Tag: school reform

Big Bird Can Close the Achievement Gap? Not So Fast . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on Big Bird Can Close the Achievement Gap? Not So Fast . . .

Don’t get me wrong: I love Big Bird as much as the next guy. But when people start talking about how Sesame Street is just as effective at closing the achievement gap as preschool, I start to worry that we’re becoming enamored with a seductively simple characterization of a deeply complex problem.

To wit: this article, in which we are told the “new findings offer comforting news for parents who put their children in front of public TV every day.” Or this radio story, in which the reporter claims that the show’s heavy dosage of reading and math can yield long-term academic benefits that “close the achievement gap.”

The lure of a set of findings like this is pretty clear: plug your kids into an educational TV show, help them learn their letters and numbers, and voila! No more class inequality. And actually, when one considers how we measure the achievement gap — via the reading and math test scores of schoolchildren — the opportunity to draw a linear line of cause and effect is available to us.

The problem, of course, is that school is about a lot more than literacy and numeracy — and the problems that beset poor children run a lot deeper than the 30 million word gap.

Consider the research around ACE Scores — or the number of adverse childhood experiences young people have — and how much those scores shape a child’s readiness to learn and develop (you can take a short quiz to get your own score here).

Dr. Pamela Cantor has spent a lot of time thinking about ACE Scores. She founded Turnaround for Children to help schools become more attuned to the cognitive, social and emotional needs of kids, and she’s one of many out there who are urging us to understand what the latest research in child development is telling us about what we need to be doing in schools. As she puts it, “The profound impact of extreme stress on a child’s developing brain can have huge implications for the way children learn, the design of classrooms, the preparation of teachers and school leaders, and what is measured as part of the school improvement effort as a whole.”

Consequently, whereas reduced exposure to the building blocks of reading and math is a problem (and one that Sesame Street can clearly help address), the biggest problem for at-risk children — the root cause — has to do with their social and emotional health.

The good news is that although these deficits are profound, they are also predictable, since they stem directly from the effects that stress and trauma have on young people’s brains and bodies. “These stresses impact the development of the brain centers involved in learning,” Cantor explains. “It is because these challenges are knowable and predictable that it is possible to design an intervention to address them. Collectively, they represent a pattern of risk—risk to student development, risk to classroom instruction, and risk to school-wide culture—each of which is capable of derailing academic achievement.”

That means the best way to help poor and at-risk children become prepared for school is by ensuring that high-poverty schools have universal practices and supports that specifically address the impact of adverse childhood experiences. So while I love and appreciate the benefits of Sesame Street, I’d feel better if instead of suggesting that every child needs more time with Grover in the morning, we suggested that every child’s ACE Score needs more weight in determining how schools allocate resources to support their students’ holistic development.  

I hope that doesn’t make me seem like Oscar the Grouch.

New PBS documentary tells a story about education we don’t ever hear

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on New PBS documentary tells a story about education we don’t ever hear

In the small town of Hartsville, South Carolina, which sits just about two hours from anywhere you’ve ever heard of, Monay Parran and her two young sons – eight-year-old Ja’quez, and eleven-year-old Rashon – begin each day in the darkness of the pre-dawn hours.

Parran, a single parent who works two minimum-wage jobs in two towns that are almost an hour apart, must drop her boys off at the bus stop early enough to make it to her first job on time. By the time she sees her sons again, after her second shift wraps up, it will be almost midnight.

This is the daily cycle for scores of families, who must make ends meet while living below the poverty line. It’s a cycle that results in young people who are often overtired and undernourished. It’s also a widespread reality that is largely invisible to most Americans, and made more complex by the distances rural families must traverse to access foundational resources like a school, a hospital – or even a minimum-wage job.

Beginning March 17, the particular struggles – and successes – of families like Ms. Parran’s will be given close attention via a new PBS documentary film, 180 Days: Hartsville (I am one of its producers), a project that was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s American Graduate: Let’s Make it Happen initiative. Viewers will experience a year in the life of one small Southern town, two schools that work primarily with low-income children, and one family’s efforts to break the generational cycle of poverty.

