This phenomenon is largely due to a lack of information and access to cultural capital (i.e., knowledge about college and the associated application and financial aid processes). As a counselor quoted in the article puts it, “They [low-income students] didn’t have any other examples, any models [of not going to a local college] – who’s ever heard of Bowdoin College?”  This situation results in a tremendous waste of the country’s human capital. Millions of talented young adults are living in "college information deserts" that are analogous to the "food deserts" that nutrition experts talk about.

Food deserts are areas with little or no access to grocery stores that offer fresh produce and other foods needed to maintain a healthy diet at a reasonable price. In the same way, there are entire neighborhoods and even regions where nobody knows about or has attended selective colleges or, more importantly, that there are meaningful differences between the colleges that one might attend with respect to support, learning environments and graduation rates. As a result, as the study highlights (and as we know well from our work in the Rio Grande Valley and other communities)[1], "many top low-income students instead attend community colleges or four-year institutions closer to their homes," where their likelihood of completing a degree may be much lower.  Many community colleges and regional universities do an excellent job of educating students, but, on average, for a number of reasons, less selective institutions have lower completion rates than more selective ones, often much lower.

There is an interesting exception to the trend highlighted in the study: top low-income students in the nation’s 15 largest metropolitan areas DO often apply to selective colleges. But such students from smaller metropolitan areas — like Bridgeport; Memphis; Sacramento; Toledo, Ohio; and Tulsa, Okla. — and rural areas typically do not. Again, for me, this reinforces the idea of the importance of cultural, not just economic, capital. Students in the big cities, regardless of income, are more likely to be exposed to people who've attended selective colleges and they have access to recruiters from those colleges.

The article ends with some thoughts about implications for selective colleges' outreach to lower-income students, but I think the study invites reflection on a broader issue: how can we systematically increase the availability of cultural capital to lower-income students? 238 colleges are not going to be able to solve this issue on their own. Whether it's through funding more college counselors or scaling up programs that put selective college graduates in lower-income high schools as tutors or advisors, lower-income high-achieving students need access to the same information and need to see the same horizon of opportunity that their high-income peers do. Otherwise, we will continue to lose out on developing the full potential of all students and slowly undermine the status of the US as a society with equal opportunity for all.

[1] See the statistics on where students attend college in the Texas Regional Action Plan documents here.  

It is far too easy to blame students when they are bored. How many times have you heard some variation of “Kids these days don’t care about school,” or “Their parents don’t teach them the value of education?” This is neither fair to the students, nor is it a productive way to think about improving learning or schools. Instead, as educators, we should reflect on how we either contribute to boredom or to engagement. What conditions for learning do we set in our classrooms and schools? How do we design learning for and with our students?

One school district I have worked with, Rowland Unified School District in Rowland Heights, California, addressed these questions in a Framework of Efficacious Instruction. The framework represents the district’s shared agreement about the kind of instruction that makes a difference for students, including what the district expects its learning spaces to look like. I want to highlight two domains from this framework:

• Building Democratic Relationships: Shared power among students and teachers is fundamental to creating a safe community where complex learning can occur.
• Designing for Invested Cognition (Engagement): Engagement includes on-task behavior, and it further highlights the central role of students’ emotions, cognition, and voice, which functions as an engine for learning and development. It is a symbiosis of thought, action, and voice between teacher and student.

The photos below are pages from the actual framework. These are teacher actions and student behaviors that I hope will give you ideas about how to create learning spaces that ignite students’ passion for learning.

While nobody doubts MOOCs will improve access to college-level coursework, a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education led me to question the impact widespread adoption of MOOCs may have on student success, particularly for students from disadvantaged socioeconomic groups.

The suite of services offered by colleges and universities can be thought of as a “bundle” students are required to purchase – when enrolling in college or university, students support and receive numerous services in addition to course content. As highlighted by the University Ventures Fund, MOOCs may contribute to the “unbundling” of services provided by universities, stripping the delivery of course content away from other university functions, such as research, residential life, and student support services. University Ventures Fund and David Stavens, founder of the MOOC Udacity, agree that non-elite institutions will be likely to unbundle services in order to deliver content to students cheaply. As the Chronicle notes, socioeconomically disadvantaged students would likely be more inclined to pursue low-cost, “unbundled,” degrees at non-elite institutions than students able to pay a premium price for a campus-based experience.

Sadly, it is students from disadvantaged backgrounds that are most in need of the complete “bundle” of services currently offered by campus-based colleges and universities. Disadvantaged students benefit greatly from academic and non-academic support resources included in the “bundle” offered by colleges and universities, as these services improve the persistence, and ultimately degree completion, of these students.

M.P. Staton’s framework for unbundling higher education, which highlights the twelve services comprising most of a college or university’s value proposition to students. Note the services are listed in the order of most easily replaceable by technology (darkest color) to those least easily replaceable by technology (lightest color). Many of the academic and non-academic supports provided by colleges and universities fall within Staton’s meta-content and skills grouping, indicating they are not easily replaceable by technology.

Of course, MOOCs have the potential to improve student outcomes. Studies indicate online learning may be as effective, if not slightly more effective, then classroom-based learning in building student knowledge. Furthermore, MOOCs may improve student persistence and graduation rates by reducing the cost of higher education, and may improve student engagement by increasing the number of students learning from elite professors and benefiting from strong learning communities.

Perhaps the colleges and universities that most effectively utilize MOOCs won’t be those that that do so as a part of a sweeping “unbundling” of their services, but rather, alongside traditional classrooms and student supports. For example, the University of Texas is exploring options to offer highly-demanded courses in both MOOC and traditional formats, limiting instances of students being unable to take over-enrolled courses. San Jose State is examining opportunities to allocate slots in credit-bearing MOOCs to groups that may be attending the university in the future, including high school students and community college students, enabling them to earn credit prior to enrolling in a four-year institution. These thoughtful uses of MOOCs may help reduce the time required to complete a college degree – a major barrier to the success of students from disadvantaged backgrounds – without a reduction in support services.

I am hopeful colleges and universities will leverage MOOCs in creative ways and proceed with caution if deciding to “unbundle” courses from support services. Perhaps efficiency gains resulting from effective uses of MOOCs will improve the ability of colleges and universities to invest more in their support services and reduce the cost of a college degree – a result that would lead to improvements in college access while ensuring students in need of support are able to excel.

Kurt Hahn and the Educational Philosophy of Outward Bound
Outward Bound is an international nonprofit that takes youth and adults on wilderness expeditions in order to develop leadership and self-awareness through experiencing the outdoors and working in teams.  The organization's German-born Jewish founder, Kurt Hahn, was an educator by trade  Hahn's public and forceful criticism of Hitler prompted his imprisonment and subsequent emigration to Britain in 1933.  While in Britain, Hahn was approached by Lawrence Holt, an owner of a merchant shipping line, whose ships were being torpedoed by German U-Boats in the lead-up to WWII.  Holt wanted Hahn's help solving a troubling phenomenon: stranded young sailors, seemingly fit and resilient, died more frequently than stranded old sailors.  Holt was quoted as saying "I would rather entrust the lowering of a lifeboat in mid-Atlantic to a sail-trained octogenarian than to a young sea technician who is completely trained in the modern way but has never been sprayed by salt water."  Thus, Hahn and Holt concluded that the distinguishing factor between young and old was not technical survival skills, but rather that the older sailors possessed self-reliance, selflessness, and core experiences that could guide them through grueling trials.  In other words, it was strong character and internal strength that kept the sailors alive.

This observation aligned with Hahn's critique of modern society, and compelled Hahn and Holt to found Outward Bound to remedy what Hahn saw as the six declines of modern youth (you can read more about Outward Bound's founding philosophy and Hahn's amazing personal story in the book Outward Bound USA: Crew not Passengers):

1. Decline of fitness due to modern methods of locomotion [moving about];
2. Decline of initiative and enterprise due to the widespread disease of spectatoritis;
3. Decline of memory and imagination due to the confused restlessness of modern life;
4. Decline of skill and care due to the weakened tradition of craftsmanship;
5. Decline of self-discipline due to the ever-present availability of stimulants and tranquilizers;
6. Decline of compassion due to the unseemly haste with which modern life is conducted or as William Temple called “spiritual death.”

"Why don't you stay in the wilderness?  Because that isn't where it is at; it's back in the city, back in downtown St. Louis, back in Los Angeles.  The final test is whether your experience of the sacred in nature enables you to cope more effectively with the problems of people.  If it does not enable you to cope more effectively with the problems - and sometimes it doesn't, it sometimes sucks you right out into the wilderness and you stay there the rest of your Life - then when that happens, by my scale of value; it's failed.  You go to nature for an experience of the sacred...to re-establish your contact with the core of things, where it's really at, in order to enable you to come back to the world of people and operate more effectively.  Seek ye first the kingdom of nature, that the kingdom of people might be realized."  

*Thanks to Steve Creech of the Colorado Outward Bound School for the photos and for filling in the details of Outward Bound's history!

A few months later, FSG had the privilege of working with a group of funders in Texas, including Greater Texas Foundation, Communities Foundation of Texas/Educate Texas, Houston Endowment, and The Meadows Foundation, to conduct action-focused research aimed at improving postsecondary persistence and completion across the state. As part of that effort, we developed an evidence base for five regions including the Gulf Coast, the Dallas/Forth Worth Metroplex, Central Texas, El Paso, and South Texas including the Rio Grande Valley. We collected and analyzed extensive secondary research, visited all five regions, and interviewed a broad array of educators and community leaders to understand and describe the existing landscape and identify opportunities to significantly improve postsecondary persistence and completion. The full set of reports can be found on the Greater Texas Foundation website.

Here is what we learned about the Rio Grande Valley.  Only 16 percent of students complete a higher education degree or certificate. Hispanic students, who currently represent more than 90 percent of the region’s students and whose numbers are projected to grow 25 percent in the next 20 years, attain degrees at an even lower rate of 13 percent. At the same time, by 2016, the fastest growing occupations in the region will require a postsecondary degree and demand for college graduates will grow by 35 percent. So unless graduation rates are improved, particularly for Hispanic students, the region’s already poor education outcomes and its economic prospects will decline.

This presents a significant and complex challenge, one that no single organization is going to be able to address.  There is no “silver bullet” solution.  Instead, it will require the combined efforts of a wide array of actors including schools, community groups, after-school programs, county and city agencies, parents, and others to move the needle in the Rio Grande Valley. We at FSG think problems like this are best addressed through collective impact – which involves a set of cross-sector actors holding a common vision for success, coordinating their actions, and striving to achieve the same goals. You can read FSG’s original collective impact article, and access additional collective impact resources in our Knowledge Exchange.

On the bright side, we also learned during our research that the leadership at multiple school districts, community organizations, and institutions of higher education across the region are highly motivated and committed to improving their coordination and effectiveness. This has led to efforts such as Brownsville’s selection as a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Partners for Postsecondary Success grantee, and to the University of Texas hosting a nationally attended set of meetings on how to collaboratively improve the Rio Grande Valley’s education, healthcare, and community prosperity.

These efforts are a great start, but there is still much work to be done to increase collaboration and to move to true collective impact in the region.  Doing so will require building on progress to date to finalize a common vision; determining and tracking progress toward agreed upon goals and outcomes; designing a strategy to coordinate regional activities; and developing an infrastructure to ensure ongoing communication, knowledge sharing, accountability, and action across all the actors. Succeeding in such an effort will also require the region’s educators to build trust, develop new ways of working together, and engage the broader community including business leaders, nonprofits, community groups, and policy makers.

To that end, a steering group including school superintendents, presidents of higher education, and cross-sector partners from the business, nonprofit, and education community has been meeting monthly to create a regional action plan to align the involved actors, integrate ongoing initiatives, and further develop the full set of solutions that are needed to drive dramatic gains for students. FSG feels honored to be partnering with Educate Texas to support the work of this group which is being funded by Greater Texas Foundation, Ford Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Communities Foundation of Texas, and The Meadows Foundation.

While the path to collective impact is a challenging one, we at FSG truly believe that such an approach to system alignment has the potential to transform the RGV, greatly increasing educational attainment and workforce readiness for a substantial number of Texas’s most underserved students. We are proud to be a partner in this important work, and we will do everything we can to make sure that young people in the RGV don’t have to make the extreme sacrifices that Luz made, but instead receive the support they need to succeed.

by Charlie Bufalino, National Development Associate and former Online Learning Specialist, Rocketship Education

At Rocketship Education, we view the key to our blended learning model as tight alignment between classroom instruction and online learning. But we’ve long faced technical hurdles in providing meaningful and actionable data from our learning lab – a space staffed by non-credentialed teachers where students work online and in small group tutoring sessions – to our classroom teachers.

To ensure students have access to the range of individualized and personalized content they need in the learning lab, we utilize multiple online software programs from different content providers. What we’ve lacked historically is an infrastructure that could integrate our programs and rationalize the data they generate.

Last year, with support from the Gates Foundation, we tackled this problem by developing a technical infrastructure that could integrate our multiple learning lab programs into one system. This effort allowed us to pull specific metrics from individual programs and combine them into universal reports to give our teachers access to integrated and actionable data. It also began to enable “goal directed assignability” in the learning lab, ensuring better alignment of online content with what students were learning in the classroom.

The build-out of the technical infrastructure has been truly exciting. It has allowed us to more tightly integrate our classrooms and our learning lab with a more truly blended, two-way learning model in which timely data inform classroom instruction while classroom instruction directly influences online content. This year, we're further enhancing our technical infrastructure, and through our partnership with a company called Junyo, we'll provide our teachers with even more advanced analytics and more granular “goal-directed assignability” to more tightly align online content with students’ classroom work.

Perhaps even more exciting, however, is the fact that the work we've done on the build-out has allowed us to begin testing the long-standing hypothesis that underpins our all our work:

Click to read the rest of this post on the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation website.

by Judy Burton, President and CEO, Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, Los Angeles

When Alliance College-Ready Public Schools launched Blended Learning for Alliance School Transformation (BLAST) at three high schools in 2011 and 2012, we were confident that the integration of technology into our college preparatory curriculum would help us individualize instruction for all students. What we didn’t fully appreciate was the impact of this powerful model on teachers at every level of experience.

These “flipped” classrooms place a variety of new demands on teachers, ranging from classroom management skills to facility with digital content tools – with a particular focus on analyzing and using the real-time data about what students are and aren’t learning each day.

