What does the future of education look like?

At Matchbook Learning, we dream of designing the future of education.

But where do you start?

We would argue that you would start at the very bottom --

The very worst-performing public schools in our country,

that are serving our most desperate children.

And why start there?

If we don't design a system that meets the needs of those children,

we'll never have a future education system that meets the needs of all children.

But what does the bottom look like?

Brenda Scott is a K-8 school in Detroit, Michigan.

If you were to visit the school,

you'd immediately be impressed by the architecture.

Amazing. Impressive. Expansive. Modern.

But the building doesn't tell the whole story.

You see, last year, before we arrived,

out of 832 students, only 7 were proficient in either reading or math.

Seven.

Now, if you think I'm overdramatizing the impact

of public education at its current state in this country,

by pulling this one example, consider this:

That we could have gone to any zip code in America

that's in the bottom 25% income-wise,

and the chances of those kids getting a college degree

by age 25 is just 9%.

The number of schools like Brenda Scott,

that are chronically failing, are projected to reach 20,000 in number,

in just two years.

And in two years an amazing thing will happen.

For the first time in our nation's history

we'll adopt a single set of national education standards,

called the "Common Core".

And these Common Core standards

will be benchmarked to the very best in the world.

To education systems like Singapore and South Korea, Finland.

And what do you think's going to happen

to the number of chronically failing schools

when we significantly raise the bar

on what our kids are expected to learn and to know

in order to be internationally competitive?

The number of turnaround schools is likely to skyrocket.

But these schools in these bottom 25% zip codes

are trapped inside cycles of poverty,

homelessness, abandonment.

Is it fair to ask any school to overcome these gravitational forces?

I can show you many images like this one,

that surround our schools.

But that would be an incomplete story.

I'd rather show you an image of inside the school.

You see, inside the four walls you get a different image.

You get hope.

You get kids like Jalen, a fifth grader,

who dreams of one day becoming a CIA agent.

He wants to be a patriot, and defend our country.

Jalen doesn't know that, statistically,

he's got a 9% chance of making his dream.

So the future of education rests, for us, on one single question --

How do we help Jalen?

I don't mean how do we help him in a one-off way.

How do we help him systemically?

So that every Jalen, in every zip code,

not only dreams their dream,

but realizes their dream.

In order to understand our future we have to go back to the past.

The picture on the left is a 1913 classroom.

The picture on the right is a 2013 classroom.

Side by side, there's a 100-year difference between these two pictures.

And yet, very little else differs.

In both pictures, students are grouped by age.

They sit in rows.

A teacher lectures them through a printed curriculum,

moving them at the same pace, sequence, and learning style.

I dare you to find another industry that has changed so little

in a hundred years.

In fact, we know in the last ten years alone

technology has completely disrupted entire industries,

with companies like Google, and Facebook.

They're leveraging technology to transform industries.

So what about technology transforming education?

Well, there's been some.

Obviously smart boards have replaced chalkboards.

We have computers and computer labs.

But, if we're honest, it really hasn't transformed

teaching and learning.

And the minute we push this conversation a little bit further,

about how technology could play a role in the classroom,

parents, and policymakers alike, become concerned that we're creating

too disconnected of a system.

We don't want robots teaching our kids.

We don't want our kids becoming robots.

And so we're wrestling with this question --

What about great teaching?

While there's a lot of debate around how to fix public education,

one thing that isn't debatable,

that the research undeniably supports,

is the impact of quality teaching.

The single most important determinant

of your child's academic success

isn't technology, isn't poverty or economic or family background,

it's the quality of the teacher that stands in front of him or her.

Think about that. Quality teaching trumps poverty.

Benjamin Bloom, a researcher, thirty years ago

did some amazing research that actually provides us a clue,

a window on what the future of education could look like.

He studied a group of elementary students

that were being taught in a conventional class:

One teacher, thirty kids.

At the end of the unit they were assessed,

and, not surprising, there is a bell curve

of performance on that assessment.

He ran a second experiment,

this time similar students, same content,

and still one teacher to thirty students.

But now, instead of just doing an assessment at the end,

they did assessments throughout, as the material was being taught,

to see if the kids had mastered what they had learned.

If they did, they moved forward. If they didn't, they'd repeat.

Under this mastery-based approach,

these students outperformed their conventionally-taught peers

by an entire standard deviation.

He ran the experiment a third time.

