Larry Cuban posted photographs of innovative ideas.
Innovation is a buzz word these days.
It is useful to be reminded that many innovations are duds.
We should not experiment on helpless children who trust us.
At least, do no harm.
Archives for category: Innovation
Larry Cuban, Teacher, superintendent, historian, questions the claim of Reeformers—in this case, Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ Project—that High Schools Are obsolescent and have not changed in a century.
This is a claim shared by Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, and Jobs. It is foundational to the Reformers’ belief that major disruption is necessary and that they know what change is needed. Both assumptions should be questioned.
Cuban asks, first, is the claim true (probably not, since the high school has been transformed from an elite institution to a mass institution), and next, whether the changes proposed are the right ones. Good questions. A third, which he does not ask, if whether the agents of change have good ideas and what qualifies them to redesign the American high school other than their extreme wealth.
This is an amazing story of a town in Connecticut where parents looked at Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas about how to educate their children and said “Hell, no.”
We live in a strange era where a handful of billionaires have taken it upon themselves to transform education. Think Eli Broad, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. They decided, not based on their own experience but based on their inflated egos, that they alone know how to re-engineer the nation’s schools, the schools that enroll 50 million children.
The schools of Cheshire, Connecticut, are fine schools. The parents are happy with their public schools. But the schools’ administration decided to adopt the Summit Learning Program, putting students on Chromebooks for their lessons. Things went south, and eventually parents rebelled. At some point, they realized that “personalized learning” is actually “depersonalized learning.” Worse, they learned that their children’s personal data would no longer be private, and that the learning program was data mining their children.
And Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning Program was kicked out of the schools of Cheshire, Connecticut.
Read the article to learn how it happened.
Last year, several classes in Cheshire, Connecticut’s elementary and middle schools switched to a new classroom model, where lessons were supposed to be tailored to every student. The kids and their parents were caught off-guard that first week of school. “We walked into math class,” recalled Lauren Peronace, now an eighth-grader, “and my math teacher said, ‘Everyone open up your Chromebooks. We’re going to go on a website — Summit.’”
Reactions were mixed. Most everyone in Cheshire, which is between New Haven and Hartford, is there for the public schools, which are among the area’s best. Some parents were skittish about the creep of more technology into the classroom, especially when they found out Facebook engineers had helped build the software and Mark Zuckerberg was spending millions promoting it. Others were at least cautiously optimistic. “My son initially thought it sounded cool,” said one parent, Theresa, who asked to have her last name withheld because of all the drama that followed. “The teachers told him, ‘You’re going to be on your own; you’ll be independent; you’re going to move at your own pace.”
The program had come with money for 130 Chromebooks, so every student could have one — courtesy of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Zuckerberg’s philanthropic LLC, and Summit’s other wealthy backers. But to hear the administrators explain it, the technology would be only one piece. The Summit Learning Program, which originated at a series of West Coast charter schools between 2012 and 2013, is conceived as a comprehensive program of “personalized learning” that promises to put students in charge of their own education. It’s now being used in some 380 districts and charter schools nationwide. Rather than having a teacher stand at the front of the room and talk, it emphasizes group projects, dialogue between students, and one-on-one time with teachers, guaranteeing at least a ten-minute “mentoring” session for each student every week. It also makes use of specialized software for regular lessons and assessments. Cheshire’s teachers had gone to training that summer in Providence, Rhode Island, at an event also funded by Summit.
But the implementation over the next few months collapsed into a suburban disaster, playing out in school-board meetings and, of course, on Facebook. The kids who hated the new program hated it, to the point of having breakdowns, while their parents became convinced Silicon Valley was trying to take over their classrooms. They worried Summit was sharing their kids’ data (it is, with 19 companies at present, including Amazon and Microsoft, according to its website), or, worse, selling it. It isn’t, but given that the guy who’d helped buy them all laptops had created a $500 billion company out of vacuuming up data and creating economic value from it, it seemed reasonable to have suspicions that the learning platform backed by CZI might also be data-hungry. Concern turned into exasperation when bizarre and sometimes inappropriate images appeared on their kids’ screens on third-party websites used as reading assignments: a pot plant, a lubricant ad, and then the coup de grâce, an ancient Roman statue of a man having sex with a goose.
