Do you ever look around the place you live and get totally bummed out by all the pollution?
Well, that’s what was happening to Elif. So she said: “Oh I know, I’ll just invent a more eco-friendly way to make plastic! It’s not like I’m just a teenager who’s still in high school or anything.”
Just click here to see this very cool 2:29 video.
How can we support more of this kind of inventiveness and inquiry in our local high-schools?
Here is a quick summary of Catherine Bracy’s September 2013 TED Talk entitled Why Good Hackers Make Good Citizens.
I believe you will want to watch it a couple of times and share it with lots of others.
One example towards the end is just sobering.
The Mexico House of Representatives let a 2-year $9.3 million (USD) contract to build a bill-tracking system. Out of frustration and irritation, Mexico City tech-geeks created a contest to create a system in 10 days for a “prize” of $9,300 (USD) (!). They received 173 apps; 5 were presented to the legislature and are still being used; the $9.3 million contract was vacated.
It appears to me, the task of closing the education gap is two-fold, consisting of ‘Inside Jobs’ and ‘Outside Jobs.’
The ‘Inside job’ would be everything that happens in the classroom in a school in a district.
The ‘Outside job’ would be everything else – community, parents, not-for-profits, foundations, health, transportation, PTA, unions, politicians, legislators, city-county-state government, business, and like that.
For the Inside Job, the best expression I have come across is M. Night Shyamalan Foundation’s recent book, I Got Schooled, which very clearly says that closing the gap is a multi-faceted, ‘systems’ challenge, requiring a multi-faceted ‘systems’ response.
Money for the Inside job comes mostly through property taxes, oil-gas fund, and equalization formulas. A perennial problem is, arguments for employing these funds tend to use one-dimensional single-issue practices, based on favored views of lobbyists or organizations for a particular ideology, concept, or anecdote – and interdisciplinary integrated ‘systems’ solutions get buried in this narrow focusing.
Many, if not most, single-issue solutions have been tried once or many times over the years. Many are still being supported or proposed. However, truckloads of data from multiple points of view reveal very little change has occurred over the last 30-40 years.. Indeed, the Shyamalan Foundation found that implementing single practices without other important integrating components consistently produced dismal results.
Over time, institutions too often and too easily fall into status quo thinking-acting-arguing, and many (most) substantive changes come from outside such institutions. I believe Shyamalan Foundation’s I Got Schooled could only have been written from outside the educational institution.
In their search for a systems-type solution for closing the education gap, the Foundation required that the practices had to:
And therein lies the power and utility of their findings.
They identified five practices that, working together in a systems context, satisfy all these criteria:
If you don’t have time to read the whole book, these five practices are summarized at tommilesabq.com.
For the Outside Job, the best expressions I’ve come across in Albuquerque are the ABC Community School Partnership and Mission: Graduate. The ABC Community School Partnership is tasking itself with:
Mission: Graduate is focused on ‘who is not graduating and why,’ for Middle-School and High-School domains.
A really short summary for all this could be:
On Sept 11th, 2013, more than 9,000 participants from around the state joined in a telephone town hall to express their concerns and aspirations for New Mexico Public Education. Their responses show New Mexicans are ready for change. Here is a summary.
It is Time to Change the Status Quo for New Mexico’s Public Education!
Keep The Promise For New Mexico’s Future
in partnership with
New Mexico PBS and The Corporation for Public Broadcasting
presents:
Central Region – Keep The Promise Education Town Hall
on Wednesday, October 16th, 2013
This is the first of 4 town halls across the state and will be focused on developing a community based vision for education in New Mexico. These Town Halls are opportunities for parents, students and educators to share YOUR vision for public education.
Together we can create real community-driven solutions to ensure a great education for all of New Mexico’s children.
Central Region Town Hall:
Wed, Oct. 16 from 6-7pm at the
UNM Continuing Education Conference Center Auditorium
1634 University Blvd. NE
Albuquerque, NM
Whew! Sixteen hour election day poll work took a couple of days recovery time. Definitely not as young as I used to be.
Because this article on reverse engineering in healthcare seemed to have a number of interesting parallels with Education I thought I’d pass it on in the blog. Just substitute “education” for “healthcare” in the article. Here’s a summary:
What happens when you create health care solutions specifically for patients in low-income settings? It turns out that learning from and investing in these settings can be powerful ways to tackle problems at home that require out-of-the-box thinking. These differences include:
These six attributes make lower-income settings appealing places to create, test, and scale new ideas (In ABQ/BERNCO, think ABC Community Schools Partnership for pre-K-12 and Mission Graduate: 60,000 for K-12 and beyond).
So, just how do ideas move through a reverse innovation pipeline?
The article provides three very interesting real-world examples in Diagnostics, Health IT, and Service Delivery.
In short, reverse innovation has tremendous potential to align incentives and disrupt existing systems and technologies. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg (or, as their African colleagues like to say, the ears of the hippopotamus – I just love that analogy).
Also … beware the resistance inherent in disrupting existing systems.
What can we do to increase the pace of reverse innovation? For starters, we can:
Many intractable problems in health care could be solved if we accelerated the spread of ideas through the reverse innovation pipeline. To do this, we will need to think differently, invest in reverse innovation, and work together to solve common problems.
Again, think of the work being done today by ABC Community Schools Partnership for pre-K-12 and Mission Graduate: 60,000 for K-12 and beyond.
The findings of this study probably apply to Albuquerque and Bernalillo County as well.
University of Wisconsin Center for Economic Development
Executive Summary
The ‘skills mismatch,’ it is argued, is the central reason why unemployment remains high, even as job vacancies remain unfilled.
This widely held view, however, is incorrect.
Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown, whose research is often cited
by skills gap proponents, put it this way: “Training doesn’t create jobs. Jobs
create training. And people get that backwards all the time. In the real world,
down at the ground level, if there’s no demand for magic, there’s no demand
for magicians.”
The complete report (1.7mb) is available in Adobe’s Acrobat format. Acrobat Reader is required to view the file. Use Adobe’s web site to download a free copy of Acrobat Reader.
Back in March, Ex-Governor Gary Carruthers being interviewed on Public Radio about ethics in life, business and government was asked, “So, what would your advice be for the good of the state of New Mexico in general?”
He said his answer was very simple: create a world-class job force. And the interviewer and he both agreed that the path to that was education. Education!
Governor Caruthers went on to say that while a Masters Degree or four-year degree would be nice, recent studies of employer/society job market needs say there probably is a greater need for excellent technical and two-year training and education.
So ,,, how would you go about making this happen? What do you think would work?