Click to read the rest of this post on the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation website.

Arthur Ashe Charter School opened in 2007. The school is one of five FirstLine Schools’ open enrollment public charter schools in New Orleans. In 2010, after several years of operation using a traditional instructional model, Ashe began planning to move to blended learning. The school had multiple reasons for making the switch, chief among them improving achievement for scholars, including a high percentage of special education learners.

Ashe became the first FirstLine school to launch a blended learning pilot for all grades, K-8, during the 2011-2012 school year. (We also piloted the program in the 9th grade of our high school.) Making the move to blended learning as an established school had its challenges. Key to our success was a very deliberate change management process, the first step of which was to define the problem we were trying to fix: Ashe scholars were making great gains to close the achievement gap, but to best serve students, we needed to ensure the gains were even greater.

Making the switch
We next asked two questions: Why weren’t we making larger gains each year, and how could we help teachers accelerate students' progress? The answer to the first question was fairly straightforward: The traditional instructional model didn’t allow us to personalize education to each scholar’s precise needs. Once we had that insight, we quickly lighted on blended learning as a potential solution.

We knew that in order to make a successful transition to a new instructional model, we'd need to do two things: 1) Pilot the program, and 2) ensure that staff, scholars and our community were on board with the approach. To manage through the change, we first brought Ashe teachers to the table to help design our blended learning model and to test educational software options. Our goal was ensuring that decisions were made at the staff level, rather than as a top-down mandate.

Once we’d achieved teacher buy-in, our job became less theoretical and more pragmatic: We were no longer focused on winning hearts and minds, but on changing techniques and designing an effective implementation. This process began in the spring semester and involved some scholars. We included students in the change management process to help build excitement in our community.

By the fall of 2011, we were ready to launch the pilot.

Click to read the rest of this post on the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation website. 

The 2011-2012 school year was a transformative one for Summit Public Schools. What started out as a blended learning math pilot in our two San Jose schools has fundamentally reshaped the model of our next generation schools, the first two of which will open in the fall of 2013. The pilot’s success has influenced how these schools will look and feel, as well as how students will interact with teachers and progress through learning levels.

As an organization, Summit Public Schools is focused on preparing all students not only to attend but to succeed in four-year colleges and beyond. To better meet that goal, we began, in the summer of 2011, to explore ways to accelerate our students' learning. We were especially interested in addressing academic gaps that dated back to elementary and middle school. Our belief was that technology offered us the ability to create a more personalized learning environment for every individual student, delivering exactly what they need, when they need it and how they need it.

Step one: Testing the model
To test this theory, we launched a targeted blended learning pilot in partnership with Khan Academy last fall. We started small, with just 200 ninth grade students in our two San Jose schools. We designed a blended learning curriculum that could support the mastery of ninth grade math concepts including algebra I and geometry. The model also included daily individualized learning time to ensure students could address any academic gaps. The pilot was a success. Our students achieved significant growth, filling academic gaps with a higher degree of success than we had experienced in our previous ten years of non-blended and personalized efforts.

Step two: Optimizing the whole school
However, we quickly realized that to truly personalize learning for all students, we needed to move beyond the targeted approach to blended learning we’d taken in the pilot. We needed to rethink the entire school experience. Every element of the school, from how learning spaces are designed, to the use of time, to the role of the educator, needed to be personalized for, and centered around, our students.

We have come to believe deeply that the most effective way to personalize learning is to provide what we are calling an optimized school model, which we will be piloting in our San Jose schools this coming year and launching in our first two next generation schools in the fall of 2013.

Click to read the rest of this post on the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation website.

KIPP Empower Academy wasn’t initially designed as a blended learning school. When we planned the school in 2009, our goal was to have an inaugural kindergarten grade divided into five classes of 20 students each. Each class would feature personalized, small-group instruction as the core of the instructional model. However, in August 2009, the state of California reduced funding for new and growing charter schools. Before we even opened, we projected a $200,000 shortfall in expected revenue for our first year of operations. Even more problematic, our planned class size was no longer possible.

After considerable research, we decided that blended learning would allow us to expand class size to 28-30 students and still maintain what we viewed as a non-negotiable: our emphasis on individualized and small-group instruction.

We opened the school with 115 kindergarten students in summer 2010. Despite the change to our initial vision for the school, we were determined to establish a vibrant culture that, starting on day one of kindergarten, would reflect KIPP’s college-prep mission. From our perspective, it wasn’t a matter of determining whether we could integrate blended learning and still maintain a strong culture. It was a matter of determining how.

Entrepreneurial educators at schools like Rocketship Education, New Classrooms and Carpe Diem are re-imagining traditional classrooms and/or schools. Funders like Charter School Growth Fund and Wave III of the Next Generation Learning Challenge (supported by the Gates Foundation) are willing to take the risk of supporting the development of additional early stage models. And philanthropic and private capital dollars (e.g. New Schools Venture Fund and Imagine K-12) are lining up behind new entrants into the broader educational technology market. But even with all this progress, much work remains before we truly understand how blended learning can be used to reliably improve children’s educational outcomes on a larger scale:

• We need to create more varieties of blended models, improve digital content and integrate analytics capabilities in order to further push the boundaries of personalization.
• We need to create space for innovation so that promising practices can be tested and scaled within both school districts and charter schools.
• At the same time, we need more evidence about what works to open the classroom bottleneck and free teachers from the real constraints (e.g. time, materials) that make it difficult to effectively use data on a daily basis to address student needs.

Addressing the need for evidence

During the 2011-2012 school year, the foundation decided to fund a cohort of five organizations operating one or more blended learning schools. At that time, we also decided to take the opportunity to address this last point: The need for more and better evidence of what does and doesn’t work to help teachers and students. To that end, we asked SRI International to conduct a one-year, quasi-experimental evaluation of these schools’ impact on students' learning and commissioned FSG to write a series of case studies about each of their models.

Click to read the rest of this post on Michael & Susan Dell Foundation’s website.

FSG’s Emily Malenfant and Amanda Rinderle and Education Elements’ Amy Jenkins invite district leaders applying for The Race to the Top District Competition and others interested in learning more about Collective Impact and Blended Learning in education to join the webinar. You will learn about how to implement Collective Impact and Blended Learning at the district level, and how to incorporate these concepts in your Race to the Top application. We anticipate a lively event, and will spend 15 minutes at the end of the webinar answering participants' questions.

This report explores the challenges low-income young adults face in accessing and using financial aid and the related trends contributing to inequality in post-secondary education today, as well as potential approaches funders can undertake to redesign financial aid to help students overcome these barriers.

Supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the report reflects interviews with national and state experts on financial aid—including policymakers, college leaders, financial aid officers, service providers, funders, and researchers.

Please share your feedback with us in the comments section below!

This new instrument has emerged over the past few years and is fundamentally changing the conversation. The Early Development Instrument (EDI) is being used to assess children on a variety of domains; however, the catch is that the results are reported at a population level, not the individual child level (as is the case with most assessments). The EDI emerged from the Offord Centre for Child Studies at McMaster University and has grown to include a Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) mapping component through relationships between the UCLA Center for Healthier Children and The United Way Worldwide. The assessment is done so that a community can determine the well-being of its children as a whole instead of pinpointing deficits of individual children. Not only does this take the stigma off of children in a community having “deficits” or “being at risk of failure,” but it also has huge implications for collective impact efforts around kindergarten readiness. Communities are seen as having needs for collectively supported activities rather than individual children in need of services.

Policy makers are flooded with statistics daily, but rarely do stats drive someone to action. The EDI gives community leaders unprecedented insight by using early childhood assessment data with GIS mapping, leading to consensus on the degree and geographic concentration of the problem.  Using GIS, the researchers working with the local communities administering the EDI can color code the vulnerability rates and show community leaders, school administrators, policymakers, and even concerned parents the magnitude of their community’s ranking on the core early learning areas. This is then used in combination with Kretzman and McKnight’s asset mapping strategies to show what resources are currently in place to address the community’s specific needs, and where resources are lacking. 

The unique feature of this tool as it relates to Early Learning and collective impact is that it serves as a catalyst for any community implementing collective impact work in the area of kindergarten readiness to create a common agenda, shared measurement system, and mutually reinforcing activities. If everyone in the community can see gaps in core development areas by geographic area, then efforts can be much more targeted. 

One initiative using the EDI in its Collective Impact efforts is the Transforming Early Childhood Community Systems (TECCS) Initiative. The TECCS initiative, a partnership between United Way Worldwide and the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities, is funded by the W.K. Kellogg foundation and is currently in more than 24 communities in 12 states across the country, representing more than 100 school districts. A recent statewide expansion of TECCS in Texas is being supported by the Texas Early Learning Council, the Texas Health and Human Services Department and local communities (six led by local United Ways). The TECCS communities in Texas (11 in total) are intently focused on fundamentally changing how children are served, by using the EDI data and maps to engage stakeholders in investing in early childhood supports and ensuring their readiness for kindergarten. By assessing the needs of the children and in turn mapping them against the current community assets, these communities will be able to better identify gaps and target funds for services and organizations focusing on filling those gaps. This instrument offers communities an exciting opportunity to create a collaborative environment that supports early childhood development in positive ways.

For your reference, below is a 3-minute video introduction to the EDI.

The Individual and The System

We recently completed an engagement with the National Equity Project (NEP), a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California, that develops equity leaders in education so that they can transform results for low-income children and children of color.  With more than 17 years of coaching and leadership development experience focused on individuals in the U.S. public education system, the National Equity Project has come to appreciate that it is not enough to challenge racism at the individual level. Rather, the conditions in the system – the structures, processes, and cultures – need to be transformed as well. The NEP adheres to the wisdom that no leader can succeed in sustaining the transformation that is needed in many public school systems without also addressing those conditions.

To walk into a meeting in the NEP’s offices is to live in the world of “burning patience.” As with many leaders who are committed (or crazy in a good way) enough to take on collective impact, NEP’s leaders embrace the enormity of the task at hand – ending racism in our schools – while at the same time honoring the journey that every individual they coach must go through in order to achieve that big goal. Let me tell you, it doesn’t happen overnight. And yet, to hear the stories of both inequity and transformation that their coaches have witnessed, one would never question why the NEP cares to do the work that it does. This is a group with “burning patience,” as well as perhaps a somewhat overly ambitious sense of one’s ability to move mountains (or school districts, as the case may be).

The Future Is All Around Us

At the end of May, I joined my colleagues Ruchi and David at a Social Sector Boot Camp for fellows of Management Leadership for Tomorrow, a career development institution focused on the next generation of African American, Hispanic, and Native American talent in the nonprofit, corporate, and entrepreneurial sectors. In front of a room of rising first-year MBAs, we had 2 hours to give them a taste of real life at FSG. Using our recent report Competing by Saving Lives as inspiration, we led our 25 new friends through a case competition. We gave them a little background – a few data points on global health needs, a large pharmaceutical company as a client, and some ideas about shared value, and invited them to “crack the case” in small teams. Ninety minutes later, we had five very strong pitch presentations that communicated the potential business value, social impact, components of a strategy, and a call to action. The competitors gave the judging panel compelling data and inspiring visions; they made us think and laugh. They were self-assured and confident, but not arrogant. Never did I see them sweat.

Later that afternoon, David joined a panel of education and other social sector leaders from Teach for America, the Broad Center, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Goodwill Industries, and Bridgespan to talk about how to build a career in social impact. Moderated by the amazing and inspiring Rafael Lopez of AECF, panelists talked about the very personal motivations that drive them in their work, as well as the poignant challenges they face in their careers – many in education. Panelists shared stories of childhood friends who didn’t graduate from high school, parents and siblings who didn’t understand or couldn’t relate, and mentors who pushed them to be better. Each one gave us a completely authentic view into their life experiences, though to call it a “diversity panel” would be missing the point entirely. This was about identifying and pursuing what is significant and meaningful in one’s life as a job.

Coming out of this boot camp, each MLT fellow likely heard the message that, essentially, their job is to be a hero. Whether their next job will be in a large urban public school district, at a multinational company, or with FSG, they will be pushed to also have transformational impact on the systems that may not have served them or their communities well in the past. To endow them with that wish is a pretty hefty idea. We all hope it will be enough.

So, coming back to the original question: What makes a great leader in the education system? These experiences have left me with some new ideas about what it takes:

• Believe in the principle of “burning patience.” Hold both the big picture goals and the process to get there in your sights at the same time.
• Be a little bit crazy and be willing to jump into something you’ve never done before. Big change needs innovation and, at times, a leap of faith. Be unafraid to take calculated risks.
• Show your confidence and your humility. In order to influence others, you need to present yourself as a leader – and someone worth following.
• Pursue what is significant and meaningful in your work. Your work will be challenging on many different levels. Ask yourself what will make your struggles “worth it” at the end of the day.
• Be a hero. Cultivate your “superpowers” so that you can participate in changing the systems that do not work for certain members of our society.

Clearly, there is an overarching theme in these takeaways to be quite bold and maybe a little unreasonable. It may not be my final answer, but until the question gets revisited, I’m feeling energized!

In 2010, a REAP policy brief on the prevalence of intestinal worms amongst schoolchildren in Guizhou province landed on the desk of Liu Yandong, vice premier and politburo in charge of education and health.  Liu expressed shock at the findings; over 30% of 1700 students surveyed were infected with worms, and infection often went hand in hand with poor health, low school attendance, and low grades.  Her department pledged US$30M to eradicate worms in Guizhou by the end of 2012.  In Shaanxi province in 2009, a REAP project looking at the impact of a daily vitamin supplement on anaemia levels and school performance alerted local government to the link between nutrition and education, later evolving into several major policy initiatives.

At both national and provincial levels, collaboration ensured policy take-up.  With the country’s top research institution the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) as a partner, REAP gains cachet and privileged access to top officials: it was through the CAS that REAP’s brief arrived in Liu’s hands. With provincial government, early buy-in is key.  Officials are invited to serve on a project board of advisors, increasing the chance of endorsement for large-scale implementation and scale-up of successful initiatives. As an external body, REAP can shoulder blame where projects fail, but encourage officials to take credit for success.  As Wang Liwei, editor of The Charitarian (a magazine on philanthropy and CSR in China) explains in an article, “In China…one must find the middle ground between maintaining independence, and working with government.”  REAP walks that line admirably well.

