Matthew Lynch

Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

Ask An Expert: Helping Students Avoid the Summer Slide

When the school year ends, teachers are happy to have a break from the drudgery of the school year, but they also want students to avoid the summer slide. The summer slide occurs when children lose some of the academic skills and dispositions that they gained during the school year due to the absence and scarcity of quality learning activities during summer vacation. As the old saying goes, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

To succeed academically, children need continuous opportunities to acquire new skills and practice existing ones. This need is especially heightened during the summer months, because children do not have the privilege of being educated by certified teachers. When we think of the summer months, we think of a happy carefree time when children can have fun and unwind. However, we forget about the potential learning opportunities that we can expose our children to. In order to make sure that your students do not experience the summer slide, here are some suggestions that your can give to their parents.

• Summer Programs: Many public and private schools run summer programs for their students. Take advantage of them. They are usually for only half a day and allow flexibility for summer vacations. Contact your child’s school to find out if they offer summer programs.

• Family Reading Program: Set up a summer reading program with your child in which they choose an agreed upon number of grade level books to read per month. Make sure that you consult the child’s teacher or a librarian for advice. In order to show solidarity, the entire family should participate.

• Specialized Summer Camps: Enroll your child in a specialized summer camp. These camps are fun and incorporate hands on activities into their curriculum as well. Some of the more popular ones include computer, science and math camps.

• Pick the Teachers Brain: Conference with your child’s current or next teacher and ask them to suggest summer workbooks, science activities, essay topics, and interesting summer activities for your child. You may even be able to elicit their help in assessing your child’s performance.

• Summer Enrichment: Summer is also a good time to fill in learning gaps. If you know that your child is weak in a particular subject, you may want to set up an enrichment program. Of course, as always, consult with your child’s teacher.

• Learning While Vacationing: If you are planning on taking a vacation this summer, you can turn it into a social studies activity. Ask your child to research the destination’s history, cuisine, popular attractions, etc. Also, once you reach your vacation destination, you can schedule tours of famous landmarks and locations, which will increase their social studies knowledge.

• Summer Journaling: Ask them to write a daily journal of all of the things that they learn each day. Remember, you will need to orchestrate learning activities for your children, because you can’t trust that they will be able to do it on their own.

• Turn Daily Activities Into Learning Opportunities: If you’re at the grocery store with your kids, challenge them to add up the total cost of your purchase. Driving to grandmother’s house? Ask them to find certain colors, shapes, or patterns along the way. If you’re dealing with older kids, think of appropriate variations.

• Learning Locally: Don’t forget about the local park, museum, zoo, aquarium, etc. Your local community is full of learning opportunities that you probably have never thought of.

Preventing summer slide can seem like a daunting task, but thankfully it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to pull it off. All parents need is to be organized and have the right plan. With the list above, you can provide them with some simple strategies that they can use to prevent summer learning loss, without taking the fun out of summer. When the new school new year begins, your students will be armed with the skills that they retained from the previous year and hopefully some brand new ones. This will make your job as a teacher a whole lot better. Good luck!

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Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform, Teachers

4 Tips Cash-Strapped Districts Can Use to Pay Teachers What They Deserve

It’s no secret that teachers in the United States receive little recognition and a salary below their abilities, and that their training after hire consists of professional development that rarely leads to much growth. There is also little incentive for teachers to strive to earn more because pay isn’t based on excellence, but on time on the job. This can lead to quality teachers feeling burned out, with no recourse for better pay for their efforts.

But with a little creativity, this truth can be reversed—even for districts on a tight budget.

Without further ado, here are some things to consider so that teachers can get paid what they’re worth, whether funds are abundant or limited:

1. Rethink the “teachers on an assembly line” mentality. There is a tendency for American teachers to be treated like factory workers. The No Child Left Behind program holds teachers entirely responsible for their students’ performance on state achievement tests, regardless of the many variables that influence students’ performance on these tests. For example, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prepare a sixth grade student reading at a second grade level to perform well on a state achievement test. It is no wonder that standardized testing has caused schools and teachers to panic.

2. Put it into perspective: remember that school principals and other administrators receive comfortable salaries. In addition to concerns about job security, low compensation, and student performance on high stakes test, teachers must also worry about subpar principals who are overcompensated for the successes of teachers. Although administrators deserve to be fairly compensated for their work, their pay does not seem equitable compared to that of teachers. If administrators are to be compensated fairly for the job performed, then teachers, too, should be fairly compensated.

3. Prioritize paying teachers more, and question the assumption that this has to be expensive. When considering these issues, a major mistake made by reform groups is to table efforts at improving teacher salaries because the expenditure does not fit into the school budget. If children are America’s most precious commodity and the focal point of the nation’s educational system, then the lack of funding is no excuse to forgo efforts. Many school reform efforts are cost-effective and can be implemented by resourceful educators. When there is a lack of money, change is contingent upon the faith and commitment level of the faculty and staff. Money should not be wasted on model programs and unsubstantiated trends.

4. Think about the indirectly related factors that will help teachers. Considering factors such as teachers’ professional development, while at first may seem unrelated, can be a key factor for successfully improving teaching salaries as well. When analyzing budgets, it is important to set aside money to hire teachers with the ability to create and teach in-service professional development programs. The ability to train the staff and educators internally will save the school money, and will give the teacher/expert a feeling of usefulness. For instance, a teacher with 30 years of experience and a demonstrated ability to obtain amazing results from her specific teaching strategies might create a professional development seminar to share her expertise. This saves the school an enormous amount of money, and saves the administrator the trouble and cost of hiring a consultant. These savings can then be passed on to the teachers, perhaps in the form of bonuses, etc.

In the end, schools operating with limited funds to support reform efforts will need to be both resourceful and creative in order to affect positive change and strive toward equitable pay for superior teachers. Forward thinking leaders, committed and imaginative teachers, and a supportive community can contribute to change that improves the working environment of our teachers – and their salaries too.

I am sure that you also have some interesting insights on how to pay teachers what they deserve, even on shoestring budgets. So share your thoughts below in the comments.

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Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform

Wasted Data: Student Information Should be Shared

It’s no secret that technology implementation in P-12 schools comes with some serious red tape. While American colleges and universities tend to be at the forefront of innovative ways of learning, childhood education lags seriously behind. A recent PBS study found that while 90 percent of P-12 classrooms have at least one computer, only 35 percent have tablets or electronic readers. The amount of policy writing that goes into allowing “new” technology like tablets, let alone the budget for them, makes it prohibitive for most schools to implement the equipment in reasonable time frames.

But what about technology that already exists in P-12 classrooms, but in less-flashy ways? Consider the database technology behind virtually every school system in the country. Schools have electronic storage of everything from basic address information of students to their in-class progress in an array of subjects. Schools often track other factors too like socioeconomic status and other defining features like racial background and family circumstances. This private data collection on students starts long before the traditional start of school. Early childhood programs in every state keep track of student information and progress too.

The problem with all of this data keeping is that the numbers are usually kept in isolation. Beginning with early childhood education, individual schools do not reach out to each other or across state lines when it comes to student progress and innovative teaching methods. In fact, a recent study released by The Early Childhood Collaboration found that Pennsylvania is the only state in the nation with a system for linking student data across all education programs, from early childhood learning through grade 12. Progressive California has absolutely no data linking programs in place and no plans to start one. As the report points out:

“Comprehensive and connected data on children, programs, and the workforce are used to track progress over time, pinpoint problems, identify underserved groups, and allocate limited resources.”

Despite such a treasure trove of data, student information seems to be recorded simply for posterity. It’s clearly not impossible to share the information (Pennsylvania does it) but states do not seem to be rushing to do it. Such an undertaking would certainly require an upfront cost which could be behind the hesitancy – but I wonder how much of the delay is simply the convenience of the status quo. Student data has always been collected for internal use, or to satisfy specific state requirements, so going above and beyond that is scary territory. How will schools find the manpower for the extra steps of sharing, and analyzing? Who will be in charge of storing the data? What about student privacy?

I understand the logic behind these questions but to me, these are all minor impositions. It has never been easier to connect all of the nation’s student data sets in order to build a better picture of what America’s P-12 student body looks like today, and set goals for improvement based on actual statistics. Like these databases, many education policies are created in isolation. What if the people who wrote those policies had a complete data set to inform their choices? How quickly would education legislation transform from theory to actionable plans based on fact?

The ECDC report recommends that states strengthen their abilities to securely link to student data amongst their schools, and to expand the information that is screened and collected. Some less tangible advice would be for educators and policymakers to realize the value of interconnected student information and begin to consider the true possibilities of combining that knowledge.

Would you support greater sharing of student data across schools, systems and states?

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Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Parental Involvement, Teachers

9 Tips for Preventing the Summer Slide

When the school year ends, teachers are happy to have a break from the drudgery of the school year, but they also want students to avoid the summer slide. The summer slide occurs when children lose some of the academic skills and dispositions that they gained during the school year due to the absence and scarcity of quality learning activities during summer vacation. As the old saying goes, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

To succeed academically, children need continuous opportunities to acquire new skills and practice existing ones. This need is especially heightened during the summer months, because children do not have the privilege of being educated by certified teachers. When we think of the summer months, we think of a happy carefree time when children can have fun and unwind. But we forget about the potential learning opportunities that we can engage our children in. To make sure that your students do not experience the summer slide, here are some suggestions that you can give to their parents:

1. Summer Programs

Many public and private schools run summer programs for their students. Take advantage of them. They are usually for only half a day and allow flexibility for summer vacations. Contact your child’s school to find out if they offer summer programs.

2. Family Reading Program

Set up a summer reading program with your child in which they choose an agreed upon number of grade-level books to read per month. Make sure that you consult the child’s teacher or a librarian for advice. To show solidarity, the entire family should participate.

3. Specialized Summer Camps

Enroll your child in a specialized summer camp. These camps are fun and incorporate hands-on activities into their curriculum as well. Some of the more popular ones include computer, science, and math camps.

4. Pick the Teacher’s Brain

Consult your child’s current or next teacher, and ask for suggestions for summer workbooks, science activities, essay topics, and interesting summer activities for your child. You may even be able to elicit their help in assessing your child’s performance.

5. Summer Enrichment

Summer is also a good time to fill in learning gaps. If you know that your child is weak in a particular subject, you may want to set up an enrichment program. Of course, as always, consult with your child’s teacher.

6. Learning While Vacationing

If you are planning on taking a vacation this summer, you can turn it into a social studies activity. Ask your child to research the destination’s history, cuisine, popular attractions, and so on. Also, once you reach your vacation destination, you can schedule tours of famous landmarks and locations, which will increase their social studies knowledge.

7. Summer Journaling

Ask your children to write a daily journal of all of the things that they learn each day. Remember, you will need to orchestrate learning activities for your children, because you can’t trust that they will be able to do it on their own.

8. Turn Daily Activities into Learning Opportunities

If you’re at the grocery store with your kids, challenge them to add up the total cost of your purchase. Driving to grandmother’s house? Ask them to find certain colors, shapes, or patterns along the way. For older kids, think of appropriate variations.

9. Learning Locally

Don’t forget about the local park, museum, zoo, aquarium, and other interesting places. Your local community is full of learning opportunities that you’ve probably never thought of.

Preventing summer slide can seem like a daunting task, but thankfully it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to pull it off. All parents need is to be organized and have the right plan. With this list, you can provide them with some simple strategies that they can use to prevent summer learning loss, without taking the fun out of summer. When the new school year begins, your students will be armed with the skills that they retained from the previous year and hopefully some brand new ones. This will make your job as a teacher a whole lot better. Good luck!

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Matthew Lynch

Instructional Leadership and Student Performance

According to research, schools that make a positive difference in the learning levels are led by principals who make a positive contribution to staff effectiveness and students under their charge. In the 1980s, instructional leadership was often depicted as “hands-on” leadership in classroom matters. The majority of recent studies report that the involvement of principals in classroom instruction are indirect, and carried out through building a school culture and leading by example.

