In addition to personalized learning for students the most exciting thing about the shift to digital learning is the potential to improve teachers' conditions and careers. A recent DLN SmartSeries paper illustrated how "blended learning environments can create more and better opportunities for teacher collaboration, enable differentiated staffing and boost meaningful professional development opportunities."

The paper also outlines three ways that digital learning is improving career options for teachers:

• Extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students and teaching peers;
• Expanding the ability to teach remotely allowing great teachers to reach students anywhere and to have more flexible careers; and
• Creating more opportunities to build tools, content and services for schools.

In the course of writing three dozen Smart Cities posts, I've identified 10 strategies that cities are using to make teaching more attractive and to better support teachers and expand their opportunity set.

1. Preparing teacher leaders. The CityBridge-NewSchools Education Innovation Fellowship is a great developmental opportunity for teachers in Washington DC. I visited with them last week and discussed Big Blended Learning Questions.

The Blended Learning Institute is a two-year certificate program created by the NYC iZone in collaboration with Pace University.

Digital Learning Now! and iNACOL have been advocating for professional development opportunities for teachers associated with online and blended learning models.

2. Exposing new tools. Mesa, Arizona recently hosted a Tech Expo, a two day opportunity for its' teachers to visit with edtech vendors and entrepreneurs to help teacher Innovation Teams develop strong grant proposals. It's a great example of a district cultivating and leveraging teacher leadership.

3. Creating an Opportunity Culture. Three metro areas have joined Public Impact in an effort to implement strategies to leverage great teaching using technology:

• Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools' Project L.I.F.T. , a zone of schools within a large urban school district seeking dramatic improvements in student learning;
• Metro Nashville Public Schools' Innovation Zone, created in the summer of 2011 to turn around low-performing schools by engaging in strategic redesign; and
• Clark County (Nevada) School District, the nation's fifth-largest district and home of Las Vegas, working to launch new job roles in fall 2014 through its Project Reach-Extended 10, based on Opportunity Culture designs.

4. Incubating innovation. 4.0 Schools in New Orleans may be the best example of incubating teacher innovation.

Smart Cities: Boston announced the unveiling of LearnLaunch, an edtech accelerator. A month ago ImagineK12 Launched 10 More EdTech Startups in the Bay Area.

5. Building capacity. As noted last week, PREP-KC is a great example of a metrowide college-prep capacity initiative that help teachers create work-experiences for kids and creates new career academy opportunities.

Online professional learning communities (PLC) like Share My Lesson, BetterLesson, and Edmodo are building teacher capacity. Bloomboard works with more than 100 cities to connect individual development plans with online professional development opportunities.

Teacher blogger Susan Lucille Davis mentions the importance of time, trust, and connections in What Teachers Really Want.

6. Create a livable city. Tony Hsieh and his Downtown Project in Las Vegas seek to create a vibrant dense urban core and "the most community-focused large city in the world."Philly and New Orleans are creating affordable housing for new teachers.

7. Safe, sane, innovative schools. The dozen EAA schools in Detroit are a great example of combining innovation and improvement strategies--and it is attracting teachers from around the country.

8. Recruit top partners. MindTrust in Indianapolis may be the best example of an impact organization reshaping a city and its national reputation. Core to the MindTrust strategy is working with top partners like Teach For America and The New Teacher Project. They also created The Education Entrepreneur Fellowship which (like 4.0 Schools in NOLA) is incubating innovation.

9. Support teacherpreneurs. Baltimore's Digital Harbor Foundation (@DHFBaltimore) is a great example of teachers taking an alternative pathway to impact. Andrew Coy (@AndrewCoy) a teacher at Digital Harbor High School and Shelly Blake-Plock (@BlakePlock) from Johns Hopkins took over a rec center and created a Tech Center in the middle of Baltimore's burgeoning tech scene.

New Schools for Chicago and Get Smart Schools in Denver are great examples of local capacities supporting new school development. Every city should run a new school grant program modeled on the The Next Generation Learning Challenge. See the NGLC Profiles of 20 next-gen high schools and this three part series on attributes common to NGLC grantees:

• Next-Gen Models Attack Problems, Leverage Opportunities
• Next-Gen Learning Models Blend Tech & Experiences
• Next-Gen Models Break New Ground, Promote System Redesign
  

10. Opening alternative routes. Forward leaning cities (and states) open and support alternative routes to the classroom and leadership. DLN Element 6, Quality Instruction, suggests "Educators should be prepared for specific roles - traditional, blended or online - and are then certified based on demonstrated performance."

Pipeline partnerships, particularly in STEM, are a key talent development strategy. UTeach, part of the National Math and Science Initiative, is a rapid pathway to the STEM classroom.

Cities like Houston work hard at teacher evaluation using all available sources. That's the right approach, but it is important, while new tools and schools are being developed, to avoid using old measures poorly applied in teacher performance evaluations. We are fond of the competency-based Summit Public Schools teacher development system . We've had a couple smart people address this on Getting Smart:

• K-12 Assessments and Teacher Evaluation: Putting Students First , by Dr. Raymond Yeagley, CAO at NWEA http://gettingsmart.com/2013/05/what-teachers-really-want/
• Education Standardization: Essential or Harmful? by Marie Bjerede
• Potential unintended consequences of the new teacher evaluation approaches by Joe Siedlecki of the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.

