The Secret Life of Schools

“Hey you! Pizza face!”

I heard the words coming from somewhere in the hall and I knew immediately that they were directed at me.

It took only a moment before Frank had grabbed my shoulder and spun me around to face him.

“I need some money for cigarettes. Give me a buck.”

Frank was a few inches shorter than me; but he was two years older and was proud of the fact that he had the dark shadow of a mustache above his upper lip. His breath reeked of stale tobacco.

I looked down at the floor of the hallway, strewn with paper and trash. He tightened his grip on my shoulder and shook me hard.

His was face was contorted in anger,

“I said I want a dollar. Give me the money or I’ll beat the crap out of you. I’ll get you by the buses.”

I noticed a group of kids from my class standing a few feet away from us. They could hear every word.

As frightened as I was I had to save face. I calculated that there wasn’t too much Frank could do to me in the hallway. A teacher would hear the commotion and break up the fight quickly. It was what happened after school that really scared me. Frank would find the right time and place, and there would be no one to stop it. I would be at his mercy. It might be one or two punches and done, or a something more serious, more sadistic. There was no telling with Frank once he got his adrenaline going.

“I only have a dollar and I need it for lunch.” I replied as forcefully as I could; but the words seemed to leave my mouth like little puffs of air rather than a gale wind.

With that, Frank swung me into my locker with a crash. My books and papers flew into the air.

I twisted my shoulder out of his grip and pushed him across the hall into the crowd of students that were gawking at the two of us. I could hear the voice of one of the teachers hurrying to the scene.

“What’s going on! Break it up! Break it up!”

My legs were gone, my body was gone, all I could feel was a surreal energy; something between power and dread.

Frank’s look of surprise disappeared. He stood up to his full height and glared at me with real hate.

“You’re dead! he said. You’re really dead!.

He pointed his finger at me,

“If I don’t get you today, I’ll get you when you least expect it. When there ain’t no crowds around to stop it!”

I was as out of control and shouted at him,

“Get lost, ‘s***head!”

Of course, the teacher heard that and later that day I was brought to the Principal’s office and punished.

I didn’t take the bus home that day because I knew Frank would be waiting for me. It was a very long walk home. I stayed home from school the next day, faking a fever and stomach ache. I was terrified.

This story isn’t unique to me. Bullies have been a staple of public education for generations. In fact, a bully like Frank may be the easiest kind to deal with; after all, no one really liked him. Most people recognized him as a bully. The kind of physical bullying he did was frightening; but I never felt like it was an assault on my identity. I might have felt like a coward at some points; but who wouldn’t be afraid of a guy like Frank. No one else was standing up to him either. So, in some way I could forgive myself my cowardice.

But what goes under the radar and is much more pervasive is the shy little girl that is harassed by her classmates. For some intangible reason her classmates have focused their darker sides on her. She is unpopular so it’s okay to insult her in any way. The insults are personal. They don’t come from a jerk like Frank; but from all the kids, including the most popular. The bullying and meanness is so pervasive that the little girl begins to believe it. After all, she is the only one they are picking on…and there are so many of them. And yes, she is ‘flat’, and she does where glasses, and she isn’t pretty, and….

Psychological bullying can be much worse than physical bullying.

So it is with cyberbullying. 58% if kids have had their feelings hurt online. Kids say and do things online that they would rarely do face to face.

This video says it all:

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So much of our student safety efforts are on filtering and blocking content. Much more of our attention should be on focused the ‘Hidden Life of Schools’. Our children our precious. When a child overcomes the embarrassment and shame they feel, and works up the courage to let a teacher know that they are being bullied…it is not enough to respond by brushing them off with a glib statement like,

“Ignore them.”

This is not an either/or situation. Of course, we need to protect the physical well-being of our students. We spend enormous sums of money doing this; from hiring security guards to installing surveillance systems. However, we also need to protect our children’s hearts and souls from those that would tear them apart with words, and pranks, and meanness.

