DK Presents at the Colorado League of Charter Schools Conference
Posted: February 24, 2012 Filed under: Blended Learning Leave a comment »
Photo by Evan Semon at the Colorado League of Charter Schools 2012 Conference
DK’s Director of Special Projects Matt Samelson presented at the conference yesterday on “Integrating Blended Learning at New and Existing Charter Schools.” Matt’s working on a research project with school leaders James Cryan of Rocky Mountain Prep and Marcia Fulton from the Odyssey School, who both presented with him. James is implementing blended learning at his new school in its planning stages, ahead of opening next school year; Marcia is exploring integration of blended learning into Odyssey’s existing program.
Kristina Tabor, DK’s director of communications, gave a talk on social media basics. She offered an overview of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, plus how to navigate social media’s power to connect with the school community.
Thank you to our hosts, the Colorado League of Charter Schools!
Hot Lunch with Mike Petrilli
Posted: February 10, 2012 Filed under: Hot Lunch Leave a comment »Fordham Executive
Vice President Mike Petrilli spoke to a full house at the Hotel Monaco today. It was perfect timing for a visit from a Washington policy expert, given the US Department of Education’s ESEA waivers that states like Colorado received yesterday. But Petrilli is fluent in many issues, and for this visit to Denver, his topics ranged from ESEA to the Common Core, school governance and pension reform.
If you missed him, head to Ed News Colorado to read his blog post on governance and hear his talk from lunch today.
~ Kristina
The Educator Pipeline Task Force & Other Teacher Effectiveness Policies in the Works
Posted: February 8, 2012 Filed under: Donnell-Kay Projects Leave a comment »DK Fellow Shelby Edwards wrote today’s round-up of initiatives to improve teacher licensure, preparation and induction systems, all issues of great interest to Donnell-Kay.
The Colorado Department of Education and the Colorado Department of Higher Education have teamed up with TNTP (The New Teacher Project) to form the Educator Pipeline Task Force. This group is working to revamp the licensure, preparation, and induction system to align with Colorado’s new educator evaluation system. The Task Force will meet February 24th at the Department of Higher Education, and this spring it will present licensure and induction recommendations. Find information including meeting details, past minutes, and presentations on the Taskforce’s website at http://co-lip.org/
The State Board of Education will hear about teacher licensure and educator effectiveness tomorrow during their regular meeting. Informational presentation and discussion regarding licensure will be Thursday, February 9th, at 10:45 AM. The State Board of Education meetings are open to the public and broadcast live on their website.
In the state legislature, Stand for Children Colorado is supporting House Bill 12-1135. This bill has been introduced and was assigned to the Education committee. HB 12-1135 encourages higher standards and incentives for cooperating teachers (those teachers with whom teacher candidates spend their field hours or student teaching hours). The key piece of this bill is to place student teachers in classrooms with coordinating teachers that have earned an effective or highly effective rating. Additional elements of the bill include professional development for coordinating teachers, and providing alternative evaluation methods for coordinating teachers to account for the time student teachers are leading the classroom.
At the federal level, we’re keeping our eyes on the GREAT (Growing Excellent Achievement Training Academies) Teachers and Principals Act. Colorado Senator Michael Bennet has been the leader in supporting this addition to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The GREAT Act would provide grants for training academies that use rigorous evaluation, hands-on training, and an emphasis on boosting student achievement. Introduced in June 2011, the bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
Download an overview of these programs and a timeline of initiatives here!
Majors Matter ~ by Alexander Ooms
Posted: February 1, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Alexander Ooms is Donnell-Kay’s Senior Fellow.
Film trivia: The movie The Graduate has only one mention of an undergraduate major, and it belongs to the character that is not a graduate. Who?
Mrs. Robinson intended to major in art history but left college early. The movie contrasts her unrealized ambitions with the promise of Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), who has just completed an unspecified degree and has only to decide which of the many roads to opportunity he wants to take. Simply being the eponymous Graduate is enough to confer considerable potential.
One of the current mantras of education reform is to give students academic skills to be the Graduate and to have the opportunity to follow any one of several professional paths. And rightly so, for the modern economy is ruthlessly demanding of ever-greater skills and abilities, and many entry-level jobs now require analytical thought and problem solving commensurate with advanced education.
But while more and more students are attending college, the number that major in areas which hold the most future promise are essentially unchanged. We are getting kids into college but dropping them off without a map.
