One of the more critical conversations occurred on Sunday to kick off the week. The topic, ironically enough though, was about a meeting that happens rarely in education.

Bror Saxberg, chief learning officer at Kaplan, organized a panel discussion at the AERA meeting about why learning scientists and educational entrepreneurs don’t connect that much. I, along with Dick Clark of USC, Kenneth Koedinger, co-director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, Michael Moe of GSV Capital , Stacey Childress of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Nadya Dabby from the U.S. Department of Education, discussed not only how these conversations don’t happen, but the fundamental reasons why they don’t.

Saxberg and many others have noted that, all too often, products and services in the education market are not informed by what we know about learning. As a result, these new offerings tend to start at ground zero and do not take advantage of what’s become, over the past couple of decades in particular, a sizeable literature about how people learn and how to design optimal learning experiences.

Although learning scientists have far more to learn—and some of the biggest advances I believe will occur in the field instead of the lab given the rise of adaptive learning products—not having products informed by what’s known about learning as a starting point is often a big miss for students. Yet we see it all the time.

To take a notable example, people from the biggest of the massive open online course platforms, Coursera, often talk about how exciting it is that they can do A-B testing to learn what works. With the massive user base they have and the big data they are able to collect, there is indeed a huge potential for breakthroughs. What sort of A-B testing are they doing though? One professor, for example, tested whether showing his face during a lesson led to improved learning. What’s sad about that is that the research to answer these sorts of questions is already well established.

From a higher level, it often seems that the best business plans in education have the least interesting learning science behind them, and the worst business plans in education have the most interesting learning science behind them. On the panel, Koedinger, a co-founder of Carnegie Learning, confirmed the point when he talked about how once he and his team had brought their research-informed product to market, the majority of the market incentives encouraged them not to improve the product along its ability to help students learn.

This points to the first of the three ideas I offered in my opening remarks as to why educational entrepreneurs and learning scientists don’t talk all that much: In public education, the incentives don’t encourage educational entrepreneurs to seek out what’s known from learning science. The products that win in the marketplace aren’t necessarily those that are the best for learning, as the policies in public K-12 education in particular are focused heavily on input-based metrics that encourage compliance, but not student learning growth. As a result, seeking out what’s known about how students learn and improving products accordingly isn’t necessarily rewarded. To change this, we need to fix the demand-side problem. Moving from a policy environment that rewards inputs like seat time to one that values student outcomes in a competency-based learning environment is critical to create smarter demand.

Second, entrepreneurs sometimes suffer from the “We went to school, therefore we are experts” mentality—when in fact, what we think we know about how learning works from our experiences is often incorrect. Because entrepreneurs have this notion, they either think they can extrapolate to solve system-wide problems for which they don’t have a solid understanding of causality or they can utilize a lean startup approach and figure it out on the ground. There is a lot to be said for leveraging a lean startup—or discovery-driven—approach. But in a discovery-driven process, the goal is to identify assumptions, test them and gain knowledge as fast and cheaply as possible. Leveraging good research that has already created a knowledge base does just that. Ignoring it is a mistake.

Finally, researchers have a long way to go to help solve the problem. The catalog of sessions at AERA was the weight of a phonebook. Outside of asking Saxberg what sessions would be useful, I had no hope of navigating it. We need more education research about things that actually matter in the field and are relevant for teachers and students. We need more translation of good research into the popular domain to help people understand more widely what is the good research and what does it say. Today every company seems to have a research study that they bring to districts validating what they do. How to clarify what’s good? And we need faster research that takes advantage of the massive amounts of data we can generate about education through digital learning.

In the panel conversation, the lack of good networks, better use of the emerging edtech incubators, the structure of federal research funding, the lag-time between learning and tangible results, and other things surfaced as additional facets of the problem. In seeking to fix this, I’m curious though: what else have you observed as something that holds this back? Students await the answer.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry first appeared on Forbes.com

First, great teaching will matter more, not less, in the digital age. As we’ve written here and here, digital learning has the potential to level the educational playing field on learning the basics. As digital content gets better and better, students around the globe will be able to learn basic content and practice skills through this new medium.

In that flat world, what will differentiate outcomes is how motivated students are to undertake the work of learning; how well they tackle the inevitable barriers to achievement, including social and emotional challenges; and whether they move beyond the basics and engage in the higher-order learning that’s increasingly important for college, careers, and life. And how well that happens for students will depend on what it’s always hinged on: the effectiveness of the adults in their lives. For most students—and for nearly all whose parents struggled in school—the adults who tip the balance are teachers.

Second, digital learning has the potential to extend the reach of the nation’s excellent teachers to far more students than they can teach today. By adopting new school models that change teachers’ roles and use digital learning to save teachers’ time, schools can put great teachers in charge of more students’ learning and turbocharge the development and performance of all teachers working in teams. And they can pay teachers more, sustainably, for reaching more students. Like it has in other professions, technology can give teachers unprecedented career advancement and earning opportunities while boosting performance.

This won’t happen automatically. Schools could just replace teachers with laptops. They could use savings from digital learning for something other than paying teachers more. They could use saved time for something other than helping more students and developing excellent teaching teams. But if they do, the nation will miss out on the enormous opportunity created by digital learning: the opportunity to give all students access to excellent teachers, while transforming teaching into a high-paying, high-impact profession.

-Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

As schools across the country adopt blended-learning models, a few clear trends are settling in, and, at the same time, some groups—like the Next Generation Learning Challenges—continue to help schools push the design envelope on what’s possible for students.

First, many schools are embarking upon a variety of design processes, RFPs from vendors and the like only to arrive at the same cluster of solutions centered around the basic models of blended learning we identified here. There is nothing wrong with that per se. Entering into a design process, for example, can help gain buy in from teachers and others in the community for adopting blended learning, which is still radically different from traditional schooling. Adopting what are becoming tried-and-true blended-learning models (yes, I know it still may be too soon to use that phrase for blended learning, but I just did it) to individualize learning for students and improve teachers’ lives is better than remaining stuck in a failed factory-based model of schooling, even if the model is not the most innovative thing ever that pushes the blended-learning field forward for students. Some standardization around a select few models—and a branding of those models—will likely be necessary ultimately to scale the practice nationwide.

The downside is that the process to arrive there can waste a lot of time and energy in reinventing the wheel, when, depending on the problem a school is trying to solve, the level of freedom it has to solve it, and the type of team it deploys to attack it, there is some predictability to the blended-learning model it is likely to adopt. Heather Staker and I are working on a white paper that will have more to say on this topic soon. But by way of an example, elementary schools are most likely to adopt Station-Rotation models or, in some cases, what some call the “Rocketship” model—which tends to be a Lab-Rotation model that emulates the basics of what Rocketship Education, a blended-learning network of charter schools, does today.

Depending on the model adopted or the framing of the problem, there is also some predictability to the groups schools might then work with to implement a solution—a further suggestion that schools ought to cut to the chase and foundations and others fostering the ecosystem should help them there. If a school plans to use a Station-Rotation model for math with one curriculum provider, for example, it will likely contract with one math vendor that provides supplemental math content—like Dreambox Learning or ST Math—or use a free solution like the Khan Academy. If it wants to work with multiple content providers on the other hand, there is a good bet it might work with a company like Education Elements, which is emerging as a leader in helping schools move to blended-learning models and offering a single sign-on software solution for schools so they can easily work with multiple content vendors. Although the company helps schools enter into a design process to rethink the use of time, teacher roles, and so forth, the basic model that most schools using Education Elements adopt tends to be pretty consistent.

At the same time, we are seeing the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), a non-profit partnership, continue to push people’s imagination of what blended-learning models might ultimately look like. I’ve written previously about its role in creating proof points capable of scaling for the field that help propel the education system more toward a fully competency-based, student-centric one, and now NGLC is at it again (full disclosure: I serve as a reviewer for their grants).

On the heels of its last effort to seed 20 new secondary school models, NGLC’s Wave IV $12 million grant program has two components to it. First, it will award 20 $450,000 grants (including matching funds) to districts, charter management organizations, or partnerships to launch new blended-learning breakthrough models, and 30 $100,000 grants to planners who are at an earlier stage in developing these kinds of models. The first grant cycle deadline is April 22, and the second is December 2. Applicants can apply on behalf of a brand-new school, a restart of a persistently failing one, or a complete redesign of an existing, higher-performing school.

There are important strands in this effort. First, despite what we’re starting to see in the field as some consistent models of blended learning that can bolster student learning, we’ve yet to see anyone create “the solution”—and we’re unlikely to ever see that I suspect. Although we have a few models that have been able to personalize learning and do a better job of instituting mastery-based learning for students, no one has figured out how to do it at scale per se yet, and there is still plenty of room for growth in student outcomes. Continued innovation in education will always be critical. A major problem today is how hard it is to innovate in education, so having groups continue to push the envelope is critical. It’s why the Silicon Schools Fund, where I’m a board member, is also playing an important role.

Second, NGLC isn’t just focused on creating great one-off proof points; it’s focused on creating next-gen schools that can scale. Too often success in education doesn’t scale. By focusing not just on the learning model at hand for students in these schools but also their business and scaling models, NGLC seeks to remedy that.

Ideally, in a few years time NGLC will have seeded a series of new schooling models that other schools themselves can adopt, in much the same way an increasing number of schools are now adopting models that have proven to be successful in the field. If that happens, scale may occur in ways we can’t predict—and may look more like an awakening to the power of putting students at the center of their learning.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry first appeared on Forbes.com

You can already find “MOOCs” (massive open online courses) on a host of websites, created and delivered by a wide array of institutions and individuals.

As I write, Coursera offers 207 courses, ranging from astronomy to public health, presented by professors at such upscale schools as CalTech, Duke, and Stanford (where, as best I can tell, all this originated—and just a few years ago). Udacity offers about twenty courses, EdX (founded by Harvard and MIT) around ten.

Providers such as these are proliferating and expanding via a hodgepodge of for- and non-profit organizations with offerings that range from free to pricey. And participation is soaring, too. Coursera claims two million course-takers worldwide—and since the courses are online, one can indeed take them anyplace, anytime.

This remarkably rapid development carries huge potential for universalizing and customizing higher education and for enormous cost savings. But it collides with age-old traditions and deeply entrenched practices regarding how one earns a college degree—and it also carries enormous risks. Who determines which students “pass” these on-line courses and what’s the evidence that they met a suitable standard of accomplishment? By what process will “credit” be assessed and assigned and how will degrees be awarded, by whom and for an accumulation of what?

A host of lesser questions arises, too, such as what’s the meaning of an online course in science that affords students no access to or experience in laboratory settings, or in art, music, and myriad “applied” subjects that cannot be fully mastered on a computer screen?

To sort some of this out, the Gates Foundation, Coursera and the American Council on Education (ACE) recently teamed up to evaluate what students deserve what sorts of “credit” for which kinds of coursework done via Coursera. The ACE already operates a “College Credit Recommendation Service” that analyzes “workplace learning” and other courses taken outside traditional postsecondary institutions and recommends to colleges which of these should count for how much of what sort of degree credit. It’s now headed toward something of the sort for MOOCs.

Which got me thinking: Why not MOOCs in K–12 education, too—for the kids, not just their teachers? Why is this not another form of on-line or blended learning with huge potential to foster equity, acceleration, individualization, choice, and much else that we prize in the elementary-secondary sector?

We already have virtual charter schools in many places and several state-provided counterparts such as the Florida Virtual School. We have online providers of specific courses (see Apex Learning, for example). Home-schoolers can access multiple options. And we have more and more schools seeking to blend on-line offerings into their brick-and-mortar classrooms.

What we don’t yet have, as far as I know, are K–12 MOOCs provided by topflight schools to students beyond their own campuses. Imagine “History at Andover,” “Pre-calculus at Dalton,” “English literature at New Trier,” “Physics at Bronx Science.” Imagine middle school health courses provided by public-health professors at Johns Hopkins or experts at the Centers for Disease Control, art classes from the Metropolitan Museum, virtual field trips to the Galapagos with the National Geographic. There’s really no limit.

I’m sure that advanced high school students around the U.S. are already availing themselves of postsecondary MOOCs. That’s really just another form of dual enrollment. But will their high schools give them credit? And if Lawrenceville Academy were to offer a nifty high-school level MOOC in, say, world geography, by what means would Bill or Belinda, students at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, get credit for taking it? Yes, this could easily be managed if their school brings it “in-house,” much like an APEX course. But what if they take it outside school and then want credit toward their diploma from Montgomery County? And why shouldn’t this be possible? Ditto for the drop-out who now has a day job (or a baby) but wants to resume the accumulation of high-school credit.

Think about the reverse, too. What if a kid enrolled at pricey Sidwell Friends takes an advanced-algebra “MOOC” over the summer? It doesn’t much matter whether the course originates at MIT, Stuyvesant High School, or Singapore’s Raffles Institution. The question is whether Sidwell will give that student credit—and then give her parents a tuition reduction or shorten the time she must spend there en route to a diploma?

All of this is much easier to visualize at the high school level, of course, and undeniably more complicated with eight-year-olds. But the concept isn’t really very different. Even in the primary and middle grades, MOOCs offer potential for gifted/talented pupils, for some kids with disabilities (particularly the physical and social kind), and for specialized or hard-to-teach subjects (e.g., learning Japanese with the help of a native speaker of that language). Youngsters in rural communities might especially benefit from access via technology to courses that their schools can’t offer. So would kids living in remote places or accompanying their parents to other parts of the planet.

But must the school remain in charge of all this, or can individual pupils and families access MOOCs for which they then get credit, whether that means credit to pass from fourth to fifth grade or to graduate from high school with an honors diploma? For the latter to work, someone must “validate” that the credit is duly earned and deserves to “count.” School systems or states might do this on their own, of course, but that would lead to uneven expectations and a lot of duplicative work. What about something akin to the ACE-Gates-Coursera initiative for K–12 education? Where are you, funders and visionaries, when we need you?

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry first appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

It was the complaint of yet another school trying to build a blended-learning model that utilizes multiple providers.

“The software content providers are proprietary. It’s impossible to get data out of them. And when we do, the data doesn’t connect easily to the standards and the data from other providers.”

So went the grumbling from another blended-learning school.

What strikes me as most noteworthy about these comments, however, is just how un-noteworthy this state of the industry is in any industry.

At the outset of any industry, the technology tends to be immature and not yet good enough for the majority of users. In order to maximize the performance of the products and services and have any hope of them getting adopted, organizations need to integrate vertically and create interdependent architectures that tightly weave different components together to optimize performance, in terms of functionality and reliability.

As Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor observe in The Innovator’s Solution, “by definition, these products are proprietary because each company will develop its own interdependent design to optimize performance in a different way.” The result of a proprietary, interdependent solution, however, is that customization is prohibitively expensive, because to customize, the company needs to re-architect the entire product.

But as an industry matures, the technology improves. It ceases to be “not good enough” for most users and begins to overshoot what most users need in terms of raw functionality and reliability.

As this happens, customers begin to prioritize new dimensions of performance. With functionality and reliability assured, they prize flexibility and customization, which proprietary products cannot supply.

The new solutions that arise to offer these customized solutions have a modular architecture—where different components fit and work together in well-understood and highly defined ways. Standards arise that specify the fit and function of all elements so completely that it doesn’t matter who makes the components or subsystems, as long as they meet the specifications. Modular architectures optimize flexibility, but because they require tight specification, it limits the freedom that engineers have to push the boundaries in terms of raw functionality.

These two states—interdependence versus modularity—exist on a continuum, but it seems to me that we may be at a crossroads right now in the blended-learning world between the two.

On the one hand, several blended-learning programs are continuing to use curriculum from one online provider, and although it doesn’t give them the customization they may prefer ideally, its simplicity and reliability are worth the tradeoff. Carpe Diem schools and the Flex Academies exemplify this–and neither seems to be complaining nearly as much about the technology.

On the other hand, increasing numbers of schools are adopting blended-learning models that have each student working with multiple software providers within one subject. But from their complaints, they appear to be pushing the industry toward modularity perhaps a bit before it is ready to shift and are therefore dealing with the corresponding headaches of a still immature technology.

At least one blended-learning school, Summit Public Schools, is partnering to build its own solution to the problem and use content from different sources to support the new competency-based learning model it is developing, which seems like a smart backward integration. Those demanding customized solutions seem to be running into headwinds. The fact that each of the schools has a unique model with different needs and requirements exacerbates the problem, as firm standards around which to coalesce just don’t exist yet.

Furthermore, some approaches to solving the problem seem unlikely to bear fruit. Standards are almost never negotiated among companies with proprietary architectures in an industry because the negotiations occur within a context where the representatives have the mindset of representing their proprietary architecture and trying not to get gored by the process. Much more likely it seems in the blended-learning world will be the emergence of a platform—like Khan Academy—on which lots of users write content that use the standards of the platform, as opposed to forcing a retro-fitting. The standards will emerge in de facto fashion, as schools vote with their feet—or clicks.

We’ll of course see how it ultimately plays out. For now though, the grumbling around the online-learning technology not being quite good enough is likely to be a refrain that we all ought to get used to hearing for at least a couple more years.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry originally appeared on Forbes.com

Quite a lot I believe.

A couple weekends ago I had the privilege of presenting at TEDx Manhattan Beach where I heard another presenter, Dr. John Ratey, speak about the importance of physical exercise in increasing brain plasticity and boosting student learning. His book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, details the connection.

Although I normally write about digital learning’s potential to transform our education, as a Crossfit enthusiast myself, I believe in the importance of living a healthy life with physical exercise.

One of the biggest misconceptions about the rise of online learning is that a student’s schooling will be spent primarily in front of a computer, with a student clicking away relentlessly as though she were playing eight hours of video games a day.

This couldn’t be further from the truth, however, if the rise of online learning fulfills its potential and creates a truly student-centric education system—which should be the ultimate goal.

As I’ve traveled around the country observing blended-learning schools, the ones I’ve been most struck by are those that give individual students the proper flexibility so that they can have the right experience they need when they need it to boost their success—both in that moment and in life. In the future of education, digital learning should be the platform that facilitates each student having a customized learning experience for her distinct learning needs—whether that experience is online or offline.

Carpe Diem Collegiate Middle and High School, one of my favorite blended-learning models, has no physical education class. Instead the school has what might be described as a fitness center with an on-site trainer who works with each student not on random mandatory athletic units but instead on a tailored program for how to live a healthy life. When students are growing antsy at their desks and need to get some physical exercise to let off some steam and reboot for more learning, they have the autonomy to go to the gym and work out.

The Silicon Valley Flex Academy, which has several elements of what I think the future of schooling will look like, is located across the parking lot from a Crossfit gym. The school has contemplated a formal partnership with the Crossfit affiliate to offer the students a Crossfit for Kids program, which, in my opinion, would be far superior to the gym classes offered at most schools.

My biggest personal surprise in online learning came several years ago when I learned that one of the more popular classes that the Florida Virtual School offers is online physical education. I struggled to imagine what this might mean, but what I ultimately learned is that the class involves a teacher working with each individual student on her daily fitness routine (from running to lifting to playing team sports) to realize her fitness goals and live a healthy life. Recalling my own experience in middle school PE, I could see the immediate benefits of having this sort of an experience instead of an awkward communal one that teaches a student virtually nothing about living a healthy life—and may even discourage that by creating negative associations with physical exercise.

It’s not just physical exercise that should see a healthier balance with the rise of digital learning, but lots of activities. Many schools are increasingly using blended learning to free teachers up to spend more time working with students in project-based learning. I’ve been struck by how much students collaborate with each other naturally—often peer tutoring each other—in the blended-learning schools I’ve visited. Whereas “socialization” often appears to me to be a negative thing in many schools, in blended-learning schools the social interactions appear to me to be far healthier and around helping each student improve. I don’t have hard data on this, but it’s my observation that this is one of the exciting—and often unintended—effects of using a blended-learning model.

To this end, when many people think about full-time virtual schools, one of their biggest fears is about students in their younger years. They ask how could students possibly have a fully online experience when they are so young. What are the downsides of spending so much time in front of a computer? The answer is that in the programs of which I’m aware, most of the learning for students in the younger years is actually offline—with books and manipulatives. The online learning mostly serves as the platform that helps the student’s family communicate with the student’s teacher and individualizes the learning, in addition to providing some exercises and games to build some basic skills.

In an age where the arts, athletics, and other so-called extracurricular activities are increasingly on the chopping block in public schools, digital learning ought to change the equation. Various blended-learning models, for example, should create more flexibility and free up more funds so that schools can offer an array of experiences, including physical exercise.