REAP's 50+ collaborators also include corporations who provide funding, donations or expertise. A $500,000 contribution from Dell, for example, provides a computer-assisted learning programme for 3^rd and 5^th graders in rural Shaanxi which REAP helps implement and evaluate. Foundation partners aid with implementation, funding, and expertise.  REAP facilitates these links, bringing actors together in a “policy action partnership” around the research work at the organisation’s core. Experimental research is guided by expert local opinion, and partnerships with government, foundations and corporate partners allow the move from research, to testing, to policy and finally wide-scale implementation.

There is a long way to go to nudge rural school participation up to urban levels, and entrance to Tsinghua University and its ilk will remain a steep struggle for countryside students. But, drawing his talk to a close, Rozelle finished on an upbeat note; “there is”, he said, “exactly enough time starting now.”  The obstacles, in health, in access, in funding, are considerable – but REAP is one amongst others finding steps to overcome them. As China presses forward, many more of us will be watching how they do it.

About the author, Jessica Davies: Jessica is studying Mandarin Chinese in Beijing. Before heading East, she completed her Bachelors in Philosophy & Modern Languages at Oxford, interning with FSG in Geneva during her year abroad. She heads home to the UK this summer to face the classroom from the other side of the desk, as a participant on Teach First.

The obstacles facing China’s poor rural students are the focus of REAP, the Rural Education Action Project, born of a collaboration between Stanford University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. At a TEDx Beijing event last month, REAP's co-director Scott Rozelle painted a vivid picture of the scale of the problem. The gap between students in large cities in China and those in poor rural areas going on to university is 35 to 1. But that gap starts long before college. In 2005, just 40% of rural students went on to high school, against 83% of their urban compatriots. The number of city-dwellers may have surpassed the rural population in China this year, but the countryside is still home to over a third of China’s future workforce: 35% of school-aged children live in poor rural areas.

The figures need little dressing up, but it was Rozelle’s placing them in the broader development context which really drove the point home. China is, it hopes, shifting from the “workshop of the world” to a higher-skilled, higher-wage economy. In the 1980s, South Korea and Mexico were going through the same transition. South Korea managed relatively successfully, while Mexico has struggled. The link with education? In South Korea in the 80s and 90s, urban and rural high school enrollment rates were more or less equal at over 95%. In the same period, rural participation in high school education in Mexico was about half the urban level. The figures for China today look almost identical to Mexico in the 80s: that, said Rozelle, should be a wake-up call.

The challenges that face rural students are manifold. Although the government has now established free K-9 education for all, K-10 to 12 must be self-funded, and the cost of secondary education in China is amongst the highest in the world. In addition, good quality secondary education is rarer in resource-poor rural areas. REAP’s work has also highlighted the impact of hidden and untreated health problems – anemia, near-sightedness, intestinal worms – on attendance and achievement. For many, a factory job with a relatively attractive wage seems a better choice. That may be the case now, but as China’s economy starts to turn its energies from the factories that have fuelled the last decade to the bright minds and sharp thinking that will shape the next, it must take its rural students with it.

In part two of this blog, I’ll look at how REAP’s “action research”, a collaborative approach to impact evaluation, programme design and implementation, is achieving results and providing an innovative model for NGO work in China.   

About Jessica Davies: Jessica is studying Mandarin Chinese in Beijing. Before heading East, she completed her Bachelors in Philosophy & Modern Languages at Oxford, interning with FSG in Geneva during her year abroad. She heads home to the UK this summer to face the classroom from the other side of the desk, as a participant on Teach First.

The Magic Wand: I’m not a quitter. But I was ready to quit my kids’ elementary school’s site council. We are a group of parents and teachers who help the principal develop a plan for the school’s success. We had spent our last meeting deciding to spend the school’s discretionary budget, a whopping $3,000, on iPads. Now a month later we were revisiting that decision. Over $3,000. Our next job? Working on the site plan our principal had to turn in to the district. It was 70-pages of strategies, programs, indicators, and budgets for every area of the school’s operation. It was needlessly complicated. It was uninspiring. It reminded me of doing my taxes. And worst of all, it was useless for driving day-to-day leadership and management of the school. Until that moment, I’d been a relatively quiet member of the group, but it was either time to speak up or quit. So I asked our principal, “Forget about the site plan. If you had a magic wand to make three big changes to the school, what would they be?” She didn’t miss a beat “Do a better job instilling a joy of learning in our children, make our curriculum more experiential, and transform our classrooms to be more student-centered and less teacher-led.” Forget quitting, I was now ready to walk through walls to help her turn that vision into a reality.

The Kid with the Giant Hands: I think we would all agree that the brain is pretty important, and that we want our kids to have the best brains they can have. But how do brains learn? The answer lies in the connection between our brains and our bodies. Basically, our brain gets information from the outside world through a variety of stimuli, processes that information, and grows. And what scientists like Dr. Hughes have learned is that if you mapped your brain’s connections with your body, and apportioned those connections on a 12-inch ruler – about six inches would be devoted to your hands, three inches to your mouth, an inch-and-a-half to your ears, and an inch-and-a-half to everything else. So you can visualize what that means, here is a composite picture of how your brain perceives your body:

Image from University of Aberdeen

Note the giant hands. Simply put, brain researchers have discovered that we learn first and foremost with our hands. Brains develop quickest and best when we are touching and then when we are talking. Listening is a distant third. And that is the problem with School 1.0 – it is way too focused on kids’ ears. So if we want our kids to be in the best learning environment possible, we have to design schools so that they are educating the kid with the giant hands. And that was why I was so excited to hear our principal talk about her vision for our school. But given standardized tests and the core curriculum, how can the school of the future be more experiential and student-centered?

Take, for example, what is possible with data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), an organization that links data from the post-secondary and K-12 systems. This allows districts and schools to understand how their students fare in college, and colleges to know more about their students’ preparation and experiences in high school. I recently talked to a woman working on college access for high school students in a rural school district in Washington State, who has used NSC data (via the BERC Group, a Seattle-based research and evaluation firm that makes Washington State data publicly available through their website). In her district – serving 7500 students, 45% of whom are Hispanic – she helps high school students prepare for college – with supports like mentoring and financial aid assistance. When she learned about the college outcomes for the district’s Hispanic graduates, she decided to share this information with the district superintendent and other administrators. She played a game at a meeting with district administrators, asking them to guess how many, of 120 Hispanic graduates, had gone onto a four-year college. The assistant superintendent guessed half – 60 students had enrolled in a four-year institution. The actual answer was two. It was a stunning and eye-opening moment. Before this, the district didn’t know what was happening to its graduates in college. With this data, they learned that the situation was bleak and needed attention.

I did some work on the education landscape in Berlin in late 2011 and remember coming across a neat statistic: the state of Berlin (it is a city and a state) spends 4% of its total state budget on early childhood education. I remember being pleasantly surprised by this figure, but of course having nothing to compare it to, I couldn’t really gauge if this was a big deal or not. The NIEER report gave me the chance to compare.

At first glance, my nervousness went away. One of the data points in the NIEER study is that reported spending per child enrolled is $4.8K per year. That actually sounded pretty good to me. A quick search on comparable early childhood data from Germany compiled in a recent study funded by the Bertelsmann Foundation gave me a similar figure: Germany overall spends about EUR 2.8K per year per child (about $3.7K). However, the fact that the German figure was lower than the US figure surprised me, so I dug further. As usual, the devil is in the details.

The methodology used in the German study – keeping in mind that Germany is increasingly aiming for universal early childhood education (even starting as early as 1 year of age) – was very different than the NIEER methodology. To get to their figure of EUR 2.8K per child, the study divided the total early childhood spend in Germany by the total number of children under 6 in the whole country! Specifically EUR 11.5B total spend divided by 4.1M children under the age of 6.

So being a data geek I went back and tried to come up with the same number for the US. Based on the data in the NIEER study I can deduce that total state spending is about $6.4B. From childstats.gov I can see that in 2011 there were 25M kids between 0 and 5 in the US. Dividing $6.4B by 20M (let’s assume that is the portion that is aged 0 to 4) yields about $320 dollars per child. Ouch.

Clearly the data and systems are not comparable 1:1, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Germany spends nearly 12x as much on early childhood education as the US. 12x! I know your next question, what about quality and outcomes? We’ll leave that for another blog. But I can tell you that in the US the benchmark for staff-child ratio in early childhood education is 1:10 or better. In Germany the actual average is 1:5 for programs serving children below 3 years of age and 1:9 for programs serving children 3 and older.

I sincerely hope I made a math or methodology error here. Otherwise, it is pretty clear where I might want to raise my hypothetical future children.

A Market for Success

Monday, April 16, 11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m. PDT

REGISTER now - it's free!

This webinar will be based on FSG’s recent work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to research how external service providers can help community colleges improve completion. We’ll cover highlights from our research and report—including what community colleges most need to improve student success rates, the landscape of service providers who can meet those needs, and recommendations on how to build a robust market for external services that helps colleges deliver stronger results. The webinar will also include a moderated discussion with presidents from leading community college and external service providers.

Moderated by Jeff Kutash, Managing Director, FSG, panelists include: 
Dr. William Trueheart, President and CEO, Achieving the Dream
Dr. Karen Stout, President, Montgomery County Community College
Dr. Rob Johnstone, Senior Research Fellow, Research & Planning Group

Registration is free, and we encourage you to check out the full report as well. We hope to see you on Monday!

Today, we wanted to share some of the fabulous questions and comments raised by the group. As context, many of COMF's members have taken on a challenge issued by the Kresge Foundation, the purpose of which is to "leverage local private investment to engage and sustain college access partnerships, thereby increasing the college-going rate and culture and Michigan." 

We led the group of foundations in a brief role play exercise focused on African American boys' educational achievement, and the comments we heard were revealing:

• "I got to take on the role of the parent, and I'm so glad I did, because it helped me see how much jargon we use every day. We are so stuck in our lingo, and it makes it harder to let others in on the conversation- especially parents and kids, the voices we need most!"
• "It can be hard to keep in mind that it's about the kids, when there's so much at stake for all of the players at the table. There's a real appearance of winners and losers, and so much stake in the game. This lets me think about my work in a new way, thinking more about how we need to make sacrifices for the common good-- student achievement."

Many of the community foundations already deeply engaged in the Kresge college access network work asked great questions, too, which their peers and FSG responded to and shared ideas about. For example:

• "Is anyone else finding that we as community foundations are just so well-positioned to take this college access work on?"
  • This was met with a resounding YES! "Our donors care deeply about education, and it's one of the most pressing community needs." "We are thinking about leveraging donor scholarship money towards this." "We're exploring using our unrestricted and donor advised funds."
• "How can I make the case that college access and success are critical, when my community is dealing with other pressing issues of crime and unemployment?"
  • "Creating the sense of urgency is key. How are you using local media to spotlight the problem? How are you using data?" "Making the case to a range of players about 'what's in it for them,' if education improves-- how will this impact crime, how will this improve public safety, how will this create more economic opportunity."
• "In an education initiative like this, who is the right backbone structure?"
  • "Who wants to be the backbone? How much credibility do they have in the community? Can they really devote the resources to doing this?" "In our community, we're the backbone. But in the community in the next county over, the school district has taken this on." "Context matters!"

We would love to hear more from others using collective impact to drive educational achievement- how are you tackling these issues and others?

All of this is part of a larger shift towards recognizing the importance of community colleges in the United States.

Despite educating 44% of U.S. undergraduates, community colleges receive just 27% of public funds. Many community college students come from low-income backgrounds, are the first in their families to attend college, and juggle a range of work and life commitments alongside school. Given that 63% of all new jobs will require a college degree or advanced credential by 2018, preparing these students to succeed isn’t just important for their own life prospects – it’s essential to a thriving workforce and economy.

The TAACCCT program and a growing drumbeat from policymakers, businesses, and national funders are fantastic developments for community colleges. But one central challenge threatens to derail all the positive momentum. Today, only 40% of community college students graduate or transfer to a four-year institution within three years. As a result millions of students lose out on opportunities for better and more fulfilling jobs. And for community colleges themselves, unless they raise completion rates quickly and dramatically the national spotlight will likely fade, funding will fall, and they risk sinking back into relative obscurity.

In short, community colleges face a clear but narrow window to raise completion. Doing so will mean stretching muscles and building capacities that few colleges possess, and most colleges cannot complete this shift on their own. While there are multiple pieces to the college completion puzzle, one aspect we’ve been exploring at FSG is the role played by external service providers. With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation we recently published a white paper on the topic – A Market for Success, How a Robust Service Provider Market Can Help Community Colleges Improve Student Completion. Highlights include the most pressing needs of community colleges to improve completion, the areas in which external service providers can best offer support, and recommendations for funders, colleges, service providers, and policymakers for building a more robust service market.

At the TAACCCT conference in D.C., I spoke about these findings with a group of ~20 external service providers convened by several national foundations and organized by VisionLink. While most service providers work in isolation, this group is an innovative attempt to pool capacities and know-how. Although more efforts are needed, I left D.C. inspired by the momentum around community colleges and the organizations that support them.  If this year is to be a coming out party for community colleges, I hope it can also be one for the role that external service providers can play in advancing completion.

If you’re interested, please check out FSG’s report for further ideas on building a robust market of providers. We will also be hosting a free webinar on April 16th with panelists from leading community colleges and nonprofits. You can register here, and we hope you will join us in continuing the conversation about how community colleges can maintain their spotlight and deliver on their missions of student success.

How does one identify an effective teacher? Many evaluations use student test scores and a predictive algorithm, attributing scores higher or lower than predicted to a specific teacher. While such “value-added” measures are a useful baseline, they are limited in their ability to identify why a teacher is effective or ineffective. Value-added measures are also controversial; many attributed last year’s scandal in Atlanta, where teachers and administrators changed student answers on standardized tests, to the district’s use of test data in teacher retention decisions.

A better approach to identifying effective teachers has been found by the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The MET Project has demonstrated a fairly intuitive result: a metric combining a teacher’s value-added data with classroom observations and student surveys is a more accurate indicator of teacher effectiveness than value-added data alone.

