DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 320 711 RC 017 387

AUTHOR McRobbie, Joan, Ed.; Berliner, BethAnn, Ed.TITLE Looking Ahead to the Year 2000: Proceedings of the

Issues for Rural Schools Conference (Tempe, Arizona,April 27-28, 1989).

INSTITUTION Far West Lab. for Educational Research andDevelopment, San Francisco, Calif.

SPONS AGENCY Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED),Washington, DC.

PUB DATE Jul 89CONTRACT 400-86-0009NOTE 61p.; Cover titles varies.PUB TYPE Viewpoints (170) -- Collected Works - Conference

Proceedings (u21)

EDRS PRICE MF01/,3203 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS *Change Strategies; *Educational Change; Educational

Innovation; *Educational Policy; EducationalResearch; Educational Technology; ElementarySecondary Education; Mass Media; ResearchUtilization; Rural Economics; *Rural Education; RuralSchools; *Rural Urban Differences; School DistrictAuts:nomy; *Technological Advancement; Theory PracticeRelationship

IDENTIFIERS *Educational Restructuring

ABSTRACT

This collection of conference presentations focuseson the twin themes of restructuring and technology in rural schools.Rural America's increasingly polarized demographics, politicalleadership voids, teacher training, renewal strategies, andever-shrinking budgets are discussed, along with ongoing mediacriticism, which is a reality for all educators in the 1980s. Openingspeaker Ron Knutson described many rural problems as being associatedwith an economic- decline that contrasts with the economic upswingenjoyed by the rest of the nation. Four educational administratorsfrom Western states placed the responsibility for improvement onstate and local administrators and educators. The major topic ineducation today is restructuring. Stanford University's Michael Kirstobserved that ideas challenging traditional educational models sufferin the current atmosphere of low public confidence, but he depictedschools as having little choice but to restructure. Arizona StateUniversity's David Berliner raised a different restructuringquestion: Why is so little attention paid to the role of research intransforming schools? Because of its promise for the rural future,technology took center stage on the conference's second day. Buttechnology specialist Robert Pearlman cautioned that the merepurchase of high-tech systems is no assurance that education willimprove. The processes of learning and teaching must be reassessedand new technology appropriately exploited to turn students intoactive learners. Pearlman proposed making technology-smart teachersthe buyers of technology, in order to create and exploit a genuinelyenthusiastic constituency for technology education. (TES)

PROCEEDINGSPAPERS

T-1 SPRINGje 1989

Lookingbe, ahead

toCa the

Year14.

erm2000

AIssuesforruralschools

FarWest

Laboratory

BEST COPY AVAILABLE

U S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION°nice of Educat onal Research and Improvement

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATIONCENTER (ERIC)

1/This document has been reproduced asreceived from the person or organicattonoriginating it

C' Minor changes have been made to improvereproduction quality

Points of view or opinions slated in thi..document do not necessarily represent officialOERI position or policy

"PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THISMATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY

Thomas I. Ross

TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCESINFORMATION CFNTER (ERIC)"

2

ProceedingsPapersSpring1989

FarWest

Laboratoryfor

EducationalResearch

andDevelopment

EditorsJoan Mc RobbieBeth Ann Berliner

Published July 1989

3

Page II

Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and D, ,opmen t serves thefour-state region of Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah, working with ednia-tors at al! levels to plan and carryout school improvements. The mission of FWL 'sRural Schools Assistance Program is to assist rural educators in the region bylinking them with colleagues; sharing information, expertise and innovativepractices; and providing technical assistance to build Local capacity for continuedself-improvement. For further information contact BethAnn Berliner, ruralconference planner and organizer, FWL,1855 Folsom Sheet, San Francisco, Call-fiv-ma 94103, (415) 565-3000.

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BOARDOFDIRECTORSFar West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development

Reginald E. Barrllniver,ity High tit boot

Tur,oti, ;Arizona

C. Diane Bishopante sure, nitendent for Pullin In,trurtionArizona Department of IA/mat:on

Phoentl, Arizona

Edmund J. CainDnectoi, Internationia Fat 11111/ Etrhange

llniversity of Nearda

Reno, Nevada

Agnes L Chancal:llama state Board of blur iliumSal ramento California

lice C. ClarkeNevada State Board orf Ftlur ation

Reno, Neilida

Gerald J. DadeySuperintendent

Caleuto llnifted School Di,trirtCritelli°, California

Roger DashDire, to, , Southern Some Center

Far We,t Laboratory

Northridge, Calitor

Linda F. DavisDeputy sure, intendent

Can Fran( r(o Unified St hoof D1,11 ili

San Frani i,r-o, California

William C. DeweyDirector, Radiation Onwlogy Re,eartII I airmail), y

llnii'er,dt /0f calif°, ma, Stns ham NoSan Franti,ro, California

Joseph M. Foleyfo.qh M Foley A,,ocrate,La, VegiN, Nerada

Kolene Grangeriii,oeuffe Superintendent

Utah State Offue of i ducat ion

Salt Lake Oty, Utah

Fay B. HaislevDom, St hoof of !jut lit1011

1.11111'01,111/ of the Par ifn

Ctorkton, California

William K JenningsSuperintendent

Son Mateo County St /tool,

Rott000ti City, Caltfot

Francisco JimenezDiiwon of Art, and ih00amtie,Unwer,ity of Santa Clara

Santa Clara, California

Raymond S. KellisSupointendentFiona limped stink)! rh.r, it r No I rPeoria, At /zoo',

William KippsupointendentRooms shoo/ Di,trutRohl ing, Cabo» ma

Virla R. Krotzcahfoil1111

Ronald S. LemosA ,i,tant Vire Chant elfin of

Aradernic Affair., Phin, and Program,

7111 California Sate llnivet,rty

Long Beath, California

Francine MaffeiPrint:pal

Saint ham!, S0h1110 tit 11001

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liar A. MartinezAt.,0, /ate Dean

coiliNe or hinrationUtah State Unioet,ityLogan, Utah

Frank D. MeyersDean, college of nini arumlhmt'r,ity0f NevadoRi at', Neoula

Joann F. MortensenKir hard,on, Mr» ten,en Smith

Salford, Arizona

James R. MossState Super intention of Publir In,t

Utah State Department o; lalinartion

Salt I ake City, Litt&

Dean H Nafzigerdation/tiny Doe, to,Fin We,t Laboratory

San Fr anci,co, California

Eugene T PaslovState superintendent of Public hi,tr in 11011

Department of Eduration

Carson City, Neparla

JoAn Saltzensure/into/dentCapra county oft( e of Edit( anonColu,a, California

Henrietta S. SchwartzDean, St hoof 01 1-1111t,IIIoll

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LookingAheadto theYear2000:IssuesforRuralSchools

April 27 & 28, 1989Tempe, Arizona

Page z,

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .

Vern special thanks to all the Rural Schools Assistance Prosnun staff Evhose effort and suppot I made the conference sosuccessful. We could not him' done it without the good humor and great skills of Dein Hertz cteilit goes to PatriciaChristen. Arid without the eApertise, insight and commitment of the people on the follownis agenda, there would nol hatebet n a conference at all

AGENDA

WelcomeDean Nafziger,Director, Far West Laboratory

Rural Schools and Rural Development:l'oliry ImplicationsRon Knutson,Texas A&M University

Preparing for the Year 2000: State PerspectivesDiane Bishop, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction,David Gordon, Califoi ma Deputy Superintendent of PublicInstruction; Eugene Pasloy, Nevada Superintendent ofPublic Instruction, James Moss, Utah Superintendent ofPublic Instruction

Facilitator: Raymond Kelhs,Superintendent of Peoria Unified School Distrait 11,An4ona

Restructuring: Prospects and Problems in Rural SchoolsMichael Kirst,Stanford Unuersity

Career Ladders: Impacts on Teachers and SchoolsFacilitator Linda Nelson, Far West LaboratoryPanel 1 -mann Menem, Senate Education Analyst, ArizonaState S .late, Glenn Dat is, Assistant Superintendent, DysartUnified School District 89. Arizona; Kolene Granger, UtahState Office of Education, John Bennion, Superintendent,Salt Lake City School District, Utah.

The Role of Community in Rural SchoolsFacilitator: Paul Nachtigal, Mid-Continent RegionalEducational LaboratoryPanel. Toni Haas, Mid-Continent Regional EducationalLaboratory, John Beard, Project SCORE, Humboldt UnifiedSchool Distract, Arizona, Barbara Bacr, Project CERES, CeresUnified School District, California

Page n

Consolidation: The Lessons LearnedFacilitator Mary Amster, Far West LaboratoryPanel Val Edrington, Superintendent, South Summit SchoolDistrict, Utah, James West, Superintendent, Ogden CityPublic School District, Utah; Reed Call,Superintendent(retired), Granite School District, UtahDiscussant: David Cot', Far West Laboratory

What Does Restructuring Rural Schools Do For Students?Presenters. Ivan Muse, Brigham Young University andNancy Moore, Principal, Altara School, Utah.

Transforming the Teaching ProfessionDavid Berliner,Arizona State University

Improving Services for Rural At-Risk StudentsPresenters Larry Guthrie, Far West Laboratory and PaulaWilkerson, Director of State and Federal Projects, CalexicoUnified School District, California.

An Integrative Approach to Curriculum Planning andStaff DevelopmentPresenter Janet Kierstead, Claremont Graduate SchoolDiscussants Nikola Filby, Far West Laboratory and LoisEaston, Director of Curriculum and Instruction, ArizonaDepartment of Education

Preparing Principals for Rural SchoolsPresenters Ivan Muse, Brigham Young Ulm ersav, NancyMoore, Principal. Altara School, Utah

Mentor Teachers: Evaluators, Coaches or Somewhere inBetween?Facilitator Judith Shulmail, Ear West LaboratoryPanel Victoria Bernhaidt, Chico State Unwersin ,

Scott Hays, Teacher, Coffee Creek Elementary School,California; Marguerite Granahan, Teacher, l'se 1 lo TsoMiddle School, Arizona, Ann Harris, Teachei, WindowRock Elementary School, Arizona.

Educational Technology in School RestructuringRobert Pearlrm,n,Educational Technology Specialist

The Great Basin Project: A Distance LearningDemonstrationPresenters. Dean Bradshaw, Far West Laboratory, RobertBrems, Director of Vocational and Secondary Education,Box Eldc. County School District, Utah, Robert Jensen,Principal, Bear River High School, Utah

Training Teachers to Use Technology: The BelridgeExperiencePresenters: Gary Peterson, Superintendent, Lee Phiter, andBecky Snyder, Curriculum Consultant, Be fridge ElementarySchool District, California

Bringing Technology to the Classroom on a ShoestringBudgetPresenters Henry Jolley, Superintendent of WasatchCounty School District, Utah and Todd Stubbs, Northeast-ern Utah Educational Services, Utah

The Answers Are Only As Good As The Questions:Asking Better Questions About TechnologyPresenter Saul RockmanApple Computer

Technology and the FuturePresenters: Robert Pearlman, Education TechnologySpecialist and Saul Rockman, Apple Computer

ClosingDean Nafziger,Director, Far West Laboratory

Page pi,

Proceedings Papers of the

Looking Ahead to the Year 20(X)Issues for Rural SchoolsConference is published by FarWest Laboratory for Educatie,-.:11

Research and Development Thepublication is supported byederal funds from the U SDepartment of Education, Officeof Educational Research andImprovement, contract number400 -36 -0009. The contents of this

publication do not necessarilyreflect the views or policies of theDepartment of Education, nordoes mention of trade names,commercial products or organi-zations imply endorsement bythe (Tinted States Government

Rural Schools AssistanceProgram

Far West Laboratory forEducational Research andDevelopment1855 rolsom StreetSan Francisco, California 94013

(415) 565-3000

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PANEL OF CHIEF STATE EDUCATION OFFICERS

C. DIANE BISHOP, ARIZONAState Superintendent

DAVID GORDON, CALIFORNIADeputy Superintendent

EUGENE PASLOV, NEVADAState Superintendent

JAMES MOSS, UTAHState Superintendent

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

RURAL SCHOOLS AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT:POLICY IMPLICATIONSRon Knutson, Texas A £+M University

RESTRUCTURING: PROSPECTS ANDPROBLEMS IN RURAL SCHOOLSMichael Kirst, Stanford University

TRANSFORMING THE TEACHINGPROFESSIONDavid Berliner, Arizona State University

EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY INSCHOOL RESTRUCTURINGRobert Pearlman, American Federatum of Teachers

I age no

1

5

8

10

13

19

25

33

43

Page ix

INTRODUCTION

Looking Ahead to the Year 2000

It's an appealing, notion, born of nostalgia Asurban schools struggle to cope Y. ith the upheavals of arapidly changing world, the rural schoolhouse standspristine, a throwback to a simpler era. Reality? The ruralschool today may not be a building at all but a tullecarpeted, all electric metal case trailer in northern Ne-vada accommodating the sudden surge in studentscaused by a gold boom. Or in California, a once proudschoolhouse nestled the foothills may have fallen intodisrepair because local voters are now mostly elderlyand not interested in school improvement bonds. Or inArizona or Utahthe rural school's insignia may nolonger be a flagpole, but a flagpole flanked by a satellitedish.

Minus the smog of urban bureaucracies, ruraleducation is bright with promise. Teaching here, andschool organization itself, can be reshaped with fewerhu rd les. High tech innovation is welcomeif madedifficult by minimal budgets. Stilt, even the most remoteschools hi.ven't escaped the shadows cast by today'ssocial and political ills. With growing frequency, ruraleducators are recruiting counselors and psychologiststo l'elp their students cope with urban-sounding prob-lemsdrugs, alcohol, teen pregnancy, suicide.

Thisspectrum top( ped "Looking Aheadto the Year 2000. issues for Rural Schools." A first of itskind gathering of policymakers, scholars and practitio-ners, the two-day session in Tempe, Arizona focused125 minds on the twin themes of restructuring and tech-nology The rural setting's increasingly polarized demo-graphics, political leadership voids, teacher trainingand renewal strateies, and e% er-shrinkmg bud gets wereall discussed, a long with a reality tor.all educators in the1980sthe steady drumbeat of media criticism

National Versus Stateside Views

Opening speaker Ron Knutson, rural policyspecialist from Texas A&M, gave a national perspectiveto rural economic dilenmus. As the rest of the nationimproves economically, he said, rural areas are still onthe decline. A "selective outmigra bon" of young adultsleaves them with few leaders, lots of kids and a votingblock of older° tizens unlikely to endorse schools spend

1 0

mg That plight is compounded by Washington poli-cymakers who confuse the farm problem and the ruralproblem and then are unable to fathom why $20 billionin farm spending doesn't stem the tide of rural decline"Basically," Knutson asserted, "we have no rural pol-icy"which helps explain rural education's fundingproblem.

The bu rd en falls to the sta tes, and the view it omthe four western region states was outlined by their topeducation officials. They spoke of a need for closer tiesbetween rural schools and social service agencies as theproblems of hunger, poverty and despair increasinglyimpede kids' ability to learn. They spoke of . need forintensive staff training, to enable teachers to implementcreative new curricula and learning strategies. Theyspoke of finding ways to lighten the paperwork over-load that burdens rural administrators. They urgedgreatPr schools accountability and decentralized au-hori t: so that the system can adapt to locl preferences

and conditions.

But the superintendents had one commontheme. Technology, they all agree, is a godsend for ruraleducation. To C. Diane Bishop of Arizona, it is thesolution to the rural/urban equity problem. Telecom-munications, she said, will make it possible for the ruralschool with limited personnel and funding to pros idecourses needed by only one or two students. Califor-nia's deputy superintendent David Gordon agreed.Calling technology "poientially a big money saver forall sch' oh," he encouraged educators in small districtsto finance high tech investments by forming partn2r-ships with their larger counterparts. In that way, hissta to hopes eventually to install satellite Li ishes at all ofits schools.

Nevada too envisions a statewide telecommu-nications network. Superintendent Eugene Poslov,addressing both human and economic concerns, seesthis as essential for keeping rural graduates competitivein the university and the workplace. Lit ih's James Moss,who oversees the nation's most comprehensive teachercareer ladder experiment, views teshnology as essentialto rural participation in that effort "Technology canturn a generalist teacher into a specialist," he said That

Past' 1

teacher is then able to meet the subject matter require-ments manda i by the state legislature, thus keepinghim or her on a par with urban colleagues. Moss, like theother superintendents, called for links between schoolsand business to hasten the rural adoption of tele-learn-ing systems.

Restructuring

The hottest topic in education today is restruc-turing, and a series of concurrent workshops allowedconference participants from school superintendents toprincipals and board members to examine a range ofrestructuring activities: Career ladders, consolidations,school /community alliances and teacher empowermentstrategies.

Stanford University's Michael Kirst, meanwhile,put the term into perspective by calling it "one of thosewords that means everything and nothing." Kirst notedthat of all the 20th century's "bold new ideas" in educa-tion, those that last are the ones that don't tinker with thebasic model, while attempts at structural change tend to"zoom in and out of the Bermuda Triangle." Yet for allhis skepticism, he depicted schools as left with littlechoice but to restructure. In the six years since A Nationat Risk triggered the 1980s reform movement, presscriticism of education has not relented. Schools intensi-fied their homework and graduation requirements, butwidely published reports of American kids' failings ingeography, science, and economics :,cl to a public per-ception that any reforms made so far have fallen short ofthe mark.

In this climate, Kirst worried that educatorsresisting the "bold and new" risk losing public confi-dence. He advised more intensification, this time byi sing tests and stepping up staff development. As forrestructuring measures, urged proceeding only afterconsidering three ques 4.; is: How will you finance this?How will you free re. aurces to begin It? Andmostimportantdoes it have a constituency?

