School Leadership

How a �� center is bringing the ‘gold standard’ in teaching within reach

Olivia Peterkin — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 22:11:16 +0000

How a �� center is bringing the ‘gold standard’ in teaching within reach

Olivia Peterkin Wed, 10/04/2023 - 15:11

The National Board Resource Center provides support, training, and community for educators seeking national certification. (Photo: NBRC)

Impact | School Leadership | Teaching

The GSE’s National Board Resource Center has helped thousands of teachers earn the most respected certification in their field.

October 4, 2023

By Olivia Peterkin

Like many great ideas, the National Board Research Center (NBRC) started with a group of people, sharing a similar goal and values, in the comfort of someone’s living room.

In this case the living room belonged to Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor Emeritus at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE). Those with her included GSE alum Misty Sato, PhD ’02, and the only six teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time who had National Board Certification, now recognized as the gold standard among professional certifications available to educators.

Linda Darling-Hammond founded the NBRC at ��, which has helped more than 2,000 teachers through the national board certification process. (Photo: Barbara McKenna)

Darling-Hammond had helped to spearhead the new measure of teaching quality put forth by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in the late 1980s. About a decade later, when she had joined the GSE faculty and was helping to redesign the �� Teaching Education Program (STEP), she and Sato set out to increase the number of board-certified teachers in the region by establishing a way to support them through the certification process.

As the other board-certified teachers in the area came on board, word spread about the community they’d built. Their efforts grew and, with funding from the Hewlett Foundation, the NBRC was established at �� in 1998 as a center providing support, training, and community for educators seeking national certification.

“Once we got the ball rolling, you could go into CERAS [the Center for Education Research at ��] on a Saturday morning and see it full of teachers giving each other advice, sharing videos of their practice and really just improving the profession,” said Darling-Hammond, who is now the president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute.

Alissa Fong is the current director of the NBRC. (Photo: �� Graduate School of Education)

A program with national reach

The NBRC, operated by the �� Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE), has helped more than 2,000 teachers get certified. Currently, it helps an average of 300 teachers with the process each year.

The center — which employs 25 National Board Certified facilitators — supports teachers throughout the board certification process, which can take between one and three years to complete. Candidates looking to certify with help from the center either pay for it themselves or are in districts that cover the costs for their teachers; other cohorts are run with grant funding.

Programming includes online classes and instructional videos led by educators in and beyond the Bay Area, in addition to one-on-one meetings that address teachers’ individual strengths and weaknesses. Teachers seeking certification with support from the NBRC have access to other teachers working in their content areas throughout the country to discuss best practices, showcase their work, and give each other feedback.

“Since the pandemic, we’ve transitioned to being completely virtual,” said NBRC Director Alissa Fong, MA ’04, who is also a professional development associate and instructional math coach for the GSE’s Hollyhock Fellowship. “That gives us a more national reach to help teachers understand what accomplished teaching means, and help them see the strengths they already have.”

Prior to taking her role at NBRC in 2020, Fong — who is a National Board certified teacher and a STEP graduate — taught math in California public high schools for 11 years.

“When I started the board-certification process on my own, it just opened my eyes and gave me access to what math teaching could look like in other geographical regions and other pedagogies,” Fong said. “The experience influenced my decision to help lead NBRC so that other teachers could have what I did.”

Expanding access

The NBRC is currently teaming up with the California Teacher Association (CTA) and Center X, a center for educators at the University of California, Los Angeles, to create fully subsidized support for educators who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). They are also working to expand access to national board certification for more educators in those communities by targeting regions where teachers need more support, and helping with financial incentives for teachers from “high priority” schools who seek certification.

“We are also really trying to target teachers who don’t have access to support programs or professional learning, so that means remote and rural teachers, and teachers in low-income communities,” Fong said.

It costs about $2,000 for submissions for National Board certification, she said. “So we also advocate at the local and state level so that teachers don’t have to pay that because the costs are prohibitive.”

Currently, the state of California supports teachers’ fees for board certification, and the benefits of national board certification extend beyond the teachers who receive it. While those who earn certification are later often tapped for leadership roles in education and administration, they’re also more likely to stay in classrooms longer and have students who perform better on standardized tests than those taught by teachers who aren’t certified, according to Fong.

One of the most significant advantages of getting support from the NBRC, she says, is building a wider professional community – and that includes candidates working outside of the classroom.

“What’s most unique about the NBRC is that it’s content-specific professional learning for all educators, counselors, school librarians,” Fong said. “The opportunity to work with people from multiple different sites and states, developing that personal and professional connection network, makes it even more special.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Linda Darling-Hammond

�� GSE and the Aspen Institute mark the end of a seven-year partnership

Olivia Peterkin — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 16:34:35 +0000

�� GSE and the Aspen Institute mark the end of a seven-year partnership

Olivia Peterkin Thu, 08/03/2023 - 09:34

The eighth cohort of Aspen Rising Presidents fellows will be the last to meet on ��'s campus (Photo: Keith Uyeda)

Faculty and Programs | Higher Education | School Leadership

Since 2016, the Rising Presidents Fellowship has brought hundreds of community college leaders to ��’s campus.

August 3, 2023

By Olivia Peterkin

It seems that the old adage rings true — all good things must come to an end.

In this case, what’s ending is a seven-year partnership between �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the Aspen Institute’s Rising Presidents Fellowship, which closed out this summer after the eighth cohort of future community college presidents departed campus on July 27.

Launched in 2016, the year-long fellowship brings community college leaders to ��’s campus for four days in the summer for sessions that equip fellows with the data analysis, community building, and leadership skills to become changemakers seated at the helm of America’s two-year post-secondary institutions.

“This partnership began as a way to create a transformative program for prospective community college presidents, addressing the need for confident and capable leaders who can produce measurable student success,” said Anne E. Palmer, executive director of the �� Educational Leadership Initiative. “Now that the fellowship’s curriculum has been created, iterated, and reformed, the program may continue to thrive without ��.”

Josh Wyner, founder and executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute, said the partnership with �� had been particularly appealing because of the deep, pertinent experience of the faculty – particularly GSE Professor Eric Bettinger and Adjunct Professor Thomas Ehrlich, as well as Graduate School of Business Professor Baba Shiv, who played integral roles in teaching content related to leadership and data analysis.

“They both have a wealth of expertise that’s relevant to the program,” Wyner said. “Tom himself was a president in the four-year college space and brought in a lot of knowledge about teaching and learning, while Eric brought in the higher education research piece — he’s truly a national leader in the use of data to advance educational outcomes.”

Russell Lowery-Hart was a fellow in the program's first cohort. (Photo: Keith Uyeda)

Making leaders that last

Russell Lowery-Hart, who was a fellow in the Rising Presidents Fellowship’s first cohort, and returned this year as a mentor, said that participating in the program was pivotal to his career success.

“When I started here, my presidency was at risk, and now I’m coming in as a mentor whose college just won the Aspen prize,” he said. “Coming here to �� I’m reminded of where I came from — including all of the learning, pain, fear, and uncertainty — and how I was able to act on the things that I learned here.”

Lowery-Hart is the first Rising Presidents Fellow to win the Aspen Prize for Community College Excel, an annual award given to U.S. community colleges. Over the last seven years the program has graduated more than 300 fellows, some of whom now lead 9% of community colleges in the United States, according to Palmer.

“In that first cohort we met at �� twice and I left with knowledge and understanding that showed me where I was failing in my presidency,” said Lowery-Hart who was also recently announced as the new chancellor of the Austin Community College District after serving as president of Amarillo College for nearly a decade.

“The work that Russell’s done to change the culture of Amarillo College is amazing,” said Maria Harper-Marinick, a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute and Lowery-Hart’s former mentor in the program. “Building a culture of caring within an educational setting is not something everyone gets to accomplish but he stayed focused on that.”

In one of the program’s final on-campus sessions last month, Bettinger encouraged fellows to lead by tapping into both data and people resources as they go on to lead at educational institutions.

“As the president of a school, you have the opportunity to see things from a panoramic view, but you’ve got to rely on others to help inform your decisions,” he said. “That requires that you be curious, inquisitive, and thoughtful.”

While the formal partnership between the GSE and Aspen has ended, Wyner and Palmer said that the relationships will continue into the future.

“This has been a meaningful partnership for ��, and we’re so grateful to have supported these education leaders in their journey,” Palmer said.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Thomas Ehrlich , Eric Bettinger

Is now the time to revolutionize school?

Carrie Spector — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 01:04:28 +0000

Is now the time to revolutionize school?

Carrie Spector Wed, 07/07/2021 - 18:04

Image: liravega / Shutterstock

Education Policy | School Leadership | Technology

Education professor Glenn Kleiman outlines the main levers to change school systems for the better.

July 5, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic might have a silver lining: real change to how we do school, says Glenn Kleiman, an education professor at North Carolina State University. After all, shutdowns already drove the reinvention of everything from attendance to submitting homework to small-group collaboration to school lunch.

On the other hand, “with people being exhausted and stressed, there is a natural tendency for all of us to [say], ‘Let’s go back to the old stuff we were comfortable with,’” says Kleiman.

On this episode of School’s In, Kleiman joins �� Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to discuss whether the pandemic can be an inflection point for U.S. education.

School has proven remarkably resistant to change, said Kleiman, who has worked on education technology since the days of the Apple II. The pandemic drove immense improvement in tech skills, and some families found they preferred virtual school, he said. Some districts plan to continue virtual academies. But others don’t know how they can afford both modalities or train enough teachers. Or they face political pressure to return to the norm.

“There’s that wonderful line about ‘Never waste a good crisis,’” Kleiman said. “And I hope we don’t end up wasting the COVID crisis in education.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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Can schools punish a student for a social media post? �� scholars discuss an imminent Supreme Court ruling

Carrie Spector — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 19:13:56 +0000

Can schools punish a student for a social media post? �� scholars discuss an imminent Supreme Court ruling

Carrie Spector Wed, 06/09/2021 - 12:13

The Supreme Court has been asked to decide whether students' off-campus speech is protected by the First Amendment. (Photo: Getty Images)

Education Policy | School Leadership | Students

Professor Bill Koski and students with the Youth & Education Law Project at �� talk about what’s at stake in the landmark case.

June 9, 2021

By Carrie Spector

When Brandi Levy, a junior varsity cheerleader at a Pennsylvania high school, learned that she didn’t make the varsity cheerleading team, she did what any teenager might – she blew off some steam on social media. On a Saturday, from a neighborhood convenience store, she posted a short, profanity-laced rant on Snapchat expressing her discontent with school and cheerleading, with an image of herself and a friend raising their middle fingers to the camera.

A screenshot of the post made its way to the cheerleading coach, who suspended Levy from the junior varsity team. The school upheld the punishment, and Levy – represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – sued the district, claiming a violation of her First Amendment rights. After two courts ruled in the student’s favor, the school district brought the incident to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will issue a ruling before adjourning for the summer.

At issue is a precedent set in 1969 in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, when the court ruled that the First Amendment protects student speech on campus if it doesn’t “substantially” interfere with school activities. Now, in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., the justices are being asked to decide whether Tinker applies to off-campus speech.

Bill Koski, a professor of law and education and director of the Youth & Education Law Project (YELP) at ��, has been tracking the case along with a team of YELP law students who are working on a similar case about internet-based speech and schools. Here, he and the students – Taylor Chambers, Bruce Easop and Leah Plachinski – discuss the case and its implications.

Why is this case so important?

Koski: From a legal standpoint, it’s important because we need some clarity on how much authority schools have over student speech. If I were a school administrator, I’d want to know what authority – or, more importantly, what responsibility – I might have to police off-campus speech. I’d want to protect the learning environment, but at the same time, I wouldn’t necessarily want to have to monitor everything being shared on social media. The court has an opportunity to provide some guidance here.

Plachinski: The Supreme Court has yet to look at a case like this, where you have a student who is clearly off campus and venting her frustration on social media. If she had just said it to her parents or friends in her own home, the school wouldn’t be able to punish her. Social media has become a prevalent way for kids to communicate, but it also amplifies speech in a way that normal conversations don’t. The court has never addressed a school’s ability to punish off-campus, internet-based speech.

Does it even make sense to distinguish between on-campus and off anymore, given the prevalence of social media and now remote learning?

Koski: There’s a famous line from the ruling in Tinker where the court said that students don’t shed their free speech rights “at the schoolhouse gate.” This imagery has a geographic feel to it, where civil liberties differ depending on whether a student is in or out of school. But Tinker was long before the internet, where that sort of geographic boundary doesn’t make as much sense.

What kind of boundary could the court establish instead?

Koski: This is a difficult case because it begs for a bright-line rule, but it’s hard to come up with one. The ACLU is proposing a test that only gives schools the authority to regulate speech in the “school environment,” which includes things like school-sponsored events or websites. But the district is proposing a much broader test that would allow schools to punish a student’s off-campus speech so long as the student targeted the school and the speech is about a school topic.

Plachinski: Tinker created the “substantial disruption” test, which says that if school officials reasonably believe that a student’s speech will substantially disrupt educational activities, or if other students’ rights were infringed upon, the school can discipline the student. In B.L., the main question is whether Tinker applies to off-campus speech, but we also don’t have a concrete definition of what constitutes a “substantial disruption.” Courts have struggled with the term for the past 50 years, so it will be interesting to see if this ruling provides a more precise definition.

What argument is the school district making for having authority over off-campus speech?

Easop: The district has suggested that it can be important for schools to be able to monitor and respond to violent or harassing speech – if someone is threatening their students, they need to have some recourse. But the student’s lawyers argued that schools would still be able to respond to that type of speech because of the “true threats doctrine,” which preserves the ability to punish threatening speech. There would still be an outlet for that kind of concerning situation.

Whatever the court decides, what would you want educators to take away from this case?

Koski: This has been cast as a First Amendment case, as it should. But it also raises some other issues. I believe educators want students’ rights to be honored and, at the same time, want to be clear that schools are a safe place where learning occurs in many different ways.

Chambers: Schools have a responsibility to help young people navigate how they engage with each other, in person and on social media. I hope schools see this as an opportunity to empower students to use social media more thoughtfully, and when kids inevitably fall short, that they use restorative practices to repair the community and help students learn from the experience, rather than using exclusionary school discipline practices like suspension or expulsion.

Koski: Many of us have been fighting for decades now against exclusionary school discipline to punish kids, to think about ways to repair and restore. I fear that a potential consequence of allowing too much amenability to punish speech outside of school is that, if history is any guide, this will disproportionately land on African-American and Latinx kids, or on kids with disabilities who don’t have the same ability to manage and moderate their behavior. This is a good moment to think about best practices for addressing these issues that don’t involve punishment and that don’t land in a federal court.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: William Koski

The debate over reopening schools during COVID-19

Carrie Spector — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 20:20:16 +0000

The debate over reopening schools during COVID-19

Carrie Spector Thu, 03/04/2021 - 12:20

Ruwan Muhandiramge / Shutterstock

K-12 | School Leadership | Teaching

William Koski talks about why many schools remain shuttered and the challenges facing districts as they look to reopen.

March 8, 2021

Hundreds of thousands of children are still attending school from home, one year after COVID-19 shutdowns hit the United States. In California, where the school reopening fight has reached the courts, “the fireworks have gone off,” said William Koski, a professor of law and education at �� University. “Families are hurting, and they are frustrated, and they have a right to be mad at this point.”

On this episode of School’s In, Koski joined �� Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about the debate over school reopening and the challenges facing districts, from legal issues to infrastructure problems.

There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on, said Koski, from federal and state government (“Where’s the money?”) down to local leadership. Cities that have been most successful in reopening schools, he said, are those where mayors control the schools, such as Chicago. Campuses there are “old, they’re vertical, they’re dense, it’s cold, there’s not a lot of outdoor space,” Koski said. “That is a very difficult public health project there, and yet the mayor was able to hammer [a deal] out.”

On a hopeful note, with vaccination ramping up, full reopening is expected on the horizon. “Realistically, are schools going to be open in Los Angeles, in Oakland and in San Francisco by the end of this [school] year? I don’t know,” Koski said. “But we will have done something very wrong if we’re not open in September.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: William Koski

�� researchers usher in a new era for California’s ‘invisible’ schools

Carrie Spector — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 18:32:38 +0000

�� researchers usher in a new era for California’s ‘invisible’ schools

Carrie Spector Wed, 09/23/2020 - 11:32

Impact | K-12 | School Leadership

An initiative to improve alternative schools, led by the GSE’s John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, reaches a major milestone.

September 23, 2020

By Krysten Crawford

For most of his 29 years in education, Robert Eiseman worked in California public schools that are largely unknown to outsiders: alternative schools set up to help kids who have fallen behind academically. Many of their students are homeless, in foster care, newly released from prison or learning English as a second language.

It’s not an easy career for any educator. Historically underresourced and poorly tracked, alternative schools were originally designed to help young immigrants in the Central Valley learn while working agrarian jobs. Over the decades, new iterations arose to address different types of challenged learners. But with so much attention focused on traditional public schools, California’s alternative schools have been subject to often conflicting regulations and left to fend for themselves — even as their numbers have grown.

“We’ve been like the crazy uncle in the room that nobody wants to talk to,” said Eiseman, whose multiple roles at Los Angeles Unified School District over the years included stints as a principal and a supervisor overseeing more than two dozen alternative schools. Eiseman says he often felt marginalized.

