Transcript Slide 1

AISGW 2009 Heads Conference
The New Leadership Landscape:
External and Internal Challenges for Today’s School Heads
Harbourtowne Resort & Conference Center
St. Michaels, MD
October 22-23, 2009
The New Leadership Landscape
Thomas Toch
Executive Director, Association of Independent Schools of Greater
Washington
[email protected]
www.aisgw.org
National Trends
Demographics
• U.S. school-age population expected to grow 39 percent by
2050, to 102 million
• Immigration driving growth; children born to immigrants after
2005 will account for a third of school-age population in 2050
• Absent immigration, school-age population would be 8 million
lower in 2050 than today
• Growth most pronounced among Latinos, rising from 20
percent of school-age population today, to 35 percent in 2050
Demographics
• Representation in school-age population of Non-Hispanic
whites to fall from 59 percent today to 40 percent in
2050
• Another key demographic driver: doubling of percentage
of jobs requiring education beyond high school, from 30
percent in 1975 to 63 percent by 2018
• As a result, a much larger segment of the education
industry will be doing same work that independent
schools do
“Disruptive Innovation”
• State departments of education are launching state-funded
virtual schools serving students within and beyond their
borders, key part of trend towards on-line learning
• Florida Virtual School, launched in 1997, teaches 90 courses,
including 10 APs, to 85,000 high school students
• Performance-based funding model: State pays FLVS after
student completes course
• It’s “supplemental” education: most students attend brickand-mortar schools and take on-line courses in addition to
traditional classes
“Disruptive Innovation”
• The 2008 book Disrupting Class predicts the rapid rise of
technology-based teaching, a “disruptive innovation”
• Using technology to customize learning to address the
different ways that students learn—Howard Gardner’s
multiple intelligences
• Christiansen’s prediction: 25 percent of high schools courses
taught on-line by 2014; over 50 percent by 2019
• Higher education: Stanford’s entire curriculum has been
available via Podcast since 2007. Within minutes of a
professor completing a lecture, Stanford posts it on-line.
Education’s Productivity Problem
• The desire to infuse technology into teaching is, of course,
partly a function of education’s affliction with Baumol’s cost
disease
• The phenomenon described by economist William Baumol,
whereby salaries rise despite an absence of productivity
increases to pay for them
• Teachers still take about the same amount of time to grade a
five-page paper as they did a hundred years ago
Education’s Productivity Problem
• At the institutional level, schools have become less
productive. It now takes more teacher-hours to educate a
student for a year, because of increasing numbers of
specialists on school faculties and the expansion of the
curriculum and extracurriculars
• The ratio of adults to students has dropped from 9.5-to-1 to 9to-1 over the past decade, according to NAIS figures
Education’s Productivity Problem
• That’s the single largest reason why, since 1985, the average
cost of an independent school education has increased 150
percent beyond the rate of inflation
• Inflation-adjusted family income has increased 20 percent
during the same period
• Only about 5 percent of families (incomes above $150,000)
can afford a single tuition at our most expensive schools
without financial aid
• Can independent education survive this trend? Should we
change the model? Can we change the model?
Redefining Quality in Higher Education
• There’s an expanding movement, funded by major
foundations like Gates, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and
Lumina, and supported by the Bush and now the Obama
administrations, to redefine the concept of quality in higher
education and introduce a value proposition
• Moving from metrics like wealth, fame and exclusivity, the
things measured by US News and other commercial rankings,
to measurements of the quality of teaching and learning
• The movement doesn’t like existing rankings, but only
because they rank the wrong things, inputs instead of outputs
Redefining Quality in Higher Education
• The accountability movement in public elementary and
secondary education has, of course, also sought to rate
schools on the basis of how much their students learn, taking
snap-shots of student performance using mostly multiplechoice tests of low-level skills—a strategy that culminated in
the No Child Left Behind Act, which has been widely
discredited as unfair to schools (NAEP math results released
last week found that achievement grew faster before NCLB)
Redefining Quality in Higher Education
• But a number of new, richer, more credible assessments are
being developed for use in higher education that measure
growth in student learning over the course of their
undergraduate careers
– Collegiate Learning Assessment, a non-subject-specific measure of
critical thinking, problem solving, and analytic reasoning
• Developed with foundation funding by respected university
researchers
• So the higher ed rankings movement is beginning to morph
into something different and more sophisticated
NCLB Reauthorization
• The forthcoming reauthorization of NCLB is likely to push the
elementary and secondary accountability movement in the
same direction, though how far is inclear
• Obama administration is pushing for abandonment of snapshot measures of school performance and replacement with
“value-added” metrics and has made the development of the
data systems needed to do value-added calculations a priority
of its $5 billion Race to the Top stimulus package
NCLB Reauthorization
• The administration is also stressing the creation of
internationally benchmarked standards and assessments and
has set aside $350 million to create such assessments
• Meanwhile, a wide range of richer, performance-based
student assessments are already in the pipeline, including the
Stanford-developed College and Work Readiness Assessment
and the forthcoming Ohio Performance Assessment System
• So, the accountability movement is not going away. Rather, it
has begun to evolve in ways that are more sympathetic to the
teaching and testing that take place in independent schools
Regional Trends
Demographics
• Between 2000 and 2007, nearly 100,000 people migrated
out of the Washington metro area
• But 253,000 foreign nationals arrived and now make up 21
percent of the region’s population (30 percent in
Montgomery Co, and half the county’s population speaks
English less than “very well”)
• Northern Virginia’s school-age population to be a third
higher by 2030. Latinos are expected to grow from 17 to
20 percent of school-age population; whites expected to
drop from 59 to 53 percent
Demographics
• Student population in the Maryland suburbs expected to rise
12 percent by 2030, but high school enrollment is expected to
drop 5 percent over the next five years
• District of Columbia student population expected to decline
14 percent by 2030
• Increasingly, the region’s students will be more diverse, less
facile with English, and from less-affluent families
Charter Schools
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Continue to expand in the District of Columbia
In 2009-10, nearly 60 schools educating 28,000 students
Compared to 44,000 students in traditional DCPS schools
One of largest concentrations of charter schools in the
country: a combination of bad public schools and substantial
funding
• No charters in Montgomery Country or Northern Virginia
• Trend: strongest charter networks trying to expand into K-12
systems