CVCS Instructional Program--Draft

(Below is a document I wrote at the Board's request. It represents extensive conversation we have had as teachers and administrators about creating an instructional program for our hybrid schooling model. Eventually, the instructional program will guide individual programs, and the school's curriculum, assessment, and instructional practices will align with it. At this stage of the process, we invite your comments and reactions to the proposed instructional program for CVCS. BL)

CVCS Hybrid Instructional Program

Executive Summary

After four years of pioneering hybrid education, Chicago Virtual Charter School (CVCS) has had academic success as evidenced by the fact that the school has made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) each year it has been held to that standard. The school has also learned how it can leverage its hybrid of virtual and face-to-face instruction to give more students greater educational opportunities.

CVCS recognizes that it accomplishes its mission when students succeed academically. Academic success at CVCS requires students possess foundational academic skills as well as independence, self-sufficiency, and responsibility as habits of mind. Students whose academic progress demonstrates they possess academic skills and CVCS’ habits of mind need additional opportunities and challenges. Students whose academic progress indicates they need more assistance need additional opportunities and support to develop their academic ability, habits of mind, or both. Thus the CVCS hybrid instructional model must provide:

• A greater range of learning opportunities for all students
• Extended academic opportunities for high performing students
• Systematic interventions within a continuum of services for at-risk students that creates academic growth and fosters independence, self-sufficiency, and responsibility
• Flexibility to meet the needs of high performing and under-performing students
• Face-to-face experiences that develop the whole child

To achieve this ideal educative function requires a facility that can accommodate it, and the current facility cannot support ideal hybrid education. This proposed instructional program for the hybrid instructional model requires more specificity before seeing what an actual day would look like for students or before determining how individual programs would work within it. An instructional program is meant to provide an overarching framework that guides the development of individual programs, which requires more collaboration with stakeholders.

Introduction

Now in its fourth year of pioneering a hybrid of virtual and face-to-face education, Chicago Virtual Charter School (CVCS) has learned much about the kind of learners a hybrid education can engender. A virtual education promotes independence, self-sufficiency, and responsibility, while face-to-face instruction promotes higher order thinking in cross-curricular settings and the development of social and leadership skills that provide experiences to build strong relationships with children and opportunities for remediation. Although traditional schools want to promote those values, build relationships, and remediate struggling students, as a hybrid school, CVCS is uniquely able to offer an education to students that will empower them to flourish in our complex world.

We have also learned that the facility of the school impacts the delivery of educational programming and consequently the school’s ability to educate students. The purpose of this paper is to take what we have learned from four years of pioneering and describe a hybrid instructional program for CVCS and then to connect that instructional program to facility needs.

CVCS Mission and Vision

Were one to read schools’ or districts’ stated mission, one would find a shared idea if not identical language. All schools exist for the purpose of taking each student’s potential and making more of that potential than would otherwise have been made in the absence of schooling in order for each child to more fully realize his or her ideal future in the next stage of life. After consultation with parents, teachers, administrators, and the Board, the mission of CVCS is “to empower students to flourish as individuals and as citizens in a diverse, global society.” On the one hand, there is nothing remarkable about our mission statement. There are two aspects of it, however, that tie directly to our proposed instructional program and to facility needs. First, we do not simply instruct students or provide education. Our mission is to empower students. That requires that students not only have foundational academic skills, it requires them to possess certain habits of mind. Those habits of mind include independence, self-sufficiency, discipline, and responsibility. Students who possess the foundational academic skills and the habits of mind necessary to be successful should have the ability to grow and pursue their interests and passions. Students who lack either foundational academic skills, virtuous habits of mind, or both, require extra attention in order to have the same access to their individual, ideal futures.

Instructional Design

The instructional design of the school must aim at empowering students and account for those students requiring extra attention. The ideal is for students to acquire the habits of mind and to possess the academic skills necessary to work as independent, self-sufficient learners. We believe that flourishing in what comes next, whether “next” is the university or other post-secondary education, the workforce, or high school, depends upon both academic ability and virtuous habits of mind, and all our efforts must aim at promoting those two things.

One way for us to measure a student’s habit of mind is by the degree of success in the virtual work environment. Students who demonstrate that they can work independently in a virtual environment require further challenges, and our curriculum provides those opportunities. These students spend part of their school week working in a physical school and the rest working virtually, and for them the face-to-face component of hybrid education should offer the opportunity to extend their academic and social development. Students who demonstrate that they cannot yet work independently in a virtual environment require intervention and a systematic series of interventions that would be increasingly face-to-face as students’ needs required. Because the ideal educational configuration at CVCS consists of students working virtually and face-to-face, our first interventions should be virtual in an attempt to put students back into the ideal virtual and face-to-face configuration as quickly as possible. In the event students do not respond to those interventions, the school must have the flexibility to be able to offer more interventions, some of which may increase the amount of face-to-face time. Those face-to-face interventions would be supported by various CVCS staff. With an adequate facility, teachers could spend more time in the school and be available to students more without compromising their virtual or face-to-face teaching. Moreover, an adequate facility will allow us to use grant funding for more instructional aides. Knowing that empowering students to flourish requires that we aim at independent, self-sufficient learners, the goal of these interventions must be to restore students’ place of work to the ideal virtual and face-to-face proportionality as quickly as possible. By offering more academic opportunities and in a systematic way, the hybrid instructional model can meet each student’s academic needs and foster the habits of mind needed for academic success.

The diagram below attempts to represent the continuum of virtual and face-to-face education CVCS should offer all its students. On the right of the diagram is the ideal configuration between virtual and face-to-face instructional settings, with one face-to-face block representing that portion of the school week when every student meets in the physical school. Those face-to-face blocks increase in the event that students are unsuccessful after virtual interventions. CVCS is defined within this continuum. Students who want a completely virtual experience have home school options and one day other virtual school options. Students who need a completely face-to-face learning environment to be successful have other schools as options where they can optimize their potential. At CVCS, we use the virtual environment to promote independence, self-sufficiency, and responsibility as virtues, and we use the face-to-face environment to promote cross-curricular learning and the social experiences necessary to flourish in a diverse, civil society. In this ideal model, we can increase the amount of face-to-face time as students require it.

From this diagram, one can see that in order to have the capacity to provide students with access to curriculum and promote virtuous habits of mind requires that we have a facility where students can be in the Learning Center for longer periods of time, but not in the traditional school sense of classrooms with desks in a row and a teacher in front. Aiming at independent, self-sufficient learners requires that the architectural form follow the educative function. Thus while we need classrooms, we also need rooms that serve as learning laboratories, remediation rooms, and other sites of independent learning activities.

Currently, our rooms do not permit the increased flexibility we need to give students who have not demonstrated the ability to work virtually the opportunity to acquire the academic skills and habits of mind they need. Rather, the current instructional design looks more like the following diagram.

In our current facility we have limited capacity to increase our face-to-face interventions for students who require it, and we are unable to offer high performing students additional opportunities at the Learning Center. Consequently, students who do not yet have the ability to work virtually are likely to flounder, while students who do have the ability to work virtually do not have the Learning Center as a resource for their growth.

Given our goals of providing students with the foundational academic skills to access the curriculum and of promoting the habits of mind necessary to become independent, self-sufficient learners, students beginning in grade three at the latest should be in school for one full day. We need more holistic and more reliable measures of student learning for all students in language arts and mathematics, but it is particularly true of students who struggle. One purpose of the Learning Center would be to verify that students have learned what it appears they have learned, not just by relying on objective assessments but by a more holistic approach to assessment. For students who are at or above grade level, differentiation of language arts and mathematics should capitalize on those strengths. Students who struggle with concepts should have the opportunity for remediation right then at the school, with the balance of the week spent virtually on practicing deficient skills and working on the other courses students take virtually. Currently, our ability to assess and teach mathematics face-to-face to those students who need it is limited. A full day of school would continue our focus on cross-curricular, project based language arts but expand to include mathematics and other activities that provide students opportunities to collaborate with their peers, practice responsibility and leadership skills.

