Monday, November 22, 2010
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Waiting for Superman (Education and Movies)
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Movies and Education (RGB STUDIOS)
State’s film tax credit lifts small businesses, excites imaginations
When he sponsored the bill that would, when adopt ed in April 2008, make Michi gan the most generous state in the nation for movie pro ducers, Andy Meisner had three objectives: creating jobs as quickly as possible in the depths of our economic melt down; growing longer-term a new industry that could some day account for perhaps 5% of the state economy, and re taining creative, educated young people who were looking to pursue their fu tures outside Michigan.
And by those objectives, Meisner said, the movie tax credit is not only a success but a bigger one than most of the much less visible tax breaks and incentives the state provides for other busi nesses — about $36 billion worth last year, including the $37.5 million for the movie, TV and video industry.
A bipartisan idea
Meisner, now the elected Oakland County treasurer, was a Democratic state repre sentative in his final term when he worked with state Sen. Jason Allen, a Republican from Petoskey, to as semble the movie tax pack age, which passed the Legisla ture with only one vote against, from Sen. Nancy Cassis, R-Novi.
“We have literally billions of dollars in various tax ex penditures, exemptions and credits that have been grant ed, many of which do not deliver the desired outcome,” Meisner said. “While the state coffers may never be fully replenished from the film tax credits, this was never about making money for the state.”
But with the next governor facing a $1.6-billion budget hole and unemployment ex pected to remain well into double digits, can Michigan really afford to give away money to have movies shot here?
Cassis’ continuing skepti cism was fueled by last week’s report from the state Senate Fiscal Agency. The report asserted that the expenditure of $100 million through movie tax credits has generated less than $60 million in economic activity. But the term-limited Cassis is doubtful a lame-duck Legislature will do anything about the credits in the bal ance of this year. To next year’s incoming crowd, how ever, they may look like low hanging fruit to throw at that budget deficit.
I hope not. I prefer to see them as seeds that sprouted quickly but will never grow into sturdy timbers of the state economy without time and tending. Given the flighty nature of the movie business, just the chatter about chang ing the rules might spur pro ducers to seek a better deal elsewhere.
Infrastructure for films
Developers are working to build a foundation for the industry here, including the construction of studios and postproduction facilities.
Schools are getting up to speed on the education need ed for jobs in film, video and video game production. And movie makers are slowly get ting more comfortable using local talent. They are, by all accounts, enormously pleased with the locations and the work ethic here and, of course, the tax break.
There are countless stories of businesses that got a quick shot in the arm from having a movie company around — a coffee shop that was repaired and repainted for a scene, a secondhand store that had its best sales day ever when the wardrobe people came in to shop, a local bistro that got a boost from a movie star on karaoke night.
And there are the intangi bles — the movies have given our collective psyche a boost amid our economic woes, something to talk about, even participate in. They greatly expanded Michigan’s pres ence on the national and glob al stage, too. Nothing calls attention to your world-class airport quite the way George Clooney can.
Movies are never going to replace the auto industry as Michigan’s economic main stay. But if we stick with what we’ve started and allow it to grow, they can — along with batteries, solar shingles, wind turbines and biomedical breakthroughs — be a solid and exciting part of Michi gan’s future. We’ve spent a lot more to get back a lot less.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
BOOSTER'S: THEY'RE READY!
Partnership for 21st Century Skills (Video Contest 2010 Winners)
https://thepartnershipfor21stcenturyskills238.eduvision.tv/Default.aspx?q=trkxL8LvXknf8kDDdmJdOg%253d%253d
https://thepartnershipfor21stcenturyskills238.eduvision.tv/Default.aspx?q=trkxL8LvXknf8kDDdmJdOg%253d%253d
Monday, September 13, 2010
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Monday, September 6, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
(Cheddar) Boost!
Who Plans to Apply for i3? Look Online Now
The U.S. Department of Education has posted a spreadsheet listing the more than 2,000 districts, schools, and nonprofits that plan to apply for the $650 million Investing in Innovation grant.
If the thought of opening an Excel spreadsheet intimidates you, there's also a convenient summary of the intents-to-apply.
This list is a compilation of those who told the department, by April 1, that they plan to apply for these competitive grants. This was more of a courtesy for the department so officials could figure out what kind of workload is in store for them and the peer reviewers. Those on this list are not bound to apply, and those who aren't on the list can still apply. The deadline for the one and only round of this competition is May 11.
The list, 2,045 organizations long, is tedious to wade through. But my quick and crude Microsoft Access query tells me that about 800 of these potential applicants are districts and schools, while the remaining organizations are nonprofits. The districts include Atlanta, Los Angeles, Denver, Hartford (Ct.), and Broward County (Fla.).
The list of nonprofits include some usual suspects—Teach for America and The New Teacher Project— but also includes some lesser-knowns, such as Clarksville, Tenn.'s "The Way Mission," and Brookline, Mass.' "Facing History and Ourselves."
A fair number of universities also make the list, including the University of Southern California and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
To receive an invitation and collaboratively participate in our i3 Collaboratory initiative please e-mail digitallearning@gmail.com with Count Me In in the Subject Line and you will receive an follow-on invitation to the Investing In Innovation (i3) Grant Collaboratory blog-site.
Investing In Innovation (i3) Grant Collaboratory
Who Plans to Apply for i3? Look Online Now
The U.S. Department of Education has posted a spreadsheet listing the more than 2,000 districts, schools, and nonprofits that plan to apply for the $650 million Investing in Innovation grant.
If the thought of opening an Excel spreadsheet intimidates you, there's also a convenient summary of the intents-to-apply.
This list is a compilation of those who told the department, by April 1, that they plan to apply for these competitive grants. This was more of a courtesy for the department so officials could figure out what kind of workload is in store for them and the peer reviewers. Those on this list are not bound to apply, and those who aren't on the list can still apply. The deadline for the one and only round of this competition is May 11.
The list, 2,045 organizations long, is tedious to wade through. But my quick and crude Microsoft Access query tells me that about 800 of these potential applicants are districts and schools, while the remaining organizations are nonprofits. The districts include Atlanta, Los Angeles, Denver, Hartford (Ct.), and Broward County (Fla.).
The list of nonprofits include some usual suspects—Teach for America and The New Teacher Project— but also includes some lesser-knowns, such as Clarksville, Tenn.'s "The Way Mission," and Brookline, Mass.' "Facing History and Ourselves."