Today, Eiseman is hopeful about the future of California’s 1,030 alternative schools. In September, an independent task force convened by the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at �� Graduate School of Education delivered to state regulators its final report on an expansive new accountability system designed specifically for alternative programs. The Gardner Center is also convening alternative school leaders from across the state for an ongoing partnership to help implement the recommendations and measure the impact.

The initiative signifies a new era for California’s alternative schools, according to Jorge Ruiz de Velasco, deputy director of the Gardner Center.

Learning why some perform better

The new accountability system, dubbed the Dashboard Alternative School Status (DASS), will for the first time provide a comprehensive view of how individual schools are performing through a number of measures, among them student graduation rates, academic proficiency and readiness to attend college or launch a career.

“We finally have data that will provide meaningful insights into which alternative schools are doing better and those that are not,” Ruiz de Velasco said. The dashboard mirrors the state system for tracking and measuring performance of traditional public schools, but in ways that recognize the uniqueness of alternative programs and the 200,000-plus secondary school students they serve.

With DASS in place, the Gardner Center has turned its attention to what’s happening on the ground in alternative schools. Earlier this summer, the center launched the California Learning Collaborative on Alternative Education, a four-year partnership with 15 public alternative schools in nine school districts from across the state. The goal is to bring together teachers, principals, administrators and �� faculty to better understand why some alternative programs perform better than others. Ruiz de Velasco says it is only one of two research-practice partnerships in the country that are dedicated to alternative schools.

“By diving deep into practice, we will be able to see how these new metrics are taking root at the school and district level,” he said. “We can improve outcomes for a student population that has been invisible for too long.”

Members of the task force convened by the Gardner Center include (l-r) Daisy Gonzales, California State Assembly staff; Tom Herman, California Department of Education (CDE) staff; Milbrey McLaughlin and Jorge Ruiz de Velasco of the Gardner Center, Cindy Kazanis, director of the CDE's analysis, measurement and accountability reporting division; and Jenny Singh, administrator of the CDE's academic accountability unit.

The ‘neglected stepchild’ of the school system

In California, there are three types of alternative schools: continuation high schools, aimed at students 16 and older and lack enough credits to graduate on time; community day schools, which serve students who have been expelled or are on probation; and opportunity schools, for those who regularly skip school or behave badly.

In all, state data indicate that roughly 350,000 students enroll in a K-12 alternative programs in any given year. Of those, about 200,000 are in middle and high school, which translates to about one in 16 secondary school students.

“To the extent that these kids have been visible, it’s been in the most negative sense,” said Milbrey McLaughlin, the founding director of the Gardner Center and professor emerita at the GSE. “They’re seen as dropouts, thugs, addicts, throwaways. The problem, however, isn’t the kids. Traditional schools have failed them.”

McLaughlin, along with Ruiz de Velasco, began identifying problems with California’s alternative schools more than a decade ago. They first documented systemic problems in a 2008 report and, in 2012, followed up with comprehensive recommendations for policies for improving them, including revamping existing state accountability measures that were widely seen as deficient, in part because reporting them was voluntary and they failed to take into account key differences between alternative and traditional programs.

Michael Kirst, a professor emeritus at the GSE who was then president of the California State Board of Education, said the Gardner Center’s insights proved to be a game changer. “On their own, they recognized that alternative schools have been the under-the-radar, neglected stepchild of the high school system,” he said. “They made state policymakers realize that this was a big problem that nobody was looking at. Their reports did not just gather dust on a shelf.”

When, in 2015, California set out to redesign its accountability system for all public schools, Ruiz de Velasco offered to form an independent advisory task force to help state officials create uniform performance measures for alternative schools that complemented metrics used for traditional schools.

"[These kids are] seen as dropouts, thugs, addicts, throwaways. The problem, however, isn’t the kids. Traditional schools have failed them.”

— Milbrey McLaughlin, Founding Director of the Gardner Center

Next up: Best practices through research

The California Advisory Task Force on Alternative Schools launched in 2017 with support from the Stuart Foundation. Its members included Eiseman, the retired LAUSD leader, and 28 alternative school leaders, education advocates and state regulators. The group’s first act was to help craft a new definition of alternative schools, which then allowed school districts and charter schools to begin developing programs for at-risk youth. Next came DASS, an early version of which the state launched in the 2018-19 school year with the task force’s input.

