When Women Succeed, the World Succeeds. #IWD2016

In honor of International Women's Day/ Journée des Droits des Femmes, a look back at  Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka's talk "When women succeed, the world succeeds."

We need to get decision makers to stop seeing women as the problem or charity case. We will not overcome inequality or poverty or sustainable peace if we do not improve the lives of women. There are only 20 women heads of state in the world. if we had more female leaders we would not be in this state. Women are part of creating the world we all want. We have to invest in women. When you leave women out, you compromise the rest of the nation.

What it will take for more governments, institutions, schools, etc. to understand that improving the lives of girls and women will increase opportunities for the entire society?

One Good Question with Vania Masias: How to Disrupt the Victim Mentality when Investing in Youth Agency.

Vania Masias

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question (outlined in About) and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

One of my dreams is that our methodology through arts becomes public policy in the public schools.  That’s my dream because every day I see the empowerment that our youth leaders have thanks to dance or arts.  I think the government, and people who have never danced, have no idea how powerful this tool is.  I just came back from Trujillo, another state in Peru.  I went with one of the “kids” who is 21 and has been with Angeles D1 for 5 years.  Five years ago, he was in to gangs.  He finished his public school, but school gave nothing to him.  He was emotionally devastated. He was into drugs, gangs, and jail.  Today, he just did a Tedx talk and he’s a leader of more than 200 kids in one of the most difficult communities in our region. He is a teacher and one of the best dancers in our company.  He learned to know himself and to start loving himself just as he is.  

When you dance you are just you — you are not your name, the daughter of so-and-so, the girl that went to this school.  When I dance, I am not in a social level, it’s just me, my soul, myself, my truth.  That’s really powerful.If I were to tell people where to invest in education: creativity, culture, arts.  I believe, because I dance and I choreograph, that every human being has a jewel.  We are so beautiful on the inside and through arts it's a beautiful thing to bring that beauty out.    Our education system was focused on the British empire, and that established norms around knowledge.  In that system, if you’re not good with math or literature, you’re kind of a pariah.  At Angeles D1, our focused education gives empowerment to the kids so teachers can see their potential and bring it out.  The arts allows you to bring those other gifts to the forefront.

“The Angeles D1 model has been heavily informed by the youth participants, their needs and vision. Your lessons on youth agency were very organic.  How would you recommend that adults planning programs for marginalized youth intentionally incorporate these lessons into their work?”

The first advice I will give is to get rid of guilt.  Growing up in a country where you have everything and then you see others who have nothing, that’s difficult.  One big mistake I made when I started the program, was that I thought I had to give everything to the youth without asking anything in return.  That mentality creates beggars and welfare dependency.  Don’t give the toys, teach them how to make the toys so that, afterwards, they can make it and sell it and it’s a development.  Otherwise, they will say “Poor me, I’m a victim,” and they will keep begging. You further the stigma that says you are poor, you won’t make it, so I’m solving your life.  I had to learn that and it was kind of difficult.  I felt guilt all the time and they knew that.  It was not healthy.I remember one day when 4 or 5 of the first generation dancers started stealing from the company.  That day, everything changed.  They weren’t stealing things, they stole the choreography that we made as a group, and they went somewhere else and charged for it.  I kicked them out of the group because that didn’t respect D1 values. 

Last week, on the way to Trujillo for the Tedx talk, we saw the same kids who stole from us.  They were in the exact same place, dancing under the same street light that they were 10 years ago.  I just turned and looked at our youth leader and started crying.  OMG.  There we were, a few blocks from the airport and he’s going to speak to a crowd of 200 professionals about his work yet we saw his peers in the exact same place.  We said nothing to each other.  It was evident.  They made the decision to not grow.  They wanted that life.  They just wanted to stay there.  It’s not wrong. It’s not good.  It’s just their decisions.When we want to communicate, we only see our side of things.  A question that helped me was “How can I reach them and generate confidence?’ I decided to go through urban culture to reach our youth.  I put myself in their place.  I tried to see what are they looking at and understand what’s gong on with them.  I hadn’t studied psychology, sociology, or anthropology to know what was going on with them.  I believed in dance.  When they moved, they were communicating something to me. So with that information, I could understand what they were seeing.  They put their eyes always down, they would never look at me. That gave me a lot of information and then I designed everything around that.  Let’s do clowning and get them to feel ridiculous. We never saw the other, to see and look is different.  We’re in such a rush, we never see each other.  When that happened, everything changed.

Vania’s One Good Question:  One of my lead dancers dreams of becoming mayor of his hometown, Tumbes, in northern Peru.  I see D1 as “The Hobbit” for him, a safe place that will support and encourage him.  As social organizations, can we develop the leaders of tomorrow to be pure and uncorrupted?

Vania Masias was born in Lima, Peru.  She graduated from Universidad del Pacifico and is a professional ballerina.  She was the principal ballerina in the municipal ballet for 7 years, with the most important roles in the classical repertory.  She then began a modern dance career with the Yvonne Von Mollendorf company, with international residencies in Europe and the Caribbean.  Vania was a principal ballerina in the National Ballet of Ireland and was selected for Cirque du Soleil.  In 2005, for family reasons, she returend to Lima and founded the Asociación Cultural D1 (de uno) and is currently the Executive Director. 

One Good Question with Mike DeGraff: Are Schools Destroying the Maker Movement?

Mike DeGraff

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”’

There was a call for 100,000 STEM teachers in the US, and since then there have been tons of initiatives, and related funding, to respond to the need (some say too much).  UTEACH is a very constructivist-oriented teacher education program for STEM teachers, that began at  UT Austin and has spread across the country.  Then we saw the launch of Maker Faire™ to showcase STEAM design in informal learning space.  When I went to my first faire 3-4 years ago, I was amazed that there wasn’t tighter articulation between schools, teacher education programs, and what’s going on in this sector.

In schools, "making" is mostly robotics, especially at the secondary level.  School libraries may have makerspaces that are more diverse, but there’s very little happening in teacher preparation for how we prepare teachers for these spaces that are proliferating. No two people have the same vision for what you mean when you say makerspace. Whenever you talk about this, it’s so easy to get excited about the 3D printer, laser cutter and other specific tools.  At UTeach, we’re more interested in how it transforms what kids are able to do and how teachers are empowered to teach differently.  Not to dismiss the tools, but ultimately, what’s so exciting about all of this stuff is how it connects to this lineage of progressive education dating back to Dewey and meaningful, authentic, relevant work.  That’s what’s so powerful to me about this whole maker movement.  It really champions student voice in a way that I don’t see in any other movement/innovation/fad.  How can we replicate that for every kid?  One of the biggest hurdles in education and industry is to get kids curious.  Makerspaces can get them to a point where they can start wondering.

The maker world and project-based formal education don’t seem to respect each other enough.  The maker world which is super auto-didactic, self-sufficient, diy, vibrant and very curious. The maker world sentiment is that schools are going to destroy the maker movement by embracing it and standardizing it.  It’s not an unfounded fear.  Look at the computer labs in the 90s.  The way that education works is in compartmentalizing.  My biggest fear is that it becomes a space where you go and do « making » for an hour completely separated from (or only superficially connected to) science, math, language arts, literature, art, etc.

The formal education world is coming from a perspective that we’ve been doing « making » well before Maker Faire started in 2006, but have called it other things like project-based instruction.  Colleges of Education see the value in makerspaces, but in public education we have to focus on serving every kid.  While the Maker Education Initiative motto is « every kid a maker » colleges of education and educators in general are asking what do we do with kids who aren’t motivated by blinking a light or don’t identify with the notion of making? How does PD play out in these different areas and what does it look like as these spaces develop?

“Do you think that schools/universities would be adopting Makers Spaces if it wasn’t tied to funding?”

These spaces have always existed in universities, but they used to be highly articulated with coursework. Making in a university is usually housed in the college of engineering, which makes sense for digital fabrication and electronics.  You were typically a junior before you got to that level of coursework and only accessed the equipment for specific, course related projects. If you talk to industry, a big complaint is that universities are producing engineering graduates who can calculate, but can’t use a screwdriver and a hammer or connect that academic experience to the real world.

A makerspace is more similar to a library type model so it’s open and you can go in and make when/what you want.  UT opened a Longhorn Maker Studio and when I went there in November it was full of kids making Christmas presents (like ornaments, a picture frame, and other highly personal artifacts).  There’s a lot of class projects, but it’s more about figuring out what they can do with it.  That’s what’s exciting.

Something that I see as very similar to the makerspace idea in the College of Science is open inquiry where students choose what they want to learn more about, design an experiment, and analyze results. In UTeach, one of the nine courses is totally dedicated to this process. Instructors have noticed that the hardest part of the process is to get students to become curious.  Get students to develop their own questions that can be addressed by experiments.  In education, we have identified content, but the gap is how we inspire students to be curious and engaged and motivated and passionate.  It’s so well connected in general to how we get students to think and be self-motivated and have internal drive.

“One could argue that Makers spaces are going the way of MOOCs — only reinforcing the privilege and access of middle-class paradigms and still largely unused in lower-income/marginalized communities.  If we really belief that Makers spaces improve creativity, critical thinking and STEM, what will it take for the movement to reach a more diverse audience?”

Why I see maker movement as being fundamentally different, is that I see it as hitting on different things, namely on student motivation and constructivist education, with what we know about how students learn best, project-based instruction, and the evolution of progressive education.  At the UTeach conference last May, we had several sessions about making in the classroom. It’s important for us is to embed this into regular coursework.  Right now, a lot of the robotics and electives are afterschool activities, but in order for this to be truly democratized, we have to make it part of our classes—science and math that every kid takes.  NGSS and CCSS math standards demonstrate value for persistent problem solvers, design cycle and implementing inquiry. Makerspaces can support these standards for all students.

As part of the maker strand at our UTeach conference Leah Buechley gave the plenary talk contrasting mainstream maker approaches with tools and techniques designed to support diversity and equality.”  This is exactly why we, in education, need to systematically develop opportunities around « making » for a more diverse population, which early indications show is working. We’re already seeing that the demographics of youth-serving maker spaces are much more diverse than that of Maker Faire.

Mike’s One Good Question: How can we use this space to address community needs ? What we’re doing is making things, but why are we making them?

