Key points:

• School-home communication is critical in boosting attendance and decreasing absenteeism
• A thoughtful school communication plan is as important to good schooling as a great teacher
• See related article: 5 ways video improves school-home communication

When you think about Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds, do you think “HVAC?”

While ESSER funds were vital for making schools safer during the pandemic, they cover more than infrastructure. The true goal of ESSER funding is learning recovery, and the heart of learning recovery is attendance.

Attendance is an important predictor of student success.

School communication is an essential piece in supporting attendance and reducing absenteeism. Parents can’t help if they don’t know what’s going on. Consistent school-home communication helps home adults understand the benefits of coming to school. If school communication is the bridge between home and school, let’s leverage ESSER funds to ramp up the percentage of students crossing that bridge.

Here are three core areas for ESSER funding and their connection to school-home communication:

1. Technologies for educational interaction

The more teachers communicate with parents and caregivers, the more successful students are. The reason is that it builds trust. When teachers share what’s happening in the classroom, parents feel better able to support their learners.

Key points:

• Sustainability initiatives are increasingly important to school districts, students, and their communities
• One school district is combining sustainability initiatives with STEM learning to empower students in their learning
• See related article: How outdoor learning spaces lead to STEM engagement

Modesto City Schools is located in Northern California, and we receive more than 260 days of sunlight annually. While the sunshine typically provides ideal climate conditions, it can also be a double-edged sword. For several years, California residents have been affected by drought and have gained a thorough understanding of the need for water frugality and sustainable lifestyles.

Modesto City Schools has prioritized sustainability initiatives designed to address climate change, reduce our carbon footprint, combat air pollution, and educate the next generation of students about a sustainable lifestyle—and that includes renewable energy.

Our district has invested in several infrastructure upgrades including: the electrification of our school bus fleet, the construction of vehicle charging stations, solar PV parking structures, and the transition to battery powered maintenance equipment.

While these projects are critical to our sustainability journey, Modesto City Schools has taken the initiative a step further by investing in the construction of six new Sustainable Outdoor Learning Environments (SOLES) to help inspire the next generation of sustainability leaders.

Key points:

• A culture of continuous learning helps leaders, teachers, and staff grow and develop throughout their careers
• Mentorship programs and intensive training are two components of a well-rounded system that supports academic leaders
• See related article: How to reimagine teacher leadership

For new school leaders, the first few weeks on the job can feel overwhelming. As a former principal, I know that leaders can only be effective when the right systems of support are in place. In fact, a recent research brief by RAND Corporation found that 16 percent of principals left their schools in the 2021-22 school year for a variety of reasons, including high workload, stressed work-life balance, threats to safety, political debates, budget constraints, and a lack of growth opportunities.

This research continues to highlight why it’s imperative that schools and districts create a culture of continuous learning so that leaders, teachers, and staff grow and develop throughout their careers. It also shows the importance of building a comprehensive leadership framework that includes transparent expectations and includes specialized support touchpoints – from onboarding to thoughtful professional development opportunities.

To support the retention of exceptional leadership talent within your school or district, I’ve compiled a list of four best practices that I’ve learned over the course of my almost 27-year career in education.

1. Establish a pathway for teachers who are interested in becoming school leaders

One of the biggest responsibilities school leaders have is to be in tune with their instructors, which includes knowing and understanding their future goals and aspirations. If teachers are interested in becoming a principal or mentor one day, do you have professional development opportunities or pathways to help them gain the experience they need to take that next step? If the answer is no, then it’s time to create this pathway–whether that’s through job shadowing, courses that allow them to build leadership skills, or a collaborative project that allows them to work with other leaders more closely.

Key points:

• School-home communication is critical for a healthy school community, but too often, communication efforts miss the mark
• Choosing the right system, protecting data, and including all parent groups are essential steps for success
• See related article: Here’s why we put all of our district communications on one platform

Implementing a unified communication solution focused on family engagement provides school districts with multiple benefits. An intuitive, easy-to-use program can standardize communication between school and home, for example, and increase overall family engagement.

Selecting the right K-12 communications platform that supports the needs of everyone and is purpose-built to engage families can save everyone time, increase technology adoption, save money, and diminish or eliminate any confusion.

It also helps districts avoid or address these top five school-home communication challenges:

1. Too many systems create too many messages and mass confusion. Parents and guardians are often overwhelmed by the volume of inbound messages and variety of messaging channels. As a result, they don’t know whether the school newsletter went into the spam folder, where the field trip permission slip is or how to add money to lunch accounts. In our district, we found that teachers and schools were using more than a dozen different platforms for family communication. Even the most engaged families shared that it was difficult to keep up with so much information in so many places.

Key points:

• Substitute teachers are already critical to the school environment
• Could funds be allocated to help substitutes find a long-term path to teaching?

California is investing $350 million in teacher residencies, recognizing the need for effective teachers, which too many of our classrooms are missing. But this big bet isn’t working. Why? Too many people can’t afford to take on the financial liability to train for the position.  

If we know the approach isn’t working, we need to look toward another solution: Substitute teachers.  

The average K-12 student spends one year of their education with a substitute. However, 56 percent of substitute teachers receive no training. Every day in America, there is a need for 250,000 substitute teachers, but 77 percent of school districts report acute substitute staffing challenges. It’s a reminder that students don’t get do-overs; every day of their education matters.  

Substitute teachers are an important part of our school ecosystem. They impact our students, as well as the well-being of our teachers. Not having effective substitutes–or, let’s be honest, any additional person with a college degree willing to help–is also impacting teachers unable to pursue professional development without sacrificing their student’s learning.  

What if we put some of this investment in residencies into professionalizing substitute teachers and giving them a pathway into long-term teaching?  

Key points:

• Absenteeism is a top predictor of academic success and can have serious consequences
• Solutions to chronic absenteeism will require long-term, strategic investment of time and resources

Districts across the country are grappling with elevated levels of chronic absenteeism that have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. The Associated Press and Stanford University’s Big Local News Project found that there were approximately 230,000 students in 21 states whose absences could not be accounted for when looking at changes in enrollment between the 2019-2020 and 2021-2022 school years.

We also know a lot about the negative consequences of poor attendance: attendance is the number one predictor of academic achievement. Chronic absenteeism can have serious impacts on students, such as the inability to master basic grade-level skills, reduced access to food and counseling resources, and significantly higher rates of dropping out. Students who drop out of school have a far greater chance of entering the criminal justice system.

Addressing this issue will require a long-term, strategic investment of time and resources. It’s important for schools and districts to understand that much like the adage, “It takes 21 days to build a new habit and only seven days to break it,” a similar approach must be adopted to address absenteeism.

K-12 school administrators often need help as they track and improve student attendance. Based on experience working with districts, I would recommend these four tips for district leaders and educators who are working to address student absenteeism. 

As a principal, you have the privilege of leading a school and making a positive difference in the lives of countless students. You have the power to create an environment of education, respect, and integrity. You are also responsible for ensuring that your students receive the best possible education and that their educational and social outcomes are improved through your leadership. Leading with integrity and improving student outcomes is a task that requires dedication, hard work, and a willingness to be open-minded and creative.

The following are 10 strategies for new principals to lead with integrity and improve student outcomes:

1. Establish a Vision: Establishing a clear school vision is the first and most important step for a new principal to lead with integrity and improve student outcomes. This vision should be based on the core principles of integrity, respect, and excellence and should be shared with your school staff, students, and parents. This vision will guide the school and should serve as a rallying point for everyone to strive towards.

2. Build an Inclusive School Community: Creating an inclusive school community is essential for improving student outcomes. This means creating an environment where all students are respected, celebrated, and included, regardless of their race, gender, religion, or any other social identity. This involves actively creating a safe and welcoming environment, such as encouraging open communication and dialogue among staff, students, and parents.

Here at Eagle Pass Independent School District, we’re right on the border of the United States and Mexico. Approximately 95 percent of our students are Hispanic, and most of them speak Spanish. Ours is a tight-knit community where many people live next door to family members, which is wonderful, but it also brought some challenges during the pandemic.

COVID just kept cycling through the community over and over again, and it was common to hear people talking about how they’d had it a half dozen times. The number of people who died in our community was heartbreaking, and it scared a lot of people. The New York Times even published a story in August of 2020 about the high rate of new infections here.

When we returned to completely in-person schooling, families didn’t want to send their students back to school. They were scared, and they didn’t understand why we couldn’t do another year of virtual school.

Before the pandemic we had excellent attendance. We’re a Title I district, so many students counted on the free breakfast and lunch they’d receive for attending. But during the pandemic, our attendance was frighteningly low. At its lowest point, attendance was approximately 5 percent, which put our funding in jeopardy. Even after our schools reopened, attendance only reached the 70-73 percent range.

When I joined our district in 2021, I was asked to review its overall communications and ensure that we were communicating effectively both with our families and with the surrounding community. Across our 13 schools, it was immediately apparent that our current platform wasn’t meeting expectations.

