Category: Equity

The Age of the Individual is Upon Us

Posted on | by Sam | 12 Comments on The Age of the Individual is Upon Us

One year, early in my teaching career, I got reprimanded for giving too many “A’s.”

“You can’t give everyone the same grade,” I was instructed. “Give a few A’s and F’s, and a lot of B’s and C’s. Otherwise, everyone will know that your class is either too easy or too hard.”

This was unremarkable advice; indeed, it was as close to the educational Gospel as you could find. It was human nature in action.

And, apparently, it was completely wrong.

“We have all come to believe that the average is a reliable index of normality,” writes Todd Rose, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the author of The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness. “We have also come to believe that an individual’s rank on narrow metrics of achievement can be used to judge their talent. These two ideas serve as the organizing principles behind our current system of education.”

And yet, Rose suggests, “when it comes to understanding individuals, the average is most likely to give incorrect and misleading results.”

In fact, the origins of what Rose calls “averagarian thinking” had nothing to do with people; they were adaptations of a core method in astronomy — the Method of Averages, in which you aggregate different measurements of the speed of an object to better determine its true value — that first got applied to the study of people in the early 19th century.

Since then, however, this misguided use of statistics — by definition, the mathematics of “static” values — has reduced the whims and caprices of human behavior to predictable patterns in ways that have proven almost impossible to resist.

Consider the ways it shaped the advice I got as a teacher, which was to let the Bell Curve, not the uniqueness of my students, be my guide. Or consider the ways it has shaped the entire system of American public education in the Industrial Era — an influence best summed up by one of its chief architects, Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose applications of scientific management to the classroom gave birth to everything from bells to age-based cohorts to the industrial efficiency of the typical school lunchroom. “In the past,” Taylor said, “the man was first. In the future, the system must be first.”

Uh, yeah. No.

Of course, anyone who is paying attention knows that the end of the Taylorian line of thinking is upon us — and Rose’s book is but one of the many factors that will expedite its demise. “We are on the brink of a new way of seeing the world,” he predicts, and “a change driven by one big idea: individuality matters.”

In systems thinking, there’s a word for this approach: equifinality — or the idea that in any multidimensional system that involves changes over time, there are always multiple pathways to get from point A to point B. And the good news is that this revolution in thinking is already underway – it’s not just evenly distributed.

The bad news is that most of us have no idea that a revolution is occurring. Instead, we are stuck in the familiar notion that most American schools are failing, that the problems are too big to tackle, and that our slow and steady decline into, well, averagarianism, is inexorable.

I am here to tell you this is not true.

We know more than we think we do.

We are further along than we think we are.

And so, in the coming months – approximately every ten days for the foreseeable future – expect a new story that is about solutions, possibility, and the people and communities whose work is lighting that new path.

The Age of the Individual is upon us.

#thisis180

The Brock Turner Case is a reminder of the important work White people have to do

Posted on | by Sam

Like a lot of you, I’ve been consumed by the Brock Turner case, and its particularly egregious form of privilege-soaked injustice.

Then again, we’re continually bombarded by stories that make it impossible to ignore the extent to which our society perpetuates different rules for different people, based on nothing more than the color of your skin and/or your proximity to power.

This week, it’s a Stanford swimmer who rapes an unconscious woman, yet still evokes sympathy from the judge who worries about the consequences an excessive sentence might have on his future — not how a lenient sentence might exacerbate her pain.

Another week, it’s a Black woman who dies in jail after being pulled over for a trivial offense.

Another week, it’s a young Black man who loses his life simply because someone else decided that he looked “suspicious.”

And so on. And so on.

As a human being, I wonder how we can continue to tolerate the inequity of the world we have created.

But as an educator, I wonder how our schools can become more effective at equipping young people to dismantle the conscious and unconscious ways of seeing the world and one another that hold us prisoner — and allow a rigged system to roll on, unimpeded.

So it was through that lens that I watched a powerful new film about racism, and how to become more proactive in combatting it. The film is called I’m not Racist . . . Am I? It follows a diverse group of twelve NYC high school students through a series of Deconstructing Racism workshops. And it is an urgent, up front exploration of race and privilege and power — and a powerful way to seed similar conversations in schools and communities across the country.

If you’re an educator, I urge you to screen the film at your school, and use it as a foundation for becoming more proactive in the ways in which you help all members of your community understand that racism isn’t just individual meanness — it’s the systematic inequity that comes from disproportionate collective power.

This is why you can’t just say that public education is failing

Posted on | by Sam

I know, I know — we can do better, and public education in America is in need of a makeover. We’re in the midst of the biggest shifts to how we think about teaching and learning in more than a century, and some of us are a little slower on the uptick. I get it.

Here’s the thing, though — amidst the pressing need for change, amidst the horror stories of abject failure, amidst the reports of growing segregation and inequity — there are also stories like this one, about a remarkable school for the sorts of kids who rarely get to be seen and heard. How might we view the challenges and opportunities ahead if we were more collectively focused on these sorts of schools, and what we can learn from them?

The Beautiful Struggle

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on The Beautiful Struggle

I’ve yet to meet a grown-up who, at some point, hasn’t felt a bit like a hamster in the wheel – spinning mindlessly towards some opaque goal, and for some abstract, poorly understood reason.

Life can feel that way sometimes.

So you can imagine my surprise when, while visiting a small public high school in the Excelsior neighborhood of San Francisco, I encountered a group of boys working on an indeterminate project out of plywood and a handsaw.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“We’re building a human-sized hamster wheel,” they replied.

Of course they were.

That’s because they were students at the June Jordan School for Equity (JJSE), where the goal of every adult is to help every young person see the world for what it is – and what it needs to become.

To do that work well, say co-directors Matt Alexander and Jessica Huang, a school must help children make sense of the world they inhabit. “This school was explicitly founded to be a force for social justice,” Huang explained, “and to do so for the kids in our city with the greatest need for it. We’re a college prep school, but our primary concern is not getting kids into college; it’s putting them in a position to have good options, and helping them see the both the oppressive aspects of our society, and the ways to make it better.

“The only way to get off the wheel,” she added, “is to realize you’re on it.”

Since its founding by a group of local parents and families in 2004, JJSE has resided in the same single-story building at the Southern edge of San Francisco, in a neighborhood that doesn’t even make it on to the tourist map.

For Excelsior’s longtime residents, the anonymity has been a good thing. Since its inception in the mid-19th century, Excelsior (which means “ever upward” in Latin) has been a refuge for working class families. Yet as median home prices continue to soar in San Francisco – and space remains finite – Excelsior is starting to gentrify, a development I heard about repeatedly during my time at the school.

“We’ve lost several of our strongest teachers in the past few years because they just couldn’t afford to stay in the city,” said Giulio Sorro, himself a longtime teacher at the school, and, like his colleagues, someone who embodies the best of the profession. “With more middle-class white parents moving in, we’re starting to hear new voices that see our black and brown kids not as assets but as deficits to their own kids. That’s going to change things. It’s already changing things.”

It may seem like the gentrification of a San Francisco neighborhood is a storyline that runs parallel to the lifeblood of a school that is trying to help its students become the first in their families to go to college, but at June Jordan, those sorts of incongruities are in fact the river running through the center of the school’s entire approach to learning.

The first hint of this occurs the moment you arrive, as I did on a recent sunny morning. The school, which shares space with a larger charter school, is surrounded by a ring of trees and greenspaces. Hillsides littered with houses, like favelas, poke up in the distance.

You must enter through a parking lot in the back, which is lined by a procession of graffiti. A particularly striking one near the school’s front doors, in colorful purple and a highly stylized script, quotes Martin Luther King to reinforce the spirit of the place:

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.


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At first blush, the inside of the school feels familiar: wide hallways lined with lockers, low ceilings, and hastily-tacked up posters for next week’s afterschool meeting or upcoming dance. Yet one thing, for a high school at least – let alone a high school serving young people whose lives have been disproportionately clouded by trauma and adversity – feels decidedly unfamiliar: the ubiquity of laughter and levity.

I asked Sorro about that, just before the start of his 9th grade Health class. “We have to redefine education,” he said while his students filed in around us. “What are we here for? Is it to compete with China and India? Is it to get into college? I don’t think it should be about those things.

“I believe good teaching is good teaching anywhere, but there’s a whole other mind-state here. Young people of color, coming from oppressed communities in America, it is set up for these kids not to make it – you can see it.”

In response, June Jordan’s diverse team of founders crafted a mission for the school that was designed to help young people of color “make it” in three key ways: as Community Members who live with respect, integrity, courage and humility; as Social Justice Warriors who stand against oppression and work to create positive change in themselves and their communities; and as Independent Thinkers who possess the intellectual skills they need to succeed.

There are other essential design principles. June Jordan is a small school – just 250 students. Students are assessed not by taking standardized tests, but by presenting detailed portfolios of their work. Teachers teach subjects, but their most important job is to integrate the school’s six habits of mind (perspective, relevance, original research, precision, evidence, and logical reasoning) into the curriculum. Every student has a personal advisor for all four years. And every member of the community – from students to parents to staff – has a meaningful, accountable voice that shapes the overall health and wellbeing of the school.

“Too often,” explained Mr. Alexander, who, like Ms. Huang, was a teacher at the school before becoming its co-director, “everyone in schools is driven by the spirit of compliance, or the idea that there is someone external to the school who needs to come in and turn it around. It’s the mindset of your job being to fix something, or to do something to people instead of building capacity or doing the work with people.

“But if you really believe in democracy,” he continued, “and you really believe that everyone has equal dignity and worth, then you have to build everyone’s capacity and let everyone be their best selves. The accountability has to go that way, too – our primary accountability is to one another, not to the state or to test scores. Our main job is to build that capacity and to recognize that everyone comes with strengths and abilities. But you have to create the space for people to develop that – and it’s really hard.”

I asked Alexander and Huang how the school went about doing that.

They talked about schema theory.

“We know from the research,” Huang began, “that your brain builds schemas, or organized patterns of thinking, in order to understand your environment. We’re hard-wired to look for patterns; it’s what kept us alive thousands of years ago. So everyone is doing this, all the time, and when it comes to education, we have an eerily consistent set of schemas we have all called on for generations. So the bulk of what we do is construct a new counter-narrative that helps kids see the invisible layer of schema that has held us all unnaturally in place for so long – from institutionalized racism, to inherited feelings about what a math class can and cannot be, to internalized notions of inferiority. This helps them start to figure out how to disrupt those patterns, and imagine a different set of possibilities.”

To make this more actionable, the school has developed a pedagogy that encodes what teachers like Sorro are setting out to do. Indeed, over years of work retreats, trial and error, and sustained, challenging, collegial revisions, June Jordan’s faculty and staff have articulated an approach that is, in their words, “expressly designed to help our students understand the forces of marginalization they have experienced growing up, and begin the process of freeing themselves from oppression, especially the internalized oppression which we see preventing so many students from meeting their potential.”

The physical manifestations of this are ubiquitous at the school – from a clear set of preferred teacher behaviors to the classrooms themselves, which feel like bursts of color and texture and collage, and in which probing academic and personal work is always in some vital stage of unfolding.

In one class, for example, students were using the facts from a real case to play out a scenario about sexual harassment and the creation of a hostile work environment. In another, a group was strategizing how best to show their support for students at another school that had recently experienced a widely publicized racist incident. And in Sorro’s classroom, each person was asked to briefly share one thing they did over Spring Break that had benefitted their health – and one thing that hadn’t.

“I went to Pismo Beach to drive ATVs,” said one young man, innocently enough.

“And why was that good for your health?” Sorro asked.

The answer he received was a reminder that part of the reason the school culture feels so light is because the burdens their students carry feel so heavy. “I have a lot of anxiety,” he explained, “and I have a real rage in me; sometimes going really fast is the only thing that can make me feel better.”

