If You Aren’t Alarmed, You Aren’t Paying Attention

March 8th, 2010 by Chad Ratliff View Comments »

“Just out: Economic Report of the President. If you aren’t alarmed, you aren’t paying attention” read a tweet that cascaded down my screen.  The good dean is not known for hyperbole, so I indeed paid attention.

The Economic Report of the President is an annual report written by the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.   It’s an incredibly comprehensive document measuring the nation’s economic progress, and ultimately serves as a guide for the Administration’s domestic and economic policies.

Think there’s anything about education in there?   Better believe it.  Bits of K12’s past, present, and future are embedded.   That’s because—as much as it pains us to admit—education and business are inextricable.   There are very smart people who disagree, but I often worry that we’re not doing enough to connect the two.  Nevertheless, whether we choose to include future workforce preparation in our own educational philosophy or not, let’s take a look at how it fits into this year’s report.

The ghost of education’s past rears its head in the chart below, which shows unemployment rates for whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.   Unemployment for whites has actually been on the decline since October 2009, peaking at 9.4 percent.   In contrast, the rate for blacks and Hispanics continues to rise—last measured at 16 percent and 13 percent respectively.   Interestingly, the unemployment gap, like the the achievement gap, remains largely unchanged since 1990.   Perhaps there’s a relationship between the two.

The report also cites the sectoral shifts currently changing the nature of work—and how the “Great Recession has aggravated this already challenging trend.”  It further reads, “the United States is increasingly a knowledge-based society where workers produce services using analytical skills.  The changing economy offers tremendous opportunities for American workers in high technology, in the new clean energy economy, in health care, and in other high-skill fields.”   I posted how this should be reflected in CTE programming here.

The less-sexy part of this phenomenon doesn’t sell as many books or warrant as many educonference presentations:  The labor market is also changing.  As stated in the report, “The prototypical American career once involved working for a single employer for many years, backed by a union that bargained for steady wage increases and for a pension that promised a stable, guaranteed income in retirement.”  Now, however,  “fewer than one in seven workers belongs to a union, and most people can count on changing employers several times over their careers.”  That trend is also expected to continue

What’s the problem?  Retirement.  Most pension plans now are “defined contribution“—meaning only employer contributions to the account are guaranteed, not the future benefits.   In other words, an individual who’s not financially savvy is screwed.

The educational attainment-to-income data is also in there, which most of us have seen before.  But, just in case you haven’t:  The more education someone has, the more money they’ll make.

What’s more striking is this chart:

For many years, there were more educated workers than demand for them.  But, as the trend stagnated, younger generations weren’t graduating at higher rates than older generations.  The trend led to income inequalities simply because a lower supply of college educated workers increased wages for high-skill jobs, subsequently dropping pay for lower-skill jobs needing less education.

A continuance of this trend will affect us more than we often consider.  The economics of education go beyond preparing children for the workforce, or even maintaining economic superiority.   Malcolm Gladwell describes the concept of the dependency ratio in this classic New Yorker piece.  What do you think the U.S. dependency ratio will look like when Baby Boomers retire?  Heathcare reform might help, but it’s not a fix.  Neither is education—at least not in it’s current state.

In the end, Dean Bruner and I were likely looking at this report through very different lenses, but his warning still rings true.   Education, like our economy, is in a period of transition.  Policy debates are raging across the country and even across my own state.  Politicization creates false dichotomies and we must maintain the ability to see the gray area.  We owe it to the next generation—in more ways than we realize.

Chad Ratliff is the Assistant Director of Instruction and Innovation Projects at Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia.

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Let’s Banish Critical Thinking, Part 2: Learn

February 15th, 2010 by Kevin Washburn View Comments »

Kyle examined his bookmarks. If he’d printed out all the information he’d found the paper would pile up to well over an inch high. Even though he’d been discerning in the references he noted, the information available was overwhelming and defeating, an obstacle that prevented Kyle from moving past the data collecting stage of his project. Whether he chose the traditional approach and wrote a paper or the technological option of a multimedia presentation, Kyle couldn’t communicate ideas he didn’t yet “own” himself, and the list of bookmarks represented more than he could ever apprehend.

