Today's Push to Innovate Public Schools: Successes and Challenges

Last month’s Learning Policy Center Colloquium Series speaker, Richard Rothstein, suggested in his most recent book that there is and has historically been a shared understanding about what our public schools should teach. In his upcoming Colloquium talk on Thursday, April 2nd, Alan Lesgold – Dean of Pitt’s School of Education - will argue that a shared understanding about education is missing, largely because the general public has not yet grasped the major changes within the public education system that are necessary in order for all students to have a chance to succeed in today's society.

There is ample evidence regarding the lack of consensus about the future of public education. National and local opposition to “standards-based” mathematics curricula is one example. As Lesgold will discuss in his talk, one tragedy of our public education system is that critical thinking and problem-solving tasks (like those emphasized by standards-based curricula) are often ignored in favor of teaching more routine tasks, which are those same tasks often performed quickly by machines and low-paid workers outside of the United States.

Despite the lack of shared public understanding about what our schools need to do, a recent push for re-thinking teaching and learning may make some progress, not because a growing public consensus is on the horizon, but because states are coming under more and more pressure to provide innovations and adopt more rigorous, cutting-edge standards. In his speech just a few weeks ago, President Obama challenged governors and state education chiefs to create standards and assessments that measure "whether students possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity." That national challenge is present more tangibly in new federal guidelines stipulating that states must commit to “implementing college and career ready standards and high-quality, valid assessments” prior to receiving federal State Fiscal Stabilization Fund money.

True, it is hard to know how much the federal government will be able to hold states accountable for making progress in implementing such standards, and it’s even harder to know whether those standards and assessments will result in real student learning gains. Nevertheless, initiatives like Achieve’s American Diploma Project Network are working to help states make these commitments to develop more rigorous standards, with some success.

While Achieve’s Michael Cohen and others in our Colloquium Series have discussed the need for better standards and alignment between standards and assessments, Lesgold will particularly emphasize the role of technology in doing that work. He will discuss how computers can support instructional design. He will bring up Valerie Shute’s work to develop assessments through games and virtual simulations as a way to measure the “21^st century skills” that Obama articulated. While all this technology is fascinating, it offers new challenges to our schools and teaching force. Some school districts – no doubt the ones with more resources and more skilled teaching and technology staffs – will be able to implement exciting technological innovations better than others will. Thus, as schools are forced to innovate, the greatest challenge for states may be to provide equitable support for that innovation.