Tom Vander Ark

Town Hall: State Education R&D

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Key Points

  • “Superpowers” like adaptability and data-driven decision-making are needed in education today. 

  • R&D can be a tool for empowerment and systemic change and the time for investment is now.

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In this Town Hall, Tom Vander Ark, Getting Smart, and Sarah Bishop-Root, Education Reimagined, led a discussion on how state R&D can revolutionize education for the 21st century. This event was inspired by the recent brief Seizing the Opportunity for State Education R&D: Findings and Recommendations for Action from Education Reimagined, Transcend and the Alliance for Learning Innovation. They were joined by an esteemed panel to highlight the innovative work happening in Virginia and North Carolina:

  • Aimee Rogstad Guidera, Secretary of Education, Virginia
  • Dr. Karen Sanzo, Executive Director, Center for Educational Innovation and Opportunity, Old Dominion University
  • Andrew Smith, Former Deputy Superintendent, North Carolina
  • Dr. Lynn Moody, CEO, SparkNC

The event highlighted how aligning educational models with workforce needs can ensure students develop essential skills. In addition, Secretary Guidera shared insights on fostering innovation through lab schools, while North Carolina spotlit collaborative efforts that serve as a model for enhancing educational outcomes.

Outline

Introduction: The Importance of State R&D in Education

Tom Vander Ark: I think we’re at a really interesting point in human history, and one that really calls for state R&D in education, learning, and development.

So, here are four reasons why I think our topic today is a big deal. First, we are two years into the rise of generative AI and a couple of months into the third generation of generative AI that is changing the opportunity set in work, learning, and life. We’re just beginning to understand what that means. Second, in the last decade, we’ve learned so much about the science of learning and development, how people grow, and how to develop engaging and effective experiences and environments. There’s so much that we haven’t yet put into practice.

Challenges in American Education and the Need for Innovation

Tom Vander Ark: Number three, we’re experiencing a new set of conditions together in American education with enrollment down, attendance down, engagement down, and regard for higher education down. All of these things make a call for new learning models, new pathways, and new experiments

Tom Vander Ark: Finally, with recent shifts at the federal level, it’s clear that states are going to need to play a bigger role when it comes to research and development in learning. Today, we’re joined by our friends from Transcend and Education Reimagined.

My co-host today is Sarah Bishop-Root from Education Reimagined. They recently put out a terrific brief on this subject from the Alliance for Learning. We have featured the Alliance for Learning and their recommendations recently in a podcast. So, this is a subject that’s really important to us, and we’re excited to have Chara joining us.

As she comes on and talks about our guests from Virginia and North Carolina, I’d love to invite all of you joining us today to share interesting and important examples of state R&D in the chat as we’re speaking. Amplify and add to the number of examples that we’re highlighting today.

And if you’re a frequent guest, you’ll know that we make good use of the chat and intend to draw a handful of you into this dialogue. Sarah, it’s really great to have you, and thanks for hosting us today.

Sarah Bishop-Root: Thank you so much for having us here. And thank you to Getting Smart for creating this space for this conversation.

I’m really excited about it today because, as you said, this is the moment we can really anchor in the education sector about the importance of education R&D and the opportunities states have to lean in and take action. By holistically thinking about how systems can support innovation and evidence-based and continuous improvements, Ally partnered with Education Reimagined and Transcend to do a qualitative research exploration of actions states can take to think about the infrastructure and conditions to support education R&D. From a systems perspective, I’m really pleased to have on the call today, Leslie Colwell from Transcend, who was the co-researcher, co-author, and dear friend in this project. Together, this was about how we hold space for the wisdom and expertise across the education sector.

Really diverse political context to bring their knowledge about what we can do to take action now, holistically. Thank you so much. And she’ll be interacting with you in the chat and bringing the conversation back around at the end after we hear from our amazing panelists.

So.

Introducing the Panelists and Their Contributions

Sarah Bishop-Root: What’s remarkable about the panelists we have today is that they’re incredible leaders. They’ve served various roles within education, from educators to state leaders, to leading organizations that are really taking action. They bring such a dynamic lens, each of them. I just want to briefly introduce each of our panelists. We are really pleased to have joining us today.

Virginia Secretary of Education, Aimee Rogstad Guidera. Secretary of Education Guidera oversees pre-K through postsecondary education in Virginia. Secretary Guidera was the founder and former CEO of the Data Quality Campaign, which is still doing incredible work and has had an unwavering commitment throughout her career to the importance of leveraging data in education to improve learner outcomes. Secretary Guidera, thanks for joining us. Dr. Karen Sanzo is here with us from Virginia. Dr. Sanzo is the Executive Director of the Center for Educational Innovation and Opportunity at Old Dominion University. She leads the ODU Lab School Network and collaborates with educators, researchers, and designers to advance the center’s mission of transforming education at the speed of innovation.

