Rock the Boat

Education and the Long Tail

Sal Khan and the myth of “higher value” teaching modes

Last night 60 Minutes profiled Khan Academy. Sanjay Gupta interviewed founder Sal Khan: 

Khan: I’ve seen some subset of teachers who say, “Oh, well, what is this video thing? You know, live human interaction is important.” And the reason why that bothers me a little bit is that I know that’s exactly what we’re saying. In fact, we exactly agree with you. That what we’re trying to do is take the passivity out of the classroom. So that you, as a teacher, will have more flexibility.

Gupta: Does it minimize the role of the teacher? Does it make it less impactful?

Khan: No, I think it’s the exact opposite. We kind of view teachers playing the role of more like a coach or a mentor. Which, once again, I personally believe is a much higher valued thing than a lecturer.

Noooooo! I don’t know whether Khan believes this or whether he’s saying it to defend against fears that Khan Academy threatens teachers and their jobs. But there should be nothing “lower value” about being a lecturer—if that is where you excel as a teacher. We should aspire to create an educational system that deploys talent in ways that maximize each teacher’s strengths. If you’re amazing with small groups of students, then lead tutorials! If TED is knocking at your door, then lecture! If you have a knack for facilitating discussion, then lead a writing workshop! We need inspiring teachers who care deeply about their students and their students’ performance in ALL of these realms. 

I’ve benefited throughout my life from teachers of all stripes and gifts. I’ll never forget them, and I would never ask the workshop leaders to swap places with the lecturers. Each is appropriate in its own context. 

Teacher accountability and K12 innovation are on a collision course

That was the thought on my mind as I read coverage of the contested release of 18,000 data reports on New York City teachers. The reports, built on value-added assessments that gauge teachers’ impact based on their students’ predicted performance, highlight both the wide variation in teacher effectiveness and the painfully obvious limitations of our existing evaluation systems. 

Predictably, the release ignited a fury of sound bytes from education’s entrenched interests. Even Bill Gates, typically absent when education controversies reach a boiling point, bent over backwards to assure educators that if he had his way, teacher evaluation systems would look more like Microsoft’s apparently enlightened evaluation system. “A good personnel system encourages employees and managers to work together to set clear, achievable goals,” Gates wrote. What a nice idea. It’s really too bad that the existing contract between the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the city forbids principals from asking their teachers to develop and share long-term planning materials. That’s right: at the beginning of the school year, managers are in fact barred by contract from working with their employees “to set clear, achievable goals.” Suddenly the system’s fraught reliance on such a blunt instrument as the dreaded standardized test makes a bit more sense. 

But let’s take a minute to step back and look at the controversy within the broader context of the changes beginning to radically reshape our traditional notions of K12 “teacher” and “school.” The UFT contract and the teacher data report share a common building block: the assumption that schools are composed of discrete classrooms in which individual educators teach a couple dozen students at a time. While this model would work relatively well if the students in each classroom were progressing through the curriculum at the same rate, any teacher can tell you that such a scenario is rarely, if ever, the case. Instead, some students are self-motivated, some bored, some are distracted, some are frustrated and struggling, and so on. 

School of One is one of the first innovations to tackle this challenge head on (and the Gates Foundation is a major donor). School of One re-orients learning around the individual student in a way that is far more comprehensive than many of the offerings out there touting their “personalized, adaptive” credentials. In the model, student learning is customized by achievement level and preferred learning modality—every day. If you’re a student, based on your progress the prior day, you might be learning to add fractions through a computer game or divide fractions with a small group of peers led by a live instructor.

I can imagine that one day almost every school will have a congruent model in place. And as the implications of this model cascade, it seems clear to me that our current notions of teacher accountability won’t cut it for much longer. Breaking down the classroom walls, literally and figuratively, is going to require a concurrent effort to build up new ways of evaluating teacher effectiveness. 

At this stage it’s hard to say exactly what those data reports should look like. But as matters of general principle (and no big surprises here) I think they will need to encompass qualitative and quantitative measures of performance; emphasize student progress; and seamlessly link to goals established in collaboration with peers and managers at the start of the school year. Perhaps most important of all: reports should reflect the fact that we are moving away from the universal label of “teacher” and toward more specialized educator roles: senior lecturer, writing tutor, instructional coach, data specialist. It’s about time we embraced this shift and stopped talking about teachers as a monolithic bloc.

If anything comes of the release of the data reports, I hope that it’s a better conversation about designing forward-looking systems that recognize these coming earthquakes and help us take innovations like School of One mainstream. Let’s not waste time refining data reports and evaluation systems appropriate for the Industrial Era schoolhouse while we simultaneously chip away at its facade. 

