Oregon K-6 Math Adoption 2008

In perhaps a fit of irrationality, or hubris, or creative genius, depending on your perspective and the time of day, Learning.com recently attempted to get a completely online-delivered K-6 math program adopted in the State of Oregon.

(For background information on this adoption, please follow this link. For interesting overviews of state adoptions in general, you can read my previous post "The Future of Instructional Materials", and view the presentation I gave last year at EdNet in Chicago. You can also check out interesting critiques of the adoption process by searching for anything by Diane Ravitch, including the Fordham Institutes "Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoptions" published back in 2005, which includes an introduction by Ravitch. Ravitch has also authored a book on the subject, "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Children Learn" also available in a Kindle version.)

I'll leave a more profound and philosophical discussion of textbook adoptions to others -- for now, my subject is our particular experience in trying to get our online math curriculum adopted by the State of Oregon.

The state had published its guidelines for this adoption, so the criteria we were going to be judged by were clear. The educational guidelines included 17 criteria, for which we would receive a score from 0-10. The scores on the 17 criteria would be totalled up and if we received an 80% score (i.e. 136 points out of a possible 170) we would be adopted and invited onto the state's "caravan" of adopted mathematics materials from which districts could select their chosen materials.

At this point I'd like to comment, in case you're wondering, that the adoption process is the gateway to $4.3 billion worth of annual business for publishers. The process is difficult, bureaucratic, arcane, and logistically nightmarish. These two factors -- the size and the complexity of the adoption process -- have driven the publishing industry to consolidate to three primary players -- Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton-Mifflin/Harcourt, only one of which is a US-based company (McGraw-Hill). So for a company the size of Learning.com to go after a prize so clearly in the realm of the multi-billion-dollar publishers could be viewed as a little nutty, or very brave indeed.

Back to the story. We spent our time preparing for the review by adding curriculum to our offering (fortunately, our platform allows us to rapidly deploy any kind of modular digital content, so adding content from third party sources is very easy). We licensed some additional content and created a compelling (in our opinion) presentation of a very flexible and complete course of study.

When we got to the review, we were graded down on items like Spanish language support and the availability of manipulatives (two factors we knew we were weak on). We were also graded down on presenting the material with a Lexile score (even though we had worked with the folks at MetaMetrix and they had written us a letter saying they didn't know how to provide a Lexile score for interactive content). So going in we were already down 30 points, leaving us very little margin for error.

The next feedback we got was that the panel felt our program would be too infrastructure intensive and require too much training for teachers to effectively use. This was actually incredibly valuable feedback and has led to a lot of additional ideas within our company. The panel also noted that we didn't really address differentiated learning very effectively, which struck us as an unfortunate oversight on their part. Our platform is built to differentiate all the way down to the individual student, and to address each student through the combination of linear instruction, engaging interactivity, individual and group projects and game play that suits them best. However, we took the feedback as a challenge to more effectively present the value of our solution.

At the end of the day, we missed being adopted by about 8 percentage points, or a total of 14 points. We would have preferred to be adopted, but going through the experience helped us learn a lot:

• We can deliver a curriculum that meets state standards (no one on the panel questioned our coverage of standards)
• We have a lot of work to do to present our solution as the easy-to-use solution that it really is.
  
• We need to reach out to additional third party suppliers for things like manipulatives and multiple language support.

We also learned some not so pleasant things. Despite providing log-in credentials for all members of the review panel -- 14 in all -- only 4 people actually logged on to the Learning.com site and review the material. Also, there was a palpable reticence on the part of the educators on the panel to consider dramatically different forms of delivery for instructional materials, and different instructional methods implied by the delivery mechanism. These things are troubling.

Nothing in this experience has changed my mind that the adoption process represents an overly bureaucratic, unnecessarily rigid barrier to innovation in the core areas of instructional materials. I can't help but believe that education could be dramatically improved if we were to dramatically overhaul the process by which instructional materials are selected and used by schools. And if we found a mechanism for accountability for decisions that are made by state and district review panels.

Until that reform comes, we'll continue to chip away at the process. Next year there are interesting adoptions in Florida and Alabama. We plan to be there.