Education Week - March 5, 2014 - S32

LESSON LEARNED
"Our new-century
learners have an
expectation of being able
to access information
and learning 24/7.
If we don't provide those
pathways for them
to earn those credits
and move on, we're
going to lose them."
students individually, coupled
with a penchant for doing more
with less, and translated it to
the fast-growing Dysart district,
where she has been superintendent
for six years. Under her leadership,
Dysart was one of the first
districts in the state to adopt the
Move On When Ready program,
a competency-based pathway to
high school graduation based on
the idea of personalized learning.
With a very limited budget, she
has found ways to use innovative
technology as a teaching tool to improve
student achievement, which
already seems to be reflected in
the district's steadily climbing
state test scores. For example,
since 2005, the share of Dysart
students who meet or exceed state
reading standards has risen from
59 percent to 81 percent.
Bursting at the Seams
Ms. Pletnick took the helm of
the Dysart district in 2007, after
serving two years there as an assistant
superintendent and after a
full career teaching at every educational
level from preschool to
college both in Pennsylvania and
other Arizona districts. She inherited
a growing district. Since 2000,
Dysart, which serves students in
fast-growing Maricopa County,
which includes the Phoenix suburbs,
has tripled in size. Ms. Pletnick
has had to juggle the growth
with a budget that did not rise at
the same rate and with a student
population of which half come
from low-income families.
When the state, working with
the Phoenix-based Center for the
Future of Arizona adopted the
voluntary Move On When Ready
initiative, it made sense to Ms.
Pletnick. The national initiative,
developed by the Washingtonbased
National Center on Education
and the Economy, breaks
away from the traditional idea of
seat time and focuses instead on
personalization. Students move
on when they've fully grasped con-
cepts and ideas, regardless of the
number of days in the classroom.
That approach resonated with
Ms. Pletnick, who has a sister with
disabilities and who watched aunts
and uncles without college degrees
succeed by taking their own directions
with education and careers.
"Everyone's path looks different,"
she said. "Sometimes, we predetermine
for a student whether 180
days of instruction in a year or 12
years means they get a diploma. "
Dysart began implementing
the Move On When Ready model,
which gives school systems a choice
of using several specific curriculum
providers, putting the program in
place in 2011 in one K-8 school.
Now the initiative is in place at two
K-8 schools and two high schools.
This year, 11 Arizona districts, including
Dysart, have incorporated
Move On When Ready into at least
one of their schools.
Arizona's version of the Move On
When Ready model has students
demonstrate mastery through
end-of-course exams to prepare
for college and careers. Doing so
earns them a high school diploma
as early as their sophomore year,
though they don't have to leave
high school.
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Ms. Pletnick has arranged for
college-level courses to be taught
by Dysart teachers and visiting
community college professors. Students
seeking a more direct route
to a career can take advanced
career and technical education
programs. A student, for example,
might graduate with a high school
diploma, as well as an associate
degree. Others might leave the
campus with a diploma and a vocational
certificate in phlebotomy
or heavy mechanics.
Ms. Pletnick has been instrumental
in helping Dysart model
the initiative for other districts
in the state, said Amanda Burke,
the director of education innovation
and strategy at the Center for
the Future of Arizona. "She's very
clear in her communications about
the importance [of the initiative]
and she is focused on making sure
graduating students in her district
are career- and college-ready," Ms.
Burke said. "It's been great to see
how it has unfolded."
Recently, the district has taken
the idea of Move On When Ready
a step further, adopting performance-based
grading. The goal is
to put more emphasis on student
mastery of content versus "compliance
grading," in which a student
gets credit just for turning in homework
or other assignments. Under
Dysart's system, performance on
assessments must count for at least
80 percent of a student's grade in
grades 7 through 12.
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Not everyone has been enthusiastic
about that change. In 2012,
parents started an online petition
protesting the policy, particularly in
mathematics. "The problem is that
the tests are weighted so much that
it seems like the more homework
you do, the less it matters," parent
Cheryl Martin told The Arizona Republic
at the time.
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EDUCATION WEEK * March 5, 2014
The district also wants to provide
opportunities for students
to pursue their education at all
hours, the way they're accustomed
to tapping into information today.
That means there's a digital-learning
center open after school hours,
and the district is investigating
flipped- and blended-learning
models of education.
"We need to personalize education
and tap into students' skill sets
and interests," Ms. Pletnick said.
"If it doesn't make sense to them, if
they can access that learning somewhere
else, it's not going to work."
Bring Your Own
Part of making sense to today's
students is using technology, Ms.
Pletnick said. But she views technology
solely as a tool to improve
student learning. "It isn't about
technology for the sake of using
technology," she said. "We're at the
point where we look at what has to
be accomplished and what we need
to get it accomplished."
But doing that in tight economic
times has been a challenge. State
funding for Dysart was slashed
in half five years ago just as its
growth was exploding, and the
district has been unable to get voters
to approve a bond issue. At the
same time Ms. Pletnick endorsed
a Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD
policy, which she said has been extremely
successful. Students bring
laptops, iPads, iPods, and other
devices to class to augment what
the schools offer. She said she was
warned that the effort could be
fraught with problems, but "all
those terrible things that people
predicted have not happened."
The district has also been an
early adopter of some open educational
resources, like Flexbooks,
an e-textbook platform provided
by the nonprofit CK-12 Foundation,
a Palo Alto, Calif., aggregator
of science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics content,
and has piloted some technology
products at low or no cost like
the Knewton Inc. differentiated
math-readiness platform, which
provides adaptive instruction.
Richard Crandall, a former Ari-
zona Senate education committee
chairman who is now the director
of the Wyoming education department,
said he's been so impressed
with Ms. Pletnick's work in Dysart
that he organized a January visit
to the district with 75 Wyoming
education leaders to show them
what innovation can look like.
"She finds ways to get things
done with very, very limited resources,"
he said. When it comes to
technology, "she has embraced this
model that there's no excuses. ...
We're going to get this done."
Though Ms. Pletnick has been
willing to try new things on a tight
budget in Dysart, one of her biggest
strengths, said Traci Sawyer-Sinkbeil,
the district's school board president,
is the ability to bring people
together and collaborate. "She emphasizes
that we're all here for the
growth of the student, so let's see
what all of you here at the table
can do to make that happen," Ms.
Sawyer-Sinkbeil said.n
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Education Week - March 5, 2014

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