However, most scholars now find that a principal’s impact on student learning is small, but has an important place in statistical data. Even marginal impact is vital to acheiving desired outcomes, because policy makers still use these findings to justify their emphasis on the selection and training of school leaders as a strategy for school improvement. The role of the principal in shaping the school’s vision and mission is described as the most influential “avenue of effects.”

School context has been found to have a significant effect on the success of a principal’s instructional leadership. Instructional leadership effectiveness should be viewed as an independent effort, but also as dependent on the learning environment.

Successful instructional leaders work with other stakeholders to shape the school to fit its mission. Instructional leaders directly influence the quality of school outcomes by aligning the school’s academic standards, timetables, and curriculum, with the school’s mission. Leaders are more effective when they are clear about missions, and manage activities that fall in line with practices needed for effectiveness.

The lack of clarity of the role of the principal in instructional leadership has been a problem. Instructional leadership has rarely defined practices and behaviors that the principal should model, making it hard to determine what needs to be considered for effective instructional leadership. Assigning clear duties to principals will help to ensure instructional leadership is carried out properly. Once principals and school leaders understand their roles, they can begin the task of leading their schools toward higher success.

 

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Matthew Lynch published in Equity, list, Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform

Top 5 Techniques for Culturally Responsive Teaching

The growing popularity of culturally responsive instruction is slowly causing traditional trends to be reversed. Teachers are increasingly being expected to adapt to the demands of a multicultural classroom. Given the wealth of diversity in our nation’s public schools, it is no wonder that instructional theory is advocating a shift toward a pedagogy that emphasizes a comfortable and academically enriching environment for students of all ethnicities, races, beliefs, and creeds.

Culturally responsive pedagogy is a student-centered approach to teaching in which the students’ unique cultural strengths are identified and nurtured to promote student achievement and a sense of well-being about the student’s cultural place in the world.

Given that a majority of teachers hail from a middle class European-American background, the biggest obstacle to successful culturally responsive instruction for most educators is disposing of their own cultural biases and learning about the backgrounds of the students that they will be teaching. A common side effect of being raised in the dominant European-American culture is the self-perception that “I’m an American; I don’t have a culture.”

Of course this is view is inaccurate; European-American culture simply dominates social and behavioral norms and policies to such an extent that those who grow up immersed in it can be entirely unaware of the realities of other cultures.  A related misconception that many teachers labor under is that they act in a race-blind fashion. However, most teachers greatly overestimate their knowledge about other cultures, which manifests itself in a lack of cultural sensitivity in classroom management and pedagogical techniques.

Here are a few practical techniques to avoid those common pitfalls and become a culturally responsive teacher in an era where this is a necessity:

  1. Get your students’ names right. It may sound simple enough, but a teacher who does not take the time to even know the names of his or her students, exactly as they should be pronounced, shows a basic lack of respect for those students. Teachers should learn the proper pronunciation of student names and express interest in the etymology of interesting and diverse names.
  2. Encourage students to learn about each other. Teachers should have their students research and share information about their ethnic background as a means of fostering a trusting relationship with both fellow classmates.  Students are encouraged to analyze and celebrate differences in traditions, beliefs, and social behaviors.  It is of note that this task helps European-American students realize that their beliefs and traditions constitute a culture as well, which is a necessary breakthrough in the development of a truly culturally responsive classroom.
  3. Give students a voice. Another important requirement for creating a nurturing environment for students is reducing the power differential between the instructor and students.  Students in an authoritarian classroom may sometimes display negative behaviors as a result of a perceived sense of social injustice; in the culturally diverse classroom, the teacher thus acts more like a facilitator than an instructor.  Providing students with questionnaires about what they find to be interesting or important provides them with a measure of power over what they get to learn and provides them with greater intrinsic motivation and connectedness to the material.  Allowing students to bring in their own reading material and present it to the class provides them with an opportunity to both interact with and share stories, thoughts, and ideas that are important to their cultural and social perspective.
  4. Be aware of language constraints. In traditional classrooms, students who are not native English speakers often feel marginalized, lost, and pressured into discarding their original language in favor of English.  In a culturally responsive classroom, diversity of language is celebrated and the level of instructional materials provided to non-native speakers is tailored to their level of English fluency.  Accompanying materials should be provided in the student’s primary language and the student should be encouraged to master English.
  5. Hand out praise accordingly. High expectations for student performance form the core of the motivational techniques used in culturally responsive instruction.  Given that culturally responsive instruction is a student-centered philosophy, it should come as no surprise that expectations for achievement are determined and assigned individually for each student.  Students don’t receive lavish praise for simple tasks but do receive praise in proportion to their accomplishments.  When expectations are not met then encouragement is the primary emotional currency used by the educator.  If a student is not completing her work, then one should engage the student positively and help guide the student toward explaining how to complete the initial steps that need to be done to complete a given assignment or task.  Once the student has successfully performed the initial steps for successful learning it will boost his sense of efficacy and help facilitate future learning attempts.

While popular among educators in traditional classrooms, reward systems should be considered with caution in a culturally responsive setting.  Reward systems can sometimes be useful for convincing unmotivated students to perform tasks in order to get a reward (and hopefully learn something in the process) but they have the undesirable long-term side effect of diminishing intrinsic motivation for learning.  This effect is particularly strong for students who were already intrinsically motivated to learn before shifting their focus toward earning rewards.  Given that one of the prime goals of culturally responsive instruction is to motivate students to become active participants in their learning, caution and forethought should be used before deciding to introduce a reward system into the equation.

A culturally response, student-centered classroom should never alienate any one student, but should bring all the different backgrounds together in a blended format. Teachers should develop their own strategies, as well as take cues from their students to make a culturally responsive classroom succeed.

References

Culturally responsive teaching is a theory of instruction that was developed by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings and has been written about by many other scholars since then. To read more of her work on culturally responsive teaching and other topics, click here to visit her Amazon.com page.

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Matthew Lynch published in list, Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform

5 Facts Everyone Needs to Know About the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Our nation’s public schools play an integral role in fostering talents. They also play a role in building our children’s internal worth. It is therefore not surprising that our schools can assist in reducing our nation’s prison population as well. Here are five facts everyone should know about the school-to-prison pipeline, and how to end it:

  1. An increased prison population costs us all money. Those of us who fall outside the group of perceived misfits who make our nation’s prison population may wonder why the school-to-prison pipeline should matter. Aside from caring about the quality of life for other individuals, there are more tangible issues that arise from this. Each federal prisoner costs taxpayers $28,284 per year, which is about $77 per day.

And that’s just the measurable cost. What isn’t measurable is the indirect impact those incarcerations have on the economy in terms of those prisoners not contributing to the work force.

  1. There is a link between dropping out of high school and going to prison. Sadly, over half of black young men who attend urban high schools do not earn a diploma. Of the dropouts, nearly 60 percent will go to prison at some point. There are also some eerily similar statistics for young Latino men.

In his piece “A Broken Windows Approach to Education Reform,” Forbes writer James Marshall Crotty makes a direct connection between drop-out and crime rates. He argues that if educators will simply take a highly organized approach to keeping kids in school, it will make a difference in the crime statistics of the future. He says:

“Most importantly, instead of merely insisting on Common Core Standards of excellence, we must provide serious sticks for non-compliance. And not just docking teacher and administrative pay. The real change needs to happen on the student and parent level. ”

He cites the effectiveness of states not extending driving privileges to high school dropouts or not allowing athletic activities for students who fail a class. With higher stakes associated with academic success, students will have more to lose if they walk away from their K-12 education. And the higher the education level, the lower the risk of criminal activity, statistically speaking.

  1. Black and Latino men get the short end of the stick as far as this phenomenon is concerned. Aside from the dropout statistics mentioned before, an estimated 40 percent of all students that are expelled from U.S. schools are black. This leaves black students over three times more likely to face suspension than their white peers. When you add in Latino numbers, 70 percent of all in-school arrests are black or Latino students.

If you want to see the correlation between these school-age statistics and lifetime numbers, consider this: 61 percent of the incarcerated population are black or Latino – despite the fact that these groups only represent 30 percent of the U.S. population. Nearly 68 percent of all men in federal prison never earned a high school diploma. The fact that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world is no surprise and the road to lockup starts in the school systems.

  1. Expectations influence student achievement and behavior. Though all people have genetic predispositions, it is ultimately the environment that encompasses the formative years that shapes lives.

In a blog post by Sally Powalski, a 10-year employee of juvenile facility in the State of Indiana, she addresses what she sees every day: young men with no expectations of improvement and therefore no motivation.

Sally says this of the young men who come through her counselor’s office:

“They have been given the message for several years that they are not allowed in regular school programs, are not considered appropriate for sports teams, and have had their backs turned on them because everyone is just tired of their behavior… Why should they strive for more than a life of crime?”

Sally hits the nail on the head with her observations. Children are just as much a product of their environments as the expectations placed on them. Parents on a first-name basis with law enforcement officials certainly influence the behavior of their children, but school authorities with preconceived negative associations create an expectation of failure too. Increasingly, educators are learning how to recognize the signs of textbook learning disabilities like ADHD or dyslexia. But what about the indirect impact that factors like poverty, abuse, neglect or simply living in the wrong neighborhood have on a student’s ability to learn? Where are the intervention programs that keep these students on academic track without removing them from the school setting?

  1. The current way of dealing with “problem” students is not working. When one student is causing a classroom disruption, the traditional way to address the issue has been removal – whether the removal is for five minutes, five days or permanently. Separating the “good” students and the “bad” ones has always seemed the fair, judicious approach. On an individual level this form of discipline may seem necessary to preserve the educational experience for others.

If all children came from homes that implemented a cause-and-effect approach to discipline, this might be the right answer. Unfortunately, an increasing number of students come from broken homes, or ones where parents have not the desire or time to discipline. For these students, removal from education is simply another form of abandonment and leads to the phenomenon called the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

So what’s the solution? Keeping close tabs on drop-out risks is certainly a step in the right direction when it comes to closing the school to prison pipeline. Better academic tracking, in order to notice areas of potential problems early on, and more mentorship intervention when it comes to discipline issues are also important.

Students who are at risk of dropping out of high school or turning to crime need more than a good report card.  They need alternative suggestions on living a life that rises above their current circumstances. For a young person to truly have a shot at an honest life, he or she has to believe in the value of an education and its impact on good citizenship. That belief system has to come from direct conversations about making smart choices with trusted adults and peers.

What do you think K-12 schools can put in place to increase academic success and close the school to prison pipeline?

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Matthew Lynch

Educational Tech: What’s Next?

There is a lot of money tied up in educational technology. In 2012, $600 million was invested by venture firms into ed-tech startups. To put that in perspective, that is 400 percent more than what was invested in the same industry in 2002. It seems that a lot of faith is being placed in the technology that will soon arrive in K-12 and college classrooms and on campuses – but what is actually being created?

Not a whole lot, according to ed-tech industry insiders. Speaking to CNN, a senior financial advisor said that there are not many fresh ideas floating around ed-tech startups. He said:

“Do they have a product that’s actually a solution for someone’s needs, and will the decision makers recognize that it’s a problem? There are lots of gradebooks out there. Don’t tell me you’ve got the first digital gradebook, and also nobody is viewing that as a problem.”

To his point, it seems that most of the ed-tech “advancements” of the past decade have had more to do with utility than the actual learning process. Course management, online communication portals between educators and parents, and even continuing training for teachers have all seen some streamlining as a result of technology. Students can take courses online and that in and of itself is a major stride in individualized learning. Still, the concept of online learning is certainly not considered cutting edge anymore. What strides have been made in the actual process since it was first introduced?

For K-12, major course providers like K12 now offer more scheduled learning experiences where students are expected to be logged in to their courses at a certain time, and possibly even visible on a web cam, in order to get attendance credit. There are also many more course options than when online learning for K-12 students first emerged. K12 boasts 105 courses for high school students alone. But for $600 million – shouldn’t there be more?

Freemium models

Following the successful mobile gaming application business model, ed-tech companies are starting to offer free services with paid upcharges. Consider Candy Crush Saga way of doing business. Anyone with a smartphone, tablet or desktop Facebook access can download the game at no cost. As users progress through the addictive, sugar-laden levels, they are prompted to make small purchases (usually between 99 cents and $3) to gain access to higher levels, add more lives or buy level “boosters” to help their luck. But giving away a product for free? What sort of business sense does that make? In the case of Candy Crush, it has proven to be savvy indeed. The game’s owner King brought in $1.9 billion in revenue in 2013 and its initial public offering earlier this year was valued at $7 billion.

Ed-tech companies are taking notice. Online learning giant Coursera (with $85 million in venture financial support) is experimenting with free courses but a small fee for the certification at the end of the course. Udacity (backed by $20 million from investor Andreessen Horowitz) is looking into monetizing courses through sponsorship opportunities and programs that match employers with promising students. In both cases, the ed-tech companies are not asking for money upfront but instead getting students “hooked” on the offerings first. From a strictly knowledge standpoint, students are the beneficiaries because certificate or not, once learning has been attained it can’t be taken back. From a practical standpoint though, without proof of completed coursework, all the free education in the world won’t translate into better job opportunities or college admittance. So time will tell if the freemium approach to ed-tech offerings will prove as lucrative as other industries but it certainly has potential.

What would you like to see the $600 million in ed-tech investments create?

Read all of our posts about EdTech and Innovation by clicking here. 

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Education Leadership, Matthew Lynch

Relating Resource Allocation to a Performance-Focused Agenda

As the focus on the improvement of learning becomes more central, what educational leaders are expected to do and accomplish through the allocation of resources has changed. Historically, supporters of education were more concerned with the dollar amount allocated per pupil, and they spent much of their political capital advocating for increases from one year to the next.

Educational leaders were responsible for creating balanced budgets with the dollars they had available and accounting for expenditures in a responsible manner– a complex task in large school districts. Little attention was paid to how resources were related to performance or what type of performance was expected. The standards-based reform movement of the past several decades changed the situation fundamentally, by prompting new questions about what the learning standards should be and how educators should be held accountable for improved performance.

In response, educators have become more focused on results, while taking the stance that higher performance cannot be accomplished without adequate resources. Thus, a sea change has occurred, prompting educational leaders to consider how resource allocation is related to building high-performing systems that work for all students. As they take seriously the charge to become more learning-focused, leaders critically examine the equity, efficiency, and effectiveness of existing resource allocation policies and practices and make decisions regarding ways in which resources might be reallocated in more productive ways.

This resource reallocation challenge is as important in the present era of standards-driven reform and accountability for results. Given the considerable variation in the needs, capacities, and contexts of schools, it is striking– though not surprising– that for the most part, resource allocation patterns in K–12 education are relatively uniform.

The uniformity of leaders’ responses to these varying needs may simply signal a safe course: the most easily defended set of decisions in a context of competition for scarce resources. Beneath the surface of this course of action, however, conflicting expectations, tensions, and barriers may be impeding leaders’ ability to think more creatively about how to organize and allocate limited resources and act strategically. These barriers exist at all levels of the educational policy system.

In such a situation, leaders might wish for definitive understanding about the impact of particular investments on student learning, yet the state of knowledge here is incomplete. The highly contextual nature of schools, the variations with which any particular improvement strategy is implemented, the motivational conditions that are present, and the need to adapt strategies to fit specific circumstances all interact with the resources brought to bear on learning improvement goals.

For districts wishing to commence anew with student-weighted allocation systems (whereby funds are allocated on the basis of student types), offering clear-cut guidance on what increments should be assigned to each student type is a crucial first step. However, a definitive response plainly cannot exist in the current state of fiscal allocation policy. The difficulty here is that currently there is no efficient resource allocation system whereby an answer can be reliably extrapolated.

Policymakers are consequently forced into determining fiscal policy without information relating to expenditure on student types. They are forced to do so with no understanding of the workings of allocation policies at different levels (federal, state, and local) either together or in conflict. Policymakers have little clarity on expenditure for different student types at the school level, nor awareness of the types of policies that would be more effective in guaranteeing that dollars reach students in the proposed ways.

