Detroit Public Schools chief facing a crisis
Deficit plagues her 1st year in Detroit; budget vote tonight
BY CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY • FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER • June 30, 2008
With a year under her belt as superintendent of Detroit Public Schools, Connie Calloway has been praised by supporters for uncovering financial mismanagement and ideas on using test results to identify areas in which students need to improve.
But Calloway also has been criticized by detractors for waiting until this month to address what became a $400-million hole in the budget and for not delivering a detailed blueprint for fixing the district's finances and improving student achievement.
The district must approve a new budget today or shut down until a deal is reached, school officials said.
Supporters -- who include community leaders, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and the state superintendent -- said her academic passion will pay off if the school board gives her time. But critics -- who include principals and several board members -- call her unresponsive at best and inept at worst. Parents give her mixed reviews.
The criticism peaked this month when the finance department released a projected $400-million budget deficit.
The deficit, Calloway said, was largely inherited from -- and covered up by -- previous DPS administrations. Some board members counter that she could have helped reduce it by making planned layoffs last year, or at least including tentative cuts when the 2008-09 proposed budget was unveiled so the hole would not have seemed as large.
It's the kind of disagreement she'll likely see more of in her second year on the job, which begins Tuesday. Calloway's critics and supporters agree that she needs to announce an improvement plan and score a significant victory soon if she is to lead the district forward.
"It's a big, old, huge bureaucracy, and we are a tough city," said supporter Carol Goss, president and chief executive officer of the Skillman Foundation. "She needs some wins. She needs to figure out what those early wins are and begin to promote that."
Kilpatrick said in a statement Friday: "The problems facing the district today are larger than anyone could have anticipated. Dr. Calloway inherited a difficult situation, but she remains focused on transforming DPS."
Caught in the middle is a district that could face a deluge of charter schools if the student population dips below 100,000 this fall, as projected.
Calloway did not respond to more than a half-dozen interview requests. But her approach to planning, academics and finances is being watched closely by educators, parents and community leaders.
Calloway inherited a district with the country's worst enrollment drop, decreasing per-pupil funding and the lowest graduation rate among big-city districts. She was brought to town to make sweeping change.
But she angered some board members from the outset by saying she preferred to communicate with the board president, who would, in turn, filter information to the body. She had a lukewarm relationship with then-board President Jimmy Womack for the first seven months, but the current president, Carla Scott, has been supportive.
A formal evaluation by the school board of Calloway's progress is six months overdue, but board member Annie Carter -- a chair of the superintendent evaluation committee -- said it is forthcoming. Some board members still say that, with support, Calloway's academic expertise will lead to improvements. But criticism is mounting from others -- such as Carter -- who said this month that she would welcome Calloway's resignation.
Morale among teachers, principals and other staff dipped this year. Union leaders were caught off-guard by a proposed budget cut that called for them to give $58 million in concessions and freeze a 2.5% contracted salary increase for teachers. And Virginia Cantrell, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers and a 40-year veteran of the district, wrote in May that morale is lower than she has ever seen. A group of 37 principals and assistant principals signed a report calling the atmosphere in the district toxic.
Still, Cantrell said, Calloway is not the cause or solution to every ill in DPS. "Everyone should be willing to get behind the superintendent," she said. "She's going to be here four more years, unless she chooses to leave, and we need to look at what we all need to be doing to move this district forward."
The state Department of Education and stakeholders such as New Detroit and the Skillman Foundation -- which pour millions in grants into DPS annually -- said one of Calloway's strengths is that she shares data with them about how schools are doing and is focused on students' well-being.
"This is the first time we felt we've had the attention of the school leader who understands teaching and learning," Goss said. "So we are hopeful."
Henry Ford High School parent Carolyn Miller-Bell went with DPS officials in May to New York to tour schools that could be models for changes Calloway has in mind for DPS schools. She gave Calloway mixed reviews for responsiveness, but the tour gave her a better appreciation for how Calloway wants to improve achievement.
"She's focused on it," Miller-Bell said. "It's just getting others focused on it. She's trying."
Contact CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY at 313-223-4537 or cpratt@freepress.com.
Calloway and the budget: 'I give her credit for uncovering things'
June 30, 2008
Superintendent Connie Calloway has said that the $400-million deficit revealed this month was largely the result of past-due bills and faulty accounting practices identified by her staff and reviewers from the Council of the Great City Schools.
She inherited a budget process that allowed structural deficits for at least four years, and faced $102 million in bills that were not budgeted for, reports show.
But some board members and a CGCS reviewer said her decision to not lay off 611 teachers in the middle of the school year, in response to declining enrollment, contributed to the deficit.
Calloway has said that she did not want to disrupt classroom instruction.
State Superintendent Michael Flanagan is among the educators and parents who give Calloway good reviews for her academic passion. But Flanagan said he will hold her accountable for fixing the financial crisis that became clear on her watch. He said there is no plan for the state to appoint a financial manager for DPS -- other districts statewide are looking at deficits, and there would be a political problem if Detroit was alone in getting one.
"There would be perceived racial overtones that just aren't necessary," he said. "I give her credit for uncovering things."
Weeks before the deficit was revealed, activist Helen Moore asked at a public meeting whether DPS faced a $65-million deficit. Calloway said she was unaware of a deficit, and Chief Financial Officer Joan McCray said DPS would have a $5.2-million surplus.
That, to Moore, shows that Calloway does not have the skills to do the job. She predicted Calloway will be gone in months.
"We cannot afford this level of mishap, incompetency and failure," she said.
While Calloway's team evaluated financial practices, it asked principals and staff to not spend certain funds -- including Title I dollars for low-income students. However, millions of that money now could be sent back to the government if DPS and the state cannot find a legal way to use it to help plug the budget hole.
CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY
Student performance: School chief is 'on track'
June 30, 2008
Superintendent Connie Calloway has offered ideas on improving student performance in Detroit schools, but no details.
For example, she announced that five schools would be reinvented and labeled Turn Around Schools. Existing staff would be removed, and independent schools of about 450 students would be formed in each building. Many educators have said that smaller schools can boost graduation rates.
But classes start in a little more than two months and details for the schools haven't been worked out, so they are unlikely to open by fall as planned. Michael Tenbusch, a former Detroit school board member, has researched several such high schools nationwide. He said the concept is a winner, but planning takes about 10 months.
"New York improved graduate rates over 4 years, from 50% to 60%," said Tenbusch, vice president of educational preparedness for the United Way for Southeast Michigan. "I believe Dr. Calloway is on track."
Calloway gained favor last fall by announcing a new state-funded early college program that would allow high school students to earn an associates degree in a health-related field without paying to attend a community college. She scored points as well with a data system she wants teachers to use to pinpoint where students need to improve on standardized tests.
But the state said DPS remains out of compliance with a federal requirement to offer free tutoring to students in struggling schools.
Chastity Pratt Dawsey
Monday, June 30, 2008
Sunday, June 29, 2008
AIM to CHANGE (TRANSFORM) the SYSTEM not the INTENTION!
Change system for sake of students
BY MIKE FLANAGAN • June 29, 2008
Narrow thinkers wanting to water down the new high school graduation requirements have wrongly bleated that the new Michigan Merit Curriculum is "cookie cutter," because it expects that all kids will learn the same rigorous academic content.
Well, it is not the curriculum that is cookie cutter; it's the current educational system, which wants all kids to fit in that box we call a classroom, when some just won't. We don't need to change the new requirements. We need to change the system.
We developed this new Michigan Merit Curriculum with the expectation that schools would expand learning opportunities in new and creative ways. Students can, for example, receive
Algebra II, chemistry and economics credits through online courses, career tech programs, and project-based learning.
Some school districts, like Wyandotte, are figuring it out and developing ways to reach every student and teach them the needed standards. I applaud them for embracing the reality that all kids can learn higher levels of math, science, English and social studies. When we broaden our ways of teaching students, we can have high expectations of them, and they will respond. I am a proven example of that.
I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and was a bit on the rough edge when my family moved out to the suburbs of Long Island. Needless to say, I didn't quite fit in, and school for me was not going well.
When I was in the eighth grade, a teacher who thought I could be doing better got me into a program called the 89ers -- eighth-grade students doing ninth-grade work. Heck, I wasn't even doing seventh-grade work at the time. But the teachers and the school expected and believed we could do it. They believed in us and approached our education in a different way, and we succeeded. It turned my life around.
