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TABLE OF
CONTENTS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
“[T]he school of the future requires precisely what bureaucracy
inhibits: creativity, flexibility, innovation, and originality. The school of
the future also requires accountability for results. And if schools are
responsible for results they must be free to achieve them as their talents and
energies dictate.”
John Murphy & Denis P. Doyle,
2001
Former County Superintendent, Prince George County, Education
writer and analyst, respectively
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The Emerging Modes of Delivery,
Certification, and Planning Working Group was charged with:
- Identifying ways in which emerging information technologies can facilitate a
more efficient and effective distribution of education services, and more
cost-effective use of facilities.
- Identifying best teaching and learning practices from emerging
organizational forms, such as charter schools and community partnerships, and
exploring how these best practices can best be replicated
systemically.
- Identifying methods for certifying learner competencies that are highly
responsive to learner needs and that permit customization of student educational
plans that can expedite achievement of their educational goals.
- Identifying sensible, long-term remedies for ongoing systems planning, for
the modeling of reform alternatives, and for short and long range forecasting of
educational change.
- Identifying ways to better coordinate the administration and delivery of
noncredit and adult education.
Four overarching principles
capture the key themes that must be applied in transforming California’s
PreK-University education system: equity and access; flexibility to meet learner
needs; quality and accountability; and coordination, cooperation, and planning
for a seamless delivery system. The recommendations presented in this report are
categorized by section as well as these four guiding principles.
SECTION I — EMERGING MODES OF
INSTRUCTIONAL DELIVERY
Equity and Access
- The State should ensure that educational institutions provide multiple modes
of delivery, including applying technologies, to ensure meaningful access for
all populations and individuals throughout their lives.
- The State should ensure long-term, continuous support that will result in
access to technology by all institutions regardless of how remote the location
of the learner.
- The State should encourage technology that aims for simplicity in design,
supports flexibility, is financially feasible, is measured through outcomes and
assessment, and allows users to enhance its applications.
Flexibility to Meet Learner
Needs
- The State should provide funding for institutional development of
distributed learning.
Quality and
Accountability
- The State should support the ongoing professional development of all staff
in technology applications, to ensure they have the skills to help students
develop the technology skills, knowledge, and aptitudes needed for lifelong
success.
Coordination, Cooperation and
Planning
- The State should take the lead in developing educational technology
partnerships that include the public, private, non-profit, and for-profit
sectors.
- The State should encourage local education agencies to establish
partnerships with utilities, telecommunication companies, software and hardware
providers, and others to facilitate functional universal access to
technology.
- The State should encourage cross-segmental collaboration and dialogue among
teachers at the same levels, to improve instructional
delivery.
SECTION II — EMERGING
ORGANIZATIONAL FORMS
Flexibility to Meet Learner
Needs
- The State and local education agencies should offer incentives to teachers
who put learning within the community or environmental context of their
students.
- The State and local education agencies should encourage innovative emerging
organizational forms, including charter schools that are standards-based and
assessed against those standards on an ongoing basis.
- The State should set aside a pool of funds to encourage the creation of
small schools in K-12 education.
Coordination, Cooperation, and
Planning
- The State and communities should establish incentives for joint development
and use of school facilities with cities and counties, including libraries,
classrooms, and recreational and community space.
- New construction should be linked to the community, and better links should
be established with the community in existing schools.
- The structures should be in compliance with the same building codes
applicable to other buildings, such as libraries and government offices.
- Technology should support distributed learning in these and other
settings.
- The State should establish an Innovation Fund to support innovative projects
and intersegmental collaboration in
education.
SECTION III —
ASSESSMENT
Quality and
Accountability
- Institutions should assess and document instructional innovations, outcomes,
and achievement.
- The State and local education agencies should assure that accountability
expectations and measures for assessment and testing are made public and
understandable for all participants in the system. Any assessment used for
‘high-stakes’ decisions and consequences should have measurement
validity and reliability, and should reflect the level at which knowledge and
skills are gained from appropriate instruction.
- The State should encourage schools and postsecondary institutions to use
test results from one set of instruments in multiple ways to avoid over-testing
learners, although high stakes decisions about student placement and promotion
should not be made on the basis of a single test.
Coordination, Cooperation and
Planning
- The State should encourage creation, by 2005, of a digital learning
portfolio for each learner that would allow the student to move through a
variety of coordinated delivery systems, regardless of the provider.
SECTION IV —
CERTIFICATION
Flexibility to Meet Learner
Needs
- The State should identify an entity to develop a common set of requirements
for certificates to be developed by a consortium of partners, including
education institutions, employers, and community-based organizations.
SECTION V — FORECASTING AND
PLANNING
Coordination, Cooperation, and
Planning
- The State should conduct an annual forecast, through a designated entity, of
education trends and needs, including elements critical to state policy-making
and resource allocation.
- The State should develop all-electronic data collection processes by the
year 2005 that would make minimal demands on school districts while providing
sufficient information for policy decisions.
- The State should develop unique identifiers for critical elements of the
educational system when continuity and cross-correlation of information is
important, particularly (1) students, (2) instructors, and (3)
institutions.
SECTION VI — ADULT
CONTINUING EDUCATION
Equity and
Access
- The State should establish a funding base adequate to the increasing
challenges facing California’s Adult Continuing Education System.
Flexibility to Meet Learner
Needs
- The State should develop a broad set of program categories that allow for
the substantial flexibility necessary to meet local needs of adult learners.
- Proposed categories include Life Management Skills, Civics Participation,
Workforce Learning, and Foundational/Academic Skills Development.
Quality and
Accountability
- The State should expand adult continuing education course standards to
include student performance measures such as those developed by the National
Skill Standards Board, the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary
Skills (SCANS), and Equipped for the Future.
- The State should support an accountability system for adult continuing
education students, emphasizing student performance and rewards for institutions
for achievement.
- The State should support the ongoing professional development of all staff
who work with adult learners to enable the students to develop the skills,
knowledge, and aptitudes for life-long successes.
Coordination, Cooperation, and
Planning
- The State should review the governance structure for adult continuing
education, including the role of the Joint Board Committee on Noncredit and
Adult Education, with the goal of achieving a seamless delivery system among
multiple providers that ensures a smooth transition for those adult learners
continuing on to formal education, pursuing other goals, or entering the
workforce.
- The State should develop a mechanism for the reciprocity of instructional
credentials, based on minimum qualifications, between the adult education and
noncredit systems to allow instructors to teach in either or both
systems.