Digital Learning Now! is a Getting Smart Advocacy Partner. Tom is a director of iNACOL. Bloomboard and Edmodo are portfolio companies of Learn Capital where Tom is a partner.

Posted by Tom Vander Ark at 7:07 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Presentations of Learning to parents and community members conclude the first school year of Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School. The end of year presentations will make the case that the sixth graders are ready to move on to seventh grade.

The presentations are the third time students at Launch will be able to show what they know. Last fall students led conferences with their parents and teachers. This spring, students turned Launch into a museum with a giant Exhibition.

Launch is the eleventh Expeditionary Learning (EL) school in New York City but the first charter school. EL is a national school developer with a network of more than 150 schools that, according to their Core Practices, "challenges students to think critically and take active roles in their classrooms and communities, resulting in higher achievement and greater engagement in school."

The 11 EL schools, representing all five boroughs, "do a lot of work together," said Geoff Roehm, Launch Executive Director, with support from the Gates Foundation. Each school has an Instructional Guide who works full time with classroom teachers. They also benefit from a regional school designer.

"I love starting my day with crew," said a student we interviewed. Crew is a 30 minute advisory period that starts the EL day. It's where they practice and talk about the shared Habits of Heart and Mind central to the Launch culture: accountability, craftsmanship, wonder, mindfulness, and compassion. The Habits are integrated into the culture and every learning experience at Launch.

Eighty of the 112 sixth graders came to Launch reading at the third grade or below. The rationale for a 6-12 school is that they have seven years to help students prepare for college and careers. The school is located in Crown Heights but most of the predominantly African American students come from Bedford-Stuyvesant. More than 30% have special needs. Nearly all live in or near poverty.

Launch is co-located with a District 16 elementary. NYC has a mature system of school choice, but other than their neighbor downstairs, district schools don't allow them to visit to inform fifth graders about the program.

The Launch curriculum is structured as a series of big schoolwide expeditions. The framework for the Food, Glorious Food unit was borrowed from the Queens EL school. Building Cities is a unit exploring urban politics, economy, and society. In Environmental Design & Craft (an applied art class) they studied and built bridges. Field work is commonly incorporated into expeditions and they promote deeper learning by making connections to the world.

The Crown Heights kids practiced "wonder" on a camping trip--a first for most of them. They practiced "craftsmanship" while building a boat. They practiced "mindfulness" when conducting a historical exploration of the neighborhood.

There are 80 MacBooks at Launch but I didn't see much evidence of use. Next year they will add 90 Chromebooks--selected mainly based on price point--and a tech coach to improve use. Launch has a pretty good technology advocate on the board--Pearson's Jonathan Harber is board chair. All the students use Google apps to submit assignments, ask questions and Roehm said his "inbox is full of student shared work."

The EL network is working on blended learning for adults--kids after that. I often describe the ideal blend as School of One (NewClassrooms.org) meets Expeditionary Learning--customized playlists that prepare students for engaging projects and community-connected work (like the design of Summit Denali). Launch is off to a good start. The 6-12 model has transformational potential for the kids of Bed-Stuy.

Posted by Tom Vander Ark at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Imagine a school where a skillbuilding playlist prepares students to engage in projects that matter. It's not science fiction; it's Summit Denali, a high school opening in Sunnyvale California in August.

Summit Public Schools is an innovative high school network in the Bay Area. CEO Diane Tavenner and Diego Arambula, Chief Growth and Innovation Officer, visited us in Seattle recently and showed us a demo of their new platform and described their new school model.

Summit has very high graduation and four year college attendance rates. More than half of their grads have or are on track to graduate from college, but the Summit team continues to innovate to improve on college and career preparation. Their vision for an optimized learning environment includes five features:

• Students are empowered to self-direct learning;
• Provide opportunities for deeper skills development across curricula;
• Offer authentic, real-world experiences that allow students to explore passions and careers;
• Personalize a student's pathway through a competency-based progression; and
• Ensure meaningful opportunities for students to foster community and a sense of belonging.

The Denali day will begin and end with personal learning time featuring a combination of playlists, online learning resources, coaching and peer-to-peer tutoring. Each student will work at his or her own pace on a personalized path driven by immediate, actionable feedback.

The core of the schedule is devoted to deeper learning projects--persuasive speeches, research papers, science labs, and engineering activities--facilitated by teams of educators. Heterogeneous groups focus on Common Core skills and dispositions including problem solving, constructing arguments, reasoning abstractly and quantitatively, and critiquing the reasoning of others. Summit is using ShowEvidence to capture rubric-based project feedback and build digital portfolio.

Denali students will develop habits of success--self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, interpersonal skills, decision-making, and responsible behaviors--through projects and many ways to engage and contribute to the school community. Students will gain real-world experiences through a series of career preparation, college readiness, and cultural appreciation expeditions supported by partnerships with Bay Area organizations.

Bringing it together. To manage this student-centered learning system, the Summit team is building Activate, a learning management system with Illuminate Education. It's usually a bad idea for a school management organization to dive this deep into software development, but Diane and team have a clear vision of a competency-based system and there's nothing on the market to manage the environment they're creating. The project is funded by the Girard Foundation and will be available free to all. Their development philosophy is "fail fast, iterate, fix it, keep moving."

