Category: Assessment

What Makes a Great School?

Posted on | by Sam

What does a healthy, high-functioning learning environment actually look like – and how can parents determine if their child is lucky enough to be attending one?

For modern American families, those questions are more relevant than ever, as increasing numbers of students are opting out of their neighborhood schools and into the chaotic, nascent marketplace of school choice.  What they’re finding is that the recipe for school success is an elusive set of ingredients that is extremely difficult to convey simply and clearly– something Bill Jackson knows all too well.

Back in 1998, when the concept of school choice was still in its infancy, Jackson founded Great Schools as a way to harness the potential of the Internet to help parents become more effectively involved in their children’s education. Today, Great Schools is the country’s leading source of information on school performance, with listings of 200,000 public and private schools serving students from preschool through high school, a cache of more than 800,000 parent ratings and reviews, and a website that receives more than 37 million unique visitors a year.

The success of Great Schools stems in large part from Jackson’s prescient anticipation of the rise of school choice. Yet its growth owes as much to something Jackson couldn’t have anticipated – the 2001 passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law – and the ways that legislation would transform how people thought about what characterizes a great school.

Almost overnight, conversations about schooling shifted radically – from a belief that the core components of a school couldn’t be measured, to a commitment to measure schools solely by their students’ scores on state reading and math tests.

And predictably, the Great Schools ratings system followed suit; each school’s 10-point score has been determined by a single measure – “its performance on state standardized tests.” This made for a rating system that was easy to apply to schools and communicate to parents. And yet as time went on and Jackson and his colleagues delved deeper into the mystery of what defines a great school, they realized that test scores were valuable – and overvalued.

What else should a ratings system incorporate? And what are the core ingredients parents could look for – and demand – as a way to drive improvement across all schools?

To help answer those questions, Jackson hired Samantha Brown Olivieri, a former educator and self-styled “data diva”, and charged her with leading the process of devising a more balanced ratings system for schools. This October, that system will debut in two cities – Newark, New Jersey, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And eventually, it will be applied nationwide.

As Olivieri explains it, the new system reflects an observation that is both simple and significant: what makes or breaks a school is not its performance on a single state test, but the quality of its overall culture. “We want parents to find not just a great school, but also the best possible fit for their child – and that’s tricky. It’s a lot harder to measure qualitative data in a way that’s consistent and useful.”

Nonetheless, Olivieri and her colleague devised a five-part portrait of school culture:

  1. robust teacher support;
  2. active family engagement;
  3. supportive environmental conditions;
  4. strong social and emotional student growth; and
  5. a school-wide climate of high expectations.

For some of the categories, Olivieri knew that schools already collect quantitative data that can provide a useful snapshot: student attendance, for example, or student re-enrollment and faculty absenteeism rates. For others, an entity like Great Schools is left to rely on qualitative measures that different schools and districts must choose to collect and share, like attitudinal surveys of students, teachers and parents, or more specific information about their programmatic features and what makes them distinctive.

“We’re trying different things out right now through this pilot,” Olivieri explained, “and we’re searching for what will be both credible and actionable. Part of the challenge is that most parents do not have a depth of experience on which to rely. When people rate a restaurant on Yelp, they do so after attending hundreds of restaurants. But that’s not generally how it works with schools; for most of us, the range of reference is quite limited.”

It is, in short, a brave new world, but it’s one that Jackson and Olivieri feel will help Great Schools fulfill its goal of helping parents make better, more informed decisions about where to send their children to school. “When I was teaching in New York City,” Olivieri said, “I learned the importance of engaging kids in their own education and having a really positive school climate that was focused on the development of a much broader set of skills. I also learned that all kids can reach their full potential – and that it will never happen until the ways we evaluate our schools are aligned with the full range of possibilities we want each child to experience.

“I understand that the phrase ‘data-driven’ has taken on a negative tone because of the way it’s been misused in the past,” she added. “But that doesn’t mean we should swing back in the other direction. The data does tell us something. And it’s true that education is not a field that can easily measure the most valuable outcomes. It’s a challenge – but it’s an exciting challenge, and I’m excited to see what we can learn – and how we can help.”

