Laurie O’Donnell

One of the objectives of the visit was to build on our existing relationship with The George Lucas Educational Foundation, and find out more about their flagship publication Edutopia. We had the opportunity to spent some time with Milton Chen, Executive Director and Steve Arnold, Vice Chair/CFO.  We were also able to brief GLEF staff on LTS, Curriculum for Excellence and Glow and get some insights into the latest educational developments in the US.

I picked this text up from the Edutopia website and really like it:

‘Kids today. No previous generation has experienced anything like the current pace of transformational societal change. Yet, in light of extraordinary advancements in how we interact with each other and the world, our system of education has been frustratingly slow to adapt.

The George Lucas Educational Foundation was created to address this issue. Our vision is of a new world of learning. A place where kids and parents, teachers and administrators, policy makers and the people they serve, all are empowered to change education for the better. A place where schools have access to the same invaluable technology as businesses and universities — where innovation is the rule, not the exception. A place where children become lifelong learners and develop the technical, cultural, and interpersonal skills to succeed in the twenty-first century. A place of inspiration, aspiration, and an urgent belief that improving education improves the world we live in.

We call this place Edutopia. And we provide not just the vision for this new world of learning but also the leading-edge interactive tools and resources to help make it a reality.‘

This is a vision of the educational future that I am happy to be associated with. Does that make me an edutopian?

One of the many highlights of our visit to the US was the opportunity to spend some time with Gary Plano Superintendent of Mercer Island School District and elected School Board member Lisa Strauch Eggers.

Mercer Island sits in the middle of Lake Washington – a 6 square mile suburban community 10 minutes drive from downtown Seattle. According to Gary, Mercer Island is the home of ‘the most expensive dirt in Washington State’. It would therefore not surprise you to find that  in terms of attainment it is the top performing school district in the State. However, what might surprise you about MISD is that rather than being complacent and playing safe it has embraced radical change as the only way to stay at the top.

MISD is in the process of creating a shared vision for 2020 that it hopes will lead to the successful preparation of all students for the cognitive, global and digital world. The current form of words for a ‘possible new mission statement’ is:
‘Mercer Island School District, in partnership with the community, commits to creating a personalised learning environment with a flexible, dynamic curriculum that inspires students to achieve ambitious, individual academic and personal development goals in order to prepare them to thrive and lead in the new, highly interconnected cognitive, global and digital world.’

This is really great to see in a country where the high stakes testing and accountability agenda embedded in the  No Child Left Behind Act has had a narrowing effect on the curriculum and acts as a disincentive to teacher creativity and professionalism.

The only other place have seen this approach in the US was in a couple of private schools I visited last year.  It would seem that those who come to school already with the greatest advantage get the opportunity to have the best preparation for life in the 21st Century. While those who arrive at school already disadvantaged get an education that was barely adequate for the last 30 years of the 20th Century. The No Child Left Behind Act does not apply to the private sector in the US (just like the National Curriculum is not compulsory for independent schools in England). This means that MISD will have to introduce a 21st Century curriculum and continue to do well in the traditional attainment tests. I think this is perfectly possible. To my mind the converse cannot be true, i.e. to have a curriculum that is driven by the need to pass tests whilst at the same time to preparing our young people  life, work and citizenship in the 21st Century.