Treat Them Like Stars
February 13th, 2012 § 2 Comments
This weekend I met an 12-year-old young man named David at a bridal shower. I don’t know too much about David because I only spoke with him for about 5 minutes, but he is neighbors with the groom-to-be, he is in seventh grade at Lester, and he seems to be a happy young man.
During the course of our conversation David said, “You make me feel like a star. Like a movie star.”
I asked him why, and he said it was because I kept looking at him (I was making eye contact) and because I wanted to hear what he had to say.
I was stunned by the sudden awareness of how often we afford courtesy to those who are “important” (influential, at or above our own socioeconomic class, able to get us something we need, etc) in our lives yet don’t pay attention to others who are not. I was also disheartened to think of kids like David who likely don’t have adults in their lives sincerely listening to, loving, and trying to get to know them.
This speaks to an important core belief at my school: A successful school must serve the whole child and not only a student’s academic growth. This will help us ensure that every student who attends our school will be academically, socially, and emotionally prepared for college, career, and life success. When students believe they are known individually and that a teacher will do anything s/he can to ensure they succeed, the students will work even harder to make it happen.
We need to treat them like stars.
Why my school will be called “Artesian”
January 19th, 2012 § 3 Comments
In the late 1880s, Memphis was almost destroyed as a city due to a yellow fever epidemic. So many people died or left the city that the state of Tennessee revoked the city’s charter in 1879. Green Polonius Hamilton comments on the severity of the situation in his book, “The Bright Side of Memphis”:
Finally the health of the city became so precarious that it became absolutely necessary to improve its water supply and sanitary conditions. Scourge after scourge of pestilential diseases had stricken the city, destroyed its population and brought desolation and woe to thousands of its citizens. Driven to this extremity the people had either to improve their sanitary conditions or die.
Three important things happened that restored the city’s health:
- The discovery of an artesian water supply (pure, sanitary water)
- The completion of a city-wide sewage system
- The constructing of a crematory for trash and garbage
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I see my school to serve a purpose much like the artesian water did to revitalize Memphis post-yellow fever. My school will be a catalyst for the transformation of its neighborhood—starting with the students. We will open our doors armed to equip Memphis’s students to overcome the obstacles that have hindered them from acquiring the skills necessary to succeed in today’s society. Students will receive individualized instruction, have access to accelerated learning paths, and be matched to mentors from the community. Through these supports, students will realize that what might have otherwise seemed unattainable is, in fact, attainable.
Adults—parents of our students, teachers and staff, mentors from the community, and tutors—begin to see the impact of a strong school providing students with access to opportunities they hadn’t had before. The neighborhood surrounding the school begins to take notice, and community members do whatever they can to protect what is happening inside the school and to be a part of what is happening because they see the positive effects manifesting in their community.
This is why “Artesian” is the perfect name for my school. The resources (people) are there and are ripe for playing a role in the restoration and revitalization of a neighborhood, but they are thus far untapped.
Now I’d like your input. What do you think sounds best for a full name of my school?
- Artesian Community School
- Artesian School of Memphis
- Artesian Academy
- Artesian Preparatory Academy
- Artesian College Prep
- …etc.
Innovation’s MVPs
December 9th, 2011 § 1 Comment
At 4.0, we talk about the importance of trying many experiments–or prototypes–when innovating. One thing we continue to come back to is the importance of a MVP, or “minimum viable product.”
It is so easy to keep working on a project until it is perfect. Who wants to showcase their “baby” when it is still rough around the edges? What I have learned during the past six months at Innovator School is that you must!
Think about it: if you continue working on a project or idea that you think is so great and will fill a need, but you never show that project to the people for whom it will fill the need until you are finished, there is a 99.9% probability that you will create a decent–maybe even good–but not as great as it could have been–product. Without asking questions and interacting with the people who will use your product, you will not know what they truly need and what’s the best medium in which to deliver the product.
That’s a big reason why it’s important to put your idea out to your users early and often. You can continually iterate based on their feedback of experiencing a prototype. This article is a great example of a MVP that led to something that almost everyone uses today: the credit card.
Innovating Due to Necessity
December 5th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Sometimes I feel pressured to “be innovative” and that I should regularly come up with new ideas that are disruptive to the current landscape. This week I stumbled upon a couple stories that helped mitigate my compulsions, and I realized that many great solutions are born out of necessity rather than innovating for innovation’s sake.