Turning our heads away from the ‘Hidden Life of Schools” will create more Ryan Halligans.

pete

Modern Times

This is from an article by Michael Schrage, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. It was written over a decade ago; but I still find it amusing.

Tele-Communications Inc., the nation’s largest cable television company is in talks to launch a unique pilot project in conjunction with Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Microsoft Corp. to design a “smart home.” The home automation industry is expected to triple in size, from $1.7 billion this year to more than $5.1 billion by the year 2000.

November 28, 1995
I moved in at last. Finally, we live in the smartest house in the neighborhood. Everything’s networked. The cable TV is connected to our phone, which is connected to my personal computer, which is connected to the power lines, all the appliances and the security system. Everything runs off a universal remote with the friendliest interface I’ve ever used. Programming is a snap. I’m like, totally wired.

November 30
Hot stuff! Programmed my VCR from the office, turned up the thermostat and switched on the lights with the car phone, remotely tweaked the oven on a few degrees for my pizza. Everything nice and cozy when I arrived. Maybe I should get the universal remote surgically attached.

December 3
Yesterday, the kitchen crashed. Freak event. As I opened he refrigerator door, the light bulb blew. Immediately, everything else electrical shut down – lights, microwave, coffee maker – everything. Carefully, unplugged and replugged all the appliances. Nothing. Called the cable company (but not from the kitchen phone). They refer me to the cable utility. the utility insists the problem was in the software. So the software company runs some remote tele-diagnostics via my house processor. Their expert system claims it has to be the utility’s fault. I don’t care, I just want my kitchen back. More phone calls; more remote diagnostics. Turns out the problem was “unanticipated failure mode” – the network had never seen a refrigerator bulb failure while the door was open. So the fuzzy logic interpreted the burnout as a power surge and shut down the entire kitchen. But because sensor memory confirmed that there hadn’t actually been a power surge, the kitchen’s logic sequence was confused so it couldn’t do a standard restart. The utility guy swears this was the first time this has ever happened. Rebooting the kitchen took over an hour.

December 7
The police are not happy. Our house keeps calling them for help. We discover that whenever we play the TV or stereo above 25 decibels, it creates patterns of micro-vibrations that get amplified when they hit the window. When these vibrations mix with a gust of wind, the security sensors are actuated, and the police computer concludes that someone is trying to break in. Go figure. Another glitch: Whenever the basement is in self-diagnostic mode, the universal remote won’t let me change the channels on my TV. This means I actually have to get up off the couch and change the channels by hand. The software and the utility people say this flaw will be fixed in the next upgrade – SmartHouse 2.1. Bit it’s not ready yet.

December 12
This is a nightmare. There’s a virus in the house. My personal computer caught it while browsing on the public access network. I come home and the living room is a sauna, the bedroom windows are covered with ice, the refrigerator has defrosted, the washing machine has flooded the basement, the garage door is cycling up and down, the TV is stuck on the home shopping channel. Throughout the house, lights flicker like stroboscopes until they explode from the strain. Broken glass is everywhere. Of course, the security sensors detect nothing. I look at a message slowly throbbing on my personal computer screen: “Welcome to HomeWrecker!!! Now the Fun Begins.. (Be it ever so humble, there’s no virus like HomeWrecker..)” I get out of the house. Fast.

December 18
They think they’ve digitally disinfected the house, but the place is a shambles. Pipes have burst and we’re not completely sure we’ve got the part of the virus that attacks toilets. Nevertheless, the Exorcists (as the anti-virus SWAT members like to call themselves) are confident the worst is over. “HomeWrecker is pretty bad,” one tells me, “but consider yourself lucky you didn’t get PolterGeist. That one is really evil.”

December 19
Apparently, our house isn’t insured for viruses. “Fires and mudslides, yes,” says the claims adjuster. “Viruses, no.” My agreement with the SmartHouse people explicitly states that all claims and warranties are null and void if any appliance or computer in my house networks in any way, shape or form with a noncertified on-line service. Everybody’s very, very sorry, but they can’t be expected to anticipate every virus that might be created. We call our lawyer. He laughs. He’s excited.