Ultimately the superintendent halted the program, making Cheshire the only one out of hundreds to do so. To the program’s supporters, this makes it a fluke, the only one that never got past the learning curve. To detractors, the Cheshire parents are among the most articulate voices on Summit’s perils, the model of successful resistance.
The “I Promise School” sponsored by LeBron James as part of the Akron public school system is the most innovative school in America. Its focus is on developing healthy children, whose dreams are big and whose education equips them to make a life for themselves. It accepts only children with low test scores. It’s goal is to help children overcome trauma. Its philosophy is informed by LeBron James’ experiences as a child growing up in dire circumstances.
Contrast this school, where children are surrounded by love and caring, with the harsh and punitive “no excuses” charter schools. Read this article and answer the question: Which is better? Love or Fear? Charter advocates should learn about this school and learn from its example.
The greatest of all innovations: a school in which love and kindness are built in as policy.
This article by Eddie Kim goes into detail. I am not posting the whole article. I urge you to read it. It is inspiring.
It begins:
An eight-year-old LeBron James sometimes didn’t attend school because there was no one who could give him a ride. He sometimes skipped class outright, instead playing video games by himself at the ramshackle one-bedroom home in Akron, Ohio, owned by a friend of his mom, who would disappear during the day. Other times, Gloria James and her son were simply too entangled in the task of securing a place to sleep and food to eat that night. “We’ll just skip today,” they’d tell each other. Then another day would rise and fall, and another, with no attendance in class.
Ultimately, James skipped nearly 100 days of school as a fourth grader in Akron. He had moved a dozen times in the three-year span between age five and eight, with Gloria struggling on welfare and relying on a network of friends to give them shelter when the rent ran dry. He didn’t play sports. He barely had friends. He lagged on basic reading, writing and math skills.
What got James back in school was the stabilizing force of Bruce Kelker, the Pee Wee football coach at James’ elementary school who first discovered his athletic talent. Kelker offered to house James, with Gloria (who could live with a friend) welcome at any time to see her son. Toward the end of 1993, Kelker and his live-in girlfriend decided to move, but another youth football coach at the school, “Big” Frank Walker, extended his suburban Akron home to James.
James credits both families for steadying his life and getting him back in school, and the saga between fourth and fifth grades has become one of the superstar’s favorite allegories. But more than just a motivational tale, James has taken his experience and molded it into a philosophy on what it takes to keep poor and stressed-out kids on the right track.
That philosophy now exists in physical form with the I Promise School, a new campus that opened a month ago as part of the Akron Public Schools system. It debuted with 240 third- and fourth-graders who are struggling academically and largely from underprivileged families. The school will grow to include first through eighth grades by fall 2022, but the fundamental features of the program are already in place.
School days are longer, running from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., as is the school year (from July through May) in order to take pressure off working parents. Students receive free breakfast, lunch and snacks. There’s a new grading system in place for the kids, as well as “support circle” sessions each day to help students learn how to calm their emotions and talk through challenges. Parents, too, are given more feedback at school (in individualized meetings with advisors) and also offered help in the form of housing and job-placement services, GED classes and a food bank — all things that James’ mother, Gloria, could have benefitted from too…
This is where Nicole Hassan and a squad of veteran Akron Public Schools staffers stepped in, organizing half a dozen “design teams” last year to hash out every ambition they could bake into the DNA of I Promise School. The teams spent months debating features that today form a public school unlike any other in the country. It’s supported in part by the LeBron James Family Foundation — it’s pledged $2 million a year to support the school’s growth — but otherwise funded by taxpayers as part of the Akron system. It’s an experiment in what a public institution can do to help kids in the most crucial aspect of their development into adulthood. “The hope is that this can become a model for more schools across the country in urban centers where young students need the most hope,” Hassan says….
