Google Student Data Mining Lawsuit

Google has argued that it has students' consent to scan and process their emails and to use the scanned information for advertising.

Judge Denies Class Action Status for Plaintiffs in Student Data Mining Lawsuit

A March 19, 2014 Associated Press article reported that a U.S. District Court judge in California has denied class action status for plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging that Google's use of students' email content without consent violates the students' privacy. In denying class action status, the judge ruled that determining which plaintiffs did or did not consent to Google's use of his/her email content is impossible; individual lawsuits will have to be filed. Google's software, Apps for Education, includes free email (Google's Gmail) and is used by thousands of education agencies across the country. A March 13 Education Week article stated that Google has acknowledged that it scans and indexes the content of Gmail messages sent and received by students (called "data mining"). The scanned information can be used for a variety of purposes, including potential advertising. Public officials, industry leaders, and privacy advocates assert that Google's alleged data mining conflicts with the principle that student information should not be used for commercial purposes.

The use of student information for targeted advertising may violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) which governs the disclosure and use of personally identifiable student information. The U.S. Department of Education (ED) recently provided guidance to education agencies on the interpretation and application of FERPA when student information is transmitted through and/or stored on the internet (cloud computing). In its guidance, ED acknowledged that education agencies may contract with providers of internet services, but "Under FERPA, the provider may not use data about individual student preferences gleaned from scanning student content to target ads to individual students." According to the Education Week article, a Google representative stated that "ads in Gmail are turned off by default for Google Apps for Education and we have no plans to change that in the future." However, in other statements, Google has argued that it has students' consent to scan and process their emails and to use the scanned information for advertising.

STUDENT POWER

: In the past year, teens in cities from Newark to Chicago to New Orleans have organized themselves into “student unions” to fight school closings, high-stakes testing and cuts to education funding. This weekend, more than 130 of the young activists will gather in Los Angeles for their first national conference. Sponsored by Students United for Public Education, the EmpowerED conference will feature workshops on speaking in public, using social media to organize, and injecting the student perspective into budget debates. “We want to create a space where students can learn from each other,” said Hannah Nguyen, a USC student who helped organize the event.

— The student union in Providence, R.I., which will send representatives to the conference, has been among the most active groups nationally — and among the most creative. To protest the state’s high-school graduation test, they staged a sit-in at the education commissioner’s office and rallied in the capitol rotunda dressed as lab rats. They even persuaded dozens of successful mid-career professionals to take a shortened version of the test and publicly release their scores. (Thirty out of 50 flunked.) Most recently, the Providence Student Union held a “walk in our shoes” challenge to protest a district policy of providing free transportation to high-school students only if they live more than three miles from school. The union organized students, community leaders and the media to join one girl on her 2.96-mile morning commute — on foot — through icy streets.

Nick Donohue

When former New Hampshire Education Commissioner Nick Donohue joined the philanthropic community, the lightbulb in his head switched on. As a state official, he never used the bully pulpit to hold a community conversation about transforming schools, he tells Morning Education. But when he assumed the role of president at the Nellie Mae Education Foundation in 2006, he realized the dialogue around education reform had to change.

— “Back then, I wasn’t thinking, ‘We need to transform,’ ” Donohue said. “Education leadership has always been about getting things done in a way the public wouldn’t notice too much.” And state chiefs spend a lot of time protecting their education empire from attempts to dismantle it, so it’s tough to have conversation about comprehensive reform, he said. It’s not as though he didn’t make waves in New Hampshire. “I’m proud of what we did and what we set in motion,” he said. For example, the state now offers extended learning opportunities outside the classroom for credit.


— But as president of Nellie Mae, Donohue could take things further. The conversation “was no longer just about improving the stagecoach and tightening the bolts,” he said. “It became, ‘What does an airplane look like?’” The foundation funds a number of projects that focus on student-centered, customized learning in addition to other initiatives. Since 1998, the foundation has distributed about $165 million in grants.

BOYS & GIRLS & COMMON CORE

BOYS & GIRLS & COMMON CORE: The Boys & Girls Clubs of America hit Washington full force Wednesday, holding about 300 congressional and agency meetings to drum up support for its mission and educate policymakers on how they serve almost 4 million youth. The legacy provider of after-school programs is more than just that, CEO Jim Clark told Morning Education, and he’s angling for a louder policy voice. Members of 50 major national chapters met with their respective elected officials on a larger scale than ever before, said Kevin McCartney, who handles government relations. The organization detailed plans to scale up summer programs, STEM resources and teaching of the arts. Summertime Brain Gain program, aimed at making sure students retain knowledge when school is out, will expand from 250 pilots last year to 1,000 programs this year, Clark said.

— Like the Obama administration, the Boys & Girls Club wholeheartedly embraces the Common Core standards. The organization provides mentoring and homework help, so if the staff doesn’t know the standards, then they don’t know what’s happening in the classroom. About a year ago, BGCA began incorporating the standards into their program design, Clark said. But the Boys & Girls Clubs won’t be joining the political fray. “We won’t get into the middle of that debate,” Clark said. “The way we’re coming at it, is we’re building it into our programs ... because that is what’s happening in schools.”

Khan Aligns to Common Core

 Mary Jo Madda · Mar 25, 2014

'Math of Khan': Sal Explains Academy's Common-Core Aligned 'Missions'

Interactive exercises stretch from early elementary math to calculus

Khan Academy

“Math missions” are the latest in Khan Academy’s student-driven features. Khan Academy founder Sal Khan on Saturday during the CUE conference announced the launch of the organization's Common Core-aligned, adaptive math exercises, which he described as “a culmination of what we’ve been working on since the beginning.”

“Standards are great, but they don’t meet the students where they are,” Khan explains as the reasoning behind launching the features, which were developed through a collaboration involving Khan Academy, Smarter Balanced and 40 handpicked teachers who wrote math questions.

Khan also expresses that these new features are meant to support teachers in Common Core integration, rather than replace teachers as the facilitator of instruction and practice. "There will never be anything that replaces or marginalizes teachers. If it came down to choosing between technology and an amazing teacher, I would choose the amazing teacher and nothing else," says Khan, who chatted with EdSurge at the CUE conference. "This [set of new features] elevates the role that a teacher can play."
So how exactly do these "missions" enhance the teacher experience?

Math missions (see photo below) consist of interactive math problems aligned to every Common Core standard. Each problem is accompanied by a step-by-step solution created for that problem.



Upon logging onto Khan Academy, students are given a pre-test to find their level before they are directed to a page of “math missions.” The missions, which cover Kindergarten math through calculus, take students through a series exercises tailored to them (based on the pre-test) to build what Khan calls "skills." Elizabeth Slavitt, Khan Academy’s math content lead, reports that “every student receives… a queue that recommends exercises for them based on their level.”

With each skill, students must answer three to five exercises in a row to gain “energy points” and move closer to finishing all skills in a given mission. Here are some examples which Khan links to Common Core standards:

• Creating line plots 1 (2.MD.D.10)
• Understanding multiplying fractions by fractions (5.NF.B.4b)
• Exploring rigid transformations and congruence (8.G.A.2)
• Intersecting functions (HSA-REI.C.11)
• Solving problems with similar and congruent triangles (HSG-SRT.B.5)

Successful completion of missions gets charted on a progress report on the student’s dashboard while “coaches”--whether teachers, tutors, or parents--can see a student’s progress when he or she gains access with a class code or coach ID.

Additional new features include a Common Core Map, which teachers can use to “assign material that is most appropriate for each student's needs without spending countless hours developing and grading different classroom and homework assignments,” according to Khan Academy’s Manager of External Relations (and former math teacher) Charlotte Koeniger. Teachers can use the map to search by standard, grade level, and/or math concept to view the standard with exemplar questions.





Surprised by the move away from videos? Khan Academy gained popularity as a video-based instruction platform, but Khan says that he's always had interactive practice questions on the site.

“To be honest, to some degree, this is a return to what Khan originally was. The original platform was a focus on interactive exercises and the videos were a complement to that,” says Khan.

The Khan Academy missions team also stresses that instead of solely focusing on introducing new topics, the adaptive platform was designed to help students address skill gaps. Slavitt explains:

“For us, our goal isn’t necessarily that Khan introduces new concepts to students. We want to give practice. Students can fill gaps if they have gaps. If it’s good for introducing new concepts, that's great. But if it's for practice, that's also great.”

For more information, visit Khan’s Common Core landing page, or view this video tour of the new “missions” learning platform.

