In spite of a woefully few success stories here and there, when you confront the daunting challenge of turning around 5,000 of America’s worst-performing schools, you have to think entirely outside the box. Here is a proposal to do just that, starting with 1,000 of these schools nationwide, and putting into practice some of the theories developed by Clayton Christensen in Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.
This plan is based on three premises: (1) that dramatic mission creep on one hand, and the dissolution of families and communities on the other, have made teaching impossibly difficult and beyond the skill set of average people; (2) that technology has made it possible to “commoditize” learning; and (3) that disruptive innovations that transform systems cannot be crammed into existing models.
Schools
The fundamental aspect of this plan is the creation of a proposed Twenty-First Century Schools Network. These schools would be entirely autonomous and not subject to state laws covering teacher certification, curriculum, seat time, class size, and so forth. They would be required only to meet safety and performance standards. The latter could be the new common standards now being proposed for use nationwide or those used by states such as California or Massachusetts, and would apply networkwide. The schools would be constituted like charters, but would not be subject to state regulatory restrictions.
The schools would be hybrid models that incorporated the use of technology as a central element of the learning experience. A range of such successful models from which to choose would be made available to the boards, principals, and faculty members of those schools. The schools would have to agree to collaborate with others in the network on curriculum and best practices.
Network schools would open in existing buildings, but with entirely new, specially trained teachers and leaders whose focus was on learning and who worked in tandem with software that delivers personalized instruction, appropriate intervention, and rigorous assessment.
Funding
Half the per-student cost would come from the federal government’s Title I traditional categorical spending augmented by the $3 billion School Improvement Program, and the other half would be contributed by the states. That leaves half the states’ average daily attendance funding to be allocated to districts to compensate them for releasing these schools to the network (minus any major facilities repairs required in any particular school). In addition, school districts would have the option of including the performance of these schools in their statistics, if they chose to do so, making this a win-win situation for all involved.
Based on the results obtained at the Rocketship Mateo Sheedy Elementary School in San Jose, Calif., and other virtual/hybrid models currently in operation, Twenty-First Century Schools would rapidly become self-sustaining, thereby freeing up funds for the next tranche of 1,000 worst schools.
Staffing
At the present time, Teach For America gets many more applications than it has slots to fill. This is not only because it is costly to recruit and train its teachers, but also because the organization is running into budgetary challenges in cities like New York, where it has become more difficult to place TFAers. This applicant pool could be culled to staff Twenty-First Century Schools and those teachers trained for the hybrid model at an anticipated lower cost.
Teacher layoffs brought on by the same budgetary constraints are also resulting in a marked upsurge in applications to virtual schools, according to a recent article in eSchool News, providing another pool of experienced teachers.
Tom Carroll, the president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, argues, in addition, that 70 percent of baby boom teachers “would stay engaged in education—as coaches and mentors in a collaborative learning culture.” That is precisely what the network envisioned would provide.
Principals could be recruited and trained from the ranks of current TFA teachers, principal-preparation organizations, and other fields. Running a Twenty-First Century School would be more attractive than running a traditional charter school for three reasons:
• There would be no facilities challenge, since the schools would take over existing buildings
• There would be no fundraising challenge, since the schools would be fully funded
• There would be the certainty of autonomy without interference from the state and district, since all regulations would be waived.
The Role of Foundations
A crucial element in this model is the establishment and support of an inspectorate to provide oversight for the Twenty-First Century Schools on a weekly or monthly basis. The oversight would not be prescriptive. Rather, the inspectorate would operate as an accrediting agency does, making sure that the school was fulfilling its mission on an ongoing basis.
In addition to being involved in this oversight function, foundations also would support the infrastructure for the network, to enable collaboration and the creation of a portal/filter to establish which successful models should be included. There would be no better place to test and refine innovative products than within this schools network, where the staffs would have both the training and the inclination to use technology routinely.
The reason for assigning such tasks to foundations is the network’s need for partners who are as objective as possible and operate outside the governmental structure. Since these schools would be located all over the country, it would even be possible to enlist the support of foundations that have regional constraints.
An added bonus of this plan would be the acceleration of the development and improvement of educational software, since providers would be assured of a market for their products on a competitive basis. Through the use of the network, participating schools would make their needs known, and solutions could be shared and evaluated as they became available.
Community Involvement
These exemplary schools would be touted in every community where they opened. Involvement by parents, students, and other members of the community would be sought and encouraged with a series of educational presentations about the hybrid model and a “Spruce Up Our School Day” where people pitched in to refurbish the building. This would happen simultaneously in all 1,000 schools, establishing their identity as a network. Priority would be given to the students already enrolled in the schools to be turned around, but if the seats could not be filled, admission would be made available to other children on a lottery basis.
