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In a recent interview, Sameer Sampat, CEO of the India School Leadership Institute (ISLI) talked about the early stages of the Institute’s development. Founded in 2013, ISLI seeks to help school leaders take their schools from “good to great” by enabling them to develop and improve their leadership skills.

When Sameer Sampat headed to India in 2013, he was already convinced that improving school leadership serves as a key lever in improving student learning. As a consequence, the opportunity to work at a new organization – launched by the Akanksha Foundation, Central Square Foundation, and Teach For India – designed expressly to develop the skills of schools leaders in India was a perfect fit. Sampat was equipped for the job through experience teaching in both the US and India and through work he had done with Roland Fryer to identify and support effective schools. In order to build on those experiences, Sampat and his founding colleagues faced the challenge of developing a program that recognizes and responds to the realities of leadership in the context of education in India.

The emergence of ISLI: Expanding the focus from teaching to leading

ISLI’s work began at a time when conversations in India were just beginning to turn from ensuring access to education for all students (through initiatives like the Right To Education Act) to creating a high quality education for all students. But, as Sampat explained “there was a lot of conversation about teacher quality, but the conversation about school leadership quality was much more limited.” Furthermore, organizations dedicated to creating new schools in India like the Akanksha Foundation encountered a similar problem that school networks in the US (like KIPP and Uncommon Schools) had faced: they were having trouble finding leaders with the skills and experience needed to develop and sustain their schools. ISLI was created to fill this need and to develop a national leadership development program that would build on the example of programs in the US like KIPP’s Fischer Fellowship Program and adapt them for the Indian context.

One of the first accommodations ISLI made was to recognize that the leadership pipeline in India is entirely different than it is in the US and many other countries. In contrast to the US, where principals usually first spend at least a few years teaching, some school leaders in India do not have extensive teaching experience. In fact, school leadership in India is often a largely managerial position. Furthermore, relatively little training or certification is required in order to become a principal. Therefore, rather than try to create an entirely new pipeline from teaching into leadership through a “pre-service” program for new leaders, ISLI chose to try to respond to the needs of existing school leaders by creating a program that could also provide “in-service” support for those already in leadership positions.

In their first year, after receiving about 100 applications, ISLI selected 7 initial fellows for a one year, highly flexible and individualized program. At that time, the framework for the program focused on six strands of competencies that they identified based on their own distillation of the common traits and practices of effective school leaders: leadership for equity; leadership for results; people leadership; personal leadership; instructional leadership; and operational leadership.

ISLI’s 2^nd Year: From a national to a “local” model

While ISLI considered that first year a success, Sampat noted that they realized that “a lot of the components of the model were not contextualized enough for India.” In particular, they found that they had to put even more emphasis on leading for learning and shared leadership than they had anticipated. “We needed leaders who themselves might not have experience as excellent teachers,” Sampat explained, “but can they identify what good teaching looks like? And then can they have the humility and the shared leadership skills to allow the people on their staffs to promote those skills on their teams?” Sampat and his colleagues also found that there was too much choice and flexibility in the US models. In fact, the Fischer Fellows model originally enabled leaders to explore some 90 different competencies; but ISLI ultimately honed their model to focus on three strands, covering eight competences in total, that they deemed central to the success of all their leaders.

Lastly, while ISLI wanted to take advantage of the knowledge and expertise of experienced and effective leaders by recruiting retired school leaders as coaches, they found that it was not easy to find principals who were aligned to ISLI’s vision of leadership. As Sampat put it, “because the culture and what it means to be a school leader is so engrained in India you almost have to have your coaches unlearn and then relearn how to do coaching conversations.” Furthermore, those principals that were most effective were already fully committed leading their own schools, with limited time to provide the extensive support ISLI envisioned. Instead of trying to turn existing leaders into coaches, ISLI decided to change to a model of on-site support that included very specific, targeted instruction for ISLI principals focused on high-leverage practices like school walkthroughs, lesson observations, and school improvement planning. In order to staff this approach, they brought in educators who had expertise in a particular area, but generally were not themselves leaders.

