Admissions to Higher Education in the United States (and elsewhere)

The Supreme Court's recent ruling with respect to the University of Texas's affirmative action programme raises the general question of how the limited public resource of access to our most attractive university placements ought to be allocated. The plaintiff in the Texas case, as in previous cases (for example Bakke in 1978), felt wronged by her own state's preference for another candidate more to the liking of the university's race-aware admissions committee, and sued for redress of grievance. The Court has sent the Texas case back to the appeals court with instructions to investigate the possibility of using race-based (and, by logical extension, perhaps other) discriminatory preferences more narrowly, while still pursuing the goal of campus diversity.

As in the Bakke decision, the court appears to continue to fail to distinguish between public and private universities, and to be willing to grant public university admissions committees the same degree of discretion that private universities enjoy. But public universities are taxpayer-funded, and taxpayers have a reasonable expectation from legally established state institutions of equal protection under the law; while by contrast, individual applicants and their families have paid essentially nothing into establishing the private universities they may be applying to, and can expect less from them since they are owed less.

Therefore our public universities need a new system on the basis of which they might practice race-based (and income-based, culturally based, and perhaps other forms of) discrimination in favour of some of their citizens at the expense of others, in pursuit of the goal of campus diversity. In America, the proper basis for such tie-breaking discrimination is the American Baccalaureate Certificate I have been advocating. This certificate, which would establish a legal right to a free, three-year bachelor's degree at public expense, would resemble the European Baccalaureate that is itself a synthesis and compromise from the similar certificates that are commonly used for university entrance in many parts of Europe, and would be further modified in the direction of the International Baccalaureate, which has been making rapid progress in gaining its popularity throughout the United States in recent years. In fact, under the Ameribac proposal developed for One World Lyceum, the final mark would be arrived at by a formula multiplying the rough equivalent of IB points accumulated by the EB percentage achieved; then, in the case of any ties, race-based and other forms of discrimination favouring candidates with a history of overcoming unequal odds might be properly applied, as they are sometimes being improperly and unjustly applied at the present time.

21st Century Schools

"Why our kids need them, what they look like, how we create them."

A friend of a friend has just today posted an entry on a local Venice-Mar Vista blog, and asked, "Who wants to be the first to post?" I'm not that shy, and so am taking up the gauntlet.

A fine book is Marc Tucker's Surpassing Shanghai, published by Harvard Education Press. Chapter 4's "Singapore: A Journey to the Top, Step by Step", written by Vivien Stewart, asks, "What can be learned from Singapore", and answers, finally,

"Eagerness to learn from other countries and an orientation toward the future matter.  The design of Singapore's education system owes a lot to lessons from other parts of the world. Focused and universal use of educational benchmarking and, more recently, significant funds for research have enabled Singapore to move up the value chain and foster a culture of never standing still. This is a system that recognizes the rapidity of change around the world and that has the capacity and inclination to learn and adapt. Singapore fosters a global outlook for everyone -- teachers, principals, and students, who are expected to have 'global awareness and cross-cultural skills' and to be 'future-ready'" (135).

Leading educational organizations such as the International Baccalaureate and APEC (the ill-named "Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation") have oriented themselves towards our global future, and the ideal 21st century school would serve as the flagship to found a system of schools similarly oriented. I have been working on such a school for years now, and while it has developed through various versions, its essential vision and purpose have remained the same: 

“By synthesizing best practices from around the world and throughout time, and without depending upon selective admissions or extraordinary resources, One World Secondary School’s purpose is to demonstrate a world-class model of education so that diverse students succeed in colleges of their own choosing.”

Learning for the 21st Century

As promised, here is my synthesis of some of the best thinking on 21st century education, as prepared for envisioning the products of the school my trustees and I have been trying to start:

The competences of One World learners

One World learners (OWLs) will prioritize learning to know and learning to do so as to facilitate the innovative, interactive use of tools such as information technology via communication in the English language, thus enabling our students to act autonomously, with a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, in their 21^st century world, while also gaining the social and civic competences to live together in increasingly heterogeneous groups. Their competences will be demonstrated through superior achievements in the priority academic content areas of English, mathematics, science, and additional languages, as well as in the overarching competence of learning to learn, which will be vitally assisted by the students’ digital competence. Such highly competent individuals should go on to succeed in colleges and careers of their own choosing, and eventually finding good work will be a natural outcome of all that our students will have learned to do; and their competence in cultural awareness and expression should durably support their ability to live together successfully in heterogeneous groups while also supporting their most crucial final outcome, their having learned to be One World learners, with the attributes in the ideal profile that follows.

Since One World Secondary School is interested in becoming an IB school, it is appropriate here also to quote from the “IB learner profile”: “The aim of all IB programmes is to develop internationally minded people who, recognizing their common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet, help to create a better and more peaceful world.”