The biggest point is with it being public is that it’s something that can carry over across the country. Our mission is to be a nationally recognized model for urban education. The common idea is that it’s easier to do a charter school, or it’s easier to do private because you don’t have to work within the confines of a public school system. But then those schools are only available to certain students, whereas every community has a public school. I want the elements of I Promise to be the norm for our district and spread across the nation so that in Chicago, in Detroit and in other areas where students have a lot of trauma, they’re utilizing these practices as well.
Of course, one of the things we’d love to see is that other communities help support such a school. A lot of our contributions have been from community partners beyond LeBron’s foundation. It’s important that LeBron’s a part of it, but he definitely couldn’t do it alone, and I think other communities could generate the same contribution. Honestly, if we believe that education is the way to create generational change and improve a community, then communities need to start supporting the school system in a real way.
Of course, LeBron James deserves a place on the honor roll. So does the Akron public school system, which thought through the whole child, loving-kindness policies of this innovative school.
Thanks to reader Christine Langhoff for bringing this article to my attention.
The National Education Policy Center reviews plans for LeBron James’s new public school in Akron, Ohio.
Overall it gets good marks.
So are the approaches of I Promise in line with research? For the most part, yes: Practices such as providing additional resources, reducing class size, offering wraparound services like food pantries, extending learning time, and offering free college tuition to graduates are all associated with positive outcomes. But the school may face challenges in educating a large population of struggling students rather than creating heterogenous classes of children with higher and lower levels of performance. And the school’s STEM focus could end up shortchanging other important subjects such as social studies and the arts.
The school can tinker with its model. On the whole, what is most encouraging is that it is a good model for public education. No harsh disciplinary practices. A cap on class size. Wraparound services. Free college for those who persist. Extra supports where needed. Best of all, it was not created to put public education out of business, but to make it better.
The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado Boul-der School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.eduNEPC Resources on School Reform and Restructuringhttp://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/newsletter-LeBron3 of 3
Reading this article, I couldn’t help but think of a song from “Camelot,” called “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” about Royalty speculating on how the peasants amuse themselves when they are feeling down. In the last stanza, Richard Burton and Julie Andrews agree that the simple folk sit around and wonder what the Royalty do.
What do the billionaires do when they educate their own children?
Elon Musk invented a school for his children.
In a corner of SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a small, secretive group called Ad Astra is hard at work. These are not the company’s usual rocket scientists. At the direction of Elon Musk, they are tackling ambitious projects involving flamethrowers, robots, nuclear politics, and defeating evil AIs.
Those at Ad Astra still find time for a quick game of dodgeball at lunch, however, because the average age within this group is just 10 years old.
Ad Astra encompasses students, not employees. For the past four years, this experimental non-profit school has been quietly educating Musk’s sons, the children of select SpaceX employees, and a few high-achievers from nearby Los Angeles. It started back in 2014, when Musk pulled his five young sons out of one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious private schools for gifted children. Hiring one of his sons’ teachers, the CEO founded Ad Astra to “exceed traditional school metrics on all relevant subject matter through unique project-based learning experiences,” according to a previously unreported document filed with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
“I just didn’t see that the regular schools were doing the things that I thought should be done,” he told a Chinese TV station in 2015. “So I thought, well let’s see what we can do. Maybe creating a school will be better.”
In an atmosphere closer to a venture capital incubator than a traditional school, today’s Ad Astra students undertake challenging technical projects, trade using their own currency, and can opt out of subjects they don’t enjoy. Children from 7 to 14 years old work together in teams, with few formal assessments and no grades handed out.
Ad Astra’s principal hopes that the school will revolutionize education in the same way Tesla has disrupted transportation, and SpaceX the rocket industry. But as Musk’s sons near graduation age, the future of Ad Astra is unclear. Will Musk maintain interest in the school once his children move on? And even if he does, can a school of fewer than 40 students ever be anything more than a high-tech crèche for already-privileged children?
Read on. If money is no object…the first things to go are grades and tests.
Peter Goodman describes a “debate” of sorts in New York City, whose mayor is searching for a new chancellor to replace Carmen Farina.
Does New York City need a disruptor, like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, or a collaborator, following Farina’s tradition?
