UIC World Class Education Colloquium

1. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Summarizing Our Path – Reviewing the December 5, 2011 Session Launching Today’s Session Concluding the Colloquium Series Moving Forward

2. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Why this colloquium series? Why now?

3. UIC World Class Education Colloquium • Potential Colloquium Outcomes – Most to Least Ambitious • Gathered key presenters at local, national, and international levels to address • what world class education means in Illinois • 2. Demonstrated impact on state & local educational policy, practice, and goals • 3. Clear recommendations for policy change • 4.  Documented consensus commitment: of significant number of participants to action on one or more specific educational initiatives • 5.  Support of selected participant organizations’ efforts to create strategic plans aligned with colloquium proceedings • 6.  Inventory of illustrative priority actions • 7. Consensus inventory of current policies and practices in Illinois that warrant deeper examination • 8.  Dedicatedwebsite to support awareness and planning post colloquium • 9. Evidence of awareness among Colloquium participants about the distinctions between the U.S. and higher-performing nations

4. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Birth to 20: What will it take in Illinois and Chicago? September 26, 2011Theme December 5, 2011Theme April 2, 2012Theme Exemplars Equity Action Who is “doing it right” and how are they doing it? How do we ensure ALL Illinois children get the best? What must WE do now to leverage the changes we envision ?

5. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Session I – September 26, 2011 Speakers and Panelists Christopher Koch, Illinois State Superintendent of Schools Jean-Claude Brizard, Chief Executive Officer, CPS Lon S. Kaufman, Provost and Vice Chancellor, UIC Marc S. Tucker, President, National Center on Education & the Economy Charles E. Pascal, Professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Ed (OISE) Noemi Donoso, Chief Education Officer, CPS Diana Mendley Rauner, President, Ounce of Prevention Fund José Torres, Superintendent, Elgin School District U-46 All of their presentations and remarks may be found on our website, worldclasseducationillinois.org.

6. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Session II – December 5, 2011 Speakers and Panelists Paula Allen-Meares, Chancellor, UIC, Vice-President, University of Illinois Steven E. Tozer, Professor, Educational Policy Studies, UIC, Director, Ed.D. Pasi Sahlberg, Director General, Finland Ministry of Education Charles M. Payne, Jr., Professor, University of Chicago, Social Service Admin. Christopher Koch, Superintendent, Illinois State Board of Education Carol D. Lee, Professor, Northwestern University, Education & Social Policy Karen V. Saffold , Chief of Elementary Schools, Rock Island Network, CPS All of their presentations and remarks may be found on our website, worldclasseducationillinois.org.

7. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Session III – April 2, 2012: Speakers and Panelists Yong Zhao, Professor, University of Oregon Jean-Claude Brizard, Chief Executive Officer, CPS Miguel del Valle, Chair, Illinois P20 Council Jennifer Gill, Principal, McClernand School, Springfield IL Beverly Gulley, Co-Chair, Council of Chicago Area of Deans Linda Lenz, Publisher, Catalyst Chicago Gillian McNamee, Director of Teacher Education, Erikson Institute Sharon Thomas Parrot, Senior Vice-President, DeVry, Inc. Sylvia Puente, Director, Latino Policy Forum Kojo Quartey, Provost, Chicago City Colleges Darren Reisberg, Deputy Superintendent and General Counsel, ISBE

8. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Major Take Aways from December 5:

9. UIC World Class Education Colloquium What We Learned in Session #1: • The U.S. has slipped well behind other nations in literacy, math, and science. • The reform strategies in successful countries are significantly different from the reform strategies used in the United States. • U.S. initiatives are neither systemic nor cost effective.

10. UIC World Class Education Colloquium 7 Strategies for Success From Marc. S. Tucker’s Standing on the Shoulders of Giants • Aggressive international benchmarking • Powerful, coherent, aligned instructional systems • Systems designed to get all students to high standards • Funding systems that put more money behind students who are harder to educate • High quality teaching force • Workplace organized and managed along professional lines, not industrial lines • Coherent education systems

11. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Looking ahead to April 2: Keynoter Yong Zhao, Author of “Catching Up or Leading the Way” • Major points: • U.S. should try to learn from other countries’ educational reform processes and results • U.S. should view other countries’ successes in cultural contexts – ours and theirs • “Fixing” schooling will require commitment beyond the education arena. • Public and private sectors should collaborate with education agencies on a few priorities that have the greatest promise of genuine impact

12. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Achieving Whole System Reform: The Right Drivers(Fullan) “Drivers are those policy and strategy levers that have the least and best chance of driving successful reform.” Criteria for successful drivers: • Foster intrinsic motivation of teachers and students • Engage educators and students in continuous improvement of instruction and learning • Inspire collective or team work • Affect all teachers and students – 100%

13. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Today’s theme: Action What must WE do now to leverage the changes we envision ? One of the many definitions of “action” in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary is, “the accomplishment of a thing, usually over a period of time, in stages….” This is the type of action we envision as we aim to improve education for all Illinois children.

14. UIC World Class Education Colloquium What does it mean to be educated? What do we want for our children? How are these two questions related? • For our children, we want fulfillment as: • Workers • Citizens • Persons What can we expect education to contribute to this fulfillment?

