Diane spent the first 3 years stabilizing the school, and began the complete curriculum/attitude/mentality (whatever you want to call it) in her 4th year as Principal. Her plan was ambitious, wild and crazy.  After all, just so we’re clear, Diane was advocating for deeper arts immersion into school curriculum at a time when arts programs were drying up every single day.  Here willingness to go against the tide and stand up for arts education is paying off.  Shortly after the program was introduced, students really started enjoying it and faculty were  seeing results.

What role should the arts play in education?  Do you think it’s important enough to be at the center of curriculum?

Stuart H. Felkner

“This grant will help us continue the work we have started in supporting, developing and evaluating teachers using multiple measures,” said Marco Petruzzi, CEO of Green Dot Public Schools. “We are proud of our record of working collaboratively with our teachers, giving them the support they need to make teaching a rewarding and fulfilling career, and providing our students with the best classroom experience possible.”

Here’s some quick reference resources for more information about the Teacher Incentive Fund.

Los Angeles Recipients (complete list of TIF award recipients)

$27.8 million to Aspire Public Schools
$11.7 million to Green Dot Public Schools
$8.9 million to Alliance College-Ready Public Schools
$11 million to National Institute for Excellent in Teaching

Description of TIF Program (Teacher Incentive Fund, Ed.gov)

This program supports efforts to develop and implement performance-based teacher and principal compensation systems in high-need schools.

Goals include:
Improving student achievement by increasing teacher and principal effectiveness
Reforming teacher and principal compensation systems so that teachers and principals are rewarded for increases in student achievement
Increasing the number of effective teachers teaching poor, minority, and disadvantaged students in hard-to-staff subjects
Creating sustainable performance-based compensation systems.

We wish Green Dot and all recipients of the Teacher Incentive Fund the very best. It will be exciting to follow their progress.

Stuart H. Felkner

Now lets pretend I’m in high-school.  My morning follows a similar pattern to the “real me” except that after the 3rd snooze alarm I open up up my Facebook app and get caught up on the daily gossip.  On the bus to school I have one headphone in my ear playing my buddies Spotify mix while simultaneously playing Scramble with Friends.   As my brain starts to fire on all synapses I walk through the school gates where I’m forced to put any technology away or it will be confiscated. Like Morpheus being pulled out of the Matrix, I “power down” and prepare myself for another boring day in the classroom.

Schools are stuck in the dark ages with their number two pencils, scantron testing and heavy, environmentally unfriendly, hard-bound textbooks.  While the world runs on wireless smartphones, video chats, Dropbox, and emails, students sit in classrooms memorizing multiplication tables on a whiteboard and flipping through vocabulary words on paper flashcards.  Education is well overdue for a spark of innovation and a complete facelift.  It is one of the last giant markets to be disrupted by technology and we are right at the brink of some very exciting changes.

At the Microsoft CEO Summit discussion on innovation in education featuring Bill Gates, Sal Khan, and Bror Saxberg, Sal pointed out that we are at an “inflection point in history” where the traditional educational model and the institutions that support it are being challenged.   Charter schools such as KIPP, Green Dot and Rocket Ship are leading this change with blended learning, flipped classroom and a data driven culture.  Even though the use of technology in these schools is still largely experimental, the results are overwhelmingly positive.  This has resulted in the emergence of a new technology frontier– Edtech.

For profit and non-profit technology companies such as Khan Academy, Kaplan INC and Edmodo are further fueling this change.  They are developing innovative ways to teach students with video lessons, provide cost effective upper level tutoring sessions and foster a collaborative environment that puts the classroom online.   Thirty more startups in the Edtech space shared their products, services and platforms at LAUNCH: Education & Kids Conference on June 12th and 13th.  These companies aim to disrupt education at the first ever LAUNCH event put on specifically for Edtech.    To quote Jason Calacanis, founder of LAUNCH, serial entrepreneur and angel investor, “This is our first education-focused event, and I believe we are at the start of something very, very big”.

Responsibly got  the opportunity to attend this conference.  Here are a few of our favorite companies from LAUNCH Education & Kids:

1.  SMALLab Learning: Its like Xbox Kinect with the added bonus of actual learning

SMALLab’s flagship product is the Situate Multimedia Arts Learning Lab, hence the name SMALLab.  This is an embodied learning environment where motion-capture technology tracks students’ 3D movements as they learn in interactive space.  Graphs, equations, and physics concepts come to life right in front of them and in real time.  Not only does it look like a ton of fun and like it could even hold my attention, student learning gains were significantly higher compared to regular classroom instruction.

2. Sifteo: Building Blocks just got fun again

Sifteo gets your brain and hands working together. Use your hands to move, shake, flip, rotate and neighbor your Sifteo cubes as you exercise your spatial reasoning, word-finding, pattern-matching and math solving abilities. Each set of three connects to a local computer that runs customizable games to target learning disabilities. This could be a real effective resource in special-needs classes.

