How Social Media Influenced School Closure Decisions

On April 25th, my local school board voted to close just one elementary school, Palisades, in Sept. 2011.

This decision surprised the 250 people crowded in the high school library, where board members, seated behind a long table, faced them and publicly voted. It surprised us because in the 90 minutes leading up to the vote, board members laid out the rationale for closing 3 schools and moving 6th graders from elementary school to middle school. Further, the cuts and reconfiguration were strongly endorsed by both of the official parental-input groups, Site Council and the Committee on Reconfiguration.

The Board slowed the process: closure of the other two elementaries and 6th grade reconfiguration is slated to happen Sept. 2012.

You can read my live Tweets here. To increase the size of my Tweets, hit the command key and the +. Or, in your browser's dropdown menu, select View-->Zoom In. The first post is the one at the bottom; read up to experience them in order.

Next-day, traditional media coverage of the vote can be viewed in the Lake Oswego Review and Oregonian.

Twitter informed the community about the meeting's result IRT [in real time]. It changed how we build consensus. District Superintendent Bill Korach customarily builds consensus by convening a lot of face-to-face meetings. He works hard to allow many people to participate in decision making process. I salute him for that! But social media can open the door wider, and it opens on demand.

The LO United site, created and maintained by a small band of local parents amassed facts. Its members, including me, left digital traces of conversations across platforms (most notably Facebook and the comments stream of our local newspaper, the LO Review).

Social media also made clear that our actions as a community were viewable by people who live beyond it.

To get a sense of just how pervasive even a droplet in social media can be, consider this anecdote from USC Annenberg librarian Avril Cunningham, who shared how a Tweet she sent to her 150 followers got retweeted and was seen within 24 hours by up to 5000 people on Twitter. Cunningham presented this case at last week's USC 2011 Teaching With Technology Conference. Avril's is one tiny example of how social media can spread information beyond where we might intend it to go. Our school closure debate, with its many passionate participants, probably sent its social media tendrils out to the tens of thousands. Some people in my Twitter community passed along to their followers URLs to the videos I shot.

Why does social media matter in this example of local politics?

It is still a new thing for us to conceive ourselves as being "always online"; but that's exactly what smartphones enable. Being "always on" doesn't mean being exclusively online, as we are when we're focused on a specific task at our computers. It means we're always aware that we could be online at any moment: snap a photo and post it to Flickr or FB; consult an app to find a restaurant or play a game; Tweet a URL; access a map to figure out where you are or where you want to go; drop a pin so it's faster to find next time. Always on. The gadgets and platforms are so seamlessly integrated that we're no longer aware of being "on," as we were when we had to do everything at a desktop. Our collective mindset is catching up with the actual practice of being Always On.  It's changing how we make collective decisions.

Hacking: Apps, School Budgets, Hegemony

Jason Jones, co-founding editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education's ProfHacker, sent me a Tweet today:

Which led me here:

Jason and I met at MLA11 and have chatted intermittently since January about public school education. We both watch what's going down in our local districts (his: New Britain, CT; mine, Lake Oswego, OR) and send nervous tweets about radical cuts to teaching staff (80 in his next year) and impending school closures (proposed 35% of elementary schools in mine).

We've also talked about how far out of sync our districts are with new media curricula. Hence the cool Tweet he sent today: a way to crowdsource said curricula by asking teachers what they need and offering up micro solutions in the form of apps. From this distance and through my perpetually-at-hand, rose-tinted glasses, this seems like a great premise for workable solutions. In public school districts where admins in charge of tech are usually thinking only of equipment replacement, crowdsourcing seems like an efficient workaround to get some curricular innovation dirt cheap and super efficient. From the "Hacking Education" Contest:

Help to shape your school system's budget by revealing what teachers really need. Build the first mobile app for hyper-local education philanthropy. We've got a list of suggestions to help get you thinking.

On the long parchment scroll of stuff I love about the Internet, quotations like that one live near the top.

