Equity, Excellence, and Innovation —
Moving Toward a 10-Year Action Plan
Welcome Back!
A new calendar year is a time of both new beginnings and of continued work to improve the HIDOE — simultaneously reflecting and looking forward. With that in mind, let's capture our work to date and illuminate how it will be applied in this and coming years.
Ideas That Transform Our Classrooms
Over the past 18 months, the HIDOE has been focused on three high-impact strategies: School Design, Student Voice, and Teacher Collaboration. As we explored how to use these to empower schools, we identified core practice changes to impact student success at a new level. I am very excited about some key shifts — delivering trainings so that we have more time for collaboration, reconfiguring our budget and planning processes to reflect our highest priorities, supporting pilot classroom innovations generated by teachers, refocusing school partnerships with business and industry to increase opportunities for applied learning, expanding upon our leadership development and succession plan, and increasing student participation in early college, Advanced Placement, and Career and Technical Education courses.
We are doing our work within a Learning Organization design — using high-impact strategies to support rigorous teaching and learning standards while providing the space for new innovations through collaborative learning practices. By being continuous learners and innovators, we will use our School Design process to replace practices that do not contribute to student success, and adopt new ways of engaging students so that they understand how to use their learning to reach their aspirations. The sharing of best practices at the school, complex and state levels shows a deep commitment to collaboration that is transforming our classrooms.
A Vision for Public Education
The work that we do is complex and powerful, and so very important to our young people's future. This is why we are focused on preparing and empowering our school teams. Our next decade of work, which will be articulated in a 10-year Strategic Plan, will require operational, policy, financial, and community partnership support.
If we are to unleash the power and promise of public education, where . . .
- Our primary mission as an educational agency is to deliver on an instructional design that prepares students for college, careers and community; and
- Every classroom provides rigorous applied learning, design thinking, project-based designs, early college readiness or access, or other empowerment learning models; and
- Students have voice in what and how they learn; and
- Teachers work and share in powerful collaboratives; and
- We adopt school designs that enable equity of access and quality, competitive education; and
- We leverage technology to provide students with industry-driven learning innovations where they design, iterate and collaborate as learners; and
- We provide a highly efficient business design to run our department and schools; and
- We have a safe and supportive culture of professional feedback to advance our internal capacity; and
- Schools are empowered decision-makers in quality instructional designs and supports, as part of an HIDOE tri-level team; and
- Every decision we make and every program we design and deliver is grounded in Na Hopena A'o; and
- Our classrooms and campuses reflect a respectful, safe, state-of-the-art learning environment;
. . . then our Board, HIDOE leadership, legislature, parents, students, and business, industry and higher education partners must work collaboratively to deliver it. We will be reaching out to all these stakeholders for their input on our next phase.
Forward Focus
The DOE/BOE Strategic Plan will sunset in 2020. A new action plan will focus our priorities, outlined above, for the next decade. Functioning as a Learning Organization, using the innovation vision set by the Governor's Blueprint for Education, and ongoing improvements identified through our accountability system, we will develop a forward-facing Statewide Strategic Plan focused on three key questions:
- What is student success?
- How do we measure what we really value?
- How do we support each child to experience success?
Student Success
There have been many definitions of student success over the years. That will continue to evolve as learning evolves, and as we consider what really matters in the learning process. Many will agree that what we value most in the school experience, which informs our understanding of student success, is not fully captured in an accountability system. If you look at our Strive HI measures, you can tell whether a student is reading on grade level, but you cannot answer whether a strengthened sense of belonging, responsibility, excellence, aloha, total well-being and aloha has been seeded. Na Hopena A'o and other qualitative assessments will help build a new definition of student success.
What We Measure
Evolving our definition of student success will determine what we measure. Traditional quantitative measures, if continued to be reported in isolation of the experiences that spark and cultivate learning, will limit our ability to talk about each child as a learner. If we value each student . . .
- developing metacognitive skills to understand how they learn, and
- learning how to access tools to understand and solve a problem, or design multiple solutions, and
- showing empathy for others in their community and engaging in community issues, and
- engaging in authentic research and contributing to a knowledge base,
. . . then we must take on the challenge of incorporating these qualitative measures.
Supporting Each Child to Experience Success
A learning design that is structured around exploration, creativity, discovery, design, and engagement is different from a learning design that is about mandated content coverage and demonstration of isolated, discrete skills. More children are reached, engaged and supported by the former; it inspires lifelong learning.
Developments in Progress
To achieve these shifts, we have some work in progress that I hope will be better understood in light of our forward focus, noted above.