From what I read, the only voice in favor of a disruptor is a former official in the Bloomberg-Klein regime and the editorial writer of the New York Times.
Turmoil and instability and upheaval are not good for students, teachers, or learning.
I hope the next leader will be an experienced educator who has had experience in the classroom and as a principal and superintendent.
I hope it will be someone who knows the New York City public schools well and who is prepared to reach out to teachers and parents and students to build trust.
Please, no more disruption.
Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center has written a thoughtful (and optimistic) commentary on the Gates Foundation’s latest big bet on reforming education. The new one will invest $1.7 billion in networks of schools in big cities, in the hopes that they can work together to solve common problems.
Welner, K. (2017). Might the New Gates Education Initiative Close Opportunity Gaps? Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/bmgf.
Welner notes that the previous big initiatives of the Gates Foundation failed, although he believes that Gates was too quick to pull the plug on the small schools initiative in 2008, into which he had poured $2 billion. Gates bet another $2 billion on the Common Core, and that was sunk by backlash from right and left and in any case, has made no notable difference. Gates poured untold millions into his plan for teacher evaluation (MET), but it failed because it relied too much on test scores.
Welner says that Bill Gates and the foundation he owns suffer from certain blind spots: First, he believes in free markets and choice, and he ends up pouring hundreds of millions into charters with little to show for it; second, he believes in data, and that belief has been costly without producing better schools; third, he believes in the transformative power of technology, forgetting that technology is only a tool, whose value is determined by how wisely it is used.
Last, Welner worries that Gates does not pay enough attention to the out of school factors that have a far greater impact on student learning that teachers and schools, including poverty and racism. These are the factors that mediate opportunity to learn. Without addressing those factors, none of the others will make much difference.
Welner is cautiously optimistic that the new initiative might pay more attention to opportunity to learn issues than any of Gates’ other investments.
But he notes with concern that Gates continues to fund charters, data, technology, and testing. He continues to believe that somewhere over the rainbow is a magical key to innovation. He continues to believe in standardization.
It seems to me that Kevin Welner bends over backwards to give Gates the benefit of the doubt. With his well-established track record of failure, it is hard to believe he has learned anything. But let’s keep hoping for the best.
Mark Naison salutes a principal in the Bronx, Luis Torres, who has overshadowed the Success Academy co-located in his Building because his school is more innovative, more dynamic than the test-taking machine at SA.
Mark calls him “a genius.”
“One of the most brilliant and important achievements of PS 55’s visionary Principal, Luis E Torres, is that through innovative programming and a relentless public relations campaign, he has totally overshadowed the Success Academy Charter School co-located in his building! Normally, Success Academy tries to humiliate and stigmatize the public schools it is co-located by pointing out how much better it’s performance is! Not at PS 55! Here, the action, innovation and excitement is all with the public school, whether it is the scientific and pedagogical innovations of the Green Bronx Machine, the school based agriculture program housed at the School; the full service Medical clinic Principal Torres has created; or the school’s championship step team and basketball team! People from all over the city and the nation come to see what Principal Torres has done; while Success Academy stays in the background.”
Was it competition that spurred Torres’ creativity? Or was he an exemplary principal who wanted the best for his students regardless of the competition?
The charter industry in Michigan might be the worst in the nation, although it has stiff competition from the charter industry in Nevada, Ohio, and California. About 80% of charters in Michigan operate for-profit, and their academic results are unimpressive. The few high-performing charters use the usual tricks of excluding the kids they don’t want. A few years ago, the Detroit Free Press conducted a year-long investigation into the state’s charter sector and described it as a $1 Billion (Billion with a B) a year industry that is unaccountable and produces results no better than, and often worse than, public schools.
In early December, the failing but profitable charter industry is holding its annual conference. Will it discuss its problems? Will it honestly assess its failings?
Of course not! It will celebrate its role as “Innovators.” If anyone knows of any innovation that the Michigan charter industry has produced, please write in here and let us know. Its biggest innovation seems to be stuffing its pockets with taxpayers’ money that was supposed to support public schools, not enriching greedy entrepreneurs.
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