The severity of the social ills in north Omaha may warrant creating an "innovation zone" there to try new approaches to raising student achievement, Ted Stilwill, the chief executive officer of the Learning Community, said Monday.
One idea with potential, Stilwill said, could be to partner with the Omaha Public Schools and teachers' colleges to open a "clinical" teacher preparation school in north Omaha patterned after medical schools.
Just as medical interns work at hospitals and get real-life training on real patients, teacher candidates would go beyond the traditional student-teaching arrangement, serve on the school staff for a year or so and "do real work," he said.
"Beginning teachers that are trained in those environments in urban schools have much stronger skill sets because they've dealt with a much wider variety of problems," he said.
Stilwill raised the teacher-preparation school idea in a briefing for members of the Nebraska Board of Education in Lincoln. He said afterward that the teacher-preparation school is only in the idea stage.
Stilwill has said that the Learning Community can serve as a catalyst to bring such ideas to the forefront, though it lacks the resources to develop such a project on its own.
The Learning Community, with 11 member districts in Douglas and Sarpy Counties, was created to launch programs to help raise achievement for disadvantaged kids and to oversee a student transfer system that aims to mix poor and more affluent students in every school in the Learning Community.
Stilwill told state board members he hopes the Learning Community can devote more of its resources to innovation. Most of its programs to date, this year serving about 8,000 elementary students and families, involve extended learning time such as after-school and summer programs.
He said the Learning Community's 1-cent property tax levy for programs to help disadvantaged elementary school students, which generates about $4.6 million a year, is not enough by itself to remedy the metro achievement problems.
Stilwill said the greatest promise of the Learning Community lies in tapping the "collective capacity" of its 11 member school districts, allowing them to learn from each other, share results and "tinker" with ideas.
He said that in the absence of a strong national commitment to education research, it's up to the local districts to innovate.
For some schools, Stilwill said, there's a need to coordinate resources, such as federal and community-based programs, so the management of those programs doesn't burden principals and teachers, he said.
"You're trying to teach the kids and doing what you do every day, plus coordinating all the activities from the other organizations," he said.
Contact the writer:
402-444-1077, joe.dejka@owh.com
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