Answer: Charter Schools, What-If's, and The Cranberries Debut Album

Question: What seemingly random but really connected stuff is flowing through my brain tonight?

I know what you are thinking: Alex Trebek just awarded me 200 under the category, "I have been eating crazy cakes while reading educational theory again." And now you are thinking of his mustache. Don't worry, it's natural, everybody does it.

If you are a Gen X’er like me, then you probably have heard of the Irish rock band The Cranberries. Their US debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?, hit the charts in a big way in the early 90’s. At that time I was just entering my 20’s and I remember often wondering at the story behind this particular LP title.

Almost 20 years later, I am again thinking of The Cranberries and that album title. This sudden reminiscing is the product of my recent visit to an urban charter high school. In Indiana, charters are still considered “alternative.” Basically, this means that in some way, shape, or form, these schools are different than our traditional township public schools. They are public, they are schools, but they are not playing follow-the-leader when it comes to education.

And because there is money involved, and it is tax money, there is a lot of controversy surrounding charters, especially in the Midwest. On this issue even a liberal educator can't count on tried and true political teams to help determine which side of the debate is right, left, or independent. It's kind of like this: imagine liberal and conservative lawmakers, teachers, administrators, and the unions as represented by the the main cast from the Gen X defining movie The Breakfast Club. I don't know who is what, you figure it out. In the final scene, everyone is lined up on the statehouse steps picking teams for a kickball game. First, the socially unacceptable and dirty poor kid gets picked by the popular cheerleader girl. Next up, the hottie quarterback picks the wallflower with bad hair, combat boots, and a serious nutritional deficiency. Finally, the nerd, custodian, and detention monitor dude decide to form some weird third party independent team. Anyway, they start out by playing what seems to be kickball (cue a Cranberries soundtrack that has not yet been recorded) and then, all of a sudden, and right before a vote is called on educational funding, they randomly start running in circles, yelling and screaming, creating new teams, and playing rugby. And through all of this, the public (who is, of course, the spectators) act like nothing weird is going on. No wonder I am visiting charter schools and loosing my mind. This kind of stuff is like the flame to my moth.

Usually when I go on these site visits, I get excited and energized and inspired. I covet the flexibility to create progressive learning spaces, course work, assessment practices, and scheduling options. On the flip side, I am always, without fail, depressed and disappointed at the lack of a school library or a good school library/information literacy program. If they even attempt a library, it kind of resembles an extra study hall room or a neglected supply closet. That kind of thing is not good for learning.

Think of what a library represents: equitable access to intellectual, academic, and interest based information, in multiple media formats, and provided regardless of a person's education, age, gender, race, or socioeconomic status. Now, think of the role of a teacher-librarian: information and knowledge organizer, user needs specialists, digital information expert, intellectual freedom advocate, defender of First Amendment rights, copyright and intellectual property knowledge base, professional researcher, avid reader, and teacher of information literacy. Think about it: what type of message does a school send when there is no library, or a neglected library, and no school librarian on staff? What would a school rather invest in anyway? How do these "other" things help foster an ongoing love of learning? Does a love of learning and the ability to independently think matter in this school?

I can't help it. I have to verbally paint a caricature of this scenario or I will explode. Behold, the picture of a school that does not have a solid library program.

In this scene, you will see a group of teachers who are both unknowingly and intentionally swapping copyright protected music with their students. Now they are running a full-length film festival themed around how Walt Disney got history all wrong in his movies. Clever, but dangerously illegal. And while they escape notice by the Feds for these activities, for now, something else wicked, and not so enjoyable, lurks just around the corner. Watch as this teacher runs to the staff workroom during the 11th hour to frantically copying class sets of material for today's course readings. Oh, but the school only owns a single copy of this textbook. Oh my, now the copyright police have show up, and the teacher is screaming something about fair use to plead his innocence. But it seems that only the intellectual property attorney know what "fair use" really means.

Watch the court proceedings now and how the defense attorney is laughing hysterically at the client before entering the court room. Why, what's the joke? It seems that the class set of illegal copies were made from a textbook full of outdated crap that no one wanted to buy in the first place. Clearly the teacher would have been better off letting the students using Wikipedia in the first place. Oh shoot, the judge just ruled in favor of the Texas based textbook company who will now use the summary judgment funds to build a new fundamental church of squeaky-clean, America-first ignorance (ouch, that one will get me some all-American hate-mail for sure).

