PIE: Partnership For Innovation in Education

The Dropout Epidemic

Posted by P.I.E. | October 25, 2010

Barbara Seibel, President and CEO of Jobs for Cincinnati Graduates

You’ve heard the phrase “it takes a village to raise a child.” For school drop-outs, that village has very little time and space dedicated to such children.  And yet these “lost” children represent huge opportunities for cities and communities.

According to Barbara Seibel, President and CEO of Jobs for Cincinnati Graduates (JCG), studies indicate every high school dropout costs tax payers more than $200,000 over the student’s lifetime. Such a negative financial impact represents rising health care utilization, higher usage of criminal justice systems, and the loss of an available workforce population. JCG became aware of a continuing education program called Fast Forward Center implemented in Montgomery County, Ohio. Based on a similar model, they developed Connect2Success.

“We were impressed by the positive outcomes focused on re-engaging drop outs,” Seibel said. “Fast Forward already had the educational component in place that resulted in their success. We felt it would be much more successful if there were a few additional components.”

She explained that without a supportive network, a dropout student will often become disengaged, and give up on continuing their education or getting a job.  Connect2Success involves a dozen local partners recruiting young people who have dropped out of school.  After assessing and analyzing each student’s situation, these partners help create a workable individual career plan. The student is provided a life coach to deal with immediate crisis issues such as transportation, housing, and childcare while also learning skills such as budgeting, credit, and job readiness skills. An education and career coach are assigned to assist the student in obtaining their GED or diploma, if needed.

Connect2Success has served 850 young adults since 2008, and according to Seibel, 87 percent of them are still engaged in the program or have successfully completed it. The coaches stay in touch with the student for a year after graduation, making sure the kids are staying on track.

JCG and its partners also learned some important best practices since starting the program. “One organization cannot do it alone. It is important to bring groups together who are already working successfully with drop out individuals,” she said.

She also recommended starting small to achieve ideal results. “The program became stronger through a collaborative partnership because we worked with the student from their re-engagement into education to the time they could successfully support themselves and their family,” she said.

Seibel also believes the kids participating in Connect2Success will be better prepared when the economy begins to turn around. For dropout students, it takes the collaboration of a village of businesses, communities, and educators to become successful and reverse the negative financial impact to society.

Learn more about Connect2Success by visiting Jobs for Cincinnati Graduates online.

Biography: Barbara Seibel has been President/CEO of Jobs for Cincinnati Graduates since 2001.  Prior to that, she was the Director of Court Services for Neglected, Abused, and Delinquent Youth with the Hamilton County Juvenile Court for 24 years. Barbara has written several best practice books for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and for the State of California Family Court System. She has a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Xavier University.

Tennessee Races to Top

Posted by P.I.E. | October 18, 2010

Tammy Sommers, Chief Operating Officer for NAI Knoxville

As a business executive and member of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, it is with great pride our state received the primary “money spot” in the Race to the Top (RttT) federal education grant.  With $501M awarded to Tennessee in 2010, we feel lucky to have gained so much attention since our reform efforts began in 2007.  In that year, Tennessee received an “F” by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the “Truth in Advertising” category comparing Tennessee proficiency to national proficiencies.  That rating allowed us to evaluate our school system, and refocus our efforts to create a new educational opportunity for Tennessee children.

With such a poor rating among comparable state and national competitors, a Tennessee Alignment Committee was formed representing state and local government officials, businesses, postsecondary, and K-12 leaders from across the state.  This group established mandatory benchmarks representing a scalable new education system that would ultimately prepare our schoolchildren for college and rewarding career opportunities both in the Untied States and overseas.

Personally, my background in education spans over 20 years.   After 13 years as an educator in four counties and several states, I became the Chief Operating Officer for an international company located in Knoxville.   With both an education and business background, I quickly began to encourage partnerships between our local schools and businesses.  As the Alignment Committee established goals and objectives, Business Roundtables were created to give Governor Bredesen feedback about what was needed in schools to prepare students for workforce “on-ramping”.

Upon completion of this work, the Committee established a timeline to implement the necessary changes in the Tennessee Curriculum, known as the Tennessee Diploma Project.  This timeline began in November of 2007 with the rollout of expected changes like – increasing credit requirements, new course requirements, and developing new assessments – to begin in the 2009-2010 school year.

As Tennessee learned of the “Race to the Top” opportunity, we continued our existing work.  We focused on recently established collaborations between educators, community leaders, and the business community.  When individual issues arose, legislators called special sessions and allowed community leaders to help find solutions among all stakeholders.

