One Good Question

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12/13/16 12/13/16

One Good Question with Connie K. Chung: How can we Build Systems to Support Powerful Learning?

Connie K. Chung

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question (outlined in About) and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Different communities are investing in their young people in different kinds of ways. Who is deciding how the investment is made is also an indicator of what we value of the next generation. Young people’s voices and even teachers’ voices can be included on a larger scale. Going forward, given the rapid shifts of what we need to teach our young people, and the current emphasis on personalized learning, those two groups of people are essential to include in deciding that what future investments might be.

A good investment requires a diversified portfolio. We’re going to need a diversified portfolio to figure out what we’re doing for the future. Much of our current investments are in developing cognition. So much of how we have invested our money, energy, time, human resources, attention and discourse, has recently been around testing. I do think testing does help for accountability, transparency, and promoting quality to a certain degree. But it’s not enough. We need more investments in the following:

developing a more holistic vision and purposes for education, that is child-centered
developing systems that are responsive to the needs of the present and the future
strategizing and visioneering to create systems in which parts work together
obtaining consistent, impactful leadership. Average turnover for superintendents in the US is 2.9 years, which isn’t enough to develop sustainable, responsive, or adequate systems for what the students need.
creating adequate space, time, and resources for teachers to learn while they are teaching. The technology and content is changing so rapidly that it requires continual learning, even for teachers.

We need to develop systems to learn from each other. I know lots of great examples of powerful teachers, schools, and networks like United World College (UWC), EL Education, and High Tech High (HTH) doing wonderful work. But I don’t see a lot of investment in ways to systematically identifying, cataloguing, curating, and making transparent and transferable some of these processes for teachers, school leaders, and heads of systems. What might be sustainable models for teachers to continue to learn in their PLCs, schools, district and region?

“What’s keeping us from making that kind of investment in US?”

It would be helpful to enable cultures and conditions where teachers’ voices are heard. I’ve seen this at EL Education schools in the US. Many of their schools have restructured their school time to enable more teachers to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams and let students do projects in longer blocks of time. Some EL Education schools have even restructured the spaces within the schools for the collaboration to occur. So that work is happening, but it’s not happening at a larger scale. In those places like EL Education, they have leadership that is listening to teachers and thinking about how to establish the conditions so that the real learning happens. They’re not so invested in finding the next silver bullet, but in developing whole school cultures that enable continual learning and growth in community to happen.

“In Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-first Century: Educational Goals, Policies, and Curricula from Six Nations, one of your findings is that countries emphasize cognitive domains over interpersonal and intrapersonal domains in their K-12 curriculum. Why does that matter?”

Learning is cognitive, but it’s also social and emotional. For example, we can look at Tony Bryk’s work on trust in schools. The places where student achievement increased were places with a culture of trust. These are environments where people felt able and vulnerable to say “This is what I need to learn and grow,” and felt safe socially and emotionally to do that. And they have communities that supported that vulnerability instead of punishing and hiding it. Carol Dweck’s work is about not just growth mindset for students but could be applied to teachers as well. The process of learning is not just cerebral, but being vulnerable and humble, and takes place in supportive and collaborative school culture that, listens to and learns from, and challenges each other. The more we acknowledge and understand that, and then build our systems to support not just the development of cognition, but cultures, systems, and relationship building, that’s the hard work that needs to be done now. It’s not magic.

I’ve heard too many times about cases where school districts pivoted and adopted a curriculum that’s student centered and adapted to the 21st century but without other support systems and structures to enable that change. But as several educational leaders have noted, “Culture eats policy for breakfast.” Even in China, our colleagues also found that, in their innovative schools districts, their broader district culture embraces innovations and trying new things. We might continue to recognize and cultivate leaders who pay attention to how to build cultures and environments that enable students and teachers to do this kind of work. We need a shift in the kinds of questions that we’re asking, a shift in processes and frameworks, not just in acquiring a new curriculum.In a 19th century factory model, where we you want to get the process right for mass production, quality was defined by consistency. The 21st century model is a sharing economy in which people all have the ability to be creators. The ability to cultivate systems and cultures that enables that to happen, where people feel empowered and equipped, is perhaps just as important as paying attention to individual components like curriculum. I think the cultural piece can’t be emphasized enough – values, attitudes, relationships, and structures. How do we create that kind of environment?

“How do we do this without over-testing social-emotional learning?”

The ultimate assessment is: are we going to survive and thrive as a country? Have we created students through our school systems who are going to live well together and promote their own and others’ well-being? That’s the ultimate high-stakes assessment! We may have people who have tested well in schools but may well be failing this real assessment around whether we can create a sustainable future together.This goes back to the purpose of education, which is important to look at as a guide. We’ve overemphasized assessment to guide us. Assessment is one indicator for achieving our broader purpose, but we’ve disproportionally given power to assessment to drive the entire endeavor of education. It’s a tool, but testing well is just part, not the entire purpose and end goal of education – personal, social, and global well-being are. For example, OECD is driving towards these broader outcomes with their Education 2030 plan; it focuses more on creating positive value and well-being for example. UNESCO is also arguing for education being a critical part of building sustainable futures for everyone on the planet. If that’s the case, let’s figure out how we can build a better world together, using all of our tools, and not solely rely on narrow indicators.

Connie’s One Good Question: Much of what we think is necessary for students to learn is already happening, just only in pockets and for certain students and not for others. That said, I have a lot of questions! How do we rapidly make sure that all students are receiving and engaging in this kind of education? What roles could researchers, policy makers, teachers, parents, and social entrepreneurs all play in this? Are there ways that we can all work together to achieve this for a larger population and wider range of student? How do we collect and connect good people who are already doing this work to make it grow exponentially vs. linearly?

Connie K. Chung is the associate director of the Global Education Innovation Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a multi-institution collaborative that works with education institutions in eight countries. She conducts research about civic, global citizenship, and 21st century education. She is especially interested in how to build the capacities of organizations and people to work collaboratively toward providing a relevant, rigorous, meaningful education for all children that not only supports their individual growth but also the growth of their communities. She is the co-editor of the book, Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century: Educational Goals, Policies, and Curricula from Six Nations (2016), a co-author of the curriculum resource, Empowering Global Citizens: A World Course (2016), and a contributor to a book about US education improvement efforts, A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform (2011). A former high school English literature teacher, she was nominated by her students for various teaching awards. Connie received her BA, EdM, and EdD from Harvard University and her dissertation analyzed the individual and organizational factors that facilitated people from diverse ethnic, religious, and socio-economic class backgrounds to work together to build a better community.

12/6/16 12/6/16

One Good Question with Susan Patrick: How can we Build Trust in Our Education System?

This is the second interview with Susan Patrick for the series “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

There’s a big difference in how you would fund the education system if you were building for the longer term – you would invest in building capacity and trust. We need to take a very honest look at our investments. If people and relationships matter, we need to be building our own sense of inquiry. That’s not at odds with innovation investments. We should be about innovation with equity. That way, we can change our own perspectives while we build new solutions.The debate about top-down reform vs. bottom-up innovation is tied to the same trust issues. In Finland, they made an effort to go towards a trust based model and it meant investing in educator capacity so that the systems trust educators to make the best decisions in real-time. If we don’t start investing in trust, we can’t get anywhere.

“When US educators visit other countries, we tend to look for silver bullet programs from the highest-performing countries. What are we missing in that search?”

During my Eisenhower Fellowship, I was able to meet with teams from OECD and UNESCO that gave me great perspective. UNESCO has just published an Education 2030 outlook presenting their global education development agenda that looks at the whole child. Their goals are broad enough to include developing nations who aren’t yet educating 100% of their population. When we read through the goals and indicators, the US could learn a lot from having our current narrow focus on academics. Our current education structure is not going to lead us to provide a better society. Are we even intending to build a better society for the future? We’re not asking the big questions. We’re asking if students can read and do math on grade level in grades 3-8. In Canada, they ask if a student has yet met or exceeded expectations. If not, what are we doing to get them there? You don’t just keep moving and allow our kids to have gaps.The UNESCO report specifies measures about access to quality education. Is there gender equality? Is there equity? They define equity as:

Equity in education is the means to achieving equality. It intends to provide the best opportunities for all students to achieve their full potential and act to address instances of disadvantage which restrict educational achievement. It involves special treatment/action taken to reverse the historical and social disadvantages that prevent learners from accessing and benefiting from education on equal grounds. Equity measures are not fair per se but are implemented to ensure fairness and equality of outcome. (UNESCO 2015)

Across the global landscape of education systems, there is a diversity of governance from top-down to bottom-up regarding system control, school autonomy and self-regulation and how this impacts processes and policies for quality assurance, evaluation and assessments. It is important to realize the top-down and bottom-up dynamics are often a function of levels of trust combined with transparency for data and doing what is best for all kids. In the US, let’s face it, our policy conversations around equity are driven by a historical trend of a massive achievement gap. Said another way, there is a huge lack of trust from the federal government toward states, from states to districts and even down to schools and classrooms. We ask, “How do we trust that we’re advancing equity in our schools?”

However, when you start to think about what we need to do to advance a world-class education for all students and broaden the definition of student success – you hit a wall in coherent policy that would align to better practices. There’s so much mistrust in the system given our history of providing inequalities across the education system, it is inequitable. In recognizing that our education system isn’t based on trust, therefore, perhaps we need to focus on what our ultimate goals and values for our education systems should be and then backward engineer how we get there, how we hold all parties accountable and how we could actually build trust in a future state. We need to consider future-focused approaches that work to build trust, transparency, greater accountability and build capacity for continuous improvement. We do need to assure comparability in testing to tell us whether we have been providing an equitable education. It’s just right now, this lack of trust is creating a false dichotomy of limited approaches to a future-focused education system. We’re defaulting that the only test that we trust is criterion-referenced standardized tests.We need to take a deep look at the implications that systems of assessments mean for the rest of the system. It seems that we’re only willing to trust education outcomes based on a standardized test, that we commit to locking students into age-based cohorts, and that we focus primarily on the delivery of content. What would be the long-term implications for creating better transparency, more frequent inquiry approaches on what is working best for both adults and children? Are there different ways to evaluate student work and determine whether students are building knowledge, broader skills and competencies they need for future success? Can we consider a range of future goals and backward map alternative approaches? All assessments don’t have to be norm-referenced. This is a familiar conversation with education experts globally. I’m afraid we’re not having that conversation in the US.

