Archive for June, 2009

Newer Entries »

P21 Panel #2

Friday, June 12th, 2009

P21 National Summit-Now here’s the All-Stars.  P21′s second panel features Stanford prof and equity advocate Linda Darling-Hammond, NEA president Dennis Van Roekel, and Obama’s special assistant for education Roberto Rodriquez.   Suarez still moderating.  In Rodriguez’s initial comment he fell short of completely embracing the P21 agenda in this sense:  He called on the national standards (currently under development by NGA/CSSO/ACT, etc) to be “high, rigorous, and deliver important content.”  And when he mentioned a need for students to learn skills he avoided the typical P21 litany (critical thinking, problem solving, media literacy, etc.) and instead talked about the ability to analyze and synthesize information.  He points out that President Obama has talked about the need for children to have a “complete and competitive education.” Wonder what he means by “complete” …

Lynne Munson

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in 21st Century Skills | No Comments »

The Content Count

Friday, June 12th, 2009

P21 National Summit-We’re keeping a running count of the number of times each of the core subjects is mentioned at today’s cyber-summit.  So far only Intel’s Paige Johnson (P21′s current chair and previously Paige Kuni) has mentioned any of these subjects, and it was in a list she marched through during her opening remarks.  Here’s the running tally:

History      0

Social Studies     1

English        1

Literature    0

Art     0

Geography       0

Science         1

Math          1

Foreign Language     0

It continues to amaze us that an organization so concerned with boosting our competitiveness abroad has, by all appearances, absolutely no interest in the study of foreign languages.  None.

Keep checking back and see if the count grows!?!

Lynne Munson

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in 21st Century Skills | 1 Comment »

West Virginia Education: It’s the Marketing

Friday, June 12th, 2009

P21 National Summit-Paine just mentioned that West Virginia has spent $300,000-$400,000 marketing “Global 21,” the state’s 21st century skills agenda.  The reason, according to Paine, is because the skills “message is not resonating with kids, parents, the business community, and others.”  Gee, it’s no surprise to us that citizens of a state that has performed near the bottom of NAEP would be concerned when the state decides to be among the first to embrace the latest education fad.  Smart folks.

Lynne Munson

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in 21st Century Skills | No Comments »

Wagner’s right! Sort of.

Friday, June 12th, 2009

P21 National Summit–Tony Wagner makes the point that 1 in 3 Caucasian students graduate high school “college and citizenship ready.”  The numbers are 1 in 5 for African-American students and 1 in 6 for Hispanic students.  We’re not sure where Wagner is getting his numbers, or precisely what he means by “college and citizenship ready,” but we share his concern that it is minority and low-income students who are bearing the brunt of the poverties in our current system of education.  We just disagree with Tony about the fix:  The answer isn’t “assessing critical thinking skills,” it’s making sure kids are educated deeply in a wide range of subjects.  Sorry, Tony.

Lynne Munson

Tags:, , ,
Posted in 21st Century Skills | No Comments »

West Virginia: “It’s Not Easy to Move Away from Content”

Friday, June 12th, 2009

P21 National Summit–Steve Paine from the West Virginia Dept of Ed just explained that it has been challenging for that state to be on the leading edge of the 21st century skills movement.  Why?  In Paine’s words:  “It is not easy to move away from content” and “traditional forms of assessment.”  “We’ve been out there on a whim” trying to implement the P21 rainbow framework, Paine explains, “and there are content v. skills wars” going on.  Glad to know that WV is getting push-back…

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in 21st Century Skills | 1 Comment »

P21 Panel #1

Friday, June 12th, 2009

P21 National Summit -  The first panel today, hosted by PBS’s Ray Suarez, convenes representatives of American business–Verizon, US Chamber of Commerce, Nat’l Association of Manufacturers–along with Harvard ed prof Tony Wagner and Steve Paine from the West Virginia Dept of Ed (WV was one of P21′s first members).  Business went first on the panel–pleading for employees “who can think,” “solve new problems,” “be efficient,” and “eliminate redundancies.”  We were told by the representative from Verizon that “everyone [has] come together today to try to figure out how to make the workforce more efficient.”  Some might be critical of the idea the the purpose of education is to achieve “workforce efficiency.”  We go on…  Suarez just said he’s concerned about students who might be trained in 21st century skills becoming victims of a corporate “bait and switch.”  Suarez claims that most “high-end” thinking in the areas of computers is going on abroad in “India, Taiwan, where its cheaper.”  He goes on:  “If you want to be a high-end thinker they can underprice you in Bangalore.”  So, he reasons, wouldn’t these new skilled workers in the US need to worry about whether companies will “ship their jobs to Bangalore?”  It strikes us as perfectly reasonable to be concerned about the risks of turning education into training–particularly if it is largely to work in tech companies.  By the way, here’s a list of the chief sponsors of this “cyber-summit:”

The Nellie Mae Education Foundation

AT&T

Dell

Intel

Apple

National Education Association

Sun Microsystems

Verizon

Lynne Munson

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in 21st Century Skills | 1 Comment »

We’re Out!

