Education Week - June 19, 2019 - 10

Learn How Ed-Tech Leaders
Are Tackling 5 Big Challenges

By Benjamin Herold

he biggest challenges facing today's K-12 technology leaders are no real mystery.
School technology chiefs are worried about cybersecurity. They have limited budgets, which have to be
stretched to manage a flood of new devices, software, and apps. And they're focused on how all that new
technology and data can support schools' bottom line: good classroom instruction.
"In addressing the myriad issues related to managing a district's digital ecosystem, IT leaders have not lost
sight of the big picture," according to the Consortium for School Networking's 2019 K-12 IT Leadership Survey
Report, which outlines the priorities and hurdles reported by 335 respondents.
To better understand the big issues facing the K-12 sector's chief technology and information officers,
Education Week spoke with officials from five school districts around the country. Here's what they told us:
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1. Beefing up cybersecurity
"If it can't run on our network securely, there's
not much reason to have it."
Joe Phillips' leap from the U.S. Army-where
he served as an intelligence analyst and IT
director, among other roles-to director of
technology for the 16,000-student Kansas
City, Mo., school district was an eye-opening
experience for a number of reasons.
The biggest difference may have been in how
the two institutions approached protecting and
securing sensitive information.
"In the Army, cybersecurity was second
nature," Phillips said. "Coming to education
was a lot like going back in time."
In recent years, educational data has
become a valuable black-market commodity.
Districts around the country have fallen
victim to phishing scams, hacks, ransomware
attacks, and missteps by their own staff and
students. The fallout has included millions
of lost taxpayer dollars, tens of thousands of
teachers and children who have had their
personal data compromised, and an erosion
of public trust.
It's no wonder, then, that the CoSN IT
Leadership survey identified cybersecurity
as technology chiefs' top priority. More
than two-thirds of survey respondents told
the group that the privacy and security of
student data was more important to them
now than in previous years.
In Kansas City, there's been a commitment
to putting cybersecurity first in the district's
five-year technology plan, Phillips said. His
department is seeking funds for new firewalls,
network switches, and wireless access points;
new backup and recovery systems; an endpoint
detection-response system that can be used
to identify and investigate suspicious activity,
such as potential phishing scams; and a new
disaster recovery data center. By modernizing
the district's infrastructure, Phillips hopes to
plug the holes that malicious actors might seek
to exploit.
The work isn't sexy, he said. Five years ago,
it might have been a tough sell to the district's
leadership and board.
But not any more.
"Putting out classroom devices is great,"
Phillips said. "But if it can't run on our
network securely, there's not much reason to
have it."

2. Budgeting on a shoestring
"We can get by with less funding because we
have good systems in place."
Mary Wegner knows a thing or two about
stretching resources in a difficult financial
environment.
She's now in her 5th year as
superintendent of Alaska's 1,200-student
Sitka school district, serving a remote
island community that "sits on a rock at the

edge of the Pacific Ocean," as the district's
website puts it. During Wegner's tenure,
the district's annual operating budget has
declined 5 percent, to a little over $20 million.
"Technology has taken a cut," she said. "But
we've learned that we can get by with less
funding, because we have good systems in
place."
One example: Sitka's leadership team and
teacher-chaired technology committee recently
committed to focusing on technology as a
support for classroom instruction, rather than
an end unto itself. That, in turn, led the district
to change its staffing patterns. A standalone
6th grade technology teaching position was
eliminated, and Sitka schools moved instead
to integrate into all classrooms the tech skills
and digital literacies that used to be taught
in standalone fashion. The moved saved
$100,000, Wegner said.
Such tough decisions are common in K-12,
the CoSN IT Leadership survey suggests.
School technology chiefs identified budget
constraints as a major barrier for the third
year in a row. One-fourth of them said they
didn't have enough resources to meet school
board expectations. Many said they tried
to supplement their funding by seeking out
grants.
That's been Wegner's approach. The money
that has come in, she notes, hasn't been
for technology per se. Rather, it's been for
priorities like culturally responsive teaching
for the Sitka district's large indigenous Tlingit
population.
The lesson?
"It's not about finding money in the budget
for tech as an isolated thing," she said. "It's
really about helping teachers change in the
classroom."

