Technology and Innovation

National micro-school model hoping to make inroads in Florida

Lisa Buie August 25, 2020

Lisa Buie

Piney Grove Academy in Fort Lauderdale, a college-preparatory school for boys from kindergarten through high school, is one of two Florida private schools that had an exploratory conversation with innovative education leader Prenda.

A network of non-traditional schools that has attracted nationwide attention from families seeking safe learning options during the pandemic could be part of Florida’s future.

Arizona-based Prenda, which launched in 2018 and now boasts more than 200 partnerships with private schools, public school districts and individual public charter schools, features online learning programs adaptable to individual students that are aligned with state learning standards. The Prenda learning model has been described as a cross between a school and a scout meeting, with students gathering in homes, community centers, libraries and other public spaces to work on individual lessons and group projects.

Prenda leaders recently held a call with a couple of Florida private school principals to gauge interest in starting partnerships here. No decisions were made, but school director Frances Bolden from Piney Grove Academy in Fort Lauderdale said she was impressed with Prenda’s model.

“When I hear about something new or innovative, I want to learn more about it,” Bolden said.

Faith-based Piney Grove serves boys in kindergarten through high school. Bolden, who started a one-room schoolhouse for a small group of U.S. military children in Bangkok while her husband served in the Air Force, acknowledged that finding a Prenda micro-school host location would be challenging in South Florida, one of the hardest hit places in the nation for COVID-19 cases, where most schools are re-opening online.

A bigger challenge is equity. In Arizona, education scholarship accounts give parents the flexibility to choose Prenda or other private options without having to pay tuition. Prenda founder Kelly Smith said the company is working on a low cost, private pay model for families in states that don’t provide school choice funding as more parents are seeking alternatives to district schools amid the pandemic.

Florida’s model for education choice has been to grant private school scholarships to lower-income families, with education scholarship accounts limited to students with certain special needs. Education choice advocates say that allowing all families to have flexible spending would allow innovation to not only flourish but also create more equity in education.

Jason Bedrick, director of policy at EdChoice, a national nonprofit that advocates for more private options in education, said the average per-pupil spending on education nationwide is $15,000. “If a portion of those funds … were to follow the child into the learning environment of their choice, that would allay a lot of equity concerns and provide more opportunities to lower income students,” Bedrick said.

Despite the challenges, it’s clear that school leaders nationwide are tempted by the model’s practice of pairing groups of eight or 10 students with an adult “guide,” a teacher, parent or another individual who has experience working with young people and has passed a background check. The guide leads students through projects such as building robots, staging theatrical productions, and hosting and judging their own debates. Students also create reports, artwork, videos, computer programs and dance routines. Lessons are self-paced, with students setting their own goals.

The Prenda micro-school model now spans 29 states, with a huge upsurge of interest since COVID-19 struck, as evidenced by website traffic: a whopping 737% increase in June compared to June 2019.

To listen to Step Up For Students’ president Doug Tuthill’s podcast with Prenda CEO Kelly Smith, click here.

August 25, 2020 0 comment

Commentary and Opinion Coronavirus / COVID-19 Customization Education Choice Featured Microschools Parental Choice School Choice Technology and Innovation Virtual Education

Sal Khan as your school troop leader sounds joyfully disruptilicious

Matthew Ladner August 24, 2020

Matthew Ladner

Hedge fund analyst Sal Khan began making math tutorials for his cousins in 2004. By 2016, Khan Academy had more than 42 million registered users from 190 countries with tutorials on math, economics, art history, health, computer science and more.

Last week, Lindsey Burke authored an interesting piece for redefinED titled, “Do pandemic pods represent disruptive technology?” A different question could be: Do pods represent the incremental improvement to digital learning that will bring that type of learning into disruptive territory?

Typically, a disruptive technology starts as what is perceived to be an inferior but more accessible product or service “competing against non-consumption.” A classic example from the early computer era featured mainframe computers as the dominant technology and personal computers as the disruptive technology. Early personal computers weren’t great, but access to mainframe computers was a very scarce commodity. Thus, personal computers were better than nothing.

The key comes with the flip: Personal computers got better over time, and at some point, people realized they were just as good or better than mainframe access. Personal computers displaced mainframe computers as the dominant technology.

