There is growing demand for graduates with technical training but that requires high-level math and science courses in high school.  But upper division STEM courses are particularly difficult for high schools to staff.  It can also be a challenge to recruit students to what often appears to be difficult and/or boring courses.

Digital learning can help with both problems.  It can make language learning an engaging, ubiquitous daily experience. And it can help bring science to life and tailor math instruction.

High school courses devoted to foreign language instruction may still be a good idea but it’s way too late to start at age 16.  With all of the language learning apps for smartphones, there is no reason not to make language acquisition a fun family activity and part of every preschooler’s day.  An elementary school can build language instruction into an online block of time every day.

Every student should have access to every Advanced Placement course.  It’s now possible for every high school to offer every AP course, save money, and be assured of consistent quality.

I wish PHET had been around when I was learning physics. PHET is library of great science simulations available free from the University of Colorado. Digital learning can help classroom teachers engage and extend learning.  Online learning can extend the reach of great teachers to students across a state.

Yesterday, Digital Learning Now released a video on Element 3: Personalized Learning, which urges state policymakers to authorize multiple statewide providers and to extend access to all students.

Element 3 also urges policymakers to eliminate limits to learning and allow students to take more than what traditionally has been a full load—why would we slow down a student that wants to learn more and graduate sooner?

Uruguay is realizing a vision of the future of education technology focused squarely on access to free technology and online resources. Unlike Vision 2 (Next-Generation Learning), neither personalization nor budget-cutting are core to this vision.

The benefit of this arrangement is its simplicity. Schools don’t need to be fundamentally redesigned, teachers are still basically doing the same kind of work they were trained to do, and free resources can go online in relatively short order without much of a fuss about payment, royalties, and copyrights. Moreover, there is a decentralization of control: individual teachers are free to decide if and how they want to use the technology in the classroom. That’s a level of control that they don’t necessarily enjoy in Vision 2.

The simplicity of Uruguay’s program is also its weakness. As a report from the Inter-American Development Bank states, “Countries can not think that they will improve student learning by simply creating access to computers. The quality in use is crucial.” Without much of a plan in place for how to integrate computers into school, Uruguay’s educators are left dealing with lots of students surfing the web and distracting themselves in class.

But still, there are plenty of examples of remarkable success. An unofficial Ceibal blog, contains some impressive anecdotes of students who have spontaneously learned to write and read with their laptops. And when students take their laptops home they can become the center of learning for the entire household, which can have untold benefits on the entire family.

Brazil is beginning to take steps in a similar direction. Its “One Laptop per Student” program is in a pilot phase in 300 schools as the government determines whether and how to expand nationally. And of course, the state of Maine has a decade-old program to equip 7-12th grade students and teachers with their own machines. A handful of similar efforts are underway, and I’ve heard some really exciting stories about the new opportunities they have created as well as some depressing stories about students using the technology completely inappropriately and counterproductively.

So here’s my basic takeaway on this access-driven vision of education technology:  Universal access to technology and online education resources is an attainable and measurable goal. While it doesn’t have all the appeal of sophisticated personalized-learning systems, it still does put an enormous amount of power in the hands of students and teachers, and in the end, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing to leave the creative implementation to the “local” level, even if that means (as always) that some schools will ultimately do a much better job than others.

Given the attainability and relative affordability of universal access, it seems like an increasingly obvious and low-risk reform proposal. After all, if Uruguay can do it, why can’t we?

Brazil Introduces OER Legislation

Brazil introduced new, federal legislation this month that support open education resources (OER) by making government-funded resources more widely available and distributed. This law could have implications north of the border; a similar law in Florida could restrict FLVS from licensing it’s content.   Read the full article “Brazil introduces OER into federal legislation and adopts local government policy” on Creative Commons.

K-20 Edtech Progress Slows

The Software Industry and Information Association‘s (SIIA) 2011 Vision K-20 survey reported a decline in progress toward education technology goals in 2011 compared to previous years. However, Keeping Pace and Ambient Insight show rapid growth in online learning despite limited improvement in student access. View the full article “Schools Making Less Progress on Ed. Tech. Goals” on Education Week.

Digital Learning Now! to Issue State Report Cards

Digital Learning Now! will issues its State Report Cards, evaluating state’s implementation of their legislation around students’ access to digital learning, October 13, 2011. Click here to learn more about Digital Learning Now! and its 10 elements of digital learning.

Mobile Learning Buzzes in Classrooms

The Mobile Native, a blog about learning and teaching with mobile devices, posted an article this week about the definition, pedagogy and implementation of “mobile learning.” Saint Marys City Schools in Ohio are already implementing smart phones school wide as educational tools to provide students with Internet access, word processing and more. Blogger Scott Newcomb says the disruptive technology has had a positive impact on students’ learning. Read the full article “Powering Up in the Classroom” on the blog, The Mobile Native.

Bryan Setser published an article this week on “Managing the Mobile Learner” that discusses the increasing need for the integration of mobile learning devices in the classroom.

MindShift reported this month that results from Project K-Nect and pilot program based out of North Carolina show mobile devices engage low-income and at-risk students in math learning and other curricular areas. Read the full article “Mobile Learning Proves to Benefit At-Risk Students” on MindShift.

Tech Start-Ups Focus on E-Textbooks

The Street reported this week that tech start-ups are capitalizing on electronic textbooks for the iPad. Read the full article “Tech Start-Ups Board E-Textbook Wave” on The Street.

