School Leader

What is personalized learning and how do we know if we're "doing" it?

Personalized learning has been a hot topic over the last decade and the challenges of education during the COVID pandemic have made it even more timely as educators have struggled to address student learning needs. The tendency of schools to approach instruction through a one-size-fits-all lens has never been more visible to parents and the public.

A team of researchers based at Western Kentucky University has just published an article in the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership highlighting our work on a four-year, federally-funded grant to implement personalized learning in 111 Kentucky schools. The article describes our effort to create an Innovation Configuration Map that helps teachers understand what personalized learning really is and assess their school's progress in implementing personalized learning strategies.

The WKU team were evaluators for a $42 million grant awarded to the Green River Regional Educational Cooperative (GRREC) and the Ohio Valley Education Cooperative (OVEC) in 2012. While the grant included several components, the overarching goal was to promote personalized learning in 111, mostly rural, schools. As we describe in the journal article, schools had wide latitude in selecting how they wanted to approach personalized learning, and in general educators have yet to develop a common understanding of what we mean by the term.

The WKU team explored research literature on constructs and strategies that seemed most closely related to the idea of personalized learning, including self-regulation theory, growth mindset, mastery learning, self-determination theory, and more. From there, we constructed an Innovation Configuration (IC) Map. Researchers Hall and Hord (2006) originally developed IC Maps as a way of helping organizations track their implementation of various change initiatives.

Our Personalized Learning IC map included four clusters/strands that described changes in the learning process, the classroom climate, and in the behaviors of students and teachers. Additionally, for each of these clusters, various indicators described the kinds of changes that might come about as a result of implementing personalized learning along a five-point continuum from continuing the status quo (no change) through implementing and finally sustaining the change intiative.

Because we lacked the resources to independently assess all 111 schools using the IC Map, the WKU team also developed a self-assessment manual for school-based leadership teams to evaluate their own implementation of personalized learning using the instrument. Then we selected six schools that reported high levels of implementation for site visits that ultimately confirmed the accuracy of the schools' self-ratings, suggesting to us that the Personalized Learning IC Map possessed some degree of validity. Schools self-assessed with the instrument for two years and researchers found that across both cooperatives schools deepened their implementation of personalized learning.

Our article suggests directions for future research and practitioner implementation using the IC Map. We are eager for others to explore the IC Map and use it both for research and to support their personalized learning efforts. You can find the instrument and the self-assessment manual on our Rock Solid Evaluation Services website. These tools may be used with our written permission. And of course I urge you to read the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership journal article for a more thorough description of the entire process. You can direct any questions about this research to me at [email protected]

The development of this Personalized Learning IC Map and the entire evaluation project for the GRREC/OVEC grant was a massive team effort. I want to especially recognized then-graduate assistants Dr. Trudy-Ann Crossbourne-Richards, who did the lion's share of the literature review upon which the IC Map was based, and Dr. Heather Arrowsmith, who developed the manuscript describing our work. WKU colleagues Dr. Jenni Redifer, Dr. Tony Norman (now dean of education at Morehead State University) and Dr. Jie Zhang (now with the University of Houston) were essential research partners on this project. I commend them all, and also the leadership of GRREC and OVEC and the 111 schools that participated in the grant.

One final thought, and speaking just for myself: I believe we need far more empirical research on this topic. I have had a long-standing professional interest in personalized learning, but I am generally quite skeptical that the casual way in which it has been approached in many schools will have a lasting effect on student achievement. The work of UK educator David Didau has illustrated how hard it is to accurately assess what students truly know and are able to do at any given moment, and that reality may point us toward much more traditional modes of teacher led, whole-class instruction, especially for students from low-income backgrounds. It also suggests that a content-rich curriculum may be far more important in the long-run than faddish, low-impact strategies for "personalization" that may have little grounding in theory or research.

I'm not ready to give up the quest for more personalized approaches to student learning, especially when they are wedded to content-rich curriculum. But I want to see far more empirical research on which strategies have the highest impact and how those compare to more traditional methods. I hope our IC Map will contribute to that effort.

Reference: Hall, G.E., & Hord, S.M. (2006). Implementing change: Patterns, principles, and potholes (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

 

 

Critical race theory prevents real progress on closing achievement gaps

Update, 4/29. I made a five-minute video as a companion piece to the essay described to below. In it I describe what critical theory is, how it can be useful, but why it has to be rejected as the single lens through which we address issues of racial achievement gaps:

In my latest essay for The Chalkboard Review, I argue that racial bias may be a real phenomena among educators, and it may partially explain the persistence of achievement gaps based on race. But indoctrinating teachers in critical race theory or imposing CRT in the curriculum isn't the answer. In fact, CRT actually prevents a meaningful exploration of how implicit bias shows up in schools and how we might do better by students.

Research from education advocacy group TNTP, billed as “The Opportunity Myth,” shows that students of color and students from low-income backgrounds regularly receive classroom assignments that are below grade-level expectations. In fact, the Opportunity Myth study found that in 4 out of 10 classrooms with a majority of students of color, students never received a single grade-level assignment (compared to only 12% of majority white classrooms that never received a grade-level assignment). 

Does racism play a role in this abysmal display of low expectations? Perhaps. The biased belief that students of color are incapable of completing rigorous assignments almost certainly does. But a fair number of minority teachers and administrators would also have to be guilty of this assumption.

Is white privilege at work in this pattern? Perhaps – to the extent that teachers assume white students are capable of high achievement and therefore challenge them with rigorous work. So racial prejudice may indeed make a difference in student outcomes. But what do we do about that? And does that explain everything about these differences?

CRT advocates would say we have to expose these implicit biases in educators—presumably the minority teachers with low expectations for students of color also hold those views because of some mysterious pattern of white supremacy—and insist that students receive more “culturally responsive” instruction like the CRT-approved but historically inaccurate pablum of the 1619 project or ethno-mathematics where concepts like finding the right answer in a math class is an alleged reflection of “whiteness.” 

Instead of imposing ineffective, CRT-inspired equity trainings or ideologically-driven curriculum on students, what if we just showed educators the research on low expectations and then trained them in understanding what high-quality, rigorous instructional resources look like and how to use them? For all students. From my own personal experience when I’ve confronted teachers and administrators with the Opportunity Myth research, they recognize the pattern and tendency to use the past performance of struggling students to justify giving them low-quality assignments, and they immediately want to help their schools do better.

