Adult Education's Day (or More?) in the Sun

Back from a few days in Burlington, Vermont, with its 70-degree March weather, and surprisingly good restaurant scene (like this one).

A sure sign of spring's renewal and hope, yesterday: adult education prominently featured in the Boston Globe!  In essence, to respond to the reality that adults go back to get a GED, then find it's not enough to get them a family-supporting job or to succeed in community college, the state is planning to "retool" the system to strengthen the focus on college- and career-readiness:

The effort would lead to increased instructional intensity, more academic and career advising, and a curriculum geared toward college and career readiness, including courses in specialized areas of interest, education officials said.

For me, some takeaways, lots of questions.  First, this move should be seen as part of the overall K-12 conversation about bolstering college and career pathways, and making a more seamless educational system.  Second, while adult education has undergone funding cuts since the recession struck in 2008, a renewed focus on the field might act as a barrier to later cuts. 

That said, it's unclear how the field will be "retooled" from above--despite the positive comments from people in the article, teachers, counselors, and directors will all have to be on-board with, and well-trained, in the new sauce.  And I worry that too strong a focus on merely career preparation--while undoubtedly important to so many GED and ESOL-skills seekers--neglects preparation for the rest of life: to be a citizen, to be a parent, to go to college for broad, not narrow skills. 

Look forward to following this one.

Sharing the Love

I've written before about my fascination with--and questions for--cradle-to-career programs like the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati.  Education Sector just put out a report on Strive, a collaborative effort by countless schools, nonprofits, and businesses to support positive academic achievement for children along a continuum from birth to college completion.

There's a lot that's promising and new about Strive.  To name just a few elements: First, from a partnerships standpoint, universities have taken the lead in new ways.  Strive emerged, six years ago, out of conversations among more than 200 education and nonprofit and community leaders.  Who convened them?  Then-University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher.  It's refreshing to witness the active role of local universities not just in supporting these initiatives, but finding ways to measure their own success in relation to K-12 work.  Second, from a policy standpoint, there is a long-overdue focus on early childhood education--often the forgotten stepchild of ed funding.  Third, from a jurisdictional standpoint, Strive is not just Cincinnati: it also involves the smaller Kentucky cities of Newport and Covington, just across the Ohio River.  And the efforts don't just comprise public schools--multiple parochial schools are actively included in the partnership.

The report covers a lot of the same ground dealt with elsewhere, but here are some nuggets I haven't seen in other reports:

• Strive's shared accountability is both in line with the edzeitgeist in its focus on data, and cuts against it by moving the focus beyond individual teachers or schools
• The Feds' Promise Neighborhoods Initiative, which echoes Strive and is centered on schooling, nevertheless requires that the lead partners of each PNI be a nonprofit or institution of higher education: this "serves to broaden the range of desired outcomes beyond the purely academic to include the developmental needs of student"  
• Sharing data is really, really hard--many partners at Strive "often collect, store, and analyze data in incompatible and disconnected way"; but they're working on improving the scene

The whole report is short, to the point, and free, so it's worth a complete look.

The Week's Links: You Better, You BTR, You Bet

Picked-up edpieces from the edworld:

The Strive Partnership gets still more positive press in a short Education Sector write-up about a report on community-wide education accountability which I look forward to reading in whole.  Strive, Promise Neighborhoods, Harlem Children's Zone, etc.  Will be interesting to see what sort of critiques the report puts forward.  The burgeoning writing on Strive is almost all breathless--perhaps for good reason, it's a cool new model, but one gets concerned with anything that looks (or is portrayed as) too perfect.

Incisive post at Eduwonk on Boston Teacher Residency teachers' effectiveness, and how it relates to larger rhetoric about in-district vs. out-of-district approaches to teacher development.   btr vs. tfa and what it says about standards, bigger issues, etc.  as always cuts to the bone.

Coach G has a good piece on the role of making errors.  Whole set of other implications for ESOL classrooms, but that's for another day.  Time to go outside and play; it's like 30 degrees warmer than usual for the 30th straight day.

