In This Issue...
July-Sept 2009
A Letter from
Merrill Vargo
In His Own Words:
A Successful Failure in a Long Career of Failed Successes
Donor Spotlight - The Stuart Foundation
OTHER NEWS
Pivot Learning Partners Congratulates Dr. Thelma Melendez
July - September 2009
From the Desk of Merrill Vargo
Founder and Executive Director
I think we all know that public education is facing dramatic new challenges: rising expectations, diminishing resources, deregulation, changing demographics and competition from charter schools and charter management organizations. One result is that education leaders today are now much more willing than ever to consider sweeping changes in the way they do business. "Innovation" has become the new buzzword; and the US Department of Education is proposing to put substantial resources into supporting what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called “proven” innovations.
Investing in what works is a promising first step. Yet no one would argue that the toolkit of proven innovation is sufficiently large or robust enough for us to stop there. The problem goes beyond one of implementation of the proven: we must continue to innovate. The problem is that, although though small-scale local innovations emerge daily in schools and individual classrooms, such local innovations are almost never documented, tested or brought to market and so remain invisible to outside observers. The result is often that educators, rather than the field of education, are labeled “not innovative.” Pivot Learning Partners is proposing to launch an initiative that would do better – mining our growing network of schools and districts to find, test, and share promising new tools and strategies, large and small. Though often new approaches are difficult to bring to scale in education, we believe that starting with the real work of real schools will result in innovations that will be scalable precisely because they help people do their work better, faster, cheaper, and/or easier.
Some might argue that tools that make work easier for educators have will have little else to recommend them. Yet embedded in the opportunity to innovate to be more effective is the chance to innovate to be transformational as well. Some – though inevitably not all – of the innovative new tools and approaches that would emerge from the “innovation incubator” approach we propose would be transformative. What is the difference between what some have called “supportive” innovations and those that are transformative? Anyone who has traded in their cell phone for an I-phone knows the difference. Transformative innovations surprise us: they don’t just make our work easier; they change the nature of the work itself.
One of the most promising areas for innovation in education involves harnessing what is often an underutilized resource in schools: the energy and creativity of the students themselves. We already have an initial project in early stages of development: WY5, a web-based platform that connects home, school and community, and helps students build a team of adult mentors and personalize their own education. Other areas we’re interested in exploring include using web-enabled tools to make it easier for school and district leaders to connect investments to outcomes and thus evaluate the cost and benefits of particular improvement strategies. Such tools also have the potential to make school budgets far more transparent and comprehensible to the communities whose support we’ll need if we are ever to have adequate resources to educate California’s children.
The work we propose is exciting and promising, but it has only just begun. We’ll keep you posted as it develops.
As Always,
Merrill Vargo
Founder and Executive Director
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A Successful Failure in a Long Career of Failed Successes
This fall Pivot Learning Partners will launch a bold new initiative to develop and use innovative tools and approaches that make the daily work of learning, teaching and improving schools more effective, efficient and meaningful. In his own words, Steve Jubb, Director of Pivot Learning’s new Innovation Incubator and District Redesign Workshop, describes his own experience designing and building an innovative tool to empower inner-city students to get more out of their education. It didn’t turn out as he hoped – but maybe much better.
I’m a systems guy; I believe we have to redesign how we work rather than blame the workers. After 25 years, I've built up a national reputation in large-scale, urban education reform. However, in 2006 I found I could not fully embrace my own success because learning outcomes for the majority of today's youth still fall woefully short of what's needed, even in the many new small high schools I helped create in the Bay Area.
It's a systems problem, so I started there. If we could redesign education from scratch, what would we create instead? How would we bring it about? I couldn’t let go of this challenge, and in November of 2006 I left a secure job to go figure it out.
My inquiry took me back to my teaching and youth development roots. I interviewed dozens of urban kids about their education, their goals and dreams, their successes and disappointments. Few felt school had an answer for them. I asked myself, “What would it take to help them leverage education to get what they want out of life?”
These young people shared a world as they experience it, one vastly different than what most adults knew growing up. For them schooling is far too rigid and under-resourced to respond effectively to who they are or what they need. This disconnect undermines their motivation and encourages passivity towards learning. From diverse stories emerge a singular theme — a pervasive disconnectedness that kills initiative, fosters passivity towards learning, infantilizes them, and inhibits exploration of possible futures. What these young people need and want are multiple connections to diverse, competent and caring adults who can show them how to be adults in new contexts and expect them to take charge of their own lives.
Who’re Your Five? (WY5) grew out of the insight that so-called “at-risk youths” can succeed when they have many positive adult figures involved in their lives. With this idea I founded WY5 to help urban youth build networks of support, starting with a core of at least five adult mentors of their own choosing from the social contexts where kids spend their time – school, home, and community.
