Transcriber: gilles damianthe Reviewer: Denise RQ
So last year I had the honor to be on a panel at the White House.
I'd been selected along with a number of public school innovators.
We were talking about education.
I come from the Community College, and in particular,
I come from Prison Education working with adult inmates,
so when I first got this email and I heard about this selection,
I was convinced that there was a mistake.
So, my family and I go to the White House.
We go up to security,
and they can't find us on the list.
So I turn to my wife and I say:
"I told you! I knew it! it was a mistake!"
(Laughter)
Well, all of that is straightened out, --it's really complicated there--,
and we're on the panel,
and there's a question about the behavior of students,
and someone makes a comment about how their challanges
with the behavior of students, must be nothing
compared to mine with our students in the prison.
And I knew at that moment that I was in the right place.
You see, I had the opportunity to tell them
[that] inmates make the best students!
They do all their homework, they show up everyday,
and if they don't, I know where they are!
(Laughter)
And they never bring their cellphones to class!
(Laughter)
My wife is a psychotherapist
and I'm the Dean at the Community College,
and as a side job, we also own and operate
an independent pre-school through middle school.
So our conversations can be very bizzare.
I'll be talking about an issue that's come up at the prison,
she'll be talking about something at the preschool or in elementary school,
and so our family slogan has become:
"Education from preschool to prison."
(Laughter)
And I want to draw on that experience today.
Today what I want to talk about
is the future of prison education,
both on how we can have more college in prison,
but also have prison education be more like preschool.
First, let me make the case for prison education,
and fortunately, it's a really easy case!
The RAND cooperation has just completed a major study
looking at prison education across the United States,
and here's what they found:
[From] 100 inmates who're released,
43 will recidivate, they return to prison.
If they participate in prison education, 30 will recidivate.
Now, 30 is still one in three and it's still far, far too high,
but the key is in that 13 that don't come back.
See, it's that 13 that means 13 victims that don't happen,
13 lives that aren't shattered,
13 properties not destoyed,
13 families that aren't torn apart.
And it is in that 13 that we also see the return on investment.
RAND estimates that for every dollar spent on prison education,
there is a return on investment of $5.
Here in Washington,
our Washington State Institute for Public Policy says
that for every dollar invested in vocational education,
there will be at least a $12 return.
And that's a return both to tax payers, to families, to society.
It also, on an individual level, impacts the inmate who releases.
That individual has a 13% higher rate of employment
if they've participated in any form of education,
and they have a 28% higher rate of employment,
if they participate in a vocational education program.
Prison education saves lives.
Prison education saves money.
Now, let me talk about my experience
and how I can twist that into my vision for the future.
For the last 6 years I've been working
as the Education Director at Collin Bay Olympic Correction Center.
And in those 6 years, we've been able to do things
that we really would not have been able to do 10 years ago.
We have an internet in a box, that we've worked with other partners,
where inmates are able to sit down
and without ever being on the internet, on the streets,
can access the same kinds of resources
that our students, that our community college,
would be able to access on the streets.
So they access Khan academy.
And they have an edited version of Wikipedia.
They have access to a learning management system
that's used at every community college in Washington state.
They are able to be
just like a Community College students on our main campus.
We've been able to use this
to turn our prison campus into our north-west campus.
And it's changed how we operate.
If you could imagine what you could do
with just taking a little bit of these innovations of technology,
and start to look at what we know is working
in graduate schools across the country.
Let's take a low residency program,
and many of you or some of you may have done the program like this.
So picture a team of faculty, kind of your dream team of faculty,
that could come to a prison
and spend a week of face to face interaction
with those students.
They could bring with them simulations,
sophisticated lab science simulations,
because there are plenty of labs that we don't want to run in prisons;
they're just not safe.
But you could take that technology, you could bind it
with that team of instructors and develop that rapport.
And then using technology that we have now,
we could secure an online class room,
so that, that dream team moves, a few weeks later, to another prison.
And you start to build a series of concurrent online courses,
that started with that, really very important, connection
that then continues throughout that semester.
And you've now opened up that possibility to have
history degrees, which happens to be where I come from.
(Laughter)
See mom! You can do something with a history degree!
(Laughter)
You can have science degrees, you can have engeneering,
there's so much more possible when we just change a little bit,
make that small change as we've heard this morning,
in how we deliver our services.
What else can we do?
So we take that dream team,
and we also add to it competency-based degrees.
And we take the life experience of inmates.
Our inmates come to us with a lifetime of experience.
And while they are in prison, they gain a lifetime of experience.
And we evaluate it, through careful assesments,
and we identify what are those skills that they have?
What are those skills they need?
And you combine that with that low-residency program
and now you can get that much closer to degrees,
opening up the number of possibilities for our students.
And then, we add other technologies.
