That was the overarching message from members of North Carolina New Schools Project's Board of Directors, Board of Advisors and supporters of school innovation from the private sector, government, education and philanthropy this week. They gathered Thursday afternoon and Friday in a meeting that featured dialogue with State Board of Education Chairman and CEO Bill Harrison and Michael Horn, co-author of the widely-read Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.

 

Reflecting on his own experience as superintendent in Cumberland County creating two successful innovative high schools, Harrison said there's a need for higher expectations for graduates and schools that can help them reach those benchmarks. Those schools must exist as far more than pockets of innovation.

"There are things going on in these new schools that comprehensive high schools can learn from," Harrison said.

"We need to be more emphatic about goals that are aimed at making sure all students are successful," Harrison said. "Too many people are satisfied with the status quo. There are too many people who aren't committed to equity. They're not committed to the same things for all children that they want for their own."

"It's not acceptable to let a student drop out of school," he said. "That's a moral imperative and an economic imperative."

The power of technology to offer alternatives creates another imperative for schools, Harrison said. Public education could become the equivalent of the public health system -- the service sought only by those with no other choice. That would be a loss for the nation, he said.

 

Horn touched on that notion of educational choices made possible by technology. He noted that one way technology is influencing public education is to be the kind of "disruptive innovation" that he and his co-authors have studied extensively in the private sector.  Online learning has the chance to address a fundamental flaw in traditional brick-and-mortar schools -- an inability to fully address the differences in how students learn best given the need for standardization in the delivery model.

 

That competition can spur improvement in the old model. "Online learning is gaining ground," Horn said, noting that he and others predict that such instruction will account for half of all high school courses by 2019. "We can use this opportunity to transform the system to make it more student centered."

 

Christopher Dede, Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard, predicted that the greatest lift would come from "blended" courses that take the best attributes of face-to-face learning and the benefits of online learning. 

 

Experts and NCNSP leaders stressed that the introduction of technology alone is not innovation; technology is a tool that can speed changes in teaching and learning and steer it in new directions altogether.

Glen Kleiman, executive director of the Friday Institute  for Educational Innovation, said he and colleagues at  North Carolina State University have begun referring to the "learning ecology" of schools to capture the scope and depth of change to the roles of teachers and students technology can bring.

"This is not just a little change," Kleiman said. "This is changing the whole ecology."

Experts from outside the state predicted that North Carolina will lead in school innovation that leverages technology given the foundation present in efforts such as NCNSP and school connectivity.

 

Dede said that too often, transformative schools that yield especially strong results can't be easily replicated because they depend on the "heroism" of individual educators. He's encouraged by the innovation underway in North Carolina because it's not such a "hot house" model, and therefore holds the promise of being scalable.

"It's a slower progression. But it's a progression that leads somewhere," Dede said. In addition, he said the a key strength of the state's efforts to transform high schools lies in a diversity of models instead of a "one-size-fits-all" approach. "Having different models under the same umbrella allows them to borrow good ideas from one another," he said. "There's evolution through diversity. I think that's really smart."

Dede suggested that high school innovation in North Carolina is a "disruptive" influence itself by raising the stakes on all schools. "Does that put pressure on other schools and communities?"

Horn called North Carolina an "exciting model" for high school innovation.

Leaders at the Chapel Hill meeting saw technology at work in Rutherford, SandHoke and Wayne early college high schools -- all part of the state's 1:1 Learning Technology Initiative, Southern School of Engineering and the New Tech school model being replicated in nine North Carolina sites. They also saw state and national examples of technology deployed across networks of schools to raise teacher and principal knowledge and skills. The leaders offered suggestions for how NCNSP can leverage technology, which the Board of Directors and Board of Advisors will take up later.

 

NCNSP President Tony Habit noted that "Innovation 1.0" in North Carolina began with purposeful design of schools that acknowledged the need for all graduates to be ready to pursue a two- or four-year degree. He projected that "Innovation 2.0" will tie innovative schools even more closely to the state's economic future and will use technology to its fullest.

