Category Archives: About K-12 International Education News

As part of a series of posts on the evolution of schools and organizations working to improve education, we have been exploring the factors and conditions (the “learning ecology” as John Seely Brown put it) that support and limit innovation. Over the next year, we hope to explore the “learning ecology” in a number of cities around the world, beginning with New York City. The New York City “ecology” stands out both as a place that has supported the development of a number of new small schools and a place that has “incubated” the development of a variety of learning models that seek to develop and scale new educational practices. Among those learning models is School of One, an initiative within the New York City Department of Education launched in 2009 focused on personalized learning for middle grade math. Since that time, the creators of School of One launched a national non-profit called New Classrooms Innovation Partners to create new models of learning for schools across the country. Their first model, Teach to One: Math, is currently in operation in 28 schools around the country. New Classrooms also operates School of One on behalf of the NYC Department of Education. The underlying designs of both Teach to One and School of One are the same. To learn more about the evolution of this approach, we talked with Joel Rose, the founder of School of One and currently the co-founder and CEO of New Classrooms.

School of One started with a fairly simple idea: students learn in different ways, so schools should reflect this fact. Of course, the typical structure of school is not designed for individual students but for a number of students grouped together in various ways. School of One aimed to challenge this model. Briefly outlined, then, School of One customized educational content to the strengths and needs of individual students.

Rose started working on School of One when he was a member of the Human Resources department of the New York City Department of Education. At the time, Michael Bloomberg was mayor and Joel Klein was the chancellor of education. Both were champions of providing more autonomy for schools and supporting more entrepreneurship within the public sector. With Klein’s support, School of One launched as a pilot project in the summer of 2009 and served as one of the first initiatives of the iZone.

Operating with a small team, Rose and his colleagues helped restructure a summer school program to create a more customized educational experience for about 80 students. Rose described the day-to-day operations within this pilot project as SneakerNet in that in its infancy the program essentially involved Mr. Rose and his team running around, making decisions on a day-to-day basis, and building the program in the process.

After this initial pilot project, the School of One team undertook a series of R&D and implementation cycles. They took the experiences and data from the first summer pilot and developed a slightly reworked model that they implemented as an afterschool program in three schools in the spring of 2010. Then, in the fall of that year, they embedded the School of One model in one public middle school, I.S. 228. Continuing with the original vision, this iteration of School of One “put multiple learning modalities into the same learning environment in order to personalize instruction around student needs.” More specifically, nearly 100 students worked in a math center with 6 teachers and support staff. The room was divided into sections of independent instruction, small group collaboration, and teacher-delivered instruction. Based on diagnostics that help create individual student profiles, students experienced these different modalities in ways that addressed specific strengths and needs for that student.

Nearly five years later, School of One continues operating in I.S. 228. The approach has also scaled nationally through Teach to One: Math, which is built on the same core tenets. Teach to One: Math is now found in eight states and Washington DC, where it serves around 10,000 students.

Rose explains that both School of One and Teach to One maintain deep investment in the planning and execution of ideas. For instance, in its early stages, the research and development team spent over 500 hours designing homework, just one small component of the overall learning model they’ve designed. This data can help purposefully design the learning model to address each moment of the teacher’s and student’s day. Within this framework, one question they want to address is “can we have an integrated model that enables teachers to deliver on the promise of personalized learning for every student, every day?”

Over the years, New Classrooms has faced a number of challenges. In particular, School of One and Teach to One still must be implemented within the regulations of traditional school, organized by grade levels and driven by state standards based on those grade levels. Given its rapid expansion, however, the learning model continues pushing at the boundaries of traditional school.

Through these changes and developments, Rose explains that New Classrooms maintains a consistent vision. That is, School of One and Teach to One challenge trends of what he sees as a broken system and innovatively provide individualized learning opportunities for all students.

In 1989, New Visions for Public Schools was founded on the belief that public/private partnerships and small school designs could help improve the drop out rate in New York City schools. Since then, the organization has gone through several iterations, expanding from a focus on incubating small schools, supporting a network of small schools, and most recently developing data-based tools that can support the work of educators across and within schools. To better understand this evolution and the issues that New Visions is working on today, we spoke with Mark Dunetz, the Vice President for School Support at New Vision and previously a principal at a New Visions high school.

