Brands's List: FutureSmart Schools

"Sugata Mitra
YEAR WON
2013
THE WISH
School in the Cloud"

"A 12-part series of ‘essential skills’ needed for effectively operating in a world characterized by accelerating change and the demands of make meaning out of vast amounts of information. It draws on concepts from the fields of Futures Studies, Complexity Science, Systems Theory, Cybernetics, Social Network Analysis, Knowledge Management, and common sense.

(This project is still a work in progress)

Part I : Pattern Recognition

the purpose of intelligence is prediction









Part II : Environmental Scanning

a process for detecting patterns









Part III : Network Weaving

building bridges across silos









Part IV : Foresight

ability to see ‘the long view’









Part V : Conscious Awareness

mindfulness and self-reflectivity









Part VI : Storytelling

reshaping cultural mythologies"

"New 2-year lease on life for 163 Partnership Academies

September 26th, 2012 | Add a Comment |
By John Fensterwald
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Financially threatened high school career academies will get a lifeline and new career tech programs will get a lift, now that Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation committing $68 million for those and related projects over the next two years.
Students in the engineering academy at Dublin High School. (click to enlarge)

Students in the engineering academy at Dublin High School. Source: California Department of Education (click to enlarge).

SB 1070 will sustain the career technology programs in high schools and community colleges that were to lose their funding and authorization at the end of this fiscal year in June. Now they will have additional time, and the Legislature will have two more years, to consider their future. The bill’s author is Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, who has been a CTE champion in the Legislature.

The chief beneficiary will be 163 California Partnership Academies, about a third of the total 503 in the state, that were started three years ago under another bill that Steinberg sponsored. Their funding will continue through June 2015.

Partnership Academies are small three-year schools within comprehensive high schools that offer career and college opportunities: college prep courses, academic counseling, job internships, and career training in areas ranging from engineering and architecture to manufacturing, agriculture, and health science. They must serve primarily minority students who have done poorly in school. Though their track record is good – with significantly higher graduation and college admission rates than similar students statewide – their future was in doubt without secure funding, even though the amount per school in state aid ($59,000, to support a coordinator’s time and collaborative planning among Academy teachers) is not huge. And not all will get money the second year, when funding shrinks from $48 million to $20 million. They’ll have to compete with data showing outcomes, such as attendance and graduation rates and readiness for the next stage at a community college. Most of the grants under SB 1070 will be competitive, administered by the California Department of Education and the Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office.

“If a Partnership Academy can demonstrate good performance, it will get the money,” said Patrick Ainsworth, director of the Career and College Transition Division of the state Education Department. “This is one of the few performance-based systems.”
Linked to community college

Those programs that create a pathway to further specialized training, workforce development, or a degree at a community college – particularly in high-demand professions – will stand the best chance of being funded. An example of such an arrangement is the Engineering Academy at Cordova High School, which has an agreement with American River College’s Engineering program. Students can earn up to six units of college credit if they get an A or B in the class and pass a portfolio assessment at the end of the year.

About a third of the $48 million next year will go toward K-12 CTE grants. Funding categories besides Partnership Academies include:

Supporting the University of California Curriculum Integration Institutes, which design CTE courses, like Business Statistics and Applied Medical English, that satisfy admissions requirements to a UC or CSU campus;
Creating pilot “linked learning” district-wide or high school-wide programs that integrate job internships and give students opportunities for experience learning in career areas that interest them;
Continuing community college Career Advancement Academies and underwriting professional development for their instructors.

The $48 million for 2013-14 and $20 million for 2014-15 will come from the Quality Education Investment Act, a $3 billion program created to settle a lawsuit brought by the California Teachers Association against Gov. Schwarzenegger for failing to repay school districts and community colleges money borrowed from Proposition 98 in 2004-05. SB 1070 is from the portion of QEIA that went to the community college system.
Going deeper

Profile of California Partnership Academies, October 2011, UC Berkeley;

David Stern, Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, on the importance of Partnership Academies;

Linked learning explained;

The University of California Curriculum Integration Institute’s role in promoting career technical education."