The value of a college degree is the focus of a recent report from Georgetown University titled “The College Payoff.” Over the last decade, the earning premium between a high school and bachelor’s degree has widened, so that on average and over a lifetime, a Bachelor’s degree is now worth $2.8 million. But the report also found that there is an increasing emphasis on what someone studies and which occupation they pursue.
Earnings rise linearly based on educational degree attained, from under a million dollars for high school dropouts (remember, over 39 years of work) all the way up to lifetime earnings of over $3.6 million if one has a professional degree (law, business, medicine):
However aside from the general boost in earnings from an advanced degree, other factors mattered as well. Most of these are ones we are born into: age, gender, and ethnicity. The other two are ones we control, and they are related: degree subject and occupation.
What the study also found is that the value of advanced degrees can be tampered – or even trumped – by the subject one studies and the type of work one performs.
Compare the lifetime earnings of two groups of workers with bachelor’s degrees: computer software engineers (average of $3.6 million) and managers of retail stores (average of $1.8 million). Same degree, but half the earnings. A college degree gets you in the arena, but it is the occupation that confers the best seats. And the key to many occupations is what one studies.
The report continues:
“Earnings today, then, are driven by a combination of educational attainment and occupation. Some occupational clusters pay better than others— for example, the STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] occupations earn much more than teachers, regardless of educational attainment.”
So one might expect that students would be flocking to STEM and similar programs, right? After all, part of the rationale behind the mantra of college prep, particularly among underserved populations, is that this will increase economic prosperity and mobility and reduce income inequality.
But as the economist Alex Tabarrok pointed out earlier this year, American students are not pursuing degrees in the fields that have the most demand and economic potential. Tabarrok looks at the change in college majors over the past 25 years, and what he finds is disconcerting:
Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has remained more or less constant.
Fifty percent more students, yet the same number majoring in STEM subjects. That’s an astonishing fact. So what are students studying instead? Well, the number of students majoring in the arts, psychology, and communications has more than doubled. And, as the Georgetown study also points out, we have a lot of education majors.
To look at this through the current cultural zeitgeist, here is a blog that lists the majors of the top 1% of earners, based on data from the 2010 American Community Survey. The most common majors among elite earners were neuroscience, economics, public policy (yes, public policy), biochemistry, and zoology. Which college majors are least likely to end up in the 1% pool? Cosmetology services and culinary arts, teacher education, mechanical engineering related technologies (whatever that is), fine arts, and court reporting.
STEM may be this generation’s version of the “one word: plastics” scene in The Graduate – the advice of an older generation that is utterly meaningless (and perhaps abhorrent) to its descendants. But we increasingly need to make sure students understand that it is not just a college degree but what that degree is in that determines their professional careers. We need to not just whisper “plastics,” but to explain that college is only part of the equation. The other part is what you study when you are there. Majors matter.
Hot Lunch with Jeff Piontek – Audio & Presentation
Posted: January 20, 2012 Filed under: Hot Lunch Leave a comment »
Many thanks to Jeff Piontek, who joined Hot Lunch today at the Magnolia Hotel in downtown Denver.
If you missed his talk, you can listen via podcast.
Follow along with his slides.
Or, read his commentary in Ed News Colorado.
Hot Lunch returns February 10 with Mike Petrilli, Executive Vice President at the Fordham Institute.
Denver Public Schools’ graduation increase is encouraging – but there’s still work to be done
Posted: January 20, 2012 Filed under: Kids Off-Track to Graduation Leave a comment »Two years ago, the Donnell-Kay Foundation issued a report: “A Call to Action: Getting Denver Public Schools Students Back on Track to Graduation.” This report provided an initial analysis of students off-track to graduation and students who had already dropped out but were still eligible to return to school. Now, DK’s Associate Director Kim Knous-Dolan writes about how DPS is doing, 2 years later.
Numbers update:
“A Call to Action” found that over 7,500 students in DPS high schools (approximately 42 percent) were off-track to graduation. In a recent presentation to the Denver School Board, the DPS administration reported there had been a slight decrease in the number of off-track students in DPS, with about 40 percent of students currently off-track to graduation.
And, today, the Colorado Department of Education reports that DPS’ on-time graduation rate increased significantly – up 4.3 points – to 56.1 percent. Similarly encouraging is that their dropout rates have decreased substantially, falling from 11.1 percent in 2006 to 6.4 percent in 2010” (Start with the Facts Report, A+ Denver, 2011).
