A 2020 Vision for a University of Illinois Initiative:
P-16 and Beyond
Report of the University of Illinois Task Force
on P-16 Education
http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/p16/
December 5, 2000
Members of the University Task Force on P-16 Education
R. Linn Belford, Professor
Department of Chemistry, UIUC
Diane Rutledge, Assistant Superintendent
Springfield Public School District #186
Michael F. Berube, Director
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities
& Professor, Department of English, UIUC
Paul Thurston, Professor
Department of Educational Organization and
Leadership, UIUC
A. Toy Caldwell-Colbert, Associate Vice
President for Academic Affairs, & Professor,
Educational Psychology, University of Illinois
Steven Tozer, Co-Chair, Professor
College of Education, UIC
J. Jerry Uhl, Professor
Department of Mathematics, UIUC
Allan Cook, Professor
Department of Teacher Education, UIS
Philip Wagreich, Director
Institute for Mathematics and Science
Education, & Professor, Mathematics,
Statistics and Computer Science, UIC
Gerald Graff, Associate Dean
Curriculum and Instruction, & Professor,
English and Education, College of Liberal Arts
and Sciences, UIC
Debra Woods, Director
NetMath, Department of Mathematics, UIUC
Violet J. Harris, Professor
Department of Curriculum and Instruction,
UIUC
Support staff:
Deloris Henry, Assistant Superintendent
for Equity and Education, Champaign School
District #4
Margaret Grosch, Assistant to the
Vice President for Academic Affairs,
University of Illinois
James A. Levin, Co-Chair, Professor
Department of Educational Psychology, UIUC
Beth Otis, Secretary
Office of Associate Vice President for
Academic Affairs,
University of Illinois
Jo Liebermann, Coordinator of Articulation
Programs, Department of Arts and Sciences,
City Colleges of Chicago
Pamela Konkol, Graduate Assistant
College of Education, UIC
Loretta Meeks, Professor
Department of Teacher Education, UIS
Jill Stein, Graduate Assistant
College of Education, UIC
Irma Olmedo, Associate Professor
Department of Curriculum and Instruction, UIC
Dawn Williams, Graduate Assistant
College of Education, UIUC
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary ...................................................................................................................4
Vision Statement ........................................................................................................................8
Foreword ....................................................................................................................................9
Setting the Context ...................................................................................................................11
 Defining P-16 and beyond ...........................................................................................11
 Implications of the land-grant mission for P-16 Plus ..................................................11
 Understanding educational discontinuities and academic literacy ..............................13
 Understanding standardized testing versus academic literacy ....................................14
 Understanding the P-16 Reform Movement................................................................15
 National context
 National-level response
 State-level response
Current Status of University of Illinois P-16 Partnerships ......................................................19
 Discontinuities in documenting current activity ..........................................................20
 Disruptive discontinuities in the P-16 Plus system .....................................................22
Education, Technology, and Society in the 21st Century .........................................................24
Toward “Systemic” Thinking in Illinois Education .................................................................26
Achieving the “2020 Vision” ...................................................................................................27
 Realizing the Vision: Academic literacy through a systemic
approach to P-16 Plus ..................................................................................................27
 An internal and external examination by the University .............................................29
 Center for Systemic Change in Education
 Focusing internally
 Focusing externally
 Realizing the Vision: Specific action items................................................................33
 Steps for immediate action
 Steps for near-term action
 Steps for intermediate-term action
 Steps for long-term action
Resolution ................................................................................................................................36
Endnotes...................................................................................................................................37
Acknowledgments....................................................................................................................43
Appendix I: P-16 Initiatives in Selected States .......................................................................44
Appendix II: University of Illinois P-16 Data Resources .......................................................47
Appendix III: Illustrations of Current University of Illinois
Involvement with Schools..................................................................................................49
References and Resources........................................................................................................53
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Executive Summary
Colleges and universities in the United States have since their beginnings in the 17th 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.
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 University of Illinois P-16 Task Force
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.
Defining P-16 and beyond (P-16 Plus)
What the University of Illinois is
doing through P-16 partnerships
The University of Illinois has invested
resources in an extraordinary variety of
initiatives interacting with the rest of the
“P-12” education refers, typically, to the continuum of
schooling from preschool through the level 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. In the 21st century, the concept of lifelong
learning will increase in importance and we use the
term P-16 Plus as a reminder of our more
comprehensive vision.
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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.
What the University of Illinois needs to
do through P-16 partnerships
The urgent need to understand and shape the
rapidly-changing interactions among
technology, society, and educational
institutions in the 21st century suggests a
distinctive role for the University of Illinois –
one that builds upon past engagements with
schools but anticipates the changes that the
next century will bring.
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:
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.
 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.
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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.
Recommendations
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.
The University is uniquely positioned in
Illinois to enter into, and to engage
others in, inquiry into systemic
educational change due to:
 its extraordinary intellectual and
technological resources;
 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 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.
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
If the Center does its work
Change in Education:
well, its significance will
a. Encouraging efforts by faculty, staff, and students at the
truly be national, if not
University to address problems in the P-16 Plus system and to
international.
develop steps toward a 2020 Vision for improvement through a
P-16 Plus mini-grants program.
b. 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.
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c. 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).
Resolution
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.
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Vision Statement
A 2020 Vision for a University of Illinois Initiative:
P-16 Plus and Beyond
As the new century begins, numerous discontinuities or gaps in the Illinois educational system interfere
with the academic development of far too many students at all levels (P-16, or preschool through
college). These include discontinuities from one school level to the next, between teacher education and
the teaching profession, and between democratic ideals and educational realities. Moreover, the first
decades of the 21st century will be a time of major change for this nation and the world. The rapid pace
of change will alter society in ways that are difficult to predict, but that will necessarily have profound
impact on schools, colleges, and universities. In the absence of careful analysis, foresight, and systemic
planning, new discontinuities in the 21st century are likely. The University of Illinois must work with the
wider educational community to articulate and enact a vision of educational improvement that
recognizes the interdependent, systemic nature of educational experiences, from preschool through
graduate and career-long education. Such a vision must recognize the educational import of social and
technological changes that confront us.
To do its part, the University should apply research, teaching, and public service resources to identify