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About the Author

Mary Jo Madda

CoSN on Secure Connections

EW TECH TOOLS FOR SCHOOLS: The Consortium for School Networking is releasing guidance today to help school districts build well-designed networks and protect student data privacy. The group is partnering with Comcast, Education Networks of America and Presidio to build on its "Smart Education Networks by Design" initiative [more on that here: http://bit.ly/1eQNcjp] and is teaming up with Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, Microsoft Corporation and The Association of School Business Officials International to launch its K-12 Privacy Toolkit [http://politico.pro/1iIddas]. “We really have to have a strategy for educating staff and school districts,” CoSN CEO Keith Krueger told Morning Education. “If we can’t earn the confidence of policymakers and parents, it could stop in our tracks the progress that we’re making toward personalized learning.” The new guidance builds on CoSN’s annual conference held this week, which ends March 22.

Google Under Fire for Data-Mining Student Email Messages

Google Under Fire for Data-Mining Student Email Messages

 By Benjamin Herold

As part of a potentially explosive lawsuit making its way through federal court, giant online-services provider Google has acknowledged scanning the contents of millions of email messages sent and received by student users of the company’s Apps for Education tool suite for schools. 

In the suit, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company also faces accusations from plaintiffs that it went further, crossing a “creepy line” by using information gleaned from the scans to build “surreptitious” profiles of Apps for Education users that could be used for such purposes as targeted advertising. 

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is currently hearing the complaint, which alleges that the data-mining practices behind Google’s Gmail electronic-messaging service violate federal and state wiretap and privacy laws. Gmail is a key feature of Google Apps for Education, which has 30 million users worldwide and is provided by the company for free to thousands of educational institutions in the United States.

A Google spokeswoman confirmed to Education Week that the company “scans and indexes” the emails of all Apps for Education users for a variety of purposes, including potential advertising, via automated processes that cannot be turned off—even for Apps for Education customers who elect not to receive ads. The company would not say whether those email scans are used to help build profiles of students or other Apps for Education users, but said the results of its data mining are not used to actually target ads to Apps for Education users unless they choose to receive them. 

Student-data-privacy experts contend that the latter claim is contradicted by Google’s own court filings in the California suit. They describe the case as highly troubling and likely to further inflame rising national concern that protection of children’s private educational information is too lax.

“This should draw the attention of the U.S. Department of Education, the Federal Trade Commission, and state legislatures,” said Khaliah Barnes, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, a Washington-based advocacy group. “Student privacy is under attack.”

In recent months, a broad cross section of public officials, industry leaders, and advocates has coalesced around the principle that students’ educational data should not be used for commercial purposes.

Regardless of whether the alleged data-mining practices of Google Apps for Education are found to constitute illegal wiretapping, such practices would constitute a direct violation of that principle, advocates say. 

The questions swirling around Google Apps for Education also have major implications, observers say, for how the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, will be interpreted and enforced in the new era of digital technology and “big data” in schools. 

The Education Department’s recently issued guidance on student-data privacy appears to deem the alleged practices of Google Apps for Education as violating FERPA. Some experts, however, argue that the federal law is too antiquated to effectively address the complex privacy concerns raised by such high-tech data mining. 

The confusion is contributing to a growing wariness of cloud-based education service providers, such as Google, among some K-12 officials. 

The 210,000-student Houston Independent School District, for example, recently declined to adopt the popular Google Apps for Education tool suite as part of its high-profile 1-to-1 computing initiative. Chief Technology Officer Lenny Schad said that decision was due in large part to concerns over how Google would handle student information.

“The landscape of what districts are facing is changing at light speed,” Mr. Schad said. “We have to come together as educational entities and say to vendors that certain privacy protections are non-negotiable, and we won’t do business with you until they are in place.” 

Plaintiffs’ Arguments

In California, a total of nine plaintiffs are accusing Google of violating federal and state law. They hope to turn the case into a class action and are seeking financial compensation for millions of Gmail users, as well as better disclosure by Google of its practices.

Judge Lucy H. Koh, whose court is based in San Jose, is expected to determine soon whether to grant the plaintiffs class certification. In September, Judge Koh denied a motion from Google to dismiss the case, Google Inc. Gmail Litigation, 13-md-02430.

While much of the California litigation is focused on consumer Gmail users, two of the plaintiffs—Robert Fread, of the University of Hawaii, and Rafael Carrillo, of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif.—are students who say they were required to use Gmail accounts when their institutions adopted Google Apps for Education. 

Their universities are among the thousands of institutions of higher education and K-12 schools to adopt the “cloud productivity” suite in recent years. (Google could not provide a current number of K-12 users in the United States.)

Proponents say Google Apps for Education contains powerful, easy-to-use free tools that allow users to perform a wide variety of basic digital functions, such as sending email and maintaining a calendar; maintain cloud-based storage of their information; and collaborate using word-processing, spreadsheet, and other software applications.

Apps for Education is also the foundation for the increasingly popular Chromebook, an inexpensive laptop computer that is now used by 22 percent of school districts in the United States, according to the company.

“I don’t think there’s another product on the market that provides the same level of power to its users, regardless of price,” said Henry C. Thiele, the assistant superintendent for technology and learning for the 6,800-student Maine Township High School District 207 in Illinois.

Mr. Thiele said his district has used Google Apps for Education since 2008. Officials there have always been aware that the company does “back-end processing” of students’ email messages, he said, but the district’s agreement with Google precludes such data from being used to serve ads to students or staff members. 

As long as the company abides by those terms, Mr. Thiele said, “I don’t have any problem with it.”

In an emailed statement provided to Education Week, Bram Bout, the director of Google Apps for Education, said that “ads in Gmail are turned off by default for Google Apps for Education and we have no plans to change that in the future.”

A company spokeswoman also noted that email scanning supports such features as virus protection, spelling checks, and Gmail’s “priority inbox,” and said that there is “no processing of information” stored in Google Drive, Docs, or other applications in the product.

But Mr. Carillo and Mr. Fread say that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Those plaintiffs in the California lawsuit allege that Google treats Google Apps for Education email users virtually the same as it treats consumer Gmail users. That means not only mining students’ email messages for key words and other information, but also using resulting data—including newly created derivative information, or “metadata”—for “secret user profiling” that could serve as the basis for such activities as delivering targeted ads in Google products other than Apps for Education, such as Google Search, Google+, and YouTube. 

The plaintiffs allege that Google has employed such practices since around 2010, when it began using a new technology, known as Content Onebox, that allows the company to intercept and scan emails before they reach their intended recipients, rather than after messages are delivered to users’ inboxes, regardless of whether ads are turned off. 

Mr. Fread and Mr. Carillo say that neither they nor any other users of Google Apps for Education consented to such practices. They are seeking financial damages amounting to $100 per day of each day of violation for every individual who sent or received an email message using Google Apps for Education during a two-year period beginning in May 2011.

While the allegations by the plaintiffs are explosive, it’s the sworn declarations of Google representatives in response to their claims that have truly raised the eyebrows of observers and privacy experts. 

Contrary to the company’s earlier public statements, Google representatives acknowledged in a September motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ request for class certification that the company’s consumer-privacy policy applies to Apps for Education users. Thus, Google argues, it has students’ (and other Apps for Education users’) consent to scan and process their emails.

In November, Kyle C. Wong, a lawyer representing Google, also argued in a formal declaration submitted to the court in opposition to the plaintiffs’ motion for class certification that the company’s data-mining practices are widely known, and that the plaintiffs’ complaints that the scanning and processing of their emails was done secretly are thus invalid. Mr. Wong cited extensive media coverage about Google’s data mining of Gmail consumer users’ messages, as well as the disclosures made by numerous universities to their students about how Google Apps for Education functions.

Mr. Wong’s inclusion of the following reference to the disclosure provided to students at the University of Alaska particularly caught the attention of privacy advocates:

The University of Alaska (“UA”) has a “Google Mail FAQs,” which asks, “I hear that Google reads my email. Is this true?” The answer states, “They do not ‘read’ your email per se. For use in targeted advertising on their other sites, if your email is not encrypted, software (not a person) does scan your email and compile keywords for advertising. For example, if the software looks at 100 emails and identifies the word ‘Doritos’ or ‘camping’ 50 times, they will use that data for advertising on their other sites.”

“The fact that Google put this in their declaration means we take it as true,” said Ms. Barnes of the privacy watchdog group EPIC. Google’s sworn court statements reveal that the company has violated student trust by using students’ education records for profit.”

