THAT'S WHAT WE'RE TALKING ABOUT!

Posted: Sunday, 08 November 2009 3:52PM Grant To Boost Michigan Science, Math Teachers

Addressing the shortage of math and science teachers who will equip Michigan's vulnerable students with the skills they need to compete in the work force, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation has awarded the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation with a $16.7 million grant to establish a new statewide teaching fellowship program. The new W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Woodrow Wilson Michigan Teaching Fellowship will provide 240 future teachers with an exemplary intensive master's program in education and place those Fellows in hard-to-staff middle and high schools. Over the five-year timeline, almost 20,000 public school students in Mich. will receive high quality instruction in the critical subject areas of science, technology, engineering and math. Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm joined the Kellogg Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at the announcement made last week at the Detroit Science Center. "This grant is an investment in Michigan's future, in the future of our workforce, and in the future of our children," Granholm said. "We must develop a workforce that is prepared for the high-tech careers of tomorrow. The new math and science teachers who emerge from this fellowship will inspire our kids to be excited about careers in science, math and technology." The W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Woodrow Wilson Michigan Teaching Fellowship will recruit a diverse mix of high-achieving candidates who show promise as future teachers. Fellows can be college seniors, recent graduates or career changers. The current market downturn in Michigan has forced many experienced engineers and professionals out of the workforce, making available a talented pool of workers who can share their knowledge and depth of experience with students. "The Kellogg Foundation has worked across the country to improve educational opportunities for vulnerable children from the early years through high school," said Sterling Speirn, president and CEO of the Kellogg Foundation. "But it's especially important to invest in a promising initiative in our home state that will match well-qualified teachers with students most in need." The Fellows, who will be announced in Spring 2011 and receive a $30,000 stipend to complete the master's program, commit to teach for at least three years in a high-need school after they complete their teacher education program. The Fellows also are placed in their schools in cohorts and receive intensive support and mentoring to encourage them to continue teaching as a long-term career instead of making it a brief assignment. As integral partners in the Fellowship, several Michigan universities also will undergo important changes. The adjustments will be necessary to provide the Fellows with the best combination of content knowledge and classroom expertise to most effectively address the challenges of their specific student populations. "Research has shown again and again that the most important element in a student's success is the teacher," said Arthur Levine, the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a respected expert on teacher education. "America's schools of education are facing the extraordinary challenge of having to prepare a new breed of teacher, ready to teach the most diverse population of students in our history to the highest levels of skills and knowledge ever required -- all in an outcomes-based system of education. This Fellowship emphasizes intensive practical preparation, rigorous grounding in the subject matter, and extensive supervised teaching experience in the same kind of high-need urban and rural schools where Fellows will later teach." "Having enough great teachers, especially in the math and sciences, shouldn't depend on where a child lives," said Mike Flanagan, Michigan's state superintendent of public instruction. "This program will help heal that disparity." The first statewide Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship, inspired by Levine's research, is already under way in Indiana. The four participating universities are Ball State University, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Purdue University and the University of Indianapolis. The first group of Fellows began their studies this past summer, and the project is being independently evaluated by the Urban Institute. Like Indiana's Fellowship, the Michigan Fellowship will serve as a model for improving teacher education across the country. Universities that participate must match a $500,000 grant and redesign their teacher education programs in science and math within a 21-month time frame by creating a collaborative relationship between the schools of arts and sciences and education. Instead of simply adding a pilot project, these model math and science teacher education programs completely replace the existing programs and are sustained for years to come. Field experience for the Fellows also starts early in the process, as they begin work in high-need schools and gradually take on more teaching responsibilities, similar to the training a medical student would receive in a teaching hospital. Mentoring support for the Fellows continues throughout their first three years in the classroom. The success of the program will be judged by the learning of the students in the Fellows' classrooms, the retention of the teachers and the changes at the university. Targeting the initiative to middle school students as well as to high school students is a key strategy for improving student performance in these subjects. The recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress mathematics results show that 8th graders have made slight gains since 2007, from an average of 281 to 283. But still, just 34 percent of students are scoring at or above the proficient level. In addition, students eligible for the federal student lunch program gained just one point over 2007 and the average score for English learners dropped this year by three points. Based in Battle Creek, the Kellogg Foundation focuses its grants on programs that improve the lives of vulnerable children. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Woodrow Wilson Michigan Teaching Fellowship matches the Foundation's goals of building innovative partnerships that create stronger conditions for learning and increasing students' ability to become productive members of society. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has a history of administering successful fellowship programs and preparing new generations of leaders. It is respected within and beyond the higher education community. Since the 1980s, the Foundation also has forged partnerships between schools and universities in order to improve professional development for teachers. Interested applicants should contact wwteachingfellowships@woodrow.org. More at www.wkkf.org,

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State of Michigan "Race to the Top" Heavy Lifting (Compliance Issues)

OUR EDITORIAL

School sabotage 

Michigan Education Association works to keep reforms, federal money at bay while school districts struggle

With Michigan schools facing an enormous funding gap, the Mi chigan Education Association is attempting to sabotage an effort that could bring in more than $600 million in federal education money.

State policymakers are working to put together one of the essential pieces of legislation required to win federal “Race to the Top” grant money. President Barack Obama is using the money to give states an incentive to enact long overdue education reforms.

Next month state school Superintendent Mike Flana gan must turn in the applica tion for the competition, now being watched by U.S. foun dations for signals about which states are serious about education reform and merit even more funding.

But the prospects for Michigan aren’t good. The MEA, the state’s largest teacher union, is pressuring cowardly lawmakers to block the Race to the Top legisla tion,  which includes provisions making it easier for nonteachers to secure classroom positions, if they have critical skills.

This seemingly innocuous change has stirred up intense political fighting, pitting teacher unions against Gov. Jennifer Granholm and others, such as the United Way of South eastern Michigan,  who want the Race to the Top funds for Michigan.

Teach for America — the heralded non profit  that prepares and places highly talented educators in struggling schools — says it must have an alternative certification pathway for its members to become full-time teachers in Mi chigan.

MEA leaders say they oppose alternative teacher certification because they believe teacher training is essential to properly instruct students. “This is not an union issue,” MEA spokesman Doug Pratt says. “This is a funda mental belief … that teachers who go through a traditional teacher prep process are going to be better for stu dents in the long run.”

But urban districts are having trouble finding highly qualified math and science teachers, in no small part because of the failure of traditional teacher training programs in the state.

That was one of the driv ing forces behind a Friday announcement by the W.K.

Kellogg Foundation that it is investing $16.7 million to establish a new statewide fellowship program to provide 240 teachers for hard-to staff schools.

If the MEA is allowed to sabotage Michi gan’s Race to the Top effort, it will mean the loss of about $600 million in federal money at a time when every classroom is facing an un precedented budget cut. Ultimately, that will mean fewer jobs for teachers, hurting the union’s own members.

It is absolutely essential that Michigan gets this money, and the education reforms that come with it .

VIRTUAL HEAVY LIFTING! (Second Life on the U.S. National Educational Technology Plan ISTE))

"Design Thinking" to Leverage the Heavy Lifting

What's Thwarting American Innovation? Too Much Science, Says Roger Martin

BY Linda TischlerWed Nov 4, 2009 at 3:18 PM

By pushing the principles of scientific management too far, corporations are short-circuiting their own futures, says the designiest dean of all the business schools. "The enemy of innovation is the phrase 'prove it,'" Roger Martin says.

The folks at McKinsey, Bain, and BCG should be happy that Roger Martin likes his job. Otherwise, he could cause them a heap of trouble.

As it is, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto is traveling the country, throwing down the gauntlet to companies who hope to analyze and strategize their way out of a recession by bringing in armies of management consultants. You'll get what you pay for, he warns, and it won't be innovation.

"The business world is tired of having armies of analysts descend on their companies," he says. "You can't send a 28-year-old with a calculator to solve your problems."



The problem, says Martin, author of a new book, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, is that corporations have pushed analytical thinking so far that it's unproductive. "No idea in the world has been proved in advance with inductive or deductive reasoning," he says.

The answer? Bring in the folks whose job it is to imagine the future, and who are experts in intuitive thinking.
That's where design thinking comes in, he says.

"If I didn't like my job, I'd go out and create a killer firm that would take on McKinsey head-to-head in their own market. A company would get better results, at a fraction of the price." McKinsey, a $5B company, bills out freshly minted MBAs at $1M a year, Martin says. Their billing structure is 10 times what a design firm typically gets.

We spoke to Martin about why MBAs and designers should learn to get along prior to his coming to New York for the Rotman School of Management Design Thinking Experts series with IDEO's Tim Brown and Target's Will Setliffe.

Fast Company: As we slowly climb out of the recession, everybody's looking for where the next innovation will come from. Why does our pace of innovation seem to be slowing?

Martin: Most companies try to be innovative, but the enemy of innovation is the mandate to "prove it." You cannot prove a new idea in advance by inductive or deductive reasoning.

Fast Company: Are you saying that the regression analysis jockeys and Six Sigma black belts have got it all wrong?

Martin: Well, yes. With every good thing in life, there's often a dark shadow. The march of science is good, and corporations are being run more scientifically. But what they analyze is the past. And if the future is not exactly like the past, or there are things happening that are hard to measure scientifically, they get ignored. Corporations are pushing analytical thinking so far that it's become unproductive. The future has no legitimacy for analytical thinkers.

Fast Company: What's the alternative?

Martin: New ideas must come from a new kind of thinking. The American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce called it abductive logic. It's a logical leap of the mind that you can't prove from past data.

Fast Company: I can't see many CEOs being comfortable with that!

Martin: Why not? The scientific method starts with a hypothesis. It's often what happens in the shower or when an apple hits you on the head. It's what we call 'intuitive thinking.' Its purpose is to know without explicit reasoning.

Fast Company: So, if you're not getting these Newtonian moments from your management consultants, where are they likely to come from?

Martin: In a knowledge-intensive world, design thinking is critical to overcoming the biggest block: overcoming analytical thinking and fear of intuitive thinking. The design thinker enables the organization to balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and administration of business, originality and mastery.

Fast Company: Who's been brave enough to embrace that idea in this market?

Martin: When he first took over, A.G. Lafley at P&G was brilliant enough to realize they were missing a lot about the holistic consumer experience by sticking to things that were rigorously quantified. For example, when the company moved into beauty products, they were looking at face cream. And the scientists decided it must be about pore coverage. So they analyzed the hell out of pores and said 'We can cover pores better than anybody.' So when women in their research started talking about wanting to feel beautiful and desirable, they'd say, 'Don't talk about that. We don't know how to quantify that!' And they couldn't understand why stupid women would go off to department stores and pay ten times more when they could cover pores just as well. Ten years ago, P&G couldn't prove they could sell women billions of dollars of Oil of Olay face cream at $30-$60. They could imagine it, but not prove it. Lafley took it as a management challenge to see across the divide.

Fast Company: If you don't have A.G. Lafley or Steve Jobs at the helm, how can you sell your organization on the idea of an intuitive leap instead of a scientific leap?

Martin: You don't have to convert the whole organization to design thinking. Propose a little experiment--say, three months in length--where you test out a bite-sized chunk of a problem using this method. If you have a little success, be sure to then attach metrics to it. In that way, you turn the future into the past in a way they understand.

Fast Company: We're a little biased toward the designers here. Don't they bear some of the responsibility for the gap in understanding?

Martin: Absolutely. Like anybody who takes a job in another country, and needs to learn the local language in order to function, design thinkers need to learn the language of reliability, terms such as proof, regression analysis, and best practices.

Fast Company: Sounds like there's a promising future for somebody who's bilingual and can combine both approaches.

Martin: This is a fascinating time, and there's an interesting battle coming. One of these smallish design firms might combine the best of the analytical from the business world and the best intuitive thinking from the design world and become gigantic. There would be massive traction for it. It wouldn't be the first time that a little company in a garage saw things differently.

Critical THINKING Critical: Some REAL-HEAVY Lifting!

EDGE (Food for Thought)
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/schirrmacher09/schirrmacher09_index.html

THE HEAVY LIFTING: WHAT he SAID! (Alignment to OUR Purpose)

CONGRATULATIONS are IN ORDER!

School leaders elected in Pontiac, other districts


Wednesday, November 4, 2009



By DIANA DILLABER MURRAY

Of The Oakland Press



Early unofficial results gave board President Damon Dorkins and school activist Caroll Turpin the top places in a tight race for two, four-year terms on the Pontiac school board.



Turpin was the top vote-getter, with 3,708, and Dorkins second, with 3,019. Angelena Thomas took 2,336, Ben Shattuck, 2,080, and Tommaleta Hughes, 1,474, in the race for the two, four-year terms, according to the Oakland County Clerk’s Web site.