(This article also appeared on Forbes.com.)

Classroom Closers?

Posted on | by Sam

After spending yesterday afternoon watching my beloved Boston Red Sox blow another game in the ninth inning, I was reminded of a simple fact: some losses are more emotionally significant than others.

As my disappointment threatened to disrupt the rest of my Memorial Day – we were so close! – I realized there’s a good argument to be made that the one statistic in the data-obsessed world of professional baseball most likely to at least partially reflect the collective confidence of a team is the one the Sox’s shaky new closer, Alfredo Aceves, failed to earn for his team yesterday: the save.

Ironically, saves didn’t even exist as an official statistic until 1960, when baseball writer Jerome Holtzman proposed it as a way to better measure the effectiveness of relief pitchers. Since then, the relevance of the stat has been hotly debated for a variety of reasons, although no one doubts the emotional toll a string of late-inning defeats can have on a team – or, by contrast, the emotional power a string of late-inning victories can unleash. Indeed, the numbers bear out an intriguing truism: when an underrated team has a relief pitcher with a huge number of saves, that team is also hugely likely to overachieve.

Which takes us to the modern world of education reform, and the ongoing efforts to capture more accurately the elusive nature of teacher quality. What is the statistical equivalent of a “save” in teaching – and if we measured it, would it help us better assess a teacher’s ability to support the learning and growth of children?

This is not an insignificant question. The Gates Foundation is currently spending millions of dollars in an effort to “uncover and develop a set of measures that work together to form a more complete indicator of a teacher’s impact on student achievement.” Districts across the country are experimenting with new ways to evaluate what teachers do – and how they do it. And the Obama Administration is incentivizing states to undertake such work as part of its controversial Race to the Top program.

Despite all this energy, however, no one – as far as I can tell – is seeking to measure what goes into being a classroom closer.

In baseball, it works like this: a pitcher can’t receive a save unless the game is near its conclusion, his team is narrowly ahead, and he records the final out. In education, the rules would be a little less concrete, but not unbearably so: a teacher would need to recognize that a student was in danger of losing his or her capacity to participate meaningfully in a lesson, and behave in such a way as to “save” the student’s ability to focus, and allow the learning to proceed.

Anyone who has spent time in a school knows that this sort of thing happens all the time, and is usually what educators are thinking of when they say that the true impact of their work can’t be measured. A child who can’t stay in his chair because he struggles with ADHD. A conflict between friends during lunchtime that threatens to derail the day. A new relative whose behavior disrupts the equilibrium of a student’s home life.

Just as in baseball, school-based save situations exist when the emotional stakes are highest. They are the moments that determine whether the ultimate win of the day – supporting the learning and growth of children – hangs in the balance. They are the relationship-rich exchanges that shape the success or failure of the most troubled students. And as with baseball prior to 1960, they are the blind spots in our current efforts to measure an educator’s overall value.

Of course, relief pitchers have a big advantage over educators when it comes to having their saves recorded: statisticians keep track of every single event in every single game. But that doesn’t mean we need to wait until a similar capacity exists in American classrooms – or even that we should pursue such a goal. Instead, classroom closers could earn saves one of two ways: by self-reporting the event, or by awarding one to a colleague whose learning-saving actions you were privileged enough to witness.

Keeping track of these sorts of events wouldn’t make sense for purposes of awarding bonuses or ranking teachers against one another. But it would be a way to remind us that, in the end, the skill of a teacher is as much about late-game emotional heroics as it is about everyday intellectual growth.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Bill Gates — Close, But Not Quite, on Teacher Evaluations

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Bill Gates — Close, But Not Quite, on Teacher Evaluations

There’s an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times in which Joe Nocera discusses the Gates Foundation’s ambitious new efforts to crack the code of teacher assessment and evaluation, a valid goal is ever there was one. Piloting a new system in four districts — and providing local leaders with tens of millions of dollars to implement it — the Gates team seems to have recognized the limited value of test scores; in these communities, they comprise only a small part of a teacher’s evaluation scorecard. As Nocera writes, “The combination of peer review and principal review comprise 60 percent of the evaluation. And students are also asked questions aimed at eliciting how well their teachers are instructing them.” Significantly, Gates is also paying for a cadre of peer teachers, whose sole job is to work with classroom teachers and help them improve the quality of their practice.