and address those areas of lifelong education that can most benefit from university collaboration with
others in the public and private sectors. By following this path, the University of Illinois can be a
national leader in demonstrating how a public research institution shares responsibility for supporting
the greatest possible academic development of students from diverse backgrounds at all levels of the
system. A time of rapid change presents substantial opportunities to improve education systemically; at
the same time, however, new challenges will present themselves. To take a leadership role in supporting
a statewide, systemic approach to meeting these challenges will require changes within the University
itself – internal changes that build the capacity for sustaining a new and historic role in educational
improvement in Illinois and the nation, preschool through college and beyond.
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A 2020 Vision for a University of Illinois Initiative:
P-16 and Beyond
Foreword
American Education has long been characterized by a
profound disjuncture between K-12 and postsecondary
education—two systems that often act independently and at
cross-purposes from one another. Consortium for Policy
Research in Education, June 2000.
Colleges and universities in the United States have since their beginnings in the 17th 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 highestachieving 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.
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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
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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 UrbanaChampaign 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.
Setting the Context
Defining P-16 and beyond
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 21st 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.
Implications of the land-grant mission for P-16 Plus
The public land-grant universities bear a special kinship, and
therefore a special responsibility, to the public schools.
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.
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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.
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Understanding educational discontinuities and academic literacy
The solutions lie not just in connecting the different parts of the
system, but in improving how each part works in itself, as well.
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 wellprepared 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
13
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.
Understanding standardized testing versus academic literacy
“Accountability needs to be a two-way street with [other
stakeholders] taking some responsibility for the success (or lack
thereof) of our schools. If teachers were provided with adequate
resources, training and support they would be willing to meet the
challenge.” – quote from a UIUC online focus group, by a public
school teacher from central Illinois.
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
14
“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.
Understanding the P-16 Reform Movement
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.
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
15
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 threequarters 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
16
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
17
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 “singleminded” 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
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.
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
18
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
Current Status of University of Illinois P -16 Partnerships
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.
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 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 20th
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.
Discontinuities in documenting current activity
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
20
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.
21
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.
Disruptive discontinuities in the P-16 Plus system
The context in which school improvement efforts must take
place is huge and complex.
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 21st 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
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 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
21st century, and how it will be implemented.10
23
 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.
Education, Technology, and Society in the 21 s t Century
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.
Throughout the 20th 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 21st 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 19th century than wired for the 21st. 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 20th
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
24
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 21st 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 havenots 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
25
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.
Toward “Systemic” Thinking in Illinois Education
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.
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 postsecondary education.
26
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.
Achieving the “2020 Vision”
Our recommendations are intended to combat the disjunctures in
our educational system that impede the development of
academic literacy in our students, from preschool through
college and beyond.
Realizing the Vision: Academic literacy through a systemic approach to P-16 Plus
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
27
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.
Restating the problems that confront us
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 highestachieving schools in Illinois existing in close proximity to some of the lowestachieving 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.
28
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 21st century coherently. The urgent need to understand and shape the rapidly changing
interactions among technology, society, and educational institutions in the 21st century suggests
a distinctive role for the University of Illinois.
An internal and external examination by the University
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 20th century, much to the detriment of millions of
students over the decades. The need will be even greater in the 21st century.
Center for Systemic Change in Education
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.
29
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 21st 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.
30
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
20th century changed dramatically, so changed the schools. When technology changed the
economy in the 19th and 20th 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 21st 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 21st 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.
31
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.
Focusing internally
To build the capacity for sustained, cross-disciplinary inquiry into the relations among
education, technology, and society in Illinois in the 21st 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 Universitywide, 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.
32
Focusing externally
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 21st 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.
Realizing the Vision: Specific action items
Steps for immediate action:
 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.
Steps for near-term action:
 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
33
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.
Steps for intermediate-term action:
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.
34
Steps for long-term action:
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.
35
Resolution
The urgent need to understand and shape the rapidly changing
interactions among technology, society, and educational
institutions in the 21st century suggests a distinctive role for the
University of Illinois.
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.
36
Endnotes
1
These were the questions used in the P-16 Task Force focus groups:
1. What seem to you, from your perspective, to be the most pressing problems facing schools in
your community?
2. What possible ways to address these problems seem most promising to you?
3. Examples of ways in which community colleges, colleges, or universities have been of any use
to you in your work?
4. What kinds of collaborations can you describe?
5. What would you work on?
6. How would you envision working together?
7. Other comments?
2
All data in this section are from the National Center for Educational Statistics (2000), The Condition
of Education 2000. U.S. Department of Education , Office of Educational Research and Improvement.
NCES 2000-062. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
3
The U.S. Office of Education reports on teacher quality issues that reside in the preparation and
professional development of teachers, but also in the conditions of the profession:

Correcting for inflation, the average annual salary for public school teachers has not increased in
thirty years.
 Teachers at schools with high minority enrollment or a high percentage of students eligible for free
or reduced lunch were less likely to have master’s degrees than their counterparts at schools with
low minority enrollment or a low percentage of students eligible for free or reduced lunch.
 Over one third of public school teachers hold academic subject area degrees rather than educational
degrees.
 Fewer than half of public school teachers who engaged in professional development activities (for
more than 8 hours) believe that that activity has a significant impact on their professional practice.
 In general, nearly 20% of public school teachers do not engage in professional development
activity.
Over a quarter of public school teachers sometimes feel it is a “waste of time” to try to do their best as a
teacher.
4
The Education Trust is particularly committed to schools and colleges serving low-income and racially
diverse children. Established in 1990 as a special project of the American Association for Higher
Education, the Trust receives funding from several national foundations as well as other support
sources.
The Trust works with local leaders, including education professionals, parent and community groups,
and business representatives to build community-wide vehicles to mount and sustain K-16 reform
efforts. The Trust also works in the interest of these Community Compacts by bringing the needs, issues
and concerns of such local initiatives to Washington’s public policy debate through the Education Trust
Action Network. The action network allies with other Washington-based advocacy groups to ensure that
good policy is promoted and dangerous initiatives are defeated.
The P-16 agenda of the Education Trust is as follows:

develop, implement and support high, clear, and consistent academic standards for all students
at all levels–kindergarten through college;
37

prepare all teachers and higher education faculty, through pre-service and continuous
professional development, to teach to high standards;

replace watered-down instruction with rigorous and challenging classes for all students;

shift more decision-making authority to the school building level, and reshape central district
bureaucracies as resources and advocates for improved practice. In post-secondary education,
more authority–and more responsibility for improving student outcomes–must be vested in
departments or cross-disciplinary faculty teams;

link standards to consequences for teachers, schools and students.
The Education Trust maintains that because of the intertwined nature of K-12 and higher education, it is
not possible to achieve significant reform or promote effective K-16 initiatives without simultaneously
changing the way that post-secondary education operates. To that end, the trust has forwarded eight key
tasks for higher education:

communicate and build an understanding of the need for collective school reform;

help develop standards for what students should know and be able to do;

align college admissions and placement with the new standards;

take a proactive role in teacher professional development;

recruit the “best and brightest” as teacher candidates and align their professional and academic
preparation with K-12 initiatives and standards;

reframe the education research agenda and share findings with K-12 leaders and professionals;

improve feedback to schools;

encourage university engagement, both organizationally and with personnel, in local school
communities.
5
In general, P-16 efforts all have a sense of urgency with regard to increasing student achievement,
aligning what is going on in P-12 with that which is going on in the post-secondary realm, and
improving teacher education and subsequent professional resources. The theory behind the P-16
movement is that improving and facilitating communication and cooperation among levels of education
will result in increased opportunities and resources for all students to succeed, regardless of background
or ability. There exists a general lack of alignment with regard to purpose, goals, and outcomes between
the various levels of the educational spectrum, from local school systems and communities to postsecondary institutions and the workforce. It is collective action toward a shared vision of “success” that
will promote the development of a “complete” student; complete with regard to such factors as
academic and social achievement and aspirations, civic mindedness, and generally being a productive
member of society. Closely tied to this notion is the belief that having a truly “quality” teacher in every
classroom has a significant impact on this pursuit.
38
There are several common themes with regard to the focus of each partnership; increasing academic
achievement and outcomes and enhancing the chances for student “success” in college and the
workforce are key among them. There is also a common interest in improving the overall quality of
teachers and the practice of teaching. Several partnerships advocate a “seamless” system of education;
education at every level should take into account those levels that occur earlier and those that follow in
order to most effectively educate the “whole” student. To facilitate this, a climate of collaboration and
open communication is necessary.
Generally, each partnership seeks to improve the state of P-16 education by engaging in collective
activity that will ensure the academic and social success of students across the continuum, “raise the
bar” of student expectation, equalize the playing field for students from all backgrounds, and better
align P-12 and post-secondary goals and outcomes. Further, each partnership has put emphasis on
improving the overall quality of the teaching force, either locally or as a statewide endeavor. This can be
accomplished at the higher education level through the recruitment of better candidates and
improvement of teacher preparation programs, and at the higher education and local levels by the
provision of continuing and substantive professional development activities for current education
professionals.
Activities within these relationships range from comprehensive school and professional development
work such as legislative initiatives, district/local curriculum reform and school/business/university
linkages, to discrete activities such as grant proposal writing assistance, math/science classroom
support, and direct financial support. For example, the primary action plan in Georgia includes setting
clear standards for student knowledge at every level, linking curricula across the educational spectrum
to facilitate access to subsequent levels of education, providing applied opportunities for students to
make “real-life” connections between what is learned in school and how the world works, building
student aspirations and goals, promoting and providing opportunities and resources for teachers to
continually grow and become more effective, and building a sense of collective responsibility among
the various levels of the educational spectrum to ensure student success and overall accountability for
that success. In short, each of these initiatives seeks to cultivate an “educational community” in which
all students and educators can experience continual success in achieving higher standards of excellence.
6
The university system partnership in Georgia is an example of this; developments in the teacher
education programs and subsequent teacher (and administrator) professional development programs are
closely aligned with the goals and standards set by the P-16 Network. In addition, the Georgia
university system is an integral part of ongoing public school curriculum development and improvement
and revision of secondary counseling and leadership programs, as well as a key element in establishing
the Georgia Teaching Force Clearinghouse. Further, the research capabilities of the university system
contribute significantly to the evaluation and assessment of the overall initiative.
The California State University System administers the California Academic Partnership Program.
CAPP has evolved from a basic university-public school partnership system in which the university
supported curriculum reform efforts, into a legislated program which involves diagnostic assessment
activities, university-school-business collaboration facilitation, measures and programs to improve
teaching and teacher education, etc. This California initiative has developed from an educational
development program into an organization that has built a true educational community within a state
that emphasizes accountability, effective partnerships, and the value of collaboration at every level.
However, some collaborations currently exist primarily as relationships of support; simply the provision
of supplementary services to the public school system by the higher education system. This seems to be
more evident with regard to science and math programs and professional development opportunities,
39
and reflects the more common school-higher education partnerships rather than this more
comprehensive P-16 philosophy of a “seamless” system of education.
7
A single faculty member in one college of education at one of the three campuses, for example, might
engage in the following over a three-year period:
 Conduct scholarly research on teacher education and publish in academic journals
 Write a textbook for teacher education programs
 Supervise doctoral student research on P-12 schooling issues
 Serve on state-level policy committees to articulate curriculum between community colleges and
four-year institutions
 Draft legislation for state teacher certification policy
 Collaborate with local school district leadership on professional development design and
implementation
 Work regularly with a single school on curriculum design and teacher development
 Provide consulting to other higher education institutions on professional preparation program
accreditation
 Teach courses in school leadership or teacher preparation
 Collaborate with school personnel in redesigning a school principal preparation program
 Supervise principal candidates in their fieldwork in schools
 Give presentations to schools on new teacher certification requirements in Illinois
 Take workshops from other University of Illinois faculty in instructional uses of technology and online learning
While few faculty will work at all those different levels, some will; and many faculty, particularly in the
education departments, will do some combination of them.
8
At the secondary school level, for example, the richest districts spend over $15,000 per pupil per year,
while the poorest districts spend less than $5,000. Just a few minutes’ drive from some of the highestachieving schools in the nation, one of the nation’s largest school systems averages dropout rates and
standardized achievement scores that simply would not be tolerated in any middle class suburb. Some
suburbs, as well as some rural areas, prepare fewer than half their graduating high school seniors to take
the ACT test, and those who take the test average scores below 18 (State mean is 21.4). Some urban
low-income schools average scores of under 15 on the ACT, with less than a third of the graduating
seniors even taking the exam. Other schools, in contrast, prepare over 70% of their students to take the
ACT, and scores average over 26. The life chances for these students vary accordingly.
ISBE (2000) School ACT Composites by County for 1997 through 1999. See ISBE Website.
9
In addition, beginning teachers in Illinois average an annual salary of $28,000, while the median
salaries for experienced elementary and secondary teachers are $43,000 and $47,900, respectively. The
trouble with these salaries, as Teacher Magazine points out, is that Illinois ranks 40th among the states
for teachers holding bachelor’s degrees. Teachers with Master’s degrees rank somewhat better
nationally, 19th, but this is largely an indication of how little teachers with master’s degrees earn in
contrast to other occupations with master’s degrees. In Illinois, teachers with master’s degrees earn on
average $43,258; the average annual income for non-teaching occupations with master’s degrees in
Illinois is $64,146.
Education Week, January 13, 2000, page 114; Teacher Magazine, March 2000, p. 27
40
Too often, “inclusive” policies have simply required schoolteachers to do more and more work with a
wider variety of students of different abilities, because teachers have had to implement inclusive
policies without the benefit of the additional in-class and administrative support those policies require.
This amounts to making individual teachers, at every grade level, responsible for the successful
realization of profoundly ambitious and sweeping federal mandates to educate every child to his or her
full potential. But even the most brilliant and dedicated teachers cannot undertake such a task alone. For
inclusive policies to work, they must be implemented systemically, with sufficient staffing and financial
support at every level, from the state to the county to the district to the school.
10
American schools have made “inclusive” education the law of the land only very recently. The IDEA
itself dates from 1975, and was re-authorized by Congress in 1997. More to the point, it is only in the
past decade that court rulings such as Daniel R. R. v. State Board of Education (1989) and Oberti v.
Board of Education of the Borough of Clementon School District (1992) have required school districts
to implement inclusive policies for children with disabilities, regardless of a child’s ability to do gradelevel work. What this suggests is that the meaning of the language of IDEA, mandating a “free
appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment,” has gradually shifted in the past
quarter-century so as to make inclusion for children with disabilities the “default” position in public
education.
This shift amounts to an epochal reinterpretation of the franchise of public education, almost
comparable with the de jure racial desegregation of American schools in the latter half of the twentieth
century, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). If it is only since the 1960s that public
schools truly attempted to educate every child regardless of race, it is only in the past decade that
American public schools have extended their reach to embrace a notion of truly universal access to
education. The teachers who are trained for the P-16 system of the next century will therefore have to be
adept in and knowledgeable about the politics and practices of teaching inclusively.
The politics of inclusive teaching are themselves quite complex, since there is a high correlation
between “children with disabilities,” “learning-disabled children,” “children at risk,” and children living
in poverty. Even the politics of labeling can be extremely complex (“learning-disabled” over “educable
mentally handicapped,” for instance, just to take two terms in the Illinois system), and labels themselves
have come in for stringent criticism in recent years. Whatever the politics of labeling, however, and
whatever the politics of disability and poverty, the central point at issue is the fact that educating
students with disabilities is very much a civil rights issue, every bit as much as was racial segregation
prior to Brown v. Board of Education. In fact, education could be construed as what philosopher
Amartya Sen calls a “capability right,” insofar as it enables citizens to make use of their other rights as
Americans; in the case of children with disabilities, it is especially imperative that the right of all
Americans to a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment be realized in such
a way as to enable today’s students to be the most effective and productive citizens they can be.
This position necessarily implies that special education should be a key component of any systemic
thinking about P-16 education, but it also implies, less obviously but no less importantly, that inclusive
educational practices will no longer be the domain of special education alone. Indeed, the most
progressive and farsighted state education policies will doubtless be those that consciously foster the
integration of all students, regardless of race, ethnicity, or disability. With its Institute on Disability and
Human Development at UIC and the new Disability Research Institute at UIUC, the University of
Illinois is well positioned to become a national leader with regard to inclusive education throughout the
P-16 system.
41
Again, equity becomes an issue. What kinds of special education for what students? How are
placements and labels decided? What cultural, linguistic, racial, or ethnic factors are taken into
consideration? For example, what accounts for the disproportionate placement of students of color,
principally African American and Latino/a in certain categories of special education, especially those
that decrease the likelihood of their reclassification? How does tracking affect special education
classification? Conversely, what accounts for the resegregation of schools/classes via gifted programs?
These equity issues highlight the importance of race, ethnicity, language, and class in special education.
42
Acknowledgments
The Task Force is indebted to a number of people who provided feedback on the report as it was being
drafted. We have mentioned in the body of the report the assistance given by the University of Illinois
Educational Alumni Association. We would also like to thank the following individuals for their
cooperation in providing information to the Task Force:
Charles Evans, University of Illinois Outreach and Public Service
Ginger Garner, North Central Association of Colleges and Schools
Ira Langston, University of Illinois Office of Academic Policy Analysis
Allan Lerner, University of Illinois at Chicago External Education
Jerry Loyet, North Central Association of Colleges and Schools
Burks Oakley, University of Illinois Online
Steve Schomberg, University of Illinois Office of the Chancellor
Ray Schroeder, University of Illinois at Springfield Office of Technology Enhanced Learning
In addition, a number of people provided written feedback on the report in various stages of drafting.
They are:
Eugene Amberg, Urbana Schools District 116
Harry Berman, University of Illinois at Springfield Office of Academic Affairs
Cozette Buckney, City of Chicago District 299
Michael Cain, Champaign Schools District 4
Victoria Chou, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Education
Stanley Fish, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Susan Fowler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Education
Mildred Griggs, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Education
Zelema Harris, Parkland Community College
Tom Kerins, Springfield Public Schools District 186
David Ruzik, University of Illinois Faculty Fellow
Larry Stonecipher, University of Illinois at Springfield College of Education
43
Appendix I: P-16 Initiatives in Selected States
Georgia:
The Georgia P-16 initiative has three primary tasks:
 alignment of expectations (standards), curricula, and assessment for students P-16;
 alignment of school reform and teacher preparation reform toward P-12 learning improvements;
 supplemental programs for 7th-12th grade at-risk students to prepare for post-secondary
education.
The Post-Secondary Readiness Program (PREP) is a component of the Georgia P-16 Initiative that seeks
to enhance post-secondary readiness of students in at-risk situations. This program is a key joint schoolpost-secondary undertaking in that it is helping to “close the gap” for students in at-risk situations.
Georgia’s push to improve teacher quality throughout the state resulted in the creation of an overall
framework for change, an increase in the availability, scope and strength of alternative certification
programs, and a new teacher quality “guarantee,” effective 2004.
Maryland:
The K-16 Partnership of Maryland identifies its major goals as follows:
 increase student achievement to enable students to meet workforce or post-secondary standards;
 provide “bold” leadership toward meaningful improvement in student achievement;
 appeal to the strength of “collective strategies” to accomplish this improvement.
In pursuit of these goals, the Maryland K-16 Partnership has approved a “high stakes” graduation
examination that will ensure that by 2004, every graduate will be prepared to engage in college-level
coursework. In conjunction with this initiative, teacher training in the state has been redesigned to
ensure that all new teachers will be held to equally high performance standards; essentially, “students
can’t learn what they haven’t been taught, and teachers can’t teach what they haven’t learned.”
California:
California identifies its greatest educational challenge as ensuring that children from at-risk situations
and disadvantaged backgrounds receive a quality education. To that end, the California State University
System, in conjunction with other higher education entities throughout the state, designed and
implemented the CAPP program.
The California Academic Partnership Program (CAPP) is a partnership between California higher
education institutions and public schools. CAPP awards grants to partnerships of schools, higher
education institutions, and business entities to improve academic programs so that more students are
prepared for college and the workforce.
44
Nevada:
The Washoe County, NV K-16 Council believes that all students should have access to a seamless
education system which prepares them for life long learning, civic responsibility, and the ever-changing
world of work through partnerships with educators (including higher education), parents, business and
the community. The council’s goals are:
 foster collaboration to encourage systemic change of the educational system;
 establish higher standards and expectations for learning;
 establish systems of accountability regarding student achievement and educational
improvement;
 facilitate communication among stakeholders.
One of the first initiatives of the Washoe County K-16 Council was to implement a Schools-to-Careers
program involving K-16 educational organizations, industry and community members. Involved in this
initiative was the establishment of Career Opportunity Centers. These centers are examples of the
integrated approach the K-16 Council uses to link classroom learning, career preparation, and workforce
development.
The Incline Village, NV K-16 Council shares the philosophies and agenda of the Washoe County
Council. In pursuit of these goals, the Incline Village K-16 Council has engaged in the following
activities:
 coordinated a National Science Foundation grant to focus on learning styles and disabilities;
 coordinated an Educational Field Studies grant for Internet training of teachers and parents;
 co-sponsored the New Generations Conference with the Rotary Club;
 sponsored the local School improvement Project;
 sponsored the local Education Fair;
 addressed the National Conference of K-16 Councils.
Of particular note is the School Improvement Project, which involved shifting to a standards-based
model for curriculum, establishing mastery benchmarks for student achievement, and implementing
additional writing content and reading content standards.
New Mexico:
The K-16 push in New Mexico centers on two primary issues, 1) the notion that all children can achieve
and demonstrate high standards if appropriate support is provided for them, and 2) the notion that good
teaching matters, and a high quality teacher in every classroom is the single most effective way to assure
that all students achieve at high levels. In pursuit of these goals, a K-16 Roundtable on Teacher
Preparation and Professional Development was convened to establish an action plan for improving
teacher recruitment, improving the quality of teacher preparation programs within the state, improving
the new teacher induction process, and expanding and strengthening opportunities for continued
professional development of teachers.
Colorado:
In response to the national attention being paid to school-higher education partnerships, the University
of Colorado and local school districts embarked on a series of extensive school-university collaborations
through the Partners in Education (PIE) program. PIE programs are intended to improve teacher
education throughout the state by enhancing the professional growth and renewal opportunities for preservice, novice, and experienced teachers. The PIE Program is comprised of three main components;
45
first-year teacher induction programs, growth opportunities for experienced teachers, and School of
Education resources to local districts. The University of Colorado has made a further commitment to
the K-16 agenda through the BUENO Center for Multi-cultural Education. Among other activities, the
Center is committed to facilitating equal educational opportunities for cultural and language minority
students at all levels of the educational system. Further, the Center provides extensive training and
support for university students, teachers, paraprofessionals, school administrators, school board
members, and community members.
Minnesota:
In Minnesota, P-16 collaborations have resulted in numerous university generated projects with the
public schools. Included in these initiatives are university-school curriculum partnerships, technology
skills development opportunities for teachers, service learning partnerships, the Leadership Institute,
The Lab District Teacher Education Center, and the Urban Teacher Education Partnership.
46
Appendix II: University of Illinois P -16 Data Resources
Resources can be found via the following link:
<http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/p16/p16-protected/resources.html>
Statistics on University of Illinois Teacher Education Programs at each campus (enrollments & degrees)
The University of Illinois Public Service Activities Searchable Database:
University of Illinois P-16 Related Activities - separate areas
University of Illinois P-16 Related Activities - all on one page
University of Illinois Online P-16 Activities
University of Illinois teacher education programs (UIS, UIC, & UIUC)
UIS P-16 data
University of Illinois at Springfield 5th Year Review of the Teacher Preparation Program
UIC P-16 data
UIC College of Ed Response to ACE’s “To Touch the Future” report (see below)
UIUC’s Partnership Illinois database: P-16 Public Service Programs
Partnership Illinois Addendum of single P-16 events at UIUC
2000 UIUC K-12/University Partnerships Directory
UIUC College of Education P-16 White Paper: Vision for Education in the Near Future — Not the
schools in our memories…
Focus group data:
K-12 teacher online focus group responses
Administrator focus group responses
Face-to-face K-12 focus group responses
47
National and state reports:
Kellogg Commission Report “Renewing the Covenant: Learning, Discovery, and Engagement in a New
Age and Different World,” March, 2000 (a PDF file) the American Council on Education’s “To Touch
the Future: Transforming the Way Teachers are Taught”
What Matters Most: Teaching For America’s Future by the National Commission on Teaching &
America’s Future
Association of American Universities (AAU) Resolution on Teacher Education (June 1999).
IBHE’s Report on the Joint Education Committee P-16 Partnership (a PDF file)
Other resources:
NRC Report Assesses Nation’s Need For Scientists
E-Learning: Education Businesses Transform Schooling by Peter Stokes
Developing Urban Teachers to Meet the Challenges of Diversity: How Critical Cogs Interact with Big
Wheels by Victoria Chou
Re-envisioning the Ph.D. Sector Meetings
Steve Tozer’s focus group instructions and questions
MCI-Brown University partnership grants
Messages to the Task Force about major issues, April 3 - April 17
Letter to Provosts from Vice President Gardner
AACTE Education Policy Clearinghouse
Ray Schroeder’s “Teacher Page” (UIS)
UIS Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning (OTEL)’s Public Service page
Other states’ P-16 web sites by Dawn Williams <d-willi2@uiuc.edu>
P-16 Initiative Bibliography, Take Two by Pamela Konkol <devonrex@earthlink.net>
P-16 Initiative Bibliography by Jill Stein <jstein1@mailserv.uic.edu>
48
Appendix III: Illustrations of Current University of I llinois
Involvement with Schools
A. Traditional forms of knowledge generation and dissemination regarding teaching, learning,
educational policy, leadership and reform, e.g., through funded research, scholarly
publications, curriculum design, and textbooks:

