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Investing in Principal Talent Pays Off in Higher Math and Reading Scores, Study Finds A new study of six school districts that made heavy investments in strengthening their cadre of school leaders shows a link to stronger student achievement and longer tenures. Read more. Share:

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			Do your tests support and engage early learners? Early learners have unique learning needs, and often require resources and tools made just for them. In this eBook, you'll discover what to look for in high-quality assessments for early learners and why specificity is vital for student, school, and district success. Download your free eBook

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COMMENTARY Why a Culturally Responsive Curriculum Works When instruction feels relevant to students' lives, amazing things can happen, writes veteran educator Eugene Butler Jr. Read more.

As States Debate Arming Teachers, Opponents Detail Mishandling of Guns in Schools As more states consider arming teachers, a gun-control group's analysis found dozens of incidents of guns left accessible to students, misfired, or used inappropriately. Read more.

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			Education Week Online Summit - Real-World Literacy Join Education Week on Tuesday April 16, 2019, from 1 to 3 p.m., for a deep dive the kinds of "new" literacies of the workplace and schools' attempts to teach them. This Online Summit provides you a unique opportunity to directly interact with reporters and literacy experts and practitioners. Learn more.

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DeVos Will Address State Ed. Leaders This Week. Here's What to Expect Last year DeVos addressed state education chiefs with some "tough love," telling them their ESSA plans were more than a little lacking even though they technically met the letter of the law. Read more.

Screen Reading Worse for Comprehension, Leads to Overconfidence, New Meta-Analysis Concludes Readers using screens perform worse and tend to think they're processing and understanding texts better than they actually are, according to a new review of nearly three-dozen studies over the past decade. Read more.

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How Digital Games Take the Stress Out of Formative Tests Elementary school teachers in the Peach State are using "game-based" formative assessments to take a pulse on their students' learning. Read more. • Special Report: Projects, Portfolios, and Performance Assessments

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LESSONS LEARNED

District leaders share ed-tech best practices and persistent challenges

They Hacked Their School District When They Were 12. The Adults Are Still Trying to Catch Up. This troubling tale is a must-read for ed-tech leaders who want to prevent students from hacking into their networks. Read the full story.

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			Education Week Online Summit - Testing for Real-World Performance Join Education Week on Tuesday February 19, 2019, from 1 to 3 p.m., for a deep dive into performance-based student assessments in your schools. This Online Summit provides you a unique opportunity to directly interact with reporters and student assessment experts and practitioners. Learn more.

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Scores Were Lower When Mass. Students Took PARCC Exams on Computers, Study Finds Unfamiliarity with technology contributed to lower scores for online test-takers in 2015, but the effects diminished over time, researchers found. Read more.

OPINION Last Words on Innovation Here is a look at innovation vs. improvement and how we can all support creating a future that works for everyone. Read more.

Microsoft Acquires Education Data Platform From Brightbytes Microsoft is acquiring DataSense, a data integration platform developed by the company Brightbytes. Read more.

Ed-Tech Startups at FETC Promote Both Mission and Profitability This year among more than 30 entries to FETC's Pitchfest to award the title of most innovative startup, many of the companies had a social mission in addition to being for-profit models. Read more.

Feedback Loops Lead the Way to Mastery Elementary students and their teacher reflect on getting feedback from experts, in support of growing as a learner. Read more.

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SPONSORED WEBINAR - Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019, 4 to 5 p.m. ET Building Community Around Essential Literacy Experiences Join Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell for a "Let's Get Practical Webinar" focused on text, talk, teaching - together toward a literate life. Click here to attend this free live event. Content provided by: Heinemann

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STEM FREE! In this Spotlight, see how schools are exposing students to STEM in the early grades, providing skills for jobs in emerging fields, and using project-based learning to engage students in authentic real-world experiences. See other Spotlights.

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"To enlist parents in their children's education, schools are increasingly sending text messages home. There's evidence to suggest parents appreciate the trend.

But can such an approach actually help young children develop concrete literacy skills, such as building vocabulary?

A new project out of Temple University in Philadelphia, dubbed Text to Talk, is showing promising early results.  

Funded by the William Penn Foundation and tested in 49 pre-K classrooms along with the School District of Philadelphia, Text to Talk relies on carefully crafted messages with tips for parents on talking about the new words their children are learning in school. The messages are send straight to family members' mobile phones using popular services such as Remind and ClassDojo. The idea is to give children the opportunity to learn about and practice specific new words in a variety of settings, with a mix of trusted adults.

Preliminary results from a small randomized-control trial found that children whose families received the messages learned more of the vocabulary words (the findings have yet to be peer reviewed.)

The project isn't the only such effort happening in K-12. A recent working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, looked at the details of an effort in Dallas, where parents of pre-kindergarteners received text messages with tips and facts about supporting their children's learning. And many schools are now using texts as ways to communicate schedules and other logistical information to parents.

But in an interview, the Temple researchers—education professor Barbara A. Wasik and research scientist Emily K. Snell—said Text to Talk stands out because it's directly tied to the literacy materials that children are seeing in their early childhood classrooms.

"I think the most important part is connecting it to the curriculum," Wasik said. "There's much more to crafting these messages than just saying, 'OK, here's 'cat.'"

Following is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

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What's the problem you're trying to solve?

Wasik: Text to Talk came out of a bigger issue we're looking at: vocabulary development in young children. One of the things we think is important is that not only should teachers be emphasizing vocabulary in the classroom, but we should also be making connections with the vocabulary children use at home.  

Why does building vocabulary in young children matter?

Wasik: There's been an enormous amount of research suggesting early vocabulary development is predictive of kids' readiness to read. 

Snell: There are also studies that show that children's language skills predict other facets of learning in the classroom, including math, their ability to understand the social science and science curricula, and even their social-emotional learning and classroom behavior.

And why does the home-school connection matter?

Wasik: Kids don't learn just by hearing words once or twice during the day. It's multiple meaningful exposures to words that helps them develop vocabulary. Our hypothesis is that if there's an opportunity both in school and at home to hear a word and get explanations of what that word means, it will reinforce the learning of that word.

Snell: It's about giving children the chance to practice using words in different settings, with different caring adults. 

Why text messages, rather than email or paper?

Snell: Especially in pre-K, teachers use a lot of paper, and they have a lot of personal communication with parents, usually at pickup or drop-off. But we were interested in seeing whether there was a more efficient way of reaching parents, especially those who maybe aren't coming to school everyday. And texting has been used in other settings, like public health, to reach more folks with more personalized messages. We did focus groups to see if that would be of interest to pre-K teachers, administrators, and parents, and we found that they were quite open to it.

What do the text messages, and the communications they are intended to spur, look like in practice?

Snell: Pre-K teachers in Philadelphia use what's called the Creative Curriculum, and there are particular books they are asked to read to their students. We ask teachers on a weekly basis to send out two texts that are related to one of the books they are reading that week. One text just introduces the word, then provides a link to a website where we have more information, including child-friendly definitions and activities they can do with their child. The other text has additional ideas of activities they can do.

What's the role of apps like Remind and Class Dojo?  

Snell: We found that teachers were already sending text messages, using their own personal phones. But when we designed this study, we didn't want to ask teachers to do that. In the last five years, though, there've been some wonderful free text messaging systems that send messages straight to parents' phones. 

Did Text to Talk help children learn vocabulary?

Snell: In our randomized control trial, we found that children whose parents had received the text messages did learn more of the curriculum-aligned vocabulary words, compared to children whose families didn't receive the text messages. The effect size was about .16, which is considered small to moderate. We were pleased with that, given the fairly small amount of effort it takes for teachers to send out the messages.

Wasik: Other vocabulary intervention programs that have required more effort and resources have gotten less significant effects. Our question was, 'Can we do something that's cost effective, that doesn't require a whole lot of teacher time but can still have an impact?' That's where we think Text to Talk may fit in.    

Is this concept something that an enterprising ed-tech entrepreneur could try to bring to market?

Wasik: I think the most important part is connecting it to the curriculum. There's much more to crafting these messages than just saying, 'OK, here's 'cat.'" Emily spent an inordinate amount of time crafting these texts. 

Snell: We tried to base the texts around what we know around the research in early-childhood language development.  We invited parents to talk to children about what the word is, and we tried to craft texts around principles of how kids learn language. We also looked at the literature around family involvement, and how parents' participation is often shaped by how effective they feel helping their children, and whether they think it's easy and fits into life, and how appealing they find the invitation. So, we really tried to make the texts friendly and encouraging, with definitions that parents can use that would be easy for children to understand.  We always tried to make the texts very encouraging and supportive of parents' own efforts.

There are always implementation challenges with efforts like this. What surprised you?

Wasik: Initially, we were naive enough to think teachers were going to construct the texts themselves. We realized early on that was not going to happen. One of the things that makes this partially appealing to teachers is that it doesn't take a lot of effort on their part. They're busy.

Snell: Another thing that was interesting was that there were many families where multiple family members were getting the texts. That is almost impossible to do with papers coming home in backpack]. Helping everyone be on the same page was really appreciated by families.

Based on what you've learned, what advice would you give to other early childhood providers?

Wasik: Find out what your audience needs, and adapt to that. Don't go in with an idea and try to make it fit your audience.

Snell: Historically, early childhood teachers don't use a lot of technology in the classroom. But I think they were surprised by the usefulness of apps like Remind and how easy they were to learn and use."

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The Backlash Against Personalized Learning View this email in your browser

Tuesday, December 11, 2018  Newsletter

The Backlash Against Personalized Learning

SHARE THIS EMAIL: Students at the Secondary School for Journalism in Brooklyn, New York walked out of class to protest it. Another New York City public school dumped it. And in Cheshire, Connecticut, the superintendent eliminated a “personalized learning” program after families complained that users received limited attention from teachers, gamed the system, faced data privacy violations, and experienced increased levels of anxiety. These approaches rely on software to lead each student through lessons deemed appropriate for that student at that time, thus assisting or supplementing teachers who are feared to have a lesser capacity to individualize. “Individualized” instruction may be a better name for these approaches, but advocates have popularized the “personalized instruction” name, and we thus use it here. All three of the above cases involved the Summit Learning Platform, which is currently used in more than 380 schools. Summit was built with assistance from Facebook engineers and promoted financial backing from company founder Mark Zuckerberg. As such, they are arguably impacted by the recent backlash against Facebook, which was sparked by revelations that the social media giant improperly shared data and permitted election meddling. (The National Education Policy Center deleted its Facebook account in March over these and other concerns.) But is personalized learning more broadly facing a backlash? Maybe. In October, for example, The New York Times ran a series of articles about efforts by affluent parents (including those in Silicon Valley) to limit students’ use of screens not only at home—where they are often used for entertainment—but at school. For example, the private Waldorf School of the Peninsula has attracted families of executives of tech companies such as eBay, Google, Apple and Yahoo with its computer-free approach.  In a policy brief for NEPC, Vanderbilt professor Noel Enyedy writes that “recent studies show little evidence for the effectiveness” of personalized learning programs that aim to use computers to tailor digital instruction to individual students. Such programs often merely translate problematic features of traditional learning into the digital context. For instance, Enyedy writes: (T)he basic formula of both traditional and computerized instruction has been ‘I, we, you,’ where the teacher (or computer) tells the student something, followed by a worked-out example gone over together, and ending with independent student practice. Everything we know about teaching and learning tells us that this formula is flawed and not working. Another challenge is that there’s no one standardized definition of, or approach to, personalized learning. “The systems lumped together under the umbrella term of Personalized Instruction differ widely,” Enyedy writes:  In fact, there is so much variability in features and models for implementation that it is impossible to make reasonable claims about the efficacy of Personalized Instruction as a whole. Worse, when decision makers consider adopting a particular system, it is usually hard to tell whether available evidence applies to the specific system under consideration. One major complaint about Summit Learning is that there is too much digital learning and not enough instructor intervention: One student told New York Magazine that she met with her math teacher for just a few minutes a month. Survey results suggest that teachers in schools that use personalized learning are less familiar with their students and their lives inside and outside of schools. Other complaints about Summit include: Software glitches One student told The New York Post she was locked out of the software for two months.) Concerns about data privacy (Summit shares data with 19 companies, including Amazon and Microsoft. An NEPC research brief notes that most school districts lack the resources to manage all their student data.) Lessons that are easy to game and trick (By skipping lessons, for example, and making educated guesses on multiple choice questions.) Prof. Enyedy’s brief concludes with a series of seven recommendations, including the following four: Education policymakers should continue to invest in technology but should be wary of advocacy promoting computerized instruction to an extent that oversteps the current research. Policymakers should encourage more partnerships among developers, educational researchers and teachers. Such partnerships have great potential to produce systematic and rigorous evidence of what works and what doesn’t. Administrators must ensure that investments in technological infrastructure and software licensing are accompanied by substantive professional development for teachers in order to provide them with skills that have not historically been in the teacher’s toolbox. All stakeholders should refrain from assuming that Personalized Instruction is the only model for computers in the classroom and be open to investigating new models integrating technology into the learning process. NEPC Resources on Computing, Technology, & Information Systems ->

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NEPC’s November Education Interview of the Month Podcast Explores School Privatization and Segregation

KEY TAKEAWAY: NEPC Education Interview of the Month is a great teaching resource; engaging drive-time listening; and 30 minutes of high-quality policy information for educators, community members, policymakers, and anyone interested in education. NEPC Publication -> NEPC Resources on Privatization -> CONTACT: William J. Mathis: (802) 383-0058 wmathis@sover.net Noliwe Rooks: (718) 708-4368 nrooks@cornell.edu

BOULDER, CO (November 15, 2018) – In this month’s NEPC Education Interview of the Month, Lewis and Clark College Emeritus Professor of Education Gregory A. Smith and Cornell University professor Noliwe Rooks discuss school privatization, segregation, and the end of public education. Greg and Noliwe, who also chairs the American Studies Program at Cornell, explore issues that have arisen from the range of privatizing reforms prevalent over the last decade, and their impact on our ability to create equitable schools. Dr. Rooks has researched the roots of school privatization going back to the 19th century, when, she points out, there was the same kind of “deep-pocketed interest” from philanthropists that exists today.  Dr. Rooks coined the term “segrenomics,” referring to the profit for businesses that offer to educate children in economically and racially segregated communities. She attempts to understand the meaning of a society in which those with access to wealth and power are invested in education reform for “poor black children”…but only with models of education that don’t look like the education their own children get.  “We try everything except for the education the wealthy provide for their own kids,” Dr. Rooks says. “This is the education for you, they say, instead of having a sense of what makes a quality education for everyone.” In her work she consistently finds this discrepancy in education quality dependent on the economic status and race of the child. Policymakers must take a long view towards equity, Dr. Rooks believes – no one election or candidate will resolve the issue. She argues that what is needed is a much broader form of organizing beginning at the local level, looking at what each individual school needs, and figuring out how to fill that need.  NEPC Education Interview of the Month, hosted by Gregory A. Smith, is released each month from September through May. Don’t worry if you miss a month. All NEPC Education Interview of the Month podcasts are archived on the NEPC website and can be found here.  Coming Next Month In December, Greg’s guests will be Dr. Rick Mintrop and Miguel Ordenes of the University of California Berkeley. Greg, Rick, and Miguel will explore the universal implementation of school vouchers and privatization in Chile, and what might happen in the U.S. if similar policies were to become more widespread here. Stay tuned in to NEPC for smart, engaging conversations about education policy.

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