Recognizing the difficulties that the ISLI leaders faced in trying to implement what they were learning in their own schools, however, ISLI still wanted to find a way to tap into the experience and expertise of the most effective school leaders in India. Therefore, ISLI decided to establish what they called the “Leaders Network.” Drawing particularly on the National Leaders of Education Program in the UK, the Leaders Network pairs each ISLI participant with a leader from a local high performing school for a “thought partnership” that includes ongoing conversations and consultations. “It’s a way for them to share their experiences,” Sampat explained, “and it’s good professional development for all of them.”

In order to accommodate many of these changes, in their second year, ISLI chose to pilot two different programs at the same time: they continued the one year program, but they also developed a second, two-year version of the program – with the “thought partnerships” a focus of the second year. They considered the two-year program a more “localized” model as the participants and their thought partners were all drawn from one metropolitan area – Delhi.

The second time around, ISLI had roughly one hundred applicants and selected ten participants each for the 1-year and the 2-year program. While the ISLI designers again felt that the one-year program was successful, they ultimately concluded that the two-year, localized, model had the best opportunity to make the biggest impact. From Sampat’s perspective, the development of the thought partnerships in the second year was a particularly crucial factor. Without that, Sampat declared, “I don’t think we would have been able to ramp up operations the way that we have.” As he explained, with the local model, staff can be concentrated in a city, with many more “touchpoints” in a given year.

The 3^rd year: Strengthening the organization and expanding the model

In the third year, ISLI concentrated on honing the two-year model, firming up the curriculum and establishing systems and structures to tighten their support and efficiency. At the same time, ISLI made a concerted effort to ramp up the scale of the program to 200 new leaders, with groups of fifty leaders in four different cities. “We felt like fifty schools was the right number to have in a city,” Sampat explained. “You have enough variety, where the schools can learn a lot from each other, but you can provide good support without getting overwhelmed.” Further, the expansion to four different metropolitan contexts allowed them to begin to learn how the model in Delhi that they had adapted from the US and the UK might need to be further localized to worked in other Indian regions. As Sampat put it, “Because doing the program in Delhi is very different from doing it in Hyderabad, which is very different from doing it in Pune.”

Sampat pointed to three ways that the program had to adapt as it expanded into different regions in the third year:

• Logistical differences including differences in languages, holidays, and schedules
• Organizational differences in the ways that schools are structured in terms of their governance and operations and in terms of the backgrounds of school leaders
• Cultural differences in the approaches to school leaders and the relationships between school leaders and the other members of the schools and the community

In terms of school structures, in Bombay and Pune private schools there’s usually a management committee that hires a principal, but in Delhi and Hyderabad the private school owner often also serves as the leader of the school. Culturally, in Hyderabad, the school leaders tend to be slightly older, and, as a result, there is a certain respect that comes with being an elder in the community that needs to be taken into account. In simple terms, that means being very conscious in Hyderabad of making appointments with the school leader before coming to visit; in contrast in cities like Delhi unannounced visits to schools and school leaders are not seen as impolite and are much more common.

While 200 new leaders started in the program, about sixty had left by the end of the third year. In part, the departures reflected attrition in the form of transfers and retirements (particularly among government schools); but some leaders left as the recognized that program did not offer what they were looking for (such as help with infrastructure rather than with curriculum). However, many of the departures also resulted from ISLI’s development of fairly strict policies around who can continue. As Sampat reported, “if you come to the workshops but aren’t attempting to implement in your schools, after we think we’ve done everything we can, we begin conversations that could lead to you being asked to leave the program.” In order to inform those decisions, ISLI has developed a number of benchmarks of progress that include basic measures of engagement including attendance at events and appointments. ISLI staff members assigned to each school also produce monthly monitoring reports looking for evidence of any efforts to implement what the leaders have been learning.

Lastly, ISLI has also established several non-negotiables around student safety. “One big thing,” Sampat noted, “is corporal punishment. By law in India there should be no corporal punishment in schools, but if you look at most of the schools, there is rampant corporal punishment when we start.” Therefore, ISLI works closely with participants to abolish corporal punishment, but a lack of evidence of quick progress in the first year also leads ISLI to ask participants to leave the program. “While we have a pretty rigorous bar for what you have to cross, we also provide a lot of support and time for you to get to that point…It takes some leaders three or four months just to be intellectually convinced that they need to make some change in their school.”

