7 Days of Genius – ��Ӱ��

The Maker Movement Is About More Than Science and Math — But Is All This Tinkering Really Effective?

Mark Keierleber — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

This is one article in a series that examines gifted education, classroom creativity and geniuses in society. (See our full genius archive) ��Ӱ�� is a proud media partner of the 92nd Street Y's "7 Days of Genius," a global series of events orchestrated to explore "the power of genius to make a positive impact on the world" running March 5-12. See events: .

In the last few years, the “maker movement” has become a marvel in American schools through Maker Faires featuring homemade robots to after-school programs that teach kids to code — to entire schools geared around the art of tinkering.

Maker-centered education, so the narrative often goes, could have profound benefits for students hoping to find work in a STEM-related job. Even President Obama has touted the economic benefits the maker movement could have on efforts to reinvigorate American manufacturing.

But for teachers who use making in their classrooms, the movement is about something much bigger — something that enhances educational experiences for all kids. They argue this learning-by-doing approach is an effective way to teach students how to develop character and purpose.

“That is one of the most important outcomes a maker educator sees,” said Shari Tishman, the lead investigator at Agency by Design, a research initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero to explore the maker movement in schools. “Learning how to make things, being involved in maker-centered education, helps young people develop a sense of agency in the world, a sense that they can change the world.”

But in education, trends often come and go. So how do teachers prove all these hands-on activities have a profound effect on student learning, to keep the maker movement from becoming another education fad left at the chopping block? (��Ӱ��: A Maker’s (School) Dozen: 13 Must-See Sessions at South By Southwest Education)

An emerging movement around making

Inside the innovation classroom at Bricolage Academy New Orleans, something is missing: chairs. Instead of sitting with paper and pencils at desks, students stand at worktables and tinker with LEGOs, robots, wooden blocks, and circuit boards.

This focus on making sets Bricolage apart from most other schools in New Orleans. Making is an integral part of the school’s purpose.

When Josh Densen decided to open a new charter school in New Orleans, he wanted his classrooms to be workshops. No more of the “same old, same old.” With a commitment to educational equity and a desire to produce student innovators, Bricolage accepted its first kindergarten class in 2013. Densen said he plans to expand the school each year until it serves students from kindergarten to eighth grade, with the tools and innovation classroom projects growing more complex as students get older.

“It’s unusual when we don’t have 100 percent engagement in that classroom,” Densen said. “They have to continue to operate with a lot of self control and focus because there isn’t an adult standing over them throughout the entire process. They are given a lot of autonomy and are expected to rise to that level of independence.”

At Bricolage, making isn’t just reserved for the innovation class, which is a co-curricular course like music, art, or physical education. A focus on innovation is incorporated into the school’s entire educational approach.

Across the country in Oakland, California, Park Day School offers a similar dedication to maker-centered learning — but with an emphasis placed on social justice. At the private school, Ilya Pratt, director of Design+Make+Engage, partners with teachers to incorporate making into their curriculum. Not all of these projects have a direct tie to STEM education.

For example, a few years back, Alex Kane used maker-centered learning to teach his fifth-grade students about the American civil rights movement. Using electrical wire and photos of key people and moments, his students built a three-dimensional map exploring how pivotal moments in that struggle were connected.

Last year, his students created a timeline exploring immigration to California. Both projects hung on his classroom’s ceiling for several months.

“For some kids, it really helped them be able to see the system,” said Kane, who now teaches fourth grade at a school in Davis, California. “Having it be a physical thing that was always hanging over our head, it was just much more in our face all the time.”

Mapping progress

Despite all the enthusiasm around tinkering, limited research explores the cognitive benefits of maker-centered education, according to an Agency by Design .

“In order to ask the question ‘Are these effective?’ you have to have an idea of what effective means,” Tishman said. “What does it mean for them to be effective? Does it mean that they’re going to do better on their STEM tests? Does it mean that they’re going to go on to live the life of an inventor? Or does it mean that they’re going to develop a sense of agency?”

Agency by Design is currently working to develop tools so educators can determine whether their maker-centered learning programs are working. If educators are unable to document how well their approaches work in the classroom, “then often any initiatives wither.”

“We believe that one important step in developing a sense of agency is learning to see that the things in our world are designs,” she said. “The assessment tools we will develop will focus on that slice of maker-centered learning, on developing a sensitivity to design.”

At Bricolage, Densen said they’re also grappling with ways to assess program success. And at Park Day School, Pratt said a system for assessment is necessary because educators generally don’t generally have experience measuring learning through subjective assessment. “All they’re familiar with is test, test, test.”

Genius Hour: A New Campaign to Bake Creativity Into the School Week

Heather Martino — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

An open canvas plastered with bright blue poster paper lined the back door of Mr. Mark Maglione’s classroom at Lillian Drive Elementary School in Hazlet, New Jersey, as the multigrade teacher began the school’s first-ever “Genius Hour” last September. “In a perfect world, if you could study anything you wanted in school, what would it be?” he asked the gathered anxious third- and fourth-graders on that Friday afternoon.

Maglione recalls that the small hands started raising slowly, and then all at once, as the kids erupted with a diverse mix of responses, his students’ enthusiasm growing louder and more specific. Like all great geniuses, their ideas knew no bounds, ranging from how to build a model World War II fighter plane to using a swivel camera to record a presentation on their Chromebooks.

Maglione marked down the ideas on the bright blue canvas.

That poster became known around school as the “Genius Hour Door,” a free space where ideas both big and small – some that only an unclouded 9-year-old mind could conjure, like “what was the first word ever spoken by man” and “how cold is Pluto?” — were not just welcome but encouraged. And Maglione says it did more than just facilitate a brainstorm; it helped him connect with, engage, and activate his students.

