Another interesting finding of the poll is that just 34 percent respondents give President Obama an A or B when grading his performance on education during his first 17 months in office. This is down from 45 percent reported in last year’s poll, which covered his first six months in office.

I’d like to hear what the educator’s response is to the information in the Gallup poll. Is funding/money the biggest problem in your school? What grade would you give the current administration based on their work on education?

For educators and education in India, this is one of the most critical budgets ever.

The passage of the Free & Compulsory Right to Education Act of 2009 is perhaps two months from being notified. With implementation imminent, educators are asking is if India is to train 1-1.25 million teachers in the next five years, to maintain the 1:30 teacher to student ration, does the India 2010 budget provide the cash?

The funds have been promised by none other than the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh. The dynamic Union Minister for Education, Dr. Kapil Sibal, is also hard at work. So the first year’s funding will reflect if he is walking the walk.

What is the Free & Compulsory Right to Education Act of 2009 supposed to do? The act focuses on key elements of a child-centered education with values and pedagogy almost 180 degrees different than government schools in India today. These include values I personally endorse:

a)     all around development of the child;

b)    building up the child’s knowledge, potential and talent;

c)     development of physical and mental abilities of the child;

d)    learning through activities, discovery and exploration in a child friendly and child-centered manner;

e)     medium of instruction, as far as practical, in the child’s mother tongue;

f)     making the child free of fear, trauma, able to express views freely;

g)    comprehensive and continuous evaluation of the child’s understanding of knowledge.

This act will affect between 30 to 35 million children, not presently in India’s schools. The Right to Education Act 2009 specifies a new level of access for formerly unschooled children: “Every child from the age of six to fourteen year shall have a right to free and compulsory education in a neighborhood school until completion of elementary education.”

It also includes the further clause that:

“No child shall be liable to pay any kind of fee or charges or expenses which may prevent him or her from pursuing and completing elementary education.

Provided further that a child so admitted to elementary education shall be entitled to free education till completion of elementary education after fourteen years the appropriate Government and the local authority shall establish, within such area or limits of neighborhood, a school where it is not so established, within a period of three years from the commencement of this Act.”

Any educator with experience can immediately tell this is a holistic law that deals with the rights of children to education, the quality of the education, the availability of the education free and locally, the pedagogical development of the teachers involved and the use of brick and mortars as well as technology and transformative pedagogy to make it happen. A great leap forward? Indeed. Revolutionary? For individuals at the middle and bottom of India’s pyramid society, absolutely.

The US Department of Education’s $650m Investing in Innovation (i3) competition, which is open to all US school districts, needs peer reviewers to help judge the grant applications.

According to a recent Ed Week blog post, the i3 grant competition has the potential to be a more complicated selection process than even the Race to the Top Fund.

Pre-K-12 teachers, principals, college and university instructors and researchers are among those urged to apply. Reviewers should have expertise in at least one of the following areas: education reform and policy, evidence, innovation, and strategy.

Click here for the official call for peer reviewers.

A pilot would not be asked to take to the air without modern equipment and extensive training in using the latest technologies. Yet many teachers with limited or no formal training are expected to prepare students for a high-tech world using outdated technological resources.

In recognition of these challenges, ISTE plans to focus on the following priorities in 2010:

5. Invest in pre-service education technology. Teacher preparation is one of the most important aspects of a world-class 21st Century system of education and learning.  A federal investment in a new, technology-savvy generation of teachers is critical. To ensure their success in the classroom, pre-service teachers must be prepared to use technology and integrate it into the curricula before their first day as a teacher of record.

6. Leverage technology to scale improvement. School districts that have successfully led school turnaround and improvement efforts recognize that education technology is one of the best ways to accelerate reform, providing the immediate tools to ensure that all teachers and students have access to the latest innovative instructional pathways. If we are serious about school improvement, we must be serious about education technology.

Click here for the full list of ISTE’s Top Ten in ’10.

As part of ISTE’s advocacy efforts this year, we’re launching a campaign, ISTE’s Top Ten in ’10.  Our goal is to raise awareness about the centrality of education technology to real and lasting school improvement, and its role as a key driver in innovation.

You can read the press release here, and the full Top Ten in ’10 document here.  But for conversation and learning from your peers, stick with ISTE Connects, where we’ll be counting down ISTE’s Top Ten in ’10, two at a time, over the coming weeks.

So let’s get the ball rolling!  ISTE’s #10 and #9 ed tech priorities for the New Year are as follows:

10.

Promote global digital citizenship.  Growing competition in a flat world means technology is a great equalizer. It breaks down artificial barriers to effective teaching and learning, and provides incredible opportunities for collaboration across borders.

9.

Invest in ongoing research and development. Solid investment in education R&D, particularly if focused on innovation in teaching and learning, ensures that we remain a global leader in this strategic domain.

Now it’s your turn.  Do these two ISTE priorities reflect key issues in your region?  What is your school or district doing to promote digital citizenship and invest in R&D?

A district in California plans to use Title I funds for “site purchases that refresh computer labs and expand our interactive instruction with document cameras and mounted projectors. We are also beginning to infuse “netbook” technology into upper grades to foster differntiated teaching strategies.”

Please describe your school or district’s plans here so that we can learn from eachother and share ideas on how to effectively and efficiently spend ARRA dollars for classroom technology and 21st century learning.  Additionally, ISTE will share this critical information and examples with the Obama Administration and Congress. We’ll post again later to tell you what

Education

Total: $90.9 billion

• $44.5 billion in aid to local school districts to prevent layoffs and cut-backs, with flexibility to use the funds for school modernization and repair (State Equalization Fund)
• $15.6 billion to increase Pell Grants from $4,731 to $5,350
• $13 billion for low-income public school children
• $12.2 billion for IDEA special education
• $2.1 billion for Head Start
• $2 billion for childcare services
• $650 million for educational technology
• $300 million for increased teacher salaries
• $250 million for states to analyze student performance
• $200 million to support working college students
• $70 million for the education of homeless children

Figures from Wikipedia

“During the past several months, the Obama Administration has outlined a vision of educational innovation and improvement to enable our nation’s children to compete in the global economy. But today’s budget proposal falls far short of the targeted investments needed to ensure all students have the modernized classrooms and technology-rich instruction needed to achieve this vision.”

I supported President Obama in his campaign and still support his work leading our country, but I have been EXCEEDINGLY disappointed by the total LACK of leadership he’s provided (along with his cabinet) when it comes to the causes of educational transformation and specifically 21st century skills. All the rhetoric I’ve read and heard from the Obama administration when it comes to education sounds like “more of the same” that we got from GWB and NCLB. I’ve had and continue to maintain a very contrary view to that vision. Unfortunately, it does not appear President Obama does… Yet. (I’m not giving up hope!)

School districts and edtech vendors around the United States continue to anticipate a massive windfall of money from ARRA, even if these proposed cuts in EETT go through. In past years, the administration has proposed cutting EETT and Congress has restored level funding. Will that happen again this year? I don’t have a crystal ball, but I doubt it will. The spending spree of the Obama administration has to end somewhere, and it is probably good (on balance) that FINALLY voices in his administration are being heard who are calling for constraints and limits on government spending. How are we supposed to spend our way out of our financial maladies anyway? Don’t we really need to save more and spend less to remedy our national debt crisis, which continues to be ignored by most of our leaders?

Miguel Guhlin, in his post “Rant – Obama Cuts Ed-Tech Funding,” shares many reasons why it may not matter that President Obama is proposing cuts to EETT. After all, who stands to benefit the most from this windfall of funding? Miguel writes:

The truth of the matter is, Who really cares anymore except companies that suffer from school’s loss of funding?

When you balance the fact that people are losing their jobs left and right, losing their homes, against the point that K-12 schools in the United States won’t have money to install high tech computer labs that:

1. Don’t get used to their full potential because the teachers–including the “computer teachers”–don’t bother to learn the software and/or help students learn it.
2. Involve school districts blowing $500K or more on initiatives like [fill in the blank with your favorite Integrated Learning System] that have a negligible impact on student achievement.
3. Technology funds get DIVERTED BY THE SUPERINTENDENT–did you know NCLB Title 2 Part D funds can get diverted by the Superintendent of K-12 school districts? It’s in there–anyways so that what is actually spent in schools ends up going to money-hungry vendors who provide what administrators who could care less about stepping out of their comfort zone think they need to have.
4. No requirement that Curriculum and Instruction departments actually LEARN how technology can be used except as a drill-n-practice tool behaviorism approaches left over from 20+ years ago.

…So, yes, if technology continues to be irrelevant to teaching, then cut it out. Excise funding on technology from the budget. If you’re not going to make it a requirement, if you’re not going to fire superintendents who dance around using technology except to put it in so that it looks like something is happening, if you’re not going to require teachers to learn how to use it and CHANGE their teaching, if you’re not going to transform curriculum specialists and how they work, then it’s a waste of money.

I absolutely agree that a LOT of the money we have spent and continue to spend on educational technology solutions is wasted. I pointed this out in my keynote for eTechOhio this past February, “Reinventing Education for the 21st Century,” quoting both Dr. Larry Cuban and Dr. Clayton Christensen.

These were the key quotations I shared on this subject in my presentation.

From Dr Larry Cuban. Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom. Harvard University Press. 2003. ISBN: 0674011090. pages 178-179:

As for enhanced efficiency in learning and teaching, there have been no advances (measured by higher academic achievement of urban, suburban, or rural students) over the last decade that can be confidently attributed to broader access to computers. No surprise here, as the debate over whether new technologies have increased overall American economic productivity also has had no clear answers. The link between test score improvements and computer availability and use is even more contested.

From Christensen, Horn & Johnson. Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. McGraw Hill. 2008. Pages 72-73:

…the billions schools have spent on computers have had little effect on how teachers and students learn… The reason for this disappointing result is that the way schools have employed computers has been perfectly predictable, perfectly logical– and perfectly wrong. As we show in this chapter, schools have crammed them into classrooms to sustain and marginally improve the way they already teach and run their schools, just as most organizations do when they attempt to implement innovations, including computers. Using computers this way will never allow schools to migrate to a student-centric classroom.

One of the points I tried to make in my keynote was that we need to look at educational technology solutions through the “accommodating or transforming” lens. Is a given technology simply going to let us do a traditional/analog task with an electronic tool, or is it going to truly enable us to TRANSFORM learning and the interactions which ensue both inside and outside the classroom? We need to seek educational technology uses which are TRANSFORMATIONAL rather than merely accommodating.

In his post, Miguel cites Jamie McKenzie and The CEO Forum on Education & Technology who claim:

…we have no reliable evidence that one-to-one computing translates into improved student learning results…

I take issue with this view, and offer up the July 2008 TCER report, “Third-Year (2006-07) Traits of Higher Technology Immersion Schools and Teachers” as a case in point.

When we ask a bad question, we almost always get a bad answer. There was so much change in campus leadership as well as variance in the ways the TxTIP program was implemented in its initial years, that was silly to ask (in essence) the question: “Has access to laptop technology led to the miraculous transformation of educational cultures in TxTIP immersion schools?” Of course it did not. When researchers looked more closely at campuses which actually implemented the TxTIP immersion project with strong leadership / administrative support and modeling, consistent PD, helpful and useable digital curriculum, etc, the results they found were QUITE different than those produced when all TxTIP schools were studied.

I’m delighted our schools, specifically in Oklahoma where I live, will receive more funding and support for educational technology needs in FY10. I’m here to tell you, our schools NEED IT. They are woefully underfunded overall, and specifically underfunded when it comes to technology. I fear, however, that in many cases Miguel’s worst fears may be justified unless state leaders (here and elsewhere) step up and insist that technology funds be spent in ways that support the TRANSFORMATION of the learning environment. This means, in my view, EVERY student and teacher in grades three and up being equipped with a netbook computer. With volume pricing, these laptops can be purchased for less than $300 each with an extended warranty from the vendor. Do all computer hardware vendors REALLY want to sell schools lots of inexpensive netbooks? No, many certainly don’t. They would much rather continue selling $1000+ laptops, and limit those sales to only a FEW campuses, a FEW teachers, a FEW administrators, and a FEW students.

The problem with this model is, educational technology for the few will never transform the face of learning in our schools. We MUST aggressively move to embrace open source learning platforms and software tools in our schools, and put netbooks in the hands of all our learners (in grades 3 and up) as soon as possible. We need to study and understand the lessons of 1:1 projects like TxTIP, articulated in reports like the July 2008 TCER report previously cited, and then implement projects which support teachers and students well in making a transition to 21st century learning.

Will the real educational leaders please step forward? If none are present with the vision to do this in the present Obama administration, could we please replace them with some leaders who DO have this vision they can not only articulate but act and lead on?

If the educational leaders we need are not going to step forward, perhaps we shouldn’t care about EETT proposed cuts. After all, if you’re not a vendor, will any of those new (non-netbook) proposed purchases REALLY make a difference to the “learning bottom line” in your classroom and the classrooms of your children? Probably not.

The seed of change is spreading across Kansas. Since 2003, 228 classrooms have participated in a Title IID initiative that has invested over $8 million dollars to improve learning in the content areas in our state. They are called Technology Rich Classrooms, and they are changing the way that teachers teach and children learn.

This Google Map mashup shows the locations of classrooms which have participated in the Kansas TRC program to date.

One of the attendees at PodStock shared that the number of participating classrooms in TRC is expected to jump from less than 10 per year to around 75 per year with the infusion of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) dollars. This additional investment in educational technology will apparently coincide with a further reduction in legislative funding for education in Kansas on a per-pupil basis. Last year the legislature reduced per-pupil funding by $30, this year the legislature is expected to further reduce funding by approximately $130 per student. These are tough times.

I think Kansas’ focus on educational technology integration at the classroom rather than the building level is right on target. As educational leaders, we often want and strive for systemic, scalable change across entire organizations. Educational technology innovation generally tends to take place in isolated pockets, however, and the TRC project seems to recognize this reality. Clarence Fisher echoed these thoughts in his post today, “Replicating Classrooms.” Clarence noted:

In the rush to build places of learning that are appropriate for changing times, we have focused a great deal of our energy on the replication of schools. We criticize models of certain schools as being great places, but not replicable. I wonder if we are looking at the wrong level. I think that we need to be looking at classrooms as the “unit” that needs to be more closely examined.

Certainly there are many models of spaces where kids can learn. From museums to home schooling situations, there are many models that are possible. But when it comes to the formal learning space, I’m starting to think that we are spending huge amounts of energy and dollars in the wrong place. We pump millions of dollars into schools and hope for the trickle down model of success. We support buildings and programs, hoping that teachers will “buy – in.” Of course there are great models of individual PD where teachers are supported on an ongoing basis to change and be successful. But I still think that most of our time, energy and dollars are being spent at the divisional and the school level.

If we are looking for models worth replicating and for success, we need to look more deeply on a smaller scale, we need to look at classrooms.

I think Clarence is right, as are Kansas leaders who have implemented the TRC program.

Does your state have a campus or classroom focus for educational technology integration programs, and specifically (in the United States) for EETT initiatives? Do you think your state or nation’s focus is appropriate or not? Do you agree with Clarence Fisher?

Webinar panelists provided detailed information about education program funds in the stimulus package, including timing and guidelines as well as district-level examples of next steps. ISTE CEO Don Knezek shared a series of ideas and suggestions relating to the stimulus package for education on March 31st. Please keep ISTE informed about how your school, district and state are using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) toward technology and technology professional development purchases by completing this online survey.