Partnership focuses on international studies curriculum
August 19 2010 by 
Stephanie Hirsh
I have very mixed emotions after attending my first Advisory Committee meeting for the Partnership for Global Learning. The content and skills advocated by the partnership are vital to students' success, and I applaud the incredible resources available to teachers through the Partnership. I'm also impressed by the number of partners who understand the importance of global competency, and support the Partnership's work. Ensuring our students develop global competency should be a no brainer when it comes to discussions of national standards.
I don't understand why this issue has been excluded from the national standards conversation. I am sad because all the right players (federal officials, business leaders, foundations, education thought leaders, practitioners) seem to support the agenda, and yet the Partnership continues to struggle to get its message and content into America's schools. How the Partnership addresses this challenge has important implications for itself as well as for organizations like NSDC that work every day to improve schools by asking them to make change to the "way they have always done things." I look forward to examining various theories of change and determining the most powerful strategies for realizing the vision we share for our schools and students.
Stephanie Hirsh is NSDC's executive director.
Posted in Stephanie Hirsh | 
Sep 9, 2010 at 11:15 AM
I think there are two perspectives that can be brought to bear on the issues that Stephanie raises regarding the extent to which the Partnership for Global Leaning's advocacy for students' global competency has or has not permeated American education. Looking back, I think it is important to realize that at the beginning of this decade, the notion that developing students' understanding of the world and how it works -- roughly what we now call global competence -- was nowhere on anyone's radar. Moreover, the national obsession with standardized testing was just beginning to drown out virtually every other metric of what students should know and be able to do. And quite frankly it took an enormous shock to the system, the horror of September 11, to cause people in and out of education to recognize how the world has vastly changed and to at least awaken some recognition that business as usual will not suffice.
At Asia Society, in the work of the Education Department and over the past 3 years through the Partnership for Global Learning, we have attempted to both seize the moment of disturbed complacency brought by 9/11 to raise awareness of the need for global competence, and to create our own breakthroughs. Beginning with the report by the National Commission on Asia in the Schools, Asia in the Schools: Preparing Young Americans for Todays Interconnected World, we have tried to make the case in myriad publications, digital resources and presentations on why from the perspective of national security, economic prosperity and citizenship in a diverse world, we continue to limit teaching and learning about the world at our peril. That has led to a two pronged approach to developing awareness and garnering support for global competence -- at the level of state and national policy and at the level of classroom practice.
Our policy work has involved developing a network of over 25 states that have in a variety of ways attempted to develop statewide constituencies for language learning and international education as vehicles for developing students' global competence. At the federal level, we have partnered with CCSSO, NEA, AASA, the Committee on Economic Development and others to issue a national policy statement on the importance of global competence and what the federal government in partnership with the states can do to support it. More recently, we have been instrumental in developing a coalition of organizations that support the learning of world languages to help craft a bill recently introduced by Representatives Holt and Tonko, HR 6036, the Excellence and Innovation in Language Learning Act , that would vastly increase language learning opportunities for US students, and which will hopefully become part of ESEA reauthorization. We have come to view language learning as the sharp edge of the overall struggle to create opportunities for developing global competence so the introduction of this bill is an important milestone. And that's to say nothing about the sea change in support for learning Chinese and the initiation of Chinese language programs across the country that's taken place over the past five years that the Asia Society/PGL has had a very strong hand in catalyzing. Through all of this, we have continued our public awareness campaign on the importance of global competence and global thinking, which most recently resulted in Education Secretary Duncan's citing of an Asia Society report (http://asiasociety.org/education-learning/learning-world/americas-standing-among-nations-relies-teachers) in a speech to kick off his "back to school bus tour" around the country.
At the level of practice, the PGL's International Studies Schools Network has grown from 3 schools in 2003 -- the creation of which required us to nearly beg districts to take our Gates Foundation dollars and other resources -- to now 26 schools and more interest in developing such schools than we have capacity to accommodate. Likewise, we will in September announce a group of 40 new Confucius Classroom Project schools which are joining 20 existing Confucius Classroom Project schools to form a national network of exemplary Chinese language programs across the US. These schools are in 23 states and DC and represent the diversity of American education. Each of these schools is partnered with a school in one of nine provinces or municipalities in China, and this Network will grow to 100 US schools nationwide by September 2011. The schools and school districts in this Network are meant to serve as models not only for Chinese language programs but also for the teaching and learning of world languages more generally. The best practices and examples of the Network are brought to the larger field of world languages and global education through our website, publications and DVDs, a monthly e-newsletter that goes out to 7,000 subscribers, and the National Chinese Language Conference, which drew one thousand participants to Washington, DC this April.
I say all of this to argue that while I absolutely agree that global competence is not now a first order priority in US education, the strategy of advocating for change at the level of policy and practice over the past decade has, I believe, laid the groundwork necessary for that to occur. Perhaps my glasses are rose tinted, but it feels like we are at a tipping point for having a much broader and sustained impact. The critical question is, what is the strategy going forward to tip the balance?
Good question (!) to which I hope others will offer their perspectives. From our perspective, we believe it is important to attack the problem from both the supply side and the demand side, and to do so in partnership with key individuals and organizations. On the supply side, a critical set of activities we must take is to align development of global competence to those drivers of change on the education landscape that do not jeopardize the integrity of the teaching and learning process that produces global competence. So, for example, I think we take Common Core standards as the out-of-the-barn horse that it is, align our efforts with CCSSO, NGA, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others, and concentrate on developing resources and examples of how teaching the Common Core standards in math and English language arts, and soon science, can be a vehicle for teaching global competence. Moreover, that teaching for global competence -- applying disciplinary and interdisciplinary understanding to address pressing world issues -- can provide the rigor and relevance needed to make the Common Core more than just a list of what students should know and be able to do. Or in the arena of new approaches to the assessment of student work -- we have made a major investment in developing a performance based assessment system that defines the ultimate criteria for high quality student work as work that demonstrates both college readiness and global competence. The strategy here is to align our efforts to integrate global competence with the emerging movement toward performance based assessment as a catalyst for improving teaching.
On the demand side, we will continue our public awareness campaign to create a constituency and a clamor for global competency including a major publication this fall in collaboration with CCSSO on the definition and practical examples of student work demonstrating global competence. We will also seek to maintain our leadership position in stimulating international comparisons and benchmarking, and to work with other organizations such as the USDOE, the Alliance for Excellent Education, the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy and Equity, NBC, and WNET who are increasingly working in this arena. And continue to work with the NEA, NSDC and other organizations who have repeatedly highlighted the need for global competency in their call for education reform.
We think this is how a true tipping point will be reached (1) align global competence with other major educational levers of reform so that it can be accomplished via existing vehicles and (2) embed global competence in the call to action of all major organizations and grassroots activities so there is demand for this kind of learning and change.
Perhaps we are guilty of creeping incrementalism, but this approach still seems more likely to me to produce real change than the big bang theory of total reinvention. I'd actually like to be very wrong about that and to that end we are also participating in some more radical interventions as well -- all roads to Mecca and all that... But for the most part, this simultaneous supply and demand side approach is our story and we're sticking to it. I would be delighted to hear others' views on this very important topic.
Tony Jackson
Executive Director
Partnership for Global Learning
Dec 20, 2010 at 7:11 AM
this approach still seems more likely to me to produce real change than the big bang theory of total reinvention.