Immersion University is the newest project of The International Education Institute (IEI), which has been providing support for critical educational endeavors for nearly 20 years. For the first seven years, it secured, managed and fulfilled about $400,000 in federally-funded contracts with the Washington State Migrant/Bilingual Education Program and its associated Office of Secondary Education for Migrant Youth (SEMY). Under those contracts, IEI President Ken Harvey, Ph.D, wrote, edited, produced, and distributed the nation’s only regular publication about the best practices for educating schools’ most challenged youth – migrant students, whose national dropout rate was 50% and academic achievement below any other ethnic group.
The quarterly bilingual Migrant Education News was distributed to migrant families and educators in Washington State and to migrant education officials in other states and at the U.S. Department of Education. Dr. Harvey personally wrote some 250 articles on the subject during those seven years and received widespread acclaim for his efforts. (See publications at http://virtual-institute.us/Ken/stories/ and letters of recommendation starting at http://virtual-institute.us/Ken/HowardLet.htm. A current recommendation can be secured by contacting Migrant Education Program Supervisor Sylvia Reyna at 360-725-4474 or by email at sylvia.reyna@k12.wa.us.)
Besides his work directly for the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s Migrant/Bilingual Education Program, Dr. Harvey also provided his services to SEMY in developing, administering and promoting the organization’s PASS portable curriculum for migrant high school students and its life-changing Migrant Student Leadership Program that raised participating students’ graduation rate from 50% to 80%.
With private funding, IEI also performed pedagogical research on how to help struggling children to learn to read in English in numerous kindergarten classes in Washington and Idaho. Dr. Harvey’s research identified a preschool music-based curriculum in Utah and a New Zealand early reading curriculum as the best options for helping schools to achieve the strict mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act. The vast majority of teachers who implemented this combo curriculum evaluated it as the best early reading curriculum they had ever used. However, the NCLB curriculum guidelines favored established curriculum publishers and prevented the IEI combo curriculum from ever being implemented nationally.
$10 MILLION PROJECT SUPPORTING NON-PROFITS
After the migrant education project was ended due to the 2008 Great Recession, Dr. Harvey turned his focus to educational and civil development challenges in the former Soviet Union republics of Central Asia. There he became a professor and distance-learning coordinator at the region’s top Western-style, English-speaking university (KIMEP University), and, in conjunction with his IEI non-profit, co-founded the Insights into Development Project to provide training and support for non-government/non-profit organizations in Kazakhstan. Starting with a small $10,000 grant, Dr. Harvey and his Peace Corps co-founder organized the first training conference and co-authored and published the first of 10 books on the best practices of civil development in the region. With nearly $10 million in funding since that initial effort, the program has grown to cover eight Central Asian countries and to provide many more training and support services. It is now administered by the ARGO association of NGOs. (See the project’s initial website at http://Insights-into-Development.com.)
During this same period, Dr. Harvey was conducting and publishing academic research on online education, digital communications, and the challenge that the internet is posing to the survival of traditional news media, including 19 chapters or articles in nine different publications just in the past four years, some of which can be seen at http://virtual-institute.us/Ken/CurrentResearch.html. As part of their research and public service, Dr. Harvey and IEI volunteers also developed numerous educational websites, including http://Virtual-University.us and http://IEI-TV.net.