Seven Keys to Education Reform (extended)
Seven Keys to Education Reform
- Build the data infrastructure for the next generation of education leadership, from formulas for government funding to data on student outcomes and teacher effectiveness.
- Make teacher pensions portable.
- Place teachers and administrators in a shared incentive system linked to student achievement in their school.
- End pedagogy wars.
- Reinvent school leadership modeled on the general manager role and asset-based management.
- Open up the dialogue on Special Education to include the children prior to high school.
- Value people of all ages.
(1) Build the data infrastructure for the next generation of education leadership, from formulas for government funding to data on student outcomes and teacher effectiveness.
Regulation accounting thwarts good fiscal management within schools. Districts can only keep one set of books, and that is the set that gets them the most funding. It is nearly impossible to find a link between investments and outcomes for education. Regulators must work with educators to develop a common system of financial reporting that allows school districts to intend the outcomes that are to be rewarded. To avoid further funding of bureaucracies, a student-centered decentralized distribution of resources must be part of this plan.
Data on student outcomes must have more depth, be actionable, and document longitudinal progress. The current state of the art seems to focus on poor test results and allowing all constituents to weigh in on possible reasons. It’s still guess work masquerading as data-driven leadership. In addition, systems for feedback to students are cumbersome and incompatible.
Merit-based contracts for teachers cannot be drafted in the absence of data. Leaders must build a system around student outcome objectives and validate the data before asking teachers to accept it as a basis for their employment and compensation. This is NOT a chicken and egg conundrum.
(2) Make teacher pensions portable
A defined benefit retirement plan that optimizes benefits only for those past age 55 with 30 or more years of service creates a pension trap for experienced teachers who feel they cannot afford to change jobs. It also fuels high turnover among new teachers who experience mandatory payroll deductions but cannot envision staying long enough to ever reap the benefits. The net result is a dichotomy between career teachers who pursue the path of security and tenure and a highly mobile short-term workforce. Schools become myopic as they lose the sustained vitality of knowledge and experience from beyond their communities.
(3) Place teachers and administrators in a shared incentive system linked to student achievement in their school.
Paying teachers and administrators to work together to achieve a short list of goals for students is a logical first step toward a more robust system of merit pay. This action creates a reward for desired outcomes while limiting the focus to collective accomplishments. It celebrates interdependence, collegiality, and a results orientation, all of which are crucial to long-term success.
(4) End pedagogy wars.
Dogma can be the enemy of diverse learners. It is not news that children are smart and different. When lessons fit their styles, students internalize teaching methods and begin to activate strategies independently. Even the best techniques become stale over time as singular approaches to formal lessons. However, it is not that the strategy has become obsolete. Rather, it is the lack of creative alternatives being presented.
Pedagogical fads come, go, and come back again because each represents good instruction when presented to students for whom they are new or particularly well suited for style. Each generation of learners misses out on crucial strategies that are out of vogue. In addition, the pinball approach to pedagogy fosters cynicism and intensifies the new school/old school divisiveness among the faculty. Case in point, the current battle being waged over algorithms versus exploration wastes the energy needed to learn how to teach both well.
(5) Reinvent schools leadership modeled on the general manager role and asset-based management.
Instructional leaders must become general managers as they assume new responsibilities for decentralized budgets and education delivery systems that extend beyond the school walls. This new role will require enhanced managerial decision models for resource allocation as well as an expanded functional skill set.
In addition, it takes counterintuitive insight to sustain optimism in schools. Budget constraints limit decision-making to zero sum games. A culture of blame highlights the problems children bring to school from home or the lowest common denominator among educators. Historically, many teachers became administrators without benefit of transformative leadership training. Despite the best of intentions, a legacy of dysfunction remains.
The current mantra about getting rid of bad teachers plays directly into an age-old practice of making an example of someone each year to gain cooperation among staff. A remnant of this is a toxic culture in which an invisible hand within the learning community can deliver a failure with precision – a major barrier to innovation and collaboration. A naive leader can easily fall into the trap of addressing cultural change through opinion leaders who are the worst offenders behind the scenes.
