Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Bruce Mau believes children and education
are the keys to greening our cities. Mau says if we can design ways for children to connect directly with living things and living systems and then integrate that experience into the way we educate the next generation, they will view green cities as a starting point rather than merely a possibility.
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/005785.html
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/005785.html
Sunday, August 26, 2007
KIPP schools
http://www.kipp.org/
A network of free schools in under served neighborhoods throughout the United States.
A network of free schools in under served neighborhoods throughout the United States.
College Ratings Race Roars On Despite Concerns
College Ratings Race Roars On Despite Concerns
By ALAN FINDER
Published: August 17, 2007
Richard J. Cook, the president of Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, will not say precisely how he used to rate his college’s competitors when the annual U.S. News & World Report peer review questionnaire showed up in his mailbox. What he will say is, “I filled it out more honestly this year than I did in the past.”
“I checked ‘don’t know’ for every college except Allegheny,” Dr. Cook said, adding that he gave his own institution an outstanding rating.
U.S. News & World Report releases its annual rankings of America’s top colleges today, under attack as never before by college officials who accuse it of using dubious statistics to stoke the intense, even crazed, competition among colleges and universities for students and prestige.
Still there is little sign that the rankings race is diminishing. While more than 60 presidents of liberal arts colleges signed a letter over the last few months pledging to stop participating in the most heavily weighted component of the magazine’s rankings — the survey of colleges’ reputations — virtually none of the most select and highly ranked colleges signed on.
Indeed, the rankings are so influential, two decades after they were started, that one clause in the contract of Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, promises a $10,000 bonus if he can raise its standing. Frustrated college officials and high school guidance counselors say the magazine is not only reporting on how colleges perform, but is also changing their behavior as they try to devise gambits to scurry into the top ranks.
Take admissions. A college’s acceptance rate, or the proportion of applicants it admits, counts towards its rank, and the more selective the college is, the better.
So some colleges try to increase the number of applicants they receive — and turn down — by waiving fees and dropping requirements. Some send out applications by e-mail, with most of the student’s personal information already filled in. Others send out persistent e-mail appeals to high school sophomores, with breathless subject lines like “Time is running out.”
“It’s pumping up the numbers, it’s making colleges look more selective, and it’s contributing to the frenzy,” said Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment at Dickinson College. “What if we become ridiculous and just go out to a shopping mall and hand out applications?”
Then there is that survey that asks college officials to rate other colleges and universities. The survey, which counts for 25 percent of a college’s overall ranking, is the most heavily weighted factor.
That has spurred colleges to send glossy promotional brochures and updates on new programs to high-ranking officials at other colleges around survey time in hopes of impressing them. Despite such efforts, college officials say they suspect that some in their ranks deliberately downgrade their competitors to try to drive down their showing.
“I see where the temptation comes,” Dr. Cook said. “So rather than be tempted to game the system, I think it’s better to drop out.”
The magazine’s editors say that the rankings provide a valuable service and that rather than blame the magazine when colleges manipulate their numbers, people in higher education ought to look in the mirror.
“We get blamed for a lot of things that are demonstrably not our responsibility,” Brian Kelly, the editor of U.S. News, said in a interview. “I find it a little shocking, given the problems in the higher education world these days, that this is the thing, U.S. News, that these presidents choose to focus on.”
Editors at U.S. News acknowledge anecdotal evidence that some colleges try to affect the rankings, but they insist it is not widespread. The editors say they have added myriad safeguards over the years from specific definitions of what counts as an application to adding questions that can sniff out fudging.
Some colleges used to drop athletes’ SAT scores from their computation of incoming students’ scores in order to increase their averages and make their institutions look more selective, Mr. Kelly said.
In response, U.S. News helped to create common definitions with organizations like the College Board so that data reporting would be standardized and harder to fudge.
Still, critics say that the magazine, which does not verify information submitted by the colleges, bears some responsibility for the litany of tactics that colleges employ.
James M. Sumner, dean of admission and financial aid at Grinnell College, said a counterpart from a well-regarded institution told him that when computing average SAT scores he excluded the SAT’s of students accepted as “development cases,” whose grades and test scores are often below average but whose families are likely to make major donations. Mr. Sumner declined to identify the university.
U.S. News reports the proportion of a university’s alumni who contribute money each year, as a way of measuring consumer satisfaction. Michael Beseda, vice president for enrollment at St. Mary’s College of California, said he knew someone whose college sent him a $5 bill, asking him simply to send it back so it would count as a donation. Several colleges have admitted taking a single donation and spreading it over two, three or five years, to raise their annual numbers.
Many of the tactics used by colleges involve admissions because they have more control over it than they do over other factors in the rankings, like endowments or reputation.
One gambit involves the so-called “snap-app” or “fast-app,” an application sent by e-mail to high school seniors in which their personal information is already filled in by the college. The University of Portland in Oregon, Ursinus College in Pennsylvania and the University of Vermont are among those to use this kind of application.
Washington & Jefferson College, a liberal arts college outside Pittsburgh, began five years ago to seek more applicants by dropping fees and some requirements, and searching for high school students relentlessly through an e-mail effort. The college switched to a two-part application; the first part can take as little as five minutes to fill out, and in some cases is counted as a completed application.
About 1,100 students applied in 2002 to Washington & Jefferson. This year, nearly 7,400 did. The acceptance rate plummeted, almost in half.
College officials acknowledge that they wanted to go up in the rankings but also say that increasing the pool of applicants was part of an overall strategy, along with building new dormitories and a fitness center and adding academic programs, to help Washington & Jefferson enroll better and more diverse students and to grow to 1,550 students from 1,100.
“It’s worked,” said Alton E. Newell, the vice president for enrollment. “My institution is a better place, a healthier place, a more vibrant place.”
But to many college and university officials, Washington & Jefferson and other colleges that have engineered huge increases in applicant pools in recent years, are recruiting vast numbers of students primarily to reject them.
The gambits enable an institution to appear more selective, but it is unclear that they can significantly affect a ranking. The U.S. News editors argue that a college’s acceptance rate counts for only 1.5 percent of the overall evaluation. Washington & Jefferson, for instance, has generally stayed in the same ranking range in the 90s and low 100s among liberal arts colleges. Last year it shared 104th place on the list with several other campuses.
Then again, does all this really measure an education? Mr. Beseda of St. Mary’s said, “I think what the rankings do is to poison the sense of what a genuine education is. False gods get worshiped.”
Next Article in Education (5 of 11) »
By ALAN FINDER
Published: August 17, 2007
Richard J. Cook, the president of Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, will not say precisely how he used to rate his college’s competitors when the annual U.S. News & World Report peer review questionnaire showed up in his mailbox. What he will say is, “I filled it out more honestly this year than I did in the past.”
“I checked ‘don’t know’ for every college except Allegheny,” Dr. Cook said, adding that he gave his own institution an outstanding rating.
U.S. News & World Report releases its annual rankings of America’s top colleges today, under attack as never before by college officials who accuse it of using dubious statistics to stoke the intense, even crazed, competition among colleges and universities for students and prestige.
Still there is little sign that the rankings race is diminishing. While more than 60 presidents of liberal arts colleges signed a letter over the last few months pledging to stop participating in the most heavily weighted component of the magazine’s rankings — the survey of colleges’ reputations — virtually none of the most select and highly ranked colleges signed on.
Indeed, the rankings are so influential, two decades after they were started, that one clause in the contract of Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, promises a $10,000 bonus if he can raise its standing. Frustrated college officials and high school guidance counselors say the magazine is not only reporting on how colleges perform, but is also changing their behavior as they try to devise gambits to scurry into the top ranks.
Take admissions. A college’s acceptance rate, or the proportion of applicants it admits, counts towards its rank, and the more selective the college is, the better.
So some colleges try to increase the number of applicants they receive — and turn down — by waiving fees and dropping requirements. Some send out applications by e-mail, with most of the student’s personal information already filled in. Others send out persistent e-mail appeals to high school sophomores, with breathless subject lines like “Time is running out.”
“It’s pumping up the numbers, it’s making colleges look more selective, and it’s contributing to the frenzy,” said Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment at Dickinson College. “What if we become ridiculous and just go out to a shopping mall and hand out applications?”
Then there is that survey that asks college officials to rate other colleges and universities. The survey, which counts for 25 percent of a college’s overall ranking, is the most heavily weighted factor.
That has spurred colleges to send glossy promotional brochures and updates on new programs to high-ranking officials at other colleges around survey time in hopes of impressing them. Despite such efforts, college officials say they suspect that some in their ranks deliberately downgrade their competitors to try to drive down their showing.
“I see where the temptation comes,” Dr. Cook said. “So rather than be tempted to game the system, I think it’s better to drop out.”
The magazine’s editors say that the rankings provide a valuable service and that rather than blame the magazine when colleges manipulate their numbers, people in higher education ought to look in the mirror.
“We get blamed for a lot of things that are demonstrably not our responsibility,” Brian Kelly, the editor of U.S. News, said in a interview. “I find it a little shocking, given the problems in the higher education world these days, that this is the thing, U.S. News, that these presidents choose to focus on.”
Editors at U.S. News acknowledge anecdotal evidence that some colleges try to affect the rankings, but they insist it is not widespread. The editors say they have added myriad safeguards over the years from specific definitions of what counts as an application to adding questions that can sniff out fudging.
Some colleges used to drop athletes’ SAT scores from their computation of incoming students’ scores in order to increase their averages and make their institutions look more selective, Mr. Kelly said.
In response, U.S. News helped to create common definitions with organizations like the College Board so that data reporting would be standardized and harder to fudge.
Still, critics say that the magazine, which does not verify information submitted by the colleges, bears some responsibility for the litany of tactics that colleges employ.
James M. Sumner, dean of admission and financial aid at Grinnell College, said a counterpart from a well-regarded institution told him that when computing average SAT scores he excluded the SAT’s of students accepted as “development cases,” whose grades and test scores are often below average but whose families are likely to make major donations. Mr. Sumner declined to identify the university.
U.S. News reports the proportion of a university’s alumni who contribute money each year, as a way of measuring consumer satisfaction. Michael Beseda, vice president for enrollment at St. Mary’s College of California, said he knew someone whose college sent him a $5 bill, asking him simply to send it back so it would count as a donation. Several colleges have admitted taking a single donation and spreading it over two, three or five years, to raise their annual numbers.
Many of the tactics used by colleges involve admissions because they have more control over it than they do over other factors in the rankings, like endowments or reputation.
