Re-posted from Diane Ravitch's blog

Parents, Educators, Advocates Demand Federal Protection of Student Privacy

Diane writes:  A coalition of parents, educators, and privacy advocates issued a statement in defense of student privacy, which is threatened by efforts to create a massive federal data base containing personally identifiable data.

THE TEACHERS WE NEED, Part 2                                

But we won’t find them this way

I admit to a strong bias on behalf of teachers. It was from teachers that I learned the harm standardized accountability wreaked on the content of their teaching, how and whether their students connected with the lessons, and how and whether they themselves stayed in teaching.  It is not an exaggeration to say that almost all my research findings, even those – maybe especially those – that contradicted my initial hypotheses, were informed by teachers, teachers who welcomed me into their classrooms, who took time to explain how policies constrained or supported their practice, who alerted me to questions I hadn’t known to ask.

So of course I have a special fondness for my students who after years of study and long hours of student teaching are now ready to step into their own classroom, meet their own students.  As I discussed in my previous blog post, I feel a great responsibility to match my recommendation to their exceptional commitment and depth of professional preparation.

That’s getting to be harder and harder to do!

This summer a former student asked me to serve as a reference as he applied for teaching positions in math.  A native speaker of Spanish who has taught in an under-funded, high-poverty school, studied in Central America, worked in state-level policy offices, and completed a master’s degree at one of our finest graduate schools of education, he was weighing options in two different cities that would enable him to continue his commitment to historically underserved youth, and in a subject area of critical importance to the children’s educational futures.

I had already written rec letters for him for graduate school and for numerous jobs and enrichment programs – all of them successful because of his many talents and accomplishments and the very visibility of his dedication.  The only challenge would be keeping this new letter concise.

The school district sent the link to “recommender.”  But nothing about the recommendation form asked me to recommend this strong candidate for teaching.  Nothing asked me to recommend him to teach math, to use his Spanish with the district’s dominant student population.

My students think we spend far too long studying the factory model school of the early 20^th century; I assure them it is not a history lesson – this is current events! They are skeptical as I describe the de-skillng of teachers then and now.  Factory efficiency experts who brought their stop watches and task-analysis check lists to the industrial plant,  took those same “scientific” measurements into classrooms, timing the micro-components of lessons to reduce wasted “seat time,” and to determine which teachers and school subjects – and which children – were worth the investment of tax dollars.

The clipboards are now digital, but the check lists are no less divorced from course content, teachers’ expertise, children’s curiosity, or, in fact, the particular subject at hand.  “Generic” rules.

The factory model school lives in the questions I was asked about my extraordinary student.   As you can see, the questions depict the teacher not as a subject matter professional but as a low-level worker in need of close supervision.   I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read “How well would you say this person responds to supervision?”  I wanted to answer “thoughtfully, as a knowledgeable colleague and member of a faculty community.”  That was not one of my choices!  The 3 choices wanted to know “extremely well,” “adequately,” or “not well.”

The next questions came straight out of the factory model list of desirable worker skills:  “How would you rate this person’s attendance?”  “….dependability?”  “…..willingness to assume responsibilitiy?” And I’m not making this up:  “…ability to follow instructions?” The next two questions made no sense at all:  “quality of work” and “quantity of work.” Two small boxes left room for comments on “strong points” and “weak points.”  Even though the answer choices were meaningless and not always grammatically appropriate to the syntax of the question, I had to choose the most positive choice because I assumed the form would be computer scored.  

My first reaction was that this generic form had nothing to do with teaching and would have been more appropriate for hires in the district accounting office or food service.  Not really. I’d want to know more about people applying for those positions as well – more information and of a different kind: how does this person approach problems? What expertise does he or she bring to this position? 

This district’s form asks nothing about the applicant’s knowledge of children, children’s learning, curriculum development, instructional practice, assessment models, the workings of a school, the policy context of the school. Nothing about the knowledge base of the teacher in what Shulman termed “subject matter knowledge” and “pedagogical knowledge”.  Certainly no question asking if this teacher understood the importance of knowing the child’s family and culture to avoid teaching “subtractively,” or knowing how to create a caring environment in support of social and emotional development.

