Members of the University Task Force on P-16 Education

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Executive summary

Vision statement

Foreword

Setting the Context

• Defining P-16 and beyond
• Implications of the land-grant mission for P-16 Plus
• Understanding educational discontinuities and academic literacy
• Understanding standardized testing versus academic literacy
• Understanding the P-16 Reform Movement
• National context
• National-level response
• State-level response

Current status of University of Illinois P-16 partnerships

• Discontinuities in documenting current activity
• Disruptive discontinuities in the P-16 Plus system

Education, technology, and society in the 21^st century

Toward "systemic" thinking in Illinois education

Achieving the "2020 Vision"

• Realizing the Vision: Academic literacy through a systemic
  approach to P-16 Plus
• An internal and external examination by the University
• Center for Systemic Change in Education
• Focusing internally
• Focusing externally
• Realizing the Vision: Specific action items
• Steps for immediate action
• Steps for near-term action
• Steps for intermediate-term action
• Steps for long-term action

Resolution

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

Appendix I: P-16 Initiatives in Selected States

Appendix II: University of Illinois P-16 Data Resources

Appendix III: Illustrations of Current University of Illinois Involvement with Schools

References and Resources

Executive Summary

Colleges and universities in the United States have since their beginnings in the 17^th century interacted with schools and academies, seeking to influence them and in turn being influenced by their needs and their graduates. By the mid-1990s, the idea of a P-16 educational system (preschool through grade 16, or college graduation) had emerged from a sustained national conversation about the disappointing quality of education in the United States. The role of higher education in meaningful school reform, from preschool through high school, received increasing emphasis, as did the need for higher education itself to change. By 1999, several national reports called for greater institutional commitment by higher education to improving schools, and over a dozen states and at least 35 communities had initiated cross-system P-16 collaborations.

The University of Illinois, as a land-grant university, bears a special responsibility for the full range of learners and teachers that constitute the citizens of the state. We therefore need to contribute to efforts to improve the education of the diverse set of people who want and need to be educated to productively participate in our rapidly changing society.

It was in this context that University of Illinois Vice President Chester Gardner in January 2000 appointed a University of Illinois Task Force on P-16 Education, with membership from Liberal Arts and Sciences and Education departments from all three of the University’s campuses (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield), and representation from public school districts and community colleges. The Task Force, co-chaired by Education faculty from the two larger campuses, was charged to assess the University’s role in P-12 education at all three campuses and to produce a written report articulating:

• a clear relationship between the University and P-12 education in Illinois and nationwide;
• a comprehensive account of the many ways in which we are already realizing that vision;
• specific proposals about how that realization could be improved in the near future;
• how this role of the University of Illinois can be made highly visible both internally and externally as a major priority of the President.
  

The University of Illinois has invested resources in an extraordinary variety of initiatives interacting with the rest of the P-16 system. Faculty, staff and students in most colleges on all three campuses are engaged in one way or another in school and higher education improvement at the national, state, district, multi-district, or school level. Over 250 different school-university initiatives, involving over 60 academic units, are ongoing across the three campuses, ranging from statewide policy leadership to single-school interventions. Faculty in the Colleges of Agriculture, Business, Education, Engineering, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Medicine, Social Work, and others have secured millions of dollars of funding for university/school initiatives in recent years. Our P-16 initiatives fall into the following categories: 1) research and development, 2) policy formation and implementation, 3) university/school collaborations, 4) teacher and administrator education, and 5) explorations of new technologies for learning and teaching. A more extensive description of the wide variety of ways that the University is currently engaged with P-12 education is described in the main body of this report and in the appendices.

Despite an impressive number of such initiatives undertaken in recent years by University of Illinois faculty, there are still major problems that challenge the educational system and that interfere with learning and teaching at all levels. There are three main shortcomings with our current partnerships that need to be addressed:

• Our current efforts do not take a systemic approach to improving education in the State, a system that goes beyond P-16.
• Our current efforts do not focus on "disruptive discontinuities" (gaps where different parts of the system should connect but do not) leading to problems for many students.
• Our current efforts do not deal well with the rapid rate of change that faces all of society today.

Decade after decade, education in Illinois has been characterized by discontinuities or gaps that lead to documented weaknesses in the State’s ability to support a quality teaching force and in student learning levels that are not on a par with national averages nor on a par with most industrialized nations. Below are just two examples of places where the parts of the educational system fail to work together in an integrated and coordinated way:

• The gap between universities and schools often separates elementary and secondary school teachers from the latest developments in their subject matter areas.
• Separation between teaching and research often hurts the quality of both.

Disruptive discontinuities such as these serve as a systemic barrier to effective learning and teaching. Rapid change over the next several decades will cause some discontinuities to become more disruptive for effective education and will create new disruptive discontinuities in the future.

We propose that the University of Illinois support a more systemic approach to improving education at all levels, an approach that we call "P-16 Plus." This approach goes beyond the usual range of P-16 education to address education as a continuous system, from early childhood education through the lifelong learning that is becoming increasingly important for a rapidly changing society. We propose that the University systematically explore a "2020 Vision" for P-16 Plus education, working collaboratively with the other stakeholders in the system to shape a vision for education over the next twenty years. We choose 20 years as a time period close enough to realistically plan for, yet far-reaching enough to require long-range vision and time for implementation.

To explore this P-16 Plus 2020 Vision, we propose a Center for Systemic Change in Education. This Center would combine the strengths of the University in inquiry, evaluation, analysis, and synthesis, but would focus on a commitment to action. In so doing, the Center would bear similarities to such national organizations as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which incorporates research, public information, and collaborative action for the public good. The charge to the Center should be to conduct joint inquiry, collaborating across disciplinary lines within the University, incorporating the different expertise of the three campuses, as well as expertise from the various sectors and levels of education in the Illinois P-16 system. Moreover, it is expected that inquiry will not be limited to theorizing about solutions, but will include collaboratively testing solutions in practice in schools, school districts, and in higher education.

We envision three main activities for the Center for Systemic Change in Education:

1. Encouraging efforts by faculty, staff, and students at the University to address problems in the P-16 Plus system and to develop steps toward a 2020 Vision for improvement through a P-16 Plus mini-grants program.
2. Evaluating, organizing, and publicizing the ongoing P-16 Plus efforts within the University with outcomes, best practices, and resource sharing through a P-16 Plus Web Portal.
   
3. Working with other stakeholders in the P-16 Plus system to jointly develop and implement a 2020 Vision for P-16 Plus, and to modify that vision as appropriate, given rapid change in society (for example, organizing a yearly "Illinois P-16 Plus Education summit meeting" to addresses these P-16 Plus issues).

The upcoming decades will be a time of major change for education at all levels. Forces at work in transforming the larger society include the increasing role of rapidly changing technologies in all phases of life, public and private; increasing globalization of culture and the economy; and demographic shifts in our population that will soon result in no ethnic group having a numerical majority. At the same time, we see rising expectations for the education of all citizens in an information age. These forces will put substantial new pressures on the educational system to adapt. The inconsistencies that have come to characterize our educational system will be transformed as new, unforeseen challenges arise. These changes will confront schools and universities with a choice: either to take a leadership role in shaping a vision for how these changes can best benefit a system of education serving all our citizens, or to see education shaped by social, technological, and economic changes in ways that are haphazard and serendipitous.

The University of Illinois can make a unique contribution by committing resources to a sustained investigation of emergent social and technological changes and their implications for education in Illinois, leading to a shared vision of educational change between now and the year 2020. The University can then support a focused effort to institute that 2020 Vision in concert with other participants in the educational system. To foster the shared 2020 Vision, the University can help to address existing discontinuities in the educational system and also can provide an early warning system for new discontinuities that develop under the strain of rapid change. The University of Illinois can and should embrace its leadership role in establishing forward-looking P-16 Plus discussions and initiatives within the educational system and across the broader public domain.

Vision Statement

P-16 Plus and Beyond

A 2020 Vision for a University of Illinois Initiative:

Colleges and universities in the United States have since their beginnings in the 17^th century interacted with schools and academies, seeking to influence them and in turn being influenced by their needs and their graduates. In 1779, Thomas Jefferson proposed a statewide educational system that would begin with public elementary school and culminate with study at the College of William and Mary. The College would serve to assist in developing curricular materials for schools, assess their graduates, and produce their teachers. Since these early days, the assumption that there should be a productive interaction between higher education and public schools persists in the minds of public and professional educators alike.

