Category Archives: Elementary School

The Girl Effect – a 3-minute video worth watching. Maybe twice, even.

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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!

Check out this new PTA/PTO assistance/organizer for any device

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This new free app is designed to support PTO/PTA organizations, parents, and school teachers and administrators. This is what it’s website says:

Blissfully Easy and Quick to Set Up
and Manage

  • SAVE HOURS OF TIME
  • KEEP EVERYONE INFORMED & INVOLVED
  • EASILY SHARE INFORMATION
  • STAY ORGANIZED AND EFFECTIVE
  • SIGN UP, ORGANIZE AND RETAIN MORE VOLUNTEERS
  • RALLY YOUR PARENTS FOR SUPPORT
  • RAISE MORE MONEY
  • BUILD A STRONG AND HAPPY COMMUNITY

Sounds like it could be quite useful. To go their website, click  here.

Work Wonders Project – marrying technology and collaboration in education

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May 27, 2014

Microsoft has today announced the Work Wonders Project, a video series that explores the power of technology and collaboration powered by Office 365. You’ll be able to watch two very bright minds as they work together to achieve positive results in a YouTube series that launches June 2.

The challenge is on: “Pencils of Promise” founder Adam Braun believes schools are the future, and education reformer Sugata Mitra thinks they’re obsolete. But the two are joining together in The Work Wonders Project to collaborate on ways to revolutionize education, including using Office 365 to do it.

Braun, whose nonprofit program has built 200 “pencil of promise” schools in Laos, Guatemala and Ghana, will work with Mitra, a ted prize winner and a professor of educational technology, who will bring his cloud-based, elementary education approach to Braun’s schools in Ghana

Very neat 3 minute video overview:  

.http://www.microsoft.com/office/workwonders/

Tom

Closing the education-opportunity-achievement gap

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Closing the education-opportunity-achievement gap

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:

  • focus solely ‘inside’ the classroom/school
  • exclude ‘Outside’  the classroom influences exactly because they are outside the control of the classroom/school;
  • demonstrate substantial ‘effect size,” that is, they must produce demonstrable, measurable, and significant results; and,
  • be scalable for implementation

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:

  • 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 – frequency, consistency, teacher/principal usability – all critical
  • Smaller (high) schools – this turbo-charges the other practices
  • More time in school – by the time children of color or low income reach third grade they are so far behind it’s virtually impossible to catch up

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:

  • Working in the Early Child to K-12 and non-graduated adult domains;
  • Identifying ‘inside needs’ that can be addressed by ‘outside’ organizations, programs, and resources;
  • Creating coalitions and collaboratives for matching proper resources with proper students-parents-teachers-administrators in proper times and places;
  • Using schools as hubs for coordinating and delivering services and resources;
  • Creating and funding full-time action positions called ‘Community School Coordinators’ to foster and coordinate matching-up ‘inside needs’ with ‘outside’ programs and resources.

 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:

  • Shyamalan Foundation’s defines the ‘Inside Job;’
  • ABC Community School Partnership and Mission: Graduate describe the ‘Outside Job;’ and,
  • Community School Coordinators are the mechanism for effectively linking the two.

I Got Schooled – Practice #5 – More Time in School

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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

