MC Weekly Issue #6, Tuesday, January 17, 2006

“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.

Back to School.

When we developed Massive Change, we were struck by the philosophy of Bill Drayton’s Ashoka Foundation ( http://www.ashoka.org” ). Ashoka: Innovators for the Public is a global nonprofit organization located in Arlington, Virginia USA is the world’s largest association of leading social entrepreneurs. Ashoka was founded by Drayton in 1981 to identify and financially support leading social entrepreneurs though social venture capital with the goal of elevating the citizen sector to a competitive level equal to the business sector. Drayton’s notion is that the not-for-profit sector used to mimic the government sector but, yearning to be effective, has recently turned to the private sector as its model. As a catalyst for social progress, the government sector has proven to be depressingly static and ineffective: in the developed world, the model hasn’t changed significantly in 50 years, whereas the business sector has transformed itself several times in the same period. What’s encouraging, is that non-governmental organizations have stepped up to the plate to fulfill the social mandate we once expected of the government, by employing the models of entrepreneurship that have fueled business. Similarly, many business leaders have used their fortune, and their business savvy, to foster significant social progress.

Nowhere has this change in leadership been more evident than in the area of education. The most notable instance is that of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Foundation is committed to creating equity by focussing on health in the developing world, and education in the developed world. Specifically, they have focussed on improving the quality of high school education in the United States. Gates famously declared, in a much-quoted speech, “America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded - though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools - even when they’re working exactly as designed - cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.”

Gates goes on to say, “Today, only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship. The other two-thirds, most of them low-income and minority students, are tracked into courses that won’t ever get them ready for college or prepare them for a family-wage job - no matter how well the students learn or the teachers teach. This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.”

“It can be helped. We designed these high schools; we can redesign them. But first we have to understand that today’s high schools are not the cause of the problem; they are the result. The key problem is political will. Elected officials have not yet done away with the idea underlying the old design. The idea behind the old design was that you could train an adequate workforce by sending only a third of your kids to college - and that the other kids either couldn’t do college work or didn’t need to. The idea behind the new design is that all students can do rigorous work, and - for their sake and ours - they have to.”

In response, the Gates Foundation has invested about a billion dollars to help redesign the American high school. They are supporting over 1500 high schools, half of which are completely new; the other half are redesigned existing schools. Some are private; some are public; some are a mix in-betweeen. All are focussed on the following criteria: high standards for all; public data on progress; turning around failing schools.

To see the full text of Bill Gates’s scathing indictment of US high schools, check out this link.

In Toronto, a remarkable organization called Pathways to Education is radically transforming educational effectiveness in one of Toronto’s most troubled communities, Regent Park. Before Pathways, the high school dropout rate in Regent Park was 56%, twice the city average. In 2000/2001 there were nine murders in the community. The vast majority of young people who had dropped out of high school had three paths available to them: low paying jobs, crime and/or homelessness.

(Attempts by the school system to reduce the high school drop our rate have failed. Overall graduation rates in Ontario are predicted to decline from 78% to 62%, a statistic that is shockingly not front page news.)

According to Pathways website: “The mission of The Pathways to Education Program is to reduce poverty and its effects by supporting the development of youth from economically disadvantaged communities and promoting their individual health and the health of the community by addressing the two principal social determinants of health: education and income.”

Pathways provides four integrated supports over four years of secondary school.

Tutoring four nights per week in the community;
Transit tickets earned through attendance, plus a $4,000 bursary to be used towards post secondary registration/tuition (representing $1000 for every year of successful attendance);
Group mentoring and specialty/career mentoring;
Student Parent Support Workers who are a bridge between the community, parents, students, schools and program.

Since Pathways’ launch, 97% of Regent Park youth have enrolled and reenrolled in the program. There are currently 610 students participating in Pathways in grades 9 through 12. June 2005 Marks the first year that a cohort of Pathways kids will graduate high school. More than half of its first cohort will be graduating (after four years), with the majority of these going on to college and university.

A year from now, Pathways expects to find over 75% of Pathways first cohort has graduated which will mean the dropout rate had been reduced by over two-thirds. In addition to this astonishing achievement, since September, 2001, Pathways has cut absenteeism by over 50%; reduced the percentage of academically at-risk students from 40% to 14%; helped students achieve more credits than their peers at all 37 high schools attended; helped students earn over 35% more credits in English, Science, and Math, a dramatic increase from previous Regent Park students.

To find out more, check out http://www.pathwaystoeducation.ca/.

One of the saddest realities of the public school system in Canada is the state of their libraries. A remarkable number of citizen-led initiatives are reversing years of public sector neglect, however, from the grassroots level to Starbucks. We’d like to single out the extraordinary Love of Reading Fund initiated by Indigo Books. This program is dedicated to “positively contributing to instilling in underprivileged children a life-long love of reading and learning. Through the generosity of its millions of customers and its 6,000+ employees, Indigo Books & Music Inc., raises money for the Indigo Love of Reading Fund, which supports worthy literacy initiatives across the country.”

The genesis of the program was an encounter between Indigo’s CEO, Heather Reisman, and the Principal of Toronto’s Church St. Public School, Dr. Judy Gillis, and her staff. Dr. Gillis was trying to create a culture of learning through a love of reading, even though their library was threadbare. That inspired Indigo to embark on a four-year experimental relationship, whereby Church Street Public School was generously provided with books and other learning materials, demonstrating what a dramatic difference these resources could make to student performance. According to Dr. Gillis, “from kindergarten up they are never without a book in hand. Our standardized literacy test results for Grade 3 through 6 are generally higher than they were and we continue to show an upward trend each year, in our Grade 6 students. It’s fantastic.”

The success of the program inspired Reisman to develop the Love of Reading Fund. Today, Indigo Books & Music Inc., with additional support from its customer contributions, brings 10 new high-needs schools into its Love of Reading Program each year. Selected schools receive a three-year commitment of $50,000 a year to augment their reading and research materials. To find out more, check out this link.

COMING SOON: Massive Change at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. Check out http://www.mcachicago.org for preliminary information. Watch this space for more details.

BRUCE MAU DESIGN EVENTS:
Bruce Mau Speaking Engagements

Thursday, February 2, 2006
The Future of Environmental Design, McGill University
Contact: Sarah Schiff, lhill@qf.org.qa, ph. 514.398.2827

Wednesday, February 15, 2006
KAMA Reading Series, World Literacy of Canada
Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario

Monday, February 20, 2006
Tasmeen Doha 2006, Commonwealth University School for the Arts in Qatar
Contact: Leland M. Hill, lhill@qf.org.qa

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