The Education Evolving Blog

Hopes and dreams, standardized tests and the achievement gap
May 17, 2013 · By Guest Blogger

Guest post by Julie Sabo, currently a 5th grade teacher in Minneapolis, Minnesota and former state Senator.

Hopes and dreams

A popular way to begin the school year is with an expression of Hopes and Dreams from students and sometimes also from parents. When I first began doing this beginning of the year ritual the Hopes and Dreams expressed were usually broad and blustery, grand in nature. Some students dreamed of worldwide social justice, some for personal strength, fame, great riches, and some for very specific careers.

An interesting change has happened...

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Young People Want More Exposure to What Professionals Do
May 16, 2013

This post was originally blogged on the Education Week Of, By, For blog.

Young people can be very ambitious and are capable of great achievements. Consider these stories of teens' achievement from a different time, as described by Newt Gingrich in Business Week:

"At age 13, Benjamin Franklin finished school in Boston, was apprenticed to his brother, a printer and publisher, and moved immediately into adulthood. John...

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Nation At Risk: 30 Years Later
April 30, 2013 · By Dan Loritz

National Public Radio education reporter Claudio Sanchez did a (five minute) story late last week about the 30 year anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s “Nation at Risk” report. Sanchez interviewed several leading national figures in the education realm, including Education Evolving’s Ted Kolderie. The story provided a sobering assessment of how little has changed in American education in the last three decades. Click here to listen to the full story.

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Minnesota's new Innovation Zone schools: Ted Kolderie talks with the Pioneer Press
April 26, 2013 · By Ted Kolderie

A story in the Pioneer Press earlier this week, More green lights, less red tape for Innovation Zone schools, explains Minnesota's developing interest in innovation, though it doesn't quite capture how we at Education Evolving believe innovation can most effectively appear in schools.

At Education Evolving we see innovation as both "top-down" and "bottom-up." The "innovation zone" legislation from a year ago encourages administrators...

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Upcoming Minnesota conference on redesigning schooling
April 25, 2013 · By Lars Esdal

Next Monday, April 29th, a Minnesota chartered school authorizer, Innovative Quality Schools, will be holding a conference on school redesign. Education Evolving associate Robert Wedl is on the IQS leadership team.

Highlights:

  • Learn about redesigning school for the 21st-century. Includes discussion of: individualized learning, non-traditional ways of measuring achievement, and the "Age 3-to-Grade 3" approach to primary school.
  • Learn about different organizational and...
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EE's Curt Johnson on Public Television
April 15, 2013 · By Lars Esdal

EE's Curt Johnson appeared on TPT's Redesigning MN: Educating the Workforce series on April 5, 2013. Curt says: "big, rapid and inevitable changes" are coming to higher ed due to the converging forces of relentlessly rising cost, and emerging online technology. Also: students are questioning the value of going to college and "collecting credits" as a ticket to the marketplace.

Johnson challenges college faculty saying, "if you can see the future coming and help design it—rather then deny it and rather then...

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Higher Education: Five steps to the future
April 12, 2013 · By Lars Esdal

In his recent Op-ed piece in the StarTribune, “Higher education: Five steps to the future,” EE Associate and former Minnesota education commissioner, Robert J. Wedl, warns if we’re to meet 21st century workforce demands—where a predicted 75 percent of all jobs will require a postsecondary education by the year 2018—we’ll need to stop grumbling about the current tax-and-cut based policy solutions to higher education issues. Instead, we'll need to focus on a large-scale redesign of what is the equivalent of...

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Not a passing storm
April 3, 2013

By Curtis Johnson

Originally guest-blogged on the LearnmoreMN blog, April 02, 2013.

Perhaps the ‘perfect storm’ metaphor is overused. But it’s an apt description of the forces converging on higher education these days. Graduation rates for most institutions remain stubbornly low; employers chronically complain that those who do graduate don’t know what they need to know or have the skills jobs...

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An idea whose time has come: teachers taking the lead
March 29, 2013

By Lori Nazareno, Guest Blogger

A growing movement is spreading across the United States. It involves teachers not only taking responsibility for student learning, but also leading the charge in reimagining what the educational experience and structures should be in order to best prepare our students for the future. This is occurring in spite of a concurrent movement to reduce the teaching profession to a compilation of standardized test scores and evaluation data in order to fire the “bad” teachers.

Despite teacher job satisfaction being at an all-time low (39%...

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Gordon Commission reports offer refreshing thinking on assessment
March 14, 2013 · By Lars Esdal

On Monday, a commission of leading education scholars unveiled a series of reports, which call for a rethinking of the role of assessments in learning. The reports assert that the primary purpose for assessment should be instructional feedback, serving as a tool to improve student learning.

The commission expressed concern over the current usage of assessment as primarily a punitive tool of accountability. One report author asked, in his opening remarks, whether using assessments to score and rank students may be morally questionable, if students of...

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