Just because someone thinks a certain group of students "can't" learn a certain subject doesn't mean those students don't "need" to learn those subjects. In this globally competitive world we now live in, all our students need to learn higher level concepts. Anyone who claims otherwise is setting up our students and our state for failure now and into the future.
Michigan's unemployment rate is the highest it has been since 1992. Is that because there are no jobs available? No. There are some 80,000 jobs available in Michigan today, but they are jobs that require the higher-level knowledge and skills that the Michigan Merit Curriculum will prime.
We want Michigan's high school diploma to mean that every student has received a bona fide, high-quality education upon which employers can depend. We want a Michigan high school diploma that means something, and that is globally competitive.
We must resist every effort to wilt and water down our nationally renowned graduation standards. The key to success in this drive to the top is the willingness to accept the need to change. We can't keep doing what we've always done and expect different outcomes.
In today's workforce, college-ready is the same as work-ready for what employers need. Someone recently alarmed me when he said: "My waitress doesn't need algebra." I was floored! I believe that all work is honorable, but what if that waitress, or store clerk, or landscaper wants to change careers and needs to go to college? Will they have the math and science background to go on and study to become a medical technician or architect?
How do we know which ninth-grade students will want to enter what career five or 10 years down the road? I refuse to predetermine that. All kids need to complete the Michigan Merit Curriculum.
For this rigorous curriculum to really work, however, we need to re-imagine what our current education system is. We need a system that meets the needs of all students, in a manner that meets their needs and the needs of employers. The classroom of the past 50-plus years no longer is relevant to all of today's students.
MIKE FLANAGAN is Michigan's superintendent of public instruction. Write to him in care of the Free Press Editorial Page, 615 W. Lafayette, Detroit, MI 48226 or at oped@freepress.com.
Don't give up on plan for higher grades
Legislators should give new tougher standards a chance to work
June 29, 2008
There's just no point in jettisoning a life preserver before you know whether it'll float.
Yet the very policy that promises, long term, to lift up generations of Michigan high school students is in jeopardy of being picked apart before it's had a chance to pay off.
The standards are just now going into full effect.
Yet, at the same time, a House subcommittee on high school alternatives has begun re-examining its success and holding hearings on a range of possible changes, the most controversial of which could create an alternative diploma and tweak some of the state's math mandates.
While the process is just beginning, every legislator ought to lend a cautious eye so that Michigan doesn't prematurely gut the rigor out of its efforts to raise the educational bar.
State Rep. Hoon-Yung Hopgood, D-Taylor, insists the subcommittee isn't out to undo the standards.
"We're looking at how kids are getting through the graduation requirements," explained Hopgood. "It may be that there can be a fine-tuning to help prevent the bad outcome, which is kids just having a lot of frustration and a lack of success with the requirements."
It's true the state's new standards warrant monitoring, if only because increasing the numbers of high school graduates is a central piece of the state's economic strategy.
But monitoring and meddling are two different things. Michigan wasted at least 20 years ignoring the importance of toughness in high school graduation standards. The price of that choice is implicit in the legions of unemployed and undereducated citizens throughout the state.
Any knee-jerk relaxation of the standards only adds to the state's negatives in the eyes of companies looking for high skills workers.
This is not to say Michigan has put a problem-free policy on the books. What government ever meets that mark? But the change Michigan has adopted is solid and drastic enough to star in the national discussion about the direction all American high schools have to travel to compete in the 21st Century. With all eyes finally fixed on Michigan for something positive, the Legislature should be leery of relinquishing the chance to lead.
Michigan has yet to even graduate a class of students under the new standards; leaders who now want to undercut the policy don't have a clear enough picture of its weaknesses or its strengths to determine what needs fixing.
Yes, it's alarming to learn that more than 20% of freshmen in the Class of 2011 -- the first to graduate under Michigan's new standards -- failed Algebra I in the most recent school year.
Legislators are right to question what's being done to ensure that those students don't fail further. But one of the ideas being discussed is weakening the need for Algebra II, an off-point overreaction to the early results.
It's better to start with a dialogue about whether local boards of education and school districts are alerting students to options built into the policy, such as completing Algebra II over two years or via career technical courses. Under that policy, for instance, school districts are supposed to establish personal curriculum teams to evaluate options for students at risk of falling short of proficiency.
Given the length of some of the policy's fine print, it's a reasonable conclusion that many local boards and districts have only skimmed the surface of the option available to help struggling students. Maybe the tweak legislators should be examining is with the communications between the state Department of Education, school districts and boards, not the overall policy.
Focusing on that process first could keep the state from needlessly dummying-down one of the smartest steps Michigan has taken to retool its future.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
AIM for TRANSFORMATION (Champion)
ROCHELLE RILEY
Where is the outrage over DPS?
BY ROCHELLE RILEY • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • June 24, 2008
This is what doesn't make sense to me.
State regulators are investigating why it took the public utilities Detroit Edison and Consumers Energy days to restore power to 700,000 to 800,000 residents after recent storms. The Michigan Public Service Commission, its director said, "has an obligation to ensure that utilities are providing customers with reasonably reliable service."
The commission is holding public hearings this week across the state.
So, if somebody in Lansing is investigating the utilities, why isn't somebody in Lansing investigating the lost power in the Detroit Public Schools? The lights went out there nearly 10 years ago, and ever since, the district has stumbled around in the dark, fighting over contracts and jobs, while the kids suffer. Are the children not as important as melted ice cream and defrosted steaks?
A whole lot of nots
Dr. Connie Calloway, the new superintendent who has spent her first year digging through dirt and incompetence and traditions that don't make sense, revealed some startling news two weeks ago during an interview:
She confirmed what critics have known for some time, that DPS is not graduating nearly two-thirds of its students.
She confirmed that 22 of the city's 27 high schools did not make required annual yearly progress -- required progress.
She confirmed that DPS has been rife with such incompetence that students did not receive textbooks at the start of the year for 19 years.
She confirmed that the FBI investigation into DPS is not over.
And she confirmed that the district's budget is about the same as it was eight years ago, even though the number of employees and students has dropped by a third. In 2000, the district spent $1.2 billion to pay 21,203 employees to serve 154,648 students. Last school year, the district spent the same amount of money to pay 15,535 employees and serve 105,000 students. What is being done with the extra money?
After those revelations, parents did not march, teachers did not rally, and Detroit legislators did not hold news conferences to say enough is enough.
But when district officials announced that there might be teacher layoffs to offset a budget deficit that is $400 million counting this year and next, folks jumped up then. The teachers aren't wrong to protest. The district has so much fat and gristle it can cut plenty before it gets to teachers, including administrators -- especially administrators.
A call to action
So my question remains: Why is the state not investigating? How can a public entity be allowed to dysfunction for so long, turning out graduates who cannot read, students who cannot last more than a semester in college, or students who do not have the skills to work? I didn't need to read a study. I know some of these students. I worked with some of these students. I cried at night about some of these students.
Since the power outage debacle, I've seen TV commercials apologizing for the letdown. The school district has not apologized to children or parents or taxpayers. But when will elected officials in Lansing who keep throwing good money after bad on a dysfunctional district, stop turning their heads away from the problem -- like a car wreck they can't bear to watch -- and do something?
It just doesn't make sense.
Please join the conversation about this column at www.freep.com/rochelleriley.
ROCHELLE RILEY
Kids are suffering in Detroit Public Schools mess
BY ROCHELLE RILEY • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • June 26, 2008
The e-mail could have been written by any suburbanites who responded to my column about the lack of outrage over the failing Detroit Public Schools.
The writer said there was no outrage because "the chips are all cashed in and there is NO hope left and people have stopped giving a rip. This is DPS -- it's over. Done. Stick a fork in it. Jesus Christ himself would have his hands full with that cesspool of failure, corruption and incompetence. Just need to find a way for the 900,000 left to speed to the exits in order to save their lives vs. being pawns to prop up a long failed institution so we can continue to pay the incompetents."
In my column, I asked why the state would investigate something as simple as a delay in getting power restored after massive storms, but would not investigate the dysfunction of the billion-dollar behemoth known as the DPS. The writer said:
"As for power outages we KNOW if we are outraged it WILL get fixed; even faster. We have hope; we know it will get better. We are way past outrage in DPS and Detroit city government in general. We are on to sickened, embarrassed and just plain tired of it all. We do not care what happens to DPS, we just hope it happens quickly rather than this slow blood loss to death; and that we rescue as many kids as possible from this burning building."
