Open Source Educational Resources

Using the Power of Open-Source Resources to Transform Urban High Schools

By Louise Bay Waters, Superintendent & CEO Leadership Public Schools

A Presentation for the 3/30/11 Hewlett Foundation OER Conference

I come to you from Leadership Public Schools to talk about the potential of open educational

resources for transforming urban high schools. We are four urban public charter high schools in

Richmond, Oakland, Hayward and San Jose, California. We serve approximately 1500 students

of whom 58-93% are low income. The majority of our students enter 9th grade performing at

the elementary level and 85% will be the first in their family to attend college. Let me tell you

what that translates to terms of student reality. First, our students have to catch up at least

two years academically each school year. This means we have no choice except to teach

college prep courses and basic skills concurrently. This is impossible without the adaptive

power of technology. Second, our students must believe that they can make these leaps and

that there is a reason for them to make the sacrifices this entails. We believe technology can

empower them as masters of their own destiny and producers in the 21st century economy.

And finally, for so many of our students, motivation and academic catch up are still not enough

to guarantee success in college. The economic and social reality of their lives will continue to

throw road blocks in their paths. We are convinced that technology can provide us

mechanisms to be real about providing life changing opportunities for our students.

You will note that I have used technology as key to addressing each of our student challenges.

However, traditional technology products do not easily address our organizational challenges.

First, we have very limited resources with huge needs. One-to-one laptops; fancy integrated

data systems, and full-service on-line courses are not within our price range. Similarly, off the

shelf solutions that require extensive professional development overtime are not realistic in a

climate of high teacher turnover – whether due to burn out or Teach –for-America career

paths. Similarly, in a challenging climate of ever changing needs with passionate, innovative

teachers, top-down, pre-set materials, no matter how good, will have limited resonance. For

these reasons, the technology solutions we are developing are deliberately open source, low-

tech leveragers of high-tech strategies.

Let me be more specific about the path we have embarked on - the LPS vision: numerous,

continually evolving, innovative technologies + intense teacher relationships—to make our

students ready for college success.

First, in order to get our two for one gains, we are teaching literacy and content concurrently.

High school is too late to first teach reading and then later teach Biology. That is what led me

to a conversation with Neeru Kholsa and discovery of the CK-12 Foundation. The CK-12

Foundation produces free, open-source, online textbooks that are easily editable. Rather than

purchasing textbooks that most kids couldn’t read, we formed a partnership with CK-12 to

produce what we call College Access Readers. These are online books that have embedded

literacy supports. Most students use these as hard-copy workbooks with embedded vocabulary

and comprehension exercises. Teachers use them with LCD projectors to access embedded

video clips and simulations or to provide direct instruction in content literacy. Advanced

students use the CK-12 original. Very low performing students use the online versions with

text-to-speech or Spanish translation. And even within this lowest-tiered application we are

finding that we need multiple levels of accommodation to address the range within the special

education continuum.

This is the reality of the differentiation that we educational leaders routinely exonerate

teachers to employ. This is the reason that differentiation in practice has fallen so short of

differentiation in theory – it is simply too hard for teachers to do with the intensity and

consistency that is needed to reach all students. In my 35 plus years as an educator, my

introduction to the open educational resources of CK-12 was the first time that I saw a realistic,

cost-effective, scalable way to provide the differentiation needed for true access to college-

prep content for struggling students. Because of CK-12, this year we have been able to create

College Access Readers in Algebra, Biology and Geometry with Algebra 2, Chemistry and Physics

due in August.

But as I mentioned before, unless students buy in to catch up, the two-for-one gains we are

asking of them won’t happen. So again we are using technology – this time to put immediate

data in the hands of students – both informing and empowering them. At our Oakland campus,

the number of students passing the high school exit exam on their first try went from 33 – 62%,

in large part from individual students understanding their data, setting goals, and identifying

the supports they needed to reach them. We have also seen phenomenal results from students

getting just-in-time data using audience response technology, more commonly called clickers.

Now we are taking both of these solutions into the open-source arena. Our intention is to

move our highly effective but low-tech (FileMaker pro) data system onto the web in an open-

source format. It will be available to others to use and improve. And by developing

proprietary reporting modules it could also be a source of potential revenue for us. More

immediately, tomorrow we will begin creating an open-source version of the very successful

but expensive clickers. While the commercial versions have provided great results, they are

$400 - $1200 per class set with a limited range of functionality. At our professional

development day tomorrow, our math and science teachers will design quizzes and exercises

tailored to each subject and designed to maximize the power of just-in-time audience response

technology. These open-source tailored quizzes will be linked to the CK-12 Readers to provide

immediate response data to students and teachers. However, we will be using mobile phones

rather than the cost-prohibitive clickers. And to ensure access and control, instead of students’

personal phones we will be using recycled last-generation Androids and iPhones via wifi and

without a dataplan. Our SmartPhones for SmartKids campaign will be launched early this

summer.

