This document discusses issues with the current education system and questions for transforming it. It argues that the traditional school model of standardized calendars, grade levels, and classrooms in boxes is outdated and does not prepare students for the future. It questions whether standardized testing, curriculum, and physical school infrastructure still make sense. It suggests education needs to be more personalized, integrated with communities, and focused on learning experiences rather than systems. The future of education requires rethinking models to better develop students' skills for a connected, rapidly changing world.

1. FuturEd: Questions to Consider about the Future of Education by Chris Shade
This session is based, in part, on the book Shift Ed: A Call to Action for
Transforming K–12 Education 1st Edition by David E. Houle and Jeff Cobb.
For more information, visit http://davidhoule.com/books/shift-ed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCGV1tNBoeU
Innovators are natural contrarians. (What box?) Here are a couple of
thoughts and questions you can use to arouse contrarian instincts.

2. The form of school right now is a box: boxes in a calendar, box buildings,
box classrooms. Boxes suggest borders, boundaries, and neatly defined
spaces and ideas, but in a world where borders and boundaries are
increasingly blurred, where ideas flow and change with a speed
unmatched in history, boxes are not the form upon which our schools
should be based, physically, psychologically, or intellectually.
The extent to which schools should have a standardized form at all is
perhaps one of the biggest questions with which we need to wrestle as
we consider the future of our educational system. The question is partly
about buildings and physical architecture, but it is more about
nonbuildings and physical architecture. As we have the increasing
freedom to access knowledge and educational resources through the
web, mobile phones, and other sophisticated communication devices, we
have to question what is gained—and what is lost—by confining our
children within four walls for pre-established periods of time to be fed
content that fits within a predefined set of measurements.
Why do we expect that shipping our children off to drab, confined,
linoleum-paved containment areas each day would result in the types of
motivated, creative individuals we need to carry our society forward in
this new century?
Technology advances not only greatly reduce the need for physical
infrastructure like traditional classrooms and libraries, they ensure that
the majority of learning activity going forward will happen across digital
networks and not within four walls.

3. Now that everything has moved to the cloud – a place where data and
applications are no longer confined to a specific server box, but
distributed across a far-flung network infrastructure…We need to do
much more than simply rearrange the chairs in our classrooms or knock
down a few walls. We need to break out of the box entirely.
A transformed school will not look like that brick building set apart from
the society it is intended to serve. A transformed school will be an
integrated part of the community and its students will be active
participants in and contributors to the community. A transformed school
will look more like life.
Schools must become community centric. The education of our young
must take place in a much more integrated way with the communities
they will be a part of as adults. There are two communities into which
schools must be fully integrated: they physical, local community in which
they serve children daily; and the virtual, global community to which they
connect.
There is no reason community libraries, community centers, and
community colleges could not share a common infrastructure. Currently,
each of these institutions has its own budget, buildings, and its own
bureaucracy. Even leaving aside the benefits of deeper connection and
integration, in an age of shrinking funding, for each of these institutions
to exist in a silo is madness.
At a minimum, we should encourage the availability of primary health
care providers in the schools for a few hours, but it would also make a
great deal of sense for there to be health care facilities permanently
collocated with school facilities.
Going to the final step, we should move toward school facilities that are
not separate at all from other parts of our communities, including the
places where we shop and do business. Imagine a thriving hub at the
center of the community that incorporates basic activities of everyday
life like shopping for groceries, getting a haircut, renewing a driver’s
license, or [laundering clothes or] picking up clothes at the dry cleaner.

4.  What does the school building of the 21st Century look like?
 Is “the school” only – or even mostly – a physical place?
 If not a boxlike classroom, then what?
 How can the buildings where we teach our young be more integrated
into society?
Of course, learning must focus on something, and it makes sense for
there to be a well-articulated set of standards along the lines of the TEKS
or the Common Core. But in world where content proliferates at an
exponential rate and the borders between nations and cultures grow
blurrier daily, there is no way anyone can claim to know a set of core
content that best meets the future needs of our students.
Today, we are connected globally. It’s as if we are returning to Pangea.

5. Until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By
the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today,
knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build out
of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every
12 hours.
Or put more simply…
The world is now 24/7/365, but education is not. That has to change. The
first step is to decided that standardized school years and school days for
all ages at all stages of the K-12 educational process are no longer valid.
They do not align with the current world of work. Vacation should not be
eliminated entirely, but rather distributed into breaks throughout the
year.

