Can GE Bring Common Core to Life?

Posted on February 8, 2012 by coreeducation

Last week the GE Foundation, the charity associated with General Electric, announced they intend to donate $18 million to support the implementation of the Common Core. Though some critics are expected to be up in arms over a private corporation getting involved in education reform, Time’s Andrew Rotherham believes the gift will put into sharp relief the lack of “meaningful corporate involvement” in the movement.

The gift is earmarked for Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit consulting firm whose leader (David Coleman) helped develop the Common Core. The money will be used to create teacher training institutes, build an online resource- and lesson-sharing tool, and help teachers model best practices. Though corporate involvement in education reform is currently a hot topic, Rotherham believes it is more of a sideshow and that “as a rule, corporations are skittish about taking on the really contentious issues in education reform.” They don’t want to antagonize politicians about education issues when more personally relevant issues, such as tax policy, are already under scrutiny. “Education reform pays off over generations; corporations want friends in government right now.”

So, the GE announcement is noteworthy because it appears the company is entering the REAL education reform debate. The Common Core is not universally popular, and for more conservative or business-friendly politicians a shared set of standards is viewed suspiciously. Bob Corcoran, president of the GE Foundation, explains the Foundation’s position as one of helping an “incredibly hard-won achievement” of developing common standards a chance to be implemented successfully.

So, says Rotherham, forget the rhetoric. “And forget, for a moment, whether you agree with the Common Core project. When school reform gets tough, mettle and commitment from companies is pretty rare.”

To read the full article, please visit http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/01/can-ge-help-bring-common-core-standards-to-life/

Duncan: Microsoft will take over TEACH; the dangers of “educational protectionism”

Posted on November 16, 2011 by coreeducation

At first blush, many listening to Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s speech at the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum may have thought they had accidentally stumbled into an economic forum. Duncan’s speech was liberally sprinkled with many terms from the current economic rhetoric: “zero-sum game,” “international competition,” and “protectionism.” Words often used in debates over economic reforms and free trade agreements were instead used to highlight the attitudes that many have towards international collaboration in the public education sphere.

Duncan urged attendees to harness the power of technology and collaboration to “elevate the teaching profession and accelerate achievement,” as well as to “resist the idea that international competition in education is a zero-sum game, in which one nation’s advance is another nation’s loss.” While acknowledging that the current global economic system creates a vastly more competitive, even cutthroat, job market, “educational protectionism” is not the answer.

In support of these ideas, Duncan then announced that Microsoft’s Partners in Learning (PiL) will be taking over the Department of Education’s TEACH campaign, a program aimed to future teachers (particularly those in STEM, special education, and those of diverse heritage) and raise awareness of the value and importance of the profession. As the new owner and operator of the program, PiL will be responsible for maintaining the website, (teach.gov, which will move to teach.org), marketing the program, and “improving and expanding the teacher recruitment campaign.” The Department’s new role will be that of official partner in these efforts.

Duncan covered many more topics during his speech, mainly focused on the potential positive impact of technology on education, citing examples from across the globe, and on the need for collaboration across countries, industries, and companies—even those in direct competition. He lauded the “healthy competition” that Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation programs have encouraged, which are “beautiful illustration[s] of how healthy competition and collaboration go hand-in-hand.”

In closing, he again used economic terms to describe the needed changes in education. Rather than a future with “countries vying to get larger pieces of a finite economic pie for themselves…expanding educational attainment everywhere is the best way to grow the pie for all.”

To read Secretary Duncan’s full speech, please visit http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/secretary-arne-duncans-remarks-microsoft-partners-learning-global-forum

Education Technology: After the Investment

Posted on October 9, 2011 by coreeducation

Jack Schneider, postdoctoral fellow for innovation in the liberal arts at Carleton College, recently blogged for Education Week’s “Teaching Now” blog on the “mania” for educational technology. He touches on the apparent consensus that the solution to the nation’s education problem is new technologies: smartboards in every classroom, iPads for each student, and collaborative projects like wikis and blogs across the curriculum. Governments, foundations and schools are pouring buckets of money into educational technology projects to help boost American students’ achievement. However, new research suggests a problem: it’s not working.