What the film will also make visible, albeit indirectly, is our national preoccupation with the needs of cities, and the extent to which many of our most hotly debated national strategies for school reform – from charter schools to online learning – simply aren’t viable in towns like Hartsville, where transportation costs alone circumscribe the choices many rural families can make, and where many residents still have no Internet access. In places like these, if you want to transform the schools, you are going to have to do it from within the traditional systems and structures – from neighborhood schools to school boards to local politicians angling for re-election — no matter how change-averse those actors and institutions tend to be.

At this moment of intense national interest in public education, you would think that figuring out how to improve the systems we already have would matter a lot more than it does, if for no other reason than because renovating a house is more cost-efficient than razing it and starting from scratch. But the particular challenges and opportunities associated with reform in rural schools matter for another reason – those schools house nearly ten million American students, or slightly more than 20% of the nation’s total enrollment. And yet, as a recent report of the Rural School and Community Trust made clear, “the invisibility of rural education persists in many states. Many rural students are largely invisible to state policy makers because they live in states where education policy is dominated by highly visible urban problems.”

Consequently, it’s my hope that films like 180 Days: Hartsville can elevate the particular circumstances and needs of rural communities, poor families, and public school educators. After all, we can’t begin to reimagine American schools for the modern era if we remain fixed on merely one type of American school. And we can’t identify solutions that will work in the majority of American communities if we continue to disproportionately share the success stories of individual schools of choice.

The questions before us have wide-ranging implications: can a community like Hartsville really change the fortunes of a generation by doubling down on its neighborhood schools? Does the stark reality of the 21st century global economy outweigh the impact of one rural town’s efforts to prepare its children to compete in that economy?

On March 17, I hope you’ll tune in to find out, and help us all widen the lens through which we see American public education.

(This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.)

What does it mean to be prepared?

Posted on | by Sam

I just spent three days at a wonderful independent school in Columbia, South Carolina. The students there are the types of young people you want to meet and hand over the keys of the world to — smart, thoughtful, and generous of spirit. They’re also the kind of community that is asking all the right questions.

I was most struck by a billboard they commissioned, shortly after their most recent graduation, in which the class of 2014 throws their mortarboards into the air, and the image is accompanied by a single word: PREPARED.

What a powerful way to convey the essence of what a school exists to do, and be. And what a singularly useful word for calibrating what we want our schools to continue to be about.

But here’s the thing: defining what it means to be “prepared” is like a shoreline at high or low tide — always shifting. What, then, does it mean to prepare young people for the rough waters of young adulthood, and how can we build a solid foundation on a shoreline of shifting sand?

Schools like Hammond are actively exploring that question, despite their proven track record in the previous era (e.g., make kids take lots of AP classes and extracurriculars, and then get them into well-respected colleges).

What is your school preparing young people for, and how is your definition changing with the times?

Hammond

A School is Not a Pet. And Yet . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on A School is Not a Pet. And Yet . . .

This weekend’s story in the New York Times about former NFL star Deion Sanders’ struggling charter school lays bare much of what’s wrong with the way Americans think about public education in general, and charter schools in particular.

The story begins with Sanders being approached with a “splendid business proposition,” “deep-pocketed backers,” and a state board of education that “fell over itself” to accommodate one of the greatest pro football players of all time.

Never mind the fact that being a great NFL cornerback has nothing to do with knowing how to build a great school. Unless, of course, the only goal for the school is to become an athletic powerhouse, in which case, hey, do your thing.

You can already guess how the rest of the story goes. A rapid rise in the national sports rankings. Televised games on ESPN. A steady infusion of uniforms and equipment. And a near-complete inattention to the things that actually determine a healthy school.