New Visions 1.0: An Incubator For The Development Of Small Schools

The early evolution of New Visions for Public Schools reflected the growing interest and commitment to the development of new small schools that swept the United States in the 1990s. In fact, while New Visions began with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to create an after school program to engage students in community service, by 1993 they had received a $25 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation to create 14 new small schools in New York City. In 1996, they officially adopted the name New Visions for Public Schools in order to reflect their focus on supporting the development of wide variety of teacher- and student-centered small secondary schools. With grants from the Gates Foundation and other funders, New Visions has gone on to open 140 schools in New York City. Interestingly, although divisions are often made between those who support opening new public schools and opening new charter schools, New Visions has done both. As the number of charter schools in New York City and elsewhere has grown throughout the 2000’s New Visions has opened up seven charter schools. As one of the few organizations bridging the “charter divide,” several of New Visions’ charter schools have been opened in cooperation with the teachers’ union and Michael Mulgrew, current President of the local union, sits on the New Visions Board. Counting both the public schools and charter schools that New Visions has opened, today, 1 in 5 students in New York City schools attend a school either opened or currently supported by New Visions.

New Visions 2.0: Supporting the Development of a Network of Schools  

New Visions’ expansion from starting new schools to supporting and sustaining a network of schools took advantage of significant changes in local educational policies made after New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002. Bloomberg, along with School Chancellor Joel Klein, sought to dismantle what they saw as an inefficient and overly-centralized school bureaucracy, by releasing schools from direct oversight by area superintendents. In contrast, they sought to grant local schools and principals with autonomy while holding them accountable for improvements in student performance. A central element of their approach was the creation of a competitive environment in which School Support Organizations tried to attract schools that would pay for their services. Rather than remaining centered on the creation of new small secondary schools, New Visions embraced this opportunity to become a School Support Organization and began to work with both new and existing schools on day-to-day operations. As a result, New Visions expanded to work with both large and small schools, as well as transfer schools (schools designed to re-engage students who have dropped out or who have fallen behind in credits) and grade 6-12 schools. Dunetz described this as a “laboratory for doing deep work on the day-to-day of everything happening in schools.”

New Visions 3.0: Creating Tools to Innovate Across the System

With another change in school administration in New York City, New Visions has expanded its focus again. In 2015, following the election of Mayor DeBlasio, Carmen Fariña was appointed the new Education Chancellor for New York City schools. She ushered in changes to the organizational structure of the system that included re-establishing the role of local superintendent and eliminating the competitive marketplace for School Support Organizations. However, because New Visions along with a few other organizations was regarded as an effective network-provider, it was allowed to retain its network of schools. As a result, New Visions still works with a select group of schools; however, the support is no longer provided in a marketplace environment. Schools can opt to be members of the New Visions PSO Network for a three-year period. As Dunetz described it, this allows New Visions to play out a set of strategies and focus more on innovation and less on competition. While there was always an explicit expectation that New Visions would work on a set of strategies that would in theory have value for the larger system, in some ways they are also back in a place where they can serve as an innovation lab and incubator for the development of tools and practices that address some of the key problems that their schools and others face.

Today, as Dunetz explained, many schools face challenges implementing their visions. From his perspective, efforts often fail at the point of implementation because people can’t organize quickly and efficiently enough to carry out anything substantially different. As he put it, “I’ve seen that innovations don’t last over time because people can’t keep up with it and can’t work out the details of something non-traditional.” Furthermore, he argues that success may be more likely to happen in places with select or non-representative student populations – where students are screened and the organization and the normal pressures of traditional schooling may be reduced. According to Dunetz, “The places that have tried to implement innovation with a typical non-selective population and with large numbers of students, they tank academically and wind up regressing towards common practice.”

In order to combat some of these challenges, New Visions’ current work focuses on finding ways to use technological tools to target areas in need of support in schools—tools developed from his own experiences as a principal. For example, New York City has a complicated set of graduation requirements that makes it very difficult for schools to keep track which students are making progress at an appropriate rate. Traditionally, every principal and school has had to figure out how to solve this problem on their own. However, New Visions worked with their schools to develop a scheduling tool that makes it possible to see whether students are enrolled in the appropriate classes and gaining the credits that they need. As Dunetz described the issues and their current approach:

I experienced, along with my colleagues, that you could do a whole lot with simple technology. Tools have become one really big piece of our strategy. We no longer see it as a necessary evil, where you have to go out and find a vendor that is the least bad. We see the control of the development of those tools as a very powerful mechanism for changing behavior.

