Educators like to talk about innovation, but bureaucracy and red tape often make it tough to try new things in the classroom.
In an effort to clear some of those barriers, the Minnesota Department of Education recently designated two “Innovation Zones” made up of a handful of school districts that want to experiment with new ways of educating students. The zones come with no additional funding, but they might offer freedom from some state regulations educators fault for stifling new ideas.
State Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius said teachers and administrators working in these innovation zones should be considered pioneers.
“We are evolving, and this is our next step,” Cassellius said. “Schools are going to look much different in 25 years.”
Ananth Pai, a third-grade teacher in White Bear Lake, has experienced firsthand how difficult the evolution of classroom instruction can be. Five years ago, Pai sunk $3,000 of his own money into technology that would allow his students to work at their own pace using electronic games.
Pai developed his approach to individualized instruction because his students had a “wide diversity of needs and abilities” that he didn’t think were being satisfied with the conventional curriculum. Some students were behind, some were working at grade level, and others were accelerated.
Parents and students liked Pai’s results, but administrators and other educators were skeptical, at least at first.
“People ought to have some way of providing oxygen in this business,” Pai said of the need to encourage new methods in the classroom. “If someone wants to try new things, they shouldn’t have to run around the bureaucracy.”
Now Pai’s classroom is a popular place to visit. A number of state leaders, including Cassellius, have spent time there.
“My classes seem to attract a lot of attention,” he said.
Last year, lawmakers created the innovation zones with a little-known piece of legislation aimed at tapping into some of the enthusiasm Pai had uncovered. It’s still unclear exactly what the zones will look like or how much leeway the state will give them; the schools that won tentative approval were the state’s only applicants.
Although separated by 40 miles, Farmington and Spring Lake Park schools will create one zone in the metro area. The other zone is made up of schools in the South-Central Education Consortium, a partnership between five rural districts in southern Minnesota.
Farmington and Spring Lake Park are betting the classroom of the future will exist largely online and will be driven by personalized technology like Apple’s iPad tablet. The districts have two of the state’s largest initiatives to put a tablet computer in the hands of every student.
District leaders say technology is key to helping every student reach his or her full potential. Their proposal includes things like sharing specialized classes and teacher training as well as creating new ways to assess students.
Without the innovation zone designation, a partnership between districts on either side of the Twin Cities would face stacks of paperwork and a long application process. School leaders now hope to avoid those delays.
“The innovation zone gives us the freedom to do all these things,” said Tera Lee, Farmington school board chairwoman. “So we can think about how we can design a school system that fits the present, not the past.”
Lynda Ihlan, president of the Farmington teachers union, said her members are excited about the innovation zone.
“There’s more to teaching a child than a test score,” Ihlan said. “I have to be honest; when it first came up, there were a lot of questions. The more we’ve learned about it, we see it as an opportunity to try new things we couldn’t do before in the traditional school day.”
The South-Central consortium will focus its efforts on providing students with the skills to land jobs with a high demand for workers, said Jerry Reshetar, a superintendent at two consortium districts. The consortium serves about 1,500 students in five small districts near Austin along the Minnesota-Iowa border.
The effort is focused on partnerships between public schools, technical colleges and local employers. Reshetar sees a need to better align school training and curriculum with the demands of the workforce, not just in rural Minnesota, but nationwide.
“We’ve flooded the market with college graduates, and a lot of them have no jobs and huge debt,” he said. “This isn’t working. We need to adapt.”
Under the consortium’s plans, businesses and technical schools would “recruit” students while they were still in high school for jobs with a high demand for skilled workers.
“The student will have an education path and a career path,” Reshetar said. “When they graduate, their employer says: ‘Congratulations, you start Monday.’ ”
Both of the new innovation zones now must flesh out their plans for the Education Department. Besides their focus on technology and workforce readiness, the two groups have asked the state to consider waiving requirements related to how they spend state resources, when students attend school and how achievement is measured.
That would take a further exemption from the federal No Child Left Behind Law, something Cassellius says she plans ask for the power to do. Minnesota already is one 34 states to receive a waiver to parts of the law from the U.S. Department of Education.
“Education can’t be boxed in any longer,” Cassellius said. “Schools have to be able to be flexible.”
The state’s innovation zones bring a mix of excitement and caution for Jim Bartholomew, education policy director for the Minnesota Business Partnership. Bartholomew likes the focus on 21st century skills and workforce needs, but he’s concerned accountability may be at risk.
“All teachers teach differently and all students learn differently. The more we do to customize learning, the better off we will be,” Bartholomew said.
But he added that that doesn’t mean a uniform way of measuring achievement is not needed.
“It all goes back to having standards,” he said.
Proponents counter that the state’s existing tools are antiquated and need to be updated.
“They are not asking to get out of accountability,” Cassellius said. “They are trying to do something special for kids.”
The state will require innovation zone participants to provide quarterly progress updates throughout the life of the five-year program. State leaders won’t micromanage the efforts, Cassellius said, but will be able to intervene if needed.
The state’s newfound interest in innovation in the classroom is a good sign, albeit a small one, for Ted Kolderie, a senior associate at Education Evolving. Kolderie said his group is a “design shop” working on how schools will look in the future.
“People are realizing that we’ve been at this ‘let’s fix up conventional schools’ thing for three decades and the needle has barely moved,” Kolderie said. “We support innovation-based systemic reform. You don’t argue about the best way — you just try new things.”
In addition to the state’s new innovation zones, Kolderie noted a proposal now under consideration in the House that would award modest grants to schools that want to try new teaching methods. That “bottom up” method that originates with teachers and in school buildings could complement the “top down” approach of the innovation zones.
For teachers like Pai, the best place to find the future of education is in the classroom, not the administrative office.
“I don’t know how that sort of thing is going to lead to change if most of the stuff you are doing has to conform with what headquarters wants you to do,” Pai said.
Christopher Magan can be reached at 651-228-5557. Follow him at twitter.com/cmaganPiPress. Read our blog: Ahead of the Class at blogs.twincities.com/education.
