News
February 1, 2011
Disrupting Educational Outcomes
By Louise Bay Waters, Superintendent & CEO Leadership Public Schools
A Presentation from the 2/1/11 Conversation,“Can Technology Radically Transform Urban High Schools?"
Held at IDEO, Palo Alto, CA.
Panelists: Neeru Khosla, Co-founder and Executive Director, CK-12 Foundation; Michael Horn, Co-founder and Executive Director of Education, Innosight Institute; and Dr. Louise Bay Waters, CEO and Superintendent, Leadership Public Schools
Moderator: Heather Hiles, CEO, RippleSend, Inc.
Heather gave you a snapshot of the LPS reality in statistical terms. We are four urban public charter high schools in Richmond, Oakland, Hayward and San Jose, California. We serve approximately 1500 students of whom 58-93% are low income. The majority of our students enter 9th grade performing at the elementary level and 85% will be the first in their family to attend college. Let me tell you what that translates to terms of student reality. First, our students have to catch up at least two years academically each school year. This means we have no choice except to teach college prep courses and basic skills concurrently. This is impossible without the adaptive power of technology. Second, our students must believe that they can make these leaps and that there is a reason for them to make the sacrifices this entails. We believe technology can empower them as masters of their own destiny and producers in the 21st century economy. And finally, for so many of our students, motivation and academic catch up are still not enough to guarantee success in college. The economic and social reality of their lives will continue to throw road blocks in their path. We are convinced that technology can provide us mechanisms to be real about providing life changing opportunities for our students.
It is our contention that there is no one innovation that will address these three needs. Instead, what we are building is a system of technology innovations to leapfrog practice in each of these areas simultaneously in an all out assault on the current reality for urban high school students.
Let me be more specific about the path we have embarked on - the LPS vision: A hybrid approach— numerous technologies + intense teacher relationships—to make our students ready for college success.
First, in order to get our two for one gains, we are teaching literacy and content concurrently. High school is too late to first teach reading and then later teach Biology. That is what led us to Neeru and our first tech disruption. Rather than purchasing textbooks that most kids couldn’t read, we formed a partnership with CK-12 to produce College Access Readers. These are online books that have embedded literacy supports. Most students use these as workbooks with embedded vocabulary and comprehension exercises. Advanced students use the CK-12 online original. Very low performing students will use the online versions with text-to-speech or Spanish translation that are currently in development.
But our remediation needs are even more extensive, we have to intentionally backfill missing skills. A high school student with 4th grade level skills is much different than a 4th grader. The adaptability of computer assisted programs makes it possible to tailor this back fill to the individual student. We are doing this with our lowest readers and 1st semester, after half a year, 58% have already shown more than a year’s growth with some gaining as much as 3 years.
But as I mentioned before, unless students buy in to catch up, it won’t happen. So again we are using technology – this time to put immediate data in the hands of students – both informing and empowering them. At our Oakland campus, the number of students passing the high school exit exam on their first try went from 33 – 62%, primarily from individual students understanding their data, setting goals, and identifying the supports they needed to reach them. We have also seen phenomenal results from students getting just-in-time data using audience response technology – clickers.
Great as each of these tech strategies are, to me none of them, per se, is disruptive. What is disruptive is their synergy in a process we call Collaborative Innovation. Let me give you an example. Two years ago we embedded our math specialist in LPS Hayward, our highest performing school. He had been developing an online math program for Algebra 1 with a backfill component for the basic math skills. He built this out at Hayward and Algebra achievement there doubled. At the same time our Oakland campus had been successfully integrating literacy into their Algebra. This is when Neeru and I decided to build the College Access Readers together. LPS gave CK-12 the online math course to continue refining and linked it to their Algebra online textbook, which we then modified by adding in the literacy strategies we had been using in Oakland– creating the Algebra College Access Reader. This fall our Richmond teachers began fully implementing the new program and then added in immediate-response data with clickers. Their just completed semester exams showed 92% at or above grade level, out-performing Hayward and triple their performance last year, and four times that of neighboring schools – and this a school in one of the highest poverty communities in California – Richmond’s Iron Triangle. This amazing systems turnaround was the results of a rapid-cycle development process that would have been impossible without technology.
However, these gains are not enough. As I said in the beginning, graduating high school college ready is only step one. Let me tell you another Oakland story so you can understand why. In December, four Oakland seniors with GPAs above 3.5 tried to drop out and the Valedictorians from the past two years, each with full ride scholarships, are not in college. One of these seniors works fulltime on the night shift at Kentucky Fried Chicken. One night a few weeks ago the principal took his mother to visit him on the job to try and convince him to stay in school. He pulled her outside and said, “Ms. Haynes, you don’t understand, my mother already works two jobs and she can’t make it without me.” In each of these cases the reasons are economic. In each case the student is a major, or in some cases the only, breadwinner in the family and the opportunity costs of going to college simply outweigh distant future gains. So again we are turning to technology in another multi-faceted attack:
First we are laying the groundwork to engage our students as producers of technology, not simply consumers. Our job is to convince the student working at KFC that struggling through college will ultimately payoff far more than his current job. We have to understand that large numbers of our students are not going to experience the college life we remember of dorms and parties and late night discussions. The economic and personal challenges of their families will remain with them and they face will numerous academic and cultural hurdles. To persevere and overcome these barriers, they need to see themselves as part of the new 21st century economy with all its opportunities --- not as simply stepping into economy of their neighborhood and experience. That is why we are starting student-run e-commerce businesses beginning this spring in Richmond. And we are establishing Tech Innovation Labs where students will be able to produce English and Spanish videos, apps, and other digital products to embed in our CK-12 flexbooks.
Second, in a growing partnership with rrriple, our students will soon be building digital portfolios where they will reflect, chronicle and curate evidence of the proficiencies they have gained throughout their time at LPS. This is also the repository of content that will be published into resumes and college applications.
Third, we are building our students’ social capital to support them as they bridge to new worlds. To do this, we are partnering with Who Are Your Five and Pivot Learning in the development of their online mentoring program which uses a protected social media space to provide inner-city students the mentoring and social capital that middle class students naturally have access to. Using this space, students will develop a virtual support team of mentors and tutors that can help them on their journey into college and potentially beyond. Our first student design team begins work this month at LPS San Jose.
Finally, and critically, we are in the planning stages for an online, on-site Community College in using our technology and facilities after school and in the evening. Our alumni already come back to their old teachers for mentoring and tutoring – we are their college safety net. We will simply leverage that to take them through any remedial courses and at least their first full year of college credit. Simply successfully completing a full freshman year increases the graduation chances of a first-generation, low-income student from approximately 9% to closer to 60%.
You may have noticed how I mentioned different aspects of our technology vision being led at different schools. This is collaborative innovation taken to the systems level. Change is hard and no one school could take on all of the innovations we are envisioning and that our students need. That is one of the reasons school reform has been so difficult – the timeline for reform is longer than the shelf life of the reformers and so vision never makes it to reality. However, we are strategically leveraging the strengths and needs of the four LPS schools to distribute the pain of early adoption. Then using the power of collaboration, as we are doing in Algebra, we can rapidly build, refine and replicate. To this end, we have taken a leap of faith and, with no funding in hand, just brought on board Dr. Scot Refsland as our Chief Innovation Officer. He is a tech CEO who is experienced in technology innovation and transfer in both the commercial and academic sectors. He will oversee the LPS Office of Innovation and Technology Transfer – the umbrella for our hybrid vision. His job is to make sure that we are leveraging the most appropriate technology in the most cost effective way to tackle the most significant educational issues we face -- and create truly disruptive results.
I have told you where LPS is going – and in a few minutes Heather will invite you to think with us and help make technology-based transformation of urban high schools a sustainable, scalable reality. However, before beginning, I want to close with a few more conversation starters:
Current conversations hold that blended learning is a cost saving disruption – enabling fewer teachers to teach more students. We hold that while these cost savings may be possible, that is not our strategy. We believe that blended learning goes far beyond cost savings to long-term economic disruption– enabling inner-city high schools to teach eight years in four with graduates who actually complete college instead of dropping out – something that is completely cost-prohibitive in a traditional high school.
The current hybrid dialog also holds that blended learning models require new schools, actually new charters, with new structures and new cultures. We contend that our definition of blended learning is actually a powerful turn-around strategy for failing schools, capable of leapfrogging the schools in most need. If this is true, rather than impacting at most 3% of California’s high school students, the power of technology and blended learning has the potential to change the opportunities for hundreds of thousands of our most struggling students.
And finally, some reformers believe that high school is too late and tackling its challenges simply too hard – God’s work but a fool’s errand. I have been at this learning journey for over 35 years. For the first time I see a realistic, replicable, path to the transformation of urban high schools. This will not happen because of any one amazing new technology. Rather it will be the result of a system of educational disruptions made possible by harnessing the power of technology with wisdom and discipline.