There is no reason to expect any knowledge of or attention to the complexities of teaching.  The heading is the name of the school district, but the copyright on the rec form is another one of those industrial vendors that are capturing our education dollars to the detriment of our educational purposes.  Here is the link: https://www.peopleadmin.com/talented/.

I was right that the rec form is “read” and “analyzed” first by computer. But there is more: this company is complicit in “analytics,” in this case crunching data to predict a teachers' measurable impact on their students' learning.  

The fast-growing talent management software company offers unique solutions, data and analytics to help schools and districts predict best teacher candidates, acquire and develop them.

These people, this organization, these computer programs and statistical gymnastics have no business in the selection of teachers for our children’s classrooms. Their models in no way capture (or even mention) what is essential in teaching.  (As a result, of course, their predictive models are even more useless.)

It would be almost a relief to learn that this vendor – and others like them – are awarded contracts through shady deals with kick-backs to school board members or “consulting fees” to district bureaucrats who sign the big checks to these groups.  That kind of corruption can eventually be investigated, brought to light, and perhaps even prosecuted. 

But when these outsourced vendors become entrenched in the system, when the systems themselves voluntarily “de-skill” by outsourcing their most important decisions to “analytics” based on empty and misleading “data,” they are tougher to dislodge.  Teachers seeking jobs are not in a position to critique the on-line forms lest they be seen not having “the ability to follow directions.”  A recommender doesn’t dare risk challenging the recommendation system while our students or former students have active applications in process.    And it is unlikely that parents have any idea that a “teacher match” system chose the list to be considered or, worse, eliminated promising teachers whose gifts and imagination and dedication do not fit the indicators, do not work in ways that can be quantified.




To share your thoughts, click on the word “comments” below.

THE TEACHERS WE NEED, Part 1
One Exceptional Teacher, 500 Characters

A sacred – if daunting – responsibility for any professor is writing those letters of recommendation that send our students on their way to new ventures.  For my students applying for teaching positions, I try to paint a portrait, tell a story – include that detail that will make a hiring principal or department chair ask “where’s the file on that Rice student, you know the one who….”  created history lessons based on the artifacts she worked with in the slavery museum, or had his ecology students paint a “habitat” wall from sub-terranean and littoral margins to lofty tree canopy to help younger students visualize the interdependence of species, who wrote a short story featuring a hearing-impaired girl after finding so little fiction for adolescents features hearing-impaired kids as central characters, not just “best friend.”   That Rice teacher.

I’ve long ago given up on trying to “out adjective” the competition of superlatives, thus my tradition of writing a strong letter, the opening paragraph emphasizing the student’s solid grounding in his or her subject matter field, then describing our program of courses on theories of learning, education history and policy, pedagogy, curriculum development, and intensive field experiences in our city’s culturally rich and complex urban schools.  The second paragraph tells the story about this particular new teacher:  concrete detail of compelling papers written, inventive strategies developed for engaging reluctant learners, an especially creative and scholarly analytical paper. The letter concludes with my statement of why this young teacher is just right for your particular school, its programs, its relationship to its community, its students.  And of course for years that letter would be printed on Rice letterhead, good quality bond carrying the university’s seal, an endorsement both symbolic and literal:  we claim this student, this graduate, as ours.  Treat with respect.

Such a letter assumes school district officials want teachers who have a deep knowledge of their subject field.  It assumes a principal is actively seeking that math teacher experienced in designing lessons for kids who “hate math,” that English teacher who is attuned to kids’ reading interests and whose first question will be what the budget is for classroom collections of print and digital books.  It assumes someone reading the letter will want to know if this teacher knows multiple approaches to teaching and has a deep and broad repertoire of ways of assessing children’s learning.  Such a letter assumes someone thinks of teachers as intellectual resources, as role models of learning, as guides to students’ development.  

It assumes someone in the teacher recruitment office reads.   As you can guess by now, I seem to keep making these naïve assumptions --- even after all these years!

Recommendation forms went digital quite a few years ago, with boxes to check, ratings to fill in on a three- or five-point scale, with a box for “additional comments” that permitted uploading an actual letter of recommendation. No good letterhead bond, but a chance to tell this teacher’s story, include that distinctive detail.

The “all my assumptions are wrong” shock came this past spring when a former student who had recently moved back to the States from abroad asked me to recommend her for teaching positions in another part of the state.  What an easy letter to write!  She had taught in Europe and in North Africa, had founded a tri-lingual school where she taught math and history.   Her experience as teacher, school leader, and tri-lingual curriculum developer would make her the dream candidate for any urban district in Texas. The letter essentially wrote itself.

I opened the link to the rec form of the school district she was applying to, then clicked through the quick-answer questions.  Yes, yes, and yes.  Then to upload the letter:  No!  A pop-up warning said the “comments” could be only 1000 characters.  I first read that as “1000 words” and knew I was way under that limit.  Then I realized “characters” and saw the added “including spaces.”  What?  I cut, counted words, cut again, re-counted.  The resulting  listing of basic facts did not hang together as a narrative – more like incomprehensible fragments:  French? School founder? Math? Arabic? Is this all one person?  The 999 "characters" did not represent this extraordinary teacher’s accomplishments nor the strength of my endorsement.

Surely the next district’s form would allow me to be more informative. Not so:  the usual irritating check list, then that “comments” box, which I approached with trepidation – could I upload my entire letter?  “Comments limited to 500 characters, including spaces.”   The message might as well have said, “This is all a formality, but you are free to add some sound bites if it will make you feel better.  No one will read them.”  

Our teachers get blamed for everything that’s wrong with education, with “kids these days,” with poor test scores and low school ratings.    And lots of people have an interest in amplifying that blame:  the charter chains eager to pounce on any weakness in the public’s schools, vendors of “teacher-proof” curriculum software, superintendents needing scapegoats for low scores or the slow pace of their latest “reform” efforts.   The politicians wanting to break teacher unions, the chief financial officers whose short-term accounting justifies replacing experienced teachers with new, cheaper ones who won’t stay long, school board members who think of teachers as “labor costs” rather than children’s guides to learning.

Image source:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ford_assembly_line_-_1913.jpg

But has anyone looked at the hiring process itself?  Are districts deliberately, or thoughtlessly, screening out strong teacher applicants or perhaps filling slots with teachers whose attributes fulfill a check list of minimum qualifications as though they were workers on the assembly line? 

Does the screening and hiring process itself discourage – or fail to encompass – the teacher who is educated across multiple disciplines, whose professional preparation built on what we know about the ways children learn, who knows and advocate for authentic assessments and close connections to the children’s families and communities?

Schools that hire on the basis of check lists of minimal credentials, with no curiosity about the candidate’s story, are unlikely to seek out and value that teacher who brings to her teaching a desire to know and connect with the stories of the children.

I hate being complicit in this system, in this systemic degrading of teachers, teaching and teacher recruitment.  But I haven’t yet found an effective way to resist or protest or circumvent this 500-character “border” wall.    The rec forms provide no address or person’s name or office for sending a recommendation letter by mail or electronic means. Nor would it be likely to be incorporated into the applicant’s file.    If you have a better idea for how we can advocate for teachers who are knowledgeable, deeply committed to children, even exceptional in their talents and their desire to grow as professionals and as assets to their schools, I invite your advice.  

And limits to the number of words, characters or “spaces” do not apply.

To see exactly what kinds of questions those “check lists” ask about people applying to teach in our children’s schools, see my next post!  (Bring a tissue – you may want to cry.)

To share your thoughts, click on the word “comments” below.

REPOST FROM DIANE RAVITCH'S BLOG

Diane's latest post is about a teacher using her own voice against reducing children to data and for honoring children's privacy, not only in the legal sense, but in care for the many ways children learn and grow -- almost none of them linear or precisely measurable.  I encourage you to visit her blog and read the entire thing.

THE TYRANNY OF TESTING:
WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN?

Data-driven
Data files
Data-philes
Data walls
TweedleDee and 
TweedleDatum
Data-
Driven
Crazy

Data are indicators, signifiers, proxies.  Representations.  What is being represented?  A test score is not a child. A test score is not a child’s knowledge or growth.  A child’s test score is no signifier of a teacher’s caring or guiding of the intellect or openness to curiosity and questions.

Then why are these headlines not entirely good news?

