Forbes | October 9, 2020
By Jeanne Allen, Founder and CEO of CER

Panelists take part in a virtual session of the U.S.-Italia Education Innovation Festival. THE CENTER FOR EDUCATION REFORM

While the political cyclone of 2020 continues to suck the air out of the proverbial room, the world of education innovation continues to engage in the all important task of responding to and iterating for the challenges of education worldwide. It’s astounding and inspiring to convene with the best in class entrepreneurs whose work is not only making a difference, but can help you forget the insanity we live in today.

It’s hard to believe, but I had the chance to attend one such convening just last month, in Italy, no less! In full disclosure, the US-Italia Ed Innovation Festival, was the brainchild of my organization.  Our “modest” goal was to create a new education renaissance, so we set out to do so with this unique hybrid event. What’s most remarkable and newsworthy isn’t just that it happened, but that the assembly of on-ground and on-line attendees from throughout the two countries were able to demonstrate the success of new educational synergies to benefit students throughout our globe in this era of Covid-19.  Despite the daily bad news headlines about education and work being upended dramatically by the pandemic, these conversations showed that it’s possible to solve our most pernicious problems with focus, coordination and the right innovations.

As in the US, schools in Italy had to adapt and rely on technology that wasn’t widely available and move fast to get teachers trained. Invalsi’s CEO Roberto Ricci and TAO-Testing’s Marc Oswald worked with the Italian Ministry of Education’s strategies for handling the blow Covid-19 had on schools. They found that many Italian schools that had transitioned from paper to digital a few years ago were able to get back up early on, and recognized that their biggest challenge was the teaching force.

“The age of the teaching population is above 40 years old, if not older,” Oswald points out. “Running a class using digital tools is not something they have learned. This has become one of the biggest challenges.”  With evaluation and real time assessments, they were able to improve teaching and learning even as school was being disrupted.

Technologies used well can not only fill gaps but broaden the horizon of students across the globe. A great example is this virtual reality dive into Herculaneum (Ercolano in Italian) a city once buried under 16 meters of ash and mud during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.   Created by teacher and VR/AR ed tech expert Michael McDonald, students and teachers from around the world “entered” the Ancient City experiencing the excavation of two-story domus homes, along with their internal architecture and décor still intact, featuring wood and marble interiors, jewelry and organic remains like food.

Marco Cappellini, co-founder of Centrica, leads a virtual session at the U.S.-Italia Education Innovation Festival this September in Ercolano, Italy. THE CENTER FOR EDUCATION REFORM

Imagine utilizing such technology to take students from rural North Carolina or East Harlem “to” Ancient Rome to help them learn the history, innovations and science surrounding its rise and fall!  Products using VR, AR and MR can open up pathways for millions, lifting constraints on what the typical physical classroom can do.

Lyman Missimer, a leader at Newsela, which provides digital, standards-aligned instructional content to millions of students said that regardless of where students are, if you are able to establish equity and accessibility you help accomplish the mission of education. Demand for  Newsela’s tools increased dramatically overnight. “What Newsela did, along with many other Edtech companies across the world. was to make products available for free to any school that would want to utilize it for distance learning,” said Missimer. “We also had to work directly with all 2,000 districts that ended up coming to Newsla and for distance learning. Engaging with those districts we learned a lot; the biggest thing was that we needed to be integrated with” all the other tools these districts are using”.

Technology is a tool not only to create efficiencies but transport learning and make our world smaller, according to  K12’s Chair Nate Davis. States, districts and schools once hesitant to engage with online learning were drawn to K12’s ability to deliver both high quality academic and technical education quickly in the face of Covid. “Technology transports learning. It makes our world smaller, it connects us,”  Davis, said. “School does not have to end locally, it can expand.”

Chris Whittle, Chairman and CEO of Whittle School and Studios also argued that school should be a global institution. “A school is a place students learn, but they learn from the environment as much as the curriculum…where they are globally connected, and students are exposed constantly to lessons,” Whittle explains.  “A well-constructed system of schools can do things that a single school cannot.”

That’s evident in the work being done at Academica, where across a large system of schools technology became a powerful tool for teachers, not a replacement.