Read the whole thing here.

Related posts:

• Living not by lies in education.
• Warren County curriculum shows why parents, community need to be more aware and involved
• Fighting racism, rejecting critical theory

Impact Kentucky Survey: Improving feedback and coaching

The Impact Kentucky survey of teachers' perceptions of their working conditions was released earlier this week. As I pointed out in my previous blog post, statewide results indicate that many schools have a real opportunity to improve feedback and coaching to help teachers improve their practice.

These survey results offer school leaders a rich window into understanding how their teachers feel. Those feelings don't always translate directly into positive or negative outcomes for students, but they are important indicators. As a strong body of research reveals, principals influence student learning primarily through their relationships with teachers and their efforts to grow the academic capacity of the school. Working conditions are a key component of that capacity. So I encourage educators to explore their school and district's results. The interactive Impact Kentucky results website allows you to compare school results to the entire state and also to similar schools (so, high schools to all Kentucky high schools, for example) and those differences automatically tag the school's greatest (relative) strength and greatest growth areas.

It can take a lot of emotional courage, but highly reflective principals will want to unpack the results with their teachers and invite teacher and staff input into specific strategies to address growth areas. Goals can be set and progress can be monitored. The process itself will likely strengthen teachers perceptions regardless of the specific strategies pursued.

I received an email from one of my former students, now a successful high school principal in a nearby district, after she read my post and reviewed her school's results. She found that, like many schools across the state, one of her lowest domains on the Impact survey was Feedback and Coaching:

I, too, am in that boat.  I make daily classroom visits, however, I do not give my teachers any written feedback.  I want to but the formal "walkthrough" forms I have seen seem so cumbersome.  I've also considered having my department leads develop some type of feedback tool that I can use but we seem stuck in the weeds when we start to create something.

It's worth looking at the five survey questions related to this domain. They read as follows:

• How often do you receive feedback on your teaching?
• At your school, how thorough is the feedback you receive in covering all aspects of your role as teacher?
• How useful do you find the feedback on your teaching?
• How much feedback do you receive on your teaching?
• How much do you learn from the teacher evaluation process in your school?

The principal who wrote me went on:

I realize that providing written feedback is something novel for my team and that I will need to do some legwork on my end.  Honestly, I have been afraid to implement something like this for fear that they would think I am trying to catch them doing something wrong.  According to their responses, I do not provide effective/frequent feedback like they wish.

Do you have a form that you find effective?

Here was my response, which initiated some additional thought sharing between us:

Obviously from the data you are not alone in feeling like you want to give teachers better feedback. I’m afraid I have not seen any specific forms that I would recommend. I think this has more to do with creating an atmosphere in which everyone is continually working on their practice. You’ve got the most important step for that in place already by making daily classroom visits. There’s no way you can provide meaningful feedback without knowing what’s actually happening in the classrooms, so you’ve got that foundation already.

The next thing I might recommend, based on examples I’ve seen elsewhere, is to just start leaving some notes for teachers. It doesn’t have to be on a form. You could probably find some  medium-sized sticky notes that you could write a short message on and leave on the teacher’s desk. I would use this primarily for giving specific praise. Acknowledging the good practices you saw when you were in the room. Once you’ve established that as something the teachers can expect, and they see that you recognize their strengths, it will make it easier to provide suggestions (“wonder what it would be like if….have you ever thought about doing….”), and then even more critical feedback (although that might come more in one-on-one conversations)…OR, if you’re doing all this to supplement the use of your walkthrough form, maybe you can also then start using blank comment space on that form to make the occasional improvement suggestion.

When this is all woven into a meaningful evaluation process, then teachers are using the formative feedback you are giving all year and the summative feedback from their evaluation to craft personalized, substantive growth plans each year. Then you can start giving specific feedback during your walkthroughs on those teaching components that you know each teacher is working on.

Keep in mind it’s been years since I did a lot of walkthroughs where I had to give specific feedback, so what I’m describing comes from what I’ve observed other administrators do and from spending a lot of time reading about and researching this topic. You will have to figure out what works best for your particular context and staff. At any rate, the very fact that you are interested in this is great. Ask your teachers for their ideas too about how you and your leadership team can improve the feedback teachers get on their instruction. They’ll have some suggestions!

My former student indicated that she'd had success with the sticky note strategy when she was previously an elementary principal, but was willing to try it with her high school teachers. I imagine it's worth a shot as a good first step, but the teachers themselves will probably have the best ideas. And, I advised her, don't take "I just want to be left alone to teach" as a viable response! That's not an option.

I'd be eager to hear from other administrators or teachers what kinds of feedback strategies have worked best for you in the past? What kinds of feedback not only fostered a positive climate but also helped teachers actually improve their practice? Feel free to comment below or email me: [email protected]

Related posts:

• Impact Kentucky teacher survey can support school improvement
• New TELLKentucky research explores differences in principal and assistant principal perceptions
• PGES and the bathwater
• Research on TELL Kentucky survey highlighted at MSERA

 

 

Impact Kentucky teacher survey can support school improvement

Results from Kentucky's new survey of teachers' perceptions of their working conditions, called Impact Kentucky, have now been released and are available for review at the state, co-op, district, and school level. Impact Kentucky, which was administered to all Kentucky teachers and administrators earlier this year, replaced the Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning (TELL) survey, which was administered biannually from 2011 to 2017. In 2018 the New Teacher Center decided to discontinue providing the TELL survey to states, and this gave Kentucky an opportunity to develop a new tool that kept the best features of TELL while making it even more relevent for the work of school improvement. 

I had the honor of serving on a committee that assisted Kentucky Department of Education personnel and representatives from Panorama, the new survey provider, in designing the Impact Kentucky instrument. It turned out to be shorter than TELL, which was an advantage, and included several new features. See more about the structure of the survey here. About 85% of Kentucky educators responded to Impact Kentucky, which is an extremely high participation rate. In summarizing the statewide results, KDE pointed out the following key findings:

• Educators report most favorably on staff-leadership relationships.
• Educators report confidence in their ability to educate all students, regardless of race or cultural background, in a data-driven manner.
• Educators report least favorably about resources.
• Lower-grade educators have more favorable views of working conditions, especially when it comes to school climate and professional learning.
• Principals and assistant principals have more favorable views of working conditions than teachers and other education professionals.
• School leaders show clear strengths in leadership effectiveness and relations with staff.

