The Amplify tablet

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Stephanee Stephens, an 8^th grade Spanish teacher at a school in Fulton County, GA, which is piloting the new Amplify tablet computer from News Corp’s Amplify brand. Introduced this spring as a challenge to the Apple iPad, which is the most popular classroom tablet, Amplify is the first touchscreen tablet designed from the ground up for the classroom. The tablet can be used to run any app or curriculum, but it incorporates special classroom management features at the operating system level such as instant polls, a timer, a classroom timeline that works something like a Facebook news feed, the ability to block a custom list of apps, and an “eyes on teacher” button that suspends the student’s app and network connection with a message to focus on the teacher in the room.

Stephens’ on-the-ground observations suggest both the possibilities and the limitations of teaching with devices in every student’s hand.

Over all, Stephens said, her experience and those of others in the program was “pretty positive.” Stephens had previously tried one-to-one computing through a BYOD–bring your own device–program. Here are some of her observations from the first four months of using the Amplify tablet.

On the importance of one-to-one computing:

“[All my colleagues and I have] agreed that there are struggles with this, but this is the way our kids need to learn to make them college and career ready. We’ve all been transformed into believing that wholeheartedly.”

On the realtime flipped classroom:

“The other day we were revieweing for our final exam. I started off with a series of formative assessments through the poll feature. Each one addressed a different topic through the year; that’s a lot of information. The ones that provided the most problems were where I directed study. I can look at those results and segment them, creating small group breakout sessions. It’s definitely student driven–the differentiation was real time. The groups would then collaborate to complete the study guides. I can check in remotely while I’m moving around the class.”

On anonymity:

“The anonymity has helped the students be more truthful rather than hide behind their peers. These are middle school students, and sometimes they don’t want to admit what they don’t know. I can quiz students directly through the tablet and find out–I need more help here, I don’t understand that. It is a one to one outlook to the teacher, without peer involvement.”

On differentiation:

“We have special ed kids that have huge executive function problems–they can’t finish a worksheet. Some of this is life changing for some of these kids.

You’ll always have outliers, whether those who need remediation or enrichment. The tablet has helped bring all the kids into the fold, top or bottom, and keep them engaged. You don’t lose anybody through boredom. Every kid is engaged throughout the class.”

On time saved:

“I can really transform my instruction to get at what’s most important. Rather than it taking a day or two to go through a stack of [quiz] papers, I can do that realtime in class. It’s been really nice to be able to use the spot check topic by topic, to see if we’re ready to proceed or need clarification.”

On special Amplify features:

“Eyes on teacher has been critical.”

“The timer has been really essential– it can be hard to get kids to move from activity to activity. When we were using BYOD I was having to project a timer and walk around with a sign that said screens down eyes up–it was a lot more involved.”

“I was doing some microblogging prior to this. Now the class feed operates like a microblog. The students and their parents can look back class by class and see what we’ve covered on a daily basis. They can get any PDFs right there in the feed. It’s a seamless process.”

On apps:

“The one feature I have not used as much is the App Controller [which allows a specific list of apps for each class and blocks others.] I really don’t feel the need to use the blocker. We use a long list of apps in class: Google Drive, Microsoft Office, Studyblue for flashcards. Google Translate–they’re really good about using Google right, but we do have Netnanny. They make movies, and use the sound recorder and some audiovisual production apps. Evernote’s Skitch for notetaking. Khan Academy.“

As Obama’s preschool plan continues to face opposition, several states are expected to opt out of federal funding. (Photo by Jackie Mader)

The proposal has been hailed by early education advocates. But like Obama’s previous efforts to increase support for early education, it’s likely to face major roadblocks in Congress, where conservative lawmakers have balked at the idea of spending more money on preschool. The recent proposal comes on the heels of a federal decision in April to direct about $370 million, the majority of funds in the latest round of Race to the Top, to the Early Learning Challenge, a competitive grant process that rewards state for increasing early childhood opportunities.

In order to fund the new $75 billion program, Obama has proposed raising cigarette taxes by 94 cents a pack, which has been met with resistance by the tobacco industry.

Although states like Michigan and Mississippi have recently expanded efforts to improve early childhood education, nationally, preschool has had a shaky year. In March, sequestration cuts reduced funding for Head Start by 5.27 percent, forcing some of the federally funded pre-k centers across the country to end the school year early, reduce spots for children, and fire teachers.

In 2011-12, state spending on pre-k per child dropped in 27 of the 40 states that fund preschool, to its lowest point in 10 years, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). While three states improved in quality according to NIEER standards, seven slid backward. And for the second year in a row, enrollment of four-year-olds in pre-k remained stagnant.

The federal funds proposed under Obama’s latest plan, which vary from $334 million in for California to $2.6 million for North Dakota, come with extensive conditions attached. States would be required to match a percentage of their federal funds each year and meet federal quality guidelines around curriculum and teacher qualifications in order to receive funding. The Obama administration estimates that only 15 states will be approved to receive funding in the first year.

“Not everybody will jump in line right away,” said Helen Blank, Director of Child Care and Early Learning at the National Women’s Law Center, a Washington D.C. based non-profit that advocates for low-income women and their families. Blank said that the new federal funds would be significant enough, and the matching funds would be small enough, to encourage states to create or expand preschool programs that will target the poorest children. “It’s a start for a state that hasn’t been able to invest,” she said.

But some advocates worry that the threat of future costs could deter conservative lawmakers in many states, especially those with the fewest preschool offerings and the highest numbers of children in poverty, from participating in the federal program. “I think that there are a lot of folks who are nervous about agreeing to that and creating an obligation of that size for their successors,” said Catriona Macdonald, campaign manager for the First Five Years Fund, a non-profit aimed at expanding early childhood opportunities. Despite research that has found preschool to be beneficial, states like Texas, which has refused federal funding for education, and those like Montana, which still do not fund pre-k, are also expected to opt-out.

Studies have shown that the first five years in a child’s life are crucial to a child’s educational success, and children who start behind often stay behind. Children from low-income homes often have less access to books and learning materials, and hear fewer words than children with a higher socioeconomic status.

In April, legislators in Mississippi, the state with the highest child poverty rate in the nation, passed its first pre-k bill, which will go into effect this year. The program will serve about 12 percent of four-year-olds in the state by providing $8 million in funding over the next three to five years to pre-k programs that can meet new and rigorous guidelines around teacher qualifications and curriculum, and raise half the cost of their programs.

But unlike every other Southern state, with the exception of Alabama, its law does not prioritize seats for low-income students or English language learners. In 2008, one out of every 14 kindergarteners and one out of every 15 first graders in the state was deemed unprepared for the next grade-level, which many early childhood advocates believe could be helped by a better early childhood system and more federal support.

Although Mississippi would only be required to provide $2.1 million as a match to receive federal funding, Obama’s program intends for states to assume more financial responsibility and oversight over the course of 10 years. “I think that is going to be the stumbling block for Mississippi’s decisions,” said Cathy Grace, director of the Early Childhood Institute at Mississippi State University. “As the match increases, then that will put more burden on the state,” she said.

Reactions to the federal proposal have been mixed across the country, and within the parties. Some conservative lawmakers fear that the program will waste money and invite too much government control over how states run preschool programs. Others have cited a controversial Head Start study released in December, which found that by the end of first grade, positive effects of the pre-k program had mostly disappeared.

In Tennessee, Rep. Bill Dunn, a Republican and critic of pre-k programs, said that the state should ignore the federal offer according to the Knoxville News Sentinel. In West Virginia, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, a Democrat, welcomed the federal support, saying that the funding would help the state’s current efforts to improve its extensive pre-k program, according to The Charleston Gazette.

On Tuesday, Mississippi Sen. Brice Wiggins, a Republican, showed support for the federal proposal while speaking at an event in Washington, D.C. Wiggins, who sponsored the pre-k legislation in Mississippi that was recently signed into law, stated that pre-k is a “bipartisan issue” that is crucial to academic success and economic growth. This year, Republican governors in six states, and Democratic governors in two states, have proposed or signed laws supporting pre-k, according to The Mississippi Press.

The task force, which plans to report its findings early next year, is notable for its strong Latino representation in particular, as well as a focus on safety. In too many public schools and libraries, the Internet is filtered or restricted altogether and students are stopped from using cell phones because of concerns about security, predation, theft or cyberbullying, so supporting safety and digital citizenship is key to getting a wider range of students access to the benefits of learning with technology.

All of this notwithstanding, what’s most eye-catching to me is the honorary co-chair of the task force: Jeb Bush, brother of the former President and former governor of Florida. I think this is more than a case of strange bedfellows. Bush’s innovation agenda is fundamentally, inextricably hostile to public education and friendly to corporations. His statements over many years make clear that he sees technology as a means to an end, which is privatization of the school system.

While he was governor of Florida, Jeb Bush expanded the Florida Virtual School, a profitmaking online school that today is the state’s fastest-growing “school district” but operates with little of the oversight of brick-and-mortar schools. His interest in digital education has only been growing since he left office. In 2008, he founded the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which promotes digital learning as part of a reform agenda that includes school choice and high-stakes testing. In 2010, he founded Digital Learning Now! , a “national campaign to advance policies that will create a high quality digital learning environment to better prepare students with the knowledge and skills to succeed in college and careers.” Corporate members of his Digital Learning Council, and former supporters of the Foundation, include K12 Inc, a controversial operator of online for-profit schools, and Pearson Education. In a 2011 profile, Mother Jones called Bush “one of the nation’s most prominent boosters of virtual schools, touring the country to promote technology as an instrument of creative destruction of the public school system.”

In April 2011, he described his vision to the libertarian Reason Magazine:

Reason: What is at the very top of your education reform list?

Jeb Bush: Applying digital learning as a transformative tool to disrupt the public education system, to make it more child-centered, more customized, more robust, more diverse, and more exciting.

I suspect this is a vision that many readers of this blog might agree with. But when you get down to the brass tacks of exactly what ‘disruption’ means, it’s a different story.

In that same interview, Bush went on to describe the dismantling of public school budgets to be spent on different providers, public and private, on a per-student basis.

“If you’re a high school and you get $7,000 per student, you have six credits. Divide 7,000 by 6, you would get $1,300. $1,300 for that geometry class split between the providers of the content, the classroom teacher, and the administration around that teacher could easily be handled. It would create higher-quality, huge-scale opportunities where you could lower costs. “

If this sounds an awful lot like a voucher system, that’s not a coincidence. Most, if not all, of the old conservative proponents of vouchers have moved on from that controversial policy idea, toward promoting charter schools and now online schools, virtual schools, and for-profit providers of digital learning devices and software.

The common thread among these policies isn’t a love for the web. It is weakening and undermining public schools, and especially their unions, while strengthening private companies with “huge-scale opportunities” to capture taxpayer money currently being spent on public education. As Bush told a friendly audience just a couple of weeks ago, “We can’t just outsource public education to bureaucracies and public education unions and hope for the best.” The use of the word “outsource” here is an amazing example of conservative Alice-in-Wonderland verbal perversion. To most people “outsourcing” means giving a task or job to an outside, private company, not having it done directly by the employees of an organization–in this case, public employees accountable to the public.

So the Aspen initiative is an occasion to have an important debate.

Is it possible to support real technological innovation in schools without supporting the privatization of schools? Can learning be personalized without destroying the public mission of schools? Do advocates of web-enabled learning necessarily stand in opposition to teachers’ unions? What is the proper role of corporations in teaching children?

What does disruption mean, anyway?

The research on this new topic is thin so far. Sample sizes are small, and what I found most disappointing in a quick review, is that researchers often don’t collect many, multidimensional measurements of outcomes instead relying on just a few, qualitative measures. It’s also worth noting that the particulars of each game-making tool are very different, so it’s hard to say whether what’s being studied is game-making itself, or merely the idiosyncrasies of each individual software program. Still, the studies suggest a promising new area for engaging learners with tech, especially in the difficult middle school years.

A student-designed game from the National Cheng Kung University study.

Games are currently being investigated as a way to increase engagement, mastery of topics, and higher-order thinking skills. Here are three recent research studies on game-making in the classroom. The sample sizes are small, but the results are suggestive.

1) Game-making and critical thinking, achievement and concentration.