Classroom observations enhance evaluation accuracy, but also create logistical challenges. As the MET Project points out, observations need to be calibrated across schools and districts to ensure consistency. Observations informing human capital decisions need to be conducted over multiple days. Finally, budget pressures have led many schools and districts to reduce assistant principal positions and central office staff, limiting the number of administrators available to conduct classroom observations.

Despite the time and resources they require, classroom observations are a worthwhile investment. As demonstrated by the MET Project, observations enhance the completeness and accuracy of an evaluation. More importantly, they enable teachers to identify their strengths and areas for improvement while receiving real-time feedback from evaluators. Such real time feedback is correlated with strong school performance. Even as resources continue to become increasingly scarce, schools and districts should prioritize classroom observations because of their value in developing and evaluating teachers.

What problems do you see with classroom observations or teacher evaluation more broadly?

Teachers and administrators: have you experienced challenges related to classroom observations? If so, how did you overcome them?

Today, I believe that these are not barriers, but are biases that I had before even entering the classroom. Two years down the line, my perspective has changed immensely.

My students were 2-3 years behind their peers from private schools. Initially, they did not take an interest in the classroom. But why would they, when their previous teacher had been brutally beating them in order to force them to learn and write something that they could not even comprehend. I was teaching in an English Medium School and I had students who could not recognize the letters of English alphabet. It took me some time to get my students invested in education and get to know each one of them.

After 4 months, I stopped receiving incomplete homework and the classroom attendance soared from 60% to more than 95%. During the course of the fellowship, I learned that the girls in my classroom woke up at four or five AM, cleaned the entire house, and then studied for an hour to complete their homework; often they could not complete it because of lack of electricity at night. Two boys who had been consistently failing for the past two years were amongst the top at the end of the fellowship. I taught 62 students, and 11 students cleared 2^nd grade entrance examination for admission to the best school in Pune. They received fully funded scholarships to see them through high school. The rest of the students gained an average of 2 years of academic growth in a single academic year, something I could not have imagined at the start of the year.

Tracking data on daily and monthly basis was immensely helpful to analyze the progress students were achieving in the classroom. It formed the basis of the long-term planning.  As soon as I checked the exam papers, I would sit for hours and put the data in a big excel sheet. The result would show me exactly what to do. I knew what topics to re-teach, and got a better understanding of my students’ learning levels.

I realized the role teachers/parents play in a child’s life. Our actions create a lifelong impression on young minds. Kids coming from impoverished backgrounds are equally brilliant as their high-income counterparts. What they lack is opportunity and guidance.

Teachers are not lacking in motivation, but instead face limited capabilities. They lack autonomy and proper training to handle large classrooms (40-80 students is the norm in low-income schools).  After 1-2 years of persistence, some teachers tend to lose their faith and resort to more traditional teaching methodologies. I realized that I had to put in 16 hours a day to plan for 26 students and work consistently to support students that were most behind.

Training systems must be sufficiently robust so that the teachers are prepared to meet these challenges. To improve our education systems we need to give teachers the respect that the profession deserves. We should make the selection process stringent to make it attractive to applicants. Our training modules need to empower teachers to cater to a classroom consisting of multiple levels of student learning.

Initially, I thought lack of infrastructure, including libraries, computers, etc., was a key impediment to improving educational outcomes in India. I see now that these are not the greatest needs. Infrastructure is helpful, but a Principal with a vision and teachers with an ongoing commitment towards the children’s education make all the difference. It is surprising to learn that girls in villages drop out after primary school because of a lack of separate toilets, not because the parents do not want to educate the girl child. So, some minimum resources are required such as neat classrooms, clean separate toilets for boys and girls, and playgrounds.

The most important learning from my experience has been that there is a gamut of challenges in the social sector, and the impacts of our work are not readily apparent. We need patience and time to see long-term change. We need to be empathetic and understand the perspectives of others.  Looking back after graduation, I realize I could not have imagined the extent to which I would undergo such personal transformation with regard to discipline, humility and assuming responsibility. I am thankful for the experience and carry the lessons forward in my daily work.

About Sanjay Mittal: Sanjay is working with FSG in India. Prior to this, he completed a two year fellowship with 'Teach for India'. He was a member of the inaugural cohort of 'Teach for India' and during the fellowship he taught two 2nd grade classrooms in a low-income school in Pune. He has a Bachelor in Engineering from IIT Delhi.

The Education Agenda begins 19 minutes into the State of the Union

First, President Obama has proposed that every state require all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18. This is critical for many students who are already disadvantaged and who stand to gain the most from educational opportunity. We know that students from low-income families are approximately 10 times more likely to drop out than their peers from high-income families and that high school completion is essential to employment, earnings, and many other lifetime outcomes. In fact, the difference between having a high school degree and dropping out is estimated at nearly $569,000 in earnings over the duration of one’s career. And if anything, the recession has only made this disparity even more acute since the majority of new jobs created in the current economic recovery require a high school or postsecondary degree while many of those eliminated by the recession did not.

However, in order to tackle this issue head-on, it is important that the proposed compulsory approach is complemented by stronger early warning systems to identify students who are at risk of dropping out along with greater support for those who are struggling. This should include an emphasis on college and career counseling, use of mentoring and tutoring, and utilization of alternative learning opportunities such as Early College High Schools. It’s important that these interventions happen early however – studies show, for example, that ninth grade can often be a “make or break year,” with performance and attendance during this pivotal time predicting up to 80 percent of the likelihood of a student graduating from high school. 

Second, President Obama has proposed steps to increase student financial aid and to keep college costs under control. Details of this plan include increasing the amount of Perkins loan funding to $8 billion, creating a $1 billion “Race to The Top” for higher education, and forming a $55 million “First in the World” competition to increase productivity. With a postsecondary degree becoming more critical to attaining and maintaining middle class status, it is important that the President incentivize colleges to keep costs down and improve outcomes. However, it will also be necessary to ensure that students enter college prepared for success. In order to safeguard students from remedial classes, secondary schools must strengthen their college preparatory programs and align their curricula with postsecondary expectations. In addition, they will need to integrate social and non-cognitive skills into their curricula to help students persist in the face of obstacles and increase postsecondary retention and completion rates. 

Of course, all the elements of President Obama’s education efforts will ultimately require state and congressional cooperation, but his speech was an important reminder to refocus our attention on increasing high school and postsecondary completion. It’s also a step closer to ensuring greater economic opportunities for those who need it most and whose success will be critical to the success of us all. In the end it’s something that we should all be able to get behind, an approach that’s consistent with America’s values and certainly our best interest.

In this current budget climate, the changes certainly could have been worse. But they’re part of a larger, concerning trend: dwindling sources of need-based grants, which we know can make the difference between dropping out and a diploma.  Low-income, degree-seeking students who receive Pell grants complete their studies at higher rates than those without the grant funding (National Center for Education Statistics). The students who no longer quality for Pell grants have few need-based alternatives beyond additional student loans. These are the same students already carrying significant educational debt, and who face the risk of defaulting on payments.

A shift towards more merit-based aid at the state level and at individual institutions has also widened the funding gap for low-income students.  In the last twenty years, state-level merit-based aid, as a percentage of total state aid, has grown from 11% to 28% (College Board). Merit-based aid recipients are more likely than ever to be from higher income brackets, meaning that the funding is less likely to be a “make or break” factor in college attendance. During the 1995-1996 academic year, 51% of merit-based aid went to high middle income and high income students. By 2007-2008, this had grown to 57% (Institute for Higher Education Policy). 

According to one national expert we spoke with recently, “Merit aid exacerbates the inequality that already exists within the current education system.  The student who was privileged enough to get a good education in high school is rewarded and is given additional resources for [their] college education, while the student who was not privileged in high school is not rewarded.”  If we are most interested in increasing the number of students who earn degrees, shifting aid towards the students more likely to finish college – even without that aid – isn’t an efficient way to do it.

With the bleak state of our national budget, it’s unlikely that federal funds for need-based aid will grow any time in the near future.  It’s worth reconsidering the shift towards merit-based aid among other funders, and ensuring that limited resources target the low-income students we know will benefit most.

Early childhood is the often neglected, but has proven to have significant impact on the long-term outcomes of children. Evidence suggests that quality early education programs give children the social, language and number skills they need for school. When children start school behind, they often stay behind. However, early interventions can dramatically improve cognitive and socio-emotional abilities of children, and have a long-term positive economic impact on kids—increasing the likelihood of graduating from high school and securing employment.

Congratulations: California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington! I'd invite you to share your thoughts and reactions with us, and Happy Holidays everyone!

Now, what if I told you that I’ve never actually worked in an office like yours? What if I said my top-notch team has analyzed the data from our own offices, but hasn’t actually walked the halls of your office? What if the lexicon I use is different than the one that you’re used to? Would you be a little suspicious of my solution?

Before we continue, the definition of empathy is essentially the act or ability to understand what another person experiences, but not actually experience it first-hand. In the context of education, degrees of empathy could be reading a book on how a school district works (low empathy), talking to a teacher (more empathy), sitting in on a classroom (higher empathy), teaching the classroom (this is actually called "sympathy," where one actually experiences the issue at hand).

• Insiders: How can reformers walk in your shoes to understand your work and be more productive? What can reformers never truly understand?
• Outsiders: What have you done to increase your empathy for insiders? Has it worked?
• Everyone: As David Brooks recently noted in an excellent article in the NY Times, what are the limits of empathy? How important is empathy? How much empathy is needed for reformers to be effective?

Our visitors came at an interesting time.  Our team at FSG has been working with the Community Center for Education Results (CCER) to build a regional cradle-to-college and career initiative for over a year and half, and we recently reached a pivotal point in the work.  With an organizing framework of a shared goal and common metrics, called the Road Map for Education Results, established early on, our current phase of work focuses on how our region is going to band together in new ways to reach the ambitious goal of doubling the number of students in our region who complete a college degree or career credential.  With the shift from the “what” to the “how” of the Road Map Project comes the riddle of shared ownership.  Our German friends sought to understand how you go about getting people to not only come to meetings but to fundamentally change the way that they work, not only for their own good or the good of their organizations, but for the good of a collective effort that is beyond the reach of their own individual roles, responsibilities, and institutions. 

It’s a hard question, and one that can easily mean the success or failure of a collective impact initiative.  Collective Impact assumes the participation of cross-sectoral actors who come together to work in differentiated but reinforcing ways and hold one another accountable for achieving a common goal.  Reflecting on the accomplishments of the Road Map Project to date, several factors seem critical for progress toward the Holy Grail of shared ownership: 

• Engaging Action-Oriented Leaders – Bringing committed and action-oriented leaders to the table is crucial. Having CEO-level leadership brings credibility to the project, but also ensures that there is a group of stakeholders, and their affiliated organizations, ready and willing to take action and make change.  With the Road Map Project, several advisory group members have deployed their own time and staff resources to convene work groups focusing on a range of issues, including how to best serve English Language Learner students, how to improve Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math education to meet the demands of our current and future job market, and how to create more effective methods of defining and measuring non-academic indicators that are critical to student success and that are the focus of many of our region’s community-based organizations.  Engaging system-level leaders has also been crucial for catalyzing the system-level change we seek.  For example, the local superintendents and community college presidents, as detailed below, have been convened by key Road Map leaders and are taking concrete actions to increase the collaboration and alignment between the local K-12 and community college systems. 

• Using Data as a Call to Action – The role of data in this work cannot be overstated. Backbone organizations like CCER, as the driving force behind collective impact initiatives, have a critical role to play in bringing data to the conversation. Data is central to making the case for change.  When you consider the state of education in our region, it is hard to ignore the need for improvement knowing that less than 1 in 4 students from the Road Map region go onto earn a college degree or career credential.  That number drops to 1 in 10 when you look at African American, Hispanic, or Native American students.  Data is a compelling way of demonstrating that large-scale improvement is needed.  Data is also useful for identifying existing programs and initiatives that are having an effect on student outcomes, and can be built upon in developing a regional approach to systemic change.  Seeing elementary literacy improvements resulting from data-driven instruction in one district, or increased college readiness from greater access to rigorous coursework among high school graduates at another district, shows what is possible.  Data makes the case for taking action and inspires what is possible.

• Enabling New Connections and Partnerships – Creating opportunities for people to connect with one another can serve as an unexpected impetus for action.  The Education Results Network (ERN), a group of hundreds of people working on education in the Road Map region, is convened quarterly to share updates on the Road Map project and gather input.  These meetings have provided an invaluable opportunity to connect individuals and organizations to one another in unexpected ways.  Through meeting new people and learning about new efforts at ERN meetings, individuals in the region are finding new ways to collaborate.  At high levels of leadership, new connections have been similarly powerful.  The region’s superintendents and community college presidents have been meeting regularly for the past year and a half, and are partnering in new ways.  Last spring, the group issued an early acceptance letter to all of the local community colleges to all upcoming high school graduates, letting them know that they are eligible to attend any of the region’s seven community colleges.  More recently, the group deployed a task force to work on aligning math standards between local high schools and community colleges to increase students’ readiness for college-level math and decrease the need for remedial coursework once students are in college.

Each of these factors has been central to demonstrating that change is needed and creating a path forward.  CCER is an important engine for keeping the many and complex pieces of this work on track, and bringing others along – and spurring them to action – is among the most crucial roles it can play in this work.  What other factors do you think support shared ownership?  In your work, have you seen other ways that organizations come together and assume responsibility and accountability for actions that are beyond their own individual domain?  What enabled this shift?

It will be interesting to see where the Road Map Project is a year from now, and see how the countless individuals and organizations in our region are working in new and inspiring ways to collectively improve outcomes for our students.  I look forward to having the chance to reflect on where we’ve been and how far we’ve come, and maybe even having the opportunity to share key lessons with our friends in Germany.

Recently, I connected with the producer of an upcoming documentary on the life of Julius Rosenwald, a philanthropist from the early 1900’s that funded over 5K schools impacting 650,000 black students in the Southern states of US. It was very intriguing to learn about this German-Jewish immigrant, willing to invest in social challenges at odds with mainstream America at the time. What resonated most with me beyond his risk taking was his approach to philanthropy.  He specifically set out to aid others willing to also invest in themselves.

Only dollars raised by the recipients were matched by Mr. Rosenwald. We discovered through family research that my great grandfather raised funds and provided labor for the construction of a Rosenwald school in his community. This sparked an active discussion in my family on the value of sustaining grants and the need to shy away from "fixing the challenges of others." Rather, a more effective approach is to actively involve those being impacted as a part of the solution. Mr. Rosenwald saw this as an imperative to sustainability, long lasting change, and self-empowerment. He created a system where collective impact could be reached via collaboration with multiple partners.