“GRADES 5, 8 GET PASS ON STAAR”

Citing “glitches” in the computerized administration of the test for some children in some grades, in the loss (seriously, the loss!) of scores for students in one entire district, and other “reporting” issues, the Texas Commissioner of Education, Michael Morath, declared that scores on the STAAR test, a product of the Educational Testing System, would not be used this year to determine grade retention or promotion for students in 5th and 8th grades – a waiver from this legislated state requirement.  

http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2015-12-25/
abbott-appoints-new-education-commissioner/

 The Commissioner promises to “hold the Educational Testing Service accountable.”  Does that mean the failure to fulfill contractual obligations will require ETS to refund our tax dollars?  Does the contract, in fact, have a penalty clause for non-performance?  And if not, does “accountable” mean that everyone in the Texas Education Agency or other state offices who had anything to do with negotiating and authorizing the contract will be fired?  What is “accountable” when children’s education is at stake?

We wish the headline had read “Commissioner Admits STAAR Useless, Apologizes to Teachers and Children.”  We wish the story explained that the Commissioner called a press conference to admit that the “emperor of standardized testing wears no clothes.”  He would go on to say that for more than 20 years the test scores had been indicators of not much (family wealth as an exception), that the school ratings they produced were proxies for a real investment in our children’s education.  

Good news that this year’s scores will not have “high stakes” for 5th and 8th graders.   Bad news that the reasons given are superficial, themselves poor substitutes for admitting it’s time to move beyond “data-driven” schooling and get back to educating all our children.

“NO MORE EVAAS FOR HOUSTON”

The Houston Independent School District’s board voted earlier this month not to renew its $680,000 contract with SAS Institute Inc for the EVAAS system of teacher evaluation based in large part on the students’ scores on the state-mandated standardized tests.  Teachers and parents, and many principals have known for years the system is a hoax, its claims completely phony, and its entire logic flawed: there has never been a test of children’s learning designed to measure teacher “performance” nor the “impact” of a teacher on a child’s learning.   It is, in fact, unethical to use a test for a purpose it was not designed, piloted and validated for – thus even using children’s test scores to determine the “value” a teacher “adds” to even one child’s learning, is unethical.   

Here's what SAS says it can do with your kids' data:

http://www.sas.com/en_ph/software/analytics.html

Did the HISD board reject the test because the district faces huge budget shortfalls left by the prior superintendent as well as requirements to share tax revenue with poorer districts?  Is the HISD board trying to get out ahead of the lawsuit brought by a group of Houston teachers challenging its validity and citing its harmful effects on many of our best teachers?  Is there another vendor lurking, circling, lobbying with even grander claims for improving learning through their system of measuring teachers?

SAS Institute Inc markets its expertise in “analytics,” tracking and analyzing corporate data, from shipping logistics, to health care data, to casinos and the military, to “education.” (Be sure to click on their "Industries" tab for a sense of how education appears as one among many industries they serve.) Our children aren’t shipping containers and their learning can’t be captured by “metrics” and “analytics.”  

When will they ever learn?

See Audrey Amrein-Beardsley’s analysis of EVAAs, including her study of its use in Houston.
see Diane Ravitch’s comments on this decision by her hometown school board. 

TYRANNY OF TESTING COMPANIES:  PRIVACY OR PROPRIETARY?

My last post was an alert to parents about the ways the “educational” uses of technology are gathering data on our kids, not (as claimed) to advise their teachers on better ways to teach them, but to make it easier to market to kids – not just to sell to them, but to shape their ideas about what they want .   “Learning to be Watched,” the new study out of the National Education Policy Center at Boulder, documented in all too chilling detail the way “education” softwares (including those required for daily assignments as well as for testing) collect very personal data on children – on minors – to build a “data” base of their social contacts for the benefit of corporations who can profit from having your child’s profile in its hands.

The authors of “Learning to be Watched” do not write in generalities: they name specific companies (Google and Nike, for example) and provide real examples of the ways schools – often knowingly – are complicit in this capture of children’s personal information. They also show how difficult it is to protect children’s privacy when privacy laws – even those protecting children – come up against the corporate claims that their information is “proprietary –  that is, a product they own, an essential part of their business plan, thus not open to outsiders.

Corporations – from testing companies to third-party marketers to unknown (and perhaps international) vendors – can scoop up personal information on young children and teenagers to use for their own profit.    And parents have few ways to find out what these strangers know about their children and how the data collected from year to year will be used to manipulate their children lives.

So are the testing companies advocates willing to have their “data” open to outsiders?  It would seem the answer is a clear and resounding NO!