Each member of the school community needs to have room to grow and excel. The children come first, but their best interests can be enhanced through programs that open doors for their parents and teachers as well. Gifted leaders raise the level of discourse without a heightened sense of competition, without winners and losers.
(6) Open up the dialogue on Special Education to include the children prior to high school.
Currently, we begin to train children to be their own advocates in the management of their learning disabilities as part of transition planning for the end of high school. By involving younger children in their diagnoses and education plans, we can draw on their insight and motivation to help them overcome obstacles and resolve some issues earlier. In addition, engaging children in very private exchanges safely preserves confidentiality while lifting the shroud of secrecy that has left many children unnecessarily sensitive and confused about the learning style issues that have the grown-ups so worried.
(7) Value people of all ages.
Older teachers and administrators have become acceptable scapegoats in education. For administrators, they represent a cost burden at budget time. Often their younger colleagues were warned in school about their alleged backward ways of teaching. Opportunists find that one of the easiest ways to connect with a challenging student is to take his side against an older adult in the building.
A system that values diversity and embraces its students as emerging leaders in their communities must be intolerant of any form of discrimination. Further, a system that marginalizes its most mature members then blames them for its ills gets distracted from diagnosing the real problems and developing viable solutions for the children.
Student-Centered Accounting
Student-centered accounting holds the potential to shrink bureaucracies, redefine resource allocation for teaching and learning, and improve student outcomes. How we achieve this will depend on how we respond to key questions in each education sector.
Under the current education finance system, governments fund bureaucracies and special programs; educators teach students. Financial incentives for innovation come in the form of short-term grant allocations that generate paper and accounting exceptions. In the end, they depend on economic factors and politics more so than their own merit. Over time, even the most enthusiastic educators experience learned helplessness where they once dreamed of possibilities for their students and designed programs to support them. To resolve the problem, we must sort out the financial data issues and retrain education managers to think like entrepreneurs.
How the money is counted impedes a district’s ability to intend its students’ outcomes. Each year, school districts receive general purpose funds and special purpose funds. They distribute general purpose funds at their discretion, while the special purpose funds target specific populations or programs and must be spent according to preset rules. Accounting systems have been set up for regulatory reporting that track expenditures in this way. Unfortunately, this approach makes it difficult to make a direct link between the overall money spent and the students who benefit from the resources. Outcomes of the education process get lost to retrospective analysis and remedial special programs.
In general, school leaders have tended to manage their share of general funds; district leaders have managed special programs. Ironically, while grant money targets student populations, supervision of each new program has created an overhead cost at the district level. The legacy of a burgeoning bureaucracy has outlived many education initiatives. In addition, centralized operations have further obscured the vision of money for outcomes. Never mind managerial accountability. It is totally diffused.
Innovative programs supported by grants do not have a systematic path to sustainability. Education programs have unnatural life cycles driven by the vagaries of government funding. In good times, particular programs that merit consideration receive generous grant funding. During economic downturns, spending is cut from all but the most politically viable programs.
Who says you have to end good programs that have lost their political backing? Once the availability of funding is threatened, program proponents publicly rally around the cause even as they privately begin to shut down. If an innovative program is to be truly effective, it must have a means to achieve more permanent funding on its own merit.
Student outcomes can be more predictable if districts knowingly maximize their investment directly in their students. Further, that investment must be stable enough to allow for orderly management of change.
Education finance is a complex issue. I have purposely simplified it to illustrate major inconsistencies between financial incentives and mission. Serious inquiry will be needed to realign the two. Some questions to ask as we explore possible solutions to the problem include…
- Can systems be developed that meet the needs of regulatory oversight while keeping student-centered budget data intact for districts and schools?
- Can we smooth education finance by accumulating trust funds during good times to use during lean years?
- Where does discretion for funding of ongoing innovation belong? Would districts benefit from more discretion in their use of special funds?
- How can we create an orderly transition to sustained funding for successful new programs that precedes the sunset clause on their grants?
- Diffusion of best practices means they become an integral part of business as usual…does that always mean a compensatory drop of outmoded practices?
On cultural change through teacher leadership…
Some time ago, I worked on a Strategic Practice grant to expand a teacher leadership program at my high school. Found this among my entries…
“The distributive leadership model is being explored to empower teachers as content leaders and mentors. While these roles have been designed to sustain momentum in academic disciplines and improve staff retention rates, incumbents also enhance the cultural diffusion of new values throughout the organization. Teacher leaders represent access to decision-making, goal-setting, and professional growth. As credible change agents, they endorse new programs by getting involved. As rank-and-file teachers, they stimulate interest in leadership values among peers as colleagues reflect upon their own professional aspirations in a new light. As a result, the current cohort of teacher leaders directly affects pedagogy as well as tacitly motivating their own successors. Ultimately, every member of the faculty should expect to have an impact on organizational growth and an opportunity to demonstrate leadership in and out of the classroom.
I continue to agree with this model; however, I would suggest some caveats below.
- Teacher leadership opportunities must offer authentic roles, not merely compensation for the absence of administrative assistants for content areas or professional development. The latter merely reinforces the bureaucracy by encumbering an exemplary leader with more low-level tasks, rather than genuinely supporting his or her career progress. Similarly, it reinforces a dues-paying mentality more so than creativity as a driver of career success.
- Cultural change cannot occur unless peer leadership is empowered to challenge colleagues past the point of complacency with existing performance. There must be a shared sense of urgency for professional development along with the commitment to a participatory change process originating with senior management.
- Having the intent and ability to lead is intrinsic to the teaching process. A culture of instructional excellence must recognize that strength across the faculty and encourage sharing of each unique voice. Access to leadership opportunities cannot be perceived to reside among a privileged few who share a common point of view.
- Student-centered learning is nearly always on the agenda for professional development. Ironically, that is modeled through teacher-centered professional development whenever the teachers are being asked to learn something new.
- Teacher leaders should reflect the diversity of the faculty and the students over time.
- Institutional mentoring programs are by definition artificial and may reflect a lack of respect for maturity among teachers. Staff members should be encouraged in their search for kindred spirits and natural mentoring relationships. Time should be allowed for faculty relationships to evolve and genuine professional nurturing to emerge. School-assigned “mentors” should not be part of the long-term solution.
In keeping with my point of view…I resigned my teacher leader role after one year to make room for the next voice to be heard.
The Paradox of Success
How success in urban middle schools has muddied the waters for high school educators
In leadership meetings…“What’s going on? The data looks good, but the kids are a mess. This must be a bad cohort year. And that’s what I thought last year…until I met this group.” In the halls…”What’s wrong with these kids? They’re smart but they’re so spacey. They’ve got no ability to focus or follow the simplest direction. It’s those damned video games.” Or, in the teacher’s lounge…“It’s those charter schools…skimming all the good kids. This is what we’re left to deal with. Can you believe it?” Fault-finding missions may be obscuring early signs of student success, costing us our faith in good programs and the insight to preserve their long-term benefits for students.
Sometimes progress takes strange forms. Suppose…
- The student who suddenly seems unclear on any concept is merely overwhelmed by emerging abstract thought at an earlier age than we have come to expect.
- A high-risk student returning to school after heavy absenteeism feels like a fish out of water and is tempted to give the social cachet of rebelliousness or underground cultural experience priority over the challenge of catching up academically.
- Students who follow others are trying on personas without the insight to back them up. They support the cultural shift at their grade level but are genuinely clueless.
- Concrete thinkers who are more independent form cliques socially as a defense mechanism, some finding refuge in adult guidance while others spin out of control.
Each of these cohorts responds to a different set of coping strategies, and recognition of their motivation is crucial to successful intervention.
