Social Innovation in Education Delivery

Sector Study: Social Innovation in Education Delivery

Alex Hiam

There is a flood of news, year after year, about new models and initiatives. In fact, we love stories about underperforming (usually inner city) schools that are turned around in a few years. First it was the tough love, ex marine drill sergeant principal, with his baseball bat in one hand and high expectations in the other, who, by dint of heroic persistence, bullied and cajoled his students to A-plus performance. The answer, of course: Find more leaders like him! (The I-believe-in-you coach who turns around the looser team is a residual variant on this character; each is often celebrated in unlikely-hero B movies from Hollywood; but neither has actually transformed education on a widespread level.)

From Get Tough to Get Smart?

After the get-tough-leadership model came and went (a few lawsuits helped nail its coffin shut), there was the halcyon period of industrial engineering, in which total quality management engineers were hired from industry to show schools how to reduce variation. The idea being, if Detroit can learn to make cars with fewer defects, so can Detroit’s schools. However, while every F-150 pickup truck ought to be identical, student’s clearly aren’t, and trying to get rid of human variation proved a relatively unrewarding task.

The measurement and testing ethos dovetailed into into the next fad, championed by the second Bush white-house, and we now have educational testing to the core curriculum as our legacy; a sort of sledge hammer approach to normative performance that wouldn’t do an industrial production line much good, and seems positively destructive to excellent teaching; but it may help identify the worst pockets of performance and encourage investment in them (I’m trying to find something positive to say about this model, since it seems to be here to stay...).

If You Can’t Fix It, Abandon Ship and Launch Another (and Another, and...)

The charter school movement introduced another dramatic wave of innovation. In my own little community, here in the Connecticut River Valley, we have charter schools that teach entirely in Chinese, schools that cater to families living in more remote hill towns, and schools that specialize in the performing arts. Elsewhere in the country, science charter schools are springing up (among many others).

Or Put a Corporate CEO and His Shareholders In Charge? Really?

Privatization swept public school innovation some years ago, but (at least in the headlines) appears to be dying down. The idea that, simply by making a school into a for-profit, it will be run better and thus teach better, proved (as far as I can see) to be wholly based on some simplistic, almost religious, faith in Adam Smith’s invisible hand, which, while it may make economies tick, didn’t improve the clockworks at schools to any great or permanent degree.

Out of the Inner City Ashes Arises Great Publicity (if not Great Success)

Currently, a wave of inner-city reinvestment is producing new success models that the media coverage likes to paint as the final solution. An exemplar of this approach is the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), Michigan’s school improvement district, which some years ago took over a dozen Detroit schools. As reported in Education Week  by Tom Vander Ark, the innovative model produced several years of improved test scores (which is termed ‘student growth’). Vander Ark quotes Deputy Chancellor Mary Esselmen as saying, “The kids get the system now—it will be like two extra months of school.” The biggest part of this innovation, then, is adding more school time to remedy the off-pace test scores. But, hey, if Education Week, the premier news source for the sector, blesses it with such positive coverage, maybe this really is the ultimate solution.

Or not? Dig just a few clickable links deeper, and you learn that the journalist covering the story, Mr. Vander Ark, is not so much a journalist as his own firm’s best publicist: His day job CEO of company/s that sell the model he writes about. Here is his self-styled mini-bio from a company-hosted blog: “Tom Vander Ark is founder and CEO of Getting Smart. He is also a partner in Learn Capital and a director of iNACOL, Digital Learning Institute, Imagination Foundation, Charter Board Partners, Strive for College, and Bloomboard.”

Is It A Real Innovation, a Sales Pitch, or Something even more Insidious?

I may be overly cynical. Michigan’s Governor Snyder lauded the innovative Detroit program for another, potentially quite compelling reason: It used software, specifically a learning platform from School Improvement Network called BUZZ (later, perhaps to sidestep bad press, renamed GAGE) to provide students with an on-line learning experience that (according to promoters) would customize learning to each individual. BUZZ had originated in a similar corporate-government-school collaboration in Kansas City, where it had not been a grand success. Recent exposés (i.e., by www.eclectablog.com) show that these school districts were being used, often at considerable expense, as lab rats for testing and development of software. I don’t need to rehash the whole sordid story here, but I can’t resist quoting from one email a journalist dug out, from someone on the corporate side to school administrator Mary Esselmen, that included the following rather pithy paragraph: “The attached invoice, totaling $1,009,660, includes $408,500 for four “coaches”; and $271,000 for high-tech cameras (used in large measure to video classroom and teacher activity that is uploaded onto PD360, SINET’s professional development product); and $80,000 for BrainHoney/Buzz.”

Whatever exactly all that refers to, it doesn’t sound like students are getting more of what they need, it sounds like software developers are getting what they need; and that can be rather expensive.

A further revelation about the Detroit experiment: Young Teach For America staff were used to develop curricula for the software—not quite the stated purpose for sending them into inner city school districts. Education reform is often not as philanthropic or sincere as it presents itself to be. That’s a problem that may be somewhat widespread in social innovation; I’ll get to it in a future blog.

Comprehending Comprehensive Reform

A more sincere and potentially beneficial reform movement is known by the rubric ‘comprehensive school reform’, and is receiving funding from the (seemingly ubiquitous) Gates Foundation, along with The Lloyd A. Fry Foundation through a 2014 grant of $39,200 to Association of Illinois Middle-Grade Schools for the Chicago School Transformation Network (Source: www.fryfoundation.org/grants), plus additional grants for training teachers and students. 

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has also been quite helpful. It gave $470,800 between 1997 and 2000 to the Michigan Coalition of Essential Schools to “support continuous improvements in school culture, faculty practice, and student learning by creating a professional development model with and for principals and teachers in middle-grades schools.” There were other funders and grants, but I don’t know that listing all of them clarifies much, except that one can spend a lot of money retraining teachers and administrators in pursuit of comprehensive reform.

I am interested to read, on the Fry Foundation’s Web site (in a foundation news post dated Feb. 15, 2013, just about two years ago now), that, “The Foundation has decided to take a hiatus from funding in the Teacher Professional Development area.” I don’t see follow-up funding since then. Perhaps this means the foundation’s board decided the initiative was unsuccessful or too fraught with “uncertainties” to quote one explanation given in the news release. If so, I don’t think we should find fault with them for that. It takes courage to put support behind an educational experiment, and perhaps more courage to turn off the support tap when the evidence doesn’t come back looking as positive as hoped. But that’s all part and parcel of investing in social innovation, and the hope is that it’s a learning experience, and not just an endless cycle of hopping on the latest bandwagon until it, too, crashes and we have to jump off.

Is It Feasible to Experiment on Schools?

I think there are some misconceptions about social innovation in general, and educational innovation in particular, that fuel the invest-and-crash cycles:

Misconception #1: That your bright new idea is on the cutting edge. Everyone thinks that, having warmed seats in many a classroom, we are potential experts on education and how to reform it. Every school board is made up of concerned amateurs. Education is a remarkably participatory sport. And yet, it’s a highly complex and sophisticated activity, and unless you’ve trained to design curricula (for example), you probably aren’t quite ready to transform the entire system based on an ah-hah moment you had in the shower this morning. There are experts studying what does and doesn’t work (just like there are experts on, say, how to send space ships to Mars), and it might be wiser to invest in ways of getting them more engaged in innovation.

Misconception #2: The idea that you can “experiment” on a school without being inhumane and nonscientific. It’s inhumane because you owe it to the students to do your level best for them, not to spin the experimental roulette wheel with their futures at stake. Pushing some half-baked software into Detroit public schools runs the risk of mucking up an entire cohort’s education. Oops. And let’s say you do that little experiment (like the Governor did a few years ago). I bet it’s not actually set up carefully enough, with double blind experimental structure and an eye to provability, to be able to say anything decisive after the experiment. Sure, scores went up during an experiment in which hundreds of additional teachers, administrators and consultants descended upon a handful of schools, but was it because of the added attention and manpower, or the model itself? Usually it’s the added attention, which cannot be sustained once the initial excitement, and the outside funding, goes away.

Misconception #3: That one can promote a new idea at the same time one tests it. There's no excuse for jumping the finish tape and declaring to the media that yours is the winning new model, long before you’ve even implemented it to the point of stability and long-term replicability. And yet that’s what we see, time and again: Each new idea is touted as the ultimate solution, long before it’s even been tested and studied for long enough to verify the initial claims.

Misconception #4: That we really can invent new approaches in established schools. I’m not so sure that the next breakthrough in education will come from someone’s brand new program. I ideas keep getting rolled out within the very old and rather rigid structure of our current public school model. Curricula have to be designed to the common core and the tests built on it. Classes have to be taught by current staff, in current classrooms, etc. etc. We work with what we have. That may be hampering true innovation to a far greater degree than anyone quite realizes. What if, for example, it would be much better to educate elementary and middle schoolers in very small neighborhood schools, with mixed-age groups, friendly, almost family-style administration, and high teacher-student ratios? It might be a better model, but we aren’t going to be able to test it in current schools, because they are set up to take advantage of the economies of scale by putting hundreds of children under one roof, rather than a few dozen children.

Looking Beyond Conventional Schools

There are some apparently successful alternative models that operate on the margins of the education system by charging tuition instead of qualifying for school board funding. For example, the Montessori model, well known as a high standard in preschools, has been implemented right up through the high school level in some places around the country, but not in large numbers of schools because it does not really work in a standard public school with its emphasis on normative testing and same-grade classrooms. Academically, the Montessori approach is a lot like having every single kid on their own IEP, or individualized education plan, something only provided for those with significant disabilities in the public school setting. In a Montessori classroom, each student starts the day by drafting an agenda for themselves, selecting learning activities, and deciding when and how to do them during the day. They also decide what help they need, going to peers, computers, bookshelves, break and snack areas, or the teacher, as they see the need. The end result seems to be quite startlingly advanced and self-sufficient students who go on to success in higher education and their careers.

I’m excited about the Montessori model, and plan to study it further, but I think it will take the effort of a great many experts to work out what lessons can be learned from it and transferred to public schools. Whatever the ultimate direction of school reform (and I do suspect it will come from outside of the current public school model), it’s going to take a lot of careful, thoughtful work to develop it, and I hope that work can be funded and pursued far from the caustic taint of corporate publicity and self-promotion.