A Puzzling Resistance To Change

Dating to the late 1800s, communities began to use so-called non-traditional school years which varied from a tradition established to serve the lifestyles and seasons of the 43% Americans still involved back then in agriculture.

The so-called traditional school calendar is predominantly still in use today even though now only 2% of Americans live on the nation’s 2.2 million farms or ranches with 1% claiming it as an occupation.

Most are still family operations including 96% of crop farms, 700,000 cattle growers like as my parents were during my early years, and more than 80% of poultry growers.  Many of these operations are now part-time occupations and nearly all are much less reliant on the labor of children during summer.

Today, when polls show that the majority of Americans and businesses favor year-round schools, a tiny but extremely vocal minority in tourism stand out as the most outspoken in defense of the traditional school calendar.

This, even though the volume of domestic person-trips taken during June, July and August has fallen to only 17% of overall tourism and 22% of leisure tourism. It’s lower than the monthly average in the dominant spring and fall months.

I could never really understand why so many in tourism began to get so worked up about the length of the school year during the last decade of my career in community marketing. I’ve studied the realities involved more than most, including reading studies commissioned in support.

The arguments are clear enough.  But the downside risks to tourism in terms of lost political and social capital seem to far outweigh any benefits.  I lost that argument here in North Carolina where changes to the school year have been restricted by lawmakers.

Of far greater risk to tourism are threats to sense-of-place such as roadside billboard blight which some defend with similar rabidity even though few tourism businesses and and even fewer destinations still use them in what is now called “desecration marketing.” 

Of greater danger to tourism are small cabals that seem to exist in every community, usually limited to three or fewer individuals.  They typically seek to hijack funds meant for overall promotion to instead offset their own facility or event expenses even though these represent a tiny sliver of why people travel or what they do on trips.

Other than the tiny fraction of tourism businesses involved in purely seasonal tourism, most businesses now support longer and/or non-traditional school calendars because they make employing youth more practical.

Businesses also find longer school calendars are more convenient for the 40.4% households with school age children where women are the primary providers, including 63% headed by single moms for whom juggling day-care and camps during the long summer break a logistical challenge.

Many in tourism seem aloof to these issues or maybe are unaware that even year-round schools are not really year-around.  Families with student-age children still get 40% of the traditional summer free for vacations and travel.

While only 10% of students are in year-round schools, the number of these schools ranges from five in Durham, where I live all way up to 50 in Wake County, North Carolina’s largest system and the 16th largest in the U.S.  In Wake and other places, they have been used to relieve overcrowding.

Nearly 3,200 schools across America are now year-round. This is an increase of 544% since 1987 when measurement first began, following increased adoption by many cities 1970s.  They are typically in session the same number of days with shorter, more frequent breaks than just summer and usually the same number of holidays.

Overall though, according to the National Center on Time & Learning, there are another 1,000 districts in 36 states experimenting with expanding the traditional school day and year as a means of improving outcomes.

Nationwide, polls show that 3-in-4 Americans believe more learning time will better prepare students.  By nearly 3-to-1, Americans “strongly agree” this would be a benefit particularly in high-poverty schools.   The case for expanding the school year is pretty compelling.

There are good points on all sides but is this really where tourism wants to make a stand, rather than make adjustments?  To me, tourism has always been better off adjusting to societal norms rather than trying to obstruct them.

In my experience, far too many in tourism are predisposed to defensively “circle the wagons” over external issues anyway, when the far greater threats lie inside under its own tent or at least closer to home.

Take for example the summer staple of “going to the beach.”  While 39% of the U.S. population lives along coastal shorelines, only 26% of Americans visit a beach in a given year with only 2.4% doing so once a month.  This means they aren’t even drawing from close in.

The length of the school year is certainly not to blame for this under-tapped potential for beach excursions.  But the answer can be found in the fact that a similar percentage of Americans bake food in a given year or frequent a theater to see a concert as go to the beach.

For some time now leisure pursuits, with no thought to over-supply, have been cannibalizing one another, which is a far greater threat than school start dates.

The obstacle that restricts leisure activity participation either at home or on holiday is not some public policy or a failure to make converts but simply competition for time from other leisure activities.  Participation also declines in proportion to what behavioral researchers and economists call increased “access to opportunity.”

This is all to say that the more access people have to an activity, the less urgency they feel to partake.  Beaches and theaters face competition not just from other beaches and theaters but from activities like baking and reading a book.

The time and effort that some in tourism place on telling school districts what they can and cannot do, would in my opinion, be far better spent on innovation, more research and better customer service.

The time would also be better spent on ferreting out those “wolves” within who seek to cannibalize promotional resources and sense-of-place to merely benefit their own narrow interests.

Education Entitlement Imperative

In March of 1867, during battles with ultra-conservative-Democratic President Andrew Johnson over how to re-organize the South following the Civil War, the Republican Congress, controlled by liberals and moderates, managed to pass, and the President subsequently signed, new legislation establishing a national department of education to collect statistics.

