21st+Century+Promise+Background

Below is the 21st Century Promise Background information in a Word document. The full text follows the document.





Over the past several years th e school districts of the Beaver Valley in Southwestern Pennsylvania have been working to redesign teaching and learning for students across the region. The Beaver Valley is home to over 170,000 residents with 73,500 households in which 28.9% have children of school age. Thirty percent of the residents are under the age of 24 and 57% are under the age of 44. The population base is divided between rural communities and two cities, 30 boroughs, and 22 townships. Education in the region is delivered through 15 public school districts, 14 private schools, four charter schools, four colleges and one community college. The community possesses enormous potential for growth and vitality. The culture of this hard working region is and has been the backbone of all the creative and innovative thinking that has personified educational reform in the region over the past decade. The innovative thinking began with an effort to construct a new vision high school that was designed to provide Beaver Valley students with an opportunity to bridge content in math, science and technology with “real world’ problem solving strategies through project-based learning experiences that reached out into the communities connecting students with both the private and public sectors. This concept shifted expectations of the role of high school in preparing students for the future. It set the stage for more creative thinking.

In 2007 the 15 school districts in the region along with the Beaver Valley Intermediate Unit received a $10,000 planning grant from The Grable Foundation to construct a major educational reform proposal for the federal government. This planning grant yielded a proposal and subsequent three year award totaling $8.6 million dollars for an innovative inter-district educational program called The Beaver County Voluntary Public School Regional Choice Initiative. All fifteen districts participated in this project, marking a significant step in the collaboration of multiple school districts and communities in furthering educational programming in the Beaver Valley region. Among other innovations, the Beaver County Voluntary Public School Regional Choice Initiative provides students the options of taking courses across school district boundaries, increasing the potential for each district to meet the needs of diverse student populations and for sharing important and critical resources, talents and materials across the region. This produced a level of choice for families and students never available in the region prior to the Voluntary Public School Regional Choice Project. This project further stretched the thinking and vision of the communities.

Each of these innovative steps has been unique and groundbreaking in the communities of the Beaver Valley. Each has added value to the educational programs in the region and nurtured the continuous learning philosophy of the school districts and communities in the region. Perhaps what has been most impacting along this journey of reform however is the fact that demands of a global market place on skills and knowledge bases has been relentless and the subsequent global pressure for students to remain competitive in that market place has exponentially increased challenges for schools in the Commonwealth. Consequently, if future educational programs in Beaver Valley are to be successful, they will need to embrace and execute creative thinking and planning. They will need to establish opportunities that not only meet needs but offer a new vision and new pathways for students. They will need to transfer 21st century educational theory into practice and provide learning experiences that prepare students to successfully navigate those new pathways. This is what the 21st Century Promise is focused to address. It is the third generation of visionary thinking for redefining teaching and learning in the Beaver Valley.

For the Beaver Valley, as in most communities across the country, it is becoming obvious that there exists a need for new strategies and new answers to prevailing questions if students are to succeed in a global arena. The 21st century needs are challenging the structures of teaching and learning we held for generations. Innovative, intuitive and accessible technology for populations worldwide, growing economies spurring increased educational opportunities in regions across the planet and a whole new platform for global connectivity are applying significant pressure on the education system in this country and specifically in the Beaver Valley. Although the community demonstrates potential for growth and vitality, the current economic conditions have generated significant concern in the communities of the region. Amidst this economic challenge it would be easy for these communities to dig in and wage a battle for economic survival. However, instead of surviving these communities look to retool, rebuild and reinvent themselves. They continue to look forward not backwards. The world we are preparing students to meet is changing rapidly, far more rapidly than our current education processes. If this issue is not addressed the consequences can be significant socially, economically and politically.

 Just to share some examples of this dramatic, dynamic and deictic change we face here are some facts. According to Forrester Research, at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will shift from the U.S. to low-cost countries like India, China and Russia by 2015. Nations such as Japan, Germany and the UK alone will lose some 25,000 IT jobs and upwards of 30,000 finance positions to India and other developing countries by 2015. Europe will lose 1.2 million jobs to offshore locales.

These are powerful and motivating statistics to say the least. They will cause us to review our current educational programs, rethink and reinvent strategies to refocus our education to prepare students for different roles, different careers with different sets of knowledge and skills to compete in a very different world with rapidly changing rules of engagement.

Peter Drucker – coined the phrased “knowledge worker” years ago. He defined this term as people who get paid for putting to work what one learns in school rather than for their physical or manual skills. What distinguished this group from the rest of the work force for him was their ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytic knowledge. He was describing the white collar worker, the individuals who work in the areas where knowledge drives economy and where brawn is replaced by inventive and innovative technologies. For the better part of the 20th century education has championed the role of the “knowledge worker.” The road to success was paved by doing well in school. Doing well in school has meant scoring well on the assessments that defined knowledge. Just for a moment, let’s consider the tollbooths that most Americans must pass through on the way to this knowledge work. Tollbooths that monitored progress on this educational roadway – PSAT, SAT, GMAT, LSAT and MCAT just to name a few. It is a litany of assessments built upon the kind of knowledge that it takes to succeed in a linear thinking world. These assessments have been used to define not only success but to also identify potential and categorize our workforce. These gates to the future require logic and analysis and they reward test-takers for zeroing in on a single correct answer. The exercise is linear, sequential and bounded by time. Over the last century, it has been these kinds of skills and this level of thinking that was sought, acknowledged and rewarded. The 21s Century has unveiled and different scenario.