One World Learners (OWLs) will become

• Disciplined enquirers who have begun mastering the critical thinking- and problem-solving skills and the knowledge necessary to continue to learn within a discipline through enquiry and research. One World students will actively enjoy learning, and their love of learning will be sustained throughout their lives.
• Balanced learners who understand the importance of intellectual, emotional, and physical balance to achieve a good life for themselves and others. In addition, they will study a broad, balanced curriculum, and will analyze, synthesize, and evaluate various ideas derived from the disciplines in a fair, balanced way.
• Caring communicators who convey empathy, compassion, and respect for the needs and feelings of others. One World students will commit themselves to service, and will be able to clearly communicate, orally, in writing, and through modern media, their principled determination to make an ethical contribution to the lives of other people and to the planet as a whole.
• Open-minded initiators who understand their own cultures and histories and are open to those of others. One World students will actively seek out other points of view and, like risk-taking entrepreneurs, will watch for and seize new opportunities, ideas, and strategies for improvement.
• Reflective innovators who develop “right-brain” traits such as curiosity, imagination, and creativity to go with their “left-brain” skills in communication and traditional disciplinary learning. In addition, our students will learn to become reflective on their experience, understanding their own strengths and limitations as they strive towards wisdom.
• Knowledgeable, collaborating leaders who explore great issues, ideas, and concepts, thereby acquiring in-depth knowledge across a broad range of disciplines. They will often acquire necessary information through digital, collaborative enquiry, thereby gaining the computing, ICT, and social skills to responsibly work in teams with networks of people who may come from vastly different cultures and also to use reasoning and persuasion to lead and to learn. 
• Flexible adapters who are ready to change with a changing economy and a changing world. Because they will have become life-long learners, One World graduates will have the self-reliant career skills, productivity, and sense of accountability to deal with our planet’s increasingly complex problems in the 21^st century.

I hereby acknowledge intellectual indebtedness to the works of Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel (21st Century Skills), Howard Gardner (Five Minds for the Future), and Tony Wagner (The Global Achievement Gap) in synthesizing the above profile.

 

A One World System of Schools

I am still working to open a school for my son, and for all like-minded families with children. I currently propose to open, with my colleagues, an upper secondary school, a lyceum (an anglicization of lycee, the nearest extant equivalent to the kind of school we propose), providing education for the 10th-12th grades, in 2015 (it usually takes two years of preparation to open a good school, and although we've been preparing for longer than that, we want to be great). This first one will be an independent school, since I've given up (for now) the idea of finding an American school board with enough courage to back our charter, which is ready to be put into operation and is replicable at currently available public school dollars.

In a One World system of schools, our three-year lyceum would be preceded by a pair of three-year middle schools, a boys' school and a girls' school, which might more plausibly be established as chartered schools; for there is plenty of evidence available (a) that it is in the middle school years when Western students fall significantly behind their peers in east Asia, and (b) it is the premature obsession with the opposite sex during early adolescence that accounts for a good deal of (a). And of course it is unfortunately well known that the early preoccupation with dating and social relationships not only detracts from learning, but also all too often leads to teenage pregnancies and thereby cyclical generations of wrecked lives. Better to keep the boys and girls away from each other in these years; whereas our lyceum and primary school would be coeducational, I advocate single-sex education during the middle school years (which are, for us, grades 7-9; we use the term middle school here because it is an exact translation for these institutions in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, which, in relatively reformed and modern versions, constitute the nearest equivalent to a model for us to use during these years).

And the lyceum and middle schools should be preceded by a six-year primary school, for children aged 6-11, of both sexes in the same classrooms. These might ideally be government schools, and their successful establishment is crucial to the democratic state, as is in reality the whole of comprehensive schooling, which should last for nine years, ages 6-15, as it does in Switzerland, which has the best overall school system, as I have argued elsewhere. Our model for primary school is Finland, whose primary schools are not very different from the fine elementary schools here in Irvine, except for the fact that the Finns, like other Europeans, begin learning a second language early, from the first grade onwards, as I would like to see Americans do as well: second language learning from the first grade would be the principal novel (for America) feature of a One World Primary School.

The ages and grades we have defined for primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary education, which are first-sixth grades for children aged 6-11, seventh-ninth for students aged 12-14, and the tenth-twelfth grades for students aged 15-17 (with a postgraduate year available to students who might benefit thereby, therefore taking education for some students up to age 19), are the most commonly used in the world, and therefore using them allows us to make maximum use of the experiences of all of the people of our planet as we strive together to raise better people for our world.