Rather than thinking of pandemic pods as a disruptive technology, they may fit in the disruption model better as the incremental improvement to digital learning. Digital learning, in other words, may have been advancing in a “pre-flip” disruptive technology until innovators improved it sufficiently for many people to see it as a better form of learning.

Digital learning often competes against non-consumption by serving students who, for a variety of reasons, would otherwise drop out of school. It serves other student niches as well. Most people, however, view education as an inherently social activity – with classmates, group activities and in-person instruction. Pods can scratch all these itches in ways that purely digital learning will struggle to do.

It is too early to know much about the combination of digital learning and pods in terms of academic outcomes. It is obvious walking in the door of a school taking advantage of both that the teachers and students are having fun, a quality often lacking in large, impersonal schools. As I discussed in a recent column, I had the opportunity to observe at group of students engaged in 3-D printing at a Prenda micro-school on the Apache Nation in San Carlos, Arizona. The thought that would not leave my head was, “Scout troop meets Sal Khan = fun school model!”

The very impressive digital learning techniques developed by Success Academy, for instance, could have a significant staying power after the pandemic. We see hints of South Korean super-star instructors in dividing teachers into digital lecturers and small group leaders. Nothing screams “impersonal” louder than a district (NYC) which numbers rather than names its schools, and the digital version of Success Academy could be offered to waitlisted students.

If, however, Success Academy organized students into pods and enrolled them in its distance learning program, something truly disruptive could emerge. The pod leader would take on the role of the small group leader in this scenario, leading discussions and facilitating group projects in scout troop leader fashion. Digital learning would provide real-time instruction and access to Success Academy’s finest lecturers from its entire network of schools. It would not be necessary to battle Bill de Blasio to follow the laws of New York and provide space.

Pods are small enough to meet in informal spaces, and equity concerns, such as money to pay guides, provide devices and academic transparency, all could be addressed.

I suspect that combining the in-person element of pods to digital learning is something that a many families and educators will find appealing long after the pandemic has faded. Big-box schooling already was set to struggle to replace retiring Baby Boom teachers in Florida and around the country. Just guessing, but those eligible may be retiring at a faster rate given the pandemic.

A new school model that is fun and empowering to teachers just might be the solution we need, when we need it.

August 24, 2020 0 comment

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Do pandemic pods qualify as disruptive innovation?

Lindsey Burke August 21, 2020

Lindsey Burke

Editor’s note: With this commentary, redefinED welcomes education policy expert Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, as our newest guest blogger.

Education policy scholars, especially proponents of school choice, have long referenced the late Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive innovation. Christensen, along with his colleague Joseph Bower, detailed the concept of disruptive innovation in the Harvard Business Review in 1995.

The idea of “disruption” in a sector “describes a process whereby a smaller company with fewer resources is able to successfully challenge established incumbent businesses,” wrote Christensen, Michael Raynor, and Rory McDonald in 2015 in a follow-up Harvard Business Review article refining the theory.

Disruptive innovation theory posits that dominant incumbent businesses may ignore a segment of their consumer base as they focus on improving products for their most profitable customers. Scrappy new market entrants then target neglected customers with early, cheaper versions of their product, and then begin growing market share as the product improves. The new business then begins capturing more customers, improving product performance while maintaining affordability, and eventually becomes mainstream.

Christensen and his colleagues caution against over-application of the theory to phenomena that do not actually represent disruptive innovation, but rather sector transformation. For example, they note that Uber, despite its incredible impact on the taxicab industry, represents sector transformation rather than disruption in part because of Uber’s large market share. This is also the case because Uber wasn’t competing with the absence of a vehicle transportation market, just a crummy one.

To be appropriately described as “disruptive,” a new entrant into the market must be enabled by one of two conditions: 1) “low-end footholds” or 2) “new-market footholds.” “Low-end footholds” emerge when existing businesses ignore “less-demanding” customers because they are overly focused on their more “profitable and demanding” customers. “New-market footholds” emerge when there isn’t a market for a good or service, turning “nonconsumers into consumers.”

As Christensen and his colleagues explain, the bottom line is this: Genuine disruption happens by market entrants “appealing to low-end or unserved consumers” and then capturing the “mainstream” market.

