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 This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Every child deserves an opportunity to reach their full potential. But our education system is collapsing under inequity, and it’s mostly because of poverty. Students who experience severe economic obstacles perform worse than students who have access to more wealth. To bridge these gaps and ensure that all children get a real chance at a fulfilling education, we need to address systemic racism and poverty as tangible barriers to learning and future achievement. Every Black or Brown student deserves access to great teaching, equitable resources, and a safe learning environment from grade school classrooms to college campuses. Black and Brown students matter and working on their behalf has never been more urgent today as Minnesota’s school population is changing.


This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills.. Shantel Gabrieal Buggs, Ph.D., is approaching her fifth year as an assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at Florida State University. She specializes in a variety of areas, including race, racism, gender, feminist theory and queer theory. She also teaches critical race theory, often referred to as CRT, at the graduate level. Critical race theory, explains Buggs, originated from legal studies and, at its most basic definition, is thinking about the ways that racism—particularly.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Terry López Burlingame, a Spanish teacher in a small, rural K-8 school in Gilmanton, N.H., worries about the mayhem this would create, if the budget passes with the ban on teaching diverse curriculums. “We honor Martin Luther King Day. We celebrate Hannukah. In the past, we’ve learned about some of our Muslim students’ faith and how they would fast. The kids were fascinated with that,” says López Burlingame, who also questions the bill’s tenets. “It’s called good teaching, to tell truths and have students look at a variety of perspectives and experiences—and a rich landscape of experiences. Otherwise, it’s just propaganda.” – Misty Crompton.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills “Recently, I was talking to my kids about the Running of the Bulls in Spain. I’ve also talked about how Christopher Columbus was not a nice guy and here’s why. I could have a parent dislike all of this or if I talk about Frederick Douglass, which means talking about slavery, or about Native People’s and their contributions. I could be investigated and penalized for this?” “It comes down to total censorship,” López Burlingame says, “and we will not be taking it lightly. We’ve been entrusted with the children of New Hampshire, and that means, we will continue to teach the truth. That means, we will not ignore the past and present experiences of [students of color].”

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. The causes of underrepresentation of marginalized students in accessing gifted education are generally understood. But they manifest differently once students enroll and are confronted with, among other factors, cultural and identity disconnects and a lack of cultural representation within the gifted curriculum. These are all problems that can and should be addressed as part of comprehensive reform that starts with modifying the curriculum and approach to teaching in ways that are culturally relevant.
This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. This capitalizes on the strengths each child brings to the classroom. There are lesson plans and gifted program standards that can help educators develop rigorous lessons for diverse gifted learners, specifically Black and Hispanic students, and create culturally responsive curricula that are equity-focused and provide student outcomes and evidence-based practices. Encourage students to pursue IL and PBL projects that explore the histories and experiences of Black and Hispanic people.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Diverse gifted learners need social-emotional support. Successful gifted learners who are developing their personal and cultural identities often attribute their academic success to their relationships with a mentor— especially one who has a cultural connection with them, someone who is like them to get advice from and lean on. A mentor provides needed support and encouragement, enabling these students to develop resiliency and a belief in their abilities — key factors in their long-term success.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. A practical and cost-effective way to increase equity in gifted programs is to focus on providing teachers with professional learning that teaches about how giftedness presents across cultures, best practices for fostering gifted learners and how to meaningfully engage with families and community partners. This type of professional support for teachers can produce a positive change in the numbers of marginalized students succeeding in gifted education (NAGC, 12, 2021).

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills and is a call for a systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools. This legislation addresses issues of equity, equality and economics. Minnesota’s economic strength is linked to the education our students are experiencing. Changes in technology and the growing demand for new technology is connected to what and how we teach our students for our collective future. Ample evidence suggests that already technology is driving Minnesota’s economic future.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. This legislation addresses issues of equity, equality and economics. Technology is changing daily. Just examine your auto or your smart phone. Changes are happening in all industries as technology continues to be updated. We need a new generation of critical and creative thinkers. They need to be prepared with learning how to work collaboratively, problem solve and engage in inquiries. In one example, a robot was built to lay bricks and its performance was compared to an adult brick layer. In the initial comparison, the robot was able to lay 6 times the number of the adult. After a number of updates on the coding that directed that bricklaying robot, the ration was 24 to one. And no lunch break was needed.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. This legislation addresses issues of equity, equality and economics. Technology updates in EV’s is rapidly changing. Battery development received a boost when researchers discovered a novel, lighter way to store battery power employing iron-air batteries, too heavy for cars but better used for battery power storage for renewable electric energy.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. This legislation addresses issues of equity, equality and economics. New cars promised by carmakers are being introduced that will demand electric power. With the growing presence of solar arrays appearing on open land around the state, more homeowners can take advantage of the opportunity to reduce their carbon footprint without an initial large investment in that energy source. Yet our graduates, looking for well-paying jobs in those industries will have a solid grounding in the advanced thinking skill needed for employability.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. For more than a century, scientists have understood the basic physics behind why greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide cause warming. These gases make up just a small fraction of the atmosphere but exert outsized control on Earth’s climate by trapping some of the planet’s heat before it escapes into space. This greenhouse effect is important: It’s why a planet so far from the sun has liquid water and life! However, during the Industrial Revolution, people started burning coal and other fossil fuels to power factories, smelters and steam engines, which added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Ever since, human activities have been heating the planet.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Average global temperatures have increased by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.2 degrees Celsius, since 1880, with the greatest changes happening in the late 20th century. Land areas have warmed more than the sea surface and the Arctic has warmed the most — by more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit just since the 1960s. Temperature extremes have also shifted. In the United States, daily record highs now outnumber record lows two-to-one. This legislation will prepare all students to address these challenges applying their advanced thinking skills.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. This warming is unprecedented in recent geologic history. A f

amous illustration, first published in 1998 and often called the hockey-stick graph, shows how temperatures remained fairly flat for centuries (the shaft of the stick) before turning sharply upward (the blade). It’s based on data from tree rings, ice cores and other natural indicators. And the basic picture, which has withstood decades of scrutiny from climate scientists and contrarians alike, shows that Earth is hotter today than it’s been in at least 1,000 years, and probably much longer. We need our students to experience a different education, one that responds positively to this challenge.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. This legislation addresses issues of equity, equality, the environment and economics. A recent publication, Novacene: The coming age of HyperIntelligence, by Lovlock, suggests, life alters its habitat (eg, as plants seeded Earth’s atmosphere with oxygen) as surely as the habitat alters life. Machines will need organic life to keep the planet at a habitable temperature – it will suit robots to keep us around.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Now, about to turn 100, Lovelock is looking forward to humanity being overtaken in cleverness by its computer progeny. This will usher in the end of the “Anthropocene” – the era in which humans became able to make large-scale alterations to the planetary environment – and the beginning of the “Novacene”. The new age will be marked by the unpredictable marvels to be unleashed by robots (or “cyborgs”, as Lovelock prefers to call them, but of a purely electronic sort) that can think 10,000 times faster than we do and will program themselves and their descendants in ways that will be beyond all human understanding. And it is already happening.
This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Technology is rapidly changing. What is new today becomes obsolete when the improvement arrives. In all industries technology improvements keeps those companies profitable. A well-prepared graduate with 12 years of practice with those advanced skills of this legislation, will be ready to replaced less skilled workers.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills Consider new developments impacting the challenges we face with methane. Tawny brown, compact and muscular, they are Limousins, a breed known for the quality of its meat and much sought- after by the high-end restaurants and butchers in the nearby food mecca of Maastricht, in the southernmost province of the Netherlands. In a year or two, meat from these dozen cows could end up on the plates of Maastricht’s better-known restaurants, but the cows themselves are not headed for the slaughterhouse. Instead, every few months, a veterinarian equipped with little more than a topical anesthetic and a scalpel will remove a peppercorn-size sample of muscle from their flanks, stitch up the tiny incision and send the cows back to their pasture.

 

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. On the opposite side of the building, other scientists are replicating the process with muscle cells. Like the fat filaments, the lean muscle cells will be transferred to large bioreactors—temperature- and pressure-controlled steel vessels—where, bathed in a nutrient broth optimized for cell multiplication, they will continue to grow. Once they finish the proliferation stage, the fat and the muscle tissue will be sieved out of their separate vats and reunited into a product resembling ground hamburger meat, with the exact same genetic code as the cows in Farmer John’s pasture.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills.That final product, identical to the ground beef you are used to buying in the grocery store in every way but for the fact that it was grown in a reactor instead of coming from a butchered cow, is the result of years of research, and could help solve one of the biggest conundrums of our era: how to feed a growing global population without increasing the greenhouse-gas emissions that are heating our planet past the point of sustainability. “What we do to cows, it’s terrible,” says Melke, shaking her head. “What cows do to the planet when we farm them for meat? It’s even worse. But people want to eat meat. This is how we solve the problem.”

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Cattle are the No. 1 agricultural source of greenhouse gases worldwide. Each year, a single cow will belch about 220 pounds of methane. Methane from cattle is shorter lived than carbon dioxide but 28 times more potent in warming the atmosphere, said Mitloehner, a professor and air quality specialist in the Department of Animal Science. With over a billion head of cattle world wide, this alternative is real possibility that will change our eating habits.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. This legislation addresses issues of equity, equality and economics. Technology updates in EV’s is rapidly changing. Battery development received a boost when researchers discovered a novel, lighter way to store battery power employing iron-air batteries, too heavy for cars but better used for battery power storage for renewable electric energy.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. This legislation addresses issues of equity, equality and economics, The ongoing development of technology that seeks solutions to the environmental upheavals we are experiencing will continue to emerge. The Novacene’s era has begun and continued efforts will be needed to save the planet. Education of our student population needs to change in response to this challenge. HF 1994 and SF 1700 and it clones includes the advanced thinking skills for all students, providing a solid base for future work in those important fields that will change our environmental future.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills Mathematics is for all students. When students are given the opportunity to choose how they learn and demonstrate their understanding of a concept, their buy-in and motivation increases. It gives them the chance to understand how they learn best, provides agency over their own learning, and allows for the space to practice different approaches to solving math problems. Give students a variety of options, such as timed exercises, projects, or different materials, to show that they’ve mastered foundational skills. As students show what they’ve learned, teachers can track understanding, figure out where students need additional scaffolding or other assistance, and tailor lessons accordingly.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Mathematics is for all students. Communicating about math helps students process new learning and build on their thinking. Engage students during conversations and have them describe why they solved a problem in a certain way. “My goal is to get information about what students are thinking and use that to guide my instruction, as opposed to just telling them information and asking them to parrot things back,” says Delise Andrews, who taught math (K–8) and is now a 3–5 grade math coordinator in the Lincoln Public Schools in Lincoln, Nebraska.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Mathematics is for all students. Student engagement and participation can be a challenge, especially if you’re relying heavily on worksheets. Games are an excellent way to make the learning more fun while simultaneously promoting strategic mathematical thinking, computational fluency, and understanding of operations. Games also foster a home-school connection when they’re sent home for extra practice.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills Student success in mathematics is dependent on mastery of the basic facts in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Early mastery leads to greater self-awareness of the relationship connecting each of these basic skills. Memorization is a pathway to success.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Mathematics is for all students. Provide them meaningful tasks. Kids get excited about math when they have to solve real-life problems (PBL). For instance, when teaching sixth graders how to determine area, present tasks related to a house redesign. Provide them with the dimensions of the walls and the size of the windows and have them determine how much space is left for the wallpaper. Or ask them to consider how many tiles they would need to fill a deck. You can absolutely introduce problem-based learning, even in a virtual world.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Mathematics learning that encourages students to learn is supported in Kahn Academy, an online math program, rich in ongoing assessments, ongoing feedback that guides helps students understand their misconceptions and an element of choice that encourages students to learn. Parents and teachers can easily follow their students’ progress within the program.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Mathematics learning that encourages students to learn is also supported by Noetic Learning, another on-line learning program that challenges all students. It is designed to provide students with problem solving experiences, provides step by step instructions and solutions and provides challenge beyond the regular school curriculum. Both Kahn and Noetic Math rely on support from teachers.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Mathematics is for all students. For early learners Young children learn best with hands-on experiences, so it’s ideal to make math real by teaching it in the context of children’s everyday learning. The home and classroom are brimming with opportunities to integrate math into children’s routines and activities. Here are a few ideas to get any adult started: Mealtime: Ask the child, What shape is the plate? or Do we have enough spoons? We need four. Clean up time: Ask children to pick up a set number of toys. While picking them up, have the child name the shape of the object. During laundry: Ask the child to sort piles and identify which pile is more or less; ask the child to match socks. Have children count to make sure everyone is present at line-up. Have children cut pieces of string for an art activity and ensure they are all equal. involve children in checking the temperature to see if the weather allows them to go outside and play. Graph peers’ interests and likes to make fair decisions among the group.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills Mathematics is for all students.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills.This legislation addresses issues of equity, equality and economics. Technology is changing daily. Just examine your auto or your smart phone. Changes are happening in all industries as technology continues to be updated. We need a new generation of critical and creative thinkers. They need to be prepared with learning how to work collaboratively, problem solve and engage in inquiries. In one example, a robot was built to lay bricks and its performance was compared to an adult brick layer. In the initial comparison, the robot was able to lay 6 times the number of the adult. After a number of updates on the coding that directed that bricklaying robot, the ration was 24 to one. And no lunch break was needed.