| The Education

Kamis, 14 Februari 2013

Is the next second language JavaScript?

Computer programming has never been taught as a core subject in schools, but perhaps it should be.

It's true that our children will never use JavaScript to chat with foreign strangers on trains in exotic locales, but "JS" — the computer programming language dominant in developing web pages and mobile apps — may be the most important second language your child will ever learn. According to a growing number of experts, learning computer science will not only pave the way for future employment prospects — job growth in this sector is booming — but contribute to the U.S. economic recovery as well.

Alas, there's no guarantee that computer science will be offered at your child's school; in fact, there's a good chance it isn't. Despite the chorus of future-focused experts advocating for better computer science education in our K-12 schools, many schools aren't meeting the challenge.

The U.S. may be the birthplace of IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and umpteen other computer science-inspired giants, but in the past two decades we’ve fallen behind other countries when it comes to pumping out trained computer scientists. American universities still boast some of the best science and engineering graduate programs, yet many of those spots are filled by foreign students. According to the 2006 Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering, the number of foreign graduate students enrolled in science and engineering fields increased by 45 percent between 1996 and 2006, while enrollment for U.S. citizens/residents increased only 8 percent.

"We are not preparing our students out of high school to compete in the area of science and engineering very well," explained John Borrelli, dean of the Texas Tech University graduate school.

What’s next — kinder code?

Doug Rushkoff, CNN columnist and author of Program or Be Programmed, is one of the nation’s leading digital crusaders. He argues that our schools need to incorporate computer programming into our core curriculum or get left behind. "It's time Americans begin treating computer code the way we do the alphabet or arithmetic,” he writes. According to Rushkoff, there is such a dearth of skilled programmers in the U.S. that firms like Google and Facebook buy entire companies, simply to gain access to their code-literate employees. “If you know how to code, you can likely get a high-paying job right now,” writes Rushkoff. “You will be enabling America to compete effectively on both the economic and military frontiers, where we are rapidly losing our competitive advantage due to our failure to teach ourselves code…"

Making sure our kids learn code isn't just smart career planning, Rushkoff contends, it's practically a patriotic duty.

Decline of CS in HS

How far are we behind? It’s hard to say. A recent poll of 18 nations by the Paris-based OECD Programme for International Assessment (PISA) gave the #1 ranking in digital literacy to South Korea, with New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and Hong Kong close behind. The U.S. wasn't tested, but Ron Anderson, professor of the Sociology of Technology at University of Minnesota, estimates that the USA, "probably would have performed in the middle third of the countries… But we will never know [because] the last student assessment of digital literacy involving American students was in 1992."

If we can’t determine our student’s digital literacy skills as compared to other countries, there are few signs we are trying to improve our standing. The number of CS classes offered in American high schools has declined in recent years. A 2009 survey by the Computer Science Teacher's Association reports in The Journalthat the percentage of high schools offering CS classes dropped from 78 percent in 2005 to 65 percent in 2009, while the percentage of AP computer classes fell from 40 percent in 2005 to 27 percent in 2009. The Journal lists multiple excuses for CS classes disappearing (none of them reassuring): a lack of teacher subject knowledge, difficult subject matter, lack of student interest, a lack of staff support.

Mark Guzdial, professor in the school of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology observed that because of bureaucratic rules and technological limitations that "learning computing in USA high schools is like learning programming in the developing world."

Times they are a’coding?

America may be waking up from its CS slumber. Codecademy, a website launched in August 2011 that offers free "coding" tutorials, has already been used by millions of code-hungry visitors. On January 5, 2012 New York mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeted his New Year's resolution to learn programming. On January 17, CNN columnist Doug Rushkoff presented his essay, "Why I Am Learning To Code and You Should Too."

But getting your future code geek enrolled in computer science classes may require some effort. There are public high schools which offer excellent programs. Montgomery Blair High School in Maryland has a team that's a frequent champion at the American Computer Science League contests. Other top contenders include Cary Academy in North Carolina, Tacoma Park Middle School in Maryland, and Jefferson Sci-Tech in Virginia.

If you dwell in the Big Apple, and your teen wants to pursue the mayor's new hobby, the best bet could be the Computer Science Institute at John Dewey High School. This rigorous program requires a longer school day for extra classes, and awards graduates Microsoft Office Systems certification.

