A friend posted this 3 minute video on Facebook and I just HAD to share it. It speaks volumes in this short amount of time – and even suggests a workable solution!
www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10151427187507658
I would love to find something like that speaks to the needs of the birth-to-middle-school youths. Anybody know of anything out there?
Very cool!
Since the early 1970s, Gallup has reported the results on their annual survey of American education. This year’s report includes findings from:
Here are the highlights of the 2013 survey and report.
You can download the entire 47-page report here.
I am struck with how tightly this couples with M. Night Shyamalan’s findings in his excellent book, I Got Schooled. By clicking on that title in the tags below, you can find summaries of his five practices that lead to success in the classroom.
Here is an overview from recent Standard & Poor’s economic research describing the importance of education to our country’s well-being:
You can read the whole, lengthy article here.
This little 3:10 video asks a question in an ‘in-your-face’ way.
Then goes on to answer it.
Then goes on to say why really matters.
Enjoy ~
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:
Here is the final I Got Schooled practice #5 – More Time in School
M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) has written a book (I Got Schooled) describing how – and how not – to close the education gap in the U.S. It should be very supportive in the current conversation and climate regarding what’s wrong with – and how to fix – New Mexico education.
For five years through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan studied what is succeeding in closing the education gap — that depended only on practices inside the classroom itself and that were scalable.
He discovered closing the achievement gap depended on five practices and couldn’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself.
These five practices must be implemented together to have any substantive effect:
• Effective teachers – dropping poor; hiring good; why it’s important; how to do it
• Leadership – how it’s important; what it looks like; how to do it
• Feedback – critical: frequency, consistency, teacher/principal usability
• Smaller (high) schools –part of the “system” that turbocharges the other practices
• More time in school – summers matter – children of low income and of color fall behind a month every summer; by the time they reach third grade they are so far behind it’s virtually impossible to catch up
Covered: successful schools, programs, clinical studies, and data and statistics, including: Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), Uncommon Schools, Achievement First/Endeavor, FirstLine schools, North Star Academy, Arthur Ashe, Los Angeles Green Dot Public Schools, and more.
The study also found four popular, expensive practices contribute little to closing the education gap:
• Small classroom sizes
• Master’s programs and Ph.D.’s for the teachers
• Paying teachers like doctors
• Funding the schools at $20,000 per pupil
MORE TIME IN SCHOOL
A very insightful view of the challenges by Franklin Schargel, a Former Teacher, School Counselor and School Administrator, appeared in a recent Huffing Post. In it Schargel names and discusses 5 main reasons kids drop out of school: