Taking On the Urgent Need for Change
Reading Time: < 1 minute
Author: West Wind
Problematizing “Achievement Gaps”: Recommendations for the National Assessment Governing Board
Critical Race Theory: An Annotated Bibliography
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[box class=”grey_box”]Prepared by Deanna Hill[/box]
Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged in the legal academy in response to growing dissatisfaction with Critical Legal Studies (CLS) and its inability to adequately address race and racism in its critique of U.S. jurisprudence. Many trace the framework back to the work of Derrick Bell in the 1960s and Alan Freeman and Richard Delgado in the 1970s and 1980s. The first CRT workshop was held at a monastery in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1989. The University of Iowa College of Law hosted the “CRT 20: Honoring Our Past, Charting Our Future” workshop in April, 2009.
CRT places race at the center of analysis. At the same time, CRT recognizes the complex ways that race intersects with ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other systems of power. CRT has an activist agenda to transform and redeem, not just to critique and deconstruct. Further, CRT works toward the elimination of racial oppression as part of the larger goal of eliminating all forms of oppression.
CRT produced several offshoots, including Critical Race Feminism, Queer-Crit, Lat-Crit, Asian Crit, TribalCrit, and Critical White Studies. Additionally, CRT crossed over into other disciplines. CRT was formally introduced into education in 1995 when Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate published in Teachers College Record the now seminal article “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education.”
Summary of The Knowledge Garage: Redesigning Education R&D to Transform Learning
Reading Time: 5 minutes
We prepared this Executive Summary of our white paper for the national invitational summit that we convened with Knowledge Alliance/Center for Knowledge Use and the Stupski Foundation, Unleashing Knowledge and Innovation for the Next Generation of Learning, from August 10–12, 2009, in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico.
Executive Summary
Education R&D has its passionate advocates, to be sure, but even they would be hard pressed to argue that the topic conjures up visions of unbridled creativity, free flowing inventiveness, and audacious risk-taking—at least at first glance.
This white paper advocates on behalf of taking a second, more introspective glance through the lens of “the knowledge garage”—the garage serving as a metaphor for ideas hatched in unlikely places by unlikely people, but ideas nonetheless that can ultimately change the world.
The paper begins with an appreciative nod to the early garage sites of youthful inventiveness, whose initial tinkering gave us the personal computer, eventually democratizing ongoing communications worldwide. It then poses the following question:
by pursuing a similar course, one also filled with creativity, inquiry, opportunity, and tenacity, could education R&D be redesigned to transform learning?
Section One, Road Trip: Rethinking Education R&D, describes the quest for the answer, led by two organizations: Knowledge Alliance and West Wind Education Policy. It highlights development of a new product, one of ideas and potential actions, six years in the making. What began as a conceptual dialogue among a group of leading research organizations to define the meaning of knowledge utilization culminated, via a broader conversation with individuals from other backgrounds and fields, in concrete dimensions of a potential R&D infrastructure for education. In between, were side trips incorporating thoughts of the future, entrepreneurship, web-based technology, and system design.
Sharing this road trip has three objectives. First, it aims to document for the actual participants the highlights of their long-term efforts to identify the intersection of knowledge, innovation, research, development, and action. Second, it provides a record in hindsight for potential participants, intended to accelerate their subsequent engagement. Third, openly sharing these activities models the comprehensive, thoughtful type of inquiry needed to assess the role of education R&D, both now and in the future, in the transformation of learning.
Section Two, Specifications: Designing a New Model, places the issue of reinventing education R&D into larger relief, by summarizing four emerging issues that will have a significant impact on the outcome. First is the profound way in which the education system itself is changing, starting with rethinking the individual relationship between students and teachers in a 2.0 learning world. Second is a new Administration on record as champions of transparency in governing and innovation as well as stewards of a record infusion of federal education funds to states and school districts. Third is the evolving conversation to replace 50 different sets of state standards and assessments with an alternative more responsive to accomplishing national education priorities in a global context. Fourth are external considerations of the general public’s role in education R&D, not only to inform citizens but to involve them as active participants, as beneficiaries, and ultimately, as taxpayers and public investors. As one wise participant noted, if the early innovators had not found their market and filled a demand, they’d still be in the garage.