This study, just published, from the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan included a total of 67 seventh-graders in an interdisciplinary class combining both science and computer science. The game-makers designed role-playing games to cover biology course content; the control group designed Flash animations illustrating the same material. The group that designed the games showed greater mastery of the subject and scored higher on a pretest/post-test measure of critical thinking skills. The researchers noticed improved concentration among the game-makers as well, but this didn’t rise to the level of a significant improvement.

The Making Games in Schools project: designing a game

2) Game-making and attitudes toward computer science.

This study, published in March, involved 992 middle school students in the UK who participated in a program called Making Games in Schools. Students used a software program called Adventure Author which is like a customizable toolbox for creating a simple 3-D role-playing adventure game, based on a fantasy game called Neverwinter Nights 2.

This study didn’t look at learning outcomes, because the games were used very differently for different subjects in each classroom and school. Instead, it surveyed attitudes among both teachers and students and found a high level of enthusiasm and positive beliefs about computing among participants. However, the study actually showed a significant drop-off in students who agreed with the statement “I want to find out more about computing.”: 60.7% of the learners in the pre-test agreed or strongly agreed, but in the post-test only 40.7% did, a drop of 20 percentage points. Maybe the experience actually turned students off, or maybe it satisfied curiosity that didn’t run very deep to begin with.

3) Game-making and critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, communication, and collaboration.

This study was done with 11 9- and 10-year-old students in the UK using a program called MissionMaker to design their own games. The games didn’t incorporate any “educational” content. Instead the study looked for evidence for the development of a wide range of transferable skills. Although all the students had played video games before, they stated that they had not understood how difficult it was to build games. Some discovered a new understanding of their own creativity through playing the games.

1) ConnectED: The Obama administration today announced a new initative called ConnectED with a pledge to provide broadband or high-speed wireless Internet access to 99 percent of America’s schoolchildren within 5 years. The administration intends to better leverage the money collected by E-Rate, a longstanding FCC program that charges a fee to all telecom companies in order to provide discounted connectivity to schools and libraries.

Internet access seems to be the fundamental requirement for most forms of tech-enabled teaching, although the proliferation of 3G and 4G enabled devices like smartphones and tablets is helping some schools get around it.

2) Computers Aren’t Enough: According to a paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, simply giving computers to around 1100 students in California’s Central Valley caused no noticeable improvement across a range of educational effects, like test scores, grades, or attendance. This probably comes as a surprise to no one except maybe Nicholas Negroponte.

3) Spread of Adaptive Learning: Knewton, the leading company in the adaptive learning space, announced a partnership with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that, along with a previously announced partnership with MacMillan, has the potential to bring their technology to nearly every school district in the country. The product rollout will begin with math, then ESL, then regular English. “We’ve heard a lot about how K-12 is not ready for [one-to-one computing and adaptive learning], that there are implementation difficulties, privacy issues,” founder Jose Ferreira told me. “So it’s pretty exciting that Houghton is forcing the issue. This will put pressure on everybody in K-12, for the printed textbook to make way for the tablet.” Knewton intends to let parents view their child’s dashboard at home, regardless of how the adaptive features are being used in the classroom.

4) LMS for K-12: The learning management system, until now, has been a cumbersome, buggy piece of enterprise software, usually sold by Blackboard, to colleges. Instructure, a startup that paired two Brigham Young University grad students with their professor, launched a commercial open-source alternative called Canvas 22 months ago and it’s been growing like gangbusters with over 6 million teachers and students using the platform. They just announced a $30 million round of funding and are said to be headed toward an IPO.

One year ago Instructure launched a K-12 product and are now in over 100 K-12 schools. “A lot of these schools don’t have the IT infrastructure to use a hosted model,” explains CEO Josh Coates. “Our cloud-based product offers the opportunity to get up and running really quickly.” The LMS serves as a virtual classroom and is aligned with sites like Facebook and Twitter. “In grades K through six, parents use it more than the kids,” Coates explains. “Parents log in to see assignments and homework. But in junior high and high high school students are becoming more sophisticated and using it themselves.”

5) Apps and Gaps: The New York City Department of Education announced the winners of its Gap App challenge which sought techy solutions to the problem of middle schoolers falling behind in math. The competition drew over 200 entries. Next up is a music education hackathon on June 28th and 29th in collaboration with Spotify.

