Of That

Brandt Redd on Education, Technology, Energy, and Trust

30 December 2015

Personalized Learning - More Evidence, More Progress

I've written a lot about Personalized Learning on this blog. The theory has a lot of things going for it. It's intuitive, it's the principle behind the most effective learning factors, and supporting evidence continues to accumulate.

When introducing personalized learning it's useful to contrast with factory-model education. Under a factory model, students with wide variation in personality, interests, skills, and talents are exposed to a consistent educational experience. Unsurprisingly, there is wide variation in the results because the consistent learning activities resonate better with some students than others. So, we grade the students with some portion of the grade attributable to student effort and other parts attributable to evidence of subject mastery. When students with inconsistent backgrounds participate in consistent learning activities, it's not surprising that the results are also inconsistent.

Personalized education applies in two ways. For fundamental subjects like Reading, Writing, and Mathematics, the learning experience should be personalized to meet the diverse needs of individual students. Customizing the experience to each student's individual needs can result in consistent achievement in a diverse population.

With a foundation of core skills in place, the second form of personalization is supporting students as they pursue diverse interests - science, music, art, history, sports, and so forth. The most successful students have always personalized their education. The innovation is for institutions to deliberately participate in the personalization effort.

Accumulating Evidence

Earlier this year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation commissioned a RAND Corporation study of 62 public charter and district schools pursuing a variety of personalized learning practices. The results are promising. Average performance of students in the study schools was below the national average at the beginning of a two-year study period and was above the national average at the conclusion. Growth rates increased in the third year achieving effect sizes exceeding 0.4 in the third year.

Five specific personalization strategies identified and studied are:
  • Increased one-on-one time between student and instructor.
  • Personalized learning paths with students able to choose from a variety of instructional formats.
  • Competency-based learning models that enable individual-pacing with supports tailored to each student's learning level.
  • Flexible learning environments that can be adapted to student needs, particularly when they have conflicting demands on their time.
  • College and career readiness programs.
The authors observe that, "While the concept of personalized learning has been around for some time, advances in technology and digital content have placed personalized learning within reach for an increasing number of schools."

Progress and Public Support

The most significant policy event this year was the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The previous iteration was known as "No Child Left Behind", this version is titled the "Every Child Succeeds Act". About the new law, iNACOL wrote, "Through ESEA reauthorization, Congress [supports] the shift to new, personalized learning models by redesigning assessments, rethinking accountability, and supporting the modernization of educator and leadership development."

Another important event this year is Education Reimagined. The Convergence Center for Policy Resolution brought together leaders from across the political and educational spectrum to describe a new vision for education. As they describe it, "We were not your typical group -- no two in agreement about how to fix the current system. What we did share, however, was a fundamental commitment for all children to love learning and thrive regardless of their circumstances. We knew it was time to stop debating how to fix the system and start imagining a new system." I had the privilege of hearing Becky Pringle, vice president of the National Educaton Association and Gizele Huff, director of the libertarian Jacquelin Hume Foundation describe their shared vision of student-centered education. It's compelling that, when you get all of the parties to converge on a shared educational vision it focuses on personalization - on meeting the specific needs of each student.


As we head into the new year, I'm optimistic. At this moment, we have progress, evidence, and policy coherently driving toward a better education for all of our students.

15 December 2015

Back to Blogging, Smarter Balanced, and the Importance of Evidence

When I started this blog I set a few guidelines for myself. One was that I wouldn't blog about blogging. I'm violating that rule today; mostly because it's been nearly 11 months since my last post and I want to record my commitment to resume postings here.

Smarter Balanced

The main reason that I haven't been writing is lack of time. The graphic shows my email traffic over the last approximately 18 months. There's a jump around October of 2014. That's when Smarter Balanced converted to it's sustainable form as a unit in the Graduate School of Education at UCLA. A bigger jump occurred in early 2015 as we entered our first operational summative testing season. My workload is slowly improving as I've staffed up the Smarter Balanced technology team with talented set of individuals.

Here are a few of the things we've accomplished at Smarter Balanced since my last post:
  • Released open source for the test delivery system, digital library, and reporting system and proven out the open source solutions in full-scale deployments.
  • Grown the subscriber base of the Smarter Balanced Digital Library to more than 600,000 educators.
  • Administered tens of millions of interim assessments. (Since interim test results remain with states and districts we only have a rough estimate of the number.)
  • Administered summative tests in English Language Arts and Mathematics to more that 6.5 million students.
  • Gained Iowa and the Bureau of Indian Education as members (while, unfortunately, losing Iowa and Maine).
Of course, this hasn't been without challenges. Addressing challenges accounts for most of the growth in my email traffic.

The Importance of Evidence

Finally, as I return to blogging I want to re-assert the importance of evidence. Too many decisions are made based on preconceived notions, confirmation bias, and a charismatic messenger. Recent research into research (meta-research?) has indicated that even rigorous, peer-reviewed, research findings are subject to confirmation bias.

Conveniently for my own opinions, the evidence in favor of personalized learning continues to grow. I have a lot more to write about this in the coming months.

26 January 2015

K-12 Education Funding... and the Strings Attached

In the 2013-2014 fiscal year, California spent $70 billion on K-12 education. To put that in perspective, Bill Gates' net worth is $80.4 billion. So, in a single year, California spends nearly all of Bill Gates' wealth on teaching children. This is a good thing, of course, but it's also an impressive number.

Nationwide, the country spent $632 billion on on public elementary and secondary schools in the 2010-2011 school year (the latest year for which I could find data). That's nearly 4% of the US GDP and 10% of total U.S government spending (including federal, state and local).

