Does “Mass Customized Learning” Represent Real Education Change?

There are big changes taking place in some Maine school districts. These districts have joined a group called the Maine Cohort for Customized Learning, and have embraced principles of what is called, “Mass Customized Learning” (MCL), or the Proficiency-Based System (PBS). 

What is the framework behind these changes? The excerpt, below, outlines the important points

Time is the Variable

• Learners advance (progression) to the next performance level in a content area once proficiency or better has been achieved and validated.  There are no traditional grade levels.
• Progression can occur at any point during the course of the year for any content area.
• At the beginning of the traditional school year, learners resume their learning at the point where they left off the previous year (continuous flow). There is no social promotion.
• Learners are typically in different performance levels for different content areas.
• Multiage classrooms are the norm not the exception.

  
  

Learning is the Constant

• Learners are placed at their appropriate developmental instructional level in each of ten content areas based on demonstrated performance.
• Curriculum is “guaranteed and viable” where the standards and supporting materials are made explicit and available to teachers, students and parents.
• Evidence toward proficiency for all learning targets is measured and recorded over time where the learner must score proficient or better prior to beginning the next performance level.
• Learning progress is scored and reported on a proficiency scale from 0.0 through 4.0. There are no traditional letter grades.

Simply put, children can now grapple with the learning targets (curricula) developed by the Maine Cohort for Customized Learning (MCCL), and aligned to the Common Core, in their own way, and at their own pace.

Districts who have embraced this change have taken on a huge task. They have undertaken to change curricula, teaching methods, assessment, grading, and the reorganization of student levels, all in the interests of creating a system that  attempts to adapt to the learning needs of individual children and is wrapped around the Common Core State Standards.

For many, it is a purpose that seemed worth the disruption it would create in the districts that opted to go for it.  Some see the benefits taking place already...but in some school districts it has created turmoil, bitterness and mistrust among parents, teachers, school board members and administrators.

Why?

If this system is supposed to be a truly customized to each learner, why is it controversial? Personalized education; isn’t that what we want?

The Pros

Those who advocate for PBS claim that there will always be controversy when an institution is changed at its foundations. The advantages to be gained from this disruption outweigh the problems, say supporters. Kids would be released from “seat time,” opening up opportunities to learn and become involved in their interests and their passions; to take advantages of learning opportunities, instead of being stuck inside a curriculum that was fixed in time and space.  The choices they will be given in how they learn and at what pace will potentially put them in greater control of their learning.

The fact that a student, in pursuing interdisciplinary learning, can get credit for work done in both disciplines (i.e. music and physics) has the potential of breaking students out of the single-subject restriction.

When fully implemented and when teachers are trained and comfortable with the methods and techniques, struggling students will get the support they need, and more the advanced students will not have to be bored or frustrated. There will be a stamp of individuality about their learning. This is a positive advantage; there is no question.

The Cons

But for many around the State, PBS has turned out to lack the promise it advertised.

• It is questionable that the progression of a student through predetermined learning targets will yield greater student achievement; it is still, in effect, as scripted as the old-school curricula. Student “voice and choice” over the least important parts of learning will have a nebulous impact on students’ long-term engagement;
• The nature and quality of those learning targets, put together by MCCL, are the subject of debate;
• It is questionable how the “unpacking” of a "measurement topic," the determination of how each child will learn that topic and of how the learning will be assessed, and the moving on to the next target once the learning has been measured will result in better, more valuable learning experiences for kids. Sometimes letting kids dive into material that is too advanced to completely grasp is a great way to motivate and engage them. But by following these measurement targets, one after another, kids are confined to baby-steps.
• The focus on the ideas, interests and passions of children -- if they don’t happen to correspond with the learning targets -- is absent.
• While the manner of the constant measurement of learning is different from the old way the impact is the same....or worse. “Will this be on the test?” has been replaced by, “Will this be part of my measurement target?” And in a system built around the possibility that EVERY aspect of their learning can be measured, there is no longer value for learning that is not. Does a child learn about musical dynamics so that they can better appreciate or even create more beautiful music....or because they can tick a word off a vocabulary list on the way to achieving a learning target?

