Education Week - October 24, 2012 - Special Report - S6

EVALUATING WHAT WORKS: DISTRICT MODELS

ONLINE OPENS REAL-WORLD DOORS
Virtual courses give Grand Rapids students time for internships and on-site experiences BY IAN QUILLEN

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S6

or many schools, mixing online courses with face-to-face learning is primarily a method for serving struggling or advanced students while keeping them inside school walls. But for several hundred high school students in the Grand Rapids, Mich., school district, blended learning is the key that unlocks the door to the real world. In 2008, the district launched the first of five Centers of Innovation, one at each of the 17,000-student district’s high schools. They are designed to give students a pathway to in-school internships and fellowships that could eventually lead to careers. Two of the centers now use online courses from e2020, a provider located in Scottsdale, Ariz., for students’ core academic subjects. “The overwhelming factor [in building a blended program] was the flexibility of being able to pull [students] out of class” for internships or college coursework, said Misty Stallworth, the assistant principal of the Academy for Design and Construction, one of those two centers. The academy serves roughly 120 students in a small wing of the much larger Union High School. “We have a lot of students who just crave the flexibility of being able to work on what they want and when they want,”

Ms. Stallworth added. The blended models within the Academy for Design and Construction and the School of Business, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship, housed within the district’s Ottawa Hills High School, were not a result of a district emphasis on online learning when the district launched the initiative, however. And the district’s first Center of Innovation, Grand Rapids University Preparatory Academy at the district’s University Prep High School, was created in response to a group of local businesses that originally wanted to open a charter school with the aim of arming students with the skills needed to succeed in four-year colleges. “A charter gets into many different areas of a system we hadn’t explored yet, including teachers’ unions,” said Mary Jo Kuhlman, the district’s executive director for organizational learning, when explaining why the district resisted the charter proposition in favor of school-based innovation centers. “We really wanted to be collaborative.”

ONLINE STUDY SCHEDULES
So instead of stopping at the creation of one center, the Grand Rapids district used the momentum from University Prep to

Melissa Gorman, a special education teacher at the Academy for Design and Construction at Union High School in Grand Rapids, Mich., works with Delvonte Jackson-Stewart, an 11th grader, in his blended learning class. The course takes place in the school’s computer lab with a 1-to-8 adult-to-student ratio.

RESULTS
While the Grand Rapids school district reports that students in its Centers of Innovation are, on average, getting better grades than students not in the program, it’s difficult to gain more isolated data on the results of the blended programs at the Academy of Design and Construction and the School of Business, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship. Neither host school—Union High School nor Ottawa Hills High School—made adequate yearly progress, or AYP in 2012, according to reports , released in August and available on the district’s website. Both schools, though, showed doubledigit percentage-point gains in the number of students meeting or exceeding their growth targets on the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP assessments in reading. Both schools have , shown marginal increases in student retention since the centers were launched in 2008.
SOURCE: Grand Rapids Public Schools

Both schools showed gains in students hitting growth targets in math and reading by a minimum of 5 percentage points, as measured by MAP assessments.

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EDUCATION WEEK: EVALUATING WHAT WORKS IN BLENDED LEARNING > www.edweek.org/go/elearning-blended

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OCTOBER 24, 2012
http://www.edweek.org/go/elearning-blended
Education Week - October 24, 2012 - Special Report

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