Just today, while attending an Intel Learn graduation in Cairo, Egypt, this concept continues to be alive and well.  Intel Learn is a youth entrepreneurship training program with the purpose of involving teens in project- based learning focused on solving community challenges.  One young man highlighted in his final presentation, “What I learned above and beyond teamwork is that to achieve a change in my community, I must be a part of the solution and not the problem.”  His team chose a project that would result in a renovation of a dilapidated public building into a small community medical clinic that would provide basic medical care.  In doing so, he explained that the crime associated with the run down building would decrease while increasing the community spirit and safety.  The students provided the research on the problems and were able to share recommendations and gain the support directly from neighboring donors surrounding the facility. Like Mr. Rosenwald’s approach to philanthropy, we each have a key role to play in tackling community issues.  Tackling this as a donor alone will not yield the most optimal results.  Ensuring the change is owned by recipients increases the probability of success and empowers the potential for ongoing transformation. 

About Barbara McAllister: Barbara is responsible for developing and driving grant initiatives for the Intel Foundation to ensure maximum impact, transparency, sustainability, and clear accountability.  Barbara’s portfolio includes girls, women, STEM and the underserved.  She has worked in various disciplines and leadership roles inside Intel for the past 16 years including facility start-ups and ramping of Intel’s Costa Rica operations, and leading the company’s Corporate Services Facility Due Diligence Team for acquisitions in Russia, Mexico, and other strategic locations.  

Indeed, over the past several years, we’ve seen much of the growth in charter schools occur in cities. There is good reason for this. High performing charter networks like KIPP and Aspire Public Schools are largely located in cities, and these network schools are driving demand for more spots. Additionally, mayors like Corey Booker, Greg Ballard, Michael Bloomberg, Thomas Menino and Antonio Villaraigosa have publicly supported the expansion of public charter schools in their cities. And philanthropic foundations have made significant investments to spur the creation and expansion of high-quality charter schools in major cities across the country, including in New York, New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Newark. All indications are that we’ll continue to see growth in cities across the country.

However, another emerging trend suggests that we might also be in store for significant growth in charter school attendance outside our major cities. Charters are leading adopters of online and individualized learning, and some are reshaping the structure of the traditional classroom. They are demonstrating that the model of a teacher standing in front of a classroom of students is not necessarily the only effective or efficient way to educate our children.

For example, Rocketship Education in San Jose, California, uses a technology-based learning lab that provides personalized learning opportunities for its students for a portion of the school day. Because the lab provides individual learning opportunities for each student, Rocketship requires only three full-time teachers for every four classrooms. The school produces outstanding academic results and significantly reduces teaching staff costs, savings used to hire academic deans, finance Rocketship’s three-year leadership development program for new leaders and increase teacher pay. Students at Carpe Diem Collegiate High School, one of the nation’s top high schools, rotate between online lessons and classroom instruction where teachers build upon the material learned online. Because a great deal of content is provided via individualized online learning, Carpe Diem needs only six full-time certified teachers for the nearly 275 students at the school. At Julian Charter School in southern California, significant online learning is used to reach students across three counties, including rural areas. Julian’s students in grades K-12 supplement their independent online study program with programming and support at regional learning centers that offer a wide variety of classes and experiences on topics like art and agriculture. Julian’s nearly 2,200 students perform above state test averages, and at a cost of approximately $6,000 per student, more than $2,000 below the state per pupil average.

Charter schools like Rocketship, Carpe Diem and Julian are rethinking what education looks like for students and teachers. By significantly incorporating technology into instructional practice, these innovative charter schools are challenging the notion of the brick and mortar classroom and school. As we learn more about how these schools provide top notch education for their students, we should consider these models as a way to meet the goal for students in all corners of the nation to have access to high quality schools. Much charter school growth is occurring in cities at this time. But as charters continue to expand the idea of what a school looks like, innovative practices and technologies may enable us to overcome geographic limitations to the point where charter school growth will only be limited by demand for high quality schools.

About Eric Paisner: Eric Paisner is the Vice President of knowledge and partnerships for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. In his role, he seeks to capture and disseminate information and resources on critical charter school issues. Prior to joining the Alliance, Eric worked as an attorney for Powers Pyles Sutter & Verville PC, advising clients on a variety of education and corporate issues. He also served as a senior consultant with Arthur Andersen, specializing in strategic management solutions for large corporations and government agencies. Eric has a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Michigan and a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife Elizabeth and two daughters.

So, what lessons might we learn from the days of the Apple IIe? And from you, the Reader, what can we look forward to in the coming months?

(Photo Credit: kenfagerdotcom)

• The education sector is a marketplace. In its early days, Apple focused sales of its new desktop computers on the education market, making the formal education system the target customer. For a corporate sales force, selling to the central office of a school district is much easier to tackle and more profitable than pitching to parents or directly to young people. So, even though platforms have also existed at home, and now mobile, and even though we have always known that young people spend 80% of their waking hours outside of the classroom, “education technology” will continue to be purchased, and therefore delivered, primarily through the formal education system. But, as more students access K-12 curriculum online, are companies missing an opportunity to address other customers? What companies are taking a more innovative approach?
• You gotta play to win. Installing a new smart board is not going to improve student outcomes. A report released earlier this year highlighted that just 1 percent of 1,000 schools surveyed provided their students with a highly technology-integrated education, even though they all had the capacity. Leadership has to make a commitment to integration, teachers and parents have to be trained and prepared, and everyone needs technical support to make it work. What other barriers need to be removed to support effective use of technology for student learning?
• Does it work? When I was in 5^th grade, I took my first computer programming class. The thought that I might someday become a computer scientist never crossed my mind, but someone thought it should have. Yet, for women, technology in schools has not led to increased educational interest in technology as a field or career. In fact, the percentage of women graduating with computer science of engineering degrees declined through the 1990s and 2000s. Broadly speaking, the question of “Does it work?” is a great one for us evaluators.  Who are you focused on? (Administrators? Teachers? Students? Parents?) What kind of outcomes are you trying to achieve with this audience? (Improved test scores? Increased engagement and interest in learning? Better communications? Changes in instruction?) There are several barriers to understanding effectiveness from the consumer perspective. On the content side, there is no standard for “quality.” The buyer is grossly unprepared to assess quality of content, and even if they were, the research behind “effectiveness” is limited and under-resourced. You are essentially left with a marketing pitch and adoption statistics. This is a field ripe for capacity building.  Given the nature of software, (at least some of the) data should be incredibly easy to come by, yet little information is being shared. In the meantime, districts are making large investments without a clear understanding or articulation of what technology will (and won’t) do for student learning. Parents fare no better. Where can today’s consumers go to understand what works?
• Does it save money? School systems want to believe that investments in technology will lead to cost savings. Open source curriculum, in particular, has been an exciting example of where school systems can save. Many blended learning models suggest that technology allows a school to operate more cost effectively than purchasing textbooks or paying high teacher salaries.  On the other hand, upfront costs are high. Infrastructure in most districts is under-resourced. Scaling is still a challenge. It would be great to see a sophisticated ROI analysis done, while, again, being clear about what you get for the money.

So, although technology in the classroom may be a bit of old news, today we have an opportunity to crowdsource from the FSG community and learn from lessons of the past. And, perhaps, something new will come from that NYT conference next week. We look forward to hearing from you!

Despite having more postsecondary institutions – and graduates coming out of them – than ever before, Indian businesses are unable to find qualified workers. This threatens the nation’s ability to continue its 8-9% annual economic growth, and limits the number of people who can rise out of poverty by gaining stable employment. Recognizing the magnitude of the problem, in 2008 the Government of India set a target of teaching skills to 500 million people by 2022. Yet experts are questioning whether the government alone has the resources to solve the problem, suggesting India may need a budget provision of over ten times what was set aside in 2011.

Smells like a significant shared value opportunity to us. At FSG, we think of shared value as the benefits created when the private sector uses core business assets in a way that sustainably addresses societal problems. In this case, businesses are constrained because they can’t find suitable workers, and significant numbers of people remain poor because they aren’t qualified for available jobs. So what can be done?

Examples such as Larsen & Toubro (L&T, a $10B diversified conglomerate) and Future Group (India’s largest organized retailer) are beginning to point to promising solutions. Per a late 2010 Economic Times report, construction is India’s second-largest industry and is facing a potential labor shortage of 170-180 million people by 2022. In response, L& T is “a rare construction company in India with a training institute that feeds into its businesses.” The company is training thousands of workers across several states, and is planning to launch further vocational training for positions such as millwright fitters, transmission line tower erection fitters, tiling masons, and surveyors. Muralidhar Rao, a Future Group executive, notes in another Economic Times article that “for our requirements, we will have to tap the vast majority of people in rural areas who do not have access to education and training… the future lies there.” The company recently formed a public private partnership with the rural development ministry to train – and place – 32,000 below-poverty-line youth from rural areas in 19 states over a 1 ½ year period. Future Group’s Employability and Skill Development COO points out that “What we are doing is not just for now. It will help us create a steady supply of employable people for our expanding store operations.”

In both examples, linking up with NGOs and government to collaborate on potential solutions has been an important component of the work. And in both cases, the organizations are leveraging core business assets to create change (knowledge of particular skills needed, ability to place candidates (in jobs that the companies themselves need to fill!), human resources strategies focused on retention (so results are long-lasting).

But unfortunately these examples, while promising, are not yet enough. The thousands of workers they are training – while certainly a step in the right direction – are not going to add up to the millions needed. What do you think can be done to turn a stream of skilled workers into a flood? How can these organizations scale, and who else can get involved? Indians have a fantastic ability to work around constraints to make things happen. If the private, public and civil sectors are able to effectively join together and match skills to workers to jobs, they can create massive social and economic impact – with lessons applicable to policies and programs around the world.

 
Trying to Crack the Nut of Teacher Education and Preparation 
Relay School of Education is the first standalone college of teacher preparation to open in NYS for 10 years, aimed at training schoolteachers in a way that “explodes the traditional, course-based paradigm that has been adopted by traditional schools of education over the past century.” Having been educated in a traditional school of education myself, I agree about the necessity of dramatically improving and transforming the way that teacher education happens, in order to stop failing millions of children in this country. And indeed, “some of the toughest critics of education schools have been educators themselves” - myself included. It's promising to see so many of these new innovations coming from outside of the traditional system—Relay grows out of Teacher U, which was founded by leaders from top charter organizations—Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and KIPP; and High Tech High’s master’s program grew out of a charter school’s need for more practice-based training and experience working with the specific populations served by the school. Innovations like this won’t reach the necessary scale, but if they can disrupt our way of thinking enough and demonstrate real results in student achievement, we just may stand a chance at shaking things up in academia.

Powerful Teacher Voices

Last week and last weekend, teachers rallied in Washington, D.C., for the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action. Organizers of the March reportedly met with senior USDOE officials, including Arne Duncan, who reported “a lot of common ground.” (March organizers evidently disagreed with this characterization.) This in itself is exciting stuff—let’s keep this dialogue going! And with a star-studded Jumbotron message from Jon Stewart and scheduled speaking from Matt Damon, it’s great to see these critical teacher voices get such visibility! What worries me, though, is the potential for it to become quickly polarizing—“Race to the Top is awful!” vs. “Race to the Top is the best!”, “We need unions!” vs. “Down with unions!,” “It’s all about accountability!” vs. “There’s too much testing!” I’m frustrated with the either / or rhetoric, without the acknowledgment that it will take comfort in the grey area to make progress on these entrenched social issues.

Teacher Tenure Drops in NYC Under Tougher Evaluation Guidelines 
Last week, Mayor Bloomberg announced the end of automatic tenure for NYC teachers, under recent tougher evaluation guidelines. Compared to 5 years ago, when 99% of eligible teachers received tenure (a number that looks similar with statistics in other school districts nationally), this year 58% of teachers eligible for tenure received it, a decision on tenure was deferred for 39% of eligible teachers, and 3% of eligible teachers were denied tenure outright. This is powerful stuff, but of course, only as good as the ability to effectively evaluate. And here, it sounds like more work is still to be done, with so many teachers up for tenure not rated as effective and some teachers complaining that evaluation standards were unclear. But on the whole, this is exciting stuff. Imagine, the ability to understand those teachers who are most effective in driving student achievement—and those who are not—and to reward them with incentives aimed at keeping them in the classroom for the longterm, to impact even more kids over the years. And, even more, to understand those teachers who are less effective, and to (as is happening in NYC) give them more time to improve and get “up to our standards”—gone are the days of the rubber rooms (we hope!).

A study released last week by Bellwether Education Partners highlighted several early accomplishments of the $650 million round one grant program: more national attention on the need for education innovation, emphasis on scaling programs that are proven to work, incentives for partnerships between public educators and private funders, and allocation of federal resources towards defined strategic priorities.

Through the winter and spring, that feeling persisted. My colleague, Brad Bernatek, is from Detroit. (This is perhaps my one chance to tell someone that he’s a Wolverine before he does.) This spring, he was invited to sit on a panel of national education experts to talk about standards and accountability in other school districts around the country. He, too, was compelled by the story of Detroit Public Schools (DPS), and the ambitious efforts of groups such as Excellent Schools Detroit, a coalition of local funders who envision better schools for Detroit’s students by any means necessary. Between Brad’s and my preoccupations with this place, it wasn’t hard to talk us into going back.

This week, Brad and I returned to Detroit to catch up with this group of funders and get their reactions to a very busy spring for education reform in the city. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder unveiled new policy that allows the state to take over any district that is low-performing, announced a new emergency financial manager for DPS (Roy Roberts), and pronounced that district “in recovery,” allowing the state to override existing contracts and establish an alternative central office called the EAS (Educational Achievement System), that will serve the lowest-performing schools in the district. State legislators passed teacher tenure reform. Dramatic reform at this level has not been seen since the early days of Joel Klein in New York City or in post-Katrina New Orleans. Oh, and before all of this happened, Roberts’ predecessor, Robert Bobb, laid off every teacher in the district last May.

While some may feel that these changes are a little like ripping the steering wheel out of a car (a Ford?) while you’re heading down Interstate 94 at 70 miles an hour, I am here to tell you that a few people in Detroit believe it’s good news.

