Instruction Drives Construction - Or Should

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 23:42:21 -0400

Frank Kelly, together with Ted McCain and Ian Jukes are the authors of the forthcoming book Teaching the Digital Generation: No More Cookie Cutter High Schools which will be released by Corwin Press in August. Frank is an extraordinary man – not only is a great and truly gifted architect and one of the partners in SHW, one of the largest educational architectural firms in the US but he also ahs an encyclopedic knowledge of current and recent educational literature. Beyond that, he has an incredible passion to make schools and learning more relevant to the digital generation. What follows is his recent EdWeek OpEd.

My colleagues and I work for an architecture firm focused on education, so we’ve attended and made presentations at various gatherings in the field. At one recent conference of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, we set up a small booth in the exhibit hall featuring images of school buildings we had designed. Most folks passed us by with quizzical looks on their faces, but a few stopped to ask, “Why are you here? This conference is about education.”

Having thought that our school designs were all about education, we were perplexed—until we recognized that most of those in attendance were focused on teaching, and that, in their entire careers perhaps, had never had the opportunity to shape the environment in which they taught. At best, they were assigned to a room, allowed to hang posters on the walls, and shuffled rows of desks. The notion that their approach to teaching and learning could be reflected in and enhanced by the school building simply never occurred to them.

Buildings are among the most telling artifacts of what we believe, what we value, and what we think. Western Europe’s great cathedrals built in the 12th to 16th centuries leave no doubt about what was most important in their time. While our society in the 21st century is far more diverse, our buildings will speak just as clearly to future generations—including the kids who attend our schools.

What do our school buildings say about what we think is really important? What do schools being built in 2008 around Frederick W. Taylor’s and William Wirt’s ideas from 1908 say to kids about their futures? What do schools that mimic the architecture of other centuries say to the children within them working on digital devices? Are our school buildings saying what we want to convey to teachers and students?

Schools are inherently about the future. We design school facilities to house the education of students for their futures, and we plan those facilities to last for decades. Our challenge is heightened by the most rapid change in all of human history—Moore’s Law, which defines the exponential growth in digital technology, is quickening the pace of change in every aspect of our society. In planning new or renovated school facilities, educators and architects are “futurists’’—the question is whether we recognize and fulfill the responsibility thrust upon us.

We cannot forget the past, but in times of rapid change, we must recognize how distant even the recent past can be. That poses huge problems for creating new schools—most of the basic decisions about schools are set by custom, assumptions, and laws before the design even begins. The question most often asked is not “how do we want to teach?” but “how many classrooms do we need?”

The question most often asked is not “how do we want to teach?” but “how many classrooms do we need?”

Our aspirations and the reality of our practices are often at odds. We talk about individualized instruction, but plan schools around spaces for group instruction. We talk about technology and anytime, anywhere learning, but persist in thinking that teachers must lecture at kids for them to learn. We talk about accommodating different learning styles and realizing success for all students, but persist in fixing the lengths of school years, days, and periods—and labeling those who don’t learn in the time allotted failures. We talk about higher-order thinking skills and authentic assessment, but standardized tests drive much of what we do. Old practices are a severe constraint in the creation of schools for the new teaching and learning our kids will need in their futures.

We must begin the planning of new or renovated schools by stepping back from the details to challenge, rethink, or reconfirm all our assumptions about what a school is and how it should work. Before any educational specification or program is written or design drawing prepared, administrators, board members, teachers, students, parents, and community representatives should come together to consider the big picture.

It is helpful to be mindful of how long it will take to plan and construct the school, how long it will be before the first class graduates, and how much the world may have changed in that time. While it may be daunting to imagine what school buildings should be like in the future, we should recall that our real task is helping kids prepare to succeed in that very same future.

Making school buildings for a future of rapid change is very different from what we did in the 20th century, when we thought kids and communities were served best by durable, permanent facilities. Unfortunately, we were very good at it, and today we are saddled with facilities that are difficult or impossible to modify to accommodate new teaching and learning needs. To make schools for an uncertain future, we need to anticipate that numerous major instructional changes will occur over the life of the building, and then plan spaces, building systems, and materials accordingly. This is not an objective peculiar to education—office and retail structures have been planned for such flexibility for decades.

To realize schools for the future, we must recognize that the elements of schools, such as instruction, technology, time, architecture, and money, are not separate, but integrally related. We cannot deal with any one of these without having a corresponding impact on the others. School districts have wasted vast sums on new technology by inserting it into the same classrooms where the same teachers used the same teaching methods on the same fixed schedules. Then we blamed the technology when it counted for little.

Decades ago, we created open-plan schools to allow more team and interdisciplinary teaching, flexibility, innovation in teaching methods, and varied groupings of students. Then we called the open plan a failure when it thwarted the old instructional methods it was intended to change. We need to think broadly about making whole systems work, both in designing and operating schools.

To make schools for the future, we must plan systemically for all the elements that make up the learning environment—and that is the essence of what should happen in the programming and design of new or renovated school facilities. That is also why architects have a real role in making better schools, and why they should participate more in educational conferences such as the ASCD’s.

Frank Kelly is the director of educational facilities planning for SHW Group, an architecture, design, and engineering firm with offices in six U.S. cities

The End of School as We Know It?

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 21:41:55 -0400

There was an interesting question asked on the Teacher Leaders Network Forum at TeacherMagazine.org related to Clay Shirky's new book, Here Comes Everybody. In the book, which was reviewed earlier on the blog, Shirky explores how technology is changing human interactions—and he shares an interesting example:

In 2007, several conservative parishes of the Episcopal Church in Virginia voted to break away from the American branch of their church. The parishes chose to align themselves with the Nigerian branch of the Episcopal Church—whose views aligned better with theirs.

Shirky argues that this shows a shift in our thinking about how we organize ourselves. Typically, humans have used geography as the primary factor when determining how to join together with others. Technology has made it possible to align with anyone, however distant, based on like-minded beliefs or other factors.

So the question asked on the Forum was this: Will we eventually see similar changes based on the ways people think about schools?

Right now, in the public school sector, most people send their students to schools based on geography. You go to the building that is closest to you, whether you are satisfied with that building or not.

Is it possible that technology may change all of that and allow families to select schools based on design and ideas that best represent their personal preferences and values instead of choosing schools based on physical location?

And if so, how will that change our work as teachers? What impact will it have on us as taxpayers? On our nation's guarantee of providing a sound basic education for all children? On any efforts at all to provide a uniform curriculum?

Food for thought.

The Role of Community in School Success

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:22:55 -0400

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The school system is not an island unto itself. It’s said that it takes a village to raise a child. Given the myriad of challenges faced in helping kids prepare for the life that awaits them, there is a need to look beyond the school day. This is a Monday, July 21st Op-Ed piece written by Peter Fortenbaugh for the SF Gate of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The achievement gap that plagues our schools is a persistent and complex problem. But to solve that problem, we first need to focus on what we call the "opportunity gap."

Here in the Bay Area, high schools with some of the highest test scores in the nation thrive just a few miles from schools where two-thirds of the students do not even graduate.

The implications of these simple facts are dramatic. In a society in which low-skilled jobs account for only 15 percent of total jobs, post-secondary education is the key to staying above the poverty level.

The story is a familiar one. On one side of the gap, college-educated parents engage with the schools. Kids go to preschool before kindergarten, and they have coaches to prepare them for college, which is a given. They get tutoring if their grades falter.

For children on the other side of the gap, kindergarten is often their first exposure to school. Parents struggle to understand the complexities of the educational system. Many children do not see college as a real possibility because no one expects it of them.

Perhaps it is the daunting nature of this challenge that keeps many of us from getting involved. But those of us in the youth development arena know that certain things can help our kids bridge the opportunity gap.

School partnership programs provide opportunities for all of our students.

Working to improve the school day is necessary but insufficient. Schools alone cannot close the opportunity gap. Teachers cannot be miracle workers - educator, coach, tutor, big brother and mentor all rolled into one.

Partnerships between schools and youth services organization can bring opportunity to students by aligning after-school instruction with the school curriculum, reinforcing what students learn at school. Kids get a safe place to study and experiences they often do not have at school: sports, art and computer lessons.

We know these programs work; we have the success stories to prove it. But they require caring adults - staff and volunteers - to make them work.

Positive adult relationships are critically important.

At the heart of the solution to the opportunity gap lie a few simple truths. All kids need to feel a sense of belonging. They need to learn how to learn. They need to be surrounded by peers who appreciate the importance of education. They need to maintain the attitude of "I can" that all children begin with. They need to feel empowered to be the drivers in their lives and not detached spectators. Positive adult relationships are the only way to help them achieve all of this.

Youth services organizations give young people the chance to develop positive relationships with role models who instill constructive attitudes and life skills. Consistently caring adults connect with kids and help them understand how school is relevant to their lives. They don't lecture through programs; they influence over time through stable and trusting relationships.

We must help families get involved with the schools.

More parental involvement with the schools can return huge dividends. Many of the parents in our communities do not know how to work with the education system. They can't help their children choose high school classes or apply for college. They can't set expectations because they often don't know what's possible.