EdNet Insight reported this week that Kno delivered the world’s largest selection of electronic textbooks to Facebook, giving 19 million students access to books and class materials. Read the article “Kno Brings Textbooks to Facebook” to learn more.

Mtelegence Corp. to Develop Readorium

EdNet Insight also reported that Mtelegence Corporation this week received a Phase II SBIR contract from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to develop Readorium, a web-based software solution to help middle school students comprehend non-fiction text in the area of science. Read “Promising Reading Comprehension Software Receives Funding from the U.S. DoE” for more information.

While coordinated with IES, it’s still frustrating that USED won’t engage the private sector on R&D and relies on the tiny Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) allocation for education.

CoSN Release: Data Privacy in Age of Sharing

CoSN released a report titled “Whose Data Is It Anyway? Public and Private Date in the Age of Sharing” outlining data sharing policies that should be enforced by districts to properly share and protect data. The report is only available to members. Read the press release “CTOs Discuss Public and Private Date in the Age of Sharing” for more information.

eReaders to Incorporate Social Reading

Andrew Losowsky, the new Books Editor at the Huffington Post, comments on the evolution of publishing today as well as the future of e-textbooks due to social media and the social environment in a recent video interview on TechCrunch.  Andrew said, “eReaders put text into digital format but they don’t allow the reader to interact with the story.” He predicts that social reading will grow in importance and change how stories are written and read.  Andrew talks about ‘time stamping’ blog posts to avoid revisions that make comments irrelevant (and it’s interesting to note that HuffPo no longer allows bloggers to modify posts after posting).  Andrew also predicts that, “Books will get better but there will be fewer of them.”

Both of the Race to the Top assessment consortia published frameworks that provide some clues as to what we can expect in the new tests that will be introduced in the next few years.  Both organizations are inviting feedback.

SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) published its “content maps and specification” in English/language arts.  In the announcement, Director Joe Willhoft said,  “These specifications are an important step toward ensuring that the SMARTER Balanced assessment system accurately measures student achievement across the full range of college- and career-ready skills included in the Common Core State Standards.”

The SBAC work is based on five design principles (p7):

1.Assessments are grounded in a thoughtful, standards-based curriculum and are managed as part of an integrated system

2.Assessments include evidence of student performance on challenging tasks

3.Teachers are integrally involved in the development and scoring of assessments

4.Assessments are structured to continuously improve teaching and learning

5.Assessment, reporting, and accountability systems provide useful information on multiple measures that is educative for all stakeholders

The SBAC focus on evidence-based design is encouraging (here’s a Mislevy paper and a blog about Cisco’s adaptation of evidence-based assessment).

SBAC reading and writing assessments will be organizes to support five “claims”:

1.Students can read closely and critically to comprehend a range of increasingly complex literary and informational texts.

2.Students can produce effective writing for a range of purposes and audiences.

3.Students can employ effective speaking and listening skills for a range of purposes and audiences.

4.Students can engage appropriately in collaborative and independent inquiry to investigate/research topics, pose questions, and gather and present information.

5.Students can use oral and written language skillfully across a range of literacy tasks.

The SBAC specifications makes clear that (like PARCC) the Common Core focus on writing about text will carry through to the new tests—a focus on meaning, comparison, analysis, and synthesis.  The emphasis shifts from literary texts in elementary to informational texts by high school. “A focus on literacy instruction that centers on careful examination of texts – reading closely and drawing evidence from the text to support inferences and judgments made.”

About speaking and listening, the specs say, “Most of the listening items/tasks will be administered as part of the on-line computer-adaptive assessment.”

Collaboration and research skills (claim 4) will be a particular challenge.  Two statements that suggest rich and complex assessments, “All short research projects will be assessed with extended responses/performance assessments, preferably over two or more days at high school.” And, “The summative assessment would be a presentation of learning – with some flexibility of medium used: oral, visual/graphic, written or a combination.”

It’s still a challenge to read the SBAC specs and envision how the shared assessment system will work and what it will cost.  It seems clear that, as expected, this will be a richer but more complex and expensive system to administer than the proposed PARCC system.

The content specifications, feedback surveys and a recorded Webinar on evidence-based design are available on the Consortium’s Website.

When I think of all those wave functions filling space, rich in potentials, accumulating more and more possibilities as they fan out, I wonder why we limit ourselves so quickly to one idea or one structure or one perception, or to the idea that “truth” exists in objective form. -Margaret Wheatley

Reactions to Gov. Rick Perry’s appearance at prayer rally took me back 15 years.  In an effort to build community support for public education, I helped organize a gathering of faith confrontations in support of youth.  Sitting together on the stage, a pastor and I experienced something completely different. Lifted by the unlikely crowd in support of children in a public school football stadium, I was swimming in the glow of the collaboration and celebration.  The big rally was a personal highlight, a sign of hope and community support.  The pastor next to me was uncomfortable, excluded, and insulted.  I had brought my eager anticipation, he brought a different vision based on years of pain: two different backgrounds, two filters, two realities that collided one week later in angry messages.

Empathy does not come as easily or naturally to me as it does to many other people.  It often takes a jolt, like the one I received after the community rally, to see a different point of view.  We each experience our own reality, viewing decisions and events in our own unique way.  After the pastor told me how much he hated the event it made me wish for a wider view with a bit more insight into other perspectives.

