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How would your work in high school have been different if you knew that in order to earn a credit for it, it would be reviewed by an anonymous teacher outside your school and, if approved, would be posted online alongside the work of your peers across the country? What if a college admissions officer or scholarship award committee needed little more than a student transcript to evaluate eligibility: no SAT, no entrance essay required. Imagine if students in classrooms across the nation could respond to a common assignment posted by CNN, NPR or any media outlet seeking youth voices? What if teachers were encouraged to develop projects that matter and had much less pressure to prepare students for “high stakes” tests? These thoughts are a subset of the implications of distributed ledger technology applied to basic high school record-keeping.
I am a former software engineer, high school physics teacher, FIRST Robotics coach and current high school principal. As a young student I experienced the founding years of the Chicago Waldorf School in K-8 and the International Baccalaureate (IB) in high school. It was the stark transition from private elementary to public inner city high school which started a lifelong interest in exploring diverse systems of education and organizational leadership. I completed one year of a DEUG in quantum chemistry in France and earned a BA in physics, with major studies in computer science, and francophone African literature. That was followed by an MA in secondary science education and finally an administrative certification to become principal. In between the BA and MA, I worked for six years as a technology consultant for Great Place to Work® Institute, Inc. and an Israeli technology startup and I owned a small business in San Francisco.
When I stepped into the classroom as a physics teacher in 2003, putting the conclusions I had drawn into practice, I saw results! This included the robotics program which won multiple competitive awards even taking first place when up against the best public and private schools of New York City and second place in New York State. We ranked nationally as one of the few all-minority teams to compete at that time. Student surveys at the school where I taught awarded me the “teacher from whom I learned the most” award, twice, an honor that remains among the proudest moments in my professional life. And in 2010 I was approved to be a principal after six years in the classroom. After an intensive year of training, I was placed at the helm of a failing alternative school in Harlem, one of the twenty-four worst among the nearly eighteen-hundred city schools. The school was listed for closure in a city press release just a few months after my appointment. Our community rallied and, against all odds, we reversed the shut down order. We enjoyed some five years after that as an A-rated school with a range of showcase programs such as a $600k podcasting studio, greenhouse, paid internships, college trips, and then teacher and student led initiatives like science courses taught through the lens of social justice, environmental and health justice programs, and a formal karate dojo. We produced albums of student music and hundreds of student films, reduced suspensions by nearly eighty percent while improving accountability benchmarks like test scores and even the city’s Quality Review awarded us the highest rating one time.
Here’s the short version of what these fifteen years in public education taught me: federal budgets, union contracts, mayoral election cycles, and even the Supreme Court now impose their authority on school communities to the detriment of students. Lawyers and politicians who rarely set foot in a school, let alone learn what it takes to mentor a young person who has experienced poverty, make decisions about how things should be run. Even when these policies are well thought out, the next election cycle hits and the new administration always seeks to distinguish themselves from their predecessor. Within a school building, change fatigue is equally unavoidable: the average tenure of a principal in a New York City public school is less than four years. I was an enthusiastic new teacher, but soon even I began folding my arms and waiting for each new initiative to pass me by. I had invested time to implement promising programs which had each since been discarded and replaced.
The remarkable thing is that despite the immense challenges, nearly every school community has a majority of teachers who work hard and demand students do the same, maintaining stability in their classrooms despite the hurricane-like destruction of political winds. Too often, these professionals have to isolate themselves to survive a career in this system, limiting their contribution to a single classroom or program within an otherwise dysfunctional community. I was trained as a principal within a network of alternative high school principals who taught me that I needed to dedicate my career to a single building if I hoped to build anything meaningful. These New York City Transfer Schools are, in my experience, among the most admirable leaders of the education reform movement. Alternative school students represent “limit conditions” in the sense that a physicist uses values like zero and infinity to test a new idea. In education reform, limit conditions include students who have been kicked out of every other school or faced the brutality of poverty or immigration status or racial injustice or gender discrimination or family tragedy or administrative runaround. Such “safety net” schools have a lot to teach us about what education reform is meaningful and what is just profiteering in the name of public education. I get the same sense of limit conditions when I find myself at the family court building in downtown Manhattan. It’s were I get to see the impact of how we treat our poorest (in the financial sense) members of society.
Despite the demonstrated results my team was having at our school in Harlem, we came under attack again starting in 2016 with a barrage of investigations. When the various investigators could find no reason to sanction us, the attacks turned to the tabloids at the start of 2017, just as the mayoral election was under way. I was reassigned from my post to protect the mayor from further bad press. I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands. I kept coming back to one key question: how can we get those veteran educators running programs with a proven track record to have greater authority in education policy discussions?
I turned to my iPad for what felt like respite from the impossible task of confronting a broken school system to learn about distributed ledger technologies like bitcoin. This type of inquiry into the state of technology is a favorite escape for me, reconnecting me to my professional roots in the tech industry. First it was actually a novel, “Neptune’s Brood” by Charles Stross, which gives a futuristic view of finance as “slow money” versus “fast money.” Then I read Nathaniel Popper’s ‘Digital Gold’ and a number of other books on the subject, followed by a library of Medium articles. What I learned was that blockchain is specifically designed to take quantifiable issues of “trust” and hand them over to a network of computers where all the logic running them is available for anyone to review and even modify (“open source”). This allows organic growth over time through crowd-sourced logic and accountability through transparency. As I read, the frequency of the word “trust” brought my thoughts back to the attacks on our school community. The experience of “trust” was one I had worked to cultivate with students and staff. I never expected that learning about cutting edge technology would bring me to reflect on issues of trust, as well.
