Eric.ed.gov – Personalized Learning: A Guidebook for City Leaders

Leaders of urban school systems are faced with a daunting fact: Some individual schools achieve incredible results for students from low-income communities, but no urban “school systems” achieve those results for all–or even most–children in an entire city. For generations, students in urban America have been underserved, with few achieving basic proficiency in reading and math, and even fewer completing college. At the same time, as cities and districts face shrinking education budgets while demands for college and career readiness increase, teachers are expected to do more with less. As new promising practices emerge at the classroom, school, district, and city levels, how can more educators and administrators be exposed to what is working elsewhere? For the purpose of this guidebook, personalized learning (PL) means that students’ experiences–what they learn, and how, when, and where they learn–are tailored to their individual needs, skills, and interests, and enable them to take ownership of their education. Early personalized learning work has generated significant interest and promising pockets of success in district, charter, and private schools alike. However, there has yet to be high-quality implementation at scale–across an entire system of schools or an entire city. Why is scale important? The benefits of personalized learning are amplified when a system–a school district or a broader city ecosystem–creates the conditions for every student to have a personalized educational experience. However, to take personalized learning to scale, systems will need to address challenges in the areas of public policy, teaching and learning, staffing structures, accountability, technology infrastructure, and funding. In this guidebook, the authors tell the story of eight cities and two consortia that aim to create the right system-level conditions so that teachers, students, and families have access to the tools and resources needed to personalize learning. To accelerate the pace of innovation at scale, these ten systems received funding to develop a system-wide personalized learning strategy and plan. To reach this ambitious goal, systems sought to design, launch, and replicate schools that implement personalized learning in a holistic manner, while simultaneously working to ensure that district and city functions (e.g., human capital and facilities) fully supported these schools, and their potential replication.