San Jose / Silicon Valley Education Summit 2015: A Call To Action.
The SJ/SV Chamber of Commerce posed the following questions to discrete segments of our community in an effort to better understand how to effectively support education in our valley:
Silicon Valley Business Leaders: What are our educational leaders doing to meet the changing needs of the 21st century workforce? How can you help in creating meaningful partnerships to address these challenges?
Silicon Valley Education Leaders: What do your customers—the employers of our area—need in this changing environment? What can be done to foster partnerships between you?
Silicon Valley Non-Profit Leaders: How can you help bridge the gap, and fully assist, between these two?
These questions were addressed this morning (4/30/15) through a series of panel discussions and keynote speakers. I was privileged to participate in the first of the 3 panels: K-12 private/public partnerships. The second panel focused on partnerships between business and institutions of higher education, and the third examined the creation of pathways for Silicon Valley’s youth who are not following a post-secondary education trajectory. Following are my responses to the questions that were submitted to the first group of panelists. Please be aware that these responses represent my personal opinions based on my own research, many conversations and personal observation; nothing herein expresses the opinion of SJUSD or its trustees other than myself.
Q: What is one thing in your daily leadership where you say “I wish the business community would help me with this?” And feel free to elaborate as to why.
1) Greater opportunities for student internships, shadow days and career presentations. We apply tremendous weight to our commitment to guiding students to develop 21st century skills that will be relevant far beyond the classroom, but “show me” is always a more powerful driver than “tell me”. We need to SHOW students the relevancy of their learning. One of the 8 state mandated priorities under Common Core, cleverly listed under “Other Outcomes”, anticipates that students will complete a college/career pathway experience as well as a community service experience before graduating from high school. In order for school districts to meet this priority, we need partnerships with both businesses and nonprofit organizations.
2) Fund the arts! Strong nonprofits are in a position to share their wealth with students and provide enrichment programs at under resourced schools.
3) Support Adult Literacy: Sponsor “Family Reads” programs that could be held on Saturdays and marketed towards young families.
4) Help to identify facilities for charter schools; school facilities are being stretched beyond capacity.
Q: If you could craft a “dream” public-private partnership between your organization and the business community, what would it look like?
An organized internship/apprenticeship / shadow opportunity / mentorship clearing house. My vision is that the Chamber, SV leadership group or other representative of the business community would fund and staff a position for a professional whose role would be to connect with large and small businesses in the area, as well as community based, nonprofit organizations and identify internship, shadowing, apprenticeship, community service and other mentoring opportunities and then organize that data through a database, dashboard or some other clearing house model whereby students and teachers could research opportunities for engagement by area of interest, location or time commitment. Such a liaison might begin by connecting with businesses that have CSR (corporate social responsibility) departments whose members would consider including students in company service days. In addition, that liaison might coordinate district or countywide summer internship, community service and/or summer camp information and recruitment fairs. Finally, I envision that this clearing house would have a special section dedicated to offering PAID summer programs of relevant learning for teachers. This network between teachers and businesses could be used to offer summer work and/or professional development internships and would serve to demonstrate support for and value of teachers. As well, it might include paid opportunities for study and travel, sponsored by local and global businesses.
Q: Coordination and sharing of best practices is sometimes overlooked in education. Where are some areas of collaboration that you would love to foster amongst other educational institutions that are not currently existing?
1. Far more direct engagement between educators. Would love to see individual schools sharing their successes and talents, teachers supporting and modeling for one another, less district driven PD.
2. Data models to increase transparency and parent access to information. For example, educational institutions should work together to create dashboards to truly compare schools across common metrics, for example the 8 defined state priority areas. A model with a menu of metrics from which parents can select to compare schools by selecting which metrics are important to them would provide a tremendous service for parents who are trying to optimize decisions about their children’s education.
3. Community or at least district Wide Summer School programs: efficiencies of scale would lead to broader range of offerings and could conceivably reach students who are seeking enrichment opportunities as well as those who are looking for credit recovery.
4. Meaningful collaboration between charter public and traditional public schools.
Q: How important is the non-profit sector in the work you are doing to provide a top-notch education to your students?
1. Vital. Enrichment, academic, safety net services. Students are only in schools 6-8 hours a day. Non profits play a critical role after school and during the summer to avoid the “summer learning loss” as well as to provide comprehensive general wellness care for students (and their families).
Q: What is not working or missing in these partnerships that you would like to see enhanced?
