Promising Words from the New TUSD Supe

by David Safier

I haven’t written about Elizabeth Celania-Fagen, the new Tucson Schools Superintendent, because nothing I’ve read until today gave me any idea who she was. Her op ed in today’s Star, A new direction for TUSD, actually says something, and I like what I hear.

Celenia-Fagen writes that the schools have to change with the changing needs, and changing skills, of their students. “The traditional assembly-line school system” no longer makes sense, she writes, and here’s why:

Digital natives are physiologically different than we were and we are. They literally have brain abilities we do not have: If you need proof, challenge a teenager in a video game or watch him multi-task. You have probably seen a teenager text message, instant message, surf the net, do their homework, and listen to their iPod and thought to yourself, “There is no way.”

Well, there is a way. They have the brain that gives them the ability. So consider this, if you could do three or more things at once successfully and did most of the time, how would you feel about doing one thing at a time and especially if that one thing happened to be something that, as far as you could see, will never benefit you? That is the current life of a digital native in an “old-school” classroom where there is lecture coupled with memorization and regurgitation of facts.

If you can Google any fact in a matter of seconds on your mobile phone, why do you need to memorize facts? Again, this is the perspective of the digital native. Their world is filled with facebooks, wikispaces, and other fascinating items.

That’s very good stuff coming from someone heading up an urban school district, or any U.S. school district for that matter.

Celania-Fagen has her work cut out for her. It’s one thing to acknowledge the changing reality of the students’ worlds. It’s another thing altogether to transform our schools to fit those needs. I was part of what was supposed to be a major educational shift in the late 60s and early 70s when I began teaching. Most of what I saw were bursts of creative energy that were eventually swallowed up by educational inertia. Some of the positive efforts made small changes in the educational system, but things really aren’t all that different from when I was a K-12 student in the 50s and 60s.

I hope Celania-Fagen doesn’t give me a call asking me to suggest how to educate the new generations of children working their way through the school system (not that I think there’s much chance of that happening). Change of that sort is a young man and woman’s game. I’m pretty skilled at reading and writing. I’m good with a blog, hell on wheels with email and can design and maintain a respectable website. But I know nothing about the insides of video games, wikis, Facebook pages and a bunch of other stuff I don’t even know enough about to name.

And that’s one of the problems with changing education to meet the needs of students. Teachers and administrators are part of past generations, and generally they wield power based on their age, meaning that the ones who make the major decisions tend to be the furthest away from the current zeitgeist. (That’s why Celania-Fagen’s relative youth is an encouraging sign to me, because it puts her a little closer in age and experience to the students.) Educators can try to understand and use the changing mind patterns of youth, but it often comes off like a minister walking into a bar and trying to sound like one of the guys, a white guy trying to talk “black,” or a square trying to sound “hip.” It rings false.

How do teachers trained to be “the sage on the stage” deal with the need to admit their ignorance about the way the world works and how to convey it to their students? It’s not an easy task. It can only be a limited success. But teachers and administrators have to try if they want to be effective.

I wish Celania-Fagen the best. She’s making a tough job tougher by trying to do something more than make the status quo work a little better than it does now. But the only administrators I ever respected were the ones who worked too hard and drove themselves crazy trying to accomplish the impossible. Hell, that’s what good teachers do in their classroom. Why should I expect any less of administrators?

Good luck, Supe!