Sounds great, right? And indeed, already this morning I’ve heard from friends and family who read the piece and wanted to confirm I shared their belief in the self-evident value of the Gates work. Except there’s something not quite right with this picture. You can locate it in the words of Thomas Kane, the Harvard education professor who advised the Gates Foundation as they gathered a wealth of data — from videotapes to in-person observations — to try and unlock the mystery of what makes some teachers so effective. All of that work, Kane says, was aimed at “identifying the practices that are associated with student achievement.”

There’s the rub.

If we really want to re-imagine education for the 21st century, the very first step is to recognize that student achievement — i.e., academic growth — is not the only goal we should have for our children (and, by extension, our teachers). Equally vital is a child’s social/emotional development, and to continue to give short-shrift to it is to misunderstand not just how people learn, but also the very way we see and interact with the world.

The world over, successful organizations and systems are aligned first and foremost around what they value, and the values then dictate what gets measured (including things that may not lend themselves to a metric at all), not the other way around. That’s why here in America, education reform will remain elusive until we clarify the type of growth — head, heart and hands — we value most in our children, our society, and our schools. And no amount of money will change that.

Stories of Transformation: Blue (School) Skies Ahead

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Stories of Transformation: Blue (School) Skies Ahead

It was fifteen years ago, but I still remember the first time I saw Blue Man Group. Watching those bald blue aliens discover how to eat a Twinkie, or investigate the queasy vibrations of a giant Jello cake, or climb the walls of the theater to learn more about the people who were sitting there – well, anyone who’s seen the show knows there’s nothing quite like it.

Since that time, Blue Man Group has become an international phenomenon, and an unlikely aesthetic portal through which to vicariously experience the wonders of inquiry, discovery and mischief. And now, those same core ingredients are at the heart of a remarkable new school in New York City – a school I got to visit and see through the eyes of two of its founders, “Blue Man” Matt Goldman and his wife, Renee Rolleri.

“Blue Man Group started in the 1980s as this outrageous idea,” Matt explained, shortly after we entered the school’s kinetic entry hall on a recent Friday morning and placed our shoes amidst a beehive of cardboard storage tubes lining the walls. “Our goal was to inspire creativity in our audiences and ourselves. We wanted to speak ‘up’ to the intelligence of our audience members while reaching ‘in’ to their childlike innocence. We wanted to create a place where people continually learn and grow and treat each other with just a little more consideration than we typically find in the ‘real world.’ And we wanted to have fun doing it.”

By the mid-2000s, their oddball idea now a full-fledged, flowering franchise, Matt, fellow founding Blue Men Phil Stanton and Chris Wink, and their wives formed a parent-run playgroup. Soon thereafter, they realized the same principles that formed the foundation for a successful theatrical performance could also be at the center of a successful school. “Better still,” Renee added, “those principles might even help spur a re-imagining of education for a new era, and a restoration of some of what this recent era of test-driven accountability has cast aside.”

The school’s mission statement spells out the core ingredients such a re-imagining will require: “cultivating creative, joyful and compassionate inquirers who use courageous and innovative thinking to build a harmonious and sustainable world.” And all of these characteristics are visibly on display for anyone who visits the school’s building on Water Street, formerly the Seamen’s Church Institute, near the southern tip of Manhattan. Student artwork is ubiquitous, from paintings to sculptures to support beams that have been turned into trees. Every floor has a common space that the children are responsible for decorating. A construction lab features a treasure chest of wooden blocks of all sizes, and everyone likes to spend time in the “wonder room” – a black-lighted, fully padded playspace with a disco floor – yes, a disco floor. Otherwise-drab hallways are brought to life with pastel colors, feathers, and fabric. And each classroom is anchored by adults who are deeply skilled in progressive teaching practices that date back more than one hundred years.

