Those were some of the key points that Anthony S. Bryk, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, made Tuesday at the annual meeting of the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO.
“We need to be problem- and user-centered,” Bryk said during an address titled “Leading, Improving.”
He lamented that too often the public discourse about education problems is dominated by complaints about broad issues such as the “achievement gap.”
“These are really macro problems,” Bryk said. “You have to get down to what’s the specific problem we’re trying to solve.”
To illustrate his point, Bryk highlighted Statway and Quantway, two Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching-led “one-year pathways” that involve “Networked Improvement Communities.” The pathways take community college students initially assigned to developmental math “to and through college math.” Quantway focuses on quantitative reasoning and Statway focuses on statistics.