A Pontiac teacher came out the surprise top vote-getter in the race for a one-year term on the board. Mary Barr, who teaches career and technology at Pontiac Middle School, had 3,300 votes.



Barr, who rode through town in a horse-drawn carriage bearing her sign during the campaign, won the seat away from Trustee Hazel Cadd, who was appointed to fill out the term in September 2008, with 1,147 votes, and Kaino Phillips with 2,620.



After his victory speech at the Coyote Club in downtown Pontiac, Dorkins, a 33-year-old Pontiac police officer, said: “This is a good thing for the board.



“This means the community is supportive of the leadership, which means the board can move forward with those programs to educate our kids. This support shows we have a chance. We will push the administration to hold everyone accountable in the district.”



Turpin, a social worker, who is married to dentist Bruce Turpin and has four adult children, was leading early in the race. A school activist, she has volunteered on many district committees, including Oakland Press Roundtable and the Financial Stabilization & Recovery Committee.



During her campaign, Turpin promised, “I will work to make our schools the No. 1 school of choice for parents and children.”



Dorkins said, “I am looking forward to working with Caroll. She’s a great advocate for kids and now it is time to take her avocation to another level as a trustee on the board.”



Voters across Oakland County selected the candidates they thought best to steer their schools through an assault of state cuts in school funding.



There was an upset in the Madison District school board, which has also survived some major struggles this year, including the firing of a superintendent, the hiring of a new one and the overcoming of a threat of jail terms if a deficit wasn’t eliminated.



Board President Keith Beguhn, who was vying for a third term, lost by only a few votes a tight race for one of two, four-year terms to challenger Albert Morrison, who had 649 votes and newcomer Alexander Marr, with 490. Beguhn had 471 votes.



Beguhn said the board and staff worked together to eliminate the deficit and he was hoping voters would give him the chance to help keep the district out of deficit without hurting programs and closing schools. James Owens was also vying for two, four-year terms.



In the second race, challenger Kenneth Melchert had 559 votes to win the a two-year partial term away from incumbent Sue Barron, who had 447 votes. Anjela Freeman had 146 votes.



In the race for a one-year partial term incumbent, Jennifer Lorenz, who opted to run for the partial term rather than another four-year seat on the board, was way out in front of Michael Hohner, with 682 votes to his 444 votes. Hohner was running to fill the seat to which he was appointed.



Other districts with contested races are Avondale, Berkley, Birmingham, Farmington, Huron Valley, Novi, Oxford, Royal Oak, South Lyon and Troy.



AVONDALE — In a five-candidate race for four, four-year terms, incumbents Cynthia Tischer, with 1,996 votes, and Cyndi Pettit, with 1,819, took the lead and challengers Sean Johnson, with 1,689, and Sid Lockhart, with 1,597, also won a seat on the board. John Nofs had 1,463.



BERKLEY — Incumbent Randy Travis, with 2,458 votes, barely claimed another term on the board, with Ryan O’Gorman taking 2,976, and Sheryl Stoddard, with 2,949, leading a close race for the other two of the three, six-year terms up for election. They beat out newcomers Paul Honkala, with 2,242, and Deborah Rittman, with 2,376. Incumbent Roger Blake ran unopposed for a partial term.



BIRMINGHAM — Incumbent Lori Soifer, with 3,305, won a tight race against challenger Katie Reiter, with 3,172 for one, four-year term on the board.



FARMINGTON — Incumbents Priscilla Brouillette, with 4,606 votes and Frank Reid, with 4,416, beat out four challengers to win the two, four-year terms on the board. Challengers were Cindy Flynn, Umesh Gandhi, Dennis Homant and Steven Stimson. In a separate race, incumbents Sheilah Clay and Gary Sharp ran unopposed in their bids for six-year terms.



HURON VALLEY — Six candidates vied for two, four-year terms. Incumbent Sean Carlson and newcomer Rebecca Walsh were running ahead of challengers Ron Boyd, Thomas Kolakowski, Jennifer Peitz and May Russell.



OXFORD — Robert Martin and Kimberly Shumaker were running far ahead of Franz Langegger in the competition for two, four-year terms on the board.



ROYAL OAK — Carrie Beerer came out on top with 4,138 votes n a race for two, four-year terms, with Jeff Bringer taking the second seat with 3,865 votes. Arthur Makarewicz won 3,149.



SOUTH LYON — Five candidates sought two, six-year terms. Candidates were incumbents Greg Downey and George Ehlert and challengers Steven Brummer, Frank Domanico and Carl Towne.



TROY — Four candidates — incumbents Paula Fleming and Nancy Philippart and challengers Bruce Bloomingdale and Bernie Lourim — vied for two, four-year terms. In a separate race, incumbents Ida Edmunds and Wendy Underwood ran unopposed for two, six-year terms.



School board races were uncontested in Brandon, Northville, Novi, Rochester, Southfield and West Bloomfield Township.



Contact staff writer Diana Dillaber Murray at (248) 745-4638 or e-mail diana.dillaber@oakpress.com. Karen Workman also contributed to this story.

Cliff-Notes on the "One-Two Punch!" (Non-compliance Race to the Top)

• 

'Funding Cliff' Looms Large for States

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm talks about school funding cuts along with state budget director Bob Emerson, left, during a press conference in Lansing, Mich., Oct. 22. Gov. Granholm said that school funding would be slashed by $127 per student and would take effect in 30 days unless revenue is found to avoid the cuts.
—Al Goldis/AP

By Erik W. Robelen

Premium article access courtesy of Edweek.org.

Amid a still-shaky economy, a troubling reality is starting to set in for states and school districts: The budget situation may get a lot worse when the federal economic-stimulus spigot runs dry.

The hope of the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress has been that the $787 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—including some $100 billion for education—would soften the pain of the recession and help drive a recovery.

But as helpful as many state and local officials have found the once-only stimulus aid in coping with current and anticipated revenue shortfalls, it creates some awfully big holes to fill when the money begins to run out late next year in what’s widely known as the “funding cliff.”

Experts also caution that the recovery of state and local coffers is likely to significantly lag behind any progress in the national economy generally. For one thing, state budgets are largely supported by individual income and sales taxes, which will likely be slower to catch up.

