John Warner is CEO of InnoVenture.com, a global Web platform helping people with big ideas attract resources they need. He is also a member of the SC Education Oversight Committee, responsible for overseeing public education accountability in the state.
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Jobs in our economy are polarizing into relatively high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-skill, low-wage jobs reflected in the increasing wage gap.
South Carolina has led the nation in public education accountability, and there has been sustained improvement in student performance over the past decade or so. Despite this, business leaders are crisscrossing the state saying that even if operated as designed, the public education system is obsolete, and too many South Carolina students are ill served. The rate of improvement must accelerate to meet the 21st-century needs of our state.
TransformSC is a business-led initiative to promote the transformation of public education. An international education leader invited to S.C. this fall, Sir Ken Robinson, noted that the form of public education prevalent all over the world was designed to produce workers for the industrial revolution. Even the most successful students are often not prepared for a globally connected economy that places a premium on creativity and innovation. Worse, some talented students who do not fit the one-size-fits-all approach to education emerge from the system convinced they aren’t smart, which haunts them the rest of their lives.
Current South Carolina public education accountability relying on high-stakes, end-of-the-year tests reflects this industrial model of education. The system provides no feedback to students and teachers throughout the year. It focuses exclusively on testing facts, which results in teaching to the test that drives out subjects like the arts where students learn to think critically and creatively. The system assumes that all students are at the same level at a given age, and that an individual student is at the same level in all subjects.
High-stakes, end-of-the-year tests too often result in high anxiety, frustration and burnout among teachers who feel they are not respected as professionals. The current system of accountability is inadequate to ensure that students are prepared with the knowledge and skills required for their success.
To transform public education, we must transform accountability. Education entrepreneurs emphasize they need the freedom to innovate. Educators in existing public schools emphasize they need the same flexibility offered to alternatives.
The General Assembly should adopt a new accountability system that relies primarily on assessments during the year that provide real-time data to students and teachers to improve their performance. It should balance assessments of facts, such as multiple-choice tests, with professional assessment by teachers of higher-order thinking skills, such as the evaluation of artistic works or science projects. The accountability system should provide flexibility for a student to advance through the standards at an individual pace.
This new accountability framework would provide existing public schools the real-time data and the flexibility to significantly improve their performance. This framework would not require existing schools that have made considerable investments in systems and training to radically change the way they operate overnight. At the same time, it would empower education entrepreneurs, including those in existing public schools, to transform education by creating radically new forms of personalized, technology-enabled learning, while continuing to meet state standards.
In a sentence, the South Carolina public education system, and the accountability system that supports it, should be transformed as follows: Learning must be personalized to each student, including project-based learning, real-time diagnostic assessments, and technology-infused instruction.
Personalizing learning allows students to advance through the standards at an individual pace, allowing advanced students to move faster and students requiring more time to master earlier standards before moving on to later ones. Perhaps initially, most classrooms would be managed much as they are now. Merely loading an existing classroom with technology likely will yield marginal improvements at best, because it doesn’t fundamentally change the way the classroom is managed. It is easy to imagine more radically personalized, technology-infused education, where teachers facilitate learning for individual students progressing at a pace appropriate to each student in each subject.
Students develop higher-order thinking skills through activities such as artistic works or science projects, which teachers professionally assess using rubrics to ensure consistency. NEXT High School is an example of a new model of education being developed around project-based learning.
For teachers to become the empowered professionals they need to be to transform education, most of the assessments should provide real-time data to teachers and parents so appropriate support can be provided to improve student learning. To the degree possible, summative data required by administrators and policy makers should be derived from these assessments during the school year. High-stakes, end-of-the-year tests should be reduced to the absolute minimum necessary.
A strong and growing consensus has formed among parents, educators, business leaders and community advocates that South Carolina public education must be transformed, not merely be improved, to adequately meet the needs of students. We all look forward to the day when visitors from across the country and around the world come to South Carolina to study what is widely recognized one of the world’s best public education systems.