His teacher expected evidence of his learning, but Kyle lacked the know-how that could enable his success. Kyle was a successful student in traditional classrooms, but he did not know how to learn, especially when he was responsible for the process.

As teachers we tend to focus on our teaching and assume students know how to learn. It’s a natural perspective—we teach, students learn. Focusing on learning can seem misdirected because what we’re going to do in the classroom demands our immediate concern—it’s what we describe in the required lesson plans. However, failing to focus on student learning capacity produces the predicament Kyle faced: expectation without enablement.

I suggested in the previous post that we examine thinking as a target. “Memorize” formed the target’s outermost ring.

Learning represents a movement toward the target’s center and beyond mere recall. In fact, we’re moving from a relatively straightforward process (rehearse→remember→recall) to more complicated combinations of processes.

Learning often involves four core processes, or four “states” of thinking. (Thinking is more fluid than the term states suggests, but this simplification can help us understand its flow.) Through experience, the brain gains raw sensory data. During comprehension, the brain sorts, labels, and organizes the raw sensory data. Through elaboration, the brain examines the organized data for patterns, recalls relevant prior experiences, and blends the new data with your experiences to construct understanding. During application the brain practices using or expressing the new understanding. There’s much more that could be said just about these core processes (an entire chapter of The Architecture of Learning explores these in depth), but allow me to move on and introduce a related idea.

The influential book 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times argues for a greater emphasis on “Learning and Innovation Skills.” Such skills, explain authors Trilling and Fadel, “are the keys to unlocking a lifetime of learning and creative work.”1 We should increase instruction in the skills of learning, not just guide student learning of core subject matter. In other words, we need to place more value and emphasis on teaching students how to self-teach (or self-learn). We need to teach them how to engage learning’s core processes; we need to teach them the thinking skills that enable self-directed learning.

As we explore learning’s core processes in detail, a myriad of related skills emerge. Here’s a partial chart I’ve compiled. All these skills either contribute to a core process or engage a combination of learning’s core processes.

Going deeper, learning to learn becomes even more interesting (or complex, depending on your perspective), but what we can actually teach comes into focus.

For example, a group of educators in Philadelphia took part of the very first skill (identifying, clarifying, and phrasing questions) and discussed, “What is the range of this skill? What do its initial steps of development look like? What would its fullest expression look like?” After we grappled with these concepts, we considered when instruction for each step might begin and where it might mature to mastery. Here’s what evolved:

As we saw this potential scope emerge, the group became excited. For the first time, many of them felt they knew what to teach to equip students to think critically. (I know, I used the term I’m advocating we banish!) My response, and what I still believe, is that we identified, at least in part, the skills we could teach that would equip students to learn independently. Learning is not separate from thinking but dependent on it:

What we know results from what and how we think. Researcher and critical thinking expert Diane F. Halpern explains:

Knowledge is not something static that gets transferred from one person to another like pouring water from one glass to another. It is dynamic. Information becomes knowledge when we make our own meaning out of it…[We] create knowledge every time we learn a new concept.

Educator Laura Erlauer agrees, explaining that thinking processes “allow the brain to thoroughly understand the new concepts and internalize them into meaningful memories.” Learning is a product of thinking.2

Where does that leave us? Here are a few possible conclusions:

  • Learning is more than memorizing. It engages cognitive processes (comprehension, elaboration, application) that extend beyond rehearsal and recall. Learning is powered by thinking, and learning provides new material for thinking. (As one commenter on the last post put it, you have to have something to think about.)
  • Teaching students how to become learners requires helping them develop these cognitive processes and their associated skills/sub-skills.
  • The associated skills possess “steps” of development that provide more specific direction for what we can emphasize in the classroom.
  • Teaching these skills should be our priority. Everything else, such as the specific topics we teach, should be the material students learn through practice in using these skills. In other words, these skills should “drive” the curriculum. That does not mean we do not teach the traditional disciplines, but that the traditional disciplines are a means to the desired end of equipping self-directed learners.