  • More time in school is needed to overcome the deficiencies inherent in low-income, inner-city family environments
  • Upper-income families use an average of 2,153 words every hour; middle-income families use 1,251; welfare families use 616
  • Average words per year for upper-income are 11.2 million; middle-income families 6.5 million; welfare families 3.2 million words
  • By age four that is a gap of some 30 million words
  • The number of words a four-year-old can understand and speak relates directly to the number of words they have heard
  • By the time poorer kids reach third grade, they are already so far behind it is virtually impossible to catch up
  • Early intervention (preschool) with significant hours of exposure closes the gap
  • Consistency and good quality here are critical
  • Our natural tendencies are to blame failures of others on something flawed inside them, and while attributing our successes to merit and our failures on chance
  • American families that tend to obsess about pre-K education are the ones that need it least
  • The children who would most benefit from preschools are the least likely to be enrolled in them
  • Even then, generally, preschool effects disappear nearly completely by the third year after the program
  • Lower-income and African-American kids stay more or less even with upper-income, white suburban classmates – so long as school was in session
  • They fell behind a month or more every summer!
  • Summer matters far more than any has thought
  • Student test scores change powerfully by what happens between June and September
  • Lower-income student families cannot compensate for middle- and upper-income families’ ability to continue to enrich their children’s experiences over the summer
  • Current standard in most places is 180 days of school a year, each one between six and seven hours long
  • Before the Civil War, Philadelphia’s schools were in session more than 250 days a year; New York’s were open all year except for a two-week break in August
  • While more classroom hours is a serious part of closing the gap, five hundred additional low-quality hours taught by a teaching staff full of below-average instructors who are neither observed regularly by their principals nor given the quantitative and qualitative feedback they need is a waste
  • Keep kids in school longer during the year and you won’t need superheroes to close the gap. Most teachers can do the job just fine
  • And this practice is scalable

I Got Schooled – Practice #2 – Right Balance of Leadership

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So, here is I Got Schooled practice #2 – Right Balance of Leadership.

Through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan spent five years studying what is succeeding in closing the education gap that depended only on factors inside the classroom itself and that were scalable. He discovered closing the achievement gap can’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself; five things must be implemented together to have any substantive effect.

Shyamalan uncovers five factors present in schools he found were significantly closing the education gap for inner city children and children of color. He provides just tons of example schools, clinical studies, data and statistics, detailing each of these five factors.

These posts are highlights for each of these five factors for folks who might feel they are too busy to read the whole book … and strongly whet your appetite for doing so. The five factors are:

  • Effective teachers – dropping poor, hiring good
  • Right balance of leadership
  • Feedback that is timely and consistent
  • Smaller schools
  • More time in school

A large number of successful schools and programs are covered in the book, 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.

Factor #2 – LEADERSHIP, the right balance of

  • School leadership is second only to classroom teaching as an influence on learning
  • “Superman principals” are not scalable
  • There is not a single documented case of a school successfully turning around its achievement trajectory in the absence of strong leadership
  • First, leaders vary in large and consistent ways – the most successful teams work under the most successful bosses (McKinsey & Company study)
  • Second, the boss’s most important job isn’t communicating strategy or even hiring and firing – it is teaching skills that persist
  • Motivating a team of subordinates isn’t nearly as important as improving their skills
  • The difference between a good principal and a mediocre one is nearly as big as that between a great teacher and a poor teacher
  • A principal effects hundreds of students, instead of a few dozen
  • Principals are profoundly important
  • The most effective principals are also the ones engaging in the most “negative teacher selection,” i.e., firing the lemons
  • The most effective principals also improved the instructional success of existing teachers
  • Least effective principals seldom leave the system – they just move to different schools, further widening the achievement gap
  • Existing, thorough application processes do not insure a consistent level of success
  • Principals should be primarily responsible for the instruction of teachers
  • But the typical urban principal spends less that 20 percent of their workday on instruction
  • Principals in the top systems around the world spend 80 percent of the school day on improving instruction in the classroom (McKinsey & Company study)
  • Schools need an Operations Manager to handle food service, discipline, custodians, paperwork, to free principals to help teachers help students learn
  • Such an administrative management model is scalable
  • Brett Peiser founder of Uncommon Schools network, on leaders: “Great leaders know culture eats strategy for lunch.”
  • Culture is everything distinctive to a place; it’s every way you know you are in an uncommon school; it’s rigorous in involving and aligning everything and everyone
  • Culture is beyond advertising brochures, it must have enough force and buy-in to overwhelm its students’ environments outside the school
  • A culture of high expectations seems almost important enough to earn a place as one of the keys to closing the achievement gap
  • Someone has to make certain that all teachers understand and support a uniform school culture in their bones
  • Again, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”
  • Consistency in students’ experience from class to class and grade to grade;  and quality control of this consistency is really important
  • Both unquestioned authority and humanity are equally important, i.e., caring and respect for students
  • There are techniques and behaviors that produce desirable results consistently, like Lemov’s Taxonomy, Teach Like A Champion, and they should be known and used
  • See also The Wooden Way, the legendary UCLA basketball coach’s system
  • And these practices are scalable

Hoping you are finding these interesting and perhaps useful.

