There are at least two conditions necessary to fill a bucket with water. You have to put water into it, and the bucket can’t leak.
Similarly, we can’t just feed academic content to students and expect them to succeed; behavioral success and academic success are interrelated. ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act), the recently passed federal elementary and secondary education authorization, finally acknowledges this.
Specifically, ESSA calls for development of consistently positive and safe school and classroom settings, student engagement, and decreasing discipline referrals. Importantly the act declares these activities as a valid use of Title I funds, and schools receiving Title IV funds must document and assess how they are doing this.
Do we need this?
Do we have students who are behaviorally acting up because of academic frustrations? Do we have kids who can’t sit in a seat, can’t work independently, or who can’t work in a group?
As Howard Knoff points out, the goal is to replace inappropriate student behavioral problems with the appropriate responses so that students can self-manage and become independent learners. Instead of individual initiatives to handle the many situations that contribute to behavioral problems (for example bullying, trauma, poverty), we need an overarching multi-tiered approach:
Positive environment
Articulated behavioral expectations
Communication and teaching of those expectations
Motivate and hold students accountable for appropriate behavior
Consistency, across time, students, settings, and situations
Special situations: preparedness to adapt to different settings
The first step for educators (and schools and districts) is awareness. Dr. Knoff has compiled a series of questions we all need to ask ourselves:
What am I doing to promote high levels of effective interpersonal, social problem-solving, conflict resolution, and coping skills/behaviors by all students?
How can I promote high levels of critical thinking, reasoning, and problem solving skills by all students?
Am I learning and sharing effective classroom management with other teachers in my school and PLN, and specifically, are there techniques to handle the issues that sometimes result in office discipline referrals?
Are there ways I can involve parents and the community to support student self-management
And then?
On Thursday night, October 20, Howard is going to lead a discussion with educators about effective multi-tiered approaches in a free discussion on Edchat Interactive. Then on November 9, he will continue the discussion on behavioral interventions for challenging students. Feel free to join us by registering here.
Creativity is an activity that produces something that is both new and task appropriate. It can’t be just new, and neither can it be just useful. It’s that simple.
Myth: The most creative people are mad geniuses.
There is no connection between mental illness and creativity. Creative people are more likely to be in better moods, better physical health, and more resilient in the face of trauma.
Myth: A creative person is creative in anything.
Creativity is actually domain-specific. If you are creative in cooking, you are no more likely to be creative in music or physics or some other unrelated area than anyone else. In fact, people are often creative in one way, but not in another. For example, divergent thinking (coming up with multiple ideas) and convergent thinking (honing in on a best or plausible idea) are two completely different forms of creativity.
Myth: Offer a reward to spur the most creative thinking.
People tend to be most creative when they are doing something because they want to do it; rewards can actually kill creativity. Giving people (even students; after all, many of them are people, too) voice and choice can be an effective way to spur creativity.
Myth: Creativity is effortless.
Yes, Picasso ate a banana before painting, and yes, Albert Einstein was a dreamer with a messy desk. But it was hard work, revision, failure, extensive knowledge, persistence, and innate talent that made them giants.
Myth: We want more creativity in our society and schools.
Society and schools are built on rules, and the average person is trained to value conformity. Many studies show that teachers, workers, and most people have an unconscious bias against creativity.
Say it ain’t so! Isn’t the education sector different, don’t we value creativity in our students?
Not according to Andy Hargreaves, of the Lynch School of Education at Boston College.
When we faced low student achievement, did we put our efforts into helping teachers innovate and improve? Nope, we came up with rubrics and broke down teaching into prescribed recipes and basic skills that supposedly would produce mediocre student achievement across the board. A low goal we failed to achieve.
And this movement was only stopped by student and parent protests manifested in the opt-out movement.
What’s next?
Myth: Just provide choice to schools, parents, and teachers, and education will get better.
That may be one condition, but Hargreaves points out that it’s clearly not enough. Sometimes, school autonomy doesn’t result in the professionalization of teachers. And sometimes greater teacher autonomy results in lower risk taking, and weak results.
