Discovering and Enacting the “What's Next” in K-12 Education

In the minds of many adults, corporate leaders, and university administrators in the United States, K-12 (kindergarten through twelfth grade) education often seems to be in its own little world, school by school, district by district, and state by state. While the world of K-12 appears small in each single venue, even at the state agency level, taken together K-12 is anything but small.

The number of people involved trumps any other employment or involvement of Americans. At nearly 50 million students in kindergarten through twelfth grade, and annual expenditures of nearly a half trillion dollars, this subject is everybody’s business. In fact, due to shifts in demographics, as the U.S. baby boomers retire they will eventually outnumber the wage earners who support them.

This will be the first time in U.S. history that these numbers will reverse. That means that each wage earner will need to be especially productive in order to produce a domestic economy that has enough surpluses for pension growth, social security, and Medicare health, and to keep inflation in check for those on fixed incomes. This is no small issue, and is even more reason to examine K-12 education in terms of how it can be modernized to meet the demands that will be placed on its graduates in years to come. This circumstance will also affect other nations as demographic and longevity realities put new pressures on the “carrying capacities” of various economies to support their non-productive population segments.

In the past, the U.S. created true innovation in education, but as modern technologies become globally ubiquitous, countries not strapped with traditional bureaucratic structures will be able to innovate at accelerating rates. However, the U.S. has great potential and capacity to find new models and implement them rapidly should the national will be there to do so, and should the desire to take the leadership role in twentyfirst century knowledge production be present.

Trying to find the “what’s next” in U.S. K-12 education is a daunting task. However, looking at U.S. K-12 education from the perspective of enterprise technologies places the education sector in league with other sectors in the U.S. such as commerce, government, and social services. Education, too, must modernize as other sectors have. In order to operate in a twentyfirst century world, American students, and students everywhere, require education with the benefit of twenty-first century technology, methodologies, and accountability.

Do you ever get the feeling that the “what’s next” in K-12 education in the U.S. is not actually going to materialize? Until recently, I thought that the various education camps in this country — vouchers, charters, constructivist, data-driven, AYP (Annual Yearly Progress), research-based, technology-enabled, e-Learning — would compete indefinitely and cloud the education waters forever. However, several events changed my mind. Ironically, those changes came out of the Motor State, Michigan, in the last year, not a particularly good year for an economy largely based on fossil fuels. My journey to discovering “what’s next” in K-12 education started by examining two parallel paths, virtual education and Annual Yearly Progress (AYP). Both rely on enterprise, or system-wide, technology, but otherwise they are different.

State-funded virtual schools use enterprise technology for curriculum and instruction

Almost ten years ago, when state coffers were full of dot-com investment dollars, a number of states, Michigan among them, started state-funded virtual schools so that progressive governors could navigate online around their entrenched state education bureaucracies. In short order, a menu of Advanced Placement and Honors courses were available online to students in the hinterlands and the inner cities. Remedial courses and teacher development followed — all designed, developed, and delivered online by experts and tutors as well as on-the-ground mentors.

In the late 1990’s, California, challenged by an access lawsuit against Governor Gray Davis and the State, created the University of California College Prep initiative (www.uccp.org ). Florida created the Florida Virtual School (www.flvs.net) in collaboration with Governor Bush and the state legislative leaders to service, in part, home learners and choice. Michigan, in the throes of finding alternate methods of retraining autoworkers, joined the growing ranks of state-funded virtual schools by creating the Michigan Virtual High School (www.mivhs.org) at the instigation of Governor Engler. A few years later, in 2002, in an unrelated Federal and Congressional action, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) became the law of the land mandating the collection of annual yearly progress (AYP) data and the creation of highly qualified teachers (HQT).

The state-funded virtual schools are not actually schools because they do not provide diplomas or graduate students. (Cyber schools and cyber charters, on the other hand, are diploma-granting individual schools.) Technically, the virtual schools are stateapproved and state-funded education curriculum and instruction providers. They develop courses, mostly for middle and high school, for delivery online by state-qualified teachers generally expert in the subject matter they are instructing. In the fully-virtual mode, students take courses from wherever they are whenever they like. Everything is online except for a series of proctored exams.

The number of students and states, and now districts and schools, providing virtual education options is growing rapidly. A national organization, the North American Council for Online Learning (www.NACOL.org), provides advocacy for state and local virtual education operations. The virtual schools all rely on enterprise, or system-wide, technology platforms known as course management systems that emulate virtually the functions of a middle school or high school course.

The virtual education process also facilitates local classroom teachers by supplementing existing classroom-based courses with the expertly developed electronic content from the virtual course. This allows students to individualize their instruction, to receive remediation, recover credits, work around their physical schedule, or accelerate their individual learning. The beauty of the online courses developed by state and local entities is that experts in the subject matter and the pedagogy of the particular subjects create and deliver the courses in the open, in full view of anyone who wants to examine their content and pedagogy. Such an examination, unlike a physical classroom, is just a mouse click away.

As the virtual schools become more popular, pumping out their challenging and engaging online courses, they do so mostly unaware of the extent to which the districts and states are collecting and analyzing performance data as mandated by law. While schools and students consume online courses to fill in gaps, recover credits, and work around tight schedules, the virtual schools do not analyze their data for student learning gains or failures, nor do they report their performance numbers to the states’ agencies, because they are not schools of record. In short, the virtual schools have not played the AYP game, though they often provide highly qualified teachers under NCLB guidelines to schools and students.

School districts use enterprise technology for gathering AYP data

After the virtual schools were well-established, school districts across the nation, compelled by NCLB, bought data technology packages, installed data warehouses and began analyzing assessment data at the local and state level. The technology-driven data analysis systems locate performance deficiencies that the schools and districts must address to meet their NCLB and state-mandated AYP targets. Once the results of the annual state assessments are known, generally well into the next school year, schools and districts respond in the traditional way — by adding more in-service, in person, training days for their teachers on whatever the AYP analysis found to be deficient. By this point, however, the students who produced the deficiencies are already in the next grade, escaping any real-time help from their now year-old difficulties.

The AYP data analysis can yield rich case information on which students are performing, and which ones are not, but how this data is used falls short because of the largely unacceptable and unnecessary time delay of returning results from the state to the schools. Thus, the statewide AYP analysis can form a statistical picture of likely failures that then become the basis for training teachers to respond to incoming classes more effectively. In other words, the reform coming from AYP analysis looks backward. It does not better prepare the student who tripped up; instead, it better prepares the next student who might trip up. In fact, it does not remediate — rather, it anticipates the next year’s problems.

If schools and districts hope to make their AYP numbers grow, there is a built-in mismatch between using modern enterprise technology-driven data collection and analysis systems and the cumbersome, inefficient, time-delayed, and perhaps uninspiring use of physical in-service days to improve teaching and learning. As a simple matter of arithmetic, it’s impossible, across a large district, to have in-service days match the amount of work that is necessary to reform what was found in the AYP analysis. Further, there is no electronic, real-time, or state-sanctioned information coming back about who the teachers were who took the training, about how well they did, and whether their training can be detected as a positive or negative contribution to AYP gains or losses in the subsequent semesters or years.

The only places where this failure to remediate based on AYP data is not the case are forward-looking school districts that have installed, and learned to operate, full data warehouses tuned to these very specific inputs and outputs. Sprinkled around the country, these districts have organized themselves into data cultures that should serve as models for all school districts and for state funding agencies and legislatures. However, this is rarely the case. It is difficult because of time and culture for districts to share complex practices with each other.

More disturbing is why states and districts have not more uniformly reported this mismatch between assessment analysis and remediation methodology. Certainly, state systems and the Federal government have not made the case either, although the problems are known. Such a mismatch would not last long in combat analysis and commander training, in medical results and physician training, or in financial results and financial officer training. Why would we not design similar full improvement systems for schools? Why would there not be guidance to do so? Unfortunately, the fact is that data-driven analysis has not led to immediate online actions to remediate teaching deficits, to focus administrative practices, to bolster supplement curriculum 24x7 for students, or to inform parents on the importance of their children’s work.

But this is not all bleak. Remember, the virtual schools provide the ingredients missing from the AYP systems — online content that can remediate deficiencies or at least help in that process.

Focusing on complementary education technologies developed separately

What has not happened in the intervening years, since the virtual schools started in the late 1990’s and the institution of NCLB in the early 2000’s, is the crossing of the expert curriculum and instruction online from the virtual schools with the data-rich collection and analysis of assessment results from states, districts, and schools. Circa 2006, the virtual education ships and the AYP ships are still passing each other in the night. Virtual schools ship out great curriculum but it escapes the district data-gathering efforts. Conversely, schools find deficiencies using

technology but address the problems, clumsily at best, with traditional in-service methods, often subjecting students to re-taking entire courses when they only misunderstood aspects of a course. Technologydriven virtual courses, courselets, or online tutoring could be a systematic and almost automatic, near real-time, answer to certain state, district, and school AYP deficiencies.