That’s what’s so interesting to me about iNACOL’s work. It’s global and focuses on future states for educators and practitioners designing new models using the research on how students learn best. We listen to practitioners working on next generation designs and then ask, is our policy aligned with actually doing what’s best for kids? What if you could set a vision for a profile of high school graduates that would ensure success? What goals would you want for redefining what students need to know and be able to do? And, how would you then approach aligning the systems of policy and practice with what’s right for kids? The new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) law gives states the flexibility to come up with new definitions of students’ success. States can now use multiple measures — and still report data transparently. This is a really important time to engage in deep conversations between states and communities, families, local leaders and educators around what would we do for redefining success — but I’m not seeing yet any states that are having enough foundational conversations on the ultimate goals and vision of education WITH COMMUNITIES. I’m hearing educational leaders say, “All we know how to do is NCLB” . . . and wonder which other indicators a future accountability system might require. They’re uncomfortable thinking about alternatives. It’s a sort of “Stockholm Syndrome” of educational policy limited by the past. ESSA is an opportunity to engage in real dialogue with the communities we serve. Communities have been locked out of the process for years now. Community outreach has become a box that people check, but it’s an ongoing dialogue and should be about building understanding and trust. This is a really rare opportunity in the United States to engage in a broader conversation around student success with local school boards and communities. This would encourage innovation and provide a clear platform driven by communities on the clear goals and outcomes we hope to achieve in our education system for equity and excellence.

Susan’s One Good Question: Who asks the question is as pertinent as which questions they ask. Earlier, I mentioned that investment in the long-term capacity building of our education system would require building our own sense of inquiry. In other more top-down nationalistic approaches to education in countries outside the US, leaders do control the system so they are having strong “values-based” conversations about education in the context of societal goals, too. Because we are a strong federalist approach to education – this isn’t possible or even desired at a national level . . . the US Department of Education doesn’t have a federal role in that way, and quite frankly, we can’t have a national or even state-level values-based conversation in the same way. In a federalist approach, we have 13,600 school boards with local control. The unit of change in this country is the local school district (LEA means local education authority). School leaders, superintendents, CMO leaders -- they actually can drive the values conversation about what our educational goals, vision and values are and how we measure success transparently. We’ve stopped talking about values in the name of objectives related to literacy and numeracy. I believe literacy and numeracy are extremely important, but let’s not forget that foundation for reading and arithmetic (with all students having proficiency) is not enough in the modern world. For students to be successful it is a “yes, and . . . “ with literacy and numeracy being important but not enough. I don’t know how schools can address the extreme inequities in our education without having a values conversation and a re-framing of conversations around re-defining student success with broader definitions of student success.I think that our local communities should start asking themselves these two questions:

When a student graduates what should they know and be able to do?
What is our definition of student success?

Susan Patrick is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL). iNACOL is a nonprofit providing policy advocacy, publishing research, developing quality standards, and driving the transformation to personalized, competency-based, blended and online learning forward.She is the former Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education and wrote the National Educational Technology Plan in 2005 for Congress. She served as legislative liaison for Governor Hull in Arizona, ran a distance learning campus as a Site Director for Old Dominion University’s TELETECHNET program, and served as legislative staff on Capitol Hill. Patrick was awarded an Eisenhower Fellowship in 2016. In 2014, she was named a Pahara–Aspen Education Fellow. In 2011, she was named to the International Advisory Board for the European Union program for lifelong learning. Patrick holds a master’s degree from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree from Colorado College.

11/22/16 11/22/16

This I Believe — Change is Possible Now.

Anu Passi-Rauste, (Finland '14), George de Lama (president of Eisenhower Fellowships), Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka (executive director of UN Women), and me! Photo credit: Elias Williams

When invited to talk about the importance of a multilingual America, I’m the last person that anyone expects to see walk up to the podium. As a Black American with unaccented English, people are surprised to learn that I grew up in a language-minority community in the US. My family is frequently stopped and asked what language we’re speaking and what country we’re from. By now, my children (11 and 7) are accustomed to these questions and are starting to understand the nuance of our Louisiana history.

My grandparents’ generation spoke Creole French as their home language and learned English in schools. English quickly became synonymous with education. Even after university study, my grandmother still regularly slipped into Creole for her phone conversations, Friday night card games and Sunday morning coffee. I felt like she was happier in Creole than in English. As a child, I wanted to be in that language with her and decided that I would be bilingual and I would raise my children in our language as well. I didn’t know that embracing my family’s language would put me on a path to championing diverse, integrated environments later in my life.

Soon after giving birth to my daughter, I began to realize that just raising my children to embrace a vision of integrated, multilingual America wasn’t enough to shift how the world would treat them. How can bilingual, bicultural kids grow up and not feel like outsiders in our country? I became clearer that they would need stronger community models than the walls of our home and that our public schools have the biggest opportunity to promote an integrated future. A few years after my daughter was born, I founded a network of intentionally-diverse, public, language immersion schools. When we opened the French, Spanish, and Chinese schools, I narrated a long-term future vision for how our integrated schools would eventually unite the region. I knew that, as our kids from all backgrounds grew up together, they would have a more nuanced, inclusive view of the world into adulthood. What I didn’t expect was that our work would make profound changes for the adults in our community at the same time.

One day, Ms. Elizabeth, a mom from a lower-income Black community, called me about a project. Her video production class had an assignment on immigration. She admitted that, before our schools had opened, she would have focused her project on how immigrants make life worse for working class Americans. After one year of witnessing her daughter make friends across race, language, and neighborhood lines, she was inspired to film a positive perspective on the value of immigration. During that one call, Ms. Elizabeth reminded me that, with the right opportunities, change is possible for us now. We don’t need to wait for the next generation to get integrated communities right.

This is What I Truly Believe — Only when diverse people have opportunities to learn, live, and love together, will we fully embrace our multilingual, multicultural America.

