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.