The Spirit of Knowledge Academy Charter School moves one step closer to approval. Congratulations to Julia and the team for this accomplishment. The state should be proud to support this initiative. Until a district can serve its diverse student population effectively, we should welcome charter schools. Charter schools with focus, culture and strong staff often demonstrate success. Julia has a track record with founding the AMSA Charter School in Marlborough, so Worcester should be off to a great start. Let’s put politics aside and find solutions that support the needs of the students. Related articles here and here.
Spirit of Knowledge
February 19th, 2010A Lesson in Leadership and Movements
February 14th, 2010This is a great video about how movements get started. If you believe that the best teachers create great lesson content, that they should be recognized and rewarded, and that, together, we can close the delivery quality gap, please get up and dance!
Strict Adoption of Common Standards a Mistake.
February 4th, 2010Those “leading the effort to design common standards said that states may not revise them or select only portions to adopt.” States must adopt them 100% and can choose to add an additional 15% of their own, they clarified. The objective of common standards, after all, is to ensure that we have education delivery consistency across the country. However, the inflexibility to tailor the content to meet the needs of your target audience is a mistake. Again, we seem to fall back on a “one size fits all” model. There are ~50 million public school students that span a learning spectrum, and “one size” will not suffice. The common standards initiative is an opportunity to improve the standards of those states who have developed lousy standards on their own. However, forcing strict 100% adoption and limiting additional standards to 15% will only stifle those states and districts who are ambitious or fortunate enough to comfortably exceed the common standards. The Educaton Week article is here.
Related Update: How timely. This article suggests that we are ignoring the overachievers. “The nationwide emphasis on bringing the bottom up may be shortchanging the nation’s best and brightest students. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, states and school districts get credit for raising test scores overall and for raising the test scores for particular subgroups, such as black and Hispanic students. But there’s no particular incentive to boost the achievement of top performers, many of whom may be hitting the ceiling on their state assessments.” Article here.
Changing the meaning of NCLB
February 1st, 2010The Obama Administration is looking to overhaul No Child Left Behind (NCLB), changing the way schools are graded and eliminating the goal of bringing every student to proficiency by 2014. Judging from the pace of education reform, the timing of this change seems about right. “Under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools. A new goal, which would replace the 2014 universal proficiency deadline, would be for all students to leave high school college or career ready.” I’ve always believed that students have different learning styles, pace and interests. The traditional monolithic delivery model no longer fits. NCLB was flawed in that it expected everyone to reach proficiency (while definition of proficiency varied widely from state to state). I love the notion of alternative options, such as vocational schools, that will help some students become “career ready” rather than “not proficient.” The NYT Article is here.
No sexual bending at school dance
January 27th, 2010Union Grove High School in Wisconsin outlaws “sexual bending” at school dance. Bummer. No wait, can’t do that either. Learn more about sexual bending here.
e.g., not allowed
Boys and Girls Are Just Different
December 14th, 2009This is a great article which only begins to identify the differences between boys and girls – particularly how they perceive their environment and how they learn. I touched upon students’ individual differences in my blog post here, and Chris breaks it down by gender. Simply put, our students have different learning styles and learning paces and a “one size fits all” approach might be fine for the majority, but detrimental for many others. In the spirit of leaving no child behind, we need to think outside of the box.
The wisdom of an eight year old.
December 8th, 2009In school, my eight year old daughter is currently covering a lesson on telling time. I watched her as she zipped through her homework, correctly identifying all the different ways to say “9:45.” Nine forty-five; quarter til ten; forty-five past nine; fifteen minutes before ten; etc. “Why would you have so many ways to say the same thing?” she asked. “Why not just one way? Then we can move on and learn something else.” She has a point. I like her perspective (this is the same daughter who once asked “why do bras only cover half the boob?”). I think it was Malcolm Gladwell that suggested that native Asians are quicker at math because their counting system is more straightforward than ours. So why do we consistently make things more complicated than they need to be?
Motives of 21st-Century-Skills Group Questioned
December 8th, 2009This edweek article questions the motives behind P21, a group promoting 21st Century skills. “Recently, critics allege [that this] is a veiled attempt by technology companies—to gain more influence over the classroom.” 21st century skills, aka soft skills, often encompass skills/behaviors such as leadership, critical thinking, team work, etc. These skills both contrast and compliment content knowledge such as math, history, english, etc. It seems to me that this is not a “technology company” only skillset. I would think it is in our best interest that *everyone* possess these skills. That is to say the curricula and state standards should include both skills and content goals. If done right, the skills are taught in the context of the content. So… are we really debating about whether or not 21st century skills are important?
Selling Lessons Online Has Deeper Consequences
November 16th, 2009This NYT article highlights several marketplaces where lesson plans are bought and sold. Since I believe that our best K-12 teachers can produce better content than most third party publishers, it would appear that these exchanges provide a win-win for everyone. Sellers can make a little money ($36,000 to be exact in one example) and buyers can save themselves a lot of time. While some in the article ponder ownership rights and district entitlement to proceeds, I believe we need to analyze the consequences of these marketplaces from the students’ perspective. These marketplaces are not perfect because, in the context of K-12 education, when you disseminate content based on the users’ ability to pay, you are contributing to the teacher quality and student achievement gaps. High-value, standards-aligned, user-generated lesson content should be freely available to all educators. In their hands, the benefits for school children are priceless.This is not to say that teachers give up all of their goods in the spirit of altruism (although that kind of sharing would make your grade school teachers proud). Rather, it is to say we need to find a better model to recognize and compensate our high value contributors. How about reallocating some of the $8 billion spent on third party published content?
David Kelley’s Education Mind Map.
November 6th, 2009David Kelley is an award winning designer and co-founder of Ideo. This is a mind map of his thoughts on education. Now if we can just figure out how to execute!