A fair number of universities also make the list, including the University of Southern California and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
To receive an invitation and collaboratively participate in our i3 Collaboratory initiative please e-mail digitallearning@gmail.com with Count Me In in the Subject Line and you will receive an follow-on invitation to the Investing In Innovation (i3) Grant Collaboratory blog-site.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Finding Our Passion!
Passionate Creative's
Who are the passionate creatives?
Passionate creatives are every where. They are not bound by geography, job description, institution, or demographic. They can be found anywhere form the frontlines of the largest organizations to the garages of entrepreneurs unleashing the next wave of innovation.
They are certainly not just knowledge workers. They include mechanics who are passionate about the machines they service, gardeners who see art where others only see plants, and craftspeople who create something amazing out of the most mundane raw materials.
What unites them is the desire to make a difference, to leave the world a better place than they found it, and to engage with those who share their passion so that they can get better faster.
These individuals go by many names. Some have adopted the label of pro-amateurs (or "pro-ams"), which was popularized by Charles Leadbeater. The label typically refers to amateurs who hold themselves to professional standards in their pursuit of their passion.
We seek to include those of us fortunate enough to be compensated for work we are passionate about, whether we are entrepreneurs, professional, knowledge workers, craftspeople, or clerical workers who are searching for new and creative ways to do the most "routine" tasks.
Of course, these individuals have been around since the beginning of human history and played a more prominent role in some eras than in others. Our goal is to expand their ranks, and position then firmly in the center of the institutions that shape our professional and personal lives.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
BOOST KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER through INFORMAL LEARNING Initiatives
Published April 2010
The foremost challenge in designing learning and development initiatives is effecting real change in a workforce. This is difficult but absolutely necessary for training to achieve solid ROI. After all, any training program likely not only cost money, but it also took time to design and attend, and therefore spent productivity. If a learning and development program didn’t change employees’ behavior, then it was a waste — even if they liked the course.
But the ability to transfer knowledge and skills learned in training back to the office is never easy. The training finishes, participants return to work, and they’re immediately pulled in a dozen different directions — none of which are designed to help them transfer what they’ve just learned into part of their daily routine.
Without skill transference, training is merely an expensive vacation that employees take from their daily responsibilities. So what can learning and development professionals do to ensure learning translates into action? Better still, how can they manipulate the forces that draw people away from adopting new skills to both motivate and enable a genuine change in behavior?
Successful learning officers know that learning is not enough and find ways to ensure their training graduates implement new ideas and skills soon after the training ends. They supplement their learning experience with a host of strategies that both motivate and enable graduates to adopt the skills taught in training. Skill transference is acquired by combining multiple sources of influence into a cohesive change strategy. The following tactics can be used to create a well-rounded change strategy.
Co-Opt the Performance System
It’s surprising how many training programs aren’t supported by an organization’s formal performance review system. While few, if any, performance review systems directly contradict what’s being covered in training, rare is the program where the skills and ideas taught in training are purposefully reinforced in the formal review process.
For instance, when training people how to hold others accountable, the specific skills taught in the course need to be contained in the formal review paperwork. If they’re not, it’s unlikely that supervisors will include training graduates’ recently acquired skills in their review. Supervisors may not even know about the new skills, let alone think to include them. So, learning and development professionals should always seek to hardwire into the review process skills that came about as a result of new training.
Enlist Informal Support
While it’s essential to build the skills from new learning and development initiatives into a formal review system, it’s equally important to take steps to ensure that informal rewards are also aimed at the target behaviors. This is best done by gathering supervisors and ensuring they play a role in getting their direct report’s training to stick.
Supervisors will need to talk about the new behaviors, discuss them in meetings, watch to see that the training graduates do what they’ve been taught and then praise graduates for their progress. For example, they might say, “I couldn’t help but notice that you’re using the new project software you studied last month. It’s good to see you using the new processes. Thanks!”
People often underestimate how important delivering praise is to encouraging new behavior. For those receiving praise, it’s clear that a good word from a colleague or authority figure goes a long way to ensure the appreciated behavior continues. A simple thank you is often viewed as more meaningful and sincere than more formal means of approbation.
In working with supervisors and managers to bring informal praise into a culture, remember that givers of praise tend to forget the power of informal encouragement. Make sure to talk with supervisors about the importance of providing the occasional “Way to go!” and discuss with them what it will take to remember to do so. What cues can be placed around them? How can managers remind supervisors? A best practice is to hold a meeting one week after participants return from an education experience and discuss the role of leadership in coaching, measuring and encouraging the new behaviors. Take five minutes and brainstorm different informal ways to say thank you.
Connect to Core Values
Much of what is taught in today’s leadership and other soft-skill courses is value-based. In addition to informing people what they should do under certain conditions, the courses explain the “why” behind the targeted behaviors. These almost always connect to the company’s core values — or at least they should.
For instance, organizations don’t ask people to be involved in decision making simply because it’s the new training trend. Rather, they ask people for their ideas because they value creative and innovative thinking or constructive feedback and criticism. They also believe that it helps people feel like they are part of the decision and aligns teams. Involving others may also lie at the heart of diversity. Organizations seek to rely on the varying views of diverse specialists and realize that doing so leads to the best choices. These may be just some of the values underpinning a training course on teamwork or decision making.
Unfortunately, the idea of talking about values is often far from the minds of leaders, whose jobs require them to focus on numbers and charts. As a result, these leaders miss an important opportunity to connect with what their people really care about. People don’t connect strongly to charts, facts, figures and logic. Rather, they connect to direct and vicarious experiences, personal stories and deeply held values. In explaining how the skills and concepts that participants have learned in corporate training link to the company’s core values, learning professionals breathe excitement and life into vanilla behaviors. Leaders should never be afraid to talk about theories, skills and values.
Link Coaching to Training
When it comes to interpersonal skills, training participants need more than knowledge. They need to turn knowledge into action. This requires them to take ideas, shape them in their own words and behaviors and then try them out. This calls for deliberate practice. As the old adage says, practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.
How does one experience perfect practice? Not alone. In determining how well they are enacting new skills, individuals need feedback from others. They need someone else to watch them, stop them when they go awry and then give them specific behavioral advice on how to improve. In short, they need a coach. A coach doesn’t simply look at the scoreboard and tell the team to hunker down. A good coach watches the team members in action and then advises them on what they need to change to affect the result.