A primary issue revolved around increasing educator requirements.  Historically, our educators have been evaluated solely on observation.  Tennessee Legislators focused on adding student performance to teacher evaluation.  I was personally inspired as Legislators listened directly to the Tennessee Education Association, and made an unprecedented vote deciding that 50% of Tennessee public teacher evaluations would involve student performance.  In this decision, 35% of the evaluation was based on a process called the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System.  The Tennessee Evaluation Advisory Committee, comprised of state and local government officials, business, postsecondary, and K-12 leaders is currently working on criteria affecting the remaining 15%.

Our education reform has not taken any new direction since winning the primary Race to the Top grant.  Both during the RttT process and waiting period, we continued our work heightening academic standards.  In fact, we just completed our first round of tests with the changed standards, and our schools realized a significant gain in cut scores from the past two years of the same standardized tests.  Cut scores are selected points on the score scale of a test.  For example, student performance on a test may be classified into one of several categories such as basic, proficient, or advanced on the basis of cut scores.

Ironically, failure served as our catalyst to providing new opportunities for Tennessee schoolchildren, and we are committed to increase our valuations as compared to the other 49 states.

State Senator Jamie Woodson said it best when Tennessee received the RttT honor and resulting monies to further support our work.  She said it was quite an accomplishment to receive the federal funding for our schools — especially since the community began creating new benchmarks and requirements just three years ago. However, she noted,  “We need to be clear that Tennessee has 90% of the work left to do in school reform. We cannot rest.”  Please refer to this site with an overview of that upcoming work, “First to the Top.”

About the Author

Tammy Sommers is the Chief Operating Officer for NAI Knoxville.  She also serves as the education member executive of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce.  Before her business career, Tammy was a classroom teacher and public school counselor.  She has played an ongoing role in education reform serving as a representative in State and Knox County education summits and collaborative union, school administration, business partnership and State government meetings.

Save Room for the Mice

Posted by P.I.E. | October 14, 2010

Mary Welsh Schlueter, PIE Founder and Chief Executive

The Federal Government thinks we edupreneurs are cool – or at least their marketers do.  In the case of education, the government just announced The Social Innovation Fund (SIF), a program matching federal grants dollar-for-dollar, creating million dollar public-private grants focused on building effective “cradle-to-grave” education solutions.

However several SIF winners, including Cincinnati’s United Way, mandate all nonprofits must “pony up” a $500,000, 5-year matching commitment for a chance to participate.   Clearly, some of the newest and brightest organizations don’t have a chance to qualify.  Instead, burdened by federal RFP requirements, the largest and most staid nonprofits have the greatest opportunity to qualify for funds.

Unfortunately, those larger, national organizations are not generally branded as delivery systems offering innovative and agile new programs for the 21^st century.   The truly innovative SIF program would have brought those “younger” groups together and coordinated a truly transformative opportunity not only for the sponsoring organizations, but the community itself.   Now THAT would have been an innovative use of funding, guaranteeing cross-pollination of newer technology and social media relationships with older, more traditional service implementation.

It’s simple: Kids want viable career opportunities.  Those opportunities rarely come alive in a structured classroom with a teacher using curriculum created in the 1950’s.  Innovation is about 24/7 learning using technology, creativity, and tech-literate classrooms.  Just like business, education has moved beyond the physical bricks and mortar classroom.  The federal government must recognize this transformation, or be left behind by global competitors like China and India who have already embraced more rigorous and innovative education programs.

If you listen to conservatives Dr. Rand Paul, John Kasich or Governor Chris Christie, you’d think the future of the federal government lies in the hands of American entrepreneurs.   It once did.   However, having Paul recently threaten to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education may not serve his U.S. Senate candidacy well, as State legislators continue to adopt rigorous national curriculum requirements.   Alternatively, loosening State and Federal budget reins might spur the adoption of regional best practices to accelerate school-specific academic achievement.

Sometimes, you need to listen to the smallest guy in the room.  Elephants are big and slow moving –not to mention the food intake!  Including nimble and truly innovative mice will offer productive change.   But, overlooking the agile edupreneur will only delay the educational reform demanded by some of the biggest government and global business institutions.  Sometimes, well-positioned mice can do much more than a horde of elephants…

Video of interview with Michael Baker, Director – Social Innovation Fund:

Testing Teachers: The Value of Measuring Student Performance

Posted by P.I.E. | October 8, 2010

Dr. Lawrence J. Johnson, Dean & Professor, Early Childhood and Special Education, University Cincinnati

Measuring student achievement is one of the most controversial issues facing education. All stakeholders: parents, teachers, administrators, policy makers, and the community can all agree that they want fair ways to determine student progress and performance but they often disagree on the role of standardized tests in achieving this goal. Some would argue that we rely too much  on such tests, while others would argue that we do not give enough importance to such tests. Some would argue these tests are flawed and have problems, while others would argue that they are objective and fair measures. Unfortunately, all sides of this issue have merit and everybody is correct to a certain degree.