“States are bracing themselves for prolonged fiscal difficulties,” said Todd Haggerty, a research analyst at the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures. “When you couple the absence of federal ARRA funds with still-declining revenues, it puts states in a difficult situation.”

An October report issued by the White House in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Education highlighted the extent to which ARRA money in the $48.6 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund has already “restored” significant shares of K-12 education funding in states.

But a close look by Education Week at data submitted to the department by the states about how they planned to spend the money shows that 36 states will have to fill a collective gap of at least $16.5 billion to return to fiscal 2008 state spending levels for K-12 education.

And that figure does not reflect the more recent revenue shortfalls many states have since encountered.

The Education Department has urged states and districts to be careful to “minimize the funding cliff” when the stimulus aid ends by using the money for purposes “that do not result in unsustainable continuing commitments.”

But some analysts say that idea runs counter to the stimulus law’s emphasis on using the money to save and create jobs. Indeed, the White House announced Oct. 19 that states had already reported saving or creating at least 250,000 jobs in education with the federal aid.

“Saving and creating jobs implies expenditures on salaries, and salaries are inherently ongoing expenses,” said Jennifer S. Cohen, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. “They create funding cliffs, because once the money runs out, you’ll have to continue funding them.”

Spending Pace Varies

The pace at which states are allocating money under the state-stabilization fund varies widely, Ms. Cohen noted.

“States that are in worse fiscal trouble are front-loading the spending,” she said, citing Arizona, California, and Illinois among those that planned to use all of the money to shore up their budgets for the current fiscal year and for the prior year.

In Alaska, meanwhile, none of that aid is expected to go out until fiscal 2011.

Illinois used about $1 billion in state-stabilization aid to bolster its budget for the fiscal year that ended June 30, and plans to use the remainder, approximately $1 billion, for the current budget year, fiscal 2010, according to Matthew E. Vanover, a spokesman for the Illinois state board of education.

“Certainly, there is some major concern at this point in time because next fiscal year, beginning July 1, in order to just remain the same, we have to come up with an additional $1 billion for education,” he said. That’s out of a total of more than $7 billion in state aid for schools, he said.

Benjamin S. Schwarm, an associate executive director of the Illinois Association of School Boards, said: “The question is, what happens after this, when you don’t have that [money] coming in. ... Everybody around here keeps referring to it as the ‘cliff,’ and I don’t think it’s good.”

By contrast, in South Carolina, the legislature opted not to release any of the state-stabilization money for last fiscal year. The state is allocating about half its expected total of $359 million in such funds this fiscal year, and the second half the following year, said Betsy Carpentier, a deputy superintendent in the South Carolina Department of Education.

At the same time, she said, virtually all of the additional dollars districts are getting in other parts of the stimulus package—such as from the Title I program for disadvantaged students and under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—are going out this fiscal year. In all, South Carolina districts are receiving $335 million in preK-12 stimulus support beyond the state-stabilization aid, Ms. Carpentier said.

Deborah L. Elmore, a spokeswoman for the South Carolina School Boards Association, said that while the stimulus aid has been a huge help, it has taken the state only so far, given that South Carolina has suffered through several recent rounds of midyear budget cuts.

“It helped to keep the hole in the bottom from being a lot wider,” she said. “Unless the economy turns around, we’re left with falling through the bottom again.”

Maryland state schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick said that, in her state, the stabilization money is being used both for this fiscal year and the following one.

“I think we’ve tried to structure something that would prevent us from really experiencing this cliff that we know will ultimately occur when the money runs out,” she said. Ms. Grasmick said she and Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, have told districts, “Please do not use this money to hire new positions, because when the money runs out, we don’t want to be in a position of having to terminate people.”

Instead, they have urged districts to think of the funds as onetime expenses, she said, such as to investments in technology or new instructional materials “that will yield some long-term benefit.”

‘A Lagging Indicator’

Meanwhile, a new report from the American Association of School Administrators, based in Arlington, Va., suggests that in many school districts around the country, federal stimulus aid has not been able to avert cuts to programs and staffing levels.

The AASA surveyed 875 school administrators from 49 states and the District of Columbia. More than one-third of the respondents said they were unable to save any core teaching jobs as a result of the stimulus money.

In addition, the percentage of districts increasing class sizes grew almost sixfold between the 2008-09 academic year and the current school year, to 34 percent from 6 percent, the survey data showed. The percentage of districts reporting cuts to their school bus transportation routes and availability doubled to 20 percent this school year, from 10 percent last academic year.

The AASA report suggests the worst may still lie ahead for many districts.

“Unfortunately, school districts’ economic welfare appears to be a lagging indicator, even further behind the still less-than-stable remainder of the economy,” the report says. “There is an unmistakable ‘one-two punch’ school districts are bracing themselves for as they budget for the 2010-11 school year. Not only is that when the [stimulus] funds are expected to end, it is also the likely low point for state and local budgets.”

A new report from the NCSL offers some grim budget news, too. It says the “steep revenue falloff in FY 2009 will not be the bottom for many states.” More than half the states expect a further decline in fiscal 2010, the report says.

On top of that, Mr. Haggerty of the state legislatures’ group said, at least 21 states have already reported midyear budget gaps.

“So you’re looking at a good number of states [with] some pretty large and significant budget gaps just a few months into the new fiscal year,” he said.

Concerns about the looming end to the stimulus program have raised questions about whether there might be a second round of federal legislation to extend the aid. The White House has been careful to avoid any suggestions that it’s planning to seek additional assistance.

But Jack O’Connell, the state superintendent in California, suggested that more aid should be on the table.

“While we have been told, count on this as one-time money, ... I don’t think it’s inappropriate [to have a second round],” he said, “absent economic recovery.”

SYNCHRONICITY at Cobo Hall Monday November 2, 2009 4:00PM & 7:30PM

This event is free and open to the public!

"The Providence Effect" documents one of the great success stories in American education. Providence St. Mel School on Chicago's West Side which has, for 29 straight years, placed 100 percent of its high-school graduates in colleges. Please join us and see this inspiring documentary about closing the achievement gap in an urban environment through a "WHATEVER IT TAKES" approach to helping at-risk kids learn at very high levels. 

Workforce preparedness and quality education for all is one of the most critical issues facing our region and country today. If we can duplicate programs being utilized by high-performing schools, we can increase the number of quality school options for all children in the region.

"The Providence Effect" at Cobo Hall with a community conversation immediately following the film with Providence Englewood's Principal, Angela Johnson-Williams, lead by Mike Tenbusch, VP Educational Preparedness, UWSEM.

