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Top Takeaways From Tennessee’s 2018 ACT Results

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Belmont announces business degree partnership with Nashville State

Two Nashville schools have partnered to offer community college students a clear pathway to earning a bachelor’s degree in business.

Belmont University and Nashville State Community College announced on Wednesday a partnership that allows the community college’s students the opportunity to earn a bachelor’s degree through Belmont.

It is a similar agreement that Belmont shares with Columbia State Community College, according to a news release about the agreement.

“This initiative outlines the steps needed to ensure credits earned properly to transfer while also maximizing each student’s financial investment in their education,” said Belmont President Bob Fisher, in a news release.

Eligible students must earn a Nashville State associate’s degree in business administration and by meeting all requirements, those students can be granted early admittance into Belmont’s Massey College of Business.

According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 80 percent of students attending community colleges nationwide intend to pursue a bachelor’s degree, but only 14 percent have one six years later.

“This partnership optimizes the impact of Tennessee Promise and Tennessee Reconnect programs by providing the financial support for our Nashville State graduates to successfully complete a four-year degree,” said Shanna Jackson, Nashville State president, in the news release. “Nashville State is committed to improving pathways and options for students who wish to transfer to great institutions like Belmont University.”

[Read more at The Tennessean] Read More

West Tennessee mayors join early childhood education coalition

“It is a fact of life that to attract good paying jobs to our area, we must have a skilled workforce. What many people don’t think about is that building those workforce skills starts with development early in life — through learning to read, solving math problems and learning how to get along with others.” — Madison County Mayor, Jimmy Harris

Expressing concern that a majority of Tennessee third-graders are not proficient in reading and math, mayors from across rural West Tennessee have formed a coalition to support the advancement of early education. The group is part of Tennesseans for Quality Early Education, a statewide, bipartisan, advocacy organization.

“It is a fact of life that to attract good paying jobs to our area, we must have a skilled workforce,” Madison County Mayor Jimmy Harris said in a released statement from TQEE. “What many people don’t think about is that building those workforce skills starts with development early in life — through learning to read, solving math problems and learning how to get along with others.”

“We can and must do a better job of educating young Tennesseans in the critical early years of learning to set the stage for success in middle school, high school and beyond,” TQEE Executive Director Mike Carpenter added in the release.

With a new governor soon to be elected and a large turnover occurring in the state legislature because of retirements, the Mayors’ Coalition aims to ensure new policymakers continue current early education investments and expand programs and policies proving to be successful. The coalition believes the state has made significant progress in improving student outcomes, but that there is much more to be done to elevate Tennessee’s citizens and communities.

“I strongly urge our next governor and legislature to continue to promote early literacy with proven efforts like Read 2 B Ready,” Harris added. “I believe this program helps our young children to establish a firm foundation for their education journey. I believe we need to continue to improve the quality and expand pre-Kindergarten programs across the state, and support our teachers with quality training and coaching.”

The Mayors’ Coalition plans to grow its ranks to include mayors of counties, cities and towns across the state over the next several months leading up to the start of the new legislative session.

West Tennessee area mayors presently part of the organization include:

• Barry Hutcherson, Chester County
• Benny McGuire, Obion County
• Bill Rawls, Brownsville
• Brent Greer, Henry County
• Brett Lashlee, Benton County
• Chris Young, Dyer County
• Dale Kelley, City of Huntingdon
• David Livingston, Haywood County
• Eddie Bray, Henderson County
• Jake Bynum, Weakley County
• Jeff Griggs, City of Lexington
• Jill Holland, City of McKenzie
• Jimmy Harris, Madison County
• Jimmy Sain, Hardeman County
• John Carroll, Perry County
• Jon Pavletic, City of Ripley
• Joseph Butler, Carroll County
• Julian McTizic, City of Bolivar
• Kevin Davis, Hardin County
• Larry Smith, McNairy County
• Mike Creasy, Decatur County
• Robert King, City of Henderson
• Roger Pafford, City of Camden
• Skip Taylor, Fayette County
• Tim David Boaz, City of Parsons
• Tom Witherspoon, Gibson County
• Wes Ward, City of Linden

About TQEE

Tennesseans for Quality Early Education (TQEE) is a statewide advocacy organization focused on education policy from birth to third grade. Our bi-partisan coalition is comprised of business, law enforcement, faith, education and civic organizations and individuals in communities across Tennessee. The group’s members support high quality early education to improve academic achievement, boost workforce development and enhance quality of life in our communities. Learn more by visiting our website at: www.tqee.org

[Read more at the Jackson Sun] Read More

Few Gains for Students in Tennessee Remedial Education Program

Tennessee’s unique approach to preparing students for college by requiring them to take remedial math classes in high schools instead of college doesn’t lead to improved math skills, according to a study released today by Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research.

The researchers who have been studying the Tennessee Seamless Alignment and Integrated Learning Support program (SAILS) also found that it did not increase the likelihood of students passing college math once they were enrolled in the course.

“By moving the remedial course requirements to high school, the SAILS program increased the proportion of community college entrants taking college-level math, but only about half of students passed the course,” said Thomas Kane, faculty director of the center. “At least those students weren’t delayed by taking a remedial course, but the SAILS course didn’t improve students’ success in math.”

Tennessee launched the SAILS program in 2012 as an alternative to traditional college remediation. High school juniors are placed in remedial courses based on their ACT score. Students in a SAILS-participating high schools who scored below a 19 on the ACT math exam could take their remedial math course in the senior year of high school. Those students who completed the course were then exempted from taking remedial math when they enrolled in a state community college.