In an interview with ��Ӱ��, Maglione explained that Genius Hour became a new conduit through which he could get to know his students and discover their interests without doing a formal assessment. Later, after students had had time to work on their passion projects independently or as part of a group, they presented those ideas to the class. “It’s sort of like show and tell on steroids,” he recalls.

#KomenskyLions #GeniusHour 5th graders wondering how dogs are trainer.

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Lillian Drive Elementary is just the tip of the iceberg. Genius Hour can now be found in classrooms across the country — as an initiative that encourages students to spend one hour per week exploring their passions and creativity. The name, by most accounts, derives from Google’s “20 percent rule,” a company initiative that guides employees to spend 20% of their time working on something other than what’s in their official job description.

At Google, the 20 Percent Rule has two of the company’s most popular products — Gmail and Google News — and in a 2004 to investors, Larry Page and Sergey Brin credited the 20 Percent Rule with baking creativity into the very DNA of the company: “Google employees have ‘20 percent time’ — effectively one day per week — in which they are free to pursue projects they are passionate about and think will benefit Google. The results of this creative effort include products…which might otherwise have taken an entire start-up company to create and launch.”

Although there’s no exact way to know how many classrooms have embraced Genius Hour, it’s clear that it’s happening everywhere from rural Texas to larger cities in Illinois and New Jersey. ��Ӱ�� spoke with educators in each of those states, and they all started down the path much like Mr. Maglione did — with an art project aimed at bringing their students passions, curiosity and multiple intelligences to the surface.

#GeniusHour in #Kindergarten works! #KomenskyLions

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Allison LaFalce, a fourth-grade teacher at Komensky Elementary School in Berwyn, Illinois, asked her students to write down all the things that make them “wonder,” or the things that they were concerned about, and then used those ideas as a catalyst to contribute to a . “I want my kids to think ‘How can I share this with the world, would it make a difference, and would it help other people?’,” she told ��Ӱ��.

Students expressed interest in learning how candy was made during one such Genius Hour, and decided to conduct a pseudo-science experiment, and then sell homemade candy at the school’s first ever Genius Hour Showcase a week ago. All proceeds from that sale are now going towards the playground for students with special needs.

Packed house at #KomenskyLions Learning Showcase #GeniusHour

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Genius Hour looks different from classroom to classroom — and perhaps that’s the point. LaFalce says the main motivation for starting this program at her school was to unlock the unique inner genius in each of her students: “Our belief is that everyone has some type of genius, whether it’s academic, fine arts, public speaking or athletics, and something to offer the world.” An added bonus: LaFalce says that her school’s Genius Hour events have sparked new involvement from her community’s parents.

1,000 miles southwest in Waco, Texas, instructional coach Jessica Torres of Lake Air Montessori Magnet School explains that Genius Hour has helped her identify gifted students who perhaps did not test well, but who have inner talents that only became evident during that one hour a week. “Originally we were struggling to service gifted and talented students, but Genius Hour allows us to help bring up students that have the possibility of being gifted and talented,” she says, “but you never realized it because they weren’t being given the opportunity to showcase their true talents.”

While there isn’t currently any quantitative data that links Genius Hour to higher overall test scores, Torres is adamant that she’s watched her Genius Hour participants become better problem solvers, learning week to week how to ask the right questions, increasingly taking more initiative and exhibiting greater independence.

Due to the success of her Genius Hour pilot, Torres is now creating a professional development model that will allow teachers at her school to have similar breaks for creative thinking. “If teachers are given more time for their own creativity to come out,” she explains, then “we would see better things happening in the classroom.”

While the term “Genius Hour” evokes images of free-wheeling independent study, many teachers involved in these kinds of programs insist that it works best if there’s some degree of structure and accountability — as well as a clear end goal to work towards.

Maglione, the teacher from New Jersey, said that in order for Genius Hour to be successful, he felt that teachers needed to keep an open mind, allowing for flexibility and students’ self direction. He also said that his students’ overall enthusiasm had noticeably increased, and that they were learning many research and presentation skills during their Genius Hour sessions that had not previously been taught at their grade levels.

“In college, people start to ask you that question: ‘What do you want to do with your life, what are you interested in?,’” Mr. Maglione says, “but often times we fail to ask students that at a younger age.”

Other teachers agree that Genius Hour has fostered an entrepreneurial spirit among their students, and many have said that it’s now their favorite part of the week. Parents, likewise, have also expressed approval, saying that their kids come home energized and excited, eager to take ownership over their own education.

“We love growing our students, so by the time they reach 8th grade, they are their own advocates,” Torres explained. “They are confident about who they are and what they can do.”

Overhauling Gifted Ed: Schools, Feds, Researchers Race to Better Identify Top Students of Color

Carolyn Phenicie — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Updated March 3: This is one article in a series that examines gifted education, classroom creativity and geniuses in society. (See our full genius archive) ��Ӱ�� is a proud media partner of the 92nd Street Y's "7 Days of Genius," a global series of events orchestrated to explore "the power of genius to make a positive impact on the world" running March 5-12. See events: .

The face of the American student is changing, and schools across the country are scrambling to keep up, providing additional services for the growing number of students in poverty and offering English language instruction to children who start school speaking dozens of languages.

After decades of working under the mandates of No Child Left Behind to raise all students’ achievement to a minimum level, schools and education leaders are increasingly turning their attention to the brightest children among the ever-diversifying student body.