 

Where we shifted a year and a half ago was to a much more explicit modeling of what it looks like to use tools at the administrative level. Now we’ve got to go to other levels. We do what we call  “strategic data check ins.” These are scripted, protocol-driven conversations that look at key planning tasks organized around the tool, or multiple tools. We do it largely through Google hangout, so we can do a large number of schools over a period of time. We go through and come up with plans that are recorded alongside the data, and then we pull back and look across so we can be a second set of eyes. That’s become a core part of our strategy and it’s become tremendously successful at shifting practice at scale very quickly around very high stakes things, like what constitutes a meaningful graduation plan and what are the smartest strategies for sitting and preparing students for Regents exams. We can organize systematically. That’s a huge step forward for us.

 

Today, New Visions is focusing on the notion that in order to be effective at regular planning you need a common reference point that is updated and available to everyone involved. The organization is working on designing a framework that takes information out of the heads of the many individuals who work with students, and puts it on paper. Dunetz described this information as more specific than generalized information, but not prescriptive for solving problems. “It’s the guts of the system,” he explained. “It’s what needs to happen in order to be able to sustain innovation, and to be transparent. See all moving pieces and what is and isn’t being implemented with fidelity. It’s different than what people are used to. People are used to a highly prescriptive checklist. Our hope is to get schools to a level of functioning on a whole set of things that can be solved in a short period of time.” With these developments, New Visions now has over twenty staff members working on data analytics and designing systems and structures that can be used by their schools and others.

All in all, New Visions has expanded from starting small schools, to incubating small schools, to leading a network of schools. Now, it serves as one example of a new kind of educational organization that goes beyond school design and school support to develop tools and practices that meet the day-to-day needs of teachers and principals in schools of all kinds.

—Deirdre Faughey

Dr. Karen Seashore Louis

Karen Seashore Louis is a Regents Professor and the Robert H. Beck Chair in the Department of Organizational Policy, Leadership, and Development at the University of Minnesota. She has also served as the Director of the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota, Department Chair, and Associate Dean of the College of Education and Human Development. Her work focuses on school improvement and reform, school effectiveness, leadership in school settings, and the politics of knowledge use in education. Her most recent books include Building Strong School Cultures: A Guide to Leading Change (with Sharon Kruse, 2009), Linking Leadership to Student Learning (with Kenneth Leithwood, 2011), Educational Policy: Political Culture and Its Effects (2012) and Reach the highest standard in professional learning: Leadership (in press, Corwin Press). A Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, she also served as the Vice President of Division A, and on the Executive Board of the University Council for Educational Administration. She has received numerous awards, including the Lifetime Contributions to Staff Development award from the National Staff Development Association (2007), the Campbell Lifetime Achievement Award from the University Council for Educational Administration (2009), and a Life Member designation from the International Congress for School Effectiveness and School Improvement.

In this interview, which is part of the Lead the Change Series of the American Educational Research Association Educational Change Special Interest Group, Louis shares thoughts on the research she would like to see on school improvement:

…we need to turn our research focus and the attention of school leaders not only to their roles and responsibilities for engaging the emotions of those who are part of the school community, but how the greater community can be mobilized to participate in caring relationships as well, particularly for adolescents. The schools I am working with are at the limit of their capacity to change the life trajectory of youth on their own. More money won’t solve the issues that they face – we need broader achievement zones that focus on older children as well as preschool/early elementary years.

This Lead the Change interview appears as part of a series that features experts from around the globe, highlights promising research and practice, and offers expert insight on small- and large-scale educational change. Recently Lead the Change has also published interviews with Diane Ravitch, and the contributors to Leading Educational Change: Global Issues, Challenges, and Lessons on Whole-System Reform (Teachers College Press, 2013) edited by Helen Janc Malone, have participated in a series of blogs from Education Week.

What is it exactly that makes a teacher a teacher? What does a teacher have to know? What do they have to be trained for? And why is it exactly that school, particularly high school, is structured the way it is? These questions travel through many educational contexts. For Professor Felicitas Acosta, a staff researcher at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento (UNGS), an Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), and an Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP) and San Martín (UNSAM), these questions are particularly relevant for the historical present of Argentina’s education system. In a recent conversation, professor Acosta helped us explore some of these main issues with secondary school teacher education in Argentina.

Rather than work within the complexities of teacher identity and teacher training, Professor Acosta argues that the Argentinian education system takes what she calls “a combined approach” to teacher training. That is, as a result of a secondary system where students take 9 to 11 pedagogical subjects, teacher preparation is designed from an amalgamation of other disciplines such as psychology and sociology. In secondary education, training teachers does not rest on education as a specific and independent discipline. Instead, there is a drastic focus on teaching teachers how to teach content (in other words, how to teach their specific subject). As a result, pedagogical training is marginalized as part of learning how to be a teacher. Within this model, teachers are trained for a system where students routinely struggle to finish secondary school. Among other causes, Professor Acosta attributes these struggles to this combined approach. Students who may not already possess the cultural capital to navigate and succeed in areas beyond content will struggle when teachers lack the pedagogical training to engage students in dynamic ways.