"Every now and then, I invite cool people to share their knowledge directly with Personal MBA readers. Jay Cross, founder of The Do-It-Yourself Degree, is one of my students and a mentor to thousands of independent learners who are rapidly accelerating their college degrees with low-cost methods like credit by examination. Even though college isn’t the focus of The Personal MBA, this is handy information that can save you tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars, so I hope you enjoy this detailed “how-to” post on using Massively Open Online Courses (or MOOCs) to earn college credit. Here’s Jay. – Josh

Josh’s 2009 post on Hacking Higher Education via CLEP exams changed my life forever.

When I discovered it, I was in the same boat as many of today’s students. Close to graduating, but stuck waiting for my school to offer the classes I needed. I was staring down a two year journey to graduate…and it wasn’t because I couldn’t work faster. The school just wouldn’t let me! So I waited, stewing in frustration and searching for a way forward.

The CLEP hack was a new lease on life. After reading Josh’s post, I switched schools, studied my ass off and graduated in four months. Along the way, though, it stopped being about my own degree and became a personal crusade to help others. As an experienced writer for companies like TurboTax, I used my research skills to launch The DIY Degree and push credit-by-exam to its fullest potential…

Discovering four additional exam formats. (CLEP is just the beginning…)
Cataloging 150+ exams by format, subject, credit classification, passing score, cost, and whether they are graded or pass/fail.
Investigating the customized “challenge exams” your school can create for non-CLEP subjects.
Batching similar exams together for rapid credit accumulation.
Identifying self-paced online courses for students who aren’t good test-takers (or “math people.”)
Coaching students ranging from recent high school grads to middle-aged IT employees to the VP of a globally-recognized software giant.
Today, I’m thrilled to share the next generation of degree hacking: turning Massively Open Online Courses into real college credit. If you want to supplement your self-education with a credential (without mortgaging your future) this post is for you.

Higher education is abuzz about the potential of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to make college less expensive, more customizable, and location independent for future students.

The wheels are in motion:

American Council on Education is evaluating 5-10 of Coursera’s MOOCs for possible recommendation to its 2,600 member universities.
Udacity is working with ACE on a small-scale pilot program of its own.
EdX is collaborating with a handful of colleges as well.
If these experiments succeed, students will someday be able to earn MOOC credits in every subject imaginable. This is great news for independent learners, but like most things in academia, it could take years to become a mainstream credit option.

In November 2012, The Chronicle of Higher Education warned students not to expect any immediate relief:

[Coursera co-founder] Ms. Koller stressed that the new arrangement is merely a pilot project, and that the courses have to pass muster before they win admission to ACE Credit… “I don’t want people to say, ‘Can I get credit for my MOOC tomorrow?’” she said. “The answer is No. We haven’t even started assessing these MOOC’s.”
Although four of Coursera’s offerings earned ACE recommendation in February 2013, widespread credit redemption is still a long way off for most courses.

Fortunately, there is a way to turn MOOCs into credits right now.

Portfolio Learning Assessment: The MOOC Credit Path of Today

With a little planning, students can use a strategy known as Portfolio Learning Assessment (PLA) to apply their MOOC learning toward graduation.

PLA lets you create a portfolio demonstrating college-level mastery of a subject. Your portfolio gets reviewed by school evaluators and, if it matches the caliber of classroom instruction, you get credit toward graduation.

Despite general assumptions, PLA is not a way to get easy credit on the honor system. You cannot simply claim “life experience” and leapfrog a course without proving anything. Rather, PLA only awards credit for documented, college-level learning.

Luckily, this is precisely what MOOCs—which are modeled after real courses from prestigious universities—provide! In the process of completing one, you obtain the kinds of credible documentation a credit-granting portfolio calls for:

Graded assignments
Course projects
Noncredit certificates of completion
Transcripts of forum posts or group discussions (in peer-to-peer MOOCs)
Statements of accomplishment (in professor-led MOOCs)
Turning MOOCs into credit with PLA is not a fantasy or theoretical ideal. It is possible right now using existing processes. As Chari Leader Kelly, vice-president of leading PLA organization LearningCounts.org, recently told Inside Higher Education:

“We are set up to do that. The infrastructure is there.”
Let’s explore how it works.