So, does the new phenomenon of pandemic pods unfolding across the country qualify as disruptive innovation in the K-12 space?

They certainly check some of the initial boxes.

Pods are a “new-market foothold” competing with non-consumption. Pandemic pods arose this summer after the widespread school shutdowns that occurred during the spring showed no sign of stopping. Parents, concerned about the prospects for their children’s education this fall, began teaming up with other families in their neighborhoods or social circles to hire teachers for their children. Some families unenrolled their children from their district school completely, registering in their state as homeschoolers and then joining a pod.

With pods, families work together to recruit teachers that they pay out-of-pocket to teach small groups — “pods” — of children. It’s a way for clusters of students to receive professional instruction for several hours each day. Families pool resources to pay tutors who may serve as a full-time teacher for the pod of students or may only teach on a part-time basis.

With many school districts around the country planning not to reopen classrooms this fall — or, at best, planning to offer some combination of virtual and in-class instruction — pods are competing with non-consumption, establishing themselves through a “new-market foothold.”

But time will tell whether pods remain a permanent facet of the education landscape. Disruptive innovation theory also holds that “innovations don’t catch on with mainstream customers until quality catches up to their standards.” Rather than making improvements to existing products in a market (such as increasing the computing power of a laptop or the cooking consistency of a microwave), disruptive innovations are “initially considered inferior by most of the incumbent’s customers.”

So, here’s where the ground is a little shakier for pods as a disruptive innovation. According to Christensen’s work on the subject, disruption also has a second qualifying condition: The new product must be inferior to the product offered by the incumbent.

Parents may consider some, but not all, of the components of a pod inferior to the existing education model. They may find the academics to be more rigorous, but the custodial component less competitive if it doesn’t provide the same length of coverage. Pods also are on shakier ground vis-à-vis disruption because some families join as a supplement to the crisis online instruction their children are still receiving through their district school. In that way, they could end up complementing the incumbent rather than disrupting it.

A third marker of disruption: The eventual improvement of quality. But there are already promising developments in the realm of pod quality. Education researcher and redefinED executive editor Matthew Ladner describes what a marriage between pods and established charter incumbents like Success Academy could entail. As Ladner explains, taking the Success Academy (COVID-era) model of “most skilled math instructor in the network [giving] live internet broadcast lectures” and coupling that with teachers and tutors working in small pods across the country to assess student learning and provide individual instruction could lead to high-quality pods at scale.

Finally, to truly qualify as a disruption, pods also will have to eventually serve a broad segment of the K-12 market. This will only happen through policy changes that can enable widespread participation in the model on the part of lower-income consumers.

For parents who cannot afford to pay out-of-pocket to contribute to a neighborhood pod, providing resources through education savings accounts (ESAs) will be a crucial support moving forward. With an ESA, currently available in Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina, eligible families whose children exit the public education system can receive approximately 90% of what the state would have spent on that child in her public school directly into their ESA. These restricted-use, parent-controlled accounts can then be used to pay for any education-related service, product, or provider of choice, including private school tuition, special education services and therapies, online learning, and private tutors.

Unused funds can even be rolled over from year to year. They enable families to completely customize their child’s education and are the perfect education financing policy to support families of all economic levels enrolling their children in pods. The pandemic has made it clearer than ever that every state needs to provide education choice – ideally through an ESA model – to all children, yesterday.

Universal ESAs would enable pods to serve a broad segment of the K-12 market, competing with, and potentially disrupting, the district school model.

Currently, district schools are mostly closed to in-person instruction, creating a clear case of non-consumption with which pods can compete. But even when the public education “product” is on the market as usual, it’s not a product that is serving consumers particularly well. Just one-third of students across the country can read and do math proficiently, and in some of the largest school districts in the country, like Detroit, those figures fall into the single digits.

Just as the pandemic is reshaping so many aspects of our lives, it also is reshaping education. Although the extent to which this transformation is permanent is yet to be seen, some non-trivial percentage of families is likely to continue their children’s education in something other than a district public school even when the pandemic subsides.