Synthesizing 21st Century Competences Into a Profile

Harvard Professor Howard Gardner, in Five Minds for the Future, defines (in the words of the book's jacket cover) "the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead", and one of these is the synthesizing mind. I have such a proclivity, and have produced a synthesis of the various competences described in yesterday's post that we hope to help our future graduates to acquire, ones I wish our current high schools were producing but in general are not. Following that is a profile of what we want One World Learners to become, which synthesizes the work that Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel have done with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, as well as that of Professor Gardner in his book quoted above and of Harvard's Tony Wagner in his The Global Achievement Gap and Creating Innovators. Both of the following quotations are from the same internal document I mentioned yesterday.

"The competences of One World learners

"One World learners (OWLs) will prioritize learning to know and learning to do so as to facilitate the innovative, interactive use of tools such as information technology via communication in the English language, thus enabling our students to act autonomously, with a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, in their 21^st century world, while also gaining the social and civic competences to live together in increasingly heterogeneous groups. Their competences will be demonstrated through superior achievements in the priority academic content areas of English, mathematics, science, and additional languages, as well as in the overarching competence of learning to learn, which will be vitally assisted by the students’ digital competence. Such highly competent individuals should go on to succeed in colleges and careers of their own choosing, and eventually finding good work will be a natural outcome of all that our students will have learned to do; and their competence in cultural awareness and expression should durably support their ability to live together successfully in heterogeneous groups while also supporting their most crucial final outcome, their having learned to be One World learners, with the attributes in the ideal profile that follows."

"One World Learners (OWLs) will become:

·            Disciplined enquirers who have begun mastering the critical thinking and problem-solving skills and the knowledge necessary to continue to learn within a discipline through enquiry and research. One World students will actively enjoy learning, and their love of learning will be sustained throughout their lives.

·          Balanced learners who understand the importance of intellectual, emotional, and physical balance to achieve a good life for themselves and others. In addition, they will study a broad, balanced curriculum, and will analyze, synthesize, and evaluate various ideas derived from the disciplines in a fair, balanced way.

·           Caring communicators who convey empathy, compassion, and respect for the needs and feelings of others. One World students will commit themselves to service, and will be able to clearly communicate, orally, in writing, and through modern media, their principled determination to make an ethical contribution to the lives of other people and to the planet as a whole.

·            Open-minded initiators who understand their own cultures and histories and are open to those of others. One World students will actively seek out other points of view and, like risk-taking entrepreneurs, will watch for and seize new opportunities, ideas, and strategies for improvement.

·            Reflective innovators who develop “right-brain” traits such as curiosity, imagination, and creativity to go with their “left-brain” skills in communication and traditional disciplinary learning. In addition, our students will learn to become reflective on their experience, understanding their own strengths and limitations as they strive towards wisdom.

·            Knowledgeable, collaborating leaders who explore great issues, ideas, and concepts, thereby acquiring in-depth knowledge across a broad range of disciplines. They will often acquire necessary information through digital, collaborative enquiry, thereby gaining the computing, ICT, and social skills to responsibly work in teams with networks of people who may come from vastly different cultures and also to use reasoning and persuasion to lead and to learn. 

·            Flexible adapters who are ready to change with a changing economy and a changing world. Because they will have become life-long learners, One World graduates will have the self-reliant career skills, productivity, and sense of accountability to deal with our planet’s increasingly complex problems in the 21^st century."

       Tomorrow I will conclude this series, based on Secretary Duncan's stimulating speech to the Inter-American Development Bank, with a description of France's interesting ongoing efforts to assure the acquisition of similar competences in its national assessment system.

 

On Teacher Appraisal

I was talking last week with some friends well placed to be influential with regard to upcoming innovations in teacher tenure and appraisal. In short, I expect that moves to replace LIFO (the last in, first out rule that governs who gets laid off in what order when districts face budget shortfalls, which seem never-ending in California) will come to this state as they already have in several others. I support replacing LIFO, and last year appeared in a StudentsFirst video explaining why I do (schools should be free to hire and retain the staff they think will serve students best: this is particularly necessary if we're going to start holding principals more accountable, as we should). But two of my friends, well informed on these matters and reasonable educators with relevant experience, raised two objections: (1) how are you going to ask teachers to give up LIFO in this economy without knowing what's going to replace it, and more specifically how they will be appraised, and (2) even if you have a great appraisal system, who is going to implement it fairly when you have so many untrained, underqualified principals filling the middle management ranks of our school systems?

I recognize that point 2 is a valid concern, but only propose to treat of point 1 today; I'll only point out here that if we get this appraisal issue right, our general talent level in education will rise over time. We may well need transitional arrangements in the meantime.