The Harvard researchers determined that during the first year in community college, SAILS students were 29 percentage points more likely to enroll in college math. About half of the students who enrolled passed the course. However, the passing rates for SAILS graduates were not higher than for students with similar ACT scores who scored just above a 19 on the ACT math and were not required to take a remedial course, Kane said.

The study results indicate that state education officials and college administrators should reconsider whether remediation in any form, such as prerequisite or corequisite courses, should be required, he said. Corequisite remediation allows a student to enroll in college-level courses and also receive additional academic supports.

“The sad truth is despite the ubiquity of remediation requirements, higher education has very little evidence that remediation improves students’ reading or math skills,” Kane said. “In states like Tennessee that made community college free for recent high school graduates, the remediation requirements may be the primary barrier remaining.”

About 40 percent of community college students enroll in at least one remedial course. But only 34 percent of two-year college students in remediation receive a degree or certificate within six years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Tennessee colleges and universities stopped offering stand-alone remediation in 2015 and moved toward corequisite as the model for helping students improve in math and English. Some other studies have already shown remediation success in Tennessee since the change. And a number of other states have followed suit, with Texas requiring colleges to use corequisite in 2017 and California passing a bill last year to do the same.

Kane said the Harvard study found that once corequisite remediation was introduced, the SAILS program had no impact on students taking or passing college-level math in their first year. There was also no effect on the total number of credits students completed at the end of their second year.

Angela Boatman, an assistant professor of public policy and higher education at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University, and one of the researchers who worked on the study, said corequisite remediation and the SAILS program are very similar because they eliminate the need for traditional remediation. The biggest difference is in the timing, because the corequisite support is offered at the same time as the college-level class.

“In the end, the advantage to the Tennessee model is moving remediation from the community colleges back to high school, because in many places like Tennessee … they may have a four-year math requirement,” Kane said. The four-year math requirement in high school means that there isn’t any additional cost on the college to offer remediation because the students are already taking a math course in their 12th year.

Those reduced costs at the community college could be an opportunity for institutions to reallocate resources to other remedial models that have shown more success in raising degree completion rates, Kane said. The researchers point to the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) and the program at Georgia State University.

An MDRC study of the ASAP initiative found that after three years, 40 percent of students in the program graduated, compared to 22 percent of students in a control group.

“We’ve been practicing remediation for decades and just now [are] getting good answers to who this is helping and how, and that needs to change going forward,” Boatman said.

Mike Krause, executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, said the benefit of the SAILS program is that students don’t have to take the corequisite course in the first place.

The Harvard study noted a positive aspect of the program — SAILS students’ perceptions of the usefulness of math improved. The study found that students in the SAILS program were 6.5 percentage points more likely to think their math content was useful, 10 percentage points more likely to indicate they were better prepared for college math and six percentage points more likely to say they were interested in math compared to their counterparts who passed the ACT threshold.

Krause said he was gratified to see that students perceptions of math were more positive.

“Looking at the report and saying in a corequisite environment SAILS didn’t move the needle fails to make the point,” he said. “Our goal is to keep students out of remediation.”

Krause said the commission will review the report to see which findings will help improve remediation in the state.

“No doubt we’ll continue expanding SAILS every year,” he said. “In this world, when you’re trying to move hard statistics, it requires every approach.”

[Read more at Inside Higher Ed] Read More

In Silicon Prairie, Kenzie Academy’s Apprenticeship Program Trains Students for High-Paid Tech Jobs of Tomorrow — Without College or Debt

Unlike many of his peers, Dylan Fields, a high school senior in a small town just north of here, has long known what he wants to do for a career. But like many others, Fields had no idea how to get from where he was to where he dreamed of being.

”I’ve watched more YouTube videos about software engineering than 99 percent of people,” he said. “It’s insane.”

Problem was, Fields, 17, didn’t how to get from Zionsville — a suburb of 26,000 — to a high-paying job as a software engineer. He visited colleges like Purdue and Vanderbilt universities and the University of Chicago, but the visits left him hesitant about whether formal postsecondary education was right for him.

“There was always a part of me that was unsure,” he said. He often wondered, “Is this the place for me?”

Then, in January, Fields shadowed his older cousin at Kenzie Academy, a tech-focused apprenticeship school that had just opened in downtown Indianapolis. He was struck by the hands-on nature of the program. With its flipped classroom model, much of Kenzie’s formal content learning takes place after hours or in the first part of the morning, and students spend the rest of the day working with their coach, instructor, and classmates to try out new skills.

“It was a completely different feeling,” Fields said, recalling himself thinking, “Oh yeah, I’m going to come here.”

Fields applied and was accepted. After he graduates from high school this spring, he will forgo college and instead enroll in a two-year program at Kenzie, hoping the program’s unique funding model will permit him to start the program without taking out a loan and that its apprenticeship model will provide him with real-world experience before graduating.

With millions more jobs requiring at least some postsecondary education but student loan debt totaling more than $1.5 trillion, students, parents, and employers are all eager for alternatives to college. Kenzie co-founder Chok Ooi, who tinkered with computers as a teenager in his native Malaysia, is betting he can help fill the gap. And with experience on Wall Street and a successful Silicon Valley startup, Ooi, 38, believes that apprenticeships will help him turn an expensive, four-year, tech-focused degree into an affordable vocational program — and produce workers for Indianapolis’s burgeoning tech scene.

