Listening to Our Students and Transcending K-12 to Save Our Nation a Companion Guidebook for Local Communities to Establish Dals® Centers for Lifelong Learning®

By Alec Ostrom, Brian Hack and Don Prentice

This journey will engage you in dealing with some hard truths and it will take you down a new pathway and new ways of thinking about K-12 education. We now live in a nation that is struggling with deep social, economic and political conflicts. We are all doing our best to resolve these conflicts and to solve the critical challenges that we all face in the Digital Age, but our children and young adults are having a very difficult time in dealing with the realities of their young lives. We wrote this book because we want to engage all of our readers in each local community in frank, honest, down-to-earth, practical conversations about our K-12 schools as the foundation for our constitutional democracy. Without well-educated citizens, our government, our economy and our society will not survive. And this is true regardless of the political beliefs of our readers across the political spectrum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664150027

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Copyright © 2021 by Brian Hack, Alec Ostrom and Don Prentice.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 01/28/2021

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1   Getting Started: Building Your Local Project Team

Chapter 2   Training your Local Project Team

Chapter 3   Formulating your Local Community K-12 Goals and Objectives

Chapter 4   Three Stories of Local Communities Establishing a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning®

Chapter 5   Creating and Implementing Your Project Implementation Plan

Chapter 6   Summary and Overview: How to Do It Right

Appendices

Appendix 1: Resources Package for the Community Starting Group to Set Up a Franchise Agreement with the Ostrom and Associates Company and to Work with an Ostrom and Associates Company Consultant to Recruit, Interview and Select Members of the Local Project Team

Appendix 2: Local Project Team Initial Orientation and Training

Appendix 3: Resource Documents for Local Project Team as the Team Works to Design, Develop, Construct, Execute and Manage a Project to Establish a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in the Local Community:

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FOREWORD

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Establishing a DALS® Center for Lifelong

Learning® in Your Local Community:

Moving from Vision to Reality

T HIS COMPANION GUIDEBOOK for Local Communities was written prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. This national crisis has had a severe impact on our society in many ways. It has also exposed some of the ingrained dysfunctions of the pre-pandemic culture of our nation. While our medical workers, our teachers and many front-line workers in our service industries have had stress added to their professional lives, the pandemic has been turned into a political conflict more so than a united response to the recommendations of our doctors and scientists. We felt it was important to take some additional time and effort to consider the impact of Covid-19 on our K-12 educational systems as well as our society in general.

Forty percent of our current citizens are within the category of minority status or people of color, meaning that they share genetic influences from nations in and around Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Demographers agree that by midcentury, the white citizens of America will technically become a numerical minority of the entire US population. When we consider how many of our doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers have ancestry from outside the US, and how many service industry workers, be they truck drivers, farm workers, or local small business employees, it is hard to imagine how our nation would have survived and succeeded as well as it has without the contributions of these Americans who emigrated, by force or by choice.

The implementation of a DALS Center® within any community, be it rural, suburban, or urban, cannot really happen unless we share a common vision of a nation that values the building of bridges instead of walls. Scientific facts are not the enemy. The majority of people on our planet are bilingual and trilingual in many locations. The benefits of diversity far outweigh the negative impacts of seclusion and isolation. Our biggest threat to national security comes to us in the form of our own domestic terrorism. The global/world economy will continue on regardless of how our nation chooses to respond. Our national response to this pandemic has clearly divided us while it has served to unite other nations.

It all starts with K-12 education. We are not the most advanced nation when compared to others. The post WWII economy that we once dominated is a memory that has largely been replaced by dysfunction with our government leaders, our infrastructure, our outdated and obsolete K-12 education systems, and our general attitude about what really matters for the health of our nation.

Whether we like it or not, our children and grandchildren will be living in a nation and in world that will be forced to deal with some very difficult, complex problems and issues. Therefore, our children and grandchildren must be properly educated and engaged in learning, applying and mastering high-quality problem-solving processes. Our Companion Guidebook for Local Communities will help you to establish a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your community to do exactly that.

This Companion Guidebook for Local Communities is focused on the critical issue of engaging our students in learning, applying and mastering high-quality problem-solving processes in an Applied Systems Thinking™ (AST) context and using open, honest, inclusive, constructive dialogues to build strong community level consensus agreements to understand complex problems/issues, to formulate solid solution sets, and to achieve strong points of energy for the sustained work necessary to execute and implement those solution sets. In other words, to be blunt, our nation needs a hard reboot.