What seems to work is a collective autonomy, or a collaborative environment. While teachers make the majority of their decisions alone for their own classes, the decisions and results are shared and discussed with other teachers.
Let’s dispel with the myths about creativity and forego shortcuts to student achievement. We know how to spur creative learning and teaching in schools. It takes work. It takes autonomy. It takes collaboration. And it’s accomplished through deliberate design around the principles of creativity and community, not standardized pedagogies for easily measurable basic skills.
If we view our jobs as givers of knowledge, then our goal is to present information. This goal is well defined and measurable. “I presented chapter 3 today.” Done.
This doesn’t necessarily lead to students actually learning, though.
If we view our jobs as leading learning, then student, and our own, learning becomes a collaborative activity. And studies show that when learning is collaborative student motivation and achievement soars. But it also becomes more complex, there are myriad obstacles that get in the way of advancing knowledge and skills. Will the students put in the time and effort? Are they paying attention? Do they have the base skills to learn? Can we motivate them? Having the good intentions of becoming co-leaders or co-laborers is just the start. Being a collaborative learning leader required purposeful practice.
Lyn Sharratt and Beate Planche have researched the conditions and skills necessary for collaborative education to drive student learning. The key factors that contribute to effective collaboration:
A nonjudgmental approach to learning
Time to work with peers during the day
Opportunities to practice
Being a participant in inquiry
Having an inquiry approach modeled
Seeing exemplary practice
Watching a video of a Collaborative Inquiry process in action
They will be discussing four tenets of collaborative learning live at 6:30PM Eastern time on May 9 on Edchat Interactive. You can find out more and register here.
A book or a video can present content. The best educators lead learning.
Sharratt and Planche’s research presents a map to refine our skills as co-leaders and co-learners, which is something no book or video can do.
On August 6-7, 1st Playable hosted the annual Games in Education Symposium in Albany, NY.
This is a free event for educators to get hands on advice in game based learning, and I was able to attend (and present) on the first day.
Keynote with Peggy Sheehy
The symposium started with Peggy Sheehy keynoting. “There’s a word for most games used in the classroom,” she began, “boring.”
But even bad games can have educational value, and the best game based curricula involves the kids in the design process. Begin with two questions for the kids:
How can I best teach this?
How do you want to learn it?
Kids today are the future, and the future isn’t sitting in rows taking tests. Schools need to be more like a game; when you get it wrong, you just do it again until you know how to do it right. In school in particular, and in society in general, we pit the seriousness of work against the frivolity of play, when we should be maximizing the outputs of work through deploying fun and engagement of play.
There were tons of breakout sessions, from fun ways to flip your classroom, digital games of Middle School Science Learning, Teaching Computer Science with App Inventor, and the NY STEAM Girl’s Collaborative.
ARGs with Paul Darvasi and John Fallon
Using the real world as the field of play. Paul Darvasi and John Fallon (the real one, not the guy at Pearson) have created Alternative Reality Games to teach a variety of subjects. One of the most recent was to teach digital literacy and privacy. Students became immersed in a mystery, trying to figure out who was trying to amass information on US and Canadian citizens in order to control them, and in the process found out just how much information was available about them, how that information could be used against them, and how to protect their identities. Another recent game was the Ward Game, re-enacting the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the classroom. Their tips:
Develop a compelling narrative and story
Create emotional connections
Repurpose space in the classroom and school and place them into the game (diplomas, newspaper articles, announcements, posters, etc.)
Create false documents that look like real ones
Use social media, like fictional characters on FB or videos on YouTube
Get collaborators who can play characters or face email or social media accounts
Use a variety of game mechanics, like quests and missions, timers, puzzles, cyphers, codes
The correct solution to a puzzle or quest must be obviously correct to the participants
Game Jam with Games4Ed
After lunch, Kimberly Heftje, Marianne Malmstrom, Steve Isaacs, and I (all of Games4Ed) ran a 45 minute session where participants broke into small groups to create their own game based learning curriculum. Four groups successfully created activities that used existing games to teach science, ELA, and math along with 21st century skills such as problem solving, planning, and collaboration. All participants will be able to re-enact those processes back in their own schools to expand on that curriculum or to create their own with their fellow educators.
