Geoffrey Canada addresses the crowd at Minnesota Meeting

recent Minnesota Meeting, everyone in the room was on the edge of their seats.  With a renowned model of success at the Harlem Children’s Zone all were anxious to hear his advice and he did not waste any time mincing words.

“If you care about your children, you’re going to have to save them yourselves.  No one is coming in to rescue Minnesota’s children.  If you don’t do it, it will not get done.”

He laid out six critical principles that he has adopted and believes are applicable to educational reform in Minnesota:

• Begin early.  Only by beginning with early childhood education and intervention can we keep students from falling behind so far, so fast that they’ll never catch up.
• No one program idea is powerful enough to do the job.  Create a continuity of best practices that help kids in school and in the community successfully achieve the next stage of progress, all the way through college.  Canada pointed out a constant continuum of support is needed.  His program believes that to tackle only one issue while everything else in a child’s universe is crumbling is a failed strategy.
• Parents have to be involved and engaged, especially for the most vulnerable children.  Canada said he was unapologetic for programs in HCZ that provided economic incentives for parents to get involved in school activities, saying the focus needs to be on what the children need.
• Schools must be redesigned for success.  He said, “You’ve got to invest in a longer school day and a longer school year” to help children keep pace with competition elsewhere.  He said we need to hold teachers accountable but also “pay teachers like they’re professionals.”
• Communities need to support young people in an atmosphere with clean parks and playgrounds and an absence of violence.
• Evaluate and measure each and every step.  He encouraged getting student testing data turned around fast enough to allow for meaningful intervention for struggling students.

Guests at Minnesota Meeting

He recognized the many challenges of dealing with an educational system that he views is in a state of crises.  It requires an ability to make long-term fixes while treating the emergency at your door.

Canada closed with an original poem which illustrated his personal story in which poetry served as the hook to keep him engaged in education while growing up poor in the Bronx.  He said, “We don’t know what will save a child.  For some it will be music, for others it will be drawing.  Our job is to provide a variety of real opportunities for kids to allow them to find the things that will save them.”

Minnesota Meeting Guests

The written word does not do justice for Canada’s talk.  He is a highly entertaining and engaging speaker full of stories to illustrate his incredibly work.  I hope to have a webcast of his talk posted soon!

Check out the fact sheet distributed at the meeting.

Ironically, this is what new teachers experience on their first day.  They enter a classroom filled with our community’s most important clients: students.

After the Minnesota Meeting event on Closing the Opportunity Gap (see Raising Expectations: Strategies for Reform post), about 40 practitioners convened to continue the dialogue around teacher quality and raising expectations. Creating and retaining high quality teachers kept floating to the top, with professional development as a key strategy. Let’s compare teaching, for a moment, to the financial industry. Setting out on a career as a financial advisor, you wouldn’t begin with the largest or most challenging clients. You might shadow another advisor for a while. Or perhaps you’d start with a small client list, take training classes, and work your way up as you master skills and demonstrate progress. Not so for teachers.

Dr. Rudy Crew spoke passionately about the need to create a system to support first and second year teachers. There is an assumption that they will just catch on. Yet, according to Crew, emerging teachers don’t have the “repertoire” of teaching strategies necessary to reach the diversity of student needs in their classroom.  In addition, most teachers that early on in their career are also only given a one year contract; creating a short window of time to “figure it out.”

A quest for mentorship, a desire for professional development opportunities, a need to develop a depth of skills, are common topics of conversation among my peers, regardless of the specific profession or field.  It is important for all “young” professionals to have a support system to guide them on their career path.

This is particularly problematic given that in the next 10 years, 25,000 new teachers will be needed in this country to fill vacant positions due to retirement or those leaving the field.  Locally, the Itasca Project’s Minnesota’s Future: World-class Schools, World-class Jobs report states that “Due to aging population trends, Minnesota will need to replace about 40% of its current teachers over the next decade or two.”

Kati Haycock noted that 40 years ago, when teaching was one of few career options for women, the “best and the brightest” women were found in the classroom. Today, women can be anything and a teaching career path, for men or women, competes with a wide spectrum of job opportunities.

