What if educational organizations looked more like networks?
Feb 7
In the spring of 2020, like public schools all over the country, Great Hearts Academies closed their campuses and launched an unplanned experiment in online learning.
That experiment is still evolving.
The classical education network operates charter schools in Texas, Arizona and Louisiana. The organization grew a new arm, called Great Hearts Nova, to assist families who value the network’s emphasis on academic rigor and character education, but also want more flexible alternatives to brick-and-mortar charter schools.
Great Hearts Nova now operates multiple online academies and microschools. It just received a six-figure grant from the Vela Education Fund to include more asynchronous learning in its curriculum, which could make it a better fit for homeschoolers or family-created microschools.
A view inside a Great Hearts microschool. (Photo via Great Hearts).
Great Hearts Nova is at the vanguard of a new trend in education that accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic: Organizations that use online learning as the central nervous system for a variety of learning environments that share their educational philosophy.
Kurtis Indorf, the founder and president of Great Hearts Nova, says its new school models “are designed to give families the space and flexibility they need without sacrificing educational quality.”
For most of its history, American public education was controlled by tens of thousands of vertically integrated monopolies. School districts built the schools, hired the teachers, scheduled the school buses and ran the lunchrooms.
Horizontal learning organizations may operate schools themselves, but they also support learning environments in other ways. They may supply online instruction or logistical and pedagogical support to schools operated by others — or cooperatives and microschools operated by families or community groups. Like charter management organizations, they often work to instill organizational cultures and promote particular educational philosophies.
The company Higher Ground has developed online resources, curriculum tools, and teacher training programs aligned with Montessori education — in addition to operating a network of vertically integrated schools and early learning centers.
Ray Girn, the company’s CEO, has described how Maria Montessori’s pedagogy is intimately tied to the classroom environment. A Montessori kindergarten teacher will curate shelves of puzzles, cut-out letters, and other items designed to help children develop specific skills. Technology makes it possible to create “the digital equivalent of the Montessori shelf” for older students.
Teachers have historically been subject-matter experts and learning coaches, but now, it’s possible to decouple those roles “for the first time in history, and embed the subject matter expertise in the environment, “ Girn has said. “The teacher and the adults can focus on being the coach and supporting this child’s journey through that experience.”
School districts experimented with similar role decoupling during the pandemic, as community groups offered in-person support and supplemental learning to students whose schools shifted online. When they worked well, these efforts allowed school districts to combine their core expertise (academic instruction) with that of other organizations in their communities (strong relationships with families, fun and engaging experiences for students).
But many of these combinations proved difficult to sustain when the era of widespread remote learning came to an end. Integrating online schooling with in-person student-adult interactions can be challenging—as our study of pandemic learning pods revealed. What does it mean to ensure coherent education for every student when different organizations are responsible for different aspects of the learning experience?
When education organizations shift from operating vertically integrated schools to supporting horizontal networks, it creates new complications. It may also create new opportunities to respond to the needs of students and families.
Think Fast
- Horizontal partnerships may be critical if microschools are ever going to achieve their potential as disruptive innovations.
- Iowa’s recent move to enact education savings accounts shows how a determined governor can change the weather around a policy priority. Last year, when rural House members held up an ESA bill backed by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, she and her allies dragged out budget negotiations, delaying adjournment of the legislative session for weeks. When lawmakers finally went home to their districts, Reynolds waded into primary elections and helped knock off five incumbents in her own party. This year, both chambers of the legislature swiftly approved her priority.
- After Iowa, Utah became the second state to create a new ESA program this year, and at least 19 states are weighing legislation to enact or expand similar programs. Others to watch include Florida, Indiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Tennessee. ESA proposals ran into snags in a Virginia Senate committee. Could parents’ wide-ranging and sometimes unconventional uses of education funds create a political liability?
- Indiana Education Secretary Katie Jenner describes her state’s new enrichment scholarship program that lets parents direct state funding to tutoring programs of their choice: “We know schools are doing everything they can to support students. We want to give parents and families some agency to get involved and support their own child.”
- Getting Smart maps the unbundled learning landscape, and offers recommendations to make it work better. One possibility it doesn’t mention: Support students with navigators — trained guides who build relationships with students and help them find learning options that meet their needs.
- Ashley Berner of Johns Hopkins University talks about pluralistic systems that treat public education as a shared societal goal, not a particular set of institutions. Factions in American politics tend to resist either the idea of shared goals or a diverse range of publicly supported education institutions.
Full Article Here: https://thinkforwardcrpe.substack.com/p/think-forward-4-schooling-goes-horizontal