Closing with Marianne Malmstrom
In a closing session for the day, Marianne Malmstrom gave a talk on creating space for student-driven learning.
Are the things we teach and assess in education the most important things for students to learn? If we fill up schools and class time with all the stuff in the standards and assessments, there is no place left for learning, we will be too busy teaching.
As the adults in the room, we are the experts in life; we don’t have to be the experts in content. And bookending Peggy’s comment, Marianne’s conclusion was that if we would just listen to the kids, they’ll tell us how to teach them.
My only regret is that I was not able to stay around for the second day. I heard Steve Isaacs’s keynote was epic!
Coming Up
I am in three speaking proposals for SxSW Edu. Please vote:
Did you know that there is research that shows the value of diversity? Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon abstracted the data that indicates:
Expertise diversity leads to innovation, the more diverse, the more innovative
More diversity leads to more conflict, but the conflict sparks useful desirable innovation
A key characteristic of a leader, one that leads to highly functioning teams, is trust; if the team members believe the leader has their back, they will be considerable more effective.
Gender and age diversity lead to consistently better results, and, in fact, are more highly associated with success than ethnic diversity
We all know that intellectual knowledge is just a fraction of what we need in order to live, and that historically the knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) were taught through societal institutions such as family, apprenticeship, and religion.
Today, these KSAs can be taught via games. Here are three examples.
Dojo, by GameDesk, helps people learn to regulate their emotions and behaviors. Have you ever wanted to calm yourself down, or to focus on one thing instead of … squirrel? Instead of trying to learn through reading or listening, you could attach biofeedback devices and learn and practice through Dojo. Imagine if students could learn these skills in schools? You can see how Dojo works in this video.
What if you could learn history through art? How was Picasso’s art influenced by society and historical events, and how did his art reflect on and impact the world around him? Andre Thomas of Texas A&M founded Live Lab to leverage the university’s Game Design students, Professional game designers, and Electronic Arts’ publishing might to create games that excite and motivate students. While Universities often produce games that show results in research trials, that’s where most university projects stop. The goal of Live Lab is to take these prototypes, finish them, and produce and distribute games that are backed up by research.
Or, what if we all had the skills to detect situations that lead to rape and the skills to defuse the situation? Decisions that Matter has been tested with hundreds of college students yielding substantial, if not yet published, results. The game was produced at a cost in excess of $1M through grants from NSF.
With all these games, impact has been proven, what remains unknown is how to get these games into the hands of thousands or millions of students who can benefit, and how do you make these operations sustainable. Those questions are yet to be answered, although we are hoping that Games4Ed can lower the barriers.
The Games for Learning Summit in NYC, organized by the US Department of Education, dove into the Why and the How of games in education with a passion. Richard Culatta from the Dept. of Ed. spoke on what makes the best games, saying they give feedback quickly – every 10 seconds – and they give students the freedom to make choices. There is a zone, Culatta said, between “what I can’t do” and “what I can do” called the zone of proximal development. This is “what I can do with some support,” and this is where learning happens. Good games adapt to learner needs to find that zone, and keep students engaged so they stay there. The value of play is that it allows for safe failure. When students don’t fear failure they will try again and again; games allow the opportunity to keep playing until the student succeeds.
Games are optimal for education for another reason, as well. It’s important to test students’ knowledge, or educators won’t know who “gets” the material and who doesn’t. And with games, assessment can happen in the background. Assessments can be fun and engaging. With games, curricula are transformed into challenging design elements.
