Reinvent Education: Part I

Today is the first of a series of posts where I will outline the elements to successfully reinventing our education system.  I will break this down into a series of "parts":  i) curriculum; ii) assessment and funding; iii) professional development; iV) defining success metrics;  and other areas that may not require a full dedicated category to.

So Part I will be about the curriculum.  I think there's been enough rhetoric about the need for change, and the need for a complete transformation of our learning centers into contemporary "learning environments.  For a moment,  I would like to stop using the term "21st century skills" because it's already been overused much like "web 2.0" and others.  The Partnership For 21st Century Skills (again, I used the term and didn't follow my own instructions) has some very forward-thinking ideas at how to create the roadmap from a skills point of view.  What do we need to teach our kids?  The aforementioned organization outlines the following student outcomes as "high priority" areas if we are to arm our children with skills needed to succeed in work and also, life:

• Core Subjects and Interdisciplinary Themes
  • Global Awareness
  • Civics Literacy
  • Financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy
  • Health literacy
• Learning and Innovation Skills
  • Creativity and Innovation
  • Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
  • Communication and Collaboration
• Information, Media and Technology Skills
  • Information Literacy
  • Media Literacy
  • ICT (Information, Communications and Technology) Literacy
• Life and Career Skills
  • Flexibility and Adaptability
  • Initiative and Self-Direction
  • Social and Cross-Cultural Skills
  • Productivity and Accountability
  • Leadership and Responsibilty

In my mind, this is a great start.  Each area has a set of "rubrics" that will outline the skills required from students.   I believe we should then leverage this organization and create an interdisciplinary federally funded national curriculum council.  This council would be comprised of government officials, educators, psychologists, technology experts and subject matter experts to help build the contemporary curriculum that would be required to be followed by school districts if they are to receive any public (state or federal) funding.   This ensures that "real world" experiential learning concepts are continuously threaded into the curriculum.  

Because this process will ultimately be "political," I would like to suggest that we allow the members of the curriculum council to be appointed in some fashion and then be voted on by some governing body.  I will let the public policy experts debate how we set up this system, because I am not a political science expert.  However, what is most important is that these people must have certain prerequisite skills and/or experience as they cannot be solely "political appointees."  I would like to think that out of this process, we can all take comfort that "we the people" had a say in establishing this council, much like local school boards are comprised of elected officials.  I will discuss in Part II how the funding and assessment should work.

A key success factor is that the curriculum is not developed solely by the "establishment.  I also believe that the council must revisit the curriculum on an annual basis to ensure that no adjustments are required.  The curriculum should be focused on utilizing a multimedia approach, meaning that educators must not and cannot utilize solely monolithic lecture-based and textbook-based approaches to learning.  However, there should be enough flexibility in each of the key subject areas for teachers to use whatever tools are required to best connect with their students and cover the concepts effectively.  Again, the end result of this process will be covered in the assessment discussion in my next post.

I see our education challenges as a series of circles on a target.  To me, obtaining agreement on what these skills are is the center of the bulls-eye, and that needs to get consensus first.  Has our education system and its stakeholders obtained buy-in to a common vision before doling out the tremendous sums of money?  I don't believe we have, but I'll let you be the judge of that. 

Like any business or established industry or organization (education is no different), the first step in leading change is to get organized around a common vision.  To me, the above is a strong start.

Stay tuned for Part II which will discuss assessment and funding.

