To build this market, we need to change the policies that exist today. That’s why we, along with over 90 leaders from across the education field, support the Growing Excellent Achievement Training Academies for Teachers and Principals (GREAT) Act, introduced in the Senate and the House today. Notably, in an era of hyper partisanship, GREAT has bipartisan support.

GREAT proposes that states be given latitude to provide dollars to teacher and principal training organizations that exhibit a laser-like focus on those skills, practices, and attitudes that research demonstrates are essential to making teachers and leaders effective from day one, and that are willing to be held accountable for the growth in student learning their graduates produce.

GREAT fosters the type of innovation necessary to produce an entirely new level of results across the field. The timing couldn’t be better – the need and the opportunity stand starkly before us.

Recent research by TNTP, an organization with a track record of identifying keys to improving teacher quality, underscores the need. Leap Year, a study of nearly 1000 first-year teachers shows that teachers who struggle from the start rarely come close to becoming effective, and that mastery of a few critical skills often distinguishes effective from ineffective teachers. Bottom line: good teaching can – and must – be taught.

Organizations are rising to meet this challenge, and GREAT will accelerate the growth of these and other innovative practices that are emerging across the field. At the MATCH Teacher Residency program in Boston, candidates experience over 80 teaching simulations — with feedback from coaches each time they teach — before they have to pass a practice-based assessment that determines whether or not they enter student teaching. At the Relay Graduate School of Education, students get intensive clinical training, complete with video review of the micro-practices and daily routines that make the difference between great teaching and mediocre teaching. Relay calibrates its trainees’ work against the learning outcomes of students – not just standardized tests, but also the ability of students to make persuasive arguments, decode complex material, and develop creative problem solving capacity. Students in USC’s online Masters program upload videos of their practice teaching, and get feedback from their peers and mentors in a virtual setting. Like Relay, USC commits to strong student growth as determined by a blend of measures in the classrooms of its graduates. Other programs, like TNTP and Urban Teacher Center, similarly base their curricula on what excellent teachers do and hold K12 student learning outcomes as the key to assessing their program and their graduates.

If these approaches to teacher preparation seem logical, you are right. Paradoxically, current law makes it difficult for organizations to adopt practices that are at the core of these models. Instead, institutions are rewarded for meeting input measures: how many books in your library, how many courses do trainees take, and how many of their courses are taught by tenured faculty (ie. researchers with little experience in classrooms).

Through years of convening the teacher prep community and the recent formation of the Learning to Teach Fund, NewSchools has long been committed to improving teacher training and currently supports the MATCH Teacher Residency, Relay GSE, TNTP and Urban Teacher Center through funding and guidance. We are glad to be part of a growing movement finally addressing this too long ignored problem, as Scholastic’s Alexander Russo points out. We are encouraged by the real progress that GREAT represents and we are proud to stand behind it.

GREAT seeks to create opportunities for states, universities, and non-profits to develop new models of training that respond to the need for extraordinary teachers and school leaders, as well as the opportunity to capitalize on what we know makes them great. It’s time for a change.

Charter Schools and the Road to College Readiness: The Effects on College Preparation, Attendance and Choice

Using enrollment lottery “losers” as a natural control group, the MIT team was able to isolate the impact of charter school attendance on student outcomes. What they found confirmed that Boston charters are not only outperforming their district-school counterparts on the state assessment (see CREDO study) but are also adding significant value as measured by AP and SAT scores and 4-year college enrollment. 

Assessing impact on multiple measures, with an emphasis on indicators of college readiness, is a breakthrough in the evaluation of charter school effectiveness. This latest analysis confirms what a growing number of narrower studies have already shown: Boston charter schools may be the best urban public schools in America.

Here at NewSchools Venture Fund, we are enthused by – and partially responsible for – the growing support for ed-tech resources that have the potential to transform public education. But we are also keenly aware of the challenges ahead. As Rocketship Education founder (and current ed-tech entrepreneur) John Danner has noted, there is a “valley of death” where “the vast majority of ed-tech companies die” as they attempt to grow from an early-stage organization to true scale.

