Frank Withrow
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- "Let us think of education as the means for developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation." (John Fitzgerald Kennedy; 35th President of the United States; 1917–1963.)
Introduction
Withrow received his BS in Education of the Deaf, MS in Speech and Hearing, and a Ph.D. in Audiology from Washington University in St. Louis. He holds Advanced Clinical Certification in both Speech and Hearing from the American Speech and Hearing Association.
Quoting from the reference given above:
- Dr. Frank Withrow worked for many years with the United States Department of Education. During the 1980s, he served as the Director of the Division of Educational Technology under the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Educational Research and Improvement. He also worked as the Director of Division of Technology Resource Assessment and Development. When he retired in 1992, Dr. Withrow was head of the Star Schools Project.
Short Biography
The following is quoted from Frank Withrow's Facebook home page:
- Dr. Withrow has been a classroom teacher, elementary supervisor, researcher, and an educational administrator. As the Director of Research and Clinical Services in The Department of Children and Family Services in the State of Illinois he developed a parent pupil program for deaf infants and their parents. His research includes electro-physiological testing of hearing in infants, paired associate learning, immediate visual memory spans, and the uses of programmed 3-D computer generated lessons.
- Dr. Withrow was the Director of Development for the NASA Classroom of the Future from 1996 to 1998. He served in the U.S. Department of Education from 1966 to 1992 as the Senior Learning Technologist. He administered technology programs for the disabled including Captioned Films for the Deaf where he developed captioning techniques for television. In addition he funded the development of reading machines for blind people. He was the Executive Director of the National Advisory Committee for Handicapped in 1975 at the time P.L. 94-142 was passed. He served as the Secretarys Liaison for the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester Institute for Technology, Gallaudet University, and the Model Secondary School for the Deaf.
- As a Senior Battelle Memorial Fellow he studied the influence of electronic media on child growth and development. He developed a demonstration of interactive cable television programs and edited a book on the influence of television on child growth and development.
- He was the program manager for the Departments television series including Sesame Street, Footsteps a series on child growth and development for parents and The Voyages of the Mimi, a multiple media elementary science and mathematics series. He also directed bilingual television programming that included Hispanics, French, Native Americans, Asians, and Afro-Americans themes. All programs included captions.
- He was the Director of Technology for the Young Astronaut Council where he developed an on-line series of lessons for students and teachers.
- He developed and managed the Star School distance-learning program for the U. S. Department of Education. He represented the United States of America as a learning technologist at a number of world conferences, i.e. OECD, UNESCO, and the Council of Europe.
- Dr. Withrow has worked as an adjunct professor at Washington University, St. Louis, MO, MacMurray College, Jacksonville, IL, and Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
- He has received many honors and awards including the United States Distance Learning Associations Leadership award. He is a member of USDLAs Hall of Fame. He has edited several books and written more than 300 professional articles. He has made numerous presentations and speeches including keynote addresses at professional conferences. He has more than 200 video and film credits.
- He was on the Board of the Northern Panhandle Head Start Program, Wheeling, WV. He was a member of the National Board for the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) at the Rochester Institute for Technology. He was a Board member of the Consortium on School Networking (CoSN). The CoSN annual educator award is named the Frank Withrow Award for Excellence.
- He was the Program Manager for two one-hour television specials on the "World of Work" which were designed to help youth and other people seeking employment understand the modern clusters of jobs and the training required to obtain such jobs. He was an advisory to the District of Columbia Public Schools multimedia project on developing employability skills for youth. He serves as an advisory to a District of Columbia School Board Member.
I Have Touched the Future
In recent years, Withrow has written a number of papers providing his insights into current attempts to improve our education system. As an example, the following is quoted from his January 2001 paper: I have touched the future … I teach.
- This most poignant and powerful declaration by Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who lost her life in the Challenger disaster, carries a powerful message. The future of the United States has always been in the hands of those who teach whether they are parents, teachers or others who have an abiding interest in children and their welfare.
- For most of the 20th Century American experts have argued over why some children can't read. Various theories from "whole language" to "phonics' have been both blamed for and put forward as the solution to the problem. None-the-less at an alarming rate many American children have failed to learn to read. Why?
- We have seldom been willing to look at the basic facts of the spelling of the English language and its detriment to the learning and mastering reading. English is the world's dominant language. It now contains more than one million words; it is used in the worldwide air traffic control systems, banking systems, and computer systems. It is this success of English that is partly to blame for the difficulty in learning to read it. English absorbs words from other languages at a phenomenal rate. Unfortunately, it most often retains the spelling of the language it adopted the word form. Consequently, the relation between the phoneme and grapheme of the words is corrupted. For example, the sounds and their letter representation in French are different from those in English. “bouquet” retains the French spelling but is Anglicized and has no relation to the phonetics of English.
- In the 1930s I remember as a youngster reading an article in The Dallas Morning News that deplored the acceptance of 'check' for 'cheque' in the new dictionary. They went on to deplore the fact that someone might want to change bouquet to bokay further diluting the English language. It is interesting that today my computer spell checker does not accept cheque as an alternative spelling. There are literally thousands of words in the English language that have the same problem.
