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Union City Online
Dr. Margaret Honey talks about Union City Online, an urban district that successfully transformed its educational program and integrated technology into the curriculum. by Melissa Burgos Brown SCR*TEC I think that one of the most important things that Union City tackled at the outset is an attitude problem that often exists among teachers [in urban districts], not through any individual's fault, but it's a social, cultural problem that says in effect "These kids can't learn. They're too poor. They don't speak English well enough. They don't come from the right background. They can't learn." From the outset of their reform efforts, Union City tackled that issue head-on. Every time the Executive Director of Academic Programs, Fred Carrigg, spoke to his faculty he said, "We are a district that believes every child can succeed." --Dr. Margaret Honey
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 argaret
Honey is Deputy Director of the Center for Children and Technology at the
Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC). She recently lectured at the Institute
of Leadership and New Technologies which was hosted by the Harvard Graduate
School of Education. For the past 17 years, her work has focused on the research
and development of educational media for children, including computer software,
television programs, and print materials. Her interest in educational media
began with her work at the Children's Computer Workshop, a division of the
Children's Television Workshop. There she was tasked with developing software for
early adolescent children. To facilitate this process, her group decided to work
at a kids computer camp in eastern Connecticut where the kids acted
as reviewers of different software programs. It was this experience that
determined the focus of her dissertation research and ultimately her life's
work.Here we will discuss Union City Online, a nationally recognized project funded by the National Science Foundation. Union City Online is one of several National Science Foundation projects directed by Dr. Honey. She holds a doctorate in developmental psychology from Columbia University. |
 Dr. Margaret Honey |
You are and have been involved in many projects to develop the use of
telecommunications technologies in education. I'm just going to focus on a few of
them. First, you are currently Deputy Director of the Center for Children and
Technology at Education Development Center, can you talk a little bit about the
Center and your role there? While I was working on my dissertation, finishing it up, I left the Children's Computer Workshop and I came to the Center for Children and Technology [CCT]. We were then based at Bank Street College of Education here in New York. I was brought on board at CCT to assist in the research about the Voyage of the Mimi. Mimi was a mixed media package developed in the 80s. It was funded with money from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education. It was designed to draw upper elementary school students into interesting math and science concepts. The first Voyage was all about studying whales in the North Atlantic and the second Voyage was about Archeology in the Ancient Maya. So was this software or Internet based? This was pre-Internet. That's why I say it was mixed media. It was a combination of video, computer software, and print materials. The video had two different components. One was a dramatic series. In each case this consisted of about 13, 15-minute episodes and was a story that unfolded over time. Each of the dramatic episodes was paired with a documentary piece. For example, in one of the dramatic episodes of the second voyage, they're in the Yukatan in Mexico and they're in the jungle and they're exploring the Maya ruins. They're on this quest to solve this mystery and there are looters in the picture, it's very dramatic and wonderful. The little girl in the story gets bitten by a scorpion and in the story it turns out she's okay, but what we would do when that kind of event took place in a drama is follow it up with a documentary piece. In this case, the documentary piece featured a group of people who were based in a laboratory, I believe in Mexico City, who studied venomous creatures. The documentary was a window into the life and work of the scientists who tackled the problem of scorpion bites and the bites of other poisonous creatures and learned how to develop medicines that would counter the bites. Each of these 15-minute dramatic episodes were followed with a documentary that would take a real-life scientific problem and see it through in another 15-minute piece. It was a really wonderful program. I spent a couple of years working on the Mimi project with a whole team of people. We did research about how these materials were used or could be used in classroom settings and really payed attention to certain modifications that we as designers needed to make in order to make them both understandable by the students, but also responsive to the constraints of classrooms and all of the issues that teachers contend with as they teach and work with media at the classroom level. That for me was the first project that pushed me back into schools. |
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Union City Online is a project that has been going on for quite some time and
has received national recognition. As director of that project, can you begin by
describing the Union City Online project and some of the changes you hoped to
