Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

Open House Do’s and Don’ts

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It’s that time of year again: when parents across the country — but particularly parents in major American cities — prepare to schedule a flurry of open houses in a frantic search for the best school for their child.

It happened to me a year ago; between January and March I visited more than 20 schools in search of the best place for my 3-year-old. Even though I’ve been working in schools my whole adult life, it was a daunting, disorienting experience. I can only imagine what it feels like for parents who haven’t stepped foot in a school since their own high school graduation.

To help ease the anxiety of my fellow parents, here are a few essential rules of the road: three questions to ask, and three things to look for.


Questions to Ask

  1. What is your definition of success — and how do you know if you’re reaching it?
  2. What aspect of your school are you most proud of — and where do you need the most work?
  3. What’s the general profile of your faculty — and how long do they stay?

Each of these questions is designed to drill down on how well a school understands what it does — and why it does it. Surprisingly, many schools haven’t thought about this as much as they should. They may have some generalized notion of success in terms of test scores or general statements about a child’s development. They are likely to know what they do well. They have to know how many of their teachers come and go each year. But if they can’t speak really clearly and specifically about what success will look like for your child — and do so in ways that go beyond just academics  – and if they can’t identify quickly where they still need work (because all schools, even the best ones, have room for improvement), you have good reason to wonder if they really have a plan worth investing in.

As examples of schools that have taken the time to figure it out, check out Mission Hill, the Blue School, or MC2 — three schools with clearly defined visions of individual- and whole-school success, and three schools with explicit lists of the sorts of skills and habits they want their students to master. Simply put, these schools know where they’re going — and how they’ll get there. Your child’s school should, too.

Things to Look For

  1. Hallways & Classrooms
  2. Playgrounds & Playspaces
  3. Safety & Security

If you visit a school during school hours, peek in the classrooms. Do students look engaged and energetic, or withdrawn and bored? Are the hallways filled with student work — and if so, does the work reflect a real range of skill-levels and ideas, or does it all look the same? Good schools know how to get kids involved — by making the learning as hands-on and relevant as possible — and they recognize and celebrate the uniqueness of each child.

Good schools also have good playspaces for children — or at least a good plan to get them there, if, like many urban charter schools, they do not yet inhabit a building with its own playground. Ideally, your child’s daily opportunities for physical activity and play are frequent and easily accessed. And if they have to travel offsite, be sure to find out the path to the playground, and how long it will take to get a small herd of children there and back every day.

And finally, good schools take the safety and security of your children seriously. Is it easy or difficult to walk into the school without being stopped or questioned by any adult? Does the school have protocols in place in the event of an emergency? And most importantly, does the school’s commitment to safety and security not interfere with the child’s sense of wonder and curiosity? Children should expect maximum security, but that doesn’t mean they should be expected to learn in environments that feel like maximum security prisons. A good school knows the difference.

The best and worst feature of modern K-12 schooling is that there are more choices to weigh and sift through. But the good news is that, as with the schools themselves, the clearer we the parents are on what we want in a school — and why we want it — the more likely we are to find a match in the marketplace.

Good luck!

 

Making Schools Safer in the Wake of Sandy Hook

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As policymakers prepare to find the best way to respond to the tragedy in Newtown, educators and parents across the country are left to wonder – what can we do to make our schools safe?

The lessons of Sandy Hook Elementary School can help us answer that question in two ways – one that is uncomfortable, and one that is essential.

The uncomfortable truth of Sandy Hook is that there is nothing we can do to guarantee that our children are safe. Short of placing an iron dome over our school buildings or turning them into police bunkers, the only thing we can do is create spaces for children that are as safe and supportive as possible.  And so while it is encouraging that national policymakers are intent on addressing the larger aspects of American culture that make acts of mass violence like this all too common, the only things individual schools and communities can do are the sorts of things Sandy Hook had already done: establish clear safety protocols, lock their doors once the school day begins, and be vigilant in their efforts to keep children safe.

There is, however, something essential our schools can do to ensure that all children feel safe and supported, and it, too, is something the educators of Sandy Hook were already doing: proactively addressing the full range of each child’s developmental needs, and providing students with the love and support they need to learn and grow.

It was happening the morning of the tragedy: principal Dawn Hochsprung and psychologist Mary Sherlach were in a meeting with the parent of a child who was struggling, and together they were working out a plan to ensure that his needs could be addressed to help get him back on track.

This is becoming a lost art, and a lost practice – most schools, if they have a team of mental health professionals at all, maintain skeleton crews whose daily efforts cannot possibly account for the needs of all the children in their charge. This is especially true in our poorest communities, where budget cuts and conflicting priorities have forced educators to cut back on counselors, social workers, and psychologists.

In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, this cannot continue.

It’s impossible to know if a more robust set of supports could have helped Adam Lanza before he decided to commit mass murder. But it’s undeniable that a more robust set of supports would help current and future generations of students get the help they need, and keep them on track to live happy, productive lives.

For proof, just look to the schools and networks that already operate this way. Consider the School Development Program (SDP), a national network of K-12 schools structured to ensure that every adult – from the teachers to the bus drivers to the custodial staff – is well-versed in the six developmental pathways children must travel down: cognitive, social, emotional, linguistic, ethical, and physical. Or visit any of the more than 200 affiliates of Communities in Schools (CIS), a nationwide network of professionals who work collaboratively to surround students with a range of academic and behavioral support services.

What programs like SDP and CIS recognize is a simple fact about children: unmet social and emotional needs become unmet academic needs. And they recognize what Yale University’s James Comer – the founder of SDP – has observed: “With every interaction in a school, we are either building community or destroying it.”

So let’s keep encouraging our elected officials to push for lasting changes in the way our society is structured. And let’s recognize that in the meantime, and from this day forward, each of us has a vital role to play.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

The Monday After Newtown

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This morning, my wife and I joined our son at a holiday breakfast celebration. The school’s multipurpose room (“the puh-pus room”, as Leo calls it) was filled with children between the ages of 3 and 6, who sat in a circle and sang songs while their parents leaned on walls and scanned the edges of the room for coffee. Then we broke bread together — each family bringing in dishes that represent “breakfast” to them: cranberry orange bread, hot tamales, donuts, fruit salad, and some delicious combination of onions and scalloped potatoes. The children quickly finished the food on their plates and then wove in and out of the groups of parents who stood and chatted, their teachers — all of them women — doing their best to maintain a small sense of order and decorum.

While Leo and I were sitting, one of his classmates came up and introduced himself to me. “My name is Antoine,” he said confidently and cheerily. “Nice to meet you, Antoine. I’m Leo’s daddy. How old are you?” “I’m almost six,” he said.

Almost six.

It remains incomprehensible that 20 children as young as Antoine lost their lives just a few days ago. It seems possible that this tragedy, unlike the others before it, may actually spark enough momentum to result in meaningful changes in our society. And it becomes essential that in the days and weeks ahead, all of us who are privileged to be members of a school community remember that amidst the coming wave of policy recommendations and professional advice, our own rules of engagement are kept as simple, and as impactful, as this:

With every interaction in a school, we are either building community or destroying it. Let’s all do our part.

The Learning Revolution, Circa 2012

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Six years ago, a funny Englishman gave a stirring speech about how schools were stifling the creativity of their students. Today, Sir Ken Robinson is a worldwide celebrity, and his TED talk has been seen by as many as 100 million people.

How did that happen, exactly? And what is the state of the learning revolution Robinson urged us to launch?