Empowerment Framework
Throughout this past year, we have been exploring the design of an empowerment framework that places greater decision-making and accountability for school design and curriculum at the school level, closest to students. This is important because quality instructional experiences for students cannot be managed from the state level. School leadership teams in partnership with teachers are best situated to design schools aligned with student voice and interests, community resources, parent input and local context. The role of the complex and state thus shifts to a focus on capacity building, leadership development, talent management, standard setting, resource development, and collaborative planning and articulation, in support of each school's articulated needs. School-based empowerment requires training, preparation, and planning to ensure that shifts in decision-making happen with proper supports. Empowerment also requires that our tri-level leadership jointly determines when it is a value-add to have centralized versus decentralized services. I look forward to building upon the feedback received from Complex Area Superintendents to document our first iteration of our empowerment model for the 2019-20 school year.
Portfolio of School Designs
The HIDOE has adopted a School Design Framework and Design Principles that focus on the purposeful design of schools around students, and with it the opportunity to grow unique school models. Our challenge now is to modernize facilities to reflect 21st century instructional spaces that support educational innovation and a discovery approach to learning and teaching. A school with a medical academy must have access to a lab environment that reflects industry standards. A school with a project-based learning approach needs to have flex space for students to meet in teams and work with a variety of instructional resources, including technology.
During the spring semester we will be sharing our initial portfolio of leading edge and unique school models in our system. We will also be identifying potential models that are missing that would be attractive for students based on their interests and aspirations, i.e. smaller academy designs, apprentice-focused academies, early college designs, transition centers, dual language academies, etc.
Innovation
When we talk about innovation in the HIDOE we are referring to an important shift in mindset toward trying new ideas, replacing dated practices, and driving toward better solutions. In a work and learning environment that embraces innovation, we are open to learning from one another ways to elevate our collective work, push our capacity, and improve student learning. We have offered two rounds of Innovation Grants to teachers and have provided financial resources to support collaboration within instructional environments. Also, we have teams working on two teacher-led conferences — Multilingualism to be held March 2, and Computer Science on June 13. Another highlight of innovation is the planning work occurring under Act 155 which empowers the HIDOE to work with developers to use our facilities and properties to generate revenue to invest into the school system.
Leveraging Technology
Ready access to online information and platforms provide both challenges and opportunities for instructional delivery and use of time. The HIDOE is number one in the nation for network access. With better network access than anywhere in the country, we have opportunities for students to take courses online, collaborate across and within schools, conduct research with students globally, access digital learning resources, engage in global academic competitions, and so forth. Our new computer science standards and CS licensure for teachers is a great resource and support. I look forward to hearing your ideas about how we can continue to leverage technology in more creative and powerful ways.
Modernization of Systems
The HIDOE is a $2 billion organization with critical business functions that support our classroom work such as financial management, food services, transportation, facilities maintenance, grounds maintenance, health services, data management, security and so forth. These services, and the individuals who perform the functions that operationalize our work in support of schools, are essential and must be run within an expectation of best business practices. Our challenge today is that our technology systems that these business functions rely on are antiquated and must be replaced. The replacement of a technology system for a particular function can take one to three years depending on how many other systems to which it is connected. We will not be discouraged by the heavy lift that is before us; we are systematically planning for the replacement of old systems. Google for Education will be replacing Lotus Notes, starting this summer with email and calendaring. We launched Future Schools Now to improve business rules and functions around repair & maintenance projects that will cut costs, shorten project delivery schedules and enable better project tracking; this took a year to design and develop.
Under my leadership, we will continue to roll out system upgrades every year to create a more efficient organization that reduces paper-based manual processes and improves delivery timelines.
Our next major modernization project will be the replacement of our Financial Management System. We will procure a flexible platform that adapts to support our complex work. We will work with the Board and legislators to redefine budget categories to make our overall budget easier to understand in greater detail. Our current system, which uses funding program categories known as EDNs, does not provide clarity around our needs, the adequacy of our budget, and expenditures aligned to instructional and operational priorities. Decision-makers and the public desire and deserve improvements in our financial reporting. This project is one of the most important that we will be undertaking this decade.
Hawai'i is a Leader in Public Education
King Kamehameha III established the statewide public education system, taught in the native Hawaiian language, in 1840. We are reminded that education innovation is not new to Hawai'i! As the oldest such system west of the Mississippi, the Aloha State has a long history developing educational equity, excellence and innovation. We remain committed to leading in these areas.
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