One gambit involves the so-called “snap-app” or “fast-app,” an application sent by e-mail to high school seniors in which their personal information is already filled in by the college. The University of Portland in Oregon, Ursinus College in Pennsylvania and the University of Vermont are among those to use this kind of application.
Washington & Jefferson College, a liberal arts college outside Pittsburgh, began five years ago to seek more applicants by dropping fees and some requirements, and searching for high school students relentlessly through an e-mail effort. The college switched to a two-part application; the first part can take as little as five minutes to fill out, and in some cases is counted as a completed application.
About 1,100 students applied in 2002 to Washington & Jefferson. This year, nearly 7,400 did. The acceptance rate plummeted, almost in half.
College officials acknowledge that they wanted to go up in the rankings but also say that increasing the pool of applicants was part of an overall strategy, along with building new dormitories and a fitness center and adding academic programs, to help Washington & Jefferson enroll better and more diverse students and to grow to 1,550 students from 1,100.
“It’s worked,” said Alton E. Newell, the vice president for enrollment. “My institution is a better place, a healthier place, a more vibrant place.”
But to many college and university officials, Washington & Jefferson and other colleges that have engineered huge increases in applicant pools in recent years, are recruiting vast numbers of students primarily to reject them.
The gambits enable an institution to appear more selective, but it is unclear that they can significantly affect a ranking. The U.S. News editors argue that a college’s acceptance rate counts for only 1.5 percent of the overall evaluation. Washington & Jefferson, for instance, has generally stayed in the same ranking range in the 90s and low 100s among liberal arts colleges. Last year it shared 104th place on the list with several other campuses.
Then again, does all this really measure an education? Mr. Beseda of St. Mary’s said, “I think what the rankings do is to poison the sense of what a genuine education is. False gods get worshiped.”
Next Article in Education (5 of 11) »
Microsoft's Class Action
Across the country, talent-hungry corporations are trying to save our struggling public schools. Are they creating smarter kids--or a fleet of drones?
From: Issue 118 | September 2007 | Page 86 | By: Elizabeth Svoboda
Kathy Lee, a 20-year veteran of Philadelphia's public schools, may be armed with a handheld mike and interactive whiteboard these days, but she knows high-school kids haven't changed. "Is there a group that's ready to present impact statements?" she demands. "I'm going to count to 10, and someone's got to step up to the plate. Remember, your stuff doesn't have to be perfect today. It's a work in progress."
Twenty-five members of Lee's ninth-grade class hunch in their seats, avoiding her gaze. Finally, a small, lithe girl named Quetta Fairy steps forward, accompanied by three group members, to take the microphone. When she jacks her laptop into the classroom's digital projector, a Microsoft Publisher document pops up on the screen. "Our group is the Community Redevelopment Group, and this is our Action Plan," she says tentatively, as if intimidated by her own amplified voice. "Our goal is to make sure that community members can be included in the revitalization process in West Philadelphia."
"Too many conversational sidebars!" Lee interjects, trying to quiet the other students. "Quetta, can you show us the surveys you put together for the community meeting you're holding?"
"These are the questions we're going to put in the surveys," Fairy responds, clicking over to another document. "Are you aware of the revitalization effort? What businesses and factories were here when you were growing up, and do you know what happened to them? Are you willing to attend meetings to discuss what is happening in our community?"
"Thank you, Quetta. Once again, there are too many sidebars." Lee turns to the rest of the class. "I need you all to pay attention, because we're addressing the competencies you need for the 21st century. You're not going to work for the same company for 50 years, you know. The factory days are gone."
On the face of it, Philadelphia's High School of the Future, a collaboration between Microsoft and the city's public-school district, seems like the kind of out-in-left-field experiment guaranteed to inspire dissent. Yet the school opened last September to almost universal acclaim. Breathless press reports read like an old Jetsons script: Interactive whiteboards! Combination-free lockers! A laptop for every student! An NPR feature titled "In Philly 'Future' School, Books Are So 20th Century" went all gooey over the school's universal Wi-Fi and student-ID smartcards, glossing over just how these bells and whistles were supposed to revolutionize education.
But the news reports captured only part of the project and, in many ways, the least-important part. The School of the Future is not just a high-tech overlay on the traditional curriculum--it represents a wholesale tearing apart of that traditional curriculum. The three Rs are gone; science, English, math, writing, and the rest are being taught not as separate "disciplines," but as a set of interdependent tools for understanding real-world problems. And while the School of the Future may occupy a relatively radical position on the spectrum, corporate involvement in the education system is becoming commonplace, a role that has stirred plenty of controversy.
"Lockheed Martin needs engineers, and they know what the standards are for producing people who can go on to engineering school and become successful," says Paul Vallas, until recently the "CEO" of the School District of Philadelphia. He goes on, ticking off other business partners that have opened their own public schools in Philadelphia: "Sunoco hires students from the city. They know what they need in potential employees." But it is precisely that utilitarian approach that has some parents and teachers concerned. They've long acknowledged--insisted, even--that schools need to prepare kids for the modern working world. But many still want them to do something more, something more subtle. That's why they like to see their kids reading Moby-Dick rather than The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Still, says Mary Cullinane, director of Microsoft's U.S. Partners in Learning program, the old mode of instruction--what she derides as the "stand and deliver" method--simply has to evolve. "We push all the kids into this big funnel," she says, "and then we're surprised when it doesn't work." Cullinane has been trying for years to drive educational strategy forward. Back in 1997, when she was the technology administrator of Union Catholic Regional High School in Scotch Plains, New Jersey (and nearly a decade before the phrase "One laptop per child" even entered the vernacular), she saw to it that every student in her school was armed with a wireless-equipped notebook computer. Three years later, she joined Microsoft, where she now acts as point person for the School of the Future project. With Microsoft behind her, Cullinane's quest seems considerably more plausible. But it is also relentlessly pragmatic: "Microsoft's interest in education is very much a vested interest," she says. "More and more companies are getting worried that they're not going to be able to find enough good employees in the future, and we're one of them."
Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, has admitted to being "terrified for our workforce of tomorrow." And company brass had dreamed for years of building a kind of technology-saturated edutopia at their home base in Redmond, Washington. It made sense enough: The company's campus already boasted a Home of the Future and an Office of the Future; a Classroom of the Future would be a natural brand extension. The thought was that it would further Gates's ambition to use technology as a catalyst for educational reform, and that the classroom would emerge as an archetype for educators and districts across the country.
That was the plan, anyway--until Vallas entered the picture. When the former Chicago city-budget guru inherited the Philadelphia school district in 2002, it was a monkey on his back. Fewer than half the students were passing basic competency tests, and more than a third dropped out before graduation. In his Sisyphean push to reverse those numbers, Vallas had one thin reed to cling to: corporate partnerships. Successful businesses' ideas about maximizing results and solving problems creatively, he thought, might help transform the failing district. "We've been seeking corporate partners all along to help us design schools and, ultimately, to help us run schools," he says. "Our approach has been to partner with everyone we can." (This summer, Vallas took the job of superintendent of the New Orleans system, which should be every bit as challenging as Philly's.)
When Anthony Salcito, Microsoft's general manager for U.S. education, offhandedly mentioned the languishing Classroom of the Future concept in a meeting the Philadelphia district arranged with potential corporate partners, Vallas decided to go for broke. "I said to Anthony, 'Look, we're building a new high school in West Philadelphia from the ground up. Wouldn't it be great if Microsoft helped us with everything from soup to nuts?'" The $65 million for the school's construction, Vallas assured Salcito, would come directly from the district's own coffers. Microsoft's role would be to dole out not money, but knowledge and insight.
Vallas's and Salcito's timing couldn't have been better. "I sent a draft up the management chain, and Bill Gates signed off on it in about a week and a half," Salcito says. The swift decision came as a shock to many, not least Vallas himself. But from Redmond's perspective, the idea was basically idiot proof: On PR grounds alone--"Microsoft helps urban kids make good"--it would have paid for itself. Still, Microsoft went beyond a cookie-cutter school tricked out with a high-tech veneer. Instead, Salcito, Cullinane, and their colleagues took Vallas's "from the ground up" directive literally, agreeing that every aspect of the school--from curriculum to grading rubrics to staff development--would be reexamined. And to ensure the experiment's universal replicability, the first class of 170 students would be chosen by lottery, not by academic merit. Three-quarters of them would hail from the West Philadelphia neighborhood in which the school was to be built.
It's no secret that the U.S. public-school system is in splinters. A surprisingly young institution--American children were mostly taught at home or in private schools until the mid-1800s, when reformers such as Horace Mann lobbied for free public education--it now often looks like an experiment gone wrong. Scarcely two-thirds of government-educated students graduate from high school, and in poor inner-city districts, such as in Cleveland, Memphis, and Milwaukee, graduation rates have fallen below 50%.
Mann argued that public schooling would eradicate poverty and crime, and build a nation of informed citizens. But factory owners--eager for a steady supply of taxpayer-educated worker bees--quickly jumped on the idea for their own purposes, leading to curricula organized according to what modern-day educators call the "factory model." Students were trained to absorb and regurgitate information, fill out worksheets, and meet baseline competency levels in writing and math--skills that would serve them well as future foremen or assembly-line employees. According to Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, author of The Right to Learn, this "batch processing" model of education--characterized by large class sizes and little interactivity--has persisted despite its glaring obsolescence.
In recent decades, a number of schools, many of them private, have tried tinkering with this outmoded system (the open classroom being one of the better-known attempts). But the push from within corporate America began when Sanford Weill, who would later become CEO of Citigroup, began applying modern business practices and know-how to public education in the early 1980s. A rising star in Manhattan's securities brokerage industry, Weill had watched two parallel trends play out: Company after company was fleeing New York, citing a lack of incoming talent, and city kids were languishing in the public schools. "You saw young people playing in the street without having a clue of what life was about and how they could become part of the system," Weill told the House Ways and Means Committee years later. "That was the beginning of the idea that the private sector should get together with the public sector and see if we could create a high-school-level program that could expose young people to a career in the financial-services industry." Such a partnership, as Weill saw it, would be win-win: Students would receive focused career training in addition to their academic course loads, and companies would benefit from a fresh infusion of qualified candidates into the entry-level worker pool.