It’s work that’s clearly needed: Black and Hispanic children represent 40 percent of students, but 26 percent of those enrolled in gifted and talented programs at schools that offer them, according to federal statistics from the 2011-12 school year.

Donna Ford, a professor at Vanderbilt University who has studied the underrepresentation of children of color in gifted education programs, calls the issue a national crisis.

“I don’t want to see any child who has an opportunity to excel be denied that opportunity because they’re black or because they’re low-income, and that is what’s happening in too many situations,” she said.

The fight is personal. As a gifted student in a 99 percent black neighborhood in East Cleveland in the 1970s, there were few opportunities for Ford at her neighborhood school. She got a “better chance scholarship” and joined four or five other black girls at the prestigious Hathaway Brown School an hour away in affluent Shaker Heights.

Ford didn’t fit in at Hathaway Brown, which bills itself as Ohio’s oldest continually operating girls’ college preparatory school. Her old friends drifted away too, as peers from her Cleveland neighborhood didn’t understand why she’d left their school.

“I didn’t feel welcome in my community, I didn’t feel welcome at that school, and I basically became a loner,” she said. She left after a year and returned to the Cleveland schools, where she was still too advanced to fit in with her classmates.

It hasn’t gotten easier for Ford. In recent years, she’s had trouble getting appropriate identification and services for her gifted son.

The availability of gifted education for children of all races across the country is spotty. Once as a way to compete with the Soviet Union and sure up the national defense, gifted education has taken a back seat in recent years. Some cite that ever-present national educational boogeyman No Child Left Behind; others say it’s just a matter of funding priorities.

Unlike students with special needs, who have a strong federal law — and billions to back it — requiring schools to support their needs, there is no mandate from Washington to identify or serve the highest achievers.

State laws run the gamut: Each state sets its own standards for whether, and how, gifted students must be identified, and then the services schools must provide to those who meet that bar.

Four states — Iowa, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Georgia — require schools to offer gifted programming and — crucially — pay for it,, a nonprofit that focuses on profoundly gifted students.

Nine states – South Dakota, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Delaware and the District of Columbia – neither require schools to offer gifted programming, nor offer money if they did. The remainder of the states fall somewhere in between — either paying for programs if districts choose them or requiring programming but not funding it.

The Referral Problem

Not all schools offer gifted programs, but in those that do, what’s causing the yawning gap between the identification of white students and their peers of color?

It’s not, of course, that white and Asian students are any more naturally gifted than their black and Hispanic peers. It’s just that schools aren’t finding those extra-able students of color in the first place.

For many years, schools relied on parents and teachers to refer students who then took a standard IQ test. That system presents two problems.

First, teachers systematically under-refer English language learners and students of color; Ford calls it the number one reason for underrepresentation of minority, low-income and English language learner students.

“Teacher biases blind them to see gifts and talents in certain populations, so we need to be very cautious with our use of teacher referral,” she said.

Family referrals present their own host of challenges. Parents may not be aware of gifted programming options or have the language skills necessary to refer their children. And unlike the old adage that every parent is convinced their child is gifted, the parents of low-income or minority children, Ford said, tend to under-score their children’s gifts when they do refer them. That leaves those kids with more moderate points in measures of gifted behaviors, handicapping their chances for referral, testing, and placement in advanced or enriched programs.

Then comes the test. A standard verbal IQ test, experts say, was created to measure the intelligence of middle class white males, and “assumes a certain cultural capital for the student taking it,” said Jennifer Giancola, director of research at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, a Virginia-based foundation that supports research on and scholarships for gifted children from low-income families. The IQ test also limits children with weaker English language skills.

A better method, research and experts say, is to screen all children, and to do so with a test that doesn’t require strong English skills.

That’s been the focus of an effort in the schools in Seminole County Florida in suburban Orlando. It was one of 11 winners — a group that also included eight state education departments and the university systems in Wisconsin and Virginia — to split slightly more than $4 million in grants from the Jacob K. Javits program, the only federal spending earmarked for the country’s highest-achieving children.

All of the projects are focused on expanding the number of minority and other underrepresented groups in gifted programs.

Seminole’s stats are like many districts across the country: white and Asian students make up 60 percent of the student body but 80 percent of those participating in gifted programs. Black and Hispanic students combined, meanwhile, were 36 percent of students but less than 15 percent of those in gifted programs, according to federal data for the 2011-12 school year.

Jeannette Leukens, an educator in the district’s Exceptional Student Support office, is directing Project ELEVATE, which looks to create a better “matrix” of test scores and other measures used to identify gifted children who aren’t spotted using the usual intelligence tests.

“We want to make sure that we are utilizing best practices, research-based components in that matrix,” Leukens said.

The work will start at five elementary schools where a large number of students are low income. If Congress appropriates the total $2.4 million the feds would like to give Seminole schools, it would expand to another five elementary schools and two middle schools.

The district is also partnering with experts from the University of Central Florida to improve teacher and parent identification of giftedness in students from those populations. The grant also will help the district write an “internationally responsive” curriculum for gifted minority students and expand its talent development program, which supports students who show potential but haven’t been officially identified as gifted.

“The grant is all about scaling up a current project that’s showing progress,” Lukens said.

Research backs the efforts Seminole and the other Javits winners are undertaking.

A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research released in September examined an unnamed large urban school district before and after implementation of universal screening of second-graders using a non-verbal test.

After the universal screening, with no change to the minimum score requirements, the program “led to a 180 percent increase in the gifted rate among all disadvantaged students, with a 130 percent increase for Hispanic students and an 80 percent increase for black students,” the researchers wrote.