At the same time, there is a decline in individuals choosing to pursue a traditional education degree.  Instead, many who are becoming teachers are choosing alternative teacher prep programs. This year Teach for America received 35,000 applications drawing locally from 10% of Carleton and 10% of Macalester’s graduating classes.  There is a need to ensure that these teacher prep programs provide quality training and have the resources necessary to meet the demands of the field.  In addition, all of these new teachers will need opportunities for professional development to help them be more successful.

“Research is very clear: Good teachers make good schools. Students who get several effective teachers in a row will soar no matter what their family backgrounds, while students who have even two ineffective teachers in a row rarely recover.” — Education Trust’s Education Watch Minnesota Fall 2006

Kati Haycock said pointedly that we can’t leave anything to chance.  We need to mitigate the risk and ensure that teachers have excellent training and professional development support to excel at working with our most valuable clients.

Peter Hutchinson, Kati Haycock and Rudy Crew discuss the issue of teacher quality.

Today, over 600 people attended the first Minnesota Meeting.  It was the first in a three-part series on education titled Raising Expectations.  I was incredibly excited to have many of you join us at At The Table.   I think that all in attendance were both moved and alarmed by the cold, hard facts about the state of Minnesota education laid out by the speakers.  The panel included Kati Haycock president of the Education Trust, and Dr. Rudy Crew, former superintendent of New York City and Miami/Dade Public Schools.  The panel was moderated by Peter Hutchinson, President of the Bush Foundation and a former Minneapolis Public Schools superintendent.

Haycock started things off with some concrete data. “On state assessments in reading, about 80 percent of your white 4th graders meet the state standards.  For black 4th graders it’s more like 44 percent, for Latino’s about 33 percent and somewhere in the mid-50’s for both Asian and native American students.”

Perhaps most alarming, Haycock said is that for students entering the system behind grade level, the education system actually widens the gap, rather than closing it.  She stressed two fundamental factors to addressing the gap – quality teachers and a rigorous curriculum.  She said, we need to raise our expectations of all students and provide the teaching to support it.

Dr. Crew, a passionate speaker with a professional history as a reformer (including being named Superintendent of the Year in 2008 and being fired from the position in the same year) laid out three primary points.

1. Raise expectations of kids, teachers, schools and governance of the school system.
2. Teachers need to cultivate a deep understanding of effective and varied teaching approaches.  He referred to this as the development of a teaching repertoire.
3. Demonstrate a “high degree of human caring,” which, he said should be evident at the board, the district, and the classroom levels, as well as in how a community spends its dollars.

Both speakers agreed that the allocation – not necessarily the amount – of dollars is critical to closing the achievement gap. Poor students simply get less – “not less in terms of dollars but in terms of what a dollar buys,” said Haycock. Crew spoke bluntly: advocating for increased funding without demanding results deters change. He said many states, including Minnesota, have “put in more money to get the same results….Good leaders need you to push for results and back their efforts for reform.”

Both speakers identified a need for better board governance, better data, and above all, more support and accountability for teaching.  Crew commented that it isn’t about intention.  No one enters the teaching profession without wanting to make a difference, but with little, if any professional support, many beginning teachers don’t know “what an A looks like,” in teaching. He advocates introducing a master-teacher approach to allow for greater compensation for and knowledge sharing by effective teachers.

Haycock who often commented on the need for measurement and data to prove what is effective and what simply doesn’t work, talked about the  need to evaluate teaching, based not on student achievement but on student growth. Teachers need to demonstrate their “value added” for students; standardized tests measure student performance as opposed to student progress.

Hutchinson also added to the conversation by saying, “We can’t compete in the global economy by falling behind in educational achievement. Over a third of our young people who go on to college are taking remedial courses when they get there – essentially taking high school over again.

Throughout the meeting the audience could be seen taking notes, nodding in agreement to the ideas of reform, and gasping in response facts like Minnesota’s academic place nationally.

So, now how do we move beyond the chairs of the convention center to take steps towards reform?

If you weren’t able to join us, you can watch it here.

Also, here is a brief fact sheet that was distributed and a MinnPost article.