I realize this leaves plenty of unanswered questions, such as:

  • What are the developmental steps for all the other skills?
  • What about problem solving? creativity? reasoning?
  • How can we “cover” the mandated curriculum while teaching students the skills to become self-directed learners?
  • How does teaching students to become self-directed learners aid achievement as measured on standardized testing?
  • Are there approaches we can use that would engage students in utilizing these skills while becoming knowledgeable of new subject matter?

I’ll address some of these in future posts, but honestly, I don’t have answers to all of them. It seems current educational mandates and structures hinder good answers to some of these critical questions (and produce the very problems Kyle faced). Changing direction likely requires a rethinking of current emphases and structures.

But then you probably already knew that.

References

  1. Trilling, B. & Fadel, C., 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 49.
  2. Washburn, K.D., The Architecture of Learning: Designing Instruction for the Learning Brain (Pelham, AL: Clerestory Press, 2010), 186).

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Bilingual Education in Policy and Practice: Teaching Under Proposition 227

February 12th, 2010 by Joshua Cook View Comments »
In 1996, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) presented to world conference a Universal Declaration on Linguistic Rights asserting as “inalienable personal rights” the “right to be recognized as a member of a language community; the right to the use of one’s own language both in private and in public” and “the right for [one’s] own language and culture to be taught” (UNESCO, 1996). At the time that this declaration was published, California would seem to be a model state. After the landmark Lau v. Nichols case of 1974 in which the Supreme Court found that “there is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education”, California would set the bar on bilingual education. In 1976, the California State Assembly would pass AB 1329, the Chacón-Moscone Bilingual-Bicultural Education Act, which “established the legal framework for a mandatory bilingual education program. In 1980, the bill would be revamped and expanded and although the bill was allowed to “sunset” in 1987, “the California Department of Education has nevertheless continued to uphold the bill’s principles” (Lemberger, 1997). And yet, in 1998, through a controversial ballot measure, California voters passed Proposition 227 which amended their constitution to ban instruction in any language other than English.
In the case of bilingual education in California it would seem as though politics had trumped pedagogy, as Californians “revealed that language learning is as much a political issue as an educational program or a field for linguistic research” (Mitchell, D., et al., 1999). Indeed, an analysis of news items on Proposition 227 in the months leading up to the vote found “he-said, she-said reporting dominated” with “little or no discussion of actual bilingual programs” (Aryal, 1998). A debate that should have focused upon linguistic theory, cultural identity and a technical decision regarding the balancing of “language and academic learning outcomes” (Mitchell, D., et al., 1999) was reduced to monolingual versus multilingual cultural warfare with little discussion of the impact on students.
In essence, Californians set a policy on bilingual education which “places language learning ahead of academic attainment” (Mitchell, D., et al., 1999), as the statewide curriculum for instructing English Language Learners was established in blanket mandate. Proposition 227 states that without parental waiver, students learning to speak English will be given a single year of sheltered English language immersion. This despite the fact that well vetted research on the subject found that “even in schools that are considered successful in teaching English to EL students, oral proficiency can take 3 to 5 years to develop, and academic English proficiency can take 4 to 7 years” (Biegel, p. 507, 2009).

Legal Aspects of Bilingual Education
U.S. law has had very little to say on the topic of bilingual education and can be reduced to a single Supreme Court Case, Lau v. Nichols, a single act of Congress, the Equal Educational Opportunity Act (EEOA), and the Fifth Circuit Court’s application of Lau. An application of the Fourteenth Amendment, Lau found that “where inability to speak and understand the English language excludes national origin – minority group children from effective participation in the educational program offered by a school district, the district must take affirmative steps to … open its instructional program to these students.” As a result of the Lau decision, the San Francisco Unified School District would enter into a consent decree, to ensure the implementation of a bilingual program to serve all students. Ironically, this consent decree would allow San Francisco to continue to provide bilingual education to its students after it was banned by Proposition 227.
Following the decision, congress incorporated the key points of Lau into the EEOA. The EEOA stated that:

No State shall deny equal educational opportunity to an individual on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, by … (f) the failure by an educational agency to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by its students in the instructional programs.

