IALA espouses this policy as its core mission.

CASEL promotes the development of five interrelated sets of cognitive, affective, and behavioral competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. The result: A shift from being  predominantly controlled by external factors to acting with internalized beliefs and values, caring and concern for others, making good decisions, and taking responsibility for one’s choices and behaviors.

Besides full time programs, blended learning programs are increasingly found in almost all high schools in the nation and now spreading to middle and elementary schools. This describes students taking regular courses along with one or more online courses for credit endorsed by their school. A new 178 page report “The Rise of Blended Learning: Profiles of Emerging Models” by the Innosight Institute describes 40 blended learning organizations and 48 different models.

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.

Take the time with this webinar to consider the impact of this rapidly growing segment of computer use. The implications may blow your paradigms.

This pathways system would be based on three essential elements. The first is the development of a broader vision of school reform that embraces multiple pathways to help young people successfully navigate the journey from adolescence to adulthood. The report contends that at present, we place far too much emphasis on a single pathway to success: attending and graduating from a four-year college. Yet only 30 percent of young adults successfully complete this preferred pathway. Meanwhile, even in the second decade of the 21st century, most jobs do not require a bachelor’s. The report notes that while the United States is expected to create 47 million jobs in the 10-year period ending in 2018, only a third of these jobs will require a bachelor’s or higher degree. See reference for other points.

“Online learning is sweeping across America. In the year 2000, roughly 45,000 K–12 students took an online course. In 2009, more than 3 million K–12 students did. What was originally a distance learning phenomenon no longer is. Most of the growth is occurring in blended-learning environments, in which students learn online in an adult-supervised environment at least part of the time. As this happens, online learning has the potential to transform America’s education system by serving as the backbone of a system that offers more personalized learning approaches for all students.”

If you think our future will require better schools, you’re wrong.

The future of education calls for entirely new kinds of learning environments.

If you think we will need better teachers, you’re wrong.

Tomorrow’s learners will need guides who take on fundamentally different roles.

As every dimension of our world evolves so rapidly, the education challenges of tomorrow will require solutions that go far beyond today’s answers.

These comments come from: http://www.futureofed.org/. Other exciting sources of education futuristic activitiy are Knowledge Works and New Tech Network and 2020 Forecast.

This powerful article deserves careful study to make significant improvement in schooling. I highly recommend it. Prensky makes the article available for widespread distribution. His website contains much other useful information.

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.

Attempts at circumventing conventional licensing have led to the availability of alternative certification, that is programs for becoming licensed to teach or administer without going through the traditional sequence. A valuable resource for examining this route is www.educationdegree.com and then clicking on Alternative Certification.

This continually updated website of 1,700 colleges and school districts contains valuable time-saving information including B.A, M.A and Ph.D. programs. One example is Teach for America. The website also references a critical review and research on alternative certification.

The professional literature contains much commentary about the quality of teacher training, much of it critical of the selection of candidates and training programs leading to certification. Legislatures in a number of states have initiated new routes to certification, hence the value of the Education Degree website for this fast changing field.

Our IALA website lists colleges for preparing people to work in alternative schools. Click on Alternative Training Programs.

A third brief video is from the fresh mind of Ken Robinson who draws engagingly as he talks about the need for change.

Two major criticisms of these studies have been made aside from their conflicting findings. One regards a definition of charter schools. Are we talking about innovative charter schools vs. those following traditional approaches, charter schools in their first few years vs. well-established ones, charter schools with mostly beginning teachers, schools serving mostly at-risk students, etc.? One may as well say parochial schools achieve better than public schools; that would dismissed as making an incomplete and unwarranted comparison.

The second major criticism of charter school studies regards a level playing field on finances. Repeated studies by Ball State University show that in all states, charter schools receive fewer revenues and in many states substantially fewer revenues–on the order of 20 percent less revenue. This factor also makes student achievement comparisons suspect and unfortunately is rarely mentioned or factored in. The study, Charter School Funding: Inequity Persists updates an earlier study which also found a considerable difference in the resources available to charter schools as compared to district schools in the same locales.

People want to know about this major reform effort, charter schools and its degree of success. Once again, the complexity of valid research rears its annoying head. I, for one, want to see charter schools actually depart from conventional practices. That is the primary purpose of charter school statutes! My observation and experience with charter schools from the earliest years show that the majority of charter schools reconstitute the conventional school. A small percentage, perhaps 30 percent, (my estimate) pioneer different approaches to education. Those interesting schools have much to teach us about learning and the results for producing responsible citizenship, productive careers and lifelong learning. How about research along these lines rather than the repeated flawed and unhelpful existing studies?