When the Foundation for Excellence in Education released its first “Digital Learning Report Card” in 2011, the state-by-state outlook for ed-tech innovation was worrying. Twenty-one states received failing grades. Four years on, the picture looks very different. While there are still only two states—Florida and Utah—earning A grades, this year’s scorecard shows half of them with improved grades and just five (Connecticut, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Tennessee) with Fs. Barriers to digital learning are falling fast.
The report card grades states on ten “elements of high-quality digital learning,” including whether students can advance by demonstrating proficiency (not merely by warming classroom seats for enough months) and whether they have the ability to customize their education through digital providers. And of course, the funding and infrastructure must be in place to support digital learning. Broadly speaking, the report praises states for adopting policies that embrace new models and ways of thinking, and shames them if they don’t. States might get dinged, for example, if they restrict student eligibility for online courses (allowing kids only to take online versions of courses already offered in schools seems truly pointless). That said, some of the report’s criteria feel more like an ed-tech enthusiast’s wish list than a coherent framework to encourage “student-centered” learning. It makes sense, for example, to reward a state for ensuring that all students “have access to high-quality digital content and online courses.” But is it really important that “all students must complete at least one online course to earn a high school diploma”? Similarly, it’s not entirely clear why students’ ability to “customize their education using digital content through an approved provider” is important to anyone other than said providers. What matters more to students: customized learning or customized digital learning?
The sudden surge in access to digital learning (and rapid dismantling of barriers) chronicled by this year’s report card is occurring despite a steep drop in legislative activity in the last year; the report notes that only fifty new digital learning laws were passed by states last year. But like a python swallowing a pig, states were busily digesting more than four hundred such measures enacted since 2011. Perhaps the area of greatest movement has been in competency-based education. Connecticut finished dead last in its overall grade, but the report holds up as a model its recent measure to allow students to earn credits by meeting non-traditional, mastery-based standards. The Digital Learning Report Card is a welcome source of encouragement for educational innovation, though it obviously tends to privilege blended learning over other forms of instruction. This edition leaves the unmistakable impression that the future of education is arriving faster than we think.
SOURCE: Digital Learning Now, “Digital Learning Report Card 2014,” Foundation for Excellence in Education (May 2015).