This distributed ledger technology facilitates trust among people who don’t know each other, have never met each other and who otherwise have no reason to trust each other. In finance, this distributed ledger is just like a modern checking account, with the record of how much money is in each account being maintained by a global network of machines instead of by machines at a centralized headquarters like that of Bank of America. Similarly, high school credits are a centralized government ledger of certified student learning. What would happen, I wondered, if that ledger were to be decentralized? With a top-down system of record-keeping, substantial educational malpractice is unavoidable as union, legal, district, state, and federal government representatives lobby for adult interests, losing sight of the students. Credits for learning devolve into flimsy proxies like seat time or test results. This systemic malfunction leads to regulations put in place to increase “accountability,” laying a foundation of mistrust. Dealing with mistrust becomes the core work of school and district leaders, hassling teachers for more information than they would otherwise need while being tied down by ordinances which act as bandages to lawsuits exposing systemic malpractice.
Consider the implications for colleges and universities. They have been forced to create a separate system to evaluate student learning beyond the high school transcript. The SAT/ACT and college essays are needed because public high school credits are not trusted by universities to represent any actual learning. Just as bitcoin stores hard earned money, a cryptocredit could store hard earned academic credit. More specifically, every cryptocredit could be linked to a digital file (QR codes when printed on paper). Click or scan the credit to find content such as a PDF monograph, MP3 podcast, or MP4 video. Students upload this original content in exchange for cryptocredit on their transcript. This exchange establishes student work as the “fiat currency” of this credit ledger.
A cryptocredit system would demand that if politicians wanted high graduation rates they would be forced to focus on the quality of students’ work, as evaluated by anonymous and independent master teachers outside of the student’s school. No longer could they doctor the cutoff score of exams or change standards or otherwise manufacture statistics needed for their next election bid. The ‘master teacher’ credential, the only validators of meaningful learning in cryptocredits, like everything in the cryptocredit ecosystem, would be entirely validated based on quality of student work. In other words, a teacher could only earn the master teacher credential after their students consistently and over a period of many years, uploaded work which was approved for cryptocredit by the existing ‘master teacher’ community. Subsequently, if a master teacher were to certify work that other independent, anonymous, master teachers did not similarly approve for credit, they would lose their ‘master teacher’ credential, plain and simple. This is just the same as if someone tries to forge a bitcoin transaction, the computer which includes this transaction is simply left out of the network of validating nodes.
With the administrative act of decentralizing high school record-keeping, we would effectively transfer the authority to award a high school credit from state governments to a network of veteran educators. Imagine a college admissions officer at your alma mater who clicks on any credit shown on a transcript and sees the culminating task that resulted from that fifty-four hours of classroom learning. Every link would have already been “curated” by independent, anonymous master teachers who do not allow work onto the blockchain that does not meet standards. Furthermore, the credit blockchain only captures the culminating work, the polished student voice, not the content or application sweat equity layers:
- Layer I (off chain): students study relevant content (flash cards, quizzes, practice problems, articulated academic habits).
- Layer II (off chain): students integrate content into their own worldview through application assignments (forming their own questions about the content, reflecting on learning, planning their extension project);
- Blockchain/ Extension Layer: students extended their learning to the real world (multiple revisions to produce a final product that is academic, nuanced, and self-aware).
After a while that admissions officer would learn that they can trust these credits to represent meaningful learning experiences. They would not need to take time to click on every single link to verify what the transcript represented, although by doing so, they would learn much more about the student’s unique voice than any essay or standardized exam can show in the college admissions process. Each credit counts toward graduation, and when students have a complete portfolio, that would be sufficient for any university to evaluate their intellectual credentials. Next to a live extended interview with the student, cryptocredit would be “gold standard” evaluation of student academic and intellectual engagement for scholarship dollars and entrance decisions — a new common application.
High school students care about how they look in front of peers. By creating a public ledger of their podcasts, writings, and videos showing them applying academic habits to local issues we learn about our own society through fresh eyes while grounding our young people’s academic learning in the complex, messy, and ambiguous world they live in. Meanwhile, a veteran teacher can become a master teacher who validates work on the blockchain, helping keep more talent in the classroom by offering an alternative career pathway to the existing administrative route.
Imagine if a teacher’s union or professional association or major school district spearheaded this decentralized accounting system? While representing all teachers, they could create a ‘master teacher’ pathway for their most effective veterans to earn extra money validating cryptocredits, while maintaining the integrity of their profession by collectively shifting professional focus to where it should have been from the start: the quality of student work. Younger teachers would have something to strive for as they struggle to create quality learning opportunities for their students. Since it’s always uncomfortable to give and receive tough feedback with peers who work in your building, having the anonymous master teacher community evaluate student work gives young teachers unbiased feedback based on defined standards of practice. Now, instead of standardized test scores and principal letters to personnel files, which fundamentally disrespect any professional educator, the most important assessment of practice among educators would be entirely in the hands of fellow teachers, and entirely focused on student work products.
In the absence of a national professional organization recognizing the potential of distributed ledger technology for school record-keeping, a new generation of professionals will soon come of age who accept decentralization as a viable architecture for large organizations, and the technology will inevitably find it’s way to public ledgers like the high school transcript.
Updates on the cryptocredit project? Follow @NZeimer. A more technically complete version of this blog post is here: CryptoCredit whitepaper.
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Blockchain Will Disrupt Public Schools was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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