What is our currency?
Due to the large amount of time that is necessary to invest during the budget process, I was unable to post to this Blog until today. On behalf of the Monticello Central School District, I would like to thank our community for the overwhelming support of our budget. Most states do not allow their communities to vote on school budgets. There are times when many educators in NY State would rather not be part of a system that relies on voters to approve the budget every year, but the process does have its virtues. We should never lose sight that our budget approval process is the most transparent in the country. This gives us clarity of purpose and helps us prioritize and economize.
Since this is the season we talk a lot about money, we should take a look at what currency we use to measure our success. In the private sector, businesses use profit to measure success. Many times their entire structure and analytical systems are focused on that alone. Almost daily in the media, we see stark examples of large companies succumbing to their bottom line - profit. In this tough economic downturn, we are learning a harsh lesson that there is no company too large to fail.
Public education is not as vulnerable to market forces as private corporations. We do not measure our success by profit. Until five years ago, we rarely used evidence to drive our allocation of resources or to improve our programs. Now, that has all changed. Through a series of legislative initiatives such as the federal No Child Left Behind policy and the state P-16 Initiative, we are now forced to create a bottom line and stick to it. These have created consequences for not attaining certain goals such as being placed on state lists and having to produce action plans to address our shortfalls. We are closely monitored by both state and federal agencies with a level of accountability that was unheard of in public education a decade ago.
What is public education’s currency? What is Monticello Central School District’s currency? It is student achievement. The focus of student achievement is to prepare our children to compete in the global market place. In today’s world, we are held to an international standard and are constantly being compared with competing nations. The focus on student achievement is driven by our government and the business community who understand that unless we improve the quality of education at all levels and open our most rigorous course work to as many students as possible, we will significantly undermine our standard of living.
We are no longer allowed to make decisions based on hunches. Professional judgment is important, but decisions must be based on hard data and not filtered by a paradigm of what we think education should be. Courage is needed to analyze everything we do based on a variety of data sets and then focus our resources to improve student achievement. Any other approach deviates from the expectations of the federal and state governments and condemns us to rely on outmoded methods that may feel comfortable but do not impact the number of students necessary to succeed if we ever hope to be competitive in the global economy.
In Monticello Schools, we are focused on this bottom line. Our currency is student achievement. We have spent the last four years redesigning our district to create the infrastructure necessary to gather and use data for our continued improvement. The results speak for themselves. Last night, I attended the Junior National Honor Society induction at our middle school. I was elated to see that it was by far the largest group of students ever to be inducted. The changes we have made to our programs and structures are a big part of this success. The community is aware that these significant improvements in student achievement throughout the district are directly related to the restructuring process we are undergoing. It is imperative that we keep this forward momentum and continue to use evidence to make our decisions.
Thanks Pat. Missed you blog entries, glad you are back.
ReplyDeleteI am thrilled that you are seeing an uptick in Honor Society, but when I hear these stories I always wonder - does this mean the entire student body shifted up in achievement? What is happening at the bottom? Is there a wider gap between the higher achievers and those that are barely getting by? We need to keep our eyes on both ends of the spectrum.
"What is public education’s currency? What is Monticello Central School District’s currency? It is student achievement. The focus of student achievement is to prepare our children to compete in the global market place."
ReplyDeleteI have to disagree with you 100% on this. For starters, you have no way of knowing in 2009 what kind of training will best suit the "marketplace" for whatever time frame your current students will begin working (and hopefully advancing). For most of human history, the marketplace was static, and education had no major role in it. That training took place in households and trade guilds. In recent years, the specific knowledge related to product creation and distribution is changing far too rapidly for anyone to know for what they may be preparing.
Beyond that, it is my firm belief that the purpose of schooling is to promote well-being in life, and training for the marketplace (even if that were possible) is only one component of that. If all of your graduates compete incredibly successfully in the marketplace, but they're all on Prozac, Lipitor, and Glucophage, and only see their kids two Sundays per month, then your school system was a total failure. We are not in the business of molding footsoldiers for international economic or military competition. In fact, we're not in business at all. We're education providers. We're here to enlighten human beings and stimulate their interest in a lifetime of learning. If we do that well, they'll adapt themselves to the marketplace, or not, as they see fit as capable independent thinkers.
