I am en route to Denver for the 2015 National Summit on Education Reform. I’ll be live-tweeting on Thursday and Friday. You can view the live-tweets below or just follow me on twitter and join in the conversation. @ethandemme
Preview of the 2015 National Summit on Education Reform
I am getting ready to attend the 2015 National Summit on Education Reform in Denver Colorado. The theme for this year’s summit is Onward and Upward: Operation Student Success. Here are some of the sessions I am looking forward to attending:
Strategy Session 1 – Turn and Face the Strain: Problem and Solutions
This session will explore how coming demographic changes – impending retirement of the Baby Boomers and a population boom of school-age children – will lead to challenges in state funding. I reviewed the report on this data a few months ago: click here to read the review.
Strategy Session 4 -Â Communicating Student Data Privacy: Challenges and Opportunities
This session will explore the challenge of student data privacy and provide guidance on forming thoughtful policies. I recently took Foundation for Excellence in Education’s online course on Data Privacy. For an overview of this and two other courses, click here.
Strategy Session 5 -Â 2015: The Year of Education Savings Accounts
“Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) started as an experiment in 2011 to offer educational choice and customization in Arizona. Since then, the program has grown. Florida passed an ESA program in 2013, and this year three more states created programs and lawmakers filed ESA bills in nearly two-dozen states. Nevada, the latest state to create an ESA program, will soon have all 450,000 public school students eligible to participate.” (from the session description)
For an overview of Education Savings Accounts (what they are, how they work), click here. To read about Nevada’s implementation of ESAs, click here.
I will be live-tweeting from the event so be sure to follow me: @ethandemme
GOP Candidates: Education Records and Rhetoric
I previously posted and highlighted statements on education (school choice and the role of parents) of GOP presidential candidates. Today, I want to look at the record of the candidates choices for themselves and their children and compare that to their rhetoric.
Jeb Bush: is a proponent for school choice and his Foundation For Excellence In Education has been an influential advocate for school choice and education reform. Bush attended Andover Academy, an elite private prep school that his dad and brother also attended. However, he opted to spend his undergrad years at the University of Texas rather than an Ivy-League school. Jeb’s oldest son attended an elite private school before going to Rice University for his undergrad. Jeb Jr. on the other hand, attended University of Texas like his father. For the Bush family, school choice means making use of both public schools / non-elite higher education institutions and the best of the elite private schools. In terms of voting record though, there is no doubt that Jeb walks the talk. Here’s an article detailing his voting record and education reform initiatives.
Ben Carson: is a proponent for school choice. [source] He graduated from Southwestern High School, a public high school in Michigan. His personal story regarding parental engagement in education and the role of his mother is powerful: if you’re not familiar with, you can read it here. He attended Yale for his undergrad. Ben Carson’s son Murray attended one of Baltimore’s elitist college prep schools, McDonogh, before attending Yal. [source]. Ben Carson has no voting record to speak of. However, he did create the Carson Young Scholars nonprofit organization which has a program devoted to increasing reading and awards college scholarship funding.
Chris Christie: is a proponent for school choice and has often struggled to push voucher legislation through the Democrat-controlled legislature. [source] He graduated from Livingston High School (public) and did his undergrad BA at University of Delaware. Christie’s oldest son attended an elite school Delbarton and is now studying at Princeton [source]. Christie has a track record of pushing for school choice such as approving charter schools and pushing for tax credits and voucher programs.
Ted Cruz: is a proponent of school choice, calling it a civil rights issue. [source] He graduated from Second Baptist High School and then did his undergrad at Princeton. Cruz has only recently (as in, this year) gotten into the school choice movement, including sponsoring school-choice friendly legislation. [source]
Carly Fiorina: is a verbal proponent of school choice. She graduated Charles E. Jordan High School (public) after spending time in schools in London and Ghana. She earned her BA from Stanford University.
Jim Gilmore: is a somewhat unenthusiastic proponent of school choice. He graduated from John Randolph Tucker High School (a magnet school) before doing his undergrad at University of Virginia.
Lindsey Graham: is a proponent of school choice. He graduated D. W. Daniel High School (public) and was the first person in his family to attend college, he did his undergrad at University of South Carolina. Graham has supported school choice legislation like this as early as the 1990s. [source]
Mike Huckabee: is a proponent of school choice. He graduated from Hope High School (public) and attended Ouachita Baptist University for his undergrad. Huckabee has been inconsistent in regards to school choice [source], and appears to be less committed to it in practice.
