Meet GreatSchools: Molly Vitorte

We'd like to welcome our newest recruit, Molly Vitorte, as our vice president of partner relationships. She brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise in partnership building and cultivating business relationships that focus on college access for minority and low-income students. Molly spent three years at the Hispanic Scholarship Fund as its national director of outreach and alliances. Prior to her time there, she was the associate director of Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies. We asked her about her influences, and this is what she told us:

What inspires you about the GreatSchools mission?
Molly: The opportunity to be a part of positive change! My father always told me that one of the biggest responsibilities we have in life is to leave the world a better place than we found it. I think GreatSchools is doing just that.

Who in your childhood most inspired your love of learning?
Molly: My grandma. She was, like my mother, an elementary school teacher, and she turned everything we did together into a learning adventure. I have tender memories of doing the crossword puzzle in the morning’s newspaper with her, and thanks to Grandma, I’m still addicted to them!

What's the best parenting advice you've heard?
Molly: The best parenting advice I’ve heard is what's working for my kid: First, that you should tell your child you love him or her every single day, no matter what. Second, that punishment will stop the event, but it won’t change the behavior.

Thank you, Molly! Simple, straightforward advice for any parent to follow.
Molly: To change behavior, kids need to be part of the solution.

The Four Key Roles of Parents

A few weeks ago, we introduced you to College Bound, our new online program designed to help parents raise college-ready high school graduates. This week, we’ll introduce you to our ideas about how parents make such a difference in their children’s education. We’ve boiled it down into four key roles and we’ve designed College Bound to help parents play these four roles more effectively.

1. Set high expectations
2. Cultivate character traits that underlie school success
3. Support learning at home and at school
4. Guide children in planning for college

1. Set high expectations
Parental expectations can be the most influential element driving student performance. Expectations get communicated all the time; parents don’t have to be elaborate or formal about it, just consistent and frequent. Expectations influence children’s behavior and decisions and affect a range of outcomes from the rigor of selected courses to grades earned. One study of more than 20,000 high school students found that not only can students clearly articulate the grades they need to bring home to stay out of trouble — their “trouble threshold” — they frequently earn that threshold grade. In other words, when parents expect Cs, students earn them. The same goes for As. Parents also play a crucial role in having high expectations of schools. When parents advocate for college-prep curriculum, content, experiences, resources and supports, they improve both their own child’s educational experience and the schools they attend.

2. Cultivate character traits that underlie school success
Recent research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that about half of an individual’s intellect and ability is inherited or genetic, and the other half is nurture or a product of environmental and societal factors. In fact, teachable character traits such as willpower, self-discipline, and the ability to delay gratification are more highly correlated with high achievement and goal attainment than IQ. Parents support achievement when they cultivate a belief in the importance of effort instead of emphasizing native talent; children who develop this outlook are more likely to try harder when faced with challenges.

3. Support learning at home and at school
Literacy development starts early; the frequency and complexity of parental language, as well as the degree of encouragement, make a big difference in children’s development. As children grow, parents don’t have to become experts in algebra to help with homework — children are more likely to complete homework and view it as valuable when parents simply provide a structured routine and a quiet and organized workspace. How children spend their time out of school has a tremendous impact on their intellectual development, and a large portion of the achievement gap has been attributed to the absence of summer learning.

At school, student achievement goes up when parents attend teacher conferences and school programs. Parents who communicate with teachers and stay informed about school resources are more likely to secure necessary supports for their children. Informed parents are better able to make quality choices about the schools their children attend, the programs in which they participate and, in some cases, the teachers who can best serve their children.

4. Guide children in planning for college
When parents discuss college — starting from an early age — and help their children to investigate and apply for postsecondary options, children are much more likely to attain a college degree.

There’s no magic formula to parenting for education success, just a lot of little things every day. College Bound inspires and guides parents to do these things, beginning when their children are young.

In Appreciation of Don Fisher

GreatSchools lost a generous friend and supporter yesterday. Don Fisher, co-founder of the Gap and philanthropist extraordinaire died at his home in San Francisco at the age of 81.

Don and his wife Doris provided the funds that allowed GreatSchools to expand from its California roots and become a national resource beginning nine years ago. We would not be able to provide our services to millions of American parents each year if it were not for Don and Doris Fisher’s generosity.

In addition to providing major funding, Don made us better by asking tough questions. He had a general sense that providing school performance information to parents was a good idea, but he always wanted to know what we were learning and what evidence we had that GreatSchools was making a difference. He asked question after question to find the weaknesses in our case; preparing to answer his questions forced us to clarify our thinking.

He was also an incredibly generous supporter of charter schools. In city after city, KIPP schools are among those that have the highest GreatSchools ratings. He gave tens of millions to the KIPP Foundation to make these schools possible.

We are deeply thankful for his generosity for education causes and will miss him greatly.

Photo credit: Marcus Hanschen

Education in the News This Week

New Study About Charters Finds Breakthrough Evidence
This week Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby released a follow-up report to her 2007 study, proving that “students who entered lotteries and won spots in New York City charter schools performed better on state exams than students who entered the same lotteries but did not secure charter school seats.” Parent involvement seems to speak to the difference, as Fordham Flypaper blogger Eric Osberg explains: “She compares charter versus district school students without the worry that charter students are somehow different, not just demographically or academically, but because their parents may be more concerned about their educations (as evidenced by their choosing a charter). The comparison students/parents made that same choice, and they fared worse when left in a district school.”

First Draft of Proposed National Educational Standards Released
On Monday 48 states (Texas and Alaska are the holdouts) signed on to the joint effort of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, called the Common Core Standards Initiative, to write guidelines detailing math and English skills that all students should have by the end of high school. But, as New York Times’ Room for Debate blog puts it, “this is one step on a long road: there is a 30-day comment period, and then the panel convened by the governors association will work on grade-by-grade standards from kindergarten onward.”

Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s Speech on NCLB
In a speech delivered yesterday in Washington to more than 150 education, business, civil rights, charitable and social services groups, Duncan stated, “Let's build a law that respects the honored, noble status of educators — who should be valued as skilled professionals rather than mere practitioners and compensated accordingly.” As translated by Fordham Flypaper’s Checker Finn: “America needs national standards and measures but should leave it to states and districts to operate their own schools.”

A Shout-out to GreatSchools
Over in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Mark Kramer, the co-founder of FSG Social Impact Advisors, cites GreatSchools as an example of "catalytic philanthropy," a service that drives change by inspiring others to act.

What Is the Solution To the High School Dropout Crisis?

Originally posted at the National Journal's Education Experts blog, in response to the provocation: President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan often talk about the serious problem of high school "dropout factories" that graduate 60 percent or fewer of their students. But there is no broad consensus on how to address the issue. One solution, proposed by a Texas education official, is for states to voluntarily ban the hiring of high school dropouts as a way of keeping kids in school. What do you think is the best way to solve the high school dropout crisis?

Trying to reduce the rate of high school dropouts without directly and actively engaging parents is like trying to fix a leaky roof without plugging up the holes. You can put out lots of buckets, nail up some plastic, but every time it rains the water is going to gush right through. No matter how much we reform curriculum or improve teacher training, if parents aren’t voraciously leading the charge against dropping out, kids are going to continue to view leaving high school as a rational and easy option.

I say kids because we are talking about kids — the path to dropping out of high school starts in early elementary school. And as Pedro Noguera noted so well, much of the problems and the solutions lie beyond school walls. Parents are at the heart of students’ formation of goals, expectations, motivation and sense of accountability.

A recent study, led by Civic Enterprises and funded by the Gates Foundation, conducted focus groups and surveyed hundreds of dropouts across the country. What did they have to say? For almost half of respondents, parents or guardians had not been involved in their schooling; most of those that were involved only became so toward the end of their child’s high school career for disciplinary reasons. The majority of parents were not aware of their child’s chronic truancy; less than half said that their parents were contacted by the school if they were absent. One of the top five reasons dropouts gave for leaving was that they had “too much freedom and not enough rules;” another top reason was that they’d missed too many days. Over two thirds of respondents said that they didn’t “feel motivated or inspired to work hard.”

What should be done? Ask the dropouts, themselves. Seven in ten said that more parental involvement would have made a difference.

