A new study has found personalized learning is strongly supported by teachers, but often lacks an innovative environment to succeed.
For two years, Betheny Gross and Michael DeArmond at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) studied schools, districts and external organizations that received grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to implement personalized learning in their classrooms.
Two of those districts — Lake and Pinellas Counties — are in Florida.
CRPE researchers surveyed 4,508 teachers, observed classrooms in 39 schools and conducted more than 450 interviews with superintendents, principals, teachers and office staff. (more…)
Betheny Gross
Personalized learning has been lauded as the next major shift in education, with policymakers stating it is the best way to increase student achievement.
However, like with any major shift, there are bumps along the way.
For example, in Lake County, Fla., it was not implemented consistently across the district, prompting school officials to change course.
And education experts state there is not one concrete definition or universal plan for implementing personalized learning.
Betheny Gross, a senior research analyst and research director at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, helped lead a multi-method study of schools implementing personalized learning. We spoke with her about the new learning method. Gross and her team visited more than 40 traditional and charter schools in 17 cities across the country.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Q: What, exactly, is personalized learning?
A: It is obviously a fairly broad concept. It is a strategy and approach to provide a personalized experience. It emphasizes crafting education experiences around student interests and talents. It is the idea that you are tailoring the child’s experiences to what they need to learn and for the talents and interests they possess. (more…)
Center for Reinventing Public EducationThe Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) is an education research and policy analysis think tank at the University of Washington, Bothell. The organization’s research finds statistical support for charter schools and for reforming the way public education is operated and funded.
Back in August, CRPE released a working paper on the impact of charter schools on student achievement. Its meta-analysis of high-quality studies found charters tend to have a small but positive impact on student achievement in math, but no additional impact in reading.
By the end of September, the National Education Policy Center released a review of CRPE’s analysis, calling CRPE’s conclusion “overstated” and “exaggerated” and concluding the report offers “little value for informing policy and practice.” (Readers of this blog may already be familiar with NEPC’s reflexive bias against charter school and school choice studies).
Well, get out your popcorn because CRPE just released a devastating counter-critique. CRPE accuses NEPC of quoting selectively, implying arguments not present, inaccurately presenting the research and several serious technical errors. In total, CRPE counts 26 errors within NEPC’s 9-page analysis.
Yogi Berra once quipped, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially ones about the future.” While true, it doesn’t stop political pundits from attempting to predict the future based on (sometimes unreliable) exit poll data. Following the drubbing Democrats (and the once powerful education unions) received in the mid-terms, many of those pundits began wondering if education choice would lead minorities, especially African Americans, over to the Republican camp.
Just check out some of the speculation (Exhibit 1, Exhibit 2, and Exhibit 3) about how the school choice issue hurt Democrats and helped Republicans (at least in Florida).
But whether Republicans can use education and school choice to win over black voters isn’t the right question. The better, and more important, question is whether the school choice movement can finally win over more Democrats…