While walking into a school board meeting I stopped to talk with a mother that was obviously distraught.  She said that her son was facing assault charges for hitting another student that had apparently provoked him with a racial epithet.  She complained that the special education teacher had not fulfilled her duties, that the psychologist had misdiagnosed him, that the counselor had inappropriately expelled him, and that the principal was just plain rude.  She began to tremble as she cried, “He’s 16 years old and he can’t read and he’s going to jail and I’m holding you personally responsible.”  I asked my Assistant Superintendent to discuss the case with her and headed for the board table still shaken by the incident.  Another mother grabbed my arm and said, “I just want to thank you!  Your schools are wonderful.  My 16 year old daughter is doing so well that she is taking college level courses and will graduate from college in three years.”  The tale of two mothers illustrates that the system of public education is still a sorting machine that works well for some students and poorly for others.  These two women, whose children were accessing the same system, had opposing views as a result of radically different experiences – a continuing reminder that parents have a variety of perspectives about their schools.

The leadership challenge is to bring perspective to every decision, to gather diverse points of view together in a learning experience.  On my first day on the job the teachers went out on strike.  I called three town meetings and found packed gymnasiums three nights in a row.  During two hours of open microphone each night I heard stories that described a wide variety of views on the situation and the history behind it.  Painful as it was, the listening and learning helped us find a relatively quick solution (and turned out to be a great way to meet thousands of people quickly).  Building perspective can be a frustrating task because it takes patience and dialog.

I’m worried that our current political climate is more about simple minded pledges than perspective-seeking dialog.  One thing I appreciate about President Obama is his apparent interest in building an understanding of multiple perspectives around every major decision.  He’s been criticized for this since the debt ceiling deal because he appears weak when dealing with folks that bring certainty of conviction. Certainty is great for execution but the politics of public education are personal and that requires perspective-building dialog

About his visit to our schools, a Japanese principal wrote, “We have tried to refine our intelligence in order to understand a different culture, and tune our senses to new discoveries and impressions, and to cultivate the sentiments of consideration and gratitude.”  That is a great perspective.

[Good Work is a Sunday series based on journal entries while serving as a public school superintendent in the 1990s]

Leadership

1.The Art of Balancing Execution & Innovation: principals and systems heads need to help their community of learners balance process improvement strategies with new approaches to learning.

2.Done Reforming; Focusing on Getting Smart: five things that seem clear right now and why I’m focused on innovations in learning.

Assessment

3.Cost-Comparability Conundrum: America is caught in a psychometric trap focused on cheap common tests.

4.No Excuse for Sucky Items: Cisco runs the biggest classroom in the work and demonstrate on a daily basis that we don’t need to settle for thin multiple choice tests.

5.Assessment as a Portfolio of Personal Bests: David Coleman’s description  of what we should be shooting for.

Online Learning

6.Promoting Quality Online Learning. Review of a great paper by Rick Hess with a discussion of how merit badges could manage matriculation and fit into state accountability systems.

7.All students are digital learners: a short discussion and video about Digital Learning Now Element 1.

8.Students deserve access to quality digital content & online courses: a short discussion and video about Digital Learning Now Element 2.

9.How to Shift Kids Media Time to Learning: edutainment, flipped classroom, and a long day/year supported by a CBO partnership.

10.How to Start a Virtual School: six mix and match strategies.

11.Managing the Mobile Learner: Bryan Setser provides advice on BYOD (bring your own device) environments.

Learning Platforms

12.Are Textbooks Transitory: an exploration of the benefits of curation, organization, and narration.

13.Adaptive Learning: Key to Customization: smart recommendation engines will emerge from three innovation pathways: proprietary content libraries, search, and monitoring/mining.

Hard to believe we are in the last weeks of summer. Seriously. It hurts. Thinking about packing up a kindergartner and starting the all-too-fast race through school years is putting a limp in my strut. And fog. Seriously, Seattle? Thank (insert reference to your faith here) that there’s preseason football to charm and distract.

United: Speaking of charming, Chris Eide and other educators are launching Teachers United (TU), a new group  bringing more teachers together to strategize about the teaching practice, what works and how to get more of what works to our kids who need it most. TU is getting more teachers engaged in the discussion about Edu-Change (aren’t you just sick to death of the word “reform” and the sneering that comes with it? The word always reminds me of my friends (who did time in Juvey) and what changes to the practice could have the most impact on kids’ achievement. Go “friend” them on FaceBook. Please. And thank you.

Come Together: Even as summer is drawing to a close, school districts are still wrapping up their contract negotiations with local teacher associations. With three weeks left til kickoff, a few districts are at risk of going into overtime in their negotiations, which would delay the beginning of the school year.  Districts are tackling these negotiations differently, of course, with some keeping the public looped in, posting negotiations on school district websites and others appearing to be lost in the wilderness with no breadcrumb trail to follow home. I know everyone loves local control and all, but with the vast majority of education funding coming from the state, with the only local money coming from levies (if passed!) isn’t it time to rethink this process? The state money is negotiated by local districts, yet the state has accountability authority? Or for those of you playing along at home, “accountability authority.” Hmmm.