Build in Reminders
To help people remember what to do at the right place and time, make use of cues. Put up charts that summarize training skills in meeting rooms. Ask people to carry summary cards with them at work. Put electronic devices to work. Build in reminders that pop up every morning. Send participants video clips that remind them of what they’ve learned or even teach a subtle variation on the theme. Ask your IT folks and video specialists to build tools and reminders that are tailored specifically to the skills covered in training.
Training courses work best when combined with a variety of other sources of influence that both motivate and enable training participants to practice what they have learned at work. This calls for a multifaceted rollout plan that supplements classroom training with both formal and informal rewards, coaching, value links and the use of cuing and reminders. These strategies are the sources of influence that inspire employees to change their behavior for good
Why Learning Is Never Enough
Kerry Patterson
Ensuring that learning and development initiatives facilitate real change in a workforce requires deliberate follow-up and follow-through.The foremost challenge in designing learning and development initiatives is effecting real change in a workforce. This is difficult but absolutely necessary for training to achieve solid ROI. After all, any training program likely not only cost money, but it also took time to design and attend, and therefore spent productivity. If a learning and development program didn’t change employees’ behavior, then it was a waste — even if they liked the course.
But the ability to transfer knowledge and skills learned in training back to the office is never easy. The training finishes, participants return to work, and they’re immediately pulled in a dozen different directions — none of which are designed to help them transfer what they’ve just learned into part of their daily routine.
Without skill transference, training is merely an expensive vacation that employees take from their daily responsibilities. So what can learning and development professionals do to ensure learning translates into action? Better still, how can they manipulate the forces that draw people away from adopting new skills to both motivate and enable a genuine change in behavior?
Successful learning officers know that learning is not enough and find ways to ensure their training graduates implement new ideas and skills soon after the training ends. They supplement their learning experience with a host of strategies that both motivate and enable graduates to adopt the skills taught in training. Skill transference is acquired by combining multiple sources of influence into a cohesive change strategy. The following tactics can be used to create a well-rounded change strategy.
Co-Opt the Performance System
It’s surprising how many training programs aren’t supported by an organization’s formal performance review system. While few, if any, performance review systems directly contradict what’s being covered in training, rare is the program where the skills and ideas taught in training are purposefully reinforced in the formal review process.
For instance, when training people how to hold others accountable, the specific skills taught in the course need to be contained in the formal review paperwork. If they’re not, it’s unlikely that supervisors will include training graduates’ recently acquired skills in their review. Supervisors may not even know about the new skills, let alone think to include them. So, learning and development professionals should always seek to hardwire into the review process skills that came about as a result of new training.
Enlist Informal Support
While it’s essential to build the skills from new learning and development initiatives into a formal review system, it’s equally important to take steps to ensure that informal rewards are also aimed at the target behaviors. This is best done by gathering supervisors and ensuring they play a role in getting their direct report’s training to stick.
Supervisors will need to talk about the new behaviors, discuss them in meetings, watch to see that the training graduates do what they’ve been taught and then praise graduates for their progress. For example, they might say, “I couldn’t help but notice that you’re using the new project software you studied last month. It’s good to see you using the new processes. Thanks!”
People often underestimate how important delivering praise is to encouraging new behavior. For those receiving praise, it’s clear that a good word from a colleague or authority figure goes a long way to ensure the appreciated behavior continues. A simple thank you is often viewed as more meaningful and sincere than more formal means of approbation.
In working with supervisors and managers to bring informal praise into a culture, remember that givers of praise tend to forget the power of informal encouragement. Make sure to talk with supervisors about the importance of providing the occasional “Way to go!” and discuss with them what it will take to remember to do so. What cues can be placed around them? How can managers remind supervisors? A best practice is to hold a meeting one week after participants return from an education experience and discuss the role of leadership in coaching, measuring and encouraging the new behaviors. Take five minutes and brainstorm different informal ways to say thank you.
Connect to Core Values
Much of what is taught in today’s leadership and other soft-skill courses is value-based. In addition to informing people what they should do under certain conditions, the courses explain the “why” behind the targeted behaviors. These almost always connect to the company’s core values — or at least they should.
For instance, organizations don’t ask people to be involved in decision making simply because it’s the new training trend. Rather, they ask people for their ideas because they value creative and innovative thinking or constructive feedback and criticism. They also believe that it helps people feel like they are part of the decision and aligns teams. Involving others may also lie at the heart of diversity. Organizations seek to rely on the varying views of diverse specialists and realize that doing so leads to the best choices. These may be just some of the values underpinning a training course on teamwork or decision making.
Unfortunately, the idea of talking about values is often far from the minds of leaders, whose jobs require them to focus on numbers and charts. As a result, these leaders miss an important opportunity to connect with what their people really care about. People don’t connect strongly to charts, facts, figures and logic. Rather, they connect to direct and vicarious experiences, personal stories and deeply held values. In explaining how the skills and concepts that participants have learned in corporate training link to the company’s core values, learning professionals breathe excitement and life into vanilla behaviors. Leaders should never be afraid to talk about theories, skills and values.
Link Coaching to Training
When it comes to interpersonal skills, training participants need more than knowledge. They need to turn knowledge into action. This requires them to take ideas, shape them in their own words and behaviors and then try them out. This calls for deliberate practice. As the old adage says, practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.
How does one experience perfect practice? Not alone. In determining how well they are enacting new skills, individuals need feedback from others. They need someone else to watch them, stop them when they go awry and then give them specific behavioral advice on how to improve. In short, they need a coach. A coach doesn’t simply look at the scoreboard and tell the team to hunker down. A good coach watches the team members in action and then advises them on what they need to change to affect the result.
Build in Reminders
To help people remember what to do at the right place and time, make use of cues. Put up charts that summarize training skills in meeting rooms. Ask people to carry summary cards with them at work. Put electronic devices to work. Build in reminders that pop up every morning. Send participants video clips that remind them of what they’ve learned or even teach a subtle variation on the theme. Ask your IT folks and video specialists to build tools and reminders that are tailored specifically to the skills covered in training.
Training courses work best when combined with a variety of other sources of influence that both motivate and enable training participants to practice what they have learned at work. This calls for a multifaceted rollout plan that supplements classroom training with both formal and informal rewards, coaching, value links and the use of cuing and reminders. These strategies are the sources of influence that inspire employees to change their behavior for good
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Learn to BOOST your Imagination, Innovation and Vision and make some real cheese!
Monday, Apr. 19, 2010
What Would Henry Luce Make of the Digital Age?
