September 30, 2015
Minority & Small Business Week
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Page 23
O PINION
Making Classrooms Work for All Our Students
Big data meets
the ‘three Rs’
B EN J EALOUS
The most im-
portant factor in a
student’s success is
a great teacher. But
in the modern class-
room, even great
teachers face daunting obsta-
cles.
This is a story about what
happens when big data meets
the “three R’s” - reading, writ-
ing, and arithmetic. It’s a story
about the recent revolution in
education technology, and how
we in EdTech can help make
our education system work for
all American students.
Kids learn at different speeds
and in different ways. A lesson
perceived as boring and un-
der stimulating to one student
could strike another student as
far too complicated to keep up.
According to one study, sev-
en out of 10 middle and high
school students require instruc-
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to their strengths and weak-
nesses. This is partly a function
of human nature, but it is also a
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few years of a child’s life are
crucial for their development,
as they learn to recognize
w
words
and numbers by
sig and sound.
sight
Many children who
grow
up poor - partic-
gr
ularly
poor children of
ul
color
co - have fewer books
in their homes, less ac-
teach them the same material?
A new generation of education
software is beginning to help
teachers answer that question.
One of these services is
Newsela. Newsela provides
teachers with daily news ar-
ticles from national and local
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different reading levels. The
class can discuss the news as
dents based on their personal
interests - for instance, Harry
Potter or Spongebob. The pro-
gram allows teachers to track
students’ growth and progress
and adapts questions based on
what a student gets right or
wrong. Like Newsela, it meets
students where they are.
On the other side of the aca-
demic spectrum is Front Row.
This creates a challenge for teachers: how
do you take a class of 20 or 30 students who
all have different home lives, backgrounds
and skill sets, and somehow manage to teach
them the same material?
cess to good libraries and less
access to the Internet. As early
as kindergarten, children in the
highest socioeconomic level
already outperform their play-
mates in the lowest socioeco-
nomic level by 60 percent.
This creates a challenge
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a class of 20 or 30 students
who all have different home
lives, backgrounds and skill
sets, and somehow manage to
a group, and students can earn
the satisfaction of moving up a
level when they are ready. The
software helps struggling stu-
dents keep up with the class,
and allows the brightest stu-
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What Newsela does for
reading
comprehension,
NoRedInk does for writing.
The web-based learning engine
generates writing exercises
and grammar questions for stu-
Front Row is an online soft-
ware that generates math exer-
cises for students based on their
current skill level. Like Newse-
la and No Red Ink, it tailors the
lesson to students’ needs and
automatically tracks progress.
The program even reads math
questions aloud for English as
a Second Language (ESL) stu-
dents - something that’s partic-
ularly important in light of the
fact that by high school, fewer
than one out of 10 students tak-
ing AP Computer Science are
Latino.
We are entering a new age
of Edtech. As Silicon Valley
investor Umang Gupta has
pointed out, there has never
been a “mega-breakout” in the
education software space, and
only one percent of all educa-
tion spending right now is on
technology. But that is likely to
change. Computers and tablets
only continue to get cheap-
er, and broadband access only
continues to improve.
In an increasingly diverse
nation, we need to use all the
tools at our disposal - old-fash-
ioned and new - to ensure that
schools work for all of our
kids. The era of widespread
personalized education is rap-
idly approaching, and social
justice-minded entrepreneurs
are starting to break the code
on how to teach using tech.
Ben Jealous is former presi-
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of the NAACP, and Partner at
Kapor Capital, a social impact
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EdTech companies including
Newsela, No Red Ink and Front
Row.
Opening Doors to the Global, High-Tech Economy
Overcoming
the crisis in
education
M ARC H. M ORIAL
Our nation’s high
schools are in a state
of troubling crisis.
Too many of our stu-
dents are graduating
ill-equipped for the academic
rigors of college and, ultimate-
ly, the challenges and needs of
today’s global, high-tech econ-
omy.
For many of our high school
graduates, earning a college
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the path towards the “American
Dream” of the job, the house
and future economic securi-
ty. And the data consistently
points to this traditionally ac-
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earn a college degree are more
likely to attain higher-skilled
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and better paying jobs than
their peers who only have a
high school diploma.
But a recent report points
to a concerning reality,
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college readiness is cut-
ting off large numbers of
students from a critical
conduit of future oppor-
tunity and success--and
because of historic dis-
The ACT testing company,
which administers a popular,
nation-wide college admis-
sions and placement test, pub-
lished a report that showed that
one in three students who took
the ACT are not ready for col-
lege course work.
In fact, just over 6 in 10
students met the test’s col-
lege-ready benchmarks in
English, math, reading and
For white high school stu-
dents who took the ACT in
2014, 76 percent tested compe-
tent for college-level English
courses and 52 percent tested
competent for math. Only 34
percent of black high school
graduates tested competent for
college-level English cours-
es, and just 14 percent were
ready to tackle college-level
math. For Hispanic students,
Only 34 percent of black high school
graduates tested competent for college-
level English courses, and just 14 percent
were ready to tackle college-level math.
parities in education between
white students and black and
Latino students, students of
color are impacted in greater
numbers.
science. The data points to a
disturbing performance gap
when you compare the results
of black and Latino students to
their white peers.
47 percent were prepared for
college-level English and 29
percent were ready for col-
lege-level math courses.
As we face a nationwide
challenge to prepare all of our
students for post-secondary
academic success, it must be
acknowledged that students of
color are feeling the impact of
the failure to prepare our stu-
dents in far greater numbers.
This failure not only hurts the
individual student by curb-
ing job prospects and higher
earning potential, it weakens
our nation and our standing as
a strong competitor in a glob-
al marketplace that values the
knowledge and skills that come
with schooling and training be-
yond high school.
Understanding
that
time-tested correlation be-
tween educational opportunity
and future economic empow-
erment, the National Urban
League has developed Project
Ready, a signature program-
ming initiative that prepares
African-American students and
other urban youth for college,
work and life.