The first answer has a lot to do with TED, and the ways it has become an unparalleled global phenomenon and idea accelerator. But it has more to do with Robinson, and the ways he was able to – clearly and cleverly– articulate our education system as it is, and as it ought to be. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original,” he argued. “By the time we get to be adults, most of us have lost that capacity. We have become frightened of being wrong. We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

The second answer has a lot to do with the impact of those words, and the ways in which our education systems have started to move – slowly but surely – in the direction of Robinson’s recommendations. In particular, I see three trends worth noting:

  1. Shifting Endgoals – In 2006, it would have been impossible to suggest that anything other than content knowledge was the desired endgoal of a quality education. The rest was fluff, and if you couldn’t measure it, it didn’t matter. Today, however, there is an increasing recognition that content knowledge is actually the means by which we acquire a quality education, while the endgoal is a set of life skills or habits we can rely on throughout our lives. This paradigm shift was foretold by Robinson, whose talk centered around one of those skills – creativity. It has since expanded to include a rotating cast of others, from critical thinking to collaboration. And it will continue to reshape how schools see their work, both strategically and morally, requiring a new wave of creative thinking about how we assess both student and teacher learning and growth.
  2. Growing Grassroots – Robinson was right to urge people to stop waiting for policies to change before they themselves change. The only way a learning revolution will begin is if we heed the advice of Myron Rogers, who advised us to “start anywhere, and follow it anywhere.” That means recognizing each individual school is, as Ken says, its own school system, and insisting that educators start being more proactive in how they reimagine the structure and purpose of school. Scores of networks and organizations are already doing just that – from Expeditionary Learning to the Institute for Democratic Education in America. More communities are joining every day. And eventually, the policies will have no choice but to catch up.
  3. Emerging Leaders – In schools and districts across the country, a new wave of leadership is emerging with the confidence to speak publicly against the dysfunctions of the current system and think strategically about how to transform education for the long haul. Montgomery County superintendent Josh Starr is one such example – the leader of a massive network of schools and educators, a passionate believer in working collaboratively with all stakeholders, and an astute communicator who relies on everything from podcasts to Twitter to community book clubs. “I see my work being as much about helping people understand how we learn as it is about balancing budgets or driving student growth. These are community-wide conversations we all need to be having, and my job is to help seed those – and to keep learning alongside everyone else.”

It’s instructive that the most watched TED talk in history is about public education – despite the mainstream media’s ongoing reluctance to provide anything more than cursory coverage. Sir Ken’s talk is a reminder that people everywhere recognize that there is no issue more important to our future than the education of our newest generations. And his message, fittingly, is that we are the people we’ve been waiting for all along.

(NOTE: This article also appeared on Huffington Post as part of its TED Weekend series.)

If Murder Can Be Tracked Like An Infectious Disease, Should Failing Schools Be, Too?

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There’s a fascinating new story out there, courtesy of NPR, in which a team of researchers pored over 25 years of murder data in Newark, New Jersey and reached a surprising conclusion: murdering someone is not as individualized a decision as we might think. In fact, the study suggests we may need to adopt a different lens when viewing the problem, and start thinking of homicide less as an individual choice, and more as a reflection of a larger infectious disease like AIDS or the flu.

“We looked at homicide as an infectious disease,” said Michigan State University’s April Zeoli, one of the lead researchers. “To spread, an infectious disease needs three things: a source of the infection; a mode of transmission; and a susceptible population.”

Zeoli and her team studied every homicide in Newark over a period of a quarter century — 2,366 murders in all, at a rate three times as high as the rest of the U.S. They tracked down the time and location of every single murder, and then plugged the data into a program that was previously reserved for tracking infectious diseases; it creates a model to show how the epidemic is spreading — and where it might go next. “We hypothesized that the distribution of this crime was not random, but that it moved in a process similar to an infectious disease, with firearms and gangs operating as the infectious agents,” the researchers wrote.

The implications here are that rethinking the causes for homicide could help cities predict how and where the “disease” would spread in the future.

Anyone else seeing the implications a study like this could have for how we think about school reform?

Currently, we tend to (overly) assign individual causes to the symptoms of whole-school or single-child success in school. A growing chorus of educators and communities, however, recognize there is a complex constellation of forces impacting every child’s capacity to learn and grow (see, e.g., Harlem Children’s Zone, Communities in Schools, etc.).

