Employing artificial intelligence, CK-12 engineers programmed Flexi to act as a tutor, responding to math and science questions, testing students’ knowledge, helping with homework and providing real-world examples of hard-to-grasp concepts.Ěý

“Our ambition is to create a private tutor equivalent for every child,” says Miral Shah, chief technology officer for the Palo Alto, California company. “The majority of students could never afford a private tutor, so we wanted to build a private tutor that mimics all the qualities of a tutor. We can help personalize the attention and assess a student’s knowledge continually.”

Flexi can start simple, with a student asking a basic science question within CK-12’s online system, such as: “Does photosynthesis happen at night?” or “Define photosynthesis.” Flexi answers the question and backs it up with content, such as video simulations or real-world examples, Shah says. 

“Ask any question to the Flexi chatbot and it will help answer the question in a way a private tutor will,” Shah says. 

Beyond just doling out answers, Shah says Flexi, which launched in May 2020, assesses a student’s understanding of a concept and suggests next steps, whether a next lesson or flashcards to review. 

Tutoring has emerged as a key strategy for helping students rebound from COVID learning loss, but tutoring resources remain in short supply. President Joe Biden used his recent State of the Union address to urge his fellow citizens . Providing a digital solution to that problem has become a potential growth point for education tech companies. But while CK-12 and others, such as Amira Learning, offer AI-driven tutoring, the concept of online tutoring itself remains relatively new and lacks research to prove its effectiveness. That hasn’t stopped the experimenting. 

Cheryl Hullihen, a special education science teacher at Absegami High School in Galloway, New Jersey, says Flexi has helped her students become more independent in finding answers to questions, while also teaching them how to formulate questions to find both general and specific information about a topic or concept. 

“I think that this is an important life skill for students,” she says. “I always explain to students that I don’t expect them to memorize definitions and equations, but that I want them to be able to find the information that they need to answer a question or investigate a problem. Students are able to see how the way that they ask a question, and the wording of their question, can produce different results.” 

Shah says Flexi’s goal is to support students. That’s why AI is needed. “If a student is struggling, we give them multiple hints,” he says. “If they are still struggling, we show them some flashcards because they are probably getting deterred by vocabulary items. Sometimes they just forget about a concept. The whole idea is to give personalized help to each student. Each student gets different and personalized support.” 

If a student still doesn’t get it, Flexi will alert their teacher.

CK-12 is a nonprofit formed in 2007 with a focus on digitizing education in a way that wasn’t just about turning analog education into accessible online content, but about using the full power of digital, such as with artificial intelligence. CK-12 says have used its free learning tools worldwide, including digital textbooks. 

Starting with math and science because of its universal language, CK-12 content mixes text, multimedia videos, interactive simulations and adaptive quizzes. “That is how we started challenging ourselves in terms of what can digitization do for education,” Shah says. The content remains flexible so teachers can customize it to fit their needs.

The AI-powered student tutor Flexi takes FlexBooks a step further, providing more interaction for the students and additional insight for educators. 

Hullihen says students in her classes use Flexi when working on an assignment in FlexBooks, but they also turn to it for activities outside of that. For example, students were working on a lab investigating potential energy and used Flexi as a resource to find equations and answer the analysis and conclusion questions. Shah says the goal is to provide enough support to get students to the correct answer, but there is no roadblock if a student wants to jump straight to the finished product.   

A byproduct of the constant interaction between the student and the system is feedback for the teachers, a tool that’s become a mainstay of modern ed tech and personalized learning. FlexBooks was designed to allow educators to add it to their curriculum, allowing assignments via FlexBooks through popular online content learning systems such as Canvas. The Teacher Assistant product, designed for educators to work with FlexBooks, tracks student understanding of assignments and delivers data to the teacher on their progress. 

For example, if a bulk of students miss a particular question on an assignment, CK-12 flags that for the teacher, letting them know students didn’t understand the concept. This can help teachers see a deficiency in student comprehension, while potentially helping educators rework curriculum so the same issue doesn’t happen in the future.

“Teachers are excited about the insight piece, getting a chance to see how students are doing in a lesson,” says Kaite Harmon, CK-12’s senior program manager.  

Shah says as students continue to learn digitally, he wants to make the process more relevant. “We have this unique opportunity that nobody has ever had before,” he says. “As a community, I hope we can all pitch into this to get the learning outcomes students deserve.”

Updated, Feb. 7

Washington, D.C.

When Aaron Cuny and Will Stoetzer were thinking about how they wanted to structure their own D.C. charter school back in 2012, they kept returning to the same question: “When were we doing the best work for kids?”

“For both of us, it came down to teaching in a small group setting, where you could think about how to reach kids individually rather than spending the majority of time and mental energy thinking about classroom management,” says Stoetzer.

Stoetzer was a special education teacher and Cuny at D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School, a top-ranked elementary school in one of Washington’s middle-income neighborhoods. Both felt the city lacked quality educational options for kids in the neighborhoods that needed them most.

“In pockets across D.C., some schools had shown that when adults got it right, there was success at educating low-income kids,” says Stoetzer. “Schools like KIPP and D.C. Prep have been very purposeful about producing academic results for low-income kids. Their success inspired us, but we had differences in perspective about how that success might be accomplished.”

When they opened Ingenuity Prep a year later with Cuny as CEO and Stoetzer as COO, they located it in Ward 8, Washington’s poorest neighborhood, and built two essential components into the school’s design so that small group learning could be its main focus: co-teaching and computer-based learning.

Computer-based learning and personalized learning are often faulted for taking the teacher out of the equation too much, but in the case of Ingenuity Prep, they have been employed to the opposite effect.

“Digital content became a good way for us to deliver high-level, engaging content to kids, but the end goal was never to deliver content digitally,” says Stoetzer, whose special education background strongly informed his thinking about the school’s design when it came to small group instruction, personalized learning, and differentiation. “All of the pieces of our model were driven by finding the best ways to maximize the time spent in small groups.”

Rarely in groups larger than 15

Ingenuity Prep serves 496 students in grades pre-K-3 to 5, with plans to expand to eighth grade. There are two to three classes per grade, each with between 25 and 30 students (24 in preschool). Each preschool classroom has three teachers, and in kindergarten and above, each classroom has two lead content area teachers, one specialized in math, the other in literacy.

There’s also a literacy apprentice who teaches across two classrooms. When students are in literacy class, the literacy-lead teacher and the apprentice co-teach the content. When students are in math class, the lead math teacher from one classroom comes to the other classroom for co-teaching support.

The school hosts resident teachers from theĚý, and school leadership says the partnership has been integral to making Ingenuity Prep’s group model function. Resident teachers already have a bachelor’s degree, but the program allows them to work toward a master’s in education, including certifications in special education and their specific content areas. After the first year, Urban Teachers places its residents as full-time paid staff members in schools — usually the ones where they had already been teaching — where they can finish out the program’s remaining three years. Ingenuity Prep currently has 11 resident teachers.

Ingenuity Prep incorporates computer-based learning into the curriculum, a practice known as blended learning. In kindergarten and above, each student has access to a Chromebook and a student web portal, which contains different online educational programs like and . ĚýTeachers blend the digital content into the curriculum to target individual student needs and provide students with independent practice in subject-area knowledge.

Aside from the benefits of exposing students to blended learning, the goal of Ingenuity Prep’s learning model has always been more one-on-one time between teacher and student. Students spend less than 10 percent of their time learning in groups larger than 15 students. Maud Cooke-Nesme, a kindergarten literacy teacher, believes the computer-based learning has been important in achieving this.

“The use of technology really helps us as teachers because it gives us the ability to have the differentiated time in smaller groups,” she says.

‘They often feel like they aren’t in class, even though they are’

The implementation of the Ingenuity Prep model looks slightly different depending on the grade level.

In pre-K classrooms, play-based learning takes the place of computer-based learning. Students spend much of the day in “centers,” where they choose from a variety of activity stations like art, music and movement, and dramatic play — in which the preschoolers take on the role of adults in everyday situations and careers. As the students rotate through the centers, the lead teacher pulls out small groups to give them formal, personalized instruction in literacy and math. There are also some large group activities, like “Mindfulness,” a short time after recess during which students practice guided deep breathing and feeling their heartbeats.

From kindergarten to fifth grade, the Ingenuity Prep model for literacy hits its stride. Students spend a significant amount of time in small groups assembled by relatively similar ability level, rotating through different learning activities, from direct instruction to guided practice and independent, computer-based practice. While there’s teacher flexibility in the model’s implementation, all classrooms must have certain components essential to its success: a classroom library, a carpeted open space, a large group instruction area, and small group instruction spaces.

In a kindergarten classroom, three groups are rotating through different literacy practice activities. Six students sit in two rows of desk, facing the front of the room, as they practice reading skills using Lexia on their Chromebooks. These students are on different levels from one another, progressing through the program at their own pace.

“Students like having that independent time on the computers,” says Avi Worrell, a second-grade literacy teacher. “They often feel like they aren’t in class, even though they are. They’re learning, but it’s fun and competitive learning.”

A second group of eight students sits at a semi-circle table, facing lead teacher Amber Morales. Morales is conducting guided reading, and she’s targeted both the text and the learning objective to this group’s specific skill level. The students are practicing sight words, with a focus on the word “where.” They follow along, tracking the text with their fingers, as Morales reads aloud and asks them questions about the story.

The last group of 10 students is on the other side of the room in a much more traditional classroom setup. They’re in rows of desks, facing the teacher and the board. Here, Urban Teachers resident Michaura Rivera is using direct instruction to teach phonetics and writing. Students practice drawing their letters on individual whiteboards, and Rivera monitors their progress.

“I really like changing through the groups because we have guided reading and instruction with our teachers, but we also go onto computers to practice on our own,” says Jahari’ Rose, a fifth-grader who has been at the school since kindergarten. “Lexia really helped us learn new sight words, how to read faster, and how to find the meaning of a story.”

In a second-grade classroom, there are still designated spaces for small and large group instruction; however, because these students are more capable of self-monitoring their behavior than those in kindergarten, the library area and open space are larger, creating a cozy, independent reading environment.

In this class, one group of students is working on computer-based programs. Another group is around a table, working on a guided writing project with the lead teacher. And the third group of students are lying on the carpeted space in the library area. They’re practicing independent reading; they’ve chosen books from the shelf marked at their current reading level, as well as two books from the level above.

In a fifth-grade classroom, the setup looks more traditional, with the majority of the desks facing the front of the room and the teachers. There’s a Chromebook on each desk because students are working on writing in a large group activity. There’s still an area for small group instruction and a library area with open space. However, both are much smaller than in the lower grade levels.

Overall, math lessons schoolwide involve more large group instruction than literacy; teachers want a more heterogeneous group in terms of student ability level so that struggling students can learn by watching stronger students solve problems. Classes still incorporate the rotational model and blended learning, but often the lead teacher will perform direct instruction with a larger group while the assisting teacher pulls out small groups of students who need extra help.

“The school isn’t super descriptive on how to implement the model,” says Stoetzer, who recently stepped into the interim CEO role at Ingenuity Prep. “We make sure we have excellent teachers who are familiar with the model, but there’s adaptability in how to make the best use of it. After all, they know their students’ needs best.”

Intensive coaching, listening to teachers

“I’ve never been in a school that puts so much attention to detail in terms of content, organization, and planning,” says Ashleigh Coleman, a pre-K-4 teacher. “The leadership really values [teacher] feedback here, and they encourage work-life balance. At other places where I’ve worked, teachers are workhorses. They’re expected to do whatever it takes to get the job done, but they aren’t listened to.”

School leadership admits that balance wasn’t always there; they’ve been very intentional about creating it. They use surveys to measure the adult culture in the building. They’ve allotted extra time for planning during the school day. And they have a robust teacher-coaching program in which school leaders observe teachers once a week.

“I worked at another school where I received pretty much no coaching whatsoever,” says kindergarten teacher Cook-Nesme. “One of the main things that attracted me here was the frequency of coaching. The coaching is specialized for literacy or math, so the feedback I receive makes sense to where I am in my development as a teacher.”

The coaching also helps create a uniform culture of high expectations.

“I previously taught at a Head Start program,” says Molly Karsh, a pre-K-3 teacher. “I have really come to appreciate the high expectations for both students and staff here. There, my kids left for kindergarten without being able to write their names. Here, my students talk about paleontology. There, my kids could not sit quietly on the carpet and learn with minimal distractions because we didn’t have that culture set in our classrooms, and I didn’t know it was possible to set it because I didn’t have the coaching or tools for handling distractions.”

This embedded culture of coaching develops a special relationship between leadership and teachers. All of the instructional leaders were once teachers, and many were once teachers at Ingenuity Prep. JaQuan Bryant, the co-principal of kindergarten through second grade, came to Ingenuity Prep as a first-grade teacher. He believes he benefited greatly from the coaching.

“But it’s interesting because some of my cousins are also in education,” he says. “When I first started here, I told them that leadership videoed me, and they freaked out. They said, ‘I would never let them do that. I’d have the union rep come in.’ But I think you need to have that sort of relationship between instructional leadership and staff to move the needle for kids. They’ve got to be able to hop into a classroom at any time. There’s got to be that trust.”

Teaching kids in trauma

“They let us have fun here, like on pajama day I got to wear my Batman onesie, but they ask us to think about our actions too,” says fifth-grader Jaiden Robinson. “The only downside about this place is the food.”

“Especially the pancakes — you can make Play-Doh out of them,” adds his classmate Dajon Walker, who has been at the school since third grade. “At my old school, the food was good. I can’t lie about that. But there was a lot of chaos. There were fights every day; it was a rampage. We didn’t listen to teachers. We just ran around and did what we wanted.”

His peer Marcellus Dyson also came to Ingenuity Prep in third grade. “In second grade, I got into a lot of fights because people kept messing with me,” he says. “There’s less fights here because they take care of it here right away and send kids to behavioral support.”

Ingenuity Prep has six full-time behavioral support specialists. If a student causes a disruption in class, the teacher texts one of the specialists, who then removes the student. The aim is to return the student to class as quickly as possible. However, there is a “reset room,” which students call behavioral support, for those who aren’t ready to go back to class immediately. There, students reflect on their behavior.

“I’ve been to behavioral support, and it’s effective,” says fifth-grader Zainah Williams. “They ask you why you’re in there, and you have to complete this worksheet about what you’d do better next time. Then, they ask you if you’re calm enough to go back to class. It helps me calm down so I can go back.”

Ninety-seven percent of Ingenuity Prep students are African-American, and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education has designated 60 percent of its students as economically disadvantaged. The state office also labeled 66 percent of students “at risk,” meaning they are more likely to drop out based on their receipt of public assistance, receipt of food stamps, involvement with the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, homeless status, or being older than expected for their grade.

Many of the school’s students experience trauma at home, and their behavior is not always a reflection of what’s going on in class. Every teacher at the school has been trained in crisis intervention management. Student and family support specialists, special education teachers, the speech therapist, and counselors also complete a deeper-level training. There’s also a full-time social worker and psychologist, and there are no security officers. The school screens staff during hiring to ensure that their values align with the school’s mission to educate low-income students with empathy and understanding.

“I grew up low-income in this neighborhood,” says third-grade teacher Davian Morgan. “But then my mom went back to school and then I went to school, so I understand the power education had in lifting us above the poverty line and into the middle class. I want for these kids to see how many doors open if you take your education seriously.”

Bryant, the K-2 co-principal, grew up in a similar neighborhood in East Oakland, California. “What keeps me at this school is that we believe every kid deserves access to an education equivalent to that of their affluent peers, an education that will allow them to be the architects of their own futures.”

The problem with replication

Back in January 2012, around the time Stoetzer and Cuny were talking about starting a school, the Illinois Facilities Fund published , an extensive analysis of public school locations and performance in Washington, D.C.

After categorizing the District into 39 neighborhood clusters, the authors of the report concluded that to provide all public school students, both district and charter, with a high-quality education, the city would need to add an additional 39,758 seats in high-performing schools. Ten neighborhood clusters – three of them located in Ward 8 – would need 68 percent of those seats.

After reading the report, Stoetzer and Cuny intentionally opened Ingenuity Prep in Bellevue, a Ward 8 neighborhood in the center of the cluster that the Illinois Facilities Fund had declared the District’s highest-need area. Ward 8 needed 10,087 additional quality seats, and the Bellevue cluster alone needed 5,969 of them.