Now in its third year, DASS collects and displays the same six metrics used for traditional schools — only adapted to alternative schools. For example, graduation rates for alternative schools are assessed based on the percentage of seniors who earn a high school diploma (or an equivalent) within a year. Graduation rates for traditional schools, on the other hand, are calculated according to the percentage of students in each ninth-grade cohort who graduate with a high school diploma within four or five years. The shorter time frame for alternative schools helps accounts for their transience; students often cycle in and out of them.

Another performance indicator tailored to alternative schools measures how prepared new graduates are for college or work. For traditional schools, the “college and career readiness indicator” is based largely on how rigorous the coursework was. For alternative school students, however, starting a career is often a top priority. The task force recommended — and the state agreed — for the California Department of Education to begin collecting new data to also account for how many students complete internships, job training programs and other work-related opportunities. This will enable new measures for assessing student progress and create incentives for school leaders to make rigorous work-based learning opportunities more available in alternative schools.

The dashboard is still a work in progress. The state is now taking up additional recommendations from the task force that would incorporate a number of local measures into the new accountability system. This includes a “positive transition rate” that is intended to better capture the number of students who leave school without a diploma but nonetheless transition to community college or adult education programs, join the military or otherwise pursue a continuing education path.

It’s also too soon to know how effective DASS ultimately will be, said Ruiz de Velasco. But he is optimistic that the new accountability system and the Learning Collaborative combined will finally shed light on alternative schools and the reasons why some perform better than others.

“This story doesn’t end with accountability, which is really about incentives at the top of the system,” he said. “Through our work with the California Learning Collaborative, our goal now is to identify best practices that align with these new performance metrics.” The Stuart and the William & Flora Hewlett foundations are supporting the collaborative.

Eiseman, the retired LAUSD leader, will advise the new research-practice partnership. While he, too, is hopeful that DASS and the learning collaborative can together lead to big improvements in alternative education, he is also excited about what they mean to him personally.

“For the first time,” he said, “I am in an environment where I don’t first have to explain what I did for a living or the reasons I was doing it.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Milbrey McLaughlin , Michael Kirst

��-run program prepares community college leaders for uncertainty

Carrie Spector — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 23:45:48 +0000

��-run program prepares community college leaders for uncertainty

Carrie Spector Wed, 09/02/2020 - 16:45

Photo: Dasha Blankovaya / Unsplash

Faculty and Programs | Higher Education | School Leadership

�� scholar Thomas Ehrlich and Montgomery College president DeRionne Pollard talk about how community colleges can navigate the COVID-19 crisis.

September 3, 2020

By Carrie Spector

In a typical year, some 40 percent of undergraduates in the United States are educated at community colleges. That figure was expected to jump even higher this fall, with young people opting for more affordable online courses during the pandemic and unemployed adults looking to develop skills for a changing job market.

But that widely held prediction hasn’t panned out. In fact, many of these public institutions are facing steep declines in enrollment—a loss likely to be compounded by anticipated cuts in their funding as the economic fallout from COVID-19 grows.

To prepare community college leaders for the challenges of the top role, the �� Educational Leadership Initiative at the Graduate School of Education (GSE) partnered with the Aspen Institute in 2015 to launch the Aspen Rising Presidents Fellowship, a yearlong program of seminars, networking and mentoring. Over the past five years, nearly 160 fellows have completed the program, a quarter of whom have gone on to become community college presidents.

This summer, a new cohort of fellows began grappling with leadership issues triggered by the global pandemic, a bleak economic forecast and growing awareness of long-entrenched racism in America. GSE adjunct professor Thomas Ehrlich, a former dean of �� Law School who has also served as president of Indiana University and provost of the University of Pennsylvania, is a faculty leader with the Aspen program. DeRionne Pollard, president of Montgomery College in Maryland, has been a mentor for the program since its launch.

We spoke with Ehrlich and Pollard about the particular difficulties facing community colleges this fall and what it might take to sustain these institutions through the pandemic.

Thomas Ehrlich

Everyone in higher ed is dealing with extraordinary challenges this fall. How is the situation different for community colleges?

Ehrlich: Community colleges are the front lines of higher education in America these days. Of all low-income students, almost half attend community colleges as their first college after high school. More than a third of students enrolled for credit are Black or Hispanic. These are populations that have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, the economic crisis and the crisis of systemic racism that is now hitting home for people in ways it hadn’t before.

