Sunday, April 26, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The Crucial Role of Design
Commentary
Why We're Still 'At Risk'
The Legacy of Five Faulty Assumptions
Our new president has looked into the abyss of our current economic, energy, environmental, and health-care policies and promises to challenge the fundamental assumptions on which they are based. He admonishes us to join him in thinking and acting boldly.
We can only hope he feels the same way about education policy.
After nearly 25 years of intensive effort, we have failed to fix our ailing public schools and stem the “rising tide of mediocrity” chronicled in 1983 in A Nation at Risk. This is mainly because the report misdiagnosed the problem, and because the major assumptions on which current education policy—and most reform efforts—have been based are either wrong or unrealistic.
Most of the people running our public education systems and leading the reform movement are knowledgeable, dedicated, and experienced. But they are so committed to a strategy of standards-based accountability that different ideas are marginalized or stifled completely.
One could write a book about each of the five major assumptions on which education policy rests, but in this limited space, a few brief paragraphs will have to suffice.
Assumption One: The best way to improve student performance and close achievement gaps is to establish rigorous content standards and a core curriculum for all schools—preferably on a national basis.
Standards-based accountability has been the national school reform strategy for nearly two decades. It is essentially a “get tough” strategy made tougher by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. By all measures, it has not lived up to its promise, and the reason is that it is based on the premise that if we demand high performance and educational excellence, schools, teachers, and students will somehow “just do it.” It is a strategy that basically expects schools to be highly structured institutions with uniform practices and policies, where a common version of education is delivered to all students.
Standardization and uniformity may work with cars and computers, but it doesn’t work with humans. Today’s student body is the most diverse in history. An education system that treats all students alike denies that reality.
The issue is not whether standards are necessary. Schools without standards are unacceptable. Society should indeed hold high expectations for all students, but those expectations should reflect the values of the family and society—doing one’s best, obeying the rules, and mutual respect—and not simply the archaic academic demands of college-admissions offices. We should be preparing young people for life, not just for college.
Standards don’t prepare students for anything; they are a framework of expectations and educational objectives. Without the organization and processes to achieve them, they are worthless. States have devoted nearly 20 years to formulating standards to be accomplished by a conventional school model that is incapable of meeting them. We will make real progress only when we realize that our problem in education is not one of performance but one of design.
Assumption Two: Standardized-test scores are an accurate measure of student learning and should be used to determine promotion and graduation.
The standards-based-accountability strategy, not surprisingly, has led to the alarming overuse of standardized tests, even in the opinion of some test-makers and psychometricians.
Some measures of accountability are necessary in any endeavor that spends public money and is responsible for an important societal mission. But is testing all students virtually every year really necessary to determine whether the system is working effectively and the money spent well? If test scores are the accepted indicator, schools have not been meeting the needs of students for the past couple of decades. So why spend more money and time on constant testing to tell us what we already know—especially when standardized tests do a poor job of measuring real learning, don’t assess most of the characteristics valued by parents and the larger society, and contribute almost nothing to the process of teaching and learning.
If the purpose of standardized testing is to measure student achievement so teachers can help individual students learn better, it fails miserably. Standardized-test scores tend, instead, to say more about a student’s socioeconomic status than about his or her abilities. If testing is to have a positive effect on student achievement, it should be formative testing that is an integral part of classroom teaching and learning.
The most disturbing aspect of today’s standardized testing grows out of the "get tough" strategy’s emphasis on high-risk tests. Using standardized-test scores to determine promotion and graduation is unconscionable. A recent Texas study confirms the negative impact of high-risk testing on students. The report notes that 135,000 high school students drop out each year, and that “the state’s high-stakes accountability system has a direct impact on the severity of the dropout problem.” Teachers complain that they are compelled to devote valuable instructional time to preparing students for the test. They argue that the demand of ubiquitous accountability testing tends to narrow the curriculum. And they say that by teaching to the test, as they are expected to do, they are forced to turn education into a game of Trivial Pursuit.
Except in school, people are judged by their work and their behavior. Few of the business and political leaders who advocate widespread use of standardized testing have taken a standardized test since leaving college. It is probably a safe bet that the majority of them, even after 16 years of formal education, could not pass the tests they require students to pass.
"But I took those courses years ago," they say. "I can’t remember all that stuff." Exactly.
A common justification for standardized testing is that it’s the best proxy for student achievement we have until something better comes along. The performance-based assessment used in many charter schools (and now statewide in Rhode Island and New Hampshire) is better.
Assumption Three: We need to put highly qualified teachers in every classroom to assure educational excellence.
A great idea! If we could do that, we’d be a long way to solving our education problem.
But it won’t happen for decades, if ever.
As a host of studies over the past 25 years have revealed, the teacher pipeline is broken at several points. We don’t attract enough of the brightest young people into teaching; we don’t prepare them well for the job; many find their working conditions and compensation unacceptable; and teachers are not treated as professionals.
Highly effective teachers are more crucial to the success of standards-based accountability than anything else. Without enough of them, the strategy can’t work. As any reasonable person would have anticipated, we missed the NCLB goal of having a highly qualified teacher in every classroom by 2006. Improving teaching is as difficult as improving student achievement.
More accountability is again seen as a major part of the solution: more-rigorous certification, tougher teacher evaluation, and higher teacher pay. But certification guarantees a high-quality teacher about as much as a driver’s license guarantees a good driver. Tougher evaluation would help get rid of ineffective teachers, but it’s hard to see how it would produce more good teachers. Higher pay is fine, but it is no more likely to improve teaching any time soon than raising pilots’ pay would make flying safer.
If we want effective teaching, we should change the ways schools are organized and operated, and shift the teacher’s primary role from an academic instructor to an adviser, someone who helps students manage their own education.
A rational system would redesign itself and make organizational and procedural changes that optimize the positive influence of good teachers and minimize the negatives. Creating opportunities for teachers to work together, to teach in teams, to share in professional development, and to be more involved in educational decisionmaking are ways to bring out the best in teachers.
Again, there are examples on the ground that such an approach works.
Assumption Four: The United States should require all students to take algebra in the 8th grade and higher-order math in high school in order to increase the number of scientists and engineers in this country and thus make us more competitive in the global economy.
This assumption has become almost an obsession in policymaking arenas today. Requiring every student to study higher-order math is a waste of resources and cruel and unusual punishment for legions of students. It diverts attention away from the real problem: our failure to help kids become proficient readers and master basic arithmetic.
The United States must indeed produce more scientists and engineers to compete in a global economy. But it is fallacious to assume that we can accomplish that by requiring every student to take algebra in the 8th grade and higher-order math through high school. It is like believing that by requiring high school students to take a few courses in painting, we will make them all artists.
Most young people who go into science and engineering are well on their way by the time they start high school, because they become hooked on science or math in the early grades and do well in mathematics in elementary and middle school. Some will go on to become scientists and engineers; others will not. To expect otherwise is unreasonable.
If the nation wants more scientists and engineers, then educators need to find ways to awaken and nourish a passion for those subjects well before high school, and then offer students every opportunity to pursue their interest as far as they wish.
Assumption Five: The student-dropout rate can be reduced by ending social promotion, funding dropout-prevention programs, and raising the mandatory attendance age.
Arguably, the dropout rate is the most telling evidence of public school failure. Nearly a third of entering high school freshmen drop out. The percentage is higher for blacks, Hispanics, and English-language learners. And in many urban districts, the dropout rate borders on the horrendous.
Most students drop out of school for legitimate reasons, and trying to talk them out of it with “just stay in” programs, or forcing them to attend for an additional year or two, makes no sense. The “get tough” strategy of high standards, rigorous curricula, and more testing has not lowered the dropout rate and, as the Texas study cited shows, probably increases it.