In the face of a shift in the source of these “knowledge workers” from American offices to offshore locations where these “knowledge workers” perform their tasks for far less than our American workforce, as educators we must retool and prepare students differently to meet this rising challenge. We will need not only new tollbooths; we will need new roads leading to new places. We must begin to recognize that the paradigm has shifted. Just as factory workers in the second half of the 20th century had to master new sets of skills and learn how to bend pixels instead of steel, many of today’s “knowledge workers” will likewise have to command a new set of aptitudes. They will need to do what workers abroad cannot do equally well for much less money. They will need to forge relationships rather than execute transactions, tackle novel challenges instead of solving routine problems and synthesize the big picture rather than analyze a single component. They will need to be facile with all kinds of technologies and flexible to respond to rapidly changing technologies. They will need to infuse technology into the very fiber of life’s daily rituals and routines and do this with seamless effort. This will require a new kind of education, a new commitment by communities to address a whole new set of challenges in a world where creative thinking, technological prowess, problem-solving, inquiry and communication skills will be paramount to succeed. We will need to produce new learners, with creative and visionary thinking potential, learners who can work interdependently to marshal ideas, resources and effort to meet volatile global conditions.

So what would new 21st Century blueprints look like? That is an interesting question! To meet the new challenges, new thinking will require new kinds of blueprints that integrate the dynamics of teaching and learning across a broad spectrum and incorporate concepts that replace the rituals and routines of the past. The blueprints will need to break down the walls that separate school from the community, business and post secondary institutions. The new blueprints will need to identify the technologies that drive the global networks, underpin the acquisition of knowledge and mange the flow of information that drives decision-making. The blueprints will need to frame, design and demonstrate how to produce these new “knowledge workers” and avoid even more long lists of isolated content and linear thought. The curriculum documents must show how the learner is expected to use content to accomplish meaningful performances to transfer linear, sequential content knowledge into insightful strategies. In essence, we need to prepare students to turn that linear data into information, then turn information into knowledge, then turn the knowledge into wisdom and finally to turn wisdom into performance.

The 21st Century Promise represents a commitment among educators, students, parents, policy makers and funders from fourteen (14) Beaver Valley school districts (Aliquippa, Ambridge, Beaver, Beaver Falls, Blackhawk, Central Valley, Ellwood City, Freedom, New Brighton, Riverside Beaver, Rochester, South Side Beaver and Western Beaver) along with the Beaver Valley Intermediate Unit to build upon current program foundations. Past effort has established a footprint for the future, now it is time to look deep into the core of long held beliefs to construct a new and innovative education process that will produce career and college ready students skilled in meeting the new demands of a global marketplace.

Standing on the interventions of the past several years, the 21st Century Promise will focus efforts on several key elements that will underpin the educational reform initiative. The first focal point will be constructing a vision of what 21st century education should look like and how it should function. From the research five (5) pillars have been identified that we believe provide the critical supports for 21st century education. Those pillars are:

(1) Curriculum / Instruction / Assessment, (2) Learning Environment, (3) Learning Organizations, <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">(4) Leadership <span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">(5) Business and Community Partnerships

<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">At the heart of the reform movement in each of these pillars lie several key components: (1) to be successful, each pillar must be aligned to core elements that define success for students in the 21st century, (2) the core elements must be defined through specific criteria that identify expectations and goals, (3) protocol must be constructed that establishes processes and defines deliverables necessary for success, and (4) benchmarks must be established to measure achievement and monitor progress. To accomplish this, the 21st Century Promise Proposal will: (a) rethink curriculum across the content areas and define explicit methodologies for effective use of student data to differentiate learning and monitor student growth, (b) identify learning environments that are not only safe, but challenging, relevant and connected to the world outside the classroom walls, (c) provide insight into the constructs of learning organizations, competent, confident and committed to continue to challenge the status quo and embrace a continuous learning mission and vision, and (d) redefine leadership and provide opportunities for leaders to evolve and emerge from within the ranks of students, teachers and community. Without strong, creative, visionary leaders, the dreams of our 21st century classrooms will dissipate quickly. Finding, nurturing, and encouraging leadership that is not person oriented but distributed and shared by all is the goal.

<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The second focal point of the Promise Proposal addresses the critical need of designing a systemic protocol of continuous improvement that incorporates a self-assessment tool to guide and manage the process of educational reform at the community, district, school and classroom level. We believe this is a pivotal element of the Promise. The self-assessment protocol will be the mechanism for building capacity for each community to continue the learning and the reform long after the grant funds we seek have been expended. This process will generate a formal “Action Plan” that will drive the participation of each district and their work in the Promise. The Promise framework will include: (a) the design of a governance protocol to manage the project implementation throughout the duration of the grant award(s), (b) rubrics that will be used to measure impact of interventions and achievement of goals against the criteria included in each of the pillars, and (c) rubrics and benchmarks for the evaluation of the impact of the Promise Proposal implementation across the region.

<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The 21st Century Promise Proposal will light the lamp of reform once again in the Beaver Valley. It will provide the resources to imagineer a new tomorrow for the students and communities in the region.