Community colleges are also dealing with more of a bimodal student population: some are right out of high school, but many are older, part-time students, often raising families. Many have been working full-time. They are grappling with the challenges of the moment more so than a lot of other undergraduates.

Pollard: Typically, when it comes to economic recessions, community colleges see a surge in enrollment as students look for an affordable, local education that’s going to help them get into the job market fairly quickly. But for a lot of our students, the idea of going to school right now is a distant 50th on the list of things they need to do. Especially if they have young kids whose schools are going online, they’re going to have to be there to provide some support. They might have to change their work hours. Their own household and economic reality could mean that they’re not going to be able to make the choice to advance their education right now.

DeRionne Pollard

How are these institutions likely to be affected financially?

Pollard: Most community colleges already have very tight budgets, and we don’t have the kind of revenue sources you see elsewhere in higher education. We don’t have residence halls. We don’t typically have robust athletic programs. We rent out our facilities for theater productions and so forth, which is usually a good source of revenue, but we can’t do that now that our facilities are closed because we can’t have people congregating.

Ehrlich: On average, community colleges rely on federal, state and local funding for almost two-thirds of their revenue, and most of these colleges were already facing grinding shortages of funds before the pandemic. These revenues are certainly going to be cut further if states and communities have fewer resources.

Community colleges are known for providing a lot of hands-on training in technical skills, like nursing or auto repair. How is it possible to sustain that kind of programming remotely?

Pollard: About 5 percent of our courses will have some face-to-face component in the fall. Because of external accreditation, students in some programs—like automotive technology or health care—will have to demonstrate tactical skills. If our students need the certification in order to get a job, we have to try to deliver it.

There are some highly sophisticated online simulations that work well for some courses, like lower division lab sciences, but not for others. To learn how to fix brakes, you have to actually touch a brake. You can’t simulate your way out of that.

Ehrlich: Community colleges are much more occupationally intense than private or broad access public universities in terms of their curricula, and it’s true, those courses are difficult to do online. Complicating matters is that the majority of courses are taught by adjunct faculty, who get paid by the course. If you’re trying to make a living this way, you might be teaching at two or three or four different campuses. If you’re adjunct faculty teaching auto mechanics and you’re not able to do it under these circumstances, you’re not going to get paid.

How do you see community colleges emerging from this moment?

Ehrlich: There’s the old cliché about not wasting a crisis—I don’t think anyone’s ever had to say, ‘Don’t waste three crises,’ but here we are. Colleges can be amazingly resilient if they revamp themselves in ways that make them stronger than they were beforehand. They’re going to have to tighten their administration and become an even leaner operation. And online learning is going to be with us for quite a while, so institutions that can innovate and reinvent themselves for the times may be able to keep themselves from serious financial trouble. That might mean expanding continuing or lifelong education programs, which I think is going to be the single biggest change in higher education over the next couple of decades, or developing more collaboration with industry partners.

Pollard: We were designed for this. If you go back and read the introductory language to the Truman Commission Report [which called for establishing a network of public community colleges in 1947], it talked about the fact that we were a nation that was fragmented. We had ethnic strife. We were politically disconnected. We had growing diversity but did not know how to recognize that. We were disillusioned. We lacked a national identity.

We’ve been here before. After every major recession, community colleges have been there to help rebuild the country. After Katrina, the community colleges in New Orleans and Houston were paramount to the rebuilding of those cities. We know our communities—we’re intimately connected to them, and there’s a mutuality and dependency in that. We become anchor institutions where communal healing and rebound occurs.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Thomas Ehrlich

Creating more inclusive schools

Carrie Spector — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 23:56:53 +0000

Creating more inclusive schools

Carrie Spector Mon, 08/17/2020 - 16:56

Image: sv_sunny/iStock

Diversity and Identity | School Leadership

Eric Abrams shares strategies for making schools more welcoming—and why falling short of the ideal is inevitable.

August 10, 2020

Amid growing awareness of long-entrenched racism in the United States, many schools are taking steps to create a more inclusive environment. But it’s unrealistic to aim for a scenario where students and teachers get everything right, says Eric Abrams, chief inclusion officer at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE).

“We all make mistakes,” he says. “It's impossible for any of us to understand every single nuance of every culture, every faith, every sexual orientation, every ability status that exists in the world.”

On this episode of School’s In, Abrams joins GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about what a more inclusive school or campus can look like and how to move toward that vision, including ways to help kids learn to fight racism in their own communities.