Youth organizations advocate for and engage with parents to help them navigate the system. Parents who are more engaged can unlock the opportunities available to their children - the chance to improve their academic performance, graduate from high school and attend college, today's prerequisite for finding well-paying jobs.

None of this is magic. But at the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Peninsula and other local organizations, we know these efforts can work. People are making a difference by devoting some of their time and dollars to help change the lives of our local children. If you want to play a part in that, your local youth services organization is eager to hear from you.

Peter Fortenbaugh is executive director of the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Peninsula. He worked as a high-tech executive and management consultant for 12 years. His e-mail is peter@bgcp.org.

CA Dropout Rate Much Higher Than Expected

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:52:47 -0400

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The real dropout rates are really hard to find. It has been suggested that the overall dropout rate in the US is between 30 and 45 percent - in urban areas, and amongst minority students the estimates rise to 50 to 60 percent.

This July 17, 2008 Los Angeles Times article written by Mitchell Landsberg and Howard Blume says 1 in 4 California high school students drop out; ad 1 in 3 students in Los Angeles Unified left school. I say shame on us,If we were running a business and a quarter or more of our product was defective, we wouldn’t stay on business very long. It’s too easy to blame the younger generation for what the do or don’t do. There are many factors at play here beyond the structure and assumptions behind schools themselves. Cultural, socioeconomic, and historical issues are at play. That said, when we continue to do things that we already know aren’t working, it may be time to stop and ask who has the learning problem here. It’s certainly not the children.

Deploying a long-promised tool to track high school dropouts, the state released numbers Wednesday estimating that 1 in 4 California students -- and 1 in 3 in Los Angeles -- quit school. The rates are considerably higher than previously acknowledged but lower than some independent estimates.

The figures are based on a new statewide tracking system that relies on identification numbers that were issued to California public school students beginning in fall 2006.

The ID numbers allow the state Department of Education to track students who leave one school and enroll in another in California, even if it is in a different district or city. In the past, the inability to accurately track such students gave schools a loophole, allowing them to say that departing students had transferred to another school when, in some cases, they had dropped out.

The new system -- which will cost $33 million over the next three years, in addition to the millions spent for the initial development -- promises to eventually provide a far better way to understand where students go, and why. But state and school district officials acknowledged that the data initially available Wednesday, after a final one-day delay, were limited in usefulness.

"I think as the system stabilizes, you will get better data," said Esther Wong, assistant superintendent for planning, assessment and research in the Los Angeles Unified School District. For now, she said, the numbers tell only part of the story, albeit more accurately than in the past.

Jack O'Connell, state superintendent of public instruction, presented the new data, based on the 2006-07 school year, as a quantum leap forward in understanding the nature of the dropout problem. But, he said, "no one will argue that the number of dropouts is good news. . . . It represents an enormous loss of potential."

State data analysts were able to come up with a four-year "derived" dropout rate, which estimates how many students drop out over the course of their high school careers.

For the state overall, it was 24.2%, up substantially from the 13.9% calculated for the previous school year using an older, discredited method. Statewide, 67.6% of students graduated and 8.2% were neither graduates nor dropouts. The last category included those who transferred to private schools or left the state.

School districts have until the end of August to correct data, so figures could change.

The statistics highlight a problem that is getting worse in California, said Russell Rumberger, a professor of education at UC Santa Barbara who directs the California Dropout Research Project.

Even using the old system of measurement, he said, the number of dropouts has grown by 83% over five years while the number of high school graduates has gone up only 9%.

"So that's sobering, it's really sobering," he said.

Rumberger attributed the trend to three primary factors: an increase in Latino immigrants, who are among the most likely to drop out; the raising of academic standards; and insufficient funding for public education.

For Los Angeles Unified, the new dropout rate was 33.6%. The rate was 25.3% under the old system in 2005-06.

Critics, including Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, have said that as many as half of Los Angeles Unified students drop out. But a recent report by an independent research group, Policy Analysis for California Education, put the district's dropout rate at 25.7%.

O'Connell chose Birmingham High School in Van Nuys for his announcement, noting that it was the focus of a Times series on dropouts in 2006. He said he was particularly concerned by data showing a dropout rate of 41.6% for black students and 30.3% for Latino students, compared with 15.2% for whites and 10.2% for Asians.

"This is a crisis," he said.

In Los Angeles Unified, African American students dropped out at a lower rate than their counterparts statewide. That was not true of the other three groups.

Among large, comprehensive L.A. high schools, the highest dropout rates were recorded at Jefferson, 58%; Belmont, 56%; Locke, 50.9%; Crenshaw, 50%; and Roosevelt, 49.6%.

Those with the lowest rates were Palisades Charter High, 2.5%; Granada Hills Charter, 6.4%; Canoga Park, 11%; Cleveland, 12.8%; El Camino, 13%; Taft, 13.1%; Chatsworth, 14.5%; and Fairfax, 14.9%.

State officials acknowledge that even the latest figures are less than ideal. The four-year rate is based not on students' actual progress over four years but on one year's worth of data for all four grades. In the spring of 2011, data will be released based on students' actual journey over four years.

Moreover, it remains difficult to say why students left school because codes designed to explain that, listing choices such as "graduated," "died" and "no show," are based on a different time period than the dropout rate itself.

Eventually, the two sets of figures will be synchronized, but the state was unable to do that before the release of the latest dropout figures.

The new system drew accolades even from some critics of the Department of Education.

"Though it has taken far too long and it is only partial progress, we applaud today's advances," said John Affeldt, managing attorney of Public Advocates, which has battled the department in court over the high school exit exam, among other matters.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger hailed the data, but said it was important "that we don't just look at numbers."

"It's good information," he said at a briefing for reporters in Sacramento, but "what we need to find out is, what is the reason for the dropouts? . . . We've got to find out what the reason is and then we can work on that to eliminate those problems."

Some of the new dropout numbers are open to misinterpretation. For instance, some continuation schools -- which cater to the most troubled students -- show dropout rates of more than 100%. That is because their enrollment is based on a single date in October, but such schools typically have students who come and go throughout the year, so more students can drop out by June than were enrolled in the fall.

Nevada County, a semirural swatch of Northern California whose schools generally perform well, showed a dropout rate of nearly 77%. The explanation, Associate Supt. Stan Miller said, is that the county charters one of the largest dropout recovery programs in California, with campuses spread throughout the state but reported as if they were in Nevada County.

Even the most successful of such programs have high dropout rates, and the Nevada County program is large enough to outweigh the relatively low dropout rate of the county's own students.

What is inescapable, ultimately, is that the effort to statistically capture the complications of teen life does not lend itself to the simple analysis that a dropout rate suggests.

Susana Garcia, 18, counts as neither a dropout nor a graduate but as a "completer" because she elected to take the general educational development test, or GED, rather than earn a diploma.

"Obviously, people ask you, 'Did you graduate or do you have your diploma or GED?' " she said. "I don't want to be seen as a failure -- or a complete failure." She added: "In my mind, I still want to go back and get the diploma."

Off to NECC

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:25:11 -0400

I’ll be taking a few days away from the CS blog and heading off to San Antonio, Texas for the annual NECC Conference. I have one workshops and three sessions to give.My schedule is:

Literacy Isn't Enough: Digital Fluency in the Age of InfoWhelm - Sunday, June 29th 8:30 AM to 3:30 PM - HGCC 001 B

Literacy Isn’t Enough - Monday, June 30th from 12:30 to 1:30 PM - Grand Hyatt Texas Ballroom D

Understanding Digital Kids - Tuesday, July 1st from 12:30 to 1:30 PM - Grand Hyatt Texas Ballroom D

No More Cookie Cutter Schools (with Frank Kelly) - Tuesday, July 1st 3:30 to 4:30 PM - HGCC 206 A

Come and say hello!

Digital Nomadism Changes Buildings, Cities, Traffic

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:07:14 -0400

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Frank Gehry, a celebrity architect, likes to cause aesthetic controversy, and his Stata Centre at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did the trick. Opened in 2004 and housing MIT's computer-science and philosophy departments behind its façade of bizarre angles and windows, it has become a new Cambridge landmark. But the building's most radical innovation is on the inside. The entire structure was conceived with the nomadic lifestyles of modern students and faculty in mind. Stata, says William Mitchell, a professor of architecture and computer science at MIT who worked with Mr. Gehry on the centers design, was conceived as a new kind of hybrid space.

This is best seen in the building's "student street", an interior passage that twists and meanders through the complex and is open to the public 24 hours a day. It is dotted with nooks and crannies. Cafés and lounges are interspersed with work desks and whiteboards, and there is free Wi-Fi everywhere. Students, teachers and visitors are cramming for exams, flirting, napping, instant messaging, researching, reading and discussing. No part of the student street is physically specialized for any of these activities. Instead, every bit of it can instantaneously become the venue for a seminar, a snack or romance.

The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr. Mitchell, means that there is a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century, architecture was about specialized structures offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favored repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles.

The new architecture, says Mr. Mitchell, will make spaces intentionally multifunctional. This means that 21st-century aesthetics will probably be the exact opposite of the sci-fi chic that 20th-century futurists once imagined. Architects are instead thinking about light, air, trees and gardens, all in the service of human connections. Buildings will have much more varied shapes than before. For instance, people working on laptops find it comforting to have their backs to a wall, so hybrid spaces may become curvier, with more nooks, in order to maximize the surface area of their inner walls, rather as intestines do. This is becoming affordable because computer-aided design and new materials make non-repetitive forms cheaper to build.