Eighty percent of Ingenuity Prep students live within a mile of the school. Ninety percent live in Ward 8, and 95 percent live east of the Anacostia River, in D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods. On the 2018 Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) exams, 38 percent of its students tested proficient or above in English and 34 percent in math. The two neighborhood elementary scores had pass rates of 8 and 6 percent for English and 13 and 9 percent for math.

When compared with the other 35 schools in Ward 8, Ingenuity Prep ranks second highest in terms of PARCC scores, with student scores in the 95th percentile for the ward. Of the District’s 113 schools where more than 50 percent of the students are economically disadvantaged, Ingenuity Prep’s test scores ranked seventh.

In general, D.C. schools with more at-risk students have lower student proficiency scores than the citywide average. However, on the 2018 PARCC exams, Ingenuity Prep students scored slightly above the citywide average for both math and English. Their combined proficiency scores were in the 74th percentile citywide, and student growth scores were in the 92nd percentile.

Despite its success and the overwhelming need for more seats in high-performing schools, Ingenuity Prep cannot replicate under the current regulations of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, the District’s charter authorizer. To do that, the board requires that a charter school have a tier-one ranking on its performance measurement framework. Ingenuity Prep currently has a tier-two ranking. When judging school performance, the charter board compares charters citywide, which presents difficulties for schools like Ingenuity Prep that serve a larger percentage of at-risk students than many of their charter peers.

“It’s a more challenging experience on this side of the river, and I think our colleagues who run high-performing charter schools elsewhere would agree with that,” says Stoetzer.

For instance, Ingenuity Prep has one of the lowest in-seat attendance rates in the city for charters, at around 89 percent, slightly below the 90 percent citywide average for all public schools. However, the two traditional neighborhood elementary schools, which serve similar student populations, have attendance rates of 89 and 92 percent. There’s a high correlation between the number of at-risk students and absenteeism, according to Ingenuity Prep’s leadership.

Because the school is located 1.5 miles from the closest Metro station, about one-third of students take the bus, which is not as reliable as the Metro, and cold winters also negatively affect attendance among those students who walk from either home or the Metro station. Moreover, many of the students come from single-parent households with multiple siblings. Often, when one child is sick or has a doctor’s appointment, the parent will keep all of the children at home because it’s not easy or convenient to take the others to school.

Ingenuity Prep has done a variety of things to increase attendance: free Metrobus passes to parents (in D.C., kids ride for free), internal incentives for students, phone calls home to students chronically absent, and listing the amount of instructional time lost because of absences on each report card. Regardless, attendance rates have increased by only 1 percent.

“I respect and appreciate that the board wants to hold a high bar for low-income students, but I think demanding that a school be tier one to replicate ignores the reality of the limited options available to kids in neighborhoods that are historically underserved,” says Stoetzer.

“The reality is that if more D.C. Preps, KIPPs, and Ingenuity Preps don’t open on this side of the river, only a few of these kids are going to travel incredible distances to go to quality schools. We are doing a disservice to our kids by not being more open to considering schools without a tier-one ranking for replication,” he said. “These kids need a better educational experience. What we’re providing here is drastically different than the neighborhood schools, and we’ve got to consider that in how we think about schools and replication.”

Correction: Resident teachers with the Urban Teachers program are eligible for various forms of financial aid. An earlier version of the story included incorrect information about tuition reimbursement by Urban Teachers.Ěý

Liu Huang joined the three-year-old philanthropy in 2017 as its head of product and technology, where she oversaw the CZI education technology team’s partnership with the Summit Learning Program, which created a technology platform schools can use for free to enable students to work at their own pace and on topics that pique their interest.

“At CZI, we’re all about collaboration across disciplines — including how we can point the promise of technology toward solving the toughest challenges in education today,” said CZI co-founder Priscilla Chan. “With her deep background in managing complex, interdisciplinary teams and building tools and products that help people learn, Sandra Liu Huang is the ideal leader to carry forward our vision for what’s possible in education.”

A pediatrician, Chan is married to the initiative’s other co-founder, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The initiative was launched when Chan and Zuckerberg, celebrating the birth of their first child, announced a plan to give 99 percent of their wealth to their philanthropy, which uses technology, research, and grantmaking to support projects across education, justice and opportunity, and science.

Liu Huang takes over from CZI’s founding head of education, former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education Jim Shelton, who left in August to move back to his family’s home in Washington, D.C. Before joining CZI, Stanford University grad Liu Huang worked at Google, Facebook, and the online learning platform Quora.

In her new post, Liu Huang oversees a multidisciplinary team of 100, who bring different skills and backgrounds to the immensely complicated task of figuring out how to help teachers and others create individual road maps for students to achieve their full potential.

“They’re going to have to integrate knowledge from a whole range of disciplines,” said Todd Rose, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of two noted books on individualization. “It’s undeniable that different disciplines have different languages, different standards for what evidence is.”

Facilitating that cross-pollination on a topic as complicated as education requires a rare skill set, he added: “I would take that and an intellectual humility and a willingness to listen to other people any day over deep expertise in any particular subject matter.”

ĚýIn an interview with The 74, Liu Huang traced the start of her interest in education to her father’s experience growing up in Taiwan. Liu Huang’s grandparents asked a local teacher, “Grandpa Liu,” to take him in.

“He ended up being given to a family friend who didn’t have kids of his own to raise,” she said, recalling the educator who altered her family’s trajectory by raising their ninth child.

Liu became her father’s last name, and thus the Liu in Liu Huang.

After emigrating to the United States, her father earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. But as educated as the family was, Liu Huang said her parents depended on her because she spoke more English.

“I actually had agency,” she said. “I took care of my parents.”

Her CZI role is a perfect fit, she said, in that it spurs her to combine her interests in technology, education, and bridging cultures.

Because CZI has a limited liability corporation, nonprofit foundations, and a 501(c)(4), it discloses much but not all of its spending. Last fall as part of a drive for transparency, CZI that it had spent some $308 million on education since 2016. Grantees disclosed include Chicago’s LEAP Innovations, Teach for America, the College Board, and Chicago Public Schools. CZI also makes “impact investments,” which are all public.

Possibly the best known of its partnerships is the Summit Learning Program, an online platform first developed in the highly successful Summit Public Schools, where students use its dashboard and other features to manage courses of study that are personalized to their needs and interests. The platform, which schools can use for free, has proven popular.

Over the past three years, the number of schools served has grown from 19 to more than 380, and results are promising.ĚýIn one Texas district, for example, over the past two years the seventh-graders who were the furthest behind their peers made a 17 percent gain on the state math assessment and a 20 percent gain in reading.

The Summit Learning Program was recently spun off from Summit Public Schools, which are run by CEO Diane Tavenner, who applauded the news that Liu Huang would take on a greater role.

“She brings a deep appreciation for the interdisciplinary nature of education, as well as empathy for the needs of teachers, families, and students,” Tavenner said. “CZI is a long-term partner on the Summit Learning Program, and I look forward to Sandra’s leadership as we work to support educators in bringing personalized learning to their classrooms.”

Go Deeper: See more coverage from our ‘Personalized Learning’ series

Here at The 74, we love a good debate. Just about every day, we publish an array of essays that take critical looks at, or offer innovative approaches to, schools, standards, practice, and policy. They’re often our most shared, circulated, and debated links of the week. We went back through the archive to look at which essayists stirred up the most discussion across 2018; here are the nine top standouts of the year, along with the following 10 runners-up. (Get every 2019 op-ed delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for The 74 Newsletter)

Struggle for the Future: Schools Lag in Preparing Students for the Age of Automation

By David Cantor

Innovation: For the first time in history, American schools are being asked to prepare a majority of students for college and higher-skill jobs. It hasn’t been easy. As technological advances enable machines to substitute for human labor, a college education is more valuable than ever, but only 1 in 3 students earns a bachelor’s degree. In response, officials have introduced a raft of initiatives, including a far-ranging focus on soft skills (like teamwork and problem-solving) through higher standards, deeper learning, and better tests, as well as expanded offerings in STEM, information technology, and career and technical education that ready students for college work. As David Cantor writes, the work has been unsystematic, plagued by racial and gender inequalities, and hampered by disputes about the purpose of education. The only thing that seems certain: Traditional models can no longer do the job. Read the full analysis.

Why Teacher Strikes Aren’t Like Other Strikes (Hint: Teachers Often Get Paid)

By Mike Antonucci

Unions: In the middle of the historic nine-day teacher strike in West Virginia earlier this year, Mike Antonucci used his weekly Union Report column to take a closer look at why the strike went on so long — and why teacher strikes aren’t like other walkouts. Rarely noted, he wrote, was that the school employees in West Virginia were still being paid while out on strike. Their much-maligned health coverage was still in effect, and they were still earning credit toward retirement. Forcing teachers back to work would have required a court injunction, but neither the superintendents nor state officials made a move in that direction — perhaps because they were unwilling or unable to enforce an injunction should the teachers defy it. Antonucci also makes the argument that teachers in West Virginia had every right to walk out — and that teacher strikes should not be illegal. Read his full assessment.

Income Share Agreements Are an Innovative Way of Financing Tuition — and an Investment in the Workplace of Tomorrow

By John Bailey

Student Finances: The evolving nature of work requires evolving our system of training students for the jobs of today and tomorrow and rethinking how we provide financial support, writes contributor John Bailey. One such innovation: replacing traditional tuition with Income Share Agreements, which give students private funds for classes in exchange for a percentage of earnings for a set period after graduation. Repayments rise and fall depending on the student’s income, making them responsive not just to changing economic conditions but also to changing circumstances in life. ISAs give students early access to their future earnings and insurance against bad financial outcomes, Bailey writes — and they give the institutions that train them a stake in their success. Read the full essay.

Falling Into the Belief Gap: What It Feels Like to Realize Your Child’s Teachers Have Sized Him Up and Dumbed Down Their Estimations

By Beth Hawkins

4Fams: Beth Hawkins writes about the hardest lesson she has learned advocating for her two sons. Both boys are white, are exceptionally bright, and live in a zip code that entitled them to seats in the best schools in the city where they live, Minneapolis. When it was time for her oldest, Royce, to enter kindergarten, principals and teachers rushed to assure her that they would nurture his gifts. And they did, pushing him to take the hardest classes and steering him to one opportunity after another. His younger brother Corey — not so much. The gatekeepers to those same opportunities saw his autism but not his intellect, steering him away from the same level of academic challenge. Never mind that his goal is the same: to graduate and go on to a college where he’ll be encouraged to develop his passions. “Call it stereotype threat, implicit bias, or pity born of privilege — there is a mountain of data on how poorly students fare when the adults in their lives don’t set high bars and push them to vault them,” Hawkins writes, in a first-person account of what it’s like to live a reality she’d previously understood from the remove of a reporter’s vantage. “But to parse those decades of research isn’t to understand on a gut level what it feels like to realize your teachers have sized you up and dumbed down their estimation.” Read her full reflection.

Inequality, Meritocracy, and Privilege: Some D.C. Private Schools Leave AP — and Further Abandon Our Shared Democratic Life

By Conor Williams

Equity: A decision by seven Washington, D.C.-area private schools to leave the Advanced Placement curriculum may not seem important in the overall scheme of things, but contributor Conor Williams is concerned. By abandoning AP, he writes, these schools for the privileged are seceding that little bit further from the educational experiences available to other, not-rich kids in their community and country. It is emblematic of the cancerous way that inequality drives today’s democratic crisis: Rich Americans are getting richer, staying rich, and separating themselves from the rest of us, moving further and further away from the shared principles that have guided our nation’s common life and enabled our democracy to survive. Read the full column.

Why Boston’s Most Racially Diverse School Could Also Be the Country’s Most Interesting School Integration Story

By Richard Whitmire

Integration: 74 contributor Richard Whitmire profiles Boston Collegiate, a high school that manages a student enrollment about evenly split between black and white teens in a city forever associated with its ugly response to forced busing in the 1970s. Even more intriguing: Boston Collegiate students come from still highly segregated, working-class neighborhoods; its student diversity remains steady at a time when schools nationally are becoming more racially isolated; and it’s a charter school, a type of public school some have blamed for worsening school segregation. The secret, Whitmire says, is that Boston Collegiate offers black and white parents the same thing — a chance their kids will get into a good college. Read the full analysis.

Do Charter Schools Take Districts’ Money? Only If You Think Children, and the Funding That Comes With Them, Are District Property

By James V. Shuls

Funding: Have you ever heard anyone ask, “How much do farmers markets cost Walmart?” Of course not, writes contributor James V. Shuls; it’s a ridiculous question that presupposes the customer belongs to Walmart and is robbing the store of its rightful funds by purchasing produce somewhere else. So why, he asks, does that question make sense when asked about education? His answer: It doesn’t — and the idea that charter schools are somehow robbing districts when students transfer in dehumanizes children, reducing them to mere economic units. Indeed, he writes, this is the fundamental problem with America’s public education system: We presume the tax dollars that fund a child’s education belong to the public school district and the child belongs in a district school seat. Read the full argument.

Investigation: In NYC School Where a Teenager Was Killed, Students & Educators Say Lax Discipline Led to Bullying, Chaos, and Death

By Max Eden

School Discipline: When 15-year-old Matthew McCree was stabbed to death at the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation in September 2017, it was the first killing in a New York City school in decades. The incident initially received substantial media coverage, focusing particularly on homophobia and unaddressed bullying at the Bronx school. Abel Cedeno, 18, who is facing manslaughter charges in the case, said he was tormented and threatened because of his sexuality. But those close to McCree say there is more to the story. Eight of his teachers and six of his friends spoke to 74 contributor Max Eden, who has become well known nationally as a critic of restorative justice discipline practices. Those inside UA Wildlife told Eden that after edicts came down to reduce suspensions and weak leadership was put in charge of the once-thriving school, “meaningful consequences for misbehavior were eliminated, alternative approaches failed, and administrators responded to a rising tide of disorder and violence by sweeping the evidence under the rug.” If school leaders had “prioritized student safety over statistics, McCree’s teachers believe, he would still be alive. And they fear that the dynamics that destroyed UA Wildlife are playing out across New York City.” Read Eden’s full analysis.

From Report Cards to Parent-Teacher Conferences, Schools Must Do a Better Job of Telling Families How Their Kids Are Doing

By Michael Petrilli

Family Engagement: Engaging parents means shooting straight about how their daughters and sons are performing and committing to making hard changes and expending real resources to help those children do better. It’s a promise to be honest and do right by all kids. But when it comes to two time-honored means of sharing news, good or bad, about student performance — report cards and parent-teacher conferences — communication is often anything but clear, writes contributor Michael Petrilli. What can be done about it? Find out here.

Personalized Learning: 5 Ways Personalized Learning Can Help Secure the Future of Rural America, By Tyler Barnett

Politics: Proposal — The Future of the Charter School Movement Requires a New Political Strategy, By Robin Lake

Teacher Diversity: Want to Close the Opportunity Gap? Start by Fixing the Diversity Gap Between Students of Color and Their Majority-White Teachers, By Brandon Brown

Curriculum: A Mom Wonders — I Never Enjoyed Math, but My Kids Love It. When Did Doing Math Become Fun?, By Tally Bernard

Gifted Education: Giftedness Doesn’t Discriminate by Skin Color or Income Level — and Gifted Education Programs Shouldn’t Either, By Lillian M. Lowery

Midterms: 5 Ways the Midterm Elections Will Have Major Implications for Education Reform, By Andrew Rotherham

Standards: Without Standards and Accountability, There Can Be No Innovation, Personalization, Flexibility — or Education Reform, By Sandy Kress

History: The First Word My 4-Year-Old Learned This Summer Was ‘Lynching’: Why I Thought It Was Important to Take My Preschooler to Montgomery, By Bekah McNeel

Employment: Why States Should Break the College-Degree Stranglehold and Make Jobs Available to All Qualified Applicants, By Michael B. Horn and Gunnar Counselman

Appraisal: Cory Booker Could Have Run Away From School Reform. Instead, He’s Doubling Down on Newark’s Education Revival. That’s a Smart Move, By Laura Waters

Go Deeper: See our complete archive of columnists and essays. Get the latest editorials, columns, and analyses delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for The 74 Newsletter.

When Neerav Kingsland announced the creation of The City Fund this summer, he about the need to scale up proven school reform efforts that had already made a mark at the city level: “While there are amazing public schools across the country, few cities have been able to increase educational opportunity for all children. Over the past fifteen years, this has begun to change,” Kingsland wrote.