One of the fantastic speakers was Refranz Davis, who by her own admission is a gamer, so she can’t keep calm. Her nephew gets bored with school and homework, but he can spend hours perfecting his Minecraft skills. He goes to YouTube and does research, he learns from it, and then he tries to buildin Minecraft. Her son prepares for a history test by copying 45 minutes of notes beforehand. He’s completely disengaged with history in school. But then he turns around and plays Assassin’s Creed, which is like a living history. He does research on the characters he finds, like Paul Revere, and it has kindled in him a love of history. But he still doesn’t like history the way it’s taught in the classroom.
Good game developers ask: “what do our users want and how can we make what they think they want, better?” This doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to the way school is taught. But look at the results: engaged players who voluntarily spend extra hours acquiring skills and knowledge. We have to remember that our goal isn’t for every student to know the dates of the Civil War. We are trying to build better people, better students, better scholars.
Michael Gallagher, CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, made a compelling point that there are 400 universities with video game curricula, a major that didn’t even exist five years ago. There is a growing shortage of coders. We will need 1.4 million coders over the next 10 years, while there will only be 400,000 Computer Science graduates. Educators repeatedly ask him, “how can I implement game based learning in my schools.” His reply, “Let your students be the advocate for games in education”. I have to agree with him.
Paul Cross, from Ubisoft, got into the details of game design by reiterating what journalists already know: you need to start out with a hook. The intro is critical to getting people engaged in a game--it creates a story and a reason for staying in the game.
He explained that Guitar Hero is both a commercial and teaching success because it wasn’t built from the standpoint of “let’s make music lessons better.” The process of innovation doesn't mean making something better; innovation is transformative. People wanted to play the music they liked and they didn’t like to practice. Guitar Hero let’s them do that and have fun while learning. You have to start with the problems you need to solve, and take the opportunity they give you to innovate.
Jeff Hemenway is from Unity, where they help people build games. He was surprised at how hard it is to convince parents of the value to letting their kids code, play games, or develop games. He quickly outlined a plan for using games for assessment. First, he says, list the Competencies you will develop in the game. Determine what evidence you need for each competency. Then create Actions in the game around the evidence.
Adding a multiple choice question in the middle of a game is good pedagogy.Good learning systems, whether they are mediated by teachers or games
Provide goals and learning expectations to students
Allow students to take ownership of their own learning
Facilitate students as instructional resources for each other
Provide feedback to move learning forward, and create a structure for students to act on feedback
Games can especially help teachers who may not have been trained in pedagogy around a learning goal.
The Department of Education did an incredible job putting together people from the gaming and entertainment industries, educators, edugame developers, and researchers. You could see the conversations and connections grow.
I am proud that the Games4Ed collaborative is helping lead the way so that students can learn by solving engaging and challenging problems.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an article by Marina Ratner, Making Math Education Even Worse, which contained quite a few misconceptions about the Common Core and specifically about the Common Core Math Standards.
Here is my attempt to shed light on what's good and bad about the standards and their implementation.
The Common Core Math Standards were adapted from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics recommendations, and these were created over a period of many years by teachers. There has been general agreement among math teachers along these standards, and they were some adjustments as the standards were folded into the Common Core.
The movement for Common Core standards was originally put forth by the Council of Chief State School Officers. Secretary Duncan and President Obama then gave it their support. The movement was thus not top down, nor bottom up, but more middle (state) to top (federal) to bottom (district and school).
The standards are not set up primarily for students who are vying for admission at elite universities. The standards were set so that high school graduates are capable of doing math work that is required in Community Colleges. Currently, about 75% of high school graduates are not able to do math at this level, even if they meet state standards for math.
Most of the old state standards were detailed curriculum maps. The new standards are learning standards. There is no one prescribed method for teaching; educators are given more discretion. When a teacher, school, or district claims that they have to teach a certain way because of the standards, it’s not true; the standards do not dictate teaching methods.
Not only are the standards generally more rigorous than state standards, there is a realignment of what is taught in each grade. A rule of thumb is that about 40% of the material overlaps existing standards for a grade, 30% of the standards moves material from a higher grade to a lower one (like what was formerly taught in 7th grade might now be taught in 5th), 15% moves material from a lower grade into a higher one, and 15% is new material that was not taught before (for example, many states never taught statistics, but statistics is now part of the standards). These are not definitive; they will vary for each state and for each grade.