4:00 pm, Monday, November 2, 2009 Oakland Room, Cobo Hall
(full-length showing of the movie at 7:30 pm in Room M2-29)

Click here for the Providence Effect movie website.  

The purpose of this event is to engage and deepen community understanding of what constitutes quality education and what the community can do to facilitate Detroit education improvement.    

This event is Free and Open to the Public.  Attendees can register at:  

http://www.liveunitedsem.org/page/event/detail/education/wzb 

Sponsored by:

United Way of Southeastern Michigan

Leadership Detroit Education Support Committee

Detroit Regional Chamber

21st Century Schools Project

DMC Sinai-Grace Hospital

Rachele J. Downs | Leadership Detroit XXX

Mid-Course SUMMARY of OUR Conversations and Intentions (The VALUE of the Self-Examined Life!)

Parker Palmer: Know Yourself, Change Your World

In the work you do each day, how do you distinguish truth from fraud, build community, and speak up for what’s right? 

 

by Sarah van Gelder

posted Sep 09, 2009

Why do bankers make unethical investments, and what makes teachers burn out after a year on the job? Acclaimed educator and author Parker J. Palmer says most of us lack an understanding of our inner lives. If we learned in school how to navigate the inner landscapes of our lives, we might gain the tools to make it through difficult times, and clarify and act on our deepest values. Palmer is the author of A Hidden Wholeness, Let Your Life Speak, and The Courage to Teach, and a founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal. YES! Executive Editor Sarah van Gelder spoke with him about why “reflection” should be the fourth “R” of education.

Parker Palmer

Photo by Dan Kowalski

Sarah: Why does learning about the inner life make you a better teacher, or doctor, or carpenter, or citizen?

Parker: Every line of work is deepened by bringing all of our human capacities to bear on whatever we are doing, and that includes our inner sensibilities as well as our externally oriented knowledge and skill.

Doctors who are acquainted with their inner landscapes are better able to help their patients draw on the healing power of their own psyches and spirits. The relation between a doctor’s emotional self-awareness and a patient’s well-being is so well-grounded in clinical evidence that many medical schools are now making doctor-patient relationships a regular part of a physician’s preparation.

Sarah: What exactly do you mean by the inner life?

Parker: The inner landscape has at least three dimensions: a cognitive and intellectual dimension; an emotional, psychological dimension; and a spiritual dimension. My definition of spiritual is that it involves the eternal human yearning to be connected with something larger than my own ego.

Engaging the inner life also makes for a more ethical professional practice. As we look around the professions today—not least in the world of business and accounting—we see why we need people who have an examined inner life to strengthen the ethics of those professions.

So, for example, if you’re a great historian, you may be seeking to be connected with the massive story of human development over time, which rescues you from the smallness of your own story. An astronomer or a physicist may likewise find meaning and purpose in the larger story of their discipline’s contribution to human knowledge. If you’re a seeker on a more traditional religious path, you may find that larger connection beyond your own ego in Allah or Yahweh or God or in the void, in the Godhead, the Buddha, and so on.

My definition of spirituality doesn’t prescribe any particular path. Instead, it opens up an inquiry. We need such an inquiry in education because sometimes the answer people come up with in response to their spiritual yearning is the Third Reich, Aryan supremacy, or some other form of racism, sexism, or homophobia. We have all kinds of ways of saying, “My group is superior to your group,” and that’s the pathological way we get connected to something larger than our own egos.

So putting these questions on the table educationally is not only acceptable, it’s critical. When we leave them unexamined, we get a lot of darkness in the world as people fail to examine their underlying spiritual dynamics in relation to their work and other responsibilities.

You mentioned carpenters. My grandfather was a master carpenter. He had a sixth-grade education, but he had Einstein in his fingertips. His inner guidance was so strong that he could build a circular staircase in the middle of a house without using a miter box to cut the complex angles required. He’d cut them freehand and perfectly join that wood in a spiral.

My grandfather’s feeling for wood was parallel to the way geneticist Barbara McClintock worked with the biotic materials that led her to breakthrough discoveries in genetic transposition more than 50 years ago, long before we had the scientific instrumentation we have today. Of course, she had all the logical and observational powers you need to win a Nobel Prize in medicine. But she also had a relationship with the maize she studied that she called “a feeling for the organism.”

When we bring our inner lives into our work, whatever we’re working with ceases to be an object to be manipulated and becomes instead a partner to co-create with. That’s what good teachers do with students, good doctors do with patients, good writers do with words, good potters do with clay.

Sarah: What role does an inner practice have in educational settings?

Parker: For starters, if we helped would-be teachers understand their inner lives, we’d have less teacher burnout. Fifty percent of those who enter public school teaching will be gone at the end of five years. Schools are too often places that don’t sustain human growth and development. And if you’re not supporting that growth in teachers, then you’re not doing that for students, because adults who don’t develop their own inner lives can’t pass those capacities on to the young.

If you want evidence of the importance of the inner life in institutional reform, look at the study of school reform in Chicago in the 1990s, done by Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider. [1]

The study asked why some schools do better than others at teaching reading, writing, and math. They found that none of the “usual suspects” made much of a difference in improving kids’ learning: not money, models of governance, state-of-the-art curriculum, in-service training, or technology.

But one variable made a huge difference, a variable the researchers called “relational trust.” If your school had high levels of relational trust—among teachers and between teachers and administrators, and teachers and parents—and/or a leadership team that cared about trust, then over 10 years, your chance of raising student performance in basic skills was five out of seven. If not, your chances dropped to two out of seven.

So, what goes into relational trust? I’d argue that it relies on the capacity to do inner work, to go beyond the ego into something larger—in this case, into the shared desire to help children grow up in a way that will give them a chance at good lives.

Doing inner work means grappling with questions such as, “How do I get my own ego out of the way enough to regard you as a collaborator rather than as a competitor? If you step on my toes, how can I forgive you and move on? And if I step on your toes, how do I forgive myself and ask for your forgiveness so we can move on together?”

Engaging the inner life also makes for a more ethical professional practice. As we look around the professions today—not least in the world of business and accounting—we see why we need people who have an examined inner life to strengthen the ethics of those professions.

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I’d add, if you choose to live an unexamined life, please do not take a job that involves other people! You’re likely to cause real damage if you do.

Sarah: When people get clear on their values, don’t they tend to change the institutions they work with?

