WILMINGTON — This past month, I attended the annual conference of the Council of State Governments (CSG) in Kansas City, Mo. Since all of you generously sent me there, I'd like to share some of what I learned.
While there, I attended “Education Reform and Transformation: Fact or Fiction,” presented by two state superintendents of instruction, one from Idaho and the other from Maine, and two Teachers of the Year, one from Kentucky and the other from Kansas.
The fellow from Maine, Don Siviski, blew me away. His state seems to have reinvented its education system based on the work of education innovators, including Tony Wagner, author of The Global Achievement Gap and Creating Innovators.
As a result, Maine is transforming its state and local school system into a learner-centered practice, where time is the variable and student learning is the constant, all leading to proficiency-based diplomas for all Maine students by a date certain.
What was especially exciting about Maine's work was that it seems to be a whole system change, embracing both the state's overall responsibility for education and local schools where the work is actually done to carry out that responsibility.
Before articulating what Maine has been doing, Siviski did talk about the 100-year-old system we now have, invented to sustain an industrial model and full of control elements, where time is fixed and student learning is the variable.
As he said in a CSG summary article, “We had this fixed mindset where your IQ didn't change. [...] We put you into ability groups because we were nice to you. We tracked you. [...] [We] limited your aspirations. [...] We just destroyed kids' dreams.
“The current system of education was invented in 1892 to prepare foremen for the assembly line,” Siviski said. “One hundred and twenty years later, it hasn't significantly changed.
“Here is our position. In 2013, time is a variable; learning is a constant. It's not just 175 days and five days in-service. [...] Everything about what we do in school just changed. Every parent is a consumer of the old system that's full of control factors. Textbooks were a control factor. The number of days is a control factor.”
He said that this system is not what parents really want for their children, nor is it what our present-day economy or life quality needs for its citizens, nor even - more importantly - what kids themselves want.
No longer do we need to have teachers impart information that is available at everyone's fingertips, or, especially with our children, right in their pockets.
Instead, we need kids to leave school with critical-thinking skills: the ability to keep asking questions until they are satisfied, with skills to communicate both in writing and verbally, with the ability to work in groups and to use their imaginations to be creative.
The two Teachers of the Year, both of whom teach middle-school language arts, talked about how they were using these new principles in their classrooms.
Again, as quoted by the CSG article, Dyane Smokorowski, Kansas' 2013 Teacher of the Year, said that the Common Core State Standards Initiative's “focus on deeper learning has made radical changes to the business of education.”
“Everything you do in the classroom has to have a real-world connection to it,” she said in the article. “How many asked that question in school, 'When am I ever going to use this?'”
“Our babies have questions, those questions deserve answers, and it's our job to guide them to the people who have the answers,” she said.
According to the article, a lesson in Smokorowski's class led to a new project - Global Teen Solutions to Stop Bullying - “in which middle school students from 15 classrooms on four continents are getting together using Skype and a website to discuss what bullying looks like in their community and what they believe are some of its causes.”
Smokorowski's students will build an action plan and visit their state legislators to discuss the project, the article said.
Now that is exciting!
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Here are a couple of other things that I think will inform the work being done in Vermont and its schools:
• Learning is a rite of passage for children.
• The database must be kid-centered.
• Get started, go slow, and don't stop.
• Education infrastructure is broken.
• Flow of money is currently per kid, so administrators get very good at attendance. What does that have to do with outcomes?
• Send some dollars to schools based on achievement.
• Allow dollars to be used differently school to school and classroom to classroom.
• Create teacher-leaders to train other teachers, rotate over time.
• Be very targeted in teacher-training dollars.
All of this is heady stuff as Vermont - both at the state level and in many local school districts, including our own - move toward implementing many of the practices.
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So I hope that you know that some real, new, and emerging ideas from this conference have made their way back home, and I hope you won't conclude that the tax money that sent me there was just a boondoggle.
But either way, I've got some new thinking to add to my long-held commitment to change the conversation about education, so thank you all.