Is there such a thing as a “typical” day in the life of a Florida Virtual School (FLVS) teacher? Each day brings new opportunities, challenges, and last-minute schedule changes.

Not that it’s easy. If I had a dime for every time someone said, “Oh that must be a piece-of-cake job,” or “I would love to sit at home all day,” I would be a wealthy teacher.

However, for this full-time virtual teacher and mother of three, it works. My day begins at 6 AM, a quiet time in my house. I spend the early hours working on grade books. I teach 6th- and 7th-grade math to 90 students. Parents and students go online to the grade book to view the student’s progress. My goal is to give each one of them the productive, positive, and personalized feedback that will enable the student to turn mistakes into learning opportunities.

FLVS provides the curriculum, so I don’t have to plan lessons or develop tests and can easily individualize instruction. I can personalize my classroom via the announcement page, which works like a virtual bulletin board.

By 8 AM, grading is done and overnight e-mails are answered. I view my calendar, noting any scheduled meetings and appointments. I sit down for breakfast with my youngest son, nine-year-old Camron, to prepare him for his day. Camron is enrolled in the FLVS full-time virtual instruction option for elementary school students and follows an accelerated curriculum for gifted students. I make sure he has his assignments organized before he traipses off to his own virtual world. Being able to oversee his schooling is a major benefit of working as a virtual teacher.

I jump back to the computer and my morning call list. My students vary in how much one-on-one instruction they need. Some students I speak to weekly, others less often, but at least once a month. Whenever students do not understand a concept, they can pick up the phone and call me for help. If their questions require that they be able to see what I am talking about, we have two options: We can use the “whiteboard,” where they can see what I am doing and talk to me on the phone at the same time. Students can write on the whiteboard and go step-by-step through a problem so that I can see where they are making mistakes. We can also use the web-based program Elluminate to work through problems together using a microphone instead of the telephone.

Navigating through FLVS courses is easy for students. Tabs enable them to move around the site at the click of a button. The lessons tab is where they learn the content, see examples, and work on practice problems. The assessment tab is where they submit their assignments for grading. If they want to, students can go to the grade book to reset an assessment and do the assignment again for a new grade. They can interact with each other in the discussion board area.

Before I know it, it is time for lunch, and I can step away from my computer to enjoy some quality time with my son: eat a sandwich, go for a walk, or play a video game. Pretty soon, it’s time to get back to work.

This afternoon, I’ll be taking my job on the road. Camron plays travel baseball for Gatorball Academy in Gainesville, an hour’s drive away. I make a call list: Who needs a welcome call? Monthly call? Do any of my students want to go over an assignment? I pack up my computer, grab my list and cell phone, and out the door we go. For the next few hours, I make good use of my cell phone, calling my students, answering their cries for help, letting parents know how wonderfully well their child is doing.

Once we’re home, I make a few notes for tomorrow. The day is done.

Is this a typical virtual teacher’s day? Will tomorrow be the same? There is no telling. What I can say, and what my students know, is that together we have the tools and the flexibility to meet whatever challenges the day brings.

Karen Faucett taught middle-school math in a traditional school setting for 13 years before moving to virtual education.

The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas
By Frederick M. Hess
Harvard University Press, 2010, $27.95; 304 pages.

 

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Ask a dozen educators why public schools seem to be in perpetual crisis and why successive reforms so often fall short and they’ll answer with familiar reasons: not enough money, union contracts, teacher certification, too much testing, NCLB…

Education policy researcher Rick Hess doesn’t always disagree, but he adds to the list a circumstance that traverses them all: Education reform itself is in a pathological condition. His title underscores the irrationality of the enterprise, “the same thing over and over,” as do the book’s many epithets to describe its workings (“aimless charade,” “frenzied tinkering,” “unduly attached,” “talismanic significance,” “ossified mantras,” “ill-conceived fad”). Reformers hype the latest solution to low test scores and high dropout rates as a stunning breakthrough, the future of schooling. Slogans such as “education is the new civil right” sound forthright, but they burden practical policy discussions with tense personal and ideological commitments.

It is true that the education establishment often meets reform proposals with heated denunciation:

…the education reform movement in Massachusetts and the nation is part of a decades-long corporate and government attack on public education and on our children.

Vouchers are designed to destroy public schools and end education as a public institution.

Our primary concern is that voucher programs could end up resembling the ethnic cleansing now occurring in Kosovo.

Such excessive expressions signify a psycho-political state, one that resembles a neurotic person who agonizes over this behavior and that feeling but never burrows down to deeper causes and structures. Reforms address class size, school size, teacher “dispositions,” parental choice, alternative certification, and other features of the system, but the basic machinery remains in place. The debates can be ferocious, Hess writes, but “seen from an arm’s length removed, the diagnoses generally amount to a concession that everyone can more or less go on about their business, so long as we demand more, do more, and spend more.”

To go beyond tinkering, he insists, we need an attitude adjustment. Certain basics of education policy have hardened into inevitabilities—the brick-and-mortar building and uniform learning goals, for example—and to put them on the table for examination strikes many as radical, irresponsible, or just plain malevolent. People need to disinvest from this routine and that, and lower the volume of their opinions. More humility and less contentiousness, Hess advises, and more experimentation and less stiffness. Most of all, stop trying to solve everything. Look at how often reform has failed before.

Indeed, the long-term perspective is the first step in the process, and so Hess devotes much of the book to setting current cruxes in the shadow of history. We argue over vocational vs. academic curricula, but the ancients did, too (Sophists vs. the Socratics). We complain about the costs of textbooks and ponder other methods of delivery; in the Middle Ages, students rented manuscripts directly from the authors! We consider summer vacation a fact of nature, but in the 1840s the school year in northeastern cities lasted more than 240 days. Some of Hess’s remembrances produce ironic results:

•Reformers pushed for smaller schools a few years back to improve instruction and deepen the curriculum, but 100 years ago reformers created large schools for precisely the same reasons.

•Reformers continue to develop new “dispositions” in teacher certification on grounds of diversity and multiculturalism, but reformers devised dispositions long ago on grounds of emotional and physical vitality. The latter look ridiculous today, so what makes the former not potentially ridiculous a few years hence?

•Reformers aim to curtail school boards in order to make administration more efficient (or less dysfunctional in the case of some boards), but, as with school size, reformers created school boards 100 or so years ago for precisely the same reasons.

•Policymakers often defend public schools as more democratic and diverse than private schools, but in the past public schools served as a restrictive mode of socialization — for instance, when they were advocated as a bulwark against private Catholic schooling.

These cases advance because of forgetfulness, which in turn licenses a damaging form of certitude and conceit. People proceed without recognizing that “there are no permanent solutions in schooling” and that ideas announced today have been announced before with equal fanfare. A little more background might temper their claims. “History humbles,” Hess declares.

More institutional memory will advance the debate, too, “emancipating” (a favorite term here) reform from unreasonable expectations, overdone claims of novelty, and us versus them groupings. With a sober awareness of past disappointments, we can bore down into existing structures and envision new, genuinely new, ways of education, “rethinking the structure of schooling.” One example is the School of One program in New York City in which the old model of one teacher handling 25 students at once in one classroom is broken up into a new model of each student being assigned each day to a large class, a tutor, a computer simulation, or a small group, whatever works best at that moment, until the student meets the learning objective. Another idea Hess floats is to break up the monopoly of school boards by nationalizing the services boards provide, so that an effective approach or policy could be imported from one state to another without going through the costly bureaucracy of the importer. Still another is to transfer the sites of teacher certification from universities to K–12 schools on a hands-on apprenticeship model.

Of course, the interests against such innovations are strong (where would all the ed school profs go?), and pathologies inevitably form defenses against the designs that would cure them. This past October, Hess wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News on the end of Michelle Rhee’s three-year run as D.C. schools chancellor. Rhee and Mayor Adrian Fenty began with the rational expectation that “if they could deliver impressive academic results in the first couple of years, their critics would melt away.” Scores did rise significantly, but “the criticism and conflict only built.” At the end, only 30 percent of the African American community in D.C. supported Rhee.

As for Hess’s sober and sensible calls for muting the rhetoric of policy debates, it’s hard to feel much optimism. In the Fall 2010 issue of UCEA Review (available at the University Council for Educational Administration web site), former UCEA president and UNC-Chapel Hill professor Fenwick W. English has an essay titled “The 10 Most Wanted Enemies of American Public Education’s School Leadership.” Scroll down to the list at the end of the article and there he is at number 5: Frederick M. Hess.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America
By James E. Ryan
Oxford University Press, 2010, $29.95; 384 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

The two schools referred to in the title of this book are Thomas Jefferson (“Tee-Jay”) High School in Richmond, Virginia, and Freeman High School, in suburban Henrico County. They show the contrasts we would expect between a high school in an urban and predominantly black school district, and one in a suburban, predominantly white, and middle-class county. But these schools do not play the central role in this book: they make intermittent appearances, illustrating a very detailed account of how legal efforts have failed in the 56 years since the historic Brown decision to overcome the effects of the segregation of black and poor students.

The overall verdict of the author, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, is that these efforts have failed primarily because we have not been able to bring together urban and suburban school districts to reduce the concentrations of black students. His plea for greater integration as the road to improving educational outcomes for poor and black students closely echoes that recently made by Gerald Grant in his Hope and Despair in the American City: Why there are no bad schools in Raleigh (see “Tale of Two Cities,” book review, Spring 2010). This may well be true, but it is surprising to see such strong advocacy for the racial integration of schools at a time when the prospects for any public action—executive, legislative, or judicial—to combine for purposes of integrating urban and suburban school districts are just about nonexistent.

None of the other legal approaches show much promise, Ryan argues. He reviews the complex tangle of legal efforts to increase state support for urban schools, by way of litigation based on state constitutions. This followed another Supreme Court check to federal action to equalize or increase support to urban schools. Little has been accomplished after decades of litigation and much admonition of state legislatures by state supreme courts. Nor is Ryan optimistic that the problem would have been ameliorated if these efforts had been more successful: “Tee-Jay” already spends in excess of $4,000 more per student than Freeman, with worse results. And he refers to the enormous increase in expenditures for Kansas City schools in the wake of a desegregation suit, and its limited results (see my review of Complex Justice by Joshua M. Dunn, “Finding the Right Remedy,” book review, Spring 2009).

Increased expenditure, Ryan argues, is a poor substitute for integration: It “take[s] as given—either as a matter of strategy or necessity—that poor and minority districts will remain separate from white and wealthier ones…. [It] channel[s] resources to poor struggling districts, which are usually in urban or rural areas, while protecting the independence and sanctity of wealthy districts, which are usually in suburbs. Save the cities, and spare the suburbs.” Ryan again and again argues that the suburban middle class has been able to protect its schools from what it sees as the threat of integration.

Ryan is more positive about the varieties of school choice—whether within school districts, or by way of charter schools and vouchers, and of course he favors interdistrict choice—but the legislative and judicial obstacles (not to mention practical ones) to the expansion of this route are clear. Nor is Ryan optimistic about the impact of the standards and testing movement, primarily because the bars have been set too low, which means that the urban schools, placing all their efforts into passing, manage to do so, while the suburban schools easily surpass the state’s yardsticks. So “Tee-Jay” does not look so bad when tested by Virginia’s standards, but Freeman pays the state standard little mind, as its students go on further to AP courses and tests: “A reform that might have tied urban and suburban schools together has been transformed into yet another one that reinforces the gap that separates them. Standards and testing promise, essentially, that urban students will learn the basics. Meanwhile, the suburban students, while not immune from standards and testing, are certainly not limited by them.”

Ryan argues for integration not only because he believes it will improve educational outcomes for black students, but also because of his commitment to the ideal of the common school, which promises to bring together Americans of all economic circumstances, and all races and groups. Ryan is distressed that this hope seems to play so small a role in our politics and public discussion. “In Search of Ties That Bind” is the title of his penultimate chapter, in which he explores the possibilities of integration in the current bleak situation. He is aware that “it is unfashionable these days to talk seriously about ways to increase racial and socioeconomic integration. The goal seems not only impossible but also increasingly beside the point…. To talk about integration is to talk about a relic from the past or a distracting frill.”

In this situation, he places his hopes for integration on the varieties of free choice and, seeking signs that we may yet become a more integrated society, finds some promise. The proportion of minorities in the population is increasing, which inevitably means more minorities in predominantly white schools. More blacks are moving to suburbs (as increasingly are other minorities, e.g., Asian and Hispanic), and more whites are returning to (some) cities. We should not exaggerate the significance of these moves: minorities do not share the same interests and ideals in schooling, and even the least advantaged ones, blacks and Hispanic Americans, may not look on their situations the same way. And the movement of blacks into suburbs very often re-creates the economically struggling neighborhoods they have left in the cities. Nevertheless, it is promising to note that “Tee-Jay” has a substantial white minority student body (16 percent), while Freeman has a sizable black minority (13 percent). That still makes them black and white schools, but this is quite different from the 100 percent black and white schools of 1954, and for many years after. Ryan is encouraged by the example of Montclair, New Jersey, and some other municipalities in maintaining integrated communities over time, and by the longtime maintenance of METCO in the Boston area, and hopes that further interdistrict programs might be launched.

One cannot be too optimistic about the reach of these developments that are increasing integration: they are operating slowly. In the end, is there any escape from the reality that the improvement of educational outcomes for a large section of the black population will have to take place, if it is to come about at all, in schools with a black majority?

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of sociology and education at Harvard University.

Podcast: Guido Schwerdt talks with EdNext about his new study.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

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In recent years, a consensus has emerged among researchers that teacher quality matters enormously for student performance. Students taught by more-effective teachers learn substantially more over the course of the year than students taught by less-effective teachers. Yet little is known about what makes for a more-effective teacher.

Most research on teacher effectiveness has focused on teacher attributes, finding that readily measurable characteristics such as experience, certification, and graduate degrees generally have little impact on student achievement. Relatively few rigorous studies look inside the classroom to see what kinds of teaching styles are the most effective. We tackle this underexplored area by investigating the relative effects of two teacher practices—lecture-style presentations and in-class problem solving—on the achievement of middle-school students in math and science.

Ever since John Dewey explored hands-on learning at the University of Chicago Laboratory School more than a century ago, lecture-style presentations have been criticized as old-fashioned and ineffective. It is said, for example, that lectures presume that all students learn at the same pace and fail to provide instructors with feedback about which aspects of a lesson students have mastered. Students’ attention may wander during lectures, and they may more easily forget information they encountered in this passive manner. Lectures also emphasize learning by listening, which may disadvantage students who favor other learning styles.

Alternative instructional practices based on active and problem-oriented learning presumably do not suffer from these disadvantages. But they may have their own shortcomings. Learning by problem-solving may be less efficient, as discovery and problem-solving often take more time than mastering information received from an authority figure. And incorrect or misleading information may be conveyed in conversations among students in middle schools.

Nonetheless, a number of small-scale studies have identified positive impacts of interactive teaching styles on student learning. As a consequence, prominent organizations such as the National Research Council and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, since at least 1980, have called for teachers to engage students in constructing their own new knowledge through more hands-on learning and group work. By the mid-1990s, in a study for the National Institute for Science Education, Iris Weiss could identify “some encouraging signs. The majority of elementary, middle, and high school science and mathematics classes worked in small groups at least once a week, and roughly one in four classes did so every day. Moreover, the use of hands-on activities had increased since the mid-1980s.” Even so, more than a decade later, traditional lecture and textbook methodologies continue to be a significant component of science and mathematics instruction in U.S. middle schools. A rigorous, large-scale study has yet to resolve a question that has divided pedagogical thinking for generations.

In our study, we examine whether student achievement in the United States is affected by the share of teaching time devoted to lecture-style presentations as distinct from problem-solving activities. Employing information on in-class time use provided by a nationally representative sample of U.S. teachers in the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), we estimate the impact of teaching practices on student achievement by looking at the differential effects on the same student of two different teachers, using two different teaching strategies. We find that teaching style matters for student achievement, but in the opposite direction than anticipated by conventional wisdom: an emphasis on lecture-style presentations (rather than problem-solving activities) is associated with an increase—not a decrease—in student achievement. This result implies that a shift to problem-solving instruction is more likely to adversely affect student learning than to improve it.

Data and Methodology

Our research draws on data from the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The TIMSS data comprise information on students in two grades in a number of countries, but we utilize only information on 8th-grade students in the United States. Our sample includes 6,310 students in 205 schools with 639 teachers (303 math teachers and 355 science teachers, of which 19 teach both subjects). In addition to test scores in math and science, the TIMSS data include background information on students’ home and family life as well as data on teacher characteristics, qualifications, and classroom practices. School principals provide information on school characteristics.

Most important for our purpose, teachers were asked what proportion of time in a typical week students spent on each of eight in-class activities. The overall time in class apportioned to three of these activities—listening to lecture-style presentation, working on problems with the teacher’s guidance, and working on problems without guidance—likely provides a good proxy for the time in class in which students are taught new material. We divided the amount of time spent listening to lecture-style presentations by the total amount of time spent on each of these three activities to generate a single measure of how much time the teacher devoted to lecturing relative to how much time was devoted to problem-solving activities.