“Denver, Washington D.C., and New Orleans have made their entire public education systems better. Other cities, like Indianapolis and Camden, have taken these breakthroughs, tailored them to their local contexts, and seen promising early results. Because of this work, hundreds of thousands of children have benefited from a better public education. These students are more prepared than ever to further their education, get good jobs, and lead lives filled with opportunity. We are now creating a new non-profit organization, The City Fund, to expand on this work.”

In the three months since the initial announcement, the organization has ramped up its outreach to local leaders in an effort to better identify the most successful and innovative systems of public schools. The group has also raised funds to help cities get there; , The City Fund has raised at least $200 million to accelerate its efforts.

The 74 talked with Kingsland and two of his City Fund partners, Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo and Kevin Shafer, about why they joined forces to create the new organization and what city-level efforts have inspired them, and they reveal for the first time what local efforts they’ve already made grants to, in hopes of scaling success.

The 74: Neerav, can you tell us why you all formed The City Fund?

Neerav Kingsland: We formed The City Fund to work with local city leaders to help all students get a great public education. It’s an injustice that if you’re born to a low-income, minority family in America, you’re less likely to get access to a great public school than your wealthier and whiter peers. We want to be a part of changing this reality.

We think there’s reason to be hopeful. Over the past decade, a few cities have made big improvements in their public education systems. New Orleans and Washington, D.C., used to be considered some of the worst public school systems in the country. Now they’re amongst the most improved. Cities like Denver and Camden are getting more students a better public education than ever before.

All of these places still have a way to go, but their rate of improvement has been remarkable.

We don’t think this is random. All of these cities gave more power to educators to meet the needs of the students they work with every day. All of these cities helped families find a school that met the individual needs of their own children. We formed The City Fund to help these cities continue to sharpen their approaches, and to support other cities who are interested in using similar strategies to meet the needs of their own communities.

Kameelah and Kevin, both of you recently worked in other cities that were doing some fairly innovative work – Kameelah in Indianapolis and Kevin in Camden, New Jersey. Can you share with us why you left your posts to join The City Fund, and what you each hope to accomplish?

Kevin Shafer: I was fortunate enough to spend the last five years as the chief innovation officer for the Camden City School District. I worked with city leaders to create new public school models, new public facilities, and support talented educators. Working with so many amazing colleagues and community members was a privilege that I’ll always be incredibly grateful for.

I joined The City Fund because I’ve come to believe deeply in the potential of local leaders giving more power to educators and families so they can meet the needs of their students. My hope is that I can share some of the lessons from Camden with leaders across the country.

I think we learned a lot about how to work with families to both meet their most pressing needs and find solutions that can make a real difference. One of the first things we did in Camden was work to make our schools safer. No child should be scared to go to school, and it was critical that we found ways to try and address that challenge right off the bat. Down the road, we also took some pretty significant steps to transform some of our most struggling schools through partnerships with proven nonprofit organizations. It’s still early, and there’s a lot of work left to be done, but there are real signs of progress throughout all of this work. I’m proud to have been a part of a great team that made that effort and eager to work with other cities so that they can find solutions that work for their families and communities.

Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo: For the past six years, I led strategy and community engagement for The Mind Trust, an Indianapolis nonprofit working to ensure all kids have access to high-quality public schools. Indianapolis now has innovative partnerships where educators are empowered to launch new schools with the school district and educators have the freedom to design schools to best meet the needs of students. But it’s messy and complicated work, and it certainly doesn’t happen overnight.

At The Mind Trust, we learned some critical lessons about the importance of engaging communities and families in conversations about how to best deliver public education. In 2011, for example, The Mind Trust put out a report with solutions for how to improve public education. The focus of the report was to push more decisions to the school level, give teachers and principals more autonomy, and hold schools accountable for results. While there were some good ideas in the report, we didn’t do enough to understand the perspectives of the people the proposed changes would affect the most. That experience taught us a lot as an organization, including the fact that those closest to the problems are often best positioned to voice and design solutions to solve them.

Tough lessons are often the best teacher. We spent the next five years correcting those mistakes. We worked with community stakeholders, and listening to parents and families to better understand how schools were and were not meeting their needs.

I joined The City Fund to continue to support city-based efforts to improve public education and invest in the types of educators, leaders, and community members I saw making change in Indianapolis. I’ve seen firsthand how solutions designed by local people closest to the challenge are the most sustainable. My hope is that more cities are able to dramatically transform their school systems to better serve students who have historically been left behind, and that parents and families are at the center of this change.

Kameelah, each of you have talked about a few common things — namely increasing the number of high-quality schools and ensuring all students have equitable access to those schools — can you tell me some more specifics about what you mean by this?

Shaheed-Diallo: I’m inspired by the educators across the country creating new amazing public schools. There is something special about walking into a school that was once just an educator’s dream and now is doing great things for kids. We’ve seen this in traditional district schools — which have been a big part of the transformation in Indianapolis — and public charter schools. At The City Fund, we want to help more educators create innovative public schools.

But it’s not enough to have a city with great public schools. We also need to make sure that families have equitable access to these schools. That’s why we are also focused on helping local leaders design systems that establish common definitions of quality and make school services and enrollment fair. We believe, in the cities where progress is being made, it’s not just about improving quality but the collaboration between city, district, charter, and other nonprofit leaders that help ensure that the best opportunities are available to the children who need them most.

That makes a lot of sense. Can you talk more about what this looks like in practice?

Shaheed-Diallo: In a number of cities, there is a local organization or a network of individuals focused on increasing the number of high-quality schools. In Washington, D.C., for example, Education Forward D.C., a local education nonprofit, has worked alongside multiple chancellors and mayors to support and sustain the significant increases in student achievement across the city.

When we talk about empowering educators to create new schools, in many cases these schools are charters. But leaders around the country are creating new models and approaches that give educators the same freedom and flexibility and have seen great results — such as the Innovation Network Schools in Indianapolis.

One example that comes to mind for me is Cold Spring Academy, which was a successful district magnet school with a strong track record of academic success in Indianapolis. Due to the school’s environmental focus, the principal wanted freedom and flexibility to extend the school day to allow more time for STEM-based instructional blocks and real-life job-shadowing opportunities for students. The principal applied to the district and converted her school to an Innovation Network School, which granted her freedom over curricular and academic decision-making, budgeting, and staffing. The principal built a local nonprofit board, which contracts with the district to oversee the school. The school expanded on its successful partnership with Marian University to offer even more opportunities to students and staff. Cold Spring is now governed by a nonprofit board with additional oversight by the district’s elected school board. This creative district partnership empowers educators to design schools to best meet the needs of their students.

We are seeing many of these schools, districts, and nonprofit partners work in creative ways to ensure that when these schools are created, that they are accessible to students who need them most, either by implementing enrollment systems that give all residents access to these schools, zoning them to prioritize neighborhoods or populations where the need is great, or even creating rules to ensure that students from high-need backgrounds are being prioritized in admissions for high-demand schools. We want to work with local leaders to build on strategies like these and to learn more about how they can be employed to make sure students and their families are finding schools that are best for them.

Kevin, what do you say to the critics who contend that increasing the number of charter schools hurts the traditional public school system? What did your experience in Camden teach you about this issue?

Shafer: That this wasn’t my experience. In my time serving Camden City Schools, one lesson became incredibly clear — parents tended to focus less on what type of school their students attended. What they did care about, deeply, was that their students were able to attend a school that was safe, warm, welcoming, and prepared their students for success.

The other thing we saw in Camden was that existing traditional public schools improved right alongside new renaissance and charter schools. Thanks to incredible hard work by teachers, school leaders, parents, and so many others, we saw district and charter schools improve together to the benefit of an entire city. There are other examples where this has been the case as well. In Washington, D.C., for instance, the traditional public schools and the charters have both made significant gains on state and national assessments over the past decade. Our hope is that this trend continues and that creating new schools continues to make all public schools better.

Neerav, there’s been a wide mix of reactions to the initial announcement that you posted to your blog back in July. In your opinion, what is the best argument against The City Fund’s approach? Do any of the criticisms resonate with you — might you be wrong?

Kingsland: Our public education system is incredibly complex, and making it better is very hard. One piece of research I always come back to is Roland Fryer’s review of 196 education studies where he found only four things that seemed to consistently work at scale — pre-K, tutoring, high-quality curriculum, and charter schools. Clearly a lot has been tried and not a lot has worked. We try to keep this in mind.

I think there are many reasonable arguments against our work. Some point to the fact that most countries with very high-performing public school systems haven’t taken the approach of the cities we hold up as successes — except for the Dutch, whose approach has much in common with these cities. This is true, and I think it should make us cautious.

It’s also fair to argue that other reforms are better bets. It’s possible that personalized learning, early childhood education, increased public funding, or a deeper focus on integration could be the best way to make public education better. Or perhaps the best way to increase student learning is to address poverty directly by giving poor families more money.

While I don’t think our strategy is at odds with any of these approaches, it is possible that our effort is just not the right focus. I don’t think this is true, but it could be. Lastly, I do think one check on our efforts is that they can only really work if parents want them. A new school, be it district or charter, can only thrive if families send their children to the school. I think this is a really important aspect of our work.

Regarding that preliminary announcement, can you tell me a bit more about the fund’s preliminary plans? Which cities are you going to be supporting in the immediate term? When do you plan to launch?

Kingsland: We can tell you a bit more about that now. In addition to the continued investments that we’re supporting from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, we’ve also made some initial grants to support the work in some additional cities: Atlanta, Indianapolis, Newark, Denver, San Antonio, St. Louis, and Nashville. In each city, we’re supporting some combination of local nonprofits, community and parent advocacy organizations, and high-performing schools. We’ve chosen these cities because we believe they have a real chance to increase educational opportunity for all their students.

On an organizational note, members of our team are also now doing some work as part of an organization called Public School Allies, a new 501(c)(4), that supports local leaders in advocating for the positive changes they think matter most to their communities. ĚýAnd finally, we’re excited to be officially launching our website early in the new year, where information about the cities we work with — and the grants we’re making — will be available in one transparent place.

And what about your funding? We’ve talked a lot about local solutions, but you’ve shared that your funders are primarily the Arnold Foundation and the Hastings Fund, who are national family foundations. How do their priorities play into your decision-making?

Kingsland: We want to be transparent about our funding as well. We’re a nonprofit working for the public good, and we’re OK with scrutiny. Along with the Hastings Fund and the Arnold Foundation, we’ve also received funds from the Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Ballmer Group.

But our strategy doesn’t come from them. It comes from the cities that have made public education better, and it will be improved in the coming years by working with local leaders, parents, community organizations, and business leaders to find solutions that do right by their students.

Kameelah, tell me more about the organization’s plans — what’s most important to you over the next few years?

Shaheed-Diallo: The most important thing for us is to identify a small group of cities that already have local leadership aspiring to drive changes aligned with our core beliefs. We want to see if we can help them make their public education systems much better for students who have historically been underserved.

Over the next decade, we’d love to see 10 or so cities show that there might be a better way to deliver public education. And I’m personally excited that Indianapolis continues to be one of them. So much good has happened there over the past decade, and the work isn’t finished yet. But we have bipartisan and community support, and I’m confident the work will continue.

At the end of the day, public education is one of the most important foundations for success in our country. We’re inspired by the idea that city leaders across the country might show us that there are new ways to make that foundation stronger for their students. That’s why we exist.

Go Deeper: See our full . Get the latest interviews, profiles, investigations, and essays delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for The 74 Newsletter.

This means the 11 charter schools known as Summit Public Schools will now be a separate organization from the still-unnamed nonprofit that will operate the Summit Learning platform used by these charters and 380 other public, private, and charter schools across the country.

“We’re at a moment in time where we’ve incubated [Summit Learning], it is relatively big, it is successful, it is substantive and can stand on its own,” said Summit CEO Diane Tavenner. “It just really makes sense at this point for the Summit Learning program to be on its own and be only focused on that work, and for Summit [Public Schools] to be able to continue to do what we do best.”

However, the two organizations will still continue to have a strong relationship, Tavenner said, with Summit Public Schools using the technology and curriculum developed by the Summit Learning platform, and likely being used to pilot new programs.

Summit Public Schools has grown from the Redwood City, California, school started by Tavenner in 2003 to 11 schools in California and Washington serving students from sixth to 12th grades. The network recently started a teacher residency program to train educators in personalized learning.

Summit started developing its personalized learning platform in 2012, partnering with Facebook in 2014 to share the technology with schools nationwide for free. The program is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The personalized learning software is used by 72,000 students nationwide and has consistent demand, Tavenner said. She said the organization doesn’t plan to expand the program, but rather, the new nonprofit will focus on meeting current demand.

While the platform’s popularity has grown, some school districts have resisted, notably, one in , that suspended the program in 2017 after parent outcry, which included student privacy concerns around data collection.

Although Summit collects student data, it does not sell it, the organization states on . Summit complies with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and has signed the Student Privacy Pledge, both commitments to protecting children’s privacy online. Facebook does not have access to students’ data through this platform,

The new nonprofit will begin running the learning platform in the 2019-20 school year. The board has yet to pick a leader to run the organization, but 90 current Summit team members, along with Chief Program Officer Andy Goldin, will take the lead. Tavenner will serve on the new nonprofit’s board, along with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chief Priscilla Chan and Chief Financial Officer and Head of Operations Peggy Alford.

This move furthers what Tavenner calls one of the tenets of her original Summit school: to innovate and share those innovations with other schools.

“There is a responsibility that goes with that, to give back to the broader system and to all students,” she said.

My day at the NYC Autism Charter School began by joining the staff to help welcome each of the 33 students into the school with smiles, high-fives, and big hellos. Despite their profound autism, nearly all the students (their ages range from 5 to 21) ride buses provided by the New York City Department of Education to school each day and walk independently to their classrooms. That might not seem remarkable, but consider that most of these students are significantly verbally and cognitively impaired, and many deal with severe anxiety and frustration from trying to navigate a world that overwhelms and confounds them. To help their students succeed each morning and afternoon, staff dot the stairwell and occasionally ride the buses to provide guardrails for them, standing back as much as possible to encourage independence.

The morning routine is representative of what happens throughout the school day. The youngest students are patiently taught to learn how to learn. For many of them, just sitting at a table and conversing with a teacher and other students is a goal that takes months to achieve. An intensive system of individualized goal setting, data collection, and intervention strategies is constantly being deployed, based on the Applied Behavior Analysis therapy methods developed by psychologists as a way to shift behaviors using positive incentives and reinforcements. The school was founded in 2005 by two desperate moms who had children with profound autism. Julie Fisher, the executive director, has a background in social work and is a behavior analyst.

The success stories I heard were moving.

One young student couldn’t tolerate anything or anyone touching his mouth and was suffering from significant dental hygiene problems. For the past several months, teachers have worked with the boy to slowly, step by step, increase his tolerance for toothbrushing and dental procedures. On the day of my visit, the boy showed his father how he can now independently brush all his teeth. His reward was a loud round of cheering and a scooter ride down the hall.

I watched a group of four young students sit together learning about mammals and discussing one another’s perspectives. Several months prior, none of them would sit in a group, and they spoke only about their own interests and thoughts.

Older students have much more advanced goals and accomplishments. While I visited, students were doing simple research projects, simple literary text analyses, and all kinds of job-training tasks. By no means are students at the school doing what most of us would consider high-level academic tasks or college prep work, but there is also no doubt that they are working extremely hard every minute of the day toward clear life goals that their family and the school believe are achievable for them.

It’s exciting to hear about the students’ accomplishments, but I also know from parenting a child with much less severe challenges that what this school is doing for their parents is life-changing. One young student’s mother had not been able to attend church since he was a baby because he was disruptive during the service. After intensive therapy at school, the family recently began attending church together again. The father I met was glowing when he spoke about how proud he is of his son’s progress and how much better things are at home now that they have strategies that work.

I heard once that the divorce rate for parents who have children with autism is 80 percent. This is apparently a myth, but the amount of stress, fear, and isolation that families who have children with autism endure makes that an easily believable figure.

Families at the school are deeply engaged. There are twice-annual Individualized Education Program meetings to set and review goals, plus monthly meetings to review data and adjust strategies. I sat in on a meeting in which teachers and parents discussed data that showed how a child’s disruptive incidents had decreased so dramatically that all agreed there was no need to track them anymore. The teacher used the rest of the time to ask how things were going at home, help the parents develop strategies to address issues, and think through ways to help with the issues at school.