Next Steps for Adult Learners: Collaboration

Helping connect students to next steps, so they can avoid language attrition, is an important consideration for adult ESOL learners.  Especially if they're studying in one of the many small programs cropping up in urban areas, which may be nimble but don't always offer a full continuum of classes.  In my former one-level ESOL program, students undertook a sequence of activities to seek out and get enrolled in their next class.

That's all well and good.  But how can different programs collaborate to help learners at one connect to classes offered at another?

As I discussed in my first piece in this sequence (linked above), mammoth waitlists await many adult ESOL learners in my state (Massachusetts), and others.  Thus, the best way to assure a student moves on to intermediate English after finishing beginning level would be to increase funding--but this isn't the place to discuss that.  Just because most programs are filled to capacity, and have four, five, or six months' worth of names waiting to join, doesn't mean there aren't gaps in enrollment that could be filled by students, if only they knew about them.  For instance, every year there are numerous classes at numerous sites find themselves in August looking for students to fill their remaining spaces for class in September.

"Collaboration" is a watchword in the nonprofit and human-services sectors, but how is it converted from platitude to practice?  It seems worthwhile to point out that collaboration is not a mere parntership, but the actual pooling of labor--co-laboring--or a joint effort to achieve a unified end.  In putting collaboration into authentic practice, a promising model is the Strive Partnership, which is a cradle-to-career educational initiative in the Cincinnati area.

Strive has advanced a model of "collective impact" built on five key principles (as wonderfully detailed here):


(1) a common agenda built on shared understandings of the problem and of actions to solve it; 
(2) shared measurement systems to assess and report effectiveness, arrived at by a consensus that ensures continued alignment, accountability between organizations, and the opportunity for participants to learn from each other;
(3) undertaking of mutually reinforcing activities in which each agency focuses on activities it can do well in coordination with other agencies' actions;
(4) continuous communication in which leaders must meet regularly and over the long term to build trust, develop a common language for their work, and keep open channels for communication; and  
(5) a backbone support organization to provide a range of supports for the initiative, from staff time to help with technology and data. 

There are many challenges to implementing such a system, but Cincinnati educators believe they are seeing some results, five years into Strive.  What could be applied to the adult-education sphere to ensure students successfully move from one program to another without seeing their language gains slide backwards?

Here are a few ideas.  It's a brainstorm: doubtless I'm leaving things out, and doubtless some of these have been tried already:

1) Draft a vision for ESOL students: What does the field hope to impart to students?  What different types of students are there, and how should their needs be met?  What do students themselves want?

2) Define success: In a given urban area, leaders could get together and outline what success might look like for different types of learners.  They could decide when to revisit these goals, how to assess their progress, and how to make corrections if students aren't benefiting from the collaborative work.

3) Communicate through Twitter: 160 characters is enough to say where a program's located, say how many spaces it has for its next classes, and link to its Web site.  Educators who may not have the time to wade through dozens of emails about job postings, professional development, and the like on adult-education listservs could get feeds of tweets targeted to issues of outreach.  This could also be done on modified listservs set up just for outreach coordinators, through Facebook pages, or the like.

4) Make the most of literacy collectives: In many areas of Boston, literacy collectives meet every month or few months.  Representatives at these meetings could bring and share lists of students who are about to leave one program and need a class at another, and actively follow up with them.  Rather than opening doors to whoever walks through, the process would guide those students already in the pipeline.

5) Use funding to incentivize collaboration: Money could reward and follow programs, or collectives of programs, that demonstrate a commitment to helping students connect to continued language support.

Just a few ideas.

What are yours?

I Used to Think ...

"We need a course where we can pull together what we're learning in our three other courses." --classmate Z.