That platform didn’t have the features and resources we needed to be able to reach our communication goals. We started looking for a better option by researching online and speaking with other districts about what they were using.

Through that exercise, we learned about ParentSquare and decided to implement it. Here are six ways that our new approach to communications has transformed our district:

1. Multilingual translation capabilities. Our primary languages are Spanish and English, so having a platform that offered translation was important for us. Our new platform comes with built-in language translation capabilities in over 100 languages and lets us deliver consistent messaging to parents and community stakeholders. 

Last October, newspapers around the country reported the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card. And just like in previous years, the headlines weren’t positive. This time, though, it was even worse than usual. It was the first time students took these biennial assessments since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and based on the results, it was quite clear our country’s students had suffered greatly. Results had dropped in both reading and math in nearly every state in the nation. But beyond that, what did the tests prove?  

Not much, according to the many superintendents I’ve spoken with. My organization, the Institute for Education Innovation, recently hosted a conclave of innovative educators, along with business and nonprofit leaders in the education field, to discuss some of the thorniest topics in education today. NAEP was among them.  

It can be tough for school superintendents to publicly criticize this nationwide assessment, which has been congressionally mandated for decades, but behind closed doors, they had a lot to say. One participant even used the words “tar and feather” when talking about the people who came up with this assessment system—in jest, of course. But the fact is, feelings around NAEP are strong. 

Their issues with NAEP generally fell into three categories.  

1. NAEP is a distraction, with zero impact on classroom instruction. It’s not really designed with that in mind. State-by-state results are dutifully reported every two years (and overall results in some large urban school districts are reported, as well.) But if your state ranks low, there’s no guide path towards improvement. There is no prescription to help raise proficiency levels. Most districts aren’t large enough to have an impact on statewide results, anyway. “I’m not concerned about NAEP scores,” one superintendent said. “I’m concerned about my own students. I’m concerned about Tier I instruction.”  

Data access is critical when educators need to make informed decisions about curriculum, assessments, academic and social-emotional interventions, and more. So how are superintendents using data–and can they access it quickly and effectively in order to use it?

A national poll from the Data Quality Campaign and AASA, The School Superintendents Association surveyed district superintendents to find out they use data to support their students and schools.

Data is an important part of superintendents’ decision-making and it provides insights about student and school performance. Data gives school and district leaders confidence that students are on track for success.

Still, despite their current data-informed insights, superintendents say they want access to more data.

Here are some top lessons from that poll:

1. Ninety-eight percent of superintendents say they would be more confident in their abilities to make decisions for their district if they had better access to information.

2. Ninety-nine percent of superintendents feel that state data could be more useful. This type of state data could be made more useful with tools to help superintendents
act on the information and more training and ongoing support for analyzing, reporting, and communicating the data.

3. Ninety-three percent of superintendents say they have started collecting new data during the pandemic, and nearly all (94 percent) who have initiated new data collection agree: the new data is giving them useful information and insights.

4. Ninety-two percent of superintendents agree that data about students’ learning and academic progress is an important part of getting kids back on track after the pandemic.

5. Eighty-seven percent say they can find all of the data that they need to understand whether or not their school is effectively preparing students for next steps. Twelve percent have only an anecdotal understanding of what happened to some students after they left.

6. Superintendents are using data to make changes and share information with communities. Nearly all report using disaggregated data in some way–95 percent use disaggregated data at least once during the year, and 25 percent use disaggregated data once a week or more.

When an unexpected crisis occurs—say, a global pandemic that forced our entire education system to transform–we believe that eventually, the distress and upheaval will evolve into calm and control as the recovery process winds down.

As educators, we’re still waiting to take that collective sigh of relief.

The Institute for Education Innovation (IEI) wanted to hear how superintendents were feeling about 2023. So, as a result, we brought them together with edtech CEOs and other industry leaders at our inaugural IEI Conclave to determine ways we can tackle today’s biggest K-12 challenges as a unified team–and do it with hope and confidence.

Teacher Retention and Recruitment

A systemic shortchanging of the profession continues to drive the teacher shortage. While conclave attendees agreed that a salary bump can help boost retention, true satisfaction occurs when educators feel empowered, recognized, and respected.

Districts can start by offering apprenticeship programs for aspiring teachers and mentoring them during those first critical three years in the classroom–the period when they’re most likely to quit. In addition, superintendents stressed the importance of ensuring a barrier-free pipeline for educators interested in administration and providing wellness programs for educators.