Pods could be what they choose. Pods are a “new-market foothold” that are competing with non-consumption (closed public schools), and could, at present, be considered an “inferior” product. But that will change as families and service providers refine the pod product. At that point, coupled with changes to policy providing ESAs to as many students as possible, they could fundamentally change the education marketplace.

As such, pods are a strong contender for what could be disruptive innovation in the K-12 space.

August 21, 2020 1 comment

Commentary and Opinion Coronavirus / COVID-19 Customization Education Choice Education Equity Featured Microschools Parental Choice School Choice Technology and Innovation Virtual Education

Micro-schools, rigorous distance learning never gonna give your innovative spirit up

Matthew Ladner August 10, 2020

Matthew Ladner

Science writer Matthew Ridley has described the innovation process as one of trial and error in which individuals combine pre-existing techniques and/or technologies.

One example: Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing were around for many years before innovators figured out how to put them together to revolutionize the energy market.

Another example: Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” were around for decades before some unknown innovator combined them to create the greatest song in the English language.

Likewise, a new policy brief posted to the Arizona Charter Schools Association website suggests that combining project-based micro-schools with rigorous live distance learning can create a new path, to scale, for high-demand schools and can unleash new opportunities for teachers while addressing equity concerns with pandemic pods.

A Phoenix radio host interviewed a 44-year (!) classroom veteran teacher last year. The teacher observed that the main problem with education today isn’t a lack of funding, which he said has “always been tough.” The real problem, he said, is that “the joy of teaching has been strangled out of the profession.”

This can and must change, and combining small education communities with rigorous distance learning just might do the trick.

If you’ve ever visited a project-based learning micro-school, you quickly see the joy so sorely lacking in most education settings. With Sal Khan, founder of a free educational video library that allows blending learning, as your scout-troop/school leader, you’re watching an excited group of kids engaging in 3-D print design. An education guide leads students through some daily academic work on computers, but then the students tackle group projects.

I watched students engaged in 3-D print design at a Prenda micro-school on the Apache Nation in San Carlos Arizona. These kids were not just learning, they were learning and loving it. These types of schools have great potential because they do not require educators to raise funds for multi-million facilities.

This style of education, which took an early hold prior to the pandemic, has been thrust into the limelight now through the advent of pandemic pods. Educators can address equity concerns, such as a low-income family’s ability to pay teachers and gain access to computers, with enlightened public policy.

Success Academy of New York developed another innovation to pair with micro-schools. Success Academy changed the roles of instructional staff for distance learning, with teachers variously tackling the roles of lecturers and small group facilitator/student problem solvers.

The most skilled math instructor in the network gave a live internet broadcast lecture via the internet. Students divided into small groups to interact with teachers to discuss the material and work out issues. Teachers then graded and monitored student achievement and scheduled individual online tutoring sessions with struggling students.

The Success Academy distance learning model is itself potentially revolutionary. In theory, the network could offer this version of itself to both enrollment lottery winners and enrollment lottery losers. Many parents on the waitlist might very much prefer this option over a spot in a district that numbers rather than names schools.

Education, however, is very much a social enterprise for many, as most of us want and need access to instructors and classmates. We need community. The Arizona Center for Student Opportunity brief referenced above calls for educators to combine Prenda-style micro-schools with Success Academy-style distance learning programs.

This proposal could take a variety of forms. Education service providers could reach agreements with pandemic pod providers to “adopt” them into their distance learning programs. Alternatively, high-demand schools could gauge interest in creating pods among their current students and their waitlisted families.

Equity-related concerns connected to pandemic pods could be addressed through funding students. Private choice programs focusing on disadvantaged student populations, such as Florida’s scholarship programs, could be used to help low-income students and those with disabilities afford micro-schools. Alternatively, public school distance-learning statues could defer costs.

In Arizona, Prenda operates schools through district, charter and private choice mechanisms. All Prenda students take the state’s AZMerit exam, and students whose education is funded through district and charter mechanisms have their results factored into school ratings.

In partnering with a Success Academy-style distance learning provider, the “mothership” would provide the live lecture, while the small group facilitation function would be conducted by in-person by guides. Different flavors of micro-schools can be created through affiliation with different mothership institutions. Teachers can run the show rather than being part of all-too-often hugely indifferent bureaucracies. All we need are some trailblazing educators and enlightened policy.

To paraphrase the Gen-X bard:

“With the schools out, it’s less dangerous! Here we are now, liberate us! Don’t feel stupid or contagious! Here we are now, educate us!”

August 10, 2020 0 comment

Commentary and Opinion Coronavirus / COVID-19 Customization Education Choice Education Equity Featured Podcast Public School Choice School Choice Technology and Innovation Virtual Education

podcastED: SUFS president Doug Tuthill interviews Pasco County Principal of the Year

redefinED staff August 5, 2020

redefinED staff

On this episode, Tuthill speaks with JoAnne Glenn, one of the nation’s top online learning leaders. In addition to being Pasco’s 2020 Principal of the Year, Glenn earned one of three Digital Principal of the Year awards from the National Association of Secondary School Principals. She is one of the founders of Pasco eSchool, which offers full- and part-time K-12 digital instruction. Over the past 12 years, the school’s mastery-based model has become a model for digital learning.

Tuthill and Glenn discuss Pasco eSchool’s advantage during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the platform will allow for flexibility of blended learning when school resumes in a few weeks. They also discuss issues of inequity and the “digital divide,” noting there are areas of Pasco County still lacking access to high speed internet.

“When families are looking outside the school district for their core instruction, it does not mean we don’t have things they may like, we just have to figure out ways to make that available.”

EPISODE DETAILS:

What the Pasco County School District is likely to look like in five years

Lessons learned in the spring and Pasco’s reopening models

Pasco’s “franchise” relationship with Florida Virtual School – using its content and platform with district teachers

How Pasco can unbundle its services and offer flexibility to families within the district and beyond

LINKS MENTIONED:

Pasco eSchool leader named top national ‘digital principal’

Pasco eSchool leader named county Principal of the Year

August 5, 2020 0 comment

Charter Schools Coronavirus / COVID-19 Customization Education Choice Featured News Parental Choice Public School Choice School Choice Technology and Innovation

New Pasco County charter school: ‘We have a plan and teachers who are ready to go to work’

Scott Kent August 4, 2020

Scott Kent

Enrollment at brand-new InPrep Charter School has reached 400, with space still available for families who want the flexibility of both in-person and online learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic has tossed K-12 education into a sea of uncertainty, forcing parents navigating waves of anxiety to search for a safe harbor for their children.

Innovation Preparatory Academy, a new K-8 public charter school in Wesley Chapel, is positioning itself as a beacon of stability.

Like many states, Florida has been roiled by conflicting policy demands amidst coronavirus apprehension. On July 6, the state Department of Education issued an emergency order requiring all public school districts to reopen brick-and-mortar schools five days a week to provide an option for families. That prompted a lawsuit from the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, which argues the DOE’s directive is unconstitutional and puts students, teachers and their families at risk of contracting COVID-19. The lawsuit is seeking all instruction to be held online until in-person has been deemed safe.

Parental frustration is boiling over. InPrep principal Sara Capwell said a mother called her in tears recently, saying, “I just don’t know what to do anymore.”

InPrep, part of the Charter Schools USA network, was scheduled to begin its first year Aug. 10, along with other Pasco County district schools. Citing concerns about rising cases of COVID-19, the school board pushed back the start date to Aug. 24.

Capwell says she and her staff would have been ready to go on the earlier date, but admits the two-week delay will give them additional time to distribute iPads to students, put the finishing touches on mobile technology in classrooms and persuade parents still trying to decide which education option is best for their children to consider InPrep.

“A lot of parents are worried about going to a school, then having the school shut down and being thrown to the wolves again because that’s what they experienced in the spring,” Capwell said. “We are an alternative. We have a plan and teachers who are ready to go to work. That’s what parents want to hear.”

Capwell says InPrep is trying to develop, as much as possible, a sense of normalcy. That means maintaining in-person classroom learning for those who want it while also providing an online “mobile classroom” that incorporates brick-and-mortar lessons.

Innovative mobile platforms will bring the classroom to students who choose to learn from home.