The Physics Outreach Program, a project of the Engineering faculty at Urbana, includes three
major initiatives:
 a Physics Van that travels to area schools, providing support for their science programs by
demonstrating and explaining “fun” and educational experiments, answering questions, and
providing follow-up help;
 the “Saturday Physics Honors Program” which provides an enrichment program for talented
senior science students (drawn from a 60-mile radius around Champaign-Urbana), taught by
faculty members and accompanied by demonstrations in an attempt to promote interest in
physics;
 the Physics Workshop for central Illinois teachers, a program striving to develop a series of
semiannual workshops whose goals will be to familiarize teachers with developments in
modern physics and with hands-on teaching materials to enable them to present these
developments to their students.

The Teaching Integrated Mathematics and Science (TIMS) Project is an example of how
Liberal Arts and Sciences/Institute for Mathematics and Science Education faculty at UIC have
taken a leading role in the national efforts to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics
and science in elementary (K-8) schools. Project activities include: teacher professional
development, school outreach, and curriculum development. Most of the project’s efforts
revolve around two related curricula developed by TIMS: the TIMS Laboratory Investigations
and Math Trailblazers, both of which are published by Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.

The Center for Literacy, also located at UIC, is a research and community service provider
which promotes literacy education in the Chicago area through its research and contractual
agreements. Additionally, the Center for Literacy is the home for several model programs,
including Project FLAME, Team Works, America Reads, and Summer Bridges. The Center
focuses on increasing the availability of literacy services and enhancing the quality of existing
literacy services. The Center for Literacy also takes an active role in providing professional
development training, classroom frameworks, and technical assistance to the Illinois State
Board of Education.
B. Faculty participation in educational policy formation and implementation at all levels, from
shaping legislation to national and state standards and assessments to local school decisionmaking:

The UIC/Illinois State Board of Education Task Force on Teacher Certification is a
collaboration with educators throughout the state and on which faculty from UIC and UIUC
served. This 1996 task force produced recommendations that were passed by the state
legislature in 1997 to restructure the teacher certification system in Illinois.

Springfield District #186, the Lincoln Land Community College, and Springfield have teamed
up to form the Springfield Public Education Partnership. The purpose of this partnership is to
49
facilitate communication among stakeholders and participants about issues of mutual concern,
identification of emerging needs in the system, and the design of strategies to address these
issues and needs.

The Illinois Alliance of Essential Schools works with twenty-two schools across the state,
providing an outside facilitator to schools undergoing restructuring to help local personnel deal
with change. It also offers in-service opportunities on such topics as instructional strategies,
curricula, and the change process. Education faculty at UIUC work with the Illinois Board of
Education on this initiative.
C. Academic programs in many departments and colleges on all three campuses are directed at
improving the preparation and development of teachers and school leaders. Not only does
each campus have numerous undergraduate and graduate programs in teacher and school
administrator preparation, but each has developed innovative programs to begin addressing
high-need areas in teaching. For example:

The UIC Community College Collaborative for Excellence in Teacher Preparation is an
example of a University – Community College – Secondary Education collaborative. Faculty in
Education, Mathematics and Science have partnered with six collaborating community colleges
as well as K-12 students to advance the preparation of future teachers in the teaching of
mathematics and science, and to increase the number of students in the collaborating institutions
choosing careers in teaching. The multi-faceted program includes faculty development in the
teaching of mathematics and science; course and curricular development in mathematics,
science, and education; recruitment of future teachers, with special focus on candidates from
underrepresented groups; mentoring and induction for teachers in the initial years of their
careers; and research and evaluation. The collaborative works toward strengthening bonds
among the collaborating institutions and works cooperatively to address articulation issues
affecting students preparing for teaching careers.
D. Faculty collaboration with school practitioners on professional development, new-teacher
mentoring, curriculum development, and research initiatives:


Springfield is a key participant in the Illinois Principals Association Roundtable, an
organization committed to keeping principals current on best practices and salient issues
through ongoing professional development.
Both UIUC and UIC faculty have co-designed, with school district leaders and teachers,
mentoring programs for early-career teachers. The UIUC collaboration works across a
consortium of several central Illinois school districts. The UIC collaboration, involving the
Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Public Schools, is now entering its fourth year and
has been mandated by the Chicago Reform Board for every new teacher in Chicago.
E. Research and development in educational applications of digital technology range from
educational software to innovative approaches to distance learning to collaborating with
schools in exploring the instructional possibilities of technology. Because this is an area in
which the University has particular strength, some detail here is warranted. For example:

The Teacher Education Student Server (TESS) Project is Springfield’s ongoing
contribution to an ALTHE (Advanced Learning Technologies in Higher Education) grant.
The server offers numerous resources for teacher education students, educational leadership
50
students, and practicing teachers. Resources include but are not limited to lesson plans,
classroom project ideas, etc.

