Help Wanted - US Secretary of Education

The United States is currently looking for a Secretary of Education. Since I am trying very hard not to get sucked into the negativity surrounding American politics right now, I'm going to stay positive. Here are the things we need to see in our next Secretary of Education if we wish to succeed in meeting the goal of providing a great education and equal opportunity for success for every one of America's school children.

Image Credit: Glassdoor.com

Our next Secretary of Education needs to understand how children learn. One of the ways we have failed our students in the past is by enacting policies that fly in the face of the neuroscience research that shows how kids learn. If we want to build a system focused on student learning, the leader of that system must understand student learning.

Since approximately 90% of American schoolchildren attend public schools, our next Secretary of Education must be intimately familiar with the workings of American public schools. This is no small requirement. Each state has a different way of funding, running, and evaluating public schools.

The leader of the Department of Education must understand the purpose of our public school system. Our public schools do not exist to serve parents. Our public schools exist because our society is better when we have an educated populace. While it is true that parents and families benefit from strong public schools, we have developed a publically funded system of education because it is good for everyone in our communities. If we lose sight of this fact and divert tax dollars to privately run schools for the benefit of parents, we destroy a system that was created to strengthen our communities. There is a reason that you cannot take your tax dollars back that the government uses on the police force to buy private security. There is a reason that you cannot take the tax dollars back that the government uses for road maintenance if you don't have a car. There is a reason that you cannot take back the tax dollars the government uses for the fire company in order to install a sprinkler system in your house. In each of those cases, those tax dollars are being used for the good of the community and removing them for the benefit of individuals would hurt everybody. Our next Education Secretary must understand that the public school system benefits the collective, and that removing tax dollars for individuals hurts everybody in the same way.

Education is Constitutionally a state right. The federal government has a role to play, but our next Secretary of Education must end the practice of coercive unfunded mandate control over state education systems. This has become toxic in part due to lobbying from companies who are looking at their own financial interests instead of what's best for our students. While companies have gotten rich off standardized testing and selling Common Core aligned textbooks, our students have been subjected to increasingly more test prep and have had fewer opportunities to find the joy in learning.

The role of the Department of Education absolutely should be ensuring that the US Constitution is not being breached in schools that receive federal funding. This means that students should be protected from discrimination based on gender, disability, race, religion, or anything else. Students can't learn if they don't feel safe. Our Secretary of Education should be a champion for all students.

Our Education Secretary should have at least a Master's Degree in an education field. If a principal, someone who is in charge of running a school, is required to possess a Master's Degree in Educational Administration, it is fairly obvious that someone wishing to run the entire American educational system should have that level of education.

Within the Department of Education's influence, nobody has greater sway over student learning than teachers. Like any other professional, teachers are better at their job when they are supported, inspired, given autonomy to use their professional judgement, and empowered. Our next Secretary must be someone who understands this. Empowered teachers create empowered learners.

We must encourage our most talented youngsters to choose teaching as a profession. In 1971 close to 21% of American college freshmen were education majors. Now, that number is below 5%. The teaching profession has been decimated by a lack of respect and a lack of autonomy. Those who choose to teach do so because they want to make a difference and help our children thrive. When education policy makes it difficult for those who choose teaching to fulfill those goals, when salaries do not allow those who choose teaching to live in the districts where they teach or pay back their student loans, when those in power emphasize the few stories of bad teachers over the plethora of amazing stories of good teachers so that they can better meet political goals, our most talented youngsters are discouraged from teaching. The next Secretary of Education must be committed to reversing this trend.

Communication will be an important skill for our next Secretary to possess. Policy at the highest levels is nuanced and complicated. The leader of a federal department will have to be able to understand and articulate clearly those policies.

The best interests of America's students should be the primary driving force behind our next Secretary of Education's decisions. The person occupying this position should have no financial interests in education companies, for-profit entities, universities, private schools, or any other organizations that may influence his/her decision making. Our students deserve an unbiased Secretary looking out for their best interests.

Sometimes we need to look beyond our borders for solutions. The American public education system helped create one of the most innovative and knowledgeable civilizations in the history of the world. We are the only nation to put men on the Moon. College students from around the globe have flocked to American universities for decades because of our excellence. American teachers are among the most educated and respected on the planet. However, we must not be blind to the excellence happening in other countries, or unwilling to learn from those who have discovered solutions to problems we face. The Secretary of Education should be willing to look at countries like Finland, Canada, Singapore, and others to see what they are doing well and how we can incorporate their solutions into our system.

Being Secretary of Education is an overwhelming job that requires a lot of expertise and experience. There are plenty of more requirements that I could come up with that I did not list due to space limitations. I haven't even touched upon issues outside K-12 education such as the benefit of pre-K programs, the impact affordable college tuition would have on our country's prosperity, or several other issues. A strong public education system has been the backbone of our thriving, free society. We must choose a Secretary of Education who is committed to strengthening the cornerstone of our American democracy.

Edcamp USA at the US Department of Education

Let me start out this post with an apology. I should have shared more in the past few months. There have been many blog worthy events and topics that have presented themselves. Unfortunately, there have been so many of those opportunities that I've been too busy to write about them. As time went on, I felt like I had so many blog posts to write that I was a bit overwhelmed to even start catching up. And, so I didn't write.