Arizona State University's David Berliner raiseda different restructuring question: Why is so little atten-tion paid to the role of research in transforming schools?When medical research shows a new drug reducingheart attack recurrence by one percent, the finding ishailed as a miracle. By contrast, a one percent differen-tial in an education study is bar, !y noticed. "Medicinehas a great criteriondead," Berliner said. "Lducationrelies on measures like 'above grade level.' But when wehave a one percent higher retention rate, that's life anddeath to the kids of this country as well. Thou ,ands of

Page 2

kids will be affected by a 1 rianre lust this small." Heurged educational researchers to extrapolate their dataand make projectionsto point out, for example, thatbillions may be saved on future prison budgets byspending more now on early childhood programs.

The Rural Future: Tele-Schools

Because of its promise for the rural future, tech-nology took center stage on the conference's secondday. Early on came a demonstration of just what is nowpossible under the rubric of distance learning. Theconference attendees in Tempe were connected by three-way audiographic hookup with Sara, a high schoolstudent in remote northwestern Utah, and her biologyteacher 125 miles away who used his electronic pointeron the big color monitor to show Saraand those at theconferencehow the jaw parts of a grasshopper moveand how wind and weather affect the artistry of a spiderspinning its web.

Unquestionably impressive. But technologyspecialist Robert Pearlman was quick to caution that themere purchase of such a system is far from insurancethat education will improve as a result. In a presentationinterspersed with videos, Pearlman told of telecommu-nications equipment gathering dust at schoolsin partbc calif e schools often take a backwards approach to itsacquisition. They buy systems and hope people will usethem, he said, instead of first rethinking the learningprocess and then "exploiting the technology" to turnstudents into active learners.

To show how it ought to work, he described anationwide experiment involving 200 elementaryschools whose students studied acid rain in depth. Thekids used computer technology to analyze data andcreate color-coded maps of U.S. acidity levels. In theend, they had 'more data than the EPA"along withthe notion that learning is exciting, relevant and some-thing you do.

Pearlman suggested t.imilar rural projects. With"the multi-media sandbox" of camcorders, VCRs, com-puters, televisions and editing equipment kids couldmake a film telling the story, say, of a local pollutedriver. They'd be exploiting technology to documentevidence and make public presentations. In other words,they'd be building the very leadership skills that ruralareas strongly need.

As for technology's constituency, Pearlmanproposed a "crazy idea" Make te,-Imology-smart teach-ers the buyers, and you'll create an instant constituency.

As the decision-makers, these teachers would automati-cally have a sense of ownership. That would lead themto create new ways of using their purchases to improveteaching and learning. "They'll become collaborators ineach others' development"--to the point of team teach-ing over long distances with teachers in other states.Their know-how and enthusiasm, transmitted to theirstudents, is technology's true bottom line

l'age 3

Clockwise from top leftDavid GordonDiane Bishoplames MossEugene Pas lop

Page 416

C. DIANE BISHOP

State Superintendent, Arizona

I would like to talk about some of the issues thatseem to he relevant to the rural and small schools ofArizona, and some of the activities that we have under-way to try to address those issues.

Giving Administrative Support

When I first took office in January 1987, one areaof cencern to me and to other members of the Depart-ment was rural and small schools. We tried to identifywhat some of the problems were and what we could doas an agency to help out. Our in-house task force stud iedthe issue ciad discovered that one area in which wecould really provide some service was communication.We want to ensure that the rut al and small schools areable to receive information rapidly from the Depart-ment of Education. !f itey have concerns they need toexpress, we want to be sure that there is a specific contactperson for them. Conversely, we need a specific contactperson when we have information to disseminate.

That idea gelled into a rural and small schooltask force team of 40 department professionals. Eachone has responsibility forme, two, or three rural schools.We serve all 90 school districts. And every school has thename of a person in the agency who "belong " to them.They can call and voice concerns or get any informationthey need. Likewise, we can use this channel to sendinformation out. This service is a tool that works y% ell forus, providing continuity by having a familiar voice andface identified for each school and district.

Growing out of this communication system ismore administrative support Many of our schools arevery small. We have a legislature or state board that canmandate things fortis to do. Many times these mandatesrequire a lot of paper work, an activity that must headded to the daily work of running a school district.That puts a real strain on the small ad ministrati \regroupthat might he running rural and small schools So wehave proposed making better use of our rural countyschool superintendents. Perhaps these individuals, orsomeone in their staff office, could take on some of theday-to-day administrative functions for the rural and

1'1

small schoolslike dealing with budget issues or withfederal reports required for special and vocationaleducationthus relieving the small districts of some oftheir burden.

This would take some legislation to redefinethe duties of the county school superintendents andperhaps free up some possibilities for this kind of inter-action. But it's something we are interested in doing,and the dialogue continues.

Finding Innovative Ways to Meet Teacher Shortages

Another area of concern is the supply of skilledteachers. We at the State Board have the responsibilitynot only for issuing certificates, but also for revoking orsuspending them in cases of unprofessional conduct orother circumstances. A great many of the cases we dealwith have to do with contract breaks, and most of thosecome from the outlying areasthe rural and smallschools People sign on in the summer to take a job in arural area. They go and start the job, but maybe after amonth or two they find out it's not what they want, orsomething better comes along, and they break the con-tract and leave. This puts a real burden on the schools.

We also have the problem of how to get indi-viduals with certain expertise out to some of these areas.The state of Arizona has a number of endorsements inplacein bilingual education, English as a second lan-guage, gifted education, and art, for example. Teachingin these areas requires specialized training. And therearen't enough specially-trained teachers to go around.Often, those who have the training don't want to residein isolated areas.

To deal with this problem, we developed analternative certification plan which was recently put inplace. The districts are just now becoming aware of itspossibilities. It allows schools to hire people who haveexpertise but who lack formal Wining from a College ofEducationsomeone making a career change, for ex-ample, or perhaps the spouse of another professional.This person could he issued an alternate certificate,

Page 5

andafter a period of mentoringcan actually becomea fully certificated teacher in the state.

This is a relatively new concept, but we havehad a fairly good response to It. We're hopeful that in thefuture, as more districts become aware of what it can doand how to go through the process, we will see more ofthese people in our field.

Another issue is educational eqnitythe oldstory about the urban versus the rural. This is not anissue of quality education. Our rural and small schoolsin Arizona are doing a tremendous job of providingquality education for their students. It's an issue more ofdiversity than of quality. When you only have one ortwo students who need or are desiring a certain course,how do you provide that when you don't have thepersonnel? How do you provide it when you don't havethe financial base?

Linking Through Telecommunications

One way is through telecommunications. Thisis probably the most comprehensive thing going on inthe state. We are involved in a major cooperative effortbetween the Board of Regents which has responsibilityfor our university system, the State Board of Educationfor the K-12 schools, and the State Board of CommunityColleges. This cooperative is charged with assessing thestatus of telecommunication in the statehow muchhardware is out there, where is it located, how muchsoftware is there, what kinds of activities are differentdistricts and schools engaged in? The goal is to guide thedevelopment of a statewide telecommunications effort.

Ideally, we would like every district to be ableto access all kinds of information across the world. Wewould like to have communication, via data processingequipment, directly into the Department of Education,andlikewise--back out again to districts. We alsowant to expand learning opportunities through dis-tance learning. All of these efforts are part of the goal.

We have recently gone through a process oflooking at the kinds of equipment and se' ces that areneeded in the K-12 area. The cooperative then is going todo a massive inventory of all state needs. The Depart-ment of Education recently went on-line with theMcGraw Hill Information Exchange, which allows theDepartment toelectronically communicate with schoolsand allows districts to electronically communicate witheach other. This is in a pilot stage, but it is our intent to

Page 6 is

collect required reporting information and disseminatematerials and resources electronically to schools di-rectly.

If you would like more information about howyou can get on-line with us, Kathryn Kilroy is the personin the Department who is heading this.

We're also pursuing the idea of having all li-braries in the K-12 system electronically linked, perhapsas soon as this summer. With one resource index andagreements made to share resources, this will maximizethe availability of library resources to the rural andsmall schools. And we would like to work towardagreements of a like nature with the universities and thecommunity colleges and the county and city libraries sothat all libraries are on-line and students have access toall of the information statewide.

Several of our rural schools are using the serv-ices of the Oklahoma State University this year. Addi-tional rural sitesspecifically in Cochise Countywilljoin them in the coming year. The University of Arizonain Tucson now has 19 instructional television fixedservice channels licensed through the FCC, and thesechannels will be used primarily by the Tucson schools.However, there is a link between Tucson and SierraVistaa rural community in the southern part of thestate. Programming done in Tucson will be made avail-able to Sierra Vista and all of the surrounding areas.Discussions are now in progress about the educationalneeds of those schools in terms of both student instruc-tion and staff development.

Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flag-staff has just signed an agreement with MCI which willenable a two-way audio-video link between Flagstaffand Yuma NAU has a branch campus in Yuma andwants to use that mechanism to offer courses at thatbranch. The new system also links NAU and ArizonaState University for the first time, and it may allow theK-12 system to share time for student instructionalpurposes and staff development.

Our cooperative has a bill in the legislatureright now requesting support for a study of the state-wide status of telecommunication. The study wouldlook at what the cost would be to network the entireeducational system. We're talking about audio, i, ideo,and data transmissionthe whole thing. We're also indiscussion with the other states who are hereUtah,Nevada, Wyoming and Montana -and with Far Westand Northwest Labs and US West Communications to

determine whether we can all cooperatively offer edu-cational programming in a multi-state effort

So there are some exciting things on the hori-zon. We are moving very rapidly in the direction of atelecommunications effort statewide which will addressmany of these areasto improve instruction and tobetter serve small and rural schools.

.1 0Page 7

DAVID GORDON

Deputy State Superintendent, California .

I'm delighted to be here on behalf of our super-intendent, Bill Honig, who is pinned down in our an-nual budget battle. In talking about some of the issuesthat we think will affect rural schools in the next tenyears, I'd like to start off by giving just a little bit ofbackground on some of the demographicsand the contextfor small and rural schools in our state. These thingsmake a tremendous difference, both programmaticallyand politically.

We have 1,024 districts and 58 county schoolsoffices, most of whose county superintendents areelected. We have 4.6 million students, and we're grow-ing at the rate of 140,000 per year. That growth rate isroughly equivalent to building a city the size of Stock-ton, Californiaor a little bigger than Tempein agiven year. We spend about $21 billion a year from allsources on our schools. It costs us $900 million to $1billion a year just to provide for inflationary increasesand cost-of-living adjustments for schools. Ninety per-cent of our students are enrolled in 352 of our 1,024districts. Thus ten percent are in the other 670 districts.We have 686 districts with fewer than 2500 students,about 500 districts with fewer than 1000 students, and375 have fewer than 500 students. So you can sce, wehave a tremendous number of small districts, but popu-lation-wise they represent a very small proportion of thestate.

Our demographics in the state are changingvery, very rapidly Interestingly enough, though, theyare changing much less rapidly in the rural areas withinthe small school districts Our statewide ethnic break-down currently is about 50 percent white, 30 percentHispanic, nine percent black, and seven Fkrcent AsianFor districts under 2500 students, the breakdown is 69percent white, 23 percept Hispanic, three percent black,two percent Asian, and two percent Native American

As for performance, I'll give you just a couple ofcontrasts for interest's !,ake. College-going rates areabout the same in the state as a whole and in rural andsmall districts. The drop-out rate, though, is signifi-cai y lower in the small and rural districts. I shouldmention that we also have an outstanding association ofsmall school districts which has done an awful lot of

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political and programmatic advocacy in the last coupleof years Bill Lucas, who works with that association, ishere, and I want to acknowledge their efforts. They justcompleted a comprehensive survey of all of our smalldistricts which they'll be making available. i enc enrageyou to take a look at that.

Seven Issues Facing Rural Schools

I think the agenda of this conference is tremen-dous. It has touched on many things that we've beenworking on. I won't get into any detail on the program-matic things we're doing in California. Many of themare already on the agenda. If you want to ask questions,feel free. Meanwhile, let me touch very quickly on sevenissues that we think will affect rural schools.

First: Accountability. I think this is kind of asleeping-giant issue for small and rural districts. In ourstate alon-, we have two major initiatives, one of whichwill require an accountability report card next yearincluding 13 items. I've got some copies if you'd like tosee it. This report card will have to he produced by everyschool every year. I think the implications for smallschool districts are tremendous in that we will need tofind ways over the next five or ten years to begintailoring our testing, assessing, and data gatheringprocedures so that we can get useful data out to parentswithout increasing an already onerous data collectionburden I think that's going to he a real challenge whichwe need to start working on right away.

Second. Getting ready for growth. The fastestgrowing areas in our state are rural areas which areturning into suburbs. The large cities are becomingprogressively less liveable, so two things are happen-ing Number one, people are taking oft entirely andmoving someplace else. Number two, they're beginningto commute phenomenally long distarkes. That is tosay, people are driving two and three how s a day eachway from the Central Valley into the San Francisco BayArea. The traffic congestion is so had that you can drivefrom Redding to Sacramento taster than you can drive

2u

from San Francisco to Sacramento, and the distance is athird longer to Redd mg. So rural communities are beingjumped by developers. They're not in the least bit pre-pared for this growth, and I think that in the next tenyears or so you'll see a lot of unlikely places turning intosuburbs. I think that unless these communities reallybegin to plan for growthbegin preparing to pass bondissues and the likethey're going to be in real troublewhen the growth hits. Developers aren't going to waituntil you get the schools built.

Third- Dealing with consolidation while main-taining the advantages of small schools There's afunny thing happening in our state. Two contradictorytrends are kind of running into one another. One is anenormous pressure for reducing bureaucracy andadministration. There's a lot of pressure to cut down onduplication, and that's creating more pressure for con-solidation. On the other hand, in the larger school dis-tricts, people are beginning to figure out that smaller,more personalized environments for kidsparticularlyin junior highs and high schoolsare a good way toaddress the needs of at-risk kids, potential drop-outs,and so on. So in the urban areas, they're creating schoolswithin schools. And in rural areas, people are pressur-ing administrators to try and consolidate. I think it'sgoing to be very important not to trade away the educa-tional advantages of smaller schools and districts infavor of administrative efficiencywhich nv.y not turnout to be as valuable as the educational advantages thatwe've got in the first place.

Fourth: Addressing at-risk students. In Cali-fornia, we're trying to put together a comprehensivepolicy that addresses the needs of at-risk kids at five1,,vels. Doing this only at the junior high and high schoollevel is not sufficient. So we're looking at a policystrategy for ages 0-5, early elementary, later elementary,middle/junior high, and high school age. This is goingto require school people to really begin working withhealth and social service providers in their communi-ties, especially regarding the younger age groups. Mi-chael Kirst and his PACE group have just done a reportcalled Condition of Children in California, and this looksat the status of children across all of these service-provided groups. I encourage you to take a look thatreport. It's a real eye-opener.

Fifth: Training, training and more training.I'm glad to see there are a lot of sessions on in-service onyour agenda. This is as it should be. We are way underinvested in training compared with any sensible privatebusiness. If we were a private business, we'd be out ofbusin.?ss because we don't train our people, either on the

front-end or through in-service In California, sx e havetremendous cui nculurn materials, new textbooks, andassessment materials. But we can t install them ade-quately because we don't have the wherewithall fortraining I'm fond of saving that the next wave of reformwon't involve new reform at all. It will simply be devel-oping the capacity to install the reforms we've alreadyput together I think we know how to make schoolsbetter But we have to teach our school people how toimplement what we know.

Sixth: Technology is absolutely crucial. InCalifornia, technology is not only crucial to rural schools,but it's potentially a big money saver for all schools. Sowe're trying to encourage small districts to form part-nerships with large suburban districts. We're so con-vinced of the potential time and money savings thatwe're putting together a proposal to try to put a satellitedish at every school site in the statethat's about 7,900sites This system would he used both for distancelearning instruction and for teacher training.

Seventh: Garnering resources in the face ofhostile demography. The political climate right now inWashington and in much of our state is pushing reformwithout investmentreform on the cheap, if you will.Education is everyone's number one priority until theyget the bill, and I think we have to convince people thatwe're not going to succeed unless we make crucialinvestments. Things like pre-school, early childhoodeducation, and teacher training cost money. Not only isour population aging, but we're getting growth in theminority communities The minority communities tendnot to voteso the task becomes much tougher. I thinkthat we have to align ourselves with business and makethe economic argument that we as a society need anadequately trained work force to keep the economy ingood shape If we can make that argument, then I thinkwe'll get the investment we need.

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EUGENE PASLOV

State Superintendent, Nevada

I'm always hard-pressed, especially when our legis-lature is in session, to attend meetings of this sort.You've heard the two previous speakers allude to theunusual features of their respective legislatures. Let metell you that Nevada has its own variation of peculiari-ties when it comes to the legislature. You never know,for example, when you leave town what's going to bedone to you. And you hope when you get back that whatwas done to you wasn't too bad.

One of the joys of being able to get here occurredthis morning as I was going to breakfast. This gentlemansaid, "Are you Gene Paslov? You probably don't re-member me, but I was in your 11th grade Erglish class26 years ago." I sat down and we had a very niceconversation. Isn't it wonderful that as a teacher you canshow up someplace and run into a student from 26 yearsago?

I want to takea minute or two and tell you aboutthe Nevada context and about some of the policies andtrends that I think are important for rural education.First of all, Nevada is 110,000 square milesa big place,but not a lot of people. Just slightly over a million people.There are 17 county school districts and about 350school buildings. In terms of percentages, we're thefastest growing state in the nation. That has a tremen-dous impact, which I'll talk a little bit about in a fewminutes. But first I want to give you sonic feel for thecontrasts we have.

Our largest school district is Clark County,better known as Las Vegas. It is the 18th largest schooldistrict in the United States and has 108,000 kids About120 miles to the north is Esmerelda County SchoolDistricta K-8 district with just 187 kids. The nextlargest school district is Washoe County, 400 miles to thenorth. So you can see that to go between our two largestschool districts is quite a ride. We recently had a choiceplan introduced to our legislature which would allowfor open enrollment. I kept thinking about the transpor-tation problem there. Since I have my private pilot'slicense, I thought maybe I could start the Paslov airlinefor kids.

