Personalized Learning: So How Are We Doing?

I’ve written about the group Education Reimagined before. ER is a small, but committed, group of folks trying to shift America’s attention from school-centered education to learner-centered education. Probably the best creation ER came up with since its inception was a document titled “Transformational Vision for Education in the United States.” In that publication, ER laid out five elements important to making the shift from school-centered to learner-centered education. Those five elements are: learner agency, socially embedded, personalized/relevant/& contextualized, open-walled, and competency-based.

Recently, ER put out a report that highlighted some of the state policy and conditions identified, and how they might be further leveraged in the context of learner-centered ecosystem design.

According to ER, learner-driven policies that enable learner agency focus on offering credit for learning outside the classroom, learner-directed funding opportunities, part-time enrollment, open enrollment, and self-directed learner designation.

Offering credit outside the classroom is happening now in Colorado, with the Innovative Learning Opportunities Pilot Program, New Hampshire, with Extended Learning Opportunities, Learn Everywhere, and work-based learning, and South Carolina, with their emphasis on work-based learning. The implication here for ecosystem design is that it provides a way for learners to get credit for community-based learning in an ecosystem.

Learn-directed funding directs funding to learners to personalize and access opportunities outside of the classroom. Idaho currently offers a program title Advanced Opportunities, Indiana has the Career Scholarship Account program, and Virginia offers Learning Acceleration Grants.

Alaska, Idaho, and Washington offer part-time enrollment opportunities that allow a nonpublic school learner to be enrolled part-time in public school. Depending on the state policy, this can be applied to homeschooled students.

Arizona, Iowa, and Kansas offer open-enrollment opportunities that enable a learner to have access to public education options outside of their zoned school within their district or across the state, depending on state law.

And Idaho offers self-directed learner designation, which provides flexible learning opportunities to the learner.

State policy changes that generate flexibility for learner-centered design include college and career pathways opportunities in Delaware, Illinois, and North Carolina, credit based on mastery or seat time flexibility in Kentucky, Maine, and Vermont, funding delinked from seat time in Arizona and Utah, innovative learning designs in Colorado, South Carolina, and Texas, public charter schools in Maine and Minnesota, waivers or education savings accounts in Indiana and South Carolina, and personalized or competency-based education in Missouri, South Carolina, and Utah.

Finally, the report highlights state conditions that could contribute to learner-centered ecosystem design: state leaders committed to learner-centered ecosystem design in Kentucky, North Dakota, and Utah; the creation of portraits of a graduate in Nevada, Utah, and South Carolina; learner-centered accountability redesign efforts in Indiana, Kentucky, and Utah; state-level competency frameworks in Idaho, South Carolina, and Utah; technical support for learner-centered design in Arkansas and South Carolina; changing infrastructure in Arizona and California; and offering state-wide virtual learning programs in Georgia, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.

The report focuses on six key takeaways when thinking about learner-centered policy:

1. Given the complex work of learner-centered ecosystem infrastructure invention, it is vital to take a holistic, learner-centered view of the policy landscape to understand and proactively address the interdependencies of existing state-level policies and conditions.
2. The existence of state policies that enable or support learner-centered approaches is not enough; leadership is needed, along with a shared learner-centered vision, the capacity to leverage policy opportunities to support design and implementation, and a political climate in which new approaches are acceptable.
3. There is an emerging trend to watch in which states are transitioning from a top-down design approach to one that is community-driven.
4. There are already a number of states that have made significant system-wide efforts to move away from the conventional paradigm and create space for learner-centered innovation.
5. Clarifying a learner-centered intent in state legislation matters when it comes to creating space for learner-centered invention and connecting policy to practice.
6. Policies and conditions that enable ecosystems to emerge from outside of the current system, but allow them to plug into the public education system and its funding, are important to expanding the potential for the development of learner-centered ecosystem demonstrations.

Policy-makers rarely take a holistic approach to anything. Instead, they are usually short-sighted and worrying about winning their next election. Long-term fixes are rare in any sector, including public education.

Our current colleges of education aren’t interested in developing programs to train a new generation of learner-centered leaders. Instead, most are committed to doing the same things over and over, while expecting different and better results.

Too many states are still in love with top-down change within public education. Community-driven opportunities occur, but only on the periphery of the school improvement movement.

Although there are a number of states making system-wide changes while moving from school-centered to learner-centered education, too many states are still trapped in the school reform strategies of the past 50 years – many of them that have failed kids, especially those who are black, brown, and poor.

Learner-centered intent, when it comes to state legislation, is usually met with resistance – from teachers, from parents, and from policy-makers.

Just like charter schools before them, out of school learning opportunities are being met with too much distrust and criticism for them to ever have a chance at scaling. And, based upon the past 10 years or so, if out of school learning opportunities do scale, they will at a snail’s pace. And that doesn’t help those kids who are suffering inside our current traditional K-12 system.

Til tomorrow. SVB