This essay is excerpted from Building Bridges One Leader At a Time: Personal Essays by the Women and Men of Eisenhower Fellowships. I'm thankful for the EF community for encouraging us to think about our own deeply held beliefs.Rhonda Broussard, USA ’14Rhonda Broussard has a passion for education and has been a leader in diversity and international education initiatives. She helps schools transform their practices and align adult culture with key beliefs for teaching and learning. Prior to launching The Ochosi Group, she founded a network of language immersion, International Baccalaureate schools serving an intentionally diverse student population. Rhonda explores her own wonderings about education reform at her blog One Good Question.

8/30/16 8/30/16

One Good Question with Darren Isom: Are you Preparing Your Students to Become Your Peers?

Darren Isom headshot

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

I back away from the “education” conversation because I think of my work as more about youth development than formal schooling. The pivotal and catalytic moments in my own learning and development happened outside of the regular school day. Even though I attended rigorous academic institutions throughout my life, it was my out of school experiences, often afterschool and summer activities and programs, that offered me the opportunities to suture my academic experiences and make them real and relevant. I recognized my talent for writing outside of school and recognized my ability to lead and manage via summers working at Summerbridge/Breakthrough Collaborative. We spend so much time thinking about academic performance and that comes from a place of privilege. When you’re white and privileged, all you have to do is to be smart to succeed. When you’re black, privileged or otherwise, you recognize that being smart is necessary but not sufficient. Being able to navigate the world successfully and achieve both professionally and personally requires more than academic preparation. I’m not saying we should downplay the role of academics, clearly they are critical, but we can’t sell kids this false promise that being smart is all that you need. Youth development makes kids fuller – it gives them the tools they need to navigate the world with those smarts.

Our education perspectives are really based on the education that we received, which then informs what we see as the drivers of success. What we need to be asking ourselves is “What actual role do we want our youth to play in the world?” I educate the kids in our program expecting them to become my personal and professional peers. I remember when my first student from Summerbridge went to Howard, my alma mater. A fellow white teacher said “Isn’t that impressive! Did you ever think that she could go to Howard?” And I replied “That was the whole point of our working with her, no?” We have in many ways these unarticulated hierarchies that manifest themselves in our expectations of our students. Even when we’re serving kids to help them academically, we don’t do so with the belief that they’ll become our peers. We do so with the expectation that they’ll “do well for their setting.” I feel very strongly about upward mobility. That’s what America has meant for me and my family. I don’t just believe in it, but I think that certain kids have obligations to it – folks are counting on them. We’re raising these kids with the expectation that they’re going to do magic – jumping numerous social tiers and integrating and succeeding in worlds their parents didn’t even know existed. If we expect them to do magic, we have to be prepared to give them the tools, tricks, and confidence they need to do so successfully.

“It's become common for schools to position arts programs as supports for academic gains (i.e. music improves math), but is that the most important function of arts education?”

Kids should be allowed to be kids. You have your whole life to be an adult and adulting ain’t fun or easy. I’m a cinephile and the theme that always gets me crying is when kids are forced into adult situations at a young age, like in Life is Beautiful. Those situations are just so unfair. Life is tough and you should have a good 15 years where you can be a child. There’s something to be said about giving kids space to be playful and young and youthful. We have to give children a space to dream before we start telling them what they can’t do. You’ll spend your whole life with people telling you what you need to be, what you can’t do, where you can sit, where you can live. Can you have some years to push the boundaries? Children excel at having fun. It’s an asset. We should leverage it.

At Memphis Music Initiative, we give kids fun, meaningful, high-quality music opportunities. Very often we go into black and brown schools with well-meaning white Boards and leadership and when we talk about what we’re trying to achieve, they’ll say “That sounds great, but we don’t want to distract the kids from academic learning with music and arts.” It’s problematic because these same rich, white folks would never be on the Board of [insert fancy private school here] and characterize arts and music education as a distraction.In youth development, we should be working to create the world that we want our children to be in, not somebody else’s poor children. You have to think about it selfishly. Seeing music and arts engagement as a “distraction” speaks to a disconnect in how communities experience art. Wealthy families see art as a distraction, a way to fill your free time, an activity of leisure. As Black Americans – wealthy or not – art is much more than that. It’s the way we navigate life, diffuse anger, celebrate successes – it’s a way of creating beauty in a world that’s often everything but. A white home without music or art is simply bland or boring. A black home without music or art is without joy. Our ability to give our kids these opportunities is necessary in their development, critical to their joy.

An organization that I admire is the Sesame Street Foundation. I’ve been enamored by their campaign to send puppet trucks to refugee camps as part of their belief that children have the right to be children no matter what their situation is and that the most dire and desperate situations only mandates these youthful opportunities for youth. There’s a recent article questioning when schools became such joyless places that resonated so strongly for me. As a child, I loved school, my school and teachers loved me. I was good at school and my teachers did a stellar job of creating a protective environment for me – an awkward, nerdy, gay kid. As educational elites, we’re so busy experimenting with what schools for poor black kids should look like. I just find all the experimentation really confusing. We’re experimenting when we actually know what works. Why don’t we recreate for them the type of education that we had growing up? The kind that worked for us? The kind that made us smart, empowered, and world ready? Are they not worthy of it? Do we think that they can’t digest it? I recognize that education reformers would say that we haven’t changed schools since rip Van Winkle, and question what we should be doing differently to prepare kids for a fast-changing world and not handicap them. But what’s fundamentally broken? Is it the model or the implementation that’s failed?

Darren’s One Good Question: There is something inherently wonderfully beautiful in all of us. How do we support our youth to manifest that beauty? I worry that we are encouraging our black kids, our gay kids, our poor kids to literally cover elements of their beauty for the sake of integrating and giving them one path to success and forcing them to abandon their uniqueness, their greatest asset, to get there. How do we enable kids to embrace and showcase that thing of beauty while readying the world to accept and embrace it?