The 4^th year and beyond?

Currently, ISLI is in the midst of a “demonstration phase” with the goal of training 1000 leaders in six cities over the next three years. In the process, ISLI hopes to see if the program can both have an impact on these 1000 schools and can do so in a cost effective way, and then to expand beyond that. If the demonstration phase proves successful, ISLI will have to face the key strategic question of how to have an even broader impact on a system of 1.2 million schools and 200 million school-going children. Sampat speculated on several approaches that ISLI could pursue singly or in combination to expand their reach and impact:

• Develop tools and resources and make them available to all schools
• Engage more deeply in government schools by embedding ISLI training program within the existing infrastructure
• Focus on the budget private school system and “productize” ISLI’s services so that a large percentage of school leaders want to achieve the kind of training and certification that ISLI offers

“We don’t want to jump too far ahead, though” Sampat cautioned. “We don’t want to start thinking about 10,000 schools, until we sure we have had a signifincat, positive impact on 1000 schools.” Notably, the 1000 schools figure would be substantially larger than most school networks in the US. While Success for All has grown to include over 1000 schools since its launch in 1987, most other school networks are much smaller. KIPP, which provided one of the leadership program models for ISLI, has about 180 schools in its current network.

For Sampat, with his experiences in both the US and India, questions of expansion stretch even further. As he puts it, “can we take what we’ve learned in India and apply it in productive ways in other aspects of the developing world?” While he expects that many adjustments will need to be made, he notes that most of the models that ISLI built on came from the US and UK, but ISLI’s model may be more relevant to other developing contexts in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia or even Latin America. Nonetheless, he expects that more adaptations will always be required. “We would have to rely on people that are in-country and on empowering them to make the changes and to make the adaptations that make sense for their context.”

— Thomas Hatch

Our recent scan of education news in the Nordic countries reveals that the quality of Finnish education has been in the news again. This time, however, articles are both praising and raising questions about recent performance.

William Doyle, reporting in The Washington Post on a recent stay in Finland, highlighted his son’s experience in school and the benefits he sees in the system. From his perspective, the Finnish school system is a “beacon of hope in a world that is struggling, and often failing, to figure out how to best educate our children.” The Globe and Mail also described ways in which Finland’s education system may be helping to address issues of inequality. They argued, “The Finnish obsession is not with education per se, but with making sure that kids…get the maximum possible school experience.” The article goes further, suggesting that the odds of a child born below the poverty line “becoming a middle-class adult are better in Finland than in almost any other country. More important, those odds are measurably better than they were 20 years ago. And it’s almost all because of the way the Finns changed their schools.”

But the Helsingen also reported on a recent doctoral dissertation Education as Finland’s Hottest Export?: A Multi-Faceted Case Study is the Finnish National Education Export Policies. This research raises questions about the extent to which Finland has been able to capitalize on the perceived strength of its education system. The Economist also weighs in with “Europe’s top-performing school system rethinks its approach,” a story on the concerns in Finland about recent declines in performance among Finnish 15-year-olds on the PISA tests. As the article explains, “PISA scores fell in 2009 and 2012 (the next results will be published in December). Data suggest the slide began around the turn of the century. Children of immigrants tend to score worse, but native Finns’ scores have dipped, too.” 

At the same time, as we reported earlier, Samuel Abrams, author of Education and the Commercial Mindset, has also stirred up some controversy in Finland with recent comments that the declines are an artifact of the improving scores of other top performers rather than an indicator of a meaningful decline in Finland’s educational performance.

In a fascinating example of the interconnections among educational improvement efforts around the world, Chris Chapman, Chair of Educational policy and Practice at the University of Glasgow, recently visited New York City to investigate efforts to establish learning partnerships among local public schools. Ironically, New York City’s approach draws on the partnerships established in England as part of the City Challenges that began in London in 2004. Those City Challenges have, in turn, helped to inspire the Scottish Attainment Challenge launched in 2015 to “raise the attainment of children and young people living in deprived areas in order to close the equity gap.”