December 21
I get a call from SmartHouse sales rep. As a special holiday offer, we get the free opportunity to become a beta site for the company’s new SmartHouse 2.1 upgrade. He says I’ll be able to meet the programmers personally. “Sure,” I tell him.

pete

Extreme Makeover: School Edition

At what point do we as educational leaders begin to take technology as seriously as the other components of our school infrastructure?

Wince every time you hear of untrained custodians, or well-meaning students wiring buildings on the cheap. Would a Superintendent of schools or Board of Education ever allow students and community volunteers to install the heating system of the school? How about the electrical system? Alarms and security?

Keep your eyes closed tight if you know of schools that have substantial numbers of six or seven year old computers running Windows 95 or Windows 98.

Cringe when you hear of corporations dumping old and obsolete computers on schools; computers that will cost the school more in maintenance than if the school had bought a new machine. Many high schools resemble technological archeological sites…if you dig deep enough you are bound to find every model of computer since the Apple IIE.

Shake your head when you see a school district with more than 100 infrastructure support people: custodians, drivers, electricians, carpenters, plumbers, etc.; and (4) network technicians to maintain thousands of computers in sixteen buildings.

Pray when you hear of a school district that has no security budget, hasn’t audited its greatest vulnerabilities, has not updated the anti-spyware on its workstations, has not had time to apply the latest anti-virus signatures, or the latest Microsoft patches.

Pray harder if they aren’t taking daily, rotating backups (even in the summer when some staff are on vacation) and keeping them offsite; and if they haven’t a plan on how or where to restore them in case of a flood, fire, catastrophic hardware failure, or Katrina-like disaster.

It’s time to stop wincing, cringing, praying, and closing our eyes to the sorry state of much of the educational technology in this country. It’s time to put technology on the same footing as the rest of the school infrastructure. Technology should be current, ubiquitous, and well maintained.

Of course this will take money; and leadership. Where we spend our money is merely a reflection of what we value. I know we value our children. At the very least our job as leaders is to insure that the 21st Century classroom in America is competitive with the 21st century living rooms of our students.

At best, we could rethink our school structures and embark on an Extreme Makeover: School Edition.

pete

Kill the Messenger

I received an e-mail this morning with this link to “Distractions in the Wireless Classroom”, which appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I have to admit, in my first attempt to read this I didn’t make it all the way through. It hit a nerve and I started responding immediately. I gave myself some time to calm down and I think I am in a better frame of mind; one where I might be a little less frustrated.

The article’s premise can be summed up in this closing sentiment,

“Despite digital distractions, large classes, decreased budgets, and fewer tenured colleagues, professors still are responsible for turning students on to learning. To do so, we just may have to turn off the technology.”

And why do we have to turn off the technology?… because college kids aren’t paying enough attention to lectures?

If the lecture is not engaging (see: 1,000,000 Google results for boring lectures), of course kids are going to be distracted. I have lot’s of old college notebooks filled with doodles, bad original poetry, and notes to myself written during relentlessly poor professorial lectures. Why didn’t we think of banning pencil and paper back then? I might have had higher grades. While we were at it, I think I would have been less distracted if we removed the windows from the classroom.

This is a perfect case of the technology exposing an educational problem that has been there for decades and being blamed for causing it. “Kill the messenger!”

I remember working with a school, many years ago, that had adopted a sophisticated computer assisted instruction system. It individualized the math exercises kids practiced, based on their ability level and success rate. Do well, and it automatically moved you to more difficult items; do poorly, and it would adjust the problem difficulty and tutorials to your level of understanding.

It wasn’t long before one of the brighter kids in the class came to the teacher with this question, “What is this?” She drew a division symbol. Rather than explain the symbol and provide the student with some instruction on how to go forward, the teacher instructed the lab manager to move her back to where she started; to do the same work over again. Her reason? She didn’t teach division until the spring.