At the high school level, the same ideal configuration of virtual and face-to-face instructional settings would obtain, but their full day would continue to include exploring post-secondary options while expanding to work during the face-to-face day in accomplishing daily assignments and work. High school students making decisions about post-secondary options need access to resources and print materials counseling offices typically provide, which would complement the career exploration they do virtually on Naviance. Again, the amount of face-to-face time a student required would depend on the student’s ability to succeed in a virtual environment, but the ideal remains fostering in students the academic ability and habits of mind necessary to succeed as independent learners. The purpose of increasing face-to-face time for high school students is therefore the same as it is for K-8 students, but the difference is that more of the responsibility to work virtually falls on the high school student. Our facility must give high school students access to adults who can work to increase students’ academic skills and improve their habits of mind. Moreover, the architectural flexibility required for K-8 students has to be duplicated for high school students, for the facility must have the capacity and be designed in such a way that high school students are separate from K-8 students. The similarities between the K-8 and high school program ensure that students experience a consistent educational experience as they progress through the grades of the school, but the special demands of high school students require that they have if not their own facility a facility within a facility.

There is another aspect in which a facility can promote academic achievement. One could safely say that children need positive affiliations in their lives in order to navigate through adolescence and into adulthood. School has the potential to promote those affiliations, and it does so in two important ways. First, schools are more than places of academic learning. Most schools have clubs, teams of all kinds, and other endeavors that provide students access to a social world that adults who have “made it” simply take for granted. These affiliations have the potential to reinforce the school’s academic mission by binding students more tightly to other students and to the school staff. We have learned that the positive affiliations we have been able to develop from spending time with students should be enhanced. Typically, these opportunities are offered after the academic school day has ended. CVCS used to offer clubs on Mondays, when there were no students in the Learning Center, which required students to take time out of their work day to come to school and which required teachers to give up time for virtual instruction and the other work teachers do to come to the Learning Center as sponsors. Having our own facility would allow after-school programming, and that means promoting healthy affiliations. Secondly, a school building offers students a means for constructing one healthy part of their identity. Identity differs conceptually from affiliation but functions in much the same way, by binding students and families to something other students and families and staff share. School culture grows out of school identity. A school should be a place where students can just “be,” to work, to be safe, and to develop.

Past Success and Future Areas of Growth

Looking back, Chicago Virtual Charter School has made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as specified by the Illinois State Board of Education every year the school has had to meet that standard. Schools that do not make AYP typically find that students who do not meet academic requirements are not distributed evenly across groups but tend to cluster in certain groups. Consequently, schools that have students in diverse demographic, language, ability, and racial groups make AYP less frequently. Looking ahead, the academic requirements of AYP become increasingly more demanding. This year, for example, 78.5 percent of all students tested must meet academic standards. Setting aside whether state testing is a good idea, setting aside the notion of testing altogether, the question would remain how to increase students’ opportunity to learn to allow them to pursue their individual, ideal futures. Long before there was state testing there were inequalities of opportunity and inequalities of success; to the extent that being literate and numerate impacts success as an adult, all state testing has done is shine a light on the manifestations in school of social inequalities. Thus our mission is to empower students to flourish, not to enable students to pass state examinations. But doing that with an increasingly diverse student population requires that we focus on what it takes for students to be empowered and to increase, extend, and expand our capacity to empower them. Our current facility, in its size and configuration, does not permit us to extend to all students, to the degree we would be otherwise be able, full access to our hybrid education. In our hybrid environment, a facility that allows us to empower students is one that enables us to accomplish our educational mission. We do not define school success by passing state mandated exams; we define school success by how many students we have empowered to flourish.

Next Steps

This proposed instructional program is another moment in the dialogue about hybrid education. It largely represents conversation teachers and administration have had the past several months as we reflect on our teaching and imagine the educational possibilities for students. We recognize that more dialogue is needed with more stakeholders and welcome it. This dialogue needs to become more granular as well because an instructional program is a framework that guides individual programs and other decisions that must be made in order for CVCS to achieve a consistency across its individual programs that at the same time aligns with its mission. Articulating an instructional program is only the first step.