As one former member of Prime Prep’s board put it, parents were seduced by the promise that under Sanders’ tutelage, their children would get athletic scholarships to college and, eventually, pro contracts. “The parents wanted a 2.5 G.P.A. so the kids could play,” he said. “And it happened.”

It gets worse. In a recording obtained by The Dallas Observer, Sanders explains to a colleague how the school came to be. “Senators, political leaders that you hooked me up with, that you put me down with — that’s how we got the school. You’re talking about a nigger sitting up there that was an athlete who didn’t graduate, another nigger sitting up there saying he’s the president, that ain’t graduate nothing, and we got a school. Think about that, man.

“How in the world do you think we got a school?”

How indeed. And although the Texas Education Agency has vowed to revoke the school’s charter, the toxic mix that birthed it in the first place – our celebrity-worshipping culture, and our endemic disrespect for both the teaching profession and young black and brown children – has already spread far and wide.

Let me say that again: Deion Sanders is right. What allowed a school like Prime Prep to come into being at all was a particularly American combination of celebrity worship, disrespect for teachers, and racist indifference to the plight of minority boys and girls.

To be clear, the space for innovation that charter school laws have allowed has led to many outstanding schools, many of which I have written about and will continue to hold up as examples of what’s possible in American public education. But it has also laid bare a widespread myopic belief that starting a school is a lot like raising a pet: provide enough love (cash), food (connections) and water (shiny stuff), and the rest will take care of itself. And yet schools are not puppies; they are complex systems of human beings with incredibly nonlinear, complex tasks to complete: the holistic development and growth of every child in the building, over the course of several formative, complicated, emotionally loaded years. A school like Prime Prep, with its naïve belief that the other parts of a school could be faked in order to engender nationally ranked sports teams, underscores this point well.

A big part of what makes this possible is our historic, and growing, disrespect for the teaching profession, and for the (few) men and (many) women who make it their life’s work. Teacher/blogger Jose Vilson has made this point numerous times, most notably in response to one of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s repeated public excoriations of female teachers. “As Christie wags a finger at this woman,” Vilson writes, “the crowd cheers, signaling a societal acknowledgment that politicians can lay waste to any courtesy towards anyone, and that democracy is overrated. Surely, dissenters get jeers at any rally, but this particular type of jeer further solidified the idea that teachers’ rights are aligned with women’s rights.

“None of this othering happens without society’s consent,” he argues. “Aside from Christie’s ego, gender plays a huge role here, and if you can’t see that, then perhaps you’re part of the problem, too.”

Of course, this isn’t just about the devaluing of women in American life; it’s about the devaluing of minorities too, especially young black men. How else to explain the senseless murder this weekend of Michael Brown, a college-bound 18-year-old who was shot ten times by a local policeman – a killing that marks only the most recent example of such a tragedy, one that extends not just to Trayvon Martin, but all the way back to Emmett Till and beyond.

These cultural flash points and news reports should be electric jolts to the system, and to all of us who exist inside the bubble together, in order to underscore just how much work we have to do as a society to transcend the historical baggage we have accrued over the past two centuries.

There is a reason our society has coined the “Those that can” line about teachers, while other countries have afforded the profession their greatest levels of respect.

There is a reason the U.S. houses 25% of the world’s prisoners, despite representing just 5% of the world’s population.

There is a reason almost half of those prisoners, 150 years after the end of slavery, have black skin – and that reason is not because of an innate pathology or proclivity for violence.

And there is a reason that so many of the most celebrated new pedagogies for poor children have never been piloted in the schools of children of privilege.

Simply put, we are anchored by troublesome mindsets that are difficult to shake off: What is good for us would not work for them. What they do in the present has nothing to do with what we have done in the past. And what they do for a living proves that they are not capable of doing anything more.

These thoughts are not unrelated. They are a huge barrier to our ongoing dream of a society that can provide greater equity and social opportunity. And they are chains we will never break until we’re willing, collectively and courageously, to reckon publicly with the world that we have wrought, and the ideas about one another we continue to carry.