What about the children?
Here's the problem, dear readers, whether your kids study elsewhere or not, whether you think you have a stake in this or not: No one is rescuing the kids from the burning building. As a matter of fact, folks have stopped watching the building burn. It's like wildfires that take the houses in California. You know they're happening, and you're glad they're happening someplace else.
My question -- where is the outrage? -- wasn't meant to ask literally why people aren't outraged, dear readers. It was meant to spur outrage. It was meant to say: Get up! Stand up! These are children, for God's sake! How can anyone who is an advocate for children in Michigan just watch? If these children were puppies, there would be lines of cars and trucks from across the state to take them to safety.
What we would do for animals, we won't do for these children? And all because some Detroiters reject help from people who aren't black, aren't connected or aren't taking from that big ball of cheese known as the billion-dollar budget? Folks, it is time to move the cheese.
We need to act, now
DPS Superintendent Connie Calloway says her plans to reform the district have been hampered by discoveries of ineptitude, possible criminal behavior and the kind of bookkeeping and record-keeping that would require Internal Revenue Service help to figure out. Her critics say any good superintendent can multitask, cleaning up the bad while pushing the good.
While they fight, children suffer.
When these thousands of children leave a school district without graduating, without being able to read, without being able to be employed, they will take one of two roads -- hard lives one step ahead of abject poverty or the sinister methods of pursuing happiness.
Either way, our tax dollars will go to them. We better wake up!
Please join the conversation about this column at www.freep.com/rochelleriley.
Where is the outrage over DPS?
BY ROCHELLE RILEY • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • June 24, 2008
This is what doesn't make sense to me.
State regulators are investigating why it took the public utilities Detroit Edison and Consumers Energy days to restore power to 700,000 to 800,000 residents after recent storms. The Michigan Public Service Commission, its director said, "has an obligation to ensure that utilities are providing customers with reasonably reliable service."
The commission is holding public hearings this week across the state.
So, if somebody in Lansing is investigating the utilities, why isn't somebody in Lansing investigating the lost power in the Detroit Public Schools? The lights went out there nearly 10 years ago, and ever since, the district has stumbled around in the dark, fighting over contracts and jobs, while the kids suffer. Are the children not as important as melted ice cream and defrosted steaks?
A whole lot of nots
Dr. Connie Calloway, the new superintendent who has spent her first year digging through dirt and incompetence and traditions that don't make sense, revealed some startling news two weeks ago during an interview:
She confirmed what critics have known for some time, that DPS is not graduating nearly two-thirds of its students.
She confirmed that 22 of the city's 27 high schools did not make required annual yearly progress -- required progress.
She confirmed that DPS has been rife with such incompetence that students did not receive textbooks at the start of the year for 19 years.
She confirmed that the FBI investigation into DPS is not over.
And she confirmed that the district's budget is about the same as it was eight years ago, even though the number of employees and students has dropped by a third. In 2000, the district spent $1.2 billion to pay 21,203 employees to serve 154,648 students. Last school year, the district spent the same amount of money to pay 15,535 employees and serve 105,000 students. What is being done with the extra money?
After those revelations, parents did not march, teachers did not rally, and Detroit legislators did not hold news conferences to say enough is enough.
But when district officials announced that there might be teacher layoffs to offset a budget deficit that is $400 million counting this year and next, folks jumped up then. The teachers aren't wrong to protest. The district has so much fat and gristle it can cut plenty before it gets to teachers, including administrators -- especially administrators.
A call to action
So my question remains: Why is the state not investigating? How can a public entity be allowed to dysfunction for so long, turning out graduates who cannot read, students who cannot last more than a semester in college, or students who do not have the skills to work? I didn't need to read a study. I know some of these students. I worked with some of these students. I cried at night about some of these students.
Since the power outage debacle, I've seen TV commercials apologizing for the letdown. The school district has not apologized to children or parents or taxpayers. But when will elected officials in Lansing who keep throwing good money after bad on a dysfunctional district, stop turning their heads away from the problem -- like a car wreck they can't bear to watch -- and do something?
It just doesn't make sense.
Please join the conversation about this column at www.freep.com/rochelleriley.
ROCHELLE RILEY
Kids are suffering in Detroit Public Schools mess
BY ROCHELLE RILEY • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • June 26, 2008
The e-mail could have been written by any suburbanites who responded to my column about the lack of outrage over the failing Detroit Public Schools.
The writer said there was no outrage because "the chips are all cashed in and there is NO hope left and people have stopped giving a rip. This is DPS -- it's over. Done. Stick a fork in it. Jesus Christ himself would have his hands full with that cesspool of failure, corruption and incompetence. Just need to find a way for the 900,000 left to speed to the exits in order to save their lives vs. being pawns to prop up a long failed institution so we can continue to pay the incompetents."
In my column, I asked why the state would investigate something as simple as a delay in getting power restored after massive storms, but would not investigate the dysfunction of the billion-dollar behemoth known as the DPS. The writer said:
"As for power outages we KNOW if we are outraged it WILL get fixed; even faster. We have hope; we know it will get better. We are way past outrage in DPS and Detroit city government in general. We are on to sickened, embarrassed and just plain tired of it all. We do not care what happens to DPS, we just hope it happens quickly rather than this slow blood loss to death; and that we rescue as many kids as possible from this burning building."
What about the children?
Here's the problem, dear readers, whether your kids study elsewhere or not, whether you think you have a stake in this or not: No one is rescuing the kids from the burning building. As a matter of fact, folks have stopped watching the building burn. It's like wildfires that take the houses in California. You know they're happening, and you're glad they're happening someplace else.
My question -- where is the outrage? -- wasn't meant to ask literally why people aren't outraged, dear readers. It was meant to spur outrage. It was meant to say: Get up! Stand up! These are children, for God's sake! How can anyone who is an advocate for children in Michigan just watch? If these children were puppies, there would be lines of cars and trucks from across the state to take them to safety.
What we would do for animals, we won't do for these children? And all because some Detroiters reject help from people who aren't black, aren't connected or aren't taking from that big ball of cheese known as the billion-dollar budget? Folks, it is time to move the cheese.
We need to act, now
DPS Superintendent Connie Calloway says her plans to reform the district have been hampered by discoveries of ineptitude, possible criminal behavior and the kind of bookkeeping and record-keeping that would require Internal Revenue Service help to figure out. Her critics say any good superintendent can multitask, cleaning up the bad while pushing the good.
While they fight, children suffer.
When these thousands of children leave a school district without graduating, without being able to read, without being able to be employed, they will take one of two roads -- hard lives one step ahead of abject poverty or the sinister methods of pursuing happiness.
Either way, our tax dollars will go to them. We better wake up!
Please join the conversation about this column at www.freep.com/rochelleriley.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
WOW! Emerging Technology Could Drive STEM Interest!
21st Century Learners
By Cathleen Richardson
What do we really know about today’s youth? As educators, do we truly understand how they think, learn, communicate, and socialize? As if you didn’t know by now, they don’t perform any of the aforementioned skills in any manner like the youth of years past. Our students live in a digital world, altered by ever-changing technology. The youth of today can instant message on their laptop, talk on a cell phone, play a video game wirelessly with a friend down the street and chew bubble gum - all at the same time.
These "Screenagers" are undeniably different. They are authors of blogs, designers of web sites, and developers of ring tones. They have created an entire language of their own using abbreviated terms such as LOL (laugh out loud), BRB (be right back), POS (parent over the shoulder), MIRL (meet in real life) and BTDT (been there, done that). The bottom line is that these students learn and comprehend in a way that is foreign to many of us, and, as a result, they often feel disconnected from traditional teachers and schools of yesteryear.
Digital students are goal-oriented and able to pursue multiple outcomes at the same time. This generation of 21st Century learners can absorb a great deal of information at super-charged speed whether it is transmitted via a cell phone, television, the Internet, or MP3 player.
Digital students are masters of varying types of technology. These students are always connected with their peers and the world through technology. The digital generation has unknowingly incorporated 21st Century skills into their day-to-day lives by becoming innovators, creative designers, critical thinkers, collaborators, and complex problem-solvers.
While these students are having fun, they are also learning.
At a recent conference, Terry Jones, founder and former CEO of Travelocity.com told the audience a fascinating story. His son, a digital native, co-created a now popular computer game called “Day of Defeat” with four students from the United States, five from Europe and one from Canada. Interestingly, they never met! They collaborated and created this game solely via email and chat interactions.
