When Innovation Isn't Innovative (or WI3)

October 6 Secretary of Education Duncan announced ED's priorities for grants under the $650 million Investing In Innovation Fund (I3). I'd recommend you read the regulations yourself to see what strikes you about the proposed regulations and associated grant making. The regulations were posted on October 9 for a 30 day public comment period.

I was excited by the title Investing In Innovation. There has been little educational innovation funded over the past 8 years. I was looking forward to seeing new ideas for teaching and learning being encouraged.

the Investing in Innovation Fund focuses on four key assurances, or education reform areas, that will help achieve this goal: (1) Improvements in teacher effectiveness and ensuring that all schools have effective teachers, (2) gathering information to improve student learning, teacher performance, and college and career readiness through enhanced data systems, (3) progress toward college- and career- ready standards and rigorous assessments, and (4) improving achievement in low-performing schools through intensive support and effective interventions.

Then I read the proposed regulations. Two of the categories, Scale Up, and Validation require that a proposal focus on programs that have already been shown to be successful. The third, the Development Grants section does provide limited funding for ideas that have not been tested.

There's no definition of Innovation, nor is there a sense that ED is really interested in innovation since most of the funding will go to activities that have a proven record of success.

In order to be eligible to submit a proposal, either by an LEA (local educational agency a.k.a. school district) or non-profit, the entity must have a proven record of "significantly closing the achievement gaps between groups of students." There is also a required 20% in-kind contribution from non-federal funds.

The regulations, as proposed, make it very difficult to generate any innovative ideas that could significantly improve the way we educate our youth. Basically ED is asking for a retooling of existing ideas. That doesn't fit my expectation for investing in innovation.

The 20% in-kind funding makes it impossible for many school districts or non-profit research and development organizations to submit a proposal.

As of today, 10 days into the comment period, there were 20 comments posted prior to mine. Though when I submitted my comments the system said it could take weeks before the submission appears online. I hope and encourage you to add your voice to the public comments.

There are many elements of the proposed rules and grants that could benefit from comment.

If we don't comment now, we have no right to complain about the final regulations.

The docket ID for making comments is ED-2009-011-0012

But who's funding innovation?

I was interested in this quote in an announcement I recently received...

"Resources should only be devoted to innovations supported by scientifically-based research." said Scott Elliot, President of SEG Research. "The Department of Education and schools should be funding proven innovations."

The requirements for the I3 Fund that will fund educational innovation in the schools were announced by by James H. Shelton, the Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement in a speech given last week in Washington, D.C. Shelton called for the educational community to "get beyond the anecdotes" and indicated that innovation grant proposals should be supported by "rock hard evidence".

I know that there have been educational programs that have been touted with nothing more than anecdotal information to support their success, but I wonder where new innovative approaches to education will come from, if the only programs to be funded are those that already exist.

I know innovation is defined locally, and programs that are old-hat in one location can be innovative in another. but, there are new technologies and new applications being developed continually. How do those get to become proven successful programs if no one is willing to take a risk?

In a book

I'm one of the subjects of this book... you can read about me pages 24 - 31

More Than Title IX

How Equity Education has Shaped the Nation

By Katherine Hanson, Vivian H. Guilfoy & Sarita Nair-Pillai

Women in America have come a long way in the last one hundred years, from lacking the right to vote to holding some of the highest profile positions in the country. This change, however, did not come without struggle. More Than Title IX highlights the impact one of the most powerful instruments of change—education. The book takes readers behind the scenes of some of the most influential moments for gender equity in education and tells the dramatic stories of the women and men who made these changes possible. The narrative blends historical analysis with dynamic interview excerpts of people whose actions made a difference in both educational equity and in the country as a whole. By showing how hard-won changes in education have improved life for women in America over the past century, the authors remind readers not to take these freedoms for granted.

More Than Title IX explores the history of well-known educational initiatives such as Title IX and affirmative action, as well as lesser-known movements such as the Women's Educational Equity Act. This accessible overview of the women's movement in the U.S. includes a glossary of key terms and initiatives from the past one hundred years, as well as a Gender Equity Timeline charting turning points in gender relations from the 1500s to the present.

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

www.rlpgbooks.com

Race to the Top

Clearly Arne's stimulus money is getting lots of attention. Everyone is thinking about how to get a piece of the action, and forgetting what the money is supposed to be doing.

1.) improve education for lots of kids,

2.) help stimulate the economy.

But in this case, it's; "educate the kids stupid," not: "it's the economy stupid"

I know that's not the widely held opinion. There's not a good history of education money being spent in the service of kids. One thing is, we don't know how to improve education on a large scale. I was just at a meeting where education was described as having "victory gardens rather than amber waves of grain."

So, are we going to be about developing more victory gardens? We know many people capable of creating a victory garden. But, can we build our victory gardens in such a way that they'll help us get those amber waves of grain?

And if you've been reading this blog, you know that, simultaneously, I want to find ways to seriously restructure the way we educate our population -- not just our youth. I won't belabor the point, but we're looking at a high school curriculum structure from the 1890s and a high school schedule that was designed in the mid-1900s. Isn't it time to push education into the 21st Century?

BTW, Arne's billions won't get us there. There's no vision for that. I was pleased and disappointed to see that the 21st Century Skills project had included science finally. It's taken them 5 years at least to get science in there, but is their vision of science really 21st Century? (pop quiz time -- what's the logic behind the traditional Bio/Chem/Physics sequence in high school science -- answer later).

What about math? Why Algebra then Geometry, then Algebra 2? Does learning Geometry exercise the brain to prepare students for learning more advanced math? We've known the brain isn't a muscle for a long time -- yet the sequence of Algebra/Geometry/Algebra 2 persists. Will the billions in Race to the Top have any impact on that?

Back to the main themes -- appropriate use of technology in the learning process and looking at topics like computational thinking as a real and recognized 21st Century skill. Maybe we need some victory gardens for those two (potentially large) topics. But we should only build victory gardens if they can be copied, enlarged, or put together to start building those really big fields of change.

Back to the billions... looks like all that money will be filtered through the SEAs -- and don't they have a wonderful record of creating innovation in their states? Which state do you think of when I say "innovation in education"? What's the innovation? Is it defined locally or nationally?

I want to encourage you to think about how anything you do can fit into a larger effort to not just revitalize what goes on in today's classrooms, but to change the education so we don't have to immediately think about classrooms as the only place where education takes place.

Oh, Bio/Chem/Physics -- alphabetical order. Honest, that's the rationale. Educational justifications were made later.