Summer, once the time for reflection, now the time for radical redesign

Posted on | by Sam

Tanesha Dixon vividly remembers the first summer she spent as a teacher – as part of a service program in Uganda, just before her senior year at Notre Dame.

“I had my heart set on being a forensic psychologist,” she told me recently, amidst the busy midday shuffle of downtown Washington, D.C. “Then I felt what it was like to be part of a place that was changing people’s lives. And I decided I wanted to keep being that person.”

Eleven years later, Dixon has become that person for scores of young men and women at the Wheatley Education Campus in the D.C. neighborhood of Trinidad. In that time, she’d observed that the stereotype of how teachers spend their summer – a.k.a seventy-seven consecutive Saturdays – never corresponded to the reality of her and her colleagues. “Summer is always the time for reflection, for the research you can’t always complete during the year, and for doing the work you have to do to make the next year even better than the last.”

This year, however, Tanesha Dixon is still waiting for her first moment of summer respite. “Every day,” she confessed wearily, “I work all day, go home, eat something, and then work until three in the morning. I feel like I’m building Rome and the road to it, simultaneously.”

Tanesha’s principal at Wheatley, Scott Cartland, knows what she’s talking about. Six years ago, his first summer at the school coincided with the DC government’s decision to install military-like checkpoints throughout Trinidad to try and stop a spate of murders. He remembers well the first school assembly he tried to organize that September. “We couldn’t get the crowd quiet enough to say anything,” he recalled. “Security guards were chasing kids around the aisles, other kids were screaming – it was complete chaos. You realize you’re outnumbered, and the kids don’t know you or trust you. We were in for a long year.”

Since then, with the help of teachers like Dixon, Cartland had helped engineer an impressive culture shift at Wheatley. But even though crucial factors like trust, attendance and student achievement had risen considerably, “it still wasn’t fast enough. Most of our kids don’t have a lot of social supports in their lives, so it’s especially important here that they start to really assume control of their own learning. And dragging a whole class of kids through the same curriculum over an entire school year clearly ain’t the way.”

For educators like Cartland and Dixon, then, the conclusion was clear: summer could no longer be the place to reflect on how to get better in a system that was never going to meet the needs of all their kids. It had to become the laboratory for something radical – a complete redesign of the structure and purpose of schooling. “What we decided,” Cartland told me, “was that the best place to start was by shifting toward a competency-based model of learning, and putting every kid in a position to be able to determine their own pace and progress, all year long.”

Although the phrase hasn’t entered mainstream conversation, “competency education” is on the mind of lots of educators and policymakers. It emerged out of the logic that if you want to make learning more personalized, you can’t continue to assign credit hours to students based on Industrial-era notions like “seat time” or “Carnegie Units.” In response, a growing number of schools and states are starting to organize learning not by credit hours, but by competencies – or the extent to which a student can demonstrably transfer knowledge and skills in and across content areas. In such an environment, each student is allowed to move through a curriculum at his or her own pace, and no one moves on until s/he can demonstrate mastery of the core concepts.

“To do that well,” Cartland explained, “a school like ours has to rethink just about everything – from grades to tests to professional development to the structure of the school day.” And to do that at all, Dixon adds, requires a reorientation that calls into question just about everything that she and her colleagues find most familiar about their chosen profession. “Some days I feel like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future,” she confessed. “I’m in my DeLorean, and it’s the 1950s again, and I’m fighting Biff. But the future is now. We have more people coming out of DC with HIV than we do with four-year degrees. We have to be courageous enough to hold up a mirror and describe what we see. And if we’re being honest, I think we have to conclude that the whole way we do school is wrong. Teaching to the middle is wrong. Moving kids through the same curriculum at the same pace is wrong.

“Educators today have a choice to make: are we willing to be like those early civil rights activists who chose to sit at the lunch counter, or do we want to stand and observe from a safe distance so we can run when the cops come? I understand where the impulse to protect oneself comes from. I feel it, too. But this is what it means to be a teacher today, and we need to be accept the challenge of behaving in some very different ways.”