In our next scene, we are back in the school where kids are having regular, unprotected, and simultaneous relationships with Facebook, Wikipedia, Google's search engine, and, (shudder) Fox News online. Everyone is "doing it" because the topic of informed prevention is uncomfortable for the all knowing adults. Without a school librarian, the school's "soft" policy becomes one of avoidance or abstinence, or both. Let's watch as these teachers passively avoid the subject, and the problem, by saying "the kids know more than we do about computers anyway, so what can we do." Can anyone say, "gag me with a cop-out?" And over in this classroom, a teacher who knows she does not have the resources or expertise to teach relevant and productive online strategies is afraid to admit it, begins a righteously preached sermon of Google abstinence.

Focus again on those darn young folks. No matter what, they are still finding ways to engage in promiscuous online research and social networking. Well of course they are gonna do it, they are teenagers for the love of Pete. And besides, if you look closely, all of the adults are all doing it too! Now for a commercial break about how mind-numbing anarchy leads to an information illiterate nation.

And don't even get me started on the print collection. Sigh, OK you got me started. Now we will take a tour of the school's supply closet, I mean, library. Here we see dogs and cats, living together, beside battered copies of "Go Ask Alice", and "Alice in Wonderland"on the "New Arrivals" shelf.

If you look over to your right, you will see that the full print set of World Book Encyclopedia circa 1991, donated by the principal's grandmother, is now being used to level some dangerously cheap bookcases. All of the set, that is, except for the "B" edition, which is missing, as if anyone would know anyway. This book was just cited as an authoritative source for a report on the 2000 presidential election. After all, the article did state that George Bush was in the running at the time of publication, but unfortunately no one noticed the lack of a W in this entry. To add insult to injury, the 24 year old new teacher who later saw this missing volume B laying on the floor next too the boy's restroom, decided to recommended it to a different student who was doing a report on the war in Iraq... You know, the Freedom one, not the Storm one.

And, no, please don't take this little vignette as permission to eliminate the need of a print collection. Ignoring the need to invest in paper books may sound cyber-savvy and fiscally conservative, but it does not help students become more information literate, for many reasons, but mostly because of digital equity.

What about digital equity? What does that even mean in a school without a strong library media program? What do teachers really know about digital equity? Are they thinking about this when they construct curriculum? Ok, one more scene before we wrap it up.

Let's take a closer look at the two students who used the outdated print World Book volume for research. They really only did this because they did not had a reliable computer or access to high speed internet at home. But you know those crazy teens, they like to pretend they have what everyone else does to avoid embarrassing social labels. Why do they have to be so darned predictable?

One of the students is allowed to leave the building with a school provided laptop, let's see him find free Wifi somewhere in the community. Great, he is resourceful! Watch as he sits at a McDonald's and starts to research the 2000 presidential election. One hour and one billion Google hits later, long after his large fries and coke are gone, the manager comes over and starts to provoke our poor student. Someone complained about a loitering teen boy, and that is just not good for business.

The other student finally talks a neighbor into giving her a ride to the public library. All of the public computers are full for two hours. When she does finally gets one, it kicks her off after an hour of searching wikipedia. But she just doesn't know enough about her topic yet! Another resourceful student, she tries to get a library card so she can check out the latest book on the Iraqi war. After all, she has been told by a teacher that the card is free! Due to budget cuts, the public library had to tighten their policies on borrowing materials. She is told that in order to get a card, she needs three forms of ID plus a parent present to sign for her, and they need three forms of ID as well, including a birth certificate that proves she is really their child. And yet, she is 17 and 6 months old. Oh well, so much for this public service.

Without at strong library and information literacy program, run by a certified and trained school librarian, you will find between the cracks, under the rocks, and in the dark corners of the school, intellectual Armageddon. Some charter schools are so darn close to getting it right, but for some reason, information literacy, libraries, and the importance of both, never make a blip on their radar. Charters will not realize their full potential, or even their potential half-life, if they don't invest in these programs.

I know, I like to sugar coat things rather than tell you how I really feel.

As you can see, these visits are pretty much bad for my mental health. I go a little bipolar and a lot manic for days afterward. I start writing crazy long blogs that look more like a treatise on educational socialism than an article. Being a teacher-librarian you would think that this feeling is old hat by now, but I have not become desensitized.

To cope with my discontent, I let myself get lost in questions, the kind that keep me up at night. Specifically, I start asking myself those great and terrible "what if’s." At least this last mess of questions provided material for:

Brunner's Bullet Points (cue The Cranberries music as my theme song today...)

• What if a secondary curriculum was specifically designed around inquiry-based teaching and learning, not some artificial linear method dictated through scheduling software, textbooks, and teacher-in-a-box programs?
  