By the mid-1990s, the idea of a P-16 educational system (preschool through grade 16, or college graduation) had emerged from a sustained national conversation about the disappointing quality of education in the United States. The dimensions of discontent were numerous, but they included:

• sharp differences in student achievement from elementary school through college, persistently corresponding to economic and ethnic differences;
  
• deep disparities in educational resources, resulting in some of the highest-achieving schools in the nation existing in close proximity to some of the lowest-achieving schools;
  
• serious questions about the preparedness of teachers to educate several million children in low-performing schools;
  
• conditions of the teaching profession that result in high rates of teacher attrition, contributing to current and increasing teacher shortages in high need subject areas, high-need districts, and among teachers of color; and
  
• the resistance of educational institutions at all levels to improvement, after more than a decade of reform efforts.

As potential state- and national-level responses to these and other problems were examined in the 1990s, the educational system’s resistance to significant improvement was increasingly understood as a failure to create systemic solutions to systemic problems. The role of higher education in meaningful school reform, from preschool through high school, received increasing emphasis, as did the need for higher education itself to change. By 1999, several national reports had been written calling for greater institutional commitment by higher education to improving schools, and over a dozen states and at least 35 communities had initiated cross-system collaborations.

It was in this context that University of Illinois Vice President Chester Gardner in January 2000 appointed a University of Illinois Task Force on P-16 Education, with membership from Liberal Arts and Sciences and Education departments from all three of the University’s campuses (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield), and representation from public school districts and community colleges. The Task Force, co-chaired by Education faculty from the two larger campuses, was charged to assess the University’s role in P-12 education at all three campuses and to produce a written report articulating:

• a clear relationship between the University and P-12 education in Illinois and nationwide;
• a comprehensive account of the many ways in which we are already realizing that vision;
• specific proposals about how that realization could be improved in the near future; and
• how this role of the University of Illinois can be made highly visible both internally and externally as a major priority of the President.
  

The Vice President asked that the report be written by Fall, 2000.

Consistent with our charge, the Task Force has focused on interactions between representatives of the University of Illinois and constituencies of the rest of the educational system of the state. University of Illinois representatives can be defined as individual faculty members; groups of faculty engaged in research, development, or other activity; academic units conducting programs of various sorts, from recruitment in schools to academic programs for practicing teachers to placement of students in schools for practice teaching; public service units providing support for education and schooling in Illinois; administrative units and officers engaging with legislators or policy makers on educational matters affecting various institutions; and so on. By "the rest of the educational system of the state" we mean public and private schools, community colleges, colleges or universities, or agencies closely associated with them, such as state and local boards of education or teachers’ unions. Thus, our P-16 Plus recommendations address purposeful interactions between any part of the university and any part of the rest of the education system of Illinois. That our Task Force commitment to the

P-16 Plus concept has special significance for the distinctively democratic mission of public schools is a key premise of this report.

The Task Force first met on February 15, 2000, and by the end of August had met a total of twelve times, sometimes by video teleconference. During that time, Task Force members met with several focus groups of teachers and administrators, three in Chicago, one in the Chicago suburbs, and one on-line focus group with 15 participants from central and southern Illinois.  The purpose was to obtain teachers’ and administrators’ thinking about various P-16 Plus issues.¹ Between meetings, material was drafted and revised using the P-16 Task Force web site <http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/p16/> and by September 11, a penultimate draft of the report had received comments from a select group of external reviewers from all three campuses and from other parts of the P-16 system. Later in September, a final full meeting of the Task Force and a presentation of findings to educational leaders in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Educational Alumni Association led to further revisions in the document. We begin our report with a consideration of the meaning of P-16, then turn to the distinctive significance of the University of Illinois’ land-grant mission for the P-16 Plus context.

Because the term P-16 is relatively new and there is not likely to be universal agreement on what it means, it is important for us to say what we mean by P-16 in this document:

"P-12" education refers, typically, to the continuum of schooling from preschool through the end of secondary school, or twelfth grade. "P-16 education" signifies an emerging national concern for understanding early childhood education, elementary, secondary, and higher education as a continuous system. The systemic nature of P-16 education is typically understood as residing within each state, because the states bear statutory responsibility for their respective educational systems. But the "system" can be understood on a national scale, as nationally-organized educational policies, practices, and standards increase. For the purposes of this University of Illinois Task Force on P-16 Education, the P-16 concept was a useful departure point for our inquiry into how the three campuses of this University can best contribute to the systemic improvement of education, especially in Illinois, from pre-school through community college, undergraduate, graduate, and career-long education. We found the P-16 term limiting, however, because the university contributes to the quality of schooling in Illinois and the nation in part through graduate programs and continuing education programs that go well beyond the "P-16" years. In the 21^st century, the concept of life-long learning will increase in importance. We use the term P-16 Plus as an indicator of our more comprehensive vision.

The traditional land-grant mission focuses on three areas: teaching, research and extension or outreach to the wider public. The University of Illinois has historically engaged in extensive and significant relationships with schools, community colleges, and other institutions of higher education in Illinois. In one sense, then, talk of P-16 education is putting old wine in new bottles.

In another sense, however, this historical perspective reveals a new urgency to the University’s role in education in Illinois and in the nation. While there have been recurrent criticisms of public schools since their establishment as a mass educational institution early in the twentieth century, they have not, until now, been at risk of being discarded in favor of a variety of private and market-driven schools such as are now being advocated in influential quarters of the nation. With candidates for major political office advocating parental choice in schooling, with a variety of policy organizations recommending that public schools be replaced by public funding of private schools with a voucher system, and with Florida already having legislated a statewide school voucher system, we are no longer simply at the threshold of school privatization. It is reality.

This is not simply a matter of public versus private funding sources for schools. More important, it is a question of the public mission of the schools versus multiple private agendas. Of all socializing agencies in contemporary culture–the family, youth peer groups, the media, the neighborhood, the workplace–only the schools have as their central mission the preparation of people with the knowledge, skills, and values to participate democratically in an imperfectly democratic society. The schools are unique in this public commitment. If that public, democratic, educational mission of the schools is set aside in favor of equal funding for different religious and ideological orientations, there is no other agency that can be expected to assume the historic mission of the schools–a mission first articulated by some of the very same individuals who initiated the American Revolution and who signed the Declaration of Independence.

That historic commitment is in jeopardy, as signaled by prominent educational critic Myron Lieberman’s book, Public Education: An Autopsy. A primary reason noted by Lieberman and many other observers for this unprecedented threat to the schools is the perceived failure of the schools to achieve their basic mission: sufficient education of the masses to prepare them for their roles as informed, productive citizens. Since the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, fuel has been steadily added to the fire of public discontent with the schools. Even prominent efforts to defend the schools, such as Berliner and Biddle’s The Manufactured Crisis, offer very little to cheer about. Instead, we are left with the conclusion that the schools are not doing very well, but not appreciably worse than they have done in the past.

At the bottom of the threat to the future of the public schools is the reality that the schools are not providing the education that a democracy expects and deserves. Nor, charge critics of higher education, are colleges and universities meeting their responsibilities. We in higher education are accused of holding a monopoly on teacher education that fails to prepare teachers who can teach well in today’s schools, and we are faced with data that show students of color finding less success on college campuses than their white counterparts. The democratic promise of schools and higher education is not being fulfilled, and the anti-public school forces stand ready to replace the current system with one that responds to the "marketplace" of competing special interests. Unless the schools and higher education can demonstrably fulfill that democratic promise better, the threat is likely to grow until Lieberman’s Autopsy is more than a prediction. And this is where the public, land-grant universities have a special role to play.

