I’ve written extensively about the “District Operating System (DOS):” the set of unsexy, below-the-radar functions like procurement, contracting, IT, and HR that determine the look and feel of what schools do. Ultimately, it also determines...
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?
I’ve written extensively about the “District Operating System (DOS):” the set of unsexy, below-the-radar functions like procurement, contracting, IT, and HR that determine the look and feel of what schools do. Ultimately, it also determines...
How ingrained district operating systems practices can interfere with policy goals and school-level initiative, and why we need to retool the DOS to enable dynamic problem-solving.
Despite little bits of progress here and there, the problem of big-city high schools—how to motivate students to stay engaged and learn what they need to be eligible for college and good jobs—remains unsolved. Graduation...
Every sector of the U.S. economy is working on ways to deliver services in a more customized manner. In the near future, cancer treatment plans will be customized to each patient based on sophisticated genetic...
This paper explains why personalized high schools are hard to get and keep, and shows how we can make them more broadly available through changes in policy and philanthropic investments.
This paper argues that district-wide systems changes are necessary to encourage and free up schools to innovate, in order to implement personalized learning at scale and meet the challenges of Common Core.
In the past couple of years I’ve probably used the word “innovation” thousands of times and read or heard it thousands of times more. Naturally. I worked in an Office of Innovation (inside the Division...
To a certain kind of mind, the status quo has no risks and no costs. The “way we do things” is seen as, if not the best of all possible worlds, then at least a...
Lamar Alexander, the new head of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has set off the long-delayed reauthorization process for ESEA. Testing is taking center stage in the debate. There is no shortage...
Everything that schools do, they buy, one way or another. Whether it’s professional development, curricula and tests, or pencils, hamburger, and software, the choice is the same: either spend money on salaries and materials to...
Current Research
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