Making the Grade: Bellwether Education Partners has issued state grades  for their recent work on “Teacher Effectiveness Legislation.” The grades are based on 13 criteria that don’t include progress made or effort – sounds like standards based grading to me – but on whether the specific criteria were met. This year’s big winner? Surprise, everyone, Indiana. With 11.25 points out of 13, the Hoosier state walks away with the top prize. Heck, Fordham gave them this year’sReform Idol award for being the “Reformiest.” For those wondering where Washington stacked up, we didn’t. The Bellwether grades only considered TN, IN, IL, CO and FL. You can grade us on the 13 criteria if you wish, but  I can still hear the echoes of “we’re 32! We’re 32!” from the Race to the Top awards.

For Hire: Two new studies of note on teacher hiring. A report out of Harvard by Will Dobbie shows that the selection criteria for Teach for America can predict a degree of student achievement in the teacher’s first year.  You’ll have to read the report to get at the particulars, but TFA’s rigorous – and often criticized selection criteria – is teaching us all something that we need to pay attention to.

Speaking of alternative pathways into teaching, the National Center for Education Information issued a report showing that 1/3 of the first time public teachers hired since 2005 were trained through non-traditional means. The report also shows wide-ranging support for some of the changes to the teaching profession that are advocated by “reformers.” (there’s that word again)

And while we’re on teaching, another study on the importance of effective teaching out of Michigan State University shows that having consistently good teachers in elementary school is important to student achievement – just as important as small class sizes.

Making the Grade II: The NCAA announced earlier this week that it is strongly considering academic requirements for the NCAA basketball tournanent. Before March Madness, there are midterms. Of the 68 teams taking part in this year’s tourney, 10 had unsatisfactory “academic progress rates” – roughly the equivalent to 50% graduation rates. Down from 19 last year.

ESEA, AKA NCLB and Beyond: With no congressional action on the reauthorization of the Secondary and Elementary Education Act (ESEA, AKA no child left behind) Education Secretary Duncan went forward on his pledge to start granting waivers to states for certain elements of NCLB.  While the details are still unclear, at least a few in the EDU-Change community are not pleased and most of us should, at a minimum, be concerned. How you de-politicize a subjective waiver process in a political environment like the one we live in now is way beyond my pay grade. Bigger worry is that it’s beyond Duncan’s too.

And in our “beyond” segment of this little missive, enjoy Michele Bachman – no, really. In recently discovered videos, Bachman likens federal involvement in education reform to Holocaust. Her mini-movie, “Guinea Pig Kids II” – and who knew there was a GP I? – is a treasure trove of hyperbole, wild metaphors and attacks on a state system of standards. Pressed for time? Watch the math video first. It’s all you need to know about devil spawn we call common core.

That should more than keep you. Enjoy your weekend.

Chris and Team LEV

Watkins says that while the collapse of the domestic auto industry and global economic meltdown took its toll on Michigan’s economic state, the leadership for building the state’s educational foundation continues to fall short.

He points to the state’s high illiteracy rate as well as the underutilized and untapped digital resources in pre-K-12 education to call need for reform. Watkins argues that innovation must erupt from asking basic questions about the delivery, focus and efforts of Michigan’s educational system.

Watkins raises important questions around Michigan’s educational system that should be continually questioned in each state to ensure that the main goals of education are being met: learning.

View Watkin’s original article “Michigan has power to reimagine education, but will it?“ Read about Watkin’s 10 Action Steps for Digital Learning in the edReformer.com articles “Tom Watkins 10 Personally Recommended Action Steps for Innovative Learning” and “The Inevitability of Personal Digital Learning.”

1. States will matter more.  As Fordham’s Mike Petrilli points out state elections matter.  With an unraveling and eventually weakened ESEA, state education policy will be more important than ever.  States will continue to aggregate control from districts over the key policy levers: standards, assessment, accountability, data, and funding.

2. RFER leadership. The Tea Party may have hijacked the news, but it is Republicans for Education Reform (Petrilli calls them Rhee-publicans) that have become a driving force in American education and Obama’s strongest allies.  Not a formal group like DFER, but pushing a similar agenda, RFER’s intellectual roots stem from Jeb Bush’s Florida formula. His foundation’s Chiefs for Change has become a very important leadership support group. [I also appreciate that while Jeb was the best EduGov under the standards agenda, he's now the leading advocate for the innovation agenda.]

3. New tests=new frame. The predominant frame for American K-12 education this decade will be the new tests developed by two Race to the Top-funded consortia.  They are dealing with a tough set of constraints (as described here, here, and here) but will introduce tests that reflect the higher standards of the Common Core.

4. Train wreck ahead. Speaking of the Core, Rotherham predicts a train wreck around the introduction of higher standards.  The WSJ reported yesterday that, based on an NCES report, most states have failed to raise the bar.  That means these new Core-aligned tests will be a real shock to the system.  Some states are starting to ratchet up the degree of difficulty, but the level of reported failure will be shocking for most of the country in 2014.

5. New Normal.  This week’s financial gyrations make clear that we’re in for several more years of what Duncan last fall called the New Normal—higher expectations and lower funding.

When you put all that together, it makes clear the importance of the learning innovation agenda.  We can’t get dramatically better results from a cheaper version of what we’ve been doing for decades.  Our schools, particularly our secondary schools, are obsolete.  We need new tools and new schools that help students and teachers succeed.

As interesting (and maddening) as education politics are, I’m going to leave the reporting and analysis to Michele & Alyson, RiShawn & Whitney, Rick & Andy.  I plan to stay focused on the future of learning—that’s where the solutions will emerge, not from the tired (often intractable) edreform debates of the past.

Next week, our team will be launching GettingSmart.com, a site devoted to innovations in learning.  We will continue to focus on K-12 applications, but will expand our coverage of innovations in informal, early, and adult learning.  We will cover learning entrepreneurs, investors, technologies, and strategies. We will build a community of learners optimistic about the potential of connecting more young people to the idea economy through personal digital learning.

According to Tony Bennett’s recent article “Opinion: Indiana is America’s Education Reform Idol” in The Education Gladfly, Indiana expanded high-quality charter schools, created a broad needs-based voucher program and focused on educator quality and local flexibility. Bennett says, “Indiana has seen the most impactful and far reaching reforms passed and enacted.”

The state honed in on teacher quality and effectiveness for compensation models, professional development and evaluation. In addition, Indiana welcomed more charters across the state with higher accountability standards. While Indiana is making large strides to implement to new models for reform, there is always more to be done says Bennett.

Read Bennett’s article ”Opinion: Indiana is America’s Education Reform Idol” as well as “Opinion: Lessons for 2011′s Education Reform Idol” to learn more about today’s event evaluating education reform.

On edReformer.com view “Overhaul to No Child Left Behind, John Deasy, Nationawide EdReform” and “Chiefs to Watch” for more information on Indian’s reform.

The partnership will allow HMH to provide students with fully customizable digital courses in all subject areas. “As the demand for groundbreaking digital content continues to grow, educators around the world have been turning to HMH’s cutting-edge programs,” says Bethlam Forsa, the EVP of Global Product and Content Development for HMH.

VSCHOOLZ provides schools and districts a fully-integrated and customizable platform that teachers can adapt to fit their students’ needs. The online courses include interactive and collaborative activities, e-text, assignments, quizzes and tests.

This new approach helps to provide students with personalized instruction using digital tools to help students better learn new material. Forsa adds, “Like never before, it empowers teachers to assess an individual student and develop the strongest customized program.”

Nagel and Patrick dive into answering tough questions about making the shift to a proficiency-based system of student advancement, discussing the current systems in place in many states, the imperative to moving away from seat time, the reasoning that supports new models, the motives to make the transformation now and the policies that need to change to make it happen.

Patrick says the future of learning will place an emphasis on personalized lessons with high-quality digital curriculum delivered in a blended learning environment to support a student’s individual learning needs. She believes that by tailoring lessons to each student and moving away from seat time, we can close the achievement gap in U.S. schools. The achievement gap is attributed to the way a large group of students at varying performance levels are moved along through courses and grades when they have not yet developed a proficiency in a particular area.

Patrick also says that while the ideas of competency-based learning aren’t new, the technologies available that can enable personalized learning make the shift much more appealing today than in the past. She says that the risk to not shifting our models now means that students will continue to drop out and “fail to be engaged or prepared for success” in the current systems.

In closing, Patrick says that student learning needs to be the driver in policy development in order to remove seat-time policies, develop student-centered policies and incorporate competency-based approaches.

View the full Q&A article “Beyond Seat Time: Advancing Proficiency-Based Learning” from THE Journal.

Chris Sturgis, Susan Patrick and Linda Pittenger also wrote “It’s Not a Matter of Time: Highlights from the 2011 Competency-Based Summit” in July 2011. Sturgis and Patrick also wrote “When Success is the Only Option: Designing Competency-Based Pathways for Next Generation Learning” in November 2010.

For more information, view the Innosight Institute article “The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning: Profiles of Emerging Models.” On edReformer.com, be sure to check out the following related articles: “It’s Not a Matter of Time,” “More On Assessment” and “On Merit Badges.”

Execution requires process management.  Innovation requires change management.  They both require goal clarity, dedicated capacity, and a commitment to data.

There are good books out on both topics.  Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck. Amazon says, “The authors describe the building blocks–leaders with the right behaviors, a culture that rewards execution, and a reliable system for having the right people in the right jobs–that need to be in place to manage the three core business processes of people, strategy, and operations.”

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, by Steven Johnson is a reminder that “Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces us to explore.”  Johnson explores seven strategies including slow hunches and accidents that may unlock innovation.

The so called ‘human capital’ agenda in education is based on the ‘great teacher in every classroom’ theory of improvement.  The assumption is that talent and training will yield consistent quality instruction.  It’s an execution agenda: culture building, smart hiring, orientation, support systems, professional development, best practice sharing, and data-driven evaluation.

Focus on the execution agenda will improve results to the extent possible within the confines of the existing school model.  Heroic effort may push results beyond expectations, but an execution focus leaves the basic parameters unchanged and, as a result, bounds the upper limit of improvement.

Taking an innovation approach to achieve better results may include piloting new delivery strategies, strategies that extended the day and year, incentives that boost motivation, and innovative staffing strategies.  Innovation is inherently disruptive.  It breaks boundaries.  It is unpredictable.  There is a chance for significantly better results.  There is also a chance for failure.

American schools would benefit from improved execution, particularly those that serve low income students.  But there is an upper bound to improvement.  Our schools, particularly our secondary schools, are obsolete.  They teach groups not individuals, they are time bound, lockstep and partitioned.  To students, they are irrelevant and boring.  Creating engaging student-centered competency-based schools requires an innovation agenda.