Digital students are determined, focused on success and creators of their own destiny. This knowledge forces us to pause, ponder and then pose a series of additional questions. According to Speak Up, an online research project, which annually surveys K-12 students, teachers, parents, and school administrators, these are some key educational questions educators should be focusing on:
By Cathleen Richardson
What do we really know about today’s youth? As educators, do we truly understand how they think, learn, communicate, and socialize? As if you didn’t know by now, they don’t perform any of the aforementioned skills in any manner like the youth of years past. Our students live in a digital world, altered by ever-changing technology. The youth of today can instant message on their laptop, talk on a cell phone, play a video game wirelessly with a friend down the street and chew bubble gum - all at the same time.
These "Screenagers" are undeniably different. They are authors of blogs, designers of web sites, and developers of ring tones. They have created an entire language of their own using abbreviated terms such as LOL (laugh out loud), BRB (be right back), POS (parent over the shoulder), MIRL (meet in real life) and BTDT (been there, done that). The bottom line is that these students learn and comprehend in a way that is foreign to many of us, and, as a result, they often feel disconnected from traditional teachers and schools of yesteryear.
Digital students are goal-oriented and able to pursue multiple outcomes at the same time. This generation of 21st Century learners can absorb a great deal of information at super-charged speed whether it is transmitted via a cell phone, television, the Internet, or MP3 player.
Digital students are masters of varying types of technology. These students are always connected with their peers and the world through technology. The digital generation has unknowingly incorporated 21st Century skills into their day-to-day lives by becoming innovators, creative designers, critical thinkers, collaborators, and complex problem-solvers.
While these students are having fun, they are also learning.
At a recent conference, Terry Jones, founder and former CEO of Travelocity.com told the audience a fascinating story. His son, a digital native, co-created a now popular computer game called “Day of Defeat” with four students from the United States, five from Europe and one from Canada. Interestingly, they never met! They collaborated and created this game solely via email and chat interactions.
Digital students are determined, focused on success and creators of their own destiny. This knowledge forces us to pause, ponder and then pose a series of additional questions. According to Speak Up, an online research project, which annually surveys K-12 students, teachers, parents, and school administrators, these are some key educational questions educators should be focusing on:
- What are the benefits of emerging technologies such as mobile devices, gaming in education, online learning and open education resources?
- What would happen if emerging technology were used to get students interested in STEM careers?
- What are the barriers/challenges to using technology?
The reality is that many schools aren’t ready or willing to address these questions. The traditional educational view of drill and practice and test taking is a difficult concept to abandon or reconsider for many educators. This is where the disconnect begins. Alan November, a recognized leader in the field of educational technology, lists on his website comments from workshop attendees on the future of education.
One workshop participant stated, “Hope can overcome fear when barriers are torn down, by allowing students to engage in a forum they are comfortable they take ownership of their learning and the teachers will be willing to change from the role of information giver to facilitator.”
Now that we know more about the digital generation, is it possible as educators that we need to rethink who we are? We must re-evaluate the practice of teaching and learning and equip our students with the necessary tools to help them advance in this digital age. Acknowledging who these students are and meeting them on their current playing field will bridge the digital gap and connect us all to the 21st Century.
John Dewey, a well-known educational reformer, says it best, “If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.”
Next, we’ll delve more into the minds of this digital generation and explore what experts say about this extraordinary group of learners.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
AIM Exemplar!
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Editorial
21st Century Schools Fund could rescue failing districts
We liked Gov. Jennifer Granholm's 21st Century Schools Fund when she first proposed it in February. We like it even better now that a strong measure of accountability has been built in.
The proposal would provide $300 million to create small, responsive schools that will be required to graduate 80 percent of their students or lose their state funding.
The state Legislature should support the idea, with these conditions: The proposal must provide funding to innovative public charter school operators, an idea Granholm says she supports, and the accountability should have legal teeth. Legislators should build the 80 percent graduation requirement into state law and not leave enforcement to the discretion of the state school superintendent.
Lawmakers are being lobbied by the teachers union to strip charter schools of eligibility to participate in the program. That would be a serious mistake.
After all, the fund is largely modeled after charters. It's strikingly similar to Detroit's University Prep Academy, which promises to graduate 90 percent of its students. Such an outcomes-based approach is needed in Michigan schools.
Granholm's program would provide both the incentive and the funding for failing schools to transform. A bipartisan panel developed the program's guidelines. Eligible schools would have to be small, with no more than 450 students, and give principals full control of staffing decisions.
What's most noteworthy is its accountability mechanism. Only schools that graduate 80 percent of their students would be eligible to keep the $3 million grants, which could be used for breaking mammoth high schools into smaller ones or other education innovations. Schools that don't meet the graduation standard would have to pay back half of the money.
That sort of accountability is unheard of in state government.
Only schools with graduation rates of 65 percent or lower -- or academies located in such low-achieving neighborhoods -- would be eligible.
Last week the bill moved to the state Senate, where Appropriations Chairman Ron Jelinek, R-Three Oaks, is threatening to kill it, calling small schools no panacea. Jelinek seems to be missing the education crisis in Michigan, in which fewer than 75 percent of students graduate from high school and in urban districts fewer than one-third.
What we're doing now isn't working. The small schools model has shown success elsewhere and deserves a chance. So far, Jelinek hasn't offered a better idea for rescuing children who are being failed by the state's public schools.
The 21st Century Schools Fund is more than about size. Its principal-controlled schools would root out under-performing teachers. And the funding would give districts powerful leverage in seeking teacher union contract changes.
The 21st Century Schools Fund marks the sort of dramatic change Michigan needs to address the unacceptable failure of its public schools.
Editorial
21st Century Schools Fund could rescue failing districts
We liked Gov. Jennifer Granholm's 21st Century Schools Fund when she first proposed it in February. We like it even better now that a strong measure of accountability has been built in.
The proposal would provide $300 million to create small, responsive schools that will be required to graduate 80 percent of their students or lose their state funding.
The state Legislature should support the idea, with these conditions: The proposal must provide funding to innovative public charter school operators, an idea Granholm says she supports, and the accountability should have legal teeth. Legislators should build the 80 percent graduation requirement into state law and not leave enforcement to the discretion of the state school superintendent.
Lawmakers are being lobbied by the teachers union to strip charter schools of eligibility to participate in the program. That would be a serious mistake.
After all, the fund is largely modeled after charters. It's strikingly similar to Detroit's University Prep Academy, which promises to graduate 90 percent of its students. Such an outcomes-based approach is needed in Michigan schools.
Granholm's program would provide both the incentive and the funding for failing schools to transform. A bipartisan panel developed the program's guidelines. Eligible schools would have to be small, with no more than 450 students, and give principals full control of staffing decisions.
What's most noteworthy is its accountability mechanism. Only schools that graduate 80 percent of their students would be eligible to keep the $3 million grants, which could be used for breaking mammoth high schools into smaller ones or other education innovations. Schools that don't meet the graduation standard would have to pay back half of the money.
That sort of accountability is unheard of in state government.
Only schools with graduation rates of 65 percent or lower -- or academies located in such low-achieving neighborhoods -- would be eligible.
Last week the bill moved to the state Senate, where Appropriations Chairman Ron Jelinek, R-Three Oaks, is threatening to kill it, calling small schools no panacea. Jelinek seems to be missing the education crisis in Michigan, in which fewer than 75 percent of students graduate from high school and in urban districts fewer than one-third.
What we're doing now isn't working. The small schools model has shown success elsewhere and deserves a chance. So far, Jelinek hasn't offered a better idea for rescuing children who are being failed by the state's public schools.
The 21st Century Schools Fund is more than about size. Its principal-controlled schools would root out under-performing teachers. And the funding would give districts powerful leverage in seeking teacher union contract changes.
The 21st Century Schools Fund marks the sort of dramatic change Michigan needs to address the unacceptable failure of its public schools.
Monday, June 09, 2008
State Superintendent: On Change, Monsters, Technology and apparent alignment to our purpsoe!
There's No Monster Under the Bed
By John Bebow - June 6, 2008
By Mike Flanagan
State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Forget that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
We have nothing to fear but fear of change.
Michigan has begun its ascent to the top of the world's job chain with the most rigorous high school graduation requirements, an aggressive worker training program, and a growing realization that we need more college graduates in the high-demand careers of the 21st Century.
Education is the key to Michigan's economic future. But it is the future's education that takes us from the system we’ve had over the past millennium and prepares our state for not only greatness, but survival.
