Keynoters focus on schools’ real-world challenges
Published: January 1, 2011
Although they tackled different aspects of modern-day educational challenges facing local school governance teams, the keynote speakers on the first two days of CSBA’s Annual Education Conference and Trade Show were grounded in the real world.
Veteran school reformer and former Berkeley Unified School District board member Pedro Noguera outlined specific steps school leaders can take to create a “culture of success” that can engage and inspire the nation’s most diverse student population. Digital futurist Ian Jukes outlined a mind-boggling assessment of the “exponential advance of technology” now under way, and he explained how public schools can help students thrive in that world.
Both speakers acknowledged the enormous challenges facing public education in an era of change that Jukes called “amazing, astounding and remarkably disruptive.” These are times, Noguera said, when school board members must rally community support for a system of public education that’s under attack; one key, he suggested, is to appeal to the larger public interest in how public schools are faring—whether people have school-age children or not.
Several hundred conference-goers jumped at the chance to “continue the conversation,” as the breakout sessions following each speaker’s General Session talks were billed, in smaller presentations that were offered this year for the first time.
“It was wonderful to hear more from him,” said Linda Jackson, board president in the San Rafael Unified School District, who attended Noguera’s workshop. “I appreciated the fact that he opened it up for questions first thing and then wove the responses into his subsequent presentation.”
Noguera apparently also found the continued conversations useful. After hearing a school board member’s concerns about an academically gifted but undocumented immigrant student in her district, Noguera said he came away with some new material he would use the very next day before another influential audience—congressional freshmen attending an orientation session at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Practical strategies
In both their large- and small-group presentations, Noguera and Jukes focused on finding practical strategies to deal with daunting problems. Noguera, in particular, made it clear that he’s all too familiar with the challenges school boards face. During his term on the Berkeley school board, he said, he found himself unable to accomplish the goals he’d set as a candidate.
“Board members can find themselves caught up with budgets and all the technical stuff that’s required, and you lose sight of the larger picture, the work you ran for the board to accomplish,” Noguera said. Board members can’t create a climate of success—where staff and students share a common commitment to quality—by themselves, he continued, and schools can’t succeed without parental involvement and community support.
He urged school leaders to expect more of parents and to give them explicit instructions about how they can help their children succeed academically.
“It’s very rare to have a high-achieving school without parental support,” Noguera said. “Parents are more likely to help their kids if we give them explicit advice. Parents are more likely to listen if they know we care about their kids.”
Jukes focused on the fast-arriving future in his presentations, urging education leaders to anticipate and accept the radical changes it brings. Unfortunately, he asserted, schools have not changed fundamentally in decades.
“We are still letting students out of school for three months a year so they can help harvest the crops,” he said. “We’re doing a fabulous job preparing our children for the 1960s.”
The world is changing so fast that modern students will need to “a completely different skill set” than their parents did, Jukes continued. School board members and teachers are under so much pressure to achieve short-term goals—“getting kids through the next test, the next semester,” he said—that there’s no time to look at broad trends.
“We’re being driven by the tyranny of the urgent,” he said. Instead, “We have to start with the end in mind.”
Jukes closed with a glimpse at his website, the 21st Century Fluency Project, which houses an online community, his Committed Sardine blog and many other resources—many of them free of charge—to help schools and society prepare for this brave new world. A free, “challenged-based” set of academic units covering basic K–12 subject matter is scheduled to be added early this year.
Easy link: