Politico Morning Education reports on Laurene Powell Jobs venture into redesigning the American high school:
FIRST LOOK: A GUIDE FOR STATES ON REVAMPING HIGH SCHOOL: A private philanthropic effort led by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, has given millions of dollars to high schools across the country with the goal of rethinking the traditional notion of high school and better preparing students for success in life.
— Now that initiative, called XQ: The Super School Project, is out with a guide for state policymakers on how to do that. “To prepare for the future of work, we must set a clear agenda to prepare the future workforce — and that agenda ties directly to our high schools,” Russlynn Ali, CEO and co-founder of XQ, told Morning Education. “We need high schools that are designed intentionally for the modern world.” Check out the guide here.
— What does that look like? XQ cites examples from high schools that it has funded. For example, the Grand Rapids Public Museum School received a $10 million grant from XQ. The school, which opened this year, is housed on a floor of the Grand Rapids Public Museum. “The curriculum will focus on big issues related to sustainability, technology, and design explored through a local lens — the history, culture, economy, and ecology of the Grand Rapids region itself,” XQ’s guide for state policymakers says. “Students will take on projects that contribute to the community in tangible and positive ways. One project is designed to become the largest river-restoration initiative in the United States.”
Forgive the apparent digression, but this guide should be read in conjunction with a new book by Beth Macy called Dopesick, about the opioid addiction epidemic. More than 300,000 Americans have died in recent years, 72,000 just in 2017. More will die next year. Many of them will be high school students. A wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee book that makes the XQ competition sound like something from the 1950s.
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The man who made billions of dollars from OxyContin is pushing a drug to wean addicts off opioids
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/09/08/the-man-who-made-billions-of-dollars-from-oxycontin-is-pushing-a-drug-to-wean-addicts-off-opioids/?utm_term=.ed53857d5fcb
Wonder what the antidote from all the DEFORMS in Education will be? Wonder who will make this antidote?
I am sure that …
The only antidote for Charter Schools are PUBLIC SCHOOLS and PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS who are certified to teach and who learned about teaching from an ACCREDITED School/College of Education, and certainly NOT that O-G stuff.
An aside: I know someone who got laid off at Macy’s. This person’s job was salesclerk. Person decided to tutor kids. Person uses O-G. I asked person, “Do you read to the kids you tutor?” Without missing a beat, person said, “ONLY IF I HAVE TIME.” From what I garnered, the entire hour is spent on drill and kill worksheets and reading nonsense words. Person said, the less pictures the better, because pictures GET IN THE WAY and are DISTRACTIONS. HUH?
Can’t make this stuff up.
“Wonder what the antidote from all the DEFORMS in Education will be? Wonder who will make this antidote?”
Oh, the edudeformers and privateers of course.
They’ve already started. In May of 2017, there was a conference in Kansas City, MO titled “From Failures to Fixes” (and isn’t that “fix” just the right double entendre word?) that featured quite a number of the national “pushers” of privatization who claimed that they had to come up with fixes for the failures of the policies that they had been pushing for the last 15 years or so. Of course it was a failure of implementation of the edudeformer policies and not the policies themselves. Rick Hess, Michael McShane, Jay Greene, Matthew DiCarlo, Matthew Ladner, etc. . . all lamenting how things weren’t working as planned. I felt so sorry for them!
What I long for are more thoughtful and strategic public-private collaborations on innovation research. Surely not all innovations,such as the Grand Rapids’ school, are worthless manipulations by billionaires out to destroy public education. But the impression that it is only the billionaire class that can fix American education by throwing big money at every glitch they begin to notice is just so sickening. My hope is that a long-haul perspective takes root which includes valuing the capacity of educators-in-the-trenches to produce knowledge about strengthening educational practice. The base I work from, in other words, is practitioner research: https://www.socialpublishersfoundation.org/. We are global, but at present are working on a small scale. A big part of the billionaire’s club approach is that they claim to be research-based. Although the research is often flimsy (see, for example, Biesta’s “why evidence-based practice won’t work”), they use their big money projects as a club to beat down other perspectives on what works and how to explore what works. My effort is to begin the painstaking process of creating an alternative knowledge base that respects research in all its forms, keeps educators in the center of the dialogue, but is not beholden to colleges of education and big-money centers, think tanks, and institutes. Sadly, the big money folks lack a sense of civic responsibility in the context of democratic principles of governance. They are impatient and just hope that throwing some money at the next big thing will magically solve deep seated problems. They have not, in other words, read deeply in the fields of education and social transformations and are not likely to do so. They look to quick fix folks like Michelle Rhee and the merry band of outside experts waving their seven-figure contracts outside the doors of the billionaire’s board rooms. L. Rowell
It would be nice if you’d identify yourself instead of using a moniker here.