Indefinite Digital Profiles

To illustrate the potential harm of Google’s alleged data-mining practices, Bradley S. Shear, a social-media and digital-privacy lawyer based in Bethesda, Md., posed a hypothetical situation in which a teacher using Google Apps for Education emails a parent with information related to a child’s disability status or mental health. 

If the full range of allegations in the California suit is true, Mr. Shear said, the contents of such an email could be used by Google to build a digital-user profile that might follow that student indefinitely.

“Who knows what the hell Google is doing with that information, and who knows what problems it could cause for that child in the future,” he said. “Years ago, it might have been put in a filing cabinet, but it wouldn’t be tagged to the child forever.”

Mr. Shear said he saw “major FERPA violations” in Google’s activities and suggested that the Education Department should investigate the company. The Federal Trade Commission, which is responsible for monitoring deceptive business practices, should also take note, he said.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act was enacted in 1974 to protect the privacy of children’s educational records and to prevent unwarranted disclosure.

Last month, the Education Department issued guidance to schools and districts for how to interpret and apply the law in the new age of cloud-based educational services, massive collection of digital data, and increased outsourcing to ed-tech vendors.

One of the scenarios detailed in the guidance appears to closely describe the alleged data-mining practices of Google Apps for Education:

EXAMPLE 4: A district contracts under the school official exception with a provider for basic productivity applications to help educate students: email, calendaring, web-search, and document-collaboration software. The district sets up the user accounts, using basic enrollment information (name, grade, etc.) from student records. Under FERPA, the provider may not use data about individual student preferences gleaned from scanning student content to target ads to individual students for clothing or toys, because using the data for these purposes was not authorized by the district and does not constitute a legitimate educational interest as specified in the district’s annual notification of FERPA rights.

If a student, parent, or educator complains about a vendor potentially violating FERPA or other federal statutes, the department has the authority to investigate those claims and issue written findings back to the school in question and to the public. 

Education Department spokeswoman Dorie Nolt said the department would be concerned if a vendor were using personally identifiable information from students’ educational records to target them with ads, but she would not comment on whether the department believes the alleged data-mining practices of Google Apps for Education violate federal law.

Joel R. Reidenberg, a law professor at Fordham University and the author of a much-discussed recent study of districts’ contracts with cloud-service providers such as Google, says that’s an open question, in part because the 40-year-old FERPA does not adequately define what constitutes an educational record in an era in which a previously unthinkable amount of digital data about students proliferates.

“The data-mining and data-processing activities involved in Google Apps for Education are very problematic for student privacy,” Mr. Reidenberg said. “But the complexity of these arrangements exceeds what FERPA is really capable of addressing.”

Greater Scrutiny Ahead

Some of Mr. Reidenberg’s recent work has been funded by Microsoft, the Redmond, Wash.-based computer and software corporation that has been competing with Google for business and challenging the younger company’s privacy policies and practices for years.

In an interview with Education Week, Cameron Evans, Microsoft’s chief technology officer for education, called on Google to be more transparent.

“If they’re not doing anything wrong, they need to step up and say it and explain to people in unambiguous terms how they capture and use [students’] data,” he said.

Mr. Bout of Google, in his statement to Education Week, said the company is “committed to protecting the privacy and security of our users—and that includes students—to make sure their information is safe, secure, and always available to them.”

Of course, the problem extends far beyond Google, Mr. Evans said. A growing number of companies rely on “freemium” business models in which they provide technology services to schools in exchange for access to an increasingly comprehensive body of information about students—including “ambient” data about where they are located, what devices they are using, with whom they are interacting, and more.

As consumers grow savvier, lawsuits such as the one in California will become more frequent, Mr. Evans predicted, and pressure to modernize state and federal data-privacy laws will grow more intense.

The privacy policy for Microsoft’s Office 365, the company’s competitor product for Google Apps for Education, states “We do not mine your data for advertising purposes. It is our policy to not use your data for purposes other than providing you productivity services.” 

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That approach was appealing to Houston school officials, said Mr. Schad, the district’s CTO. 

When seeking vendors as part of its new PowerUp technology initiative, the Houston district was aware of the “thousands of other districts using Google Apps for Education very successfully,” said Mr. Schad, but ultimately elected to contract with Microsoft. Google’s data-mining practices were a red flag, he said, as was the company’s lack of responsiveness to Houston’s concerns about how student data would be handled.

“Four years ago, data privacy was not on people’s radar screens,” Mr. Schad said. “But this issue has legitimate legs, and big [cloud-based tool suites] like Google Apps for Education are going to be under greater scrutiny.”

Vol. 33, Issue 26

 

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Q&A with Jim Shelton and Student Privacy

EdTech, Student Privacy, Too Much Testing? Q&A With The Department Of Education

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A few weeks ago, I wrote this article as a follow up to Common Sense Media’s Student Privacy Zone Summit. Immediately following the summit, the U.S. Department of Education laid out some guidance and best practices through their Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC).

There are a ton of questions we need to ask about edtech, privacy, and student data. A lot of those questions are in my inbox–from the thousands of readers who have sent me feedback and comments to the article I mentioned above. It was clear that the conversation needed much more attention.

So I reached out to Jim Shelton, acting deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, who was panelist at the Student Privacy Zone Summit. The following is an unedited Q&A exchange between myself and Shelton. We cover a lot of ground: edtech in general, standardized testing, privacy, and more.

Jordan: I’m very excited about new learning technologies. Every time a developer shows me a new game-based learning or adaptive learning technology, it blows my mind. However, it is NOT increased student engagement, or more efficient content delivery systems making better content accessible to more students that excites me. Those are sales pitches. Instead, education technologies excite me because I can envision how they are going to enable us to address some of the negative learning and motivational consequences of high stakes testing. New edtech has the potential to replace standardized assessments with much more accurate and precise computer based assessments that take context into account. Of course, this is preferable. Not all individuals are the same and it is a fantasy to believe we can accurately assess them all using identical rubrics.

What excites you most about educational technologies? How do you imagine these technologies are going to impact the general and long term landscape of education in the U.S.? How can the Department of Education play a part in harnessing edtech to mediate some of the tensions around high-stakes standardized assessment?

Shelton: There are almost a dozen things that excite me about the potentially transformative impact of educational technologies, but I’ll try to focus.

Education technology does present an opportunity to reduce the time and attention placed on testing regimens, including the many tests it turns out take up much more time than those once-per-year exams. The Department has tried to help on this issue by using our grant funds to encourage development of the next generation of assessments – most recently a $350 million investment through a forward-looking grant competition. That said, forgive me for being a broken record, we need to invest much more in research and development if we want to make dramatic progress in the area of assessment. Because of limited investment in R&D, the field was not ready to respond to some of the more innovative elements of our assessment competition (e.g. cumulative assessments rather than one-time summative assessments).

In addition to reducing testing burden, there are many other exciting things that education technology has to offer. Top of the list is access. As we solve the connectivity issues and the cost of devices continues to fall, we can provide every student in every school access to almost any course. Every high school student will have access to every Advanced Placement course and foreign language no matter how rural or poor – or just small – their school is. And the quality trade-off of live versus online or blended courses is getting smaller every day – where it still exists.

Second is personalization. Being able to better meet students where they are with what they need is going to be by far the most transformative thing ed tech will do for learning – and frankly teaching – whether by allowing students to demonstrate mastery of knowledge or skills in a range of contexts (i.e. better more flexible assessment) or providing teachers with clearer, more timely and actionable data to enable more targeted support to individual students. It also can allow the use of complex adaptive algorithms to customize each student’s learning experience to his or her performance, learning needs and preferences. Imagine a world in which every student has access to their own personal tutor 24 hours a day. That’s where things are headed.

However, even the best personalization and ed tech we see today will seem like eight tracks in the years to come if we take full advantage of the opportunity that the broad use of education technology provides to dramatically accelerate our learning about learning. The ability to test and rapidly iterate instructional tools and resources to understand which produce the best results with whom will dramatically improve learning and teaching if we harness it. Khan Academy is important not only because it provides millions of students with new learning opportunities, but also because their use provides the opportunity to see what works hundreds of thousands of times a day. Combined with advances in learning science and instructional design, we should see an explosion in research and new significantly more effective tools and resources.

Last but not least is making teachers’ and school leaders’ lives easier. Applications to regularly send texts to each student’s parents about their child’s progress and upcoming assignments – immediate scoring of simple quizzes to give a sense of where the class and individual students are, collaboration tools to find great lessons or get advice – all of these have the potential to make educators’ lives better and easier and to allow them to be more effective. That’s why the President’s budget request this year includes $200 million through ConnectEDucators to help teachers build their skills and become better users of the ed tech tools available to them.

