Re-Envisioning Professional Education

In the dynamic, hyper-connected, and unpredictable 21st century, workplace and career paradigms are rapidly changing. The professions are no exception. Technology has routinized and increased access to the expertise that traditionally set professionals apart from other workers, leading some to forecast professions’ demise. Even if, as we suspect, new forms of complexity and needs for expertise continue to outrun technology, professionals’ lives and careers will diverge dramatically from past norms. In the world we anticipate, the number of theories, diagnoses, and strategies among which each professional — alone or in teams — must make informed and workable judgments will increase exponentially, as will the rapidity with which their specialties become obsolete and have to be retooled or replaced. In this world, learning to learn will far outstrip the importance of applying the specialized knowledge with which professionals are initially programmed. If this prediction is correct, then university-based professional schools (hereinafter “professional schools”), which historically have done that initial programming, must change at the same pace as their graduates’ careers. Evidence that professional schools are not evolving quickly enough is widespread. Employers and policymakers criticize professional schools for not preparing graduates to succeed in the modern workplace or to solve increasingly acute public problems. And prospective students are voting with their feet, opting for less expensive and more relevant training from accelerators, boot camps, and massive open online courses (MOOCs) and in dynamic work environments themselves. In order to help the professions retool for the modern world, professional education must retool itself

Governance of Steel and Kryptonite Politics in Contemporary Public Education Reform

Public education in the United States has been crippled by a combination of entrenched bureaucratic governance and special-interest politics. To remedy these failings, school districts, states, and the federal Education Department have adopted education reforms characterized by rigorous outcome-focused standards and assessments and the empowering of public schools, charter or otherwise, to meet the standards. Despite promising initial results, however, the reforms have been widely criticized, including by the populations they most seek to help. To explain this paradox, this Article first tries to assimilate the new education reforms to the most frequently proposed alternatives to bureaucratic governance — marketization, managerialism, professionalism and craft. It concludes, however, that none of these models adequately elucidates the reforms or provides an attractive alternative to special-interest politics, a crucial concomitant of bureaucracy. The Article claims that another governance model, democratic experimentalism, better explains the recent reforms and provides a richly participatory alternative to special-interest politics, which directly engages stakeholders — families and teachers, in this case — into its collaborative governance mechanisms. The Article finds, however, that the new education reforms have largely omitted the “democratic” part of experimentalism, resulting in the backlash by special interest groups and the constituents the reforms help the most, parents and students. The Article concludes by proposing a more fully democratic version of the reforms designed to improve student outcomes, powerfully engage key stakeholders, and diminish objections

Family Moves and the Future of Public Education

State laws compel school-aged children to attend school while fully funding only public schools. Especially following the COVID-19 pandemic, this arrangement is under attack — from some for unconstitutionally coercing families to expose their children to non-neutral values to which they object and from others for ignoring the developmental needs of students, particularly students of color and in poverty whom public schools have long underserved. This Article argues that fully subsidized public education is constitutional as long as public schools fulfill their mission to model and commit people to liberal democratic values of tolerance and respect for all persons as equal choosers. To be sure, those values are not neutral. But as Brown v. Board famously concluded, their promotion in public schools is perhaps the nation’s and states’ single most compelling interest, because it is essential to the ability of people with diverse beliefs to live together harmoniously while preserving their vast freedoms in other respects. To keep public education from qualifying those freedoms any more than necessary, states give families a right to opt for private education, but at their own expense. This arrangement serves the compelling interest in public education, however, only if public schools — bolstered by compulsory education laws and their uniquely full public subsidization — attract enough families. For well over a century, public schools have attracted around 90% of all school children. Today, however, family moves away from public education are eroding its ability to attract children due principally to public education’s conflation of “public” with bureaucratically “uniform” education — precluding pedagogically, democratically, and equitably essential differentiation among students. The Article proposes ways public schools can better model liberal democratic values by engaging all families in the cooperative and differentiated direction of their children’s learning

Leading Through Learning: Using Evolutionary Learning to Develop, Implement, and Improve Strategic Initiatives

Equitably educating students requires effective differentiation of services based on students’ strengths and needs. Doing so reliably at scale is difficult given the diversity of students and contexts in our public school systems and the diversity of needs created by historical and institutionalized discrimination against people of color, immigrants, and other populations. Still, a number of systems and organizations have succeeded in advancing equity at scale. They have done so by finding new ways to design, lead, and manage their operations and engage internal and external stakeholders – in our language, new ways to govern2 their work. Cutting across these promising governance practices are adult and student learning systems that provide transparency into how school leaders actually lead, teachers actually teach, and students actually learn day to day, school by school, classroom by classroom, and lesson by lesson. This combination of transparency, experimentation, and broad participation and knowledge sharing reveals effective ways to serve individual and groups of students, severing deeply entrenched links between student background, access to opportunity, and learning outcomes

Community science for coastal acidification monitoring and research

© The Author(s), 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Gassett, P. R., O’Brien-Clayton, K., Bastidas, C., Rheuban, J. E., Hunt, C., Turner, E., Liebman, M., Silva, E., Pimenta, A., Grear, J., Motyka, J., McCorkle, D., Stancioff, E., Brady, D., & Strong, A. Community science for coastal acidification monitoring and research. Coastal Management, 49(5), (2021): 510-531, https://doi.org/10.1080/08920753.2021.1947131.Ocean and coastal acidification (OCA) present a unique set of sustainability challenges at the human-ecological interface. Extensive biogeochemical monitoring that can assess local acidification conditions, distinguish multiple drivers of changing carbonate chemistry, and ultimately inform local and regional response strategies is necessary for successful adaptation to OCA. However, the sampling frequency and cost-prohibitive scientific equipment needed to monitor OCA are barriers to implementing the widespread monitoring of dynamic coastal conditions. Here, we demonstrate through a case study that existing community-based water monitoring initiatives can help address these challenges and contribute to OCA science. We document how iterative, sequential outreach, workshop-based training, and coordinated monitoring activities through the Northeast Coastal Acidification Network (a) assessed the capacity of northeastern United States community science programs and (b) engaged community science programs productively with OCA monitoring efforts. Our results (along with the companion manuscript) indicate that community science programs are capable of collecting robust scientific information pertinent to OCA and are positioned to monitor in locations that would critically expand the coverage of current OCA research. Furthermore, engaging community stakeholders in OCA science and outreach enabled a platform for dialogue about OCA among other interrelated environmental concerns and fostered a series of co-benefits relating to public participation in resource and risk management. Activities in support of community science monitoring have an impact not only by increasing local understanding of OCA but also by promoting public education and community participation in potential adaptation measures.AGU Centennial Grant NOAA OAP OFFICE North American Association for Environmental Education Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation Sea Grant programs within the region Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions Funding acknowledgment: MIT Sea Grant award NA18OAR4170105 to Bastidas NERACOOS The WestWind foundation (to Rheuban) Woods Hole Sea Grant (NOAA Grant No. NA18OAR4170104

Linking soil microbial community structure to potential carbon mineralization: A continental scale assessment of reduced tillage

Potential carbon mineralization (Cmin) is a commonly used indicator of soil health, with greater Cmin values interpreted as healthier soil. While Cmin values are typically greater in agricultural soils managed with minimal physical disturbance, the mechanisms driving the increases remain poorly understood. This study assessed bacterial and archaeal community structure and potential microbial drivers of Cmin in soils maintained under various degrees of physical disturbance. Potential carbon mineralization, 16S rRNA sequences, and soil characterization data were collected as part of the North American Project to Evaluate Soil Health Measurements (NAPESHM). Results showed that type of cropping system, intensity of physical disturbance, and soil pH influenced microbial sensitivity to physical disturbance. Furthermore, 28% of amplicon sequence variants (ASVs), which were important in modeling Cmin, were enriched under soils managed with minimal physical disturbance. Sequences identified as enriched under minimal disturbance and important for modeling Cmin, were linked to organisms which could produce extracellular polymeric substances and contained metabolic strategies suited for tolerating environmental stressors. Understanding how physical disturbance shapes microbial communities across climates and inherent soil properties and drives changes in Cmin provides the context necessary to evaluate management impacts on standardized measures of soil microbial activity

Carbon-sensitive pedotransfer functions for plant available water

Currently accepted pedotransfer functions show negligible effect of management-induced changes to soil organic carbon (SOC) on plant available water holding capacity (θAWHC), while some studies show the ability to substantially increase θAWHC through management. The Soil Health Institute\u27s North America Project to Evaluate Soil Health Measurements measured water content at field capacity using intact soil cores across 124 long-term research sites that contained increases in SOC as a result of management treatments such as reduced tillage and cover cropping. Pedotransfer functions were created for volumetric water content at field capacity (θFC) and permanent wilting point (θPWP). New pedotransfer functions had predictions of θAWHC that were similarly accurate compared with Saxton and Rawls when tested on samples from the National Soil Characterization database. Further, the new pedotransfer functions showed substantial effects of soil calcareousness and SOC on θAWHC. For an increase in SOC of 10 g kg–1 (1%) in noncalcareous soils, an average increase in θAWHC of 3.0 mm 100 mm–1 soil (0.03 m3 m–3) on average across all soil texture classes was found. This SOC related increase in θAWHC is about double previous estimates. Calcareous soils had an increase in θAWHC of 1.2 mm 100 mm–1 soil associated with a 10 g kg–1 increase in SOC, across all soil texture classes. New equations can aid in quantifying benefits of soil management practices that increase SOC and can be used to model the effect of changes in management on drought resilience