I go to educator Gary Stager for my final word on the impact of assessment on learning:

“Assessment has nothing to do with learning. Without a school system, the term assessment would never be used. It would have no meaning. Indeed, assessment is something done to others. Learners learn, think -- perhaps even reflect, but they don’t assess themselves UNLESS coerced to do so. Learning is a natural act. Assessment is not.”

In a system that values student learning over the documentation of a student’s long-march through standards, assessment is invisible; hardly seen, embedded in student accomplishments.

Most critical of all is that MCL falls far short of its name: if all children are expected to master the same measurement topics, then the system is not customized. Nor is it personalized, or individualized, or any other kind of -ized.

The change that has the greatest potential for changing student lives moves away from a system that pushes content and measurement, and toward the support and encouragement of student passions and interests; individual students derive their curriculum from their goals.

We need to create the change that gives students the best chance of success by allowing them to determine their own direction.

But those tests!
Changing from one test-based system to another, while having a potentially positive effect on students in some senses, will not change the most critical factors in the work of school districts:

• that the assessment of learning is the most important part of the work of a classroom;
• that standards like the Common Core are the basis for student learning;
• that state standardized testing will continue to be the yardstick by which a school’s value is determined.

There are many reasons why the industrial model of top-down teaching and learning no longer serves our kids well. The PBS system understands to a degree that children have to construct their own learning; but this philosophy can’t truly succeed if it is superimposed upon a system that teaches standards instead of students; and is evaluated through high-stakes testing.

One big leap forward for the PBS system would be to institute a system which allows students to determine their learning direction, and choose their own learning targets according to their interests. This would still not be ideal; a system like that, while possible under the Common Core standards, is definitely better off without it.

And there will still be those tests.

A little history always helps

Public education has been so manipulated by political winds, corporate greed, and the quest for power and influence that we hardly know what it really looks like. It’s as if the institution is functioning in a deep fog; we know life is difficult and we might even think we know why, but we can only see ten feet in any direction.

When the No Child Left Behind law first attached school funding to the results of testing, public education took a dive. There are few educators, politicians and education profiteers who would deny it in the face of overwhelming evidence. The curriculum contracted and narrowed; test results reigned supreme, and Campbell’s Law came into action:

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

According to education historian and activist Diane Ravitch: “Campbell’s Law explains why high-stakes testing promotes cheating, narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, and other negative behaviors.” The culture of schools changed radically in the ten years that followed, and the cry-out for change to a broken system increased. But the testing was the baseball bat that broke the system!

For many players in this public education game, the era of high-stakes testing and the cry-out about those broken schools opened up a world of opportunity. Our schools are doing badly, they said, for lack of Real Good Rigorous Standards. Bill Gates gave several million on pocket change to the National Governor’s Association, and the Association of Chief State Education Officers, and under their wing, the Common Core State Standards were born. Now we have a real national curriculum that will raise the bar and make sure our country Stays Competitive.  The Smarter Balanced assessments, aligned to these Standards are coming next.

“But! But! But!” splutter those who have been following along, “It’s the tests that broke the system in the first place!”

So what ought Maine to do?

The high-minded claims of the proponents of  PBS just don’t matter. They are swimming in deep waters.  The "old model," since NCLB is governed by testing; so is the "new model."

It is, in the most critical senses, the same model. PBS districts are taking a different path at a different pace to the same destination. We can’t look for real change that charges up kids’ interest in learning -- because that begins with who they are and what they love. We can’t allow kids to explore, to discover, to create, to change the world, if tests loom over them. “Rigor” (even in kindergarten!) will continue to be a word that means, “To make harder for no apparent reason,” rather than, the production of high-quality work that can be expected when kids are excited to learn; when they are engaged and passionate.

Look at it this way. A guy is in a prison cell. Ratty blanket and flat mattress. Someone decides to make this guy happier by replacing it with a Sealy Posturepedic mattress, sheets with bajillion thread counts and goose down pillows. The guy sleeps great. But when he wakes up, he is still in prison.

I leave it up to you to decide if you think the chance of a more comfortable prison cell will really happen under PBS, and also, whether it is change worth fighting for; or if we’d serve our children better if we stand up and insist that the Common Core State Standards and the associated high-stakes testing be removed from the Maine landscape completely.