Txting 4 better skool kulture?

From local school board meetings to the halls of the legislature to our offices in Seattle, the topic of how to create a better school culture geared toward achievement has been hotly debated. How can we engender an environment that makes success desired? How we can get students to encourage each other to do better? In essence, how can we make school cool?

While I’m all for innovative marketing strategies to get the message out to dropouts and struggling students that going to school pays off in spades in the long run, a new campaign launched by the New York City School District made me do a double take—or rather a double text. The administration plans to use text messaging campaigns to promote success amongst low-achieving students.

According to the New York Times, “the city is planning an intensive campaign that would use cellphones to help motivate students, most of them minorities and from poor families, in two dozen schools. The pilot program will include mentoring and incentives for high performance, like free concerts and sporting events and free minutes and ring tones for their phones. Every student in each of the schools will be given a cellphone.”

Cool? Definitely. But what’s wrong with this idea? Let me count the ways: Not only does this program essentially bribe students to do better in school, while obscuring the real value and advancement possible through education—it does so with cellphones, which, despite bans in many schools, have continued to be the bane of instructors’ existence. This doesn’t improve culture; it’s merely an expensive patch on a gaping wound.

Thankfully, earlier in the week, the Times published this editorial, which decried cellphones in the classroom and supported teachers who take sometimes drastic measures to ensure their classrooms are Nokia-tone free.

Last month, we posted a blog supporting the Los Angeles Unified School District’s innovative efforts to reach dropouts and low-achieving students using such online forums as MySpace and YouTube. This ultimately seems like better route to reaching students and certainly supports a learning environment and culture that prizes personal initiative to learn rather than the pursuit of a free cellphone.