Recent front-page media headlines report an outpouring of education change ideas, practices, and experiments:
- A new charter school in New York City will pay teachers $125,000 a year, more than double what the average teacher in the city makes. (New York Times)
- U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan advocates mayoral control of schools in Detroit and other cities. (Detroit News)
- Duncan also pitches a "strange bedfellows" collaboration between a teachers' union, the American Federation of Teachers, and a charter school operator, Green Dot in Los Angeles. (New Yorker)
- Charter schools run by the Harlem Children's Zone for low-income, minority students are outperforming counterparts in New York City's school system. (New York Times)
- Montgomery County schools in Maryland are at leading edge of the "data-driven" movement, a technology-based approach to using student academic performance assessments to guide their learning processes. (Wall Street Journal)
- In Washington, D.C., school chancellor Michelle Rhee's ambitious and controversial district-reform agenda includes higher pay for teachers willing to eliminate tenure job security. (TIME)
- Louis Gerstner Jr., the former CEO of IBM who has been deeply involved in education reform, calls for extending the school year by 20 days and establishing a national curriculum and testing for reading, math, science, and social studies. (Wall Street Journal)
Are we entering a golden age of successful education innovation... finally? Which efforts will Duncan support with the $5 billion in federal stimulus funding his department controls? Which changes will be implemented at scale? Which, if any, will make a big difference? Four years from now, when the Obama's administration wraps up its first term, how much of the public education system will have been changed?
When we try to sort out these and other innovation efforts--to figure out which ones to pay attention to and learn from--we start by asking key questions in the process of innovation development:
What goal/problem/issue is being addressed by the innovation effort? Essentially, there are two big goals for education change: eliminate the "achievement gap"--academic performance and graduation rates--between low-income, minority, and immigrant students and more affluent white students; and eliminate the "excellence gap" between U.S. students and students in many other nations. Each of the efforts mentioned above would claim to be aiming at one or both of these goals, but they engage very different parts of the education system:
- Design of schools (Harlem Children's Zone, Green Dot/AFT)
- Instructional practices within a school and classrooms (data-driven movement)
- Design of school districts (mayoral control)
- Practices of school districts (teacher pay, tenure)
- State government policies (length of school day) and federal government policies (national curriculum and testing)
This suggests the need for a "systemic" approach--pushing changes into the classroom, school, district, and state and federal policy "playing fields"--to reach goals. But--and this is a big but--there are few, if any, states or school districts where reformers and innovators have launched a "top-to-bottom" assault on the status quo. The innovation efforts mentioned here, as well as many others, don't amount to a coherent approach; each implements quite different concepts about how to reach the goals. And the "distance" between some of these innovations and achieving the goals of innovation can be quite large; for instance, how will paying teachers more change the system's academic performance and how long will it take for its effects to be evident?
What concept/hypothesis is being put into play? The idea of creating a national curriculum to improve school performance is based on very different assumptions than the idea of, say, increasing the length of the school day or ending teacher tenure. Schools like Green Dot and the Harlem Children's Zone charters tend to focus on engaging low-income students in learning process and getting them to stay in school to learn. But not many "engagement schools" have shown an ability to generate strong academic performance while they reduce drop-out rates. So many ideas, but so little proof of their effectiveness. Which innovation assumptions should a school district or charter school operator or federal secretary of education bet on?
At what stage of development--concept, prototype, launch, scaling up--is the innovation concept? A great many of the concepts attracting attention are at the very early stage of development. A Green Dot/AFT blended school is at the pre-concept stage. The $125,000-per-teacher charter is a concept that is just starting its first test year; it could easily take 5-6 years to demonstrate how the innovation is working. The set of practices that make up the data-driven approach has lots of backing and the additional oomph of potential access to federal stimulus funding, but it is just beginning to spread into school systems. Mayoral control of schools helps keep a school district focused on improvement, but the track record in Chicago, New York, and a few other cities does not suggest it produces rapid, dramatic jumps in student academic performance; it's an incremental strategy.
The innovations in the headlines amount to a thousand flowers blooming. But this does not an innovation agenda make. What's needed is:
- Portfolio. A set of bets/investments on a portfolio of innovations with explicit assumptions and rationales that can be tested and, if they work, implemented in a few years, not decades. We need a garden of deliberately selected innovations, not a landscape of wildflowers.
- Process. A disciplined (and transparent) process to manage, invest in, and judge the progress of the innovations in the portfolio. The commercial sector has developed standards and practices for innovation, and so can the social innovation sector.
- Places. "Ensembles" of innovations that come together in a set of schools--"flagship" states, school districts, charter authorizers, for example--so we can start to see systemic impacts, not just narrow-gauge innovations.
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