I would like to contribute to the discussion around developing and using the standards that tell teachers, students and parents what we, as a state, think all school children should know, and the skills that they should have, in order to be prepared for college, work, and a successful life in the 21st century.
I agree with former West Virginia Governor, Bob Wise, now head of the Alliance for Excellence in Education—“a public school that is unable to reach and teach all students is a school that is not doing its job.”
While Wyoming does a better job than most of matching the federal NAEP scores, our closest form of national measurement, with state-administered tests—by that, I mean that a student testing as “proficient” on the state test, would also be considered “proficient” on the national scale—we need to guard against lowering the standards and expectations for our students.
We have far too many schools in Wyoming that are not serving their students well. In fact, I would hazard to speculate, that every school district in Wyoming, without exception, is doing a fabulous job with a few students, a decent job with many, but are failing miserably far too many students. We see students being subjected to an irrelevant curriculum that lacks rigor. And there are far too many students struggling to catch up to the small number of high-performers. We have large student populations with high student-teacher ratios of adults disconnected from students, and serious issues involving student and teacher safety. It is no mystery to many of us why Wyoming’s smallest schools, in terms of student achievement and graduation rates, are also Wyoming’s most successful schools. Rather than consolidate and unify and build larger and larger schools…the research clearly shows that a far better strategy is to preserve small schools embedded in caring communities, and to break up big schools into “schools within schools” in order to rebuild the community so necessary for ultimate success. I believe that there are simple, practical steps that can be taken to ensure that every Wyoming student has a caring adult within the school system itself, that knows them well, and follows their educational career over time, and establishes the relationship that will help to keep them engaged and becoming lifelong learners. The number one reason that dropouts express for their decision to leave school is “nobody cared or noticed that I left,” ahead of relevance, “nothing I was being taught has anything to do with the realities of my future,” and rigor, “because I didn’t learn what I needed to, I was unprepared for high school, and couldn’t keep up…it got to be hopeless.”
Linda Darling-Hammond , a noted educator and researcher suggests that four elements are critically important in highly effective schools: (1) personalization achieved through teams of teachers working with shared groups of students; (2) well-qualified teachers supported by ongoing peer collaboration and professional development; (3) a common core curriculum organized around performance-based assessment, which engages students with work that resembles what they will do outside of school and which challenges them intellectually; and (4) a variety of supports for struggling students in the context of an intellectually engaging and challenging curriculum.
Increasingly, research has shown that the skills and knowledge to succeed in postsecondary education and the workforce are the same. Further, nearly all decent-paying jobs require some postsecondary education, a requirement that will only increase over time. We need to end the disconnect between what we want and expect our students to know and do and what our schools are actually delivering through instruction in the classroom.
I hope that you will include in your discussion how we can most successfully address the problem of dropouts. The Alliance for Excellence in Education notes that NCLB does not set an ultimate graduation rate goal; therefore, states are not required to set—and schools are not required to meet—meaningful progress benchmarks toward that graduation rate goal. Since NCLB does not hold schools accountable for the end measure of the K-12 process, it has in fact, created an incentive for schools to push out students who will not test well on annual assessments. This push-out strategy recognizes that without accountability for whether or not a student actually completes the twelfth grade, it is better to weed the low-performing students out early, before they lower the school’s overall test performance scores. This must not happen in Wyoming. We need to make sure that graduation rates for all students and student subgroups must be included in our own determinations of Adequate Yearly Progress, and must be on an equal footing with test scores and must have similar, annually increasing goals that yield a reasonable trajectory toward achieving the objective of graduating all Wyoming students prepared for college, work, and life. While a few states have elected to set goals, most have not. Only New Mexico, Ohio, and Tennessee have set graduation rate goals of 100% by 2013-14. Wyoming needs to join that short list. Nothing less than 100% graduation is acceptable.
Research shows that the leading predictor that a student will drop out of college is the need for remedial reading. To address this problem, I suggest that the State of Wyoming increase its investment in tools like ACT. Currently, we pay for every high school student to take the ACT exam, but interestingly, I noticed on a recent report from ACT, only 80% of Wyoming students actually took the test. Why?
ACT offers a suite of services, EPAS® Educational Planning and Assessment System, which I believe should be implemented state-side. More information can be found on their website, http://www.act.org/epas/index.html , but here is a brief summary of what they offer, and why I believe it would be a valuable tool:
EPAS® Educational Planning and Assessment System was developed in response to the need for all students to be prepared for high school and the transitions they make after graduation.
The EPAS system provides a longitudinal, systematic approach to educational and career planning, assessment, instructional support, and evaluation. The system focuses on the integrated, higher-order thinking skills students develop in grades K-12 that are important for success both during and after high school.