“We want to make apprenticeship sexy again,” Ooi said with a laugh.

Students will begin their apprenticeship once they reach their second year. The school, Kenzie Academy, is developing a consultancy arm, Kenzie Studios, where apprentices will work with experienced technologists and attempt to apply what they’ve learned for paying customers. (Kenzie will also run a corporate retraining program for midcareer employees at other organizations.) The hope, Ooi said, is that the apprentices will collect a yet-to-be-determined apprentice wage while building relationships that could lead to postgraduation employment.

Employment is key, as Kenzie’s financial model is largely premised on its students finding well-paying jobs after graduation. Like Purdue, Kenzie is experimenting with income share agreements, which means students don’t pay any of the $24,000 tuition up front. Instead, they agree to pay back 17.5 percent of their postgraduation salary to Kenzie for 48 months. Students who get low-paying jobs could end up paying less than $24,000, and students with high-paying jobs could pay more. Students who do not find work, even with Kenzie’s support, will not pay the tuition.

“That’s why when our students are struggling, we pay special attention to them,” Ooi said, “because our future income depends on them.”

Silicon Prairie

Ooi’s path to developing an alternative to college in Indianapolis started when he attended college in — Indianapolis. Born in Malaysia, where he built his own computer and launched a website for his high school at age 16, Ooi met a recruiter visiting from Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. He faxed her a newspaper article about launching the school website. This encounter won him a scholarship to IUPUI, where he soon enrolled. The “Crossroads of America” became the first place in which he set foot in the United States.

Ooi eventually transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, and he landed on Wall Street after graduation. He was working at Goldman Sachs when the financial crisis struck in 2008 and headed off to Silicon Valley soon after. In 2011, Ooi and a business partner launched Agility.io, a company employing 250 software engineers in Vietnam to do outsourced work from tech firms like Samsung, Viacom, and Bose. Agility.io taught every single one of its employees to code from scratch.

Now, with Kenzie, Ooi says, “We’re trying to take what works for Agility and adapt it to middle America.”

Ooi says Indiana’s biggest selling point is its state government “being very pro-business.” Among other policies, the state has a business-friendly tax environment and invests in workforce development programs like Kenzie.

In 2016, Vice President Mike Pence — then the governor of Indiana — called the state “Silicon Prairie,” a moniker that other Midwestern cities and states have applied to themselves. But Indiana has an increasingly strong claim to the title.

In 2015 and 2016, tech jobs expanded in the Indianapolis area at the fourth-fastest rate in the country and the highest in the Midwest, according to a report last year by real estate firm CBRE. In January, Amazon announced that Indianapolis was among 20 finalists from more than 230 cities and regions that are seeking to host the tech giant’s second headquarters. SalesForce has its name on the tallest tower in town, and Infosys, the global technology company, is in the midst of building its American training facility in Indianapolis — with plans to fill 3,000 new jobs there over the next five years.

Mike Langellier, president and CEO of TechPoint, an Indianapolis-based tech advocacy organization, says the city’s emergence as a tech center is the result of several macro trends.

First, he points to the costs and congestion in traditional tech hubs like the Bay Area, Seattle, and New York City, which are “hitting the point where they’re becoming unsustainable to scale companies there on a reasonable cost basis,” Langellier said.

Mike Cammarano, who lives in Silicon Valley and works remotely as Kenzie’s head of curriculum, is experiencing the challenges firsthand.

“Everything here is really dysfunctional,” he said. “All of the housing prices are extremely high, the highways and railways are maximally congested. There’s this obvious opportunity to develop other tech hubs in other parts of the country that aren’t facing these same types of constraints. Most people around here appreciate the fact that this makes sense.”

Second, Langellier notes that technology and the internet are now embedded into everything from the watches we wear to the tractors we drive (or, with GPS, the tractors that can drive themselves).

“Until now, we’ve primarily engaged with the internet, and now the internet is engaging with physical objects around us,” Langellier said. “That’s causing technology to inject its way like never before into areas like sciences and health care and agriculture and logistics, and it just so happens that the cores of many of those industries are in other parts of the country, like Indianapolis.”

Indianapolis is now a city where IndyPy, a Meetup group for the Python programming language, has more than 1,400 members. It’s where the tech community pushed back when the state legislature passed what it views as overly conservative legislation. It’s also where the governor of the state came to Kenzie’s kickoff event when the school had only 18 students.

The tech companies moving to Indianapolis are looking to capitalize on a strong educational and philanthropic landscape. Indiana University’s main campus and Purdue University are both located just over an hour away, as is Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, which U.S. News and World Report has ranked as the best engineering school in the country for 20 straight years. There’s also Ivy Tech Community College, which serves nearly 200,000 students annually.

Educational nonprofits like The Mind Trust, the Strada Education Network, and the Lumina Foundation are all based in Indianapolis. Global pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is headquartered there, too, and its endowment is “one of the largest grant-making foundations in the United States.” Indianapolis is also home to SalesForce’s biggest hub outside of San Francisco; in May, the company donated $500,000 to Indianapolis Public Schools.

In tech parlance, Indianapolis — with its talent pipeline, supportive network, and business-friendly government, not to mention its affordable cost of living — has all the makings of a strong ecosystem.