Skill-building playlists will be curated from the world of open content as well as what their own teachers develop. The college and career readiness system will track growth trajectory of knowledge, skills, and success habits against college goals (I don't know of anyone even thinking about this). Students falling short of their planned growth trajectory, on any front, will see a big red warning system. The system will also need to translate the innovative experiences into credits and grades for application to traditional universities.

The space will be innovative as well. The NGLC-winning school design is "an open learning space where students can work on digital content in individual workstations. These workstations will be surrounded by learning spaces for small-group learning, one-to-one coaching and mentoring, and larger-group workshops and seminars."

A powerful culture permeates everything. The Summit team is researching which habits of success characteristics are most beneficial. Persistence to and through college is a priority. They want students to "own their own learning, to be ready for college--that's what kids are missing right now," said Tavenner.

The Summit cohort model has worked well, but they want to add more personalized and competency-based aspects. Denali students will have the social and cooperative aspects of working in teams and the benefits of customized skill building playlists.

Check out the feature on the Summit teacher development system (the best we've seen). Like Bill Gates, Summit Public Schools is one of our favorite education startups.

Posted by Tom Vander Ark at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Kansas City may be the least appreciated Great Education Improvement Story out there--at least on the Kansas side of the Missouri River. As noted in 2011, "restructuring their high schools into small learning communities in 1999 improved graduation rates from 48% to 81% by 2005. Getting students into the right math courses and focusing on the quality of instruction boosted math proficiency rates from 7% in 2003 to 53% by 2008. The percentage of students reading proficiently nearly doubled over the same time frame. College enrollment rates doubled, from a quarter to nearly half of the graduating class during the same period."

To continue the trends and share the work with other metro districts, PREP-KC was formed in 2005. The Kansas City, Kansas superintendent that kicked off the reforms, Ray Daniels, is a founding board member. Working with input from leaders in business, higher ed, and K-12, PREP-KC founder Susan Wally is bringing college and career preparation to scale in bi-state urban KC by working with 6 school districts serving over 60,000 children and young people. Each district partner was selected because demographics showed very high percentages of low-income students, students of color, and English language learners.

After an analysis of the most significant gaps in students' preparation and knowledge, PREP-KC developed and implemented 3 key strategies for significantly improving student outcomes:

• Math Benchmarking . The PREP-KC team works with math faculties to increase the rigor of math instruction and prepare more students to complete advanced math courses during their high school years. In the Center School District, scores on the state's high school math exam have gone from 13.6% students scoring Proficient or Above (2009) to 47.8% (2012). PREP-KC launched a Khan Academy pilot and also works with its partner-schools to measure the numbers of students completing college-prep math courses and develops and implements early-college math courses for a growing number of students.
• Workforce Experiences . PREP-KC's on-staff Workforce Liaisons design and support career exploration events throughout the school year in partner high schools. To do so they engage professionals from over 200 businesses (450 professionals) to volunteer for customized career events, including Career Jumping (school-based "speed dating" events for students and professionals) and customized work site and campus visits. During the 2012-13 school year PREP-KC created nearly 4,000 individual student experiences for urban high school students. Teachers and principals are asking for more because of the powerful positive impact on students' understanding, aspirations and motivation.
• Accelerated Career Academies. PREP-KC supports 6 Academies across a number of its urban high schools, each with higher education and business partners. The career themes of the Academies are aligned with the KC region's high-need, high-paid workforce opportunities, and include; Healthcare, Bioscience, Engineering, Business/Finance, and Supply Chain/Logistics. Students, mostly first-generation college-goers, are expanding their school day and summers to include training at business sites and on college campuses, and will leave high school with workforce credentials, early-college credits, and a plan for their career pathway. These cohorts of students are also contributing to a college-going culture in their high schools, and employers are interested in these students as they seek a diverse and well-prepared workforce.

To track the impact of these college and career preparation efforts, PREP-KC populates a web-based data dashboard to analyze trend lines over multiple years of implementation. These trend lines can help school leaders, as well as funders, see the impact of their leadership and philanthropic investments. One key measure of progress is the number of urban students who graduate from high school with early college course credits. In Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools (KCKPS), data from their 4 large high schools shows that in 2009, 12.6% of the senior class graduated with college credit; in 2012, 39.8% graduated with college credit.

Districts. KCKPS benefits from a long serving board and homegrown leadership. Superintendent Cynthia Lane has been in the district for 25 years. Lane helped create early college opportunities for all students. In a recent blog she highlighted a woodworking shop that was converted to a "Word Shop" at Washington High School where she "found the room filled with teenagers engaged in writing. Yes, I did say writing! Teenagers choosing to be at school, on a beautiful spring evening, to write poetry!"

Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS) , in Missouri has struggled. In 2011, the 16,700 student district was stripped of its accreditation. The same month, Dr. R. Stephen Green, President and CEO of the Kauffman Scholars program, was appointed interim superintendent. Eight months later he was made permanent. They claim to have "met 19.5 percent of the standards needed for accreditation."

The Buzz platform , and a powerful vision for student-center learning, was piloted in KCPS before Covington and Esselman took their show to the Motor City.

Cool Schools. A visit to Wyandotte High School a dozen years ago convinced me that it was possible to convert a big bad high school into a good college prep school. Small learning communities, a solid core curriculum, a relationship-based advisory, and lots of peer instructional feedback made a big difference. PREP-KC was, in part, formed to share these practices with the metro area.