In Illinois, as in the nation, if universities and schools are to work productively together, a wide range of educational discontinuities must be addressed. Decade after decade, education in Illinois has been characterized by deep discontinuities and disjunctions in what should be a coherent educational system. The often-noted failings of educational reform in the past two decades are in many ways a failure to address these discontinuities, which prevail between, for example:

• different levels of schooling, distorting curriculum into a set of mixed messages that prevent students from full initiation into commonly shared academic practices;
• the culture of the university and the culture of schools, one consequence of which is that teacher education programs leave elementary and secondary school teachers outside the conversations of the academic disciplines. In turn, these teachers are not well prepared to induct their students into those disciplines and into academic literacy more generally;
• teaching and research, within the university setting as well as between universities and schools, with a distinct status hierarchy that places researchers above teachers, often to the detriment of both teaching and research;
• schooling and the real world of citizenship, work, and personal fulfillment, with consequent barriers to students seeing a meaningful relationship between their performance in school and their post-secondary prospects after graduation;
• democratic ideals and the educational realities of schools and universities, leading to inequitable resources and opportunities for different social groups.

As a result of all of these discontinuities, schooling tends to exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities rather than ameliorate them.

We put "discontinuities" at the center of our diagnosis of educational problems for several reasons. Perhaps the most important is that educational discontinuity and disconnection can interfere with the development of academic literacy for students (and often for teachers). By academic literacy we mean, to begin with, what the Illinois Board of Higher Education Workforce Preparation Action Plan Task Force established in 1996 as the most primary goal of education at all levels in Illinois: the achievement of "high standards of academic, analytical thinking, technical and professional, and employability skills so they [learners] are well-prepared for employment and further education and training" (p.5). But, in addition to that, we mean a particular kind of "literacy" about how academic institutions work: a literacy that requires what some researchers have identified as understanding of academic "codes" or modes of discourse used in academic disciplines and settings, as well as the procedural knowledge of what academic institutions require, what they reward, and how and why to get from one level to the next. Particularly if Illinois is successfully to educate populations of students who have traditionally struggled most with the discontinuities of education in our schools and colleges, all dimensions of academic literacy will have to be cultivated–and for a wider range of the State’s students.

Perhaps the most widely recognized illustration of disruptive educational discontinuity, as noted by education change researcher Seymour Sarason some thirty years ago and by others since, is the familiar phenomenon of students whose elementary school work leaves them at a loss when they reach middle school, or of high schools students who find themselves at a loss when they get to college–if they make it to college at all. For such students, each progressive level of schooling feels like a completely new start in which students cannot be confident that what they have previously learned will be pertinent to the next stage of learning. As a result, students negotiate their courses not by growing in intellectual sophistication, but rather by giving each successive instructor whatever he or she seems to "want," however arbitrary or contradictory these demands may seem. This kind of "disruptive discontinuity" helps explain the phenomenon that has been observed by leading developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, among others, in which students learn a subject in a way that enables them to pass a test or course, only to revert to primitive beliefs about the subject when it is put in a new context. Students in such situations are learning how to get through courses or standardized tests, but they are not developing the sort of academic literacy that can genuinely inform their ability to negotiate increasingly sophisticated levels of learning and schooling. Such a discontinuous system harms all students, but it takes a special toll on students from less privileged backgrounds, who pay a higher price for failure to acquire academic literacy than others do.

An educational system whose components fail to work together in an integrated and coordinated way will be systematically ineffective in socializing students and teachers into academic literacy. This is especially true if discontinuities exist within the separate levels of the educational system, as well as between them. The solutions lie not just in connecting the different parts of the system, but in improving how each part works in itself, as well.

One of the striking features of the current education debate is the strength of the reaction against the abuses of "high-stakes" testing that is coming from outside the circle of professional educators. While Illinois in general and Chicago in particular have drawn national praise for the implementation of new standards and high stakes testing for students, the standards picture is not uniformly positive. This is particularly important in the P-16 context because the attention to student testing and teacher testing is a direct result of the national and state movements to "raise standards" in schooling. Since the rise of standardized testing after World War II, many educators have warned that over-reliance on such tests in assessing student performance easily distorts the process of teaching and learning, forcing instructors to "teach to the test" rather than emphasizing more authentic knowledge and skills, and turning schools into test-taking factories rather than institutions of learning.  Today, however, to an unprecedented degree, we see these objections being publicly voiced by many journalists, parents, and concerned citizens as well as students themselves. In several notable cases–including one in a high-achieving Chicago high school–students have refused to take a test that seemed to them a demeaning of their education.

The furor over standardized testing seems to us a reflection of a larger crisis of assessment that has overtaken the public discourse about schooling and the effort to raise American educational standards.  It is easy to denounce weak performance of high school students on basic tests of literacy and numeracy. It is also relatively easy to establish new standards and to design new assessments that raise the achievement bar still higher. It is another thing, however, to provide the educational supports to teachers and students so that higher achievement, embedded in intellectually engaging school cultures, can be made available to the children and youth our schools have historically and persistently served poorly. Any Illinois P-16 effort must address the tension between "getting serious about standards for students and teachers," as the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future puts it, and the dangers of over-reliance on testing. It appears to us that the implementation of standards and assessments makes sense only if it is situated in a wider effort to nurture academic literacy among students at all levels. The accountability discourse that dominates schooling effectively crowds out a popular or professional discussion of what it means to create intellectually engaging cultures in schools and colleges that effectively educate all kinds of students in the academic literacies that will support their highest aspirations. The University of Illinois can take a leadership role in establishing such a discussion–in the profession and in the public view.

Debates about the P-16 system of education have emerged for a variety of reasons, many of which are related to the resistance of public education to more than a decade of high-profile school reform efforts. The projected shortage of school teachers in the United States, especially in the areas of math, science, and special education, has induced many states to rethink their procedures for teacher training and accreditation. But this shortage will not be ameliorated unless the teaching profession does a better job at every level of retaining the new teachers recruited to the field; thus, P-16 debates also involve questions of how to recruit and retain the next generation of teachers at every level of the system, and how to create school cultures that foster the intellectual growth of students and teachers alike. Moreover, the increasing emphasis on "testing" as a means of evaluating students, teachers, school districts, and entire states has brought greater pressure to bear on every facet of education, from preschool programs to graduate programs. Most recently, the development of alternatives to affirmative action in some states has compelled educators to confront the profound inequities between school districts: as states such as California, Florida, and Texas abandon "race-conscious" policies in favor of admitting the top five, ten, or twenty percent of students from every high school in the state. Educators are finding that these new strategies bring to the fore problems with the relationship between high school programs and college admissions, as well as problems with the financial and educational disparities between high schools.

National context

The widespread move toward P-16 collaboration across the country stems in great part from the call for institutions of higher learning to join forces with P-12 educational bodies in effecting system-wide, standards-based reform. This is closely related to the notion that all individuals in a democratic society should have the opportunity to be educated for success, achievement, and civic responsibility, regardless of their current social, economic or developmental status. Despite such reform goals, educators have become frustrated with the resistance of the educational system to reform efforts. The U.S. Department of Education reports:²

• Discrepancies in academic preparedness for postsecondary work limit access to higher education, based on factors of ethnicity, income, and urbanicity.
• Preparation in reading, writing, or mathematics is inadequate for success at the college level, reflected in the amount of remedial coursework offered at the postsecondary level.
• The achievement gap between black and white students in reading remains relatively unimproved.
• The United States significantly lags behind Germany and Japan with regard to overall quality of mathematics education.

These disparities and disappointments in student learning continue to reside in inequalities in educational resources. The U.S. Department of Education further reports:

• Deep disparities in educational resources persist, resulting in some of the highest-achieving schools in the nation existing in close proximity to some of the lowest-achieving schools.
• Nearly half of the low-income student population is not at least minimally academically qualified for admission to 4-year postsecondary institutions. (Of those low-income students at least minimally qualified for admission to 4-year postsecondary institutions, over three-quarters sought and took steps toward admission.)
• School districts with the largest concentrations of children living in poverty spend considerably less per student than districts with smaller concentrations.
• Public revenue for education has not increased at the same rate as personal per capita income; a smaller percentage of personal income is being spent on elementary and secondary education than in the past.

