This morning I watched the standards based report card video for parents from the Hawaii Dept. of Education. Kudos to the DOE for providing a parent video and for providing an informative website.

But OMG.

The design sucks. The DOE shouldn’t be in the design business.

Any adult should be able to understand and use first grade standards. First grade is not that hard.
But I don’t understand what the standards in the report cards mean and I have an M.A., I have extensive experience as a parent, and I’ve tutored many many kids.

Over the last months, I’ve been translating Hawaii standards from “Students will. . .” to “I can. . .” It takes real research to translate them into simple language. If I can’t understand them, how can a parent who hasn’t finished high school be expected to understand them?

The other problem is that, whether a child is ready or not, school and the report card marches on. If a child doesn’t get his times tables down in third grade, then how is it going to show up in fifth grade, when the standards have moved on? Once the child is behind, the child, parents, and teachers can’t see what the child really knows and doesn’t know.

Check out the writing standards under language arts for fourth graders. Those standards are ongoing challenges for accomplished adult writers–and they won’t show up again in eighth grade standards.

It’s time for a child-centered system that children and parents can understand and that simplifies our teachers’ workload. It’s time for a system that is lifelong, K through gray.

It’s time for a system that can help Hawaii achieve economic, energy, and food self-sufficiency.

Proctor & Gamble offers eSaver, a coupon site. You can track your running progress on Nike’s site. It’s cool stuff.

The ante has been raised.

Before not only did you have to produce and deliver what you do very well, but you had to come up with your unique brand. Now you can’t just put up an ad with your unique brand, you have to create your unique “meaningful digital strategy.” Now you have to hire a team of geniuses to create a “value-added” product to sell your real product.

In your spare time. With your spare money.

But wait!

You don’t have to come up with your own “meaningful digital strategy” because icanology is one.

Icanology offers meaningful solutions, meaningful connections, and meaningful achievement. It is an easy way to give others an experience of what you know and can do. It’s an easy way to give them the tools and reasons to hire you, use your products, or fund your cause.

Which leads me to an early morning flash: Maybe icans aren’t enough. Should there also be a wecanology? Maybe “wecans” could help teams describe what they can do. Hmmm. . .

He hasn’t gotten much of a response because education as a system can’t be innovated. Schools, designed like factories, are set up to maintain order and reject change

The few responses have been about innovations in the way that teachers are thinking about teaching students. Gardner’s intelligences and recognizing learning disabilities may be important but they aren’t school innovations. They are tacked on to school as we know it.

Arne Duncan’s reform is just more of the same.

The new book, Disrupting Class , describes the potential for education innovation from the view of how innovation has worked in business.

Real innovation is going to come out of the corner of our public eye. It’s going to be free, community-driven, paradigm-shifting, and disruptive.

Yong Zhao lays out the problem of national standards and testing beautifully in his blog post Arne Duncan’s Mistaken View of Education and NCLB.

No Child Left Behind is a topdown, industrial response to postindustrial problems.

Icanology is a postindustrial solution that will make the old system seem what it is:  archaic and inhumane.

And it’s simple:

Restate the standards into icans. Let anyone write icans and attach, comment on and rate resources. Create icanographs of subjects.  Let each person grow lifelong icanographies, personal pages for sharing and archiving icans earned, endorsed, written, etc.

Teachers can generate instant reports. Assessment becomes what educators call “authentic.” Evidence of accomplishment can be easily linked to icans.

Children and their parents can clearly see the gap between what is expected and what has been earned. They can find many ways to fill that gap.

Children can also leap ahead. They can tackle a reading list with book reports or move through a math level on their own.

They can get credit for work on multidisciplinary projects in other settings. A 12-year-old who produces a radio show for the Paia Youth and Cultural Center may earn icans for technology skills, language arts, civic action, and working with others.

Essential skills not honored in school, skills like caring for the very young and elderly, doing housework, working at a job, and behaving ethically, can be articulated and recognized. Endorsements for icans earned can come from teachers, librarians, youth center staff, and other community members.

If we get icanology right, it will go viral, from teacher to teacher, school to school, person to person, organization to organization.

Eventually more reliable data will emerge. Our measures of success will change. Maybe a new list of “standards” will shake down.

