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BLENDED LEARNING IN DC PUBLIC SHOOLSDANIEL K. LAUTZENHEISER AND TARYN HOCHLEITNERyear, Rice and his team vetted ELA content from 48different vendors, taking into account approval fromthe DCPS pedagogical unit to settle on the final two forpiloting across DCPS: Lexia Reading, a reading technologycompany that helps struggling K–5 readers, in17 schools, and myON Reader, an e-library that recommendsbooks on the basis of students’ reading levelsand interests, in 27 schools.Funders. Building blended classrooms is not free.Money for these new projects comes to DCPS from avariety of sources, including local dollars, federal grants,and willing partners. The district budget includes a substantialinvestment in the technology and infrastructurenecessary for blended learning. Individual schoolsreceive discretionary funding allocations (termed “localfunds”) to purchase new technology such as computersor whiteboards at their discretion. In fiscal year 2014,about $4.4 million in local funds has been budgetedto support the integration of technology in classrooms,which includes the cost of programs, equipment, andprofessional development for teachers. 11As with many districts pursuing new initiatives,DC has benefited from a number of national and localphilanthropic partners eager to support the district’sefforts. One of these is the DC Public Education Fund,founded in 2008 to identify donors and attract philanthropyto help fulfill DCPS Capital Commitment priorities.It has been remarkably successful over the pastfive years in doing so.The DC Public Education Fund facilitated the$750,000 grant from Google that allowed DCPS tocreate the central office blended-learning team andhelp get the Teach to One (TTO) blended-learningmath initiative at Hart Middle School off the ground.In 2012, it was the DC Public Education Fund, again,that shepherded $500,000 from the Michael and SusanDell Foundation and an anonymous donor, a donationthat was split between Ketcham Elementary Schooland Randle Highlands Elementary School to allow thetwo schools to transition their core classes to a blendedstation-rotation model. (We describe TTO and RandleHighlands in more detail later in this paper.)Another organization central to early DCPS blended-learningefforts is the CityBridge Foundation, aDC-based family foundation started by David andKatherine Bradley that concentrates on educationreform. Abbey Goldstein, education director of City-Bridge’s Education Innovation Fellowship, describesCityBridge as “more of a venture philanthropy shopthan anything else. We work really hard to research bestpractices in education around the country. And thenwe do whatever it takes to bring those ideas to DC.”The foundation’s three current priorities are schoolturnarounds, replicating high-performing models, andeducation innovation. It is in this third area that City-Bridge launched the first Education Innovation Fellowsclass in 2013. In partnership with the NewSchoolsVenture Fund and with a $1 million, three-year grantfrom Microsoft, the fellowship recruits DCPS and DCpublic charter school teachers eager to lead blendedlearningefforts and supports them with a year-longcohort experience in an attempt to catalyze more suchactivity across the city.In the fall of 2013, CityBridge also worked with theNext Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) initiativeto establish the Breakthrough Schools: DC challenge,a $2 million grant competition for teachers andschool leaders to create new, whole-school innovationmodels. The NGLC initiative has already granted $21million for blended-learning schools across the nation,and CityBridge hopes the effort will continue to makethe district a hub of school innovation. 12Under the Hood: Blended Learningin Southeast DCDiscussions of district strategy, the selection of vendors,and funding are just the beginning. What really mattersis how these pieces come together in practice. To geta better sense of the district’s blended-learning efforts,we tagged along with John Rice on one of his weeklyschool visits, this time across the Anacostia River intoSoutheast DC. DC is split into four geographic quadrantsand eight political wards. The Anacostia River is ageographic barrier separating almost all of Wards 7 and8 from the rest of the city.The river serves as a physical reminder and a symbolof the stark divide within the nation’s capital. CapitolHill, the National Mall, embassy-lined MassachusettsAvenue, and ritzy Georgetown are but a few miles from6
BLENDED LEARNING IN DC PUBLIC SHOOLSDANIEL K. LAUTZENHEISER AND TARYN HOCHLEITNERCityBridge Education Innovation FellowsThe objective of the Education Innovation Fellowship,Abbey Goldstein says, is to grow a pipelineof blended-learning teacher leaders in DC, generate“proof points” to show blended learning can work,and establish DC as a hub for education innovation.The fellowship launched in January 2013 with aninaugural cohort of 12 fellows (selected from 63 totalapplicants) split evenly among elementary, middle,and high school and between traditional DCPS publicschools and public charter schools.The fellowship year is divided into three stages. Inthe spring, CityBridge brings blended-learning expertsto DC for workshops and takes the fellows on site visitsacross the country to see the best blended-learningpractices in action. In the summer, fellows identifya problem in their classroom they want to solve viaa blended solution and design and implement theirown pilot project for it. Finally, in the fall, the fellowsimprove on and expand their pilot projects.By providing teachers who have an inclination toexperiment with blended-learning models with thetraining and resources to get started, the CityBridgefellowship can slowly start to create a coalition of thewilling and demonstrate that high-quality blendedlearning is possible in DC. Although it is still tooearly to evaluate the impact of the year-old program, itseems to be resonating with teachers and their principals.As Tanesha Dixon, a fellow who teaches seventhand eighth grade at Wheatley Education Campus,comments, “This new way of teaching has reenergizedmy passion for teaching.” 1Note1. Tanesha Dixon, “Let the Cat (and All of Your Students’Papers) Out of the Bag,” Blend My Learning blog,December 6, 2013, www.blendmylearning.com/2013/12/06/let-the-cat-and-all-of-your-students-papers-out-of-the-bag/.Anacostia, but a world apart demographically. Ward3 in Northwest DC boasts an average family incomeover $240,000, more than twice the district average of$118,394. Meanwhile, Ward 8, which contains twoof the three schools we visited, has the district’s lowestaverage family income ($43,255). Ward 8 also has a22 percent unemployment rate—more than double thedistrict average—and almost 20 percent of the populationdoes not have a high school diploma. 13We found this community reflected in the schoolswe visited. Anacostia High School’s student body is 100percent black, and 99 percent receive free and reducedpricelunch. The school is consistently one of the lowestperformers on the DC CAS, though results haveticked slightly upward since a 2009–10 restructuringby DCPS. In 2012, only 19 percent of students wereconsidered proficient or advanced in math and 20 percentin reading, and the school’s graduation rate was40 percent. 14 Hart Middle School fares only slightlybetter, with 26 percent of students rated proficient oradvanced in math and 30 percent in reading. 15 RandleHighlands Elementary School, located just across theborder in Ward 7, was slightly better still: 28 percentof students were proficient or advanced in math and42 percent in reading. 16 Both Hart and Randle Highlandswere classified as “developing” schools by the stategovernment for the purposes of the federal No ChildLeft Behind Act, making them middle-tier performers.Anacostia, in contrast, was deemed a “priority” schoolin need of intense support to address very low performance,one of 32 across the district.While these three schools have varying degrees of studentperformance, they have each demonstrated a willingnessto use blended-learning pilots to try to addresssignificant student academic challenges. The effort lookswholly different in each school, from the station-rotationapproach, to the adoption of the TTO model formath instruction, to fledgling experiments with onlinetechbooks. Regardless of where the school resides on theblended-learning spectrum, each is a useful example ofDCPS efforts and illustrates the potential opportunitiesand challenges of technology in the classroom.7
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