Whether teachers were trying to help students with self-care, job training, or academic tasks, I observed ongoing diagnosis, creative problem-solving, and determination from the staff to focus on setting students up for an independent life. An array of programs at the school are designed to facilitate successful pathways for each student and to draw on resources outside the school. Middle school students from nearby district and charter schools are recruited to serve as peer mentors. The goal is to expose the students with autism to neurotypical peers and to help build understanding and empathy in the other direction. The school also runs an extensive internship program in partnership with local businesses as wide-ranging as Facebook, Shake Shack, and White Castle. Students build rĂŠsumĂŠs that they can show to prospective future employers.

Specialized schools like the NYC Autism Charter School naturally raise questions about whether students would benefit from more exposure to, and inclusion in, “regular” classrooms and peers. As I’ve experienced, there is often a trade-off between a school that is fully equipped to accommodate children’s differences and a more inclusive environment, but the hope and law are that students should be served in the least restrictive environment possible. The school has moved students into more inclusive settings, but it is rare.

I also wondered whether staff at the school are as determined to teach academic skills as they clearly are with social and life skills. Most of the students are unlikely to go to college; nevertheless, the academic curriculum seemed underdeveloped, and most of the school’s leaders are social workers and behavior analysts, not academic instructors.

Finally, I understand the urgent need to ensure that students learn to comply with adults’ requests in order to get jobs and function in “normal” social settings, but I wonder if enough attention is paid to also cultivating the knowledge in these students that they have a unique lens on the world that can be beautiful and important. I saw little in the way of art and music classes, where many students with autism shine. While all students are taught piano (and perform at an annual recital to a packed house), there is not a great deal of music outside that, and art tends to be part of individual instruction if, or when, students show an interest. In one class, students were asked to write about what happened in a picture showing two people sitting near a log in a park with a basket. One girl’s description was about a mystery in “dark Brazil.” I wanted to know about what was happening in her dark Brazil, but instead, the teacher moved on and the students would find out the following day what really happened and whether they got the story right.

Kids with autism or who are just complex thinkers and learners experience daily messages that they don’t fit in and must change in order to do so. In many ways, they must, but they also need as many opportunities as possible to be valued for who they are. Despite regular efforts at the school to provide positive feedback and asset-based thinking, I wonder if it could do more to celebrate and share the wonder and beauty of the autistic mind.

There are no easy answers to these questions. Julie Fisher and her team are well aware of the tensions and worry about them.

The school is an extremely resource-intensive endeavor. Students benefit from a 1:1 student/adult ratio and go to school year-round. Good special education teachers are notoriously hard to find, and the job is very intense, so the school does a lot of internal staff coaching and in-house training. Most charter schools would be unable to afford this level of support, but the school has a special allocation from the city to support its students’ unique needs.

The original East Harlem school recently opened another campus in the Bronx, placing further pressure on the staff and creating the need to systematize much of what they previously held in their heads. The school now has online student files, curricular material, and other resources. More packaging and systematizing of their approaches would likely help relieve training and supervisory demands, and could allow them to spread their most effective strategies to other schools that work with students with “low-incidence” or profound disabilities.

In all, I came away moved at the intense dedication and commitment I saw. The students were happy, loved, supported at home and at school, and being prepared to make the most of their lives. And the school was looking to pull every community asset and lever it could find to do that. That is personalized learning at its best.

Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education as well as affiliate faculty at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.

The media images illustrating students in “personalized learning” environments often look something like this: elementary schoolers with headphones on, looking at tablets, or teenagers typing away on laptops.

But during a recent panel discussion, experts and educators sought to make one thing clear: Personalized learning is not about technology, and you don’t need a lot of money to carry it out.

“It’s really about leadership,” said Heidi Vazquez, a third- and fourth-grade teacher at The Compass School in Kingston, Rhode Island, at the Education Writers Association’s national seminar in Los Angeles.

“It’s definitely a lot easier [with money], and technology is an amazing tool to help you get there,” Vazquez said, “but … in order to do this work, the thing that teachers need the most … is time.”

“They need time to collaborate; they need time to figure it out,” Vazquez said. “The pacing question is the biggest piece of it.”

Also on the panel were April Chou, vice president of education at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University and skeptic of technology-based school reform.

‘The Difficulty of Innovating’

The panel comes at a time of keen interest — and investments — in personalized learning. In June, the published a report identifying several key challenges of work in six school systems trying to create personalized learning models in collaboration with regional partners. The effort was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as was the study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education looking at how well it worked.

“Taken together, the experiences of the schools … followed a familiar pattern of promising practices struggling to replicate at scale across systems,” the report says, and they “underscore the difficulty of innovating inside a system that was never designed for innovation.”

For instance, teachers and principals had difficulty translating abstract goals into “meaningful student outcomes” to guide classroom practices, and central offices “failed to fundamentally change structures, policies, and supports to facilitate innovation,” the report said.

Even at CZI, an organization formed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, that seeks “,” officials are cautious about technology’s role in personalized learning.

“It’s really critical to recognize it, that we see technology as a tool, and it’s only just that — a tool in the hands of people that can be powerful depending on how we use it,” Chou said. “Technology has a role to play, but at the center of any of these teaching and learning interactions is really the relationship between a student and a teacher. I think we miss the mark collectively when we think about personalized learning as being synonymous with technology.”

Chan and Zuckerberg are expected to invest “” in “whole-child personalized learning” through CZI, as Education Week explained in a recent story.

As more institutions seek to expand personalized learning initiatives — including the U.S. Department of Education, under the Obama administration — advocates and experts .

A Historical Perspective

The nascence of personalized learning, in fact, can be seen in little-known initiatives of the 1920s and 1930s like the , the , and the — all evidence of personalized learning as defined by “an earlier generation of reformers who loved innovation,” Cuban said.

But the personalized learning movement of the 21st century is facing layers of conflict: chief among them the coexistence of the “age-graded school system” (in which students are separated into different classrooms based on age) and standards-based accountability, Cuban said.

Cuban said the age-graded school remains the “dominant” structure in U.S. education, even in places that seek to innovate in a variety of ways to differentiate instruction and better address individual needs.

During the EWA panel, Cuban also discussed the standards-based accountability system that we now know so well — a system that requires students to demonstrate mastery of a certain set of knowledge and skills by a certain time, largely measured by periodic tests. This accountability system that now governs public schools across the country inherently conflicts with the personalized learning initiatives that districts and advocates are so arduously trying to get off the ground, Cuban said.

“Many schools trumpet their alignment of lessons to Common Core standards and personalized learning in the same breath,” Cuban said. “They have learned that those tensions exist, but in my own research in 2016, 2017, they seldom arose in any discussion with teachers, principals, and superintendents who were enamored with personalized learning.”

Developing metrics for how to measure personalized learning is a work in progress, Cuban said. Tying outcomes back to how students perform on traditional assessments, or even to student engagement, inevitably perpetuates the tension between allowing students to progress at their own pace and the edicts of standards-based accountability. And early of how well personalized learning systems are serving students have yielded .

What questions should parents, educators, and other interested parties be asking as they seek to understand personalized learning and how it works in the classroom?

Start with the “why?” and “how?”:

●ĚýAsk school or district leaders:

ဝĚýWhat are the purposes of the program that you now are going to invest in?

ဝĚýHow would you define success?

ဝĚýWhat does personalized learning mean to you?

ဝĚýWhat is your vision for personalized learning?

ဝĚýWhat culture shifts are you seeing (or not) as a result of personalized learning?

●ĚýAsk teachers:

ဝĚýWhat are the purposes of personalized learning to you as a teacher?

ဝĚýHow would you define success in your classroom?

ဝĚýWhat culture shifts are you seeing (or not) as a result of personalized learning?

●ĚýAsk students:

ဝĚýHow does this classroom approach differ from prior experiences in school?

ဝĚýShow me a project you’re working on and what you’ve learned from it.

ဝĚýHow does your teacher help you?

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

That’s according to from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which analyzed the efforts of districts and organizations that received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create personalized learning models in their schools. The research comes at a critical moment for the personalized learning field, as scant evidence has emerged to demonstrate whether the billions of dollars invested in these scattered efforts are paying off.

Researchers found successes in smaller districts in the northeastern United States as well as charter schools, underscoring their argument that the bureaucracies of large district systems often impede the implementation of personalized learning.

“This study is very clear that just asking our teachers to do this work is probably not going to work in the long run,” said Betheny Gross, research director at CRPE and co-author of the study along with Michael DeArmond, a senior research analyst. “We noted just tremendous misalignment between what the folks in the schools were trying to do and what their school systems were prepared to support them to do.”

In 2014, the Gates Foundation gave $6 million to $7 million to each “Next Generation” grantee, 12 districts and organizations tasked with creating replicable personalized learning models. The foundation then asked CRPE to analyze how these efforts performed in the first few years. Researchers wrote that “the system change envisioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as necessary for widespread adoption largely did not occur in the early years of these initiatives.”

Personalized learning changed how instruction was taught and the physical arrangement of the classroom, but it rarely reinvented the way students engaged with academic content, researchers said. Students and teachers both reported preferring the individualized style of instruction that is a hallmark of personalized learning, but they felt stymied by a lack of support and ambiguity in expectations from their superiors.

The tension between taking innovative risks and delivering on yearly state and federal accountability benchmarks, as well as a lack of curricular or financial resources, often stifled schools’ work, principals told researchers.

“The initiative’s challenges through the first few years of effort underscore the difficulty of innovating inside a system that was never designed for innovation,” the researchers wrote.

But not all schools failed in their explorations. Gross found that principals played an important role in whether personalized learning was implemented well. Successful leaders allowed teachers to innovate but then paused to analyze what worked and decide whether those approaches met the school’s goals and what innovations to stick with, the researchers found.

The newly envisioned classrooms in these schools — from Denver to Dallas to Chicago — emphasized social-emotional supports, project-based curriculum, “playlists” that helped students navigate their learning, internships, and flexible seating arrangements. Schools used grant funding for professional development, coaches, and consultants to help educators plan.

“The thing to understand about all of this is that we have to learn not to think of it as another flavor or version of reform,” said Andrew Calkins, director of Next Generation Learning Challenges, one of the initiatives launched by the Gates Foundation to award these personalized learning grants. “This is a fundamental rethinking and reimagining of everything about what schools focus on.”

Enthusiastic, but in need of support

To analyze the effort, researchers interviewed more than 300 educators, principals, and district staff, observed classrooms, and conducted a survey of teachers both inside and outside the initiative to compare experiences.

The survey revealed that teachers implementing personalized learning models were more likely to let students work at their own pace, say that their students had choice in what they learned in class, and report that their students moved through the curriculum based on successful mastery of a topic.

Teachers found themselves putting in extra hours after school, on weekends, and over the summer to create personalized learning models for their students. But despite the extra workload, teachers told researchers that they preferred this type of instruction.

“I love teaching like this,” a Florida elementary school teacher told researchers. “The students can see how excited I am, so they’re feeding off of that.”

A 10th-grade science teacher said, “I think we all instinctively know that it’s the most natural, effective way to teach and learn.”

Some students also reported enthusiasm for having so much control over their learning. One student told researchers he had worked his way up to a fifth-grade academic level, despite technically being a fourth-grader. When students were asked whether they would prefer if teachers just told them what to do, they said no.

However, some expressed frustration during these transition years, telling researchers that expectations weren’t always clear.

“We really didn’t know how [standards-based grading] worked and there was a lot of confusion,” a high school student said. “It was just thrown on you.” Students told teachers they didn’t understand why they got a certain grade, a confusion that increased anxiety for high school seniors applying for college.

Not everyone was engaged in rigorous academic instruction, researchers found. In one classroom, a student made a model of a circus tent, which involved calculating measurements of shapes like columns, semicircles, and rectangles, and scaling them to a smaller size. But in another corner of the same room, a peer, who was significantly behind academically, was described by researchers as looking “utterly bored,” “mindlessly” clicking through remedial math software on a computer.

It’s unclear what the academic outcomes looked like in these classrooms. CRPE researchers weren’t tasked with calculating achievement, but in 2017, RAND researchers found that schools with personalized learning models improved in math by 3 percentile points in relationship to a comparison group.

What schools can learn

Educators, researchers, and leaders participating in this grant work said they weren’t surprised by the findings, and they recognized that schools have more work to do.

To that end, researchers compiled recommendations based on two years of observations, including several strategies that districts can implement to help scale their personalized learning efforts.

1. Decide what problems need to be solved — Bring together teachers to pinpoint problems and set goals that focus on innovation.

2. Create flexibility in schools — Identify what policies in schools conflict with innovation and create flexibility. Ensure the district office understands the personalized learning goals of schools.

3. Support change management strategies — Add coaching support to schools and help leaders learn how to manage innovative changes.

4. Pick leaders for innovation in districts — Identify leaders to help guide the work of personalized learning and allow time for collaboration among teachers so they can share best practices.

The work is still in progress, said Mark Kostin, associate director at Great Schools Partnership, one of the grantee organizations that partnered with 21 schools in the northeast region of the U.S. to help them implement personalized learning models. He said the schools he’s been working with have found success in sharing their ideas with each other and creating a common language about what they want to implement in their schools. But he agreed that schools have also experienced the challenges outlined in the new research.

“This work we always knew would take time and effort and energy and persistence,” he said.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to the , the personalized learning efforts analyzed here in this research, and The 74.

We don’t have to live with this social Darwinism, especially when states like Connecticut, South Carolina, and Massachusetts show that we can bring these highly effective learning programs into free public schools and achieve great results.

Many know Montessori as a preferred educational approach among families who can afford to send their children to expensive private schools. What they don’t know is that Montessori was originally developed to elevate the lives of low-income children — and that it is being embraced in the public sector. For example, public schools in Hartford, Connecticut, offer Montessori preschool magnet programs to children from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Angeline Lillard of the University of Virginia Hartford’s public Montessori programs and found that they leveled the playing field for children from low-income families.

Despite having lower academic measures at the start of preschool, by the end, she found, low-income children who attended Montessori were statistically equal to their peers from higher-income households who attended Montessori and other schools. In contrast, children from low-income households who attended traditional preschools evidenced a consistent and persistent gap in achievement compared with peers from higher-income families.

Greater academic achievement in Montessori didn’t come at the expense of developing integrated skills that are essential for better life outcomes. In Lillard’s study, Montessori children liked school more than children in other programs. They were more persistent in dealing with difficult tasks and had better social understanding and higher executive functioning that improved their ability to engage in goal-directed behaviors. These are skills that are relevant for school and life success.

A study of South Carolina Montessori programs evidenced similar results. Low-income Montessori students showed more growth in English language arts, math, and social studies than low-income peers outside the program, and Montessori students in general showed higher creativity, executive function, and school attendance, and fewer behavioral issues, than their non-Montessori peers.

Montessori is by no means the only early learning approach that works. Teachers and staff at Boston Public Schools created , a model that combines the best elements of child-centric, highly developmental, brain-building early childhood education programs. It now operates in the majority of the district’s elementary schools, and the result is citywide improvement in language, literacy, math, executive functioning, and emotional development. Best of all, Boston is making Focus on Early Learning available to all public schools — complete with an infrastructure, high-quality materials, and guidance on how to build collaborative environments, evaluation mechanisms, and continuous quality improvement.

There are important lessons here. High-quality early learning programs can be brought to scale in very diverse public settings to produce the outcomes we want to see in all children. We can be more successful by focusing on developing the whole child, not just academic skills. And, what’s ideal for low-income children is what’s ideal for all children: understanding them as people and giving them self-agency, the freedom to learn at their own pace, and the guidance to become lifelong learners and doers.

Iheoma U. Iruka, Ph.D., is the chief research innovation officer and director of The Center for Early Education Research and Evaluation at HighScope Educational Research Foundation.

Most of the money will be spent on professional development for teachers, with some going toward technology for classrooms. Chicago Public Schools will receive $4 million, and , a national personalized learning organization that has worked closely with Chicago to develop its student-centered learning models, will receive $10 million.

“The goal of this grant is to expand the number of schools that are getting access to personalized learning,” said Phyllis Lockett, founder and CEO of LEAP Innovations. “This opportunity for equity is really huge, just from the standpoint of personalized learning meeting kids where they are and valuing differences.”

Personalized learning in Chicago is opt-in, meaning principals and teachers can choose to adopt the approach. LEAP helps support those schools. Lockett said there’s great demand from Chicago schools, making the extra funding critical for expansion. Nearly 100 schools will be added to the 120 that already have personalized learning models.

LEAP’s work will center on redesigning traditional teaching and learning practices, which includes professional development sessions throughout the school year, in-school job coaching, classroom resources, technology, and social-emotional support. The personalized learning model involves more student agency over classwork, collaboration with other students during the day, and teachers working in tandem with their peers and having more one-on-one time with students.

Though not every district has $14 million to spend on personalized learning support, Lockett said the approach is still scalable. She pointed to a recent report showing that although upfront costs in Chicago ranged from $338,000 to $780,000 per school, they decreased over five years to become 2 percent of a school’s budget.

“We’re partnering with Chicago Public Schools and LEAP Innovations to redesign learning environments and put far better tools in the hands of teachers — helping them do the work of their lives and provide transformative and personalized learning experiences that let students unlock their potential,” said Jim Shelton, president of education for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in a press release. “We’re proud to support CPS and LEAP’s efforts to help educators understand and meet the needs of each and every student.”

Disclosure: LEAP Innovations and The 74 both receive funding from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

She thought for a moment. In any other school, in any other year, she might have said no. After all, it was the beginning of a new trimester, and she already had lessons planned out for the next month. But something else was turning in her head, and in two seconds she decided to scrap those plans.

“Yeah, let’s do it,” she said.

It was exactly the kind of impromptu decision Henderson was supposed to be making. Her school, Barrington Middle School in Barrington, Rhode Island, is one of three personalized learning laboratory schools for the state, experimenting with deeper, experiential learning practices that officials hope will expand to encompass all of Rhode Island’s and eventually become national models.

As personalized learning has gained traction nationally, Rhode Island has become a leader in the field after launching a statewide initiative in 2016 under Gov. Gina Raimondo’s Office of Innovation. Central to this $2 million public-private partnership are the three Lighthouse Laboratory schools — 360 High School, Barrington Middle, and Captain Isaac Paine Elementary — that are receiving $200,000 over two years to help fund professional development, curricular materials, or staff stipends.

The goal is to devise scalable methods of empowering students to drive their own education through personalized learning, to better prepare them for careers. “We need to take this moment to catch our education system up to the 21st century,” said Daniela Fairchild, director of education for the Office of Innovation.

The Lighthouse schools check in at least once a month with the office, which has staff available for ongoing support, is bolstering professional development for teachers, and created an open resource database for educators statewide to share their materials, curriculum, and best practices.

The three schools had already been delving into personalized learning before the grants, so the state money is meant to help them accelerate work in two years that might have normally taken six to seven years, Fairchild said.

In Barrington, interest in personalized learning was sparked by the district’s performance on the 2014 PISA exam. Administrators poring over the results of the international test noticed something that concerned them: Students weren’t able to connect the material they were learning in school to the questions on the exam — and, by extension, to skills they’d need for successful careers after graduation.

“We want kids to own things, not just test well,” said Paula Dillon, assistant superintendent at Barrington Public Schools. “ ‘Can they apply it?’ is more important than ‘Can they regurgitate it?’ ”

So the district decided to move toward a deeper, experiential learning model that would connect student learning with projects and real-world impacts. Specifically, they focused on teaching the “4 Cs”: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.

Part of that effort involved a partnership with Northeastern University’s — Network of Experiential Learning Teachers — program, which connects educators from innovative schools across the nation to collaborate and share best practices. The university has long practiced what it preaches, with its college students participating in learning projects around the globe.

For Chris Unger, associate teaching professor in Northeastern’s graduate school of education, who helps facilitate NExT’s outreach, teaching through experiences works for the same reason driver-education schools put students behind the wheel of a car. “Employers aren’t asking, ‘Do they know this book knowledge?’ ” Unger said. “They’re asking for people who can critically think.”

The kind of teacher collaboration modeled at NExT has been built into teacher schedules at Barrington. The school has Hackathons, where teachers share the projects they’re working on with other educators and community members to get feedback. The Rhode Island–based , which supports personalized learning efforts, has partnered with the district to help with teacher training.

Teachers are encouraged to work with their colleagues to create interdisciplinary projects for students. For example, Henderson and several colleagues formed a new entrepreneurship class by combining their technology and business classes.

To encourage idea sharing and feedback, Principal Andrew Anderson hung a chart with an image of a pineapple (a traditional symbol of welcome) where teachers can write down upcoming lessons, in case their colleagues want to observe and learn from them or offer advice on how to improve on what they’re teaching.

This deeper, experiential learning has led to increased teacher leadership and student voice.

“From an educator standpoint, it means that administrators trust the learning that is going on in the classroom,” Henderson said. “For my students, it means they can see I trust them … and I am completely interested in who they are as individuals.”

Hands-on learning

In Julie Abruzzi’s math class, sixth-grade students were talking animatedly as they designed 3-D models for makerspaces. Barrington Middle School is constructing a new campus next to the current building, and students will be involved in deciding what should go into the new makerspace that will be housed there.

Calculating ratios, students first sketched out their designs on graph paper and then selected scraps from a recycling bin to create their models. Their dreams for the space included everything from green screens to bookshelves to chairs that swung from the ceiling. “It’s a place where you can make learning fun,” said sixth-grader Ethan Knight.

In science class, teacher Shawn Henderson used national news to inspire a lesson that combined the skills of math, science, and language arts. After a in Yankee Stadium in September, he divided national baseball stadiums among his students and had them calculate the distance between the seats and home plate, and whether fans had enough time to react to a fly ball. The students then wrote to the ballparks’ directors recommending improvements to stadium safety. The students received several letters back, thanking them for their advice and providing feedback on how their suggested improvements — like a clear wall — might be impractical due to weather.

“Please let your students know the Houston Astros are proud of them for their research,” wrote Bobby Forest, vice president of baseball stadium operations, in a letter to the class. “It is because of them change can and will happen.”

Over in Rebecca Henderson’s technology lab, eighth-graders were finishing up prototypes for their entrepreneurship class, where they’ve been creating their own businesses, tracking would-be competitors, and learning marketing skills for the product designs they’ve invented. These creations can be anything they want, as long as it tackles a solution to a problem. The students’ inventions range from a goalpost that tracks how fast a ball is traveling to dog collars that serve as a housebreaking training tool by causing a doorbell to chime when the pet approaches the door, signaling it needs to go out. The students said they like the freedom that comes from this open-ended entrepreneurship.

“You experience it on your own,” said student Eva Brieger. “You figure it out on your own.”

“It’s cool that you don’t have any answers,” classmate Morgan Alverson added.

But this kind of autonomy can be frightening for educators, who have their eyes on standardized tests and feel the pressures of preparing students for a wide span of knowledge rather than spending time digging deep into a few topic areas.

“I’m not going to lie and say it’s not a concern of ours, how we will continue to do [on standardized tests],” said Andrew Anderson, principal of Barrington Middle School, where, in the , proficiency rates in math and reading were 64 and 81 percent, respectively. “But I feel like teachers have found a good balance of making sure curriculum and content is being taught but also having these opportunities where kids can explore.”

Rebecca Henderson said some teachers feel trapped because of the traditional demands of testing, but over time at Barrington, she’s seen them loosen up because of the freedom project-based learning allows. “I’m starting to see more teachers let go of traditional teaching that spoke to tests,” she said. “That has been a gradual process.”

Fairchild emphasized that state assessments aren’t the only way students are evaluated. She pointed to the Every Student Succeeds Act, which allows for states to measure accountability based on indicators like chronic absenteeism and suspension rates as well as reading and math scores. “Assessments are an important way to measure our performance and progress, but they’re not the only way,” she wrote in an email to The 74. “The best preparation for a test is great teaching and challenging and engaging content.”

To measure the performance of Lighthouse Schools, the Office of Innovation is working with the nonprofit to analyze the three schools’ assessments. They will be looking at local tests, rather than state exams, because of recent changes that make comparisons challenging. The state is also measuring school climate and culture data that should be released this month, Fairchild said.

A preliminary look by the state at Barrington Middle School showed that all teachers have begun plans for project-based learning units in their classrooms. At the beginning of the school year, 49 percent of students were tracking their own performance data, and the school has a goal of 100 percent by year’s end.

The state is still developing tools for assessing the effectiveness of its schools’ personalized learning strategies. Next up: a partnership with Highlander Institute and to create and test a tool for teachers to measure the effectiveness of their personalized learning instruction with their students.

Rhode Island may be the nation’s smallest state, but that’s part of the reason it can effectively serve as a laboratory to experiment with best practices around personalized learning, said Richard Culatta, head of the International Society for Technology in Education and former leader of Rhode Island’s personalized learning work. He thinks personalized learning has the power to level the achievement gap.

“Over time, what I hope to see — I think the students will see in Rhode Island and other places where this is implemented — is narrowing the equity gap,” Culatta told The 74. “I think one of the reasons we have so many gaps is because we don’t have a learning model that’s tailored to individual student needs.”

The state’s ESSA plan also makes the work of personalized learning easier, Culatta said. The federal law gives states more flexibility to innovate and measure success beyond traditional academic indicators. When Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos approved Rhode Island’s ESSA plan in March, she for its personalized learning opportunities, specifically “Pathway Endorsements” that allow students to focus on subjects that fit their interests.

The word “personalized” appears six times in the of Rhode Island’s ESSA plan, utilized as a method for improving low-performing schools, a priority for awarding out-of-school funding for disadvantaged students, and a way to enhance high school diplomas.

The word also manifested itself in the students’ robot-wedding preparations. In the month after Rebecca Henderson agreed to her students’ proposal, the sixth-graders had learned to program the robots to walk down the aisle and dance at the reception. They also learned how to plan a ceremony and to collaborate with their classmates to come to agreement on wedding music and formal attire for the bride and groom. And when the big day finally arrived, students invited teachers and community members to come see WALL-E and Eve get hitched.

https://twitter.com/bms4c/status/957818308207828993

“I was more accepting [of the idea] because allowing them to personalize their projects empowers them to learn,” Henderson said. “I no longer have to ask them to learn. I guide them to learn.”

Disclosure: The Highlander Institute, which supports Barrington Middle School’s work, receives financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

“That reaffirms that personalized learning is not about technology — it’s about changing teacher and school practices in support of better outcomes,” said Tim Carnahan, director of programs at , a national personalized learning organization based in Chicago that released the report.

Principals called teachers the most important asset in implementing personalized learning, the report authors found. “Teachers remain the most critical resource in personalized learning models,” Carnahan said.

The analysis — conducted by the education consulting firm Afton Partners — looked at six district and charter schools in Chicago’s Breakthrough Schools Initiative and found that although upfront costs were 7 percent of per-pupil funding, after five years they were 2 percent of the school’s budget. Startup costs ranged from $338,000 to $780,000 at each school.

This finding is important to personalized learning supporters looking to scale programs at a time when many districts find their budgets perpetually on the chopping block, said Katie Morrison, director at Afton Partners.

“What happens in the case of budget reductions?” she said. “[The analysis] confirms that [personalized learning] can be done with limited funds.”

About half the startup costs were for “things” — technology software or new classroom furniture to create flexible learning spaces — and the other half were for “people” — professional development, stipends, and bonuses, Morrison said.

Many teachers in these personalized learning schools worked as part of a team, instructing multi-age classrooms with small staff-to-student ratios in project-based learning environments. Technology allowed teachers to create profiles for students with individualized learning pathways.

But Carnahan and Morrison agreed that schools need to do a better job of financially supporting the teachers in these roles. Stipends — rather than increased salaries — for new teacher leadership responsibilities aren’t a sustainable model, Morrison said, and schools need flexibility to restructure how teachers are paid as their roles expand.

The authors recommended that schools pilot programs with flexible pay models for teachers and analyze which technology is the most sustainable and effective.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides funding to The 74 and the Breakthrough Schools Chicago Initiative.

Personalized learning can be done anywhere, but to do it well, change is required in every tier of a school system.

That’s the view of Richard Culatta, who helped lead Rhode Island’s Personalized Learning Initiative in 2016 with a mission of spreading this model of learning across the state and developing best practices in laboratory schools.

Part of the challenge is that the phrase, which is growing in popularity, is very difficult to define. Some districts are quick to equate personalized learning with technology alone — a mentality that has caused many to fail, said Culatta, who now leads the International Society for Technology in Education, a global nonprofit organization that shares best practices in education technology among its nearly 16,000 members.

“You can’t buy personalized learning,” Culatta said — but “I’ve never seen a successful implementation of personalized learning without some tech to support it.”

Culatta spoke with The 74 about personalized learning, technology, and the elements that make up a successful personalized learning model.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: There’s a lot of talk about what personalized learning is and what it isn’t. How do you define it?

Culatta: I think the easiest definition is, personalized learning adapts the pace of learning and the learning approach to the needs of individual learners, and it ties to their interests and passions and provides learner autonomy.

If you had a parent say, “My school’s pushing personalized learning; I don’t know what that means,” would you explain it differently?

The only thing I would say a little bit differently is it means yes, the learning is adapted to their child, but it also means that they’re getting input and feedback in near-real time. Maybe not instantly, but pretty darn close. So they are able to know what supports they can provide, which, in traditional learning, comes after it’s too late to be helpful. Most of the time, in traditional learning experiences, by the time the parent gets the feedback, it’s kind of autopsy feedback. It’s like, “Hey, your kid has failed a test,” or “They’re behind in all these things.” Which is great that the parents know that, but in personalized learning, you’re saying, “Hey, here’s where your kid’s at, literally, today, and here are opportunities where you can help support them in what they learned today.”

Do you see personalized learning as something a whole school must adopt, or as a program that even an individual classroom could do?

You could certainly do elements of personalized learning at any level, including at a classroom level. But the challenge is, personalized learning, if you do it right, in my opinion, really requires some structural changes. Some of those things would be hard to do if a school wasn’t all in. So having flexibility on the timing and how much time is spent in a particular activity — if only one teacher is trying to do that, and the rest of the school is on this very rigid schedule, that could get pretty hard. Also, I think, for the students, particularly if you’re talking about middle and high schools, where there are many more teachers involved with each student, and one is providing a sort of personalized experience and they go to another teacher and it’s very traditional and nothing gets tailored to their needs, it’s kind of a jarring experience for the student. So I don’t know that it serves them well.

Can you do it at a more granular level? Of course. Is it more effective if it’s done at least with a cohort of teachers? Yes, I think so.

When thinking of the district, the school, and the classroom level, what needs to be in place to do personalized learning well?

This is where it gets exciting, and I think there’s a misunderstanding here. There are many, many models for personalized learning. There’s lots of ways to do it, and so, depending on the goals of that school, or the district, or whatever level it is, what’s required is going to vary.

That said, as I’ve looked at a number of models over the years, there are some themes, some basic elements that generally exist no matter what the model is. One of them is some sort of technical tool to help manage the progression of students. Some people like to use the term “dashboard.” I don’t know that it has to be a dashboard, but a tool to help manage student progression, that’s one thing.

Another element is a school model where the scheduling element has some flexibility. There’s all different kinds of ways to do that. But if you’re in a model where you say, “We’re totally personalized,” and yet there’s this super-rigid schedule, and everything has to end at this time and at the end of this week, I’ve just never seen that in an effective personalized learning location.

So, a tool to manage the progression, flexibility around the schedule, and a culture where it’s clear that there is autonomy on the part of the learners, that the learners are the owners of the learning experience and that they are making a choice about how to go through their learning. I think that’s a third element that pretty much is a showstopper.

What impact do you think this work can have in Rhode Island, especially as the state is serving as sort of a laboratory when it comes to developing best practices for personalized learning?

That was our goal in Rhode Island: to say, how can we create a lab state? It’s nice because it’s smaller. Some of these things are big, systemic things that are hard to change in any state, no matter the size, but it’s easier sometimes when you can tackle those in an area where I could literally get everybody in the same room. And then, once you work through that, then take it to scale in states where that would be harder.

The thing with personalized learning is, it is a long game. It’s not something you do one Thursday and then all of a sudden everybody has better grades the following Monday. These are systemic, cultural changes, and so it takes a while. And it takes a while to get the model right. Over time, what I hope to see — I think the students will see in Rhode Island and other places where this is implemented — is narrowing the equity gap. I think one of the reasons we have so many gaps is because we don’t have a learning model that’s tailored to individual student needs. So if some student is struggling or stuck for whatever reason because they’re lagging behind … they just get farther and farther behind. The good thing with personalized learning is, you can actually go back and catch some of that stuff and correct it.

I also hope to see, and we actually started to see, evidence of that in the schools in Rhode Island. There was evidence of closing of gaps. I think a lot of the experiences that we have in schools now, the level of engagement, the level of buy-in from the students in terms of participating in the learning experience, is quite low. I think that’s something else that we will see shift over time as we have more personalized learning.