Later, after several other intense and highly personal recollections from the previous week, Sorro asked the group, “Is it always good spending time with family?”

“Family can be poison sometimes,” said one student. Sorro nodded calmly. Throughout the class, his demeanor stayed constant; he did not over-react to the highly charged stories, or under-react to the quotidian ones. “In my teaching I try to go to the depth and the heart of it all,” he explained. “You have to put it all out there. I believe in going to the pain – and to the love.”

That duality – the intellectual and the emotional, the pain and the love, the heavy and the light – is what makes June Jordan such a different place to go to school.

“We try to create space for real collegial accountability,” Huang explained towards the end of the day. “We have real honest conversations here about the things that matter to us. But that’s taken years to build – years to build.

“What it means now is that if you have an idea, you understand that it’s your land to work here. That’s an Emiliano Zapata line: ‘The land belongs to those who work it.’ No one is going to do it for you.”

I reflected on her words as I walked the hallways of the school, which were blanketed by quotes, murals, and personal reflections.

Written across an upraised fist above a doorway were the words of Shirley Chisholm: “You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”

Down another hallway, just past a mural honoring two former students who were shot to death, I saw a sign telling me: “Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives.”

And then, just outside a classroom, I found the JJSE Secrets Wall, where all members of the community were invited to anonymously post a secret (no matter how silly or somber) – and, in so doing, perhaps feel less burdened by its weight.

I don’t like myself.

I smoke weed.

I tried to kill myself.

Depression rules my life.

I feel like my parents won’t be proud of me when I’m older.

I can’t live without my Playstation!

I grew up around drugs, police, and losing family.

It felt jarring to see such naked admissions posted so publicly, and in such an otherwise-traditional looking place. But that is precisely what makes the June Jordan School for Equity so special. Spend time here, and you will feel the dialectical pull of the world as it is, awash in both beauty and heartbreak; and the world as it ought to be – empathetic and equitable, devoid of the mindless churn of the human-sized hamster wheel, and reoriented around a different sort of body in motion: the wheel of democracy, which, though it grinds slowly, propels us steadily toward justice, and the society we seek.

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For America’s Schools, Is This the Beginning of the End of Average?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on For America’s Schools, Is This the Beginning of the End of Average?

One year, early in my teaching career, I got reprimanded for giving too many “A’s.”

“You can’t give everyone the same grade,” I was instructed. “Give a few A’s and F’s, and a lot of B’s and C’s. Otherwise, everyone will know that your class is either too easy or too hard.”

This was unremarkable advice; indeed, it was as close to the educational Gospel as you could find. It was human nature in action.

And, according to a new book, it was completely wrong.

“We have all come to believe that the average is a reliable index of normality,” writes Todd Rose, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the author of The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness. “We have also come to believe that an individual’s rank on narrow metrics of achievement can be used to judge their talent. These two ideas serve as the organizing principles behind our current system of education.”

And yet, Rose suggests, “when it comes to understanding individuals, the average is most likely to give incorrect and misleading results.”

In fact, the origins of what Rose calls “averagarian thinking” had nothing to do with people; they were adaptations of a core method in astronomy – the Method of Averages, in which you aggregate different measurements of the speed of an object to better determine its true value – that first got applied to the study of people in the early 19th century.

Since then, however, this misguided use of statistics – by definition, the mathematics of “static” values – has reduced the whims and caprices of human behavior to predictable patterns in ways that have proven almost impossible to resist.

Consider the ways it shaped the advice I got as a teacher, which was to let the Bell Curve, not the uniqueness of my students, be my guide. Or consider the ways it has shaped the entire system of American public education in the Industrial Era – an influence best summed up by one of its chief architects, Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose applications of scientific management to the classroom gave birth to everything from bells to age-based cohorts to the industrial efficiency of the typical school lunchroom. “In the past,” Taylor said, “the man was first. In the future, the system must be first.”

Uh, yeah. No.

Of course, anyone who is paying attention knows that the end of the Taylorian line of thinking is upon us – and Rose’s book might be a way to expedite its demise. “We are on the brink of a new way of seeing the world,” Rose predicts, and “a change driven by one big idea: individuality matters.”

In systems thinking, there’s a word for this approach: equifinality – or the idea that in any multidimensional system that involves changes over time, there are always multiple pathways to get from point A to point B.

But if that’s true – and The End of Average paints a very compelling picture that it is – what are the implications for our public schools?

To seek two variations of the myriad ways we could answer that question, I visited two very different schools – one, a neighborhood elementary school in suburban Maryland, and the other, an urban charter school in Washington, D.C. – to see what the principle of equifinality, and the mission of uncovering the uniqueness of every child, actually looks like in action.

Ducketts Lane Elementary School: A Strengths-Based School

Ducketts Lane is a big, brand-new K-5 elementary school in Howard County, Maryland – about an hour outside of D.C. The school, whose 800 students reflect the diversity of the surrounding community, with significant amounts of Black, White, Asian and Latino students, opened just three years ago in response to rising enrollment in the district. And as principal Heidi Balter explains, it, “the fact that we all started the school together and built it together has made a big difference in the culture you’ll find here. And the core of that culture flows from our decision to see one another through our strengths.”

What Balter means is the school’s decision to utilize the Gallup Strengths Finder tool, an evaluative instrument that has been used by more than 12 million people, and which is finding a growing audience among the nation’s public schools. Similar to the more widely known Myers-Briggs tool, respondents answer a series of questions, which then reveal one’s top five strengths (there are 34 in total).

At Ducketts Lane, the process of placing strengths at the center has been a slow and deliberate process across the school’s first three years of existence. “Year one was about ensuring that every faculty member knew their strengths,” she explained to me amid the din of several hundred schoolchildren. “Year two was about making sure that all of the adults were familiar with their colleagues’ strengths. And this year has been about extending that awareness to the students – specifically, to the 4th and 5th graders.”

