Afterword to the Paperback Edition

SINCE THE HARDBACK publication of this book, I have traveled all over the United States speaking to a wide variety of audiences—state school superintendents, educators and parents from both public and independent schools, and community, philanthropic, business, and military leaders. I have also had opportunities to speak with leadership groups in the Middle and Far East. From Bahrain to Taiwan, from Wall Street to West Point, the response has been remarkably consistent. Almost without exception, diverse audiences have affirmed the importance of the Seven Survival Skills and shared my concern that the majority of students are leaving high school without the skills that matter most—even in those districts that score well on Advanced Placement exams and state tests.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the most frequent question I’m asked is: “What can we do about the problem?” Fortunately, because of some important work that has been done over the last several years, there are exciting new answers to this question. In this brief Afterword, I outline essential steps to overcome the “global achievement gap.” I begin by considering what communities can do to create a higher level of accountability for schools and districts—beyond standardized test scores—and I tell the story of how the Virginia Beach City Public Schools set about transforming teaching and learning in their district. I then describe what many educators are doing to improve teaching and enhance learning in their classes in schools throughout the United States and elsewhere. Taken together, many of these initiatives and examples point to what we—educators, parents, business and community leaders—need to be advocating for with our state and national legislators as essential elements of an Accountability 2.0 system for education in the twenty-first century.

Creating Accountability for What Matters Most: All Students Graduating College-, Career-, and Citizenship-Ready

The first critical step in creating a community-wide focus on the skills that matter most for students’ success is to engage in a very different kind of strategic planning. Typically, districts create new strategic plans every few years in a process that is usually led by school boards with very little community involvement. All too often, these efforts result in the production of overly long written documents with lists of five-year goals (such as improving test scores by a certain percentage), which rarely result in any real change in classrooms. Once in a great while, though, a superintendent sees a strategic planning effort as an opportunity for community engagement and adult learning—and as a way to create a road map for significant improvements. One such leader with whom I have worked is Jim Merrill, currently in his fourth year as superintendent of the Virginia Beach City Public Schools in Virginia.

The third-largest school district in the state, Virginia Beach enrolls 70,000 students and has a diverse minority population that is 45 percent of the total enrollment.1 When Jim was selected for the superintendent’s position in 2006, the district enjoyed a reputation as highly successful, with all of its schools having made “adequate yearly progress” on state tests and meeting additional accreditation standards. However, Jim was concerned that Virginia’s tests (like those of most other states) assessed only basic skills with a minimum level of proficiency required to “pass” and, hence, that success on these tests was not a reliable measure of students’ career- and college-readiness. In his second year on the job, Jim and his senior administrators met with me for a day-long retreat and decided to work on a very different kind of strategic planning process—one that would involve the entire community in a conversation about how the world has changed and what were the most important student outcomes that the school district should now be accountable for.

With strong school-board leadership and support, Virginia Beach staff set out to collect the kinds of data that they thought should inform a more meaningful strategic planning process. First, they conducted focus groups with local employers and college teachers about the skills students needed to succeed. Second, they administered the College and Work Readiness Assessment (discussed in Chapter 3) to a sample population of their 12th graders and learned that—despite having scored well on state tests—the top 50 percent of these seniors who took the test were in the lowest quartile of college freshmen taking the same test. Third, they took a hard look at the state-mandated formula for computing the district’s high school graduation rate and concluded that it resulted in inaccurate—and overly optimistic—reporting of the percentage of students who successfully completed high school in the district—as is the case in most states.² Although it turned out that the district’s 82 percent graduation rate was more than 10 percent higher than the national average, Jim declared that this was unacceptable. Finally, they subscribed to the National Student Clearinghouse, which gave them data on their students’ enrollment and persistence in postsecondary-degree programs.³ To better understand these quantitative data, the district conducted subsequent focus groups with recent Virginia Beach graduates about some of the ways they felt most and least well prepared by the schools for their futures.