As Chapman explained, “the Scottish Attainment Challenge focuses on improving outcomes in literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing by enhancing the quality of learning and teaching and leadership within the education system and working with families and communities to support the holistic development of children.”

The Attainment Challenge also draws on the lessons from Scotland’s own School Improvement Partnership Programme. The Scottish partnerships seek to create links between government authorities, local schools, and university researchers to develop a shared commitment to improving outcomes for all children and young people. The partnerships are intended to:

• Develop a clearer understanding of their local area, local needs, what is and isn’t working
• Establish mechanisms for utilizing the best evidence to inform planning and service delivery
• Increase capacity to generate, use and interpret evidence
• Foster a better understanding of the barriers and enablers of delivering effective services to meet local needs

The Scottish system is also exploring the potential of creating local, community-based and cross-sector improvement strategies like the Strive Partnership, Harlem Children’s Zone and the Promise Neighborhoods initiative in the US. Along with these approaches to what is often referred as “collective impact”, Scotland is also making a significant investment in supporting the development of evidence-based practices in education as well as in other sectors.

This interest links to the broader public services focused work of WhatWorksScotland, part of a UK network of Government funded What Works Research Centre’s in the UK. Distinguishing the Scottish and UK “What Works” efforts from those of the What Works Clearinghouse in the US.), Chapman explained that WhatWorksScotland is an approach to public service reform that uses collaborative action research to facilitate change in Community Planning Partnerships in four sites:

• Aberdeenshire — with a focus on the development of community planning and health and social care integration
• Fife — where they are exploring a school intervention initiative, the development of a community welfare hub, and collaborative approaches to support families
• Glasgow —with an emphasis on using evidence to inform a ten-year place-based initiative called Thriving Places, and on participatory budgeting
• West Dunbartonshire — where the work centers on public service reform at the neighborhood level and community-led action planning

This “case study” approach is combined with a wider program of research exploring key issues in public service reform: including leadership, governance and partnership “evaluability,” the effective translation of knowledge into action.

As an academic at Nottingham, Warwick, Manchester and now Glasgow, Chapman is intimately familiar with both the City Challenges in England and the most recent developments in Scotland. Currently, he’s involved with a number of aspects of the work both as an advisor to the Scottish government and the Director of the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change, which supports and studies the partnerships. Chapman’s previous work includes articles on school networking and scale-up, school effectiveness and improvement, with forthcoming pieces on professional capital and collaborative inquiry to appear in the Journal of Professional Capital and Community. Chapman came to New York to learn more about the evidence base underlying the partnership work in the US as well as to see what it looked like in practice. In New York, Chapman saw “opportunities for teachers to systematically inquire into each other’s practice and develop meaningful professional conversations about how to improve the quality of learning in classrooms” – both of which he considers to be key dimensions of partnerships.

Dr. Santiago Rincón Gallardo

Dr. Santiago Rincón Gallardo is a Banting Postoctoral Fellow at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Chief Research Officer at Michael Fullan’s international education consulting team. His academic work explores how effective pedagogies for deep learning can spread at scale. These ideas have been published in the Harvard Educational Review, the Journal of Professional Capital and Community, the Journal of Educational Change, the Education Policy Analysis Archives, the Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, and in three books in Spanish. Beyond his academic work, he conducts research and advises leaders and educators interested in advancing whole system reform for instructional improvement in educational systems. As an educator and organizer, Santiago worked for over a decade to promote grassroots educational change initiatives in Mexican Public Schools serving historically marginalized communities. Santiago holds an Ed. M in International Education Policy and Ed.D. on Education Policy, Leadership and Instructional Practice from Harvard University.

In this interview, which is part of the Lead the Change Series of the American Educational Research Association Educational Change Special Interest Group, Santiago shares his thoughts on educational change:

In my view, the challenge of radically transforming the instructional core and creating the systems to do so at scale is one of the most important, exciting, and even daunting issues for educational change today. As they currently exist, schooling and school systems won’t take us much farther in the direction of nurturing deep learning, change agency, and deep democratic values among our younger generations (they have arguably taken us in the opposite direction).