Getting Started: 6 Steps to MOOC Credit via Portfolio Learning Assessment

I spoke to Chari in preparation for this post to learn more about the step-by-steps. Although LearningCounts.org is not the only PLA facilitator, they offer a proven path for MOOC credit conversion and serve as a solid example.

STEP 1: Enroll in a college that offers Portfolio Learning Assessment. Here is a list of schools that use LearningCounts.org to administer their PLA programs. These colleges are set up for this process and ready to walk you through it. A $500, three-credit course on portfolio development is required as a starting point.

STEP 2: Target which course(s) you want to earn portfolio credit for. Your portfolio needs to show that you accomplished the learning outcomes of a specific course at the college you attend. Since PLA is not as cheap or automated as other credit paths, it pays to amortize the cost and effort by creating a portfolio for several subjects at once (say, a cluster of computer science courses.) LearningCounts.org allows up to 12 credits in a single portfolio. In any case, list out the exact names and numbers of the courses you are targeting from your school’s course catalog.

STEP 3: Identify MOOCs that offer learning outcomes similar to those courses. The biggest consideration that Chari stressed to me was the importance of learning outcome equivalency. You might want to earn portfolio credit for Excelsior College’s “Operating Systems” course, for instance, but that does not necessarily mean a MOOC in this subject covers the same material. If the PLA evaluator decides your MOOC was too shallow or introductory, you can be denied credit.

To avoid this, locate a syllabus like this one for any course you are considering. Then compare it with the course description of the MOOCs you want to use and make sure they are at least roughly similar.

Pay special attention to any final exams or projects in the syllabus. These tell you the level of achievement required by the course and serve as an “upper bound” on how much you need to know to earn credit. If your school’s “Intro to Marketing” course requires a marketing plan as the final project, for example, you want a MOOC that shows you how to write one.

STEP 4: Inform an advisor about your portfolio plans. It is critical to share your portfolio plans with a PLA advisor. They are the arbiters of what you will receive credit for, and their stamp of approval will motivate you through the portfolio creation process. They can also confirm your portfolio credits will count toward your major, rather than being recorded as electives.

I suggest using some variation of this email script when you are ready to seek advisor approval:

Hi [NAME],
I have decided to use Excelsior’s Portfolio Learning Assessment program to earn credit for college-level mastery gained from Massively Open Online Courses.
Here is the Excelsior course I want to earn PLA credit for, with a link to the course description:
ELEC-201: Digital Electronics (3 credits)
Here is the Coursera MOOC I expect will impart comparable mastery:
Digital Signal Processing
It is my intention to successfully pass this MOOC and apply my documented learning outcomes (work exercises, test scores, letters of completion, etc.) toward the construction of a credit-granting portfolio for the Excelsior course listed.
Can you confirm my plan will lead to the credits I am seeking, or help me correct course if not?
I really appreciate your help. Thanks so much!
- [YOUR NAME]
This script makes your plan clear and allows the advisor to approve or correct as needed. Continue a back-and-forth dialogue until you get the green light.

STEP 5: Take your MOOCs and document your learning along the way. If and when you get advisor approval, it’s time to actually take the MOOC. Crucially, however, you should approach the course with the desired learning outcomes in mind and gather evidence of those outcomes as you go. If you are targeting credits for an “Object Oriented Programming” course, and you write a software program during your MOOC, keep it. If it’s a professor-led course, request a statement of accomplishment at the end. If it’s a peer-to-peer course, record your forum transcripts. Save any graded assignments, tests, or papers. These materials will prove college-level mastery and become the bedrock of your portfolio.

STEP 6: Develop and submit your portfolio for evaluation. Finally, it’s time to consolidate all of your documented learning outcomes into a structured portfolio that proves you achieved the required outcomes. Although every school has different requirements for the length and layout of a portfolio (and your advisor can help you with this) they virtually all require a summary of the knowledge you will be demonstrating.

CAEL’s how-to book on PLA, “Earn Credit For What You Know”, offers the following as an example for how you might introduce an evaluator to your portfolio:

Course: Web Design
Experience: My experience related to designing Web pages is best described by the following building blocks:

Understanding the client/server system and the Internet.
Using HTML to create graphs and charts and to format pages.
Using web-authoring software to create animations and effects.
Refining webpages to be user-friendly.
Creating a company Intranet.
Your advisor will assist you in expounding upon your summary and organizing your learning outcomes for the PLA evaluator. The evaluation itself costs $250. Once your learning is deemed college-level, you earn credit as planned.

Breaking Down The Costs

Paying $500 for a portfolio development course and another $250 to have your portfolio reviewed might seem steep, but consider the alternatives.

Here are the average costs of earning 12 credits according to DIY Degree’s Cost-Per-Credit Calculator:

Credit Option Cost Per Credit
Private, 4-Year University $1,137
Public, 4-Year University $316
Portfolio Learning Assessment $62
Despite the up-front costs, PLA saves you hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a per-credit basis. Best of all, if your school does not limit the number of credits obtainable from PLA, you can create multiple portfolios to amortize that initial $500 fee across even more credits.

What About Credit-By-Examination?

Nationally standardized exams like CLEP and DSST offer an even faster credit path for MOOC learning. Priced at just $80-$100 apiece, they are also more cost-effective.

Unfortunately, the subjects covered by these exams are mostly the lower-level, “gen ed” courses (like English 101 or Intro to Computers) mandated by all majors, rather than the advanced, upper-level subjects needed to complete a specific one.

PLA offers a fast and cost-effective credit path for subjects that lack standardized tests. An example would be a course like “Object Oriented Programming” which has no test but is required for computer science majors. With PLA, you could take a MOOC instead and earn credit from a portfolio of your learning outcomes.

For MOOCs in general education or business subjects, credit-by-exam is the way to go. If you are targeting upper-level courses, PLA is the slightly more expensive, but superior, alternative.

Who Should Use PLA for MOOC Credit Conversion?

Portfolio Learning Assessment is for self-motivated, independent learners who are not afraid to prove what they know, including:

Adults with a lifetime of work experience in a subject they need college credit for.
Younger students who would rather take MOOCs than brick-and-mortar courses.
Anyone who wants to earn a degree without breaking the bank.
What Does This Mean For Self-Learners?

I always encourage students to develop an internal locus of control over their college career by using the best accelerators currently available instead of waiting for uncertain future reforms. I also support putting effectiveness before ego by doing what works even when it is not “the normal way.”

While it would be nice to not have to use circuitous workarounds like this, MOOC conversion via PLA offers one of the highest returns on investment available in today’s college system—and a practical way to graduate faster.

Even if you already have a degree (or never wanted one) this is still a victory for you. Every step colleges take in this direction supports a future when what you know trumps how you learned it, and the collapse of antiquated barriers is something we can all celebrate!

Jay Cross is the founder of The Do-It-Yourself Degree, where he helps thousands of independent learners who rapidly accelerate their college degrees with low-cost methods like credit by examination.

Like this post? Join over 41,000 readers and subscribe to Josh Kaufman's email newsletter. You'll receive useful ideas, book excerpts, and resources that will help you make more money, get more done, and have more fun. It's free!"

"4. Data narratives and deep assessment diagnostics will replace test score snapshots.

“What you’re going to see on Khan Academy over the next six months to a year is much more rigorous deep assessment diagnostics on the site. This will really help people fine tune the activities that are going to be the most appropriate for them at any given time.”

“And then there’s the whole issue of talent identification when there’s someone off the charts. We’re going to get the data, the analytics, on all these kids and we don’t just get these snapshot SAT scores or whatever else, we get these data narratives. And so you could almost identify talent as well, I would think.”"

"What has struck me though is how after having agreed upon the standards, we seem to be going about the work of implementing the assessments for them backwards. I’m certainly no expert in this and this is genuinely complicated, but a story from Steve Spear’s research, as recounted in his book Chasing the Rabbit and which we wrote about in Disrupting Class, frames the point and my ultimate question.

While a doctoral student, Steve took temporary jobs working first on an assembly line at one of the Detroit Big Three plants and then at Toyota at the passenger-side front seat installation point.

In Detroit, the worker doing the training essentially told Steve, “The cars come down this line every 58 seconds, so that’s how long you have to install this seat. Now I’m going to show you how to do it. First, you do this. Then do that, then click this in here just like this, then tighten this, then do that,” and so on, until the seat was completely installed. “Do you get how to do it, Steve?”

Steve thought he could do each of those things in the allotted time. When the next car arrived, he picked up the seat and did each of the preparatory steps. But when he tried to install it in the car, it wouldn’t fit. For the entire 58 seconds he tried to complete the installation but couldn’t. His trainer stopped the assembly line to fix the problem. He again showed Steve how to do it. When the next car arrived, Steve tried again but didn’t get it right. In an entire hour, he installed only four seats correctly.

One reason why it historically was so important to test every product when it came off the end of a production line like the Detroit Big Three’s was that there were typically hundreds of steps involved in making a product, and the company could not be sure that each step had been done correctly. In business, we call that end-of-the-line activity “inspection.” In education, we call it “summative assessment.”

When Steve went to work at the same station in Toyota’s plant, he had a completely different experience. First, he went to a training station where he was told, “These are the seven steps required to install this seat successfully. You don’t have the privilege of learning step 2 until you’ve demonstrated mastery of step 1. If you master step 1 in a minute, you can begin learning step 2 a minute from now. If step 1 takes you an hour, then you can learn step 2 in an hour. And if it takes you a day, then you can learn step 2 tomorrow. It makes no sense for us to teach you subsequent steps if you can’t do the prior ones correctly.”

Testing and assessment were still vital, but they were an integral part of the process of instruction. As a result, when he took his spot on Toyota’s production line, Steve was able to do his part right the first time and every time. Toyota had built into its process a mechanism to verify immediately that each step had been done correctly so that no time or money would be wasted fixing a defective product. As a result, it did not have to test its products when they came to the end of the production process.

That’s quite a contrast between the two methods for training Steve Spear. At the Detroit Big Three plant, the time was fixed, but the result of training was variable and unpredictable. The “exam”— installing the seat—came at the end of Steve’s training.

At Toyota, the training time was variable. But assessment was interdependently woven into content delivery, and the result was fixed; every person who went through the training could predictably do what he had been taught to do.

The Detroit example represents how America’s factory-model public schools operate. They were in fact modeled upon factories built during the industrial revolution. The Toyota example illustrates more how a competency-based learning system would work. As I’ve written numerous times, this is how our education system should operate. Many psychometricians say that assessments can either drive instruction or be used for accountability but not both; the Toyota experience suggests otherwise if the assessments are implemented in a competency-based learning system in which time is variable and learning is fixed.

Consider now how we are implementing the Common Core assessments: summative assessments to measure what percentage of students failed. In essence, we are using them as an autopsy. This approach is, of course, an outgrowth of our factory-model system, which requires this sort of assessment; it is not an indictment against the assessment consortia per se. It is also arguably enshrined in federal law, as the Elementary Secondary Education Act requires that states implement yearly assessments, for example. But with the Detroit-Toyota story as background, let’s think about the three specific worries mentioned earlier: whether the new tests will be truly different; whether they will doom the accountability movement because of their length; and whether the states will stick with them after the first year of results. Would competency-based learning help to alleviate each of these concerns?

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia’s announcement that it is scaling back the performance items on its test adds fuel to the fire on the first concern, but at the same time David Coleman, a key thought leader behind the Common Core, and others on a panel at former Governor Jeb Bush’s National Summit on Education Reform went to great lengths to assure folks that the assessments truly would be different.

Of course, if there were instead systems of assessments in a competency-based learning system built for students to take an assessment on-demand when they were ready to demonstrate mastery on specific competencies, we would see a different picture develop with assessments that left no doubt that they were different. Perhaps there could be short assessments to verify basic objective mastery around a particular concept followed by rich capstone-like projects that could measure several competencies and be reviewed on an on-demand basis by an outside party, similar in some respects to how Western Governors University manages its assessments, for example (and yes, Western Governors’ assessments are designed by psychometricians).

The assessments could also presumably be more bite-sized and not interrupt learning in school for several days. As Education Week reported, “A key push in the latest redesign was to ensure that the test yields enough detailed information to enable reports on student performance in specific areas of math and English/language arts.” That’s in part because the assessments have to form an approximate measure of an entire year of curriculum. The summative test therefore has to be a certain length so that it can collect such statistically valid information. Smarter Balanced’s assessment, for example, will be roughly 6.5 to 8 hours long.

What’s most stunning about this test length is that this was a decrease in time from the length the test was supposed to be, according to this announcement. I don’t know if this tone-deaf length will doom the accountability movement more generally, as some worried in private in Washington, D.C., but I will also understand the complaints of parents if this goes forward.

As to the last question over whether governors will stick with Common Core after the first year of assessment results, we don’t really know. Many are speculating that on the heels of students’ and schools’ disastrous results on the assessments, states will simply “lower the cut scores” that determine proficiency, thereby masking the actual results and avoiding the political heat. That would hardly align to Common Core’s mantra of fewer, clearer, and higher, however. Others speculate that governors will just walk rather than deal with the continued expense and political headaches.

If we were instead using assessments in a competency-based learning system, however, then the equation would change. The learning objectives and assessments would be far more transparent to students and their parents, and they would understand why they had not passed a certain concept, as they could receive immediate feedback to inform what they would learn next—and understand the importance of true mastery. In many cases, students could move back down to an earlier concept from a previous “grade” that they might not have mastered if that made the most sense for them to move ahead ultimately and realize success, thereby avoiding the “Swiss Cheese” problem that is too prevalent in education today and that competency-based learning, such as that used in Toyota’s training, solves.

For those worried about accountability (and count me in that group), this would actually allow for a far more accountable and rigorous system, as we could have near real-time data about where each student was in her learning (and with much more visibility into where each student actually was because we would be testing students based on their actual level, not an assumed one based on their age) and see the progress and growth that a school was achieving with its population with a bottoms-up approach rather than today’s clunky top-down one.

We wouldn’t need to play all the games that we do today with summative assessments where we are constantly making difficult tradeoffs and relying on various statistical machinations to create valid and reliable instruments. Instead, the focus would be on true mastery, not “good enough” (to see why that’s a valid concern, check out Sal Khan’s chapter on testing in his book The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined).

To the credit of David Coleman and Dr. William Schmidt, a professor at Michigan State University and another of the key thought leaders behind the Common Core, at Bush’s summit they spoke about how Common Core could unleash competency-based learning. Indeed, Common Core and competency-based learning should be a natural fit, as the former creates learning maps for students to master that can shift the emphasis from time to mastery of deeper learning. Coleman and Schmidt also properly warned about the possibility that competency-based learning might mean students just zipping past concepts without truly mastering them (Tom Vander Ark has written about this concern more here).

At the same time, one of the things that has concerned me most about the Common Core is its language around age-based grades that imply the same factory model we’ve always had. At Bush’s summit, prior to someone asking about competency-based learning, Schmidt reinforced this worry when he in essence said that students should be working on the same things on the same day at the same age, and that it makes no sense for it to be otherwise because it’s not equitable.

I’m all for all students having an equal opportunity to be exposed to and master the same foundational concepts, as opposed to the way today’s system works (and by the way, the adoption of digital learning would go a long way in helping solve this), but at the same time, this mindset of age-based grades is dangerous and a terrible relic of today’s factory-model system that is anything but equitable. It helps keep a deeply flawed and inequitable system locked in place, which is why a couple hundred education leaders joined me in the summer of 2011 to encourage the development of a different view of assessments entirely (you can read the open letter here). What’s more, sticking to age-based grade bands could be Common Core’s undoing.

Common Core creates a huge opportunity for innovation and personalization and the implementation of a competency-based learning system. It’s an opportunity we shouldn’t waste. With the way things are moving now on the assessment front, however, there are real concerns that states will walk away from it en masse. Even if they don’t, there are real concerns that the assessments that will be put in place will stunt innovation and educational transformation, not encourage it. If we called a timeout though and shifted our mindset and our education system to a competency-based learning one—one in which new assessments could help drive the shift—might we see a different picture develop? Wouldn’t we worry less about states walking away from the Common Core in that picture?"