How to take Public Ed to the Next Level and Generate $225 Trillion

Reposted from Forbes:

We set out to determine the costs and benefits of taking U.S. schoolkids from their middling global rankings to top five in the world, as measured by math scores and rates for high school graduation, college entry and four-year college completion.

There’s no other way to put this: The resulting numbers were big. Really big.The investment required to implement all five would run somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.2 trillion, spread over 20 years. Or $310 billion a year in today’s dollars. And the payoff, as calculated by factoring in all those additional, better-skilled high school and college graduates on our national GDP? Almost $225 trillion, spread over an 80-year time horizon, which incorporates an entire generation’s professional achievement.

There are, of course, numerous assumptions in this exercise, from the political (school leadership gains would require new collective bargaining agreements in many states) to implementation (initial forays into universal pre-K have produced results well short of our expectations). But we did encourage the researchers to be conservative in their approach. The blended-learning assumptions forecast none of the personnel or textbook cost savings that would almost surely come from having students learning in part via online tools. Teacher efficacy focuses solely on recruiting great new teachers, versus removing lousy ones. And so on…

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NYC Public Schools Lifting Cellphone Ban

Reposted from the Atlantic:

New York City’s public school district is gearing up to scrap a controversial policy forbidding its 1.1 million students from having cellphones on campus. The thing is, plenty of students are already ignoring the ban. It turns out some of the poorest kids in the city are the ones who will notice the change most.

For most of New York City’s 1,800 or so public schools, the ban on cellphones is little more than a line in the district’s discipline code. The out-of-sight, out-of-mind rule doesn’t appear to be in force at most schools. When discussing his plan in September to axe the policy, Mayor Bill de Blasio even acknowledged that his son Dante brings his cellphone to his school, Brooklyn Technical High.

In fact, some New York City teachers rely on student cellphones as tools in the classroom to help with tasks such as research projects. These classrooms become what Andrew Miller, a Tacoma-based educator who specializes in online learning, called “pockets of excellence.” But these kinds of pockets of excellence can’t exist at the 87 schools with metal detectors on campus because the security screening effectively bars kids from physically bringing their devices to class.

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The Silence of Education Reformers on Ferguson is Deafening

Reposted from Dropout Nation:

Dropout Nation is undertaking its mission, one to which all school reformers should be committed at all times and all moments: Building brighter futures for all children. Challenging systems that harm the futures of all of our sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, and cousins. Stand along with communities to bend the arc of history toward economic and social progress. And create cultures of genius in which all of our kids are provided the high-quality education they need and deserve.

Back in August and September, after Wilson’s callous slaying of Brown led to months of protests in and out of Missouri, this publication ran pieces on how the Ferguson-Florissant School District exemplified the failed policies and practices endemic in American public education. This included focusing on how the district failed to provide all kids with college-preparatory curricula, a Dropout Nation Podcast on how we must use the events in Ferguson to save young black men from the economic and social abyss, and a report on how Ferguson-Florissant was doing worse on behalf of black children than the notoriously-woeful St. Louis district nearby. So why can’t reformers do the same? More importantly, how can the school reform movement talk about addressing equity in public education while remaining silent about Ferguson?

To be a school reformer is to look at all the issues that happen in the lives of our kids, understand how American public education impacts those matters adversely, and champion solutions that can transform the schools and other institutions at the center of the lives of children, their families, and the communities in which they live. When reformers don’t live up to their obligations, as both members of a moral movement for bettering the lives of children as well as human beings, they are doing disservice to the mission. The silence of so many reformers on Ferguson is shameful, unacceptable even. And it must stop.

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You Think You Know What Teachers Do? You’re Wrong

Reposted from the Washington Post:

Teaching as a profession has no mystery. It has no mystique. It has no respect. We were students, and therefore we know teachers. We denigrate teachers. We criticize teachers. We can do better than teachers. After all: We do. They teach. We are wrong. We need to honor teachers. We need to respect teachers. We need to listen to teachers. We need to stop reducing teachers to arbitrary measurements of student growth on so-called objective exams. Most of all, we need to stop thinking that we know anything about teaching merely by virtue of having once been students. We don’t know.

I spent a little over a year earning a master of arts in teaching degree. Then I spent two years teaching English Language Arts in a rural public high school. And I learned that my 13 years as a public school student, my 4 years as a college student at a highly selective college, and even a great deal of my year as a master’s degree student in the education school of a flagship public university hadn’t taught me how to manage a classroom, how to reach students, how to inspire a love of learning, how to teach. Eighteen years as a student (and a year of preschool before that), and I didn’t know anything about teaching. Only years of practicing my skills and honing my skills would have rendered me a true professional. An expert. Someone who knows about the business of inspiring children. Of reaching students. Of making a difference. Of teaching. I didn’t stay. I copped out. I left. I went home to suburban New Jersey, and a year later I enrolled in law school.

The people I encounter out in the world now respect me as a lawyer, as a professional, in part because the vast majority of them have absolutely no idea what I really do. All of you former students who are not teachers and not lawyers, you have no more idea of what it is to teach than you do of what it is to practice law. You did not. And you don’t know. You observed. Maybe you learned. But you didn’t teach. The problem with teaching as a profession is that every single adult citizen of this country thinks that they know what teachers do. And they don’t. So they prescribe solutions, and they develop public policy, and they editorialize, and they politicize. And they don’t listen to those who do know. Those who could teach. The teachers.

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The Future Is Not As Far Off As It Seems… [MEME]

Jefferson’s dream was the evolved education of each successive generation through a public system that is well-funded and free of political partisanship, ideologues and the interests of the private sector. If he were with us today, he would encourage is to continue dreaming. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Live in the future, educators everywhere. Never give in to self-serving interests. Never give up on the dream. The future is not as far off as it seems…