Michael DeGraff is the Instructional Program Coordinator at the UTeach Institute. His work includes coordinating the Instruction Program Review process for all UTeach Partner Sites as well as supporting instructors to implement the nine UTeach courses.Michael has been a part of UTeach since 2001, first as an undergraduate student at UT Austin (BA Mathematics with Secondary Teaching Option, 2005), then as a graduate student (MA Mathematics Education, 2007), and finally as a Master Teacher with UKanTeach at the University of Kansas. He was also instrumental in launching Austin Maker Education.

One Good Question with Ejaj Ahmad: Why We Should Build Leadership Instead of Leaders.

Ejaj Ahmad

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Bangladesh became independent in 1971, and while the founding leaders were visionaries, I’m not sure they thought deeply about the kind of education that the next generation would need to take the country forward? That’s my gut feeling. Once you ask this One Good Question, you are forced to somehow link your input and process with the output that you’re seeking.  As a country, we have not yet really explored the educational foundation that we need to put in place to create an inclusive and just society. I say this because we see it every day how the divided education system, namely English medium (British curriculum), Bangla medium (national curriculum) and Madrassa (Islamic studies curriculum), contributes to communal tension and violent politics. Young people from these divergent education streams grow up with differing values and ideologies and they rarely interact with people from other educational backgrounds. This is one of the root causes of many of the divisions we see in Bangladesh today. Moreover, the curriculum in school, college, and university relies primarily on rote learning which doesn’t foster creativity and critical thinking in students. As a result, most young people enter the job market with little prior training in problem solving.

At Bangladesh Youth Leadership Center, we aspire to see the next generation exhibit values of inclusiveness, tolerance, and compassion. We also want to see them develop strong critical thinking skills so that they can question deeply held values and assumptions. Therefore, our organization runs after-school leadership programs that unite high school, college, and university students from the three different educational systems and provide them problem solving, leadership, and communication skills and engage them in the community where they can translate their learning into action by designing and implementing service projects.

“You are committed to developing youth leadership and agency.  Why does it matter?” 

This question is powerful because more than 52 percent of Bangladesh’s population of 160 million is below the age of 25. Traditionally, we have always equated leadership with position. We use the word ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ interchangeably although intuitively we know that they are not the same. Leader is a person or a title, whereas leadership is an activity, which can be exercised from a position of authority or without a position of authority. Now imagine if every single young person perceived leadership as an activity and not as a position then the impact this shift in thinking can have in society. Young people don’t have titles and they don’t occupy public office. However, if they believe that they don’t need a title to exercise leadership and bring change then this sense of agency can have tremendous impact on society. We will no longer be waiting for elected officials to solve our problems; we can take ownership of our part of the problem and do our bit to make progress in our community.

Our youth leadership programs also take young people on a journey of self-exploration, which we also feel is critical for the world today. We need to help young people ask difficult questions, reconcile multiple identities and work across religious and cultural boundaries. This is especially relevant in today’s world where most of our conflicts happen due to differing values and identities. Yes, you are a Bangladeshi, or an Indian, or an American. But you are also a human being. What does it mean to be a human being in the 21st century? What are some of the values that we can all share across nationalities, cultures, and religions? I believe that good leadership education can make people curious and humble. If we can all learn to reframe our truths as assumptions and not hold a monopoly on what we believe to be true, I think we can do a better job of getting along with each other despite our differences.

Ejaj’s One Good Question: What values and habits from the past do you need to carry into the future? What values and habits were once useful but are no longer so? In other words, which part of our cultural DNA do we need to preserve and which part do we need to discard to create a better world, both for us and for the ones we love?

Ejaj Ahmad is an entrepreneur and an educator of leadership, who speaks and advises globally on leadership issues. He is the founder and president of Bangladesh Youth Leadership Center (BYLC), a nonprofit that aims to create a more inclusive, tolerant, and just society by training the next generation of home-grown leaders. Ejaj holds a master’s in public policy from Harvard University and a master’s of arts with honors in economics from St. Andrews University.

One Good Question with Tom Vander Ark: Can Design Thinking & Rethinking Scale Boost Ed Equity?

Tom Vander Ark

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

We’ve inherited a sedimentary system made up of a series of 100 years of laws and policies and practices that for us in the US are federal, state, and local.  This is in contrast to an engineered system designed to produce a set of outcomes.  So, that’s the first problem: our investments, speaking about our public education system writ large, is this product of a democratic process, and not a design system.  It’s many and mixed intentions, it’s compromises both good and bad, it’s consequences both intended and unintended, working itself out over time.

The US has a number of anachronistic fixations with local control and reliable and valid assessments.  This fixation has the advantage of vesting investments closest to the kids, but the disadvantage of it is linking it to community wealth.  This is a great example of a well-intentioned design principle that has produced outrageous inequities in US education.  Education funding and, to some extent, quality are now zip code specific because we vested power in local governments.When Arne Duncan announced his departure as Secretary of Education, I wrote a blog post suggesting that we mark that day as the end of standards based reform.  From Dick Reilly to Arne Duncan, we had an unusual 20-year arc in the US, where federal government had unusually strong influence from a policy (NCLB) and investment standpoint (AARA, Race to the TOP).  It was a great moment in US education that marked a national, bipartisan consensus for equity.  As a country, we could no longer sit by and accept chronic failure for our nation’s children.

NCLB was designed as a framework for school accountability to make sure that every family had access to good educational options.  In retrospect, almost everyone agrees that the steps and measures used were flawed, but if we had used an iterative development process -- kept what was good and fixed the obvious problem -- the country would be in a better place.   One of the problems with NCLB, was that when faced with a choice between measuring proficiency or measuring growth, we latched on to proficiency because it was easy to measure with valid assessments.  We largely ignored growth in the law and now we can see the consequences of it.  NCLB had a strong focus on getting underperforming kids to grade level which created two unintended consequences: discouraged schools from teaching students who were furthest behind (over age, undercredited), and weaker administrators fixated on the test.  Rather than offering a rich, full, inspiring education, they offered test prep.  Not only did that not produce lasting academic results for kids, it led to educators trying to game the test, with examples of cheating and embezzlement in the worst cases.

“In the past few years we’ve seen funders, media, and eventually schools rally around the next big tech innovation (1:1, MOOC, coding, etc).  How much does the next big tool matter for lasting academic outcomes for all students?”

The reason that I’m so passionate about public education and investment in innovation is because I think that it’s the fastest path to quality and access to quality in the US and internationally.  In my previous Ed Reformer blog, I wrote about education reform, making the system that we have better.   Getting Smart reflects the new imperative, for every family and neighborhood around the world, to get smart fast.   Innovation is critically important to improving access and quality.  It’s why I’m really optimistic that things will get better, faster in the US and accelerate international change as well.In the US, innovation investment allows us a design opportunity.  The design experience that I’m most passionate about, is people who are conceptualizing LX+IT (learner experience + integrated information technology).  They’re not just developing new school models but also integrating information systems and student access devices. 

We’re still in the early innings now of new tools and new schools. There are thousands of good new schools, but there are only dozens of schools that are doing this fundamental design work of reconceptualizing learning environments and learning sequences and the tools that go with it.  This is the opportunity of our time: to find ways to scale both the work and the number of folks benefitting from it worldwide.Internationally, we have the first chance in history to offer every young person on the planet a great education. When we first started investing in scalable models in the US, funders and founders had grand ambitions that assumed linear replication.  Over time, we’ve learned that scaling nationally or internationally is much harder than maintaining strong regional programs and outcomes.   We’re starting to see a shift in replication and inspiration across geographies.  Take Rocketship for example.  They run an amazing model that everyone has flocked to see in the past few years.  Among the visitors, were two young MBAs from Johannesburg, who took the lessons learned from Rocketship and created SPARK Schools ins Johannesburg.  SPARK is as good a blended learning model as I’ve seen anywhere on the planet.  Rocketship didn’t have to cross the ocean for that to happen and now students in South Africa are benefitting from a model that was created in the US.Summit Public Schools has taken a different approach to scaling ideas before scaling schools.   This year they have about 19 school partners with their Basecamp model and next year it might be 10 times as many.  They have created a powerful Personalized Learning Platform, partnered with Facebook and Stanford to figure out how to scale it broader use, and now team with schools across the country to implement this pedagogy into existing models.  We hope that hundreds of schools benefit from their fundamental design work.  Seeing these types of growth gives me a tremendous sense of optimism that things can get better worldwide faster than most people realize.

Tom’s One Good Question:  Will we actually achieve equitable education access?  I’m concerned that things will get better faster for young people who have engaged and supportive adults in their lives.  I’m worried about young people that don’t have engaged parents/adults in their lives. Parents who get powerful learning are raising confident, equipped  well-informed young people.

Tom Vander Ark is author of Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World, Smart Cities That Work for Everyone: 7 Keys to Education & Employment and Smart Parents: Parenting for Powerful Learning. He is CEO of Getting Smart, a learning design firm and a partner in Learn Capital, an education venture capital firm. Previously he served as the first Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Tom served as a public school superintendent in Washington State and has extensive private sector experience including serving as a senior executive for a national public retail chain.

One Good Question with Susan Baragwanath: The Only Way to Break Cycle of Poverty.

Susan-Baragwanath-New

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

I have never been into deep thinking on education and I am not much of a philosopher. As a practitioner for 37 years I saw immense change from rote learning to the touch of an iPad. Show me a young person who knows the times tables and can write a sentence in the imperfect tense? But does it matter when they can use a calculator and Google ? As a teacher I have always felt it was  my duty to challenge a student to believe that they could do anything they wanted. It was up to me to provide the mechanism so they could achieve to the best of their ability. But now, in the 21st century, what mechanism is it exactly?

There has been huge investment in technology in recent years. This has facilitated both teaching and learning in ways that we previously couldn’t imagine. The change is so dramatic that the traditional teacher now struggles to keep up.  We used to joke we needed to be ‘a page ahead of the kids’. Now the joke is on us. Older teachers, with all their wisdom, are so many volumes behind social media, fantasy games, apps etc etc they will never catch up. I see colleagues still trying to put coins into parking meters while a kid is paying with his smartphone.

Many countries have national curriculums and the Education Ministries are given a sum which is then passed on down the line eventually ending up in a school for implementation.  Those curriculums which were once worked on by very clever and sophisticated people are now struggling in this technological world.  Change can be slow and national curriculums can easily end up a dinosaur in their relevance to the next generation. But yet the poor teacher has to implement it and will have a performance review based upon it and may be under the regime of merit pay.