But change is difficult for those who are entrenched in the current system. That attitude may serve them, but it certainly doesn’t serve our students or state.
Michigan's new high school graduation requirements, called the Michigan Merit Curriculum, are heralded as groundbreaking, and were strongly supported by the education associations in Michigan, the State Board of Education, and state Legislature before Governor Jennifer Granholm enacted the new law in 2006.
The new law ensures that all Michigan students receive the high quality education they need and deserve, no matter what future career path they choose. The knowledge that students gain with the Michigan Merit Curriculum is needed today whether they go on to a post-secondary program or directly into the workplace after high school.
There is a campaign being waged to weaken and water down these new graduation requirements. It is a campaign based upon a fear of change.
Those who are unwilling to change claim that all kids aren't going on to college and don't need to take higher level math and science studies. They claim that thousands more high school students will drop out. They claim that school shouldn't be taught in "cookie-cutter" fashion. These claims are alarmist and are no way based in fact, and only meant to monger and perpetuate the fear and ignorance of change.
There is no need to alter the new high school graduation requirements. There is flexibility built into the law that addresses the needs of all students. The law allows for flexible schedules and support programs for students to learn the requirements through programs outside of the traditional courses. They can earn the graduation credits in a Career and Technical program, in an Early College program that is career focused, or in numerous other programs. The law also allows for a flexible pathway for Students with Disabilities, through a Personal Curriculum plan.
We want a Michigan high school diploma to mean that every student has received a bona fide high quality education upon which employers can understand and depend. We want a Michigan high school diploma to mean something, and that is globally competitive.
That is why we must resist every effort to wilt and water down our nationally-renowned graduation standards.
The key to success in this drive to the top is the willingness to accept the need to change. We can’t keep doing what we’ve always done and expect different outcomes.
For this rigorous curriculum to work, we need to retrofit our education system. We need a system that meets the needs of ALL students, in a manner that meets their needs and the needs of employers. Governor Granholm has proposed a 21st Century Schools Fund to develop small, more personal high schools that build the relationships that accentuate the relevance of the curriculum.
Accelerated technology sweeps over our society at a dizzying pace. Why do some students have the advantages of these technologies and others don’t? Why don't we have technology steering classroom instruction in our schools? If they are going to be using advancing technology in the workplace, shouldn't they be learning with it in school? Students use hand-held technology in every part of their daily lives except in education. No wonder they are bored in school.
The classroom of the past 50-plus years no longer is relevant to today's students – even as young as pre-Kindergarten. Recent studies reveal that it is a lack of real-life relevance in our schools that is frustrating our high school students and giving them a hopeless reason to drop out. We need to re-design how we deliver education, from early childhood through post-secondary, and we need to do it quickly and collaboratively.
Is this new curriculum really the monster under the bed? Or is it a fear of change on the part of some educators who don't want to take on the challenge of teaching every student in their school? Or is it parents who struggled in school and don’t feel their kids need it. Well, all kids do need it. I am convinced that all kids can learn algebra and chemistry, just like they can learn how to write grammatically correct and understand how their government works.
To overcome this fear, we need school administrators working with teachers—working with higher education—working with business—working with parents—working with private foundations to configure an education system that is inclusive, relevant, rigorous, accountable, and flexible enough to reach every child in Michigan.
This ultimate reform will need courage to succeed. Long-standing differences need to be put aside. Staunch, long-held beliefs need to be buried. Turf battles need to selflessly collapse. The only special interest group that matters is the students.
By John Bebow - June 6, 2008
By Mike Flanagan
State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Forget that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
We have nothing to fear but fear of change.
Michigan has begun its ascent to the top of the world's job chain with the most rigorous high school graduation requirements, an aggressive worker training program, and a growing realization that we need more college graduates in the high-demand careers of the 21st Century.
Education is the key to Michigan's economic future. But it is the future's education that takes us from the system we’ve had over the past millennium and prepares our state for not only greatness, but survival.
But change is difficult for those who are entrenched in the current system. That attitude may serve them, but it certainly doesn’t serve our students or state.
Michigan's new high school graduation requirements, called the Michigan Merit Curriculum, are heralded as groundbreaking, and were strongly supported by the education associations in Michigan, the State Board of Education, and state Legislature before Governor Jennifer Granholm enacted the new law in 2006.
The new law ensures that all Michigan students receive the high quality education they need and deserve, no matter what future career path they choose. The knowledge that students gain with the Michigan Merit Curriculum is needed today whether they go on to a post-secondary program or directly into the workplace after high school.
There is a campaign being waged to weaken and water down these new graduation requirements. It is a campaign based upon a fear of change.
Those who are unwilling to change claim that all kids aren't going on to college and don't need to take higher level math and science studies. They claim that thousands more high school students will drop out. They claim that school shouldn't be taught in "cookie-cutter" fashion. These claims are alarmist and are no way based in fact, and only meant to monger and perpetuate the fear and ignorance of change.
There is no need to alter the new high school graduation requirements. There is flexibility built into the law that addresses the needs of all students. The law allows for flexible schedules and support programs for students to learn the requirements through programs outside of the traditional courses. They can earn the graduation credits in a Career and Technical program, in an Early College program that is career focused, or in numerous other programs. The law also allows for a flexible pathway for Students with Disabilities, through a Personal Curriculum plan.
We want a Michigan high school diploma to mean that every student has received a bona fide high quality education upon which employers can understand and depend. We want a Michigan high school diploma to mean something, and that is globally competitive.
That is why we must resist every effort to wilt and water down our nationally-renowned graduation standards.
The key to success in this drive to the top is the willingness to accept the need to change. We can’t keep doing what we’ve always done and expect different outcomes.
For this rigorous curriculum to work, we need to retrofit our education system. We need a system that meets the needs of ALL students, in a manner that meets their needs and the needs of employers. Governor Granholm has proposed a 21st Century Schools Fund to develop small, more personal high schools that build the relationships that accentuate the relevance of the curriculum.
Accelerated technology sweeps over our society at a dizzying pace. Why do some students have the advantages of these technologies and others don’t? Why don't we have technology steering classroom instruction in our schools? If they are going to be using advancing technology in the workplace, shouldn't they be learning with it in school? Students use hand-held technology in every part of their daily lives except in education. No wonder they are bored in school.
The classroom of the past 50-plus years no longer is relevant to today's students – even as young as pre-Kindergarten. Recent studies reveal that it is a lack of real-life relevance in our schools that is frustrating our high school students and giving them a hopeless reason to drop out. We need to re-design how we deliver education, from early childhood through post-secondary, and we need to do it quickly and collaboratively.
Is this new curriculum really the monster under the bed? Or is it a fear of change on the part of some educators who don't want to take on the challenge of teaching every student in their school? Or is it parents who struggled in school and don’t feel their kids need it. Well, all kids do need it. I am convinced that all kids can learn algebra and chemistry, just like they can learn how to write grammatically correct and understand how their government works.
To overcome this fear, we need school administrators working with teachers—working with higher education—working with business—working with parents—working with private foundations to configure an education system that is inclusive, relevant, rigorous, accountable, and flexible enough to reach every child in Michigan.
This ultimate reform will need courage to succeed. Long-standing differences need to be put aside. Staunch, long-held beliefs need to be buried. Turf battles need to selflessly collapse. The only special interest group that matters is the students.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
AIM is TRANSFORMATIVE!
ROCHELLE RILEY
Woes, expectations mount for DPS chief
BY ROCHELLE RILEY • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • June 7, 2008
The Detroit Public Schools budget deficit has grown from $45 million to $65 million -- and could grow higher, Superintendent Connie Calloway said.
In a wide-ranging interview she outlined a plethora of problems, including an ongoing FBI investigation, a continuing inability to evaluate teachers and a majority of high schools not meeting standards, thus failing in their duties to students.
Calloway, ending her first year as superintendent, also confirmed, once and for all, that the DPS graduation rate is 38% -- a figure her staff members demanded that she call attention to after national media reported that the rate was 25%.
"Why would I embroil myself in a discussion about whether it's Type A failure or Type B failure?" she said she told them. "It's unacceptable."
In a two-hour interview, the first in a series about how to fix the city schools, Calloway was quick to point out that the district celebrated some high points this year, including sending the only high school band from Michigan to the Beijing Olympics.