• Sumner Academy of Arts and Science is a college prep magnet school and the top high school in Kansas, according to U.S. News and World Report . Lincoln College Preparatory Academy is the equivalent on the Missouri side.
• The region's leading performing arts school is Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts.
• Ewing Marion Kauffman School is a traditional college prep charter school supported by the Kauffman Foundation. University Academy is a K-12 college prep charter school started by the former CEO of Helzberg Diamonds and the former CEO of H&R Block.
• Delaware Ridge and Red Bridge are elementary Expeditionary Learning schools.
• KIPP Endeavor Academy is led by Jake Schmitz who came from YES Prep.
• Alta Vista started in a church basement 16 years ago. Today it is a top college prep K-12 charter school.
• Cristo Rey is a college prep Catholic high school featuring work studies that subsidize the tuition and boost student efficacy.

KCPS also features two dual language schools and two public Montessori schools in the area.

Impact & Innovation. Seven months ago Munro Richardson left the Kauffman Foundation to co-foundmyEDmatch, a startup committed to Making Better Education Matches between teachers and networks/districts. Since launching a beta site in February, they've attracted 10,000 teachers.

There are 223 Teach for America corps members in KC. Two thirds of the alumni are working in education and three are leading schools. In addition to TFA the Kauffman Foundation supports entrepreneurship, innovation, and STEM education.

Google Fiber. KC is a pilot city for Google Fiber, an ambitious effort to demonstrate the benefits of high speed Internet. Within the 180 "fiberhoods" selected by the Mayors on both sides of the river, Google provides 1 gigabyte Internet for $70 per month--it's free if you pay the $300 connection fee. For $120 per month you get 200 channels of HDTV with DVR (who knew Google was into TV?). They have just started wiring schools and public buildings. To sweeten the deal, Google is piloting Chromebooks for $10 a month for fiber customers. Austin, TX and Provo, UT are next on the list for Google Fiber.

Imagine the learning opportunities with connections 100 times faster than is common today. A new generation of apps will develop with gigabyte technology. Google claims they want to move the web forward, make it more affordable, and more ubiquitous. Folks like PREP-KC are exploring how Google Fiber can be leveraged to improve classroom instruction.

Conclusion. KCKS demonstrates that a thoughtful and comprehensive improvement strategy applied over time can yield impressive results. Every city needs a best practices capacity like PREP-KC. Imagine the 24/7 learning potential when every community benefits from gigabyte connections.

Posted by Tom Vander Ark at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Leaders often cut their own path. That is certainly the case for Dan Scoggin, perhaps the most countercultural guy in K-12. The Phoenix school network leader has an unusual "reverence for western tradition." Back-to-basics doesn't come close to describing Great Hearts Academies, a K-12 charter network offering "classical education, revolutionary schools."

The elementary schools follow the Core Knowledge curriculum. There are no electives in high school (other than the latin/greek track). All the graduates go to college, most of them selective. Critics argue that's possible only because Great Hearts targets middle income communities, although the schools in Phoenix serve the entire Metro area, including low income communities.

The high school day starts with Humane Letters, a two hour Socratic seminar where students read great books and the founding documents. They ask, what does it mean to be human? What is justice? Students apply two rules: textual evidence and reason in the common pursuit of truth. Seniors write a thesis and defend their work in front of a panel and their peers.

There is no reference to pop culture at Great Hearts--just the study of spirit, law, and philosophy. "Character is not an outcome--it is a state of being first," said Scoggin. "Character arises from forming habits of heart." Elementary students at Great Hearts focus on "comportment."

Raphael's painting School of Athens (1510) adorns the lobby of all Great Hearts schools--placing the Aristotle-Socrates dialectic center stage. There's no BYOD here, Scoggins thinks "Kids need a place away from technology to relax and think big thoughts."

Scoggins uses unusual language to describe aims: the lifelong pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. He's happy to list what they love: 1) moral intellectual and physical virtue, 2) western tradition, 3) human dignity and freedom, 4) philosophical realism, 5) conversation and community, and 6) humility. The school culture is "about service and love."

Families are lining up in Phoenix and soon Great Hearts will have a Texas network. "Families want a school that stands for something," said Scoggins, "They long for an idealistic focus."

Kern Convening. As previewed last week, The Kern Family Foundation convened grantees focused on character development this week. David Pistrui (a Romanian rocker, Austrian economist, and super smart program evaluator) facilitated the program. DSST Public Schools and Educational Enterprises joined Great Hearts, as well as higher ed and NGO partners.

"We're a values first organization," said Kurtz of DSST. "Each human being strives to be fully known and affirmed for who they are, and to contribute something significant to the human story."

"Character starts with the adults," said Kurtz. That means core value commitments, modeling, 360 degree evaluations, and celebrations. "We're working hard to scale culture as we grow 35% per year."

DSST is a STEM network with a clear goal of sending every student to a four year college. It's a 1:1 data driven network that tries to practice brain-based instruction. The seven DSST schools serve 2,800 diverse (mostly low income minority) students who receive a grade on each character dimension each trimester. The shared values include student decision-making on deciding whether students return from a suspension. "It's a high care, high accountability culture," said Kurtz.

"Character is personal," said Duncan McCrann, "It requires internal action compelled by external realities." McCrann launched the KIPP high school initiative before joining Educational Enterprises, a Phoenix charter network and Milwaukee private school network. Their mission is to prepare "students to live internally driven virtuous lives." They believe that to preserve the liberty enjoyed in America young people must be prepared to pursue fulfilling lives.