This Lead the Change interview appears as part of a series that features experts from around the globe, highlights promising research and practice, and offers expert insight on small- and large-scale educational change. Recently Lead the Change has also published interviews with Diane Ravitch, and the contributors to Leading Educational Change: Global Issues, Challenges, and Lessons on Whole-System Reform (Teachers College Press, 2013) edited by Helen Janc Malone, have participated in a series of blogs from Education Week.

Samuel Abrams, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, is the author of the newly published Education and the Commercial Mindset (Harvard University Press, 2016). In a recent conversation, we spoke with Abrams about the book, particularly his chapters on Finland and Sweden. Abrams also discussed with us a recent controversy in Finland sparked by some of his comments in an interview printed in the Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s major daily. Abrams and colleagues, Jeffrey Henig and Henry Levin among them, will discuss the book at Teachers College on Monday, May 2.

Twenty years ago, Wall Street forecasters in the United States estimated that by 2010 approximately 10,000 to 20,000 of the nation’s 100,000 K-12 public schools would be run by for-profit firms. As Abrams details in his new book, those predictions were wrong. In reality, the tally was about 750. Disappointing academic and financial outcomes had pushed this sector to the margins, Abrams noted.

At the same time, Abrams said, those same analysts were correct that federal policymakers would embrace a bottom-line approach to assessing school effectiveness with a focus on student performance on standardized tests in reading and math. The high-stakes testing prescribed by No Child Left Behind in 2001 and the Race to the Top initiative in 2009, Abrams said, has constricted curricula, crowding out time for history, science, art, music, crafts, physical education, and play. Such testing, he added, has also generated unnecessary stress for students and teachers alike.

To deepen his analysis of the rise of market forces in U.S. education, Abrams analyzes in his book the divergent paths taken by Sweden and Finland. As Abrams puts it, Sweden and Finland provide a study in contrasts. He writes that Finland’s relatively high performance on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) cannot be dismissed because Finland is small, homogeneous, and egalitarian. Abrams explains that Finland’s Nordic neighbors—Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—are also small, homogeneous, and egalitarian; however, these nations have repeatedly posted PISA results indistinguishable from those posted by the United States.

According to Abrams, the difference between Finland and its Nordic neighbors has been deliberate steps taken by Finnish policymakers to improve school curricula as well as the preparation, pay, and treatment of teachers. Abrams writes that Finnish policymakers had concluded in the 1960s that because the nation was young (having only declared independence in 1917) and poor in natural resources (with little more than timber), they had to invest significantly in schooling to develop the nation’s human capital. Economic necessity and national pride together forged education policy, he said. By contrast, Sweden, Abrams writes, was long a regional power, benefitted from its wealth in mineral resources, and prospered from its highly developed industrial and banking sectors; Denmark, too, was long a regional power, with strong agricultural and industrial sectors; and Norway benefitted from not only oil discovered in the North Sea in 1969 but also abundant fisheries and hydroelectric power.

The divergence of Finland and Sweden, in particular, may be seen at two points, Abrams explained. First, in 1962, Swedish authorities introduced a comprehensive school program (grundskola), merging students with different aptitudes in grades one through nine with the plan to reform teacher education so teachers would be better prepared to differentiate instruction. But such reform of teacher education never took place. Finnish authorities introduced their own comprehensive school program (peruskoulu) for students in the same grades in 1972 with a similar plan to reform teacher education. And the Finns followed through, requiring that all teachers from 1979 forward earn a master’s degree in pedagogy. Thirty-seven years later, Finland remains the only Nordic country with this requirement.

Second, Swedish authorities in 1992 embraced privatization while their Finnish counterparts never did so. For the Finns, Abrams said, schooling has been an instrument for nation building. Outsourcing school management to private providers, he said, did not comport with that purpose. For the Swedes, schooling was not about nation building. Outsourcing school management accordingly didn’t pose the same problem.