It would be nice if you’d identify yourself instead of using a moniker here.
In her step-daughter’s new memoir, Laurene is quoted as saying she and Steve were “cold people”.
And?
Laurene is not very endearing.
You can watch the documentary about Steve Jobs here
The “guide” is a series of ed reform slogans with some stats and some graphics.
Example: “4 out of 5 CEO’s say the skills gap makes hiring difficult”
The “skills gap” is one of ed reform’s pet theories.
They also love “the jobs of the future haven’t been invented yet” along with some made-up statistics.
I cannot believe they spent this much money to create this “guide” that could have been cobbled together by combining The Slogans of Arne Duncan with The Slogans of Betsy Devos.
4 out of 5 CEOs don’t know what the hell they are talking about.
Imagine the sales for a book with that title: The Sayings of Arne and Betsy
A very short book.
The Sayings of Arne and Betsy:
“Schools are filled with white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and grizzlies. The end.”
A very short book. But you left out the part about how everyone lies. The kids are dumb, the teachers are bad, the parents lie, only Arne and Betsy are smart.
Okay, here’s the 2nd edition: “Only talking pineapples are smart. They tell no lies, making sure EVERYONE feels confused and stupid, as we all should. Talking pineapples protect everyone, eating the hares and grizzlies that lurk in the bad places. The end.”
It’ll be like that infamous book “The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro Agnew.” Inside its covers were blank pages. Quite a collector’s item if you can find one.
Katrina was the best thing to happen to NOLA schools. I imagine the book could have photos of Arne & Betsy standing in their raincoats in the middle of a hurricane, surrounded by rubble.
My favorite Arne line is the one he uttered after visiting a class in NYC.
He said, “I want to be able to look into the eyes of a second-grader and know whether he is college-bound.”
Diane, like Duncan would ever look into a 2nd-grader’s eyes. He meant, “I want to have data at my fingertips telling me whether…”
I also looked at the XQ’s guide for state policymakers. The stats are all about job growth to 2030 and the failue of public high schools to prepare students for the high tech jobs.
In addition to positioning the aim of education as job preparation (and saving the economy), the idea behind the initiative is to deschool education, outsource as much as possible to museums, libraries, social service agencies, and to corporations. I know a recepient of one of these awards. He co-authored a winning proposal but neither of the proposal writers lasted as the managers of the charter school they had envisioned. What happened? The Super School Project managers were unhappy with their management, especially the low enrollment. In addition, one of the co-designers was out to milk the charter school by setting up an LLC to provide managerial services. In other words, the idealism in this case was overtaken by the opportunity for one of the parties to profit from the charter school laws and collision with the realities of little initial interest in the school and the pressure from the Super School Project “investors” for rapid results to brag about.
This is another case of the billionaire’s sense of entitlement to have a larger voice in state policy formation for education than they have earned. As Chiara notes, the guide is slick in design but filled with cherry-picked, recycled and questionable state-by-state factoids. Some of these appear to be straight from the latest version of Gates’ “quality counts” reports, equally questionable.
Laura, we may be thinking about the same school. The politics involved have gotten sticky.
4 out of 5 CEOs say cigarette smoking is good for your lungs.
It amuses me how no one in ed reform questions the college remediation numbers.
How are they deciding who “requires” remedial courses in colleges? Are we sure their analysis is valid? What if they are recommending way too many students for remediation?
No one in ed reform asks.
Here’s a good one, from the guide:
“Increasing student achievement will add 70 trillion to GDP over time”
‘over time’ 🙂
Just make up a number. It’s as good as that number.
that number is right from Eric Hanushek. I think he said 300 trillion or 150 trillion. Whatever.
Over how much time?
Millions of years?
Billions and billions [Carl Sagan]
You guys are hysterically funny.
I would also be really careful having billionaires and CEO’s design apprenticeships.
The students really need an advocate at the table. Apprenticeships are intended to benefit both parties – the employer and the employee. Ed reform apprenticeships, funded by billionaires, seem to exclude the “benefits to employees” side of the equation.
If apprenticeships are designed and run for the benefit of CEO’s and shareholders, the student-employees are going to get robbed. Someone needs to be looking out for them- they are really young and they will sign onto rip-offs and bad deals.
I hope we’re not relying on the ed reform billionaires to speak for student workers.
They need an adult advocate.
Apprenticeships the way they are currently set up are designed to exploit gullible inexperienced young people.
In public-private partnership high schools (like a couple of those getting the Powell-Jobs XQ $), the question is, how much tax $ are the privates getting to participate [i.e. is it enough to do anything of value to students], & who is watching the till. Contract should be public record, & regularly monitored/ reported back to public by school district (or state if they are running the district). If the school involved is a charter of course none of that will happen. Perhaps Powell-Jobs at least will keep an eye on her $ but she’s private & doesn’t have to report to district; will just yank the grant if she doesn’t like where things are headed…
“Russlynn Ali, CEO and co-founder of XQ, told Morning Education. “We need high schools that are designed intentionally for the modern world.”