Henry Luce, co-founder of TIME and long the head of Time Inc., was an unlikely revolutionary. He was the son of a Presbyterian missionary in China, a product of élite boarding schools, a Skull and Bonesman at Yale, an ardent Republican throughout most of his life. He became one of the wealthiest men in the U.S., and he lived accordingly. He disliked most of the New Deal and loathed Franklin Roosevelt. His famous 1941 essay in LIFE, "The American Century," was a call to reshape the world on the American model. He was a passionate champion of the U.S.'s unpopular wars in Korea and Vietnam.(See the best TIME covers.)
What made Luce a revolutionary figure in American life was not his politics or his religion or his missionary zeal. It was his success in creating a new era of communications that had an enormous impact on the culture of the 20th century. At the precocious age of 24, Luce and his brilliant classmate, friend, partner and rival Briton Hadden created the first newsmagazine (a word they invented). TIME was truly something new — a concise summary of the news of the world, published weekly and marketed throughout the U.S. and later around the world. It was not to everyone's taste, with its deliberately idiosyncratic language and its sometimes arch opinions. But for its hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of readers, TIME was among the first publications to make the news of the world available to them. TIME became a kind of glue, providing professionals and other (mostly middle-class) people with a common, reliable and concise guide to the type of information that was now more important to them than ever before. In Sinclair Lewis' 1922 novel Babbitt, the title character speaks triumphantly of the "sane standardization of stores, offices, streets, hotels, and newspapers throughout the United States." To Lewis this standardization was a mark of society's arid consumerism, but to most middle-class Americans, such changes represented progress; to Luce they became the process by which a market for a national newsmagazine could be created. (See the worst TIME covers.)
Hadden died prematurely, in 1929, a few days after his 31st birthday. Luce moved forward with his own vision without looking back. In 1930, during the early months of the Great Depression, he launched the first truly serious business magazine — FORTUNE, a dazzlingly beautiful monthly designed to examine business and capitalism in a way that would provide knowledge about the economy that he believed most Americans, not just businessmen, should have. FORTUNE was a lively, literate, serious and pathbreaking magazine in a field that had previously been largely celebratory. Six years later, Luce produced the first issue of LIFE, perhaps the most popular magazine ever published in the U.S. In the new age of photography, it was not the first "picture magazine." But LIFE was by far the most creative and successful, offering a visual representation of its time and revealing, as Luce wrote in his famous prospectus, "the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud ... strange things — machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon ... things hidden behind walls and within rooms; things dangerous to come to." (See LIFE Magazine's classic pictures.)
Luce launched other innovations, like The March of Time, the first newsreel to offer documentary features, which won an Academy Award. There was a weekly national radio program drawn from TIME. And in 1954, the first serious sports magazine — SPORTS ILLUSTRATED — began publishing. Like FORTUNE, it relied on good writers (among them William Faulkner, A.J. Liebling, Wallace Stegner, Budd Schulberg and John Steinbeck). Luce insisted that it should elevate the world of sports from being "just a game" to a metaphor for the human condition. The Time Inc. publications were extraordinarily expensive to publish, but he believed that spending more money for greater quality was the best strategy for success. As one of his associates put it, Luce and his team moved ahead in "an atmosphere of complete and serene confidence" to grasp "the chance of a lifetime."
From the mid-1930s through the late '50s, Time Inc. was probably the largest news organization in the world, with bureaus on every continent. It claimed to reach more than 20 million people each week, and even more during World War II, which the Time Inc. magazines reported on at least as intensely as any other organization. The company's success was partly a result of shrewd management. But it was also a result of Luce, who had looked into the future and seen an increasingly integrated nation bound together by railroads, highways, radio, movies and the rise of a national corporate culture. As a result, Americans would need a vast amount of information and an efficient way of accessing it. Luce embraced that future and created vehicles that served the needs of his rapidly changing times. He had few rivals in the breadth and influence of his empire — William Randolph Hearst, the great newspaper mogul of his time; or William Paley, the founder of CBS; or Lord Beaverbrook, the publisher of newspapers in Britain and beyond; or, more recently, Rupert Murdoch. (See TIME's World War II covers.)
By the time Luce retired in 1964, three years before his death, his empire was beginning to show its age. Time Inc. was still thriving, but it was rivaled by television and countless newer magazines. His colleagues prodded him to move into television and branch out into other areas. But Luce, no longer the restless pioneer, tried instead to protect what he had already created — though after his death, his company did indeed expand into electronic media, developing HBO and becoming a major force in cable TV. LIFE, however, had ceased to be profitable by the late 1950s and stopped being published as a weekly in 1972, five years after Luce's death. TIME, FORTUNE and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED have survived and reinvented themselves as the publishing world has changed. But like all magazines and newspapers, they face tremendous challenges.
What would the young, ambitious, innovative Luce have thought about the opportunities that might await him in our own challenging time? Much of what he cared about in his era might seem to him irretrievably lost. For decades, he had worked to portray (and shape) America as a united, common culture. Despite differences in class, race or region, Americans, he believed, shared a basic set of values that transcended diversity. "Nobody is mad with nobody," a LIFE article brightly announced in the 1950s, at perhaps the height of the belief that there was a broadly shared vision of the U.S. In our own fractured and fractious time, such an assumption would find few adherents. But Luce's project of the 1950s and '60s — promoting a vision of a coherent national purpose — is not irrelevant today, despite radical changes in the character of American life.
In other ways, Luce might feel at home now. He was comfortable with diversity. He was an early supporter of racial justice. He was not alarmed by immigration. He welcomed progress and was fascinated by the cultural and technological changes around him. And he believed that all Americans could be educated through the dissemination of knowledge — a project widely embraced today. (See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers.)
One of the most powerful results of the digital age has been the creation of a vast body of new knowledge and information — so vast as to be almost impossible to absorb. A related result has been the fragmenting of that information into discrete communities of knowledge that often reflect individuals' prior beliefs and preferences. Luce, I believe, would resist those trends, just as he resisted similar ones decades ago, and would seek ways to use the tools of technology to broaden, not fragment, a national culture.
Luce was, above all, in search of vehicles of change. He had no fear of the new, and he welcomed it throughout most of his life — modern art (which he once had loathed), modern technology, modern design and modern business (he was always attracted to the most creative and progressive business leaders and considered himself one of them). For all his political conservatism, he was a man in search of the future.
In our time, he would face both the seemingly intractable problem of making money from digital information and enormous competition from thousands of individuals and organizations trying to respond to those new challenges. But Luce — for all his flaws — was an innovator, a visionary and a man of vast and daunting self-confidence. Were he to live in our time, trying once again to revolutionize the spread of knowledge, he might find his talents much in demand.