A recent front-page article in The New York Times details the efforts of the Kyrene school district in Tempe, Arizona to boost achievement through huge investments in technology. Since 2005, the district has invested $33 million in technology through hiking property taxes, but rather than seeing a jump in student performance, test scores in reading and math have stagnated. The district’s response? A new ballot initiative to get new taxes to pay for more technology.

Schneider cites the large investments of private foundations and local businesses that have contributed to the craze. They invest tens of millions of dollars in educational technology projects regularly, yet stories similar to Kyrene’s are happening all over the country. Even Tom Vander Ark, formerly of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, admits that the research linking educational technology to academic achievement is weak. “It’s very difficult when we’re pressed to come up with convincing data,” he said.

Schneider asserts that the discrepancy between perceptions and reality, though, require some investigation. It is easy to walk into a thriving classroom where all children have a tablet computer and believe that the technology is driving the achievement. However, one has to remember that schools with such technology available are generally well-resourced with lots of other factors in its favor. Straining out what makes the school a success is more difficult than simply pinpointing one particular aspect.

However, this does not mean that we should give up on educational technology. Any tool, including technology, is only as effective as the person wielding it. So rather than throwing in the towel, districts should begin to look closely at what comes after the investment. Is the technology being used appropriately to enhance learning and instruction, or simply as a flashy addition to otherwise ineffective techniques? Comprehensive training and professional development opportunities should be considered a crucial component to any educational technology investment, and teachers should be given ample opportunities to subsequently “brush up” their tech know-how through additional training and support.

As Schneider concludes, there is an “urgency of working toward school improvement. We can’t wait. ..But we also can’t afford to get it wrong.”

**Core Education, LLC is dedicated to teacher effectiveness, including the design of teacher professional development for instructional technology. For more information about our services, see http://www.coreeducationllc.com/services.php

Gates Foundation Reconsiders Education Investments

Posted on August 3, 2011 by coreeducation

Ten years and $5 billion into his philanthropic push for school reform, Bill Gates is doing some soul-searching. “It’s been about a decade of learning,” he says, and acknowledges that education isn’t only a civil rights issue but also “an equity issue and an economic issue…It’s so primary. In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there’s such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.”

One of the first large-scale programs launched by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the establishment of 20 small high schools in several metropolitan areas, the idea being that smaller schools would translate to fewer behavior problems, better attendance, and more one-on-one interaction with adults. “The overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about—whether you go to college—it didn’t move the needle much…maybe 10% more kids, but it wasn’t that dramatic,” Mr. Gates admits. The program was shut down, but Mr. Gates believes that the students who attended did get “a better deal” than those in larger public schools.

Mr. Gates warns against overestimating the potential power of philanthropy, however. Various government entities spend $600 billion a year on education, while the combined total that has ever been spent by philanthropists on education would not even add up to $10 billion. This “drop in the bucket” reality has made foundations like the Gates Foundation re-think their focus when it comes to helping education reform.

Instead of trying to buy reform with school-level investments, a new goal is to leverage private money in a way that redirects how public education dollars are spent. Gates points out that compared to the money spent on research and development in the pharmaceutical and information-technology sectors, educational research and development is practically nonexistent. This can be attributed to the lack of a clear organization or entity that sees education research as their main business investment. This is the gap that the Gates Foundation is seeking to fill.

Since it is a well-known fact that teachers have greater influence over the quality of a student’s education more than any other factor, including class size and per-pupil spending, the Foundation has been working on a personnel system that can reliably measure teacher effectiveness. The five-year, $335 million project will examine whether aspects of effective teaching—classroom management, clear objectives, diagnosing and correcting misconceptions—can be systematically measured. The research includes studying more than 13,000 lessons taught by 3,000 elementary school teachers in seven urban school districts as well as interviews with students to find out what they think works or doesn’t work in the classroom.

Mr. Gates is hoping that teachers will buy-in to this project, noting that teachers are the key to long-term reform. He knows this part of his dream is an uphill battle, however. When asked whether or not the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers have any incentive to back school reforms that help kids but diminish union power, Mr. Gates questioned the scope of that power. He noted that the U.S. has both union-strong states and right-to-work states, but that “the educational achievement of K-12 students is not at all predicted by how strong the union rules are.”