Some may argue that this plan represents an experiment conducted at the detriment of the nation’s most disadvantaged children. But the opposite is true. This model promises to deliver a better, more consistent quality of education to children who have been shortchanged for decades—and to do that in spite of the human-capital challenges that make reform so problematic now.
Gisèle Huff is the executive director of the Jaquelin Hume Foundation in San Francisco, whose focus is on K-12 systemic education reform.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Free-Market, Disruptive Innovation, and the Commodification of Learning
Thursday, August 20, 2009
DEHUMANIZED When math and science rule the school
Mark Slouka's article in the September issue of Harper's Magazine, DEHUMANIZED When math and science rule the school provides an economic, social and historical context for "what we teach and why." He argues the emphasis on mathscience and the devaluing of the humanities by those who control education and write and talk about education in the general media have framed the discussion within the context of economic success and competition.
He asks the question, Why is every Crisis in American Education cast as an economic threat and never a civic one?
Here is a short excerpt from the essay but it's worth picking up a copy of Harper's and reading it in its entirety.
Many years ago, my fiancée attempted to lend me a bit of respectability by introducing me to my would-be mother-in-law as a future Ph.D. in literature. From Columbia, I added, polishing
the apple of my prospects. She wasn’t buying it.“A doctor of philosophy,” she said. “What’re you
going to do, open a philosophy store?”A spear is a spear—it doesn’t have to be original. Unable to come up with a quick response and unwilling to petition for a change of venue, I ducked into low-grade irony. More like a stand, I said. I was thinking of stocking Kafka quotes for the holidays, lines from Yeats for a buck-fifty. And that was that. I married the girl anyway.
It’s only now, recalling our exchange, that I can appreciate the signifi cance—the poetry, really—
of our little pas de deux. What we unconsciously acted out, in compressed, almost haiku-like form (A philosophy store?/I will have a stand/sell pieces of Auden at two bits a beat), was the essential drama of American education today. It’s a play I’ve been following for some time
now. It’s about the increasing dominance—scratch that, the unqualifi ed triumph—of a certain
way of seeing, of reckoning value. It’s about the victory of whatever can be quantified over
everything that can’t. It’s about the quiet retooling of American education into an adjunct of
business, an instrument of production. The play’s almost over. I don’t think it’s a comedy.
Despite the determinisms of the day, despitethe code-breakers, the wetware specialists, the
patient unwinders of the barbed wire of our being,this I feel is true: That we are more nurture
than nature; that what we are taught, generally speaking, is what we become; that torturers are
made slowly, not minted in the womb. As are those who resist them. I believe that what rules
us is less the material world of goods and services than the immaterial one of whims, assumptions,
delusions, and lies; that only by studying this world can we hope to shape how it shapes us;
that only by attempting to understand what used to be called, in a less embarrassed age, “the human condition” can we hope to make our condition more human, not less.
Then there’s amortization,
the deadliest of all;
amortization
of the heart and soul. —Vladimir Mayakovsky
Now go get a copy of Harper's and have a nice day.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Gates and the Magic Pill
Gates Foundation seeks education's magic pillSEATTLE — Ever since Americans sent their children to one-room schoolhouses, parents have known what makes a good school: an inspiring, organized, creative teacher. But researchers haven't been able to quantify what exactly makes a teacher effective and how to tie that to student achievement.
Now the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — an influential voice in education policy today — hopes to end that confusion. Nine years and $2 billion into its work to improve America's public schools, the Seattle-based foundation is turning its focus to teacher effectiveness.
"We've been sort of looking around for the silver bullet for education reform, and actually the answer has been right under our feet the whole time," said John Deasy, deputy director of the foundation's education work.
Over the next five years, the foundation plans to spend another half a billion dollars in its quest to figure out what qualities make the best teachers and how to measure those qualities in the classroom.
The project has two parts: research to develop and test methods to rate teachers and experiments at a handful of school districts around the nation to try out new ways of recruiting, training, assigning and assessing teachers.
Among those asked to submit proposals for a share of the money were school districts in Atlanta; Denver; Hillsborough County, Fla.; Memphis, Tenn.; Omaha, Neb.; Palm Beach County, Fla.; Pittsburgh; Prince George's County, Md.; Tulsa, Okla., and a group of Los Angeles charter schools.
This week, the foundation chose five finalists: Hillsborough County, Memphis, Omaha, Pittsburgh, and the Los Angeles charters. Final decisions will be made this fall.
