Great ideas abound. Putting them into practice when it requires not simple adjustments, but completely new machinery is a massive challenge when considering our established educational practices. This publication is a chronicle of those challenges, of conflict, of brilliant ideas and cooperation, of false starts, and hard-fought, painfully incremental gains made over time only to be lost in an instant due to external shocks. Still, we must continue to think, to act, and to persevere in the face of stagnation and setbacks. Education is how we invest in the future of humanity.
Responding to Increased Learner Variability in a Complex Education Landscape
In this publication three years ago, as students and educators were returning to the classroom, six big urban school system superintendents came together to make a powerful point. They called for a competency-based system that delivered “life-ready” graduates. Why? Because the then and still current system is time-based and the results are highly variable, from illiteracy to the Ivy League, despite our massive time investments in each child. Such highly uneven outcomes, largely driven by socio-economic circumstance, perpetuate inequities and limit the ability of too many willing students to fully participate in our economy and political processes.
McGraw Hill exists to provide content, services, and technology to help further the education mission. Though we do not personally attend to student learning and district decision-making, we have an important role to play today, in business-as-usual fashion, as well as tomorrow, with familiar yet innovative solutions that support bold and sensible visions of the future educational enterprise, described by successful and imaginative practitioners. Meanwhile the context in which practitioners operate has gotten more complex and more challenging, despite a truly staggering amount of computing power, bandwidth, freedom, and wealth compared to most nations and our own past.
In this post-pandemic era, child poverty and chronic absenteeism have risen, as student performance scores in literacy and mathematics have fallen, reversing decades of steady gains. Social media continues to fuel adolescent anxiety and depression. We are at peak levels of gun violence on school property. And the level of political and belief system polarization is at the highest level I’ve seen in my adult lifetime. Still, there are undeniable pockets of success and a multitude of reasons to remain optimistic about our shared future.
Supporting Transformative Learning Models at Scale with Student Data
Yes, the unrelenting pace of technological innovation can lead to uncertainty, confusion, and a tyranny of choice. However, when thoughtfully applied, the latest education technology will allow us to deliver personalization at scale and make competency-based models a reality. We’ve been talking about data-informed instruction for nearly my entire thirty-year career. For the first time in this author’s view, we are finally able to deliver on that promise. It begins with a mature view of student data that serves students’ educational needs and leads to better decision-making at every level of analysis, from the classroom to the state and all points in between.
The high degree of variability of student readiness for individual lessons as part of rigid grade-level scope and sequence is well known. In response, integrated core, intervention and supplemental solutions must work together elegantly, with near-real time adjustments to the teaching plan to make the most of classroom time and independent work in between live sessions. Untethered point solutions for independent practice leave it to the already overworked and overwhelmed teacher to calculate optimal next steps.
That is why, foremost, we are developing and deploying subtle curriculum platform delivery capabilities that take on much of the computational, administrative and logistic burden of personalized instruction. Further, we also offer a longitudinal view of each student’s acquisition of discrete competencies and skills across grade levels – a pivotal development in scaling a competency-based model. Today, this capability is embedded in our program. And we are actively field testing our next generation literacy program, built in accordance with sound science of reading principles and instrumented to help ensure the right content at the right time based on timely student proficiency estimates. Our software engineers and user experience experts, alongside our authors and pedagogues, have thoughtfully considered how we might continuously capture student performance data in unobtrusive ways that do not disrupt the flow of a highly engaged class. Further to elusive student engagement, our newly released for the lower primary grades respects student agency and allows even the little ones to chart, to a degree, their own learning paths. For older students, the Career Center in allows for self-exploration of possible career paths and connects students’ literacy growth to their future goals.
Preparing for a Competency-Based Future
No one reading whether working in schools, government or industry designed the current educational system. We inherited it. And teachers brimming with compassion and empathy do their best to persevere. Yet now, more than ever, we have the means to move from the old model of a semester, a book, and a high-stakes test to one in which we carefully orchestrate and co-create a series of discrete learning moments for each student. This represents a clear paradigm shift decades in the making.
McGraw Hill, a familiar name to many of you, has been around for 137 years. We will continue to deliver familiar solutions, while we prepare for a competency-based future. We’re ready when you are.
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Sean Ryan is president of McGraw Hill’s School group, which is responsible for providing PreK-12 educators and learners with programs, tools, and services supported by differentiated pedagogical instruction and purposeful technology.