Jason's suggestion is timely because I just found out I've been named a Fellow at Washington State Vancouver's Mobile Tech Research Initiative.

WSUV is a hub of mobile tech research and storytelling. Dr. Dene Grigar, Assoc. Prof. and Director of WSUV's Creative Media and Digital Culture Program, was just awarded, with Brett Oppegaard, a $50K NEH Start Up Grant for the Fort Vancouver Mobile Project.

It's ironic that at this moment when mobile apps are at the cutting edge of digital academic research and enable the timely fulfillment of hyperlocal public education curricular goals, our schools are being hacked to bits: not binary digits, but little paper snowflakes where whole sheets of paper once unfurled.

In my own district, the School Board will vote next Monday (April 25) on how many elementary schools to shut down and whether or not to move 6th graders from elementary schools to middle schools.

Regular readers of this blog know that the parents of grassroots org LO United surfaced $4-8 million of alternative budget reductions and a substantial body high-test academic research about how 6th graders fare in middle schools compared to elementaries.  (Short answer: poorly.)  LO United supports closure of one school and keeping 6th graders in elementary school.  After studying the issue, I made three videos to promote the LO United positions: "Keep Our Schools Open,""LO Unites: Saving Schools and 6th Graders," and "Fiscal Responsibility."

Here's where the part about hegemony comes in.

I had assumed that community resistance to the LOU positions emanated from doubt about the quality of LOU's work.  I made the movies to let LOU experts talk and find an audience.  The videos galvanized conversation, but the lion's share of credit falls to the assiduous LOU folks who kept up a steady stream of emails and face-to-face meetings with district admins and the School Board, who have used LOU tools and data to revise their original plans.

What motivates the huge impending change in our school district is not the surface story about budget, but a deeper one about ideology.  Hanging around at pick up, volunteering at art lit, co-hosting a mom's margarita fundraiser for the school, I hear again and again: 6th graders are bored in elementary school.  They need the specialized curriculum at middle school.  I wasn't even tracking it at first.

Then I drove my 4th grade daughter to volleyball practice at the local jr. high and she said, "I can't wait to go here!  You get to choose your classes!  6th graders are bored at my school."

That's how hegemony works, right?  Invisibly.  Not a top-down declaration but murmured here and there.  It functions the way gossip does, policing community values.  "Everyone" knows it to be true. Perception of this kind is not susceptible to facts because it is boundless like water, always moving, re-routed by a little factual blockage here and there, but finding nevertheless its path to the wide river of common knowledge.

This is a picture of a colonized subject.  With a little Geek Dad thrown in for Jason.

Video v. F2F

As my participation has increased in LO United--a group of parents crowdsourcing solutions to our school district's $6.5M shortfall--I find I'm leaving more and more digital traces of our work. Collectively edited letters, notes and comments on FB, videos to articulate LO United positions to the broader community.  I speculate that these digital artifacts have turned up the heat on a local debate that was already moving from simmer to boil.

It's a David-and-Goliath story, this small group of parents pooling their expertise to challenge what had looked until a couple of days ago a fait accompli: closing 35% of our elementary schools and moving 6th graders to middle school, a one-two punch that now seems to have been in the works for months before its official announcement last December.  But the smooth thing in David's hand isn't a rock.  It's a smartphone.

As of two nights ago, the district is officially considering Scenario A, which closes just one elementary school and leaves intact the 6th graders in elementary school while our district studies the academic literature about moving 6th graders to middle school and otherwise assesses the suitability of that proposed move for our learners.  This is a HUGE shift in both tone and process.  For months, it had seemed, LOU had been knocking its head against the brick wall: presenting a metric tonnage of alternate budget cuts, academic research, and, most crucially, an interactive data enrollment model designed by LOU dad Jeff Carpenter that allows one to forecast precisely how many seats will be available in a given classroom in a given school in various scenarios of growth (0%-5%).

