Digital transformation is being heavily evangelized amongst school reformers.  Heck, I’m one of them.  As I write this I’m attending a summit hosted by Digital Promise, focused on school level digital transformation stories.  I’m a believer in the tremendous potential of personalized learning, student adaptive content, and competency based assessment systems.  I know it can accelerate student learning because I’ve seen it in practice.  But there is a three-headed monster in the closet.

In our district, we call it a unicorn, actually.  And we’re all on the hunt.

High Quality Digital Content

First is our search for high quality digital content.  A few districts develop their own online content.  As a large school district, we have some capacity to do that in-house.  Of course it takes time and resources to either train current curriculum writers or hire new curriculum specialists to develop high quality digital content.  Regardless, developing talented educators with both the content expertise and digital literacy acumen is a daunting undertaking.

Many schools come to the conclusion that they don’t have the capacity to develop their own team of digital content creators, so they buy content from external vendors.  ST Math, Lexia, Achieve 3000, and hundreds of other programs offer content across the market.  New content-driven companies come online every day.  They’re constantly looking for willing districts and schools to help them test and vet their developing content platforms.  To survive, textbook publishers have moved into digital spaces, and quality and pricing of content is as variable as it was when everything was paper-based.

In other words, the content question is not easy, and let’s not even get into the professional development required to build the capacity of staff to utilize the content once you acquire it.  Transformation to the digital environment has not made the challenge of providing high quality, rigorous content any simpler.  Perhaps it’s even more complicated.

Standards & Assessment

You might normally think that the conversation about standards should be addressed in the conversation about content.  Fair enough.  Certainly content and assessment are closely intertwined – or at least should be.  Yet content standards often come to life (or go to die) in the assessment system.  We have to ask ourselves the basic question about how we come to understand what students currently understand and what they’re ready for next.

Competency-based learning, personalized learning, and student adaptive learning systems all rely on an ability to adequately assess student performance and then marry content to the unique learning needs of each student.  To be frank, even our most talented classroom teachers struggle mightily to do this.  How do you develop a learning experience tailored to each individual student?  Many teachers skip it altogether, and instead move their entire class through a standardized scope and sequence at the same time.  Assessment for grading trumps assessment for learning, as there is little real intention of adjusting content and pedagogy based on what individual students are actually learning.  You cover the curriculum using the best teaching strategies you’ve got, and move on.  Or, you use the scale of the school to create tracks based on grouping “similar” students.  That’s not really personalizing learning either, and the structures of tracking often create inequitable barriers that make it difficult to move from one track to another.  Once a student get’s “locked in,” it becomes an identity that is hard to shake.

The hero of the story is supposed to be digital content providers, who have adopted the language of personalized learning, and proclaim to offer a student adaptive system to match.  That automatically implies a robust assessment system – a system that can accurately assess student work, provide quality formative feedback, and then provide the next level of content. This can work when the content and skills being assessed are relatively simple.  Most current digital content delivery platforms live in this space, if they address assessment at all.

But more complex thinking and understanding requires more complex assessment.  The Common Core State Standards aspire to move learning to a deeper, more rigorous place. Districts and content vendors alike must face the challenge of developing reliable and valid items that give us the learning data that we need.  We don’t typically hold vendors accountable for their assessment systems because frankly most educators aren’t comfortable with the technicalities of assessment, nor do we usually have the resources to adequately field test items or calibrate our scoring. Complex understanding is hard to measure.

It’s one thing to know what we want to teach. It’s quite another to understand what students have learned.  Good assessment is expensive and hard to find.

The Dashboard

Okay, so we know nothing is perfect.  But let’s say that over time you curate a portfolio of internally developed systems and external providers that gets you a package of high quality, rigorous content, with assessment instruments that do an arguably good job letting you know what students know and can do.

That’s really the starting point for any blended learning model, at least in terms of the digital learning component of your system.  If you’re running a rotation model in your classroom, for example, you need to have a basic degree of trust that the computer-based learning that happens when you are pulling small groups or guiding collaborative learning is providing a meaningful, standards-based learning experience for your kids.

Assuming you’ve come this far, now you want to pull all of your systems together in one place where students, parents, and teachers can easily monitor and reflect on progress and areas for growth.  A data dashboard that brings all the assessment data across content providers and assessment systems together into one gloriously accessible place.  The unicorn.

