Category: Assessment

The Learning Revolution, Circa 2012

Posted on | by Sam

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?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on If Murder Can Be Tracked Like An Infectious Disease, Should Failing Schools Be, Too?

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

Posted on | by Sam

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 . . .

Gaming the System

Posted on | by Sam

. . . is not the goal, as Seth Godin illustrates well in a recent blog post (and if you like it you can also check out his TEDx talk, which took place moments before mine). As Seth wrote:

Sometimes, we can’t measure what we need, so we invent a proxy, something that’s much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation.

TV advertisers, for example, could never tell which viewers would be impacted by an ad, so instead, they measured how many people saw it. Or a model might not be able to measure beauty, but a bathroom scale was a handy stand in.

A business person might choose cash in the bank as a measure of his success at his craft, and a book publisher, unable to easily figure out if the right people are engaging with a book, might rely instead on a rank on a single bestseller list. One last example: the non-profit that uses money raised as a proxy for difference made.

You’ve already guessed the problem. Once you find the simple proxy and decide to make it go up, there are lots of available tactics that have nothing at all to do with improving the very thing you set out to achieve in the first place. When we fall in love with a proxy, we spend our time improving the proxy instead of focusing on our original (more important) goal instead.

Gaming the system is never the goal. The goal is the goal.

How Do We Fix DCPS?

Posted on | by Sam

. . . is the question @amyjwatkins asked me on Twitter this morning, in response to the news that DCPS plans to close 20 neighborhood schools in an effort to concentrate its student populations and provide them with fuller services.

Great question, Amy. To answer it, imagine if DCPS adopted the following as its theory of change (TOC)?

IF we have cultures of transformational learning where we

THEN all students will flourish and achieve to high levels.

Think that TOC (which is the brainchild of the remarkable QED Foundation), would give the district the focus it needs to reimagine urban public education in ways that are both specific and visionary? I do. And the good news is that DCPS has already broached the idea of moving to a competency-based system.

In sum, it’s possible — and essential — to fix DCPS. And it will require a comprehensive theory of change that recognizes the limitations of the current test-obsessed climate, and reimagines the structure and purpose of school.

What do you think?

Sunday Morning Quarterback

Posted on | by Sam

Earlier this week the DC Public Charter School Board released its latest rankings of every charter school operating in the nation’s capital. Some schools earned higher or lower scores than last year — each school is rated either Tier 1, 2 or 3 — but the majority did not change. No surprise there: these things take time, not to mention the fact that our system for evaluating whether a school is high- or low-performing remains imperfect at best.

Still, the report worried me, mostly because of the language charter leaders used to frame their reactions to the rankings. “If your results aren’t good after a fair period of time, you need to lose your right to operate,” said Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, or FOCUS. And Naomi DeVeaux, deputy director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said this: “You can’t tread water and stay a Tier 2 school. Each school has to continue to become better.”

On one level, my response is, “Well, of course.” No school should be allowed to continually provide a subpar learning environment, and every school should be proactively seeking ways to improve. Yet what I hear in the undercurrents of these comments is an expectation that schools achieve quick results, sustain a linear march to excellence, and operate under a no-excuses culture of expectations. And maybe it’s just coincidence because we’re in DC, but when I hear that kind of language from the top, I think of the Washington Redskins. And when I consider all we need to do to improve the city’s schools, I can’t think of a worse organizational model for systemic change and sustained success.

For those that don’t follow it closely, the Redskins are a storied NFL franchise with a long history of success — just not recently. In fact, since current owner Dan Snyder bought the team in 1999, the Redskins have become a perennial cellar dweller and experienced nearly constant change at the top — seven different head coaches over the past thirteen seasons, to be precise.

This is not exactly a recipe for success. Yet Snyder has spent goo gobs of money over that time, and he clearly, desperately, wants to win. So do the players. So why aren’t the Skins winning? And what does any of this have to do with the DC charter school community?

Simply put, what has plagued the Skins is the impatience of Dan Snyder, and the jittery culture he has established. He overpaid for free agents instead of building through the draft. He failed to consider the ways different pieces come together to form a team — that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. And by hiring and firing coaches whenever things didn’t turn around quickly enough, he ensured that his team would never have time to establish a sustainable, long-term road map for success.

