Evaluation That Matters

In education, there is a great deal of discussion of using value-added measures as part of the determining factor for teacher evaluation. The concept behind this is that there should be some quantitatively measurable product that lets us compare teacher to teacher. Good teachers should produce higher levels of measurable value-added on standardized tests and poor teachers will produce less. Furthermore, it is conceptualized that this works in business.

Does it? Should it? Will it? The Gates Foundation which has been funneling hundreds of millions of funds has been a significant proponent for value-added. The same leadership from Microsoft that built a software empire and with Bill Gates as Chairman of the Board has watched their empire start to fade into decline. It is easy to think of the ubiquitous nature of Microsoft products, Windows, Office, and Xbox. However, only one of those products has a future (Xbox) where as new Windows products are frequently being ignored, only purchased by enterprise that is dependent on legacy software and consumers not quite ready to switch to OS-X, Chrome, Android, or iOS. The real story is how Microsoft lost its innovative edge. To understand that is to understand it's employee evaluation system that pitted employee against employee, destroyed team work, and eliminated trust. The story of this is Stack Ranking. Microsoft, as well as Adobe and others, began evaluating their employees on a curve. In each group, based on the performance and value given during that time, a few employees were evaluated real high, a few real low, and most in the middle. As a result of this methodology, top performers moved around the company to avoid working with other top performers. Cut throat competition occurred, the type that produced only a few winners and multitudes of losers. Employees looked at only their value, knowing that it was better for them if others did worse. Team work, innovation, and creativity were all lost as individuals looked only to short term gains. While the Department of Education through Race to the Top requirements, prompted by the Gates Foundation looks to push forward value-added measurement, Adobe, Microsoft, and others are backing away from it having seen their innovation edge gone and as corporations that are shells of their once great selves.

The interesting thing is that teachers are prideful people. They are caring people who entered the profession to make a difference. Principals and district administrators are the same, they simply discovered that they could help more kids learn and grow if they were supporting instructional development for whole schools and whole school communities. I've worked with growth measurements for eight years. Each time a teacher gets their results, they analyze and over analyze each student's performance. They question why students went up. They perseverate on each child that didn't grow or didn't grow enough. Instantly they have fifteen adjustments that they are preparing to do to support children. Growth measures, when consistently shared, just by their very existence are powerful tools. They are one part of the complex picture that is a child's development.

For evaluation to matter, it isn't an experience of some "boss" telling some "employee" you need to change this or do that. Evaluation that matters starts with the leader asking questions and listening to the employee. Conversations that cultivate brainstorming, exploration, and the development of interdependent innovation. Very little of the world of evaluation is about removing employees from the workplace in any career field. The majority of evaluation is about finding and generating greatness within ourselves and our work group. Great leaders find ways to create synergy within their work groups. They curate their questions so that employees can generate solutions that make a difference.

Teachers get it. They understand that administrators come and go. Many teachers have been here long before the principal arrived and will be here long after the principal is gone. Over the journey of time, our judgements matter very little. It is their judgement that matters most. They will react to the Excellent, Satisfactory, Needs Improvement, or Unsatisfactory ranking, but those our external valuations. Temporary titles based on the judgement of a temporary individual. Their pride in performance and their view of each child's growth is what matters. As leaders, if we can facilitate through questions, support, and discovery personal reflective growth in our teachers, we will make a difference in our teachers' lives and the lives of each child they teach.

Finding Corporate Synergy

Meaningful Assessment

Franchises for Educational Assessment?

Every once in a while there are small pleasures in life that we have the opportunity to enjoy. Mine is when you feel like a company is always abusing you, the ability to fire it and find a new product. When we lived in an apartment in Michigan, my wife and I would always complain about Ameritech cable. It rarely worked and when it did, the reception was poor. Many times I would go through the customer service rigamarole trying to get it fixed, but in the end, the product was the product. Unfortunately, Ameritech had a franchise at the time with the village and was the only provider of cable in the area. In addition, the apartment complex didn't allow satellite at the time (it was the 90's). Thus we had two choices, rabbit ears television or to take the abuse from Ameritech. It was a great pleasure to become a homeowner and to have my choice between cable and satellite television. I gladly fired the cable company and chose a satellite service. I still smile about it.