Photo Credit:  Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Smart)

We’re learning that questioning the tests can put the questioner in jeopardy.  Anyone – including teachers – who wants more public scrutiny of the mandated standardized tests that so dominate our schools these days, may be “surveilled.”  A teacher or blogger who raises questions about the tests is in danger of being threatened by – yes, the testing companies that have no problem gathering and selling data on young children but do not want anyone to know what they are doing.  

Yes, this sounds far-fetched.  But thanks to Diane Ravitch’s blog, more of us are learning how this works.  Ravitch’s blog has become a kind of town square for sharing information about our children and their schools.   

Several of her recent posts show how diligently teachers are raising serious concerns about these mandated tests – from the claimed levels of difficulty, to the accuracy of content, to the many problems in giving and scoring the tests.  All instructionally important for the children and the ways these tests are used to govern their education.  

But apparently off-limits as “proprietary information” that can put the questioners in danger of reprisal.  Absurd? Yes.  Dangerous? Yes?

But so threatening to the testing companies that teachers and bloggers doing their professional duty to look out for the children are themselves being threatened with legal action.

Here are just some of Diane Ravitch’s recent blog posts that shed light on this growing threat, in the teachers’ own words.  When you read these, and follow the links back to the original writers’ blogs, you may wonder as I do, How are teachers’ and bloggers’ being surveilled? Who is monitoring their writing and capturing their words to use against them?  Who controls the metrics and “analytics” of teacher correspondence? And who said they could? Who gave them the power to traffic cop communications among educators who are looking out for the children? Is this something else our tax dollars are paying for?

One teacher's questions
Who owns the [test] copyright? 
The testing company's complaints
Who's censoring correspondence critical of testing?
How can Twitter disappear a controversial message?

I invite you to read these for yourself, think about your own kids, and add to the conversation with your Comments.

“Learning to be Watched”:  What You Wish You Didn’t Need to Know about Who’s Tracking Your Kids


Do you let strangers into your home to go through your kids’ closets or toy boxes?  If someone just happens to come to the door and wants to ask your child nosy questions, do you welcome her in?  What about that person lurking on the edge of the playground—aren’t you supposed to call security?

If you’re a careful parent, you find these questions absurd: of course you protect your child from strangers.  Or do you/?

A powerful new study shows in vivid detail the many ways our children are being watched and profiled, not by a stranger we could identify in a line-up, but by the very tech companies our schools have contracted with to provide the software that is becoming the course content, the assignments, and the assessments in too many of our classrooms.    

This study gives chilling details of the way individual students just doing their homework online, shifting across different social media, are being tracked and exploited for commercial purposes.  It also brings to light the complex surveillance and marketing networks behind what appear to be respectable "educational" vendors.

The paper is full of detail and smart in an analysis that follows the money.  Every parent should read it and forward it to their child's principal, school board member and state legislator.  Parents concerned about their children's privacy as well as who is making decisions that allow strangers to prey on our kids so blatantly yet so covertly should start a conversation about who's tracking their kids.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"In the National Education Policy Center’s 18th Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends, Learning to be Watched: Surveillance Culture at School, Faith Boninger and Alex Molnar describe how schools facilitate the work of digital marketers. Google, for example, subscribes over 30 million students and educators to its Google Apps for Education (GAFE) and tracks students when they shift to Google applications not explicitly part of the GAFE suite (e.g., YouTube). Facebook tracks whenever its users browse to any page housing a “like” button, and uses that tracking information in its ad targeting systems."

Find Learning to be Watched: Surveillance Culture at School, by Faith Boninger and Alex Molnar, on the web at:

http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/schoolhouse-commercialism-2015

The Tyranny of Testing:  TEA Says the Tests Don't Matter Anyway!

photo credit: http://calicospanish.com/testing-standards-changes-impact/

Well, the Texas Education Agency didn’t exactly say in so many words that the STAAR test doesn’t matter, how else to explain their statement that the 14,220 students whose answers “disappeared” because of computer glitches will not be required to re-take the test.  And Commissioner of Education Michael Morath told the members of the State Board of Education that local districts could “decide” whether the 8,778 special education students and remaining more than 5,000 students tested as English Language learners would need to be re-tested.  He said these students’ tests, which he blamed on the testing company, would not be factored into the school ratings.