These are a few of the technology-based products we are developing to provide access,

acceleration and ownership for our students. I am sure you have noticed common threads:

these are open-source, low-cost, low-tech implementations of high technology. In fact, much

of what we are doing has more in common with successful strategies in the developing world

than with typical American solutions filled with bells and whistles. But I think that this makes

sense. In reality America’s inner cities are our third world.

Great as the potential for each of these open-source products, to me none of them, per se,

represents the real power of open-source. The real power is the synergy open source makes

possible. We call this process Collaborative Innovation and we believe it represents the true

transformative potential of the open source movement. Let me give you an example. Two

years ago we embedded our math specialist in LPS Hayward, our highest performing school. He

had been developing an online math program for Algebra 1 with a backfill component for the

basic math skills. He built this out at Hayward and Algebra achievement there doubled. At the

same time our Oakland campus had been successfully integrating literacy into their Algebra

courses. This is when Neeru and I decided to build the College Access Readers together. As part

of this collaboration, LPS gave CK-12 the online math course to continue refining and make

available open source. We linked it to their Algebra online textbook, which we then modified

by adding in the literacy strategies we had been using in Oakland– creating the Algebra College

Access Reader. This fall our Richmond teachers began fully implementing the new program and

then added in immediate-response data with clickers. The three benchmark exams this year

have had 84%, 92% and last week 93% at or above grade level, out-performing Hayward, triple

their performance last year, and four times that of neighboring schools – and this a school in

one of the highest poverty communities in California – Richmond’s Iron Triangle. This amazing

systems turnaround was the results of a rapid-cycle development process that would have been

impossible without open source resources.

However, these gains are not enough. As I said in the beginning, graduating high school college

ready is only step one. Let me tell you another Oakland story so you can understand why. In

December, four Oakland seniors with GPAs above 3.5 tried to drop out and the Valedictorians

from the past two years, each with full ride scholarships, are not in college. One of these

seniors works fulltime on the night shift at Kentucky Fried Chicken. One night in January the

principal took his mother to visit him on the job to try and convince him to stay in school. He

pulled her outside and said, “Ms. Haynes, you don’t understand, my mother already works two

jobs and she can’t make it without me.” In each of these students’ cases the reasons are

economic. In each case the student is a major, or in some cases the only, breadwinner in the

family and the opportunity costs of going to college simply outweigh distant future gains. Great

open-source products or development processes may change the academic realities for our

students but they do not directly address their economic realities. So again we are turning to

technology, this time engaging students as producer of technology, not simply consumers.

Our job is to convince the student working at KFC that struggling through college will ultimately

payoff far more than his current job. We have to understand that large numbers of our

students are not going to experience the college life many of us remember of dorms and parties

and late night discussions. The economic and personal challenges of their families will remain

with them and they will face numerous academic and cultural hurdles. To persevere and

overcome these barriers, they need to see themselves as part of the new 21st century economy

with all its opportunities --- not as simply stepping into the economy of their neighborhood and

experience. That is why we are establishing Tech Innovation Labs where students will be able

to produce English and Spanish videos, apps, and other digital products to embed in our CK-12

flexbooks. Again, the open-source nature of CK-12 allows us to involve students as well as

teachers in the continual evolution of these materials, providing an authentic purpose and

audience and a reason to learn 21st century skills. These same labs will also be used to help

students develop eCommerce businesses, providing on-the-job training and sustainable funding

for student activities.

To leverage the developing interest in business and technology and address the many barriers

our students face in transitioning to college, we have just started an online Community College

in Oakland using our technology and facilities after school and in the evening adding in

mentoring and tutoring support. Our alumni already come back to their old teachers for

assistance – we are their college safety net. We will simply leverage that to take them through

any remedial courses and at least their first full year of college credit. Simply successfully

completing a full freshman year increases the graduation chances of a first-generation, low-

income student from approximately 9% to closer to 60%. Our first four students began online

classes three weeks ago and we are offering our first full class beginning April 18th. It is our

hope that down the line we will be developing open-source materials for these courses.

