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Math quiz: what’s 4100 into achievement?
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010We like the snide here at buzz. After all, there is a lot to be wry about when it comes to what’s still wrong in American education.
But let’s face it, we can also get a bit misty-eyed over the many people whose hard work is making things better for the learners who need it most. So pardon us if we admit we’re a bit verklempt over this tale of teachers turning around a large, low-performing school.
Doing it not because of an external policy or a new funding stream, but just because they knew they and their students could do better.
Here’s the tease, from Sam Dillon’s September 27 piece in the New York Times–read the full piece at the Times website.
4,100 Students Prove ‘Small Is Better’ Rule Wrong
BROCKTON, Mass. — A decade ago, Brockton High School was a case study in failure. Teachers and administrators often voiced the unofficial school motto in hallway chitchat: students have a right to fail if they want. And many of them did — only a quarter of the students passed statewide exams. One in three dropped out.
Then Susan Szachowicz and a handful of fellow teachers decided to take action. They persuaded administrators to let them organize a schoolwide campaign that involved reading and writing lessons into every class in all subjects, including gym.
Their efforts paid off quickly. In 2001 testing, more students passed the state tests after failing the year before than at any other school in Massachusetts. The gains continued. This year and last, Brockton outperformed 90 percent of Massachusetts high schools. And its turnaround is getting new attention in a report, “How High Schools Become Exemplary,” published last month by Ronald F. Ferguson, an economist at Harvard who researches the minority achievement gap.
Be the Change You Want to See in the Department of Education
Monday, August 9th, 2010When Mike Smith spoke at the Knowledge Alliance’s 2010 gathering in Tamaya, he generated about as much heat as the noonday New Mexico sun.
How’d he manage that? By saying, more or less, this:
With Race to the Top and other funding competitions, the U.S. Department of Education is ready to take on a new role: moving from program monitoring and compliance to supporting real change in our education systems.
Smith’s audience–primarily staff from regional education labs, research organizations, assessment providers and other education service organizations– had much to say about this idea.
Mostly about why it wouldn’t work.
In sum (and without some of the more colorful commentary), while there was certainly excitement about the idea of the Department moving past compliance monitoring, there was serious doubt about this happening, mostly because the staff and the culture at the Department wasn’t sufficiently changed. You can’t, it seems, teach an old bureaucrats new tricks.
Which led to the question of whether Race to the Top and other ARRA-funded programs could truly transform American education. The initial consensus: It’s an emergency funding infusion–that’s not going to yield sustainable, systemic change.
Or at least that was the consensus until Janice Jackson of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education leveled this challenge: the automakers used their emergency federal dollars as opportunity funding to reform their systems. Why can’t education do the same?
Which set of a new round of discussion. Not one that looked like it would really answer the questions, though, as most of the comments continued to focus on the perceived need for the Department of Education to change–specifically, to bring more education experts but also business leaders and other cross-sector voices into informing how education is designed and funded, and how new approaches are implemented.
Which suddenly sounded very familiar.
Because we’ve been talking a lot about how philanthropy can bring different sectors to the table for these sorts of discussion. In fact, Dori Jacobs of the Rodel Foundation gave us quick highlights of this process during a recent web seminar–a presentation she’ll reprise at length in New Orleans this October.
In short, Rodel was savvy about bringing partners to the table–to a lot of tables, actually–to build a reform agenda for Delaware. They started this process long before anyone knew there would be a Race to the Top. But it’s because they undertook it that they were ready when Race to the Top came along–ready not for crisis funding but for opportunity funding.
Whether Mike Smith’s prediction will come true–well, we can’t quite say. But rather than just pointing figures about who else needs a culture shift, it’s clear philanthropy can take the lead in shifting some cultures–and hopefully some resulting outcomes–along the way.
What IS the Big Idea? Solving Education’s R&D Dilemma
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Education isn’t like auto manufacturing, delivering cell phone service or finding a cure for cancer. In lots of ways. But the way that’s on the mind of education leaders gathering in Tamaya, New Mexico specifically has to do with Education R&D.
Or the lack thereof.
As the Knowledge Alliance, organizers of Big Ideas 2010: Succeeding in a VUCA World put it, deep and effective innovation in education is lacking because:
1. Education research, compared to other sectors, is poorly funded.
2. Most education research is conducted by universities, which value theory development and individual scholarly contributions more than practical solutions to real problems and interdisciplinary collaboration.
3. Formal mechanisms to capture and transform practitioner knowledge into a professional knowledge base are non-existent.
4. Most school districts, when it comes to innovation, operate instead within a short-term, fragmented, and reactive environment.
5. The commercial sector that serves the education market does not invest heavily in R&D.
6. The net effect of federal and state policy and funding decisions creates an unpredictable marketplace for innovation.
In other words, education has an R&D problem.
Of course, in research, starting with a well-defined problem is a good thing.
Over the next few days, participants will be sharing big ideas on the following questions, all geared at transforming education in America:
1. Infrastructure
Is a re-invented R&D infrastructure best driven at the federal, state, or local level—or distributed across all three? At each level, what are respective roles for the public, private, and non-profit sectors?
2. Partnerships
How are successful cross-disciplinary R&D partnerships established and maintained? How can existing organizations with comparable missions align their efforts and collaborate to redesign and sustain a new R&D education system?
3. Problems of Practice and the Research Agenda
How should the agenda and priorities for education R&D be identified?
4. Tools, Processes, Engineering and Design
What kinds of engineering and design processes are needed to convert solid research into strategies, products, and services that support the reinvention of learning?
5. Policies, Markets, Systems and Sustainability
How can the public education marketplace serve as a demand-side driver of transformative, effective solutions to the most intractable problems of educational practice?
6. Expectations, Measurement, and Results
What will success look like, how will we know if we achieve it, and how can we build in performance objectives/measures for each basic design element (the Catalyst Network, sites, design teams, innovation centers)?
Stay tuned for updates from the 91 degree new frontier in Education R&D.
New Government Grantportunity: Funding Financial Education
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010Once upon a time, at a cocktail party far, far away, a thirty-something Latina with one master’s degree in urban planning and another in architecture was relating why so many smart kids from the East L.A. neighborhood where she grew up didn’t go on to college . . .
They just didn’t understand why they should take out student loans and get maybe $10,000 in debt [editorial note: this was a loooooong time ago, and loan debt for a typical state university bachelor's degree is now considerably higher] rather than just getting a job right out of high school and earning money their families needed right away.
Which caused yours truly to turn to the host and ask What would you give to be $10,000 in student loan debt?
Said host immediately answered about $100,000 in student loan debt. He was midway through his medical residency at a prominent hospital, that golden moment when you know how much student loan debt you’ve amassed but don’t yet have any income to start paying it off.
Not all debt is the same. Not all degrees are the same. By the time she was standing in that living room, the urban planner/architect knew that. But she also knew that too many kids just as smart and hard-working as she is don’t know it.
Financial literacy is one of the many soft skills–like time management or how to choose which college to attend based on your interests, needs and abilities–that can stymie students, especially students who are the first generation in their families to attend college. Or who would be the first generation but aren’t, because they never start. Or just never finish.
The U.S. Department of Education just released applications for a single $1.7 million grant for financial education. State agencies should send a notice of intent to apply by August 5.
One award isn’t enough to meet our nation’s enormous lack of financial literacy, of course. But grantmakers may want to help their state partners try to land the grant–and to make financial education part of their work, whether or not they win the federal dollars.
Read what 