Dr. Andrew Smith is probably one of the most incredible advocates for education R&D. Currently, he is a North Carolina Senate Policy Advisor and was formerly the North Carolina Department of Instructions’ Deputy State Superintendent, leading their R&D work within the Department of Innovation. Then, Dr. Lynn Moody, CEO of Spark, North Carolina, and she was formerly a district superintendent between two school districts for 15 years. She has had a career of infusing innovation and learner-centered approaches to open doors for igniting possibilities for all learners. Thank you so much, panelists, for being here.

And the reason why we selected these two states is because we believe Leslie and I really felt in the brief, if you have a chance to take a look at it, these are two states that we uplifted as examples for some of our recommendations. So, I’m going to turn it over to our panelists, and we’ll just dig in.

North Carolina’s Approach to Education R&D

Sarah Bishop-Root: So we’re going to start with North Carolina. I’m going to ask a question to Dr. Smith. Would you please share about how the North Carolina Department of Instruction, Office of Innovation, became an R&D arm and describe its function?

Dr. Andrew Smith: Absolutely. Good afternoon, good morning everyone. Very glad to be with you.

As Sarah mentioned, yes, this is absolutely my passion. I really got to live out my dream job for about two and a half years at the agency. It was my dream job because it’s at the intersection of policy, politics, and practitioners. I got to do it in an ecosystem of innovation, and that to me is really exciting.

But that all started because of a really strategic leader, Superintendent Katherine Truitt, who had the vision to say, “Hey, I know you’ve been doing innovation back in your old school system, which Lynn Moody used to lead and was my boss. Even my first innovation job. I’d like for you to come to the state level and think about what innovation, what R&D could look like for the state of North Carolina.”

It was the perfect timing because she was doing a reorg of the agency. She said to me, “Here’s a master list, here’s the org chart, what fits in innovation?” So, I was able to work with my colleagues and select a subset of offices that together became the Division of Innovation.

Inside of that was the Research and Evaluation arm, our Learning Recovery Office, the North Carolina Virtual Public School, which serves 60,000 kids a year across our state, our Formal Innovative Practices and Programs Office, as well as our Office of Charter Schools. Our division oversaw our 207 charter schools for the state. They were really part of our innovation hub as we think about the work of charter schools in North Carolina. We set on this mission to identify, codify, evaluate—really important—and scale effective innovation in North Carolina. Our real value proposition was that we were student-centered. All the innovation we’re working on is to drive student outcomes, but we did that by building capacity. Using the tenets of the diffusion of innovation, as well as building tools to make it easier for districts and school leaders to do R&D in their own space. We did that both at the agency level. We weren’t just trying to help do R&D out in the field; we also wanted to think differently about what innovation could look like inside of our agency.

At that space, we actually developed an in-house tool working with both our ROI team. The infamous Senator Michael Lee is here, distracting me, and he’s my new boss and the most innovative senator in this state. I’m just messing with him. Sorry, y’all, he’s throwing me off. And all of my innovative bosses. Yes. We basically had the opportunity to have PowerSchool and Infinite Campus, which is our student information system that’s required across the state. We have every data point known to man, known to children, and we hired in-house qualitative and quantitative researchers.

That allowed us to ask any research question we ever wanted to know. We would just bebo down the hall and say, “Hey, quantitative analyst, figure this out. How many days does it take of remote learning in a row before student outcomes start to dip?” Because a legislator like Senator Lee may ask, “I want to develop a policy about remote learning and how many days we can have.”

We were able to pull that data in. We basically devised two tracks, so we had this current track that the systems were operating on. The Division of Innovation operated on this other track, and it was going to be the new, faster track. We embedded our work inside of various departments so that no matter where we are, whether we’re there or not, the innovation was designed for the end users. We developed this return on investment tool for our finance team and our federal agency team to look specifically at expenditures. We built that in concert with them. Once it was developed and ready, we delivered that over to them. That’s one of the big learnings that we had in our space around how to think about innovation at the agency level.

Lastly, as we thought about the field, we always wanted to try and lift up innovation across the state. You weren’t going to find the most innovative practices at the agency. We went out, we curated, we found them, we put them on a master data sheet, and then a website that was interactive, that had both videos and testimonials, one-pagers about innovation across the states so we could lift that up and evaluate it to make sure it’s working at the same time. That’s just a little bit about the ecosystem that we live in here in North Carolina around the vision of innovation.

Sarah Bishop-Root: Thanks, Andrew. I love this notion of creating a parallel track to really allow people to stay on their daily challenges that they’re facing but supporting them and uplifting them in a really powerful way.

Dr. Moody on Spark NC and Innovative Education Models

Sarah Bishop-Root: I’m going to move on to Dr. Moody. Dr. Moody, would you please tell us about Spark NC and how you would describe the R&D it supports within districts across North Carolina?

Dr. Lynn Moody: Sure. Well, let me just start by saying when Andrew was talking about his bosses, he’s been the smart one in this space. We’ve always gone to him for advice, and he’s helped guide me for a number of years, whether it was at the local district level or when he was at the state. And still now as we proceed with Spark NC.