“Not a lot of drama around here,” said Maureen Donohue Krauss, who oversees economic development at the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce. “Some people consider that dull. I just consider it easy to succeed.”

‘Our future is tied to our students’ futures’

How easy to succeed?

Ooi got the idea for Kenzie in the spring of 2017 while on a trip to Africa organized by Geeks on a Plane, which coordinates overseas trips for entrepreneurs. In Nigeria, he learned that Andela, which helps train software engineers, was receiving business from American companies, and he realized he could start a similar organization to do that work in the heartland.

“A bunch of my friends said, ‘If you do it, we will write you a check,’” Ooi said. “So I raised $1.1 million in three weeks after the trip.”

With that money in hand, and entrepreneur friends Rehan Hasan and Courtney Spence as his co-founders, Ooi launched Kenzie. They eventually raised $5.8 million over two rounds of funding, with hopes of serving 1,000 students over the next five years.

Kenzie started offering classes in January this year, and as of September they had about 50 students spread across four cohorts. The students range from 19 to 52 years old, and many students already have an associate’s or bachelor’s degree (including Dylan Fields’s cousin, who graduated from Indiana University).

To gain admittance, students start by filling out an online application for one of three programs: software engineering, user experience (UX) engineering, and digital marketing. The application includes questions like, “At 1:14 p.m. in Indianapolis, Indiana, what time is it in San Francisco, California?” and, “If your friend walks a mile in 15 minutes, what is her speed in miles per hour?”

“It’s a relatively low bar,” said Cammarano, the head of curriculum. “It’s essentially a screener that people have a basic level of English language literacy and computer literacy.”

A subsequent stage of the process includes a technical interview with an instructor, though Kenzie staff say they are looking to see how applicants think and how they respond to setbacks more than they are looking for previous coding experience.

“The core of it is metacognition — thinking about how you’re thinking,” said David Gregg, an associate instructor in the software engineering program.

Once admitted, students begin a full-time program. In the first year, direct instruction is limited, partly because Ooi believes in a more hands-on approach. Lecturing, he said, “kills the creative daylight out of you.”

Students attend class across two floors of loft space above the Hard Rock Cafe. There’s an emphasis on collaboration, so walls are kept to a minimum. Meeting rooms that do exist are named after employees’ children or pets. Students work on laptops at long tables and roll their desk chairs into a semicircle when an instructor delivers a mini-lesson. There’s one basketball hoop and many bikes.

Students are introduced to new skills and content through brief demonstrations and online videos. They then practice applying the content through a variety of exercises on Kenzie’s online learning platform. Students can help one another, and there are also coaches (students from earlier cohorts who have already gone through the curriculum) and instructors available for support.

Not all instruction happens in person. Because Ooi says he prioritizes “the best talent,” some instructors teach remotely via video and primarily engage with students through Slack, a messaging app. The UX engineering program, for instance, is taught by a former LinkedIn UX designer who lives in New Orleans and a former Google UX designer who lives in New York. They visit Indianapolis periodically. (This is not unusual — Ooi’s family lives in New Jersey, where he visits on weekends, and his co-founders live in Colorado, as do other members of his team.)

Ooi hired an alumnus of Teach For America to coach his instructors, recognizing that industry experience doesn’t necessarily translate to strong teaching. Kenzie is also spending more in advertising to attract more women and more minorities because “long-term, it pays off,” Ooi said.

Kenzie staff tend to describe the company by emphasizing what it isn’t — a coding boot camp. They note that Kenzie’s program is much longer and includes a year of apprenticeship, compared to the intensive courses that tend to last around 15 weeks and have proliferated in recent years. Since its launch seven years ago, General Assembly, for example, has reached more than 40,000 students and now counts 25 locations in the United States and six overseas. The Flatiron School, another coding boot camp, has expanded to six locations since WeWork acquired the school in October 2017.

Kenzie is also not a registered apprenticeship program, which is a classification given to programs that meet certain criteria and apply to the U.S. Department of Labor. In turn, these programs are eligible for federal funding — an initiative that started under former president Barack Obama with $175 million in 2015 and continued under President Donald Trump, who committed $200 million last year.

That lack of official status gives pause to Angela Hanks, who directs the Center for Postsecondary and Economic Success at CLASP, a think tank focused on low-income Americans.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not a quality program, but it means you can’t compare it to a program where there’s a requirement around the wage progression and multiple requirements around labor standards and mentorship,” she said. “In some ways this is an experiment where they’re trying several things at once.”

Mary Alice McCarthy, who worked on apprenticeships as an official at the Departments of Education and Labor during the Obama administration, is excited to see the model extending beyond traditional trades like plumbing and carpentry, and she thinks apprenticeships are more effective than the boot camp model. McCarthy notes, however, that apprenticeships are normally free or available to employees at a minimal cost, a far cry from Kenzie’s $24,000 price tag, which includes the year in Kenzie Studios.

“It’s a little concerning when a company is training up its own consultants but charging people to be their own consultants,” she said.

For Kenzie student Jennifer Browning, 42, all concerns are relative. In early July, she was incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison, finishing a 15-month sentence for repeated arrests for driving under the influence and possession of opioids without a prescription.

By late July, after a meeting with Ooi, she was a student in the newest software engineering cohort at Kenzie. Ooi said there are a handful of students who were formerly incarcerated.