Most of these findings are unsurprising and, for the most part, consistent with results from previous administrations of the TELL Kentucky survey. Of interest to me was that the second-l0west rated domain of the survey was feedback and coaching, with only a 56% favorable rating. The questions in this section had to do with the frequency and quality of feedback teachers receive from their supervisors. Less than half of teachers (48%) indicated that they learned much from the formal evaluation process at their schools. This is yet another signal that Kentucky schools, like those in most other states, have a lot of work to do in making teacher evaluation a more meaningful and growth-building process.

Interestingly, Impact Kentucky also suggests that teachers have relatively strong relationships with their administrators (staff-leader relationships was the highest-rated domain of the survey). Giving critical feedback to teachers may be uncomfortable for many principals because they worry doing so will damage their relationships. But my previous research on coaching principals to improve their instructional leadership found that school leaders can sometimes leverage their positive relationships precisely to help teachers grow. The principal in our case study found that her strong personal connections to teachers made them more likely to receive her improvement feedback in positive ways, and to trust her guidance and help. Giving good feedback is difficult, to be sure, but principals have far more capacity than they realize, and the results are worth the risks involved.

Survey results vary considerably across schools and districts, of course, so I encourage teachers and school leaders to explore their local data for strengths and growth areas. 

Of great interest to me is the extent to which Impact Kentucky results also correlate to student achievement outcomes when controlling for demographic variables. In other words, could improving teachers' perceptions of their working conditions also have a measurable impact on student learning? The linkage from previous research is mixed. The TELL Kentucky survey was most predictive for student outcomes at the elementary level, and only for certain constructs within the survey. I believe Panorama will be generating some research reports for KDE examining this connection, and that will have the greatest utility for school leaders. If we're going to take the Impact Kentucky survey seriously, then we ought to have some reasonable confidence how doing so may actually improve student learning outcomes.

Regardless, measuring and tracking teacher perceptions of their working conditions can be useful in other practical ways. For example, my research colleagues and I used TELL Kentucky results to explore the impact of implementing school-wide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports. These are the kinds of applications that may also be useful to school leaders if they are willing to work with their teachers to explore their survey data, what it means, and how they can collectively respond. Panorama is offering two webinars on June 4 and 5 to assist school officials to do just that. See more here. 

I look forward to seeing how that process, and the research behind the survey itself, continues to play out.

Related posts:

• New TELLKentucky research explores differences in principal and assistant principal perceptions
• PGES and the bathwater
• Research on TELL Kentucky survey highlighted at MSERA

 

Every school should confront the "Opportunity Myth"

Creating a policy environment for effectively closing achievement gaps and accelerating overall student learning is the number one priority for the Kentucky Board of Education. To that end, at our annual retreat earlier this month KBE members spent an entire day hearing from a number of speakers from Kentucky and across the United States about their successful efforts to close gaps and boost achievement. Among the most interesting to me was a presentation from the TNTP organization on the "Opportunity Myth."

The Opportunity Myth report was issued more than a year ago, and while I missed it at the time, Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis and leaders at the Kentucky Department of Education have been busy trying to share this vitally important research and its implications with school and districts leaders across the Commonwealth. Consistent with my own observations from thousands of classrooms visits over the years, the Opportunity Myth demonstrates that in far too many schools students are not being challenged with rigorous, grade appropriate content and lessons. And sadly, children of poverty and children of color are far more likely to be deprived of meaningful and challenging learning tasks.

In this post I'd like to summarize the findings of the Opportunity Myth research, reflect on the reasons for this problem, and urge educators to take this work seriously and explore its implications for their own school improvement efforts. As always, ideas I share on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of anyone else affiliated with Western Kentucky University (where I am professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education.

The Opportunity Myth: Too many lessons below grade level

TNTP (formerly known as The New Teacher Project) conducted research in 4 school districts and one charter school network, involving about 250 teachers and almost 4,000 students. The districts were chosen to represent a wide range of sizes, student demographics, and geographical diversity. Researchers administered student and teacher surveys, but in my opinion the most important component of the study was an analysis of student work samples and a series of classroom observations. 

The "Opportunity Myth," according to the authors, is the idea that if students come to school prepared and do the work that is presented to them by their teachers, they will succeed and be academically ready for the next level of learning. This is a myth, TNTP says, because student work samples revealed that while students accurately met the requirements of their classroom assignments 71% of the time, their work met grade-level academic standards only 17% of the time. This, in spite of the fact that 83% of students reported earning A's, B's, and C's in English language arts and 78% reported earning similar grades in math.

Simply put: teachers were routinely giving assignments that did not require students to do grade-appropriate work. And this pattern was much worse when classrooms were made up of a majority of minority students. In fact, in 4 out of ten classrooms with a majority of students of color, students never received a single grade-level assignment (compared to only 12% of majority white classrooms that never received a grade-level assignment).

While this study is limited to the four districts and one charter network included in the research, the findings are consistent with many of my own observations visiting both high- and low-performing schools throughout my career. In many instances, teachers are completely unaware of how low their expectations are for student performance, or how inconsistent their lessons are with the rigor of state standards. And this may help explain why so many students are well below proficient levels in reading and math, and why achievement gaps continue to persist. Low-rigor lessons may also be more common in traditionally high-performing schools than we realize, but students with affluent, educated parents may simply be gaining more content knowledge outside of school that helps enhance their scores on standardized tests. So for schools of all kinds, the Opportunity Myth should provoke a serious bit of self-analysis and soul-searching about the quality of classroom assignments.

Curriculum, intervention, and expectations: Sources - and remedies - for the problem

As an educator myself, my immediate reaction to these findings was to ponder why. What accounts for the disconnect between the learning tasks teachers are giving students and the level of rigor required by grade-level standards? My instinct is that teachers (and their administrators) are not aware how much they are lowering the bar, and if that's the case, what systemic issues or unrecognized attitudes are contributing to this problem? And in identifying the causes, could we also point ourselves toward some possible remedies?

Curriculum. First, I've become increasingly concerned that most schools still need to do a lot of work around curriculum development. There is a significant difference between the state's academic standards (which stipulate the bare minimum of content and skills students need to master) and the actual curriculum needed to deliver those standards. Curricula include all the many choices schools must make about the specific texts students will read, content that will be provided, instructional materials that will be engaged, and lessons that will be taught.

In other words, curriculum is much more than just a textbook series. But in many schools, individual teachers are still making the vast majority of decisions about instructional materials. The Opportunity Myth research bears this out, finding that teachers reported spending about 7 hours per week creating or finding lessons and materials accounting for about 57% of everything they used in the classroom. This inevitably leads to vast inconsistencies across classrooms, disconnects between lessons and state standards, and ultimately learning tasks that are below grade level.

Schools should engage a systematic process of curriculum review and selection, and consider fully-developed curriculum programs like Core Knowledge that specify at a high level of detail the texts, concepts, and learning task for each grade level. Teachers should be spending a lot more of their time assessing student progress and developing interventions for those who are struggling to meet standards, and a lot less time inventing curriculum.

Intervention. But intervention efforts also have to be effective. I've long been an advocate for standards-based assessment of student learning, which is highly sensitive to students' "readiness levels." Rather than treat all students as if they are ready to learn the same material at the same pace, a more mastery-learning approach emphasizes constantly assessing student learning and then modifying instruction to meet students where they currently are. I believe many teachers have gotten that message, but now in their sensitivity to meet students at their readiness level, they may be grossly underestimating how prepared students really are for rigorous learning tasks (I've also come to understand that accurately gauging student readiness level is much harder than many of us have realized). 

If regular classroom instruction is unintentionally being watered down, then the interventions being offered to students in what educators call "Tier II" and "Tier III" (those who are preforming more significantly below grade level) are also failing then to catch students up to where they need to be, and never will as long as Tier I (the instruction offered to all students) is also below grade-level standards. We need a statewide reconsideration of how we are using systems of intervention, which on the whole appear to be making no impact on closing achievement gaps or accelerating students toward proficiency. And that reconsideration should begin by significantly ramping up the rigor of regular classroom learning tasks.

Teachers will naturally worry that students will fail if challenged with more demanding, grade-appropriate learning tasks. But the Opportunity Myth study offers some encouragement in this regard, finding that when students were confronted with grade-appropriate learning tasks they succeeded with those assignments 65% of the time. Moreover, value-added models employed by the study found that students who were consistently given grade-appropriate assignments made more than 7 months more academic gains in a single year than their peers who did not, proving that most students are far more capable than their teachers may realize.

Expectations. And this brings us to a final cause, deeply inter-related with the points above. Beyond the structural problems of poor curricula or ineffective systems of intervention, far too many educators simply have unfairly low expectations of what students of color and poverty are capable of doing, however well-intended their motives might be. We are far too prone to use poverty as an excuse for student outcomes. Poverty makes a huge difference, of course, but the Opportunity Myth makes it clear that students are far more capable than we sometimes give them credit, and we need a much greater collective sense of responsibility for school improvement and a hair-on-fire sense of urgency about figuring out how to get there. Believing in our kids, implementing a real curriculum, and figuring out interventions that actually catch kids up to grade level have to be key pieces of that process.

TNTP and the Kentucky Department of Education offer a wealth of resources for schools that would like to diagnose their own gaps between instruction and grade level standards and organize their improvement efforts around the Opportunity Myth research (my thanks to Associate Commissioner Amanda Ellis and her team for assembling this list of links). Among the resources available are the following:

• Assignment review tools that will help schools analyze classroom assignments for alignment with Kentucky standards in reading, writing, math, and social studies. This will help educators better determine if assignments are on grade level.
• The Student Work Library offers examples of assignments that are weakly, partially, and strongly aligned to grade-level standards in English language arts and math. KDE consultants are also working on vetting items for a student work library that will show assignments that are weakly, partially and strongly aligned to the KAS for reading & writing and mathematics.
• The Student Experience Assessment Guide is a how-to guide for systematically gauging the quality of students’ daily academic experiences and how to make informed decisions to improve those experiences for all students.
• The Student Experience Toolkit provides multiple resources available to ensure strong and engaging instruction and for enacting high expectations.

I encourage every school, but especially those that face the need to improve student proficiency rates or close achievement gaps, to use these resources for starting a rich, community-based conversation about how we can all take responsibility for  accelerating student learning.

Related posts:

• What I see in low-performing schools
• Why Knowledge Matters: The most important education book of 2016
• Why Knowledge Matters, Part II: Strengthening standards with a knowledge-rich curriculum
• What if everything you knew about education was wrong?
• Why Kentucky's 5-star school rating system is important - but maybe not in the way some people think

Prichard Committee gets it wrong on scholarship tax credits

The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, one of Kentucky's most influential education advocacy organizations with roots in the state's historic education reform act of 1990, has decided to take a position on scholarship tax credits, a proposal that would encourage private donations for scholarships that help children access the school of their choice. Unfortunately, the Prichard Committee gets it completely wrong on this issue, ignoring clear evidence that scholarship tax programs tend to have a fiscally neutral or even positive impact on state budgets and positive impacts on student learning outcomes. Sadly, an organization that prides itself on citizen empowerment in education is helping perpetuate a system that routinely denies some families the right to select a school that is the best fit for their children - a privilege affluent families enjoy and practice every single day.

Disclosure: I serve on the board of directors for EdChoice Kentucky, a non-profit coalition advocating for scholarship tax credits; Disclaimer: as always, opinions expressed here are mine alone and do not reflect the views of Western Kentucky University (where I work) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member).

I have written extensively about how scholarship tax credits work. For background on the technical elements of the policy, please see this post from last year and the related links at the bottom of the post.

The key flaw in the Prichard Committee's position on this issue, expressed on their blog yesterday, is the claim that such a tax credit would eventually "cost" the state $200 million in revenues, funds that are better spent on other much-needed education initiatives. This assertion is based on a review of last year's unsuccessful scholarship tax credit bill by the Legislative Research Commission, charged with estimating the cost of various proposals. The problem is that the LRC is not permitted to calculate potential savings to the state for proposed legislation. Prichard Committee leaders know this, and yet still present the issue as if this particular tax credit has no potential benefits for state coffers.

Scholarship tax credits give children who otherwise could not attend a tuition-based school the chance to do so. Based on the experience of other states, Kentucky would likely see a 1 to 1.5 percent switch of students from public schools to non-public schools in the first year of implementation. When students don't attend public schools, the state is not required to spend education dollars on them (while local property tax revenues remain stable). To illustrate the point, currently about 72,000 school age children in Kentucky are not enrolled in public schools (they are homeschooled or attend tuition-based schools). If these students all showed up wanting a public school education, the state would have to come up with approximately $287 million extra dollars each year. So students choosing a nonpublic school option actually save the state money and increasing that number would further this savings.

Families in 17 other states enjoy the benefits of scholarship tax credits. Over 40 research studies have examined the impact of these policies on state budgets and every one of them found either a net neutral or positive fiscal impact. Not a single study finds a negative financial impact on the state. Again, the Prichard Committee often prides itself on the use of research to support education policy, and should know better than to ignore such evidence.

The Prichard blog also claimed there was no evidence that scholarship tax credits positively impact student learning, but only selectively cite studies about school vouchers, a policy that may have the same intended effects as tax credits (expanding parental choice for needy families), but are in no way structured or financed in the same way. This too is irresponsible, and ignores research from Florida, which hosts the nation's largest scholarship tax credit program, finding that students who benefited from the program had higher rates of college attendance than their demographically-similar peers. Earlier research found that student achievement in public schools improved when the school was in close proximity to schools attended by scholarship students.

Certainly more research needs to be done on the achievement effects of school choice policies, but it is disingenuous for Prichard to make this claim about scholarship tax credits when research finding positive effects clearly exists.

If the Prichard Committee wants to avoid taking a policy position because they believe there is insufficient research to support it, I respect that decision. But to actively advocate against a policy that has real potential benefits for children while pretending no evidence exists in its favor deeply undermines the credibility of the organization.

There is absolutely no reason to believe there is a conflict between giving all families the same kinds of education options as affluent families and providing a strong public education for everyone who wants it. The Prichard Committee should know better.

Related posts:

• Why I support scholarship tax credits for Kentucky - and you should too
• Does giving parents education options "divert money" from public schools?
• Expand educational options for Kentucky families with scholarship tax credits
• Scholarship tax credits: Kentucky's best chance for school choice
• EdChoice Kentucky advocates more schooling options for all families
• A School Choice Primer, Parts I, II, and III

New TELLKentucky research explores differences between principal and assistant principal perceptions

One of the many things I love about my work is the chance to partner with colleagues from across Western Kentucky University and beyond on a variety of projects. The fruit of one of those collaborations was recently published in the NASSP Bulletin, peer-reviewed research journal of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. 

This research study used the 2011 Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning (TELL) Kentucky survey, administered statewide to all Kentucky educators, to explore how high school principals differed from assistant principals in their perceptions of school working conditions. My co-authors included former WKU colleague Dr. Jie Zhang (now a the University of Houston), WKU Educational Leadership doctoral program graduate Dr. Chunling Niu (now with the University of Kentucky College of Social Work), retired WKU colleague Dr. Stephen K. Miller, and Dr. Tony Norman, director of WKU's EdD program.

The TELL Kentucky survey was developed by the New Teacher Center of Santa Cruz, California, and has been administered every other year since 2011 to all Kentucky teachers and other school-level, certified personnel. The survey collects teacher attitudes toward eight aspects of their working conditions: Time, Facilities and Resources, Community Support and Involvement, Managing Student Conduct, Teacher Leadership, School Leadership, Professional Development, and Instructional Practices and Supports. The survey has always enjoyed a high response rate (80% in 2011) and provides a useful tool for reflecting on factors that impact teacher job satisfaction and school-wide professional culture.

Previously our research team had used the 2011 TELL Kentucky results to examine how implementing school-wide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) impacts teacher perceptions of their working conditions. In this study, we wanted to focus on school administrators. Specifically, we were interested in how assistant principals might differ from principals in their perceptions.

As I have written previously, the assistant principalship is the gateway for many aspiring principals to enter school administration, but not always a good one. Assistant principals are often relegated to uninspiring, non-instructional managerial tasks that may not prepare them well for the multi-faceted job of school principals. While empirical research is limited, we found evidence from earlier literature that principals and assistant principals often differ in their perceptions of each other's roles. We hypothesized that assistant principals might likewise differ in their perceptions of the school's working conditions. And given that the primary way principals impact student achievement is through developing structures of distributed leadership and by building academic capacity in the school, we speculated that differences between principal and assistant principal perceptions might also be related to student achievement outcomes.

We limited our population to high schools (where the most combinations of principals and assistant principals could be found). Using selection criteria described in the article, our sample included 149 principals and 240 assistant principals representing 133 schools (many schools have multiple AP's and some even have multiple principals). We found that principals and assistant principals had significantly different perceptions of their schools on two TELL constructs: school leadership and teacher leadership. In both cases, principals tended to rate their schools more positively than assistant principals. In other analyses (presented at the Mid-South Education Research Association in 2013), we had found that high school principals tended to rate most TELL constructs higher than teachers.

In this way, assistant principal perceptions were more like teachers on the constructs of school leadership (which has to do with how responsive and collaborative school leaders are with teachers) and teacher leadership (which focuses on how teachers are empowered with decision-making authority). Differences in principal and AP perceptions did not predict differences in student achievement, however.

Limitations abound in every research study, of course. Our school achievement variable was the overall academic index score of the school, which is an amalgamation of numerous student outcome data points. A more fine-grain analysis may have revealed other effects on student achievement. But it's also possible that, by virtue of their mostly non-instructional roles, differences in assistant principal and principal perceptions just have limited bearing on the academic life of the school.

The study also revealed some interesting interactions between parental involvement and discrepancies between principals and assistant principals in their perceptions of working conditions. Schools with high levels of parental involvement tended to also have higher degrees of agreement between APs and principals on TELL constructs. Our earlier research found that higher levels of parent involvement were (unsurprisingly) predictive of higher levels of student achievement in the school.

While we can't draw causal connections among these variables, this research in general suggests there is value in principals working more closely with their assistant principals to calibrate their perceptions of what is happening in the school. Doing so may not only build a unity of purpose but also serve to better empower assistant principals as more significant decision-makers in the school and better prepare them for leadership roles.

I'm continuing to work with colleagues on several additional analyses of TELL data from 2011 and subsequent years, along with results from other teacher perceptions surveys, and how these tools might better predict student achievement outcomes and therefore inform school improvement efforts in more meaningful ways. We hope to begin presenting and publishing those results later this year.

You may download our study on the NASSP Bulletin website (behind a paywall, but you may have access through a university affiliation). Contact me directly for more information on our research.

Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of Western Kentucky University (where I am associate professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I have served as a member since 2016).

Related posts:

• Research on TELL Kentucky survey highlighted at MSERA
• TELL Kentucky-PBIS research presented at AERA

What if everything you knew about education was wrong?

Near the beginning of his book, David Didau says he doesn’t actually want to convince you that everything you know about education is wrong (though a fair amount of it actually is), but rather “that you will consider the implications of being wrong and consider what you would do differently if your most cherished beliefs about education turned out not to be true.” He spends a good portion of the book exploring why we have a tendency to stubbornly believe what we do, but then he explodes some of the most commonly-held beliefs in P-12 education.

Didau, who is from England, is a former teacher and a devotee of education psychology. As formative assessment guru Dylan Wiliam notes in his introduction to Didau’s 2015 book, What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong?, the practice of education in recent years seems remarkably disconnected from what research actually reveals about the way we learn. Didau uses that research to challenge a host of ideas about instruction and assessment and offers a robust defense for a rather traditional approach to learning: knowledgeable teachers carefully modeling and guiding students through supported practice, revisiting challenging, domain-specific concepts until students have become experts in their own right.

According to Didau, if there’s one overarching misconception about education, it’s that we can observe short-term, incremental learning in students. “We teach, children learn,” Didau says of our false assumptions. “That’s the input/output myth.” Research on learning reveals that the process is far more complicated, Didau argues. In our obsession with short-term learning gains, we mistake “performance” - the ability to mimic a skill or concept - for real learning. Information can be forced into short-term memory over brief periods of time, but it doesn’t last. Thus the experience of every teacher: today students seem to understand the lesson, but tomorrow they’ll be as clueless as if I had never taught it at all.

Didau shows how forgetting is actually an essential part of learning. Unless a learning experience is imbued with a very high degree of emotional content or connection, new information usually has to be taught - and forgotten - several times for it to become embedded in long-term memory. Real learning takes place when new knowledge becomes linked to an existing schema - a mental framework of understand a complex web of information - or when schema are completely rearranged into new patterns to incorporate added content.

The implications of this understanding of learning are considerable. Didau is critical of many current practices of formative assessment, which seek to determine whether students have attained short-term mastery of a concept. Relying on students correctly answering formative assessment questions or tasks can be misleading, especially if the teacher assumes these correct answers means she can “move on” and be done with the concept. “If they answer your questions correctly, it means very little,” Didau says. “Who cares what they know at the end of the lesson. Better to assume that they are likely to forget it.”

Didau advocates a practice he calls “interleaving,” or intentionally reteaching key concepts while increasing the amount of time after each lesson. Not every concept or skill would need to be addressed through interleaving, but only those he calls threshold concepts, or those key understandings that students often struggle to master and upon which further progress in that subject depends. For example, Didau suggests gravity in physics, evolutionary theory in biology, opportunity cost in economics, and deconstruction in literature as possible threshold concepts for each discipline. Each subject might have several more threshold concepts depending on the grade level or developmental level of the students.

That these concepts are difficult to master explains why they are linchpins to deeper learning. The key goal of lesson planning should be to make sure every student is engaged in productive struggle with new material, because that’s where maximum learning takes place. Teachers should be assisting students in moving from a novice to an expert level (as developmentally appropriate) relative to their subjects.

While all of the above may sound like common sense, much of educational practice in recent decades stands in the way of the kind of rich, content-specific, and teacher-led instruction Didau is advocating. In fact, Didau positions the teacher as essential player in the learning process (very much the “sage on the stage” and not merely the “guide on the side”). In contrast to teaching approaches that place a major emphasis on student agency, collaborative learning, and “real-world relevancy” (whatever that means), Didau argues for a traditional model of instruction whereby the teacher as content-area expert explains new material, models new skill and application of knowledge, and carefully directs students through scaffolded levels of practice until independence is achieved.

Didau doesn’t necessarily reject project-based learning, group work, or “21st century skills” as wastes of time, but argues that spending energy on these strategies is far less effective and efficient than teacher-led instruction. Lest the reader think Didau’s methods would lead to rote memorization of facts, he presents a powerful argument that embedding new knowledge into students long-term memory is inseparable from teaching them how to think critically and creatively. “Creativity requires form,” he argues, illustrating how masterful artists spend years learning techniques and styles so that they can actually deviate from them.

As an advocate for formative assessment strategies, I found What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong? compelling on multiple levels. Didau offers several pages of his book to formative assessment expert Dylan Wiliam, who agrees with Didau that there are many ways of oversimplifying and misusing formative assessment while still making a strong case that, whatever its limitations, teachers and students benefit from having more data about their learning progress than less.

Didau does not argue against assessment, but shifts the emphasis in how assessment is used. Specifically, he argues that regular testing of previously-taught material is itself one of the most powerful means of helping students relearn and therefore master new knowledge. So he advocates for less re-teaching and lots more retesting of previously-taught material.

Related to this, I found Didau’s ideas challenging to my keen interest in helping teachers create more personalized learning environments. I’ve recently become concerned about some of the excesses in the personalized learning movement that have de-emphasized the important role of knowledge in favor of teaching generic skills (as if those could be separated from domain-specific content), but still feel that instruction needs to be far more directed to individual students’ readiness levels relative to a clear and rigorous curriculum. But if Didau is correct, it’s far more difficult to actually establish a child’s readiness level that I assumed, and students may actually benefit greatly from being regularly reintroduced to content they or their teacher think they have already mastered.

Perhaps there is more room here for whole class instruction than I’ve previously considered, and perhaps the key really is ensuring that no matter how many times a student has encountered a concept, the learning must be deliberately difficult enough to cause the student to struggle, but always with the actual possibility of supported success.

I believe all teachers and school administrators would benefit from reading What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong? and struggling with the questions David Didau raises. Alongside recent works by E. D. Hirsch (reviewed here) and Daisy Christodoulou (reviewed here), Didau’s book makes a strong case for a rigorous and well-planned curriculum and thoughtful teacher-led classrooms.

Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of Western Kentucky University (where I serve as associate professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member).

Related posts:

• Seven Myths About Education
• Why Knowledge Matters: The most important education book of 2016
• Why Knowledge Matters, Part II: Strengthening standards with a content-rich curriculum
• If caring is king, content is queen.
• Yes, kids need to know about the American Revolution.

Making Montessori work in the charter school sector

This month the Thomas B. Fordham Institute released a fascinating study, Three Signs a Proposed Charter School is At Risk of Failing. The report searches for indicators in the applications of proposed charter schools that were associated with those schools eventually posting low student performance. The authors found three signs associated with eventual charter school failure: 1) a lack of identified leadership for self-managed charter schools, 2) a lack planning for specific, intensive interventions for at-risk students, and of particular interest to me, 3) whether the school was proposing a "child-centered" curriculum or instructional approach like Montessori or Waldorf.  

The findings of this study are useful to policy-makers and those involved in charter school authorizing, especially here in Kentucky where we've recently moved to become the 44th state to allow charters. All of these risk factors for charter failure are worth pondering, but I'm specifically interested in the third finding regarding schools that intend to use a more non-traditional, "child-centered" approach. For several years I've been writing about my desire to see more public schools and schools of choice embrace such philosophies, especially Montessori. Three Signs is a warning that charter applicants and authorizers need to think very carefully about how to make such innovative strategies successful.

The authors of Three Signs examined charter school applications from four states (Colorado, North Carolina, Indiana, and Texas) and looked for elements that were associated with whether the applicant turned out to be a "low-performing" school, defined as being in the lowest 25% of schools in student achievement, and below the 50th percentile in academic growth in their early years of operation (previous research has indicated that if a charter is low-performing in its early years, it will likely remain so). Three patterns emerged:

1) Failure to identify the principal, or strong principal candidates, in the school's application resulted in a 51% likelihood that the school would be low performing. This pattern did not hold if the applicant was affiliating with an existing charter school network.

2) If the school intended to work with at-risk populations of students, but failed to describe "an intensive academic program that includes high-dosage, small-group instruction or extensive individual tutoring," the school was 61% likely to be l0w performing.

3) If the school intended to offer a "child-centered, inquiry-based learning model, such as Waldorf, Montessori, Paideia,  or other experiential models," it had a 57% chance of turning out l0w performing.

When a charter school application had two or more of these risk factors, the chance of failure increased to 80%.

The researchers recommend that, rather than simply reject charter school applications with these risk factors, authorizers think about how to mitigate against these risks and increase the likelihood that such schools can actually succeed.  For example, authorizers can insist that applicants provide a carefully crafted rubric and strategic plan for recruiting, selecting, and retaining high-quality leadership applicants, and ask applicants who intend to work with at-risk students to intentionally elaborate on their intervention and student support plans.

Regarding the issue of schools that want to use experiential models of learning, the authors of Three Signs point out that charters are intended to be innovative and try approaches that would be more difficult in traditional school environments, and that 20-30 percent of existing charters utilize such models. Montessori programs in public schools have increased by 50% since 2000, and half of these are charter schools. 

But such programs require extensive and specialized training for teachers, and the researchers speculate that some of these charter schools may have lacked sufficient supports so that child-centered strategies can be implemented with fidelity. Moreover, some of these methods involve multi-age grouping of students which may, if learning is not personalized to students' individual readiness levels, result in a misalignment of curriculum with materials assessed on state tests. Three Signs suggests authorizers take care to ensure that charter school applicants who intend to use innovative methods take these issues into careful consideration.

I appreciate the researchers' thoughtful discussion of these issues, and I certainly hope charter applicants and authorizers are not discouraged from pursuing child-centered philosophies. Some of the most exciting examples of education innovation I've seen are where schools are attempting to integrate a rigorous curriculum with Montessori methods, especially with at-risk learners. But I have also observed how difficult it is to implement such approaches with fidelity. Schools require strong structures of teacher training and development and appropriate resources  or they easily lapse into a weak version that Montessori dad and author Trevor Eissler calls "Monte-something."

Such resources and supports do exist, however. The National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector is devoted specifically to helping public Montessori programs, whether in charter or district-run schools, implement the Method with fidelity. The other findings from Three Signs also suggest that, to enhance the success of charter schools using experiential models of learning, applicants and authorizers must take careful steps to ensure strong leadership and thorough plans for student interventions and supports. 

Other research data, while limited, indicate that when Montessori is used with fidelity student achievement can be enhanced. I hope charter school applicants, operators, and authorizers, especially here in Kentucky, will pay attention. 

Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of Western Kentucky University (my employer) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member).

Related posts:

• Montessori in public schools
• Montessori Madness
• Classical education, Montessori, and the tension between the "what" and "how" of learning

Why the education establishment feels so deeply threatened by school choice

Last night I had a dream. I was attending a very large meeting of regional and state education leaders. I recognized many of them as friends and colleagues I have known for years. In this meeting they were passionately discussing their fears about Kentucky's recent move toward charter schools, the implications of school choice, and their general sense of threat to public education. I rose to speak on the issue, to share my own perspectives as a longtime school choice advocate and a recently-appointed member of the state Board of Education. But after I talked for a bit I looked around to discover they'd all gotten up and walked out. Only about three people remained, listening out of what appeared to be politeness alone.

The dream was at once both comical and disturbing, a symbol of the constant tension I feel in my work these days when many people I admire and support view me with confusion at best, and suspicion or even hostility at worst, for the public positions I have taken on school choice. The battle for charter schools in Kentucky has been bruising, and will likely take new forms as the law is implemented and new choice policies come under consideration. A strong sense of fear characterizes the education establishment these days. The need for civil, informed dialogue and reflection is enormous, yet harder than ever to achieve.

In light of this situation - and in light of my dream, I want to strongly recommend a brand new paper by American Enterprise Institute education scholar (and Maryland Board of Education chair) Andy Smarick, called Analyzing an Educational Revolution. Smarick uses Thomas Kuhn's n0w-famous 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to explore the slow-rolling earthquake taking place in education policy. Advocates for charters and choice often downplay the paradigm-disrupting nature of their ideas, emphasizing how choice fits within the existing structures of educational delivery, but Smarick says this is not the case. The "differentiation and choice" paradigm does, in fact, represent an enormous break with a century-old way of thinking about schooling (what he calls the "territorial exclusive franchise model") that has completely dominated the educational landscape in the U.S. His paper, which is highly readable and only 26 pages long, helps illuminate the disrupting nature of the new paradigm and explains why members of the education establishment feel so threatened.