I saw evidence of Tanesha’s claims recently during a two-day workshop for her school and five others in DC – a mixture of existing neighborhood schools like Wheatley, and new charter schools that haven’t yet opened their doors. Each school had received a grant from the Citybridge Foundation (full disclosure: Citybridge has asked me to write a series of articles about school reform issues in DC) to reimagine its school in ways that make learning more personalized for each student. “The best and worst feature of competency education is that it never looks the same,” explained Rose Colby, a national expert on the subject who kicked off the meeting. “But let’s begin by letting you all share your most pressing questions or wonders.”

Scott Cartland raised his hand first. “At Wheatley, we’re struggling to design the right performance tasks for kids, and we’re wondering how we’re going to be grouping kids and allocating time. This model requires a much more open-ended system, and we’re still working in the old model, which breaks the day into lots of periods but pushes kids through that day in rigid groups.”

“At some point,” Rose replied, “we have to acknowledge that tweaking the old schedule won’t really work. The only way forward is to begin by thinking about what kids need, and then aligning everything to flow from that.”

Every night, late into the night, that’s exactly what Tanesha Dixon is trying to do. “We’ve built systems of curriculum that are basically grade-based and fixed. Starting this fall with our 6th graders, we’re going to try and do the opposite: to lay down the entire curriculum at the start of the year, and let kids move through it at their own pace. But meanwhile the education world is obsessed with standards, and the switch to the Common Core.”

Dixon took a deep breath. “The thing is, standards are not competencies – they don’t rise to an equal weight. Competencies are the transfer; they’re the performance component that bundles lots of standards together into one demonstrable concept. It’s big. It’s right. And I like that at Wheatley we’re not shying away from the challenge – but some days I wonder how we can pull off such a massive shift when so much of the old way of thinking about all this remains in the minds of so many.”

Cartland agrees. “Right now, I feel like everything we’ve done has been one giant sprint to the starting line. The summer has been invaluable. But this fall is when the real work will begin. That’s when we’ll find out if it was all worthwhile.”

(This article originally appeared in Huffington Post.)

Positively Deviant School Reform?

Posted on | by Sam

If you had six months, little to no resources, and a clear mandate to solve a chronic country-wide problem – knowing that, if you failed, you would be asked to leave that country altogether – what would you do?

I ask because this was precisely the challenge Save the Children was faced with, in Vietnam, in the early 1990s. And the way they succeeded has great relevance for those of us who continue to struggle with other intractable problems (like, say, comprehensive school reform).

In 1990, two-thirds of Vietnamese children under the age of five were suffering from malnutrition. A string of typhoons had decimated the country’s central food staple: rice. Consequently, traditional supplemental feeding programs offered little more than a temporary solution.

Under these circumstances, Save the Children (STC) was asked to help Vietnam solve its widening problem of child malnutrition – and told that the solution could not come from more food, more money, or more resources of any kind: the people were going to have to solve the problem themselves. And if STC couldn’t help them figure out how in six months, its visa would not be renewed.

In response to these desperate circumstances, STC decided the first thing they should do was see if any of the country’s poorest families had children who weren’t malnourished; surely, if there were, something valuable could be learned from them. As STC’s Jerry Sternin explains, “Aid workers visited households, asked questions, and, most importantly, observed how mothers and other family members fed and cared for their well-nourished kids.” And as it turned out, “in every instance where a poor family had a well-nourished child, the mother or father was collecting tiny shrimps or crabs or snails (the size of one joint of one finger) from the rice paddies and adding these to the child’s diet, along with the greens from sweet potato tops. Although readily available and free for the taking, the conventional wisdom held these foods to be inappropriate, or even dangerous, for young children.”