15. UIC World Class Education Colloquium What “Actions” has the Colloquium generated? Some envisioned colloquium goals were witnessed; Some are yet to be realized. Among colloquium outcomes were: • Gathered key presenters at local, national, and international levels to address • what world class education means in Illinois • Supported selected participant organizations’ efforts to create strategic plans aligned with colloquium proceedings • Created a dedicatedwebsite to support awareness and planning post colloquium • Evidenced awareness among Colloquium participants about the distinctions between the U.S. and higher-performing nations • Motivated dialogue about the current state of education in Illinois and how effective change may occur

16. UIC World Class Education Colloquium • What are the most important issues we should now address? • What should we start doing? • What should we stop doing? • What should we do differently?

17. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Enlarging the Education Picture • We know what a classroom should look like • We know what a school should look like • Do we know what a system should look like?

18. UIC World Class Education Colloquium What is Systems Thinking? Systems thinking is the process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole….In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization healthy or unhealthy. Systems thinking offers a powerful perspective and a set of tools that can be used to address the most stubborn problems. Adapted from Systems Thinking, Wikipedia, 2012

19. UIC World Class Education Colloquium • A Fantasy System • Ideally, a healthy system would operate like a “well-oiled machine.” • Each person would know and understand their roles and how their work contributes to the system’s successful conduct. • The connections among parts in the system would be clear and needed adjustments, therefore, more easily achieved. • Outcomes would be more predictable because it would be easy to see what was “fed” into the system. • This is a greatly oversimplified scenario but the graphic does demonstrate that the actions/ movement of any one component continues to have an impact on every other part to a greater or lesser degree across time.

20. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Education Systems – A “Loose Coupling” at Best Richard Elmore cites the term “loose coupling” as frequently used to describe the manner in which education and our schools are organized. In short, it means there is a serious disconnect between components and that many people/parts are not exercising their assigned functions in ways that would make the system work optimally. There is a great deal of “silo-ing” and deliberate buffering – none of which leads to either long-term or whole system improvement. Elmore states, “Schools are almost always “aboil” with ‘change,’ but they are rarely involved in any deliberate process of improvement.”

21. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Educational Systems – An Alternate View Not so Simple – In Fact, Highly Complex Per Michael Fullan, education systems are dynamic and complex. Educational change will continue to be non-linear – unfolding in a broken back-and-forth fragmented manner. Further challenging change endeavors is that education institutions are nested in the broader context of community and politics. Fullan advocates “turning systemic thinking on its Head.” Ask, “How can we focus our efforts at the bottom so that there is some chance to achieve widespread improvement under the conditions of nonlinearity in the ‘big’ system?” Fullan, Michael. Turning Systemic Thinking on its Head

22. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Where WE Might Begin • Broadly, Fullan’s suggested strategies are: • Networking – action-oriented and purposeful; can lead to “coherence-making” if there are the right mechanisms, skills, and supports to build capacity. Reculturing and restructuring are needed so that networking does not become another fragmentation. • Reculturing and Restructuring – Reculturing is the process of developing new values, beliefs, and norms; building new conceptions about instruction and new forms of professionalism for teachers. Restructuring concerns changes in roles, structures, and other mechanisms that enable new cultures to thrive. Fullan further cautions that neither top-down nor bottom-up strategies will work by themselves. The bottom and the top must work in combination to maximize impact on learning outcomes on a large scale. Fullan, Michael. Turning Systemic Thinking on its Head

23. UIC World Class Education Colloquium • Some of the many components to be considered “systemically”! • Selected system components below are in random order. • How will the change you advocate interact productively with these elements? Teacher Preparation EducationPolicy Higher Education Content Curriculum School Leader Preparation Career Education Funding Instructional Practice Data/Evidence Secondary Education The Whole Child Diverse Populations Research Elementary Education Birth to 20 Continuum Special Needs Standards Family & Community Equity Social & Emotional Supports Early Childhood Education Professional Development Assessment

24. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Keeping our Eye on the Prize… Improving Instruction and Learning “If you push an organization and you don’t have a theory about how it shows up in teaching and learning, you’re basically causing people to do rain dances.” Richard Elmore Per Richard Elmore, “You don’t change performance without changing the instructional core….The relationship of the teacher and the student in the presence of content must be at the center of efforts to improve performance.” • Elmore’s strategies for increasing learning and performance are: • Increase the knowledge and skills of teachers • Change the content • Alter the relationship of the student to the teacher and the content Elmore, Richard. Usable Knowledge

25. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Sample Resources on the Current Status of Educational Policy and Practice to Prompt Reflection on Your Vision of Change • National: • ESEA Reathorization http://www.ed.gov/blog/topic/esea-reauthorization/ • Regional Educational Policy: • CMAP Go to 2040 http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/2040/main • State Educational Policy: • Common Core Standards http://www.isbe.net/common_core/default.htm • Illinois P 20 Council http://www2.illinois.gov/gov/P20/Pages/default.aspx • Illinois Educational Research Council http://ierc.siue.edu/ • Advance Illinois http://www.advanceillinois.org/ • Illinois Race-to-the-Top http://www.isbe.state.il.us/racetothetop/default.htm

26. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Our Challenge: Rethinking the path from - Policy Practice Outcomes • and acting on what we now know and believe.

27. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Mini Grant Awardees • Associated Colleges of Illinois (ACI) • Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) • School District U-46 • Fox Valley Montessori School • Illinois P-20 Council

28. UIC World Class Education Colloquium Acknowledgments • We wish to acknowledge the following for their immeasurable contributions, leadership, partnership, and support of the UIC World Class Education Colloquium series: • Victoria Chou, Dean, UIC College of Education • Terry Mazany, President & CEO, The Chicago Community Trust • David Hiller, President & CEO, McCormick Foundation • Christopher Koch, Superintendent, ISBE • Jean-Claude Brizard, CEO, Chicago Public Schools