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But those kinds of distances are really quite signifi-cant. The longest bus ride in our rural counties is 103 or104 miles--one way. So we have, as you can see, somereal contrasts. The Nevada economy right now is won-derful. It's a growth economy, it's booming, and it ispredicated on two major industries. One is gaming. Theother is mining. Mining has historically had a tremen-dous impact on the economy. And currently there is aboom in gold and silver. Nevada is now turning into thelargest gold-producing state in the world. Mining inNevada is looking very quickly to surpass South Africa.But the gold and silver industry is volatile. Its profitabil-ity is based upon current technology and internationalprecious metal prices. as well as on the availability ofgold-producing ore.

Gold is a non renewable resource. In otherwords, at some point it's going to be gone. Right nowsome relatively small communities in rural Nevada areexperiencing 300 and 400 percent growth, with tremen-dous impact on the schools. Now what will happen isthat this gold and precious metal boom will probablylast another 15 to 20 years--experts have different opin-ionsand the duration depends on a lot of differentfeatures. And then it will be goneagain, with tremen-dous impact.

Coping with an "Accordian-Like" Economy

This accordian-like economy of growth andreduction is likely to remain in effect in Nevada for agood number of years. As a result, many changes areoccurring in our rural communities. And I want to justtalk about three dramatic policy consequences. Some ofthese David Gordon mentioned, and I think you willhear them again from other speakers. But I do think theyare worth emphasizing.

First: The school infrastructure. By this I meanthe building, the sta fling, the transportation. All of theseare undergoing some very dramatic changes. Elko is aprime example. Its K-12 population grew by 16 percentjust last year. Now that's two relatively small elemen-

r) .."4 4.,

tary schools-400 students each. But it has some verydramatic consequences for the community of Elko. Itmeans, for example, that they have added portablebuildings to their elementary schools. They have entirelementary schools that are built with portable struc-tures. In light of the inevitable bust in mining, there arecost advantages to portable schools. When numAg driesup, those portables will probably have reached the endof their building life.

As part of this growth that is occurring in min-ing and other rural communities throughout Nevada,their problems begin to look more like suburban andurban woes. For example, we are now experiencingproblems with youth gangs. When someone mentionsyouth gangs, you think of Los Angelesnever Elko,Nevada. Guess what, folks, Elko has youth gangs. Andwe're having more and more difficulty with familyproblems and youth problems such as suicide, teenagepregnancy, and various criminal activities. In Elko, forexample, the police are dealing with a tremendousinflux of folks from all over the countryand thisburden has caught them by surprise.

It's interesting to see the way Nye County,another one of our rural mining communities, is dealingwith the infrastructure problem. There, the communityof Round Mountain is about 60 miles north of Tonopah.Tonapah is in the middle of Nevada, and although it'snot the end of the world, there are those who claim youcan see the end of the world from there. Round Moun-tain is in the middle of the desert, and Echo Bay MiningCompany is mining there. I flew out to Round Moun-tain. It's no longer round, and it's not a mountain. It's abig hole, 700 feet deep.

Echo Bay built a new junior /senior high schoolin Round Mountain and gave it to the school district. It'svery nice, and quite adequate for a school building. Butit's probably going to last for only about 10 or 15 years.It's a pre-fabricated type structure. It will either wearout or it can be taken down in 15 or 20 years But themining company put it up for the local hoard of trustees.So we see the involvement of the business communitytrying to deal with these infrastructure problems.

Second: Telecommunications. This issue is oftremendous concern, not only for its cost-saving as-pects, but for what it has to do with equity. We aregenerally of the viewand I think it can be substanti-ated empiricallythat the quality of our rural schools isnot adequate. Not adequate to allow the ".raduates to becompetitive in university settings, in other post-secon-dary areas or in workplace settings. We've been falling

far short. That is a very serious problem. Telecomnuiri-cations has the potential for at least addressing thisaspect of educational equity in rural communities. Wehave, as was mentioned earlier, been working with FarWest Laboratory. The State Board of Education has putinto placesome new graduation requirements just withinthe last couple of years. One of them was in arts andhumanities. We knew that our rural schools were goingto have some trouble with that, so we've been workingwith the Lab to develop new training and materials, andalso to begin looking at the telecommunications capac-ity to help in that.

Let one tell you what happened with one smallhigh school of 22 students, 7th-12th grades. The localschool district tried to close it down a few years ago. Itwas an old school that had been there for many yearsand the communitya very strong Mormon commu-nitydid not want it closed down. The local board andsuperintendent did want to close it down and transportthe kids 40 miles to the larger high school. There was abattle. The legislature said, "We can solve this problemwith telecommunications." And actually they did. Theyput some money into it.

On Monday morning before the Nevada legis-lature there are going to be four bills introduced thatif passedwill create a statewide telecommunicationsnetwork that will establish some pilot projects. It's ahybrid system utilizing microwave, satellite communi-cations and fiber-optics, and we've got the public utili-ties involved. If we can get these bills passedand wethink that we canwe will make a dramatic statementon the need for telecommunications for our schools aswell as for county, local and state governments.

We are also deeply involved with public televi-sion. How can we have our public TV stationslocatedprimarily in our two urban areasreach out to our 15rural areas?

Third: Rural school financing remains an on-going problem. Our keynote speaker this morning talkedauout some of the mythology around providing serv-ices in rural communities. The myth is that it's lessexpensive It clearly is not, as he pointed out. What is ourability to provide the support service, infrastructure, orstaffing services? It is now very difficult for us to attractthe best of our teaching force out into our rural commu-nities and maintain them I am convinced we're ph% tohave to pay them substantially more moneythe teach-ers, support sta ff, guidance counselors, ,chool nurses,school psychologists We cannot get school psycholo-gists into our rural communities. It's very difficult. Yet

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there's a tremendous need.The Nevada system for financing schools al-

ready does address the differential cost of doing busi-ness in rural communities. But it is insufficient We aregoing to have to revisit this, and its not going to be doneby this legislature. They meet only every two years. Atany rate, we are going to have to revisit school financingand make a much more dramatic statement regardingthe differential cost of doing business in our rural corn-muniLles. I think there is real interest in doing that. AndI think we will have the support of the legislature andour rural communities.

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JAMES MOSS

State Superintendent, Utah .

Part of the challenge of batting clean-up is to seewhat's left. Let me share some things with youmoreby way of confirmation than informationperhaps witha few additional perspectives as well. We're delighted tobe here in Arizona. Ray Kellis, who is a fellow Mormon,keeps reminding me that Brigham Young was sickwhen he led the Mormon pioneers into Utah. He did notsay, "This is the place." What he actually saidbut wasnot heardwas, "This is a disgrace. Drive on." So we'deventually get to Arizona one way or another. We areglad to be here.

The challenge we face in Utah, particularly inrural Utah, is very similar to that which you face in otherstates. We began our er" acational program at least forthe transplants to Utah with the indigenous popluation.A 17-year-old girl named Mary Jane Dillworth gathereda group of Mormon pioneerchildren in a covered wagonin August of 1847 to begin the educational program. Shehad a large class with few resources. Utah education hasnot changed much since then. We continue to haveinteresting demographics.

You may be aware of the fact that in the last tenyears Utah's student-age population increased by 45percent. The national average showed a decline of ninepercent. I think Arizona had about a 13 percent increase.Massachussetts had about a 25 percent decrease interms of its student-age population. We're dealing inthese Western states with some very large increases inpopulation, and Utah ham led the way in that for sometime.

Our dependency ratio is the highest in the na-tion. We have the highest percentage of our populationaged 0-17 of any state in the nation. IN have the lowestpercentage of age 18-64 of any state ii, the nation. Thatposes some real problems for us. Of course rural educa-tion has felt the impact. As Ron Knutson indicates, theproblem you have in rural education is that you do havethat gapwith the large families who are continuingand then the old-age population, but few people inbetween.

The other challenging point is that we are not arich state. When the U.S. Department of Commercemeasured the wealth production in states by the 26 most

commonly utilized taxes, Utah ranked 47th or 48th inthe nation in our capacity to raise money. So stateresources are not great, but we continue to have a largeinflux of students. Asa result of that, our class sizes havebeen among the largest in the nation. We now vie withCalifornia due to that state's Proposition 13 that broughtsome of the challenging problems Dave Gordon men-tioned. We have the lowest expenditures per pupil ofany state in the nationor nearly the lowestand ouradministrative costs are the lowest. So we are movingtowards year-round education for purely economicreasons. We have a higher percentage of children inyear-round education than any otherstate. School build-ing in Utah has ground to a halt. We have only twobuildings under construction in the entire state rightnow. So we are facing some interesting demographics,and we're responding to them in very positive ways. Wehave a number of district superintendents from ruralareas who are providing some very dynamic leadershipin facing those challenging juxtapositions in demo-graphics and funding.

Four Main Challenges

There are four main challenges that I believe we willface in education in the next 15 years. First, to increaseeducational productivity. That's going to be very diffi-cult for us to do because we already have the most costefficient educational system in the country. We franklyare able to do some exciting things with very littlemoney, and I believe that's due to the quality of theeducation force in the state, and to very dedicatedparents.

A second challenge is to maintain and improvethe quality of our educational system. We were hear-ing increasing calls for reform from outside the system,beginning with the Nation at Risk report. The demandshave not let up. State governments are now getting intothe act in a very aggressive way through the NationalGovernor's Association. And the business communityin America is recognizing that America is no longercompetitive in the world. The reason it is no longercompetitive in large part is because we are not as pro-

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d lichee as we once were And lower productivityasbusiness people perceive ittraces to the lack of qualityin education.

My perception is that it's not a lack ol qualitybut rather the lack of the dynamic partnership whichformerly had characterized the business-education re-lationship in this country th,,t we must renew. Andthere are some exciting things happening which I'llmention briefly in just a minute in that regard.

A third major challenge for all of us is going tohe increased accountability. That's coming in partbecause of increased scrutiny from the business com-munity, and a shift from inp it orientations to outcomeorienta tions as we negin focusing less and lessappro-priately, I believe -tn what we're putting into educa-tion, and more and more on what are we getting out ofeducation. Dave Gordon alluded to the program whichthey have now coming out in California. I'll mentionbriefly our assessment programs in Utah as well.

And the fourth is greater flexibility. Futuristshave spoken for the last several years about the shiftfrom hierarchical structures to more networking struc-tures. We're beginning to see that shift moving aggres-sively into the educational agenda. Examples are site-based management, the agendas of both the NEA andthe AFT in terms of teacher empowerment, and the shiftof authority and responsibility down to more locallevels. It's going to affect all of us.

Utah's .ziajor Changes

Now within the broad framework of those fourimportant challenges, let me just briefly summarizesome of the major changes that are happening ;n Utah:that will affect rural education The first has been theimpact of technology. We have with us Dr. KoleneGranger who'll he speaking 'ater, and one of the firstthings she did when she became an Associate Superin-tendent at our State Office was to chair a new masterplan for educational technology. That has begun toguide our efforts as we looked in four major areas to tryand strengthen our technology roles.

The first has been with computer-assisted in-struction in the classroom. The second has been thedevelopment of instructional managementutilizingtechnology. The third has been the adoption of an inte-grated distributed data processing system in which wecan access information from the districts, process it, and

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then turn around and provide it back to them in a c'anetvof student learning areas, financial areas, grading, and avariety of other things. And the fourth exciting a r.a is,of course, distance learning. An:', you'll be hearingmuch more about that

We're happy that Dc ln Bradshaw, who for-mally was with us in theStateOffice in Utah, is now withFar West Laboratory. All of us are benefitting from thework the Lab is doing in distance learning programs.We see distance learning as the major salvation for ruraleducation. A generalist teacher who may have very fewstudents has to meet a set of state-mandated graduationrequirements and use a core curriculum. That's a diffi-cult challenge. But you can turn a generalist into aspecialist w you utilize appropriate technology. 'Youcan also provide for classes which you simply don'thave in the curriculum because of limited faculty slots insome rural schools. So technology will have a majorimpact.

The second area that I think is coming at usvery quickly and will affect rural education is educa-tional choice. It's interesting to see the shift from theReagan administration tc the Bush administration intaking out the most controverstal aspect of choice edu-cationpublic/privatec%oice. But within the context ofSecretary Cavazos's continued efforts to push choice, Ithink we're going to need to be aware that it will impactus. We have in Utah already probably one of the mostextensive developments of choice in public highereducation. We're very proud of the fact that Utah ranksfirst in the nation in our participation in the advancedplacement programs, and still has a better-than-averagepass rate. We're moving aggressively in concurrentenrollment, but we have yet to move into a significantinterdistrict shift on the basis of choice other than toaccommodate growth.

We do have extensive numbers of Utah stu-dents who have made inttadistrict choices. But to havea public pol icy of choice is an agenda that I think is on theminds of several people in our state, and that willpotentially have an impact on rural education. Theconcept ot magnet c hook of course, is also one thatwe'll be looking at. We're in the process of looking atsome pilots, but we have no full-blown magnet schoolsvet.

We do have some other things that are interest-ing. We have a block grant program tor'fundi ng that thegovernor and the State Board ot Education have sup-ported John Bennion who is here from the Salt LakeCity School District, will be speaking to you later Salt

2b

Lake City is one of the districts utilizing a block g- ntfunding approach that will allow for much greater localcontrol and local flexibility. It will be exciting to see howmuch of that translates into educational choice and site-based management, resulting in the empowerment ofteacht?rs and principals at a local level.

A third major change that's taking place has todo with the content of our educational system. Wehave developed in the last five years a major reform inUtah's core curriculum that is now being implementedthroughout the state. We've increased our graduationrequirements, and we have made a major shift towardboth vocational education and a focus now on charactereducation. These changes obviously are difficult toinipler lent and even more difficult in rural settingswhen you have fewer teachers and fewer administra-tors dealing with those important areas.

A fourth major focus for us is the teachingprofession itself. And I think it's no supnse to any oneof us that one ')f the majoragendas we'reall going to faceis who really controls the education profession in thiscountry. That is going- to be a very important policydecision that we're going to need to address in the nextfew years with our teachers, groups of teachers, com-mittees of teachers as empowered individuals, the Toledoplan, or the NEA agendawhichever you'd likeas-suming greater responsibility. Principals, district super-intendents, state boards and state superintendents willhave less control. What's coming at us is the question ofwhether we'll have a shared system of goy._ rnance or abattle between vai ious parts of the education family Weneed to be aware of that. It will affect how we relate toeach other in rural education.

We have a course of major development in allfour states dealing with career ladders and differenti-ated staffing, and use of volunteers. You'll be hearingmore al: .nit those later in the conference.

A fifth major change that we're making in-volves funding issues. We've already heard severalmentions of the challenge of rural and urban equity. Theresults you get depend upon how you define that. If youtalk about population equity, then obviously you getone answer. If you get talk about program equity, youget a very different answer. We've just commissioned inUtah a major school finance study that, after 18 years,has the potential to significantly revise our school fund-ing formula. One of those issues that we're going to haveto confront is how we can be sure that we provideequitable funding for rural schools.

The sixth major focus concerns how we dealwith students. We have been excited at what's beenhappening in California, Arizona and Nevada in at-riskyouth programs. We are doing the same in Utah. Thebusiness community is driving this very aggressivelybecause they want to ensure that all students come outof the educational system with marketable skills. As wehave addressed at-risk youth with the Council of ChiefState School Officers and other major national groups,we have found the focus increasingly moving towardearly childhood ducation.

Interestingly, some states have very conserva-tive attitudes toward early childhood education. I don'tknow that California shares that as much. But we cer-tainly have that in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, andthe Rocky Mountain statesa very conservative atti-tude in dealing with early childhood education. Thatwill be the case in our rural areas perhaps more than theurban areas. But early childhood education is an agendathat we have to confront, as the research ye clearlyindicates. We need better preven tion programs and lessemphasis on remediation later. It's more cost efficientand more successful to deal with it earlier. So we'll seean increase in early childhood programming.

The learning process itself is being changedrather dramatically in Utah with Outcome -Based Edu-cation in many of our rural districts. We have a majorassessment program to respond to the call for accounta-bility with district report cards, norm-referenced testingcontinuing in each of our districts, a criterion-refer-enced testing program that is tied to our cox curricu-lum, and of course some basic statewide skills testingthat we have about every three years.

The last thing that I'd like to mention is amajor agendathe growing need or the business-education lartnerships in this country. The Californiacompact tI at Bill Honig and others wor!sed very aggres-sively to develop about a year ago with the CaliforniaRoundtable and Business Alliance has been duplicatedin some ways in Utah. The governor just announced amonth agi major effort on the part of the state Boardof Regermo the Board of Education for filo Utahpartnership for education and economic dev-1 ,mentthat will bring business closer together %,ith educationto stimulate economic development and strengtheneducation.

The problem for rural education in Utah is thatthe ma, _ ..orporations are all pretty much located in theurban centers. As we look towards those business-

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education partnerships, the challenge will be to ensurethat they reach out to affect rural education as well asurban education

Rural America is changing dramatically and Ithink we have to recognize that. When I lived in LongBeach in California, I remember going once to El DoradoPark and seeing this beautiful playground and a littlespace designated off to the side. It looked just exactlylike my backyard in Utah as I was growing up and Ilooked over and it said, "Wilderness Area." I th', ught tomyself, what's one man's backyard in Utah is somebodyelse's wilderness area in Long Beach, California. Thingsare changing, and we have to recognize that what wasrural America ten years ago is not rural America todal .

Finally it is critical for us to recognize that in thenext two years we're going to have a census. We'regoing to have redistricting once again in this country,and there have been some fairly dynamic shifts. I'malready seeing pc-eying for the realignment of congres-sional districts. We are in danger of having a major lossof political power in rural America in the next threeyears. My feeling would he that it's essential for ruralleadership to band together and maintain its influenceduring that time of political change.

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RURAL SCHOOLS AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT: POLICY IMPLICATIONS.

Ron Knutson is a professor and CA tension economist rn agricult uremid r und development policy at Texas A&M University.