Weill's first Academy of Finance, sponsored by American Express, opened in 1982 at Brooklyn's John Dewey High School with 35 students. Over the following two decades, 600 public academies opened in 40 states, each with its own career-focused specialty: finance, hospitality and tourism, or information technology. At every stage, new business partners joined the conga line. To date, AT&T, Citigroup, Lucent, Oracle, and Verizon have all bankrolled their own academies under the auspices of Weill's nonprofit National Academy Foundation. The foundation plans to open 160 new academies within the next five years, bringing dozens of corporate partners on board along the way. One of its most tireless supporters has been Gates, who presented Weill with a $5 million grant from the Gates Foundation in 2006.
Other companies have followed Weill, looking to shore up their supply of human capital. Since its inception in 1994, IBM's Reinventing Education initiative has dispersed $75 million to more than 20 school districts across the country, so they can reinvent their classroom offerings according to the company's "Learning Village" guidelines. Google inaugurated the Google Teacher Academy earlier this year, which invites educators to learn how to incorporate Google into their lesson plans and become "technology evangelists." In May, Ernst & Young published a white paper titled "Best in Class: How Top Corporations Can Help Transform Public Education," a list of recommendations to other companies hoping to overhaul local public-school systems.
Science, English, math, and the rest are not taught as separate disciplines. The three Rs are gone. The school tears apart the traditional curriculum.
Self-interested corporate funding has prompted some cynicism. But that reaction misses an essential point--Weill's experiment failed in one critical respect: He had conceived of the academies as feeders for firms like Citigroup and American Express, but that pipeline never materialized. Of the 45,000 students who currently attend the academies, says J.D. Hoye, the foundation's current president, "only a small fraction" end up working for sponsoring companies. Yet in the big picture, Weill's efforts were a smash. More than 90% of National Academy Foundation students graduate from high school, compared to sub-50% to 70% in the struggling urban districts where most academies are located, and 80% eventually obtain two- or four-year college degrees. Five to 10 years after graduation, 85% of alumni continue to work in white-collar jobs.
Cullinane is based in New York, where she helps manage Microsoft's Partners in Learning education-reform program, but one week a month, she leaves her desk and returns to Philadelphia. Known to the kids affectionately as "Miz Mary," Cullinane is an evangelist. She sees the School of the Future as part of a much broader and more complex bid to change American education. Around the time Vallas and Salcito were first planning the school in West Philly, Microsoft helped found an advocacy group called the Partnership for 21st-Century Skills, which encourages schools nationwide to adopt their own curriculum reforms. The partnership's members run from Apple and Adobe to AT&T, Cisco, Dell, Intel, and dozens of other corporate giants who agree that public education is in dire shape. Part of Cullinane's role is turning the School of the Future concept into a replicable meme, one personal encounter at a time.
On the day of my visit, Cullinane leads a tour beginning in the School of the Future's Interactive Learning Center, a student library showcasing bizzspirational tomes such as Who Moved My Cheese? One of the first PowerPoint slides she shows to the dozens of educators features a boldfaced caveat: "This is not a prescription, only an example." "People think we have the answer here. I don't believe that," Cullinane says, projecting from her diaphragm to make sure the people in the back row can hear. "People ask us, 'Why haven't you discovered the silver bullet?' But there is no silver bullet. We're going to show you our innards, and you can decide if any of that is going to support your development."
Cullinane describes a Bertelsmann-commissioned study comparing the effectiveness of two distinct teaching styles: standing in front of the class and lecturing, or a more free-form manner, using dynamic digital aids and encouraging direct student participation. "Now, which group did better?" she asks. "Raise your hand if you think it was stand-and-deliver." Thinking they see the answer coming, no one moves.
"You sure?" Cullinane says, grinning as though preparing to pull a scarf from her sleeve. "Actually, you would be wrong--in fact, there was no difference in the groups' scores when they were tested on the material directly afterward. But, when the groups were tested again one year later, the students in the traditional group could remember almost nothing, and the other group was expanding their detailed knowledge of the topic to other subject areas. As teachers, what kind of legacy do we want, kids from the first group or kids from the second group? And as a Microsoft person, which kid do I want to hire?"
Those data are at the center of the School of the Future's curriculum--and the heart of its revolutionary potential. For all the pomp and circumstance that surrounds corporate-ed projects, many just piggyback career-related classes onto traditional scholastic fare. At Weill's Academies of Information Technology, for example, students take classes such as Digital Media, Advanced Web Tools, and Introduction to the Internet, but also slog through freshman English and sophomore-year social studies.
The Philadelphia school district and Microsoft, by contrast, have opted to dynamite the stand-and-deliver approach and rebuild from scratch. Under George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind policy, the educational focus in America has been squarely on coaxing students to perform to preset standards--on teaching to state tests, which is essentially the factory model with a fresh coat of paint. From the School of the Future's perspective, that strategy is nonsensical. Teaching the three Rs in a vacuum, with no attention to practical skills and application, is like handing a kid a golf club, without explanation, and expecting him to become Tiger Woods.
Cullinane's position is that a more interactive, integrative classroom environment helps kids retain knowledge better and engage more actively in learning--and an intimidating array of research backs her up. In addition to the Bertelsmann study, she cites the Jasper-Woodbury experiments conducted at Vanderbilt University in the 1990s, in which researchers challenged teenage students with real-world problems that demand cross-disciplinary thinking. (In one scenario, a hiker finds an injured eagle in a remote mountain pass that can be reached only by personal aircraft; students work in teams to figure out the best way to retrieve it, given a fixed wind speed and fuel capacity.) Compared with students in traditional math classes, the Jasper-trained pupils performed better on tests of math and science knowledge; they also had stronger general problem-solving skills. In a separate trial of the Jasper method, students scored higher on measures of creativity as well.
Inspired by such results, Salcito, Cullinane, and the Philadelphia Board of Education swept aside the old "silo learning" model and replaced it with one in which subjects are subsumed into open-ended topics: "How are our identities constructed?" or "Should the U.S. be concerned about bird flu?" Traditional disciplines are applied in the course of exploring these broader questions, exercising students' writing, calculating, and analytical skills concurrently, as well as the career-oriented skills on Microsoft's "education competency wheel," including organizing and planning, motivating others, dealing with ambiguity, and working in a team setting. In Kathy Lee's "learning sessions," for instance (School of the Future denizens steer clear of talking about "classes"), students like Quetta Fairy are investigating the growing pains associated with Philadelphia's urban renewal. Every aspect of this real-world transition lends itself to an instructional opportunity. Eminent-domain laws that allow the city to raze buildings and homes are grounds for an in-depth online investigation into how legislative systems operate--and for discussions about how to create an open forum for residents of affected neighborhoods. The question of how new buildings should be designed serves as a springboard for polishing kids' trigonometry skills. In another lesson, kids did Internet research to pinpoint areas in the city that they felt were not receiving their share of social services. And a study of slavery prompted laptop-driven examinations of the students' own family trees. "I asked my mom for the last names of our relatives, and I researched my entire family back into slave times," says Tyler Wilson, one of Lee's students. "It was really cool."
In developing those lesson plans, School of the Future teachers have the option of pulling down prototypes from the Microsoft Web site, which the company has collected over the years. All of them have three common core elements: They're geared toward molding students into more-critical thinkers, more-confident communicators and presenters, and more-experienced users of Microsoft software--theoretically, all characteristics of the ultimate 21st-century employee. (Predictably enough, many of the plans, available for free on Microsoft's Web site, carry tag lines such as "Software required: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel.")
Microsoft likes to describe the school's environment as "continuous, relevant, and adaptive," but it's clear that "relevant" is the program's real linchpin. Shirley Grover, the school's principal (aka, chief learner) until she resigned in July, says that many teachers bristle when students ask them the time-honored question, Why do we need to know this? But from her point of view, if a teacher can't answer that one, the lesson plan is underdeveloped.
One year into the experiment, it's way too early to assess just how well the School of the Future is doing. Certainly, it is beset by the same problems plaguing most urban schools ("Too many sidebars"), and many students still read and write below grade level. Their advancement as a group will not be tracked until they take their first state-administered tests in 11th grade, more than a year from now. And because School of the Future students still must meet the proficiency levels in traditional subjects mandated by No Child Left Behind, they also have access to individually paced online courses and other resources to make sure they stay up to grade level in crucial areas such as algebra and reading. Still, these kids already come across as seasoned presenters and communicators. "Before, I wasn't excited about learning," says Wilson, an open-faced teen with a ready smile who wears a different college sweatshirt every day to remind herself of where she's headed. "Going to school on Saturday to work on a project? Yeah, right. But this school really makes us all want to participate and be heard." Last spring, Wilson won an award in Philadelphia's National History Day contest for a digital documentary she and other students created on the city's involvement in the Underground Railroad.
For her part, Grover loves to talk about how the kids' new practical knowledge has upped their prospects on the job market. She brings up Black History Month, when the students wrote interpretations of Langston Hughes poems and presented them--in PowerPoint, naturally--to residents of a local senior-citizen center. "One kid used Microsoft Movie Maker to weave the other kids' PowerPoint presentations into a movie, with music," she says. "An employee at the center was so impressed that he said, 'I'll pay you to make another movie for me.'"
"How well do you conduct yourself in front of a group? How well do you use these computer applications? That's the pace of business," says Amy Guerin, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia school district. "We are constantly selling and pitching for our jobs--that's how the world operates. Any one of these kids could pitch a toy, pitch a story, pitch an initiative at City Hall."
Not all parents and educators are convinced that the purpose of public education is to build a nation of pitchmen. And since Microsoft is open about the fact that it isn't just in this for the good karma, it's worth asking whether these students will receive a balanced, broad-based education. Is this work missionary--or mercenary?
"When the scoreboard at a high-school football stadium is branded with the name of a soft-drink corporation or a local business, we don't spend much time worrying about the motivations," says Christian Long, a school planning consultant and former president of DesignShare, an online global forum that addresses the future of education. "On the other hand, when we talk about partnerships that bring together corporate and educational leaders to help shift learning for entire systems and societies, we should raise the bar of conversation."
"I don't like this idea that if you're not preparing kids for the high-tech world, they're not worth anything," says Susan Ohanian, a former teacher and the author of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? "These companies seem to be devaluing a lot of other skills that are very necessary." Jim Horn, an education professor at New Jersey's Monmouth University, is still more direct. "The efficiency experts have been hard at their message, which is that we need to streamline these schools and make them operate like successful businesses. But schools should not be work-preparation centers. They should be places where children are nurtured and receive multifaceted educations."
Cullinane insists that preparing kids to be all-around thoughtful, productive human beings and equipping them to meet the demands of the workplace are not mutually exclusive goals. "The tools we're giving them are going to be applicable regardless of their life choices," she says. "Whether you're a scientist, an accountant, or a stay-at-home mom, your ability to effectively communicate ideas and learn on the fly will directly correlate with your success. Imagine a mechanic who needs to learn the changes from one model year to the next, or a new recruit who, all of a sudden, receives an opportunity to present her ideas to the group vice president. These scenarios happen every day, and School of the Future learners will be well equipped to handle them."
It's easy to make a straw man of the School of the Future, to presume that Microsoft is chiefly out to create a future generation of Redmond cubicle warmers. But that assumption overshoots the mark. After all, the Philadelphia school district is the final arbiter of what makes it into the school's curriculum. And if filling its own future ranks had been Microsoft's primary aim, it could have just opened a private School of the Future near corporate headquarters, built a tunnel between the two, and handed the kids a stack of programming manuals. "I'm not sure the kids are particularly affected by the Microsoft name on the door," Long concedes. "They are affected--positively, I think--by the access to human capital, ideas, and resources. As for being mini-Microsofties, it's doubtful."
What isn't in doubt is that something has to give in the American education system. Barring a sudden onset of political courage, change will more likely come not from Washington but from the hundreds of companies, including Microsoft, that are taking it upon themselves to invest in the talent supply. "Does being involved in the schools give us a competitive edge?" Cullinane asks. "Well, we would be thrilled to see companies around the world devoting time and resources to improving education. Our economies would all benefit from such an investment, as would our communities, and, most important, our children."
In some ways, the question of whether or not mini-Microsofties, Sunoco-ites, and Citigroupians will throng tomorrow's schoolyards is a distraction from the more critical issue of who will oversee how these corporations are granted access to the system--and what they will do once they get it. One ominous sign, according to Eva Gold, principal of Philadelphia-based educational nonprofit Research for Action, is that when public-private partnerships start to multiply, the public side of the equation can atrophy. After the state took over the Philadelphia school district, for example, it disbanded the existing Board of Education; now most decision making about the district's future happens behind closed doors. "When the district engages with outside providers or partners, these are not publicly discussed decisions," Gold says. "There are weekly meetings of the school-reform commission, but you have to submit in writing what you're going to say beforehand, and you have three minutes to talk about it. It's not a time for dialogue." Monmouth University's Horn agrees: "A system run by bean counters instead of a democratically elected school board leads to a breakdown of the democratic process," he says. "The purpose of education should be defined by the community where the school sits, by the parents and teachers."
Yet considering the level of desperation poor urban districts have reached, it's easy to see why improving student performance might eclipse consensus building on the priority list, at least temporarily. Certainly the parents and teachers in West Philadelphia seem largely in favor of this particular oligarchy and its potential for delivering swift and dramatic results. What's more, talk to a group of these students and you come away believing that they are among the most curious and articulate 14- and 15-year-olds around. They're determined to build meaningful lives--and, more important, actually believe they can.
Few if any of those plans, it's worth noting, seem to include Microsoft. Tyler Wilson wants to be a doctor or a psychologist; Ryan Wheeler, inspired by a learning unit on forensics, wants to be a criminologist. Almost all of the students see the school's small classes, nurturing staff, and achievement-oriented culture as their ticket out: "My sister tells me every day, 'I want to be like you. I'm getting there--just watch,'" Wheeler says. "But she already got knifed."
Public-private partnerships can be capricious, and it's hard to predict how this one will evolve. Given the sheer number of companies getting involved in school reform, we could be heading toward a bewildering hodgepodge of curricula and philosophies in schools across the country. Whether this corporate patchwork constitutes a utopian vision or an Orwellian one will be for administrators, parents, and students to decide.
"What I'm curious about is whether Microsoft will continue to develop authentic relationships with the school's staff, students, and local community in the years to come," Long says. "Starting a school is one thing. Sticking it out as a key partner as the school faces normal growth challenges, acquires new leaders and programs, and embraces the ongoing realities of urban education is another."
For now, Microsoft seems determined to stick it out, helping develop new curricula, integrating new Microsoft technology into classrooms, and burnishing the project's public image. After Cullinane finishes fielding questions from our tour group, it's on to the next task: preparing for the arrival of a group of educators from Kuwait. A few students who have been using Rosetta Stone programs (not a Microsoft product) to teach themselves Arabic will step in as assistant tour guides; more-seasoned translators will help ensure that the Microsoft message passes through the language barrier intact.
"This school provides proof positive of what can be done," Cullinane says. "Our goal now is to share it as widely as possible. We don't want to limit it to the parameters of 'If a company like Microsoft and a school district like Philadelphia decided to build the School of the Future, what would it look like?' Now the question can be, 'If a country like the United States and industries like technology, manufacturing, and service decided to make education their number-one priority, what would it look like?'"
From: Issue 118 | September 2007 | Page 86 | By: Elizabeth Svoboda
Kathy Lee, a 20-year veteran of Philadelphia's public schools, may be armed with a handheld mike and interactive whiteboard these days, but she knows high-school kids haven't changed. "Is there a group that's ready to present impact statements?" she demands. "I'm going to count to 10, and someone's got to step up to the plate. Remember, your stuff doesn't have to be perfect today. It's a work in progress."
Twenty-five members of Lee's ninth-grade class hunch in their seats, avoiding her gaze. Finally, a small, lithe girl named Quetta Fairy steps forward, accompanied by three group members, to take the microphone. When she jacks her laptop into the classroom's digital projector, a Microsoft Publisher document pops up on the screen. "Our group is the Community Redevelopment Group, and this is our Action Plan," she says tentatively, as if intimidated by her own amplified voice. "Our goal is to make sure that community members can be included in the revitalization process in West Philadelphia."
"Too many conversational sidebars!" Lee interjects, trying to quiet the other students. "Quetta, can you show us the surveys you put together for the community meeting you're holding?"
"These are the questions we're going to put in the surveys," Fairy responds, clicking over to another document. "Are you aware of the revitalization effort? What businesses and factories were here when you were growing up, and do you know what happened to them? Are you willing to attend meetings to discuss what is happening in our community?"
"Thank you, Quetta. Once again, there are too many sidebars." Lee turns to the rest of the class. "I need you all to pay attention, because we're addressing the competencies you need for the 21st century. You're not going to work for the same company for 50 years, you know. The factory days are gone."
On the face of it, Philadelphia's High School of the Future, a collaboration between Microsoft and the city's public-school district, seems like the kind of out-in-left-field experiment guaranteed to inspire dissent. Yet the school opened last September to almost universal acclaim. Breathless press reports read like an old Jetsons script: Interactive whiteboards! Combination-free lockers! A laptop for every student! An NPR feature titled "In Philly 'Future' School, Books Are So 20th Century" went all gooey over the school's universal Wi-Fi and student-ID smartcards, glossing over just how these bells and whistles were supposed to revolutionize education.
But the news reports captured only part of the project and, in many ways, the least-important part. The School of the Future is not just a high-tech overlay on the traditional curriculum--it represents a wholesale tearing apart of that traditional curriculum. The three Rs are gone; science, English, math, writing, and the rest are being taught not as separate "disciplines," but as a set of interdependent tools for understanding real-world problems. And while the School of the Future may occupy a relatively radical position on the spectrum, corporate involvement in the education system is becoming commonplace, a role that has stirred plenty of controversy.
"Lockheed Martin needs engineers, and they know what the standards are for producing people who can go on to engineering school and become successful," says Paul Vallas, until recently the "CEO" of the School District of Philadelphia. He goes on, ticking off other business partners that have opened their own public schools in Philadelphia: "Sunoco hires students from the city. They know what they need in potential employees." But it is precisely that utilitarian approach that has some parents and teachers concerned. They've long acknowledged--insisted, even--that schools need to prepare kids for the modern working world. But many still want them to do something more, something more subtle. That's why they like to see their kids reading Moby-Dick rather than The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Still, says Mary Cullinane, director of Microsoft's U.S. Partners in Learning program, the old mode of instruction--what she derides as the "stand and deliver" method--simply has to evolve. "We push all the kids into this big funnel," she says, "and then we're surprised when it doesn't work." Cullinane has been trying for years to drive educational strategy forward. Back in 1997, when she was the technology administrator of Union Catholic Regional High School in Scotch Plains, New Jersey (and nearly a decade before the phrase "One laptop per child" even entered the vernacular), she saw to it that every student in her school was armed with a wireless-equipped notebook computer. Three years later, she joined Microsoft, where she now acts as point person for the School of the Future project. With Microsoft behind her, Cullinane's quest seems considerably more plausible. But it is also relentlessly pragmatic: "Microsoft's interest in education is very much a vested interest," she says. "More and more companies are getting worried that they're not going to be able to find enough good employees in the future, and we're one of them."
Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, has admitted to being "terrified for our workforce of tomorrow." And company brass had dreamed for years of building a kind of technology-saturated edutopia at their home base in Redmond, Washington. It made sense enough: The company's campus already boasted a Home of the Future and an Office of the Future; a Classroom of the Future would be a natural brand extension. The thought was that it would further Gates's ambition to use technology as a catalyst for educational reform, and that the classroom would emerge as an archetype for educators and districts across the country.
That was the plan, anyway--until Vallas entered the picture. When the former Chicago city-budget guru inherited the Philadelphia school district in 2002, it was a monkey on his back. Fewer than half the students were passing basic competency tests, and more than a third dropped out before graduation. In his Sisyphean push to reverse those numbers, Vallas had one thin reed to cling to: corporate partnerships. Successful businesses' ideas about maximizing results and solving problems creatively, he thought, might help transform the failing district. "We've been seeking corporate partners all along to help us design schools and, ultimately, to help us run schools," he says. "Our approach has been to partner with everyone we can." (This summer, Vallas took the job of superintendent of the New Orleans system, which should be every bit as challenging as Philly's.)
When Anthony Salcito, Microsoft's general manager for U.S. education, offhandedly mentioned the languishing Classroom of the Future concept in a meeting the Philadelphia district arranged with potential corporate partners, Vallas decided to go for broke. "I said to Anthony, 'Look, we're building a new high school in West Philadelphia from the ground up. Wouldn't it be great if Microsoft helped us with everything from soup to nuts?'" The $65 million for the school's construction, Vallas assured Salcito, would come directly from the district's own coffers. Microsoft's role would be to dole out not money, but knowledge and insight.
