Tag: schools

A New Funding Model Might Change The Game For Public School Teachers And Students Nationwide

Posted on by robbie

As deputy superintendent of Shelby County Schools in Memphis, Tenn., Lin Johnson has a bird’s-eye view of each school’s student population and funding. “When you start to think about the level of poverty within Memphis, it’s pretty deep,” Johnson says: Of the 104,000 students currently enrolled in the county, close to 40 percent live in poverty. And, Johnson adds, despite the funding and staff dedicated to the county’s schools each year, there is no guarantee those resources are actually helping the students who need it most.
Johnson credits a model called weighted-student funding — also known as student-weighted allocation — for improving the way Shelby schools now operate. “When I first arrived here, [I spoke with] a number of principals, and the one thing I heard that echoed was, ‘We need to address inequity within our districts,’” Johnson says. “How are we aligning resources to make sure we are meeting the needs of students, [while] giving principals flexibility and autonomy to address those needs?”
In a traditional funding model, each school receives a set allocation of staff and resources, depending on the size of the school — for example, a school might receive one teacher per 20 students, regardless of the students’ needs. With weighted-student funding (WSF), each school receives a budget based on the number of students at their school, while taking into account student needs. Proponents of this funding model praise it as a way to ensure students who need additional funding for a specific reason (i.e., English language learners or those with low proficiency scores on standardized tests, for example) receive those funds, while helping principals feel like they have more control of the planning process.
Education Resource Strategies (ERS), a national education nonprofit, worked with Shelby County Schools to set up ­their new funding model. “The goal is to ensure schools use the resources they have to ensure all kids have an opportunity to be successful — and this includes strategies on how to use time, assigning teachers in ways that leverage their expertise and giving new teachers support from mentors,” says David Rosenberg, a partner at ERS. “You’re also able to allocate dollars more equitably. As far as transparency, it’s very clear why you get what you get. It’s about student need, and not every student gets the same thing.”
While some school districts opt to partner with nonprofits like ERS to help implement WSF for a fee, other school districts, such as those in New York and Chicago, have decided to go it alone. Regardless of the approach, “it’s giving more autonomy to schools,” says Marguerite Roza, senior research affiliate at the Center on Reinventing Public Education and director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown, a research center dedicated to exploring and modeling complex educational policies and practice. “There’s some research that shows that when you’re looking at school productivity, there’s a cocktail of conditions that yield a higher return on your dollar.”
How high of a return remains to be seen. While WSF has been implemented in the school systems of at least 16 major urban areas as of 2018, how it actually helps students is still being determined. In 2016, the Edunomics Lab received a three-year grant from the federal government to study 19 districts where WSF has been implemented, including Shelby County as well as other cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco and Denver. In April of this year, the lab will host a meeting between researchers and other interested parties to discuss WSF’s impact on standardized test scores, while identifying areas of the funding formula that require more research. “The number one reason districts do this is for equity,” Roza says. “Right now in a lot of districts, they are doling out principals and AP programs and may end up with one school that spends a lot more than another, and that’s not particularly equitable.”
But districts don’t necessarily need to implement WSF in order to train their principals to be more strategic stewards of their resources. For example, schools in Tulsa, Okla., are chronically underfunded. Tulsa Public Schools does not use WSF, but is implementing something called Empower, a pilot program to help school leaders reorganize people and money to create more collaborative planning time for teachers. With Empower, Angie Teas, principal at Tulsa’s Mark Twain Elementary, was able to provide teachers with 90 additional minutes each week for collaborative planning between classes, something Johnson and Teas both deem “essential.” “Instead of it being a compliance-based process that schools complete over the summer,” says Eddie Branchaud, principal associate at ERS, “[Tulsa is] building a process in which schools look at student and teacher needs, identify priorities and engage their teams — all on an earlier timeline that allows them to hire the talent they need and prep their staff to implement [any necessary] changes.”
Though it will be a few years before there’s enough data to show if WSF works or not, the key to its popularity might lie in the fact that students seem to be in favor of it. Clark County, in Nevada, isn’t currently using a WSF model, but they’re moving in that direction, thanks to local high-school students who were invited to provide feedback on the current budgeting process. “The conclusion was that [the school] should make that decision, not the district,” says Roza. According to a town hall held last month, Clark County district leaders are expecting to implement their changes by 2024.
But even though students seem to support WSF, Roza also points out that it might not be right for every district. An individual school’s capacity to deal with change is an important thing to consider. “If I’m in a district and I don’t have really great principal management skills, [such a] model might be a bad idea, given that I don’t have the conditions in place to benefit from it,” Roza says.
Similarly, there’s no easy way to identify that there’s a direct correlation between weighted-student funding and improvement in grades. “It doesn’t seem practical to say ‘If my kid’s in third grade and my district just adopted a weighted-student formula, that’s the reason their reading scores went up,’” Roza says. “I think what we are realizing is that we thought we could run large urban districts as factories: We could line up the pieces and parts in the same way, and get the same results.”
While WSF often helps school districts with more than 20,000 students, it doesn’t do much for smaller districts, such as those with fewer than 5,000 students enrolled. “If you have a small enough pot of money where you know what’s going on with each school, I wouldn’t bother with it,” Roza says. And because smaller schools automatically receive less money due to a smaller student body, the formula can actually backfire: In Boston, for example, implementing weighted student funding led to a Hunger Games scenario, where one school gained faculty while another lost beloved teachers.
Regardless of outcome on a student-by-student basis, Roza says that giving schools control over their own finances is a significant improvement. “Much of what schooling does involves human interactions, human process and relationships,” Roza says. “By giving principals the ability to decide how to spend [their money], you’ve made a step towards equity.”