Best Practices: A Look at Finland's Successful Education System

Before I start to lay out some ideas for how the United States can "reinvent" its education system to ensure that our country is globally competitive in five, ten, twenty years, it is always important to take a look at best practices.  A good strategist always looks at what is working and why.  And so when Education Secretary Duncan talks about how we "need to take a look at the possibility of a longer school year because that is what other countries have," is that really what we should be looking at?  I keep saying "quality, not quantity."  So lets take a look at Finland and why Finland has arguably the highest performing education system in the world.  I have attached one such article link for your review. Another one is here. I will outline a couple of key elements:

1. Unified School System:  The country uses a "unified school system," which means that from ages 7-16, students stay in the same school, versus a "primary and secondary school" system we have in the U.S.   Then they choose either their equivalent of our "high school" or a vocational school path.  Their research indicates that it is dangerous to divide students too early.  So as a result, this takes away the selection process that plagues many school districts.  It also has resulted in Finland having a very, very low difference in achievement between the country's best and worst schools.
2. Preschool begins at age 6:  how's that for you parents?  Let kids be kids for some of their developmental years!
3. Fewest hours in school:  that's right, Secretary Duncan!  They achieve all of their metrics with high quality time spent learning, not more mediocrity. They even get 10-week breaks in the summer.
4. Less $ spent per pupil than S. Korea and the United States:  enough said.
5. A philosophy of inclusion:  they have an "open access" policy, meaning that even the poorest citizens have access to a quality education, unlike the United States. They also pay for much of the student's incidentals during this 9 year period, including all school lunches, no university fees, and students can stay in the upper secondary school system (our high school) for as long as four years.

I haven't even gotten to the pedagogy, which includes a very, very large focus on match and science along with reading literacy.  The OECD has stated that 15-year olds in Finland have the highest standards of reading literacy in the world.   This is partly due to a cultural dedication to reading in the home.  Finnish parents are involved, and work with their children outside of school.  They also have a tight collaboration between their R&D in academia and private industry. 

I can get into more specifics about the pedagogy and of course their mindset about education.  And I'm sure that there will be some skeptics that will discuss such differences as our more heterogenous environment, their lower consumption habits overall, and their higher tax rate that is not atypical for socialist countries.  However, don't you think we should be acknowledging that maybe we can learn a thing or two from outsiders? 

It's time for America to wake up and start looking outside the status quo for these answers.  It's not going to come from inside the establishment.

An Approach To Education That Should Be Considered

After seeing the large sum of money recently doled out by the government as part of the education stimulus plan, again putting "the cart before the horse" so to speak, I began to become more certain than ever about what we need to do to fundamentally transform our nation's education system.  It probably goes to the heart of the foundation of our constitution and the philosophy of "federalism" versus state-centered.  Technically, my idea, while certainly not new, should fit inside both philosphies although I am sure that some of my readers might think this idea is a movement towards a more controlling central entity at the expense of state sovereignty.  I hope that is not the case.

In just about every civilized nation in the world, there is one set of education standards that the system is held accountable to.  I believe that before we make investments of the magnitute of what we have already agreed to, the states should ratify a set of federal curriculum standards so that every citizen of the United States is learning the same set of skills and are assessed under these criteria.  The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has done some very interesting work in this area, but their maps, while forward-thinking to some degree, have not been universally adopted.  If our education system has any realistic chance of being globally competitive five, ten years, twenty years from now, we need one common roadmap.  To the best of my knowledge, we don't have that.

The states do not lose control in this process.  States can maintain whatever flexibility is needed to adhere to and meet the performance measures defined by the roadmap.  They control spending, specific pedagogical mechanisms and all other operational areas.  It doesn't matter how big or how small a state's budget is, the system can be scaled up or down to meet the specific needs of any one state.   As a strategist for many years, even though  I have not worked extensiviely within the education system, I see no realistic chance of the stimulus being successful in the long term.  I don't think the architects of the package have read Michael Raynor's management book, The Strategy Paradox.   I suggest they read it today, because the current plans are devoid of all strategic flexibility, contrary to what the advocates might be saying.

Before we squander this exciting, critical opportunity which is to ensure our children's future in a rapidly evolving, technologically driven, globally connected world, shouldn't we ensure that everyone is following the same playbook?

Just a thought.

Will The States Share Their School Performance Data?