This isn’t a teacher sitting in front of a computer screen of Zoom squares, checking to see if worksheets have been completed, Capwell says. Online students will learn the same curriculum, at the same time, as students in the actual classroom. In fact, 360-degree cameras and microphones put the online students in the classroom and follow the teacher around during a lesson, even when classes break up into smaller groups, making for an interactive experience. That includes online students interacting with their in-person classmates.

“We’re trying to make it as real as we can so they can feel like they’re there,” Capwell said.

Improving the quality of distance learning is just one goal. Making in-person and online learning as seamless as possible is another.

InPrep wants to make sure students don’t miss a beat if their parents initially choose the online option as a temporary solution and then pivot to brick-and-mortar later. The school also will provide the flexibility for students to move back and forth between in-person and online if that becomes necessary.

“When they do come back, they’ve probably already made friends, because even though we’re a new school, they’ve built relationships in class and with teachers,” Capwell said. “We’re trying to give them a mirror of actually being there. When they come back, they can just jump in.”

The number of students choosing in-person learning versus those doing the “mobile classroom” keep shifting, a testament to how volatile the pandemic is. Initially, about 90% of InPrep’s inaugural families chose in-person, but after the COVID infections began soaring, that figure dropped to as low as 52%. The figure has since rebounded to around 65%, while the school continues to survey all its parents to make sure they still are where they want to be in terms of in-person or online.

Regardless of the exact figures, it’s clear that a significant number of parents want in-person learning for their children, while others prefer the options online can provide, at least in the short term.

As for those families who still are undecided about what to do, Capwell is getting the word out that InPrep is open, has teachers who are ready to teach, and has processes in place to facilitate learning while protecting everyone’s health. She said she already has seen an uptick in enrollments in recent weeks, an additional 25 to 35 students each week.

InPrep also has begun hosting Facebook Live presentations to show off the new school and to have staff members role-play safety procedures to reassure parents.

“Parents can actually see that and go, ‘Oh, so it’s not like everyone’s going to show up and be afraid to interact.’ We’re going to interact, and do so safely,” Capwell said. “Once they see the actual visuals in our building, I think that the interest will be exponential.”

Although chartered as a K-8 school, InPrep will be K-6 its first year, building a middle-school culture in the upper grades before adding seventh grade in 2021-22 and eighth grade the year after that. The school currently has more than 400 students enrolled toward this year’s target of 615, so space is available. Even if it reaches its maximum capacity, Capwell said, InPrep will be able to practice social distancing between students in every classroom. And while students and faculty will be required to wear masks, they will be allowed to take five-minute “mask breaks” each hour – while remaining socially distant – to give everyone a literal breather so they can stay focused on learning.

This may be what passes for normalcy in the turmoil of a pandemic. But for many parents craving constancy, they’ll take however much they can get.

August 4, 2020 0 comment

Customization Education Choice Education Equity Featured Homeschooling Microschools News School Choice Technology and Innovation Virtual Education

The rise of altschool and other micro-schools

Special to redefinED July 28, 2020

Special to redefinED

Acton Academy opened in 2009 with 12 students, teaching content through online game-based tools, Socratic discussion and face-to-face projects the school calls “quests.” Today, Acton offers kits to entrepreneurs and parents interested in opening their own schools following its model.

Editor’s note: This commentary from Michael B. Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, is included in the Summer 2020 edition of Education Next.

From San Francisco to Austin, Texas, to New York, new forms of schooling termed micro-schools are popping up.

As of yet, there is no common definition that covers all these schools, which vary not only by size and cost but also in their education philosophies and operating models. Think one-room schoolhouse meets blended learning and home schooling meets private schooling.

As Matt Candler, founder of 4.0 Schools, writes:

“What makes a modern micro-school different from a 19th century, one-room schoolhouse is that old-school schools only had a few ways to teach — certainly no software, no tutors, and probably less structure around student to student learning. In a modern micro-school, there are ways to get good data from each of these venues. And the great micro-school of the future will lean on well-designed software to help adults evaluate where each kid is learning.”

Several factors are driving their emergence. Micro-schools are gaining traction among families who are dissatisfied with the quality of public schooling options and cannot afford or do not want to pay for a traditional private-school education. These families want an option other than home schooling that will personalize instruction for their child’s needs. A school in which students attend a couple days a week or a small school with like-minded parents can fit the bill.

Some trace the micro-school’s origins to the United Kingdom, where over the past decade people began applying the term micro-schools to small independent and privately funded schools that met at most two days a week. As in the United States, the impetus for their formation was dissatisfaction with local schooling options. Although home-schooling families have for some time created cooperatives to gain some flexibility for the adults and socialization for the children, the micro-schooling phenomenon is more formal.

One of the early U.S. micro-schools, QuantumCamp, was founded in the winter of 2009 in Berkeley, California, out of a dare that one couldn’t teach quantum physics in a simple way. The result was the development of a course that would be accessible to children as young as 12.

The school now offers a complete hands-on math and science curriculum for students in first through eighth grades and serves about 150 home schoolers during the school year; double that number attend the summer program. Tuition ranges from $600 to $2,400 depending on the program and enrollment period.

In 2013, QuantumCamp introduced language arts courses. Each academic class meets once a week for an activity-based exploration of big ideas and then offers out-of-class content that includes videos, readings, problem sets, podcasts, and other activities to enable students to continue exploring concepts at their own pace.

At roughly the same time as QuantumCamp’s founding, in Austin, Texas, Jeff Sandefer, founder of the nationally acclaimed Acton School of Business and his wife, Laura, who has a master’s degree in education, launched Acton Academy. In creating the five-day-a-week, all-day school, the couple sought to ensure that their own children wouldn’t be “talked at all day long” in a traditional classroom. The Acton Academy’s mission is “to inspire each child and parent who enters [its] doors to find a calling that will change the world.” The school promises that students will embark on a “hero’s journey” to discover the unique contributions that they can make toward living a life of meaning and purpose.

With tuition of $9,515 per year, Acton Academy initially enrolled 12 students and has since 2009 grown to serve 75 students in grades 1 to 9. The school has learning guides—they aren’t called teachers—whose role is to push students to own their learning. The model enables the academy to have far fewer on-site adults per student than a traditional independent school and to operate at a cost of roughly $4,000 per student per year.

Acton compresses students’ core learning into a two-and-a-half-hour personalized-learning period each day during which students learn mostly online. This affords time for three two-hour project-based learning blocks each week, a Socratic seminar each day, game play on Fridays, ample art and physical education offerings, and many social experiences.

The Socratic discussions teach students to talk, listen, and challenge ideas in a face-to-face circle of peers and guides. The projects require the students to work in teams to apply the knowledge they have learned. They also foster a ‘‘need to know’’ mind-set to motivate the online learning and provide a public, portfolio-based means for students to demonstrate achievement.

Early results appear impressive, as the first group of students gained 2.5 grade levels of learning in their first 10 months. Now the school is spreading. There are currently eight Acton Academies operating—seven of them in the United States. Twenty-five are slated to be open by 2015. The Sandefers are not operating them, however; they provide communities that want to open an Acton clone a do-it-yourself kit plus limited consulting and access to wiki discussion groups. They are developing a game-based learning tool to help prepare Acton Academy owners and the learning guides in the schools. Tuition at the academies ranges from $4,000 per year to $9,900.

Inspired in part by micro-schools like Acton Academy that use his software, the prince of online and personalized learning himself, Sal Khan, launched his own micro-school in the fall of 2014 in Mountain View, California. The Khan Lab School, which charges $22,000, opened with roughly 35 students and intends “to research blended learning and education innovation by creating a working model of Khan Academy’s philosophy of learning in a physical school environment and sharing the learnings garnered with schools and networks around the world.”

As Isabella, an 11-year-old student who previously attended a nearby public school, said, “Here it’s different from my old school because you’re doing your own playlist and you have more projects.”

Mandeep Dhillon, a parent with two children enrolled at Khan Lab School, amplified the differences.

“After a while, we realized public, private school didn’t matter. Kids were being programmed in chunks,” he said. “I hate the term home schooling because it’s based on location. It’s not really about having them at home. What we’re trying to do is build an independent path. It’s not about the schooling, it’s about experiences.”

As these small schools proliferate, their impact on the wider world of schooling—public and private—is potentially large, but still anything but certain.

