This past spring, Getting Smart, a Washington-based group committed to helping leaders, schools, and systems ideate, design, and implement innovations for equity, released a report titled Building an Innovation Index. The report was written by Nate McClennen, Getting Smart’s Vice-President for Strategy and Innovation. Nate earned a reputation as a learning leader when he served as Head of Innovation at the Teton Science Schools in Wyoming, a nationally-renowned leader in place-based education.
Nate and I worked together several years ago launching the “School’s Out” team, a group committed to exploring learning opportunities that do not depend on places called schools.
According to McClennen, there are three big ideas contained in the report. Those three big ideas are:
In the United States, schools, districts, and universities find it difficult to innovate within an entrenched and well-established system.
Innovation continues to be a vital element in the educational ecosystem.
What if we reframed the concept of school itself as an education innovation enterprise?
McClennen writes:
“If a true innovation index existed for schools and could be match with student outcome data, each school or district could place itself on a path towards increased innovation for equity. There are pitfalls. Is the field of learning sciences advanced enough to establish critical innovative practices that are known to improve equitable outcomes through a variety of lenses? It will take a concerted effort to build an effective and useful tool to support school innovation.
Given these potential pitfalls, an innovation index could consider the following dimensions. We describe each dimension and propose a measurement system to collect date to build the index within the dimensions. A rubric-based self-assessment effort based on the elements of each dimension could be designed to evaluate around the index or it may manifest as a simple binary checklist with articulated evidence criteria.”
McClennen believes there are three dimensions important to an educational innovation index. They are the context dimension, the learning model dimension, and the school model dimension.
The context dimension focuses on mission and leadership. McClennen describes the context dimension this way, “All innovation initiatives are grounded in a strong, clearly-defined and research based learning model. Schools that focus in this way learn and improve faster and increase collaboration among staff who are all moving in the same direction.”
The learning model dimension includes culture, learning goals and integration, technology enhancements, solid pedagogical practice, impactful assessment strategies, and strong advisories for young learners to exercise their student voice.
McClennen believes the school model dimension starts with professional learning, emphasizing personalized professional learning systems, staffing and compensation models, and scheduling. Facilities and transportation play an important role in the school model dimension, as well as an equitable funding model.
Finally, all of this must be stainable and scalable.
McClennen concludes by writing:
“An Innovation Index, used as an internal improvement tool, could accelerate the redesign process across the nation. Early steps include 1) building a coalition of participating schools, 2) designing shared agreements around the index, dimensions and elements, 3) designing connected tools to collect data, 4) create a central data repository and mapping system, and 5) map a long-term plan to understand the impact of the Innovation Index project.
While not an easy lift, the creation of a K-12 National Innovation Index is an important step to discuss and debate as we collectively build new learning models where every learner gains the knowledge, skills, and agency to both contribute to and thrive within the world.”
The idea of a national education innovation index is an interesting one, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for the traditional school systems to get excited about such a proposal.
We’ve discussed this before. Today’s school systems are conservative places, fearful of trying anything that might sacrifice their incremental test-taking improvements.
It would be nice to think that traditional districts could run schools while working to implement McClennen’s education innovation index. But then that would mean they would have to do two things at one time, and that seems to be too tall of an order these days.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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