Schools Making A Difference: Films and Discussions

The Portland City Club is continuing its educational series Schools Making A Difference: Portraits of Excellence, Engagement and Equity – films, panel discussions and participant dialogues.

Though economic realities pose significant challenges for our education system, when schools and communities work together with a clear vision and heroic effort, they can achieve stunning results. Exemplary schools provide high expectations and opportunities for all students to succeed. They also provide real world learning experiences that prepare students for college, careers and citizenship in the 21st century. They do this through an engaging curriculum that recognizes the diverse talents and needs of their student populations. Join fellow citizens, educators, and students for any of four evenings of films, panels, and participant dialogues that offer portraits of such schools in our region and around the world.

The series continues Feb 8 at Mission Theater with a screening of Robert Compton’s “Two Million Minutes” followed by panel discussion. March 5th: “The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System” by Robert Compton. (Hollywood Theater) The final forum is March 14 How Important Are the Arts and Civic Education for Our Students’ Current and Future Lives? featuring the film “Paper Clips” by Elliot Berlin & Joe Fab. (Hollywood Theater)

I attended the first session which featured the film Lessons from the Real World. Bob Gliner, filmmaker, as well as local educators offered an engaging follow up discussion with the audience. The film highlights project-based learning in greater Portland region schools. It’s a fascinating look at K-12 schools that weave community and societal problem solving through their curriculum.

Oregonians will have another chance to see the film which is screening on OPB Plus Sunday night, Feb. 12 at 7 PM throughout most of Oregon. More on “Lessons From the Real World”

Many people feel our public schools are failing, or at best, muddling through. What to do about this critical issue has almost exclusively focused on the efforts of No Child Left Behind and now Race to the Top legislation to improve test scores in core subjects like math and reading. 

Lessons From the Real World, contends, like many educators, that focusing on test scores to improve student achievement is looking in the wrong place.

Learning to read, do math and other subjects will come if students care about what they are learning, rather than drilling them with subject matter largely divorced from their real lives, and the community and societal problems which often impact those lives.

In Portland, Oregon, teachers at a wide range of schools are putting this idea into practice. While this is their story, it can help point the way to rethinking how schools everywhere can be successfully transformed.

Worksheets and Kodachrome: Lessons in Kodak’s Bankruptcy

This week Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy. Is there a lesson for educators about what happens when you lose touch with your customer?

First some personal background. I’m from Rochester New York – “The Kodak City.”
My dad worked at Building 29 – right at the heart of the business. Rotating through round-the-clock shifts, literally working in the dark, he mixed the chemicals that became film. One of Kodak’s many benefits, was a guaranteed job for your children when they reached college age. So in the late ’60’s, during my college summers, I worked at Kodak. The first two summers I worked on the Kodak railroad. Yes, Kodak ran it’s own track and trains within the 1,200 acre Kodak Park industrial complex. The summer before my senior year, I washed tour buses and drove the Kodak ambulance. If I remember correctly, I was making more than triple the minimum wage.

Of course, Kodak could afford to be generous to its workers (and extremely philanthropic to the Rochester community). It had a monopoly on the film market. George Eastman had transformed the complexities of the 19th century photographic “chemistry set” into something easy that anyone could do. He understood that his customers wanted simplicity. In the early days of the 20th century he pitched his cameras with the slogan “You push the button, and we do the rest.” (Users of the early Brownie cameras shipped their cameras to Rochester, where the film was taken out, processed and printed. Their reloaded camera and finished prints were shipped back to them.) Kodak continued to simplify with innovations, like drop-in film cartridges, but they always maintained control of all phases of the photographic process – dominating the markets for film, film processing, processing chemicals, and photographic paper.

At the same time the George Eastman popularized photography, compulsory public education brought education to the masses. Instruction was based on the notion that you could tell people what they needed to know. State education departments, publishers and teachers decided what was important and then delivered it to students via textbook and lectures. Perhaps the unstated slogan of that instructional model was “you listen and take the notes, and we do the rest.”

