Big City Education:

Back in Our Hands

Four--and Only Four--Educational Initiatives

Rationale and Expanded Summary

Contents

Rationale

An Introduction to “Big City Education: Back in Our Hands”

Initiative One: Clear, Comprehensible, and Meaningful Standards

Initiative Two: Smart and Open Assessments

Initiative Three: “Student-Centric” Learning through Technology

Initiative Four: New Models of School Choice

Conclusion

Monte Joffee, Ed.D.

917-447-7012

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Rationale

Big City Education: Back in Our Hands (“Education in Our Hands”) is a progressive educational platform Big City. It is clear, intuitive, and appealing. It is based on the premise that the breakdown of educational progress stems from two factors causing disempowerment and marginalization:

(1) Educational progress has been hampered by the marginalization and demoralization of precious educational human resources: parents, teachers, community leaders, churches, neighborhood organizations, and entrepreneurs. All of these human resources and talents must be activated to renew education at the grassroots.

(2) A moral message of hope and “learned optimism” (Seligman, Hoy) must replace the current climate of fear, pessimism, and cynicism.

Big Cityites want to see disruptive change in K-12 public education. This is possible when educational reform draws from the raw energy, creativity, and entrepreneurship that have made Big City great. Like Big City, reforms in education must:

  • be sharp and straight: easily understandable, doable, and attractive;
  • align with the city’s new demographic: upwardly aspiring minorities, entrepreneurs, rugged and hard-working citizens, post-racial youth, educators who want dignity restored to their work lives, people who want to overcome divides and the politics of interest groups—in short, the people who lift themselves and the city.
  • transcend past educational policies that attempt to create change by placing blame, penalizing, and victimizing educators and students while avoiding romanticized and unaccountable notions of education.

Education in Our Hands meets all of these criteria. With four and only four initiatives it is intuitive and doable. It opens the closed walls of the education establishment to the vast and powerful winds of democracy, promising maximum grassroots-inspired change with minimal top-down dictates. It sidesteps distracting and moot preoccupation with pointless controversies and debates about education. It will augur forth a generation of unmatched Big City global citizens and leaders through four initiatives that are truly “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

An Introduction to “Big City Education: Back in Our Hands”

Big City must activate a culture of educational empowerment that will foster a generation of global citizens who can protect and advance American prosperity and democracy and assure American global leadership well into the future. Big City Education: Back in Our Hands (“Education in Our Hands”) activates the values that have made our city great to bring about educational success for our children.

Educational empowerment must transcend the limits of the current educational outlooks. It must resist a misplaced trust in “expertism.” It must draw on clear goals, transparent measures, and tap new pools of human talent. It must incorporate the promise of mobile technology to expand education far beyond the school gate.

What blocks the road to academic success? We must make it easy for students to advance through the two key gateways: promotion and graduation. To accomplish this we must empower students, parents, and outside-the-system educational forces such as communities, corporations, churches, and community-based organizations.

Four--and only four--initiatives are necessary to set new dynamics into motion:

  1. Develop rigorous yet thin standards for promotion and graduation that are clear enough for every parent and student as well their supporters to understand;
  2. Provide a means for students to “credential” competency in these standards through fair and on-demand testing that is linked to promotion and graduation;
  3. Establish a technology infrastructure that enables “student-centric” teaching and learning (Christensen 2008) so students can efficiently achieve credentialing;
  4. Develop new models of the schoolhouse such as Teacher Professional Partnerships and enriched afterschool and weekend programs.

We have to make educational reform easy, not difficult to the point of requiring Supermen. We need to prune back the overgrown vine of the educational system so parents and the community can help students meet standards and to enrich the Ground Zero of education—the classroom.

Initiative One: Clear, Comprehensible, and Meaningful Standards

We need to create standards that can be widely understood and utilized by parents, students, educators, community supporters and entrepreneurs. The standards need to be clear, understandable, rigorous, and thin.

The need for standards has been recognized through the administration of four presidents but efforts have been shipwrecked by the very thickness of standards that have emerged from unaccountable “educational experts.” The Common Core Standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics, while excellent tools for teachers, are thick to the point of incomprehensibility and are thus meeting parental resistance. The lesson learned is this: Big City must take the lead in creating a new set of rigorous standards that can be readily grasped by parents and their supporters.

These K-12 standards in core subjects must be linked to a new, open, and smart system of credentialing student mastery of these standards [See Initiative Two].