Section Three, GPS: Navigating the Road Ahead, describes how an innovative idea successfully implemented by dedicated educators and achieving positive results may still not survive—a situation all too common in education today. A future scenario, based on forging a new teacher-student relationship more compelling for a digital world, is used to illustrate the point. The paper then revisits the scenario in order to pose this question: what would have happened differently if a redesigned R&D education infrastructure had been in place?
Section Four, Body Parts: Building the Infrastructure, moves from the conceptual to the concrete. It uses the scenario as backdrop to examine the respective parts—from the leadership structure that provides oversight, field support, outreach, and dissemination, to the local design teams and innovation sites that address problems of practice through cycles of continuous improvement—of what a top-down/bottom-up redesigned R&D system in education might look like. It also poses, as part of this context, a way to position policymaking and practice in a seamless relationship, enriched by the coordinated, strategic use of research, knowledge, development, and dissemination.
Section Five, Test Drive: Shifting into High Gear, poses three recommendations intended to prompt action.
- Recommendation One: create a new leadership structure to redesign R&D in education, with two preconditions intended to accelerate its initial and long-term success: 1) conduct a series of rigorous benchmarking studies to capture, and then customize for implementation, the relevant best practices from comparable types of entities and 2) align with other R&D entities, both within and outside the federal government, that share the same applied research mission.
- Recommendation Two: implement a proof of concept of the approach outlined in this paper that, ultimately, would position local design teams nationwide as consistent participants in implementing ongoing innovative practices in education.
- Recommendation Three: support a series of targeted and coordinated outreach efforts so that the new education R&D infrastructure can evolve into a true knowledge ecosystem, which routinely uses research to reinforce effective state and federal policymaking; helps build a market, based on practitioner needs, for product development that will spur continual innovation; and informs and engages the public and its many segments, so that they, collectively and respectively, have an identifiable stake in the outcome.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in many respects, was the ideal sponsor of this white paper. Its male namesake was part of a cadre of young independent-minded learners a generation ago who used their imagination and resolve in ways that ultimately transformed the world. In democratizing access to information, they also fashioned a whole new type of student, “the 24/7 learner,” for whom self-directed education has become not just an aspiration, but an expectation.
As with any transformation, there are winners and losers. Clearly, the first category includes the growing numbers of students for whom the Internet has become the primary source of both knowledge and co-invention. In the potential loser category is the current education system, increasingly at risk in achieving its mission, as increasing numbers of students are learning in spite of, not because of, what they experience in school. Even more troubling are the growing numbers of students who, precisely because they lack access to the Internet, are in danger of falling even further behind.
It is therefore fitting for the Gates Foundation, as well as growing numbers of other innovators, to weigh in on the side of forging new solutions to transform public education—using, as their legacy, both the experiences and resources grounded in the early garage days. Accordingly, this white paper ends with a call to action on behalf of forging future learning opportunities. It suggests embracing not only the original inventive spirit of the garage, but also the purposeful actions—and lasting entities—that such creativity ultimately produced.
A dual inventive/sustainable approach cannot come soon enough. Fundamental challenges now confront all aspects of society, calling upon the entire country to act like one big garage. The problems are increasingly apparent; remedies, less so. The risk, absent proven and thoughtful approaches, is defaulting to inappropriate or deficient solutions. The stakes are high, but the opportunities are endless—if we can evolve the myriad, often vitriolic separate discussions currently underway into collaborative deliberation followed by collective action.
Developing a culture and habit of using R&D in education to innovate for the long-term—the message conveyed in the following pages—can serve this purpose. The message is long overdue.
It’s time, taking a cue from the quintessential garage band of all time, therefore, “to head out on the highway.”