That course wasn't there for me to take, but as much as often this semester I've tried to pull together what I've learned.  In September, facing readings flush with theory that felt far removed from the classrooms I'd taught in and the immigrant parents I'd worked with, I felt like I was being asked to predict weather patterns at 40,000 feet based on how I felt the wind blowing over my face.  As time went on, I sensed progress, most notably when I opened my mouth in class, started, "In another class I'm taking, we've been studying X ..." and could make the link back.  Taking a reading from class A to integrate into an essay in class B: another good sign.  I can't completely make the jump from ground to cruising altitude yet (I leave that for the basketball court; oh, wait).  But I'm gaining hops.

I learned a lot about a lot of stuff, from the mundane to the pointy-headed: parent-engagement techniques in districts and charters, Common Core, methods to improve child protective services, promotive and protective factors in child development, how foundations affect school reform, an eye-opening amount of management theory, an eye-crossing amount of stats.  On a personal front, I've worked on communication, from how to use hand gestures to voicing dissent in a way that informs new consensus.  I've learned how to manage time much better (and only been made fun of for my 15-minute increments ... 200 times plus/minus 100 times by T.).  On a professional front, I've had many conversations with folks in numerous fields, to the point that I got an email back confirming an informational interview a couple weeks ago and found myself staring at the subject line thinking: Catie who?  Works where? (It was in the email; all's well).

I'm one stats project (speaking of that), two final papers, and three class evaluations away from being done.  But taking a moment to glimpse the light ahead, some changes in my thinking.  Warning: these are (a) a Sample, (b) Broad, (c) General, and (d) Obvious in some cases.  The more nitty-gritty stuff ... well, I'll leave that for my posts on ESOL techniques.


I used to think ... in terms what I saw right in front of my eyes; now I think, not only that way, but also in frameworks, strategies, concepts.

I used to think that business practices were cold; now I think they can inform many types of management.


I used to think of cradle-to-career work in terms of starting programs, a la the Harlem Children's Zone; now I think collective impact might work better in many places.


I used to think of consulting as outside my interests; now I think that consulting assistance has helped spur great initiatives that I'm very much interested in (see here and here).


I used to think about poverty in terms of the experiences of the students in my class; now I most definitely still think about them, but also about funding issues, building support to sustain policy changes, strengths-based interventions, targeting vs. universal, and more.

I used to think that early parenting classes were mainly site-based, or classroom-based; now I think that home-visiting may be the key to making them productive.

I used to think that national foundations were too aggressive in promoting school reform; now I think they have a role in advancing knowledge in the field and, yes, putting their money out there to spur innovation (insert many caveats here).

I used to think a mission statement was crucial to keeping an organization focused on what matters; now I think that's still important, but should also be accompanied by strategic action steps, a theory of change, a theory of action, and criteria for ways to measure those actions.  

Oh god, the profs have gotten in my blood.  Back to that stats.

How Do You Have a Mission and Still Be a Dreamer?

... or, how do you get nitty-gritty and fuzzy all at once?

Dan Pallotta had a post a few months ago urging missions, not just "mission statements":

Don't waste your advertising space on your mission statement. Use the space to tell people what you've accomplished, or what amazing thing your product will do — use it to show them what mission you're actually on.

And from Steve Jobs's Stanford speech, where he asked himself:

"If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

When I ran an adult ESOL program, I came up with a clear mission statement outlining exactly what my students would get out of it. 

The four most important things: 1) Everyday language skills, like how to talk to the doctor.  2) Academic behaviors and skills, like arriving on time to class and organizing a binder.  3) Setting goals that are realistic and achievable.  4) Links to "next steps," i.e. the program they could continue on to after graduating from mine.

I talked about them constantly.  I would even say, "I'm on a mission to help them ..."  And I focused like a laser on making sure they happened.  Did they happen?  You bet they did.  I wouldn't let them not happen. 

But if you focus like a laser, how do you remember all the other things you care about?  One class, we tried to get students job placements, and failed.  We got them more job-ready, but they didn't have enough English to do more.  I saw how hard it was for my immigrant students to change certain parenting habits.  I saw how even the many services my human-services agency provided--food stamps applications to immigration assistance--weren't enough to move most families out of poverty.  I constantly wanted to expand to more levels of ESOL, but without expanding staff, it wasn't realistic.