Perhaps we should distinguish between policy and law.   The law in most countries is that every child is entitled to basic formal education for a number of years. But government policies create inequities in implementation of those laws. It can also depend on who is in power at the time and if they allow policy to take over. Most countries manage to run reasonable schooling systems within the constraints of bureaucracies.   But one terrible example of a country that doesn’t [run a reasonable schooling system] is  Yemen. Pre-1994, they had a half decent school system left over from the British.  But then the President of the day said that young people didn’t have to go to school anymore. In other words basic formal education was ‘off’. One of the results is that the Yemen is the most dangerous and shambolic country on earth. Young people who should have had the benefit of a basic formal education now appear on our TV screens wielding guns and chopping off peoples heads.If we don't believe in investment  and follow the law and make sure our teachers are given every assistance possible to be up with the play in the digital world, then we should remember the example of extreme and utter chaos of the Yemen, because it can get that bad.

“We have so many marginalized youth (teen parents, adjudicated youth, etc) who need different supports to access mainstream culture in order to break the cycle of poverty.  What role can education — in and out of school — play to support them?”

In my experience the only way to actually bring a marginalized young person out of the cycle of poverty they live in, is to provide wraparound services via the school.  In one college where I worked (the poorest in NZ with the highest Pacifika population at the time) we tried all manner of things to improve educational achievement.  Most of it didn’t work because students came to school hungry and there was no government sponsored food program. You cannot teach a hungry child. The family would often be in crisis and children were regularly bashed up by angry  or drunk parents who had no work. Communicable diseases (yes, even in beautiful, peaceful New Zealand) was rife.  Scabies, boils, rheumatic fever, tuberculosis – I saw it all. Try to teach a troubled child from that background the history of the Tudors. You may as well bark against thunder.

In this extreme case, food, pastoral care, health care and education in that order became a solution to the problem of marginalized youth. It sounds easy, but I received a letter from the Minister of Education forbidding (strong word that) me to pay for food out of the ‘education’ budget. I was publically scolded by officials from the Department of Health for ‘making a scene’ over a scabies outbreak affecting 70% of the 800 students as they said that ‘scabies didn’t happen in winter’.  It most certainly did as I and other teachers got it. It became so bad (many students became infected and hospitalized) they considered calling in the military. The blind eye approach to ‘no scabies in winter’ cost the country buckets of money to get it under control. It was real head in the sand stuff. I solved the pastoral care problem by hiring retirees who were not brain dead at 65 but tired of classrooms full of kids who were too distressed to learn anything.

Eventually in my own little world I managed to shame, cajole, shout, stamp etc and I got all those things above that broke the cycle.  It took me ten very long years and I probably neglected a lot of other things including my own children (who thankfully have grown up into amazing adults) but you need to ask the question – why did it have to be so difficult and take so long ?

Once you get over that, education is filling that enquiring mind.  And it is a joy to see the fruits of your labour.

Susan’s One Good Question :  I am still thinking about it!

Dr. Susan Baragwanath works as an independent consultant. She was a career secondary school teacher and administrator who taught internationally. Dr. Baragwanath is the founder of He Huarahi Tamariki Schools, Maori for ‘a chance for children’. Her program plan was to provide basic formal education and training for teen parents to graduate from high school. These include high quality pre-schools. The highly acclaimed schools were honored and became models, replicated in more than 50 locations around New Zealand.

One Good Question with Susanna Williams: Is Higher Ed the Equalizer We Think?

Susanna Williams

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Higher education has seen wholesale disinvestment since 2008.  The majority of students in our country attend public universities, and 26% attend community colleges.   Liberal arts & research institutions serve a very small population of US students, and their funding challenges are unique.  As the economy has recovered, the funding has not returned to state-funded higher education.  Part of this is a function of discretionary spending at the state level because very little funding comes from federal government.  Most states have mandated spending that has to be accounted for, but higher education is one of the few discretionary lines, so states tend to turn to the public universities and say «  charge more tuition. »  At the same time as tuition is increasing, we’re getting the message that the full pathway to life is through college attainment.  Universities are then seeking outside students—foreign nationals and out-of state students who will pay the sticker price for tuition as opposed to the in-state rates.  So there are fewer seats available for lower-income applicants.

Employers then use the college name as a basis for hiring. So community college students are at a disadvantage on the hiring market, unless they are health care assistants, and the hospital has a relationship with their specific college program.  Connections become pathways to employment and prosperity.

When we do not fund quality education, yet hold people’s lives accountable as though they have received that education, we’re actually saying that we don’t believe that education is something that everyone in our country should have equal access to. And we’re ok with some people being poor and we’re ok with some people not having access to opportunity.

“How did the funding become discretionary?”

Higher education and public policy hasn’t caught up with modern times.  When state constitutions were written, basic education was just K-12 through the 1970s.  At that time, you could get a great manufacturing job or vocational training and make solid money. Then the world changed. The only thing slower to change than education is government.  There is a strong case for community colleges to be a part of basic education and should be included as K-14 education.  The State of Washington’s constitution’s first prioirity is to fully fund basic education, but they’re not meeting basic expectations.  Look at funding formulas driven by property taxes and tax code and no one wants to tackle the tax code.  It’s not sexy and doesn’t win you elections.

“Who’s actually having this conversation?” 

I’m not sure people are connecting the dots.  The only way it’s happening is through lawsuits over K-12 education.  State legislatures have been held in contempt of court because they haven’t figured it out.   That’s another conversation that we don’t want to have.  What is it that families do?   We need to be asking what does it actually cost to educate a child who does not grow up with the benefit of house with books, afterschool curriculum, print-rich nursery school environment?  What does a middle class child have as ancillary benefits?  What are the habits that their families inculcate and the culture that they grow up in? How can we provide those standards for all children?

“In our analog/digital divide, higher ed institutions are working feverishly to incorporate new tech tools and communication paradigms into their pedagogy and engagement.  Do the tools really matter for this generation?  How should post-secondary institutions position themselves for responsive/inclusive engagement?”

With respect to the founding of higher education in Europe, the primary function was to train priests.  Higher education today retains the vestiges of that holy process.  It is serious and magical and spiritual, and you can’t touch that or dirty that with technology and money is the worst kind of profanity.  People keep calling for the end of college.  Colorado had a major freakout about MOOCS, which challenges the delivery of higher education.  I think there’s a big disruption coming.  Competency-based education is going to shift the paradigm and project based learning will change instructional practice.  Badges of proficiency will change that option.  When we remove the Carnegie credit hour and let students show what they can do, then we no longer need to have institutions as arbitors of confidence.

We say that institution and pedigree matters, yet people still hire based on who they know and how comfortable they feel with that person.  Take the example of The Wire and the network of the dealers on the street.  That show demonstrates that networks are equally powerful in dark economy and formal economy. Our challenge is to figure out how to teach and give networks to other people.  If you win the lottery and leave East Flatbush, and make it to the Ivy’s, there’s no guarantee that you will be able to access the network of the Ivy League.  Again, this assumes that access and equity are goals of education.   There’s a big divide in education philosophy between those who are warriors for justice through education and those who are gatekeeprs to keep marginalized people out of power structures.  I forget that others use education as a sorting tool.

Susanna’s One Good Question: How do we effectively move people to opportunity in our country, if we don’t agree that everyone should have opportunity?

Founder & CEO of BridgEd Strategies, is a lifelong educator and communications specialist with over 15 years of experience as a teacher, administrator, and strategic leader in K-12, higher education, and the philanthropic sector as well as political campaigns. Susanna led marketing, communications, and government relations at Renton Technical College, while also serving as the executive director of the Renton Technical College Foundation. She joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Postsecondary Success team in 2012 after connecting with the director through a blind message on LinkedIn. Active on Twitter since 2009, Susanna is a strong advocate for the power of social media and the power of networks. A 2011 German Marshall Memorial Fellow, Susanna received a Masters in Education from Bank Street College of Education and a Bachelors in Politics from Earlham College. She lives in her home borough of Brooklyn, New York.

One Good Question with J.B. Schramm: Is College Still Relevant?

J.B. Schramm

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Every school success paradigm I’ve seen involves similar components: excellent educators, school leaders, data and measurement, standards, etc.—but what you never see is “students” as part of the solution.  We have this sense that students are vessels into which education is to be poured.  In order to move forward in our communities, we need young people from our communities to take charge.   They need to have confidence and be equipped as critical thinkers, problem solvers, strategists, and risk takers.  They need the motivation to challenge power structures and be problem solvers in the broader community. We don’t win, and our nation doesn’t become a more just place, simply by informing students. We need to offer them the responsibility to take charge of their education and future.The fact is, young people are most influenced by their peers.  Young people today are taking responsibility for more and more parts of their lives, either because adults are abnegating obligations, or because technology is giving youth more opportunity to control their own communication and networks.  Young people influence young people, tremendously.  We are missing a huge opportunity when we define students as the objects of education.  The key that we need in our investments is to show that young people can be drivers of their education.  They can take charge of improving achievement in their schools.  The paradigm changes when you start with the premise that the young people are on your side, that they can be driving education gains not only for themselves but also for their classmates.I learned these lessons working at College Summit, the nonprofit championing student-driven college success.  They coined the phrase #PeerForward, which means to find and train a community’s most influential students in college access and leadership so that they run campaigns with their peers to file FAFSA, apply to college, and explore careers.  In this model, the peers are owning the outcomes, not just following adult voice.  That’s a very powerful model.  We all care more when we own something. When you’re talking about under-resourced institutions, the most powerful resource that schools need is already there in abundance – the students!! They can solve their problems. They want to achieve and they want to be challenged.  For teenagers especially, just when they are hungry for greater challenge, we so often keep them in the same sort of structure as elementary school.  Let’s take off the training wheels and give them the chance to take on bigger challenges.

“Given all of the contemporary discourse about the ways that traditional K-12 education is not preparing students for the new global economy, is college still relevant?”