Detailed Discussion:

When it comes to standards: comprehensible is more important than comprehensive. Unfortunately, comprehensive now trumps comprehensible. Consider the first domain for sixth grade in the Common Core Standards for Mathematics:

“Students use reasoning about multiplication and division to solve ratio and rate problems about quantities. By viewing equivalent ratios and rates as deriving from, and extending, pairs of rows (or columns) in the multiplication table, and by analyzing simple drawings that indicate the relative size of quantities, students connect their understanding of multiplication and division with ratios and rates. Thus students expand the scope of problems for which they can use multiplication and division to solve problems, and they connect ratios and fractions. Students solve a wide variety of problems involving ratios and rates.”

Needless to say, this describes important mathematical concepts but it is not readily intuitive and comprehendible—even to a parent who is committed to helping his/her child succeed! The parent consequently feels confused about how to help the child and is left with no choice but to repeat well-meaning adages, “Do well in school,” “Do your homework,” “Listen to your teacher,” etc. This is the embodiment of disempowerment. In its place must come parents and their children sitting around the kitchen table working together so children can meet standards.

We should be finding ways to enable parents, relatives and friends, leaders of trusted institutions in the community such as ministers, committed teachers, and students themselves to understand standards. And we have to make it easy for them to do this! The community must know what is expected of each student at a given time and how to help him or her succeed. As noted by Stevenson and Sigler in their seminal work The Learning Gap (1994), this is one of the keys of the success of Asian primary schools.

In terms of grade promotion standards in grades K-8 The Core Knowledge Foundation Curriculum has been tested in thousands of schools. The standards for each grade are clear and the authors address the matter of cultural literacy as a direct means toward overcoming the effects of socio-economic status. Most importantly, parents have access for “What Your ___ Grader Should Know” in grades K-6 so they can become fully involved in educational efforts.

In terms of graduation standards, consider these two very clear and meaningful ELA standards:

  • “Read and respond at the literacy level of Newbery Award fiction books” (targeted for elementary school); and
  • “Read and respond at the literacy level of YALSA Award books and a community newspaper” (targeted for middle school credentialing).

They are both broadly suggestive of bands of competency and are readily understandable and meaningful to parents, educators, students, supporters, and publishers. As a result, every stakeholder can work toward meeting them. A student’s success in demonstrating competency should be the cause of great celebration.

There are four and only four general bands of competency. In English Language Arts they would look as follows:

A- Foundational Skills Credential

Description: Knowledge of alphabet, phonemic awareness, and basic sight words; ability to read and respond to Dr. Seuss books.

Target: Early childhood grades

B- Fundamental Skills Credential

Description: Ability to read and respond to trade books such Newbery Award winners.

Target: Upper elementary grades

C- Citizenship Skills Credential

Description: Ability to read and respond to content at the level of community newspapers and Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) book awardees.

Target: Middle school grades

D- College-ready Skills Credential

Description: Ability to read and respond to content at the level of The Big City Times (college-track) or technical manuals (career-track).

Target: High school grade

In summary, Big City can take the lead in American education by developing rigorous yet thin sets of promotion and graduation standards for English Language Arts, mathematics, social studies, and science. These standards will be the first step toward empowering students, families, educators, community groups, and entrepreneurs.

This leads to the second initiative—the process of certifying student competency in the standards which will serve as the basis for promotion and graduation.

Initiative Two: Smart and Open Assessments

The second initiative of the platform is constructing on-demand and “smart” assessment of students to certify when they have achieved competency in the standards of Initiative One.

Think of the Department of Motor Vehicles. It is not relevant when or how many times a person takes a driving test; what matters is whether he or she is credentialed to have the competency to take the wheel. A similar approach is embedded in SAT and various types of professional testing such as bar exams.

Current high stakes testing is flawed because (1) it is not linked to clear standards for each grade and (2) the arbitrary one-time administration of a high stakes test in each grade is needlessly inflexible and anxiety-prone.

Unfortunately, annual testing linked to the Common Core State Standards in grades 3-8 is state and national policy. This does not mean, however, that the lives of students and teachers need to revolve around this one-time administration. Although “Education in Our Hands” calls for two additional layers of open and smart assessment for promotion and graduation, they would ultimately become the truly meaningful focus of assessments.

The first layer—annual promotion testing—would be linked to the thin standards for each grade (3rd to 8th grade) such as those proposed in the Core Knowledge curriculum.

  • Promotion tests would be “smart”—test questions would be drawn from a databank of questions; questions from this database are also pulled to create rigorously predictive on-demand practice tests that can be taken at school or home.
  • Promotion tests would be “open”—students could take the test multiple times until they can cross the finish line of meeting standards.

The second layer would mark the gateway of graduation out of primary, elementary, middle, and high school grades. Graduation testing would entail a process of credentialing to enable students to demonstrate mastery in the bands of competency described in Initiative I. Graduation testing would also be smart and open.

Rather than the hyper-focus on the one-time administration of state high stakes assessments, schools and teachers would be evaluated on the percentage of students who cross the finish line in each grade and the percentage of those who achieve credentialing by key benchmark grades.

This would unleash an explosion of new efforts to encourage academic achievement:

  • Shared accountability of parents and students. Parents--and students themselves--would unite with the efforts of schools to help students work toward promotion and achieve credentialing.
  • Classroom instruction targeted toward test preparation would become targeted, smart, and economical. As advocated by E.D. Hirsch, with efficient instruction only 50% of classroom time needs to be targeted toward meeting standards; once mastery is established, classroom time can be devoted to applications of learning. This approach would build the educational foundation of American creativity and entrepreneurship for the 21st century.
  • A culture of academic press and self-efficacy would be created in schools, the home, and in the community. Smart and open testing for promotion and graduation based on crystal clear standards would take the mystery out of parents’ perennial questions of “What will my child’s test scores be?”, “How is my child doing?”, and “What can I do to help?”

Initiative Three: “Student-Centric” Learning through Technology

Through the promise of technology student-centric learning can finally take place on school or home computers as well as on mobile devices. Clayton Christensen of the Harvard School of Business predicts a disruptive shift away from prevailing classroom approaches to instruction. By 2017, he asserts, 50% of secondary school instruction will take place through student-centric online learning apps designed by students, teachers, publishers, and entrepreneurs to teach academic content. These apps would be posted, downloaded, and reviewed on an open app marketplace similar to those exchanges servicing Apple and Android mobile devices. Learning apps would compete to meet the unique learning needs and styles of students.

According to Christensen, the development of these apps depends on two infrastructure components:

  1. Designing the marketplace where learning apps are posted, downloaded, reviewed and rated.
  2. Building an easily accessible technology to facilitate the authoring of learning apps by large numbers of educators, teachers, publishers, or students. The process of developing a learning app should be as easy as posting a YouTube video.

Big City should take the lead in building this infrastructure which could grow into a national exchange. Once in place, the process of teaching and learning will be revolutionized. A great deal of student-learning will take place via these student-centric learning apps and the proliferation of learning apps will make it possible for each student to find instructional resources that match his/her learning style. Many students will also create apps that demonstrate for others how they themselves have successfully mastered content. Student learning will become even more efficient as apps are reviewed and rated.

This process will shift the nature of teaching and learning. Instead of deliverers of content, teachers will become motivators, managers of student learning, and community builders. As schools cease to become the exclusive places where instruction is delivered and the monopolies that credential students, they will become shops where craftsmanship is fostered, laboratories where rigor is nurtured, studios and theatres where creativity is born, playing fields where values of hard work and sportsmanship are developed, and launching pads to community service and work where responsibility is taught. These qualities will make American youth the leaders of global citizenship in the 21st century and enrich the country. It will also bring dignity back to the work life of teachers.

Initiative Four: New Models of School Choice

Both Horace Mann and John Dewey assumed that public education would be linked to a vibrant and accountable public sphere. There are some neighborhoods in the city where this still holds true and a sense of shared accountability among stakeholders for student success can be found. The schools in these communities are likely to be successful and their efforts should be celebrated and protected.

Unfortunately, in other communities students have been academically frustrated. These are not “failing” students from “failing” schools; rather they are wounded students trying to learn in wounded schools. In such places the key to unleashing a revitalized public education lies in opening up the possibilities of teacher professionalism and expanding partnerships with more individuals and organizations committed and willing to work hard to help students meet credentials.

New types of schoolhouses will foster new pools of human talent. The precursors of this development ar small de-constructed schools and small learning communities within schools. In communities of persistent educational failure, however, this process of opening and experimentation needs to be expanded to include our hard-working and sincere teachers. It has to become easy to open and shutter grassroots educational programs—as distinguished from the complicated applications for charter and devolved schools. The barriers to funding and operating them must be lowered.