EPAS focuses on a number of key transition points that young people face:
- 8th/9th grade—Preparing for high school studies
- 10th grade—Planning and preparing for college and the workplace
- 11th/12th grade—Being ready for life after high school
EPAS is unique in that its programs can be mixed and matched in ways that meet the needs of individual schools, districts, or states. However, each program includes the four components that form the foundation of EPAS:
- Student Planning—Process through which students can identify career and educational goals early and then pursue those goals.
- Instructional Support—Support materials and services to help classroom teachers prepare their students for the coming transitions. This component reinforces the direct link between the content and skills measured in the EPAS programs and those that are taught in high school classrooms.
- Assessment—Student achievement is assessed at three key transition points in EPAS—8th/9th, 10th, and 11th/12th grades—so that academic progress can be monitored to ensure that each student is prepared to reach his/her post-high school goals.
- Evaluation—An academic information monitoring service that provides teachers and administrators with a comprehensive analysis of academic growth between EPAS levels.
These four components of EPAS work together to respond to the needs of students, teachers, and school administrators in concrete and effective ways.
The entry point to this system is at the 8th/9th grade when a student would first take the Explore component of EPAS. If it is determined that the student is not ready for high school rigor, then remediation can be arranged. I believe that one of the strategies that ought to be provided by the State is access to another program, PrepMe, http://www.prepme.com/, which states like Maine have been using very successfully to help students succeed through personalized, customized, and challenging learning experiences at a fraction of the cost of more traditional remediation efforts like private tutors. As we move into the upcoming legislative session, it is my hope that we can target some of our education dollars to a package that would include the financial resources to provide every student with all components of the EPAS, and access to PrepMe for customized learning and remediation.
I wholeheartedly believe that customized learning, and distance education innovation, is the surest method to provide excellent, high quality learning experiences to every student in Wyoming—in spite of our demographic and geographic challenges of a small population spread over vast distances. I encourage any of you who have not already done so to read “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns,” by Clayton M. Christensen, which I believe will be the most influential book about education this decade. Christensen is a Harvard Business professor who wrote a now-famous book some ten years ago about his theory of “disruptive” change—“Disruptive Innovations.” His main point is that recent studies in neuroscience have shown that the way we learn doesn’t always match up with the way we are taught. If we hope to stay competitive—academically, economically, and technologically—we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence, reevaluate our educational system, and reinvigorate our commitment to learning. Christensen points out that customized learning will help many more students succeed in school; that student-centric classrooms will increase the demand for new technology; that computers must be disruptively deployed to every student; disruptive innovation can circumvent roadblocks that have prevented other attempts at school reform; and that we can compete in the global classroom—and get ahead in the global market. He notes that already 43% of rural schools in the Nation are leveraging online courses that would otherwise not be available, and predicts that based on logarithmic projections the data suggests that by 2019 more than 50% of all high school courses will be delivered online.
I particularly am drawn to his depiction of a student-centric classroom. “Computer-based learning, which is a step on the road toward student-centric technology, offers a way…The proper use of technology as a platform for learning offers a chance to modularize the system and thereby customize learning. Student-centric learning is the escape hatch from the temporal, lateral, physical, and hierarchical cells of standardization. The hardware exists. The software is emerging. Student-centric learning opens the door for students to learn in ways that match their intelligence types in the places and at the paces they prefer by combining content in customized sequences. As modularity and customization reach a tipping point, there will be another change…teachers can serve as professional learning coaches and content architects to help individual students progress—and they can be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage.”
Online technology provides accessibility for those who previously would not have been able to take a course. It provides convenience for a student to fit the course into his or her schedule at the time that it is most desirable. To varying degrees, it is simpler because it offers comparatively greater flexibility in the pace and learning path. And when it is software-based, it can scale with ease.
Among the reasons that I believe we need to ensure our content and performance standards need to be viewed within the context of a robust technology based foundation that can be deployed across vast distances are several factors:
- Computer-based learning will keep improving. Software developers will take full advantage of the medium to customize it by layering in different learning paths for different students.
- Students, teachers, and parents will have the ability to select a learning pathway through each body of material that fits each of the types of learners—the transition from computer-based to student-centric technology.
- We are facing a looming teacher shortage. The baby-boomer generation of teachers will start retiring en masse soon, even as the student population, which is the highest it has ever been, will not decline in any proportional way. In 1999, 29% of teachers were over 50 years of age. In 2007, it was 42%, which suggests that a decade hence there will be a wave of teacher shortages across the country. Unless computer-based learning has been honed in the foothold markets, it won’t be ready for the mainstream when school districts will need the accessibility that it brings.