Recently, the Village of Deerfield, where I live, had been having trouble with their electric service. The village had a franchise with ComEd and ended up suing the provider for lack of reliable service. Eventually, after years of wrangling with ComEd, the village joined an electricity aggregation consortium and opened up more freedom of choice for its residents. Simply they got frustrated and had to find a way out from the lack of competition creating monopoly-like service.

One critical question in education is why are we allowing assessment providers to have franchise rights for large scale assessment. Why is Illinois a PARCC state and California a Smarter Balanced state? Why can't they and the ACT corporation, the College Board, the Northwest Evaluation Association, Pearson Education, and anyone else who wants in on the assessment business go through an approval process and compete district by district for providing assessments. People trust SAT and ACT scores because we have known them for years and they are less impacted by legislative influence. They are seen as valid, reliable, and constant. Many adults still know the SAT and ACT scores. They remember taking the tests and what it meant for their future. State assessments aren't viewed in the same way. They are not viewed as reliable, and with the state frequently changing the assessments and the cut scores, they are not constants. Many districts, including my own, want outside evaluation mechanisms of our choice. Why not give it to us? What should states franchise their assessment mechanisms? These corporations and certainly our state and federal education leaders are capable of running correlation studies between the assessments to determine achievement and growth profiles. Why is it that schools need to become more competitive but the assessment providers don't? If open market reforms are so good for education, then lets try it with measurement devices also.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is a lot of money involved here. For many states assessment costs for PARCC and Smarter Balanced will significantly increase. Furthermore, the amount of student and teacher time will significantly increase in many states. There are vested interests in having guaranteed revenue streams for these assessment providers. However are those interests the same as parents, students, school districts, and school communities. We don't need to reinvent the cable franchise. For the most part, these are for-profit companies, let them compete for our business. It will help increase their customer service and create a greater level of quality for all of us. 

Stick it to the Man Commercial

Leaps of Faith

So this weekend I have the opportunity to study together with a group of families from my religious community and the topic is "Leaps of Faith." In the first gathering, I had the opportunity to listen to two of my former students share their ideas regarding what is a leap of faith. They are bright, intelligent, and articulate youths who described brief visions of what it takes to move forward and the trust one needs to have that one will land safely on the other side of the journey. In their comments, I started to question the mechanisms and tools we use in our journeys.

At the start of this school year, a retiring first grade teacher shared with me her favorite moments of teaching. She described the miracle of first grade as a majority of students enter the room as non-readers and yet somehow through a variety of twists and turns, they each in their own way become readers. It is in this story essence of this blog truly comes forth. Teaching, as well as life, is a blend of scientific artistry. There is no set formula for a child to become a reader. We have tools, we have resources, but we do not have an exact recipe. There isn't a list of steps in which #37 states upon completion of these previous 36 steps and doing this now the child is a reader. It isn't like programing the alarm clock or entering the code on a garage door, when upon completion of these specific steps the child will become a reader. Learning is not a product of a recipe from the back of a Betty Crocker Brownie Mix. Learning is a blend of scientific artistry. Tools, knowledge, and ideas when put into the hands of an expert becomes a fanciful product. It is the expertise and freedom the artist has; the relationship between the artist and the canvas that creates the learning moment. Furthermore, the freedom and tools we provide can allow for the learning moments to be standardized and palatable or gourmet and exquisite. It is our choice as teachers, principals, and district leaders to decide if the child learns to read through a series of worksheets and stale texts or through delightful stories and exquisite visuals. It is our choice to decide if our learning experiences are likely to lead that child to their "Home Run" book that encourages them to be a reader for a lifetime. Becoming a reader is a leap of faith. A trust by the teacher, the student, and the parent that you will succeed, you will magically break the code. A journey in which we will add a little bit of this and a dash of that to get you there.