A third one that I would add is of lesser importance, but as a parent, I need to say it — parents feeling like they’re much more involved in the learning process. I have four kids, and great teachers, but I generally have very little knowledge of what’s happening in my kids’ learning experience. That’s frustrating as a parent who wants to be engaged and involved, and there is not an easy way for me to do that.

Do you see any promising examples of how to boost parent engagement through personalized learning?

Absolutely. The key with personalized learning is, if you are able to share that idea of monitoring progress in real time, or near-real time, that can be shared both with the student, which is part of what powers the student, and also the parents. So you are able to see very quickly where my kid needs some extra help, and do that long before a final grade is put in place, or long before they move on to the next class or the next grade. Also, it’s an opportunity … I’m going to give an example, but with a caveat: Personalized learning is not software. You can’t buy personalized learning. There’s no way to do it. There are tech tools that are essential. I’ve never seen a successful implementation of personalized learning without some tech to support it, but there are people out there that say, “Buy this software, it will make you be personalized learning,” and that is not the case.

So I want to clarify that. But I’m going to give an example of where there’s a tech tool that has been very helpful for me. My kids use a tool that helps teach math. I get an alert every day [about] behaviors that they’re working on, and here’s an activity that you can do. It’s simple things like, while you’re going through the grocery store today, look for things that you can group into tens, because that’s the activity that they did earlier that day. It immediately makes me more engaged as a parent. It feeds me a line for how to be more involved with my kids’ learning.

Can you describe the relationship between personalized learning and technology?

It is tricky. One of the worst things that’s happened for personalized learning is the conflation of the idea that you can buy software that then, by having kids use it, suddenly is the same as creating personalized learning. Particularly when you’re talking about adaptive software. There are lots of tools that are adaptive learning, adaptive software, or computer adaptive, and that’s great. And that certainly can be an element of broader personalized learning, but if you just buy a piece of software that adapts based on some questions a kid asks on the screen, that doesn’t count as personalized learning.

Technology does have a really, really important role, because you have to have tools to help support both teachers and students in this new model. And I’ll give a couple of examples. One that we’ve mentioned already is that the tools help monitor the progress. You know where everybody’s at. That gets really hard to do on paper. And then, related to that, is this idea of some sort of way to visualize it. A dashboard for the students, for the parents.

But the other element that is important to note is, when you’re talking about personalized learning, the amount of learning content increases. I used to be a teacher. I was a Spanish teacher, and if I was teaching four classes a day, I prepared one thing and delivered it to that class. Great, that’s what it was. Now, if I’m going to a personalized learning model, it’s not just one thing I’m preparing. I may have eight or 10 activities that need to be prepared for every class or for every student. So the amount of learning resources increases. When that happens, having high-quality digital resources is really critical because you can very quickly search and align and identify learning content, the volume of learning content, much more effectively.

I don’t believe that personalized learning is the same as just having kids sitting, working by themselves. But there are times that you may be in smaller groups, or occasionally working on something by yourself. That’s very hard to do if the students themselves don’t have access to a device and connectivity. So those are the areas right off the top of my head where I would say it’s pretty critical to have a tech element.

I visited a school — I was in England, south of London, a school there that had been a failing school. What they had done was unbelievable. They had completely transformed the school using a personalized learning model, and all of a sudden, all their graduation rates were up, they had students that were engaged. It was just one of these unbelievable stories.

I was talking to the teachers, and they sort of looked like zombies. They were all falling asleep, they were all yawning. They showed me this room, and after school every day — it was all on paper, sitting there with paper and pencil — they would literally redesign and adapt the learning experience for the kids for the next day. So they were there until 8:00, 9:00 at night doing this very difficult manual process. And I was like, “Why do you keep doing this to yourselves? This is crazy.” And they were like, “We are watching this transform the lives of these kids, how could we possibly stop?” And I said, “Yes, I take that point, but there are also some ways that you could enable this.”

I share that story because when people say, “Do you need technology to personalize learning?” No, but if you want to get some sleep at night, then yeah, you actually do need some tech to help take it to scale.

It seems like the push for adopting social-emotional learning models in the classroom ties into the goals of personalized learning. How you see these two areas working together?

When I think about learning, for me, it is broader than just, “Do I know how to solve this math problem?” It’s really about being somebody who can thrive in a globally connected world. Some of these are basic cognitive skills that we’re talking about, academic skills. Some of them are what you would call social-emotional, and there’s a bunch of different names for them. But whatever it is, it’s sort of that: How do you appropriately engage with others? How do you recognize your own growth mindset?

There’s another piece that I think is critically important, which is understanding the tools that you need to be successful. How do you use tech appropriately in learning? I’m a big advocate for having every student learn how to code. I think it’s critical that we also are teaching digital citizenship. There’s going to be a big push on that from ISTE this coming year because I’m worried that we aren’t talking about what are the skills you need to know in order to be a force for good in your community in a digital space, and how to use technology in a way that helps connect you to different cultures and experiences.

Could you talk more about what it means to be a digital citizen and how you teach students to be a force for good on the internet?

[Digital citizenship] is having a basic understanding of deciphering what is legitimate information online. Another example is using technology to motivate and organize your community, however you define that, for good. When I was in school, when we wanted kids to help organize around a good cause, they’d make posters and hang them up in the halls or put them on a telephone pole around town. Today, if you wanted to organize for good, you’d probably [be] much faster using text messages or a Facebook group. But those are skills that we need to teach. How do you take a challenge that we’re all facing and use digital tools to solve it?

Another one that’s critical today: How do you debate? How do you argue respectfully and share different opinions in a digital space? Sometimes we see people engaging and cordial in a physical space, and they go online and just lose all of their brain when it comes to how you debate. That’s a skill that we need to teach.

These areas are all very positive things. How do you make the world a better place? How do you decipher good, true information? How do you recognize and learn new cultures? How do you collaboratively design and edit learning materials? Something as simple as collaborative document editing: If you have 20 people that are on a Google Doc and we’re all collaboratively editing on a wiki, what does it mean to be respectful in that space?

[There’s also] engaging with government. In the past, if you wanted to engage with government, you’d call a number or write a letter to an elected representative. Now, we have all these ways to engage around the safety of my community because I have tools that allow me to digitally engage with law enforcement or my community. is a great example of a tool that helps you identify public works issues that need to be addressed. But that whole body of how do you use technology to be an effective citizen is something we don’t teach. And just because people are savvy in the use of technology, does not mean that they are savvy in understanding how to use it to better the community around them.

How do we implement education technology so districts use research-based tools that are both affordable and meaningful for students?

That’s a pretty well-paved path at this point. Personalized learning is still out there, still kind of cutting-edge a little bit, but we know what you need to do in order to use technology effectively. We have ISTE standards, which are internationally accepted and recognized. They’re openly available; they’re free for anybody.

We have a theme at ISTE, which is “learning first, technology second.” All the really effective tech implementations I’ve ever seen have always started with a learning mission. How do we bring in and choose the right technology to make that vision a reality? All the disastrous examples I’ve seen, the ones where something has not worked well, always started with someone who went, “Hey, let’s get a bunch of computers and then we’ll figure out what to do with them.” So high-level, it’s learning first, set the vision, then figure out how the technology can support it, and then if you get more granular, that’s where I point to the ISTE standards and say, how does that look on paper?

With tech companies , how do you make sure teachers know how to use education technology effectively?

There’s two different things, and this is where it gets intermingled or confused. One is support for teachers on using particular tools that have been adopted, and in that case, it’s totally appropriate for the company to be involved and to be providing training for the schools. The other piece, and this is the part that’s been missing, and it’s what we hope to help fix, is before this selection, the conceptual level of what is the role that technology plays. How do I make good decisions about what tech to use and what not? How do I make sure my students are being engaged and using the technology appropriately?

The part that’s missing is making sure that the teachers and educators are prepared on knowing how to use technology and how to select the right tools independent from any company. That’s where it gets gray.

How would you compare how the U.S. uses technology in the classroom to other countries?

There are a lot of really good examples internationally. One of the areas where the U.S. has a lead is this idea of using technology as a tool for learning as opposed to a tool for just delivering content to students. One of the unfortunate things we see often around the world — and, by the way, including places in the U.S. — is the device is used as a sort of a delivery channel for students. They’re just viewing a video or reading content on the screen. It’s very one-way. It puts those learners in a very passive mode. They’re just consumers of content, and the technology is just a delivery tool to get that content to them. It’s the least interesting way to use technology in learning.

What we’re starting to see in a lot of places in the U.S. is where they’re saying, no, this tool is not just about delivering learning content. It’s actually the tool for the learners to use to design and create and problem-solve and use it as a tool to give them powerful new ways to tackle the problem. Which is very different than just having it be a way to consume.

That, I would say, is the difference between effective and [ineffective] uses of technology. One of the things we’re seeing is there is a lot more consistency in implementation in other countries. Whereas in the U.S., you may go to one school and it’s just off-the-charts awesome, you may go to a school that’s right down the street, and it’s not good at all. And I think part of it is because we have a very decentralized model, which has its advantages for innovation, but keeping sort of consistency or economy to scale is not one of them.

Among its nine schools is Escalante School, which enrolls roughly 75 children from kindergarten through sixth grade. This year, eight of its future students are enrolled in Upstart, an online personalized learning preschool program that children complete from home.

“When we talk about the differences between rural and urban low-income families, rural low-income families just may not have as many opportunities or resources available to them, just because of the area that they live in,” Melinda Dalton, a coordinator with Upstart, told The 74. Dalton is a liaison between Waterford, the nonprofit technology and research firm that runs Upstart, and two rural school districts in Utah.

Upstart launched in Utah in 2009 as a low-cost option to expand preschool in a state that didn’t have a state-funded program. Since then, it has been a particular boon for the state’s rural areas. About 30,000 Utah children have gone through the program over the past eight years, with about 14,150 participating this school year. It has also now spread to seven other states, where 700 early learners are enrolled.

State and federal policymakers are increasingly recognizing the value of early education, especially in keeping the achievement gap more at bay for disadvantaged children before they enter kindergarten. Preschool programs teach younger children early literacy and math skills alongside essential social-emotional skills. About 1.5 million 3- and 4-year-olds were served in state-funded preschool programs in the 2015–16 school year, more than double the number enrolled in such programs in 2002, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.

The Upstart program prioritizes low-income children, English language learners, and children who live in rural areas. After several years of waiting lists, which climbed to more than 1,700 families two years ago, Utah legislators authorized more funding. The program received $11.5 million this year. Last year the list was smaller and only had children from higher-income families, said Claudia Miner, vice president of development at Waterford.

Families agree to use the program 15 minutes a day, five days a week for literacy. There are also science and math options for students who want to spend more time with the program. Program administrators will provide laptops and internet services to participating families that don’t have them.

Other members of the family are free to use the software as well, Miner said.

“We allow the family to put additional children on the program. Everybody has his or her own individualized learning path. We encourage that,” Miner said, adding that some parents learning English set up their own accounts to get additional language exposure.

The main benefit of the program is that it’s totally personalized, Dalton explained.

“If they need to be introduced to the letter C six times before they can understand that … that’s great, they have that opportunity,” she said. “If they catch it on the first time … they can move on to the next level.”

Upstart has gotten the federal nod of approval: Waterford received an $11.5 million in 2013 to expand to more rural areas in Utah.

A by the Utah Office of Education found that tests of participating students “showed that Upstart participation had a large impact on students’ early literacy skill development.”

Kimberly Veator’s son Tyson, now a kindergartner, did Upstart last year, alongside an in-person pre-K program.

Technology isn’t going anywhere, and it’s important that young children use it for more than games, she said. Tyson learned a ton, and his kindergarten teacher noticed his advanced skills in his beginning-of-the-year testing, Veator said.

“It seemed like he flew through it,” she said.

Though she’s heard that finding the time was a challenge for other families, the 15 minutes daily wasn’t a problem for her family, she said, because they got into a routine using it and Tyson knew he had to finish Upstart before he got any other screen time.

Brandon Jensen’s daughter Marissa used the program in previous years and was able to start kindergarten reading, and his younger daughter Loryn uses it now. Loryn in particular likes to keep using the program even after her required 15 minutes are up.

“This is the best program out there,” he said.

The girls like the — often traditional songs, like the ABC’s, remixed with a new lesson — and will go around the house singing them even when they aren’t using Upstart.

The program in recent years has grown outside of Utah. More than 700 children participate in pilot programs in Idaho, Indiana, Ohio, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

Results from pilots in Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana show that children tested as high as an “advanced first grade” level on some specific reading skills, according to tests conducted by Waterford. The Pennsylvania pilot, which started earlier this year in Philadelphia, enrolled 23 refugee families. Among those students, whose first language isn’t English, half scored at “kindergarten intermediate” levels or higher on reading tests.

Philadelphia is, of course, far from the rural setting that has seen much of Upstart’s growth. Mayor Jim Kinney in 2016 started a universal preschool initiative to create 6,500 seats over five years, but there aren’t enough seats yet, and they sometimes aren’t convenient for families, said Jenny Bogoni, executive director of the Read by 4th Campaign, a group of Philadelphia nonprofits, churches, and other organizations committed to get children reading on grade level.

Waterford came with $400,000 to fund the program, computers, and internet access for a year, and although it didn’t provide the social-emotional or executive function skills, “it was 100 opportunities for pre-K-age children to have access to resources that weren’t here in Philadelphia,” she said of the 100 children who enrolled.

Though Upstart teaches letters and numbers, an online program can’t teach those executive function and social-emotional learning skills —Ěýthings like focusing, paying attention, or taking turns —Ěýoften credited as some of the lasting benefits of preschool.

As a way to bring the early learners together, liaisons for Utah’s 18 most rural districts host kindergarten readiness events, like a Halloween party or story time at a library, Miner said, and every program holds a graduation ceremony. Parents get a certificate to go with their child’s “diploma.”

Some children who use Upstart are enrolled in other pre-K or day care programs, and Upstart coaches will email with parents to share, for example, the importance of play.

“We work through the parents,” Miner said. We try, in training, to reassure the parents that they know more than they think they know,” Miner said.

The most recent entry is a of a Carnegie Corporation of New York effort to create and monitor new high schools featuring both high levels of personalization and positive youth development, known as the initiative.

In 2014, RAND began tracking 10 district schools that are part of the initiative and that opened in either the 2014–15 or 2015–16 school year. The programs are small high schools in traditional districts, including Denver; Providence, Rhode Island; and Prince George’s County, Maryland.

“Designing Innovative High Schools” reports on their progress observed over the first two years. Researchers will be able to analyze data on academic performance and other markers in late 2018 or 2019, when the evaluation period ends and scores from tests that measure fall-to-spring academic growth are available.

The September 2017 interim report, meanwhile, jibes with feedback collected by other personalized learning researchers, including a different set of RAND researchers who in July found modest but promising results in a set of schools receiving Gates Foundation Next Generation Learning Challenges grants in Alabama and South Carolina, among other places.

Here are five top takeaways from the latest look:

Quality curriculum is scarce. Teachers agree students are more engaged when given the opportunity to apply what they learn to real-world problems. And technology is one avenue that enables teachers to facilitate this, tailoring lessons to student passions and skills in development. But materials — particularly online resources —Ěýare often low-quality and not in line with the new academic standards recently adopted by many states.

Although teachers told RAND they like this aspect of teaching in an Opportunity by Design school, they also say they need more time and support to find good alternatives.

“A lot of teachers enjoy this,” researcher Laura Hamilton told The 74 in an interview. “It’s a way for them to apply their professional knowledge and creativity.”

Like its predecessors, the new report suggests that identifying good curricula is an arena in which support from district staff or an “intermediary” organization is crucial.

Assessing mastery is also a challenge. One of the schools’ chief design principles, determining when students have mastered a topic and are ready to move on, continues to be difficult. Just as quality curriculum is in short supply, reliable tools for gauging student understanding are hard to find.

Teachers also report feeling pulled in conflicting directions. The concept of basing student advancement on competency is geared toward allowing some students to move ahead at a quicker pace while others, who may be years behind in core subjects, master missing skills. Yet teachers still feel pressure to prepare students for annual state assessments of grade-level proficiency.

Teacher hiring and retention are crucial. If only because of the novelty of the model, teachers with experience in both personalization and youth development, a kind of social-emotional learning, are in short supply. This is particularly true when it comes to teachers licensed in high-demand areas, such as math, science and engineering.

Although all are part of traditional school districts, the majority of the schools in the study sample have the freedom to work around contracts to hire teachers who have the right skills and are motivated to work in a personalized setting. Those that must hew to district hiring rules face additional hurdles, researchers found.