Brinkley is the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University and author of The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (Knopf; 2010)
Saturday, April 10, 2010
BOOST the CHEDDAR!
Thursday, Apr. 08, 2010
Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?
In junior high school, one of my classmates had a TV addiction — back before it was normal. This boy — we'll call him Ethan — was an encyclopedia of vacuous content, from The A-Team to Who's the Boss?
Then one day Ethan's mother made him a bold offer. If he could go a full month without watching any TV, she would give him $200. None of us thought he could do it. But Ethan quit TV, just like that. His friends offered to let him cheat at their houses on Friday nights (Miami Vice nights!). Ethan said no.
One month later, Ethan's mom paid him $200. He went out and bought a TV, the biggest one he could find.
Since there have been children, there have been adults trying to get them to cooperate. The Bible repeatedly commands children to heed their parents and proposes that disobedient children be stoned to death or at least have their eyes picked out by ravens. Over the centuries, the stick (or paddle or switch) has lost favor, in most cases, to the carrot. Today the petty bribes — a sticker for using the toilet or a cookie for sitting still in church — start before kids can speak in full sentences.
In recent years, hundreds of schools have made these transactions more businesslike, experimenting with paying kids with cold, hard cash for showing up or getting good grades or, in at least one case, going another day without getting pregnant. (See pictures of kids comparing their paychecks at school.)
I have not met a child who does not admire this trend. But it makes adults profoundly uncomfortable. Teachers complain that we are rewarding kids for doing what they should be doing of their own volition. Psychologists warn that money can actually make kids perform worse by cheapening the act of learning. Parents predict widespread slacking after the incentives go away. And at least one think-tank scholar has denounced the strategy as racist. The debate has become a proxy battle for the larger war over why our kids are not learning at the rate they should be despite decades of reforms and budget increases.
But all this time, there has been only one real question, particularly in America's lowest-performing schools: Does it work?
To find out, a Harvard economist named Roland Fryer Jr. did something education researchers almost never do: he ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in multiple cities. He used mostly private money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million and brought in a team of researchers to help him analyze the effects. He got death threats, but he carried on. The results, which he shared exclusively with TIME, represent the largest study of financial incentives in the classroom — and one of the more rigorous studies ever on anything in education policy. (See Roland Fryer Jr. in the 2009 TIME 100.)
The experiment ran in four cities: Chicago, Dallas, Washington and New York. Each city had its own unique model of incentives, to see which would work best. Some kids were paid for good test scores, others for not fighting with one another. The results are fascinating and surprising. They remind us that kids, like grownups, are not puppets. They don't always respond the way we expect.
In the city where Fryer expected the most success, the experiment had no effect at all — "as zero as zero gets," as he puts it. In two other cities, the results were promising but in totally different ways. In the last city, something remarkable happened. Kids who got paid all year under a very elegant scheme performed significantly better on their standardized reading tests at the end of the year. Statistically speaking, it was as if those kids had spent three extra months in school, compared with their peers who did not get paid.
"These are substantial effects, as large as many other interventions that people have thought to be successful," says Brian Jacob, a University of Michigan public-policy and economics professor who has studied incentives and who reviewed Fryer's study at TIME's request. If incentives are designed wisely, it appears, payments can indeed boost kids' performance as much as or more than many other reforms you've heard about before — and for a fraction of the cost.
Money is not enough. (It never is.) But for some kids, it may be part of the solution. In the end, we all want our children to grow into self-motivated adults. The question is, How do we help them get there? And is it possible that at least for some kids, the road is paved not with stickers but with $20 bills?
Fryer runs an education-innovation laboratory that has a staff of 17 and an annual budget of about $6 million. His goal is to use the scientific method to figure out how to close the learning gap between America's white and minority kids by the year 2025. When I visit Fryer at his Harvard lab this spring, he hands me an agenda for the day and proudly introduces me to his team. For the next three hours, as we talk about the experiment, Fryer is charming and intense, occasionally lapsing into economist speak and then apologizing for being a "nerd." (Comment on this story.)
But Fryer's fascination with the lives and choices of kids is not entirely academic. He grew up poor in Texas, where he lived with his dad, a copier salesman. When Fryer was 16, his dad was arrested for sexual assault and Fryer had to bail him out of jail.
Meanwhile, Fryer raised himself, and not very well. He got a job at McDonald's and stole from the cash register. He sold marijuana and carried a .357 Magnum for a while. But he was fiercely competitive on the basketball court and the football field, and that's where he excelled, earning a basketball scholarship to the University of Texas at Arlington.
In his first semester of college, Fryer took a calculus class. On his initial exam, he scored 45 out of 100. "My friends started calling me Colt 45," he remembers. The failure enraged him, and his pride kicked in. "I didn't want to be like everyone else from my neighborhood," he says.
Fryer started working hard in school for the first time. He graduated in two and a half years with an economics degree. Then he got his Ph.D. at Penn State University, where he began to use the tools of economics to study the problems of inequality. He joined Harvard's faculty at age 26, a case study in the power of shifting motivations.
At Harvard, Fryer heard about a school in New York City that was trying to incentivize kids on a small scale. The idea appealed to him because, unlike reforms focused on the teacher or the curriculum, it treated kids not as inanimate objects but as human beings who behave in interesting ways. But he had no idea if it would work.
In 2005 he persuaded Gavin Samms, a friend and Harvard colleague, to go to New York City with him to try to sign up some schools for a pilot program. "We didn't know anything about what we were doing," Fryer says. They couldn't afford to stay in New York, so they stayed at a hotel in the Meadowlands — a grim tract of wetlands in New Jersey. Then they drove around to pitch the idea to principals.
One day while they were visiting a school, they got a call from the school system's headquarters, which had originally approved their project. "They said, 'You gotta leave now,' " Samms remembers. " 'You gotta leave the schools.' " Fryer protested, but he lost. "It was just too political," he says. "It was an election year. They'd already gotten letters saying, 'You can't be paying kids.' "
New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein doesn't remember kicking Fryer out, but he concedes that the program was contentious. "When people want to try new and different things in education," Klein says, "it will always stir up controversy."
In January 2007, after the mayoral election had come and gone, Fryer returned to New York — this time with a more audacious plan. He wanted to create a treatment group and a control group, just like a real scientist. And he had a $2 million grant from the Broad Foundation, which had taken an interest in Fryer because of the scientific rigor of his approach.