Fellowship Program Aims to Change Teacher Prep

Posted on July 26, 2011 by coreeducation

In 2007, Indiana adopted a new teaching fellowship program, established by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, to recruit professionals with STEM expertise. Fellows, whether mid-career or fresh out of college, were set to work in secondary schools serving disadvantaged populations. The program seeks to not only address the shortage of STEM teachers, but to change university-based teacher preparation to resemble the residency-type training doctors receive.

Michigan and Ohio adopted the fellowship programs this year, announcing the first sets of fellows this spring. Each participant earns a teaching certificate and a master’s degree and receives a $30,000 scholarship. In return, fellows commit to teaching for three years in a high-needs school (schools with a significant percentage of students at risk of academic failure).

Fellows typically work in schools several days a week for a full academic year with increasing teaching duties as the year progresses. A benefit of this set-up, says fellow Jeremy Sebens, is that “you could take the theory you’re learning and apply it the very next day and come back and say, ‘Hey this worked great,’ or ‘It didn’t work at all.’” Another fellow, Hwa Y. Tsu, noted that he has now seen “how the classroom gets set up, how they deal with establishing culture, establishing expectations, rather than student-teaching where I drop in for six weeks and then I drop out.”

The fellowship program came in response to calls for intensive recruitment for STEM teachers. President Obama has even weighed in, calling for the recruitment of 100,000 STEM teachers over the next decade. The Woodrow Wilson program is only one among a growing number of ventures to tackle this problem. This program now involves 17 universities across Indiana, Michigan and Ohio; to date, 349 fellows have been admitted, including the 211 named this spring.

The program is not intended to impose “a cookie cutter design,” but there are central elements that the foundation expects. The programs must be “truly clinically based,” and the design and implementation of the programs must be a genuine partnership between a university’s education school, college of arts and sciences (and engineering school, if applicable), as well as with local school districts. Another element is ongoing mentorship from experienced teachers that continues throughout the fellows’ three-year teaching obligation.

The Changing Face of Education Philanthropy

Posted on May 31, 2011 by coreeducation

In a typical year (without a stimulus bill), the federal Department of Education has about $20 million in discretionary funds. In 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave away over $373 million to education, the Walton Foundation gave approximately $134 million, and the Broad Foundation about $39 million.
Education philanthropy has increased dramatically in the past 10 years.
Back in 2000, when the NewSchools Venture Fund — the founding institution of venture philanthropy — was a mere two years old, the “New Big Three” foundations (Gates, Broad, and Walton) donated about the same amount to American schools as the “Old Big Three” (Ford, Carnegie, and Annenberg). Just five years later, the New Big Three were spending almost four times as much as the Old Bigs. This is significant because the priorities of the Gates, Walton, and Broad foundations — charter schools, mayoral control, and teacher evaluation and pay tied to student test scores – are aligned, and stand in contrast to some of the priorities of the older funders. Ford, for example, prioritizes school-funding equity and neighborhood-school partnerships, alongside accountability. Annenberg funds arts and civics education. Carnegie, like the newer donors, focuses on teaching.
How does this infusion of venture capital influence the educational policy scene and what are the implications for federal, state and local policymakers? For more on this topic, see Dana Goldstein’s blog post (from which much of this summary was taken): http://tinyurl.com/5r9nhz3

Digital Instructional Resources for the Common Core

Posted on May 18, 2011 by coreeducation

The Pearson Foundation has announced a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create a complete, foundational system of digital instructional resources built around the Common Core State Standards.

Over the next three years, the Pearson Foundation will develop 24 courses covering math for grades K-10 and reading/English language arts for grades K-12. The courses will enable teachers and students to access the latest and most effective digital learning technologies as they prepare to meet the internationally benchmarked college readiness goals of the Common Core Standards. The courses will be developed to increase student engagement and will focus on the essential understanding of the concepts that inform Math and Language Arts. The key learning behaviors of collaboration, the appropriate use of technology, and real-world engagement—that educators agree are already defining college and workforce success—are integrated with the content.”