This is all very positive news.
Recommendations Update:
“A Call to Action” also gave a high-level overview of the quality of school options available for this group of students (often labeled “alternative schools,” but now referred to in Denver as “Intensive Pathways Schools”).
The report called on the district to conduct a deeper, ongoing analysis in an effort to better support early identification of struggling students, provide effective supports/interventions, and ensure high quality educational options for them to graduate with a meaningful diploma.
Specifically, it called upon DPS to do the following:
- Use data to understand the population and drive options;
- Create a portfolio of high quality school options;
- Ramp up prevention systems;
- Build capacity in high schools to get kids back on track;
- Expand outreach to re-engage youth; and
- Implement a meaningful 100 percent graduation policy
DPS has pursued many of the recommendations in the report, but there is still a great deal of work to be done. An important next step is to figure out why the graduation rate is increasing and why the dropout rate is falling. Then, DPS should invest in those strategies that are working.
DPS should be commended for its recent efforts to segment the student population based on academic need. In the most recent Strategic Regional Analysis (SRA) to the Board in fall 2011, DPS provides a detailed and thoughtful analysis of how off-track students’ schooling needs should be better aligned with district offerings.
Over the past few years, the district has also been integrating an early warning system into high schools (commonly referred to as the Stoplight Report) in an effort to flag students early in the process of falling off-track to graduation. Plus, there are several new school offerings and credit recovery options. It is still too early to say what success these schools and programs are having with students, but it is something to watch closely. And building partnerships with organizations such as Colorado Youth for a Change and City Year will help the district more effectively recover and serve dropouts and students off-track to graduation.
There’s still work to be done:
Although we are seeing positive trends in DPS with this population, there is still an immense amount of work to be done. Graduation rates must continue to dramatically improve and college remediation rates must drop. Getting to the state “on time” graduation average in the next few years (73.9 percent for 2010) would be a good short term goal, with a longer term goal of 100 percent graduation.
DPS must improve policy and practice changes around this population of students, including:
- Adequately funding students through weighted student funding;
- Increasing attention to rigorous and fair accountability metrics;
- Having meaningful and strong instructional and leadership capacity building;
- Increasing proficiency-based pathways; and
- Implementing effective interventions.
New Multimedia on Blended Learning
Posted: January 12, 2012 Filed under: Blended Learning Leave a comment »DK’s Matt Samelson spoke at the Edu Tech Innovators Meetup last night about the foundation’s blended learning projects.
(as the videographer, I apologize for the shaky video)
Tom Vander Ark at Colorado Succeeds' Legislative Academy
And Tom Vander Ark was in Denver this week to speak at Colorado Succeeds’ Legislative Academy. The powerpoint presentations from Vander Ark and his co-presenter Marguerite Roza will be available later today on the Succeeds website. In the meantime, there’s also new podcast up online with a nice overview of his point-of-view on digital learning (click to download the mp3).
~ Kristina Tabor
Colorado wins $17.9 million in Race to the Top
Posted: December 22, 2011 Filed under: Donnell-Kay Projects | Tags: rtt Leave a comment »With the help of The Donnell-Kay Foundation, Colorado now has $17.9 million more to advance education reforms. The money comes from the third round of the US Department of Education’s Race to the Top. DK gave the Colorado Legacy Foundation $15,000 towards writing this application. Colorado lost out to other states in the previous two rounds and also last week in a bid for early childhood education funds.
DK’s Executive Director Tony Lewis: “We are very pleased to have been able to support Colorado’s Race to the Top effort this year. Commissioner Hammond, Chief of Staff Jill Hawley and the entire CDE team did a fantastic job in writing the proposal and we have every confidence in them and Colorado school districts to improve K-12 education with these new funds.”
Chesterton’s Fence ~ by Alexander Ooms
Posted: December 21, 2011 Filed under: Innovation Leave a comment »Alexander Ooms is DK’s senior fellow.
I recently came across – in, of all places, an essay on tax polices for capital gains — a topic I think resonates in any discussion on education reform: The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence.
I like fallacies. As a somewhat directionless undergraduate philosophy major, I lost interest in the Heidegger seminar, but I became increasingly entranced by basic logic and understanding how people think. Fallacies are potholes in rational thought. Understand how to recognize them and one is more able to avoid them. Help other people see them and you are more likely to find consensus.
