The technology “villain” may also be our savior
One evening at an education conference, there was a showing of the documentary Most Likely to Succeed, in which an interviewer asked a mother why she had put her school-age child into an alternative education school. She responded, “Something is going on.” She, like millions of other people, have a vague awareness that something is wrong, something ominous, about our educational system. This mother interviewed in the documentary pointed out that college-graduate students are arriving back home to live with their parents, a truth of the present age.
Education has let down millions of people and it can no longer be candy-coated respectably. But surely all those educators and all that policy and kind intent are not awry. It worked before respectably well, so what’s the real “why” of it all?
There is a lot of finger pointing as to fault. The constantly changing major Federal programs have an appearance of messing everything up, the teacher unions blocking change, the parents checking out and not helping their kids, and on and on. None of this is necessarily the primary truth. In fact, with the amazing ingenuity of the American people, it is simple to argue that the big “Why” has to be none of these things or we would have solved it by now.
The big “Why” is the unlooked-for-issue, the issue no one dares blame so we don’t even look – but, ha! It’s technology infiltration of course. The Internet really does change everything. Yet, that’s just the surface layer.
Now, technology itself is just that, an ingenuity of some kind or other. It’s persuasive. It’s ubiquitous. We love it because it makes us better, cooler, and shows off our smartness. Education technology as its own category of technology is amazing, and goes all the way up the scale into shock-and-awe if you have the time to stop and review it all. It’s not the individual bits and pieces of the greater tech scene; no, those are great. Rather it’s the sum of the effect, and more interestingly, what technology is missing and unapplied as yet.
Now, there are lots of indicators that the education system is in some ruin. Studies show high numbers of students can’t read well, when in truth that has probably always been so. But it is only recently easy to aggregate large numbers of student data all together at once and see it in statistically significant ways and find lots of anecdotes.
High School graduates are also way under-prepared for college, again something that has probably always been so but is more pronounced, because higher education institutions have had to shift faster to stay ahead and are therefore also going dramatically out of sync with K12, which has been slower to change.
Politically, what policies coming from what level are attempting to fix these? Was an action taken on a broad or local enough scale or both to truly ameliorate the wrong? Not yet. But there has been a lot of blame, shame, and regret inappropriately so.
The wealthy of America, and now a large part of the middle class, have already left the traditional public education system for various alternative flavors of education including the fairly new “unschooling” movement. What’s left in public education are a whole lot of low-income students, typically considered a more difficult set to handle because they unfortunately come loaded with more emotional problems and barriers like actual hunger, and special needs students requiring more expensive assistance by specialists.
It seems patently unfair to thereafter hold public education to blame for what can most appropriately be labeled a cascading failure of our socio-economic system.
Something is going on, and many have been arduously pursuing its definition. What hasn’t been done is to draw together all the competing elements outside education to look at where education must inevitably go to “fix” it. After all, cascading failures usually begin when one part of the system fails which causes all the nearby nodes to then take up the slack for the failed component.
We can think of Education as a key single point of failure of the human system where it is supposed to have provided a means to keep up with change, to prepare people now and in the next generation to compete adequately.
If the starting “why” is technology and ubiquitous information accessible anytime and anywhere, and those things together are at a faster rate of change than human systems like Education can keep up with, well, you will get a series of failures that “cascade” or fall one after another. Cascading failure, essentially a term most often associated with electrical systems, when applied in this case is signifying that the pressure on the education node in the network is greater than that node is built to withstand.
Fail-over from the system’s shorting-out is falling to alternatives – private schools, unschooling, Charters, and now pure open-market consumerization of learning. The surge shorting out the education system is technology, but not only in use inside education, but also its rate of impact on all other aspects of human life, including its insistency that humans are ready to be employed to further serve it (technology-as-industry). This is a vicious tripling of education’s requirement to meet society’s needs to use technology and serve technology while itself being imbued with technology.
Technology allows teachers and institutions to achieve fantastic levels of individualized instruction with truly independent paths per each student simply because technology in its present and burgeoning state actually can do things beyond human scales. One machine can keep track of, and calculate statistics of, millions of students at once. One program can inexhaustibly redirect lessons with slight alterations to lines of questioning and examples and exercises with infinite patience until a student gets the right answer.
Our highest-level political officers and perhaps our system, have not created a new human corollary to meet the explosion of technology. Friction of inconceivable proportions has resulted. It is the challenge of our Age and we are not meeting it head on.
What’s important is that we have all lived within a fairly new system, one built on industrial principals for a certain age, with a focus on learning homogeneity and conformity that won big gains for most of us. We cannot believe that in our single life-times a quantum change would have occurred. We want for our kids what we had, only better. We have not torn down the old building we built, perhaps too enamored with our past success like a former medal-winning athlete or prizefighter. We can’t talk about today because we are stuck in yesterday.
To really come to grips with what we have to do as individual learners, as teachers, as school and district and government leaders, we need to fully analyze the real villain of this cascading failure and come to grips with what would solve it, for real.
Why? Because the technology villain may just also be the savior.
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Summer is right around the corner and that always means great news for students and teachers alike– no more classes, no more homework or grading, and no more early mornings. However, a term that all parents and teachers should be wary of is what the education industry refers to as the “summer slide,” and it affects thousands around the world throughout the summer break season.
Typically in the summer, parents witness a lack of desire to continue learning and a sense of lethargy that sets in after a few difficult weeks that are spent on final exams or papers. The conclusion of the positive momentum that leads up to the slide results in learning loss from the prior months, decline in reading and math skills, and the inability to get off to a positive start in the fall. This can set a student up for a poor start to the next school year and potentially a significant decline heading into the future.
Encourage reading. As stated before, it is okay to take a little time off from school – every student needs it. But it is important for them to continue reading, whether it’s a book, morning newspaper or magazine. It is critical to keep reading skills in top shape heading into the new school year. Don’t let them sit around and watch television all day – push them to read.
As a parents, it is more than okay to let children have some fun and enjoy the summer. But it is incredibly important to continue to think “big picture” when the summer slide starts to hit. No one wants to see their students lose the positive educational gains they developed during the school year. Relaxation is healthy, but too much of it can be harmful to a student’s development.
Students throughout the U.S. face persistent challenges of postsecondary readiness, access, affordability and completion. Because of these challenges, students often must enroll in remedial courses, drop out before earning a degree or graduate with thousands of dollars of student loan debt.
Unfortunately, traditional policy and funding silos have made it challenging to bring these programs to scale.
ESSA State Plans – ESSA empowers states and local decision-makers to implement the strategies they choose for improving teaching and learning, provided they are grounded in evidence of success. Because of this, there is a unique opportunity to create more early college high school and dual and concurrent enrollment opportunities for students. As states collaborate with stakeholders to design new education systems that comply with ESSA, CHSA is working to elevate opportunities in the new law to expand and scale dual and concurrent enrollment and early college high school programs. We released guidance and recommendations to states aligned to these opportunities in ESSA and we continue to track and engage with states as they release public drafts of their state plans for comment. CHSA hopes to serve as an ongoing resource to states throughout plan development and implementation to expand high-quality postsecondary pathway options for students.
HEA Reauthorization – Similarly, the CHSA has begun to engage around reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Members are participating in a working group to develop recommendations for advancing these programs through the law and continue to work closely with our congressional champions to help them integrate these programs into their priorities for reauthorization. The Higher Education Act could be a powerful vehicle for scaling these programs particularly as we look to modernize the federal financial aid system to increase student access and affordability of higher education.
The time is past due for online professional learning to be the go-to method for the teaching profession. It’s less expensive, offers continuous learning, employs familiar tools for online sharing and peer collaboration, encourages focused rather than passive learning and provides schools with easy ways to continually train and retrain new as well as experienced teachers. In short, the online experience meets the redefined goals for professional learning as outlined by 
The key to a true hybrid PD is to visualize how learners today move back and forth between a digital and face-to-face environment. A blended solution should offer a choice-driven, coherent, and grounded opportunity that meets teachers’ professional needs and fits today’s lifestyle — a kind of thoughtful, just in time, approachable path to professional learning. Here are some elements:
Job embedded. Rarely can online material match perfectly with daily experience. A teacher must extract useful knowledge that can be 
Make it a Conversation. Learning is rapidly moving from a vertical, hierarchical form of transmission to a peer-driven, social learning experience. The online learner needs to feel fully connected to others in the course. This can extend to having teachers sit side-by-side at computers as each go through the course. They alternate between the screen and the person next to them. It works, particularly for a conversation rich subject like PBL, which has many moving parts and requires a broad skill set from a teacher.
Don’t Make Everyone Go Online. Learning online sounds liberating to many people. To others, as one teacher said, “It just makes me want to clean out my purse.” 
Our goal at Breakthrough San Juan Capistrano is to get low-income first-generation students in and through college, and the same is true for the school district our students attend. Even though we have similar missions, we get there walking different paths. There are considerable structural, bureaucratic, demographic and political differences operating in school districts and not in nonprofits. But as a program director working with a college access nonprofit supporting 160 students (94 percent which will be the first in their families to attend college) some key nonprofit best practices could support school districts in our shared efforts to close the opportunity gap and enable more underserved youth to graduate college. In the last three years 88 percent of our students have applied and been admitted to 4-year universities, so there is something we can offer to support our common purposes.
Even though national graduation rates as an aggregate have increased over the last decade, the rate of low-income first-generation students entering and finishing college has remained stagnate. According to Pell Institute report on “6-Year Degree Attainment,” only 10.9 percent of low-income, first-generation students attained a Bachelor’s degree, whereas 54 percent of non-low-income, non-first-generation students obtained their degrees. In the grand scheme a less college-educated nation can atrophy an economy, reduce civic engagement and curtail innovation. And, as reported by the Office of the President in 2014, “Increasing college opportunity is not just an economic imperative, but a reflection of our values. We need to reach, inspire, and empower every student, regardless of background, to make sure that our country is a place where if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.” As the rate of low-income, first-generation students starts to grow, an event horizon of demography and college attainment will culminate in a large uneducated workforce in just a few decades. This is not as a result of malintent, but severe structural inequities. As noted in the The State of School Counseling: Revisiting the Path Forward 2017, “High student to counselor ratios tend to be exacerbated in urban settings, with counselors also among the most under-resourced and vulnerable to school budget cuts, compounding the difficulty in providing services in communities with the greatest need.” Something must be done and there are ways that school districts can be creative, audacious and innovative with the resources they do have and ones they just need to uncover. And, nonprofits can serve as a guide to uncover some of those resources.
Operating in silos can occlude the combined impact of resources, efforts and services for organizations. As a nonprofit, actively seeking external organizations to either fill, extend or deepen program leverages the best of what we do in the service of our students. Start by mapping out all the community-based organizations in the local community that work towards the same goals of supporting underserved communities in an effort to understand the landscape. Initial contact should be focused on orienting one another to the services offered and ways these services can be aligned. Maintain constant communication to ensure alignment. For example, we partner with the local Boys and Girls Club to host college application workshops for all our students, we’ll host a workshop one month while they host another. In the end all our students have access to workshops and as an organization we are only planning one every two months. School districts can start looking past their walls to seek other organizations’ support.
The Parent Teacher Association (PTA) has been an effective way to mobilize parents to support the cultural and social aspects of schools, however, tapping into the community to extend the impact of day-to-day programming on students can be critical to filling the void of scarce resources. Identifying, training and building in volunteers to serve as mentors, a second set of eyes on college essays and more can further enrich the work that counselors do every day. In our organization, we mobilized and train community members to mentor our seniors through the college application process. We serve as the direct trainers, maintain accountability and quality while mentors act as the first line in supporting our students to finish their applications on time. There is more planning, program creation and process development at the front end, but in time it will free up and enable students to have the critical support they need throughout the admissions process.
Rapid creative, human-centered innovation is key to improving programs within nonprofits and many startup organizations. By getting feedback from users, i.e. students and families, designing program based on that feedback, implementing and evaluating enables identifying the high-leverage actions or behaviors necessary for successful outcomes. The key is a rapid cycle of feedback and action. Our organization is constantly eliciting feedback and other forms of data (academic) from students and families to understand the effectiveness and impact of our program. If there’s a gap we fill it immediately, gather more data and make adjustments. If school districts only have a finite budget and resources, it’s critical to deeply understand from students and families what works well and continuously improve, innovative and create.
This scaling of content is most difficult for early childhood educators. Early childhood, as defined by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, or NAEYC, is the education of children up to age eight. In some districts, early childhood is considered preschool to grade two, and in others, it extends to grade three. Too often, these teachers are grouped together for professional development workshops and webinars in literacy. Grouping these teachers together is problematic, as preschool literacy activities are vastly different from those in second and third grade. In fact, best practices in literacy development for each early childhood grade level build systematically on one another.
Research demonstrates teachers are more likely to make instructional changes when professional learning is ongoing, job embedded, and personalized to individual teacher needs. This personalization of professional learning should consider the teaching context, previous knowledge and instructional needs of each educator. The end goal is to build individual capacity and create lasting change in pedagogical practices. Some districts are utilizing instructional coaches to model best practices and work with individual teachers and grade level teams, as veteran teachers do not have the same professional learning needs as first year teachers. Personalizing professional learning with coaching and reflection provides teachers with the ability to see the impact on their students and practice new instructional skills in a safe environment.
In addition to coaches, a few school districts are incorporating microcredentials and online professional learning platforms that provide individual learning plans for teachers. Microcredentials, or digital badges, are performance-based assessments that allow teachers to showcase their growing skills. Each microcredential is focused in a particular area, has submission criteria, a research base, recommended resources and a scoring rubric. Microcredentials allow teachers to engage in self-paced, job-embedded professional learning that is connected to the daily skills teachers need.
Personalizing professional learning must also include the incorporation of technology. In today’s digital world, our students are more connected than ever. Since anytime learning is both personal and pocketed, students require teachers who are able to integrate technology in meaningful ways to enhance deeper learning. Yet, many teachers are lacking the technological skills to effectively do so. Further, teachers also lack a clear understanding of the connection between teaching, technology and content. To affect change through the implementation of personalized learning through professional development with technology, it is important to consider the perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and self-efficacy of teachers involved in implementing technology in their classrooms. This is best achieved through instructional coaching and personalized professional learning incorporating technology. Engaging teachers in personalized professional learning is one way to better insure young students are exposed to current day instructional strategies aimed at building foundational skills for success.