The culmination of this effort was a community-wide meeting to talk about these and other district data and to consider what were the most important outcomes for Virginia Beach graduates in a changing world. Nearly 1,000 people—educators, parents, community members—gathered in the Virginia Beach Convention Center on a warm summer evening in 2008 for discussion at tables seating ten. After an hour of presentations, which included looking at various data as well as at videos of the focus groups that had been conducted, and then engaging in extended conversation at each table, individuals were asked to consider a long list of possible learning priorities for the district and to select the ones they considered most important. These “votes” were then quickly tabulated electronically. To the surprise of many, there was a virtual consensus on the outcomes that should be the highest priority for the district in coming years: The skills of critical thinking and problem solving were at the top of nearly everyone’s list.

Jim, his staff, and the school board then took this information and created a very different kind of strategic plan. Instead of the long laundry list of mashed-together goals, priorities, and initiatives that, all too often, is the result of most districts’ strategic planning efforts, the Virginia Beach strategic plan, called Compass to 2015: A Strategic Plan for Student Success, has been streamlined down to one strategic goal, four outcomes for students, and five strategic objectives, with a few key strategies and measures identified for each—and it fits on the front and back of one page! The plan is quoted below, minus the key strategies and measures. (You can download the complete document at this link to the Virginia Beach website: http://www.vbschools.com/compass/StrategicPlan.pdf.)

Our Strategic Goal

Recognizing that the long range goal of the VBCPS [Virginia Beach City Public Schools] is the successful preparation and graduation of every student, the near term goal is that by 2015, 95 percent or more of VBCPS students will graduate having mastered the skills that they need to succeed as 21st century learners, workers and citizens.

Our Outcomes for Student Success

Our primary focus is on teaching and assessing those skills our students need to thrive as 21st century learners, workers and citizens. All VBCPS students will be:

                 •  Academically proficient;

                 •  Effective communicators and collaborators;

                 •  Globally aware, independent, responsible learners and citizens; and

                 •  Critical and creative thinkers, innovators and problem solvers.

Our Strategic Objectives

                 1)  All teachers will engage every student in meaningful, authentic and rigorous work through the use of innovative instructional practices and supportive technologies that will motivate students to be self-directed and inquisitive learners.

                 2)  VBCPS will develop and implement a balanced assessment system that accurately reflects student demonstration and mastery of VBCPS outcomes for student success.

                 3)  Each school will improve achievement for all students while closing achievement gaps for identified student groups, with particular focus on African American males.

                 4)  VBCPS will create opportunities for parents, community and business leaders to fulfill their essential roles as actively engaged partners in supporting student achievement and outcomes for student success.

                 5)  VBCPS will be accountable for developing essential leader, teacher and staff competencies and optimizing all resources to achieve the school division’s strategic goal and outcomes for student success.

The district leaders’ next step was to begin working on creating accountability for teaching and assessing the four essential student outcomes that had been identified. They decided to start by defining what critical thinking means and, more important, what it looks like in the classroom. District central-office and building administrators conducted “learning walks”—using the same process I describe in Chapter 2—to help everyone be more clear about what critical thinking looks like when it’s happening. The results of their efforts are summarized on their website,⁴ which I have excerpted here:

Last school year, we concentrated on looking for critical thinking skills, attempting to see how these skills were manifested in student engagement, questioning and work products. This school year, the leadership learning walks will still be looking for the hallmarks of critical thinking, but we will ask principals to specifically point out their areas of focus as the result of the Compass to 2015 strategic plan. The goal is to support schools as they work on the needs inherent in their schools. All learning walks are followed by a conversation with the school leadership.

      In the meantime, we anticipate that stakeholders may ask us: How do we know when we have encountered critical thinking in classrooms? Below is a list of attributes identified collectively by the principals of Virginia Beach City Public Schools:

                 •     Students successfully grapple with higher-order questions asked by teacher.