As we drove to our first gathering this weekend, my wife who is also an educator and I were discussing Common Core learning experiences in the car. Although our children sitting in the back on their iPads, the eldest interjected into the conversation that the Common Core was easy and boring. It's just more skills and worksheets that they make you do. He's ten and he's bright. He picked up on what was being labeled Common Core and hit the nuances of it from his experience. For him, the Common Core was like Michael and Jane serving castor oil or gruel in Mary Poppins. As we look at the corporatization of learning in the United States, we are given many static recipes to promote learning. They are "scientifically researched" that when implemented with "integrity and fidelity" will provide "valid and reliable" results. Each of these recipes lacks the leap of faith. They don't trust the artist to look at the canvas and adjust to the medium in front them. The results are Betty Crocker and not gourmet. Our children often walk away and find it to be boring stuff.

This corporate experience of learning is a choice by district leaders, school leaders, teachers, and parents. Yes, it is admittedly being pushed on us from all sides. However, the Common Core State Standards can be accomplished without using static recipes and tasteless learning experiences. We as leaders and practitioners can decide what resources to use, how to use them, and when to stop using them. We can create and build our learning if we wish and have the internal stamina to stand up to the constant electronic bombardment of Common Core aligned sales pitches. We choose the learning experiences and we get to decide whether the medicine is served in castor oil and gruel or with a spoonful of sugar.

The Common Core State Standards make many assumptions about the pace and order students should learn things. If we look at them as targets and recognize that our children will not learn them at the same pace or in the same way, they are more likely to be palatable and we are more likely to help our children to be successful. Furthermore, if we focus on growth and moving children forward in meaningful ways through this Common Core journey, we can create experiences that engage children and ourselves. We can have every tool available to us, but it is us the learner and the leader that cultivates that tasteful experience. Learning is a leap of faith, one in which we must have belief if we want to be successful.

The Leap of Faith

Luke learns to trust himself even with the best tools available

I Teach Dead People

Last month, I had the opportunity to sit around with some associates in our temple and as will happen from time to time people will ask me about trends in education. As parents, community members, and products of public schools, often it is hard for them to conceptualize the changes that are occurring in and around education. Now, to give context to my conversation, it is important to understand that I live and work in outlier communities. I live in a community with a less than 1% free and reduced lunch population and work in a community with just under 10% free and reduced lunch population. It was only in my first principalship where I led a learning community which had a state average, 50% free and reduced lunch population. In each setting however, I have had a large involved parent and community group that cherished and was invested in their public schools. As I sat talking with this group of well-educated, successful, involved friends, we began discussing the new Common Core State Standards and their children's ISAT results.

I've blogged before about the challenges of new assessments and new data lines. That, as they say, is a story for a different time. These parents understood the process of re-norming and  changing the content of the assessments. What struck this group of intelligent and articulate individuals was when I explained why. I shared the emphasis of "rigor" being placed on educational experiences, standards, and assessment. One of the physicians looked at me oddly, paused, and asked, "Wait, you teach dead people." We paused. We laughed. We pulled out our phones and looked up the definition. The humor left the group as we all stared at our screens and pulled bits and pieces from the definition found on the Merrian-Webster.com website:

• 1) "the difficult and unpleasant conditions or experiences that are associated with something" - Wait, can't children have fun as they learn? Shouldn't they like school?

• "a (1) :  harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment : severity" - Schools are being asked to become harsh and inflexible places. Should teachers become harsh in opinion or judgement?

• "(2) :  the quality of being unyielding or inflexible : strictness"  - Will this definition foster the innovative entrepreneur? Is the child who is the product of this learning experience going to be our next inventor or scientist?

• "severity of life :  austerity" - Are we teaching children to be reasonable in their approaches, interactions, and choices?

• "b :  an act or instance of strictness, severity, or cruelty" - Isn't there a difference between strictness and cruelty. Does one need to go hand in hand with another? We want our children to be high achievers but also be balanced in their approach to life.

• 2) "a tremor caused by a chill" - As we got this far into the definition I was longing for the days before smartphones as a chill truly had overtaken the group.