It wasn’t long before more kids begain getting ahead of the teacher’s timetable. They were excited and ready to learn new things; but they were each sent back to to their original starting point. Eventually, the system was removed because it was causing problems.

Of course, the system wasn’t causing the problem; it was only exposing it. These bright kids were always in her classroom. If she was lucky they were patient and sat silent while she taught to the middle of the class. Maybe she tried to keep them occupied with some special work or projects that they did independently. Removing the technology didn’t fix the problem of how to engage these bright kids who were ready for division; it only put it back out of view.

“Cynthia M. Frisby, associate professor of strategic communication at the University of Missouri, has noticed students on MySpace and eBay during her lectures. She has also noticed more failing grades. Now she bans laptops in her large lecture courses and has a clause in her syllabus about the inappropriate use of technology. The result? “Huge increases in attention and better performance on exams,”

So, all it takes is to remove the technology and grades go up. This formula for success might help us meet the NCLB standards. In the same article David D. Ho, chief executive officer of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and a professor at Rockefeller University notes,

“Computers can calculate those odds in a nanosecond, but they cannot formulate the question nor conceive the process by which to do so. Neither can Google. “We should be teaching our students to think creatively or to become innovators, not just test takers,” he says.”

“That goal is increasingly difficult to attain. We deal with legislatures holding school districts “accountable” through multiple-choice testing as they cut budgets to higher education, resulting in ever-larger classes where digital distractions are most common and where we rely again on computer-graded bubble tests emphasizing right answers rather than process.”

I agree with Dr. Ho and his goals; but; note taking with or without laptops, in overcrowded lecture halls is not going to get us there.

A final story; a colleague of mind is attending graduate school in the evenings. The school shut down the Blackboard server because students were getting all the notes without having to attend class. If it were you, and all you were doing when you attended class was taking lecture notes, and you could get them electronically without attending, wouldn’t you? The important question to ask is “What value is the teacher adding?” Most kids would come if the time they spent in class had real value to them.

Technology is exposing issues that have always been there. This is a grand opportunity to explore the issues and to hear the message. Let’s learn whatever lessons need to be learned. Let’s not turn the technology off. Let’s turn teaching and learning on.

pete

ps: The article makes a number of good points about cyber-rudeness and netiquette. However, I believe teaching students technology civility is perfectly compatible with using technology and not an excuse to ban it.

Who is Making Ed Tech Decisions?

“Today I was told by a superior that she read an article about how bad Wikipedia is. HELP ME FIGHT THEM. I am really getting frustrated. Today a teacher proposed a wonderful class that would allow movie making and student website building. Again my superior said, no because she does not want their content tied to our school site. “Help me fight them!”

There have been so many horror stories lately about web tools and projects being rejected by decision makers that I thought it would be helpful to investigate the mysterious “superior”, who lives in each of our schools.

In a recent forum I facilitated at the 2006 NYSCATE Conference it was interesting to hear stories of the wide range of people making important technology decisions on behalf of school districts. In one case it was a district network technician killing a request for a project using Skype because he felt it had security holes. Another technician tuned down a request for a podcasting project because it might use too many network resources. In another case a Library/Media Specialist zonked a request to create and use Wikis because, in her opinion Wikis are not legitimate learning tools. A Director of Technology (DOT) put on hold a request from a teacher to have students write and manage their own blogs because he feels blogging will expose them to risks from predators. A building Principal believes that technology is a distraction from “real” learning and turned away all tech related requests no matter how legitimate.

This is not a debate over whether the decisions in the preceding examples are “good” or “bad”, although one could readily debate them. The bottom line is that we need to create better decision-making processes. An ad hoc environment of this kind can lead to arbitrary and unexamined decisions. An important “strategic” step we can take to change this situation is to establish a decision making process that insures that ideas for initiatives get a full and formal hearings, that there is a discussion of all the issues, and that when a decision is made, it represents the thinking of more than one person. It also helps if the people who are examining the issue are the most appropriate people to make the decision.

