Technology and Innovation

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Ruling like it’s 1968

Adam Emerson
Adam Emerson

A former member of the Buffalo Teachers Federation named Lynn Seagren Bass took to the pages of the The Buffalo News today to berate the union’s longtime leader, Phil Rumore, a man whom Bass identifies as “the ultimate guardian of the toxic status quo, a broken system that hurts children.” Bass’ moment of clarity came in 1996, she says, when she became a parent in addition to a veteran school teacher of 14 years. She joined a school-based management team that she says eventually eroded her early idealism as she watched union representatives “openly prioritizing their contract over progress.”

That was due to a culture, Bass writes, nourished by a union chief who executed a “doublespeak strategy” of publicly embracing innovations while fueling “distrust and adversarial relationships.”

[Rumore] seems to think it’s still 1968. According to him, his organization is blameless and system failure is always someone else’s fault. In reality, no miraculous “educational partnership organization” can possibly succeed with the unreasonable constraints of the current contract …

… In 2006, I gladly escaped to become principal of Tapestry Charter High School. Our second graduation was June 27. Our graduates represented every Buffalo ZIP code and had 61 percent free and reduced lunch rate. Nineteen percent had special education accommodation plans and our population was 63 percent African-American and 6 percent Hispanic. Our graduation rate was more than 90 percent. We’ve created a positive school community with a dedicated group of professional educators. Parents are given a valued voice.

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Blog AdministrationCustomizationTechnology and InnovationVirtual Education

The value of online learning

Adam Emerson
Adam Emerson

The New York Times’ feature Room for Debate has brought several educators together to talk about whether and how students benefit from virtual instruction. It’s nice to hear from educators on this subject, including this refreshing argument from teacher Gary S. Stager on the contribution online learning makes toward public education:

Learning is no longer bound by artificial schedules, random teacher assignments or age segregation. Students feel more connected than in “school” where talking is the No. 1 infraction and teacher access is severely curtailed. When work is public, peers learn from it and support reciprocal growth. Everyone is a teacher and learner all of the time. The quality of work benefits from the extra time, collaboration and expertise.

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Blog AdministrationCharter SchoolsTeacher QualityTechnology and Innovation

Charter network leader Moskowitz on class sizes

Adam Emerson
Adam Emerson

“Obsession with class size is causing many public schools to look like relics,” Success Charter Network founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz writes in the Sunday Washington Post. Small class sizes are no guarantee of success, and a “19th-century school can be transformed into a well-managed 21st-century school by adding just two students per classroom.”

 As an example, she cites the makeup of the network’s crown jewel, the Harlem Success Academy Charter School:

… we’ve gotten some of the best results in New York City … some classes are comparatively large because we believe our money is better spent elsewhere. In fifth grade, for example, every student gets a laptop and a Kindle with immediate access to an essentially unlimited supply of e-books. Every classroom has a Smart Board, a modern blackboard that is a touch-screen computer with high-speed Internet access. Every teacher has a laptop, video camera, access to a catalogue of lesson plans and videotaped lessons.

Public schools are spending so much to reduce class sizes that there isn’t enough left to ensure the development of the teachers they hire, Moskowitz writes. What’s worse, she says, human capital is getting more expensive while better technology and intellectual property are getting cheaper.

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Blog AdministrationEducation and Public PolicyTechnology and Innovation

The federal role in education

Adam Emerson
Adam Emerson

Most barriers to innovation in education occur at the state and local level, Tom Vander Ark writes today at edReformer, but there are a few at the federal level. They include:

1. NCLB picked criterion-referenced testing over growth models; that probably set back competency-based learning a bit. Growth models are being approved state by state.

2. The feds retain the historical bias/restrictions against private enterprise; e.g., excluding private enterprise from stimulus funding (compared to massive private investment in energy).

3. Input-oriented programmatic funding (exacerbated at the state level)

4. Inadequate Investigator driven research funding rather than DARPA-like strategic funding

Also, RiShawn Biddle has some good historical context on the role federal funding has played in education.

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Blog AdministrationCommon GroundCustomizationEducation and Public PolicyTechnology and InnovationVirtual Education

A public-private accord in Florida with jaw-dropping implications for online learning

Jon East
Jon East

A Florida House committee was treated Tuesday to a high-level discussion of digital learning that included the likes of former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise and national education reformer Tom Vander Ark, but the showstopper came from a different duo with a jaw-dropping accord. The policy director for the nation’s leading public virtual school and the president of a leading private virtual education company told lawmakers that competition is the best way to give students new online opportunities.

No, we’re not making this up.

Sitting around that committee room table were Holly Sagues, chief policy officer for Florida Virtual School, and Barbara Dreyer, president and CEO of Connections Academy. Florida Virtual is far and away the nation’s most successful public virtual school, whose 213,926 courses last year represented three times the rate of the next closest state. Dreyer and one of her own private competitors, K-12 Inc., have found common ground with Florida Virtual on a plan that would introduce statewide private providers for all forms of online learning.

They have agreed to a plan that is animated by two basic objectives. First: “To provide students throughout Florida with as many quality online education options as possible and to make those options available to every student regardless of where they live or whether they attend a district school.” Second: “To bring more consistency in the qualifications, funding, and accountability applied to all public and private providers.”

