ABQ/ Manzano Mesa Elementary School's Homework Diner: Learning on the Menu
By Olivier Uyttebrouck
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
October 23, 2012
Homework too often is an afterthought in the busy household of Vanessa Lucero and her two young sons.
Simply getting dinner on the table is a big chore.
"I get home and I'm so exhausted," said Lucero, 25, who works for a state agency. "We don't ever sit together as a family."
But each Monday, Lucero, her husband, and sons, 7 and 9, attend an event at the boys' school, Manzano Mesa Elementary, where the family eats a good meal and the boys do homework under the supervision of teachers and volunteer tutors.
Manzano Mesa started the program, called Homework Diner, to offer students a safe, focused environment for finishing homework assignments with the help of parents and teachers. The school is near Southern and Eubank SE.
Parents and school officials say the program owes much of its success to two culinary arts students from Central New Mexico Community, who prepare tasty, nutritious meals for up to 90 people each week.
"This is wonderful help," Lucero said on a recent Monday evening. "If I don't know how to solve a second-grade problem, they have teachers here."
The school provides books and other supplies that are often lacking at home, she said. And Lucero can help her sons do homework without worrying about preparing dinner.
"Usually I feed them and then I clean up, and before I know it, it's bedtime already," she said. "How often do you get to sit at a table and eat together and do homework?"
Lasagna and salad were on the menu for 89 people who attended the event in the school's gymnasium. Tablecloths, china dishes and real silverware provide a homey feel.
- Among those attending were six teachers who each are paid $20 for the evening through federal Title 1 funding.
- Helping the teachers were University of New Mexico student teachers, volunteer tutors and Manzano Mesa administrators.
Homework Diner is funded by a $1,000 grant provided through Albuquerque Sprout, a microgrant program sponsored by the nonprofit Rio Grande Community Development Corp.
- Deanna Creighton Cook, the community school coordinator, estimated the cost of the program at $200 a week, including about $100 a week for food.
- The school is searching for additional funding and plans to continue the program as long as money is available, she said.
Manzano Mesa began Homework Diner last school year, when it offered six events, Creighton Cook said.
Other schools in APS have expressed interest in replicating the program, she said.
Older siblings of Manzano Mesa students often come to finish homework, Principal Peggy Candelaria said.
- "This is a safe, inviting place for the community to come and get homework done," she said. Parents benefit by watching their children learn from skilled teachers and tutors, Candelaria said.
- "The family watches the way the teacher presents the information to the kids, and they're able to mirror that at home," she said.
Among Manzano Mesa's students, no fewer than nine foreign languages are spoken in the home, Candelaria said.
Chinese and Vietnamese translators with the New Mexico Asian Family Center also take part in Homework Diner to help Asian-language speakers, who make up 10 percent of Manzano Mesa's student body. Many teachers speak Spanish.
"Having a translator here and having them read aloud is so important to having the parents play the active role that we want them to play in the child's education," said Tasha McWilliam, a student teacher who tutors at Homework Diner.
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Grants/ Grants High School Garners "2012 College Readiness Award" for Academic Achievement
By Bob Tenequer
Cibola Beacon Staff Writer
October 23, 2012
Grants High School (GHS) has received the "2012 College Readiness Award" from the New Mexico ACT Council for increasing the number of students taking the ACT Assessment.
- Over the past five years, GHS has significantly increased their level of achievement and college readiness, according to the ACT Council.
- Only 12 high schools in New Mexico were honored for this superior level of achievement.
Karen L. Pennell, assistant Vice President and ACT Southwest Regional Manager said, "The New Mexico ACT Council wanted to recognize New Mexico high schools that have made significant strides in increasing college and career readiness of their graduates, as demonstrated by their ACT score increases over the past five years."
Pennell added, "This can only happen as a result of the high school's faculty and staff efforts and the dedication of Grants High School students and parents focused on college and career readiness and to raise the level of academic readiness of all students."
The ACT test is a curriculum and standards-based educational and career planning tool that assesses students' academic readiness for college.
ACT defines college and career readiness for gaining the knowledge and skills a student needs to enroll and succeed in college, trade school or technical school without the need for further remediation.
In September, Alton Autrey, GHS principal, said, "Praise should go out to the students, parents and teachers. Moreover, "the students for having the will to prepare for the ACT test, the parents for making sure they followed through and the teachers who provided them a valuable service."
The New Mexico ACT Council is comprised of secondary and postsecondary educators who advise ACT, Inc., on the utilization of ACT programs and services in New Mexico Schools and colleges.
The ACT Assessment is the college admissions test that is used and accepted by all colleges nationwide and throughout New Mexico.
In 2012, over 75 percent of New Mexico students took the ACT, which is, the predominant college admissions and readiness achieve test in New Mexico.