With a quick audience survey, McCrann demonstrated that "Acquiring character requires pain and struggle." The deliver strategy is often historical narratives, embedded throughout the curriculum, where students experience vicarious pain through great stories--the moral dilemma of Paul Revere, for example. They ask students to consider identity (who I am), purpose (what I do with my life), and performance (how I act).

"You can't have self-chosen frame," said McCrann. Kurtz added that the prevalence of "Anything goes while you are discovering inner self," doesn't work. When pressed on behavior out of school, McCrann said, "We want kids to internalize values; outside of school is great place to focus on the tension."

So what is character? James Davison Hunter, author of The Death of Character said it is 1) the self restraint to say no, 2) making affirmations of ideas bigger than self, and 3) making a choice. "Character is clear understanding of the sacred, a presiding presence, and a structure of accountability." Kurtz added "It's sacred--not theistic--values that create accountability, and that's the best you can get in pluralistic society."

"The enterprise of character formation has reached for the non-offensive, universally relevant languages, pedagogies and lenses of psychology," said Ryan Olson, the Kern Foundation education program director. "Other disciplines--history, philosophy, literature, theology--have fled the field." While recent approaches promote healthy self-image, "They lack the essential framework for effective character formation--the discipline to say "no" to temptation (chances to deviate from the good); the attachment to a community, creed and cause greater than oneself; and the responsibility to be accountable for one's beliefs, decisions, practices and affections.

The Kern Foundation, according to Olson, is "bringing to light models that are working" and "funding R&D that will form character in this deeply pluralistic, supernova-like context in which we find ourselves, where we don't agree on basic questions like, What is the good life? Why be good?" Olson's eclectic collection of grantees enjoyed the chance to "Dream and collaborate together."

For more on character, see On Being a Real Person: The Missing Core of K-12. On DSST, see On the Blended Learning Road with DSST's Jake Firman and One-to-One Leadership and Learning at DSST.

Posted by Tom Vander Ark at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Taking full advantage of personal digital learning requires the ability to compare measures of academic progress in different blended school settings. As noted two weeks ago, it's time for the next big advance in digital learning: comparable growth measures.

There are thousands of students using adaptive instructional systems every week. Millions of students engage daily with digital content that has embedded assessments. Most U.S. students will join them in the next two school years. The bad news is that, in most schools, the data is trapped in the individual applications--you may get a zippy chart but there's not much you can do with it. There is no easy way to combine data from multiple apps with teacher observations to create a composite reporting and competency-tracking system.

Thousands of schools use pre- and post-adaptive assessments to monitor student growth rates, but these growth rates often don't match state estimates based on end-of-year grade level tests.

And, by all indications, states will continue to give large scale end-of-year grade level exams through the end of the decade despite the fact that schools will have thousands of data points on the progress of each student well before they sit down to take the test.

We could change all of this by developing a system of comparable growth rates. It would require that an independent scale and a method of describing growth on that scale be adopted. There would also need to be a simple mechanism for conducting linking studies.

A proposal. Given that 20 states and most test publishers (CTB, ETS, NWEA, Measured Progress, Pearson, Scholastic, Scantron, Cambium-Voyager) currently report student reading ability on the Lexile scale from MetaMetrics, it seems like a logical choice for a common reference point. In addition to test publishers, all the major text and trade book publishers have elected to use Lexile measures as a way to describe text complexity.

Instructional companies are building intervention and instructional programs around Lexile measures. For example, Scholastic Reading Inventory and Curriculum Associates' i-Ready have also linked their assessments with the Lexile Framework illustrating the practicality of a common scale.

Add their newer Quantile scale for math (which testmakers are beginning to link to) and we've got a common reporting standard before the end of 2013 rather than waiting for the consortia to figure this out in 2015-16.

Not surprising, when I talked to Malbert Smith and Ellie Sanford-Moore of MetaMetrics, they thought using the Lexile/Quantile scales as common scales was a brilliant idea. Smith said a common scale would unlock "a storehouse of value." With the ubiquity of Lexile- or Quantile-denominated tests and instructional and digital resources on the same scales, differentiated instruction is truly possible.

There are several measurement characteristics are required to optimally measure student growth. "For the best measurement of student growth, the measurement scale must be: unidimensional, continuous, equal-interval, developmental, and invariant with respect to location and unit size," as Metametrics' Gary Williamson discussed at NCME this year. "In fact, the Lexile scale possesses all of these necessary characteristics. So it is not only appropriate for the measurement of student growth, it may well be the most appropriate scale for the measurement of academic growth in reading."

This new vision and reality is rapidly taking shape in North Carolina. For years, North Carolina has been reporting student Lexile and Quantile measures off of their grade 3-8 assessment and their end-of-course assessments, and recently collaborated with ACT and MetaMetrics to link the ACT with the Lexile and Quantile Frameworks. This fall the K-2 test they are using to monitor reading progress (DIBELS) will be linked as well. So next year, parents and teachers will be able log in to HomeBase and see growth trajectories to determine if a student is on target to for college and careers. "These growth calculators are like retirement planners," said Smith, "They show students and parents how to bend the curve so you can achieve your goals."

North Carolina is a great example of productive use of summative measures--just think of the potential of instantaneously mining the instructional experience of every student and updating growth trajectories drawn from multiple real-time sources.

