Scaling Innovation in Assessment (in China)

While the rest of the policy world is at the national charter school love fest conference, I'm in Los Angeles at the national student assessment conference.

I had one of my more disturbing, but unfortunately, not surprising, conversations yesterday after a session where I learned more about an innovative, NSF-funded science assessment project. "What's next?" I asked the presenter. "How are you going to scale this up into more classrooms across the country?"

"I don't know," he replied. He told me that the commercial publishers weren't really interested. And, despite the relevance of the project, which uses advanced simulations and has shown promising results in improving students’ understanding of both science content and the process of scientific investigation, neither were districts and states.

He did not know how to bring this innovation to scale -- at least in the United States. "But they are really interested in China," he told me, and went on to explain Chinese educators' plans to implement the NSF funded initiative (which is probably funded under the guise of helping America's students to compete).