Education Needs Remodeling not “Fixing”

Fast Company magazine published online an article on education reform How to Spend $100 Million to Really Save Education. An article I appreciate because it challenges the popular narrative around public education now such as “charter schools and strong MBA style leaders” are THE answer.

That same week I spent two full days in Los Angeles with committed teams of District and school site leadership from nine of eleven California Districts in the middle of implementing major transformation of their high schools as part of the California Linked Learning District Initiative. This initiative supports districts a system of college and career pathways in their high schools and is supported by ConnectEd The California Center for College and Career, The School Redesign Network at Stanford and The James Irvine Foundation.

The Fast Company article led to a Twitter conversation tagged #fixedu that I think is misnamed given the spirit of the article. The popular narrative is all about “fixing” and it frustrates me, especially given my time with these nine California districts this week. Here’s why.

Learning from Hollywood: Or How Twitter Made Me a SuperMom for a Day and Why it Matters

Last week I spent two days at the Learning from Hollywood conference put on by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and held at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. The conference brought together approximately 200 experts from entertainment, academia, philanthropy, gaming, libraries, journalism and education to talk about how these sectors can collaborate to harness digital media in support of education. The eclectic mix of leaders in their fields made for a constant buzz – and my still-tired synapses. I attended representing ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career and with much thanks to their friends at the Pearson Foundation for securing a somewhat last minute invitation. Here are a few of my takeways grouped by theme rather than chronology, though please note this post expresses my own opinions and experience not ConnectEd’s.

My five themes are:

• Respect Your Audience
• It’s the Participation, Stupid
• Parent Attitudes Matter
• Digital Media to What End?
• Cool Stuff to Check Out

In order to respect my audience’s time, I’m going to cover the first two in this post and put the other three in this follow-up post. Here we go.

Respect Your Audience

“Respect your audience” became a conference mantra we all could have chanted in unison by the end of our time together. We heard it over again and again from the most expert storytellers. Producer Marcy Karsey of The Cosby Show and Roseanne fame said, “The very very basic thing is respect the audience. It’s the first and most important thing.” Producer Don Hahn of Lion King and Beauty and the Beast fame said, “Trust the sophistication of the audience.” Producer Peter Gruber of The Color Purple, Rain Man and Batman fame said, “When you try to move folks, are you audience centric? Otherwise you have no chance.”

Several speakers and participants quickly applied that mantra to students as the audience.

My Story Featured in Seth Godin’s ebook “Tales from the Revolution”

Download "Tales from the Revolution"

My friend Beverly Schoff Belling over at Creativity on the Loose submitted a story about me and the impact of my work with mothers and my book, This Is Not How I Thought It Would Be: Remodeling Motherhood to Get the Lives We Want Today, to Amazon’s The Domino Project.

Inspired by Seth Godin’s book Poke the Box, designed to be “a call to action about the initiative you’re taking – in your job or in your life,” The Domino Project encouraged submissions of “stories of passionate self-starters who regularly go above and beyond to make a difference by doing.”

People voted on the hundreds of submissions. (Thank you!) And the story about me that Bev submitted is one of the 100 stories collected in the free ebook Tales from the Revolution: True Stories of People Who Are Poking the Box and Making a Difference. (Free now, regular price 99 cents.)

Hope you’ll download it to your phone, Mac or Kindle. It’s a great collection of stories to inspire you to take action on whatever you care about!

My 6 Fave Discoveries from 2010

As a Happy New Year gift, I wanted to share 5 of my favorite things I discovered in 2010 – along with one RE-discovery. Hope you’ll share yours too!

1. CaringBridge

When a friend or family member has a serious medical crisis, CaringBridge makes it easy to keep everyone updated on the situation without having to field a bunch of separate calls and emails from caring people – for free. I put a site up when my father-in-law was in the hospital this spring. Recently, he asked to understand more about what happened, and I was able to go to CaringBridge and print a slick book that included all of our updates and all our friends messages of hope for him. www.caringbridge.org

2. Insurance for iPhones

When my iPhone was stolen out of my car this past spring, I did some digging and discovered State Farm will insure iPhones! Now both our iPhones are ensured for loss or theft.

Creating a Family Vision

Our family makes its way through an annual New Year’s resolution process that serves us pretty well.

This year was different.

Our family is dealing with a lot of transition: our daughter transitioning to middle school; both my husband and I changing our employment – in ways that drastically change family time and the way we share family work; and the transition for our extended family that came along with my father-in-law’s brain bleed and ongoing recovery. Frankly, this year knocked us on our butts.

I thought our family needed to shake things up a little this New Year’s.

We did our standard steps. We reflected on 2010 together over Christmas Day dinner. My husband and I went out on our annual date night (this year at the Dal Rae) during which we usually can manage to reflect on the past year and set intentions for the next one by the time dessert is served. This year, we weren’t even done processing 2010 by the time we paid the check.

So I proposed  to my husband and daughter that it was a good time to create a family vision. (well, that implies they had an option, and they knew they didn’t)