Conservatives had long opposed compulsory public education.  Fearing even the collection of statics, the department was soon-after demoted from cabinet level to the status of office.  However, in 1870, under the new act and the new administration of President and Civil War hero U.S. Grant, the government began to conduct statistical surveys.  In 1872, Congress authorized the hiring of the first statistician.

This is how we now know that between 1870, around the time many of my great-grandparents were born and 1952, two years after I was born, “every decade was accompanied by an increase in 0.8 years of education.”

Unfortunately, that annual bump in the level of education stopped thirty years ago.  It probably isn’t coincidental that this was also when the middle-class went into decline and about the time conservatives -- by this time mostly Republicans -- took power as well as aim at government and education policy.

Ironically, it was conservatives who, in 1642, first put compulsory education into law.  The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were ultra-conservatives, but they believed education was a moral and social imperative.

However, it would be another 210 years before Massachusetts established compulsory attendance, which reminds me of a hotelier-friend of mine in Durham, NC where I live, who found that asking prospective employees if they had a car was insufficient, so added the question, “and does it run?” 

By 1900, pressed by the Progressive Movement, 34 states including four in the South had legislated compulsory schooling if even for as little as a few weeks a year.  This included my native Idaho, first settled by my great-grandparents in 1860, which embedded education in its pre-statehood constitution in 1887. 

By 1907, North Carolina, my adopted home now for nearly 25 years, followed suit and finally, Mississippi became the last state to do so in 1917.  By 1910, 72 percent of American children were attending school.

Back then, half the nation's children attended one-room schools as my father did during the 1920s and 1930s in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho.  By 1918, near the end of the Progressive Era, every state required students to at least complete elementary school.

It isn’t clear why conservatives have so often opposed education.  You almost need a scorecard to keep track of when conservatives have been in control of each of the major political parties in the US.

When I need a break from writing essays such as these, I often pick up a small book entitled The Good Of This Place, a collection published by Dick Brodhead, a friend of mine in Durham, who is currently President of Duke University.

Before ascending to become president of Duke, Dick had been the long-time Dean of Yale College.  One of my favorites in the book, which was published just as I retired, is entitled Taking Democracy to School, a 2001 pre-9/11 lecture he made as part of the De Vane series to mark Yale’s 300th anniversary.

Here, Dick tells the story of an 1778-80 public education legislative proposal made by Thomas Jefferson entitled “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” during the time he was elected Governor of Virginia while the American Revolution was in full swing.

To me, Jefferson and James Madison were the conservative Republicans of their time, resisting change, especially when it came to proposals by other founding fathers to abolish slavery.

The bill was repeatedly submitted by each of these men and a watered-down version was finally passed by the Virginia Commonwealth in 1796, well after formation of the United States of America and a constitutional compromise that would leave slavery in place until the Civil War triggered passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In this speech, Dr. Brodhead points out several “paradoxes of democratic education” contained in Jefferson’s proposal:

1. “It failed partly because Virginia voters were unwilling to entrust their local schools to a statewide system…largely because they refused to assume the tax burden…”
2. “Jefferson would make the school the great equalizer, the tool for neutralizing differences of income and family standing [except slaves.]
3. His whole three-tier apparatus is an elaborate sorting device, a mechanism for separating the persons of superior parts and blessing him with further advancement.”

I can imagine the characteristic twinkle in Dick’s eye as he dryly notes that – “When Jefferson speaks of best geniuses being “raked from rubbish,” the limits of his egalitarianism comes clear.”

Today, education is an entitlement but a sense of “entitlement” is not limited by socio-economic status or level of education or privilege.  In 2011, while summarizing some of his research, Ed O’Brien, phd candidate in psychology at the University of Michigan noted that – “For some, a dull moment can seem like an eternity, whereas for others there is no such thing as a dull moment.

Fortunately, for the most part, I have always been more like the latter but especially now in retirement.  The study found that, unfortunately, for people who feel entitled, time passes oh, so slowly.

According to a 2012 McKinsey Global Institute survey, there are 75 million unemployed youth around the world, one in eight between the ages of 15 and 24.  For them, time is excruciatingly slow. The figure increases to 225 million when counting those who are underemployed.

Yet, paradoxically, only 43% of the employers surveyed in nine countries including the United States could find enough skilled entry-level workers.

Of those of student-age who didn’t attend post-secondary school, 57% are “too cool” (in my opinion, a form of entitlement) and 43% are “too poor.”  Another 18% are “disengaged” and 26% are “struggling.”

The McKinsey report analyzes three “critical intersections” for students, educators and employers: 1) enrolling in post-secondary education, 2) building skills, and 3) finding a job.

“Cost” is the top barrier to enrolling in college, denying nearly a third of high-school graduates access.  Among those who go on, only “46% are convinced they made the right choice as far as selecting institution or field of study.”

For those who do go on, there is a big disconnect at “building skills,” the second intersection, with 60% citing on-the-job training and hands-on learning as the most effective instructional techniques, “but fewer than half of that percentage are enrolled in curricula that prioritize those techniques.”

