The following are Antioch Unified School District Superintendent Don Gill’s opening remarks at the East County Business/Education Roundtable Luncheon on Friday at Lone Tree Event Center. He discussed the effectiveness of the district’s learning academies, which include Dozier-Libbey Medical High School, Deer Valley Law Academy, Delta Academy for the Performing Arts and the Academy of Engineering and Designing a Green Environment. The deadline to apply for enrollment in an academy is Dec. 10 at the school district office.

If you look at the film “Did You Know,” it’s sort of shocking to realize the extent of energy and resources that are put into education around the world on a global scale. I had a chance to have been not long ago with a group of international educational leaders through a Youth Intervention Network dinner. It was startling to hear from them first-hand the amount of resources, economic and human resources that are invested in education.

They look at education reform on a long-term basis. They are not looking at it as we do with 2-, 3-, 5-year bites of time where our funding is so cyclical and so tumultuous. You look at the sheer number of students in India. 25% of their students are honor students, and they outnumber the entire student population of our country. It’s a little bit startling.

Look at kids today. Go to a restaurant or a movie, watch them interact with technology. You will see kids involved in technology, able to multitask five different ways. Kids learn differently and are learning around the clock. So looking at school as a separate activity that happens at school hours and all of a sudden it stops at the end of the school day, is not a realistic look at education today.

If you look at education on a global scale, it’s the top agenda item in almost every single country in the world. Just in 2007 alone over $2 trillion in economic resources were driven toward education reform in a global sense. We in the United States are in a very fierce competition for global knowledge and the economy. The competition really focuses on students who can gain skills in literacy, numeracy and high-order skills. They are looking at what kids can do and how they can apply their knowledge.

We need to look at the best in the world if we are going to compete effectively. We have to look at international standards. We are looking at national and state standards that are not at the same high level as international standards.

And the best systems that are achieving success are those systems that are swift to adapt, slow to complain and open to change. We work in silos. We need to break down those barriers. Core underpinning structure: family, church, community and schools – all four help support our youth. In California alone the drop-out rate is nearly 30 percent. We cannot afford the economic loss in productivity in losing 30 percent of our students who are dropping out.

We are responding in our work with our linked-learning and pathway programs with our four pathway schools. They are doing everything you would ever want a school to do. They are producing students who attend school more regularly. They produce students who do not get into disciplinary issues. And they produce students that have the highest grade point averages and the lowest Ds. The other benefit is parents participate in these schools more actively because they are involved with their child in selecting the type of educational program that they want their child to participate in. The other residual benefit – and it’s totally unintended – is the ability of teachers to work more collaboratively. They are involved in self-learning in their professional development and designing exciting lessons for students.

At AUSD it’s not a lot different than other school districts in East County. We just happen to be a little ahead of the curve. It took a visionary board back in 2007 to pass a resolution declaring their intent to move toward multiple pathways. Today we use the term “linked-learning.” What it means is that it allows kids to engage in an educational program of their choice around a career-based theme. Part of that is that the curriculum is more rigorous. The exciting thing that we’ve learned is that kids step up to the higher level of expectation that these schools offer. For example, kids at Dozier-Libbey Medical High School are taking a college-level course in grade 9; they are taking biology in the ninth grade. This is unheard of. And the kids are excelling and achieving at levels far beyond our wildest expectations.

But those are the types of programs that we believe are going to make the connection for kids. Because you need to provide a rigorous academic program along with relevancy. The two need to be connected. But they also have to be built upon relationships. Teachers are involved in a smaller learning community and as a result they get to know their students on a first-name basis. Students feel comfortable working with their teachers, administrators, support staff and their peers.

What we find out that the kids gain from this is a real sense of connectedness to the future. Most kids are in the moment. If you ask them what is a long-term goal for them, they may say, “I want to go to the movies on Saturday night.” Now these kids who are part of a pathway program might say, “My goal is to become an engineer, my goal is to go to Stanford University or Cal Berkeley.” They know a specific subject that they are interested in.

Our purpose in having these linked-learning programs is certainly not to steer kids and give them only one path to a future. It’s really to develop the skill sets that would expand and transfer into any career choice that they may have in the future. So, for example, our medical high school is not designed to produce medical doctors. Our law academy is not designed to produce attorneys. It’s to open up the hundreds and thousands of career opportunities within those fields and prepare them for college. Because once they have their college education the world is theirs to choose from.

There are kids graduating from college in China in the millions. Where we are producing 1.6 million in a year they are producing 3.3 million. That’s pretty tough to compete against. But we believe that we can do that.

The other things we are doing is we are looking at improving the quality instruction in the classroom. We provide coaches in our classrooms to help support teachers. These coaches would go in, observe and teachers receive follow-up coaching to help them become better at what they do in the classroom. That’s one of the key components to quality learning is the ability of teachers to instruct their students. And then for administrators we are deeply involved in providing them the training they need to be successful in being curriculum leaders.

It’s much more demanding today to run a school. In the old days you could get by just maintaining and managing the plant and making sure that everything operated well. Now we have to do that and make sure that quality teaching and learning go right.

We can’t do this alone. We need to integrate outside resources, funding, learning grants. We received a $2.5 million grant from the federal government to support smaller learning communities. Next year Antioch High School over the next five years will transform their high school into a wall-to-wall linked-learning academy. So that’s an exciting opportunity for that school. We also have math grants that help support the learning of math and science in our schools.

We are a region. Every single school district in East Contra Costa County produces positive academic gains. That’s something we have to be proud of. Because we are the forgotten child on the other side of the hills. I was never more proud of the work we are doing in AUSD and other school districts in the county; we are leading the way in many cases. The types of teaching and learning going on is going to produce the outcome that our businesses and communities need.

[The entire forum will be broadcast at 8 p.m. on Dec. 21 and 11 a.m. on Dec. 22 on Comcast Channel 27, Astound Channel 32 and AT&T U-verse channel 99. For more information on The East County Business-Education Alliance go to www.emeraldconsulting.com or e-mail Keith Archuleta at keith@emeraldconsulting.com or call 925-755-9291.]

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AUSD Superintendent Don Gill

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