As a special educator, one of my greatest privileges was to witness the convergence of knowledge, maturity, and stamina evident in students with emerging abstract reasoning. It was the surest sign that they were ready to clear one of their toughest hurdles, the high school graduation exam requirement. Often they were juniors or seniors before they finally “grew up.” But what is happening with the children in general education who are arriving at that intellectual age at a younger chronological age?
As urban adolescents begin to catch up with their peers elsewhere, teachers and administrators must make accommodations to stay head. The range of skill levels, especially in ninth and tenth grade classrooms, creates a greater need than ever for differentiated instruction. Students regressing behaviorally as they cope with that giant leap into the world of abstraction need greater academic challenge combined with help getting organized. The returning drop-out needs respectful and private remediation along with leadership opportunities. The concrete thinker benefits from scaffolding to create a bridge to abstract concepts as well as peer tutoring to stay connected with student leaders. Every student needs a chance to share his or her strengths in class.
Beyond the classroom, advisories and activities must offer opportunities for students to reinvent themselves as young adults with positive identities in meaningful communities. Alienation abounds. Students drop out of school not only as a self-fulfilling prophecy of academic failure, but also to protest their failure to find their voice in the setting. Even the most engaged students need safe ways to challenge authority, assess risk, and test boundaries. There must be rewards for carrying the burden of greater knowledge at a younger age, the chance to apply it in freely chosen ways.
Progress is being made. New management challenges are the price of that success. Many current frustrations in education replace complaints such as, “My students are so concrete they could sink a ship.” Or, “I quit teaching math because I felt like I had to start over each year. The students never remembered anything.” Those were not the good old days.
We cannot turn our backs on math and literacy basics yet. However, the new model for the urban high school must include a broader range of options for academic content, electives, and extracurricular activities. Talented and well-educated youths need opportunities to grow in multifaceted ways as they explore their interests. They must become leaders for their own cause as they reach for new possibilities in careers and higher education.
Student Outcomes – The Macro Picture
Student data is useful at many levels. Attendance, grades, and test scores are standard records tracked by guidance staff or registrars. In addition, teachers collect a vast array of evidence to document that students are meeting curricular objectives. Increasingly, however, more extensive data is being gathered by students for daily motivation and for portfolios demonstrating their progress in school. This information often offers a clearer picture of the total student and his or her development intellectually, emotionally, and socially.
At a macro level, students are asked to…
- Attend
- Participate
- Be in charge
- Get results
A few examples of how these basic success factors can be tracked are presented by category below:
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Be in Charge |
Get Results |
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A portfolio of student accomplishments and outcomes is necessarily begun by the teacher in the early years of school. However, ownership of this record should be transferred to the child gradually throughout elementary school to facilitate the development of self awareness and self control. By adolescence, the notion of being in charge expands to include responsibility not only for self but for relationships with other people and institutions. Authentic assessments, periodic progress reviews, and student goal setting are integral to that process.
Next step…psychosocial benchmarks
No-Fault Education Policy
Better public schools are full of people with good intentions doing wonderful work. Exemplary models for educating children are being developed across the country, and each has instructional leadership at its core. They depend on excellent teachers. So why did I list the seven keys to education reform without a single entry about the best teachers? The short answer is that plenty of people are addressing the issue already. The slightly longer version turns on the difference between building a better educator and building a better education system.
Education policy is about the entire system of public education. A sustainable system must be robust enough to serve its mission while being inclusive of the general population of students and teachers. It cannot break down in the absence of a hand-picked collection of education’s finest participants.
Further, the current system did not break down because of its incumbents. It has collapsed under the weight of data limitations, institutional myopia, bureaucratization, and a mismatch between mission and incentives. It has become abundantly clear that a bad system can drive good people to do bad things. What we need is a good system that makes it easier for all people to do better things.
Seven Keys to Education Reform
My reflection on posts to date led to the revised list of seven keys to education reform…
- Build the data infrastructure for the next generation of education leadership, from formulas for government funding to data on student outcomes and teacher effectiveness.
- Make teacher pensions portable.