“We believe in giving people a second chance, and what better way — they can do work under our apprenticeship, where people don’t question your past, they just care about the delivery of the work,” Ooi said. “After they deliver good work, nobody will typically care anymore. They’re like, ‘What can you do?’ versus ‘Tell me about your past.’”

Browning, a mother of four with a bachelor’s degree who worked as a stockbroker for Charles Schwab earlier in her career, overflows with gratitude at the second chance.

“My family is super excited because I think they were worried about what am I going to do when I get out, are the opportunities going to be limited?” Browning said. “I think it’s God’s will.”

The future of higher ed

John McDonald, the CEO of ClearObject, a 40-person IT company based just outside of Indianapolis, is not a fan of traditional higher education. He notes that roughly 70,000 of the state’s high school seniors graduate each year, and about half of them go to one of Indiana’s public colleges or universities. In two years, 8 percent of those students graduate with an associate’s degree; in four years, 42 percent graduate with a bachelor’s degree. Of those graduates, two-thirds have debt. In other words, of those 70,000 high school graduates, just 5 percent — 3,634 of them — graduate on time and without debt.

“To call that system broken is a disservice to the word ‘broken,’” McDonald said.

At work, McDonald’s company posts job descriptions that ask for a “BA/BS degree in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent practical experience.”

“We want a [bachelor’s degree], but if you can prove you have relevant experience, we don’t care,” he said.

Mary Alice McCarthy, who worked on apprenticeships as an official at the Departments of Education and Labor during the Obama administration, is excited to see the model extending beyond traditional trades like plumbing and carpentry, and she thinks apprenticeships are more effective than the boot camp model. McCarthy notes, however, that apprenticeships are normally free or available to employees at a minimal cost, a far cry from Kenzie’s $24,000 price tag, which includes the year in Kenzie Studios.

“It’s a little concerning when a company is training up its own consultants but charging people to be their own consultants,” she said.

For Kenzie student Jennifer Browning, 42, all concerns are relative. In early July, she was incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison, finishing a 15-month sentence for repeated arrests for driving under the influence and possession of opioids without a prescription.

By late July, after a meeting with Ooi, she was a student in the newest software engineering cohort at Kenzie. Ooi said there are a handful of students who were formerly incarcerated.

“We believe in giving people a second chance, and what better way — they can do work under our apprenticeship, where people don’t question your past, they just care about the delivery of the work,” Ooi said. “After they deliver good work, nobody will typically care anymore. They’re like, ‘What can you do?’ versus ‘Tell me about your past.’”

Browning, a mother of four with a bachelor’s degree who worked as a stockbroker for Charles Schwab earlier in her career, overflows with gratitude at the second chance.

“My family is super excited because I think they were worried about what am I going to do when I get out, are the opportunities going to be limited?” Browning said. “I think it’s God’s will.”

The future of higher ed

John McDonald, the CEO of ClearObject, a 40-person IT company based just outside of Indianapolis, is not a fan of traditional higher education. He notes that roughly 70,000 of the state’s high school seniors graduate each year, and about half of them go to one of Indiana’s public colleges or universities. In two years, 8 percent of those students graduate with an associate’s degree; in four years, 42 percent graduate with a bachelor’s degree. Of those graduates, two-thirds have debt. In other words, of those 70,000 high school graduates, just 5 percent — 3,634 of them — graduate on time and without debt.

“To call that system broken is a disservice to the word ‘broken,’” McDonald said.

At work, McDonald’s company posts job descriptions that ask for a “BA/BS degree in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent practical experience.”

“We want a [bachelor’s degree], but if you can prove you have relevant experience, we don’t care,” he said.

“[Young people today] can build a website, they can code an app, so they’re going into business for themselves … and offering skills they’ve learned largely on demand to other people, largely on demand,” McDonald said. The current higher education system is “absolutely, completely busted. It’s bankrupt. And our kids know it.”

Not everyone in Indianapolis is so quick to scrap the system.

Scott Bess is the head of school at Purdue Polytechnic High School, a district-charter hybrid that opened downtown two years ago. Bess is quick to jettison some parts of traditional education — Purdue Polytechnic uses a project-based model instead of conventional subject-based classes — and he is a fan of Kenzie; about 20 students and one teacher took coding classes there over the summer. But he’s not ready to take college off the table for his students, partly because his school partners with Purdue University, and partly because statistics still show that the more education you have, the more money you make and and the less likely you are to be unemployed.

“I don’t want to take that option away from people because we don’t know if 10 or 15 years from now if that differential goes away through people like Kenzie,” Bess said. “Maybe it does, but if it doesn’t, I don’t want our students to be locked in, like, ‘Shoot, I made the wrong choice when I was 18 years old.’”

Bess thinks it might be possible to integrate elements of traditional and nontraditional postsecondary education, combining the institutional resources and supports of a college or university with the industry responsiveness of Kenzie. An example of this, Bess said, would be a university outsourcing its software engineering curriculum to Kenzie.

McCarthy, the former official in the Departments of Education and Labor, agrees on the possibilities for collaboration. She thinks colleges should start partnering with apprenticeship programs, given how apprenticeships “smooth the transition from school into work and keep the education system well connected to the labor market and what firms and companies need.”

McCarthy thinks there’s a model where on-the-job learning related to classroom instruction could earn students credits, similar to the system in the United Kingdom, where colleges are trying out degree apprenticeships.

“They take the best of both worlds,” she said. “Folks are working while they’re studying, and it’s much more experiential and hands-on. Their education has a longer shelf life and will be more important to them later in life.”