                 •     Students articulate meaningful response to “so what” (what if, why).

                 •     Students generate higher-level questions.

                 •     Students engage in authentic learning activities and/or create authentic work.

                 •     Students defend positions with justification based on factual evidence and data.

                 •     Students analyze and solve new problems by generating a variety of ideas and solutions.

                 •     Students recognize and pose problems inherent in a given situation.

                 •     Students adapt learned knowledge to more complex/ambiguous situations.

                 •     Students use and explain the right method of thinking (reasoning, decision making, problem solving, making judgments).

                 •     Students evaluate and communicate their own thinking.

                 •     Students make connections and predictions using prior knowledge.

                 •     Students select, create, use and communicate effectiveness of a variety of tools, such as graphic organizers or grid paper.

      Education is no longer just about teaching Johnny (or Juan) to read. It’s about teaching him to think critically about what he reads, interpret what he reads, and relate what he reads to his own life. If we are asking students for critical examination and reflection, we must be willing to do the same. These learning walks are our common journey to better understand the needs of the children, to improve how we teach and to more clearly define what we expect of our students and ourselves.

“It’s the hardest work I’ve ever undertaken in my career,” Jim told me recently. “We’re trying to effect change at scale, and we have to ‘play on two playing fields’ at once. We’re still being judged by the criteria for ‘Adequate Yearly Progress’ and state accountability standards, while we are holding ourselves to a much higher standard. We have to succeed at both. It’s hard but it’s the right work to be doing.”

Assessments of Students’ Mastery of Core Competencies

Recently, there has been much discussion about creating systems that reward teachers who improve standardized test scores and making these scores a part of all teachers’ evaluations. While I strongly advocate strengthening evaluation systems for educators and phasing out tenure at every level, the risk of so-called pay-for-performance plans is that they will cause individual teachers—working in secret because they are competing against their colleagues—to figure out gimmicks for improving their students’ test scores but not necessarily their learning. As we’ve seen, test-score improvements don’t tell us very much about what students know and are able to do. If you go back and look at the Virginia Beach leaders’ list of evidence of critical thinking in the classroom, you will notice something interesting: The words teacher and test do not appear. As Jim explained, “When we began doing learning walks to look for evidence of critical thinking, we initially just focused on what the teachers were doing. We soon discovered, though, that the only real evidence of critical thinking happening in the classroom was in what the students were doing.”

The most effective way to assess the quality of instruction in a classroom—and to ensure that students have the skills they need for careers, college, and citizenship—is to systematically look at student work and to regularly require students to “show what they know.” As you may recall from Chapter 6, when I asked Ben Daley at High Tech High how he assessed the effectiveness of a teacher, he answered simply: “We judge teachers by the quality of their students’ work.” You may also remember that all three of the schools I profile in Chapter 6 require students to show mastery of core competencies through culminating projects and portfolios of their work. Students are required to “perform” in order to show what they can do with what they know—much in the same way that student performances in athletics or the performing arts are the only true test of competence in those areas.

There is growing interest in the idea of having all 12th graders perform senior projects as a way to assess critical thinking and communication skills. Beginning with the graduating class of 2008, all seniors in Rhode Island public schools are now required to complete a “performance-based” assessment in order to graduate. According to the Rhode Island Department of Education website, this new graduation requirement “was developed in response to concerns from colleges and employers that high school graduates—even those who performed well in courses and on tests—were not always well prepared for college and work. To succeed after high school, students must think creatively, solve problems, work in groups, speak in public, and apply what they have learned in real-world situations. The mission of the diploma system is to ensure that all students can compete in academic and employment settings, and can contribute to society.” These performances can include an exhibition of student work (such as a project or internship) or a graduation portfolio. According to the Department of Education, “Each assessment is designed around the student’s own interests or passions.”5 (The exact requirements are determined by individual high schools.)

