Public Impact News & Views

Missing the Mark at the Arizona State Ed Tech Summit

written by Bryan and Emily Ayscue Hassel on April 22, 2013

As Stacey Childress and many others have pointed out, Andy Kessler’s closing remarks at this week’s big ed-tech conference at Arizona State University went way off track. By positioning technology as a way to replace teachers, Kessler missed the mark on two key points.

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

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

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

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

This blog entry first appeared on Education Next’s blog. If you wish to comment, please do so on the original blog post.

Authorizers: See What Replacing Failing Charter Schools, Replicating Great Ones Can Do

written by Bryan on March 19, 2013

How could cities see their charter school sectors take off in quality, matching or besting the performance of their district schools, and the state? Public Impact researchers working with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute on a new study found that replacing low-performing charter schools while replicating high-performing ones could dramatically improve quality within just a few years. (For Fordham’s take on this, see the Ohio Gadfly Daily.)

Searching for Excellence: A Five-City, Cross-State Comparison of Charter School Quality, with research by Lyria Boast, Gillian Locke, and Tom Koester, and foreword and Fordham analysis by Terry Ryan and Aaron Churchill, considered charter schools in Albany, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, and Indianapolis—all of which have a decade-long history of charter schools and relatively large market shares of charter school students.

The study shows that the charter school sectors in five cities outperformed their home districts’ schools, which had similar levels of student poverty.

But within each district, quality varied widely, from very high-performing charter schools to dismal ones.

The study also compared charter performance to average statewide performance—admittedly, a higher bar, as schools statewide had significantly lower levels of poverty than the charters (and their urban districts). Charters in all five cities trailed the state overall—often by a wide margin.

Clearly, something needs to change in cities’ stance toward both their lowest-performing and high-performing charters. And that’s where the study has good news, pointing the way to improving the quality of charter schools overall.

The study ran a simulation to show what could happen when cities:

*Close or replace low-performing schools and
*Expand or replicate high-performing schools.

If the bottom 10 percent of schools were closed in Cleveland, for example, while the top performers significantly expanded, within five years the city could have charter schools substantially outperforming their home district and on par with the state’s results.

This is just an illustration. Real authorizers wouldn’t want to simplistically identify the top and bottom 10 percent based just on proficiency levels. Instead, they would need more complex performance frameworks that took into account proficiency, growth in student performance, and other important outcomes.

In some cities, authorizers and charter supporters have begun building the systems needed to replace failing schools and replicate great ones. In Indianapolis, authorizers including the mayor’s office and the statewide Indiana Charter Schools Board have prioritized scaling up schools that have been successful in Indianapolis and elsewhere, aided by funding from The Mind Trust’s Charter School Incubator. At the same time, Ball State University has recently joined the mayor’s office in aggressively closing low-performing schools. This report makes clear why all authorizers should follow their lead.

Various resources exist to help. Our report Going Exponential offers advice for authorizers, school operators, and policymakers about growing successful charter schools, based on research about how organizations have grown quickly and with quality in other sectors. We have also worked with the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) to develop an “academic performance framework” authorizers can use to identify high- and low-performing schools based on clear criteria. And check out NACSA’s publications about closure and replication, including this monograph.

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Ohio Gadfly Daily blog. If you wish to comment, please do so on the original blog post.

Connecting Smart Cities

written by Joe Ableidinger and Bryan on February 13, 2013

For several months now, Tom Vander Ark has been issuing rich installments in his Smart Cities series, building a detailed map of where innovations in learning are happening. Here, we profile an organization connecting Smart Cities–the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust)–and its work helping city-based organizations support the emergence of high-quality blended learning.

CEE-Trust describes itself as “a network of city-based foundations, non-profits, and mayor’s offices that work together to support education innovation and reform.” Already at 28 members from coast to coast, CEE-Trust launched from Indianapolis-based education reform organization The Mind Trust in 2010, with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York and The Joyce Foundation. The network was created “to ensure that cities around the country have local institutional champions that drive the education reform agenda forward,” Executive Director Ethan Gray said in a 2011 interview. “We believe that city-based organizations are an under-tapped resource, and can be better leveraged to align key constituents to support education innovation and reform.”