By contrast, consider the approach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the NFL’s oldest and most successful franchises. In my 42 years on earth, the Steelers have won six Super Bowls, and played in eight. Along the way, they’ve also had nine losing seasons.  And yet over that entire period, the Pittsburgh Steelers have maintained a consistent organizational identity. They’ve always built through the draft. And in 42 years, while the rest of the sports world lives and dies on each game, they’ve had just three head coaches: Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin.

Which takes us back to the comments of Robert Cane and Naomi DeVaux, and some lessons from the gridiron we would be wise to apply to the classroom as well: Sometimes, successful organizations do tread water. And always, the mark of a great culture is the extent to which it is aligned around core values and principles, and the extent to which its leaders create a culture of security, not anxiety, by their words and actions.

What are the core values and principles that define the shared vision of the DC Public Charter School community? And when it comes to constructing a path for sustained excellence, how can charter leaders be more like the Steelers — and less like the Redskins? There’s no single answer to those questions, but this much seems clear: when it comes to making hiring or firing decisions based solely on a school’s rating (or a team’s record), I can guarantee what legendary Steelers owner Art Rooney would say: that dog just won’t hunt.

(This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

OK, Obama Won. Now What?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on OK, Obama Won. Now What?

It’s official. Barack Hussein Obama has been re-elected.

Now what?

When it comes to public education, let’s start by recognizing that Race to the Top was well-intentioned — and ultimately out of step with a truly transformational vision of where American schooling needs to go. Yes, we need better ways to improve teacher quality and capacity; no, we can’t do it by doubling down on what we currently measure. Yes, we need to find a way to ensure equity across all schools; no, we can’t do it by ignoring the ways in which schools are inequitably funded and resourced. And yes, we need to ensure that every young person is prepared to be successful in life by the time they graduate; and no, we can’t do it by continuing to assume that the endgoal of schooling is a discrete set of content knowledge at the same time the new Industrial Revolution is removing all the barriers from knowledge acquisition — and accelerating the need for an essential set of lifeskills and habits.

The definition of leadership I offered in American Schools is the ability to balance a distant vision (“One day . . .”) and an up-close focus (“Every day . . .”). Great organizations, whether they’re schools or Fortune 100 companies, see, nurture, and respond to both mission and vision in everything they do. That’s the tension. That’s the art. And that’s the way to ensure that we’re not just solving the practical problems on our plate; we’re also working towards the aspirational goals that animate our efforts.

In Obama’s first term, we received a series of education policies that addressed the problems on our plate; and we were driven by a mission to perfect our ability to succeed in an Industrial-era system that no longer serves our interests.

What would a healthy tension between vision and mission look like in an ideal second term when it comes to public education? I’d suggest three things:

1. Vision (“One day, every teacher in America will be a special education teacher.”); Mission (“Every day, every school and teacher preparation program will work to deepen its capacity to prepare teachers for the 21st century classroom and its emphasis on greater personalization and customization.”)

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: every child has special needs, and every child deserves an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). Here’s something else that’s equally obvious: we are responsible for creating the “short-bus” stigma around special education, and we can change it.

Finland is instructive here. By investing deeply in the capacity of its teachers to diagnose and address the individual needs of children, Finland helped ensure that, in effect, every kid ended up in Special Ed. This removed the stigma, so much so that by the time they reach 16, almost every child in Finland will have received some sort of additional learning support. We could do the same. President Obama can’t require traditional and alternative teacher preparation programs from overhauling what they do, but he can certainly put public pressure on them to do so. And individual schools and districts can certainly shape their own professional development calendars with an eye toward that long-term vision, and a step toward the short-term goal of equipping teachers to become more fluent in the full range of student needs.

2. Vision (“One day, every child will be equipped to use his or her mind well and in the service of a more just and harmonious society.”); Mission (“Every day, every school and classroom will identify, and assess, the skills and habits it believes its graduates will need in order to use their minds well and in the service of a more just and harmonious society.”)

As I’ve said before, it’s time for teachers to stop defining themselves as passive victims of the policies of No Child Left Behind. It’s been a decade, and no one has stopped us from identifying — and then piloting — a better, more balanced way to assess student learning and growth.

Actually, that’s not true. The New York Performance Standards Consortium has been doing this for awhile now, and with great results. Individual schools like The Blue School in New York City or Mission Hill School in Boston have been doing it. And forward-thinking districts like Montgomery County in Maryland are exploring ways to do it more.

What are the rest of us waiting for?

The future of learning is one in which content knowledge stops being seen as the end, and starts being understood as the means by which we develop and master essential skills and habits — the real endgoal — that will help us navigate the challenges and opportunities of work, life and global citizenship. This future will require us to do more than merely give lip service to the skills we value; it will demand that we find ways to concretely track and support each child’s path to mastery, while maintaining our awareness and appreciation for the nonlinearity of learning and of human development. And the good news is the art and science of teaching and learning are not mutually exclusive. We can do this. In fact, many of us have already begun.

3. Vision (“One day, it will be universally agreed-upon that education in America is a public good, not a private commodity.”); Mission (“Every day, every policymaker and decision-maker will repeat this vow: whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children.”)

In America, we hold two definitions of freedom in creative tension: the first is the capitalistic definition, in which freedom means choice and consumption; the second is the democratic definition, in which freedom means conscience and compassion.

This will never change; our challenge will always be to manage the tension between the two in ways that serve both. But it’s foolish to unleash choice and consumption in American public education and expect that it will deepen our capacity to exercise conscience and compassion. We can either see education as a private commodity or as a public good. And we must choose.

That doesn’t mean we need to get rid of charter schools or choice; in fact, I’d say it’s undeniable that almost every great school I’ve visited has become great in part because it had greater freedom to chart its own path. But it does mean any investments in school choice need to be proactively made in light of the original vision of charter schools, and that we stop pretending that schools with smaller class sizes, better-trained teachers, and richer learning options are only appealing or viable for the families of the wealthy or the well-located. Simply put, a great learning environmentis challenging, relevant, engaging, supportive, and experiential — no matter who the kids are, and no matter where the community is located.

If I were in charge, those would be my marching orders.

What do you think?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Reimagining Our Schools, NOW

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Reimagining Our Schools, NOW

It’s a presidential election season, which means we can all be sure of two things: conversations about education will take a backseat to more “pressing” issues like the economy and foreign policy, and Congress will once again do nothing to address our desperate need for a new federal education policy.

However, just because our elected officials can’t get the job done doesn’t mean the rest of us are powerless to be the change we wish to see in the world. In fact, local educators could do a lot to sidestep national policymakers by committing to do just three things this coming school year:

1.   Be Visionary – Almost every school in America has a mission statement to guide its short-term decisions. Almost no school in America has a vision statement to guide its long-term aspirations. Is it any wonder that educators feel overwhelmed by the day-to-day responsibilities of their work?

One of the defining characteristics of any transformational organization – whether it’s an elementary school or a Fortune 500 company – is an ability to manage the creative tension between a distant vision and an up-close focus. As educators, that means it’s essential we keep an eye on the daily progress of our students in subjects like reading and math. And it means articulating a long-range goal to which we aspire, and being mindful of which decisions will get us there – and which will take us off course.

As an example, consider Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philadelphia with a mission of “providing a rigorous, college-preparatory curriculum with a focus on science, technology, mathematics and entrepreneurship.” SLA’s mission clarifies the curricular focus of the school, but it tells us little about what shapes its philosophy of learning. For that, you need to consider its vision: to consistently ask and answer three questions – “How do we learn? What can we create? And what does it mean to lead?”

That extra layer of specificity is helpful not just to prospective parents, but also to SLA students, staff and administrators. And while educators are right to feel that the last ten years of federal education policy have narrowed their work to little more than basic-skills literacy and numeracy, there’s nothing preventing schools from taking the time to dream bigger.

2.   Be Specific About What Matters Most – Everyone agrees that in an ideal school, young people acquire the skills and habits to develop not just intellectually, but also socially and emotionally. According to our lawmakers, however, the mark of a successful school is still disproportionately based on reading and math scores. That’s ridiculous – but so are we if we refuse to take the time to explicitly identify which additional skills and habits we want students to practice and acquire.