So we added a tablet, a simple tablet
like a iPad kind of thing,
that we load with all the lectures, all the materials, the textbooks,
in our case, we would use open educational resources
because they come with the amazing price of free,
and we load that textbook
with everything that an inmate student would need.
So when a two-week lock-down happens,
the education doesn't end,
and with that tablet
we combine that with this form of education.
And we expand those possibilities.
And these are all using technologies that exist now!
We're moving them from the streets,
securely moving them into the prison!
But then there's preschool.
Preschools and prisons have a lot in common.
They all have similar rules:
Keep your hands and your feet to yourself,
no biting, hitting, spitting, no running.
Prisons have wreck, preschools have recess,
prisons have hobby-craft, preschools have arts and crafts,
prisons and preschools, both have music,
and they both, have lots and lots of drama.
(Laughter)
But they also share one other thing in common:
They are both about creating a space,
a space where the individual can learn or re-learn,
how to be in the world.
So let me draw on two examples from our preschool program.
Many of you wil remember having Lincoln Logs sets,
those little logs, with the little pieces
and you put them together to build forts.
At our preschool, we recently made a real Lincoln logs set,
and I mean 6 foot long Lincoln Logs.
And we did that intentionally,
because the only way to make it work,
is for those children to work together.
Because no one child can move a 6 foot long Lincoln log!
They have to work together to build
and so they learn through that exercise the joy of creating,
when you get to create something,
when you get to destroy something,
that you get the owners permission.
(Laughter)
You have that opportunity to build together.
The other thing we know
is that no significant learning happens
without a significant relationship.
And we know, when you think back to your experiences as a child,
that it is those early relationships
with those teachers that are so vital.
So we take those 2 ideas
and how do we incorporate those into this furture vision?
Well we do it in subtle ways.
I used to work with an inmate
who had committed absolutely terrible crimes.
And even when he was incarcerated,
he committed some terrible assaults.
But he had changed, made some other decisions,
and now he was working in our adult basic education classroom.
And he was learning how to take cassette tapes...
--some of you may not know what those are--,
(Laughter)
--I 've just realized that!--,
and digitizing them and putting them next to books
so that low literacy students
could read and hear the words at the same time.
It was really frustrating for him.
As he's working through that he'd come to me:
"Mr Walsh, I don't know how to do this!"
And I'd say:
"I don't know how to do it either, break it 'till it works!"
And he'd go back, and he'd work on it
and he'd work on it, and he'd come to me and say:
"I broke it again, I got to restore it!
I broke it again, but i'm getting closer!
I'm breaking it till it works!"
And he's experiment with it in a safe enviroment.
In our horticulture program I had a student
who had never once gardened,
who had never had anything to do with plants.
And we know that horticulture is theraputic.
And he came to me, or I came to him
and he was showing me with just this utter joy on his face,
what he was able to bring into the world:
a garden plot that he had planted,
that he had taken care of,
and at the same time he was learning botany and biology.
I had a student who I had expelled from our business program.
It was really not a good fit for him there,
and so he'd eventually chosen to end up in our baking program.
And the one thing I know about that baking program
is that I have an instructor, who everyday, when I ask him
how things are going, he says:
"I'm just having so much fun!"
And this student, in that class, could make
the most beautiful braided breads that you've ever seen.
He'd make challah, and I can guarantee
we were the only challah producer for about 70 miles on the Peninsula.
He would make these breads that tasted amazing.
And his life in the living units, his life in our classes,
were completed changed when he found that place
where he could connectedly, and artistically, express himself.
In our business classes,
my instructors have spent far too much time
finding every single TED talk and putting it on our network
to share with the students,
so that a student can go
from an accounting software package to a TED talk.
They can go from business math,
and then they can go and watch
a podcast from Planet Money or some other kind of podcasts.
They learn that they are in control of their learning,
and they jump back and forth between these things.
It's dynamic, it's fluid, but they are in control of it.
A few years ago I started a computer programming program,
and I had pictured a very, very traditional program:
everbody would start at the same time
and they'd end at the same time.
There would be lectures, there'd be text books
there'd be big fancy projects.
Well, we found out that it wasn't working.
So we changed courses,
and we took the same ideas and the same outcomes,
and we started teaching
computer game design and development
as a way to teach computer programming.
If you were to go into that class room now
you would see it's very much like a preschool:
some students are playing games,
some students are breaking games,
some students are writing games,
some are doing music, some are doing arts,
all of them are learning.
And there are learning high level computer programming languages:
Java Scripts, C++, C#.
The learning there is intensive, but it's student directed,
they form their own teams, just like those giant Lincoln Logs,
and they figure out how to build what they want to build.
But I have to tell you,
I always worry, I always worry that one day,
the associate super attendant is going to stop by
and she's going to look in and shes going to say:
"Wow! They look like they're having fun!"
(Laughter)
"Don't they know this is prison?"
Thank you very much.
(Applause)