The network facilitates multicity collaboration by hosting convenings and working with members to document effective practices and lessons learned in member cities, and to analyze cutting-edge issues in policy and practice. CEE-Trust also works closely with its policy partners, the Center on Reinventing Public Education and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The network and its leaders have developed a deep understanding of what it takes to catalyze education reform at the city level, as evidenced in the 2012 report Kick-Starting Reform–co-authored by CEE-Trust and Public Impact–which drew on profiles of three high-impact CEE-Trust members to identify lessons for reformers in other cities.

Subsets of CEE-Trust members belong to topic-specific working groups that meet several times a year to explore partnerships and seed collaborations. CEE-Trust’s current working groups focus on school governance reform, charter incubation, funding for education reform, and blended learning.

Blended Learning Working Group: This working group aims to expand members’ understanding of and engagement with high-quality blended learning. Working group members visit top national blended schools to learn from their leaders, teachers, families, and community supports. Grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have enabled CEE-Trust to develop members’ capacity to attract and support blended models, and to create opportunities for entrepreneurs to incubate, launch, or grow new blended programs.

Recently, CEE-Trust has provided members with advising tailored to their specific blended-learning goals and city context, which will lead to a set of white papers to aid other city-based organizations. To catalog blended-learning activity, CEE-Trust also launched BlendedLearningNow, an aggregator of blogs, news, research, case studies, and videos. In January 2013, CEE-Trust hired Carrie Douglass, formerly of the Rogers Family Foundation in Oakland and a key player in the pilot of four personalized blended models in Oakland Unified Schools in 2012-13. Douglass is spearheading CEE-Trust’s blended-learning work.

Blended-Learning Workshops and Summer Institute: In spring 2013, CEE-Trust and its partners Evergreen Education Group, Innosight Institute, and Public Impact will conduct six blended-learning workshops to introduce participants from member cities to key elements of high-quality blended models. CEE-Trust members will host workshops in Oakland (Rogers Family Foundation), Chicago (Chicago Public Education Fund), Denver (Donnell-Kay Foundation and Gates Family Foundation), Nashville ( Tennessee Charter School Incubator), Detroit (The Skillman Foundation), and the Twin Cities (Charter School Partners and The Minneapolis Foundation). These workshops will create a cohort of promising leaders across the six cities, and help CEE-Trust members seed and support promising new schools and programs that use blended instruction to enable mastery-based, personalized learning. In the summer of 2013, a small group of exceptionally talented educators who attended the spring workshops will be invited to attend a summer institute to develop plans for implementing blended models with the local support of CEE-Trust members.

Through its blended-learning and other reform-focused activities, CEE-Trust connects some of today’s smartest cities–including existing blended-learning leaders and education technology hubs, and others poised to join them in creating, implementing, and supporting the next wave of high-quality blended schools and programs.

This blog entry first appeared as part of Tom Vander Ark’s Smart Cities series on his Education Week blog Vander Ark on Innovation. If you wish to comment, please do so on the original blog post.

Teachers: This is the Moment to Expand Your Impact

written by Emily Ayscue Hassel, Bryan and Celine Coggins on October 26, 2012

If you are a teacher who helps students learn exceptionally well, this is your moment—schools and policymakers must vastly expand your impact, now.

Today, our nation is at a crossroads; we simply cannot fall short educationally for another decade as other countries surge.

Why is this time unique? Two crucial trends are at play. First, the United States has begun to act on the compelling data showing great variation in teachers’ success in helping students learn, as well as the monumental impact this variation can have on the life chances of students. As states and districts work to build better teacher-evaluation systems, schools will have increasingly accurate and useful data to identify which teachers are exceptionally effective.

Second, we are experiencing a major generational change. For the first time in memory, a majority of teachers have fewer than 10 years of experience. In the coming decade, they will decide whether to stay in the classroom or move on. Opportunities for leadership and compensated professional growth will weigh heavily in their decisions. As the Teach Plus report Great Expectations: Teachers’ Views on Elevating the Teaching Profession shows, early-career teachers want clear standards of excellence, performance measurement, and overhaul of compensation and tenure. They also want to get out of their classroom walls and collaborate with peers to meet student needs in flexible instructional groups.

Ever since the release of “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, the United States has tried dozens of reforms that have not capitalized on the excellent teachers already working in schools. Meanwhile, growing volumes of evidence have shown large differences in teachers’ effectiveness. Excellent teachers more consistently help students close achievement gaps and advance individually, in spite of students’ differing familial advantages.