- Place teachers and administrators in a shared bonus pool linked to student achievement in their school.
- Develop and share best practices – all of them, not just the fashionable lessons du jour.
- Reinvent school leadership modeled on the general manager role and asset-based management.
- Open up the dialogue on Special Education to include the children prior to high school.
- Value people of all ages.
This supersedes my earlier Four-Point Plan to Support Education Reform.
The Case for Career Mobility
The revolving door for newcomers, the pension trap, and the toxic culture of a flat pyramid contribute to the breakdown in public education. Today, students may pursue their diplomas through traditional classrooms, online courses, and dual enrollment in college. Just as the doors are opening and the walls are coming down for students, teachers and administrators would benefit from access to career detours outside of their districts.
An enlightened workforce would bring benefits to any education complex, adding…
- Perspective from educators in other districts or career paths;
- Management tools from other industries and organizations;
- Credible knowledge of practical ways to apply lessons learned in school;
- Insight for organizational effectiveness and culture; and
- Creativity from a fresh look at the milieu.
Access to 401K plans, Social Security, and other retirement options would improve equity and fiscal prudence for all educators. In addition, districts should allow employees to leave and return later without loss of service credits. A sunset clause should be introduced to union contracts for an orderly transition to pension plans with transferable contributions.
Leaving one’s job is not the only solution. New teacher induction programs that offer mentoring and retention incentives are a topic for another day; likewise, in-district professional development. However, removal of the barriers to mobility is crucial to enlightened self-interest for educators.
The New School Leader
From Instructional Leader to General Manager
As reform-oriented superintendents experiment with new budget formulas, a dramatic shift toward decentralization of school funding and decision-making is emerging. The model makes good sense for management of 21st century schools. However, one may wonder if traditional training in instructional leadership will be adequate preparation for school leaders.
Instructional leadership has been a priority for principal preparation programs for many years. The movement recently gained strength from concern for achievement gaps among children, particularly in urban education. While these programs provide for course work and a wealth of mentoring in the many other roles of school leaders through residencies or apprenticeships, all heads of schools may find themselves perplexed as they venture into the unfamiliar waters of general management. So, what’s the difference?
I would hypothesize that new accountabilities will elevate non-pedagogical decision-making to a level of equality with academics. The headmaster of the future will need to be knowledgeable in finance, marketing, human resources, organizational behavior, information tecnology, and facility operations. He or she will make policy and judgment calls in conflicts, but there will be less emphasis on cumbersome consensual decision-making. The more democratic participatory leadership will be pushed further down into the organization to the level of the small learning community. Management of teacher effectiveness will rely on a combination of shared leadership and new data on student outcomes. In addition, many learning opportunities will engage students with community resources beyond the school’s oversight.
(To be continued…)
Middle School Remedial – Part 1: Mission
Many students who ultimately will drop out of high school demonstrate a similar pattern of absenteeism and academic failure by grade six. This program builds a cohort of seventh and eighth grade students who are overage, provides remedial education, and fosters new learning habits before they enter high school
Mission:
- To engage students who are overage in grade and/or underperforming due to significant absenteeism by grade six and prepare them for academic success in high school.
- To diagnose knowledge gaps that may be contributing to academic performance and support remedial learning.
- To provide accelerated access to age appropriate content through intensive content focus, learning across the curriculum, and social learning opportunities.
Beliefs:
- Students who have experienced academic failure and/or absenteeism are likely to continue to struggle unless this pattern is altered early in adolescence.
- Access to academic success is the most effective path to behavioral change.
- Adolescents grow intellectually as a result of group processes with their peers, families, and communities that is either social or academic in focus.
- At risk students may benefit from more comprehensive chunking of academic content (as opposed to spiraling) and recover credit at a somewhat accelerated pace.
- High school readiness is measured in academic, developmental, and social/emotional benchmarks.
- Informed decision making depends on concrete evidence, analysis of facts and risk factors, and either democratic or independent choice.