make at the beginning of the project. Over the last five years I have spent a lot of my time working in the Union City Schools. That has been a very important collaboration for me personally and for the Center as a whole. The story in a nutshell is, in 1989 Union City was one of the big city urban districts in New Jersey that was cited by the State Department of Education for sort of extreme failure. They were failing on 42 out of 50 indicators. That's not unusual for an urban city and those problems continue to plague our urban cities these days. We were originally brought into the Union City district by Bell Atlantic. They were launching a multimedia education trial that, in a nutshell, took a group of seventh graders from the Christopher Columbus School and gave them computers at home. They also put a lot of computers in the school, gave computers to all of the teachers and administrators in the school, and to several administrators in the district. They provided home-access to computers as well as school access and linked them up over a network. Again, you have to think pre-Web, because why would anybody tackle this with the World Wide Web. Bell was one of the phone companies that was investing heavily in video on demand and they had a group that was interested in experimenting with multimedia on demand. That's what the technology trial in Union City was set up to do. We were brought in to serve as educational consultants and advisors to the project. We played a lot of different roles in that endeavor. We were the eyes and ears on the ground that helped to troubleshoot problems. We brought certain issues to Bell Atlantic's attention that needed paying attention to. We also documented what was taking place on the project and examined some of the student-learning outcomes and wrote reports. We also worked with the teachers and supported them as they used the technology in their classrooms. Most importantly for us, what that project enabled us to do was to develop a relationship with the district and also with Bell Atlantic. |
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"... one of the reasons why the district has been able to
take such phenomenal advances with the technology and use it so effectively is
that they had and continue to have broad consensus around an educational vision
and a consensus on how they think teachers should teach and students should
learn." |
Well, we worked with them in subsequent years and almost four years ago we wrote
a proposal in collaboration with the district and with Bell Atlantic, to the
National Science Foundation which was funded. It helped to much more broadly
distribute the technology infrastructure throughout the district and even more
importantly than that, to really begin to develop and put in place mechanisms
that would support and help sustain and grow the human infrastructure over time.
That project has been hugely successful and I'm not saying that because we're
involved. It was really a collaborative effort and the district has invested
enormous resources of their own and has a lot of creative people working on
effective ways to use technology. What has made Union City a particularly interesting place for us to work in and to learn from is that back in late 1989 early 1990 when they were under the threat of state takeover they decided that they were going to undertake a very, very comprehensive program of reform and restructuring. You can read about a lot of this on their Web site. They changed everything and they didn't do it all at once. They started working with K-3 and then 4-6 and then went into middle schools and then high schools where they are still working on reform and restructuring. The K-8 level has been hugely successful and Union City now has the distinction in the state of New Jersey of being the only urban district whose students are passing the state standardized tests with grades that are comparable to students in suburban areas. That is a huge, important accomplishment and technology has been a critical component of that endeavor for them. |
| The point that we always make
in talking about Union City and the reform and technology efforts is that
one of the reasons why the district has been able to take such phenomenal
advances with the technology and use it so effectively is that they had
and continue to have broad consensus around an educational vision and a
consensus on how they think teachers should teach and students should learn.
It's all built around inquiry and project-based work and putting into practice
student-centered kinds of learning. Again, there's a mountain of information
on the Union City Web site. The virtual tour, which we worked on with students in the district, takes you through the history of the reform and restructuring efforts. It's a very interesting community, it's taught us a huge amount about the challenges of teaching and learning and working in urban schools. We've worked with incredible teachers there and incredible administrators and phenomenal students. The kids who we started working with as seventh graders as part of the project are now going into their senior year. I think everybody is just taking such great pride in their accomplishments and I'm hoping that they get into some of the best schools in the country. |
| "From
the outset of their reform endeavors, the district put professional development
as front and center. It's a key, central, very important part of the project." |
Professional development is
just one area that the Union City project has focused on and an area that
many districts are now finding is key to the successful implementation of
technology in the classroom. Can you talk about that effort? It has, of course, changed and evolved over time and the district has in place professional development structures and practices that they began implementing in the early 90s. They include what they call "Awareness Sessions" in which they bring in a speaker from the outside to talk about an issue. They also have sessions where they share experiences or strategies. For instance, all of the third grade teachers in the district will get together and talk about the successes that they are having in their classroom and failures that they're having in their classrooms. It's equally important to share both, as a strategy and opportunity to learn from each other. There are now numerous professional development opportunities around the use of technology, many of which are being led by students. Students are being used left, right, and center to train teachers on how to build Web pages, how to conduct searches on the Internet, how to make PowerPoint presentations, and so on and so forth. Lots of professional development work is going on in the district. Was this a key part of the Union City project from the beginning? From the outset of their reform endeavors, the district put professional development as front and center. It's a key, central, very important part of the project. |