But those kinds of achievements, dotted here and there, are buried under a mountain of incompetence, ineffectiveness and insanity that has kept her -- and the six superintendents before her -- from effectively tackling the district's two largest problems: improving learning and stanching an enrollment bleed that, by this fall, should send the district below 100,000 students for the first time since the 1917-18 school year.
Calloway says, to the ire of critics, that she has to shovel out all the muck before she can create a new district and new way of thinking, restructuring the schools to match the number of students and the needs of the region.
She also has to bring the district's budget and employee numbers in line. That's no easy task. The public schools have been a jobs factory for decades. The district's budget is about the same as it was eight years ago, even though the number of employees and students has dropped by a third. In 2000, the $1.2-billion budget paid for 21,203 employees and 154,648 students. Last school year the district spent the same amount of money to pay 15,535 employees and serve 105,000 students.
Calloway wants to conquer problems by raising standards and changing the school system from one that has no direction to one that trains the kinds of workers Michigan needs. But first, she must solve problems that include:
• A $65-million deficit on a billion-dollar budget. That amount may seem small, but it becomes important when it represents missed enrollment projections and a special account to keep teachers employed who, in other years, would have been laid off in keeping with enrollment decline. And Calloway neither closed schools nor laid off teachers this year.
• An FBI investigation into risk management that did not end with a guilty plea by former interim Superintendent Bill Coleman. She declined to release details.
• An instructional department that hasn't ordered textbooks for the start of the school year for 19 years, forcing students and teachers to work without books in the weeks before state standardized tests.
"Philadelphia has 229,000 students and 100 people in its curriculum, instruction and textbooks division," Calloway said. "Detroit has 105,000 students and 238 people in ours, and I couldn't find the one person in that department whose job it was to order the textbooks for children to have on the first day of school. Let's just say we have a new director of curriculum and instruction."
Twenty-two of the city's 27 high schools did not make required annual yearly progress, which means the district must make drastic changes in how those schools operate -- or lose money and students.
With those kinds of problems, the first question is: Can the school district be fixed? The second question is: Can Connie Calloway do it?
Calloway, her hair in a ponytail, her face devoid of makeup, said that the cleanup will soon be over and she can begin to change a system of 220 similar schools into a network of schools that principals run to meet different student needs.
"We're really looking forward to site-based management where the principal is responsible for the building, ordering supplies, having input as to who is in the building and choosing how to use their Title I money, whether they want to use money for an additional math teacher, or two parent internships, or an English as a Second Language class."
But just as important, Calloway wants the high schools to graduate instant workers.
"We're going to turn out a class of graduates who are relevant to what this community needs immediately," she said. "They will be employable.
"Why couldn't we be a site for an alternative energy school? Why wouldn't we be a training school to support the rail industry? Why wouldn't we have a design school to look at mass transportation? Why couldn't we train students in demographics?" she said. "Whatever the relevant needs are for the employment market, we are uniquely qualified to provide workers for those needs."
She has already planned a health curriculum that will help DPS turn out nurses to deal with a massive shortage.
Watching Calloway is like watching the president of a bank in Mayberry, N.C., moving to Detroit to fix an ailing financial center. She may be overwhelmed. She may be seeing things she never saw in her old district, whose student population is about one-fourth the size of Detroit's high school population.
But don't underestimate small-town wisdom, or the wherewithal of a veteran whose smile belies a tough constitution and who seems unbothered by critics.
She has the support of the federal and state government. Both have shown leniency in releasing funds without appropriate paperwork or extending deadlines to use funds.
She has the support of the mayor, who has put on hold plans to support charter schools across the city while she tries to transform the district.
She has the support of a business community weary of a failing school district, and informed parents who like hearing a superintendent talk as much about students as contracts.
But Calloway faces impatience from detractors, including some school board members who say that, after a year, she can no longer complain about the district she inherited and instead needs to present concrete plans to fix problems.
"I've lost patience with the excuse that 'it was on fire before I came,' " said the Rev. Jimmy Womack, the board member who asked about the deficit before it was announced and was told there was none.
Womack, for instance, reminds that the school district laid off teachers and closed schools three years in a row before Calloway's arrival. In her first year, Calloway did neither and did not cut spending. So even with the avalanche of staggering problems, Womack said, she should have known the numbers would not add up.
"She may be a consummate educator, but she is not a good superintendent," Womack said. "Yes, you inherited a district in crisis. Yes, you inherited a district in bad need of repair. But at some point, you have to come up with solutions and take responsibility for those things that were created under your watch."
Calloway said she has decided to fix the district slowly -- the same way that it fell into such bad shape. She plans to do it by raising standards and creating something that those who want to buy into can celebrate and those who don't can leave.
"I haven't fired anyone -- yet. But many people have left voluntarily," she said.
If Connie Calloway can transform the schools, it will be nothing short of the miracle that Detroit parents and business leaders have sought for years.
She says she's up to the job. She has to be, she said, or the state will fail.
"We have virtually shaped the city and the state," she said. "We are the second largest employer in the state of Michigan and have a direct impact on shaping the future of Detroit and of Michigan. Every year, we graduate a cohort of students who will either add to our economic well-being or, if we don't do our jobs well, we will be responsible for supporting.
"Detroit has to do something," she said. "If we don't, we will continue to lose jobs, continue to lose enrollment, and we will fail our commitment to the city and state. We will fail our children."
Woes, expectations mount for DPS chief
BY ROCHELLE RILEY • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • June 7, 2008
The Detroit Public Schools budget deficit has grown from $45 million to $65 million -- and could grow higher, Superintendent Connie Calloway said.
In a wide-ranging interview she outlined a plethora of problems, including an ongoing FBI investigation, a continuing inability to evaluate teachers and a majority of high schools not meeting standards, thus failing in their duties to students.
Calloway, ending her first year as superintendent, also confirmed, once and for all, that the DPS graduation rate is 38% -- a figure her staff members demanded that she call attention to after national media reported that the rate was 25%.
"Why would I embroil myself in a discussion about whether it's Type A failure or Type B failure?" she said she told them. "It's unacceptable."
In a two-hour interview, the first in a series about how to fix the city schools, Calloway was quick to point out that the district celebrated some high points this year, including sending the only high school band from Michigan to the Beijing Olympics.
But those kinds of achievements, dotted here and there, are buried under a mountain of incompetence, ineffectiveness and insanity that has kept her -- and the six superintendents before her -- from effectively tackling the district's two largest problems: improving learning and stanching an enrollment bleed that, by this fall, should send the district below 100,000 students for the first time since the 1917-18 school year.
Calloway says, to the ire of critics, that she has to shovel out all the muck before she can create a new district and new way of thinking, restructuring the schools to match the number of students and the needs of the region.
She also has to bring the district's budget and employee numbers in line. That's no easy task. The public schools have been a jobs factory for decades. The district's budget is about the same as it was eight years ago, even though the number of employees and students has dropped by a third. In 2000, the $1.2-billion budget paid for 21,203 employees and 154,648 students. Last school year the district spent the same amount of money to pay 15,535 employees and serve 105,000 students.
Calloway wants to conquer problems by raising standards and changing the school system from one that has no direction to one that trains the kinds of workers Michigan needs. But first, she must solve problems that include:
• A $65-million deficit on a billion-dollar budget. That amount may seem small, but it becomes important when it represents missed enrollment projections and a special account to keep teachers employed who, in other years, would have been laid off in keeping with enrollment decline. And Calloway neither closed schools nor laid off teachers this year.
• An FBI investigation into risk management that did not end with a guilty plea by former interim Superintendent Bill Coleman. She declined to release details.
• An instructional department that hasn't ordered textbooks for the start of the school year for 19 years, forcing students and teachers to work without books in the weeks before state standardized tests.
"Philadelphia has 229,000 students and 100 people in its curriculum, instruction and textbooks division," Calloway said. "Detroit has 105,000 students and 238 people in ours, and I couldn't find the one person in that department whose job it was to order the textbooks for children to have on the first day of school. Let's just say we have a new director of curriculum and instruction."
Twenty-two of the city's 27 high schools did not make required annual yearly progress, which means the district must make drastic changes in how those schools operate -- or lose money and students.
With those kinds of problems, the first question is: Can the school district be fixed? The second question is: Can Connie Calloway do it?
Calloway, her hair in a ponytail, her face devoid of makeup, said that the cleanup will soon be over and she can begin to change a system of 220 similar schools into a network of schools that principals run to meet different student needs.