And now that you have read our book, Listening to Our Students and Transcending K-12 to Save Our Nation, we know that you most likely have many questions in mind, but in all likelihood, it all boils down to the following questions and answers:

1. Are our present K-12 school systems truly broken and obsolete? And why can’t they be reformed or improved?

Yes, our present K-12 school systems are broken and obsolete, by any measurement, and they have been for at least 20 years. And no, they cannot be reformed or improved. We have been working on dozens of K-12 education reform programs for the past 30 years and none of them have ever successfully done anything to change our K-12 school SYSTEMS. And while some of these programs have improved learning for our children and young adults (like the federal laws on education for special needs students and physically handicapped students, for example), they have done nothing to improve the fundamental factory assembly line SYSTEMS we use to deliver K-12 education.

And here is the bottom line: If, after reading our book, you still believe that the present K-12 school systems can provide your children with a high-quality, Digital Age education that will enable your children to achieve success in their future adult lives and chosen careers, then stop reading this Companion Guide and return it for a refund.

2. How can we really move forward with a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in our local community?

You will have to engage a diverse team of leaders of the stakeholder groups* in your local community who are willing to sit down and have a series of dialogue conversations that are open, honest, inclusive, civil, courteous, respectful, and focused on creating positive and constructive consensus agreements to move forward with establishing a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your local community. *[Stakeholder groups include parents, elementary students, middle and high school students, teachers, business owners/employers, community members, community leaders, and representatives from local or regional organizations like colleges, trade and technical schools, local government, and the U.S. military forces.]

If you have individuals or groups in your local community who are opposed to such dialogue conversations because their minds are closed and they are unwilling to work openly, honestly, respectfully and inclusively with diverse representatives from other groups, then moving forward may be very difficult. You can move forward without certain stakeholder groups, but if those groups are most likely going to engage in active opposition to what your leadership team is doing, then the road ahead will be very difficult. And let us say that we are not discouraging your local project team with this disclaimer, but we must be honest with you and realistic.

3. Won’t it be too expensive and difficult to do? The key here is the establishment of a strong consensus agreement(s) to move forward to establish a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your community. And we would advise you to make your funding sources part of that strong consensus agreement, with the help of some local businesses, for example, that are willing to contribute some significant seed money, or with the help of some local wealthy people who are willing to sustain your work, and/or with funding from one or more grants. If you have such an agreement(s) then you will most likely be able to figure out ways to obtain the future funding you will need, and in this book, we explain a number of different funding options.

In the beginning, your DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® must, of necessity, be a private educational organization, so that you are not subject to all of the federal and state educational laws and regulations that are bound up in the Common Core State Standards, standardized teaching and standardized testing at present. Later on you may be able to obtain state or local government funding support if the laws change, but don’t count on it.

4. But if we move forward with the establishment of a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning®, won’t we be in danger of engaging in socialism? The short answer here is no, you will not be engaging in socialism, because your local project team will be establishing a private enterprise franchise business as we explain in this book.

There is a good deal of confusion and misinformation in our society right now over accusations by certain groups that certain other groups in our nation are advocating socialism. In truth, the United States of America, since its founding with the Constitution ratified in 1789, has always had a mixed economy – mostly capitalistic, but with some socialistic components like certain services that are owned, controlled and delivered by the federal government and state and local governments. Some examples of these services include: The K-12 public schools; the U.S. Post Office; the U.S. military forces; the federal banking system; state and local roads and highways and the federal interstate highway system; certain hydroelectric dams; the Tennessee Valley Authority; the Social Security retirement system; Medicare; Medicaid; and the list goes on.

What is important to remember here, is that these services are all forms of democratic socialism, and they are NOT forms of authoritarian or dictatorial/police state socialism that are found in such nations as Russia, China, North Korea, etc.

It will take some significant funding to establish a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning®, but if your local community really wants to make it happen, they can and they will. Stated another way, if you have achieved a strong stakeholder consensus agreement to establish a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your local community, the most important next question is How can we make it happen?

Simply by raising this question your group has taken a most important first step. The purpose of this Companion Guidebook for Local Communities to Establish DALS® Centers for Lifelong Learning® is to provide your group with a step-by-step how to process and the information and resources you need to move from the vision described in our book to the reality of a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your local community.

This is the first edition of our companion guidebook, and right now there are no existing DALS® Centers for Lifelong Learning® in place for your group to visit and see, but the Ostrom and Associates Company is working very hard to get our first working model in place in a local community most likely somewhere in northern California. But if your group would be interested in employing us as consultants and/or resource people, please refer to the consulting information section of our appendices at the end of this book.

Explanatory Note: At present the Ostrom and Associates Company is working to engage a larger company (or companies) to adopt and purchase our Digital Age Learning Systems® Model of K-12 Education. If our DALS® Model of K-12 Education is sold after the publication of this Companion Guidebook for Local Communities to Establish DALS® Centers for Lifelong Learning® book, then that new company will take over as the parent company and the name of that company will replace the Ostrom and Associates Company wherever it is stated in this book.

Moving forward to establish a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your local community is indeed a bold and challenging undertaking, but we believe it is the best option for your children and young adults, and for your community. Your children and young adults deserve and must receive the best K-12 education possible to properly prepare them with the Digital Age Skill Sets® they must master to be successful in their future adult lives and careers.

Make no mistake, however, the process for establishing a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your community will involve dialogue sessions where you must be willing to examine and change decades of cultural norms and traditions that have dominated our K-12 education systems. But again, the facts are clear. Our present K-12 school systems are obsolete and broken, and you must decide, for your local community, if you are willing to transcend these obsolete and broken systems, and if you are collectively willing to establish what we call the Conditions for Change™ (please see pages 26-31).

And one more important item before we jump into the details of the process to establish a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your local community, and that is a companion process known as feedback. As you move forward, we would very much appreciate your feedback with any input, ideas, questions or concerns, and we will use your feedback to continuously improve our DALS® Centers for Lifelong Learning® and local community implementation processes. Our contact information is listed in the appendices section of this book and the feedback process is explained there as well.

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INTRODUCTION

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Welcome to Applied Systems Thinking™

(AST) and a New Approach to

Local Community Teamwork

I F YOU HAVE a group of stakeholders in your community who are exploring the idea of establishing a DALS ® Center for Lifelong Learning ® , or if your group has already decided to move forward, then we would strongly urge you to read and use this Companion Guidebook for Local Communities before you go any further.

As you saw when you read our book – Listening to Our Students and Transcending K-12 to Save Our Nation – we designed and developed our DALS® Model using a very different and unique design process that was based on Applied Systems Thinking™ (AST) and a very different approach to K-12 education. In this Companion Guidebook we will engage you in learning and using this AST process and approach, and we would like to begin by emphasizing some very important principles:

1. It is impossible to establish a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your community by using the usual or traditional thought processes, communications processes, decision-making processes and political processes that were used to create and establish our present K-12 schools.

2. In order to establish a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your community you will need to make a commitment to the use of AST and to a process that is open, transparent, inviting and inclusive. And what we mean by inclusive is that your leadership group must include people from all sectors of your community, including all socio-economic levels, all ethnic groups, a balance of males and females, a balance of different age groups, a range of people from different jobs or careers, a range of people from different levels of education or training, and a range of people with different life experiences.

3. There are no short-cuts and there are no silver bullets. Establishing a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your community will involve a big-time commitment, open minds, a willingness to consider a new, unique and authentic model of K-12 education, and a willingness to do the hard work necessary to create the sustained energy and unity it will take to get the job done.

4. You will need to make a strong commitment to open, inclusive, patient, disciplined DIALOGUE and CONSENSUS DECISION-MAKING, and these dialogues should be facilitated by someone who is experienced with true dialogues and consensus decision-making processes. You will need to abandon the older and more traditional forms of debate and discussion, and decision-making that are implemented with voting and/or executive top-down directives.

5. And most important of all, you will need to make a very strong commitment to LISTEN to your children and young adults, and to LISTEN to each other and to the representatives from all of the stakeholder groups in your community. LISTENING is very hard work and it takes commitment, dedication, patience, training and lots of practice. We all like to talk and share our ideas and opinions and questions, but very few of us really like to LISTEN, and this is especially true when it comes to LISTENING TO OUR CHILDREN AND YOUNG ADULTS. And we would strongly suggest that you establish some listening monitors within your local project group who work to make sure that everyone is engaged in actively and empathetically LISTENING to everyone else in your dialogue conversations, and that no one individual is dominating those dialogue conversations. Dialogue conversations with high-quality listening require lots and lots of practice.