Everyone's Golden Ticket

Before I discovered blogging as a communication tool, I wrote school newsletter articles. Last year, I wrote an article that connected the lessons I learned from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, which was new at that time, to education. The question I used to frame that article is worth posing again as we approach the mid-point of the year: what does it take to be successful in school? Gladwell’s answer, which he illustrates with examples from Bill Gates to Michael Jordan to The Beatles, is twofold. The first, necessary but insufficient condition that must be met for success is that the circumstances have to be right. Michael Jordan would not have become what he became if he were 5’6” tall, Paul McCartney would not have become what he became if didn’t have both arms and two hands, and Bill Gates would not have revolutionized computing if he did not have access to a university mainframe computer as a high school student. It is necessary to have the right circumstances, but circumstances alone are insufficient.

And according to Gladwell, “natural talent” is irrelevant. That may surprise, because anyone who ever saw Michael Jordan play basketball thinks “talent.” When we listen to the White Album, we think “talent,” and it’s understandable to think Michael Jordan’s ability and The Beatles’ ability owe to innate talent, not hard work. Gladwell would challenge the statement I often hear from students, “I’m just not good at that,” if the student means “I don’t have talent for math,” for example. That’s because according to Gladwell natural talent does not explain why people are successful. Talent as we see it comes from having the right circumstances and hard work.

Thus the second, necessary but insufficient condition is hours and hours of focused, hard work, ten thousand hours minimum, to put a number on it. It is worth reading his book to see the full discussion of his examples, but one example in particular struck me, and it still resonates as we approach the middle of the year. In the early 1990s, researchers asked instructors at Berlin’s Academy of Music to rate violinists’ ability as world-class, good, or unlikely to play professionally. Then the researchers interviewed the violinists about their practice schedule as far back as childhood. What they found was a correlation between instructors’ ratings and how many hours of practice put it by those judged as world class. Gladwell sums it up this way: “The people at the very top don’t work just harder or much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder” (pp. 38-9, Gladwell’s emphasis).

Now if we asked teachers to group their students into three categories of superior, good, and average and then determined how much students worked on learning, would we see the same correlations? I would like to say yes categorically, but if Gladwell is right it’s not just hours and hours of hard work but hours and hours of hard work on the right things under the right circumstances. That’s why for students who are behind we create plans to help them catch up, which is part of the right circumstances. And of course, students who are behind will have to work on areas of deficiency as well as grade level material, which will require them to work not just harder or much harder, but much, much harder. For students who want to become world class academically, they too will have to work very, very hard. One can earn passing or even good grades in less demanding schools by working less, but to be successful, according to Gladwell, hard, focused work under the right circumstances is everyone’s only golden ticket to success.

I read in the December 2 edition of Education Week an article on a study conducted by Caroline Hoxby. Hoxby looked at student achievement in New York City schools. Because the demand for charter school exceeded the supply, 94 percent of students had to go through a lottery to enroll in charter schools, creating a randomly assigned control and treatment group of 80,000 students over seven years. Although her methods and conclusions will surely be debated in the academy, it is worth noting that of those students who finished eighth grade in a charter school, they “performed nearly as well as students in affluent suburban districts” and closed the achievement gap by 86 percent in math and 66 percent in English. What interests me most is that charter schools were not the reason for the gains. For 14 percent of students in charter schools, in fact, the effects of the charter school were negative. Thus it’s not charter schools that makes the difference but the kind of charter schools. Hoxby identifies the characteristics of charter schools whose students are academically successful, and of those, longer school day and more days in the school year, more time devoted to studying English, and a mission emphasizing academic performance stand out.

So what do effective charter schools in New York City have to do with students’ success in Chicago? Using Gladwell to read Hoxby, we see that the first two characteristics of effective charter schools speak to the circumstances the schools create and their demand for hard work, and the third speaks to the circumstances the schools create for students to succeed. There is nothing special about a charter school unless it creates the right circumstances and the demand for hard work. It’s another question why all schools don’t get that done, or how charter schools in New York City have been able to get that done for 86 percent of its students over the last seven years. What Hoxby describes are the circumstances for success, but it must also be the case that students in these schools worked hard. Just being there may have worked for Chance Gardiner in Jerzy Kosinski’s novel, but students can’t just show up in a good school and expect to be successful. After reading Gladwell, one can only conclude that students whose luck gained them a spot in a charter school that created the circumstances for their success and demanded that they work hard had to work not just harder or much harder but much, much harder to close the achievement gap. Together, the right circumstances and hard work are the necessary and sufficient conditions for success, what we could call a golden ticket.

I should say, everyone has the opportunity to create a golden ticket if they have the right circumstances. At CVCS, students have the right circumstances for success. We have a robust curriculum. Hours and hours of hard work on a thin curriculum would not meet the condition of right circumstance. Moreover, students have the opportunity to work a longer school day than students in other schools, or perhaps I should say, as long as students in suburban schools (like my daughter, who works from the time she gets home until 7:00 or 8:00 every night). We have teachers and families working together to support children. We create individual paths for students to help them meet their goals. Once the circumstances are right, all that remains is hard work, and that’s up to students. There is only one way to get a golden ticket, and at CVCS, everyone has the opportunity to create one for themselves.

Assigning Middle School Grades and Occam’s Razor: A Grading Exercise

Assigning Middle School Grades and Occam’s Razor: A Grading Exercise

In the Middle Ages, William of Occam made a claim that has come to be known as Occam’s Razor: pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate. It means that one should not resort to complexity unless it is necessary, and it is a warning against making anything unnecessarily complicated. I thought about Occam’s Razor as I approached writing this blog, and I wonder if it applies to assigning letter grades to students in a mastery-based school. I would be interested to know your thoughts on that. Perhaps after this exercise in assigning grades you will be able to speak to it.

But more immediately, and more concretely, I have an exercise in assigning letter grades to seventh grade students in a variety of academic situations, and I would like your input and thoughts to help us make grading in middle school better. For each of these students, who are fictional but resemble actual students, please assign the grade A, B, C, D, or F and explain why. The rationale behind determining grades is important because in order to formulate a grading policy for middle school, there must be a rationale that can be articulated and can apply to every student. A clearly stated and defensible rationale ensures that assigning grades is neither arbitrary nor capricious.

Please provide the grades and the rationale you use to assign them in the blog so everyone can see your thinking and anyone can comment on it. When we set out to make sense of assigning grades in middle school, we believed we had a rational plan that could apply to everyone and represent accurately middle school students’ academic attainment. There may be other ways of thinking about grades for middle school students, however, and I am interested in seeing them.

There are three rules for this exercise. First, in some way, math grades for seventh graders must incorporate what Illinois says seventh grade students must know and be able to do in math. Secondly, every student must have a grade, but simply assigning grades without providing the rationale behind the assignment will not further this discussion and probably cannot be considered. You can approach the rationale from the individual cases or you can approach assigning grades by using an articulated rationale, but to be considered in our internal deliberations, there must be a clearly stated rationale that articulates to each grade assigned. Moreover, not having a formula for calculating grades is unfortunately not an option because it puts at a disadvantage our students who want to apply to selective enrollment high schools. When our counselor fills out those applications, the only representation of school work the prospective high school wants to see is a letter grade. Thus every student in this exercise needs a grade. Finally, the data below are all the data given and no other considerations can be made. It seems reasonable to allow teachers to consider, for example, how hard a student tried. Of course effort matters, but grades are a reasonable proxy for effort. That is, if a student works very hard at learning, the outcomes of that learning should show up in results, and by measuring results we are measuring effective effort.

For the purpose of this exercise we will assume that none of these students qualifies for special education. So what grades would you give each of these students at the end of the school year? The first one is easy.

Seventh Grade Student 1
Mastered 90% of seventh grade math in the OLS
Mastered 95% of Illinois Math 7 Standards

Seventh Grade Student 2
Mastered 90% of fifth grade math in the OLS
Mastered 40% of Illinois Math 7 Standards

Seventh Grade Student 3
Mastered 90% of fifth grade math in the OLS after working two years at fifth grade level
Mastered 40% of Illinois Math 7 Standards

Seventh Grade Student 4
Mastered 90% of sixth grade math in the OLS
Mastered 75% of Illinois Math 7 Standards

Seventh Grade Student 5
Mastered 90% of eighth grade math in the OLS
Mastered 80% of Illinois Math 7 Standards

When I try to complete this exercise, articulating a rationale that could be evenly applied to all of these students resulting in a grade is complex. The question to answer is given that there is value in OLS math, and given that seventh grade letter grades must reflect what Illinois says all seventh graders should know and be able to do, how can that value and grade level attainment be captured in a single letter grade? Our solution to this problem was an Occam Razor solution, holding that middle school grades reflect grade level skills and ability, but I am eager to consider other ways of thinking that are parsimonious but at the same time sufficiently complex to cover all the students in this exercise. There could be a rationale that accounts for the various academic situations represented above that is as sharp as Occam’s Razor. I look forward to your solutions to the problem of assigning middle school grades in a mastery based program.