 I've been studying appraisal systems in my usual comparative way for some time now, primarily because the school (One World Secondary) I am planning to open will eventually need one, and secondarily because this is a hot topic in education policy debates these days. Possibly the best system in current operation is that of Singapore, its Enhanced Performance Management System (EPMS). This system has been operational since 2005, and has succeeded in attracting and retaining a large cohort of talented, qualified teachers in one of the world's best run school systems. Under EPMS, all Singaporean teachers, like all other civil servants in that Chinese-dominated, multi-ethnic society, are appraised annually. Teachers who perform well receive bonuses of 10-30% (smaller than the performance components we are proposing at One World) and are eligible for promotions along one of three career tracks, not all of which require them to leave the classroom, a defect common in our education personnel systems. So performing well leads to increased pay and attractive promotions along with high status (teaching is the second most respected career among college students in Singapore, behind medicine but ahead of law, business, and the many other careers outcompeting education in the United States), while performing poorly leads to counselling and targeted professional development and can lead to the removal of teachers from classrooms into other careers to which they will be presumably better suited in an economy whose unemployment rate remains near two percent.

We have a lot to learn from EPMS, which has continued to be revised annually, which is fundamental to One World's teacher appraisal system, and which should be studied in districts throughout the United States.

Towards Richer Assessment

Today's morning news summary from Alexander Russo featured two stories from The Washington Post, one on Governor Brown's sensible call yesterday for reducing the number of tests our students are required to take and another on the U.S. Department of Education's attempt to research means to prevent cheating on tests. I wrote in a comment on the latter about the value of richer, essay-style assessments that prevent such cheating, and I'd like to expand on this to the general topic of the kinds of assessment we need to improve our educational system as a whole.

As I prepare to open a school, I have been working on course descriptions that might pass muster with the University of California in case our negotiations with high quality external curriculum and assessment providers break down. For our 11th-grade (Secondary V) Advanced English Language and Literature course, for example, our students will end the year with a final examination in two parts, a four-hour essay exam and a 30-minute oral (preceded by 35 minutes of preparation). Now how would any dishonest principals go about falsifying this kind of external examination? And teaching and learning in preparation for such broad and rigorous tests makes academic and linguistic demands that should stead our university-bound students well in their futures in higher education and beyond, as those who have done the French OIB, which is the model for this particular assessment, can well attest.

Why We Should Support an American Baccalaureate Certificate

Yesterday I introduced my idea for an American Baccalaureate Certificate, and I promised to provide some details today, so here they are.

A European Baccalaureate (EB) Certificate, the base model for what I am proposing, is a really impressive document to behold. The first page lists the 25 countries -- from the Kingdom of Belgium through the Czech Republic, with all of the other EU countries listed in between -- that will confer free college education to the holders of this certificate. Then one turns the page and sees a Baccalaureate report, with a list of the 11 subjects the student will have been assessed in during the final year of secondary school along with an overall mark expressed as a percentage of the available points.

For the American equivalent, I am proposing that the subjects assessed include three at an advanced level (like the very impressive new Pre-U qualification from Cambridge International Examinations); three more subjects studied at standard level providing subject balance, as in the International Baccalaureate; and five more subjects (perhaps history, geography, philosophy of knowledge, physical education, and comparative ethics) which would be studied to only a minor extent by students during the last two years of secondary school, to ensure at least a minimum standard of achievement in a broad range of subjects, like the EB does.

I also propose that those earning such a world-class qualification be automatically entitled to three years of free college tuition in our public universities, or be able to use equivalent sums towards tuition in the private universities that would be wise enough to recruit students so optimally prepared to succeed in higher education.

A Hermione School

Hermione is a character in the Harry Potter series. She is such an eager student that in The Prisoner of Azkaban, she pulls off the very clever trick of attending (at least) two sets of classes at the same time, with the assistance of some magic procured from Dumbledore, the school's headmaster.

The school systems of the world are multifarious, and feature a variety of virtues, some of them mutually inconsistent, but many potentially coordinable. Some of us would like to be able to help students like Hermione, by making as many of these attractive school features as possible available on a single campus. This summarizes what we have been trying to do at One World Secondary School.

The school has been in development for over four years now, originally as a kind of dream, almost fantastic school, but soon thereafter in total seriousness. It has evolved over that time, principally in response to my discovery of an ever increasing number of world class features. I have put together the best plan I can, and thank my friends for their assistance. But if the school is ever going to open to all classes of the general public, starting with a comprehensive seventh grade, now is the time for public officials in our school district and municipality to show their support; otherwise we may be just another addition to the ranks of independent schools serving those who can afford tuition, with the poorer families shut out ultimately by irresponsible charter office officials who insist on maintaining monopolistic control over the types of schools that can open in the communities they are entrusted to serve, and whose trust they have violated.