Jordan: Adaptive and personalized learning technologies open up a lot of really complicated questions. In order to provide individualized, contextualized, and adaptive learning opportunities immense amounts of students’ personal data is collected. This will become even more commonplace as learning software begins to employ the same sorts of predictive algorithms that Facebook, Amazon, and Google use to show us particular kinds of content before we ask. On the one hand, adaptive and predictive technologies have the potential to completely change the landscape of education in the U.S. On the other hand, folks are really skeptical and frightened of the privacy risks. Your office’s Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) laid out some best practices and guidance around student privacy. This seems like a logical first step.

What questions have to come next? How can we create policy that protects students without creating obstacles for innovation? How can we regulate uses of data that we haven’t even begun to imagine?

Shelton: The first step is to have a set of principles about the basic rights and protections we think every child ought to have. Once we have those, then we need an evolving and layered (federal, state and local) regulatory framework that continues to change as the field evolves. Our new guidance is an attempt to build on the foundation that FERPA and COPPPA provide and have provided for years. We are evolving as the landscape changes and our hope is that states, districts and schools are paying attention to us and taking appropriate steps themselves. But there is a huge variance in how districts are protecting themselves and their students, which is in some ways completely understandable given the differences in their size and capacity, so that means we need federal and state regulatory frameworks that help close those gaps while also maintaining a healthy environment for new more effective solutions. This challenge is not unique, but it is pressing because our children’s safety is at stake. That said, we also don’t want unwarranted panic to result in bad legislation or regulation that robs us of the opportunity for the potentially fantastic advancements ed tech holds. That would be like someone passing laws that keep us from buying nice things because burglars might break in and steal them.

Let me add that in addition to our responsibility to create a robust regulatory framework to protect students, two other things are critical: (1) the ed tech industry needs to adopt some ethical standards with regard to the uses of student data and student privacy; and (2) we need to educate students and families to understand their rights and how to protect them. These two groups will always be on the front line of whatever is new in the data space and their choices will always be most determinative of how safe our children actually are online – even in school.

Jordan: I worry that, with the best of intentions, we could end up over-regulating around student privacy in a way that recreates the same two classes of education that already exist: the elite who buy private education, the others who get public education for free. Those who can afford to circumvent privacy legislation will be able to buy their children the advantages of data driven education get shockingly precise adaptive technologies. Those who can’t afford it…well they get what they’ve always had: lowest common denominator content and testing that’s not personalized and doesn’t take cultural and socioeconomic differences into account. Of course, this isn’t the only place technology introduces concerns around equality, accessibility, and socioeconomic class. And my concerns about access to adaptive technologies is hardly relevant when we consider the wide technology gap between schools of different resources.

Can you say a little about how the Department Of Education thinks about the resource inequality when it comes to challenges in education technology adoption? Could the digital literacy gap get so large that it becomes irreversible? Can you paint a picture of what access to computers and broadband really looks like on a national level? Can you say a little about how socioeconomic factors impact privacy concerns?

Shelton: I want to echo your concern that we need to address the digital divide as quickly as possible, but I also want push back a bit on a premise you keep asserting. If we don’t act, there is a risk that affluent districts and households get all of the advantages to ed tech that we’ve been discussing and that lower income families and schools are left behind. This risk is not just a matter of resources but is also impacted by the constraints districts feel they have to place on the devices, applications and infrastructure they provide.

President Obama launched the ConnectED initiative to accelerate the transition to rich, interactive digitally enabled learning environments that support the best teaching and learning experiences in the world for all students. But we know that’s not enough. As Secretary Duncan said in his recent speech at the Common Sense Media Privacy Zone summit, privacy and good technology aren’t at odds – students have to have both. And frankly I don’t see affluent families wanting to buy their way out of key protections. However, my anecdotal observation is that after those key protections, there does seem to be an inverse relationship between the restrictiveness of school district technology policies and the average income of the district’s families. In some places, BYOD (bring your own deice) has made this issue painfully obvious, and it doesn’t need to be that way. We can create regulatory and policy environments that still allow all students – especially those most in need of great tools and resources – to access the best that ed tech has to offer safely. Industry can pay an outsize role in making sure that happens.

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What's So Bad About Big Data In Little Classrooms? Jordan ShapiroContributor

Education Is Working Just Fine Jordan ShapiroContributor

Grit, Optimism And Other Buzzwords In The Way Of Education Jordan ShapiroContributor

We Need More EdTech, But Less Technology In The Classroom Jordan ShapiroContributor

As an aside, I would like to push you to expand your vision of what personalization means. Although it appears determinative of education and life outcomes in so many ways, socioeconomic status tells us very little about a student’s actual prior learning, current performance, particular learning needs and preferences, and interests. We can infer a little about what exposure and resources a student has based on his family’s income but not as much as can be inferred from his vocabulary, understanding of context, practice and reported support. I don’t have a naïve belief that ed tech will render poverty irrelevant, but I do believe that personalization will mean getting well beyond our current race and income labels.

Jordan: Privacy is certainly one big concern when it comes to educational technologies. But I’ve also heard lots of concern about increased centralization of knowledge. This is the “corporate oligarchy” fear. Some people worry that there’s something inherently undemocratic about private for-profit entities controlling educational content. Of course, these same concerns arise in debates about the common core curriculum. But an additional layer of concern exists when media companies like Google or News Corp are manufacturing hardware and/or content for the classroom. Blending educational content and media content inspires an understandable fear of corporate big-brother piping propaganda into our classrooms.

How do you respond to these kinds of concerns? What responsibility does the Department of Education play in making sure schools create free thinking citizens rather than subservient laborers? How do we protect small communities so that they remain independently empowered while simultaneously receiving the benefits that come from being a part of a gigantic and powerful network?

Shelton: All indications are that exactly the opposite is going to happen. Open architectures and open content are some of the fastest growing trends in education technology. From what I’ve seen, Apple, Google, Microsoft, News Corp and most new providers are creating platforms and tools that empower users to access a broad range of content and to control their experience. And to be totally honest, my personal hypothesis is that those companies that overly restrict flexibility and openness will not thrive in the marketplace.

Teachers and students empowered with technology have more freedom than ever to find the resources that best meet their needs, including alternative perspectives. Our investments in teacher training are critical to encouraging that freedom as is the Department’s investments in a free utility called the Learning Registry, which allows any application to find any registered learning resource wherever it sits. Many of the learning resources created with our grant dollars are also available for broad use – Open Education Resources (OER). At the post-secondary level, the federal government has given community colleges hundreds of millions of dollars to create high quality open content and courses.

Additionally, we can’t forget the powerful application of technology as a tool for people with differing views to challenge each other and collaborate. I’ve seen students debating the definition of citizenship with students from the other side of the world – and perhaps more importantly the other side of town.

The evolution of the media market gives you one analogue for what technology can do to a content market. If that’s the case, then we don’t need to worry about freedom and diversity of perspectives. We need to pay attention to the mechanisms to ensure accuracy and quality.

Jordan: I have to ask a question about video games. I’m a big fan of game-based learning. I’ve seen, just watching my own kids, how powerful video games can be as an instructional method. Clearly, video games are not the magic solution to everything, but they are one powerful tool that teachers can begin to add to their toolboxes. But there are a lot of barriers to classroom implementation. The biggest barrier has to do with resources and access to technology. But even in schools where resources aren’t in the way of adopting game-based learning solutions, there’s often inadequate professional development for teachers. Or, in schools that do have adequate technological resources, teachers find that students don’t have sufficient access to technology at home to make introducing game based learning successful.

What other obstacles to implementing game based learning or educational technologies do you see? And how does the Department of Education play a part in eliminating those obstacles?

Shelton: I too am a big fan of well-designed learning games as one of many tools for learning and teaching. I think there are three other big barriers to broad adoption in classrooms. The first is the hardest – the cultural stigma that people have to get over that playing a game is wasting time. The second is that in addition to training for teachers on how to integrate game based learning we need more and better tools that make game integration easier and more seamless and make the data more accessible. We have to make it easier and more useful for teachers to embed games in their instructional toolkit and daily routines.

Finally, with a few notable exceptions, educational games as a category need to be better designed and clearer about what they are good for and what they are not designed to do. While educational games utility is unclear, teachers are making a rational choice to invest their time in other strategies. But once a case can be made that the games will make a difference, I think things will open up pretty quickly. An innovator named Zoran Popovic worked with a well-designed learning game to integrate adapative algorithms to improve its performance. They then partnered with schools and districts to launch Algebra Challenges that resulted in students from many backgrounds solving literally millions of algebra problems and mastering key concepts.