He has served as chief economist in the Agr 'cultural Marketing Service of the USDA and vi lordership positions on several

national commissions. Ht' ha: authored over 300 publicatrons and is especially known for Ins college textbook and numerous

art u It's on family fin in survival ant' the impact of gout'? nment programs. fhs most recent work mvolves the development of several

policy options for 7dilrcssing rural community and de, elopment issues.

What are we doing to improve our rural policyand its impact on rural schools? It's my viewand youwill see why, as I go through the results of our work overthe past two yearsthat rural schools are a tremen-dously important key to changing our national policywith respect to rural America. And what we need tochange isn't just our rural policy. We need to change thewhole picture of how we do things and how schoolsrelate to rural communities. I hope today to give you afeel for our views on that issueand when I say "our"views, I'm talking basically about the results of fourworkshops that were held about a year ago in Syracuse,Birmingham, Minneapolis and Reno, and in which over700 individuals participated.

I've titled this talk Comprehensive Rural Develop-ment PolicyThe Rural Education Component. And therural education component is in fact probably the mostimportant component of rural policy. I want to talksome about what rural development is. T1 en I want tolook at some of the demographics at the status of ruralpolicy and the effects that I see on rural schools. I alsowant to look at the concept of a comprehensive ruraldevelopment policy that came out of our workshopsand the role of rural schools in that policy And then I'mgoing to back off a little bit, realizing that if we're goingto do somet1 ing about federal policy, we're going tohave to influence the actorsthe people who makepolicy. So I'm going to talk briefly about the change inactors that's taking place in Washington now. And thenI'll end up with some brief comments on the prospectsfor rural development policy as 1 sec them

What Is Rural Development?

it development is a relatively simple con-cept It ins the largely public but also private efforts

to influence economic growth and the level of living inrural areas. It means policy initiatives at any levellocal, regional, state or national. Most of our rural edu-cation policies area t the local and state levels; only aboutsix percent of our rural education funds come from thefederal government. The big role that I see for the federallevel is leadership I don't think we're going to get awhole lot of extra federal money. But the previousadministration had a very negative attitude towardrural schoolsmaybe toward all schools. We hope nowto see that attitude changing. And we hope that theattitude toward rural development is changing as well.

Let's look a little bit at the demographics. Thesituation in rural America is not good. More important,it's not improving. EN en though the rest of the economyis looking a lot better, the rural economy is not. I see thiss a product of many years wherein we've negiected

rum! education and rural health. Rural unemploymentis a third higher than urban Historically, urban unem-ployment was always higher, but that changed in the1080s. And now I think we're going to have a verydifficult time turning it hack.

Rural income is a fourth lower than urban.Rural poverty is a third higher You poTle here arecertainly aware of the poverty problems that we have onthe Indian reservations Yet I would guess that most ofthe people in this audience think that the incidence ofpoverty is highest in inner cities. It's not. It's highest inrural areas. We have a higher dropout rate in ruralschools. As as a result, we have a lower level of educa-tion completion in rural schools. And one of the mostvexing things about the problem is that demographi-cally, we have a bimodal distribution of the population.We have a lot of old people and a lot of young people.

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What does that do to rural schools' Look whathappens when you put up a school bond issue in thatkind of environment. The preferences of the old peoplewho vote are different from those of parents who rillvote for higher appropriations for schools. The olderpopulation will tend to vote more for security andhealth programs and vote down the school bond s We'vebegun to realize that when the general economy im-proves, the rural economy doesn't. It's a very, verydifficult problem. And there's going to have to he achange in national policy to solve it.

We can divide the problem into three pal ts. Oneis a human capacity componenthealth and education.A second is an infrastructure componentroads,bridges, water treatment systems, school buildings,telecommunications systems. And third, there is a fi-nancing or taxation componenthow do you get themoney to do these things? How do we finance it at thelocal, state, federal levels?

At our four workshops we spent a tremendousamount of time in roundtable discussion, trying to getpeople to prioritize the issues facing rural America. Wesent out a survey in advance, and the most importantissue identified in that survey was income and employ-ment. But at the workshop, the most important issueturned out to be education. Nut agriculture, not publiclands, not water quality, not jobsbut education. If youlook at it regionally, education turned out to he the mostimportant issue in the Northeast and in the South. In theWest it was the second most important issue. So educa-tion ranked high in all areas. And if you add it up itranked highest as a rural problem.

To me, that is a very important finding becausethere are a lot of leaders in rural America who don'tappreciate the fact that we've got problems in ruralschools. Aboi i t six months ago 1 spoke at an agriculturalroundtable ling in Chicago tlyt included the chiefexecutives of the largest agribusiness firm in the coun-tryJ, 'in Deere, Monsanto, Nabisco, General Foods,and so forth. There were two former Secretaries ofAgriculture in the audience. I made my point about theproblems of rural schools. And one of the agriculturesecretarieswho shall go unnamedsaid he doesn'tbelieve it. He said, "Look at me. I was ed uca ted in a ruralschool, and I rose to he Secretary of Agriculture " I wastempted to say, "Exactly, that's part of the problem "

But the point is that we have a lot of leaders outthere thinking that because they were successful, ruralschools must he of good quality And that's somethingwe have to overcome, because leaders ha :e a lot of

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intly,mce on policy outcome and on the amount oft:cntion given to the problems

The Status of Rural Policy

Whether you like it or not, rural policy is estab-lished by agriculture committees not by the educationcommittees or health committees. There's a myth in theagriculture committees that the best rural policy is astrong farm policy. But I hope that the record of the pasteight yearswhere we spent an average of $20 billion ayear on farm programs, yet the rural areas continue togo downdemonstrates to these people that this ideais, pure and simple, a myth. It's the first thing we've gotto overcome.

Secondly, there are very few targeted ruralprograms. Bascially, we have national programs. Whoruns them? Most of the people who are elected orappointed to positions in Washington come from met-ropolitan areas. Most of the people live in metropolitanareas. So when you have a national program, its designtends to be targeted on where most of the people areAnd the problems in rural schools, rural health, andrural water treatment are significantly different fromthose in urban schools. Yet our national programs areoriented toward the urban problems. My view is that wedon't need to spend a whole lot more money on theseprograms. What we need to do is target them to solverural problems. The only money I know of that's specifi-cally targeted toward rural schools is the $6 million thatthe Labs receive. That's $20 billion on rural programsversus $6 million on rural schoolsnobody even no-tices it except the Labs

There's a myth that it costs less to provide ruralservices than urban We've all heard about the Medi-care/Medicaid is! ,e where some bureaucrat appar-ently did a study and found out that it costs tens toprovide rural mc -twat services than urban Therefore,we set up a structure of aid where we pay less formedical care for the elderly if they're in rural hospitalsthan we would if they're in urban hospitals Now if youdon't consider the imality of the service, then of courseit costs less to provide medical care in rural areas. Youdon't have the specialist:, You don't have the complexequipment. So we set up a system that predestined thefailure of rural hospitals. And you could almost argue.its same for rural schools.

No doubt it costs more to attract good qualityteachers to live in rural areas instead of urban or subur-

ban area Su re you've got some committed people w, howant to teach in rural schools But by and large, youcan't attract the highest quality tea chers. So inherently itcosts more Rural schools only cost less if you don'tconsider the quality factor And do we have any goodstudies that really look at what the comparative costs arebetween rural and urban schools if we were indeed toprovide equal quality in education? Tha t's research thatwe badly need. For the same quality, what does it cost?Who benefits? Why is it that we don't invest as much inrural schools?

A mayor got up at one of our planning sessionsand said, "1 don't really think we want to invest anymore money in rural education because the people thatwe train will simply move away, and then they won't beavailable for our local factories." That mentality is un-fortunate. It fa.ls to recognize that future lobs will re-quire higher skills and thus higher levels of education.It's true that if you train people well, they may moveoutmaybe even out of the state. But this doesn't meandon't educate them. It means that while we once consid-ered education to be a local responsibility for localfunding, and now we look on it as a local/state respon-sibility, we could also say it is a local/state/federalresponsibility. And we're not spending nearly enoughmoney at the federal level on education

That's not going to be a very well receivedmessage in Washington, considering the big budgetproblem. But the bottom line is that basically we have norural policy.

What all this means for rural schools is, first ofall, the rural demographics create th, needyou've gota large proportion of young people, but it detracts fromthe political support because you've also got a largeproportion of old people. Secondly, selective outmigra-tion makes funding for education increasingly difficult.If the best people continuously move out, you havemore and more problems in the long run.

Need for a Comprehensive Rural Policy

We need to divide the problem into its threeparts One is social infrastructurecapacity buildingSecond is physical infrastructure. And third is businessdevelopment And what we're talking about here isneeded redirection of programs. Sure we need moremoney, but we probably aren't going to get it. So howare we going to redirect our programs?

For social infrastructure, we need first of all toeliminate the rural health inequities You have a igher

proporation of old people, so you're going to havegreater health needs And yet we'' e got hospitals goingbelly-up

Secondly, we've got to eliminate the inequitiesin school financing. And it's my view that while thepressure is now on the states to do that, through courtdecisions and the like, I think an argument can effec-tively be made that over time the pressure is ng tomove toward the federal level, particularly for financ-ing rural schools.

Third, the problem of illiteracy. I'm interestedin this one because it was a big election campaign issue,but I've heard absolutely nothing since the electionabout any initiative with respect to illiteracy.

Fourth, in several of the regions, the problemwas identified as a lack of leadership. And it wasidentified not in the sense that we don't have politicalleaders. We do. But we don't have knowledgeable po-litical leaders. Now whether it's true that you can't trainleaders, I don't know. I hope we can, at least over thelong run. But there's no doubt that selective outmigra-tion has taken its toll in terms of rural informed leader-ship.

As for physical infrastructure, certain thingsmay not seem to have much education meaning, butactually they have a whole lot. You can't employ aneffective distance learning system in rural schools, forexample, unless you have a modern telecommunica-tions system And so one of the things we're going tohave to do is support initiatives in the telecommunica-tions area. And we need rural health delivery systemsemergency medical services in all rural areas. For someof Ciese things you don't really need to have big federalInvestments. If you can provide the private incentivesin, say, telecommunications, you can acct mplish a lot.

And then there are needs in buness develop-ment: Technical assistance, management training andbusiness services. We have very few business schoolsthat teach rural or e'en small business management. Atthe University of Texas, their concept of a ,,mall businessis compact computers. MY concept of a small business isa hardware store out in Muleshoe, Texas that has tocompete against a Wallmart, which is a big business.There's nothing that will kill a rural retail structurefaster than the arrival of a Wallmart store. Yet manyrural communities will compete for a Wallmart store.Y,m can't live without them, but you can't live withthem.

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The Role of Rural Schools in a ComprehensivePolicy

What is the role of rural schools in a comprehen-sive rural policy? Well first of all, good schools make acommunity an attractive place to live. What's the firstthing a business looks at when it thinks about whetherit can get people to live in an area? It's the quality of theschools and the doctors.

Secondly, an educated labor force is a flexiblelabor force. So it's obvious that if the quality of ruraleducation declines, we're going to need more job train-ing. Keep the quality of education high and you won'tneed as much job training because the people will beflexible. One thing we must do is create an environmentthat discourages selective outmigration Can you createrural communities that people want to go back to? Sothat after they go to a good university like Texas A&M,they say, "I want to go back and work in Muleshoe"not in Houston or Dallas or Austin?

And third, the ability to deal with the short-runproblems as well as the long-run issue. The long-runissue is rural education. But we've got a whole bunch ofshort-run problems like illiteracy and job training.

Future Prospects

I think we're beginning to get a recognition ofrural problems. And I even think there are a few peoplenow whoare beginning to recognize that rural problemsand the farm problem are not synonymous. Not many.But a few.

Budget constraints are going to limit large scaleinitiatives. We might be able to do some targeting andcreate some private incentives. But we aren't going tospend huge amounts of mone' ,r the forseeable future.That's one of the reasons why it's so agonizing to attackthe rural health problem. Equity requires $6 billionWhere are you going to get it from? Rural telecommuni-cations have about the same price tagthat's why youlook to private incentives.

There is increasing recognition of the need forcap:-..:ity building. When we got into this project, all ofthe talk was on infrastructure. Now we're hearing moreand more about building human capacity. That means alot of potential for targeting programs for rural schools.

The final point is that it's going to require anomnibus approach. Traditionally, rural developmentinitiatives come from the agriculture committeesthe

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House and the Senate There is an initiative occurring onthe Senate side to have an approach that cuts across anumber of commtheeareas, including education, health,and small business To the extent that you have contactwith legislators, you ought to know something aboutthis.

I have here a list of senators who have signedonto the omnibus approach. A few of them are membersof both the agriculture committee and also the educa-tion committee. There's Harkin from Iowa., Durenbergerfrom Minnesota, and Cochran from Mississippi. That'sa useful piece of information.

When you turn to the House side, you find thatthey don't have an omnibus approach going yet. So youlook to the agriculture committee. Its chair man is de laGarza from Texas. English from Oklahoma is chairmanof the subcommittee on rural development. On thatcommittee are Jon tz from Indiana and Grady from Iowawho are also associated with the education committees.

The attitude in Washington toward rural schoolsappears to have improved. Under the previous ad mini-stra tion, when I contacted the Department of Educationand told them what we were up to, the response was, "Isthere any way we can put a stop to this?" It was a verynegative attitude. They contended that rural educationis not a part of rural development and has no place inrural development. They did not want to see a ruraleducation initiative. I thank the Labs' experience infighting for its appropriations in rural developmentreflects that kind of attitude.

But now the president appointed a taskforce on rural development. So I am excited about thepossibilities For the first time in a long time I think we'regetting a correct tocu:, on the rural development issuea human capacity focus We're not thinking about roadsand bridges and sewer systems, and so forth. We'rethinking about how do we help people.

Much work remains to beaccomplished. All wecan do at the universities is focus attention. We can't getinto the tenches politically Somebody is going to haveto pick up the ball. Since rural education ends up so highon this agenda, as I see it, it's going to have to come frompeople like youfrom our school boards, teachers,superintendents, principals. If you want to deal with theproblem, it's high on the agenda of needs. The questionis, do you put it high enough on your priority list to getpolitically involved?

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RESTRUCTURING: PROSPECTS AND PROBLEMS IN RURAL SCHOOLS

F. Michael Kirst iti a professoi oft ducation and Business Administration al Stanford Llnizyr,:itv and co-du ectoi of PACE, a

highly respected reseaich ,croup thi.; °intuits educational policy analysis for the state of Calif(); ma lie is a past vice pi esident

of AERA and a menthe; of the stet', im committee for the Education Commission of the States. His recent publications include

"Schools in Conflict. Political Turbulence in Arne, it-an Education" and "Who Controls Ohio Schools. Amerom m

Conflict

I'm going to talk about three things with youtoday. The first is the current political and social sceneand the political dynamics of education policy. Thesecond is where 1,ve've come from in the so-called firstwave of educational reform. And the third is wherewe're attempting to go with reform. And I have someskepticism about whether there will be a second wa ve ofreform or whether we're stuck on a flat beach with notmany waves rolling.

The Current Political and Social Debate

It's been five years, almost six, since the NationAl Risk report If you look at the pol fica I situation facingeducation, you see that even though we've done a lot ofthings since then, there's still a steady drumbeat ofcriticism about the quality of American education.Hardly a month goes by without some report comingout claiming that the American populationparticu-larly its childrenis illiterate.

Last fall, the National Geogr,i ph ic Societyopened up with a survey of what kids know aboutgeography and proclaimed that they've found the lostgeneration. These kids don't know where they are Theycannot locate Chicago or Miami on a map or name acountry that borders the Pao fic Ocea n. They're hopelessin the Middle East. That was followed up by reportsproclaiming them mathematically and scientifically il-literate, particularly compared with other cow Aries. Ithink we topped Thailand and Botswana on some tests,and occasionally we beat Ontario, Canada. The mostrecent survey proclaimed that we were economicallyilliterate That is very much in the news.

So the general view is that vhatex er has hap-pened in education 110,-, fallen tar short ot the mark And

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indeed the criticism continues it a very intense pace inthe media. The issue of education continues to defy thepolitical cycle theorythat the American public getsbored with a- issue a fter three years. Education contin-ues to be featured in headline stories. Compoundingthis the labor shortage some areas we have verylow unemployment. We're bginning to draw from adecreasing labor pool of qualified people. And that isreally getting businesses quite upset, so they too aree-calating their critical rhetoric. The future labor forcelooks like it will consist of groups not historically strongin educational achievement. And growth and changingdemography are exacerbating that picture.

All of this is taking place in a period wheneducation continues to be good politics rhetorically. Butwe're not seeing the kinds of funding increases that wesax. in the first three to four years a fter the Nation At Riskreport. Studies have found that education expendituresna tiona II% from 1983-87 increased 17 percent faster thaninflation. That was the bull market. You've seen the best,I would guess, for a while Now expenditures are begin-ning to scale down. And a lot of the state governmentsare in difficult tiscal condition Every sta le a t this confer-ence, except Nevada, is facing a slow-growth revenuepicture.

So we enter a dangerous period. Expectationsfor educational achievement and public discontent arerising rhere's a call for even more drastic reformsafeeling that what e've done is merely tidd ie around theedges My concern is that if education looks resistant to"bold new ideas" like restructuring, then once againeducational leadership will take a pasting in the pressand slitter turther loss of public confidence

A lot of studies tend to show that educationalleai.ership is out of step with the general public Fort. \ample, in national polls somewhere around 70 per-

Piige 23

cent of the genera! public favors more choice in educa-tion. However, la a poll taken two months ago only onethird of school boad members want parents to select theschools that their children attend. So we have the pub-lic's discontent and call for reform, the slowing down ofexpenditures at least in terms of state aid increases andpossibly too of the local property tax, and a sense of anew Bill Bennett type scenario: "Somebody hijackededucational reform," as he put it, and it was those hadold educators againteach srs, superintendents andschool board members.

I think were entering a period where standstillpolicies are not good enough. And this conference isvery well timed to address that.