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Santa Fe/ OPINION: Betsy Tapia, Teacher Who Made a Difference
By Blake Myers [Myers is a graduate of St. Michael's High School who now lives in Phoenix. His teaching inspiration, Betsy Tapia, died earlier this month. She taught at St. Michael's for more than three decades]
The New Mexican
October 22, 2012
There is not a bone in my body that does not attribute where I am today to the fact that I had Betsy Tapia as a teacher in high school. This feeling that I have, this debt of gratitude I hold for this marvelous woman, was not just awakened in me with the news of her passing, but has been with me and spoken to me ever since I graduated from St. Michael's High School in 2007.
I have had many other remarkable teachers in my life, and I have learned so much through their charity and passion for education, but it was in Ms. Tapia's class that I really began to learn about myself. It was in her class that I was asked what I thought about life, love, generosity, what face I displayed to the world, and what was behind it all - who I really was. Now, I say class, but I really mean classes. From sophomore to senior year I took every single class that was available to me that Ms. Tapia offered, amounting to four classes total. I ate up everything she offered.
Despite Ms. Tapia's reputation for being incredibly intimidating, I, along with many others, was drawn to her, because her intense demands elicited the best work. Though I fell short of her standards many more times than I met them, the pride I had in my work was never more keenly felt than when I did well in her class.
In the end, her Socratic style of teaching inspired me to attend her alma mater, St. John's College, where Socratic discussion is the norm, and after graduating I now find myself teaching as well. Whenever I think about the teacher I want to be, I think about Ms. Tapia, and it is always painful to feel how much I fall short of her. Even now, as I write first-quarter evaluations for my students, I know that I am not doing them as well as she would have.
I remember the last time I saw her, visiting St. Mike's from college. I was nervous as I entered her classroom, expecting the same stern face I had come to expect from years in her class, the face that expected so much and was so hard to please. Instead, I was greeted by a great big smile that welcomed me back, a smile that wanted to know how I was doing in the world and how I had been. We talked about how her current class was doing, and what college had been like for me in a kind of casual and caring way I had never experienced with her before. All of that tough love she had given me over the years was revealed as being what it most essentially was - love.
I can only smile when I think of how many individuals have benefited from being students of Ms. Tapia's, and it saddens me to think of the many who will never know her. Regardless, and though it is trite, she truly lives on in those of us who would be wildly different if she had not been in our lives. She will be truly missed.
Every time I thought about coming back and visiting St. Mike's, I thought most keenly of visiting her. I know now that that will never happen again. It sharpens the feeling that we should cherish those who have done so much for us while we have the chance. Let us always remember and love our family, our friends and our teachers.
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Washington DC/ Competency-Based Schools Embrace Digital Learning
[Santa Fe mention]
By Katie Ash
Education Week: Digital Directions
October 17, 2012
Tom Rooney sees competency-based education-supported by digital learning tools-as the path to building a better school district.
The superintendent of the 4,200-student Lindsay Unified School District in California, Rooney set in motion this school year a plan to move to a system in which students progress not on the basis of their age or a set school calendar, but by demonstrating proficiency on learning objectives.
Educators in the district are aware that the transition will undoubtedly hit some bumps in the road, as do most district-wide school improvement efforts. But school leaders entered the school year feeling well prepared because the district has been gradually putting competency-based education, or CBE, in place since the 2009-10 school year.
The move to competency-based education-also known as proficiency-, standards-, and performance-based education-by Lindsay Unified and other districts will likely give them a head start in preparing for the new demands of the Common Core State Standards, experts point out, and in their ability to use technology more effectively to personalize learning.
"We have these practices that are ingrained in the traditional public education system that are not consistent with principles of learning and not consistent with how most of the rest of the world operates," says Rooney.
- "Prior to kindergarten, everyone learns to talk at a different time," he continues. "They get potty-trained at different times, but suddenly when you get to kindergarten, you're placed in this box, and you're given the kindergarten curriculum because you're five, not because you're ready for it, or even if you already know it all.
- Kids learn in different ways on different time frames."
National advocates for competency-based education echo those sentiments, pointing out economic and policy forces that are building momentum for such an approach.
- "We're in a place right now with the forces of global competitiveness, the adoption of common core, all of these new learning models, and the desire to do student-centered, personalized learning-you can't really do that in a time-based system," says Susan D. Patrick, the president and chief executive officer of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. The Alexandria, Va.-based iNACOL is a fervent advocate for competency-based education.
- "Common core is a game changer because it's going to allow us to be able to share best practices and knowledge of skills across states, and it's going to keep the innovators that are developing online content from having to reinvent the wheel in 50 states," says Patrick.
- The ability of states to collaborate will allow more districts to be able to implement pedagogies like competency-based education without having to start from scratch, she says.