This time, Fryer wanted to get a random sample of city schools to participate. Which is not as easy as it sounds. At some schools, the principal and teachers opened their arms wide and said, "Sure. We're struggling here. We'll try anything." At others, Fryer had to spend hours pleading with staff who felt kids should learn for the love of learning — not for the cash. "To this day, I can't tell you what will predict one or the other," he says. "I could walk into a completely failing school, with crack vials on the ground outside, and say, 'Hey, I went to a school like this, and I want to help.' And people would just browbeat me about 'the love of learning,' and I would be like, 'But I just stepped on crack vials out there! There are fights in the hallways! We're beyond that.' "
Eventually, Fryer and his team got 143 schools to sign up. About half would be randomly selected as a control group, meaning the kids would not be paid. In the other half, students would earn money for their performance on 10 routine tests given throughout the year.
The summer before the experiment began, a New York Daily News reporter heard about the plan. The story, headlined "It's a Cash Course," quoted an antitesting activist who called the plan "horrendous." One of Fryer's other funders pulled half a million dollars. Fryer got kicked out of the schools again, he says. This time, Klein took him to a Yankees game. A few days later, Fryer was allowed back in the schools. But he started waking up at 3 a.m. to check the newspapers.
The anger was not something Fryer had anticipated. "I totally underestimated how pissed off people would be because of this," he says. "This is exactly the kind of R&D education needs. I never said it was going to solve all education problems. I just thought it deserved to be tested." (See the 10 best college presidents.)
The most damning criticism of Fryer came from psychologists like the University of Rochester's Edward Deci, who has spent his career studying motivation. Deci has found that money — like other tangible rewards — does not work very well to motivate people over the long term, particularly for tasks that involve creativity. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that rewards can have the perverse effect of making people perform worse.
A classic experiment in support of this hypothesis took place at a nursery school at Stanford University in the early 1970s. There, researchers divided 51 toddlers into groups. All the kids were asked to draw a picture with markers. But one group was told in advance that they would get a special reward — a certificate with a gold star and a red ribbon — in exchange for their work. The kids did the drawings, and the ones in the treatment group got their certificates.
A few weeks later, the researchers observed the children through a one-way mirror on a normal school day. They found that the kids who had received the award spent half as much time drawing for fun as those who had not been rewarded. The reward, it seemed, diminished the act of drawing. So instead of giving kids gold stars, Deci says, we should teach them to derive intrinsic pleasure from the task itself. "What we really want is for people to value the activity of learning," he says. People of all ages perform better and work harder if they are actually enjoying the work — not just the reward that comes later.
In principle, Fryer agrees. "Kids should learn for the love of learning," he says. "But they're not. So what shall we do?" Most teenagers do not look at their math homework the way toddlers look at a blank piece of paper. It would be wonderful if they did. Maybe one day we will all approach our jobs that way. But until then, most adults work primarily for money, and in a curious way, we seem to be holding kids to a higher standard than we hold ourselves.
In the fall of 2007, the New York City experiment began. Fourth-graders could earn a maximum of $25 per test, and seventh-graders could earn up to $50 per test. To participate, kids had to get their parents' permission — and 82% of them did. Most of them also opened savings accounts so the money could be directly deposited into them. Meanwhile, Fryer and his team found other testing grounds. In Chicago, Fryer worked with schools chief Arne Duncan, now President Obama's Education Secretary, to design a program to reward ninth-graders for good grades. Over beer and pizza in a South Side bowling alley, they sketched out a plan to pay kids $50 for each A, $35 for a B and $20 for a C, up to $2,000 a year. But half of their earnings would be set aside in an account, to be redeemed only upon high school graduation.
In Washington, middle schoolers would be paid for a portfolio of five different metrics, including attendance and good behavior. If they hit perfect marks in every category, they could make $100 every two weeks. Schools in Dallas got the simplest scheme and the one targeting the youngest children: every time second-graders read a book and successfully completed a computerized quiz about it, they earned $2. Straightforward — and cheap. The average earning would turn out to be about $14 (for seven books read) per year.
The early feedback was promising. Principals were lobbying to get their schools switched out of the control group and into the treatment group. Parents began using the paychecks as progress reports, contacting teachers to find out why their kids' checks had gone up or down. In Chicago, Duncan discovered that the program affected kids in ways he'd never expected. "I remember going to schools and seeing how excited the kids were when they got their checks. They were like pep rallies — but around academic success!" he says. Fryer appeared on The Colbert Report and CNN to talk about the experiment, and that's about when the death threats started. All the while, Fryer refused to speculate about what the data would reveal. He was not all that interested in whether the kids raised their grades or turned in their homework. Grades are subjective. The more objective measure would come at the end of the year, when the students took their standardized tests. Would they improve more than the kids who were not getting paid? Or would they, as the psychologists predicted, actually do worse? "If it doesn't work, we're going to stop and start doing something else," says Washington schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. "But if it does work, it should drive where we put our money." (Watch Michelle Rhee talk about D.C. schools.)
The results began to trickle into the lab last summer. In New York City, the $1.5 million paid to 8,320 kids for good test scores did not work — at least not in any way that's easy to measure. In Chicago, under a different model, the kids who earned money for grades attended class more often and got better grades, two major accomplishments. Those students did not, however, do better on their standardized tests at the end of the year.
In Washington, the kids did better on standardized reading tests. Getting paid on a routine basis for a series of small accomplishments, including attendance and behavior, seemed to lead to more learning for those kids. And in Dallas, the experiment produced the most dramatic gains of all. Paying second-graders to read books significantly boosted their reading-comprehension scores on standardized tests at the end of the year — and those kids seemed to continue to do better the next year, even after the rewards stopped.
The kids had much in common. In all four cities, a majority were African American or Hispanic and from low-income families. So why did the results vary so dramatically from city to city?
One clue came out of the interviews Fryer's team conducted with students in New York City. The students were universally excited about the money, and they wanted to earn more. They just didn't seem to know how. When researchers asked them how they could raise their scores, the kids mentioned test-taking strategies like reading the questions more carefully. But they didn't talk about the substantive work that leads to learning. "No one said they were going to stay after class and talk to the teacher," Fryer says. "Not one."