As someone who preaches to others the importance of telling the positive stories in education, I am sorry that I didn't share some of the incredible things I see teachers and students doing around me.  Here are a few brief descriptions with links to catch you up on some of them:

• Our 4th grade students have been collaborating with 6th grade students in India to put together an awareness campaign to stop child labor in Asia and Africa
• The South Elementary School students wrote a school-wide collaborative book and recorded it digitally.
• Our 2nd graders had an amazing virtual field trip to Colorado to learn about snakes
• South Elementary students have visited many national parks, including Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, Yellowstone National Park, and Biscayne National Park
• The 4th and 5th grade chorus had the opportunity to participate in a 3-continent cultural and musical exchange with students in South Carolina, Venezuela, and Kenya via Skype
• Our 4th grade students learned about weather from meteorologist Gian Villamil and NASA/NOAA scientist Bill Brown.
• South Elementary students have started a "Distance Teaching" project in which they will teach students in Kenya using math materials we have here in Pennsylvania through short videos.  In return, Kenyan students will be teaching us Swahili. I just received word last week that I have been approved for a grant that will allow me to travel to Nairobi at the end of next school year to put together a documentary showing the learning gains by both groups of students as teachers and learners using this pedagogical model.
• 6 other organizers and I ran a very successful edcamp in Northeastern Pennsylvania in which amazing conversations, great professional learning, and excellent networking took place among teachers in the region.

There are other amazing things going on at school, but that list gives you some idea of the things we've been doing. Because of those projects, Skype in the Classroom took notice of our school and asked me to represent them at a media event in New York City last week, and at the Social Innovation Summit, which is hosted by the United Nations. Being able to share stories of the amazing things our students and teachers are doing in front of thousands of the most innovative problem solvers and do-gooders from around the world in New York is definitely one of my career highlights so far.

Edcampers gather for a group picture after #EdcampUSA

So, that brings me to Friday.  The US Department of Education and the Edcamp Foundation collaborated to bring teachers from around the country and policy makers from the Department together in an unconference format to improve education for the first time. There was overwhelming demand among teachers to get a free ticket to the event, and I was fortunate enough to get selected in the lottery. I am also grateful that my district agreed to allow me to take a professional day to attend.

Anyone who follows this blog or knows me understands that I have not always agreed with policy decisions coming out of the Department of Education.  I can honestly say that I did not have high expectations that USDOEd would put much weight into the ideas that teachers shared at this event, and I was a bit worried that they would use it as a publicity event instead of an opportunity to really hear what teachers are saying.  Reflecting back on the day, I believe that the Department was very interested in hearing what we had to say.  I know that policy changes slowly.  I'm not expecting RttT to end tomorrow due to our discussions, but I think this was a positive step forward.  Welcoming teacher input and inviting teachers into the building to have discussions with policy makers was a positive.

I was pleasantly surprised at the feedback I heard from those in the Department. Emily Davis, a Teacher Ambassador Fellow at the Department is amazing.  She spent the day attending sessions, providing input, and taking notes to pass along to others in DOEd. We need teachers like her in higher policy positions.  I know she is looking forward to getting back in a classroom, but voices like hers are needed in rooms where education policy is being decided.

Right before lunch, Ruthanne Buck, a Senior Adviser to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (who made a brief appearance in the morning) sat in on a session in which digital leadership was being discussed. She seemed very impressed with the quality of the ideas being discussed and debated.  I had the opportunity to talk with her over lunch about educator-led professional development like edcamps, the need for teacher voice to be heard by those in senior policy positions, and the need for our best teachers to have avenues into those top policy positions.  She was genuinely interested in finding ways to give teachers more influence, which was a pleasant surprise for me.

The discussions at this edcamp were excellent.  Unlike many of the other edcamps I have attended, the sessions were more geared toward bigger issues and action rather than classroom pedagogy and tools.  There's nothing wrong with the latter topics, but this venue called for deeper and larger thinking, and those in attendance definitely recognized that.  The first session I attended, entitled "We're here. Now What?" was a great discussion about taking action to improve education.  Another session on building digital leadership also talked about actions we can take to help develop leaders who will take risks, push back against poor policies, and share success stories.  Both of these sessions made me realize that I have been shirking my responsibility to blog about the good things happening in my small corner of the educational world. In addition to continuing to share the positive stories I encounter at speaking engagements, I committed to doing a better job of documenting those stories here on this blog.

At the end of the day I accomplished another goal of mine for the visit.  As part of the grant I mentioned above, I would like to do some professional development for teachers in the Kibera Slum of Nairobi (more about that in a future post), and work with the Kenyan Education Ministry to put on a STEM summit in which teachers from Kenya have the opportunity to share their best practices with me, and I, as a PAEMST awardee, get to share some of the best practices I've seen in the US in return.  Emily was kind enough to take me upstairs in the Department to the International Affairs Office (I'm not sure if that's the official title) to make a connection who will help me coordinate those activities.

At the end of the day we were asked to commit to blogging about the day and committing to action going forward on the things we discussed.  Here are my committments:

• I commit to blogging more often about the good I see around me in education
• I commit to developing the potential leaders around me to be voices for student-centered, learning-focused educational policy through graduate course offerings, professional development opportunities, encouragement, support, and by sharing their success stories with the media.
• I commit to fostering the connections I have made at the Department of Education, United Nations, National Science Foundation, the corporate world, and non-profit organizations doing social good to promote positive changes in education policy here in the United States, and internationally.