More: Fixing America’s Schools

Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation

Posted on by robbie

Mindfulness, the practice of being awake to the present moment, is now in vogue in American workplaces as varied as Google, Goldman Sachs, Aetna and General Mills. Backed by scientific research of the cognitive benefits of ancient Buddhist meditation, corporate types thinking of productivity and the bottom line quickly trained their workers how to focus using mindfulness. Outside of finance, tech and manufacturing industries, NationSwell found seven more workplaces where you find employees reaping the benefits of meditating on a regular basis.

1. Concert Hall

Where: Tempe, Ariz.
After studying mindfulness for four decades, Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is renowned as the field’s mother. Her concept of mindfulness differs from the common practice, in that she believes no meditation is necessary to change the brain’s chemistry; instead, she achieves mindfulness by existing in a state of “actively noticing new things,” she tells NationSwell.
As part of her research, she once split the Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra into two groups and instructed each to play a piece of music by Johannes Brahms, which she recorded. Langer asked the first group to remember their best performance of the familiar piece and try their best to replicate it. She told the other group of musicians to vary the classical piece with subtle riffs that only they would recognize. Langer taped both performances and played them side-by-side for an audience. Overwhelmingly, listeners preferred the second one. To Langer, it seemed that the more choices we make deliberately — in a word, mindfully — as opposed to the mindless repetition, the better our end-product will be. The most important implication for Langer came later, when she was writing up the study: In America, she says, we so often prize a “strong leader to tell people what to do,” but as the orchestra’s performance proves, when an individual takes the lead instead of doing what someone instructs her to do, a superior result is the likely outcome.

2. Primary School

Where: East Village, New York City
“The research is pretty conclusive: when kids feel better, they learn better. One precedes the other,” declares Alan Brown, a consultant with Mindful Schools where he offers mindfulness training to the private school’s freshman and sophomores. Brown incorporated a serious practice into his life at a week-long silent retreat, after “jumping out of my skin, reading the toilet paper, doing anything but to be with your own thoughts and with yourself.” He now teaches kids how to be attuned to themselves and recognize feelings that may be subconsciously guiding their lives, like when they’re hyped up with sugar or are stressed out about a test. (Solutions: spending a moment in a designated corner calming down, breathing through a freakout to restore higher cognitive functions.)
As someone in the caregiving profession, Brown reminds himself and his fellow teachers they need to adopt mindfulness practices as well. With them, “the way I interact with others comes from a place of much greater compassion for the kids: clearly this young person, who is not a fully-formed, self-regulating adult, is probably trying their best and probably has some really significant hurdles outside the classroom. I’m not going to let that get to me.” If teachers expect similarly enlightened behavior from their kids, Brown adds, they have to know, “You can’t teach what you don’t have in your own body” and better embrace a meditative practice to see the results at every desk.