Thomas Kuhn explored how the greatest scientific breakthroughs have not come from the natural processes of doing science within conventional frameworks of thinking or practice. The discovery that neither the earth nor the sun was the center of the universe could not have emerged from existing scientific paradigms, Kuhn explains. Likewise, the emergence of relativity theory and quantum physics was not the result of conventional, Newtonian approaches to science. These new paradigms created full-blown crises in the scientific disciplines that took decades or even centuries to subside until the new paradigm was firmly accepted.

Andy Smarick adapts Kuhn's framework for how these paradigm shifts take place to analyze education policy in the U.S. Smarick describes the existing paradigm of educational delivery as the territorial exclusive franchise model, in which geographically-defined government actors (the local school district), governed by a majoritarian democracy (the locally-elected school board), assigns students to attend certain schools and oversees all aspects of a fairly standardized educational program.

Smarick contrasts the dominant paradigm with the differentiation and choice paradigm, which suggests that families should be able to select from a variety of publicly-financed educational options, many of which will vary considerably in terms of educational philosophy, instructional emphasis, curriculum, etc.

As Kuhn had explained in Structures, dominant paradigms emerge because they actually work to help explain things and solve problems at an unprecedented and effective level. Smarick explains how the territorial exclusive franchise model of education emerged during a time of great consolidation, commensurate with the apex of the Industrial Revolution and political Progressivism, in economic, political, and cultural structures (for another great look at this historical process, see Yuval Levin's book, The Fractured Republic, and my review here). As Ashley Berner Rogers notes in her excellent new book, Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School, the new paradigm ended a much more pluralistic and community-based model of educational delivery, and sometimes reflected a dark spirit of prejudice toward Catholics, immigrants, and other minority groups. Smarick doesn't deny this, but emphasizes that the district model also brought standardization, efficiency, uniformity, and especially a much greater and necessary level of educational equity and access, all at a time when America was gearing up to be a singular world superpower.

But the nature of dominant paradigms is that over time they can become blind, or at least tone deaf, to the many problems their assumptions and structures cannot explain or solve. For all the great accomplishments of the territorial exclusive franchise model, problems abound. Monopolistic systems tend toward one-size-fits-all solutions, resist innovation, and require complex quality control structures. Above all, our rate of improvement in student learning, however real, is so agonizingly slow the system simply cannot be expected to meet the educational goals required by our rapidly deconsolidating economy and culture (see my extended discussion of these patterns, especially as they apply to Kentucky, here).

The differentiation and choice paradigm has emerged in response as an alternative way of conceptualizing educational delivery and accountability. But this model requires a huge shift in thinking about how education is funded, which principles of democracy should be operative in how schools are governed, and a willingness to accept new risks and emergent problems for which there are, as yet, no clear solutions. Smarick carefully examines each of these areas.

In terms of funding, the old paradigm assumes education dollars belong to districts to allocate for the operation of schools to which they have assigned students. The new paradigm assumes that education dollars will follow students to their families' choice of schools (much as Medicare dollars or food stamp dollars follow beneficiaries to the health care providers or grocery vendors of their choice), with a variety of possible mechanisms for authorizing which schools would be eligible for such publicly-funded students to attend.

In terms of school governance, the two paradigms offer competing assumptions about how best to ensure democratic accountability for education. The old paradigm is democratic in the sense that it empowers a governance structure elected by majority vote. But the new paradigm questions the extent to which such structures have truly been effective and raises concerns about how minority viewpoints are easily shut out. It further suggests that "democracy" also means the empowerment of individual families and the engagement structures of civil society (like churches, civic organizations, nonprofits, businesses, etc.) in determining what the educational landscape should look like. Above all, the old paradigm defines the "public" nature of education as "owned, operated, and managed by the government with majoritarian-elected oversight." The new paradigm defines public as "serving the public interest" with a broad array of possible educational options driven by family choice and subsidiarity.

Finally, Smarick illustrates how, per Kuhn, dominant and revolutionary paradigms "ask fundamentally different questions, look for different types of answers, and prioritize different things." Smarick notes how choice-based systems require a great deal of careful thinking and policy-making around enrollment, as decisions have to be made about how families choose schools and how schools are allowed to prioritize student admissions, if at all. These questions are largely irrelevant under the old paradigm, which just assigns students to their schools mostly based on where they live. From my own perspective, another emergent problem is how to determine which schools of choice should really be eligible for public funding (the "authorizing" component of charter schools, for example). Adherents to the territorial exclusive franchise model view the unknowns and risks associated with these new challenges as further evidence of the superiority of the dominant paradigm, while adherents of the differentiation and choice model see them as the natural process of policy-making based on a new set of assumptions.  Thus the "incommensurability" of the two worldviews, as Kuhn called it, becomes more intractable.

Smarick's Analyzing an Educational Revolution helps explain the ferocious backlash of educators toward the differentiation and choice paradigm. Kuhn's Structures described a similar reaction within the scientific disciplines to new paradigms:

Kuhn argued that such shifts are often interpreted as an existential threat to not only established ideas but also the careers and professional work of respected leaders. The revolution reflects critically "upon much scientific work they have already successfully completed." The identification of disqualifying anomalies in the existing system and the offering of a new approach produce "a period of pronounced professional insecurity" for those at the helm.

Choice advocates need to understand this insecurity and respond with some degree of sensitivity and appreciation for the major shift in thinking and practice they are asking of dedicated professionals deeply committed to their work. Likewise, choice opponents would benefit from reading Smarick's analysis to help further clarify how the dominant paradigm emerged in the first place, and to better understand its strengths and limitations, as well as the new problems they are likely to face as the differentiation and choice paradigm grows in strength.

I'll interpret my dream last night in the most positive way possible, especially in light of Andy Smarick's Analyzing an Educational Revolution: as a reminder to be gracious to my fellow educators for whom this differentiation and choice talk sounds like an utterly foreign language. In time, I hope more of them will stay in the room with me to listen.

Usual disclaimer: All views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of Western Kentucky University (where I work) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member).

Related posts:

• A School Choice Primer, Part I, Part II, and Part III
• Education in the Fractured Republic
• What makes a school "public?"
• Breaking the government monopoly on education
• Kentucky School Choice Rally: Text [and video] of my comments