Here’s why:

• Some believe these policies will remove a lot of road blocks and give reformers a green light to redesign a dysfunctional and chaotic system that is long overdue for an overhaul.
• Emergency Financial Manager Roy Roberts is seen as a credible and well-connected leader for this newly structured system – A driver with a good track record, if you will. On paper, he’s a former GM executive. But one local funder told us that he’s also a strong, visible community leader in his own right, as well as a major philanthropist. He isn’t an educator, but his responsibilities will require more management prowess than direct content expertise, as he will sit above the DPS and the EAS. Also, he will have the talents of Doug Ross, founder of the CMO New Urban Learning and a local hero in education reform circles, leading DPS’s new charter school office.
• The local philanthropic community – as represented by the reform leaders participating in Excellent Schools Detroit – remains committed and focused on the success of schools and students. They’re keeping their eyes on the road. ESD partners are engaging directly with Mayor Bing and Mr. Roberts to ensure reform efforts at DPS align with the potentially dramatic changes that to come with redevelopment. The leadership of The Skillman Foundation and United Way, in particular, are recognized widely for their vision and voice, and are further supported by the coordinated efforts of their partners W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, McGregor Fund and the Detroit Regional Chamber. Right now, they have to be the headlights and turn signals – making sure that implementation heads in the right direction. And you can bet they will continue to be the dashboard that helps all of us understand what progress is being made.
• There are untapped talents and resources in Detroit. We heard a lot of folks talk about leveraging the local assets that already exist in the community. It’s not just about the wealthy elders who have stayed. It’s also about the many young, innovative, energized people who are interested in getting involved. See the virtual network of doers at Michigan Corps as an example. Collectively, they will be the gas that fuels the long-term success of this effort.
• Out-of-town talent is also beginning to roll into Detroit. TFA has returned to Detroit with a corps of 100 teachers. The Strive Network is sharing their model, which we’ve held up as a great example of collective impact, with local leaders. And our friends at Mass Insight are also sharing their school turnaround model. Kiva, the online micro-lending organization, is even starting its first US-based effort in Detroit.  It’s beginning to feel like Detroit is getting the attention it deserves. Let’s hope this talent does not behave as road-trippers at a rest stop.

Reflecting on our visit and where New Orleans is five years later, I am hopeful. We came at a time when just about everything is unknown (Who will fill the remaining key leadership positions on the new leadership team? Will Detroit get help from the major national funders, like Broad and Gates? Where will the Mayor prioritize investments for the city’s redevelopment?), and a lot will change in the coming months. Obviously, there will be many challenges ahead, but I think it’s also an important time for the rest of us to say, Folks, start your engines!

As stated by one foster care advocate I spoke with last week, “Youth in foster care have one problem: they have no adult to parent them for a certain period of time. Every child needs parenting every day and every other intervention hinges on that.” While that sounds obvious, the systems and supports for youth in foster care often fail to fulfill the gap left by the parental void. And many youth change foster care placements multiple times while in care – only 25% of kids in care have 2 or fewer foster homes. Can you imagine moving families, homes and schools more than twice within a few years?

Here are some take-aways on how to create environments where critical and creative thinking come together:

Develop Universal Trust
• As I watch Hunter describe all the moving parts and roles, I can only imagine how his students feel when hearing this. It sounds very complex, not to mention the fact he has them reading social and political theory along the way. However, to my surprise the students aren’t concerned. They trust their teacher and most importantly each other because they have a “deep rich relationship together.” Hunter realized that he didn't have to control every conversation and told them that their collective wisdom was greater than his own. I have a feeling this was a part of his teaching philosophy from day one; sowing the seeds of trust so that his students would be ready for anything.

Embrace Ambiguity as an Opportunity for Innovation
• Hunter said "The World Peace Game is about learning to live and work comfortably in the unknown." My favorite example of this is when he describes a student from one of the poorer countries seizing the oil fields of a neighboring country without provocation. Everyone was shocked. They come to find out later that the country with the oil fields was planning an offensive to dominate the world. If she hadn’t acted they would have succeed. This student was able to see what was going to happen long before others. This event prompted a discussion on whether having a war to prevent a larger war is a right course of action-an amazing teaching opportunity that could never have been designed.

Provide the Guidance, So They Can Go Wild
• For some reason many people believe that creativity only happens when there is a lack of structure or order. Consequently, that means creative people have no process and that rules constrain. Whenever I hear that I'm always surprised because every creative person I've worked with - architect to musicians has a process that provides a structure that they use to channel their thoughts. So don't buy into the notion that framing a situation or providing structure destroys the creative process. Hunter has provided a lot of structure and guidance, but has been able to do it in such a way that still invites participation by choosing the role of “clock-watcher and clarifier."

Expect Greatness
• Age ain't nothing, but a number the late, great musician Aaliyah use to sing. The World Peace game carries this tune in its message that we should underestimate children or anyone for that matter. Hunter has his students read The Art of War by Sun Tzu and why not? If you expect greatness you get greatness and students will rise to the challenge. One of the most amazing parts of the talk is when one of the students explains how through playing the World Peace Game he was able to understand Sun Tzu. Through the power of play students are able to take in and understand what seems out of reach.

What are some things you took away from Hunter and his students?

From my own experiences volunteering in government primary schools in the poor neighborhoods of Bangalore, children were hardly fazed by teacher absenteeism and misconduct. It’s far from surprising that the Education for All (EFA) agenda has been widely criticized globally for having a one-dimensional focus on increasing access to education for children around the world, while not focusing enough on the need to improve learning outcomes.

Given that, we’ve seen many approaches to this challenge come into play—the Fast Track Initiative, invests in a partnership model to support the development, monitoring, and evaluation of education reform at the global and country levels. The World Bank’s strategy on Learning for All acknowledges rapid changes globally and calls for a new focus on learning instead of schooling. The recently released Global Compact on Learning from the Brookings Institution argues for reprioritization in the education sector, focusing on early childhood education, basic literacy and numeracy in the primary grades, and a emphasis on livelihood skills and transitional support to secondary education as the key drivers of change.

Yet despite these new calls for focus, and for all players to come to the table and join in the common fight to improve education, I can’t help but feel a little lost in the muddied waters of this movement. We’ve heard these messages time and time again—that education is critical for the development of individuals and nations; that we need to move together in a common direction to improve learning outcomes for all. Yet it’s clear that despite the fact that everyone agrees on the critical importance of education, the global movement to change the status quo has failed to capture the attention of the public, and has failed to truly move the bar on delivering quality education to children in the developing world. Efforts to make change are disjoint, operate in vastly different contexts, and often present confusing or competing messages. I wonder to what extent we can even speak of a “global education movement,” given that there has been no single, unifying strategy to improve learning outcomes to point to. What will it take to chart a common strategy, what roles will varying stakeholders play (government, international organizations, private sector, foundations and NGOs, communities, parents and youth), and what unit of analysis should we work within—globally, nationwide, provincially, or within cities and communities? I think of how education reform is organized in the US, or exciting examples of partnership, like Strive, that operate in a city and its surrounding regions, and wonder how meaningful it is to talk about a global strategy that is supposed to operate in 192 countries with 116 official languages, with vastly different states of development and experiences of childhood.

Without negating the importance of identifying high-level priorities, or of sharing important lessons to be learnt across countries and contexts, this movement needs a clear strategy, through a manageable unit of analysis. It needs to define the unique position that different players take to address critical challenges in education, and identify specific ways that we can better work with each other to drive better learning outcomes for kids.

We need more examples of great strategy on improving education in the developing world. What examples do you have to share?

The film posits that there is too much homework for all students, starting at too young of an age, which ultimately detracts from children’s time spent with their families and their opportunity to enjoy “just being kids.” It also makes the point that students are under too much pressure to focus on their future, particularly college and career, at too young of an age. It also frames college as an option that isn’t for everyone and that we shouldn’t approach K-12 education as such (it doesn’t address the idea that college as an option that is available to everyone). Another segment of the film notes that an increasing focus on achievement within traditionally “academic” subjects limits students’ opportunities to explore other potential gifts and passions such as music and the arts. As I took it in, I was struck by the film’s seemingly false dichotomies and all or nothing propositions. I don’t believe that an academically rigorous curriculum has to exclude music or the arts or different learning styles. I believe that homework can be a powerful tool for student learning and mastery as well as parent engagement. There is also an evidence-based connection between homework and student performance and achievement (a point that the movie cites, prior to making a plug for other schools to do as a “homework free” school in Wyoming has done).

I was also struck by the position of privilege of the students and families in the movie (with one token-esque exception). In general, the students and families portrayed were white, middle to upper-middle class, with personal familiarity and experience with post-secondary education and professional careers. These are parents concerned that their children are losing their childhoods because of too much homework, too much pressure, and not enough opportunity to find themselves and their passions. These are families where, with less (or ideally no) homework, fewer tests, and less rigorous experiences (one recommendation at the conclusion of the film was for students to avoid taking Advanced Placement courses, one route towards earning tuition-free college credit while still in high school), the large majority of these kids would still go onto be accepted into and thrive in college and life.

The film left me wondering how this can possibly align to all of the efforts to increase the readiness – academic, social, emotional, and financial – for college among low-income students, first-generation students, and students of color whose parents are likely not able to offer the same level of support, engagement and know-how as many of the parents in the film. Its messages left me baffled in their contrast to programs like that in Washington State’s Federal Way School District, with its Acceleration Program that automatically enrolls qualified middle and high school students in advanced classes, including Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate. In the Acceleration Program, students who meet standard on the state’s standardized tests are automatically enrolled in advanced classes. Parents of qualifying students have the option to opt their children out of the classes, and students who do not automatically qualify are able to opt-in. Though the program is still relatively new, it has seen early success in increasing the number and diversity of students in advanced classes. Over two-thirds of 11th and 12th grade students enrolled in advanced classes this year, and nearly two-thirds of 11th and 12th grade students of color enrolled in advanced classes. Federal Way recently received a grant to develop an assessment program for its Acceleration Program to understand student outcomes over time.

In his report Justin points out the need for access to education on a global scale, especially in some of the poorest countries. “Of the 1.5 billion young people in the 12 to 24 age group, 1.3 billion live in developing counties (World Bank 2007) and there are more than 67 million children not enrolled in primary school around the world.” He goes on to discuss U.S. corporate philanthropy in global education. Here are some quick facts for your perusal:

• AMOUNT OF GIVING: U.S. Corporations give $.5 billion/ year to education while giving $7 billion/year to global health related work, with most companies giving less than $1 million annually to education
• TYPES OF GIVING: Most contributions are in the form of cash (70%) in comparison to in-kind donations (products and services) and most are not directed towards the geographic areas of highest need
• WHO GIVES THE MOST: Out of the main sectors giving to education the energy and technology sectors give the most ($24 million combined) followed by consumer and materials companies
• WHO GETS THE MOST: Emerging economies (China, Brazil, India) as well as Mexico receive the most funding, however geographical focus of funding depends by industry and its corresponding business ties to geography

Most companies’ reasoning for giving to education ties back to business needs. Some companies give to education to develop new global market opportunities, to build community relationships, or to develop the workforce in communities of operation, among a few. However, most companies are missing out on the big bets of giving to education and are losing the full potential of their giving both for their business and for the people they aim to impact. This is where CSV comes in.

Justin begins to probe in his report on the need for companies to start “leveraging their assets and minimizing liabilities. Education must be linked to education goals, assets linked to economic opportunities, and companies must innovate, influence product design, and develop reach and networks both amongst each other and within the communities they serve.”

A few off the top of my head CSV-like ideas include:

• Technology companies (Microsoft, Vodafone, Motorola, Nokia) who already invest in global education, could develop hardware or software to use mobiles phones for learning. This would mean integrating new product software onto existing affordable phones or even developing new phone hardware that could generate a profit in emerging markets, and also have an impact on providing access to education in areas of most need 
• Technology companies could cluster (and collaborate) together to develop a “package of services/products” that provide technology access in the classroom. For example: Cisco building a network infrastructure while Dell or Microsoft developing affordable technology solutions for learning
• Chevron and Shell both invest in communities in which they operate such as the Niger Delta. Oil companies such as these could place an added focus on education programs, outside of the already funded STEM activities. By focusing on an education pipeline this could provide future return on investment. Company resources such as providing mentoring, and internships could also be leveraged to both serve the company’s future workforce development as well as community workforce development.

The one thing that struck me was the vast different in spending of U.S. companies into education versus health (7%), and I think part of it comes back to shared value. It seems a lot more apparent what the opportunities for health-investments might be (creating new demand for products, workforce health productivity) and it’s more apparent to companies, as so it seems. As we continue to brainstorm new CSV opportunities for global education, I turn to you! What shared value opportunities do you see for U.S. companies in global education?

Although many things have been cited as the cause of the “Creativity Crisis” from the increase in TV watching to the structure of our current education system, what Kim and others have zeroed in on as a solution is the need to expose children to creative problem-solving. Kim found that "the creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children's creativity." In President Obama’s State of the Union he said that “this is our Sputnik moment” and has since met with leaders in Silicon Valley to understand what it will take to support the innovation needed to get America’s economy back on track. At the root of innovation is creativity, which is the vehicle that allows us to see where and how something can be improved.

So with all of these studies, polls, and presidential calls for action, what can we do to address the creativity crisis that’s at the root of innovation? For the rest of 2011, I would like to bring you along as I start to answer this question and identify some potential models that are addressing the need to cultivate creativity. Before I lead you on the journey, I thought I would share with you one my own personal experiences in trying to solve the “Creativity Crisis.”

After spending years working with companies on innovation, I found myself wondering more and more what would happen if we started earlier. What would happen if creativity was cultivated from day one? What better way to answer this question than immersing myself in the thick of it – Middle School. While working in design strategy, I joined Citizen Schools, a national organization that partners with middle schools across the country to provide extended day learning opportunities. The thing that attracted me the most to Citizen Schools was its commitment to establishing communities of learning through connecting parents, teachers and students to the community by grounding learning in real world experiences.