We need people with no experience teaching in high schools to shut the F up and get the H away from our community public high schools before they cause any more damage to the teaching and learning process that goes on in the schools every day. The hubris and arrogance of these people is astonishing.
Holy frijoles (and I’m being quite civil with that phrase, it should be very crude for how bad this guide is), the first page, first paragraph-LIE #1 “99% of the jobs created during the economic recovery went to workers with postsecondary education or training”. YEP, and I’ve got that great white sand beach ocean front property over at Lake of the Ozarks in Central Missouri to sell ya. . . .
“Our society has changed. Our high schools need to change, too.”
How tritely illogical can they get?
Am downloading it now as I can’t read all of it on their site. Also you can order a hard copy for free. I’d say order one. . . . it’s a piece of edudeformer and privateer history. Hell it might be rare and valuable in 100 years.
News flash: society is always changing. That’s what Eve said to Adam. Time to start wearing fig leaves?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that most of the new jobs won’t require postsecondary education. Does XQ have another source?
Didn’t B Dylan sing a song about that back in the 60s-“The Times They are a Changing”:
Somewhat before Bob Dylan rocked his generation, the prophet Isaiah sang the song of his vineyard in what we call chapter 5. It was not catchy, and it was mostly bad news. It complained that the vineyard had not produced good grapes, so the vines would have to come out and be burned. What seemed to be the problem back then? People not taking care of each other for the most part, being frivolous, ignoring what needed to be done. Hmmmmm.
Yuh, what you said, Diane. Anybody who reads the papers knows that the “growth” areas are min-wage jobs like counter service, home-health aide, et al vassals serving the 1% so they can spend 24/7 watching their $ grow. That line from the Powell-Jobs XQ guide is a blatant lie.
Lots of new jobs for home health aides and truckers.
every month it becomes more and more clear that those benefiting from the great “Trump economy” are ONLY the already wealthy
Laurene Powell Jobs: employer of Arne Duncan.*
(He was on CSPAN again last night–a rerun. {I didn’t watch–same-old-same-old to sell his book [none of the profits being donated to “help children” insofar as I’ve heard: have you heard any different, Diane, or any other reader here?]}.)
*Unless he decides to run for Chicago mayor…& beats Paul Vallas! (BTW, Vallas is #2 in current polls.)
Tried to watch it but wasn’t able to last through it. And the transcript was just a reprint of the closed caption which is a joke.
Yes, Senor Swacker–very unwatchable.
& his book–very unreadable.
It all reminds me of “Annie Hall,” where some idiot NYU “professor” is talking as an “expert” on Marshall McLuhan, & Marshall McLuhan appears & says, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You know NOTHING of my work!”
And Arne knows NOTHING about “how schools work.”
He DOES know how to destroy them, though.
Wow, that Russlyn Ali gets around. Last time I saw her she was browbeating me and a bunch of colleagues, in the service of EdTrust West and No Child Left Behind. If you want a good humanities curriculum strip-mined she’s your girl, but I advise everyone to run away from anything she promotes.
Just what we need, more arrogant billionaires ready to impose “their vision” including selling lots of products to public schools. So many billionaires so interested in public schools. It’s the spirit of altruism? No, capitalism! They see lots of opportunity to capture public money and stuff it in their greedy pockets. There were MIA for decades until they saw a way to further enrich themselves. Now they’re self appointed education “experts.”
I am a person with lots and lots of money therefore I know better than any of you what needs to be done…..
What happens next is …we will now unload our program, our favorite project on you all…it will now add to the already existing churn and burn and shift …and please do this new program with ‘fidelity’…
I guess learning from history is not something they do in Silicon Valley. I’d be shocked if a single person on Laurene’s team of self-styled education experts has read Diane’s “Left Back”, the best history of American education. If they had, they’d realize how hackneyed and stale are their claims that education needs to be modernized, how dubious the record of the many modernizers has been, and how false is their claim that schooling hasn’t changed in 100 years –it suffers from endless, misguided change! The current K-8 curriculum is nothing like what I experienced as a kid. I got a sizable dose of American cultural lore, patriotic songs, stories of the presidents, history, literature, intelligible math, excellent straightforward science instruction, and grammar. Today’s kids get Common Core test prep in ELA and math, and not much else. The test prep IS the stultifying curriculum. Middle school science and history used to be immune but now “literacy kudzu” is creeping into those domains too, strangling the “native vegetation”. So a lot HAS changed –thanks to another ignorant, meddling billionaire, Bill Gates. Laurene will join the ranks of failed, half-baked, self-important modernizers in the history of American education.