| Another thing I found interesting
in the Union City project was the commitment to community involvement, the
"Business, Community, and Educational Applications of Technology course"
is just one example of this. Can you talk about what students do in this
summer course and the impact it has had on the students and community centers
involved? That was the brainchild of my colleague Andres Enrique who about three summers ago got the course off the ground. Andres's vision, which he saw through, was to enlist interested community organizations and city agencies in working with teams of students to develop Web pages. That course was successful beyond our wildest hopes. We never thought that it would have the kind of far-reaching consequences that it had. That first summer, the students worked in teams. We had about 15 kids in the course. We all worked with them that summer. I think there were about five adults working with them. They developed Web sites for the Public Housing Authorities, for the city's daycare organization, and for the mayor's office. What the kids say was the most challenging part was conducting the research about the organizations, learning about what they did, who the constituents were, and what kind of information was needed to represent them online. The kids always say that the technical part, building the Web site was easy, it was doing all that background information and figuring out how to organize it into a design that would be meaningful, that was the challenging part. It proved to be very, very successful and the district right away saw the potential of the new technology. They also saw that they now had a group of about 15 students who were extremely knowledgeable. So they had the foresight to set up what is now an institutionalized program called the Computer Applications Mentoring Program where they partner technologically knowledgeable students with technologically naive faculty. They work on joint projects together so the kids learn content and do research around content-based issues and the faculty learn technical skills. That has been another extremely effective program that's grown out of the work in Union City. |
| "What
the district has tried to convey to the parents is that the schools are
a place where they're welcome." |
There is also a Parent University
Program that has existed since 1991, can you describe this program and
it's success in Union City? That program is headed up by a woman named Adrianna Berne in the district. I believe it's modeled on a program that they learned about that took place in New Mexico. They are always very careful not to take a regional credit for the program. The intent behind the program was to figure out ways for parents to be drawn more effectively into the schools. How it's evolved over time is, it offers a whole range of courses that parents need to participate in, in order to do things like complete a GED requirement or to get basic computer skills that will allow them to get a job. So there are a whole range of courses that the Parent University offers. There are also other activities. They offer cultural trips like visits to museums or science institutions. What the district has tried to convey to the parents is that the schools are a place where they're welcome. At the same time, the district also set up local school-based government structures that they call SIT Teams, School Improvement Teams which parents sit on and participate in. All of this work has made a big difference in parent involvement and parents in particular have been hugely interested in the technology offerings that Parent University offers. Most of the technology computer courses that Parent University offers are taught by teachers in the school district who volunteer to run Parent University courses. So there's a huge amount of dedication on the part of the people involved. When the public libraries got wired and began offering courses for people in the community, they had over 1,000 people sign up in the first week. It's an interesting community. It's a very poor community, but it's clearly a community where people want to learn, take on new challenges, and get skills that will improve the quality of their life. I think they're very invested in their children succeeding. It feels urban, but certainly nothing like New York. It's just like a kind of community. |
| Lastly, is there any advice
that you would give to school districts in urban areas such as Union City,
who are just getting started in their technology initiatives? I think that one of the most important things that Union City tackled at the outset is an attitude problem that often exists among teachers [in urban districts], not through any individual's fault, but it's a social, cultural problem that says in effect "These kids can't learn. They're too poor. They don't speak English well enough. They don't come from the right background. They can't learn." From the outset of their reform efforts, Union City tackled that issue head-on. Every time the Executive Director of Academic Programs, Fred Carrigg, spoke to his faculty, he said "We are a district that believes every child can succeed." There has been a huge attitude shift in Union City, as a result of tackling that issue very explicitly and very directly and very deliberately and by getting across that message time and time and time again. Now that's not to say every teacher in the district feels that way. There are still people who will say to me "You know, I can't teach these kids. They can't learn." But I think our research is certainly showing that there's been a significant shift in teachers' attitudes of what students are capable of and what they can do. The teachers have a huge amount of pride in the students accomplishments. And now the district is invited to speak all over the country and students are always brought along. So if you want them to come talk to you, they do a wonderful job. |
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