In that sense, aside from its distinctive decorative flourishes, much of what the Blue School does is not new, and does not claim to be. After all, John Dewey knew a thing or two about how people learn, and as Renee pointed out, “Dewey’s Lab School was both a destination for learning and a base camp for cultivating culture. That’s what we want here as well.”

However, two components of the Blue School’s program are new – groundbreaking, even – and the rest of us would be wise to take notice.

The first is the school’s educational framework, which takes its organizing principles directly from the personality profile of the Blue Man himself. “When we were designing the show,” Matt explained, “we imagined the characters seeing and interacting with the world like children do. The Blue Man continually explores and researches the world around him. So we imagined him doing so via six different lenses:

  1. The Group Member – the lens of collaboration, connection, and global citizenship
  2. The Scientist – the lens of curiosity, critical thinking, experimentation and analysis
  3. The Hero – the lens of perseverance, commitment and leadership
  4. The Trickster – the lens of provocation, innovation, and play
  5. The Artist – the lens of imagination, instinct and creative expression
  6. The Innocent – the lens of emotional awareness and mindfulness

“These six lenses are mindsets or approaches children, teachers, and others in our community can assume to explore work, academic areas, an environment, and materials,” Matt shared while we watched a cluster of four-year-olds make mud in their airy, light-filled classroom. “We want to teach our kids how to surf in all of those different energies. And we want to help them develop critical life skills and practices along the way.”

An educational framework organized around archetypal personalities, each of which is mapped to different core attributes that combine to make up a creative, joyful and compassionate person? I have never seen another school organized in such a way, and the elegance of the design extends to which lenses are likely to be most compatible with which components of the curriculum (which, befitting a progressive school, is negotiated between children and adults, and which therefore largely unfolds in real time based on expressed student interests). This is what makes Renee proudest. “We’re still learning, but so far we’ve been able to create a healthy, warm, safe, nurturing environment where community is paramount and where children’s interactions between classes are just as important as what happens during classes. It’s the kind of educational program I wish I’d had for myself and which we all dreamed we’d have for our children – a place where people feel like there is genuinely no better place to learn and to grow.”

What makes the Blue School’s framework even more exciting is its commitment to explicitly link everything it does to the latest research about how the brain works, and about how people learn. As Renee explained, “we know there is a broad range of expectations within each age group and that the rate of development varies greatly between children. This is why we believe age doesn’t matter nearly as much as sequence. There are clear developmental progressions that children experience – physically, cognitively, emotionally, and linguistically – and no one experiences any of them at quite the same pace. Why, then, do we continue to educate children in a linear, grade-by-grade process, when the research clearly tells us that this is not how people learn?”

Lindsey Russo, the school’s director of curriculum documentation and research, agrees. “Schools were not applying this new neurological science out there to how we teach children,” she said in a recent article profiling the school in the New York Times. “Our aim is to take those research tools and adapt them to what we do in the school.”

Consequently, children at the Blue School learn directly about the different regions of their brains, and what thoughts and behaviors they control. Adults speak daily about the importance of meta-cognition and helping children develop “supported autonomy.” And school leaders seek advice and feedback from leading scholars like UCLA neuro-psychiatrist Dan Siegel and NeuroLeadership Institute co-founder David Rock.

“Teaching and learning are reciprocal processes that depend upon and affect one another,” Renee said, smiling, as a phalanx of strollers and parents surrounded her. “We just hope our school can be one of the places to help us understand, as a country, how to support those processes in ways that help as many people as possible unleash their wildest, most beautiful selves on the world we all share.”

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

To praise or not to praise

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on To praise or not to praise

What’s the best way to support the overall learning and growth of children — via a healthy doze of generalized praise, or with a strict diet of precise, targeted feedback that helps children see their own work more objectively?

That’s the question posed in a recent article in the Washington Post, and based on the reaction it’s receiving — hundreds of emotionally-charged comments on either side of the debate — it’s clear that the issue of when, and how, to deliver feedback to children is a serious hot-button issue for parents and educators.