Other atypical habits emerged. Most families fed their young children twice a day – in the morning, before they left to work in rice fields, and in the afternoon, after they returned. But because small children have small stomachs, they could only eat so much of the available rice at each sitting. By contrast, the outlier parents had instructed an adult in the house (usually a grandparent or older sibling) to feed their children regularly – as much as five times a day. As a result, even though every family had the same amount of rice, some children were getting twice as many calories as their friends and neighbors.

Armed with these insights, STC worked to help the parents of the malnourished children change their behavior. Within weeks, the early morning trip to the rice paddy with a small net and empty tin can – for retrieving the shrimp, crabs and greens – had become routine. And by the time STC’s six months were up, more than 40% of the children who participated in the program were rehabilitated; another 20% moved from severe malnutrition to moderate malnutrition; and Save the Children received another six-month visa.

What explains STC’s remarkable success? A strategy called Positive Deviance (PD) – or the idea that in every community, there are already individuals and/or groups behaving in a way that will engender better solutions to community-wide problems.

As the Positive Deviance Institute explains, the PD approach “is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.” And as Sternin suggests, “because PD is based on the successful behaviors of individuals and groups within the socio-cultural context of each program community, it is always, by definition, culturally appropriate. It is very much an ‘approach’ not a ‘model.’”

As someone who cares deeply about American public education, I believe the PD approach could yield great returns for our ongoing reform efforts – but only if we become clear on what it is that constitutes “positive deviance.”

Currently, we celebrate the teachers or schools that demonstrate unusual gains in reading and math scores. But that’s like trying to solve malnutrition by focusing on whether children eat out of bowls or on a plate; it’s related to the goal, but only indirectly.

What, then, is the central goal of American school reform? I would suggest it’s creating a system that is capable of supporting the development and growth – cognitively, socially, emotionally, and ethically – of every child. And if that is our goal (or close to it), then our examples of positive deviance must come from schools and communities that, despite limited resources, are helping children to holistically develop and grow.

That means no private school examples will suffice – and it means no highly unique, highly expensive models like Harlem Children’s Zone. It probably also needs to mean only public schools that do not screen for certain types of students – so, no magnets, either. We’re looking for places that are positively deviant even though they have the same resources as the rest of us.

So who fits the bill? For districts that are reorienting themselves around the personalized needs of every student, we might want to spend more time looking at what RSU2 is doing in Maine, or what superintendent Pam Moran has helped engineer in Albemarle County, Virginia. For individual schools that are attuned to the holistic developmental needs of kids, we can look to Malcolm Price Lab School in Iowa, or The Project School in Indiana. And for networks that help their members focus on the right combination of inputs and outcomes for kids, we should study Expeditionary Learning, New Tech Network, and James Comer’s School Development Program.

There are, in other words, lots of examples of positive deviance in our current system – and lots of places that are refusing to be limited by the current myopic definition of what constitutes “success.” And while none of these places are perfect, together, their examples of positive deviance just might add up to the perfect plan for American public education going forward.

What other examples are you aware of — and what is the positive deviance your example brings to light?

(This article originally appeared in Huffington Post.)

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?

The Empathy Formula

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The Empathy Formula

For over a year now, I’ve been working with a remarkable group of people at Ashoka who believe empathy is the foundational skill we need in order to become effective changemakers in modern society — and who are bold/quixotic enough to envision a world in which one day, every child learns to master it as readily as s/he masters the ability to read and write.

The challenges associated with an idea this big are myriad. Public education in America is organized around content knowledge, not skills. It defines success via the prism of intellectual, not emotional, growth. It survives via compulsion, not commitment. Any effort to elevate a “soft skill” like empathy must unfold within a larger culture that aspires, tragicomically, to be Bruce-Willis hard. And any adult who already sees the value of nurturing empathetic children needs useful guidance in how to actually do it.

It’s a tall order. And in a recent conversation with some of my Ashoka colleagues, I heard something that might diffuse all those challenges in a single stroke.