We’re really excited about the work we’re doing with Spark NC, and we think it’s a real innovative way to do school. We had kind of two simultaneous goals. One was to create a pipeline of talent in tech-infused jobs for North Carolina. We began our work when Apple opened their headquarters in Raleigh. The buzz on the street and all the social media was that all these jobs would go to people from California, not North Carolina, because we wouldn’t be prepared for it. So we wanted to change that pipeline, particularly having some diversity in that pipeline as they move forward.

But as most of you in education know, it starts a lot earlier than college. So one was in economics for North Carolina. The second part was just this genuine, Andrew and I have been on this pathway for a long time, how we could do school differently, how we could prove that you could change school.

We have three pillars at Spark. One is to really be learner-centered, so we could talk all day about what does that actually mean. One is to be industry-relevant, and how we work with business partners every day. And then one is competency-based. So what does that look like?

Along those lines, the big question comes in: what are the outcomes that we’re driving for? When I tell you that one’s economics and one from a talent pipeline and another area is to really reinvent school and inform other traditional educators about how that could look and why that works for students, then you have to ask different questions.

I feel strongly that if your strategic direction is around innovation and you’re using historical measures for research and development, you’re probably not going to get the right answer. I’ve always been a little afraid of when we would say, “Oh, we’ll just do a survey with students,” and the first thing that we’d always say is, “Be careful what you ask for because they might actually tell you what they want and how they expect to get it.”

In the research and development arm of what does that mean for Spark NC and how we would measure the outcomes and what are the outcomes. We spent a great deal of time over the last couple of years talking about those.

We talk about them more in line with what are the signals that might indicate that we’re actually doing what we say. We have four signals that we look at that aren’t traditional research and development. One signal is around the learners’ sense of belonging. Do they see themselves in these roles? Do they believe that they could be successful in these roles? Do they feel like they’re part of something bigger? Do they believe that they can pursue occupations in these high-tech career fields?

One is market value asset, and that signal is about do they actually produce something in our particular units of learning with Spark? Do they actually produce something that is marketable to an employer? Then their success skills and or durable skills, whatever terminology you’re using in your state. But are we actually teaching leadership and collaboration? Most importantly to us is, are we teaching ethics in those tech-infused careers?

Lastly, is it really helping them make an informed career decision now that they’ve had an opportunity? What we’re really proud of in being learner-centered is that it’s really driven by the student. They select their learning units, they select the pace in which they’re going, and so they don’t have this risk of failure with us, but they can trial in these high-tech careers that they’re not necessarily comfortable with. Our last results, talking about research and development, our students, 72% of our learners are now saying that they have little or no interest in pursuing one of those high-tech career fields. Now they have a stronger interest in those since they’ve experienced Spark NC. We think that’s a great win. We really are doing what we set out to do.

Tom Vander Ark: Thank you, Lynn. You know, I’m a Spark NC super fan. Love what you guys are doing. It really is reinventing pathways in an important way. You know, my favorite part is just the way the modular curriculum stacks into courses, stacks into pathways, and helps schools, whether they’re urban or rural, to deliver against really dynamic new pathway opportunities.

Rebecca Holmes from CEI, Colorado Education Initiative, leads really innovative work across the state of Colorado. She has a question for Andrew. Lynn describes work that is sort of partitioned off by the nature of its organization, which is a separate nonprofit funded by the state, but with a given sort of partition that creates the space and opportunity for her to do work. Rebecca wonders, how do you create space when you’re working at a state agency? How do you create space for R&D work that is separate and distinct from the statewide work? How do you initiate it, how do you protect it, when it’s the state as an actor, Andrew?

Dr. Andrew Smith: Yeah. I feel like our approach was that it was a call out. It was intentional funding for both my position as well as positions within the org chart to do this important work. It was funding for the research analysts. So we carved out the human resources, but we also carved out kind of the policy space and said, “We want you to also do the innovative policy development.”

So we kind of made a name for ourselves that we weren’t compliant. You weren’t going to find me in your school checking to make sure that you were in school the six-and-a-half hours every day. My job was to come in and solve problems with you. It took time. Anybody who’s at a state agency knows this. There’s a level of trust that can or cannot exist. So we held these convenings where we brought practitioners together across the state, and this was over four days. We really tried to dive into what their challenges were, and then we put our experts with them to solve them. It just felt very different from the typical experience that you would have with a state agency where it’s just, send me your report, your audit’s not in on time. Very hands-on, and over time, and it took time, we saw a lot of traction with that and folks trusting us to both build tools for them and support them with tricky topics. Federal funding was a great one. Our Office of Learning Recovery, they were the guys who tried to figure out how to say yes to your funding request. Federal programs, that department would say no. Ours would be like, but didn’t you just, the law looks like it’s gray here. So we tried to be like, we’ll find an answer for you. Then we would try to work with our colleagues to convince them of answers.

