, smaller book club with @kperry’s students in Oklahoma. However, we haven’t read and blogged along with another middle school class in our division. We haven’t Skyped read-alouds to elementary school students or worked on our own fluency with high school mentors. We haven’t used VoiceThread to comment on electronic galleries of political cartoons made by students in local social studies classes. We haven’t asked for feedback on our class wiki from other sixth and seventh graders in our system. I wonder why not. I hope that the strides we’re making in connecting with classrooms online will help us form tighter PLCs and more meaningful learning partnerships locally.

Innovation gets cloudy

Entrepreneurship, invention, and workplace best practices appear in more and more K12 classes. The classes find voice and find one another online. More administrators, teachers, and students join the ongoing work of reforming classroom practice. Teachers and students become more systematic about documenting and sharing planning and work. Administrators and teachers find ways to schedule standards-aligned classes focused on authentic work. They work with legal to draft new permissions policies for publishing and selling student work to sustain such classes. Public education teachers pick up on blended-instruction, distance learning, and the radical differentiation offered by competitors like virtual, independent, and home schools. Conversations online broker local discussions that lead to real change in how teachers, departments, schools, and divisions approach teaching and learning. New definitions and widespread rollout of CTE help American public schools become a part of the world instead of remaining apart from it. Teachers begin treating classrooms like work spaces and students like collaborators. Vision, mission, and strategy work at the classroom level creates accountability, responsibility, and interdependency between learners of all ages. Regardless of school tracking and scheduling schemes, teachers find more meaningful ways to structure physical space and grouping in the classroom – campfire, watering hole, cave; entrepreneurs, inventors, artists. A wider variety of richly authentic, self-selected tags apply to teacher and students alike creating new relational connections inside and between classrooms – and between learning inside and outside school – so process, product, and feedback become better differentiated to meet students needs. Learning becomes quantum as learners use flexible grouping and social media to learn in several ways and “places” at once.  Imagine a school where learners use 1:1 network access to determine inquiry-based daily schedules built around tags and ratings from administrators, teachers, current students, and alumni.  Imagine K12 public education distance learning built around following microblogs of other students attending classes at other learning sites.  Inquiry by RSS becomes common practice for building differentiated textbooks.

Teacher evaluation gets the NCLB treatment

Regardless of local outcomes, RttT assurance efforts and value-added debates spur deep local conversations about teacher evaluation, tenure, and the disparities between different teacher pay schemes and between teacher salaries and the value of the time and results they produce. New pay menus and branching career paths come into play as it becomes obvious that imposing new terms on obsolete learning models and career progressions is unfair and unworkable. Teachers and administrators work through messy conversations about where teacher value comes from, and teachers have to decide between joining pay pilots, waiting for whatever gets implemented, or being grandfathered into current systems that cap pay and annual increases. New opportunities for different types of pay increases encourage teachers to become project-based and develop versatile career portfolios like those of Gen Y professionals in other fields.

Yeah. That’s right – next year. Bam. Done. All five predictions. 2010. Love those round numbers. Something wonderful is going to happen.