What would happen if we reclassified how we define a failing school — away purely from individual adult ineptitude or child indifference, and more toward the holistic language of infectious disease? As Zeoli explained, “by figuring out what makes some neighborhoods ‘resistant’ to homicide, despite having the same risk factors as areas with high homicide rates, policymakers could apply those insights to “inoculate” other areas in order to prevent homicide from spreading.”

We can do the same in school reform. We should do the same. Don’t you think?

When it comes to a longer school day, something’s gotta give

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Now that five states are planning to add 300 hours of class time in an effort to close the achievement gap and re-imagine the school day, I can only come to one conclusion: Something’s got to give.

Continue reading . . .

The Power of Outrospection

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Did you get the memo? Apparently, introspection is out, and outrospection is in.

Actually, as philosopher Roman Krznaric explains in this cool new RSA Animate video, what’s really in is empathy, and what’s really required is a systemic effort to drive social change by stepping outside ourselves. See for yourself — and see what you think.

The $10,000 Education?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The $10,000 Education?

There’s a lot of excess noise in just about every contemporary debate about public education, which makes it hard for anyone to see clearly what’s happening, and what needs to happen, in order to pull our institutions of American schooling – from Kindergarten to College – out of the Industrial era and into the modern world.

One thing, however, seems clear at every level: we need to become a lot more efficient in how we spend our money (not to mention a lot smarter in how we use our degree). Which is why I find it interesting that almost no one is talking about what Florida Governor Rick Scott proposed last week.

Scott challenged every community college in his state to create bachelor’s degree programs that cost students $10,000 or less. “Every business has to figure out how to make itself more efficient,” he said. “They’ve got to use technology, they’ve got to use the Internet, things like that. We can do the same thing with our state colleges.”

It’s too soon to tell how effective Scott’s challenge will be, and if Florida ultimately becomes a model of affordable higher education for the country. But his idea certainly comes at an interesting time – and one has to wonder when exactly the keepers of America’s colleges and universities will wake up and smell the MOOC.

On one hand, one could look at the numbers and wonder what all the hubbub is about: in worldwide rankings, more than half of the top 100 universities are American – including eight out of the top ten.

On the other hand, there is a growing sense that investing in higher education does not yield the path to prosperity it once did. Indeed, according to a recent article in The Economist, the cost of college has risen by almost five times the rate of inflation since 1983, and the amount of debt per student has doubled in the past 15 years. Two-thirds of graduates now take out loans. And those who graduated last year did so with an average of $26,000 in debt.

Making matters worse is this untidy stat: the odds of an American student completing a four-year degree within six years stand at no better than 57%. Yet all the while, universities are spending plenty more on administration and support services, while states are cutting back on financial aid.

In this sort of environment, it should be no surprise that new entities are stepping into the fray and threatening the way we think about higher education.  In fact, 2011 may be remembered as the year of the MOOC, or “massive open online courses.” They’re free, they’re college-level, and they’re available to everyone. Entities like Western Governors University (WGU) now offer tuition costs of less than $6,000 a year, and students have complete freedom over deciding when they study and take their exams. And companies like StraighterLine are offering online courses for as low as $49.

So amidst all these tectonic shifts, what does the future hold? A few things seem clear: first, there will always be the Ivory Towers of the university, and the growth of online courses will never replace the value of real-time, relationship-driven learning. Second, we need to admit that we have arrived at a point at which the production of credentials (e.g., knowing how to graduate) has come to matter more than the cultivation of anything real (e.g., knowing how to think). And third, the most certain future path for all levels of American education is the one down which learning becomes more personalized and customized – and that, I say, is a good thing. “The best sort of democratic education,” says Shop Class as Soulcraft author Matthew Crawford, “is neither snobbish nor egalitarian. Rather, it accords a place of honor in our common life to whatever is best [for each individual].”

Amen. And onward march.