We tend to assume that kids (and adults) know how to achieve success. If they don't get there, it's for lack of effort — or talent. Sometimes that's true. But a lot of the time, people are just flying blind. John List, an economist at the University of Chicago, has noticed the disconnect in his own education experiments. He explains the problem to me this way: "I could ask you to solve a third-order linear partial differential equation," he says. "A what?" I ask. "A third-order linear partial differential equation," he says. "I could offer you a million dollars to solve it. And you can't do it." (He's right. I can't.) For some kids, doing better on a geometry test is like solving a third-order linear partial differential equation, no matter the incentive.
Similarly, in Chicago, kids were paid for grades — a result they could not always control. There, the findings were mixed. Kids who got paid did indeed get better grades, and they also attended class more — a week and a half more over the school year. That is a big deal, since nearly half of Chicago's high school kids drop out before they graduate and the kids who skip school and fail courses as freshmen tend to be the ones who drop out. We won't know until 2012 if the experiment lowered the dropout rate, but we do know that the rewards did not raise standardized-test scores.
So what happens if we pay kids to do tasks they know how to do? In Dallas, paying kids to read books — something almost all of them can do — made a big difference. In fact, the experiment had as big or bigger an effect on learning as many other reforms that have been tested, like lowering class size or enrolling kids in Head Start early-education programs (both of which cost thousands of dollars more per student). And the experiment also boosted kids' grades. "If you pay a kid to read books, their grades go up higher than if you actually pay a kid for grades, like we did in Chicago," Fryer says. "Isn't that cool?"
It may also help that the kids in Dallas were the youngest in the experiment, making them more receptive to reforms. It's hard to know for sure. Another caveat is that the Dallas model worked differently on different kids. Most (including Hispanic kids and poor kids) did better when they were being paid. But the ones who spoke very little English and took their standardized tests in Spanish did not benefit from the incentives, a mystery that Fryer addresses at some length in his study but cannot entirely explain. (See pictures of Detroit schoolkids sharing their dreams for the future.)
Meanwhile, in Washington, each school got to choose three of the payment metrics, and some of the elements ended up being outcomes like test scores. But the students were also paid on the basis of attendance and behavior — two actions that are under their direct control. Under this hybrid model, the kids who got paid did better on their standardized reading tests. Because of the small size of the school system, the Washington sample was less well balanced than those in the other cities. But its results contain one remarkable finding: the kids who were helped the most by the experiment were the ones who are normally among the hardest to reach. "The typical reform helps girls more than it helps boys," Fryer says. "[This] is the opposite. In D.C., all the results are being driven by the boys. That's fascinating."
When I talked with Washington students, teachers and principals about the experiment, they appeared to have very low expectations for its long-term impact. Many of them, speaking from experience, seemed to think that nothing as simple as money could reach a certain hard core of kids. "The children we had challenges with before, we still have challenges with," says Vealetta Moore-Parker, a guidance counselor who runs the incentives program at Burroughs Education Campus.
Nevertheless, according to Fryer's results, kids with a history of serious behavioral problems saw the biggest gains in test scores overall. Their reading scores shot up 0.4 standard deviations, which is roughly the equivalent of five additional months of schooling.
Kids may respond better to rewards for specific actions because there is less risk of failure. They can control their attendance; they cannot necessarily control their test scores. The key, then, may be to teach kids to control more overall — to encourage them to act as if they can indeed control everything, and reward that effort above and beyond the actual outcome.
The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), one of the most successful charter-school networks in the U.S., has been doling out financial incentives for 15 years, using a model that happens to align perfectly with the results of Fryer's study. KIPP students get paid for actions they can control — getting to school on time, participating in class and having a positive attitude — with "money" they can redeem for supplies at the school store. Over the years, KIPP leaders, who now run 82 schools nationwide, have learned a lot about which rewards work and which do not. They have found that speed matters, for example. Recognition, like punishment, works best if it happens quickly. So KIPP schools pay their kids every week. (Interestingly, the two places Fryer's experiment worked best were the ones where kids got feedback fast — through biweekly paychecks in Washington and through passing computerized quizzes in Dallas.)
Just like grownups, kids need different kinds of incentives to get through the day, some highbrow and some low, some short-term, some longer-term. And money and other external rewards can be a gateway to more substantive motivators. KIPP fifth-graders get a lot of prizes like pencils; high school kids can earn freedoms — like the privilege of listening to their iPods at lunch. "Our ultimate goal is to get kids to be intrinsically motivated," says Joshua Zoia, who founded the KIPP Academy in Lynn, Mass. "But we have to get kids hooked in. We have to meet them where they are."
When Fryer briefed Rhee, the Washington schools chancellor, about the results, she was shocked — happily so. "It is just so hard to show impact in education," Rhee says, citing past experiments that showed no payoff despite enormous effort. "We don't see results like this for a lot of other things we're doing," she says. So she went to the Washington city council to ask for more money to keep paying kids — and to keep studying what happens. "If next year's data show something different, so be it," Rhee says. "We'll take it year by year." The program has wound down in Chicago, Dallas and New York City, although schools in all three places continue to experiment with incentives.
Fryer believes there's more good research to be done on incentives. But he doesn't think incentives alone can fix our schools; he is increasingly convinced that the answer will involve a combination of reforms and that the interaction among those reforms will matter more than any single change in isolation. And whatever we do, he says, we have to test it first — and fearlessly. "One thing we cannot do is, we cannot restrict ourselves to a set of solutions that make adults comfortable."
Chyna is an eighth-grader at the Takoma Education Campus in Washington. Chyna likes to refer to herself in the third person, and when you ask her a personal question, she looks you dead in the eye, asks, "Honestly?" and waits for you to reply before giving you her answer.
Chyna wants to be a lawyer or a radio personality when she grows up. But last year she had a hard time. She and a friend got into a fight with another girl at school. "We basically jumped her," Chyna admits. The police came, and Chyna found herself in a juvenile-detention center, waiting for her mom to pick her up.
This year is going better. When I meet her, she has just received her regular paycheck. She earned $95, her highest check yet. She squeals with happiness and hugs her girlfriends. When I ask her how she did it, she says, "I tried my hardest." She adds, "I tried to wear my uniform, because I knew I wanted some money because my birthday is next week." She has saved her past four paychecks for this reason. The money, she says, gives her just enough incentive to hold her tongue.
"For the most part, I'm still Chyna," she says. "But once in a while I just snatch it back, 'cause I know that paycheck is coming." Then I ask her about the psychologists' argument that she should work hard for the love of learning, not for short-term rewards. "Honestly?" she asks. "Yes, honestly," I say. She looks me dead in the eye. "We're kids. Let's be realistic."
Friday, April 9, 2010
Saturday, April 3, 2010
A 3-D BOOST!