Vallas's and Salcito's timing couldn't have been better. "I sent a draft up the management chain, and Bill Gates signed off on it in about a week and a half," Salcito says. The swift decision came as a shock to many, not least Vallas himself. But from Redmond's perspective, the idea was basically idiot proof: On PR grounds alone--"Microsoft helps urban kids make good"--it would have paid for itself. Still, Microsoft went beyond a cookie-cutter school tricked out with a high-tech veneer. Instead, Salcito, Cullinane, and their colleagues took Vallas's "from the ground up" directive literally, agreeing that every aspect of the school--from curriculum to grading rubrics to staff development--would be reexamined. And to ensure the experiment's universal replicability, the first class of 170 students would be chosen by lottery, not by academic merit. Three-quarters of them would hail from the West Philadelphia neighborhood in which the school was to be built.
It's no secret that the U.S. public-school system is in splinters. A surprisingly young institution--American children were mostly taught at home or in private schools until the mid-1800s, when reformers such as Horace Mann lobbied for free public education--it now often looks like an experiment gone wrong. Scarcely two-thirds of government-educated students graduate from high school, and in poor inner-city districts, such as in Cleveland, Memphis, and Milwaukee, graduation rates have fallen below 50%.
Mann argued that public schooling would eradicate poverty and crime, and build a nation of informed citizens. But factory owners--eager for a steady supply of taxpayer-educated worker bees--quickly jumped on the idea for their own purposes, leading to curricula organized according to what modern-day educators call the "factory model." Students were trained to absorb and regurgitate information, fill out worksheets, and meet baseline competency levels in writing and math--skills that would serve them well as future foremen or assembly-line employees. According to Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, author of The Right to Learn, this "batch processing" model of education--characterized by large class sizes and little interactivity--has persisted despite its glaring obsolescence.
In recent decades, a number of schools, many of them private, have tried tinkering with this outmoded system (the open classroom being one of the better-known attempts). But the push from within corporate America began when Sanford Weill, who would later become CEO of Citigroup, began applying modern business practices and know-how to public education in the early 1980s. A rising star in Manhattan's securities brokerage industry, Weill had watched two parallel trends play out: Company after company was fleeing New York, citing a lack of incoming talent, and city kids were languishing in the public schools. "You saw young people playing in the street without having a clue of what life was about and how they could become part of the system," Weill told the House Ways and Means Committee years later. "That was the beginning of the idea that the private sector should get together with the public sector and see if we could create a high-school-level program that could expose young people to a career in the financial-services industry." Such a partnership, as Weill saw it, would be win-win: Students would receive focused career training in addition to their academic course loads, and companies would benefit from a fresh infusion of qualified candidates into the entry-level worker pool.
Weill's first Academy of Finance, sponsored by American Express, opened in 1982 at Brooklyn's John Dewey High School with 35 students. Over the following two decades, 600 public academies opened in 40 states, each with its own career-focused specialty: finance, hospitality and tourism, or information technology. At every stage, new business partners joined the conga line. To date, AT&T, Citigroup, Lucent, Oracle, and Verizon have all bankrolled their own academies under the auspices of Weill's nonprofit National Academy Foundation. The foundation plans to open 160 new academies within the next five years, bringing dozens of corporate partners on board along the way. One of its most tireless supporters has been Gates, who presented Weill with a $5 million grant from the Gates Foundation in 2006.
Other companies have followed Weill, looking to shore up their supply of human capital. Since its inception in 1994, IBM's Reinventing Education initiative has dispersed $75 million to more than 20 school districts across the country, so they can reinvent their classroom offerings according to the company's "Learning Village" guidelines. Google inaugurated the Google Teacher Academy earlier this year, which invites educators to learn how to incorporate Google into their lesson plans and become "technology evangelists." In May, Ernst & Young published a white paper titled "Best in Class: How Top Corporations Can Help Transform Public Education," a list of recommendations to other companies hoping to overhaul local public-school systems.
Science, English, math, and the rest are not taught as separate disciplines. The three Rs are gone. The school tears apart the traditional curriculum.
Self-interested corporate funding has prompted some cynicism. But that reaction misses an essential point--Weill's experiment failed in one critical respect: He had conceived of the academies as feeders for firms like Citigroup and American Express, but that pipeline never materialized. Of the 45,000 students who currently attend the academies, says J.D. Hoye, the foundation's current president, "only a small fraction" end up working for sponsoring companies. Yet in the big picture, Weill's efforts were a smash. More than 90% of National Academy Foundation students graduate from high school, compared to sub-50% to 70% in the struggling urban districts where most academies are located, and 80% eventually obtain two- or four-year college degrees. Five to 10 years after graduation, 85% of alumni continue to work in white-collar jobs.
Cullinane is based in New York, where she helps manage Microsoft's Partners in Learning education-reform program, but one week a month, she leaves her desk and returns to Philadelphia. Known to the kids affectionately as "Miz Mary," Cullinane is an evangelist. She sees the School of the Future as part of a much broader and more complex bid to change American education. Around the time Vallas and Salcito were first planning the school in West Philly, Microsoft helped found an advocacy group called the Partnership for 21st-Century Skills, which encourages schools nationwide to adopt their own curriculum reforms. The partnership's members run from Apple and Adobe to AT&T, Cisco, Dell, Intel, and dozens of other corporate giants who agree that public education is in dire shape. Part of Cullinane's role is turning the School of the Future concept into a replicable meme, one personal encounter at a time.
On the day of my visit, Cullinane leads a tour beginning in the School of the Future's Interactive Learning Center, a student library showcasing bizzspirational tomes such as Who Moved My Cheese? One of the first PowerPoint slides she shows to the dozens of educators features a boldfaced caveat: "This is not a prescription, only an example." "People think we have the answer here. I don't believe that," Cullinane says, projecting from her diaphragm to make sure the people in the back row can hear. "People ask us, 'Why haven't you discovered the silver bullet?' But there is no silver bullet. We're going to show you our innards, and you can decide if any of that is going to support your development."
Cullinane describes a Bertelsmann-commissioned study comparing the effectiveness of two distinct teaching styles: standing in front of the class and lecturing, or a more free-form manner, using dynamic digital aids and encouraging direct student participation. "Now, which group did better?" she asks. "Raise your hand if you think it was stand-and-deliver." Thinking they see the answer coming, no one moves.
"You sure?" Cullinane says, grinning as though preparing to pull a scarf from her sleeve. "Actually, you would be wrong--in fact, there was no difference in the groups' scores when they were tested on the material directly afterward. But, when the groups were tested again one year later, the students in the traditional group could remember almost nothing, and the other group was expanding their detailed knowledge of the topic to other subject areas. As teachers, what kind of legacy do we want, kids from the first group or kids from the second group? And as a Microsoft person, which kid do I want to hire?"
Those data are at the center of the School of the Future's curriculum--and the heart of its revolutionary potential. For all the pomp and circumstance that surrounds corporate-ed projects, many just piggyback career-related classes onto traditional scholastic fare. At Weill's Academies of Information Technology, for example, students take classes such as Digital Media, Advanced Web Tools, and Introduction to the Internet, but also slog through freshman English and sophomore-year social studies.
The Philadelphia school district and Microsoft, by contrast, have opted to dynamite the stand-and-deliver approach and rebuild from scratch. Under George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind policy, the educational focus in America has been squarely on coaxing students to perform to preset standards--on teaching to state tests, which is essentially the factory model with a fresh coat of paint. From the School of the Future's perspective, that strategy is nonsensical. Teaching the three Rs in a vacuum, with no attention to practical skills and application, is like handing a kid a golf club, without explanation, and expecting him to become Tiger Woods.
Cullinane's position is that a more interactive, integrative classroom environment helps kids retain knowledge better and engage more actively in learning--and an intimidating array of research backs her up. In addition to the Bertelsmann study, she cites the Jasper-Woodbury experiments conducted at Vanderbilt University in the 1990s, in which researchers challenged teenage students with real-world problems that demand cross-disciplinary thinking. (In one scenario, a hiker finds an injured eagle in a remote mountain pass that can be reached only by personal aircraft; students work in teams to figure out the best way to retrieve it, given a fixed wind speed and fuel capacity.) Compared with students in traditional math classes, the Jasper-trained pupils performed better on tests of math and science knowledge; they also had stronger general problem-solving skills. In a separate trial of the Jasper method, students scored higher on measures of creativity as well.
Inspired by such results, Salcito, Cullinane, and the Philadelphia Board of Education swept aside the old "silo learning" model and replaced it with one in which subjects are subsumed into open-ended topics: "How are our identities constructed?" or "Should the U.S. be concerned about bird flu?" Traditional disciplines are applied in the course of exploring these broader questions, exercising students' writing, calculating, and analytical skills concurrently, as well as the career-oriented skills on Microsoft's "education competency wheel," including organizing and planning, motivating others, dealing with ambiguity, and working in a team setting. In Kathy Lee's "learning sessions," for instance (School of the Future denizens steer clear of talking about "classes"), students like Quetta Fairy are investigating the growing pains associated with Philadelphia's urban renewal. Every aspect of this real-world transition lends itself to an instructional opportunity. Eminent-domain laws that allow the city to raze buildings and homes are grounds for an in-depth online investigation into how legislative systems operate--and for discussions about how to create an open forum for residents of affected neighborhoods. The question of how new buildings should be designed serves as a springboard for polishing kids' trigonometry skills. In another lesson, kids did Internet research to pinpoint areas in the city that they felt were not receiving their share of social services. And a study of slavery prompted laptop-driven examinations of the students' own family trees. "I asked my mom for the last names of our relatives, and I researched my entire family back into slave times," says Tyler Wilson, one of Lee's students. "It was really cool."
In developing those lesson plans, School of the Future teachers have the option of pulling down prototypes from the Microsoft Web site, which the company has collected over the years. All of them have three common core elements: They're geared toward molding students into more-critical thinkers, more-confident communicators and presenters, and more-experienced users of Microsoft software--theoretically, all characteristics of the ultimate 21st-century employee. (Predictably enough, many of the plans, available for free on Microsoft's Web site, carry tag lines such as "Software required: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel.")
Microsoft likes to describe the school's environment as "continuous, relevant, and adaptive," but it's clear that "relevant" is the program's real linchpin. Shirley Grover, the school's principal (aka, chief learner) until she resigned in July, says that many teachers bristle when students ask them the time-honored question, Why do we need to know this? But from her point of view, if a teacher can't answer that one, the lesson plan is underdeveloped.
