Public Services Lab Blog

Transforming education

Mark Griffiths - 27.06.2011

A brilliant scheme that has transformed the education system in New York has shown how a disciplined approach to innovation can reap huge rewards

I have been reflecting on the recent event that NESTA and the Innovation Unit hosted with John White.

Watch his short interview with us here:

John was until recently the Deputy Chancellor of the New York City school system where he was the architect of their innovation strategy - the iZone.  My headline question before and after the event is 'what can the UK learn from what has been put in place in New York?' 

For me this question has two linked parts;

• What has been done in the iZone to create a well-functioning innovation system in education? And then,
• What are the innovations that are being trialled by the iZone schools?

My reading of the view set out in the event answers the first question by saying that a well-functioning innovation system in education:

• Has an ambition over and above that associated with the word 'improvement'.
• Is disciplined, which I understand to mean that not any new idea is trialled, but only those where there is a persuasive case that the innovation has a direct link to affecting what matters.  As set by the iZone, what matters is the goal of preparing their students for a career and (or) college - which strikes me as a more than decent objective for any school system.
  Moreover, to be disciplined we need to wrap around the ideas being trialled a robust approach to impact and evaluation.  In that way we know not just that it works (or not), but also what the lessons are for everything bundled up in the question 'how do I adopt this innovation?'

• Designs in a route to dissemination.  Great ideas developed in glorious isolation do not make a well-functioning innovation system.

As presented by John White and David Albury the iZone handles these questions neatly; the iZone has an R&D function searching for promising new initiatives both within and outside of the New York City (NYC) school system; the innovations being trialled are robustly evaluated and the schools in the iZone are seen as innovating on behalf of the system - they are part of a network that provides support for implementing the innovations, and then a route to the dissemination of innovations that work. 

This means that the iZone is much more than a crucible where it is hoped that a hundred flowers will bloom.  Instead, it moves away from this metaphor so that adjectives like 'deliberate', 'purposeful', 'controlled' 'robust' and 'disciplined' are used in relation to it (as they were at the event).

In my view the Uk's education system is poorly positioned to be a well-functioning innovation system.  Without some innovation infrastructure like that in the iZone we are left with a system where innovation can either be pushed from the centre, or developed by individual schools or school federations.  Neither of these responses strikes me as plausible: for example, it strikes me that individual schools, and even federations of schools, do not have the capacity to look purposefully for innovations to adopt, nor the incentive or the infrastructure to innovate on behalf of the wider system.

On the topic of the ambition that innovation implies, for me the most arresting part of the event was a graph that David Albury displayed: it showed incremental improvements in high school graduation rates in NYC with a hinge point where a different trajectory of improvement was set.  This, David argued, coincided with a new focus on reforming how and what students learn that built on previous reform efforts familiar to us in the UK (new schools, school accountability with autonomy, performance standards, leadership academy for school principles and so on.)  I think it was implied, if not stated, that it was this most recent phase of reform that deserved the epithet 'transformative innovation'.

This leads to the question of what to think about the innovations taking place in the iZone.  I think the focus on creating the opportunities and the conditions for students to learn more is the right one and is the focus of NESTA's own idiscover programme.  The teaching approaches that the iZone are trying out look on my reading to be a combination of student centred mastery learning and enquiry based learning directed at real-world problems (incidentally John White had a great phrase to sum up the gap between schools and the world outside of schools - 'American schools', he said 'are frankly un-American.')

I have two questions:

1. How successful have the iZone schools been at adopting these teaching approaches? 

This strikes me as the tough question given Elmore's (I think correct) observation that "the closer an innovation gets to the core of schooling, the less likely it is that it will influence teaching and learning on a large scale".

2. What innovations are the iZone schools adopting that are directed at the toughest question - improving literacy?

The iZone branded initiative School of One is an exciting initiative and is showing some really positive impact findings.  It's also a great example of technology being used in the classroom in the right way.  This is obviously all great stuff but School of One is a maths programme and, as Hirsch persuasively argues, it is literacy, rather than maths, which is the toughest achievement dimension to influence.

If you want to offer an answer to these, please use the comment below.