6. When formal schooling was first established, the school calendar fit the
needs of a particular community. When families became more mobile,
the school calendar was standardized. The current 9-month calendar that
most schools operate on was established when 85% of Americans (and
students) were involved in agriculture, and when climate control did not
exist in school buildings.
In today's United States, only about 3% of Americans are engaged in
agriculture.
Summer learning loss from
http://www.summerlearning.org/?page=know_the_facts:
To succeed in school and life, children and young adults need ongoing
opportunities to learn and practice essential skills. This is especially true
during the summer months.
Many Americans have a wonderful image of summer as a carefree, happy
time when "kids can be kids,” and take for granted the prospect of
enriching experiences such as summer camps, time with family, and trips
to museums, parks, and libraries.
Unfortunately, some youth face anything but idyllic summer months.
When the school doors close, many children struggle to access
educational opportunities, as well as basic needs such as healthy meals
and adequate adult supervision.
Did You Know?
All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in
educational activities during the summer. Research spanning 100 years
shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the
end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning

7. of the summer (White, 1906; Heyns, 1978; Entwisle & Alexander 1992;
Cooper, 1996; Downey et al, 2004).
Most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in
mathematical computation skills over the summer months. Low-income
students also lose more than two months in reading achievement,
despite the fact that their middle-class peers make slight gains (Cooper,
1996).
More than half of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-
income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning
opportunities. As a result, low-income youth are less likely to graduate
from high school or enter college (Alexander et al, 2007).
Children lose more than academic knowledge over the summer. Most
children—particularly children at high risk of obesity—gain weight more
rapidly when they are out of school during summer break (Von Hippel et
al, 2007).
Parents consistently cite summer as the most difficult time to ensure that
their children have productive things to do (Duffett et al, 2004).
http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.summerlearning.org/resource/collection
/CB94AEC5-9C97-496F-B230-1BECDFC2DF8B/Research_Brief_04_-
_Cooper.pdf
All children go to school the same number of hours and the same number
of days. This fact alone confirms that we are sorting children as opposed
to educating them to their highest levels of achievement.

8. As long as we hold time constant for teaching, learning, and testing, we
are sorting children based on the speed of learning, not based on
intelligence.
What if we were to abolish traditional grades in favor of standards-based
grading?
What if we were to abolish grade levels entirely and instead work each
student to help him/her advance according to his/her own ability?

9. The real issue with curriculum has less to do with the specifics of the
content or the particular skill sets to be taught and more to do with how
we support learning experiences that combine the two effectively. Nearly
everything we currently know about effective childhood learning points
to smaller classes and more individual attention; toward group and
project-based work; toward deep involvement of those who are most
about the children, most importantly parents and grandparents. At the
same time, everything about our legacy, factory model school systems as
well as the constraints of the Industrial Age work schedules prevents us
from pursuing these strategies even if we were to muster the collective
will to fund them properly.
Shift to thinking about learning experiences, not education systems.
Today, people want to experience, to participate, and to be engaged.
They look for personalized experiences that are unique, productive,
motivating, enjoyable, and meaningful.
• Does the idea of a common, standardized curriculum make sense in a
hyper connected, rapidly changing world? If so, what are the critical
points of commonality and standardization and what are the ways in
which it makes sense to customize education to the needs of
individual learners?
• How do we best determine the balance between teaching content and
teaching skills?
• Does education change by country as each country finds it place in a
more integrated, connected, and complementary global economy?
• What is the ideal school year and school day?
• What grade levels should we have and are they related to age? Is the
traditional concept of grade levels even of value any longer?
The current assessments measure students’ abilities to solve existing
problems and give answers to predefined questions. Such assessments
are antithetical to challenging, encouraging, and measuring students’
abilities to create new solutions, identify new problems, and ask new
questions.

10. Sir Ken Robinson shared the following statistic:
The NFL is a $9-billion-dollar industry.
Hollywood is an $11 billion dollar industry.
Standardized assessment? $16 billion.

11. SAT is not going to get you very far with predicting who’s going to do well
in college; and certainly not far with regards to who is going to do well in
society or contribute to society.
A study of nearly 123,000 students in over 30 different types of colleges
and universities that have made standardized tests optional found no
significant different between those who submitted SAT or ACT scores and
those who did not (five-on-hundredths of a GPA point and six-tenths of
one percent in graduation rates).
US students have been awful test takers for over a half century. The
awful test scores American students have received over the past half
century should have rendered the US an economic backwater. The
country should have hit rock bottom in national security, jobs, and
economy by now. But facts suggest otherwise.
The more sophisticated you are, the less you can measure

13. A number of strength-based assessments have been developed.
HOPE
MOTlVATlON
Hope, motivation, and mindset
Social and emotional intelligence

14. Creative thinking
Global competence
• How do we best assess students to ensure they are ready for a global
society in the 21st
century?