Our society relies on the internet for education, jobs, and personal needs, yet our country’s digital divide has been an ongoing issue, affecting the 14.5 million Americans who don’t have access to broadband internet. This issue is not just limiting education access, but it’s also contributing to an ongoing workforce crisis. It’s time to recognize that equal access to high-speed internet is essential, and urgent action is needed.

The digital divide refers to the gap between those who have access to modern information and technology that support info-sharing and those who have little to no access. This gap can be attributed to various factors, such as socio-economic status, geographic location, age and race/ethnicity, and has significant implications for education access and workforce development in the United States.

According to a recent Pew Research Center Report, 43 percent of American households nationwide with income under $30,000 don’t have access to reliable internet services at home and 41 percent don’t have any sort of device/computer. Along with that, our country’s digital divide is especially evident in rural areas, where 60 percent of rural Americans view the lack of high-speed internet as a problem. This often stems from the fact that rural areas are less likely to be wired for broadband services, therefore resulting in slower internet speeds.

From seeking jobs to finding healthcare to furthering education to career readiness, high-speed internet has become essential to meeting basic needs and quality of life. Although we’re seeing more companies getting back into the office, 26 percent of U.S. employees still work remotely as of October of 2022 and it’s expected that 36.2 million American employees will be working remotely by 2025. Students who may also be full-time workers are finding themselves not only requiring reliable internet access to complete their coursework and studies, but to remain employed and financially secure.

Even if the old spoon under the pillow trick hasn’t worked for the students in your district yet, it doesn’t mean it won’t be your turn next!

No matter how well prepared you are, weather cancellations can be cause for confusion. It’s worth taking a few extra precautions so your families know exactly what the story is.

Here are a few simple tips districts can follow to make sure weather communication messages are reaching home without causing confusion:

Tip 1: Reach Families Where They Are

Most districts have a page on their website dedicated to weather closures and delays. Schools use their school-home communications platform to alert families via text message, email, and phone. They also send alerts to local radio and TV stations. Many post a banner on their website. Social media is helpful, too. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are often the first things folks look at in the morning.

A quick bulletin via a digital school newsletter platform is easy because you can at once share via MNS, on social media, and even embed on your website. If you send a bulletin, duplicate key info – like instructions for how to translate the update and  where to sign up for alerts – from event to event.

Repetition really helps folks to remember the procedures.

School models are, for the most part, outdated–and very overdue for replacement. When students reach high school, research shows that close to 66 percent of students are disengaged. But even students who do successfully navigate their schooling emerge with only a specific (and often narrow) skillset that may or may not match their strengths or interests.

Conventional schooling often leaves students disillusioned, questioning their intelligence and value as it is framed by a system that needs an overhaul.

Learner-centered education can play a critical role in reshaping education systems, offering a more holistic approach to meeting learners’ needs and helping students find fulfillment in their academic accomplishments.

K-12 Value Networks: The Hidden Forces That Help or Hinder Learner-Centered Education, a report from the Clayton Christensen Institute and authored by CCI senior research fellow Thomas Arnett, offers insight into understanding why schools struggle to change their instructional models, along with tips to establish and support learner-centered education models.

Program leaders, sponsors, learners and their families, staff, community partners, and funders are all critical to the success of these learner-centered education models.

The report describes how five different learner-centered education models–The Met, Virtual Learning Academy Charter School, Iowa BIG, Village High School, and Embark Education–were able to launch and grow their models by assembling value networks congruent with their vision for learner-centered education.

1. The Met: The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, known as The Met, is a network of six small, public high schools located in Providence and Newport, Rhode Island. The hallmark of The Met’s learner-centered model is that its learners go out in their communities for two days out of the week to lead real-world projects as interns for partner organizations. For example, learners might work with a local bakery, a law firm, a tech company, or a recording studio.

When learners join the Met, they and their families work with an advisor to identify their strengths, needs, and interests, and then develop an individualized learning plan with an internship as its centerpiece. Learners are responsible for researching potential internship opportunities and communicating with partner sites to arrange their internships. Advisors coach them as they do their research and outreach to ensure that internships match their needs and interests.

2. Virtual Learning Academy Charter School: The Virtual Learning Academy Charter School (VLACS) is a statewide virtual school created in 2007 that serves K–12 learners throughout New Hampshire. The concept for the school came from the superintendent of the Exeter Region Cooperative School District, who saw an opportunity to take advantage of a new charter school law to apply for a statewide charter. Rather than create another conventional school, however, the superintendent recognized the distinctive value of using a virtual school model to offer a wide array of flexible, part-time and full-time learning options unavailable through brick-and-mortar campuses.

VLACS’s competency-based model is highly adaptable to learners’ needs and interests. It offers a range of options for learners to earn credits: through online courses, learner-designed projects, and out-of-school learning experiences such as internships and travel. Learners who take online courses move through those courses at their own pace and earn credit whenever they’re able to demonstrate mastery of designated competencies. For projects and other learning experiences, VLACS aligns these experiences with state learning standards and then measures learners’ mastery of standards using performance-based assessments.

Related:
What data tells us about student-centered learning
5 ways peer networks lead to better student support systems

Four-day weeks are becoming more common in school districts, particularly in rural areas of the U.S. Many districts are finding students and families like the shorter school weeks. In fact, in a survey of schools with four-day week policies, 85 percent of parents and 95 percent of students said they would choose to remain on the schedule rather than switch back to a five-day week. While these shorter weeks are popular with stakeholders, might there be unintended consequences of four-day school weeks? Are there certain ways to implement the schedule that lead to better outcomes for students?

Most of what is known about these questions has come from research conducted in the last five years. My colleagues and I have studied the four-day week using quantitative and qualitative data from state departments of education, school districts, and the NWEA MAP Growth research database. These projects and other recent research on four-day weeks have shed some light on questions about the implementation and outcomes of four-day school weeks. The research analyzes qualitative and quantitative data to compare students’ experiences and outcomes on four-day and five-day school weeks. We find that there are both benefits and drawbacks to the shorter school week, and these tradeoffs can vary based on the characteristics of the school district and how they implement the four-day week in practice.

Benefits: What Supporters of the Four-Day School Week Are Saying

Supporters of four-day school weeks argue that the schedule change can result in district cost savings, better student attendance, and improved teacher recruitment and retention. However, the research to date doesn’t offer strong support for these arguments. Districts with four-day school weeks experience only a modest, ~2% reduction in spending and are not seeing changes in their attendance rates on average. Superintendents and principals report that they think the four-day week is helping them to recruit and retain teachers, but the current research does not provide evidence to support this claim.

Another benefit of the four-day school week is that parents, students, and educators like the schedule. Students reported enjoying having more free time, time to work, and time with family. Most teachers viewed the four-day school week as a positive change, saying it reduced the stress of their job or critically enabled them to supplement their income. A common claim across four-day school week district members is that the schedule boosted morale. In support of that claim, a study of Oklahoma high school disciplinary incident rates shows that the four-day school week significantly reduced rates of bullying and fighting. However, survey data find no differences in students’ or families’ perceptions of school climate across similar four-day and five-day week districts.

Impacts on Student Achievement: Drawbacks and Factors to Consider

Despite district stakeholders’ claims that students were learning just as much, or even slightly more, on the four-day week schedule, the research generally suggests otherwise. Although student test scores may be holding steady or increasing in a four-day week district, we need to consider how students’ scores are improving relative to similar students on a five-day week schedule. If the four-day week students would have improved more if they had stayed on a five-day week, the four-day week would be negatively impacting their test scores. Indeed, studies consistently estimate small to medium negative effects of four-day school weeks on student achievement over time relative to five-day weeks. However, these negative effects are not the same for all districts. The research indicates that there are at least two factors that can make a difference when it comes to the schedule’s impact on student achievement: (1) instructional time and (2) whether the district is located in a rural area.

Four-day week districts with higher amounts of instructional time are more likely to have smaller negative effects or no effects of the schedule on achievement. When switching from a five-day week to a four-day week, districts typically opt to have Monday or Friday “off” and extend the length of the other four school days each week. According to a study of four-day weeks in Oregon, having at least eight hours of school per day on a four-day week, relative to the average seven-hour day in five-day week districts, prevented the negative impacts of the schedule.

Rural districts, relative to districts located in towns or suburbs, also experience smaller negative effects or no effects of the four-day week on student achievement. The research cannot yet speak to why the schedule has less negative impacts in rural areas, but possible reasons include: more instructional time, outsized positive effects on teacher recruitment and retention, and students missing less class time for traveling to athletics and other interscholastic competitions.

Key Takeaways: Recommendations for Educators and Districts Based on the Research

Given these mixed findings, communities are likely to make different choices about the four-day school week depending on their goals and the local context. Below are three key takeaways from the research to keep in mind.

• In conversations about adopting four-day school weeks, we need to consider that the research offers only weak support for some of the current arguments for adopting four-day school weeks (saving money, reducing student absences, and attracting and retaining teachers).
• The overwhelming popularity of the four-day school week with stakeholders and the benefits they perceive from the schedule need to be considered in policy discussions.
• District leaders must consider the possible negative consequences of four-day weeks on student achievement, particularly if the change will substantially reduce instructional time. Data show that while student achievement in four-day school week districts has generally been trending upward over time, the gains were less than those of similar districts with five-day weeks.

When determining if a four-day school week is right for your district, consider the local context, stakeholders’ goals and priorities for the district, and how your implementation will bolster positive effects of the schedule and minimize or prevent negative effects. The calculus involved in weighing the tradeoffs of the schedule will depend on the anticipated size of each tradeoff and the priorities in each district. For academic recovery efforts, it is essential that districts committed to or planning to adopt four-day weeks monitor their students’ academic progress and seek ways to increase instructional time on the schedule. While there are both benefits and drawbacks to four-day weeks, considering each district’s context and priorities is critical for guiding conversations about adopting four-day school weeks. 

Additional Resources for Educators:

4-day school weeks: Educational innovation or detriment?
Does four equal five? Implementation and outcomes of the four-day school week

Related:
What if every teacher had a work-from-home day?

Increasingly, district leaders are incorporating video into school-home communication. Many districts that tried video options out of necessity during the pandemic are seeing the benefits that video can provide for parent engagement and are expanding video options even as schools are back to in-person instruction.

Districts are finding that using video can improve school-home communication by making the process of engagement easier for parents. Video options can help with:

• Removing barriers to school-home communication.
• Providing educators with real-time connections with students’ families without the hassles of gathering everyone in the same location.
• Reaching parents who might be hard to engage otherwise. If a parent is working two jobs, doesn’t have access to transportation, or would have other barriers to coming to an in-person meeting, a video call can make the process easier for a parent.
• An overall shift in individuals’ behaviors and technological skills to rely on video tools.

Here are five tips for school leaders who want to incorporate video into their school-home communication strategies.

1. Make Connecting Simple: Choose Easy-to-Use Technology for Parent Teacher Communication

The more steps parents are asked to take to use new technology in your district, the less chance you have to get them to adopt it and use it to build relationships. When offering video options, make connecting as simple as possible for parents. Avoid choosing a program that requires a separate app to download. Give parents the option to connect to video meetings with an easy-to-use link. Making connecting easy and user-friendly will help lead to more positive interactions and calls. When the technology is difficult to use or requires too many steps, it can lead to negative views on your district’s video options and impact participation.

2. Leverage Data in Calls with Parents to Help Them Understand How Their Child is Doing and Set Shared Goals

During video calls, teachers can have the student’s record available and can share it on the screen to help parents understand how their child is doing. Incorporating student-specific data can be useful during the conversation to build a bridge between school and home and make parents feel part of the process as stakeholders. According to the Pew Research Center, many K-12 parents are concerned about the pandemic’s impact on their children’s education. In a recent survey, 61 percent of parents reported that they felt the first year of the pandemic had a negative impact on their child’s education. Sharing data and discussing it together can help parents understand how their child is doing and empower them to be part of the academic recovery process.

3. Use Screen Sharing and Visuals to Enhance Calls

Visuals can help enhance school-home communication, and using video can provide more flexibility for communicating information with parents. Video can allow an educator to share a screen during a meeting with parents to explain topics like test scores or a student’s academic progress, or attendance, or other data. Having options for screen sharing and visuals can make the meeting more engaging and productive for both parents and teachers.

4. Enable Recording and Logging to Save Teachers Time on Documentation

Teachers are balancing a lot every day and are often stretched thin. Using video meetings can cut down on the need for manual logging and documentation, which saves teachers’ time. Automatic logging of communication history can lighten the workloads of teachers. Today’s video tools can allow for an automated parent teacher communication log with recording and documentation, allowing teachers to focus on helping students.

5. Meet Parents Where They Are: Use Video as Part of a Variety of Options for Communication

Video should be included as part of a variety of options for engaging parents. Not all parents will want to use video chat options. By incorporating flexible options that meet parents where they are, such as calls, texts, emails, video, and in-person communication opportunities, K-12 schools can build and strengthen strong school-home relationships.

For parent-teacher conferences and other education-focused meetings, offering video meetings can be a great way to engage more parents in K-12 education. Video calls that are automatically recorded and stored alongside student data and communication records can also make documentation of meetings easier on teachers, allowing them to spend more time teaching and helping students. Using video for school-home communication can support schools’ efforts to engage parents as stakeholders in helping K-12 students have better academic outcomes.

Related:
How transparent communication builds trust in our district
5 ways a more equitable school-home communication system helped our district

Each year, we share our 10 most-read stories. Not surprisingly, many of this year’s Top 10 focused on innovative ways to engage students, digital resources, and online and hybrid learning strategies related to post-pandemic teaching. This year’s 3rd most-read story focuses on edtech insights from every part of a school and district.

In this episode of Innovations in Education, hosted by Kevin Hogan:

• Why back-office systems are an essential element to successful learning
• 9 priorities for a future-focused education system
• Some good news (sort of) on post-pandemic learning gains

There are lots of promising innovations in tiny pockets of the education system, but decades of advocacy and investment have failed to see those innovations scale. How can we better predict which innovations flourish and which founder?”

My last blog post argued that new value networks are the missing enablers for disrupting the conventional model of K–12 schooling. But the concept of value networks can do more than explain why disruptive models struggle to take root. All organizations live within value networks. And analyzing an organization’s value network makes clear whether and how it will approach potential improvements and innovations.

What are value networks?

Clayton Christensen defined value networks as “the context within which a firm identifies and responds to customers’ needs, solves problems, procures input, reacts to competitors, and strives for profit.” For a company, a value network might include its customers, suppliers, distributors, investors, and the competitive and regulatory landscapes that shape its business model. Similarly, most US public schools sit in value networks defined by government agencies, families, staff, unions, voters, vendors, and the regulatory and competitive landscapes in which they operate. 

Value networks determine what an organization must prioritize to survive and thrive. Because value networks shape an organization’s priorities, they also dictate which improvements and innovations it will pursue and which it will fumble, ignore, or even resist.

A few important clarifications are worth noting. 

First, an organization’s value network isn’t just another way to refer to its stakeholders. There’s overlap between these terms, but there are also important distinctions—mainly in how the terms are commonly used. The term “stakeholders” often emphasizes all the groups that a school system should pay attention to, regardless of how much influence any given group has over the decisions of the school system. In contrast, I use the term “value networks” to draw attention to which external entities actually have more or less power to shape an organization’s priorities through resource dependence, regulation, democratic governance, etc. 

Second, value networks are not the same as social networks. Many schools participate in social networks—such as the CAPS network, the League of Innovative Schools, or the Digital Learning Collaborative—that facilitate sharing ideas and practices. Participating in a social network may connect an organization with funders, suppliers, partners, or other entities that become part of its value network. But whereas social networks facilitate the exchange of information, value networks provide the resources and authorization that an organization needs to survive and thrive.

Now consider a few insights that come from seeing different forms of K–12 schooling through the lens of value networks.

Competing priorities within K–12 districts

By design, a school district’s governance structure aims to give a degree of power to a wide array of stakeholders. People from different neighborhoods and groups from across the political spectrum all have a right to meet with administrators, speak up in school board meetings, and vote in elections. Local businesses, advocacy organizations, and community groups shape public opinion and influence voters. Local, state, and federal education agencies—also influenced by democratic governance—mandate processes a district must follow. Additionally, employee unions influence districts through collective bargaining. 

These competing interests from different elements in a school district’s value network are what often make the status quo so calcified. A school district’s value network becomes like a system of forces with vectors all pushing in different directions. District leaders get caught up just trying to maintain equilibrium and stability as they navigate the politics of their value network. In principle, a district’s democratic governance and its mandate to serve all students in a region helps ensure that all stakeholders have some power to influence its priorities. But when an organization’s value network produces a set of divergent priorities, the organization gets stuck trying to be all things to all people, yet struggles to do anything exceptionally well. 

Meanwhile, innovations that don’t align with the dominant priorities of the value network don’t last long. Strong leaders may be able to pursue them for a season. But if the innovations don’t deliver success in the way the dominant value network influences define success, those innovations will ultimately wither. 

The charter school advantage

Value networks also illustrate why charter schools can often innovate more easily than district schools. For one, the general principle in much of charter school legislation has been to give charter schools greater autonomy in exchange for increased accountability. Thus, charter schools generally have less prescriptive directives from the overseeing government agencies in their value networks. But beyond their relationships with governing agencies, charter schools also have an opportunity to create greater alignment across the rest of their value networks. 

Charter school founders launch their schools with a particular vision for education: In one school, that vision may be rigorous college preparation for low-income students. For others, it may be an emphasis on arts or science and engineering. With a specific vision in mind, charter school founders then recruit board members, donors, staff, and families who share their vision, and may even encourage stakeholders who don’t share their vision to go elsewhere. Thus, they assemble value networks that align with their visions. That kind of alignment just isn’t possible for a district school with more state policies to follow, a publicly elected board, a mandate to serve all students living within a given boundary, and unionized employees. 

This doesn’t mean charter schools are inherently more innovative than district schools. Some charter schools are pretty similar to their district school counterparts because their value networks resemble those of districts. Meanwhile, some district schools have instructional models that diverge markedly from conventional K–12 schooling. Consider, for example, Village High School in Colorado’s Academy School District, Springs Studio in the Colorado Springs School District, or Innovations Early College High School in the Salt Lake City School District. Why do some district schools develop innovative models while others maintain the status quo? Because innovative schools have value networks that prioritize their innovations.

Toward a better theory for understanding innovation trajectories

The lens of value networks moves us toward better categories for understanding innovation trajectories in K–12 education and other fields. There’s a long history of promising innovations failing to scale across public education. To this day, approaches like competency-based learning, flexible pacing, project-based learning, and other learner-centered practices often remain confined to “bright spots” lauded for their potential, but confined to the exceptions, rather than the rule. 

Instead of bemoaning a monolithic bureaucracy holding education innovation back, a theory of value networks can better predict which innovations can emerge in a given context. From there, new value networks might emerge to support a range of value propositions across communities and states. Doing so will require not just spotting and heralding innovations, but understanding the value networks from which they emerged in the first place.

Related:
Only out-of-the-box solutions will fix the real problems in schools

With 22 schools and 8,000 students—nearly all of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch—we have to cover a lot of area in our district. We’d been using a number of applications to maintain open lines of communications with our parents and guardians. We knew that some were working, and others weren’t, and we wanted to create a more unified school-home communications approach.

In 2020, our new superintendent brought a robust communications platform with him when he joined our district. As soon as we saw the platform’s various functionalities and how it eliminated the need for all of those disconnected communications strategies, we were hooked.

Here are four reasons why we decided to consolidate all of our district communications on a single platform:

1. Get everything in one place. With our one new platform, ParentSquare, we were able to eliminate numerous systems and apps. We also eliminated our appointment signup tools and, other than one newsletter, we no longer use Smore. We’ve been able to eliminate all those individual applications and programs. We did receive some pushback from our elementary schools related to one app we phased out, but we were able to address that by showing them just how much more they’d be able to do in the new platform. Once we piloted our communications platform and showed them firsthand, the elementary teachers realized it was true.

2. Speak their language. We have a large population of English language learners in our district. With our school-home communications platform I can write in English and then have the parents read it in their preferred language, such as Spanish. It’s automatically translated for them and then the reverse process happens when any responses are sent back to me that were initially written in Spanish. This has eliminated the need for a translator for basic conversation and it was a real “a-ha moment” for many people in our district.

Related:
Has your district unified school-to-home communications?
Why we use a multilingual districtwide platform for personalized communications

3. Keep student data private.  When I took over the aspect of district communications, I didn’t fully understand the importance of student privacy. From a technology director’s perspective, privacy is about not giving out passwords. But from my vantage point, it’s also about who does or doesn’t have the right to access a student’s information. When you use some apps, those permissions happen at the building level (e.g., I’ll just add a grandma or grandpa for this student) without really understanding whether that person should have access or not. Today, our communications platform is integrated with our student information system (SIS). That helps us better understand who should or shouldn’t have access to the student communications and do a much better job of keeping student data private.

4. See who is (and isn’t) communicating. Our platform generates reports that show me who’s communicating the most and who needs to be communicating more. For example, we’re using newsletter templates and eye-catching graphics on the admin page to show teachers how many posts they’ve sent, identify anyone who is “over-sending” messages and determine who their biggest communicators are. We’ve been using this method more and have also worked the data into our principal’s meetings. 

Making Changes on the Fly

When we looked at our audience and how we were communicating with them, we knew we needed a robust app that teachers, administrators, and parents could use on their mobile phones. We also needed something that was easy for teachers to use on their laptops, versus on their iPads or phones.

We piloted the program first and used that time to gather feedback and determine what specific district settings would be best. This was a good approach for us because we were able to make changes on the fly and pivot as we learned what was and wasn’t working for our stakeholders. And it ultimately led to a successful implementation, rollout, and use of our new unified school-home communications platform.