As Wiley has pointed out however, the EEOA may not have explicitly provided for bilingual education. The EEOA does establish the right to “equal participation”, what Wiley calls “the right to access an education that allows for social, economic, and political participation” (2002, p. 39). What is not explicitly established is “the right to an education mediated in one’s mother tongue(s)” (Wiley, 2002, p. 39). This would be made clear by Judge Legge in the majority decision to uphold Proposition 227, “Since there is no requirement in the federal constitution for bilingual education, the voters of California were free to reject bilingual education” (Valeria v. Davis, 2003)
The key to understanding what is required of an educational agency is the phrase “appropriate action”. This appropriate action was not made explicit by Lau or by the EEOA. This would not be made explicit until the 1981 Fifth Circuit Court heard the Castaneda v. Pickard case. Castaneda established a three-fold framework for what constitutes “appropriate action”:
  1. The school system is purs[uing] a program informed by an educational theory recognized as sound by some experts in the field, or at least, deemed a legitimate experimental strategy.
  2. The programs and practices actually used by a school system [must be] reasonably calculated to implement effectively the educational theory adopted by the school.
  3. Even if theory is sound and resources are adequate, the program must be borne out by practical results.
In Valeria, Legge states “The Castaneda court … requires educational agencies to take ‘appropriate action,’ it does not require a program of bilingual education.” An unexplored option under Castaneda is whether or not single year immersion mandated by Proposition 227 meets the third criteria and has been “borne out by practical results”.
Marshall, et al. have established a framework on the “assumptive worlds of the policy maker”. What is interesting about Proposition 227 is that education policy was not made by district officials or state or federal legislators, but by the voters of California through ballot initiative. We might look at this legislation through the lens of the first domain of the “assumptive worlds”, “Who has the right and responsibility to initiate policy?” (Marshall, et al., 1985, p. 95). Do the voters have the right or the responsibility to initiate legislation on the linguistic rights of a minority group? Aryal’s meta-analysis on the media portrayal of this issue found that it was “not treat[ed] as an education story” and that popular discourse “seem[ed] to have forgotten that this issue will affect the lives of hundred of thousands of children for years to come” (1998). In his dissent to the Valeria decision, Judge Pregerson raised concerns along these lines:

Proposition 227 generates the type of restructuring of the political process that runs afoul of the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment. Proposition 227 siphons power away from those minorities who are directly affected by bilingual education policy and transfers the power to influence that area of educational policy to the general electorate. While public school students and parents could influence policy at the local level before the passage of Proposition 227, they must now launch a successful statewide ballot initiative to bring about any meaningful change. (Valeria v. Davis, 2003)

Education Policy Aspects of Bilingual Education
The years following the passage of Proposition 227 were marked by turmoil in California schools. In an action research study on bilingual teacher candidates, Rubio and Attinasi (2000) identified six dominant themes in reaction to the mandated changes. Faced with the difficult (and expensive) task of rebuilding entire programs, some districts opted to make minimal changes to classroom instruction. For others, the changes caused uncertainty and awkwardness as they struggled to interpret the pedagogical implications of the policy. Many teachers reported duress at the changes, most often at being “kept in the dark” as to what the changes would mean. Other districts opted for rigid directives, sometimes including the directive that “no waivers will be given”. Some districts took the opposite tack and actively sought parental waivers that would allow them to continue to operate their bilingual programs. Some districts pursued alternative programs such as dual immersion programs or as in the case of San Francisco Unified, continued bilingual education under its court ordered consent decree.