The Cisco Regional Networking Academy is a partnership based in Springfield between
Central Illinois high schools, community colleges, vocational schools and universities. The
program offers instruction to two teachers from each participating school which becomes a
“local academy.”
New interactions between P-12 students and higher education via technology:

NetMath Project , a project developed by members of the Department of Mathematics at UIUC
to allow students at high schools who could not offer calculus to take a freshman level calculus
course via online media. Over the past five years, NetMath has allowed hundreds of students to
take calculus, even though they were in rural or urban schools that did not have a calculus
teacher. NetMath is a prototype model for the new Illinois Virtual High School
<http://www.ibhe.state.il.us/Board%20Items/2000/ 04April/ item07.pdf>, which will be
offering a wider range of courses to students statewide who do not have those courses available
at their own schools.
New interactions between P-12 teachers and higher education via technology:

Curriculum Technology and Education Reform (CTER) OnLine <http://cter.ed.uiuc.edu/>, a
program developed in the Department of Educational Psychology at the College of Education at
UIUC with support from University of Illinois Online <http://www.online.uillinois.edu/>,
allows practicing P-12 teachers and administrators to earn a Master of Education degree through
a program of courses that are largely online and largely asynchronous. P-12 teachers
participating in this program of study report that the flexibility allowed by the new interactional
media is crucial to their successful learning.

CTER students in a course on social and policy issues involved with educational uses of
technology developed a set of “White Papers on Technology Issues for Educators”
<http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/wp/> which have been accessed by thousands of P-16 people from
Illinois, from other states, and from other countries. The course instructors, experts in the
domain, state that “these resources represent the best overview of these issues, written by and
for educators and their particular concerns, available on the Web.” In this case, student work
serves as an important resource for a broader P-16 audience.

The Math Teacher Link Project <http://mtl.math.uiuc.edu/> developed by the Department of
Mathematics at UIUC offers P-12 teachers online mathematics learning modules which can be
completed asynchronously. These units vary from small (0.25 unit) modules to larger modules.
The modules can be started and completed at any time. MTL illustrates that the new interactive
media allow learning and teaching to transcend the traditional limitations of scope and time
provided by the more conventional course structure embedded in the semester system. Both
CTER Online and Math Teacher Link allow many more teachers to learn from interaction with
higher education in ways that would not have been possible before.
51
New interactions between P-12 classrooms and higher education via technology:

The Chickscope Project <http://chickscope.beckman.uiuc.edu>, developed by people at NCSA
(National Center for Supercomputing Applications) and in several departments at UIUC, allows
P-12 classrooms to take and analyze MRI images of a developing chicken egg via remote
sensing. Through a web interface in their own classroom, teachers can control an MRI machine
on the UIUC campus, and have the images immediately appear on their computer screens.
There are now remotely operated telescopes, electronic microscopes, and other devices that are
much too expensive to be physically located in a classroom. Although the remote sensing
technology created a new form of interaction, this interaction becomes educationally valuable
only through the uses of communications technologies to create a learning community focusing
on the growing library of MRI images of fertilized chicken eggs. The students involved are
given feedback on their analyses of their own images by email from experts in higher education.
Students and teachers draw upon an electronic library of images, some of which have been
annotated by experts.
Teachers in some cases have attended summer institutes at UIUC, a more conventional form of
P-16 interaction. Some classrooms have been supported in the Chickscope project by Project
SEARCH <http://bmrl.med.uiuc.edu:8080/SEARCH/new/> students, undergraduates who
physically travel to public and private school classrooms, after school settings, and youth club
settings to help improve the science learning of elementary school students.

Project SEARCH (Science Education and Research for Children), which is an exemplary case
of a traditional P-16 interaction (sending undergraduates into P-12 classrooms as aides)
benefited from the uses of email and the Project SEARCH website in carrying out their P-16
interaction.
New interactions between higher education students and P-12 via technology:

Teaching Tele-apprenticeships Project <http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/tta/> explored a variety of new
ways for teacher education undergraduate students to interact with P-12 classrooms, even before
the conventional field experiences of student teaching and other internships. For example,
university students can serve as “web weavers” for P-12 teachers. In one case, a
P-12 teacher sent via email a list of 15 authors that the teacher was going to cover during the
school year. A university student was able to search the web, find good web sites for each
author, and construct a web page containing multiple links for each author
<http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/i57/I57-writers-website/>. This activity was valuable for both the teacher
and for the university student. The teacher could have done this herself, but it would have taken
valuable time. The student engaged in a learning activity that was highly motivating, because
she knew it would actually be used by a P-12 classroom, not just evaluated by her professor as
an exercise.
52
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