Key points:

• Public schools are part of a complicated system
• True system transformation will require disruptive replacement

I can’t count the number of times people at an education conference have approached me and said something to the effect of, “But how do we transform the education system?” or “We need to focus on system transformation” or “How do we scale system transformation?”

I get why they share these sentiments with me. Ever since I wrote Disrupting Class in 2008, I’ve been publicly in favor of transforming education, not merely reforming it (although I do work in both spheres). But when I hear calls about transforming existing systems, I recoil a bit and grow suspicious. There are many reasons for my reaction.

Foremost among them is this: Despite all the fancy models and white papers around what are all the levers to pull in order to transform a system, system transformation almost never happens by changing the fundamental tenets of the system itself. Instead, it comes from replacing the system with a brand-new system.

To start to understand why, consider the complicated system in which public schools find themselves. As Thomas Arnett explained, they are one part of a vast value network of federal, state, and local regulators, voters and taxpayers, parents and students, teachers, administrators, unions, curriculum providers, school vendors, public infrastructure, higher education institutions, and more.

ChatGPT is barely six months old, but AI is already a buzzword in K-12 education.

It grabbed the attention of decision makers immediately, earning a ban from NYC schools in January of 2023, with other large districts following. Others are embracing the technology, with voices like Sal Khan encouraging educators to teach with AI.

As school leaders rush to take sides, it’s important to remember AI is unproven and unvetted, especially for school and district-level solutions. Instead, it’s critical for leaders to realize that most schools can greatly improve how they manage critical daily functions using existing, effective, and easy-to-implement technology.

Issues extend beyond cheating

While cheating was the immediate worry, there are deeper concerns about AI in schools.

For instance, how will it affect students’ abilities to do challenging tasks? A Google search replaced a trip to the library card catalog with a few keystrokes. However, students still needed to do something with the information. What happens when typing a few words into ChatGPT is enough to shortcut entire assignments?

Since formalized education was in its infancy, legislators, educational leaders, and governments worked together to develop models that make education more efficient and cost effective–but they often fell short of serving the needs of students or enriching their lives. And, while people under the age of 18 comprise 25 percent of the global population, it never occurred to most people in positions of authority to ask what they need from their educational systems.

Students experienced great tumult these past few years, especially because of the global pandemic. This singular event put a spotlight on the challenges of quality and equity in education. And it is students who can help change how the world’s young people learn.

In September 2022, the UN convened the inaugural Transforming Education Summit, with the ambition to elevate education to the top of political agendas and spur action considering global school closures caused by COVID-19 to address the issues faced by students during this time. 2023 also marks the “halfway point” to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, with SDG4: Quality Education to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.

It is against this backdrop that the Transforming Education Survey was launched by the World’s Largest Lesson, in partnership with UNICEF and UNESCO. This uniquely global research gave voice to those not usually heard and represented a diverse group of students from across the world, with 37,000 students responding from 150 countries.

The word ‘metaverse’ has certainly been used a lot recently, specifically within conversations around the advancement of technologies and the ever-changing landscape of how we work and live. More often than not, it is usually connected to the gaming industry and does not tend to come up in conversations about education. However, the AI-powered virtual world is becoming increasingly appealing to content creators and educators as they recognize how it can be used to improve engagement and creativity and create personalized learning programs.

What is a predictive metaverse?

A predictive metaverse is a hypothetical concept that refers to an advanced form of a virtual world that is powered by AI and machine learning algorithms. In this scenario, the metaverse would be able to predict and anticipate the actions and behaviors of its users. It is essentially taking virtual learning to the next level.

This concept of the predictive metaverse is based on the idea that as virtual worlds become more sophisticated and realistic, they will also become more intelligent and able to analyze data in real time. The predictive metaverse would use this data to understand the preferences, behaviors, and intentions of its users, and then provide personalized recommendations, predictions, and feedback based on that understanding.

For example, in a predictive metaverse, an AI algorithm could predict the behavior of users in a virtual marketplace, such as what they are likely to buy, when they are likely to buy it, and how much they are willing to pay. This information could then be used to optimize the marketplace, improving the user experience and increasing sales.

It seems hard to believe, but the pandemic in the U.S. started three years ago. With all the changes COVID-19 brought to schools, perhaps the one that most people forget is how the virus altered the delivery of education.

While everyone is happy remote learning and hybrid models are pretty much over, it isn’t accurate to say education has returned to what was “normal,” pre-pandemic instruction.

The main reason school looks different is that districts bought a heap of specialized technology just to keep instruction alive during those three years. A 2022 survey by the Consortium for School Networking shows that more than 80 percent of U.S. schools now have a device for each K-12 student. That’s way up from pre-pandemic numbers, where about two of three high schools and middle schools were one-to-one and less than half of elementary schools had a device for each student. And that’s only counting student devices–not the needed network improvements, teacher training, or the other myriad purchases required to create a robust network both in schools and at students’ homes.

While this outlay for technology resets the bar of what is expected for schools, now and going forward, it also brings up some powerful questions. Can schools afford to use all the new technology they have? More importantly, however, can they afford to maintain all this equipment in the long term? 

A recent McKinsey survey reports that districts still have $130 billion in unspent ESSER funds to allocate in the next three budget cycles. Slightly more than half of the 260 district officials surveyed said “they were struggling to assemble the internal strategic-planning and operational capacity to make and execute spending decisions in the face of competing priorities and ongoing disruptions.” These same officials expect IT services costs to rise between 6 percent and 8 percent over the next three years. 

Following years of challenges brought on by COVID-19 and the inequities in education highlighted by the pandemic, decades- and centuries-old educational systems are finally being challenged. The school systems and dynamic leaders that embrace change will succeed and create an educational environment that is more equitable and prepares students for their futures.

A new report from The Partnership for Leaders in Education at the University of Virginia (UVA-PLE), “Exploring New Frontiers for K-12 Systems Transformation,” determined that these challenges have sparked a transformation of education systems in the United States.

“Our New Frontiers report spotlights the most successful education leaders who are courageously rising to the moment and making once-in-a-generation investments and changes to their educational systems for the benefit of their students, their staff and their communities,” said William Robinson, executive director of UVA-PLE and co-author of the New Frontiers report. “Districts that innovate and embrace change will thrive, and the districts that choose to ignore or, worse, resist transformation put themselves and their students at risk.”

In New Frontiers, UVA-PLE identifies four key areas of focus needed for change and innovation in K-12 educational systems:

• Innovative Secondary Models – a commitment to changing the secondary model to enhance student pathways and ensure access to opportunities for every student, along with a district and system recognition that investments in education are investments in the future economy;
• Far-Reaching Academic Acceleration – a focus on accelerating student learning post-pandemic instead of on learning recovery;
• Creative Staffing – new and innovative pathways to recruit, train and invest in teachers and matching education talent pipelines with student needs;
• Equitable Resource Reallocation – rethinking organizational design and resource allocated to align with priority breakthroughs, student needs, and a deep commitment to eradicating gaps and inequality.

UVA-PLE, a leading organization focused on advancing leadership capacity and insights to create transformational school systems, developed the report with research and feedback from nearly 50 education leaders and superintendents across the nation. Those districts and systems have successfully implemented changes and innovations since the pandemic started. The report also includes vignettes, case examples, and recommendations for transforming our systems to better serve students and families.

Related:
5 education innovation trends worth watching in 2023
65 ways equity, edtech, and innovation shone in 2022

As recipients of public funding and taxpayer dollars, K-12 school budgets and spending expenditures are under a microscope. Relief funds stemming from the pandemic have only sharpened the focus, particularly on infrastructure and technology investments. In my role as Chief Technology Officer at one of the nation’s largest school districts, Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS), being accountable and ensuring we are making prudent financial decisions is a top priority for my team.

Striking a balance between innovation and sustainability is a challenge most school districts are facing. At HCPS, we have adopted three guiding principles that serve as the driving force and framework behind every IT decision—equity, efficiency, and excellence.

Equity

At HCPS, we are committed to delivering equitable learning opportunities to all students. From an infrastructure standpoint, that means eliminating the digital divides that exist within our own campus.  Students in Building A must have access to the same level of high-quality Internet as students in Building B, regardless of a school building’s age or geographic location. If students in Building B experience frequent lag or downtime, their learning will be disrupted and result in learning loss.   

To remedy this, we are building a future-ready wide area network (WAN) that can scale with user demand to deliver robust and reliable connectivity campus-wide. Additionally, we have been working with K-12 partners like ENA by Zayo to assess, design, and deploy upgraded wireless local area networks (WLAN) at several of our buildings.

Related:
5 education innovation trends worth watching in 2023
How learning science informs edtech product development

2022 marked a confusing year in the world of education innovation. As a friend and school leader said to me a few months ago, “Innovation is dead, right?” 

She was half joking while perfectly summing up something in the air last year in schools: a pandemic hangover mixed with ongoing, day-to-day challenges of running complex systems. Together, these made many “new” approaches to education feel too overwhelming to even entertain. 

Lurking behind that, a surreal dynamic was unfolding across both K-12 and higher education: as emergency closures subsided, schools quickly regressed to their pre-pandemic approaches, despite new or worsening challenges at their doorstep. That re-entrenchment makes good sense given the resilience of traditional business models. Yet, it doesn’t match up with new realities like stark learning gaps, worsening mental health crises, significant enrollment declines, and a cooling job market. Business as usual is a rational response for a taxed and weary education system, but it’s also risky in light of all the ways the world has changed.

Given this tension, in the year ahead, I’ll be watching innovations that explicitly add new capacity and connections to the mix, at once expanding schools’ ability to innovate and also upping the relationships and resources available directly to students. Here are five on my radar:

1. Building relationships that power recovery

Arguably the top theme of this year in K-12 circles was learning recovery. I’ll be watching programs that are recruiting volunteers and staff beyond teachers to help students accelerate their learning. Significant ESSER investments are powering new tutoring programs. At the same time, the National Partnership for Student Success is calling for districts to enlist a broad array of supports, such as success coaches and mentors, to rally around students. Aligned with that vision, the Biden administration just made a major investment in the Americorps Volunteer Generation Fund. In sum, the next year will offer a powerful testbed for what it takes to build out a network of “people-powered supports” that supplement classroom teachers and school counselors. 

This presents a huge learning opportunity for the field. The rightful focus on these interventions is moving the needle on learning—in particular, upping the pace of learning–for students who fell the furthest behind during the pandemic. But they also offer an opportunity to ask questions about the upsides of students having more relationships—with tutors, mentors, and coaches—at their disposal. What developmental assets are students gaining through these additional relationships? What’s motivating non-teacher adults to partake in coaching and tutoring? How are schools effectively brokering communication between teachers and other supportive adults? And which relationships tend to outlast interventions, remaining in students’ lives as part of their webs of support that can step in if new challenges arise? 

Answers to questions like these could be critical to schools’ student support strategies long after the learning recovery agenda fades. They could shape how schools move beyond the one-teacher, one-classroom model (and one-counselor, hundreds-of-students model) that has dominated the last century.

2. Rebooting career services 

Ironically, the notion of “learning recovery” was hardly a topic of conversation in higher education circles. That’s not surprising. Widespread, rigorous data on postsecondary students’ outcomes remain a pipedream of policy advocates. 

But declining enrollment and looming doubts about the value of college are pushing some institutions to pay more attention to graduate outcomes. Core to that conversation is whether a college degree ultimately pays for itself, and for whom. Does going to college guarantee a good job? And is access to better jobs equitable across lines of race, class, and gender?

When it comes to securing jobs, many campuses leave students to their own devices. Most offer only a small, underfunded office ill-equipped to tackle opportunity gaps that underlie employment and wage gaps: career services. Average student-to-staff ratios are laughable, with an alarming 1 career services professional to 2,263 students, according to NACE. 

This year I’ll continue to watch two different trends among schools overcoming the constraints of traditional career services. First, some colleges and universities are integrating “career services” more expansively across their entire enterprise. These initiatives often sit in the president’s cabinet, like work afoot at Colby College, Wake Forest, or Johns Hopkins, where leaders are putting significant resources behind ensuring all students have for-credit career preparation experiences, access to work-integrated learning and internships, high-touch mentoring, and deeper alumni access. 

Promising as these holistic approaches are, they remain the exception rather than the rule, especially at lesser-resourced campuses. In light of that, the second career services trend I’m watching is the rise of more modest programs supplementing on-campus offerings, specifically geared towards expanding students’ networks and providing targeted, personalized guidance on everything from interview prep to industry norms. 

These emerging models rely heavily on resources and networks beyond capacity-constrained campuses. For example, Social Capital Academy (SCA), founded by Cal State Fullerton (CSF) business professor and social capital scholar David Obstfeld, offers CSF students virtual, personalized coaching over the course of four Saturday morning sessions. SCA is powered by a cohort of volunteer professionals that Obstfeld has recruited from a variety of employers and colleagues. Another model, CareerSpring, founded by the former head of Houston’s Cristo Rey high school, Paul Posoli, offers an open network of virtual career advisors to first-generation students, as well as job placement services. While these efforts aren’t as comprehensive as college-wide initiatives, they’re poised to scale much faster. They’re also addressing the acute cost that network gaps can exact on first-generation college students’ chances of converting their hard-earned degrees into higher earnings post-graduation.

Together, these trends point to a future of career services that is more distributed and networked, either within or beyond campuses, rather than housed in small, centralized, and understaffed career offices.

This post originally appeared on the Christensen Institute’s blog and is reposted here with permission.

With all the surprises sprung on the world over the last few years, it can be both exciting and frightening to imagine what 2023 might hold. Will this be a year defined by amazing breakthroughs for humanity—like cracking the formula for nuclear fusion and clearing a path to abundant clean energy? Or will it be a year loaded with new challenges—such as a global recession or escalating tensions between powerful nations?

Amidst the tectonic shifts that may be on the global horizon, there’s a comparatively smaller phenomenon brewing in US K-12 education. While barely a blimp on the global scale, it could impact learning trajectories for millions of American students and have a significant impact on the conventional model of schooling. What warrants this attention? Microschools.

What are microschools?

The concept of microschooling gained traction throughout the 2010s, then saw a huge uptick in both interest and new examples during the pandemic. EdChoice estimates that as many as 2.2 million children could be in microschools full time. But what are they? Defining the term can be tricky because they come in so many variations and run with somewhat synonymous terms like learning pods, learning hubs, and some versions of hybrid homeschooling. 

Barnett Barry, a research professor at the University of South Carolina, offers a good description of microschools in an article he wrote for The Conversation. “As their name suggests, microschools, which serve K-12 students, are very small schools that typically serve 10 to 15 students, but sometimes as many as 150. They can have very different purposes but tend to share common characteristics, such as more personalized and project-based learning. They also tend to have closer adult-child relationships in which teachers serve as facilitators of student-led learning, not just deliverers of content.”

Some of the better-known examples of microschools include national name brands like the Acton Academy schools, Wildflower Schools, Prenda microschools and the Khan Lab School. But most microschools today, especially those that have sprung up since the pandemic, tend to be local learning communities, often serving students of mixed ages, created by entrepreneurial parents or educators. In the last year, organizations such as the National Microschooling Center and KaiPod Catalyst have launched to support the people and communities creating microschools.

What characteristics make them potentially disruptive?

Microschools have definitely made a mark in the K–12 landscape. But whether they will follow a disruptive trajectory and grow to become mainstream alternatives to conventional schools is an open question.

When people think of disruptive innovations, they tend to focus on new technologies: personal computers, online video streaming, rideshare apps, etc. But the real transformative impact of a disruptive innovation comes not just from technology, but from the new organizational models that technologies enable.

Consider the example of steel minimills as recounted in The Innovator’s Solution. Prior to the 1960s, most of the world’s steel came from massive integrated mills that did everything from reacting raw ore in blast furnaces to rolling finished products at the other end. Minimills, in contrast, melt scrap steel in small electric arc furnaces. Because they could produce molten steel cost-effectively in a small chamber, minimills didn’t need the massive-scale rolling and finishing operations that are required to handle the output of efficient blast furnaces—which is why they are called minimills. In short, minimills used a new technology (electric arc furnaces) to enable a new organizational model. That model used different resources and processes to produce steel products with a different cost structure.

In a similar fashion, many new microschools are experimenting with innovations to the organizational model of schooling. 

To be clear, small schools that serve students of various ages aren’t a new idea. They harken back to the one-room schoolhouses of the late 1800s. But the one-room schoolhouse had a few inherent challenges. First, how does one teacher effectively instruct children at different levels of learning and development all in the same room, at the same time? Second, how can one teacher effectively teach a wide array of specialized academic disciplines at higher levels? These two challenges are at the heart of why one-room schoolhouses were replaced by age-graded elementary schools and subject-specialist secondary schools.

In contrast, many microschools today include mixed age classes but take advantage of new learning technologies to make the small school model more feasible. Online instructional materials have come a long way from the McGuffey Readers of the late 1800s. Their media-rich content presentations engage more than just the “bookish” children in a class; and they beat static textbooks hands down at providing students with basic feedback and adapting learning pathways based on their needs. Additionally, the Internet offers students endless pathways of research, exploration, and creativity—far beyond the confines of the best classroom library or set of art supplies. Microschools can also take advantage of online course providers like VLACS, FLVS or Outschool to access specialist teachers without needing to hire those teachers as full-time staff.

These technology resources then enable some fundamental shifts in core processes of the organizational model: the roles of students and teachers. Students can explore and master content through paths and at paces more suited to their needs. They can also take more ownership for their learning as their success no longer hinges on compliance with teachers’ whole-class instructions. Meanwhile, microschool educators can shift their focus from controlling classrooms and covering content to mentoring students and guiding them on personalized learning journeys tightly aligned to their mastery of content and their interests.

These innovations are not only valuable for changing the nature of the learning experience, and as a result, some of the core value propositions of the schooling model. They can also change the fundamental cost structure of schooling. The fact that microschools don’t need teachers for each grade level and subject area allows them to work at a small scale, while still serving a diverse array of students. Their ability to operate at a small scale, in turn, reduces the start-up barriers for microschools. They don’t need to build, buy, or rent large school facilities, but can instead operate using spaces available at libraries, community centers, churches, retail spaces, parks, or homes. Low startup and facilities costs are especially important for the microschools that operate without public funding: allowing them to create a new tier in the private school market for families that can’t afford conventional private schools.

But will microschools prove disruptive?

Although early minimills changed the resources, processes, and cost structure of steel production, their disruption of the industry didn’t happen overnight. Early minimills couldn’t produce the imperfection-free steel required for automobiles and soup cans. Instead, they began by serving the least-demanding tier of the market: rough rebar for reinforcing concrete. It took decades for minimills to improve their processes and produce higher-quality steel at lower costs. 

Similarly, although microschools represent a potentially disruptive organizational model for schooling, most current iterations fall short when it comes to meeting the needs and expectations of most K–12 students and families. Some require more parent involvement than what most working parents can offer. Many don’t yet offer great support for families that rely on schools for transportation and food services. They often aren’t well-suited to serve students with particular special education or social and emotional needs. And their small scale doesn’t allow them to offer large-scale programs like sports, band, and theater, or the complete suite of electives and extracurriculars available at larger conventional schools. 

Additionally, most microschools operate without public funding. Even with their lower cost structure, it’s hard to compete for families on a cost basis with free public education. Thus, their disruptive potential will also depend on state policy changes that provide them with public funding or shifts in district policies and practices to make them a district-supported offering.

Just as minimills had to refine their processes over time to produce higher-quality steel products, microschools will need to climb up their own improvement trajectories to become compelling mainstream alternatives for most families.

But this isn’t just a “time will tell” story. My upcoming posts will explore two additional trends to watch in 2023 that could hold promise for the future of microschools: learning ecosystems and potential shifts in district and state policy, both of which will likely determine whether microschools make a significant dent in the K-12 landscape.

Related:
Predicting innovation trajectories in K-12 education
Only out-of-the-box solutions will fix the real problems in schools

It’s no secret that the pandemic shift to remote learning resulted in boom times for edtech. Market intelligence firm HolonIQ expects global edtech spend to reach $300 billion in 2022 and up to $404 billion in 2025. The growth is fueling investment, too, as last year venture capital tripled over pre-pandemic levels.

But is all that money well spent on learning products with proven efficacy in the classroom, or are those billions going toward technology for technology’s sake?

With the boom in edtech and so many shiny, new product offerings on the market, it’s essential for educators to select tools they can trust will have a long-term impact on learning. More often than not, these are the tools that have prioritized learning science in their product design, to guide product vision and focus.

Learning science is an interdisciplinary field that combines research from multiple topics, data, and practice with the goal of furthering our understanding of how we learn and improving instructional practices and processes. Incorporating learning science results in thoughtful products that have clear paths for impact on student learning and allow for a targeted and thoughtful experimentation and product iteration throughout the product development lifecycle. 

As educational technology companies look to place learning science at the core of their products, there are three key steps to success: aligning their teams around education outcomes, building a feedback loop, and evaluating and validating your results. 

Aligning your Development Team 

Aligning your team around key educational outcomes is the first step towards integrating learning science into the product development process. The product development team and involved learning science experts have to determine, and ultimately rally around, selected educational outcomes in order to establish a product vision. This may mean a specific learning outcome for students, an overall goal for classrooms and teachers, or a rate of adoption increase in a certain subject. It could also appear through improved student confidence in learning, equitable instruction and lesson content, and the potential to equip students with skills for their futures. 

Regardless of the vision and goal, it has to serve as a consistent roadmap for both teams as they move through the development process. Having agreed upon educational outcomes can act as a North Star against which teams can measure progress of a product or its new features. This could accelerate the ability to align, build, and iterate upon a product. Without such an alignment, teams may be driving towards different and less impactful outcomes, ultimately slowing down development and innovation. 

Building a Feedback Loop

Once aligned around a common goal, the collaboration is only kicking off. The product team must build in opportunities for learning science consultation and feedback elicitation at key parts of the development process. During the discovery and exploratory phases of product development, consulting with learning science experts can aid in clarifying the product vision and providing focus. During the design phase, consistent communication with learning scientists can aid in improving the intentionality behind design choices, and ultimately keep the team aligned with the desired learning outcome and impact. And finally, during validation and testing phases, learning science may work closely with efficacy research teams to align on key metrics of interest and to pinpoint what aspects of the product could be changed or iterated upon based on the results of a study. 

As education companies, we can demonstrate our commitment to learning by consistently being learners in our fields, receiving feedback, making changes, and constantly iterating on our products. As students’ patterns change, we have to meet those changes with new products and features that match their needs. We’re learning companies – we need to be receptive to constantly changing and learning. 

Determining Efficacy 

Finally, the product team needs to establish a system for validating learning science-informed features. Once a product or feature has been built with the intention of impacting specific outcomes or principles, teams need to participate in experimentation and product iteration over an extended time, validating the tool’s efficacy and capabilities. Companies need the flexibility to include teachers and end-users in the iterative process, using research and long-term studies to determine (and prove) that a tool is effective. Be prepared to receive feedback from your customers, and recognize their expertise as field scientists, partnering with you to ensure your product meets the needs of their learners. 

The efficacy of educational technology plays a critical role in the current challenge teachers face in helping students recover lost learning at the hands of the pandemic. By testing the impacts of learning science product integrations on intended outcomes using efficacy research, organizations can build a powerful system of rapid testing and iteration. In turn, teams can accelerate their ability to measure and improve their tools, in a field (and time) where small adjustments can make a huge difference for learners. 

Ensuring Outcomes 

As teachers and administrators look to technology to help them improve efficacy in their classrooms, they should be looking for focused, well-researched products based in learning science. And as organizations look to build successful, impactful tools, they need to invest in their product development with a cycle of testing and iteration that puts learning at the center.

Related:
46 edtech innovations at ISTELive 22
37 predictions about edtech’s impact in 2023

In this episode of Innovations in Education, hosted by Kevin Hogan:

• 5 of the biggest education trends in 2023
• 5 ways our district streamlines edtech ecosystems
• Using Federal Grants to Hire Personnel: Advice for Districts

There are lots of promising innovations in tiny pockets of the education system, but decades of advocacy and investment have failed to see those innovations scale. How can we better predict which innovations flourish and which founder?”

My last blog post argued that new value networks are the missing enablers for disrupting the conventional model of K–12 schooling. But the concept of value networks can do more than explain why disruptive models struggle to take root. All organizations live within value networks. And analyzing an organization’s value network makes clear whether and how it will approach potential improvements and innovations.

What are value networks?

Clayton Christensen defined value networks as “the context within which a firm identifies and responds to customers’ needs, solves problems, procures input, reacts to competitors, and strives for profit.” For a company, a value network might include its customers, suppliers, distributors, investors, and the competitive and regulatory landscapes that shape its business model. Similarly, most US public schools sit in value networks defined by government agencies, families, staff, unions, voters, vendors, and the regulatory and competitive landscapes in which they operate. 

Value networks determine what an organization must prioritize to survive and thrive. Because value networks shape an organization’s priorities, they also dictate which improvements and innovations it will pursue and which it will fumble, ignore, or even resist.

A few important clarifications are worth noting. 

First, an organization’s value network isn’t just another way to refer to its stakeholders. There’s overlap between these terms, but there are also important distinctions—mainly in how the terms are commonly used. The term “stakeholders” often emphasizes all the groups that a school system should pay attention to, regardless of how much influence any given group has over the decisions of the school system. In contrast, I use the term “value networks” to draw attention to which external entities actually have more or less power to shape an organization’s priorities through resource dependence, regulation, democratic governance, etc. 

Second, value networks are not the same as social networks. Many schools participate in social networks—such as the CAPS network, the League of Innovative Schools, or the Digital Learning Collaborative—that facilitate sharing ideas and practices. Participating in a social network may connect an organization with funders, suppliers, partners, or other entities that become part of its value network. But whereas social networks facilitate the exchange of information, value networks provide the resources and authorization that an organization needs to survive and thrive.

Now consider a few insights that come from seeing different forms of K–12 schooling through the lens of value networks.

Competing priorities within K–12 districts

By design, a school district’s governance structure aims to give a degree of power to a wide array of stakeholders. People from different neighborhoods and groups from across the political spectrum all have a right to meet with administrators, speak up in school board meetings, and vote in elections. Local businesses, advocacy organizations, and community groups shape public opinion and influence voters. Local, state, and federal education agencies—also influenced by democratic governance—mandate processes a district must follow. Additionally, employee unions influence districts through collective bargaining. 

These competing interests from different elements in a school district’s value network are what often make the status quo so calcified. A school district’s value network becomes like a system of forces with vectors all pushing in different directions. District leaders get caught up just trying to maintain equilibrium and stability as they navigate the politics of their value network. In principle, a district’s democratic governance and its mandate to serve all students in a region helps ensure that all stakeholders have some power to influence its priorities. But when an organization’s value network produces a set of divergent priorities, the organization gets stuck trying to be all things to all people, yet struggles to do anything exceptionally well. 

Meanwhile, innovations that don’t align with the dominant priorities of the value network don’t last long. Strong leaders may be able to pursue them for a season. But if the innovations don’t deliver success in the way the dominant value network influences define success, those innovations will ultimately wither. 

The charter school advantage

Value networks also illustrate why charter schools can often innovate more easily than district schools. For one, the general principle in much of charter school legislation has been to give charter schools greater autonomy in exchange for increased accountability. Thus, charter schools generally have less prescriptive directives from the overseeing government agencies in their value networks. But beyond their relationships with governing agencies, charter schools also have an opportunity to create greater alignment across the rest of their value networks. 

Charter school founders launch their schools with a particular vision for education: In one school, that vision may be rigorous college preparation for low-income students. For others, it may be an emphasis on arts or science and engineering. With a specific vision in mind, charter school founders then recruit board members, donors, staff, and families who share their vision, and may even encourage stakeholders who don’t share their vision to go elsewhere. Thus, they assemble value networks that align with their visions. That kind of alignment just isn’t possible for a district school with more state policies to follow, a publicly elected board, a mandate to serve all students living within a given boundary, and unionized employees. 

This doesn’t mean charter schools are inherently more innovative than district schools. Some charter schools are pretty similar to their district school counterparts because their value networks resemble those of districts. Meanwhile, some district schools have instructional models that diverge markedly from conventional K–12 schooling. Consider, for example, Village High School in Colorado’s Academy School District, Springs Studio in the Colorado Springs School District, or Innovations Early College High School in the Salt Lake City School District. Why do some district schools develop innovative models while others maintain the status quo? Because innovative schools have value networks that prioritize their innovations.

Toward a better theory for understanding innovation trajectories

The lens of value networks moves us toward better categories for understanding innovation trajectories in K–12 education and other fields. There’s a long history of promising innovations failing to scale across public education. To this day, approaches like competency-based learning, flexible pacing, project-based learning, and other learner-centered practices often remain confined to “bright spots” lauded for their potential, but confined to the exceptions, rather than the rule. 

Instead of bemoaning a monolithic bureaucracy holding education innovation back, a theory of value networks can better predict which innovations can emerge in a given context. From there, new value networks might emerge to support a range of value propositions across communities and states. Doing so will require not just spotting and heralding innovations, but understanding the value networks from which they emerged in the first place.

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Only out-of-the-box solutions will fix the real problems in schools

As members of the media have bemoaned the tragic results of students on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—also known as the nation’s report card—many have been all too willing to jump into the game of who is responsible. Yet, few have sought innovative solutions to change the fundamental underlying reality: today’s schools were not built to maximize each and every student’s learning.

Just weeks earlier, a new report titled “Out of the Box,” along with an accompanying afternoon of virtual programming, sought to introduce a way to change that reality through the use of “innovative model providers” to shift us away from the current paradigm of schooling and “support school communities in actualizing the visions they set forth.”

The solutions generally offered in the media to the challenges students face have revolved around things like tutoring, summer school, longer school hours, and more days. Although there’s nothing wrong—and some things right—with those solutions, what none of them do is upend the fact that today’s schools were not designed to optimize learning. Their time-based nature means that they were, in fact, built to embed failure for the majority.

Even worse, some of these ideas share the assumption that all students should just have more of the same type of schooling experience they’ve always had—a schooling experience that also wasn’t doing what today’s society needs it to do prior to the pandemic because of the way it was designed. Put differently, the schools we have do exactly what they were built to do—which is at odds with the society we inhabit today.

What if instead of layering tutoring on top of today’s schools, we instead took the principles of effective, high-dosage tutoring and embedded those in schools themselves?

Or, as the “Out of the Box” report says:

“Imagine, for example, elementary classes that deeply embed the science of reading, making use of phonics instruction to the degree appropriate for each student and using technology and artificial intelligence to support building the requisite vocabulary and content knowledge to access rigorous text. In middle grade math, imagine sophisticated diagnostic assessments generating a personalized learning plan that adapts daily and allows each student to drive their own progress using a variety of learning modalities. … Science and social studies classes could integrate combinations of text, virtual reality, group discussion, and interdisciplinary projects that extend beyond what an individual teacher could sustainably plan for each day.”

But the report then points out that, “Just as an engine has little value atop a horse and buggy, truly realizing new possibilities requires fundamentally reimagining elements of existing paradigms in order to transition to something new and better.”

So how do we do that?

Readers of my new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, know that I’ve pushed the importance of autonomy: arming a separate group of educators with the ability to rethink completely how school works.

The authors of “Out of the Box”—Joel Rose, Jenee Henry Wood and Jeff Wetzler—agree, but go even further in specifying what this likely means.

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It was fantastic to gather in person at ISTELive 22 in New Orleans. Here’s a sample of the newest edtech innovations, products, and solutions eSchool News learned about during the show.

3M and Discovery Education announced 31 State Merit Winners in the 2022 3M Young Scientist Challenge. As the nation’s premier middle school science competition for 15 years, the 3M Young Scientist Challenge features outstanding innovations from young scientists that utilize the power of STEM to improve the world.  The 3M Young Scientist Challenge asks students in grades 5-8 to identify an everyday problem in their classroom, community, or the world and submit a one- to two-minute video communicating the science behind their solution.

Aperture was on hand to demonstrate its scalable SEL solution for K-12 that grows with students and staff, from teacher-based ratings and strategies at the elementary level, to student- and teacher-facing assessment and strategy software for high school students and staff. Research-based DESSA assessments provide partners with an SEL foundation rooted in the promotion of assets, not deficits.

ASUS announced the latest lineup of notebooks, desktops, displays, and networking solutions, featuring an array of innovative gaming and education products for students and educators in the K-12, higher education, and esports education sectors.  The ASUS Chromebook CR1 is a dependable option ready for a wide range of scenarios. Available in clamshell or convertible designs, this laptop is ready for a long lifespan of classroom use with its all-round rubber bumper, spill-resistant keyboard, and ultra-tough hinge. The ROG Strix GT15 desktop gaming PC offers tournament-grade performance with its powerful 12th Gen Intel CPU, up to the Core i7-12700KF, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 GPU.

Avantis Education, maker of ClassVr, announced the launch of Eduverse – a ground-breaking new online platform that gives students access to a K-12 metaverse. In the Eduverse, students can access immersive, educational content and amazing VR experiences. They can interact with each other as avatars, all in a secure and controlled environment, inside and outside of the classroom.

AVer Information Inc., the award-winning provider of distance learning, video collaboration and education technology solutions, announced their participation in the ISTELive 22, one of the world’s most influential education events, hosted by The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). AVer will be launching the new U70i document camera, as well as showcasing award-winning classroom solutions designed to keep students engaged in different learning environments. 

Codelicious introduced attendees to its full-year computer science curriculum for K-12. Codelicious courses are delivered with everything teachers need to teach computer science, including lesson plans, assessments, and standards mapping. The curriculum is updated regularly to stay current with new technology, so teachers spend less time writing lessons and more time engaging students. By bringing Codelicious into the classroom, teachers provide their students with opportunities to learn skills in collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving. These are all skills students need to be successful, whatever their future holds.

Schools and districts now can bring the thrill of virtual coding competitions to their classrooms and communities at any time with CoderZ Technologies LTD’s newest offering, CoderZ League in a Box. This latest version of the code-learning platform enables educators to create on-demand local tournaments in addition to participating in the international CoderZ League: the Virtual Cyber Robotics Competition. While students can gather at a school or community center for a league tournament, the gameplay occurs on CoderZ’s online coding platform. Teams of students play together in fun “missions” by programming virtual 3D robots while learning the principles of coding.

Construct 3, a game engine that allows anyone to develop their own games without having to know how to code, in partnership with STEM Fuse is launching its newest curriculum GAME:IT Advanced just in time for the fall semester. The GAME:IT Advanced course is the capstone course in the high school game design and programming pathway.

Dell’s education strategists were onsite hosting conversations spanning digital inclusion, K-12 cybersecurity, the growing esports movement, and more hot topics related to education and the role technology plays in empowering learning today. Access the full livestream of Dell’s Think Tank session on Defining What’s Possible for Reinvented Learning, which brought together a diverse group of education thought leaders to discuss their vision for the future of education and surface barriers to overcome for every student to succeed. Or, watch the full livestream of Dell’s Think Tank session on Implementing What’s Possible for Reinvented Learning, which brought together district and organization thought leaders to discuss strategies for implementing what’s possible for students including learning formats, teacher roles, grading practices, work-based learning, and more.

The skills required for success in the new economy were already changing. Now, COVID has sped up these changes dramatically.

As researchers warn of a growing “digital skills gap” that threatens to hold back innovation, experts are calling on schools to rethink instruction so that it more closely aligns with emerging workforce needs.

The global pandemic has quickened the pace of technological development around the world as services that had not been digital before moved online and others that were performed by humans became automated. This rapid digital acceleration has created a huge demand for more highly skilled workers who can develop software, program machines, and support new innovations.

“There are just not enough people with the right digital skills to enable the transformation that companies are seeking,” said Salil Gunashekar, a research leader and associate director at RAND Europe who focuses on science and technology policy.

RAND Europe, the European arm of global research firm RAND Corp., issued a report in March that describes the worldwide digital skills gap in stark detail. The report should serve as a wake-up call for education leaders in the United States and elsewhere to think about how instruction should change to meet employers’ needs more effectively.

“Employers are actively seeking employees with digital skills in order to adapt to an increasingly digitalized environment,” the report says. “While the demand for digital skills is high, supply is low — and businesses often struggle to find talent for digital roles.”

Consider these statistics:

• A global survey of companies with more than 1,000 employees across a wide range of industries found that more than half (54 percent) agreed that a shortage of digital talent has led to a loss of competitive advantage and that if the digital skills gap isn’t closed soon, there will be negative impacts on product development, innovation, and customer experiences.
• In European countries, the report noted, 57 percent of organizations find it hard to fill ICT specialist roles. This trend exists in other parts of the world as well; for instance, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says the demand for software developers will grow 22 percent through 2030.
• The world’s major economies stand to lose up to $11.5 trillion in potential growth by 2028 if the digital skills gap isn’t addressed.

In this episode of Getting There: Innovations in Education, sponsored by Adobe Sign:

• Nine 2021 takeaways to improve edtech going forward
• How personalized learning can help improve digital equity issues
• What social-emotional learning (SEL) really means

Recently I told a group of high school students that my research investigates how schools are changing during the pandemic. One student’s unprompted reaction in the Zoom chat was so straightforward that it made me chuckle: “Oh we changed a lot.” Indeed.

The Canopy project, a collaborative effort to document school innovation across the country, endeavors to categorize and compare the nature of those changes. Starting in 2019, the project has issued calls to nominators—education non-profits, researchers, funders, and state agencies—to suggest schools on their radar that are innovating at a school-wide level. Leaders from nominated schools then participate by sharing details about their school models.

In September 2019, the project featured data on 173 schools’ innovative approaches, and in September 2020, a new interactive data portal featured 144 schools that shared their approaches during the pandemic for the first time.

This week, the project is releasing new data from January 2021. Among the 222 schools appearing in the data portal, 78 are new additions, and another 99 have shared updated information to supplement their existing Canopy profiles.

As we begin to analyze this latest batch of data, here are five takeaways that stand out:

1. Social-emotional learning continues to rank as the most widely cited approach.

To participate in the Canopy project, school leaders share the innovative practices underway at their schools using a set of consistent “tags,” or keywords and phrases. Seven broad domains, like project-based learning and blended learning, are represented by “general approach” tags. Dozens of additional tags describe more concrete “specific practices.”

Among the 78 school leaders that first participated in Canopy in January 2021, 86% reported implementing social-emotional learning (SEL), making it the most commonly-reported general approach.

A personalized, learner-centered educational experience is one of the main drivers of K-12 innovation and extraordinary student outcomes, according to CoSN’s annual innovation survey.

The survey includes three categories: accelerators that pave the way for teaching and learning innovation in schools, hurdles that hinder it, and tech enablers are tools that districts can leverage to surmount hurdles and embrace accelerators.

Accelerators of K-12 innovation include:
1. Personalization: As the consumer sector has exploded with new ways to customize user experiences and products, schools are also finding ways to provide customized learning and support at the individual level.
2. Social and emotional learning: A core function of education is building skills and understanding mental, social, and emotional well-being, including empathy, grit, persistence, flexibility, and adaptability.
3. Learner autonomy: Learner autonomy is all about student agency, encompassing anything from letting students choose how they access content, to how they organize their learning, to how they exhibit their learning.

Hoover City Schools in suburban Birmingham, AL, was already one-to-one when the pandemic struck in March. And while its transition to remote learning in the spring was relatively painless, teachers and students continue to adjust to the new realities of hybrid school days.

In this conversation with eSchool News, Bryan Phillips, CTO of Hoover City Schools, describes some of the positives he notices with this forced migration and divines which practices should probably remain once we get back to whatever normal is.

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eSN: What are some of the things your teachers are doing that they didn’t do before COVID, but you think they will continue to do when the pandemic finally goes away?

BP: A lot of teachers are running Google Meet every day, recording their lesson, and keeping it. So the kids that aren’t there, they can just send it to them. It’s a vlog—a video diary of what they do every day. Keeping those lesson plans, I think that’s a plus.

For a lot of the advanced courses, we don’t have a teacher for both physical and virtual. So she may have office hours on Tuesdays with the remote kids can ask questions, which I think will be a huge plus moving forward. Some kids may not feel comfortable walking up to a teacher or calling a teacher over their desk in class and asking a question. But if they can go back and send the teacher a message, “Hey, I need to talk to you.” They get them on Meet and work that out and learn whatever that concept is. That’s something you do in college. Well, kids are now learning it in seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th grade.

Across the country, redefining the status quo has become the status quo for K–12 schools. Wide-scale remote and hybrid learning, mask-wearing culture, and “pods” all fall outside the bounds of what most of us imagined as mainstream schooling before this year.

But despite how schools all face a similar set of challenges, innovation towards new solutions—especially student-centered ones—can be a surprisingly lonely endeavor. Many of the leaders and educators responsible for designing and implementing new approaches are left asking: hasn’t anyone done this before? And how do I find out?

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The Canopy project aims to make those questions easier to answer. Last year, the project focused on surfacing a diverse set of innovative schools and documenting the practices they were implementing.

Now, the Christensen Institute and Transcend have teamed up, along with dozens of other Canopy project contributors, to ensure that up-to-date knowledge about school innovation is accessible and useful to the people who need it most this year: school leaders and design teams.