The question of feedback is vital, however, in ways that go beyond individual classrooms and students; indeed, some of the Obama administration’s primary proposals for K-12 education reform are based on the assumption that extrinsic motivators are a particularly valuable form of feedback — performance pay for teachers, for example.

Is this a viable strategy to pursue? What exactly is the debate between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation when it comes to individual performance, and how should those arguments be shaping the way we think about everything from drafting federal policies to finding the best school for our children?

To unpack that a bit, here are two previous pieces of writing about the subject — the first describes a live debate between educators on the subject; and the second summarizes the recent research and offers some suggested next steps. See what you think — and please share your thoughts and reactions publicly.

The (Keynesian) Economics of School Choice

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The (Keynesian) Economics of School Choice

In the halls of Congress and on the presidential campaign trail, a debate is raging over which set of economic proposals to pursue in order to rebuild the national economy. At the same time, K-12 education reformers are engaged in their own frantic search for the right recipe(s) that can unlock the full power of teaching and learning. But rarely do we acknowledge that one individual stands, improbably, at the center of both debates – John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes’ influence on economic thinking is well established: ever since 1936, when he first argued the economy was driven not by prices but by “effective demand,” we’ve been in a continual debate over whether outside agencies (like, say, the government) are required to intervene during times of crisis. By contrast, Keynes’ influence on education thinking remains largely invisible – yet most urban school districts across America are being recast in the image of his core theories, particularly the notion that providing more choice in schooling will empower urban parents to drive demand in a new way and, in so doing, unleash a series of tailwinds that can transform public education.

Regardless of how one feels about the move toward greater school choice, it is almost surely here to stay. Consequently, as more and more parents encounter the inchoate marketplace of public school options for their children, we should stop asking ourselves whether school choice is “good” or “bad”, and start asking a different question instead: In what ways can urban parents’ newfound power as education consumers engender more schools capable of giving more young people the skills and self-confidence they need to become active, visible contributors to the public good – a public good that, amidst the din of the ongoing battle between our intermixed democratic and capitalistic ideals, still seeks to fulfill our founding spirit of E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one?

That’s a big question, and I think it’s possible for us to answer it – but only if we understand the extent to which urban parents can actually drive “effective demand” in ways that will ultimately serve their and the larger community’s interests.

I know of what I speak, because I’m the parent of a two-year-old in Washington, DC. Most of my closest friends are also DC residents, and also the parents of children about to enter formal schooling. All of us are spending a lot of time thinking about where to send our kids, and all of us are well-educated and motivated to make the right choices: in short, we are the low-hanging fruit in an idealized marketplace in which knowledgeable parents can drive demand.

But there’s a problem: most of the resources that exist today to edify my friends and neighbors are still reflective of the myopic notion that schools can be meaningfully ranked according to a single measure – test scores. To make matters worse, whereas in theory all families in DC have the same chance to get into the same set of schools, the reality is that most middle-class families will have more of a particularly precious resource than their lower-class compatriots: the time it will take to evaluate and assess which schools are the best fit for their child.

As an example, look at Great Schools, the wildly successful organization that accurately bills itself as “the country’s leading source of information on school performance.” Great Schools receives more than 37 million unique web visitors a year, and it supports parent outreach and education programs in three cities – including here in DC. In a world where parents are feeling overwhelmed and under-informed, Great Schools is the closest thing to a one-stop-shop out there.

The good news is that Great Schools is filled with great information that will be helpful to parents – from individual school data to concrete recommendations about ways to stay connected to their school; build new play structures; start a school library; or identify the attributes of a great principal. Ultimately, however, the main factor fueling Great Schools’ growth is its school ratings system, and the bad news is that each school’s 10-point score is still determined by a single measure – “its performance on state standardized tests.”

The appeal of such a simple recipe is clear; it’s equally clear that such a formula will never drive effective demand. Instead, this sort of rating system is feeding a different beast. Keynes had a name for that, too – he called it our “animal spirits,” and warned that, absent a holistic picture of any given situation, these spirits can lead us “to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation.” When that happens, Keynes cautioned, “enterprise will fade and die,” and where “effective demand is deficient not only is the public scandal of wasted resources intolerable, but the individual enterpriser who seeks to bring these resources into action is operating with the odds loaded against him.”

