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!
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
Thanks to Franklin Schargel for pointing out this new Carnegie Foundation study.
BY SUSAN HEADDEN – Carnegie Foundation for the advancement of teaching 2014
This is my attempt to summarize the main points of 28 pages of this important and timely study. Interestingly, much of this tracks very closely with M. Night Shyamalan Foundation’s studies and book: I Got Schooled, which I summarized earlier in my blog.
Talent Drain – turnover and departures are lowering the average classroom experience level
Why They Leave – mainly because of poor/lacking administrative and professional support
New Generation, New Attitudes – impatience with dysfunctional structures, older teachers didn’t have to put up with all the testing and curriculum changes
Myths About Money – again, solid administrative support seems more important than money, pension back-loading is hard to swallow
The Toll of Teacher Turnover – turnover is very expensive, student relationships suffer, support from veteran teachers is rapidly vanishing
How Much Turnover is Too Much – it turns out that number/quality/costs of turnover is very poorly tracked, principles aren’t getting good teachers to stay and aren’t good at getting bad ones to leave, there are no good ideas what effective turnover targets should be
Supporting a Teacher’s First Years – careful hiring is important, new teachers are not prepared for realities of classroom, there is too little summer training, there is too much late hiring, there is lack of comprehensive induction (useful discussion of benefits of comprehensive induction and various approaches)
Houston Boot Camp – a mentoring program in the face of daunting statistics and politics
Roving Mentors in Iowa – mentors working outside of their normal grade levels and subject areas have much to offer to the new teacher, a lot of work gathering data on what was working
Teacher Residencies: Working Into The Job – pre-service apprenticing for up to a full year is producing desirable results in effectiveness and retention
A Matter of Match – problems arise from weak interviewing, little interaction with school personnel, hiring late in the process and after school year starts. turnover destroys continuity and trust for teachers and students
Returns On Investment – high quality induction produces lower turnover and higher retention, poor hiring practices leaks good teachers
Anamosa, Iowa –a detailed example of mentoring support
To read the whole study, click here.
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
Here is I Got Schooled practice #4 – Smaller schools
M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) has written this book to describe 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
SMALLER SCHOOLS
This seemed like a timely and useful article – Tom
“If you want to eat a more healthful diet, you’re going to have to shell out more cash, right? (After all, Whole Foods didn’t get the nickname “Whole Paycheck” for nothing.)
But until recently, that widely held bit of conventional wisdom hadn’t really been assessed in a rigorous, systematic way, says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.
So he and his colleagues decided to pore over 27 studies from 10 different developed countries that looked at the retail prices of food grouped by healthfulness. Across these countries, it turns out, the cost difference between eating a healthful and unhealthful diet was pretty much the same: about $1.50 per day. And that price gap held true when they focused their research just on U.S. food prices, the researchers found in their meta-analysis of these studies.
“I think $1.50 a day is probably much less than some people expected,” Mozaffarian tells The Salt, “but it’s also a real barrier for some low-income families,” for whom it would translate to about an extra $45 a month or $550 a year.
Still, from a policy perspective, he argues, $1.50 a day is chump change. “That’s the cost of a cup of coffee,” he says. “It’s trivial compared to the cost of heart disease or diabetes, which is hundreds of billions of dollars” — both in terms of health care costs and lost productivity.”
Read the whole article here.