Prior to leading Memphis Music Initiative, Darren was a manager with the The Bridgespan Group where he was a strategic advisor to nonprofit and foundation leaders in youth and community development, foundation strategy and education policy.Before Bridgespan Darren worked in direct services in New York, with funding for public art and performance initiatives throughout the Times Square District (Times Square Alliance) and youth services (Groundwork). Darren worked as the director of Global Logistics for CSI, an international trade finance group, where he managed strategy, organization, and change management projects in Belgium, Spain, France, The Netherlands, and Germany.A seventh generation New Orleans native, Darren is a graduate of Howard University, Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, and Columbia Business School’s Institute for Nonprofit Management. As a volunteer, Darren has been an activist around issues concerning disconnected youth and LGBT communities of color. He has served as an advisor to the leaders of several Bay Area and national foundations and currently serves on the board of Horizons Foundation.

3/8/16 3/8/16

When Women Succeed, the World Succeeds. #IWD2016

In honor of International Women's Day/ Journée des Droits des Femmes, a look back at Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka's talk "When women succeed, the world succeeds."

We need to get decision makers to stop seeing women as the problem or charity case. We will not overcome inequality or poverty or sustainable peace if we do not improve the lives of women. There are only 20 women heads of state in the world. if we had more female leaders we would not be in this state. Women are part of creating the world we all want. We have to invest in women. When you leave women out, you compromise the rest of the nation.

What it will take for more governments, institutions, schools, etc. to understand that improving the lives of girls and women will increase opportunities for the entire society?

2/9/16 2/9/16

One Good Question with Tom Vander Ark: Can Design Thinking & Rethinking Scale Boost Ed Equity?

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

We’ve inherited a sedimentary system made up of a series of 100 years of laws and policies and practices that for us in the US are federal, state, and local. This is in contrast to an engineered system designed to produce a set of outcomes. So, that’s the first problem: our investments, speaking about our public education system writ large, is this product of a democratic process, and not a design system. It’s many and mixed intentions, it’s compromises both good and bad, it’s consequences both intended and unintended, working itself out over time.

The US has a number of anachronistic fixations with local control and reliable and valid assessments. This fixation has the advantage of vesting investments closest to the kids, but the disadvantage of it is linking it to community wealth. This is a great example of a well-intentioned design principle that has produced outrageous inequities in US education. Education funding and, to some extent, quality are now zip code specific because we vested power in local governments.When Arne Duncan announced his departure as Secretary of Education, I wrote a blog post suggesting that we mark that day as the end of standards based reform. From Dick Reilly to Arne Duncan, we had an unusual 20-year arc in the US, where federal government had unusually strong influence from a policy (NCLB) and investment standpoint (AARA, Race to the TOP). It was a great moment in US education that marked a national, bipartisan consensus for equity. As a country, we could no longer sit by and accept chronic failure for our nation’s children.

NCLB was designed as a framework for school accountability to make sure that every family had access to good educational options. In retrospect, almost everyone agrees that the steps and measures used were flawed, but if we had used an iterative development process -- kept what was good and fixed the obvious problem -- the country would be in a better place. One of the problems with NCLB, was that when faced with a choice between measuring proficiency or measuring growth, we latched on to proficiency because it was easy to measure with valid assessments. We largely ignored growth in the law and now we can see the consequences of it. NCLB had a strong focus on getting underperforming kids to grade level which created two unintended consequences: discouraged schools from teaching students who were furthest behind (over age, undercredited), and weaker administrators fixated on the test. Rather than offering a rich, full, inspiring education, they offered test prep. Not only did that not produce lasting academic results for kids, it led to educators trying to game the test, with examples of cheating and embezzlement in the worst cases.

“In the past few years we’ve seen funders, media, and eventually schools rally around the next big tech innovation (1:1, MOOC, coding, etc). How much does the next big tool matter for lasting academic outcomes for all students?”

The reason that I’m so passionate about public education and investment in innovation is because I think that it’s the fastest path to quality and access to quality in the US and internationally. In my previous Ed Reformer blog, I wrote about education reform, making the system that we have better. Getting Smart reflects the new imperative, for every family and neighborhood around the world, to get smart fast. Innovation is critically important to improving access and quality. It’s why I’m really optimistic that things will get better, faster in the US and accelerate international change as well.In the US, innovation investment allows us a design opportunity. The design experience that I’m most passionate about, is people who are conceptualizing LX+IT (learner experience + integrated information technology). They’re not just developing new school models but also integrating information systems and student access devices.

We’re still in the early innings now of new tools and new schools. There are thousands of good new schools, but there are only dozens of schools that are doing this fundamental design work of reconceptualizing learning environments and learning sequences and the tools that go with it. This is the opportunity of our time: to find ways to scale both the work and the number of folks benefitting from it worldwide.Internationally, we have the first chance in history to offer every young person on the planet a great education. When we first started investing in scalable models in the US, funders and founders had grand ambitions that assumed linear replication. Over time, we’ve learned that scaling nationally or internationally is much harder than maintaining strong regional programs and outcomes. We’re starting to see a shift in replication and inspiration across geographies. Take Rocketship for example. They run an amazing model that everyone has flocked to see in the past few years. Among the visitors, were two young MBAs from Johannesburg, who took the lessons learned from Rocketship and created SPARK Schools ins Johannesburg. SPARK is as good a blended learning model as I’ve seen anywhere on the planet. Rocketship didn’t have to cross the ocean for that to happen and now students in South Africa are benefitting from a model that was created in the US.Summit Public Schools has taken a different approach to scaling ideas before scaling schools. This year they have about 19 school partners with their Basecamp model and next year it might be 10 times as many. They have created a powerful Personalized Learning Platform, partnered with Facebook and Stanford to figure out how to scale it broader use, and now team with schools across the country to implement this pedagogy into existing models. We hope that hundreds of schools benefit from their fundamental design work. Seeing these types of growth gives me a tremendous sense of optimism that things can get better worldwide faster than most people realize.

