On Wednesday at the MACUL conference, I participated in a panel discussion that was streamed on SchoolTube.com. Since the sound was such that it was impossible for anyone standing nearby to hear, and since my estimate for the number of people watching the stream is in the low single digits, I'm posting the text of my prepared remarks here. (Yes, you, dear reader, could single-handedly be doubling my audience.)
The question to the panel was, "Particularly as it relates to technology, how has No Child Left Behind impacted our schools and what are your thoughts on its future? "
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In the past fifteen years or so, I've studied a lot of technology-based educational programs, and I've had a hand in designing quite a few. Every few years something new has come along that has promised to change the way teachers teach and the way learners learn: back in the early 1990s everyone was going to learn computer programming through LOGO, then the early World Wide Web was going to change the way kids think about research, then there were discussion boards, handhelds, science simulations, presentation software -- remember hypercard? -- and so on. Most of these haven't entirely disappeared, but rather than starting a revolution, they've settled into a niche, or they have been more or less co-opted into the normal routines of life in school. Now we have "Web 2.0," a term which already has started to move from "wired" to "tired," but as skeptical as I've become, there's one aspect of Web 2.0 that I think actually deserves MORE attention. And that's democracy. When I say Web 2.0 democracy, I don't mean online voting or candidate websites or Moveon.org. I'm talking about the expanded ability for everyone to speak and be heard, and the potential for everyone's ideas to be taken seriously.
There's reason to be skeptical about the hype on this topic, too: Just a couple weeks ago, Chris Wilson wrote an article in Slate arguing that two of the sites often held up as examples of the new information democracy -- Wikipedia and Digg -- are actually controlled disproportionately by a tiny percentage of contributors. Ok, so we haven't exactly figured out Web 2.0 democracy. But there has been a huge qualitative change in the past few years: young people now take it for granted that they can be part of the world's information space, and if there's not a true democracy right now, at least there's a sense of leveling the playing field: make a great video with a $200 camcorder, and a million people might watch it on YouTube. Write a provocative and intelligent blog, and you could attract more readers than your local newspaper.
What does this have to do with NCLB? Our children are growing up in a world where outside of school they have the tools to have a voice, and even more importantly, the expectation that they can have a say. NCLB represents the opposite: what matters is the standard-makers' ideas, and the students' task is to learn those. Certainly, we want our children to engage with the vast knowledge that we share and value as a society. However, to paraphrase Deborah Meier, we need to practice the HABITS of democracy, which is different than simply acquiring knowledge ABOUT democracy and all the things that go with it. And those habits include the hard work of engaging with other people's ideas -- in other words, democratic discourse.
Since democratic discourse depends on the ability of ordinary people to speak and to be taken seriously, the rise of blogging and other web 2.0 practices has the *potential* to increase the quality and quantity of democratic discourse. However, it won't happen automatically, and if we want people to acquire the habits of "citizenship 2.0," we had better start practicing democracy it at *every* level of schooling.
My group at the University of Michigan, Interactive Communications & Simulations, has been quietly developing and running programs that, seen from this angle, are profoundly tied to the key practices at the core of democratic communities. Sometimes, in order to highlight the challenges of these practices, we have created "pretend" communities or even intentionally dysfunctional ones, but at the core the issue has always been, "how do we listen to other people's voices, and what do we do with those points of view?" Put another way, we've always strived to create spaces where democratic discourse can happen, even though sometimes those spaces are AROUND the activity rather than WITHIN it.
NCLB, it seems to me, is inherently antithetical to these ideas, especially the idea of listening seriously to students' and teachers' points of view. And it's not just the top-down nature of the standards or the time that must be devoted to test preparation. It's the fact that it gives each level of power an excellent excuse not to listen to those below: "You must do this for NCLB, so there's no point in discussing the matter." And of course, that trickles all the way down. Not that there weren't plenty of structures in place before NCLB that had the same effect, but now everyone has a bigger stick.
So the basic tenets of NCLB are not really new, even if the scale and scope is. But as young people learn to use the web more and more as a medium of expression and discourse, the gap between school and popular culture will only increase, and it's young people's hearts and minds that are going to increasingly be left behind.
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