PILOTed

KIPP Foundation CEO Richard Barth Speaks in Westchester

If your parents are in the top quartile (wealth) in the US, there is an 80% chance you will go on to college. If your parents are in the bottom quartile, there’s an 8% chance.

But what if we found ways to change that? What if we found that a certain way of teaching could give kids born to the lowest quartile a 95% chance of graduating high school and an 87% chance to go on to college?

This is the record of KIPP, and as Richard Barth, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, told a group of us on May 22, it’s a record shared by some pockets of public schools and the best charter schools in the country. We had assembled because Westchester Community College offers a series of salons, where they bring the community into people’s homes to discuss literature, media, politics, sports, and arts with national figures.

How does KIPP achieve its results with at-risk students? Barth revealed that KIPP is predominantly middle schools, and the program features

1. Curriculum that includes both character and academics
2. High expectations for each child, that he or she will graduate and go on to college
3. Schools days lasting from 7:30 AM to 5:00 PM
4. Homework practically every night
5. Individual support for  any student struggling to learn
6. High degree of autonomy for each school
7. Training, coaching, and supervised teaching for new teachers
8. Variety of assessments of teaching used to inform ongoing teacher professional development
9. Compacts with parents that children will come to school every day with their homework completed

Other high performing schools outside of the KIPP system may have found other effective systems, but this is what has worked for KIPP. KIPP has 125 schools, reaching 40,000 students. KIPP’s growth goal is to double the number of students it serves, but that’s just a tiny fraction of the 55 million students in K12 across the US, or 31 million students in poverty (receiving free or reduced price lunch).

Barth asked the audience a question, “How many of the kids in this country woke up today and went to a school that gave them a shot to compete in today’s global economy?” After a pause, he answered, “1 in 11.”

He then pointed out, that while we would all like to change this immediately, no one knows how to do it; there is no magic pill. And even if someone did know what to do, we don’t have the systems or the resources to effectuate this type of change overnight. Barth proposed a more realistic goal: suppose we wanted to change this ratio to 1 in 3 students over the next ten years; wouldn’t that be remarkable progress and something more likely to be achieved?

Someone in the audience proposed that we look at the charter schools as education laboratories, learn what they do best and how they do it, and then figure out how to apply those lessons to public schools. She asked how KIPP was interacting with public schools.

Barth said that KIPP decided that they would focus their efforts and resources where they had enough control to ensure success. KIPP has conducted leadership academies, where principals or district administrators spend time in KIPP schools and learn KIPP methods, and these have had some success. In terms of KIPP directly working with public schools, the average superintendent lasts for only two years. If KIPP were to set up a program to mentor the public schools in a community, and new leadership came in, what are the chances that the program would continue? (I had the distinct impression that this was not a hypothetical situation, but that’s just a hunch.)

As with other charter schools, KIPP has two funding mechanisms. First, KIPP receives state and federal funds for each student, and those funds come from the same pool as public schools. Second, KIPP receives money from philanthropy, and has raised $195 Million since its founding in 1994. It’s clear that KIPP as an organization will not solve the educational problems of the country: they will not have the reach, their expenditure per student is not sustainable over 30 million students, and public schools do not have the flexibility to try some of their methods.

Yet, thousands of kids have been able to graduate high school and attend college because KIPP gave them the confidence, support, and tools.

 

Notes from SIIA's 2012 Ed Tech Industry Summit

 “The education system in the US is a national disgrace.”

So began the opening keynote address by Cengage CEO Ron Dunn at the SIIA’s Ed Tech Industry Summit on May 7.

Massachusetts is currently the number one state in student achievement in the US. But, if it were a country, it would be just 17^th in the world. What does that say about the other 49 states?

Dunn noted that there has been a lot of noise about education reform, and there is a lot of stupid money coming into education, but these are not getting to the root of the problem. Our goals should be to help teachers teach and students learn, not to reduce costs or make backpacks lighter. Dunn went on to comment that inadequate professional development around education technology has been the biggest impediment to change, and that our focus is often distracted.

In the second day’s keynote, Idaho Superintendent Tom Luna described how Idaho is transforming education with the recent passage of the Students Come First laws. He observed that it’s not just one thing, reform has to be comprehensive involving compensation and tenure, managing technology, changing teaching paradigms, giving parents greater voice and choice, and putting the children first.

The first hurdle was pushing the reforms through the legislature. When the education and political leadership looked at all the changes they felt needed to be done, they concluded that they would face just as much opposition if they tried to do part of the reforms or all of them, so they did not compromise on the breadth of the reforms they pushed through the legislature. In fact, they faced so much opposition that they received personal threats along with having their tires slashed. There was so much pressure that any time the legislators went home for the weekend, Luna knew that he would need to recount votes and re-innoculate the swing legislators.

The legislation passed. Tenure has been replaced with a different due-process system for new teachers. Teacher compensation has been raised, and is dependent on a combination of student test scores, parent evaluations, and school administration evaluations. Parents have more choices, students can opt to take individual courses from different schools or providers. All students need to take at least two online HS courses to graduate. And technology and PD are built into school financing so they can’t be singled out for reductions when budgets get tight.