Ok, let’s think about this a minute.  The state has claimed that the tests are essential for measuring student learning. If that’s true, does that mean the state thinks these special education and English language-learner students don’t “count,” or that, in fact, their teachers know how and what they are learning from all they have done in class all year.

The state has claimed that the mandated STAAR test is a valid measure of the quality of a teacher’s work and can be used to determine if a school is “failing” and needs to be closed – perhaps to have its children outsourced to a charter chain.  If 14,220 students’ scores don’t matter, if we can assess the value of a school’s academic program, the quality of its teaching, the adequacy of its resources without these scores, then why test all those other millions of kids?

If you read the words of the Commissioner and TEA’s official spokesperson, you’ll note that they seem much more concerned about whether the testing company is “responsible” for these glitches, whether it is fulfilling its contract, than whether the tests serve any educational purpose.   The state of Texas spends hundreds of millions of dollars on these tests—somehow not getting blamed for betting on the  wrong testing company looms larger for our Commissioner than what these tests (even when the answers don’t “disappear” into cyberspace).

The message for parents:  if you choose to opt your children out of the state tests, you will not be alone: The Commissioner has already “opted out” of the claims that the tests matter.    

See my next posts to find out who in Texas is opting out and why (and what their children do on test days), and to see the extraordinary national movement away from expensive, meaningless (and harmful) standardized tests and toward courageous advocacy for real teaching and learning.   Our bureaucrats may not yet understand the exciting possibilities that await our children when the testing dollars get put back into classrooms, but parents are getting and sharing that message and it’s a powerful one.

Which Future of Public Schools?   Scenarios for 2025

The struggle to sustain and strengthen our public schools is really a struggle to envision and create a powerful future for the children.  To start this new school year with a focus on the children, I'm pleased to introduce Alexandra Whittington, a mom, a futurist, a tireless advocate for children, and, I think, an optimist about how we -- working together -- can make our schools what the children need them to be:

Educating.  All our Children has identified some of the top emerging issues and uncertainties in the future of public schooling: will corporate interests maintain their stronghold on curriculum and teaching?  Should schools embrace the cultural diversity of students and their families/communities?  Can high-stakes testing and real (i.e., “messy”) learning co-exist?   I value this exploratory perspective and it opens a mental space to flesh out some implications for the future—and consider if we like or dislike the impacts.  As a reader of Linda’s blog, a parent, and a futurist interested in education, I’d like to add the following future scenarios to the conversation she has initiated on learning, creativity and teaching.

Scenario 1:  Artificial Intelligence

Continued standardization and increased emphasis on technology in public schooling in 2025 has contributed to an environment where learning and teaching are automated, quantified, and above all, predictable.  Big data is the intersection of these major forces (standardization and technology) and guides the decisions of school administration. 

The technology essential for a successful school comes packaged as a benign Silicon Valley “making the world a better place” product. This fact lends to all types of privatization schemes involving school admins.  These partnerships ensure that tangible results (test scores), which generally increase funding, are achieved.  Publicly-funded school systems that are not so shrewdly run are quietly brushed aside by an invisible hand in the high-tech education marketplace. Robotics, artificial intelligence, massive data mining and virtual reality are just some of the technologies involved in the typical public school experience in 2025.

One of the biggest changes is that by 2025, a major in Theatre Arts is considered a good preparation for teachers.  But not for the public speaking skills or creativity….Since public schools use scripted lesson delivery in the classroom, "acting" becomes quite an advantage to getting hired.  The “coaching” that started out on headset technology has evolved with the use of VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) and, even though wearable technology is now very much a social norm, the most effective teachers are those who can memorize lines.  It boosts the bottom line when teachers skip the hardware.  And it helps differentiate human from robot teachers.

Photo credit:  http://www.createdebate.com/debate/show/should_teachers_be_replaced_by_robots_3

For the most part, parents are kept out of the inner workings of school systems.  The privileging of data in schools has resulted in a predominantly impersonal, technical environment, so even though teaching is seen and described as highly “personalized,” it is based not on how well a teacher knows a student, or the quality of the time they spend working together, or parental influence and insights on their own child’s learning.  Instead, schools are service providers to maximize expected outcomes based on computational formulas meant to interpret a student’s abilities, strengths, weaknesses and, ultimately, career potential… all of which are now rendered as data points to be manipulated and mined.   