Along with a number of other partners, such as the National Governors Association, MetisNet, Jobs for the Future, and the American Youth Policy Forum, iNACOL recently launched an initiative called CompetencyWorks that aims to promote competency-based education and provide resources for educators who are interested in learning more about the model.
The CompetencyWorks organizers hope to bring innovators together and help share their experiences with more schools and districts.
The concept is not new, but several factors have contributed to renewed interest in the structure, says Patrick.
- "What's different now is that [previously it] had to be entirely paper-based," she says.
- "Now, with all of the new online and blended learning tools, teachers have a whole set of resources that can help them work with students on their learning goals.
- Teachers have a way to manage the personalization and allow the different pacing to happen in a very structured, goal-oriented way."
In addition to helping teachers differentiate instruction for students, new technologies are giving rise to more powerful and detailed information systems that can help track students at the level of granularity that CBE requires, says Christine Sturgis, the founder of the Santa Fe, N.M.-based education consulting company MetisNet, one of the partners of CompetencyWorks.
- "[CBE] creates an enormous amount of data about students and teachers and teacher effectiveness," she says. New information systems are needed to make "data-rich and informed decisions," adds Sturgis.
Based on conversations at a competency-based-learning summit held in March 2011, Sturgis and Patrick published a five-part working definition of CBE.
Under the definition:
- students advance upon mastery,
- competencies are broken down into explicit and measurable learning objectives,
- assessment is meaningful for students,
- students receive differentiated support based on their learning needs, and
- learning outcomes emphasize competencies that include the application and creation of knowledge.
However, re-engineering schools to a competency-based model is not a silver bullet, and creating competencies must be done thoughtfully and carefully to be successful, Sturgis explains in a paper about designing competencies, published by CompetencyWorks.
- "If the competencies, learning objectives, and rubrics are not designed well, students may become bored by low expectations, frustrated by high-level competencies without adequate scaffolding embedded in the learning objectives, or disengaged through inconsistent feedback from flawed rubrics," the paper says. "Although it is obvious, it cannot be overstated: Well-designed competencies are one of the essential elements for high-quality competency education."
'Pace Does Matter'
Empowering students and making sure they know exactly what it is they should be learning and how it can be demonstrated is a key component of CBE, its advocates say.
"Learners really understand where they're at and where they're going next," says Rooney, the Lindsay Unified superintendent.
- To create their learning objectives, officials of his district brought together 30 teachers and about a dozen administrators to go through the California state education standards for grades K-12 and realign the information into need-to-know learning objectives.
- The district also worked with the Marzano Research Laboratory, run by educator Robert J. Marzano, to help design the new curriculum.
- In addition, the group created a set of assessments to go with the curriculum to evaluate how well students learned the material.
After several years of tweaking those standards and piloting them in classes, the district moved to CBE officially in 2009-10 with the incoming class of 9th graders.
Teachers, who under the new system are now called learning facilitators, scrapped the traditional grading scale and moved to a 0-4 rubric, where a 3 is the minimum passing standard and 4 indicates that a student has gone above and beyond the requirements of mastery.
- Although students in Lindsay Unified are still grouped into grade levels, each student is also grouped by a content level (readiness levels 1-13), so the learning facilitator knows exactly where every student falls in each subject area by content level.
- The district also built in more flexibility with scheduling so that students can move from one content level to the next without having to wait for the semester to end.
- In addition, students receive frequent and meaningful feedback from their learning facilitators, Rooney says. In the new information system, teachers, students, and parents can check to see students' exact progress in each content area at any point in time.
But just because students now learn at their own pace does not mean that students can take multiple years to get through one content level, emphasizes Rooney. "Pace does matter," he says. "Our system is about increasing the rigor and holding everyone accountable-administrators, learners, and learning facilitators."
Students who are more than two content levels below their grade levels receive individualized learning plans to help them catch up to their peers. Those students are allowed to test out of certain parts of the curriculum that they may already know to increase their pace.
Ultimately, though, what CBE comes down to is good teaching, Rooney says. Providing good feedback, making sure that students learn what they need to know before they move on, and differentiating instruction for each student is what good teachers have always done, he says.
The Boston Day and Evening Academy, an alternative high school in the Roxbury section of Boston that serves overage, undercredited students, has been using competency-based education since it opened 17 years ago, says the director of curriculum and instruction, Alison Hramiec.
- The school, which does not use a traditional grading scale or group students by grade levels, has broken down each yearlong course into 11-week classes so that students have more flexibility to move from one class to the other.
"With this population of students in particular, they leave school, they have poor attendance, different situations arise, and they may fall behind in that class," Hramiec says. In a traditional school, she says, "when they get back to school, everyone's far ahead, and there's no flexibility to get those kids caught up."
But at the Boston Day and Evening Academy, students have the flexibility to start up where they left off, she says.