Friday, June 12th, 2009

The staff of Common Core has moved across the street into a hotel today.  That’s because the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the nation’s chief advocate for skills-based learning, is convening its “national summit on 21st century skills” across the street from our offices at the Capitol Hilton today.  We’ll be bringing you live blogs from the event through mid-afternoon and hope you will stay tuned.

Lynne Munson

Tags:, ,
Posted in 21st Century Skills | No Comments »

Is It Worth It?

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

“What gets tested gets taught.” Unfortunately, this statement underpins the sad tale of the narrowing of the curriculum for many students across the country. Schools are reducing the time that is spent on the arts, science, and social studies to augment time for reading and math… the tested subjects.Some states, however, do include subjects such as social studies as part of their state assessments. Virginia is one of the few states that tests history and social studies; but, the Virginia State Board of Education is considering eliminating those assessments for third graders so it can save $380,000 each year, and so schools can focus resources on improving reading skills. Students will still be tested in fourth and eighth grade, but concerns have been raised that important content might slip through the cracks.While Common Core does not necessarily believe that all subjects need to be tested, we do agree with Ken Bassett, president of the Virginia Consortium of Social Studies Specialists and College Educators when he said that this move could lead to “dumbing down the expectations for students.”  Especially in the early grades, when substantive subject matter teaching is so rare and so needed.Is a savings of $380,000 per year really worth further narrowing of the curriculum for our youngest students?

Tags:,
Posted in Curriculum | 1 Comment »

No Homer, Sophocles, or Shakespeare Here

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Louisiana’s English standards currently require students to “Identify and explain connections between historical contexts and works of various authors, including Homer, Sophocles, and Shakespeare.”  But they may not for much longer.  Because today the Partnership for 21st Century Skills announced that it has signed three new member-states:  Louisiana, Nevada, and Illinois.  This means that these states will soon begin the process of reshaping their standards, assessments, and teacher training around P21′s skills framework.

This framework, familiar to most readers of this blog, sidelines the learning of content in favor of the acquisition of skills including critical thinking, collaboration, and media literacy.  The problem is not only that teaching these skills would leave even less class time for learning history, literature, the arts, and other core subjects.  Skills cannot even be taught independent of content.  And it is content, aside from the most trivial, that P21 neglects.

P21 lists a series of “core subjects” on their website including English, world languages, arts, and math but provides no details about how they are to be learned.  Interestingly this is the only list on P21′s otherwise rather dynamic website that links to absolutely nothing.  The list is–quite literally–an end in itself.  At a huge national summit P21 is convening in DC at the end of this week the only breakout sessions dedicated to anything resembling content deal with health, civic, and financial literacy.  No Homer, Sophocles, or Shakespeare here.

Lynne Munson

Posted in 21st Century Skills | No Comments »

Why We’re Behind

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

At 4 pm today Common Core is hosting a release event for Why We’re Behind: What Top Nations Teach Their Students But We Don’t, an in-depth look into the content of education in nine high-performing nations that consistently outperform the U.S. on international assessments, specifically on PISA:  Finland, Hong Kong, South Korea, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Netherlands, and Switzerland.Our research found that one common ingredient among these nations is that they are dedicated to educating their children deeply in a wide range of subjects.  Why We’re Behind publishes extended excerpts from national curricula, standards, and assessment practices – documents that can offer lessons to individual states that might want to follow these exceptional models.  Here are some examples:

  • Fourth graders in Hong Kong visit an artist’s studio, study Picasso’s Guernica, and analyze the works of modernist sculptor Henry Moore.
  • Finnish 5th and 6th graders study how the invention of writing changed human life and the impacts of the French Revolution; they trace a topic such as the evolution of trade from prehistory until the 19th century.
  • Seventh graders in Korea are expected to know not just about supply and demand, but about equilibrium price theories, property rights, and ways to improve market function.
  • Japanese 7th to 9th graders “conduct experiment regarding pressure to discover that pressure is related to the magnitude of a force and the area.”
  • Eighth graders from the Canadian province of Ontario are expected to conduct musicians, create compositions, and know music terms in Italian.
  • Dutch 12th graders must know enough about seven events connected to the Crimean War to be able to put them in chronological order.
  • Canadian 12th graders in British Columbia are expected to identify the author of the words:  “Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men” and to what Admiral Nimitz was referring when he said:  “Pearl Harbor has now been partially avenged.”
  • On a Swiss exam 12th graders write an essay analyzing JFK’s October 1962 proclamation that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The excerpts are also full of useful guidance for the common standards movement.  Just yesterday the NGA and CSSO announced that 46 states and three territories are participating in their effort to create a “common core” of voluntary state standards.  In part, the effort is about “measuring our students against international benchmarks,” according to Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine.  But we wonder how well participants in the “common core” standards effort have actually studied what students abroad are taught.

As our nation considers common standards, let us keep in mind that the notion of standards being “common” is less important than what the standards contain.  Rich content must be the top priority.

Lynne Munson

Posted in Standards | No Comments »

Newer Entries »