I attended and judged an unrelated education hackathon in NYC over the weekend that came up with some interesting apps. It was good to see teachers and even students on teams with designers and coders. part of a national “day of civic hacking” where developers in many places tackled education-related challenges. Seems a lot of people are thinking about how to relate the real needs of teachers and students to solutions technology may be able to provide.

A new report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank, looks at three school districts – Milwaukee Public Schools, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District and the School District of Philadelphia – to see how prepared, or ill-prepared, they are to deal with making good on their financial promises.

The research found large differences in what the impact of retirements would be on school districts’ budgets over the next decade, which reflects a larger pattern of variation across states. Even Milwaukee, the district with the best projections, faces large costs. The paper also highlights a problematic truth of these guaranteed retiree benefits: someone must pay for them, whether it’s school districts, taxpayers or younger teachers.

Pension and retiree health care benefits are a staple of teachers union demands. Throughout a teacher’s career, the employer pays into a pension fund. In some places, the teacher doesn’t need to make any contributions. After retiring, teachers receive pension payments that are based on their years of service and final salary and which are often adjusted for inflation. Because many teachers retire in their 50s, before being eligible for Medicare, unions have also negotiated for school districts to cover the health care of retirees.

As of 2010, the difference between what states had promised to their public employees and what they had reserved to actually pay for these costs was $1.38 trillion, according to an analysis from the Pew Charitable Trusts. In all, states will have to pay out more than $3 trillion. Audits of the Los Angeles Unified School District estimated that the school system’s future health care benefits costs for retirees would be $5 billion. For the Fresno Unified School District, the costs were predicted to be $1.1 billion – double the district’s annual operating budget.

Critics have suggested that problems faced by pension funds have been overstated, and that the picture is rosier than depicted by the conservative groups in particular that have raised alarms about public pensions.

The Fordham study, The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School-District Budgets, found the most dire situation to be in Philadelphia, where researchers estimated the school district will have to pay $2,361 per pupil on retirement costs by 2020, up from $1,923 at its current level. In a best-case scenario, the system would have to cut classroom instruction by $62.4 million and instructional support by $14.7 million.

“They’re faced with this catastrophic situation,” said Robert Costrell, a pension expert from the University of Arkansas who worked on the analysis. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett has proposed legislation that would overhaul the state’s pension plan, but it has yet to gain momentum in the legislature. “It’s very surprising,” Costrell said. “There are still some who will bury their heads in the sand.”

Costrell said he was also surprised by Milwaukee, but pleasantly so. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial 2011 Budget Repair Bill that significantly weakened labor in the state required employees to contribute to their own pension funds. The legislation also prevented teachers unions from using collective bargaining to determine retiree health benefits. Districts can now determine those on their own. Milwaukee Public Schools will be implementing large changes, including increasing eligibility requirements and reducing subsidies for premiums beginning in July.

The changes will actually drop Milwaukee’s pension costs from $1,029 per student to $845 in 2020, Fordham researchers projected. The cost of retiree health care will rise $248 per pupil in that time to $1,079.

Ohio also recently took steps to address its pension problems. Legislation passed in 2012 will keep retirement costs per pupil fairly constant over the next decade at about $1,200. But the state chose a reform that essentially requires young employees to pay for the pensions and health care of their older, retiring peers.

Costrell noted that if a private company set up a retirement structure like that, it would be forced to forfeit tax benefits because it’s illegal to take money out of the paychecks of younger workers for the benefits of their older peers. “That raises huge issues going forward,” he said.

There’s a ton of education data out there now. Every state in the nation now maintains a longitudinal data system that tracks each student’s test scores year after year. (That’s thanks to more than $620 million in federal funds for setting up state data systems since 2005, plus additional Race-to-the-Top grants). But McCann and Kabaker make the argument that, for the most part, they’re not being used by teachers to figure out how to teach their students better.

McCann and Kabaker describe recent efforts in Oregon and Delaware to get teachers to actually use the data. In both cases, it was time consuming. One Oregon school district got the school board to approve a later start time to the school day so that teachers could pore over data in the morning. Other schools set aside regular blocks of time during the school day for teachers and administrators to meet. Delaware hired professional data coaches from Wireless Generation, a private company now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp. The idea was to examine the data and plan instructional changes, such as when to use whole group versus small group or individual instruction. Or the teachers could identify which students need additional help. Some teachers were resentful that it was taking away from conventional lesson planning. Many teachers struggled to find the required hours. And McCann and Kabaker point out there’s only so much you can do with year-end test data.