Of course, individual schools—including many that are members of the Coalition of Essential Schools—have required senior projects for years. One well-documented example that I recently came across is the senior-project requirement of Quest High School, a public high school of choice in Humble, Texas. All students spent the entire second semester of their senior year working in teams to complete a three-part project, which includes a twenty-page argument-based paper, a community service project, and a culminating public presentation of the team’s work and research to a panel of judges, parents, teachers, students, and community members. The Coalition offers an excellent thirty-minute video that follows the members of one team as they work on their project components during the semester. The video also includes a seven-page table of rubrics used to assess the different elements of each student’s project.6 (Similar senior projects are required in Virginia Beach’s themed academies and advanced academic programs.)

While new 12th-grade project and portfolio graduation requirements represent an important innovation, they would be far more effective if they were incorporated into all courses at every grade level and became “graduation requirements” for transitioning from elementary to middle school and then again from middle to high school. Mission Hill School, founded by world-renowned educator Deborah Meier, is an excellent example of a K–8 public school in Boston that requires all students to complete an extensive portfolio and exhibitions of mastery as a requirement for completion of 8th grade. Students begin working on their portfolio and exhibition requirements in 6th grade.⁷

Another excellent example of an international program that requires students to demonstrate mastery (and one that I regret not having explored more fully while doing the research for this book) is the International Baccalaureate Program. Developed initially as a way to standardize course and curricula requirements across a variety of schools around the world, the IB Program has evolved to become a coherent K–12 approach to teaching and assessing many of the Seven Survival Skills. High school students enrolled in IB must take at least six IB courses that culminate in rigorous exams on which students must demonstrate that they can apply what they have learned. But, perhaps even more important, they must also complete the following additional requirements:⁸

Theory of Knowledge

One of the most important elements of the DP (Diploma Program) is the theory of knowledge course, which challenges students to question the bases of knowledge—to reflect critically on how they know what they believe to be facts or the truth. It consists almost entirely of exploring questions about different sources of knowledge (perception, language, emotion, reason) and different kinds of knowledge (scientific, artistic, mathematical, historical), such as:

                 •     Do we construct reality or do we recognize it?

                 •     Does knowledge always require some kind of rational basis? Is there any kind of knowledge that can be attained solely through emotion?

                 •     Is scientific knowledge progressive; has it always grown? Can we reach a point where everything important in a scientific sense is known?

Creativity, Action, Service (CAS)

Another important element of the DP is creativity, action, service (CAS). To fulfill this requirement, students must take part in artistic activities (creative); sports, expeditions or local or international projects (action); and community or social service projects (service). Participation in CAS raises students’ awareness of community needs and gives them an opportunity to apply what they have learned in the classroom to address these needs. It also gives them confidence in their ability to bring about change. The projects must have tangible results and offer real benefits to others. Reflection on their experience is also an important part of student involvement in CAS.

The Extended Essay

An extended essay, of at most 4,000 words, offers students an opportunity to conduct an in-depth study of a topic of special interest. The experience and skills gained in carrying out independent research and producing a structured, substantial piece of writing provide excellent preparation for independent study at the university level.

Because of these additional requirements, I consider the IB Program to be a far better standard of rigor than Advanced Placement courses, which cover too much content and require far too much factual recall on the final exams, rather than requiring students to show what they can do with what they know. In contrast to the IB Diploma Program, for which all students must write an extended research paper, students routinely take an entire AP curriculum and never write a research paper because teachers say there is simply no time for such extended independent work when so much required content must be covered. I recently conducted a focus group with some 12th-grade students who had taken courses in both programs. When I asked about the differences between them, one student replied, “AP courses teach you what to think. IB teaches you how to think.” The other students at the table nodded in agreement.