Dropping out of school is not an impulsive decision. The process begins long before high school, often by the 4th or 5th grade, when courses begin to be content-heavy and students can no longer get by with the ability to “decode” English, but must be able to understand what they read. If scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are reliable measures, only about a quarter of 4th graders can read proficiently, and the percentage declines in the 8th and 12th grades.
Students who fail early and often come to accept failure as inevitable and are on the path to dropping out as soon as they can. Probably a third of students who plan to drop out have made up their minds by the 8th grade and mark time until they can legally leave school.
To reduce the dropout rate, we must first understand and accept why students choose to leave school. The reasons most often given are boredom, personal or family problems, and inability to understand and do the work required. A smaller percentage of students drop out because they find school to be a waste of time; these often are young people with the ability to succeed in school but who find that what is offered in the classroom doesn’t interest or challenge them. (Some years ago, a survey of students asked what word they would use to define school. “Boring” won hands down.)
The key to graduating is learning; the key to learning is motivation. There are innovative public schools that graduate most of their students because they personalize education, encourage students to pursue their interests and build on that enthusiasm, and offer multiple opportunities to learn instead of a one-size-fits-all education.
President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan should open a second front in this war on mediocrity and failure.
We need to continue making every effort to improve the existing public schools. They will enroll most of our young people for many years to come.
Simultaneously, we should pursue a parallel strategy of creating new, innovative schools and giving them the autonomy and resources to explore new ideas. These new schools can be a much-needed research-and-development sector for the conventional system.
Secretary Duncan should support a national effort patterned after Renaissance 2010, the program he launched in Chicago to replace failing schools with new, diverse models different from conventional schools and from each other.
It is neither wise nor necessary to bet the future on a single reform strategy, especially when hundreds, perhaps thousands, of schools are demonstrating every day that there are other and more successful ways to help children learn and succeed.
But we can pursue two strategies only if we act to assure that the dominant strategy does not smother the fledgling movement in its crib.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Yin and Yang turns Outside In
Commentary
Traditional public schools fail urban students
Alternative approaches are working
Peter Plastrik and Margaret Trimer-Hartley
Two big factors driving the Detroit school district's financial crisis won't be solved by cleaning up the books.
First, the district's schools don't work. They produce stunningly bad results -- far more dropouts than graduates, and graduates who aren't academically ready for college or careers. This failure generates the black flight from the city and into charter schools and nearby suburban districts.
Second, governance of the district is unaccountable for results. The faces may change -- new board members, new superintendents -- but the culture doesn't. It's a culture of low expectations and denial of the brutal facts of performance. There is no capacity within the district's leadership to redesign the school system to radically improve student achievement.
Big city school systems across the country -- Washington, D.C., New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles -- are mired in persistently poor performance.
Large-scale innovations in school design and school governance point the way to better education in those communities.
Even in Detroit -- where the education and political establishment clings to the old, failing model it controls -- these innovations are taking root.
The first innovation is in the redesign of schools for low-income African-American and Latino students so they will beat the odds by staying in school, graduating and going to college.
This kind of restructuring isn't about engaging in curriculum battles, buying new textbooks or toughening high school graduation requirements. Such actions alone won't make a significant difference in urban school graduation rates or student learning.
What does work and what is already being done here and elsewhere is a radical makeover of schools to engage low-income, at-risk students in learning and give them the nurturing and support often missing at home.
This redesign creates a new kind of school that uses teachers, curriculum, performance data, community resources, time and technology in new ways to engage students and make schools accountable for learning.
The general admissions schools we work with -- University Preparatory Academy (UPA), a K-12 system with 1,600 students, and University Prep Science & Math, a 6-12 charter system that opened this year with 162 sixth- and seventh-graders -- are just two examples of the model working in Detroit.
They are small schools of 125-500 students with small class sizes of 16-18 students. They offer every child powerful and enduring relationships with teachers and provide mentors from the world of work and other parts of the community. They customize student learning, tailoring lessons and projects to each kid's skill level, learning style, maturity and interests, rather than using one-size-fits-all curricula and textbooks.