According to Ratey’s research, that’s something we can’t afford to lose if we’re serious about boosting student achievement. Student-centric digital learning provides a means to make sure that it doesn’t fall by the wayside.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry first appeared on Forbes.com

Behind the Headline
Game Changer
Education Next| Fall 2012

A new education technology start-up called Hallway is being launched by students at an elite Virginia high school (TJ), reports Steven Overly in the Washington Post. It’s an online portal where students can submit questions on school subjects that their peers can answer. Students can then rate which questions and answers are most helpful. The idea grew out of Facebook groups that allowed students to communicate about assignments; the founder of the new venture says that the Facebook groups taught him that students learn best from collaborating with peers in an online environment.

An article in the Fall 2012 issue of Ed Next by Michael Horn looks at the growth of “social learning” sites like Hallway. “if you place the word ‘social’ in front of nearly anything these days, you can get a meeting in Silicon Valley,” Horn writes. (see “Game Changer”)

Another article in the Fall 2012 issue of Ed Next coincidentally looks at elite high schools like Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a selective school that the founders of Hallway attend. (see “Exam Schools from the Inside”)

-Education Next

According to reports, such as this one in eSchool News, the effort in Peru has largely been a flop. The initiative cost the government more than $200 million. One person quoted in the story even wonders if it may have even widened the gaps between rich and poor students in the country.

Ouch.

Yet this was entirely predictable ahead of time.

All too often advocates for education technology have extolled its benefits without recognizing that technology alone will not transform education. Technology by itself does not transform anything in any sector. What tends to matter far more is the model in which the technology is used.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative in particular gathered significant publicity and hype for its admirable goals, but people implementing it in many countries appeared not to have thought through the professional development teachers would need or, even more importantly, a redesign of the schooling model itself to leverage the considerable benefits that digital learning can deliver.

We have seen this movie before, both inside and outside education. As we wrote in Disrupting Class, for a couple decades we spent aggressively on equipping classrooms with computers in the United States—well over $60 billion by a conservative estimate—without significant gains to show for it. Like most established organizations in other sectors, the education system’s inclination when it sees a potentially disruptive technology is to cram it into its existing model to sustain what it is already doing, but not fundamentally transform that model into a student-centric one (the importance of making this transformation should be clearer in light of the ACT’s announcement today that 60 percent of 2012 high school graduates are at risk of not succeeding in college and career).

Where technology has helped transform education—in online learning (both at a distance and in blended-learning models)—it is because it has been implemented in a new learning model. Carpe Diem Schools provide a great example; their schools look nothing like a traditional school and their flagship school has achieved dramatic results for students.

The inclination to use technology as a sustaining innovation has not just been true with computers. There is a long history of schools using technologies to, in effect, sustain the chalkboard and prop up the 20^th-century factory model classroom with the teacher in front of 20 to 30 students of the same age. The recent hype over electronic white boards has been only the latest incarnation of this, as the images from my blog here make clear.

When we finally learn that technology alone won’t transform education—even as it will almost certainly be a critical ingredient in the transformation—we’ll be in a much better place. Districts spending wildly on iPads and other devices should take note. Peru can attest to that.

-Michael Horn

This blog entry originally appeared on Forbes.com

Looking to boost the numbers of students attaining a high-quality and affordable postsecondary credential, the Foundation announced $9 million worth of grants to support innovators inside and outside of the postsecondary establishment.

In secondary schools, the Foundation gave $1.2 million to the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) for its Wave III effort to fund secondary schools that use blended learning to support personalized learning for students at an affordable price that is scalable ($3.3 million of the $9 million for postsecondary actually went to NGLC as well to fund four breakthrough postsecondary models).

In my travels and conversations with people from around the country, I’m often struck by how much more K-12 public schools are seizing online learning to transform education than most people realize—or than I think statistics would even capture.

As a reviewer for the NGLC secondary school models, which seeks to not just fund those schools using online learning but those really taking their approach the extra mile with innovative, push-the-envelope student-centric designs, I have been struck further by how much blended learning has arrived. We reviewed exciting applications from charters and districts whose leaders were truly thinking outside the box in different ways. In their applications, there was an emerging familiarity with using a common language to talk about blended learning, which, given our work in defining different blended-learning models, is gratifying to see. As Andy Calkins, deputy director of NGLC said in an email to me, “These attributes [of blended learning] are starting to be commonly understood to be the hallmarks of next generation learning, at least among those keeping their eye on trends in the unfolding future of K-12 education.”

What will now be most interesting of course is seeing the actual execution of these schools’ plans—as always, the devil is in the details in education. Some of these school models open up this fall while others will open in the fall of 2013. Another question is if these models can scale. Calkins suggests that more thought and creativity is still needed here. The applicants are, in his words, creating great working models of blended learning 2.0 schools, but NGLC is more than just about creating a series of proof points, as it is focused on helping the models it funds scale aggressively.

Stay tuned to the grant winners: Academy 21 at Franklin Central Supervisory Union in Vermont, which is focused on a high-need, predominantly rural community; Cornerstone Charter Schools in Michigan, which seeks to prepare Detroit students for college and health-focused careers; Da Vinci Schools in California, which will integrate blended learning, early college, and real-world experiences with its existing project-based learning approach; Education Achievement Authority in Michigan, which, as part of the statewide turnaround authority is trying to create a student-centric system for students in Detroit; Match Education in Massachusetts, which already operates high-performing schools in Boston and will now focus on using technology to increase the effectiveness of its one-on-one tutoring; Schools for the Future in Michigan, which will serve students significantly below grade level; Summit Public Schools in California, which aims to build off its experiments in blended-learning models to launch a competency-based school; and Venture Academies in Minnesota, which is a new charter organization that will focus on accelerated college credit attainment and cultivation of entrepreneurial leadership.

In the postsecondary space, the Gates Foundation made a number of grants—both directly and through NGLC—to intriguing ventures with the potential to improve education dramatically, including some of my disruptive favorites: start-up MyCollege Foundation, which will establish a non-profit college that blends adaptive online learning solutions with other services at a low cost; University of the People, the world’s first tuition-free, non-profit, online academic institution dedicated to opening access to higher education globally; New Charter University, a competency-based university that charges only $199 per month for students seeking a degree and for which NGLC will fund a research study of its online students and a comparative one of students enrolled in a blended-learning environment delivered through a partnership with the Community College of the District of Columbia; Southern New Hampshire University, which under its President Paul LeBlanc has already created an autonomous online division and will now pioneer the “Pathways Project,” which will offer a self-paced and student-centric associates degree; and MIT, which will use the funds to create a free prototype computer science online course for edX.

As with the secondary-school models, the proof in many of these cases is yet to come, but it is exciting to see a foundation step up and take some risks to reinvent learning to create dramatically better and lower-cost learning experiences for all students.

This blog entry originally appeared on Forbes.com

From the Journal

“Can Khan Move the Bell Curve to the Right?”
By June Kronholz
(Spring 2012)

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“The Flipped Classroom”
By Bill Tucker
(Winter 2012)

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“Getting At-Risk Teens to Graduation”
By June Kronholz
(Fall 2011)

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“Future Schools”
By Jonathon Schorr and Deb McGriff
(Summer 2011)

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“Florida’s Online Option”
By Bill Tucker
(Summer 2009)

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From the Blog

“Bright Spots Shine in Blended, Online Learning”
By Michael Horn
(3/1/2012, ednext blog)

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“How Digital Learning Can and Must Help Excellent Teachers Reach More Children”
By Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel
(9/13/2011, EdNext Blog)

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“Why Digital Learning Will Liberate Teachers”
By Michael Horn
(8/10/2011, EdNext Blog)

In the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next, June Kronholz wrote about Performance Learning Centers (PLCs), high schools use blended learning to help at-risk kids recover credits and make their way to graduation.

In the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next, Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff wrote about some other schools using blended learning in “Future Schools.”

Little did they know, at the beginning of the 21^st century soldiers across the ocean would be able to read their kids a bedtime story via Skype or Facetime.  Questions would be answered with a simple Google search.  Music would be downloaded straight to your phone with the click of a button.  And kids in rural Nebraska would learn physics from engineers in Japan without leaving their 11^th grade classroom.

Most schools around the nation operate the same way today as they did a century ago.  They have the same schedule, the same classrooms, the same grade levels, the same teachers, and the same courses. With the ring of a bell, students move to the next subject, and the cycle starts all over again.

What if we were to channel our inner Hanna-Barbera, and visualize what public education should look like in the digital age?

I submit we would have an education system focused on student learning.  No arbitrary schedules or seat-time requirements.  Just learning.  Each student at his or her own pace, according to their learning style.

Interactive and adaptive learning technologies can allow students to learn in their own style and at their own pace.  This means no student gets bored and no student gets left behind.  Teachers are no longer forced to use textbooks that become outdated the moment they leave the printer.

Digital learning can provide real-time data so teachers can differentiate instruction with laser-like precision.  Data brings a level of efficiency to both teaching and learning that will improve both the experience of education as well as the outcome.

Imagine with me an education system where a student’s homework is listening to their teacher’s lecture, and class time is spent working through the military genius of Napoleon by using the latest GPS mapping software?

Or it might be a 10^th grader in his backyard, at the picnic table, diving into his chemistry lesson via his mobile tablet.  He gets so caught up in what he is learning that two hours go by before he even looks up.

It could be a 5^th grader whose classroom consists of students from several grade levels engaging in an interactive learning environment where grammar skills and concepts are practiced through gaming.  After providing an overview lesson on sentence structure and basic concepts, her teacher works with each student individually, based on their specific needs.

This modernized education system cares less about HOW she learns sentence structure as long as she learns it.

When a student masters the course concepts and skills, they have the opportunity to advance to the next level.  Some students might advance in 3 months, some in 9 months, and – potentially – some would advance after a year.  The bell would no longer control public education in our country.  The focus moves from how long it takes to master the content to simply making sure students master it – period! There would be no need for end-of-year tests, but only end-of-course tests.

What I do know is that our education system will not modernize itself without leadership.  We need state, district, and school leaders who can see this vision and have the courage to make the changes necessary to support student-centered learning.  These leaders should focus their efforts on moving to a competency-based education that requires students to demonstrate mastery of the material, ending the archaic practice of seat-time, funding education based on achievement instead of attendance, eliminating the all too common practice of restricting students to district boundaries, and removing barriers to effective, high quality instruction.

Digital learning levels the playing field. No matter where you live or what school district you are assigned to, technology provides the opportunity to access knowledge and resources students and educators need.

Ask any teacher what their students spend most of their time doing in the halls, not to mention during class, and they will tell you that their kids are always on their smartphones – for academic as well as social reasons.  We are already on the 4^th version of the iPhone, but very little thought has been given to the need for public education 2.0.

If each student was given the opportunity to learn at their own pace with an education plan customized to their individual needs, then each and every student would achieve his or her God-Given potential for learning. They would all be prepared for success in the 21^st century economy.

Hanna-Barbera had the courage to visualize 100 years into the future.  The technology is available, just waiting to be utilized. Do we have the courage to act today?

-Jeb Bush

Jeb Bush is the chairman of the Foundation for Florida’s Future and Foundation for Excellence in Education.  This blog first appeared on redefinED.

Computers, I figured, would continue to be useful to scientists and engineers and others with complex calculations to make. Cell phones would function like traditional telephones, only portable. The internet (whether or not Al Gore had anything to do with it) was for emailing and such. And “information technology” was sort of like engineering, a field for wonky college students wanting to write computer code. K-12 education might benefit marginally from bits of all this but mainly would sail on like a clipper ship of yore, powered by the same winds that had always propelled it.

Well, I was wrong. But this confession isn’t just another paean to the potential of online learning. That’s there, of course, and real. What has struck me more, however, is the number of contemporary education problems to which technology offers at least a partial solution—but only if we can picture it holistically, not simply as a tool for doing one thing or another.

Let me illustrate with five major-league challenges in today’s K-12 reform world—noting in advance that this could as easily be a list of twenty-five.

Formative and summative assessments
Old-fashioned assessments consume much valuable class-time, are either simple-minded in construction or labor intensive to evaluate, rarely work well across a broad range of students (it takes far too many questions to differentiate at the low and high ends as well as in the middle), and their turnaround is too slow to yield useful information when you really need it. (A major reason for the failure of “public school choice” under NCLB is that nobody knew for sure before August or September whether their kids had the right to change schools that year.)

Computer-adaptive assessments combined with computerized scoring, including open-response and even essay-type questions, could go a long way toward salving all those bruises.

Teacher evaluations
It’s understandable why teachers don’t want to be judged on the basis of a single year-end test or by the difference in student scores between a pair of year-end tests. It’s unfair and inadequate in a dozen ways, and even more so once you get outside the realm of English language arts and math in grades three through eight. Indeed, it’s no better than having the principal pop in for a few minutes once or twice a year.

Technology, however, makes it possible to record, retrieve, and evaluate entire portfolios of student work, daily and weekly learning outcomes, and a host of teacher practices and behaviors, all of them able to be analyzed, reviewed, and discussed at multiple points during the school year—and indeed over multiple years.

Weighted student funding (WSF)
As with most major reforms of school finance, doing WSF right entails complex formulas, oft-changing allocations of money (when a kid shifts schools, for example, or moves to the next grade, or her needs change), sophisticated building-level budgeting, and the integration of dollars from multiple sources that carry different requirements.

Technology can’t solve all those problems—deciding what weight to assign to which conditions, for example—but it can surely simplify the managing and tracking of dollars, the amalgamation of amounts from different programs, and the budget challenges that arise at every level of the system.

Quality education choices for every child
What does school choice mean in rural America? For a child who is unusually gifted in, say, physics, but also wants to play the violin? For a parent whose kid is theoretically free to change schools but who cannot access reliable information by which to evaluate the options? For a youngster who had to drop out to work at a day job or help with baby care but who wants to complete that diploma?

Technology doesn’t guarantee that good information will lead families to make educationally sound school choices but at least it removes the “How was I to know?” excuse for bad choices. It can beam lessons to kids who live on mountaintops or accompany their parents to Thailand. It can be accessed 24/7. It can augment the course offerings of brick-and-mortar schools. And it creates the possibility of changing schools just by inserting a different URL into one’s browser.

Parent engagement
How do we draw parents more deeply into the education of their daughters and sons and turn them into partners with teachers and counselors? It’s not easy—but instant, painless communication between school and home is a big help. So is the ability of Mom and Dad to access their child’s homework assignment, see her test results, retrieve a weekly report on what she did and didn’t learn, even watch her behavior in class in real time (or when convenient.)

One could indeed go on, as these examples really are just slices of the possible. Note that I didn’t even get to individualization of instruction, special ed, saving money, or myriad other potential benefits of technology when used properly in the K-12 context.

Note, though, that pulling off this kind of transformation isn’t like adding a new program to school-as-we-know-it. It’s no bandage. It’s more like heart-lung transplant surgery. Which is exactly how we tend not to think about education reform—and is exactly what engenders fear and loathing in traditional educators, whether because major surgery is just plain scary or because they’re worried about their jobs or just because they’re not too comfortable with technology themselves.

Realizing the promise of technology for American K-12 education is going to be really hard. Misused, it could even aggravate some of today’s education woes. But if we go at it comprehensively, the payoff will justify the struggle. With apologies to Ralph Tyler, it will make the change wrought by the overhead projector resemble that produced by the paperclip.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This post originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

Behind the Headline
Future Schools
Education Next | Summer 2011

In a special issue of the Washington Monthly, Bill Tucker writes about “stealth assessment,” the use of formative assessments built into the learning process which allow teachers to keep tabs on learning continuously. As he describes the process

students would spend their time in the classroom solving problems, mastering complex projects, or even conducting experiments, as many of them do now. But they’d do much of it through a technological interface: via interactive lessons and simulations, digital instruments, and, above all, games. Information about an individual student’s approach, persistence, and problem-solving strategies, in addition to their record of right and wrong answers, would be collected over time, generating much more detailed and valid evidence about a student’s skills and knowledge than a one-shot test. And all the while, these sophisticated systems would adapt, constantly updating to keep the student challenged, supported, and engaged.

Tucker notes that one glimpse of this future can be found at School of One, a personalized learning program in New York City. In the Summer 2011 issue of Ed Next, Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff wrote about School of One and other schools that blend online and face-to-face learning.

The president said the study showed that we need new resources and policies to “keep good teachers on the job and reward the best ones.” But does the work of the Chetty team justify strong policy interventions? Do school board members need to peruse Education Next’s reader-friendly version of this econometric study, then take appropriate steps to replace weak teachers with high performers?

A number of commentators think not. “The differences produced by the high value-added teachers are relatively small,” Diane Ravitch tells her readers. Maria Bustillos objects to “firing ‘weaker’ teachers for the sake of a barely perceptible increase in students’ ‘lifetime income.’” Sherman Dorn says the effects are only “moderate.”

For these commentators, apparently, teachers are made of the same ticky-tacky that was used to build those identical “little boxes on the hillside” about which folksinger Malvina Reynolds crooned back in the 1960s. The people in those tickytacky houses were all made out of “ticky-tacky,” she warbled, and “they come out all the same.”

The Reynolds melody was as catchy as her words, and every adolescent was soon whistling it. But, fortunately, great teachers have always ignored such nonsense. They passionately care about the lives and education of each individual student—even when they know that the rewards come slowly.

Education is a long, measured process. Good parents start the education of their children the minute they are born, even though the payoff is years away. It is even more so with teachers, as they work with students for fewer hours a day.

Nonetheless, a top-notch teacher, as compared to a typical one, can over the course of a year raise student performance by as much as a third of a year’s worth of learning.

But despite those gains, salaries earned at age 28 are only $182 more, or 1 percent higher, for students who have experienced a year of great teaching. When the payoff is so low, why should we care whether schools keep their good teachers? Why should we bother asking bad teachers to find another job?

The answer is simple: One percent gains seem small, but they add up in the same way those saved Ben Franklin pennies do. Just 1 percent of additional income from one year in a room with a great teacher adds up to $25,000 over the typical wage earner’s lifetime. Extrapolating out to 10 years of excellent instruction, one can hazard the claim that the opportunity to enjoy consistently high-level instruction bolsters lifetime income by a quarter of a million dollars. That just about justifies the handsome tuitions charged by high-quality private schools and the large sums parents pay to buy homes in neighborhoods with outstanding schools.

And a great teacher works with not just one student but has a substantial average impact on all 28 of those in the typical class the Chetty team studied. Over the space of just 10 years, a teacher affects the lives of 280 students. On average, a great teacher has an impact that adds up to nothing short of $7 million. When the future is discounted at the standard rate, the annual value of the great teacher, relative to the typical one, drops to around a quarter of a million dollars, the number President Obama used.

Admittedly, some of these numbers are extrapolations and all are subject to error. But there is no justification for all teachers to be paid an identical salary as long as they have the same meaningless credentials and have spent the same number of years in the classroom. It’s time for school districts to stop treating teachers as if they were ticky-tacky—little boxes, sitting in the classroom, all teaching just the same.

But what has received less attention is how digital learning could have improved Jobs’s own educational experience.

In the early pages of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, however, how a different education system—a competency-based one powered by digital learning—could have helped Jobs screams from the pages.

From the book: “Even before Jobs started elementary school, his mother had taught him how to read. This, however, led to some problems once he got to school. ‘I was kind of bored for the first few years, so I occupied myself by getting into trouble.’”

In other words, because today’s education system is a monolithic one—where students learn the same thing on the same day in the same way regardless of their individual needs—Jobs had to repeat things he already knew because that’s where the rest of the class was. Naturally he lost the zeal and motivation for school and therefore acted out, as there were few opportunities for him to realize real progress and feel successful.

“’Look, it’s not his fault,’ Paul Jobs [his father] told the teachers, his son recalled. ‘If you can’t keep him interested, it’s your fault.’”

This charge at teachers perhaps isn’t altogether fair, although it’s on to something; it really was the fault of the system itself. Most teachers have a nearly impossible task, as they are told to deliver a curriculum in the course of a year and somehow manage 20 to 30 children, who are all in different places and have different learning needs at different times.

A far better system for Jobs—and for every child—would have been a student-centric one that could naturally and affordably customize for each child’s needs.

That said, one teacher, Imogene Hill, seemed to be able to deliver the goods for Jobs in 4^th grade.  To regain his interest, she had to use a little extrinsic motivation first.

“After watching him for a couple of weeks, she figured that the best way to handle him was to bribe him. ‘After school one day, she gave me this workbook with math problems in it, and she said, ‘I want you to take it home and do this.’ And I thought ‘Are you nuts?’ And then she pulled out one of these giant lollipops that seemed as big as the world. And she said, ‘When you’re done with it, if you get it mostly right, I will give you this and five dollars. And I handed it back within two days.’”

Soon, with the chance to be successful and make progress at hand, intrinsic motivation kicked in, which appears to echo some of Harvard Professor Roland Fryer Jr.’s research findings.

“After a few months, he no longer required the bribes. ‘I just wanted to learn and to please her.’”

Jobs recounted that she became “one of the saints of my life.”