Role of community health workers in type 2 diabetes mellitus self-management: A scoping review

Background: Globally the number of people with Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) has risen significantly over the last few decades. Aligned to this is a growing use of community health workers (CHWs) to deliver T2DM self-management support with good clinical outcomes especially in High Income Countries (HIC). Evidence and lessons from these interventions can be useful for Low- and Middle-Income countries (LMICs) such as South Africa that are experiencing a marked increase in T2DM prevalence. Objectives: This study aimed to examine how CHW have been utilized to support T2DM self-management globally, their preparation for and supervision to perform their functions. Method: The review was guided by a stepwise approach outlined in the framework for scoping reviews developed by Arksey and O’Malley. Peer reviewed scientific and grey literature was searched using a string of keywords, selecting English full-text articles published between 2000 and 2015. Articles were selected using inclusion criteria, charted and content analyzed. Results: 1008 studies were identified of which 54 full text articles were selected. Most (53) of the selected studies were in HIC and targeted mostly minority populations in low resource settings. CHWs were mostly deployed to provide education, support, and advocacy. Structured curriculum based education was the most frequently reported service provided by CHWs to support T2DM self-management. Support services included informational, emotional, appraisal and instrumental support. Models of CHW care included facility linked nurse-led CHW coordination, facility-linked CHW led coordination and standalone CHW interventions without facility interaction. Conclusion: CHWs play several roles in T2DM self-management, including structured education, ongoing support and health system advocacy. Preparing and coordinating CHWs for these roles is crucial and needs further research and strengthening

Re-Envisioning Professional Education

In the dynamic, hyper-connected, and unpredictable 21st century, workplace and career paradigms are rapidly changing. The professions are no exception. Technology has routinized and increased access to the expertise that traditionally set professionals apart from other workers, leading some to forecast professions’ demise. Even if, as we suspect, new forms of complexity and needs for expertise continue to outrun technology, professionals’ lives and careers will diverge dramatically from past norms. In the world we anticipate, the number of theories, diagnoses, and strategies among which each professional — alone or in teams — must make informed and workable judgments will increase exponentially, as will the rapidity with which their specialties become obsolete and have to be retooled or replaced. In this world, learning to learn will far outstrip the importance of applying the specialized knowledge with which professionals are initially programmed. If this prediction is correct, then university-based professional schools (hereinafter “professional schools”), which historically have done that initial programming, must change at the same pace as their graduates’ careers. Evidence that professional schools are not evolving quickly enough is widespread. Employers and policymakers criticize professional schools for not preparing graduates to succeed in the modern workplace or to solve increasingly acute public problems. And prospective students are voting with their feet, opting for less expensive and more relevant training from accelerators, boot camps, and massive open online courses (MOOCs) and in dynamic work environments themselves. In order to help the professions retool for the modern world, professional education must retool itself

Governance of Steel and Kryptonite Politics in Contemporary Public Education Reform

Public education in the United States has been crippled by a combination of entrenched bureaucratic governance and special-interest politics. To remedy these failings, school districts, states, and the federal Education Department have adopted education reforms characterized by rigorous outcome-focused standards and assessments and the empowering of public schools, charter or otherwise, to meet the standards. Despite promising initial results, however, the reforms have been widely criticized, including by the populations they most seek to help. To explain this paradox, this Article first tries to assimilate the new education reforms to the most frequently proposed alternatives to bureaucratic governance — marketization, managerialism, professionalism and craft. It concludes, however, that none of these models adequately elucidates the reforms or provides an attractive alternative to special-interest politics, a crucial concomitant of bureaucracy. The Article claims that another governance model, democratic experimentalism, better explains the recent reforms and provides a richly participatory alternative to special-interest politics, which directly engages stakeholders — families and teachers, in this case — into its collaborative governance mechanisms. The Article finds, however, that the new education reforms have largely omitted the “democratic” part of experimentalism, resulting in the backlash by special interest groups and the constituents the reforms help the most, parents and students. The Article concludes by proposing a more fully democratic version of the reforms designed to improve student outcomes, powerfully engage key stakeholders, and diminish objections