A change in our measure of teaching style can be interpreted as a shift from spending time on one practice to spending time on the other, holding constant the total time spent on both practices. For example, an increase of 0.1 indicates that 10 percentage points of total time devoted to teaching new material are shifted from teaching based on problem solving to giving lecture-style presentations. We combined the other teaching activities (besides lecturing and problem solving) into a separate measure of the share of total teaching time devoted to other activities and control for this measure throughout our analysis. We also control for the total number of minutes per week that the teacher reported teaching the math or science class, as more total instructional time could have an independent effect on student learning.

Although it is difficult to determine from the TIMSS data exactly how much time is spent on lecturing as distinct from problem-solving activities, it appears that teachers generally follow the advice given by progressive educators. On average, they allocate twice as much time to problem-solving activities as to direct instruction. Specifically, teachers devote about 40 percent of class time to problem-solving activities (with or without teacher guidance); during roughly 20 percent of class time, students listen to the initial presentation of material to be learned. The remainder of the class time is allocated to such tasks as class management, reviewing homework, re-teaching the material, and clarifying content (see Figure 1).

Teachers who spent more time lecturing were more likely to be male and under age 50. Interestingly, they were also less likely to have the maximum number of years of teacher training registered by the background survey or to have taken pedagogical or content knowledge classes in the prior two years (see Figure 2).

A key challenge in studying the effects of teaching practices is that teachers may adjust their methods in response to the ability or behavior of their students. If teachers tend to rely more on lectures when assigned more capable or attentive students, this would generate a positive relationship between the amount of time spent lecturing and student achievement, even in the absence of a true causal effect. Similarly, there could be unobserved differences between students whose teachers rely more and less heavily on lecturing if, for example, teachers in schools serving low-income students adopt different practices than teachers in other types of schools.

To address these concerns, we exploit the fact that the TIMSS study tested each student in both mathematics and science. This allows us to compare the math and science test scores of individual students whose teacher in one subject tended to emphasize a different teaching style than their teacher in the other subject. In other words, we ask, if a given student’s math teacher spent more (or less) time lecturing than his or her science teacher, does the student perform better or worse on the math test than on the science test?

Results

Contrary to contemporary pedagogical thinking, we find that students score higher on standardized tests in the subject in which their teachers spent more time on lecture-style presentations than in the subject in which the teacher devoted more time to problem-solving activities. For both math and science, a shift of 10 percentage points of time from problem solving to lecture-style presentations (e.g., increasing the share of time spent lecturing from 20 to 30 percent) is associated with an increase in student test scores of 1 percent of a standard deviation. Another way to state the same finding is that students learn less in the classes in which their teachers spend more time on in-class problem solving.

Importantly, the strength of the relationship increases when we restrict our analysis to the roughly one-third of students in the TIMSS sample who had the exact same peers in both their math and science classes. Among this group of students, a shift of 10 percentage points of time from problem solving to lecturing is associated with an increase in test scores of almost 4 percent of a standard deviation—or between one and two months’ worth of learning in a typical school year (see Figure 3). This pattern increases our confidence that the overall result does not reflect differences in the peer composition of students’ math or science classes. In fact, it suggests that peer effects may actually be leading us to understate the strength of the relationship between lecturing and student learning.

Do certain types of students benefit more from lectures than others? We find suggestive evidence that the relationship between lecture-style teaching and achievement is strongest among higher-achieving and more-advantaged students. For example, the positive effect is largest for students who report having more than one bookcase in the home, a rough indicator of the quality of their home environment. There is no evidence, however, that lower-achieving students or students from less-advantaged backgrounds learn less when their teachers emphasize lectures.

These patterns are consistent with the findings of a 1997 study by Dominic Brewer and Dan Goldhaber, which found that more in-class problem solving for American 10th-grade students in math is related to lower test scores on a standardized test. Because our results are based on comparisons of the same student in two different classes, however, they are less subject to the concern that teachers adjust their practices based on the students to which they are assigned. Furthermore, the other commonly investigated teacher characteristics (e.g., gender, experience, and credentials) do not show significant effects on student achievement in our analysis. This is in line with previous findings in the literature and underscores the importance of the statistical relationship between more lecture-style teaching and student achievement.

While the richness of the TIMSS data enables us to control for an unusually large set of teacher characteristics, our results could still be biased if teachers with different effectiveness levels are more likely to choose different teaching styles. For example, if more-effective teachers tend to spend more time lecturing because they are good at it and enjoy it, then our results could show a positive effect of lecture-style presentations, even if those teachers would have been even more effective had they devoted more time on problem-solving activities. Given the pedagogical emphasis on the use of problem-solving activities, it seems unlikely that the very best teachers would be using the less-effective teaching style (the only alternative explanation for our finding).

Still, it is important to keep in mind that our results are limited to student achievement as measured by the 2003 TIMSS test scores in 8th-grade math and science in the United States. Different results might be found for different subjects, grades, or tests. Depending on the teacher, the students, the content taught, or other factors, problem-solving activities could turn out to be the more effective style. Even though lecture-style teaching seems to be a more effective method in middle-school math and science, that does not mean it would be the preferable approach to elementary-school reading.

Also, our findings are based on student performance on the TIMSS math and science exams, which are designed to measure mastery of factual knowledge of the curricula that schools expect students to learn. Other tests intended to measure problem-solving ability and the competence to apply mathematical and scientific concepts in real-world settings (such as the Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] administered by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) might yield different results. Unfortunately, we are unable to ascertain whether this might be the case, as PISA did not ask teachers about their pedagogical approach.

Finally, our information on teaching practices, which is based on in-class time use reported by teachers, does not allow us to distinguish between different implementations of teaching practices. In other words, a certain teaching technique may be very effective if implemented in the optimal way. But the strength of our approach is that it examines which teaching style turns out to be effective, on average, for teachers in general. Optimal teaching methods that cannot be executed by teachers in general may do more harm than good.

Conclusion

Given the limitations of the data, our finding that spending increased time on lecture-style teaching improves student test scores results should not be translated into a call for more lecture-style teaching in general. But the results do suggest that traditional lecture-style teaching in U.S. middle schools is less of a problem than is often believed.

Newer teaching methods might be beneficial for student achievement if implemented in the proper way, but our findings imply that simply inducing teachers to shift time in class from lecture-style presentations to problem solving without ensuring effective implementation is unlikely to raise overall student achievement in math and science. On the contrary, our results indicate that there might even be an adverse impact on student learning.

Guido Schwerdt is a postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University and a researcher at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, Germany. Amelie C. Wuppermann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mainz, Germany.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

The way the 1st graders hurtle toward their computer workstations, you’d think they were headed out to recess.

It’s an unseasonably warm winter morning in San Jose, California, and the two dozen students at Rocketship Mateo Sheedy Elementary School get situated quickly in the computer lab, donning headphones and peering into monitors displaying their names. The kindergartners follow a moment later, until 43 seats are filled. The effect is of a miniature, and improbably enthusiastic, call center.

This lab—and the larger plan for the school surrounding it—has probably done more than any other single place to create enthusiasm for “hybrid schools.” Such schools combine “face-to-face” education in a specific place (what used to be called “school”) with online instruction. (Rocketship uses the term “hybrid,” rather than the increasingly prevalent term “blended learning,” because the computers are not actually “blended” with face-to-face instruction in the same classroom.) It’s a sign of how young the hybrid and blended field is that this school at the epicenter hails all the way back to 2007. Rocketship Education, a small but burgeoning network of charter schools that serves an overwhelmingly low-income immigrant community in San Jose, has made a name through its, forgive the phrase, high-flying student performance. Two of its three schools are old enough to have test scores. They rank among the 15 top-performing high-poverty schools statewide, and the site that opened in 2009 was the number-one first-year school in the state in the high-poverty category. But what positions Rocketship on the cutting edge of school reform is its vision for how technology will integrate with, and change, the structure of the school. (Disclosure: Our firm, NewSchools Venture Fund, is a significant investor in the work of Rocketship and of several other organizations mentioned in this article.)

The scene in the computer lab represents the first steps toward realizing the Rocketship vision. In the lab, the 1st graders log in by selecting from a group of images that acts as a personal password, and then race through a short assessment that covers math and reading problems. Faced with the prompt “Put all the striped balls in one basket and all the polka-dotted balls in the other basket,” a student named Jazmine uses her mouse to move the objects to their places. Then it’s on to the core activity of her 90 minutes in the lab: a lesson on counting and grouping using software from DreamBox. The scenarios are slightly surreal—more objects to move, in this case mostly fruit, and the reward for getting it right involves an animated monkey bringing yet more fruit to a stash on her island—but she and most other students take on the task assiduously. It may be a lesson, but that’s not how Jazmine sees it. “This game is really easy,” she says. A bit later, she’ll read a book from a box targeted at her exact reading level, and make a return visit to the computer to take a short quiz about what she read.