The result is an academic environment that lacks surprises.  For example, as long as the adequate instruction time and content is covered in class, student scores can be forecast and bad grades can be addressed before they happen.  So there are no bad grades, low scores, or failures.  Everyone passes.  It’s designed that way to provide a service (to give parents and students what they want, i.e., job or college preparation for the student) and make teaching a “skill” (not a passion or a career, but a compliant service role that, ironically, requires no specific preparation other than being a quick study). 

What the school system of 2025 is not designed for is accidental learning, spontaneous discoveries and unscripted connections between seemingly unrelated ideas.  Some parents and students balked, but it was the way society was moving anyway.  In 2025 it’s not just that learning is predictable but so is life.

Scenario 2:  Mind Manifests Itself

In 2019 a breakthrough scientific discovery was made.  A convergence of new data determined that creativity is the most critical mental capacity needed to develop intelligence starting at preschool age.  The multiple-choice question was suddenly like lead paint on toys; many parents took action as if their children faced life-threatening consequences and quickly became involved in the growing Opt Out movement.  By 2020 it was seen as a moral failing not to step in as parents and demand alternatives to the ‘teach to the test’ environment that had dominated America’s public schools for almost two generations.

A parent- and student-led movement took place, culminating in the biggest disruption to public schools since Brown v. Board; the Opt Out Walk Out of 2022 fought for what educators have always known:  that “mind manifests itself,” (as the Dr. Arnold Gesell and the Gesell institute has put it since the 1950’s) and that our schools should honor a child-centered philosophy of learning.  On the first day of school in fall 2022, a million kids and parents walked out.  The parents worked together in their neighborhoods to coordinate homeschooling and co-ops so that the children were still engaged in learning during the weeks-long protest.  Their employers sympathized with their cause and helped coordinate the effort.  The student absences added up to billions of dollars in federal school funds lost to the schools—this is what got their attention.  After weeks of empty threats the response of the school system was swift.  So-called “accountability” was left for dead and the funding model changed from “standards” based to equal investments in meeting the real needs of all our children. 

Photo credit:  http://www.examiner.com/article/teachers-protest-the-bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation

The students and their parents worked with school systems and legislators to negotiate new expectations of the public schools, making demands for International Baccalaureate (IB) programs, community-centered schools and Montessori schools.  Libraries were fully re-funded and enrichment programs like art, physical education and music became consistent parts of the school day again.  Parents were advocating for a variety of programs, guided by experts in childhood development and a strong recognition of the inherently valuable potential of each and every child. 

By the start of the school year in 2025, many long-overlooked obligations to our children were being addressed by the schools.  For example, young children had longer and more frequent recess breaks throughout the day.  Exercise became an important part of their day and lunch periods were extended—the childhood obesity epidemic was quickly reversed!  In fact, schools became central to the healthy sustenance of entire communities through school-run food markets.  The simple fact that children and families didn’t have to go hungry anymore was a tipping point that increased parent engagement to nearly 100% in most public schools.

The value of socialization at school was recognized as critical to emotional intelligence and students were allowed the time they needed to play and chat with friends and teachers on a more relaxed schedule.  Teachers were able to adhere to looser routines so that emergent learning opportunities could be utilized.  Parents enjoyed innovative “open door” classrooms that offered transparency via both face-to-face and virtual/remote access.  It took a lot more work on everyone’s part but the positive results were worth it.

At the same time, classes were given more opportunities to venture out and conduct hands-on learning in nature and in the communities.  A new relationship was being established between schools and families, built on trust.  Money and power had driven a wedge between teachers and students, parents and schools for way too long.  That chapter was over.

My scenarios follow a predictable pattern for images of the future:  one “optimistic,” one “pessimistic.”  The actual future will probably not be so black and white.  But the stories are meant to bring attention to our choices regarding key uncertainties today:  what should be the role of modern technology in education? To what extent do we allow private companies to monetize schooling? Can schools be forces for positive social change in our communities?  I wanted also to spread a hopeful vision where parents act as driving forces for change in our schools, preventing our children from being used as financial instruments, analyzed as data points, and developed into little more than a ‘future workforce’.  Let’s advocate for a future learning environment where all our children are given equal opportunities to grow in the best way possible.