  
• What if the assessment of student mastery in new concepts and skill development was based on individual growth and not some ass-backward design founded on the bell curve model?
  
  
• What if the curriculum reflected an organizational understanding of knowledge as abundance instead of knowledge as scarcity?
  
  
• What if schools were not trying to get students to trample one another in a metaphorical “race to the top” (of what I don't know, the top of a bunch of scan-tron sheets and number two pencils?), but instead were thoughtfully and methodically trying to guide students forward as they embark on a lifelong journey that will be fully discovered and explored along the way?
  
  
• What if there was a school defined purpose of education supporting global cooperation in learning and problem solving instead of a purpose that is based on some unfounded political blabber that we must prepare children to compete for vital, life saving resources in a terrifying cut-throat global marketplace? And BTW - if you believe this than you must also believe the collective political mindset that only scientists and mathematicians are important and will be able to finesse their way effectually through these difficult social issues (see also: sputnik circa 1950'ish) so if your student is a liberal arts major, they are screwed.
  
  
• What if creativity, cultural intelligence, authentic learning, social justice, and progressive intellectualism were valued above obedience, quotas, standards, sociopolitical power, natural physical abilities, and short term memorization skills?
  
  
• What if all students were expected to learn how to independently organize, find, and creatively apply information through problem solving instead of being expected to learn how to finish a series of preordained tasks quickly within strictly measured time frames?
  
  
• What if students were encouraged to communicate and negotiate with adults while learning to choose their own academic goals instead of being expected to compliantly fail when they don’t agree with or understand goals set before them by people they don’t know?
  
  
• What if secondary students were not only given a choice in where they learned, but also how they learned, what they learned, and who taught them?
  
  
• What if the collective needs and expectations of the school, township, state, national, and global communities could somehow be balanced with the need to empower and honor the individual learner?
  
  
• What if the school was a living, breathing part of the community, not an isolated series of brick and limestone buildings that lock the kids in and the world out?
  
  
• What if the local community knew that the best secondary education ensures teen students will be seen and heard in the community on a regular basis, Monday through Friday, between the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.? What if teens believed they were expected, supported and welcomed in their communities?
  
  
• What if the school building was a sacred learning space, a physical sanctuary, and was open and available to students based on their real world schedules?
  
  
• What if intentional social and academic learning did not stop after the school doors were locked, but continued on in a safe and authentic virtual learning space?
  
  
• What if teachers were practicing administrators and administrators were practicing teachers and everyone had direct responsibilities for teaching students and no one at in a closed office most of the day?
  
  
• What if schools were run like a democracy, and administrators, teachers, and students shared power and decision making responsibilities?
  
  
• What if the teachers were trusted by the politicians, the community, and their administrators and were given academic freedom like their colleagues in colleges and universities?
  
  
• What if professional development, quiet reading time, original research, and collaborative planning were required to happen during the regular work day instead of being something “extra” and expected to be accomplished outside of a teacher's job description?
  
  
• What if building and maintaining relationships with a manageable sized group of students that stayed together for 4 to 6 years was not only a “good idea” in secondary education but part of the school’s best practices?
  
  
• What if a school defined a “highly qualified teacher” as someone who could articulate and demonstrate how they have succeeded in fostering a classroom culture that loves and respects learning for the sake of learning, instead of giving that title to those who are assigned to students that will naturally produce the highest test scores, achieve the best attendance rates, and collect the least amount of discipline referrals?
  
  
• What if a school community could take for granted that they would always have an excellently funded print and digital library, managed by a teacher-librarian who provided equitable and free access to library materials while teaching students, teachers, and staff how to find and use information?
  
  
• What if being technically literate was an expectation for everyone in the school, and in turn, the school was expected to continuously support the ongoing development of technical literacy by investing in up-to-date hardware and software?
  
  
• What if a school was built on a foundational layering of social justice, democracy, tolerance, collaboration, and individual freedom for each and every person in the building?
  

So, what if?

Most charter schools around me were organized and are run from a business model perspective. Others are run on a social platform and tied to the NFP or service agency who founded the school. I only know of one specific charter in my city and state (although there may be some I have yet to discover) that was founded, organized, and is currently run by professional educators. I know of none, anywhere, that have been founded, organized, and run by teacher-librarians.

So, this is how and why the title of The Cranberries debut album came back to me after my recent visit to a charter school. I use it here as a question for progressive educators, and especially progressive school librarians.

Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?