Here's where the 2013-2014 California money came from, in billions of dollars. Other states have similar proportions between federal and state/local funds:

Local Funds$21.78031%
State Funds$40.86458%
Federal Funds$7.38211%
Total$70.026

For this post I'm going to concentrate on the strings attached to the Federal funds.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA 1965)

Federal funding of education, at least at contemporary rates, centers on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Passed in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," the ESEA was intended to address inequities in education. It had been long observed that students from lower income, urban schools have significantly lower educational achievement than their middle income, suburban contemporaries. ESEA provided supplementary funding to the lowest achieving schools with provisions intended to insure that existing funding is preserved rather than replaced.

The ESEA was set up to require periodic reauthorization by congress – typically every five years. However, due to congressional gridlock on educational ideas, the reauthorizations have often been single-year continuing resolutions that continue funding for another year without changing the provisions of the law. Major updates occurred in 1981 under the Reagan administration and in 1994 under the Clinton administration. But the biggest update was No Child Left Behind, proposed in 2001 and signed by President Bush in January of 2002.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB 2002)

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is the name given to the 2001/2002 reauthorization of ESEA. It establishes the accountability and reform framework in which state education systems presently operate. In theory, states have the ability to opt out at the expense of federal funding. In practice, no state is willing to give up approximately 11% of their educational budget.

The principle focus of NCLB is on the Standards and Accountability theory of education reform. Here are the main requirements:
  • States must establish state standards (sometimes known as core standards) for achievement in English Language Arts (ELA), Mathematics, and Science. Most states also include standards for Social Studies and other subjects.
  • States must test all students in grades 3 through 8 and again in either grade 11 or 12 to measure progress in ELA and Math. 
  • At a minimum, states must test students in science three times. Once in grades 3-5, once in grades 6-9, and once in grades 10-12.
  • The testing results for each school should show Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) toward having all students meeting or exceeding state standards by the 2013-2014 school year.

Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)

Among the most challenging parts of NCLB as been the Adequate Yearly Progress requirement for schools. Schools receiving Title I assistance (those with a large number of low-income students) receive increasingly strident interventions each consecutive year they fail to achieve AYP:
  • Year 1: No intervention.
  • Year 2: Develop an improvement plan, provide students the option to transfer to other schools including paying for the transportation to get there, and prescribed uses of Title I funds.
  • Year 3: Must continue year 2 interventions plus and also provide tutoring and/or after school programs from a state-appointed provider.
  • Year 4: Must continue year 2 and 3 interventions plus one or more of the following: Replace responsible staff'; Implement a new curriculum; Decrease a school's management authority; Appoint an external expert to advise the school; or Restructure the internal organization of the school.
  • Year 5: Shut down or completely restructure the school.
When NCLB was passed, there was an optimistic outlook. Within 12 years, nearly all schools would be meeting state standards for performance with a small number of underperforming schools receiving intervention. It turns out that, as a country, we haven't worked out a formula for consistent school improvement. If the process for meeting AYP standards was well-known, the goals might have been met.

One concern has been that certain states set unreasonably low standards. Prior to adopting the Common Core State Standards, Tennessee had the lowest standards for reading while Massachusetts had the highest.

Despite low and inconsistent standards, so many schools are failing to meet AYP goals that there aren't enough resources to deliver the prescribed remedies. In 2011, 48% of public schools failed to meet AYP goals. In 21 states, more than half of schools didn't meet AYP goals and in 41 states and Washington D.C. more than one fourth of schools didn't make AYP. There aren't enough tutoring organizations, replacement staff, or trained principals to supply the year 4 and 5 remedies for this many schools, not to mention sufficient funds to pay for these interventions.

Waivers

With so many schools failing to meet AYP goals and the remedies being impractical to implement, congress is way overdue for an ESEA reauthorization that adapts to current circumstances. Unfortunately, no proposed update has made any significant progress. Congress has left us with continuing resolutions that preserve the law as it stands.

To relieve pressure, the Department of Education, under Secretary Arne Duncan has begun granting waivers to NCLB to states that produce an acceptable alternative plan. Not surprisingly, the granting of waivers is controversial. The authority of the executive branch to waive requirements like these seems to have legal precedent. However, it's not clear that alternative requirements can be applied without congressional action.

Nevertheless, every state except Nebraska has applied for a waiver, many have been granted, and even Nebraska has announced plans to apply for a waiver in 2015.

The Way Forward

There's growing hope that congress may finally address ESEA reauthorization in 2015. There are even hints that the reauthorization may include support for competency education. Many organizations are offering wishlists for reauthorization from civil rights groups to advocates of federalist solutions. As in the past, divisions on education don't follow traditional political lines.

Here is my personal wish list for an ESEA reauthorization:
  • Preserve and strengthen state standards, encourage but don't require alignment of standards between states.
  • Preserve regular assessment of student achievement with an increasing emphasis on Depth of Knowledge.
  • Accelerate the shift from seat-time measures to direct measures of competency for the granting of secondary school credit.
  • Encourage the transition from periodic testing events to continuous assessment of student skills (curriculum-embedded assessment) with frequent and rapid feedback to students, teachers and parents.
  • Clarify the difference between standards and curriculum and establish a framework for public review of both standards and curriculum. Require schools to report the origin of curricular materials on public websites and on every worksheet or assignment.
  • Sustain the concept of interventions for schools not achieving AYP goals while shifting to more practical and supportive remedies than those in NCLB.