The district in the study, like many across the country, already had different threshold scores: To move to the next step in the screening process, non-disadvantaged students had to get 130 points, while those who are eligible for free and reduced-priced lunch, a common measure of poverty, had to get 115.

The logic for the lower cutoff, Giancola said, is that the tests are aiming to measure capacity, which is the “product of everything that’s been poured into you from the day you were born.”

Students in underrepresented groups likely had fewer resources — things like high-quality preschool, effective teachers, or extracurricular enrichment — “poured into them” in the years before they took the gifted test.

“You’re not going to do as well on that test, and it doesn’t mean you’re not smart, you just haven’t been given the same nurturing environment to allow you to perform well,” she said.

Fairfax, Virginia: A Gifted Child’s Utopia

Even as the Seminole schools, and many others across the country, work to make their programs more inclusive, one school is already taking a no-holds-barred approach to capturing all its gifted kids.

Schools in Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the country’s largest districts, educating more than 165,000 children in suburban Washington, D.C., started to revamp their process about 15 years ago.

Around 2000, district gifted education coordinators noticed that even though they used criteria beyond just an intelligence test to screen gifted students, “the gifted programs just weren’t very diverse,” said Carol Horn, gifted coordinator at Fairfax schools. She joined the district as a gifted teacher in 1989 and moved into the central office to work on gifted programming 10 years later.

“We knew there were students from all cultural groups, across all economic strata, in all areas of the population that were gifted, however, the current practices we used just weren’t identifying them,” Horn said.

One principal suggested they start the screening early — as soon as kindergarten. So they gathered 30 incoming first-, second-, and third-graders and got money from the district for a three-week summer school program. The students spent their time investigating wetlands, culminating in a field trip to nearby Huntley Meadows, a county park.

It was a huge success, with news of its results spreading by word-of-mouth among principals. By the next year, there were Young Scholars programs in 16 different schools. It’s now offered at 81 of the district’s 139 elementary schools and three of 26 middle schools.

Implementing the model, which now includes special programming during the academic year, requires collaboration among classroom teachers and gifted resources teachers and leadership from principals to make it a priority, Horn said.

“Curriculum becomes the identifier of talent. The students may not have the verbal and math skills to do well on traditional tests, however, when you start to listen to them talk and give them problems to solve, you start to see what amazing thinkers they are,” she said.

Although participation in the Young Scholars program isn’t equivalent to a gifted and talented designation, the program is helping find students who likely would’ve otherwise been left aside. Just over half — 53 percent — of those in the Young Scholars program are eligible for free and reduced-priced lunch, and many are English language learners, Horn said.

And of the roughly 5,000 Young Scholars now in junior and senior high, 95 percent are taking an honors, Advanced Placement, or International Baccalaureate course, or are getting full-time gifted instruction in designated Level 4 centers for the district’s most gifted children.

Of the younger students in the program, Horn estimated about half are eligible for Level 2 services. Those provide differentiated instruction by the classroom teacher to students in kindergarten through sixth grade in subjects where they excel.

The remaining half of elementary-level Young Scholars are split between the top-tier Level 4 centers, which run from third through eighth grade, and Level 3 programs, which offer part-time services by a gifted resource teacher from third through sixth grade.

Rose Masuku’s daughter Namambo, a fifth-grader in the Fairfax schools, participated in the Young Scholars program this summer, something Masuku says she looked forward to every morning. Namambo now receives Level 3 services in math and English, and loves her gifted instructor and the project-based learning she assigns. A friend who lives down the street is also in Namambo’s class, and the two often talk about what they did at school, Masuku said.

“She learns quickly and gets bored,” Masuku said, “so I’m really happy they could put her in something more challenging.”

For older students, there are also honors classes open to all seventh- and eighth-graders, and all high school students can take honors, Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes. They also can dual enroll in local colleges, or apply to attend the district’s prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which U.S. News ranked number 3 in the country this year.

Fairfax is, of course, an anomaly nationally. Although the schools are diverse (about 40 percent white, 25 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Asian, and 10 percent black), students tend to come from wealthy families. The average household income is well over $100,000, and more than two-thirds of households had incomes over $75,000 in 2013, according to the Census Bureau.

For all of its successes and national praise, though, the programs in Fairfax may be in danger: The district faces a budget shortfall somewhere between $50 and $75 million for next school year,.

“At times like this everything’s up for the chopping block, and it’s just hard to predict what will happen,” Horn said. The program has survived “quite a few” budget cuts, which Horn chalks up to the number of children served.

“Because so many students benefit from the services we provide,” she said. “I hope it continues.”

The Tiny School Project Is About to Get Even Smaller: 4.0 Schools’ New Plan to Reach Edu Entrepreneurs

Mark Keierleber — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

For Matt Candler, testing new school models should be like opening a food truck. Unlike a decked-out, sit-down restaurant, food trucks can serve customers from the street corner without massive investment or risk.

If the food truck is a hit, scale up.

With this in mind, Candler, the founder and CEO of New Orleans-based education incubator 4.0 Schools, is putting his money where his mouth is. In order to reinvigorate ingenuity in a big way, Candler is thinking small.

On Tuesday, he will announce a new initiative — the Tiny Fellowship — at the South By Southwest Education Conference in Austin, Texas. The new concept follows Candler’s , which gave education entrepreneurs funding and support to help guide innovative ideas to real-world schools that challenged the status quo — even within the education reform community. After some reflection, Candler realized he had been thinking small, but not small enough.

Unlike the previous project, participants won’t have to quit their day jobs to pursue their big ideas. The fellowship aims to spark greater ingenuity with smaller risk.