Parker: Yes, the inner life is subversive! When you develop an awareness of your inner life, you became aware of the disparity between your integrity and the way the institutions around you operate. And you may become aware that you are part of the problem—that you live a divided life, that the actions your institutions demand of you conflict with your inner values.

Institutions are projections of our own inner lives. Yes, they appear to have superhuman powers. But we can call them back to some semblance of humanity by reinventing them, because we invented them in the first place.

For example, a doctor at one of our Center for Courage and Renewal retreats said that the HMO where he works has him on the edge of violating his Hippocratic Oath two or three times a week. And under No Child Left Behind, many teachers are struggling with the demands of a testing system that threatens their commitment to serve the best interests of kids.

At that point, you have to reach deep and ask yourself, “Am I going to continue to live a divided life? Am I going to tuck this under the rug and pretend that I don’t know what’s going on? Or am I going to become a moral change agent within my institution and rally like-minded people around me, coalescing our power to bring about institutional change?”

Part of our problem is that our major institutions are often so complex that outsiders who want to hold them accountable have little access. Wall Street is a horrific example. We all know what happened when so very few insiders were willing to say what they knew—that our markets and financial system had become a house of cards. We need people within these institutions to act as moral agents, watching out for the best interests of those who are supposed to be served and of society at large.

In a recent article I wrote for Change Magazine [2], I argued that professional education must include the competencies individuals need to work toward change in our very dysfunctional institutions. In other words, all professionals ought to have some of the skills of a community organizer.

Sarah: In the new edition of your book, The Courage to Teach, you talk about debunking the myth that institutions possess autonomous power over our lives.

Parker: I tell a true story in The Courage to Teach about a medical resident who was given an impossible load of critical care patients to look after all by herself. She was unable to cope, and one of her patients died.

What do medical schools teach would-be doctors about their responsibilities and powers when they are asked to participate in wrongdoing? Do they teach them to blow the whistle on a system that puts them in an impossible situation? Or do they condition them to avoid getting crosswise with their superiors, and to just hope they make it through the day without anyone dying?

Institutions are projections of our own inner lives. Yes, they get large and complicated and appear to have superhuman powers. But we can call them back to some semblance of humanity by reinventing them, because we invented them in the first place. I think students don’t understand this. They believe that institutions have slots that you must fit into. But those slots are malleable, and those institutions can be rearranged. We have to help empower students to learn how to do that.

Sarah: Successful students are often the ones who did fit themselves into the slots within the educational institution that they graduated from.

Parker: That’s an important point. For generations, our schools have replicated the problems of our institutions. If you drive around small towns that haven’t rebuilt their high schools for the last 80 or 90 years, you see schools that were built to look like the factories that their graduates were going to work in. A lot of them look like those deadening assembly plant buildings that General Motors used to have, because the whole idea was to condition people to live and work under those circumstances.

But clearly that’s not education. Education was meant to be liberating for free men and women, which is where the name “liberal education” comes from.

Sarah: In Change Magazine, you proposed that we teach students how to “mine their emotions for knowledge.” What does that mean?

Parker: Fear can be like the canary in the mine. It’s trying to tell us that danger is coming and we need to do something about it. But people need help discerning their emotions, just as they need help discerning facts. We need to help students understand that some emotions come out of neurotic fears that can and must be overcome. But other emotions are pointing them toward external problems that they need to confront.

More from Parker J. Palmer

Now I Become Myself
How do you find the right work, the work that you alone are called to do? The first step is to ask a different question...

Integral Life, Integral Teacher
How can an inner decision to live and work with integrity spark a social movement?

We do our best discernment in community, where many eyes, ears, sets of experiences, and voices can sort out the wheat from the chaff. That’s how every mode of human knowing proceeds, including science. All of us together are smarter than any one of us alone—especially if we listen to the dissenters and to the people raising critical questions.

When students work together, they can learn how to move toward provisional conclusions about what’s true and false, what’s right and wrong, which leads are worth following, and which of them can be laid down and forgotten. If our schools would do that, we would have more community in our lives, better results in the world of work, and deeper discernment by citizens in our political life.

Likewise, institutional change doesn’t come about simply through the actions of courageous whistle-blowers. It happens through the formation of communities of people who have a shared moral concern and who can provide encouragement, resources, and protection for each other. That way, the whistle-blower isn’t so easily picked off and hung out to dry.

I don’t know of any great movement that hasn’t depended on base communities to sustain individuals in the demanding work of social change.

Sarah: You ended your new edition of The Courage to Teach by saying, “Let us resist the temptation to respond with a fearful ‘no’ or an elusive ‘maybe,’ and allow our lives to speak a clear and heartfelt ‘yes.’” What does it mean to do that in the times we’re in today?

Parker: For the past eight years, we had political leaders who lied to us. They pumped up our fear of terrorism to persuade us to agree to subverting our Constitution and disempowering citizens—strategies that we’ve seen before in fascist and totalitarian societies.

Now, of course, we have the fear that the American economy has been, and continues to be, a house of cards. A lot of people are suffering, and there is more suffering to come.

Rebuilding is going to require lots of Americans to re-envision what abundance means. I experienced more abundance in the Quaker community called Pendle Hill—where I spent 11 years living on $2,400 a year (beginning in 1975) plus room and board—than I have at many other times of my life. This abundance comes from knowing that we’re there for one another. If the bottom falls out of my life, I have a support net, and if the bottom falls out of your life, I can be part of the support net for you. That’s abundance.

There are not many Americans who live in that kind of milieu, so we’re surrounded by fear. And yet, I don’t think there’s any more important time than this to say a heartfelt “yes” to the human possibility. That sense of possibility disappears when we say “no” or “If I can’t have my illusions about the economy and about America’s inherent greatness, then I’ll give up. I’ll hunker down, get what I can for me and my kind, and let the devil take the hindmost.” That can very quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, we need to make “yes” a self-­fulfilling prophecy. But it has to be a “yes” tempered by a clear-eyed knowledge of both what is going on and what we know to be possible.

The challenge is to stand and act in what I call “the tragic gap.” This is the gap between the hard facts that surround us and what we know to be possible—not our dreams or fantasies, but what we know to be possible because we’ve seen the evidence with our own eyes, just as I saw evidence of communal abundance during my years at Pendle Hill.

It’s an ongoing journey to stand in the tragic gap and keep acting in hopeful ways, holding the tension between what is and what could be. It’s so easy to flip out either into cynicism—­because the latest wave of bad news has just washed over you—or into a kind of idealism, because something has gone well and you allow yourself to imagine that it will be this way forever. A good example might be the people who thought Barack Obama would get everything right, who are now tempted to drop out of the political process as Obama proves to have feet of clay, the kind that come with being human.

When I think of the great leaders whom I admire—whether it’s Nelson Mandela, or Dorothy Day, who started the Catholic worker movement, or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar—I think of people who stood in the tragic gap for a long, long time, people who kept moving forward saying “yes” in full awareness of the hard realities around them while never abandoning their vision of possibility.

If more and more of us can hold that tension and keep moving forward by saying “yes, yes, yes” to each incremental step toward the possible, no matter how small, then I think all kinds of good things can happen.

AFTER the STIMULUS (Beware Bubbles and Sharp Objects)

TIME MAGAZINE

Can the World Agree on a Stimulus Exit Plan?
By Michael Schuman / Hong Kong Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009

During the dark days of the global credit crunch a year ago, policymakers around the world had a generally easy time coordinating decisions. As asset prices tanked, lending dried up and growth shriveled, governments and central banks were forced to take similar steps — pump up fiscal spending and slash interest rates to support growth and unfreeze financial markets. Now, as an economic recovery emerges, governments are hoping for another coordinated effort to exit from their massive stimulus plans, including near-zero interest rates. That intention was clearly laid out during the September G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, Pa. The leaders of the world's 20 most influential economies pledged to "withdraw our extraordinary policy support in a cooperative and coordinated way."

Yet what sounds so simple on paper will be far more complicated in the real world of economic policymaking. The problem is that the upturn isn't as synchronized as the downturn. Countries are emerging from recession at different speeds, with each facing its own special mix of inflationary pressures and unemployment — both of which affect decisions for monetary and fiscal policy. "We won't get the kind of coordinated response that is the rhetoric of the G-20," says Paul De Grauwe, professor of economics at the University of Leuven in Belgium. "Each country is going to look at its own interests."
(See TIME's special "Out of Work in America.")

That possibility is already becoming a reality, as signs appear that central-bank policies are beginning to diverge. On Oct. 6, Australia became the first G-20 nation to raise interest rates, hiking its key rate by a quarter of a percentage point, to 3.25%. With "inflation close to target and the risk of serious economic contraction in Australia now having passed," Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Glenn Stevens said in a statement, the central bank decided that it was now "prudent to begin gradually lessening the stimulus provided by monetary policy." Meanwhile, in other industrialized nations still suffering from high unemployment and yawning excess capacity, policymakers are in no hurry to tighten. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve has indicated that it won't act aggressively anytime soon on its key interest rate, which remains in a zero to 0.25% range. "It seems likely that the recovery will be less robust than desired," William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in an early October speech. "This means that the economy has significant excess slack and implies that we face meaningful downside risks to inflation over the next year or two." The Fed's key interest-rate target, he added, "is likely to remain exceptionally low for 'an extended period.' "

A haphazard exit from stimulus measures, with countries going their separate ways, could pose its own set of problems. In this era of globalization what one government does in one corner of the world can have a knock-off effect on economies in another corner. For example, countries that raise interest rates ahead of others could end up attracting money from foreign investors seeking a higher return, potentially draining funds away from economies that are still badly in need of investment. Or if too many governments turn off the stimulus tap too quickly, global demand could fall sharply. "An unruly rush to the exits is no better in a global financial crisis than in a crowded theater," wrote Adam Posen, a member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, in the Financial Times in September.
(See pictures of retailers that have gone out of business.)



Though governments are aware of the dangers of an uncoordinated exit, they prefer to keep their options open, since they must also address domestic political concerns. That means clearly defined time frames or targets for any exit could prove hard to achieve. The financial crisis "is affecting differently every country. Every country will have to define its exit strategy in its own time," Portugal's Finance Minister, Fernando Teixeira dos Santos, reportedly said at a conference of European Union ministers earlier this month in Sweden. "I don't think that we can have a precise, or a common, schedule. In my perspective, we need a flexible approach," he said.

Nowhere is the policy challenge bigger than in Asia. With the region's recovery gaining pace more quickly than elsewhere, it could be the first region to face inflation pressures. In China, growth is rapidly returning to pre-crisis levels. On Oct. 22, China reported that its gross domestic product grew by a healthy 8.9% in the third quarter, from the same period a year earlier. Inflation in China "will rise faster than in most other major economies and will therefore justify earlier and stronger-than-expected rate hikes," wrote Jun Ma, an economist at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong, in a September note. Concerns are also mounting that continued loose monetary policy in Asia could fuel dangerous and unstable asset price bubbles, especially in property. There has been some speculation in financial markets that South Korea's central bank could raise interest rates in the coming months to cool a roaring housing market. Frederic Neumann, an economist at HSBC in Hong Kong, says Asian central bankers might need to hike rates by four percentage points over the next year — much more than is expected from the Fed — in order to quash inflation and asset bubbles. "This is the real test for Asia: the region's central banks have to hike earlier and far more aggressively than the Federal Reserve," Neumann says.

However, Neumann and other economists question if Asia will take such action, even if it does prove necessary. By raising rates ahead of the rest of the world, Asia could attract capital flows and put pressure on its currencies to appreciate. Stronger currencies would make Asian exports more expensive — a consequence policymakers in the region's trade-dependent economies might wish to avoid. "Unless you are really forced to do something independent of the Federal Reserve, you are probably not going to go that route," says Duncan Wooldridge, an economist at UBS in Hong Kong.

In the end, some economists believe that a coordinated global exit strategy, especially in regard to monetary policy, will ultimately happen, but by default. The Federal Reserve holds so much influence in the world economy that other central banks might be wary of deviating too far from its policy. "The nature of the coordination is not that bankers sit around a table and do things together," says the University of Leuven's De Grauwe. "The nature is that some of the big guys make a move and force everyone to move." In the global recovery, as in the downturn, everyone may sink or swim together.

THINK "The New Untouchables" STIMULUS!

 NEW YORK TIMES

October 21, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

The New Untouchables

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about — our struggling public schools — was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.

There’s something to that. While the subprime mortgage mess involved a huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, it coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street — precisely when technology and open borders were enabling so many more people to compete with Americans for middle-class jobs.