There are a number of reasons this valley of death exists, but one major challenge identified by ed-tech organizations within and outside our portfolio surprised us: a lacking digital infrastructure. Whether a new blended learning elementary school such as Ingenuity Prep, a web-based platform to teach grammar like NoRedInk, or a third-party evaluator of high quality education apps such as eSpark, all share a basic need for reliable Internet connectivity in the classroom. The problem is that many, if not most, schools cannot provide enough broadband to support a truly robust blended learning environment. And this problem doesn’t just affect entrepreneurs, either. Teachers won’t innovate using digital instructional tools if they don’t have faith that they will actually work when students turn them on. 

To unlock digital innovation in education, then, requires a serious and dedicated commitment to building the digital infrastructure “backbone” around which that innovation can take place. We believe that federal education policy can and should focus on helping states and school districts to build that infrastructure so that all students – whether in rural Alaska, suburban Maryland, or urban Detroit – have equal access to digital learning. Just as it took a national commitment to build the Interstate Highway System, so too will we need to make a national commitment to modernize the digital infrastructure of our entire school system to see it done.

At present, the most relevant federal policy supporting this effort is the federal e-Rate program. Authorized by Congress in 1996, e-Rate provides a portfolio of communications services to schools, including Internet services, and is overseen by the Federal Communications Commission. In many ways, e-Rate has been remarkably successful in helping wire up our schools, but as FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel recently noted, “roughly half of E-Rate schools access the Internet at speeds of 3 Megabits or less.”

Have you ever tried to watch a YouTube clip with only 3 Mbs of connectivity, when others are also trying to make use of the same network? It’s the digital equivalent of going to the dentist – painful. 

We must do better. NewSchools Venture Fund is working with other advocacy organizations, including Education Superhighway, to build support for making US schools the most wired in the world. A recent Ed Week story on e-Rate helpfully summarizes the various components that a comprehensive redesign of e-Rate might entail, but for the moment we’re focusing on one particularly unique piece of the puzzle: building a new quasi-governmental agency staffed with experts that would provide direct services to school districts to help them build the network they need for digital learning.

We call this the Digital Depository (Digital Depository Concept Paper), and at its core it represents a reimagining of the federal role in education. As a result of the structure of our federalist system, most school districts never interact with the federal government in any meaningful way, other than through compliance exercises.  What if we created a new entity, staffed by IT experts, that could help identify individual network needs and work directly with schools to design a comprehensive solution? What if our government focused on helping schools rather than monitoring them? 

A well-informed skeptic might offer two objections to this plan. First, she might argue that in a nation with more than 14,000 school districts, a new Digital Depository would quickly be overwhelmed with demands on its services. And she’d be right! That’s why we’ve proposed making it a requirement that school districts form consortiums of a certain size – serving more than 50,000 students in aggregate, say – in order to access the Depository’s services. There is no reason we need to build 14,000 separate school district networks, each with its own peculiarities and administrators. The Depository thus creates a clear, though entirely voluntary, incentive for school districts to collaborate in an aggregate fashion. 

Second, our well-informed skeptic might express some reservations as to whether a new public agency would really act any differently than most other public agencies – which is to say, bureaucratically and compliance driven. And she’d have a point! The reality is that we desperately need innovation within public-sector services in order to spur private innovation, particularly in education (which is and should remain a public good). To address this concern, we’ve proposed making the Digital Depository “quasi-governmental” in nature. For example, it would have an independent board of directors, some appointed by federal agencies, some by private business, and some by school districts themselves. Just as importantly, employees of the Depository would not be civil-service protected. Our hypothesis is that there are many smart engineers (think wealthy Google retirees) who wouldn’t mind doing a “service tour” to help schools, but have no desire to join a cumbersome federal bureaucracy tied to the federal GS pay scale. Like technology itself, the ethos that should pervade the Depository should be: smarter, nimbler, faster. 

The Digital Depository is just one proposal to help build capacity to support schools – if you like the idea, please let our policy director know. But more importantly, we need to make it a national priority to build the digital infrastructure that ensures that every school, teacher and student in the US has equal access to digital learning. In the days ahead, expect to hear more from us as we help build a broad coalition in support of this goal. 

Scale

This year, current and alumni members of the NewSchools portfolio helped open 37 new charter and turnaround schools. Our portfolio of school investments now includes 331 schools providing a high-quality education to more than 130,500 students in 16 states. The majority of these students (83%) are from low-income households. If the NewSchools portfolio were a district, it would be roughly equivalent to the 19^th-largest school district in the country (San Diego).

Quality

Schools in the NewSchools portfolio are improving their students’ prospects for college and career success. Relative to their low-income peers nationwide, students who attend a high school in the NewSchools portfolio are almost twice as likely to enroll in college and four times as likely to graduate from college. Of the 4,583 graduates of our schools who enrolled in college in 2012, it is likely that 2,206 might not have enrolled without the high quality of education that the schools in our portfolio provide. 

Our City Funds in particular are showing early indications of strong student outcomes. Portfolio schools in these three cities (DC, Boston, and Newark) are achieving student proficiency levels that are 31 percentage points higher than the local district in math, and 25 percentage points higher in ELA/Reading.

Where We’re Headed

A major theme of NewSchools’ Summit 2013, which took place on May 1^st, was “Learning in 2028.” In a series of talks throughout Summit thought leaders shared their visions for the future, the reasons for striving forward, and the work required to get us there. While I’m encouraged by what we’ve accomplished so far, I’m excited by what another 15 years of growth will mean for the school networks in which NewSchools has made investments. If the portfolio continues to grow as it did over its first 15 years, doubling in size every 3-4 years, the result will be over 500,000 students attending schools in the NewSchools portfolio in 2028. Over the course of these 15 years, roughly 200,000 students will graduate from portfolio high schools. About 175,000 will go on to college. Of these, over 90,000 might never have gone to college without the support of a school in the NewSchools portfolio.

NewSchools is working towards a better future in education. This is the essential progress I envision, and I’m committed to getting us there.

• EdSurge Live: John Glover
• EdSurge Live: Jordan Meranus
• EdSurge Live: Shawn Sprewer and April Chou
• EdSurge Live: Alex Grodd and Alix Guerrier

EDSURGE LIVE: JOHN GLOVER

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EDSURGE LIVE: JORDAN MERANUS

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EDSURGE LIVE: SHAWN SPREWER AND APRIL CHOU

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EDSURGE LIVE: ALEX GRODD AND ALIX GUERRIER

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Summit 2013 Learning in 2028 Series

• Learning in 2028: Sal Khan
• Learning in 2028: Matt Pittinsky
• Learning in 2028: Elisa Villanueva Beard
• Learning in 2028: Hadi Partovi and Krishna Vedati
• Learning in 2028: Randi Weingarten

WATCH NOW: LEARNING IN 2028: SAL KHAN

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WATCH NOW LEARNING IN 2028: MATT PITTINSKY

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WATCH NOW LEARNING IN 2028: ELISA VILLANEUVA BEARD

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WATCH NOW: LEARNING IN 2028: HADI PARTOVI AND KRISHNA VEDATI

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WATCH NOW: LEARNING IN 2028: RANDI WEINGARTEN

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Learn More About Summit 2013

I spent my entire K-12 career dreaming of the day that I would be done with the classroom. My worksheets were completed, my boxes were checked, my grades were average. In short, I didn’t see the relevancy in going to school, aside from socializing. When I finally discovered how much fun it was to learn something new, build something from scratch, take pride in accomplishments; I felt cheated by the educational system. I may have learned a lot without realizing it in those twelve years, but who I was as a person was not one of them.

This is my seventh year teaching 5th grade and I look forward to every Monday morning. Not only have I discovered myself through teaching, being an educator defines who I am. Looking back down the road that lead me to an event with the nation’s top educational policy makers, practitioners, and entrepreneurs was more rewarding than I can articulate.

During a day filled with resonating messages, Ted Mitchell’s conversation with Thomas Friedman will impact every student I ever work with. “It is no longer true that if you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll be guaranteed a spot in the middle class.” In our connected world there is no shortage of, or access to, vast pools of talent. As sobering as it may be, average is over.

The heart of Mr. Friedman’s talk revolved around five absolutely enlightening habits-of-mind for success in the 21st century. Over the past week, I’ve thought a lot about how this framework has revolutionized both my classroom and my career.

Persistence + Creativity > Intelligence

I can’t begin to talk about how powerful this notion is without thanking the Learnzillion team and one person in particular, Eric Westendorf, for unlocking a side of myself that I didn’t think existed. While I’m very proud of my students’ work and how I’ve been able to facilitate it, I’m never happy with my own products. I worked harder and longer on creating video math lessons for Learnzillion than on anything else I’ve ever done. When we met as a team a few weeks ago to collaborate on this year’s plan, I re-watched my lessons for the first time since I submitted them. I braced myself for the inevitable cringe but it never came. The satisfaction I felt was overwhelming.

Now, if I get a really good roll, I could land a baseball in the ocean from my driveway. Last summer was one of the nicest on record in New England and I saw the majority of it through the window behind my computer. So, what did the Learnzillion team did to engender that level of effort and how can we transpose over the classroom model?

Think Like a Start-up

When Eric and Alix talk about Learnzillion, you can’t miss their genuine belief that it will change the world. They don’t have to say how much they appreciate everybody involved in the effort (even if they still do) because it’s clear from their every action. That, in turn, flows throughout everyone who has come in contact with the project. And when everybody internalizes a shared vision, all of the usual challenges to collaboration just naturally dissipate. From the Learnzillion staff, to the coaches, to every member of the DreamTeam, we truly believe that each and every one of us plays an integral part in the effort.

Always be in beta because even the greatest of ideas can be improved. This summer’s plan for lesson creation looks even better than last year’s. Responding to user data, these slight shifts make the work even more rewarding. As challenging as the project is, when you understand that your energy will lead to an even more effective product, it’s that much more rewarding. It takes tremendous time and effort to curate and cultivate a good idea. If we’re going to continue to be an innovation society, the 9-5 model may be on the brink of extinction. Show me the person who loves their job and I’ll show you somebody who’s never worked a day in their life. Change isn’t a good thing or a bad thing; it’s change. Hey, a cliche’s a cliche for a reason.

Think Like an Artisan

I do everything I can to transfer the mentality I’ve seen from working with Learnzillion into the classroom. To get the same effort from my students I try to ensure they see the relevancy in their work. Through a collaborative website, students always have an audience far more meaningful that their teacher, they write for each other. Just as Learnzillion leverages a supportive community, my students have access to language stems that ensure positive and productive feedback. When students are used to feeling successful, they’re more likely to invest the time it takes to create work that reflects their full effort. Like artisans, they create products they are proud to carve their initials into.

Think Like an Immigrant

The days of filling out worksheets to check off the boxes are over. Students can’t afford to be satisfied with average work. When students’ passions drive their instruction, their products surpass my every expectation. Like those who have come to this country with nothing, expect that nobody is going to hand you anything. Pave your own way.

Think Like a Waitress

This might be my favorite. Mr. Friedman told the story of his favorite pancake house. When the waitress delivered the meal, she brought extra fruit. That waitress didn’t control much but she took full advantage of the little she could control. We need to educate a generation of kids to understand that the scales aren’t always tipped in their favor. We have to help them discover how they can take full advantage of every opportunity, every strength, and every interest. No matter how seemingly insignificant, they must leverage everything within their power.

If we intend for this democracy to be successful, it is time that the classroom plays the central role in helping each and every student discover what drives him or her. I’ll end with a final quote from Thomas Friedman. “Leadership is inspiration.” It’s way too easy to get caught up in the daily minutia of making sure all of the boxes get checked. Creating an optimal climate for students to internalize these habits-of-mind has to come from the collective heart. While it may not be easy, it certainly is rewarding. And, it could be exactly what we need to change our collective course. I, like everybody else I met at Summit 2013, envision a future where kids develop the habits of finding and following their passions inside the classroom, not in spite of it.

Check out this video for a look inside the Lewis5 classroom

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After 15 years of working to improve education by supporting and enabling the ideas and efforts of passionate innovators, instead of looking back, NewSchools Venture Fund is looking 15 years further down the road. We believe that looking toward the future is key to preparing for it. We also believe that the best way to understand the future is to listen to those creating it. Hear from NewSchools entrepreneurs about the challenges facing education, the solutions they are creating and the visions of the future informing and driving their work forward. We also took the time to listen to KIPP King senior, and soon-to-be Harvard Freshman, Laetitia Tiani Vessah, who spoke to the on-the-ground realities facing today’s and tomorrow’s students.

Thank you to:
Norman Atkins of Relay GSE, Sam Chaudhary of ClassDojo, Sooinn Lee of Locomotive Labs, Emily Sawtell of Hapara, Jason Singer of Gobstopper, Laetitia Tiani Vessah of KIPP King Collegiate Highschool and Eric Westendorf of LearnZillion for sharing their visions and work with us, and thank you to all of our entrepreneurs working towards a better state of education for today and tomorrow.

In response to a question from John about “pivoting” when a new product or business is not gaining traction, Mark talked about the questions he asks his game designers at Zynga before they begin a new project:

1. How will you know if you’ve got a winner?
2. How will you know if you don’t?
3. What will you do if you’re not winning?

There are several potentially important insights from these questions that might be of great value for education entrepreneurs in general and charter school operators in particular.

First, in the education space, we frequently focus on the performance floor, rather than the ceiling. In other words, we tend to ask ourselves how we’ll know whether we’ve got a loser, rather than a winner. Moreover, we don’t view the question as binary. If a school, service or product is neither a winner, nor a loser, we tend consider this a partial victory and press on. Zynga only wants games that are homeruns. In our world, we settle for singles and doubles.

Second, when the data shows that a Zynga game is not winning, Pincus pushes the design team to make a decisive choice about the way forward: Either declare failure and move on to the next project, or “pivot” in a different direction to determine whether the underlying product can be turned into a winner – not just by tweaking at the margins, but by dramatically shifting the design, application or business strategy. In the education space, our pattern is to think in terms of incremental change and continuous improvement when confronted with underwhelming, albeit positive results. Perhaps more important, declaring outright failure is rarely contemplated – especially among charter school operators, who typically wait for their authorizer to tell them when it’s time to give up. In Silicon Valley the new mantra is “fail fast.” In education, it’s “failure is not an option.”

Finally, Pincus forces his game designers to think about all this up-front – before the project is actually launched. It’s all too easy to convince yourself that you’re succeeding once you’ve already invested a lot of time, energy and money into something, even if you’re not. By being clear and explicit up front about the target, it’s a bit easier to be objective about whether it’s actually been met. Equally important, Pincus insists that his designers answer the “now what?” question before the data is in. In our world, the governing ethos tends to be: “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

What would it look like to apply Mark Pincus’s questions to an educational venture, like a charter management organization? What if CMOs established clear and ambitious annual performance benchmarks for each new school, during its first few years of operation? What if these CMOs decided up front what their response would be to less than stellar outcomes after year one, at the latest? And what if they committed themselves to closing new schools before they fall into a pattern of mediocrity?

Starting a school is not the same as developing the next Words With Friends. Students and families put their trust in school operators. A sudden school closure or a radical shift in an educational model violates that trust and can be extremely disruptive and damaging to vulnerable children, not just gamers or well-heeled investors. At the same time, the difference between an average school and a great one usually has more to do with execution than design. It’s much easier to re-position a game than it is improve the quality and rigor of instruction. Nevertheless, tinkering around the edges of a school or a school model that isn’t producing great results is not a formula for success.

At a minimum, school operators should have one or more actionable contingency plans for how they will respond to less-than-stellar results – not after five years, but after one-year or even one semester. Performance benchmarks and pivot plans should be shared with staff and parents at the outset, to ensure that there are no surprises if they have to be put into place. And equally important, CMOs should develop effective early exit strategies for unsuccessful new schools, which minimize the negative impact on students and families.

All of this is obviously much easier said than done, but perhaps education entrepreneurs should start spending some time on Farmville.

Currently available are:

• In Conversation with Secretary Duncan
• The Common Core is Coming!
• Mark Pincus and Andrew Ng with John Doerr
• A Conversation with Tom Friedman
• What America Can Learn from the World’s Leading Schools
• Millions and Millions of Great Teachers Needed: How Will we Meet this Need?
• It’s Time to Give up on ___ and Replace it with ___.
• The Parent Voice in Ed Reform
• How the Education Market Will Kill Your Innovation

WATCH NOW: IN CONVERSATION WITH SECRETARY DUNCAN

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In the Summit 2013 keynote session, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (interviewed by NewSchools Board Member Laurene Powell Jobs) reflects on the last four years, speaking to the successes and challenges faced.

WATCH NOW: THE PARENT VOICE IN ED REFORM

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WATCH NOW: HOW THE EDUCATION MARKET WILL KILL YOUR INNOVATION

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