Mid-Year Course Promotions: The Background

Mid-Year Course Promotions

It comes as a surprise to no one that not everyone at the same age is at the same place academically. Two unrelated eleven year old students born on the same day in the same year share the same age, but that age is only a very rough predictor of what each child knows. Whatever else their shared age could predict, we can be confident that age does not predict that those two children will have the same academic ability. Teachers and schools attempt to cope with these differences, and coping with different academic abilities is what we call differentiation. At CVCS, we are able to operationalize differentiation in a variety of ways. Students in kindergarten through grade eight can work at a pace appropriate to their individual ability and academic goals. They can also work at a curricular level appropriate to their ability.

Significant philosophical and educational issues underly this discussion of mid-year course promotions. Although I will not discuss those issues here, I need to point out that surface discussions of an issue like mid-year course promotions, which is what I am engaging in here, rely upon but have in no way worked out those underlying philosophical and educational issues. There certainly is a pragmatist approach to these issues that would approve working out the particulars and then determining the principle—our system of common law works precisely this way—and if that’s what we are doing here, we should at least examine the principles thus extracted from our decisions. But I digress.

Last year, mid-year course promotions came as late as the end of the third quarter. At that time, the practice had been to promote students to the next course when the previous course had been completed. Teachers started pointing out that what students knew when they were in the Learning Center looked different from what their learning looked like in the Online School. In some cases, very different. That discrepancy could owe to teachers’ faulty perceptions. The other, more worrisome explanation was that in someone’s haste to finish a course there was more of an emphasis on completion than learning. So we did what any responsible educator would do: we sought to verify what students claimed they knew. We learned through that process that there was an emphasis, perhaps an overemphasis, on marking lessons complete rather than on learning. The upshot of that is course promotion may not indicate student learning.

This year, we have focused on what students know and can do, especially in mathematics and language arts. Coursework in the Online School can add great value to students’ learning, of course, and students who are behind in their coursework or who are able to accelerate should be able to obtain mid-year course promotions. Because we are so focused on what students know and can do, and for a variety of other operational reasons, we moved mid-year course promotions to their eponymous place in the school calendar, January 29.

Some parents had legitimate concerns about that move. What appeared as operational obstacles last summer are now less of a problem. For example, K12 is scheduled to roll out a new math program next fall, and students who began a new math course under the old math program might have faced an inefficient transition between the two. Students who accelerated through courses could run out of curriculum in high school, but K12 has made arrangements with the University of Maryland to offer qualified seniors in any K12 school a year of university courses for the price of the books (more on that soon as details emerge).

Effective immediately, students will now be able to receive a course promotion after January 29. We will still need to validate that the student has in fact learned the material from the previous course, and that validation can come in a variety of ways. The important thing is that whatever individual plan we have for a student continues to be in the best interest of that student. Removing the deadline for course promotions should have nothing to do with that.

Is Hybrid Education a New School Paradigm?

John Goodlad in A Place Called School observed that “Schools differ; schooling everywhere is very much the same” (p. 264). There are probably many reasons to account for that observation, but one reason is likely that we have a massive, dominant understanding of what school is supposed to look like. At the risk of oversimplifying the idea, that dominant way of thinking could be called a paradigm, a word Thomas Kuhn used in 1962 to describe why certain scientific theories hold sway and how they are replaced. Think astronomy before Galileo or physics before Newton. or weather forecasting before satellites. Paradigms are powerful because they almost force us to make sense in predictable ways of things we see. Paradigms determine what we are allowed to ask and what the answers can be. We would not think, for example, that a thunderstorm was the result of someone melting beeswax, which is what the Andaman Islanders reasonably thought given the weather paradigm through which they viewed the world. You can try this yourself the next time you are in a school for the first time. You can also test this idea by telling someone about CVCS, for the surprise you hear refers to the paradigm used to make sense of what school should be.