Simply pointing out these mismatches in capability, which generally receive their financing from the same state treasury, is not enough. In the education world, awareness alone does not inspire change. In the forprofit world of commerce, and the life-and-death worlds of warfare and medical care, systems that identify problems but do not answer those problems systematically would be suspect and would cause a public stir. The absence of attention to a systematic problem that puts people at risk would be considered negligent, perhaps legally so. With soaring dropout rates in our urban centers, with student engagement at all time lows, and with challenged graduation rates, one can argue that the critical lack of well-educated students will begin to contribute to a decline in economic, social, and political capability both in our country and in individuals.

At what point do the mismatches in detection and correction lead to a true examination of how we conduct education in the twenty-first century? At what level do dropout rates and graduation rates cause widespread concern? And when they do, where is the “next thing” in education going to come from?

What woke me up to the possibility of a different world for education, where schooling can begin to modernize alongside commerce, healthcare, the military, and finance, are the following two events where separate educational technology trajectories (delivery of virtual education and analyses of assessment data) collided. One realization later, I was led to two “discoveries” of what could be argued to be a “what’s next” in education.

Realization — developing an evidentiary base for learning in real-time

In 2005, Michigan State University School of Education researcher Patrick Dickson put in a request to Michigan’s Virtual High School asking for all the data for students who had taken Algebra online over several years. (See W. Patrick Dickson, “Toward a Deeper Understanding of Student Performance in Virtual High School Courses: Using Quantitative Analyses and Data Visualization to Inform Decision Making, http://www.mivu.org/upload_1/NCREL.pdf (Editor's Note: As of December 15, 2009, this article appears to have been removed from the Web.)). Since the courses were delivered through a course management system (Blackboard Learning System™) and taken completely online, there were data from that

system on what the students actually did in the course, or did not do, in addition to their test scores, which are generally the only data available to school data systems beyond attendance data. While there are a great many data points in the assessments of subject mastery and contextual knowledge, there is almost a complete paucity of data on what students actually do (what, when, in what sequence, how long, and with whom) to earn their grades and learn their subject.

Dickson wanted to compare what students actually did in their course (what, where, how, and when) with their ultimate grade (derived from the formal assessment process). He was looking for patterns — what did the students do to learn well or what did they do poorly, where did certain students excel and others fail to grasp a concept, when did students begin missing the beat, and what did the students do in relationship to their eventual grade. Even though the Blackboard Learning System did not then have a sophisticated data package, its ability to generate graphs that demonstrated patterns of use in the course, evidence of what the students did, was very telling.

The course management system records such functions as time in certain sections of a course (e.g., assigned content, quizzes, online discussions, and email with instructors), and when and what assignments were turned in electronically. As a rudimentary attempt to peer into the learning process, Dickson could easily detect, after several weeks of student activity in the online course, those students who were going to make it and those who were not — all from the “click” patterns recorded by the course system.

Dickson’s study was the first I am aware of where a course management system was used as the basis for instrumenting the learning process in an academic High School course.

It was as if Dickson was looking at evidence of learning, an EKG tape of each student’s learning actions where each click of the mouse was a heartbeat. He could tell who spent a lot of time in their lesson content, responded with assignments in a timely way, did well on assessments of particular Algebra problem sets, communicated in discussion with fellow students or in conference with instructors. Dickson could determine, from the click evidence, individual learning strategies — which students front-end loaded their learning, which ones crammed at the end, and which ones did not put the required time and energy into their course, nor ever developed a strategy for taking the course. This “use-data,” and the patterns it generated, put a new tool in the hands of a seasoned education researcher and immediately created a literal evidence-based vision (in the form of visual graphics) of each student’s activity, something that is literally not possible by traditional means.

What Dickson did with his NCREL funding (North Central Regional Education Laboratory, now Learning Point Associates) and Michigan Virtual High School course data from Blackboard’s Learning System was essentially “instrument” the learning process. Imagine, in a variety of physical settings, what it would take to get the same data from a classroom, a study hall, a student’s bedroom, or family kitchen tables. It would be impossible. The intervention alone would render useless any meaningful data gathering. Instrumentation, on the other hand, can deliver on-going student evidence on an individual basis that could conceivably address in real-time individual responses to students or groups of students.

Dickson’s work led me to two “discoveries” or conclusions that pointed toward the fact that the “next thing” in education might just be around the corner.

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