3. Leveraging data to drive instruction
"Instead of digital tools being used as a
babysitter, we've grown a lot more focused."
Using ed tech to improve teaching and
learning is the Holy Grail for many K-12
technology chiefs. Often, that means getting
actionable data in the hands of teachers in
time for it to actually inform key decisions,
such as how to group students or what needs
to be re-taught.
Three-fourths of the tech leaders surveyed
by CoSN, for example, said they are working
to be more responsive to educators' IT needs.
Nearly half said they're focused on "surfacing
real-time data for educators pulling together
multiple sources of information."
It's not as simple as it may sound, especially
for small and rural school districts, said
Jaraun Dennis, the chief technology officer for
Wyoming's 3,000-student Uinta County School
District #1.
"In our elementary schools alone, we
have five or six different options for digital
tools," Dennis said. "Imagine the gamut of
data generated when you have teachers

10 | EDUCATION WEEK | June 19, 2019 | www.edweek.org

logging into all those different places, then
going to another place to look at state
assessments, and somewhere else for literacy
assessments."
Uinta doesn't have instructional coaches
to help. The district's IT staff are stretched
thin. Convincing people who understand both
the technical and the educational side of the
work to come work for low pay in southwest
Wyoming isn't easy either.
But progress has come, Dennis said, as the
district has become more intentional about
how and why it's using classroom devices
and instructional software in the first place.
From a hazy plan to use technology to support
"blended" and then "personalized" learning,
Uinta has grown into a model where teachers
use specific software programs to identify and
fill gaps in students' learning.
"Instead of digital tools being used as a
babysitter, we've grown a lot more focused,"
Dennis said.

4. Breaking down information silos
"It's hard to keep up."
Even for large, well-resourced systems like
Texas's 80,000-student Katy Independent
School District, getting actionable information
in the hands of educators in a timely manner
is a major challenge.
"That's the way it is with any large
organization," said Jamey Hynds, the district's
director of business intelligence. "Data are
siloed, and people in different departments
are trying to put that information together to
fulfill their own needs."
A variety of efforts to make the flow of
information more seamless fall under the
general umbrella term of "interoperability."
The CoSN leadership survey shows just how
rare most are: 27 percent of respondents
said their districts have fully implemented
single-sign on solutions to make it easier for
students and staff to access multiple software
programs. Fifteen percent make regular use
of data dashboards to visualize and analyze
information. Just 8 percent say their digital
content is fully interoperable.
Hynds has led Katy ISD's efforts to address
such challenges. The district has its own data
warehouse, used to store information from a
wide variety of sources, including assessments,
the district's student information system,
and human resources and financial software.
Hynds' team has developed "well over 100
dashboards," he said, including one to track
legislation that could affect the district.
How do such tools improve decisionmaking?
When teachers or counselors are meeting
with parents, they can open the district's
"student viewer" to quickly see an individual
child's full academic history, allowing for
instructional decisions to be made on the spot.
Central office staff use other dashboards
and data to project new student enrollment,
including where English-language learners

are likely to be, and plan future facilities and
staffing patterns accordingly.
And Katy principals can now easily track
all the student devices used on their campus,
seeing how they're used and when they need to
be replaced.
It's just the beginning, Hynds said.
"Think about the Internet of Things, creating
information about HVAC systems and lights
and letting us predict energy costs," he said.
"Everything is exploding. It's hard to keep up."

5. Improving training and professional
development
"It's a cool tool. But how is it going to impact
student learning?"
Perhaps the biggest issue school technology
chiefs must help address isn't really IT-related
at all.
It's about improving teaching and learning
in the classroom.
Austin Houp, now in his second year as
the director of curriculum, instruction, and
technology for Missouri's 800-student Ash
Grove school district, described the challenge.
"At times, some teachers have a tendency
to use tech for tech's sake, with no clear
pedagogy or learning objectives behind it,"
Houp said. "I'm able to have the conversation
with them, 'Yes, it's a cool tool. But how is it
going to impact student learning?' "
There's a lot of evidence that training
and professional development around K-12
technology use is spotty. It's also highly
inequitable: A 2017 analysis by the Education
Week Research Center found that students
in high-poverty schools were much less likely
than their counterparts in wealthier schools
to have teachers who had received training
on how to effectively integrate technology into
their classroom instruction.
Houp outlined the contours of the challenge
in Ash Grove.
For years, Houp said, any training he
provided came on top of his regular duties
as a social studies teacher, basketball coach,
and football coach. That meant that most of
his work with other teachers was focused
on the basics of how to operate the iPads
and Chromebooks the district had recently
purchased.
In his current position, though, he's been
able to branch out a bit. Now Houp works with
teachers to analyze data from benchmark
assessments. There are conversations about
which digital curricular materials might make
the biggest impact.
"The biggest impact has been a higher level
of consistency in how we view technology in
our district," Houp said. "All of us are on a
much better page."
SPECIAL REPORT: See more stories from
our special report about the challenges
ed-tech leaders are facing.
www.edweek.org/go/tech-leader-challenges

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Education Week - June 19, 2019

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