In other words, parents and policymakers need to be guided by more than their animal urges for simple answers to complex problems, and schools need to be evaluated by more than one criterion. As Keynes first suggested, 75 years ago, “it may be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease whilst preserving efficiency and freedom.”

The same sort of recipe can apply to school choice – but only if we prevent ourselves from seeing choice itself as the panacea; it is freedom and efficiency that we need. And until our freedom to choose is matched by our efficiency to help parents better understand what powerful learning looks like – and requires – our future efforts to help parents drive demand are likely to remain as elusive as our current efforts to get many of those same parents back to work.

Is it time to redesign the report card?

Posted on | by Sam

This week, parents and guardians of schoolchildren across the country will receive their first report card of the 2011-2012 school year. For some, the occasion will provide welcome confirmation of a young person’s superior effort. Others will open their mail to find an uncomfortable wake up call. Yet for too many families, the report cards will offer little more than confusion – about how their child is actually behaving, what he or she has actually learned, and whether any meaningful progress has actually been made. “I have a masters degree in education,” said Devon Bartlett, a parent whose children are in first and fourth grade, “and even I can’t make sense of what my child’s report card is trying to tell me. Clearly, we can do better.”

Given how uninformed so many parents feel, and considering how differently the nation’s 100,000+ schools choose to track student growth, is it time to give the school report card an extreme makeover, and dress it up for the 21st century?

Continue reading . . .

Occupy Third Grade?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Occupy Third Grade?

On a crisp fall morning in the nation’s capital, 3rd grade teacher Rebecca Lebowitz gathered her 29 public school students on their familiar giant multicolored carpet, and reminded them how to make sense of the characters whose worlds they would soon enter during independent reading time.

“What are the four things we want to look for when we meet a new character?” Ms. Lebowitz asked from her chair at the foot of the rug. Several hands shot up before nine-year-old Monica spoke confidently over the steady hum of the classroom’s antiquated radiator. “We want to pay attention to what they do, what they say, how they feel, and what their body language tells us.” “That’s right,” her teacher said cheerily. “When we look for those four things, we have a much better sense of who a person really is.”

As the calendar shifts to the eleventh month of 2011 – a year of near-constant revolution and upheaval, from the Arab Spring to the Wisconsin statehouse to the global effort to Occupy Wall Street – what might the rest of us learn from students like Monica? If, in short, we were as smart as a third-grader, what would we observe about the character of this year’s global protests, and what might we decide to do next?

1. It is not about “democracy” – As much as we glorify and value the principles and practices of our democratic system of government, it’s not democracy per se that is at the root of this unleashed global yearning. As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently pointed out, what motivated the protesters in Tahrir Square – and what most animates those who continue to brave the wintry weather in public squares around the world – is a deeper quest for what lies at the root of a genuinely democratic society: justice.

The people protesting around the world are not just looking to be seen; they’re demanding to be heard. And what they’re saying is that from Egypt to the United States, essential social contracts have been broken – contracts that require at least a modicum of fairness and balance. If anything, therefore, these movements are about highlighting an uncomfortable truth: merely having a democracy does not guarantee a just society, and the tendencies of democracy and capitalism, left untended, tend to flow in different directions.

2. It is about unsustainable social orders – Across the Middle East, citizens have been risking their lives for months to protest the injustice of their daily lives. And yet the absence of social justice is a cancer that has already spread well beyond the borders of the Arab world. According to a recent analysis of the 31 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), nearly 11% of all people in OECD countries live in poverty. Worse still, 22% of American children are affected by poverty, yet the United States spends only 0.33% of its GDP on pre-primary education.