The more examples we have like that the more quickly we’ll see broad adoption of learning games in classrooms.

Jordan: The current buzzwords in education are plentiful: teacher accountability, formative and substantive assessment, the common core, data-driven instruction, one-to-one technology adoption, character education. I’ve been an outspoken critic of these buzzwords, arguing that they obfuscate the issues more than they open a space for real conversation. In particular, I’ve written extensively about the problems with buzzwords like “grit, perseverance, and optimism.” Lucky for us, the conversation around education is always evolving. The words we hear today will be replaced with new words.

I’m curious how you think the conversation will change in the years to come? Which buzzwords will drift away and which will become more predominant? And in the political sphere, what educational issues will have a primary place in the 2016 presidential election season?

Shelton: I have no idea what the next round of buzzwords will be, and while some of the terms like grit, persistence and resilience have become faddish, there is important science and a fair amount of common sense behind them.

I think that one of the most important concepts ahead of us in education is empowerment. We’re beginning to see the ways in which technology can help students take control of their learning – moving at their own pace, going deep where they desire and exploring new areas of interest. Teachers are finally getting the tools they need to do what we’ve been asked to do for years – differentiate. With the tools available teachers cannot only create new and more flexible group approaches but truly tailor strategies and access resources for individual students. School leaders have an unprecedented level of transparency into individual classrooms and tools to engage teachers, students and parents. Parents have many new kinds of information and choices. All of these things will unleash latent demand for more and better solutions, and I am more confident than ever the world will respond.

And as to your question about the 2016 election – I would love to see education become a genuine election issue. Not based on some hot button, litmus test issue, but based on which candidate believes our kids deserve the opportunity to realize their full potential and is willing to do what it takes for each child gets that chance. Voters should ask candidates in the next election what they believe and what they are willing to do.

Jordan Shapiro will be speaking at the Global Education And Skills Forum in Dubai (March 15-17) about game-based learning, educational technology, and the future of learning. 

Higher Ed CBE

The Competency-Based Education Network has announced its first cohort of 18 colleges and two higher ed systems that will work alongside each other in developing new competency-based degrees.
The effort is funded by the Lumina Foundation and coordinated by the nonprofit group Public Agenda and was first reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education. The participating colleges and universities will work together to accelerate progress on their competency-based learning models through rapidly testing new ideas and sharing results.
The participating colleges and universities are: Antioch University, Argosy University, Brandman University, Broward College, Capella University, Charter Oak State College, City University of Seattle, DePaul University, Excelsior College, Lipscomb University, Northern Arizona University, Salt Lake Community College, Southern New Hampshire University, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (Texas A&M University-Commerce and South Texas College), the University of Maine at Presque Isle, the University of Maryland University College, and Westminster College. And two community college systems: Kentucky Community & Technical College System and the University of Wisconsin-Extension are also involved.
 POLITICO 

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Published Online: March 4, 2014

Published in Print: March 5, 2014, as U.S. Outlines Data-Privacy Guidelines

Ed. Dept. Makes Protecting Student Data a High Priority

'Summit' tackles challenges

By Benjamin Herold

Seeking to help schools protect students' privacy without inhibiting the use of digital technologies in the classroom, the U.S. Department of Education released new guidance last week on the proper use, storage, and security of the massive amounts of data being generated by new, online educational resources.
"This can't be a choice between privacy and progress," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told a gathering of privacy advocates and ed-tech leaders who gathered for a "summit" on the hot-button issue.
The guidance comes amid a flurry of activity around student-data privacy. Also in recent weeks, a leading technology trade group issued its own recommendations for protecting such data; major state legislation was proposed in California; U.S. Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., announced that he will soon introduce a federal bill; and the San Francisco-based nonprofit Common Sense Media hosted the high-profile "School Privacy Zone" summit here.
James P. Steyer, the CEO of Common Sense Media, said the confluence of efforts is a good sign.

A Flurry of Recommendations

February was a busy month for a wide cross-section of groups interested in student-data privacy:
Federal Government
The U.S. Department of Education released new guidance to help schools and districts interpret major student-privacy laws and implement best practices. Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., announced that he will soon introduce new legislation on the issue.
State Government
California state Sen. Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat, sponsored a new bill that, among other goals, would prohibit providers of online educational services from using or disclosing student data for commercial purposes, such as marketing. Bills in Kansas and a number of other states are also under consideration.
Ed-Tech Industry
The Software & Information Industry Association released "best practices for the safeguarding of student-information privacy and security for providers of school services." The recommendations focus on limiting the use of personally identifiable student information to "educational and related purposes" and improving policies related to transparency, contracting, security, and data-breach notification.
Privacy Advocates
The nonprofit Common Sense Media hosted a "School Privacy Zone" summit in Washington attended by dozens of advocates, ed-tech leaders, and government officials, including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The group recently conducted polling research on U.S. voters' attitudes about student-data privacy and is promoting a set of "fundamental principles" related to the issue.

"I've never felt that industry self-regulations were sufficient to protect the interests of kids and families," said Mr. Steyer, whose organization is known for evaluating media and educational technology intended for use by children. "We want the best [private] actors to step forward, but we also need legislation and regulation and advocacy. It's the combination that works."
For its part, the federal government will seek "vigorous self-policing by commercial players" handling sensitive data about children, Secretary Duncan said, but it is "not going to wait for industry or rely on promises" to protect that information. The federal guidance is nonbinding and contains no new regulations; instead, it offers interpretations of existing laws and encourages "best practices" by schools and districts.
The 14-page document highlights the challenges of securing students' data in the rapidly evolving digital education landscape. The Education Department's short answer—"it depends"—to two frequently asked questions by school officials about how federal statutes apply to the sharing of sensitive student information with third-party vendors left some privacy advocates unsatisfied.
"The guidance really underscores the fact that student-privacy rights are under attack," said Khaliah Barnes, a lawyer for the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, based in Washington.
Representatives from the software industry, meanwhile, commended the department's guidance.

Crafting Protective Measures

In his keynote address at the summit, Mr. Duncan touted the "extraordinary learning opportunities" associated with new digital learning tools and the vast amounts of information they generate. He cited examples of schools' use of technology and data to personalize student learning, free up teachers' time for high-value instructional activities, and engage parents.
But the secretary also stressed that "school systems owe families the highest standard of security and privacy," and he sharply criticized some common industry practices, including "take-it-or-leave-it" contracts with districts that allow companies to unilaterally and without notice change their privacy-protection practices.
"It is in your best interest to police yourselves before others do," Mr. Duncan said in a direct message to ed-tech vendors.
Many policymakers, advocates, and even industry officials say a baseline standard should be that third-party vendors use student information only for educational purposes.
The new federal guidance, however, makes clear that defining "educational purposes" in the digital age is a complicated endeavor, and that student-privacy statutes now on the books are straining to meet the challenges presented by "big data" and ubiquitous digital learning tools.
Take, for example, the "metadata" collected on students via digital devices and online learning programs, which can include keystroke information, the time and place at which a device is being used, and more.
Under some circumstances, such metadata are not protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, a 40-year-old law intended to protect children's educational records from disclosure. According to the new guidelines, it may thus sometimes be permissible for vendors to use such information for data-mining and other noneducational purposes.
The circumstances under which students' personally identifiable information may be used by third-party vendors can also be murky. As a result, the Education Department suggests that "schools and districts will typically need to evaluate the use of online educational services on a case-by-case basis to determine if FERPA-protected information is implicated."
Some privacy advocates, though, criticize the department as having weakened FERPA by regulatory changes made in recent years.
"In the process of encouraging a market in data-mining software and the outsourcing of education into private hands, [the department] seems willing to sacrifice our children's privacy," said Leonie Haimson, the executive director of the New York City-based nonprofit Class Size Matters and a frequent critic of industry involvement in student data-sharing initiatives.

Outlining Best Practices

Dozens of bills addressing data privacy have been proposed in a number of states in recent months, and at the federal level, Sen. Markey said last week that he would seek "new, updated rules" to protect sensitive student information that is transferred to private companies.
The focus of the planned federal legislation, Mr. Markey said in a statement, would be prohibiting the use of such data for targeted marketing to children, ensuring parents' rights to access information about their children that is held by private companies, and creating other new safeguards.
Hoping to get out ahead of the rising regulatory tide, the Software & Information Industry Association, a trade group based in Washington, released its own recommendations.
"We're concerned about [the possibility] of legislation that might capture very appropriate uses of student information," said Mark Schneiderman, the group's senior director of education policy. "Our intention is to create a 'trust framework,' and at the same time make sure we're not cutting off our nose to spite our face."
While the SIIA focused on best practices for industry, the Education Department focused in its new guidance on supporting smarter, more effective practices by schools and districts.

Related Blog

Among the federal recommendations for school systems are conducting an inventory of all online educational services now in use; developing policies to evaluate and approve proposed online educational services, including no-cost software and apps that require only click-through consent; and pursuing written contracts with all new data vendors.
But while such approaches are welcome, they might not be enough to keep up with rising parental concerns about the privacy and security of their children's data, said Joel R. Reidenberg, a Fordham University law professor who recently published a scathing review of districts' current contracts with cloud-computing service providers.
"I don't think it's a reasonable expectation that districts are in a position to police vendors and really take control of their data," Mr. Reidenberg said. "But it's great that [the department] finally got something out."

Vol. 33, Issue 23, Pages 1,13

Related Stories

• "Education Leaders Tackle Student Data Privacy Issues at Summit,"(Digital Education Blog) February 24, 2014.
• “Danger Posed by Student-Data Breaches Prompts Action,”January 22, 2014.
• "Districts' Use of Cloud Computing Brings Privacy Risks, Study Says,"(Digital Education Blog) December 13, 2013.
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Transformative Scale: The Future of Growing What Works

In just 12 years, Gerald Chertavian has nurtured Year Up from start-up to star status among nonprofits that offer job training and educational support to disadvantaged urban young adults. A remarkable 84 percent of Year Up’s graduates land full-time jobs or enroll in college within four months of completing their year-long skills training and internship program. Such success has propelled the program’s annual enrollment from 22 students in one city in 2001 to more than 2,000 students in 12 cities today.
Year Up’s growth can be captured by a simple catchphrase: “scaling what works.” It is a phrase that has energized social entrepreneurs and philanthropists alike, and a rallying cry to direct more funding to interventions that actually get results. Leaders such as the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation,¹ Grantmakers for Effective Organizations,² Results for America, the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, and many others have worked tirelessly to advance this effort. Even the federal government embraced the idea. Soon after taking office in 2009, President Obama launched initiatives to identify and support social programs with proven benefits. This is critical work, and it must continue. (See Sidebar: Continue to Expand Proven Programs)
But success has its limits. Chertavian now confronts a dilemma shared by many other successful social entrepreneurs.³ He has a proven program and steady site-by-site growth. Yet, Year Up reaches only a tiny fraction of the 6.7 million low-income young adults in the United States who are out of work and out of school. “Given the magnitude of the problem, we can’t be satisfied with a plan that just doubles the size of Year Up,” says Chertavian. “We need a new path to close the gap between what we’ve achieved to date and what we still need to accomplish.”
That new path requires innovative ways of thinking about scale. It is no longer sufficient simply to scale what works in an incremental manner. Three years ago, a Stanford Social Innovation Review article proposed the notion of scaling impact rather than organizations, asking, “How can we achieve 100x the results with just 2x the organization?”⁴ More recently, Chertavian and other social sector pioneers have started to tackle an even more fundamental question: How can we grow our impact to actually solve problems we care about? In short, how can we achieve truly transformative scale?

Strategies for Transformative Scale

In their quest for answers, these pioneers are experimenting with ways to help far more people while keeping a lid on the growth of their own organizations. Reviewing their efforts to date, we can identify nine approaches that hold real promise for addressing at a transformative scale a number of major social problems. The approaches that follow aren’t exhaustive, nor are they necessarily new. But they represent a set of experiments that build on all our progress to date and could grow impact in ways that lead to lasting solutions.