The UMass Mindfulness in Medicine program teaches the benefits of meditation to their staff members.

3. Hospital

Where: Shrewsbury, Mass.
Modern mindfulness was formalized in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Jon Kabat-Zinn created an eight-week meditation routine to reduce stress for the hospital’s chronically ill patients that’s now replicated worldwide. Back on the medical campus where it all started, a new mindfulness program is being offered this summer for the people on the other side of treatment: the physicians, nurse practitioners and care managers.
The Mindfulness in Medicine program works to combat the frequent feeling of dissatisfaction about a lack of patient interaction among doctors. Instructor Carl Fulwiler gives lectures about the clinical research on meditation’s benefits, teaches 90-minute workshops for busy staffers and leads full-blown courses for a dedicated few. His teachings focus on how to avoid burnout with strategic pauses; by taking a breath immediately prior to seeing a patient, doctors can focus solely on the interaction. “Often they’re thinking about what’s the next thing they have to do or the documentation. They’re not even hearing a lot of what the patient is saying,” Fulwiler observes. With mindfulness, they can see what “might be contributing to a bad encounter, what’s preventing us from being empathetic, compassionate and more efficient in our style of communication?” The whole interaction may be over in three minutes, but having that time be meaningful is vital for helping the healers themselves feel the rewards of a demanding job.

4. Government

Where: Washington, D.C.
Change rarely comes to our nation’s capital, but that’s okay in Rep. Tim Ryan’s mind. A meditative practice equipped him to deal with legislative gridlock and partisan bickering. The seven-term Democrat representing northeastern Ohio practices mindfulness in a half lotus position for roughly 40 minutes daily — a regimen he began after attending one of Kabat-Zinn’s retreats in 2008, after which he gained “a whole new way of relating with what was going on in the world,” Ryan tells The Atlantic. “And like any good thing that a congressman finds — a new technology, a new policy idea — immediately I said, ‘How do we get this out?’” Ryan first wrote the book “A Mindful Nation,” exploring the ways mindfulness is being implemented across America, and today, in sessions of the House Appropriations Committee on which he sits, the representative advocates for more funds to be deployed to teach meditation tactics. The money may not be forthcoming just yet, but that hasn’t stopped mindfulness from gaining more new converts like Ryan every day.

5. Police Department

Where: Hillsboro, Ore.
Last month, Americans watched videos of officer-involved shootings in Baton Rouge, La.; St. Paul, Minn; and North Miami, and they read about the five cops who died in a sniper attack in Dallas. While those crises were deeply felt by civilians nationwide, they were only a glimpse of what cops encounter regularly. “Law enforcement is a profession that is deeply impacted by trauma. On a daily basis, we bump up against human suffering,” says Lt. Richard Goerling, head of Hillsboro Police Department’s investigative division and a faculty member at Pacific University. “It doesn’t take very long for police officers’ well-being to erode dramatically,” he adds, ticking off studies that track early mortality and cardiovascular issues among public safety professionals.
Through the organization Mindful Badge, Goerling teaches several police departments in the Portland area and in Northern California how mindfulness can better cops’ performance: sharpening their attention to life-or-death details, cultivating empathy and compassion that’s crucial for stops and searches and building resilience before encountering trauma. The theory goes that once an officer receives mental training, he can sense when a stressor in his environment is activating his flight-or-flight reactions and then check those instincts. “If a police officer is in their own crisis,” Goerling suggests, “they’re not going to meet that person in a way that’s totally effective.” The lieutenant is aware mindfulness isn’t a cure-all for “a landscape of suffering,” but he believes it’s a first step to changing a “broken” police culture that takes its officers’ health for granted.

