Education Week - October 2, 2013 - 26

COMMENTARY
Looking Beyond Our Borders
For School Improvement Ideas
By Helen Janc Malone
A
I
s we move forward with the
implementation of the Common
Core State Standards, reauthorization
of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act, and
preparations for celebrating
the 60th anniversary of Brown
v. Board of Education, it is im-
perative that we stop for a moment and think
critically about what kind of educational system
we want for our children in the 21st century. And,
of equal importance, how do we get from here to
there? One way to approach this complex task is to
look outside ourselves, beyond the United States’
borders, and consider what other nations have
done or are doing to transform their educational
systems.
Why look globally for inspiration and ideas?
U.S. school reformers are designing innovative
approaches to educational improvement; however,
such strategies reside on the margins, as our
schooling system remains largely unchanged. We
have considerable work left to close the achievement
and opportunity gaps, to increase high school
graduation rates, and to boost college-completion
and career-training levels. Our students’ performance
on the Program for International Student
Assessment, or PISA, not only shows an average
standing among developed countries but also highlights
the differences across demographic lines,
further emphasizing the need to rethink what
learning supports we offer to our students, particularly
low-income students and students of color.
Although, as a nation, we have made progress
on student-learning outcomes, we appear to be
making incremental changes rather than finding
sustainable solutions to our pressing education
problems. Global perspectives might illuminate a
different path.
What lessons could we draw from other nations?

Finnish, Singaporean, and South Korean PISA
scores have been splashed across U.S. headlines,
leading to a national outcry to improve our education
system as a way to stay competitive and “win”
the international test-score race. However, when
we look deeper into the international benchmarking,
our debate appears to be bifurcated between
two sentiments: (a) that other countries are too
different for us to learn from them and, thus, we
should stick with domestic-only innovations; or (b)
that we could cherry-pick reforms applied by leading
education nations and transplant them in the
United States in hopes that the selected strategies
would turn our schools around. Either view presents
us with a false choice: to ignore other education
systems altogether or to look for a silver bullet
while disregarding contextual factors that interact
in complex societies.
Researchers from six continents, representing 15
countries, and I took on the challenge of unpacking
what lessons we could draw from international
benchmarking in concert with our domestic innovations.
In a recently published book, Leading Educational
Change: Global Issues, Challenges, and
Lessons on Whole-System Reform, we argue that
educational change cannot happen only at the top
but, rather, it must transform the learning process
throughout an entire system, inside classrooms,
within communities, within districts, and at state
and federal levels. We also argue that educational
change cannot happen in a piecemeal fashion. It
must simultaneously address instructional practices;
equity and educational justice; accountability
and assessment; and the role we, as a society, play
in supporting student learning and development.
What we, as a nation, ought to consider is that leading
countries address education comprehensively, integrating
several aspects of schooling simultaneously.
As my colleagues—including Andy Hargreaves,
iStockphoto/Natashin
>> INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
ON EDUCATION REFORM
A new blog inspired by the book Helen Janc Malone edited on
educational change launches this week. For the next five weeks,
leading researchers from around the world will discuss creating
positive change in K-12 education. To read the blog, please visit
www.edweek.org/go/malone.
What’s in Your Blend?
Schools Need to Step Up to Get More From Blended Learning
By Charles Mojkowski
t’s nearly impossible nowadays to buy a
cup of coffee without having to sort through
the several blends your local barista has
to offer. What started in the high-end coffee
shops to cater to the coffee aficionados
among us has driven even the local 7-Elevens
to offer a few blends, from bland to robust.
The secret is in combining beans of
different flavors to create the perfect taste experience
or, for a philistine like me, merely the appropriate
jolt of caffeine.
Schools are doing their own blending as well, not
with coffee beans, but with just the right mix of technology
and face-to-face instruction. It’s hard to find
a district that is not working on its own version of
blended learning. As I review what’s out there, however,
I am reminded more of bland instant coffee
than a double espresso.
Why am I disappointed? Because educators are
failing to exploit the new and emerging technologies
in ways that will give student learning opportunities
the jolt they need.
It’s hard to fault the technology, with its exponential
growth in capabilities. It drives cars, wins game
shows, and performs passable legal due diligence.
But, as Apple cautioned long ago, the importance
of technology is not technology. It is rather in the
nature of the partnership that humans form with
technology. And, as in any partnership, each partner
must bring something of value to the table.
So, what does technology bring to the table? We
need only to listen carefully to what technology says
it wishes to contribute. It is telling us that it can provide
access to a cornucopia of learning resources so
that anyone can learn anything at any level in any
place from anyone at any time.
That sounds promising, but all of that capability
must be matched by a worthy partner. And educators
have been far from worthy. To the blend, they add a
stale array of timeworn and tepid ingredients:
• A 20th-century school organizational structure;
• A fixation on providing the same learning outcomes
for every student;
• A focus on external motivational techniques;
• A rigid curricular scope and sequence for all stu-
dents;
• An asphyxiating and narrow assessment system;
and
• A separation of in-school from out-of-school
learning.
26 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 2, 2013 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary
All of these and many more features and components
are in direct contradiction to what the technology
is telling us it has to offer. It’s unrealistic
to expect that technology can make up for the inadequacies
of such a system. No, I fear that it’s as
Shakespeare’s Cassius observed: “The fault, dear
Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves that we
are underlings.”
And we have known of this bitter blend for years.
This statement was released by the National Council
of Teachers of Mathematics nearly 20 years ago:
“While efforts of the National Council of Teachers
of Mathematics have focused on guiding reform of
the teaching and learning of mathematics, we are
aware that there are numerous other reform efforts
with respect to current schooling practices. Schools,
as they exist in most communities today, are no longer
viable social agencies. The ways in which schools
are organized, staffed, governed, and financed are
products of a different social era in history.”
The essence of new and emerging technologies
and the directions in which they are taking learning
and work are in direct conflict with the fundamental
nature and structure of the existing system
of schools and schooling.
Perhaps that recognition is what prompted Ken-
“
Educators are
failing to exploit the
new and emerging
technologies in
ways that will give
student learning
opportunities the
jolt they need.”
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