Tuesday, August 3 - 6:30 pm
Documentarian Links
Mike Bowler - Retreat Summary
Peggy Siegel - Reflections and Implications
The penultimate session after dinner Tuesday was a call to action. Five of the major presenters, Tony Bryk, Louis Gomez, Mike Smith, Tom Vander Ark and Ted Kolderie, were asked to sum up their impressions of the retreat and make recommendations. The overall message: Let's get going.
Tony: Ideas are great, but the challenge is to make them work on the ground. Try to do something without worrying first about organization; let organization evolve. A few individuals often make something work -- ie, IHI started with six. So a subset of you must step forward.
Louis: Reasons to be encouraged: There's a commitment to practice. Encouragement about the road ahead, which could be a "wedge for equity." And there's evidence that people are embracing a diversity of methods, although more is needed.
Ted: VUCA is the normal state of affairs. He "ended up with a sense that in a situation where nobody can be sure, try different things."
Mike: He quit the group in the early '80s because it was an advocacy group that "hustled for dollars." Today it's much different, "but at some point you've got to do something, got to prove to yourself that you're different than you were before."
He made a specific proposal to the Alliance: Pick two topics, recruit five KA members to concentrate on 1) technology in education, now and in the future, and 2) the new common standards with an eye toward helping all the children in the country.
"Now is the time to act. If you spend two years and don't act, you'll never act....You can change the education environment. You know more about the education environment than just about anyone else."
Jim K in concluding: The collective power [represented here] is one of a kind. The two days' discussions had been "robust far beyond the expectations of the planning committee.... It's a game-changer." To quote Burwick: We can change the world.
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