The school’s emphasis on strengths is impossible to miss; its imprint is ubiquitous, from the sign I saw in the front door as I entered (“Kindness is caring – show your caring strength”) to the conversations I had with adults and children alike, almost all of which began with people sharing their “top fives.”

For Balter, a thirty-year veteran with wavy blond hair and the cheerful, focused air of an elementary school principal, that common language has been revelatory to the way she approaches her work.

“One thing I hadn’t thought about before in my career was focusing on strengths, not weaknesses. This is the piece that’s different. But what we’ve found is it helps you understand why someone is doing what they’re doing. Our teachers have started to see that student behavior that in the past would have been described as combative or disruptive is usually just something a child is doing because it’s what the learner in them needs. So we feel like we’re starting to get the language we need to identify the positives in kids, and to help them see what makes them uniquely special. And that’s helped us all see qualities in our kids that we might have missed before.”

Derek Anderson, Balter’s Assistant Principal, agrees. “Before we started using this assessment, we all had our habits and preferences – but this gave us a language to talk about the ways in which we were all different. As an educator, we’re used to asking what we can do better. But now, we’re talking about what’s going well and what people do well.”

To be sure, that doesn’t mean everything at Ducketts Lane looks and feels different from the classrooms of our youth. In fact, much of the school feels joyfully traditional. Kids aren’t doing asynchronous learning on computers, or self-directing their own time; they’re still in English or Art or History class (in age-based cohorts), and they still have bells and passing periods and grades. Yet it’s clear that the school’s emphasis on identifying each student’s strengths can only lead in one direction: the days for all those averagarian features are numbered. And it’s clear that, even at this early stage, the school is giving its students something precious. As one 5th grader put it – a sweet, self-possessed girl named Izetta – “I feel like I’m understanding myself more now, and that feels good.”

Two Rivers Public Charter School: Building a Culture of Metacognition

In the crowded landscape of public charter schools in the nation’s capital, Two Rivers finds itself at the top of the list; last year, its waiting list for preschool ran 400 deep, and its traditional metrics (i.e., test scores) all trend upward. Like Ducketts Lane, it is also highly diverse. But whereas Ducketts Lane was founded to deal with overflow district enrollment, Two Rivers was founded by parents who wished to create something they hadn’t seen elsewhere in the nascent DC educational marketplace.

I remember one of our first meetings,” said Jessica Wodatch, the school’s principal and one of those founding parents. “There were a bunch of us in this crowded townhouse, trying to imagine the school we wanted to create and what it should say about learning. And the things we talked about fell into four buckets are still at the core of what we do today:

  1.     Learning must be joyful, hands-on, and relevant to life;
  2.     Kids must become good people;
  3.     The school must be welcoming to all; and
  4.     The education must be well-rounded.

Today, Two Rivers is at capacity – over 500 kids – and its classrooms feature children with a wide range of skills. Typically, this has led educators to apply a “method of averages” approach and teach to the middle. But at Two Rivers, it has led the leadership team to think more innovatively about staff development, and about what it will take to ensure that all kids – not just the ones who come to school most ready to learn – get to participate in all aspects of the learning experience, and not just remediation.

“What is core for us is that we’re a community that comes together around rich and exciting problems in search of common solutions,” said Wodatch. “That is the essence of what we are about. But that means we have to think differently about how we assess student learning, and how we prepare teachers to create classrooms that are able to meet each child’s individual needs.”

The way Two Rivers has done that is through a detailed deconstruction of the essential skills they want young people to develop – critical thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, character and communication – and a detailed evaluative rubric that describes what each of those skills look like in action. “This approach requires us to be thinking about learning in its totality,” Wodatch explained. “That means we choose instructional foci that connects with our assessment priorities. And since we have to really invest in our own staff development, it means we spend a lot of time focusing on student work together, and looking at our instructional moves.”

I saw this on display recently, at a staff development day in which teachers from different teams met up to share and respond to examples of student work from their classes. Two 4th-grade teachers, Ben Johnson and Anya Rosenberg, shared examples from a class project to clean up the Anacostia River, while 2nd-grade teacher Jessica Hall wanted feedback on some student essays about the trailblazing African-American female pilot Bessie Coleman.

The depth of their feedback for one another, and the extent to which each teacher was willing to open themselves up for a detailed examination of their own individual decisions (and hidden biases), was evident throughout the 90-minute session.

“I wonder how we can help kids get better at discriminating between what’s good to cite from the text and what’s not,” offered Johnson.

“I notice how well you’ve scaffolded this assignment,” Rosenberg told Hall. “But I’m also realizing how this conversation has opened up a can of worms for me. We spend so much time thinking about complexity, and about how to help kids become more complex thinkers. But now I’m realizing that what matters more is examining the worth of the assignment. How can we start to gear our tasks in ways that connect more deeply to the worth of the material, and to the deeper epiphanies we want them to have?”

Creating space for those types of adult epiphanies, which are happening in service of the needs of kids, is precisely the point of work like this. “We’re so used to boiling everything down to the aggregate or to trends or to quantifiable numbers,” Johnson said afterwards. “But these sorts of exercises are reminders of how important qualitative data is, and how much we need to understand not just each individual child, but also our own individual habits and assumptions – the sorts of things we might not be able to see without the help of our colleagues.

“To be a great teacher, you have to be vulnerable with your practice. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

The Beginning of the End of Average?

What schools like Ducketts Lane and Two Rivers show, I think, are the ways in which the principle of equifinality is already at work in more communities than you might imagine.

And that, too, is the point. The goal doesn’t need to be to make all schools use evaluative rubrics or the StrengthsFinder tool; the goal is to ensure that all schools find ways to uncover each student’s strengths, challenges, passions, and abilities while remembering that there are myriad ways to do so – and that all roads to transformation must pass through adult minds and bodies first.

“So much of being successful,” said Wodatch, “is being innovative within the constraints of the current system so we can impact the lives of these kids. We’re doing that now, as are lots of other schools. But if we could make more of those constraints go away – if we could stop sorting kids by the Bell Curve, and instead set each kid on their own individual “J-curve” trajectory – I think you’d see the beginning of something truly transformative for kids.”