While researchers are clear about the correlations among economics, ethnicity, and school achievement, they are increasingly convinced that the quality of classroom teaching makes a crucial difference to student learning regardless of student background. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future cites studies showing that as much as 40% of the differences in student performance can be attributed to teacher qualifications. Unfortunately, the lowest income children are the most likely to receive instruction from the least qualified teachers. Teacher quality thus becomes a major concern for P-16 initiatives.³

National-level response

Two prominent issues to emerge in the national conversation on the P-16 collaborative approach to education are: 1) the alignment of educational standards and expectations between P-12 and higher education, and 2) the diminishing supply of quality teachers and the lack of rigorous and comprehensive teacher education programs. Higher education institutions play a significant role in P-16 reform measures, particularly with regard to these two key issues. The roles and participation of post-secondary institutions in addressing these issues are viewed by P-16 advocates as important in effecting a comprehensive effort toward lasting systemic change.

There is currently a disruptive discontinuity between standards and expectations. The P-12 system, as a national entity or at the local level, cannot enact and maintain effective measures of reform without the proactive participation of higher education institutions. In particular, the system of public universities is a vital element for wide-spread, long-term success. Public universities in Illinois currently produce the majority of new teachers in the State. There is an identifiable degree of discontinuity between what is happening within the public schools and what is expected of public school graduates in the post-secondary realm. Too many students are graduating high school without the academic knowledge or skills necessary to navigate through or experience success in their post-secondary educational or work related pursuits. One of the key elements in effective P-16 collaboration is an environment in which higher education and P-12 institutions can work together to create a mutually beneficial and consistent set of reasonable, attainable, and challenging educational standards for public school students and educators alike. Through a careful examination of academic and social expectations of students, we can reduce the disruptive discontinuities that hinder student achievement at successive levels of the system.

Equally important to the P-16 agenda is the issue of low teacher supply in specific areas, particularly in hard-to-staff schools serving students of color and low income students; and overall lack of quality practice at the P-12 level. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future argues that there is an acute need for competent, caring, and proactive teachers in America’s classrooms. At the same time, however, as argued in the American Council on Education’s To Touch the Future, teacher education programs reside at the periphery of most institutional agendas. This can be attributed in part to the "low-status" reputation of educators; becoming a public school teacher is rarely presented as an attractive option for the "best and brightest" students entering college or considering a subject-oriented career. P-16 initiatives call for higher education institutions to give renewed consideration to the issues of recruitment, development and attrition/retention rates of a high quality teaching force. Given the nature and importance of teaching in today’s public school systems, the call from the national P-16 front is that institutions of higher education take immediate steps to evaluate and reinvest in their programs of teacher education and continuing professional development.

Specific initiatives at the national level abound. For example, the 1998 "new Title II" of the Higher Education Act provides higher education institutions with funds and resources to recruit and prepare teacher candidates. The Act places emphasis on areas of shortage, academic content, and best teaching practices. The American Council on Education has forwarded an "action agenda" with ten key recommendations for programs of teacher education. The Education Commission of the States has prepared numerous documents addressing the restructuring of higher education and the alignment of higher education expectations with P-12 standards. The Kellogg Commission calls for a "covenant" between higher education and the public schools that ensures that access to "life-long learning" is a reality rather than a theory. Similarly, the Education Trust has prepared its own set of tasks for higher education in pursuit of effective systemic reform, and suggests that the current system of teacher education and licensure in this country is just "not good enough." The Education Trust, the agency most responsible for popularizing the P-16 concept among educators and policy makers, is an independent non-profit organization with the primary goal of making schools and colleges work for all. A nationwide push for P-16 collaboration is key to effecting the Trust’s "single-minded" approach to what is best for students with regard to achieving academic success at every level, and the Trust argues that school reform without higher education reform is simply not going to happen.⁴

State-level response

The Education Trust, like other national agencies advocating P-16 initiatives, recognizes that in educational reform, the state is where the action is. Georgia and California have the most comprehensive and articulated initiatives in place, with attention to all areas of the educational spectrum. For example, Georgia articulates long-term goals that have implications at the local and state level for students, teachers, and communities in such areas as student success and achievement, the quality of teaching, and general civic responsibility. New Mexico calls for a "systemic, sustained, statewide effort" toward improving the overall quality of education by thoroughly developing the cadre of teachers. Other states’ P-16 programs seem to be much smaller in scope; the activity in Minnesota and Colorado is characterized more by attention to the provision of math and science programs and resources to individual schools rather than a statewide effort at comprehensive, multi-level education reform.

The Task Force has gathered information about P-16 initiatives from Georgia, California, Kentucky, Minnesota, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma and Massachusetts. However, the list does not end here; P-16 initiatives exist in various forms in other areas as well. It bears mentioning that not all P-16 initiatives are necessarily statewide, centralized endeavors; for example, Incline Village and Washoe County are two very distinct partnerships that exist in local Nevada communities, but which are in partnership with higher education and part of a larger statewide initiative. In contrast, the initiatives in Georgia, California, and New Mexico clearly involve the state as a whole, from institutions of higher education down through local communities. Appendix I provides brief sketches of the P-16 activities of several states about which published material is available.

"Councils" or "Partnerships" generally are comprised of post-secondary institutions and local school districts. However, many initiatives have broadened the scope of involvement to include additional stakeholders in the educational context, such as members of the business community and other local interests and organizations. Although some partnerships have been initiated at the statewide or higher education level, a number of the them have been generated from the bottom up, with local stakeholders such as parents, boards of education, local industry and community groups carrying the torch.⁵

Post-secondary institutions are engaged in a wide spectrum of activity with regard to P-16 partnerships. At the most basic level, post-secondary institutions typically provide local schools and districts with support services such as curricular resources, professional development opportunities, and enhanced educational opportunities and mentoring programs for students. On a deeper level, higher education partners work to strengthen existing teacher education programs in terms of quality as well as to align such programs with the shared goals of the partnership.⁶

Much of what the P-16 advocates recommend is beginning to happen in Illinois. For example:

• Since 1996 the State has steadily worked to design and implement standards and assessments for students and teachers–though implementation proceeds slowly, unevenly, and in some districts with inadequate funding and expertise. Currently, the State Board is considering the options for a plan, already legislated, for assessing all Illinois teachers using standards consistent with Illinois K-12 learning standards.
  
• Second, the formal Illinois partnership with the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future has resulted in an Advisory Council with membership from all levels of the educational system–elementary schools, secondary schools, teachers’ unions, administrators’ associations, parent organizations, higher education (including the University of Illinois), the Illinois State Board of Education, business organizations, and so on–which is seeking to take a systemic approach to school improvement in Illinois.
  
• Third, teacher education, certification, and certificate-renewal reform are well under way in Illinois, with active involvement by the legislature, the Illinois Board of Higher
  Education, the Illinois State Board of Education, higher education institutions, the two major teachers unions, and the business community, among others.
  
• Fourth, the 1990s saw a period of extended work by Illinois four-year colleges, universities and community colleges on reform efforts.
  
• Finally, the Illinois Joint Education Committee, involving educational leadership from the Governor’s Office, the State Board of Education, the Board of Higher Education, and the Community College Board, has recently formed a "P-16 Partnership" to work on educational issues that are of system-wide significance.

All of these are major items in the national P-16 agenda. And in all of these University of Illinois faculty and staff have participated, often taking leadership roles. Throughout the 20^th century the University of Illinois has invested considerable resources in an extraordinary variety of educational initiatives that engaged schools and community colleges. These activities continue today. Even a cursory data search reveals that faculty in most colleges on all three campuses are engaged in educational improvement initiatives at the national, state, district, multi-district, university, or school level.

Because of the relative newness of the P-16 concept, there has been no ongoing effort to document the full extent of P-16 Plus activity on the three University of Illinois campuses. There is no single comprehensive data source on these activities, and the several data sources together are not exhaustive. They overlap each other and they leave gaps. While we have consulted a variety of the most promising data sources on P-16 Plus activity, as well as asked for new reports to fill in some of the gaps, we do not have a complete picture of all University interactions with the schools and the general public. What we have, however, is informative and useful. These are the main sources we have identified:

• the At Your Service University of Illinois Public Service and Outreach Directory compiled in 1998 reports a sample of 53 K-12 University of Illinois/school initiatives residing in 40 different academic units and 94 higher and continuing education initiatives;
  
• the University of Illinois P-16 Activities Searchable Database lists 48 K-12 initiatives, nearly half of which were not included in At Your Service;
  
• Partnership Illinois lists 77 P-16 activities, divided into four categories, a large number of which were in neither At Your Service nor the Searchable Database; the "Teaching Resources" category alone had 31 initiatives from 25 different academic and service units;
  
• in response to a query from the Vice President’s office, each campus produced additional lists of P-16 initiatives. Omitting duplicate counting, over 250 different P-16 initiatives appear to be ongoing across the three campuses, ranging from statewide policy projects to single-school interventions;
  
• that figure is much, much higher if every single faculty member’s school activities are counted. What counts as a P-16 activity is widely diverse and variable, even according to our definition, and may include a faculty member’s presentation to a school or it may include a multi-year district- or state-level collaboration;
  
• across the three campuses, many more academic and service units outside the education departments than inside them engage in P-16 activities, and not just in Liberal Arts and Sciences; Engineering, Fine and Applied Arts, Agriculture, Aviation, Urban Planning and Public Affairs, the Medical School, and other colleges have one or more departments participating in P-16 efforts.

Appendix II identifies a P-16 resource list and Appendix III provides briefly detailed case descriptions of some of these initiatives from different colleges on each of the three University of Illinois campuses. Some are funded by the University, some by private foundations, some by State and Federal sources. As a whole they fall into several different categories, among which these five are prominent:

1. Research and development: Reflecting the University’s land-grant, research mission, faculty engage in traditional forms of knowledge generation and dissemination regarding teaching, learning, and educational policy, e.g., through research publications, curriculum design, and textbooks.
   
2. Policy formation and implementation: As leaders in their fields, many University faculty are engaged in educational policy formation and implementation at all decision-making levels, from shaping legislation on national and state standards and assessments to local school decision-making.
   
3. University/school collaborations: Faculty from dozens of different departments on all three campuses have engaged in numerous collaborations with school practitioners and school districts on professional development, new-teacher mentoring, curriculum development, research initiatives, and technology development.
   
4. Teacher and administrator education: All three campuses have long provided academic programs, involving many departments and colleges, for preparation and development of teachers and school leaders in elementary education; math, science, English, social studies, and other areas of secondary education; middle school education; special education; physical education; arts education; school social work; and various other certificate areas for school professionals.
   
5. Exploration of new technologies: As the University of Illinois has emerged as a technology leader, faculty have often combined one or more of the above categories in educational applications of new technologies, from educational
   software, to innovative approaches to on-line learning, to collaborating with schools in exploring the instructional possibilities of technology.
   

These five categories are useful for organizing and understanding the different kinds of activities that number in the hundreds if taken separately. However, the categories also obscure the enormous variety of faculty activities with schools and higher education agencies in Illinois.⁷

At the three University of Illinois campuses, these P-16 activities are multiplied many times over for the 200-plus faculty in the education departments. What is more, there are more departments outside than inside the colleges of education engaged in some combination of these sorts of activities, though not in the same depth as education faculty involve themselves. Consider, for example, a mathematics professor who devotes her P-12 activity to the single problem of mathematics curriculum development. This individual may quickly find herself working at the levels of basic research, dissemination, policy formation, school partnership, consultation, individual teacher development, and student assessment, all of which require different kinds of activities and interactions with school and university personnel.

Despite the extensive array of faculty efforts reported in various databases, there is little reason for self-congratulation, if our many initiatives bear in common the goal of helping schools improve significantly. The problems that were catapulted to public attention in 1983 are real and they persist. Illinois is a particularly challenging state for school improvement efforts, due to the size and diversity of our school population and due to disparities in funding.

According to the State Board, Illinois schools in 1998-99 enrolled over 2 million students PreK-12, of whom .56 million are in secondary schools. Of these 2 million-plus students, 38.6% were African American, Hispanic, Asian Pacific Islander, or American Indian, a figure that has grown since 1991. Also growing is the proportion of the student population, now 13.5%, eligible for Title I funds for low-income students. Above that secondary school level are Illinois community colleges, public and private, enrolling another 340,000 students, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Another 375,000 students attend public and private four-year institutions in Illinois. And beyond that, some six million adults in the workforce are ultimately candidates for training and re-training, which we will see taking place much more often in the information age of the 21^st century. The sheer scale of education in this State is enormous: one out of every twenty students enrolled in higher education in the United States attends an Illinois institution. Moreover:

• In Illinois we find some of the greatest educational disparities in the nation, both in resource allocation and in educational outcomes. The wealthiest school districts support their students at an average annual per pupil expenditure three times the level of the poorest districts at both elementary and secondary levels.⁸
  
• Efforts to provide quality higher education to young people from educationally weak backgrounds, urban and rural, have not been a clear success story on our campuses. Our graduation rates for students of color on all three campuses remain lower than for white, non-Latino students, and our efforts to reach the urban low-income student in Chicago have resulted in a six-year graduation rate of only 36% at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Due to more competitive admissions, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) enrolls relatively fewer young people from weak academic backgrounds than UIC. Although the graduation rate for students of color at UIUC is the highest of any public institution in Illinois, the rate still trails the rate for White, non-Latino students.
  
• Teachers in Illinois are of similarly uneven quality, with several thousand throughout the state teaching full-time without certification or with certification in an area in which they are not teaching. Approximately 67,000 certified elementary school teachers teach in the public schools, with over 30,000 certified secondary school teachers. The quality of such a large population in any occupation varies a great deal. Even among our certified teachers, a great many are not adequately prepared to succeed with low-income students and students of color. This is mirrored in our own University of Illinois inability to recruit and retain students of color in teacher preparation programs. In any event, it bears noting that the three campuses together contribute only a few hundred teachers annually to the pool of well over 100,000 classroom teachers working in Illinois schools at any one time.
  
• Education Week’s recent rating of each state’s teacher quality gave Illinois a D+. Although Illinois is a "teacher-export" state (producing more teachers than there are total vacancies), the nation-wide teacher shortage is already felt in Illinois in such areas as mathematics, science, world languages, special education, and bilingual education. Unqualified teachers are teaching these subjects to thousands of Illinois school children, or the subjects are in some cases simply not being taught.⁹
  
• The stress of the work, often conducted in under-funded conditions and with insufficient time and without decision-making autonomy to accomplish what needs to be done, also contributes to high rates of teacher attrition. As one school administrator commented in a Task Force focus group, "The pressures on teachers are great in a climate of accountability and higher expectations for all." A teacher in a Task Force focus group concurred by saying: "Teachers and schools are being asked to do more and more and not given the . . . support or time to do so."
  
• The importance of special education in the P-16 framework should not be underestimated.  Special education is among the areas in which the teacher shortage will be most acute in coming decades, and it is arguably among the most precarious fields in the educational system.  It is not simply that the state of Illinois, like its forty-nine sister states, will need
  P-12 teachers who can address and educate children with "special needs" in accord with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA); more than this, there is the larger question of what the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act will come to mean in the 21^st century, and how it will be implemented.¹⁰
  
• Public schools and our teacher education programs alike are lagging behind in the instructional applications of technology. Most teachers in schools, and most teacher education candidates, are neither familiar with nor skilled in optimal uses of technology in teaching and learning contexts. When asked what kind of professional development they would most value, teachers interviewed by the Task Force (some of them on-line) identified instructional technology skills as one of the most urgently needed areas.

Throughout the 20^th century, a fundamental problem confronting society was the difficulty of managing technological change in ways beneficial to all.  Industrial technologies brought progress, but helped create new extremes of wealth, poverty, and the problems of too-rapid urbanization. Mass production technology and the internal combustion engine stimulated suburbanization, white flight, and the concurrent decay of the cities. New technologies for drawing power, minerals, lumber and other natural resources from the earth threatened the global environment. Nuclear technology, used both peacefully and in the hands of hostile nations, became (and remains) a danger to the world. As we enter the 21^st century, the positive and negative potential of such technologies as genetic engineering and digital communication remain incalculable. The ability to manage these technologies for the ultimate good of society will be a challenge for social and educational policy.

