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School Progress Should Be as Easy to Track as Stocks, says U.S. Educational Technology Director Bailey

March 8, 2003

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Educators who really want to improve their schools should take a look at how Amazon.com and Wal-Mart do business, a high-ranking official from the U.S. Department of Education told a Stanford audience March 8.

Most corporate executives wouldn't think of making a major decision without a careful analysis of market trends, sales figures, and customer satisfaction. "Next to their employees, data is the most important resource those companies have," said John Bailey, the Education Department's director of educational technology.

Yet when it comes to analyzing the test scores and other raw data they collect on students, many school administrators don't even know where to begin. "It's one thing to have data, and another to know what to do with it," Bailey said. "Often times what we're seeing is there are lots of reports coming back to schools, but it's not intuitive to teachers or parents or even superintendents what these numbers mean."

Bailey, who formerly served as director of educational technology under Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, was the featured speaker at an all-day conference on the "Business of Education," organized by students at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. More than 300 students, educators, and entrepreneurs attended the program, which also featured panel sessions on educational leadership and technology.

In his hour-long presentation, Bailey noted that "data-driven decision-making" was supposed to be a cornerstone of President's Bush's $12 billion No Child Left Behind federal education program. In practice, some states are doing a better job of using computerized data than others. Tennessee, for example, is analyzing standardized test scores to project how individual students will be doing on basic skills by the time they reach 12th grade. "They're even experimenting with estimating what a student's score will be on the SAT or ACT," Bailey noted. If it looks like the student is struggling, then the school can intervene early.

For parents, he added, access to computerized performance data can be particularly helpful. "Every night in America, there's this common pattern around the dinner table: How was school today? Fine. What activities did you do? Not much. Do you have any projects due next week? No. …Yet one of the most basic research principles we know about education is that whenever you involve parents more, student achievement increases," he said. Ideally, mom and dad should be able to track their child's academic progress online every day, "as easily as they would monitor a stock portfolio."


Michael Wood
CEO, Leapfrog

Technology also can be a great help to teachers struggling to educate students of different ability levels. Speaking earlier in Bishop Auditorium, keynote speaker Michael Wood, CEO and vice chairman of Emeryville-based LeapFrog Enterprises, wowed the breakfast crowd with several interactive toys that allow youngsters to practice basic skills in privacy, at their own pace. Among them: a "twister" game that drills kids on math facts and spelling, an interactive handheld game that helps middle schoolers study for tests, and a talking globe that quizzes kids on geography.

Wood, a former high-tech lawyer who earned his bachelor's degree in political science from Stanford in 1974, came up with the idea for his first LeapFrog product in the early 1990s after trying to teach his 3-year-old son to read. The child kept confusing the names of the letters with their sounds, and Wood thought an electronic device might help. From that first product, the Phonics Desk, LeapFrog has grown into one of the most successful toy companies in the world: seven of Amazon's top 15 toys are Leapfrog products, and the company is now America's second largest publisher of children's books, after Scholastic.

Wood is particularly proud of his company's newest product, LeapTrack, a computerized test booklet that can help teachers instantly identify students who need extra help, and then customize remedial lessons for them. "Only 43 percent of fourth graders can read at a basic reading level. Half of all high school graduates have not mastered seventh grade math. And one-third of 17-years-olds can't place France on a map of the world," he noted. "There are lots of times when being at work is challenging and hard and frustrating. But all the anxieties pale, knowing that we have the ability to help change kids' lives."

Later that morning, at a panel session on developing educational leaders, representatives from several nationally recognized non-profit organizations discussed the ways they are working to identify and train the next generation of teachers, principals, and superintendents. Among the speakers was Jerry Hauser, chief operating officer of Teach for America, a national corps of outstanding recent college graduates who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools.

"This year we have about 16,000 applicants, and of those we will pick about 2,000," explained Hauser, who began his career teaching high school math and history for the corps in Compton, Calif. "We look for the same leadership qualities you would look for in any sector: people who are achievement-oriented, have the ability to set ambitious goals, and will work relentlessly to reach them. Beyond that, we look for strong critical thinkers, people with an ability to influence and motivate others, and to operate with sensitivity to people from a wide range of backgrounds."

The best educators, Hauser added, have something he calls an internal locus of control. "Some people look at incredibly difficult circumstances, and they sit back and focus on the outside forces. They say, "Gosh, this is terrible that this is happening to me," and they tend to give up." In contrast, the most successful teachers and principals look at a problem and say, "What can I, as a leader, do about that?"

Among the afternoon panel sessions was a program exploring the role of competition in public education, called "Competition, Choice, and Charters." As moderator Eamonn Callan, associate dean at the Stanford School of Education, observed, "Those three words tend to generate passion, and sometimes debates on the subject yield more heat than light."

In fact, there were some predictable disagreements on the panel. Kent Mitchell, president of the San Francisco teacher's union, said that the city's public schools have offered magnet school choices since the mid-1980s, but the system has not produced miracles and may in fact be exacerbating educational inequities, by drawing middle-class students and involved parents out of troubled schools.

On the other hand, Don Shalvey, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aspire Public Schools, a not-for-profit organization that has built 100 charter schools across the state, said that charters are among the few vehicles that can realistically increase the supply of quality educational spaces for kids. "We target communities that need more supply," such as East Oakland and East Palo Alto, he noted. If competition spurs the remaining schools to improve, so much the better. "I'm convinced," he said, "that the U.S. Postal Service got better because of competition from Federal Express."

Other panel sessions at the day-long conference included programs on financing educational ventures, leaning through technology, entrepreneurship in education, and the technology behind No Child Left Behind, the most ambitious federal education program in decades.

—by Theresa Johnston