A 2020 Vision for a University of Illinois Initiative:

P-16 and Beyond

Report of the University of Illinois Task Force

on P-16 Education

http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/p16/

December 5, 2000


Members of the University Task Force on P-16 Education

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R. Linn Belford, Professor

Department of Chemistry, UIUC

Michael F. Berube, Director

Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities

& Professor, Department of English, UIUC

A. Toy Caldwell-Colbert, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs, & Professor, Educational Psychology, University of Illinois

Allan Cook, Professor

Department of Teacher Education, UIS

Gerald Graff, Associate Dean

Curriculum and Instruction, & Professor, English and Education, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, UIC

Violet J. Harris, Professor

Department of Curriculum and Instruction, UIUC

Deloris Henry, Assistant Superintendent

for Equity and Education, Champaign School District #4

James A. Levin, Co-Chair, Professor

Department of Educational Psychology, UIUC

Jo Liebermann, Coordinator of Articulation Programs, Department of Arts and Sciences, City Colleges of Chicago

Loretta Meeks, Professor

Department of Teacher Education, UIS

Irma Olmedo, Associate Professor

Department of Curriculum and Instruction, UIC

Diane Rutledge, Assistant Superintendent

Springfield Public School District #186

Paul Thurston, Professor

Department of Educational Organization and Leadership, UIUC

Steven Tozer, Co-Chair, Professor

College of Education, UIC

J. Jerry Uhl, Professor

Department of Mathematics, UIUC

Philip Wagreich, Director

Institute for Mathematics and Science Education, & Professor, Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, UIC

Debra Woods, Director

NetMath, Department of Mathematics, UIUC

Support staff:

Margaret Grosch, Assistant to the

Vice President for Academic Affairs, University of Illinois

Beth Otis, Secretary

Office of Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs,

University of Illinois

Pamela Konkol, Graduate Assistant

College of Education, UIC

Jill Stein, Graduate Assistant

College of Education, UIC

Dawn Williams, Graduate Assistant

College of Education, UIUC

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Executive Summary 4

Vision Statement 8

Foreword 9

Setting the Context 11

w  Defining P-16 and beyond 11

w  Implications of the land-grant mission for P-16 Plus 11

w  Understanding educational discontinuities and academic literacy 13

w  Understanding standardized testing versus academic literacy 14

w  Understanding the P-16 Reform Movement 15

w  National context

w  National-level response

w  State-level response

Current Status of University of Illinois P-16 Partnerships 19

w  Discontinuities in documenting current activity 20

w  Disruptive discontinuities in the P-16 Plus system 22

Education, Technology, and Society in the 21st Century 24

Toward “Systemic” Thinking in Illinois Education 26

Achieving the “2020 Vision” 27

w  Realizing the Vision: Academic literacy through a systemic
approach to P-16 Plus 27

w  An internal and external examination by the University 29

w  Center for Systemic Change in Education

w  Focusing internally

w  Focusing externally

w  Realizing the Vision: Specific action items 33

w  Steps for immediate action

w  Steps for near-term action

w  Steps for intermediate-term action

w  Steps for long-term action

Resolution 36

Endnotes 37

Acknowledgments 43

Appendix I: P-16 Initiatives in Selected States 44

Appendix II: University of Illinois P-16 Data Resources 47

Appendix III: Illustrations of Current University of Illinois

Involvement with Schools 49

References and Resources 53


Executive Summary

Colleges and universities in the United States have since their beginnings in the 17th century interacted with schools and academies, seeking to influence them and in turn being influenced by their needs and their graduates. By the mid-1990s, the idea of a P-16 educational system (preschool through grade 16, or college graduation) had emerged from a sustained national conversation about the disappointing quality of education in the United States. The role of higher education in meaningful school reform, from preschool through high school, received increasing emphasis, as did the need for higher education itself to change. By 1999, several national reports called for greater institutional commitment by higher education to improving schools, and over a dozen states and at least 35 communities had initiated cross-system P-16 collaborations.