When we place undue importance on standardized tests and ignore the many other measures that teachers can use to assess performance, we are placing too much emphasis on single measure of performance and the results can be misleading. On the other hand, if we ignore the important information standardized tests can provide we do our students a disservice. Yes standardized tests are flawed and they sometimes disadvantage subgroups of our population. But we must remember that any measure of human performance is flawed and a mere proxy for the truth. Although standardized tests are flawed, they are among the most carefully developed tests we have at our disposal and if used with the appropriate caveats they are important indicators of student performance.  If we wait until we have the perfect measure we will never assess students and our best option is to use multiple measures of performance to measure student growth and to understand the limitations of these measures.

We also need to move away from a norm-referenced view of student achievement where student performance is reported in a percentile rank that compares students with the normative group. From this perspective 50% of students are always below average. Moreover, this is a static comparison and it says nothing about student learning and growth. Students that are from schools serving students from high socio-economic backgrounds tend to have high percentile comparisons that may actually hide the real growth they are or are not making. That is, a student may not be making much growth and still have a high percentile rank. On the other hand, schools serving students from a low socio-economic background may have a low percentile comparison even though they are making more than a year’s growth in a year. In the first instance percentile comparisons hides underperforming students and in the second situation percentile comparisons mask good performance.

A better way to use student achievement data is to move to a value-added system of assessment where student growth becomes the key metric instead of the student’s percentile comparison. In this model, a student’s current level of learning is compared to the students past level of learning. If a student is making more than a year’s level of growth in a year they have a positive value-added score and if they are not making progress at the same level as the past they have a negative value-added score. This approach focuses us on what is most important – how well are students performing. It also provides a more equitable comparison because we are comparing students to themselves instead of comparing them to other students who may have a more advantaged situation. A value-added system also allows us greater accountability by linking a student’s value-added score to individual teachers. Finally this system provides better diagnostic opportunities by helping us see when student learning begins to falter.

In closing, all educational stakeholders want a fair system to measure student performance. Although standardized tests are controversial and not perfect, there are one of our most carefully developed measures of student performance and can provide useful information to help us understand how students are learning.  Standardized tests should not be our only measure of performance and should be a key part of balanced set of performance measures.  A value-added way of looking at student achievement is superior to a norm-referenced view of student performance. However all measures of performance have limitations and when using a value-added system of achievement the appropriate caveats need to be taken into consideration.

About the Author

Dr. Lawrence J. Johnson is Dean and Professor, Early Childhood and Special Education, CECH at UC. Dean Johnson also serves as Executive Director of the Arlitt Child and Family Research and Education Center at the University of Cincinnati.

Dean since 1999, Johnson has published extensively completing 10 books, 33 chapters in books and 71 refereed journal articles. In addition to his publications, he served as the Principal Investigator or primary author of 200 grant proposals that were funded for a combined budget exceeding $100 million. The scope of these projects has had an impact at the local, state, and national level.

Dean Johnson has been recognized by multiple organizations for his contributions in education and by the by the states of Illinois, Alabama and Ohio. Dr. Johnson served a 6-year term as co-editor of the Journal for Teacher Education and Special Education and was twice the chair of the State of Ohio University of Education Deans.

Adopt-A-Class Walks Its Talk

Posted by P.I.E. | October 7, 2010

Mary Welsh Schlueter, PIE Founder and Chief Executive

It’s easy to talk about innovation.  The hard part is implementation.  You’ll see in the coming months, we’ll profile selected edupreneurs and review their specific steps for success.

This week, in the P.I.E. article, Our City of Adopters, we learned how Bill Burwinkel introduced and implemented Adopt-A-Class – a mentoring program that fosters relationships between schools and the community.  When I asked for his “Call to Action” steps, he offered PIE some guidelines for the program’s success.

First, he looked to help schools with the highest levels of poverty, and therefore, highest financial strain.   Generally, students impacted by poverty have an inconsistent learning environment preventing proper development of their mental, physical, and emotional health.

Second, he chose partner businesses highly interested in promoting a culture of community philanthropy, cohesiveness, and teamwork among its employees.   A recent study indicated 95% of Adopters reported the program had been a positive team-building experience for their business or community group, and allowed them insight into the issues facing urban schoolchildren.

Third, AAC provided communication, oversight, and “matchmaking” links between the educational institutions and their adopters.   In fact, AAC does such a good job they have a 97% adopter retention rate, and 25% of existing participants have increased their involvement by adopting more schools and classes.