Where We've Come From in the First Wave ofReform

I would call the first wave of educational re-form, in strategic terms, intensification. You take theexisting model of education and you say that it's allrightwe just need to intensify it. Don't change itdrastically, just do more of it. When I asked one rurallegislator in California what he wanted out of our re-forms there, he said, "I just want to make the littlebuggers work harder

Well, there is evidence that he has gotten hiswish. As far as we can tell, homework is up somewhat.High school graduation standards have changed. Kidsare now taking about a course and a half more of mathand science, and about a course less of vocational edu-cation. Some of the middle track students who are goingon to college are facing much more difficult collegeentrance requirements. We've tended to centralize thecurriculum at the state and district level in order toupgrade it into the higher order skills.

We're doing just a whale of a lot more testingI'm not sure what we do with all this data. I've beentrying to find out what they do with it all herein Arizonawhere they're testing like mad. The legislature feelsgood about that, I guess. We are working on betterindicator programs. And generally speaking, we haveupgraded the system in terms of its requirements. We'vealso spent more money. And we've increased teachersalaries across the country and in most of these westernstates faster than the inflation rate. Teachers in Califor-nia now have the purchasing power they had in 1972When you look at teachers' salaries they sort of lostground relative to inflation and other similar profes-

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sions. Then from 1972 on, they've come beck and madeup that ground.

We hak e accomplished, then, what I would callincremental intensification of the existing model ofeducation. But I have ,i1 ways contended that if we wereto do a report card on education reform after 1983,instead of using Ted Sizer's views or Ernie Boyer's or BillBennett's, we probably ought to look at the list in ANation At Risk. If you look at that list, there's beenmovement on all of it--except anything that called forsignificant change in the structure of schooling.

Look at year-round schools, for instance. Theyhave not caught on appreciably other than in places likeCalifornia and Utah where year-round schooling wasabsolutely forced down their throats by rapid growth.But nistorically, as soon as growth tails off, year-roundschools go away There's certainly no national move-ment towards year-round schools, though this was oneof the things called for in A Nation At Risk.

The other thing we haven't acted on in a mas-sive way is the so-called career ladder issue. Utah andArizona both have programs, but nationally, careerladders have 1,ot taken root. What we're seeing in Ari-zona is typicala pilot program with a lot of uncer-tainty above whether it's going to spread.

Changes That Last and Changes That Don't

Now let's look ahead and talk about where wemight goarid what the implications are for ruralschools. Before I do thatand as we sort out all of thesegrand things that the state superintendents said todaythat they are working onI think we need to take a lookat the history of educational reform and do a sort ofbarnyard analysis.

Which types of reform tend to leave a lastingdeposit? And which types of reform tend to go into a

Bermuda Triangle, only to come back out again? Thefeeling I had when I heard all these talks about telecom-munication was what that eminent philosopher YogiBerra called "dcia vu all over again" When I came intothis business they told me that the hottest thing in ruralareas was a balloon over the mid west that was going topipe educational television down. And I heard an emi-nent group of state superintendents from the midwestsay that this wa s going to cha nge rural education. Darnedif I can find it out there now.

So let's step back and look at all this. DavidTyack and I studied 75 years of educational reforms. We

made a list in two columnson the right side, reformsthat lasted; on the lett side, reforms that come in and out.Differentiated staffing, for instance, came back as careerladders. Mci It pay is one that will always go round andround.

On the list of things that have lasted is every-thing from the Carnegie unitwhich some of us wouldlike to get rid ofto vocational education, teacher aids,education of the handicapped, and school consolida-tion. Those things, I think, are there and in place.

But there is a long list of things that don't last.Among those have been anything that has attempted tochange the basic pedagogy in the classroom. As far as 1can tell, the last major change in pedagogy we had waswhen we unbolted the desks from the 11.,.;or. And thatwas probably in the 1930s. All of the reforms made tointroduce technology Into the classroomrad io, broad-cast television, and more recently even microcompu-tershave failed to take root. We in education havebeen very successful in resisting technology. I think theburden is on the technologists to prove that a new era isdawning.

Other things that have not lasted are new math,flexible scheduling, and something school administra-tors will remember called program planning budgetingsystems or ['PBS's.

Things that last tend to have three characteris-tics. First, they tend to be structural or organizationalaccretions. You add something ti. the existing structuresuch as vocational education, school lunch, or guidancecounselors, but you don't d ishirb the base. The way youhandle technology is, you don't change the classroomstructure in any way, but you tack on a lab. You hire atechnician and send the kids down to the lab. The kidslearn how to use the computerusually they learnoutmoded programming languages. The parents arehappy, and the structure goes onbuffered and un-changed.

Second, reforms that last are those that areeasily monitored. In other words, you know whetheryou have them or not. The t was one of the problems withindividualized Instruction systems. You never knewwhat they were doing behind the classroom door.

And thirdbut most importantreforms thatlast have to build a political constituency of some sort inorder to be preserved The constituency turned negati veon new math. The same happened with flexible sched-ulingparents saw kids sitting outside of their school

during their flexible schedules, and that did it. There hasnever been a strong teacher-based con tituency for tech-nology We douse overheads and things of that sort. Butwhere is the bottom-up constituency for the kind ofgrand telecommunications schemes I heard outlinedtoday? Can these happen from the top down, from thestate capitols in Carson City or Phoenix?

The Rural Future: Intensification and Restructuring

With that in mind, let's come back to the criteriafor reforms that last. Let's look at them in the ruralschool political context and talk about them. The firstkind of strategy that we can look forward to would bemore intensification. Again, don't change the basic struc-ture or the basic pedagogy, but do it better.

Make the tests better, for one thing. Arizona istalking about junking its current test which is the IowaTest of Basic Skills and coming ii. with a criterion-referenced test which better matches their curriculum.And we could do a lot more staff development. Califor-nia has some very good curriculum ideas but very littlemoney to provide staff development so that teacherscan use these ideas. And we could do more with the waywe're teaching math and science. Something is funda-mentally wroi ;g there. The science books look like glos-saries or dictionaries. Kids are memorizing terms. Wecould do fairly simple things like have more teacherInd action, as is being done in rural schools in California,or provide some kind of help for the first-year teacher.

So I think there's something to be gained bymore intensification. But since most of the rhetoric callsfor moving on to bolder ways, let's move on to restruc-turing.

Re5t rueturmg is one of those words that meanseverything and nothing. In fact, in an article I use in myclasses on politics, ii Floricl 1 legislator is quoted assaying, "When you don't know what to call something,call It restructuring because it sounds good, and thatwill help you politically."

I'm going to break restructuring down to threetypes. The first type is restructuring yllich primarilyfocuses around either teacher professionalism, teacherparticipation or revamping the structure of the schools.The second type of restructuring would be a choicesystem And the third kind would be schools as the hubof a comprehensive children's services system. Besideseducation, a problem in rural areas is health. This ad-dresses the role of the school in delivering health andearly childhood development services.

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Upgrading the Teaching Profession

Okay, let's go back to the tirst type which isprotessionaliza hull and changing the internal structure.It's well that we think about the rural aspect of this.Because most ot the examplesmaybe 95 percent otthemare trom big city schools. These are largelyAmerican Federation of Teachers' locals, and the RFT isprimarily leveraged into the big cities. The usual sus-pects mentioned are Rochester (New York), Dade County(Florida), Hammond (Indiana), Toledo (Ohio), Santa Fe(New Mexico), and San Diego (California/ I wouldn'tcall any of those places obviously rural.

The whole orientation of restructuring and itspolicy and research discussions have been around bigcity schools. They talk about things that don't havemuch application to most rural areas. For example, theytalk about decentralization so that the individual schoolbecomes th,.2 locus of decision-making. Well, most schoolsin rural a, eas don't have a hugecentral office. They mayonly have one school. I mean, the whole talk of decen-tralizing the Chicago schools doesn't have a lot to dowith Potter Valley, California. So that's a problem

Another thing they talk about is the need tohave smaller schools. A lot of the schools are too big. Weneed to have schools within schools. We need to haveteachers form what they call charter schools whereteachers would take over part of a school and run it morethe way they wantagain, that doesn't apply that muchto rural areas.

However, one thing that does apply to ruralschools is a cha lige in teacher participation in rethinkinglabor relations in education. From the teacher's stand-point, the basic idea behind this is that we've gottenmost of what were going to get out of the traditionalway of nego .:ing more and more into a contract. Ifwe're really going to move ahead on staff development,curnci 'um developmen t, or rethinking the school struc-ture, probably the wrong place to do that is in an annualnegotiation which is then put into great detail in abargaining agreement.

So we're talking abou, more flexible types ofcollective bargaining. In California we call these policytrust agreements. We have ten distncts experimentingwith these. Some of them are small. The idea is that theteachers and the administrators get together and workon things collaboratively. The key word is trust. Theyagree to do something like develop a new staff de% clop-ment program or work out a new English curriculum.

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And they do this in a t ollaborah ve fashion, changing thedynamic ot labor relations They may include it in am morandunmotunderstanding Or they may just agreeverbally on it People have said, where are the policytrust agreements, I want to see them all written up. Butit's a different kind of process.

Now obviously the rural labor relations base ismuch different from Los Angeles, for example. But weneed to think more about how these ideas might fit intoit. It seems fo me that this kind ot thing has obviousapp'ication.; to smaller areas where there is a moreintimate setting.

Another angle of thisand one that would tiein with policy trust agreementsis the increased use ofteachers to evaluate other teachers. In other words, peelevaluation. Peer evaluation of beginning teachers is theeasiest area. Longer run would be peer e% aluation ofexperienced teachers, and peer help for teachers whoare really having problems. Toledo, of course, has a veryactive program wherein other teachers take on the realbasket cases and work with them over a number of yearsrather than haying the administration do it. If teachersalso have more of a role in setting policy for personnelrelations, that would change the way we're currentlydoing business. It would upgrade the profession ofteaching.

Obviously the career ladder idea is anotherrestructuring area And the main problem career lad-ders have run into, as far as I can see, is that we'veconfused the idea of career ladder with merit pay. Thetwo have been merged together in people's minds.While there is a constituency for some aspects of thecareer ladder ideayou get paid more for doing adifferent type of work as you move (if) in the careerstructurethere's also a negative constituency amongteacher unions for merit pay.

In order to look at these protessionalizationchanges, go back to thi reforms that last. Ask yourself.Is there a constituency in your local district for thesekinds of professiona 'WWII reforms? Or ,r-e the teacherorganizations stuck in the we-them collective bargain-ing industrial union model, which is essentially whatwe adopted wholesale in education and brought intothe rural districts as well. It you want to restructure andget your district on the list of restructured hallmarkdistricts, you need leadership to create this kind ofconstituency.

If you do anything like this, there will be thou-sands ot experts descending Upon 'oil to pull yourexperiment up by its roots to see it it's growing People

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are lust mad to go out and find these restructuredschools. It you've got any, let me know I have numerousvisitors who will buy plant' tickets to wherever the hellyou are to come look And that, I think, Ind icates a littlehit about where we are

Changing the School Day and School Year

Now, another part of this is the restructuring ofthe school day and school N. ar. In the high schools,people are asking themselves, "Did Moses hand downthe 50-minute period?" The Carnegie unit has a con-Stitt leVICVIt'n a powerful constituency called the stateuniversities. So to bust up the Carnegie unit, we have totake them on. We're finding that in science, for example,we're teaching some teachers to do better instructionthrough laboratory and hands-on work. But by the timethe kids set up the experiment, the period's over. Thebell rings, and out they shuffle, on to the next class.There's something's wrong with that structure. So we'rerethinking longer and shorter periods.

Sizer is calling foi much more interdisciplinarywork, much more merging of curricula around commu-nications skills, and scientific and technical skillsbreaking down the subject matter areas that we havetraditionally had. Do physics and chemistry have to heseparate courses, or could we blend them together intoa new style of course that might appeal to everybody? Isit forever that we form separate courses for biology,physics and chemistry? Is there some way to weavethese together toes- more general principles? Thenthe question con -e', the constituency? Do thebiology teachers iv,. interdisciplinary? These arenot easy questions. But developing a consituency isgoing to he important.

The other aspect of restructuring that we's eheard so much about is the hea Ye use of technology ofvarious types. My view of the way to get this is thereverse of what we've always done, which is to firstbuild the exotic system and hope people will use it. Thehistory of reform would say you build demand from thebottom upget people saving we really want thisandthen you gradually phase it in and put it on-line

Choice

Why is choice a hot topic now' Every now andthen these reforms come zooming, out of the BenumbTriangle to hit the front page of the newspaper. I wrote

a paper in July 1u88 saving I really saw choice on theback burner, not on the front burner Wow' BY OctoberI was completel wrong, and the president, of course,ran a conference on choice

There are two basic reasons why choice ismoving now politically, One is that its advocates havefinally conceded that in the short-run they cannot getaid to private schools They have stepped back with anew sti ategv: you gradually phase choice in through thepublic schools and then later get to Nirvanaaid to theprivate schools. But you'll notice that the key thingmaking choice acceptable is thai we no longer talkaboutgiving any money to those dreaded entities, the Catholicschools. We only talk about choice within the publicschoolsBush was very clear on that And we don'tmention the word pouchers, or tuition tin credits, Thoseare passe, defeated.

Choice has picked up a whole bunch of allies inthe Democratic Party The sponsor of choice in Minne-sota comes from the Democratic Farmer Labor Partyhardly a right wing organization. It spawned HubertHumphrey, Eugene McCarthy and Walter Mondale. Allof a sudden choice has become hi-partisan because it's inthe public sector only.

The second reason why choice is moving now isbecause it's the easiest way for a politician to have a bigprogram without spending much moneyor any moneyat all. California's superintendent, Bill Honig, has achoice bill. I le says in his bill analysis that there are nocosts. It's great. You get on the front pageno cost. Ata time when your budgets are in trouble, that's tooirresistible for most politicians I low do you do it with-out cost? Well, you don't pay for transportation. Youlust pass a simple state law that says a child can go to anyschool i thin the district or outside the district. Presto!Yon have a statute, you have a program, you have ve frontpage, and you' ve done ery little that costs anything.

But the political outlook is not clear. Minnesotapassed it. And then Arkansas and Iowa immediatelypassed it. Theirs are open enrollment hills. And some ofthe states put in racial or ethnic balance requirementsChoice has been defeated in Arizona and Colorado, atleast for the short-run In other states, it's pending. Idon't think pass in California this year

If it does happen, what effect will choice ha veon the rural area' The impact could be great or small ornot much My guess is, it will be not much, If you onlyhave one school and the next one is 100 miles away,there's not a whole lot of choice. And I don't think our

Pace. 29

friends in the legt 'attires are willing to pay for thetransport. Or the other hand, it there are rural schoolsthat are reasonably close to each other, then it mighthave a significant impact

It you talk with some ot the people 'n Minnesotaand Arkansas--ON er coiktails, not over, -they willsay that the main impact they hope choice will have is toclose down some of the small districts, which theycouldn't do through school consolidation. If you can geteven a marginal number of students to leave some ofthese rural schools to go somewhere elseparticularlyat the high school level where a larger, more robustcu mt. u I urn will be offered you ca n starve these schoolsout. Then you don't have to go through the legislaturesand try to close them down directly. So you want to lookout for that one. It's interesting

My own view is that if all ot these choice billspassed, they would affect probably two to three percentof the total students in t' e U.S. The constituency forchoice is growing. It's a structural change , se consoli-dation. It could be impiemenL'd. And ,.)u definitelyknow whether you have it or notyou know whetherstudents are moving. So it would fit the criteria forreforms that lastif the constituency is built Teacherorganizations and generally the school people a re waryof it. It's being pushed by business groups and parentalgroups in soi.t cases, although not so much the PTA.Where that political balance comes out between thosetwo forces will determine choice.

Schools As the Hub of Comprehensive Children'sServices

The schools can't do it all. The problems facingthe schools in rural America are largely problems con-cerning health, family, child abuse, and early childhoodeducation. A little bit of remedial reading and one anda half more science and math courses are not going tohave a huge impact on the '. We need to rethink whatschools do and consider at la nce of schools with othersocial agencies.

This comes from an analysis ot a worseningconditions. There a re many children with multiple needs.Services are fragmented In my big study on the condi-tior5 of children in California, the child looks like apinball, bounced from agency it) agency. The only agencythat has any data on the impacts on these kids is theschools. The schools arc the only agency held account-able. Social services have case tiles, but they don't know

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where the kids went or what happened. in most casesThere's very little hollow -up. Schools are exemplary inaccountability, but yet we're highly criticized for ourlack of it. So we could do more.

What's the role of he school in a rural area?That's a fairly complex item It's clearer in some urbanareas where you could take a lot of the ca, or coLfityservices, locate them at a school site, and put an admmistrator there to head a sort of comprehensive programof school services. But if the county government ishundreds of miles from the school, how de you link theschool and county services' I think that's a difficultproblem. And wha tare the relationships between schoolpeople and county service providers for children?Usually they're not very close. As one person in Califor-nia said, when you get the social welfare and juvenilejustice services together with the schools, you're talkingabout unnatural acts committed by unconsenting adults.

So we ha ve a lot of work to do. Obviously, earlychildhood programs such as more pre-school and after-school childcait. are important. How to pay for those ..,

another question.

The rural application is made more difficult bydistance. But on the other hand, some of the schtx)1/county people know each other better. One of my favor-ite stories on this is about San Diego's superintendentTom Payzantin my judgment one of the best in thecountry. I le came from Oklahoma City to San Diego,and after five years he still had not met anybody inchildren's services or children's welfare in San Diegoaunty government. Finally, he lost a school-based health

.rmic in a close board vote. The guy from children'shealth services called him up and said, "You know,maybe we ought to meet. I could have helped you withthat if I'd only known who Noll were."

We have to overcome this. I think it's veryimportant to have interaction in rural areas betweenchild abuse services and education services

Needed: Constituencies .:nd Funding

1 don't think we're going to get away fromdemands to do more beyond intensification. One di t li-cults' will be how to build constituencies for all of thesechanges, because we are pretty set in our ways anddange is hard And the other will be how to financethese kirds ot changes to the extent of taking at leastplanning money and tree resources to begin some kinds

4P

of work on either school district restructuring or teacherrestructuringall of this taking place as state aid isslowing down.