The other five districts will be considered for smaller grants to pay for parts of their effective teaching plans.
Their ideas, which were presented in Seattle earlier this month, focus on teacher training, putting the best teachers in the most challenging classrooms, giving the best teachers new roles as mentors and coaches while keeping them in front of children, making tenure a meaningful milestone, getting rid of ineffective teachers, and using money to motivate people and schools to move toward these goals.
"It really is about an effective teacher for every student every year of their school career," said Vicki Phillips, director of the foundation's K-12 education program. "If we did that, we would make the kind of progress that we have all long dreamed about in this country."
Foundation officials said they were impressed with how thoughtful the districts were in their proposals and how clear it was that teacher's unions, school officials and elected school board members worked together to come up with the ideas.
Pittsburgh Superintendent Mark Roosevelt said the process propelled his district forward.
"I'd say we made almost 10 years of progress with our union in three months," he said. "It was like a door had been opened that we didn't know was in the wall any more."
Before getting involved in the Gates grant proposal process, Pittsburgh had focused on other school reforms like closing troubled schools, improving principal training and fixing curriculum to make it more rigorous and more consistent across the district. Teachers were next on the agenda.
Roosevelt speculated the transformation would continue with or without money from the foundation, although some of their ideas would take considerably more time to accomplish without the cash.
Districts chosen for the project will agree to use the foundation's research findings to influence their reform efforts, said Tom Kean, a Harvard researcher and foundation deputy director who is in charge of this part of the project.
Among the research ideas the foundation wants to explore is one that involves making digital videos of teachers in thousands of classrooms. Researchers will track elements of teacher performance and compare that information with student test scores.
The nation's largest teachers union expressed cautious optimism about the foundation's efforts.
John Wilson, executive director of the National Education Association, said he was glad to see someone putting money into research about teacher effectiveness, since there hasn't been much independent analysis combining teacher pay and student achievement.
"We all want great public schools for every student. It's rather complex how to get there," Wilson said.
Vouchers vs. Charters; Duncan Speaking at ACT/America's Choice Event
Later this afternoon, the Fordham Foundation will host a debate about the future of vouchers. EdSector's Kevin Carey makes an appearance along with right-wing ed reformers. It'll give us a good indication of how the right-wing maniacs and neoliberals reformers view vouchers vs. charters given the current education reform climate; was the threat of vouchers truly the "nuclear option" that would push other reforms, including competition, high-stakes testing, and privatization through the charter school movement?
Additionally, Duncan will appear at an ACT/America's Choice-sponsored event called, "Rigor and Readiness." Here's some info about the event via the PR-USA:
Superintendents Convene in Washington, D.C. at Symposium Hosted by ACT, Inc. and America's Choice
As the nation focuses on the importance of college and career readiness to students' economic futures, leading education innovation organizations ACT, Inc. and America's Choice will host a Superintendents' Symposium Series to introduce district leaders to Rigor & Readiness, its instructional program focused on readiness issues.
District Superintendents from across the United States will convene at the Superintendents' Symposium Series to discuss practical solutions for increasing student college and career readiness.
On Thursday morning, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will brief Symposium attendees on the $650 million "Investing in Innovation Fund" or "i3 Fund," formerly known as the "Invest in What Works and Innovation Fund." The Symposium will be hosted by ACT, Inc. and America's Choice.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Tutoring Pre-Kindergarteners: Thank NCLB
Tutoring tots? Some kids prep for kindergarten
Students under growing pressure to perform at ever-younger ages
By Jacqueline StensonMSNBC contributormsnbc.com contributorupdated 7:00 a.m. PT,Tues., Aug 18, 2009For two hours a week this summer, Krissy Rubesch has been working with a tutor on reading and math. Summer schooling isn’t unusual for kids who need a jumpstart on academics for fall, but Krissy is only going into kindergarten.
Already a pro at reading phonetic words such as “cat,” she has spent seven weeks learning about the silent “e,” letter combinations such as “sh” and other more advanced reading skills. She’s been working on addition with four-digit numbers and has done some creative writing to improve her penmanship and ability to sound out words.
Krissy, who turned 5 this month, will be among the youngest kids in class, and her mother emphasizes she isn’t trying to create a superstar student. She just wants to make sure her daughter is prepared to keep up with the other children who are learning their words and numbers, too. All of them will be expected to master various academic skills in the upcoming school year, or risk retention.