• 3) "a condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable; especially :  extremity of cold" - This seemed to be the first definition that began to somewhat make the group feel better. They wanted their children to be challenged, but not to the point of being extremely uncomfortable. They wanted achievable challenges. Ones that can be overcome and the students feel value from doing. The extremity of cold as the example didn't resonate with the group as being a valuable challenge. Rather than wanting war stories of walking to school uphill five miles through the blizzard, this group wants to know what cool things you did in the classroom.

• 4) "strict precision :  exactness <logical rigor>" - Precision is valuable, but the highest level of precision will always come from computers and robots. As parents we hope for innovative, collaborative, and creative. We want good skills, but value the process as much as the product.

• 5) "a obsolete :  rigidity, stiffness" - Perhaps this definition is an accurate product of the children this process is trying to cultivate?

• "b :  rigidness or torpor of organs or tissue that prevents response to stimuli" - It was here that the physician's definition began to come forward. Are we working to create rigid individuals, teachers, principals, or students who are prevented to responding to stimuli.

• "c :  rigor mortis" - Are we teaching dead people?

Rigor, the new goal in education. I was at a loss to explain why this was an emphasis by the state. A movement of national importance. Bright people had taken down my walls and shown that yes the emperor before them had no clothes. Foiled again by the information age: a smartphone and the Merrian-Webster online dictionary.

I went home and thought about this. I thought about challenge our kids, raising them to be good people who can handle hard questions. Then I thought about one of our middle school math teachers. When reviewing page 2 of a new math book, he explained that the problem on the page was one of those "Somebody out there hates you problems." The challenge to the problem was not the mathematics, but the wording and the way the units were organized. He explained that the language is meant to fool the students. The children are just beginning to understand the concept of slope and in the language of the problem they use x and y differently as variables and thus make the children flip their understanding of procedural knowledge. Even if the children understand how to calculate slope and what slope means, the problem challenges them to reanalyze the variables. It's like calculating gallons per mile instead of miles per gallon. The answer doesn't make conceptual sense, hence a "Somebody out there hates you problem."

At MIT, a group of professors, looked at the challenge of assessments and learning. Developing some of the best and brightest engineers in our country, the instructional leaders began to question the grade-focus of the students and wished to develop a learning and achievement focus in their classroom. Paul Henry Winston outlines guidance for grading that they developed for their 6.034 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class:

• "We should find a way to deemphasize grades so as to make room for big ideas"

• "We should test understanding, not speed and general intelligence"

• "We should not care whether a student demonstrates understanding early in the semester, or late, as long as the student demonstrates understanding."

• "We should give an A to every student that demonstrates A-level understanding"

Winston goes on further when discussing assessment (at MIT!!!!):
"Further guided by our desire to test subject understanding rather than general intelligence, we decided to resist the temptation to be so clever that our quizzes test the students on how well they can penetrate our cleverness, rather than their understanding of the material."

The lessons here are fundamental. The concept that learning should be assessed by not the adult capacity to create clever problems meant to trick students but rather the child's ability to understand a concept. Assessment should be about learning. Schools need to be about learning. The goal of creating "rigorous learning experiences" may not create the type of learning situations the promoters of the term wish to obtain. Creating intrinsic learners who work on meaningful problems in situations which promote innovation  and understanding should be our goals. It is in Dr. Winston's classes at MIT and the results, are amazing:

"When we first tried our new grading procedure in the fall of 2006, we expected many students to leave by the end of the first hour or two of our three-hour final, because there were a substantial number who were in the highest category for all or all but one of the four quizzes. As time went by, we noted, with some alarm, that many known-to-be-excellent students stayed the entire three hours. When the exam was over, we asked one of the highest-category students why she did all five parts when we had made it clear she needed to do only one. “Oh,” she said, “I did the rest for fun!” Our pride was palpable. We knew we were on to something."

Let's not teach dead people but those who zest for life and learning as these MIT students do.

