I was privileged recently to present at an “IgniteDC” venue, an interesting format where you provide 20 slides for a five minute talk. The slides are automatically advanced every fifteen seconds. The results can be interesting, occasionally disjointed, and occasionally memorable.
I don’t know where mine landed, frankly, but it led to great conversations afterward – and I was doubly privileged to meet a few teachers in the audience who thanked me for the presentation. It is sobering to have heroes thank you just for talking about the challenges that define their careers. They are the ones who must be thanked.
Nevertheless, the state of U.S. education is somewhat dire. There are a few bright spots coming up this year: federal dollars tied to innovation and accountability; a new film that spotlights the needs of our most under-served children; graduate degree programs focused on leading a new education system, rather than navigating the current broken one; and more.
My hope was to begin the conversation, and trust we would have a more noble exchange of views than has characterized other public policy initiatives lately.
UPDATE 5/3/2010 – the video has been posted to Blip.tv and iTunes – embed below:
5 Comments
Why do the innovations need to scale? Why not break up our large schools into smaller units. If we’re going to move away from the books/paper/pencil/sit in rows of the 19th century education, why not move far away.
How about multi-age teams of students solving problems? How about small school-within-a-school settings that change based on the needs of students over time?
One of the major reasons my 2 children (both very smart, both with different needs for types of settings) are in private schools is due to the overall size of the public schools available, both in terms of total environment and individual class size.
Excellent questions – and some of the ideas you mention have been tried. Multi-age teams of students solving problems is a great method, from my non-education perspective. Why do they need to scale? Because children in large urban districts never seem to get the taste of these great ideas. For a variety of reasons, these become “dropout factories” starved of resources. Breaking up large schools into “schools-within-a-school” itself would be an innovation, and your question implies scale! Let’s say the data show this is a worthwhile innovation – is it only good for your children, or do the kids in Detroit, Indianapolis, NYC, Miami, etc. also deserve that approach? How do we do that? How do we scale that idea to the most underserved? The system isn’t working until it’s working for more than just my kids or yours; it isn’t working until all kids have the same options for life that our kids have.
ok, if you are using scale to mean horizontally across the US, I agree. Also, while money will help some school districts, the problems kids in poor neighborhoods have spread far beyond school. Back in the ’80s my Mom worked in Harlem, helping coordinate bringing services to needy kids through the schools. I think things have only gotten worse since then. Really fixing education for poor inner city and poor rural districts is going to take a lot more than fixing education.
There are no easy answers and what works in one environment may not work in another. We need a basket of options so local educators can pick the ones that fit their population. The best example I ever saw was a school run by the students. Kids are bright, innovative, and creative. So pair them with adults and let them go. The worst that could happen is that it won’t work and students will continue to fail as usual.
Having over the past week attended three high school graduations and seeing over twenty-five hundred students’ parade across the stage it truly makes you think about the education system. Thankfully I am past having any children of my own in school but I work with high school age youth each week. In our area we have a population quickly out pacing the school capacity. Our district went from two high schools to seven over this past year. We have new schools being built but we can not use them because we can not afford to hire teachers. Do I have answers? No. But I do realize that until we start putting our money and support behind our educators, instead of those that entertain us, actors, professional performers and athletes, we will never solve this problem.
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