1. Communication needs to be better facilitated to help students re-enter school system from the juvenile justice system. Along the same lines, more support & training is needed for teachers who work with more challenging students; there is still work to do to overcome the presumption that certain kids are going to fail no matter what intervention a teacher offers.
2. More enrichment and support resources are needed for kids with special needs.
3. Wider access to summer programs is also important - either neighborhood based or with transportation provided.
Q: If you could tell government officials one thing about a need you have that they may not currently be hearing, what would you say?
1. We need city-wide WiFi: many students do not have internet access in their homes, making it difficult to do homework. If every business owner paid for wifi that extended beyond their structures and if the city committed to free wifi accessibility in all public spaces, that would be a tremendous advantage to students. Infrastructure, information highway, data storage, cloud capacity.
2. After school programs: help fund longer hours for homework centers at schools. but note that later hours would also entail funding transportation needs.
3. Promote adult literacy: illiterate adults don’t read to their kids and if parents aren’t reading to, with and in in their children’s presence, children are much less likely to learn to read, to associate it with positive emotions or to incorporate it as an important part of their learning and leisure experiences.
4. Please help to identify and make available facilities for charter schools.
5. Support the Arts and early childhood education
6. In general, whatever you do to strengthen our economy, support working families, ensure living wages will ultimately benefit students: strong economy = more self sufficient families = kids less stressed, better prepared to learn. At the end of the day, what people want to know is are there fewer kids in poverty? Do we have more prosperous communities? Assessment at the school level is important, but what we really care about is are we building a better community; a stronger community will foster healthier children.
1. Stronger partnership and communication with probation department would be helpful to support students who are re-entering the school system. Continued strong connections with school linked services to schools ensure that districts are better prepared to meet non-academic student needs.
1. Please limit new mandates, regulations. Unless you are reforming Prop 13. Not a great seller in business community, but numbers are real: since passage of prop 13, state funding per pupil has plunged from 1st to 49th. Teacher salaries are too low. Great things are expected from the public schools, yet those with expectations don’t demand adequate funding to do this job right. Public schools need more funding for, among other things, smaller schools, smaller child-teacher ratios, more qualified candidates, more emphasis on school leadership development, and more sustained sources of money for technology and its associated training and professional development.
Q: What is the biggest challenge facing K-12 education in the next ten years, and how can the business community and non-profit sector help to meet it?
1. The country is looking at a massive deficit between the number of tech jobs that will exist in the coming years and the number of prepared candidates for those jobs. Businesses and non-profits should be leading this push. If companies like Google and Apple want to continue to innovate they'll need prepared candidates. Bridging the Digital Divide is probably the most crucial challenge* and schools will need sustained sources of hardware & software, updated regularly, ongoing professional development for teachers and hands on career experiences for students.
2. The personalization of education. Very soon we are going to stop talking about teaching classes in favor of teaching individuals. The landscape of higher education is already moving in this direction with online learning and k-12 is just beginning to test the waters with blended learning. Talented educators will not become obsolete, but the idea of teaching the same lesson to a diverse group of students will begin to seem arcane. Learning will become personalized and group experiences should shift focus from content to skills: citizenship, empathy, service, problem solving, group dynamics, etc. Companies can help by working WITH educators to produce quality content deliverables and to design curricula that allow students to shape their own learning through inquiry, exploration and research with teachers as facilitators rather than content deliverers.
3. Stopping the mass exodus from teaching (average career now about five years) and addressing the pending additional shortage of even inexperienced replacements due to under enrollment of education programs. The business community has the power and pulpit to reshape teaching a desirable, respected and well compensated profession. Of course doing so would require surmounting myriad other challenges but, if the business and non-profit communities truly want to help, they might start by ceasing to blame teachers for the systematic problems they can't control and to simply start asking them what they need to do their jobs better. (this comment courtesy of David Michael Slater, author and educator - www.davidmichaelslater.com)
2. Finally, I conducted a very non-scientific personal survey on my FB and twitter accounts to solicit feedback to this question. Responses ranged from too much testing to pleas to save the arts, increase time for physical activity and support more unstructured outdoor play. Others argued that a lack of emphasis on social emotional learning is the greatest challenge and still others lamented the general “breakdown” of the public education system as a whole. Check out my FB post for more individual comments re: greatest challenges to public education ( https://www.facebook.com/NewsAndViewsArea2).
*toughest challenges to closing digital divide: 1) technology not sufficiently valued as instructional tool, 2) teachers do not receive sufficient tech professional development, 3) too many students have limited access to tech outside of school and 4) funding is insufficient.
I look forward to hearing your feedback and how YOU would respond to the foregoing questions!