Luna says it’s now up to them to implement. We can’t hide behind excuses that other countries don’t have our diversity or poverty. They may not have our exact problems, but all the countries ahead of us have their own hurdles to overcome, and they have made a commitment to educate all their children. Luna’s goal is not just for Idaho to become first in the US, it’s for Idaho’s students to become global leaders in student achievement and employability.

Since teachers are the number one factor in schools driving student performance, the ability to develop and keep good teachers is going to be critical to Idaho’s success. One small indication of success is that since passage of Students Come First, the number of teachers who have left Idaho to teach in other states has decreased by half.

With a general election coming up this November, Luna is hopeful that interim results will convince voters to stay the course.

In a panel of effectively communicating the power of education technology, Matt Cohen, Tom Whitby, and Frank Catalano pointed out that because there is so little education reporting in the general press, bad reporting gets magnified and distorts what is actually happening. Reporters don’t go into schools and they don’t talk to teachers; they talk with vendors, government officials, and politicians. As a result, persistent myths that get passed on as facts damage efforts to improve schools.

In addition to poor reporting, the trio noted three obstacles to improving teacher and student effectiveness. First, there have been so many different education reforms, many teachers feel that if they just ignore any attempt to change the way they teach, it will eventually go away. Second, if you take bad practice in the classroom and make it digital, it’s still bad practice. Effective change is effectuated through superior leadership that can overcome these and other obstacles. Third, the only tech professional development that most teachers get is one to two days at the beginning of the school year; that’s not enough to modify behavior or impart competence. Technology has to be made part of every teacher’s workday for it to hold up to its promise.

Bob Resnick of Education Market Research showed the growth of K12 education purchases has been increasing by 4.2% per year since 2004, to $18.3 Billion, despite education cutbacks. Comparing 2010 to 2009, digital products were up 17.9%, while the total market increased by about 4%. His data shows that student enrollment is likely to increase at the same time per pupil expenditures are increasing. The fastest growing segments (2010 over 2009 sales) are

• Reading and Math interventions (50% increase in sales)
• Online digital content (35% increase in sales)
• Assessment (35% increase in sales)
• Instructional software (25% increase in sales)
• Interactive Whiteboards (23% increase in sales)

While sales of some traditional materials are decreasing:

• Library books and services (17% decrease in sales)
• Teacher resource materiuals (13% decrease in sales)
• Guided leveled readers (10% decrease in sales

Resnick’s survey indicates the growth of interactive white boards, with an installed base in 2010 of 1.5 million units, or an average of 20 IWBs per school. Most teachers say that that they primarily use IWB resources that come “from their own imagination and ingenuity.” Resnick commented that the next wave of content development will be for IWB use and for 1 to 1 classrooms.

Resnick’s data points out the shift from print to digital occurring at all levels of education. Cengage’s Dunn, Idaho’s Luna, and panelists Whitby, Cohen, and Catalano demonstrated the complexity of education issues and the need to focus on student learning as the end result. Luna’s statewide initiative in education reform shows how difficult it can be to effectuate systemic change, and is an interesting experiment in top-down education reform. (Of course, that’s easy for me to say, I’m in NY, and it’s not my salary being affected.) Maybe, ten years from now, we will no longer start education conferences by pronouncing that the US education system is a national disgrace.

 

Related articles

• Slides and links from the SIIA Social Media Marketing Presentation (academicbiz.typepad.com)
• Imagining the Possibilities in EdTech: Planning (jackcwest.wordpress.com)
• Interview | Fun with StudyDog (edtechdigest.wordpress.com)
• Top 10 21st Century skills taught in schools

Slides and links from the SIIA Social Media Marketing Presentation

Here are the slides from our presentation on May 7, 2012 at the SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit. I was lucky to share the podium with

• Glen McCandless of Focus Marketing
• Charlene Blohm of C. Blohm & Associates
• Ileana Rowe of Corporate Growth, and
• Brandi Brown of ETA Hand2Mind

Each of us had a different perspective on social media, so I know that I learned a lot from them.

Social Media Marketing Full Presentation

View more presentations from mweisburgh.

And here are the Diigo links on social media, plus a few more, that the panelists put together:

http://www.diigo.com/user/mweisburgh/socialmedia

 

The top ten 21st century skills taught in US Schools

1. Sitting still at a desk while someone in the front of the room lectures
2. Preparing for standardized tests
3. Changing what you are doing every 50 minutes, no matter whether you’d actually finished in 10 minutes or whether you needed more time
4. Writing five-paragraph essays incorporating highly scored words such as “paradoxically”, “nonplussed”, and “notwithstanding” while filling nearly all the allocated space
5. Answering even numbered questions (because those are the ones that don’t have the answers printed in the back of the book)
6. Focusing time and effort solely on activities that will be graded, along with the related skill of sticking to a rubric when completing assignments, and being careful not to go beyond the rubric
7. Eschewing tools, technologies, and resources that could reduce time and effort or improve the end result because that would be cheating
8. Forming learning and work groups only with others of the same age, because age is the most important attribute for what a person can and should do
9. Knowing and accepting your place, because your teacher’s and society’s evaluation of your worth as a person is reflected in your grades and test scores
10. Avoiding the things you like to do, but doing what you are told, because learning and work shouldn’t be fun

 

Related articles

• Testing, Testing (06880danwoog.com)
• Key Things Parents Can Do To Make Sure Their Children Are Prepared For The 21st Century (education.com)