The back to school question for school and system leaders is, “What’s the right mixture of execution and innovation for our community?”  Execution is doing things well; innovation is doing the right things.  Execution makes things consistent, innovation makes things different with the potential of being dramatically better.  Improved execution will boost results in the short run; innovation is a long-term play. They both require political capital, but the more disruptive the bigger the withdrawal.

Every school needs an execution agenda to improve the quality of instruction around an adopted curriculum.  Every school needs a change agenda—a phased approach to a more student centered, standards-based, competency-focused environment.  Finding the right balance is the art of leadership and the product of dialog.

[posted first on Huffington Post]

Patrick points to online learning as an important driver in the shift from print to digital learning that is no longer dependent on traditional district-operated schools. The paper proposes that all students statewide should have access to to full- or part-time online learning without limits in regards to geographic location, number of operators or performance standards.

The authors also state that barriers to enrollment, such as enrollment caps, geographic limits, district limitations or last educational experience, should be eliminated in order to allow all students access and opportunity to learning online.

Online learning is expected to reduce costs associated with facilities, transportation and administration, making individual course offerings cheaper. The paper suggests that virtual schools should be recognized as Local Education Agencies (LEA) in order to provide funding that gives optimal students choice, flexibility and learning potential. The authors add that compentency-based funding models could encourage schools to accelerate progress among struggling students.

Innovative online programs offer differentiated and individualized instruction that incentivizes students to excel at a pace best-suited for the individual.

By bringing these three components – authorization, enrollment and funding – together, online and blended learning environments can provide students access to the best education and teachers without with fewer barriers and expenses to learning.

Tom Vander Ark also published a Viewpoint article on “Differentiated Charter Authorizing Strategies for Innovation, Scale, and Quality,” which asks states to authorize laws that reflect the realities of charter schools and emerging opportunities today.

Click here to download the full NACSA Viewpoint article, “Authorizing Online Learning.”

What to do with transition? The reality is that schools are locked into input models of capital outlay dollars to build buildings, add on classrooms, and control for class size and growth.

So, finish construction projects, halt the future bond planning, and rethink what is possible with a mobile learning approach. Can classrooms exist without walls? Can schedules be shifted to support learning off site? In short, develop a question and answer set for how companies provide for a distributed workforce. Then apply those lessons to student access points and devices. A great place to start is with a new school approach or an incoming class.

Want to play with this a bit? Offer a pilot this year for incoming freshman where parents sign up for remote learning and support choices. See how many freshman parents would be interested in blended learning as a curriculum with a portion of their student’s day being provided off site. Would you have to staff the freshman academy the same way? Would this effect lunch schedules?  The big play here is a plan. Connect with folks who can help you with this pivot, gather data, and act on the results after a year. What if the plan saved you money? What if your community had more options?

What to do with devices? As I travel the country I’m seeing everything from devices sitting in closets to devices purchased without professional development. Computer cramming is alive and well in this country despite warnings from the authors of Disrupting Class.

We have to get smarter about leasing devices, but we must also asses the technologies kids already have. According to Unisys, “87 percent of IT managers say that 50 percent of employees use their own devices.” Is this a network challenge for district and school IT managers if this happened with kids? You bet. But here’s the rub. You don’t start with a model that allows everything in. Rather, you make incremental plans to assess what is out there in your student bodies.

Heck, start it as a Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) effort for seniors. You can call it a privilege if you want. Have seniors fill out their device information, specs, and permissions info online and then monitor the use with smarter filtering systems. Are they responsible along with their families on their devices or is the school liable? Make sure you really know CIPA here, because we have a lot of school/district technology directors in this country “making crap up.”

Again, plan, do, study, and act on the process. Have students prepare presentations for school boards and have them be active participants in the community rules around mobile use. You may be surprised at the stewardship if students are engaged in their own learning community around mobile devices and tablets.

How can you get out of the way and unleash learning? According to iPass, “more than 65 million tablets will be shipped in 2011 and 60% of mobile workers will use them.” What will student environments look like in this shift? And if 22-34 year olds who are mobile workers consume 70% of the tablet market, do you think they’ll buy them for their kids? Stop making the school lists. Stop requiring the use of textbooks and consumables that are dated for today’s learners.

Start with pre-k planning and think through how the school centers of kindergarten could now be a large room with some manipulative and devices. Do early childhood learners need hands on colors and activities? Yes. Can they replicate a portion of this experience on a device? Yes. Are they already doing so at home when they leave your classrooms? Yes.

Let’s work this year to research, pilot, and study what is happening in our world. Let’s commit to connecting our kids to the kind of future workforce they’ll find. But, let’s not do it without common sense and collaboration. It is equally true that too much connectivity can cripple reflection, tactical learning, and visceral experiences without proper planning for technology integration/conversion.

So, let’s communicate and collaborate as to the very best face-to-face experiences and the very best of blended learning. As Brian Greenberg remarks in his latest blog, “the technology itself is not the game changer; it is the personalization that technology affords that can change the life of a child and hopefully that of an adults.”

All students deserve access to high quality digital content & online courses

Digital Learning Now, chaired by Jeb Bush and Bob Wise, promotes online and blended learning as a key strategy for boosting student achievement.  Released on December 1, 2010, DLN’s 10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning is a framework for state policymakers.  This week, DLN released a video on Element 2, student access.  It recommends that all students have access to quality content and courses.