In our subprime era, we thought we could have the American dream — a house and yard — with nothing down. This version of the American dream was delivered not by improving education, productivity and savings, but by Wall Street alchemy and borrowed money from Asia.

A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won’t be just a passing phase, but our future.

“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”

This problem will be reversed only when the decline in worker competitiveness reverses — when we create enough new jobs and educated workers that are worth, say, $40-an-hour compared with the global alternatives. If we don’t, there’s no telling how “jobless” this recovery will be.

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive.

Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.

As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be.

As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

THINK Mayoral "BIG PICTURE" Education STIMULUS!

An Education Stimulus for the Nation's Cities

By Gregory A. Ballard, Cory Booker, and Karl Dean

Given the beating that city and state budgets have taken in recent months, America’s mayors have come under tremendous pressure to scale back all but the most critical investments in public safety, infrastructure, transportation, and other core services.

But for the nation’s big cities, there can be no true, long-term economic recovery without adequately educating far greater numbers of young people. No matter how steep the fiscal downturn, mayors must redouble local efforts to improve graduation rates and—no less important—to create meaningful educational options for the staggering numbers of adolescents who have been pushed aside or have given up on school altogether.

We therefore argue that one aspect of school reform—expanding high school options and alternatives—deserves to be ranked as a top priority for the nation’s mayors and school superintendents. A new generation of innovative high school models offers rigorous academic coursework, supports for students who face personal challenges outside of school, and opportunities for returning students to both catch up on what they have missed and prepare themselves for college and careers. For students who have not been well served by traditional “one size fits all” high schools, these programs offer a second chance to realize their full potential.

—Jonathan Bouw

In each of our three midsize cities, the schools lose roughly 4,000 students every year. Over their lifetimes, these students each earn about $260,000 less than high school graduates, pay about $60,000 less in taxes, and put an enormous strain on our health-care, criminal-justice, and social-welfare systems. They represent yet another generation that could have contributed to the civic and cultural life of our communities.

We are convinced that even a modest investment in well-designed alternative high schools can have a major impact on the dropout problem, and, by extension, the economic and social burdens dropouts place on our communities. Indeed, we see a movement to provide much broader high school options for all students as an essential piece of any long-term strategy for the economic, civic, and cultural recovery of our cities.

Our three cities are place-based partners in the Alternative High School Initiative that has been managed by Big Picture Learning and the National League of Cities under a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Through this initiative, our cities are beginning to make strong, systemic efforts to reach out to young people who have left school or have begun to drift away. We are in the midst of opening an array of high-quality high school options, so that all our young people can achieve academic proficiency, earn a high school diploma, and be prepared to pursue postsecondary education. Launching and expanding these alternatives, we have found, requires that city and school leaders be receptive to schools that are innovative, often started from scratch, and sometimes managed by entities other than local districts.

Newark, N.J., for example, has introduced what amounts to an education stimulus package to reclaim its dropouts. Through a partnership that includes the Newark public school system, Essex County College, and nonprofit organizations such as Gateway to College, Diploma Plus, Communities in Schools, and Big Picture Learning, the city will have launched eight new alternative schools and programs focused on dropout prevention and recovery during the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years. These efforts eventually will serve between 1,000 and 2,000 young people—a sizable portion of those who have left the system.

Indianapolis and Nashville, Tenn., are continuing their successful partnerships with Big Picture Learning. Its alternative school model created in Providence, R.I.—the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, known as the Met—combines demanding academic work and experiential learning, boasts a national graduation rate of 92 percent, and regularly meets adequate-yearly-progress goals in all of its schools nationwide.

In addition, Indianapolis has already opened four new Diploma Plus schools, a model that targets students who are overage and undercredited, and a YouthBuild program that blends construction training with a return to school for dropouts. Next year, Nashville also plans to open a Diploma Plus school, and will launch a Gateway to College program, which provides high school dropouts between the ages of 16 and 20 with a means to complete their diplomas while also earning significant college credits. The city also plans to start a new YouthBuild program.

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What have we learned from these efforts? We have come to understand that for alternative programs to flourish, mayors must work closely with school leaders and play an ongoing, hands-on role, going well beyond their customary involvement in education.

Specifically, to the extent that it is possible, mayors can identify and offer available space within their cities to house alternative high schools. Further, they can lead the reform of municipal policies, such as zoning restrictions or rules governing access to public transportation, that might prevent local alternative schools from finding homes or attracting students from other parts of their cities.

Mayors also can champion increased front-end investment for principals and teachers to be trained in new approaches to teaching and learning that work with students who have had bad experiences in traditional high school environments. It is rare that a school district has funding to pay the professional-development costs for launching many new schools at once. In our cities, we have combined public and private money with the help of a broad range of community funders and partners, including philanthropic foundations, higher education institutions, and nonprofit organizations.

Equally significant, launching these efforts requires true leadership from the city agencies that support young people. Students leave school for many reasons—health challenges, problems in the justice or foster-care system, family conflicts, and so on. We therefore need to be sure that city departments are providing or are forging strong collaborations with relevant county and state agencies to provide all the necessary support services for young people and their families. In our cities, we have convened meetings of the heads of various city agencies to brainstorm new ways to collaborate on education and youth development and to create interagency agreements and realign services when necessary.

Many of our alternative high schools are operated and managed by groups outside the local school district. Indianapolis was the first city in the nation to be granted chartering authority by the state legislature. As a result, Mayor Gregory Ballard’s office is able to tap per-pupil funding for new alternative high schools opening as charters.

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Other cities and school districts can learn from our efforts. It is possible to hold students to high standards while also allowing them to learn at their own pace and in ways that respect their singular talents, interests, and learning styles. Reclaiming students who have left or are drifting away requires a broad array of interventions and innovations, as well as flexibility in regulation, which requires municipal leadership at the highest level.

Regardless of the size of the nation’s cities or the economic troubles they face, urban dropout rates are too sizable to overlook. As civic leaders across America explore ways to stimulate their economies, we urge them to spark the growth of alternative high schools and dropout-recovery programs in their communities. The development and expansion of these student-focused, project-based schools can change the odds for the most underserved students. And they have the power to transform the dynamic of leaving school early into a culture of graduating from high school ready for college and work.

But it will take leadership from mayors, who, as our experience illustrates, can be catalysts for change, ensuring adequate resources and buildings, appropriately trained staffs, flexibility, and expanded options—crucial elements of the education stimulus America’s cities so desperately need.