Tag: Poverty

A Year of Wonder: What is the Future of Higher Ed?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on A Year of Wonder: What is the Future of Higher Ed?

It’s been the no-brainiest of no-brainers for as long as anyone can remember: If you’re a parent, and you have the means to do so, a mark of your commitment to your children is measured by the amount of money you’re able to sock away for their college education.

But what if it’s no longer true?

What if, in the wake of impending seismic shifts in higher education, the parents of today’s Kindergartners (aka the Class of 2032) need to stop worrying about their 529’s, and start preparing for a radically different landscape – one in which the very notion of “admissions” is an anachronism, the price tag is reasonable, and the experience doesn’t unfold over four years, but one’s entire life?

Before you block me from your Twitter feed for inanity, hear me out.

First, let’s consider the present state of higher education:

  • Student debt is out of control. Whereas in 2004, the total amount of loans American college students had was around $250 billion, by the time today’s Kindergartner was born, that number had surpassed $1 trillion.
  • Nearly half the students who begin college don’t finish within six years.
  • It is now the norm for students in the bottom income bracket to borrow at least half their household income to attend a four-year college.
  • And in the last twenty years, the average amount owed by a typical student has more than doubled.

Meanwhile, the majority of our colleges and universities are not even set up to give students an equivalent return on their investment: after all, the central function of the “hybrid university” is research, not teaching.

So what does that leave us with? An increasing disconnect between the skills young people have, and the skills their prospective employers need. As Forbes put it in 2014: “With the large numbers of recent college graduates who can’t find employment that pays well enough to justify the costs of going to college, it appears that we have reached the final stages of a process that has driven costs up but value down.”

Even the U.S. Department of Education sees the writing on the wall: “Today,” they write, “college remains the greatest driver of socioeconomic mobility in America, but if we don’t do more to keep it within reach for middle-class families and those striving to get into the middle class, it could have the opposite effect – serving as a barrier, instead of as a ticket to the American Dream.”

That’s bad news for middle-class families, but it’s devastating news for low-income families, who are constantly told that the only way to change their fortunes is by making sure the next generation is college-bound – despite the fact that just 9% of the country’s poorest students actually graduate with a bachelor’s degree by age 24 (as opposed to 77% of the wealthiest).

This is all starting to sound as sham-tastic as Trump University.

To be clear, the promise of college as a pathway to prosperity is still true for many – just not as many as before. Making college more accessible and affordable helped create the modern American middle class, thanks to policies like the G.I. Bill and the Higher Education Act. In fact, Title IV of the law focused on ensuring equal access for students from low-income families. It created support programs to help those students enroll in and afford higher education. And the 1972 reauthorization of the bill saw the beginning of the modern framework for federal student aid.

The problem is that while Congress has built out its own framework for federal aid, the overall costs of higher education have risen dramatically, resulting in a lower purchasing power for Pell Grants and a greater reliance on federal student loans. Consequently, whereas middle class kids can still get saddled with unwanted debt and a degree of limited utility, poor kids can get buried altogether.

This is not, therefore, merely a question of privilege. It’s a question of priorities – and of making sure that our institutions of higher education have the right ones.

The good news is there are more examples than you might think of colleges and universities that are changing their practices in ways that better serve the needs of kids and their families – and there are compelling reasons to think that by the time today’s five-year-olds graduate from high school, the landscape they face will be filled with options that are more personally relevant, affordable, and accessible.

If you’re looking for a future-oriented public university, for example, take a close look at Arizona State. As recently as a decade ago, ASU was little more than a party school with nice weather. Now, it’s the top-ranked university in the country for innovation – ahead of places like Stanford and M.I.T. Yet it’s still pretty affordable, and still pretty easy to get into.

And if you’d rather see how one of the world’s top universities is reimagining itself, check out Stanford 2025 – and see what you think of the creative ways they are redefining the structure and purpose of college (Goodbye Transcripts, Hello Skillprints). Or take note of Nike founder Phil Knight’s recent decision to give Stanford $400 million – not for its endowment or a new sports facility, but to create a new scholarship that recruits students from around the world to solve the world’s most intractable problems.

As Google’s Jamie Casap argues, this is precisely where education should be headed. Today’s students shouldn’t be thinking about what they want to be; they should be asking themselves what problems they want to solve.

Of course, that sort of shift requires a very different model of higher education – and a very different price point. But as Kevin Carey writes in The End of College, what schools like ASU and Stanford are showing us is where other universities will need to go if they want to survive. “To prosper,” he argues, “colleges need to become more like cathedrals. They need to build beautiful places, real and virtual, that learners return to throughout their lives. They need to create authentic human communities and form relationships with people based on the never-ending project of learning. They need to do it in ways that are affordable and meaningful for large numbers of people.”

For Carey and others, that means that many of the things we associate most strongly with “the college experience” may, once today’s Kindergartners reach university age, no longer exist. “The idea of ‘applying to’ or ‘graduating from’ colleges won’t make as much sense in the future,” Carey suggests. “People will join colleges and other learning organizations for as long or as little time as they need.”

Before that can happen, however, a vital monopoly must be broken: the sale of recognized credits and credentials. But Carey believes the exponential advances in information technology, coupled with the widening understanding of how people learn, will soon result in a digital marketplace of credentialing that reduces the diploma to its rightful, antiquated place. “The way the Internet allows people to connect with one another and share information creates new sources of authority that can be used to validate credentials,” he argues.

“They will allow people to control and display information about themselves in new and powerful ways, by assembling credible evidence of knowledge and skills gained in a variety of contexts – in college, in the workforce, in life.” And they will make each person’s educational identity “deep, discoverable, mobile, and secure.”

This is certainly the bet LinkedIn made when they spent $1.5 billion to acquire Lynda.com a year ago. It’s what new organizations like Accredible or Mozilla’s Open Badges platform are starting to develop. And it’s why some of the world’s top universities have combined to launch EdX and offer free online courses from top instructors.

So if all of these future-oriented efforts are already underway, why are they still at the margins of how we think about college?

Simply, because old habits die hard.

The comfort we get from continuing to imagine college as it has always been – as a symbol of acculturation and access, more than a vehicle to meaningful skills acquisition – will take a bit longer to collapse under the weight of its own untruth.

But make no mistake about it – we are already chasing chimeras. The unquestioned promise of college is, for too many, an illusion – and, worse still, an increasingly unaffordable and reckless one to pursue.

That means change is upon us. But perhaps by the time today’s five-year-old is graduating from high school, greater affordability, access and relevance will be, too.

Occupy Third Grade?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Occupy Third Grade?

On a crisp fall morning in the nation’s capital, 3rd grade teacher Rebecca Lebowitz gathered her 29 public school students on their familiar giant multicolored carpet, and reminded them how to make sense of the characters whose worlds they would soon enter during independent reading time.

“What are the four things we want to look for when we meet a new character?” Ms. Lebowitz asked from her chair at the foot of the rug. Several hands shot up before nine-year-old Monica spoke confidently over the steady hum of the classroom’s antiquated radiator. “We want to pay attention to what they do, what they say, how they feel, and what their body language tells us.” “That’s right,” her teacher said cheerily. “When we look for those four things, we have a much better sense of who a person really is.”

As the calendar shifts to the eleventh month of 2011 – a year of near-constant revolution and upheaval, from the Arab Spring to the Wisconsin statehouse to the global effort to Occupy Wall Street – what might the rest of us learn from students like Monica? If, in short, we were as smart as a third-grader, what would we observe about the character of this year’s global protests, and what might we decide to do next?

1. It is not about “democracy” – As much as we glorify and value the principles and practices of our democratic system of government, it’s not democracy per se that is at the root of this unleashed global yearning. As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently pointed out, what motivated the protesters in Tahrir Square – and what most animates those who continue to brave the wintry weather in public squares around the world – is a deeper quest for what lies at the root of a genuinely democratic society: justice.

The people protesting around the world are not just looking to be seen; they’re demanding to be heard. And what they’re saying is that from Egypt to the United States, essential social contracts have been broken – contracts that require at least a modicum of fairness and balance. If anything, therefore, these movements are about highlighting an uncomfortable truth: merely having a democracy does not guarantee a just society, and the tendencies of democracy and capitalism, left untended, tend to flow in different directions.

2. It is about unsustainable social orders – Across the Middle East, citizens have been risking their lives for months to protest the injustice of their daily lives. And yet the absence of social justice is a cancer that has already spread well beyond the borders of the Arab world. According to a recent analysis of the 31 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), nearly 11% of all people in OECD countries live in poverty. Worse still, 22% of American children are affected by poverty, yet the United States spends only 0.33% of its GDP on pre-primary education.

When these data are combined with other indicators like income inequality, access to health care, and the percentage of elderly citizens living in poverty, the United States gets a social justice rating that trails all but four of the OECD’s 31 countries. Add to that the now-well-known fact that the top 1% of Americans now control 40% of the total wealth, and you have an unsustainable social system, plain and simple. Clearly, people are angry, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

3. It does require a reboot of public education – History has shown us that to sustain a movement for transformational social change, anger is both necessary and insufficient. To sustain our energy, we are best fueled by an empathetic regard for the needs of others, not just our own. As Gandhi put it, “I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion.”

If what we seek, then, is a more sustainable and just social order, how should we recalibrate our public schools – the institutions most responsible for equipping children with the skills and self-confidence they need to become effective and justice-oriented change agents as adults?

We might start by evaluating each other the same way Ms. Lebowitz’s students evaluate new characters in a book. To fulfill the egalitarian vision of 2011, children must grow up in learning environments that are sensitive not just to what they do and say, but also to how they feel and what their body language tells us about the larger world they inhabit. This, too, is a central insight of those who study systemic change. “We need to learn to attend to both dimensions simultaneously,” says M.I.T management professor Otto Scharmer. “What we say, see, and do (our visible realm), and the inner place from which we operate (the invisible realm, in which our sources of attention reside and from which they operate).”