One example is Southwest Airlines. Back in the 70s, Southwest sold one of its four planes to Frontier Airlines and was forced to figure out how to make enough money with only three planes. If they couldn’t figure it out, they wouldn’t survive as an organization, so they came up with the “ten minute turn.” Unheard of at the time, a Southwest plane could arrive at and taxi away from a gate within ten minutes. (This means all the passengers could deplane, the crew could unload luggage, clean the interior, refuel the jet, load the next flight’s luggage, and have all the new passengers ready to go–within ten minutes.)
Did the execs at Southwest come up with this ingenious idea because they were trying to disrupt the airline industry? No; the ten minute turn was born because the company needed to overcome a precarious situation.
What’s Happening in Memphis – Nov ’11
November 28th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
A lot has been happening in Memphis this past week around charter schools, so I wanted to share to keep you in the loop. Let me know if you have any questions, and/or if I can clarify anything.
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The unified school board (for Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools) denied 17 revised charter applications last week under the premise that the charter schools are taking money from students in the unified school district and will cause job losses. They will now appeal to the TN State Treasurer. Only 2 of the 22 original charter applications were approved by the unified board in October. http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/nov/22/unified-school-board-denies-17-charter-school-appl/
It’s a frustrating decision the unified board made because “the alternatives that these kids [who’d be recruited for an all-boys’ charter school] would have to go to, boys there score 5 percent proficient on their test,” [Ross Glotzbach, Grizzlies Prep board chairman] said. “In one school, they did not have one seventh- or eighth-grader pass the math TCAP in the last year.” http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/nov/23/rejected-charters-in-limbo/
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The Achievement School District did not receive any high-quality high school charter applications, but it also seems that the ASD prefers strong elementary and middle schools rather than high schools (even though there are already 7 MCS high schools under the ASD) because they believe strong lower schools feeding into high schools will cause the high schools to be strong. I agree with this as a long-term strategy, but are we going to let 4-9 years go by before high schoolers in Memphis will reap a benefit? http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/nov/21/turnaround-strategy/
QuestionStorming – Unbundling Lab Exercise #1
November 17th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
QuestionStorming is a fun exercise that we learned reading The Innovator’s DNA. In essence, you take time to brainstorm 50 questions to a problem or challenge you’re trying to solve. There are a few rules:
- QuestionStorm 50 questions
- Do not start a new question until the previous one has been recorded.
- Don’t preface questions, and don’t try to answer them. Just ask questions.
- Make sure you are getting a range of questions:
- What is? – These questions focus on facts and the as-is situation
- What caused? – These questions get at the root of a problem
- Why? – These questions reflect the rationale behind a problem
- Why Not? – Don’t be content with the answers to the why
- What if? – This is a good way to think about ways to impose restraints or to eliminate constraints.
In Innovator School we practiced QuestionStorming as we thought about 4.0′s next steps with Students Involved in Community Change (SICC). The exercise helped us to realize there are still a number of unanswered what isquestions when it comes to working with SICC, and it’s tough to know the most strategic direction to follow when our problem isn’t fully defined.
One group's QuestionStorm from Essentials last weekend - The most intriguing questions are highlighted. [Click image for a larger view
Unbundling Lab at 4.0 Schools
November 15th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Clarifying the problem, understanding the “real” problem, and locating the root-cause of the problem — these are all things many of us do intuitively when we solve problems. At 4.0 Schools we call these processes “unbundling.”
At 4.0 we practice unbundling skills to get good at understanding hugely complex problems such as education…hopefully so that we will be able to come up with solutions that get at the “pain” of the problem instead of simply treating symptoms. To quote from The Innovator’s DNA, we want to be “constantly challenging the accuracy of [our] mental maps about the territor[ies]” in which we work. Peter Drucker said, “…there are few things as useless—if not dangerous—as the right answer to the wrong question.” Many of the exercises we use to practice unbundling help us to find the REAL questions we’re trying to solve for, which is why it’s important to be able to get to the root cause.
This weekend 4.0 hosted 30 participants in an Essentials event focused on unbundling. Alex Hernandez from the Charter School Growth Fund and Robert LeBlanc, a restaurant entrepreneur in New Orleans, reflected on their experiences solving tough problems. The participants practiced unbundling using these speakers’ stories and experiences. (I’ll share more information about these exercises later this week.) I was very happy with this Essentials event because the participants left with many associations of how they can apply unbundling in their current jobs, and I hope many of them will come back to 4.0 and continue to practice with us!
A Successful Lottery Model for Schools?
November 8th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Last week I mentioned that programs like tnAchieves “may help students take the first step of getting into college, but I see it only as a Band-aid for helping to improve the college achievement gap.” That sentence was driven by a study I read by Deming, Hastings, Kane, and Staiger. The authors looked at “the impact of a public school choice lottery in Charlotte-Mecklenburg (CMS) on postsecondary attainment,” and found that:
- Students from low-quality neighborhood schools benefit greatly from choice.
In this study, students who won the lottery had a higher likelihood to graduate from high school and from college. In addition, while students were in high school they had higher GPAs, took more math courses, and had fewer absences than their peers who did not win the lottery to attend a school of their choice.
- The lottery in CMS closes the college achievement gap, not just the K-12 achievement gap.
This is important to me because a lot of education reform efforts are focused specifically on K-12. Many schools tout “every student will go to college,” but they should also focus on preparing their students for success in college, not simply ensuring passing grades on state tests and decent SAT/ACT scores.
- Lottery winners show REAL and PERSISTENT gains instead of gains seen from systems set in place to help students.
Oftentimes schools and organizations perceive they are helping to close the college achievement gap by creating systems, such as with tnAchieves where mentors help students apply for financial aid. These systems do help more students gain access to college, but they do not help students be better-prepared for success in college. Students who won the lottery in CMS took more math courses and had higher GPAs than their lottery-loser counterparts which likely helped them be better prepared for college; thus this group of students also was more likely to graduate from college.
This study intrigued me and piqued my interest for various reasons, particularly because I want to see how school choice affects school quality overall in districts. I am convinced that parents will be more involved when they’ve taken the time to research and choose, and I also think that individual schools tweak what they offer students and improve their effectiveness so that more parents will choose them.
What other school districts do you know of that have built “choice” into their structures?
Band-aid for a Gaping Wound?
November 2nd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I just signed up to be a mentor with tnAchieves in Memphis. I am happy to do this and help provide a chance for students to attend college.
There are some hopeful aspects to this program (from what I can tell on its website; I have yet to attend training):
- High school seniors are paired with a mentor who provides “encouragement” before they start college.
- The mentor helps his/her students apply for financial aid. This is key because, according to an email I received from The Leadership Academy, “Less than 35% of eligible students in Memphis complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FASFA), but more than 85% of those that complete the form get aid for college.” Good; we’re ensuring that more students receive financial aid.
- Students are required to give back to their community through 8 hours of community service.
- Students attend a 2-year community college with their scholarship money.
This program may help students take the first step of getting into college, but I see it only as a Band-aid for helping to improve the college achievement gap. (More on this tomorrow.) To me, tnAchieves helps improve accessibility to college for those who might otherwise not go due to finances. I’m also encouraged that students start out at a community college because it helps promote the local economy and allows students to succeed or fail in a lower-risk environment before heading on to complete a Bachelor’s degree.
Maybe Perception Is Not Reality
November 1st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
In the southeast, we live in a world where educational options seem few and far between for members of every economic class. I am starting to find that disposable income and other resources, such as consistent access to transportation, definitely play a role in the perceived lack of educational choices for low-income families. Here, perception becomes reality because even a “chosen” school a few miles away likely will not include a bus for a child not zoned there.
For middle-class families, however, I want to believe that the perceived lack of public educational choices is not reality. At least in Memphis, there are many public schools that provide great academics for children who can test into optional programs, which are similar to magnet schools. Most often, an optional program is similar to a “school-within-a-school” model, and children who participate in one part of the school will rarely interact with children who participate in the other, even though they are under the same roof. This isn’t a model I prefer, but it is serving an important purpose for now.
Last week at the Education Champions breakfast, a group of parents was lauded for the work they’re doing to re-engage in the Memphis City School system. I’ve met Mandy (featured in this video), and so far I’m quite impressed with the passion she puts into partnering with her principal and rallying parents together to feel like they have ownership in their school; they are doing their part to show other school communities how this can be done.