Guest Commentary: The Boston Globe Rocks the Virtual Schoolhouse

Jim Stergios is a Boston Globe columnist who writes about leadership, education and the future of America.
In a recent column, he talked about "the good news" and "the bad news" happening in Massachusetts public education.
"The good news for Massachusetts is that last January the state passed a law to double the number of charter schools. Further good news is that students in our charters consistently do better than their district peers; in other states that level of consistency is not always the rule.," Stergios wrote.
"The bad news for Massachusetts is that states like Florida, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona and so many others are pushing forward with digital learning much faster than the Bay State is. In fact, the education bureaucracy is putting some of the strictest limits in the country on expanding digital learning. That may seem odd in a state better known than most for developing and leveraging technology," he added.
Stergios goes on to describe the ongoing fight in Massachusetts to expand K-12 online learning in the state.
Click here to read his complete post and find out why he believes the state's "Department of Education that has wasted 18 months dithering and, in fact, choosing most every opportunity to choose regulatory options that are the polar opposite of what experts recommend in order to ensure accountability to the public and to ensure high-quality options for students."

Tom Vander Ark: Blended Restarts--Everything is Different Now

The only difference between a good school and a bad school is everything.
I thought of this maxim, draw from work with 800 struggling schools, this morning on a 5am call about school improvement. When you compare the attributes of a No-Excuses high schools (Aspire, Alliance, Green Dot, KIPP, IDEA, Uplift, Summit to name a few) with a big struggling urban schools, everything is different: expectations, culture, curriculum and course-taking patterns, community connections, structures for personalization, staffing patterns, teacher skill levels, support services, schedule of the day and year. It’s the difference between coherence—everything works together for teachers and students—and dysfunction.
Blended learning is a shift to an online environment for at least a portion of the day to boost learning and operating productivity. I’m enthusiastic about the potential of blended learning in school improvement (and first wrote about blended restarts in 2009) because it has the potential to 1) offer a comprehensive online curriculum delivered with consistent quality, 2) leverage master teachers across a larger number of students, 3) utilize remote teacher in hard to staff subjects/services, and 4) expand the number of high capacity providers (like Connections Learning) supporting restarts.
Click here to read my complete post and to learn about an exciting new direction the Walton Family Foundation is taking in the school improvement arena.

Terry M. Moe: The Coming Fall of the Teachers Unions

Bruno Behrend is the director of the Center for School Reform at the Heartland Institute. Recently, he reviewed my new book Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools, for the American Thinker, a daily Internet publication devoted to the thoughtful exploration of issues of importance to Americans.
In his review, Behrend said, "Moe demolishes many of the myths surrounding teachers and their unions. The most important of these is the myth that teachers are unhappy with their unions and yearn to shed their yoke. Not quite."
He also writes, "The book shows teacher unions are an inexorable force imposing their will on education policy at the federal, state, and local level. Reforms and reformers are blocked at every turn by a political juggernaut built over decades and intricately designed to block reform."
Click here to read the complete review
Click here to learn more about Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools.

Michael B. Horn: The Future of Education Policy--Moving from Inputs to Outputs to Outcomes

My colleague, Katherine Mackey, and I have written a new report that should really push the envelope.
Our conclusion is that the majority of education policy continues to focus on rewarding systems that meet certain input measures that are, for the most part, inappropriate for judging online learning.
Focusing on inputs has the effect of locking a system into a set way of doing things and inhibiting innovation; focusing on outcomes, on the other hand, encourages continuous improvement against a set of overall goals, and in this case, can unlock a path toward the creation of a high-quality student-centric education system.
This report is certain to raise some hackles. It already has. In a post on the Education Week's Digital Education blog, a writer spotlighted one policy recommendation, the elimination of teacher-certification requirements, as something she hadn't "heard a lot of talk about."
"Would such a step help ensure quality by forcing educators to focus on outcomes, as Horn and Mackey argue? Or would it potentially undermine the quality of online learning available for those students?" the writer asks.
Well, no one is advocating having unqualified people teach our children. What we are saying in report, Moving from Inputs to Outputs to Outomes is that policymakers need to move beyond input-focused policies that regulate seat time, attendance, student-teacher rations, teacher certification, and enrollment caps--factors that may or may not have to do with learning--and instead move toward outcomes-based policies. Technology can, and will lead the way.
Click here to read the complete study.

Christina Martin: Victories for Oregon’s K-12 Kids

Oregon’s legislators looked somewhat frenzied as they fought for key education reforms in Oregon. After tense negotiations, significant amendments, and a tug-of-war on several education bills, the Oregon legislature passed a package of education reforms with strong bipartisan support. The governor has said that he supports all bills in this package, meaning that these bills should soon be law.
While some of the reforms have problems, the overall outcome is excellent as it gives significantly more power to parents to choose the right public school for their kids. Among the reforms are freer access to virtual charter schools, creation of college-sponsored charter schools, and more school choice.
Click here to read more about this great victory for Oregon students.

Tom Vander Ark: Digital Learning Now for Charters

With less funding than traditional schools, charters have more incentive to find solutions that can boost achievement and reduce operating costs. They usually have more flexibility to implement solutions. But they often have limited capacity and get cut out of deals that benefit districts and students in traditional schools. Despite the mixed bag, we’ll see lots of blended learning innovation in the charter space this fall.
I had the good fortune to participate in a session at the National Charter School Conference (#NCSC) in Atlanta with two of my favorite people, Susan Patrick, CEO of iNACOL, and Mickey Revenaugh, EVP Connections Learning. We reviewed the 10 Elements of Digital Learning, a project of the Foundation for Excellent Education and chaired by former governors Jeb Bush and Bob Wise.
The session was full and I thought the Q&A would focus on blended learning implementation, but instead the focus was on the policy details behind this framework including administering a competency-based learning system, ensuring assessment security for online learning, selecting high quality content, and creating incentives for providers to serve at-risk students.
Most charters will need a phased plan and some assistance to shift from print to digital and from teaching age cohorts to serving individual students.

Guest Commentary: Scott MCLeod Wonders Whether the Educational Faculty Leadership Is Irrelevant to the Digital,

Scott McLeod is an associate professor of Educational Administration at Iowa State University and the director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE). In the Summer 2011 issue of the University Council for Educational Administration Review, McLeod wrote a thought-provoking article challenging
many of the tightly-held beliefs of education administrators.
"We no longer live in an information push-out world where we passively receive information that is broadcast out to us by large, centralized entities. Instead, we now live within multi-directional conversation spaces in which 15-year-olds can reach audiences at scales that previously were reserved for major media companies, large corporations, and governments. We all now can have a voice," McLeod wrote.
"We all now can be publishers. We all now can find each other’s thoughts and ideas and can share, cooperate, collaborate, and take collective action. Time and geography are no longer barriers to communicating and working together. Of course these changes also have
resulted in dramatic impacts on learning. Students and educators now have access to all of the information in their textbooks—and an incredible wealth of primary documents—for free. They have access to robust, low-cost or no-cost, and often multimedia and interactive learning resources (texts, images, audio, video, games, simulations) that can supplement, extend, or even replace what is being taught in their classrooms. Via collaborative Internet-based tools such as blogs, wikis, videoconferencing, and social networks, they can learn from and with students and teachers in other states or countries. They also can quickly and easily connect with authors, artists, business professionals, entrepreneurs, physicians, craftsmen, professors, and other experts.
"If it is difficult to overstate the technological disruptions that are occurring around us, it is equally difficult to understate the lack of progress that most schools have made in response to these overarching societal changes," McLeod argued.
"While students 'power up [at home, they] power down every time they go to class,' " McLeod added.
Click here to read the complete essay and why McLeod says given the scale and scope of the transformations occurring, educational leadership faculty must do better and embrace change.

Terry M. Moe: What Marcus A. Winters said about 'Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools'

City Journal is a magazine about urban policy. "The Bible of the new urbanism" according to London' Daily Telegraph.
Recently, Marcus A. Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who writes about education policy, reviewed my new book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools. In his review, Winters said, " Moe traces the sources of the unions’ power and explains why they behave as they do. In the process, he blows apart several pervasive myths that have been used for far too long to let teachers and their unions off the hook."
He added, "The book is a must-read for anyone frustrated by the slow progress toward improving America’s public schools."
Winters wonders what will change the balance of power between teachers unions and education reform.
"It is a factor outside of education that Moe believes is the real game-changer: the rapid expansion of information technology. Moe believes, as he and John Chubb argued recently in their 2009 book, Liberating Learning, that technology has the power to weaken the unions by fundamentally changing the way that schools operate."
Click here to read all of Winters review.
Click here to learn more about Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools.

Guest Commentary: Bryan Setser on Wither State-Led Virtual Schools

On his watch as chief executive of the state-led North Carolina Virtual Public School, Bryan Setser over saw enrollment triple to more than 65,000 students and standardized test scores dramatically increased in all subject areas. In 2011, he joined Open Education Solutions as its vice president, advisory services. In a recent post on edreformer.com, Setser speculated on the future of state-led virtual schools.
"Are state-led virtual schools in trouble? I pondered this question quite a bit when I resigned my post as CEO of the North Carolina Virtual Public School in April. Three reasons led to my decision and continue to fuel my advisory work for Open Education Solutions."
Click here to read more about Setser's new thinking about the future state-led virtual schools.

Terry M. Moe: California in the Dark Ages

You’d think that California, the home of Silicon Valley, would be at the forefront of the movement to harness technology in boosting K-12 education. But nothing could be further from the truth. California remains in the dark ages. And under the bold leadership of Governor Jerry Brown, it seems intent on staying there.
Brown was heavily backed in the 2010 election by the powerful California Teachers Association, and, soon after his election, he tipped his hand by appointing a CTA lobbyist to the state school board. His most recent gift to the CTA: as the new state budget takes shape, he is refusing to approve funding for the state’s educational data system, which links data on students and teachers, generates a ton of information on performance and its possible determinants—and (gasp) makes it possible to evaluate how much learning is actually going on in each teacher’s classroom. Just what the CTA doesn’t want.
The CTA has long fought against this data system: first by opposing any linkage between student and teacher data, and then (when it eventually lost that battle) by opposing the use of such data, even as just one factor, in evaluating, paying, or possibly dismissing teachers. Under Race to the Top, President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan explicitly sought to encourage the creation and use of these data systems by insisting that any states with California-like “firewalls” must remove them if they were to stand any chance of winning a share of the money. Desperate to be a winner, California dutifully complied. Sort of. It removed its restrictions from the law, but it allowed local districts to decide whether the data would actually be put to use in any way. And at the local level, of course, all such decisions are subject to collective bargaining; and local unions have regularly made sure that the data don’t actually get used in ways that might reflect on the performance of individual teachers, and thus be a threat to jobs.
Brown’s latest move, the denial of funding, is the crowning blow. If it stands, it will essentially destroy the state’s data system—and give the CTA exactly what it has wanted from the beginning. The technology exists for California to collect and store massive amounts of pertinent information on students and teachers, statewide, and to put that information to sophisticated, productive—and fair—use in improving the public schools. There is no doubt that the advance of technology and the productive use of information are the future of American education. President Obama knows it. Secretary Arne Duncan knows it. Education reformers in all corners of the country know it. But the CTA and Governor Brown are modern day Luddites. What they know is that technology is threatening to low-performing teachers, that it is threatening to jobs—and that its innovations need to be resisted, however much they might actually improve the management and operation of California’s public schools.
Long term, of course, this assault against the revolution in information technology won’t work. But in the short term, it will make technological progress slower and more difficult—and it will have consequences. Governor Moonbeam has become Governor Luddite, and it can’t help but take a toll on California’s schools and kids.

Tom Vander Ark: My Commencement Address to the Internet Academy Class, 2011

On the Internet, even commencement addresses are virtual.
That's right. My speech to the 2011 graduates of Internet Academy, one of the nation's oldest virtual schools, was streamed during the school's virtual graduation.
I hailed the students as learning pioneers who will use their skills in online learning in any walk of life they pursue.
I also told them that their online learning skills set them up for success.
Click here to see the video. And again, congratulations to the Internet Academy Class of 2011.

Guest Commentary: Thoughts from the Virtual Graduating Class of 2011

William Cattron, a PA Cyber Charter graduating senior, was chosen as the senior speaker for the Western Graduation ceremony.
Nearly 1,500 students graduated from PA Cyber Charter School this year. In his speech, Cattron characterized his fellow grads as a " graduating class that has taken advantage of a cutting edge education."
"Seek out the opportunities that are there for your special talent and go live an exceptional life—a life with purpose and meaning. Show the world what we PA Cyber graduates have and can accomplish. We have not and will not be assembly lined—our individual differences are what make us strong. These individual differences will make us successful," Cattron urged his classmates.
"My family and I continued with PA Cyber because we learned that it had a better math and science curriculum and I had greater access to college classes while still in high school. I’ve enjoyed my college classes and my PA Cyber virtual classes, especially the interaction with the other students and teachers," he continued. "Thank you PA Cyber for helping me fulfill my high school dreams and preparing me to achieve my college dreams."
Click here to read Cattron's entire speech.

Tom Vander Ark: Anytime Anywhere Learning

Sometime in the last few years we passed a milestone in human development: anyone can learn almost anything anywhere. All you need is broadband and a browser. The explosion of informal learning resources has surrounded the calcified formal system and changed the opportunity set for another billion people. Personal digital learning is an inevitable component of human development–both formal and informal–from here on out.
The bottom line: The genie is out of the bottle. When our children, students and employees have so many learning opportunities outside the ones that we have provisioned for them, it requires us to rethink everything.
Click here to read my complete post.

Terry M. Moe: Talking About Teachers Unions

I appeared on the Ronn Owens Radio Show this week. Owens has a daily, high-rated, talk show show based in San Francisco.
The focus of the program was my new book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools. Our conversation was wide-ranging, touching on subjects such as union impact on how schools are organized and the power unions have over getting bad teachers out of the classroom.
We also talked about seniority rules, the role public employee unions have on the political process, and the impact information technology will have on education and teachers unions.
I also took phone calls and answered emails from listeners.
Click here to find a link to the podcast of the hour-long show. The link is the "Ronn Owens June 6 10 a.m."
Click here to learn more about Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools.

Lisa Graham Keegan: School Choice and Funding Options

What is at the top of my education reform wish list?
Watch this quick-hit video with my answer, which includes online schools as an option.

Guest Commentary: Mimi Ito on Facebook's Educational Potential

Mimi Ito is a cultural anthropologist studying new media use, particularly among young people in the United States and Japan. She focuses on the changing relationship to media and communications among youth and is a co-author of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and
Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (MIT Press, 2009).
Ito recently spoke about her work to the Hechinger Report's Jennifer Oldham at a Hechinger Institute seminar, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, on digital media and learning in Santa Monica, Calif.
Click here to read a Q&A with Ito and find out why one of her biggest concerns is that While most kids have access to cell phones or computers, they don’t necessarily interact with adults who can mentor them on the best ways to take advantage of these technologies.

Tom Vander Ark: Creating Cohorts in a Blended World

Michael Horn, my Liberating Learning blog contributor colleague and author of The Rise of Blended Learning, and I hosted a webinar in which we featured AdvancePath, a drop prevention week, and Carpe Diem, a blended college prep high school in Yuma.
Groups of kids with similar birthdays have been used as the basic building block of education for a century. As we gain the ability to customize learning for every student is there any value in learning in a group?
The Carpe Diem model relies on a backbone of computer-based instruction but it is supplemented with daily workshops in each subject. The computer-based instruction allows the student to vary pacing but workshops are generally cohorts of students moving at approximately the same pace. Like other high performing schools, Carpe Diem utilizes cohorts for integration and application. Workshops promote peer-to-peer learning and problem solving. Students at Carpe Diem generally start and finish classes together.
AdvancePath also relies on a backbone of computer-based instruction but students start and finish classes on their own. There is one-on-one help available on demand and some small group instruction. With students coming and going, there is limited efforts to derive benefit from the cohort; AdvancePath has a fully individualized approach to learning.
Carpe Diem and AdvancePath academies have a very intentional culture that is supportive and productive. Creating a graduation focused culture is important but it doesn’t dictate a cohort approach (i.e., an individualized approach like AdvancePath has a learning environment with clear norms).
As schools incorporate online learning and competency-based practices, we will see more innovative strategies for combining the benefits of customized learning and peer cohorts. Click here to read more about five strategies to promote learning together.