Psychometricians like to have year-end tests built on 50 items or more for validity. Imagine the precision available from measuring 50 items per day embedded in learning experiences.

Another advantage of Lexile, noted by Bellwether's Andy Rotherham, is the ability to "link to real work applications--reading a DMV application, reading an editorial page--actual tasks rather than just a definition from on high of what a college and career ready standard looks like. Parents really want that and will appreciate it." Rotherham, who supports the goals of the two state assessment consortia, stressed that a common scale is "key to a real expansion of competency-based and other approaches, it's the kind of unifying idea that can allow more pluralism in delivery."

Rotherham's colleague Andy Smarick noted that it's likely that at least a few more states will leave the consortia and that an independent scale provides an useful backstop.

Some experts have expressed concerns that Lexile measures are not accurate enough, but a recent Journal of Applied Measurement article indicates that the Lexile scale shares the same reliability as other measures of reading ability with the major source of unreliability being the measurement of the students (not the measurement of the text).

Better measures of individual student growth in reading and math are key to better instruction, easier comparison of instructional tools, and management of competency-based environments. Better growth measures are key to understanding what's working and what's not in online and blended environments--it's key to next-generation accountability systems.

We can wait two or three years and let the consortia try to figure this out or we can use a widely adopted scale that is already embedded into the English Language Arts standards and a scale for math achievement that is used by many states and publishers and expand the ability to draw common inferences about growth in student learning.

Disclosures: Curriculum Associates and Pearson are Getting Smart Advocacy Partners

Posted by Tom Vander Ark at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

After an extensive review process, three products that support writing instruction have been selected to participate in fall trials in seventh grade classrooms coast to coast -- Criterion from ETS, PEGWriting from Measurement Incorporated, and Pearson's WriteToLearn.

The Classroom Trials will provide fair and transparent demonstrations of the current capabilities of software designed to support the instruction of writing in a classroom setting.

The trials focus on software services that provide automated feedback to students and teachers. Many of the applicants are offering automated scoring of student written responses for prompts on state year end tests to support demands for more and better writing. These instructional systems are designed to support new instructional demands on teachers associated with college and career ready assessments. The Classroom Trials have been designed to scrutinize those capabilities because of their likely importance over the next few years.

A Working Group, responsible for overseeing the design of the study, conducted the product selection and included Darion Griffin from the American Federation of Teachers and Michael Kaspar from the National Education Association. Carl Whithaus, UC Davis, and Norbert Elliot, NJIT, provided valuable assistance on research design. Input was also solicited from the National Writing Project.

The Classroom Trials team -- Jaison Morgan, Mark Shermis, Lynn Van Deventer, and Tom Vander Ark -- led the study design and participated in the section process. In partnership with the Working Group, they reviewed a variety of products and offered specific comments and detailed feedback to the vendors who submitted their products for review, an early sign of the specific attention that the study will pay to the use those systems.

The study is an empirical and baseline investigation into formative uses of software systems to support the instruction of writing in a classroom setting. The project seeks to answer a central question: C an this new and emerging field of software support the instruction of writing in a classroom setting?

Class sizes have grown in many states along with the expectations for student writing and the need for structured feedback. Software can play a vital role to address those workload constraints, and teachers need more information to understand their potential. As a result, both the NEA and AFT are playing an active role in the study design.

A Q&A with 7th grade teacher Jeff Pence describes how he uses a writing platform to teach writing evaluation, organization, conventions, sentence fluency, word choice, voice and more.

"My students completed 28 essays - that was per student, and I taught 130 students per day. Each one of those was submitted for assessment an average of six times, so that's well over 20,000 drafts that were assessed and graded, just for my classroom."

The study will equip hundreds of teachers like Jeff to try writing assessment software in their classroom and will compare sources of evidence about the use of each product compared to control groups. See the Classroom Trials site for a detailed discussion of the study.

Disclosure: Pearson is a Getting Smart Advocacy Partner.

Posted by Tom Vander Ark at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A small green book with the audacious title anchors a prominent stack of books in our family room. On Being a Real Person by Harry Emerson Fosdick offers up a formula for health and happiness rooted in personal responsibility and his Baptist faith. Seventy years later there are fewer of us with Harry's formulaic clarity.

George Packer's new book outlines America's unwinding , "allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward." David Brooks writes frequently about the impact of the unraveling social contract, "People don't behave badly because they lack information about their shortcomings. They behave badly because they've fallen into patterns of destructive behavior from which they're unable to escape."

In Emerson's day, many students experienced alignment of behavioral expectations between school, home, and a faith congregation. In Packer's America, there are fewer constraints, but less stable families and communities, and more cracks for kids to fall through.

The role of school. Last year Reed Hastings predicted that computers will keep getting better at teaching stuff and that will allow teachers to focus on what computers will never do--to teach young people how to be human. He said new learning technology "will free up teachers to teach humanity" including the ability to create and collaborate. "Our task is to inspire," said Hastings. A recent paper outlines how new tools and strategies are improving teaching conditions .

From hundreds of school visits, I get the impression that most schools have lost ground on teaching humanity in the last generation. It's likely a function of the increased focus on tested subjects in schools, growing diversity and poverty of school aged students, and a general decline in participation in traditional faith communities--we've become preoccupied, diverse, and unmoored.