By, “appropriate” I mean that curriculum decisions should have input from curriculum experts and technology decisions from technology experts. It seems like a simple proposition but the lines between the two are often blurred.

Take the question, “Should we bring online learning to our district?” The curriculum folks see “online learning” as technology and the decision is pushed to the DOT. Is it truly a technology decision? The question of whether we allow students to have access to online courses has technical aspects; but fundamentally it is a policy, curriculum, and pedagogy issue. Sometimes when we are dealing with technology’s role in teaching and learning, we defer to technology experts. Tech folks need to be involved, they can offer a lot to the process; but the decision is best owned by instructional staff.

Similarly, “one to one” laptop initiatives can either be hardware oriented or curriculum oriented. “What is it that we are trying to change by giving every student a laptop?” In the best of all worlds that question is being answered by curriculum people, not just technology advocates. By the way, why not include students on the committee, they are key stakeholders in the whatever decisions are rendered.

Of course, in today’s school structure, the administrator in charge always retains the right to have the final say over whether an initiative goes forward. Even so, our chances of success are much better if we have a committee made up of key educators, with a clear rubric, that examines requests for projects and makes formal replies and recommendations to the requester. The committee may ask for more information, it may raise concerns and ask the requester to address them. In all cases the committee will render a thoughtful reply to the person making a request.

Years ago, I used to hear DOTs say, “My job is to bring technology into common classroom use. If I am successful, I should work myself out of job”. I like the sentiment in that statement, even though I don’t think the job will go away in our lifetimes.
For those of us in positions of technology leadership it is particularly helpful to understand that by organizing and structuring the decision making process in new and more thoughtful ways, we are building a new understanding of technology and a new sense of “ownership”.

By having a defined structure we also build a process that is less arbitrary, and more thoughtful, and fair. No matter what decision is rendered, it is more likely to be accepted because it has been given a fair hearing. Of course, in order to put a process like this in place, it takes courage, trust, and real leadership. Build it into your next technology plan or reshape an existing committee.

“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” — Anais Nin

peace

pete

The “Facts” about Internet Sexual Abuse and Schools

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

A teacher is turned down when he wants to have students do podcasts as part of his curriculum. The Director of Technology claims it’s because the teacher can’t guarantee the safety of the students.

A very technology saavy and creative art teacher wants to provide an innovative project where kids connect to other kids and artists outside her classroom through blogs, e-mail, and IM. She is turned down without an explanation. It’s particularly frustrating because over the years she has advanced several ideas for projects that employ technology and each of them has been turned down.

Staff members and students are complaining that the filtering systems in their school is too restrictive and needs to be adjusted.

A few weeks ago, my school began to block Wikipedia. When I asked why, I was told that a student searched how to make pipe bombs. When I asked what they did to him, I was told nothing because they don’t know who did it. [I am back in my old school district as of Sept. and was shocked to find out that we don’t have a student sign-on that allows us to track the student traffic.] When I mentioned that the majority of students use it properly I was told by the school librarian that the information in Wikipedia was not accurate. I shared the article you pointed out during the workshop and she said it meant nothing because she actually found an author misspelled on the site. Today I was told by a superior that she read an article about how bad Wikipedia is. HELP ME FIGHT THEM. I am really getting frustrated. Today a teacher proposed a wonderful class that would allow movie making a student website building. Again my superior said, no because she does not want their content tied to our school site. “Help me fight them!”
From Will Richardson’s post “dispatches from the front lines”

These are recurring themes that are common everywhere I go. The restrictive nature of the decision making is frustrating a lot of passionate ed tech leaders, so let’s spend some time looking at the problem and developing an approach that has some chance of changing the outcomes.

Let’s be clear, this has to be a generalized conversation. It will not be accurate in every situation.

First, what are the key factors that are going into decisions?