Originally I envisioned WY5 to be a web-based software tool to help young people “find a dream, build a team, and make it real,” using technologies familiar to tech-savvy kids – email, on-line social networks, texting, and so on. Not knowing much about the software business, I teamed up with an Internet entrepreneur half my age and “just did it.” We didn't get it done, however, and ended up running out of money before developing a workable Alpha version of the software.
That didn’t deter me. While working on the software, I took on eight inner city kids to mentor, aged 16-18, from two partner charter schools in Oakland and a youth development organization in San Francisco. All were youth of color with poor academic records, home situations impacted by poverty, language barriers, and/or major obstacles to high school graduation and leading successful lives. All volunteered because they wanted help.
We met every other week from fall to spring. Without workable software tools, I patched together existing free web tools — Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn — to simulate core WY5 functions. These software substitutions never took hold in most cases, and the partner organizations were too busy to fully take up WY5 sponsorship, though I had a lot of support from each WY5 liaison. As their lead mentor, I filled the gaps in human and technical functions.
Setting personally relevant goals and achieving them are WY5’s core measures of success. Learners' teams helped them track their progress towards their own self-identified milestones. Real and virtual adult mentors informed, taught, encouraged, and pushed them along – but it was the youths themselves who did or did not get it done.
Of the eight kids I worked with that year, the results were mixed: All eight of the kids screwed up multiple times during our work together by missing appointments, making excuses, procrastinating — all the classic teen avoidance strategies. Yet, most of them went on to achieve a majority of their short-term goals (improving attendance, asking for help, turning in school work), and five achieved higher goals (passing classes, getting a summer job or internship, competing in a “Spoken Word” competition). Two entered four-year colleges, while another earned a scholarship to a private school. However, four students failed courses despite improving in other ways. I've lost contact with two of the original eight.
Meanwhile, I ended the year with no workable test version of the WY5 software, despite a lot of time, effort, and money to develop it. I never even got close to my goal of having 100 kids using WY5 by June 2009. Yet I came away encouraged and energized to give it another shot. Why? This unsolicited email arrived in my inbox last May from one of the 16-year-olds I worked with:
“I want to tell you that I will be setting my goals for the University of Santa Cruz. I have done a visit and met great people. It’s a great place and with great people to support you… thank you for giving us the chance to be able to take a big step of changing our lives with our own hands and choices. Thank you for giving me the chance to let my mind to have a wider point of view.”
For under-educated youths, the barriers to success have increased over time and take root sooner and more deeply than most of us realize. Getting these kids to take the risk of working hard and not letting failure deter them is not easy. That’s why I am encouraged by my failures, because with each one I learned what should and could be true for them. In each attempt to create tools that any young person can use to change their own lives, I’ve gotten closer to something I think will work.
Thomas Edison said it best when he wrote, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Donor Spotlight
The Stuart Foundation
Pivot Learning Partners would like to sincerely thank and acknowledge the Stuart Foundation for supporting our development of a mid-level district leadership curriculum. The Foundation’s support will enable Pivot Learning to increase its capacity to provide a more comprehensive toolkit for district leaders to redesign their school districts to become high-performing organizations.
The Foundation’s work in education leadership is critical in its effort to develop education systems that provide opportunities for all students to be engaged, to achieve, and to develop the skills, knowledge, and abilities necessary to be successful in further education or career choices. In addition to strengthening induction programs for new principals and enhancing opportunities for the on-going professional development of veteran principals, the Foundation is particularly interested in systemic interventions that address the role of central office district leadership.
Pivot Learning Partners is honored to be in partnership with the Stuart Foundation as both organizations seek to transform California’s public school system.
Other News
Pivot Learning Partners Congratulates Dr. Thelma Melendez
Pivot Learning Partners would like to congratulate Dr. Meléndez de Santa Ana for her new appointment at the U.S. Department of Education. “The strongest leaders in public education are those who are guided by a clear vision about why education matters. Thelma Meléndez is someone who has that clear vision,” Merrill Vargo, Executive Director of Pivot Learning Partners, said of Meléndez de Santa Ana. “Californians can trust her to be a voice in Washington for all our children, but especially for the millions of English language learners in California and across the nation.”
Download the full Press Release Here (PDF)
What is WY5?
WY5 (pronounced why-five) is a student-centered, web-based software tool to help young people form teams of mentors to support career exploration, personal goal achievement, and planning for success. WY5 is part of Pivot Learning Partners’ Innovation Incubator and is one of a suite of innovative new web tools for learning, teaching and central office system redesign. WY5 Alpha software is slated to be ready for testing by December 2009.
If you are interested in learning more please contact Steve Jubb at sjubb@pivotlearningpartners.org
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