Bobby Jindal: is a strong proponent of school choice. He attended Baton Rouge Magnet High School before doing his undergrad at Brown. Jindal has supported and fought for voucher programs in Louisiana. [source]
John Kasich: is a proponent of school choice. He attended various public schools and did his undergrad at Ohio State. As governor of Ohio Kasich has pushed through several school choice reforms including vouchers and funding for charter schools [source].
Rand Paul: is a proponent of school choice. He attended Brazoswood High School (public) and spent three years studying at Baylor University (he left before earning a BA.)
George Pataki: is a strong proponent of school choice. He attended Peekskill High School (public school) before doing his undergrad at Yale. His daughter Allison (a published novelist) attended high school at The Hackley School (an Ivy-feed school for Yale) before her doing her undergrad at Yale.
Marco Rubio: is a strong proponent of school choice [source]. The son of immigrants who never graduated from high school, he attended South Miami, a public Sr. High School and did undergrad work at Tarkio College and Santa Fe Community College before getting his M.A. from the University of Florida and his J.D. from the University of Miami.
Rick Santorum: is a proponent of school choice. [source] He attended various private and public schools before graduating from Carmel High School, a private parochial school. He completed his undergraduate degree at Penn State. Santorum’s children have made use of homeschooling as well as charter schools. Given his rhetoric regarding not having government involved in education as well as thoughts on public funding, some saw him as duplicitous for enrolling his own children in a state-paid-for PA charter school even while his resided primarily in Virginia. [source]
Donald Trump: is a vocal proponent of school choice. He attended The Kew-Forest School and New York Military Academy. He did his undergrad years at University of Pennsylvania. His children have attended various prep schools including Choate Rosemary Hall and The Hill School and have done their undergrad studies at Georgetown and University of Penn.
Independent Learning Plans
Alaska’s Chugach School District (CSD) is the first district to transform itself full into a competency-based school. In a blog series on CSD, Bob Crumley, CSD’s current superintendent, described their transformation, “We began to talk with community members about what they wanted for their children and their schools. We realized that first and foremost we needed to center schools around our students. We needed to be more comprehensive as we structured schools that would prepare them for life beyond graduation.â€
To that end, CSD set out to develop a mission statement that could guide them in implementing this new model of learning. Here’s what they came up with:
“The Chugach School District is committed to developing and supporting a partnership with students, parents, community and business which equally shares the responsibility of empowering students to meet the needs of the ever changing world in which they live. Students shall possess the academic and personal characteristics necessary to reach their full potential. Students will contribute to their community in a manner that displays respect for human dignity and validates the history and culture of all ethnic groups.”
This competency-based model is made up of four interconnected parts:
- Student empowerment: “Students need to be able to seek out things they are personally interested in, create a plan, and find the resources. We are always looking for ways to students to learn beyond the classroom.â€
- Assessment systems: “CSD uses a common scoring (grading) system with Emerging, Developing, Proficient, and Advanced. Reaching 80 percent on an assessment indicates proficiency and 90 percent is advanced.” – “Before a student moves onto to the next level there is a cumulative assessment based on up to three assessments. The first, described as the analytical assessment, is the student’s reflection on his or her learning. Second, there is a skill assessment that focuses on the specific content. The third, a performance assessment, is often co-designed with students. In this assessment, they show evidence of their ability to apply their skill.
- Domains of learning (content areas): “ten content domains of standards: mathematics, technology, social sciences, reading, writing, culture & communication (student will understand and appreciate the unique aspects of their own culture, as well as Alaska Native or world cultures), personal/social/service (the values and skills necessary to reach one’s full potential and foster the development of those around them), career development, PE/health (healthy interpersonal strategies that apply in both rural and urban environments), and science.”
- Preparing for life: “We have to be a slingshot. There is a momentum that builds to propel students forward beyond their graduating high school. They need to have a wide array of opportunities. I don’t know if we have to help them find their specific direction, as it is going to change a lot in their late teens and early twenties. It’s a rarity for teens to know exactly what they want to do and successfully pursue it. We need to help them have the capacity to take advantage of changing interests.”
For an in-depth analysis of CSD’s model, below is the blog post series that I pulled the above quotes from. It’s worth reading the whole series, but particularly the first two posts.