Graduation project off for class of 2010, State Board says

The state's new graduation project will be delayed a year to allow schools more time to implement the new requirement.

The class of 2010 was to have been the first in the state subject to the new graduation hurdle. That distinction now falls to the class of 2011 after the State Board of Education voted Thursday in favor of the one-year delay.

Board Chairman Bill Harrison recommended the postponement to give schools time to put the plan in place. Legislators have been considering dropping the requirement entirely. Although the board added the requirement four years ago, while the class of 2010 was still in middle school, schools, parents and students began to clamor in recent months for its elimination.

Harrison's proposal keeps alive an idea that for many years has been viewed as a valuable approach to engage students with an in-depth research project that would serve as an "authentic" assessment of student skills in such critical areas as communication and research.

The approach has been gaining ground in North Carolina and across the nation as an effective way to assess what students have learned and are able to do -- without having to rely solely on paper-and-pencil tests.

A number of schools in the state began requiring a senior research project -- either as a graduation requirement or as part of senior English -- before the board added the requirement statewide.

Sharper focus on global benchmarks sought 

The United States is missing a key opportunity to improve its schools by failing to take full advantage of international benchmarks, according to a recent policy brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based group that promotes high school transformation.

The brief -- Short Sighted:  How America's Lack of Attention to International Education Studies Impedes Improvement -- urges the Obama administration and Congress to take steps to learn more from other leading nations in economic development and education.

While the United States does participate in the two key international benchmarked assessments -- Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) -- the Alliance for Excellent Education argues in its brief that the U.S. doesn't pay enough attention to the results.

Other nations that are making gains are using the assessments to drive improvements, the brief says, pointing specifically to efforts in Germany. There, unexpectedly low performance on the 2000 PISA was enough of a shock that the country sought expert help through OECD, which administers the assessment, from several countries, including Canada, England, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Sweden.

 

The brief says the nation can ill afford to remain uninterested in the experience and lessons of other often higher performing nations. The Alliance cites recent rankings on the international assessments to make its case: U.S. 15-year-old students were 25th of 30 industrialized nations in mathematics literacy, 21st of 30 in scientific literacy and 24th of 29 in problem solving.

Even as the United States supports the development and administration of the assessments, the Alliance notes, the nation is receiving only a limited return on its investment.

"From a big-picture perspective, however, some might say that the United States is underwriting opportunities for other nations to learn how to improve their education systems," the brief says, "while forgoing these opportunities itself."

The Alliance outlines a number of recommendations aimed at making better use of the data, engaging individual states for specific samples and doing more to learn from other countries. Among them:

Common thread for top scoring nations: Teaching quality

One key difference between the United State and other nations with higher performance on international assessments such as TIMMS and PISA is their focus on teacher preparation, the Christian Science Monitor showed in a series of recent articles.

The newspaper examined how teachers in Finland and Singapore are trained and supported in a search for clues to why students there often outperform their peers around the globe.

In both cases, the stories reported, teaching programs are highly selective, teachers are highly trained and once in the schools teachers are treated as professionals -- with clear paths to career advancement, strong autonomy or both.

"Teachers in Finland and a number of other high-performing countries are more involved than American teachers with creating curriculum and measuring whether students are really learning it. And this in turn develops teachers' own understanding and effectiveness," the newspaper wrote, paraphrasing Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who has researched teaching internationally.

In Singapore, "not only is teaching an honored profession," the paper reported, "it's also paid as well as science and engineering careers."

The newspaper cited a recent paper by Darling-Hammond that identified four key areas where nations with strong student performance tend to have an edge over the United States:

• Support for new teachers -- In New Zealand, new teachers spend 20 percent of their time being coached.
• Teaching versus planning time -- In most European and Asian countries, teachers spend 15 to 20 hours a week outside the classroom for planning and meetings with colleagues, parents and students
• Participation in decisions -- Teachers elsewhere are involved in writing curriculum, designing tests and solving problems
• Lifelong learning -- In Singap0re, Sweden and the Netherlands, teachers receive a minimum of 100 hours a year in professional development