Education Week - March 5, 2014 - Leaders to Learn From - S16

technologies with high potential
for transforming classrooms toward
more personalized, studentcentered
models.
His group works within the
iZone, a community of nearly 300
public schools in the city committed
to personalizing their learning
environments to accelerate college
and career readiness for students.
But he's also reaching out to software
developers and connecting
them with the problems the city
wants to solve-from below-gradelevel
mathematics performance for
60 percent of 6th graders, to helping
students and parents wade
through the often-overwhelming
high school choice process.
Mr. Hodas, 53, is chipping away
at the monolithic procurement system
in New York City by directly
connecting developers with the end
users who need help solving their
problems. His main tool thus far
has been introducing competitions
in which small and midsize companies
are invited to tackle challenges
faced by educators, students, or
parents in the school system. The
winners receive cash prizes and the
chance to pilot their technology in
the innovative schools with educators.
In a way, Mr. Hodas hopes
to bridge what he calls "the moat"
between the needs of the school
system's 1.1 million students and
135,000 employees and the hundreds
of companies that would like
to provide programs and products
to meet those needs.
The Gap App Challenge was the
first of the district's competitions
to benefit the iZone, and eventually
other schools in the district.
Through that challenge in 2013,
200 software developers submitted
ed-tech strategies to address
the performance lag in middle
school math. Educators from the
city's public schools were on the
panel of judges. Winners shared
more than $100,000 in prizes
and the chance to be considered
for school-based pilots. Today,
software-development teams are
working with students and educators
in 50 schools and "improving
how [each] product works and
the way teaching works with that
product," Mr. Hodas said.
Toward an 'Ecosystem'
The partnership derails the
typically adversarial procurement
process, where "what's good for
me is bad for you," Mr. Hodas said.
"Part of the goal [of the challenge]
is to make developers smarter."
Instead of a zero-sum game, he
is dedicated to an "ecosystem" in
which partners learn, grow, and
benefit as much as possible.
Following the math challenge,
the iZone set up a one-day Music
Education Hackathon that produced
40 music education tools,
and then a School Choice Design
Challenge, in which six teams produced
technology that could eventually
help 80,000 8th graders
and their families find and choose
a high school from among more
than 700 program options.
Each of the challenges began
with defining the problem by the
people who grapple with it every
day.
"When we talked to middle
school math teachers and curriculum
coaches, we asked, 'What's the
problem with middle school math?'
Nobody said, 'fractions' or 'percentages,'"
Mr. Hodas said. What
makes teaching middle school
math so difficult is the wide range
of abilities within a given class,
and the gap in proficiency, he said.
Mr. Hodas is the first to say
that he did not invent this sort of
"user-centered design," but he can
be credited with applying the approach
to New York City's schools.
Instead of creating a specification,
as is typically done in procurement,
the "problem statement" becomes
the rallying point for creative solutions.
For the music "hackathon,"
developers were asked to provide
solutions for music teachers that
would help students better understand
the technicalities of volume
and pitch, encourage students' collaboration
and practice, track progress,
and give educators a new way
to work with parents.
"Steven is about 10 years ahead
of where everybody else is in his
thinking about how the iZone can
scale innovation to a large number
of schools," said Sara A. Schapiro,
the director of the Digital Promise
League of Innovative Schools, a national
coalition of 40 school districts
and education agencies committed
to demonstrating, evaluating, and
scaling up innovations to find better
results for students. New York
City's iZone is a member.
By initiating an open call to developers
to bring their ideas to
schools, New York City has been
able to identify technology solutions
that would not have been discovered
through a traditional requestfor-proposal
process, she said.
Some of the bureaucracy pre-
vents the smaller companies from
doing business in New York City.
They wouldn't have the time or
resources to get a vendor number
there," Ms. Schapiro explained.
"We look to New York City as an
inspiration as we consider how to
move forward in districts around
the country."
Work History
Mr. Hodas' work outside schools
reflects long-running ties to education.
At NASA, he built a website
to connect teachers and students
with scientific resources. He then
created websites for high school
and college students. Ten years
ago, while an executive vice president
at Princeton Review, an
education services company in
Framingham, Mass., Mr. Hodas
presided over the development of
a large-scale formative-assessment
platform for school districts.
"We went from having no business
and no product to having New
York City as our first client," he
said. Working closely with the city's
education department, Mr. Hodas
became intrigued by the institution.
"I was really impressed with
the scale of everything, the dedication
of the people doing the work,"
and how often they couldn't get
their issues and ideas to surface in
a way that could be addressed, he
said.
The fact that Mr. Hodas had
two elementary-age children in
city schools at the time raised the
stakes. The experience "planted the
seed of really wanting to be on the
inside."
He noticed "the moat" after he
began working at other companies,
consulting with accelerators and
incubators, and grew more familiar
with how school districts operate.
"The [district] has all the kids, all
the teachers, all the infrastructure,
the problems, and the money. On
the other side of the moat is this
growing community of small, innovative,
nimble, clever companies
that are desperate to help the district
solve its problems, but because
of the moat, it doesn't happen very
often."
Mr. Hodas fully expects his team's
initiatives and the iZone will begin
to have an impact on the labyrinth
of formal procurement in New York
City schools. "If it doesn't, then
we won't have accomplished very
much," he said. n
In other courses, I use
content to build skills. In
Cambridge Global Perspectives,
I use skills to deepen
understanding of content
CAMBRIDGE GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES TEACHER
Are your students up for a good
argument? We certainly hope so!
Cambridge Global PerspectivesTM
is
an innovative inquiry-based program
which develops Common Core skills
including research, analysis of
sources, argumentation, collaboration
and presentation skills.
It is a fl exible curriculum available
as a one- or two-year program from
sophomore through to senior year
and leads to a globally recognized
assessment.
Find out more about Cambridge Global Perspectives
at www.cambridgegp.org
Ed Wk half page US.indd 1
S16 | LEADERS TO LEARN FROM > leaders.edweek.org
EDUCATION WEEK * March 5, 2014
07/02/2014 13:43
http://www.cambridgegp.org http://www.cambridgegp.org http://leaders.edweek.org
Education Week - March 5, 2014 - Leaders to Learn From

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - March 5, 2014 - Leaders to Learn From