One frustrating result: Teachers too often sacrifice time set aside to collaborate and refine their classroom strategies to cover for vacant positions.

Principals crave mentoring and coaching. Carnegie worked with an organization called Springpoint: Partners in School Design to help principals build capacity for leading their schools. Springpoint organized structured tours of different Opportunity by Design schools and consulted with individual schools, providing technical assistance. This support was extremely valuable, principals told RAND, in terms of thinking through the challenges presented by the principle of mastery.

It’s important to keep in mind, Hamilton emphasizes, that not only are the schools in question trying to implement new models, they are also busy trying to deal with the endless challenges that come with simply being a new school.

“It’s very hard to start a school from scratch,” she says. “There are a lot of challenges that are more mundane than designing a personalized learning curriculum.”

Students don’t yet own their learning. One of the tenets of personalized learning is that students should both be empowered to help design their educations and accountable for understanding what steps they need to take to meet an academic goal, such as a particular college entrance score or career certification.

While numbers varied by school, about one-fourth of students in the 10 programs studied were unsure whether they were on track to graduate from high school. Schools’ data systems are good for enabling students to track whether particular lessons meet learning standards, but don’t do enough to help students put that information into context or use it for long-term planning.

Student focus groups, Hamilton concludes, provide “grounds for optimism.”

“We heard a lot of students who appreciated having the opportunity to work on something that was tailored to their interests, participating in decisions and having a voice in how the school is run,” she says. “These are things that are important to the non-academic skills they will need.”

Disclosure: The Carnegie Corporation of New York also provides funding to The 74.

Twenty-four teachers-in-training will be part of Summit Public Schools’ first Summit Learning Residency Program, which will train them to lead students in a personalized learning classroom setting — a hallmark of the Summit model.

To immerse them in the practice of tailoring education to the individual, the residents themselves will learn their coursework and receive their teaching credentials through personalized learning.

Personalized learning adapts instruction, curriculum, and testing to each student’s strengths and preferences, allowing them to work at their own pace. Instruction is usually project-based and is customized through technology and data, as well as one-on-one mentoring between a student and the teacher.

“Even really experienced teachers coming into Summit have a steep learning curve. It’s a very different approach to how you think of your role as a teacher and how you’re going to move students through the curriculum,” Pamela Lamcke, the new program’s director, said in an interview. “Our hope is that if we can front-load this experience in the credentialing year, they’ll come in stronger.”

For four days a week, the residents will work alongside a teacher in Summit’s eight California schools, which are middle and high schools in Sunnyvale, Redwood City, El Cerrito/Richmond, San Jose, and Daly City. At first, the residents will observe an experienced teacher and then eventually take over teaching one section of a class. Every Friday, the residents will meet as a group and either engage as a whole group, in smaller groups, or in a one-on-one setting with their instructor completing their own coursework.

Leaders hope the program will serve as a training ground for future Summit teachers, but the residents are not committed to teach for Summit once they graduate and receive their California Preliminary Teacher Credential.

Janine PeĂąafort graduated from Summit Prep in 2012 and will be part of the residency program. She said she realized she wanted to become a teacher as a high school student, when she would observe her teachers and think about how she would lead the lesson.

“I was really inspired by my high school teachers,” she said. “It just seemed like they were having fun in teaching and also working with each other.”

She first got to see personalized learning in action when she was part of the tutoring program at Summit Tahoma, a high school in San Jose. (Summit Prep had not yet adopted the personalized learning model when PeĂąafort was a student.) While she had her doubts at first about how it would work, she said she was able to see how students were progressing through their coursework in real time while still getting personal attention.

“Being an actual teacher within this model just taught me a lot about the reasoning behind it and the way it’s benefiting our students,” she said.

PeĂąafort believes that studying through a personalized learning setting as a student in the residency program will help her professionally.

“I think this upcoming school year is going to be very interesting because I’m going to be able to say, ‘I’m basically learning the same way that you’re learning right now.’ So if any struggles come up, I’m going to be able to empathize with students as a personalized learning learner,” Peñafort said.

The majority of the residents received their bachelor’s degree one to four years ago and were chosen from a pool of Summit tutors and teaching aides. Summit has been accredited to award credentials, and the residents must meet the same requirements they’d be expected to complete in traditional teacher credentialing programs.

Personalized learning has origins in the Montessori model, which began in Italy more than 100 years ago. But schoolwide personalized learning as it is practiced today stemmed in the last few years from the development of technology and software programs to support individual student learning. Many of the pioneers of the personalized learning model are charter school networks, like Summit, because they are usually smaller than traditional schools.

(Read more from The 74: Personalized Learning Boosts Math Scores, New RAND Study Finds — But Scaling Is a Challenge)

One criticism of personalized learning is that technology plays a dominant role in a student’s learning, shifting the focus from the teacher at the front of the classroom, but Summit leaders say teachers are a vital part.

“We believe absolutely that teachers are the core of a personalized learning classroom,” Lamcke said. “Technology is a tool that teachers use, but it does not take the place of a teacher.”

She said while students are engaged in the technology, which was developed for Summit by a team of coders from Facebook, it frees up the teacher to do one-on-one check-ins and provide timely feedback. The teacher can also take aside a small group of students who need more support while the others move forward.

“Really if you look closely at the data, not every student in the same bucket needs the same support or resources,” Lamcke said. “And so what we’re asking teachers to do is use a lot of data to really think about the needs of every single student, so everyone is able to access what they need and nobody is waiting for anybody else to move forward.”

Jimmy Zuniga, who teaches English at Summit’s Everest Public High School in Redwood City, will be a mentor teacher to the residents. He also attended Summit schools, graduating from Summit Prep in 2008. Zuniga said that when he started teaching at Summit four years ago, there was a learning curve even though he graduated from a well-respected teacher training program at Stanford. He said he had to adjust from a teacher-centered classroom to a student-centered classroom.

“I think if I had done the Summit (residency) program, I think I could have learned some of the basics built around good teaching in the context of a student-centered classroom, which would have enabled me to be more effective more quickly in differentiating from my students once I did step into my own classroom,” he said.

As a mentor teacher, he wants to give back to his community by helping to train a new generation of educators. Zuniga said he wants to instill in the residents the necessity of having a growth mindset and being willing to constantly improve.

“I think as teachers at Summit, we’re constantly trying to think about how we can better serve the kids that we teach every day,” he said.

The first class of teachers in training will not pay for the program, but Lamcke said she expects residents will pay tuition in the future. The program leaders are still figuring out how the program will be financed on a long-term basis. She declined to say where the funding for the first year is coming from.

Ultimately, Summit would like to expand the teacher residency program to the 130 schools nationwide that use the Summit Learning Platform.

“Coming from a traditional school setting, it’s really exciting to jump into a personalized learning model. … So I, too, am learning alongside the students,” Peñafort said. “I think it’s really teaching them how to become independent learners starting from the time they enter Summit.”

1. Personalized learning starts at home

We grabbed a lot of headlines as being one of the pioneers of personalized learning. We remain staunch advocates for the purposeful integration of technology to support student learning and promote student agency, but personalized learning is about much more than tech. It’s about a deep understanding of the unique needs and interests of every student and family. Our annual home visits have become an essential component of our personalized learning model. When we change the dynamic from a parent in a teacher’s classroom to a teacher in a student’s home, we develop much with our families and a deeper understanding of how to best serve each and every Rocketeer.

2. To change the system, we need to create more demand

Rocketship is focused exclusively on elementary education. Of course, a lot of parents, funders, and partners have encouraged us to build out a K-12 system. It’s definitely tempting. It’s hard to watch our Rocketeers leave us in fifth grade and wonder, ? But for us, it comes down to the difference between trying to transform our public school system and building a parallel system. We believe a self-contained K-12 system undermines our ability to engage parents beyond the classroom and create parent demand for equity in public education. It’s what former U.S. secretary of education John King was talking about when he said, “We are investing something like 98 percent of our national philanthropy in supply, and at best 2 percent in demand, and we’re not seeing equity-focused systems change happen quickly enough.” We need to invest more energy in creating demand.

3. Honor the power of parents

We built our parent leadership program to help families exercise their power to demand political attention, hold leaders accountable, and enable high-quality public school systems to thrive. Because we offer only elementary education, parents must engage, organize, and advocate for high-quality middle and high schools — at least, that was our theory. Well, 10 years later, we’ve seen this movement take hold in San Jose, where have helped open high-quality middle and high schools. We learned that if we truly want to scale to the size of the problem in public education, we need to focus on catalyzing movements for high-quality public education that puts parents in the driver’s seat.

4. Integrating students won’t create culturally responsive schools — teachers will

There has been a lot of chatter about charter schools and segregation lately, and much of it is off the mark. Parents from historically marginalized communities choosing a school because they believe it is in the best interests of their child is a far cry from the government prohibiting students from attending a school on the basis of their race. Rocketship Education in our schools, regardless of ethnicity, race, class, or creed. We value diversity, but we don’t believe students of color should have to to attend a great school. Furthermore, there’s a different measure of school diversity that research shows is much more impactful to students of color: We need to build to ensure our students experience ĚýIn , he uncovers a powerful interview from an African-American teacher in Virginia who said, “The first people that should have been integrated was the teachers and administration.” She was right. And still is.

5. Actions speak louder than words

I didn’t have any children of my own when we launched Rocketship. Now I have two. Both my kids attend Rocketship Fuerza Community Prep. When my wife and I decided to enroll our kids in Rocketship, I wasn’t trying to make a statement; I just wanted my kids to go to a great school, as every parent does. And fundamentally, if our schools aren’t good enough for my own kids, how can I honestly say they are good enough for any kids? But I now realize the significance of that choice. It’s what : “the hypocrisy of progressive people who say they believe in inequality, but when it comes to their individual choices about where they’re going to send their children, they make very different decisions.” It’s not a comfortable topic to discuss, but we need to confront it.

Rocketship schools start every day with a full school assembly called “Launch.”

Photo: Rocketship

6. Meaningful inclusion benefits all kids

In our early years, we struggled to develop a quality program to serve students with disabilities. Like most schools, we focused on compliance. But over time, we developed a program that we are deeply proud of. In our , the vast majority of students with disabilities spend 80 percent of their day in general education classrooms. The benefits to students with disabilities are clear. But inclusion also benefits typically developing students who develop greater empathy for the diverse needs in our school community. Don’t get me wrong — it’s hard to achieve. When a student with behavioral challenges is disrupting other students in a classroom, many parents’ first thought is to remove that student from the class. When we don’t, some parents get upset. But that’s a small price to pay for developing an that celebrates and helps all students as they discover and develop their remarkable potential.

7. Never stop learning

A few years ago, we tested a new approach that we called the flex model. The idea was to unleash the impact of excellent teachers by creating a dynamic, open learning environment guided by three teachers and one school leader. Some schools thrived with this model, but others did not. The lack of structure made it difficult to control quality, and . But the flex model taught us about the critical impact of student agency, real-time coaching, and how to build an adult culture based on continuous learning, weekly goal setting, and actionable feedback. Those tenets have become a hallmark of our work today. We took a lot of heat for this pilot, but we are stronger for it.

8. Define your mindset

Building a culture of continuous learning may sound nice, but it is not for everyone. Not every educator wants a coach in the classroom every week. For some, it feels like they are constantly being judged, and they burn out quickly. We learned this lesson the hard way. So over time, we’ve honed our hiring practices to find educators with a mindset that better matches our model. Teachers who thrive at Rocketship are tenacious learners who embrace feedback and constantly strive to master their practice, no matter how many years of teaching experience they have. By adapting our hiring practices to evaluate mindset alongside skill, we are strengthening our adult culture and improving student outcomes.

9. You won’t go far trying to go it alone

We set some lofty goals for our growth when we launched 10 years ago. And while our moonshot may have helped draw attention to the massive size of the achievement gap, it grossly underestimated the complexity of growing a network of public schools that depends on a dizzying array of public agencies, from authorizing school boards to zoning commissions to bond-financing boards. Building strong, productive, and transparent partnerships with these stakeholders takes considerable time and attention, yet it is paramount to our collective success.

10. Proud to be a public school

Last spring, I was chatting with a couple of parents at my kids’ school. They were telling me what got them interested in Rocketship Education. They said, “Rocketship is like a private school, but free.” I get it. In a world divided by haves and have-nots, it’s a pretty clear pitch. But it doesn’t sit right with me. I remain a staunch advocate for public education. It’s the backbone of our democracy and the foundation of the American dream. Do we need to revitalize public education? Absolutely. But we can’t take the “public” out of our schools. We must wear it like the badge of honor that it is. Which is why we are making a small, but symbolic, change to our name. Rocketship Education is now Rocketship Public Schools.

New York, New York

The organization’s motto: “Great oaks from little acorns grow.”

“Root, root!” the tutors shouted in unison, every time the tree tattoo flashed on the screen.

Part of Great Oaks Charter Schools’ mission is planting strong roots in a community by investing in tutor housing, partnering with local youth programs, and investing in school buildings that revitalize neighborhoods. These roots are critical, Great Oaks president Michael Duffy told the room, as other systemic roots have been planted over the years that enforce segregation and discrimination.

“The work of repairing decades or even centuries of … discrimination won’t end in this upcoming school year, but most certainly will be lessened by it,” Duffy said. “Change begins with the 300 people in this room. Change begins with you.”

The six-year-old K-12 network of four schools in urban areas of New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Delaware enrolls 2,500 students, the majority of whom are low-income and minorities. The network’s model centers on preparing all students for college through daily, high-intensity tutoring; each student gets two hours of tutoring every day, regardless of his or her academic performance.

“It’s like the original personalized learning, tailoring what one student needs through an adult,” Duffy said.

These sessions are led by the nearly 300 tutors who serve Great Oaks through AmeriCorps. The recent college graduates tutor three or four students at a time, grouped by their academic abilities; they receive daily instructions for supplementing the day’s math or reading lessons and then give teachers feedback on student progress.

The tutors serve for one year and receive a $12,630 stipend, as well as housing provided by Great Oaks. The network boasts a group of tutors who combined speak nearly two dozen languages. Last year, 45 percent were black, 33 percent were white, 14 percent were Latino, 5 percent were Asian, and 3 percent were mixed-race.

Many of the tutors were inspired to work in the communities where they experienced the frustrations of an inequitable education system that gave more resources to wealthier suburban students than to kids in poorer urban areas.

Photo: Kate Stringer

Jaylah Pickett will be working at the Great Oaks school in Newark, where she grew up and went to public school. “I understand the achievement gap and the lack of resources,” said Pickett, who thinks she could have benefited from tutoring when she was a student. She plans to work in education policy after she completes her year of service.

Walline Alphonse will also be working in Newark, but she plans to go to medical school after this gap year. Alphonse was attracted to the tutoring program because it provides urban students with a resource that usually only their wealthy suburban peers have access to. Alphonse, who also grew up in New Jersey, said she wishes tutors had been around when she was a student to act as role models and mentors.

The program is a sustainable training ground for local educators: About one-third of tutors stay in the community after their year is over, and nearly 90 percent of them are working in the education field.

Great Oaks is also trying to create sustainable community development through responsible building practices and tutor housing. For example, the Bridgeport, Connecticut, school and tutor residences will be moving this year to a new space that recently replaced abandoned warehouses as part of a larger city revitalization effort. The Wilmington, Delaware, school shares space with another charter inside a former Bank of America building. The Newark school houses its tutors in Teachers Village, a complex that includes affordable living space for hundreds of educators across the city as well as three charter schools and a day care.

“Our school presence is bringing life back to streets that have previously been home to parking lots and abandoned buildings,” Duffy said. “We don’t come at this work from a deficit perspective, seeing all the things that are missing. Instead, our aim is to focus on the real assets that are already present and build on them.”

This opposition makes sense in many ways. Schools of choice, to varying degrees, are free of the hard-won regulations that these groups fought for over the past two decades: the right to access to, and inclusion in, general education classrooms, rather than isolated institutional settings; and the right to a defined set of supports and services to help students with special needs succeed in school.

Indeed, there are good reasons to be alert to issues like counseling out, disproportionate or inappropriate school discipline, and denial of services in public charter schools, which are required to comply with the same federal and state protections as district-run public schools. And when it comes to vouchers, education savings accounts (ESAs), and other forms of private school choice, the issues get more complex around student rights and school responsibilities.

