For Children in Massachusetts Today is a New Day

It has taken ten years of advocacy by colleagues throughout Massachusetts to achieve this reform package. I am proud of the role MASCD has played in shaping the agenda. Working together with hundreds of educators, business leaders, parents and politicians, we have come to a new day for children. The power to transform is with us; let us use it wisely. "It's about all the kids!"

(Note: Pay particular attention to Goal 4: Innovation and Systemic Reform to Create a 21st Century Public Education System) Technical Help Request: Please comment on how to anchor this to the goal 4 section below if you know how. Thanks

Below is a communication I received from a colleague of mine in Massachusetts. I am the President of the Massachusetts Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (MASCD) and Mary Forte Hayes is the Executive Director. Yesterday Mary was at the Kennedy Library when Governor Deval Patrick announced the next generation of education reform. The last major educational reform in Massachusetts was in 1993.

Dear Colleagues,

It was an exciting day today (June 25, 2008) at the Kennedy Library, a perfect setting for the launch of a visionary plan for education in the Commonwealth. I was there, as were many education and policy leaders and friends of MASCD. The Governor unveiled his vision for education, which is a call to completely redesign the system as we know it. He kept repeating “Today is a new day,” with good effect, and with the backdrop of the wall of windows onto the blue sky and water of Boston harbor framing the skyline. The Governor stressed many times, as did Secretary of Education-designate Paul Reville, that “all children” means ALL. Paul Reville recapped details of the 10 year plan that have been shared over the past 2 days. There are some very bold actions included. They are consistent with our priorities and well-aligned with the Whole Child compact. See summary below, which I have taken from the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE). Thanks to MBAE for the timely summary.

Mary Forte Hayes

Ready for 21st Century Success

The New Promise of Public Education

Acknowledging that our schools "must ensure that high school graduates know and are capable of much more than ever before", this report calls for transforming public schools over the next decade to meet the needs of current and future realities rather than perpetuate past practices that did not prepare all students for the demands of higher education and a technologically driven economy. With an unequivocal commitment to eliminating disadvantages based on socio-economic status, the proposed reform strategy focuses on four challenges:

International competition and an outdated curriculum

- Massachusetts must shift its focus from a 20th century approach to teaching to a modern curriculum that includes 21st century themes such as global and cultural competency, financial literacy, and other applied skills as well as strengthening content ranging from math, science, and world languages to social sciences and the arts.

A stubborn achievement gap - This can only be closed by acknowledging that children have different needs based on the advantages and obstacles they encounter outside of school. Public education must be coordinated with other social and health services so all children can meet high standards.

An education workforce crisis - Student achievement depends on teacher quality. The teaching profession has to be promoted as the critical and valuable vocation that it is in order to attract and retain outstanding candidates. The system for preparing, supporting and evaluating teachers must be comprehensively re-designed.

A century-old system - The system of standards and accountability instituted in 1993 has brought us far, but reaching the goal of bringing all students to proficiency requires a new, individualized approach. In an economy where the same skills are needed for college and for jobs at family-sustaining wages, it will take new, differentiated approaches to give all students what they need to succeed.

Read the Full Report

Four Goals of Action Agenda

Putting Children's Learning Needs First

For each goal, the Patrick Administration has identified what will be achieved in the short (by 2011), mid (by 2015), and long(by 2020) terms to reach the stated vision. Details can be found at: http://www.mass.gov/governor/education

Goal 1: Raising Student Achievement

Key short term goals include increased support for early childhood education; an inter-agency Child and Youth Readiness cabinet; a pilot drop out prevention and intervention program for urban districts; Student Support Coordinators to link services for students in low-income schools; and a statewide data system that will provide a "Readiness Passport" to document all education and social service experiences received by every child.

Goal 2: Teachers and Education Leaders - Supported and Effective Educators

By 2011, establish differentiated pay for high-need locations and disciplines; pilot intensive induction and mentoring for new teachers; establish Readiness Science and Math Teaching Fellowship to increase supply of teachers in these fields; accelerate development of "real time" assessment data to support instruction; strengthen MCAS requirement with complementary measures of student growth and 21st century skills; build state capacity to attract and retain a highly competent, culturally diverse teaching force. Mid- and long-term actions would strengthen teacher preparation in several different ways and provide support for continued improvement at all education levels.

Goal 3: College, Career and Life Success

In addition to integrating 21st century skills into all aspects of public education; needs based financial aid would be increased; offer community college opportunities to early childhood educators and income-eligible parents; provide accelerated graduation and early college opportunities; allow in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants; build a school-to-college web portal; offer college readiness assessments to high school juniors; and guarantee transfer credit among public colleges and universities. In the longer term, additional initiatives to increase work and college readiness will be implemented, in some cases focused on students with specific needs.