Despite the kids’ engagement in the online lesson, no one is claiming that time in front of the computer is directly responsible for the extraordinary performance of Rocketship students. Rather, the online work is essential to the long-term vision for the school’s instructional model—and for Rocketship’s growth trajectory. Crucially, the lab requires an adult who has experience with children, but no teaching credential (nor, indeed, bachelor’s degree) is required. For this class, it’s a young mother named Coral De Dios, who dispenses help and order as the moment requires. Her ability to monitor the 43 kids here means that the school requires less staff, ultimately saving hundreds of thousands of dollars each year that can be plowed back into resources for the school, including staff salaries. In cash-strapped California, that’s no small matter.

But the larger impact of the technology is still ahead, in the ways it will integrate with, and alter, classroom practice. Rocketship is building a model in which kids learn much of their basic skills via adaptive technology like the DreamBox software, leaving classroom teachers free to focus on critical-thinking instruction and extra help where kids are struggling. Likewise, teachers will be able to “prescribe” online attention to specific skills. Part of the model involves providing teachers with a steady stream of data that will help them adjust instruction to kids’ specific needs, and to guide afterschool tutors. Today, those linkages between the computer lab and the classroom remain incomplete, in part because the data from various online systems aren’t sufficiently standardized; the many data points from different systems could be overwhelming to teachers.

Rocketship’s data guru, Charlie Bufalino, says that to date, vendors haven’t invested sufficiently in the R&D and technical fixes that would make a standardized stream of data possible and take menial tasks like attendance out of teachers’ hands. As more schools like Rocketship build hybrid and blended systems, however, and as more entrepreneurs develop the missing-piece systems, the tipping point may be reached, fueling rapid growth of this new approach to schooling.

Rocketship and the other school models we describe here offer a vision for what deeply integrated technology can mean for children’s education, for the way schools are structured, and for the promise of greater efficiency amid a lengthy economic downturn. This is much more than simply taking a class online. Already, millions of children take one or more online courses, ranging from credit recovery to Advanced Placement. And there’s a wide range of ways that the school facility and online learning—“bricks and clicks”—mix. (Michael B. Horn and Heather Staker offer an excellent guide to the landscape in their recent paper, “The Rise of K–12 Blended Learning.”) Our interest is specifically in schools and platforms that use technology intensively and thoughtfully to tailor instruction to individual students’ needs, and provide robust, frequent data on their performance. Most of our examples are high-performing charter schools, which have become a particular hotbed for the type of hybrid and blended models we are describing. Their designs call for bringing new productivity to the way schools deploy staff and dollars. They all share an ambition to prepare their students for success not just on tests, but in college.

School of One

Much of the enthusiasm for the potential of blended learning comes from what is currently a math program. School of One, operating inside three New York City public middle schools, is an exciting experiment interweaving a wide range of online learning possibilities with classroom instruction. Indeed, a visitor needs only to walk into School of One’s classroom space at Intermediate School 228 in Brooklyn to see what customized education looks like. The classroom is an open space that runs the length of the building wing, but is subdivided by bookshelves into workspaces where small groups of students work with the teacher or individually with laptops. The first sight that greets the eye is an airport-style video display, listing not cities and flights, but students’ names and how they will receive their instruction during that period. For those who are starting on the computer, a press of a button will take them to a lesson provided by 1 of more than 50 content providers. Each lesson runs about half an hour, and students may switch from one content provider to another on the same skill. Others work in small groups with a teacher, who will typically oversee two or three groups of students, the content and groupings informed by data from the student’s work online.

“You understand way better,” says Edwin, a 12-year-old 7th grader clad in basketball-ready dark blue T-shirt, shorts, and athletic shoes. Thanks to the unusual structure of math classes at School of One, he says, teachers work with only 9 or 10 students at one time, while at other schools, “the teacher doesn’t have time to go over things with every student.” He adds, “It’s a really good program for kids who have trouble with math.”

Behind the flashy images on the laptop screens, the real power behind School of One is in its brawny “back end” systems, which enable the creation of real-time, hourly reports of students’ progress and shortfalls. Teachers review these reports daily, both individually and in a collaborative planning period when they discuss the progress of individual students as well as student groups. Teachers can review the information before school, after school, during their prep period, or even while they are overseeing instruction (so they can identify the students in a group who, according to previous assessment data, may be struggling to learn a skill). “We get data every single day to help us understand what’s working and what’s not,” says founder Joel Rose. When a student struggles on Tuesday, she can be assigned to a small group for help from a teacher on Wednesday, and with enough data and enough flexibility, it will even be possible to assign her to a teacher who is particularly good at teaching that lesson. It’s a model that seems certain to make us question assumptions about how we organize classrooms and schools.

Like the teachers, students can see a map of their accomplishments. That map is tied to state standards and will later align with the Common Core standards. As at Rocketship, aligning lessons to these standards is no small matter; School of One had veteran math teachers codify the precursors and dependencies for each skill. They sourced more than 25,000 lessons for middle-school math, from which they chose the top 5,000. Many lessons were not included because they did not closely align to their map. School of One has enough faith in the power of its standards and assessments that it will soon offer students the option to press a “prove it” button that allows them to demonstrate mastery at an upcoming task and, if successful, skip it. The button stands as a testament to a core notion of the blended idea: learning that proceeds at a pace the student is ready for, rather than one set by the needs of an entire class.

DSST Public Schools

The constant, real-time stream of student assessment data is a crucial element of the most promising tech-enabled schools, including some high flyers that don’t fit neatly under the blended label. One of the most interesting is charter school network DSST Public Schools, named for its flagship, the Denver School of Science and Technology. DSST enrolls a mostly-minority, 47 percent low-income student population and has achieved national renown for its extraordinary results, including the second-highest longitudinal growth rate in student test scores statewide. Among graduates, 100 percent have been accepted to four-year colleges, where an astonishing 1 percent require remedial courses, in comparison to 56 percent for the Denver district. Technology is everywhere as one strolls through DSST’s Stapleton campus in northeast Denver, just barely within sight of peaks of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. In a 6th-grade social studies class recently, students used collaborative user-made web sites called wikis to access and respond to in-class and homework assignments. The teacher projected a map of Asia and posted prompts on the wiki for students to respond to as they learned about the geography of the region.

DSST’s assessment system provides real-time, instant feedback to teachers and students on students’ progress, measured through quick assessments that students take on netbooks. Teachers at DSST have been developing these informal assessments and in the 2010–11 school year are working with a consultant to review the validity of the assessment items and gather feedback that will in turn make teachers better item writers. The data enable teachers to differentiate instruction and connect instructional strategies with student results. As at School of One, both teachers and students at DSST can track mastery on a particular standard. Teachers can quickly adjust groups and/or identify topics for re-teaching. Through these assessments and classroom observations, teachers identify students in need of extra support, who are then assigned to afterschool tutoring the same day. Teachers use the information to plan lessons, deciding whether to spend more class time on a certain area or focus on individual tutoring based on class scores. DSST is also using data to analyze teacher performance. “The technology enables us to collect good data on our school performance, which is used to drive and motivate student achievement,” says founder and CEO Bill Kurtz. “We believe that education innovation will be driven by common data.”

Carpe Diem Collegiate High School

Elsewhere in the charter universe, schools are incorporating hybrid and blended structures into already successful school organizations, which increasingly seek efficiency, even as they expand and work to maintain excellent student achievement. The impact has been dramatic, for example, at Carpe Diem Collegiate High School of Yuma, Arizona. Carpe Diem represents what will likely be a crucial chapter in the story of blended schools: a turn to a blended model because of financial or facilities challenges. The charter school, which serves 250 mostly low-income students in 6th through 12th grades, faced a crisis after losing its lease on a church building. Its founders radically transformed it from a traditional structure to one heavily dependent on online instruction, and in 2006 completed a facility tailored to the new model. In the reinvented school, small groups take classes directly from teachers, while most students take online classes in a learning center that features 300 low-sided cubicles in one brightly painted room. Student cubicles have a desktop computer and monitor; many have been personalized and decorated with artwork. The learning center is staffed by the principal, two instructional assistants, and a course manager, who also talks with students about their progress.

Students begin their day by logging onto a software system called e2020 and accessing the calendar, selecting a subject area, and looking at their lists of assignments for the week. On any given day, based on the data, teachers may gather an entire grade or a subset of students, sometimes in groups as small as one or two. Some students work through all subjects each day, while others focus on math for the week on one day, science for the week on another day. Carpe Diem has been a state leader in student growth for the past two years.

