Somewhere between three pages of notes from Howard Fuller (starting with a hastily scribbled, “this is a street fight, not a debate) and ending somewhere around “owing students a school system worthy of their  future,” I took an entire page to write three phases in all caps:

• Rapid scale
• Student outcomes first
• Breaking the model

From the keynotes to the breakouts, I kept returning to these three statements. (No doubt the reason why they were crudely underlined six or seven times each by the end of the Summit.) They seemed to capture a sentiment that permeated each speaker’s remarks and each hallway conversation. A shared fear that too often it feels like ed reformers are merely shouting into the echo chamber rather than rapidly scaling innovation and disruptive transformation that will lead to something big. A guarded sense of wanting to move forward but only when the evidence shows that moving forward is the right direction for all students. And an overwhelming feeling that the current model – the one we’ve had for the past eighty years or so – must be fundamentally re-imagined if we truly expect to achieve new, ambitious goals for public education.

As the community engagement manager for Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), I couldn’t help but think, too, that these phrases strike at the very heart of the work we’ve been doing since our 2010 launch. In October, we issued our latest of three waves of “re-invention” challenges to secondary and postsecondary educators. Wave III will provide $12 million in grants over the course of this year to new blended model schools and college degree programs that fundamentally re-design how students learn, how schools and institutions enable that learning and allocate resources to support it, and how their approaches can multiply virally.

In many ways, Wave III embodies the rallying cries we heard at the Summit:

• We’re searching for models that aren’t just innovative in the way they deliver content but purposeful about the way they plan for rapid scale and financial sustainability, pushing innovative practices beyond the echo chamber and into the wider field.
• We’re reaching out to districts because, to echo the words of Kaya Henderson in the opening session, “we can’t have a truly scalable movement without districts.”
• We’re looking for innovators who feel emboldened to break the model while still relying on sound research that guides how students learn and how we design environments to support it. Like Doug McCurry, who shared Achievement First’s litmus test for innovation in a breakout, we believe that administrators and teachers need proof – proof that blended environments help empower students, personalize instruction, and allow teachers to “do the job they do best.” But, like Alex Hernandez of Charter Growth Fund, we feel a sense of urgency to push the innovation cycle and learn from the messy challenges ahead. 
• We’re also looking for models that embody the attributes we watched in countless videos at the Summit: personalized learning, competency-based pathways, and formative feedback to both students and teachers.

And we’re still looking for partners.

When we first issued the challenge, we wondered aloud if there were truly people ready to “storm the Bastille” of education reform.

The answer is yes. In April, NGLC announced its first cycle of Wave III funding: $750,000 to five developers of new school models at the middle and/or high school level. Here are three observations about what they’re seeking to accomplish: 

1. They are completely re-imagining students’ experience of “school.” While all cited valuable lessons they’d learned from studying the pioneers in this space, each model will  integrate elements of project-based, online, personalized, group, and anytime/everywhere learning, together with strong links to postsecondary education.
2. They are applying technology-enabled strategies to challenge the status quo in school design.  One California grantee will scrap the traditional school calendar by opening its doors to students ten hours per day, seven days per week, year-round. Students will contract individually with the school to create their own personalized schedules and conduct a substantial portion of their learning outside of the school’s walls.  A New Jersey grantee will use working-world learning environments and processes, all on a technology platform like those used by business and industry today, to create learning experiences for students that connect deeply to the environment outside of school.
3. They are pushing the envelope on financial modeling and scalability. These innovations, as promising as they are, will mean little if they require supports or operating conditions that are not readily scalable. The NGLC grantees are thinking as deeply about these challenges as they are about their learning models, so that viable, viral scaling is embedded as a central element in their school’s DNA.

We’ve just closed our second application cycle and look forward to announcing more grantees later this spring and into the fall. (The deadline for the final cycle is June 8; see www.nextgenlearning.org for more information if you’re already working on a new blended model and would like to apply.) Along the way, we’ll be documenting and sharing their stories, working with these innovators to learn what works for student success and how they are empowering both teachers and students for higher learning outcomes.

We may not be out of the echo chamber yet but we’re confident about what lies on the other side.

Carie Page is Community Engagement Manager of Next Generation Learning Challenges (http://nextgenlearning.org), a new initiative aimed at addressing the barriers to educational innovation and tapping the potential of technology to dramatically improve college readiness and completion in the United States.

• A Simple List to Improve Public Education, Joseph DiSalvo
• New And Notable At NewSchools 2012, Alexander Russo
• Getting Smart coverage of NewSchools Summit, Getting Smart
• At Summit, A Rallying Cry (Or Echo Chamber?) for New Kind of Reform, Education Week
• Is There Really a Movement?, Jessie Arora
• Ten Conversations with Edupreneurs, Tom Vander Ark
• Improving Education Through Innovation and Entrepreneurship, The Aspen Institute

These students, like nearly 15 million other US children, are growing up in households with incomes at or below the federal poverty level. Often, their childhood experiences include exposure to gang and gun violence and lack of basic material necessities. The odds are stacked against them: only 9% will graduate from college, the strongest predictor of workforce success in our information-based, global economy.

Yet, these students’ futures are breaking with the statistics. Javon is off to college in the fall, and the others are on the same path. How? Each of them is receiving the quality of education that all parents wish for their children—one that prepares them with the skills and confidence they need to succeed in college and beyond.

Welcoming Summit participants, our CEO Ted Mitchell asked the audience to focus on the vital lesson these students can teach us: a great education can reverse the cycle of poverty. The successes of our best schools and best teachers show us that. However, he continued, “nobody’s satisfied with the scale of our impact.”

This sobering self-examination would continue throughout the day, starting with the opening session led by Howard Fuller. Known for his fiery frankness, Fuller did not disappoint. Decrying the urge to rest on past laurels, he urged the audience to remain laser focused on work that would improve the lives of children. “We should tell no lies, and claim no easy victories as we move forward to help our kids,” he told the 900+ crowd. This advice (and admonishment) would reappear in conversations in each of the more than 20 sessions at Summit. Fuller urged the crowd to seek out new strategies that would radically change the education system. “We have to stay focused, relentless, and not be scared. If you’re not scared, you can make change in America.”

Self-described “super-nerd” Professor Roland Fryer, who heads the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University, reminded the largely pro-charter audience that charter schools have received a mixed report card from recent national studies. Many charter schools should be closed, he stated. Fryer’s Apollo 20 initiative is trying to translate the achievements of the most successful charters to traditional district schools. Later, DC Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson argued that the distinction between charter and traditional district school was far less important than successful and failing school. 

Addressing another area where the education reform movement has paid little attention was a poignant conversation around innovating to serve students with special needs, including English language learners. Featured entrepreneurs included Daniel Yoo from Goalbook, which helps connect educators connected to a single special needs student; Teddy Rice from Ellevation, which is developing tools for ELL teachers; and Jack Lynch from Presence Learning, which uses technology to connect speech therapists to students around the country. This group discussed the achievement gaps faced by special needs students and how important innovations can better serve them.

Throughout the day, Summit speakers refused to avoid the difficult conversations about the reach of our movement and the impact of poverty on student success. Each conversation was a recommitment to meet Ted’s challenge to focus all our efforts on the children we serve. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, speaking during the closing session, summarized this sentiment: “I’m not for education reform; I’m for results.”

Summit 2012 was only the beginning for many of the challenging conversations we must continue in order to truly transform our public education system into one that serves up an excellent education for every student. The day inspired and re-energized attendees to keep students like Juan and Paris central to every decision we make, to honor the people doing the hard work that benefits students—especially those from our toughest communities—and to refuse to accept poverty as an immutable life sentence for 15 million of our nation’s children.

Mayor Emanuel told the audience that there are two basic things about education that he feels strongly about. First, he believes in what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now.” Secondly, he feels that there three groups – principals, teachers and parents – and everything must be built around those three, with a culture of accountability.

Mayor Emanuel also discussed some of the innovations he’s helped implement. Examples included having school report cards going to parents and creating a merit-pay system for principals to ensure accountability in tandem with principal training to help them improve.  Chicago has implemented longer school days. Mayor Emanuel sees this as one opportunity to create positive changes, considering them a “moral imperative.” He also discussed the need to create community college school curriculum that ensures students are career ready.

“We owe it to the next generation to give them a school system that is worthy of their future,” Mayor Emanuel told the crowd.

Jim Blew, of the Walton Family Foundation, moderated a panel with leaders from three public school systems. Cami Anderson, of Newark Public Schools, was involved in the Teach for America (TFA) program early in her career. Now that she is running a large public school district, she still feels her core principle remains that “schools are the system of change… We have to have awesome schools that run great programs to get great results, putting kids on a different pathway than what we are seeing.” Anderson explained that entrepreneurship and autonomy helps school leaders rise to occasion. To have change at scale, we have to have systems for all kids. “Individual islands of excellence are not options.” 

Kaya Henderson, of District of Columbia Public Schools, is also a TFA alumnus. What has changed in her new position is her sense of possibility about districts. Henderson used to feel that districts “were too entrenched,” yet, her experience in D.C. has shown her that districts can have the “willingness to change the status quo.” She feels strongly about rethinking the district’s role, and allowing schools to have autonomy as long as they are meeting critical benchmarks. 

Chris Barbic, of the Achievement School District in Memphis, Tennessee, emphasized the idea that “a system will never reform itself…pressure has to come from the outside.” Barbic feels his district’s role is to “push autonomy  down to local level as much as possible,” by encouraging charter schools to replace the troubled schools in Memphis, becoming neighborhood schools and welcoming all students. Schools must include students, including special education students, that have often encountered difficulty enrolling in charters schools.

All three of the panel members have taken lessons from their days in entrepreneurial organizations and are finding ways to implement innovations in their public school districts.

Ellis started off by asking Joanne Weiss, of the U.S. Department of Education, if she felt Race to the Top is the defining program that’s going to make a difference to the 15 million children living in poverty.

Weiss stressed that “There is no magic bullet… By the end of the day today, 7,000 children will drop out of school. Race to the Top defines a more impactful role at the federal level.” The goal, she explained, is to empower states to take ownership of the student outcomes in their states.

“Budgets reflect our values – where we are investing our tax dollars,” Weiss added.

Mitch Chester of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education told the audience that he feels Race to the Top is “a courageous move on the part of this Administration… to ensure education prepares students for the world they are going to encounter.” Chester added that the program builds on work that is already being done in Massachusetts. “It’s an ambitious agenda, but it’s moving ahead very well.”

Ellis also brought up the topic of school administrators, like principals, helping to create the needed learning environments.

Jean Desravines of New Leaders responded that, “From a policy perspective, it’s unprecedented.” Over 34 states have decided to enhance education policy underscores the demand for reform. He stressed that change in the laws is not enough – there has to be a focus on execution and implementation.

More and more, charter organizations and districts are training their own teachers. Pioneers in the field joined a panel to provide insight on creating and running teacher preparation programs.

One major topic was “What does success look like?” Michael Goldstein of Boston’s MATCH Education responded that MATCH starts by asking the question “Will people want to hire your graduate?” This market demand type information can help inform the strengths and weaknesses of the program. They also have blind evaluators who can evaluate rookie teachers in action, and compare against other new educators.

Heather Kirkpatrick of Aspire Public Schools said Aspire’s long term measures of success include looking at retention rates, examining if they are garnering student achievement scores, observing teachers at work, and by making a difference in the teaching population (by hiring minority teachers who reflect the students they are teaching).

This morning started with Laysha Ward, of presenting sponsor Target, greeting the enthusiastic morning crowd. “It’s a privilege to join this important conversation. Every child deserves a quality education, regardless of race or socio-economic status. I’m honored to be here among some of the world most innovators who will move the needle with the speed that this movement demands.”

Ted Mitchell, CEO of New Schools Venture Fund, spoke in-depth about the core theme of this year’s summit: 15 million young people are living in poverty. Mr. Mitchell said:

“This is the most diverse summit we’ve had. We need it to reflect the lives of the students that we reach. The conviviality is matched by the seriousness of the task that we face – nothing less than transforming American public education into something that serves students for the first time. The stakes have also never been higher.

“Great teachers, great schools and equipment can change lives. While we are making progress, yet we are losing our case in the court of public opinion. Far too many think the basic tools that have helped youth aren’t the solution, but are seen as part of the problem. We will need to create a movement that is broader, bringing others into the conversation.

“There are no more natural allies in this movement than America’s teachers. We need to listen and respond to teachers.”

Howard Fuller, of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University, addressed the audience about concerns that he sees in the education reform movement:

“We’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go… We are still not doing what we need to do for kids. We have to do even better. We should claim no easy victories as we move forward to help our kids.

“People want change as long as nothing changes, so we have to make sure the change is real… We have to create an alternative reality. We ought to be embracing parent choice as a crucial element of [our work].  

Stay tuned for more updates throughout the day!