“We saw so many of those entrepreneurs diminish the boldness of their ideas and simplify it or dilute it and do something that could serve schools immediately, and serve the status quo,” Candler said. “We are going to make our launch program tinier, and the best way to do that is to design it for people to be able to go through it before taking this gigantic risk and quitting their job.”

In turn, Candler said he hopes the program will become more accessible to all kinds of different people at all different stages of life, not just the youngest and most flexible — the demographic that’s typically part of the startup world.

When Candler first launched the Tiny Schools Project, he saw a troubling trend: Even education reformers were focusing too much oxygen on school models that were already tested and proven — rather than following the true essence of innovation.

“Maybe one of the reasons that the charter movement has stalled out is that it actually wasn’t tiny enough, the schools we were starting weren’t small enough to allow the folks leading them to innovate and to create new models,” said Candler, who previously launched more than 30 KIPP charter schools and has held leadership roles at the Center for Charter School Excellence in New York City and New Schools for New Orleans. “Tiny is very much a part of trying to revive that and bring back the original spirit of the charter movement.”

Through the project, school startups will be given a platform to test their models in small environments before becoming full-fledged schools — with feedback from participating families and students along the way. Along with access to 4.0 Schools’ network of startup alumni, the fellowship will give participants $10,000 to test their ideas. These concepts can be new school models or learning spaces like Operation Spark — “the best coding lab in New Orleans.”

“We believe that kids learn best in a combination of more responsive, personalized schools, and learning spaces that are created by educators who are super passionate about a particular concept or idea or area of knowledge,” Candler said.

Even in its previous iteration, people have taken notice of Candler’s approach. In November, he the White House Summit on Next Generation High Schools, where he called on 1,000 communities from across the country to create their own small-scale school prototypes — and committed to providing startup capital and training to help those ideas come to life.

Flor Serna, left, launched Electric Girls, a program that teaches young girls fundamental skills in electronics, programming, engineering, and design, with help from 4.0 Schools. (Photo courtesy 4.0 Schools)

The idea behind the Tiny Schools Project was inspired by two of Candler’s peers: Brian Bordainick and Josh Densen.

One of 4.0 Schools’ first employees, Bordainick spent his spare time building Dinner Lab, which gives aspiring chefs a chance to showcase their work at pop-up locations. At around the same time, Densen, who was among 4.0 Schools’ first cohort of education entrepreneurs, decided to launch a pop-up version of his school — which combines a commitment to educational equity with the maker movement — at a local music festival. Laying toys out on a blanket, Densen let kids play as he explained to parents his vision for a new school.

That project became Bricolage Academy of New Orleans, which emphasizes educational equity and the school’s makerspace as defining characteristics. (Related: How Bricolage Academy and schools across the country are bringing the art of making to K-12 education)

“Josh really is, in many ways, the godfather of this Tiny Schools concept,” Candler said. “This pop-up idea is really the breakthrough idea. The food truck analogy represents a more mature, later stage version of the school where you’re doing repeated interactions with the same families.”

Kicking off the Tiny Schools Project, four education entrepreneurs first went through 4.0 Schools’ three-month launch program, creating pop-up schools to gauge feedback from participating families. These pop-ups then became “tiny school pilots,” which lasted between two and 12 months and served about a dozen students.

Those initial ideas have since become Rooted School, The Noble Minds Institute for Whole Child Learning, NOLA Micro Schools, and 1881 Institute.

“Their schools are evolving faster and staying more innovative because I’ve given them this year to try that out and not have to become experts in running a $1 million company,” Candler said.

Under the fellowship, 4.0 Schools will provide coaching to participating entrepreneurs until they’re able to secure 10 loyal customers. That could be 10 months or a year, depending on how long it takes to create a live prototype with revenue.

“This could be within the context of an existing public school system where those families are showing up and paying with their time or they’re using vouchers, or they’re working in a charter system, or a low-cost private school, or even a homeschool collective,” Candler said.

The first wave of the fellowship will include entrepreneurs 4.0 Schools has already worked with in the past, ones that have been through their three-day workshop and built a prototype for their business. The application process will open to the general public in August.

Through the project, Candler said he hopes to create an ecosystem of new schools that are smaller and more personalized for students’ needs. That’s already starting to happen.

At Noble Minds, which received approval to open as a New Orleans charter school in 2017, teachers and staff will emphasize social and emotional learning just as much as academic benchmarks.

“You can be just as focused on academic excellence and closing the achievement gap as any other school while also wanting to build skill sets in children that impact them personally, and not just academically,” Noble Minds Founder and CEO Vera Triplett said. “The more social and emotional learning skills the students have, the less punitive you need to be.”

Through the Tiny Schools Project, Noble Minds’ concept was tested through summer school and after-school programs at a local charter school. That opportunity had several payoffs. For one, it gave Triplett a chance to test-drive potential teachers, who will come to Noble

Minds with backgrounds in both education and child development. “We were able to identify folks who could do it,” she said, “and then we were also able to eliminate folks who couldn’t.”

Until the charter school opens its doors, Noble Minds will use a grant from NewSchools Venture Fund to continue their “food truck” version this fall at an existing charter school.

The Tiny Schools Project also allowed Triplett an opportunity to prove there was demand in the community. Moving forward, she plans to keep her charter school as tiny as possible so it can become “a fine-tuned engine.”

Opinion: 2 Geniuses, 2 Americas: Why I Want My Students to Read Ta-Nehisi Coates But Believe Lin-Manuel Miranda

Robert Pondiscio — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

I have no idea if Lin-Manuel Miranda has read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me”; nor am I aware if Coates has seen Miranda’s “Hamilton” on Broadway. But it would be fascinating to listen to the two of them discuss each other’s work and their views on what it means to be young, black or brown, and American today.

