IALA » Wayne Jennings

Alternatives, the National Scene

Wayne Jennings — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:10:45 +0000

Dan Daly, executive director of IALA wrote recently of the organization’s efforts to impact state and national policy:

This past June, IALA hosted the Tri-State Alternatives Leadership Summit in Bloomington and formed The IALA Coalition for Innovative Education. Leaders from the following ten organizations participated; IALA, MN Association of Alternative Programs, IA Association of Alternative Education, WI Charter School Association, MN Association of Charter Schools, Association of Recovery Schools, Coalition for Charter School Management, Education Evolving, EdVisions Schools and MN Online Learning Alliance. David Bly, former MAAP President and current member of the MN House of Representatives also attended.

The purpose was to find common issues, explore ways to collaborate and impact state and federal legislation/policy. Organizations in the Coalition are currently ratifying the IALA Position Paper and the following Components of Innovative Education:

A learning program that is “different” from traditional schools and/or “focused” on a specific theme
A student-centered learning program using a variety of measures to assess student performance
Staff at the site able to make decisions about all aspects of the school and control finances
Staff at the site accountable for student performance results and fiscal responsibility
Small size

The Coalition will add organizations from throughout the country to give learning alternatives a fuller voice. Contact Dan Daly at dddaly@comcast.net or 612-716-5620.

Gardner, Advocate for Educational Pluralism

Wayne Jennings — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:52:00 +0000

Howard Gardner, professor of education at Harvard and well known for his books including Multiple Intelligences and Five Minds for the Future, writes of the importance of a variety of educational programs to fit different students. In a recent article, he writes that after studying various approaches such as Reggio Emilia (a program he particularly likes), Montessori, Waldorf, traditional and other types of schools he is more convinced than ever of the importance of “educational pluralism.”

Obvious as it is, schools have insufficiently acted upon the fact that all children do not learn the same. Hence, the need for a variety of educational programs to meet the diverse needs of students. He states, ” The lessons I have learned over the decades are: (1) to be ever open to new and powerful ways of educating and (2) to shun those who block the roads of individualized pedagogy as well as those who seek to impose a uniform way of presenting material.”

Posted via email from waynebj’s posterous

Multiple Assessments: Hope Survey

Wayne Jennings — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 23:41:07 +0000

What effect is the current standards movement and teaching to the test having on our students? What do you know about how students at your school view the school environment? Now your school can find out by seeing the school from the eyes of your students based on their responses on the Hope Survey. This diagnostic tools assesses the school environment and culture based on the developmental needs of adolescents including: autonomy, belongingness, goal orientation and academic press. These four variables also lead to data around student engagement and overall hope (psychological well being). Schools can then use this longitudinal data to test out appropriate interventions on a whole school level and/or individual student basis. The instrument has been in use for nearly a decade and has national norms for comparison.

One of the developers Dr. Mark Van Ryzin has not only proved that taking a more “whole child” approach with students is good for them psychologically but also showed a correlation to raised achievement in students. In short, giving students hope can literally last a life time. For more information on the Hope Survey, check out the new website at: http://hopesurvey.org or contact Aaron Grimm: aaron@edvisionsschools.org or 507 248-3738 x7.

Prologue to Revolution: Exciting Approach

Wayne Jennings — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:37:14 +0000

“Prologue to Revolution,” a seven page report by Francis Duffy, lists four “industrial-age” paradigms hampering school change, describes why they persist in the face of evidence to the contrary, and asks about the reader’s beliefs as a road to action. This readable piece provides a compelling argument for school transformation and suggests avenues for its achievement. You will find this article provocative reading.

Anyone can request a free subscription to the Duffy Reports by the F. M. Duffy Group or obtain other useful materials at the website. Francis Duffy, a long-time advocate for systems change, offers workshops, publications and other services. Email fmduffy@earthlink.net to receive copies of reports.

New Book Blames Students

Wayne Jennings — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:27:44 +0000

Bad Students Not Bad Schools by Robert Weissberg, U of Illinois professor emeritus of political science, is a throwback to highly traditional education when principals exercised the power to throw kids out. This easy read, colorfully written with a degree of exaggeration, ultimately lapses in frustration at how to fix schools. Several chapters describe the failures of many efforts at reforming schools with big money, big ideas and big organizations. These are some of the best and most useful parts of the book evidencing considerable research.

Weissberg skewers movements like diversity and equity as distracting for educators and destructive to goals of academic achievement. Weissberg’s single focused interest in academics would eliminate students without demonstrated school success. He has no time for the whole child and other “soft” movements or even the choice movement though he seems ambivalent on that.

We are beginning to see a spate of articles along the lines of Bad Students impatient with the pace of academic achievement and irritated in general with immigration, rights, mandates and law suits. The new Core Standards, constant calls for rigor, increased testing and graduation exams remind me of the 1950s when Why Johnny Can’t Read and other books launched attacks on public education that put educators on the defensive for a decade until Kohl, Dennison, Holt, Silberman and others questioned seats bolted to the floor education. Bad Students Not Bad Schools needs to be read and confronted to better understand the many uncomfortable people frustrated with current schooling.

Posted via email from waynebj’s posterous

National and State Alternative Education Conferences

Wayne Jennings — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:22:03 +0000

Mark your calendar for any of the following conferences about alternatives of interest to you or colleagues.

The International Association for Truancy and Dropout Prevention will hold its 100th annual conference September 26-30, 2010 in Chicago.

The Iowa Association for Alternative Education will hold its 23rd Risky Business conference September 27, 2010 in Des Moines.

The Green Schools Across America will hold its first annual conference Oct. 24-26, 2010 in Minneapolis.

The National Dropout Prevention Center/Network will hold its 22st annual conference Nov. 14-17, 2010 in Philadelphia.

The Texas Association for Alternative Education will hold its 21st annual conference February 3-5, 2011 in Austin.

The National Alternative Education Association will hold its annual conference February 9-12, 2011 in Nashville.

The National At-Risk Education Network will hold its 8th annual conference February 22-24, 2011 in Panama City, Florida.

The Minnesota Association of Alternative Programs will hold its annual conference February 23-25, 2011 in Duluth, MN.

The Washington Association for Learning Alternatives will hold its 36th annual conference March 3-5, 2011 in Ocean Shores, Washington.

The Iowa Association of Alternative Education will hold its annual conference April 7-8, 2011 in Des Moines.

The Magnet Schools of America will hold its 29th annual conference May 15-18, 2011 in Indianapolis.

Alternative Education Course

Wayne Jennings — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 03:23:27 +0000

Here is an opportunity for anyone interested in 3 semester hours of graduate credit on the topic of alternative education from an expert. For about a decade Roy Weaver served as editor of Changing Schools (national journal of alternative education for 20 years) and organized alternative education conferences during the late 1970s and 1980s. The course is offered entirely online and will run from June 21 to July 23. The course will cover the broad range of alternatives, including free schools, open schools, schools-within-schools, schools-without-walls, magnet schools, charter schools, home schools, and virtual schools. For more information: Dr. Roy Weaver, Professor of Curriculum at Ball State University rweaver@bsu.edu cell: 765.744.0913. Course Information: http://cms.bsu.edu/Academics/CollegesandDepartments/Distance/Academics/CourseInfo/Schedule/Summer2010Schedule/EducationalStudies.aspx

Registration: https://www.bsu.edu/webapps2/see/

Blueprint School

Wayne Jennings — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:00:53 +0000

I’ve waited for years for this marvelous book, Lives of Passion, School of Hope: How One Public School Ignites a Lifelong Love of Learning. It tells a story of a K-12 progressive school (Jefferson County Open School, Colorado) that combined the best features from research and practice such as: strong advisory system, personal learning plan, learner centered environment, world as classroom, service learning, travel study and competency based graduation. I began such a school in 1971 but it did not have sustained progressive leadership after my first seven years as principal. Nor has it documented its successes, both immediate and long term in the graduates’ lives. This book does all that with statistics and a rich assortment of anecdotes. If ever we needed a blueprint about schooling, one could hardly do better than this book. Every student is expected to become an effective communicator, a complex thinker, a responsible citizen, an ethical person, and a quality worker. How’s that for a set of outcomes? This is one of the most important books I have read and I highly recommend it. The author, Rick Posner worked in the school and has produced a most readable and essential book for educators and the public.

New Center for Research on Digital Media and Learning

Wayne Jennings — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:44:06 +0000

There’s little doubt that the Internet will transform schooling (read choices) and how students learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. A newly-created Digital Media and Learning Research Hub at the University of California-Irvine will explore the impact of digital media on learning and its potential for transforming education. The Center is funded by a $2.97 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The foundation has invested substantially ($50 million since 2006) researching digital learning and gaming with positive results and continues with a variety of media projects including astonishing findings of the positive impact on youth in the three year research report, Living and Learning with New Media.