Inquiry Keeps Me From Doing the Dishes

I found an Edu 2.0 site I love. Actually, it is a 2.0 of a lot of things site. Actually, I didn't really "find" it, I followed my yellow brick road of inquiry of which journey began with a posting through an ISTE group that I joined. If you are not a member of ISTE, and you actually read my blog, you should join (no, they didn't pay me to say this). AAAANNNYWAY, here are the footsteps of my own random inquiry model.

1. I received an email post from Bonnie Bracey, who is the chair of the ISTE Digital Equity special interest group (see: bit.ly/9Q7nTk). I read said posting.
2. Her email included a link to a blog article about teacher empowerment and the digital divide, and as I am very interested in both topics, I followed this link (http://oreil.ly/blF6t2)
3. The link led me to the an article posted by Lucy Gray, who writes about ed 2.0 for the O'Reilly Radar (see: http://radar.oreilly.com/).
4. This site was so interesting that I mentally filed away the article in the "to read now or maybe later" and bookmarked it so I didn't forget.
5. I clicked around for a while, (while thinking "man I want to write for this site") saw the edu 2.0 link, click on it, and again landed on an article by Ms. Gray.
6. This article was published today and was about the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report: 2010 K-12 Edition, of which publication Ms. Gray sits on the advisory board (see: http://blogs.oreilly.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/10544).
7. I began to read the 40 something page report, well, because she asked me to (well she asked her readers to) and she also asked for comments. I could not resist, and it was time for a new blog entry anyway.
8. I, being an awesome librarian and research, skimmed the table of contents of the report, read the sections that were most interesting to me, and wrote a comment.
   
9. I have included the comment below, but please read her article and at least skim the document. It is worth your time. For my blog, I have fixed many typos but not for my comment to her post (lord I wish blog comments could be edited). So, no worries about me quitting my day job to blog for O'Reilly Radar since I clearly would have to pay my own personal editor.
10. Oh, I also bookmarked this page, and shared it through various social networks.

Not a full inquiry cycle, but you see how it goes...

My comment:

"From what I have read so far, I can appreciate this and other published documents by this group as being helpful for school librarians (like me) and other forward thinking tech educators. Many of us are currently attempting to work within traditional public school districts to integrate authentic information literacy standards (see: http://bit.ly/9RkbIG) through professional development and modeling instructional practice.

Specifically, I was drawn to the "Critical Challenges" section with regards to digital literacy (top of pdf page 7). Please accept these comments as an insider who teaches in a large urban high school.

One of the main roadblocks for information literacy integration in secondary education is a misguided internet phobia (especially 2.0) on the part of decision makers. They are concerned about what harmful content "may potentially" be accessed during the school day. What occurs then is excessive filtering put in place by network administrators who are not educators, and/or, for whom it is much easier to block web-based tools using prefab software settings. Instead, they should trust the professionals (school librarians and tech savvy classroom teachers) with the opportunity to teach students how to use 2.0 ethically, productively, and safely .

When pressured for more open access, the argument soon centers around E-Rate, legal counsel advice, and the inability of IT to differentiate filter settings by age and grade of the user. More often than not, teachers are blocked from content as well, or have very limited access to 2.0 through time restricted override authentication. I won’t begin to address how troubling this is when considering the social, college, and workplace readiness of our digital divide students.

From mentoring and collaborating with new and pre-service teachers, it is clear that even these “almost” digital natives are not arriving to the field of teaching as digitally literate educators. There doesn’t seem to be any recognition of 21st century learning or ISTE standards in undergrad, graduate, and administrative programs at the university level.

Considering the economic climate, the integration of cloud computing and outsourcing of the “business of Information Technology” seems to me a no-brainer. I think schools are wasting so much money forking over millions annually (per school) for licensing alone. The instructional technology integration can, in my opinion, be handled very effectively and efficiently. However, again, many of my peers are not able to get far with their advocacy. I suppose this problem could be a simple matter of innovation potentially disrupting the sustainability of highly paid positions held by those with a mindset entrenched in decades of tradition? For sure, there is not enough power sharing where decisions of technically innovative methods are concerned.

What is having the most impact on the tech ed market right now is online learning environments. As a progressive educator, I see so much potential in this border-less learning space. As a researcher and scholar, I use PLN’s and as many social tools as possible. However, here is the reality. For-profits are making huge profits by replacing teachers with packaged software programs. School buildings and virtual schools alike are becoming “credit mills” that rely on low level thinking and testing skills. Fewer teachers equal more money to acquire an ungodly number of licenses and to increase the pay of administrators. What I hope to see soon is more open access courses created by quality educators that can be accessed and applied easily by teachers and learners alike. Again, this may be difficulty as it would threaten the stability of traditional K-12 organizations and the bottom line of corporate educational publisher of content and software.

