A Fresh Approach

Throughout his more than 30-year career as an educator, Jon Gundry has had a strange knack for being in places just as history is being made.

In September 1977, he was working for the Jungle Aviation and Rescue Service, an organization of the US Air Force, teaching English to students in Panama when then-President Jimmy Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty. Two decades later, Gundry was teaching high school students in Cyprus, under the US State Department’s Fulbright Scholarship program, when the Persian Gulf War broke out.

“It was another great experience for me, a great learning experience,” he said in a sit-down interview with the Weekly. “But the return was very difficult. I came back thinking I’d reached the pinnacle of my teaching career. What was I going to do to top that?”

At a July 26 meeting of Pasadena Unified School District’s governing board, Gundry, who served as interim superintendent of the LA County Office of Education since September 2010, officially became PUSD’s new superintendent by unanimous approval.

His appointment comes at a pivotal moment in the district’s own history. Schools are traveling on the course of 10-year strategic plan created by former Superintendent Edwin Diaz, who retired June 30, just two years after suffering a stroke in July 2009 and after much publicized infighting between board members and district staff. Board members maintain the announcement of Diaz’s departure came as a surprise; at the July 26 meeting, Gundry assured the board his tenure would not meet a similar fate.

“I’m very pleased to be here,” he said upon his public appointment. “I’ve never run out of anything yet that I’ve done, so you don’t have to worry about that."

Gundry’s professional background reveals a consistent upward movement through teaching and administrative ranks. His accelerated ambitions have been the result of a careful focus on achievement — his own as well as the students and districts he’s served.

He’s kicked administrators out of their posts, worked with a politically divisive board and helped struggling schools succeed, with one becoming a nationally recognized Blue Ribbon School.

But whether or not Gundry will have similar success in Pasadena, at a district that’s had its fair share of challenges, remains to be seen.

Gundry was born into a family of educators — his father and two uncles were teachers and administrators in New Jersey and Texas — but his initial thought in college was to attend medical school. During his senior year at North Arizona University, however, Gundry went to Bolivia with the American Field Service and had the opportunity to work with children. From then on, he knew he wanted a career in teaching.

Online Life Degree – Accredited WGU Program: Online Life ...

A growing number of educational institutions are offering online life degrees, which are degrees based upon an individual's past work experience and accumulated skills. While some of these institutions are legitimate, many are nothing more than scam operations.

The most legitimate way to get a life degree is though competency-based educational programs. This article explains competency-based education, reviews the best online competency-based program, and offers prospective students warning signs to look for in programs which are illegitimate.

Competency-based education is a unique educational model which focues on skills rather than class hours. In competency-based degree programs, students prove mastery over a required set of skills in order to graduate, rather than take a required number of classes. Such programs simply shift the focus from credit hours to mastery of skills.

Competency-based degree programs typically provide students with a list of skills which must be acquired, as well as learning materials (both text and video) meant to teach those skills. In order to graduate, students must pass competency examinations demonstrating that they have mastered all the required skills.

The benefit for professionals with work experience is this: upon enrolling, students can begin taking competency exams immediately for those skills they have already mastered on-the-job. Some students are even able to immediately take all of the examinations and receive a legitimate degree in a matter of weeks or months.

This is no different than public universities which allow adult students to pass out of courses by allowing them to take the final examinations for courses they've never attended.

Western Governors University , an online, nonprofit university supported by 19 state governors and accredited by four different organizations, including the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, offers the only accredited online competency-based degree programs in the United States.

While some refer to an online skills-based degree as an online life degree, it is more accurate to call them competency-based programs; such programs can reward students with work experience who are able to pass examinations.

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