Ooi said Kenzie already has a partnership with Indianapolis-based Butler University and is exploring further coordination with institutes of higher education.

Far more jobs today require postsecondary education (65 percent) than 40 years ago (28 percent), and more models are being developed to fill that need.

“Things like Kenzie fill the hole for the people that need another way,” ClearObject CEO McDonald said. “And, in reality, we all need another way.”

[Read more at The 74 Million]

 

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Foundation, church partner to install tiny houses for homeless college students

A Lynnwood-based foundation and a local church are partnering with a Seattle company to provide portable housing units for homeless college students and those attending work-training programs.

Pallet, a Seattle-based Social Purpose Corporation, is working in conjunction with the Jean Kim Foundation for the Homeless Education and Lynnwood’s Good Shepherd Baptist Church to build a six-unit, fenced-in community on the church grounds.

For the past two years the church — in partnership with the Jean Kim Foundation — has been hosting an encampment for people experiencing homelessness. The foundation, established in 2015, offers six options to support students who are currently homeless or at risk of homelessness. This includes helping students enroll in college and connecting them to apprenticeship, vocational skills and literacy programs. (See our earlier story to learn more.)

Good Shepherd Pastor Christopher Boyer said he has already seen a change in those who have found shelter in the community known as Shepherd’s Village, a 10-minute walk from Edmonds Community College.

“They see a light at the end of the tunnel and it’s not an oncoming freight train as it is for so many folks experiencing homelessness,” he said. “Over all it’s been a fabulous experience and I hope other churches in the area buy into this idea.”

Each 64-square-foot unit comes with a built-in bed, desk and shelf and will have heating, air conditioning and electricity. The units will also include a smoke detector, fire extinguisher and emergency escape hatch built into the wall. Shepherd’s Village also has a solar-powered shower and Wi-Fi so that the students can study. An on-site manager will also be available to assist residents.

The project, at a cost of $31,000 for six units, has been entirely funded by the Jean Kim Foundation.

Pallet CEO Amy King, whose husband Brady designed the units, said she hopes more cities will decide to use the same method to help with the issue of homelessness.

“I think it’s a more versatile approach and it’ll hopefully save them money in the long run, which allows them to help more people,” she said.

In addition to Pallet, King and her husband own a construction company called Squarepeg, with both businesses serving as a second-chance employment opportunity for people who have a criminal and/or addiction history.

“With both companies we have construction jobs and manufacturing jobs and we have a pipeline of people who come to us from the Department of Corrections, local shelters and case managers throughout the cities,” she said.

Jason Dunbar, services coordinator for the Jean Kim Foundation, said the idea of investing in the project is to ensure each student has a stable, personal space to work toward a better future.

“The mission here is get people off the street, help break the chains of poverty through education,” he said.

Residents of Shepherd’s Village will be vetted to ensure they are good fit for the new community. He said applicants cannot have warrants, cannot be registered sex offenders and will be subject to weekly random drug tests.

Dunbar said Shepherd’s Village is not just meant to provide someone struggling with homelessness a roof over their head, but to give them a sense of worth.

“I think when you’ve got value, your success is going to be better,” he said.

[Read more at Edmonds News] Read More

As Memphis parents struggle to find information about schools, one parent group is calling for a simpler enrollment system

Memphis parent Leisa Crawford didn’t have time to look through dozens of websites and zig-zag hundreds of miles around town to find a school for her child.

So she relied on word-of-mouth.

“When you live here in Memphis … you don’t go on the website,” she told members of parent advocacy organization Memphis Lift earlier this year. “We heard about KIPP, Snowden — OK, we’re going there. Or it’s a neighborhood school and we don’t even look past that.”

Parents have found it difficult to get information about schools because there are so many types to choose from compared to 20 years ago. So Crawford and dozens of parents like her are calling for a simpler way to access information about the more than 200 schools in Memphis.

They hope a process called “unified enrollment” will help them make sense of their choices and get their children into their favorite school. In unified enrollment, each family across the city would fill out a common application listing their top choices. They would then submit those choices electronically by a deadline that is the same for every parent. Often, information about schools is included on the application website.

Memphis schools have been segregated for decades. Currently, parents who are white, well-connected, and affluent have a better chance of getting into the best schools. They have more time to research, and so are more informed about school offerings, quality, and application deadlines.

But parents from low-income families, who are mostly people of color, often have less flexible schedules because lower paying jobs do not offer many opportunities for parents to take off from work to look for schools. This means they often miss school application deadlines — and better schools tend to fill up long before then.

“Over the years, we’ve talked with parents and grandparents who are frustrated with their neighborhood schools and are drowning in the process to enroll their children in high-performing schools,” said Sarah Carpenter, Memphis Lift’s executive director.

“They know their babies are not getting the education they deserve, but parents can’t always find a solution,” she continued. “The truth is, when parents can’t get access to quality schools, then real school choice doesn’t exist.”

A handful of cities see unified enrollment as a way to solve that problem, including Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Newark, N.J., and Washington, D.C. The program in Detroit never happened because of a toxic political environment, poor planning, and bad timing. Newark’s got off to a rocky start, but enjoys almost unanimous support from parents who use it.

Simplifying how parents enroll their children in Memphis schools is already in progress. Shelby County Schools now allows parents to apply and transfer to schools online — including its sought-after optional schools that require students to score well on tests. The district enrolls about 80 percent of Memphis public school students; the other 20 percent are charter schools or schools run by the state.