Another adjustment is that the standards attempt to measure thinking, not just knowledge. In the old standards, a student merely got the answer right or wrong. On the new ones, students show their thinking process so that they can get credit for knowing what to do even if they make stupid errors. Because there are multiple ways to think through a problem, teachers are directed to show students multiple approaches and not just one algorithm.
I am personally not a fan of the Common Core Math Standards, however. My biggest objections are:
That the materials are so grade dependent. If a 3rd grade student is doing 7th grade work, the only thing that is measured is how well he or she is doing 3rd grade work. It's like saying, "every two year old should be able to crawl perfectly" and ignoring that some two year olds are actually walking.
The tests are high stakes. I believe that any high stakes test can be gamed. Since teachers and schools are penalized by poor performance, they will come up with ways to game the system, like having some students "absent" or "suspended" for the test, or claiming that some students are "disabled", or teachers refusing to take low performing students into their classes so that their class tests appear higher. If we want the best teachers taking the hardest students to teach, those teachers shouldn't then be penalized.
The tests only measure what happens on 1 particular day. A student could be held back because he/she was sick on the day of the test and not performing well.
Assessment should be built into everything students do, with feedback for the teacher and student as the day and year progress. And the data from this feedback should inform administrators which students are not learning and which are so that actions can be taken during the year to remediate (both the teacher and student).
We need a multi-pronged approach to improving education. Something like:
Raise awareness of the full spectrum of issues
Encourage local experimenting
Get great leaders in schools, they are what sets the school culture
Give teachers time in schools to share, learn, plan, and develop a team approach
Build feedback mechanisms into all school activities, as automatedly as possible, so students, educators, administrators, and parents know what is working
Scale what is working, prune what isn't
There really are models that are showing impressive results, where good leadership provides direction, teachers work in teams to ensure learning for all children, and students do learning activities that provide both motivation and feedback. That’s where our attention should be directed.
In fact, that’s the mission of our company, Academic Business Advisors, to find education practices that accelerate student learning, to continuously improve them, and to help them scale.
Bloggers' Cafe at NECC2008 (Photo credit: teachandlearn)
What can you learn when over 14,000 education technologists descend on one convention?
From hundreds of conversations over three days, we observed the following megatrends:
For the first time in six years, education budgets are not contracting, and education buyers are actively looking for where they should spend their money for the greatest learning impact.
The tide of digital content is rising, while the tide for printed textbooks is moving out. State deals for platform companies like Copia are accelerating this trend.
Assessment is critical, especially assessment that is built into activities for students that provide students and teachers feedback about competencies and skill and knowledge gaps. A soon to be released report from the SIIA will show how assessment is growing while test prep is contracting.
The maker movement portends a move toward doing as learning, creating robots, digital storytelling, building electronics, 3D printing, game creation, and service learning projects
While in past years, tech administrators were focused on technology, growing numbers of tech administrators are realizing that their jobs are about technology enhancing learning. Creating relationships is the killer app for education.
They talked about wanting to produce a generation of learners, not learned, and that to do that with our students we all need to model the skills we want our students to acquire.
And technology administrators are acknowledging that their job is to build a learning culture. The most effective ones embrace this challenge, and lead change by sharing decisionmaking, building up others by giving them challenging tasks and holding them accountable, and making sure the right people are on the team; technology will not replace teachers, but those who use technology will replace those who don’t.
The SIIA hosted an informative breakfast where education buyers told software and content publisher that while there are thousands upon thousands of great apps, schools know that free and low cast apps have hidden costs, which make school administrators wary of widespread adoption. They take up space, they don’t share data with other enterprise systems, and they take up management time. What happens when a teacher bases a week’s curriculum on an app and that app stops working, disappears, or changes to a paid app? While free is popular with teachers, administrators don’t want to sell kids eyeballs just to get a free app.
