Reimaginging Learning: A Big Bet on the Future of American Education

Today's young people are the most diverse, connected generation in history and have incredible aspirations for themselves. Educators all over the country are reimagining learning to better meet this generation's needs, rethinking classrooms and schools so they work better for students. It's an exciting time for innovation in education.At the same time, big bets are an increasingly popular concept in philanthropy. Several articles and papers in the last year have encouraged donors to consider them as a way of creating meaningful change, including in education. Big bets are usually defined as large grants to a specific issue or an individual organization.We're proposing something different.We've been working with partners across the country who are pursuing a common vision: reimagining learning with a broad set of outcomes in mind, so that every student finishes high school with an abundance of choices and the freedom to pursue them. Philanthropists have an opportunity to make a big bet on this shared vision.Most schools weren't designed with this vision in mind. But right now, all over the country, teams of educators are working to change this. They are partnering with families to create schools that speak to their hopes and honor their strengths. These schools prioritize rigorous academics and help students develop critical thinking skills, set important goals and create plans to reach them, and develop the mindsets and habits they need to take charge of their futures.Through deep engagement with our partners, we've thought concretely about how these ideas might spread and where existing momentum and early evidence might shine a light on a path forward. In September 2015, with our partners Summit Public Schools and Transcend, we released a paper entitled Dissatisfied Yet Optimistic (DYO), which made the case for reimagining learning. This new companion piece explores what it might take to strengthen and accelerate the momentum created by the early pioneers who are designing schools consistent with the ideas in DYO.What follows is a big idea for how $4 billion in philanthropy over 10 years could dramatically improve the performance of our schools by focusing on this emerging vision for how schools could produce much better and broader outcomes for students

Fairness perceptions of educational inequality: the effects of self-interest and neoliberal orientations

The Australian education system features considerable socioeconomic inequality and is a frequent source of controversy in Australian public life. Yet meaningful reform to this system has proven elusive. In this article, we examine the public’s fairness perceptions of educational inequality based on parental financial capacity, using an online survey of adults (N = 1,999) from New South Wales, Australia. We asked about the fairness of inequality in school resources and education quality, and used a scenario in which students from high-income and low-income families had achievement gaps due to differences in educational experiences. Respondents had diverse perceptions about the fairness of educational inequality, but most perceived the scenario as unfair or very unfair. The partial proportional odds models showed that self-interest and neoliberal orientations predicted people’s fairness perceptions of educational inequality. The findings of this study have implications for achieving meaningful reform of the Australian education system that is in line with public opinion

Attributions for underachievement among students experiencing disadvantage and support for public assistance to them

In this study, we investigated people’s perceptions about the causes (i.e., attributions) of underachievement among students experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage and their support for public assistance to those students. Results of an online survey conducted with Australian adults (N = 1,999) revealed that people preferred societal attributions to individual attributions for underachievement among those students. The respondents’ attributions, particularly societal attributions, significantly predicted their support for public assistance to students and schools in need. There were statistically significant differences between people with conservative and progressive political views in their attributions and support for public assistance. However, after taking people’s attributions into account, their political views add little to the prediction of their support for public assistance. These findings have implications for the promotion of equity-oriented educational policies

Teacher workload in Australia: National reports of intensification and its threats to democracy

The recent reforms of education, driven by neoliberal logics of choice, competition, and autonomy, have fundamentally challenged the importance of education and schooling as core to the healthy functioning of socio-democratic societies. Little attention has been paid, however, to how the de-democratisation of education is affecting the work of teachers as educators. Drawing on data from a series of systematic and comparable large-scale surveys (N=48,000), we draw attention to the stark reality of teachers’ work today in the context of Australia. The most prominent finding is the documentation of the universal intensification of teachers’ work and explosion of teachers’ working hours driven by instruments of compliance, datafication, and diminution of time to get on with the core job of teaching. We reflect upon how intensification of teachers’ work threatens the democratic purposes of schooling and argue for system-level monitoring and evaluation to inform policy-making to challenge de-democratising practices