A year ago, I co-authored a white paper with Andy Rotherham and Chad Aldeman that outlines today’s post-secondary paradox.  On the one hand, college is more valuable than ever. In immediate term the wage premium is about 70%, the highest it’s ever been.  From a medium term perspective, the number of jobs requiring postsecondary education is climbing. Today, just 45% of Americans have a post-secondary degree, and by 2025, 65% of jobs will require one.  If you want to be in the running for that set of jobs, education beyond high school is essential. (For more information, see Lumina Foundation’sA Stronger Nation report.)At the same time, college is riskier than ever, with historic debt loads, and employers questioning the value of many postsecondary programs.So how can students handle the post-secondary paradox? Young people need to be smart shoppers about their post-secondary education. You can no longer blindly get a degree from anywhere. Some colleges do a much better job of educating and graduating students than others; plus students need to navigate a wider array of options for quality postsecondary education today. You can no longer meander across majors, without considering career goals. That’s not to say students should lock into a career path in 9th grade. Teens are not going to all of a sudden know what they will want to do in 20 years; data suggests that they change jobs even more frequently than previous generations. Students benefit when they consider careers that interest them, and the economic potential of those fields, and then thoughtfully explore them.As smart shoppers, students can consider which range of careers intrigue them, which postsecondary programs will get them on the right path, and which institutions most effectively graduate students from similar backgrounds.  Unfortunately due to budget crunches, school districts are dedicating fewer and fewer resources for college and career planning. Just as the postsecondary paradox leaves students more in need of college-going know-how than ever before. Not surprisingly, college-going rates are down, especially for low-income students.

Students, parents and community organizations need to step up, help schools prioritize college and career planning, and access the resources—including influential students, recent college grads, and volunteer mentors — close at hand. (Check out: College Advising Corps, College Possible, and iMentor)The need for postsecondary education, and in fact deeper postsecondary education, becomes more pronounced the farther out we look. Some labor theorists predict we’re on the verge of the greatest workforce shift since the Industrial Revolution. Over the next few decades, large employment sectors will disappear, they say, due to automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, etc.  How can we prepare for a world like that?  I think we need to be skeptical of hyper-focusing on training students for what the job market requires right now.  Narrowly directing students to fill today’s job gaps may lead to employment and aid certain industries in the short term, but it’s not in the service of our kids, nation or industry in the long term. Rather, we need to raise the conversation about the future of work with students, employers, education innovators, and technologists. Also, I believe it’s a smart bet that this brave new world will favor people who can lead, create, problem solve, work in teams, and persevere. We call those attributes Power Skills. These are the skills employers cite today as being most in demand.  The most effective colleges develop Power Skills well, as do challenging work experiences, and demanding community service work—for example, we have seen Power Skills develop in College Summit Peer Leaders running peer campaigns in their high schools. For America to prosper relative to advancing economies around the world, we need to develop this kind of deeper learning in all students, in every corner of our nation. The question isn’t “whether” postsecondary education. It’s which kind of postsecondary education. Now is not the moment to soften ambitions, especially for students from low-income and under-represented communities climbing uphill. Nor is it time to resign ourselves to status quo postsecondary education.  We need to challenge our students, educators, employers and technologists to stretch, figuring out better ways for students to learn and take charge of their future.

J.B.’s One Good Question:  How can young people drive their education and improve student achievement in their communities?

J.B. Schramm chairs the Learn to Earn initiative at New Profit, a venture philanthropy and social innovation organization that provides funding and strategic support to help the most promising social innovations achieve scale. J.B. leads the organization’s ecosystem innovation work for college access, postsecondary education and career, helping colleagues in the field equip 10+M more Americans for career success by 2025.

One Good Question with Tony Monfiletto: Are the Right People in the Education Redesign Process?

Tony Monfiletto

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Our investment in accountability structure and high-stakes standardized testing reveals the fact that adults think of kids as problems to be solved, rather than assets to be nurtured.  In Jal Mehta’s, The Allure of Order, he outlines how the investment in accountability at the back end of the system is an effort to make up for the fact that we haven’t invested as aggressively in the front end.  We don’t put enough time, energy or strategy into good school design, preparation of teachers, or capital development. Because we don’t put enough resources into those areas, we try to make up for it in accountability structures.

“From substitute teacher to education policy, you’ve worked in practically every level of education impact and have deep understanding of how all of these roles influence opportunities for all students.  What is standing in the way of deeper, effective collaboration for public education in this country?”

We were working off of an old industrial model of education and when that industrial model stopped getting results, we had different expectations for what schools could do, but we never changed the design of the schools to catch up to the new expectations.  When we didn’t change the design of the schools or invest in the people who could populate the new generation of schools, we started accountability structures instead.  If we’re going to deal with the lack of effective design, it’s going to mean dealing with both the accountability structures to make sure that it’s rethought around clear design principles.  We have to do both at the same time.  You can’t have accountability structures built around industrial factory schools when that model isn’t solving the problem.  You have to get both right and right, but now we’re not doing either.  People are trying to deal with the metrics questions but aren’t willing to give up on the design.  Even those who are thinking about innovative school design, they’re still doing it within the confines of the existing model i.e. replacing teachers with blended learning.  These are add-ons, not really answering questions for what’s happening in the instruction.

“Do you think we have the right people in the conversation about school design?”

I don’t.  What’s happened is that we’ve let two camps develop: traditional education interest groups/educators vs. high-stakes standards educators. The traditional camp is dominated by teacher unions, school administrators, Diane Ravitch, etc. and the high-stakes camp is dominated by those who believe in econometrics.  They think that if you get the econometrics right, then align the systems and create the right incentives, everything will come out in the end. The discourse on school design is dominated by those two camps and they’re not the right people to be in the conversation.  The trappings of the existing system make it difficult for both camps to imagine anything else.  We need youth development advocates, neuroscientists, community leaders who are not from education sector, social service providers who understand cognitive and non-cognitive human development—those are the people who ought to be in the conversations.   If we had them in the discussion and designed backwards, we’d have a much differently designed school than our current models.  At Leadership High School Network in Albuquerque, we operate and founded a network of schools built around 3 pillars: learning by doing, community engagement, and 360 support for kids and families.  All pillars are equally important and they all hold up the institution.  What we found is, when any two of the three pillars converge, the impact for kids is exponential.  It’s the convergence that creates the impact, but they have to be seen as equal partners in their work in the schools.

Tony’s One Good Question: Can we give the community a new mental model for what school can look like? And then, can we create a new assessment system that allows for people to have confidence in that new model?

Tony Monfiletto is Executive Director of New Mexico Center for School Leadership. He is a father, husband, educator, visionary, thought leader, and ambitious builder of ideas and schools. He is charming, focused, intense, productive, and deeply committed to both his work, his family, and our community. Tony grew up in Albuquerque with both parents as teachers in the South Valley, family roots in northern New Mexico as well as Chicano activism and Catholic social justice as part of his life.

One Good Question with Anu Passi-Rauste: Education to Build Talent Pipelines.

AnuPassiRauste

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

I’m really encouraged that we’re starting to see our education investments shift to include different projects and initiatives in which students are part of a bigger ecosystem and instrumental in designing our future. The new generation needs to be a part of collaboratively solving world problems.  We don’t know what the jobs will be in the future because the world is changing so rapidly. I want to see the future as a sustainable world, where people are empowered to grow and learn for their own success.We see those expectations in the UN Sustainable Development Goals and on the national level in Finland.  To transform our education system is a long process.  Fifteen years ago, when I was a teacher, I experienced that the most fascinating way to teach was to learn together with the students. What I saw then was that, when students had problems that they were interested in, they were self motivated to dig deeper.  As an entrepreneur, I have learned that the best part of my work is that I need to learn every day.  We are social learners.  The best part of being an entrepreneur is that we need to test all the time and validate our process.  The scientific method is part of my daily life and part of my adult learning process.  Education practice is slowly starting to incorporate this method into general pedagogy.  The real positive inspiration is that you get interested by yourself and you start to follow some fields or topics and then identify what value you can bring there.Although we focus on skills and competence based education, those competences aren’t the only means to developing students for the future.  Schools are still silos—they are physically isolated from society and within the buildings, school lessons are still divided into one-hour topics with related projects.  We’re still learning for the test and valuing extrinsic motivation over instrinsic motivation.  My entrepreneurial career is focused on how the school is part of the big community and creating opportunities for schools and students to work together with companies, organizations, and civic groups.  Organizations can learn from the students and give students meaningful problems to solve. It also gives forerunner companies the possibility to enhance their learning about next-generation employees and consumers. As a result, students get relevant learning beyond classes, more experience and opportunities to find their own passion and motivation for learning.

“Your past projects have centered on student agency in innovation and problem-solving.  What does it mean for greater society to have today's youth be an integral part of entrepreneurial solutions?”

Today’s learning is organized around problem-based learning, challenges and case studies. What if this could be done in close collaboration in our actual economic ecosystem ? If we can bridge this gap, it helps us to employ the young graduates and build their courage, self confidence, and attitude for lifelong learning and self trust.  We can create opportunities for students to feel integrated and valuable in greater society.  We help students with their ideas and have industry experts who are willing to listen and coach them.  In the end, students come up with brilliant solutions to company-based challenges or their own ideas for start-ups. This model also increases democratic opportunities for the broader population.One thing that I’ve learned is that, when students are really working on their own ideas, they want to be responsible for their own learning.  It doesn’t mean that they don’t need support, but that they can then identify the supports that they need.  That’s what creates a critical role for teachers, facilitators and companies to respond to the students’ needs.  Access to community-supported learning needs to be a right for everybody.  We still have work to do to refine the models that connect the employers and students.  Under our new venture, LearnBrand, we want to give students an opportunity to apply the knowledge that they’ve learned, which is a critical part of the learning process. We focus on actionable learning where we engage people during their college and university studies.  We give them real world assignments and experience. We build a bridge between learners and employers and help both sides equally; students grow their practical skills and employers manage their future talent pipeline.

Anu’s One Good Question : How do we empower our students to keep their curiousity and growth mindset throughout their lives ?

Anu Passi-Rauste, an avant-garde educator and leading expert in digital learning, challenges educators, students, and policymakers to adopt innovative approaches to education in K-12, higher education, and corporate training settings. Her latest venture, LearnBrand, strengthens business partnerships for college and university students.

The Year in Review: 10 Good Questions.

Asking the right questions is more important than having the right answers.  One of my favorite parts of the fall interviews was to hear these amazingly accomplished, visionary thinkers and doers ask questions that they couldn't answer on their own.    Looking forward to hearing more questions in the new year.

1. Zaki’s One Good Question :  Bangladesh has made lots of progress to educate more people in our society, but we see that the system is not yet producing a respectful society.  Education is about creating global peace.  Are we matching what we really want to accomplish through education ?  Are we missing the way that education should be defined ? (BL)

2. Saku’s One Good Question : My question is an extremely boring one: What is the point of school ?  Once we answer that, then we can move on to the question of how to educate all youth. (FI)

3. Michael’s One Good Question : How much input should local, state, and federal governments have on the programmatic strategies of schools,  given their variation in education goals and knowledge of effective programs ? (US)

4. Noëlle’s One Good Question :  How well does our education system engage students? Ideally, I would specify "boys" rather than just "students" because boys are falling behind in Malaysia. Girls outperform boys in Maths and Science unlike international norms. And in public universities, girls account for 70% of the intake. Our education blueprint has highlighted the risk of "lost boys". It appears our education system isn't really working out for boys. Given the patriarchal expectations within conservative communities, I wonder what impact this achievement gap will have on the next generation. (MY)

5. Allan's One Good Question: Given the importance that we place on education and that we know what it takes to provide high quality education for all children, why haven’t we solved it for all children ? That’s what this country has to wrestle with. (US)

6. Alex's One Good Question: I asked this question earlier on Twitter. I’ve been thinking a lot about how our philosophy of education as parents is different/similar to our approach as educators. The places where those two perspectives are in tension are the most interesting areas for me to explore. As a parent, I value personalization, socio-emotional development and self-directed learning a lot more than I did as an educator. What do those seemingly disparate perspectives mean about high quality education for all children ? (US)

7. Marcelo's One Good Question: This is hard. My question.  Of course I have children, is it possible for them to have a better future ?  I am seeing here in Brazil we face immediate threats to global warming.  Strong period of economic depresssion.  Huge problem in education. Do they have a good future ? Thinking more globally, will they even have any place to go ? (BR)

8. Karen’s One Good Question : How can a student’s experience build on his/her fount of knowledge, both linguistic and cultural ? (US)

9. Ellen’s One Good Question:  If the most critical student competencies for the future are about addressing complex problems with diverse populations, how can we better prepare teachers to do the same? (US)and the one that got us all started...

10. Rhonda's One Good Question: In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation's role in the world?

What good questions will you ask in 2016 about our world's education needs?

Didn't Get the Answers You Wanted in 2015? Maybe You're Asking the Wrong Questions…

But when you start thinking you know everything, you stop being curious.

I started 2015 asking, what, I thought, was a bold, reflective question for the year.  It was our first morning in Havana, and we were introduced to the ceiba tree and her place in Cuban history : meetings, prayer, dreams, wishes, gratitude.  I took a solemn walk around the ceiba tree three times, asking for clarity for the year ahead. My professional and love lives were exploding in ways that felt beyond me.  I hoped that the ceiba would help me quiet my heart and brain, and eventually show me the right paths for both sets of complex needs.My ask for clarity was steeped in doing life better.  Work better.  Love better.  Improve outcomes.  Change behaviors.  I thought those would be the right answers and that the ceiba would help mefigure out how to execute them.  As 2015 draws to a close, I have certainly gotten the clarity that I asked for, but the answers were not what I wanted.  Here I sit, nursing a broken heart, on the other side of a painful work transition, and questioning everything again.  Before the ball drops this week, I want to commit to asking the right questions for 2016, not necessarily getting the right answers.  Something manageable between « What is the meaning of life ? » and « What are my interim goal metrics ? »This weekend, Ravi Gupta penned an article about the need for students to engage in deep questioning. « When a student does not have courage, time, and space, their questions are often basic or vague — and sometimes don’t evenend with a question mark. Can you help me? . . . I don’t understand . . . This is hard. » Sound familiar ?  He’s described my ask for clarity perfectly.  I hadn’t asked a deep question, but made a vague plea for help.  What if I had applied his advice for how schools can teach students to question, to guide my adult inquiry?

There is a gap between what we ask for, what we can intuit, and what we actually need to learn.  In Ian Leslie’s forthcoming Curious, he focuses on the paradox necessary to remain curious--- understanding enough about something to find it interesting, but not having the answer be so complex that questioning is overwhelming and unattainable. The right question fits uncomfortably in that space, inspiring us to ask and giving us hope that the answer(s) are totally within reach.This fall, I started asking myself questions about my beliefs in education, trying to test how I wanted to serve my professional purpose.  Those questions were a step up from vague clarity, but they were still statements in disguise.  They were really easy to answer and justify with rich examples from my work.  I had brilliant responses to those questions, because they didn’t force me to reconsider my position, to adopt a different perspective, or to learn.  Then it occurred to me that I couldn’t answer my own question with the same knowledge that asked it.

So I went back to my inquiry and, this time, decided to ask my peers and colleagues around the world to weigh in.  Not just the peers who would mirror my perspectives, but those who had completely different ways of seeing the question.  In One Good Question, I ask international thought leaders and doers in education to reflect deeply on their country’s investments, policy, and practices.  Throughout the fall conversations, every interviewee noted that facing the One Good Question challenged their own thinking (victory for questioning !).  For many, they were unsure if their country leadership was asking themselves this type of essential question to inform education design/reform.  How many of our country policies, state priorities, and school practices are based on the right answers to the wrong questions ?There's an inherent tension about the urgency of public education transformation.  I get it.We don't feel like we have the luxury of time to reflect, iterate, and deepen adult learning because we’re trying to make swift, scalable transformation for all kids.  But if, as leaders- and I mean all of the ways that we lead in this movement -- we're asking the wrong questions, those « wrong » questions will still give us answers.  If we’re not asking complex enough questions, we might even be convinced that we have the right answers.The questions that we ask matter, so we should give ourselves the time and space to ask the right ones.

One Good Question with Zaki Hasan: Move Bangladesh from Fashion Economy to Thought Economy.

Zaki Hasan, (photo credit: Mr. Saikat Majumder)

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

If you talk about the philosophy of education, in Bangladesh, we’re still like 17th century Europe – an industrial country focused on economic equities : jobs, food, survival. We’re not talking about which common social values the world should have.  After I earn the money in my skilled job, do I understand the value of human life in this world ? Unfortunately, what happens when there is not enough employment or job security, people turn to unethical means to survive. There must be some global values system that we start talking about in education.  Will that not be the number one problem when we’re trying to kill each other not from lack of money but due to lack of accepting diversity ?  Who will solve this ?  The medical system will not.  The political system will not.  Only education can do this.Bangladesh is a young country. Since the independence, I broadly categorize the generations into three: the first generation questioned the injustice and owned the country’s independence, the second generation questioned autocracy and has started the journey of democracy 24 years back , and now the third generation is questioning our journey without a vision and we are heading to a bright and shiny future. This journey would only be successful when our children are equally ready through education to make the journey. This generation and generations after this need to understand the values that the previous generations had started building this country on i.e. justice and democracy, which must continue to improve in creating a society based on equity.We need a different education investment framework and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals give us a reasonable starting point.  There are some missing focuses though. For example, in the next 15 years, when we talk about basic literacy, it has to take into account how differently we have started communicating by using technology than what it had been so far in the form of in person communication and written scripts. The long discussed issue of digital divide is becoming a much more complex issue in the coming days.   For example, a person with post-graduation education from Bangladesh today might have less exposure to new technologies than a typical elementary school child in the US.  There has to be more investment in education, especially in the methods of communication, to decrease such the global achievement gap.  The developed countries still have a lot to improve, but they are still focused on their immediate crisis of economic survival than equally having social value creation and even equally important aspect of transforming our children into thought leaders.  Least developed countries need a radical restructuring of education.  We’ll stay stuck in factories and providing good clothes to wear, but developing countries will continue to rise in thought economy.  We have to change the education system to allow people to think freely and creatively.

Photo credit: Mr. Saikat Majumder

“In Bangladesh, you've been instrumental in growing global education programming. How effective are western innovations/models in improving education gains in Bangladesh?  Are there other US education initiatives that would advance education access?”

My visits to public, community schools in US were bittersweet.  Children there have an assurance that they can go to school in their area.  Common Core State Standards had just been rolled out and it was wonderful to see that federal and state system have agreed to core common standards and still had the freedom to apply them in their own way.  The most beautiful moments I had were observing student-teacher interactions.  I visited Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy and, at first, I couldn’t understand the role of the teacher and the student.  Sometimes the student was leading the class and the teacher was in the back of the room.  The roles seemed interchangeable and that made me happy.Here, going to school is like winning a lottery ticket.  Even if you get access to a school, you cannot assure that the quality is maintained.  In the classroom, many teachers are not trying to make learning interesting, they are trying to ‘teach’ children instead of making children interested to ‘learn’. Education can be important to empower students to take control of the class. The classroom environment that I saw in the US is something that would be beautiful.  No one wants to feel inferieor, not even your 3 year old child.  I don’t know how it happened in the US and how it could happen in Bangladesh.  If the US reached consensus on CCSS in 2012, maybe we can do it here by 2022. If we can shift to more inclusive pedagogy, especially children-focused learning, the next generation will believe that more is possible in all schools.

Zaki’s One Good Question :  Bangladesh has made lots of progress to educate more people in our society, but we see that the system is not yet producing a respectful society.  Education is about creating global peace.  Are we matching what we really want to accomplish through education ?  Are we missing the way that education should be defined?

Zaki Hasan is currently serving as the Executive Director (ED) of Underprivileged Children’s Educational Programs Bangladesh (UCEP).He has worked in various sub-sectors of education including Technical Education, Early Childhood Development, Primary Education, Secondary Education, Adult Education, Girls Education and ICT-aided Education. He has been member in various boards and committees on issues/organizations involved in education. He has numerous publications including editor of more than 20 children books. He was also the founding Country Director of Room to Read Bangladesh. He has worked for several other non-profit international organizations such as Save The Children, ActionAid, and Helen Keller Intl. Zaki Hasan is an Eisenhower Fellow.

One Good Question with Saku Tuominen: Next 100 Years of Finnish Education.

Saku Tuominen

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

What education expenditures tell us about Finland : we invest significantly in education because everyone in Finland feels it’s important.  However, the discussion we refuse to have is why ?  What is the essence of education, the purpose of schools?In Finland, we love solid hard work, but we tend to be risk-averse in our work, reacting to crisis well, but not developing longer vision when systems function well.  I feel that even our Prime Minister should take the opportunity of our new curriculum to be visionary, and ask four essential questions to inform how we redesign education in our country :

1. What are the skills kids should learn at school ?

2. How should they learn those skills ?

3. Who should be the people facilitating the learning process ? Is it teachers and teachers only ? What is the role of young people ? Old people ? Companies ? Parents ?

4. Where should the learning take place ? Should it be only in schools ? In the city ? In the parks ? In society ? Via internet platforms ?

Based on the answers to these questions, then we should ask what governments, companies, and cities are responsible for doing to recreate our education ecosystem.

“In your Scool project, you've identified the biggest need as helping schools change and providing platforms for change at the student, teacher, school, and system level. Why do you think it can be difficult for schools to adopt change?  What are the early learnings about where change is most impactful — at the student, teacher, classroom, school, or system level?”

In order for human beings to change, they must first believe that change is possible.  In this case, we must believe that we can change the way we educate and how our schools are structured. Then we have to have the courage, the mental toughness and resources to do the work of change.We ask ourselves how we can be certain that the new things we try in schools will work. Well, the honest answer is that we don’t yet know, but how can we be certain that the things we do in schools today are relevant from the perspective of 2030 ? We don´t know that either. The best way to encourage change is to redefine failure.  We are trying new things and none of the outcomes are failure if we’re learning from the results.  In 2016, Finland will launch a new curriculum that includes freedom for teachers and schools to define teaching, but there has been no discussion about the evaluation system. This ambiguity fosters a disincentive to actually try anything new.  If schools or teachers take the freedom to teach curiosity and creativity, but then students are only measured on maths and physics, there’s an inherent tension.With the Scool project, our mission is to help schools change.  Culturally, not enough Finns are risk-takers and entreprenuers.  Although the new curriculum encourages more teacher freedom, not all teachers are likely to exercise it.  We need to do a massive empowerment campaign for teachers, showing them that it’s great to take risks, to make « mistakes. »  The HundrED project of Scool is designed to support teachers risk-taking by giving them the best platforms to share new ideas and best practices in classrooms just like theirs.During our site visits across Finland, we’ve been to schools that are doing amazing things with average budgets.  In one school, a teacher refuses to give any grades to any students, students themselves are giving the grades.  The biggest problem is that the best kids hesitate to give themselves the best grades that they deserve.  In another school, the teachers no longer purchase educational materials, and instead, they are creating their own with students.  Teachers help guide the content and the context for book-making about the topic of study.  In some instances, they may even sell the books to others as resources.  In a third school, students took responsibility for a bullying problem.  The school decided to take teachers completely out of the equation and gave the responsibility of solving this problem to the oldest students in the primary school. As a result of the student-led interventions, all of the difficulties disappeared.  This is the area that is getting me most excited.  Because if you can tell these stories of success within the same regular conditions, it gives more credit for other schools to try something new.  These three examples illustrate the essence of the future of schools : putting students at the center of problem-solving for their own learning.What’s the key commonality in these schools ?  It’s like what happens in any great company—you have to have a great principal in place.  One teacher can make changes in one class, but over time it becomes more complicated.  It’s all about principal leadership, because they inspire teachers to try innovations, and then they celebrate and share the gains that teachers have made with the greater community. 

Saku’s One Good Question : My question is an extremely boring one: What is the point of school ?  Once we answer that, then we can move on to the question of how to educate all youth. 

Saku Tuominen is co-founder and creative director of Idealist Group : Entrepreneur, innovator, creative director, executive producer, author, keynote speaker, curator, olive oil producer, right wing (in ice hockey). I dream and do. Idealist Group is a production company of ideas, a platform for everything I do. The mission of the company is to improve the world with bold ideas that are executed well. At the moment Idealist Group concentrates on three main areas: the future of education, office work and video.

One Good Question with Dr. Michael Goetz: How school Spending Impacts Change.

Michael Goetz

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

The biggest myth is that education can cure all social ills.  Given the diversity of the population, it’s not possible to equalize outcomes when the inputs are so different.  That said, I think it’s the greatest goal of the education system and should in fact be promoted with new effort.  Therefore, schools districts and states and the federal government should continue to close gaps based on socio-economic class, as well as the conscious and unconscious racism and sexism inherent in our culture.

“Happily, those programmatic strategies that help all children learn, have the greatest effect on those struggling to learn, including the disenfranchised youth, that is : a focus on intensive, embedded teacher professional development, tutoring and other extra help strategies for struggling students, and early interventions, such as quality preK programs should top the lists in most schools. These programs have shown the most impact on academic growth.”

For decades, the US education funding system has been designed to ameliorate the academic and social inequalities produced by our economic and cultural disparities.  Our federal, state, and local funding system all contribute to priority in different ways. Federal funding, such as Headstart and Title I, and state/local funding formulas are designed to subsidize needs of low-income and/or marginalized groups.  Despite their design, these funds don’t necessarily perform in the ways that the public assumes.  For example, the formula built for Title I funds includes a geographical sparsity index, which means that more funds per student may go to Wyoming than to inner city LA.  There is a similar disparity with state financing that links to property wealth.  State formula funds are allocated to counteract the property wealth of local municipalities.  In the 80s, states began spending more money on education than local governments.   Since states were « purchasing » education at a higher rate, they felt more entitled to have a say about what happens in schools.  Essentially, these funding inequities compelled states to introduce standards based movements. Standards and accountability based movements at the federal level show disparities between and within states as well as between and within districts and schools.

“Often, we use our preconceived notions about education outcomes to inform our decisions.  What are the biggest myths about how education works in the US, that we continue to fund?  What could be possible for education outcomes if we shifted our funding away from X and did Y instead?”

The other big myth is that the sheer existence of additional funds can help cure education shortcomings.  School finance experts debate all the time whether more money matters. But all of us agree that how money is used matters. For example, in every economics research study, I ask a group of teacher leaders what they need to bring struggling students up to par.  The answer is always an additional program and it's always 20% more funding than they currently receive.  We have returned to the same community after a decade of the program implementation and they ask for another 20% budget increase !  What happens is that they take the new funds and use them to reinforce existing programs and services instead of restructuring their expenditures.

• They supplement vs. supplant? Yes, you’re on the right track.  What they’re doing is taking the money and applying it to things that they already do.  When a school or district’s programs are not producing results, more of the same does not lead to improvement :  redistribution of current resources and infusing of new, evidence-based programming is the smarter decision.

• So what should schools ask for ?  Most educators and education lobbyists approach funding requests from a loss mindset : we have endured budget cuts and we want you to restore our full funding.  When educators understand what achievement students will make as a direct result of the new program, they can make needs-based asks.  If awarded an extra $4,000, I will be able to graduate one more student, because that’s the proven result of ABC program.Statistically, we know many programs, when implemented well, impact student achievement for all students, such as intensive embedded teacher professional development, which requires full-time instructional coaching, and introduction of certified teachers as tutors.  Those are two of the most effective strategies and the hardest ones to implement with fidelity.  What education economists will tell you is that if you don’t mandate implementation, you likely will not see positive academic outcomes because resources will be used for the existing programming.  We suggest that states start with no mandates and then look at the schools that are not performing.  If they haven’t implemented these strategies yet, then start slowly mandating the interventions—start with instructional coaches in year 1, then maybe certified tutors.

• What should districts and schools stop funding ?  This is highly controversial, but what continues to elude me is how many facets of life the schooling system attempts to take part. Schooling should be good at educating students to standards. This is their priority. Rhetorically, « why are schools in the business of transportation, food service, security, medical care, and athletics ? » I’m not saying that these are not useful periphery services to academics, but I do suggest schools should be focusing on what they do best :  educate students. These perifery services may take place on campus, but I question whether the education system should be directly responsible. I do not expect superintendents to lay concrete at the new school, but I do expect the superintendent to contract out this service to a reputable company that actually has experience laying concrete. This is what people would be calling community involvement in education.  Struggling schools should cut out all athletics from their school and move to community-based sports teams.  This will increase community involvement for athletics and be aligned with international practices.  Economically, it may create a surplus to fund necessary academic interventions or it may not. However, it would allow schools to get on with educating students.

Michael’s One Good Question: How much input should local, state, and federal governments have on the programmatic strategies of schools,  given their variation in education goals and knowledge of effective programs?

Dr. Michael Goetz is the Executive Director of Research on Social and Educational Change (RSEC). Clients include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Picus Odden and Associates, Council for Better Education, Foundation for Child Development, National Academies, National Center for Innovation in Education, and several legislative and gubernatorial committees.Dr. Goetz received a B.A. in Educational Studies from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at University of Wisconsin—Madison. He received a Wisconsin-Spencer Doctoral Research Program Fellowship, a dissertation grant from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and the American Education Finance Association (AEFA) New Scholar Award.

One Good Question with Noelle Lim: What STEAM Could Mean for Malaysia.

Noëlle Lim

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

In Malaysia, education takes the lion share in the government budget, so it's clear the government is fairly serious about it. One reason is cultural, our society prizes good education, and another is that Malaysia relies on foreign investments, so it's an open economy that needs to have a globally competent workforce.Parents are serious about education too. For example, in Malaysia and developed countries of Asia, it's a norm for parents with the means to pay for their child to attend supplementary classes conducted by private tutors. However, I think parents pay for these classes, not in hope their child will become the next Nobel Prize winners, but to pass the national exams with straight As. It's assumed that if you do this, you can perhaps win a scholarship or get a place in a good university, and you'll be set for life.

“During your Eisenhower Fellowship, you came to the States to learn more about education entrepreneurship.  How will your school design reflect learning and innovation from both countries?”

The PISA rankings show that Malaysia's education system is in the bottom one third (yet neighbor Singapore is number one), and TIMSS show that Malaysia is below average international standards (it was above average in the 1990s).  It appears to be an uphill task for Malaysia to catch up. I don't think we need to aspire to be number one, but aim to be in the top quartile. And I think we're capable of doing that because our society values education.Malaysian schools needs to upgrade the content of what they are teaching.  For instance, an online, centralized database of teaching notes with suggested pedagogy and updates could help the schools.Secondly, the current method of teaching in Malaysia, and indeed still in many countries, is done in silo. We don't help students connect dots, and there's a push for STEM in Malaysia.  I believe the focus has to shift to STEAM instead and subjects to be taught in an interdisciplinary way.  Finding solutions to complex problems in the world requires a more comprehensive way of thinking, and a combination of science and arts/humanities. Innovations too, for example the iPad is a marriage of tech prowess and design.In the States, I visited two schools that are shifting from STEM to STEAM and incorporating more holistic offerings such as entrepreneurship and liberal arts : North Carolina Math & Science and Illinois Mathematics & Science Academy.  I chose those schools because the Ministry of Education from Singapore and Chinese frequently visit them.  These public schools have strong academic performance, particularly in STEM, and selective admissions.  At the North Carolina campus, the chancellor Todd Roberts, has a degree in English and believes in a well-rounded education.  Illinois Math & Science is developing an entrepreneurship thread.  They are mobilizing their alumni base and drawing them in to mentor students and provide internships in start-ups in Chicago.  These are gradual processes, to move towards STEAM instructional expectations.Two questions that I asked almost all schools I visited were « What is the purpose of a school? What is the purpose of education? »  Apart from ensuring children are literate and know their sums, I believe it's about helping the student discover a range of possible interests and to help the child choose which path to pursue and to arm him with the relevant information. This means schools have to give the child opportunities to work on projects of personal interests like capstone projects.  Once the child finds his interest, there is no looking back. Many successful people I've interviewed, say that what they do is their passion and luck of course helps. Either they found their passion by accident or were drawn to it by a mentor. I think schools can play a bigger role in helping children find their passion.I also believe schools should produce people who will develop the agency, aptitude and desire to want to solve complex problems. It's not just to pass exams, but to create the next generation of scientists, artists, makers, entrepreneurs, and leaders.

Noëlle’s One Good Question :  How well does our education system engage students? Ideally, I would specify "boys" rather than just "students" because boys are falling behind in Malaysia. Girls outperform boys in Maths and Science unlike international norms. And in public universities, girls account for 70% of the intake. Our education blueprint has highlighted the risk of "lost boys". It appears our education system isn't really working out for boys. Given the patriarchal expectations within conservative communities, I wonder what impact this achievement gap will have on the next generation.

Noelle Lim is a presenter and producer with BFM 89.9, Malaysia’s only business radio station, and heads its education division, BFM Business School. She is interested in the intersection of media, education, and technology.  During her Eisenhower Fellowship, she investigated innovations in high school curriculum and pedagogy to inform her plan to start a school and to launch a project that prepares and connects low-income students in Malaysia and Southeast Asia to the best schools in the US, UK and Australia.

One Good Question with Allan Golston: Investing in Instruction Matters Most.

Allan Golston

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

"In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

I believe that our investments reveal that the next generation is obviously the future. Our future depends on how well we prepare our students, regardless of their background. Demographic population in this country is shifting in dramatic ways – the next generation will need to be socially mobile and solve the world problems of the future and do it with fundamental skill sets—think critically, solve problems, and apply knowledge in complex ways. One way that we believe this is possible, is through high quality education. High quality education only happens if it’s supported by great teachers. Fundamentally, this is why we invest in education : access to a high quality education that prepares young people for their future- career or post-secondary studies and then career--- we think that is mission critical.The Gates Foundation’s education strategies are prioritized and focus heavily on the investment in professional development. We would frame that in our work as feedback on teacher effectiveness. What’s clear from our experiences and the research is that, what happens between a teacher and student in the classroom is one of the most important investments that you can make that drives student outcomes. Once you say that, then that means that you have to focus on instruction. If you focus on instruction, how do you dramatically improve and sustain high quality instruction so that it benefits all kids ? That means : feedback for teachers, and personalized PD for teachers that helps them improve their practice. If you look at the foundations’ investments, that is one of the critical paths and one of our top three education priorities.

“During your opening at the US Education Learning Forum, you spoke eloquently about the education caste system that you experienced in your Denver high school. Do you think that it's possible to eliminate that in the US and if so, what change does that require?”

I do think it’s possible. Several reasons that I know it’s possible, is that we see it working in certain places and that gives us a lot of confidence that we can do this. If you think about education as an equalizer, but then access to high quality education isn’t accesible to all, then education itself becomes a cause of inequity. Education for too many of our young people depends on zip codes and parent income levels. It’s a huge problem and yet we know what it takes to solve it. If you look at where it’s working across the country, students are thriving and achieving. The four things that we believe makes it possible :

1. high expectations for all students, coupled with

2. great teaching that is sustainable for all teachers and all kids,

3. more personalized education for all students, and

4. where students and educators are at the core, driving the learning.

After a recent learning trip in eastern rural Kentucky, a resource-limited area further devastated by the decline of the coal industry, these principles were borne out in clear ways. What I was struck by most was seeing the fourth principle in action. Educators in this community were at the core of the work and they were unwavering in their responsibilities to students. I contrasted this with many visits to urban resource-limited areas, where often times you hear educators say that they don’t believe all kids can learn. They list a litany of realities (poverty, hunger, parent absenteeism), that almost fall in the conversation as excuses. Yet in eastern Kentucky, down to the individual stakeholder, everyone refused to accept those same conditions as excuses and demonstrated the « whatever it takes » attitude : data-driven, iterating with students, deeply involved in student growth and incremental growth and support. These are things that I think are extraordinary—they know the students’ social struggles and still ensure that that family has access to food and can get basic needs met/get back on their feet, all without lowering expectations for student achievement.I think that in rural areas, there is a sense of community that you don’t see in urban settings. It’s [more] natural based on the small size of their communities—everyone knows each other. The geographic dimensions create community urgency and agency that can be very difficult to duplicate in an urban setting. I also think that when you are in a resource-constrained environment, often you have to figure out how to get things done when you know that there are no additional resources coming. In rural areas, there is no hope of resources dramatically increasing -- there won’t be a better contract or more taxes – so, in those areas, educators have to think differently. Their mindset for how to get things done more quickly takes on a different dimension.We tend to think of urban as a monolith as opposed to sum of the parts. I’ve seen in some urban areas that, when they break down their geographic footprint into smaller footprints, they can duplicate the culture of community that exists more organically in rural settings—knowing all the students and ways to come close to rural community in urban settings. I believe it’s possible.

Allan's One Good Question: Given the importance that we place on education and that we know what it takes to provide high quality education for all children, why haven’t we solved it for all children ? That’s what this country has to wrestle with.

Allan C. Golston, president of the United States Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, leads the foundation’s efforts to ensure that all students receive a high-quality education that leads to success in college and their career. He oversees the U.S. Program’s major areas of investment—Education, Pacific Northwest, Special Initiatives, and Advocacy.

One Good Question with Alex Hernandez: Personalized Learning and Design Thinking Matter for All Kids.

Alex Hernandez

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question (outlined in About) and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

"In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

I see two big trends that guide how I think about investing philanthropy.First, we are in generational change towards school choice. No matter your politics, every family wants a say in where their children go to school. Even those who fight against other families’ right to choose schools, they consistently exercise ‘choice’ for their own children. The good news is Americans are making choices in more and more aspects of their lives and the pressure to give families a say in what happens to their children will keep growing. If we truly believe in a free public education, children should not be automatically assigned to schools based on how much rent or mortgage their parents can afford. That’s not free or equitable. That’s a price tag.Second, our society is in a relentless march towards more personalization and this will eventually impact how we organize our schools. I often think of one of our five-year-old neighbors who was an expert in trains but ‘struggled’ in school. He loved trains. He read everything he could he could get his hands on about them and had incredible content knowledge. Instead of listing all the ways he didn’t ‘fit into’ school, how could we create a school that ‘fit around’ him. Our families just need permission to hope for something better for their children. Silicon Valley’s biggest innovations are not technology solutions, they are the new business models facilitated by technology. So what will new school models look like going forward?The shift towards choice and personalization will happen over a generation but there is no turning back at this point.

“In your ThinkSchools blog, you highlight the benefits of personalized learning and design thinking as solutions to one-size-fits-all public education models. What's the relationship between the two and how can classrooms, schools, or systems take a first step to embrace that paradigm?”

My interest in personalized learning kind of happened all at once. At work, I have the privilege of visiting a number of high-performing charter, district and private schools. These schools are doing incredible work, yet, after great gains, their students seemed to be hitting these stubborn ‘ceilings’ around reading comprehension, writing, college persistence, etc.At the same time, my twins boys began kindergarten at their local neighborhood school. I observed a four-to-five year grade level spread in academic ability among the five-year-olds in their classes. Our boys attended a ‘good’ school and the teachers did many of the things I’d want to see as an educator and a parent. But it became painfully obvious that many children were not getting what they needed academically which also impacted them emotionally. One kindergartner wrote a letter to the teacher begging her to teach her some new math content while another five-year-old arrived at the conclusion that she was no good at math because everything seemed over her head.I began to wonder if squeezing the proverbial lemon harder would get us the results we wanted or if we needed some radical new approaches.I believe in personalized learning because I think we can do better than organizing school into boxes with thirty children and a teacher for thirty hours a week. I see school as more blank canvas than foregone conclusion.Design thinking is simply an approach for educators to re-think school based on deep understanding of what students and families want/need. I’m on the board of 4pt0 Schools which uses design thinking to help education entrepreneurs launch Tiny Schools. With Tiny Schools, we are rapidly testing new school concepts with students and families participating at the beginning of the design process.Now using student input may sound obvious, but, if you’ve ever created a high school schedule, you know that the deep human needs of students are at the end of a very long list of other priorities.Or take textbook adoption as an example. Committees of adults spend hours poring over textbooks even though there is little to no research showing that textbooks are effective learning tools. Plus, textbooks are insanely expensive. If the text selection process were based on how how kids actually interacted and learned from textbooks, I suspect we’d see some very different decisions being made.It’s counterintuitive, but, once you decide what your innovation is, have actual kids inform the design of your innovation. I was just at Summit Schools with Diane Tavenner, who explained that their personalized learning platform relies heavily on student input. At every turn, Summit solicits feedback from students as the ultimate end user. They built the student-facing dashboard first and then they built the teacher interface. When in doubt, you don’t seek expert judgement, you ask the kid.

Alex's One Good Question: I asked this question earlier on Twitter. I’ve been thinking a lot about how our philosophy of education as parents is different/similar to our approach as educators. The places where those two perspectives are in tension are the most interesting areas for me to explore. As a parent, I value personalization, socio-emotional development and self-directed learning a lot more than I did as an educator. What do those seemingly disparate perspectives mean about high quality education for all children?

Alex Hernandez is a Partner at the Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit that supports the growth of the nation’s best public charter schools. In that role, he leads CSGF’s Next-Generation Schools practice focused on personalized learning and school model innovation. He is a former Area Superintendent at Aspire Public Schools and joined CSGF in 2010. He taught high school math in South Los Angeles and later served as a Broad Fellow at Portland Public Schools. Before that, Alex worked for several years with JP Morgan and Disney’s venture capital arm, Steamboat Ventures. He is a graduate of Claremont McKenna and has an MBA and Masters of Education from Stanford University. He is also a columnist for EdSurge.

One Good Question with Marcelo Knobel: General Studies Reform for Brazil's Universities.

Prof. Marcelo Knobel

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Sometimes there is an investment but the priorities are completely wrong.  In Brazil we have significant investments--- the government pays for K-12 and university education for all students -- , but the priorities are not leading us to strong education outcomes. Our system and needs are really complex, but there are two existing investments that could be better leveraged for change : value of the teacher as professional and scalability of non-governmental education organizations.  Our teachers are underpaid and not well-prepared for the work, and society provides no incentive to be a professor, or positive value of the profession.  To change that, for the next generation, it’s necessary to have a really smart and fast plan to change this situation. This is where scalability of non-governmental organizations matters.  There are philanthropic and social investment efforts here, but they aren’t as well developed as in the US.  It’s difficult to keep an ONG runnning.  There are a few ONGs run by the civil society or wealthy families, but their impact is very small in comparison to the need.  Fundaçao Lemann is making some interesting programs, but the number of people that these programs can impact is small.  Brazil should have 1,000 organizations like this, but we maybe have only 10. Scaling the impact of our ONGs would reach a much broader population than we can do currently.

ProFIS image

“In your upcoming book, you posit that Brazilian higher education would benefit from offering general Liberal Arts Colleges among existing post-secondary institutions. What void will Liberal Arts Colleges fill and how will they transform access and success for the greater population?”

My main concern is to advocate for the cause of General Education in university.  In Brazil 43% of the population completes high school, but only 12% has a post-secondary degree[1], so we’re already dealing with an elite population.  The benefits for these elite is very clear—better salaries, better jobs.  In our university system, we currently have no general education or liberal arts course requirements.  When a student tests to enter university, they are only applying to a specific career strand : medicine, education, chemistry, accounting, etc.  It may seem like a minor detail but it’s not.  Some careers are extremely difficult to access. At UNICAMP for example, less than 1% of applicants are accepted into the medical program.  If you are accepted and after one month you don’t like this course of study, you have to drop-out of university and start all over for the next year. A general studies or liberal arts base would allow students to experiment and learn more about specific industries before making a commitment to one of them.In the real world when companies hire engineers, they provide a 6 months training period for the specific content in that position.  The ideal candidates are excellent learners and problem-solvers first, then content experts.  Ususally companies prefer to hire people who can think outside of the box and have certain soft skills that we don’t learn here in Brazil at all. General education has been in place in the US for years. In the global market, companies and countries like China, Singapore, and Hong Kong are in search of more well-rounded professionals who can deal with problems and learn how to solve them across multiple disciplines.  If you’re learning only content in university, within 10 years your content may be outdated.ProFIS created at UNICAMP is a hybrid of my general education vision. This is a pilot that I would like to see the entire university adopt.  We recruit the best students from the local public high school, who wouldn’t normally attend university. On average 80% of students are living in poverty and 90% are first generation in the university.  We’re automatically increasing social inclusion by making a space for these students in university.Even when these students are the best in their schools, they still have strong gaps in their basic education.  ProFIS anticipates and supports academic and socio-economic gaps with an army of staff and resources: the best professors in university volunteer to teach in ProFIS, Teaching Assistants provide extra tutoring, Social Workers help with problems at home—if students don’t show up for one week, we call the home to get them back, and we pay students a minimum wage to prevent them from dropping out because they need to earn money for their family.  Fifty percent of our students continue on to traditional university studies.The problem is that ProFIS is only a tiny drop in the bucket.  We can only admit 120 students per class (about 10% of applicants) but we have thousands who have this need.  If this program could be replicated in 100 universities, it could start making a difference.  We need advocacy with the university system, the legislature, and large employers.  If employers are clamoring for this particular employee profile with a well-rounded education, then our country will make changes.  Politicians need to advocate the change.  Universities need to replicate.  We also need to educate the general population to know that this can exist so that they can demand it.  My upcoming book will show how this is possible and trending all over the world.  Brazil is out of alignment with this trend and we should make a difference to catch up.Read more here about the ProFIS model and impact.

Marcelo's One Good Question: This is hard. My question.  Of course I have children, is it possible for them to have a better future ?  I am seeing here in Brazil we face immediate threats to global warming.  Strong period of economic depression.  Huge problem in education. Do they have a good future ? Thinking more globally, will they even have any place to go ?[1] from BRAZIL – Country Note – Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators 

Marcelo Knobel is Director of the Brazilian National Nanotechnology Laboratory (LNNano), of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (University of Campinas, UNICAMP). From 2002 to 2006 he coordinated de Núcleo de Desenvolvimento da Criatividade (Creativity Development Center, NUDECRI), of UNICAMP and from 2006 to 2008 he was the Executive Director of the Science Museum, also at UNICAMP. He was the Vice-President for Undergraduate Programs from 2009 to 2013.  He was a 2007 Eisenhower Fellow to the US taking a deeper look at scientific culture and the popularization of science via science museums.

One Good Question with Karen Beeman: How Biliteracy Supports Social Justice for All.

Karen Beeman

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.”  These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“Voy a una party con mi broder."

When Karen Beeman gave this example of a typical statement from a bilingual student, the room of language immersion educators nodded and smiled in agreement.  We had all heard our students mix languages before.  But Beeman’s point was not about the typical interlanguage that occurs during language acquisition.  Her example was of children whose first language is bilingual.  Kids who inherit this natural mix from their bilingual homes and communities and learn later, usually in school, to separate the two languages.In her practice at the Center for Teaching for Biliteracy, Beeman contends that we need to acknowledge that while bilingualism is a starting point for many of our students, it is not the anticipated outcome.  She prides herself in making education research accessible for K-12 teachers and this workshop exemplified that belief. 

Just a few minutes into her talk, Karen had the audience building linguistic bridges between Portugese and English to understand how the practice would support student constructed learning.  To the untrained eye, bridges look like translations and Beeman knew that, once teachers created their own bridges, they would see the value in leading their students through this construction.Karen has dedicated her career to elevating and protecting the status of minority language in a majority language education system, specifically Spanish in the US.  When I sat down with her to talk about her One Good Question, I assumed that her focus would be on investing in language minority education.  What I learned, however, was far more about her vision for all youth in our country.  Karen grew up the child of Americans in Mexico and when she moved to the States for university, she had the unique perspective of appearing American and having strong linguistic and cultural identity in Mexico and Mexican Spanish.  Karen quickly became an education advocate for bilingualism and champion for elevating the status of Spanish in urban communities with significant Hispanic populations.Karen’s inquiry starts from that place of language specific, culture-specific instructional practice and quickly progresses to questions of social justice and equity: How are we preparing minority students to see themselves in the culture of power ?  For the 71% of ELL youth who speak Spanish[1], access to bilingual academic communities that support literacy in both languages, means that they get to comfortably exist in majority culture.

"When students feel visible and what is going on in school matches who they are, we reach their potential."  - Karen Beeman 

For bilingual and heritage students, this visibility begins with equal access to and respect for their home languages.  Karen is agnostic about the type of academic model schools choose.  Traditional bilingual, dual language, and two-way immersion programs are all built around English language expectations. What makes the biggest difference?   Looking beyond the monolingual perspective and the English dominant perspective.  "We cannot use English as our paradigm for what we do in the other language,"  Karen insists.With respect to the pedagogy and materials in current Spanish-language programs, Beeman contends that  we’re creating our own problem.  Most texts in bilingual classrooms (fiction, non-fiction, and academic) are translations into the non-English language.  This means that they are translating English grammar and syntax progressions into a language with completely different rules.  Bilingual students may miss out on natural, age-appropriate expressions in Spanish and often misunderstand the cultural context of a translated story.  Beeman traveled to Mexico for years and brought back authentic children’s literature in Spanish that also didn’t work for her bilingual American students.  In written texts the academic grammar and syntax is at a higher register than oral language.  Bilingual students whose Spanish-dominant parents may not be literate in Spanish, then have little understanding of the « authentic » text.What Beeman experienced was that neither monolingual contexts work for bilingual students.  If we are to capture bilingual students’ full potential, we need a third way. Enter language bridges : a constructivist approach that showcases the background knowledge and expertise of the students, and allows them to access the curriculum and complex ideas in the majority language. Beeman then takes this perspective outside of the classroom : we need to stop imposing monolingual perspectives on education policy, pedagogy and educator training. When we recognize that

1. We have a language of power (academic register of English) and a culture of power (middle-class, European-influenced discourse) that influence all of our instruction ; and

2. Our country is becoming increasingly diverse linguistically, ethnically, and socially ;

We quickly understand that the need for all types of language and culture bridges in our instructional practice encompasses the majority of the country.  Whether we’re addressing socio-economic status, home language, or student identity, most of our students walk into their classrooms as the « other » in the curriculum.  Looking at the trends for increasingly diverse population in the US, we have to ask ourselves what happens when our education system doesn’t embed respect for minority cultures.

Karen’s One Good Question : « How can a student’s experience build on his/her fount of knowledge, both linguistic and cultural ? »[1] Ruiz Soto, Ariel G., Sarah Hooker; and Jeanne Bataloca. 2015 Top Languages Spoken by English Language Learners Nationally and by State.  Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institue.

Karen Beeman provides national professional development for teachers and administrators in bilaterally and bilingual education. Karen is co-author, along with Cheryl Urow, of Teaching for Biliteracy: Strengthening Bridges Between Languages."