1. Distribute through existing platforms
The nonprofit sector historically has been a proving ground for social innovations. Once nonprofits perfect a program, the challenge is how to move from small-scale demonstrations and pilots to reach large numbers of people who could benefit. One way to accomplish this is to hitch a ride with an existing network or system that can replicate a program in hundreds, if not thousands, of locations.
Sixty percent of Americans live within three miles of a YMCA. Capitalizing on this fact, the national Y is using its nationwide network of community Ys to spread a diabetes prevention program that originated with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).⁵ By altering participants’ eating and exercise habits, the program reduces the incidence of type 2 diabetes by 58 percent in at-risk individuals.
Critical to the success of this effort was the Y’s ability to create a sustainable funding model for the program. The original NIH model involved health professionals working one-on-one with high-risk individuals, a high-cost approach that prevented widespread adoption. Together with the Indiana University School of Medicine, the Y adapted the program to a group model led by trained community instructors. Using this model, which delivered the same compelling results at one-fourth the cost, the Y was able to persuade health insurers to reimburse program costs. That, in turn, cleared the way for the Y to expand the program to 614 locations, with many more to come.⁶
The potential to deliver successful programs using the existing infrastructure of a national nonprofit network is huge, but getting there won’t be easy. Any initiative that chooses to go this route has to figure out how to ensure that providers in a widely dispersed network can reliably deliver consistent results.⁷ This means investing in systems such as a network-wide approach to performance measurement. Social entrepreneurs who wish to extend their impact via networks also will have to relinquish some control to achieve the scale they seek.
2. Recruit (and train) others to deliver the solution
Rather than relying on a single player, such as the Y, to help bring a program or initiative to scale, it’s possible to teach a collection of unrelated nonprofits or agencies to deliver a successful program to far greater numbers of beneficiaries. In some cases these organizations can further drive down costs by using volunteers.
Year Up chose this route when it partnered with Miami Dade Community College in 2012 to establish the Professional Training Corps. Modeled after the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), this program sets students on an associate degree track while providing them with the professional development and internship experience that mirrors the Year Up program. The pilot, if successful, will provide the template for spreading the program to community colleges across the country and reaching a projected 100,000 students a year.
Organizations that pursue this pathway typically must build a new set of capabilities. “Doing”—actually delivering a program—and “enabling”—training another organization do so—are two quite different processes, and it’s important to be very clear about what is required to do enabling well.
3. Unbundle and scale up the parts that have the greatest impact
Successful social-sector initiatives typically involve lots of moving parts that combine to deliver the desired results. But what if you don’t need all the parts to get the same or nearly the same results? If you can identify the essential components that account for most of your impact but require only a fraction of the total cost and effort, then it may be possible to break them out and take them to scale.
KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, is a national network of public charter schools that has taken this approach to leadership training. Since opening its first two schools in 1995, KIPP’s network has grown to serve more than 50,000 students in 141 schools in 20 states and Washington, D.C.
Two years ago, KIPP launched the Leadership Design Fellowship, an eight-month program for public and charter school district administrators that provides intensive training on KIPP’s principal-development model. KIPP chose to scale this aspect of its work based on a core belief that outstanding schools are built and sustained by great leaders. The idea behind the fellowship program is that its graduates—some of whom lead districts touching hundreds of thousands of students—will implement KIPP’s principal-training model in their own school systems, thus extending KIPP’s impact without adding to its size.
The challenge for KIPP and others who unbundle and replicate elements of a successful program is to ensure that the new, lower-cost model actually works and increases total impact. The gold standard for evaluating program effectiveness is the randomized control trial (RCT). While some nonprofits may have strong RCT evaluations of their full programs, they may not have tested, or even considered, the distinctive impact of unbundled subcomponents. Sometimes such testing can be built into the original RCT. For example, multiple groups can receive variations of the model that include only certain subcomponents. At the same time, many social sector leaders are asking if there is a faster, less expensive path for assessing the potential of unbundled approaches than traditional RCTs, which often come with a seven-figure price tag.
Lower-cost RCT models are a research priority for the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy. It recently announced a three-year initiative to demonstrate the feasibility and value of low-cost RCTs.⁸ Leading evaluation organizations like MDRC and MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, and some new players like IDinsight, also are experimenting with low-cost approaches that have promise. No doubt, nonprofits and funders interested in the unbundling pathway will benefit from these new approaches as they either confirm when unbundling works or show when total impact is higher with the full model.
4. Use technology to reach a larger audience
Technology can provide another lower-cost pathway to growing a program’s reach and impact. Khan Academy, for example, delivers instructional videos online to millions of people around the globe. As a result, the organization has remained very small even as its audience has exploded.
Even traditional nonprofits can use technology to accelerate the spread of an existing program or practice.9 College Summit, whose mission is to help increase college enrollment and success rates among low-income high school graduates, has gone this route. Currently, the organization partners with 180 high schools in 12 states and serves upwards of 50,000 students. But with a $2.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, College Summit has developed 20 Facebook apps that can help guide many more low-income students through the college admission process and support their success on campus. Apps deliver automated alerts for important deadlines; facilitate the formation of teams of family, mentors, and friends for support and encouragement; or guide students through the process of transferring from community college to a four-year university, among other services. Time will tell whether this experiment succeeds. What’s clear today is that this kind of technology-enabled project, while potentially risky, could help nonprofits significantly expand the reach and impact of their work.
5. Don’t just build organizations and programs, strengthen a field
Nonprofits and funders committed to far-reaching social change understand that their goals cannot be reached without the support of a critical mass of organizations and individuals working together as a field. Key players include policymakers, researchers, community groups, accreditation agencies, service-delivery enterprises, advocacy groups, talent recruiters, funders and investors, and others.¹⁰ Field-building strategies often follow one of two paths: growing the field by raising awareness of an issue to generate support and funding, or improving the performance of existing players already committed to the field.
Building on the evidence base created by Big Brothers Big Sisters of America in the 1990s, MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership, exemplifies both approaches. More than 5,000 organizations provide mentoring to three million disadvantaged young people, but another 15 million youth need these services. Moreover, not all kids currently enrolled in mentoring programs are served effectively. MENTOR works to close this mentoring gap by enhancing the quality and quantity of mentoring relationships for America’s young people. Its goals are to increase the resources and capacity of the mentoring field to reach more children, and to improve the effectiveness of the field by developing and disseminating standards, research, and state-of-the-art tools. This field-building effort complements the work of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the largest mentoring organization in the United States, reaching more than 200,000 young people—but still only a fraction of those in need.
Others have pursued leadership development as a way to improve the performance of an existing field. For example, in K–12 education, organizations like New Leaders for New Schools, the Broad Superintendents Academy, The New Teachers Project, Teach for America, and the Center for Inspired Teaching have produced a wave of leadership talent that has helped to shape the education reform movement. Few other fields have such a robust leadership development pipeline, which may bode poorly for their ability to achieve true transformative scale and impact even given significant programmatic innovations.
Meanwhile, fields also need data and metrics to track and improve performance and to channel resources to what is working. Expanded use of data—thanks in large part to the advent of low-cost information technology platforms—is one of the most powerful forces shaping fields today. The Strive initiative in Cincinnati, Ohio, involves a wide range of players agreeing on performance metrics and sharing data against the common goal of every child being successful “from cradle to career.”¹¹ Similarly, the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals established a set of well-defined, sector-wide measures to drive the field of global development, and the Common Core State Standards are driving the use of data to strengthen US public education. Such efforts align the strategies of diverse players towards shared goals and measurement, enable assessments of what is working on the ground, and support learning and improvement.
One caution is that field-building investments take a long time to play out, and their effectiveness can be difficult to assess. But in many instances, it is the absence of appropriate investments in field infrastructure, including business-to-business functions like talent sourcing, financing, and match-making for mergers and collaborations,¹² that severely limits the potential for transformative impact.
6. Change public systems
Our public systems, like education, juvenile justice, and child welfare, operate at a massive scale. But too often they are not achieving impact at scale. Public system reformers often pursue one of three distinct avenues to achieve transformative impact: change a critical component of the system; inspire change by demonstrating a better way and embarking on a change management process; or gradually inject new leadership.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation is choosing the first approach in its efforts to change the juvenile justice system. Over the past 20 years, the grantmaker has invested more than $100 million to try and change decisions about whether to send a troubled young person to jail, to a detention facility, or to home-based rehabilitation. Rigorous evaluations show that the home-based program championed by the foundation works best for most kids and for society by decreasing recidivism and strengthening families. “It’s fair to say that the entire field of detention and even juvenile justice has been fundamentally changed” by the initiative, says foundation CEO Patrick McCarthy. The program has spread to 200 sites in 39 states and is poised to continue growing.¹³
An illustration of the second approach to changing public systems can be seen in the way that high-performing charter schools in Boston (e.g., Brooke, Excel Academy, and MATCH)—as in many cities—have shifted the debate in the public system by setting a new bar for what is possible in urban education.
Finally, Teach for America demonstrates an approach to changing a system that relies on an infusion of new leadership and talent. With 170 full-time staff members devoted to alumni services, it is investing heavily in the continued development and placement of its 30,000 alumni, with the goal of injecting highly capable, reform-minded leaders into key positions within the education system and other public and private entities that affect it. The aim is to achieve impact at a transformative scale by changing the education system from the inside out.
These examples acknowledge and respond to a simple truth: the path to transformative scale in sprawling public systems requires changing the systems themselves. Otherwise, as Casey Foundation CEO Patrick McCarthy notes, “A bad system will trump a good program every time.”
7. Embrace the need for policy change
Government funding is often considered the Holy Grail for social-sector initiatives. An act of Congress, for example, can theoretically turn a demonstration project into a national standard overnight. Well-known examples include the adoption of hospice care, which spread nationwide after gaining Medicare reimbursement; and state-funded kindergarten, which began as privately funded programs in a number of cities but transitioned to public dollars in response to widespread citizen demand.¹⁴
The Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) provides a more contemporary example. NFP serves low-income, first-time mothers by partnering them with a registered nurse who provides ongoing home visits that continue through the child’s second birthday. Today, NFP reaches more than 26,000 mothers in 43 states. When well implemented, the program has been shown to significantly improve the life outcomes of both mother and child, and to provide $5.70 in benefits to society for every dollar spent.¹⁵
In 2010, Congress established the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program and committed $1.5 billion over five years to expand and improve state-administered home visitation for expectant and new mothers. (Currently, 13 home visiting programs meet federal eligibility criteria.) The legislation was the result of support by the Nurse-Family Partnership National Service Office and President Obama, among others.
At the same time that it provides a model for policy change that leads to scale, this example also illustrates the challenges facing any social initiative advanced by the federal government. The 13 programs approved for federal funding are not identical, and many states are ill-equipped to identify which programs will provide the best outcomes given their particular context and needs. As the Pew Center on the States concluded in 2011, many states “are not prepared to capture or maximize the additional investment.”¹⁶
8. Don’t ignore for-profit models for scale
In some cases, a for-profit business model might be the most effective strategy to achieve transformative scale. In the developing world, businesses have helped address the basic needs of many millions of the poorest people, providing necessities such as clean water, health care, electricity, agricultural supplies, communications, and financial services. In Mexico, Farmacias Similares became a runaway hit by selling prescription medicine for at least 30 percent less than the competition and by making doctors available for $2 a visit.¹⁷
Sometimes nonprofits and philanthropists can play a critical role in unleashing the scaling power of for-profits by demonstrating the viability of a new market or business. Microfinance is the classic example. The concept started out as a project run by nonprofits and government agencies. Over time, these organizations built a track record of sufficient scale and financial performance. The result: commercial entities—and eventually the enormous for-profit capital markets—became convinced that microfinance was a viable business model and invested heavily to grow it.
Many market-based approaches to social problems require a combination of nonprofit, philanthropy, and government support to prove an innovation is worthy of for-profit investment.¹⁸ None of this is to suggest that for-profits are the solution in every circumstance, or to minimize the significant challenges that can emerge as they try to balance profit and social impact. Yet, with access to enormous capital markets and a business model that inherently promotes scale, we need to better understand and embrace how for-profits can be part of the solution to many social problems.
9. Alter people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors
For a certain category of issues, impact at a transformative scale requires altering the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of many people so that the change becomes the new social norm. Public health and issue-based advocacy groups, among others, have developed an extensive suite of social marketing and grassroots-organizing tools that they deploy to obtain these results—as in the campaign for smoking cessation in the U.S.¹⁹ But two recent innovations are worth special attention.
First, more and more organizations are building informal, peer-to-peer networks to achieve transformative scale. This work is based on the understanding that many norms and practices are shaped in a community, and therefore, certain types of changes must be scaled through the community. In Senegal, the practice of female genital mutilation was largely eliminated in one generation through the work of Tostan, an African-based nonprofit that helped to spark a process among villagers of discussions and advocacy that spread from village to village.²⁰
Second, a burgeoning body of work in behavioral economics and psychology helps us understand how people make both large and small choices in everyday life. Sometimes those choices are harmful to both the person and to society, such as filing taxes late or over-eating. The UK government recently created the Behavioural Insights Team, aka the “Nudge Unit,” that aims to steer people to better choices through small behavioral changes. For example, standard letters warning people to pay their overdue car tax get only about an 11 percent response. A simpler test letter declaring in big letters “Pay your tax or lose your [make of car]” got double the normal response. Another test letter with a photo of the car in question got triple the normal response rate.²¹ Many of the issues that the social-change sector cares most about affecting, such as health, education, and criminal justice, are rooted in behavioral choice that may be subject to similar nudges.