Tom’s One Good Question: Will we actually achieve equitable education access? I’m concerned that things will get better faster for young people who have engaged and supportive adults in their lives. I’m worried about young people that don’t have engaged parents/adults in their lives. Parents who get powerful learning are raising confident, equipped well-informed young people.

Tom Vander Ark is author of Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World, Smart Cities That Work for Everyone: 7 Keys to Education & Employment and Smart Parents: Parenting for Powerful Learning. He is CEO of Getting Smart, a learning design firm and a partner in Learn Capital, an education venture capital firm. Previously he served as the first Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Tom served as a public school superintendent in Washington State and has extensive private sector experience including serving as a senior executive for a national public retail chain.

2/2/16 2/2/16

One Good Question with Susan Baragwanath: The Only Way to Break Cycle of Poverty.

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

I have never been into deep thinking on education and I am not much of a philosopher. As a practitioner for 37 years I saw immense change from rote learning to the touch of an iPad. Show me a young person who knows the times tables and can write a sentence in the imperfect tense? But does it matter when they can use a calculator and Google ? As a teacher I have always felt it was my duty to challenge a student to believe that they could do anything they wanted. It was up to me to provide the mechanism so they could achieve to the best of their ability. But now, in the 21st century, what mechanism is it exactly?

There has been huge investment in technology in recent years. This has facilitated both teaching and learning in ways that we previously couldn’t imagine. The change is so dramatic that the traditional teacher now struggles to keep up. We used to joke we needed to be ‘a page ahead of the kids’. Now the joke is on us. Older teachers, with all their wisdom, are so many volumes behind social media, fantasy games, apps etc etc they will never catch up. I see colleagues still trying to put coins into parking meters while a kid is paying with his smartphone.

Many countries have national curriculums and the Education Ministries are given a sum which is then passed on down the line eventually ending up in a school for implementation. Those curriculums which were once worked on by very clever and sophisticated people are now struggling in this technological world. Change can be slow and national curriculums can easily end up a dinosaur in their relevance to the next generation. But yet the poor teacher has to implement it and will have a performance review based upon it and may be under the regime of merit pay.

Perhaps we should distinguish between policy and law. The law in most countries is that every child is entitled to basic formal education for a number of years. But government policies create inequities in implementation of those laws. It can also depend on who is in power at the time and if they allow policy to take over. Most countries manage to run reasonable schooling systems within the constraints of bureaucracies. But one terrible example of a country that doesn’t [run a reasonable schooling system] is Yemen. Pre-1994, they had a half decent school system left over from the British. But then the President of the day said that young people didn’t have to go to school anymore. In other words basic formal education was ‘off’. One of the results is that the Yemen is the most dangerous and shambolic country on earth. Young people who should have had the benefit of a basic formal education now appear on our TV screens wielding guns and chopping off peoples heads.If we don't believe in investment and follow the law and make sure our teachers are given every assistance possible to be up with the play in the digital world, then we should remember the example of extreme and utter chaos of the Yemen, because it can get that bad.

“We have so many marginalized youth (teen parents, adjudicated youth, etc) who need different supports to access mainstream culture in order to break the cycle of poverty. What role can education — in and out of school — play to support them?”

In my experience the only way to actually bring a marginalized young person out of the cycle of poverty they live in, is to provide wraparound services via the school. In one college where I worked (the poorest in NZ with the highest Pacifika population at the time) we tried all manner of things to improve educational achievement. Most of it didn’t work because students came to school hungry and there was no government sponsored food program. You cannot teach a hungry child. The family would often be in crisis and children were regularly bashed up by angry or drunk parents who had no work. Communicable diseases (yes, even in beautiful, peaceful New Zealand) was rife. Scabies, boils, rheumatic fever, tuberculosis – I saw it all. Try to teach a troubled child from that background the history of the Tudors. You may as well bark against thunder.

In this extreme case, food, pastoral care, health care and education in that order became a solution to the problem of marginalized youth. It sounds easy, but I received a letter from the Minister of Education forbidding (strong word that) me to pay for food out of the ‘education’ budget. I was publically scolded by officials from the Department of Health for ‘making a scene’ over a scabies outbreak affecting 70% of the 800 students as they said that ‘scabies didn’t happen in winter’. It most certainly did as I and other teachers got it. It became so bad (many students became infected and hospitalized) they considered calling in the military. The blind eye approach to ‘no scabies in winter’ cost the country buckets of money to get it under control. It was real head in the sand stuff. I solved the pastoral care problem by hiring retirees who were not brain dead at 65 but tired of classrooms full of kids who were too distressed to learn anything.

Eventually in my own little world I managed to shame, cajole, shout, stamp etc and I got all those things above that broke the cycle. It took me ten very long years and I probably neglected a lot of other things including my own children (who thankfully have grown up into amazing adults) but you need to ask the question – why did it have to be so difficult and take so long ?

Once you get over that, education is filling that enquiring mind. And it is a joy to see the fruits of your labour.

Susan’s One Good Question : I am still thinking about it!