Education in America is on the threshold of the most dramatic changes since teachers and students came together in classrooms. This holds as much potential for bad news as good.

The University of Illinois, as a land-grant university, bears a special responsibility for the full range of learners and teachers that constitute the citizens of the state. We therefore need to contribute to efforts to improve the education of the diverse set of people who want and need to be educated to productively participate in our rapidly changing society.

The University of Illinois P-16 Task Force

It was in this context that University of Illinois Vice President Chester Gardner in January 2000 appointed a University of Illinois Task Force on P-16 Education, with membership from Liberal Arts and Sciences and Education departments from all three of the University’s campuses (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield), and representation from public school districts and community colleges. The Task Force, co-chaired by Education faculty from the two larger campuses, was charged to assess the University’s role in P-12 education at all three campuses and to produce a written report articulating:

w  a clear relationship between the University and P-12 education in Illinois and nationwide;

w  a comprehensive account of the many ways in which we are already realizing that vision;

w  specific proposals about how that realization could be improved in the near future;

Defining P-16 and beyond (P-16 Plus)
“P-12” education refers, typically, to the continuum of schooling from preschool through the level of secondary school, or twelfth grade. “P-16 education” signifies an emerging national concern for understanding early childhood education, elementary, secondary, and higher education as a continuous system. In the 21st century, the concept of lifelong learning will increase in importance and we use the term P-16 Plus as a reminder of our more comprehensive vision.

w  how this role of the University of Illinois can be made highly visible both internally and externally as a major priority of the President.

What the University of Illinois is doing through P-16 partnerships

The University of Illinois has invested resources in an extraordinary variety of initiatives interacting with the rest of the P-16 system. Faculty, staff and students in most colleges on all three campuses are engaged in one way or another in school and higher education improvement at the national, state, district, multi-district, or school level. Over 250 different school-university initiatives, involving over 60 academic units, are ongoing across the three campuses, ranging from statewide policy leadership to single-school interventions. Faculty in the Colleges of Agriculture, Business, Education, Engineering, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Medicine, Social Work, and others have secured millions of dollars of funding for university/school initiatives in recent years. Our P-16 initiatives fall into the following categories: 1) research and development, 2) policy formation and implementation, 3) university/school collaborations, 4) teacher and administrator education, and 5) explorations of new technologies for learning and teaching. A more extensive description of the wide variety of ways that the University is currently engaged with P-12 education is described in the main body of this report and in the appendices.

The urgent need to understand and shape the rapidly-changing interactions among technology, society, and educational institutions in the 21st century suggests a distinctive role for the University of Illinois – one that builds upon past engagements with schools but anticipates the changes that the next century will bring.

What the University of Illinois needs to do through P-16 partnerships

Despite an impressive number of such initiatives undertaken in recent years by University of Illinois faculty, there are still major problems that challenge the educational system and that interfere with learning and teaching at all levels. There are three main shortcomings with our current partnerships that need to be addressed:

w  Our current efforts do not take a systemic approach to improving education in the State, a system that goes beyond P-16.

w  Our current efforts do not focus on “disruptive discontinuities” (gaps where different parts of the system should connect but do not) leading to problems for many students.

w  Our current efforts do not deal well with the rapid rate of change that faces all of society today.

To take a systemic approach to preparing more teachers in math and science, for example, requires taking into account the various factors that contribute to that shortage. These factors include the conditions of teaching, the nature of elementary and secondary school instruction in math and science, the nature of math and science instruction in colleges of liberal arts and sciences, contributions that community colleges do or do not make, the weak recruitment of promising candidates into the field, the lack of incentives to support such recruitment, and so on.

Decade after decade, education in Illinois has been characterized by discontinuities or gaps that lead to documented weaknesses in the State’s ability to support a quality teaching force and in student learning levels that are not on a par with national averages nor on a par with most industrialized nations. Below are just two examples of places where the parts of the educational system fail to work together in an integrated and coordinated way:

w  The gap between universities and schools often separates elementary and secondary school teachers from the latest developments in their subject matter areas.

w  Separation between teaching and research often hurts the quality of both.

The University is uniquely positioned in Illinois to enter into, and to engage others in, inquiry into systemic educational change due to:
w  its extraordinary intellectual and technological resources;
w  the sustained record of in-depth University involvement with the schools, marked by a rich record of activity in many different academic departments and colleges on each campus;
w  and the diversity and importance of the local contexts in which our three campuses interact with schools and communities – from a great urban center to a diverse mix of rural and urban settings to the seat of State government. We have documented major components of that record of activity in this report.

Disruptive discontinuities such as these serve as a systemic barrier to effective learning and teaching. Rapid change over the next several decades will cause some discontinuities to become more disruptive for effective education and will create new disruptive discontinuities in the future.

Recommendations

We propose that the University of Illinois support a more systemic approach to improving education at all levels, an approach that we call “P-16 Plus.” This approach goes beyond the usual range of P-16 education to address education as a continuous system, from early childhood education through the lifelong learning that is becoming increasingly important for a rapidly changing society. We propose that the University systematically explore a “2020 Vision” for P-16 Plus education, working collaboratively with the other stakeholders in the system to shape a vision for education over the next twenty years. We choose 20 years as a time period close enough to realistically plan for, yet far-reaching enough to require long-range vision and time for implementation.

To explore this P-16 Plus 2020 Vision, we propose a Center for Systemic Change in Education. This Center would combine the strengths of the University in inquiry, evaluation, analysis, and synthesis, but would focus on a commitment to action. In so doing, the Center would bear similarities to such national organizations as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which incorporates research, public information, and collaborative action for the public good. The charge to the Center should be to conduct joint inquiry, collaborating across disciplinary lines within the University, incorporating the different expertise of the three campuses, as well as expertise from the various sectors and levels of education in the Illinois P-16 system. Moreover, it is expected that inquiry will not be limited to theorizing about solutions, but will include collaboratively testing solutions in practice in schools, school districts, and in higher education.

If the Center does its work well, its significance will truly be national, if not international.

We envision three main activities for the Center for Systemic Change in Education:

a.  Encouraging efforts by faculty, staff, and students at the University to address problems in the P-16 Plus system and to develop steps toward a 2020 Vision for improvement through a P-16 Plus mini-grants program.

b.  Evaluating, organizing, and publicizing the ongoing P-16 Plus efforts within the University with outcomes, best practices, and resource sharing through a P-16 Plus Web Portal.

c.  Working with other stakeholders in the P-16 Plus system to jointly develop and implement a 2020 Vision for P-16 Plus, and to modify that vision as appropriate, given rapid change in society (for example, organizing a yearly “Illinois P-16 Plus Education summit meeting” to addresses these P-16 Plus issues).

Resolution

The upcoming decades will be a time of major change for education at all levels. Forces at work in transforming the larger society include the increasing role of rapidly changing technologies in all phases of life, public and private; increasing globalization of culture and the economy; and demographic shifts in our population that will soon result in no ethnic group having a numerical majority. At the same time, we see rising expectations for the education of all citizens in an information age. These forces will put substantial new pressures on the educational system to adapt. The inconsistencies that have come to characterize our educational system will be transformed as new, unforeseen challenges arise. These changes will confront schools and universities with a choice: either to take a leadership role in shaping a vision for how these changes can best benefit a system of education serving all our citizens, or to see education shaped by social, technological, and economic changes in ways that are haphazard and serendipitous.

The University of Illinois can make a unique contribution by committing resources to a sustained investigation of emergent social and technological changes and their implications for education in Illinois, leading to a shared vision of educational change between now and the year 2020. The University can then support a focused effort to institute that 2020 Vision in concert with other participants in the educational system. To foster the shared 2020 Vision, the University can help to address existing discontinuities in the educational system and also can provide an early warning system for new discontinuities that develop under the strain of rapid change. The University of Illinois can and should embrace its leadership role in establishing forward-looking P-16 Plus discussions and initiatives within the educational system and across the broader public domain.