Ted Fujimoto: Seizing Educational Excellence By the Throat and Not Letting Go

I am very concerned about the charter movement but for another reason that may surprise some. In many jurisdictions, the charter authorizer teams and boards are sometimes the most bureaucratic bunch out of the public school system, which means that a charter must fit inside their box to be approved. I worry that we are creating a chartering environment where the most innovative and solid school designs can’t get approved by charter authorizers and the vanilla ones are.

What are your thoughts on the new ESEA rewrite?
I think there are more positives than negatives, and a huge improvement over its predecessor. I’m for any policies that make it easier for schools and classrooms to implement personalized, deeper learning pedagogy, such as project-based learning.

What I like is the recognition of the need for the creation of personalized learning environments that can support things like project-based learning, workplace learning, and internships, as well as innovative assessments that are more competency-based versus seat time. I also like the ability for states and local communities to have more power to align resources and policies to meet the needs of their communities and partner with community-based organizations.

I don’t mind and think that national standards that are calibrated with international ones are needed to prevent states from ‘dumbing down’ what kids should be able to know. But I do worry that the implementation of these standards in the classroom means pacing guides and standardized assessments, which is completely on a different planet than personalized learning. You can’t have it both ways.

What innovations in education have impressed you this year?
Successful innovations are ones that have broad impact. There are many great innovative practices and ‘things’ that happen in schools around the country every day, but most don’t last and fail to have a major impact because the system and environment they are in are toxic. Individual innovations have limited impact unless combined with a cohesively designed set of innovations to make a system.

What impresses me are two things: (a) communities that manage to change the system and their environment to be aligned and supportive of implementing innovations and (b) the groups that bring a whole-school design that bundles cohesively a system of innovations. Communities that have made significant progress include Napa County with NapaLearns, that have transformed all K-12 schools across their districts into deeper learning using the New Tech Network design.

The work of CELL (Center of Excellence in Leadership of Learning) at the University of Indianapolis, Innovative Schools of Delaware, and the state of Arkansas continue to be great examples of organizations and agencies that have helped communities across their states cultivate conditions to support and implement deeper learning whole-school designs in partnership with whole-school replication networks. I am working with a new set of school teams that are leveraging the 20 years of learning from the first-generation replication networks.

(Continued on next page)