The Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) asserts that its technology will provide personalized learning, providing access to materials that are aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Let’s dig in and see what they are offering.

Common Core State Standards
If you haven’t heard about the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSS), in a nutshell it is an effort to set common learning goals at each grade level across multiple states. From the CCSS FAQ:

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led effort to establish a shared set of clear educational standards for English language arts and mathematics that states can voluntarily adopt. [...]

Standards do not tell teachers how to teach, but they do help teachers figure out the knowledge and skills their students should have so that teachers can build the best lessons and environments for their classrooms.

For example, if you move to another state in the middle of the year, your child will find the knowledge they are expected to master in the new school not radically different from their old school – as long as both states are following CCSS.

Delaware has adopted the Common Core State Standards and is in the process of implementing them. Delaware’s transition plan and timeline shows currently we are in Phase II, culminating with Phase IV in 2014.

[...]

Common Core State Standards are not a direct SLC offering. But it should be noted that the Common Core State Standards are jointly sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The Council is represented on the board of the Shared Learning Collaborative. SLC states that it is “Led by the vision of the Council of Chief State School Officers and nine participating states…”

Personalized learning
Here’s what SLC says about its personalized learning offerings:

The goal of the SLC is to establish a set of shared technology services that make it easy for students and teachers to have a full picture of their students’ learning and then find the resources and tools they need to provide personalized learning.

This is perhaps the sketchiest part of the infrastructure. So far the SLC tools for personalized learning consist of two items: the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), and Learning Maps.

Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI)
LRMI is basically a tagging scheme specialized to describe learning materials aligned with the Common Core State Standards. The idea is that content providers can apply these special tags to their CCSS-compliant learning materials and contribute them to a shared pool. Content could be just about any type of document or media: lesson plans, text-based resources, video, audio, images, documentation of specific learning activities, or more.

Teachers can then search for those materials using the highly specific tagging terms. Content providers may be individual teachers who wish to share their materials, or (more likely), organized content providers, possibly for-profit. These vendors could then market their content libraries to schools as being pre-wired for Common Core State Standards.

The main LRMI website is http://www.lrmi.net. You can review scenarios for using LRMI here, in a jargon-y kind of formal description called use cases. The tagging scheme itself is described here.

What makes it so sketchy is that there is no description of how to actually apply the tags to content. On one online LRMI forum, one person (presumably a vendor who wished to use the LRMI spec in his product or service) asked this very question, and here was the response:

We (the LRMI Technical Working Group) have been revising the specification since then and haven’t produced the full fledged examples that you refer to.

This is a priority at this time, though.

On another online forum, someone asked: “How likely is it that search engines will adopt the LRMI schema?” The question remains unanswered since October.

So currently, it appears there is no working product that uses the LRMI tagging scheme. I was not able to determine whether the tagging scheme would be capable of being used in free tools like Google, or only in more specialized search tools which may or not be free or open-source.

It should be noted that representatives of Microsoft and the Gates Foundation are represented on the LRMI Technical Working Group. Microsoft is a competitor to Google in certain respects and has typically been reluctant to do anything that would benefit Google.

Learning maps
Learning maps are another SLC offering to support personalized learning, but are apparently at the concept phase:

Learning maps are a graphical representation of student learning data that will help teachers and students visualize individual learning progress and needs. More information on the learning maps will be available soon. [...]

Learning maps will connect teachers and students to relevant online content by utilizing Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) and Common Core State Standards tagging functionality.

How is Delaware involved with the Shared Learning Collaborative?
The SLC website states that Delaware is participating in Phase 2 of the SLC pilot. This makes sense, because Delaware has a working version of the system already set up (or about to be set up, when the first dashboards come online next month). In a sense, Delaware committed to Phase 1 before SLC officially existed. But SLC does not provide details of Phase 2.

Phase 2 may not be that big of a deal. Considering we already have much of the system in place or in development, it may simply be a matter of implementing a content search engine and choosing one or more content vendors.

But it is not clear which new features of the SLC platform Delaware will be adding, if any, or at what level it will integrate with the SLC offerings. So I asked DDOE who in Delaware was handling SLC issues, and what Phase 2 will consist of. Here’s the response:

As you indicated, Delaware was selected to participate in phase two of the pilot. As such, we are participating in functional workgroups and providing information about related initiatives in Delaware as requested. We are looking forward to learning more from the Phase I sites. Once we know more about what the specifics will mean for Delaware at the state and local level, we will share more broadly with stakeholders within the state.

It appears that by announcing Delaware’s involvement in Phase 2, SLC caught Delaware a little bit unprepared to discuss it. Who is participating in these “functional workgroups?” Keep your eyes open for any reaching out to stakeholders on SLC Phase 2 in Delaware, and be on the lookout for new RFPs.

Conclusion
The Shared Learning Collaborative is clearly an effort by the early developers of the technology to lock in and capitalize on their investment – or rather, the investments of the Dell and Gates foundations, and investments from early-adopter states (Texas and Delaware). The stage seems set for a wave of state-level contracts for SLC system implementations and related services.

The system appears to have originated among a group of Texas-based vendors, consultants, and academics centered in Austin, with assistance from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation; vendors who remain at the front of the line today.

And the name “McKinsey” seems to wind through the SLC membership. In education reform, McKinsey & Company appears to be a kind of Skull and Bones club, with the McKinsey firm involved directly, or with former McKinsey employees in key roles. The McKinsey firm itself is an SLC partner. Double Line Partners, builder of the first SLC-style systems in Texas and Delaware, has two former McKinsey employees on its team. And Jack Markell, Governor of early-adopter state Delaware, is himself a former McKinsey consultant.

Nonetheless, the SLC model has many advantages. The technology is innovative, at least by the standards of state Departments of Education. The act of unifying state databases into one data warehouse will allow states to use their own data in ways that were considered too costly or difficult before.

With the choice of an open-source license, the real promise of the SLC platform is the new features that can be added by states, and then shared with all other states. Currently states are generally running proprietary (closed-source) systems, and if they need to add a new feature or modify the system, are at the mercy of the vendor. The open-source license allows states to regain control of their own systems.

There is even the tantalizing possibility that one or more vendors could offer the entire system as a hosted, cloud-based service, which wouldn’t require any hardware installation or management at all by the state. This would benefit smaller states without the resources to set up or manage their own in-house system.

And while initial vendor lock-in will be strong, eventually competition will be inevitable, as hungrier and more innovative firms find new and better ways to implement or improve the products, develop new add-ons, or simply by the old-fashioned technique of providing better service.

Part 2 of a 2 part series – click here for Part 1

They donated it to the Longwood Foundation.

…

“Walking back the cat” is an information analysis technique, which I first heard about in a classic column by William Safire:

Intelligence analysts have a technique to reveal a foreign government’s internal dissension called ”walking back the cat.” They apply what they now know as fact against what their agents said to expect. In that way, walkers-back learn who ”disinformed” or whose mistake may reveal a split in a seemingly monolithic hierarchy.

So keep that in mind, as we go through and compare the quotes found in the news on Day Zero of the announcement. These are the people who participated in the planning, or otherwise had detailed knowledge ahead of the public.
[...]
…

First of all, Senator Coons:

“This building is a gift,” Senator Coons said at an event announcing the news Thursday morning. “It is a gift from the people of Bank of America who have made it possible, to the people of Delaware, the children, and the organizations that will bring this building to a new life in the years ahead.”

So what kind of schools will Delaware put in the building? Well, perhaps Delaware won’t be putting any schools in the building at all:

[Longwood President Thére] Du Pont says the foundation will be picky when it comes to approving schools to move into the facility. “We will implement a rigorous testing process to screen the tenants for the building…”

See, this building does not belong to Delaware schools. To Wilmington parents who have been forever seeking a measure of local autonomy, of real political control of their own schools, this must be difficult news to hear.

Charlie Copeland may have let the cat out of the bag:

The Longwood Foundation plans to take that building and create the “Community Education Building” (CEB) and put 4 Charter Schools right in the heart of the City of Wilmington.

I think the screening process is complete, and has been for some time.

And finally, as recounted by Kilroy, there is the February 12 radio show in which Red Clay Superintendent Merv Daugherty was asked about the lack of traditional middle and high schools in the city, and responded that there were plenty of charter schools.

So – I’ll leave the detailed “walking back of the cat” as an exercise for the reader. But ask yourself: Who disinformed? Who knew what, and when?

Again, this is Day Zero of the announcement. There are surely more details to come. But we have got to get the governing documents for this deal into our hands and out on the blogs before the Feb. 28 referendum. And keep your eyes open for any meetings or public hearings for the intended use of this building.

And while we are setting forth to build dashboards, we need a public dashboard which would replace and surpass the current school profiles site, by providing the additional data and capabilities afforded by the Education Insight infrastructure.

The film is 53 minutes long, but a shorter version is available for showing in classrooms, and includes a teacher’s guide.

A Separate Place is a documentary film about the ambiguous legacy of segregation and desegregation in African American education. Focusing on the schools built by P.S. du Pont in Delaware, the film is based on compelling interviews with teachers and students whose lives span seventy-five years of African American education.

The film is compelling, featuring many photos of the shacks used for schools in the early part of the century, and then the neat brick schoolhouses built by du Pont. The interviews with former students and teachers in the segregated school system are priceless. The first part of the film describes the system of schoolhouses built by du Pont across Delaware, then the second half focuses on Howard High School and later desegregation efforts.

Also, there is currently a photo exhibit at the Delaware Public Archives, The African-American Educational Journey In Delaware. The Archives also provides three free related e-books.

…in the 2009 Appoquinimink referendum, the state contributed $3 for every $1 from Appo. But for Red Clay’s current referendum, the state is contributing only $1.50 for every dollar from Red Clay.

It was pretty clear from the referendum documents that this was the case. But it is nice to receive independent confirmation from professional journalists.

Raising more questions than answers, the News Journal report also included links to state law here and here, providing formulas for calculating the state share of referendums. State worksheets for the Appo and Red Clay calculations were not provided.

The law prescribes a dizzying series of calculations which are difficult to verify independently. Each step itself requires initial calculations using tax and market information that is not readily available. I worked on it for about an hour last night and didn’t get very far, lacking information required by the formula. At some point I will put up a post laying out the steps in detail, but I can’t devote any more time to it right now.

The formulas are based on assessed value of property in the district. So even if the formulas are followed, the result can be manipulated significantly by the assessment values, and indications are that this is in fact the case.

[,,,]

I made an unscientific calculation comparing the assessed value of a house in Hockessin vs. a house in Appo with a slightly higher market value. Contrary to my expectations, the Appo house was assessed more than 20% lower than the Hockessin house.

In an earlier and more professional effort than mine, the News Journal provides many more such examples confirming my comparison. Unfortunately the link to the News Journal’s excellent Special report on reassessments is broken.

However, the 2007 article by Mike Chalmers is available to regular citizens via the NCC public library (login requires NCC library card). Chalmers states: “The financial problems of local governments are exaggerated by outdated assessments.”

In New Castle County, real estate assessments are based on 1983 values. What was the value of a home in Appo in 1983, which may not have existed yet? Route 1 was opened in 1978, and the bridge was opened in 1995. Furthermore, in 1983 the nation and Delaware was still reeling from a deep recession, and the Appo region had not yet established itself as the bedroom community for the exploding growth of Delaware’s banking industry that it later became.

In residential property, seniors are also eligible for exemptions. I assume there is a higher concentration of seniors in Red Clay than Appo. I’m not sure what effect this has on the calculation of the state share.

The News Journal yesterday also suggested taking a look at including business property assessments, implying that Red Clay had enough business property value to account for the difference in the state referendum funding. I took a preliminary look for this information, and found that the state reports total assessment values per district up until 2007-2008. But in following years the assessment information, key to the funding formulas, was dropped from Delaware’s Educational Statistics Report. Perhaps it has moved somewhere else?

But the latest assessment numbers from those reports show that in 2007-2008, Red Clay total assessment was $5,045,915,844 vs. 1,500,809,472 for Appo, a ratio of about 3.3 to 1, which is not nearly as high as I had expected. And once the number of households are taken into account, the assessed value in Red Clay may be brought much closer to parity with Appo.

Businesses may in fact be taxed at a lower effective rate, since some businesses are eligible for exemptions.

One very useful document is this: NCC property tax rates per school district.

Presumably there was some kind of state committee charged with performing these calculations, and possibly even a public announcement. But for most citizens, obscurity appears little different from secrecy.

I have an idea that the blogging community can crowdsource the verification of the funding formulas. If I get the time to follow through, I will put up a worksheet page for this purpose, where anyone can contribute missing information for the calculations (verifiable of course).

With Red Lion working way back to DIAA, dozens of athletes depart

The dramatic reversal in priorities resulted in about 40 athletes leaving Red Lion at the end of the first semester on Jan. 27, athletic director Ken Howard said. It’s unclear where most of those athletes are now enrolled, adding intrigue to a long-running saga.

Okay, here we go with another education reform organization, one which Delaware had a hand in creating, and which will be a player in Delaware schools soon: the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC). Some of its participants are already on the scene here in Delaware. The partners are names you have probably heard before: Wireless Generation, Double Line Partners, McKinsey & Company, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and more.

The technical notes on the SLC web site are sketchy, so I’ll have to make some educated guesses. But basically: the vendors and consultants who built the new school data systems in Texas and Delaware have gotten together and are now going to give that system away for free, and make a tremendous amount of money doing it.

[...]

After all, there’s $500 billion on the table. Here’s what Rupert Murdoch had to say when his company News Corp purchased Wireless Generation:

“When it comes to K through 12 education,” Murdoch said in a statement about the Wireless Generation purchase, “we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.”

Let’s hear what the SLC website has to say (keep an eye on the bolded sentences):

Led by the vision of the Council of Chief State School Officers and nine participating states, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York, the SLC is an alliance of states, foundations, educators, content providers, developers and vendors who are passionate about using technology to enhance education.

I’ll look into who these outfits are in a moment. But what are they proposing to do?

The collaborative aims to accelerate the progress of U.S. public schools toward personalized learning by creating a set of shared technology services that will work better and cost less per state than what can be accomplished by each state working individually.

They did put some sketchy technical specifications online, so we can talk about those too. There’s even a hook to the Common Core State Standards, which are also being adopted by Delaware:

The SLC technology will support the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and help states and districts provide teachers with the instructional data and tools they need to make personalized learning the norm in every classroom.

Personalized learning? Wait a minute, I thought data driven reform was supposed to turn students into widgets! but I digress…. I’ll look at what “personalized learning” really means later.

What is this technology they are planning to build?
The working title is Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI), and much of it has already been built in the course of developing systems for Texas and Delaware. It includes:

• A data warehouse that gathers data from a state’s various education-related databases, and
• A pre-built set of dashboards that pull data from the data warehouse, and display it to teachers and other stakeholders.

This part greatly resembles Delaware’s Education Insight project, which is currently under construction, with the data warehouse up and running, and the first dashboards due next month (teacher dashboards). I’ve blogged about this before, here and here and here.

The Teacher Dashboards will pull together all the different pieces of data about a student, and provide tools to slice and dice it into different kinds of analytical reports. This information will then allow the teacher to identify if intervention or additional supports are needed. You can see some mockups of Delaware’s teacher dashboards here (under “Dashboard Snapshots”).

Delaware’s dashboards are being built by Double Line and Wireless Generation, while the underlying data warehouse was built by ESP Solutions, in conjunction with several other firms.

And when I say “built,” I mean Delaware’s system was built using designs (and likely much of the same code). that was used to create the Texas system. The Texas system was in turn based on an initial design framework funded by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and developed by Texas-based vendors and consultants. Delaware’s RFP for the dashboards specified that they were to be based on the Dell templates and the Texas implementation.

How are they going to make money giving it away for free?
The systems and standards developed by SLC partners will be released under an open-source license. That means a state, a vendor, or anybody can download the source code, review it, and even modify it and deploy it for their own customers. I plan to take a look at it myself as soon as it is available.

I assume they have to make it available it as open source, simply because it was developed with public funds (Texas and Delaware). It would be unseemly or probably even illegal to sell the software outright..

But they are not concerned about giving the technology away, because open-source can be a very good business model, especially if you are the sponsor and creator of the technology and the standards that support it. In addition to the source code, the SLC technology relies on a universe of standards and specifications developed by SLC partners, which are also publicly available for free as open standards.

However, just having the source code and standards for the technology won’t get you too far. The real work (and the real money) is in the process of making sure the system can connect to all the state’s various data sources, and is customized to meet the particular requirements of each state, a process known as integration. This part will not be done for free. On top of that, the deployment of the SLC system will generate consulting fees, training, ongoing customization, add-on features, and other needs known as professional services. Wireless Generation’s $8 million data-coaching contract with Delaware is just a small example.

Integration and professional services are that $500 billion market Rupert Murdoch was talking about.

So if you are a state looking to adopt this kind of technology, are you really going to download the code and the specifications and deploy it yourself? Or are you going to put out an RFP to have that all done for you? Sure, any consulting firm can download the code and the specifications and bid on the job. But the SLC partners who developed the technology and the standards have the most experience, having already done this work in Texas and Delaware, and they will get the integration job. And they will also have the most experience in the ensuing bids for professional services work, and these contracts will be awarded over and over again in each state that chooses this technology.

In fact, even at this early stage when the design specs are still sketchy and the source code isn’t even available yet, each level of the specs already includes an “RFP Guide” to help states write an RFP for implementing the technology. State technology officers will most likely model their RFPs on the SLC language, or even copy it outright. So when you control the language of the RFP, you are already the leading contender.

In this case, the open source model is far more lucrative than selling the software outright. When you design a proprietary (closed source) system, the minute you are finished it starts getting stale. Then you can be certain some other vendor is working on a newer better system. But the SLC system was built with a minimum of capital investment on the part of the vendors, who built it with a combination of foundation money and public funds via Texas and Delaware. So any vendor who wishes to build a competing system with their own capital will quickly encounter a truism in technology: “You can’t compete with free.”

So by developing and asserting control over the system and its specifications, SLC is now in possession of an enormous money-making machine. Vendor members of the Shared Learning Collaborative are already ahead of the curve to win the wave of contracts coming from state after state. This is the point of the Shared Learning Collaborative, and it is how its partners will lock in and capture as much of that $500 billion as they possibly can.

Coming up in Part 2:
Phase 2 of the Shared Learning Infrastructure in Delaware
Personalized learning and the Common Core State Standards

In 1985, the Education Law Center sued to address state funding disparities for New Jersey’s most disadvantaged school districts (Abbott vs. Burke). The suit was successful, and created a number of Abbott districts in New Jersey:

Abbott districts are school districts in New Jersey that are provided remedies to ensure that their students receive public education in accordance with New Jersey’s state constitution. They were created in 1985 as a result of the first ruling of Abbott v. Burke, a case filed by the Education Law Center. The ruling asserted that public primary and secondary education in poor communities throughout the state was unconstitutionally substandard.[1] There are currently thirty-one Abbott districts in New Jersey.

Prior to 2011, the State of NJ did not release the total amount spent per pupil on schooling. Since the Abbott original ruling in 1985, New Jersey increased spending such that Abbott disctrict students received 22% more per pupil (at $20,859) vs. non-Abbott districts (at $17,051) in 2011.

The basis of the suit was the provision in the New Jersey Constitution stating:

…the Legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools for the instruction of all the children in the State between the ages of five and eighteen years.

Delaware’s constitution has the same provision. [...]

It could well be argued that in Wilmington, education at the secondary level is neither efficient nor complete. Since Wilmington is not isolated in its own district, the Abbott principle could be applied to Red Clay and the other city districts as well as to the state. In fact, all the underperforming schools in Delaware should be looked at through the lens of Abbott. Rather than handing extra money to affluent and growing Appoquinimink, perhaps the state could more equitably divert some of that money toward improving Wilmington schools.

The interesting thing about the Abbott ruling (and a series of subsequent rulings) is that it calls for MORE funding for disadvantaged districts if neccessary to assure the “thorough and efficient” school system required by the NJ constitution. The ruling is so ironclad it was even able to reverse Governor Chris Christie’s budget ax:

TRENTON — In a widely anticipated decision, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered the state to spend an additional $500 million on public education in poor districts next year. [...] Christie had argued that the state’s current fiscal woes made it impossible to spend the full amount required by the funding formula approved by the court in 2009.

Still, the majority opinion written by Associate Justice Jaynee LaVecchia said Christie’s cuts to education spending have been “consequential and significant” and must be rolled back. She also wrote that the state, which had promised to fully fund the formula, cannot back away from it when funding poor districts.

This demonstration of teeth in the New Jersey law should help reassure Wilmington residents that if they were to build new middle schools and high schools in the city, an Abbot-style law would keep their fears of isolation and defunding from becoming reality.

In conjunction with Delaware’s neighborhood schools law, an Abbott-style ruling in Delaware could help assure the success of new neighborhood middle schools or high schools in Wilmington.

Critics of the Abbott rulings say that the additional spending has not resulted in improved outcomes. Supporters counter that outcomes do improve at the elementary level, but vanish at the high school level. This path suggests not that the spending is ineffective, but that even more social supports are needed outside the school. The state constitution guarantees equality of opportunity, which the Abbott principle goes a long way to address.

Update 2: Joanne and I have made peace. Joanne is awesome! I am going to move to Appo just so I can vote for her!!

*****

Update: Well look at this – I poked the state, and Appo screamed… I didn’t think there was that kind of relationship, but now I’m not so sure:

Joanne Christian, on February 13, 2012 at 8:33 pm said:

Well Mike O.–you are officially now a tool. The referendums described had NOTHING to do with any school programs–it is all bricks and mortar. And Appo is not going to referendum this year so far, because our growth has slowed down w/ the economy and we can take a breather in building. But go ahead, spread away your lack of knowledge in how all of this works and create an air of conspiracy models, and nefarious sub-plots in funding and further mislead the public in public education. Best to stick w/ what you know in getting your blog beyond Basic Enquirer edition.

 
I have my first hate mail! I’ve arrived!!
 
 
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While we’ve all been focusing on suburban and city parents in this Red Clay referendum, maybe we’ve taken our eye off the elephant in the room: the state contribution.

It turns out that in the 2009 Appoquinimink referendum, the state contributed $3 for every $1 from Appo. But for Red Clay’s current referendum, the state is contributing only $1.50 for every dollar from Red Clay.

Am I missing something that would explain the difference?

Perhaps if the state were to match Red Clay at the same rate as Appo, Red Clay could build the new suburban school AND afford to fund new programs in the city. Or something else that would be a step forward for both city and suburbs.

I was looking at the 2009 referendum in Appoquinimink. Really impressive stuff. You should go download the presentation, and make sure you go to the end and see the awesome architectural concept drawings, mostly for later phases, but still. And check out the aquatic center!

This was the “no tax increase” referendum, which was passed without actually raising taxes – mainly because of growth, and retirement of past debt. Oh, and also because the state provided three dollars for every one dollar Appoquinimink residents provided.

So then of course I looked at next month’s Red Clay referendum, and it turns out the state is only providing $1.50 for every dollar from Red Clay. Keep in mind Appo has an overall 21% rate of low-income students vs. 44% for Red Clay.

So let me get this straight: Appo gets 3:1 state funding with NO tax increase, while Red Clay gets 3:2 state funding AND a tax increase. What were they was DDOE and the General Assembly thinking?

Update: I’m going to leave this as an open thread for folks to report and compare their experiences of the city and the suburban meetings. Please share!
…
Red Clay will hold a public meeting at Skyline Middle School on Thursday, February 9 @7pm. Click here for more info.