Like Lindsay Unified, the Boston Day and Evening Academy has spent several years aligning the curriculum with state standards and breaking it down into need-to-know competencies.
- "You start with [the standards] and from there pull out what you believe are the enduring understandings," says Hramiec. "Those are the big learning objectives that are the ones you want students to carry with them ten years from now."
- All students must demonstrate competencies independently and multiple times to move on, she says. They are given many opportunities to practice mastery informally before the actual assessment.
Protecting Innovators
One state that has taken the lead in competency-based education is New Hampshire, which in 2005 eliminated the Carnegie unit, a seat-time-oriented way of accounting for students' academic progress. Schools in the state were given until the 2008-09 school year to move from a time-based to a mastery-based system.
Those regulations extend to the statewide online public high school, the Exeter, N.H.-based Virtual Learning Academy Charter School, or VLACS, which has been competency-based since it opened in 2007.
When students take and complete courses at VLACS is flexible, allowing students to move at their own pace. They can complete courses in 10 weeks or take as long as 36 weeks, says Steve Kossakoski, the chief executive officer of the school.
Students must score at least a 75 or greater on all competency-based assessments, out of a possible 100, in addition to receiving a passing average score on all the assignments (not just the ones pegged as competencies) in order to pass.
To help brick-and-mortar schools in the state meet the mastery-based requirements, VLACS has begun offering competency-recovery classes for students in regular schools who have fallen behind.
- "In a traditional school, one of the things they've struggled with is what do you do with a student who hasn't met competency in a world where everything is attendance-based?" says Kossakoski.
- In the competency-recovery courses that VLACS offers, the courses are broken down into smaller units so students only need to go through the parts of the class that they didn't pass the first time.
Interest in the competency-recovery classes has jumped from about 200 students the first year it was offered to 1,400 students in the last school year, says Kossakoski.
The Washington-based Council of Chief State School Officers has brought together nine states, including New Hampshire, in its Innovation Lab Network to build new models of education that empower learners. Members of the network challenge the status quo with six design principles for transformation, one of which is performance-based learning.
- "We want [states] to wrap around [innovative schools and districts] and protect them like a cocoon," says Gene Wilhoit, the president of the CCSSO.
The Common Core State Standards have helped pave the way for innovative learning models such as CBE, says Wilhoit.
However, while innovation is happening in pockets around the country, large-scale statewide movements are rare, he says.
To push that progress along, the Innovation Lab has identified diagnostic tools that need to be developed and more effective intervention strategies for teachers.
One of the most recent states to join the CCSSO's Innovation Lab is Iowa, which has begun to explore the idea of competency-based education. It granted districts in the state access to seat-time waivers after a forum about CBE held in December 2011.
The 500-student Collins-Maxwell Community School District, about 40 miles north of Des Moines, is one that has taken advantage of the change in policy.
"Competency-based education challenges some of the structures that we think may be there to support students, but may actually be limits," says Jason Ellingson, the superintendent of the rural district, who also sits on the state's task force on CBE.
Although the district has not rolled out a proficiency-based education system, it is taking steps to encourage organic growth of the model, officials say.
For instance, this school year, the district will be giving out iPads to all of its K-12 students. While elementary school students will leave the devices at school overnight, middle and high school students will be allowed to take the devices home with them.
"We feel that those tools are going to be pushing the idea of personalized learning, and we think that's going to help the discussion around competency-based education," says Ellingson.
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Denver CO/ Boulder Valley to Use New Model to Teach Teachers about Technology
By Amy Bounds
Denver Post Camera Staff Writer
October 21, 2012
The Boulder Valley School District has three people assigned to help teachers at 55 schools figure out how to integrate technology into their classrooms.
Looking for a better way to use limited resources, a committee of teachers, principals and community members spent a year developing a vision and researching programs in school districts nationwide.
The group settled on a model in which small groups of teachers will receive extensive training and then serve as mentors to other teachers in their schools.
- "It's a good new direction," said Boulder Valley educational technology manager Kelly Sain, who worked with a similar model in two other school districts. "The enthusiasm from our teachers has been huge."
In this first year, the district is asking middle and high school teachers to apply for 30 spots.
- The next year, 30 elementary teachers will be chosen, and
- the program will be open to any Boulder Valley teacher for 30 spots in the final year.
Teachers can apply until Oct. 29, with the training expected to start in January.
Teachers in the program will receive nine days of professional development, salary credit and about $2,600 worth of digital tools to use in their classrooms. The professional development will include time for the teachers to collaborate, Sain said.
"We want to build a community of learners," she said.
Librarians at the schools also will serve as resources for the teachers as they try new projects in the classrooms. The digital toolkit is expected to include devices like video cameras, iPods and smartboards.
Once the first group is trained, they will be expected to become resources at their schools, helping and encouraging colleagues.
- "They know the staff members and the culture," Sain said. "They can do a fantastic job connecting with others. That's really important as we go forward to try to figure out how to use digital tools with our students."
Andrew Moore, Boulder Valley's chief information officer, said the three people in the educational technology office have been spread too thin. This model, he said, should be a more effective way to help teachers incorporate technology in their lessons.
He said another reason for trying the model now is that it's becoming increasingly difficult for teachers to keep up with all the innovations, from iPods to netbooks to the paperless possibilities of Google collaborative environments.
"Technology is changing rapidly," he said. "We're in a different world than we were even just three years ago. Teachers need to know how technology can keep kids engaged in the learning process."
For more information, go to https://sites.google.com/a/bvsd.org/21st-century-cohort.
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Austin TX/ Texas Schools Head to Trial over School Finance, Claim System is Unconstitutional
By Will Weissert
Huffington Post
October 21, 2012
Attorneys representing around 600 school districts argued Monday that Texas' school financing system is so "hopelessly broken" that it violates the state Constitution while keeping students from being prepared for the well-paying jobs of tomorrow.
The state countered that, even though the system is flawed, it's nowhere near a crisis point.
- Six lawsuits have been filed on behalf of about two-thirds of school districts, which educate about 75 percent of the state's roughly 5 million students.
- They have been rolled into a single case that opened before state District Judge John Dietz in Austin. The trial is expected to last into January.
The Texas Constitution guarantees an "efficient system of public free schools," but the plaintiffs say many schools can't provide an adequate education because the way they are funded is inefficient and unfair.
- Districts in rich and poor parts of the state are on the same side in the matter because Texas relies on a "Robin Hood" scheme in which districts with high property values or abundant revenue from oil or natural gas taxes turn over part of what they collect in property taxes to poorer districts.
"The system of school finance, as we see it, is hopelessly broken," said Rick Gray, who represents more than 400 districts mostly in poorer areas of the state. All the plaintiffs "are a united front in our belief that the system is unconstitutional," he said in his opening statement, adding that "the stakes are simply too high to ignore anymore."
The lawsuits were filed after the Legislature cut $4 billion in state funding to schools and another $1.4 billion for grant programs in 2011.
- The plaintiffs note the money was cut even though Texas' population has boomed and the number of low-income students has skyrocketed.
- Students from low-income families generally cost more to educate because many require instruction to learn English or participate in costly remedial programs outside the classroom.
- Meanwhile, Texas has imposed increasingly more-difficult standardized tests that high school students must pass to graduate.
- The districts claim that funding cuts have forced them to layoff teachers, increase class sizes and cut back on education programs - all steps that ultimately leave their students less prepared for tougher exams.
"The bar has been raised and yet one hand has been tied behind school administrators' backs," Gray said.
He said experts will testify in coming days that, if current educational trends continue, the earning power of Texas residents forced to settle for low-wage jobs will decline so much that it will cost the state $11 billion in lost tax revenue by 2050.
The state Attorney General's office says that because Texas places great emphasis on local control of its school districts, shortcomings are the fault of individual districts.
Texas funded schools beyond the rate of inflation and enrollment growth between 2006 and 2010, and even with the 2011 cuts, districts still need "to show they are spending their money efficiently," Assistant Attorney General Shelly Dahlberg said.
"Superintendents' wish lists" include items like iPads for students, and districts offer programs, such as sports and extracurricular activities, that aren't required by the state, she said. Dahlberg also noted that districts pay teachers based on seniority, not student performance.
Standardized testing requirements that began last year are being phased in gradually and won't fully be required to graduate at least until 2015, Dahlberg said. She also predicted that "almost every single" superintendent eventually called to testify in the case will concede that they expect their students' test scores to continue improving over time - regardless of funding levels.
"I would suggest that we might have an impending crisis, but today it is not a crisis," Dahlberg said. "And we do not believe the plaintiffs can meet their burden of proof to show that it is."
Legal battles over school finance are nothing new in Texas; the case that began Monday is the sixth of its kind since 1984.
In 1993, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that it took $3,500 per student for schools to meet state standards, a figure which Gray said now equals around $6,600 when adjusted for inflation. But he said only 233 of Texas' 1,024 school districts can raise that amount because of state-imposed caps on how much they can collect in property taxes.
Also, districts considered property-wealthy collect on average about $2,000 more per student per year than those in poorer districts - even though they charge on average 8 cents less per dollar paid by area residents in property taxes. Gray said that works out to a discrepancy of about $64,000 per classroom each year.
Attorneys for other plaintiffs told the judge that it costs more to educate the growing number of students who are poor or don't speak English as a native language.
David Hinojosa, who represents the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that 60 percent of Texas students now receive free or reduced-price lunches at school, and as Texas enrollment grows by 80,000 students per year, as many as 95 percent of those new students are from low-income families.
