TECHNOS—Jamie McKenzie, Ed.D.

July 20, 2008

Jamie McKenzie, Ed.D., Editor of From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal and Educational Writer, Speaker, and Consultant

Jamie McKenzie has been active in the education field for nearly 40 years, beginning as a social studies and English teacher, moving into leadership positions as a principal and superintendent, and then into the directorship of libraries, media, and technology in the Bellingham, Wash., public schools. For the past decade, Jamie has been a full-time speaker, writer, and consultant, presenting and conducting educational workshops in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. He is a prolific writer, publishing books, articles, and Web sites and “zines” such as From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal, No Child Left, and The Question Mark. His major themes include increased commitment to professional development for teachers; strong advocacy for the development of critical thinking, deep questioning, and authentic learning for students; and the use of new technologies to transform classrooms and schools. Educated on the East Coast, Jamie now lives in Seattle and travels the world sharing his mantra of “complexity.” Technos caught up with him recently between trips to Paris and Minnesota.

Technos: What is the title of your new book?

J.McK.: It’s called Leading Questions: Managing Complexity in the Public and Private Sectors, and I’ve been taking orders for it online for a while. It’s at the printer now and will be available for shipping very soon.

I saw the Table of Contents online and realized your Chapter 17 is called “Interviewing”!

I’m glad you didn’t get a chance to read it before you called. This will be a more comfortable interview if you haven’t read the chapter.

Well, let’s give it a go…

Let me start: I’m very excited because I will be giving a keynote address at the National Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference [Nov. 30–Dec. 2, San Diego] this year. Having begun my professional life as a social studies teacher, I attended that conference for many years—and it’s exciting for me to be invited back to present the Keynote. In the late years of one’s career, that’s a great honor.

Congratulations! I understand that your topic will be “The Brave New Citizen”—can you give us a little preview of some of the points you’ll be making in your talk?

I think we’ve gone through a couple of decades with various companies and powerful people pushing new technologies, and some of that’s been really beneficial for the culture, but it has actually undermined the quality of thought and the rigor with which people approach questions and thought. So, we end up with Wikipedia becoming a major source now for a lot of people. It being written by you, me, and our neighbor’s daughter, this calls into question the issue of where we find reliable information. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term “Wiki-Lobbying” from the Colbert Report—Stephen Colbert coined the phrase to refer to what happens when a company like Microsoft pays someone to go into Wikipedia to modify articles that they find aren’t sufficiently appealing. So, the truth is kind of for sale to the highest bidder who has the best marketing and P.R. skills.

So that’s what’s happening with Wikipedia.

Well, yes. There have been some very interesting articles in the NewYork Times about how the IP numbers of those who make changes to Wikipedia can be tracked—and it turns out that many of those people work for the CIA and Wal-Mart and other big organizations who can afford to monitor the site. So, that’s what my speech is about: Let’s be discerning in the way we deal with information and not just get on the bandwagon that everything digital is good.

In fact, I’m writing an article right now contesting the notion that there is something called a “digital native”—that term is very popular with educational technology people, and was part of the title of an article by Marc Prensky, [“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”]. I find this whole thing really offensive, because he sets up essentially a battle between the generations, as if there is some incredible, wonderful benefit to having grown up with things digital and that all the old folks are out of it and have no chance because they didn’t grow up with it. But I disagree and think that being “digital” could actually be a form of deprivation. So that a kid is sitting at a table in a restaurant playing on his GameBoy instead of having a conversation with his parents, that’s not necessarily a benefit.

My presentation for the social studies conference deals with these issues of citizenship—how do we raise citizens to understand the world and make smart choices? If you go to CNN.com on any given day, you’ll see that 90 percent of the articles are about entertainment and celebrities, but so-called legitimate news has dropped off the screen. How do students even know what’s happening in their world?

I’m quite concerned about issues of growing artificiality in the culture. It’s one of my problems with the idea that a digital native is some form of advantaged person. I don’t see kids playing outside as much, running in the woods—I see them inside more, deprived of a lot of sensory experiences; they’re over-scheduled and there’s a lot going on that puts kids in a passive, entertained position rather than being active. These are things to be concerned about. I believe that kids’ imaginations are more likely to develop if we put them in situations that provoke and nurture imagination as opposed to spoon-feeding them and entertaining them all the time. I think these are very important challenges for parents in this culture, to raise a child who still has an active imagination.

You’ve written a lot about questioning—asking the “deep questions” to get below the surface information, as opposed to just accumulating knowledge.