Some vendors say they already have it.  They’re lying.

Okay, maybe lying is too strong a word here.  Certainly there are dashboards available that have the ability to take data from multiple sources and put them together into one place.  You can even automate the inputs.  But some content and assessment vendors don’t want to play.  Their programs offer a closed system that doesn’t want to talk to an external dashboard.  In fact, I think the higher the quality of the content, the more likely the vendor won’t want to share their data.  You might think that a district owns the data that is generated by their own students, and could ask for access to that data however they want it.  Not the case.  There is little financial incentive for established vendors with internal progress data dashboards to make their systems compatible.  And yes, I’ve sat in dozens of meetings and conference sessions where the proposed solution is to band together as districts to force vendors to meet our request for data output or refuse patronage.  I call that the Walmart strategy – to force our suppliers to comply or walk away from the table.  The problem is districts are desperate for the content and vendors know it.

The most promising systems have found ways to patch their systems together.  But it’s usually an analog solution.  At our personalized learning school Advanced Learning Academy, for example, students do the heavy lifting and use the transfer of data from disparate locations into a common digital dashboard as an opportunity for reflection and dialogue.  But the dashboard can’t talk back to the systems.  It’s just a container for data.  And it’s tremendous work for the teachers to manage all of the data transfer.

Bringing It All Together

We know what the unicorn would look like if we found it.  High quality, engaging content across subjects with a trustworthy assessment system that all feeds into a dynamic data dashboard. Opportunities for peer feedback and collaboration would permeate the system.  Access to expert insight would be no further than the touch of a button.

I guess that true disruptive innovations don’t come neatly packaged in a box.  It’s the organizational pursuit that builds our capacity and refines our abilities.  Perhaps we should just embrace the hunt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have about as complicated a relationship with charter schools as you can imagine.  Of course the most obvious connection is my experience as a principal of a charter high school in San Francisco (and a fine school at that, I might add).  Many of the educators and friends I admire are heavily involved and invested in the success and spread of charter schools.  Certainly there are students and communities who have benefited from access to high quality charter options.

Yet I remain skeptical.

And the purpose of this post isn’t to engage in a breakdown of my skepticism.  I’ve largely avoided the topic of charter schools in my blog posts since I run the risk of upsetting people I care about regardless of what I have to say.  Charters are not without political implications.  “Don’t go there, Daniel” is a phrase that’s reverberating in my mind.  Even my wife and I can get into a good old-fashioned debate (dare I say argument) about where it’s best to send our kids to school.

So, it’s with a bit of caution that I dig in to a conversation about some of the reasons why families would leave their neighborhood, district-run public school for a charter option.  This is particularly salient in my current role as a district administrator in Santa Ana, where we are seeing an influx of charter school options and petitions for new schools.  Like I said, it’s a tricky topic for me and I’m not without my biases.

Regardless, here are three aspects of charter school enrollment that have been bouncing around my head lately.  It’s hardly an exhaustive list, but hopefully opens a door into understanding the current and future role charters might play in the educational landscape.

Elitism

Whether or not we care to admit it, as parents we often seek out exclusivity for our kids.  Top ballet instructor in the city?  Yes, please.  Access to a program for gifted students?  Where do I sign up?  When it comes to our children, we want the best.  The needs of other people’s children fall into the periphery.  That desire to secure excellence for our children drives what is being reported as an ever-growing effort on the part of middle and upper-class families to acquire whatever training and education we can get for our children to have a competitive edge.  The opportunity gap is widening, thanks in large part to well-intentioned parenting.

Charters play to that sense of elitism.  Big time.  From official marketing to subtle ways schools talk about themselves and their programming, the idea is to give parents and families a sense that space is limited, and that the increased demand is proof of a better program.

Now, a true charter advocate would call this critique nonsense – of course parents choose what they perceive as the better choice.  That’s the entire policy intent behind charter legislation.

Yet scarcity is a powerful asset and it is actively used by many charters to manipulate demand.  If my school with a capacity of 2000 students only enrolls 1800, and your 400-seat charter down the road has 500 kids trying to attend, which school is actually the one in higher demand?  We might describe my large high school as “under enrolled” or suffering “flagging demand,” while our charter neighbor touts lottery admissions and waiting lists.  Scarcity drives enrollment energy and shapes the vocabulary we use to talk about different school choices.