Fourth, AAC offers specific tools for K-8 grade students that spur academic achievement.   Young students are offered the chance to meet and partner with professional adults from the work world.  Moreover, Adopters profile how education is a valuable pathway to success, and they serve as concrete role models to underserved kids.  In fact, a recent AAC Teacher Survey stated that a large percentage of teachers report the program has had a positive impact on their students’ social (93%) and written communication skills (90%).

Fifth, AAC has earned teacher and adopter praise by serving as a partner who believes educating students should be the community’s first priority.

The Adopt-A-Child program was just a figment of Bill Burwinkel’s imagination until he partnered with like-minded community and school members.  There are schools in every district that can benefit from a program like AAC.  Use Burwinkel’s example to transform a challenge like poverty into an opportunity through mentoring.   Ready, set…

Our City of Adopters

Posted by P.I.E. | October 4, 2010

P.G. Sittenfeld, Director of Community Engagement, The Community Learning Center Institute

One of the true superheroes of our city’s public school system presents an unlikely profile: Bill Burwinkel is neither a teacher, principal or public school parent.  In fact, he’s not even a high school graduate.

But seven years ago, Burwinkel observed a then-failing public school system and recognized that communities share responsibility for school neglect and failure.  He believed a vibrant education system was the better alternative, and decided to roll up his sleeves and begin working to help fix the problems.

Burwinkel’s efforts produced one of Cincinnati’s largest and most successful mentoring programs named “Adopt-A-Class”.  Begun in 2003, AAC paired businesses, community organizations, high schools, and colleges with students from elementary public schools.  Adopters threw holiday parties and celebrations for their students, and delivered needed classroom supplies.  Bonds grew, mentorships developed and deeper commitments evolved as adopters hosted career fairs, student service projects, and offered job-shadowing opportunities.

Burwinkel, a 60-year-old Cincinnatian and CEO of National Marketshare Group, Inc., began AAC initially as an opportunity to donate extra consumer items his retail brokerage company had accumulated.

Having pulled himself up by the bootstraps to start his own company, Burwinkel believed “giving back isn’t an option; it’s an obligation.”  Burwinkel chose a nearby public school to offer the extra supplies and paired many of his employees with one classroom of students.  Within a year, Burwinkel matched 671 students with 17 sponsoring companies, all of which continue as Adopt-A-Class partners six years later.

AAC started in just one school, but today has expanded its army of adopters.  Today, more than 170 businesses and community groups mentor more than 6,000 students at 17 area pubic and parochial schools.  High profile businesses, professional sports teams, police departments, and university athletic teams participate by offering positive role models to those neediest members of the community.

“Adopt-A-Class has become an indispensable piece of our community learning centers,” says Darlene Kamine, who oversaw the public school district’s community learning center strategy for 10 years.  “Adopt-A-Class embodies the vision of connecting our schools to the community in the ongoing effort to make our schools neighborhood hubs.”

For many new volunteers, the program offers a comfortable — yet impactful — way to get involved in improving the lives of young people.  Once a connection to the students is in place, more meaningful relationships and deeper commitments often result.

One of the many devoted champions for Adopt-A-Class is Judy Oden, an employee at a local developer, who has coordinated her co-workers’ mentoring relationships.  Her sponsoring company has arranged Easter egg hunts and graduation parties; organized coat drives and school supply donations; and regularly sends volunteers to tutor students.

“It’s good for our own company morale,” says Oden.  “The real gift is seeing the student’s faces light up when we visit the school.”

Burwinkel regularly witnesses transformations in company cohesiveness.  “It made my company feel like more of a team,” he says.  “I had one employee tell me after our first student holiday party that he began to feel the true meaning behind Christmas for the first time.”

Adopt-A-Class is just one example among many organizations in Greater Cincinnati connecting students and mentors.  In a city where only 1 in 5 residents have school-aged children, the growing base of volunteers has helped fuel broad civic support of the school system, including an overwhelming 60 percent to 40 percent margin in support of renewing last year’s school levy.

In the case of Adopt-A-Class, the education and inspiration is just as much for the adopters as for the students.  “As more than 6,000 adopters have now discovered for themselves, our public schools aren’t places to fear or avoid or ignore,” says Burwinkel.  “They’re places to rally behind, cheer for, and invest in.”

About the Author

P.G. Sittenfeld is the Director of Community Engagement for The Community Learning Center Institute – a Cincinnati based organization that leverages the use of schools as neighborhood hubs providing additional academic support, health resources, and recreational and cultural opportunities. Sittenfeld has written for The New York Times, TIME magazine, and The Cincinnati Enquirer. He serves as a division co-chair for the United Way of Greater Cincinnati’s 2010 Annual Campaign; a board member of the Freestore Foodbank; a board member of CincyPac; and a member of the CincinnatiUSA Chamber of Commerce HYPE advisory committee.