6. Athletic Competition

Where: San Diego, Calif.
BMX bikers may not seem like a group that’s primed for meditation, but when an elite biker stuttered with anxiety at the starting line, his coach James Herrera looked into any way to solve the problem of managing stress before a high-stakes event. Herrera soon got in touch with the Center for Mindfulness at the University of California, San Diego, and he signed up his seven-man team for a small study into the effects of meditation on “very healthy guys who are at the top of their sport,” lead author Lori Haase tells NationSwell. Over seven weeks, the bikers practiced a normal mindfulness routine, but with extra impediments like having their hands submerged in a bucket of icy water to teach them to feel the sensation of pain, rather than reacting to it cognitively. As the weeks went on, their bodies seemed to prepare for a physical shock, without an accompanying psychological panic. In other words, participants’ bodies were so amped up and hyperaware that they didn’t need to react as strongly to the stressor itself compared to an average person. The study didn’t test whether it made them faster on the course, but it seemed to suggest that reaction times could be sped up by using mindfulness to slow down.

7. Military

Where: Honolulu, Hawaii
Like cops, members of the military have much to gain from situational awareness. A couple seconds’ of lead-time for a soldier to notice someone in a bulky jacket running into a public square could prevent a suicide bomb from taking out dozens of civilians and comrades abroad. But that’s not all mindfulness is good for in a service member’s line of duty.
Before soldiers even leave home, they must deal with leaving family and putting other aspects of their lives on hold. To prepare soldiers for deployment, University of Miami neuroscientist Amishi Jha offered mindfulness trainings at an Army outpost on Oahu to soldiers heading to Afghanistan. To fit the program into an already crowded training regimen, Jha drastically cut down the standard 40-hour model to an eight-hour practice scattered throughout eight weeks. Despite the stress of leaving that could sap the mind’s attention and working memory — “everything they need to do the job well when they’re there,” Jha notes — the mindfulness trainings prevented their minds from wandering. Tentative research Jha’s still conducting suggests those benefits persist post-deployment. Her session was just like boot camp, Jha found, only for the brain.

MORE: How Meditation Is Bringing Calm to San Francisco’s Toughest Schools

Why Are America’s Innovations in Education Spreading Worldwide But Not Here?

Posted on by robbie

At a recent NationSwell Council event, Wendy Kopp spoke about the irony of having American innovations in education being put to use all over the world, but failing to find momentum to spread them far and wide here in the U.S.

The Next Big App: Safer Walks to School Designed by Students Themselves

Posted on by robbie

Imagine walking to school and constantly checking over your shoulder. This is the reality of the students who attend the magnet high school Academy of Palumbo in Philadelphia. Thanks to mass school closings and big budget cuts by superintendent William R. Hite Jr., walks to school have become longer and more dangerous for some students. According to the New York Times, 24 schools were closed and almost 4,000 public school employees were let go just last year, forcing more kids into less public schools.
Muggings and attacks are frequent in this area, especially for kids on their way to school. As a high school algebra teacher, Susan Lee, puts it, “It’s easier to grab them on their way here.”
But once Lee heard about the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow contest, a program that urges schools to raise interest in science, technology, engineering and math, she knew that her students themselves held the power to make their walks to school safer.
MORE: In New Mexico, High Schools that Inspire Would-Be Dropouts
Teaming up with her to work on this project was physics teacher Klint Kanopka and a team of 15 students. The group worked together after school for several months investigating the safest routes to school, interviewing and charting their peers’  data to create an algorithm that could be used in an app for students get to school safely.
The app gives scores, 1-5,  to different streets depending on recent crime data within 10 blocks of the school. The lower scoring a street is, the safer it is. If a shooting occurs on a certain street, that street will immediately jump up to a 5, meaning the students should avoid that street if possible.
The students’ project landed them a spot as one of five winners of the Samsung contest beating more than 2,300 other schools. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the winnings included $140,000 in new technology from Samsung and a free trip to Washington for the students and teachers.
As for the future of the app, Lee hopes it can be adapted and used anywhere across America. In the meantime, Kanopka is talking with University of Pennsylvania masters students specializing in urban planning and engineering about creating a program between the university and the Palumbo students this summer to help the students to continue refining and growing the safety benefits on their app.