Most important, we will be positive about all learning. All will move forward and no one will be behind.

Of course trust is an essential ingredient to successful social systems. But school improvement is not as simple as that.

The prevailing view of education is classically industrial. The problem is always scarcity so we need more. If only we had more hours in school, more homework, more expertise, more parent involvement, more testing, more creativity, more risk-taking, more trust. . .

But the results of more are causing the problems.

5-year-olds attend full days of school and are assigned homework to meet academic standards, even when we know that play is essential to development.

12-year-olds are bussed from their neighborhoods into large centralized schools, have 6 courses with 5 to 6 sets of homework from 6 teachers who each have 120+ students, even when we know that preteens search for new identities and roles that require positive social interaction and adult support.

Although 15-year-olds require 10 to 12 hours of sleep a night and three meals and two snacks a day, they miss breakfast to catch buses as early as 7, start school at 8, eat junk at recess, eat lunch at noon, work or do sports after school, and have hours of homework at night. We blame their poor attitudes on “hormones” while their schedules are illegal in a workplace.

Teachers are required to teach to the standards, but children simply aren’t standardized. Despite our teachers’ often heroic efforts, the system creates “behind.”

Our 30% national high school dropout rate—50% for minorities–is a crisis and a shame.

All of the energy, time, talent and resources can’t evolve a system designed, like a factory, to maintain order and prevent change.

Dr. Flanagan ends her post with “Our national values are spread out before us for re-examination. Individual gain vs. public good? Free markets vs. effective regulation? Me and mine vs. you and yours.”

But can we blame parents when they seek a better way?

The problem isn’t our national values. The problem is that the education system is not aligned with our values.

Further support of and enforcement of this system not only won’t work. It’s inhumane.

The question isn’t “How can we build trust?” The question is “Is there another way?”

Is there a new system, one that supports teachers, students, and parents, one that is more aligned both with our values and with how so many of us are learning today?

The answer is yes.

A hallmark of industrial thinking is that we can only change if we are all “on the same page,” all moving in the same direction, all trusting each other. But new social systems, like Wikipedia and craigslist.com don’t work like that at all. They start among a few, at first distrusted by many, and then grow exponentially until they are part of our cultural fabric.

That’s how our new system is going to emerge. It won’t be a learning system or an education system. It will be something else.

I’m betting on icanology.

Information is in the air, available everywhere. I’m learning all the time. For me, personally, school is too slow, time-consuming, and expensive. The old teacher/learner, expert/curriculum/training models are too inefficient.

My concerns have become: How can I capture and share my learning? How can I verify it? How can I build a reputation built on this learning? How can I find people who want to learn together with me? How can I best make a difference with what I’ve learned?

I predict that new systems, like icanology, will answer those questions. They will emerge like Google, Wikipedia, and the Obama campaign, out of the corner of our public eye, until they become business as usual.

If not in 2010, at least by 2011.

I checked “other” and then commented about not fitting into any category.

Nancy, my dear friend and personal whistle-blower, is going to roll her eyes after reading this–I’m always trying to be special. Well, icanology is special and I took the opportunity to say so. And Twitter made it possible.

But Nancy’s right. Creating community is pointing out how other people and projects are special. Which is what Twitter is all about.

Here are ten reasons why I love Twitter:

1. It connects me to people and groups who are thinking in interesting ways and doing interesting things.

2. It jogs my brain. My favorite tweets  are about thoughts, ideas, and new projects.

3.  It’s an instant knowledge/social/cultural update.  On a good day, it’s an instant upgrade.

4. It keeps me current in much more interesting and diverse ways than print and news services ever could.

5. It lets me live and work geographically and socially on the fringe of things.

6. It keeps me in the stream of, and sometimes even in the thick of, global events and movements.

7. It feels good. I occasionally get pleasantly surprised. I often get inspired.

8. It’s grounding. Some people complain that it’s a distraction but it’s fairly easy to eliminate “went to the beach” and “doing my laundry” types of tweets. Then it’s distracting like a newspaper is distracting.

9. It’s fast and efficient. I don’t have to follow the Education Week blog. I can skim their summary and link when I want to. I can find great blog entries from recommendations.