But though their hearts are in the right place, the advocates have the wrong target in their sights. They are too often inadvertently working against the very policies that can open up new possibilities for innovation and quality, and empower parents to make decisions about their children’s unique needs.

Families of students with special needs have certainly benefited from the fights of the past. But they also know that processes and protections like Individual Education Programs (IEPs), school-provided therapies, and the right to sue for more appropriate placements are not enough. Too many families find themselves expending huge sums on lawyers and moving to different neighborhoods or school districts to find a good fit and proper services.

I (Robin) was lucky: I had the financial means to move and a deep knowledge of the system that helped me fight to get my son into a school where he thrived. Those without the financial means to sue or move or leave their current system are simply faced with fighting against a massive bureaucracy that responds only to the loudest and most powerful voices. What disability groups must acknowledge is that the fight for rights is meaningless when parents have no real choices or power.

In many cities, students with unique needs have no substantive educational choices. They attend their neighborhood school, or the district places them in a school with a program for their specific disability. Families have some say through the IEP team, but the power dynamic at meetings, particularly for disadvantaged families, results in most decisions being made by school personnel.

School choice can change this power dynamic. In the charter context, rather than constantly fighting to make the school fit their child, parents can choose a school already designed to be a good fit. Parents can choose a school that they believe is the right academic match and culture rather than fighting the district to layer services and supports to make the neighborhood school work. In the case of an ESA, parents can craft a curriculum and a set of services individualized to their child’s unique needs rather than trying to find one school that offers that package.

The challenge still lies in how we make all forms of schools offer the necessary protections for students with special needs, but the traditional answers are insufficient. The IEP, which documents the goals the student will achieve and the supports and services he or she will receive in order to do so, is the essence of the compliance culture and inefficiency in special education. Private schools show no desire to embrace the IEP and all the bureaucracy it entails. And charter schools are often at war with the rigidness it forces upon them.

Rather than expending effort to fight school choice, we need to focus on fighting for policies that will make choice work well for students with special needs. We need to counter overt discrimination, pushing out, or counseling out. We need to develop policies, such as unified enrollment systems, and mobilize advocacy groups, like , to ensure that families get the information and support they need to choose the right school for their child.

Schools of choice, with their autonomy and incentives to demonstrate outcomes, could lead the way forward on innovation and quality in special education. Advocates should shift their sights and start fighting for policies that open up new possibilities and empower parents to make decisions about their children’s unique needs.

See previous 74 interviews, including 2017 Teacher of the Year Sydney Chaffee, former education secretary John King, and former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. The full archive is here.

It’s fitting for a guy who has made it his mission to end the notion that there is such a thing as an average human being.

I first met Todd in 2013. He was giving a lecture on this topic, and the neuroscience behind it, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

It felt a little bit like Elon Musk giving a talk at a Ford plant.

---

If you don’t already know Rose’s name, then you will soon. His theories of smart individualization and adaptive personalization are quickly penetrating education policy debates in unexpected and important ways. And he has a powerful team of researchers, marketers, and believers behind him.

“We are focused on the personalization of society,” he told The 74 of his work at the Center for Individual Opportunity. “Getting away from a one-size-fits-all view of people and the systems that we build around that and trying to get something that’s far more personal and helps develop the potential of every single person.”

The below interview has been edited for length and clarity:

The 74: Your own personal story explains so much about the theory of change you have developed. Tell us how you came to this work and this mindset.

Rose: My interest in these ideas and the failure of average and the power of harnessing individuality probably comes from, really, two things. One was a deeply personal experience and the other was a professional sort of insight.

The personal experience was … It’s nice that I’m a professor at Harvard and some other things, but I also failed out of high school, pretty spectacularly. I had a 0.9 GPA and I didn’t quite fail – they actually kicked me out. I like “fail” because it makes it seem like I had some choice. I ended up on welfare, I had two kids while I was working minimum-wage jobs at 19 and needed a different life, and I did still have this sort of weird belief in the power of education to transform lives and life circumstances. So I got my GED and went to college at night and I sold fence during the day and slowly built up a new view of myself and what I was capable of.

I had always assumed that I’d be a neurologist. After that I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do and Harvard had started a brand-new program called the Mind, Brain, and Education program, and so I thought … I didn’t know where Harvard was. I actually could never have pointed it out on a map. I grew up in rural Utah.

I wanted to be there, and I actually ended up getting into the program — that’s the program I’m the director of now.

The professional aspect of this was that I knew that the sort of standardized approach to success didn’t really work for me and that I had to carve off my own kind of path, but when I got to Harvard, it was during a period of time when science was changing pretty dramatically.

I was working at Mass General Hospital, watching changes in medicine, in neuroscience, in nutrition, where we were getting away from one-size-fits-all and really starting to look at personalization of things based on a new kind of science. And so it was that moment where I realized, “Wait a minute. This applies deeply to education and the workplace and human potential in general.” That really kick-started this whole path that I’m on right now.

What does the “end of average” mean, more specifically, for pre-K–12 education, and what does it mean to be “designing to the edges”? How is this playing out in American classrooms right now?

The “end of average” for education means that it is unacceptable to design learning environments assuming most kids are like an average kid, because it turns out scientifically, mathematically, there actually isn’t such a person. It’s just an empty middle. They don’t exist, and so you’ve designed textbooks and curricular materials and assessments that fit actually nobody at all, and then kids muddle through and then we reward the ones who muddle through the best with better grades. All the while thinking we’re actually nurturing their potential, and we’re not.

So it means flexible design of environments. Every other industry decides education designs flexibly and we still pay for average-based products. We call it “age-appropriate,” but it’s actually just like you buy an age-based textbook; it’s just what does the average kid of that age know and can do, and it’s absolutely creating artificial barriers for kids.

The second thing, the biggest one for me, is right now we’re fixated on a set amount of time to learn and then we give you a grade and then really at best you’re going to know how you compare to the kid sitting next to you, but based on this new science and based on the ideas of “end of average,” I think you have to shift to mastery. I don’t care how my kids perform compared to kids sitting next to them. I want to know whether they’ve mastered the material they need to live the life that they want.

How is personalized learning addressing some of these issues? What are its limitations?

I think one of the mistakes I think we’re making in education is to view personalized learning as another fad, but it’s not. It’s something bigger than that. There’s something stirring in society. We are realizing the extreme limitations of standardization.

Most everyone wants personalized medicine now. You would never accept average-based medicine anymore. This is true in nutrition. This is true all across the board, and education is just following that same path. We’re getting away from one-size-fits-all and focusing on systems that really try to understand who you are and help develop you to your full potential.

The mechanisms of personalization are part of that, but it’s obviously bigger. A big step toward getting there is actually the change in the assumptions that the public makes about themselves. People are still willing to see people through the lens of a bell curve — thinking some kids are just innately smarter than other kids.

If you believe that, then we should keep building our education system the way we’ve built it, as a great and fair sorting mechanism, to sort the best from the rest. Until we change that fundamental set of assumptions, it’s hard to create demand for these things. That’s our charge.

With respect to creating demand — as this is an enormous paradigm shift — what are you doing to engage meaningfully with parents?

Parents want this for their kids, but they don’t want to be the one that experiments on their kids. It’s interesting.

They know that the old way doesn’t really work, but they just are unwilling to stick their kids out there, but the second you show them really great examples that other kids are getting, then suddenly there’s your demand. They find that unacceptable. They want their kids to have that because they know if other kids are getting it and their kid isn’t, then their kid’s falling behind.

If we go and tell people, “Oh, there’s a different way to think about education,” like, their eyes just gloss over. We’ve found it’s really important to tie these ideas to something bigger than just education.

We are absolutely living in an age of personalization now, and we show them. We have to show that this is a complete rethink of ourselves as a society and then position education as part of that, so our work is largely to develop that broader change in the way the public sees themselves as a way to create demand for education.

What is your response to skeptics? To people who say things are going OK?

Here’s the thing. Relative performance is how some parents gauge success … “We’re doing fine compared to somebody else.” But who cares? What we really want to know is, have we developed your kid’s potential to its fullest, period? And that doesn’t have anything to do with what another school is doing and whether you’re slightly better than they are.

To me, if you think the way we’re doing it now is fine, then keep your kids in those kind of schools, but I think we could do a lot better, and I think it’s not even just a little bit better. I think we will write stories about this a hundred years from now about the time when education became something profoundly, qualitatively different than it was before.

Do you think it will take a hundred years or do you think it will take 10 years?

I think it’s going to take a few decades to really infuse across everything … I mean, things take time and I’m super impatient, so I hate even saying that out loud, but I think you will see dramatic change in the next decade because I don’t think we have a choice.

I think it’s the moral thing to do. I think kids deserve to go to a public education system that tries to know them and develop their potential instead of artificially limiting it and labeling them and whatever. I just think it’s immoral, but if we just looked at basic national self-interest, economically, we just aren’t producing the kind of talent we need to even have a functional economy. Even if we just went on that, we have to do something different.

If this was 20 years ago, we probably knew this back then, but we didn’t have the know-how or the technology to scale it, and so it just was ideological. We’ve seen this all the way back to John Dewey, who argued, wrote a great paper [“Individuality in Education”]. That’s a hundred years ago, but we can do something about it now. It’s not more expensive, but it does take a lot of will.

Do you think the election strengthened or complicated your theory of action?

I think it clarified it. If you think about what this kind of education system needs, it’s a highly contextualized set of solutions. What looks right in LA Unified may not be the same as what it looks like in Salt Lake City. The principles will be the same, but the way it looks will be specific to the kids and the context and the resources and constraints.

I think what we need are a lot of local innovations and experimentation with what really will work for whom under what circumstances, and I think when you have a strong national presence, the sort of knee-jerk reaction is to say, “What if we just had a federal play for this,” but I don’t think that’s the best path to a solution here. I think a lot of state and local innovation is what was needed, and now there’s pretty much no other option but to do it that way.

They’re just a few of the ways public schools in Rhode Island are testing out a statewide effort to personalize learning for all students and train educators to embrace a “paradigm shift” in the way lessons are delivered.

Broadly speaking, personalized learning tailors the instruction, content, pace, and testing to the individual student’s strengths and interests, using technology, data, and continuous feedback to make that customization possible.

This summer, early adopters at a dozen schools are competing for funding to further experiment with the concept as part of Rhode Island’s $2 million public-private personalized-learning initiative, which was launched in September 2016 by the Office of Innovation under Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo.

Twelve finalist schools for the Lighthouse Schools Challenge Grant — whittled down from an initial 30 applicants — are in the final stages of drawing up proposals that will be shared with and scaled throughout the state and eventually, officials say, serve as a nationwide model for what successful personalized learning looks like in widespread practice.

Three winning schools will be selected in early August by a state panel of education department officials, principals, superintendents, teachers, parents, students, and nonprofit leaders. Each school will receive $200,000 to implement its plan immediately for the 2017–18 school year.

That quick turnaround will require ongoing support from state officials, who have been working with applicants in a series of summer workshops.

Daniela Fairchild, director of education for the state Office of Innovation, said the state’s push for expanding personalized learning is rooted in a critical need to prepare students for future jobs, many of which don’t even exist yet.

“It’s about the economy, it’s about equity, it’s about opportunity,” Fairchild said in a recent interview. “We see the current [education] system as having been really valid for a very long time, but [we need] a focus on personalized learning because our world is changing and we find that what worked 30 years ago or 50 years ago just isn’t good enough for today. It’s not a knock on what we have; it’s just that we want to be proactive in thinking about how we can serve all of our students and prepare them for the economy of tomorrow.”

Rhode Island students, principals, and teachers collaborated at a June workshop on personalizing learning as part of the process for applying for a Lighthouse Schools Challenge Grant worth $200,000.

Photo: Rhode Island state Office of Innovation

In doing so, officials will be capitalizing on the flexibility afforded by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) — the nation’s federal K-12 education law, which returns significant power to the states — to chart and test how personalized instructional techniques can be delivered to its 142,000 students in 306 schools.

Richard Culatta, who headed the Office of Innovation in its first year before leaving in May to become CEO of the D.C.-based International Society for Technology in Education, said Rhode Island has long worked to position itself as an incubator for personalized learning.

“What we were really trying to do is say, ‘What would it look like for Rhode Island to be a lab state? Can we be kind of the [research and development] shop for the rest of the country on a number of issues, including education?’ ” Culatta said.

(The 74: Rhode Island’s Big Bet on Classroom Innovation — A Statewide Personalized-Learning Initiative)

The state has invested in expanding wireless internet infrastructure to virtually all schools, which supported a widespread experimentation with a variety of digital learning modes, he said.

And many schools, including some grant applicants, also invested in tablets or laptops for all students and host FUSE (Educator Fellowship for Blended Learning Leadership) RI fellows, who coach teachers on blended learning techniques where traditional instruction is mixed with online methods. The fellowship program is run by the state’s homegrown , a nonprofit which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and provides specialized professional development for educators on blended and personalized learning.

The Lighthouse program is funded in part by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a three-year, $3 billion investment by the pediatrician Priscilla Chan and her husband, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, to advance science, education, and technology around the world. Other funders include the Jaquelin Hume Foundation, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, and the Overdeck Family Foundation.

As they test new practices, the Lighthouse schools are expected to share their findings and guide the way for other schools, with the goal that all schools statewide will integrate personalized learning into their pedagogy.

“There will be high expectations for them … the ones that get the grant will be models, and they will have to share around the state,” said Todd Grimes, principal at Westerly High School, one of the finalists. “So it’s exciting but there’s also some risk involved.”

Asked what he views as the biggest challenge in this effort, Culatta echoed the principal’s concern that cultivating “a new culture” among educators, policymakers, and even families will take time and concerted effort.

“It’s a big culture shift to say, ‘Wait a minute, maybe it’s a fundamental right for students to have an education that’s tailored to their needs,’ ” he said. “[A lot of people may say] ‘The system that we have works just fine for me. Why should we change it?’ ”

(The 74: Personalized Learning Boosts Math Scores, New RAND Study Finds — but Scaling Is a Challenge)

The original applicant pool of 30 included 26 district schools and four charter schools. The majority are located in Providence County, the state’s most heavily populated region, with six cities and 10 towns. Rural and suburban areas of the state were represented in smaller numbers, officials said.

The 74 asked to speak with leaders from the 12 applicant schools to learn about their early efforts experimenting with personalized learning and what they plan to do with the grant money should they win. As part of the application, schools must submit a budget proposal and explain how they’d sustain the program launched by the grant.

Although they hesitated to reveal all in the midst of the competition, a few were glad to outline the gist of their proposals. A similar theme emerged: Most said they plan to focus on boosting professional development for teachers and providing students opportunities to take real ownership of the curriculum.

Here’s a sampling:

Who: Thornton Elementary School Principal Louise Denham

What’s already in the works: All students in one fourth-grade and one first-grade class were given Chromebook laptops last fall and spent the year using “playlists,” a list of student-specific assignments and activities, followed by a short assessment to give teachers immediate feedback. Other grades took turns using shared iPads or computers a few days a week. In 2017–18, all 344 students will receive their own Chromebook.

As a grant recipient, she would: Expand technology staff and support teacher tech leaders to encourage collaboration and professional development; potentially enact changes to classroom setup to support students’ needs and technology use.

“I thought that with the grant, we can begin moving [with] a faster focus on getting teachers the professional development that they need,” Denham said. “We have to work on those paradigm shifts a little at a time. And if we’re in it together, we can support each other and collaborate.”

Who: The Compass School Director Brandee Lapisky

What’s in the works: The K-8 charter school located on 20 acres of farmland in southern Rhode Island piloted a student “voice and choice” group last year that paired student leaders with Lapisky and other staff to conduct student-driven projects. Among them: starting a student newspaper, building and operating a farm stand, and clearing a hiking trail around the campus perimeter.

As a grant recipient, she would: Appoint a staff member to the role of personalized-learning launch director for two years to train all staff on personalized-learning techniques and technology; they’d then return to teaching.

“If we can lift our baseline up a few notches as a part of this work, then we can raise the platform for everyone,” Lapisky said.

Who: Chariho Middle School Assistant Principal Steven Morrone

What’s in the works: A 1-to-1 program with Chromebook laptops for all 965 students in the grades 5–8 school; students work in small groups through “station rotations” using different apps and software in each station as well as “playlists” of assignments.

As a grant recipient, he would: Increase existing use of student “voice and choice” in directing learning; expand opportunities for virtual learning and earning advanced credits.

“We have pieces where we personalize the learning, but this grant [process] is helping us think about what we already do and how can we bring it to scale for all kids.”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides support to The 74.