Goal 4: Innovation and Systemic Reform to Create a 21st Century Public Education System

The Readiness School concept which has received much press attention is part of this goal, which would also establish a Readiness Finance Commission to recommend cost savings and efficiencies, potential sources of revenue, and options for a complete overhaul of the state's education finance system. Other key features of this goal are expanding learning time both during out-of-school time and the summer; establishing a public-private Commonwealth Education Innovation Fund to foster innovation; expand student access to online learning; and provide other incentives and programs to use technology to improve teaching and learning.

Links to Subcommittee Reports and Video of Announcements
Above summary provided by MBAE, email of 6-25-08.

Scholastic’s “2008 Kids & Family Reading Report- Reading in the 21st Century: Turning the Page with Technology"

Thanks to Wesley Fryer's post, Online kids are readers!, I learned about Scholastic's reading report and about www.readthewords.com, a free website that allows me to upload a document that Read the Words then processes and reads back to me. I can turn it into an mp3 file or podcast that I can then post to my blog, wiki or website and sit back while the report is read to me in a voice I select. Enjoy this demo; you can download the PDF file of the report from the innovation3 box in the left column, courtesy of www.box.net.

Pygmalion: What 21st Century Literacies Does John Need to Learn?

Clarence Fisher at Remote Access posted some interesting data for his students blogging and commenting habits. One question I have: Is their a correlation between attainment of 21st Century Literacies and your data?

In other words: Do students who evidence attainment of 21 Century Literacies blog and comment more, and students who blog and comment less do not evidence attainment of 21st Century Literacies. I suspect that if the potential of tapping the richness of collective intelligence to help us invent a more creative, collaborative, contributory future is dependent on students developing 21st Century Literacies, then I'd conclude that understanding and monitoring student attainment of these literacies is something we have to research.

As I work to introduce my 15 year old grandson John to Web 2.0, I am thinking about these issues. What the syllabus for our web 2.0 instruction? for students? for teachers? for administrators? for parents? for school board members? for the public at large?

Can we as a society take the risk of not teaching 21st Century Literacies? What are the personal, social, planetary benefits of everyone attaining 21st Century Literacies? We speak too much of consequences. What are the benefits to our students if they acquire 21st Century Literacies?

When I thing of 21st Century Literacies, several sources come to mind. I think the juries still out on this issue.

Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee
February 15, 2008

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

1. Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
2. Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
3. Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
4. Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
5. Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
6. Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

Or iste NETS

“What students should know and be able to do to learn effectively and live productively in an increasingly digital world …”

1. Creativity and Innovation
2. Communication and Collaboration
3. Research and Information Fluency
4. Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving & Decision-Making
5. Digital Citizenship
6. Technology Operations and Concepts

Or Will Richardson's

The new world of learning is requires us to teach students to be independent learners, ones that are not dependent on teachers but are:

* Self-directing--we now have the ability to create our own, personal curriculum around the ideas or topics that we are most passionate about. We no longer require curriculum to be delivered to us. We need to help our students find their passions and pursue them in the context of online networks in ethical, effective, organized and safe ways. And finding a balance between the online and offline life is also a "literacy" in this age. There are so many ways to communicate these days (blogs, wikis, IM, text, etc.) that it's easy to get overwhelmed.
* Self-selecting--in this world, learning spaces are created, not provided. And teachers are not assigned, they are selected. The creation and nurturing of these highly collaborative spaces and communities is a new "literacy" that we need to help our students develop. How do we find the best teachers? How do we connect to them? How to we build communities with others that are supportive and effective?
* Self-editing--whereas most of us were educated in a world where the materials we worked with had been edited by someone else along the way, in today's world, less and less of what we read is now "edited" in the traditional sense. So, reading and writing is no longer enough; we need to develop people who are effective editors of information as well.
* Self-organizing--the Dewey Decimal system doesn't serve the online world well, so we have to organize our own stuff. To do that, we use tags and social bookmarking systems, building folksonomies where we organize the Web together.
* Self-reflecting--as we become more and more in charge of our own learning, we need to develop the ability to reflect upon and assess our own work. This "metacognitive" work can involve a number of different genres and tools.
* Self-publishing--our students will need to be literate at sharing out the work they produce because that increases the connections and conversations that can lead to further learning. Blogs, wikis, podcasts and video are among the publishing skills they will need to have.

Or the New Media Literacies Project.

From the Executive Summary - Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

The new skills include:

* Play— the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving
* Performance— the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
* Simulation— the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
* Appropriation— the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
* Multitasking— the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
* Distributed Cognition— the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
* Collective Intelligence— the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
* Judgment— the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
* Transmedia Navigation— the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
* Networking— the ability to search for synthesize, and disseminate information
* Negotiation— the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.


Fostering such social skills and cultural competencies requires a more systemic approach to media education in the United States. Everyone involved in preparing young people to go out into the world has contributions to make in helping students acquire the skills they need to become full participants in our society. Schools, afterschool programs, and parents have distinctive roles to play as they do what they can in their own spaces to encourage and nurture these skills.

New Media Literacies Project