Intensification of teachers’ work under devolution: A ‘tsunami’ of paperwork

Australian public school teachers work some of the longest weekly hours among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, particularly in the state of New South Wales where average hours are officially in, or near, the statistical category of ‘very long working hours’. These reports of a high workload have occurred alongside recent policy moves that seek to devolve responsibility for schooling, augmenting teacher and school-level accountability. This article explores changes in work demands experienced by New South Wales teachers. As part of a larger project on schools as workplaces, we examine teaching professionals’ views through interviews with teacher union representatives. Consistent with a model of work intensification, workload increases were almost universally reported, primarily in relation to ‘paperwork’ requirements. However, differences in the nature of intensification were evident when data were disaggregated according to socio-educational advantage, level of schooling (primary or secondary) and location. The distinct patterns of work intensification that emerge reflect each school’s relative advantage or disadvantage within the school marketplace, influenced by broader neoliberal reforms occurring within the state and nation

Labour commodification in the employment heartland: Union responses to teachers' temporary work

This article analyses the commodification of professional labour and union responses to these processes within the employment heartland. It explores the category of fixed-contract or ‘temporary’ employment using Australian public school teaching as the empirical lens. Established to address intensifying conditions of labour market insecurity, the union-led creation of the temporary category was intended to partly decommodify labour by providing intermediate security between permanent and ‘casual’ employment. However, using historical case and contemporary survey data, we discern that escalation of temporary teacher numbers and intensifying work-effort demands concurrently increased insecurity within the teacher workforce, constituting recommodification. The paper contributes to scant literature on unions and commodification, highlighting that within the current marketised context, labour commodification may occur through contradictory influences at multiple levels, and that union responses to combat this derogation of work must similarly be multi-level and sustained

Submission to 'Valuing Australia’s Teachers: Parliamentary Inquiry into the Status of the Teaching Profession'

Parliament of Australia website. Together, over the last five years, through a series of research projects, the above colleagues at the University of Sydney, Curtin University, University of New South Wales (Australia) and the Lulea University of Technology (Sweden), have examined the issues of work, workload, and conditions of work of Australian school teachers and school leaders, drawing international comparison to Sweden and elsewhere. We have reported (in conjunction with the NSW Teachers Federation (NSWTF), and State School Teachers Union of Western Australia (SSTUWA)) on the largest, recent survey of teachers’ work and workplace conditions in the country through input and extensive responses from over 20,000 teachers and school leaders. We welcome this Parliamentary Inquiry as both timely and of great importance

Teachers’ work during the COVID-19 pandemic: Shifts, challenges and opportunities

Reports of teachers’ work intensification have become common over the last decade, so it seems important to ask: how are teachers coping with the additional demands and changes brought by COVID-19? In this paper, we present initial data from a large, system-wide survey of teachers in NSW public schools, undertaken during the first phase of the pandemic in Australia, in order to document the nature of these shifts. These data provide teachers’ voice on some of the challenges, and difficulties they face in relation to professional work during the pandemic; and also the opportunities they have identified within the flux of change that has occurred in 2020. This study considers: 1. teaching in ‘COVID-wary classrooms’; and 2. teaching via remote learning. Heavy demands for up-skilling, particularly for the second of these shifts, teaching via remote learning, and the development and implementation of new public health understanding within schools, have created new and additional challenges for the teaching profession

Oral Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) Lessens Tumor Development In The APCmin Mouse Model of Spontaneous Familial Adenomatous Polyposis

Colorectal cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths for both men and women, and the third most common cause of cancer in the U.S. Toxicity of current chemotherapeutic agents for colorectal cancer, and emergence of drug resistance underscore the need to develop new, potentially less toxic alternatives. Our recent cross-sectional study in a large Appalachian population, showed a strong, inverse, dose–response association of serum perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) levels to prevalent colorectal cancer, suggesting PFOS may have therapeutic potential in the prevention and/or treatment of colorectal cancer. In these preliminary studies using a mouse model of familial colorectal cancer, the APCmin mouse, and exposures comparable to those reported in human populations, we assess the efficacy of PFOS for reducing tumor burden, and evaluate potential dose–response effects