We need to rethink traditional models for teaching and learning. Finding ways to use the innovative technology of the 21st century can improve public education by maximizing teacher expertise, and creating new ways for parents to engage with their child’s schooling. Some technology can also create more flexible learning environments for students to receive curriculum and instruction tailored to their unique needs. Using these technologies in the classroom can greatly increase the efficiency of teaching, learning, and administration. Our work addresses policy barriers that make many of the most promising innovations impossible to implement.
Current Work: A Learning Agenda for Taking Personalized Learning to Scale
With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CRPE is conducting a multi-year, multi-method effort to learn about how school districts and regional partners can support the successful implementation, expansion, and sustainability of personalized learning (PL) in schools. CRPE researchers will use a combination of field studies, surveys, and secondary data analysis to explore how schools, districts, and partner organizations outside the school district help to seed and grow PL and with what results.
Key questions for the project include:
What do principals, teachers, and system leaders need to know and be able to do to successfully support, implement, and scale up PL?
What policies and practices, at the classroom, school, district, partnership, and state levels, offer important supports (and barriers) for successfully implementing and scaling up PL?
What are the early results for teachers and students?
Big city districts face a sea of troubles—from persistent pandemic-related learning loss to student and teacher absenteeism, to declining enrollment, to political pressures and fiscal cliffs. Can district leaders keep this turbulence from disrupting schools...
In the face of financial, political, and capacity constraints, leaders within the Baltimore City Public School System and Chicago Public Schools are making progress toward closing post-pandemic gaps in student learning. They’ve had to choose...
Amid the chaos and multiple hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic, educators in the St. Vrain Valley School District vowed to extract long-term lessons from the crisis. We have been rethinking student time, instructional delivery systems,...
AI allows us to do what would have been inconceivable just a year ago. I had a student who loved art. She would have never considered taking a course on computer-integrated manufacturing—challenging even for engineering...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving at lightning speed, but will U.S. classrooms be able to evolve with it—and take advantage of its potential benefits? A new report by the American School District Panel (ASDP), a...
Expensive dreams Eraste Talla Ngoualadjo always planned on attending a four-year university in the United States. But when his family emigrated from Cameroon to Boston in 2022, they were astounded by the high cost of...
Today’s students are struggling after they leave the K-12 system: fewer students are enrolling in college, and more of those who enroll are floundering and at risk of dropping out. Meanwhile, many who seek to...
In October 2023, CRPE reported that only California and Oregon had provided schools with guidance on navigating AI, while 13 other states planned to release similar guidance. Since then, three additional states have weighed in:...
This commentary was originally published by EdSource. Improving literacy instruction is once again in fashion among America’s policy circles. Between 2019 and 2022, state legislatures passed more than 200 bills that sought to push and...
Imagine a time traveler from 1924 arrives in 2024. She’s overwhelmed by how the world has changed, from ubiquitous smartphone use to widespread vaccine access. Then, she steps into a typical school, and she’s confused....
Current Research
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