All of us who work in classrooms with children of color would be richer if we could eavesdrop on such an exchange.

The parallels are striking. Both are young men of color who have created two of the most praised and dissected cultural works of the moment. Both were recent and richly deserving Macarthur Foundation “genius grant” recipients. Each turns his creative lens on our nation. But their respective visions of America signaled through their work, could scarcely be more different.

We can be a bit promiscuous in our use of the word “genius” but if it applies to anyone it’s Lin-Manuel Miranda. Anyone who can read, as he did, Ron Chernow’s 700-page doorstop biography of Alexander Hamilton and think, “Hip hop musical!” has a mind like few others.

But where Miranda’s genius burns bright, Coates’ burns hot. He is, by a considerable margin, our most influential contemporary thinker on race. He has made that ongoing conversation both more potent and pointed, arguing, among other things, for reparations to compensate African Americans for the effects of slavery, Jim Crow, and to balance the nation’s moral debt. Miranda’s vision is capacious and generous; Coates’ is focused and prosecutorial.

It is not an overstatement to say that “Hamilton” is a watershed moment in America’s cultural evolution and in the first rank of plays produced in our history. In less expert hands, a hip hop musical with a rapping Hamilton, Jefferson, and Washington would be “Springtime for Hitler” wince-worthy. But Miranda connects dots that no one else saw, drawing a straight line from America’s revolutionary moment to the contemporary music and idioms of youthful rebellion. The effect is mesmerizing.

It is impossible to think of our founders merely as dead white males once you have seen them embodied by young black and brown ones. On stage nightly, “Hamilton” transfers ownership of America’s narrative and ideals to those whose grip on them has been fraught for more than 200 years. And Miranda’s genius runs in both directions. Your parents and grandparents don’t like rap? They haven’t seen “Hamilton.”

There’s likely not a history or civics teacher in America who wouldn’t pay dearly to have her students see “Hamilton”. It’s harder, however, to account for education’s romance with Coates, whose book “Between the World and Me” won the National Book Award and is already widely assigned in high school English classes and required reading on college campuses.

The book, an extended letter to his son, is a powerful jeremiad, however his message seems hopeless, even nihilistic. Coates’ America is structurally and irredeemably racist, and our schools offer no sanctuary. “I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast,” he writes. “One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both.”

It is undoubtedly possible to read that as a teacher and think your personal commitment to social justice exempts you from this withering indictment. Coates does not just reject this notion, he sneers at it.

“It does not matter that the ‘intentions’ of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, ‘intend’ for you is secondary. No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of ‘personal responsibility’ in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of ‘intention’ and ‘personal responsibility’ is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. ‘Good intention’ is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”

The Dream — the American Dream — is where Miranda and Coates part company. One says to young people of color it belongs to you; the other says it’s a lie. Perhaps Coates would tell Miranda that his view of “Hamilton” as immigrant American everyman (“Hey yo, I’m just like my country, I’m young, scrappy and hungry”) sheds no light on the black experience.

Perhaps, he might insist, immigrants are allowed to rise up in America because they don't carry the weight of history on their shoulders the way African Americans do. Would Miranda, the son of immigrants, agree? Coates might criticize “Hamilton” for a gauzy view of history, and soft-pedaling slavery; Miranda would likely point out the subject comes up in the third line of the show.

Near the end of “Hamilton”, Miranda, in the title role, sings,

“I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me.
America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me.
You let me make a difference.
A place where even orphan immigrants
Can leave their fingerprints and rise up.”

Hamilton’s unfinished symphony invokes the Constitutional call to build a more perfect union. This belief in this possibility and the effort to bring it about, is why many of us teach—particularly those of us who work exclusively with children of color. Thus it stings to read Coates saying, in effect, don’t waste your time.

Wittingly or not, his message to young people of color is you have had the great misfortune to be born in a country that is determined only to break your black body.

Coates’ America is “Egypt without the possibility of the Exodus,” in David Brooks’ memorable phrase, “African-American men are caught in a crushing logic, determined by the past, from which there is no escape.”

For teachers, to see America through the eyes of Ta-Nehisi Coates is to see ourselves as either oppressor or the oppressor’s tool. No other outcome is acknowledged or offered.

For the moment, Miranda seems to have the upper hand in this argument. “Hamilton” is the toast of Broadway; its soundtrack one of the most downloaded rap albums in history. Its praises sung by AP U.S. History teachers, its lyrics sung from the backseats of minivans. However, Coates may have the last word with our students.

Works of genius endure. Ten years hence, 50 years hence, Coates’s memoir will arrive in English class unchanged. By that time “Hamilton” will be among the most performed high school musicals in America. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s music and lyrics will remain, but performed by a white cast of teenagers in an American suburban high school, as it inevitably will be, “Hamilton” will sacrifice a bit of the moment and the cultural context that makes it great.

It will be a challenge for Miranda to ensure that the enduring message of “Hamilton” survives when most of our children’s exposure to his transcendent show will be not on Broadway or iTunes, but onstage in high schools, many of them far from diverse. Coates’ message will remain potent, persuasive, and uncut. Perhaps this makes him the greater genius. He works in a medium that only time can dilute. The best we can hope for is that he proves to be a poor prophet.

It is simply not my place to disagree with Coates. I have not lived a day outside of “The Dream” he derides. In the wake of Ferguson, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and too many others to catalogue, I have no choice but to accept that he has come honestly by his dim view of America.

However, as a teacher who works exclusively with students of color, I do not have the luxury — none of us do — not to offer some hope to our students on behalf of this country, whose optimistic citizens built our schools and pay our salaries, yet which still has much to answer for. For now, at least we can say this: A diverse nation that produces a Ta-Nehisi Coates and a Lin-Manuel Miranda is one in which something is going very right.

For all the differences between these two geniuses, both Coates and Miranda deserve to be heard, pondered and debated equally. I will hang my hope here: I want my students to read “Between the World and Me.” But I want them to believe “Hamilton.”

WATCH: A Chicago School Leader Now Officially a MacArthur ‘Genius’

WATCH: Meet the Visionary Chicago School Leader Who Just Won a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant

Heather Martino — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

(Chicago, Illinois) — It’s 5 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, and final preparations are underway for a mural unveiling at Chicago’s Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy. As the room quickly fills with students curious to see the final artwork, the charter high school’s CEO, Juan Salgado, makes his rounds, shaking hands and sparking small with talk with youngsters he deems “the people that matter the most.” He eyes a girl wearing a Cubs t-shirt in the front row: “Let’s hope for a win! I’m mostly a Sox fan…but I’m a Chicago fan.”

The sentiment is a familiar one on this mid-October afternoon, as the city braces for game three of the National League Championship Series: Cubs vs. Mets, hosted at Wrigley Field. The stadium’s just 10 miles away from Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy (IHSCA), but the revelry and euphoria of America’s pastime couldn’t be further from the fear and violence that Salgado’s students face every day — or his relentless quest to alter their daily reality.

Salgado has devoted his life’s work to brightening the present and future of Chicago’s Latino community. And as years of success stories have piled up — as word has spread across the city, and been passed down through families — he has become an admired fixture of his city. He’s a force for meaningful change in a city that’s struggled with more than its fair share of negative headlines.

Which is perhaps why no one but Salgado was surprised by the sudden, shocking news release that made national headlines in September: He had been singled out as one of 24 recipients of the elite and mysterious 2015 MacArthur Fellowship — more commonly known as the “Genius Grant.” Unbeknownst to Salgado, a committee working in secret had nominated and vetted Salgado’s work, and chosen him to be the recipient of the five-year, $625,000 fellowship. Salgado learned of his nomination, his victory and his prize when his phone rang. In an instant, a life-long cause became a focal point of national inspiration. Overnight, his name appeared in many of America’s top publications.

“I think the recognition of the work that we’re doing as a whole is in so many ways even more rewarding than the resources,” Salgado says, pointing to the honor over the money. “It’s the ecosystem screaming to us saying: ‘You’re on the right track!’”

Since 2001, Salgado has led Instituto Del Progreso Latino, the nonprofit organization that operates IHSCA. Instituto’s mission is to educate and empower Latino immigrants through adult programming that drives and facilitates upward mobility within the community. This includes pathways to citizenship, literacy classes, childcare and employment assistance.

“Instituto has always had a vision for ensuring that we work with the entire family,” says Salgado, now the president and CEO. In 2010, that vision inspired the organization to plan and launch IHSCA, the first of Instituto’s two charter high schools in Chicago.

IHSCA is unique in that students take twice as many math and science credits as required at traditional public schools, and commit to both an extended school day and summer classes which facilitate a 32-credit curriculum. Behind most of the structure here is a deliberate strategy: Keep the kids off the streets, while actively encouraging them to explore careers in healthcare, “a growing industry where there are a lot of job opportunities,” Salgado says, and “very few Latinos going into those occupations.”

Since opening its doors in August 2010, IHSCA has served 760 students, with 96.7 percent of them coming from low income families, . 95 percent of the student body identifies as Hispanic, and the inaugural Class of 2014 saw a 95 percent college acceptance rate, with 132 first-generation college students and $4.5 million awarded in scholarships.

By contrast, over 40 percent of residents in the Lower West Side neighborhood where IHSCA is situated reported having no high school diploma. That number is more than twice the Chicago average, .

Those grim statistics prompted Salgado to open a second charter high school with a separate mission: Re-engage students who previously dropped out of school.

“More children should be able to benefit from our approach,” he explains, an insight as to how he might spend the “Genius Grant” fellowship money.

“Imagine a world where just a few blocks away from us, Cook County jail is not necessary”

The Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy, or IJLA, is an alternative school for 16 to 21 year old youth. Many of its students no longer live with their parents, and over 50 percent of them are parents themselves. The school, which shares a space with IHSCA, also houses several students who are from rival gangs.

“When you come here it’s not just about getting the right academic preparedness,” Salgado says. “You also have to demonstrate social emotional skills that are critical to your functioning in society.” Those skills are something that Salgado embodies as he walks the halls throughout the day, stopping to shake hands and talk to every student and parent he passes.

“It’s not good enough just to run a school,” he says, “you have to be present.”

Which brings us back to the mural celebration, and Salgado’s persistent outreach, from shaking hands to answering questions and constantly tying school events to the unique challenges of his community. On this Tuesday evening, the mural is part of a broader commemoration of the “Year of Peace,” an initiative set in motion by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office as a response to the city’s overwhelming violence among youth. It’s an ideal that hits particularly close to home for students at Instituto’s two charter high schools on Chicago’s southwest side.

“We lost two youth in the last two years ourselves,” Salgado tells me later. He’s referring to Michael Orozco, 14, and Angel Cano, 16, both of whom were killed by gang violence, and whose stories reverberate off the brightly painted murals adorning the halls of Instituto.