Mark Trachtenberg, arguing on behalf of mostly property-wealthy districts, noted the state's growing Hispanic population now means roughly one in five students requires extra instruction in English.
"This is not a future crisis," he said, "it is a present crisis."
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Washington DC/ INTERVIEW: 'How Children Succeed' - Q&A with Paul Tough
From Valerie Strauss' Answer Sheet daily column
Washington Post
October 23, 2012 More »
Here is a conversation I had by email with Paul Tough about his new book, "How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character."
Tough is an author and speaker who worked as an editor for both The New York Times Magazine and Harpers Magazine and as a reporter and producer for the public-radio program "This American Life." Tough's also wrote "Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America."
- Thanks for agreeing to talk about the book. Briefly, what is it about?
The book is about two things: first, an emerging body of research that shows the importance of so-called non-cognitive skills in children's success; and second, a new set of experimental interventions that are trying to use that research to help improve outcomes for children, especially children growing up in disadvantage. Some of this research is decades old; some is very new. Part of what I'm trying to do in the book is to show the connections between fields of research that are generally kept quite separate, including various branches of economics, neuroscience, pediatrics, and psychology.
- What kind of non-cognitive skills are you talking about and are these things that can really be taught in a classroom?
The skills I'm talking about include grit, curiosity, perseverance, conscientiousness, self-regulation, and optimism. I do think they can be taught in the classroom - I think most of us can think of a teacher in our past who helped us develop one or more of those skills - but I don't think we yet have an ideal model for exactly how to teach them in the classroom.
There are a couple of experimental classroom interventions that I think seem particularly promising, including Tools of the Mind, which uses extended make-believe play and other teaching strategies to develop self-regulation in 4- and 5-year-olds, and OneGoal, the Chicago-based high school program that teaches juniors and seniors a particular set of non-cognitive skills designed to help them persist in college. But I don't think it's an accident that many of the interventions I write about aren't classroom-based, but are the work of mentors or psychologists or pediatricians or coaches. And the book points out that the most effective time to help a child develop healthy non-cognitive skills is in early childhood, before the first day of school.
- That raises a number of questions. First did you identify any particular population of students that is lacking these healthy non-cognitive skills more than others?
The development of non-cognitive skills is highly affected by a child's environment growing up. So children who grow up in significant adversity are more likely to have difficulties with those skills.
- If early childhood is the best time to teach these skills, should we be talking about teaching parents how to instill these in their children?
I think we should definitely be working more with parents to help them help their children develop non-cognitive skills. But I don't think that necessarily means "teaching" parents what to do. At the end of chapter one I write about a variety of interventions that provide emotional and psychological support to parents - from child-parent psychotherapy to Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up to attachment-based home visiting.
There's experimental evidence that suggests that when stressed-out parents get that kind of support, they are better able to give their children, in turn, the kind of support they need to develop these skills.
- I find it interesting that something like "grit" would be seen less in children who live in poverty vs. children who don't. You mention in the book a woman named Madeline Levine who writes about the problems affecting children who grow up in affluence, and it seems as if they have the same sorts of problems with grit, perseverance, self-regulation, optimism. What's the difference in the populations? Your book also describes two different schools - a wealthy one and a charter school that caters to low-income students. How different are the students in terms of these issues? How different are the interventions at these schools?
That's a good point. I do think there are plenty of kids in poverty who have lots of grit - arguably more than the average well-off kid. But the problem with focusing too much on the resilience and grit of disadvantaged kids is that we run the risk of minimizing the often quite harmful consequences of growing up in poverty. Some children do become more resilient as a result of growing up in difficult environments - but many others are simply worn down and worn out by the experience. (That's especially true for disadvantaged children who grow up without a close and supportive relationship with a nurturing adult.)
That said, you're quite right that kids who grow up in affluence face their own set of challenges in the realm of character. Madeline Levine and I both draw on the work of Suniya Luthar, a psychologist at Columbia University who has studied affluent children in depth. Luthar found significant psychological problems at the high end of the income spectrum, and in fact in one study she found higher rates of depression and substance abuse in high-income adolescents than low-income adolescents. These problems arise most often in those high-income homes where children feel simultaneously a great pressure to achieve and an emotional distance from their parents - a particularly toxic combination, according to Luthar and Levine.
So rich and poor kids both face psychological pressures that often express themselves in difficulty persevering and overcoming setbacks. The profound advantage that rich kids have is the family and neighborhood resources that allow them to do well in material ways - to graduate from college, for instance - despite those struggles. They have a social safety net that catches them when they go off course. Most low-income children do not. And so for them, I would argue, these character challenges are more urgent.
The schools I write about in "How Children Succeed" that are collaborating on a character initiative are the KIPP charter schools in New York City, which serve a mostly low-income student population, and Riverdale Country School, a private school in the Bronx that serves a mostly high-income student population. Together, they have come up with a list of seven character strengths they are trying to encourage in their students. But the intervention at KIPP is much more fully developed than the intervention at Riverdale.