Tom Vander Ark: So many great examples from North Carolina. Sarah, let’s shift to Virginia. Why don’t you reintroduce our guest from Virginia and tee this up.

Sarah Bishop-Root: Thanks, Tom.

Virginia’s Guiding Principles and Education R&D

Sarah Bishop-Root: I’m going to move on with a question for Secretary of Education Guidera. Secretary, Virginia has such a strong guiding principles framework. How is education R&D important to Virginia to support education and broader challenges the state is navigating?

Aimee Rogstad Guidera: Good afternoon, good morning everyone. Thrilled to be here. This is a topic I love because it’s all based in evidence and data and using information to find insights and the focus of improvement, which is what in education we have not always done such a great job with. So Sarah mentioned guiding principles. I think you all might put this in the chat, but every decision that we make in Virginia goes back to our guiding principles. I know you all cannot read that, but hopefully you’ll go to our website and look at it. So we’ll put it up. And what’s in, there you go.

The magic happens. So thank you. What you’ll see in here is that the governor released in May of 2022, a couple of months after he was sworn in, this set of guiding principles, and it is on all of our walls. I have big copies everywhere, and every decision we make goes back to this. What’s important to talk about is that you’ll see innovation on here is one of our guiding principles, but it’s not innovation for the sake of innovation. It’s innovation as it relates to our overriding goal, which is to ensure that we are preparing every Virginian for success in life. How do we do that? We do that with high expectations, with focus on readiness for work, for military, for further education.

We’re very, very discerning about how we do things. Undergirding everything we do is a commitment to use information, not as a tool, as many of you know, the Data Quality Campaign, not as a tool of shame and blame or a hammer, but as a tool of enlightenment and empowerment and improvement. That’s to me what R&D is all about, right? How do you try new things, but with a focus and a commitment to being honest about what works and doesn’t work so that we can look at what we find out with those data and say, so what does this data or this experiment or this R&D tell us, and now what do we do differently to get better results?

I’ve always called this the holy grail in education because to be blunt, we really don’t do this very well in education. We’ve gotten great at having good information, right? That’s a new thing the last 20 years. We’re talking about how to use it, but this whole idea of how do you actually use information, especially the powerful insights from research and development activities, and then shape what you do differently in the future and go to scale is something that is just in its infancy. We need more networks like this. So let me tell you a little bit about why in Virginia we’re doing this and how we’ve done this.

I’m actually going to use the five pillars that are in the great brief that everyone has, and I think that’s in the chat already, of thinking about how we framed what we did in Virginia before we turned to Karen, who’s just been an extraordinary partner and a huge part of what we’re doing here in Virginia.

One is the vision and goals, and that’s what I just talked about, right? We’re innovating and using research, development, and data not for the sake of just saying we’re using it, but because it fuels our goal of making sure that we see every single student in Virginia, we meet them where they are, and we get them what they need to be successful. You cannot do that without longitudinal data, and that is why I’m a passionate advocate for having longitudinal data, as it allows you to see every single child and meet them and personalize education.

This focus on innovation is critical because we know from the data that we are not serving every child well in Virginia and anywhere in this country because the one-size-fits-all approach to education is not working. We need to recognize that there are different ways of education that meet different students’ needs. That was really at the heart of why innovation was part of our guiding principle wheel, what we’re doing. One of the things I know Karen will talk about.

The Role of Lab Schools in Virginia’s Education System

Aimee Rogstad Guidera: Is the launch of lab schools, right? In Virginia, we have had very little choice within our system. We have a very, we have seven charter schools. There has not been a charter school created in the last two decades. We have very little choice, so we have no choice outside of schools. We have an earned education improvement scholarship tax program as the extent. We have very few choices for parents to make in there. So the governor came in saying, how do we have greater choices for families and students within the public system? At the same time, spark innovation and bottom line, give people permission to build the schools that they themselves want to teach in, that they want to lead in, that they want their kids to go to, and that they want to hire people out of.

That was the whole reason for building on these lab schools. Real briefly, the lab school initiative had to be led by higher education, partnering with local school divisions, and then bringing in community partners on that. I’ll get to that later on in the pieces. But the second principle that’s listed in the brief is there needs to be dollars to do this, right? When we created these lab schools initiative, we also, in a bipartisan way, put $100 million into an innovation fund, which was to fuel the planning grants, the implementation grants, and the startup grants that were necessary for these schools to go. Again, Karen will go into more detail, but we will have 15 of these schools that will be up and running and with students in them by September of this year, which is awesome.

We have six right now running, and they are extraordinary. You can go online and look at more of them, but they’re great. Money matters, right? You need to have incentives, and you need to be able to support that. The third piece in the brief talks about the importance of also just looking at the regulations, looking at the realities when you start doing innovation. I’m also really proud to say that part of what we’ve done in Virginia through legislation is that we have taken away some of the barriers that we know are necessary to putting interesting ideas into reality. We’ve passed in a bipartisan way reforms on both transportation and on seat time regulations so that it makes it much easier for people to think creatively about how do we use time differently and how do we use transportation differently if we want people to go to different schools, different options, do dual enrollment, go to our lab schools, do work-based learning to get experience, right?