While a few barriers to access are erected in the name of quality education, most are simply protection of school district enrollment and budgets.  Having managed a district budget, I know it’s hard to cut the budget and manage down an enrollment decline.  But erecting artificial barriers that limit online enrollment by district or county, or placing enrollment or budget caps on virtual schools shortchanges students and families.

Class size restrictions don’t seem to pay off in traditional schools and they unnecessarily limit online schools and restrict blended schools from using differentiated staffing strategies that leverage the talent of master teachers.

States should require at least one online course for graduation

In addition to attacking barriers, Element 2 suggests that states should add a gradation requirement that all high school students take an online college/career prep course.  I’d go a step further and require at least one online course each year of high school.  Nearly all young people will learn online after high school whether it’s in college or corporate or military training.  High school is a great place to start learning online.

DLN also anticipates that the requirement for at least some online learning will increase the supply and will expand student options.

For more:

• Watch the Element 2 video
• Read the discussion of Element 2 recommendations

Achieve released eight rubrics for evaluating Open Education Resources (OER) including the degree of alignment to the Common Core Standards, quality of assessment, degree of interactivity, quality of practice exercises, opportunities for deeper learning, utility of of teaching materials and accessibility. The rubrics are being piloted with state- and district-level users. Click here to download the rubrics.

Also with Achieve support, testing consortium PARCC released Common Core content frameworks. Check out the visual that makes clear what’s new about Common Core English standards: reading carefully, writing about texts (no more decontextualized prompts), and conducting research.

Pearson Partners with Mooresville on 1:1 Laptop Program

Superintendent Mark Edwards announced this week that Mooresville Graded School District located in Mooresvill, North Carolina will partner with Pearson to provide online curriculum for a 1:1 laptop project aimed at preparing its students for the 21st-century, global workplace.  Read Bryan Setser’s edReformer interview with Edwards,  “Digital for a Dollar Day”.

Dreambox Learning Improves Rocketship Education’s Math Achievement

Dreambox Learning, a K-3 adaptive math learning platform, announced results this week from an international study of Rocketship Education‘s use of Dreambox Learning proving the tool to be effective in improving math proficiencies. Rocketship Education runs three high-performing schools in San Jose, Calif. Click here to learn more.

ShowMe iPad App Makes Educational Tutorials Easy

Online resource providers like Khan Academy have developed free, video lessons students, parents, teachers and coaches. Now, with the ShowMe app, teachers can create their own videos for students similar to the Khan Academy resources. The ShowMe app allows any teacher to create whiteboard lessons and educational tutorials for students around the world from the iPad. Visual and audio lessons can be recorded, uploaded and shared online to students through an online portfolio.

We also visited with Eli from Desmos this week.  He’s building “a place where anyone can create and share rich, interactive content that works across platforms.” Plus he’s got a really sweat graphing calculator. Click on ‘Examples’ and play with the variables on the left.  It brings algebra to life.

Apollo Group to Acquire Carnegie Learning

More good news for folks producing engaging and adaptive content: Apollo Group, Inc. announced this week that it will acquire Carnegie Learning, Inc., a publisher of research-based math curricula, for $75 million and the related technology from Carnegie Mellon University for $21.5 million to help accelerate efforts to incorporate adaptive learning into its academic platform. Read about how adaptive learning on edReformer.

Ed-Fi.org Brings Universal Data Standards to Students Systems

The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation introduced Ed-Fi, “a universal data standard that permits interoperation among student data systems,” developed to improve student achievement in K-12 education. We’re looking forward to learning more about achievement dashboards and how Ed-Fi may facilitate motivational profiles.  Click here to learn more about Ed-Fi.

Katie Salen: Why a School Designed by Gamers Works for Kids

NYC-based Quest to Learn (Q2L) is an exciting school design.  Founder Katie Salen blogs on Education Nation about how games promote productive failure and collaboration.

[Disclaimer: Learn Capital has a commercial relationship with Pearson]

According to “The State of America’s Children 2011,” a report issued last month by the Children’s Defense Fund, the impact of the recession on children’s well-being has been catastrophic.  Here is just a handful of the findings:

• The number of children living in poverty has increased by four million since 2000, and the number of children who fell into poverty between 2008 and 2009 was the largest single-year increase ever recorded.

• The number of homeless children in public schools increased 41 percent between the 2006-7 and 2008-9 school years.

• In 2009, an average of 15.6 million children received food stamps monthly, a 65 percent increase over 10 years.

• A majority of children in all racial groups and 79 percent or more of black and Hispanic children in public schools cannot read or do math at grade level in the fourth, eighth or 12th grades.

Blow’s conclusion: “We risk the creation of an engorged generational underclass born of a culture that has less income equality and fewer prospects for mobility than the previous generation.  It’s hard to see how we emerge from this downturn and its tumult a stronger nation if we allow vast swatches of our children to be lost. My fear is that we may not.”

After posting the story Blow tweeted ML Kings ‘promised land’ speech.  The video ends quoting King suggesting that we we account to the god of history “and we will talk in terms of things we done it seems that I can hear the god of history say that it was not enough”

The call to grace is a call to a life of effortful caring,

to a life of service and whatever sacrifice seems required.