No Wheels, Just Feet, on This School Bus

Posted on by robbie

What cuts down on costs, helps the environment, and most importantly, keeps kids in shape?
Walking to school.
With childhood obesity rates at historic highs, there is significant demand to fix this harmful epidemic, and this solution is as simple as they come.
A unique program, called the Walking School Bus, collects kids along a route and together, they make their way to school as a group – not totally dissimilar to the bus experience, but with the added benefit of exercise and fresh air. With no bus driver needed, transportation money instead goes towards a chaperoning adult who not only leads the children and ensures their safety, but also can act as a mentor and role model for them.
Although walking programs can be found running independently of each other throughout the country, many of them are funded by the National Center for Safe Routes to School, a program established to help find alternative routes for children to get to school.
Walking School Bus programs vary in size – in Providence, Rhode Island, only 14 kids participated last academic year, whereas in Columbia, Missouri, 450 children from 13 different school districts took part.
Sadly, Columbia’s program has lost funding, but the Walking School Bus program still exists and can be set up in your community. Here’s how.

6 Ways We Can Make America Home to the ‘Smartest Kids in the World’

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Author Amanda Ripley readily admits that as an investigative reporter for Time, The Atlantic and other publications, she avoided covering education for years, considering it too “soft.” Fast forward six years and the author of The Smartest Kids in the World has become a leading voice on the American education system, its problems — and ways to fix them.
While covering Michelle Rhee, the controversial superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C., Ripley started to feel the urgency many teachers expressed.
She soon embarked on a year-long investigation, following three American exchange students to Poland, Finland and South Korea from 2010 to 2011. Each country has a different approach to education — from the pressure-cooker model to the utopian one — and all three have made marked progress in their students’ overall performance. NationSwell spoke with Ripley recently after she headlined a panel at the fifth annual Women in the World conference in New York City. Here are six things we learned about recharging our education system.
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How Baltimore Successfully Moved Residents Out of the Inner City

Posted on by robbie

It may surprise some to hear, but it takes a fair amount of convincing to get impoverished families to move to a middle-class suburb. Good schools, safer streets, and larger accommodations seem tempting, but many studies show that when given the chance, people tend to relocate to similarly disadvantaged, racially segregated areas.
But that’s not the case in Baltimore — anymore, that is. Two-thirds of the 2,000 families that moved to predominantly white, middle-class neighborhoods in 2005 are still living in their suburban neighborhoods up to eight years later. Those urban migrants kept their jobs in the city, sent their children to better schools, and somewhat miraculously, have experienced almost no racial friction in their new surroundings. So what did Baltimore do right? And what can other cities learn?
A new study in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management lays it all out. After tracking those 2,000 families for the past eight years, it discovered how a lawsuit eventually created an act that not only turned the tide of resistance in Baltimore, but ensured permanent, content residents outside the city’s notoriously gritty corridors.
It all started with a 1995 ACLU lawsuit, which charged that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Baltimore’s housing authority were running a program that didn’t encourage those on federal housing assistance to move.  It wasn’t until 2005, though, that the court finally sided with the ACLU and created of a new voucher program.
The updated program required participants to move from hyper-segregated, hyper-poor neighborhoods to majority-white, suburban ones.  Those neighborhoods had to be less than 10 percent poor and less than 30 percent black. But the inspired part of it all, and likely the portion that ensured its success, is that counseling was provided from move-out to move-in to picking a new school.
So while leaving behind family and friends and moving to unknown suburbia was intimidating, it seems that the counseling helped residents adjust and realize the benefit from leaving behind the neighborhood they knew. “These women had never experienced safe neighborhoods or good schools,” Stefanie DeLuca, associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins and fellow at the Century Foundation, says. She studied the families and did in-depth interviews with 110 of them to get a better idea of their experience. “They were so segregated from mainstream opportunities.”
Realizing their new potential, the new residents of suburbia could see the value in relocating. As Atlantic Cities reports, one originally hesitant women, Kimberley, says in retrospect that “it’s only in leaving that I started growing and wanting to do different things, learn different things and be something different.” In fact, DeLuca and her associates found that the families that did return to the city were the ones who were most hesitant to leave.
The case of Baltimore proves how a willing government and available funds aren’t enough to solve the problem of hyper-segregation; the problem is often cyclical. But with time, patience, and counseling resources, the cycle can be broken.

Sorry Kids: The Rise of Virtual Learning Might Mean the End of Snow Days

Posted on by robbie

For any kid who has experienced the pure joy of waking up on a school day only to discover that it’s been canceled due to inclement weather, we hope you enjoy those memories. Because traditional snow days full of sleeping in, sledding, movie marathons and hot chocolate are over. This winter has been one of the snowiest and coldest on record for many parts of the country, forcing schools to shut their doors for days at a time. In the past, teachers would try to make up for lost time by squeezing multiple lesson plans into one day. But now teachers can connect with their students online by uploading digital lessons, holding classroom discussions and even allowing students to turn in homework assignments via email. In other words, much to students’ dismay, snow days are no excuse for a break anymore.
MORE: This Controversial Teaching Method Is Transforming Classrooms
In Chicago, which was slammed by the polar vortex earlier this year, “tele-schooling” is gaining popularity among teachers who say that missed class time can be a big problem in an era of high-stakes testing. As some of the more affluent school districts issue students laptops or tablets, weather is no longer a barrier for learning. “I told my kids, ‘If we’re not here, we can’t fall behind,'” Steve Kurfess, a math teacher at Conant High School in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, told the Chicago Tribune. “Especially with math, every day is taken into account.” Kurfess has embraced online learning to bridge the gap between school attendance and required coursework. He’s uploaded all of his lessons — about 600 or 700 videos — so students can access them at any time. Save for tests and quizzes, his entire class is paperless. After the school was closed for two days earlier this month, Kurfess said that 98 percent of his students completed the required coursework. “I didn’t miss a day,” he said.
MORE: The Next Frontier in Online Education Isn’t What You’d Expect
As the idea of virtual classrooms continues to expand, Ohio has put a law on the books that allows schools to make up as many as three snow days a year online. This way, schools don’t have to extend the school year into summer to make up for lost time. While the plan was piloted a few years back in the Mississinawa Valley School District, a small, rural community near the Indiana border, it wasn’t until last month that teachers used their “e-days” as they call them. So far, the feedback has been positive, with more than 150 districts in the state having submitted “Blizzard Bags” plans, according to the Ohio Department of Education.
Of course, there are still some technological issues to mitigate before virtual learning becomes the new normal. Most importantly, officials are looking for ways to provide equal access to computers, tablets and Internet for students in less affluent school districts. Some are even partnering with organizations to provide free Internet access in areas where students live. Wifi-enabled school buses might soon become a reality, as well. But as access to technology and Internet grows more and more abundant, snow days as we know (and love) them may become a relic of days past.
ALSO: The Minerva Project: On Online College to Rival the Ivy League

The Coolest Jobs Aren’t Just For Millennials Anymore

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The digital landscape is changing right before our eyes. The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55-65 year age bracket, which has grown 79% since 2012. Seasoned pros are going digital and that means the coolest jobs, fellowships, and internships are not just for twentysomethings or millennials. Teach For America has recently made a concerted effort to tap into the Internet’s fastest growing group by stepping up recruitment efforts away from college campuses. The non-profit recently partnered with Encore.org, a site dedicated to people over 50 starting a second or third career, to help reach the coveted age group. “For every teacher getting ready to move on, there seems to be someone at the conclusion of another line of work eager to get into a classroom and mentor the next generation of students,” says Marci Alboher, author and Vice President of Encore.org, “If you thought Teach for America was just for high achieving twentysomethings, think again.”