Reforms that do not acknowledge this truth and expand the impact—and number—of excellent teachers are bound to fall short. Schools must stretch their thinking far past the current mentor/master paradigm for teacher advancement. To do so, schools must extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students, couple teacher collaboration with teacher leadership, and empower top teachers to shape school culture. Meanwhile, policymakers must clear away the policy brush that holds great teachers back and boost the national will to put an excellent teacher in every classroom.

Altogether, these changes provide the linchpin for what we call an Opportunity Culture, one that embraces excellence and opportunity for students and teachers alike.

How should schools go about this?

First, they must help excellent teachers reach more students. Using job redesign and age- and child-appropriate technology, schools can help great teachers teach more students, paying more for their additional responsibility from existing per-pupil funding. New models can also free teachers’ in-school time for collaboration and improvement.

For example, excellent elementary teachers can reach two to four times more students by specializing in their best subjects, while less costly paraprofessionals supervise students during noninstructional time, such as recess and transitions between classes, and complete paperwork.

Alternatively, teachers at all levels can reach substantially more students by swapping teaching time, as little as an hour daily per student, with personalized digital instruction supervised by paraprofessionals. With the right schedule changes, teachers can collaborate, reach more students, and maintain personalized instructional time. The charter school network Rocketship Education provides one example of schools that combine subject specialization and digital instruction to achieve stellar results in high-poverty elementary schools while increasing teacher pay, within budget.

Teacher-leaders can bring excellence to multiple classrooms by leading teams. Of course, some schools already have grade-level or department leaders. But rarely do these teachers have accountability for other teachers’ student outcomes, authority to select and evaluate peers, and enhanced pay that is sustainably funded. With full accountability for all students in a set of classrooms and explicit authority to lead teams, teacher-leaders have an enormous incentive to develop others and help all of them do their best. Lastly, master teachers can teach larger classes—within reason and by choice—allowing other teachers to have smaller classes.

These models let schools create instructional career opportunities for excellent teachers, for more pay, within budget. They also create opportunities for teamwork, job flexibility, funded planning and development, and varying roles that fit each person’s talents, all helping to retain teachers and increase their satisfaction. These models also support sustainable pay increases of up to 130 percent for multi-classroom leaders and 40 percent for others.

Second, schools must couple collaboration with teacher leadership. Professional learning communities are not new, but their developmental potential is squandered when individual teachers are unaware of which of their peers achieve the best outcomes and when excellent teachers are isolated. Moreover, schools find scheduling a challenge and paying teacher-leaders unsustainable.

Efforts like Teach Plus’ highly successful Turnaround Teacher Teams, which infuse schools with trained teams of excellent teachers and acknowledge excellence openly, give great teachers license to lead and good teachers license to learn.

Combining collaborative efforts like this with reach models makes collaboration and pay increases sustainable. When paraprofessionals supervise students during noninstructional time and digital learning, teachers can collaborate.

Third, schools must empower excellent teachers to influence not just classrooms, but also school culture and policies. Excellent teachers should play a prominent role in determining peer selection, instructional practices and materials, evaluation methods, and retention decisions.

Policymakers must remove barriers that prevent schools from boosting the impact of great teachers for more pay, within budget. The policy changes needed are many (see the full article for more). In summary, states must improve teacher evaluation, track the number of students with excellent teachers, and let these teachers obtain automatic multi-state licenses. Excellent teachers must be able to vary their class sizes, use paraprofessionals, and change roles, schedules, and technology to help more students and peers.

Policy must enable districts to pay excellent teachers more for advanced teaching roles—routinely and within budget—with even more for those succeeding with the most-challenging students.

States must insist that schools report retention rates of excellent teachers, protect them from layoffs, and limit tenure to those who achieve consistent excellence. To save teachers time, states must give all students access to wireless learning, and all teachers access to student data and matching instructional options.

Finally, state and federal policymakers must build public will for reaching every student with excellent teachers. A blend of powerful mandates and incentives must define core policies and funding, not just special programs. In other words, creating an Opportunity Culture must be this nation’s No. 1 education priority. Other reforms cannot succeed, sustainably and at scale, without attracting and developing highly capable teachers who stay in the profession longer and expand their impact within schools and their profession.

This is an abridged and edited version of an article published on EducationWeek.org

This blog entry first appeared on Education Next’s blog. If you wish to comment, please do so on the original blog post.