But even if your child’s high school doesn't offer any CS classes, you can still help your son or daughter learn what some have dubbed an essential 21st century skill. In addition to Codecademy, Khan Academy has plans to offer CS training. For more immersive experiences you can choose from one of InternalDrive.com's140 "tech camps" for kids 7 to 18 years old. If these tuition prices are beyond your budget, perhaps they can qualify for "Code Summer Plus" — a condensed version of Codecademy's curriculum that is part of President Obama's Summer Jobs Plus Initiative.

No matter how you do it, keep the ultimate goal in mind: your child’s future opportunities. How bright are the chances of future employment for CS specialists? A Georgetown University study estimates that from 2005-2018 there will be a 2.2 - 2.6% annual employment increase in computer and mathematical science occupations, with 700,000 of the 800,000 new jobs occupied by computer specialists. Many of these jobs will bring considerable rewards. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "In May 2008, median annual wages of computer systems software engineers were $92,430." Be aware though — the number of "programming-only" jobs will decline, largely due to increased use of software interfaces. Explosive growth is in other computer fields — especially apps development. The smartphone industry has created almost 466,000 jobs since 2007, generating $20 billion in 2011 alone.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that not every child has what it takes to be a computer scientist. Not only are strong problem-solving and analytical skills essential, but it also helps to be detail-oriented, and to have a crackerjack memory. So before you engineer an education makeover for your child, make sure your child is as excited by the prospect as you are.

Times they are a’coding?

Rabu, 13 Februari 2013

Gates: Test scores not enough for teacher reviews

After three years of research on measuring teacher performance, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Tuesday that it takes multiple measures to most accurately judge educators.

The Seattle foundation concluded in its final report on its Measures of Effective Teaching research that test scores or principal evaluations are not enough on their own. The findings mirror what teachers unions have been saying.

The federal government has been pushing states through incentive grants and waivers to update their teacher evaluation systems because it felt existing systems were inadequate. At the same time, the Gates Foundation was studying these issues, saying it wanted to add to the discussion. Most states and big city districts have adopted some elements of the recommendations.

Foundation officials say the more reliable systems include a balanced mix of evaluation methods: student test scores, lesson observation and student surveys.

"If you do it right, you can generate measures that will help identify teachers that are having a bigger impact. That's a really big deal," said lead investigator Thomas J. Kane, professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The foundation studied 3,000 teachers across the country. The research included classroom videos of 13,000 lessons, interviews with students and administrators, test scores and experiments to test theories.

Classrooms were studied in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the Dallas Independent School District, Denver Public Schools, Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Fla., Memphis City Schools, The New York City Department of Education and Pittsburgh Public Schools.

One of the new conclusions of the report is that having a second person, other than the principal, evaluate a teacher greatly enhances reliability.

The researchers also established a baseline for how much influence test scores should have on teacher evaluations, saying tests should not represent more than half the total teacher evaluation score, unless the district is just trying to determine future test scores.

Vicki Phillips, director of the foundation's K-12 education program, said the focus of teacher evaluation systems should be on giving feedback to help teachers improve.

Several districts involved in the research acknowledged that student surveys were the most controversial part of the process, and some, like Hillsboro County Public Schools in Florida, have opted to leave them out of the mix when scoring teachers.

Jean Clements, president of the Hillsboro Classroom Teachers Association, said her district decided the results of student surveys, which ask questions like "do you feel challenged to do your best work," may not be trusted by teachers.

The researchers found, however, that student surveys help teachers improve their practice because those results evoke the most emotions.

Test scores and principal evaluations don't bring tears to many teachers' eyes, Kane said. "Getting these student surveys back ... hits you where your heart is."

Selasa, 12 Februari 2013

Ravitch on Rhee

The PBS show “Frontline” on Tuesday night aired John Merrow’s documentary on school reformer Michelle Rhee, which focused on the 3 1/2 years she was chancellor of D.C. Public Schools. There is sure to be a variety of opinions on what it said and what it didn’t say.

