A couple of days ago, I got an email from Kevin Thurman at Tom Vilsack's Heartland PAC, inviting me to join a conference call with the governor and other education bloggers today at 10:30 AM. Like most teachers I know, I am usually, um, teaching at 10:30 in the morning. However, as you may have noted from my post below, today God (jeebus, mother nature, the cosmic forces that hold our universe together, the flying spaghetti monster, whatever) apparently wanted me to talk to Governor Vilsack.
So I called in.
For a while, it looked like I would be the only one to make it, but it turns out that Doug from Education at the Brink also got through, with three of his students in an advanced speech class. His write-up is here. (Kevin told me the call was recorded and he'd post a transcript online; when he does, I'll update.)
As we waited for Governor Vilsack, I furiously scribbled out my questions, and Kevin explained what the Heartland PAC is. The PAC is focused on electing and supporting Democratic governors in the 38 state races over the next fourteen months. They will do this, in part, by using a series of "conversations" to gather input from people all over the country who both have good ideas to contribute and seldom get to be a part of the conversation. Once the "conversations are finished and the ideas collected, they will be sent to the 38 Democratic candidates for governor, and maybe other office-seekers as well. As Vilsack writes on the PAC's website,
This interactive effort is a call to action for Democrats to regain the mantle as the Party of ideas and to inspire bold new public policy around the values of opportunity, security and responsibility. [. . . G]overnors have a dramatic impact on public policy, influencing people’s lives in dramatic ways and forecasting the political future for both parties for decades to come.This is the sort of effort I can get behind, especially given that, hey! I have good ideas and people never listen to me! But also because, as I told Gov. Vilsack, national and state-wide conversations about teaching and learning almost never include teachers.
None of this can be a reality without your ideas and your action. By electing new leadership at the state and local level, we pave the way to regain the majority status as a Party.
But to do this, we must close the idea and message gap. We invite you to become innovators and activists with us at Heartland PAC. Join the discussion, start your own discussions, and by doing so help us identify and develop the best ideas to share with candidates who want a different out come on Election Day.
The plan is to spend three or four weeks on education as the first of many of these "conversations" before moving on to discuss other topics of interest to candidates for governor. This week, unfortunately, is a week for discussing early childhood education, with elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education up in subsequent weeks. I don't know that much about early childhood education, though.
Governor Vilsack opened his part of the call with what sounded a lot like the Education Stump Speech, with a heavy emphasis on the potential competition American students face not just from each other but from developing countries. For every one university graduate in this country, Vilsack told us, there are three in China, and three more elsewhere in the developing world. That six-to-one ratio means that American students will be left in the dust if we remain complacent in this country about the quality of our educational system.
I got the first question--and at this point, I was confused about whether this conference call was part of the "conversation" or just about the conversation. At any rate, I got in a plug for the kind of self-organizing that some of us progressive education bloggers have been doing, specifically noting Joe Thomas's good work at pulling a group of us together to pool ideas and have a conversation that way. That Gov. Vilsack wants to tap into that same kind of grassroots, out-of-the spotlight discussion is a positive sign. It was here that I made my comment about teachers seldom being included in conversations about education policy.
Again, after I said that, the governor seemed to do some stumping, giving me a list of (quite good) things Iowa has done to improve, recruit, and retain quality teachers in Iowa's schools. I'll get back to this seeming stumpiness later.
Doug then asked about the testing mania that has gripped the country, and how we can get back to more authentic assessment (which was one of the questions I scribbled in haste before the call got going). Vilsack once again went to Iowa's success at using the Iowa Basic Skills Test flexibly under No Child Left Behind, and pointed out that only 90 of Iowa's 1000 public schools were in need of improvement. (By contrast, I think there may be 90 MPS schools alone on the list in Wisconsin . . .) But Vilsack did promote a three-point plan for moving away from standardized testing. First, he said, Americans need to understand those economic issues he talked about at the start of the call: If we are clearer on the impending economic juggernaut that is the developing world, we can get the idea that maybe this strong focus on testing is misplaced. Second, we need to develop stronger connections between students and their community. Finally, we need a focus on developing students' creativity and innovation in the early years, when they will profit most from the attention.
Finally, one of Doug's students asked a question about school prayer, which seems to be the focus of their speech class. Then the governor signed off, and I wandered off to lunch and a rare mid-afternoon chiropractic appointment.
As I thought about it after the conversation, my slight confusion from earlier returned: How does this conference call fit into the "conversation" plan? And, more importantly, how does the Heartland PAC fit into the next several election cycles? First of all, I didn't get to the list of concerns I had written at all--which is okay, I mean, the guy has a state to run--at least in part because there was a lot of stumping--which is also okay, since Vilsack is, after all, a politician, and that's what they do. But I never really felt like we got to the "conversation" part of the process.
Which is why I highly recommend the web discussions, instead; I think that part has the potential to be both quality and helpful to the Dem cause in 2006. I think the people putting the discussions know what they're doing and, assuming we participate, they will build some very good material.
However, the cynic in me is very aware that Tom Vilsack's name comes up often in talk about 2008. If he can help elect, through his Heartland PAC and projects like this one, a half-dozen or more Dem governors, he'll have lots of favors to call in. This may be why he spent a lot of time today talking up himself and what he's done, more than listening. We'll see.
At least now, should Vilsack be elected in 2008, I have an in for Secretary of Education . . .
Addendum: Here are the issues that I wanted to raise, but didn't have time to.
- Testing--how can we build support for authentic assessment, since we know that standardized tests don't work as well. (This is the question Doug asked.)
- There is, as I have shown here, a strong correlation between poverty and test scores, a correlation that exists regardless of per-pupil spending. Which ties into . . .
- Problems of environment--we can rearrange teachers, students, buildings all we want, but we're still teaching the same students with the same teachers. And we still only have these students for 18% of their lives or less between birth and age 18. Schools cannot overcome all the problems of environment.
- The threat of vouchers, always and everywhere.
- Funding--I never got the chance to ask Governor Vilsack how Iowa pays for all of the great things that they do. (If I had the time or the Google monkeys I could probably find out.)
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