The Original Personalization App—Great Teachers

written by Bryan and Emily Ayscue Hassel on September 17, 2012

With all the buzz about the District Race to the Top and jockeying to fit it into differing agendas, you might miss its simple premise: “There are great teachers … who have figured out how to personalize education and we are asking our districts to identify them and amplify their reach and impact,” Secretary Arne Duncan said in his remarks announcing the competition.

The goal of this competition is to “support LEAs that demonstrate their commitment to identifying teachers, principals, and schools who have a vision and the expertise to personalize education and extend their reach to all of their students,” says the introduction to the final criteria.

The criteria require all applicants to:

1. Meet an “Absolute Priority” for learning personalization that includes “expand[ing] student access to the most effective educators” and increasing all educators’ effectiveness.
2. Measure and report the number and percentage of students whose teacher of record is highlyeffective, reporting separately those who have effective teachers.

The competition awards points for:

3. Having a plan to increase the number of students who receive instruction from highly effectiveand effective teachers.
4. Giving schools flexibility to change schedules, staffing models, and budgets to implement their plans.
5. Showing financial sustainability beyond the grant.

Most of the buzz about this competition has focused on technology. True, self-paced digital instruction and “learning management systems” that measure students’ progress and prescribe next steps will surely keep improving and increasingly personalize learning. And technology is crucial to save teachers time, and ultimately it should make all of what a teacher does easier, including personalization, as we’ve said here, here, here, and here.

But the competition criteria recognize that all of these tools are much more likely to propel student learning if more students have proven excellent teachers in charge of their learning. Personalization has been part of great teaching for decades, long before the PC landed in classrooms. Maria Montessori’s individual-choice methods and Carol Ann Tomlinson’s masterful differentiation manuals that show teachers how to combine large group, small group and individual instruction are just two of many great examples. But still, some teachers “get it” faster and do it better. That’s why RTTT-D directs applicants to give more students access to these teachers.

As districts shape their applications, they will be smart to acknowledge the education department’s very clearly expressed view on this, and not submit applications implying that technology will “teacher-proof” education or that excellent teaching will soon become less important. Performance differences in other professions mirror that in teaching, so it’s unlikely that technology alone will make education the only job on earth in which the person in the job doesn’t matter.

In short, a few simple reminders, both to applicants and to other education leaders who want to achieve better outcomes with personalized learning for more students:

1. Excellent teachers personalize, whatever it takes. The original personalized learning app is having an excellent teacher. Great teachers do it with no technology and bad textbooks. They do it with cobbled-together materials from the Web. They just do it, because they are compelled by the learning potential and needs of their students. Put digital tools in their hands, and they will tell you how to make them great for personalizing learning.

2. Excellent teachers need new school models to personalize learning for more students. Schools can redesign roles and use technology to put top teachers in charge of more students’ learning. These models free a great teacher from other duties that peers and paraprofessional staff can do with a great teacher’s leadership and collaboration. And they make it possible to pay excellent professionals about 20 to 40 percent more and teacher-leaders up to 130 percent more, within budget. Some models allow paying all teachers more, sustainably. If you’ve been following our work on opportunityculture.org, this is old news. If you haven’t, check out the short videos, infographic, and slide deck describing these school models.

3. Last but not least, excellent teachers can spread their personalizing techniques, materials, and attitudes to peers. But only if they are recognized, empowered within their schools, and provided with time to collaborate and lead. Most of the school models mentioned above allow schools to provide this time, but teachers need leaders’ help to arrange the school schedules and teaching roles accordingly.

Districts that want to achieve personalization and outstanding learning at scale will focus on all three of these—recognizing the excellent teachers already in classrooms, committing to models that reach the most students possible with excellent teachers in charge, and baking accountability and the time to lead and develop peers into the school recipe.

Adding well-designed digital tools (read Tom Vander Ark and Innosight) to these strategies will lead to big wins, not just for competing districts, but also for teachers and their students.

-Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel

This blog entry first appeared on Education Next’s blog. If you wish to comment, please do so on the original blog post.

Public Impact News & Views

Welcome to the Public Impact blog, offering news and views from the Public Impact team. Questions or concerns? Contact editor Sharon Kebschull Barrett.

Missing the Mark at the Arizona State Ed Tech Summit

Authorizers: See What Replacing Failing Charter Schools, Replicating Great Ones Can Do

Connecting Smart Cities

Teachers: This is the Moment to Expand Your Impact

The Original Personalization App—Great Teachers

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