The short version of the Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence is this: don’t ever take down a fence until you know why it was put up. Simple enough. However, particularly as it relates to education reform, the long version is worth reading:
“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle […]. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
There are a lot of fences in education policy, and there is often a rush to dismantle them. In many cases this is justified. In some it is not. But in all cases, it is worth asking: why was this particular fence erected in the first place?
Take, for example, the single salary structure of most public school districts (including Denver). This policy establishes strict uniform pay differentiated only by years in the job (and highest educational degree obtained). It’s hard to argue in the current day that an elementary gym teacher and a high school science teacher have jobs that should be paid exactly the same – or that a gym teacher with more years in the job should always be paid more. But before we decide to tear down the single-salary fence, why is it there?
Well, the single salary schedule was put in place in the early 20th century, in large part to prevent salary discrimination against women, who were often paid less than their male counterparts — particularly as teaching was one of the few jobs that was socially acceptable for women at all. At the time, there was not much in the way of HR systems, it was not easy to compare or monitor pay systems. Without a clear problem of discrimination, and without other mechanisms to prevent it, a single, centralized plan made sense. The single-salary fence was put in place with a pretty good purpose in mind.
I would argue – for lots of reasons – that this fence should now be taken down, but I would not argue against its original intent. And if one wants to dismantle this particular fence (which, please note, is not an argument against either unions generally or collective bargaining), one should make sure that any change maintains the reason it was enacted in the first place. Whatever pay program might replace single salary systems, it should not discriminate against women (or anyone else). Understanding why a policy was enacted should help clarify a discussion to see if it is still serving the purpose for which it was intended.
It’s one of my general beliefs that a lot of the educational fences that reformers want to take down are there for reasons that many would have wholeheartedly agreed with at the time. Many of these fences were built to protect the same principals that reformers now invoke to argue for their removal: fairness and equity.
The arguments in education these days are all too often about protecting or dismantling a policy and rarely about why the policy exists and if there is a better way to achieve the same goals. My hope is that applying the fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence allows for more common ground. When confronted with a policy fence, we should try to recognize the principals inherent in its creation, and if they are still served or if another structure is more appropriate. We should all want fences placed so that everyone can be on the same side.
The Link Between School Finance & Governance ~ by Kim Knous-Dolan
Posted: December 19, 2011 Filed under: School Finance Partnership Leave a comment »Kim Knous-Dolan is Donnell-Kay’s Associate Director.
Last week I attended the School Finance Partnership Meeting (Ed News coverage here), and as I listened to the discussion, it was clear there are there are still deep philosophical differences about how best to fund (and at what level) education in Colorado.
It caused me to reflect back on two recent white papers that are part of a series on school governance sponsored by the Fordham Foundation.
I realize the word “governance,” especially coupled with school finance, will make people’s eyes roll into the back of their heads. I agree with Rick Hess when he says governance is not sexy. And, although topics like technology, quality teachers, and Tim Tebow (in my opinion) are sexy, governance is a hugely important issue that gets little play, but deserves considerable attention. And, in this case, the governance questions relate to the school finance debate happening now in Colorado.
The first paper, “Fractured Governance of Resources and the Need for a Coherent and Fair System of Funding to Support High Quality Public Schools,” by Cynthia Brown examines the history of funding inequality in America, largely related to governance structures in American K-12 education.
“The Machinery that Drives Education-Spending Decisions Inhibits Better Use of Resources,” by Marguerite Roza describes the confusing and chaotic nature of an education system that has multiple political layers from above (federal, state, etc…) and also political layers from within the system (e.g. labor, parent, and community groups) that largely dictate school board funding decisions.
In Brown’s article, Boalt Law School Dean Christopher Edley, Co-Chair of the Federal Commission on Equity and Excellence recently said of school finance policy:
There is no area of public policy that better illustrates the contemporary chaos of our federalism [characterized by] federal, state, and local [governments including] 15,000 local school districts plus 3,000 charter school entities…[we have] property taxes but also state revenues and some federal revenues…[There is] utter confusion in the minds of the public as to which level of government is responsible for particular policy choices, particular failures, particular successes…The school finance reform issues brings into high relief this conflict over roles, responsibilities, and accountability.
Both these articles are worth a read and may provide some insight and fodder into how our funding system is intricately linked with our school governance system. If we want an education system that provides quality outcomes for all children, it may be time for Coloradoans to think deeply about different governance and funding structures. At the very least, such conversations will help us surface more of the deeply held beliefs that either guide us, or sometimes hold us back.