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills This legislation addresses issues of equity, equality and economics. Technology updates in EV’s is rapidly changing. Battery development received a boost when researchers discovered a novel, lighter way to store battery power employing iron-air batteries, too heavy for cars but better used for battery power storage for renewable electric energy.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills positively responds to the call from the National School Boards Association report on equity (2016). “It goes without saying that students are not likely to learn subject matter they are not taught, We must also guarantee that students have equal access to high-level curriculum.” That High Level Curriculum is delivered with the advanced thinking skills of this legislation embedded.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills positively responds to the call from the National School Boards Association report on equity (2016). Superintendents around the state recognize the importance of this legislation and when asked to support it and given the research that supports the rationale, they do support, despite the leadership of MSBA whose lobbyist want to main local control.  Local Control results in inequities of opportunities for students across the state.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills began in the fall of 2019. We carried our proposal around the House and Senate offices, secured 46 signatures from both sides of the isle and the pandemic shut us down. Prior to the shutdown the House held a hearing of information we had been sharing, the failure of districts to close the achievement and the on-going demographic changes happening in our schools. We had also reminded everyone that the Star Tribune’s investigation into how districts were using the $600M/year for basic skills. The article pointed out that no one had kept track of how those dollars were being spent. The information shared by the state demographer was dated from 2017. We employed more recent data. Out of that meeting the House leadership directed school districts to start keeping track of how their dollars were being spent.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Members of the legislature, members of MSBA, school board members, the EDMN representatives joined forces in an attempt to stop this legislative effort. Out of their 12-month journey, they recommend two important delaying tactics. One was to maintain local control, the other was no mandates. They wanted the dollars but did not want any accountability. They received a nearly 5% increase in funding over two years. So, their financial needs have been met.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Public education was established in the early years of this democratic republic. The belief held at the time was in this republic, we needed an educated electorate. So began an education for the 18th century. It served its purpose teaching all students how to read, write, and compute. That education is no longer appropriate for a productive citizen in this century. Students graduating from our schools will be able to pursue current and future changes in the workplace, earning a higher salary in meaningful work.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. Public education was established in the early years of this democratic republic. The belief held at the time was in this republic, we needed an educated electorate. So began an education for the 18th century. It served its purpose teaching all students how to read, write, and compute. That education is no longer appropriate for a productive citizen in this century. Students graduating from our schools will be able to pursue current and future changes in the workplace, earning a higher salary in meaningful work.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. This legislative effort became a Call for Systemic Change in the teaching and learning that was happening in our schools. This legislation,  addresses issues of equity, equality and economics. Equity means the same opportunities for all students. These bills expect all students to be taught Critical thinking, Creative thinking, Inquiry Learning, Problem Based Learning and How to Work Collaboratively. Those skills, when taught with fidelity, will positively impact student achievement. This legislation also addresses Equality. One challenge facing Minnesota is the changing demographics, students of color out number white students in many districts. Our practices in gifted education need to change to a more inclusive model of identification. Universal screening is an expectation in all districts. Gifted Education will be in every district addressing both equity and equality.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. This legislation addresses issues of economic surrounding environmental concerns, health care challenges, home owning equity issues faced by many in our communities and workplace challenges facing our state. The rapid technological changes in those areas demand a different education that will better prepare all students for this technological future. Minnesotans graduating from all our schools in the state will attain a higher lifetime earning potential while contributing more dollars of tax revenue to fund the efforts against these challenges.
This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. The experts generally agreed that standards for teacher training should be established, that the teacher of the gifted should have state certification and/or an endorsement in gifted education, and that the teacher should have high intelligence, an understanding of giftedness, originality, and self-confidence
This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. This legislation is a call for a systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in Minnesota schools.  Many recognize the importance of this change and support this initiative.  Business leaders, parents, students, organizations addressing inequities in healthcare, social services and education all are supporting this legislation.  Yet, we battle resistance from MSBA and those opposed to a mandate.  But this is not a mandate, it is Call for System Change.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills This legislation is in response to ongoing challenge facing our school, the achievement gap. Districts have failed to make any headway and Minnesota has one of the largest learning gap of all states.  Taught with fidelity, these advanced thinking skills would engage all students in the learning and narrow the achievement as students engage in IL and PBL consistently.

This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills The MN House in April of 2019 responded to that report by ordering districts to start reporting out how dollars would be sent. This legislation, once implemented, would return to an accountability system so MDE could keep track of the impact of the legislation while the public would be better informed.
This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills. This legislation once implemented provides expectations that all students would be taught the advanced thinking skills, supporting the MSBA and MASA long term initiative for personalizing learning

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools This legislative initiative addresses advanced thinking skills and offers a solution to the challenge of closing the achievement gap and brings Personalized Learning to all classrooms in the state. Yet, despite receiving a 2.4% increase in the first year and an additional 2% in the second year, district leadership and MSBA leaders celebrated the wiping out of any accountability through mandates, effectively announcing that they did not want district to be accountable for how those dollars were to be spent.  It appears some agency should be watching.  They do have a poor track record from the recent past.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools, impacts all students. Equal access to a high quality public education has been a top social justice issue for the past century. After all, it was only 65 years ago that the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling was made and “separate but equal” education was found to be decidedly unequal. One would hope that a landmark ruling and the passage of time might heal an education system that was designed to limit access to students of color and benefit white students. Unfortunately, issues of educational equality and equity are still the most commonly raised issues in communities across the nation (See: McNeel, 2019; McMillan, 2019; Peetz, 2019; Wilson Phelan, 2019).

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools, impacts all students. Equity is the provision of personalized resources needed for all individuals to reach common goals. In other words, the goals and expectations are the same for all students, but the supports needed to achieve those goals depends on the students’ needs (Equity Education, 2019).  This legislation expects all students to be offered experiences to practice these advanced thinking skills daily.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools impacts all students. To understand what equity means in schools, we must first separate it from equality. “We have heard the terms equality and equity used interchangeably. However, it is critical to note that while both concepts are key to social justice and deal with resources, they are significantly different,” states The National Association for Multicultural Education. “Generally, equality is associated with treating people the same or people having equal access to resources and opportunities.” Equity, on the other hand, is about ensuring that everyone receives what they need to be successful — even if that varies across racial or socioeconomic lines. In short, equality is not enough to combat hundreds of years of oppression, poverty, and disproportionality. “While the world in which we live distributes talent equally, it does not equally distribute opportunity,” explains Equity Education.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools impacts all students. Culturally responsive education focuses on elevating the learning capacity of students who have traditionally been marginalized in education. According to Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain, academic struggles are often attributed to a “culture of poverty” or “different community values toward education” but they really exist because “we don’t offer [students] sufficient opportunities in the classroom to develop the cognitive skills and habits of mind that would prepare them to take on more advanced academic tasks.” The idea of culturally responsive teaching (CRT) is that we work toward equity by ensuring that marginalized students receive opportunities for high-level thinking and grow into deep thinkers. “When you’re engaged in complex thinking, your brain grows,” says Hammond. “Too many classrooms have students passively sitting. The teacher is doing the majority of the work.” Hammond sees CRT as a driver toward “helping students have environments in which they can grow their brain power and be active participants in their own learning” and where “they see that they are more than capable because competence precedes confidence.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools impacts all students. When it comes to the allocation of school resources, equity and equality are very different. “Should per-student funding at every school be exactly the same? That’s a question of equality. But should students who come from less get more in order to ensure that they can catch up? That’s a question of equity,” says Blair Mann of the Education Trust. “The students who are furthest behind — most often low-income students and students of color — require more of those resources to catch up, succeed, and, eventually, close the achievement gap. Giving students who come to school lagging academically (because of factors outside of a school’s control) the exact same resources as students in higher income schools alone will not close the achievement gap. But making sure that low-income students and students of color have access to exceptional teachers and that their schools have the funding to provide them with the kind of high-quality education they need to succeed will continue us on the path toward narrowing that gap.” Ensuring that students who need more to achieve success receive those resources and opportunities illustrates equity in action.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools and impacts all students. Both Equity and Equality are Crucial in Education. Though the terms are not the same and can have vastly different implications when it comes to education policy and decisions educators make, both equity and equality are important to ensure the best possible outcomes for students. Importance of Equity in Education Equity is crucial in classrooms to ensure that all students get to the same positive outcomes regardless of where they started or what unique challenges they might experience. For educators, this means taking into account each student’s situation, from learning disabilities to cultural differences and everything in between. Educators who operate classrooms equitably understand that their students will not all respond the same to the same instruction.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools, impacts all students and addresses equity in the teaching and learning for all students. Serving just gifted students is not enough in an equitable learning environment. Serving just the free and reduced lunch students is not enough in an equitable learning environment. Serving just the students of color and disabled students is not enough in an equitable learning environment. All students, K-12, will be provided the advanced thinking skills of this legislation.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools. This legislative initiative is in response to the failure of districts across the state to fulfill the intent of the legislature when it comes to funding.  Investigative reporting in Star Tribune in 2019, the writer pointed out that districts had not kept track of the $600M coming to the schools for basic skills.  Our own effort found less than a quarter of districts across the state follow the intent of law, to develop gifted programs, provide a system of identification for those gifted kids, and provide staff development on the nature and nurturing of gifted kids, K-12, while receiving, over the past 15 years, $13 PPU. That is a lot of funding that no district was held accountable for while this was happening. Not the legislature, not the school districts, not the MDE.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools, when taught with fidelity, will narrow the achievement gap. Research, grounded in Effect Size studies (ES), coupled with a meta-analysis provides evidence of academic growth on achievement measures. An ES greater than .1 suggests 0.2 – 0.4 is a small but educationally significant impact, 0.4 – 0.6 is a medium educationally significant impact and greater than 0.6 is large.
359. This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools, include Creative Thinking Strategies. The ES from this article reports on a meta-analysis of 120 studies (total N = 52) 578; 782 effects) examining the relationship between creativity and academic achievement in research conducted since the 1960s. Average correlation between creativity and academic achievement was .22.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools, include Critical Thinking Strategies. The results of the meta-analysis of the influence of PBL on students’ critical thinking abilities are found, found that PBL has a high positive effect on students in science subjects (physics, chemistry, and biology) with an influence of 83.45%.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools, include Problem Based Learning Strategies. Our analyses found statistically significant differences overall favoring the PBL group over the control group in social studies (ES = 0.482) and informational reading (ES = 0.181). In the PBL group, gains were 63 percent higher for social studies and 23 percent higher for informational reading than in the control group. In informational writing, differences between the groups overall were not statistically significant. However, informational writing growth was higher, at a level of statistical significance, among teachers who were rated as implementing unit sessions more as intended. Duke, Halvorsen, Strachan, Konstantopoulos, & Kim, 2017.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools, include Collaborative Learning Strategies. The sample of the study consisted of 20 representative studies involving 2434 participants selected from an extensive literature search based on the use of collaborative activities in a formal education setting cutting across multiple grade levels and subject domains. Analysis of representative studies(k= 28) yielded a moderately weighted average effect size of 0.26. A mixed effects model was used for the analysis of the moderators of effect size.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools, include Inquiry Learning Strategies. When used in place of a textbook approach, an inquiry-based approach yielded significantly higher achievement for high school students with special needs. Twenty-six junior high school students with learning disabilities studied two science units via an activity-based, inquiry-oriented approach or a textbook approach. Pre- and post-tests revealed that when students were taught by experiential, more indirect methods, they learned more and remembered more than they were taught by more direct instructional methods. 
364.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools and include Inquiry Learning Strategies. The research also revealed that hands-on science activities were greatly favored over textbook activities by students who had experienced both.

This legislative initiative is a call for systemic change in the teaching and learning happening in our schools include Inquiry Learning Strategies Students were asked about their impressions of the two instructional methods.96% reported that they enjoyed the inquiry approach more, and over 80% considered the activities more facilitative of learning and more motivating. Scruggs, T. E. and M.A. Mastropieri. 1993. Reading versus doing: The relative effects of textbook based and inquiry-oriented approaches to science learning in special education classrooms. Journal of Special Education 27 (1): 1-15.