What data freaks really want are so-called “formative” tests that children take many times through the year so that you can see how much they’re learning before the year is over when there’s still time to make adjustments. But formative tests are at their infancy and there’s a lot of push back against adding more tests to the school year. Oregon didn’t have any formative assessments, but it is now starting some pilots.

The results?

In Oregon, schools that participated in the data program tended to see their reading scores increase more than schools that didn’t participate. It’s important to note that the participating schools tended to be lower performing at the start, back in 2008. By 2012, the students of the data-analyzers had, on average, surpassed the reading scores of the non-analyzers, but just by a hair (80.52 vs. 79.62). It was not as rosy in math. Students of the data analyzers did improve and close the achievement gap. But the non-analyzers were still outperforming the analyzers at the end.

In Delaware there is no data on whether the data coach program is working. That’s because Delaware was experimenting with other reforms at the same time and it’s difficult to say how much of a role the data analysis alone had on student achievement. But the state department of education is working to produce an independent analysis.

Delaware benefited from Race to the Top grants to fund its data coach program, but McCann and Kabaker are worried that Congress will cease funding it in 2014. Even President Obama’s budget doesn’t include any Race to the Top money for elementary and high schools.

Instead, the authors point to the “Improving Teacher Quality State Grants” program for advocates of data-driven instruction. It is currently used for class-size reduction and teacher training programs. The authors want Congress, when it reauthorized the No Child Left Behind Act, to explicitly promote the use of data training projects with these funds instead. The authors also want the Department of Education to redesign the statewide longitudinal data systems grants to reward proposals that focus on the use of data, not just the existence of the data.

Since then, as online and blended learning have grown in K–12 education, it’s been difficult to know how that prediction has held up because there has been a paucity of good, trustworthy data.

The California Learning Resource Network (CLRN) has stood out, however, as one group trying to fill the data gap about what’s happening in California’s schools—and it’s done its work in a nuanced way that gives a reasonably meaningful picture, not just high-level aggregate numbers.

The results from its latest survey of California districts and charters, released May 20, shows that although 46 percent of respondents report having students participate in online or blended learning, just 19 percent of elementary districts and charters engage in online learning whereas a whopping 73 percent of unified and high school districts and charters do. Furthermore, of those districts or charters that say they have students learning online, 78 percent indicated that high-school students participate in online learning; 49 percent said middle-school students do; and 28 percent said elementary-school students are engaged in online learning.

Not only that, but how schools are blending online learning differs starkly between elementary schools and secondary schools as well. According to the census, the top three blended models across all districts and charters are the Rotation model (47 percent), the A La Carte model (40 percent), and the Enriched Virtual model (33 percent). When these numbers are disaggregated by grade span, however, a different picture emerges. In elementary schools engaged in online learning, Rotation blended learning is the dominant model with 80 percent of the implementations; just 15 percent of elementary districts/charters utilize more than one blended model. In unified and high school districts/charters engaging in online learning, however, the top model is the A La Carte model (48 percent), and 38 percent employ more than one blended model.

What’s so striking is how much this accords with the analysis we released last week in our paper, “Is K–12 blended learning disruptive?,” which introduced the theory of hybrids. The data is supporting that theory.

In the paper we concluded that some models of blended learning were hybrids— sustaining innovations relative to the traditional classroom—whereas other models of blended learning were disruptive to the traditional classroom. Most Rotation models are sustaining innovations, whereas the A La Carte model, for example, is disruptive.

The theory suggests that the disruptive models of blended learning will be the agents of change over the long term, but we placed a caveat on this prediction. In elementary schools, because there appears to be little nonconsumption within, the theory leads us to expect that the sustaining innovation Rotation forms of blended learning will dominate in the long run, and the disruptive models will play less of a role. Given the CLRN survey results that say that 80 percent of elementary schools engaged in online learning are using a Rotation model, this appears to be proving true.