A Note from Another Dimension
| Detroit Free Press 04/04/2010, Page A22 |
Welcome to the virtual non-lives of young people By CHLOE SMILEY “Look!” my young friend Rebecca exclaimed, “I’ve got glasses that make everything look 3D! How sweet is that?” I paused for a second, and then asked her to take off the glasses. Rebecca complied. I asked that she look around. Rebecca did. “Do you notice anything?” I inquired. She shook her head. “Rebecca, dear, the whole world is in 3D. I am a three dimensional person. Those ripoff glasses that cost you two payments of $19.99 plus shipping and handling are three dimensional,” I said, taking a step back to miss the falling debris after her cranium explosion. While this incident might have left Rebecca picking up her shell-shocked brain, it left an even more lasting impression on me. This new generation has not grown up with a real childhood, but a virtual one. It is a generation that would rather see the movie or play the videogame than actually experience real life. This generation has grown up around the idea that “playing” involves sitting or lying down while your eyes track movements on a screen and your brain turns into a bowl of lumpy oatmeal. If this generation comprises the leaders of tomorrow, I am genuinely frightened. I gathered firsthand experience dealing with this apathetic age group as I baby-sat my neighbor. Upon arriving at the house, I was greeted with the sight of a 12-year-old watching the Food Channel. Once the show ended, I told her that I had some ideas for the evening. I went for my best activity: cookie making. The dismissive “Nah, I don’t want to” almost broke my baby-sitter’s heart. However, when I peeked into her room and saw her playing “Cooking Mama,” I almost laughed out loud. She would prefer moving a mouse around with an end product of completing a level than actually cooking and having homemade chocolate chip cookies. The fact that anything was picked over chocolate chip cookies clearly demonstrates that priorities are not right in this generation. While they have no practical skills to their name, they have successively completed all 50 levels of “Cooking Mama.” I’m not going to exclude adults from this obsession with living in the virtual world. For many adults, TV sets must be bigger and better and bolder so that entire rooms are dedicated to a single screen, and all who enter must pay homage to its splendor by fixing their eyes upon it. There must be surround sound so it feels as if you are actually there. That way it’s too loud for any real communication to interrupt the show. And don’t forget HD. Norm Samat, the director of ABC’s “Monday Night Football” HDTV feed, said, “You almost get into a trance looking at HDTV pictures, because you really see more.” In the same article, it is stated: “When watching TV on a 16:9 screen, you use your peripheral vision, which truly makes you feel like you are a part of the program.” Being part of a program is great, but why don’t you get up and actually live? If you are looking for drama, listen in on a group of four or more girls. If comedy is your thing, go to any public place and watch awkward adolescents try to be cool. It’s pretty darn funny. There are videogames in which you can pretend to be a ballerina — go take a dance class. You can pretend to be a chef — go to the kitchen and actually cook. I’ve seen games in which you can pretend to baby-sit, be a gymnast, a teacher, etc. — go do those things! Then there’s the father of them all: th e much beloved Sims games. In these games, you can pretend that you have a life. Which, if you are playing the game, you don’t have one or at least aren’t really living it. Before you know it, there will be games in which you pretend to go to school, pretend to graduate, pretend to go to college,pretend to get a degree, and then pretend you haven’t wasted your entire life. | CHLOE SMILEY, 16, IS A JUNIOR AT CLARKSTON HIGH SCHOOL. THE FACT THAT ANYTHING WAS PICKED OVER CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES CLEARLY DEMONSTRATES THAT PRIORITIES ARE NOT RIGHT IN THIS GENERATION. |
Friday, April 2, 2010
BOOST THIS! ALIGNMENT to a HIGHER PURPOSE GROWS! (STUDENT-CENTRIC SUCCESS)
Robert Bobb: Schools should lead rebirth of Detroit; Mayor Bing should lead schools
Posted: 01 Apr 2010 08:25 AM PDT
Visit http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2010/03/robert_bobb_schools_should_lea.html to listent to the full interview.
By Jonathan Oosting | MLive.com
March 31, 2010, 11:52AM
Robert Bobb believes the City of Detroit cannot solve its problems without the Detroit Public Schools system doing the same, and he thinks Mayor Dave Bing can lead both efforts.
“We’re talking about the rebirth of the City of Detroit,” Bobb, the state-appointed emergency financial manager for the district, told Frank Beckmann this morning on WJR AM-760. “The rebirth of the City of Detroit will never be successful if Detroit Public Schools is not leading.”
While Bobb advocates mayoral control for the district, he told Beckmann it’s important the public approve such a move in order to avoid the type of frustration many have voiced about his own appointment.
“Let’s take it to the voters, make your case, and show them the advantages of having one person” in control, he said, citing the efforts of Excellent Schools Detroit to spur grassroots support for a ballot initiative.
However, Bobb was against mayoral control before he was for it, explaining that he fought a similar effort in 2006 as President of the Washington D.C. School Board. “I fought against it in D.C., but for the reason that the citizens didn’t get a chance to vote on the issue,” he said. “It wasn’t an issue on the campaign either.”
If voters reject mayor control, Bobb suggested a far more radical scenario. “The other option, given where we are, would be federal receivership over the Detroit Public Schools,” he said.
Since his appointment a year ago, Bobb aggressively targeted waste and unnecessary spending, but he said last month the district is “still under water” and acknowledges the deficit has actually grown under his watch to a projected $317 million.
“We’ve grown our deficit only because we wanted to do more for kids in the classroom,” he said.
Other highlights of the interview:
On corruption: The Detroit Free Press reported this weekend on Stephen Hill, a former DPS department chief who allegedly scammed the district by diverting more than $57 million in school funds to vedors who did little in return. Bobb cited the case as yet another example of corruption previously allowed to run rampant in the district. “I’ve managed cities — large cities — but the level and cesspools of corruption is almost a lifestyle for some individuals in Detroit and in the Detroit Public Schools.” Bobb also said additional indictments related to theft and corruption should be coming in the next couple of weeks.
Olive branch to the Board of Education: Bobb this week sent a letter to School Board President Otis Mathis this week in an attempt to end a hard-fought battle over academic control, saying he’d meet regularly with the board and asking Mathis to drop the lawsuit the board filed against him last year. While the letter was a nice gesture, Bobb warned he’s not going to roll over. “If you want to fight, I’ll fight,” he said of the board. “I don’t want anyone to be mistaken in that regard. But by the end of the day, it’s all about the kids. We have to have a very strong academic program.”
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