We try to take some of those barriers down while at the same time holding ourselves accountable for ensuring that mastery and proficiency and acquisition of skills, knowledge, and competencies is critical to everything we do, but how do we get looser so that it’s easier for people to be innovative and not have to color inside the lines? The last two go together. How do you build a culture for innovation and the relationships and the importance of it? So much of this is about the culture.

I work for a boss, my governor, who comes out of a career in the business community, and not a single decision in this administration gets made without saying, start with the data. Where are we? Measure it. Bring your data. In God, we trust; all others bring data. Where do we want to go, and how do we measure that success so that we can keep ourselves honest? Then the second question always is, who’s best in class as determined by the data? How do we learn from them and bring it back and make it the Virginia way? To me, that’s the innovation cycle right there. You’ve got to be honest with where you are. You’ve got to be able to identify where you’re going, identify the challenges, and learn. So this culture of innovation, of success, but also of transparency and accountability for results is absolutely critical to R&D, right? This whole idea of just doing R&D for the sake of saying you’re doing it leads you to a whole out of nowhere. If anyone ever wants to get an underscore of that, go to an AER meeting and look at all the research that’s being done that is completely useless and is a waste of time, energy, and money. Great research needs to be, what are the burning questions that we have? In my mind, every question in education needs to start and end with, does this thing, whatever we’re going to research, actually improve student outcomes? That is all I care about. Every decision we make in those administrations on that and every investment of dollars we make is answers to that question.

The relationship piece, as I mentioned with the lab school piece, we didn’t say go to school divisions and say, go dream up a better mouth. Shut by yourself. We said, build the schools that you need in your community. We invited communities to come together and say, what do you need? How do you do this? How do you build in these assets? What we have are lab schools that look completely different depending on where they are. We have a space lab school out on the Eastern Shore where we have Wallops Island launching things into space. We have a huge crisis in terms of not being able to attract nuclear physicists to move out there because our school system is meeting their family’s needs, and we don’t have enough people to hire. We’ve got a Southwest Heels because in the Southwest we have an entire crisis about healthcare and pipelines for healthcare pieces. We have hospitals coming together. We’ve got NASA coming in, so we’ve got community members coming together and building things.

What’s core to this, and Karen will again talk to this more, is throughout, we are putting the R&D piece into this development so that we’re going to be learning about what works and that we’ve built a network that’s going to learn together. I’ll close by saying the relationships and the culture piece is that you also have to be so discerning about how do you make sure you build a culture that’s a learning enterprise in and of itself. That’s why we were so pleased that ODU is leading the outside of government approach to this, outside the education area. By making sure that there is a home for innovation and opportunity for education in Virginia that resides at one of our great universities and is tasked with really building this network, not just of lab schools, but all kinds of innovation that’s happening at cost.

We, at the same time, created when we released this wheel, an Office of Innovation within the Department of Education. Those two offices will work together. So that’s a culture, right? You cannot mandate culture change. You need to build it. You build it by bringing people together and giving them permission to color outside the lines and give them really clear goals about where they need to go. Then say, go, just go do it and try things, but let’s learn at all times. We’re really excited about what we’re building. It’s awesome to see what’s happened in a short period of time to go from a concept in January of 2022 to actually having students finishing their first year lab schools three years later. It’s all done because we have some incredible people across this Commonwealth who, when given permission to think differently, think outside the box, just blew. I think that that is the point right now we’re in with education. We’re ready. We just need to give ourselves permission to do things differently and keep our eyes on the North Star of making sure we’re preparing every child for success.

Sarah Bishop-Root: Thank you, Secretary Guidera. Wow, thank you so much for connecting it back to the brief. I mean, I think really hitting on the infrastructure and conditions that were highlighted, we’ll turn it over to Dr. Sanzo. So, your role is so much more than an intermediary. You’re a visionary, you’re really connected. You’re a professor. You’re doing so much, but please share about the center, its partnership with the Governor’s office and the Virginia Department of Education and how the lab program is getting implemented.

Karen Sanzo: Yeah, sure.

The Center for Educational Innovation and Opportunity

Karen Sanzo: Well, I want to thank you for the opportunity to be here, and I want to highlight that I have the ability to be here, and I’m in front of people, but as with anything, the Center has an amazing team behind all of the work that’s really helping make this happen at Old Dominion University and across the state.

The Center for Educational Innovation and Opportunity serves as the hub for coordinating the lab school network. As mentioned, we have 15 lab schools across the state right now. Six started this year, nine are launching next year. As you can appreciate, the work that goes into lifting up a school is nuanced. It’s very busy day-to-day. It’s really the technical pieces of standing up that school. Sometimes you feel like islands, right? So your islands out there in the ocean. One of our lab schools is maritime, so we like to lean into some of those. What we do at the center is we’re able to bring those islands together and create this large continent where we’re interacting together, learning from one another.

At the center, we are able to coordinate the cultivation of best practices, sharing these best practices across the state. We come together in learning walks across lab schools that we have, as well as leaning into some of the schools that are in the Commonwealth. Tomorrow, some of our team will be engaged in a learning walk at a high school in Virginia Beach. They’re coming together to think about what is innovation. As we heard earlier, what are those outcomes? One of the things that we’re doing at the center is thinking about what do we actually mean by innovation and instructional innovation? How are we measuring our growth, and how are we ideating around that and evolving the work and bringing the 15 schools together as well?

As Secretary Guidera mentioned, we don’t want to keep the knowledge within just these 15 schools. This is a significant and amazing investment from the state, and we want to ensure that we are learning and sharing this across the Commonwealth as well as nationwide. Also, at the center, we’re able to provide technical expertise or be responsive and help to identify that technical expertise in areas that all of the schools need. It might be STEM, it might be scheduling, it might be computer science, so that the answer’s in the room and we, whether it’s the actual technical knowledge in the room right now, but we can help identify that. The other piece is that scaling piece. How do we learn, how do we research, how do we scale innovation?

We like to work around the network improvement community work. We call ourselves network innovation communities, and we want to cultivate that. One of the pieces that we’re launching coming up in the next month is our collaboration grants for research on innovative practices. That’s a mouthful where we are having cross-lab school research that will take place across the upcoming year. The lab schools are putting in proposals now, and we have a team that we’ve drawn from lab schools, from Old Dominion University itself, that will help support the research that’s taking place, and then to be able to share it at our next innovation summit.

This past April, we had hundreds of educators from across the state that came to Old Dominion University. It was a wonderful partnership. Secretary Guidera was there to help launch the work. We had the Virginia Department of Education there. We had Sophia McDaniel, who’s really been helping us day-to-day from the Department of Ed. I just wanted to emphasize this doesn’t happen without collaboration and partnership and the multi-stakeholder process that’s involved. The hundreds of educators came, learned about the lab schools as well as other innovative processes. Then we’re bringing them into the networked innovation community so that we’re able to help push into their schools, learn from them, so that we really create this robust community of practice.

Sarah Bishop-Root: Thanks, Dr. Sanzo. One of the things that Secretary Guidera mentioned was the incredible appropriations for this work. I know that you shared with Les and I that the planning grant component of that was very critical to the work. Could you speak to that a little bit for us, please?

Karen Sanzo: Sure.

Absolutely. As you heard from the secretary, this initiative launched in 2022, and it was really important for us to have this runway of resources and time, and the money is great. What that enabled us to do was to have the time, the personnel to come together, to learn from stakeholders, to bring in city government, school districts, universities. In some cases, there are multiple universities, colleges, community colleges that are partnering together, as well as bringing in industry. To be able to think deeply and contextually about the needs of our students, of the community in which they serve, so that we can thoughtfully design the schools to meet the needs of the community. As the secretary mentioned, the Aerospace Academy of the Eastern Shore is an example where Wallops, NASA, Wallops Island, has come in. We’re going to take our students out to see rocket launches so they can see the tangible product of their work. If we didn’t have the time to launch that school, I’m not sure we would really have the infrastructure that’s necessary to be successful. So the gift of time, I cannot overemphasize how wonderful that opportunity has been for us to thoughtfully design and implement the work.

Sarah Bishop Root: Thank you so much. Before I turn it back over to Tom, I just want Leslie, I wanted to just get your thoughts. Is there anything else from what we’ve heard today from both states that you think is important to emphasize in correlation to the brief and its recommendations?

Leslie Colwell: Yeah. Thanks, Sarah. Hi everyone. I’m Leslie from Transcend. I had the honor of partnering with Sarah to explore challenges and opportunities for state education R&D, and you can see why we highlighted North Carolina and Virginia. Thank you to these four leaders for highlighting and sharing your approaches.

Sarah, one of the things that we really wanted to do with the brief was bring state education R&D to life through these examples. I think we also wanted to demonstrate that there’s no one way to go about this work. No matter what a state’s governance structure, political environment, state priorities around education, there is an entry point to be a leader on innovation and R&D. I just want to say there’s so many things that we’ve heard that align with some of the key themes and the recommendations in the brief.

The Importance of Dedicated Capacity and Networks

Leslie Colwell: I think we’ve heard about how important a unifying vision and guiding principles are that really center innovation in R&D. We heard about the importance of leaders and champions for this work, so those who are on this call, but also, governors, policymakers. I think Secretary Guidera’s point about you just can’t ignore culture and mindset change and the role of state leaders in really setting the tone and creating the conditions for innovation, that’s so important.

We heard from Andrew about how important dedicated capacity is to hold innovation and research and evaluation. I think what’s also come through quite a bit is the importance of networks and partnerships between the state education agency, higher ed, communities. Andrew referred to this as the ecosystem of innovation in the state. Karen’s talking about how regularly different stakeholders are coming together in Virginia and really talking about shared goals and measures. Just love the picture that you all are painting for us. Thank you.

Sarah Bishop-Root: Thanks, Les. Tom, back to you. Questions from the audience that we want to bring to our panelists.

Tom Vander Ark: We have lots of great comments and questions. Jim Flanagan has been talking about the challenge of new measures in innovation. Often, innovation has the dual aim of increasing traditional measures but also promoting growth on new dimensions. An example would be Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina were all early leaders in adopting a portrait of a graduate. They laid out a broader set of learning goals. Those were stated, but we really, we still don’t have great measures for many of the dimensions across the portrait of a graduate. So an innovation agenda could aim both at promoting development of those measures, but it could also be focused on better measures of creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. Just acknowledging that, Andrew, anything you want to add on the challenge of not only promoting innovation but measuring its effectiveness in categories that we’re not very good at yet?

Dr. Andrew Smith: Yeah. I mentioned we tried to do the tools, but also the policy. As we were designing our portrait of a graduate, we also decided the measures weren’t right. We introduced an almost two-year process to redesign our school performance criteria in North Carolina that had a myriad of new things involved. The number of kids who are employed and listener enrolled measuring the durable skills. One of the things that I’m really excited about that still lives on at the agency is a federal grant we received where we partnered with ETS and Carnegie to come together to develop new AI-driven tools to measure at scale those portrait of a graduate skills. We got an R&D grant from the feds still intact as of today, I believe. They will be doing that work over the next three years to build a system that really truly measures it reliably and validly.

Aimee Rogstad Guidera: We have just finished a redo of our accountability system, which we’re calling a school performance and support framework. Much like what Andrew just described in North Carolina, we want it to be, like I said, everything focused on are we preparing people to be ready for life. We also have built into that new accountability system readiness measures at the elementary level, middle school, and high school. Much like North Carolina, we are now giving credit not for people getting a whiff of work-based learning or a whiff of college experience. It is, you only get credit in the accountability system for the school by the number of students who actually earn an industry-recognized high-demand credential, not just basket weaving or something else and or, and or credit college credit and or an associate’s degree and or military readiness. You know, be able to pass the f the one of the middle school is really interesting because what we wanted to be able to do that as we start talking about blowing up the one-size-fits-all system, middle school is critical to doing that. We have created at the middle school level, and this gets directly to the question of how do we test all this profiles of a graduate in a way that says this matters to master it.

We have created, or are in the process of creating, a performance-based assessment that starts with every eighth grader after working with our newly retrained guidance counseling and teachers. To look in eighth grade and every eighth grade will produce an academic and career plan. That starts with the students looking at our Virginia Office of Education Economics Data, which is, I think, the nation’s leading labor market information system right now that’s accessible to everyone and anyone about what the regional job demands are. It starts with students being able to know where to access that information and use it and analyze it. Then we have a new outcomes portal at our state higher education agency, the Chev, if you go Google college outcomes in Virginia at Chev, you’ll find this. It provides extraordinary outcomes, labor market progression, how long it took, whatever. What we’re going to be doing is linking all those things together so that our students will be able to identify the top jobs that they’re interested in and then be able to identify the multiple ways and pathways and financial aid that allows you to access those different pathways. Understand there’s not a one pathway, there’s not a one size. Here are the options, and here are the outcomes. So people, families, and students can make great decisions.

Tom Vander Ark: As we wrap this up, I want to invite each of you to give a tweet-length answer to a tough question.

Conclusion: The Future of State R&D in Education

Tom Vander Ark: Why should we prioritize state R&D now, in so many places, budgets are down, enrollments are down. It’s a tough time to make R&D a priority, but I’m going to start with Secretary Guidera. What’s your response? Why is state R&D a priority?

Aimee Rogstad Guidera: Because what we’re doing right now is not serving every child, and until we do that, we have got to do things differently. You’ve got to do it by actually figuring out what works.

Tom Vander Ark: Dr. Sanzo, what would you add to that?

Karen Sanzo: I think it is actually an investment in our students in the future. I think too, it’s cultivating this is not a tweet length, but it brings in more educators into the process because then they’re able to better study their own practices and make revisions that are going to help support all kids.

Tom Vander Ark: I love that. Dr. Smith, why prioritize state R&D now?

Dr. Andrew Smith: Well, I guess I’ll borrow from Plato and make it a little more innovative, but something about necessity is the mother of innovation. I think we’re just at a time where we need to think differently. R&D will help us both think about ROI and what really works.

Tom Vander Ark: Lynn Moody, I want to make this harder, not only for a state but for school districts. You’ve led a number of really great school districts. Why should states and school districts prioritize R&D right now?

Dr. Lynn Moody: I’ll just keep hammering on this. As long as you have a strategic direction that is around innovation, but your evaluation system or your research and development measures something different, it will always trump the strategic direction. We’ll never get to innovation unless we look at it differently. So it’s critically important that now we think about different measures, different outcomes, different ways of thinking about how students are learning, including asking a student if they believe they’re doing quality work.

Tom Vander Ark: Sarah, why don’t you take us out with your tweet on the importance of state R&D? What do you and this brief that we’re celebrating today have to say on that subject?

Sarah Bishop-Root: We have the Alliance for Learning Innovation on right now. I’d like to give Sarah Shapiro or Timothy a chance to share. They’re really building a national coalition right now and have a view at the federal level, at the state level, at the community level. I’d love to hear from one of them.

Sara Schapiro: We think this work is critically important for all the reasons people are talking about. At the federal level, if it’s not happening in the ways that we are hoping, the states are doing extraordinary work and you’re building demand for what the federal government needs to do to support your work in data, in R&D investments. So it’s this virtuous cycle of amazing work happening at the state level and helping the federal government better define its role in R&D in this time of great policy change.

Sarah Bishop-Root: I mean, I think right now we can transform systems that are driven by trust and empowerment of communities, by elevating what every learner needs to have a successful future. It’s a system-wide effort. We can’t just think about this in the context of one-off innovation or instructional improvement just for instructional improvement. We need to think about this. Really anchored in how do we transform systems that they become systems of learning that result in powerful transformation. I think thinking about this holistically, what you’ll find in the recommendations and the brief is so critical. So we’re not having the hamster wheel conversations over and over again about why we’re not seeing the results that we really want to see for every learner in the United States of America.

As I started in this call, this is a collective effort. It has to happen across systems. It has to happen in partnership with other sectors. It has to happen in partnership with communities. It has to happen in partnership at the federal level for us really to see meaningful change in prepared systems for the future of this country.

I want to thank you all for being here today. Please check out the brief sign up at ALI if you want to get their notifications and great information as they continue to build this coalition. Les and I are moving into phase two of this work. We would love to hear from you to contribute. This is really about the collective voice of the education sector. We’re just holding space for it. So please reach out to us if you want to engage in how we move forward with our work. We’d love to hear from you.

Tom Vander Ark: Thank you, Sarah. Appreciate you and the Education Reimagined team. Thanks to Transcend, Sarah, thanks to the ALI for your great work.

Guest Bio

Sarah Bishop-Root

Sarah Bishop-Root is a Partner of Policy Leadership at Education Reimagined and has extensive experience in policy leadership and education reform. Sarah previously worked as a Policy Director and Program Director at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, where Sarah focused on Next Generation Learning initiatives. Prior to that, Sarah held positions as a Senior Manager and CourseSites Program and Community Manager at Blackboard, where Sarah developed marketing strategies and programs, as well as facilitated educator adoption of technology tools. Sarah holds a M.S.Ed. in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University

Aimee Rogstad Guidera

Aimee Rogstad Guidera was named Secretary of Education by Governor Glenn Youngkin in December 2021. In this Cabinet position, she oversees education from Pre-K through Postsecondary in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Before joining the Youngkin administration, Aimee was a strategic consultant helping states, foundations, companies and non profit organizations strengthen their efforts to improve student learning and outcomes. Prior to launching her consultancy, Aimee was Founder, President and CEO of the Data Quality Campaign, a national, nonprofit advocacy organization leading the effort to ensure that students, parents, educators, and policymakers have the right information to guide their actions so that every student can excel.

Dr. Karen Sanzo

Dr. Sanzo is the Executive Director for the Center for Educational Innovation and Opportunity. She is also the Director of the ODU Brooks Crossing Innovation Lab and a Professor of Educational Leadership.

Dr. Andrew Smith 

Dr. Andrew Smith was recently named Assistant State Superintendent for Innovation at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. In his role, he supports the development of innovative practices across North Carolina while overseeing the departments research and evaluation, promising practices, charter schools, learning recovery and acceleration, and NC virtual public schools. Previously, Andrew served as the Chief Administrative and Strategic Planning Officer in Rowan-Salisbury Schools. In his role, he was responsible for rethinking education and developing transformative practices within the organization through the strategic planning process. Andrew also managed the process for bringing the district’s unique Renewal Legislation to fruition.

Dr. Lynn Moody

As President of SparkNC, Lynn works closely with the Board of Directors, ensuring effective governance and strategic direction. She leads the team oversight in vision and mission aligned to strategic direction. She plays a crucial role in fundraising, community engagement, and financial oversight to support the organization’s mission and achieve its goals.

She is best known for her passion for transforming education. She helped to co-create the proposal and the vision for SparkNC. Dr. Moody has received several awards, including the NC Order of the Long Leaf Pine, Discovery Education’s “Innovation in Education” Award, and the “Friday Medal” from the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.

Tom Vander Ark

Tom Vander Ark is the CEO of Getting Smart. He has written or co-authored more than 50 books and papers including Getting Smart, Smart Cities, Smart Parents, Better Together, The Power of Place and Difference Making. He served as a public school superintendent and the first Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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