There is something else I would like to see explored by schools and districts: In addition to regular exhibitions of mastery and extended independent work, all students could be required to maintain digital portfolios that would follow them from year to year. Digital portfolios offer excellent opportunities for students to have a real audience for their work and for documenting their progress over time. And, as my colleague Evangeline Stefanakis’s research has shown, digital portfolios offer students who normally do not perform well on timed, standardized tests an important alternative way of demonstrating proficiency.9

Although individual students and their teacher would have access to all of the students’ work produced during the course of a school year, students might also “publish” a few products each year—research papers, reports, presentations, and so on—that could be viewed by parents and their teachers in future years. Imagine a teacher being able to start a school year by perusing the work that students had done the previous year. Imagine, also, that such portfolios of work, which would be the property of individual students and their families, could follow the student to another school or district—or even be shared as a part of the college admissions process.

As you may recall, all three of the schools that I profile in Chapter 6 require students to maintain digital portfolios, and you can browse through some excellent examples on the High Tech High website. Recently, I learned that digital portfolios are widely used by many schools in several Canadian provinces, and the software for maintaining them is available for free.¹⁰ A number of educational institutions are working collaboratively in Canada to continue developing the software and to research its impact in classrooms. The technologies for developing and maintaining high-quality student digital portfolios—free software, inexpensive digital cameras, and “cloud” file storage—have recently become readily available and are very reasonably priced. For this reason, I believe that digital portfolios have the potential to become another one of those “disruptive technologies” in education that Clayton Christensen writes about in his provocative book, Disrupting Class.¹¹

Working Collaboratively—and Transparently

The work individual teachers may do to improve students’ standardized test scores is usually done alone in the secrecy of a classroom, and the results are often not known for many months. By contrast, students’ demonstrations of mastery through culminating projects, the IB Program, and digital portfolios lend themselves to a far greater degree of teacher collaboration—and the results are immediately and publicly evident. In schools with robust programs that require students to do final exhibitions and maintain digital portfolios, teams of teachers routinely assess the quality of student work together, and parents and community members are invited to attend special student exhibition nights. In addition, outsiders (college teachers, employers, and community members) are often asked to “audit” the quality of randomly chosen portfolios. And the IB program requires that teams of teachers from other schools grade a school’s final exams and papers. In fact, schools cannot even be accepted into the IB Program without rigorous peer review, which includes visits from an inspection team.

All of these opportunities contribute to creating a different kind of “face-to-face” accountability, where teachers’ work is more transparent and therefore subject to greater scrutiny. Their work—and that of their students—is regularly on display. If the students are consistently producing projects and portfolios that are of lesser quality, it is much harder to hide.

In addition to phasing in student portfolios, districts should encourage teachers to develop portfolios of their own work. Here’s the ideal: You are looking at an excellent example of a student’s paper or project in his or her portfolio, and you want to know more about the teacher’s “work”—the project or unit design—that lies behind this student work. So you follow a link embedded in the student’s portfolio that takes you to the teacher’s portfolio. Here you might find the following:

           •   The outline of the unit of study or project design, which includes goals and outcomes, assignments, resources, and so on

           •   A video clip showing how the teacher introduced the project or unit of study

           •   Video clips of class and small-group discussions

           •   The rubrics used to assess students’ work, with a range of sample papers or projects produced by students (all capable of being downloaded for discussion by teams of teachers)

           •   Finally, a videotaped discussion of students’ experiences in doing the work—what they found most engaging, ways in which they were motivated, what they learned, and so on

As we learned in Chapter 4, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards offers voluntary advanced certification for teachers—and peer-reviewed portfolios prepared by candidate teachers that include sample lesson plans and video clips of teaching are essential elements of their certification process. Moreover, the National Board is now working on a similar certification process for principals.¹² In that same chapter, I outlined the kinds of things I think should be included in a principal’s portfolio.