“My concern is there’s so much emphasis, probably because of No Child Left Behind, on reading and math,” says Heather Rubesch, mother of two in Kansas City, Kan., referring to the controversial education law signed in 2002 that focuses on increased academic performance and standardized testing.
While more parents are keeping the youngest kids like Krissy out another year before starting them in kindergarten — often entering them into pre-K in a practice called “red-shirting” — Rubesch decided against that for Krissy, who already attended two years of private preschool.
“She is ready and I saw no reason to hold her back,” says Rubesch. “But I do want her to have the confidence academically, especially against her peers who are almost or over a year older than her.”
Long gone are the days when parents signed their kids up for kindergarten based on whether their birthdays met the school's cut-off, and youngsters simply showed up on the first day, where they played, snacked and napped. Perhaps they had attended preschool, but if they did, they almost certainly didn’t have any summer tutoring to make sure they really were ready for kindergarten.
Today, many children go to two or three years of preschool and some stay on for another year of pre-K. Like Rubesch, some parents have begun signing their kids up for summer classes or one-on-one tutoring to improve their reading, math, writing and overall "kindergarten readiness."
It’s not hard to see why parents feel the pressure to help their kids, but is all this kindergarten preparation really necessary? Is it just one more example of over-the-top helicopter parenting? Or has kindergarten become so rigorous that kids need every possible advantage to succeed?
‘Pressure-cooker classrooms’
Critics of the state of early education say there are problems all around. The pressure, they say, largely starts at the top with efforts such as the NCLB, the federal act that pushes schools to increase performance or face penalties. That puts pressure on superintendents and principals, who put pressure on teachers, who in turn increase their focus on academics for even the youngest children.Knowing that standards are high, parents who want the best for their kids also can pressure them in ways that aren’t productive or welcome (though Rubesch says Krissy loves her tutoring, which is given by her former preschool teacher). The pressures are trickling down into the more academic preschools, and even to new parents hoping that certain toys and music will nurture a baby genius right from birth.
“It’s like a dog chasing its tail,” says Joan Almon, executive director of the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit organization in College Park, Md., who formerly worked as a preschool and kindergarten teacher. “You don’t know quite where to stop this. But the kids need it to stop.”
The group released a report this spring titled “Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School,” which concludes that kindergartens have changed dramatically in the last two decades “from places where love of learning was thoughtfully nurtured into pressure-cooker classrooms where teachers are required to follow scripts, labor under unrealistic one-size-fits-all standards, and test children relentlessly on their performance. Kindergarten has ceased to be a garden of delight and has become a place of stress and distress.”
The report is based on nine studies, including three commissioned by the group that examined the state of kindergarten in New York and Los Angeles. Those three new studies showed that play materials such as blocks, sand and water tables, and props for dramatic play “have largely disappeared” from more than 250 full-day kindergarten classrooms studied. Most children had half an hour or less a day for playtime, and some got no playtime at all.
Instead, standardized testing and preparation for those tests were a daily activity in most of the classrooms, even though such tests are of “questionable validity” for kids under 8, the report says.
Today, says Almon, kindergarteners are expected to perform at the level traditionally expected of first-graders — reading, for instance, by the end of the year, despite any solid support behind the change.
“There is absolutely no research showing that children who read at age 4 or 5 do better at age 10 or 12 than children who start reading in first grade,” she says. “But there is research showing if you push 4- and 5-year-olds too hard, it backfires.”
The report points out that while there’s ongoing concern about American children catching up with their counterparts in countries such as Japan and China, specifically in areas such as science, math and technology, schooling in those countries before second grade is “playful and experiential.” And youngsters in Finland, where teens consistently score high academically, also attend play-based kindergarten and start first grade at age 7 rather than age 6.
Power of play
Play not only is a stress-reliever from all these academic pressures, Almon says, it’s also a critical way that children develop language, express their creativity, expand their social skills, solve problems and generally learn about their world — all important abilities that will help them in kindergarten and well beyond.“Through play children take on every aspect of life,” she says, without them worrying about being judged by adults. “In their world of play, they rule supreme.”
But as kindergarten has become more academic at the expense of play, retention rates have gone up and so have extreme behavior problems, says Almon. “We think that’s coming about because the children are so stressed about expectations that are unrealistic.” Problems are surfacing in preschool too, where expulsion rates are more than three times higher than the national average for kindergarten through 12th grade, according to a Yale survey involving 40 states.
Carleton Kendrick, a Boston-area family therapist for more than 30 years, says he sees first-hand the consequences of “fast-tracking” children.