Who needs a desk?
The effect already reaches far beyond university campuses and is causing upheaval in the commercial-property industry. Debra Moritz, a director at Jones Lang LaSalle, a firm that helps companies to manage their office buildings and consults on property investments, says that the total area devoted to traditional office space has begun to decline, although slowly. This is because inefficiency is more obvious as workers become mobile, she says. According to Jones Lang LaSalle's research, workers are at their desks, on average, less than 40% of their time (Ms Moritz ditched her own desk long ago). This does not mean that office space will drop by 60%. But it does mean that office designers are thinking about using space better.

There will be more “on-demand spaces” and “drop-in canters”, says Ms Moritz, with flexible layouts that facilitate collaboration. Within a typical office building, the area devoted to solitary work, such as the cubicles immortalized in Dilbert cartoons, will shrink. Internal walls and furniture are becoming movable. More space is given to communal areas, some of which are distinguished not by their function but by their etiquette loud or quiet, say as in libraries.

A particularly striking example, bordering on caricature, is the so-called Googleplex, the headquarters of Google in Mountain View, California. Naturally, it has Wi-Fi coverage. But the Googleplex is famous for its good and free victuals, doled out at food courts throughout the sprawling campus, and for the casual mixture of play and work. Over here a software engineer is writing some code on his laptop, sweaty in his workout clothes from the volleyball game in progress on the lawn. Over there another one is zipping along on a scooter, heading for a massage or going to pick up his laundry from the onsite service. Google even extends this workspace, virtually, throughout the entire San Francisco Bay Area by running a fleet of commuter shuttles, all of which have Wi-Fi on board to allow uninterrupted coding.

Some traditional property developers are drawing inspiration from this sort of thing. Nomadism is not good for the office industry as such, concedes Robert Dykstra, who has been developing commercial property for 27 years. He, however, has spotted an opportunity. His new office park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a dilapidated city that hopes to take some service-sector jobs from nearby Chicago and Detroit, is unlike any traditional office and more like a community centre. Instead of renting to corporate tenants, says Mr. Dykstra, he plans to sell memberships as a club does by the hour, week or month to nomads dropping by. Mobile workers come in, find all the services they might need from tech support to copying and satisfy their needs for work, love and play as well, with the aid of fitness studios, restaurants, cooking classes and music rooms.

This flexibility is what separates successful spaces and cities from unsuccessful ones, says Anthony Townsend, an urban planner at the Institute for the Future, a think-tank. Almost any public space can assume some of the features of a Googleplex or a Stata Centre. For example, a not-for-profit organization in New York has turned Bryant Park, a once-derelict but charming garden in front of the city's public library, into a hybrid space popular with office workers. The park's managers noticed that a lot of visitors were using mobile phones and laptops in the park, so they installed Wi-Fi and added some chairs with foldable lecture desks. The idea was not to distract people from the flowers but to let them customize their little bit of the park.

Third places
The academic name for such spaces is third places, a term originally coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book, The Great, Good Place. At the time, long before mobile technologies became widespread, Mr. Oldenburg wanted to distinguish between the sociological functions of people's first places (their homes), their second places (offices) and the public spaces that serve as safe, neutral and informal meeting points. As Mr. Oldenburg saw it, a good third place makes admission free or cheap the price of a cup of coffee, say offers creature comforts, is within walking distance for a particular neighborhood and draws a group of regulars. The eponymous bar in the television series Cheers, where everybody knows your name, is an example.

Mr. Oldenburg's thesis was that third places were in general decline. More and more people, especially in suburban societies such as America's, were moving only between their first and second places, making extra stops only at alienating and anonymous locations such as malls, which in Mr. Oldenburg's opinion fail as third places. Society, Mr. Oldenburg feared, was at risk of coming unstuck without these venues for spreading ideas and forming bonds.

No sooner was the term coined than big business queued up to claim that it was building new third places. The most prominent was Starbucks, a chain of coffee houses that started in Seattle and is now hard to avoid anywhere. Starbucks admits that as it went global it lost its ambiance of a home away from home. However, it has also spotted a new opportunity in catering to nomads. Its branches offer not only sofas but also desks with convenient electricity sockets. These days Starbucks makes bigger news when it switches Wi-Fi providers it dropped T-Mobile for AT&T in February than when it sells a new type of coffee bean. Bookshops such as Barnes & Noble are also offering more coffee and crumbs, as Mr. Oldenburg puts it, as are churches, YMCAs and public libraries.

But do these oases for nomads actually play the social role of third places James Katz at Rutgers fears that cyber-nomads are hollowing them out. It is becoming commonplace for a café to be full of people with headphones on, speaking on their mobile phones or laptops and hacking away at their keyboards, more engaged with their e-mail inbox than with the people touching their elbows. These places are physically inhabited but psychologically evacuated, says Mr. Katz, which leaves people feeling more isolated than they would be if the café were merely empty. That is because the physical presence of other human beings is psychologically and neurologically arousing but now produces no reward. Quite simply, he says, we have not evolved biologically to be happy in these situations.

Many café-owners are trying to deal with this problem. Christopher Waters, the owner of the Nomad Café in Oakland, regularly hosts live jazz and poetry readings, and actually turns off the Wi-Fi router at those times so that people mingle more. He is also planning to turn his café into an online social network so that patrons opening their browsers to connect encounter a welcome page that asks them to fill out a short profile as they would on Facebook, say and then see information about the people at the other tables.

Most nomads are very open to this sort of thing. Technology aside, there is not such a big difference between a geek with earphones and a laptop today and a Paris existentialist watching the world go by at the café Les Deux Magots in the 1950s. The first might be simultaneously instant-messaging, listening to music and e-mailing, the other puffing a Gitane and jotting down notes about being and nothingness. But as soon as an attractive new customer breezes in, both will instantaneously realign their focus of interest.

As more third places pop up and spread, they also change entire cities. Just as buildings during the 20th century were specialized by function, towns were as well, says Mr. Mitchell. Suburbs were for living, downtowns for working and other areas for playing. But urban nomadism makes districts, like buildings, multifunctional. Parts of town that were monocultures, he says, gradually become fine-grained mixed-use neighborhoods more akin in human terms to pre-industrial villages than to modern suburbs.

Ms Moritz at Jones Lang LaSalle is already counting more offices leaving suburbs entirely and moving back into downtowns, which tend to be younger and hipper. This helps to revitalize city centers. Paul Saffo, the forecaster, sees a simultaneous movement to charismatic exurbs, such as Mendocino on the Californian coast or Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where incoming nomads are building consensual communities with lifestyles reminiscent of the Utopia movements of earlier times. The big losers, Mr. Saffo thinks, are the suburbs that were built for specific functions in a previous era but are now blighted.

The same trend is also changing traffic patterns. Alan Pisarski has been researching urban movement for three decades and has written a series of three books called Commuting in America the first in 1986, the others one and two decades later. He is now working on the fourth. Thanks to the ten-year intervals, Mr. Pisarski claims he has been able to capture the biggest trends. In 1986, before the era of mobility and at the dawn of the PC era, he still observed the classic diurnal flow of the post-war commuting pattern, which had baby-boomers sitting in traffic jams at 8am and 5pm between the suburbs and the downtowns. In 1996 he saw a new circumferential pattern as jobs shifted to the suburbs, so the baby-boomers were now sitting in jams on the beltways. At the same time he already noticed that the fastest-growing group was telecommuters.

Things started looking very different in his 2006 book. Younger workers were now joining the baby-boomers in the workforce. Car trips had stopped increasing and were even declining in cities such as Seattle, Atlanta and Portland. Traffic was still heavy but now spread out over much longer periods, starting at 5 AM and lasting till noon, say. Bizarre new patterns were cropping up, such as a reverse commute in Seattle as lots of male computer scientists at Microsoft in the suburb of Redmond raced downtown to find females a weekday ritual called the running of the programmers.

The current data, for use in the next book, are telling Mr. Pisarski something else again. The baby-boomers are starting to retire, forcing employers to compete for new talent by letting younger employees work wherever they please. Even the older workers are becoming nomadic (Mr. Pisarski himself is 70 and works from his BlackBerry and laptop). Traffic congestion, though still bad, is for the first time not getting worse. Car-pooling, which green city governments are still encouraging, is declining sharply as commuting times and directions are becoming more diverse and more complex.

Indeed, even though there are as many cars on the roads as ever, they are now making very different journeys. In the previous decade trips followed a radial pattern, says Mr. Pisarski, as both office workers and telecommuters ran errands away from their workplace and back again in order to check their voice messages and faxes. Now people are making trips in a daisy-chain pattern, he says. Nomads set off in the morning to drop off the kids at school and then spend all day hopping from one third place to another, with stops at the gym, the post office and so on. Throughout the day they remain connected to colleagues and family members who are elsewhere, and increasingly their movements form no discernible collective pattern at all.

Doug Johnson - Damned by a Single Measure

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:49:52 -0400

Source

In his book Teaching For Tomorrow Ted McCain quotes digital guru Dave Masters as saying:

You can get a good picture of a person’s health by taking their height and weight but would you go to a doctor who only took your height and weight and said here’s a picture of your health. The answer of course is no. It would require a battery of tests - urinalysis, blood tests, blood pressure, cholesterol, checking for lumps and so on to get an accurate picture of your health.”

However schools act like the doctor who only takes your height and weight and then says here’s a complete picture of your health.

Ted goes on to write:
We test students using standardized instruments that primarily measure information recall and low level understanding, and then claim that it’s a complete picture of a student’s learning, which is absolutely not true. It’s presumptuous for us to say that current test scores are a complete indicator of student learning.

A complete picture of student learning needs to include portfolios of performance, demonstrations. This involves not just the recall of theoretical content, but also the application of that theory to solve real life, real world problems or to create innovative new products and ideas using real world tools.

Doug Johnson has written a great comment on America’s fixation on single measurement criteria for determining academic success by students and suggests five better ways to assess the quality of schools. Here’s what Doug has to say:

Anybody who goes in to see the doctor knows that the first thing you do is jump on the scale so that your weight can be determined. Wouldn't life be easy if the testing ended at stepping on the scale? Weight, after all, can be a pretty good indicator of general health. But a physician would be a quack if the physical exam did not include blood pressure checks, urine analysis, some prodding here, some thumping there, and at least one nasty bit involving a rubber glove and lube.

One's physical health certainly can't be determined by a single measurement. Attempting to do so would constitute malpractice.

Why then do schools let politicians require that they rely on a single measurement - test scores - to determine their health and effectiveness?

No one has ever been able to satisfactorily explain to me how a "5th grade reading level" is established. It seems if a reading level is either median or mean of all 10-year-olds' reading levels, by logic alone, one could conclude a sizable chunk of those tested would be lower than the norm. If not, the norm itself would be too low.

A school being labeled failing because all of its students don't read at grade level is like labeling a school failing because not all its students are at or above normal weight for their age group.

The testing game is rigged by NCLB. It is a plan designed not to improve public schools, but to discredit them, giving ammunition to those who want vouchers, charter schools and other financially motivated "improvement" plans that will keep poor schools poor thus keeping the poor people, poor.

Knowing that the deck is stacked, were I a school board member, superintendent or principal, I would be offering my community other means of evaluating the quality of the education my school(s) offers. And fast.

Five years ago I railed against our state's "report card," suggesting more informative ways parents can judge the value of their children's schools. Stars I suggested then, and still believe in, are:

Star One: School climate.
Funny how a person can sense the safety, friendliness, and sense of caring within minutes of walking into a school. Little things like cleanliness, displays of student work, open doors to classrooms, laughter, respectful talk, presence of volunteers, and genuine smiles from both adults and kids are the barometers of school climate. If a school doesn’t earn this star, a parent doesn’t need to bother looking at the other criteria. Get your kids out quickly.

Star Two: Individual teacher quality.
This is why total school rating systems aren’t very helpful. Five-star teachers are found in one-star schools and one-star teachers are found in five-star schools. Listen to what other parents have said about the teachers your children will have. Insist that your kids get the teachers that get good reviews.

Star Three: Libraries and technology.
The quality of the library is the clearest sign of how much a school values reading, teaching for independent thinking, and life-long learning. A trained librarian and a welcoming, well-used collection of current books, magazines and computers with Internet access tells a parent that the teachers and principal value more than the memorization of facts from a text book, that a diversity of ideas and opinions is important, and that reading is not just necessary, but pleasurable and important.

Star Four: Elective and extracurricular offerings.
What happens in class is important. But so is what happens during the other 18 hours of the day. I want elementary schools for my kids that offer after-school clubs and activities that develop social skills and interests. I want secondary schools that are rich with art, sports, tech ed., music and community service choices that develop individual talents, leadership, and pride in accomplishment.

Star Five: Commitment to staff development.
The amount of exciting scientifically-based research on effective teaching practices and schools is overwhelming. Brain-based research, reflective practice, systematic examination of student work, strategies for working with disadvantaged students are some of the latest findings that can have a positive impact on how to best teach children. But none of it does a lick of good if it stays in the universities or journals. Good schools give financial priority to teaching teachers how to improve their practice. Would you send your child to a doctor who doesn’t know the latest practice in his field?

With only a small amount of imagination and work, most of these qualities can be reported out empirically - through surveys, through comparisons with other districts, and simply through effective communication to the community of the achievement of students both in and out of school.

If test scores are to be used, schools should be reporting the percentage of students who make a year's progress as determined by a value-added test like the NWEA MAPS test. While it is unreasonable to expect every 5th grader to weigh 100 pounds, it is not unreasonable to expect that every child to put on a few pounds.

I hate seeing good public schools (and the good people in them) damned by a single measure. But it will happen where the leaders are timid and short-sighted.

Small School Experiment Doesn’t Pan Out

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:36:30 -0400

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Ah yes. As I always say, “beauty is in the eyes of the beerholder.” In complete contradiction to yesterday’s posting, this is a June 23, 2008 Seattle Times article written by Betsy Hammond and Lisa Grace Lednicer that questions the effectiveness of academies and small high schools within high schools. My question is – is the academies model fundamentally flawed, or is this a classic example of TTWWADI (That’s the Way We’ve Always Done It) – that despite “millions of dollars for teacher training,” and “an army of experts to coach schools,” educators continue to maintain essentially the same traditional mindsets about teaching, learning, and assessment. Decide for yourself.

Oregon's highly touted small high schools this month graduated their first class of students who spent all four years in intimate academies intended to revolutionize the big American high school.

Armed with $25 million from billionaire Bill Gates and other education reformers, backers of small schools heralded the academies as the best way to curb high dropout rates, forge connections to keep teenagers on track and prepare every graduate for college. Four years into that effort, however, the small schools have yet to deliver on those promises.

Instead, their statistics look a lot like results from the lumbering, impersonal high schools they are supposed to replace. Lots of students quit, and most of the graduates aren't ready for the rigors of college.

At Marshall and Roosevelt high schools in Portland, which each house three academies, about half of the students didn't make it to graduation. That's the same low graduation rate as when they were two big schools instead of six small academies.

"At first, I loved going to school," says Victoria Sargent, 17, who attended Pauling Academy, a science- and math-focused school on the Marshall campus. "After a while, it was boring to me. Nothing was a challenge. I never had a connection with teachers."

Sargent said she was frustrated that she couldn't get classroom help with math and that teachers weren't clear about their expectations. This spring, she switched to night school at Marshall.

In Hillsboro, Ore., Liberty High broke into small schools four years ago, but its dropout rate remains the highest in a district with three other traditional high schools. Despite progress in getting more students to take college-prep courses, three in five Liberty graduates fall short of entry standards for the University of Oregon — the district's definition of college-ready.

Twyla Baggarley, who graduated from Liberty this month, passed Advanced Placement calculus as a junior but worries that she might not be primed for college after a lackluster senior year. Tired of teachers who taught straight from the textbook, she chose to take just one full-year core course, AP English, and padded her schedule with photography and two periods of PE.

She and other students say administrators seemed so caught up in tinkering with the small schools' structure that they didn't pay enough attention to the quality of teaching.

"I saw no point in taking another class where I have to just teach myself," Baggarley says.

The lessons for other high schools are sobering. Even with millions of dollars for teacher training, an army of experts to coach schools and the backing of top philanthropies, fixing high schools so they work for all students remains a formidable and elusive task.

Oregon's small-schools initiative was launched in 2004 with grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Meyer Memorial Trust. Nationally, the Gates Foundation has donated more than $1 billion to create and support small academies.

Eleven big high schools got grants of about $1 million each to break into academies of fewer than 400 students each. Two schools have since backed out.

Marshall, Roosevelt and Liberty jumped in first and are graduating the first class of seniors who spent all four years in academies.

Educators at the Portland schools made the switch four years ago after mounting pressure to improve. At Marshall, former Principal John Wilhelmi had to cut band, auto shop and other popular programs because so many students left to attend other schools.

"We felt our graduation rates could be better, our school climate could be better," he recalls. "We felt we could stop the loss of kids with this vehicle of personalization."

Despite the smaller classes, key indicators of student success at Marshall and Roosevelt — test scores and attendance, for instance — haven't changed much since the campuses split into small schools.

At Marshall, students missed on average more than five weeks of school last year. At Roosevelt, the average was six weeks.

Students in two academies at Roosevelt and two at Marshall have shown improvement in reading since the change, but math performance declined. At Roosevelt, math performance remained flat.

Administrators say students at both schools pose special challenges to educate. Officials say many of these students enter high school less prepared than their counterparts at other high schools, and many work part time to help support their families.

Nevertheless, some students and parents say the small-school transformation overpromised and underdelivered for the class of 2008.

"The idea and the potential are great, but the actual execution has been less than great," said Cindy Adams, whose youngest son, Brandon, graduated this month from BizTech.

Gates Foundation leaders also have grown impatient at the uneven results when big schools break into small ones. This fall, Gates probably will switch the focus of its grants for fixing high schools to target teaching and raise teacher quality, says Vicki Phillips, who directs Gates' education initiatives.