As it turns out, there’s a formula we can use to explain how people master empathy, even if no one’s ever described it that way before. And best of all, it’s got a familiar ring to it:

E = EC².

This “Empathy Formula” first emerged out of a conversation several years ago between Emotional Intelligence author Dan Goleman and behavioral scientist Paul Ekman. As Goleman describes it, the two men were discussing FEMA’s feckless response to Hurricane Katrina, and trying to clarify what went wrong, and how the full range of human capacity could be activated in solving our most intractable problems in the future.

What Goleman and Ekman mapped out — in a little-read blog post from 2007 – was three different ways a person can convey empathy. The first is “cognitive empathy,” or the act of knowing how another person feels. This is the first stage of becoming empathetic, and while it may be helpful in motivating people or running for elective office, it also has a dark side if it exists in isolation: narcissism and sociopathic behavior, to name a few.

The second is “emotional empathy,” or the capacity to physically feel the emotions of another. Until recently, we were at a loss to explain how, or even why, we do this. But now scientists have located the process in a set of special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. These cells are what help us recognize and understand the deepest motives and needs of our fellow human beings. As with cognitive empathy, however, emotional empathy can have troublesome consequences if applied in isolation. As Goleman writes, “One downside of emotional empathy occurs when people lack the ability to manage their own distressing emotions can be seen in the psychological exhaustion that leads to burnout. The purposeful detachment cultivated by those in medicine offers one way to inoculate against burnout. But the danger arises when detachment leads to indifference, rather than to well-calibrated caring.”

That leads to the third and final part of the formula — “compassionate empathy”, which is what occurs when we combine the previous two in the name of acting upon what we think and feel. This was the missing ingredient in FEMA’s response to Katrina. Is it possible that it’s also the key to helping us unpack not just how to walk in another’s shoes, but also how to act compassionately on their, and our, behalf?

What would happen if schools were more mindful of this Empathy Formula? Instead of offering disconnected but well-intentioned efforts to help children think, feel or act, would adults start to help children think, feel and act? Would communities be increasingly populated with people who were neither narcissistic nor emotionally empty? And would the most pressing problems of our day — from energy to education to enlivening our civic life — be analyzed, internalized, and diffused by a new generation of changemakers?

Ashoka certainly thinks so. What do you think?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

 

Are Parent Trigger Laws a Good Idea?

Posted on | by Sam

It’s hard not to feel excited for the group of parents who successfully took over their California community’s school, and who now are dreaming of bigger things. “Our children will now get the education they deserve,” said Doreen Diaz, whose daughter attends Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto. “We are on the way to making a quality school for them, and there’s no way we will back down.”

It’s equally hard to feel confident that this story will have the ending Ms. Diaz and others envision. For starters, any proposed changes at the school won’t take place until 2013. What happens when the majority of parents who spearheaded the campaign move onto the local middle school? Will a majority of the parents who opposed the trigger seek to switch the school’s focus a second time? And with something as complex as creating a healthy school in an environment beset by poverty — 100% of the school’s students are eligible for the free lunch program — how can the members of this community become fluent around issues of teaching and learning to make thoughtful choices about the future direction of their school?

A few months back, I suggested that this debate could provide an opportunity for the nation to step up its game in two areas — making effective group decisions and understanding how people learn — via a massive national book club (hello, Oprah?).

Clearly, this will never happen. But here’s something that must: a series of well-facilitated community conversations and meetings that help all residents of the Desert Trails attendance zone imagine their ideal school, and then work backwards to make that ideal real.

A great starting point would be to ask everyone in Adelanto to share the story of the most powerful learning experience of their lives — and then to stitch those stories together in order to build a school that is designed to create those types of experiences for all kids. I’ve been gathering people’s learning stories for years now, and they all point to a small set of core conditions that any good school must possess.

In fact, I can guarantee that the sort of place the parents of Desert Trails seek will need to be challenging, engaging and supportive, and that what kids learn will need to feel relevant to their lives and be as hands-on as possible. That means any proposal disproportionately concerned with raising kids’ test scores should be rejected outright, as should any proposal that doesn’t offer kids a balanced curriculum that includes physical education, the arts, and an approach to learning that gets kids outside of the classroom and into their communities. It means throwing out any proposal that isn’t clear about how it will equally foster a child’s intellectual, social and emotional growth. It means ignoring any proposal that doesn’t directly address how it will provide wraparound services for the children and families of Adelanto, whose needs extend far beyond the schoolhouse door. And it means tossing any plan that isn’t explicit about how it will provide all of these resources in a community where school funding is still determined by local property taxes.

In other words, anything is possible — and this thing in particular is really, really hard.

What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?

Posted on | by Sam | 18 Comments on What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?

OK, people, let’s get specific: Out of all the schools in the world, which ones are the most transformational when it comes to imagining a new way to think about teaching and learning in the 21st century?

There are a lot of inspiring schools out there, so I want to repeat: which are the most transformational – by which I mean schools that are demonstrating, by policy and practice, 10 or more of the 22 core categories from QED Foundation’s Transformational Change Model?

What I find so useful about the QED model (scroll down a bit on their home page to see it) is the way it identifies the central pillars of a high-quality education, and then demarcates what each pillar looks like in a traditional, transitional, and transformational setting. In a traditional school, for example, we tend to assume the student bears the primary responsibility for learning; in a transitional environment, that responsibility shifts to the teacher (see, e.g., just about every recently proposed accountability policy in the U.S.); but in a transformational context, the responsibility is shared via a learning team that includes, and extends beyond, teacher and student.

Of course, learning teams are just one part of a holistic system of environmental conditions. That’s why, taken together, the QED change model helps clarify what we need, and which stages our own evolution will need to pass through, in order to pull K-12 schooling out of the Industrial-era model and into a new, Democratic-era paradigm.

Because that sort of clarity is in short supply, too often we hold up models of school reform that are, at best, examples of transitional progress, not transformational change.

With that caveat in place, please help me find the best set of transformational schools the world has to offer – and please ground your recommendations in the QED change model.

I’ll start the bidding with two examples, and a sample of the ways in which the school is modeling transformational practices:

Science Leadership Academy (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) – SLA is an inquiry-driven high school that opened its doors in 2006. Students at SLA learn in a project-based environment where the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection are emphasized in all classes.

Selected Transformational Practices:

  • Philosophy: Traditional – Coverage; Transitional – Depth/Breadth; Transformational – Standards-based Inquiry
  • Goals: Traditional – Test Results Targets; Transitional – Curricular goals; Transformational – Learner Aspirations & Life Options
  • Assessment: Traditional – Of Learning; Transitional – For Learning; Transformational – As Learning
  • Educator Development: Traditional – Re-certification Hours; Transitional – Group Learning; Transformational – Collaborative Inquiry

Riverside School (Ahmedabad, India) — Riverside offers a curriculum and experiences of engagement with the city that enables children to better understand their skills, potential, and responsibilities as citizens. It is also developing social intervention initiatives in the city to provide a wide array of activities (cultural, instructional, and recreational) that can be synchronized with the regular school curriculum.

Selected transformational practices:

  • Model of Success is Based On: Traditional – The Willing and Able; Transitional – Inclusion; Transformational – Racial and Social Justice
  • Context for Learning: Traditional – Classroom; Transitional – School; Transformational – Learning Community
  • When/Where Learning Happens: Traditional – In School; Transitional – Coordination between in- and out-of-school; Transformational – Anywhere/Everywhere
  • Student Investment: Traditional – Requirements; Transitional – Engagement; Transformational – Passion

To be sure, Riverside and SLA are just two of the schools out there doing several things really well, and being very intentional about the way they do so. What other schools are demonstrating a transformational approach to teaching and learning? And in which specific ways are they doing so?

I look forward to your recommendations and ideas.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)