10. It’s low maintenance and obligation-free. It doesn’t ask anything from me. I can ignore it. I don’t have to use it for days, then when I get back to it, it’s still okay.

Oh, and you can follow icanology on Twitter here.

Icanology is social enterprise startup in Makawao, Maui, Hawaii. http://icanology.com
We are seeking three interns asap through the summer, and, if available, part of September.

Work full-time and play part-time in an exceptionally beautiful setting. Under the direction of an experienced web designer, develop a project that can transform education.

We supply a shared cottage on a 5-acre Makawao estate with a swimming pool, $100/week for food, a shared car, and airfare from the West Coast reimbursed on a scale over 2 months (no free vacations!)

Qualifications: CSS, Javascript (jQuery,Prototype, etc.), Ruby/Rails, Python/Django, PHP etc. relational and/or non-relational databases and related technologies.
Some experience or knowledge of “semantic web” concepts is a plus.

You must be a team player. Clean. Upbeat. Motivated to change the world.

Please email your questions, resume and 3 references to lynnras@gmail.com

Her list of complaints about university education:  oversimplifications of civic engagement; idealization of the expert; fragmentation of knowledge; emphasis on technical mastery; and neutrality.

In other words, while the world falls apart, efforts at saving it are considered naive and unprofessional.

Meanwhile, the big questions aren’t seriously pursued by universities, but they are vigorously pursued by fundamentalists. Great.

Nowhere is the result of the university disconnect seen more prominently than in the Department of Education.

Yesterday Education Week blogged about 46 states agreeing to jump on board with nationalizing grade level standards. From the perspective of the current system, it makes sense. Why have 50 different versions of the same thing?

But who is challenging the underlying reasoning of the standards themselves?

While No Child Left Behind is strengthened, a nation of teachers witness the systematic creation and destructive results of “behind.”

Parents and grandparents deal with the stress of young children faced with long academic days, more homework, and  3 weeks of testing every April.

But they are all in a Catch-22.

If they aren’t supporting standards, then they aren’t with the new Obama program. Aren’t they up to the challenge?

But we aren’t just looking at standards. We’re looking at standardization of children. As if people are standardized. As if people all learn the same things at the same rates at the same time. As if these standards represent the real learning required to make it in this world.

Because teachers must teach to the standards, any deviation into creativity risks that they aren’t doing their job. And their job is directly correlated to the test scores of their students. And those results are soon going to be a matter of public record.

But their protests are discounted. Don’t they want to be accountable? Don’t they think that children should be working to standards? What are they afraid of? Can’t make the grade themselves?

My hairdresser refused to send her 5-year-old to a kindergarten that expects full-day attendance emphasizing academics, with one hour a day on mathematics and then homework.

Although she’s not a Christian fundamentalist, her child’s going to a private, relatively-inexpensive Christian school because at least they let 5-year-olds  play.

I am a total Obama supporter. I think Arne Duncan is exceptional. But the Obamas and Duncan are wildly successful products of the current industrial system. As fabulous as they are, they can’t see beyond the current system. They need our help.

Where are the protesters?

As a life and professional coach, I feel sorry for our teachers. I like the new administration’s energy but in many ways it’s more of the same:  more money, higher standards, more assessment, more parent involvement, and (my guess) more homework for kindergarteners. But, most of all, it’s even more work for teachers.

Teachers are asked not just to teach a curriculum. They are expected to design curricula around content and performance standards and then evolve their curricula  as they go. They are asked to continually learn on the job and at the same time increase their students’ outcomes. They are being asked to not only become great teachers but to reinvent what teaching is.

And now they are going to be publicly graded on their performance.

With only 24 hours in a day, teachers, like all of us, face massive personal demands. They have their own children and aging parents to care for; bodies, homes, and cars to maintain; relationships to nurture; financial decisions to make; and communities to contribute to.

The old systems of support–schools, hospitals, churches, businesses, governments, and more–are undergoing massive change and teachers are in the front line.

Teachers need our help!  We all need help!

The solution is not more of the same.

Icanology has the capacity to not only support schools, students, teachers, and parents where they are now, but also help them evolve the system in the act of using it.

Icanology can help the Obama administration expand and then reach a new vision for learning, one that makes sense for all of us and for this century.