A couple of years ago, as I describe in the book, KIPP developed a character report card - which they now call a character growth card - and a few times a year, every student at KIPP's New York City middle schools is evaluated on all seven character strengths by each of their teachers. Character language permeates the KIPP schools.At Riverdale, there's no character growth card. Administrators and teachers do talk about these character strengths in class and in assemblies, but the strengths have much less of a noticeable presence at the school than they do at KIPP Infinity.
- I've heard people question the idea of grading children on their character traits, seeing it as some form of social engineering. Your thoughts?
I don't think it makes sense to "grade" kids on character in the traditional sense, and I don't think anyone is really arguing that we should. I think the folks at KIPP may be right that if you want to get serious about helping kids develop these skills, you need to have some way to measure those skills; without that, character-development programs can easily devolve into vague nostrums about being good. (As I point out in the book, a recent study by the National Center for Education Research found that none of the many large-scale character-education programs in use in American schools produces any significant positive outcomes.) But I'm not convinced that a numerical assessment is the best approach to developing these skills. It's certainly not the only approach: OneGoal, for instance, which I think is doing as good a job as any organization of developing these skills in students, doesn't use a numerical measurement tool for those skills.
What I observed in my reporting at KIPP Infinity was that in practice, the character report card seemed to function more as a conversation piece than like a traditional report card. In the book I describe some of the conversations that were taking place on report-card night at KIPP Infinity the first time the character report cards were given to students. In the conversations I observed, the simple fact of having this numerical assessment in front of them seemed to give parents, teachers, and students a way of talking about these important skills in a positive, non-confrontational, growth-oriented way. And that's a rare occurrence in any school; those are often difficult conversations for teachers and parents to have. If the report card provides a vehicle for that kind of deep and collaborative discussion between parents and teachers and students, then it's performing a valuable function.
- You looked at a public charter school and a private school for this book, both of them institutions that are not in the mainstream of public education. There was a character education movement in traditional public schools for years, but, apparently, that kind of curriculum didn't seem to change the dynamic that it was intended to improve. How do you assess the character education programs in the past? How do you know that the it is the character education at KIPP that is responsible for its results and not other factors, such as entrance policies that choose specific children, attrition rates, etc.?
First, let me point out that while you're right that I did some of my reporting for the book at a public charter school and a private school, I reported in more depth at two traditional public schools (Fenger High in Chicago and I.S. 318 in Brooklyn). And of course much of my reporting for the book didn't take place in schools at all, but in pediatric clinics, neuroscience labs, living rooms, and fast-food restaurants.
I write in the book about the earlier character education movement that you're referring to: In the 1990s, partly because of the encouragement of President Clinton and Hillary Clinton, schools across the country took up character education as a mantra. I describe in the book how those programs tended to get caught up in accusations of bias and political battles between left and right, and how most of them wound up being pretty watered-down. And I describe that NCER report that concluded that most current character-education programs and curricula (and there are lots of them even today!) are ineffective.
- I'm not quite sure what you mean by "How do you know that the it is the character education at KIPP that is responsible for its results?" That implies that in the book I credit the character program at KIPP for certain results. I don't think I do that. (Please let me know if there's a passage where you think I do.) I do point out that the college-graduation rates for KIPP's New York City alumni cohorts have improved somewhat over the last four years, but I don't offer an opinion for why that has happened; if anything, I connect it to the intensive work of the mentors at KIPP Through College more than anything going on right now in the middle schools.
(By definition, the recent middle-school project I write about in the book can't possibly be responsible for any recent change in college-graduation rates; the kids receiving character growth cards at KIPP Infinity are many years away from college.)
I admire the way that KIPP has been so candid as an institution in the last couple of years about their disappointing college-graduation rates. I think they'd be the first to admit that they don't yet have the problem solved. But I think it's a crucially important question to take on, and I'm glad they're taking it so seriously.
- You say early in the book that reform efforts based on content have failed to affect achievement gaps, and, that an emphasis on character in some way seems like a better alternative. I would note that I don't think the decade of No Child Left Behind was really about content, but rather about how to assess what kids learn which turned into being too much about test prep, but I'm curious why you think that helping kids develop grit, optimism, etc., will help them learn how to read Homer or understand and use the Pythagorean Theorem.
I would disagree somewhat with your characterization of my argument. I don't think I ever argue in the book against "reform efforts based on content." (Though again, please let me know if there's a particular passage where you think I do so.) I certainly think content is a crucial part of education! But in the book I do argue against the intense national focus on standardized tests, which measure a fairly narrow range of cognitive skills and turn out to be not very effective predictors of the educational goals that I think we should care about, especially college-graduation rates.