In my experience, many of the students in the surveys seem to feel “entitled” as do many prospective employers which are as much impediments as any failure by educational institutions to make adjustments.  At the third intersection, a quarter of youth fail to make a smooth transition to work.

The report proposes some improved models and in the United States, a Career Readiness Partner Council coalesced just a few months ago to evolve a new model between employers, policy-makers, educators, students and families.

However, I am more persuaded that a critical part of the answer is to be found by expanding the social and moral imperative for education into pre-school years.

Programs such as Smart Start, which brings together all the people involved in a pre-schooler’s life— “families, teachers, doctors, caregivers, social workers, and many others” as well as the More at Four program, have been proven effective by researchers at Duke University.

A recent Gallup survey of students reveals that student engagement with learning and education is highest during elementary school at 76%, falling to 61% by middle school and 44% in high school.  Fixation on standardized testing is one of the culprits.

I am convinced that even early intervention, well before elementary school is the answer to creating a lifetime enjoyment of learning.

Music Engages More Regions Of The Brain Than Anything

Many people who have been come to know her over her more than twenty-year career in community/destination marketing (DMO) have been surprised to learn that my successor in Durham has undergraduate and graduate degrees in music, degrees often cited as excellent preparation for admission to professional schools.

Music is obviously also a perfect preparation for running a DMO!

In her new book Now You See It, Cathy N. Davidson, notes that neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Levitin has discovered that “music makes complex circuits throughout the brain, requires all the different kinds of brain function for listening, processing, and producing in various forms and makes us think differently.”

Levitin, who wrote the book This Is Your Brain On Music,directs the McGill University Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise in Montreal. He has noted that “music engages more regions of the brain than anything else.”

Additionally, in remarks at the University of Miami, he noted that “brain studies also indicate that components of expertise that contribute to superior performance include memory, attention, will power, belief in self, physical configuration and an ability to view multiple failures as necessary steps to succeed…”

One of Professor Davidson’s popular classes at Duke University substitutes the word “Internet” for the word “music.” The preparation materials for This Is Your Brain On The Internet, note that “the kind of research one does every day on the Internet helps one to think in a creative, collaborative, nonlinear fashion.”

Her new book makes the case that along with gaming, the Internet is giving us a model for how to reform public education. This month, we’re seeing the eighth class of first year students entering college who have grown up with the Internet as a given, a central part of the household, play and work.

Davidson’s new book makes a compelling case for a fresh look at the core benefits that subjects such as art and music bring to a holistic education. In the book, she also notes that the people who originated both the IQ test and the objective, multiple-choice exam, both warned against their use during their lifetimes and why.

Yet today, we find a major part of every class year devoted to taking standardized tests that measure only memorization and are largely irrelevant to the workplace. Davidson argues that the literacy skill to learn, unlearn and relearn must be added to the old three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic.

Education according to Davidson must now include “three new Rs “rigor, relevance, and relationships.” Maybe innovation is right under our nose.

44% of Workplace Interruptions Are Self-Induced

I’ve spent all weekend reading and rereading an incredible new book, released just last Thursday.  It is entitled Now You See It – How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.

This book is a must-read for anyone concerned with transforming both the workplace and public education to better suit the world that has evolved so dramatically “since that fateful day in April 1993 when Mosaic 1.0, the first popular Web browser” unleashed the Internet for widespread use as the author notes.

In full disclosure it is written by Cathy N. Davidson with whom I share a passion for Durham, our adopted hometown and whose work at Duke University, as co-founder of HASTAC and as an author are more reasons to believe Durham is indeed where great things happen.

This is one of those books where nearly every sentence reveals new research, information, insights and examples of why we urgently need to update both our workplaces and educational system.

Our current workplaces and the educational system meant to prepare us are both creatures of 19th century thinking.  The Internet has revolutionized the way we work and collaborate but the layout and rules of the workplace and the educational system largely remain stuck in the century before last.

Davidson humorously notes that Ichabod Crane, the schoolmaster in the classic 1820 book entitled The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, would be baffled today by electricity, moving images, computers and cell phones but he’d be right at home and find little had changed in today’s classroom since the horse and buggy days of Sleepy Hollow.

If you’re like me, you’re guaranteed to finish this book enthusiastic and optimistic about the changes we need to make.  You’ll also come away with a fuller understanding of how our brain works including the fact that it is always “on” and that 44% of workplace interruptions originate and 80% of our neural energy is consumed not from external sources but from the distractions in our own minds.

The question isn’t whether we can and must multi-task but when have we ever mono-tasked?  Researchers noted in the book have confirmed that switching from one specific task to another uses less than 5% of the brain’s normal “at rest” energy.

I really can’t do the book justice in the framework of one post but there is no one book I’d recommend more to anyone wanting to see into the near and long-term future of how we’ll live and work and learn and unlearn and relearn in this century.