Ironically Kodak sowed the seeds of its own demise by pioneering digital photography in the mid 70’s. But the innovators at Kodak’s Apparatus Division Research Lab couldn’t make the case for “Film-less Photography” as it was called. “Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? How would you store these images? What does an electronic photo album look like?” More on the first digital camera

Kodak leadership couldn’t accept challenges to their traditional photosensitive film model, so they licensed their digital patents to other companies who began creating the first digital cameras. Kodak’s leaders scoffed at the primitive digital images, and continued to milk their cash cow. The only thing to fear was losing market share to film competitors like Fuji Film.

At the core of Kodak’s eventual demise was the failure of the leadership to remain connected to their customers. They convinced themselves that the public would continue to want to buy film, load it into the camera, take a picture, drop the film off at the processor, and return later to pick up their photos. Easy to believe when you’re making money at every stage of that process. Leadership wouldn’t accept that their customers wanted greater control and functionality over the imaging process. Users would be willing to forgo the quality of the Kodachrome for the ability to do new things with images. Manipulate them, mash images up with other content, e-mail them off to someone, and perhaps never actually print a photo.

So do education leaders have something to learn from the bankruptcy of Kodak? Is their obsession with standardized achievement test data as misguided as Kodak tracking Fuji’s market share? Will innovative teachers get tired of explaining “the effectiveness of social media in the classroom” to their school board and leave the profession?

Has our educational leadership lost touch with their customers – the students? Given the growing array of cheap digital tools available to our students, will they passively wait to be told what, how, when and with whom to learn? Is the information flow of the traditional classroom (lecture, note-taking, test) as outmoded as taking your film to the drugstore for processing?

Given all the technologies available for students to direct their own learning, how much longer can the traditional school survive? When will worksheets go the way of Kodachrome?

Image credits: Emergence of Advertising in America On-Line Project

Kodak Simplicity
Kodak advertisement, 1905
Ad#K0431

Let the Children Kodak
Kodak advertisement, 1909
Ad #K0082

John W. Hartman Center for Sales
Advertising & Marketing History
David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Duke University

Testing or Teachable Moments?

Extinguished
Extinguished

If you read my blog you’ll know that while I support accountability, I’m outraged by the fact that a generation of teachers and students have become slaves to corporatized testing. While our school district mission statements all claim to “foster life-long learners,” in reality, teachers are forced to spend increasing class time prepping kids for predictable tests. … Maybe after they graduate, students will learn how to function in an unpredictable world that devalues routine work and rewards adaptable learners with marketable “soft skills.”

And so today’s Oregonian guest column by Portland teacher, Allen Koshewa, struck a chord with me. He writes:

Several years ago, after I brought in tulips from my garden, my fifth-grade students wanted to plant their own. I learned that few students in my school’s high-poverty community had ever planted anything, so we planted tulips (not in the curriculum). In the process, one student found part of a rusted horseshoe, so we studied the history of the neighborhood (not in the curriculum), discovering that a farm had existed there 90 years earlier. Then, because of the proliferation of questions about the artifacts we’d unearthed, we studied archaeology (not in the curriculum). With the new push for common core standards nationwide, perhaps no student in any fifth grade in the United States will plant tulips, explore the history of his or her neighborhood or learn about archaeology ever again.

I urge you to read his entire essay. As you do, reflect on how the test regime has extinguished the teachable moment. Tulips… to planting… to discovery of horseshoe create the incentive to study local history and techniques of archaeology. Students using one discovery, to pose, and then answer their own questions. Teachable moments that inspire students with purpose, mastery and accomplishment.

Image credit: Flickr/FrasSmith

Black Friday: Will Teachers Be Shopping or Working at the Mall?