If there's one thing responsible for the district's willingness to entertain Scenario A, it's Jeff Carpenter's interactive enrollment tool.  It demonstrated unequivocally that the proposed six remaining elementary schools would not have sufficient capacity to house our learners, even at a 0% growth rate.  (In fact, district enrollment has grown by 8.3% in the last four years.)  District officials availed themselves of it, and backed away from the proposed three-schools closure scenario.

 Some rights reserved by miss_rogue; via Flickr

As of two nights ago, when the district directed Consolidation Committee members to review the feasibility of closing just one school, it would seem that the LOU message finally resonated with district leadership.  They deserve serious kudos for listening.  They must be exhausted.

The Lake Oswego community places a strong value on face-to-face meetings, and there have been many and many and many of them.   Brown-bag lunches, informational bits at PTA, Consolidation Committee, Site Council, school board meetings, city council meetings, and lots of private meetings.  Face time big time.

I wonder if the introduction of video into the social media mix on Feb. 28th might have shifted the perception of the "face":  facing our choice because knowing we are being watched, in-your-face, the intimacy of a screen and face time.  The first video I made took people by surprise.  Volunteering for art lit the next day, several women approached me to discuss it.  The principal, who has always been friendly, snubbed me.  The video's very existence seemed to excite strong reaction: effusion, revulsion.  I'm not sure why, beyond the idea that perhaps I was taking what was construed as a family matter in a small town and quite literally enabling anyone in the world to see and judge it.  I've been told this gesture is "negative" and have been advised to "go the parent meeting. Get yourself informed locally." So I did.

I've just returned from a Q-and-A with the principal at the junior high school.  On the plus side, the science curriculum would flourish in the lab setting with science-specific teachers.  On the minus side, many many elements of implementation have yet to be determined; and 6th graders will certainly lose the formalized leadership opportunities that exist in our elementary schools (Green Team, school store, planning graduation--even the cherished Outdoor School program.)  Class sizes and student:teacher ratios vary widely.  While I appreciated that principal Dr. Ann Gerson nimbly and honestly responded to questions, it's clear that moving ahead quickly with 6th grade middle school configuration would make for a bumpy ride.

I didn't Tweet the meeting because I've not encountered anybody in LO on Twitter.  I took notes on my phone.  From what I could tell, that notetaking was the only digital record of the meeting.  Which is the problem when a community relies on f2f to transmit major developments: working parents or those otherwise occupied get stranded on the shores of the information stream.  This creates little klatches of people who have not just different kinds of information, but even different content.  The lack of a consistent digital stream has made it harder to foster consensus.  We may not even agree on basic facts because we aren't swimming together in the digital stream.

The vacuum left in FB and YouTube seems to have advantaged LO United.  It's created space for David's smartphone to find the soft spot around the temples, not to strike, but to linger there and whisper in people's ears.  Videod faces--on demand, declarative, Panoptic in their implication that people were watching--perhaps has leached some energy out of the closed-door meetings.

"Fiscal responsibility" may be a tattered mockery in D.C., but here in our small town it means real dollars and deep accountability.  One disappointed Consolidationist at a meeting two nights ago presented the steep cuts to schools and the precipitous 6th grade reconfiguration as "fiscally responsible." I knew we would need faces countermanding this claim, because it's a potent political cliche: "making hard choices."  In this case, it seems the hard choice is to question authority: however respectfully and armed to the teeth with facts.  Hence.......

A Hyperlocal Internet Public

As radicalized Egyptians massed in the streets and Mubarak shut off internet for 92% of his citizens, Dave Parry (Asst. Prof. of Emerging Media, UT Dallas) wrote a post called "It's not the Public Internet, It's the Internet Public." Parry observes:

While the government could shut down the hardware of the internet, it could not shut down the social effects of the digital network. In the same way a public is fundamentally changed by the existence of print technology, a public is fundamentally altered by access to the digital network.

I've been thinking through Parry's formulation over the last month, as I watched citizens in my small town (38K people) organize against a proposal to cut 1/3 of our elementary schools and move 6th graders from elementary schools into middle schools.