Unified enrollment has been floated twice before in Memphis — once in a 2015 report commissioned by the Achievement School District, and again during meetings last year , between Shelby County Schools and its charter sector. But talks haven’t gone far.

The 2015 report by the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice included interviews with school leaders, education advocates, parents, and philanthropists, and said the city is ripe for unified enrollment.

National philanthropies have widely supported unified enrollment because they want traditional districts and charter sectors to collaborate on the process, and not compete with each other for students. To avoid claims of bias, some cities have brought in a third-party to manage the system.

Critics say unified enrollment unfairly helps the charter schools that otherwise wouldn’t have as big a platform to advertise their programs. Supporters say the benefits of unified enrollment outweigh the issues. Though many policymakers have called for changes in their unified enrollment systems, few have called to scrap them entirely.

Shelby County Schools’ application process would be combined with charter and state-run schools, which is a tough sell because the district sees those schools as competitors. School board members said as recently as this summer that charter schools are a significant financial burden that state lawmakers should help alleviate.

Still, district leaders’ interest has grown in recent years.

One of Shelby County Schools’ own, Sharon Griffin, has taken the reins at the state-run district. Griffin is known for her collaborative leadership. Her new role could help bring more cooperation between the state-run district and the local district and make unified enrollment more likely. But this is just one of many thorny issues for the two districts to sift through, including sharing student information, and managing crumbling facilities.

Last year, Shelby County Schools was more open to unified enrollment as part of a larger effort to educate parents on their choices, and even sent out a survey to charter operators to gauge interest.

“There is some interest,” said Natalia Powers, who oversees

Ultimately, she said the parent’s interest should be top of mind as leaders consider a unified enrollment system.

“It’s not about the school leader,” she said. “It’s about ease and accessibility to parents.”

The change could help school operators too, said Carpenter, the parent advocate. Schools could track parent preferences more easily and give operators a better idea of how many students they will enroll. But the real winners would be parents, she said.

“Access and choice are different,” she said. “We have choice but we don’t have access to choice.”

[Read more at Chalkbeat] Read More

Community colleges prepare for TN Reconnect influx

Money is often the top barrier standing between students wanting to further their education, but thanks to Tennessee Reconnect, adults who want to go to college don’t have to fit the bill. The program offers a full scholarship.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do,” Megan Roberts, a first semester Tennessee Reconnect student, said. “It was just so expensive to pay for classes.”

Roberts is a wife, mom of a special needs child and a first semester student at Volunteer State Community College in the Tennessee Reconnect program. She’s also pretty lucky. Only 1,500 Reconnect students got accepted at Vol State this fall before classes were full.

“In Reconnect, I don’t have to worry about a part time job on the side. I don’t have to worry about juggling a job and two kids and school,” said Roberts.

Vol State does have to worry about juggling the extra students this fall and the hundreds more coming in the spring.

“This office was really busy,” said Pam Carey, manager of the Vol State Adult Learning and Veterans Affairs Office.

Carey says advisers are working around the clock to gear up for the spring. She says the phone in the Reconnect office never stops ringing.

“There was a survey to ask do you want weekends, online, nights and the majority was online, so they did increase the online offerings,” added Carey.

Vol State also added extra night classes and faculty. The school will soon add an extra worker in the adult learning center to help new adult students with the transition.

And Vol State is not alone, Nashville State Community College recorded the highest Reconnect enrollment in the state with more than 3,500 students this fall. They added nearly 20 extra positions and expanded online classes. Even with all of the additions, not everyone will be accepted for the spring semester. Classes will fill quickly so a little advice from Roberts.

“I would say not to be completely discouraged or feel crushed that you didn’t get into Reconenct now, just keep fighting for it. Keep perusing your goals because at the end of the day it’ll be worth it,” said Roberts.

Spring registration begins Nov. 6 at Vol State.

[Read more at Fox 17] Read More

Report: Long-term coaching critical in retaining principals

Dive Brief:

• The NYC Leadership Academy announced the publication this week of new research on the impact of coaching principals in a report entitled “Still in the Game: How Coaching Keeps Leaders in Schools and Making Progress.”
• The research indicates that New York City principals who have worked with leadership coaches for at least five years remained at their schools twice as long as the national average, improved their ability to “supervise staff, distribute leadership, communicate, and lead with resilience,” avoided the complacency that sometimes comes with long-term leadership, and were able to develop beneficial and trusting relationships with their coaches.
• Nationwide, about half of principals participate in mentoring or coaching programs, though support is typically reserved for leaders requiring remediation or first-year principals.

Dive Insight:

This report, which can be obtained in full by filling out information on the organization’s website, makes a case for long-term support of principals through mentoring by non-evaluative coaches. The purpose of such mentoring is to help these school leaders deal with challenges they face, help them become more effective at improving school culture and performance, and retain them at their school. Principal turnover can be expensive, costing an average of $75,000, according to a 2014 report. Excessive principal turnover can also delay school improvement while teachers and other staff members adjust to a new leadership dynamic.