Next Steps
Several years into the program mandated by Proposition 227, California’s English Language Learners (ELL) find themselves in a difficult position. In 1998, just after the passage of Proposition 227, a review of data on students who had transition from bilingual education programs showed that “Third-graders who had graduated from bilingual classrooms in San Francisco, for example, scored 40 percentage points higher in math than their native English-speaking counterparts. On the language portion, bilingual fourth-graders scored 25 points higher than the natives. And in reading, eight-grade bilingual grads outscored the natives by nine points – although their reading scores slipped behind in later grades” (Asimov, 1998). Today, “linguistic minority children, particularly those who are not yet proficient in English, lag far behind children from English only backgrounds” (Biegel, 2009, p. 532). Furthermore, Rumberger and Gándara have identified seven inequitable conditions that effect ELL students’ opportunities: (1) inequitable access to appropriately trained teachers, (2) inadequate professional development opportunities to help teachers address their instructional needs, (3) inequitable access to appropriate assessment to measure their achievement, gauge their learning needs, and hold the system accountable for their progress, (4) inadequate instructional time to accomplish learning goals, (5) inequitable access to instructional materials and curriculum, (6) inequitable access to adequate facilities and (7) intense segregation into schools and classrooms that place them at particularly high risk for educational failure (Biegel, 2009, pp. 533-534).
As research has conclusively demonstrated that a single year of English language immersion is not a practical approach to the instruction of English language and academic content for ELLs, Education policy makers must seek new ways to develop strong programs for ELLs. While California may not be allowed to provide bilingual instruction, “the conditions that had been put into place before”, specifically its programs for the “training for bilingual teachers” (Varghese & Stritikus, 2005) provides an excellent resource for the reconstruction of strong programs. Varghese and Stritikus (2005) call for the creation of explicit “spaces” in teacher education programs where “teachers’ beliefs, their local settings, and research-based content” are discussed alongside “language policy” to make these discussions explicit for young teachers.
Varghese and Stritikus (2005) found that a teacher’s “sense of professional identity, … personal history and their entry into the profession” had as much impact in how teachers responded to language policy as did the school district’s official policy. Rubio and Attinasi (2000) take the discussion a step further by offering two concrete solutions via teacher education to California’s dilemma. First, new teachers must be thoroughly prepared by their programs. Having identified a list of seven needs of a strong BCLAD teacher certification program, it becomes as simple as filling these needs: (1) methods for primary language support (legal under 227 as “support”), (2) English Language Development (ELD) instructional strategies, (3) Specifically Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE) strategies, (4) support in lesson planning (as in the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP)), (5) support in classroom management, (6) homework strategies with parents and (7) access to ELD/SDAIE resources and materials. Finally, Rubio and Attinasi (2000) provide a set of enduring understandings that graduates of Bilingual Credential programs must possess: (a) how language policies affect the larger societies, (b) a focus on short range compliance with Proposition 227 and (c) the ideal education for societal bilingualism through dual language immersion. In this way, teacher education programs may provide the best and brightest hope to ameliorating the Achievement Gap for English language learners.
References
Aryal, M. (1998). “He says, she says: How California’s major papers have covered prop. 227”. Media File, Volume 17 #3.
Asimov, N. (1998). Bilingual surprise in state testing. San Francisco Chronicle. July 16, 1998, A1-A10.
Biegel, S. (2009). Education and the Law. St. Paul, MN: West.
Lau v. Nichols (1974), 414 U.S. 563, 94 S.Ct. 786
Lemberger, N. (1997). Bilingual Education (p. 171). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Marshall, C., Mitchell, D. & Wirt, F. (1985). Assumptive words of education policy makers. Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 62, No. 4, pp. 90 – 115.
Mitchell, D., Destino, T., Karam, R. & Colón-Muñiz, A. (1999). The politics of bilingual education. Educational Policy, 13 (p. 86).
Rubio, O. & Attinasi, J. (2000). Teachers in post-Proposition-227 southern California: implications for teacher education. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 27 no. 4
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), (1996). Universal declaration on linguistic rights. World Conference on Linguistic Rights, Barcelona, Spain.
Valeria v. Davis (2003), 320 F.3d 1014, 1018-20 (9th Cir.).
Varghese, M. M. & Stritikus, T. (2005). “Nadie me dijó [nobody told me]”: Language policy negotiation and implications for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 56 (pp. 73 – 87)
Wiley, T. G. (2002). Accessing language rights in education: A brief history in the U.S. context. In J.W. Tollefson (Ed.), Language policies in education: Critical issues (pp. 39-64). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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School discipline for off-campus conduct?