At first, I was indifferent to reconfiguration.  I had long marveled that a community of our size (5667 students K-12) would maintain 9 elementary schools.  It seemed luxurious, like loitering beneath a showerhead unmodified for water conservation.  Atavistic.

But then my good friend Martha said, come to this meeting.  She's actively involved in LO United for Schools, a grassroots dream team.  About 400 people have signed their petition; this meeting drew about 200 people, including the mayor, the school district superintendent and local news crews.  The LO United team presented three tiers of budget cut ranging from $2.5 million to $11M, each tier preserving the 9 schools.  (Easier to do than you might think: even the rosiest projected savings from this utter reconfiguration nets only 1.5 million.  The LO United folks put that number around $400K.)

Breakout sessions, brainstorming solutions, willingness to engage skeptics: the rigor and emphasis on transparency impressed me.  I realized I was watching a f2f enactment of crowdsourcing, the culmination of hundreds of hours of budget work, mathematical modeling of the schools' physical capacity, social scientific research and lots of community organizing and outreach.

I went away to think.  And watch what might come of it.

Two weeks later at a school board meeting, district officials were indifferent to, even tacitly disdainful of, the bound book of solutions presented to them by LO United.

Me?  I was disdainful of the book. It seemed a slow way to navigate so much disparate information. Why not a webpage with links?

But even that bound report, it turns out, was too technologically progressive for district officials.  For it literalized the unsettling effects new media had rendered on their budgeting process and attendant public relations.  It was no longer credible to imply: we're the only experts.  We have all the facts, you don't.  Back off and let us do our jobs.

Over the ensuing weeks, the district kept mum as LO United churned out more budget ideas, more literature reviews, feedback from realtors about the depressing effect of shuttered schools on home values.  It seemed arrogant, this silence.  Not one suggestion worthy of consideration?  Really?  Many resonated with me.

Silence is no longer tenable for the powerful, because the Internet makes information hoarding difficult and costly.  Wikileaks shows that even high-test professional hoarders will mess it up anyway.

The folks at LO United hadn't heard the term "crowdsourcing" until I introduced it, but taxonomy is irrelevant. They were crowdsourcing; their entire MO is based on it.  Which goes right to Parry's point that "a public is fundamentally altered by access to a digital network" whether or not they are conscious of specific new media practices.

At a Feb. 28 webinar on Information Arts, Liz Losh (Director of the Culture, Art and Technology Program at UCSD's Sixth College) declared that she's "troubled with the ease with which people talk about new media literacy" because it "ignores digital rights and responsibilities." (Those interested in this subject should consult her book Virtualpolitik.)

I'm struck, in this hyperlocal example, by the extent to which social media has drawn a political line in our community: those who exercised their digital rights to insist upon transparency, and those who hewed to paternalism, however well-intentioned it may be.  Again, this question of taxonomy isn't relevant to the agents in question, though it is to me: I doubt people in my community would construe the issue in these terms, but as a scholar I'm alive to the political valences of mediation.

But what exactly is crowdsourcing "mediating" in this hyperlocal example?  It collapses the space between online and offline.  Face-to-face is the grounding element in the circuitry that is crowdsourcing.  As information and social applications of information zip through the grids too fast to follow individually, hyperlocal grounds those potentialities, that energy, in a specific place and specific bodies.  In this sense even what we saw in Egypt was hyperlocal: the global and networked telescoped down into particular bodies standing on a bridge being sprayed with power hoses in a particular moment.  I was suggesting this in my previous post.

Circuitry embodied in microscopic feedback loops of f2f conversation, connecting the wired and those who do little more than check email online: we stand shoulder to shoulder on the school yard watching our kids play.  Or nod at each other as we cycle down a path.  Or greet the local baker by name as we walk into her shop.  This is what I was thinking as I stood there at the playground last week, listening to my friends talk about their online LO United work as our kids loped around the schoolyard, a dog barking in the distance, gray clouds thinning overhead.  I thought, so many of these people standing next to me are not going to read a text heavy web page.

So I took out my flip camera and started making this video.