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!
This 11 minute TED talk provides a quick review of where education has come from two generations ago to where the world is now – and the opportunity to shift from “the teacher has the information you need to know” to “here’s something I challenge you to learn about and report back upon – mistakes are totally OK and will be thoroughly discussed and learned from.”
Support for those that are doing and supporting this approach.
Encouragement to those that are not to take a close look.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up4hFj-jcTY
This new free app is designed to support PTO/PTA organizations, parents, and school teachers and administrators. This is what it’s website says:
Sounds like it could be quite useful. To go their website, click here.
Some students at Medea Creek Middle School in southern California, have a very clear understanding of what’s broken about our economic and governance systems. Probably a much clearer idea than most Americans.
Here is a brief article including the less-than-9-minute video they made to explain it to the rest of us:
ularresistance.org/young-students-solution-to-corporate-rule/
In the first paragraph there is a link to the school’s website if you’re interested; it’s a pretty cool website.
Kudos and thanks to these young thinkers and voices.
What might Albuquerque, Bernalillo County, and New Mexico middle schoolers be capable of that we’re not taking advantage of?
Please feel free to share this widely..
Tom
This little 1:34 minute video might stir up a little middle- and high-school STEM action.
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