But she alone couldn’t solve the more systematic problem at hand in the education system, nor can we continue to have an education system that relies on the anomalies—superheroes who ignore the system’s bad incentives.

Isaacson’s book supplies some evidence for why.

“Near the end of fourth grade, Mrs. Hill had Jobs tested.” According to Jobs, he scored at the high school sophomore level. “Now that it was clear, not only to himself and his parents but also to his teachers, that he was intellectually special, the school made the remarkable proposal that he skip two grades and go right into seventh; it would be the easiest way to keep him challenged and stimulated. His parents decided, more sensibly, to have him skip only one grade. The transition was wrenching. He was a socially awkward loner who found himself with kids a year older.”

And herein lies a real problem. Today’s education system forces us to make cruel tradeoffs. On the one hand, we can keep children with their age-level peers and friends regardless of academic fit—which may involve social promotion regardless of whether a student has mastered a subject or holding a student back even if she is capable of taking on much more difficult concepts. On the other hand, we can hold a student back if he hasn’t mastered certain concepts, which will put him in an unfortunate social position, or, if he has mastered the concepts already, we can have him skip grade levels and meet Jobs’s social plight. Neither answer is a great one.

What a competency-based learning system powered by digital learning does is break the tradeoffs. A student can remain with her friends and peers while working on the objectives, projects, and courses most appropriate for her, regardless of what the others are doing because the online medium can naturally individualize the learning. A student moves on to a concept once she has mastered it, not when the calendar dictates that she move on. Each student owns her learning; accelerating through learning objectives isn’t hard to accommodate. The teacher is freed to add significantly more value by serving as a learning coach, mentor, and much more—including by bringing students together to have important discussions and apply their learning with other students at all levels of learning where that is appropriate.

This week I had the opportunity to visit a school, the Silicon Valley Flex Academy, that is mere miles from where Jobs grew up. It’s working to create a student-centric education system, and it breaks these tradeoffs. It’s too bad that it wasn’t around when Jobs went to school, but fortunately an increasing number of programs are bucking the system and working on doing the same.

Of course, Jobs ultimately survived the educational malpractice he faced, and he changed the world in significant ways. The curiosity was not beaten out of him—but only barely, he said. All too many children, however, don’t escape this—and it’s not just their loss. It’s ours, too.

I suspect that is one of the reasons that toward the end of his life, Jobs—along with Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and others—had set his sights on bringing some disruptive innovation to education, as Isaacson recounts. According to Jobs, “All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.”

Jobs had come around. He had realized that although technology had not improved the education system to this point, in the future, it could be a part of the answer to America’s education woes—a critical component in creating a student-centric system in which every child could realize her fullest human potential, not just the lucky ones.

- Michael Horn

This post originally appeared on Forbes

The questions addressed by the panel included:

Is digital learning education’s latest fad or its future?
What fundamental changes to the ways we fund, staff, and govern American schools are necessary to fulfill the technology’s potential?
Will policy tweaks suffice or do we need a total system overhaul—and a big change in the reform priorities that can bring this about?
Who will resist—and do their objections have merit?

If you missed the event, you can watch it above or read more about it here.

For more on this topic from Ed Next, please see

“Bright Spots Shine in Blended, Online Learning,” by Michael Horn

“Can Khan Move the Bell Curve to the Right?” by June Kronholz

“The Flipped Classroom,” by Bill Tucker

Is digital learning education’s latest fad or its future? What fundamental changes to the ways we fund, staff, and govern American schools are necessary to fulfill the technology’s potential? Will policy tweaks suffice or do we need a total system overhaul—and a big change in the reform priorities that can bring this about? Who will resist—and do their objections have merit? Fordham is bringing together experts on all aspects of education policy—from governance to finance to human capital—to examine how policymakers can make digital learning a transformative tool to improve American education…and weigh the dangers that lie ahead.

More information on the events and the panelists can be found here.

In the video, leaders from Rocketship and School of One discuss the advantages of digital learning while sharing their concerns about California laws and union regulations that have limited the role of online learning.

More about the book is available here.

HT: Joanne Jacobs

KIPP Empower Academy is a Los Angeles-based elementary school that opened in 2010. It currently serves kindergarteners and 1st graders, and it plans to grow by one grade each year up to 4th grade. A blended-learning school, students rotate between individualized online-learning, and small-group stations within each classroom. In the school’s first year, its now 1st-grade students experienced some notable results. As reported on its website, “Though many students at KIPP Empower Academy entered kindergarten without basic letter and number recognition skills, by the end of the year, 98 percent were reading and performing math at or above the national average.” Not only that, but many students were also reading at a “2.5” grade level and performing math almost at the 3rd-grade level. And reported teacher satisfaction at the school was sky high.

Carpe Diem is a blended school based in Yuma, Ariz., which will be expanding beyond the state into Indiana in the next school year. The school, which serves grades 6 through 12, uses an individual-rotation model. In 35-minute increments students rotate from online learning for concept introduction and instruction to face-to-face for reinforcement and application. In 2010, Carpe Diem ranked first in its county in student performance in math and reading and ranked among the top 10 percent of Arizona charter schools.

The Los Altos School District began using the Khan Academy last year in a handful of 5th-grade and two 7th-grade classrooms to blend its math learning. This year the district has incorporated Khan Academy into its math curriculum for all 5th- through 8th-grade students—about 1,000 in all. With Khan Academy, teachers are able to individualize learning for each child based on real-time data. The blended-learning environment in Los Altos schools allows for seamless targeted intervention and flexible groupings, as well as real collaboration among students—all of which allows them to exercise their own student voice and choice.

Quakertown Community School District (QCS) is a traditional school district in Pennsylvania that has embraced the power of online learning to create a “self-blend” learning environment for students. All students in grades 6 through 12 have the option to take one or more online courses, and district teachers teach all the courses with the exception of those, like Mandarin, where there is no certified teacher available within the district. Two district teachers are responsible for only online courses, and roughly 75 percent of all QCS teachers are responsible for at least one online course. Courses are asynchronous; students can work on their assignments at any time during the day. Many students take advantage of this option in order to work around vocational programs, work schedules, and extracurricular interests. Some take these classes at home, and others work on them during free periods during the school day. There are designated areas in the high schools and middle schools, called cyber lounges, where students can work comfortably in a cafe setting between their face-to-face classes. The online courses allow students to move at their own pace and complete courses based on competency rather than being tethered to the traditional semester timeline.

Most powerfully, students in the district have produced a number of videos that speak to the power of the district’s approach, from the advantages of online learning from students’ point of view to the perspective of a face-to-face and online teacher, as well as a video that summarizes the district’s positive and improving student outcomes.

*  *  *

For more video viewing of blended-learning schools, I also recommend checking out the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools BLAST school, which is turning heads in Los Angeles.

This post originally appeared at Forbes.com

Getting Smart: How Digital Learning Is Changing the World

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

“The revolution is on,” Tom Vander Ark declares in this review of digital learning circa 2011. With long experience in education, including time as a superintendent in Washington State, officer with the Gates Foundation, and CEO of Open Education Solutions, not to mention an endorsement from the former governor of West Virginia, Bob Wise, Vander Ark outlines the current moment as a welcome and overdue threshold in primary and secondary education. On one page alone he repeats, “The learning revolution underway is the shift from print to digital…,” “The revolution will yield powerful learning platforms…,” “The revolution will yield a new generation of schools…,” and “The learning revolution is underway but progress will be lumpy….”

As the subtitle indicates, we stand at a critical moment, and there is good reason for optimism, given the ways in which digital technology can customize learning and dismantle the old calendars and spaces of schooling. Extraordinary innovations have arrived—online curricula, learning games, customized play-lists—and they are ready for implementation across the land if only educators and public officials break with standard procedure and embrace them. It’s time to “get smart,” and hence this 10-chapter exhortation on the efficacious future. Every few pages Vander Ark adds a bold prediction sidebar: “In five years…Information from keystroke data will unlock the new field of motivation research…,” “In five years…Most learning platforms will feature a smart recommendation engine, similar to iTunes Genius…,” and “In five years…Science will confirm the obvious about how most boys learn and active learning models will be developed in response using expeditions, playlists, and projects.”

He accumulates rousing examples of individuals and institutions in breakthrough practice:

• students tapping into iTunes U, compiling e-portfolios, and editing web sites

• peer-to-peer learning sites and learning games such as Mangahigh

• online organizations such as K12 and School of One that replace wasteful “seat-in-class” time with customized learning time

• social networking that “will augment and then replace the classroom as the dominant organizing unit”

Experts, too, assert the radical advances of digital tools, such as Tom Chatfield, author of Fun Inc.: Why Gaming Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century, who says of games, “I’m in awe at their power to motivate, to compel us, to transfix us, like really nothing else we’ve ever invented has quite done before.” Vander Ark encapsulates the advent in a simple formula: “It changes everything when anyone can learn anything almost anywhere.”

As the effusions pile up, however, one wonders about how much the enthusiasm obscures some circumstances that complicate Vander Ark’s bold and sanguine vision. After all, broad, well-funded digital initiatives such as Maine’s statewide laptop program for middle schoolers have been around for a decade, and yet their academic impact has proven disappointing again and again. And Vander Ark affirms that social media “can help build a common culture and help make sense of a confusing world—and increasingly so for school communities,” but all he says about the dark side of social networking among teens—including excess peer pressure and gossip, sexting and bullying, cheating—is, “Some of their reasons for connecting will not be as noble as we’d like, so we’ll need to stay on top of this.”

These conditions don’t change the overall potential of digital learning, but more acknowledgment of them sustains a more sober, less partisan advocacy. Without it, Vander Ark slips too often into dramatic predictions and platitudes. He announces, “If we can help enough people get smart, I believe we can confront the challenge of climate change, public health, peace, and security,” as if smart people never pollute the earth or start wars. After glimpses of three bright kids learning online in creative ways, Vander Ark writes, “These portraits represent how millions of students could be learning with tools that are currently available to schools,” as if the cases of three prove millions more. And the trick of motivating kids, he says, has been found: “Any thirteen-year-old could tell you the answer. It’s game designers”—a too pat and blunt answer.

All this hype and prophecy is unnecessary. The digital future is here, and its main educational advantage, the individualization of learning, is recognized by everyone. At this point, the pressing questions are practical: how much it costs, how to overcome bureaucracy, for example. Vander Ark does include an appendix of concrete advice, such as urging state leaders to allow students to personalize their learning and base matriculation on demonstrated competency, not on seat time, but these are precisely the points to expound in the main text, not stick in an appendix. We don’t need any more puffy announcements of youth liberation, such as “This greater self-awareness and freedom brings with it new responsibilities and opportunities for students to better advocate for themselves.” And overdone assertions, such as “games have the motivational power to help us change the world,” don’t mean anything to public officials. What we need is sound evidence, presented without hyperbole, of scalable and cost-effective digital programs that yield higher reading, writing, and math achievement.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Any time a high school student takes a course from a district other than the one where they live, a portion of Utah’s state aid shifts from the home district to the district providing the course online.

A district with a brilliant slate of online suddenly has the chance to solve its fiscal problems the easy way.

I learned about the Utah experiment at a conference held at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and sponsored by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. While the details of the Utah experiment were not discussed, the basic idea is certainly intriguing.

No longer must students in rural Utah be denied the opportunity to take physics, chemistry, computer science or an esoteric language simply because the local district cannot afford teachers for courses with small enrollments.

No longer must a student in Utah take a social studies course from a teacher the student finds boring and unhelpful.

No longer must a student who cannot attend school on a daily basis—either because he or she is sick, or pregnant, or feels bullied, or wants to train for an Olympic sport—be denied the opportunity to maintain a regular schedule that will lead to a timely graduation.

Some find the policy unfair to smaller school districts, which lack the resources to create online courses.  To keep the playing field level, they say, each district should be allowed to provide online courses only to their own students. That way state aid would continue to flow to the district bearing the expenses associated with facilities management, extracurricular activities, transportation, the school lunch program, the guidance counselors, and much more.

If only a few students take just one or two online courses, the new policy may not pose too heavy a burden, but if student demand for courses outside their own high schools escalates rapidly, the inter-district competition could prove to be seriously disruptive for some districts.

One solution would be for the state to fund online courses outside the home district at something other than the full amount—perhaps at the 50 or 60 percent level.  The remainder would go to the home district. If Utah is not doing that already, it might consider an amendment along these lines.

If small districts want to keep all of their state aid, they should be able to save on upfront costs by contracting their online courses offerings out to other providers.  Florida Virtual School is already marketing such courses nationwide, and both commercial and university providers can be expected to follow, if they are compensated for each course taken.

Of course, there could be a race to the bottom, as each district looks for the cheapest provider.  If tests are easy, some students might be tempted to take a course no matter how poorly it is constructed.

Clearly, some kind of industry or state vetting of courses is needed if online learning is not to become the latest fad to go wrong.

Exactly how Utah is solving these problems is something I plan to share with you in a future post.  For now, I simply want to herald the idea of inter-district competition in the online world.  Whatever problems it may pose for some districts, it is hard to see why district needs should be put ahead of student ones.

If digital learning is to advance beyond the pilot stage, it needs to work within the current system of public education, not against it.  Public school districts have a legitimacy unrivalled by any other institution in American education. Whether digital learning is blended into the classroom or offered online, or both, districts have to be part of the action.

The solution is to put districts into competition with one another within an overall framework that maintains course quality.  If that is done, then it will only take two or three entrepreneurial districts to convince the remainder that they need to adjust if they are to keep their students from slipping away, one by one, course by course.

I shall report later on the specifics of the Utah experiment.  For now, I simply want to herald the general concept.  Putting districts in charge of online learning, while allowing them to contract out to private providers if they wish, creates a competitive marketplace within a legitimate political framework.  If properly implemented so as to maintain course quality and integrity, it can give all students, no matter what their racial, ethnic, or religious background, no matter what their place of residence, an opportunity to take well-designed courses offered under the direction of truly high quality teachers, to be taken by students each at their own pace.

-Paul Peterson

Still, the chatter in various social media about the announcement extend two faulty themes that needlessly limit educational technology discussions.

The first misguided frame, expressed by Core Knowledge’s Robert Pondiscio in USA Today, is whether technology, in this case digital textbooks, is a “magic bullet.” Pondiscio is right: Of course it’s not and anybody who claims so is foolish. But debating this point gets us nowhere.

What’s most important to understand about the digital textbook effort is that it’s an opportunity to open up a large amount of existing public money that has been locked into use by a very small and closed set of publishers. Opening up classrooms to new technologies in no way guarantees that textbooks or digital instructional materials will be better. But, it does provide the opportunity to shift power to educators, offering the possibility for not only more customization by teachers, but also access to a greater array of better materials. And, smaller publishers, including those who offer free content, such as Core Knowledge, may finally have a chance to enter classrooms based on the strength of their content, rather than their distribution and sales teams.

The second faulty frame is the conspiratorial suspicion of nefarious intent: any technology initiative is just a cover for private profit-seeking. But let’s be serious. We wouldn’t be having this discussion around school modernization. Construction companies make a lot of money on educational projects. We understand though, that this is a reason to exercise strong oversight of public funds. It’s not a reason to oppose modernizing crumbling facilities.

In reality, opposition to digital textbooks cements corporate control of instructional materials. This is about technology-driven industry change. Again, our K-12 schools already spend billions each year on textbooks — almost all purchased from the same small set of publishers. New companies are surely aiming at these dollars, just as Google, Facebook, and Craigslist have siphoned off newspaper ad revenues. And, this industry change also opens the doors for open educational resources (OER) that can be freely shared and modified. This is the real battle, between new and old ways of doing business, open and closed, as seen in the recent debate over SOPA. If there’s a critique here, it’s that there was little sign of the OER community in either the FCC’s announcement or the “Digital Textbook Collaborative” that it convened.

Two more things you may have missed:

• TASC continued its Digital Learning Beyond School effort with a white paper and video that makes the case for using technology to help community educators and teachers engage students in learning anywhere at any time.
• My favorite article from yesterday’s coverage describes a collaboration between the University of Utah and Google that is helping kids with autism spectrum disorders to shine. (h/t @mcleod)

-Bill Tucker

It’s no surprise that, 28 years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, school-reform efforts have generated so little effect. Our schools have proven, over the past century, quite adept at resisting change.

Recent attempts to inject accountability and innovation have brought us to an important opportunity. No Child Left Behind helped add transparency, and Race to the Top (RttT) motivated states to rethink teacher evaluation, charter limits, and more. The Investing in Innovation fund (i3) has seeded some promising innovations and helped attract more private investment to public education.

But none of these initiatives hits at the reasons that education has proven itself so innovation-resistant: governance and compensation. Further, there is good reason to believe a third impediment—the absence of useful data—will persist even through the Common Core State Standards initiatives.

Finland serves as a model for many reformers. There is a single curriculum; teachers are well educated and well respected. Their system reflects Finnish ideals and builds on Finnish strengths, and their students score at the top of international tests like PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study).

But a top-down system will continue to be the wrong approach in this country, whether on a national or state level. It doesn’t reflect American values or culture, nor does it address the size, diversity, or income disparity of the United States. (Finland has half as many students as New York City, and only 13 percent live in poverty.) In a country of 300 million people, a top-down approach makes substantive change virtually impossible. To fix our schools, states have to stop trying to fix them; the quickest way to raise performance is command and control, but over the long run martial law does not even work well for generals.

States can create a more agile, more American, system of governance that eliminates impediments to improvement, empowers schools to innovate, and uses data to help families find the right schools for their children. The federal government should encourage them to do so.

None of the proposals below address the role of profitmaking companies in K‒12 education (though my bias might be clear, as I have run education companies for 30 years). It is important not to conflate marketplace with for-profit. It is also important to recognize that it takes time for deregulation and a newly formed marketplace to work. The breakup of AT&T and the telecommunications bill of 1986 did little to help consumers in the very short term, but they cleared the path for lower costs and technologies including the Internet and the cellphone. Occasionally efforts to create a marketplace don’t work at all, as happened with banking deregulation. As education is a public good and requires public funding, proposed structures should be measured by the incentives they will create for schools, districts, and teachers to produce great student outcomes at reasonable expense.

Empower Schools

Although our ultimate goal is a system of schooling that naturally evolves and improves, it’s important to keep in mind that the capacity for experimenting and innovating resides in individual schools, not in central offices. Under the current system of governance and funding, schools have too few resources and too little discretion for experimentation. Without the dollars to implement novel ideas and to discover what works and what doesn’t, most schools look for, at most, incremental improvement.

Right now, every state distributes state and federal funds to districts; in turn, the districts distribute funds to schools. Imagine that states instead channel funds directly to schools and require that the schools contract with a school support organization (SSO) for an array of services similar to what its district’s central office now provides (see Figure 1). There are many ways to implement such a plan, but the recent transition of New York City schools to its empowerment model might serve as a useful example, even though the city may be losing its resolve to change.

Ideally, existing school districts would be spun off as independent nonprofits and freed to compete with other districts, as well as with the new SSOs in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, for schools and dollars. University of Washington research professor Paul Hill and others have proposed variants of this concept.

Since most schools (especially those in small and wealthy districts) would probably keep their existing districts as their service providers at first, the initial shift would be subtle. But before long the roles and behavior of schools and districts would begin to change. Freed to choose a district or other SSO based on service, cost, and philosophy, schools would demand more for less, and SSOs would step up to pull schools away from their local districts and compete by differentiating themselves from their competitors. Perhaps they would charge less for similar services; perhaps they would deconstruct the services, providing only busing, technology, or financial/purchasing support. Eventually, districts and SSOs would also vie for schools based on their track records of learning outcomes.

Under this proposal, districts would become providers of services rather than owners of geographic zones. With their schools acting as clients rather than dependents, districts would be forced to compete for them, thereby becoming more innovative and cost-effective.

Concrete results would take a while to materialize, but they would come. The current system of big-district purchasing, for example, favors large textbook publishers, which play it safe. School-level purchasing—with proper financial controls—would allow smaller, more responsive companies to compete for business.

Charter schools are the one reform initiative of the past three decades that has addressed the issue of K–12 governance and gained some traction (some 5 percent of public schools are now charters). This proposal builds on some of the lessons learned from the charter school movement and would allow effective charter networks like Green Dot, KIPP, and North Star to operate as school support organizations on a level playing field with districts, with equal funding and authority. A great deal of innovation today is coming from charter networks; this change would encourage districts to match them.

Most states would need to implement significant initiatives to prepare school principals for their new role, and to recruit new principals with the right skills; education schools and programs like New Leaders for New Schools could participate in this effort. Further, states would need to balance power between districts and schools; for example, districts should have the power to reject association with a poorly performing school. Both schools and districts should be pushed to improve themselves and their products and services.