We need outreach and education such that all parents — poor parents, working parents, parents who don’t speak English — are empowered to guide their children’s education. Parents need easy access to good information, enabling them to answer basic questions: Is my child on-track with academic requirements? If not, where is he/she struggling and what resources are available to get up to grade-level? What does my child have for homework? Is my child frequently late to or missing school? Beyond this, parents need support in cultivating the high expectations, goals and college/career planning that can sustain their children through the high school years.

Many policymakers and funders shy away from the realm of parenting, perhaps because it seems too difficult to influence. But we shouldn’t give up. Even a modest increase in effective parent involvement could have as much impact as major school reforms.

Education in the News This Week

Welcome to another new series we'd like to run, a spotlight on the week’s buzz-worthy education stories:

Debating 21st Century Skills
Common Core, a non-profit research and advocacy organization that supports parents, educators, and others who are pushing for a broad liberal education for all children, released a strong challenge to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills — a national advocacy organization focused on infusing 21st century skills into education. In Tuesday’s Boston Globe, Diane Ravitch, co-chair of Common Core and research professor of education at New York University, wrote that “thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. And a great deal of knowledge is necessary before one can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.”

Bringing Innovation to Scale
In the latest issue of Democracy, “A Journal of Ideas,” Teach for America’s executive vice president of public affairs reports that the international achievement gap is costing the U.S. economy between $1.3 and $2.3 trillion annually, and the domestic achievement gap between low- and high-income students is costing us around $500 billion a year. “As the president and education secretary have made clear, maintaining the status quo is not a real option. The stakes are too high for the country to continue propping up a mediocre public education system.”

Testing the Theory of “Learning Styles”
Researchers have been conducting experiments on various “learning styles” for fifty years, notes Dan Willingham, cognitive psychologist and author of Why Don’t Kids Like School?, on the Washington Post’s education blog. “They’ve been tested with the sorts of materials that kids encounter in schools. They’ve been tested with kids diagnosed with a learning disability. There just doesn’t seem to be much evidence that kids learn in fundamentally different ways.” A lesson clicks or doesn’t, he writes, “because of the knowledge the child brought to the lesson, his interests, or other factors,” not “because of an enduring bias or predisposition in the way the child learns.” (If you like this, check out the adept response by Robert Pondiscio of The Core Knowledge Blog.)

How Music Rewires the Brain
In case you missed it last Friday, Chicago Public Radio aired an interview segment with researchers at Northwestern University’s auditory neuroscience lab about the effects of musical training on the brain stem: “It seems that through musical training, the brainstem can actually get better at picking out a desired signal in a noisy environment. […] Learning music appears to make people experts at picking apart complicated sounds — and not just musical sounds.”

Sounds like we should pick up some earplugs and register our kids for those trumpet lessons they’ve been asking for!

Introducing College Bound

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Welcome to a new series on the GreatSchools blog called The Making of College Bound.

College Bound is our new program at GreatSchools, launching in beta this month, and we’d like to invite you to come with us for a behind-the-scenes look. Let's start by answering the question, Why College Bound?

As many readers know, GreatSchools is primarily known for its school information. One in three families turns to GreatSchools to search for the right school, track the performance of their children’s school, or get general information about K-12 education. Over the past decade, GreatSchools has emerged as the leading source of transparency about the performance of American K-12 schools. We’re very proud of this accomplishment, and we will continue to improve the quality and accessibility of our school information.

But we also know that much more needs to be done to inspire and guide the nation's parents to be effective champions of their children’s education at home and in their communities.

Several years ago, we began asking some key questions: Who is using GreatSchools? What impact are we having? For whom? What else can we do to help close the achievement gap — beyond helping families make informed choices about where to send their kids?

During that exploration, we learned that we have less impact on low-income families than we’d like and so have an opportunity — indeed an obligation — to reach further and inspire and guide those most in need of help.

So we allowed ourselves to dream: What could and should we do to make a more significant impact on low-income families? We wanted to continue to leverage our strength in online technology and media, but we recognized that we’d have to get closer to the customer to learn what we needed to learn. So we began to work in selected cities, including Dayton, Ohio, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to understand deeply the ways that low-income parents are involved in their children’s education. We held focus groups, we did ethnographic research, and we created prototypes. We learned so much!