It’s interesting, because Alvin Toffler wrote about three levels as he talked about going from data to information to knowledge — and I never liked the word “knowledge”; I would use the word “understanding” instead. “Knowledge” always sounded like some sort of inert matter to me, as if someone could pour knowledge into my head. And I think that’s part of what’s been wrong with schools — the idea of pouring knowledge into kids’ heads. What’s wrong with that is we’re not teaching kids to develop their own independent understanding, to make up their own minds about the really difficult questions in life. As citizens, they’ve got two choices: They can either read or listen to a particular columnist and decide that’s how they’re going to vote and not bother with the thinking part; or they have to struggle through the difficult questions and wade through all the information to decide which candidate is the best to vote for. They should be thinking about their priorities and their values and really making an informed, independent choice. Unfortunately, the drift of the culture is towards a term I’ve coined, “MentalSoftness™”—going the easy path and letting others think for you.

I’m just wondering if you’ve ever edited entries in Wikipedia?

With pride, I can say: Yes, I have. I have a Web site called NoChildLeft.com, and I’ve been a very strong opponent of the law for a long time and am offended by its impact—which is that poor kids in particular are getting double and triple doses of math and reading to the detriment of other courses and which I see as fundamentally undemocratic. At any rate, just to see what it was like, I went to the article about the No Child Left Behind Act at Wikipedia and I added two statements about the activities of a group of Republicans who at the time were criticizing the law because it basically trampled on local control of education. They let my change stand, but within the next month Wikipedia posted a comment that there had been so much controversy about that article, they were shutting down the editing of it. I use this as an example in my speeches of how stupid Wikipedia is, because if they’d allow someone as biased and outspoken as me to make changes to their articles, it challenges the wisdom of the entire system.

You’ve written about the well-meaning Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation money going to the Small Schools Project, and the possibility that just because they have a lot of money doesn’t mean they know how to fix our schools.

The Small Schools Project: Unfortunately, they forgot about the curriculum! They poured a lot of money into making the schools smaller but didn’t pay enough attention to the learning part—just being small isn’t good enough. The other thing is that there is some evidence that when they gave some of the big cities a lot of money, those cities created some small high schools in ways that damaged other children. They siphoned off some “special kids” for the new “special schools” in the “special project”—and they were all excited about being part of the Microsoft project—but the other kids got shoved aside. Nobody took the time to measure what the impact was on the other kids.

What does it mean to say one is teaching “authentically”? Can new technologies help?

Well, new technologies can help, but a lot of teaching authentically is really about finding ways to engage young people—particularly middle school and high school kids—in authentic challenges from the workplace, the community, or a simulation of those. Having the kids visit those workplaces, interview the people who work there, determine the problems that need to be solved, and then develop products that might actually be used is what it’s about. For instance, students might visit a rural co-op for electricity, find out that the co-op was having problems with its customers because of recent outages, and then might develop videos that could be broadcast on local public television to communicate with the co-op’s customers. Instead of being in school, studying subjects in an abstract sense, the kids would actually be engaged in wrestling with real problems and issues. Fred Newmann coined the term and I took his concept and tried to give examples of authentic teaching. [See our Featured Article by Jamie, “Teaching Social Studies Authentically.”]

What’s the reaction of the teachers you work with to all of these issues? How do they feel about teaching authentically, and using the new technologies?

I think what’s sad is that the vast majority of teachers I work with are very receptive to this kind of learning. But, they feel pressured, depending upon what kind of school and community they work in, to teach kids to score well on two tests. So, I see across the nation a huge retreat from what we might call progressive education, as school after school does mechanistic, standardized, teach-to-the-test education—what I call “factory-style learning,” which is in complete opposition to everything I’m advocating. The reality is, that most of my work is now overseas. It’s very hard to find any schools in the United States that are focusing on questioning, thinking, and problem solving because of No Child Left Behind. The curriculum has been dumbed down, and we’re into scripted learning—even though there is evidence that comprehension in the United States is in serious trouble at the middle and high school levels and you can’t do comprehension without questioning and thinking—the focus has been on this kind of education. So most of my work is now either with private schools in the United States, who have the latitude to still do thinking, or affluent suburban public schools that have high enough scores that they can still focus on these kinds of goals and objectives. Basically, if you’re a poor kid in the United States, you don’t get this kind of learning. You have to come from a wealthy family and live in a wealthy neighborhood to get thinking. The consequences of this for a democratic society are really horrendous.

You do a lot of speaking, consulting, and workshops in other countries. Why is that?

I do have lots of work in Australia, New Zealand, and the International Schools community—and that’s interesting because the International Schools serve mostly the children of powerful business people who are overseas. So if you’re working in Singapore, Hong Kong, or Shanghai, and there’s an International School, you’ll have 1,500 kids from families of powerful business managers and diplomats—and those schools have no sense of obligation to No Child Left Behind or the testing regime whatever. They do know that they need to get their kids into Ivy League schools and have them score well on the SAT, but the kind of pressures that we’re experiencing in the United States in terms of curriculum aren’t much of a factor there. Many of us in the United States who believe in this kind of learning are spending a great deal of our time in Australia and New Zealand, because both of those countries have a huge commitment to a thinking curriculum. They’re really into inquiry learning, in comparison with the States—and I see that as tragic, a terrible drift away from our educational mission.

Well, that answers my question, but I’m stunned at your response!

Basically, my phone stopped ringing. Back in 1998, 1999, 2000, I would turn away speaking jobs because I had far too much speaking work here. All of a sudden, the music stopped, as the song goes—the phone just stopped ringing. When the technology bubble burst, there wasn’t much money available from corporations and the states to sponsor speakers, trainers, and consultants. The conferences were still being held, but they weren’t paying speakers to speak. Then, No Child Left Behind came in and added the other element of focusing on just reading and math and on test scores. What was ironic, just before No Child Left Behind came in, most states were adopting curriculum standards that had a huge commitment to thinking and problem solving—so, if you looked at their curriculum standards, it was kind of heartening that states were moving in the direction of saying they needed thinkers, not just good memorizers. That was encouraging, but then No Child Left Behind came on the scene, and they learned that what really mattered was to massage the test scores so their schools weren’t failing. They had to start “gaming the system”—it was no longer about the whole child, or educating kids in a really good way, and the states that did best with No Child Left Behind did the most manipulation of state test results. So, Texas and Mississippi had a huge gap between their claims of proficiency on their own tests and how their kids did on the national assessment, the NAEP tests. We ended up with a lot of what I would call educational fraud.

Have you been able to follow up with the participants in your workshops, to see how they’re doing?

I average three to five trips a year to Australia and a couple more to New Zealand, and I run into people who first heard me 15 or 10 years ago. They tell me what they’ve been up to since the last time they heard me. Returning is one of the most gratifying aspects of being a speaker, having people tell me stories of how the strategies I suggested are working for them. The other thing is the development of email, which is really gratifying, because I get far more feedback through email than I did prior to the Internet. I’ve been writing since the early 1980s, and I’d get maybe one letter in response to a piece—it was just part of the culture that people didn’t write. Now, with writing three electronic newsletters, I get a lot of email. Sometimes these people feel like they’re the only people in their schools who are using the thinking and questioning models. I think there have been teachers like this for thousands of years—Socrates, obviously, tried it and got punished for it—there have been good people for many years who have been engaging kids in questioning, but it hasn’t always been appreciated.

Would you change your career path if you could have a “do-over”?

I’ve been very fortunate in my life…at the age of 62, I look back at my aspirations in my twenties, and I think I’ve had the most wonderful life. I feel very lucky. The fact that I just spent a week in Shanghai and a week in Paris is wonderful! My biggest regret is not about what life has given me as a career but about this retreat I see, educationally, in the United States—taking four decades or more of progressive education and pretty much flushing it down the toilet. I think it’s going to take a very long time to recover, because we not only have lost the momentum and the focus on problem solving and thinking and developing the whole child, but we’ve created a huge cohort of school leaders who’ve been told that what matters is test scores and numbers and curriculum alignment, and they’re rewarded for the factory style of education rather than progressive education, which would be healthy for our country and our children. Unfortunately, many of the really great leaders that should be currently coming into the schools and becoming principals have chosen not to do that. There’s been a huge drop-off in the number of people applying for leadership positions in schools, and the whole notion of a principal’s job has shifted. It used to be this idea that the principal is the instructional leader, the best teacher in the school, and should be on the front edge of the best new learning strategies—if reading comprehension is the prime goal of the school, the principal should be an expert in that; if he’s not an expert this year, by next year he or she better be. I don’t see that focus on instruction and learning happening now. Instead, I see a focus on a sort of corporate manager, crunch-the-numbers approach where schools have been invaded by alien philosophies and approaches that actually don’t work in schools. It’s the false notion that if we ran schools like a Pizza Hut, we’d all have better children. Those strategies are being used, and I think they’re doing terrible damage.

Has your philosophy changed through the years?

I would say my philosophy has deepened, but not wavered. I remember starting teaching in the 1960s and reading Jonathan Kozol’s book, Death at an Early Age—and he’s still writing amazing books about social injustice. So: I started on social injustice and I will finish on social injustice. I think what’s happening in our country is shameful and the way we handle the bottom half of our country, and now the middle class by sending jobs overseas, I think we’ve lost our way. We have such wonderful traditions and wonderful values that we care about, but I think we’re off the path. We need to get back on the path where we stand for those wonderful ideas.