In contrast, in high school, and to a lesser extent middle school, we said that in the long run, the disruptive models of blended learning will substantially replace traditional classrooms because there are so many areas of nonconsumption for online learning to plant itself. In the CLRN survey, we indeed see the A La Carte blended-learning model as dominant in secondary schools. In the past, the presence of nonconsumption also led us to believe that online learning would grow much faster in secondary schools initially, which remains true according to these latest results. The survey also says that many high schools use Rotation models, but this could accord with our paper, in which we suggest that Rotation models will be the dominant form of blended learning in core classes in high school in the immediate future. My suspicion is that if we had a bit more detail on the data, this would prove accurate.

The survey doesn’t answer whether our 50 percent by 2019 prediction is on track, but it sheds some light on the question. Even in a state where there are many policies that limit the growth of online and blended learning (Digital Learning Now! gives California an “F” for its digital-learning policies), digital learning is still spreading, and the theory of disruptive innovation allows us to understand and anticipate that growth.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

A bill was introduced in Michigan this week that would end funding for the standards, meant to increase rigor in English and math classrooms across the nation so that students are more prepared for college, and the tests that go with them. Other states, including Alabama and Indiana, have also tried to peddle backward after adopting the new standards. (An effort in Alabama to stop  implementation failed; one in Indiana to slow implementation succeeded.)

Still, most states are plowing ahead. The resistance so far has come from right-wing conservative groups who fear federal overstepping because the Obama administration, although not involved in the creation of the Common Core, has been a cheerleader for the adoption of new, more rigorous standards and offered federal incentives for states to adopt them. The standards still enjoy a wide coalition of proponents, which included teachers unions and right-leaning think tanks like the Thomas Fordham Institute.

Next year, as Common Core hits classrooms—and as many schools grapple with how to handle the new standards along with new teacher evaluations and the new standardized tests coming online in a couple of years—that coalition may be tested, however.

Already, presidents of the two national teachers unions have called for states to wait before connecting school and teacher accountability to the new standards. The unions say this is only prudent to make sure implementation is fair and teacher buy-in is assured, although some proponents of the standards have accused the unions of backing down on their support.

More interesting, perhaps, will be watching how districts, principals and teachers react to the standards once they go into effect in classrooms. Some high school English teachers are already concerned they will have to reduce their focus on literature to make room for the inclusion of nonfiction informational texts called for by the standards. And content experts have worried about more esoteric issues, such as how much algebra is covered by the standards and how the concepts of geometry are presented.

The Hechinger Report will be reporting from classrooms in the next year to determine how teaching is changing and how any problems are being worked out–or not, so stay tuned!

Today the MOOC platform Coursera announced a new partnership with 10 major state flagships and state university systems. While Coursera’s existing university partnerships focus on professors at elite institutions producing and sharing online versions of their courses, these partnerships are different. The focus is on incorporating existing MOOCs and newly created MOOCs– covering basic intro level and general education requirements–into the universities’ offerings, flipping the classrooms at public institutions, using MOOCs as a catalyst for collaboration on teaching and learning, and to enhance access to credit-bearing programs.

One area of innovation that Coursera cofounder Daphne Koller singled out to me is the use of MOOCs for high school dual enrollment programs. “I’m really excited about it,” she said.

“There are so many studies that demonstrate the benefit to students in high school in having access to college-level material. It encourages them to go to college and complete college. But that opportunity has largely been available to the most advanced students at highly endowed school districts that have teachers that can teach college-level subjects. It’s been a very inequitable offering.”

Research suggests that having access to college courses doesn’t just benefit the highest achievers. It can give average performers a way to transition more easily into college and a head start on completing their degrees. It can potentially address the needs of the high percentages of public high school graduates who need remediation when they get to college. It could also save money, which is especially important for low-income students.

The problem has been that many high schools serving underprivileged students don’t have teachers qualified to teach at the college level. There also may be space constraints or other logistics issues with hosting high schoolers at local community colleges.

Koller says that the “self-contained” nature of a MOOC allows it to be facilitated on the ground, within a high school, by an instructor who is “passionate and motivated, but not necessarily expert.” The state of Ohio has already proposed funding the use of MOOCs in this way, to help with college readiness and address remedial needs.