At UPA and the science and math academy, every teacher is expected to know his or her students as well as they would know their own children. A big part of their job is to dig deeply, ask questions and figure out who their students are, what makes them tick and what makes them trip.
"We have ongoing -- daily -- discussions about whether we are doing enough to meet the needs of all of our students -- the low and high achievers and the unengaged," says Shawn Hill, principal of the science and math middle school. "The day that we pass the buck, give up on a child or stop asking what else we can do is the day we should close the school."
The most successful urban schools are designed to not only meet the needs of children who come to school hungry, tired, abused, angry or otherwise unprepared to learn, but to overcome them. Rather than write kids off because they are not motivated by traditional schooling, these schools use nurturing, sustained relationships to figure out what will excite them.
They know that the problems students and families have in high poverty communities are not excuses, but they are reasons why traditional school strategies don't work.
In addition to individualization, high-performing urban schools also hold high expectations for all students and usually offer college preparation as the expected path for all. There is no general education track. The schools rely heavily on partnerships with businesses and other institutions in the community to provide students with internships and experiences in diverse real-world settings.
These schools come in many varieties from college prep to science or arts-focused. They have different grade configurations, instructional approaches and student discipline codes. But no matter what their twist, a growing number of schools -- mostly charters -- that embrace the new model are performing much better than urban districts, and some are even reaching suburban-school level results.
New forms of governance
The second innovation in urban education is in school governance. Effective school governance systems allow schools to focus on student achievement and support site-based decision-making rather than central control.
Education reformers in Detroit and elsewhere have broken the iron grip of locally elected school boards and freed themselves from meddlesome and meaningless politics and personal agendas.
When Adrian Fenty became mayor of Washington, D.C., in 2007, he immediately got the City Council to abolish the city's elected school board.
"There are a lot of things you can do to improve urban education," Fenty says, "but getting rid of the school board is at the top of the list. When you have nine people who are going to vote on every little thing, let alone the controversial things, nothing's going to get done."
Responsibility for the new schools rests in many hands, including mayors in New York (1.1 million students) and Chicago (400,000 students), as well as authorizers of charter schools outside of traditional districts -- universities and community colleges, county governments, Indian tribes, state legislatures, state boards of education and nonprofit organizations.
• In Michigan, the second largest school system, with 30,000 students, is not a traditional district, but the 58 charter schools authorized by Central Michigan University.
• In Los Angeles, the nation's second largest school district, the mayor and school board created a nonprofit that controls 10 schools (18,000 students) that were in the school district until their teachers voted to join the new partnership.
• In New Orleans, a post-Hurricane Katrina shakeup by state government left the traditional school district with only a small fraction of the students it used to have and put the rest into the care of charter schools authorized by the state, or "recovery district" schools run directly by the state. Now charter schools serve a majority of the city's students.
• In Houston, two charter school networks, Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and YES Prep, plan to launch 55 more schools by 2017 and capture total enrollment of 30,000 students, 15 percent of the city's market.
• In Dallas, Richland College created an accelerated learning charter high school for students to earn an associate's degree and high school diploma at the same time.
Detroit charters' role rising
In Detroit, 40,000 students attend charter schools -- meaning about 25 percent of schooling for city children is governed by charter boards and the dozen universities and other entities that authorize them. This market share will grow as state barriers to more chartering in Detroit erode and/or the city's mayor receives some authority over schools.
Governance innovations are not a panacea, but they have two important virtues. First, they can establish oversight that is strategically focused with clear, measurable goals, rather than the often conflicting and confused edicts that come from political boards.
Second, the new operators can be more directly held accountable for the results of the schools. Mayors who run school systems face judgment at the polls every four years. Charter school boards must renew their contracts every few years. A scheduled day of reckoning is not a guarantee that these schools will perform well -- but it's a start toward accountability.
It seems likely that the Detroit district's new no-nonsense financial czar, Robert Bobb, and new funds in the federal stimulus legislation will set the system back on its feet, at least temporarily. But it will take innovation -- big changes in school design and governance accountability that produce dramatic improvement in results -- to get the system running permanently in the right direction.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
NSF ITEST Grant Partners / Oakland Schools
OAKLAND PRESS
Schools expand virtual design, manufacturing training
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
From staff reports
AUBURN HILLS — Dassault Systèmes, a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, has announced that it provided an additional 400 seats of its PLM software to Oakland Schools through an academic partnership program.
This relationship with the intermediate school district, which began in 2002, provided Oakland County’s 28 school districts access to CATIA, a top virtual product design solution, as well as its digital manufacturing software counterpart DELMIA. Instructors at each of the 23 facilities taking advantage of the program have been trained in the software.
“The goal of this program is to fill the gap between education and industry by exposing students to the same high-tech tools employed by the leading aerospace, medical, consumer product, and automotive companies of the world,” says Bill Williams, Oakland Schools’ Career Focused Education consultant. “For example, more than 80 percent of new vehicles launched today are designed in CATIA, making training in this software a must for any would-be automotive engineer. We encourage every high school to take advantage of this offering and make 3D virtual design and digital manufacturing courses available to all of their students.”
Williams notes that manufacturing offers excellent career opportunities with typical wages and benefits being about 25 percent higher than other occupations. The other benefit is the anticipated growth in the application of digital manufacturing.
“We commend Mr. Williams and Oakland Schools for their efforts in this area,” says Roy Smolky, DELMIA Worldwide Academic Relations, Dassault Systèmes. “We believe programs like this are vital in helping not only Oakland County, but the U.S. in maintaining its role as the world's technology leader.”
The Dassault Systèmes solutions available through Oakland Schools are used to educate students in virtual product development where all product design and manufacturing processes are created, simulated and optimized in a virtual 3D computer environment, prior to being built in the real world. Companies using these technologies shorten development cycles and reduce production errors.
“We know from experience that students who are trained in these sophisticated tools are better prepared to enter university level programs, as well as the workforce,” adds Vickie L. Markavitch, superintendent, Oakland Schools. “It’s crucial that we tap students’ interest early on, encouraging them to acquire appropriate skill sets and pursue available careers in science and manufacturing.”
Monday, April 06, 2009
Pontiac Northern High School CAPTURES MICHIGAN STEM-FOCUSED CROWN!
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| Robots crash and bang into the corner at Saturday's FIRST Robotics competition at EMU |
Posted: Saturday, 04 April 2009 5:27PM
Pontiac Northern, Milford, Utica Win FIRST Robotics Michigan
A coalition of teams from Pontiac Northern, Milford and Utica high schools won the FIRST Robotics state championship at Eastern Michigan University Saturday afternoon, earning the right to represent the Great Lakes State at the FIRST world championships April 16-18 in Atlanta, Ga.
They bested a coalition of teams from Fremont, Berkley and Grand Rapids Creston high schools.
Around 4,000 students, mentors, teachers, family members and volunters crowded EMU's Convocation Center for the raucous finals, complete with team mascots, flags, slogans, pounding music and big-screen video.
Teams that made the quarterfinals but didn’t advance to the semis were Auburn Hills Notre Dame Prep, Belding, Bloomfield Hills Andover, Bloomfield Hills International Academy, Madison Heights Bishop Foley, Pontiac Oakland County Schools, Romulus, Saginaw Career Complex, Southgate Anderson, Troy, Ypsilanti Willow Run and a combined team of Zeeland East and West high schools.
FIRST, an acronym for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, was established in the late 1980s by inventor Dean Kamen as a way to get American high school students as interested in science and engineering as they are in sports. The robotics competitions borrow a great deal of their style from big-time sporting events, as teams of robots work together to accomplish specific tasks in a game that changes every year.
From Feb. 27 through March 28, FIRST in Michigan operated seven district events to determine which teams would qualify for the state finals. The 2009 season in Michigan has seen an entirely new competition format that is serving as a pilot program for FIRST, with smaller "district" competitions restricted to Michigan teams replacing larger, more involved "regional" events in the state that were open to teams from anywhere. The idea was to cut travel and other expenses for the teams to make FIRST more affordable.