So I would urge you as you go forward with thisto think about these ideas in terms of your context.Because the one thing we've learned about all of these

forms is that they're tailored to the particular sta to andlocal context. There is ne way that you can take themfrom one place to another in cookie-cutter fashion. AndI think that's what you're all about at this conference.

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TRANSFORMING THE TEACHING PROFESSION.

David Berliner a in ole,No, of Cunteulum and lust, stetson and the P9ehology of Education at As i:ona State Umpenaty.

He has been a Feller(' at the Cerites for the Adcauced Studies of Bohai -Iola! Sciences a insiting seholai at ME, and president of

AERA (1985-8bI III, recent book,: Include Ins labor of lope, the fourth edition of "Educational Psychology", a widely used

textbook, and "Talks h, Teachers". He has also publNhed m awning recent as tscle%; ba .ed on Ins reseaith on erpert, 'wince rind

postulant teaches s. W'tli Ursula Cm-anova, lie co-authors a monthly article called "Resets cli and ['tact It e- for Instructor

Mi7gaZIlle

The title of my presentation is 'Transformingthe Teaching Profession." What I'm really talking aboutis the role of research in that transformation. You allknow that you go to univ, rsities and learn the world ofresearch. Then you go into the world of practice. Andthen you have to stop and say, "What did they teach methere, what am I doing here, why is there a chasmbetween the two?" There are two communities, andthere is a chasm. But I think that's changing.

In order to understand a little bit c:lout ourprofession, we have to go back in history and try tounderstand the nature of professions in general About120 years ago there %v] three equally di!.reputableprofessionsmedicine, law, and education. Doctorsand hospitals were the people and places associatedwith pain and death. Only a few returned from medicaltreatment healthy, happy, mod convinced that the medicalprofession was distinguishable from the local black-smith or the visiting healer or snake -oil salesman.

The true state of medical ignorance has recentlybeen uncovered Just tal.-e these statisticsduring theCivil War, among the Union troops, penetrating chestwounds incurred a 62 percent mortality rate and ab-dominal woontiq carried in M7 percent de, th rate Bycontrast during World War 0, which is not yet themodern era of medicine, only about three perct nt ofinjured American soldiers failed to survive. In the 80Years between the Civil War and the Second Wo. Id War,incredible ad va nces had taken place Doc tors during theCivil War, 120 years ago, believed that pu was part ofthe natural healing process Thus infected wounds wererampant. Physicians themselves propogated many in-fections by probing wounds with fingers wiped on pus-stained aprons and towels. The importance of cleanhands and sterilised equipment was simply not u kier-

4

stood. Maggots were the most effective infection fight-ers; they infested the wounds and ate only the diseasedtissue, leaving behind the healthy part of the wound toheal.

So the profession we revere today, 120 yearsago was causing itarm, spreading disease Althoughwell-known and often used in Europe, tnermometers,stethoscopes, ophthalmoscopes, hypodermic syringes,and other simple instruments were rarely used byAcnerican practitioners The military physicians contin-ued to g; ye their patients dangerous doses of potentlaxatives and emetics, long alto the substances hadproved absolutely ineffective or harmful. A brave Un-ion surgeon general, William Hammond, banned timeuse of two toxic dr igs because they had severe sideeffect' He n' -,aced profuse salivation and the develop-ment of v. grene of the gums, mouth and face, so hestopped .he drugs. And for that he was court-martialedby the military and condemned by the American Medi-cal Association. His crime was using his eves to figureout that this stuff doesn't work

The Union Army was so discouraged by themedical profession of its time that it did what mostgoverning boards do when they are unhappyit in-vented a test. The exam revealed to the Union Armygenerals that "the typical physician expressed vagu.and confused ideas in barbarous English that %vas indefiance of all rules of grammar." The standard courseof instruction was looked into. What was it like forphysicians then? It consisted of two four-month terms oflecture s during the winter season, with the second to iiiidentical to the first. That is, they didn't 1 now what todo, but they figured four months wasn't enough so theyrepeated it.

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So ignorant of contemporary developments inscience was a Harvard professor of pathology and anat-omy in 1871 that he confessed his inability to use amicroscope. At no school was there any gradation ofstudies or sequencing of subjects. There was simply nological order. Instruction was didactic. Rote learningwas emphasized. Students endured between six andeight hours of lectures daily, supplemented by textbookreadings. There were few if any written examinations.To receive a medical degree, students merely needed topass a brief set of casual, perfunctory oral questions. Theage of 21 tended to be an official requirement for gradu-ation, but not too much attention was actually paid tothis.

State licensing did not exist. A graduate with adegree from any kind of institution could practice any-where in the country. The ability to pay the fee was thesingle entrance requirement for many medical schoolsand some would say it still is. Literacy was definitely notneeded. Indeed, when Charles Eliot, the eminent Har-vard professor, took over the presidency, he attacked itsmedical school. He proposed written examinations forgraduationand he was vigorously opposed by Har-,ard's professor of surgery who argued that more thanhalf of Harvard's medical students could barely write.

In fact medical schools were so disreputable,and the profession so bad, that the best students chosecareers in the clergy or teaching. As disreputable as wewere, we were higher in the hierarchy than medicine.Eliot pointed out here's a lesson in how to endearyourself to your faculty"an American physician orsurgeon may be and often is a coarse and uncultivatedperson devoid intellectual interest outside of hiscalling and quit_ nable to speak or write his mothertongue with accuracy." He described Harvard's medi-cal school as "a money-making institution, not muchbetter than a diploma mill." And he ;Y rote, "The igno-rance and general incompetency of the average gradu-ate of American medical schools at the time when hereceives the degree which turns him loose upon thecommunity is something horrible to contemplate."

It sounds like our legislators in Arizona talkingabout our graduates of schools of education.

Eliot tried to put into effect the scientific M.D.degree, but he was voted down by his faculty. Hewanted the new biology, he wanted anatomy and physi-ology, he tried to get in chemistry and pathology. Thefaculty voted him down. After all, the faculty argued,medicine was an art, not a science. An interesting com-ment. The faculty at Harvard said that the scientific

Page 34

approach was a fad, and it showed disdain for theclinical wisdom of America's physicians. Experimentalresearch was roundly scorned. Some of the most emi-nent medical professors at this time stated that they didnot accept the germ theory of disease; it was too silly tocontemplate.

The handful of people doing research eitherhad to be independently wealthy or had to steal equip-ment for their studies. Medical schools were not con-nected to hospitals until Johns Hopkins in 1880 or so.

Lawyers in those da-s also appeared to berather despicable. The profession seemed to be run bythe greedy and the conservative, though they oftencame from "a better class" than did physicians or teach-ers. A legal education was really no more rigorous thana medical education. It did not take much in the way ofapprenticeship, and one only had to read a few books inorder to be able to practice law.

It was also true in that same recent pastroughly 1870everyone seemed to think that teacherswere simply persons who were unfit for the rigors offarm, factory, or commercial life. What was clear in mylittle review was that to the vast majority of Americansthere were three equally disreputable professionsmedicine, law and education.

It's Our Turn Now

Now it's interesting to reflect on the idea thattwo of these professions gained some stature over thepast 100 years. Physicians have become wealthy andrespected, assuming the qualities of a priesthoodattimes even a deitybecause they have acquired knowl-edge, skills, concepts and technology that have allowedthem to treat and to cure illness. Lawyers, althoughsometimes still retaining an unsavory image, havemanaged to climb the occupational hierarchy in terms off ince and prestige. In our modern society they possessknowledge and skill to respond to problems in com-merce, finance, taxes and social behavior.

Now what about our third professioneduca-tion? I thinkand this is the point of this whole discus-sionthat it's our turn now. We have something now,for the first time, that the ordinary person does not have:a knowledge base consisting of facts, of concepts, oftechnology, that can transform our profession as well.It's a time of intense criticism cif education. Everybodykeeps carping at us. As Mike 'first said, it's the one

4)

unusual exception to the rule that the public loses inter-est. It looks like every year they stay interested in ourprofession

The transformation I have in mind is one wherethe research provides us with the kind of social statusthat is has provided medicine. We're haunted in educa-tion with the public's erroneous belief that someone canwalk in off the street and deliver a curriculum to 30 or sochildren. People don't realize that there is somethingcalled pedagogical knowledge, and that it is a veryunique form of knowledge. The publicall these peoplewho may have raised a kid, trained a dog, taught a wordto a nephew or niece thinks that teaching is easy.

What most people don't have is experiencewith 30 kids who may have diverse cultural back-grounds, impoverished cultural backgrounds, lack ofliteracy skills or an array of literacy and health prob-lems. And the public's image of pedagogical knowledgeis non-existent. What we're developing in our field issome specialized form of pedagogical knowledge, andI think it will increase our status and our remuneration,just as it has in some other professions.

As the art of medicine has been enriched by ascientific underpinning, so is the art of teaching about tobe enriched, I think. And it will always be an art. Asfamily practice medicine is an art, so is teaching an art.But if family practice medicine didn't have a firm scien-tific underpinning, you wouldn't see your physicianAnd that's, I think, what we're developing in educationnow.

Educational Research Compared With Physics andMedicine

Let's put these ideas of mine to some tests. Let'sask some questions about this field and see where itleads us. How good is current research in corn parison tophysics or medicine? We're always denigrating our-selves and saying we're not a real Science. Well, let's goup against some "real" sciences and see how our re-search looks. Let's ask what has it given us so far, or ifany of it is of practical value Let's ask how should weinterpret it and how should we transmit itand this iswhere think the rural schools have a real advantage.

First, how good is our research in comparison tothat of physics and medicine? Now, it's not often that asocial scientist is willing to com pare his work to physics.But an interesting study was done. About two years ago

a researcher named Larry Hedges wrote an articl: thathad a tremendous impact oil me. It was called "HowHard Are the Hard Sciences, and How Soft Are the SoftSciences?" He looked at education and at physics andstarted to compare them. And the way he comparedthem was interesting. He asked the question, howcumulative is the knowledge in these fields?

He looked at high energy physics as a case. Andhe said, okay, here's a field that spends billions on asingle experiment. Let's look at some of their findings.Let's look at, say, the lifetime of the muon as a set offindings. Or the mass of the charged pion. Or the life-time of the charged pion. And let's look at the number ofstudieshere are 10 studies of the muon, 13 studies ofthe lifetime of the charged kappa. And let's ask the ques-tion, do these studies hang together? Are they cumula-tive in nature?

If you remember some of your basic statistics,there was a very simple test for this. You take the datafrom a set of studies, you run a chi-square lysis, andwhat you're really asking is, is the data set you'relooking at homogenous--that is, does the data seem tohang together?

Here are 11 studies of the charged pion, lookingat the lifetime of the pionhow long it lasts in highenergy physics. You run the chi-square. You look at theprobability. And what you find out is that the probabil-ity is less than 1 in 10)0 that this set of data could be con-sidered homogenous The conclusion: It doesn't hangtogether. It's really pretty wobbly. I went out and founda physicist friend and said, "Do you know your datadoesn't hang together?" He said, "So?" I said, "How canyou do anything?" He said, "We're doing great."

Data doesn't necessarily have to be perfect inorder to be very useful. They say, "It's good enough.We're putting people on the moon, we're inventingcrazy weapons, we have all sorts of new computers-our physics is fine, what's wrong with you?" If younotice things like the lifetime of the muonthe proba-bility is so low you can't trust it. Things like the chargedpion lifetime, the neutral pion- Lifetime, the mass of thelambdacan't trust the dat The } ,nt is that the dataof high energy physics--( of the most revered, excit-ing, expensive sciencesdoesn't hang together.

That's the hard sciences, what about the softscience%? You can't get much softer than the socialsciences, and of the social sciences, you can't get muchsofter than educational research. So let's start out with62 studies of spatial perception by gender reported in an

Page 35

article by Linn and Peterson The probability is less than1 in 1000 that they hang together. Looks like someproblems there. Okay Let's look at the sottest ot socialscience datastudies ot open education versus tradi-tional education. And to take a mushy area, let's look atself-concept. We take 18 studies of self-concept, com-pute the chi-square and look at the Fn. obability. And loand behold, it's actually hanging together. The 18 stud-ies of self-concept all give reasonably cumulative dataThey tell us in fact with regularity that self-concept isalmost always higher in open education classes than itis in traditional education classes.

Now, when you actually compare a set of socialscience studies with a set of high energy physics studies,you learn something remarkable. First of all, they lookalike. High energy physics is no more cumulative andno more reliable than social science research. That is, ifyou do 20 studies in a field and ask, "Do they hangtogether," the answer is yesat least to the same extentthat physicists have data that hang together. In fact thesocial science data used actually looked better than thephysics data by a slight degree. So from the standpointof how we stack up against physics research, we do d amwell. It's just that we expect our data to always ban;together, and the physicistsdon't. We're applying higherquality standards to our research than many other scien-tis ts do. Hedges went on and to say okay, we row knowthat our research hangs together pretty well, but we allknow that social science research has measurementproblems. My gosh, you can't me,'sure anything insocial science. We don't have absolute zero like thephysicists do When they talk about zero, they have areal zero. When you talk about raising a temperaturefive degrees, everyone knows what that is. When youtalk about raising achievement five months, nobodythis room knows what that is. We have no absolute zeroNobody knows what zero intelligence is-1 suppose it'sdead. Nobody knows what raising two points of intelli-gence means

Then I ledges looked at di° 1960 metals hand-book and the 1970 metals handbook and he looked at theestimates for thermal conductivity of a whole set ofelements. And what he was asking was, how well overthis decade did their measurement techniques work forthem? There were incredible breakthroughs during thistimethermal conductivity is important in all the elec-trical work going on now, all the computing work,molecular stuff. lie looked at carbon, the most commonelement. Between 1961 and 1970 there was an 8000percent difference in the measurement of carbon Now

want to tell you, we make errors in education. Butthey're rarely 8(10(1percent. That's a measiiremiint errorbey.), ,I most that I know of.

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4'

You take some other factorsindium, 242 per-cent; iridium, 151 percent. The point of the study is thatal though we nave measurement problems in education,so does everybody else Our research in social science isreally no better and no worse than research in thephysical and chemical sciences. The hard sciences ain'tso hard, and the soft sciences ain't so soft

So our research stands up very well, if we'rewilling to treat it that way. We seem to hold this incred-ible belief that all research studies have to converge ona single kind of evidence, to be so conclusive as to saythat we know exactly what we're doing. Chemists don't,and physicists don't, and they're pertectly happy thatway Maybe we neve` to re- evaluate the criteria we holdfor our research.

What Education Can Learn From Medicine

Having looked at physics and chemistry, I wantto look al medical research. And I'm going to use anargument -nade by m y colleague N. L. Gage. What Gagenoted a number of years back was based on the resultsof a largescaleexperiment with a drug called propanolol.Propanolol is a drug from a tamilv of beta-blockers. It'sused to increase the ra te of survival for people who havehad at least one heart attack. Some of you may be usingit. It's now de rigueur. A physician who doesn't prescribea drug like that a fter someone's had a heart attack coulobe sued for malpractice. What was the study like? Therewere random assignments of 380(1 people, to either thedrug or a placebo treatment. The investigators used adouble-blind procedure with about 190(1 persons ineach group. The cost: $20 million. 1 point that out be-cause the entire Office of Education Research and Im-provement k JERI) has a budget of about $54 million.After 30 months, 9.5 percent of the men who had re-ceived the placebo had died, while only 7 percent ofthose who had received the beta blacker had died. Thedrug reduced the percentage at fatalities by 2.5 percent

Now it this were an educational research find-ing, it would be considered trivial Imagine going beforea school boa rd and saving, "We've reduced dropouts inour district by .5 percent, and it only cost tou a milliondollars." They'd say, "0.1c:el the program."

Medicine has a great criteria dead. Everybod vunder-tands dead or alive We have things like abovegrade let el or retained in school. Those don't quite getthe attention of the death rate. In the medical arena, theresults of the propanolol study were regarded as so

important that the experiment was discontinued onethical grounds. The researchers after 30 monthsimagine, 30 months, we get six months to turn around aschool felt that their data was so strong that it wasunethical to keep denying treatment to the control group.Their results led to the recommendation that propanololbe used for the potential saving of about 21,000 lives peryear in the U.S. alone.

Notice what they did. They took a lousy 2.5percent difference and they projected it. That's some-thing medicine does and we don't. If I went to a schoolboard and said, "We can reduce the dropout rate by 2.5percent," they'd say, "Mmm, that's interesting." Butwhat I also should have said was, "And that will saveour community $38 million over the next 20 years."Because it's going to be something like that And nation-wide it could be in the billions in terms of taxes paid andincarcerations not paid for.

This study went on to say, "21,000 lives saved "Well that's not quite true with a two percent difference.To show you how we treat data differently in education,if you run a correlation coefficient on this table, thecorrelation is .045. You've all heard that correlations thatlow are useless. If I had gone to a major educationalresearch journal and said, "I've spent 30 months on thisproject, and the kids are reading 2.5 percent better in thisprogram than in the other program; the correlationbetween having the treatment and success is .04; and thepercent of variance explained is two-tenths of one per-cent"I'd probably be rejected from some jou -nalsbecause the results are trivial. I might not get it pub-lished But in medicine it became accepted practiceovernight.

If this doesn't make the case about the way wetreat data in our field, let me give you one more. This isa study of cholesterol lowering. It took nine years Anyof you have studies that are alowed to go nine years? Itcost over $150 millionabout three years of the OERIbudget. It dealt with the lowering of cholesterol throughdiet and the use of a drug. And here are the results.

They had about 1900 in the experimental group,1900 in the placebo condition. Definite fatal or full heartattack appeared in 8 1 percent of the experimental groupand in 9.8 percent of the placebo group. And they calledthis study a miracle study. I am not making up the term.For a lousy 1.7 percent difference, the results wereconsidered so impressive that they made the front pageof The New York Times and the Boston Globe and led to acover story in Time magazine and an article in Sciencewhich held that the results of this study would "affectprofoundly the practice of medicine in this country."