So, where to begin? It may seem odd at first, but one of our important AST (Applied Systems Thinking) guidelines for beginning any process is to ask several important questions. Here they are:

1. What problem or problems are we trying to solve?

One sort of overall answer might be that your group is trying to solve the problem of the inadequacies and incapacities of your present local K-12 schools, and while this answer is correct, it is incomplete, and we will explain in this guidebook why and how it is incomplete.

A more general answer for starters, using AST, is this answer: Your group is working to solve ALL of the problems associated with establishing a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your community, and those problems must be listed and described in great detail so that you are certain you are working to solve the right problems.

Very often, when groups are working to solve what they perceive to be the right problems, they often end up working on the wrong problems, and they end up having the wrong conversations. And as our late friend and mentor Don Prentice put it, How long does it take to solve the wrong problem?

2. Have you considered the full range of solution options, in depth and in detail, before deciding on a course of action? Failing to explore and to carefully examine and consider the full range of solutions to your identified problems is a recipe for disaster. And as we said before, there are no short-cuts and no silver bullets.

3. How will you know when you are ready to take action and ready to start the process for establishing a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your local community? There are two very important answers to this critical question:

A. Are the solutions or solution sets you have adopted clearly defined, described and MEASURABLE? In other words, when you use or implement a solution, how will you be able to measure to make sure it is working and achieving the goals and objectives you want it to achieve?

B. Has your group reached a strong consensus agreement to use or implement the solution(s) you have developed, AND to do the sustained work over many years that will be required for successful implementation? One of the common mistakes that groups make is to quickly leap into action before carefully describing the specific problems to be solved and formulating measurable solutions or solution sets, and before achieving a strong consensus agreement for sustained work over several years. Leaping into action often feels good, but it will lead to disaster if the proper strong consensus agreements are not in place BEFORE any actions are taken.

4. Have you formulated and established a complete and comprehensive project implementation plan (PIP) that describes your action steps, your work processes, identified persons in leadership, management and worker positions, timelines and deadlines, resources, and measurable process implementation benchmarks? We strongly recommend that BEFORE you formulate and establish your project implementation plan, you first go through a process to create a Transformation Map™ to guide the development of your project implementation plan. We will explain the Transformation Mapping™ process in detail in a later chapter and in the Glossary.

5. Have you made a check-list of all of the critical tasks and jobs, in the proper sequence, that must be completed as you work to establish a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your local community? This checklist should be constructed from the questions and issues raised in your team dialogues, and from your completed Transformation Map™, as well as from your Project Implementation Plan (PIP).

6. Have you used an open, inclusive, careful process to select the stakeholder representatives who will serve on your project planning and implementation group (team)? Have you selected representatives from all of the sectors in your community who are open to new ideas, open to new ways of thinking and working (like AST), and willing to be positive and constructive? Do you have representatives who are K-12 students, K-12 graduates, K-12 teachers, parents, grandparents, local and regional business owners/employers, employee unions, community leaders, community members, local and regional government leaders, local and regional college or university leaders, trade and technical school leaders, apprenticeship program leaders, and representatives from the U.S. military forces?

7. Have you gathered input (ideas, questions, concerns, resource information, etc.) from representatives from each of the stakeholder groups in your local community? And have you carefully clarified, analyzed and documented all of that input so it can be used to formulate your project implementation plan? It is very important for your leadership team to seek out and to document as many ideas, questions, concerns and sources of information as they can, through a continuous process and repeated cycles of information gathering that uses different modes of communication: conversations, e-mails, texts, social media applications, surveys, etc. Then all of this information needs to be analyzed, clarified, categorized and documented for use in building your Project Implementation Plan.

Our Companion Guidebook will help you to successfully answer all of these questions and many more. So let’s get started!

The governance system of the Digital Age Learning Systems (DALS®) Centers for Lifelong Learning® will be an open, organic network of networks which engages representatives from each of the stakeholder groups, with an especially strong focus on the inclusion of the learners in the governance structures, processes and working relationships.

– Don Prentice 06 June 2011

How many industries that were around 100 years ago–and are still around today–are making their products almost the exact same way? Can you think of an industry that uses almost the identical methods of production they did 100 years ago, one that hasn’t undergone radical industrialization, innovation, or significant transformation? How about the American classroom? Our method of teaching hasn’t radically changed over the past century. It’s stuck, it’s dated, and it’s in need of radical transformation.

– Shawn Parr – 30 March 2012

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

– Anonymous

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CHAPTER ONE

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Getting Started: Building

Your Local Project Team

O NE OF THE most important driving principles behind our DALS ® Centers for Lifelong Learning ® is that of local community governance . With our present K-12 schools (public schools, private schools, charter schools or online schools) local community members are largely excluded from the governance of their local schools (with the exception of a small percentage of charter schools). We believe that the stakeholders in each local community need to be actively engaged in how their local K-12 schools are established and in how those schools are governed and operated.

The first step is to build your local project team. The members of your local project team must be carefully selected so that all of the stakeholder groups in your local community are well represented. Here are some important guidelines and steps you will need to execute:

1. Reach out to some strong leaders in your community to form a starting group. These should be people who are well known, well respected leaders, who have resided in your community for at least a decade or longer, and leaders who have worked with members of your community on various projects. These leaders also need to be people who are humble, hard-working, cooperative, well-spoken and good listeners. Please avoid people who are self-centered, egotistical, loud, rude, and/or focused on promoting themselves and/or on maximizing their own political power.

Also, all of the members of your starting group will need to read our book – Listening to Our Students and Transcending K-12 to Save Our Nation, and this Companion Guidebook for Local Communities to Establish DALS® Centers for Lifelong Learning®.

2. Once you have your starting group, that group will need to reach out to all of the stakeholder groups in your community to recruit potential members of your Local Project Team. Here are the guidelines for this process:

A. Make sure your starting group contacts and engages people in the following stakeholder groups, and please recruit at least two people from each group, and be sure to include people from different income levels, from different ethnic groups, from different age groups and from groups with different life experiences:

• Students – from ages 12 to 18 who are currently in school; and recent high school graduates and drop-outs who graduated within the past 3 years; and former students who are in the 21 to 30 age group. One or two representatives from each of these age groups, for a total of up to 6.

• Parents or guardians of current and/or former students.

• Grandparents of current and/or former students.

• Local and regional business owners/employers in your community and in the surrounding region.

• Union leaders from your local region.

• Local community leaders from local governments, local churches, schools or local community organizations.

• Local community members who are not in any of the groups listed above, including homeless people, unemployed people, etc.

• College or university folks from your local region.

• Trade and/or technical school folks from your local region.

• Military recruiters from your local region.

The goal here is to recruit and select at least two people from each of the above listed stakeholder groups, for a total Local Project Team not to exceed 30 people.

B. Contact these local community stakeholder groups in multiple ways. Don’t just send them a flyer or an e-mail. Please contact them in person, by phone, by e-mail, by text message, by U.S. mail, and by holding recruiting meetings where they live in neighborhood churches, fire stations, meeting halls and/or the homes of people from your starting group (using proper Covid-19 guidelines, of course).

C. Provide all the stakeholder groups with information handouts on the DALS® Centers for Lifelong Learning® and invite them to come to meetings to discuss the information in the handouts. Please go to Appendix 1 for copies of the handouts to be distributed.

D. At the informational meetings invite folks who show up to apply to be active participants in the governance group. Give them application forms [see Appendix 1 section F] and ask them to submit their complete forms in person or by U.S. mail by a set deadline.

E. Explain to the folks at these meetings that the applications will be reviewed by the starting group and then individual applicants will be interviewed and final selections will be made, and all applicants will then be notified via letter if they are selected or not.

3. The starting group will need to do the following to prepare for the interviews with the applicants:

• Prepare one-page profiles of the ideal qualities your initial group would like to see in those who are selected from each stakeholder group. [Please see a sample profile in Appendix 1] Please note that your Local Project Team needs to be made up of stakeholder representatives who have the following minimum qualities:

✓ They need to be strongly interested in the establishment of a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® in your community. There is no point in including strong naysayers or disrupters. Ultimately a DALS® Center for Lifelong Learning® will only be established if there is a strong consensus agreement among a sufficient number of community stakeholders to achieve a point of energy for sustained work over several years.

✓ They need to be people who are fairly open-minded and willing to listen respectfully to people with different points of view, willing to fairly and objectively consider new facts and information, and willing to buy and read a copy of our book – Listening to Our Students and Transcending K-12 to Save Our Nation.

✓ They need to be people who strongly support lifelong learning (open-mindedness, thoughtfulness, a willingness to examine assumptions, and a willingness to consider and accept new information or new perspectives) and people who are willing to participate in an open, inclusive, honest dialogue process and to build strong consensus agreements.