This sort of work occurs informally in most schools, which hold generalized values for things like character, collaboration and empathy. Sometimes these words may appear on a wall;  other times they may get discussed during an advisory class. But there’s a big difference between implicitly valuing something in a person and explicitly committing to ensure that a person embodies those values.

The good news is that in a lot of schools, this sort of work has already begun. At the Project School in Indiana, educators work every day to nurture three sets of habits in their students: mind, heart and voice. And at the MC2 school in New Hampshire, students are assessed by their ability to master seventeen habits of lifelong learning – habits with specific rubrics and sub-skills that build a clear map for personal growth and evaluation.

Imagine if every school took the time to decide which skills and habits were most important to them, and then went the extra step by deciding how to measure what matters most?

3.   Be Comprehensive – It is both necessary and insufficient to craft a shared vision or identify which skills are most important for a young person’s overall learning and growth. What distinguishes transformational schools from the rest is their commitment to align everything they do – from student assessment to teacher evaluation to parent inclusion – around what they aspire to become.

This is not a code our elected lawmakers are likely to crack anytime soon. So let’s stop waiting. Let’s use the coming school year to take back our profession by raising it to a different standard of clarity and possibility. And let’s start holding ourselves accountable to a vision that actually reflects what we know is required to leave no child behind.

Hey Tom — When it Comes to Ed Reform, China is the Least of Our Worries

Posted on | by Sam

Tom Friedman has a new column about education in today’s New York Times in which he almost makes an important point about the state of K-12 schooling in America, and what we can do to improve it.

The thing Friedman gets right is the easy part — the fact that despite the willingness of American politicians to keep beating the xenophobic drums and lead the chant for everything to be “made in America,” American businesses are already operating in the flat world of globalization and cost efficiency. Consequently, Friedman writes, “the trend is that for more and more jobs, average is over.” In other words, if you aren’t uniquely skilled to succeed in the modern world, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be back looking for work.

Fair enough. But then Friedman shifts to talk about international scores on the PISA test, and America’s consistent mediocrity vis a vis the rest of the world. Then he quotes the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher, who asks us to “imagine, in a few years, [that] you could sign onto a Web site and see this is how my school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world.” According to Schleicher, parents could then “take this information to your local superintendent and ask: ‘Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?’”

I’m sorry, what?

Don’t get me wrong — in the modern world of school choice, parents need more and better ways to compare schools, and the PISA is probably the best test out there for gauging the overall health of a nation’s educational quality (largely because its questions tend to be more open-ended and challenging than the U.S. versions, which are often straight multiple-choice). I’d even bet Schleicher envisions that when American parents learn, say, that Finland has a completely different approach to teacher recruitment and development, they will start demanding that we abandon our crisis response to the teaching shortage (i.e. Teach for America) and devise our own Marshall Plan for teaching.

I’d also love it if that happened. But it never will if our lead vehicle is little more than a web site that helps parents compare America’s PISA scores to China’s.

Why? Because America needs to have another conversation first — the one that actually clarifies what we now know about how people learn.

The good news is . . . we know a lot. More than ever before, we can assemble a picture of the ways our brains respond to and make sense of information. We can help people diagnose their individual strengths and weaknesses. And we can offer models of schooling that previous generations could only dream about — models in which children not only love going to school, but actually acquire relevant skills and understandings about themselves and the world.

The bad news is we aren’t having that conversation, and we aren’t elevating those stories. We talk about “achievement” as though it’s a proxy for “learning,” when in fact it’s a proxy for “3rd and 8th grade reading and math scores.” We propose incentive structures for adults that ignore what we know about how motivation works in human beings. And we propose comparing schools to other ones around the world before we actually understand what a healthy and high-functioning school really looks like — and requires.

What Schleicher envisions is right in spirit: a comparison platform that would empower parents, principals and teachers to demand something better. Until we deepen our collective capacity to imagine something bigger than the world of schooling the rest of us experienced, however, all a platform like that will do is improve our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

This is what student learning looks like

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on This is what student learning looks like

This movie was produced by five-year-olds as a culminating project for a study of butterflies and habitats. It’s worth noting that this happened at a first-year-school that had never done this sort of thing before. Just to underscore that this sort of thing is possible anywhere, as long as the community is committed to letting kids demonstrate what they’ve learned in engaging, creative ways.