"We're really looking forward to site-based management where the principal is responsible for the building, ordering supplies, having input as to who is in the building and choosing how to use their Title I money, whether they want to use money for an additional math teacher, or two parent internships, or an English as a Second Language class."
But just as important, Calloway wants the high schools to graduate instant workers.
"We're going to turn out a class of graduates who are relevant to what this community needs immediately," she said. "They will be employable.
"Why couldn't we be a site for an alternative energy school? Why wouldn't we be a training school to support the rail industry? Why wouldn't we have a design school to look at mass transportation? Why couldn't we train students in demographics?" she said. "Whatever the relevant needs are for the employment market, we are uniquely qualified to provide workers for those needs."
She has already planned a health curriculum that will help DPS turn out nurses to deal with a massive shortage.
Watching Calloway is like watching the president of a bank in Mayberry, N.C., moving to Detroit to fix an ailing financial center. She may be overwhelmed. She may be seeing things she never saw in her old district, whose student population is about one-fourth the size of Detroit's high school population.
But don't underestimate small-town wisdom, or the wherewithal of a veteran whose smile belies a tough constitution and who seems unbothered by critics.
She has the support of the federal and state government. Both have shown leniency in releasing funds without appropriate paperwork or extending deadlines to use funds.
She has the support of the mayor, who has put on hold plans to support charter schools across the city while she tries to transform the district.
She has the support of a business community weary of a failing school district, and informed parents who like hearing a superintendent talk as much about students as contracts.
But Calloway faces impatience from detractors, including some school board members who say that, after a year, she can no longer complain about the district she inherited and instead needs to present concrete plans to fix problems.
"I've lost patience with the excuse that 'it was on fire before I came,' " said the Rev. Jimmy Womack, the board member who asked about the deficit before it was announced and was told there was none.
Womack, for instance, reminds that the school district laid off teachers and closed schools three years in a row before Calloway's arrival. In her first year, Calloway did neither and did not cut spending. So even with the avalanche of staggering problems, Womack said, she should have known the numbers would not add up.
"She may be a consummate educator, but she is not a good superintendent," Womack said. "Yes, you inherited a district in crisis. Yes, you inherited a district in bad need of repair. But at some point, you have to come up with solutions and take responsibility for those things that were created under your watch."
Calloway said she has decided to fix the district slowly -- the same way that it fell into such bad shape. She plans to do it by raising standards and creating something that those who want to buy into can celebrate and those who don't can leave.
"I haven't fired anyone -- yet. But many people have left voluntarily," she said.
If Connie Calloway can transform the schools, it will be nothing short of the miracle that Detroit parents and business leaders have sought for years.
She says she's up to the job. She has to be, she said, or the state will fail.
"We have virtually shaped the city and the state," she said. "We are the second largest employer in the state of Michigan and have a direct impact on shaping the future of Detroit and of Michigan. Every year, we graduate a cohort of students who will either add to our economic well-being or, if we don't do our jobs well, we will be responsible for supporting.
"Detroit has to do something," she said. "If we don't, we will continue to lose jobs, continue to lose enrollment, and we will fail our commitment to the city and state. We will fail our children."
Monday, June 02, 2008
Part of the Transformative Equation?
Factor in a stronger state effort to improve students' algebra scores
June 2, 2008
Michigan lawmakers shouldn't be so hasty to second-guess the value of algebra as part of the state's more rigorous high school graduation standards.
The temptation is growing, because thousands of high school freshmen are failing Algebra I, a cornerstone of the new nationally hailed curriculum.
Of course, it's within reason to ask, if students are stumbling out of the gate in ninth grade, how will they possibly make it to the graduation finish line when even tougher classes await them?
The Class of 2011 will be the first to graduate under a requirement that all students complete four years of math, including Algebra I and Algebra II.
Those standards made sense when the Legislature approved them, and they do today.
Reverting to more relaxed math standards ignores the deficits that Michigan has already handed generations of graduates and dropouts.
Second-guessing algebra would be tantamount to poking a hole in what is supposed to be an academic life raft. Math is too clearly interwoven into virtually every job of the future to even be negotiable.
There are enough imaginative ways to teach it so that every mind can grasp at least the fundamentals.
The best move legislators can make on behalf of struggling students is questioning and demanding wider access to tutoring and early individualized student assessments. Struggling students need to be identified before the point of failure.
Where are the data and the plan to deal with inadequate preparation and innovation in elementary and middle schools? These schools are too key to the success of the new high school curriculum to let get a pass on future failures.
Indentifying the starting point of students' struggle with math is one way to make algebra accessible again. It's also the direction legislators should head to help Michigan make education in general relevant again.
June 2, 2008
Michigan lawmakers shouldn't be so hasty to second-guess the value of algebra as part of the state's more rigorous high school graduation standards.
The temptation is growing, because thousands of high school freshmen are failing Algebra I, a cornerstone of the new nationally hailed curriculum.
Of course, it's within reason to ask, if students are stumbling out of the gate in ninth grade, how will they possibly make it to the graduation finish line when even tougher classes await them?
The Class of 2011 will be the first to graduate under a requirement that all students complete four years of math, including Algebra I and Algebra II.
Those standards made sense when the Legislature approved them, and they do today.
Reverting to more relaxed math standards ignores the deficits that Michigan has already handed generations of graduates and dropouts.
Second-guessing algebra would be tantamount to poking a hole in what is supposed to be an academic life raft. Math is too clearly interwoven into virtually every job of the future to even be negotiable.
There are enough imaginative ways to teach it so that every mind can grasp at least the fundamentals.
The best move legislators can make on behalf of struggling students is questioning and demanding wider access to tutoring and early individualized student assessments. Struggling students need to be identified before the point of failure.
Where are the data and the plan to deal with inadequate preparation and innovation in elementary and middle schools? These schools are too key to the success of the new high school curriculum to let get a pass on future failures.
Indentifying the starting point of students' struggle with math is one way to make algebra accessible again. It's also the direction legislators should head to help Michigan make education in general relevant again.
AIM for 21st Century Small Schools Initiative
Posted: Friday, 30 May 2008 11:11AM
Gov Asks For Small High Schools, Renewable Power Standard
Gov. Jennifer Granholm offered business a share of the savings in a plan to reduce the number of state prison inmates in her speech Friday at the Detroit Regional Chamber's Mackinac Policy Conference.
And she proposed a "21st Century School Fund" to create 100 small, academically challenging high schools across the state.
Granholm began by reviewing Michigan's economic challenge -- the loss of 330,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000 as part of a national flight of manufacturing jobs overseas, and Big Three market share falling from 70 percent in 1990 to 45 percent today.
But she also pointed to dozens of big investments in the state in recent years by companies in her targeted areas of alternative energy, the life sciences, advanced manufacturing and homeland security. And she touted her continuing overseas investment missions, especially alternative energy efforts in Sweden.
Granholm said she was asking the Legislature and the crowd at Mackinac to back three initiatives -- the 21sts Century School Fund, a mandate that 10 percent of the state's power must come from renewable sources by 2015, and the prison reform plan.
Granholm said the small high school plan is part of an overall effort to "attack, declare war, on the dropout problem." She said Michigan "must replace those large, impersonal high schools that fail with small, challenging high schools that work." She also backed more "middle colleges," five-year high schools that graduate their students with an associate's degree or other usable career credential. She said the 21st Century Schools Fund would require no new taxes, only a redirection of existing revenue.
More broadly, Granholm said of education, the state needs to flip education on its head to meet the needs of employers. "We don't want people to get degrees in French or political science," she said. "Those are my degrees, so I can say that. We want people to get degrees in areas we need," such as health care.
Granholm also asked -- as she did last year -- for the renewable energy standard, which has been tied up in the Legislature over complaints that it remonopolizes the state's electric market, and doesn't go far enough to mandate renewable energy.
However, Granholm said the lack of the standard means Michigan is losing out on massive investments that are occurring elsewhere in renewable energy.
Granholm also touted her record as a cost-cutter, pointing out that she's cut more out of state budgets than any Michigan governor in history, that Michigan is now 46th in state employees per capita, and that the state is leading the nation in putting state business online.
But she said one area of state government is skyrocketing in staff and costs: corrections. She said Michigan's corrections staff has grown from 5 percent of state employment to more than 20 percent, and that Michigan incarcerates its citizens at a rate far higher than its neighbors -- with no appreciable effect on crime rates.