Managing Director of Academica Virtual Education Antonio Roca described the school network’s approach. “We found ourselves with 200 brick-and-mortar schools in the Fall and wondered how we were going to open those and respect parents’ wishes on returning or not. We built something new –  ‘the classroom of the future’ –  and have installed auto-tracking cameras and large flat-screen TVs that allow teachers to simultaneously teach students remote and live. We think that this is where the future is – combining the two modalities and making it seamless so that students don’t have to miss another day due to covid or traveling – a student can watch their live class, engage, and interact from anywhere with both the teachers and their peers,”

And Academica’s Dual Diploma Program is helping open up endless possibilities to attain knowledge for students across the globe, connecting over 12,000 students from 11 countries with new career opportunities. Program director Richard Collins likened today’s advancements in technology to an important lesson from a famous art critic nearly 100 years ago who noted that just because art was getting printed into books did not mean people were going to stop going to Florence and Milan and Paris to see art.

“That reproduction was supposed to stimulate people to go and see it and learn about it before they go and see it,” Richard says. “We are finding out today how to use our digital tools, which are here to stay, and make it work within a system that has been in the planning, and in the making for centuries.” The innovation of being able to take courses from two countries simultaneously and aligning requirements for credit that allows a dual diploma opens up global pathways that would never before have been possible, without leaving your computer.

Making it possible for exceptional writing instruction to occur, Jamey Heit, Co-Founder and CEO of Ecree, Inc. found that “even before Covid-19, the way the US was teaching [writing] wasn’t working.” The power of technology to help improve access to best in class instruction is no longer tied to a single place. “The reality is that the way the US has been teaching every subject has not worked for the majority of students.” Employers say that effective writing is the foundation for great communication skills. Ecree’s work spurred a discussion among attendees about how access to strong writing support and coaching can and should be global.

It’s about “how do you give people equal opportunity to participate in the future?” says the visionary founder of GSV, Michael Moe.  When things aren’t working and there are so many disparities, it causes cynicism and distrust.  “ The fundamental issue is access to quality education,” but it’s not ubiquitous. So “people are angry and believe the system is rigged and they’re right,” Moe says. We must lift barriers to the future. Said Zanichelli Venture’s Enrico Poli on site in Italy,  “We need to give our students trust in the future and in our education system” across the world.

Enabling educators and workforce leaders to lower the barriers to advancement across oceans and irregardless of today’s physical challenges, the gathering produced renewed hope and resolve in massive global coordination to educate and train future generations for future unforeseen obstacles. Being “in” Italy physically and virtually was just the motivation people needed to renew, precisely the definition of renaissance.

Follow Jeanne on Twitter or LinkedIn or some of her other work here. 

Forbes | October 5, 2020
By Jeanne Allen, Founder and CEO of CER

The increasing lunacy of the political world just got even more crazy, with the news that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio would be cancelling all schools and daycare this week for all students in 9 zip codes throughout some of the neediest communities in Brooklyn and Queens. Concerned with infection rates of over 3% in those large boroughts, de Blasio is once again making a mistake that could be fatal in other ways for more people, by condemning entire blocks of a city without regard for what’s actually going on in that particular block or community.

No wonder the union representing school principals which usually supports the Mayor issued a “no confidence” vote in his leadership late last month, asking the state to take over education for the city for agreeing to let “educators work remotely if they live with family vulnerable to the coronavirus,” despite precautions they’ve taken. While the principals are back and have prepped schools for safety, the Mayor’s agreement undermines parent confidence in schools and the ability of these institutions to do their job.

Indeed the principal’s union showed uncharacteristic independence from the Mayor’s administration by taking this bold step. And they were right to do so. This weekend’s announcement to send all students home again is bone chilling for the people whose livelihoods may have just gotten back to some semblance of normalcy when schools reopened.

“The covid recession was a … depression-like blow for those at the bottom,” reported the Washington Post. “Seven months into the recovery, Black women, Black men and mothers of school-age children are taking the longest time to regain their employment.”

Mothers of school-age children face more employment losses and a slower recovery WASHINGTON POST

Many parents without other supports rely on school and day care to help them return. That’s likely why the number of students enrolling in Catholic schools is rising rapidly throughout the country, and charter school inquiries are up dramatically. As argued and predicted weeks before school began, it’s the schools with the flexibility, accountability directly to parents (if they don’t’ serve, they close) and commitment that are not only open but safe.

As I wrote this August, it is “impractical and wrong to make policies on reopening the same for every community, as if Covid affected every street, school, town, and region in the same way.”

Now widely studied and reported, private, Catholic and Charter systems took the most innovative steps to safeguard and ensure both safety and education would be accomplished so that they would be able to open at typical back-to-school times when officials deemed it safe.

But innovation seems to belie Mayor de Blasio and many other officials across the country. They seem to think that it’s something just for business or tech sectors. The reality is that while it is not a difficult thing to accomplish, the need must be felt.

Social innovation is “a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable than present solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals.”

In other words, innovation needn’t come with fancy bells and whistles. Sometimes it’s just doing something better, more effectively.

Thomas Carroll, superintendent of Boston Catholic Schools, knew he had to offer in-person schooling to his families and spent several months reviewing and researching supports to help schools make that possible.  “If your school is hesitating about opening in the fall,” he wrote on the website, “seriously consider a Catholic school that offers live in-person instruction, a sense of community, and teachers who will love your children like their own — all in a safe, healthy environment with faith and respect.”

It turns out many were willing to do just that.  Despite fears over enrollment drops  because of the pandemic, enrollment surged by 4,344 to 31,176 students. This is actually happening in every system that offers choice.

St. Pius V School Lynn School Student ST PIUS V SCHOOL LYNN | @STPIUSV1

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Zeta Public Schools, a charter network in the Bronx, has overhauled “everything from drop-off procedures and toilets to taekwondo class (no more shouting allowed).” Founder Emily Kim has been writing to me since the summer, sharing first hand how Mayor de Blasio’s actions were ignoring the most  important considerations schools needed to reopen. She wrote:

“After announcing nearly one month ago that all NYC school staff would have access to 34 expedited COVID-19 testing sites, including charter schools, the Mayor and the Chancellor have refused to provide charter schools with the list despite repeated letters asking for the information for the safety of the NYC communities we serve, as well as the entire NYC community….When we requested outdoor learning space, as invited by the Mayor’s Outdoor Learning initiative, we received an email from the DOE congratulating us for being approved to use our own pre-existing space for outdoor learning.”

Instead of waiting for the city to help them, charters like hers took safety into their own hands. Flash forward a month, the Zeta Charter Schools in-person school model is so well-done that Kim was invited to brief more than 100 charter leaders nationwide about “how she changed recess, lunch, transitions between classes, and other necessities.”

A Zeta Public School Classroom ZETA PUBLIC SCHOOLS

And today, Zeta’s charter schools are educating students because, as its founder wrote recently, “our families across our four schools informed us they were in great need for us to serve their children in person for a variety of reasons: they cannot afford child care, they are essential workers, their children are struggling academically, their children have special needs, their children are English Language Learners, they are in temporary housing (homeless/shelter situations), or they simply need to get back to work.”

By being innovative, Kim and leaders like her around the country are able to mitigate the threat of Covid while providing a stable, productive environment for students, and consequently for the adults around them.

With scores of examples like this, there is no substantive rationale for closing entire cities, other than they are not compelled to innovate. As social innovation expert Geoff Mulgan of the University College London writes, “A contented and stable world might have little need for innovation. Innovation becomes an imperative when problems are getting worse, when systems are not working, or when institutions reflect past rather than present problems.”

And there’s the rub. De Blasio is content to run a system that is not working for most kids, and not only won’t acknowledge it, but will condemn hundreds of schools and communities to a purely virtual, economically-devastating existence despite myriad innovative solutions that have already been demonstrating success nationwide.

Disappointingly, Governor Andrew Cuomo, while pushing back on some city closures, approved de Blasio’s school closures effective immediately, without providing families any option, or resources to provide or find another way to educate their children.

Clearly nationwide and local models for handling Covid’s impact on school never reached the executives in the Empire State. A pity for those who will suffer the most.

Follow Jeanne on Twitter or LinkedIn or some of her other work here.