The Next Big Thing - Smaller Schools

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:52:55 -0400

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This is a June 22, 2008 article by Liz Bowie of the Baltimore Sun talking about something that is central to our new book and dear to our hearts – building smaller high schools. A few years back I visited a high school in Texas that was literally more than 2 city blocks in size.

Although it contained wonderful facilities (including a gigantic football stadium) and offered a wide range of programs I had to wonder how easily students could get lost literally and figuratively on such a sprawling campus. Is bigger better?

Across the nation, urban school districts are breaking up large schools and replacing them with smaller ones. In Baltimore, new high schools with as few as 400 to 500 students have been carved out of old ones with enrollments of 2,000 or more.

  Now support for small schools appears to be taking root - at the neighborhood level and the school board - in neighboring Baltimore County, which like many suburban districts has long favored large schools.  

Vocal parents upset about crowding in the Towson area and elsewhere have demanded new, smaller schools rather than additions to existing ones. Sparked by those complaints, the school board recently reversed course and withdrew a proposal to expand Loch Raven High School; the county has also agreed to build a new 400-seat elementary school in the Towson area rather than expand a school.   The school board, meanwhile, is taking a closer look at research on school size.  

"The current board, I think, believes that an overly large school presents problems," said JoAnn C. Murphy, president of the county school board.   County Executive James T. Smith Jr., who supported building additions at two schools this spring rather than new schools, said in an interview that he has never had a conversation about school size with the county's school superintendent. He also said he has no opinion on optimum size for schools, though he believes schools with 2,000 students are too large.  

Over the past decade, the county has added additions of 400 to 600 seats to seven high schools, turning several into schools of 2,000 students or more. This fall, Vincent Farm Elementary will open in the northeast part of the county with a capacity of 700 students, much larger than an average elementary school. 

Achievement
The switch to smaller schools by urban school districts is supported by research indicating that they might boost student achievement.

Craig Howley, an Ohio University researcher and a proponent of small schools, said "a suburban community that is building high schools over 1,000 is making a mistake." Achievement "degrades" for all students at schools with enrollments exceeding 900, he maintains.

Just how big a school should be has been debated for the past half-century when the first proponents of large high schools extolled their cost effectiveness, large course offerings and opportunities for sports and extracurricular activities. Schools for as many as 3,000 and 4,000 students were built in the 1970s across the nation.

But many urban districts began rethinking that strategy, particularly when graduation rates dropped, violence and fighting rose, and achievement declined. These problems prompted some educators to conclude that large urban schools were unmanageable.

Even suburban districts began to question whether bigger was really better after the killings at Columbine High School, a large suburban school in Colorado. The size of the school was a contributing factor because students did not feel as close a connection to their teachers and other students, according to one report.

Current educational research suggests small schools might be more beneficial to students. The optimum size for a high school is 600 to 900 students, according to a study published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis in 1997.

"We did find that the ideal size of a school did not vary by the social or racial composition of the school. However, small size was more strongly linked to achievement gains in more disadvantaged schools," said Valerie Lee, a University of Michigan professor and one of the authors of the report.

Other studies have shown that students in small schools are more likely to be better known by their teachers and go to college.

'Personalization'
New York, Chicago and Baltimore are just a few of the cities that have created small schools. Michigan is offering $3 million in state money to any school that wants to downsize or create new small schools of 400. To be eligible a school must have a graduation rate below 70 percent and the school must return 50 percent of the money if the school doesn't graduate at least 80 percent of its students.

"I think there is a certain weight of evidence that has developed around the country," said Chuck Wilbur, the education adviser to Michigan Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, over the course of the past decade, has donated more than $1 billion to cut up large urban high schools under the belief that students would perform better in smaller schools.

The foundation donated $12 million in Baltimore to break up existing high schools, and local foundations added $8 million more.

While results have been mixed at schools that were broken up, a recent study by the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank, showed that the newly created innovation high schools in Baltimore with 400 to 500 students have better graduation rates than other high schools in the city, with the exception of the elite schools.

Moreover, in two of the "innovation" high schools that graduated their first classes this spring, more than 85 percent of students had been accepted at a college, the majority of them four-year institutions. In Baltimore about 44 percent of graduates go on to college.

"I think that the size of a school matters. You can have strong large schools, but in schools that face challenges, personalization matters a great deal," said city schools chief, Andres Alonso.

There are still those who support large high schools and say that they can point to any number of top high schools in the county that are quite large. High-achieving students, they say, will have a larger selection of Advanced Placement and honors classes in a big school.

One of Prince George's County's premier high schools is Eleanor Roosevelt, which now has 3,700 students.

And a number of top Montgomery County high schools are nearly as large.

But Howard County and Anne Arundel County high schools are smaller. In Anne Arundel, the enrollment is between 1,200 and 1,600. Howard County, another county that has grown rapidly, has decided to limit the size of its high schools to 1,400 students but is building elementary schools of 700.

"Success is not directly related to size," argues David Lever, executive director of the state's Interagency Committee on School Construction. "I think the more important factor is how the school is managed."

But many educators say that it is more difficult to manage very large schools.

Troubled school
One of Baltimore County's expansion projects was a 600-seat addition to Woodlawn High School, now the district's most troubled high school.

At Woodlawn only 25 percent of students passed the biology high school assessment last year and only 37 percent passed English II. Those pass rates are below those of some of the new small high schools in Baltimore.

Smith, the county executive, said he would support the breakup of Woodlawn into two schools with separate staffs operating out of one building. But he does not think that the county has the money to build a new small high school on a different site to downsize Woodlawn.

Gene Bottoms, the senior vice president of the Southern Regional Education Board, said that simply breaking up failing high schools does not necessarily improve the teaching.

But, he said, all things being equal, students in smaller schools are likely to be more involved in extracurricular activities and to have closer ties to their schools that result in higher achievement.

One of the problems with large high schools, Bottoms said, is that students tend to be segregated in different tracks.

The best schools are known for their top students, he said, but the success of the top 25 percent masks what is happening to the bottom 25 percent.

"It is much easier to sort students into pigeonholes and create low expectations for some students," he said.

Meg O'Hare, a county school board member, said sometimes parents have been happy to get additions to their schools because the alternative was trailers next to the schools. But rarely are the core facilities - the gym, cafeteria and hallways - expanded to handle the extra students. The result, she said, is still too many students in the facilities.

Often, she said, the school board supported building a new school, but county executives have decided to allocate money for an addition instead.

"Things come into our budget that we didn't put there. We always rolled over," O'Hare said. "The school board is starting to stand up to the responsibility for adequate facilities for the public schools."

She said the Loch Raven vote was the board saying: "Enough." The county executive contends that decisions about school size are made by the school board.

The problem of crowding in the northeastern portion of the county remains. Five high schools - including Towson, Hereford, Loch Raven, Perry Hall and Patapsco - have an enrollment that is 10 percent above the school's capacity. The county executive's office contends that that is not enough to warrant building a new school.

30 Strategies For Education Reform

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 22:15:37 -0400

aPrakash Nair is a futurist, a visionary planner and architect with Fielding Nair International, one of the world’s leading change agents in school design. He is also the Managing Editor of DesignShare.com which attracts over one million visitors each year. He is the recipient of several international awards including the prestigious CEFPI MacConnell Award, the top honor worldwide for school design.

He has written extensively in leading international journals about school design and educational technology and their connection to established educational research. What sets him apart from anyone in the business this side of my friend and colleague Frank Kelly is that he understands education not just facility design. Prakash has created a Guidebook to as he writes:

Close some big gaps in education - the gap between research and action, between stated goals and policy and between perception and reality.

Few will argue that these gaps exist when it comes to the way education is delivered in this country. In what other industry would the majority of proven research be discarded in favor of an overused, discredited model? In education, the research unequivocally supports a student- centered model but schools and school systems overwhelmingly favor the older mass-production model of schooling. Where else is there such a gaping chasm between the stated goals of an organization and the policies that are adopted to accomplish those goals? In education, there is widespread support for the idea that every student is important and yet, in practice, systems are set up to favor a few at the expense of the many.

As for the gap between perception and reality, the perception among most parents, communities and policy makers is that failing schools can be "fixed" by doing more of what has failed. The reality is that failing schools need a completely new approach that engages students and co-opts them into the learning process. And what about the “successful” schools, those whose students rank high on standardized tests and go on to college in impressive numbers? These have an even lesser incentive to change even though that they are better at selecting talent than at nurturing it.

Why do these gross disconnects exist? Mainly, the problem lies in the entrenched nature of bureaucracies. Systems designed for a different time and for a different set of needs have since become fragmented and deeply compartmentalized. Even where there is commonality of purpose, the "systems" themselves remain hopelessly gridlocked. Communities need to bypass the system and focus instead on making a set of specific strategies happen. Systemic roadblocks can be more easily identified and overcome when they prevent some specific strategy from being implemented. This approach is more practical than wholesale systemic reform which is nearly impossible to implement except in the most desperate of circumstances.