As we enter the current century, schools and universities are in their organization and practices more tethered to the 19^th century than wired for the 21^st. The rate of change in digital technology is now so rapid that the ultimate impact on schooling, and on education more broadly, is difficult to manage or to respond to effectively. Now in the Model T stage of development, it is already clear that "e-learning" will transform fundamental dimensions of schooling: teaching practices; how homework is assigned and completed; how student learning is assessed; how communications with parents are conducted; how learners "attend" school; what will count as "school" itself; and how formal learning experiences become extended throughout the lifespan of the learner. Moreover, digital-technology businesses will increasingly form partnerships with schools, creating new, more interdependent relationships between public school systems and the private sector. It is likely that in the next two decades the character of schools will be changed in ways that are beyond our current ability to predict, just as the current trends in on-line learning and virtual classrooms were not predictable two decades ago.

This portrayal is not to suggest that a new golden age of education is upon us. Rather, the 20^th century demonstrated the great difficulty faced by schools and universities in serving ideals of democracy and education in times of rapid technological and social change. It is not only technological change, but also the intersection of technological change with demographic change in the U.S. that must be analyzed for its educational and social significance. At century’s end, we are left with a fragmented education system marked by inconsistencies and discontinuities so glaring that it has few defenders. In the 21^st century, the management of technological change in schools and universities will have profound social implications that at this point can only be speculated about. The educational gaps between the haves and the have-nots could be exacerbated or ameliorated. The historic democratic mission of the public schools could be more reachable than ever before as information is made readily available to all, or the democratic mission of the schools could become obscured and attenuated by economic inequality and new integration of schools with the private sector that is most responsible for the generation and distribution of learning technologies. Universities themselves could find their agendas and character driven by electronic market competition in ways that transform the existence of universities as we know them, or that leave intact relatively few surviving examples of current universities with the power to keep alive historic institutions in a digital age. Education in America is on the threshold of the most dramatic changes since teachers and students came together in classrooms. This holds as much potential for bad news as good.

The dramatic changes that schools and universities will undergo in the next decades call for sustained, cross-disciplinary analysis involving researchers and practitioners with expertise and insight into the relationships among education, technology, and society if we are to shape the educational future rather than have it shaped for us. The University is uniquely positioned in Illinois to enter into, and to engage others in, such inquiry due to (a) its extraordinary intellectual and technological resources; (b) the sustained record of in-depth University involvement with the schools, marked by a rich record of activity in many different academic departments and colleges on each campus; and (c) the diversity and importance of the local contexts in which our three campuses interact with schools and communities–from a great urban center to a diverse mix of rural and urban settings to the seat of state government. We have documented major components of that record of activity in this report.

The five major ways identified above that the University of Illinois has interacted with the schools in the past are not adequate categories, however, for understanding what will be needed in the future. The extensive history of our involvement with schools has taught us that a much less fragmented and more systemic approach is needed if we are serious about having a positive impact on a system in which we are enmeshed. Our interactions with the schools will have to incorporate new and flexible ways of thinking that attend in a coordinated way to how technological and social change will transform our whole system of schools, colleges and universities in the near future. We must inquire, in a careful and sustained way, into how we at the University of Illinois can play a role that is most productive within that system.

Awareness of the systemic relationship of higher education to the schools has given rise to a visible P-16 trend nationwide. Because of this, this Task Force was charged with exploring the significance of that trend for the University of Illinois’ role in Illinois education for the future. The P-16 concept has proven to be a useful heuristic. In our view, however, the current P-16 trend does not sufficiently guide the role that the University of Illinois should play in Illinois in educating the diverse populations to which public education is now committed, and to which it was not committed a century ago. Although the P-16 concept was a useful catalyst for our discussions, our analysis is not limited to established P-16 arguments for three reasons:

• First, "P-16" demarcates a period of formal education, from Preschool through the fourth year of college, that will soon be outdated. It does not anticipate the ways in which new technology provides both the necessity and the means for lifelong learning, re-learning, and re-training in an age of technological and occupational change.
  
• Second, P-16 agendas are most effectively formed through state-level, system-wide collaborations among all of a state’s major educational stakeholders, and our Task Force was not designed to bring all or even a good sample of these stakeholders to the table. Instead, we were charged to focus on the future role of the University of Illinois within a
  P-16 systemic perspective. One of our major recommendations, in fact, calls for initiating a statewide process involving other educational constituencies.
  
• Third, the P-16 approach has become an established paradigm of educational-stakeholder collaboration that will be effective only if it is informed by the kind of sustained, critical inquiry and experimentation that P-16 organizations (councils, commissions) are not well set up to do–but that a University like ours is well positioned to conduct. That is, P-16 initiatives in Illinois and elsewhere around the nation will be ill-prepared to foresee and respond to the kind of technological and social changes that are certain to affect schools in the coming decades unless a more fundamental kind of intellectual work is done to inform those initiatives.
  

This reinforces our earlier recommendation for a focus that goes beyond just P-16, which we call "P-16 Plus" to indicate its broader scope.

In the section to follow, the Task Force recommends that the University of Illinois become much more purposeful and systemic in its efforts to help improve the quality of teaching and learning in Illinois at all levels, and that a new institutional commitment to this systemic approach should focus campus resources on this vision in the future. What is meant, however, by "systemic" in the P-16 Plus context?

We are speaking of "systemic" in two contexts, one descriptive and one normative. The descriptive context is simply the fact of the interdependence of the different levels of schooling. For example, the success of secondary education is partly dependent on the success of elementary education, and the success of elementary education is dependent partly on the success of teacher preparation, which is in turn conditioned by both secondary and post-secondary education.

The second context of "systemic" is normative. That is, we are recommending that the University support initiatives that take into account the various kinds of interdependence relevant to any particular problem being targeted. To take a systemic approach to preparing more teachers in math and science, for example, requires taking into account the various factors that contribute to that shortage. These factors include the conditions of teaching, the nature of elementary and secondary school instruction in math and science, the nature of math and science instruction in colleges of liberal arts and sciences, contributions that community colleges do or do not make, the weak recruitment of promising candidates into the field, the lack of incentives to support such recruitment, and so on. A systemic approach to the problem is one that seeks to address the interdependent components and the interactions among them that constitute the problem to be solved. Such a complex approach may well require collaboration among a number of educational agencies, since no one agency controls more than one or two of these variables.

We believe that the concept of "academic literacy" can and should effectively guide such a systemic approach to school and higher education improvement in Illinois. Schools and colleges are charged with many tasks, from preparing safe drivers to preventing drug abuse to contributing to scientific research and economic prosperity. At the center of these tasks, however, is the induction of students at all levels into an intellectual culture that will equip them to perceive the world and themselves through the lenses of the disciplines that organize human understanding. The ability to think creatively and well within and across these disciplines, representing human achievement in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, requires what we are calling academic literacy. It will be increasingly valued in our information age but is currently available to far too few students in an educational system characterized by discontinuities and disjunctures that work against the acquisition of academic literacy, not for it.

Despite an impressive number of initiatives undertaken in recent years by the University of Illinois faculty, these efforts do not represent a planned or coordinated approach to improving education in Illinois. It is not that we as a University have turned a cold shoulder to the schools–on the contrary, we have embraced them with literally thousands of school-university interactions over the decades. The problem is that those interactions, with notable exceptions, have been so disconnected, discontinuous, and uncoordinated with one another that they have not resulted in systemic school improvement in Illinois. We believe that the University is capable of contributing toward such systemic school improvement, but only if we look hard at how we do business-as-usual, and only if we are prepared to change ourselves. Part of this change must be the pervasive recognition, among university faculty, staff and administrators, of the interdependence among the various components of the educational system, together with the admission that if we continue interacting with the schools in the haphazard way we have in the past, there is not much reason to believe that the University of Illinois will contribute much to lasting improvement in the educational system.

From its opening pages, this report has described a number of persistent problems in education in the nation and in Illinois. These include:

• sharp differences in student achievement from elementary school through college, persistently corresponding to economic and ethnic differences;
  
• deep disparities in educational resources, resulting in some of the highest-achieving schools in Illinois existing in close proximity to some of the lowest-achieving schools;
  
• serious questions about the preparedness of teachers to educate the diverse groups of children in Illinois schools, rural and urban;
  
• conditions of the teaching profession that fail to attract and retain sufficient numbers of teachers, contributing to current and increasing teacher shortages in high need subject areas, high-need districts, and among teachers of color;
• the resistance of educational institutions at all levels to improvement, after more than a decade of reform efforts. This has led to public doubt about whether the public schools can fulfill their democratic mission and has led to new proposals for public funding of market-based alternatives to public schools;
• failure to respond systematically and intelligently to new educational technologies that should be of profound importance to rural, suburban, and urban school systems as well as colleges and universities.

In some areas, such as teacher shortages, achievement disparities, and technology gaps, the problems of schools and higher education are getting worse. If the University of Illinois is going to play a significant role in addressing such problems, a purposeful strategy for the distribution and coordination of faculty expertise will be required. A part of that strategy must be, we believe, the willingness of faculty to learn from our school-based colleagues. By discerning and initiating the institutional changes that our era requires, we can remain true to the historic promise of the land-grant university, thereby assisting the schools to achieve their promise as well.       

Our recommendations are intended, therefore, to combat the disjunctures in our educational system that impede the development of academic literacy in our students, from preschool through college and beyond. The Task Force recommends that the University of Illinois become much more purposeful and systematic in its efforts to help improve the quality of teaching and learning in Illinois at all levels. This is an enormous challenge in a state with over 2 million PreK-12 students enrolled in the public schools alone, and with 726,000 college and university students representing one out of every 20 higher education students in the United States. These numbers illustrate, however, why the University cannot depend on its past practices of interacting with Illinois schools and colleges as a model for the future, if we want to be part of a system-wide approach to engaging the social and technological changes of the 21^st century coherently. The urgent need to understand and shape the rapidly changing interactions among technology, society, and educational institutions in the 21^st century suggests a distinctive role for the University of Illinois.

We recommend two fundamental steps, one that looks internally into our own University, and one that looks externally to our University’s interaction with other educational institutions in Illinois. First, the University of Illinois should build the internal capacity to conduct new kinds of inquiry into the current and future relationships among education, technology, and society. Second, the University should look externally to the state level to participate in and inform a state-level "P-16 Plus" initiative that brings the full range of educational stakeholders, public and private, to work together on the future of education in Illinois. In addition, of course, we recommend that these two efforts, external and internal, should inform one another. To accomplish these two goals will require the assignment of responsibility and the allocation of resources to a unit that may need to have characteristics of an administrative unit and characteristics of a center for advanced study. We suggest the name "University of Illinois Center for Systemic Change in Education" for this unit. The systemic and collaborative planning we call for was not done in the 20^th century, much to the detriment of millions of students over the decades. The need will be even greater in the 21^st century.

To execute its mission, the University of Illinois Center for Systemic Change in Education will have to begin with a commitment to inquiry, but inquiry that itself is driven by a commitment to action. In so doing, the Center would bear similarities to such national organizations as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which incorporates research, public information, and collaborative action for public health. In the field of education, prominent models include the University of Minnesota’s Center for School Change, or the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, a collaboration of University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Michigan, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. A major difference we envision is that, unlike these national centers, the focus of the University of Illinois Center for Systemic Change in Education will be education in the state of Illinois, systemically conceived. If the Center does its work well, however, its significance will truly be national, if not international.

The Center for Systemic Change in Education must have (1) a clear charge, (2) a clear agenda for inquiry and action, and (3) a structure for accomplishing its agenda. We believe the charge to the Center should be to conduct joint inquiry, collaborating across disciplinary lines within the University, incorporating the different expertise of the three campuses, as well as expertise from the various sectors and levels of education in the Illinois P-16 system. Moreover, the Center should address how education in Illinois can be systemically improved in the first two decades of the 21^st century–and how the various parts of the state’s educational system can best prepare for the decades thereafter. It is expected that such inquiry will not be limited to theorizing about solutions, but will include collaboratively testing solutions in practice in schools, school districts, and in higher education.

While it is not the intention of this Task Force to dictate the agenda for the Center we propose, below are six key examples of the kinds of questions it should pursue.

1. What elements of the conditions of teaching in Illinois can and should be changed to improve the quality of student learning throughout the State–and what role can higher education play in addressing these changes?
   
   A primary point of intersection between higher education and the schools (public and private) is the preparation of school teachers and administrators in colleges and universities, but the profession itself is an obstacle to school improvement. We know that the conditions of schooling and the teaching profession, including (a) lack of professional autonomy and respect for teachers; (b) insufficient time and money to teach students well and to interact with one another to develop as professionals; and (c) low salaries, are obstacles to the building of a quality teaching force. These conditions: (a) do not often enough attract our best students into the profession, (b) retain only a minority of the graduates of our teacher preparation programs in the profession of teaching; and (c) do not attract and retain enough teacher and administrator candidates to avoid massive shortfalls when student populations increase, leading to emergency staffing measures that lower the quality of the profession further.
   
2. What changes within the University, and in the University’s relationships with schools and districts, are necessary for teacher and administrator preparation to meet the needs of school children and youth throughout Illinois?
   
   Over the past decade, research cited by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s future demonstrates that the quality of teaching is the single most important variable in student learning. Yet the Commission further argues that higher education often inadequately prepares teachers with the subject matter expertise and the pedagogical knowledge and skills to teach well in contemporary schools. This can be remedied only by a joint effort between the colleges of education and the colleges of liberal arts and sciences that teach the subject-matter that teachers are expected to teach in schools. What it would take for this to happen effectively, and to incorporate school district expertise in doing so, is a challenge for higher education today.
   
3. What are the emergent social changes that must be recognized and analyzed to answer the above two questions well?
   
   Historically, schools and universities have been conservative institutions, slow to change. However, the changes in education that have taken place over the past two hundred years have been shaped by three kinds of changes in the wider culture: demographic, technological, and ideological. When the populations to be educated at the beginning of the 20^th century changed dramatically, so changed the schools. When technology changed the economy in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, so changed the schools. And when social beliefs and values changed regarding women in the workplace, family life, or religion in public life, the schools changed as well. Now, as we enter the 21^st century, the changes that are taking place demographically, technologically, and ideologically are sure to change schools, higher education, and new unknown sites of learning, in ways that are difficult to predict. The CEO of Cisco Systems, one of the most successful companies in history, claims that his company can remain competitive only if it "reinvents itself" every three years. School reform efforts that were launched in the 1980s and early 1990s, and are now taking place nationwide, may or may not be appropriate for the year 2020.
   
4. In the midst of already-ongoing school reform efforts at the national and regional level–standards and accountability efforts that are clearly driving reform in Illinois–how can the University of Illinois play a significant role in helping the state and local districts make sense of whether these efforts are the right ones for the students of 2020?
   
   There has emerged in the last ten years a "new orthodoxy" about standards-based school reform that pervades current school reform in Illinois. If it is the right direction for the beginning of the 21^st century, many questions remain unanswered: how such reforms will be funded, how higher education can play a role in preparing teachers for the newly reformed system, and how to make the standards-based approach serve all parts of our student population well. But the analysis needed to determine whether these reform efforts are moving in the right direction must be a multidisciplinary one, involving school leaders, teachers, teacher unions, university educators and researchers, business people, and others.
   
5. Given the answers to the first four questions, is Illinois organized, as a state, to move well toward systemic educational improvement in schools and higher education?
   
   Many members of the educational community and the business community think the answer to this is a clear "no." They argue that the Illinois State Board of Education’s internal organization, together with its interface with the Illinois Board of Higher Education around school reform issues, lacks the capacity for leading meaningful systemic change in Illinois. But what kind of study would determine whether that contention is correct, and what a better state-level organization would look like? One thing is certain: in educational reform, "the state is where the action is," as Linda Darling-Hammond, Executive Director of Teaching America’s Future, writes, and the quality of the state apparatus effects the quality of any and all reform efforts.
   
6. How does higher education need to change; and how can the University of Illinois lead that change by word and deed?
   
   The key insight of the P-16 movement in the U.S. has been the systematic interdependence among the various components of the P-16 educational system, higher education included. The Task Force has identified a number of useful constructs for understanding that interdependence, among them the "discontinuities" that disrupt the current system and the need for such unifying concepts as "academic literacy" to guide reform. Both of these have implications for how higher education needs to change internally and in its relations with
   P-12 education. What those changes should be, and which of them the University of Illinois is able and willing to make, should be the target of sustained inquiry and implementation led by the Center for Systemic Change in Education.
   

The structure of the Center should be as lean as possible, focusing resources on collaborative inquiry and systemic solutions to educational problems confronting education in Illinois. Because it will have a statewide charge involving the expertise and school partners of all three campuses, the Center should report to the central University administration rather than to any single campus administration–and should incorporate faculty from all three campuses as well as school practitioners/leaders in Center governance and decision-making.

To build the capacity for sustained, cross-disciplinary inquiry into the relations among education, technology, and society in Illinois in the 21^st century, the University will have to establish an institutional organization that can do the following:

• Organize and support joint inquiry in a newly created Center for Systemic Change in Education across disciplines and with shared participation across the three University of Illinois campuses–involving in this inquiry, wherever possible, other educational institutions of the State as well as other participants in the private and public educational community;
  

• Organize and support sustained internal assessment of how the University could better respond to technological and social change for our students’ benefit (e.g., address the marked disparities between different ethnic and economic groups’ success rates University-wide, which are the result of social changes to which the University has not yet adequately responded, possibly incorporating technological solutions that have not yet been considered);
  

• Organize and support collaborative experimentation and implementation for systematically improving education at all levels in the State, whether initiated by faculty, educational collaborators, or by the Center for Systemic Change in Education.

Representatives from the University of Illinois Center for Systemic Change in Education should immediately begin work with the Illinois Joint Education Council (leadership of the State Board of Education, Board of Higher Education, Community College Board, and Governor’s office) to formulate a state-level P-16 Plus deliberative body. This group should consider what information, resources, and organization are needed for the State to begin moving Illinois education intelligently and coherently into the 21^st century.

We believe that with these two major steps–one directed toward internal change and one toward external change–the University can execute the following agenda. We have grouped our recommendations in the order in which we think they need to take place. Some are for immediate implementation, while others can be implemented only with careful review and deliberation by the new Center for Systemic Change in Education we recommend establishing.

• Encourage the University of Illinois President to take an active role in promoting and implementing these recommendations as a University priority and further encourage him to:
  
• Create a Center for Systemic Change in Education with a clear charge, structure, and governance.
  
• Allocate recurring funds to this Center to address system-wide educational initiatives, including those recommended here.
  
• Designate a Coordinator to direct this Center.
  
• Establish a multi-campus, multi-disciplinary steering committee for this Center to take advantage of the three campuses’ distinctive areas of expertise and diversity of educational context; include school practitioners in this steering committee.

• Initiate and support a program to support cross-disciplinary inquiry into the foreseeable trends in education, technology and society, involving expertise from the three University of Illinois
  campuses–involving in this inquiry, where appropriate, other educational institutions of the state as well as other participants in the private and public educational community.
  
• Initiate a program of studies to evaluate current and foreseeable P-16 disruptive discontinuities and the effectiveness of different approaches for dealing with them to improve learning. This program of studies should create an internal grant framework that supports proposals from University faculty and units to address systemic disruptive discontinuities in the educational system statewide.
  
• Hold an annual, highly visible P-16 Plus Educator Summit, bringing together key stakeholders from across the P-16 Plus system to identify disruptive discontinuities and promising systemic approaches for improvement.
  
• Initiate work with the Illinois Joint Education Council (leadership of the State Board of Education, Board of Higher Education, Community College Board, and Governor’s office) to formulate a state-level P-16 Plus deliberative body for shaping a P-16 Plus initiative for Illinois.
  
• Create and maintain a P-16 Plus Portal as a user-friendly, well-maintained and organized web-based portal for P-16 Plus information, including links to resources in other states.
  
• Re-examine University admission and placement standards in light of the adoption of state and national learning standards and other changes in P-12 education.

The Center for Systemic Change in Education should:

• Propose intellectually challenging, standards-based alternative routes to teacher certification to address teacher shortage areas such as urban and rural teaching, minority teachers, and mathematics, science, special education, and bilingual education teachers.
  
• Collaborate closely with selected community colleges on such teacher-quality issues as recruitment and preparation of teacher candidates of color, basic skills preparation and remediation, and the offering of approved teacher recertification experiences, including professional development in instructional uses of technology.
  
• Collaborate with selected community colleges to aid in the transition of students transferring to the University of Illinois.
  
• Develop and implement small-scale P-16 Plus learning models that address disruptive educational discontinuities and that assist low-performing schools in meeting state learning standards. Evaluate the impact of those models on learning.
  
• Develop a program in which doctoral students in disciplines with low employment prospects in higher education can prepare for teaching positions in school systems.
  
• Investigate ways to modify the incentive system for University faculty and staff to reward systemic efforts to improve the P-16 Plus system.

The Center should:

• Support the use of technologies to create and support learning communities for systemic
  P-16 Plus reform statewide.
  
• Collaborate with selected P-12 schools and districts to develop models for systemic reform in high need areas and to implement widely those that prove to be effective in improving learning and teaching.
  
• Support inquiry into student and teacher accountability approaches that are not limited to standardized achievement scores, but that assess learning in ways that motivate students and teachers in schools.
  
• Establish a system of regular evaluation of the impact of the initiatives supported by the Center described above, involving representatives of the P-16 Plus system to monitor educational, technological, and social changes, to identify new disruptive discontinuities in the system, and to reshape the "2020 Vision" as needed in the future.

Even though technologies allow educationally powerful new interactional frameworks, and even though there are a wide number of P-16 Plus interactions that are possible even with more conventional media, these will not have a systemic effect on educational improvement if people do not know about them.

One of the valuable side effects of our P-16 Task Force has been the growing awareness by Task Force members of the wide range of possible ways to improve education through

P-16 Plus interactions. In order for a larger number of people at all levels of the P-16 Plus system to learn about these possibilities for educational improvement, a P-16 Plus Portal is needed: a website that serves as a clearinghouse for P-16 Plus interactions and evaluations of their effectiveness. The P-16 Plus Portal can also serve to support a P-16 Plus community in which people contribute new knowledge to the Portal as well as drawing upon the existing knowledge of P-16 Plus interactions. There is an extensive body of expertise on the creating of such portals at the University of Illinois, an existing body of knowledge about P-16 Plus interactions, and a critical mass of faculty members interested in P-16 Plus to make the development of a University of Illinois P-16 Plus Portal both plausible and sustainable. Because of the nature of the Internet, a University of Illinois P-16 Plus Portal can have a much broader positive impact for educational improvement, as well–statewide, nationwide, and worldwide.

Resolution

Education at the state level functions as an interdependent but often loosely coupled system of diverse institutions, policies, and processes, with complex interactions among the different components. One key leverage point for systemic improvement in education is to focus on the discontinuities among the different components, both improving existing interactions and creating powerful new interactions. At the same time, it cannot be assumed that each of the parts is functioning properly in itself, as if educational discontinuities exist only between components, and not within them, as well. We propose that the University of Illinois improve P-16 Plus education by:

• establishing the internal capacity for sustained inquiry into how Illinois educators can anticipate and respond systemically to emergent social changes brought about by globalization, technology, and demographic shifts;
  
• working with the full range of educational stakeholders in Illinois to encourage the growth of a 2020 Vision of academic literacy across the P-16 system and beyond; and
  
• collaborating with others throughout Illinois to implement and evaluate educational innovations that demonstrate how academic literacy can be a legitimate expectation for all members of a democratic society.
  

The University of Illinois can make a unique contribution by committing resources to a sustained investigation of emergent social and technological changes and their implications for education in Illinois, leading to a shared vision of educational change between now and the year 2020. The University can then support a focused effort to institute that 2020 Vision in concert with other participants in the educational system. To help foster the shared 2020 Vision, the University can help to address existing disruptive discontinuities in the educational system and also can provide an early warning system for new disruptive discontinuities that develop under the strain of rapid change. The University of Illinois embraces its leadership role in establishing forward-looking P-16 Plus discussions and initiatives in the profession and in the public domain.

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

Appendix I: P-16 Initiatives in Selected States

Appendix II: University of Illinois P-16 Data Resources

Appendix III: Illustrations of Current University of Illinois Involvement with Schools

References and Resources