In addition, Abrams said, the Swedes had been under the Social Democratic Party from 1932 to 1976 and again from 1984 to 1991. He suggests the desire for change and, specifically, school choice was accordingly understandable. In 1991, only 1 percent of the nation’s primary and secondary schools were under private management, Abrams writes in his book. By 2010, the portion of primary and secondary schools in Sweden under private management had grown to 22 percent; and of that portion, 76 percent, or 17 percent of the country’s primary and secondary schools in total, were run by for-profit operators.

To Abrams, the problem with for-profit operation of schools is not that businessmen are making money off the provision of a public service such as education. Textbook publishers, software developers, and bus operators all make money from schools and should, he said, but they are all providing a discrete good or service that can be easily evaluated. “School management, on the other hand, is a complex service that does not afford the transparency necessary for proper contract enforcement,” he said. “Without such transparency, there’s client distrust: parents, taxpayers, and legislators can never be sure the provider is doing what was promised; and the child as the immediate consumer cannot be in a position to judge the quality of service. Regular testing has been promoted as a check on quality. But teachers can teach to the test. And worse, as we know from cheating scandals in Atlanta and many other cities, teachers can change wrong answers to right answers on bubble sheets once students are done.”

In sum, Abrams said, the idea that schools could and should be run like businesses resulted from “a blinkered laissez-faire triumphalism prevailing in the wake of the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the fall of the Berlin Wall.” According to Abrams, the economist Arthur Okun, whom he quotes in his prologue, got it right: “The market needs a place, and the market needs to be kept in place.”

Ironically, at the same time that Abrams highlights in his book what he sees as numerous strengths of the Finnish approach, he generated controversy in Finland with comments in an interview published by Helsingin Sanomat. Shortly after his book was released, Abrams was asked in the interview about growing concerns over declines in Finland’s most recent scores on the PISA test. Abrams contended that the concerns were groundless, as the decline reflected the improvement of other countries, primarily Asian countries and jurisdictions like Shanghai, that have focused explicitly on improving PISA performance. Under these circumstances, on a normed test like PISA, Finland’s scores would be expected to go down, Abrams said, but would not necessarily suggest any real decline in the quality of education. Finnish scholars nevertheless subsequently argued in one article after another in the same newspaper that the performance of Finnish students had indeed declined, particularly in mathematics. According to Abrams, this decline is a modern problem, echoed in similar nations, not a Finnish problem.

This post was originally posted on The Hechinger Report and was written by Nichole Dobo.

Expect changes at this year’s ASU+GSV Summit, an annual education technology gathering with a reputation as a bustling conference for high-rolling financiers and hoodie-wearing start-up founders.

There were new faces – and perspectives – in the mix at the three-day conference in San Diego this week, and they could break the stranglehold of deal-making that has often been seen as the dominating feature of the event.

An influx of public school educators at this year’s conference could help change the tone. Digital Promise, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization that advocates for effective use of education technology, sent 150 educators to the conference, giving members of the organization’s League of Innovative Schools scholarships to attend the (pricey) event. That’s just one example, so the final tally of educators at this year’s conference is likely to be higher – some estimate that at least 1,000 will be there. And for those who could not attend get to San Diego, the conference featured a “conference cam” livestream.

Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. secretary of state and a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, gave one of the keynote speeches, and used it to challenge the elite attendees to consider immigrants, out-of-work blue collar workers and the poor when it comes to education technology.

“I want to encourage us to think about how innovation in the private sector can help in the most public of goods … education,” Rice said.

So will teachers, superintendents and charter school leaders get any attention from the bankers, techies and so-called thought leaders at this conference?

The “leading educators” sessions at the conference were among the most anticipated, according to an online poll ahead of time. That series included trips away from the conference to visit schools such as High Tech High.

The changes to give educators a more prominent position at this conference weren’t accidental. That reputation as an event only for people interested in making deals?  “I’m not so sure we’re happy about [that label],” Deborah Quazzo, co-host of the conference and a managing partner at GSV Advisors, said recently in an interview with Ed Surge, an online publication that reports on the business side of education technology.

Quazzo said she wanted the conference to include people who wouldn’t normally hang out together in the same room.

Meanwhile, spending on education technology continues to grow. Globally, spending on education hardware increased by an estimated 7 percent in 2015, according to a new report from Future Source Consulting. The report pegs this technology spending at $15 billion, up by $4.5 billion since 2012.

Those new conference attendees may hope that someone will ask teachers, students and parents – the people who have to make use of that stuff – before spending that money.

As part of a series of posts on the evolution of schools and organizations working to improve education, we have been exploring the factors and conditions (the “learning ecology” as John Seely Brown put it) that support and limit innovation. Over the next year, we hope to explore the “learning ecology” in a number of cities around the world, beginning with New York City. The New York City “ecology” stands out both as a place that has supported the development of a number of new small schools and a place that has “incubated” the development of a variety of learning models that seek to develop and scale new educational practices. Among those learning models is School of One, an initiative within the New York City Department of Education launched in 2009 focused on personalized learning for middle grade math. Since that time, the creators of School of One launched a national non-profit called New Classrooms Innovation Partners to create new models of learning for schools across the country. Their first model, Teach to One: Math, is currently in operation in 28 schools around the country. New Classrooms also operates School of One on behalf of the NYC Department of Education. The underlying designs of both Teach to One and School of One are the same. To learn more about the evolution of this approach, we talked with Joel Rose, the founder of School of One and currently the co-founder and CEO of New Classrooms.

School of One started with a fairly simple idea: students learn in different ways, so schools should reflect this fact. Of course, the typical structure of school is not designed for individual students but for a number of students grouped together in various ways. School of One aimed to challenge this model. Briefly outlined, then, School of One customized educational content to the strengths and needs of individual students.

Rose started working on School of One when he was a member of the Human Resources department of the New York City Department of Education. At the time, Michael Bloomberg was mayor and Joel Klein was the chancellor of education. Both were champions of providing more autonomy for schools and supporting more entrepreneurship within the public sector. With Klein’s support, School of One launched as a pilot project in the summer of 2009 and served as one of the first initiatives of the iZone.

Operating with a small team, Rose and his colleagues helped restructure a summer school program to create a more customized educational experience for about 80 students. Rose described the day-to-day operations within this pilot project as SneakerNet in that in its infancy the program essentially involved Mr. Rose and his team running around, making decisions on a day-to-day basis, and building the program in the process.

After this initial pilot project, the School of One team undertook a series of R&D and implementation cycles. They took the experiences and data from the first summer pilot and developed a slightly reworked model that they implemented as an afterschool program in three schools in the spring of 2010. Then, in the fall of that year, they embedded the School of One model in one public middle school, I.S. 228. Continuing with the original vision, this iteration of School of One “put multiple learning modalities into the same learning environment in order to personalize instruction around student needs.” More specifically, nearly 100 students worked in a math center with 6 teachers and support staff. The room was divided into sections of independent instruction, small group collaboration, and teacher-delivered instruction. Based on diagnostics that help create individual student profiles, students experienced these different modalities in ways that addressed specific strengths and needs for that student.

Nearly five years later, School of One continues operating in I.S. 228. The approach has also scaled nationally through Teach to One: Math, which is built on the same core tenets. Teach to One: Math is now found in eight states and Washington DC, where it serves around 10,000 students.

Rose explains that both School of One and Teach to One maintain deep investment in the planning and execution of ideas. For instance, in its early stages, the research and development team spent over 500 hours designing homework, just one small component of the overall learning model they’ve designed. This data can help purposefully design the learning model to address each moment of the teacher’s and student’s day. Within this framework, one question they want to address is “can we have an integrated model that enables teachers to deliver on the promise of personalized learning for every student, every day?”

Over the years, New Classrooms has faced a number of challenges. In particular, School of One and Teach to One still must be implemented within the regulations of traditional school, organized by grade levels and driven by state standards based on those grade levels. Given its rapid expansion, however, the learning model continues pushing at the boundaries of traditional school.

Through these changes and developments, Rose explains that New Classrooms maintains a consistent vision. That is, School of One and Teach to One challenge trends of what he sees as a broken system and innovatively provide individualized learning opportunities for all students.