We get one percent differences all the time 'neducational research. But we keep looking for the equ iva-lent of the cure for polio And that doesn't happen inmedicine or education very often. You're not going towipe out whole diseases Medicine makes its improve-ments by little percentages, small differences, except forthe rare case of a vaccine. In education we keep lookingfor the vaccine and throwing out the one percent differ-ences that I think we should be more proud of.

People take medical studies like this one toheart because they have to di with longevity. Each ofyou changes what you do because of information thathas b., do with one percent or one-tenth of one percentvariances in longevity. Most of you have probablychanged your diet. You've moved from red meat tochicken or fish. Many of you have started jogging andother exercise programs. The majority of you don'tsmoke, I would bet, and many of you have stoppedsmoking. I do all of those things. And I do them for alousy one percent variance accounted for. If I reallywanted to know something about longevity, I'd get mygrandparents ages at death, I'd multiply by four, take anaverage of it, add about five years for medical science,and I'd have a real good estimate of how long I'm goingto live. And for 18 days or 36 days or at most six or eightmonths, I do all of these things that are ruining my life,like dieting and jogging.

We do these things because we take longevityso seriously. But it is life and death to the kids of thecountry as well when we have one percent differences ina treatmenta new reading program, a new math pro-gram, a new way of restructuring the schools, onepercent higher retention rates. It really is life or death,and we're the only ones who can make that argument.The public certainly takes longevity seriously and itdoesn't take schooling seriously. But the nation's healthis at stake. When we talk of a nation at risk, it's just likecholesterol in that sense. And we have to start treatingour research the way the medical profession treatstheirsextrapolating it to the thousands and thousandsof kids who will be improved by a finding that's just thissmall.

We have data in educational research of a 20percent variance explained. The time on task literature,for example. Controlling for time on task, we often get2(1 percent of the variance in achievement explained byhow kids spend their time in school. That's 200 timesmore powertu I than medical studies that are consideredmiracles We have to put our research into a context forinterpretation. We seem to be holding standards that areinappropriate

4L, Page 37

What Educational Research Has Given Us

All right, I said I'd stack us up against physicsand medicine, and I hope I've convinced you that we'reprobably not so bad. But we have other questions to askof the research. The second question is, what has it givenus so far? Well, I would argue that there are five charac-teristics of a scientific community. A scientific commu-nity serving the world of practice ought to be able toverify ideas everyone knows aboutbecause there aregood ideas always floating around in the world ofpractice It also ought to be able to provide new ideas,,:omplicate some things, simplify some things, and comeup with some counterintuitive things.

So how about verifying existing ideasdo wedo that well in education? Yes, we take some ideas thatseem to be floating around and try to imbed them inricher interpretations. Take, for instance, one that was inthe document that the president and some of his ap-pointees gave us a couple of years ago called WhatWorks. One point was, parents should read to their kids.Now that's not exactly the highest level idea I have everheard expre.sed. And some people criticized What Worksfor having that kind of banal tone to it.

But the fact of the matter is, the research com-munity has imbedded that little bit of advice in somevery interesting ideas. We now know that kids who areread to a lot come to school with what might be called astory structure or scheme. They know that stories havebeginnings, middles and ends, and that they have acertain continuity. They learn that there is a block in theenvironment that the hero or heroine has to overcome,and that often outsiderselves, parents, ingels comein and intercede. What they learn is a way of conceptu-alizing stories. And when they go to school, they canlearn from explanations being told to them in storyformthat have that same quality.

So we take ideas that everyone seems to knowabout, and we verify them. And then we get villifiedsometimes because it sounds so banal. But you have todo that in a field. The notion that women can't do mathis floating around. Everyone knows it. For years womenwere counseled out of it. But the research communitycame up with a very interesting finding. If women takemath courses, they 10 as well as men. If you test them atage 18, women don't c o as well as men. If you look at thewomen who have had the same amount of math as men,lo and behold, they've done as well.

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There are lots of those. Like the time on task I ex-plained to my father that I was studying the way kidsspend time in school, and he said, "You mean if theyspend more time, they learn more." I said, "Yes." And hejust laughed. He thought that was the funniest thinghe'd ever heard and said anyone who would fund mewas an idiot. The finding itself was trivial: spend moretime, learn more. Any fool knows that. But what none ofus knew at the time was that there was incrediblevariation across cla ssrooms and districts in the way timewas spent in schools. And that was worth understand-ing. So we do a lot of verifying of common sense thingsthat "eveyone seems to know about." But as you allknow, common sense is not necessarily common prac-tice.

What about finding out new things? One that'scome into the literature lately that wasn't even dreamedabout ten years ago was the notion of reciprocal teach-ing. Reciprocal teaching, as described by Palinscar andBrown. looks something like this. Take 5th and 6thgrade kids that can just barely decode a sentence andcan't comprehend anything. They areal the 15th percen-tile nationally on a comprehension test on any of yourstandardized measures of reading. You work with themfor 15 days, trying to get them to ask questions of theprose they're reading.

On the first day you learn that they can't evenform a question. You give them a little paragraph aboutthe camel, the ship of the desert, and you say, "Ask mea question about that." And the question might be, "Thecamel in the desert." So you spend 15 days getting themtraineda half hour a day in how to ask the who, what,when, where, how questions about a paragraph. At theend of the 15 days, you ask them to read something andask a question and they can do it. And isn't it interest-ingsomething else happens. They can answer all thequestions on a comprehension test. They go from the15th percentile up to about the 70th percentilein 15 days.How can you do that? Well it's easy. If you can ask thequestions, you ought to be able to answer them. Nobodyhad ever given them the skills to figure that out Theyhad drifted along to 5th grade and they didn't knowthat.

Now we have in 15 days a miracle. Did you seeit in the newspapers? If it were medicine, the headlinewould be "Miracle Drug Found." It's education. "Mir-acle Treatment Found." The stuff has been replicated,done in actual classrooms with actiial teachersnot theexperimentersand kids go from the 15th percentile tothe 50th percentile. If it were a medical drug, it would be

considered a miracle. In education, well, it's driftingdown into the schools. We don't have the mechanismsto get it out there. I would argue that it's a brand r wtechnology.

Ideas are new too. In education we don't justgenerate technology, we give you ideas as well. Let megive you one that Walter Doyle has discussed. He talkedof taking a different metaphor into the schools aboutwhat ckissrooms are like. He talks of classrooms asplaces where students exchange performance for grades.That's an economic notion. If you realize that, then youcan account for some funny things that happen in class-rooms.

For example, a creative lesson will be started bya teachera new, bright teacher starting out a scienceprocess curriculum. And the kids say, "What are wesupposed to know?" And the teacher says, "I don'tknow yet." The kids say, "What are we supposed todo?" And the teacher says, "I don't know, we're goingto create it, we're going to take a field trip to the pond,we're going to collect things, we're going to write downour observations, and we're going to develop what welearn as we go along." The kids go bonkers. They startsaying, "Are we going to be tested on this?" The teachersays, "Well, maybe." And the kids start to sweat. Theysay, "On what?" The teacher says, "We'll have a proj-ect."

The kids ask, "Can we work on it together?""Can my parents help?" "Can I use references?" "Can Iuse the libr dry ?" What you see is a new concept emerge.It's called grade surety. Some kidscollege-bound kidswith upwardly mobile parentshave to have gradesurety. They have pressure put on them for the A's andB's so they ran get into college. These kidswhen givena creative, open-ended, process-oriented lessonde-stroy it. They destroy it because classrooms can beconceptualized as places for exchange of performancefor grades. The teacher says, "I hold the grades. You giveme the right performance, and I'll give you the gradesyou need." That's an implicit contract, like the economicsystems we're all used to. When in fact that is violated bythe teacher saying, "I don't have any grades, I don'tknow what we're doing, we'll see what happens, it'llemerge"the kids go bonkers and rip the lesson down,and in two weeks the teacher is teaching a very pedes-trian lesson out of the textbook. Because then the kid canexchange performance for grades, and he or she knowshow to get an A.

I also said that a productive scientific commu-nity would expound on ideas that would complicateeveryone's lives. One such study was done by Kessler

and Quinn who evaluated the performance of barrio 5thgraders in San Antonio in very complex languageskillsthe use of irony, metaphor and so forth. And the kidswere evaluated against prep school 5th graders fromNew England. The prep school kids had a reading levelof 7th grade; the barrio kids had a reading level of 3rdgrade. Very sophisticated language use tests wereadministered to the two groups of kids. And the barriokids, who were bilingual, outperformed the New Eng-land prep school kids, who were monolingual.

That's one of a dozen studies I can quote youthat is now going to complicate our lives because it saysevery kid who is monolingual in this country is beingcheated of some cognitive advantages. Now what do wedo? It's not an issue of English only. It's not an issue ofSpanish. It's an issue of bilingualism is better. Now whatdo we do?

How about some findings that simplify? Wehave the notion that the high school curriculum hasgone so far overboard in offering electives that we'd bebetter off -ipping the trend and doing in-depth work.This has .nylications for the rural schools where every-body's asked always to go into the large high schools, tosomehow consolidate, so that kids can have electives.Well, I think that there is a trend emerging from bothcognitive psychology and critics of education that saysyou're much better off building knowledge structuresin an area in depth than having some breadth.

An example is, you can get a history course thatteaches the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, theSpanish American War, the preparation for World WarI, the Great Depressionyou can spend a week on all ofthese and the kid has a smattering of information, andcan pass a test. It now seems reasonably obvious to a lotof people that if the teacher knows something about theCivil War, he or she ought to teach the Civil War for allsix weeks. Or teach the six weeks on the Great Depres-sion. Teach something in such depth that the kids candevelop knowledge structures in depth that relate to therest of their knowledge. This march through thecurncu-lum, an eon a week, is probably a mis.

The same thing is true of all these courses kidsare taking. Instead of an introduction to this and anintroduction to that, kids would be lots better off goinginto some areas in depth. That can simplify a curricu-lum. And for the rural educators, it can help you makea really good case that you can do a bang-up job educat-ing right in your own communities without consolidat-ing. I don't know if you want to do that, but I think a casecan he made.

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Now some counterintuitive things. This is thetime of year where kids are going to be left back. They'regoing to be retained in grade. The public thinks this iswonderful, we've imposed standards with the reformmovement. By God, we're finally leaving kids back whodon't meet the standards. The state of Arizona this yearwill leave back an estimated 15,000 kids. The cost ofleaving them back is $45 million. Every one of those kidsis $3000 a year or so. We get a $45 million mcrea iebudget by retaining them in grades Well, but that'sgood for them, they say

But here's the counterintuitive finding. Theresearch evidence is absolutely, incredibly clear that ifyou are leaving back 15,000 kids, it's probably the wrongdecision for 14,500 of them. It may be the right decisionfor a small number. If you have two kids who arc ofequal ability, low ability, or who have equal emotionalproblemscall them identical twinsand you pro-moted one and retained the other in grade, the one youpromoted will probably be about 15 percentile pointshigher on ail the standardized tests than the one youretained in grade, and would be about eight percentilepoints higher in virtually all the self-concept measuresand liking-of-school measures.

Retention is the wrong decision, over and overagain. I can muster 100 studies for you that are counter-intuitive to the belief that if a kid's not performing well,might as well leave him or her back. The public seems tolike that, legislators like thatand it's wrong, and it'sexpensive.

The Practical Value of Educational Research

What 1 wanted to get to is the question does anyof this have practical value' We're doing our duty as ascientific community by generating the kinds of thingsthat the field needs.

But is any of it of practical value? What aboutthe time-on-task literature. Or the success rate litera-ture. Or the notion that academic feedback improvesperformance. Or studies on motivation and expectancy.What about wait-timethe amount of time a teacherwaits between asking a good, meaty, higher-orderquestion and calling on students. Is that of practicalvalue?

Absolutely. The ya Hance accou nted for in thosestudies is often one and two and three and tour and 2(1percent. Far larger than the medical studies that are

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considered miracles. Wait-time alone correlates withachievement about .15 or .20 It has a one percent vari-ance accounted for. So it's rather remarkable that no-body pays much attention to it. We have concepts ofgreat utility. Biology has homeostasis. We have curricu-lum alignment, academic learning time, engaged timewe have concepts also that result in remarkably helpfulways of conceptualizing schools and classrooms.

We have technology just lilo2 medicine. Coop-erative learning didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago. Coopera-tic e learning is a full-fledged technology. It changesteacl:ers' and students' lives. The classroom manaw-ment literature that's come out of the University ofTexas and published by Prentice Hallconsidered amiracle by a 20-year veteran of the New Yo:-Ic Cityschools. He finally read a book that made sense abouthow to run classrooms. Outcome-based instruction. Allo1 these are technologies now available, but that the laypublic doesn't know we have available We have ourown research literature, our own language, our ownpedagogical knowledge.

How should we interpret these research find-ings? Carefully. Our research knowledge does differfrom physics and chemistry in that it deals in humansystems. You work with human beings and all kinds ofstrange things are going to happen You put in a newresearch finding, and you get a new principal simulta-neously. The research finding doesn't seem to hold upbecause everybody's worried about the new principal.Or you nave a person implementing cooperative learn-ing who's going through a divorce. What does that do tocooperative learning)

Over and over we have human problems enter-ing our system in ways that the people running thelinear accelera tor a t Sta n tont don't have. What does thatmean? It means something similar to when you get apackage in the mail stamped "Fragile, Handle WithCare." That's the way to treat the research find in:sha- d le them with care. They won't always hold true inTucson, in Phoenix and Flagstaff. They might in two ofthe three, but not the third. That's okay. Medicine doesn'talways work in practice the way it does in the laboratoryeither People don't take medicine the way they'resupposed to. they d when they're not supposedtoand the medicine becomes inactive or twice asactive.

Our research is fragile. It's imbedded in theMinion context. It has to be handled with ( arc. lint toignore it is an incredible mistake

How To Communicate Educational Research

My last issue is, how do we communicate allthis? And I think we do in two ways. My colleague GaryFenstermacher has talked of the ends of the continuumbeing either you impose it on people or you providepeople with evidence and let them vork with it. What'shappened too often in education is that somebody'staken a research finding and imposed it. That's thewrong way. It won't be implemented, it won't becomepart of people's lives, it won't change their professionalidentities. What you need to do is present them withevidence when they say, "We're having trouble in theschool around this thing, is there research evidence thatcan be discussed?"

And the issue is one of discussion. What wereally are talking about is finding a way to get teachersto meet together and discuss these issues. To have studygroups around research problems. And it's here that Ithink leadership is needed to get them started, butteachers have to take over these discussions. In otherfields you get norms where people meet regularly. InTempe the radiologists meet every month at the hospitaland go over research. The other physicians meet regu-larly. Where are teachers meeting regularly to discussthe research that's important to them? To be confrontedby evidence and to h y to think about their own prob-lems?

So I would say it can never be imposed, that'sthe wrong way to go. And I think the rural schools havean advantage because they don't lock up at three o'clocklike some of our urban schools do. We have schoolswhere teachers can't meet after school because there aresafety problems. It seems to me that developing a schoolculture where people once a month sit down and dealwith the research issues can make a vast difference.

In other words, we have a research communitynow that's generating useful things, and I think we havea profession that needs to come to grips with that inorder to transform itself. I think the reason medicinegets its remuneration and status is because medicinepossesses knowledge that the lay public doesn't have.And I really do think it's our turn now.

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EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOL RESTRUCTURING .

Robert Pearlman 1, the National Consultant On '..ducat«mal (In 1r)logy for the Amer loin h'rlera firm of Thither s He has

been a (-hiss, oom teacher of mathematics and ((yr:oilers for 20 years. In the ear ly 1980s hr helped ileeelOp the COMOlitei eiiniation

Program err the Boston Public Se boob. th' has pumeered teaching compnteis to kids aryl training feather,, administrat ON and

parents '^ new teill11010gteq In ins A FT inn k Pe:flirt:aryl esents at a With' range of education technology and refry m con fo cm-cc

He rs the author of "Educational Technology and School Restructuring," published in the lure 1989 issue of Electronic

Learning.

This is a talk that at one time or another wasknown as "The Great Potential of Technology in Educa-tion." Many of you may have given this kind of speechin the years from about 1980 up to 1985 or 1987. I gave itmyself many times, but then there had to be a correction.We were a little bit overzealous. So I changed it to "TheMyth of Technology in Education." And by now thespeech is known as "Beyond the Myth of Technology inEducation."

What that means is, there is a cadre of us outhere now who've learned about technology We'velearned about education. And its time for us to see howthe two are going to fit together at,d to learn what roletechnology nlav in this development.

To backtrack a little bit, how many remehiberTim' magazine's co\ e The Computer as Man of theYear. Remember what year that was? It was 1983. TheI B M PC had come out the previous year. Apple I I waswell on its way to getting into schools and into homes.This was sort of the glory time for computers. Interest-ingly enough, the word we heard over and over again atthis conference yesterday was not computers but tele-communications. So you can see that times have changed

In fact, as George Leonard predicted very wiselyin 1984, "Strange as it may seem, it is entirely possible toput millions of computers in schools without producingany real educational change." Now, a lot of us who wentinto this business realized that it was always a goodhustle. It was motherhood and apple pie. You could getany kind of money for technology. And we've done itWe've put two million computers in Other prognosti-cators have addressed this same issue.

In Derek Bok's presidential paper at Harvardin 1985, he wrote that there are three reasons whytechnology failed to live up to early hopes. resistance byteachers, high cost, and the absence of demonstrablegains in student achievement

Harold Hodgkinson, who has made a won-derful career as a speaker and demographer indulgingus with the facts of the transformation of the Americanpopulation, said that while the U.S. has gotten comput-ers into schools more quickly than perhaps any othercountry, they are not necessarily in the classrooms. Thatis very true In the main, they were put in labs. A newspecies of subject emerged called computer literacywhich feeds out technological, geographic, and scien-tific literacy as a separate component to be introducedinto the curriculum. We have that going on in a lot ofschools now, but we don't have much else.