College Bound, an innovative online-offline parent-training program and support group, is what emerged from this process. And we’re really excited to bring it to the world beginning this month. Stay tuned. In the coming months, we’ll be sharing lots more about what College Bound is, how it works, and what we’re learning.

Obama to School Kids: Success Requires Hard Work

As I watched President Obama address our nation’s school kids today, one piece of advice stood out: “No one’s born being good at things you become good at things through hard work.”

I’ve been working really hard with my daughters to help them learn this lesson. As President Obama said, “If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.”

This attitude is what Stanford researcher Dr. Carol Dweck describes as “growth mentality.” Her research has shown that students do much better when they believe that doing well is a function of hard work as opposed to innate talent.

Parents, too, have a responsibility in keeping their children on track. In that spirit, I hope that parents use the opportunity to reinforce the messages that their kids heard today. Tonight, try asking this question to your child. “Do you think some people are just smarter than others or do you think people get smart because they work hard?” Listen to the answer and consider how you can talk with your child to help him or her understand how critical hard work is.

I know a university student in China. She’s a senior at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities and I know that she’s gotten there through a lot of hard work. I recently asked her: “Why do you work so hard?”

“Because I want China to be strong and prosperous,” she responded. She saw a direct connection between her work in school and the future of her nation.

We Americans are typically motivated more by self-interest and our desire to contribute to our family and community than by our desire to make the nation prosperous. The task for us parents is to help our children see the link between the hard work today and their opportunity to pursue their dreams tomorrow.

When I ask my nine year-old daughter “Why do you work hard?” I hope she’ll respond: “Because when I grow up I want to be able to do lots of things for myself and the world. Maybe I’ll want to invent something new like a medicine that saves people. Or maybe I can make a car that doesn’t pollute. Or maybe I can help homeless people. And I want to make money and enjoy knowing lots of things.”

Thanks, President Obama, for carrying this message to America’s schoolchildren. We parents are listening, too.

Read the President’s remarks. (Also posted at The Huffington Post.)

Meet GreatSchools: Katherine Kornas

Weeks after moving from snowy, chilly Chicago to balmy San Francisco two-and-a-half years ago, Katherine Kornas helped us create an online community for parents on GreatSchools, and she hasn't slowed down since. Now the director of product management, she oversees the planning and execution of GreatSchools products on a day-to-day basis. Formerly with the education division at Discovery Communications — the same media company behind the Discovery Channel and TLC — Katherine has thorough experience in digital video development, and online library management, and building lesson plans for K-12 classrooms. If that weren’t impressive enough, she also taught in high school classrooms and coedited an SAT-prep book and video series for students. Here's what she had to say about parenting and education:

What inspires you about the GreatSchools mission?
Katherine: The idea that a child’s education is a shared responsibility — that it takes more than just a teacher in a classroom for eight hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, to educate a child. Parents are part of a network of folks who influence a child’s intellectual, social and emotional growth. Our job at GreatSchools is to support them so that they make a direct impact at home as well as give back to that network.

Who in your childhood most inspired your love of learning?
Katherine: My dad, hands down. I think it’s in the genes; I got my height, fair skin, and overactive brain from him. Growing up, it was a given that he had the right answer for every single question in the world. We called them “Words of Wisdom From Jim.” Why do airplanes stay in the sky? Could I buy shares of dog food in the stock market? Why not? We’re both the type who are kept up at night by harebrained ideas or the pursuit of a solution for some nagging problem.

What's the best parenting advice you've heard?
Katherine: Never tell your kids what they can’t do: “You can’t be an engineer. You’re not good at math.” Always focus on the positive. Again, words of wisdom from Jim.

What Are the Best Methods for School Improvement?

Originally posted at the National Journal's Education Experts blog, in response to the questions: What are the best methods of school improvement that will work across the country? What are some examples of successful school turnaround models? Can they be replicated elsewhere in the country?

I think one promising route to success here involves re-conceptualizing the role of school districts so that they come to think of themselves as "managers of a portfolio of schools." The Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington published an interesting report on this a few days ago.

And, to make that transformation happen, we are going to have to find a way to cultivate more of that all-too-illusive ingredient: public will. More parents and citizens are going to have to be convinced that their schools today are not as good as they think they are and that the community needs to aim for something higher. And that's going to require more than publishing low test scores every year.