House K-12 Innovation Chairwoman Kelli Stargel is showing clear interest, and substantial legislative groundwork has been laid. Some two dozen online advocates worked collaboratively over the past eight months around those objectives and were able to avoid the acrimony and division that has characterized previous efforts. Their product could make Florida a national model in the arena of online education and includes:

  • Authorizing the state Board of Education to select private companies meeting certain standards to provide online courses or fulltime online education statewide – in direct competition with Florida Virtual School.
  • Bringing consistency to the qualifications, funding and accountability applied to all public and private providers. Some districts currently contract with private companies to provide fulltime virtual programs, and there is currently wide disparity, particularly in funding.
  • Removing the mandate on school districts to provide fulltime programs themselves and letting students choose from Florida Virtual or the private providers.

The implications for legislation in this state this year are obvious, but the example being set by the Florida Virtual School is something that deserves its own form of awe. This is an innovative public school that has developed markets in other states and nations, and it is showing a disarming level of institutional confidence. At a time when many public educators are conditioned to see private options as an assault on their turf, Virtual School president and chief executive Julie Young is saying, essentially, bring it on. Maybe her real savvy is simply to make sure they all play by the same rules, but her moxy is something to behold.

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Blog AdministrationEducation and Public PolicySchool ChoiceTechnology and Innovation

Getting beyond left and right in education reform, a rally from an unlikely source

Adam Emerson
Adam Emerson

Soon after redefinED launched in late November, contributor Jon East commented on Jeb Bush’s call for bipartisanship  in developing “meaningful, child-centered” education reform during the former Florida governor’s National Summit on Education Reform in Washington, D.C. As Jon noted then, “this is not to be dismissed as idle happy talk,” and he should know. Jon covered education policy for more than two decades when he was an editorial writer for the St. Petersburg Times, and recalled that “Bush achieved much of his own sweeping education agenda in Florida from 1999 to 2007 through taut partisan muscle …”

This week, Reason.tv released its interview with Bush at the National Summit, exploring mostly Bush’s interest in transformative and disruptive technologies in the classroom. But in the closing seconds of the 6:30 minute video, Bush returns to the theme of bipartisanship and reminds his interviewer of the liberal heritage of school choice:

I think a liberal can support systemic change. School choice in the 60s was a creature of the left, not of the right. It makes no sense for me to think you have the left supporting an unsustainable system and the right not focusing on rising student achievement as a high priority but just kind of focusing on local control being the dominant feature. We need to get the debate beyond that, and I hope to play a role in that.

Here’s the full video:

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Blog AdministrationSchool ChoiceTechnology and Innovation

Robinson: New education paradigms require a transformation of public education

Adam Emerson
Adam Emerson

The Cooperative Catalyst team this morning introduced the uniquely creative mind of Ken Robinson, whose animated presentation on new education paradigms made its way on YouTube in October and has since enjoyed more than 2.4 million hits. 

Calling for a radical rethinking of public education today, Robinson argues that we’re “educating people out of their creativity” in an education system “modeled on the interests of industrialization, and in the image of it.”

“Schools are still pretty much organized along factory lines — ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects,” Robinson says in his presentation. “We still educate children by batches, we put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are.”

To paraphrase, we still falsely assume that children have identical needs, and we assume one school works for all students. A top-down, assembly line model. The critique is similar to one made by sociologist James S. Coleman 50 years ago in The Adolescent Society:

The same process which occurs among prisoners in a jail and among workers in a factory is found among students in a school. The institution is different, but the demands are there, and the students develop a collective response to these demands. This response takes a similar form to that of workers in industry …

Author Zoe Weil, in her post on Cooperative Catalyst, takes Robinson’s arguments one step further and proposes five solutions to develop new education paradigms. As Coleman did decades ago, Weil calls for a reassessment of the way schools are financed and structured so that education can flourish in an environment of choice:

Restructure how schools are paid for and create real school choice for every family; public funding for schooling based on zip code is inconsistent with our core values. Providing equal and adequate funding for every child that can travel with the child to any school will provide opportunities for creative school approaches to flourish and a variety of teaching and learning styles to meet the needs of each child.

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Blog AdministrationCustomizationTechnology and Innovation

The blueprint for digital learning recognizes no distinction between public and private

Adam Emerson
Adam Emerson

Two former governors from two different political parties this week announced the 10 elements of a digital-learning initiative they hoped would set educators on an entrepreneurial path to disruptive innovations in public education. If it wasn’t clear to the more than 500 people in attendance at the Washington, D.C., conference, where the elements were unveiled, this was a bipartisan drive to further scramble the current conept of “public schools” and “private schools.”

What former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise identified at the National Summit on Education Reform were the principles of transformational productivity in education demanded by President Obama’s White House education team. When Bush says that we have to think of public education “as educating the public” and calls for policies that allow students to customize their education, he’s applying the same concept that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan does when Duncan tells schools to do more to “personalize” education.

The Digital Learning Now! initiative meets all these goals, and makes no distinction between public and private schooling. Indeed, its provisions demand that states recognize all learning providers – public, private and charter – equally. And for traditional school districts to adopt the digital innovations at the core of education reform, they will have to recognize private providers – with all their human and financial capital – as partners.

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