One year into the experiment, it's way too early to assess just how well the School of the Future is doing. Certainly, it is beset by the same problems plaguing most urban schools ("Too many sidebars"), and many students still read and write below grade level. Their advancement as a group will not be tracked until they take their first state-administered tests in 11th grade, more than a year from now. And because School of the Future students still must meet the proficiency levels in traditional subjects mandated by No Child Left Behind, they also have access to individually paced online courses and other resources to make sure they stay up to grade level in crucial areas such as algebra and reading. Still, these kids already come across as seasoned presenters and communicators. "Before, I wasn't excited about learning," says Wilson, an open-faced teen with a ready smile who wears a different college sweatshirt every day to remind herself of where she's headed. "Going to school on Saturday to work on a project? Yeah, right. But this school really makes us all want to participate and be heard." Last spring, Wilson won an award in Philadelphia's National History Day contest for a digital documentary she and other students created on the city's involvement in the Underground Railroad.
For her part, Grover loves to talk about how the kids' new practical knowledge has upped their prospects on the job market. She brings up Black History Month, when the students wrote interpretations of Langston Hughes poems and presented them--in PowerPoint, naturally--to residents of a local senior-citizen center. "One kid used Microsoft Movie Maker to weave the other kids' PowerPoint presentations into a movie, with music," she says. "An employee at the center was so impressed that he said, 'I'll pay you to make another movie for me.'"
"How well do you conduct yourself in front of a group? How well do you use these computer applications? That's the pace of business," says Amy Guerin, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia school district. "We are constantly selling and pitching for our jobs--that's how the world operates. Any one of these kids could pitch a toy, pitch a story, pitch an initiative at City Hall."
Not all parents and educators are convinced that the purpose of public education is to build a nation of pitchmen. And since Microsoft is open about the fact that it isn't just in this for the good karma, it's worth asking whether these students will receive a balanced, broad-based education. Is this work missionary--or mercenary?
"When the scoreboard at a high-school football stadium is branded with the name of a soft-drink corporation or a local business, we don't spend much time worrying about the motivations," says Christian Long, a school planning consultant and former president of DesignShare, an online global forum that addresses the future of education. "On the other hand, when we talk about partnerships that bring together corporate and educational leaders to help shift learning for entire systems and societies, we should raise the bar of conversation."
"I don't like this idea that if you're not preparing kids for the high-tech world, they're not worth anything," says Susan Ohanian, a former teacher and the author of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? "These companies seem to be devaluing a lot of other skills that are very necessary." Jim Horn, an education professor at New Jersey's Monmouth University, is still more direct. "The efficiency experts have been hard at their message, which is that we need to streamline these schools and make them operate like successful businesses. But schools should not be work-preparation centers. They should be places where children are nurtured and receive multifaceted educations."
Cullinane insists that preparing kids to be all-around thoughtful, productive human beings and equipping them to meet the demands of the workplace are not mutually exclusive goals. "The tools we're giving them are going to be applicable regardless of their life choices," she says. "Whether you're a scientist, an accountant, or a stay-at-home mom, your ability to effectively communicate ideas and learn on the fly will directly correlate with your success. Imagine a mechanic who needs to learn the changes from one model year to the next, or a new recruit who, all of a sudden, receives an opportunity to present her ideas to the group vice president. These scenarios happen every day, and School of the Future learners will be well equipped to handle them."
It's easy to make a straw man of the School of the Future, to presume that Microsoft is chiefly out to create a future generation of Redmond cubicle warmers. But that assumption overshoots the mark. After all, the Philadelphia school district is the final arbiter of what makes it into the school's curriculum. And if filling its own future ranks had been Microsoft's primary aim, it could have just opened a private School of the Future near corporate headquarters, built a tunnel between the two, and handed the kids a stack of programming manuals. "I'm not sure the kids are particularly affected by the Microsoft name on the door," Long concedes. "They are affected--positively, I think--by the access to human capital, ideas, and resources. As for being mini-Microsofties, it's doubtful."
What isn't in doubt is that something has to give in the American education system. Barring a sudden onset of political courage, change will more likely come not from Washington but from the hundreds of companies, including Microsoft, that are taking it upon themselves to invest in the talent supply. "Does being involved in the schools give us a competitive edge?" Cullinane asks. "Well, we would be thrilled to see companies around the world devoting time and resources to improving education. Our economies would all benefit from such an investment, as would our communities, and, most important, our children."
In some ways, the question of whether or not mini-Microsofties, Sunoco-ites, and Citigroupians will throng tomorrow's schoolyards is a distraction from the more critical issue of who will oversee how these corporations are granted access to the system--and what they will do once they get it. One ominous sign, according to Eva Gold, principal of Philadelphia-based educational nonprofit Research for Action, is that when public-private partnerships start to multiply, the public side of the equation can atrophy. After the state took over the Philadelphia school district, for example, it disbanded the existing Board of Education; now most decision making about the district's future happens behind closed doors. "When the district engages with outside providers or partners, these are not publicly discussed decisions," Gold says. "There are weekly meetings of the school-reform commission, but you have to submit in writing what you're going to say beforehand, and you have three minutes to talk about it. It's not a time for dialogue." Monmouth University's Horn agrees: "A system run by bean counters instead of a democratically elected school board leads to a breakdown of the democratic process," he says. "The purpose of education should be defined by the community where the school sits, by the parents and teachers."
Yet considering the level of desperation poor urban districts have reached, it's easy to see why improving student performance might eclipse consensus building on the priority list, at least temporarily. Certainly the parents and teachers in West Philadelphia seem largely in favor of this particular oligarchy and its potential for delivering swift and dramatic results. What's more, talk to a group of these students and you come away believing that they are among the most curious and articulate 14- and 15-year-olds around. They're determined to build meaningful lives--and, more important, actually believe they can.
Few if any of those plans, it's worth noting, seem to include Microsoft. Tyler Wilson wants to be a doctor or a psychologist; Ryan Wheeler, inspired by a learning unit on forensics, wants to be a criminologist. Almost all of the students see the school's small classes, nurturing staff, and achievement-oriented culture as their ticket out: "My sister tells me every day, 'I want to be like you. I'm getting there--just watch,'" Wheeler says. "But she already got knifed."
Public-private partnerships can be capricious, and it's hard to predict how this one will evolve. Given the sheer number of companies getting involved in school reform, we could be heading toward a bewildering hodgepodge of curricula and philosophies in schools across the country. Whether this corporate patchwork constitutes a utopian vision or an Orwellian one will be for administrators, parents, and students to decide.
"What I'm curious about is whether Microsoft will continue to develop authentic relationships with the school's staff, students, and local community in the years to come," Long says. "Starting a school is one thing. Sticking it out as a key partner as the school faces normal growth challenges, acquires new leaders and programs, and embraces the ongoing realities of urban education is another."
For now, Microsoft seems determined to stick it out, helping develop new curricula, integrating new Microsoft technology into classrooms, and burnishing the project's public image. After Cullinane finishes fielding questions from our tour group, it's on to the next task: preparing for the arrival of a group of educators from Kuwait. A few students who have been using Rosetta Stone programs (not a Microsoft product) to teach themselves Arabic will step in as assistant tour guides; more-seasoned translators will help ensure that the Microsoft message passes through the language barrier intact.
"This school provides proof positive of what can be done," Cullinane says. "Our goal now is to share it as widely as possible. We don't want to limit it to the parameters of 'If a company like Microsoft and a school district like Philadelphia decided to build the School of the Future, what would it look like?' Now the question can be, 'If a country like the United States and industries like technology, manufacturing, and service decided to make education their number-one priority, what would it look like?'"
The presidential candidates' positions on education
http://www.ontheissues.org/senate/Hillary_Clinton_Education.htm
http://www.ontheissues.org/Social/Barack_Obama_Education.htm
http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/John_Edwards_Education.htm
http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Rudy_Giuliani_Education.htm
http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Mitt_Romney_Education.htm
http://www.ontheissues.org/Social/Barack_Obama_Education.htm
http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/John_Edwards_Education.htm
http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Rudy_Giuliani_Education.htm
http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Mitt_Romney_Education.htm
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
New York Times: City to Reward Poor for Doing the Right Thing
New York Times (NY)
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
March 30, 2007
Section: B
City to Reward Poor for Doing Right Thing
DIANE CARDWELL; Elisabeth Malkin contributed reporting from Mexico City.
Seeking new solutions to New York's vexingly high poverty rates, the city is moving ahead with an ambitious experiment that will pay poor families up to $5,000 a year to meet goals like attending parent-teacher conferences, going for a medical checkup or holding down a full-time job, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday.
Under the program, which is based on a similar effort in Mexico, parents would receive payments every two months for family members meeting any of a series of criteria. The payments could range from $25 for exemplary attendance in elementary school to $300 for a high score on an important exam, city officials said.
The officials said the program was the first of its kind in the country.
The project, first announced in the fall. was scheduled to begin as a pilot program in September with 2,500 randomly selected families whose progress will be tracked against another 2,500 randomly selected families who will not get the rewards. Officials planned to draw the families from six of the poorest communities in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx.
To be eligible, families must have at least one child entering fourth, seventh or ninth grade and a household income of 130 percent or less of the federal poverty level, which equals roughly $20,000 for a single parent with two children.
The city has already raised $42 million of the $50 million needed to cover the initial program's cost from private sources, including Mr. Bloomberg. If it proves successful, the mayor said, the city will attempt to create a permanent program financed by the government.
Likening the payments, known as conditional cash transfers, to tax incentives that steer people of greater means toward property ownership, Mr. Bloomberg said that the approach was intended to help struggling families who often focus on basic daily survival make better long-term decisions and break generational cycles of poverty and dependence.
''In the private sector, financial incentives encourage actions that are good for the company: working harder, hitting sales targets or landing more clients,'' the mayor said in an announcement at a health services center in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
''In the public sector, we believe that financial incentives will encourage actions that are good for the city and its families: higher attendance in schools, more parental involvement in education and better career skills.''
Since Mr. Bloomberg outlined the plan last fall, reaction among antipoverty experts and advocates has been mixed, with some hailing it as an innovative approach that could become a powerful model for the rest of the country and ultimately win the support of the federal government.
Indeed, the program is being financed by several high-profile organizations, including the Rockefeller, Starr and Robin Hood Foundations, as well as the Open Society Institute and the insurance and financial firm American International Group.
The Rockefeller and Starr Foundations are donating $10 million each, while the Open Society Institute is giving $5 million and A.I.G. is donating $2 million. A spokeswoman for the Robin Hood Foundation did not return calls or an e-mail message, and Mr. Bloomberg's spokesman, Stu Loeser, declined to say how much the mayor contributed.