Another paradigm we use to make sense of schooling is home schooling, which has been around since the beginning of education in the US (see, for example, Edward McClellan’s Moral Education in America) The Illinois Supreme officially sanctioned home schooling in the 1950 case People v. Levisen, which held that the “object [of compulsory attendance laws] is that all shall be educated, not that they shall be educated in any particular manner or place” and thereby established home school as a private school in the eyes of the law. Setting the legal equivalence aside, in the US, children are school in school or at home.

It is difficult to create a new paradigm of education. No Child Left Behind has made a significant impact on schooling, but it has not created a paradigm shift in Kuhn’s sense of the term. Computers and technology have changed many aspects of our lives, but even schools that are technology rich are for the most part paradigmatically the same as they were when chalkboards were the great technological advance. When you tell someone about CVCS, the two major paradigms of education, the brick and mortar school and home school, shape how people make sense of what you are saying. I have even heard people in the CVCS community struggle to describe how we do school. That’s because it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to step outside a paradigm to see the world differently.

According to Kuhn, the impetus for a paradigm shift or scientific revolution occurs when science, or what is accepted as true science, cannot account for all the facts scientists encounter. Likewise if less dramatically, the two paradigms of brick and mortar schooling and home schooling cannot account for all aspects of hybrid education. We are not a brick and mortar school, yet students attend a school building and encounter a school-based curriculum and teachers who teach and assess. We are not a home school, but there are certain aspects of what we do that can be found in home schooling, namely the involvement of parents in students’ education. Is a new paradigm of education emerging? Maybe. If hybrid education is part of one paradigm and part of another, does that provide sufficient cause to make it a new paradigm? No, but the question of paradigm shift remains.

As a faculty, we have been wrestling with this paradigm issue, but not as a question of paradigm shift. Nor are we approaching it by asking what educational practices constitute a hybrid education. Any hybrid school will have a collection of educational practices that separate it from a brick and mortar school or home school, but defining what a hybrid school does is more than writing down a collection of educational practices. Moreover, approaching the question that way would require us to start within the two current paradigms of education, which means hybrid school would simply be a mixture of those two and not something different. Rather, we are approaching the question of hybrid education by asking what virtues such an education promotes. I mean virtues in the Aristotelian sense, where the purpose of anything is a matter of determining the virtues that thing fosters, rewards, and honors. For Aristotle, before understanding what the ideal constitution for a polis should be, one had to know what purpose the polis served, and the only way to understand purpose is to understand the kind of citizens the polis wanted to create. In our case, we seek to articulate not only what kind of students we want to graduate from CVCS but what kind of faculty we want to become, for it the question of virtue includes both students and faculty.

We are having dialogue all across CVCS about what the purpose of hybrid education and the values we think it should represent. Teachers are working in their departments, led by their teacher representatives, to articulate our shared hybrid education values. Teachers also have the opportunity to contribute directly to the conversation through posts to administration. Administration will meet with teacher representatives to discuss what the dialogue tells us, and then we will take that to the whole faculty and staff to give final shape to hybrid schooling values and the academic, social, and civic virtues we want to promote in ourselves and in our students. Then I will present to the CVCS Board the instructional design that will best allow those values to flourish.

I invite you to become part of this dialog.

Our Two Moments of AYP

First, we need to celebrate. For the 2008-09 school year, CVCS has made “adequate yearly progress, or AYP, a federally determined, state-defined benchmark for school performance. AYP is a composite measure, drawing on attendance, percentage of students tested, academic performance in mathematics and language arts, and for high school, graduation rates. Schools and school districts either make AYP or they do not. We made it. More importantly, student performance is not taken just as a whole but also potentially in ten sub-groups. If a school has enough students in sub-groups of specified races, limited English proficiency, low income, and special education, each of those groups must make adequate yearly progress for the school to be said to make adequate yearly progress. I am grateful for this part of the legislation, for schools can no longer rely on those groups who historically have done well in school to carry the school. Every group of students must demonstrate proficiency in mathematics and language arts, and while it is certainly true that we need to focus on individual students, as a society we recognize that individual student achievement gaps are not evenly distributed across all groups but tend to accumulate in certain minority groups. As educators, we now have no choice but to look at student achievement from the standpoint of the academically least advantaged. Apart from the social justice this part of No Child Left Behind promotes, there is the great educational challenge of solving a problem that for a long time was ignored and now appears to be very, very challenging. Yet in spite of these hurdles, CVCS made AYP. Again.

While we are in the moment of celebration, you should also know that the academic bar schools have to clear to make AYP becomes increasingly higher over time. That is, making AYP this year represents even more of an accomplishment than making it last year or two years ago. The fact that CVCS made AYP for the third year in a row is a tribute to the students, families, and teachers of CVCS, and we should all take this moment to indulge ourselves in this accomplishment.

But now it’s time to get back to work. On a more reflective occasion we can discuss the merits of No Child Left Behind, the name given to the legislation enacted in 2001, for it has its flaws as many people have pointed out. Its principal virtue, as I claim above, is that it forces us to lift every student up to ever higher levels of academic performance regardless of their sub-group membership. This year, 77.5 percent of all students at CVCS must demonstrate their proficiency against state learning standards, which is 7.5 percentage points higher than last year and 15 percentage points higher than two years ago. Taking our current overall percentage passing of 74.6 percent, you can see why I say let’s take one moment to celebrate and then get back to work. Looking ahead, by the 2013-14 school year, every student from grade three on is required to demonstrate a proficient knowledge of mathematics and language arts.

As parents in grades two through eight know, we are working hard this year to improve our success, to extend it to more and more students. Our K-8 Learning Center program now focuses on reading and writing, and every week students take grade level math exercises to see if there are deficiencies we need to target in our instruction. Students’ work samples have a published writing rubric to guide students’ work and our feedback. It is enormously hard work as everyone knows by now, but constant improvement requires hard work. And we have no choice but to constantly improve. The bar has been raised.

‘Getting It Wrong’: Scantron Achievement Exercises as Best Practice

‘Getting It Wrong’: Scantron Achievement Exercises as Best Practice

In education, a “best practice” is the belief that one activity or method produces a better outcome than alternatives. As educators, we crave best practices because it allows us to place better bets for optimizing student learning. When we began the practice of holding weekly math exercises to see what students knew, I thought it was a best practice because those assessments are based on grade level state standards and allow us to pinpoint our teaching to what students did not know. Spreading out the standards across the year allows us to monitor student math attainment in grades 2-8 in fine detail and to remediate where necessary on very specific skills. In some cases, students had already learned the material, in others they had just learned it, and in still others students had never seen the material before, but every Monday, students in grades 2-8 have the opportunity to show us what they know in math.

At least two parents have asked whether it makes sense to assess students on math concepts and skills they have never seen and then teach those concepts and skills after the assessment. Intuitively, their concern makes sense, because students typically do poorly on material they have not been taught, especially skilled subjects like math. In fact, most of us learned this way: the teacher instructs the class, the students study what they are supposed to learn, and then the teacher gives some kind of assessment to determine what learning has taken place. Our intuition about that process being the right one probably comes from our experience in school.

Recently published research in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied lead us to a startling, counterintuitive conclusion: students actually learn more if they are assessed on material before they are taught the material. When I read about this research in the October 20 edition of Scientific American (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong), I had to read what it implies twice, so I will write it again in case you think that you misread something or that I mistyped it, this time quoting from the article: “Learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so students make errors.” For us, that means that students who are behind in math and have to fight their way through weekly math exercises and then learn the concepts learn more than if they had studied for the exercises ahead of time. To put it another way, from the perspective of this research in experimental psychology, Scantron weekly math exercises are a best practice for those who are behind in math.

The claim that one practice is a “best practice” is not a claim to absolute truth, and certainly not the end of the discussion of how best to educate students. Rather, it is a belief that must be continually tested. We rarely have the kind of conditions that would allow us to test our practices scientifically, but if we measure the outcomes we are getting, we can at least reduce the uncertainty about the effectiveness of our educational practices. One measurement of the effectiveness of the Scantron math exercises is the attainment of students over time. I will be reporting on that measurement, and others, in the presentation of the dashboard at the November Board meeting.