As we transition to next-gen tools and schools, educators have the opportunity to place the subject of "becoming a real person" at the core. There are several related schools of thought on the subject of "teaching humanity"--a big venn diagram--with labels including workplace skills, social emotional learning, and character development.

In the first category, Ken Kay spent a decade advocating for adding the 4Cs-critical thinking and problem solving; communication, collaboration; and creativity and innovation-to the 3Rs. Tony Wagner's 7 survival skills adds entrepreneurship.

MacMillion and McGrath urge an entrepreneurial mindset, "the process of discovering new things to do--things for which there are no precedents and about which there is very limited data/information." The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship provides curriculum and activities to boost awareness of business opportunities and increase persistence.

Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed , said, " We don't teach the most important skills," a list that includes "persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence." We don't teach them and we don't know what to call these "soft skills." David Conley, EPIC, thinks the non-cognitive skills could more accurately be called "meta-cognitive learning skills."

CASEL defines social emotional learning (SEL) as:

• Self-management: Managing emotions and behaviors to achieve one's goals
• Self-awareness: Recognizing one's emotions and values as well as one's strengths and challenges
• Social awareness: Showing understanding and empathy for others
• Relationship skills: Forming positive relationships, working in teams, and dealing effectively with conflict; and
• Responsible decision making: Making ethical, constructive choices about personal and social behavior.

Marty Neumeier thinks there are five "metaskills" --an update of workplace skills and SEL:

1. Feeling: including empathy, intuition, and social intelligence.
2. Seeing: the ability to think whole thoughts, also known as systems thinking.
3. Dreaming: the metaskill of applied imagination.
4. Making: mastering the design process, including skills for devising prototypes.
5. Learning: the autodidactic ability to learn new skills at will.

On the character front, there are groups like Character Counts that have tried to create composite "values that everyone can agree on": trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship.

Kern Foundation's Ryan Olson noted that charter development programs have "come to be considered as almost exclusively psychological in nature." Productive perhaps but divorced from "the ends toward which character education is aimed." Olson calls the question of the ends and aims of public education.

The college and workplace readiness programs focus on the knowledge, skills, and dispositions likely to produce career success. Democratic schools typically teach civics, encourage student voice, and encourage collective decision making--they are often schools with a strong culture rooted in the purpose of preparing contributing citizens.

Is the goal of public education to prepare entrepreneurs, citizens, or good people? Ideally, all three. Good schools may emphasize one over the others in their aims but they do all three while preparing students for success at the next level of their education.

Critics of state testing programs argue that purpose has been narrowed to skills development, but the ends and aims of schooling are a function of leadership and a product of a community conversation. It is not unreasonable to demand that students should be able to read, write, and solve problems when they graduate but measures of these skills don't make sufficient aims to develop a compelling school.

What good schools do. All schools create a culture--or allow a culture to be created. All schools teach values whether they articulated or not--there's a view of what is good and what is not tolerated. Writing about Danville Kentucky, I noted that Good Schools Start With Good Goals.

At the Denver School of Science and Technology Public Schools (the best high poverty STEM school), Bill Kurtz asks two big questions, "What's your view of the human condition?" and "What do people want?" He suggests that most people want to be connected to a bigger story and they want to be affirmed for their unique gifts and talents. To that end, DSST constructed core values including respect, responsibility, integrity, courage, curiosity, and doing your best to guide their students and team in pursuit of discovering their unique talents and developing them to further the larger human story.

Great Hearts Academies in Arizona prepares its graduates for top universities and "to be leaders in creating a more philosophical, humane, and just society." Great Hearts engages students in "an intense and formative dialogue with the Great Books and Ideas of Western Culture," with the intent of understanding "more fully what it means to be a human being."

The operators of EAGLE College Prep, also in Phoenix, "strive to be a warm and loving organization with strong relationships built on trust, service, respect and genuine communication." They match "time-honored values" with cutting edge approaches.

New school developers bring their values to the design process. Invigorating an existing school starts with a community conversation about shared values and desired outcomes.

The existing toolbox for character development and college/career preparation includes visual cues and daily reminders, student behavior and feedback systems, and advisory curriculum. Good schools integrate core values into the curriculum as well as staff development and evaluation systems. Good schools hold regular community conversations

Good schools encourage students to practice enterprise. The Big Picture and Cristo Rey networks are particularly good at structuring internships. Service learning can yield many similar benefits.

What's next? College Board has BigFuture and Envictus has Navigation 101 but teens and their families could use better support for the all important postsecondary decision.

Comprehensive learner profiles will soon power recommendations for secondary course taking and help counselors make sure students gain exposure to the most appropriate college and careers. (Families should have the ability to manage the privacy settings in the student profile.)

The Hope Survey measures students perception that they can set and accomplish goals. Schools should have access to more tools like this that measure perception and track social emotional growth.

Students should be tracking their own development in digital portfolios. For example, schools could ask students to blog on their learning and development on a different character trait every month.

On character development, schools could use better advisory curriculum and instructional units that can be incorporated into history, social studies, and English language arts.

Is all this more stuff for schools to take on? A better way to think about it is a new spine of character development and college/career preparation. As Hastings suggested, new blended formats are creating the potential to incorporate a central focus on developing young people--one rooted in purpose, and a Ryan Olson said, "attaches them to a cause greater than themselves and that holds them accountable for their actions."

