Technology Can Supercharge School Improvement

It has become a truism to say that schools are the only sector that citizens of 2013 could visit that would look like they did 150 years ago, when fewer students graduated from high school or college.  Yet today society needs more students to learn more and progress farther. As a sector, education has been a laggard in adopting technology to support teaching and learning.

I founded LearnLaunch to encourage entrepreneurs and educators in New England to create and adopt a new generation of software tools which will supercharge teachers’ efforts to personalize learning for each child…. Tools that will bring the digital world into the classroom to solve persistent issues of K-12 outcomes, college persistence and college affordability.   Tools to engage students, save teachers and counselors time and improve their effectiveness.   And to do that as a community.

It has been 30 years since “A Nation at Risk” and the birth of the standards-based education reform movement.  Massachusetts, an early adopter with our Ed Reform Act of 1993, developed by MBAE, was a leader in adopting the tools of this movement, and reaped the benefits as our school leaders, teachers and students reached for the highest standards in the land.  The Commonwealth benefited, moving into first place in the land, as measured by scores on the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress).

There is certainly more work to be done to improve Massachusetts public education to close achievement gaps and to ensure that all students are college and career ready.  Charter schools pioneered the approach of urban schools with high expectations, more learning time, principal selected teams and parent engagement, and more district schools are adopting these approaches, especially with regard to school improvement in the bottom quartile of schools.  Based on research on the importance of individual teachers, there is a focus on “increasing teacher capacity” (professional development),   and changes to the recruitment and preparation of teachers.  System wide changes include parent choice among a district “portfolio” of schools and student weighted funding to ensure more resources go to the neediest students.

These efforts can be supercharged by software tools, many of them developed by companies right here in Massachusetts.  Is your goal to have all children read by third grade?  Have you looked at Lexia Learning of Concord, MA?   Care about hands-on science education?  Do you know about the Concord Consortium?   Ten Marks improves math instruction.  Elevation Education supports English Language learners.   Besides the growth companies mentioned above, there are over 150 Ed tech startups reaching out to parents, teachers and schools here in Massachusetts.

In Silicon Valley, philanthropists are funding the creation of “blended learning” schools, which seek to find the appropriate mix of teacher talent, support staff and software to deliver great personalized learning to students at an affordable cost.  Some are experimenting with competency- based models, in which students progress at their own pace, rather than as freshman, sophomores, juniors and seniors.

Our goal is to bring the educator, industry and entrepreneur community together to move this conversation, and change, forward.  Indeed, 450 joined us in the conversation at the LearnLaunch “Across Boundaries:  Innovation and the Future of Education” conference at MIT.    Check us out!   www.learnlaunch.org.  We provide monthly meetups, biweekly classes and bi-annual conferences to education innovators, and have launched an accelerator program, LearnLaunchX, for the most promising.

 Eileen Rudden, a member of the board of MBAE, is a 25-year software veteran and the cofounder of LearnLaunch and LearnLaunchX, an Ed tech accelerator.