Post 1 – Driven by Student Empowerment: Chugach School District
Post 2 – Chugach School District’s Performance-Based Infrastructure
Post 3 – Chugach Teachers Talk about Teaching
Post 4 – Ownership, Not Buy-In: An Interview with Bob Crumley
Post 5 – Performance-Based Education in a One-Room School House
Post 6 – Teaching through the Culture: Native Education in a Performance-Based System
Post 7 – Performance-Based Home Schooling
To read about other schools that are implementing Independent Learning Plans, click here to read an article from Getting Smart.com. You can read more about the story behind CSD by reading the book Delivering On The Promise.
The movement towards competency based instruction is starting to pick up steam and I am looking forward to seeing the results.
Poverty, Education and Parental Engagement
Who can help us solve the problem of poverty? Depending on how frame of reference, we might answer this in a number of ways. We might say government agencies, or nonprofit think-tanks, or charitable ministries. Since education is one solution to poverty, we could speak of teachers and school administrators and principals.
While it is true, that all of these people or groups of people have roles to play in ending poverty, it is easy to forget another and perhaps most important group of people: those who live in poverty. In her 2015 TED Talk, Mia Birdsong explains why “the story we tell about poverty isn’t true.” The conventional story of poverty goes like this: those who work hard are successful, therefore those who are unsuccessful (poor) must not be willing to work hard. With this mentality, Mia says, we are “convinced that poor people are a problem that needs fixing.” She goes on to describe the reality:
Marginalized communities are full of smart, talented people, hustling and working and innovating, just like our most revered and most rewarded CEOs. They are full of people tapping into their resilience to get up every day, get the kids off to school and go to jobs that don’t pay enough, or get educations that are putting them in debt . . . They are full of people doing for themselves and for others, whether it’s picking up medication for an elderly neighbor, or letting a sibling borrow some money to pay the phone bill, or just watching out for the neighborhood kids from the front stoop.
Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice also critiques the notion that poor people on the whole are passive, incompetent, or unmotivated. At the 2014 National Summit on Education Reform, Rice said: “it is such a mistaken impression that poor parents either don’t care or don’t know what is best for their kids.”
If the story we tell ourselves about poverty is wrong, how might we change it? Mia asks us to ponder some what-if questions. “What if we recognized that what’s working is the people and what’s broken is our approach? What if we realized that the experts we are looking for, the experts we need to follow, are poor people themselves? What if, instead of imposing solutions, we just added fire to the already-burning flame that they have? Not directing — not even empowering — but just fueling their initiative.”
Everywhere I go, I see people who are broke but not broken. I see people who are struggling to realize their good ideas, so that they can create a better life for themselves, their families, their communities.
When it comes to the topic of poverty in the context of education reform, it is important to bear in mind what Mia and Condoleeza are highlighting. We need to start with the assumption that poor parents want what’s best for their children, know their children better than anyone else, and are capable of helping their children succeed provided they are supported along the way by the various institutions of civic society: family, neighborhood community, school, library, church, etc..
We should #TrustParents
Below is the complete TED Talk. Click here to watch Condoleeza Rice’s keynote from the 2014 National Summit on Education Reform.
Math Students: Sense Makers Not Mistake Makers
For many, if not all, students, achieving mastery in mathematics involves intense struggle. Often, that struggle is seen as a negative thing, by teachers and students alike, and becomes the source of frustration. But what if we were to shift our perspective on students as “mistake-makers” to “sense makers”? What if we celebrated the process, trials and errors and all, as much as the ability to solve a problem and get a right answer?
This perspective, students as sense-makers, is championed by math teacher David Wees. In an article in MindShift, Wee is quoted:
“I want to know the ways that they [the students] are thinking rather than the ways they are making mistakes . . . My interpretation that they’re making a mistake is a judgment and usually ends my thinking about what they are doing.â€
This way of thinking is also celebrated by mathematician Paul Lockhart who writes:
Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity— to pose their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs— you deny them mathematics itself.
Wees says that “Kids ask questions: 1) to find out if they did the problem right; 2) because the teacher is standing near them and they can, and; 3) occasionally they ask “I wonder what if†questions, which show they are thinking about the math.” In order to help his students develop their mathematical thinking abilities “Wees took to not answering the first two kinds of questions and encouraging the third. He found himself often asking the same question, whether a student had gotten the problem right or wrong. He’d ask them to explain their answer or how they could check to see if they were right or wrong.”
To explore more about this philosophy of mathematics, check out my series on parental engagement in math. And to read about how we can turn everyone into a math person, click here.