Place Based Education
Personalized Learning
The blended world
Our kids already live in a blended world. K-12 is starting to catch up with a variety of models that combine the best of online learning and onsite support. Here’s 5 trends signaling a blended singularity: Schools become blended. The biggest growth area for online learning is traditional…
EdTech
TIF or Promise?
Alyson at EdWeek contrasts the love-but-no-$ for Promise Neighborhoods and the whopping $517m for the Teacher Incentive Fund, which allocates grants to districts to create or bolster performance-pay programs. I’m on the board of MLA Partner Schools in Los Angeles which has developed a great turnaround strategy for…
Personalized Learning
Urban showdown coming in RttT states
While bloggers were disappointed by a series of blob-friendly compromises, I’m mostly bullish on final RttT language primarily for an important clause that will result in real improvement in the nation’s worst schools. Flypaper said, “It appears high inspiration was tempered by the various and messy forces of…
Personalized Learning
Leaders & Laggards: a call to action
The Leaders and Laggards report is an important scorecard showing why, how, and where America is losing the education race. We pride ourselves on innovation but this report suggests there isn’t much of that in education. A bipartisan group of think tanks scored states on school management, finance,…
Personalized Learning
Free higher ed courses not great USED investment
Rick Hess makes a series of good arguments that the $500m ‘online skills laboratory’ isn’t a great investment. In the mixed provider post secondary space, quality content isn’t the top barrier. It’s pricing that reflects the sunk costs of existing institutions. A healthy market will make investment in…
Personalized Learning
i3 grant opportunities for SES providers
The Invest in Innovation (i3) grant program offers an opportunity for supplemental educational service (SES) providers to support the grant application of a partner school district. The $650 million grant program has three categories; the smallest category–Development Grants–will have awards of up to $5 million that only require a research…
Personalized Learning
The Chamber of Commerce Party
I had dinner with four Republicans last night. They wonder where their party went. It was a chamber of commerce gala, so I probably had dinner with a couple hundred Republicans and a lot of pro-growth Democrats, but I talked politics with four in particular. The current and former state…
Personalized Learning
Ouchi is almost right and late to the party
Bill Ouchi, back in EdWeek, is still pitching decentralization a decade after a bunch of us showed that it was a thin theory. In nearby districts, John Stanford and I both did the 100 flowers approach with pretty thin accountability. We assumed that people knew what to do and would…
Personalized Learning
Big Levers
There are plenty of theories about how to improve education. Most focus on what appear to be big levers—a point of entry and system intervention that appears to provide some improvement leverage. These theories usually involve ‘if-then’ statements: ‘if we improve this, then other good stuff will happen.’ Leading theories…
Personalized Learning
Regression to the mean
Last week, Reed Hastings predicted the future. He suggested that elected school boards all regress to the mean and that it’s impossible to create continuity of leadership. Denver had the most aggressive reform agenda of any district led by an elected board until yesterday when they began…