Myth of the Moonshot

There are milestone events that change the fabric of our world. Moments in time that grab our collective essence and refocus us on the great possibilities of who we are and who we can be. Some of these milestones are positive, generations of people can remember where they were on July 20, 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon or November 11, 1982 when the Space Shuttle Columbia took off for the stars. We remember tragic milestones, the death of Kennedy, the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the fall of the World Trade Center. We also remember when we heard about events that both positively and negatively changed our world, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As outsiders, because we experienced these events as a moment in time, we assume that the greatness that occurred came into being as instantaneously and effortlessly as the moment itself. Unfortunately, life's greatest achievements don't occur because of short bursts of high energy work but rather long journeys of incremental improvement.

On May 25th, 1961, three and a half years after the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, President John F. Kennedy set forth the goal for the United States to put a man on the moon. The speech, given before a joint-session of congress, was intended to provide both broad goals for the country and give details on how to strengthen an economy recovering from recession. Fifty years later, the same needs and goals apply to our society. We imagine, due to the length of history and personal experience, that only a couple of years later, an astronaut landed on the moon. Unfortunately, that's not true. It was eight years and 6 Apollo missions later. It came at great cost, the initial projected costs in 1961 7 billion dollars. The actual cost of the Apollo program in 1973 was 25.4 billion dollars ($170 billion in 2005 dollars). The Manhattan Project, began in 1939 and employed 130,000 people over the course of its journey. Six years later the work produced 2 nuclear bombs that were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. The project cost nearly 2 billion dollars ($26 billion in 2013 dollars). Each program that aimed to take great leaps forward was neither inexpensive nor instantaneous.

In our lives, we constantly look for "moonshots" opportunities to make gigantic leaps forward, rushing through the work and the challenge and reaching some great target on the horizon. This happens to us as individuals whether it is hoping to drop great amounts of weight, win the lottery, make dramatic improvements our job, or fantastic gains in an athletic event. It also happens to us as a society with initiatives such as No Child Left Behind, Race for the Top, and the War on Poverty.  What we learn from these "moonshot" experiences more often than not is that there is no gigantic leap, improvement is gradual and incremental in nature. Effective change occurs in an evolutionary not revolutionary manner. It is important to dream big but in order to make the dreams become reality, the journey is one of inch by inch improvement.

When we take on our daily journeys and work to improve as people, as parents, as teachers, and as leaders, it is not by making giant leaps forward. Improvement occurs in manageable steps. When the goals are small, attainable, and incremental, we grow. With each step of growth, we move closer and over time those moonshots happen and we didn't even notice. When we see the step in front of us, we can move our feet. One step at a time, moment by moment, we change, we evolve, we become a little more perfect than before. If we show those steps to our children instead of the great leaps, they too will achieve.

The most amazing thing is that we live in one of the most revolutionary time periods. The Internet has taken down many of the barriers between countries and people. Computers more powerful than ones that once took up whole buildings of college campuses can now be found in our pocket. How many of us remember where we were when we first saw the World Wide Web, our first email, our first smartphone. Just like all moonshots, the evolution of these has been evolutionary also. As we think about what we want to be, what we want our children to be, lets remember how far we have come, inch by inch, in the few short years since the iPhone first appeared on the stage on January 29, 2007. It has come far and so have we.

Holding on to Our Heroes

Teachers and administrators join the education profession because they want to make a difference in the lives of children. In college these individuals are surrounded by future business leaders, stock traders, scientists, doctors, and lawyers. They choose a path that does not provide fiscal fortune but rather huge internal gain. Educators opt in because of the aha moment, that child's smile as they get it, the celebration of achievement, the light bulb moment of discovery. Teachers select this career for the personal gain of changing lives. Relationships that start in the moment and often last a life time.

In the first year, they discover what the job really is. It's more than setting up activities, running reading groups, and comforting the crying child. In that initial go around they learn that preparation time isn't the 3-5 hours a week embedded in their schedule but the 3 hours a night in addition prepping materials, grading assessments, emailing parents, it's the Saturday or Sunday afternoon making copies, rewriting materials, stapling projects together. In that first year our teachers discover the challenges of classroom management, the office politics of any working environment, and they discovery the world of educational acronyms. Teachers learn about: IDEA, IEP, 504, PLOP, ISAT, IRT, MDC, NCLB, RTTT, NAEP, PISA, and many other points of jargon. Their world spins and they remark, "I just want to help kids learn." 