Along with two friends, I became a Citizen Teacher in their Apprenticeship program and created a twelve-week curriculum, “Design It!,” based on design-driven creative problem solving. Design is an ideal way to bring together these students’ energy, enthusiasm and desire to leave a mark on the world, primarily because it is an inclusive process that can channel their ideas. Citizen Schools’ approach to bringing in the community to be partners in learning, gave me an opportunity to not only expose kids to design thinking, but also to remind them that learning can be fun and a vehicle to impact the world around them. In essence this is the power of creativity and what creative problem-solving can do for not only young people, but also the world.

We centered the apprenticeship on solving a problem of the student’s choosing – changing their lunch experience. Rallying around a school issue, brought kids together that would normally not interact. What a change from the beginning of the class when the students self-divided themselves by grade, gender and English proficiency! Central to the design process is empathy – empathy for those you are designing for and for your teammates. The students evolved into this new mindset because of the balance of instruction and creativity we provided in our interactive exercises.

These activities had a mix of auditory, visual and kinesthetic components in order to insure that every child could participate in something he or she felt comfortable in while learning some new.

At the end of the program our students not only mastered design skills, they also gained empathy for each other and the people who operate their school. As a result of the approach, we had universal participation in a class where 95% of our students were English learners. Students at the beginning of the program, who could barely make eye contact, were now explaining their project proudly to friends, family members and teachers. The most rewarding part of this experience has been seeing our students look at learning in a new way. Some went on to math and design enrichment camps over the summer, while others have decided to recommit to their classes for the following year.

Needless to say I left the experience with more questions than answers, but what I can say is that we must create environments where convergent and divergent thinking can thrive and children and youth feel their contributions matter. Working with Citizen Schools increased my commitment to creativity and put me on a journey to want to learn more. I hope you will come and join me throughout 2011 as I discover what organizations, professors, parents and young people are doing to foster creativity.

As my colleague Rajni points out in her recent blog post, “New York.. is still struggling to shift from a more punitive approach to juvenile incarceration to less-expensive community-based programming for youth. The state has been requesting more Family Court judges for years, but caseloads remain high. Currently, the cost of juvenile incarceration in state-run facilities is as high as $240,000 per youth per year.” Indeed, despite promising efforts around the state, the time has clearly come for reform.

But how can we help catalyze this important transformative systemic reform? 

Last week's Huffington Post called attention to the New York Juvenile justice Initiative (NYJJI) formed last year with an aim toward “better directing philanthropic efforts (and dollars) towards reform of that system.” Support of this statewide, collaborative strategic planning process, in a unique public private partnership, with funding from private foundations, many of whom are members of NYJJI, and from a public agency, is certainly an innovative role for funders to take on.

As Penny Fujiko Willgerodt, executive director of the Prospect Hill Foundation (one of the project funders) explains, “All this stuff has been happening all over the place, and it became clear that [there was a need for] one coherent, strategic planning process to get everyone on same page. A way that this could be coordinated to achieve maximum impact.”

Indeed, funders in New York are playing a range of important roles in supporting coordinated reform of the juvenile justice systems. Beyond grantmaking to individual organizations, what role can funders play in such efforts?

1. Visibility: As pointed out in the Huffington Post, “The donor community has been great.. People pay more attention to the issue [because of their involvement].”
2. Expertise: Key thought leadership has been provided by funders who have spent years building expertise in juvenile justice reform and in systems reform on other topics. These funders often bring a deep understanding of the players and what has and hasn’t worked in the past, as well as perspectives from their national work or work in other geographies.
3. Different Perspectives: Timothy Silard, president of the San Francisco-based Rosenberg Foundation, the largest California-based private funder of criminal justice policy reform advocacy, recently called on the philanthropy community to draw upon their “unmatched ability to bring together both likely and unlikely allies -- not just reform advocates, but also businesses and community leaders, law enforcement, policy makers, and others -- ensuring that we move beyond issue silos to find common ground, share resources and ideas, and focus collectively on the task at hand.” Ensuring that government agencies, private organizations and advocacy organizations alike have a seat at the table for reform is a critical step.
4. Infrastructure Support: What FSG calls “collective impact” requires significant investment of time and resources. Funders can play an important role in supporting things like backbone organizations, the creation of shared measurement systems, or aligned strategic planning processes like this one.

So, I’d offer a slight reframing to this African proverb, thinking about the groundfloor learnings of juvenile justice reform in New York State: If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go together. If you want to go farther, you go together, with funders as partners, not just checkbooks.

Where else have you seen funders playing an innovative role in supporting collective impact efforts? We'd love to learn from you.

But she also has a point – California ranked 43rd among all states in per-student funding this year at <$9K per child. All schools – private, public, charter, traditional --  are endlessly fundraising from non-governmental sources to fill the gaps. Wouldn’t a nice policy fix that just puts more money in the pot solve all of our problems here?

As state budget cuts begin to be implemented across the country, the line item for public education is always one of – if not - the largest number. This large target, combined with the failures of the existing system make it easy for your average state senator or representative to say, “We’ve got to cut some of this system out.” Many argue that our public education system is no longer something worth paying for – and no one is willing to fight for a system that -- can we all agree? – is not perfect. But who is out there pushing for a better public education system, one that isn’t just focused on cutting more from the state budget?

Teachers unions are traditionally the heavy-hitters in this arena. Everyone, including their critics know this. Michelle Rhee has famously made the point that teachers unions have historically done a helluva job advocating for teachers’ rights. But today teachers are more likely to be the targets of criticism, from Waiting for Superman and Bill Gates to state legislatures. Every day there seems another example of teachers losing their advocacy clout – This month’s pink-slipping of all teacher in Detroit Public Schools being one of them.

From its early days, the charter movement (certainly in California) has invested in policy advocacy for school choice to ensure that charter-friendly policies would give this alternative market a slice of that education budget. So organizations such as the California Charter Schools Association lobby state legislators, but CCSA will never really be able to lead an agenda that goes beyond what’s best for its charter school members.

At the local level, grassroots advocacy groups, led by parents and community members, are getting smart and may be able to have success at shaping local policy. In California, Parent Revolution (based in Los Angeles) and Great Oakland Public Schools are beginning to raise the profile on key issues. On a larger, multi-state scale, Stand for Children and the emerging StudentsFirst.org (Michelle Rhee’s effort) are trying to organize the grassroots. These efforts, with the exception of five-year-old Stand for Children, are still in their infancy, however, and have yet to demonstrate true influence with legislators.

So who can credibly fight for better system-wide change?

Leading place-based philanthropic funders of all sizes have an opportunity to play an important role as an interested party without special interest -- and they can do it visibly or behind the scenes. Here are two recent examples:

• The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County recently engaged in a successful campaign to increase funding for early childhood education in the county. As a result of their effort, county residents passed a property tax measure that will direct $5M to support all-day kindergarten in district schools and double the number of available pre-school slots for at-risk children.
• The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has long been committed to education policy reform in California. Earlier this month, the Foundation announced the creation of the California Education Policy Fund, to be managed by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors with the help of Capitol Impact, a lobbying firm based in Sacramento. By setting up this $3.5M fund outside of the Foundation, Hewlett and RPA hope to attract additional partners and funding who will support their policy agenda.

Have you seen a funder play an effective advocacy role in shaping education policy reform at the local or state level?

However, making the shift from prosecuting 16-18 year olds in juvenile court has not been easy. It is far more expensive to prosecute youth in juvenile court, partly due to the fact that juvenile justice systems are currently not equipped to handle a potential growth in the juvenile court-involved population. New York, for example, is still struggling to shift from a more punitive approach to juvenile incarceration to less-expensive community-based programming for youth. The state has been requesting more Family Court judges for years, but caseloads remain high. Currently, the cost of juvenile incarceration in state-run facilities is as high as $240,000 per youth per year. In his recent State of the State address, Governor Cuomo emphasized juvenile justice overhaul as a cornerstone of his efforts to reduce state deficits by closing underutilized facilities and supporting less expensive community-based programs. Yet the Governor has not introduced any proposals on to address the age of criminal responsibility. North Carolina had high hopes for raising the age from 16 to 18 this year, but two proposed bills died in the finance committee in the last two sessions, due to pressures around budget cuts. Making the case for these reforms is challenging due to the initial cost of the change. Amidst budget crises and a general trend to close facilities and adopt less expensive approaches, juvenile justice systems struggle to identify ways to accommodate the corresponding growth that would occur by introducing 16-18 year olds into the juvenile population.

Initial steps to raise the age of criminal responsibility may be slow, but ultimately, these efforts go hand in hand with a more fundamental shift towards less punitive, therapeutic models to address youth offending. The ultimate savings to taxpayers ensured by reducing recidivism long term and providing youth the support they need out of adult prison is surely preferable. In states like New York, where initial steps to close facilities and identify more cost-effective ways of reforming the system are beginning to take shape, careful planning and an assessment of the implication of raising the age must be ongoing. How do you think states should prioritize raising the age in a tough budget climate?

At the same time there has been much talk and fanfare around greater accountability for schools, particularly for teachers. “Pay for performance” bills connecting teacher salaries to evaluations are being proposed in many states. This is absolutely the right direction, but too often the rhetoric is about justifying lay-offs and education cuts and lacks any commitment to support teachers to improve.

Missing from the headlines is the connection between these two trends in education, which are inevitably headed on a collision course. It’s laudable to push for raising the standards for education, but it’s irresponsible to meanwhile take away the support for teachers and students to succeed in this endeavor. As budgets decrease, teacher to student ratios increase, funding per pupil decreases, wrap around support systems are scrapped, and ultimately student achievement goes down.

While teachers have a demonstrated profound impact on student achievement, one could argue that policymakers making decisions to not raise taxes, not cut programs that are ineffective, or not entertain a number of other options to responsibly fund our youth’s education also have a profound impact on student achievement.

On a national level, the dialogue is headed in the right direction. In Wednesday’s speech given at TechBoston Academy in Boston, President Obama acknowledged the need for increased fiscal austerity but firmly refuted the idea that cutting education is a responsible means to this end, saying “we cannot cut back on job-creating investments like education.” He also drew the link between needing to invest in supporting teachers while building towards a system of greater accountability.

Everyone wants greater accountability, but not everyone is owning up to the responsibility they have in the results produced if we decide to underfund education.

The news from Madison has painted a grim picture of the future of collective bargaining rights for public employees, including teachers, nationally. The protests there have been going on for weeks, getting national and international attention; in California, where I work, sympathy protests are being staged (though presumably without the pizza deliveries). At the time of this post, Governor Scott Walker does not appear to be changing his position, the state’s Democratic lawmakers are still absent, and the suspension of government business is taking its toll on an already crippled state economy. This bitter freeze makes Lambeau Field look like a nice picnic spot.

 In New York City, the Department of Education (DOE) and City Hall did not exactly take to the streets, but it did publish a list of nearly 5,000 teachers who would be laid off in a “worst case scenario” of state budget cuts of $1.4Bn to the city’s education budget. The move was seen by the city’s teachers union as a “political maneuver to create panic” in a  NYTimes article, designed to alarm parents and ease passage of a bill that would allow the DOE to lay off teachers based on performance, rather than seniority. Call it an act of education policy terrorism.

And in Philadelphia, the district’s Renaissance Schools Initiative, which aims to turn around 18 of the city’s public schools, has incited communities and teachers to take action -- Students at West Philadelphia High School walked out of classes on a recent Friday afternoon, and a rally of parents, teachers and students demonstrated outside of District offices last week. Protesters “expressed frustration at the constant changes … and their perceived inability to speak out without facing negative consequences.” This "Renaissance" is perceived as throwing the baby out with the bath water.

In each example, the institution in power is aiming for dramatic change, and an un-empowered stakeholder group resists that change. We have forgotten those old saws of “stakeholder buy-in” and “collaboration” in the rush to “get it done.” This is not to say that consensus-building is the only way to achieve change, but in communities around the country, a greater sense of the collective impact that must be achieved would be helpful. Until that happens, it’s not surprising that fear is driving today’s education debate to a fevered pitch. Rather than letting that fear cripple progress, let’s hope that there are education leaders out there who are courageous enough to include these stakeholders in the change-making process.  Where have you seen collective impact done well in education reform?

OK, maybe you’re thinking this is turning into more of a history lesson than a conversation on the current state of education in the U.S. and, in full disclosure, I was a history major in college.  But hang in there with me. Matthews goes on reflect on these trends and raises the following question, ”If we have managed to be the world's most powerful country, politically, economically and militarily, for the last 47 years despite our less than impressive math and science scores, maybe that flaw is not as important as film documentaries and political party platforms claim.” It’s an interesting question that took me to a different conclusion than Matthews. Few would argue that being the world’s most powerful country has enabled the U.S. to run up an outsized financial debt, but the same can likely be said of human capital, where the U.S. has been able to import talent from around the world to compensate for the mediocre performance of our K-12 education system.

That brings me back to Sputnik and Von Braun. Would the U.S. have rebounded from its Sputnik moment and beat the Soviet Union to the moon without Von Braun and his colleagues? Foreign nationals have played an important role in the success of the U.S. economy: coming to take advantage of the world-class higher education system and staying afterwards to provide an important source of brainpower, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. In my mind, this seems like a more likely explanation for the disconnect between U.S. stature and educational performance. Like the economic parallel, we have “borrowed” human capital at will from around the world and have taken that for granted. But like our financial situation, the world’s appetite for lending the U.S. their human capital may be waning. A 2009 study entitled, “Losing the World’s Best and Brightest” provided some survey data supporting the anecdotal perception that foreign nationals studying in the U.S., particularly from emerging markets such as China and India, may increasingly be more likely to return home after graduation than in the past. In many ways this is a good thing, as it points to the fact that these students are much more optimistic about prospects in their home countries.

But what does that mean for the U.S.? It means that a world-class K-12 education system is more critical than ever for the prosperity and well-being of the U.S. The efforts of the Obama administration to transform K-12 education in the U.S. should be viewed as a solid first step, not to restore a lost golden age of K-12 education but to address the fact that the U.S. may need to rely more and more on “homegrown” talent in the future. That could be a win-win for the global economy, with U.S.-educated foreign nationals contributing to the growth and prosperity of their home economies while offering Americans the opportunity to create a world-class educational system that produces graduates that are ready to contribute to the creative and technical expertise necessary to “stem” the tide of this STEM gap.

I loved middle school and teaching middle-school aged kids. They were still full of the wonder of discovery, and as a teacher, I could shape and mold their views of the world. At the same time, they were old enough to understand sarcasm. I needed that. I couldn’t have taught elementary school and I tip my hat to those well-rounded, kind, energetic, and really really really really patient people who choose to do so.

