Springfield set to make history
Friday, October 19, 2007By MARLA A. GOLDBERG
mgoldberg@repub.com
SPRINGFIELD, Massachuetts - The city is on track to become the first public school district in the country to make its curriculum available over the Internet for use by impoverished nations seeking to improve their schools.
“I think this is actually an historic evening … Springfield is a city of firsts,” said School Committee Vice Chairman Kenneth E. Shea last night.
The committee approved the concept of partnering with the Open Learning Exchange Consortium of Cambridge, to share the district’s curriculum internationally. A second vote to finalize the agreement will be taken in the next six to eight weeks, Shea said.
The Open Learning Exchange is a non-profit organization founded this year by Richard R. Rowe, a former associate dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. Rowe, who said the consortium is supported by the Hewlett Foundation, served on the state Board of Education in the 1990s, appointed by former Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.
In 2003, Rowe oversaw Web development and Internet fund-raising for former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.
The consortium’s goal is to help primary and secondary schools teachers in poor nations, such as Nepal, Niger, and Haiti, to create high-quality courses by way of local and international collaboration. The plan is for an Internet curriculum library called Billion Kids, Rowe said, which will let educators share and re-mix materials.
The consortium expects to have more than 100 partners worldwide within the next three years.
Rowe said his group, which is also in discussion with the Lawrence and Fitchburg school districts, approached Springfield first after discussion with Joseph B. Rappa, executive director of the state Office of Educational Quality and Accountability.
“Springfield stood out as a community where there was real leadership,” Rowe said.
A letter from Rappa to the School Committee said the district would be an excellent partner for the Open Leaning Exchange because of its demographic composition. Rappa also cited an educational audit last spring, which commended city school administrators, teachers, and staffers for improved student achievement and standards, and for making information electronically accessible to teachers.
Rappa said the partnership could be mutually beneficial, by aiding Springfield’s efforts to build an on-line curriculum.
Last year, the Springfield schools enrolled 25,800 children, about 78 percent of whom were classified as low-income by the state Department of Education. For almost 22 percent, English was a second language. Ethnically, about 50 percent are Hispanic, 26 percent black, 18 percent white, and six percent of other backgrounds.
Assistant Superintendent Denise L. Pagan-Vega said that the district’s K-5 curriculum is already in digital form on an Intranet system, and it would be fairly easy to prepare it for Open Learning Exchange release. The consortium estimated that processing Springfield curricular information would take about 80 hours, and cost $1,500, which it would pay.
Rowe said that if all goes as planned, nations such as Nepal could begin adapting the Springfield curriculum to their own needs next summer.
More than one billion children in more than 100 countries lack access to the most basic learning opportunities, according to the Open Learning Exchange. The consortium hopes to harness the Internet’s power in order to achieve the United Nations’ Millennium Goal of basic education for all by 2015.
The Open Learning Exchange is modeled after the OpenCourseWare program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which allows for free world-wide access to MIT’s course materials. State Assistant Secretary for Information Technology Anne Margulies, who is former executive director of OpenCourseWare, serves on the Open Learning Exchange board.