When these data are combined with other indicators like income inequality, access to health care, and the percentage of elderly citizens living in poverty, the United States gets a social justice rating that trails all but four of the OECD’s 31 countries. Add to that the now-well-known fact that the top 1% of Americans now control 40% of the total wealth, and you have an unsustainable social system, plain and simple. Clearly, people are angry, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

3. It does require a reboot of public education – History has shown us that to sustain a movement for transformational social change, anger is both necessary and insufficient. To sustain our energy, we are best fueled by an empathetic regard for the needs of others, not just our own. As Gandhi put it, “I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion.”

If what we seek, then, is a more sustainable and just social order, how should we recalibrate our public schools – the institutions most responsible for equipping children with the skills and self-confidence they need to become effective and justice-oriented change agents as adults?

We might start by evaluating each other the same way Ms. Lebowitz’s students evaluate new characters in a book. To fulfill the egalitarian vision of 2011, children must grow up in learning environments that are sensitive not just to what they do and say, but also to how they feel and what their body language tells us about the larger world they inhabit. This, too, is a central insight of those who study systemic change. “We need to learn to attend to both dimensions simultaneously,” says M.I.T management professor Otto Scharmer. “What we say, see, and do (our visible realm), and the inner place from which we operate (the invisible realm, in which our sources of attention reside and from which they operate).”

Recent events have underscored just how essential it is to acknowledge our global interdependence; after all, it was the financial subterfuge of the few that affected the personal wellbeing of the many. That’s why a healthy democracy is more than just policies and practices – and a healthy school is more than just test scores and teacher policies. That’s why the American activists of tomorrow need more than just the occasional lesson about Gandhi or King; they need consistent opportunities to actively apply their own developing compassion for others in the service of creating a better world. And that’s why students like Monica need to grow up in a society willing to heed the rising voices of the protesters and recommit to our nation’s founding promise:  “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice.”

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

The Many Faces of Thea

Posted on | by Sam

It wasn’t until the end of her tragically short life that Thea Leopoulos first discovered the depth of her talent as an artist.

A buoyant, beautiful girl with dark eyebrows and sharp brown eyes, Thea spent her childhood believing the experts who first told her, back in third grade, she was unworthy of acceptance to the local program for “gifted and talented” children. Since then, Thea had struggled in her coursework and felt uninspired by a stream of classes that focused too much on academics, and not enough on other forms of learning, like the arts.

Then, in her junior year of high school, she produced a finger-painted portrait of B.B. King and removed any doubt of whether or not she was talented. Soon after, her capacity to excel in every area of her life changed dramatically. She had discovered a new source of confidence and calm. She had found her path.

A few months later, she was killed by a drunk driver.

Along with 400 others last week, I learned about Thea’s story at a statewide conference of Oklahoma educators titled Faces of Learning: The Power and Impact of Engaging Curious Minds. On hand was Thea’s father, Paul, who shortly after his daughter’s death established the Thea Foundation and adopted the mission of carrying her legacy forward by advocating for the importance of art in the development of young people. “There are too many children today who, like Thea was, are either mislabeled or under-engaged by a system of schooling that pays insufficient attention to the whole child. It is equally true that every child, as Thea did, can discover their own inner sources of strength, passion, and purpose in school. But that won’t happen until we restore a balance to what we teach children, how we teach them, and how we go about evaluating our efforts.”

Jean Hendrickson, the conference’s chief architect and the executive director of a statewide network called A+ Oklahoma Schools, hopes that sort of change is afoot in Oklahoma. “I see this conference as the latest effort on our part to encourage each other to start to see our work differently,” she said. “Learning has lost its face – it has become an impersonal pursuit of metrics, not people. Yet we all know that the locus of learning begins and ends with the human being, and with the soul, spirit and mind. So my hope was to use the metaphor – faces – in a more intentional and multidimensional way: How are we thinking about this word when we describe our work as educators? Do we imagine it as a noun or a verb? And how can we help people grapple with this word and make their own work more grounded in the personal needs and aspirations of the children we serve?”

Hendrickson’s frame for the conference was a way for her to link Oklahoma’s efforts to a nascent national effort called Faces of Learning, in which local communities are encouraged to mobilize themselves by asking – and answering – four essential questions:

  1. How do people learn best?
  2. How do I learn best?
  3. What does the ideal learning environment look like?
  4. How can we create more of them?