Considerations for Making Headway

All of these strategies hold promise for moving from selective and limited impact to transformative scale. Exploring them will require experiments (and some failures). But in the long run, the social returns can be huge. At the same time, it is important that we are realistic about the magnitude of the work ahead. Several cross-cutting considerations are important no matter which strategy one chooses to pursue:

• Be clear about success: Crystal-clear objectives are the essential component of any strategy. To achieve transformative scale, your core objective must be to solve the problem (rather than simply to expand a successful program). Such a definition opens the door to new perspectives, pathways, and resource allocation.
• Focus on a well-defined unit of impact: Without evidence of impact, there’s no reason to scale. Always be clear about the impact you are aiming for and measure continuously to ensure that you are achieving it. As you experiment with new pathways to deliver impact, be aware that the results may be different from those achieved by long-standing programs. A clear unit of impact also enables one to keep an eye on whether a new pathway is actually serving the intended population, a common pitfall of technology solutions and for-profit models.
• Rethink capitalization: All transformative scale strategies require thinking differently about capital. We must be serious about funding overhead and infrastructure, about making risk capital available that can support the failures that will inevitably occur in the quest for big solutions, and about providing an entirely different magnitude of both growth capital and ongoing revenue. One of the illusions we need to overcome is that these pathways are cheaper than conventional replication strategies. While it is often true that the unit cost of the intervention goes down in these scenarios, the total system cost will almost always be higher given the vastly larger population that is being targeted.
• Innovate to drive down costs: One of the great barriers to scale is the cost of interventions. Although it is generally true that you get what you pay for, it is also true that the social sector in the developed world has paid very little attention to the critical link between cost and achieving real scale. We have much to learn from social innovators in developing countries who have no choice but to hold costs at rock-bottom from the very start as they aim to serve massive numbers of beneficiaries. Furthermore, lowering costs improves the return on investment for a given approach, in some cases making it sufficiently positive that entire new streams of revenue become available (e.g., for-profit insurers reimbursing for the Y’s Diabetes Prevention Program).
• Focus on driving demand: Both “push” and “pull” dynamics, “supply” and “demand”, are required for transformative scale. It isn’t enough to focus only on supply, with a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality. Truly unlocking demand (of beneficiaries and of funders) can be a game-changer.
• Invest in new capabilities: Grantmakers should keep in mind that transformative scale often requires major investment in capabilities that many nonprofits don’t currently possess. That means funders need to take risks on the investments required to build these. And nonprofit management teams must not fool themselves into thinking, for example, that shifting from hands-on service delivery to consulting or to a web-centric strategy will be easy. It may require different people, major training investments, new technology, or more sophisticated financial management systems among other forms of costly, but good, overhead.
• Engage the community: The success of transformative scale strategies often hinges on the involvement of local communities in the formulation and implementation of the solution. Knowledge of local circumstances and the deep engagement of local players can be critical to helping a solution to spread and stick.

Taking “what works” to transformative scale will be the defining challenge of the social sector in the coming decade. The hard work of figuring out how to do that has begun. Now we need to test which strategies are truly viable, perfect them, and ultimately push ourselves to new ways of thinking and acting that will determine our ability to address in full the most important challenges facing this country and the world.

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CONTINUE TO EXPAND PROVEN PROGRAMS

Even as we explore strategies for transformative scale, we should remain committed to scaling up proven programs through organizational growth as rapidly as is possible.
Consider Youth Villages. The program started in Tennessee 20 years ago and has developed a highly effective approach to intensive in-home treatment services for troubled kids who typically would be placed in foster care, detention centers, or other juvenile facilities. The results are impressive. For these hardest-to-serve youth, Youth Villages achieves twice the results of the typical program at only one-third the cost. This stellar performance, coupled with some key philanthropic investments, has enabled the program to expand to serve some 22,000 children in 12 states each year.²²
A few philanthropic innovators have stepped up to help Youth Villages expand. The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation led a pioneering effort to raise $40 million from coinvestors to make the last phase of Youth Villages’ growth possible (part of a larger effort by the foundation that has raised $279 million to help scale a few highly effective organizations over the last five years). Nevertheless, there are another 300,000 children who could benefit from Youth Villages’ services. Imagine if private and public funders were to commit the level of resources necessary to actually serve all of this need? After all, there’s still no inherent limit to the size a nonprofit can achieve. The real limitation is money.
See a shorter version of this article, as part of the sponsored supplement "Smarter Philanthropy for Greater Impact."

Notes

¹ Nancy Roob and Jeffrey L. Bradach, “Scaling What Works: Implications for Philanthropists, Policy Makers, and Nonprofit Leaders,” The Bridgespan Group, April 2009.
² Grantmakers for Effective Organizations launched the Scaling What Works initiative in 2010. It has produced research reports, webinars, tools, and videos. Access the information at http://scalingwhatworks.org/resources.
³ Bill Shore, Darell Hammond, and Amy Celep, “When Good Is Not Good Enough,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2013.
⁴ Jeffrey Bradach, “Scaling Impact,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2010.
⁵ Taz Hussein and Michaela Kerrissey, “Using National Networks to Tackle Chronic Disease,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2013.
⁶ Kristen V. Brown, “YMCA Diabetes Prevention Program May Be U.S. Model,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 5, 2013.
⁷ Daniel Stid, Alex Neuhoff, Laura Burkhauser, and Bradley Seeman, “Implementation Science: How a Funder Helped 75 Agencies Apply Proven Programs to Prevent Teen Pregnancy”, The Bridgespan Group, November, 2013.
⁸ For background on the Low-Cost RCT Competition, see:
http://coalition4evidence.org/low-cost-rct-competition/.
⁹ For another example, see GEO’s report Pathways to Grow Impact, Philanthropy's Role in the Journey, February, Grantmakers for Effective Philanthropy, 2013, p. 10
¹⁰ The Strong Field Framework: A Guide and Toolkit for Funders and Nonprofits Committed to Large-Scaled Impact, The James Irvine Foundation and The Bridgespan Group, June 2009, p. 3.
¹¹ John Kania and Mark Kramer, “Collective Impact,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011.
¹² Among the many strategies to improve the performance of existing players, mergers and collaborations have broad appeal for their potential economies of scale and more uniform delivery of high-impact, evidence-based services. See Katie Smith Milway, Maria Orozco, and Cristina Botero, “Why Nonprofit Mergers Continue to Lag,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2014.
¹³ See Patrick McCarthy, “The Road to Scale Runs Through Public Systems”, GEO Supplement to Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2014, p. 12.
¹⁴ For additional commentary on this pathway, see GEO’s Pathways to Grow Impact: Philanthropy’s Role in the Journey, p.10.
¹⁵ Lynn A. Karoly, M. Rebecca Kilburn, and Jill S. Cannon, Early Childhood Interventions, RAND Labor and Population, 2005.
¹⁶ Pew Center on the States, “States and the New Federal Home Visiting Initiative: An Assessment from the Starting Line,” August 2011.
¹⁷ Michael Chu and Regina Garcia-Cuellar, “Farmacias Similares: Private and Public Health Care for the Base of the Pyramid in Mexico,” Harvard Business School Case 307-092, January 2007. (Revised April 2011.)
¹⁸ Matt Bannick and Paula Goodman, “Priming the Pump: The Case for a Sector Based Approach to Impact Investing,” Omidyar Network, September, 2012.
¹⁹ For example, see GEO’s description of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s anti-smoking strategy and its use of marketing in Pathways to Grow Impact: Philanthropy's Role in the Journey, pp. 9–11.
²⁰ Aimee Molloy, However Long the Night: Molly Melching’s Journey to Help Millions of African Women and Girls Triumph (New York: HarperOne, 2013).
²¹ Leo Benedictus,“The Nudge Unit–Has it Worked So Far?” The Guardian, May 1, 2013.
²² For background, see www.emcf.org/our-grantees/our-grantee-portfolio/youth-villages/performance/#youth-served.

Jeffrey Bradach is cofounder and managing partner of The Bridgespan Group. Before joining Bridgespan, he was on the faculty of the Harvard Business School.
Abe Grindle is a consultant in Bridgespan’s Boston office.