Policy & Reform Archives - Page 38 of 53

Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform March 8, 2016

Parents: The Missing Ingredient in K-12 Success

As educators, we talk a lot about the role of teachers in the lives of students and debate the best ways to strengthen the classroom experience for students from all backgrounds. There is only so much a teacher can do, though, particularly with large class sizes and limited resources. Even teachers in the best of circumstances are limited when it comes to hours in the day and the amount of material that must be covered. As K-12 academic standards become more rigorous, parents are becoming an even more integral piece of a student’s success.

The timing couldn’t be worse though, from a cultural standpoint. A report released in February by Stanford University that found that the number of U.S. households with two working parents nearly doubled from 25 percent in 1968 to 48 percent in 2008, and that doesn’t even factor in parents who have part-time jobs, health issues or other children that vie for their time. Sending children off to school is a relief for many parents who need a place for their children to go and put their faith in the school to make those hours productive ones.

Asking parents to pick up some of the “slack” for teachers is often perceived as a burden and not as the legitimate parental duty it actually is. If you look at students living in poverty, whose own parents may not have played an active role in their own K-12 learning, the chance of parental involvement in the education process is even slimmer. No teacher would argue the fact that parents ARE needed to maximize student success – so how can educators, and society as a whole, make it so?

The parental difference

The most obvious benefit of parental involvement is more time spent on academic learning, with direct results in student performance. There are other benefits too, though, like:

Parents being aware of what is taking place at the school and getting involved.
Parents better understanding where their children may struggle, and not just hearing it secondhand at a teacher conference.
Better attendance and participation for kids who follow the enthusiasm and good example of their parents.
Parent-child bonding over a common goal (and what better one than education?).

Schools doing it right

Teachers reading this are likely shaking their heads as their frustration builds. Yes, parents are needed! Yes, students perform better if their parents are involved in their academics! But HOW do we get the message across to parents?

Every school district and community will have a difference approach but here are a few places that have figured out some great ways to trigger parental interest in what happens at school:

Sunnyside Schools, Washington: This school district has designed a pilot program that will engage parents and investigate what methods best keep parents involvement in education of children the highest. Regular, informal meetings are part of the plan and a family advocacy group is working with the school district to find the best solutions.

Chicago Public Schools: In June 2013 Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett unveiled a five-year action plan to help kids get ready for their college, career and life. In that plan, she discussed the importance of holding adults accountable as indispensable allies and says they must enforce homework, turn off the television and make education a priority. To help parents keep children on track, her action plan promises to launch city-wide “Parent Universities” that help parents learn more about appropriate expectations of their children, how to build academic skills and ways to support their college plans. Parents can also learn more to help better their own lives.

Getting parents to the right level of participation will take at least a generation of K-12 students but it is a must for future academic and life success.

How have you been successful at getting parents more involved in their children’s schooling?

Matthew Lynch published in Equity, Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform, Year-Round Schooling March 7, 2016

Time to Learn: Revisiting the School Calendar Debate

The nine-month school calendar that emerged over a century and a half ago has proven resistant to change. It remains the predominant organizational structure within which learning takes place today, despite significant social, economic, and cultural changes over the past century that could have resulted in alternate ways to structure time for learning. Still, most school districts continue to organize learning around a traditional school calendar, with Summers being a period of limited or no district-sponsored learning activities.

One explanation for the present school year is that it follows the 19th-century agrarian calendar, freeing up the youth to work on farms during the summer months. Other explanations include the notion that children should not be exposed to the discomfort of early 20th-century, factory-like, non-air-conditioned school buildings in the summer.

Missing from these explanations for a nine-month calendar, however, are discussions that focus directly on student learning and achievement, which should be at the forefront of conversations focused on schooling. The propensity to naysay an alternate or modified school calendar routinely includes an array of non-achievement-based concerns. Issues that too often enjoy parallel positions of importance include: family vacations, costs, use of facilities, extracurricular activities, teacher and administrator stress, and even the summer-recreation industry.

Students in the U.S. spend fewer days in school than their counterparts in many industrialized countries. In Japan, for example, students attend school 243 days a year, and academic learning does not end once the school day is over. The school day is instead extended, as many students attend Juku. Juku are privately run after-school services that primarily focus on academic subjects, although some provide tutoring in the arts and sports.

Public schools involved in extended learning time efforts provide a U.S. version of a Juku; albeit one that is public and available to all students. They recognize that the amount and quality of time does influence learning, and their efforts result in improved learning and achievement for a number of children. Even though extended learning programs may primarily focus on low-performing, high-poverty schools, given the international achievement gap, all schools should keep a close eye on the success of these schools.

Extension to the school day is important, but extension to the school year is important as well. Research suggests that not only do achievement gaps develop when children from low socioeconomic backgrounds are away from school, but the rate of these gaps accelerates during the summer months. Comparable achievement occurs during the school year for children from both backgrounds.

During periods away from school, however, skills for children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds continue to grow, while no such advances occur for children from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Evidence suggests that modified calendars have a positive impact on achievement for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and thus should remain a viable option for schools seeking to improve achievement for students living in low socioeconomic environments.

Clearly, a structure for learning is needed that restores our stature as a well-educated nation and contributes to our ability to be a major player on the global economic playing field. Just as important, we need to provide enough time for learning so that young people have an education that allows them to grow into competent and confident adults able to choose how to live their lives. Holding on to a rigid traditional school calendar seems imprudent when viewed in light of such goals. Historically, supplemental schooling experiences to the nine-month calendar have existed. The time is ripe to flip the arrangement so that the traditional calendar becomes supplemental to more effective arrangements of time for learning.

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform, Teachers March 3, 2016

Highly Qualified Teachers: Should Federal Requirements be Removed?

The federal provisions that define “highly qualified teachers” in the No Child Left Behind Act could soon be a thing of the past if U.S. House legislation is signed into law. The Student Success Act, drafted by Minnesota Republican John Kline, calls for removal of teacher hiring requirements at the federal level. Kline and other proponents of the Student Success Act, say the current outdated policies in place are actually hurting K-12 schools because things like credentials get in the way of hiring the best teachers. Individual states could still enforce stringent credentialing for teachers but the federal government would have no input. The term “highly qualified teachers” (HQT) would be removed from federal law.

Predictably, Democrats on the Education and the Workforce Committee that drafted the legislation hate it. Representative Pete Gallego, a Democrat from Texas, says the bill is a recipe for disaster when it comes to federal oversight and protection for disadvantaged students. He says:

“This legislation guts the core goal that all students should receive a quality education. It leaves children behind by taking resources from kids who need it most.”

Also at issue is the removal of funding for professional development for teachers and lack of protection for collective bargaining action.

A different K-12 bill supported by mostly Democrats has already passed the Senate that maintains the HQT policy but hands over a little more control of hiring teachers to states. The Strengthening America’s Schools Act would keep in place federal requirements that insist teacher evaluations, including student achievement, be used in personnel decisions.

Both bills allow states to use Title II funding to further develop teachers and administrators and for reduction in class size (though the House bill limits that to 10 percent of funds). Both bills also call for teacher evaluations to be used to determine equity in distribution. The biggest difference between the Senate and House bills is the inclusion and exclusion, respectively, of the HQT federal requirement.

At least on paper, the federal HQT provision looks good. HQTs must have state certification, at least a bachelor’s degree from a four-year institution and demonstrate competency in the core academic subject area. That seems pretty standard to me. If a state license, college degree and expertise on a subject being taught are somehow keeping qualified teachers from the classroom, what requirements should there be instead?

Critics of the HQT federal mandate say that the requirement focuses too much on the upfront status of the teacher. While those three conditions are a starting point, the real measure of a teacher should lie in student outcomes. To help K-12 teachers reach their full potential in the classroom, provisions that allow for continued training and development need to be emphasized, not taken away. Further, since the strength of college-level education programs vary and the licensing exams are different between states, how can the federal government really mandate what constitutes a HQT?

Proponents of the HQT provision concede that states must do more than the basic requirements when it comes to hiring and cultivating teachers, but that without that federal mandate, students will suffer – particularly minority and low-income children. The concern is that without the three HQT provisions, inexperienced and unqualified teachers will find their way into Title I schools. The promotion of equitable distribution of teachers in all classrooms – particularly ones with at-risk students – would be detrimentally impacted if federal HQT mandates are eliminated.

So what control should the federal government truly have over teacher qualifications? Should it be up to states to decide what their student bodies really need from teachers? To what end will disadvantaged students be harmed if either legislation is signed into law?

Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform March 1, 2016

Four Forms of Forgetting That Affect Sustainable Leadership

The main challenge to educational reform is not to retreat to the past. Instead, we should build an intelligent relationship that acknowledges its existence, understands its meaning, and learns from it. An organization may choose to forget elements of the past. De Holan and Phillips introduced four kinds of “organizational forgetting.” They categorized them based on whether they were intentional or unintentional, or whether they applied to established or recently acquired knowledge.

Dissipation

Dissipation occurs when new knowledge is brought into the organization, but without goodwill or ability to make it stick in people’s memory toward the goal of organizational effectiveness. Dissipation is easily prevented by passing on the new knowledge to others. Most charismatic leaders find this difficult, refusing to face that they will be replaced, or the ultimate end to their position .

De Holan and Phillips suggest that new knowledge is passed not only through mentoring or succession; it can also be transmitted when leaders explicitly connect it to what people already know.

Degradation

Degradation occurs when well-established knowledge is lost accidentally. It commonly occurs when there is high turnover of critical personnel, who are unable or unwilling to create collective knowledge that would enable a successful joint action without their presence.
High turnover in teaching staff causes noticeable difficulties, mostly in innovative schools, where distinctive goals, practices, and structures are renewed as teachers come and go. The sudden downsizing in middle-level management can also cause degradation, since management losses and budget cuts reduce middle-level managers ability to support the principals in their running of schools.

Suspension

While organizational forgetting is usually accidental, some of it is deliberate, as part of a strategy for change and improvement. Collins and Porras found that one of the factors that leads to long-standing success in business is companies’ abilities to engage in diverse research, knowing when to keep successful innovations, and when to “forget” the rest.

Suspension is needed in educational policy in the U.S. This can be achieved by cutting back on the curriculum, exempting schools that succeed using other designs, reducing external accountability, putting less emphasis external testing, giving other personnel the administrative tasks that burden teachers, and improving school infrastructure in poor communities, making them better suited for student learning (Teachernet, 2005). While it is easy to abandon tasks and practices that one never wanted in the first place, it is harder to let go of those practices that they found comfortable. Hargreaves (2007) suggests that, to achieve this, a much more organized, and focused process is required to make suspension practical, deliberate, and desirable.

Purging

Purging is forgetting some of our poor practices, bad habits, and outdated ways of doing things that do not meet the needs of changing cultures and times. However, unlearning practices we feel are effective and exchanging them for new, unfamiliar ones can be uncomfortable. The temptation to cling to the past is normal and understandable.

According to Hargreaves, when purging involves teaching literacy, testing processes and attitudes, communication with parents, or school administration, there are two core issues that must be considered. First, we have to ask if the areas for unlearning have been diagnosed correctly, and whether this unlearning is for educational or political reasons. Second, we need to find out whether the knowledge transition is being managed in a supportive or a traumatic manner.

The emphasis of reform should be for the experienced teachers to improve their practices. Purging and other acts of forced forgetting lead to the wasting of the teachers’ wisdom as professional elders, and makes them discouraged and upset.

Renewing the Past

In the words of the great English romantic poet William Wordsworth, “let us learn from the past, to profit the present, and from the present to live better in the future.” Sustainable leadership therefore needs both a rear-view mirror and a windshield.

Leaders must sustain themselves and those around them to promote and support learning, persist with their vision. The must lead the charge in avoiding burnout, and ensure that the improvements they bring continue after their departure. Leaders should also consider the impact their leadership has on neighboring schools, how they encourage diverse teaching and learning in their schools, and their how the interact with their community.

Most school leaders want to do things that matter, inspire others to join them in their vision, and leave a lasting legacy. Often, leaders don’t let their schools down, but the systems through which they lead do. Sustainable leadership requires a collective effort from all stakeholders in the school. If change is to matter, spread, or last, sustainable leadership must be a central priority of education systems.

Matthew Lynch published in Equity, Policy & Reform February 29, 2016

How to Improve Equity in K-12 Learning

Since amendment XIV of the U.S. Constitution mandated that “no state shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” no child can legally be denied the right to a public education in the United States. As such, equity in education has long been an ideal and ensuring equity among all students, regardless of their personal circumstances, has been a primary goal of educators.

Unfortunately, the practice of equity in education has been less than effective. Government steps that have been recommended to remedy the problem include having states specifically identify and report on the teaching staff, programs, and services they deem necessary for a quality education; and adopting and implementing a school finance system to provide “equitable and sufficient funding” for all students essentially to meet learning standards. These recommendations follow a 2013 report called, “For Each and Every Child”, in which it was reported that “some young Americans – most of them white and affluent – are getting a world-class education” while those who “attend schools in high poverty neighborhoods are getting an education that more closely approximates schools in developing nations.” The problem of ensuring that every child in the United States receives a quality education is quite a substantial one.

Better resource allocation

Perhaps then, the first step to addressing this issue should be for some determination to be made about how, under general circumstances, education can be made equitable to all students. This assessment should not directly involve teachers or administrators, whose assessment may be skewed, but rather the assessment should be through observation. After all, the assumption seems to be that money – preferably money poured into schools – is enough to solve educational issues. That is, reassignment of resources to support schools in poorer areas will be sufficient, along with some reporting on considered needs, to balance the public education system. This is problematic because the issue of equity, and perhaps equality, is far more complex than an influx of money can solve – but it is certainly a good starting point.

Better feedback on what’s working.

States should provide feedback on those programs and strategies that are most effective for equity building. Part of the problem with the government’s solutions is that they assume states and ultimately schools can figure out what it is they need or what it is they need to do to provide a quality education. There are many elements at play, not just the immediate financial ones. Students in certain affluent areas have the benefit of the best teachers, given that it is highly desirable to have a placement in this area. It is also decidedly competitive to even try. Therefore, a compilation of feedback from the states should be gathered in order to rank the most effective programs so that they can be shared with all.

Analyze findings for better results.

School systems need to have an approach for analyzing findings about recommended shifts in learning approaches and objectives. These approaches should be designed to help teachers and administrators understand not just what they have to avoid but also what it is that they can do to achieve optimal equity moving forward. This will take massive amounts of data that will need to be centrally collected, understood, and used to improve equity in all K-12 public schools.

The goal of achieving equity in schools has long been a goal of the education system. However, most attempts to date have fallen far short of the mark.

What do you think needs to be done to improve the balance of education for kids in this country?

Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform, Teachers February 29, 2016

The Top 5 Unexpected Benefits of Early Childhood Education

A trend is emerging when it comes to P-20 education: optional preschool is becoming a thing of the past. As a nation, we’re finally beginning to accept that preschool is beneficial—even necessary—for the success of most American children. It’s why Obama has invested billions in early childhood education, and Presidential hopefuls such as Hillary Clinton are emphatic about preschool’s importance.

As someone who has extensively written about preschool-related initiatives on this site, I’ve seen enough to uncover some unexpected benefits that come from early childhood education, and I want to share a few of them with you:

1. More preschool means a child is more prepared for Kindergarten.

A study has found that children who attend all-day preschool are much better prepared for Kindergarten than children who go to half-day programs.
Researchers from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs studied 1,000 3-and 4-year-olds enrolled in 11 Chicago schools. Students who attended preschool seven hours a day were compared to those who attended three hour programs, then tested at the commencement of preschool to see if they were socially and academically prepared to begin kindergarten.

The study found 59 percent of the students enrolled in the half-day program to be ready compared to 81 percent of the all-day preschool attendees.

2. Even better, preschool means a child is more prepared for life.

Research shows that students who start the formal education experience, even one year earlier than Kindergarten, fare better long term in their academic careers.

3. Preschool may be one key to correcting the achievement gap.

Remember the study mentioned in point #1? Well, in that same study, researchers discovered that 78 percent of white students were prepared to enter kindergarten compared to 74 percent of black children and 62 percent of Native American and Hispanic students.

Last year, Minnesota contributed $40 million in funding for pre-K scholarships for low- income families. Thanks to those dollars, 5,800 students were able to attend preschool. About 15,000 more students still need access to pre-K scholarships, but Minnesota made an important stride.

4. Preschool can help the most at-risk ethnic group, Native Americans, achieve better success.

In education circles, we talk a lot about the way black and Latino students struggle in K-12 classrooms through a combination of cultural circumstances and inequality.
But the reality is that American Indian K-12 students are the most at-risk of any minority group for either dropping out of high school or never making it to college. The American Indian Fund reports that American Indians who earn a bachelor’s degree represent less than 1 percent of all of these degree earners. It is not shocking then to realize that 28 percent of American Indians lived in poverty compared to 15 percent of the general population, according to 2010 U.S. Census figures. A college education opens doors for a higher quality of life.

However, the path to college starts long before the application process.

Fortunately, the American Indian College Fund’s Early Childhood Education program recognizes this. They sponsored a meeting which brought together 45 representatives from four American Indian tribal colleges who discussed strategies for better early childhood education and family involvement in the community.

The representatives looked at how the American Indian community can better prepare children for long-term academic success, targeting learning opportunities from birth to 8 years of age.

5. Crime rates could drop in cities like Detroit—if more children went to preschool.

Jose Diaz of the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation conducted the study “Cost Savings of School Readiness Per Additional At-Risk Child in Detroit and Michigan” where the findings appear. The research was commissioned by the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation and it suggests that investing in early childhood education could cut Detroit’s crime rate and save taxpayers in the state millions of dollars, according to a story on the study by The Detroit News. The story says that Detroit taxpayers would save around $96,000 for each child who was enrolled in a quality early education program and Michigan taxpayers would save $47,000 for each child.

The figure was derived from adding cost savings to special education, public assistance, childcare subsidies, the victims of crime and the criminal justice system. The majority of the savings would come from the criminal justice system.

Currently, only 4 percent of prisoners in Michigan under the age of 20 years old graduated from high school.

As it is right now, thirty eight states offer free, voluntary preschool learning programs and nearly 1.6 million low-income families receive assistance from the federal Child Care Development Fund to pursue early childhood education. And imagine this: that fund is just one portion of President Obama’s $75 billion plan to expand early childhood learning in order to give American student a stronger foundation going into Kindergarten.

Granted, not everyone agrees with the idea of concentrating so much energy on early childhood education. Some critics think that universal preschool, for example, is just a way to add more education jobs (especially since some proponents want to insist that states accepting federal preschool dollars pay preschool teachers at the same rate as elementary ones).

But overall, I expect that in the next decade, our terminology will change from K-12 to PK-12 when we talk about student benchmarks. More states will lobby for pre-K funding and more families, from low- to high-income, will seek out early learning options to set their kids up for academic success.
So what do you think? Will preschool ever be considered as necessary as kindergarten through twelfth grade? What are some benefits (or even drawbacks) of increasing the number of early childhood education programs?

As usual, I am interested to hear from you, so please leave a comment.

Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform February 28, 2016

5 Major Barriers to Sustainable School Improvement

School improvement is a central issue for educators today. Modern children and youth will graduate into a very different future from that of previous generations because of the numerous technological advances and social changes that are constantly pulling life into a drastically different direction. However the school community is slow to change and create the improvements that are essential to fostering growth and sustainable school improvement. Here are five barriers to school improvement that are hindering schools today.

Expanded Administrative Duties – Since the task of leading a school has expanded and become more complex, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the responsibilities placed on principals far exceed their capacity to handle them singlehandedly. Though school leaders were traditionally only accountable for input into learning processes, they are now held accountable for all learning outcomes for both teachers and students. We now find that school leaders can only make a meaningful impact on student outcomes if they have sufficient autonomy to make decisions on issues such as the curriculum, teacher recruitment, and development. Administrators face an ever growing list of duties as school budgets tighten, staff levels decrease and student populations increase. Suddenly administrators are responsible for everything from fundraising to testing coordination to athletic development. Again, the main responsibilities left to school leaders should be those aimed at improving student learning.
The Aging Profession – The average age of today’s school leader in the U.S. is 51 years, which means that most of the current crop of school leaders will retire over the next five to ten years. Therefore, while schools look toward improving the quality of current leadership, they should also develop clear plans for the future in terms of effective processes for leadership succession. The need for networking has also become increasingly important, with school leaders finding it wise to collaborate with leaders from other schools and districts in sharing resources and skills so as to deliver a diverse range of learning opportunities as the the valuable resource of experience begins to bleed away from schools. It’s essential for school improvement that the wisdom and experience of retiring staff is passed on to young educators through mentorship.
Unattractive Working Conditions – In many developed countries (and this is not just confined to the U.S.) there is a remarkable decrease in the numbers of applications for the position of school principal. This is due to the negative connotations attached to the job, which it is seen as overburdened, stressful, offering inadequate training and preparation, having a meager salary compared to output, and generally poor working conditions. Most teachers and deputy principals feel that the additional incentives that are offered to principals are just too small to compensate for the burdensome workload. The simple fact is that quality professionals deserve the respect of quality compensation.
Policymaking – Another demand in current school leadership is the need for policy and practice to work better together. This is because the government policy that is designed to change practice in schools can only work efficiently where it is synchronized with the school-level processes. Additionally, effective implementation relies heavily on the motivation and initiative of school leaders. These times require that policymakers engage school leaders in meaningful and ongoing consultation in the area of policy formulation and development, because school leaders who feel connected to the reform process are more likely to influence and involve their staff and students in the implementation process and also in sustaining changes.
Constant Change – As noted earlier, schools are now being confronted by an increasingly complex scenario. In these rapidly changing environments, the major problem is that goals and objectives for schools and the means for their achievement are not always clear or static. Another challenge presents itself in the form of external pressure to change. School leaders must induce their teachers and students to handle the processes of change effectively. There is also a need for involvement of parents and the wider community in school processes. Additionally, current school leaders have to seek to improve the wellbeing of students by involving the private sector, sports clubs, faith-based groups, and community-based organizations in school activities. With the flurry of changes, there has been a growing concern that the role of school principal, having been designed for the industrial age, has not yet fully evolved to deal with the complexity of challenges in schools that involve preparing the youth to face the 21st century.

Changes in the school context give rise to myriad issues that require adjustment of both policy and practice of school leadership. The role of the school leaders is the key for improvement of school outcomes through influencing motivation and capacity of teachers and by affecting the environment in which they work. To achieve positive outcomes for students and for the future, a model of sustainable school improvement is essential.

Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Policy & Reform February 24, 2016

We Need to Talk About BYOD

The BYOD Listening Project asks: In the rush to control students’ devices, have we overlooked the ‘moment of teaching’?

By Sharon Price Campbel

If you’re a teacher in the U.S., you have likely bumped into BYOD (bring your own device). Especially in recent years, school districts are rushing to “leave no device behind” and education technology companies are coming up with myriad new products and services to deliver the promise of BYOD Nirvana. At conferences and in district offices, educators are spearheading many iterations of teaching and learning opportunities.

What can we learn from the previous megatrends in education technology? The first small wave of technology occurred when computers were installed in public school offices. They were not to be touched by the likes of teachers, but by trained office professionals only. It took another decade for computers to become available to educators in the teacher’s lounge. By the turn of the millennium, computer-literate teachers began to ask for, beg for, and write grants for computers in the classroom.

A flood of federal money available for technology purchases created the second wave, the Educational Technology Tsunami. To cash in on the gold rush, business suppliers slapped “education friendly” labels on business equipment. Manufacturers racing to get their share of the federal bucks cut corners on research, design, and quality control to get products into the marketplace. Classrooms became a nightmare of unsupported, unreliable hardware and buggy software. Classroom teachers who had been enthusiastic became concerned about job security. They feared reporting faulty equipment and feared that they had inadequate computer skills. When the federal funding ended, school districts found themselves unable to financially support their technological machines and dreams.

Riding the same surge was the “No Child Left Behind” legislation. Its unattainable expectations, on top of education’s first attempt to merge onto the digital freeway, nearly crashed education. Systems had been too quickly adopted and inadequately designed, and were incapable of the tasks they were purchased to perform. School districts became the graveyards of metal hulks and husks of educational technology—and federally-driven, data-based, student failure.

Since then, we have learned and improved. Manufactures and legislators are beginning to include educators in the conversation about expectations and realistic outcomes for tomorrow’s teaching tools. Teachers are getting very good at forming their own independent learning communities, and ideas are spreading faster than ever before. It was during this hyper-connected, surging wave of mobile device integration into all aspects of life that we ushered in BYOD.

It will take work. Early concerns about device security/privacy, unrestricted web access, and the potential for distractions in the classroom have driven the marketplace toward an obsession with control. There are now dozens of device management products that offer instructors and districts varying levels of control over student devices; however, these products don’t serve the fundamental purpose of BYOD in education, which is to improve instruction, empower students for self-directed learning, and leverage this generation of students’ technological prowess to turn the current model of instruction on its head.

In the rush to control students’ devices, we have overlooked the “moment of teaching.” Very few teachers are able to accomplish ordinary tasks, such as grabbing a picture from a document camera and getting it to each student device, without having to halt instruction and fiddle with far too many steps to integrate into teaching. So why is instructional software so clunky when we need it the most? The answer is that most companies making this software rarely set foot in an actual classroom. They are so focused on features and functions that they overlook how the product is used in the classroom during instruction. If one of the purposes of device management is to minimize distractions, shouldn’t the product just work and require no active management on the part of the teacher? Yet most device management products require that the teacher be behind his or her computer to share learning resources or to monitor and control student devices.

We can’t rely on product developers to just deliver brilliance. Rarely through history have major innovations been the result of one person or team, instead they have been the result of teams building on the work of or listening to others. The BYOD marketplace should be listening to the visceral and rational experiences of teachers, administrators, and students to make better products.

EXO U is sponsoring the BYOD Listening Project to strike up a dialogue between teachers, students, parents, administrators, and the marketplace, with the goal of pinning down and solving the increasing challenges that teachers and students face when attempting to integrate devices into a daily classroom teaching. I am serving as a moderator for the project, and we’re asking for your perspective on mobile devices in the classroom. What works? What doesn’t? Where are the significant pain points or problems at the interface of mobile devices and learning?

The BYOD Listening Project is asking for your engagement and in return, we will analyze, collate, and report themes and major takeaways. Our aim is to provide highly useful data and models for BYOD implementation that improve that moment of teaching.

Sharon Price Campbel has taught in Napa County Juvenile Offender programs, an alternative high school, and Youth Employment programs. For the last 28 years she has been a middle school teacher. In 2009, she was named a California School Master, the oldest, most prestigious California education award.

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

Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform February 23, 2016

Top 3 Ways to Improve Learning in Schools…Using School Lunches

As we all know, nutrition and educational performance are related. And with one third of the U.S.’s 300 million residents obese, it is more important now than it has ever been to focus on how healthy the available meal options are for students. While it may seem far-fetched that food may have such a dramatic impact on our students, the truth is that a well-nourished student is able to think more clearly and focus better.

Here are three ways to improve learning in schools with a simple tool: school meals and other food-based initiatives.

1. Free and reduced school lunch programs. Free school breakfast and lunch programs are often credited with higher levels of student achievement in the schools where they exist. Non-profit children’s hunger programs intended to feed at-risk students on the weekends are sprouting up all across the country. There is a connection between what a child eats and how that child performs academically.

2. Healthier school lunches. It is well known that First Lady Michelle Obama is passionate about school lunch nutrition standards. In fact, she says that she is willing to “fight to the bitter end” to ensure that the school lunch nutrition standards she helped draft stay in place — despite a Republican-drafted bill that would allow some school exemption. The First Lady lobbied for higher nutrition standards that went into effect in 2012 that called for more vegetables, fruits and whole grains in school meals, along with less fat, sugar and sodium. Over 90 percent of public schools in the U.S. have subscribed to the standards since their enactment.

The First Lady’s standards have received some pushback from the industry-backed School Nutrition Association, which says that fewer lunches are being sold because children do not want to buy the healthier lunches. Furthermore, a House of Representatives bill authored by Alabama Republican Robert Aderholt would give school districts the opportunity to skip the nutrition requirements for one year. According to Aderholt, the change came on too quickly and that schools need time to adjust.

Unhappy teens have also protested against these standards, going onto Twitter to complain. Photos of unappetizing school fare in cafeteria Styrofoam trays have flooded Twitter since the hashtag was born as many teens are declaring that they would rather go hungry (or that they have gone hungry) than eat the “healthy” lunch options offered at their schools.

Despite the growing pains many schools are going through with the new nutritional standards, this is still an important initiative for students and their well-being.

3. Holistic food movements. This is perhaps the most interesting method of getting students what they need in terms of nutrition. An understanding of food and its role in lifelong physical and psychological health is also important because it addresses more than the immediate. Quality of life and longevity are impacted by food lifestyle and healthy eating habits that are formed early in life. In a culture where children grow up with a skewed concept of where food originates, some schools are now stepping in to provide guidance with student-led gardening programs.

The School Garden Project of Lane County, Oregon, for example, boasts 30 gardens at K-12 schools in five districts. Over 800 students are taught to “create, sustain and use onsite gardens” every year.” By simply showing the basics of food growing, students have an informed approach to eating without an official lesson in “healthy eating.” For many K-12 students, working in a school garden is the first time they are making a real-life connection between the items they see in the grocery store and their original location.

The Center for Nutrition in Schools at UC Davis found that garden-based learning does more than just improve nutrition knowledge. Students who participate in garden programs on school grounds have higher overall academic achievement and experience elevated self-esteem and social skills.

It’s clear that food makes a difference in the quality of education, sometimes even in the most unexpected ways. I hope that food-based initiatives are given some attention as we look for improvements we can make to our K-12 education system.

Matthew Lynch published in Equity, Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform February 23, 2016

2 Reasons the Concept of “Justice for All” Does Not Apply to American Schools

In the US, the concepts of equality and justice are intertwined. The idea of “justice for all” has existed since America’s early days.

But the truth is that the application of this idea has been far from perfect to this very day. Let’s take a quick look at our historical lapses in carrying out the idea and how those affect us today.

De jure and de facto segregation. De jure segregation, or legalized segregation of Black and White people, was present in almost every aspect of life in the South during the Jim Crow era: from public transportation to cemeteries, from prisons to health care, from residences to libraries. Under segregation, Black and White people were to be separated, purportedly to minimize violence. De jure segregation, or “Jim Crow,” lasted from the 1880s to 1964. Jim Crow laws were efficient in perpetuating the idea of “White superiority” and “Black inferiority.”

De facto segregation is the direct manifestation of de jure segregation, because the U.S. government could mandate that laws that segregated the races were unconstitutional, but it couldn’t change the hearts and minds of its people. If people didn’t want to be in the presence of another ethnicity or race, they could certainly make this a reality. So, de jure segregation was implemented by law; de facto segregation, by common understanding and personal choice. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many White citizens simply moved to the suburbs to avoid mixing with Black citizens. This “White flight” led to the creation of “chocolate cities” and “vanilla suburbs,” which are still prevalent today.

In relation to education, the legal segregation of the races in Southern schools was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In the United States today, however, Black and Hispanic students tend to be concentrated in schools where they make up almost the entire student body. Also, the percentage of Black students in majority White schools has decreased to a level lower than in any year since 1968.

De facto segregation is a huge problem in the United States as it allows bigotry and discrimination to occur more easily. What happens as a result? Many schools in mostly Black neighborhoods find themselves unequally funded and seriously neglected.

Persistent stratification. The disparities between rights of certain ethnic groups in American culture can easily be identified by the disparity in the number of individuals incarcerated in the nation’s prison systems. African American men are arrested and imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates. Reports indicate that even when similar crimes were committed by White and African American men, the penalty was more severe for the latter. As a result of this socioeconomic stratification, a privileged class exists, with some Americans receiving benefits unavailable to others. For example, data from the U.S. Department of Labor reported higher unemployment rates for African Americans and Hispanics across all major age and gender groups in 2009.

The number of children from ethnic minority groups living in poverty continues to increase as well. In 2006, approximately 13 million children were living in poverty. The number of Hispanic children living in poverty has increased by 23% since 2000, and the number of African American children living in poverty increased by 8.4%. A 2006 study showed that social status had a significant influence on mortality rates, as well as “chronic diseases and injuries with well-established risk factors such as alcohol use, tobacco smoking, obesity, elevated blood pressure, cholesterol, and glucose.”

We need to be aware of history so that we can understand certain attitudes and problems that exist today, and hopefully repair them as we continue to strive for the ideal of “justice for all.”

Now I want to hear from you: what are some factors that prevent us Americans from fulfilling this admirable ideal? Share your thoughts in the comments.