You may have noticed how I mentioned different aspects of our technology vision being led at

different schools. This is collaborative innovation taken to the systems level. Change is hard

and no one school could take on all of the innovations we are envisioning and that our students

need. That is one of the reasons school reform has been so difficult – the timeline for reform is

longer than the shelf life of the reformers and so vision never makes it to reality. However, we

are strategically leveraging the strengths and needs of the four LPS schools to distribute the

pain of early adoption. Then using the power of collaboration, as we are doing in Algebra, we

can rapidly build, refine and replicate.

I have shared numerous examples of how we are using open-source educational resources to

transform both our schools and the lives of our students. In a moment I will open it up for

questions. However, first let me pull it all together and underscore what I see as the genius of

Neeru Khosla and Murugan Pal in creating CK-12 and, by extension, what I believe is the power

of the open- source movement.

On the most basic level, Neeru and Murugan have created a disruptive product – free, online

textbooks. However, by also developing a platform that not only facilitates but actually invites

customization, they have allowed others to create infinite numbers of tailored textbooks like

our College Access Readers. Because of the editable format, these Readers can have multiple

levels of differentiation addressing the previously unsupportable needs of access and

acceleration that are at the core of educational equity. Because of CK-12’s online distribution,

the best of these second generation flexbooks can, themselves, inspire adaptation. This is

resource customization gone viral – and it’s free.

As powerful as the CK-12 generated products are, it is the power of the process of flexing that is

most transformative for the adults in a school system. At a systems level, a district or charter

network is charged with ensuring students equity of access across teachers, schools and time.

We all know of schools, particularly urban schools, where there is a stellar teacher next door to

a class in chaos or where the star one year leaves with her bag of resources and is replaced by a

newbie with nothing. We also know of the consistent frustration where high quality educational

resources produce excellent results at one school and have limited impact at another due to

failure of buy in and implementation. The answers to these conundrums have been

professional development and accountability. I submit that far greater consistency can be

achieved through involvement and innovation.

When we create our College Access Readers we bring the course teachers from all four schools

together. They start with the California content standards, Conley’s college readiness

standards, the state testing blueprint and their experience with our students and line out the

scope and sequence. They then flex CK-12 to this structure – a process that only takes minutes.

After an introduction to basic content literacy approaches, they next go through the flexed

content and identify vocabulary and concepts that need extra support, text that should be

clarified and areas that can be reduced to provide room for literacy work. In their eyes this is

an empowering, pragmatic activity that allows them to develop materials tailored to their

students’ needs. At the same time it is embedded professional development on multiple levels.

After a content specialist with literacy background actually does the editing of each chapter,

teachers review the scaffolded text in a webinar, suggesting last edits before the final version is

posted. Again, this is professional development, this time to build quality implementation.

Since these “final” versions of the Readers are also editable, teachers are then free to create

their own tailored text. What we find is that our most experienced teachers do this while our

new teachers do it very little – so the one process provides the differentiated support and

autonomy needed to address the range of teacher experience.

To capture the lessons learned and the tailoring that has gone on, we also incorporate a cycle

of teacher interviews. From these we are able to identify practices to share across the network

– like the student packets the Richmond Algebra teacher will be sharing tomorrow. This not

only accelerates improvement but also provides authentic validation for high-performing

teachers. This sharing would be much less effective if it were not so easy to incorporate into

the College Access Readers or if teachers were not working off of a common set of resources.

Similarly, we would not be able to move into new arenas without this common curricular spine.

For instance, tomorrow Biology teachers will be looking at virtual labs they can incorporate into

the Biology Reader and sharing regular labs that they can link to specific concepts.

Just as the CK-12 product made it possible to do the previously undoable – ultimate

differentiation – the CK-12 process makes it possible to address the ultimate conundrum of

teacher support – reconciling autonomy and consistency; equity and flexibility. I think you can

understand why I see this hidden power of flexing as so transformative.

And then, when you throw in the potential to engage students as producers of CK-12 content

you take it to a whole new level. When our students know that the “Khan Academy” style

videos they will be producing in Geometry this year may be used by next years’ students it is

empowering. When they learn that they may be viewed by students in Lagos, Nigeria where

schools want to use our Readers, it is mind blowing.

As you move through your sessions today and tomorrow think of the power of open source

educational resources on at least three levels – free, innovative products; empowering

processes; and the opportunity to transform how students experience education as producers

of their own educational content. Know that what you are envisioning can impact the future.