I loved middle school and teaching middle-school aged kids. How inspiring to see them connect math to the future they envisioned for themselves. Or when they solved complex problems with a child’s unique vision. Like the 7th grade girl who, in 15 seconds, without putting pencil to paper, solved this problem: “You have 100 animals. Some are chickens. Some are rabbits. There are 360 legs. How many are rabbits.” When asked how she did it, she replied “I imagined all the rabbits standing on their back legs like people. So all 100 animals had 2 legs on the ground. That’s 200 legs, which means 160 legs in the air and that’s 80 rabbits.” I would still have been writing “2x+4y=360”.

I loved middle school and teaching middle-school aged kids. Of course I loved my Palm Pilot too, but I still got rid of that piece of junk when it just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

So I’m going to put my consultant training aside that tells me to run the numbers, and just speak from my own experience. I would get rid of middle schools. I don’t think it makes sense to take 11-14 year-olds, when they are going through a huge physical and emotional change, and put them in a new school environment with a new type of schedule and a less nurturing environment. I don’t think it makes sense to isolate them where they have no younger students who will look up to them as role models, and no older students to model their behavior after. I don’t think it makes sense to perpetuate a school structure that often leads to behavior issues that get in the way of teaching and learning. So my vote would be to get rid of middle schools and have more K-8 or K-12 schools. After all, we all know what happens to a bungee cord if you put too much strain on it. It snaps.

What is it going to take? From at least a decade of investments in structural reforms, more attention needs to be paid to instruction. Large foundations have invested billions of dollars in down-sizing large schools into small learning communities, relaxing local requirements in hopes of unshackling innovation, and introducing business management approaches into public school organizations. But structure needs to be balanced with instruction.

One promising approach is building direct structural linkages between high schools and post-secondary education AND integrating instructional approaches that better prepare students academically and socially for success in college. Addressing both structure and instruction, early college high schools and middle colleges are showing initial successes in critical outcomes such as high school graduation and college enrollment. Philanthropic foundations that take seriously what research and evaluation have shown and integrate those findings into future grant-making strategies are poised to make significant contributions to improving American education.

As countries like India and China continue to rise economically and socially, America will need to invest more in education to dramatically improve low-performing schools. Some argue that home and culture, as portrayed among “tiger moms,” are more important for student success. While parenting certainly matters, what goes on in schools and in classrooms can also matter tremendously. Our country needs to grasp this moment and invest wisely in building a world-class education system.

Victor Kuo, PhD, is a Senior Consultant in FSG’s Strategic Learning and Evaluation Center. He recently joined FSG last year.

The Good: U.S. Department of Education launches dashboard.ed.gov.

Also this week, the DOE launched the Education Dashboard, an easy to read, top-level report-out of 16 indicators that tracks student outcome data at the federal and state levels. The effort at transparency and common metrics should be commended.

The intended use of the Dashboard is what’s most interesting to me – using data to increase civic engagement about education! The website urges readers to use the data to “spur and inform conversations about how to improve educational results – conversations among families, teachers, administrators, policy-makers, the business community, and other interested stakeholders.” Implicitly, this instruction encourages us all to become part of the solution and raise public accountability.

This is a welcome shift from the previous administration that reflects a sensitivity to how data is used by people (and institutions) we care about. It’s GreatSchools.org’s philosophy of user interface applied to national policy. Parents, teachers, students, and voters can all understand the data as it’s presented here. But what kind of engagement can we hope for? No dashboard can have enough influence on Congress’s votes to approve another round of Race to the Top-like funding levels for NCLB v. 2.0...

The Bad: Another unfunded mandate?

All signs on the proverbial wall point to an enormous funding vacuum once ARRA/Race to the Top funds dry up. The Republican Congress is taking a hardline approach to cutting spending across the board and a return to 2008 funding. When No Child Left Behind was passed in 2002, the economy had hit a bump with the dotcom bust, but state budgets were nowhere near as grim as they are today. Even Arne Duncan is quoted in EducationWeek this week as arguing that money doesn’t matter: "There's no price tag for fixing NCLB, it won't cost a nickel."  But is that really true? Is it possible to get the results we are looking for with no additional monies, or, more likely, the shrinking budgets that we are seeing in states like California?

The Bold? What will NCLB v. 2.0 look like?

As President Obama sets the stage for rewriting NCLB, the “boldness” of the effort is in question. Realistically, the political climate is not interested in “bold;” it’s unclear whether Obama will be able to rally his own party to support his administration’s vision. But I, for one, think the best possible outcome here would be to see thoughtful, ambitious policy approved with bi-partisan support at a level of funding that makes sense for states and rewards what works for kids.

At the end of the day, are we willing to put our money where our mouth is?

We welcome your thoughts on how NCLB v. 2.0 should be realized. For some thoughtful commentary on the State of the Union address, check out this post from Justin Cohen of MassInsight.

The Bad: Pressure to control illegal immigration led to the defeat of the DREAM Act, now pressure to control the debt may defeat fully funding Pell grants

By 2050, Texas, California and many other states will be majority Hispanic.  This population also greatly lags other populations in college graduation rates.  It’s time legislators stopped getting bogged down by rhetoric about amnesty (which the DREAM Act is not) and started acting responsibly to improve education outcomes for this population because they will play an increasingly important role in the economic growth of this country.

On that same note, in the debate about funding for the Federal Pell Grant Program for low-income students, the discussion on national policy is not where it needs to be.  While protected by stopgap legislation until March, there is great concern that Pell Grant’s budget will be slashed at that point.  It is widely known that affordability is one of the single strongest barriers to retention and success of students (See Public Agenda report for more).  Yes, we are in a difficult budgetary time, but underinvesting in our education is not the way to spur the economic growth to get us out of this mess. 

The Bold: A national funder and local community work to catalyze student dreams

Meanwhile, communities cannot afford to wait for national policy to catch up with the realities of poor educational outcomes.  The Lumina Foundation is a national funder of higher education reform that has taken an active role in inspiring change.  As part of one of their signature initiatives, Achieving the Dream, Lumina gave Houston Community College (HCC) a grant to improve its use of data and pilot and scale reforms that would improve the success of community college students.  HCC developed learning communities pairing their student success course and developmental education courses with core subject classes and saw a 10 point jump in course completion for African-Americans and a 3 point jump for Hispanic students. 

A local funder, The Houston Endowment provided further support to scale Achieving the Dream to all colleges in the Gulf Coast region of Texas.  And they didn’t stop there.  Now The Houston Endowment is investing in a new initiative by Houston A+ Challenge, Preparing to Dream.  Inspired by Lumina’s initiative, Preparing to Dream aims to improve post-secondary access and success by reaching students in high school and helping to improve paths to college.  These initiatives have successfully involved a broad community of philanthropists, schools districts, educators, local government, and nonprofits, providing a model for catalyzing change across a community. 

In this tough economic climate, it is imperative that we not turn our backs on the dreams of our youth and our future.  The challenges to improving educational performance are big and will only become bigger tomorrow, unless there is a concerted effort to reverse the trend that includes all stakeholders at both the local and national level.

The Good: Under Klein, New York has seen gains in graduation rates and NAEP scores

Klein put in place tougher promotion guidelines for students in 3rd through 8th grade, implemented a rating system for schools with real implications for those that persistently failed, worked with the teachers union to make changes to seniority transfer rights, and tested out monetary incentives for teachers, principals, and students. As noted by Bob Schwartz, academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (and cited in the New York Post), schools under Klein experienced “the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country.” New York City’s graduation rate for regents and local diplomas increased from 31,000 graduates in 2002 to ~50,000 in 2009. And as Klein noted in his farewell letter, “At CUNY colleges alone, the number enrolled as first-time freshmen has increased by more than 9,000 students (from 16,000 in 2002 to 25,500 in 2009), with Latino and African-American students leading the way.” NAEP scores in New York schools increased 11 points in 4th grade reading and math, compared to a 1-point increase in the rest of the state and a 5-point increase nationally.

The Bad: Incoming Chancellor Cathie Black Already Faces Opposition

As incoming Chancellor Cathie Black steps into her new role, parents, educators, and education experts are engaged in a debate about the merits of her appointment. In November, a group of teachers and other stakeholders protested her appointment by attempting to apply in-person for the position she was vacating – chairwoman of Hearst Magazines – stating their lack of news experience shouldn’t make a difference. Will Black be able to overcome the doubts of others, while maintaining the gains made by her predecessor? No way to know quite yet – but she certainly faces an uphill battle.

The Bold: The Center on Reinventing Public Education Points to Four Courses of Action for Districts to Improve Talent Management

In November of 2010 the Center on Reinventing Public Education released “Talent Management in Portfolio Districts,” a review of New York City and Washington, DC to examine how these “portfolio districts” who oversee a range of school types (district, charter, whole-school reform models, etc.) are changing the way human capital is managed. CRPE identified four courses of action that they suggest districts take to transform talent management:

1. Assign talent strategy to a senior reform executive
2. Distinguish strategy from routine transactions (thinking holistically about how a talent management system can meet human capital needs vs. executing on administrative human resources items)
3. Redesign policies and practices to support flexibility and performance
4. Change the culture to focus on performance

The Good: Community Center for Education Results launches civic initiative to address the urgent need to improve education in Seattle
The Community Center for Education Results (CCER), backed by The Seattle Foundation, is a great example of what we mean by a backbone support organization. CCER’s goal is to double the number of students in South King County and South Seattle who are on track to graduate from college or earn a career credential by 2020. Led by people who are plugged into the community, CCER is driving toward a common agenda and shared measurement systems for the south Seattle region in the form of a Road Map for Education Results. As a backbone support organization, CCER helps in implementing the Road Map by coordinating the efforts of other partners, but also by providing crucial capacity in areas like data collection and analysis and conducting public awareness campaigns. This effort is still nascent, but is starting off down the right path for a successful collective impact effort.

The Good: Gates Foundation Measures of Effective Teaching Project Finds Student Opinion Matters to Effective Teaching
The Gates Foundation is partnering with top education experts and researchers to figure out what makes for an effective teacher. After studying thousands of lessons, instituting additional in-class tests, and speaking with students in seven large school districts around the country, the project just released four major preliminary findings. First and foremost? Students know good teaching when they see it. Additionally, student opinions on how organized and effective a teacher is matter. So take note, educators. If you want to understand and improve teacher effectiveness, don’t forget to ask the kids themselves.

The Bad: Student to School Counselor Ratio in the US? 457-to-1.
The American School Counselor Association tracks student/school counselor ratios in public schools across the country and by state. While the organization suggests a 250-to-1 ratio, the national 2008-2009 ratio stood at 457-to-1. Only five states (New Hampshire, Wyoming, Vermont, Mississippi, and Louisiana) had ratios lower than the recommended level. In my home state of California, the ratio was 814-to-1 - the worst in the nation. As education budgets have shrunk across the country, guidance counselor positions have been drastically reduced. These counselors play a critical role in helping students access and prepare for college, resolve academic and personal problems, and succeed in school. If we want our young people to achieve, we need to reverse this trend and find a way to increase the number of counselors. After all, how can we hear student voices if there is no one there to listen to them?

The Bold: Michelle Rhee Launches StudentsFirst with Plans to Raise $1B in First Year
Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, recently announced that she’s launching StudentsFirst, an organization with a mission to build a national education reform movement. Rhee’s new organization boldly plans to raise $1 billion and attract 1 million members. Why? To bring pressure to bear on policy makers, ensuring that students have access to high quality teachers and great schools, that school systems are efficient, and that parents and communities are engaged in education. As part of that effort, StudentsFirst will be encouraging students to become members, share their stories, and advocate for the changes they want to see in education. Given Rhee’s history in D.C., we have no doubt that StudentsFirst will be effective at pressuring elected officials and policy makers on behalf of children. At the same time, parent and community engagement, which was an Achilles heel for Rhee in D.C., will be a critical success factor for StudentsFirst. So can Rhee succeed with StudentsFirst where she failed with DCPS? We hope so, because if Rhee can incorporate the voices of students, parents, and communities, she can create a grassroots movement that will carry significant weight in shaping education policy.

So now back to my son, Gabriel. The next morning, I showed him the picture of the gun, praising him on the accuracy of the drawing. I asked him why he drew it, and he said, “Dad, it’s not a real gun. It’s just pretend. It doesn’t shoot bullets.” As he ran off, I reflected on how glad I was that I had asked him (and even more importantly, that he hadn’t said “Because the voices told me to…”).

The Good: Hidalgo ISD: Early College High Schools as a District-wide Strategy
Jobs for the Future just released a fascinating case study of Hidalgo ISD, a south Texas district that serves a student body that is 99.5 percent Hispanic, 90 percent economically disadvantaged, and 53 percent limited English proficient. Starting in 2005, the district committed to having all of its students earn college credits in high school. Preliminary results are impressive. Ninety-five percent of the Class of 2010 graduated with college credits; two-thirds had a full semester of college under their belts. These students are college ready - not because their high schools say so, but because they’ve taken and passed college-level courses. Plus, those credits can significantly reduce college costs and time to degree. College ready + lower costs = more college graduates – now that’s an equation we can all understand.

The Bad: Private Giving to Universities Down
In 2009, giving to universities and colleges plummeted 11.9 percent, the greatest annual decline since the Depression. Even worse, those donations are becoming increasingly concentrated. In 2009, gifts to the 20 universities that raised the largest amounts of money, including Stanford, Harvard and Cornell, accounted for 26.2 percent of all giving. But Pell Grant recipients attend these colleges at rates well below the national average. Thus, universities become engines of inequality. This contraction comes at a time when state higher education funds are drying up. We’re not going to improve completion rates of underserved students by perpetuating a donor cycle rigged to favor rich institutions. Let the Ivy League fend for itself. Donors’ money would be better spent on colleges who actually need the cash.

The Bold: Target to Launch Read with Me Initiative
Target recently announced plans to donate more than $500 million over the next five years as part of its Read With Me initiative, aimed at helping children become proficient in reading by the end of third grade. It will be exciting to track how Target might apply its design and marketing expertise, leverage its relationship with millions of parents, and harness the input of an A+ list of content partners including Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone and IDEO to advance the national literacy movement.