High Tech High

Yet, even in schools that have been aggressive in incorporating technology, there is such a thing as too much in adopting blended approaches. Such is the case at High Tech High, whose campus near the San Diego airport is perhaps the most eye-poppingly technology-rich in the country. Rooms within the warehouse-sized buildings are delineated with glass walls 15 feet high, leaving the remaining space under the 25-foot ceilings for a chaotic crisscross of air ducts, structural supports, and wires. Mixed-media art hangs from every wall, door, and metal roof beam, and gee-whiz technology is everywhere. Students use the same computer-aided design systems that they would find in a professional design firm as they model real-life, design-forward chairs. The hallways are lined by prize-winning robotics projects. And outside, students further their studies of air pressure by racing hovercraft they have designed using large circles of plywood with plastic-bag cushion edges and leaf-blower engines.

High Tech High has taken gentle steps into blended territory through its use of ALEKS, which bills itself as “a Web-based, artificially intelligent assessment and learning system.” ALEKS, which runs on computers on the periphery of a 9th-grade classroom, provides teachers with detailed diagnostics, helping them to focus on the areas where students are struggling, and lets students take lessons at their own pace. A student logs on to ALEKS and begins by taking an adaptive assessment, each question chosen on the basis of previous answers. With this information, ALEKS develops a snapshot of a student’s knowledge in a given content area, recognizing which topics he has mastered and which he has not. This information is represented for both the student and teacher by a multicolored pie chart, which is constantly being updated as the student masters new topics. Once a student has mastered a specific topic, new ones become available for the student to choose from. “It doesn’t slow you down,” says Danie, a 15-year-old boy with a dark mop of hair that he regularly brushes off his forehead. Danie, wearing untied high-tops and faded black jeans, confesses matter-of-factly that he is repeating the 9th grade. “Students learn at different speeds,” he says with marked confidence. He hastens to add that the technology augments, rather than replaces, the teacher. “Nothing,” he says, “can replace human interaction.” Danie’s teacher, Jane Armstrong, agrees, saying ALEKS gives her more flexibility in grouping students. Today, Armstrong has divided the class in two. Half of the students are using ALEKS while Armstrong is working with the other half in small groups. “This setting allows me to get to know all of my students,” she says. “If I’m just lecturing them, I don’t get to know what they’ve mastered.”

California’s budget situation today is nothing short of disastrous. Yet High Tech High recently rejected a much more aggressive move into the blended field, a “flex” plan that would have brought students to campus only once a week, with the other four days spent online, typically from home. The plan would have created enormous cost savings by allowing five different cohorts of students to use one building each week. Yet teachers, students, and parents rejected the idea of giving up the daily campus experience, and teachers were not enthusiastic about doing a large proportion of their teaching online. “We’re not drinking the Kool-Aid,” said founder and CEO Larry Rosenstock.

On the Verge

Indeed, it seems likely that, just as happened with charter management organizations, rapid growth will take place only when the pioneers can demonstrate proof points of excellence in student performance. “In order for there to be larger market traction, the overall industry has to see more results,” says Anthony Kim of Education Elements, a nascent firm that designs the technical back end for blended schools. “We’re at the very early adopter stage right now.”

Blended schooling is dawning at a time when, as recent public opinion polls show, people are open to online learning. According to the 2010 EdNext-PEPG Survey (“Meeting of the Minds,” features, Winter 2011), support for online coursework jumped 8 to 10 percent in a single year. Yet as much as anything, the blended effort is being driven by a new fiscal reality. In a widely regarded speech at the American Enterprise Institute called “The New Normal: Doing More with Less,” education secretary Arne Duncan noted that a loss of housing valuation meant that education funds are down sharply and aren’t coming back anytime soon. In the spirit of never wasting a crisis, he said he hoped the difficult financial straits would help bring an end to “the factory model of education” and an increase in productivity in schools. He said, “Our schools must prepare all students for college and careers—and do far more to personalize instruction and employ the smart use of technology.”

Is the blended school the model he’s looking for? Tom Vander Ark, a former head of education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and now a partner in a private equity fund focused on education innovation, thinks so. In the past, technology actually made schooling more expensive, as computers were layered onto an existing model without adding any efficiency. Technology-driven productivity, he says, stands to change that. “We can make learning far more productive,” says Vander Ark. “It’s the first chance in history to change the curve.”

Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff are partners at NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit venture philanthropy firm that supports entrepreneurial innovation to improve public education for low-income children.

Additional photographs of the hybrid schools are available here.

Question: What do former D.C. Public Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, KIPP Academy cofounders Mike Feinberg and David Levin, and Colorado state senator (and author of that state’s nationally noted teacher-quality legislation) Mike Johnston have in common? Answer: They’re all alumni of Teach For America.

While much of the debate around Teach For America (TFA) in recent years has focused on the effectiveness of its nontraditional recruits in the classroom, the real story is the degree to which TFA has succeeded in producing dynamic, impassioned, and entrepreneurial education leaders. From its inception as Wendy Kopp’s senior thesis project at Princeton more than two decades ago, TFA has sought to bring more teaching talent to some of the nation’s most disadvantaged communities and create a corps of change agents like Rhee, Feinberg, Levin, and Johnston. How well has TFA fared on that second score? Here, in a new line of research, we seek to answer that question.

Since its founding in 1989, TFA has placed more than 24,000 high-achieving college graduates in some of America’s neediest schools. This has produced an alumni network populated by impassioned former educators. TFA aims, proclaims the web site, to turn these alumni into “lifelong leaders for fundamental change, regardless of their professional sector.” Its efforts include keeping close connections with alumni and providing a variety of opportunities to volunteer at schools, join education-oriented political campaigns, advocate, and connect with a wide-reaching education network.

To date, the vast majority of research on TFA has focused on the classroom effectiveness of corps members and how long they remain in classrooms. Very little is known about TFA corps members who leave teaching but stay involved in education reform more broadly. In a recent study of TFA alumni, Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt (2009) argue that corps members are more likely to remain in education, whether in administration, educational policy work, or charter school management, than those who opt not to enter TFA or drop out of the program. This suggests that TFA has a lasting influence on corps members’ careers, but does not address the question of whether these individuals become the kind of change agents envisioned in TFA’s mission of eliminating “educational inequity by enlisting our nation’s most promising future leaders.”

We pursue that question here, as part of a larger analysis of organizations that successfully “spawn” education entrepreneurs. Examining the work histories of founders and top management team (TMT) members at nationally prominent entrepreneurial education organizations, we find that TFA appears more frequently in the professional backgrounds of these proven entrepreneurial leaders than does any other source in our sample. We don’t know whether it is the TFA experience, the criteria by which TFA selects its corps members, or institutional relationships that account for this. However, the research does find that TFA is producing a large number of entrepreneurial leaders. How and why this is so, and what might be learned from TFA’s success, are questions that deserve careful scrutiny.

Entrepreneurs Needed

The education sector has long struggled to attract and retain high-quality professionals. At the same time, stubborn achievement gaps, increased competition among school providers, and a heightened focus on performance have created an appetite for creative problem solving and scalable, transformational initiatives. In a world of online learning, school turnarounds, Race to the Top, and the Investing in Innovation Fund, there is room for leaders who are able to lever change by creating and expanding organizations of all kinds. Turning these opportunities into results requires people able to create and lead new, high-quality ventures.

With the proliferation of teacher residency and principal leadership programs, education has seen many efforts to recruit, develop, and retain quality teachers and administrators in recent years. However, there are fewer organizations aimed at developing leaders to direct reform initiatives outside the classroom or the schoolhouse. TFA is one among a small cadre of organizations that currently includes New Leaders for New Schools, Education Pioneers, and Teach Plus. TFA is particularly notable for its efforts on this score, as it engages former corps members through “Alumni Summits” and initiatives to advance alumni in positions of leadership as nonprofit board members, public officials, and leaders at the school and classroom level. It also supports alumni through partnerships with graduate schools and employers to help them transition to the next steps in their careers.

Recently, TFA started a new program, the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative, which explicitly promotes innovation and entrepreneurship in the education sector. The program facilitates connections between alumni interested in starting education ventures with established social entrepreneurs. The initiative supports TFA alumni who are applying for fellowships such as Echoing Green and the Mind Trust, provides tools for developing fundraising plans and grant proposals, and publishes a newsletter that includes information about funding opportunities and management strategies.

Today, there is a sizable network of TFA alumni who have become education entrepreneurs. We have already mentioned KIPP Academy cofounders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, who started a single charter school in 1994 that has evolved into one of the most well-known charter organizations in the U.S., with 99 schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia. TFA alum Chris Barbic founded YES Prep Public Schools, which has grown to serve 4,200 students at eight campuses throughout Houston. Sarah Usdin began New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) in 2006, after Hurricane Katrina devastated public schooling in that city. Before heading up the D.C. school system, Michelle Rhee established The New Teacher Project. Accounts sometimes suggest that these individuals are intriguing outliers. Our research suggests that they are evidence of TFA’s success at recruiting and creating change agents.