I draw on the work of many analysts, including Melissa Roderick at the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research and the authors of the book "Crossing the Finish Line," to suggest that doing a better job of developing non-cognitive skills in students could be a particularly fruitful way to increase college-graduation rates. The reason that I focus so much on the Chicago organization OneGoal is that they are trying to put that research into practice now in a very direct way, and their results, though quite preliminary, look promising.
As for the question of how helping kids develop grit and optimism might help them learn how to read Homer or learn geometry: I don't go into this too deeply in the book, but I do think there's pretty strong evidence in the psychological literature that if we can help young people improve their sense of self-efficacy - if we can help them develop what the psychologist Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset - they do better not just in the long run, but right away, in class. Dweck's data shows that students who believe that they can improve their own abilities deal better with setbacks and apply themselves more energetically to difficult tasks - all of which would be very useful to a student about to tackle Homer or the Pythagorean Theorem.
In June, the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research put out a report on these questions titled "Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners: The Role of Noncognitive Factors in Shaping School Performance: A Critical Literature Review." It came out too late for me to include any reference to it in my book, unfortunately, but I would recommend it as a good resource for any of your readers who want to delve more deeply into the research around these skills and how they can play out in the classroom.
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Washington DC/ OPINION: Personalized Learning on the March
By Michael Horn
Education Week [Edweek.org]
This post originally appeared on Forbes.com
October 22, 2012
Two developments this week signal that funders are pushing personalized learning and innovation forward in schools-and both herald promising things for improving education in this country.
The first development was the launch of the non-profit Silicon Schools Fund, which will provide seed funding for new blended-learning schools that use innovative education models and technology to personalize learning (full disclosure: I'm one of the Fund's board members).
The Silicon Schools Fund plans to raise $25 million, which it will invest in creating up to 25 new blended-learning schools in the Bay Area over the next five years.
Several aspects of the Fund's plans excite me.
- First, the focus on the Bay Area will tap Silicon Valley's innovative minds and increasingly entrepreneurial ventures in education technology to create a cluster that drives personalized learning forward. This should accelerate innovation in the Bay Area first, but the Fund aims to create models that allow others around the country to replicate what is working.
To that end, I'm also pleased that the Fund will be supporting district, charter, and independent schools interested in starting or redesigning schools that will utilize blended learning to boost results for all students. This should give the Fund a better chance at creating a cluster that helps the education field make great leaps forward in the years ahead that can ultimately reach all students across the nation.
Having the support of such visionaries in education as Sal Khan of the Khan Academy, John Fisher, who is Chairman of the KIPP Foundation, Ted Mitchell from NewSchools Venture Fund, and Brian Greenberg, who will be the Fund's CEO, is also a huge bonus.
Silicon Schools Fund's website does a great job of articulating the vision.
- The second development this week that gives me hope for the future of personalized learning was the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) announcement of another series of grants totaling $5.4 million for 13 new models of personalized, blended learning at the secondary and postsecondary levels (full disclosure again: I served as a reviewer for the NGLC secondary school models grants).
NGLC, an initiative dedicated to improving college readiness and completion, has now completed its third wave of investments focused on breakthrough models (here is what I wrote about their last announcement)-and in the K-12 middle and high school arena, has funded 20 school models that, together, showcase a promising mixture of projects.
Of the 20 models funded, roughly 10 are charters, another 5 or so are district-charter partnerships, and the final 5 are more traditional district, state-district, or district-university partnerships. It's clear that many charters are at last living up to their promise of creating new, innovative models, and it's great to see districts begin to contemplate bigger transformations.
In many cases, many of the models funded are pushing their own comfort zones. As a result, I suspect not all of these will be successful, but that failure should in fact be a critical lever in improving our education system, as I've discussed here.
- One of the more interesting developments is the emergence of models that are deliberately connecting inquiry, project-based learning with the more "1.0 versions" of blended learning.
- As a result of these, along with the competency-based learning environments that all of the models will be pushing, there will also need to be new thinking on how to evaluate these models. Policies will ultimately matter.
In the absence of policies that encourage competency-based learning and focuses not just on proficiency for each student, but also each child's individual growth, we could see these models struggle to gain traction to transform the wider education system.
The performance metrics used to judge schools today are also problematic in that they are overly narrow. As we see these new school models emerge that leave traditional practice far behind, I suspect that we will increasingly see that the standard measures are too thin to be adequate at judging how schools are doing for students. In many ways, this tension will put a stronger emphasis on moving to a policy set that focuses on student outcomes, not inputs, but that has a richer understanding of what those student outcomes could look like and how to value them.
The latest grantees in the NGLC portfolio-Aspire Public Schools, Intrinsic Schools, Generation Schools Network, Foundations College Prep, Fayette County Public Schools, and Whittemore Park Middle School-will now be a part of the pioneers leading the way.