Michael, a freshman at IHSCA, was a known member of the gang Satan’s Disciples. He was walking with friends to get ice cream when he was fatally wounded by a rival gang during a drive-by shooting. “He was a fearful young man,” Salgado tells me while recounting the story of how Michael became affiliated when he was only in the seventh grade.

“He just wasn’t given enough time to find the right escape route,” he says.

Angel, on the other hand, had been trying to cut ties with his former gang, and even dropped out of school in an apparent effort to go undetected. He worked construction with his father for two years before deciding to re-enroll at ILJA. Salgado tells me that Angel didn’t even make it past the first 35 days of school before he was identified and killed.

“You can almost say that he would have been better off had he stayed out of school,” Salgado says, but Angel “wanted schooling for himself, and it ended up costing his life.”

Both Michael and Angel fell fate to the same tragic deaths; their casualties a byproduct of Chicago’s rampant gang violence.

Sadly, they are not alone.

Over the last two years (2013-2015), there have been 1,378 homicides in Chicago, with 310 of those deaths among children and teens, . And 2015 proved to be the deadliest in recent years, with 497 confirmed murders, as compared to 445 and 436 in 2013 and 2014, respectively.

Moreover, 2015 saw 2,986 shooting victims in the city, .

That’s precisely why, Salgado tells me, the Year of Peace has such a deep and profound meaning for Instituto’s students. “They live the same situation on a day-to-day basis,” he says, “and so that’s why having a safe environment like ours is so critical.”

At the mural unveiling, the festivities begin with a performance by the school’s dance team. Their choreographed movements are accentuated by glittery skirts, as the all-girl team salsas their way through the song “Day 1” by singer Leslie Grace. The American-born vocalist with Dominican roots weaves together a melody of Spanish and English lyrics to describe love at first sight in this new genre of Spanglish Bachata Urbana.

Watching them perform is a reminder of the concentrated effort to not only incorporate, but also celebrate, the influences of Latino heritage and culture at Instituto. They are a community that learned Spanish before English, and part of Instituto’s mission speaks to that cultural dignity and identity.

At ISHCA, students are required to take four years of Spanish and English classes, and many participate in after school activities that celebrate indigenous rituals.

“You have to appreciate who you are,” Salgado tells me, “in order to really have a deep appreciation for other cultures and other beings.”

Like many of his students, Salgado is a first generation Mexican-American living in Chicago. He likes to tell the story of how his mother held Spanish classes at home, but registered him for kindergarten using the English version of his name – John – so that he’d have an easier time assimilating. It wasn’t until he was about to graduate from college at Illinois Wesleyan University that he decided it was time to start going by his real name – opting to have “Juan” put on his formal degree.

“It was kind of that point in life where I knew that I was going to be doing something in community,” he says.

Salgado recalls being truly alone for the first time in his life during his college years, and how that solitude enlightened his perspective of what his mother had gone through when she came to America. “Being an immigrant is incredibly hard – you’re leaving everything,” he tells me. “It’s a huge sacrifice and people do it because they want something better for their children.”

After earning a bachelor's degree in economics from Wesleyan, Salgado went on to obtain his Masters degree in Urban Planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He later received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Illinois Wesleyan University, and was recognized by the White House in 2011 as one of 13 people nationally serving as Champions of Change for social innovation in their communities.

Despite the many accolades and awards for his work, Salgado says the news of his MacArthur fellowship landed like a shock to the system. He says he received the phone call on September 8, 2015, shortly after he dropped his three children off at school. A representative from the MacArthur Foundation asked if he was alone, and if he could find his way to a quiet space.

“It was just a complete, complete shock,” Salgado recalls wide-eyed, “because this was happening without me knowing.” The MacArthur process is shrouded in secrecy, including the foundation’s backgrounding of Salgado’s work, as they interviewed people who had worked with him. “It’s the kind of thing that you don’t even dream of,” he says, “ because our dreams are even limited.”

When Salgado broke the news of the exclusive award to his wife, Leticia, she was happy — but also worried that this new role would make her already overworked husband even crazier. “Just don’t forget,” she told him, “that your family is what grounds you.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “I’ll never forget.”

Salgado tells me that his children are always around his work. His eldest son, Angel, does homework in Salgado’s office as the ceremony continues with student speakers and remarks from a representative of the Mayor’s office. The mural, a visual representation of the Year of Peace, was commissioned as part of the Mayor’s challenge to students to combat school violence.

Finally, it’s time to unveil the mural. The paper is unrolled, and the image of a Phoenix – the school’s mascot – emerges surrounded by colorful flames. As the Greek legend goes, the Phoenix obtains new life by arising from the ashes of its predecessor.

“This is just a painting for some of you guys, but it’s supposed to transcend the subconscious,” explains the artist, Miguel Del Real.

“We all have our inner struggles, our inner challenges,” he says, but “it’s finding that place to grow or prevail.”

Salgado studies the mural, preparing to say a few words next. The teacher introducing him mentions the news of the MacArthur Genius Grant, and the audience erupts in applause.

As Salgado takes the microphone, he asks them to close their eyes and imagine a world where no child is lost to gun violence. “Imagine a world where just a few blocks away from us, Cook County jail is not necessary,” he says.

He goes on to ask young people what they can do to solve the problem of violence and take leadership roles in their community. He challenges them to be like the Phoenix, and “rise from the ashes no matter what their circumstances, no matter what their past, no matter what their crimes on society might be.”

Finally, he asks them to imagine a world where “we let the voices of young people drive the solutions that are necessary to save their own lives in our city.”

“Imagine that world, because it’s not a dream,” he tells them. “It can be a reality.”