“Some people believe private industry has no place in education. Getting Smart makes a persuasive case that private investment and innovation can and will transform schools for the better and provides a compelling map for both educators and investors.”
—John Katzman, chief executive officer, 2tor, Inc.
“Rocketship pioneered the hybrid school model, using a combination of traditional classroom and individualized learning to eliminate the achievement gap in a more efficient, sustainable, and scalable manner. Tom’s book does a great job of explaining how the next generation of charter networks like ours will provide the solutions to eliminate the achievement gap in our lifetimes.”
—John Danner, CEO, Rocketship Education
“We better get smart about Getting Smart. This is just-in-time learning that practitioners and policymakers need to implement. The sooner the better.”
—Elliot Washor, EdD, codirector, Big Picture Learning
“This is a refreshing overview of one of the biggest problems facing us in the United States and of the strategies that can catapult us past it to educate the talent critical to our future. In the twenty-five years I’ve worked with countless education market firms and leaders, few can match the vision, intelligence, entrepreneurial skill, political savvy, reach, and commitment to making positive changes to education of Tom Vander Ark. He uses it all and more to write this prescription for moving ahead. It’s not rocket science or pie in the sky. It’s about unleashing the creative talent and constructive energy in our kids, teachers, administrators, parents, and government with skills for the twenty-first century and beyond. U.S. economic competitiveness? It ain’t hardly over yet. You won’t be sorry you’ve read it.”
—Nelson B. Heller, PhD, president, EdNET/Heller Report
“Tom Vander Ark’s amazing description of the ‘digital revolution’ coming at American K–12 should get states acting to maximize its potential—perhaps generating autonomous schools free to innovate with the new technology. ‘Digital’ can personalize, helping improve both learning and the system’s economics. Legislators take note.”
—Ted Kolderie and Joe Graba, Education|Evolving
“Getting Smart shines a light on challenges facing the U.S. education system but doesn’t stall out there. Rather, it homes in on solutions and opportunities in front of us through digital learning. Tom Vander Ark is one of the brightest, most passionate, and visionary education advocates in our midst with the gift of being able to organize key message points and paint a picture of exciting and engaging personalized learning experiences that will transform teaching and learning. Consider the shifts and drivers moving us toward transformation. Reflect on Tom’s predictions one, five, and ten years out. Educators, policy makers, and parents are considering digital and blended learning. Our young people are already there—it’s time the rest of us catch up! As Tom says, ‘The revolution is on.’ ”
—Vicki Smith Bigham, president, Bigham Technology Solutions, Inc., and EdNET Conference Manager, MDR
“Tom Vander Ark earns his merit badge showing us where the parts to the new learning ecosystem are. As William Gibson noted, ‘The future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed,’ and finding those clues to the future is hard work. Fortunately, Tom has done the detective work weaving together the fabric of the digital revolution that is going on already. He shows how today’s innovations will link and become the transformative ‘killer apps’ of the future. He finds the leading edge—and finds much of it is being led by the learners themselves!”
—Myk Garn, director, Educational Technology Cooperative, Southern Regional Education Board
“Getting Smart is a must-read for educational leaders. It explores exactly how today’s students are different; how learning has changed; why, where, and how we still need to change; and more. Tom Vander Ark identifies key drivers that are forcing change and provides a detailed analysis of a wide variety of emerging learning programs, systems, and products—all with the view of today’s new reality in terms of learning.”
—Julie Young, president and CEO, Florida Virtual School
“Anyone over twenty-five, parents, and educators alike will gain insight into the rapidly evolving field of digital learning and the very real world in which our children are growing up. In order to educate our children we need to understand the many opportunities in their world and recognize they are different from their parents.”
—Samuel H. Smith, Washington State University
Governor Bob Wise
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vander Ark, Tom, date.
Getting smart : how digital learning is changing the world / Tom Vander Ark ; foreword by Bob Wise.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-00723-5 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-11585-5 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-11586-2 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-11587-9 (ebk.)
1. Computer-assisted instruction—United States. 2. Internet in education—United States. 3. Blended learning—United States. I. Title.
LB1028.5.V26 2011
371.33'40973—dc23 2011024028
For students from Newark to Nairobi
During the past two decades, West Virginia’s leaders in government and education worked hard to wire our schools and made sure students had access to technology. Our state became a national leader in educational technology. I’m proud of the work our teachers and principals did. They opened up the world for many students and brought foreign language instruction into the most remote parts of the state. It deepened and expanded learning for many students but it didn’t result in a significant difference in traditionally measured outcomes. And it added to the growing cost of educating our students.
The situation is much different today. Learning tools are better and cheaper and there is more clarity around the problems that we’re trying to solve. In fact, early in 2010, I came to the conclusion that this country faced three educational challenges that would not be solved by conventional means: global skill demands versus current educational attainment, the funding cliff faced by most states, and a looming teacher shortage.
These are tough problems, but technology can help—specifically learning online. In June 2010, the Alliance for Excellent Education published the Online Learning Imperative with the core premise that “[t]he current process and infrastructure for educating students in this country cannot sustain itself any longer.”1 Since publication, I’ve been on a national campaign to help schools and policy makers explore new ways to solve some vexing problems. Following is a short discussion of each of the problems and how online learning will be part of the solution.
Despite growing investment, U.S. academic achievement and high school completion rates have been essentially flat for several decades. Specific reform strategies show promise but the system is pretty resistant. Producing and sustaining educational quality at scale has proven to be a vexing challenge; yet online learning is a massively scalable solution to provide standards-based curriculum, effective teaching, and flexible delivery. As Tom points out, personal digital learning holds the promise of customized and engaging learning—we both think these factors can change the learning curve and ignite a decade of significant academic improvement.
The residual of the Great Recession and subsequent stimulus funding was a “funding cliff” that most states experienced beginning in 2011. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has suggested, the “new normal” will be an extended period of constrained resources and increasing academic demands. As noted in the Imperative, “As technology has revolutionized the way Americans get news, communicate, listen to music, shop, and do business, now is the time for American students in thousands of underperforming classrooms to realize the same gains.”2 The only way we can get better results for less money is to leverage the power of learning online. Schools such as Rocketship and Carpe Diem that blend online and on-site learning are demonstrating that it’s possible to structure schools in new and more productive ways.
The last big challenge is the goal of a great teacher in every classroom in America—critically important but not possible, at least not without technology. I frequently point out that there are eighty-eight certified physics teachers in Georgia and 440 high schools. As we push more students into higher-level math and science, we need to use online learning to extend the reach and impact of our nation’s best teachers and ensure that every student has access to the best courses and the best instruction.
President Obama has been talking about “winning the future.” And at the Alliance, we know that starts with education. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush and I cochair Digital Learning Now!, which in December 2010 issued a report outlining the path forward for state policy makers.
As the Alliance team campaigns for excellence and equity, we have the good fortune to work with the Foundation for Excellence in Education; Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K–12 Online Learning; Michael Horn, leader of the Innosight Institute; and Tom Vander Ark’s team. We appreciate Michael’s contribution in coauthoring Disrupting Class3 and his advocacy for innovation. Getting Smart builds on and extends that work and describes the historic pivot to personal digital learning.
Tom and I have been at this for a while and know how hard it is to improve public delivery systems, but we’re both optimistic that online learning will drive dramatic progress in this coming decade for American education, with millions of young people getting the quality education so vital for them and our nation.
This book deals with the most important subject in the world—learning. The arc of human history will be bent by learning—specifically, the proportion of the seven billion people on the planet who have the knowledge and skills to support their family, make thoughtful choices, and participate in self-governance. The alternative consequences of mass illiteracy and ignorance in the United States and around the globe are dire. If we can help enough people get smart, I believe we can confront the challenges of climate change, public health, peace, and security.
Learning is the big change lever. I’m glad there are people who have dedicated their lives to fighting poverty and disease, to conservation and security, but in the long run our only hope for a sustainable future is helping more people get smart. That’s why I wrote this book and why I spend all of my time working on and writing about innovations that will extend quality learning experiences to those who don’t have access to them today.
What’s happening around the edges makes me very optimistic. The Internet has changed the opportunity set; as access to broadband expands, devices become cheaper, and learning content gets better, it’s almost possible for anyone to learn anything.1 Dramatic advances in informal learning (for example, Google Search, Wikipedia), military and corporate training, and growth of online learning make me very confident that we can improve the quality of education in the United States without a big increase in investment. Perhaps even more important, we are very close to being able to build new tools and schools that will reach the next billion—young people in places that historically have had little or no educational opportunity.
What makes me qualified to tell you about learning? I don’t have the traditional qualifications to discuss this topic but I have a point of view informed by some interesting experiences, so allow me to introduce myself.
I’m an engineer by original training and spent a lot of the first few years of my career underground in Colorado and Pennsylvania coal mines managing construction projects. I still find great satisfaction in imagining how a system can work better and being part of implementing the solution. Engineering school taught me to work hard and to be systematic about problem solving—two things that have served me well.
Drawn by the deep satisfaction of creating the spark of learning for another person, some people know early that they are called to teach. I did not feel the pull until after I finished an MBA and got the sense that there had to be a better way to construct a series of learning experiences that prepared young people for careers in business. Frustrated by boring and disconnected classes, on graduation day I walked into the dean’s office and said, “That sucked.” He asked me to help make it better. I spent a couple evenings a week over the next seven years as an adjunct instructor at two universities in Denver trying to make business education more applied, more engaging, and more integrated.
At twenty-six I thought I was smart enough to launch my own consulting firm. It proved to be a big failure but a great learning experience. In 1987, I joined a retail start-up in a new category called membership warehouse (like Costco and Sam’s Club) just as the concept took off. As a senior executive of what quickly became a multibillion-dollar company, I found myself in the CEO’s office one day being instructed to adopt a children’s charity in Denver and take them to the next level. It seemed like an odd request and an imposition for a self-centered young man with goals. I picked a wonky-sounding research and advocacy group called Colorado Children’s Campaign. After ninety days of reading data reports and visiting high-poverty schools with the executive direct, Barbara O’Brien, I had a full-on conversion—she made me a learning evangelist. I had spent almost fifteen years worrying about the next job, the next car, and the next house and suddenly I had a new mission that I was passionate about and a good sense of the kind of work I enjoyed doing. After we sold the company to Kmart, I knew I would spend the rest of my career in education—I just had no idea where or how to start.
In 1994, after seven hundred days of contemplating this new education mission (while helping telecom companies implement new technology), the opportunity knocked. A friend called in July as we were walking out the door on vacation and said, “I’m doing a search for a school district in Washington State. I convinced them to interview a nontraditional candidate and I can’t find one. Would you apply?” I laughed and after a short discussion, as a favor, I told him he could submit my name. When we returned six days later, there were six messages on my answering machine. The last said, “You are a finalist, you need to be in Seattle tomorrow.” Long story short, three weeks later I moved my family to Federal Way, a city between Seattle and Tacoma. The teachers went on strike my first day as superintendent; they had been at an impasse with the district for some time but I think my presence just made it too good an opportunity for the state association to pass up. I spent the first week meeting teachers on the picket line during the day and holding open-microphone town hall meetings at night—the strike turned out to be a great way get to know the community.
The second big shock (after the strike): no data. I was used to morning sales reports by store by item. This was before state standards and end-of-year assessments. So the first thing we did was to identify twenty-four key performance indicators, half academic and half covering staff and customer satisfaction and financial, operating, and safety measures. By my fourth year as superintendent, we had introduced new options and made progress against every metric we tracked but it was clear that the three-year plan would take a decade to complete. We had not restructured our high schools. Efforts to introduce standards-based report cards resulted in a no-confidence vote. Attempts to push budgets and autonomy to schools had assumed too much about capacity.
The work improving schools is intensely personal for students, families, and teachers; it is unbelievably political and complicated by layers of bureaucracy. Being a public school superintendent is the best and worst job in the world simultaneously—the rewards are great but so is the pain. It is far more complicated than running a billion-dollar corporation. Although the leadership agenda is similar to that of the private sector, the people who work in education are different—they bring a sense of mission and sign up for a different employment bargain. As a result, an incentive strategy that works in business won’t be received and work the same way in education.
After my fifth year as superintendent, I had the opportunity to join a small new family foundation, the Gates Library Foundation. A few months into the assignment, it was merged with another family fund to create the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I told the cochairs that I thought it would take $2 billion to make a difference. Bill suggested we start with $350 million but after eight years we had invested most of the $2 billion that I originally requested—and another $2 billion on scholarships. The cochairs provided thoughtful leadership and gave me an extraordinary opportunity for which I will always be grateful. The two things I enjoyed most were the ability to travel every week and meet with the best educators in the world and the luxury of having conversations about how U.S. education could work differently and better, and have some ability to effect the desired change.
After my first year at the Gates Foundation, my oldest daughter graduated from a high school in the district where I was superintendent. After five years of sitting on the stage at high school graduations, I sat in the audience. As the students marched into the Tacoma Dome, it seemed as though there were not enough students in robes. I grabbed the program and counted—only four hundred. But I knew that we had sent six hundred students from two middle schools. I spent the next hour thinking about the two hundred students not on stage—nearly one-third of the students had not made it to graduation—and the thousands of students who had not graduated on my watch. I guess this should have been apparent from the annual budgets and enrollment projections that I submitted to the school board but it wasn’t even discussed. This very personal learning experience, with subsequent confirmation of the national drop-out crisis by Chris Swanson (now at Education Week) and Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute, led to my decade-long focus on improving U.S. high school graduation rates and college-preparation levels, particularly for low-income and minority students.
I have spent thirty years now in several major sectors of our economy, attempting to lead in business, nonprofit, public, and philanthropic organizations. I have some appreciation for the benefits and limitations of each sector. As the result of working with four hundred nonprofit education reform and advocacy organizations and with dozens of public school districts, it seems clear to me that we cannot achieve excellence and equity in education without the kind of innovation that only comes when private investment is involved. Producing innovations and taking them to scale is what private capital does best. Convinced that the world needed a dramatic increase in public and private learning investment, I cofounded Learn Capital, the only venture fund dedicated to learning. We invest in early-stage companies that provide innovative learning content, platforms, and services. The Learn Capital portfolio companies that are mentioned are noted in the list of companies and websites in the Appendix.
I advocate for and invest in learning entrepreneurs, edupreneurs as they’ve been called. I travel a lot. I visit schools around the world and meet with learning entrepreneurs and policy makers and blog about it every day at www.GettingSmart.com.
This book will make the case that innovation is key to excellence and equity in education; that learning is more important than ever; that it is easier, faster, and cheaper to do; and that personal digital learning is transforming formal education—and everything else.
I am convinced that there is an amazing new world of education right around the corner—engaging learning experiences for students, an exciting future for learning professionals, and productive options for families. This book is also a call to join me as an advocate for innovation in learning as the key to lifting the achievement of U.S. students and reaching the next billion young people worldwide.
This book was written for everyone who is a learner and specifically for people who care about elementary and secondary education. Following are a few words of advice for leaders, teachers, parents, learners, and investors.
It’s time for you to put a stake in the ground. With pressure to achieve more with less, you know that your school(s) can’t keep doing things the same old way. It’s time to lead a conversation about the shift to personal digital learning: more engaged learning, extended learning time, and lifting the floor and blowing away the ceiling. People and politics will be more important than academics and technology during the transition. And you’ll need to lead by example by being a digital learner yourself.
Look around. There are so many new ways to teach. Technology is making the traditional job of teacher more manageable with engaging content and smart tools that allow you to network with students, provide access to excellent (and free) online tutorials, and offer a whole new generation of finely calibrated learning games. Many of these are described in Chapters Three to Five. As outlined in Chapter Nine, there are new jobs for teachers emerging: you can also teach online, start a school, or start a company. Similar to other professionals, you can work for yourself, create a partnership, or work in a public delivery system—the options are expanding; you can choose or create the work you love.
I hope that the material in this book—by revealing the breadth and complexity of the emerging online world—will help you want to explore it with your children and for your children. Of course, you know it’s really up to you whether that time your child spends online is productive or not, and the more engaged you are the better. Fortunately the new learning software and online curriculum being introduced are more engaging and some of them allow you and your child’s teacher to monitor activity. Also, as you’ll see in Chapter Six, there is a new generation of schools that blend online and on-site learning in interesting ways, ways that might work well for your children.
There’s a world of learning online—you can learn anything. There are a lot of choices online, many of them dumb, some dangerous. It’s more important than ever for learners, young and old, to be self-managers and find the right balance between work and play (it’s all the same to me). Set some goals, learn something new every day, week, month, and year. Write a blog; it’s a great way to find out what you think you know.
Whether you’re seeking a return or just a big impact, the shift to personal digital learning is changing how schools work, how companies are run, and how the military trains the troops. I’ll try to make the case in Chapter One that learning technology (tech) will be at least as important as clean tech and bio tech are to shaping the arc of human history. Edupreneurs are building curve-bending tools and schools that will improve the college and career preparation of millions of students around the world.
Let’s get smart together.
A lifetime of influences end up in a book. I’m grateful to the dozens of people who encouraged my work in education, the hundreds of people who helped shape my vision of what is possible, and the one hundred thousand teachers and leaders whom I’ve had the chance to work with, support, and learn from.
This book is primarily about what I think I’ve learned in the last few years working with smart partners at Learn Capital, supporting our portfolio companies, and serving on boards such as the International Association for K–12 Online Learning.
The discipline of daily blogging at www.GettingSmart.com continues to focus my learning. I appreciate dozens of thoughtful education bloggers, people who take the time to comment, and the more than one hundred people who agreed to be interviewed over the last two years.
Learning is a family affair. Karen, my partner of thirty-five years, supported my midcareer calling, persevered through a superintendency, continues to put up with constant travel, and runs our public affairs business. On top of challenging projects and busy schedules, our daughters, Caroline and Katherine, provided invaluable assistance by managing and supporting the process of writing this book. The whole family focused holiday and weekend attention on this project for over a year. I feel very fortunate to benefit from their love and support, their energy and enthusiasm, and their shared commitment to excellence and equity in education.
I appreciate the heroic leadership of Jeb Bush and Bob Wise, two former governors who have extended their national leadership as cochairs of Digital Learning Now!, a policy blueprint for the future of education.
I’m grateful for the people who read an early draft of this book and gave constructive criticism on how to make it better. Thanks to Kate Gagnon for suggesting the project, to Paula Stacey for editing my dense code, and for the support of the Jossey-Bass team.
Tom Vander Ark is CEO of Open Education Solutions, is a partner in Learn Capital, and blogs daily at www.GettingSmart.com.
Previously he served as president of the X PRIZE Foundation and was the executive director of education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Tom was the first business executive to serve as public school superintendent. A prolific writer and speaker, Tom has published more than one thousand articles and blog posts. In December 2006, Newsweek readers voted Tom the most influential baby boomer in education.
Tom chairs the International Association for K–12 Online Learning (iNACOL) and serves on the board of AdvancePath Academics, LA’s Promise, and Strive for College Collaborative.
Tom earned an engineering degree from Colorado School of Mines, which, in 2010, awarded him the Distinguished Achievement Medal. He received his MBA in finance from the University of Denver. He continues his education online.