One of my favorite educators, Ron Berger, has been saying this for a long time. “To build a new culture, a new ethic,” he writes in his book An Ethic of Excellence, “you need a focal point – a vision – to guide the direction for reform. The particular spark I try to share as a catalyst is a passion for beautiful student work and developing conditions that can make this work possible.

“Work of excellence is transformational,” he writes. “Once a student sees that he or she is capable of excellence, that student is never quite the same. We can’t first build the students’ self-esteem and then focus on their work. It is through their own work that their self-esteem will grow.

“If schools assumed they were going to be assessed by the quality of student behavior and work evident in the hallways and classrooms – rather than on test scores – the enormous energy poured into test preparation would be directed instead toward improving student work, understanding, and behavior.”

And so,” Berger and a growing number of educators have concluded, “instead of working to build clever test-takers, schools would feel compelled to spend time building thoughtful students and good citizens.”

Imagine that.

The age of the Individual is upon us.

(This article also appeared in Medium.)

Discipline in schools moves toward peacemaking

Posted on | by Sam

The first time he got in trouble, 7-year-old “Z” kicked his teacher — getting him into more trouble.

A few months later, shortly after his grandfather passed away, he kicked his teacher again.

In many schools across the country, where zero tolerance policies allow little wiggle room for understanding why a child may be misbehaving, Z would have been suspended, expelled, or even arrested.

That was how Z’s school district in Broward County, Florida, had operated for years — enforcing zero tolerance policies, and arresting or suspending children (most of them students of color, and often students as young as Z) at a higher rate than any other school district in the state.

On one level, of course, a zero tolerance policy makes sense. After all, schools can’t be safe places if students are allowed to kick their teachers. Order must be maintained. What could be clearer than saying that misbehavior will not be tolerated?

But on another level, every child is different, and students need the right kind of support if they are to be able to learn and grow. Different kids bring different sorts of issues with them to school, and punishment is rarely the best way to help a child who is most in need of love and support.

Classroom or Courtroom

Punishing children harshly does nothing for their ability to succeed academically, and statistics show that it contributes to the achievement gap. Suspended students spend less time in class, which correlates to lower test scores and grades and increased apathy and dropout rates.

Instead of being suspended, Z was placed in a Behavior Change Program the district had organized, where trained professionals teach children how to deal with their emotions and make better choices. His mother is relieved; Z still has a chance to be whatever he wants to be in the future, she says.

That distinction — keeping kids in the classroom, and out of the courtroom — is what Broward County superintendent Robert Runcie and a growing number of school leaders across the country are saying can make the difference in putting a child like Z on a path to success, instead of a path to prison.

This is a major challenge for American schools today — changing the way adults respond to student conduct, particularly with students of color. Consider this: Today, American public schools suspend roughly 3½ million kids a year — more than twice the rate in the 1970s — and we refer a quarter of a million children to the police for arrest.

Every year.

Worse still, educators suspend black students at more than double the rate for white students — even though statistics show that a student who is suspended or expelled is three times as likely to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year.

“When adolescents experience injustice in any context,” explains UCLA professor Phillip Goff, “they end up committing crime at much higher rates later in life regardless of how likely they were to be involved in crime to begin with. That is a sobering statistic. It means we can now show that injustice causes crime.

“When you expose young people to injustice, they lose hope that playing within the rules and working hard is going to pay off. They start to believe more and more that we live in a world where the goal is simply to get by and get over — and when you are teaching that implicitly, you shouldn’t be surprised that discipline becomes a problem.”

Restorative Justice

The good news is that more schools are heeding the advice of experts like Goff, and adopting restorative justice programs — alternative approaches to discipline in schools.

Restorative justice programs provide a way to repair the harm that occurs between people when conflicts arise. What they’re showing is that when victims, offenders and community members meet to decide how to do that, and do it well, the results can be transformational.

This is happening in Oakland, California. The city’s school district is nearly 75 percent nonwhite and 75 percent of student’s meet the requirements for the free lunch program and has experienced extensive discipline and violence issues. In 2012, however, it expanded its adoption of restorative justice work, and has seen change for the better.

It works like this: instead of suspending or expelling students who misbehave, schools with restorative justice programs bring kids together under skilled facilitation by a trained adult — and, often, fellow students — in order to resolve their conflicts peacefully, and build a stronger community in the process.

Howard Zehr, a distinguished professor at Eastern Mennonite University who is regarded as the “grandfather of restorative justice,” puts it this way: Typically, the questions our traditional systems try to address are: What rules or laws were broken? Who broke them? And what do they deserve?

By contrast, restorative justice (RJ) asks a different set of questions: Who has been hurt? What are their needs? And who has the obligation to address those needs and remedy the harm that has been done?

Positive Outcomes of Mediating Peacefully

Students are now asking for a circle, says one Oakland school staffer. “Instead of throwing a punch, they’re backing off and asking to mediate (conflicts) peacefully with words. And that’s a great thing.”

Better yet, it’s working. According to a September 2014 report that the district submitted to the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education:

• More than 88 percent of the teachers reported that restorative practices were very or somewhat helpful in managing difficult student behaviors in classroom.
• More than 47 percent reported that RJ helped reduce office referrals, and 53 percent said it helped reduce disciplinary referrals for African American students.
• Suspensions have declined significantly — and most significantly for African American students suspended for disruption and/or willful defiance, a decrease of 40 percent.

Knowing this, here are a few good questions to ask the leaders at your child’s school:

• “What is your approach to discipline? Do you have a zero tolerance policy here?” (And, if they do, are they willing to consider exploring a shift to a restorative justice program?)
• “What are the disciplinary statistics of the school?” “How often do you suspend students?” “How often are kids behaving violently?”
• “How are you helping students develop the skills they need to manage their emotions and make better choices in their interactions with other people?”
• “In what ways are the teachers here being trained to become more sensitive to the different cultural needs of their students?”