“In Oklahoma,” Hendrickson explained, “the schools in our network adhere to a set of commitments that include daily arts instruction, experiential learning and enriched assessment. The schools collaborate around curriculum, mapping the instruction so that interdisciplinary concepts emerge that encourage cross-curricular integration, and the use of multiple intelligences to structure learning opportunities for students. And the infrastructure in A+ schools supports common planning time, shared vision, and faculty commitment to the goal of schools that work for everyone.”

Do you belong to a like-minded network of schools, or want to create one? Do you have a personal story to tell about your own most powerful learning experience? Are you ready to see America restore a balance to how, and what, we teach young people in our schools? Please join with Jean, and Paul, and many others across the country, and add your voice to the chorus of stories at facesoflearning.net.

Let’s Scrap the High School Diploma

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Let’s Scrap the High School Diploma

This month, schools across the country are hard at work preparing auditoriums, printing programs, checking commencement speeches, and readying for the arrival of one of our society’s most cherished rites of passage – the high school graduation ceremony.

Perhaps by this time next year, we can do our students an even greater service and scrap the high school diploma altogether.

OK, maybe not next year, but soon. After all, almost every component of today’s traditional diploma reflects yesterday’s traditional thinking – if by yesterday we mean the 19th century.

It was 1893, to be precise. That’s when the first blue-ribbon commission was assembled to study the nation’s schools, which, at that point, were still largely decentralized. Among its findings, the ten-person committee recommended that “every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil.” Not long thereafter, the College Entrance Examination Board was established in order to create a common assessment and set uniform standards for each academic subject. Couple those developments with the rise of the Industrial Era, the exponential growth of immigration, and the need to move an unprecedented number of students through the system, and you have the seeds that slowly gave shape to the public schools we have today.

Although these developments were clearly pivotal in fueling American growth in the 20th century, it’s equally clear that same system is ill-suited for the particular challenges and opportunities of the 21st. Which brings us back to the high school diploma – a document that still depends, in most places, on the same set of required courses, the same set amount of “seat time,” and the same set of curricular content that students have been studying since the end of the second World War.  No wonder that more than half our students have been classified as chronically disengaged – and that figure doesn’t even include absentees and dropouts!

We can do better. But first we need to shake free from the comforting familiarity of the pomp and circumstance of high school as we have come to know it.

The good news is that several schools across the country are already taking this courageous step. One such place is the Monadnock Community Connections School, or MC² for short (mc2school.org). A public school of choice in New Hampshire, MC² was founded to fulfill a distinctly 21st century mission: “Empowering each individual with the knowledge and skills to use his or her unique voice, effectively and with integrity, in co-creating our common public world.” As school founder Kim Carter explains, “Learning at MC² is personalized – so it can be tailored to each student’s learning needs; experiential – because students learn best by doing; negotiated – so that students can participate in decisions about what they will learn; and community-based – because learning takes place through a variety of community interactions.”

As you might expect, MC²’s goals and mission force it to look quite different from the typical high school. Instead of annually promoting kids from one grade to the next, students at MC² cannot progress until they have demonstrated mastery in a set of core competencies. Students spend as much time learning out of the school building as they do in it. Every student must write a 100-page autobiography in which they reflect on the people and events that have shaped the person they have become. And no one receives a diploma until they have successfully made a public presentation of their own personal growth and preparedness for adult life. (You can view a few of those presentations here).

In schools like this, the old adage is turned on its head: children are to be seen and heard. In schools like this, academic learning is balanced by an equal emphasis on emotional and vocational growth. And in schools like this, teachers and administrators have stopped relying on Industrial-Age benchmarks, and started identifying which Democratic-Age habits of mind and being will be most essential to their students’ future success as global citizens.

To create places like this for every child, we don’t need to sacrifice our desire for greater rigor, equity or accountability – but we do need to scrap many of our most time-tested symbols of schools, and of schooling. Redefining the requirements of a high school diploma is a great place to start.