I was so focused on what I could do and had to do--and how to do it better.  That was the mission.  

How did I keep dreaming about solving the bigger problems?  I sat on the porch on summer Saturdays reading about language acquisition, or the Harlem Children's Zone.  I spent a couple months visiting other programs doing similar but slightly different things.  I schlepped to trainings, networked, debated ideas over food and beer.  I piloted a bunch of ideas in my program--some successes, some failures.  Any way to increase the flow of ideas into my brain--and classroom.   

But ultimately I found the day-to-day work, in a one-man program in a small agency, was so demanding that it shut off the really big dreaming.  I moved on.

Wherever I land next, I hope I can answer the question, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" with a resounding "Yes."  I hope my workplace makes it easy to do that.  I hope my colleagues are asking themselves the same question.  Nonprofits must focus on doing excellent work every day.  It is about the daily impact.  It is, at some level, about the next grant.  But it has to be about dreaming, too.

ConStrived?

I had a fascinating conversation Friday with a self-described "instigator" who's helping lead a replication of the STRIVE Together program of the Cincinnati area elsewhere in the Midwest.

Such organizations are modeled loosely off the Harlem Children's Zone and attempt to create cradle-to-career pathways for kids in disadvantaged areas.  These Midwestern models differ from HCZ in that they are larger than 100 square blocks and promote collaboration among existing agencies.  And their funding is different--I mean, not everyone can be hand-in-glove with Wall Street, right?

Here's what else the Other Midwest Plan has going for it: business, community, and school-district buy-in.  Focus on STEM subjects: science, technology, math.  Accountability measures from top-to-bottom, including managed instruction and continuous improvement plans.  Use of great practices from across the country.  Assurance of on-the-ground quality, through plenty of support and professional development for teachers, out-of-school time programs for kids, inclusion of volunteer labor.  Emphasis on kindergarten readiness.  I took the devil's-advocate pose over and over, and got pretty satisfying answers back.

When what started as a 20-minute call ended at an hour, I thought: Wow, this Other Midwest Plan sounds great!  ...

... But is it too good to be true? 

The rapid dissemination of the cradle-to-career idea (which I've written about before) is encouraging, insofar as I think it's a good way to frame the movement to achieve legitimate outcomes for kids from tough backgrounds.  But it's also a new path full of booby-traps. 

A few questions that I think must be addressed:

• How does the laudable focus on educational achievement not get narrowed to outcomes in math and English (or, in a better world, math, English, and science)?  
• How do you avoid imposing so much quantitatively-based accountability that you create (unfortunate but plausible) incentives to "teach to the test," or worse, manipulate data?  How do you create broad, fair evaluations?
• We know that quality of teaching and adult-child interaction are so important in both K-12 classrooms and daycare.  How do C2C programs assure that the consensual, progress-oriented message from movement leaders is not diluted at the grassroots level?  More to the point, how do they plan to increase the supply of effective front-line practitioners, especially in an era of fiscal retrenchment?
• The C2C approach is warm, fuzzy, and consensus-oriented.  It sometimes seems everybody's determinedly on the same page--or at least trying to get there.  What if the consensus is wrong?
• How do you make room for (Business-Speak Alert) "process correction" or continuous reflection, when you're keeping a good face up to secure grant money and political will?  
• Many of the major social advances in American history grew out of mobilization and politicization of people at the grassroots.  People spoke up and got angry, and things changed (see Civil Rights, women's rights, the Voting Rights Act).  Can a movement that is so--in some ways--bloodless have long-term impact?
• How do you keep funders and agencies working together?  If funding pulled back at some point, or results were uneven between agencies, wouldn't agencies be tempted to steer their own ship again?
• Isn't this an idea from Rich White Men for poor people of color?