Here is the reaction of education historian Diane Ravitch, who has become the preeminent voice in the growing opposition to Rhee’s style of school reform. This appeared on Ravitch’s

I was invited by Frontline to offer reactions to the documentary about Michelle Rhee. I was disappointed that the documentary did not mention that Rhee is now working on behalf of a far-right agenda of privatization; that Washington Teachers Union President George Parker now works for StudentsFirst; that Rhee’s “miraculous gains” as a teacher in Baltimore have been discredited. But I had space limitations. So this was my commentary:

I watched John Merrow’s documentary on “The Education of Michelle Rhee” with high anticipation. I wanted to see what she had learned from her experience, and what lessons there might be for the nation.

The documentary emphasizes her steely determination to do whatever she thought necessary to turn around the Washington, D.C. school system. She fired principals; she fired teachers; she closed schools. She told every principal that he or she must set a target for raising test scores. If they met it, their schools would win thousands of dollars; if they didn’t, they risked termination. She tied teachers’ evaluation to student test scores.

Rhee assumes that better test scores equal better education. She never once mentions literature or history or science or civics or foreign languages; she doesn’t talk about curriculum or instruction. She never calls out a teacher for poor instruction or a principal for a weak curriculum; she is interested only in the bottom line, and that is the scores.

The problem, of course, is that focusing obsessively on test scores has predictable results: narrowing the curriculum (some districts and schools have dropped the arts and other subjects to make more time for testing); cheating; teaching to the tests; and distorting the whole education system for the sake of scores. Our best public and private schools would never dream of making test scores their goal. They know that a real education includes the arts, history, science, literature, foreign languages and physical education. Their parents expect nothing less.

Unfortunately, Rhee cared only about test scores, not a balanced curriculum. By the end of the documentary we learn that the public schools in D.C. improved “slightly” on national tests but “are still among the worst in the nation,” and its high school graduation rate is dead last. We learn that her relentless focus on test scores produced allegations of widespread cheating, not better education. Her policy of firing teachers and principals did not turn around the schools; it created turmoil. Every year, about 20% of the teachers (including those she hired) leave, and most of the principals she hired have moved on.

The only logical conclusion from this documentary is that states and districts should not do what Michelle Rhee did. It didn’t work. It failed. Rhee, however, remains unfazed. She’s taken her reform agenda to the national stage and is now urging states to follow her lead.

True educational leadership involves a commitment to children and to education (not just test scores), a dedication to improving curriculum and instruction, and the ability to recruit and develop a strongstaff. That is the kind of leadership I saw when I visited Finland, a nation whose students never take standardized tests yet do very well on international assessments.

Thankfully, such leadership is hardly absent in the United States. In schools all across the nation, I have come across countless unsung educators who build teamwork and a culture of professionalism. They create a climate of respect built on wisdom and judgment, not carrots and sticks.

Senin, 11 Februari 2013

Gates Foundation MET Report: Teacher Observation Less Reliable Than Test Scores

A few years ago, Bill Gates decided to learn more about whether a teacher's effect on student learning could be measured. Three years, 3,000 teachers and about $50 million later, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation thinks it has the answers.

On Tuesday afternoon in Phoenix, the Gates Foundation released the third and final component of the Measuring Effective Teachers project, a gargantuan effort spearheaded by Harvard economist Thomas Kane.

"Effective teaching can be measured," the authors wrote in the latest installment. They're sure of it because they used a randomized experiment to figure it out. Reliable teacher evaluations, the paper claims, include "balanced" proportions of teacher observation, students' standardized test scores and student surveys. And for the first time, the randomized trial shows that teachers who perform well with one group of students, on average, perform at the same levels with different groups of kids.

The findings are important because of what they may contribute to the debate over changing how teacher evaluation is conducted, which has emerged as a hot-button political issue favored by the so-called education reform movement. Such changes are controversial because the idea of measuring a teacher's contributions to student learning contests the predominant labor management model in education: salaries and benefits that increase with experience, and layoffs based on reverse order of seniority. Measuring teachers promises administrators and policymakers that they can make hiring and firing decisions with an eye toward quality of instruction.

The federal government's Race to the Top competition had states vie for cash by doing such things as formalizing their teacher evaluations to include student test scores. Many states have signed on, and several districts have already implemented such systems.

One major point of pushback to using test scores in teacher evaluations has been the concern that such tools, known as value-added measures, reflect student demographics more than a teacher's ability, and penalize teachers who take on more difficult students. "We didn't know if in fact what we were seeing -- the differences we were seeing between teachers were about the teacher or about the students who were coming into their class," Steve Cantrell, Gates' chief education researcher, told The Huffington Post. "By randomly assigning students to teachers, we were able to show that teacher effectiveness is really about the teachers."

After randomly assigning classes to teachers in consecutive years, Cantrell said, MET found that "the performance of the teachers in the second year was almost identical to the year prior."

While the study shows some reliability in measuring teachers who either overperform or underachieve dramatically, the authors note that "the vast majority of teachers are in the middle of the scale, with small differences in scores producing large changes in percentile rankings."

Moreover, the report found that overall, classroom observations -- the way most teachers around the country have been evaluated for decades -- are highly unreliable on their own. "It is clear from these findings and the MET project's earlier study of classroom observation instruments that classroom observations are not discerning large absolute differences in practice," the authors wrote. They found that counting observations for half of the total score is "counterproductive."

"The way that most teachers have been evaluated forever is completely unreliable," said Tim Daly, who leads TNTP, a consulting group that places new teachers and helps districts implement evaluations. "Before, what we were weighing is, 'Should we move in the direction of using student learning or is it too precarious?' They show we have no choice but to change -- the way they're doing it is totally inadequate."

The report also notes that teacher observation becomes more reliable when more than one judge watches a class. The lesson for districts is that staffers other than principals need to be trained in teacher observations.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers union, has been critical of the MET Project's teacher quality research in the past. But in advance of Tuesday's release, she released a statement lauding the effort. "The MET findings reinforce the importance of evaluating teachers based on a balance of multiple measures of teaching effectiveness, in contrast to the limitations of focusing on student test scores, value-added scores or any other single measure," Weingarten said.

And as for Gates, while the foundation is closing a major chapter on teacher quality research, Cantrell says the next step is culling and tagging a massive video library of teaching practices to be studied by researchers and used by education schools.

Gates also intends to focus on helping teachers improve. "Now we know that we can identify and take up multiple perspectives on what great teaching looks like," said Vicki Phillips, who heads the Gates Foundation's college readiness efforts. "Now, how do we help make sure there's more and more of that?"

Minggu, 10 Februari 2013

Gates Foundation study: We’ve figured out what makes a good teacher

Even as most of the nation’s 15,000 public school districts roll out new systems to evaluate teachers, many are still struggling with a central question: What’s the best way to identify an effective educator?

After a three-year, $45 million research project, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes it has some answers.

The most reliable way to evaluate teachers is to use a three-pronged approach built on student test scores, classroom observations by multiple reviewers and teacher evaluations from students themselves, the foundation found.

“We identified groups of teachers who caused students to learn more,” said Thomas J. Kane, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and principal investigator of the Gates study, also known as the Measures of Effective Teaching project.

The findings released Tuesday involved an analysis of about 3,000 teachers and their students in Charlotte; Dallas; Denver; Memphis; New York; Pittsburgh; and Hillsborough County, Fla., which includes Tampa. Researchers were drawn from the Educational Testing Service and several universities, including Harvard, Stanford and the University of Virginia.

The large-scale study is the first to demonstrate that it is possible to identify great teaching, the foundation said.

Researchers videotaped 3,000 participating teachers and experts analyzed their classroom performance. They also ranked the teachers using a statistical model known as value-added modeling, which calculates how much an educator has helped students learn based on their academic performance over time. And finally, the researchers surveyed the students, who turned out to be reliable judges of their teacher’s abilities, Kane said.

They used all that data to identify teachers who seemed effective. And then they randomly assigned students to those teachers for an academic year.

The teachers who seemed to be effective were, in fact, able to repeat those successes with different students in different years, the researchers found. Their students not only scored well on standardized exams but also were able to handle more complicated tests of their conceptual math knowledge and reading and writing abilities.

Researchers found that multiple classroom observations of teachers by several people — a principal, a peer, an outside expert — result in the most accurate assessments. Many school districts currently rely on observations by just one person, usually a principal.

The Gates Foundation hopes that states and school districts will use the research to create evaluation systems to help teachers improve, not just in hiring and firing decisions, said Vicki Phillips, who directs its college-ready education programs in the United States.

Denver is already doing so, said Tom Boasberg, superintendent of the Denver public schools. “There’s not some clear dividing line in the middle, with some folks on one side who are clearly not effective teachers and some on the other who are clearly effective,” he said. “You have a lot of folks in the middle who want to get better. The key is to use multiple measures and feedback to help them get better in this enormously complex job.”

For decades, teacher evaluations were little more than a formality in most school systems, with most educators getting top ratings based on little more than a principal’s checklist. Tenure, rather than student achievement, largely determined whether a teacher was rehired at the end of a school year.

But reformers have been pressing for evaluations that judge teachers at least in part on how well their students perform on tests. The Obama administration has accelerated that change by requiring states to adopt such evaluation systems to compete for Race to the Top funds or to receive waivers from No Child Left Behind, the federal education law.

Critics have said that some of the new evaluation systems place an unhealthy emphasis on test scores.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the findings from the Gates study “reinforce the importance of evaluating teachers based on a balance of multiple measures of teaching effectiveness, in contrast to the limitations of focusing on student test scores, value-added scores or any other single measure.”

Sabtu, 09 Februari 2013

Language Education We Can Use

As the global nature of work and life in the 21st century becomes clearer by the day, calls for a greater focus on international education and language learning are growing louder. Leaders from the education, business, and national security communities are agreed: International understanding and second-language proficiency are critical to individual and national interests—and our K-12 system must do more to promote them.

But with respect to international education and language learning, more of what we are doing today wouldn't be better. In fact, it might be worse.

For too many years, we have maintained a language-learning strategy that simply does not work. In programs using outdated pedagogies focused on grammar and translation and coupled with low expectations, students take foreign languages with goals that seemingly include everything except actually learning to speak the language. If graduates of our high schools regularly reflected that, after four years of mathematics, they couldn't solve for an unknown variable, we would be outraged. But we share a laugh when someone says, "I took four years of a language, but I can't really speak it."

As a nation, we seem unconcerned by students' wasting years in language programs with instructional approaches that have no chance of helping them achieve meaningful levels of proficiency. Students are neither learning to speak in large numbers nor at high levels because the traditional platform cannot possibly deliver enough intensity or time in the target language. As a result, everyone understands that putting Spanish or French or Mandarin on your resume simply means that you took it, not that you speak it.

But what is the goal of traditional programs if it is not learning to speak the language? Teachers and administrators will tell you that there is much more to language classes than just oral proficiency. There is cultural awareness and sensitivity, global knowledge, and exposure to the target language.

They are absolutely right. And these objectives would be well worth the investment if traditional world-language programs were actually set up for those outcomes. Unfortunately, they aren't. They continue to operate with the primary goal of increased proficiency and a secondary goal of increased global knowledge. The result? We achieve neither.

But we could. To do so, however, we will need to part ways with our traditional one-size-fits-all approach to language instruction.

Let's start with increased global knowledge. Rather than perpetuate the fiction that world-language classes can result in advanced proficiency, it is time to convert existing courses to a classroom experience that provides a combination of introductory language exposure, cultural studies, and deep, experiential learning about the countries that speak the target language. These middle and high school language courses would have the following three components:

• Specific, real-life language instruction narrowed to focus on survival travel skills and with the goal of teaching a subset of the current language curriculum to greater depth and understanding—with relevance and utility as guiding principles;

• A cultural-studies framework that teaches students how to understand a country's cultural identity and to compare and contrast countries; and

• Global knowledge through the study, comparison, and contrasting of countries that speak the target language.

To be clear, students will not leave these classes with advanced language proficiency. What they will obtain, however, are the language skills needed to travel in countries that speak the language, an understanding of other countries and cultures, and an awareness of the global issues that impact both those countries and our own.

For the students who seek to achieve proficiency, classrooms with dual-language instruction will provide the route. In these classrooms, the target language is not taught as a separate subject; it is the language in which instruction is delivered. Students master the curriculum objectives in all subject areas, while becoming highly proficient in a second language. A recently released book by the renowned dual-language-education researchers Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier, Dual Language Education for a Transformed World, provides ample evidence that not only is dual language a best practice for second-language acquisition, but it is also the "most powerful school reform model for high academic achievement, whatever the demographic mix!"

There are different models of dual-language education, including 50/50 two-way (in which half of instruction is presented in English and the other half in the target language), and 90/10 full immersion (in which nearly all instruction is conducted in the foreign language being taught). Communities with native Spanish-speaking, Mandarin-speaking, or other English-language-learner populations can benefit from the 50/50 model—a program that promotes academic achievement through enrichment, rather than remediation. In 90/10 programs, native English-speaking students benefit from the academic rigor inherent in learning nearly all content through the target language.

For students who enter these programs in the elementary years, school districts and states would develop companion middle and high school coursework that would build their language skills and ensure high-level proficiency by high school graduation.

No doubt, it will be difficult to wean our schools and districts from their traditional language approaches. But these approaches seek to teach language to 100 percent of the students with a success rate of 1 percent. Instead, we should aim for 10 percent participation in dual-language education to achieve 100 percent success, and support the remaining 90 percent of students with courses that will build survival language skills, cultural understanding, and global knowledge.

The good news: We can redeploy the existing world-languages course platform, teaching positions, and support resources to implement a language-learning and international education agenda that will actually achieve results.

In doing so, we will be in tune with the demands of states, businesses, and parents to better prepare students for the global world in which they will live and work.

Jumat, 08 Februari 2013

A Broader Bolder Approach to the Common Core Engages the Whole Child and All Children

This blog is co-authored by Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor, co-directors of the national Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA, where their current focus is on systemic reforms to enhance school and community efforts to address barriers to learning and teaching and re-engage disconnected students.

As more states move to implement the Common Core State Standards, we should applaud the movement's potential benefits, but also recognize its limitations. It is essential to note that the current focus is only on school curricula, and so far only on a few facets. While an enhanced curriculum represents a major step forward for many states, it clearly doesn't amount to a whole child approach. Moreover, like many other school improvement plans, the Common Core largely ignores barriers to learning and teaching, thus impeding teachers' capacity to effectively engage all students.

States concerned with whole child development are expanding the curriculum by developing standards for social and emotional learning. This presents a great opportunity for schools to build on existing natural opportunities in arts, music, and other areas for promoting social and emotional learning. But broadening the focus on healthy development is not, itself, enough.

The Common Core State Standards include a brief "application to students with disabilities." They are silent, however, about the many problems that students, at some time or another, bring with them to the classroom that impede their learning and interfere with efforts to teach. In some districts, many students face restricted opportunities associated with poverty and low income, difficult family circumstances, excessive mobility, lack of English language skills, violent neighborhoods, substance abuse, inadequate health care, and lack of enrichment opportunities. Such problems are exacerbated as youngsters internalize the frustrations of confronting barriers and the debilitating effects of poor school performance. They are further compounded by teachers who often are ill-prepared and poorly supported to address the problems in a potent manner.

Common Core Standards for learning supports can enable schools to provide an equal opportunity for all students to succeed at school and beyond. In their absence, however, the new curriculum standards probably will widen the gap between educational haves and have-nots and undermine any commitment to develop the whole child. That would hardly be a recipe for enabling better teacher and school performance.

For Common Core State Standards to fulfill their potential, schools need strong teachers focused on the whole child, aligned with a unified and comprehensive system for addressing barriers to learning and teaching and re-engaging disconnected students. This reality calls for a shift in school improvement policy and practice from a two- to a three-component approach: in addition to (1) instruction (including curriculum and teaching); and (2) governance and management; strategies must incorporate (3) supports that address barriers to learning and teaching. All three components are essential, and efforts to revamp schools cannot afford to marginalize any of them. This is being demonstrated by trailblazing work across the country (e.g., Gainesville City Schools, GA.)

Continuing to ignore standards for learning supports perpetuates the myth that teachers alone are responsible for, and capable of, closing the achievement gap, increasing graduation rates, and ensuring that students are career and college ready. This convenient mythology takes a lot of relevant actors off the hook for their responsibility to enhance equity of opportunity for all students. As such, it also contributes to the undermining of public education. The simplistic fix is enticing, but it avoids the more complex reality that only a comprehensive effort can ensure that all children get the whole-child education they deserve, and our nation needs.

The Broader Bolder Approach to Education thus joins the many others endorsing efforts to embed Common Core Standards for a Learning Supports Component into school improvement policy and practice.

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