I’m not sure how a large comprehensive public school can flip the elitist script.  These institutions are sitting ducks, as they can’t help but be large and inclusive.  “Everybody gets in” is not a particularly strong marketing campaign with parents who don’t see “everybody” as a comparable advantage.

Every Student Counts

Charters don’t take kids for granted.  I don’t mean that in it’s traditional, euphemistic sense.  Rather, the charter school is never the default option for enrollment, and therefore, the school understands that you have to convince every student who enrolls to come to the school.  It should come as no surprise then that charters expend a tremendous amount of resources and energy in their marketing.  When I became a charter principal myself, one of the aspects of my job that I simply hadn’t anticipated was the amount of time I would spend with potential students.  I spent at least a night or two each week in the fall at enrollment fairs and parent meetings.  We made individualized follow up phone calls.  I walked neighborhoods and even knocked on doors.

This focus on enrollment is further incentivized by the economics of public education, which again, most teachers and administrators in district schools don’t appreciate as fully as do charter operators.  If I’m an elementary school that receives $8,000 a year for a student, I should recognize that losing just one kid results in a loss of nearly $50,000 for my school over the course of that student’s elementary school experience.  That’s a HUGE amount of money.

Of course this type of personal attention is not lost on students and families who are considering a switch to a charter school. For some, it may be a refreshing change from what they’ve experienced at their neighborhood school.  It feels like the charter school just cares a lot more.  If a potential parent called my charter school for information, I always called back the same day. It was that important.  This is certainly not because I somehow liked my charter kids more than I do my district students – the system just doesn’t incentivize my time interacting with potential students.  The same could be said at all levels of the organization.  In a charter school, if an office manager can’t figure out how to be inviting and helpful to every potential student who walks through the door, he or she doesn’t last long.

To illustrate the point, just last week I was in a conversation with some of my district colleagues about our marketing efforts and found myself critiquing our district website.  It’s not that our website doesn’t have an inviting presentation or lacks important information.  It just values sharing information and directing traffic over driving enrollment.  In my charter school, you could navigate to the application from every single page of the website.  It was a constant option, and it was carefully curated.  As the leader of a charter school, I knew every parent comment posted on Great Schools, and when a not-so-positive comment appeared you can bet I was reaching out to my PTA to get some new positive comments generated.  I was constantly attending to our public perception and encouraging enrollment.  You couldn’t turn that off.

But believe me, charters struggle just like any district-run school to provide personalized attention once the student is enrolled.  In fact, I believe it is a serious miscalculation to equate a personalized recruitment experience with a more personalized classroom experience.

Mission-driven

Every school has a mission statement.  It likely is hanging somewhere in the front office and is peppered with flowery language about lifelong learners and preparation for success.  It’s mostly garbage.

It isn’t garbage because its authors aren’t well intentioned.  It isn’t garbage because what it says wouldn’t be nice if it were true.  It’s garbage because the organization is not entirely committed to aligning itself to the mission in any concrete or measurable way.

In this regard, charters are often different, especially the good ones.

Strong schools in general, regardless of their governance structure, understand the importance of deliberately infusing the mission into the daily work of the school.  And they understand the importance of walking potential students and families from the aspirations of the mission statement to measurable data.  The organization aspires to hold itself accountable for what it says it values most.  Charter schools as a movement seem to understand this better than the rest of us.

This is why charters can be so effective as brand-managers and recruiters.  They aren’t branding an educational program, they are offering their perspective on the purpose of education, with a program to match.  That is a powerful recipe for connecting with families – as you feel like you have something substantial to offer.  There’s some evangelism to it.

Of course that means the opposite statement can be true – charter schools tend to undervalue the things they don’t aspire to in their mission statement.  Vocational education?  Not typically interested.  Remedial support?  Only to a certain extent.  Special education?  Well, yes, we offer that, but it’s not our forte, and especially not if you happen to have a severe disability.  At some point, the welcome mat is replaced by a conversation about finding a school that’s a good fit.  Yes, 100% of your graduates go on to college, but let’s not forget that the ones who weren’t “college-bound” left a long time ago (or never came in the first place).  This is a common critique of charters, and some charter operators are quite open about it.  It’s coded in the language, but it’s there.  “We want families to have options,” or even more simply, “go somewhere else if you don’t like it.”