In sum, the key to a safe and healthy school climate has less to do with the children — and more to do with the adults. The approach school administrators, teachers, and other adults take to discipline in schools can make all the difference. As Broward County superintendent Robert Runcie puts it, “It isn’t about improving student conduct, as much as it is about changing the way adults respond to student conduct.”

(This article originally appeared on GreatSchools.org)

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.

This is what every student could look like (and be)

Posted on | by Sam

Here’s the thing about me: I love schools. And I’m in them all the time. Lots of them, all over the country. So it’s safe to say that I am as aware as just about anyone what is out there when it comes to American educational options.

And yet here’s the other thing: I’m constantly hearing about new places doing great work — new to me, at least, because the folks there have been doing their thing for a long time — and whose approach to learning is precisely the sort of thing we should be hearing a lot more about.

The latest entry in that category? The June Jordan School for Equity, a remarkable public school in San Francisco.

See for yourself, by watching these three short profiles of three recent JJSE students.

And here’s the final thing to consider: schools like JJSE are filled with amazing young people like Lupe, Henry, and Sintia. So when you hear about the declining state of American education, just remember this:

The future of learning is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.

Lupe Carreno

Henry Eik

Sintia Henriquez

 

Across the Country, a New Type of Partnership Between Charters and Districts Emerges  

Posted on | by Sam

Increasingly, I’m hearing a question that drives me crazy: “Are you for or against charter schools?”

There can only be one legitimate answer to that question: It depends.

Are you speaking of the situation in Michigan, in which four out of five charter school operators are for-profit entities? Or the overall tendency for charters to be even more segregated than their public school neighbors? Or the reluctance by some charter leaders to hold themselves to the same standards of transparency and openness as traditional public schools?

If so, thumbs down.

But if you’re talking about places like Baltimore, where all charter school teachers are unionized (and the charters themselves are almost all locally conceived and teacher-led), or if you’re pointing to the growing movement among some charters to intentionally enroll and serve integrated student bodies – by way of the National Coalition of Diverse Charter Schools – the picture takes a very different shape.

And then there’s what’s happening with Summit Basecamp – a new sort of partnership between charters and traditional public schools that may very well offer the best evidence so far of what Al Shanker first called for back in 1988, when he imagined a new kind of school in which teachers could experiment with different ways of reaching students, and then inject that wisdom back throughout the public school system.

That’s what Diane Tavenner has done at Summit Public Schools, a successful network of charter schools in California and Washington that represent the bleeding edge of innovative approaches to personalized learning.

Unlike other models – I’m looking at you, Rocketship – whose efforts to leverage technology seem to be more concerned with creating magic in the balance sheet than in the classroom – Summit Schools have created scores of “playlists” that let students navigate their own pace and path through content knowledge, in order to free up more time for project-based learning, mentoring, and community-based work.

As a result, Summit Schools are besieged with visitors from around the world, all of them eager to see how technology can be used in ways that augment, not replace, the foundational social and emotional bonds between teachers and students.

And yet, as exciting as the attention has been, Tavenner felt it wasn’t going to allow her to fulfill her school’s overarching mission, so she sought out a transformative partnership with Facebook, whose engineers have helped her perfect the digital learning platform that allows Summit’s personalized learning system to function. And then she made that platform available for free, open source, to anyone who thought it would be useful to them.

You read that right. She perfected a product that could be worth millions – perhaps even billions – of dollars. And then she gave it away.

Still, Tavenner and her team realized that merely making the tool open source wasn’t optimal educationally. Surely, there must be schools and communities out there who would benefit from integrating the platform into their schools as a cohort, and continually learning from one another about how to get better at shifting to a different way of thinking about school – one that requires the kids, not their teachers, to be the hardest workers in the room.

From that idea, the Summit Basecamp project was born – a nascent, growing network of nineteen schools (across ten states) who are working to adapt Summit’s Personalized Learning Platform, or PLP, to their own needs and norms.

Two of those schools are located near where I live in Washington, D.C., so I set out to visit both of them – Truesdell Education Campus and Columbia Heights Educational Campus, or CHEC – and see what all the fuss was about.

What I wondered was this: Is it possible that a charter school 3,000 miles away can exert a positive influence on the growth of a neighborhood school just a short walk from my home? Or is the reality of this transcontinental game of Telephone such that most of what makes a school special will get lost in translation somewhere along the way?

***

Truesdell and CHEC offer good test cases for the Basecamp idea, albeit for different reasons.

CHEC is located on a busy corner of one of D.C’s most racially and socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods. Its students, who are overwhelmingly poor, Black and Brown, mulled about in their school uniforms the morning I visited, awaiting the start of the school day, while white-collar professionals passed hurriedly by on their way to the nearby subway.

When you enter the building, you must first pass through metal detectors that are staffed by a uniformed school resource officer. The halls of the school are wide and deep, evoking memories of an archetypal American public school. And while the 6th and 7th graders can still expect a rather traditional school day here – 65-minute classes, one after the other, divided by subject – for the 8th graders, Basecamp has meant the beginning of a very different school experience.

The day begins with individual goal setting – each student must establish daily and weekly learning goals, as well as a long-term aspirational goal (i.e., “to be the first in my family to go to college”) to which their daily decisions are pegged. It includes consistent time with an adult mentor. And it is anchored by personal learning time during which students must self-direct themselves through a series of content-specific playlists; and by group project time, during which kids and teachers can directly engage in more hands-on work together.

“The key,” Tukeva explained to me as we wandered CHEC’s cavernous halls, “is to target the kids who are not ‘buying what we’re selling’ in the old model. We have a lot of kids who are already thriving, but we also have a lot of kids who need different ways to get them engaged.

“Overall, this project represents a pretty intense jump for us. Before we signed up for Basecamp, we weren’t a 1-to-1 school; now, every student has his or her own computer. That’s a big jump. Before Basecamp, we didn’t have an integrated digital platform, so that’s a really big jump, too. We’d also never allocated time before for a mentor to work with each student intensively. So all of these steps are making our approach to personalized teaching and learning more comprehensive – it’s taking the different pieces we’d been working on and making them all more integrated.”