Yesterday, the NY Times published an interesting article which gives me some comfort, though not much, that the education stimulus package will result in material improvements in performance.  You might recall that  I published an entry recently that was sharply critical of the process and stipulations for the $115 Billion stimulus package.  It is important to note that I am very much in favor of additional investment into the education system.  But anytime you put the cart before the horse, as a strategist, I worry that the money will be squandered.  What exactly is the plan?  Why do we think that a "quick hit" rather than a sustained investment over many years will work, especially when there is absolutely no consensus on that the 21st century learning framework should be?  I'll be blogging about this topic next week.

In the meantime, I was very encouraged to see that the Education Secretary is requiring some important data from the states if they want to receive the second phase of funding after the $44 Billion that is being made available to states immediately.    Will the states play nice here?  What are they afraid of?  Probably how bad the "real" numbers are, and perhaps some, but not all of the states have "dumbed down" tests in order to inflate their scores to meet NCLB criteria and other measures.    I'm also interested to see how the states evaluate their teachers.

I am not writing this post to take a point of view one way or the other.  But if we are to truly reinvent our education system, then we need states to be transparent in this process. 

Lets see how the states respond to this NY Times article, if at all.

More to come on this subject next week.

Games And Education: How To Make It Work

Last week I was at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.  Unfortunately, this year I did not observe any "transformational" products coming out of the commercial video games industry.  That includes that much-hyped "OnLive" game streaming service that will be coming out in early 2010.  However, I did spend my time at the IGDA Games For Education Luncheon and interfaced quite a bit with members of academia who are stewarding various games design curricula at their higher ed programs.  I also noticed a very small, unpopulated area at the Sony Playstation booth called "Playstation-edu."  Their handout was a brief teaser that states the following: Playstation-edu will allow educational institutions to purchase development kits for either the PSP or the PS2 (or both).  The goal is to have them used in the classroom and for students to learn about the computer architectures behind game consoles.  The program is geared towards engineers and computer programmers.  We don't provide an engine, so artists and designers won't find it useful unless they are working directly with a programmer.  We are currently talking to TMs to elicit their interest in supplying engines.  We do provide all of the samples, demos, SDKs, SN compilers and debuggers that professional developers use." What does a business-side games executive like me make of this?  Absolutely NOTHING!  All this does is promulgate the issues we discussed at the luncheon.  These include the following:

1. How do encourage women and minorities to consider a career in the games industry, including making games for education?
2. What types of tactics can the commercial games industry undertake to strengthen the appeal of game-based learning in education?

There were other topics discussed, but the main issue I see is that in higher education, game development classes are at least 80/20 and sometimes as high as 90/10 male/female.  We need to foster partnerships between programmers and designers in the K-12 level, not at the higher education level.  Non-profit programs such as AMD's Global Kids Digital Media Initiative are a good start.  However, the games industry needs to look at enrichment programs but most importantly, begin to fund game projects that appeal more broadly than the traditional core gamer.   One of the academics at my table had a great suggestion:  tap into the arts for potential game designers.  The arts is 75/25  female and has the creativity sorely needed in the commercial games industry. We also need to get the games industry to stop using the term "Serious Games."  I know this comes across as me being "Anti-Ben Sawyer," but please do not take it that way.  Ben has done a great service in pioneering a movement around games as a utility beyond a purely entertainment experience.  However, the term "serious games," to the non-gamer, means that the games are not "fun."  What K-12 student would want to play a "serious game"?  For other sectors such as the military and health care, perhaps this term is appropriate.  But in education, the name just won't work.  I know this is semantics, but unfortunately, semantics are important in a distribution channel long opposed to change, and for a long time unwilling and incapable of fundamental change. I spoke to my friends/colleagues about giving "games for education" a keynote at a major games industry event, because I believe that the optics are finally at a point where this area of the industry is on the radar screen of key influencers in the education marketplace.  Teachers are demanding we bring 21st century technology products into the classroom, and they are demanding that we find a way to create fun, immersive game-based experiences to help connect with their students. The time is now, folks.  Who's brave enough to make the journey?