Abrams says his job is not to change people’s minds or to tell them how to think. It’s to help them be more conscious of the actions they take.

“I don't think it's possible to make a space that's going to be safe in terms of nobody ever having their feelings hurt or being offended by something that happens,” he says.

But it’s important, he says, for people to develop the capacity to face their misstep with grace and to learn how to apologize in a meaningful way. “It ought to be okay to make a mistake and have somebody call you on it,” he says.

Learning these skills takes time, he says—a lifetime, even. ”If we can put conversations about equity, diversity and inclusion in the category of lifelong learning, we'll all be much better off.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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College in the time of COVID-19

Carrie Spector — Wed, 27 May 2020 20:36:04 +0000

College in the time of COVID-19

Carrie Spector Wed, 05/27/2020 - 13:36

A-Digit/Getty Images

Higher Education | School Leadership | Teaching

Harry Elam talks about how higher education is responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

May 18, 2020

How do you run a college in the middle of a global health and economic crisis? Is it possible to maintain a commitment to hands-on, experiential learning while courses are being taught remotely? If you need to limit the number of students living on campus at one time, who gets to be there and when?

Photo: Linda A. Cicero/�� News Service

On this episode of School’s In, �� administrator Harry Elam joins Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about the decisions involved in running a college or university during the current crisis.

Elam has held many roles at �� since joining the faculty in 1990. He currently serves as vice provost for undergraduate education, vice president for the arts and senior vice provost for education, as well as a professor oftheater and performance studies. In July he will take on the role of president at Occidental College, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles.

Now straddling responsibilities at both institutions, Elam is deeply engaged in plans for a time of tremendous uncertainty—considering different ways, for example, to modify the timeline of the academic year, to get creative when teaching remotely and to help lessen the impact of economic disparities that have been exacerbated by the crisis.

“The playing field is all the more uneven,” he says. “We’ve got to think consciously about what we can do to make it a better experience.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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Moving toward a ‘community school’ model

Carrie Spector — Wed, 27 May 2020 16:45:38 +0000

Moving toward a ‘community school’ model

Carrie Spector Wed, 05/27/2020 - 09:45

Chuwy/Getty Images

Education Policy | K-12 | School Leadership

Milbrey McLaughlin talks about what it takes to create a full-service community school district, and how this could be a model for COVID-19 recovery.

May 18, 2020

The COVID-19 crisis has made it clear that schools offer much more than learning, with many families struggling to offset the sudden loss of support for meals, child care and other services.

As districts explore ways to support students through the economically uncertain times ahead, some are looking to the “community school” model: an approach that integrates health and medical care, social services, mentoring and other resources with academics in K-12 schools.

It takes an array of community partners to meet students’ needs, especially in high-poverty urban areas, says Milbrey McLaughlin, a professor emerita at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) and founder of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. “Schools can’t do it alone.”

On this episode of School’s In, McLaughlin joins GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about what it takes to create a full-service community school district, where schools mobilize and deliver community resources as an integrated part of the school day.

McLaughlin’s new book, The Way We Do School: The Making of Oakland’s Full-Service Community School District, offers an in-depth profile of the nation’s most ambitious community school initiative: a nearly 10-year effort to transform all 86 district schools in Oakland, Calif., into community schools.

“It’s top-down support for bottom-up change,” says McLaughlin, noting that the program has stayed strong despite the district’s considerable challenges. “Oakland has had five superintendents in eight years. Even with that kind of leadership turnover, the plan remains in place.”

You can listen to School's In on SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Soundcloud.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Milbrey McLaughlin

School Leadership

How a ������������ center is bringing the ‘gold standard’ in teaching within reach

A program with national reach

������������ GSE and the Aspen Institute mark the end of a seven-year partnership

Making leaders that last

Is now the time to revolutionize school?

Can schools punish a student for a social media post? ������������ scholars discuss an imminent Supreme Court ruling

The debate over reopening schools during COVID-19

������������ researchers usher in a new era for California’s ‘invisible’ schools

������������-run program prepares community college leaders for uncertainty

Creating more inclusive schools

College in the time of COVID-19

Moving toward a ‘community school’ model

How a �� center is bringing the ‘gold standard’ in teaching within reach

�� GSE and the Aspen Institute mark the end of a seven-year partnership

Can schools punish a student for a social media post? �� scholars discuss an imminent Supreme Court ruling

�� researchers usher in a new era for California’s ‘invisible’ schools

��-run program prepares community college leaders for uncertainty