Recent events have underscored just how essential it is to acknowledge our global interdependence; after all, it was the financial subterfuge of the few that affected the personal wellbeing of the many. That’s why a healthy democracy is more than just policies and practices – and a healthy school is more than just test scores and teacher policies. That’s why the American activists of tomorrow need more than just the occasional lesson about Gandhi or King; they need consistent opportunities to actively apply their own developing compassion for others in the service of creating a better world. And that’s why students like Monica need to grow up in a society willing to heed the rising voices of the protesters and recommit to our nation’s founding promise:  “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice.”

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

What DC Can Teach Us About Teacher Policies

Posted on | by Sam | 7 Comments on What DC Can Teach Us About Teacher Policies

This weekend, an article in my local paper crystallized three things we need to stop doing if we want to transform American public education for the long haul – and three things we should start doing instead.

1. STOP having a national debate about labor law; START having a national conversation about how people learn.

The article I’m referring to was written in response to the July 15, 2011 announcement that 206 teachers in the D.C. public school system had been fired for poor performance, “a rarity in a big city school system and an extension of former chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s aggressive drive to upgrade classroom instruction in the nation’s capital.”

Indeed. For the past four years, ever since Ms. Rhee first took the helm of the D.C. public school system (DCPS), the tenor of our national conversation (and my local one) has been squarely fixed on teachers, on teacher evaluations, and on the role teachers unions have played in our ongoing efforts to guarantee each child an equal opportunity to a high-quality public education.

On one level, this makes sense: teachers are clearly the most significant in-school factor to a healthy learning environment for kids; teacher evaluations are clearly in need of an extreme makeover; and teacher unions have clearly been occasional obstacles to some of the larger efforts to remake our public schools. In that regard, any and all efforts to “upgrade classroom instruction” are exactly what the doctor ordered.

And yet, the reality is that the past four years have been more of a national debate about labor law – and less of a national investigation about how people learn. And the problem is not that labor law doesn’t need fixing; it does. But when things like “last in, first out” (LIFO) firing policies, collective bargaining rights, and teacher pensions crowd out our capacity to identify what highly effective teaching and learning really looks like – and requires – what we get are cover stories about personnel dismissals and litmus tests on national personalities, not evaluation tools that are designed to help the vast majority of teachers get better. Which leads to the second thing . . .

2. STOP spending so much time talking about the best and worst teachers; START focusing on everyone else.

Although mass firings of the sort DCPS reported last week are rare, the number of personnel affected was still quite small – just 5% of the total workforce. In fact, very few teachers were rated as either great or horrible; the vast majority – nearly 70% — were simply rated “effective.”

This underscores a rather obvious point: the only way to transform the teaching profession is by crafting policies that help the vast majority of educators improve the quality of their practice over time – not by lionizing the master teachers or demonizing the ones that should find a new line of work.

Is that what’s happening in DC? I believe our new schools chancellor, Kaya Henderson, when she says that IMPACT, the city’s new teacher evaluation system, is designed to build capacity, not just weed out the unwanted. Perhaps over time IMPACT will even become a useful national model for a different sort of evaluation tool that can provide feedback, reinforce high standards, and help ensure a high-quality teacher in every classroom. However, based on a recent in-depth review of IMPACT, we’re not there yet – and we’re still way too focused in our public rhetoric on the best and the worst teachers. It would be nice to see the rhetoric and the reality get more in line with each other. And it would be nice to imagine that some worthy educators won’t recklessly lose their jobs along the way.

3. STOP viewing poverty and education as an either/or; START viewing them as a both/and.

Anyone who lives and works in education knows that an ongoing argument has been occurring between some who feel you can’t fix education until you fix poverty, and others who feel you can’t fix poverty until you fix education.

The reality is that both sides – and neither side – are right. Poverty and education are inextricably linked, and the ecosystem each child inhabits – from his home and community to his health and his school – has a massive, complicated impact on that child’s capacity to learn and grow. Therefore, any new policies that fail to account for that complexity aren’t just poorly designed; they’re patently unfair.

This point was reinforced in the article about the DC firings and the IMPACT evaluation system. As Washington Post reporter Bill Turque wrote, “a breakdown by ward confirms, as it did last year, that the overwhelming majority of highly effective teachers work in schools with lower rates of poverty and other social problems.”

This news shouldn’t surprise anyone – how could it be otherwise? – and yet too many of us are still suggesting the path forward must be lit by signs saying either “It’s The Poverty, Stupid,” or “No Excuses Means No Excuses.”

We can do better. We have the capacity for greater nuance in our understanding of something as complex as teaching and learning. And as we spend the summer months preparing for a new school year, we would be wise to be more mindful of what we must stop, start and keep doing in the months and years ahead.