Accountability would become simple (and imperative) under this model. The newly empowered schools should live or die by their performance; similarly, SSOs would lose their customers if they proved unable to support high achievement (which is how the stock of K12, Inc., lost 40 percent of its value following a single critical article in the New York Times). Accountability goes hand in hand with empowerment; promoting one without the other will not succeed.

Empowering schools would also mean encouraging parental choice. After the district’s monopoly is broken up, it would be critical that states create intelligent, consumer-friendly systems to support parents in choosing their children’s schools. Any number of successful models exist, all of which would provide transparency and could be used to balance families’ desire for schools within reasonable distance with their desire for the right outcome.

This is not an easy change; further, many districts are already well run and don’t need change at all. But this proposal would remake the relationships between schools, districts, and states into a far more efficient and effective model, one that would increase agility and remove regulations that limit the autonomy of school leaders. (As Arizona congressman Jeff Flake once asked, “Who out there can sing their district fight song?”)

Offer Teachers a New Deal

Once we’ve empowered schools, we’re ready to address teacher compensation. Many people believe that teachers unions are a major cause of whatever they think is wrong with our schools. It’s not that simple; plenty of research suggests that districts without unions do not perform better than those that have unions, and are only slightly less expensive.

To be sure, pensions and tenure are huge impediments to organic change. But two parties signed the contracts putting them in place: the union, whose job is to get its members more pay for less work, and the district. It was the side representing kids—the districts and state legislatures—that failed. Demonizing unions and teachers is unfair and counterproductive.

The problem isn’t the total compensation; if anything, teachers are underpaid. It’s the structure of that compensation, a series of long-term obligations that severely limit agility while creating off–balance sheet debt that would make Wall Street blush. (According to district budget figures, New York City, for example, spends as much on teachers who no longer teach as on those who still do.)

Ending tenure without ending the current pension system would create some impossible pressures; teachers nearing certain vesting thresholds, for instance, would have a target on their backs. To create an agile system, states must end both tenure and pensions. We can take a big step down this road without reneging on commitments made to a generation of teachers who have accepted lower base salaries for long-term benefits. The starting point, in fact, is something many teachers would embrace.

States should give each teacher the right to choose an alternative contract that contains terms and benefits consistent with those in the private sector (e.g., an at-will contract with standard health-care benefits, 401k, etc.), and sits outside of the existing teacher pension system. Choosing this alternative contract would convert any existing pension to a lump-sum 401k contribution. In return, the new contract would have a far higher base salary; in fairness, states should require districts to hire an auditor to determine the savings that can be expected from each alternative contract teacher, and give that savings to the teacher as increased pay.

Under this plan, no current teachers would be forced to change their contracts. If a state chooses to implement this policy change on a school-by-school basis, teachers who choose the current traditional contract might be offered a transfer or be grandfathered, that is, allowed to continue under their current contract. But the alternative contract could be attractive: depending on the state or district, the expected pension-related savings over a standard contract could be as much as $25,000 per year per teacher. In New York City, for example, a teacher might choose her current contract and a $65,000 salary, or the alternative employment terms with a $90,000 salary but with no tenure guarantees. This change would not reduce costs overall, but it would begin to curb the practice of paying operating expenses with long-term, off–balance sheet debt.

Conversion specifics will vary by state; obviously, those with huge unfunded liabilities will have a tougher time finding an elegant solution to converting past pension obligations for teachers nearing vesting milestones. Some percentage of teachers will refuse to switch; every teacher who does switch, though, will reduce the scope of the long-term problem. Many teachers will prefer to have their retirement funds fully in their control, along with a higher base salary, over a pension subject to fierce political pressure.

So which teachers might choose the alternative contract? My hunch is that newer teachers, who would appreciate the extra cash, and high-performing teachers, who would be unconcerned about the decreased job security, would be likely converts. If that’s true, it’s probable that schools with the highest-need students (who traditionally have the least-experienced faculty) would be most likely to convert over to the new contract, and might thereby be able to attract higher-performing teachers.

Schools operating under the alternative contract would be free to evaluate teachers based on student performance and evaluation, as well as classroom observation and other evidence. These teachers could be empowered to shape their schools, by taking part in choosing the curricula they use in their classrooms and the formative assessments they use to measure student progress, for example. Giving teachers a voice in decisions that affect their work is a logical complement of recognizing and compensating them as professionals rather than as assembly-line workers.

Does this proposal solve the compensation problem? Not entirely, though it would take us halfway there. If we also clean up our accountability systems, we could compare the performance of teachers under each contract and adjust the compensation system to include performance metrics as appropriate.

Align Assessment to Curricula

For all their deficiencies, assessments of student learning are an indispensable component of an evolving school system. Without accurate assessments aligned with curricula and standards, education innovators would be flying blind.

The multistate Common Core State Standards project is an improvement over the patchwork of past state standards. But the standards are not the source of flaws in state accountability systems; the culprits are the state tests.

Tests used by international organizations, like TIMSS and PISA, and also our own NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress), can measure performance because they’re both broad and deep; they use a reasonable number of items (many of which are constructed responses) against a large number of standards. But that design makes those tests too long to give to one student. Instead, they’re matrixed; 10 students might each take one-tenth of the test. A few thousand well-selected subjects might give us an accurate picture of 4th graders in a state, but these types of tests cannot be used to measure the performance of a student or school.

A state or national test, on the other hand, can only last an hour or two in each subject. Because such tests must contain several items per standard to be accurate, it will measure only a fraction of the standards. And since a test must be reliable from year to year, it will measure that same subset every year. This limitation encourages schools to narrow their curricula to only those standards likely to be measured and gives rise to illusory performance gains. At present, various groups of states are trying to work out this problem. In the end, they’ll trust that the testing companies will solve this problem, and once again, they’ll be disappointed. There’s a better path.

Imagine if states stopped commissioning their own tests and instead created a small set of requirements for each curriculum provider:

• Adopt or create a secure summative test for each grade level. This test should align closely to the curriculum, and every school using that curriculum would use that test to measure student performance.

• Work with client schools to administer NAEP (or some other matrix-based test aligned to the standards) to 2,000 students each year in key grade levels; use their performance to set the curve for the summative test (think of this as “Curriculum NAEP,” the equivalent of the current state NAEP testing).

• Set the curve for tests on a standard score range that facilitates value-added analysis.

This new way of thinking about summative testing would retain the advantages of the Common Core project and the best state tests while eliminating most of the disadvantages. States would retain the authority to determine the curricula they might subsidize or even allow; they might adopt only one for some subjects and grades (say, for K–6 math); in this case, the world would look a lot like it does now. States would be better off, however, allowing schools to adopt curricula, along with the corresponding summative tests, that best fit their students’ needs. Again, it makes sense to empower schools at the same time that we hold them accountable for student performance. Either way, states could continue to compare schools, since each curriculum would be scored on the same curve and the scores equated through Curriculum NAEP.

This proposal would eliminate most gaming around test scores. There would be no incentive for a provider to dumb down its test, since Curriculum NAEP scores (and therefore the curve) would leave scaled scores unchanged. Moreover, the proposal would create a true alignment between curricula and tests, by removing the state as intermediary. Rather than teach to the state test, schools would teach a curriculum, and then test students accordingly.

Best of all, this regimen would encourage differentiation and competition among curriculum providers. In the end, the curriculum generating the best results for a particular cohort (say, middle-school Latina students) would likely be adopted by schools with large groups of those students.

That competition would extend to the tests themselves. A test should be judged not only by its accuracy, precision, and reliability, but also by its ability to promote learning. Many educators believe that authentic assessment (asking students to perform complex tasks rather than answer multiple-choice questions) encourages better teaching and learning; if this proves true, then curriculum providers using authentic assessments would dominate the market, despite their higher costs.

Finally, this approach would save money. Curriculum providers will find much more agile ways to connect to assessment providers than any state consortium has found so far.

Let the Data Flow

If our schools are to continually improve, we need to gather data and make it available not just to schools, school districts, and parents, but also to independent researchers, who can comb the databases for correlations and any underlying causal connections. Our goal should be to create a veritable education genome project open to all appropriate parties, with proper security measures to address privacy concerns.

We currently gather data through a 1970s-era approach that is slow and expensive. As data move from classroom to school to district to state to the federal government, the details that would allow us to draw meaningful conclusions about things like the effectiveness of a textbook, a supplemental services provider, or an afterschool program are lost. Meanwhile, Google and others manage much more data with far less cost and difficulty. We need to adapt their processes to education data.

The testing companies already collect data from individual schools, as they send and collect test booklets either directly or through the district. These vendors are technically savvy and have the incentive to maintain participation in a lucrative assessment market. States should require their testing vendors to collect data from each school in a standard format, including at least the curricular materials used in each classroom, the calendar and schedule in use at that grade level, the background of the teachers, and any academic interventions used for particular students. The companies should be required to then forward these instructional data, along with test scores, subscores on specific components of the test, and student demographic information, to the state in a standardized format. The state, in turn, should publish a database with accounts allowing schools, districts, education consumers, and (in a privacy-ensured format) researchers to access at will.

There are obvious privacy concerns about publishing personal data in a state database. However, these data are far less sensitive than other data that are commonly secured and made widely available. (Just what would someone do with your son’s 5th-grade math grades?)

Thousands of researchers would surely exploit the resulting database. Curriculum providers would look for evidence of their (or their competitors’) effectiveness. Policymakers would examine the results of various interventions, including afterschool programs, changes in class and day length, or class-size reductions. Teacher preparation and in-service training programs would know whether and where they were having an impact. Parents would be able to make informed choices about where to send their children to school.

Most states would save money by making use of this more efficient way to collect data. At the same time, it would spawn a wave of innovation, as various players start using the data.

Innovation and the New ESEA

All four of these proposals would move us away from a command-and-control education system, and toward an agile education marketplace that encourages innovation and excellence. But even if these proposals sound reasonable to you, you’re probably still wondering how and when they might ever come to pass.

The answer is through the next iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA); by attaching the mind-set of RttT and i3 to the billions of dollars of annual education aid to states, we can use incentives to encourage the right behaviors quickly and inexpensively. Title I channels $14 billion per year to states, which pass it along to districts along with their own funding. Imagine if the new law leads states to channel that money, along with their own funds, directly to schools, and discourages them from holding to the status quo. With a small tweak (for example, an increase or decrease in funding of 10 percent), the feds would give states a $3 billion push in the right direction.

The language enabling schools to choose a district or SSO should be simple. Each state should find its own path to empowering schools. Perhaps some states would empower high-performing schools first, while others might put failing schools into governors’ districts like the one currently proposed in New Jersey. Perhaps states with higher population density would create statewide choice systems, while others would favor parents who sought short travel times. There are many mechanisms imaginable for allowing a school community to vote on its district or SSO affiliation and for states to license and monitor school support organizations.

Similarly, Title II provides roughly $3 billion per year for professional development. The federal government could limit those funds to states that give teachers the right to choose the alternative contract. Again, though, the new ESEA should allow states great latitude in structuring that right (for instance, they could give that choice to individual teachers, or allow a school-by-school vote); regardless, each state will have to figure out what to do with its pension obligations to teachers who switch to the new contract.

The process by which Common Core states are creating math and English tests is well under way; it may result in top-notch exams that lead to dramatic performance increases. The easiest place to implement an assessment marketplace, then, is in science, history, and language courses. ESEA should establish a group that registers curricula in those areas; if this marketplace proves effective and states struggle with the Common Core tests, this marketplace can easily expand to incorporate math and English.

The accountability provisions of ESEA should require testing companies to phase in collection of school-level instructional and background data. Initially, the testing companies could provide the data to client states for analysis; perhaps down the road, states or foundations will find it useful to run studies across multiple data sets.

None of these proposals is expensive; in fact, most will save money in the short and long term. And although some might be politically inexpedient, none would have the natural and well-funded opponents of other commonsense reforms. Further, this is not an exhaustive list. Every reader of this article could probably come up with additional reforms that would create a more responsive education system.

This plan places a great deal of faith in competition and innovation, though within the construct of a robust public school system. As I’ve noted, this faith could be misplaced: perhaps education truly is different, and there simply is one immutable right way to run schools. But there is something to be said for empowering our schools with transparency, choice, and agility. American ideals shouldn’t just be taught in the classroom; they should shape that classroom.

John Katzman is the executive chairman of 2tor, Inc.

Just under 18 months ago, the U.S. Department of Education awarded over $330 million to two state consortia, PARCC and Smarter/Balanced, representing 45 states and the District of Columbia, to design and implement new student assessment systems. Two smaller state consortia, Dynamic Learning Maps (DLM) and the National Center and State Collaborative (NCSC), received an additional $67 million to develop new assessments for students with significant cognitive disabilities. The new assessments, offered mostly online, will replace the current state tests given to millions of students each year in reading and math. At the time, Secretary of Education Duncan called these initiatives an “absolute game-changer” and pledged tests of “critical thinking skills and complex student learning that are not just fill-in-the-bubble tests of basic skills.” In short, it’s an all-out effort to significantly improve one of the weakest — and most despised — aspects of our nation’s current educational system.

But, while it’s easy to think of the consortia as “building tests,” the more apt description is that they are attempting to re-invent, with heavy use of technology, the entire process of assessment. They are developing new types of assessment questions to go beyond multiple choice in conjunction with new methods to deliver, administer, score, and report on these assessments. They will delve deeply into professional development. And, together, they are also adopting common performance standards so that proficiency, which now means different things in different states, is a consistent standard across states.

Officially, the new assessments, including formative and interim tools, will not launch until the 2014-15 school year. In reality, though, most of the work needs to be fully-baked for field-testing in the 2013-14 time frame. That means the real work will take place over the next 18 months. This timeline will increasingly drive both decision-making and expenditures. Even though the consortia have generous grants, doing something quickly, for the first time, and in collaboration across many diverse states costs much more.

Many schools and districts, but not all, will struggle to develop the raw capacity – hardware, software, bandwidth, and tech support – to deliver online testing. Since it takes time for budgeting and procurement, districts want to know right now what the “requirements” are going to be. Yet, there’s a chicken/egg situation because the consortia don’t yet know the content/item types, so they can’t say whether to prepare for bandwidth-hogging simulations, graphics, etc.

At the same time, we have a limited sense of schools’ and districts’ actual capacity. When pushed, they may find a way: As one official at a recent State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA) event noted, in his state districts and schools felt like they were being pushed off the cliff when online testing was implemented, but in reality, the cliff was only a couple of feet high. While the consortia are developing a “readiness tool” to assess the state of technology down to a school level, they’ll soon have to make a guess as to how ambitious the tech specs will be and that will then become a major constraint to development. And, that guess will have to be made in 2012 about 2015 technology. (iPads were not even around when the Department announced the grant competition.) Lower tech requirements will make schools’/districts’ lives easier, but may limit amount of innovation in item types, data collection, etc. Too far towards the other extreme increases the capacity problem.

From an instructional technology and content standpoint, the enormous scope means that the process by which the consortia do their work may have large implications. For example, if the consortia specify that you must have a device with at least a 13” screen size, good luck selling a 10” iPad tablet. More importantly on the back-end, decisions about the underlying technology architecture and standards for data/content transport will also have implications for both the vendor marketplace and integration of all sorts of other data systems (reporting, analytics, student information systems, formative assessments, content repositories, learning management systems, etc.). In other words, the consortia have the potential to exert a fair-amount of market power in a market that is currently dysfunctional. Whether the consortia choose to wield that power, and whether they do it as a force for good, remains to be seen. Ideally, this will all be done with a keen eye towards interoperability, openness, and extensibility, a system design principle where the implementation takes into consideration future growth. But, designing with the future in mind may take more time, could cost more, and often entails risk – presenting a dilemma for high-stakes development on a tight timeline.

The consortia provide a real opportunity to both understand and upgrade schools’/districts’ technology capacity. As a technology director told me, “they’ll buy for the testing mandate.” Yet, whether this capacity will have dual-use for instruction remains to be seen. Schools could get just enough bandwidth to support testing, but have to shut down any other uses for multiple weeks throughout the year. They could also decide to acquire “secure” computer labs, but isolate these from day-to-day classroom instruction. On the good side, one of the hopes of the new assessments is that they will point instruction to more cognitively challenging and beneficial methods. To the extent that these are technology-based, students must have access not just for testing, but also for instruction.

This may all seem to be too far in the weeds to pay attention. But like it or not, how we measure matters. The next generation of assessments will go a long way towards determining whether digital learning actually fulfills its immense promise. And this may be the best chance to get it right.

UPDATE: Smarter/Balanced and PARCC release statement announcing the new technology readiness tool.

- Bill Tucker

To become proficient at dividing a one-place number into a three-place number, a girl with blue-painted fingernails wrote in her math journal.

To become proficient in multiplying decimals, wrote a dark-haired boy. To become proficient at subtracting one four-place number from another. To become proficient in arithmetic word problems. To complete an exercise in the properties of numbers, like (4 + 9) + 5 = ? + (9 + 5).

No two youngsters seemed to have quite the same math goals because, of course, no two youngsters are quite alike when it comes to learning. That’s why Los Altos is betting the future on an online math program from Khan Academy, and why scores of other schools and districts are clamoring to include Khan Academy in their math curriculum.

For the next 45 minutes, Julian met individually with his 5th graders to refine their goals. (In November, Julian left Los Altos to become assistant principal in the Milpitas Unified School District.) Everyone else logged onto the free Khan Academy web site and called up the “module,” or math concept, that fit their goals. Some watched short video lectures embedded in the module; others worked their way through sets of practice problems. I noticed that one youngster had completed 23 modules five weeks into the school year, one had finished 30, and another was working on his 45th.

As youngsters completed one lesson, an online “knowledge map” helped them plot their next step: finish the module on adding decimals, for example, and the map suggests moving next to place values, or to rounding whole numbers, or to any of four other options.

Julian, meanwhile, tracked everyone’s progress on a computer dashboard that offers him mounds of data and alerts him when someone needs his attention. He showed me, for example, the data for a child who had been working that day on multiplying decimals. The child had watched the Khan video before answering the 1st practice problem correctly, needed a “hint” from the program on the 3rd question, got the 7th wrong after struggling with it for 350 seconds—the problem was 69.0 x 0.524—and got the 18th correct in under a minute.

But just as powerful are the data kids have on themselves. The Covington youngsters regularly pulled up an array of charts that showed them which math concepts they had mastered and which they were working on, needed to review, or were stumbling over.

The classroom buzzed with activity, and amazingly, all the buzz was about math.

Salman Khan (on left) and the team at the Khan Academy.

Khan’s Rise

By now, more than 1 million people have watched the online video in which Salman Khan—a charming MIT math whiz, Harvard Business School graduate, and former Boston hedge-fund analyst—explains how he began tutoring his New Orleans cousins in math by posting short lessons for them on YouTube. Other people began watching the lessons and sending Khan adulatory notes (“First time I smiled doing a derivative,” wrote one) or thanking him for explaining fractions to an autistic son.

Khan quit the hedge fund, moved to Silicon Valley, and in 2009, with funding from a constellation of technology stars (Bill Gates’s children were using the videos), launched the nonprofit Khan Academy. A year later, Mark Goines, a member of the Los Altos school board and a legendary Silicon Valley investor, introduced Khan to the district’s new superintendent. Los Altos already ranked among the best-performing districts in the state, but it had set itself a goal of improving individual achievement, and “capturing data at a granular level” on each student was proving difficult, Goines told me.

A few weeks later, in November 2010, Los Altos agreed to pilot Khan Academy with two classes of 5th graders and two classes of 7th graders and provide Khan with feedback to refine the web site and tools. By summer 2011, some 250 school districts, charter schools, and independent schools were asking to be part of the pilot—Khan chose only a dozen—and have Khan staff work with them to integrate the videos, data dashboard, and other tools into their curriculum.

Salman Khan’s short videos remain the centerpiece of Khan Academy (there already are 2,576 of them and counting). In each one, Khan’s voice describes a discrete math concept, such as solving a quadratic by factoring or interpreting inequalities, while only his hand-scribbled formulas appear on-screen. Khan’s idea was that youngsters would watch the videos at home and work on problems in class, essentially “flipping” the classroom (see “The Flipped Classroom,” What Next, Winter 2012). But teachers told me that youngsters also are using the videos as a just-in-time solution when they’re stumped on a problem in class, or to move ahead when they feel ready.

The data that the web site churns out and the site’s gaming features seem to be the real learning motivators. Youngsters become “proficient” in a concept by answering a “streak” of 10 consecutive computer-generated questions: miss one and the computer sends you back to the start. Youngsters earn “energy points” for correct answers, and badges for accomplishments as diverse as working speedily (that’s a meteorite badge) or becoming proficient in the Pythagorean theorem (that’s a moon badge).