Some antipoverty advocates have bristled at what they see as the condescending notion that poor people need to be told how to raise their families. Others have focused on the broader economic issues at play.
''It is encouraging that the mayor believes there's a public role for addressing intergenerational poverty, inequality and economic mobility,'' said Margy Waller, a former Clinton administration adviser who is a co-founder of Inclusion, a research and policy group based in Washington.
''What is troubling is the focus on personal behavior as the solution to what is at least in part a problem of the economy,'' she said. ''Given what we know about the growth of low-wage jobs and the shrinking of the middle class, it will be, in fact, impossible to bring more people into the middle class unless we improve the labor market as well.''
A similar concern seems to have emerged with Mexico's program, known as Oportunidades, which is now 10 years old, has a budget of more than $3 billion a year and covers nearly one-fourth of all Mexicans.
Intended to replace the food subsidies that had dominated much of Mexico's antipoverty efforts, the program offers cash stipends to families to keep their children in school and take them for regular checkups. Parents must also attend regular talks on issues including health, nutrition and family planning.
Outside evaluations have found that the program has been successful in raising school attendance and nutrition levels and that the percentage of Mexicans living in extreme poverty has fallen.
Still, there are questions about how much more effective the program can be in lifting large numbers of people permanently out of poverty, in part because jobs are lacking.
In January, Santiago Levy, one of the program's creators and a former undersecretary of finance in Mexico, said at the Brookings Institution in Washington that even if the program were 100 percent effective, it alone could not solve the problem.
''Now's he's out with a high school degree, a healthy man: Is he going to get a job or migrate to the U.S.?'' he said.
But others see cause for optimism in the results of Mexico's program and similar ones in other Latin American countries. In Nicaragua, for example, primary school enrollment rates grew to 90 percent from 68 percent; in Colombia, secondary school enrollment in urban areas rose to 78 percent from 64 percent, said Laura Rawlings, a World Bank specialist who has studied the programs, which she said are active or being created in nearly 20 countries.
The idea to try the program in New York has its roots in the broad attack on poverty that Mr. Bloomberg has made a high-profile cause for his second term. Roughly one in five New Yorkers lives in poverty, according to the Community Service Society of New York.
In keeping with the administration's emphasis on outcomes, city officials say they will closely monitor the test group's progress against that of the control group with the help of M.D.R.C., a nonprofit policy research organization involved in the program's design.
All 5,000 families will be asked to agree to participate in the program before knowing which group they are in, said Gordon Berlin, the president of M.D.R.C., and those not receiving benefits will be paid a nominal fee to submit to monitoring and surveys, he said.
Officials expect that some of the control families will inevitably drop out, but Mr. Berlin said that in conducting similar experiments in the past, he had found that most were willing to participate even without the benefits because they were informed that it would help guide a government policy decision in which they had a stake.
The families receiving the benefits will be given a list of goals they are expected to meet, as well as the values assigned to them. They will also get a ''passport'' for documenting the completion of tasks that are not automatically reported elsewhere, said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor overseeing the effort.
The city is working with state and federal officials, Ms. Gibbs said, to make sure that families do not lose other benefits because of the grants.
ref dm ed blog apa link
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
March 30, 2007
Section: B
City to Reward Poor for Doing Right Thing
DIANE CARDWELL; Elisabeth Malkin contributed reporting from Mexico City.
Seeking new solutions to New York's vexingly high poverty rates, the city is moving ahead with an ambitious experiment that will pay poor families up to $5,000 a year to meet goals like attending parent-teacher conferences, going for a medical checkup or holding down a full-time job, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday.
Under the program, which is based on a similar effort in Mexico, parents would receive payments every two months for family members meeting any of a series of criteria. The payments could range from $25 for exemplary attendance in elementary school to $300 for a high score on an important exam, city officials said.
The officials said the program was the first of its kind in the country.
The project, first announced in the fall. was scheduled to begin as a pilot program in September with 2,500 randomly selected families whose progress will be tracked against another 2,500 randomly selected families who will not get the rewards. Officials planned to draw the families from six of the poorest communities in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx.
To be eligible, families must have at least one child entering fourth, seventh or ninth grade and a household income of 130 percent or less of the federal poverty level, which equals roughly $20,000 for a single parent with two children.
The city has already raised $42 million of the $50 million needed to cover the initial program's cost from private sources, including Mr. Bloomberg. If it proves successful, the mayor said, the city will attempt to create a permanent program financed by the government.
Likening the payments, known as conditional cash transfers, to tax incentives that steer people of greater means toward property ownership, Mr. Bloomberg said that the approach was intended to help struggling families who often focus on basic daily survival make better long-term decisions and break generational cycles of poverty and dependence.
''In the private sector, financial incentives encourage actions that are good for the company: working harder, hitting sales targets or landing more clients,'' the mayor said in an announcement at a health services center in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
''In the public sector, we believe that financial incentives will encourage actions that are good for the city and its families: higher attendance in schools, more parental involvement in education and better career skills.''
Since Mr. Bloomberg outlined the plan last fall, reaction among antipoverty experts and advocates has been mixed, with some hailing it as an innovative approach that could become a powerful model for the rest of the country and ultimately win the support of the federal government.
Indeed, the program is being financed by several high-profile organizations, including the Rockefeller, Starr and Robin Hood Foundations, as well as the Open Society Institute and the insurance and financial firm American International Group.
The Rockefeller and Starr Foundations are donating $10 million each, while the Open Society Institute is giving $5 million and A.I.G. is donating $2 million. A spokeswoman for the Robin Hood Foundation did not return calls or an e-mail message, and Mr. Bloomberg's spokesman, Stu Loeser, declined to say how much the mayor contributed.
Some antipoverty advocates have bristled at what they see as the condescending notion that poor people need to be told how to raise their families. Others have focused on the broader economic issues at play.
''It is encouraging that the mayor believes there's a public role for addressing intergenerational poverty, inequality and economic mobility,'' said Margy Waller, a former Clinton administration adviser who is a co-founder of Inclusion, a research and policy group based in Washington.
''What is troubling is the focus on personal behavior as the solution to what is at least in part a problem of the economy,'' she said. ''Given what we know about the growth of low-wage jobs and the shrinking of the middle class, it will be, in fact, impossible to bring more people into the middle class unless we improve the labor market as well.''
A similar concern seems to have emerged with Mexico's program, known as Oportunidades, which is now 10 years old, has a budget of more than $3 billion a year and covers nearly one-fourth of all Mexicans.
Intended to replace the food subsidies that had dominated much of Mexico's antipoverty efforts, the program offers cash stipends to families to keep their children in school and take them for regular checkups. Parents must also attend regular talks on issues including health, nutrition and family planning.
Outside evaluations have found that the program has been successful in raising school attendance and nutrition levels and that the percentage of Mexicans living in extreme poverty has fallen.
Still, there are questions about how much more effective the program can be in lifting large numbers of people permanently out of poverty, in part because jobs are lacking.
In January, Santiago Levy, one of the program's creators and a former undersecretary of finance in Mexico, said at the Brookings Institution in Washington that even if the program were 100 percent effective, it alone could not solve the problem.
''Now's he's out with a high school degree, a healthy man: Is he going to get a job or migrate to the U.S.?'' he said.
But others see cause for optimism in the results of Mexico's program and similar ones in other Latin American countries. In Nicaragua, for example, primary school enrollment rates grew to 90 percent from 68 percent; in Colombia, secondary school enrollment in urban areas rose to 78 percent from 64 percent, said Laura Rawlings, a World Bank specialist who has studied the programs, which she said are active or being created in nearly 20 countries.
The idea to try the program in New York has its roots in the broad attack on poverty that Mr. Bloomberg has made a high-profile cause for his second term. Roughly one in five New Yorkers lives in poverty, according to the Community Service Society of New York.
In keeping with the administration's emphasis on outcomes, city officials say they will closely monitor the test group's progress against that of the control group with the help of M.D.R.C., a nonprofit policy research organization involved in the program's design.
All 5,000 families will be asked to agree to participate in the program before knowing which group they are in, said Gordon Berlin, the president of M.D.R.C., and those not receiving benefits will be paid a nominal fee to submit to monitoring and surveys, he said.
Officials expect that some of the control families will inevitably drop out, but Mr. Berlin said that in conducting similar experiments in the past, he had found that most were willing to participate even without the benefits because they were informed that it would help guide a government policy decision in which they had a stake.
The families receiving the benefits will be given a list of goals they are expected to meet, as well as the values assigned to them. They will also get a ''passport'' for documenting the completion of tasks that are not automatically reported elsewhere, said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor overseeing the effort.
The city is working with state and federal officials, Ms. Gibbs said, to make sure that families do not lose other benefits because of the grants.
ref dm ed blog apa link
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Notes from 8.11.07 Meeting
to do:
-Add dates to all posts
-site all references as APA on Ref Blog
-fill roles: secretary, etc. at next meeting
tentative schedule:
August/September - secondary research
September - secondary research (divide the research)
October - secondary research - begin to narrow focus (start general surveys)
November - continue research on narrow focused topic, put project plan together (Nov 15)
December - primary research, surveys, outline research
January - start wrapping research up
February - start writing, research should finish mid month
March - continue writing, editing
March/April - start final edits, powerpoint, get presentation together, rehearse
tentative meeting dates:
Aug 25/26
Sep 8/9
-Add dates to all posts
-site all references as APA on Ref Blog
-fill roles: secretary, etc. at next meeting
tentative schedule:
August/September - secondary research
September - secondary research (divide the research)
October - secondary research - begin to narrow focus (start general surveys)
November - continue research on narrow focused topic, put project plan together (Nov 15)
December - primary research, surveys, outline research
January - start wrapping research up
February - start writing, research should finish mid month
March - continue writing, editing
March/April - start final edits, powerpoint, get presentation together, rehearse
tentative meeting dates:
Aug 25/26
Sep 8/9
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Sustainability Education Handbook
Sustainability Education Handbook was created to help K-12 teachers understand sustainability concepts and incorporate them into their classroom. In the course of writing this Handbook, the Michigan State Framework Standards and Benchmarks have been evaluated comprehensively for opportunities to integrate sustainability concepts into your existing curriculum. Every sample activity provided in the Handbook correlates to particular state standards and benchmarks.
The Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education
Mission Statement The Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education will work toward realizing the dream of a sustainable and peaceful future for Earth through scholarship, education, and action. The Center will advance understanding and achievement of the goals of environmental and sustainability education through innovative educational research methods, emergent eco-pedagogies, and educational philosophy and practice based on ethics of care and sustainability. The Center will elevate the environmental mission of Florida Gulf Coast University and serve the university community, the local community of the Western Everglades and Barrier Islands, and the wider community of scholars.