Startup Weekend #DCEDU: From Friday night idea to 1 of 4 finalists

I arrived at Startup Weekend EDU in Washington, D.C., last Friday ready to dive in and work on someone else’s idea. Then I ran into my friend Greg, also down from New York. He said he was planning to pitch a couple of ideas and encouraged me to go for it, even if I hadn’t prepared anything. After all, why not? Surely I’d been mulling over an idea that had some promise? 

I realized that I did have something to offer. I’d been thinking for a while about the shortcomings of our existing tools for communicating student data to parents. Complex assessment data increasingly guides educators’ work, effectively cutting even sophisticated, affluent parents out of the conversation about their child’s achievement. We’ve made some strides in the right direction with school-level data—when I showed New York City’s Progress Report format to DC teachers, they were impressed. But for a parent, that kind of summative data at the school level isn’t actionable. And as I ended up saying in my pitch, in the age of the infographic, I know that we can do better. My mission: making student data fun for families.  

That message resonated with the #DCEDU audience. As we narrowed down the list of pitches to form 12 teams, I found myself joined by two developers, two teachers, and an e-learning specialist. We spent the next 48 hours creating a quick and easy way for teachers to generate kid-friendly, individualized infographics displaying local data for students and their families. This is the story of how we got there. 

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Why edtech entrepreneurs should pay more attention to teacher teams

Read the op-eds and white papers floating around these days, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that there hasn’t been a successful innovation in a traditional public school classroom in decades. But that’s not entirely the truth. I’d venture to guess that there have been millions of successful innovations in our classrooms—but that’s just it, those ideas aren’t leaving the classroom. For years, a teacher would have an insight, turn it into curriculum or technique, refine it over time, and then retire. When the lights would go out in her classroom, the innovation would be lost in the dark. 

So to be more precise, we haven’t scaled many successful education innovations. That’s a very different problem. And I’m not sure we’re trying to tackle it in the right way.

Right now we’re seeing two approaches to scale, when it comes to providers and strategies (we should also be scaling markets, but that’s a topic for another day). You can achieve scale through enterprise-level sales to states and districts (e.g., Wireless Generation) or you can achieve scale by appealing directly to consumers, whether teachers (e.g., ShowMe) or students (e.g., Grockit). Nothing revolutionary in that—that’s how the world works, B2B or B2C. 

But there’s a catch: the real work of re-inventing education certainly doesn’t happen at the district level, and increasingly it doesn’t happen at the level of the individual teacher. It happens in the context of educator teams. 

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Individual versus community success

A couple weeks ago The New York Times Sunday Magazine published a cover story that generated a lot of buzz in education circles. Paul Tough’s article was titled What if the Secret to Success is Failure? but the article was more broadly about “the question of whether and how schools should impart good character.”

Tough discovered that two Bronx schools—one a charter serving disadvantaged students, the other an elite private school—were in the midst of a loosely aligned effort to develop good character in their students, both as a positive outcome in its own right and for its demonstrated connection to long-term success in work and life. Here’s how the Riverdale headmaster explained it:

“Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful. Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.”

With the help of researchers, KIPP Infinity and Riverdale settled on a core set of traits: zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, and optimism. KIPP has even gone so far as to institute character report cards. 

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What can teachers learn from chefs?

“Most of the time it was the bad students who were shipped to the culinary school. Today things have changed a lot.”

So says four-star Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert while talking with the president of the Culinary Institute of America on an episode of cooking show Avec Eric. The two men are overlooking the Hudson River at the institute’s Hyde Park campus, reminiscing and talking shop. Ripert continues: 

“Today it’s a prestigious, honorific title to be a chef. I think it’s because of the help of TV and media. It has created a great interest in our industry … [W]hen I was in culinary school, it was very uneven in terms of quality of students. Some students who were there didn’t really want to be chefs. Some students were passionate, some students didn’t know what they were doing there. But when you have such a demand, and when you have a great curriculum, you really create future champions in our industry.”

Few professions have undergone as dramatic a transformation in a 25-year time span as chefs have since the ~1970s. To be sure, there have always been great chefs, as there have always been great teachers. But as Ripert notes, the prestige now tied to the profession, and the depth of talent that brings, is a new phenomenon. How did chefs do it? And could teachers pull off a similar feat? The need is urgent: today only 23% of new teachers come from the top-third of college graduates (McKinsey: Closing the Talent Gap). 

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