Constitutional Law Change Proposed

Wayne Jennings — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:21:41 +0000

David Bly, former President of the Minnesota Association of Alternative Programs and a co-founder of IALA has written a powerful booklet, The Middle Class Amendment, which you can read online. Bly, a Representative from Northfield, is a member of the Minnesota Legislature. While IALA does not make political endorsements, we think the topic of interest to alternative educators and students because Bly like many of us believe education change is nearly impossible. Thus, Bly proposes a constitutional amendment.

School Choice Expanding Worldwide

Wayne Jennings — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 02:35:43 +0000

Since the early 1990s when the nation’s first charter school was opened in St. Paul, MN, the scope and availability of school-based options to parents has steadily expanded in the U.S. and abroad. No longer can traditional education be a public monopoly. Sponsored by the National Center on School Choice (NCSC), this 648 page ($115) Handbook of Research on School Choice studies K-12 school choice. Coverage includes charters, vouchers, home schooling, magnet schools, cyber schools, and other forms of choice, with the ultimate goal of defining the current state of this evolving field of research, policy, and practice.

Alternative Education: Standards, Descriptions, Action

Wayne Jennings — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:18:10 +0000

Several helpful documents are available for describing, implementing and evaluating alternative education programs. The first three refer to alternative education broadly, that is, providing a choice of programs for all students. The last one is more attuned to at-risk students.

Ray Morley and the Iowa Association of Alternative Education prepared a thoughtful document, Alternative Learning Environments: a Checklist of Quality Indicators. This offers a program the opportunity to examine its practices for their alignment with some of the best thinking about alternative education.

The Seattle Public Schools under the leadership of Elaine Packard adopted a well-worded document, Quality Indicators for Alternative Schools in the Seattle School District.

Member John Loflin wrote a valuable document which is part of our resource bank of materials. His Pseudo-Alternative School Checklist identifies numerous aspects of alternative education which are not truly “alternative” practices. It is a thoughtful and provocative document.

A Tennessee official has written what they describe as the first national framework of practices that are common to alternative education which have been adopted by the National Alternative Education Association. The framework covers 10 areas: Mission, Leadership, Climate, Staffing, Curriculum, Assessment, Planning, Parents, Collaboration, Program Evaluation.

Valuable Resources on Alternative Education

Wayne Jennings — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:01:02 +0000

Here are useful resources with links to other sites:

Brief descriptions in Summary of Educational Models include: Accelerated Schools, America’s Choice, Big Picture, Communities in Schools, EdVisions, Job Corps, Youth Build and 17 more.

The Alternative High School Initiative (AHSI) is a network of youth development organizations with over 258 sites nationwide for creating educational opportunities for young people for whom traditional school settings have not been successful. AHSI was launched in 2003 with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Financing Alternative Education: Profiles and Policy by The National Youth Employment Coalition with the support of major foundations and the U.S Dept. of Labor recognizes that some of the most promising and innovative practices are taking place in our nation’s community-based and alternative education schools and programs serving youth between the ages of 16 and 24 and describes innovative practices and funding mechanisms.

Range of Alternatives

Wayne Jennings — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:01:28 +0000

We recently created the outline below showing the kinds of choices available to students in some parts of Minnesota. This may be similar to other states. By no means are all of these alternatives available to all students in all places but it represents a major shift in what parents had to choose from in 1970 which was almost nothing in the public sector. In that sense it represents major progress in the IALA mission of leading, promoting and supporting learning alternatives in education to better match needs of every child. Of course, much remains to be done to reach the policy that every state and the federal government provide a choice of different programs for each child.

Minnesota Options for Students

1. State approved alternative programs (SAAP)

Area learning centers (ALC)
Contract schools
Alternative programs

2. Charter schools

3. Online/distant learning schools

4. Traditional schools

5. Magnet schools

6. Post secondary enrollment options (early college enrollment)

7. Open enrollment

8. Nonpublic schools

9. Programmatic schools

Open education
Core knowledge
Subject: performing arts, science
Experiential and community based
Project based
Waldorf
Montessori

10. Recovery schools

11. Democratic schools

Federal Program Supports School Choice

Wayne Jennings — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 23:21:50 +0000

The U. S. Department of Education’s Office of Voluntary Public School Choice program supports States and school districts in efforts to establish or expand a public school choice program. It supports efforts to establish or expand intradistrict, interdistrict, and open enrollment public school choice programs to provide parents, particularly parents whose children attend low-performing public schools, with expanded education options.

Building Choice.org supports the federal program with numerous and comprehensive “Tools” for communities to use beginning with the rationale and establishing a vision all the way to evaluating programs. Valuable resources, research and examples will help communities or schools at any stage in their program. Building Choice was developed for USDE by WestEd in collaboration with Edvance Research who also did a series on Innovation Guides.