July 28, 2020 0 comment

Commentary and Opinion Coronavirus / COVID-19 Customization Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Equity Featured School Choice Technology and Innovation

Pandemic offers opportunity to extend learning time

Special to redefinED July 21, 2020

Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: This commentary from Nick Sheltrown, chief learning officer of National Heritage Academies, a network of more than 80 charter schools serving more than 59,000 students in nine states, first appeared on Education Next.

The disruptive influence of pandemic-related school closures on student learning may serve as a catalyst for much-needed shifts in how we think about how much time we devote to learning. Decades from now, we may look back at this period as we do with the launching of Sputnik in 1957, as an event that spurred innovation in new and productive directions. The reason for this optimism lies in the lessons we are uncovering around instructional time.

In the early 1960s, psychologist John B. Carroll was studying second language acquisition when he noticed that subjects in his study were all able to master the language content, but the time they each needed to do so varied greatly. This experience led Carroll to develop a model of learning that featured the importance of time as the key variable. In Carroll’s formulation, student learning is a function of time spent learning divided by the time needed for learning.

Carroll also identified other factors like student aptitude, background knowledge, and quality of instruction as influential in the amount of time needed for learning. This may not seem revolutionary now, but Carroll’s articulation of the relationship between time and learning was highly influential.

What does this have to do with the Covid-19 pandemic and American education?

The fundamental problem Covid-19 has introduced a dramatic loss in the quantity and quality of instructional time across the American educational landscape. With students and teachers physically separated and schools scrambling to design and deliver remote learning to students, policymakers and parents alike are concerned with the potential learning gap that the Covid-19 closures cause, particularly for at-risk learners. It is unlikely that the typical school will be able to match the quality of its face-to-face learning in remote delivery.

At the same time, the wide-scale closure of school buildings presents a unique opportunity for K-12 educators to undergo a quantum leap in the development and delivery of learning to students. Schools are being forced to innovate at scale. If schools learn how to deliver remote learning well as a response to this crisis, what is stopping them from doing so during the summers and snow days? Why not create a mastery-based learning plan for every student that includes learning throughout the calendar year—a true mix of in-school and remote learning? Instead of driving a loss in learning time, perhaps the lessons we are learning now can help unlock more time than ever before.

These aspirations may seem countercultural for American educators and families, but this mindset change is critical for U.S. education. Seventy years of achievement data have shown that there have never been enough learning hours in US school calendars to close achievement gaps for at-risk learners.

The real opportunity of this pandemic is to break the monopoly school buildings and school calendars have on our collective mental model of delivering learning experiences to children. The idea of seasonal, location-centric learning is not compatible with the needs of a 21st century economy. Nor is it compatible with the realities of achievement gaps or global competition, not to mention hurricanes, polar vortexes, and—of course—pandemics. If American educators, parents, and students see learning as a continuous activity that occurs throughout the year, at home and at school, and supported by both parents and educators, there is reason to believe that this difficult period will mark a positive inflection point in education in this country.

This is not to say that extending learning time through remote learning will be easy. Certainly not. Educators, parents, and students around the country can attest to the many challenges of remote learning, amid competing demands of remote work, remote caregiving, and for many, unemployment and financial strain. Pedagogical, safety, privacy, and technical challenges have slowed ambitious educators and parents looking to provide robust remote learning experiences to students. Challenges around access persist, with too many families living without broadband Internet or enough devices for their children to use.

Even so, it is still possible to serve students without digital access. Sending printed packets home, creating video-based lessons optimized for smartphones, answering questions over the phone for students, and taking advantage of low-tech, on demand tutoring services like Kapeesh are all better than the alternative of complete educational inactivity. The lessons we are learning about remote learning are not limited to digital spaces.

The mistake often made in education policy circles is to focus on every input in learning—curriculum, technology, pedagogy—while holding instructional time constant at 180 days. But recall Carroll’s finding: learning is a function of time. If we want to improve student learning, we must increase the quality of learning time or the quantity of learning time.

Remote learning represents a clear opportunity to solve for the quantity portion of this problem. Schools and families will get better at remote learning because this pandemic is forcing us to do so. That is the necessity. The opportunity, however, is to capitalize on what we learn from this disruption and provide students extended learning time outside of the traditional school year.

July 21, 2020 0 comment