-M. Scott Peck

Driving my mom around the leafy suburbs today, I said, “Bet you wouldn’t guess that most kids here live in or near poverty.”  Here in the town where I was superintendent, we hide our poverty pretty well.  This place is a slice of America serving students in poverty and students from higher income families, students who’s families came from all over the world to live here, students who a lot like my kids and students who are very different.

After a half a century as a sleepy collection water front neighborhoods and semi-rural properties, Federal Way, Washington experienced 20 years of uncontrolled growth including an explosion of multi-family housing and strip centers.  In an effort to gain some measure of control a group of civic leaders lead an incorporation effort in 1990.  As an adolescent city, Federal Way is struggling to become something more than a mall and a collection of strip centers.

My wife and I wanted to raise our kids in a diverse place where community leaders were working together to meet new challenges—and we found that in Federal Way.   An active chamber and group of civic leaders formed a police department, built parks, improving streets, and creating an identity as a great place to “live, learn, work and play.”

In the early 90s, there was an unusually level of cooperation across traditional boundaries.  Elected officials in Federal Way hired a retired Army officer as City Manager, a hospital administrator as Fire Chief, and a business executive as School Superintendent.  The city and school district co-manage three junior high and city park complexes.  The police provide high school security.  The City and the Chamber of Commerce share the cost and responsibility for economic development.  The Chamber facilitates business partnerships with the schools and provides financial support through an educational foundation.  Advancing Leadership, sponsored by the Chamber, develops community leaders. A Multi-Service Center supports a variety of family needs. Life long residents and new comers working side by side have made the community safer, more prosperous, more attractive and livable.  Schools have improved, new businesses have been attracted to the community, and a real downtown is emerging.

This place is coming together for one simple reason; there are a few thousand extraordinary people who believe this is more than the place they live, they call this place home.  They lead lives of personal, social, and civic responsibility.  From different backgrounds and with disparate view, they live as trustees.  They live, give, serve, shop, worship, play, lobby and vote here—all done with interest and intent.  They do it not only for their own children but for other people’s children.  They own stock here.

Occasionally initiated by self-interest, sustained and effective community leadership takes empathy on a massive scale, not just for the person in front of you, but for neighborhoods, diverse groups of people, for a piece of a hurting world.  It means seeing the need, in a powerful and personal way, letting it focus your attention, and compelling you into a compassionate response.  Leaders take ownership, they act like trustees.

Anyway, from the land where blinking causes you to break out in a sweat, here now the news:

Pell 1, Congressional Republicans 0: Amid worries of government shut down, Greece-like credit ratings and a solution-less budget dilemma, it might have been easy to miss the fact that Pell Grants were one of the proposed casualties put forward by congressional republicans. Fortunately, Pell survived – actually getting a (temporary?) increase – as did the maximum grant award amounts. Pell is protected until 2013 in this deal, unfortunately, this victory comes at the cost of federally subsidized loans for graduate students. Mixed blessings, to be sure.

Even as we fight to maintain funding for college-goers, proof of the value of college going continues to mount. “The College Payoff” shows that “a college degree is key to economic opportunity.” There are some not so clear cut distinctions about college degrees, showing that the workforce and earnings attainment aren’t some monolith where pay is conferred based on educational attainment alone. Sadly, race and gender still play a significant role in earnings – where are the “biology is not destiny” folks these days, there’s work to be done – and that occupation plays a significant role in earnings. Still, on average, folks who get college degrees earn significantly more than those who don’t over their lifetimes, like double or more. Is money everything? Yes and no, but when you don’t have it, it sure feels like everything.

Two and Two Aren’t Always Two: We all know that what’s in a number depends on what got counted. So, if you’re on a weight loss kick, you might mentally start the count at your highest recent weight. (I’ve been known to eat dessert for two or three weeks before starting a diet. Low hanging fruit and all that.) But when the data really count, shouldn’t you be measuring exactly the same things in exactly the same way so as to compare results? Take high school graduation rates – please – if you measure based on the number of incoming seniors vs. the freshman cohort, you get a much better graduation rate. This summer, all states will begin using a more rigorous measurement so as to get a better feel from Arkansas to Illinois for how states are doing. When states use their own methods, some truths get lost and others amplified. A uniform measure will start to end that myth making – until some creative type figures out how to game the system.

You Say Tomato, I Say Potato: A new GAO report shows that states’ use of the SIG (School Improvement Grant) funds is widely varied. Which comes as a huge shock to almost no one. Some states focused on a few schools, others spread the money around like peanut butter on wheat toast. Some invested in deep transformation, others consulted the Ed Department’s website. With nearly no uniformity in how monies were invested, the results overall are likely to be hard to compare and could actually tank future funds. Note to the Feds: money is a carrot AND a stick. Get what you want out of it.

(BTW, rumor has it that two of our local SIG schools made AYP for the first time in a very long while. Not confirmed yet, but if true marks a very significant positive step forward. Look for this bit of positive news in a future update.)

Buy Local: LEV is bringing a new focus to Schools that Work to our members and interested others. The first of our on-line chats and education sessions will focus on highly effective public charter schools. You can check it out and join in the conversation at the links below my signature. Also for you politically interested types, the LEV political action fund is hosting its first fundraiser of the season on September 1 from  6-8. You can get more information from Jenny at jenny@educationvoters.org.

For more, see League of Education Voters