And this time, what he did was

in addition to this mastery-based approach of frequent assessments,

he gave every student their individual tutor, a college student.

And in this one-to-one mastery-based environment,

these students outperformed their conventionally-taught peers

by two standard deviations.

Now think about what Bloom stumbled upon.

By simply changing the delivery of instruction

to be more of a one-to-one mastery-based environment

96% of those students outperformed their conventionally-taught students.

Bloom's solution is elegant, simple. It's beautiful.

But unfortunately, for us, it's not scalable.

We can't give every student their own teacher.

We couldn't financially afford it,

and even if we could, where would we find the teachers?

So we come back to this question --

What should we do for Jalen?

On the one hand, you have technology transforming entire industries,

and yet there's obvious constraints and challenges

around how we do that in education.

On the other hand, you have this compelling research that says

the impact of a teacher on a child's learning,

and yet there's constraints and challenges

around how we scale great teaching.

Maybe the answer isn't either technology or great teaching.

Maybe it's a both/and, that intersection.

The blend of great technology and great teaching,

or what we would call a blended model of school.

You see, in a traditional classroom we start the year in September.

Let's say it's a 4th-grade class,

and we move that class through

in a linear fashion through a 4th-grade curriculum,

assess them at the end of the year,

assuming they have mastered that 4th-grade material

in the linear fashion, and are ready to go on to the 5th grade.

But if we assess those kids

at the beginning of the year, in September --

in Jalen's school we would find,

and in many schools like it --

These kids aren't ready for the 4th-grade.

They're one or two or multiple years behind.

And if all we do is move them through a 4th-grade curriculum

we'll find at the end of the year they're not ready to advance.

So rather than optimize this broken system,

we decided to blow it up.

Metaphorically speaking. (Laughter)

We went into Jalen's school

and we created every classroom to be a blended classroom,

and here's a picture of that.

Every student has their own individual learning path.

Let me deconstruct this classroom for you.

In the classroom there are four distinct groups.

Along the far left of the classroom, are a group of students

that are working individually on their computers.

They could be listening to an online lecture,

doing a game-based problem,

reading a narrative.

There's a group at the back that

are working intensively with a teacher.

The teacher's giving direct instruction, from him or her.

This is a group that may be behind the curve.

A group in the middle has gone through the first two groups,

and is now applying what they've learned, demonstrating mastery.

They could be doing group work, or project work,

writing an essay, doing a scientific experiment.

And, finally, there's a fourth group, along the far wall,

that are now online, assessing what they just learned

in those different rotation groups,

to confirm that they in fact learned it,

but also, to extend their learning curve,

to figure out now what to do next.

You can see how this model would be great for students,

different modes of instruction,

meeting them where they are, different pacing,

but how does a teacher begin to teach in this environment?

In the old way, they knew what they were going to teach on Monday,

on Tuesday --

Now you've got kids at different paces,

taking assessments at different times,

each with their own individual learning path and learning style.

At Matchbook Learning we do three things with these teachers.

To not only enable them to teach in a blended classroom, but to thrive in it.

First, we give them real-time data on each student.

They pull up a dashboard on a computer,

and they can see every student plotted,

both on their current performance,

and on their year-to-date performance.

Now we obviously want to optimize both of those axes,

but the reality is --

Kids accelerate and decelerate their learning at different times,

get stuck, unstuck, at different points in the curriculum,

and so what we do with this data is we can see trends,

and on that real-time data, we give them real-time feedback --

what instructional strategies are working well, with which groups,

which kids are working well with what instructional strategies.

And then the third thing we do,

is we sit down with these teachers,

one-on-one, every two weeks.

And we ask them a series of questions

that actually they're best able to answer, not the technology.

Are the students engaged in their learning?

What are you observing?

What's evidence that they're mastering what they're learning?

What's their work-product look like?

And, finally, based on the data, what will you do next?

How will you regroup the students over the next two weeks?

What new strategies will you use?

What existing strategies will you tweak?

This enables them to prototype rapidly.

Real-time data. Rapid feedback. Constant prototyping.

These three things have enabled other industries

to completely transform themselves.

And this combination of daily feedback, and bi-weekly sit-downs

enables us to coach and mentor teachers over a hundred times,

individually, in a given school year.

You'd have to be a professional athlete or a Hollywood actor

to get that kind of coaching in your career.

But that's where we're elevating the profession of teaching.