What student, teacher, and leader portfolios all have in common is the concept of performance standards and performance-based assessment. There is a great deal of talk about adopting national content standards, but I would like to see much more attention paid to the idea of performance standards. You may know the parts of speech (a content standard), but the real question is, can you write an effective essay?—which is the performance standard that matters most in the real world. You can quickly do an Internet search for the definition of gerund (something I always struggled to remember when I taught grammar), but no amount of time spent online will likely teach you how to write better essays. The Council of Chief State School Officers has recently received a great deal of attention for its advocacy of national content standards. Much less well known, and potentially far more important, is the work it has been doing in the development of performance standards—beginning with writing.¹³

In fact, the United States lags quite far behind in the development of performance-based assessments for accountability purposes. Linda Darling-Hammond has researched how the best education systems around the world regularly use performance-based assessments in most courses and even as a part of national exams.14 And now Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft have formed an alliance to develop online assessments of twenty-first-century skills.¹⁵ This test will be piloted as part of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests in 2012.

Sponsoring Research and Development

The calls to overhaul our education system often ignore an essential precondition: You cannot create new products and services without research and development. Schools, districts, and states have no “education R & D” budget. How, then, are they supposed to create the new models of teaching, learning, and school organization? Expecting compliance to top-down mandates is simply not an effective strategy for creating the kinds of change I’ve been describing. And while the U.S. Department of Education has recently announced a series of “innovation grants,” it’s not clear exactly what kind of innovations the Department hopes to incentivize beyond better ways to improve scores on bad tests.

One cannot expect an entire school district to transform itself from a model of schooling that is nearly a hundred years old—and all too familiar to virtually every adult—to a new model of twenty-first-century learning that seems far too abstract and ethereal to many. We need to create more models and laboratories—existence proofs—of twenty-first-century schools all over the country. Throughout the past decade, the charter school movement has spawned a great deal of R & D in secondary school redesign (done with significant support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others). All of the models I describe in Chapter 6 grew out of intentional efforts to create very different kinds of high schools. But schools do not have to be charters to be innovative. New Tech High is a national network of high schools that is growing rapidly around the country, and most of these new schools are not charters. Rather, New Tech High is often invited to start a new school in a district in order to demonstrate what a different model of education can accomplish. In fact, with the visionary leadership of Governor Mitch Daniels and strong support from the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Center of Excellence in Leadership and Learning (CELL), Indiana is now working toward establishing at least one High Tech High in every single school district in the state.16

I would like to see every large school district—or associations of smaller districts—establish laboratory schools similar to New Tech High and the three I’ve described in this book. In effect, they would be district-sponsored “charter-like” schools—similar to the Pilot Schools established by the Boston Public Schools and Teacher’s Union in 1994 that now serve about 10 percent of the BPS enrollment.¹⁷ Parents and teachers would choose to apply to the schools, which could have a lottery to ensure that the student composition is the same as in other schools, and these schools would have the same resources per student as other schools in the district. But they’d also have a distinct mission: to develop new models of teaching, learning, and assessment—the practices that I’ve described here—that would, over time, spread to the other schools in the district. Establishing such schools could have the added advantages of incentivizing the “edupreneurs” who might otherwise leave teaching and of offering competition to area charter schools.

Beyond “R & D”: Creating a Culture of Innovation

A question I am asked by many educators is: “How can I teach the Seven Survival Skills to students when I haven’t learned them?”—an important question that leads me to ask several others. For example: How are these skills best developed by and for adults, and to what extent is a culture of innovation an essential precondition for this new kind of adult and student learning? What do some of the most innovative companies in different sectors do to develop adults’ capacities to be innovators, and what might educators learn from them? These questions lie at the very heart of the challenge to create the new innovation economy that many are now calling for, and I plan to devote my next book to exploring this topic.

In the meantime, I continue to have great admiration for the educators who—in spite of being pressured to just teach to the tests—struggle to teach their students the skills that matter most. And I continue to have great appreciation for the many parents and business, military, and community leaders who tirelessly advocate for the total transformation of our obsolete education system. Because of all that I have seen and heard in the two years since completing this book, I have an even greater sense of urgency—as well as hope—about this work we do together.