3. JoyTunes

Starting in 3rd grade, my mom made me join the school orchestra. I had two choices of instruments: Violin or Cello. Since I rode the bus home everyday and couldn’t begin to imagine lugging a giant cello with me, I chose the violin. Much to my parents joy and excitement, I picked up the violin rather quickly and actually enjoyed it so much that I asked for private lessons. After 3 years of dedication and study, I discovered a basketball and abandoned my violin in pursuit of glory and fame in the NBA. Maybe if JoyTunes was around back then I would have found playing music to be more fun and worthwhile.
JoyTunes uses interactive video games controlled by regular instruments to help children and adults learn to play real music on real instruments. They are solving the problem for 85% of the population who “wished they had learned to play an instrument” but never got past the frustrating first steps of learning to play.

My best experience as a teacher in 2012: taking seventy first graders hiking in Franklin Canyon. While that might sound to some like one of Dante’s levels, it was an awesome experience. Only a few of the students had ever been to a national park or ever gone hiking, and the field trip completely enamored them with the great outdoors. We cemented this fascination with an environmental science and justice unit that followed. The trip to the Franklin Canyon enabled my students to make a tangible, personal connection with what they were learning.  Students could explain to me the necessity of recycling because they understood that paper came from trees like the ones they saw in Franklin Canyon. They connected their unique experiences with nature with what we learned about in our textbooks. On the hike, for example, a docent mesmerized the students when she used a plant to create soap in front of their eyes.  When we discussed deforestation in the Amazon and the extinction of medicinal plants a few weeks later, 6 year old Carlos said, “Plants are really useful! They make soap and save us! We need to take care of them.” That life lesson does not materialize from words printed on a page. Students further created personal scrapbooks of photographs they had taken juxtaposed with pictures of their feet. This was a tangible expression of “Take only photographs, leave only footprints.” Students further took ownership of their role by writing on the final page of the scrapbook exactly how they would be “heroes for the earth.”  Promises to pick up any litter and declarations to try to use reusable dishes rather than paper showed how much students had internalized the trip and ensuing lessons. I can guarantee that students would not feel so passionately without the experiences afforded to them through this trip. The generosity of Responsibly and its network of donors allowed the classroom environmental justice to come alive for my students so that they can now be Heroes for the Earth!

-Sandy Russell
TFA Teacher at Futuro College Prep

Starting next week, Responsibly will be taking up a more permanent resident at Hub LA and utilizing their workspace so this partnership couldn’t have come at a better time.  We are looking forward to surrounding ourselves with likeminded entrepreneurs who believe that making money and doing good don’t have to be mutually exclusive.  More information about the Hub LA can be found on their website here.

If you can find the time on Friday from 5-8pm, stop by Hub LA office for a casual discussion and networking event.  We’ll be sharing a little about Responsibly and talking about education.  Who knows, maybe we’ll even solve the education crisis right then and there.

The process of getting funding for a charter school is not an easy one. First an implementation stature must be approved by both the state and federal law in order to receive funding. After a charter has been granted state and federal sanction it must be approved by the board of education located within the sponsoring district of the charter school. After the charter has been approved, getting the funding for the school is a whole separate process.

My mother has been teaching at a charter school for two years and her school has still not received funding from the state of Oregon. The charter school at which my mother works is in the middle of nowhere. The town she works in is named Mosier, Oregon. Mosier, Oregon has a population of 430 people and not much else. When my mom began work at Mosier, the school’s charter had just been approved; however the state of Oregon currently does not have the money from the federal government for charter school funding. The school in the last two years has only received $60,000 of the schools allotted $185,000 from the federal government.

Last year the teachers at the Mosier charter school did not have funding for books and had very few classroom supplies. This year the school has 25 copies of each book that are shared between about 60 students from three different classrooms. My mother works 6am to 5am with no breaks and the school cannot afford teacher benefits. Because there is no principal, administration, or secretary at the Mosier charter school, the teachers are in charge. The average teacher salary is also substantially lower than my yearly college tuition.

It is not easy to start a charter school and it is not easy to work at one either. Without teacher benefits or even lunch breaks it is difficult for me to understand why anyone would want to teach at a charter school. My mom, however, loves it. She can teach her students any way she wants. On Thursdays she takes her students exploring. Sometimes they walk up to 15 miles in one day. Last week she took them to a court and a museum. My mother would not give up her job for anything and stated, “If I could live life over I would have still chosen to be a teacher, for the knowledge we give to our students at Mosier charter school is immeasurable.”

Pitzer College ’14
Lily Hammer

Until College, I have only attended public school. Now, I attend Claremont Mckenna
College, a very wealthy private school located east of LA; however, I began my education in
a free day care center in downtown San Francisco, then moved on to an elementary school
located on Treasure Island, only to then move once more to the San Francisco East Bay and
enter a fairly decent school district. While I was making my way through the public education
system, I latched on to the musical education that was offered at the third grade and then
afterschool sports and clubs in middle school and high school. Later, I submerged myself in
multiple honors/AP courses that were offered throughout high school.

I was able to graduate high school with enough extracurricular activities and honors
classes to be able to qualify admission to elite schools and universities. I believe this will not be
the case for my brother, a young boy who is 2/3 of his way through the 5th grade. Statistics on
budget cuts aside, if you weren’t aware of how public education is failing our nation’s youth,
this should provide you with a new perspective.

Elementary classes in my former school district have grown to the new standard of
around 35-40 students in one class, with only one teacher. In my brother’s 5 th grade class,
there are 36 students. One instructor is not enough to keep 36 energetic kids paying attention
to the lesson. Most of the time, much of the teacher’s time and energy is wasted on keeping
the kids quiet and discouraging side conversations. This does not suggest that today’s youth is
much “wilder” than generations before, but instead that classes—especially for lower grades—
lack their former structure and effectiveness as a learning environment.

School sponsored music education is practically nonexistent in my former school district.
If one wishes their child to learn how to play a musical instrument before the 5 th grade (an
option that is available sometimes) or more likely in the 6th grade, one must search for private
lessons. This singles out opportunities for lower income families—a very common demographic
of most public schools in California.

Moving on through middle school and high school, I have noticed that all my former
schools have severely limited their afterschool options and activities including funding for
clubs to function, sports, theater organizations, etc. These are some of the main activities that
colleges look for in applications: additional interests outside of an academic sphere that help
frame students perspectives and life ambitions.

My former high school has cut down graduation requirements. They are requiring that
students pay to participate in sports (eliminating again lower class families from participating
in which some situations, participation in sports leads to great scholarship opportunities), and
are further eliminating through budget cuts alternative language classes (such as German) or
arts classes (theater, glass art, wood shop). What I have personally seen and heard leads me
to wonder: how are young kids (like my brother) going to develop specific passions that will
drive them to go to college and achieve their dreams when their main means of expressing
themselves and exploring new things are gone?

We need to keep these educational projects, after school activities and sports alive in America’s schools.  They keep students excited about learning and out of detention.

Bojana Bozic

Responsibly Blogger

One of the main alternations to the system is its shift in focal point. Now, teachers strive to aid in the success of their students in these newly enforced state based standardized performance tests such as T.E.K.S, for the stakes are high not only for students’ progression but also for teachers’ job retention. Because of the focal shift, many of the previous concerns of a well-rounded education are dissipating; furthermore, schools deem extra-curricular and interactive programs as unnecessary. The shift initially seems to be austere reform to a more intense and rigorous education. However this strict approach of testing and its new severe consequences of teacher job loss and student grade-level failure redefines education. Education is no longer learning but rather, test prep; moreover, the reforms cause classroom struggles in covering the vast variety of concepts that will be on the test, and in many cases, all depth and rigor is lost.

Noureen Nanjee

Claremont Mckenna Student

Stuart Felkner Co-Founder

Exhibition Night at Da Vinci Design High School is an electric event where our students, across all of their classes, display their interdisciplinary projects for the community to see.  Throughout the semester, the students receive information through a variety of means from labs, to poetic analyses, with all of this culminating in a tangible project that demonstrates the students’ learning in an applied manner.  This model of education emphasizes hands-on learning, critical thinking, teamwork, and presenting one’s findings.

Exhibition is always an exciting time around our campus because our students work tremendously hard all year and this is their night to show off.  Our project, “Brave New Voices”, sought to make the students’ activism-inspired poems heard through speakers they built.  We went through the process of designing, redesigning, and testing our speakers over the course of two weeks and arrived at phenomenal final products.  The kids put in a remarkable effort and it was great to see them take ownership of their ambitious, yet very successful, projects.  Nights like exhibition reassure me that there are still progressive efforts to develop the necessary skills our students need to become the leaders of tomorrow.

Alain Bonnie
Teach for America
Physic Teacher Da Vinci School

I, along with 16 of my fellow college students (all part of our school’s service club, Rotaract) completed an international service project in Panama City, Panama. We had been planning this trip all year figuring out logistics, funding, planning our project and so on. By using our school’s extensive resources, we had managed not only to get enough grants to fully fund our trip, but also have enough time to raise donation money for the organizations that we were working with.

We worked with a local NGO in the Casto Viejo barrio helping rebuild a community center, which not too long ago had been the area’s center of gang activity. Evidence of which could be seen by symbols of political repression graffitied on the decayed walls.  Thanks to an initiative by the Panamanian government, the area of Casto Viejo has been cleaned of gang violence and small business have started throughout. Nevertheless, poverty and education continue to be critical to the area. The building we were working in had been converted to a fledging community center for children and single mothers. Our task was to expand this community center and help refurbish a theater to be used for children practice performing arts, for women to empower themselves through real-life scenario skits, and for the community to have its first public space to screen movies. Along with this, our group volunteered for an organization called FUNDRADER. This organization is a local government initiative, which helps people learn English.

In only a short span of 10 days, our group succeeded at accomplishing these two tasks and much more. We also made a long lasting connection with the area of Casto Viejo, donated over $1,300 to both organizations and were also invited to meet with the Panamanian Rotary Club to talk about our future involvement in the area. We all came back home inspired, humbled and eager more than ever to work on sustaining our relationship with the area of Casto Viejo and the NGOs that we worked with.

Utilizing a break, whether that is over summer vacation, spring break, etc., to go and complete a project for another community is something that any group of determined people (doesn’t have to be college students!) can accomplish. It is far more enriching and rewarding than a normal vacation. Seeing first hand how your time and effort—at least in my case—have helped increase the opportunities for dozens of disadvantaged children and abused women can be a life changing experience.

Planning a trip like this is no more difficult than planning a international vacation. Money for travel, lodging, food, etc., is always a big concern. There are ways to get funding- apply for grants from your local Rotary Club (contact them to see if there are any community service projects happening in the future- everyone loves volunteers!), look into NGOs that work in that area, or reach out to family and friends. If you are a college student- check to see if your school’s research institutes and clubs will help subsidize your expenses. There are many ways to reach out in the community and fundraise for your cause. As for lodging, if you are abroad, look into hostels! When traveling in big groups, 8+ people, Hostels usually give out special discounts. For example, our group’s hostel in Panama City gave us a special deal on breakfast-$3.50 per person per day for a full, freshly cooked breakfast! Food costs in most developing countries are very cheap- save money on your overall food expense by skipping out on touristy restaurants; eat locally from small restaurants and food venders. Our group of 17 managed to get a great deal from a local restaurant in Casto Viejo—Café Rene—a 5 course dinner for only $8.50 per person!

The first step in a successful service project is to ask yourself, what are you most passionate about? Find a topic that you connect with personally and build up from there. Find some friends, work together and experience first hand how a little bit of help can go a long way.

Bojana Bozic

Responsibly Blog Writer

Claremont Mckenna College, ‘14

The term “dropouts” often evokes ideas such as deviance, dysfunction, cultural deficiency,
and an individual lack of drive. Society puts blame on individuals who dropout of high school,
even though the blame should be placed on school. The failing of schools to provide equal
access to resources and educational needs leads to higher dropout rates. The highest dropout
rates are among students of color who feel discrimination, stereotyped, or excluded. Students
who also fall in the bottom 20 percent of all family incomes are six times more likely to drop
out than students in the top 20 percent. Dropout rates are also highest among urban areas,
24.5 percent. Students have reported in past surveys that they “dropout” due to problems with
school performance, engagement, early pregnancy, economic responsibilities, and marriage.
Dropouts also report dissonance between what students need and what schools provide,
a cultural dissonance often exists as well. According to the Hispanic Dropout Project, many
Latinos students felt encouraged by teachers and school administrators to stop coming to
school due to overcrowding in urban community public schools. The point I am trying to make is
that dropout implies individual blame, not the lack of support, care, and funding that student’s
need. As observed by Dale Mann (1987), the concept dropout implies that children fail to learn
whereas the concept of push-out implies school fail to teach.

Lily Hammer
Pitzer College class of 2014

Source:
Dill, Bonnie Thornton., and Ruth E. Zambrana. Emerging Intersections: Race, Class, and
Gender in Theory, Policy, and Practice. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2009. Print.

It saddens me that recent budget cuts to Texas’ public education have resulted in a
decrease or altogether elimination of such formative excursions. The impact of field trips is
immeasurable. Field trips allow children to observe how abstractions taught in school come
alive in the real world. A field trip to the Zoo might inspire a future biologist, an adaptation of a
Shakespearean play might unearth a future novelist, or a visit to Dallas’ 6th Floor Museum might
influence a student’s decision to pursue a degree in History (as it did in my case).

Unfortunately, these budget cuts do not only negatively impact the students, but
according to an article published in The New York Times these cuts also harm local museums.
Dallas’ Museum of Nature and Science (the place where I first grasped the concept of
homeostasis) has felt the impact of state budget cuts and has even, “received several donations
specifically for subsidizing field trips.” Despite these efforts to welcome curious and eager
students, costs of transportation alone are too high for local public schools to accept the
charity.

I strongly believe in the positive impact of organizations such as Responsibly. I can only
hope that field trips and other creative projects continue to exist so that young students can
encounter the same excitement about pursuing an education that I have been so fortunate to
experience.

Elise Hansell
Freshman at Claremont McKenna College