Complementing the instructional system, additional resources may also be developed including those from third-party curriculum providers whose solutions offer the greatest potential for student success. The courses will be made available in 2013, before the Common Core Standards are implemented. Funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will support four courses to be offered as free, open educational resources, with the intent of widening access and spurring innovation around the Common Core.

Pearson, one of the nation’s leading education technology companies, will offer these courses to school districts, complete with new services for in-person professional development for teacher transition to the Common Core and next generation assessment. The Pearson Foundation will also work with other partners to explore opportunities for additional commercial development and distribution.

For more information, see: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110427005250/en/Pearson-Foundation-Partners-Bill-Melinda-Gates-Foundation.

State Strategies to Improve Chronically Low-Performing Schools

Posted on April 15, 2011 by coreeducation

A new issue brief released by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices offers lessons drawn from its State Strategies to Improve Chronically Low-Performing Schools project, which sought to address underlying causes of failing schools: weak leadership; inadequate skill levels among teachers; and insufficient high-quality teaching materials. In 2009, the project gave Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Mississippi grant funds and consulting services to develop policies and plans for turning around chronically low-performing schools and districts. As a result, the report has several recommendations for building state capacity. States should engage external partners to manage school and district turnarounds; set ambitious but realistic goals for school improvement that incorporate multiple measures; develop a human capital strategy to improve the quality of leadership and teaching; and increase state authority to intervene in failing schools and districts if other approaches prove insufficient. School closure should be used only when a state or district authority is certain it can send students to a better-performing campus. “Fixing failing schools and districts is hard but necessary work for governors to ensure all students have access to an education that prepares them to compete in the modern economy,” according to the report. To read the policy brief, visit http://www.nga.org/Files/pdf/1103FIXINGFAILINGSCHOOLS.PDF

Core Education is committed to working with states and districts to improve human capital strategies to positively impact low-performing schools. For more information about our services, see www.CoreEducationLLC.com

Wave 2 Funding – Next Generation Learning Challenges

Posted on January 20, 2011 by coreeducation

Next Generation Learning Challenges, funded by the Gates Foundation, announced a new round of challenge grants that will provide up to $10 million to expand promising technology tools and applications that help more students master seventh- through ninth-grade math and literacy competencies, which are critical to college and career readiness.

Next Generation Learning Challenges provides investment capital to technologists, institutions, educators, and entrepreneurs to bring promising technology solutions to more students across the K-12 to postsecondary spectrum. The initiative released its first request for proposals (RFP)-focused on improving postsecondary education-in October 2010. Finalists eligible for funding from this round will be announced within the next several weeks.

An RFP released yesterday seeks proposals for the new round of grants. Proposals must outline promising approaches to helping students master seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade content and competencies aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Applicants’ approaches must also include innovative learning assessment strategies that generate real-time information, which teachers and advisors can use to help more students succeed in their education.

Proposals are due March 4, 2011; winners are expected to be announced in June 2011.

Applicants responding to the new Next Generation Learning Challenges RFP must present programs and applications that meet the following criteria:
–Target seventh- to ninth-grade math or literacy content and deeper learning competencies as defined by the Common Core State Standards; programs may focus on all ages of learners;
–Use modular content that can be mixed and matched easily by learners and teachers;
–Use embedded assessment that can capture and assess student performance and provide performance feedback that students and teachers can use to improve the learning process and results;
–Exemplify contemporary research in cognitive and learning science, including interactive and contextualized learning, multiple learning paths, and scaffolded learning that results in deeper disciplinary understanding of concepts, as well as opportunities for students to practice skills and competencies; and
–Focus on student progression and mastery of concepts and skills, rather than “seat time.”

See the RFP here:
http://nextgenlearning.org/sites/site-1/assets/Final_RFP.2.pdf

The competition plans to make 26 awards – 12 at $250,000 and 14 at $500,000. The grant period is 15 months.

See http://www.coreeducationllc.com/page4.php for more information about Core Education’s grant and proposal writing services.

The "Core" of Education

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