IALA espouses this policy as its core mission.

From IALA’s standpoint, this is an overdue but welcome affirmation of our position that all students should have a choice of distinctively different programs.

This year’s conference, February 9 – 12, 2011 in Nashville, will feature a President’s Business Meeting for State & National Leadership, similar to the Leadership Forum at past IALA conferences. We enthusiastically support this initiative and encourage organization leaders to attend and urge members to join NAEA. (membership is free!) Dr. Ray Morley of Iowa will represent IALA at the meeting of alternative organizational leaders.

Wayne Jennings, IALA Board Chair
Ray Morley, Vice-Chair
Dan Daly, Secretary/Treasurer

From their site: Options basically fall into two categories. First are schools of choice, all schools that aren’t regular public schools—magnet, private, charter, homeschools. In the U.S., there are about 133,000 schools; of those, about 40,000, or one third, are schools of choice. Second are choice programs, like open enrollment, school transfer options, vouchers, and tax credits. Currently, 47 states have some kind of open enrollment policy; all 50 have the school transfer option under No Child Left Behind, 9 states offer public or privately-funded vouchers, and 7 states offer tax credits.

In her new book The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future (Multicultural Education) Linda Darling-Hammond share her views on how schools can be improved for all students from all backgrounds.  She poignantly describes what the United States needs to do in order to build a stronger, more equitable educational system.  Recently she appeared via audio cast on Elluminate talking about both The Flat World and Education, as well as, The Right to Learn.  http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/lindadarlinghammond.mp3

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:

1. A learning program that is “different” from traditional schools and/or “focused” on a specific theme
2. A student-centered learning program using a variety of measures to assess student performance
3. Staff at the site able to make decisions about all aspects of the school and control finances
4. Staff at the site accountable for student performance results and fiscal responsibility
5. 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.

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.”

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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.

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

I would like to know what others have to say about the use of personal technologies such as smartphones in the classroom.

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.