Another attractiveness of this method to institute reform through the implementation of specific strategies, is that it is very flexible and can be tailored to the needs of any given community. It permits districts with modest goals to begin with small victories and use them to leverage more widespread change. For those with more ambitious expectations also, reform efforts can be focused on specific strategies. Even widespread reform is more easily managed when broken up into easily measurable chunks.

By providing a simple and common vocabulary that all school constituents can use, this Guidebook also bridges the gap between laypersons and experts. It can thus help diverse school constituents to work together toward realizing shared expectations.

Prakash outlines how various school constituents can mobilize support for their goals using this Guidebook as a resource. You can read the entire document by clicking this link.

Eight Track System in an iPod World

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 09:43:19 -0400

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Sorry about the image - it’s as close as I could get. Please forgive me for being just a little bit cynical about what Jeb Bush had to say – I acknowledge, it’s a great quote…

“…our education system is an eight-track system living in an iPod world."
Jeb Bush, Foundation For Excellence in Education speech, June 19, 2008

But as you read on in this June 20, 2008 article written by Ron Matus of the St. Petersburg Times, you begin to realize that this is not about fixing our public schools, not about providing adequate funding for facilities, for proper training for a system that has and is being overwhelmed - but about paving the way for voucher and charter schools. I have nothing against competition between the public and the private education sectors as long as the playing field is level. The public education system is an $800 billion plus industry that the private sector would love to get their hands on. Read the article for yourself and see what you think this is really about…

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush rallied the troops Thursday, telling a supportive crowd that their often-unpopular visions of reform are the best path to modernizing schools.

"The world is much more interconnected, much more technologically advanced and it is much more interdependent," Bush told a packed ballroom at a Disney resort. "And yet our education system is an eight-track system living in an iPod world."

The duo delivered brief, keynote addresses at a summit organized by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which Bush formed last year.

Among the 400 guests expected to attend over two days were dozens of policy wonks who believe more school choice and testing can help deliver a higher quality education to more students.

Spellings mounted a vigorous defense of No Child Left Behind.

"It's right and it's righteous," she said.

Spellings was a leading architect of the 2002 federal law, which initially won broad, bipartisan support but has since come under withering, bipartisan fire. It requires every state to annually test students in math and reading, and to break down results by race and income level. High-poverty schools that don't meet federal standards face consequences

Spellings called No Child a "game changer" because it has forced schools to take a hard look at who is and isn't succeeding — and what is and isn't working.

In Florida, Bush began installing his brand of accountability three years before No Child. Between 1999 and 2007, he led the charge for vouchers, charter schools, school grades and teacher merit pay — all topics for discussion at the summit.

The result: Angry teachers, frustrated parents, a still-smoking battle over vouchers and national test score gains that are among the country's biggest.

Speaking with reporters later, Bush weighed in on three proposed constitutional amendments, all education related, that are set for statewide vote in November.

Bush allies on the Florida Taxation and Budget Reform Commission led the effort for two of them, which would rewrite language in the state Constitution that courts used to strike down the first of three Bush-backed voucher programs.

If passed, Amendments 7 and 9 would shift the policy debate over vouchers back to the Legislature, where Bush says it should be.

Bush also favors Amendment 5, which would eliminate local property taxes for schools, but require the Legislature to replace the funding through higher sales tax, budget cuts or other revenue sources.

What if...? Re-imagining Learning Spaces

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:34:55 -0400

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This is a British paper on the future of learning environments. I believe that the observations contained apply equally as well here in North America. Here’s what they have to say...

At the present time we are witnessing a massive investment in the design and build of new schools to equip the UK education system for the 21st century. The economically and architecturally ambitious Building Schools for the Future (BSF) program is setting out to rebuild or renew every secondary school in England over the next 10 to 15 years. But how much of this effort has been inspired by an equally wide-reaching educational vision? Already, evidence from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) is suggesting that the design quality of recently built schools is not good enough to achieve the Government’s aim of transforming children’s education. If the design quality is insufﬁcient – what is the quality of the educational strategy underpinning that design?

The design of these schools will shape the ways in which we think about, experience and conduct education in this country for the next 50 to 100 years. The educational visions upon which they are built will be solidiﬁ ed in bricks and mortar, the learning relationships they envisage will be captured in concrete and glass. The institutions created now will physically encapsulate and determine the ideas it is possible to have about education, learning and learning relationships until the dawn of the next century.

That is a long time to spend working in institutions that do not engage with the educational challenges of the 21st century and which do not exploit the resources that it has to offer.

This paper is not concerned with questions of ‘design quality’, nor with the funding mechanisms enabling the build of new schools. Instead, our aim is to ask the following questions:
·      What are the educational visions and debates needed to underpin the design of new educational institutions?
·      What are the digital resources which may reshape the practice of learning in the 21st century?
·      What alternative visions could be conceived for the ‘schools of the future’?

The aim is to ensure equal attention is paid to the educational visions underpinning new school designs as it is to questions over the abilities and costs of architects and builders. Without this educational debate, the new schools currently in development are likely to become straightjackets for educators and learners, rather than sites to support, encourage and develop learning in all its guises over the next 100 years.

This paper arises from a two-day workshop bringing together individuals from a range of design, teaching, mentoring, policy and research backgrounds. The workshop aimed to ‘re-imagine’ learning spaces, and actively encouraged the development of ‘what if’ scenarios that push the boundaries of current thinking and encourage debate of the relationship between educational goals and the design and resourcing of spaces for learning. These scenarios are presented in the paper, not as recommendations, but as a stimulus for discussion.

You can download the paper by clicking on this link.

These Students Have a (Business) Plan

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:46:45 -0400

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Our new book Teaching the Digital Generation: No More Cookie Cutter High Schools examines several different educational models that focus on an entrepreneurial approach to learning. This June 19th, 2008 Christian Science Monitor article by Stacy Teicher Khadaroo examines the value of entrepreneurial programs.

Standing before a phalanx of potential investors, three young women make the case for their high-end day care concept. They've written a 37-page business plan, and they confidently whip through a PowerPoint about their mission, budget, and marketing plan.

Then they break into song like only teenagers can – a charming choreographed performance of their jingle.

Welcome to "The Pitch" – a culminating event for juniors at Fenway High School in Boston. In 14 weeks, each team of students has gone from not knowing what a business plan is to creating one and trying to sell it to a panel of professional adults, the hypothetical investors.

Entrepreneurship education is gaining popularity as a way to motivate students to master everything from math to public speaking. In the era of No Child Left Behind, it's hard for many schools to make room for entrepreneurial classes in their schedules. But groups that promote these classes, particularly in urban settings, are convinced that a curriculum about creating, financing, and owning a business can also nudge up test scores and graduation rates.

At Fenway, a high-performing public school, educators saw the value so clearly that they made the demanding "Ventures" class a requirement. The course carries into senior year with career exploration and an internship. It's one of many ways students here connect with the world beyond high school and practice the skills they'll need there.

Ventures "is about the ability to open doors for yourself in the adult work world," says Rosemary Sedgwick, who piloted the program a decade ago with funding from Adobe Systems and now is Fenway's director of development. "It leaves them with that entrepreneurial spirit that they can go out and make things happen."

Students are more engaged in school, many experts say, when lessons seem relevant and when projects have consequences beyond an assignment that only their teacher will see.

Ventures teacher and director Amy Carrier sets high standards for the business plans. She gets mentors to coach the teams as they conduct customer surveys and call businesses to research their ideas. "This is not the kind of class where a teacher can give a lecture," she says.

For Farah Jeune, creating marketing for the Play Place Palace day care sparked a career interest. She and her teammates took critiques from the judges in stride. One judge noticed that they hadn't budgeted for gasoline as part of their transportation service.

"The level of sophistication was unbelievable," says judge Linda Lanton, "because they targeted a particular market segment – the wealthy." She's the vice president of new ventures at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, which hosted the event at its office, just a baseball's toss away from the school and the famed Fenway Park stadium.

Judges graded everything from the viability of the ideas to students' speaking skills.

Friends at other schools don't have this opportunity, students say. "Yesterday, when I went shopping to get an outfit for this, the lady was impressed that high school students were doing business things, because you usually learn about things like this in college," Farah says.

Blue Cross freed up some employees two mornings a week to mentor. "I've really come to appreciate [the students'] drive and their work ethic," says Tuoyo Louis, the lead mentor at Blue Cross and a Fenway trustee. "I didn't get some of this stuff until I was in business school, so to see it in high school..., it's amazing."

"It's really essential for every student to know the rules of the game of life," Ms. Carrier says.

Sometimes those rules feel uncomfortable. Students complain when first asked to don office-appropriate outfits, for one thing. But Melissa Gonzalez says her main challenge was dealing with "harsh, rude, ignorant people" when contacting car dealers and auto shops while working on an autocustomization plan. She says she enjoyed the task despite the hurdles.

For Steve Mariotti, founder of the National Foundation for Teaching of Entrepreneurship (NFTE), "getting someone to think entrepreneurially ... is a form of mental liberation."

His nonprofit in New York has worked with nearly 200,000 students nationwide, primarily low-income and minority, over the past 20 years. Mr. Mariotti created a curriculum model, similar to Fenway's, so that entrepreneurial education would not be limited to children whose parents own a business.

The reach of such education has grown tenfold since he started, Mariotti estimates. But he and others say there's still a long way to go to make it more widely available.

Early research on NFTE programs found links to increases in students' independent reading, college aspirations, and leadership behavior. The boost to academic and life skills is primarily found among students at a socioeconomic or cultural disadvantage, says Andrew Hahn, a professor and founder of the Center for Youth and Communities at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

In their senior year, Fenway students have to pitch themselves to a workplace for an internship.

Sometimes students are scared heading into the internship, Carrier says, but when they come back after six weeks in a professional environment, "they blossom into these adult versions of themselves, and they're wise.... And they're able to link everything Fenway's given them ... to what's real."

From a Nation At Risk to a Nation Behind

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:54:36 -0400

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Video Clip

The United States, considered "a nation at risk" in the 1983 government report of the same name, continues to fall fast behind other nations in education and economic opportunity, according to a new documentary.

Titled Two Million Minutes, the film takes a look at how U.S. students allocate their high school years (approximately four years or two million minutes) compared with students in India and China. The documentary demonstrates that students in the U.S. spend much less time on education and thinking about career opportunities than their global peers in India and China. It examines the implications this may have on the future of the United States in the 21st century global economy. The film documents the lives of two students from each of the three countries to compose a global snapshot of education from the viewpoint of the students preparing for their future.

Conceived by high-tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Robert Compton, the documentary is part of the ED in '08 Campaign, which aims to push the federal government toward big changes in U.S. schools. Backers include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Film crews recorded high school seniors in the U.S., India, and China in 2005-06.

Daniel Pink: Preparing Kids for 21st C Success

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:34:25 -0400

Part 1
Part 2

Take a look at this two part eSchool News TechWatch interview with Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and Free Agent Nation, talking about what it will take for students to succeed in an outsourced and automated world--and how schools should change their approach to education accordingly.

College Goal Questioned in New Book

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:58:32 -0400

Source

This is an interesting June 18, 2008 EdWeek article (Vol. 27, Issue 42, Page 14) by David Hoff about Charles Murray’s new book, Real Education. Be sure to read Frank Kelly’s response at the end of the article

Fourteen years after The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure drew wide condemnation for its racially charged arguments on achievement, the author’s latest book, Real Education, will dispute the premise underlying much of education policy: All children should be challenged to achieve at high levels during their K-12 careers and pursue further education after high school.

“It’s just idiotic,” Mr. Murray said of such beliefs in a recent interview.

Relying on the thesis of The Bell Curve—that intelligence, and therefore prospects for academic achievement, is determined by heredity—Mr. Murray’s new book argues that education policies should recognize that not all students can be expected to take high-level academic courses, and that some students should concentrate instead on vocational training to prepare for the workforce.

“We’re talking about [college] material that only about 10 percent of high school graduates can understand.”

The ideas “all fall from the recognition that ... variation in [intellectual ability] has enormous relationship to what you can and should do educationally,” said Mr. Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Although Mr. Murray predicted that most educators and politicians will object to the ideas in Real Education, he said it won’t be as controversial as The Bell Curve. In that 1994 book, he and co-author Richard J. Herrnstein, who died shortly before the book’s publication, wrote that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, saying that 84 percent of blacks score below the average score of whites, and that educational interventions won’t narrow the achievement gap between the races. Other scholars strongly reject that contention.

“This [new book] doesn’t deal with race,” Mr. Murray said. “Anything that does not deal with race doesn’t get as much blowback as something that does deal with race. ”

Still, Mr. Murray’s book, scheduled for publication in August by Crown Forum, an imprint of Random House Inc., will probably generate more attention than if anyone else had written it, one education policy expert said.

“If this book were put out by anyone who didn’t have the reputation of Charles Murray, nobody would pay any attention to it,” said Andrew J. Rotherham, a co-director of Education Sector, a Washington think tank.

Mr. Murray previewed some of the ideas in Real Education last month in the journal The New Criterion. In the article, he wrote that education policy based on the idea that schools can dramatically improve student achievement is unproductive.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act’s goal that all students will achieve proficiency in reading and mathematics by the end of the 2013-14 school year is an example of what he calls “educational romanticism.”

Although Mr. Murray touches on such ideas in Real Education, most of the book deals with issues related to higher education.

The book is structured around what Mr. Murray calls “the four simple truths” in education. He outlined those ideas in a series of opinion essays published early last year in The Wall Street Journal.

Although Mr. Murray dedicates a chapter to discussing the educational implications of the variation in intellectual ability, he doesn’t reargue that point, he says.

But the book mischaracterizes the NCLB law, said Mr. Rotherham, who has read a prepublication version. Mr. Murray, he said, doesn’t acknowledge that although universal proficiency is the law’s stated goal, the law has several ways that schools can meet accountability goals until 2013-14 without ensuring universal proficiency.

“It’s a fundamental misreading of No Child Left Behind and where we are on education reform,” said Mr. Rotherham, who was an education adviser to President Clinton at the end of his second term.

Other critics say that Mr. Murray’s emphasis on the immutability of intelligence distracts from efforts to improve academic achievement.

“The fixation on the fixedness of intelligence is probably wrong and in any case cannot be helpful,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington research and advocacy organization that supports policies such as high academic standards and the creation of charter schools as ways to improve student achievement. “Our kids could learn more than they are learning, and that’s the key point that should drive our education policymaking.”

Because some students don’t have the intellectual ability to handle college-level work, not all students should go to college, Mr. Murray asserts in another of his “truths.”

In the book, Mr. Murray publishes excerpts from college textbooks and suggests that the texts are too difficult for the vast majority of students.

“We’re talking about material that only about 10 percent of high school graduates can understand,” he said in the interview last month.

Instead of paying expensive college-tuition bills, he said, some students should pursue vocational training to win certification for specific skills that are useful in the workforce, such as accounting.

“It doesn’t make a difference if you got your C.P.A. at the University of Virginia or an online school,” Mr. Murray said of preparation to become a certified public accountant. “If you got a good score, you got a good score. You can take that to an employer, and the employer knows what that means.”

Most students shouldn’t consider a four-year college degree that covers the liberal arts and other challenging material, Mr. Murray said.

One researcher said that he agrees with the assertion that not all students should enroll in college. But schools, he said, shouldn’t track students into classes or other programs based on perceptions of their intellectual ability.

“What concerns me is someone making the decision about a kid very early on” in his or her educational experience, said Pedro A. Noguera, a professor of sociology at New York University and one of the organizers of a statement, released last week, that says schools need support from social and health programs to ensure high levels of student achievement.

“What we should be striving for is to use education to help poor kids out of poverty,” Mr. Noguera said. “For many of them, that means college.”

Another researcher suggested that many higher education institutions are already largely offering the type of education focused on knowledge and skills needed for specific professions.

“Our system is producing something very close to what [Mr. Murray] wants,” said Jay P. Greene, the chairman of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, who has read portions of Real Education.

Another “truth” outlined in the book is that half of students will always be below average, regardless of overall gains in student achievement. The fourth tenet is that U.S. prosperity depends on the education provided to gifted students.

Mr. Murray predicts that many educators will dislike his book because it criticizes the “typical progressive curriculum.”

But one educator said he agrees with the ideas Mr. Murray presented in The Wall Street Journal last year.

“There were pieces of it that made a lot of sense,” said Thomas J. Hanson, a retired superintendent of two Maine school districts.

“He had some very valid points” about not all students going to college, Mr. Hanson said. “There needs to be more than one option available for students.”

FRANK KELLY COMMENTS: I think Murray raises some interesting issues about our schools. He is clearly operating under the industrial age idea that schooling (teaching and learning) can be done in only a limited number of ways and that, we should, therefore, ultimately in some manner sorts kids out depending on their 'intelligence' into different paths with different intended outcomes. He certainly has not thought about the possibility of treating each kid as an individual or about giving kids and their parents choices about the education they pursue.

If we could treat kids as individuals by using varied methods of instruction appropriate to their learning styles and interests, varied amounts of time for realizing learning objectives, and varied amounts of support from teachers/advisors in varied learning environments, I think his entire proposition bites the dust. People/kids will always have widely varied intellectual capabilities (not to mention similar variables in every other characteristic), but how do we make schools that allow/encourage each kid to go as far as he/she possibly can?

How can we morally do otherwise? Certainly mankind has demonstrated for a very long time, that we are incapable of sorting folks out intellectually and the faster our world changes, the lower our odds of ever doing that.

The entire premise of our democracy is that every man should have the freedom and opportunity to rise as far as their own capabilities and energies allow. It seems he is leaping from a fact-that people have different abilities-to a conclusion that makes those differences liabilities rather than assets.

Why Football is Better Than High School

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:02:40 -0400

Source

Thanks once again to Frank Kelly for pointing this article out to me. This 1998 article, which is as relevant today as it was then, is from Phi Delta Kappan, a national magazine for educators. The article by Herb Childress is titled, Seventeen Reasons Why Football Is Better Than High School. You can read the reasons yourself, but they boil down to keeping kids engaged and active in their own education.

Says Childress:

I use football as my specific example not because I love football; I use it because I hate football. It's been said that football combines the two worst elements of American society: violence and committee meetings. You can substitute "music" or "theater" or "soccer" for "football," and everything I say will stay the same; so when I say that football is better than school, what I really mean is that even football is better than school.

His hatred of football aside, the points Childress made a decade ago are still true today.
And before you ask, you better believe this is a rebuff to those people who foolishly believe a school district would be better off without sports, music or other extracurricular activities.

This article is worth a look.

What Would Your High Test School Look Like?

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:27:38 -0400

Source

Doug Johnson - not just a pretty face. What a devastating commentary by Doug on the current focus of schools. In planning schools for the tenor of the times, he suggests there are traditional elements we can get rid of, and new features we will need to add. You can find the entire posting at his Blue Skunk Blog

Buildings reflect the values of those who design them. They are, so to speak, philosophy made visible in bricks and mortar.

When the Mankato Schools built its last new building, Dakota Meadows Middle School, in the early 90s, the project team was led by a remarkable educator - principal Jane Schuck. Thanks to her vision, the school had two overriding design principles - the "middle school concept" and "technology-infusion," Those principles are visible yet today in the building's design and program. It remains, in my experience, still the most innovative school building in Minnesota.

What principles will be on display in our new elementary building? I know two, for sure. First, this will be a "green" building. In selling the referendum, we promised that we would work for LEED certification, making sure the project is as environmentally friendly and energy efficient as possible. I am excited about this. Second, there will be increased attention paid to safety. For the first time in our district, the building design process will need to consider things like "lock downs." One of the most remarked-upon ideas from our recent visit to other schools was a entry door configuration that required all visitors to pass through the school office before gaining access to the rest of the building. Sigh...

But what about the educational philosophy behind our new building? Cowed by AYP and other NCLB threats, will our entire building be designed "to raise standardized test scores," as one of the team has already suggested? If so, what would a building like that look like?

From current practices, there seem to be many things the building would not need:

a gymnasium, art room, music room
certainly no playgrounds
probably no library media center
science classrooms only if science scores start to "count" on state tests
no stages, no auditoriums, no large group venues of any kind
no technology beyond computers for drill and practice in math and reading and, of course, testing

Probably small, cube-shaped classrooms with straight rows of desks all facing the front of the room would be just the ticket for extended reading and math "practice." (No thinking outside the box, for heaven's sake.) Lots of space for special education. Minimal distractions. Maximum efficiency of movement for less time off the tasks of direct reading and math instruction.

Until citizens in a single voice stand up and shout, "Being educated is about more than doing well on tests!" test-performance-schools that both educators and kids will detest will be built.

What would your "high-test" school look like?

Top 100 Lamest Excuses For Not Changing

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:40:54 -0400

Source

Change is hard, you go first… Dilbert

Mitch Ditkoff has written a terrific piece on reluctance to the excuses folks give as their reason for NOT changing. While they were written for business, change a few words here and there and a large number of them apply in any field, especially education. As he writes:

Since 1986, I've been working with a wide variety of organizations who have acknowledged their need to innovate -- enough, at least, to invite Idea Champions (his company) in to help them on their way.

It's been a fascinating ride.

Along the way, I've noticed that a lot of people who work in corporations are ruled by a host of "reasons" why innovation can't happen.

Many of these reasons, I realize, are based on years of in-the-trenches experience. My clients are not hallucinating, merely reporting how difficult it's been for them along the way.

I guess you could call these people realists.

I understand their point of view, but it is precisely this point of view that's the problem.

Innovation, as I've said before, is an inside job. It begins with the individual. Organizations don't innovate. People do. And if people are ruled by past experiences, old assumptions, and limiting concepts of what's possible, nothing much will ever change.

And so, as a public service, it is my pleasure to present to you the Top 100 Lamest Excuses for Not Innovating -- excuses I continue hearing again and again out there on the front lines of corporate America.

Please remember, dear reader, that there may be a kernel of truth in each of these reasons. Indeed, what sometimes may seem like an excuse may simply be a clear assessment of current reality.

Current reality, however, is only one form of reality. And just because it's current doesn't mean it's the way it will always be. Or should be.

Real innovators challenge excuses. Real innovators challenge the status quo. They do not concede to current reality. They find a way over, around or through whatever obstacle is in their way -- whether that obstacle is a lack of funding or the assumption that there is a lack of funding.

As you read through the list, take note of the excuses YOU find yourself making. Also take note of the excuses you hear others making.

At the end of the list, I offer you a simple technique to free yourself from the tyranny of these innovation-averse excuses.

Give it a shot.
1. I don't have the time. 
2. I can't get the funding. 
3. My boss will never go for it. 
4. Were not in the kind of business likely to innovate. 
5. We won't be able to get it past legal. 
6. I've got too much on my plate.

7. I'll be punished if I fail. 
8. I 'm just not the creative type.

9. I'm already juggling way too many projects. 
10. I'm too new around here. 
11. I'm not good at presenting my ideas. 
12. No one, besides me, really cares about innovation. 
13. There's too much bureaucracy here to get anything done. 
14. Our customers aren't asking for it. 
15. We're a risk averse culture. Always will be.  
16. We don't have an innovation process. 
17. We don't have a culture of innovation. 
18. They don't pay me enough to take on this kind of project. 
19. My boss will get all the credit. 
20. My career path will be jeopardized if this doesn't fly.

21. I've already got enough headaches. 
22. I'm no good at office politics. 
23. My home life will suffer. 
24. I'm not disciplined enough. 
25. It's an idea too far ahead of its time. 
26. I won't be able to get enough resources.

27. I don't have enough information. 
28. Someone will steal my idea. 
29. It will take too long to get results. 
30. We're in a down economy.

31. It will die in committee. 
32. I'll be laughed out of town. 
33. I won't be able to get the ear of senior leadership. 
34. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

35. The concept is too disruptive. 
36. I won't be able to get enough support.

37. I don't tolerate ambiguity all that well.

38. I'm not in a creative profession. 
39. Now is not a good time to start a new project. 
40. I don't have the right personality to build a team. 
41. Our company is going through too many changes right now. 
42. They won't give me any more time to work on the project. 
43. If I succeed, too much will be expected of me. 
44. Nothing ever changes around here. 
45. Things are changing so fast, my head is spinning.

46. Whatever success I achieve will be undone by somebody else. 
47. I don't have enough clout to get things done. 
48. It's just not worth the effort. 
49. I'm getting close to retirement. 
50. My other projects will suffer. 
51. Been there, done that. 
52. I don't want another thing to think about. 
53. I won't have any time left for my family. 
54. A more nimble competitor will beat us to the punch.

55. Teamwork is a joke around here. 
56. I've never done anything like this before. 
57. I won't be rewarded if the project succeeds. 
58. We're not measured for innovation.

59. I don't have the right credentials. 
60. We need more data. 
61. It's not my job. 
62. It will hard sustaining the motivation required. 
63. I've tried before and failed. 
64. I'm not smart enough to pull this off. 
65. I don't want to go to any more meetings

66. It will take way too long to get up to speed.

67. Our Stage Gate process will sabotage any hope of success. 
68. I'm not skillful at building business cases.

69. Summer's coming. 
70. The marketplace is too volatile. 
71. This is a luxury we can't afford at this time.

72. I think we're about to be acquired. 
73. I'm trying to simplify my life, not complicate it.

74. The dog ate my homework. 
75. Help! I'm a prisoner in a Chinese fortune cookie factory

76. My company just wants to squeeze more blood from the stone. 
77. My company isn't committed to innovation. 
78. I don't have the patience. 
79. I'm not sure how to begin.

80. I'm too left-brained for this sort of thing. 
81. I won't be able to get the funding required. 
82. I'm getting too old for this.

83. We're too competitive, in-house. Collaboration is a rarity. 
84. Spring is coming. 
85. I'm hypoglycemic. 
86. That's Senior Leadership's job, I just work here.

87. I'm thinking of quitting. 
88. Market conditions just aren't right.

89. We need to focus on the short term for a while. 
90. Innovation, schminnovation.

91. What we really need are some cost cutting initiatives. 
92. Six Sigma will take care of everything.

93. Mercury is in retrograde.

94. IT won't go for it. 
95. Maybe next year. 
96. That's my boss's job. 
97. That's R&D's job. 
98. I would if I could, but I can't, so I won't. 
99. First, we need to benchmark the competition. 
100. It's against my religion.
 THE TECHNIQUE I PROMISED YOU

1. Make a list of your three most bothersome excuses.
2. Turn each excuse into a powerful question, starting with the words "How can I?" or "How can we?" (For example, if your excuse is "That's R&D's job," you might ask "How can I make innovation my job?" or "How can I help my team take more responsibility for innovating?"
3. Brainstorm each question -- alone and with your team

Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:39:39 -0400

Source
Video

Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources. He has worked with national governments in Europe and Asia, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, national and state education systems, non-profit corporations and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations.

This is his TED video - he suggests that creativity is as important as literacy. Why don't we get the best out of people? He argues that it's because we've been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies -- far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity -- are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. "We are educating people out of their creativity." RIt's a message with deep resonance. Robinson's TED Talk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006. The most popular words framing blog posts on his talk? "Everyone should watch this."