Rolling in the Dough and STILL Can't Move the Public Education Needle
I see from the latest info from the Gates Foundation that they are pivoting towards "ensuring that students have not just a voice, but also a role in transforming education." Interesting. They have an article about a program, Kitsap Strong, that includes help for students in that area.
Kitsap Strong is a collective impact initiative of over 100 community partners in Kitsap and North Mason counties, including schools in six school districts, working to improve residents’ well-being and educational attainment. Kitsap Strong’s Future Bound program is all about helping high schoolers design the future they want.
Over the last year, the Youth Leadership Team conducted outreach to students, teachers, and administrators at their schools and prepared for and hosted a Future Bound Convening to share their recommendations to over 100 school and community leaders.
- More academic and mental health counselors - The Youth Leadership Team recommend that high schools have more academic counselors, as well as separate mental health counselors, so students can receive more support. They also recommended more support groups for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and LGBTQ+ students, along with expanding multicultural activities.
- More in-school programs about college and careers - It is very important that every student gets a chance to learn about the opportunities they have with financial aid,” said Eden. “We emphasized the need for this to happen during school hours, as not everyone has the means (specifically transportation) to come before or after school.”
From the Gates Foundation's own story:
- Nearly 90% of Washington's high schoolers say they want to pursue some kind of education after graduation.
- Students said they want more personalized support that matches their needs and interests.
We cannot design solutions that we think students want and need. We need to design programs that meet students where they are and reflect what students actually want and need.
And speaking of the Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) hasn't been doing well in their public education ideas. In August it was announced that 48 employees were laid off.
Now, from the Chalkbeat blog, there's this story - Mark Zuckerberg tried to revolutionize American education with technology. It didn't go as planned.
Gee, where have I heard that before? One of the richest people in the world thinking that they have the answers for public education and wasting millions of dollars on ideas that don't work. It is so very sad that neither the Gates Foundation nor (apparently) Chan Zuckerberg Initiative understand that real change will come from supporting teachers and principals who ARE the people on the frontlines.
From the article (bold mine):
Fast forward to this summer: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s philanthropic arm, laid off dozens of staff on its education team and announced a shift in strategy. “Our understanding of what’s possible in the world of education — and in our world more generally — has changed,” Sandra Liu Huang, CZI’s head of education, wrote in an August blog post. “And so, at CZI, our education efforts must change too.
“People keep hoping that our technologies are the Swiss Army knives or steamrollers that they can do everything,” said Justin Reich, a professor at MIT and author of a bookon the limits of technology in education. “Instead, our best technologies are very particularly shaped ratchet heads and the landscape of education is millions of bolts.”
But in other cases, parents complained about the newfangled approach to education or worried that students’ data would be shared with Facebook. (Summit says Facebook does not have any access to its data.) Some students said there was too much time on screens. In 2018, students at a Brooklyn high school walked out in protest, prompting a flurry of news stories. The following year, the New York Times published a piece featuring complaints from parents in Kansas. “We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies,” one parent told the Times.
It wasn’t clear how representative either the success or the horror stories were, though.
That’s in part because Summit struggled to produce evidence that its program was leading to the large learning improvement that Zuckerberg had hoped for. Summit declined to participate in a study of the program designed by Harvard researchers. (Asked about Summit’s effectiveness now, both CZI and Gradient Learning pointed to positive experiences in a number of schools, as well as a survey of school leaders in which nearly all said Summit had made a positive difference for their schools.)
Presently, Gradient Learning says that over 300 schools are using Summit, indicating that in recent years more schools have left the program than have newly adopted it.
CZI is not getting out of education. Huang, the company’s education head, said the company will now focus on “creat[ing] educational tools” that can help “address chronic learning and teaching challenges.” That includes exploring how artificial intelligence can improve education, according to a document obtained by Insider. (A spokesperson for CZI said in an email, “The public discussion about AI in education is evolving rapidly, and we are approaching it thoughtfully and cautiously.”)
Comments
Cracking up
Public 2Private
I love the idea of public schools, but the constant churn of leadership, the toxic community that enables the mismanagement and Byzantine regulations show up in the classroom, in a not good way. Just look at yesterday’s Seattle Times article about shuffling classes and moving to split grade models in October, and district leadership calling this all “routine.” This is some amateur hour management stuff.
And it’s predictable that tech giants cast themselves as the starring role in turning education around. Tech can be effective at getting information up on a medium, but how it is accessed and used are the same old people problems that need other solutions.
HAL
$11k/student funding doesn’t sound right. When I divide the operating costs of the district ($1.2B) by the number of students (48k), the number is closer to $25k. And that’s not including capital costs, which I assume the private school number includes (they don’t have other options to pay for new capital but to bill students). Private schools benefit from other factors - cohesive community, enforceable rules and standards, ability to dismiss onerous teaching/testing requirements. But dollars to dollars, they are not far off. Teachers earn less at private schools.
Something Else
HAL, you hit on something. We are asking schools and districts to handle more and more societal issues and something's got to give. Keeping families afloat is important but then, what is the mission of a public school?
Blue Dog
Regardless, imagine if you could get hold of that $11,500 in the form of a voucher, and join forces with other families to run a parent cooperative school where a classroom of 20 students has a $230,000 budget. Imagine what a great education you could provide for your kids that way. Awkward truths about public education suddenly become hard not to see.
But the rest of what you said is a tough slog to deal with. The number eleven isn't in the teens by definition. Average private school tuition isn't $30k+ if you include religious schools with their separate funding sources, sure, but that doesn't mean their per student spending is the same. The state funding is 60% of total funding according to SPS, so, sure, you can try to claim the additional sources of funding "brings us up to the 20s" but it doesn't (11.5k / 60% = 19k).
I feel like you're trying to round all the public education funding number up "to the 20s" -- maybe 40% higher than it actually is if readers of what you write are somehow thinking high 20s is "in the 20s" -- so you can claim the disparity is small, but those claims really requiring some stretching to the point of breaking, don't you think?
I mean, c'mon. Public schools are underfunded, especially given the additional challenges they have to deal with that private schools cheerfully get to self-select out of. Can't we just agree on that?
Something Else is perfectly correct:
"Private schools benefit from other factors - cohesive community, enforceable rules and standards, ability to dismiss onerous teaching/testing requirements. But dollars to dollars, they are not far off. Teachers earn less at private schools."
SPS doesn't seem to have enforceable rules and standards for the Central Office staff, never mind the students, for allocating the money properly and transparently. That would require proper oversight. But the Board doesn't think oversight is necessary.
Private schools are not perfect but are not a jobs program for the mediocre staff in control of the spending. Board Directors there seldom try to use the Board positions for power trips in their political party, either. Their students are their customers who cannot be undermined.
Oversight Or Else
SP