As usual, the exhibit floor was HUGE, and seemed dominated by 2-3 story booths of companies with plenty of money. But also as usual, many of the real innovation were seen in the small booths that were tucked away. We were especially impressed with the startup Buncee, The Global Oneness Project, and Project Foundry.
There are four types of problems: Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic. And there are four recommended approaches to solving them.
In this posting, we will borrow from David Snowden’s Cynefin Framework, and map the application of the principles both to the problems confronting education reform and also to the practice of problem based learning in schools.
Simple problems
Simple problems are those with known solutions, where there are predictable and repeatable cause-and-effect relations. These problems lend themselves to algorithms and best practice analysis, “whenever this happens, do this.” You sense the situation that exists, you categorize what type of problem it is, and then you respond according to the best practice. The shorthand for this type of problem solving sense, categorize, respond. Bureaucracies handle these types of problems very well.
English: Cynefin framework with all five domains labeled (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Complicated problems
Complicated problems generally require more analysis, but the results can still be predictable. It is more likely that there is no single solution to the problem, there may be many solutions that could work depending on the skills and disposition of those involved. Often, no two situations are exactly the same, so one is dependent on extrapolating from past experience and devising custom solutions. Because there is no one “best practice” experts determine “good practice”, solutions that should work based on the skill sets of those involved. In these problems, you sense or get data about the situation, you apply your expertise to analyzing the information to determine a likely course of action, and then you respond based on a plan that came out of your analysis. Professionals, rather than bureaucracies, are needed for these situations because they can devise customized plans based on their knowledge and experience.
Complex problems
Complex problems have no clear solution(s) except in hindsight; they are unpredictable. The value of extensive planning is diminished, because it will not yield a “good practice”. Algorithms are not useful, because there are no clear cause and effect rules. No one can predict which course of action will work, so one would want to try many different actions, with relatively little vested in any one (safe-to-fail actions or probes), and then reinforce those that are working and diminish those that are not. The approach to these problems would be to try different actions or probe, figure out which ones are and are not working, and then respond accordingly to amplify what’s working and curtail what is not. From these probes or actions, a practice will emerge that, in hindsight, will seem the one that would obviously work. The shorthand for this approach is probe, sense, respond.
Chaotic problems
In a chaotic problem, things are seemingly spinning out of control. There are so many factors happening at once that one cannot get a grasp on the relationships between them, and the situation itself is probably changing rapidly. This is an unwieldy situation, where no solutions are evident. A chaotic situation might inspire creativity, or it could demand some immediate triage actions to try to bring it under control, sense whether more triage is needed or whether solutions can emerge, and then to respond. The shorthand for this approach is act, sense, respond.
How does the Cynefin framework relate to education policy?
Much of the time we are sitting inside a problem, and select the problem solving mode that we are most familiar with.
A bureaucrat might look at education improvement as a simple or cause and effect problem and say, “the problem with education is X, and that problem just needs Y.” For example, “The problem with education is that we have no national standards, so we just need a common core of standards and our educational system will improve.” Or “The problem with education is that we have too many bad teachers, so we need to measure teachers and hold them accountable and then our educational system will improve.”
An educational professional might look at education improvement as a complicated issue, one where there are known approaches, but solutions need to be individually crafted based on the state, district, school, or student. For example, “if we assess each student and determine his or her strengths and weaknesses, then we can individualize instruction for that student so each student will learn at his or her potential.”
An entrepreneur might look at education improvement as a complex issue, one where we don’t know what will work, but one where a solution would emerge through trial and error. For example, “Let’s start a bunch of charter schools and allow them flexibility so that we can then scale what’s working.”
A CEO might look at education improvement as crisis management, “Let’s first make sure everyone has basic reading, writing, and arithmetic covered. We will give each teacher prescribed lesson instructions and make sure the students get lots of practice, and then we can start dealing with the other problems and solutions.”
We need to recognize these biases as we look to improve the different facets of the education system:
Are we in a chaotic crisis?
Are we looking for some emergent solution?
Is this something that has multiple solutions and where implementation will require customization and expertise?
Is there one best practice that will work?
How does this framework apply to the classroom?
We already give students tons of simple problems, problems that have one solution and that primarily require them to look at the problem, determine the formula to use, and then apply the formula in order to get a good grade.
Some students are also being given the opportunity to solve complicated problems. These problems do not have one right answer, students learn to get information, analyze and plan, and then operate against their plan to produce an end product.
There is a nascent movement around “engineering design” that presents students with problems that require an iterative process of sensing, probing, sensing, and reacting.
And chaotic problems? Do you know cases where students are confronted with unwieldy situations that are spinning out of control? Perhaps we should use Washington as a model for that.
If your parents are in the top quartile (wealth) in the US, there is an 80% chance you will go on to college. If your parents are in the bottom quartile, there’s an 8% chance.
But what if we found ways to change that? What if we found that a certain way of teaching could give kids born to the lowest quartile a 95% chance of graduating high school and an 87% chance to go on to college?
This is the record of KIPP, and as Richard Barth, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, told a group of us on May 22, it’s a record shared by some pockets of public schools and the best charter schools in the country. We had assembled because Westchester Community College offers a series of salons, where they bring the community into people’s homes to discuss literature, media, politics, sports, and arts with national figures.
How does KIPP achieve its results with at-risk students? Barth revealed that KIPP is predominantly middle schools, and the program features
Curriculum that includes both character and academics
High expectations for each child, that he or she will graduate and go on to college
Schools days lasting from 7:30 AM to 5:00 PM
Homework practically every night
Individual support for any student struggling to learn
High degree of autonomy for each school
Training, coaching, and supervised teaching for new teachers
Variety of assessments of teaching used to inform ongoing teacher professional development
Compacts with parents that children will come to school every day with their homework completed
Other high performing schools outside of the KIPP system may have found other effective systems, but this is what has worked for KIPP. KIPP has 125 schools, reaching 40,000 students. KIPP’s growth goal is to double the number of students it serves, but that’s just a tiny fraction of the 55 million students in K12 across the US, or 31 million students in poverty (receiving free or reduced price lunch).
Barth asked the audience a question, “How many of the kids in this country woke up today and went to a school that gave them a shot to compete in today’s global economy?” After a pause, he answered, “1 in 11.”
He then pointed out, that while we would all like to change this immediately, no one knows how to do it; there is no magic pill. And even if someone did know what to do, we don’t have the systems or the resources to effectuate this type of change overnight. Barth proposed a more realistic goal: suppose we wanted to change this ratio to 1 in 3 students over the next ten years; wouldn’t that be remarkable progress and something more likely to be achieved?
Someone in the audience proposed that we look at the charter schools as education laboratories, learn what they do best and how they do it, and then figure out how to apply those lessons to public schools. She asked how KIPP was interacting with public schools.
Barth said that KIPP decided that they would focus their efforts and resources where they had enough control to ensure success. KIPP has conducted leadership academies, where principals or district administrators spend time in KIPP schools and learn KIPP methods, and these have had some success. In terms of KIPP directly working with public schools, the average superintendent lasts for only two years. If KIPP were to set up a program to mentor the public schools in a community, and new leadership came in, what are the chances that the program would continue? (I had the distinct impression that this was not a hypothetical situation, but that’s just a hunch.)
As with other charter schools, KIPP has two funding mechanisms. First, KIPP receives state and federal funds for each student, and those funds come from the same pool as public schools. Second, KIPP receives money from philanthropy, and has raised $195 Million since its founding in 1994. It’s clear that KIPP as an organization will not solve the educational problems of the country: they will not have the reach, their expenditure per student is not sustainable over 30 million students, and public schools do not have the flexibility to try some of their methods.
Yet, thousands of kids have been able to graduate high school and attend college because KIPP gave them the confidence, support, and tools.