Consequently, I am wondering within your implementation guidelines if you will more thoroughly discuss team based decision making and collaborative integration. Will this be a top down approach, or grassroots? Will you strive to work with University Education programs? Who will be on that team? If your team decides to take a pragmatic/human approach to implementation, please don’t forget to include school librarians (media specialists). We are information specialists and teachers by training, and have a lot of offer, especially when looking at how best to organize and search for 2.0 content, and apply it through inquiry based learning."

Good lord! Does everything I write end up as a stump speech?

Some women have shoes in every color, The YA Librarian has a soap box in every color. It's what I do...

Read the report and tell Ms. Gray what do you think. And, you might want to make sure you proof read it, or she might think I posted under another name.

Still Mucking Around

As I consider my discontent further, and try to find my road to research, I am thinking back on three pieces of advice I have gotten recently.

The first was from my husband (who clearly didn't coin this phrase, but I first heard it from him). He was not talking about public education, but investing in the stock market, which requires a good amount of research in order to be successful.

Invest in what you know.

I would also include ...what you love, and ...what most interests you. At this stage in my life I think all three pretty much connect in one form or another. Please just take my word for it and do NOT make me illustrate with a Venn Diagram. God I hate Venn Diagrams.

I would also argue that a person cannot really and truly "know" something unless they experience this "thing" first-hand on a daily basis (except of course on school vacations and other major holidays...).

This piece of advise is really common sense, but I guess I don't have a whole lot because I needed to hear it. Why would I spend time concentrating on anything else when I will be investing my time, money, and my soul (I think this is a requirement of admissions to a doctoral program) for this research.

So, by following my husband's advice and defining what "know" really means to me, I have narrowed my focus professionally (not personal, my family would be at the top every time) to the short list below (in random order).

High School Education
Library Science
Information Science (including web 2.0)
Literature
Writing (Probably what I know the least but it is more than a passing interest and I am actively involved)

I know a little about cooking, playing guitar and piano, and knitting, but not enough to warrant giving away too much of my time, money, and soul to further my investment. Maybe someday I will be a one woman band while whipping up a souffle and knitting sweater vests, not probably not in the next 100 years.

The second piece of advise was given to me, at different times, by two of my professors at Butler University (Shelly Furuness and Jody Britten).

Isolate the things about your work as a High School Teacher-Librarian that trouble you, that you feel are just not right, then decide if you want to change it.

Notice they didn't say "then decide if you can change it." As master teachers they did not limit my creative problem-based thinking by undermining my confidence. All learners can do that just fine on their own. What learners need is someone to believe in them. I digress...

So, how could I make change? I could stick around where I currently work and try to be a change agent at my school. Or, I could identify other educational environments that are more in-line with my academic ideology and have already implement changes, or are on their way. Regardless, I still need to narrow my focus on those things that rub me the wrong way.

Some people would say that I have another option: leaving the profession. Don't get me wrong, I do have those fantasies of leaving in early June and forgetting to come back in August. I could work at Starbucks (yummm, soy vanilla latte) or work in a Book Store (yummm, soy vanilla latte and that new book smell). I think all teachers AND librarians have at one time or another.

I didn't include leaving as an option because being a YA Teacher-Librarian is not a J.O.B. but a calling. Even if I didn't need the money (which is in no way lucrative or even desirable for most people with my level of education) I am not sure I would be happy doing anything else, at least not in this stage of my life.

The third piece of advise came from Dr. Britten about two months ago.

Articulate why these things are wrong and how you should make changes to the power holders in a way they could understand and not ignore.
Basically, beat them down with it. Leave no room for someone to come along and say, "Brunner does not know what she is talking about." One of my dreams is to start a free public charter school. When I look at research and learning strategies, I always see things through this lens. What would MY school do differently. Even if I was CEO and Principal of a new school, I would still have to answer to many people.

So, in short I am working on articulating what I think is wrong and then the why and how these things can be changed.

The what will come from mostly from my own organic experiences (invest in what you know).

The the why and how will come mostly from those who are much smarter than me and have hopefully done some of the work. (content area professionals, education researchers, master teachers, and proactive librarians) and those that will have the most to gain or to loose from my work.

Often times in education we forget ask the end users key questions: What do you want? What would make things better? What can we do for you? What are your goals?

In my case, the ultimate end users who could benefit or not from my work are are my students, current and future. Second on the list are high school educators including other YA teacher-librarians. Third, the community at large. Every citizen, domestic or global, has a stake in public education.

Tomorrow, what "I" think is wrong and should be changed in public high schools today.