Ted Mitchell, president of the NewSchools Venture Fund and a Khan Academy board member, told me that Khan developers “were blown away by how important” the games and badges seem to be in giving kids a sense of accomplishment and progress. Even older kids, for whom badges are ho-hum, “are instantly motivated” when they complete a streak, and the program acknowledges their accomplishment, says Brian Greenberg, who until recently was chief academic officer of Envision Schools. “What’s brilliant about Khan Academy is the instant feedback,” Greenberg told me.

Envision runs four charters in Northern California, including one that piloted Khan Academy with a small program for remedial-algebra students last summer.

Los Altos has extended the Khan Academy program to all of its 5th and 6th grade classes, and to its 7th graders who were achieving at grade level and below.

The Teaching Curve

From Covington Elementary, I dropped in on Courtney Cadwell’s 7th-grade pre-algebra class at Egan Junior High. She, like Julian, piloted Khan Academy last year. Based on that first-year success, Los Altos extended the program to all of its 5th- and 6th-grade classes, and to its 7th graders who were achieving at grade level and below.

Cadwell, a 17-year teacher who was wearing University of Texas orange for her alma mater, calls Khan just “one resource we use.” The previous night, she had assigned worksheet homework; she began the class with a textbook lesson. Math projects ringed the classroom, a reminder that Khan Academy doesn’t include project-based lessons. That night’s homework included a reading on the origin of zero: Cadwell, among others I spoke with, said Khan’s weakness is that it “is not great at helping kids conceptualize math.”

Khan’s strength became clear a few minutes later when the students opened their laptops. Cadwell strolled the room with an iPad in hand, tracking the youngsters as they moved through problems and modules, and intervening with a quick one-on-one when the data identified a student who was stumped. “I’m getting data in real time about each student instead of assuming the entire class needs intervention,” she explained afterward. Khan “lets me use my class time more wisely.”

It also means that teachers have to figure out new ways to work. “Teachers have to be willing to escape from the role of standing in front of the class” and flexible enough to group kids based on need, said Julian, who was a math coach in New York for 20 years and retains his big-city bustle.

As I watched Julian, Cadwell, and later Ruth Negash at Oakland’s Envision Academy of Arts and Technology, they seemed to be always on the move—meeting individually with children, tutoring small groups, and occasionally addressing the whole class. “I actually work harder” with Khan Academy, Julian said. “I’m up and around more, meeting with kids more.” That gives time back to students and, as Cadwell said, makes them “take ownership of their learning” by setting their own goals.

It also means a new level of classroom collaboration: youngsters can look at each other’s data and identify “coaches” among their classmates. Julian urged his 5th graders to ask the Khan program for a hint, watch a video, or ask a coach for help before coming to him. “Show him how to do it, don’t walk around the class giving answers,” he admonished would-be coaches. Pretty soon, a girl in a pink T-shirt turned to a girl in purple for coaching, and the two worked meticulously at solving 1.94 x 5.52.

The Khan Academy provides data in real time about each student, resulting in more efficient class time management for teachers.

Making It Work in Oakland

Los Altos is an affluent, tech-savvy community; I next wanted to see how Khan Academy could work in an inner-city classroom. So two days later, I visited Envision Academy, a downtown Oakland charter school, and Ruth Negash, an intense 4th-year teacher with wild, curly hair and two education degrees from San Francisco State University.

In 2011, Negash taught two summer-school classes of 9th, 10th, and 11th graders who had failed Algebra I. One randomly assigned class used Khan Academy; the other was a traditional math class. The results were promising enough that Negash now is using Khan in all of her 9th-grade algebra classes.

On the day I visited, Negash started both of her classes with a minilecture on linear equations, and then had her students solve for x in 7x + 4 = 18. The classes quickly became fidgety, first as Negash explained the problem, and then as youngsters finished at different speeds. Negash had to urge them to “respect the community of learning.”

But that changed a few minutes later when the youngsters opened their computers—I had noticed the same change in Cadwell’s class—and worked on Khan Academy for the next 75 minutes. I heard an occasional groan of exasperation. “They threw a trick question at me and sent me back to the beginning,” one boy moaned when his streak was broken. But the energy now was directed toward everyone’s screen.

Although everyone in Negash’s classes had taken, and presumably passed, algebra in 8th grade, their math competence ranged from marginal to impressive. In both periods, three or four youngsters claimed a table in the hallway, where they worked silently at lessons on quadrilaterals and complementary and supplementary angles, typical geometry exercises. But other students struggled with addition and subtraction, and one quarter don’t know their multiplication tables, Negash told me. (To keep those youngsters from falling even further behind, she gives them a reference sheet with the multiplication tables on it.) Negash told both classes to work on the Khan module on solving for a variable—a continuation of her minilecture—but Khan’s online prompts were urging most youngsters to first review lessons on lower-level skills.

Some of these youngsters simply “feel safer” doing arithmetic and will move on when they’ve experienced some math “success,” Negash predicted. Other educators had similar takes: Khan “takes away a lot of the fear about math” by letting kids backfill their gaps and then move ahead at their own pace, said Sandra McGonagle, the principal of Santa Rita Elementary in Los Altos, which also is using Khan Academy in its 5th and 6th grades.

“You don’t have to worry about getting something wrong in front of the whole class,” one of Julian’s 5th graders, the girl with blue nail polish, told me.

But in Negash’s classes, the wide range of math abilities is clearly a challenge. Negash sat with one low-performing student for much of the first-period class and with three others in the second period, hoping to encourage some of that “success.” Meanwhile, other students were calling for her help. Two boys were stumped by “adjacent” in a word problem; language issues crop up “every day,” Negash said.

When Negash finally had a moment to consult her Khan dashboard at the end of second-period class, she saw that one youngster had spent 62 minutes solidly working on math, but another had spent only 14 minutes. “It’s hard to figure out a different plan for 25 kids every day,” she sighed.

Gia Truong, superintendent of Envision Schools, said Khan Academy developers had urged her to let Negash’s students “start where they were” in math and move forward. But that’s creating a conflict when some kids are so far behind, she told me: “If you do that, you might never get to the algebra standards” that California students must pass in order to graduate.

“You’re in the new paradigm, but the grading standards are in the old paradigm,” she added.

Getting to Results

Test results at both Los Altos and Envision—the only two pilots to have any results so far—suggest that Khan Academy is working. Los Altos says that among the 7th graders who used the program in 2010–11—all remedial students—41 percent scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the California Standards Test compared to 23 percent the year before. Among 5th graders, 96 percent using Khan were proficient or advanced compared to 91 percent in the rest of the district.

At Envision’s summer-school program, the youngsters in the Khan Academy class spent only half their time on algebra—the rest of their time was on lower-level math skills—and yet still slightly outscored the traditional class, which spent all of its time on algebra.

Both districts are quick to say that it’s far too early to claim success: there were only 115 youngsters in the Los Altos pilot and just 20 at Envision. “It’s enough to say this is promising; it’s not enough to say this is the future,” former Envision Schools officer Brian Greenberg said.

Most observers of the Khan experiment agree that the measure of success must be student achievement. Otherwise, “I’m not very sympathetic,” said Michael Horn of Innosight Institute. As teaching is increasingly differentiated, however, schools may need a different kind of assessment. California’s year-end test can tell which 5th graders meet the state’s math standards; it can’t tell if some of those 5th graders have progressed to trigonometry or pre-calculus, as two Los Altos kids did last year.

But several experts also suggested measuring Khan’s impact by also looking at changes in the distribution of test scores. Khan Academy isn’t likely to close the learning gap because some kids, freed from the teach-to-the-middle plod of the usual classroom, gallop ahead. But Khan would be a success if low-performing kids move ahead too and “shift the bell curve to the right,” said the NewSchool Venture Fund’s Ted Mitchell.

Some other Khan watchers gave a surprisingly strong endorsement to such measures as student engagement and self-confidence, and to soft skills like goal setting and teamwork. “I don’t look at it as just based on the data,” said Mark Goines, the Los Altos school board member whose high-tech background (he helped develop and run TurboTax for Intuit, Inc.) suggests a fine reading of the data. “The kids seem to be happy about learning. That makes me excited,” he said.

What about increasing class size, I asked: Should Khan’s success be measured in part on its ability to increase teacher productivity? In elementary schools, where students generally spend the day with one teacher, increasing class size because of Khan would mean bigger classes in every other subject, too. And Goines, who said he has viewed “hundreds” of online programs, cautioned that there aren’t any comparable products in other subjects, especially in writing.

A fear among advocates of online learning is that slow learners will be abandoned in front of a computer, and a large classroom increases those chances. “It would then become a babysitting tool,” said McGonagle, Santa Rita’s principal.

At Envision Academy in Oakland, teachers say Khan takes away a lot of the fear about math by letting kids backfill their gaps and move forward at their own pace.

Blending Khan

Finally, I asked for “takeaways” from the Khan Academy experience. Greenberg told me that it’s more important that teachers be “nimble” and “entrepreneurial” than that they be tech wizards. All three teachers said they felt comfortable with technology, but that, more importantly, they were risk-takers. Even before she began piloting Khan Academy, Cadwell asked her PTA to buy classroom laptops for the youngsters in her remedial math class. “I figured if I could get them onto some practice sites, I’d figure things out from there,” she said.

Santa Rita’s McGonagle said it was “crucial” to have pilot teachers like Cadwell who can act as avatars for the rest of the district as it expands its blended learning. Cadwell is mentoring other Los Altos teachers this year. They “don’t need training as much as they need time” with the program, she told me (the data are fairly easy to use, but she and Julian asked Khan’s engineers for so much of it that both say they don’t always use it all).

The schools, meanwhile, are holding rollout meetings for parents and are urging parents to join the web site, where they can see the same data as the teachers, including whether little Bobby is really working on math up in his bedroom as he says he is. “It’s not just training the teachers; it’s training the community,” Goines said.

That training shouldn’t end with just learning to manipulate the data, though. It also means learning how teachers can use their time differently, how to work with youngsters who have different abilities, and how to blend Khan into the curriculum, not substitute for it, everyone told me. Cadwell and Negash said that they find gaps in the Khan curriculum, and that it isn’t completely aligned with either California or core-curriculum standards, although Khan is adding lessons to fill the holes.

“You can’t just put a kid down in front of a computer,” Goines said, although the kids I saw in Julian’s, Cadwell’s, and Negash’s classes sure seemed to enjoy it.

June Kronholz is an Education Next contributing editor.

When former governors Jeb Bush and Bob Wise strode to the stage at the 2011 Excellence in Action National Summit on Education Reform in San Francisco last October, Sal Khan had just shown the 750 attendees his vision of the digital future.

Khan is the former hedge-fund analyst turned education rock star who started Khan Academy, a nonprofit that reaches millions through its free online lessons and assessments. Tools like these, said Khan, can catapult education from its time-based roots toward a competency-based model in which students progress upon actual learning—mastery—instead of seat time.

At the same conference a year earlier, the two former governors, cochairs of Digital Learning Now!, released “10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning.” This year, Bush and Wise said they had evaluated each of the 50 states against the elements and explained the assessment methodology they had used: states were judged against 72 individual metrics. (Disclosure: I was one of many who provided feedback on how different states ranked on the criteria and serve as a “digital luminary” for the Digital Learning Now! effort.) Rather than announce where the states fell in the ranking, the governors gave the crowd a preview of their “Roadmap for Reform,” a guide to help states navigate different paths toward changing their online education policies (see sidebar).

With the road map in place, one might assume that moving into the future will be a straightforward exercise: the pieces are all there and model legislation is forthcoming, so state policymakers just have to enact the 10 Elements.

Of course, things are never so simple, and many questions remain.

Some questions reflect legitimate disagreement over Digital Learning Now!’s recommendations, even among those who agree with its broad vision. An obvious flash point will be the idea that states require students to take at least one college- or career-prep course online to earn a high school diploma.

One argument in favor of the requirement is that the outcome from taking an online course—gaining the skills to succeed in a digital environment and perhaps become more self-driven—is valuable in a world in which postsecondary education and workforce training are increasingly done online. Yet some see this as yet another input-based requirement in a system already overburdened with mandates, and in conflict with the spirit of digital learning: if the experience is so important or compelling, won’t students naturally flock to online learning, particularly given Digital Learning Now!’s recommendation that dollars follow students to the online course of their choice?

Another consideration is that elementary-school students don’t take courses—at least in the sense that high-school and middle-school students do—and so ensuring that elementary-school students have access to online learning at the course level seems to miss some fundamental principle. According to the state report cards, though, several states have achieved their goals at the elementary-school level, which only raises more questions.

Many of the pieces that Digital Learning Now! casts as critical to the endeavor are not yet in place, and therefore no one actually knows how they will work in practice. For example, Digital Learning Now! has hitched its wagon to the enactment of the Common Core standards and accompanying next-generation assessments that should be in place by 2014. Whether these assessments will facilitate a competency-based learning environment unburdened by time—or lock in today’s system—is yet to be seen. States may abandon the digital effort when they see the up-front costs of implementing an online assessment system. And if they do, what will that mean for a plan that rests on paying for achievement instead of seat time? Valid, reliable, authentic, on-demand, and independent assessments are critical to moving to a system based on student learning outcomes. What about those courses that don’t fall under the Common Core? Does an outcome-based funding system require extending the Common Core to all subject areas, or will states create unique standards for subject areas other than math and English? Could entrepreneurs develop competency badges for their students that the public would recognize as legitimate? How would such competency measures be accredited?

A number of operational challenges need to be worked out as well. Utah, for example, passed in the spring of 2011 Senate Bill 65, based on the 10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning. Utah state senator Howard Stephenson declared that the bill ends the “tyranny of time and place” in education by allowing dollars to follow high school students to their online course of choice. The legislation calls for the state to withhold 50 percent of the provider’s fee until the student successfully completes the course.

Not surprisingly, the devil has been in the details. Crafting a viable funding model for online courses that makes sense for districts and providers alike has not been easy. Even more challenging is helping schools and districts transition to a world in which students still need some of the services they provide but take most of their courses online. How does funding work in this model? How do schools create the flexible schedules and offer the critical services—many of which may be nonacademic—to accommodate students’ varying needs? How do they transition to this service—or community center—model?

A related set of issues plagues the funding model from the state’s fiscal perspective. If students progress based on competency instead of cohort, the state should presumably reward schools and providers that help students progress faster. And Digital Learning Now! suggests that it should reward those providers that help students make the most growth. Set aside for a moment the demands on state data systems created by an outcome-based system that rewards growth and the fact that these systems are not in place today. If this policy were in place, the state would be on the hook for paying for a student who masters, say, 20 half-semester courses in a given year, rather than a more conventional 12 or 14. How will states deal with this fiscal uncertainty? Holding back students seems like a poor choice, as does punishing schools that can educate students faster with less revenue.

And what if a student masters the high school curriculum by the time she is 15, as many students undoubtedly could? Does she go to college? Does she take time off? Or does she stay in high school with her friends but take college courses? If so, who pays?

Suggesting that a road map document could tackle such complexity isn’t fair. But a glimpse into the exciting— and uncertain—future presented by Digital Learning Now! does raise many legitimate questions. That’s no reason to delay implementing its recommendations though; innovation is never perfect right out of the box. Iteration in practice is critical. With the “Roadmap” coming on the heels of Khan’s conference presentation, surely some in the audience wondered whether innovations yet to come might even clear away many of the familiar roadblocks.

Michael Horn is cofounder and executive director of education at Innosight Institute.

The market is plenty motivated to create disruptive products and services to serve the public education system, but today’s policies and regulations don’t incentivize and reward those products and services that best serve students. As a result, philanthropic dollars are critical to help create the correct conditions such that those products that are efficacious and serve a higher end—student learning—are the ones that gain share.

As we’ve argued, public policy should reward those providers that best deliver student outcomes—and punish those providers that do not serve the public good.

There is one area, however, where I think philanthropic dollars should probably fund products and services, which is in the category of assessments. If we’re going to have a system that pays providers on how students do on outcome measures, we need robust assessments that are authentic and that people trust. The political incentives—for a variety of reasons—to create high-quality assessments aren’t particularly strong, so having philanthropists invest dollars to create these assessments and continue to push innovation is critical.

This is why yesterday’s announcement that The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will award a $100,000 prize to the designers of software that can reliably automate essay grading for state tests to drive testing of deeper learning is so important. Open Education Solutions and The Common Pool designed and will be managing the competition.

The Hewlett Foundation’s leadership in creating better assessments to measure critical reasoning and writing is a big step forward—and its use of Kaggle, a platform for predictive modeling competitions, to host the competition is clever.

According to the press release, “The automated scoring competition intends to solve the longstanding problem of high cost and low turnaround of current testing deeper learning such as student essays. The goal is to shift testing away from standardized bubble tests to tests that evaluate critical thinking, problem solving and other 21st century skills.”

In addition, the competition is being conducted with the support of the two state testing consortia that are currently designing the next-generation assessments for the Common Core. Having this buy-in and collaboration gives the competition serious validity and the potential to have real impact.

-Michael Horn

The top-line findings, that blended learning models cost an estimated $8,900 per pupil (+/- 15%) and fully online schools cost $6,400 (+/- 20%) — compared to traditional expenditures averaging $10,000 — will surely be repeated in statehouse policy battles throughout the country. But, those who actually read the short brief will quickly realize that the authors have bent over backwards to caveat their findings in multiple ways. The most important of these caveats? The author’s cost figures reflect estimates of what online and blended schools are currently spending, rather than what they should be spending. In other words, since we have little understanding of how spending relates to student outcomes, the authors cannot say much about either the effectiveness or productivity of this spending. Is it the right amount? We just don’t know.

Still, readers of the paper will better understand the various components of costs in blended and fully online programs – and how they differ from one another and with traditional instruction. These insights should inform those looking to evaluate digital programs by helping them ask better questions about the choices these programs have made and how they align with an overall instructional philosophy. For example, online programs could spend relatively little on content, relying primarily on their teachers to adapt free and open educational resources. In that case, the program would instead need to invest in its educators, ensuring that they have both the support and expertise needed to assemble and modify curriculum. Likewise, programs investing in sophisticated adaptive content will likely pursue a different instructional model.

Finally, one part of the paper will hopefully improve the overall dialogue around potential “cost savings” from digital innovations. The authors correctly note the wide variations in types of blended and online programs, along with the many different reasons that educators and policymakers pursue these programs. Often, advocates confuse attempts to reduce overall costs with efforts to re-allocate the same costs into a different instructional model (i.e., Rocketship). The first results in lower total expenditures. While the latter may mean lower expenditures in certain areas, such as facilities, those savings are put back into different areas in an attempt to be more productive or focus resources on a particularly vexing instructional problem.

As debates around digital learning become increasingly prominent across the country, it would behoove advocates on all sides to better understand the economics behind these programs. This paper is a helpful start, not only for its content, but also for highlighting the ongoing need to better understand the student outcomes that result from these public expenditures.

-Bill Tucker

California policy has done its best to create a byzantine—some might say bizarre—set of regulations to frustrate the power of online learning to do just that. From geographic barriers that limit the ability of students in certain locales to access online learning to restricting blended learning in some unfortunate ways, California has created a maze to frustrate would-be innovators.

There have been some attempts by legislators over the last couple of years to begin to rectify some of these problems, but they have only stalled. Although some charter school operators, such as Rocketship Education and KIPP Empower, as well as some school districts, like Riverside School District, have created stellar blended-learning models, the most advanced school districts in California in online and blended learning have seen their efforts frustrated and curtailed. Even the exciting emerging blended-learning models appearing throughout California in response to tight budgets are limited in how innovative they could be by California’s regulatory landscape.

Against this backdrop, a group called Education Forward has introduced “The California Student Bill of Rights Act”—a proposed ballot initiative that would unlock some of the most onerous barriers to online and blended learning in California. But it would do so in an indirect way.

The initiative is actually not about online or blended learning per se; instead it’s designed to solve one of the most pressing problems facing California students today.

That problem is this: a stunning 1 million high school students in California—roughly 50 percent of the state’s high school student population—attend schools that do not offer the full slate of courses required for admission to the state’s university systems. This means that in many of California’s public high schools, students can graduate, but they won’t be able to get into a UC or CSU college even if they have a good GPA and good test scores.

The initiative solves this problem by creating a mechanism to move beyond simple seat-time funding and instead offer fractional funding to the course level, so students can take courses from an outside institution if their home school doesn’t offer a certain course. The initiative also stipulates that a school or district cannot deny students access to the courses needed for admission to the University of California and California State University systems, including college prep and Advanced Placement courses—a statement of a student’s basic educational rights.

If the initiative gathers the requisite number of signatures to be on the ballot, with a single vote this November, California’s voters could eliminate one of the most egregious examples of inequity in its educational system—and it won’t cost taxpayers any additional funds to do it. This fact alone should allow people from all sides to come together and get behind this.

The initiative certainly isn’t perfect—no initiative or bill is. It leaves a lot of discretion up to several entities, from the departments of education and finance to potentially the legislature—to create the mechanisms to make this all work well. If it passes, the “real” work would likely begin afterward. Some of the organizers behind Education Forward have some clever ideas about how to fund the online courses a student might take, for example—by offering 50 percent of funding to the provider up-front for enrollment, 25 percent for the student passing the course, and the last 25 percent upon successful passage of the state final exam—but this idea, which moves the focus to student outcomes, isn’t codified explicitly in the initiative (although the notion of competency-based learning is, which might lead to such an outcomes-based funding system).

But what successful passage of the measure would do is assert the voice of the people of California as a means to pressure the stalled legislature to do the right thing. And in so doing, it could do more than just solve the problem of equity to high-quality educational opportunities in the state, it also creates a mechanism for competency-based learning, establishes a strong grounding for what online learning and blended learning are, and eliminates the outmoded geographic barriers that prevent students from being able to access high-quality learning opportunities no matter where they originate in the state.

As such, it’s a much-needed breath of fresh air for a state that has been stuck for years now when it comes to education policy—and it could lead the way to bigger and better things ahead.

-Michael Horn

This post originally appeared at Forbes.com

But just as these criticisms aren’t going away, neither is online learning itself. The genie is out of the bottle. So how can we go about drafting policies that will push digital learning in the direction of quality?

This is something we at Fordham are thinking a lot about, and we’ve published three papers (so far) in our series, Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning: Rick Hess on quality control; Paul Hill on funding; and Bryan and Emily Hassel on teachers. And in January, we’ll publish an analysis by the Parthenon Group of what high-quality fulltime online learning really costs.

I’ll leave it to others to rebut the Times’ extremely selective use of data, expert opinion, and evidence. Where the article landed a punch, in my view, was around the perverse incentives at play today. Clearly K12, and its well-paid CEO, Ron Packard, face strong incentives to boost enrollment at their schools. Unfortunately, states haven’t figured out a way to create similar incentives around quality. And that needs to change.

First, a short digression. I worked at K12 a long, long time ago, just after its creation. (I believe I was employee number 10.) I needed a job, and I convinced Bill Bennett to create a role for me (the august-sounding Vice President for Community Partnerships) in which I would figure out how to take K12’s rich resources and make them available for poor kids. Our basic assumption was that K12’s model—which relied on parents or other caretakers doing most of the instruction—wouldn’t be feasible for kids living in poverty, most of whom would need the custodial care offered by traditional public schools.

To be honest, I didn’t make much progress. The learning materials weren’t even created yet, and so I had few “partnerships” to offer to communities. I left after 9 months for an appointment in the George W. Bush administration.

But what a difference a decade makes. One of the real surprises of the online learning movement is that lots of poor families are choosing to give it a try, and that explains (to a large degree) why K12’s test scores are lagging. (Yes, poverty and achievement are linked, at least for now.)

And the impression painted by the Times article is that online education companies like K12 have every reason to sign up as many parents as possible—poor, rich, whatever—regardless of how prepared they are to tackle the challenge of home-based instruction. Because of some states’ sloppy finance systems, the schools can keep the money if the families change their minds and head back to traditional schools. And, as has been true for all public schools since the beginning of time, the online schools get paid whether their students are learning or not.

Fixing the payment problem is a no brainer. (Schools of all kinds should only get paid for the days of instruction that kids actually show up for.) But is it time to consider performance-based funding, too? To pay companies like K12 more or less depending on how their students perform on state tests or depending on their graduation rates?

In his paper for Fordham, Paul Hill dismisses the idea, arguing:

Pay for performance would create a harsh environment for all education providers. Conventional, virtual, and hybrid schools might spend money on a student’s instruction for a whole course or semester yet receive nothing in return. Online vendors of all kinds, who have little control over their students’ effort or persistence, could be even more at risk. In general, this approach would limit the unproductive use of public funds and quickly destroy any vendor that could not demonstrate good results. It would favor providers with deep pockets, e.g., district-run schools and online vendors supported by large foundations. Performance-based payment as defined here could create a lethal environment for smaller-scale innovators.

He’s probably right about smaller-scale innovators, but I still think it’s worth a try, at least for full-time online schools. (It might be harder in the “blended learning” setting, where a child might be taking just one or two subjects online.)

What if K12 only got paid for every student that made at least a year’s worth of progress on the state test? Some argue that this would create its own perverse incentives, encouraging the company to cherry pick students who are most likely to succeed. But if the measure is student growth, and the test being used is a good one (a big if, admittedly), then all kids but those with severe cognitive disabilities should be seen as contenders.

Instead of indiscriminately signing up students willy-nilly, K12 would then have a reason to vet each family’s situation to make sure they are ready for the rigors of online learning. They would invest, up-front, in assessing whether the child’s parents or other caretakers are up to the task of instructing the student, and whether they have a home situation conducive to success. And then K12 would work like the dickens to make sure every student was making strong progress over the course of the year.

Personally, I’d like to see performance-based pay for all schools. That won’t fly anytime soon, but performance-pay for online learning (at the least the full-time, virtual charter school version) could. Which state is ready to give it a try?

-Mike Petrilli

Kipp shares her experience teaching 11th and 12th grade English online while she resides with her family in rural Colorado. Though not physically in a classroom, Kipp has been able to successfully engage students through live class sessions, emails, instant messaging, and texting. Kipp used to teach in a traditional classroom setting but says that despite some of the unique challenges teaching virtually presents, she finds the online teaching experience more rewarding and in many instances more effective.

Stanford’s move is significant. But, unless it goes further, Stanford University Online High School is still just a small, selective program for gifted students. Here are two ways to have real impact:

1. Scale the program, allowing tens of thousands of students to participate. At this point, though, the university seems reluctant to grow the school much beyond the size of a typical elite independent school.
2. Generate research and knowledge, helping to define what quality high school online education looks like, what works for whom, what implementation practices matter, and why.

Perhaps Stanford’s move will push other institutions to consider the real game-changer – offering elite quality education, at an affordable cost, on a more massive scale. When will the University of Michigan, UVA, UNC, Berkeley, or any of our other great public universities do this for an entire state?

If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools”—charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet—as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits….

In Florida, only fourteen months after Crist handed a major victory to teachers unions, a new governor, Rick Scott, signed a radical bill that could have the effect of replacing hundreds of teachers with computer avatars. Scott, a favorite of the Tea Party, appointed Levesque as one of his education advisers. His education law expanded the Florida Virtual School to grades K-5, authorized the spending of public funds on new for-profit virtual schools and created a requirement that all high school students take at least one online course before graduation….

A combination of factors has made this year what Moe calls an “inflection point” in the march toward public school privatization. For one thing, recession-induced fiscal crises and austerity have pressured states to cut spending. In some cases, as in Florida, where educating students at the Florida Virtual School costs nearly $2,500 less than at traditional schools, such reform has been sold as a budget fix.

But, here’s what the article left out: Florida Virtual School, which is prominently connected with privatization in four separate paragraphs of the article, is not a private corporation. It is, instead, a state-owned and state-run institution. There are no shareholders. There are, though, real, live teachers. Led by a former elementary school teacher, the school employs over a 1,000 state certified teachers, almost all of whom have also taught in traditional classrooms. It is fully accredited by two major agencies: The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) and The Commission on International and Trans-Regional Accreditation. And, while it is not a charter school, it was the country’s first state-wide Internet-based public high school and has enrolled hundreds of thousands of public school students since 1997.

Florida Virtual School is, in short, a poster child for public sector innovation.

But none of that fit into author Fang’s narrative. It would have made a simple story into the complex one that it is.

K-12 online learning is vast and varied, crossing both political and ideological lines. Programs range from Stanford Online High School to specialized dropout prevention high schools run in partnership with community-based nonprofits toRocketship, which plows savings from technology into extended learning opportunities and higher teacher salaries, to the North Carolina Virtual Public School, a signature program of Democratic Governor Bev Purdue (launched when she was the state’s Lt. Governor). Full-time virtual schools, the majority of which are run under contract to a for-profit schooling company, are part of this landscape. So, too, are numerous traditional school districts — including those who run their own programs and those who oversee contracts with private providers.

Within this landscape, as in any new arena, there are areas of serious concern. Among full-time online learning programs, what we know of performance is decidedly mixed. And, Fang’s article is correct to point out the moneyed influence and lack of transparency from operators like Ohio’s White Hat Management. We’ve been writing about these issues for several years.

But, just as alternative energy should not be defined by Solyndra, neither should online learning be defined by White Hat. Strong oversight to ensure both high quality learning experiences and accountability for public funds is essential. So, too, is knowledgeable and objective reporting.

Schools will not need as many conventional teachers as they did yesterday, but those they need will be able to tap top-notch technology and instructional support teams to achieve excellence at scale. They’ll get paid more, too, potentially a lot more. And all this can be done within tight budgets so long as education systems judiciously blend technology and people.

Digital learning has the potential to transform the teaching profession in three major ways:

• Extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students.
• Attracting and retaining more excellent teachers.
• Boosting effectiveness and job options for average teachers.

Extending the reach of the best. In the digital future, teacher effectiveness will matter even more than it does today. As digital learning spreads, students worldwide will gain access to core knowledge and skills instruction. What will increasingly differentiate outcomes for schools, states, and nations is how well responsible adults carry out the more complex instructional tasks: motivating students to go the extra mile, teaching them time management, addressing social and emotional issues that affect their learning, and diagnosing problems and making the right changes when learning stalls.

The top 20 or 25 percent of teachers already meet these challenges. But in traditional classrooms, they only reach 20 to 25 percent of students. That’s where digital learning can help.

Digital technology, along with changes in teacher roles and schedules, should make it possible for top teachers to assume responsibility for all students, not just 20 or 25 percent of them

For example, by replacing 25 – 50 percent of teaching in some subjects, digital instruction can free excellent teachers’ time, enabling them to take responsibility for more students – keeping similar class sizes and gaining planning time. These “time-technology swaps” are already used in top-performing schools that combine digital learning with excellent teachers to boost results.

Digital tools can also connect excellent teachers working live with students across the hall, state, or nation – using web cameras and email. Shy instructional masters can help design smart software to personalize learning. Star performing content masters can go viral on digital video, and someday holograms, to millions of students anywhere, who with excellent teachers can convert that access into stellar learning.

Attracting and retaining the best. Digital learning will also transform career opportunities for excellent teachers. As they reach more students, they should earn more out of the per-pupil funds generated by the expanded number of students. The chance of enhanced advancement and pay will, in turn, make the profession a more attractive long-term career for top performers, wooing unfulfilled engineers and lawyers into a better life.

-Bryan Hassel and Emily Asycue Hassel

This blog entry also appears on Flypaper. It is based on “Teachers the Age of Digital Instruction,” a paper published this week by the Fordham Institute as part of its Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning series.

“Teachers,” written by Public Impact’s Bryan and Emily Hassel, opens with an important and refreshing perspective: “that digital education needs excellent teachers and that the teaching profession needs digital education.” Rather than replacing teachers, the authors see digital learning as transforming teaching — both by offering tools for traditional classroom teachers and by enabling entirely new ways of teaching. Often missing from conversations around technology, the paper outlines the varied roles that teachers play, including helping with motivation, social and emotional support, and stretching critical thinking and analytical skills. It concludes that the future is a much more differentiated field, with a smaller number of higher-paid, more empowered teachers acting in teams with a variety of specialized and lower-paid support personnel. (School of One offers one glimpse of this future.)

Some of the paper’s most interesting discussions touch on new administrative structures and the role of unions. The authors see today’s teacher evaluation battles as a relic of an old one-classroom, one-teacher model. Instead, they envision a different form of accountability, such as that in a small professional firm, where one person takes on both leadership and administrative responsibility to coordinate a variety of teaching personnel and supporting technology tools. They reject the notion that digital learning is necessarily a union-killer. Instead, they see a role for a new type of union, modeled perhaps after the Screen Actors Guild, which provides employment and pay security in increasingly differentiated teacher roles, but does not constrain top performers. One quibble though, is that when the paper discusses these new models, it too often uses a static, more-effective/least-effective teacher frame. A more helpful frame might place the same weight on effective teaching, but explore the interdependency between a teachers’ role and effectiveness.

Overall, the paper both rightly recognizes the fallacy of technology replacing teachers and appropriately posits that digital tools will be limited in potential if shoved into traditional teaching models. Additional exploration should go even further, contemplating how digital learning might also change and possibly more tightly align the roles of informal and out-of-school educators, including those in museums, cultural institutions, youth development programs, and of course, homes.

The second paper, written by Paul Hill, details how current school funding systems conflict with new forms of digital learning that cross school, district, and time boundaries:

The problem boils down to this: Our system doesn’t fund schools, and certainly doesn’t fund students. It funds district-wide programs, staff positions, and so forth. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to move money from concrete facilities, established programs, and entrenched staff roles to new uses like equipment, software, and remote instructional staff. Yet to encourage development and improvement of technology-based methods, we must find ways for public dollars to do just that—and to follow kids to online providers chosen by their parents, teachers, or themselves.

Hill blames this funding rigidity — not the lack of ideas from teachers, principals, or innovators — for the relative scarcity of education innovation at scale. And, while states have developed workaround solutions, few go far enough. His solution: a new “follow-the-child” funding system. While many states already have what is often called weighted-student funding, where funding follows students to their educational institutions and is weighted to account for greater needs, such as those of an English language learner, a new system needs to go beyond “whole school” models. In other words, if digital learning “unbundles” school so that students can choose courses and learning experiences from multiple places, as in Florida and other states, then funding needs to be just as nimble. And, it even needs to accommodate parents who want to assemble their own learning experiences. Hill says:

Funds available for a child’s education must include all the taxpayer funds available to support students’ education. To make this happen, some government entity would need to assemble all of the funds available from all sources for K-12 education in a locality, keep an account for every student, and faithfully allocate its con-tents to whatever school or education program a student attends.

Hill goes on to discuss important implications of these ideas, including dilemmas around accountability and choice. And, while many might reflectively reject Hill’s ideas as a digital-age voucher, there’s also the kernel of another more radical idea. If taken to its logical extreme, localities might not just assemble K-12 funding, but also those for all sorts of other services, such as juvenile justice, mental health, out-of-school programs, etc., enabling an approach that just might resemble a digital-era Harlem Children’s Zone.

To get those challenging, high-wage jobs, today’s students are going to need college courses, vocational certification, or job training, many of which will be offered virtually. For perspective, nearly 30% of college and university total enrollment is online enrollment.

Schools must equip students with the knowledge and skills they will need for future success, and today that means using a technology-inclusive education. Yet less than 10 percent of our nation’s students are benefiting from digital learning.

Thankfully, state leaders are recognizing the power of digital learning and the impact it has on students’ future success. Michigan and Alabama were the first states to require an online learning experience in order to graduate high school. New Mexico requires students to either take an online course, a dual-enrolled course or an Advanced Placement course in order to graduate high school. This year, Florida passed an online course requirement.

Because of the leadership of Governor Otter and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna, Idaho is the latest state in a nationwide movement to use technology to prepare students to achieve in and outside of the classroom. By requiring students to take at least two credits online to graduate, the state is arming its kids with the knowledge and skills they will need to thrive in our increasingly digital world.

Equipping every student with a personalized digital learning experience is a must in today’s digitally-driven society. Digital learning can customize education with high expectations and ensure that all students graduate from high school with the knowledge and skills to succeed in college and careers. It leverages the power of technology to give students the ability to learn in their own style, at their own pace, providing all students the opportunity to achieve

Idaho’s actions are trailblazing a path of bold reforms that make systemic changes in education and extend customized digital learning to all students.

-Jeb Bush

But the state shouldn’t be shocked by the report. As the truism goes, you get what you pay for.

Colorado’s policy environment incentivizes exactly what it’s getting from its full-time virtual schools—and arguably not just its virtual schools, but all of its schools statewide.

The biggest problem is this: It pays a school all of its funds on a “count day” on October 1 based on the number of students enrolled on that day. If students leave afterward, the original school keeps the funds. If students enroll elsewhere, the new school receives no funds.

This incentivizes providers to enroll students, but there are few incentives in place to focus on what happens after that. As a result, a significant number of online providers seem to have followed these incentives and done exactly what Colorado paid them to do. The end result isn’t pretty for students, as a great number of them allegedly leave soon after the count day and enroll back in district schools if they enroll elsewhere at all.

Some are using this to bash all online learning, as well as for-profit providers that are seizing this revenue-making opportunity (as many such providers did in higher education), but in so doing, these critics are missing the point.

As I’ve written numerous times, studying whether online learning is more or less effective than traditional learning is invariably asking the wrong question. Online and blended learning have the potential to dramatically transform our education system by being able to individualize for each student’s distinct learning needs (just look at the results from Carpe Diem, KIPP Empower, or Rocketship Education), but whether it does so will have a lot to do with policy—whether we change the incentives and focus not on merely serving students and micro-managing the inputs, but instead focusing on the student outcomes and leaving behind an antiquated factory-model system for a student-centric one. Ultimately we want a system that can deliver the right learning experience for each individual student when he or she needs it—whether that be an online or offline activity.

And just because many studies show that on average online and blended learning work better than does face-to-face learning, this does not mean that just because a program is online that it will be good. There will be both good and bad online programs, just as there will be good and bad face-to-face ones. Good programs, however, that do customize for these different learning needs and lead to increased student engagement and time on task, should be easier to scale in a digital world as opposed to an analog one.

Similarly, an oft-leveled charge at for-profits in education is that they only care about their shareholders, not about their customers. This is absurd. The way companies create shareholder value is by serving their customers. The problem here is that what the customer—the state of Colorado—is incentivizing is blatantly misaligned with what its students need.

As I wrote in a paper for the American Enterprise Institute titled “Beyond Good and Evil: Understanding the Role of For-Profits in Education Through the Theories of Disruptive Innovation,” for-profit companies are not inherently good or evil. Rather, successful companies do what their customers offer incentives to do—not much more or less. To say that for-profits are evil or poor quality misses the point because quality is defined by what a customer will pay someone to do. Blaming for-profits for doing what we have asked and paid them to do from the outset makes little sense.

What’s interesting in this particular case, however, is that a successful for-profit, K12, Inc., does apparently defy its incentives to some extent. According to Jeff Kwitowski, K12’s VP of Public Affairs, “K12 invoices the school for student-related expenses based on the number of students who are enrolled each month, not based on the October 1st enrollment count” despite the policy in place.

That’s good and smart of K12 to observe the spirit of the law, not just the letter. But policymakers must do better and create a system that does not rely on heroes and anomalies.

Given that, as I also wrote in the AEI piece, for-profits scale faster on average than do non-profits, they tend to be aggressive in seizing these policy opportunities, so policymakers need to fix bad policies quickly before an industry coalesces around a faulty value proposition and stands in the way of changing those policies with lots of money to back it up (as has happened with the players—mostly non-profit and government-run—that make up the country’s current factory-model education system).

There is a second problem with Colorado’s policy environment as well, which creates problems for truly judging how online learning programs are performing and could create incentives to avoid serving the hardest-to-serve and most vulnerable students. This one lies in the way our education system—across the nation—calculates graduation rates.

Although I’m still working out my thoughts on this, here’s the dilemma. The common graduation rate formula that has just recently been adopted across the country calculates a state’s graduation rate based, in essence, on the percentage of an entering freshman class that finishes high school with a regular diploma four years later. This may make sense as a way to judge a state (although there may be legitimate questions if it makes sense when moving to a competency-based learning system and away from one based on time), but it creates some problems for judging schools to where students are transferring in the midst of their high school experience.

The reason is this: Picture a school—like many of the online schools in Colorado—that enrolls a student in the fall who is classified as, say, a junior, based on his age. The graduation rate calculation says he should graduate in two springs from now; if he doesn’t, the school’s graduation rate falls. But say that student is many credits behind—let’s pretend for simplicity’s sake a year behind—and not on track to graduate “on time.” If the school manages to accelerate the student and the student graduates only a few months late—the summer after and not an entire year behind—shouldn’t that school get credit for accelerating the student? With today’s measurement systems, it is penalized.

The reverse scenario also exists today, as we give credit to schools that may have merely enrolled advanced students.

This doesn’t make sense. When a student transfers schools, he ought to be recognized based on the credits he brings and where he truly is academically, not based on his age—and the success of the school calculated accordingly.

This points to a desperate need to move toward a competency-based learning system that measures and rewards individual student growth, as well as an underlying shared learning infrastructure that allows the country to identify each unique student in a consistent way—so that when he or she moves geographies, the student’s record does as well—and to keep track of what that student knows and can do in a consistent way across geographies. Even moving past the question of calculating accurate graduation rates, unless this occurs, it remains challenging to figure out whether a school is helping a child academically with just a snapshot view.

Until we fix these problems, we shouldn’t be surprised at stories like the one unfolding in Colorado.

The biggest shame in all of this? By focusing on the wrong part of the story, it may set back our opportunity to leverage the rise of digital learning to transform our system into the student-centric one that each student deserves.

-Michael Horn

This post originally appeared at Forbes.com

On student/teacher engagement:

The part that is often missed when discussing these concepts is that it’s a strategy for learning that humanizes the classroom. Building and growing teacher-student relationships is essential to improving student learning outcomes. When a teacher has the opportunity to speak to each student and assess their progress every day, students feel that learning matters. They feel challenged and supported. Again, it’s not about the technology or the devices, it about shifting our pedagogy to put each student first.

I use this tool for all the reasons stated and more, particularly the opportunity to spend more class time addressing the higher order thinking skills. Could it be that this is the point that critics are missing? The term ‘ flipped classroom’ places too much emphasis on a tool used by students to prepare for class and clouds the fact that teachers are developing fuller, richer learning cycles with their new time. Let’s call it the ‘flip-tool’ and start to write more about the consequences that is the rich learning cycles we have been able to develop for our classrooms.

On technology and ensuring equal access:

I have vids on flash drives and DVDs for kids w/ no internet access/digital tools.

[Teachers] don’t need the internet to do this! They can create videos, and save them on students’ machines quickly and easily. That way students just watch them from the computer without having to worry about connecting to the internet. We’ve also been able to repurpose old laptops for just this use. Since all the computers need to do is play a few videos, old laptops are perfect for this task.

On managing time and motivating students to do at-home activities:

The flipped class allows for learners to customize when and where they learn. I have plenty that spend class time learning and practicing, and at home, they don’t worry about chemistry. There is no such thing as “homework” anymore. If they work, they can use class time to front-load and account for their work life. We went through how to budget time and use the resources so they don’t overwhelm themselves through the year…. Most of what my kids (and many flipped kids) do is use the videos as A) remediation if they need it, or B) pre-learning for use in class the next day. The videos I put out are less than 10-minutes in length, so the time at home is considerably LESS than a “normal” homework assignment. Plus, they aren’t sitting at home struggling with a worksheet or book assignment, so their mental stress is also alleviated to a degree with a flip.

one of the most surprising things I learned when a colleague and I went to using videos to deliver most of the “content” of our class was that when forced to boil down the content to the most important concepts in order to create the videos, we ended up with a total of 8 videos of about 10-15 minutes each for our 10 week course in microbiology. In the past, we wold have spent FAR more time delivering the same content in class. Now, class time is spent exploring the content in context, the students are in the lab more often and the class time is a far more collaborative endeavor for the students. We have been able to do more higher-order thinking projects with the “found” time. Also, the students really like being able to control the pace of the delivery of the content in the videos. We provide them with sheets to take notes on while watching the videos so it is not simply a passive activity. Flipping has definitely resulted in more engaging and enjoyable class time for the students and the teachers.

Finally, as chemistry teacher Aaron Sams explains, it’s important to emphasize that there’s no single model, with most teachers figuring this out, adapting, and improving their practice as they go.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that digital learning systems can be tailored to the specific interests, learning styles, and levels of accomplishment of each student.  As digital curricular materials employ ever-more-sophisticated technologies—3-dimensional videos, game playing, interactive exercises, real-time provision of information on student performance to teachers and students alike, and more—they will be seen as essential 21^st century learning tools.

But we can expect a strenuous, highly politicized debate over the way in which digital learning should be provided.  On the one side will be those who propose that most digital learning in K-12 public education be of the “blended” variety, that is, take place within public school classrooms under the tutelage of a highly qualified teacher.

On the other side, “online” proponents will argue that blended learning alone is not enough.  American education can be transformed only if the power to drive change is placed in the hands of students, who are offered a choice of providers that include not only the blended classroom but also those who offer products  exclusively online, supplementing asymmetric video presentations of online materials with interactive systems that employ such tools as Skype, interactive games, social networking, email communications and phone conversations.

All of this became clear at the conference sponsored in San Francisco last week by the Foundation on Excellence in Education, the nonprofit headed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who is promoting a strikingly innovative, bipartisan reform agenda that combines the Common Core standards promoted by the Gates Foundation and the Obama Administration with the accountability and choice principles to which he was committed during his eight years as Florida’s governor.

It is digital learning that holds together and gives spark to Bush’s agenda.  Common standards provide a nationwide platform upon which next generation curricular materials can be built; choice allows students to pick the courses most suited to their needs, abilities, and interests; and accountability ensures that learning is genuine.

Bush put on an impressive show.  His self-deprecating wit, extraordinary command of the subject, and undeniable passion generated a level of enthusiasm seldom found outside the confines of a well-orchestrated campaign event. When the former governor interviewed Melinda Gates about her support for Common Core standards, she relaxed noticeably, revealing a personal warmth and depth of knowledge less well displayed in her formal presentation.

But the true star of the show was Sal Khan, a former venture capitalist turned curriculum specialist, who has become a rock star of digital education. Unlike some other proponents of digital learning promoting their wares at the conference, Kahn taught his audience by both precept and example.  Not only did he advocate next-generation learning, but, in so doing, he blended a sweater-casual speaking style with a smoothly offered, high-tech digital presentation that was little less than astounding.  When he finished, only the most hard-nosed of skeptics walked away unconvinced that Khan had invented the one-and-only way to teach math to young people.

For Khan, next-generation learning combines simple, short, witty videos with problem sets that must be mastered before one moves to the next stage of instruction.  To motivate students, he uses, surprisingly, nothing more than badges and other phony rewards reminiscent of the stars that old-fashioned elementary school teachers used to post next to the names of high achievers.  Real-time data on success and failure is provided simultaneously to teachers, students, parents and anyone else authorized to access that information. You can learn all about the Khan method by looking at his videos on YouTube.

Yet Khan leaves the debate over blended versus online learning wide open.  On one side, the power of online learning is demonstrated by videos that are being viewed by Khan’s distant cousins as well as by the next generation of the Melinda and Bill Gates family, a saxophone player who is self-educating himself into an electrical engineer, and millions of young people in developing countries across the globe.

But the “blenders” will undoubtedly point to certain in-classroom keys to his accomplishments in the public schools of Los Altos, California.  There, student success at problem-solving is monitored in real time by teachers, serving as coaches, who intervene when videos are not enough. For blenders, the keys to the intervention’s apparent success include the use of real-time performance information by qualified teachers, not just the videos and problem sets.

Apparent success, it must be said, because the impact of neither the blended nor the online version of the Khan intervention has yet to be documented by a randomized trial.  Still, Los Altos school authorities are impressed enough to allow Khan Academy to expand from just a couple of demonstration classrooms to middle schools throughout the district.  And other charter and district schools are climbing on board this fast-moving train.

But the debate between blended and online learning will continue.  Too much politically is at stake for it to be otherwise.  It is not yet clear that blended learning a la Khan Academy will be any more efficient than the current bloated system of public education.  At a time of extreme fiscal exigency, legislators will look for ways in which technology can save money, not for new ways to add costs.

Meanwhile, school districts and teacher unions can be expected to fight publicly funded online learning that offers students a choice of taking courses outside their local district school.  If online learning should prove to be more effective than the learning that takes place within classrooms, it would provide a serious challenge to the school district-teacher union duopoly that blended learning does not.

-Paul E. Peterson

In the tiny Florence School District outside Pueblo, Johnson was one of 39 students who left Florence High School last year to sign up for online classes with GOAL Academy, one of the largest online schools in Colorado…

Johnson said she signed up for GOAL in July after her former science teacher promised free college classes. But she was back at Florence High School by January with no credits earned.

“I feel like I wasted an entire semester of my life,” said Johnson, now working overtime to boost her grades in hopes the gap in her transcript will be less noticeable to colleges.

So, a trusted former teacher, perhaps at a free BBQ in a local park, told Johnson about a wonderful new way to learn. Good for GOAL, which got a year’s worth of funding. And bummer for Florence High, which lost Johnson’s state dollars.

But the real risk — and real consequences — were borne by Johnson. It may be true that Johnson made a poor decision when she decided to enroll in GOAL in the first place. But, a system that offers little guidance and no safety nets for ill-informed high school students making big educational decisions is almost certain to produce many more stories of seventeen year-olds wasting a semester of school at the worst possible time. If we are going to offer students new options — and we should — policymakers must first do whatever they can to mitigate the risks borne by students.

Wrestling with the Mobility Issue

Data from both Ohio and Colorado show exceptional levels of mobility among full-time online students. In Ohio, state data show that about a third of students were enrolled for less than a year. Ed News Colorado found that of 10,500 students in the largest online programs in fall 2008, more than half – or 5,600 – left their virtual schools by the fall of 2009.

Representatives of online schools claim that this mobility is not necessarily a bug, but a feature. And, they’re not entirely wrong:

Reasons for the turnover include working with an at-risk student population that sees online learning as their last resort, students who use online as a brief experimentation with a new learning process, and parents not being able to stay home to oversee their children’s studies, said Heather O’Mara, executive director of Hope Online, one of the state’s largest online programs.

“We are all so different, we are serving different audiences and students are enrolling for very different reasons,” O’Mara said. “At Hope, we particularly target kids who are at risk, who have not been academically successful, not only at their previous school, probably several schools before that.”

But it’s also likely that high mobility is a sign of dissatisfaction or misaligned expectations about what online learning would really entail. And, since we don’t accept “we serve difficult students” as a blanket excuse when evaluating traditional school districts, we shouldn’t accept it for online schools either.

Most importantly, we need to align the incentives so that schools are compelled to share the risk with students — even if it slows growth. Here, Branson Online High offers a hopeful example, as its recent focus on ensuring families understood the online program before enrolling appears to be leading to more successful outcomes.

These are sticky, complex issues. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers, in its recent brief on virtual charter schools, acknowledges that high mobility impacts instruction and makes it challenging to evaluate virtual school performance, but offers no prescriptions.

I’ll offer up my ideas over the next few days. But it’s time to stop ducking this issue. I hope providers, advocates, and accountability hawks will respond with ideas of their own.

-Bill Tucker

It’s called “the flipped classroom.” While there is no one model, the core idea is to flip the common instructional approach: With teacher-created videos and interactive lessons, instruction that used to occur in class is now accessed at home, in advance of class. Class becomes the place to work through problems, advance concepts, and engage in collaborative learning. Most importantly, all aspects of instruction can be rethought to best maximize the scarcest learning resource—time.

Flipped classroom teachers almost universally agree that it’s not the instructional videos on their own, but how they are integrated into an overall approach, that makes the difference. In his classes, Bergmann says, students can’t just “watch the video and be done with it.” He checks their notes and requires each student to come to class with a question. And, while he says it takes a little while for students to get used to the system, as the year progresses he sees them asking better questions and thinking more deeply about the content. After flipping his classroom, Bergmann says he can more easily query individual students, probe for misconceptions around scientific concepts, and clear up incorrect notions.

Counterintuitively, Bergmann says the most important benefits of the video lessons are profoundly human: “I now have time to work individually with students. I talk to every student in every classroom every day.” Traditional classroom interactions are also flipped. Typically, the most outgoing and engaged students ask questions, while struggling students may act out. Bergmann notes that he now spends more time with struggling students, who no longer give up on homework, but work through challenging problems in class. Advanced students have more freedom to learn independently. And, while high-school students still occasionally lapse on homework assignments, Bergmann credits the new arrangement with fostering better relationships, greater student engagement, and higher levels of motivation.

Once Bergmann’s and Sams’s lessons were posted online, it wasn’t long before other students and teachers across the country were using the lessons, and making their own. Across the country in Washington, D.C., Andrea Smith, a 6th-grade math teacher at E. L. Haynes, a high-performing public charter school, shares Bergmann’s enthusiasm, but focuses on a different aspect of the flipped classroom. Smith, who has taught for more than a decade in both D.C.’s public charter and traditional district schools, immediately saw the benefit for students, but says she was most captivated by the opportunity to elevate teaching practice and the profession as a whole. As Smith explains, crafting a great four- to six-minute video lesson poses a tremendous instructional challenge: how to explain a concept in a clear, concise, bite-sized chunk. Creating her own videos forces her to pay attention to the details and nuances of instruction—the pace, the examples used, the visual representation, and the development of aligned assessment practices. In a video lesson on dividing fractions, for example, Smith is careful not to just teach the procedure—multiply by the inverse—but also to represent the important underlying conceptual ideas. Like Bergmann, she makes it clear that the videos are just one component of instruction. She’s keen on the equivalent of a motion picture’s “director’s cut,” where a video creator might explain the reasoning behind the examples chosen and how she would extend those activities into class time.

“Flipping” is rapidly moving into the mainstream. Bergmann and Sams have completed a book, are in high demand across the country at educator conferences, and even host their own “Flipped Class Conference” to train teachers. The chief academic officer at Smith’s school, Eric Westendorf, is taking the tools he has piloted at the school and building them into a platform for teachers everywhere to create and share videos. Most notable, though, is the emergence of the Khan Academy, an online repository of thousands of instructional videos that has been touted by Bill Gates and featured prominently in the national media.

Given education’s long history of fascination with new instructional approaches that are later abandoned, there’s a real danger that flipping, a seemingly simple idea that is profound in practice, may be reduced into the latest educational fad. And, in today’s highly polarized political environment, it also runs the risk of being falsely pigeonholed into one of education’s many false dichotomies, such as the age-old pedagogical debate between content knowledge and skills acquisition.

But the ideas behind flipping are not brand new. For over a decade, led by the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), dozens of colleges have successfully experimented with similar ideas across math, science, English, and many other disciplines. NCAT’s increasingly impressive body of practice shows that thoughtful course redesigns lead to improved learning. Carol Twigg, NCAT’s president and CEO, says there is no magic: course redesign is “a hard job.” She’s not assuming students love homework. But redesign offers an opportunity to reengage students and improve their motivation, while setting proper expectations and monitoring to “push school to the top of the list.” And while many course redesigns focus on incorporating more project-based learning opportunities, Twigg’s experience leads her to quickly dismiss pedagogical extremes: “If you don’t have basic math skills, you can’t do an interesting physics project.”

There is also some danger that the flipped classroom could be seen as another front in a false battle between teachers and technology. Yet Bergmann and Sams emphasize that the “only magic bullet is the recruiting, training, and supporting of quality teachers.” And while Khan Academy’s prominence engenders fear of standardization and deprofessionalization among some critics, Bergmann, Sams, and Smith see instructional videos as powerful tools for teachers to create content, share resources, and improve practice. Smith admits that if such tools were available when she first started out, she “would have run to this every week when planning.”

It seems almost certain that instructional videos, interactive simulations, and yet-to-be-dreamed-up online tools will continue to multiply. But who will control these tools and whether they will fulfill their potential remains to be seen. As Scott McLeod, one of the nation’s leading thinkers on educational technology and the director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education, observes, the “reason Sal Khan is so visible right now is that nobody did this instead. It would have been great if the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics had been doing this, but someone from the outside had to fill the vacuum.” His guidance to educators: “Start making!”

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

And not just in the obvious ways. Yes, directly through digital instruction. But also by freeing excellent teachers to reach more students in-person.

Today, only about 25 percent of U.S. classrooms have teachers whose students learn enough to close achievement gaps in a few years and make further progress like the world’s top students. Another 25 percent have lagging teachers whose students end up further behind.  The rest have solid teachers – students on track stay on track, but students starting behind stay behind, and few get ahead. Overall, U.S. students end up pretty much where they started out in life, the antithesis of the American dream.

How could digital learning change this picture? One way is by helping solid teachers become more effective. As Michael notes, digital tools can free these teachers’ time to give students more personal attention and develop higher-order capabilities. Digital technology can also help diagnose students’ learning needs and suggest responsive instruction, thereby mimicking the differentiation that only excellent teachers deliver today.

A second way digital learning can improve outcomes is by helping top-25% teachers reach the majority of students. Sound far-fetched? As we asserted in our 2009 report 3X for All, not really. Consider three ways digital technology could give dramatically more students access to the best teachers:

• Time-technology swaps: If students spend part of the school day learning digitally—monitored by support staff or volunteers—that frees the in-person excellent teachers’ time. They can use that surplus to reach more students—in some cases up to 3 or 4 times as many students if they also specialize in what they teach best. (More below about why time with excellent teachers will still be the great differentiator of student outcomes in the future.)
• Remote instruction: For schools with severely limited numbers of excellent teachers, like many rural and urban areas, bringing in great, live (though not in-person) teachers through videoconferencing, holographic technology, or other means could give students access to great interactive instruction they’d otherwise miss.
• Boundless instruction: As Sal Khan has made famous, superb conveyers of content can also capture their performances on video and make them available not just to dozens, but to millions of students. Smart software that responds to each child’s learning level is another example. Combining these with time-technology swaps could enable far more students to have the best of both worlds – great basic content and motivating, live teachers who take learning to the next level.

Together, strategies like these should make it possible for the top 25 percent of teachers to reach far more than 25 percent of students. Schools should be able to pay top-tier teachers more out of regular per-pupil funds for the additional children they teach, which should make it easier to attract and retain excellent teachers. We’d be much closer to making teaching an “Opportunity Culture” like other professions, with multiple ways of advancing over a career.

Why is leveraging excellent teachers so important?  As digital tools proliferate and improve, solid instruction in the basics will eventually become “flat”—available anywhere globally. Three big factors will increasingly differentiate student outcomes: (1) development of students’ self-motivation (2) effectiveness addressing learning barriers, like time-management, emotional disruptions, and social pressures that  affect learning even among advantaged children; and (3) students’ higher-order capabilities like analytical, conceptual and creative thinking, especially as applied to solve real problems.

In the digital future, teacher effectiveness may matter even more than it does today, as these highly complex instructional tasks are left to the adults responsible for each student’s learning.  A large field of industrial psychology indicates enormous performance differences even in simple jobs, but especially in complex jobs like this. Teachers who nurture motivated, tenacious problem solvers while using new technologies to reach more children can become the fuel of local, state, and national economies.

– Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

The article, “In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores,” indeed shows that bolting technology solutions on today’s existing education system is a bad strategy for improving student learning. As my coauthors and I wrote in Disrupting Class, this has been true for some time. The United States has wasted well over $60 billion “cramming” technology in schools in this way to little effect over the past couple decades—and predictably so, according to our research. That some schools continue to do this is unfortunate—particularly in tough budget times—and is worth reporting.

But to generalize beyond this case study that all technology in education is not worth the investment makes no sense and asks the wrong question, as Jonathan Schorr argues persuasively. As Tom Vander Ark points out, this storyline is both an old and outdated one.

Simply put, people should not take from this article that technology will not be a significant part of the answer for the struggles of the country’s education system. It will likely be the very platform for it.

Technology has the potential to transform the education system—not by using technology for technology’s sake through PowerPoint or multimedia at the expense of math and reading or something like that—but instead as a vehicle to individualize learning for students working to master such things as math and reading, thereby creating a student-centric system as opposed to today’s lockstep and monolithic one.

According to the article (and with a full caveat that the article of course may not capture the true intent of the school officials profiled), a goal here was to create a computer-centric classroom. If this is true, it dramatically misses the point. As others have noted, a critical problem with the notion of creating the “classroom of the future” is just that phrase—“the classroom of the future”—for the ways in which that language locks in our imagination around the current paradigm of schooling and even sometimes implies that creating this should be the goal in and of itself.

Instead we need to be doing what an increasing number of schools like another Arizona-based school, the Carpe Diem Collegiate High School and Middle School, are doing and disrupting that flawed paradigm by implementing online learning to create a student-centric system—not to increase costs for the community through bond measures or otherwise, as the article reports—but to use existing resources to prioritize student learning and achieve great results.

Those cited in the article who criticize those in favor of upgrading technology first and asking questions later about how it will impact student achievement are exactly right, as Bror Saxberg—one of the leading thinkers in understanding how to use technology to bolster learning—argues here.

Nor does this rule only apply to technology. Spending on virtually any K-12 educational initiative without having increased student learning as the ultimate priority makes no sense.

-Michael B. Horn

Richard was considered a home schooler at the time, but “hybrid schooler” would have been more accurate: He took classes from an online provider, a small private school, and a performing arts program.

Richard made the team, and by midseason lots of new baseball buddies were hanging around our house on weekends. Soon we discovered that Richard wasn’t the only “hybrid student” on the ball club that year. Leon’s first baseman spent his mornings taking online courses through the Florida Virtual School, the knuckleball pitcher was taking a “dual enrollment” English class through the community college, and the left-handed pro prospect had enrolled in a financial management course at a local college (in case he was drafted).

Moreover, one of Leon’s outfielders had figured out an ingenious way to get a music education few families could afford out of pocket. This kid took mostly music classes at Leon by day and then several online courses at night and during the summer. He ended up being a four-time All-State musician and getting a college offer from Juilliard.

When I first encountered all these hybrid students, I figured there must be something in the water at Leon High. But I came to realize that many of these unconventional schooling options were the by-product of reforms former governor Jeb Bush had initiated, especially the creation of the Florida Virtual School.

The rise of hybrid schooling bodes well for students whose needs, gifts, interests, and learning styles do not align with the factory school model of the 20th century, and for parents who know that no school can maximize the potential of every child every year in every way. (There is a Magic School Bus, but no magic school.)

Customized education is good for all kids and not just for academic reasons. Several years ago, Richard entered a local talent competition structured much like American Idol. Different singers would perform at big community gatherings and then people would vote for the ones they considered the best. Richard kept advancing week after week, until on the night of the finals, one of the organizers took me aside and said, “I don’t get it. You guys just moved here a year or so ago, and yet Richard seems to have a really strong base of support.”

As Richard’s proud papa, I wanted to tell this guy, “Of course, Richard’s got lots of support—he’s the best one.” But I knew what this guy was getting at, so I explained, “See that guy over there? That’s Richard’s drama teacher at Young Actors Theatre. He gets all his thespian friends to vote for Richard.” Then I said, “See that family over there? They know Richard from baseball. Those kids over there took classes with Richard at the classical Christian school. The college students way back there know Richard from Young Life youth ministry. And those kids over there are in the AP classes Richard is taking at Leon.”

The contest organizer realized that Richard’s social network was far larger than he’d expected. What I marveled at was how diverse his friendship network was. Gay. Straight. Christian. Non-Christian. Jocks. Thespians. Nerds. Cool kids. Richard’s friends reflect the diversity of his hybrid-schooling life.

Now, I’m not so naive as to think that hybrid schooling will eradicate high school cliques or classroom bullying. But customized schooling can offer kids a far richer, and more varied, social experience than they might otherwise get. And when you add these social benefits to the educational advantages of customized schooling, you can see why I’m glad that Jeb Bush and other reformers had the Hank Greenberg–like chutzpah to change the way that Florida does education.

William Mattox is a resident fellow at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Florida.

In “Getting At-Risk Teens to Graduation: Blended learning offers a second chance,” June Kronholz writes about Performance Learning Centers (PLCs), schools that mix credit recovery and blended learning to help at-risk kids make their way to high school graduation. And, in the process she helps to add nuance to a discussion of online learning that is too often filled with false assumptions and dichotomies.

In the mythical battle between teachers and technology, PLCs don’t fit neatly into the dominant narrative. They are high-touch, combining small learning communities and wrap-around supports for guidance and social services. And, they are not cheap, with both start-up costs and relatively low educator/student ratios.

There are no silver bullets in this story. Despite the students’ strong scores on Virginia’s Standards of Learning exams, Kronholz wonders about the rigor of instruction (a concern across Virginia given the state’s college remediation rates). And, we don’t yet have data about how well students do after graduation. Still, the PLCs show promise. And this is the type of story that helps us understand what a different notion of school, made possible in part by technology, looks like — warts and all.

-Bill Tucker

Eighteen-year-old Tyriq Jones was fairly blunt about the mess he had gotten himself into before transferring to the Hampton, Virginia, online school where I approached him one chilly day this spring. “I got in trouble. I was playing around. I got backed up” in high school, he said. He had failed three classes in his junior year and, faced with the prospect of repeating a year, probably would have dropped out instead, he told me. “I didn’t want that kind of pressure.”

People who deal with at-risk teenagers say dropping out is not an event; it’s a process. Youngsters miss school and get “backed up” in class, so they miss more school because they’re bewildered or embarrassed, and fall further behind. Seeing few ways to recover, “they just silently drop out,” said Richard Firth, who showed me around the Hampton school and two others in Richmond that are using online learning to derail the cycle.

In the three years the 75-seat Hampton Performance Learning Center has been open, it claims to have graduated 91 students. There’s a waiting list for admission, so the school opened a second shift, which also is near capacity. Sherri Pritchard, the school’s social-studies “learning facilitator”—there are no teachers and no principal here—said 95 percent of her online students pass Virginia’s end-of-course history test, which would put them well ahead of both the Hampton school district’s and state’s pass rates.

And Tyriq: He has only a C average after a year at the Hampton PLC, he said, but he graduated in June—on time—and plans to enlist in the Army, his goal all along.

The New Alternative

Online K–12 education made its appearance in the mid-1990s, largely as a resource for bright students who had no access to accelerated classes. It moved next into core high-school courses where districts found themselves with teacher shortages—math, science, foreign languages—and has been growing bumptiously, and in a dozen directions, ever since.

The International Association for K–12 Online Learning, which goes by the acronym iNACOL, estimates that 82 percent of school districts now offer at least one online course. Thirty-two states have virtual schools where online offerings range from one class to an entire high-school curriculum, according to an annual report on online learning published by the Evergreen Education Group, a Colorado consultancy. At the Florida Virtual School alone, students collectively took 220,000 classes online in 2009–10 (see “Florida’s Online Option,” features, Summer 2009). Twenty-six states have at least one full-time online school, and perhaps 225,000 youngsters were full-time online students this year, says John Watson, editor of the Evergreen report.

During a recent visit to the Richmond PLCs, Congressman Eric Cantor chats with Dr. Donna Scott.

Two of the fastest-growing trends in online education converge in the Performance Learning Center project, which is why I called Communities in Schools, a nonprofit dropout-prevention program that devised the model in Georgia in 2002.

The PLCs call themselves an alternative to traditional schools and distance themselves from the credit-recovery factories that many districts have opened to boost their graduation rates ahead of state and federal sanctions. (Indeed, a few PLC students enroll for the chance to accelerate.) But the schools do offer struggling kids like Tyriq a chance to make up courses they failed in traditional teacher-student classrooms, which puts them at the nexus of a national debate. States are raising their graduation standards, but returning kids to the classroom for a second attempt at algebra often is counterproductive—Why should we suppose they’ll understand equations any better the second time around?—and gobbles up teacher time.

The second trend is the “blended” approach, combining online learning with a teacher-led classroom (see “Future Schools,” features, Summer 2011). Most instruction is online in the PLC model, but a teacher-coach is there to answer questions, direct projects, and keep kids on track.

Communities in Schools linked those two trends with the small-school idea and has expanded the project to seven states and 33 schools. PLCs have only four or five classrooms, four or five teachers, and fewer than 100 students. Teachers are district employees who are paid the district scale and apply for their jobs. Kids remain part of their home schools, which has raised graduation statistics for those schools and generated buy-in from their administrators.

PLCs generally receive the same per-pupil funding as  traditional schools. Their biggest expense, after salaries, goes to licensing fees for the online curriculum, which Richard Firth, the Virginia PLC director, put at about $35,000 a year per school. Start-up costs for computers, teacher training, and to carve new schools out of old facilities can be a showstopper for financially pressed school districts. Richmond, which is building its first new high school in 40 years, plans to include some multipurpose rooms that could be used for a future PLC.

Richard Firth, director of the Virginia PLCs, says dropping out of school for at-risk teenagers is not an “event” but a “process.”

The only outside funding comes from Communities in Schools, which pays the salary of a services coordinator, who links youngsters with housing, day-care, medical, and other service providers and helps them plan what they do after graduation. The services coordinator at the Richmond career-center PLC keeps a closet of baby clothes in her office for students whose own children can attend Head Start or day care downstairs.

Almost disarmingly, the PLCs reach out to youngsters that schools typically find the most troublesome. Sherman Curl, the academic coordinator—i.e., principal—at the Adult Career Development Center PLC in Richmond, handed me a brochure describing the students for whom the PLC is a good fit. Kids with “poor attendance,” “excessive tardiness,” “academic failure,” “apathy,” “social issues,” low motivation, and such “challenges to success” as pregnancy and poverty, it read.

In a summary of its 2009–10 academic year, Virginia’s Communities in Schools reported that one-third of the students at its four PLCs were at least two years behind in academic credits when they arrived. They were a year or two older than their conventional-school peers and, in the previous year, averaged six suspensions and 24 absences each at their former schools. Several youngsters told me they’d fallen in with the wrong crowd at their old schools, or they felt bullied and isolated. “I started messing up,” a chatty 18-year-old named Chelsie Saunders told me at the Hampton PLC, which is housed in a modern teen center, complete with pool tables, a basketball court, a coffee bar, and an airy television lounge with leather sofas.

“These are kids who never made it in a comprehensive school,” said Wes Hamner, the academic coordinator at the Richmond Technical Center PLC, which occupies one floor of a sprawling trades-training campus in Richmond’s industrial district.

For all that, the three PLCs I visited were remarkably quiet and orderly: There wasn’t much chatter about what kids were learning, but there wasn’t any catcalling, hallway scuffling, or acting out in class, either. Hamner pointed out that there’s no security at his school and that the lockers don’t even have locks. Teachers sat in the back or in a corner of the classrooms, while students sat at computers, wearing headsets.

Teacher Pat Sessions monitors student work via a “dashboard” on her computer.

Teaching to the Student

At Hampton, I asked Pritchard, the social-studies facilitator, how she knew what her students were doing, so she opened a dashboard on her computer. It showed that on computer 3, a student was working on a U.S. history unit, or “module,” on civil rights. The teenager on computer 6 was working on a module on imperialism for the same course, and the student on computer 7 was doing a review and practice test on the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Most PLCs, including those in Virginia, use NovaNET, an online curriculum that is marketed by Pearson Education Inc. The program tests a student at the end of each lesson, module, and course, and lets those who pass their tests with at least an 80 percent move on. For those who don’t pass, the computer singles out the content they seemed not to understand, reteaches it, and retests.

Administrators and teachers at the Richmond Adult Career Development Center PLC: Sherman Curl (front right), Rani Gharseese (front left), Elizabeth Muse (center), Pat Sessions (back left), Ingrid Thomas (back center), Stephania Muterspaugh (back right)

Kids like the immediate feedback, Katherine Fox, the academic coordinator at Hampton, told me: “It’s difficult for them to wait for success. Kids want to move on.” A mop-haired boy named Michael told me that he used to obsess over test questions at his conventional school and couldn’t force himself to move ahead. The NovaNET practice tests and make-up tests relieved him of that anxiety, he said, as he pulled certificates from his backpack to show that he had completed two business classes, oceanography, and biology. “No one gets left behind here,” he said.

Back on Pritchard’s dashboard, meanwhile, I could see that the student on computer 1 was using an open-source educational website called SAS Curriculum Pathways to research voting rights for the government class, while the student on computer 2 was researching Appomattox on SAS for history class. Most Hampton PLC computers can access only NovaNET; the few that can access SAS can’t go any further than research sites to which SAS provides a link.

At the career center PLC in Richmond, which is housed on the top floor of a 1920s-era school built for the city’s elite black students, science facilitator Patricia Sessions showed me more. A “pacing sheet,” a sort of minimum speed limit set by the state education department, suggested that teachers should expect to devote three weeks to a unit on biochemical processes, part of the biology curriculum. But when Sessions opened the computer file of a student named Trish, it showed that Trish had finished the unit in a week. She’d spent 26 minutes on an online lesson about atoms and molecules, and got a 90 on the test. She’d spent an hour on the properties-of-water lesson and another hour on acids and bases, and got 80 on both.

Teachers told me that most NovaNET courses are comparable to textbook-based courses in length and content—a comeback to critics who talk of watered-down curricula at alternative schools—but that many students move through them more quickly, and often finish high school a semester early. “I’m constantly working rather than waiting,” explained a tattooed girl named Shaina at the Richmond Tech school.

Pritchard told me that she started the school year with students grouped largely by subject—say, geography in one period, government in another. But as the year went on, and students progressed at different speeds, classes became more diverse. In any class period now, she could have youngsters working on either semester of any of four subjects.

Wes Hamner is the academic coordinator at the Richmond Technical Center PLC.

As students finish courses, they can move to another classroom to work on courses they may find slower going. If they earn enough credits to graduate before the school year is over, the services coordinator steers them to mentorships, trade training, or jobs. Sessions, who was playing Mendelssohn in her otherwise-silent classroom as her students worked, said she started the year with 20 kids in her afternoon class and was down to 8 by late March.

All that movement precludes lectures or class discussions. Teachers told me that anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of the work in their classrooms is done online, with work sheets, projects, one-on-one meetings, and, for seniors, a research report and presentation accounting for the rest. The walls of Pritchard’s classroom were ringed with poster-board projects on the Zhou Dynasty, the Battle of Fort Fisher, and the roles of the secretary of defense and the U.S. Department of Education, among others. It wasn’t AP material, perhaps, but it showed persistence and attention to detail that are not always common in city schools. Last year, the whole school read the same book, Facing the Lion, and used it as a springboard for cross-disciplinary studies.

The students I talked with said they didn’t miss discussions or were self-aware enough to know that lectures didn’t fit their learning style. “I wouldn’t be listening anyway,” Tyriq told me; “I’m not a person to talk,” said another 18-year-old named Dashawn. Instead, kids said they liked the anonymity and independence of working online. “I like being in my own bubble,” Chelsie Saunders told me in Hampton: “I don’t like waiting on people” on some lessons and “I don’t worry about people getting frustrated with me” for working slowly on others.

Teacher Stephenia Muterspaugh prepares Shakeva Seward, Thomas Griffis, and Brittany Goodman for their Standards of Learning tests at the Richmond Adult Career Development Center PLC .

A Promising Start

The PLCs take youngsters who have at least attempted 9th grade, plus a few overage 8th graders. But most kids arrive in 10th or 11th grade when they realize they’re not on track to graduate. For admission, they must score at an 8th-grade level on standardized reading and math tests (the Richmond Tech PLC raised that to 9th grade because it had so many applicants), pass an interview, and sign an achievement contract that also commits them to attend a daily meeting called Morning Motivation. Each gets a learning plan that plots an individual path to graduation and then to a trade program, a job, or college.

Yvonne Brandon, superintendent of Richmond City Schools, expressed enthusiasm for online learning when we spoke. “We have to transform our ideas of what learning looks like,” she said. But PLC staffers told me that the districts sometimes struggle to understand them. Grade levels, quarterly grades, GPAs, and the academic calendar are fuzzy at a move-at-your-own-pace school: Youngsters told me how many credits they had, not whether they were juniors or seniors.

Sherri Pritchard is Hampton PLC’s social studies “learning facilitator.”

Students graduate when they earn the state-mandated 22 credits, but they can’t receive diplomas until spring. Firth, the Virginia PLC director, said he recently learned that some of those graduates-without-diplomas were being counted as absent by the district because, well, they weren’t in school. “We’re so outside the box and education is so inside the box,” Hamner sighed.

The data on online education are still pretty equivocal. There are no data on what kind of student performs best in an online class, although everyone I talked with assumed it probably was the independent achiever, because that kind of student performs well in any setting. There are few quality measures, although Michael Horn, executive director for education at the Innosight Institute, a Mountain View, California, think tank, points out that we don’t know how to measure quality in face-to-face classes, either.

Barbara Means of SRI International, a research institute in Menlo Park, California, told me that much of the ambiguity is because state data systems aren’t set up to compare online learners to in-class learners. They don’t record which students taking the state’s standardized math tests completed them at the end of an online course, for example, and which took them after a face-to-face class. Most states don’t keep student-level data, so researchers also can’t compare similar students at a full-time virtual school and those in a full-time conventional one.

Means reviewed 12 years of literature on online learning and said that from the limited data they presented she concluded that “there wasn’t much difference” in the educational outcomes of kids who studied online and those who studied in a classroom. That suggests that schools should consider some other reason if they’re thinking of shifting curriculum or students online, she said: Perhaps it’s cheaper or there are social benefits, like making school more flexible for working students or for those with infants.

Means also surveyed the literature comparing outcomes at traditional schools to outcomes at schools that blended face-to-face and online teaching. Youngsters in the blended environments, with a teacher and technology, did “significantly better,” she said. But that may be because blended schools offered youngsters more learning time, more content, or perhaps both, rather than because of the different approach to teaching.

Katherine Fox, academic coordinator at the Hampton PLC, hands Tyriq Jones his diploma.

Credit-recovery and online programs have been accused of low standards and a weak-tea curriculum, anything to get kids into the graduation statistics, critics contend. But the PLCs insist on the rigor of their program because it’s based on a general-education curriculum, not a credit-recovery curriculum. PLC students take the same state tests as their traditional-school peers. And computer testing on NovaNET and other online curricula prevents social promotion or the intervention of soft-hearted administrators. “We legally graduate kids; I don’t do them any favors,” said Wes Hamner at Richmond Tech PLC.

In a report on the 2009–10 school year, the project says that, nationally, its students improved their scores in all four core subjects compared to their performance in their home school the year before—by from 6 to 11 percentage points—and that 96 percent of the students classified as seniors at the beginning of the school year graduated. For a project that works with potential dropouts, that’s hugely impressive, but there has been little outside research on the PLCs that would confirm that.

The results at the Virginia PLCs are equally ambiguous. In 2009–10, the 432 youngsters who attended the four schools arrived with D averages in math, English, science, and social studies, and, except for math—which was still stuck in the basement—raised them to a C. But the averages include the 30 percent of kids who dropped out, switched to a GED program, or left for some other reason, probably lowering the grades.

After experiencing little success in a traditional high school, Tyriq Hasan Jones graduated in June 2011 from the Hampton PLC.

The PLCs also reported that 96 percent of their students passed Virginia’s end-of-course algebra exams, 97 percent passed reading, 90 percent passed biology, and 100 percent passed writing. That would put the PLCs ahead of state averages in all four subjects. (The results say a lot about Virginia’s learning standards: Is it really possible that only 6 percent of the state’s 400,000 high schoolers failed reading and 6 percent failed Algebra I last year?) The scores of PLC students are included in the results of their home schools, which makes them difficult to verify. The PLCs also don’t accept English-language learners, kids with discipline problems or most disabilities, or those with elementary-level reading and math abilities, as other public schools must, which muddies the comparison.

Still, more than one-third of the youngsters who started at the Virginia PLCs in fall 2009 graduated in 2010, including 68 students who headed to two- or four-year colleges, the Virginia project reported.

When I spoke with Chelsie Saunders in Hampton in early spring, she laid out a career path that included community college, university, and then a career in teaching or nursing. “Honestly, if it wasn’t for here, I wouldn’t graduate,” she told me. When I checked back in June, she had.

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter, and currently a contributing editor at Education Next.

If this sounds alien to you, clearly you haven’t signed up for Twitter. This five-year-old phenomenon allows individuals to dash off short comments to their friends, families, professional colleagues, and whoever else might be interested in their stream of consciousness. The technology has already been credited with bringing down oppressive regimes and creating whole new ways of reporting breaking news. It’s a truly open marketplace of ideas, with no editors, gatekeepers, or quality control. So what does it mean for the education debate?

The first thing to understand about Twitter is that most of its messages amount to, “Hey, check this out,” followed by a link to a newspaper article or blog post. It’s a handy device for telling the world (or at least the people in your own world) about news or columns that you find compelling. It’s also a form of self-promotion; quite a few tweets announce posts the tweeter herself has written.

But in the hands of a gifted provocateur, Twitter can be so much more. Take scholar-turned-reform-apostate Diave Ravitch, who according to Klout.com is the most influential tweeter in the education policy space (see sidebar). As Alexander Russo, a freelance writer and blogger, remarked sardonically, “a 72-year-old grandmother has won the Internet.” She’s done it not only by linking to columns and articles she agrees with, but by offering bumper sticker–style statements that tend to set the web aflame. For instance, “Accountability is only for teachers and principals, not for students, families, elected officials, district leadership.” Or: “Last places to go to find out how to ‘reform’ schools: Congress/State Legislature/US Dept of Education.”

Want to follow the top tweeters in education?
Twitter lists made up of the Top 25 Education Policy/Media Tweeters and the
Top 25 Education Tweeters may be found at the Education Next Twitter page.

This might not exactly be H. L. Mencken, but it surely provides raw emotional relief for educators and others who feel besieged by the modern-day reform movement. They “retweet” Ravitch’s rants and, thanks to the multiplication effects of networks, soon tens of thousands of people receive them. In fact, Ravitch’s tweets are so influential that an anonymous someone has created the Twitter handle “@NOTDianeRavitch” to argue the positions held by the education historian before she changed her mind on most education policy issues.
Not that reformers don’t have their own Twitter heroes. Former District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee is within striking distance of Ravitch’s influence and serves up a steady diet of can-do reform truisms. Tom Vander Ark, an entrepreneur formerly of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, offers an optimistic take on the burgeoning field of online learning. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan promotes his administration’s policies via @arneduncan. And @EdTrust offers its patented progressive take on education and social justice.

It’s hard to know whether all this tweeting adds up to anything significant. Of course, much the same was once said of blogs; now it’s well-accepted that a well-written blog post can be just as influential as a newspaper op-ed. Twitter offers a nonstop stream of views, ideas, opinions, and emotions; get yourself in the flow or be left behind.