News & Views item - December 2011

 

 

Stanford's President: What It Will Take to Improve K-12 Schools (December 16, 2011)

John Hennessy in the latest issue of the Stanford Magazine writes that: "Education reform is a Stanford priority, and a national imperative... One of the most critical ways we can make an impact is in assuring an educated workforce for our future, and we can do that in part through our work to improve the educational outcomes in our nation's K-12 schools. If every student had a highly effective teacher for even three years in a row, we could nearly eliminate the achievement gap between student groups."

 

So, just exactly what is this very rich private university in cash strapped California doing to back up its president's fine words.

 

According to Professor Hennessy, the university has created "two new multidisciplinary centers — the Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA) and the Center to Support Excellence in Teaching (CSET) — that are providing innovative research and tools for educators and decision makers".

 

The object (mission if you like) is to determine how to prepare teachers "for the modern classroom." The Center to Support Excellence in Teaching has over the past three years worked with over 1,200 teachers and school administrators to try and determine just what those parameters are, in order to develop "professional development courses to help improve teacher quality. Recently, a set of districts and universities around the country has begun using CSET’s innovative online professional courses to help prepare more effective teachers".

 

In addition Stanford's president emphasises that "a key shortcoming has been the lack of data and sophisticated analysis to tell us what reforms are most needed and cost-effective," and thereby, the rationale for setting up the Center for Education Policy Analysis to process and analyse appropriate data with the view to "translating evidence into improvement by working directly with state and federal policy makers. Participating in the program are seven large school districts across the country serving nearly 2 million students, in cities including New York, Miami, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco and Oakland."

 

Both programs are working toward "long-term partnerships" with the aim to develop sustained leadership in order to maintain and further the improvements.

 

It's to early to judge the efficacy of the Stanford CSET and CEPA initiatives but it's worth noting that they are the effort of one university and there is no inherent reason one or more of Australia's Group of Eight mightn't, with appropriate drive, undertake similar programs of comparable scope.