The McKinsey Study in 2010 noted that 14% of teachers leave the profession after their first year. Nearly half (46%) leave after five years. It notes challenges that face the profession from a macroscopic profession including relative wage level decrease compared to other valued professions, lack of high achieving professionals entering the profession, and lack of governmental prestige placed on those entering the field. Other studies focus, on teacher burnout, testing pressures, and working conditions. In the several years since these studies have come out, as a profession, we have increased rather than decreased these pressures. Since 2010, schools have brought through another round of "more rigorous" standards and testing with CCSS, NGSS, PARCC, and SmarterBalance. We have gone through a period surfing the ripples of the 2008 recession with reductions of wage increases, reductions of staff, balance tightening, and reductions of retirement benefits. We have doubled down on data and assessment by focusing on both growth and achievement. At schools throughout the nation we are staring carefully at the precipice whether we break our profession or find a way to save it.

Leadership matters more than ever; administrative leadership, teacher leadership, and legislative leadership. In this world in which everyone worries about increasing standards and increasing rigor, leadership needs to build bridges between the past and the future. For generations our teachers and students have done great things. When assessment factors in SES (socio-economic status),  schools in the United States outperform the best-fit line compared to schools across the world on PISA.* More interesting in looking at PISA was how few developed countries have more families in poverty than the United States. Reading through the Common Core State Standards can at times feel like you are reading the diagnostic manual for your computer's CPU. It is filled with technical words, carefully crafted language that is word-smithed to provide an exacting meaning by the authors but language that leaves parents and practitioners in the dust. Leadership needs to connect the best practices of our past with our growth towards the future. We need to identify those growth steps we have made in our classrooms and clarify the next step as not a moonshot but rather an evolutionary development. The phrase "Race to the Top (RTTT)" implies a need to react quickly. An anticipation that we are not there and if we do not expend great energy in a quick fashion it will pass us by. "Race to the Top" ignores that after any sprint the athlete is exhausted. They move fast, react swiftly, and then stagger afterwards. This is not the vision of teaching we should desire, but rather that of the tortoise beating the hare. The methodical journey down a path that leads to ongoing success. 

Teachers join this profession to become difference makers. They seek work environments in which they can improve the lives of children. As leaders, we need to look at each new initiative and identify how much of this is based in the best practices that we do, what in the initiative is absolutely necessary, what components fit within what we believe is morally right and viable for our students, and what time and resources will it take to implement it well. Governmental leaders may be in a race, but if we want teachers and educational professionals to be in it for the long run, we need to take the multitudes of acronyms and right size the pace for our staff, students, and community. Our teachers can only be heroes if we create the space for it. 

*Please note, I believe there are enormous challenges with international assessment and PISA, but it was nice to be able to cherry pick a statistic. 

Parenting in a 1:1 World

The 80's were a wonderful time. We were recovering oil crises of the 70's, elected an actor to be president, and embracing the brat pack.  Parenting was easy then too. Each night I would dutifully come home, hang my coat on a hanger, sit down at the table, quietly do my homework, set the table, have a quiet conversation with the family, kiss my mom good night and get ready for the next day. Come on now, my mom probably fell out of her chair reading that wishing that I would have just done one of those things. Parenting in the 80's was hard. Parents no longer could let their children play outside without being afraid that they would be kidnapped. AIDS was new to everyone and there was great fear of how it could be transmitted and who could get it. The great verbal battle between the superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States continued, as the US went everywhere to halt the spread of communism. There were real fears of nuclear war. Households began to have multiple televisions, more cars than drivers, three-way calling and call waiting became things, and those portable music players boom boxes and walkmen showed up everywhere. Parenting wasn't easy then. It wasn't easy in the 60's, the 40's, or the 20's. Think about it, try being a parent in the time of Prohibition. Parenting is hard, that is why so many family comedies resonate with us.

Douglas Adams in his book, A Salmon of Doubt, states three rules of technology:

"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

The more I read that, the more that I find it to be true. There was a time in my life in which I could learn every technology. That time has passed. Even the most tech-saavy of us need at times to seed to the next generation to learn the nuances of these new tools and toys. However, just because I don't know every aspect of the technology, I can learn enough to parent my children with it. Here are some simple guidelines that we use in our household to parent with technology. Interestingly enough, they are very similar to those our parents used before us as they dealt with the issues of their time:

1) There are limits to everything in life. So we set a timer.

As a child of the 80's I can remember my parents and my uncle complaining of how much my cousins and I watched the "idiot box." It wasn't that there was high quality programming on, after all it was an event when we went over and watched the first Wrestlemania at their house. However, we would just as easily watch that as Jeopardy, Anne of Green Gables, and Thundercats. Eventually my Aunt and my parents set time limits for all of us regarding watching television. They were the generation to allow televisions to go into the bedroom and if we messed up, they were the generation to walk in and angrily take that television right out of the bedroom. In fact, focal point of the American Academy of Pediatrics position statement on media, children, and screen time is focused on this phenomena of consumption media and has very little to do with children using computers and tablets in school. 

As we learned from our parents, we let our children know, that they have a set amount of time that they can use their tablets for entertainment purposes. We set timers. Frequently they comply. At times, we need to use the Find My Phone iPhone App to mark it as a lost phone and set a passcode on it. We have some great videos on the District 58 Parent Tech Support page to how to do this.

2) Device usage comes with supervision.

One of my great memories of the 80's was the movie Footloose. Great music, a young Kevin Bacon doing gymnastics as he rebelled against society. We learned that dancing could be evil. In the movie we see the townspeople have raided the library and are burning those items that are filling their children's heads with corruption. Media of all types have exposed the consumer to new ideas. Some healthy and some questionable. The obligation for both schools and parents has always been to teach our children how to handle ideas and content that we question. This is no different then when the Elvis and the Beatles influenced the world as it is now. The content is easier to access and we continue to need to help our children to learn to make good choices. The only way to do that is for us to be around when they encounter the media. Children should use their devices in a supervised family area. The same as they would with television. There is no need for children to sit in their room and play on their tablet, it is only for adult convenience do families allow it. At times, even with the best filters, children will hit inappropriate content, the same as they would trouncing through the library and flipping channels with the remote control, the trick is teaching children how to handle and move on when they find content that is inappropriate. This is what we need to teach as both adults and teachers.

3) The device is mine, you are simply borrowing it.

Before we drove the car for the first time, mom and dad explained the rules to the game. The Goldbergs did a terrific take on this in their episode, "Call Me When You Get There." If we didn't follow the rules, we were not allowed to drive. Well, sort of, we were not allowed to go drive where we wanted to go. We were still required to go to the store to pick up groceries we needed for dinner or drive to the pool to pick up our brothers from practice. We just weren't allowed to go driving where we wanted to go. The technique is the same today as it was then. Children are allowed to use their devices until its a problem. When it becomes a problem, they lose the privilege to use it for entertainment but still can use it for their classwork. When the work is complete, they put the device away. After a while, children earn back the privilege to use it for entertainment again.

4) Children don't have credit cards.

I remember when I got my first credit card. I was entering college. I had been lectured to several times regarding the dangers of credit cards before I was ever allowed to touch it. Even though credit cards usage is more widespread now, the same rules apply. Children and teens don't belong having credit cards. As such, please do not share your iTunes or Google Play account passwords with them. Make the child come to you to enter the password and approve the purchase. Furthermore, you paid for the app, you can decide if it is on or off the device. In the restrictions section of the device, set the password requirements to immediate when using the store functions. This will require children to have a parent enter the password to download or re-download apps. It seems like a pain, but truly can keep the balance of device control in the hand of the parent. Furthermore, I recommend turning off in-app purchases. Just like coins at the arcade, in-app purchases can create big costs really fast. There are a lot of good free and inexpensive apps, children don't need a daily roll of quarters at this arcade.

Parenting is hard. It always has been and always will be. It is the balance of loving our children and giving them a safe guided path through the world. While the tools and toys have changed, the core challenges have not. By setting similar boundaries that our parents did, we can guide our young padawans to grow up and become successful jedis.