Education Week - Sizing Up: Blended Learning - S34

PRIVATE MODELS
OUTSIDE PUBLIC SYSTEM,
BLENDED MODELS TAKE HOLD
By Benjamin Herold
San Francisco
Since becoming one of the first
Roman Catholic elementary schools
in the country to adopt a blended
learning program, Mission Dolores
Academy has boosted enrollment by
16 percent, cut per-pupil operating
costs by one-third, and generated encouraging
academic results.
Now, the 250-student school here
wants to take the next step.
"Figuring out how to get data that
people find reliable and actionable so
that we can adapt our curriculum,"
said Principal Dan Storz, "has become
kind of the Holy Grail."
Most observers agree that Catholic
and other private or independent
schools are several years behind
public schools when it comes to embracing
blended learning. If they
adopt blended programs at all, the
focus tends to be on cutting costs
and expanding course offerings
rather than rethinking how education
is delivered.
But some advance-guard private
and independent schools, like Mission
Dolores, are beginning to leverage
blended learning data to make
strategic schoolwide decisions or
overhaul their school's culture.
Others are looking to technology to
provide students and teachers with
more collaborative, engaging experiences.
Private schools are forming
consortia to share resources and
ideas and encourage the creation of
new blended learning materials.
They're all signs that nonpublic
schools want to be leaders in the nascent
blended learning movement,
said John E. Chubb, president of the
National Association of Independent
Schools,or NAIS, in Washington.
"Our schools want to be producers,
not just consumers, of online content,"
Mr. Chubb said. "They deserve
credit for that level of entrepreneurship,
and I think we'll see more."
According to the National Catholic
Education Association, based in
Arlington, Va., K-12 Catholic school
enrollment has declined from a
peak of 5.2 million students in 1965
to 2 million today. More than 2,000
Catholic schools have either closed
or been consolidated in the past 13
years. NAIS member schools, which
serve 569,000 students, according to
the organization, have also struggled
in recent years, in large part due to
the shaky national economy.
Power Through Data
Hit by those trends, Mission Dolores
merged with a nearby school,
Megan Furth Academy, in 2011. The
school then received a $500,000 grant
from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
to work with a New York Citybased
nonprofit, Seton Education
Partners, to go blended. The goals
were to reduce costs by pushing class
sizes higher and to bolster academic
performance and relevance.
"The two go hand in hand," said Mr.
Storz, the principal. "No matter how
much money blended learning saves,
your cost structure is going to be bad
if you don't have families willing to
pay tuition."
(Education Week receives financial
support from the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation for its coverage of
the education marketplace and innovation
in education. The newspaper
retains sole editorial control over the
content of this coverage.)
Located adjacent to a historic
church in the heart of the gritty
Mission District here, the academy
uses a "classroom rotation" model in
which groups of about 15 students
cycle throughout the day between
classroom computers and time with
their teacher. The program has generated
signs of positive growth in
students' reading levels and math
achievement.
One key has been granting teachers
access to the "back end" of the
software programs Mission Dolores
uses.
"I understand the data now. Before,
I had no clue what [students] were
doing on computers," said Michelle
Escobar, who teaches 7th and 8th
grade reading.
The difference, she said, is that now
she's able to more frequently regroup
her students based on skill level and
more regularly reteach the content or
skills that students struggle to grasp.
Assistant Principal Paul F. Reck-
tenwald said Mission Delores Academy
administrators are trying to
extend that approach by attempting
to analyze school-level data from different
software programs, two sets of
standardized assessments, and more.
Among other things, they hope to
identify gaps in the school's curriculum
and uncover inconsistencies in
teachers' grading. Such sophisticated
data use would put the academy at
the cutting edge of blended learning
programs, regardless of sector.
"We need to synthesize information
to be more strategic," Mr. Recktenwald
said.
Another Seton Education Part-
ners elementary school, the DePaul
Catholic School in Philadelphia,
is using blended learning data to
gauge students' noncognitive skills,
part of an effort to emulate the "no
excuses" culture favored by charter
Every school faces the essential challenge of
preparing students for the
LITERACY
demands of the 21st century
The Degrees of Reading Power®
(DRP®
) is a powerful
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students' reading comprehension abilities.
With this assessment, teachers have actionable data to
scaffold their instruction with the right degree of intensity
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college and career readiness.
Now available as a web-based assessment, DRP Online
provides educators with immediate access to student
performance data and provides new reports that align to
Common Core State Standards.
drp.questarai.com/home
S34 | EDUCATION WEEK: SIZING UP BLENDED LEARNING > www.edweek.org/go/blended-learning JANUARY 29, 2014

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Education Week - Sizing Up: Blended Learning

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