Dr. Susan Baragwanath works as an independent consultant. She was a career secondary school teacher and administrator who taught internationally. Dr. Baragwanath is the founder of He Huarahi Tamariki Schools, Maori for ‘a chance for children’. Her program plan was to provide basic formal education and training for teen parents to graduate from high school. These include high quality pre-schools. The highly acclaimed schools were honored and became models, replicated in more than 50 locations around New Zealand.

1/26/16 1/26/16

One Good Question with Susanna Williams: Is Higher Ed the Equalizer We Think?

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Higher education has seen wholesale disinvestment since 2008. The majority of students in our country attend public universities, and 26% attend community colleges. Liberal arts & research institutions serve a very small population of US students, and their funding challenges are unique. As the economy has recovered, the funding has not returned to state-funded higher education. Part of this is a function of discretionary spending at the state level because very little funding comes from federal government. Most states have mandated spending that has to be accounted for, but higher education is one of the few discretionary lines, so states tend to turn to the public universities and say « charge more tuition. » At the same time as tuition is increasing, we’re getting the message that the full pathway to life is through college attainment. Universities are then seeking outside students—foreign nationals and out-of state students who will pay the sticker price for tuition as opposed to the in-state rates. So there are fewer seats available for lower-income applicants.

Employers then use the college name as a basis for hiring. So community college students are at a disadvantage on the hiring market, unless they are health care assistants, and the hospital has a relationship with their specific college program. Connections become pathways to employment and prosperity.

When we do not fund quality education, yet hold people’s lives accountable as though they have received that education, we’re actually saying that we don’t believe that education is something that everyone in our country should have equal access to. And we’re ok with some people being poor and we’re ok with some people not having access to opportunity.

“How did the funding become discretionary?”

Higher education and public policy hasn’t caught up with modern times. When state constitutions were written, basic education was just K-12 through the 1970s. At that time, you could get a great manufacturing job or vocational training and make solid money. Then the world changed. The only thing slower to change than education is government. There is a strong case for community colleges to be a part of basic education and should be included as K-14 education. The State of Washington’s constitution’s first prioirity is to fully fund basic education, but they’re not meeting basic expectations. Look at funding formulas driven by property taxes and tax code and no one wants to tackle the tax code. It’s not sexy and doesn’t win you elections.

“Who’s actually having this conversation?”

I’m not sure people are connecting the dots. The only way it’s happening is through lawsuits over K-12 education. State legislatures have been held in contempt of court because they haven’t figured it out. That’s another conversation that we don’t want to have. What is it that families do? We need to be asking what does it actually cost to educate a child who does not grow up with the benefit of house with books, afterschool curriculum, print-rich nursery school environment? What does a middle class child have as ancillary benefits? What are the habits that their families inculcate and the culture that they grow up in? How can we provide those standards for all children?

“In our analog/digital divide, higher ed institutions are working feverishly to incorporate new tech tools and communication paradigms into their pedagogy and engagement. Do the tools really matter for this generation? How should post-secondary institutions position themselves for responsive/inclusive engagement?”

With respect to the founding of higher education in Europe, the primary function was to train priests. Higher education today retains the vestiges of that holy process. It is serious and magical and spiritual, and you can’t touch that or dirty that with technology and money is the worst kind of profanity. People keep calling for the end of college. Colorado had a major freakout about MOOCS, which challenges the delivery of higher education. I think there’s a big disruption coming. Competency-based education is going to shift the paradigm and project based learning will change instructional practice. Badges of proficiency will change that option. When we remove the Carnegie credit hour and let students show what they can do, then we no longer need to have institutions as arbitors of confidence.

We say that institution and pedigree matters, yet people still hire based on who they know and how comfortable they feel with that person. Take the example of The Wire and the network of the dealers on the street. That show demonstrates that networks are equally powerful in dark economy and formal economy. Our challenge is to figure out how to teach and give networks to other people. If you win the lottery and leave East Flatbush, and make it to the Ivy’s, there’s no guarantee that you will be able to access the network of the Ivy League. Again, this assumes that access and equity are goals of education. There’s a big divide in education philosophy between those who are warriors for justice through education and those who are gatekeeprs to keep marginalized people out of power structures. I forget that others use education as a sorting tool.

Susanna’s One Good Question: How do we effectively move people to opportunity in our country, if we don’t agree that everyone should have opportunity?

Founder & CEO of BridgEd Strategies, is a lifelong educator and communications specialist with over 15 years of experience as a teacher, administrator, and strategic leader in K-12, higher education, and the philanthropic sector as well as political campaigns. Susanna led marketing, communications, and government relations at Renton Technical College, while also serving as the executive director of the Renton Technical College Foundation. She joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Postsecondary Success team in 2012 after connecting with the director through a blind message on LinkedIn. Active on Twitter since 2009, Susanna is a strong advocate for the power of social media and the power of networks. A 2011 German Marshall Memorial Fellow, Susanna received a Masters in Education from Bank Street College of Education and a Bachelors in Politics from Earlham College. She lives in her home borough of Brooklyn, New York.

12/22/15 12/22/15

One Good Question with Zaki Hasan: Move Bangladesh from Fashion Economy to Thought Economy.