Rethinking the Scale-Up Challenge
Reading Time: < 1 minute
Unpacking the Difficulty of Reframing Racial Achievement Gaps So Data No Longer Reinforce Racial Stereotypes
Systemic Equity Leadership
Closing All the Gaps: How that Phrase is Problematic
Building Capacity for Dual Credit in Southwest Ohio: The Promise of Regional Practices
Reading Time: 3 minutes
[box class=”grey_box”]Deanna Hill conducted interviews with participants in dual credit symposia and wrote up this report describing her findings. The symposia brought together university faculty with high school teachers who teach mathematics courses that students receive university credit for completing.[/box]
In 2008, West Wind Education Policy Inc. (West Wind) received a grant from the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation (Jennings Foundation) to develop and manage the Teacher Development Collaboratives (the Collaboratives)—a project designed to support the recruitment, retention and development of teachers in Ohio. The project created four Collaboratives1 across the state, one of which was the Southwest Teacher Development Collaborative hosted by the Hamilton County ESC.
Since the inception of dual credit in Ohio in 2007, the Hamilton County ESC has been a leader in bringing education leaders in K–12 and in Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs or higher education) together to provide opportunities for high school students to earn college credit in mathematics, science, and foreign language courses in high school. Hamilton County ESC Assistant Superintendent Kathy Thornton, in collaboration with partners from K–12 and higher education, was instrumental in obtaining and managing three consecutive state dual credit grants to Region 132 to support these collaborative efforts.
In its first year, the Southwest Collaborative focused on building capacity and creating a sustainable model for dual credit coursework in the region. Prior to the award of the second year of funding, the Hamilton County ESC leveraged resources it garnered through its 2009 dual credit grant to implement some of the ideas that were generated by the Southwest Collaborative. One such idea was to host symposia focused on content alignment that would further position schools and universities to prepare and partner on dual credit programming.
In February 2009, the Hamilton County ESC collaborated with the University of Cincinnati’s Clermont and Raymond Walters branch campuses to develop and deliver a symposium on dual credit for pre-calculus courses. The symposium was facilitated by the ESC, with presentations from Clermont and Raymond Walters faculty and a “voluntary adjunct” (a high school teacher approved as an adjunct, as is required to teach dual credit courses). Participants included K–12 administrators and teachers (some of whom had dual credit in their schools and/or were already approved as voluntary adjuncts) as well as higher education administrators. The focus of the first symposium was on helping participants understand the concept of dual credit, networking across the system, and beginning to investigate alignment of the high school and college pre-calculus curriculum.
In April 2009, with support from the Jennings Foundation and West Wind, the group developed and delivered a second symposium. The second symposium was again facilitated by the ESC, with presentations from the higher education faculty and voluntary adjunct. In part because the second symposium was promoted as an opportunity for participants to earn university credit, there were fewer participants overall and a few new K–12 participants who had not attended the first symposium. The focus of the second symposium was on networking and rigor, with K–12 teachers and higher education faculty examining textbooks and scoring exams together.
The overarching objectives for both symposia were to:
- [Help participants] understand the concept of dual credit;
- Increase the awareness of dual-credit and networking opportunities throughout the region;
- Deepen the alignment between pre-calculus courses in regional high schools and institutions of higher education;
- Increase rigor, access, and success for students in college-level courses in high school.
Following the symposia, higher education administrators and faculty met with interested K–12 administrators and teachers to provide additional information about dual credit and to assist teachers in applying for voluntary adjunct status.
To continute reading, download the full report.
The Social Construction of “Other”: A Critical Analysis of Language & Imagery in Ed Policy
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[box class=”grey_box”]This was presented by Circe Stumbo, President, West Wind; Anedra Million, Assistant Principal of Amanda Elementary School in Middletown, Ohio; and Bonnie McIntosh, COO, West Wind, at Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Alumni of Color Conference on March 7, 2009.[/box]