Michigan added 16 new rookie teams this year and how has 134 total, trailing only California in the number of participating schools.
This year's game, called "Lunacy," saw robots designed to pick up and dump 9-inch game balls into goals hitched to their opponents' roobts for points during a two-minute, 15-second match. Additional points are awarded for scoring a special game ball, the Super Cell, in the last 20 seconds of the match. Teams can also score by tossing balls into their opponents' trailers from designated points around the competition floor -- meaning that many teams this year recruited basketball or baseball players who could throw the balls accurately for long distances. A first this year was a low-friction competition floor and low-friction tires, which made the robots slip and slide and piloting more diffiicult.
The state's top 64 teams qualified for a chance to compete in the state championship. A day and a half of seeding matches whittled that down to the top eight teams. Those teams got to choose two alliance partners each -- teams they thought offered robots that could complement their own. Thus, eight three-team alliances competed in best-of-three elimination rounds in quarterfinals and semifinals before a thrilling finals showdown that offered all the drama and surprises of a state championship athletic match.
More at www.firstinmichigan.org.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Our Work with URC continues to yield benefits
Michigan Tops $1.3 billion In NSF Grants Since 2000
Michigan researchers brought more than $1.3 billion in National Science Foundation grants into the state between 2000 and 2008, more than their counterparts in bigger states like Florida and Ohio, according to a new NSF tally.
The vast majority of the federal grants, an average of $147.5 million per year, were generated by Michigan’s University Research Corridor institutions, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Wayne State University.
In 2008, for example, the three research universities received more than $130 million, or 83 percent of more than $156 million in grants awarded in the state last year.
“Important advancements and technologies have been developed because of NSF support,’’ said Steve Forrest, UM vice president for research. “In addition to a multitude of important individual investigator grants, NSF has also funded our large and transformative efforts such as the Engineering Research Center for Wireless Integrated MicroSystems and the U-M Engineering Research Center for Reconfigurable Manufacturing. NSF backing also allows our state to participate in the National Nano Infrastructure Network which links the Lurie Nanofabrication Facility to other advanced resources around the U.S.’’
When academic research grants from all sources are totaled, the URC institutions receive more than 94 percent of academic research dollars coming into Michigan.
“MSU researchers receive substantial support from NSF, and we appreciate the recognition of our research capabilities that this level of funding provides,” said Ian Gray, MSU’s vice president for research and graduate studies. “NSF funding supports the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory and much of the research conducted in our top-ranked College of Education, where faculty are studying ways to improve K-12 education, particularly in math and science. Our nationally ranked plant sciences research is also well supported by NSF.”
Michigan ranked ninth in the nation for NSF funding with $1.3 billion, just behind the much nation’s second-most populous state of Texas, which brought in $1.5 billion to rank eighth. Florida, the fourth-most populous state, ranked 11th, attracting $1.1 billion in grants over the same period.
Among neighboring Great Lakes states, Ohio ranked 18th for NSF funding with $800 million in grants, while Indiana ranked 19th, bringing in $771 million. The states receiving the most NSF grants were California, New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Texas. Arizona rounded out the top 10 behind Michigan.
“Wayne State University looks to the National Science Foundation for support in many critical areas,” said Hilary Ratner, Wayne State vice president for research. “Their funding supports many of our critical research activities. Examples of projects include the development of novel technology for extending highway bridge life through controllable suspension components based on smart fluid technology, and development of intelligent textile technology that will be used as a respiratory sound monitoring device. These and other important projects will help drive the economic future of Michigan and the nation.”
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 "to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…" With an annual budget of about $6.06 billion, NSF funds about 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America's colleges and universities.
For the complete list, visit: www.cnsfweb.org/AllStates.Alpha.2000-2008.pdf.
For more on the URC, visit www.urcmich.org.