Targeted Solutions for Students Not Attending High School
I am interested in working on alternative education programs and gathering data to assess their effectiveness. The concept is summarized below…
This proposal seeks to explore ideas for students who have experienced difficulty succeeding in traditional high schools. The model is more of a program than a school, but it might fit into a transfer school or borough center. Initially, my program would target one of three cohorts of high school students:
- Students who have earned most of their high school credits but have one or two specific content area deficits preventing them from graduating (e.g., math or science),
- Students who function below grade level as a result of cumulative absenteeism and would benefit from a period of remedial skill development to catch up with their peers, or
- Students (ELL) who have delayed enrollment in high school and have little experience with national or local curriculum frameworks.
While many students initiate their return to school, I am interested in developing a small collection of programs and recruiting students who have not been attending school to test their effectiveness.
Academic programs would comprise short cycles of full-time immersion in a content area. Each curriculum would be tailored for remediation and comprehensiveness to meet the needs of students. In addition to attending classes, students would have the option of spending part of each day either pursuing online course work and independent assignments or getting more individual instruction in a skills lab environment.
Students who have been caught up in failure cycles need multiple opportunities for success early in the change process. Compact course modules allow then to accumulate credits relatively quickly and to experience deeper understanding of content that once mystified them. From an instructional perspective, content focus allows for greater flexibility and creativity within the curriculum while meeting specific learning needs.
Both the remedial skills program and the ELL program would focus on universal skill sets for content areas. The first would create a bridge to the curriculum by honing prerequisite skills. The latter would introduce the overarching goals and common skill sets for each content area within the context of advanced cultural studies in the student’s native language.
My reasons for creating a program rather than a school are twofold. First, the immersion courses would target relatively homogeneous groups of students to solve specific needs – a model that would be unsound for education in general. Secondly, traditional high schools have more options for elective courses and fine approaches to college preparation. The goal of my program would be to set the students on a path to success that would allow them either to earn their diplomas relatively quickly or earn enough credits to return to high school in good standing to complete their studies.
Something to Talk About…Part II
Headmasters and their assistants need to know every child with an IEP. They need to carry on a continuing dialogue with the children about their strategies to overcome obstacles. Each child should come to expect that their principal will take a private moment to ask what goals they are working on, how it’s going, and what their back-up strategies are. And this could happen at any time, so they should always be ready. This is not a pop quiz, but a way to transfer ownership of the learning process back to the child. Knowing that school leaders value creative responses to learning challenges will motivate the children and their teachers to work together to find compensatory strategies. They will no longer be going through the motions of Special Education on a treadmill of lowered expectations.
The plan…
- Take charge of the situation.
- Provide professional development to ensure robust strategies are in place and readily articulated.
- Open a dialogue directly with the children.
- Ask for help from SPED teachers and the children as collaborators.
- Streamline the IEP process and create data banks that track real progress over time.
There is no Get Out of SPED Free card. Children must know that they will have to work harder than their peers sometimes to overcome obstacles. They have to want it. And they have to know that there is a good chance of success. Having the head of their school recognize their plight and show interest in their progress takes the battle out of the closet and elevates the reward for accomplishment.
(to be continued…)
Something to Talk About…Part I
Among the things that “everybody knows” is the fact that Special Education is the cause of all the trouble in education finance. This budget buster is the thing of entitled teachers and under-funded mandates. School administrators complain about it to Everybody!
“You guys are killing us. You are where all the money goes. I don’t know what you do in there, but it is costing us a fortune…” Special Ed teachers worry a lot and try to please their bosses. With a death grip, they hold onto their classrooms and try to manage them as tightly as possible. It is the least they can do. Meanwhile, the children, far from understanding what all the worry is about, sit in class with heightened anxiety (as if learning has not been stressful enough for them already) and try to follow the assorted learning strategies that their teachers recognize as best practices..
The trouble is…nobody told the kids what is going on or why they are doing what they do. They know there is an embarrassing issue about which dozens of adults have met and held lengthy discussions. Confidentiality is so well protected as to obscure the process, to keep it hidden from the child. Counterintuitive strategies meet protests, motivation is uneven, and unknown achievement benchmarks are missed.
In business, managers know what their real budget busters are, and they monitor them closely. This is rarely the case in schools. Special Ed department heads and teachers are entrusted with the care of the Students with Special Needs according to the letter of the regulations. Is the child making reasonable progress at this time? Is the child in need of services? Is the child in the least restrictive environment? These questions are answered according to a schedule, and the child is re-evaluated periodically. However, longitudinal information is not tracked. Funds are available regardless of progress over the long haul.
One could hypothesize that these factors contribute to children becoming SPED for life. Critical intervention opportunities are missed and childhood learning issues become entrenched patterns of dysfunction that pervade the adolescent’s world socially and intellectually. Persistent concrete thinking yields naïve decision-making and impulsive behavior. Processes that are rational in the abstract appear random in the concrete. Acting out behavior is a natural outcome that is misdiagnosed as a discipline issue. Social learning is truncated as rigid rules replace sheltered exploration. Academic success becomes more elusive. Students seek failure as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
(to be continued…)
A proposal to re-engage students not attending high school
Mission Statement
Our Mission: To create a learning environment that enables students who are overage and under-credited to re-engage in education, design a personalized plan for accelerated progress toward graduation, and chart a path for success after high school.
We have the vision that every student should finish high school prepared for a bright future. To be successful, students must rediscover their voice within the community, their identity as lifelong learners, and their goals to continue their educations and pursue rewarding careers.
We believe that change is not easy and that every students needs to participate in a precedent setting re-entry program in order to reset their expectations for achievement.
We empower students to define their own credit recovery plans based on their learning styles, program flexibility, and decision support systems.
We know that educational opportunities and mentoring experiences extend beyond the school walls and seek partners for virtual learning, dual enrollment in college, community service, and workplace training.
Together, we value diversity within our academic village and approach one another with a tone of decency, respect, and the presumption of good intentions. We strive to meet the needs of each student as an individual while celebrating success as a community.
Essential Aspects of the Program
The new high school or program will re-engage students and facilitate their successful completion of high school through
- A unique full-immersion entry period for resetting expectations for student achievement,
- A student-specific learning plan for accelerated progress to graduation, and
- Advisory programs to enable students to reinvent themselves and facilitate decision-making.
Students will rediscover their voice within the community and their identity as lifelong learners. Each will graduate with access to continuing education and aspirations for a rewarding career.
Initially, academic programs would comprise short cycles of full-time immersion in a content area. Each curriculum would be tailored for remediation and comprehensiveness to meet the needs of students. In addition to attending classes, students would have the option of spending part of each day either pursuing online course work and independent assignments or getting more individual instruction in a skills lab environment. Diagnostic testing for learning issues or knowledge gaps would inform instruction as well.
Students who have been caught up in failure cycles need multiple opportunities for success early in the change process. Compact course modules allow then to accumulate credits relatively quickly and to experience deeper understanding of content that once mystified them. From an instructional perspective, content focus allows for greater flexibility and creativity within the curriculum while meeting specific learning needs.
Once students have developed new patterns for engagement in learning, they would have the option to modify their schedules to define course sequences, expand the curriculum, or pursue offsite learning opportunities. Ownership of their educations will be crucial for student success in this phase. Advisors would facilitate program development by helping students create pacing plans and apply for alternative learning options. Each course would be offered in at least two levels of intensity.
The Advisory program would address issues of identity, voice, and goal setting. Students who have stopped attending school demonstrate a paradoxical mix of leadership and inertia. Often, they have acted decisively and against the advice of others based on a limited view of their possibilities, choosing isolation and academic failure as self-fulfilling prophecies. The goal of the Advisory would be to allow the students to see themselves as leaders while giving them a way to find their voices back in a school community. Small group activities would give students opportunities to experience empowerment and seek a broader range of possibilities from which to make decisions, especially when they feel themselves shutting down. As their credits accumulate, students would shift their focus to plans for school and work after graduation.
On College Readiness
Critical success factors for a student in college include…
- Independence – self directed learning, defining one’s own program of study, time management strategy, mining of resources, and quest for knowledge.
- Perception – high level of awareness with insight and attention to task as well as strong reading fluency and comprehension.
- Communication – excellent writing, tailored to audience and genre, and strong oral and multimedia presentation skills.
- Collaboration – the habits of working in study groups, able to organize, convene, and effectively collaborate to increase knowledge and/or deliver group products.
- Leadership – solid citizenship in the classroom and decision-making during unstructured time.
- Perspective – conversant in the arts and humanities and cognizant of time and context.
- Analytics – strong analytical tool kit for application in math and physical and social sciences
- Leverage – ability to combine a good general knowledge bank with tools of analysis to achieve understanding and solve problems.
- Organization – management of materials, processes, and concepts for efficient access and effective use.
Pedagogy and culture must support students in their readiness to succeed in college, reaching beyond the school as necessary to provide access through productive use of out of school time, dual enrollment programs, and independent study options. Assessment tools must be robust enough to authentically evaluate the many dimensions of student accomplishments.
Historical Habits of Mind
Came across a wonderful set of “habits of mind” for historical thinking that was developed by the Bradley Commission on History in Schools on behalf of the National Council for History Education. Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools was published in 1995 and continues to be influential in curriculum design. Highlights are provided below.
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Historical Habits of Mind
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Philosophy of Education
Education provides the leadership, guidance, scaffolding, and material resources for successful transformation from childhood to early adulthood. The child forms his or her intellect with the knowledge, academic skills, and critical thinking needed to address opportunities and dilemmas in real life as well as to continue the pursuit of understanding as a lifelong learner. The academic village serves as a microcosm for society in which to develop physically and emotionally and to explore citizenship in a democratic world. Education must have meaning and relevance, but the student should be transformed by education into a broader minded individual open to further expansion of horizons and prepared academically for access and competitiveness.
Teaching involves laying down basic schemas, elaboration and rehearsal to establish memory, periodic reinforcement to retain long-term memory, and development of metacognition. Children engage more effectively in learning when they have a connection to the content and develop deeper understanding through exploration. However, teachers must periodically assist students to formalize their strategies for problem solving, essentially identifying the skills learned, techniques applied, and ways to validate results. In this way, students create their own pathways to algorithms yet consciously develop analytical toolkits that they know how and when to use in the future. In addition, basic knowledge and skills must be retained in memory to reduce search time early in problem solving and allow students more time to pursue more complex and interesting aspects of cognition.
Educators must protect and facilitate equal access to general education for diverse learners while fostering the highest achievement of each child according to his or her individual potential. Every child has a platform for success; programs must be designed and modified until every child has been accommodated. Natural variations in learning style and growth and development create challenges for educators as they develop an academic milieu that provides for all learners. Great and small leaps in comprehension occur unpredictably, and students can encounter unexpected obstacles to their learning. Great care must be taken to understand the whole child beyond expectations related to age, grade level, and performance.
Heterogeneous groupings of children allow them to benefit from one another’s strengths and diverse points of view. Student support services are provided to create a level playing field for students with disabilities and greater challenges for gifted learners within the same classroom wherever possible. Lesson plans must offer a variety of approaches such as multi-sensory explorations, inductive and deductive processes, and group workshops. Students should be prepared to perform well on periodic standardized assessments; however, more authentic alternative assessments must be used throughout each unit of study. Educators must be informed by the data gathered through formal and informal assessment to improve their practices continuously.
Finally, college preparation is essential to the vision for every student, especially those for whom education has been a struggle. In fact, the absence of high expectations for the future can be the greatest obstacle for underachievers. The high school diploma is not the ultimate goal; rather it is the key to unlock the next door, the reason to keep going. Graduation merely signifies the transfer of stewardship from the school to the young adult.
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