In conclusion, as you sit down to begin your task around content and performance standards, I hope that you will keep these things in mind:
- We have far too many standards. With nine standards, of which a student only has to achieve proficiency in four or five, and can graduate without being proficient in any of the core subjects so necessary to college and work—in today’s age, what is necessary for success in college, is also what is necessary for any post-secondary path to success. Today’s workforce demands a much higher level of knowledge. We need to eliminate the disconnect between a smorgasbord of irrelevant and unchallenging offerings in high school, and the focused commitment on core subjects that are so necessary for college success. The 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” warned of a rising tide of mediocrity that threatened the Nation’s economic standing, and that the secondary school curricula, in particular, “have been homogenized, diluted, and diffused to the point that they no longer have a central purpose. In effect, we have a cafeteria style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main courses.” It is my observation that in twenty-five years, not a heck of a lot has changed.
- Leave room in the standards for innovation and variety—the ability of educators to design project-based systems of integrated learning, for example, where rigorous core knowledge is incorporated into practical hands-on projects like building a house, or designing a better automobile. I encourage you to adopt the Hathaway Success Curriculum as a minimum for every student, and that we officially adopt the goal of 100% graduation, with 100% of our students being eligible for the Hathaway Scholarship regardless of whether they are headed straight for the workforce, technical school, or a university. We need to seek continuing funding for the Hathaway Fund, and expand the scope to provide even more opportunity. I would allow any deserving student to take their Hathaway dollars to any accredited institution in the country—wherever they can find the best education for their futures—and to set it up like the WICHE and WAMI programs, if you return to Wyoming and work for 3 or 4 years after graduation it remains a straight-ahead scholarship, if you choose to live and work somewhere else, than you need to repay the system just like a student loan. At the very least, we need to allow students to take their Hathaway Scholarship to in-state technical schools where they can get the education they need to secure high-paying jobs that are begging for talent here in Wyoming. The best way to ensure that the University of Wyoming and our Community Colleges concentrate on providing an excellent education, is to make sure that they have some healthy competition to contend with.
- Guard the rigor of our standards carefully. Anecdotally, I have been told of students who were AP students in Wyoming, who when they moved out-of-state discovered that they needed private tutors to successfully complete courses. 36% of our first year Hathaway recipients failed to keep their scholarship because they needed remedial courses in college—we have ample evidence that our high schools are not preparing our students. Many students have in the past taken general courses, and avoided AP courses, because they believed it was better to have a high GPA, only to find that they are miserably unprepared for college rigor. I suggest that high school graduation be tied to both GPA and ACT scores.
- “Seat time” does not equal student learning. We need to provide plenty of options to students and parents so that no matter what kind of intelligence you have, or what kind of learning style, that you are provided with methods that succeed. We need to allow students to progress at whatever pace they are capable of, and to base where they are in their educational career not on their age, but on their mastery and progress through a discipline. We need to remove road blocks to concurrent enrollment with community colleges. We need to encourage the establishment of public charter schools that can bring innovation and variety to what should be a “system of schools,” not the, one and only, monolithic school system. All schools, traditional public schools, public charter schools, private and parochial schools should be held to the same high standards of accountability and achievement, and there should be real consequences for failure. It is disheartening to many of us to see Wyoming schools not making AYP, some for as long as 4 or 5 years, without any meaningful change, or consequence, except to the students who are still not being educated.
- Because every child matters, I would hope that we have adequate benchmarks, and sufficient strategies to address the needs of children who are struggling. At a minimum, we should make sure that every child is reading proficiently by the time they are in the 3rd or 4th grade, and that they are not automatically promoted until they are. We need to make sure that they don’t leave elementary school until they are proficient in the skills needed to succeed in middle school. At each step on the path, we need to make sure that the assessment, remediation, and encouragement is available to every kid. ACT’s EPAS system can help us pick up the ball once they hit 8th or 9th grade—which can offer a component of consistency not only across Wyoming, but across the Nation and the globe.
- We need to get out of the way of students who don’t need help, and who are ready to soar. Rather than tell parents to quit teaching their knowledge hungry children, because they will know too much, and “they’ll just wind up being a discipline problem,” we need to encourage kids to go as far and as fast as they are capable. I love Newt Gingrich’s proposal—if a kid is able to master the body of knowledge and graduate from high school at the end of his or her junior year, they ought to be able to take the dollars set aside for their senior year to college as a scholarship—and if they are able to graduate after their sophomore year, they ought to be able to take two years of funding with them to college. Now, that’s incentive!
- Conversely, if a student is awarded a diploma from a high school in Wyoming, and enrolls in college within a year of their graduation, and is required to take a remedial course in anything—I believe that the school district that awarded that diploma should be required to pay the full tuition, books, and fees required. The school failed the student, and ought to be held accountable. Maybe then we would stop deluding our students with the myth that a high school diploma, in and of itself, signifies anything more than an endurance contest.
Thank you again for the invitation, I’m sorry I can’t be with you, but nonetheless, I look forward to many fruitful conversations as we move through the Fall season of Joint Education Committee meetings, and the upcoming Legislative Session.
