Five, Four, Three,
Per pupil funding cuts, declining student enrollment, ballooning healthcare and pension costs, and an aging teaching pool has Michigan in the throes of a catastrophic education crisis. At the same time, Michigan’s education system is rising to meet the challenge of preparing tomorrow’s workforce to compete globally by enacting one of the most rigorous career and college ready high school graduation requirements in the country, adopting challenging content expectations at every level, and raising performance expectations for all students across the board.
For Michigan educational innovators, there is no better time to be in public education than right now. The four disruptive forces, identified in Harvard researcher Clayton Christensen’s book, Disrupting Class, are sweeping through the Great Lake State: improved learning technologies, an enhanced understanding of and appreciation for multiple intelligences and learning styles; shortages of high qualified, highly effective, properly prepared teachers; and exorable cost pressures.
Michigan By Bruce Umpstead
On April 27, 2011, Governor Rick Snyder challenged Michigan’s public education system to embrace the sweeping changes by implementing “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace” learning programs that would allow school funding to follow
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The challenge for Michigan’s educational innovators and to many of the Governor’s reforms is the lack of technological infrastructure and innovative capacity available to schools.
the student to the best learning resource that meets her/her individual learning needs and gives them the best opportunity to graduate career and college ready with a head start on earning college credit. In his special message he called for innovations that break with seat time requirements as the primary measure of learning and lengthen the school day and school year for every student, by blending online and face-to-face instruction. He identified online learning, project based learning, and experiential learning as promising trends that research is starting to suggest are “cost-efficient, competitive, innovative, and effective in motivating student achievement.”
The challenge for Michigan’s educational innovators and to many of the Governor’s reforms is the lack of technological infrastructure and innovative capacity available to schools. Many of the basic services that businesses rely on to innovate are not available in every school in Michigan. Businesses large or small would never hire staff without providing the equipment and support necessary to do their job. But every day we send 1.5 million Michigan school children and 90,000 educators to work without the proper equipment, infrastructure, and support to
produce a high-quality, globally competent workforce needed to reinvigorate Michigan.
Conference 2012 | MACULJOURNAL Two, One
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