The Powell-Jobs XQ guide is mostly just scare headlines announcing that half of workers will be replaced by robots. And then a bit of mush suggesting human skills will still be needed. (Guess that’s the lucky half.) Followed by a lot of guff implying she knows what those lucky-half jobs will be, & that’s what smart hischs who want her $ will teach. [Did she never read Alvin Toffler? The job market already moves too fast to train for specific jobs in hisch, & the speed of change increases yrly.]
I am pleasantly surprised by the ed programs she awarded (if they can live up to their hype), but she seems to have overlooked a slight problem. 5 out of the 7 schools she profiles/ awards are charters [one of which opened this month so no track record] — which, judging from how things go in charterland, means she’s dumping her money into iffy propositions that will likely fritter the grant $ away w/ minimal results [or fold].
When did education become about strict job training? Serious question–does anyone know when this “transition” occur?
Well, it’s never been strictly about job training. There has been a job training component in American public high schools for a long time, dating back at least to the end of WW2, probably earlier (depending on what job one was looking for) but before then those that would have “needed” job training got it on the job and didn’t go to high school.
When did education become about strict job training?
“It is important to realise that these branches of knowledge developed after the
structures, both physical and relational, were in place, and not the other way
around. What we have here is knowledge developed within institutionalised
relations; knowledge of people already objectified by disciplinary power;
knowledge, that is, predicated on institutional inequity, and thus committed to
rationalising that objectification.
So pedagogy is knowledge of the learning of children confined in classrooms,
just as child developmental psychology is an accurate description of the growth
patterns of children produced (both constructed and oppressed) in family and
school. When the common translates into the normal and hence the real, these
descriptive charactertures define the nature of children.
The unexamined givens of these systems of knowledge are the institutions in
which they are based, just as the power relations that are embedded in these
institutions comprise the assumptions on which these disciplines are built. And
in its turn, the knowledge produces a magnification of that power asymmetry,
both because it forms the basis of a verbalised truth that necessarily supports
the institutional structure, and because it becomes the property of the
professionals who practice it, thus necessarily excluding all others from its
mysteries.
Ideologically, these disciplines claim to modify the negative effects of
disciplinary power, which
.seems to have undergone a speculative purification by integrating
itself with such sciences as psychology and psychiatry. And, in
effect, its appearance in the form of tests, interviews, interrogations
and consultations is apparently in order to rectify the mechanisms of
discipline: educational psychology is supposed to correct the rigours
of the school, just as the medical or psychiatric interview is supposed
to rectify the effects of the discipline of work. But we must not be
misled; these techniques merely refer individuals from one
disciplinary authority to another, and they reproduce, in a
concentrated or formalized form, the schema of powerknowledge
proper to each discipline . . .the examination . . .is still caught up in
disciplinary technology (Foucault, 1992, p226).”
Ideologically, these disciplines claim to modify the negative effects of
disciplinary power. (knowledge is power)
What constitutes TRUTH and MYTH, won’t be settled by ignoring the
RESULTS that define WHOSE interests are being served.
SEE, the division of the spoils,(top 1% vs bottom 50% national income shares)
Social spending vs MIC spending.
A reply, Diane to your 9/11 9:11 AM (strange coincidence, & as to my reply) comment:
& when one looks into Arne Duncan’s eyes (& those of Betsy & Eva & Kohs & Waltons & Gates, et.al., ad nauseum) one sees he has no soul.
Here’s an exchange I purely hate.
From https://www.cbsnews.com/news/laurene-powell-jobs-xq-the-super-school-project-ten-million-grant-ten-schools/
Chip Reid, CBS News correspondent:
“What’s the fundamental problem with American high schools today?”
Russlyn Ali, CEO XQ program:
“They are frozen in time! We’ve gone from a Model T to a Tesla, from a switchboard to a smartphone, from a typewriter to a touchscreen, and our high schools today look exactly the way they did 100 years ago.”
How revealing. High schools – secondary education – to this [& every] philanthro-dough-distributor are manufactured gadgets to be updated/ marketed. Her statement would make a good Dilbert strip. Each frame shows the antique tool X’d-out next to its tool-of-the-minute. In the last frame we see a current school bldg X-d out next to a Rube Goldberg whirligig.
Then I’d add a reality-check, a few frames showing what’s actually being funded by ed-philanthrocapitalists:
(a)no-excuses kids in rows w/taped mouths & folded hands
(b) evangelkids singing “Jesus Loves Me” near a blackboard w/pic of dino being ridden by human
(c) stacks of computer-print-out test score marked “Teacher – F”, “School – F”
(d) rows of little kids in earbud/ laptop labs
(e) children in goggles/hardhats providing free labor in a mfg plant
(f) a crumbling school bldg divided into classes marked “LD” “Behavior Issues”, “Handicapped”