It’s true – it’s a big jump – and yet CHEC has also been piloting new approaches to teaching and learning for years. Consequently, it had already established an internal culture of experimentation. “We’ve been piloting different things for a while now,” she added, “so this doesn’t feel as foreign as it might in a different school. Our entire 8th grade team went out to Summit together this summer, where they worked as a team for two weeks. And so far, our kids are really liking both the technology and the increased levels of freedom.”

In that sense, early returns suggest that for a school like CHEC, which was already well on its way to becoming more student-centered and tech-savvy, a project like Basecamp is an effective accelerator. “We’ve had some small technological glitches,” she added, “and we have a much more bilingual population than Summit, so we have dual language needs they don’t which has forced us to do a lot of translating. But mostly it’s enabled us to go farther faster, because we can take everything that Summit has already done – from their playlists to their insights about how best to use the PLP – and modify it to our own purposes.”

By contrast, at Truesdell, Basecamp provided the impetus to start from scratch. “We’ve had crazy turnover here,” said Adam Zimmerman, a former classroom teacher at Truesdell and the school’s first-ever Director of Operations, Culture & Innovation. “But there’s a group of us that all arrived together about four years ago and feel some real continuity with one another and a desire to build something together. We’re all trying to find ways to keep growing as professionals. We also knew that if we just kept doing what we’d been doing, we weren’t ever going to effectively reach every kid. So we said, let’s bring in something that’s exciting that we can all get behind as a team. Basecamp is a retention tool for our teachers as much as a new learning strategy for our kids.”

I saw evidence of Truesdell’s upstart energy everywhere. One class I visited had been looking at injustice in the U.S. After spending a few weeks exploring topics together – police brutality, wealth inequality, etc. – they were able to choose their own for a culminating project. And as their teacher, Leah Myers, explained to me, “They’re allowed to decide if they want to work alone or in groups. The project is a public awareness campaign – either on social media, or in the local community – which they’re going to have to track the success of and then present a civic action project based on their findings.”

I asked Adam what was most exciting and most challenging about this new way of thinking about school – whereas, for example, organizing student projects had happened at Truesdell before, providing intense mentoring and unleashing kids to be the lead drivers of their own content acquisition had not. “It’s a new set of muscles we’re all trying to develop,” he explained. “Many of the teachers you’re seeing here were rated ‘Highly Effective’ before we ever brought Basecamp into the picture. That’s an important title to have in D.C. So how do you get teachers working towards something totally new and not merely reverting to what has worked best in the past whenever it gets challenging? We’re still figuring that part out.”

To be sure, both campuses still have plenty to figure out. Giving kids more freedom and authority over their own learning sounds great; but if what you’re giving them authority over is still not that interesting to them, there are limits. In one class, for example, I spoke to a group of students who were working on a project around percentages and figuring out how much a product might have been marked up.

“So you guys are using these rubrics all the time now to evaluate yourselves, huh?” I asked them.

“Yeah.”

“Is it better than what you did before, or worse, or do you not really care?”

“We don’t care,” they replied flatly.

Fair enough.

Yet for every exchange like that, there were ones like the kind I had with Diana, Leslie and Dania, three eighth graders who had decided to work together on a campaign about xenophobia.

I asked them what they thought about the new approach to learning. “It’s our choice now if we want to work together or alone,” Diana offered, a slight smile of embarrassment breaking across her face as she spoke. “It doesn’t really feel the same because last year we were used to having the teacher stand up and teach us but now we have this new program so we’re using the computer a lot. It’s hard, but I get to do it at my own pace so I can learn it more better and if I don’t understand it I can go over it again and I don’t get frustrated if other people are ahead of or behind me.”

Leslie nodded her head in agreement. “It just changes the way we interact with the teacher,” she explained in halting English. “Now she don’t stands up there teaching the whole class about migration. Now everybody’s doing different things and so she walks around answering questions. It’s given us more freedom. When a teacher stands up there she sometimes moves too fast and we’re behind. But now we can go at our own pace.”

Before I left, I spoke to another student – a young man named Kyree – who Zimmerman said embodied the potential of what schools like Summit, CHEC and Truesdell were trying to bring about. Kyree had been a Truesdell student, and then left – the result of instability at home – only to return after a rocky, violent tenure at another school. He spoke with a slow deliberateness, his eyes focused both squarely on me and on a distant horizon in which he was actively imagining the possibilities of his own future.

“I have a strain to be perfect at everything I do,” he began, “but sometimes it doesn’t actually come out to be what I want it to be. So I just strive to do more than usual, and do better the next time.

“I like this school better than my last one. At my old school, there wasn’t much learning or motivation to learn. But this school helps me learn faster than usual – I can go beyond the class or if I need to catch up I can catch up. I like that. You can find your own pace. But mostly I like hand work and there’s a lot more of that now.”

I love the way Kyree described what he liked – that there was more “hand work.” And we wonder why so many kids are so bored in school!

Because I get to visit schools all the time, I know how many Kyrees there are out there – young people with heavy burdens, great potential and a set of needs that have not been well met by the traditional classroom approach. I also know how many schools there are that are taking positive steps to support and inspire them more. So while it’s early, and the future is still a little murky, projects like Basecamp suggest to me what’s possible in the future of public education – and what type of standard we should establish for the charter sector.

As Summit founder Diane Tavenner has said, schools like hers – and projects like these – are “fueled by a deep dissatisfaction with the status of even our best schools, but also an extraordinary optimism that we can and will change them. We know that students are capable of so much, and so are our schools.

“Despite our hard work, we are far from realizing our full aspirations: classrooms, schools and systems where every student is joyfully realizing his or her potential. But we are optimistic that there has never been a better moment to harness this potential. We know more than we ever have about how people learn, what motivates them, and what drives success and satisfaction in life and work. We have access to technology that can help students and educators create and pursue knowledge more effectively than ever before, technology that can even bring communities together. And we are beginning to see glimpses of what’s possible when schools embrace the challenge of entirely redesigning the way they meet students’ needs and interests.”

(This article also appeared in Medium.)

As Fifty States Reimagine Education Policy, Four Are Ready to Offer Guidance

Posted on | by Sam

What makes a mind come alive?

How can one community impact every child?

What do schools need to be changing from, and to?

And how can states set the conditions for lasting change?

In theory, these questions have always mattered. In reality, they are about to matter a lot more now that the United States Congress is poised to reauthorize its central education policy for the first time in thirteen years – and usher in an era of state authority on everything from school accountability to teacher education policies.

Now that the balance of power is shifting back towards the states, what should they do with it?

That’s the riddle of the moment – and it’s one the Innovation Lab Network (ILN) has been trying to solve for years.

A network of states that work collaboratively to transform their respective school systems, the ILN includes several members that are fostering meaningful, systems-level changes in their states. And now the ILN is ready to share some of the insights of that work – by way of four short films and a website of related resources – in the hope that other states will parlay their newfound autonomy into decisions that can lead to, as the ILN puts it, the “Next State of Learning.”

In New Hampshire, for example, state officials have done away with the Carnegie Unit – the form of credit which, beginning in 1909, made time, not learning, the key metric by which high schools nationwide would measure student performance. In its place they’ve established a core set of competencies that all graduates need to develop in order to graduate – and they’ve allowed students to demonstrate mastery of those competencies in a number of ways: via a school course, an internship, or a course of independent study. In addition, eight districts are experimenting with a way to assess student learning that relies less on standardized tests, and more on locally developed performance tasks.

According to Ellen Hume-Howard, a longtime educator in the state and the Curriculum Director for the Sanborn School District, what’s driving all of these state-level changes is an observation that many would find self-evident: “One of the things that has been really fascinating for me around what’s happening in New Hampshire is that so much of it is what classrooms teachers have thought we should have been doing for quite a long time. It’s really driven by common sense: If we’re serious about putting students at the center of what we do, then we need to change a lot of the things that have been in existence for a long time. There are simply a lot of practices that no longer fit.”

They’ve reached the same conclusion in Maine, where legislators have stipulated that by 2017, all graduates will be assessed by specific, demonstrable skills– not time-based determinants of credit. For educators like Derek Pierce, the principal of Casco Bay High School in Portland, that has made all the difference. “Schools are getting better at breaking down the walls and recognizing that the world is where we need to do our learning,” he said. “In Portland we’re super fortunate to have a lot of support from our local school board and our district, and even the state in the kinds of practices that we’re doing.

“We’re not fighting against the tide to support kids to have a more personalized path to reaching their goals.  The state of Maine supports proficiency-based work, and it’s helped to have legislation that supports our values – it strengthens our standing in the community to know that we’re not just making this stuff up.”

In Colorado, there are examples like the St. Vrain School District, which decided several years ago to remake its entire feeder system into one that could provide high-quality STEM training to its students – the majority of who are low-income and Latino. When they decided that training needed to continue after graduation – by way of a program called P-TECH that lets graduates complete a two-year associate’s degree for free – they approached their legislators for help.

It sounds strange – educators approaching their legislators for help. But according to Gretchen Morgan, the Colorado Department of Education’s Interim Associate Commissioner of Innovation, Choice, & Engagement (and a former teacher and school principal), that’s the sort of arrangement more states should be preparing to follow. “I think our role at the department isn’t necessarily to seek specific legislation. But we are in a unique position to know who’s doing things in different parts of the state. And so, being able to bring them together so they can learn and build momentum is our role; it’s to help facilitate those conversations.

“What happened in St. Vrain is a good example,” Morgan continued. “There was a district doing some really good work around STEM. They had found some great partners to work with. And they wanted to have P-TECH legislation passed that could enable them to partner in stronger ways and set up a high school with some very specific characteristics. Because we knew they were working on that, we tried to put them in places to talk with other people who had similar interests. And now we have a pathway for those kids that can extend beyond their high school graduations.”

And then there’s Wisconsin, a state whose highly partisan political climate makes the passage of legislation particularly challenging. How, then, have they been able to establish themselves as a leader in the push to make learning more personalized for every student?

Part of the answer comes from an innovative approach to governance: twelve cooperative educational service agencies (CESAs), independent of the state, that exist solely to help local districts coordinate services and receive the type of professional learning their educators feel is most important towards advancing their professional practice. According to Jim Rickabaugh, the head of the CESA in Southeastern Wisconsin, “If the things we offer districts are not the things that they want and need, we will cease to exist; it’s all fee for service. That means we have a clear role to play, and part of it is connecting local districts to the state in ways that make everyone feel they are less driven by compliance, and more by a need to generate deeper levels of commitment among learners, educators, and the communities they serve.”

This sort of culture is evident in places like the Waukesha School District, where a number of schools have begun providing alternative approaches to teaching and learning. As Assistant Superintendent Ryan Krohn puts it, “The primary function of education over the last 150 years was to efficiently deliver instruction. Well, the function has changed. The function is now to ensure high levels of learning for all, but the designs are still about efficient instruction. So we need to come up with a set of designs that match that, and here in Waukesha, we’re starting to see examples of redesigned systems that ensure high levels of learning for all students by flipping the script and providing students with the ownership of this work.

Look across those four states and the work they have undertaken, and you start to see some patterns: a clear emphasis on local engagement and authority; compelling examples of district-level innovation and change; an “urgently patient” approach to systems change; and a clear understanding that if public education is going to be reimagined for a changing world, young people – their strengths, their passions, and their own unique paths to proficiency – must be placed at the center.

How this new era of school reform unfolds remains to be seen. But it’s notable that a move to make learning more personalized and restore local authority in decision-making has already generated strong bipartisan appeal.

Perhaps, then, the ILN’s question is the right one to be asking: In this post-NCLB policy climate, where will the Next State(s) of Learning emerge?