February 12th, 2010 by brianjford View Comments »

Recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (which covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the U.S. Virgin Islands) decided two cases in which public school districts disciplined students for creating fake MySpace profiles of their principals.  For reasons that I do not understand, Pennsylvania is a leading state in this area of the law.  Those of us who track these issues nationally look to the Keystone State as a leading indicator.

The decisions were decided by co-equal panels of different judges in the same court.  On the surface, they are dramatically different.  In one case, it was acceptable for the school district to impose discipline.  In the other case, under nearly identical facts, disciplining the student ran afoul of the First Amendment.

For a detailed, two-part analysis of how the court reached different results in each of these cases – and why the decisions are important – please go to http://bit.ly/9cdVnx for part one and http://bit.ly/bhZKcW for part two.  I hope you will take advantage of this blog to discuss these evolving issues.

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Education Design Thinking- The Balance of Exploitation and Exploration

February 12th, 2010 by Rob Jacobs View Comments »

Should schools get better at what they do or find better ways of doing what they do?

Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, James March believes that organizations may engage primarily in two types of activities, exploration, the search for new knowledge, or exploitation, the maximization of payoff from existing knowledge.

In public education terms, schools can look for new strategies, methods, and models for delivering education, or they can refine, hone, manage, and systematize the delivery of their current models of education.

In his new book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is The Next Competitive Advantage, Roger Martin explains that while both are valuable and both are critical, it is hard to do. “…they are hard to engage in simultaneously; most often, organizations choose to focus on one activity, either exploration or exploitation, to the exclusion of the other and to their own detriment.”

In other words, education focuses on either the exploration of new models and methods, or focuses mainly on managing and administering their current model and methods.

Roger explains that there dangers of an organization that focuses only on exploration.
“An organization exclusively dedicated to exploration will expire relatively short order. Typically, exploration alone will not generate the returns needed to fund further exploration.”

If education is always looking for the next best thing, the next model, method, or strategy, they will fail to produce the student achievement results demanded of them. They will not capitalize or leverage the good models, methods, strategies, and ideas that have been developed.

But there are dangers too for the organization that focuses solely on exploitation.

“ On the other hand, many organizations flip quickly from an early exploration phase—the generation of the founding idea behind the business—to the steady exploitation of that idea, never returning to exploration. These organizations, solely dedicated to exploitation, might last somewhat longer than exploration-only businesses, but the business that creates value only through exploitation will exhaust itself in due course. It can’t keep exploiting the same piece of knowledge forever. If it tries to do so, the cost of the business can be devastating.”

If education is never looking for new models, methods,strategies, or ideas for delivering education to it’s students, it is inevitable that the model they exploit will eventually cease to produce the results desired of it.

Roger provides the following table for reference. I have added the education references.

Exploration
 Exploitation
Organizational Focus
 The invention of teaching and learning
 The administration of teaching and learning
Overriding Goal
 Dynamically moving from the current knowledge stage to the next
 Systematically honing and refining within the current knowledge stage
Driving Forces
 Intuition, feeling, hypotheses about the future, originality
 Analysis, reasoning, data from the past, mastery
Future Orientation
 Long-term
 Short-term
Progress
 Uneven, scattered, characterized by false starts and significant leaps forward
 Accomplished by measured, careful incremental steps
Risk and Reward
 High risk, uncertain but potentially high reward
 Minimal risk, predictable but smaller rewards
Challenge
 Failure to consolidate and exploit returns
 Exhaustion and obsolescence

Roger Martin argues that what is needed is balance between exploration and exploitation found in Design Thinking. “The design thinker therefore, enables the organization to balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and administration of business, and originality and mastery.”

The education design thinker enable a school to balance finding new and better ways increasing student achievement and delivering effective instruction, while mastering, embedding, and refining the effective methods that are in use. Schools that get better at what they do while finding better ways to do it. That is educational design thinking.

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