- The bottom line is that the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet do not phonetically represent the 44 sounds of the English language. In fact, several letters in the alphabet have no independent phonetic value. The letter "c: for example is always pronounced as "s" or "k" as in cigar or cookie. "X" is another letter with no value of its own since it is always pronounced as "ks or z." In fact, the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet are combined 196 ways to represent the 44 sounds of English.
- America is one of the few countries in the world that value "Spelling Bees." Why? In languages that are more phonetic in nature where the sounds and the letters and combination of letters are exact reflections of one another, if you can say a word you can spell it. The American occupation forces in Germany after World War II thought that it would be a good American tradition to have "Spelling Bees" for young German students. It quickly became apparent that either all of the German children were much smarter than American students or something else was wrong. Nothing was wrong. German uses the Roman alphabet but has a greater consistency with respect to sound letter relations than English. Therefore, if you can say a German word you can spell it. The talent needed in a "Spelling Bee" is mostly memorization.
Education for All
The following is quoted from Frank Withrow's paper: Education for All. It represents some of his personal insights into our educational system.
- We fall short of our mission if we fail to include all children in our universal learning systems. The United States of America pioneered the concept of universal education for all children. In the late 1800s and early 1900s we opened a new high school almost every day across this nation. Horace Mann established that public schools benefit all people within a society; therefore all people should share in the costs of public education. Not only has the USA created a great K-12 education system we developed under the federal land grant college program a network of outstanding higher education opportunities for all that can qualify. Too often we separate K-12 from higher education but in reality the system is one from preschool to graduate school.
- The struggle for universal education has not been easy. Each generation has had to fight for the right to enter the schoolhouse door. For years many children of color were provided separate and unequal educations. It was not until 1954 that the Supreme Court in its most important decision unanimously struck down segregated schools. Unfortunately, there are those who still fight this decision and send their children to charter, church and/or private schools.
- We do not like to admit our racial biases but they remain. Unfortunately sectional rivalries and the false priorities still resonate with some in this great country. Unfortunately, there are those today that would eliminate our great public school system and replace it with an elite private system. Such ideas are often based upon the belief that marketplace principles will force competition making all schools better. This is a flawed principle. The principles in NCLB are not new but just the latest effort in a long line of federal education programs designed to open the doors of public schools to all learners. While the principles of NCLB are worthy the administration of NCLB has unleashed a mad search for assessment practices. It assumes that the objective of education is the passing of factoid based achievement tests without understanding the limitations of such tests. Schools are unfortunately becoming testing factories that emphasize the ability to recall factoids rather than measuring authentic learning.
- Critics have challenged NCLB managers with respect to assessment to no avail. The political infrastructure is convinced that good scores on such tests are the only real measures of achievement. In a modern era of digital tools a much more accurate measure of achievement would be portfolios of student's work on project based educational activities. Quality assessment programs by their nature cost more than we are willing to invest. The Department of Defense has understood that real tests of proficiency mean that if you are training pilots to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier they must demonstrate landing and taking off from the deck of a carrier. They have simulators that allow practice until the trainee is proficient enough to actually land and take off from the deck of a real carrier. We have not as yet been able to design assessment of school children as effectively as we have Navy pilots. However, competing in science fairs, civics contests and art festivals are more meaningful examples of student achievement than test scores.
- Politicians and the general public are not interested in creating a totally modern year round digital education system, because it will (1) cost more and (2) tear down the myths of traditional education achievement. Consequently we reamin prisoners of time bound by a agrairain society's model of schools. In a modern system testing would be an integral part of the learning process. There are examples of virtual high schools where a learner might take a French literature class on line from France, an art class from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Civics class from the US Congress and Advanced Placement Mathematics courses from NASA astronauts. The same student might also play the Oboe in his School's Symphony orchestra, be a player on his school's basketball team and be an actor in the schools drama club. The major barrier to such a system is Administrative management of such diverse learning resources and crediting the learner with achievement for his or her accomplishments from such multiple learning environments. We have the elements of such systems in place. So far we have lacked the will to implement them on a widespread basis. The federal Star School distance learning program has demonstrated the effectiveness of distance learning systems. The Virtual High School in Florida and other states have demonstrated the ability to provide high quality e-learning content both in schools and homes. Home schooling parents and children have demonstrated the effectiveness of digital based learning systems. Lemon Grove, California, Irving, Texas, the state of Maine and many others have demonstrated the viability of one on one laptop educational resources that provide 24/7 learning experiences year round. Achievement and productivity in these programs demonstrate their success. However, such programs require schools and communities to develop new and different models of education. No longer is learning controlled by the school, teacher or for that matter the School Board. Learning in the digital age requires a new organization within the community and within the professional ranks.
References
Bull, Jennifer (June 1994). Papers of Frank Withrow. University Libraries, University of Maryland. Retrieved 7/27/09: http://www.lib.umd.edu/NPBA/papers/withrow.html. Quoting from the Website:
- The Papers of Frank Withrow span the years 1981 to 1990. The collection documents the development and funding of educational television programs during this period with an emphasis on math and science curricula.
- The collection consists of four series:
- Series 1: Bank Street College of Education
- Series 2: Children's Television Workshop
- Series 3: Office of Educational Research and Development
- Series 4: Audiovisual and Computer Material