Like I said, my relationship with charter schools is complicated.

I just received my latest issue of Entrsekt, a quarterly magazine published by the International Society for Technology in Education – or ISTE as most educators know it.  The lead article carries the same title as this blog post, and provides a refreshing classroom-based perspective about how technology can open up new opportunities for students to share their thinking and make choices about their own learning.  It seems that student-centeredness is on the rise – and thank goodness for that.

Yet all this talk about student empowerment and student voice gets me worried.  Specifically, I worry that in our discussions about empowering students, we don’t take the time to talk to them – much less listen to them.  In our rush to develop systems and adopt programs of choice on behalf of our kids, we don’t exactly practice what we preach.  It’s not intended to be ironic.  When education digests a new concept and brings it out to scale, it is often stripped of the essence that made it exciting and effective in the first place.  Our good intentions can become monsters.

Take high school for instance.  When students walk into high school, they are virtually stripped of their agency.   Students are generally told the classes they need.  Students have little say in selecting their teachers, or how classes will be taught.  Phones are on lockdown.  Students are told when to eat and when to use the bathroom.  The walls belong to the adults.  So let’s be frank about the inherent conflict that comes from restructuring and reculturing schools and classrooms that seek to authentically empower students.  Let’s not underestimate the huge change implications of transforming a system to orient itself to the student experience.

If we believe that students bring meaningful perspectives and insights into their own educational experiences, then we might ask ourselves how we are systematically attending to students’ thoughts, hopes, and dreams.  The best teachers, of course, already understand this – they don’t need new initiatives to practice true student-centeredness in the classroom.  At a school or district level, things can get more complicated.  As a district administrator myself, I can attest to how easy it can be to allow the day to day workflow to disconnect us from the very students we are committed to serve.

So, we’ve been experimenting.  We began with a question – how can we authentically connect district administrators with students in a setting that facilitates honesty and open dialogue?

We started with seven of our high schools.  We brought together district leadership and groups of 300 students, chosen in a manner to approach a random sample across the school, to respond to essential questions related to a range of school-related topics.  Individual students recorded their personal responses, and then discussed them with student colleagues and school and district staff.  We then collected this data, transcribed or photo-captured student responses, and shared back with site leadership teams.  While we offered nearly a dozen discussion topics, students across schools overwhelmingly chose to discuss issues related to school discipline and the school to prison pipeline, expansion of opportunities to pursue personal interests, and experimentation with alternative and personalized school schedules.  The request for better food was a constant.

When we went to talk to younger students, we realized we would need a protocol that would be more appropriate for younger learners.  Each school selected 90 students who were divided into three rotations.  One rotation focused on capturing student narratives about powerful learning experiences, another rotation engaged students in a discussion about their perceptions of their current school learning environment, and the final rotation brought in high school students to facilitate a dialogue around the high school experience and how it could be improved.  We again collected student responses – scanning student written responses in both the high school and school learning environment discussions, and collecting the student video narratives.  While our intermediate students were more reserved in their critiques of their experiences, they did offer lots of helpful feedback in terms of their perceptions of academic rigor and challenge, their desire for more universally available support and guidance, and at some schools, a call for improved safety and supervision.  As is the case with the high school sessions, we return the input data to school leadership teams for their discussion and review.

When taken together, we saw a number of interesting patterns amongst our students’ responses.  In terms of the academic experience, students voiced a clear desire to have more ownership of the path through intermediate and high school: access to more course choices, fewer required courses, and more flexibility in daily schedules.  They also expressed some impatience with elements of their experience that lacked meaning or authenticity, including disdain for busy work, unnecessary homework, and having to endure some classes where teachers didn’t seem terribly interested in their personal goals or challenges.  “Believe in us more.”  “Trust us more.” These were common statements we heard from students.  Some comments were hard to hear.

We also heard a lot of students talk about what is working for them at school.  Many students shared anecdotal evidence of teachers who had gone out of their way to support, encourage, and mentor them.  Similarly, many students talked about enrichment experiences and field trips that stood out as significant to their learning.  There was a strong call to make these types of experiences both more widely available and in greater quantity.

Student voice and empowerment are not boxes to be checked off a list.  It’s an ongoing commitment and it’s never finished.  As our intensive, albeit imperfect efforts can attest, students have plenty to say about the educational experiences we are offering them.  We just have to take the time to listen.