In a policy brief, the New York Leadership Academy suggests eight policy changes that school district should make to better support principals. These suggestions, which are further explained in the brief, include the following:

• Make coaching a part of new principal induction
• Offer coaching beyond the first two years of the principalship
• Budget coaching into per-pupil expenditures
• Take advantage of the flexibility offered by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)
• Provide principals with an ongoing, non-evaluative thought partner
• Re-envision the principal supervisor role as supportive, not just evaluative
• Consider cost-effective ways to supplement and enhance one-on-one coaching
• Develop coach skills and monitor progress to ensure success

As the role of principals changes, principal supervisors‘ roles are changing as well. In the current educational climate, principals need more support than ever before. School districts also need to create principal pipelinesthat can help build leadership skills in potential principals. However, most school districts have tight budgetary frameworks, and providing long-term support for principals in the form of coaches may not be an option. In those cases, professional development programs or stronger collaboration between principals in support of one another may provide other forms of support and leadership development.

[Read more at EducationDive.com] Read More

Haslam wants Tennessee districts to be able to lease technology to improve TNReady test

Tennessee will make it easier for school districts to access and purchase the technology — such as laptops — necessary to take TNReady tests starting in the 2019-20 school year.

Gov. Bill Haslam announced the change on Wednesday after a statewide listening tour focused on improvements to TNReady, the state’s standardized test for public school students. The technology upgrades are among the items the state is targeting to fix a flawed test administration over the last several years.

Haslam said to reporters on Wednesday that during the listening tour he heard from teachers that they wanted the state to get TNReady testing right.

“My summary from being at all six of these (listening sessions) and from teachers is: ‘Fix this, don’t start over,'” Haslam said to reporters Wednesday morning. “We’ve been through a lot of change in the last 10 years … what I heard from folks is don’t reinvent the wheel. Make this work.”

Haslam also laid out plans that will guide how the state chooses its next testing vendor, with Questar Assessment’s contract extended only through spring 2019. The state’s search for a new testing company allows a “reset” moment on a test that has frustrated the governor.

Feedback from the listening tour will help improve the state’s overall testing experience and serve as a handoff for the next governor.

“By the end of the school year we will know who our testing vendor will be for the 2019-20 year,” he said.

Cheaper technology tools for districts

Haslam’s focus to make technology easier for districts to access follows complaints heard statewide about internet and computer resources available to teachers.

The state will use its Tennessee Student Technology Enrichment Program to identify companies that can provide “high-quality devices,” such as MacBooks or Chromebooks, at competitive rates, according to Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen.

“This is about equitable access during the year just to have keyboarding skills,” McQueen said. “More equitable access allows students to better prepare.”

Districts will be able to purchase, finance or lease the equipment, McQueen said.

And under the lease option, districts will be able to rent technology for a period of three years, and the state estimates that could reduce the total cost of ownership by as much as 40 percent.

The search for a new test company

Tennessee is in the process of finding a new vendor after repeated issues with its current test company Questar Assessment.

The state needed to stick with Questar for one more testing cycle due to how hard it would be to transition to a new vendor within several months time.

Haslam said requests for contract proposals will focus closely on the next company’s technology components.

The state will request its new test company partner with Tennessee businesses and universities to create test materials and score tests.

Haslam also wants the new vendor to be able to allow online access to test results as soon as they are available. And he wants to target a test company that can provide optional tests for districts that mirror what is required on TNReady.

Other changes in place

Although TNReady has been plagued with issues, McQueen has put into place fixes she hopes will improve the tests.

Changes this year include practice runs to ensure the test is working correctly, more overall support and resources for educators and improved training on the platform for teachers.

Districts have begun to get test documents back faster and there are fewer parts to the test overall. The state is using less paper on the paper version.

The state also has full-time staff to help districts with any issues that pop up.

And recent changes also include teachers from across Tennessee appointed to provide feedback to the state education department as it seeks to improve TNReady.

Superintendents sound off on Haslam’s plan

Mike Winstead, director of schools for Maryville City Schools and a facilitator for Haslam’s statewide tour, said he was largely encouraged by the changes.

Technology, he said, ranked as a key topic of discussion at all of the tour stops.

Winstead said that it is critical to start by making sure there are an adequate number of devices in each school.

“I think this announcement will certainly help in that regard,” said Winstead.

Knox County Schools Superintendent Bob Thomas, however, said the simple bottom line is that schools need a system “that works” to restore confidence in Tennessee standardized test.

“This needs to be the year where everything comes together and works successfully like it’s supposed to,” Thomas said.

Haslam takes matters into his own hands

Haslam announced his listening tour in late August to hear from teachers, parents and students on how to improve the test that is entering its fourth year.

So far, the Tennessee Department of Education and its vendors have been unable to administer TNReady without some sort of issue, which has eroded trust in the exam among teachers, parents and state lawmakers. TNReady has become a frequent theme among the Republican and Democratic nominees for governor.

With the impending gubernatorial election, Haslam has expressed fear that either candidate will halt progress made in the state. The TNReady issue has been one that has weighed on him, he said.

“It’s been one of my biggest frustrations,” Haslam said.

Both Haslam and McQueen have said they are committed to moving the state fully to online testing.

But getting there hasn’t been easy.

The first year of the state’s test in spring 2016, Measurement Inc., the state’s first vendor, failed to deliver online testing. The company then was only able to deliver paper tests to high school students during the state’s testing window.

In its second year, after the state switched to Questar, a small number of tests were graded incorrectly and test scores were returned to districts late.

And in the 2017-18 school year, widespread issues stemming from Questar making an unauthorized change caused a slowdown in online testing for high school students.The issue was first reported as a possible “deliberate attack” to Questar’s systems.

[Read more at The Tennessean] Read More