School finance today works in opposition to the focused and effective utilization of resources that promote improved education of students. Just as an archaic computer can no longer function properly in a technological environment inundated with the latest software, this nation’s school finance system frozen by a combination of unrelated expenditure policies and administrative plans can no longer serve the needs of an educational system calling for reform.  A new model is required, to do one thing– ensure that every child receives instruction for his or her needs in order to become an involved citizen having total participation in this modern economy.

Current school finance systems fund programs, uphold institutions, and offer resources and staff employment so the school and district administrators can fully execute the multitude of laws and regulations that have become part of public education. However, the methods employed by today’s school finance systems– deploying expenditure levels based on habit and not need, covering up funds’ actual allocations, supporting institutions whether they are viable or not, hypocritically addressing equity, spending resources flippantly, attempting to make adults accountable by compliance and not by results– confuses the links between resources and academic aims that make finance relevant to student performance.

The school finance system evolved in a era in which programs were funded, and students passed or failed without much regard paid to the role of funding in student performance. This pattern was sustainable then, as jobs were available for people with low skills, and the vast majority of workers were not required to be well educated in order to maintain a healthy economy. Unfortunately, that legacy has proven unworkable in today’s highly technological, information-based economy, where low-skilled workers cannot rise above the poverty level and overseas workers are able to compete effectively in the market for skilled jobs, once available solely to Americans.

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

7 Ways Technology Is Impacting Modern Education

Technology in the classroom can be so much more and so much better than the stereotypical cell phone going off in the middle of class. With higher-learning institutions offering up programs like a BSN-RN/MBA completely online , technology can be a major tool, both regarding pedagogical resources and regarding connecting with the younger generation. But how does this work?

The top seven important concepts to understand when examining the use of technology for educational or instructional purposes include:

1) Active engagement with the learning material.
Technology is interactive, and students learn by doing, researching, and receiving feedback. This helps students become passionate about what they are learning. For example, they may study geography using interactive software such as Google Maps or Google Earth, instead of looking at a picture.

2) Use of real-world issues.
This model encourages the use of real-world problems in the classroom. By using the Internet, students can research real issues happening at that moment that are related to the classroom curriculum. This helps students understand that the lesson being taught refers to real problems and real people.

3) Simulation and modeling.
Simulation software helps to bring to the classroom real activities that would be impossible to see without technology. By using specific simulation tools, students can see planetary movements, how a tornado develops, or how dinosaurs lived. Modeling software offers similar features. Instead of the static models used in previous decades, these tools allow students to see the dynamic characteristics of models.

4) Discussion and debate boards and forums.
By using the Internet or software tools, students can create online groups, Web pages, and virtual communities that connect them in real time with students and teachers anywhere around the world. They can receive feedback from their teachers and share questions and concerns about their lessons. By listening to and reading about others’ opinions and feedback, students refine their thinking, reaching higher levels of comprehension and deeper understanding. Online communities also present the opportunity for students to interact with others around the world.

5) Working groups.
Technology-focused education doesn’t involve a class of students learning by themselves, staring at a book. Working groups foster group activities, discussions, and debates, and they encourage the establishment of democratic group dynamics.

6) Coaching.
Teachers play more of a coaching role these days. They aren’t just instructors who deliver a lesson. Rather, they support and guide student activities as coaches do. They provide feedback and coaching to the class so that students receive the appropriate information and academic training. Teachers guide students in developing skills in problem solving, research, and decision-making.

7) Formative assessment.
Teachers ensure that students are learning not only the concepts, but also how to use the technology resources they have. Technology-focused activities mostly require critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. Teachers work as facilitators, providing constant feedback, enabling students to achieve deeper levels of understanding.

Teaching is all about introducing students to a whole world of concepts that they didn’t know about yet. Technology in the classroom is like a foray into modern invention – and you get to be the expedition leader. Rather than viewing digital devices and Internet spaces as a threat to your duties, view them as unexplored areas of growth for both you and the young minds trusting you to show them what’s out there.

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