I heard a great interview this morning on NPR’s Morning Addition: For Halloween, TV Scares That Are Still Kid-Friendly, addressing the question of how scary is too scary?

Elizabeth Blair spoke to folks from Nickelodeon and PBS Kids, who are both airing specials this week, including an Arthur episode guest starring none other than an [animated] Neil Gaiman.

Horror has been making a comeback in the last few years, and the kids’ media space is no exception. From a revamped Goosebumps franchise and the new R.L. Stine series The Haunting Hour on the Hub, to large publishing properties like Coraline (by Gaiman, and brilliant, in my opinion) and of course, Twilight.

Unfortunately, another growing trend is the over-protection of our children by “sweetening” spooky media that they seemed fine to handle 10-15 years ago. At the same time, some of today’s media, both scary and sexual, is even more provocative than it used to be (take the recent Glee-troversy). The kids’ media industry, in general, seems to be polarized when producing mature content. Programming is either over-sanitized and squeaky clean or quite racy, with little account for how these themes and stories might affect kids.

What’s “safe” and “scary” are subjective and it’s healthy to have a little of both. In developing kids’ media (or programming like Glee which we know kids are watching), I’m hoping we can find a balance. The first key is really thinking about where kids are at developmentally. Children mature at different speeds, emotionally, physically and cognitively, and the difference between a 7 and 9 year old (or even a 7 and 8 year old) can be huge. It’s also crucial to talk to kids directly about what they like, think and feel about our content. By listening and then applying their perceptions, the kids will reap huge rewards and it’s not bad for the brands either. When media meet audience’s needs, the more successful they will be. A win-win!

However, it’s not just about the content itself, but also the experience surrounding viewing and playing (co-viewing, anyone?) By discussing “grown-up” themes with our children, we are accepting reality instead of hiding or running from it. We’ve become so scared of showing kids the darker sides of life, but they’re right out there (tabloids, TV, and, yes, even in the news) and kids can see it! Our public figures and branded characters are modeling behavior that warrants discussion. It’s more scary for us, as adults, to touch on tough topics, but when we avoid them, we create more fear and confusion in kids who already see what’s happening.

We have a choice with how we process these experiences together with our children–and those of us who make and design media, let’s look for ways to build this co-viewing experience and media literacy dialogue right into the content.

Happy Halloween — don’t be scaaaared! 🙂

Guest post by Sara M. Grimes, PhD

Years ago, when the idea of “games for learning” was still a relatively new concept, a small but important movement emerged around issues of gender in gaming. Led by scholars, designers and members of the game community, the primary objective was to address a gaming gender gap that had formed in the 80s and early 90s. Then as now, boys were generally gaming more (and more often) than girls, male characters appeared far more often than female characters within games, and there were far fewer women than men in the game industry. The “Girls Games Movement” articulated a growing concern about the hidden yet systematic ways in which girls were being deterred from entering into technology design, as well as other IT and engineering professions.

By the mid-1990s, the movement had crystallized around a push for “female friendly” games and an emphasis on bringing more women into the industry. With some important exceptions (see also That Game Company, Tale of Tales and Her Interactive), both missions fell markedly short of expectations. Ambiguous, often highly presumptuous, ideas about what constitutes “female-friendly” gave birth to a new genre of “pink games” – games that rely on (and reproduce) stereotypes about girls’ likes and play preferences. Meanwhile, the mainstream game industry remains heavily male dominated.

While the issue of “girls and gaming” has resurfaced several times over the years, there has been a noticeable shift in approach. During the past decade, girls and women have continued to play digital games in greater and greater numbers. They have done this in various ways, from embracing mainstream games, to contributing to the massive success of gender-inclusive games like Mario Kart and Dance Dance Revolution, to sustaining a small but enduring “pink games” market. Much of the discussion has now shifted onto the importance of paying better attention to the games girls do play, and finding out more about how and why. The conversation has also broadened to include boys and men, through a more inclusive consideration of the issues that all players face when it comes to games and gender.

In other respects the gender gap first observed in the 1990s remains as wide as ever. Girls and women are more likely to play free, online and “casual” games, as opposed to the console, computer or subscription games considered as “core” within game culture. They are less likely to own, select or purchase their own game technologies. There is still a notable lack of women working as designers and programmers-a disparity found across the IT industries, where female participation has actually decreased since the 1980s.

These were some of the issues addressed at the 3G Summit: The Future of Girls, Games and Gender, held this past summer at Columbia College in Chicago. The event brought together 50 teenage girls from local schools with five leading female game designers and scholars (Mary Flanagan, Susan Ruiz, Jennifer Jensen, Erin Robinson and Tracy Fullerton) for four days of dialogue, design workshops and gaming (you can watch a video of the public forum here). A key theme of the event was breaking down barriers that keep girls out of game design, thereby disrupting the cycle of self-perpetuating status quo that has developed within mainstream game culture.

The 3G participants had some great ideas about how this might be done. Highlighting the immense flexibility of the growing independent games market, they encouraged girls and boys to start carving out their own niches, and not to be afraid of redefining and realizing their own visions of what a “game” can be. I think that this time, the call to action has come at a uniquely opportune moment. Not only are we now seeing entire schools built around game design (i.e. Katie Salen’s Quest to Learn), but entry into game creation has become more accessible (and fun) than ever. Just look at the recent outcrop of “user-generated content” tools found in games such as LittleBigPlanet and Kodu. Not to mention the emergence of easy to use design platforms like Scratch.

I’m hopeful that these tools will open up game design to girls and young women, as well as boys who might not otherwise feel drawn to (or even welcome in) design and programming. The focus that these games and tools place on creativity, fun and community-building (i.e. sharing your creations with other players) also provides an alternative entry point into STEM-one that enables kids to merge technical skill development with their own interests, creativity and storytelling practices. I can’t wait to see what games girls will produce when given the tools and encouragement to let their imaginations run wild. After all, kids are the consummate experts when it comes to finding new and innovative ways to play.

Additional reading:

From Barbie® to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games Edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins

Beyond Barbie® and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming Edited by Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner and Jennifer Y. Sun

The Ludica Group website

The She’s Got Game blog

IGDA’s Women in Games special interest group

And be sure to check out the Cooney Center’s National STEM Video Game Challenge!

Sara M. Grimes is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, where she teaches and researches in children’s media and literature, digital games and play. Sara’s current research explores the legal and cultural dimensions of children’s user-generated content, particularly in games such as LittleBigPlanet and Spore. You can read more about these projects on her research blog, Gamine Expedition.

Great piece by Edutopia, Rapping Math Teachers Bring It, featuring the Rapping Mathematician

Also check out these instructions to learn how to write your own math rap!

Check out this recent Wall Street Journal article:

Using the iPad to Connect:
Parents, Therapists Use Apple Tablet to Communicate With Special Needs Kids

The iPad is quickly being utilized for kids with speech and communication issues and can have real breakthrough effects for this population. Apple CEO Steve Jobs says that these therapeutic uses weren’t something Apple engineers could have foreseen. Mr. Jobs said that emails he gets from parents resonate with him. “Our intention is to say something is going on here,” and researchers should “take a look at this.”

Children who had tremendous difficulty communicating what they were feeling, needing or thinking, are being given a new set of tools that are pretty miraculous. You can follow the progress of several of these children at their inspiring blogs below.

Caleigh’s Corner

iHelp for Autism 

Junior’s Voice

Here’s a good roundup for Assistive Technology (AT) using the iPad:

ATMac: Empowering Disabled Apple Users

The domestic educational research group here at Sesame Workshop gets to have really fun conversations. We talk to experts. By experts, we mean the 3- to 9-year-old children for whom we create content. We explain to them that we’re grown ups and don’t remember what it was like to be their age and that they’re experts about what they like and what they think and know about the things they read, watch and play. We also talk to their parents and teachers when we can to gain a fuller picture of a children’s learning environment. What the children and their caregivers tell us in terms of what is liked, what is understood and what is learned goes back to the production teams throughout Sesame Workshop. Children’s comments, suggestions and our interpretations of what the children understood (or didn’t) helps the production team make adjustments to content where possible and provides guidance for future productions.

Over the next year, you will hear from our group: David Cohen, Mindy Brooks, & I who spend our time out in the field along with our fabulous groups of interns and freelancers who help us talk to the little experts with big ideas. We will focus particularly around work we have done on The Electric Company given that the target audience for the Cooney Center skews slightly older (ages 6-12) than our Sesame Street viewers and users.

Throughout the evolution of The Electric Company, we have spoken to children all around the country as there were originally concerns that the show and its accompanying Website, games and outreach materials skewed too urban and specifically too “New York.” But it doesn’t seem to be so. What we found during travels to the Midwest, Southwest, and Mid-Atlantic states was that the biggest regional differences were in which basketball and football teams the children were rooting for. The kinds of digital games and television shows and things they wished to do everyday (go to the mall, the park, fast food restaurants), were surprisingly similar.  Television, for better or worse, appears to be the great equalizer. Almost all children watch television and have established favorites, and they are often getting the same messages from TV about what is cool, hip, and fun. Because of this, we have to be very careful about the messages we are sending them.

Working for an educational media organization, then, makes the part about sending positive and helpful messages easier. With The Electric Company our goal has been to encourage children to become excited about literacy and to learn vocabulary and phonics skills. Through spending time with children as they view the show, experience the games and activities, we have learned a lot about the early elementary school years, as well as about the media and technology that motivates youth during these very exciting times. Stay tuned as we bring you more tales from our experiences in the field.

Jennifer Kotler is the Assistant Vice President of Domestic Research at Sesame Workshop. She holds a Ph.D. in Child Development from the University of Texas at Austin.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and PBS received notification today of a Ready to Learn grant for nearly $72 million from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement. CPB and PBS submitted a joint application in June in response to an RFP designed to fund research, development and deployment of transmedia content to improve the math and literacy skills of children ages 2-8, especially those living in poverty.

The grant, which provides the organizations nearly $15 million annually from 2010 to 2015, will allow CPB and PBS to advance pioneering work on behalf of the next generation of children – digital natives who will use media across many technology platforms – in partnership with local PBS stations, leading children’s producers, educational technologists, university and community partners and researchers. This is the fourth Ready To Learn grant received by CPB and PBS since 1995.  These funds have historically been leveraged with additional financial support from CPB and PBS.

“This grant is a critical investment in America’s children,” said Patricia Harrison, president and CEO for CPB.  “Public media – both nationally and through our local stations – is uniquely poised to ensure that children, parents, educators and caregivers have access to the most effective, purpose-built media and resources to close the achievement gap in math and reading skills for the highest need young children.”

“This generous grant will allow public media to deliver the next generation of educational resources to help kids build the skills they need to succeed in school and in life,” said Paula Kerger, PBS president and CEO. “Research shows that the years before age five are the most critical period in a child’s life. This is when children learn how to learn – when their educational, emotional, and social skills begin to take shape. Educational media are an important and effective component in motivating and developing young learners.”

Read entire press release

Today we bring you the first in a series of STEM related blog posts — starting with last year’s Cooney Center Prize finalists for the Motion Math — Gabriel Adauto and Jacob Klein.

Throughout the process of creating Motion Math, our bouncing star fraction game for the iPhone and iPad, we’ve greatly benefited from conversations with our primary users: kids. The game was just released, and you can buy it here. We were honored this past June to be a finalist for the Cooney Center’s inaugural Innovations in Mobile Learning Prize, and we wanted to share five key take-aways from dozens of rounds of user-testing with kids aged 6-14 in homes and schools.

1. Kids Grasp Technology
One danger with creating educational games is that we all have some common sense about how to teach; this intuition can blind us to the ways that kids (and especially today’s digital natives) are different. To take one striking example, many young kids now expect all screens to be touchscreens; we’ve heard from many parents that their young children now pinch and tap the TV!

Adults are more articulate about what they want in an interface, but often struggle in ways that kids never do; we’ve learned to be wary of adding features that adults ask for.  A great example is text instructions – kids get the symbolic hints whereas adults prefer explicit language.

Also, kids are fantastic bug finders! If you want your game to be played upside down, sideways, and in ways you never intended, give it to a child. We encourage this creative testing by asking students to find bugs. In the rare 😉 cases that they do, we reward them with a collection of hand-picked bug stickers.  It’s charming to watch them wear around a sparkly bug sticker on their shirts as a badge of their technical prowess.

2. The Deeper You Look, the More Complex the Subject Matter
We decided to tackle fractions in our first game: we knew it was notoriously difficult for many learners, but didn’t comprehend its complexity before talking to kids. The fact that 1/2, 50%, 0.5, and 3/6 all mean the same thing is odd; at the same time “1/2” is very different from “1/2 of 2.”  Fractions can mean a distance on a number line, selecting parts of a group, parts of a whole, breaking something into parts, and many other physical metaphors. Competence in one metaphor doesn’t necessarily mean understanding (or even awareness) of another. When first exposed to fractions, kids don’t necessarily come home and start converting measurements in the kitchen. Games are unique device to show patterns among concepts because the game environment can be constructed in a way that surfaces these relationships. As we start on new math topics, we’ll assume there are more wrinkles in the idea than we expect; the challenge is to surface this complexity and demonstrate patterns while preventing beginners from being overwhelmed.

3. Show, Don’t Instruct (And Iterate!)
The part of our game that has undergone the most profound change is the introduction.  Even when testing our original paper prototype, we realized our unique game interaction would require some explaining: our game doesn’t rely on the more common interaction of tapping, but rather tilting.  In addition to novel gameplay, we also introduce a new form of educational content: placing a bouncing fraction-star on a number line. It’s potentially overwhelming.

Initially, we wrote carefully-crafted instructions: “Move the fraction star to the right place on the number line by tilting.” We added italics on the last word to really drive home the game mechanic, and we were pretty proud of ourselves. One day of classroom testing proved we had perhaps the most useless sentence ever written. Most kids didn’t read the instructions; even ones that did forgot them as soon as they moved to the next screen. Words failed. After many attempts and revisions, we settled on the current version: we introduce tilting by putting the player on an empty screen with nothing but a bouncing star and targets to land on. Some adults get confused, but 95% of kids immediately explore the device and figure it out.  Only after the game interaction has been mastered do we introduce the idea of a star holding a fraction.  We find some validation for this approach from education pioneer Maria Montessori, whose “auto-educating apparatuses” were designed to allow children to individually explore concepts deeply by leveraging their senses. “This makes it possible for the child to work by himself, and to accomplish a genuine sensory auto-education, in the visual perception of form,” she wrote. Our users are now able to understand the application controls without verbal clarifications.

4. Multiply the Motivation
One second grader struggled to make it past the first level, and we expected her to stop playing. Instead, she bragged to her friend: “I got 6 stars!” and immediately played again. Minor bits of motivation can maintain engagement, so we kept adding different forms of feedback: progress stars for each correctly solved problem, a cumulative score, new level indicators, bonus effects, and a game-over indication of overall progress – presented as a fraction, naturally. Different levels of positive feedback motivate learners at different skill levels. At the same time, we didn’t want to create a game that overly congratulated our players or made victory too easy: that’s why we’ve made the last few of our 24 levels quite difficult.

5. Doubt Your Own Awesomeness
After working for many months, our natural bias was to love our game, and it was easy to go into user-testing inclined to hear affirmation.  When we go into classrooms and the teacher announces that we are app developers testing a new game, the kids get very excited and put themselves on best behavior. (The Hawthorne effect is the psychology term that describes this phenomenon.) In general, we must remain skeptical about our customers’ reactions to the game despite their praise and enthusiasm.  More telling are the subtle indications of their liking, such as picking to play our game again rather than other iPhone games on the same screen. When a kid presses “Play Again” without asking for permission, they are showing real engagement. They have found the game easy enough to begin, but they also believe that they could improve over their last performance, and when they play again over and over they are in a state of flow: continuous engagement. This is an ideal state for maximal learning and enjoyment.

Just hanging out with children reminds us of our important role in maintaining their excitement about learning. With focused observation and questioning, and letting go of our own biases, user testing can provide the feedback and inspiration to create great learning products.

Gabriel Adauto and Jacob Klein are co-founders of Motion Math. Their first game, a bouncing star fractions game for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, can be purchased here.

More to Explore:

Motion Math recently won an Editor’s Choice Award for Excellence in Design from Children’s Technology Review!

The first annual National STEM Video Game Challenge is now open for applications. This nationwide challenge invites game makers big and small to show their passion for playing and making video games. This competition aims to motivate children’s interests in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). The Developer Prize challenges experienced game developers to design mobile games, including games for the mobile Web, for young children (grades pre-K through 4) that teach key Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) concepts and foster an interest in STEM subject areas. In addition, a Youth Prize will engage middle school students (grades 5 through 8) in STEM learning, 21st Century Literacy Skills and Systems Thinking by challenging them to design original video games. With a prize pool of $150,000, and more than one way to win, don’t miss out on your opportunity to make a difference and win BIG!!!

(more…)

Reprinted from Huffington Post

This teacher bashing must stop! It is an unwise diversion from what matters most: teaching children to love learning and be creative right from the start. As an unabashed ally in the moral outrage that animates Davis Guggenheim’s powerful film “Waiting for ‘Superman’ “, count me as a skeptic of the proposed prescriptions advanced by the movie. Brent Staples of The New York Times gets it just right: “the many complex problems that have long afflicted public schools are being laid almost solely at the feet of the teachers’ unions.” He says that many of the attempts to demonize teachers are “cartoonish” and he is right.

“Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” does get many things right. The look inside many vulnerable families and the heroic commitment parents have to a better education that charter school pioneers like KIPP and SEED have delivered to their children belies the myths perpetuated by venal demogogues about low-income communities. I know that teaching today is no picnic: my son is a Teach For America corps member teaching in an inner-city charter school. Like many other teachers he is struggling mightily: working 14 hour days to help his kids get a better chance.

But the prescription in the film: a great expansion of charter schools and a push for a teacher performance system and the end of tenure are not going to change the education world.

Here is why — we are missing two key pieces of the puzzle: We are not committed to early childhood and family support needed to bathe children in a decent start, and we lack a strong commitment to use technology that can deepen and personalize learning in a digital age.

Instead of preparing for new needs with modern technologies, national policy has unintentionally turned many of our schools into test prep academies that are focused on standardized skill sets in a world that demands higher-level thinking. This approach, despite recent efforts to upgrade to a new common core is almost out of gas.

Perhaps most tellingly, we cannot even teach our kids how to read well and comprehend the complex issues our generation has utterly failed to address! Millions of kids are reading below grade level in fourth grade, a key measure of school success. Why should everyone care how well kids read in primary school?

Because children who are below grade level by age ten tend to stagnate and eventually give up and drop out in high school. Harvard educational psychologist Jeanne Chall famously called this phenomenon the “fourth grade reading slump,” where children cannot make the transition from learning to read to “reading to learn,” which hinders their learning in all other subjects. Because of these early literacy setbacks America is losing the global race in science and math, areas central for 21st century skilled jobs.

While national policies such as No Child Left Behind have strongly emphasized the need to teach key reading skills like decoding and phonemic awareness in the early grades, and spent billions of dollars in promoting these areas, far too many students hit a wall by fourth grade and by high school more than 7000 students per week are dropping out, a national crisis that costs us billions of dollars in lost wages, according to Alliance for Excellent Education in Washington, D.C.

To rectify the reading problem, we need to make sure that children have been exposed to a wide ranging vocabulary with complex words and ideas before age five. Kids who are read to frequently or who have a regular dialogue with parents or family members are exposed to a wide variety of experiences which prepare them for school. Unfortunately, today many low income children do not have this luxury. They have unemployed parents and difficult living situations and schools that fail to teach early literacy in a way that compensates for the lack of these skills.

It is here that digital media can make a vital contribution. Educational video games, handheld devices, and media production tools can allow young students to see how complex language and other symbol systems attach to the world. Digital media sites such as Sesame Street and The Electric Company have the potential to increase “book” vocabulary, and the concepts attached to such words, for children whose families are unable to do so.

If introduced into early childhood classrooms, digital media can have other major advantages. Early exposure to these media can teach students to master the production of knowledge, not just consumption. Kids as young as five or six can learn to play and create videos, write blogs, use educational apps, and collaborate online.

We recommend the following for policymakers, business leaders and practitioners to consider as we retool early learning for a digital century:

Create An Early Learning and Family Support System
The United States stands alone as the only developed nation that does to offer voluntary, universally available quality early-childhood education to underserved families. It is a national disgrace. In addition, during a difficult economic time, why not expand paid family leave to allow parents to spend more time with their infants and toddlers. Such leave could be accompanied by great parenting education courses drawn from the experiences of pioneering countries like Sweden where most men now take a full year off from work.

Establish a Digital Teacher Corps
Most early childhood practitioners are unskilled in embedding new media in powerful instructional practices. A Digital Teacher Corps should be established to work in the lowest-performing preschools and elementary schools in order to train teachers to help students learn to read by transforming information for discovery and problem-solving.

Create a “Digital Hangout for Kids” in Every Community.
Children as young as eight are already spending nearly seven and a half hours every day consuming all types of media, but very little of this time is spent on quality media or intentional learning, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Let’s build on national models like Club Tech of the Boys and Girls Clubs, and the Quest to Learn, Digital Youth Network and School of One models in Chicago and New York City. It is time to extend the learning day and create a place in every community where young children can gain confidence in their literacy and interactive technology skills.

Establish Model Digital Schools and Preschools in Every State
Highly successful, innovative small charter schools such as High Tech High, Apple Tree and KIPP Academies have proven that kids can learn essential literacy skills starting in early childhood with a personalized curriculum, integrated technology, and skillful teachers. Each state should establish at least one digital partnership Pre-K through third grade school as a model demonstration site. These schools should be laboratories for testing many different digital approaches to learning and assessment, as well as for testing different ways to break down the barriers in and out-of-school learning. They could become a hub for the professional development of digitally savvy teachers.

Modernize Public Broadcasting
Public broadcasting should continue to advance experimentation with new formats such as games, mobile media, and social network communities that will engage children in both literacy and digital skills. Educational media companies should also make available publicly-supported productions to educators at low or no cost via the internet and new communities of practice.

American policy makers and educators are at a dangerous crossroads: we can marginalize union villains and squeeze performance gains from stressed-out professionals living in a time warped learning paradigm. Alternatively we can invest in high quality early education and family support and embrace the potential revolutionary power of the digital technology that has engaged every three-year-old I know. These elements are the potent, untapped forces for change in the America’s educational performance in the next decade. If we invest early and unlock personalized learning anytime, anywhere, we may one day stop waiting for magic bullets and super-human teachers.

Ellen Galinksky addressed similar themes in her guest post yesterday. Read her views and then add yours!

The past few weeks have been big for our industry — conferences from EdNet to Engage, the expansion announcement of E-Rate, a stellar New York Times article on Learning by Playing, the release of Waiting for Superman, and NBC’s Education Nation.

Guest blogger, Ellen Galinsky, offers her perspective on Education Nation (reprinted from What It Will Really Mean to “Put Children First”–Reflections on NBC’s Education Nation in Huffington Post):

Many of this nation’s movers and shakers in education gathered this last week of September in New York City for two days of discussion at a unique event convened and broadcast by NBC News. The purpose of calling upon these thought leaders–including the President, the Secretary of Education, select members of Congress, mayors, superintendents of schools, union leaders, academics, reformers, teachers, parents, and students–was to profile the problems in education and spotlight what works.

In many ways, this gathering was more coherent than I expected. I came to think of it as a song with many verses, but one recurring refrain. That refrain was that the U.S. has dropped to number 25 in educational achievement in the world. Yes, the U.S. is now Number 25! And despite increasing per pupil expenditure, and despite the No Child Left Behind Act, achievement scores in the United States have remained flat.

Many different metaphors were used to describe this crisis. It is an economic and workforce development crisis. It is a national security crisis. Geoffrey Canada, the C.E.O. of the Harlem Children’s Zone described the achievement gap between the rich and the poor as the “civil rights movement of our generation.” But perhaps the stickiest analogy was the one used by Congressman George Miller of California when he said, “This is our Sputnik moment; this is the moment when we as a nation have realized (as we did when Russia launched Sputnik in the 1950s) that we have to change. And we have to change NOW.”

Among the participants there was a unifying hope that change could happen and that change must happen. One participant I spoke with at the close of the meeting said that he remained inspired by the Berlin Wall. Although the Berlin Wall had seemed impenetrable, seemed that it would never fall–it did fall.

In almost every session, the speakers were asked what caused us to fall behind and there was amazing consensus about this. It was a complacency that we were a superpower, that we were best, a malaise. Beneath this was the view that the adults had put adult issues first. We didn’t put children first.

And there were the adult controversies that flared up during the two days: the “us versus them” fights: charter schools versus public schools, unions versus reformers, good teachers versus bad teachers, firing the lowest performing teachers versus helping teachers succeed, etc. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called for a stop to this kind of blame game, when he said that we are all at fault–the bureaucracies of the unions, of the school boards, of schools, and of the Department of Education. “We all have to change,” he said.

And in fact, when the blame game began to mount during sessions, others would defuse it. Geoffrey Canada called charter schools laboratories for innovation–but said that the solutions must take place in the public schools. And Duncan and Canada agreed that although teacher unions were portrayed as the “villain” in the just-released and much talked about Waiting for Superman documentary by Davis Guggenheim, in a number of districts across the country, teacher unions had signed contracts that opened the doors to reform.

If the meeting was like a song, its concluding verse was that we all must work together for change. We all must put children first. If we don’t put children first, then we will slip below number 25. But if we really put children first, then adults may be second. “And some of us won’t like that,” Becca Bracy Knight of the Broad Center said.

The reason for the optimism rests on the now known fact that there are pockets of innovation across the country where the achievement scores of the children have risen–where, more importantly, the gap between the more and the less advantaged students has disappeared. All children can succeed, if we put children first.

There was also near consensus about what it takes to help all children succeed. It takes talented teachers and principals, engaged parents, high expectations of children and teachers, more time in school if necessary, sharing best practices, and holding everyone accountable.
But in my view, there were three verses that were largely missing from the new theme song that is uniting us to become an “education nation.”

First, there was an almost singular focus on student achievement as measured by standardized tests. What was missing was a focus on student engagement. It was said again and again that students must strive to be their own personal best, to get great scores on tests, to succeed. These are extrinsic reasons for learning, but the 21st century is calling for an intrinsic focus on learning too. In the convening, it was repeatedly argued that our model of education, our school calendar, and even our classroom architecture were based in the needs of the agricultural age and the industrial age–not on today’s i-generation with the Internet (and iTunes, iPhones, iPods, and iPads) where information is a Google away.

Children are born with a quest to learn, their eyes are bright as they strive to understand and master their world. We need to keep those fires burning brightly; we need to keep children engaged in learning. Importantly, Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia raised the issue fostering children’s motivation to learn. I have seen far too many children, even in high performing classrooms, who have lost their engagement in learning. There is a reason that the business community increasingly measures its success by “engagement.” This is a measure we need to use in education too.

Second, although there was one session on early education–on ensuring that less advantaged children don’t enter pre-kindergarten or kindergarten programs already behind (and I was honored to be a speaker in that session), the conversation in that breakout group almost never entered the mainstream. In fact, I could count on my fingers the number of times that early childhood education was raised in other sessions. If we are to be an education nation, we must include families and early childhood teachers as a part of the solution, from children’s earliest days.

And finally, although there was talk about skills for the 21st century, the focus remained largely on literacy, math, and science. Just like other “we/they” adult controversies, this can’t be an either/or. My years of studying the best research on early learning makes it clear that we will not be able to reverse the downslide we are facing without intentionally promoting such life skills as “taking on challenges,” “focus and self control,” and “perspective taking” from children’s earliest days.

NBC’s Steve Capus closed Education Nation with a commitment that NBC News will continue to cover education on a regular basis. Everyone in the audience around me was heartened by this commitment. Now, I hope that we can widen the focus so that next year, when we convene we will be closer to really putting children first.

Read Michael H. Levine’s Huff post piece Stop Waiting: A New Day for Learning

Up next: Scott Traylor’s insights on the recent event, Back to School – Learning and Growing in a Digital Age