The Old Way: Technology as the Solution

It shouldn't 1,c that much of a sui prise thattechnology all by itself in the form of computers didn'tdo much. Here's an article that came out inn(' New YorkTimes on June 20, 1987: "Services Hurt by Technology.Productivity is Declining." Obviously our goals ineducation are to improve teadung and learning Wewant that to happen better and nun e efficiently But hereit wasn't happening as in other industries.

Then we all got hit by this type of article lastyear from the Wall Street lour mil: "t_ )mputers Failing asTeaching Aids." Now this is one of those classics wherethe headline doesn't exactly correspond to the article,but the headline all by itsclt was quite damaging.

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Why would this kind of developmei.t occur?We've had certain trends in the use of computers ineducation. All through the 1970s I was teaching com-puter science. Then in 1982 we said, all right, now w e'rcgoing to teach computer literacy. We had a lot of pro-grams like tnat, but then many people in the field said,no, that's not the way it should be. Computers should bea tool. So in 1984 we started talking about computers asa tool. And in 19e5 we started talking in the literatureabout integrating computers into the curriculum. Theone thing we hadn't done--and which we're starting todo's talk about this. Using technology to cha nge school-ing. ro change the way teachers teach and studentslearn.

Certain people have h. -1 writing about thisreally well. Lewis Perelman , LI sometimes getsconfused with meput out a p.por from the NationalSchool Boards Association's Institute for the Transfer ofTechnology in Education. Lew points ou' a lot of inter-esting things, but the main !s, he grounds thetheory of techno. .;y in schooling with the theory cur-rent in Europe that's called socio-technic systems. Th.ttis, you can't approach the problem simply from the viewof the technology. You have to look at the social relation-ships at the job, and the technology has to fit that kind ofconstruct.

There's a wonderful movie showing vignettesin the workplace in Scandinavia called "Computers inContext." It shows computers being introduced in dif-ferent workplaces in Scandinavian industry, such asamong graphic artists at a major newspaper. The tech-nology was put in, an' it de-skilled the graphic artists.It caused lots of labor unrest It changed the way thework was being done, but in way that was negof; ve forthe employees. Then they formed a committee of thegraphic al tists and management and discussed how touse the technology to up-skill these workersto helpthem do then jobs better. As a result, they put in a newsoftware systen that was not displacement of task butdecisig 1 support and productivity support for thoseworkers. Now it's become a living breathing and veryexciting system.

his same point is made in a new book by aHarvard professor named Shoshana Zuboff. In herbook -In the Age of the Smart Machineshe coined theword "informate." It means organizing to exploit infor-mation technology. And when you think about it, there'sa nice paradigm there. You can go out and buy technol-ogy right now. You can buy lots of computers, telecom-munications networks- the whole construct It costs alot of money. And the question is, are your employees

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our managers and ct orkeise,ganized in such a waythat they can exploit those techno..)gies? In other words,can they use them in a productive way?

I'm sure many of you can go into offices any-where and see computers on every person's desk Beau-tiful piec2sof furnitureullexploited. The people aren'trained. They wanted computers for status, but theydidn't really know how they were going to use them.What Zuboff says is that "management must changegearsfrom enforcement to the creation and promo-tion of an environment that induces commitment to theorganization and that fosters internal motivation in theworkforce."

Now these themes are starting to emerge in theeducational technology community. I live in botl-worldsthe educational technology corn munity andthe restructuring community. My job for the AFT is tosort of broker between these two worlds. I speak oneway to one world, another way to the other. Increas-mgly, though, there are conferences like thi- which aremerging these themes.

About a year ago, a Minnesota conference foreducational technologists had my boss, Al Shanker, fortheir keynote speaker because they wanted someonefrom the educational restructuring community to talk tothem. The National School Boards unit has been run-ning conferences now for a couple of years called"Making Schools More Productive." One was in Dallasin November. T-ose are excellent conferences whichbring out both of these themes. The new Center onTechnology and Educationnow run by Bank StreetCollege which replaces Harvard as the national educa-tioni-._ technology centerstrikes a new theme. They'regoing to work on projects that will take place withschools that are already restructuring on some dimen-sions. They plan to work with the Rochester publicschools to identify products c e wax sof us, ig technologyfor student achievement in concert with that district'smajor restructuring effort.

So this theme is starting to show up. And Iconsider this conference another example of rt.

The New Way: Technology As a Means to an End

Many schools approach the issue by asking,"What technology can we put in to transform this situ-ation?" What h.ippens if vou start instead with thedesign of the sdooling process?

C .tJ

A number of new schools have emerged aroundthe country in the past several years. There's the AppleClassroom of Tomorrow (ACOT) project from Applea project in which students intensively use computers.Every student might have a computer to use at schooland also one at home. Project Headlight by SeymourPapert of MIT is based on the same idea, but uses IBMcomputers. These projects have changed considerablyover the years in what they're'doing and how they'reorganizing. Hyperschool is a school in Columbus, Ohiowhich the Apple multimedia marketing group hasseeded. They're using multimedia as a way of changingthe learning process.

Saturn and Chiron are two schools that willstart up this fallone in St. Paul and the other inMinneapolis. These schools are very different from allthe others in that they start not from the technology butfrom the actual learning process. Curiously enough, wetalked a lot about school choice yesterday, and somepeople think choice is another idea drilling out of Min-nesota. California may have its weird polifcs, butMinnesota seems to have all these interestir. educa-tional ideas. 1 went there to try to figure out why that isthe case, and the on'v thing anyone could come up withis that it's cold in the Twin Cities. So they sit arounddiscussing educational ideas.

The Saturn School in St. Paul will open up thisfall as a school for grades four, five and six. It will beorganized in such a way that every student has a per-sonal gro.. th planone similar in notion to an IEP, butever-changeable, not fixed, and worke out with par-ents Ord the kids. In fact Saturn is working with acompany called Peak Solutions to develop artificialintelligence software that will help teachers and stu-dents do goal settingnot only on a long- term basis, buton a weekly basis. A student will come in at the begin-ning of the week, get on the system, look at all thelearning activities that he can participate in that day orthat week, see the suggestions made by the teachers andthen actually pick the learning activitieswhich mightbecooperative in naturetha' ne will engage in. There'sa lot of choice built into the system. Kids will choose theactivities they want. And the program will be built overtime.

Saturn's aim is to build a new school setting anda new schooling process designed to produce learningsuccess for each student It does not attempt to fitpromising innovation into traditional practice. Theschool is going o be located in a downtown shoppingcenter on a floor of a mall. In downtown St. Paul, all thebuildings are connected by a skyway to all the other

buildings, so you can walk through the skyway to themuseum, the hospital, a business or a bank. The designis set up so that all the activities will be real life ones,built around those sites.

A very similar philosophy emerges in the Chi-ron Middle School. This is a project started by a guynamed Ray Harris, a real estate developer who is veryactive in Minnesota circles. He brought together a steer-ing committee made u2 of the teacher union president,Louise Sunden, teachers in the Minneapolis district, anda number of key consultants in the area. Many of youmight know one of them, Joe Nathan, who is associatedwith the national choice movement. This steering com-mittee did an interesting thing. They held a competitionfor ideas. Harris financed it. Any group in Americateachers, administrators, anybodycould put forth theidea for the new Chiron school. There was a $1000award offered for five different groups from anywherein the U.S. Only on ?, as it turned out, was from outsidethe Minneapolis area.

Then they had a second round in which each ofthose five groups got $1000 to work on upgrading theirproposal. Finally, they selected the best proposal. Theyweren't bound by it, but they got a lot of people investedin nurturing ideas for how this school would be de-signed.

What's different about this school is that itsfocus will be on experiential learning and learning byapplication. It won't be organized as a single site school.There will be five sites throughout the communityatthe zoo, the hospital, the downtown business area, thegovernment area. They may have other kinds of alterna-tive and roving sites as well. The school's 300 kids, all ingrades five, six and seven, will be eivided into groups of60. The 60 kids will rotate every 9 weeks between thesites. Each site will have a permanent site teacher and apermanent site paraprofessional who will develop theprogram. e zoo, for instance, they'll get local volun-teers, they'll design projects around the site--they'llthere permanently over many years.

Traveling w: it the group will be a home-basedteacher and a home-based paraprofessional. So therewill be two adults who will always be with those 60 kids,not just that year but over several years. They will get toknow those kids and their families. One impact teacherfrom the school district will come in and work in c. nine-week cyclein order to fertilize the rest of the district.There will be five adults for each 60 kidsa one totwelve ratioand a lot of volunteers.

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The idea is, the kids will do learning activities atthe site. At the zoo, for instance, they'll study animals,keep data on animals, make presentations about thezoo's problems, develop films, videos, newspapers,publicationsdo all sorts of real life activities associ-ated with the site.

Students as Active Educational Workers

I'm stressing these models not because they arethe end-all of ideas, but because I want to showyou theirschool design notion. They are redesigning the teachingand learning process to get away from the usual frontallearning and get more into experiential learning. Sowhat about technology? Well, if you look at the budgetsfor these two schools, you find that you've never seen ahigher budget for technology. It's enormous. And it's allstart-up. Chiron is going to spend $300,000 of its start-upmoney for technology. What kind? Not one computerfor every kid. but the tools they need to do the jobs thatwe've been talking aboutnamely, tools to captureimages and information, to develop and present thatinformation, to make videos and publications. So we'retalking desktop publishing and things like camcorders,so they can go out and capture information fror thecommunity.

The Saturn school has several partners, includ-ing Apple Computer Corporation, Pioneer Communi-cations, Control Data Corporation, and Peak SolutionsThe school is organized in such a way that it will maketremendous use of technology, but the technology willbe used to develop the learning activities.

Now taking that idea, what are the precondi-tions for this kind of development? There are two im-portant notions, if you're going to think about reorgan-izing the school in order to exploit the technology. Thefirst has to do with the students. And the second has todo with the teachers.

Here's a quote from Mary Alice White, directorf the Electronic Learning Center at Columbia Univer-

sity: "We need not integration into the curriculum, weneed to change the way we teach and learn. What ismissing is a conception of how technology can changeschooling." In regard to the students, that might bealong the Imes of what Al Shenker has been talkingabout. He says: "Il's time to move away from debatesabout delivering teaching and think about what makesfor effects e learning. It's time to ask how schools can berestructured so that youngsters will be turned from

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passix e into active students who can and v dl do thework that they must do if they are to educate them-selves."

The paradigm shifts to active learners. EliotSoloway, who is at the University of Michigan, talksabout doing history, not just reading about history.Doing science, not just reading about science. So let'sshift the notion to kids as active educational workersand find some examples of what than might look like.

The first one I want to talk about is the NationalKids' Network which was set up by the National Geo-graphic Society and the Technical Education ResearchCenters of Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a collabora-tion which was recently awarded one of the four StarSchools grants Under the network last year, kids at 200schools throughout the country, working in teams, tookwater samples from local rivers, lakes, ponds, openfields, and water taps. Back in their classrooms, theteams measured the pH levels of the water, recorded theresults, and took averages for the samples. Then eachteam entered its results into a specially designed soft-ware program that allowed the class to average resultsand then telecommunicatc themvia modemto anational computer.

The next day the results from all sites wereavailable for download from the national computer tothe classroom computer, where they could be printednut and where special mapping software could generatecolor-coded national maps of acid rain levels. Studentsthen discussed the findings and communicated theiranalysis, again via modern, to a national expert at theNational Oceanic mid Atmospheric Administration whowrote back and compared their findings to currentscientific analysis

These kids have more data on acid rain than theEPA. They were able to put out a newspaper and sendIt to their parents, showing them, "Here's what wekm lied about acidity in our community "These kids areactive learners. And this year the project will expand to2000 schools.

Another example of kids becoming active learn-ers is the Grapevine project at San Francisco's LowellHigh School. There, an English teacher teaching TheGiallo; of Wrath wanted the kids to really get some senseof the Depression Era. They began producing a vide-odisc, using old photos and film strips, to rec.:eate thesights and sounds of the Depression and to build ahypercard database of information of 1930s. They didwhat can now be done by any group of teachers and

students in Amenc,i Students and teachers together canproduce a film of the sights and sounds and history oftheir own community. They can gather documents,pictures, film sequences, songs, Juni io segments such asspeeches and interviews, and use image, audio anddigitizing technology to build a videodisc.

These are kids engaged m doing history. They'rethe creators. And the idea has many, many applications.You can use what I call the multi-media sandboxequipment you can find around the house such ascamcorders, VCRs, APPLE computers, TV and editingequipment. In a rural town called Blue Earth, Minne-sota, the kids made a promotional video for the town.This kind of thing can be done in other rural areas.Students can go out to a local polluted river, film it, andtell its story. This kind of communicating uses the skillsof the 20th century.

We heard Ron Knutson talking yesterday aboutthe need to create leadership in rural areas. The ideahere is, if kids can go out and learn about their commu-nities, document what they're learning, and then pres-ent that to othersthose are what we call leadershipskills. They become self-documenting journalists, an-thropologists, technicians. They turn into active learn-ers and producers.

Teachers and Technology

Now I want to talk about teachers. Mike Kirstasked yesterday, where's the bottom-up constituencyfor technology? Do the people you may be buyingtechnology for vnt to use it, and are they willing tofight for the budget to keep it? It's amazing how manybills have been snagged in state legislatures when a fightoccurs between people promoting a tech-- Aogy bill ineducation and those promoting general aidbecausethe teachers' organizations will fight for the general aidso that salaries are maintained.

But to talk about teachers, we have to first talkabout the technology transfer gap. All of the technologywe're talking about came from development for indus-try. It then shifted to teacher educators who tried todisseminate it to teachers in order to put it into practicein the classroom. This is the transfer circuit. And alongthat loop, there are problems. Someone from a technol-ogy company comes to a school, puts on a presentation,and says, "You should buy all these things." The imagethat technology companies have of school buyers is asuperintendent with a calculator trying to figure out

how many teachers he can save. But suppose you im-prove that image. Suppose that superintendent is think-ing instead, "Well, I can really make this thing go if I canput this technology in place." You're still left with thequestion, where are the teachers? Where in this loop arethe people who are supposed to exploit these things?

Let's lo a Intl,- .:-ercise. Imagine what's avail-ablecomputers for students, computers for teachers,software, integrated learning systems, local area net-works, VCRs, videodiscs, distance learning. What's theprimary thing that superintendents and school hoardsare going to buy? What about the technology peoplewho are the coordinators in districts do they buyanything different from what the superintendents buy?Mostly, both of these groups are focused on the kidproblem. How are we going to get computers into thehands of kids.

N,,w, let's think if the buyers are instead teach-ers. A crazy idea. Teachers have got some moneywhatare they going to buy? A VCR, right? "Hey, maybe I canpresent some stuff. Maybe I'll buy a videodisc player1 P make a presentation. Maybe I'll buy a computer forme 'o run some things, like software on critical thinkingor on running discussions." So the teacher would thinkof it from a different angle.

Let's imagine if there were a team of teachers ata teacher-run school or a school within a school. Whatare they going to buy? They'll buy the teacher stuft,maybe the student stuff. They might even buy an inte-grated learning system. You can start to shift the focusin your district in this directionand I've been advocat-ing this around the country. Get technology-smart teach-ers, put out requests for proposals, let them come upwith their ideas, let them buy what they want to buy inorder to do the things that they think will change schools.Let them own the technology.

David Dockterman, who has done a lot of thedesign work for Tom Snyder Productions, says, "thecomputer is an invaluable productivity tool for middlemanagers in business. Why can't it be the same forteachers in schools?" He points out that you should lookat the functionality of teachers and ask, what can a goodteacher do with a computer? Obviously if a teacher hada computer, he or she could do all his or her own work,do demonstratioas, and run good discussions by run-rung off simulations from a single computer.

From that point of view, you can see that teach-ers could possibly do a lot with computers. Imagine ateacher work station in a school. They might do presen-

Pase 47

tations using imagery with videodiscs or VCRs, theymight be promoting dialogue and discussion. Theymight be doing curriculum development and usingdesktop publishing to do it. They might even be soproud of what they've produced that they might shareit with someone else. They might put it on a scanner andsend that image over a telecommunications network tosomeone else. They might want to discuss their workwith colleaguesimagine a phoue line connecting theirwork station with the world. And they might want toshare these resources with students.

I am an urban person, not an expert on ruralschools. But I know something about telecommunica-tions. There is a notion that telecommunications ordistance learning is one-way course deliverydeliver-ing courses to students. But teams of teachers might buycomputer-managed instructional systems, not to sup-plant teaching and other form, .f learning, but insteadto serve as a platform for se,. directed learning, fortutoring, and sometimes just for old-fashioned "drilland practice." Or they might use DISCOURSE, a tech-nology with small terminals on each student's desk thatenhances communications and facilitates the transfer ofinformation, such as testing, in classroom settings.

And teachers in restructured schools will take anew interest in distance learning, a technology thatsome mistakenly believe will supplant teachers in theirdistricts. Instead, restructuring teachers will use thistechnology to team-teach across wide re- ons, to facili-tate student projects and activities, and to engage in jointprofessional development activities from large-scaleteleconferences to small-scale, one-on-one mentoringover two-way video.

All of this means that the role of teachers will beexpanded. When students are treated as active workers,the expertise of teachers becomes ever more critical infacilitating student learning. Teachers, therefore, needto assume greater responsibility and authority for deci-sions about the kind of technology that most appropri-ately supports their expanded role. And to do that, theywill need greater access to, and training for, the tech-nologies that are now available.

So if you're going to restructure schools, reor-ganize in a way that enables teachers and students toexploit the information technology. Technology by it-self won't change schools. But it can support teachers asthey design student learning activities to turn studentsinto active educational workers and turn teachers intofacilitatorsand coaches of student learning. Those schools

Page 48

that rede:,:p the schooling process ivill be best posi-tioned to "informate"to exploit fully the pitential ofeducational technology.

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