Zaki Hasan, (photo credit: Mr. Saikat Majumder)

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

If you talk about the philosophy of education, in Bangladesh, we’re still like 17th century Europe – an industrial country focused on economic equities : jobs, food, survival. We’re not talking about which common social values the world should have. After I earn the money in my skilled job, do I understand the value of human life in this world ? Unfortunately, what happens when there is not enough employment or job security, people turn to unethical means to survive. There must be some global values system that we start talking about in education. Will that not be the number one problem when we’re trying to kill each other not from lack of money but due to lack of accepting diversity ? Who will solve this ? The medical system will not. The political system will not. Only education can do this.Bangladesh is a young country. Since the independence, I broadly categorize the generations into three: the first generation questioned the injustice and owned the country’s independence, the second generation questioned autocracy and has started the journey of democracy 24 years back , and now the third generation is questioning our journey without a vision and we are heading to a bright and shiny future. This journey would only be successful when our children are equally ready through education to make the journey. This generation and generations after this need to understand the values that the previous generations had started building this country on i.e. justice and democracy, which must continue to improve in creating a society based on equity.We need a different education investment framework and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals give us a reasonable starting point. There are some missing focuses though. For example, in the next 15 years, when we talk about basic literacy, it has to take into account how differently we have started communicating by using technology than what it had been so far in the form of in person communication and written scripts. The long discussed issue of digital divide is becoming a much more complex issue in the coming days. For example, a person with post-graduation education from Bangladesh today might have less exposure to new technologies than a typical elementary school child in the US. There has to be more investment in education, especially in the methods of communication, to decrease such the global achievement gap. The developed countries still have a lot to improve, but they are still focused on their immediate crisis of economic survival than equally having social value creation and even equally important aspect of transforming our children into thought leaders. Least developed countries need a radical restructuring of education. We’ll stay stuck in factories and providing good clothes to wear, but developing countries will continue to rise in thought economy. We have to change the education system to allow people to think freely and creatively.

“In Bangladesh, you've been instrumental in growing global education programming. How effective are western innovations/models in improving education gains in Bangladesh? Are there other US education initiatives that would advance education access?”

My visits to public, community schools in US were bittersweet. Children there have an assurance that they can go to school in their area. Common Core State Standards had just been rolled out and it was wonderful to see that federal and state system have agreed to core common standards and still had the freedom to apply them in their own way. The most beautiful moments I had were observing student-teacher interactions. I visited Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy and, at first, I couldn’t understand the role of the teacher and the student. Sometimes the student was leading the class and the teacher was in the back of the room. The roles seemed interchangeable and that made me happy.Here, going to school is like winning a lottery ticket. Even if you get access to a school, you cannot assure that the quality is maintained. In the classroom, many teachers are not trying to make learning interesting, they are trying to ‘teach’ children instead of making children interested to ‘learn’. Education can be important to empower students to take control of the class. The classroom environment that I saw in the US is something that would be beautiful. No one wants to feel inferieor, not even your 3 year old child. I don’t know how it happened in the US and how it could happen in Bangladesh. If the US reached consensus on CCSS in 2012, maybe we can do it here by 2022. If we can shift to more inclusive pedagogy, especially children-focused learning, the next generation will believe that more is possible in all schools.

Zaki’s One Good Question : Bangladesh has made lots of progress to educate more people in our society, but we see that the system is not yet producing a respectful society. Education is about creating global peace. Are we matching what we really want to accomplish through education ? Are we missing the way that education should be defined?

Zaki Hasan is currently serving as the Executive Director (ED) of Underprivileged Children’s Educational Programs Bangladesh (UCEP).He has worked in various sub-sectors of education including Technical Education, Early Childhood Development, Primary Education, Secondary Education, Adult Education, Girls Education and ICT-aided Education. He has been member in various boards and committees on issues/organizations involved in education. He has numerous publications including editor of more than 20 children books. He was also the founding Country Director of Room to Read Bangladesh. He has worked for several other non-profit international organizations such as Save The Children, ActionAid, and Helen Keller Intl. Zaki Hasan is an Eisenhower Fellow.

11/18/15 11/18/15

When Women Succeed, The World Succeeds: Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.

Last night, we opened the Global Network Forum for Women, with a state on the world’s priorities from Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women - ‎UN Women. We have seen Dr. Mlambo-Ngcuka pave the way, particularly in the UN, for women’s equality worldwide.What has improved in women’s status worldwide in the last 20 years :

Girls education has improved, especially in countries with the lowest levels,
Countries have created gender machinery- to promote gender equality,
Lots of laws passed-- recognizing domestic violence as a crime, marital rape as a crime, women to have property rights, amended constitutions to reflect gender equality,
Progress in maternal death & infant mortality. Not where we should be, but progress,
Countries that targeted health services to women,
Fight HIV & AIDS. Countries invested time, energy, research and hardwork. More people living with HIV AIDS and living a full life,
Reduced poverty.

These efforts need to be celebrated. We have more women in visible positions of power and are at the center of the UN’s SDG agenda. We cannot expect the world to succeed, if women are not succeeding.While Dr. Mlambo-Ngcuka prefers the glass half-full perspective, she was very clear that our governments are still marginalizing women’s development. Governments only invest 10% of their funding towards gender equality (sewing machine syndrome) and continue to treat women’s issues like micro-enterprises instead of recognizing the major economic power and potential of over 50% of the population. Violence against women has remained flat in the past 20 years and we’ve been in a complex transition from domestic violence to cyber crimes.We need to get decision makers to stop seeing women as the problem or charity case. We will not overcome inequality or poverty or sustainable peace if we do not improve the lives of women. There are only 20 women heads of state in the world. if we had more female leaders we would not be in this state. Women are part of creating the world we all want. We have to invest in women. When you leave women out, you compromise the rest of the nation.

"In every generation, there is a mission that we have to fulfill. We can either betray it or fulfill it. It is in our hands by 2030 to change the world significantly. I look forward to sprinting with you in this marathon for the next 15 years." - Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka