Race to the Top - Implementation Efforts FOCUS on Personalized Learning (Submitted by Jim Ross for MI STEM Partnership)

Published Online: January 4, 2013

District Race to Top Winners Turn to Implementation

By Michele McNeil

The first federal Race to the Top competition that reaches down to the local level leaves most large, urban districts out of the winners’ circle in favor of charter schools, midsize systems, and two large consortia of school districts—all of which must now turn to implementing proposals that collectively have won them $400 million.

The 16 winners, announced last month by the U.S. Department of Education, beat out more than 350 other applicants and include three charter school organizations, traditional districts such as Carson City, Nev., and Guilford County, N.C., and a group of 22 rural districts from Kentucky.

Florida’s Miami-Dade County school system is the biggest urban district on the list. It won the coveted Broad Prize last year.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the winners’ circle includes “a really good mix” of districts that are already education reform leaders and districts that have not received as much attention.

“We know that school districts have been hungry to drive reform at the local level,” Mr. Duncan said in a Dec. 11 call with reporters.

More than 300 outside peer reviewers helped score the applications. A single point was all that separated the applicant that ranked 16th—the Lindsay Unified School District, in California—and the two that tied for 17th place and were not funded, which were the Mapleton public schools in Colorado and the Jefferson City schools in Missouri. Large districts such as New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia scored far outside the winners’ circle.

SPREADING THE CASH

This latest version of the well-known Race to the Top brand, which has become the Obama administration’s main lever for education change, is meant to spark improvements at the district level, particularly in the area of personalized learning. The contest was also meant to spread Race to the Top money around in states that had not won before—and among districts in rural America.

Indeed, 11 of the 16 districts or groups of districts are in states that did not win the original 12 Race to the Top grants for states in 2010.

Few of the winners, however, serve mostly rural students, with the largest concentration in the Kentucky cooperative that won.

“I think the big story is that the usual suspects didn’t win,” said Andy Smarick, a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit consulting firm in Washington. “It just shows the education reform community is probably myopically focused on a small number of districts and less cognizant of big, important things happening elsewhere.”

Still, he said, smaller districts—which may have smaller central office staffs and may not be as accustomed to managing large, federal, high-profile grants—may struggle more with implementation, he said.

“I think this is going to be the biggest issue,” he said. “It’s not only about hiring enough people but the right people.”

IMPLEMENTATION NEXT

With award letters in hand, the districts now turn to implementation.

Within the next two months, districts must draft “scopes of work,” which serve as a contract of sorts between the department and each winner and which establish timelines, key deliverables, and detailed budgets for the four-year grant period. The scopes of work are critically important, as they are how the department will hold districts accountable for grant implementation.

For the KIPP program in the District of Columbia, one of the charter school winners, a $10 million grant will expand its Capital Teacher Residency program by training 415 new teachers over the next four years.

At 350,000 students, the largest district to win was Miami-Dade, which will focus its $30 million on expanding a math initiative designed to change how the subject is taught in middle schools. The money will pay for, among other things, two teachers in every middle school math classroom.

In Carson City, Nev., the $10 million award comes as the district is facing a $5.5 million cut for its fiscal 2014 budget—and at a time when it’s seeing success with a “learner-centered model” that it has started with a federal School Improvement Grant at one low-performing middle school. The grant will support two high schools and two middle schools with a combined enrollment of about 4,200 students.

“We would like to see more opportunities for our secondary schools to experience change,” said Richard Stokes, the superintendent of the 7,000-student district. “This is a huge blessing for us. We believe this grant will allow us to continue making academic progress.”

The gist of Carson City’s learner-centered model is this: Rather than presenting a one-size-fits-all academic curriculum, teachers will seek to tailor lessons to the needs of students by using assessments along the way to gauge students’ mastery, and their problem spots.

The district will use its grant to continue to build its data system, hire highly skilled veteran teachers as “implementation specialists” in the participating schools, support family engagement programs so parents are involved in the work, and provide continued coaching to administrators.

LARGE RURAL WINNER

The largest rural winner in the competition is the Green River Regional Educational Cooperative, a group of 22 districts from across rural Kentucky that educate 59,000 students.

The group’s winning application, worth $40 million, has four key components: making students more responsible for their own educational success, helping teachers gear their instruction to competency-based learning, creating more personalized learning, and working with preschools to improve kindergarten readiness.

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“These grant dollars allow us to have a laser-like focus on college and career readiness through competency-based learning,” said George Wilson, the executive director of the Green River co-op, in Bowling Green, Ky. “There have certainly been pieces that we’ve tried, and very successfully. This lets us do some new things.”

In practice, that means spending the winnings on a number of efforts. They include career counselors in each of the 23 participating high schools, and training and materials for preschool and day care teachers.

There also will be intensive professional development for educators so they teach not based on seat time or grade level, but based on what students have already mastered and what they’re ready to learn next.

“This is not going to happen with the flip of a switch,” Mr. Wilson said. “This is a fundamental change in the way we approach K-12 learning.”

Maker Movement/Spaces

The Maker Movement Comes Alive

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OCT 22 2012, 11:41 AM ET

Advances in technology have helped people create items using affordable 3D printers, bringing them back to their DIY roots.

Creative people and consumers around the world are embracing the "Maker  Movement," a term that defines the practices and habits of millions of people who are returning to pre-industrial roots by self-producing everything from robots to handmade crafts.

The trend's momentum has been documented in the book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of WIRED, released Oct. 2.

Makers' tools of production are epitomized by the rise of 3D printers that have become affordable for the masses. However, despite such advances, many people lack the time, tools, or creativity necessary for the Do It Yourself (DIY) culture.

In addition to online homemade crafts giant Etsy, startups are taking advantage of this trend by offering consumers the "maker" experience by combining their ideas and dollars with those who can turn them into reality. One site, Quirky, allows its community of "inventors" to submit ideas that they'd like to turn into products. If the idea gets enough traction, Quirky works to mass-produce the item and sell it through its retail partners. (The "inventor" keeps a royalty from the sales.)

Makeably, the newest site to enter the market, was founded by two long-time ex-Googlers, Anastasia Leng and Ryan Hayward. Leng says, "We enable our users to work with makers to create custom objects, including art, home decorations, accessories, and unique wedding pieces. Users browse from hundreds of 'custom project templates' submitted by their curated network of makers and collaborate with a maker of their choice to turn their idea into reality."

In addition to these sources, Kickstarter and other crowd-funding platforms have given inventors the funds they need to create the products they envision. 

But online retailing isn't everything, as community interaction forms a major component of the Maker Movement. Sonja Rasula runs StateOfUnique.com and organizes events that connect makers with consumers, such as her upcoming Unique NYC. She said, "While the Maker Movement traditionally refers to people creating DIY technology-based products and solutions, in my world the Maker Movement is much larger and more diverse. To me, a maker is someone who solves their own problems, uses do-it-yourself methods, forges their own path, and is quite simply passionate about creating things."

Ryan Blumstein, 27, who co-founded Surface Grooves LLC with his fiancee Elissa Masin, 28, recently exhibited home furnishing and lighting products at New York City's Maker Faire. He said, "The Maker Faire was a great representation of different people creating new and fresh experiences. It brings the community together through education and innovation."

As at-home creative technologies become better and cheaper, traditional retailers may face increased competition from both the little guys and producer-consumers.

Building a Networked R&D Collaboratory (Overview: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) Submitted by Jim Ross

Getting Ideas Into Action: Building Networked Improvement Communities in Education (PDF)

http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/sites/default/files/bryk-gomez_building-nics-education.pdf?utm_source=Ready+News+D3+-+13&utm_campaign=Ready+News&utm_medium=email

"While innovations abound in education, we argue that the field suffers from a lack of purposeful
collective action. Instead, actors work with different theories of the same problem, activities are
siloed, and local solutions remain local."

"In this essay, we focus on an alternative social organization for this activity network: How might
one structure and guide the varied and multiple associated efforts necessary to sustained
collective action toward solving complex improvement problems?"

"Open networks abound in education. In the main, they function as free-floating idea bazaars,
contexts for self-expression, and places to share information. In fact, the current social
organization of educational R&D functions much like an open network. It is characterized by a
multitude of voices lobbying for preferred approaches, but with weak mechanisms for directing
intentional action that cumulates in coherent solutions to complex problems. In this regard,
educational R&D’s inability to orchestrate such improvement is akin to a market failure."

"The terrain for possible innovation is vast and complex. The roadmap organizes the challenges to be confronted in this space in agreed upon ways. It establishes standards for how developments in different domains must fit together, and then sets micro-targets, domain by domain. In these ways the roadmap helps to coordinate he activity so that different innovations in hardware and software can be expected to interoperate at designated times in the future. In the industry’s view, road mapping is a “practicalapproach to deal with the complex process of technological innovation” (Schaller 2004:13). In essence, the roadmap reshapes accountability relationships that go beyond the confines of an individual firm or laboratory (Schaller 2004). Participants, both individuals and firms, are not autonomous actors operating within a disconnected marketplace. Rather, they form a densely connected network of peers who share a focused interest in common regions of the roadmap."

Absent a working theory of the whole, interventions fail because of externalities not considered (also known as implementation failures), even though these are often predictable. For example, curriculum
interventions often fail because of inadequate professional development. At base here is a natural human tendency to grasp for promising solutions or best practices without fully understanding how such solutions must be integrated with other solutions and pre-existing organizational conditions.

(21st Century Digital Learning Environments Process - Similar to Roadmap & Driver Diagram presented by Carnegie - our graphics designed to aid this process)

RoadmapDriver Diagram

"In general, a driver diagram has three key elements: targets, primary drivers, and secondarydrivers. The target is one of the community’s agreed upon outcomes from the program improvement map. The primary drivers are the major causal explanations hypothesized to produce currently observed results. Secondary drivers, in contrast, are interventions in the system aimed at advancing improvement toward targets."

***** "In principle, each cycle propels some bit of local learning. When parallel development activities occur in different sites at the same time, a network can learn from the ensemble of these experiences."

******* "This practice of learning through doing enlivens the mantra of continuous improvement that deficits are a treasure. Each process failure provides an opportunity to learn and to improve both locally and network wide."

******** "Applied research in education today has become hyper-concerned with the internal validity of the individual field trial. Treatises on modern causal inference place primacy on the word cause while largely ignoring concerns about the applicability of findings to varied people, places and circumstances. In contrast, improvement research must take this on as a central concern if its goal is useable knowledge to inform broad scale change. This consideration has important implications."