Too much pressure to perform academically from teachers and parents can lead to a range of anxiety-related complaints and psychosomatic symptoms in youngsters that normally wouldn’t show up until the teen years or later, he says. School stress can cause young children to be worried, overwhelmed, ashamed, guilty and even clinically depressed. For some, the stress can contribute to headaches, stomach upset, stuttering and insomnia.
“The parents think something is wrong with the child — and not the parents and teachers and education system,” says Kendrick.
“As a therapist who has seen many children become mentally and emotionally overwhelmed by being placed on this out of control, educational gerbil wheel, I hope that parents will wake up and say ‘no’ to hurrying their children through preschool and kindergarten,” he says.
Jodi Allen, a kindergarten teacher in North Miami Beach, Fla., says that with today’s high academic standards, she understands where anxious parents are coming from. “It used to be you had to read in first grade and now you have to read in kindergarten or you don’t go to first grade,” says Allen, who had to hold back two girls who couldn’t read well enough to pass kindergarten.
Still, she wishes parents wouldn’t worry quite so much because, after all, it is a teacher’s job to teach, and most of her students who have attended preschool are prepared enough for kindergarten. “We tell the parents at open house that [the students] don’t have to come in reading, but they feel the pressure,” she says.
As a result, it’s not uncommon for preschool kids in her area to get tutoring or at least intensive study time with their parents to prepare them for kindergarten, she says. Allen herself has been tutoring this summer for extra income.
‘A little too prepared’
Looking back now, Wendi Aarons of Austin, Texas, says she learned a lesson of her own after extensively preparing her first son, Sam, for kindergarten two years ago.He’d already gone to a preschool that “concentrated on prepping him for kindergarten,” Aarons says, and she worked with him during the summer before he began school to further hone his skills. “By the time he started kinder, he was already reading at a second-grade level,” she says.
On one hand, knowing how to read boosted his self-esteem. “He was known as the best reader,” Aarons says. “In kindergarten, that’s like the equivalent of having a Camaro.”
But there was a downside, too. “I think he was actually a little too prepared, as he began to be very bored and unchallenged throughout the year,” Aarons says. “Kindergarten is seven hours a day in Texas, and he just didn't have enough to do.”
Aarons says she talked with the teacher about moving Sam up a grade, to challenge him more, but the teacher said he was not socially ready for that. Sam was challenged more in first grade, Aarons says, including getting extra projects to keep him busy. And while he still complained of being bored, he no longer said he didn’t want to go to school.
With her younger son, Jack, who will start kindergarten this month, Aarons has been taking “more of a casual approach.”
“He went to a preschool that was a lot more play-based,” she says, “and while I'm working on his reading with him, it's not to the extent that I did with my first son.”
For parents, one of their biggest tests is trying to figure out what’s best for their young school kids in today’s rigorous academic climate. The answers aren’t always so simple, and they certainly go beyond teaching tots the three R’s.
“It's really a fine line between over- and under-preparing,” says Aarons, “and I think a lot of parents don't know what to do, exactly.”
Monday, August 17, 2009
Gates Pushes Mayoral Control; Donated $4.1 Million to LearnNY
Gates' $4 Mil Lesson
Aided School Control
By CARL CAMPANILE
August 17, 2009
America's richest man chipped in to help preserve mayoral control of New York City schools.
Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates -- a pal of fellow billionaire Mayor Bloomberg -- has secretly bankrolled Learn-NY, the group that joined the campaign led by The Post to extend mayoral control.
Gates funneled about $4 million to the pro-mayoral-control forces during the fierce, dragged-out legislative debate, The Post has learned. A spokesman for Gates confirmed the donation and the approximate size.
The donation helped pay for Learn-NY's extensive public-relations, media and lobbying efforts in Albany and the city. The effort include advertisements, parent organizing and canvassing -- including a five-borough bus tour and trips to the state capital.
Gates gave the money from his personal pocket -- not from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has pumped $150 million into the city to develop small schools.
He made it clear that he liked having city CEOs in charge of education decision-making and accountable for results.
"You want to allow for experimentation. The cities where our foundation has put the most money is where there is a single person responsible. In New York, Chicago and Washington, DC, the mayor has the responsibility for the school system," Gates said during a CNN appearance.
Another billionaire philanthropist -- Eli Broad, a proponent of charter schools -- also gave millions to Learn-NY.
In related news, Bloomberg defended budgeting 8 percent raises for teachers over the next two years in spite of tough economic times, as The Post reported yesterday.
"It would be irresponsible when all of the other unions have gotten [similar raises] for us not to put the pattern into the budget," he said.
"Things are going to be different down the road as we continue to talk to the UFT."