Assignment 2 - Directed Research
Our objective in the interviews discussing the Design Management (DM) Program was to determine DM’s effectiveness at the mid-point of the program. We were interested to know if current students’ own perceptions of the program had changed since they started, how they described the program to people unfamiliar with design management, and if they were able to implement the teachings thus far in their professional and daily lives. These inquiries and others like it in the future will help DM to discover, define, develop, and deploy an army equipped with the tools needed to attack unsustainable global issues.
It is important to explore this topic for many reasons. By definition, DM must educate around the premise of allocating creative assets to create a more strategic advantage. This program must sustain itself within that philosophy by not only meeting the expectations of its students, but also by exceeding those expectations and all those belonging to other DM stakeholders. DM must self-apply all of its lessons to ensure that it can deliver what it promises to deliver and that the system, at its core, is deemed sustainable.
It is also important to understand how students identify and define DM to a broader audience. Those who are less fortunate and can not benefit directly from the program must be indirectly educated by it if the global issues of today are actually going to be positively impacted by its population. The delivery of these lessons must also be allocated in a creative manner to those who are resistant to them; therefore, the sustainability of the program is at the mercy of the students and their willingness to adopt DM tactics.
Another crucial factor is that the program will fail if the students do not believe in the lessons at the core of the program, not just its surface objectives. The students must understand that it is not just important to recycle, but more important to see that deep design is implemented so there is less waste that needs recycling. DM must continuously identify ways to make the lessons of triple bottom line performance as adhesive as possible. It is particularly important now because of the immediacy of the impact of business’s 3P (people, planet, and profit) performance across the globe.
Lastly, this topic is important to explore because in order to evaluate and then reevaluate the program, DM needs first hand feedback from those who make the program possible. If DM is not itself sustainable, as earlier mentioned, it will be impossible to become the front-runner in the academic arena for educating the population about the identification and allocation of creative resources to create a sustainable, strategic advantage in business.
Our research into student satisfaction rates and the success of the DM program required a methodology that would uncover underlying attitudes and motivations of our target group. Therefore, we chose a qualitative research approach with a focus on inductive reasoning in one-on-one interviews with current DM students. We generated a set of eight questions to be asked in an informal setting in a period of twenty minutes. Due to the limited time allotted for each interview, it was important to create a casual and comfortable atmosphere and quickly establish a rapport with the interviewees. Our questions were structured in a way that would ease the interviewees into the subject matter by way of personal history. The first questions focused on factual information; how they heard about the program and why they chose to apply. Once they felt committed to the subject matter, the remaining questions were designed to dig deeper into their thoughts and perceptions about the program. We included questions that highlighted their interactions with third parties about DM, as well as questions about how their participation in the program has changed their own views and future goals. We were careful to generate a comprehensive set of questions that highlighted how well the program has communicated its curriculum to its students.
The DM students interviewed, 2 men and 8 women, are professionals from various design fields between the ages of 23 through 33. It was discovered that many students found out about the program in happen-stance ways. The limited descriptions of the program, made by the interviewee’s, centered on core elements from the DM ideology like “strategic sustainable advantage.” DM students often found explaining the program difficult. Also, there is a stereotypical resistance of people outside the program to the idea of designers having the skill set to manage a non-design workforce.
One of the most interesting findings was that about half of the people interviewed have not changed their career and personal goals since they entering the program and the other half have switched from a primarily self-oriented approach to becoming more collaborative in finding solutions to solve global issues. To date, most DM students believe that their expectations have been filled, some of whom have been helped in the various ways design can make businesses succeed. As part of their expectations some have had obstacles with applying sustainable practices as a part of business strategy of the company. Most people have utilized the tactical techniques of the program, but have not yet had the opportunity to use strategic techniques.
Overall, most find that the program is effective, though there are some reservations that have been noted. The consensus of the class is positive toward the program. While some have taken more from certain lessons, no one is displeased about the program as a whole. All class participants think it is a great investment for personal development and future growth as professionals working with the DM practice.
It is the authors' recommendation that the school work harder towards better self-promotion both inside and outside of the classroom. The benefits are two-fold: it will provide a larger student body, more people equipped to provide creative strategic advantage and advertise the program’s usefulness, as well as better educate the business world to the necessity of hiring such well outfitted employees. Further research into business perceptions of this program are important as well as further investigation into the program's future steps to elevate self-awareness. DM’s overall long-term success will be determined not by what the students take from the program, but ways in which they give back to the program by walking the line of sustainable development and continuing to educate the population on the importance of the triple bottom line.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Savage Inequalities
Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools is a book written by Jonathan Kozol in 1991 that discusses the disparities in education between schools of different classes and races. It is based off of his observations of various classrooms in the public school systems of East St. Louis, Chicago, New York City, Camden, and Washington D.C.. His observations take place in both schools with the lowest per capita spending on students and the highest, ranging from just over $3,000 in Camden, New Jersey to a maximum expenditure of up to $15,000 in Great Neck, Long Island.
Friday, August 3, 2007
The Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME)
The Principles for Responsible Management Education(PRME), launched at the 2007 Global Compact Leaders Summit on July 5 in Geneva, provides a framework for academic institutions to advance corporate social responsibility through the incorporation of universal values into curricula and research. The principles have been developed by an international task force consisting of sixty deans, university presidents and official representatives of leading business schools.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Notes from Class/Mary 8.1.07
BOOKS:
Shakespeare, Einstein & The Bottom Line
Ecology of Commerce
Where the Wasteland Ends
SITES TO CHECK OUT:
Say Yes To Education
Bloomberg website - PlaNYC 2030
www.sustainablepratt.org
Cloud Institute
The Healthy Schools Network
The Edison Project (schools)
Market Data Retrieval
Harlem Children's Zone (whole neighborhood approach)
Michigan Plan - guarantees college tuition link 1 link 2
Feeder Schools
PEOPLE TO TALK TO:
Eva
Deborah Johnson
Jamie Cloud
NOTES:
-Make a business case for sustainability/financial viability
-incentive for parents
-Think about school - lots of people need to buy in
-K-3 is a critical time
-social/economic factors preventing kids from going on
-manage cycle of an activity
-consultancy
-target teachers
-look at where others stand along the model
-graduate education system is the best in the US - hold onto that - why has our ranking slipped?
-Educational Consulting - getting students prepared for the future - educate people for the future
-K-12 "owned" by the public sector (it is very political)
-Look at what went wrong, what's the future forward
-"feedstock" for the future - through higher education - cultivate the seed beds
-look at the life cycle of the creative person
-people are paying for creativity
-strategic advantage for American grad school education
-incentive systems
-new voices for business
-definition of design - "to mark out"
-contributory value of art and design to economy
-Scott note: 3rd grade reading stats make plans of how much prison space is needed
-Scott note: School is client (they have $, kids do not)
-Suggestion-Pratt Sustainable Survey (ala Quinnipiac College Poll)
-America is cowboy country (wild, eccentric, risk taking) = US school's competitive advantage
-Designers are Abductive Reasoners
Shakespeare, Einstein & The Bottom Line
Ecology of Commerce
Where the Wasteland Ends
SITES TO CHECK OUT:
Say Yes To Education
Bloomberg website - PlaNYC 2030
www.sustainablepratt.org
Cloud Institute
The Healthy Schools Network
The Edison Project (schools)
Market Data Retrieval
Harlem Children's Zone (whole neighborhood approach)
Michigan Plan - guarantees college tuition link 1 link 2
Feeder Schools
PEOPLE TO TALK TO:
Eva
Deborah Johnson
Jamie Cloud
NOTES:
-Make a business case for sustainability/financial viability
-incentive for parents
-Think about school - lots of people need to buy in
-K-3 is a critical time
-social/economic factors preventing kids from going on
-manage cycle of an activity
-consultancy
-target teachers
-look at where others stand along the model
-graduate education system is the best in the US - hold onto that - why has our ranking slipped?
-Educational Consulting - getting students prepared for the future - educate people for the future
-K-12 "owned" by the public sector (it is very political)
-Look at what went wrong, what's the future forward
-"feedstock" for the future - through higher education - cultivate the seed beds
-look at the life cycle of the creative person
-people are paying for creativity
-strategic advantage for American grad school education
-incentive systems
-new voices for business
-definition of design - "to mark out"
-contributory value of art and design to economy
-Scott note: 3rd grade reading stats make plans of how much prison space is needed
-Scott note: School is client (they have $, kids do not)
-Suggestion-Pratt Sustainable Survey (ala Quinnipiac College Poll)
-America is cowboy country (wild, eccentric, risk taking) = US school's competitive advantage
-Designers are Abductive Reasoners
Gates Foundation - Education (US specific)
Preparing All Students for College, Career, and Life
Through its partnerships in communities across the United States, the foundation is committed to raising the high school graduation rate and helping all students—regardless of race or family income—graduate as strong citizens ready for college, and work. Our Education initiative also works to provide children with opportunities for quality early learning.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/UnitedStates/Education/default.htm
Through its partnerships in communities across the United States, the foundation is committed to raising the high school graduation rate and helping all students—regardless of race or family income—graduate as strong citizens ready for college, and work. Our Education initiative also works to provide children with opportunities for quality early learning.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/UnitedStates/Education/default.htm
Education for All
Education for All is a global movement led by UNESCO, aiming to meet the learning needs of all children, youth and adults by 2015. The movement was launched in 1990 at the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand. There, representatives of the international community (155 countries, as well as representatives from some 150 organizations) agreed to "universalize primary education and massively reduce illiteracy by the end of the decade". In 2000, ten years later, the international community met again in Dakar, Senegal, and took stock of many countries being far from having reached this goal. They affirmed their commitment to achieving Education for All by the year 2015, and identified six key measurable education goals which aim to meet the learning needs of all children, youth and adults by 2015.
The six goals are:
Goal 1: Expand early childhood care and education
Goal 2: Provide free and compulsory primary education for all
Goal 3: Promote learning and life skills for young people and adults
Goal 4: Increase adult literacy by 50 per cent
Goal 5: Achieve gender parity by 2005, gender equality by 2015
Goal 6: Improve the quality of education
Education for All
Find out...
Why is early childhood care and education so important to achieving EFA?Why do disadvantaged children benefit the most?
Who are the 77 million out-of-school children?
How much is needed to meet the 2015 target date?
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