For her part, Professor Acosta sees international, structural, and historical roots for this issue. The historical roots extend to the 1930s as Argentina began its mass schooling project. As schooling expanded in Argentina, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, the increase in bodies in school buildings required greater and greater attention to how to organize those bodies. This increase is, at least in part, how Argentinian secondary schools arrived at the 9 to 11 pedagogical subjects in which students enroll. Yet, Dr. Acosta uses this historical lens as an “excavation of the present.” She shows how the current conditions for training teachers emerged from these historical issues. In terms of structural issues, Professor Acosta explains that Argentina’s education system design produces its own defects. The lack of particular pedagogical training and an emphasis on antiquated approaches in general demonstrates how the system produces its own defects. For example, Professor Acosta is forced to follow what she sees as an antiquated model in her own teacher training, simply so that her teachers do not fail in the already-existing system. Finally, Professor Acosta points to international influences that help structure Argentina’s education system the way it is now. She contends that Argentina, as with other countries, is greatly influenced and shaped by other education systems. All of these issues had a direct impact on teacher education.

Argentinian teacher education schools are structured into two categories. The majority of institutions are parts of universities. The universities do face standards and norms for training teachers. At the same time, many of the public universities have legal autonomy from the state. There are also a growing number of teacher training institutes. An original conception of these institutes, as considered by the Argentinian educator Pizzurno, saw institutes training teachers but attached to a lab school. In this vision, school would not be organized by subjects. Teachers in these institutes would be appointed. Teachers would not teach one but rather related subjects. The institutes do not, according to Professor Acosta, reflect Pizzurno’s vision.

As previously mentioned, in both the universities and the teacher training institutes, teachers are trained for content rather than pedagogy. Professor Acosta does not believe that pedagogy should be privileged above content. Rather, she asserts that “the organizational model has led [us] to believe that pedagogical knowledge is unimportant.” Combatting this issue is not as simple as training teachers differently. As previously mentioned, to only train teachers differently without changing anything else would be to train these teachers to fail as secondary teachers. Professor Acosta believes that the very structure of secondary school must be changed in order for teacher training to be changed.

Particularly within her university, Professor Acosta sees these issues as deeply problematic for her student teachers. Her university is fairly new and quite small (particularly in comparison with universities such as the University of Buenos Aires). The university was both created and located to help more students gain access to university. Most of her students are first generation university students, but most of the professors have been trained at places like the University of Buenos Aires. Initially, teachers were trained in a consecutive model, where they learned content and then pedagogy. The school is now moving toward a concurrent model, where both are taught simultaneously. Overall, in its 20 years of existence, the teacher training curriculum has changed 3 times.

All of this information is simply to say that, while the university is trying to make a number of changes they are still greatly restricted in how well they can prepare teachers. They are trying to “get the teachers to consider how the teaching job is built and constructed.” The overall goals are to improve an Argentinian system that is still greatly inequitable at the secondary level. Yet, Professor Acosta argues that her university and the system in general is highly constricted by the system’s design. Her university still bases 75% of its training on content, which immediately pushes pedagogical training to the side. The university, by necessity, still mirrors secondary schools. So, while Professor Acosta believes certain actions may be taken to improve teacher education within her university, they are ultimately bound to present day demands.

In order to learn about what’s happened with testing and assessment in Norway in recent years, we had a conversation with Sverre Tveit. Tveit is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Education at the University of Oslo. He will join the University of Agder in southern Norway as University Lecturer in August. In addition to his comparative research related to assessment policy, Tveit has also worked on education and assessment issues at the municipal level (the equivalent of the district level in the US) and was a board member of the Norwegian School Student Union (which organized protests against the initial implementation of the national tests in 2005). He talked with us about how the national tests seem to have been integrated into the Norwegian education system but also pointed to the ways in which local and national politics reflect continuing debates over issues and tensions of testing, assessment, and accountability.