Research Methods

The methods used in this study mirror those applied in research on entrepreneurial spawning in other sectors, such as biotechnology. We first identified a group of entrepreneurial organizations within the education sector and traced their founders’ and TMT members’ work histories. We then identified organizations that appeared multiple times as previous employers across the sample and, hence, could be considered “spawners” of entrepreneurial leaders.

To create our list of entrepreneurial education organizations, we limited our search to nonprofit and for-profit organizations that were founded after 1989, TFA’s inaugural year; that focused on domestic, K–12 public education reform; and that could be considered nationally prominent. We drew on three distinct sources to identify organizations for our sample. The first was an electronic survey of 14 widely recognized experts in public school innovation. We asked participants, “From your perspective, what are the top 15 U.S. entrepreneurial education organizations that have emerged in the sector since 1989?” All 14 participants responded, and we identified 16 organizations that more than one respondent identified as a top organization. Next, we identified organizations supported by a donor clearinghouse of venture philanthropies and foundations whose mission is to support social entrepreneurship in K–12 public education across the nation. Finally, we conducted publication searches in popular and academic media using Lexis Nexus and Google Scholar. The searches were conducted in November 2009 and used the following search terms: Education, Entrepreneur*, Organization, and K–12.

These methods yielded a comprehensive list of 49 organizations; many are charter management organizations, some recruit and/or train human capital, and others offer supplemental resources to the public education sector, such as software technologies for data management and assessment or afterschool programs (see sidebar).

We then constructed a database of the work histories of the 49 organizations’ leadership members, comprising 71 founders and cofounders and 320 TMT members. We make the distinction between founders and other management team members in the event that there are noteworthy differences between those who start organizations and those hired to manage daily functioning, growth, and stability. Often, the organizations in our sample publicly listed the founders and members of the management team, along with their work and educational histories. When these data were ambiguous or not publicly available, we called the organizations to request the information.

We term the organizations that appear in founders’ and TMT members’ work histories “originating organizations.” To ascertain which originating organizations were the most prolific spawners of entrepreneurs, we identified those that had at one time employed a founding member of at least 2 of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations in our sample.

Entrepreneurship and TFA

Of all the originating organizations that appeared in work histories, TFA appeared the most frequently. Let’s look first at the 71 founders or cofounders of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations. TFA appeared in the work history of at least one founder of seven of these organizations, or about 15 percent. The next most-represented originating organizations—the San Francisco Public Schools, Newark Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, AmeriCorps, the White House Fellows program, McKinsey & Company, and the United States Department of Education—each appeared in the work history of a founder of two (or about 4 percent) of these organizations. In other words, the drop-off from TFA to these other large and/or esteemed organizations is stark indeed.

To get a sense of whether TFA’s outsized success is simply the result of its size or TFA is indeed punching “above its weight,” it’s worth noting the comparative size of these various ventures. TFA is today an organization with almost 10,000 employees, including 8,200 current corps members. But TFA’s size a decade ago was only about one-quarter of what it is today, meaning that the alumni pipeline is much thinner than its current size suggests. TFA estimates that it has produced more than 20,000 alumni. TFA is clearly smaller than organizations like the Chicago Public Schools, with around 41,000 employees, and McKinsey, with some 17,000 employees. TFA is dwarfed by the approximately 75,000 current AmeriCorps members and some 500,000 alumni (some AmeriCorps volunteers are also TFA corps members), but is far larger than the White House Fellows program, with 13 current fellows and some 600 alumni. In short, TFA has fared impressively for its relative size.

While many founders have participated in TFA, there is little evidence of their having had other work or internship experiences in common. One reason for this homogeneity may be that approximately 23 percent of the founders had only one job prior to starting their own venture. A lack of experience created fewer opportunities to build professional networks, making the large number of TFA alumni among founders all the more salient.

TFA stands out in the work histories of the TMT members at the 49 organizations on our list as well (see Figure 1). Fourteen of the 49 entrepreneurial organizations had at least one TMT member who was once a TFA corps member or employee, and 10 of these organizations had at least one member who had been a TFA corps member and worked for TFA national. Compare this to the next three highest-ranked originating organizations: 10 entrepreneurial organizations had at least one TMT member who had been employed by the New York City Public Schools, nine entrepreneurial organizations employed KIPP alumni, and the work histories of seven entrepreneurial organizations’ TMT members included Andersen Consulting.

A Look at the Spawners

Only two of the originating organizations that spawned at least two founders, the White House Fellows program and McKinsey & Company, operate outside the public education sector. McKinsey, a management consulting firm, is the only private institution on the list. When it came to spawning TMT members, McKinsey was joined by its consulting brethren Andersen and Deloitte. For TMT members, consulting was a common professional experience with about 10 percent of all TMT members having this practice in their backgrounds.

It is interesting to consider why experience in the consulting industry is not unusual in the career histories of TMT members. Members of top management teams, including chief finance officers, chief operating officers, and even those leading growth and marketing divisions, face complex challenges. Consultants are commonly hired to solve problems in these functional units in both the private and public sectors. Perhaps their skills translate well in the entrepreneurial world. Former consultants may be particularly adept at addressing tough management issues in entrepreneurial organizations in the education sector, where challenges arise both internally and externally, due to the complicated political and financial dynamics of meeting public education needs in the U.S. There may be certain functional roles on TMTs for which having a consulting background prepares leaders particularly well.

Additionally, consulting firms such as McKinsey are increasingly offering their services in the education sector. For example, McKinsey’s Social Sector Office supports an education practice that focuses on systems strategy and transformation, talent and performance management, administration and operations, and institutional strategy and innovations. Teams in McKinsey’s education practice regularly publish reports on the education sector, including a recent analysis of the economic impact of the achievement gap and strategies for attracting top undergraduates to and retaining them in the teaching profession. Such work may be exposing their employees to the overwhelming need in the education sector for solutions to challenging problems. That exposure, coupled with entrepreneurial aspects of the organizational culture, employee selection criteria, or institutional relationships may create an environment similar to TFA. Again, we cannot be sure at this stage what factors may be at play, but it is certainly an intriguing finding.

Another leading spawner of team members is KIPP. Nine organizations in the sample had at least one TMT member who had worked for KIPP’s national office or in a KIPP school. Given that KIPP was started by two TFA alumni, maintains close ties with TFA, and recruits many of its teachers from the TFA ranks, it is no surprise that five organizations in the sample had TMT members who had previously worked both for TFA and for KIPP.

Several school districts were also among the organizations that showed up most often in TMT members’ work histories. New York City appeared most often. Other districts were Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles.

Looking across all the spawning organizations, one returns to the question of why, given the many sources feeding into the education talent pipeline, TFA seems so prolific. It seems clear that explanatory factors include the criteria by which TFA recruits, the organization’s strong and purposive culture, the skills that corps members develop, and the opportunities provided to alumni. Just to take one example, by providing talented young college grads with classroom experience, TFA confers upon them a degree of credibility that opens doors that might open less readily for others. Sorting out the relevant import of these elements is far beyond the scope of our current effort, but it is an exercise well worth pursuing for those reformers eager to identify, emulate, and amplify TFA’s successes.

TFA’s Influence

Is there cause to suspect that there are any systematic differences between those education entrepreneurs who are TFA alumni and those who are not? Given their classroom experience, for instance, are TFA alumni more likely to wind up in instructional or curricular roles than are TMT members who are not TFA alumni?

To investigate this possibility, we looked at the 30 TFA alumni who are TMT members at organizations in our sample and identified the specific nature of their jobs. As seen in Figure 2, less than one-third of these TFA alumni are in administrative positions like operations or finance. Most are involved in human resources, such as hiring and training teachers or other support staff; academic affairs, such as developing curriculum for instructional programs or schools; or working to develop new schools or expand existing ones. This first cut suggests that entrepreneurial TFA alumni disproportionately take on roles more closely related to instruction and staffing. As mentioned earlier, it is not uncommon for TMT members in operations and finance to have consulting experience in their professional backgrounds.

Looking Ahead

The findings presented here on the leadership pipeline signal many avenues for productive future inquiry. First, TFA specifically sets out to recruit individuals with leadership potential. As TFA explains, it seeks college graduates who have demonstrated “past leadership and achievement…perseverance and sustained focus in the face of challenges, strong critical thinking skills…[an ability to generate] relevant solutions to problems, superior organizational ability…and superior interpersonal skills to motivate and lead others.” The TFA selection process consists of an online application, a phone interview, and a final interview, which includes multiple individual and group activities, plus a personal interview. Sorting out the impact of TFA acculturation and training from its success as a talent identifier will require additional research that examines the alumni’s career expectations and decisions over time, with an eye to their experiences during and after their corps engagement with TFA.

Second, we found that certain of TFA’s geographic regions appeared more likely to generate entrepreneurial behavior. TFA corps members with work experience in New York City and San Francisco seemed especially likely to become top managers in entrepreneurial organizations in education. Perhaps there is something distinctive about the TFA experience in these locales. Maybe, and more likely, there was something about the place at that particular time that worked in concert with the TFA experience to produce entrepreneurial leaders in a particularly effective way.

In the 1990s, when many of the entrepreneurial organizations in our list were being founded, San Francisco, and the Silicon Valley more generally, was a hotbed of entrepreneurial behavior, which included unprecedented levels of capital funding for those wanting to start their own ventures. At the same time, New York City, with its similar culture of entrepreneurialism and capital funding activity, was going through a period of political and educational reform that would lead to the era of mayoral control. This period of fl ux created opportunities for new organizations and programs to enter the education market. The combination of an entrepreneurial culture, access to funding, and openings within the education market may have made these cities particularly conducive to TFA’s mission of creating entrepreneurial leaders; indeed, the two cities were among the first to bring TFA teachers into their schools. Therefore, it may be useful to think about the TFA experience more expansively and with an eye to its place within a larger context of reform and opportunity.

Third, working for TFA at the national level appears to be a more common experience for those who end up working for an entrepreneurial organization, rather than founding one; TFA members who were founders of organizations were more likely to have been TFA corps members. This suggests that different TFA experiences may equip alumni for different roles. It raises a variety of important questions, most notably, what it is about the TFA experience that imparts to individuals the skills and desire to tackle certain challenges.

Certain kinds of organizations, such as TFA and KIPP, and professions like consulting may be especially conducive to producing educational entrepreneurs. It is worth asking whether there are particular jobs, roles, or work environments that contribute to the cultivation of entrepreneurial behavior.

Finally, our research suggests the value of rethinking how TFA and its alumni have been studied in education and also how we think about retention. Rather than assume that it is good or bad when TFA members leave classrooms or school systems, we focused on the role that TFA alumni may play in launching entrepreneurial ventures. While TFA members may not be retained as teachers, the findings suggest they may still have an impact in education, perhaps an outsized impact.

Another intriguing question is how to weigh the impact of a single Mike Feinberg, Mike Johnston, or Michelle Rhee. Is their impact equal to that of having 100 teachers stay another year? Of 1,000 teachers staying another five years? Is it worth having thousands frequently depart classrooms if it increases the likelihood that a single game-changing entrepreneur—a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates—will emerge? Conventional debates about retention and TFA teacher effects may start to seem trivial when we compare the potentially enormous impact of a few such individuals.

Monica Higgins is professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Career Imprints: Creating Leaders Across an Industry. Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and author or editor of several books, including Education Unbound and Educational Entrepreneurship. Jennie Weiner and Wendy Robison are doctoral students in Education Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Education Next talks with Richard A. Epstein, Daniel Pianko, Jon Schnur, and Joshua Wyner

For a decade, at least since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the nation’s foremost education goal has been to erase achievement “gaps” in which African American, Latino, and low-income students dramatically lag behind their peers. This emphasis has enjoyed broad support through the Bush and Obama administrations, and from major funders, but it raises the question of whether high achievers and gifted students have been overlooked along the way. Has a focus on reading and math proficiency, and on boosting graduation rates, meant less attention and support for the “talented tenth”? Richard A. Epstein, professor of law at New York University School of Law and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, and Daniel Pianko, a partner at University Ventures Fund, argue that high achievers have paid a high price for our attention to struggling students. Jon Schnur, chairman of the board of New Leaders for New Schools, and Joshua Wyner, of the Aspen Institute, see no tension, and argue that equity-focused efforts to improve teaching and learning benefit students across the board.

Education Next: Is the education of the most able students in the United States being shortchanged? What evidence would you cite to support your position?

Jon Schnur and Joshua Wyner: Too many of our students at every achievement level are being shortchanged. Based solely on their race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, there are students at high, middle, and low levels of achievement who are not receiving the educational challenges they need to succeed and excel. While we have a growing and important number of small-scale breakthrough successes in American education, recently announced Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results and other analyses show that we have performance gaps for our students at all levels of achievement relative to their peers internationally.

According to the 2009 PISA results, the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 25th in math, and 17th in science among the 34 OECD (Organisation for Economic

Co-operation and Development) countries. When we unpack these data, we see that U.S. students perform well below the standard of readiness for college and/or careers, regardless of where they fall on the achievement continuum.

Meanwhile, within the United States, modest advances in the number of students achieving proficiency have not been accompanied by similar increases in the number of students from all backgrounds achieving at advanced levels. In a 2008 study, Tom Loveless found that from 2000 to 2007 our nation’s highest-performing 10 percent of students made much smaller gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) than our lowest-achieving 10 percent. A similar trend existed in some grades and subjects during the prior decade (see Figure 1). We need to make dramatically greater progress to help more students reach and remain at the highest level of achievement.

While race- and income-based gaps are narrowing to some extent (especially in the earlier grades), four common but faulty assumptions could block progress toward closing these and other serious achievement gaps:

First, while most American schools will have to improve for our nation to reach internationally competitive education levels, many Americans assume that performance gaps exist only in someone else’s community or schools.  In a 2010 PDK/Gallup poll, only 18 percent of Americans surveyed graded our public schools nationally at an “A” or “B.”  By contrast, 77 percent of public school parents gave their oldest child’s school an A or B, a percentage that grew by eight points over the prior five years. To offset such misperceptions, we need to require that all schools in all districts report student performance—and calculate achievement gaps—using the same, internationally benchmarked standards.

Second, some mistakenly assume that a “talented tenth” strategy should focus on the schools and communities that already tend to achieve at the highest levels. The 2008 Achievement Trap study (Jack Kent Cooke Foundation) shows that low-income

students are less likely than other students to reach or remain at advanced levels of education at every grade. Access to rigorous coursework is unevenly distributed across American high schools, as shown by national audits of AP classes conducted by the College Board. And recent reports show that the fastest-growing gap between black and white students is at advanced levels of achievement. This is not surprising in some ways, given problems in current educational practice: we tend to provide less funding, have fewer outstanding teachers and principals, and require less rigorous coursework in schools that serve lower-income students. Not only is this grossly unfair, but our nation’s economic competitiveness, given both the larger populations of countries like China and India and our rapidly increasing diversity, will depend on our tapping students from all backgrounds in order to supply the innovators, engineers, and leaders we need to succeed.

The promising news is that we know the potential to achieve at the most advanced levels is distributed widely. The growin

g number of schools successfully serving low-income students provides hard evidence that when these students have access to an excellent education they can reach levels achieved by their affluent peers. When schools and systems aim to improve what matters most, the entire culture and practice in a school building can change. Such schools hold expectations high and ensure teacher and school-leader excellence and effectiveness.

A poorly conceived “talented tenth” initiative risks failing to capitalize on the potential of students of all backgrounds to achieve at the highest levels. To avoid that outcome, we need to dramatically increase the number of high-performing schools serving low-income students.

Third, some assume that students already achieving at the highest levels will be successful without additional educational interventions and progress. But studies show that many students at the most advanced levels don’t stay at that level without intensive work. Moreover, the stagnation of performance among America’s most-advanced students shows the consequences of failing to meet their educational needs.

Finally, some falsely assume that the question is how we split up the existing pie of educational focus. Changing entire systems of education is the best strategy for improving overall performance and increasing the performance of advanced students, while also closing achievement gaps. A 2010 study by Richard Freeman and colleagues shows that countries that perform best on TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) not only have a higher average score, but also have 1) less variation in performance and 2) smaller achievement gaps between different demographic groups. McKinsey & Co.’s most recent education report on how the best school systems improve cites evidence from Singapore, Finland, and elsewhere that improving overall performance can best be accomplished at the same time achievement gaps are closed.

Richard Epstein and Daniel Pianko: Enormous sums of money have been poured into grades K through 12 since 1970. Measured in constant 2007 dollars, the expenditure per pupil in the United States more than doubled, from $4,060 in 1970 to $9,266 in 2008. Over that same period, achievement levels for students at age nine showed a moderate increase. Achievement levels for those aged 17 have been dead-level since 1990 (see Figure 2). A stagnant educational record in the face of massive increases in expenditures means that the current system has the unique distinction of failing both its strongest and its weakest students.

As Hanushek, Peterson, and Woessmann have shown, our best and brightest have been treading water, while other countries have caught up with or passed the United States. The most recent PISA results place the United States 31st of 56 participating countries in the percentage of students achieving at an advanced level in mathematics (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011). These weak numbers complicate the challenge posed by Schnur and Wyner. Unfortunately, not every student can benefit from advanced education, and it could well be that the best way to increase performance is to reduce the number of students included in these programs while continuing to focus on bringing all students to international standards. It is most difficult to broaden a base and increase average quality at the same time.

Indeed, within the current milieu, one major drawback is that our most able students are not so much “shortchanged” as they are ignored. One telling sign is that the federal government does not impose minimum standards for gifted education, even though the No Child Left Behind law imposes all sorts of mandates to bring up the bottom. Nor does the federal government allocate dollars to gifted education. The one program of note, the Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act, has a long title, but its total expenditures were $7.5 million for 2008 out of the roughly $40 billion of allocated federal funds, a drop in the proverbial bucket in a nation where 6 percent of all students, some 3 million, are classified as gifted.

The situation at the state level is so erratic as to be schizophrenic. Illinois, for example, has one statewide test to identify the top math and science students and bring them together in one school. But most states do not allocate any funds specifically for gifted and talented students. New York City runs an extensive system for gifted and talented students, but the special appropriations at the state level are exactly $0. States are hard-strapped for cash, so there is little reason to think that these policies will be reversed with time.

State political leaders realize it is easier to ignore the needs of high-performing students. Tracking students into high-performing schools touches a third rail of racial politics. Unfortunately, it is likely that Caucasian and Asian students would disproportionately obtain places in these elite schools, which in the eyes of some would only widen the achievement gap. While the revolt against tracking students has had limited impact on those needing additional help, our nation has lost out on the long-term gains that gifted students could supply.

EN: In the past two decades, education policy has emphasized closing the achievement gap between low performers and high performers by raising the achievement of the low performers. Have the most-talented students paid a price for this focus?

Epstein & Pianko: Addressing the plight of students who are left behind is a noble, important goal. But the two goals of educating all Americans and providing the talented tenth with the specialized instruction they need do not have to be mutually exclusive. The Holy Grail of educators for the past 20-plus years has been to find ways for students of different abilities and aptitudes to learn at different paces in the same classroom. Educators have developed remarkably effective methods for achieving this goal for the early grades. However, this paradigm starts to break down by the time students reach middle school. The challenges become insuperable by the time students reach high school. The difference between those students capable of doing calculus and those who are barely ready for geometry, is too dramatic for even the ablest teachers to span in one classroom. Either there is separate education, with whatever perceived stigma it might have, or students at both ends of the spectrum will languish.

The real issue is a perception that a focus on gifted programs must automatically detract from children who are not achieving at grade level. To the contrary, the Loveless study cited above offers some support for the proposition that high performers suffer systematically from the focus on closing the achievement gap, while there is limited data that grouping all students together improves the quality of education for struggling students. No Child Left Behind only aggravates the problem because it is directed solely at keeping students and the schools that they attend above some failure line. A 10 percent improvement in the performance of gifted students counts for naught if a tiny fall in the performance of the weakest students puts the school out of compliance with federal standards. As elsewhere in life, you get what you measure and pay for. Policymakers expend virtually all dollars to cluster students above some pass-fail line, not for excellence at the top.

Schnur & Wyner: The answer to both parts of this question is no.

Policies over the past decade have neither substantially harmed nor significantly helped the achievement of our highest-performing students. While we haven’t seen substantial gains for students at advanced levels, there is no evidence to suggest that there have been overall declines, either. Still, we can’t afford stagnation of performance for any of our students.

EN: What policies would you support to ensure America’s future competitiveness and prosperity? Should we target our limited resources to boost literacy and numeracy in the general population or invest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and other programs aimed at the “talented tenth”?

Schnur & Wyner: As we argue above, the evidence shows this is a false choice. The data from countries around the world refute the fundamental assumption that we can only do one or the other. The highest-performing countries in the world not only have the highest raw achievement scores, but also the smallest achievement gaps between subgroups within their population. High-functioning education systems that pay attention to the needs of individual students serve all children well. Therefore, it is not a decision about how to target scarce resources to one specific subgroup at the expense of another.

Ultimately, America’s competitive advantage rests on a public education system that pushes beyond the limits of the “talented tenth” paradigm and fully develops the human capital of far more of our students. After all, if we can only rely on our top 10 percent to drive our economy, we’re on a losing path, since China and India are already fielding competitive teams of far greater size.

That’s why we need an education agenda that strategically recruits, retains, and rewards the most effective teachers and principals; that builds incredibly high standards; that develops rigorous and useful assessments to measure progress against those standards; that builds data systems that allow teachers, principals, students, and parents to quickly and conveniently access those data for everyday use; and that focuses on dramatic intervention within our country’s lowest-performing schools. We need an accountability system that holds schools and school systems accountable for all of their students, including the lowest- and highest-achieving.

This comprehensive approach offers the best chance to improve outcomes for every student, from our “talented tenth” to students languishing grade levels behind. It guarantees that we have a system that attracts the best talent to support success, sets clear goals, measures progress toward those goals, gives educators information they can use to improve student outcomes, and demands dramatic action in the face of persistent failure. A few specific policies can help foster this reality:

Raise K–12 standards to assess and drive readiness for success in college and careers. Improve the rigor of what students are taught and build better tools for assessing what they have learned. Tremendous recent progress has been made through adoption of the Common Core by 44 states and the nascent plans of multistate consortia to create better tests of student work that align with the Common Core.

Increase access to the most rigorous courses. Ensure that every high school offers high-quality AP classes in core subjects and that districts prepare students of every racial and socioeconomic group in earlier grades to succeed in AP.

Set targets for advanced learning and measure student growth toward them. Continue the state-by-state efforts to measure the growth of every student. Assiduously collect and report the numbers of advanced learners as well as gaps between subgroups, and hold educators accountable for ensuring that gaps are closed at every level of achievement, including advanced. At the same time, we can’t allow for definitions of academic growth and achievement to focus too narrowly on exams (the approach embodied by NCLB). Instead, we know that students learn, think, operationalize, and develop differently—they all have the potential to serve as our next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, and scientists.

Adopting these policies can contribute to a culture in which we have high aspirations for every student, hold great expectations for every teacher, and no longer abide the notion that our nation must choose between excellence and equity. In the end, only if we reform our schools at scale to improve teaching practice will we succeed. By driving every education practice toward excellent outcomes for every child, intentionally moving each student from where they are to a much higher level, our nation will be able to realize its ideal of eliminating gaps in education and opportunity and, thereby, regain its place among the world’s education leaders.

Epstein & Pianko: It is a national economic imperative that the United States maintain its (fast-eroding) advantage in innovation, which comes from the talented tenth. There is a tremendous body of research that shows that innovation, which sparks new industries and job creation, originates from the minds of a few. Since we fail to focus attention on increasing the aggregate number of Americans capable of achieving radical innovation or starting new entrepreneurial endeavors, we have likely sacrificed any number of start-ups that could have led to a Fortune 500 company or the next Facebook.

Figuring out how to do this is of course the hardest problem. Schnur and Wyner point to the role of increased standards through the Common Core and the success of certain high-performing schools. The Common Core, even assuming the most robust application, sets a baseline that by definition our future Facebook founders must exceed by orders of magnitude. We agree wholeheartedly that the standards for all students must be raised dramatically, but the opportunities for our highest-achieving students must include coursework that is radically beyond the Common Core.

Fundamentally, we do not accept that this is an “either/or” debate about whether to prioritize low- or high-performing students. We believe that there is a “both/and” solution that drives achievement for all students. All students would benefit from allowing self-directed, advanced learners to take some portion of their coursework online and/or at their own pace. Technology has opened up a remarkably cheap and efficient methodology for providing individually tailored instruction. State and federal policymakers must move decisively to create online programs to expand learning options for all students, including the talented tenth (see “Virtual Schoolteacher,” school life). States and/or the federal government could identify best practices for online skill assessments that all students could take at key break points in their school careers (e.g., 6th grade or 9th grade). Students who score well on such an exam could 1) complete lower-level coursework by learning online at their own pace so they can advance more quickly to higher-level coursework and 2) take advantage of a national network of advanced coursework.

Ideally, students would proceed online at their own pace and have access to in-person teacher assistance as needed. New York City, through its School of One and iZone/iLearn programs, is piloting such a strategy right now. Policymakers should encourage (or push) districts to create similar options for their students by tying Title I and other federal aid programs to initiatives that promote online learning for the most talented students and that also provide physical locations for these students to do their advanced group work. For example, each intermediate unit or district of more than 50,000 students might be required to create math and science academies, which offer a portion of their instruction online, with in-person practical application or advanced work. Allowing students to continue in regular schools for some courses while doing advanced work in others (see “High Schoolers in College,” features) may well be the best solution.