American Teacher Poster
American Teacher Poster

Throughout my teaching career I had a second job. For the first decade, I spent my summers painting houses. My non-teaching friends joked that I had “summers off.” No, I just had a different job. As the superintendent gave the the opening day pep talk at the start of the school year, I was thinking about the dormers that I still needed to finish.

Ten years into my career, I couldn’t afford to own a home in the community I taught in. I frequently ran into former students. “Hey Mr. Pappas … great to see you … remember me? … are you still a teacher?” I would think – would you ask a doctor that question? …  or don’t you consider teaching a real job?

What’s your kid’s teacher doing tonight – home working on lesson plans, or selling cell phones at the mall?

Eventually, I realized I could align my second job with my teaching career – so I turned to academic writing and adjunct teaching. By supplementing my income with summer and evening work, I figured out a way to stay in the classroom for 25 years.

So much for the personal backstory. This post is about American Teacher, a film that follows four teachers who struggle to make ends meet while trying to stay in the profession they love. With narration by Matt Damon, it tells their stories through a mixture of footage and interviews with students, families, and colleagues, as well as the teachers themselves. By following these teachers as they reach different milestones in their careers, it uncovers a deeper story of the teaching profession in America today.

“American Teacher” is waiting for a major theatrical release. I plan on attending the Portland Ore premiere of the film on Thursday Dec 8 at the Hollywood Theater. The film’s producer Ninive Calegari will be hosting the screening.
(I wonder if she’ll bring Matt??) For more information on national screenings of “American Teacher” or to arrange a screening in your area click here.

Statistics show that nearly half of all teachers leave within the first five years. Low salaries and high stress are among the top reasons teachers “burnout” and quit the profession. Sixty-two percent of our nation’s teachers have second jobs outside of the classroom. What’s your kid’s teacher doing tonight – home working on lesson plans, or selling cell phones at the mall?

In countries known for superior student performance (Singapore, South Korea and Finland) top college students are drawn into teaching by competitive salaries and high respect for their contribution to society. In contrast, US teachers are underpaid, relative to other skilled professionals, and they have to listen to politicians accuse them of being lazy and undeserving of collective bargaining rights.

Nearly half of the American teaching profession is eligible for retirement in the next ten years. Will that be seen as a opportunity to hire low-paid replacements? Or do our kids deserve something better? 

PS. Need some inspiration? Read my recent post Why I Teach? A Voice from StoryCorps

Why I Teach? A Voice from StoryCorps

Ayodeji Ogunniyi
Ayodeji Ogunniyi

It’s not an best of time for teachers – budget cuts, layoffs, increased class size, test-score based evaluations, and attacks on collective bargaining / tenure, etc.  Meanwhile, the self-appointed corporate reformers would have you believe that they can fix education with a strong dose of market incentives.

There are many people that cry because they’re hurt, they’ve been neglected; but to cry because you couldn’t read. That spoke volumes to me.

This morning I heard a moving StoryCorps narrative on why one young man chose to become a teacher.

Spoiler alert – it wasn’t merit pay.

From StoryCorps: In 1990, Ayodeji Ogunniyi left Nigeria, along with his mother and brother, to come to the United States. They arrived in Chicago, joining Ayodeji’s father, Abimbola “Yinka” Ogunniyi, who’d arrived a few years earlier, and was working as a cab driver. Abimbola always wanted Ayodeji to be a doctor. But while Ayodeji was studying pre-med in college, his father was murdered on the job. At StoryCorps, Ayodeji talked about how his father’s death changed the course of his life.

Listen to Ogunniyi’s story at StoryCorps

Read more about Ogunniyi at the LA Times

StoryCorps National Teachers Initiative celebrates the brilliant and courageous work of at least 625 public school teachers across the country. By recording, sharing, and preserving their stories, we hope to call public attention to the invaluable contributions teachers have made to this nation, honor those who have embraced the profession as their calling, encourage teaching as a career choice, and unify the country behind its teachers—helping us all recognize that there is no more important or noble work than that of educating our nation’s children.

Photo credit: StoryCorps