In Norway over the past fifteen years, as in many other countries, there have been numerous debates over the extent to which tests should be used for accountability and/or diagnostic purposes. The “shock” of the 2001 PISA results sparked a reform of the entire primary and secondary education system that included new testing and accountability policies developed by the right-wing government and endorsed by a unanimous parliament. However, as Tveit portrays in “Educational Assessment in Norway,” in 2004-2005 protests erupted against the right-wing government’s plans to publish schools’ test results, open up more non-public schools and facilitate more school choice. Those protests died down as a more left-wing coalition government went ahead with the implementation of national tests, yet with more emphasis put on formative and diagnostic purposes. Since that time, students in Norway have regularly taken national tests in the fall of 5^th and 8^th grade in reading, numeracy, and English instead of at the conclusion of 4^th and 7^th grade (as was originally proposed). Part of the reason for changing the timing of the tests was to shift the focus from ensuring that students have reached proficiency by the end of middle and lower secondary school, to providing teachers and schools with information they can use to inform their instruction moving forward.

While the tests themselves no longer seem to be as controversial, there are still concerns from educators that the tests do not yield the kind of specific information that can help them improve instruction. As Tveit explained “if you talk to teachers, many complain that the testing takes time that could have been used better for working with students.” On the other hand, he pointed out, many others feel that the tests have become a crucial part of the government’s effort to improve the quality of education across schools.  These tensions between the use of the tests for governing and accountability purposes versus formative and diagnostic purposes are central in Tveit’s investigation of how policymakers’ rationalize and legitimate the national tests. He has found, for example, that policymakers’ efforts to satisfy the demands of both those who want to use tests for accountability purposes and those who want to use the tests for formative purposes lead to methodological compromises that can be problematic. To shed some light on these debates, an ongoing research project Practices of Data Use in Education (PraDa) looks specifically at how teachers and schools in different municipalities are using the data from the national tests, the lower secondary school graduation exams, and other sources.

The use of test data for ranking was also a matter of considerable controversy initially. The right-wing government that implemented the testing program envisioned the tests as a source for rankings and comparisons among schools that could spur school choice. But when the tests were introduced, the more left-wing coalition that took over the government discouraged the production of rankings and “league tables” that might be used to “name and shame” poorly performing schools. The current government’s recent move to make schools’ tests results more widely available through a “user-friendly” online format has generated relatively little public discussion. The compromise makes it possible to see how an individual school compares to municipal and national averages, although schools cannot be ranked or compared directly.

Different perspectives on testing and assessment are also reflected at the local level. In fact, even though there have been limits on the use of testing at the national level, the municipality of Oslo, led up until recently by a more right-wing local government, has developed an elaborate system of annual tests that includes tests at a number of different subjects and ages in primary school. Ironically, however, while the right-wing government that is now in place at the national level could pilot the use of grading in primary schools, Oslo, which would have been a logical place for such pilots has now elected a more left-wing government. The new Oslo government seems more likely to curtail any expansion or use of testing than it is to participate in such a pilot.

Looking ahead, a committee created to help imagine Norway’s “schools of tomorrow” has proposed that Norwegian schools, teachers, and students need the freedom to go deeper into some content areas rather than being required to cover a wide range of topics. Similar to recent changes proposed for the Core Curriculum in Finland, the report also encourages a shift to a more interdisciplinary curriculum. Of course, such shifts would have important implications for testing and assessment as well. Exactly what will come of the report and exactly how much interest there is in Norway for another set of reforms, however, remains to be seen.

Dr. John Hattie

John Hattie is Professor and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia and chair of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. He is the author of Visible Learning, Visible Learning for Teachers, Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn, and Visible Learning into Action. He is also co-editor of the International Guide to Student Achievement.

John Hattie’s influential 2008 book Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement is believed to be the world’s largest evidence-based study into the factors which improve student learning. Involving more than 80 million students from around the world and bringing together 50,000 smaller studies, the study found positive teacher-student interaction is the most important factor in effective teaching.

In this interview, which is part of the Lead the Change Series of the American Educational Research Association Educational Change Special Interest Group, Hattie shares his thoughts on the most important issues in educational change today:

The most important issue is scalability. There is a rich source of educational research, there are so many excellent educators in our schools and universities, and there is so much we know about what this success looks like. The missing ingredient is how to scale this success.

This Lead the Change interview appears as part of a series that features experts from around the globe, highlights promising research and practice, and offers expert insight on small- and large-scale educational change. Recently Lead the Change has also published interviews with Diane Ravitch, and the contributors to Leading Educational Change: Global Issues, Challenges, and Lessons on Whole-System Reform (Teachers College Press, 2013) edited by Helen Janc Malone, have participated in a series of blogs from Education Week.