Up next:  Factor #3 – Feedback

Tom

I Got Schooled – Practice #1 – Effective teachers

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I Got Schooled Practice #1 – Effective teachers – hiring good and dropping poor

Through his MNS Foundation, Shyamalan spent five years studying what is succeeding in closing the education gap that depended only on factors inside the classroom itself and that were scalable. He discovered closing the achievement gap can’t be figured out by examining just any single practice by itself; five things must be implemented together to have any substantive effect.

Shyamalan uncovers five factors present in schools he found were significantly closing the education gap for inner city children and children of color. He provides just tons of example schools, clinical studies, data and statistics, detailing each of these five factors.

These posts are highlights for each of these five factors for folks who might feel they are too busy to read the whole book … and strongly whet your appetite for doing so. The five factors are:

  • Effective teachers – dropping poor, hiring good
  • Right balance of leadership
  • Feedback that is timely and consistent
  • Smaller schools
  • More time in school

EFFECTIVE TEACHERS – dropping poor, hiring good

  • Are the engine that make schools run
  • Not all teachers perform equally (as do neither all salesmen, lawyers, accountants, basketball players, school principals, …)
  • Get the least effective teachers out of classrooms
  • You can discover who underperformers are
  • National studies find just 2% of teachers are rated unsatisfactory
  • Teachers in the middle, performance-wise, may be the most important factor for scaling success to 132,656 K-12 schools nationwide in 2010
  • One year with a great teacher is worth $20,000 in lifetime earnings for every student in that class
  • The effects of poor teachers in student learning outweighs the benefits provided by the good ones
  • Someone who barely graduated from Nowhere State is just as likely to be a great teacher as someone with a Summa Cum Laude from Harvard
  • Until you see them teach, you are picking blind; seeing them teach takes 2 to 3 years
  • After 2-3 years, tenure locks both good and bad teachers in place
  • Release procedures can take  300 days and cost $250,000, and so becomes too much trouble to take on
  • By replacing just 5 to 8% of the least effective teachers with average teachers, student overall achievement scores would rise to those of Canada or Finland
  • There is no evidence we can improve teachers’ performance by giving them bonuses or sending them to graduate school
  • Reliable tools must be used to determine teacher competence and effectiveness
  • Actual-versus-expected student progress can be a valid rating system (i.e., Value Added Method – VAM)
  • But … “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”  Voltaire
  • Hence the teacher evaluation problem: “Until someone comes up with a perfect tool for judging teachers, one that judges no teacher unfairly, there’s no point in using anything.”
  • If no one can be fired without a “fair” evaluation, and a fair evaluation needs to be error-free, then no one can be fired.
  • Multiple tests, as designed by the Measures of Effective Teaching project (MET),  are providing greater reliability and validity to teacher evaluation (see the MET January 2013 final report)
  • Good news: an inner city student having a great teacher for four years in a row will close the gap separating her from her suburban counterpart, without doing anything else
  • Bad news: three great teachers won’t make up for one poor one
  • The ratio of great teachers to poor teachers is nowhere near three-to-one
  • For schools on the wrong side of the achievement gap, these “roadblock” teachers effectively trap students
  • Eliminating roadblock teachers is a necessary first step toward closing America’s achievement gap, but it’s not sufficient in and of itself. “You can’t fire your way to excellence.”
  • Hiring good teachers and releasing bad ones is a scalable practice

Next up: The right balance of leadership