Table of Contents
Executive Summary
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Scaling Up
Critical Questions
Action Agenda
Appendix
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III. INTRODUCTION
On June 26 to 28, 1997, a selected group of psychologists joined educators in Washington, DC, to discuss the best ways of evaluating educational practices and bringing practices deemed effective to scale. Entitled Bringing to Scale Educational Innovation and School Reform: Partnerships in Urban Education, the conference was sponsored by the American Psychological Association's (APA) Committee on Urban Initiatives and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, with additional funding provided by The College Board.
Over the last decade or so, experts in various fields have generated a significant amount of information about educational innovations that actually work in urban schools. Unfortunately, there continues to be a wide gap between that accumulated wisdom and what actually happens in classrooms on a day-to-day basis. To meet the U.S. Department of Education's (DOE) twin goals of fostering successful learning in urban schools and improving the dissemination of quality innovations, that gap must be closed.
In 1996, the DOE's Office of Educational Research and Improvement convened a multidisciplinary meeting of experts in urban issues. The meeting's participants came to a consensus on what conditions are necessary for supporting the educational development of students in urban schools, who are more likely to be poor ethnic minorities, yet did not address the question of how to bring those conditions to scale. Building on that meeting, APA's Bringing to Scale Educational Innovation and School Reform conference represented an attempt to answer that question.
Designed to foster a new kind of partnership among social scientists, educational practitioners, and policymakers, the conference brought together 21 participants representing a variety of viewpoints, including academia, K-12, the DOE, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Congress, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and the Educational Testing Service. The participants came from different disciplines, but they shared an intense commitment to making schools work for every child and a profound knowledge about what works and what doesn't when it comes to school reform.
Although an interdisciplinary gathering, the conference brought together a critical mass of psychologists who had a vision of psychology's potential role in the debate. As a result, a major focus of the conference was on how psychology could contribute to the reform effort. Although a single discipline obviously cannot be expected to solve a complex social problem such as urban education, psychology has much to offer. Psychologists bring to the table a renewed commitment to educational excellence and reform, expertise in evaluation and replication methods, the process of change, and human factors. At the end of more than 2 days of brief presentations and passionate discussion, conference participants had discussed dozens of ideas for making psychology a full partner in educational reform. The result was the action agenda outlined at the end of this report.
Congressman Thomas C. Sawyer (D-Ohio) opened the conference with a statement of urgency. The stakes of educational failure are higher than ever before, he emphasized in his keynote address. Thirty years ago, for instance, a high school dropout could find a job pumping gas or repairing cars. Not anymore. In our technological society, gas-pumping jobs are few and far between, and repairing cars requires mastery of skills far beyond those acquired in high school.
Although educational failure represents a tragedy on an individual level, said Sawyer, it also has implications for society as a whole. 'Our children are our future' is more than just a political platitude. In reality, the aging of our society and other demographic trends make education a vital issue for every citizen. As the baby boom generation starts retiring in the coming decades, for example, the ratio of workers to Social Security beneficiaries will shrink dramatically, raising the more basic economic issue of productivity. The baby boom generation is 78 million strong, the generation behind them, only 44 million. To keep our economy going, younger Americans will need to outdo the productive capacity of their more numerous forebears. Will they have the skills to become extra-productive members of society? The fact that nearly a quarter of these young Americans live in poverty today makes it unlikely that they will, the Congressman said, but the basic arithmetic of intergenerational dependence means that they must.
Since World War II, the nation has spent billions of dollars on efforts to improve schools. Except in scattered instances, those efforts haven't resulted in lasting improvements in student achievement, and the few strategies that have been successful have rarely spread. In an era of limited resources, psychologists and educators must identify effective, research-based interventions and share them with schools around the nation. The Congressman ended his presentation by inviting psychologists to help prepare America's children to be productive citizens in the future.
B. Psychology's Potential Contribution
In the discussion that followed Congressman Sawyer's talk, conference participants accepted his challenge.
In her welcoming remarks, APA past president Dorothy W. Cantor, PsyD, traced psychology's long history of working on educational issues back to William James, Thomas Dewey, and others who were present at the discipline's founding. Yet, she said, psychology lost that early commitment to education somewhere along the way. As a convener of the conference, she stressed that it was important to regain that sense of commitment. We have a history to look back on and a future to look forward to.
Throughout the conference, participants noted the unique contributions psychology has to offer the educational reform effort. Psychologists' training gives them an in-depth understanding of the learning process, intellectual ability, and motivation. They have the methodological know-how to evaluate educational practices and replicate proven programs. They are intimately familiar with the process of change and the individual and interpersonal factors associated with it, making them well-suited to fostering readiness for change in individual educators and entire educational systems. Their research skills give them a commitment to the proper collection, interpretation, and use of data, which schools can use to make data-based decisions about their practices.
Psychologists readily acknowledge that psychology cannot solve the problems of urban education on its own. By working with partners in other fields, psychologists will be able to fulfill the potential suggested by their earlier commitment to educational issues.
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