Posted by Tom Vander Ark at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

For the last six months I've written more than 30 Smart Cities posts in search of the secrets of educational innovation and improvement. I've also been learning from other authors. Following is a compilation of other folks thinking about cities and innovation--half from education and half from business and technology.

1. The Center for Reinventing Public Education is the leading advocate for urban portfolio strategy which includes 7 components:

1. Good Options and Choices for All Families,
2. School Autonomy,
3. Pupil-Based Funding for All Schools,
4. Talent-Seeking Strategy,
5. Sources of Support for Schools,
6. Performance-Based Accountability for Schools, and
7. Extensive Public Engagement .

2. CEE-Trust is a network of more than 30 local funders and agitators advancing a portfolio strategy. With Public Impact, they recently released two reports on Scaling a Successful Pilot to Expand Blended Learning Options Citywide and Interventions and Catalysts in Markets for Education Technology: Roles of City-Based Funders .

3. The Department of Education has advocated for Education Innovation Clusters that "articulate the connection between three key partners; educators, researchers, and entrepreneurs - each adding their unique strengths to the network."

4. Andy Smarick's new book The Urban School System of the Future notes that districts were designed to operate similar attendance boundary schools and not "built to constantly develop different types of schools populated through parental choice. They weren't designed to continuously identify, replicate, and expand their best schools. They weren't designed to regularly close and replace failing schools. They weren't designed to authorize others to run autonomous schools. These tasks are not in the DNA of the traditional school district."

5. In Startup Communities Brad Feld documents the buzz, activities, and dynamics of entrepreneurial communities. Feld thinks entrepreneurs must lead the startup community and leaders must make a long-term commitment to an inclusive and engaging community. Brad thinks start communities can leverage universities like his hometown of Boulder Colorado does. (See last week's Getting Smart feature.)

6. The Thriving Cities Project from University of Virginia, measures urban "endowments" which are comprised of the:

• True: education and knowledge production;
• Good: moral and ethical formation;
• Beautiful: art and aesthetics;
• Prosperous: economic life;
• Well-ordered and Just: political and legal systems; and
• Sustainable: public health and environmental.

7. In The Rainforest Victor Hwang and Greg Horowitt explore innovation ecosystems. They suggest that the secret to building the Next Silicon Valley is building human networks that generate extraordinary creativity and output.

8. Cities: Where Good Jobs Are Created, is an excerpt from Jim Clifton's book

The Coming Jobs War . Clifton argues that what cities need for job creation "entrepreneurs, enterprise energy, and the leadership to put it all together" is all located in cities, "the highest probability source of job creation." He suggests that the culture of Bay Area "that responds to innovation and creates business models like no other place on Earth." Clifton urges other cities to "align efforts citywide" to "wage a war for jobs."

9. Ten years ago Richard Florida outlined the Rise of the Creative Class , but recently he acknowledged that creative coastal cities were not providing much trickle down benefit to middle class workers.

10. Joel Kotkin has criticized Richard Florida's Creative Class theory and outlined the growth formula of low tax energy rich Red State Growth Corridors.

Comparing the work of these leading authorities, I think we can derive four important elements:

• innovation takes an ecosystem;
• talent development feeds the ecosystem;
• the ecosystem leverages local assets; and
• policies impact the ecosystem--good and bad.

From a K-12 standpoint, urban districts need partners--investors, talent developers, new school developers, and policy advocate--to create an innovation ecosystem.

Posted by Tom Vander Ark at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In his February state of the district speech, Houston superintendent Terry Grier pitched the idea of giving every high school student a laptop. "This is a way of transforming what and how we teach," Grier told the school board in April. The rollout starts with teachers in 10 schools getting laptops this summer. Students get theirs in January.

Leading the project is Chief Technology Information Officer Lenny Schad, who joined HISD in January (and hit the ground running). Grier hired Schad based on his tech leadership in Katy ISD, a western Houston suburb that was an early adopter of web 2.0 apps like Edmodo and bring-your-own-device strategies.

Schad said he was frustrated by the perception that big districts can't lead the shift to digital learning. "We have an opportunity to show people," said Schad. This shift is inevitable, "it's not if, it's when." Schad is committed to working with his colleagues to make the transition successful for teachers and students.

Houston ISD issued an RFP for Windows laptops in April, "always an interesting process," said Schad. After several cycles with a couple of vendors, he said they achieved their targeted pricing. The package includes leased laptops, dedicated onsite support, loss and damage protection, as well as phone and online support.

With other districts picking tablets, Schad thinks "the keyboard is an important facet especially for high school students."

They didn't consider Chromebooks because the rate of home internet access is still pretty low. Schad is working with the city and providers to boost broadband access.

Our implementation team has "walked campuses to identify and observe early adopters--we will incorporate them and leverage their leadership in the rollout." He anticipates the teacher leaders will add "breadth and depth" to the deployment. Schad plans to spend time planning and preparing with school leaders this summer.

The laptop project is primarily funded with repurposed budgets--one of the lessons learned from early movers like Mooresville North Carolina (which is featured in Funding the Shift).

Edmodo will be the learning platform in 2013-14. Instructional materials will include a lot of "open content and free web 2.0 tools."

Schad is thinking hard about strategies to support and measure teacher development and student engagement.

Disclosure: Edmodo is a Learn Capital portfolio company where Tom is a partner.

Posted by Tom Vander Ark at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend