Breaking path dependence in California charter schools
Dr. Louise Waters is the Superintendent and CEO of Leadership Public Schools (LPS) in the East Bay of San Francisco. Here’s how she describes her challenge:
A lot of our families don’t have steady employment, so our kids may be major contributors to the household income, or provide childcare while their parents work night shifts. Some might be homeless, undocumented, in gangs, or foster care. Since the Great Recession of 2008, the social safety net has come unraveled and we’ve seen hunger and medical issues. Kids fall so far behind that by the time they get to high school they are four or five years below grade level, and no longer believe that they can succeed. Talk about constraints...
Dr. Waters and her team did not allow the constraint to limit the ambition. On the contrary, they set an enormously ambitious goal: in time, they wanted all LPS students to leave school ready for college without remediation (i.e., with no need to take catch-up classes), representing a 1,000-percent increase in the level she found when she arrived. To make this possible, students would need to progress two to three grade levels each year through high school. But there was no extra money to feed the realization of this elevated ambition: Dr. Waters and her team would need to achieve it in the face of budget cuts for her schools, along with everybody else’s. There was, they realized, no conventional prescription for achieving anything like this. LPS would need to find an entirely new way to do it.
So they brainstormed as a team using whiteboards to capture, pull apart, and interrogate all the elements of the situation. They knew what their goals were, how they might typically be expected to achieve them, and what wouldn’t work in their circumstances. Two things they knew would be important were the Holy Grails for accelerating student achievement— differentiation and intervention:
Differentiation: Each student requires a differentiated approach, because each has a different learning style, language proficiency, and area of “stuckness.”
Intervention: Having the ability to spot an issue of poor understanding around a topic as it emerges, address it immediately, and keep the learning process going. Circling back days later has far less impact—the student will have already moved on.
The traditional paths for addressing differentiation and intervention lie in hundreds of hours of one-on-one tutoring, many of those after school. But this was not a path they could take: even if LPS had the resources to deliver this, they didn’t have kids who could always stay after hours, and they certainly didn’t have the quality of pupil feedback they needed—giving instant feedback on their grasp of a topic is not something many teens excel at, especially those insecure in their abilities. If you’re already three grade levels behind, you feel raising a hand only confirms how dumb you are.
But from her prior role as an academic, Dr. Waters had a strong sense that getting this kind of data held the key, and her team felt that a smart application of technology in the classroom could help address the feedback constraint and create a new path to accelerated learning. By chance, a foundation had donated some “clickers” to the school—simple remote-control devices used to poll audiences at conferences. Right-click to agree, left-click to disagree, and the feedback appears on the screen. Could this work to get an immediate student-by-student reading on how well they understood a lesson?
They tried it out with one teacher and one class at one school; though the technology was clunky, the results were compelling. The teacher was able to clearly assess how every member of the class was doing, and intervene immediately with the ones who were struggling, on their own terms. So the question became how to scale this: how to design the ultimate clicker?
Dr. Waters now gambled, committing her limited resource slack to hire a Chief Innovation Officer, and immersing him in classroom-based R&D. If she could show promising, scalable results, she’d be able to attract grant support to build their dream. And if they could prove its value, they might be able sell this new technology-based approach to other schools, recoup their investment, and fund further R&D. This was not just a teaching innovation now, but business-model innovation.
The introduction of the ExitTicket app (as they named the evolution of this tech-based instant feedback) was immediately popular with kids. It was new, different, and offered the kind of text-based interactivity they knew. At first, teachers shared aggregate data with the class on how they were improving collectively, so as not to embarrass individual pupils. But the class wanted to see their individual scores improve, as one would with any game. So they sat up straight, paid more attention, and tried to beat their scores, while the teacher made quick interventions to help. Scores continued to rise and a sense of agency developed amongst the kids, who were soon participating in further design iterations. The cycle of hope and energy and excitement, as Dr. Waters described it, started turning in a positive direction.
In 2013, 97 percent of LPS students were accepted to college with over 33 percent ready to start without remediation. They’re a long way still from the 100-percent goal, but have traveled far from their 10-percent start. It is remarkable that so many students have been able to make up two to three years’ worth of improvement in a single year and, by that metric, the program has paid for itself. LPS launched ExitTicket for other schools in August, 2013, and already 100,000 students use it in 4,800 schools in 108 countries. Though money is very tight in education, the program should be financially self-sustaining within a couple of years and able to provide the funds for further classroom innovation.
The LPS team refused to accept that resource constraints would necessitate reducing ambitions. The future of their kids was just too important to them. And they refused to accept that the conventional path to deliver differentiation and intervention was the only path. They were both opportunistic and resourceful in breaking path dependence—open-minded enough to seize an opportunity when it presented itself (donated clickers) and willing to step outside of accepted methods to take full advantage of it (hiring a CIO to embed in the classroom). And while they are keen to point out that Ed Tech, as these tech-enabled classroom initiatives are known, is no panacea, and not the only thing they did in order to achieve their results, they are thrilled with how much they have been able to achieve with so little.
Let’s summarize exactly what LPS did to succeed:
They had a very clear-eyed view of all the constraints they faced, yet still set themselves an even bigger goal—100 percent college readiness without remediation.
They knew that if they simply continued to do what they had done before they would fail to meet their bold ambition—they would need a different approach.
So they went to the whiteboards, mapped out what they knew, unbundling and interrogating component parts, deciding what to keep, what to change, and where to focus.
They knew what really mattered—differentiation and intervention—but they couldn’t achieve that in the conventional way given their constraints of time and money.
And they valued a different kind of intervention anyway—immediate feedback—which would be a better fit with their students.
So when the clickers were donated they sensed the opportunity to use them for immediate feedback—this became a potential new path to deliver differentiation and intervention.
To realize the opportunity they had to commit to it, hiring a part time CIO to build the tool alongside the teachers—the new path required a new kind of resource.
They iterated in one classroom, in one subject, creating many prototypes until they had confidence that it worked for the students and could scale.
Then they rolled it out across all four schools and in different subjects.
And in selling ExitTicket to other schools, they broke their own business model path dependency, creating new revenues that should continue to fund further R&D.
This wasn’t the punky, slash-and-burn of a maverick young start-up—the LPS team deals in children’s futures. But by diligently identifying and naming what they knew to be true about accelerated learning, generating the insight that immediacy of feedback was the key, they were ready to seize the initiative when the moment came. And that’s why we must take the time and effort to analyze and label the biases inherent in current paths. By making them visible we make it easier to discuss how and when they might hinder our progress.