Granholm, a former prosecutor, said that "I will not allow violent criminals to be released into society, period." But she said there are ways to trim the prison population by selectively releasing low-risk inmates. And she proposed sharing any savings on a one-third basis between law enforcement, higher education and a reduction in the Michigan Business Tax surcharge.
In opening her speech, Granholm joked about her recent surgery for bowel obstruction, saying she pleaded with the doctor not to use the word "bowel" in public comments, and that state Republicans were in no way responsible for the "obstruction." And, she said, the last thing she remembered before the anesthesia took her under was her surgeon saying, "You know, I'm a Republican..."
© MMVIII WWJ Radio, All Rights Reserved.
Gov Asks For Small High Schools, Renewable Power Standard
Gov. Jennifer Granholm offered business a share of the savings in a plan to reduce the number of state prison inmates in her speech Friday at the Detroit Regional Chamber's Mackinac Policy Conference.
And she proposed a "21st Century School Fund" to create 100 small, academically challenging high schools across the state.
Granholm began by reviewing Michigan's economic challenge -- the loss of 330,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000 as part of a national flight of manufacturing jobs overseas, and Big Three market share falling from 70 percent in 1990 to 45 percent today.
But she also pointed to dozens of big investments in the state in recent years by companies in her targeted areas of alternative energy, the life sciences, advanced manufacturing and homeland security. And she touted her continuing overseas investment missions, especially alternative energy efforts in Sweden.
Granholm said she was asking the Legislature and the crowd at Mackinac to back three initiatives -- the 21sts Century School Fund, a mandate that 10 percent of the state's power must come from renewable sources by 2015, and the prison reform plan.
Granholm said the small high school plan is part of an overall effort to "attack, declare war, on the dropout problem." She said Michigan "must replace those large, impersonal high schools that fail with small, challenging high schools that work." She also backed more "middle colleges," five-year high schools that graduate their students with an associate's degree or other usable career credential. She said the 21st Century Schools Fund would require no new taxes, only a redirection of existing revenue.
More broadly, Granholm said of education, the state needs to flip education on its head to meet the needs of employers. "We don't want people to get degrees in French or political science," she said. "Those are my degrees, so I can say that. We want people to get degrees in areas we need," such as health care.
Granholm also asked -- as she did last year -- for the renewable energy standard, which has been tied up in the Legislature over complaints that it remonopolizes the state's electric market, and doesn't go far enough to mandate renewable energy.
However, Granholm said the lack of the standard means Michigan is losing out on massive investments that are occurring elsewhere in renewable energy.
Granholm also touted her record as a cost-cutter, pointing out that she's cut more out of state budgets than any Michigan governor in history, that Michigan is now 46th in state employees per capita, and that the state is leading the nation in putting state business online.
But she said one area of state government is skyrocketing in staff and costs: corrections. She said Michigan's corrections staff has grown from 5 percent of state employment to more than 20 percent, and that Michigan incarcerates its citizens at a rate far higher than its neighbors -- with no appreciable effect on crime rates.
Granholm, a former prosecutor, said that "I will not allow violent criminals to be released into society, period." But she said there are ways to trim the prison population by selectively releasing low-risk inmates. And she proposed sharing any savings on a one-third basis between law enforcement, higher education and a reduction in the Michigan Business Tax surcharge.
In opening her speech, Granholm joked about her recent surgery for bowel obstruction, saying she pleaded with the doctor not to use the word "bowel" in public comments, and that state Republicans were in no way responsible for the "obstruction." And, she said, the last thing she remembered before the anesthesia took her under was her surgeon saying, "You know, I'm a Republican..."
© MMVIII WWJ Radio, All Rights Reserved.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Science and the ART of Transformation!
Put a Little Science in Your Life
A COUPLE of years ago I received a letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as we’ve all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I’d written had become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces physicists’ search for nature’s deepest laws — the soldier’s letter might strike you as, well, odd.
But it’s not. Rather, it speaks to the powerful role science can play in giving life context and meaning. At the same time, the soldier’s letter emphasized something I’ve increasingly come to believe: our educational system fails to teach science in a way that allows students to integrate it into their lives.
Allow me a moment to explain.
When we consider the ubiquity of cellphones, iPods, personal computers and the Internet, it’s easy to see how science (and the technology to which it leads) is woven into the fabric of our day-to-day activities. When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality of our lives. When we assess the state of the world, and identify looming challenges like climate change, global pandemics, security threats and diminishing resources, we don’t hesitate in turning to science to gauge the problems and find solutions.
And when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon — stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology — we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there’s simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future.
These are the standard — and enormously important — reasons many would give in explaining why science matters.
But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.
As a practicing scientist, I know this from my own work and study. But I also know that you don’t have to be a scientist for science to be transformative. I’ve seen children’s eyes light up as I’ve told them about black holes and the Big Bang. I’ve spoken with high school dropouts who’ve stumbled on popular science books about the human genome project, and then returned to school with newfound purpose. And in that letter from Iraq, the soldier told me how learning about relativity and quantum physics in the dusty and dangerous environs of greater Baghdad kept him going because it revealed a deeper reality of which we’re all a part.
It’s striking that science is still widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the “real” world in the form of technological or medical advances. In reality, science is a language of hope and inspiration, providing discoveries that fire the imagination and instill a sense of connection to our lives and our world.
If science isn’t your strong suit — and for many it’s not — this side of science is something you may have rarely if ever experienced. I’ve spoken with so many people over the years whose encounters with science in school left them thinking of it as cold, distant and intimidating. They happily use the innovations that science makes possible, but feel that the science itself is just not relevant to their lives. What a shame.
Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension.
It’s one thing to go outside on a crisp, clear night and marvel at a sky full of stars. It’s another to marvel not only at the spectacle but to recognize that those stars are the result of exceedingly ordered conditions 13.7 billion years ago at the moment of the Big Bang. It’s another still to understand how those stars act as nuclear furnaces that supply the universe with carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, the raw material of life as we know it.
And it’s yet another level of experience to realize that those stars account for less than 4 percent of what’s out there — the rest being of an unknown composition, so-called dark matter and energy, which researchers are now vigorously trying to divine.
As every parent knows, children begin life as uninhibited, unabashed explorers of the unknown. From the time we can walk and talk, we want to know what things are and how they work — we begin life as little scientists. But most of us quickly lose our intrinsic scientific passion. And it’s a profound loss.
A great many studies have focused on this problem, identifying important opportunities for improving science education. Recommendations have ranged from increasing the level of training for science teachers to curriculum reforms.
But most of these studies (and their suggestions) avoid an overarching systemic issue: in teaching our students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science’s underlying technical details.
In fact, many students I’ve spoken to have little sense of the big questions those technical details collectively try to answer: Where did the universe come from? How did life originate? How does the brain give rise to consciousness? Like a music curriculum that requires its students to practice scales while rarely if ever inspiring them by playing the great masterpieces, this way of teaching science squanders the chance to make students sit up in their chairs and say, “Wow, that’s science?”
In physics, just to give a sense of the raw material that’s available to be leveraged, the most revolutionary of advances have happened in the last 100 years — special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics — a symphony of discoveries that changed our conception of reality. More recently, the last 10 years have witnessed an upheaval in our understanding of the universe’s composition, yielding a wholly new prediction for what the cosmos will be like in the far future.
These are paradigm-shaking developments. But rare is the high school class, and rarer still is the middle school class, in which these breakthroughs are introduced. It’s much the same story in classes for biology, chemistry and mathematics.
At the root of this pedagogical approach is a firm belief in the vertical nature of science: you must master A before moving on to B. When A happened a few hundred years ago, it’s a long climb to the modern era. Certainly, when it comes to teaching the technicalities — solving this equation, balancing that reaction, grasping the discrete parts of the cell — the verticality of science is unassailable.
But science is so much more than its technical details. And with careful attention to presentation, cutting-edge insights and discoveries can be clearly and faithfully communicated to students independent of those details; in fact, those insights and discoveries are precisely the ones that can drive a young student to want to learn the details. We rob science education of life when we focus solely on results and seek to train students to solve problems and recite facts without a commensurate emphasis on transporting them out beyond the stars.
Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that’s been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings. Science needs to be taught to the young and communicated to the mature in a manner that captures this drama. We must embark on a cultural shift that places science in its rightful place alongside music, art and literature as an indispensable part of what makes life worth living.
It’s the birthright of every child, it’s a necessity for every adult, to look out on the world, as the soldier in Iraq did, and see that the wonder of the cosmos transcends everything that divides us.
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