1. Student safety – fear of having an incident where a student is exposed to an online predator. Also in this genre, is the fear of kids within the school harassing each other and defacing the system with obscenity. These fears also extend to students gaining access to materials that are pornographic or inappropriate, such as bomb making.

2. Security – fear of opening the system to a process or an application that might allow unauthorized access to the network, as well as to the sensitive data that often resides there.

3. Overwhelm – unwillingness by a decision maker to take on more work because they are barely able to keep their heads above water with the status quo.

Obviously, there are other factors that go into the decision to allow a particular technology into the schools; but we’ll deal with only these three for now.

The most difficult explanation for restricting many online technologies is the effort to keep students safe. This rationale is complicated and must be approached carefully. It is important that we not dismiss the concerns that many decision makers have for safety. Here are some statistics that raise alarm bells for educational decision makers:

One in -five children have been solicited sexually while on the Internet. (Telegraph.co.uk January 2002).

Four (4) percent of all youth Internet users in 2005 said online solicitors asked them for nude or sexually explicit photographs of themselves Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later. 2006. National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Crimes Against Children Research Center, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. December 4, 2006

More than three-quarters of the unwanted exposures (79%) happened at home. Nine (9) percent happened at school, 5% happened at friends’ homes, and 5% happened in other places including libraries (Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later. 2006. National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Crimes Against Children Research Center, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. December 4, 2006

Maintaining the safety of the children in their charge is a major part of the social bargain between parents and schools. Parents who drop off their most treasured possessions at the school’s doorstep, expect them to be returned safely, and more knowledgeable than when they left them.

Once we acknowledge the concern for safety, does that end the conversation? Not by a long shot. It is our job to put the concern into context, provide a balanced perspective on the issue, and to educate decision makers as to the “facts”.

A good place to start is to look at the steadily decreasing Child Sexual Abuse trends:

All forms of child abuse, not just sexual abuse are undergoing a dramatic decline. Of course, you’d never know this from the hype the media is giving the cases of Internet related sexual abuse that they can trace back to MySpace or Facebook.

The picture painted by the media gives the impression that child abuse and sexual abuse are increasing and that our children are under siege from online predators and pedophiles using the Internet to snare their victims. The following chart puts some perspective on the threat from strangers, Internet-based, or not.

The key statistic that is so often overlooked and rarely discussed is that 95% of Child Abuse and Sexual Abuse is perpetrated by family members. 79% of perpetrators are parents. Other relatives accounted for 7% and unmarried partners of parents and “other” accounted for 4% and 5% of abuse. If we want to decrease child abuse our efforts would be far more effective if we focused our attention on the family rather than the few sensationalized Internet-based incidents.

A great place for schools to put their efforts if they want to reduce the incidence of child and sexual abuse is in training their staffs to identify the warning signs. Although educators report more abuse than any other sector of society, incidents continue to be severely under-reported.

 

Educational Personnel make the highest number of child abuse referrals.

 

The number of referrals and investigations is far lower than victimization rates.

It important to remember that ninety-five (95%) of all abuse is perpetrated by a family member or someone known to the victim. Of the five percent (5%) of abuse perpetrated by others, the Internet is involved in only a small percentage. I was unable to find any definitive statistics on the prevalence of these types of cases.

It is also important to point out that when Internet related abuse cases have been reported, 79% occurred at home, 9% happened at school, 5% happened at friend’s homes, and 5% happened at other places, including the library. When we slice the “less than five percent pie” into these smaller pieces, the risk gets much, much smaller.

Our first step as leaders is always to listen carefully to the concerns and issues of those we wish to lead, especially if they are decision makers and leaders themselves. We must take their concerns and fears seriously and not dismiss them as irrelevant.

Our second step is to put the risk into perspective.

All charts, reports, and other documents used in this post, as well as other links to key sites on the topic are available at the edtechjourneys wiki.

In future posts, I’ll examine some practical steps you can take to influence the decision making process in your district.

pete