I think for us as school board members it's a blessing in disguise that we can no longer predict the requirements of the marketplace, because we are now free from pretending we can ably prepare for it. That means we can put our focus on developing the whole person. Whole people can make their own effective choices in relation to whatever marketplace they experience, as well as all aspects of their long, full lives.
Steve Greenfield
NPCSD BOE member
I want to thank you for your well thought out response. You do miss the point on several levels. If you read my entire blog you would see that we are devoted to the very well rounded education you espouse. What we are advocating for is evidence based decision making. Student achievement can be whatever you require it to be as a school board. It would be our hope that all school districts are producing well rounded students. How do you know that? How can you prove it?
ReplyDeleteWe are working on a series of student based portfolios that our students use to run their learning conference with their parents. We no longer do teacher lead conferences at many grade levels, now we do student lead conferences. Students choose their best work and areas they need to grow and our teachers facilitate their discussion.
The method just described is one of many we are adopting that will help our students develop the skills they need for the 21st Century. There is now much research on these skills and I would ask that you find out what they are. These skills produce both a well rounded students and position students for success in the market place. Please go to the Educational Summit portion of the Apple Computer Web Site. That presentation does a great job in melding the needs of the Market with the whole child. There are many others. Please refer to the last few issues of ASCD Educational Leadership and the last few months of Education Week. They all speak to this issue.
Your premise is interesting but wrong. You represent those who do not want to embrace the changes that are coming our way. Instead we put our heads in the sand and make statements like we cannot foretell the future, so let’s do nothing. History is littered with the corpses of those who took this approach.
We'll have to agree to disagree. Actually, history is littered with the corpses of those who believed -- and those who were victimized by their belief -- that the marketplace is the destination of the journey of childhood and that nations are defined by market type, monetary per capita income, etc. A cursory view of world history from the industrial revolution to the present should clarify that, and our poor ability in this country to function democratically as a self-governing people (or balance the federal budget) is still overwhelmingly a function of the market supremacy-oriented Cold War mindset. Another thing that's been amply studied about the 21st century is that the traditional Western competitive marketplace and the mathematics that drive it are going to litter history with far more corpses (and failing markets) than previously imagined. For example, over the course of their lifetimes your 2009 graduates are going to need to know at least as much about management of mass population migration, war, and global refugee crises as about information technology. They're also going to need to know more about moderating the effects of cancer and nutritional deficiency, unless a lot more of them learn about how to practice small-scale sustainable agriculture.
ReplyDeleteThere's no need to be snide. My premise is no more wrong than is yours. We have different viewpoints about the probability of various future scenarios, and whether it's best to prepare children to be active decision-makers about what the "marketplace" represents to them rather than for us as educators to passively accept that an all-powerful "invisible hand" places requirements upon them -- and us -- that are beyond our control. Therefore we can honestly draw different conclusions about what needs curricular emphasis and what kinds of outcome evaluation systems we'd consider most capable of identifying success.
I'm not seeking to deny students in my district the ability to function in the marketplace -- quite the contrary. They need to have that choice should they decide to exercise it. We're doing OK in the marketplace prep department in the NPCSD. Check out Newsweek three years running, as reported again in today's Freeman. That's not the point. The point is you insist that these types of data (and the value system that drives you to seek them) are our currency, period. I happen to disagree with that, and it's not due to lack of information or a tendency to flee from reality.
I am not an innovator on these themes. I went to a college that overwhelmingly focused on the "great books" curriculum and the liberal arts. When I was entering in freshman year from a typical overcrowded, underperforming late 1970s NYC public school, I was told (to my shock) that if I had an interest in preparing for the marketplace I'd have to go to grad school. The flawed, but still evolving curriculum was established after World War One to emphasize developing levels of broad understanding and analytical skills that would help in preventing world wars over career preparation. Yet our alumni tend to succeed very well in the marketplace. One who graduated a year after me is President of the United States. I went into underground music and sit on the School Board and the volunteer fire department in a small town, and feel every bit as successful as my colleague from the class of '83.
I was elected because my viewpoint on this parallels that of the majority of my community. I'm assuming the same is true of the process that led to your appointment in Monticello. I think that's a beautiful thing about this country, and it preserves my sense of place in these contentiously changing times.
Steve