Industrial Standardization; Digital Normalization
Normalization is to digital outcomes what standardization was to industrial outcomes. Let’s see what this means in the context of high school education.
TLDR: data derived from project-based learning is of inherently higher quality than data derived from teaching to a multiple-choice test. If you can accept this premise, this article is about nothing more than high quality educational data. Normalization plays a critical role as it allows us to fairly grade project-based work products by bringing evaluators to a common understanding of a given credit.
Today’s (Industrial) Educational Data
The elite educators of our day at the Harvards or Stanfords choose to admit to their own ranks based on SAT tests, for example, with extra college essays thrown in for good measure. All they want is good educational data and standardized tests dominate the educational data landscape in our industrial school system.
Standardized tests are not the root of the problem—if public high school transcripts all represented equivalent and meaningful learning, the SAT would not be needed. As bad as standardized tests are at evaluating meaningful learning, high school credits are even worse. The incentives of state controlled high school credits drive politicians to show marginal gains relative to their predecessor or even simply to the prior year. To achieve this they issue credits more easily each year to meet district targets.
For example, during the early stages of this pandemic, NY State officials narrowed the Common Core Standards down to a very small number of “priority standards” signaling to schools that they only would be evaluated on these, making easier and easier for schools to promote students from one grade to the next whether they learned anything or not. The SAT or AP or Regents Exams were invented to offer an apples-to-apples comparison of schools since transcripts had failed to do so.
Unfortunately, today, students who ace even the AP exams have a thing or two coming. They have demonstrated mastery of compliance-driven instruction, the exact opposite of critical thinking.
Brain scientists and educators have, for many decades now, concluded that teaching standardized thinking is not a form of deep critical thinking. But we can’t opt out of these if there is nothing to also opt into, first. With the birth of decentralized digital platforms, we now have another way to produce educational data that is of much higher quality than any standardized test or state controlled transcript could ever be.
Tomorrow’s Educational Data
If we distinguish the regime of standardization from the practice of normalization, light is shed on quality educational data. This distinction can at first feel cloudy to educators since in a teacher’s daily practice, these ideals are not neatly differentiated. For example, in order for teachers to grade standardized tests, they must learn to normalize grading practice. Below I offer specific implementation details for systems driven by normalization at the school district, individual school, and even at the level of student-to-student incentives toward greater critical thinking.
Let’s jump into a future where normalization from a crowd of vetted educators forms the bases of our academic expectations. Imagine that each 11th and 12th grade student is expected to upload one 10-minute segment at the end of each calendar month. No more taking six courses at a time with bells that indicate when to transition from one subject to the next. No more waiting four months to earn any credit after cramming for concurrent final exams. Shockingly, earning just one credit per month yields a higher rate of credit awards than how public schools operate today [see https://hs.credit with password WelcomeGuest for a detailed comparison of New York State versus project-based credits].
Instead of having schools evaluate their own students’ work to determine credit awards, these media segments are evaluated by three credit experts in much the same way that standardized exams are evaluated today. In a digital context, that same level of third-party scrutiny comes to every single project-based credit on an app that replaces the traditional high school transcript. Click on a credit to see the media segment behind it, scan a QR code when printed. The platform offers a marketplace where educators can earn a nice side-hustle administering decentralized credits, earning $180/hr to do so.
Each 10-minute media upload serves as the foundation of this agile dataset. An upload has several properties, including: the student’s profile name, the teacher’s profile name, the calendar month, the type of credit (subject, level), a geographic tag determined by the teacher (corresponding to the address of the school where they work), and a credit value of 0 or 1 which is determined by a committee of three credit experts on the platform of competing credits.
Individual educators are evaluated based on how well their determination of a credit matches that of the credit experts, rather than by how many of their students earn these high quality credits. Each teacher indicates whether they approve a student upload for credit evaluation. This yields a rate at which the credits that they approve are subsequently verified by the credit experts. This is a measure of normalization of practice between the educator and the credit expert.
At the school level, we compare the rate at which students within that community, earn their potential of one credit each calendar month. In aggregate, then, educators have collective accountability for their community to secure credits for their students. Sometimes this requires classrooms preparing students who are not at the level of earning credits, working out other aspects of their human survival. Teachers should not be penalized for making a difference with these disengaged young people, as long as they maintain a solid understanding of the academic goal (i.e. their academic practice remains normalized to that of the community of paid experts).
Even more important is the fact that students at elite schools are incentivized to ensure that their colleagues across all schools are successful. This helps normalize educational opportunities across schools and helps shift from a district having a few elite schools to each school having an elite group of academic performers within it. More on this later.
The simple act of earning or failing to earn one of these project-based credits each month provides our gold standard measure of educational outcomes. The key is a singular focus on quality of student work products. Creativity and collaboration and production values are thus favored over consumption and competition and multiple-choice exams. Teachers listen more than they talk. Students are engaged because they are answering questions they themselves wrote.
More specifically, any registered user on such a credit platform can see:
* How many of the months did a particular student earn their credit? What types of credits do they earn most reliably?
* Which teachers are normalized with the credit experts?
* What is the credit award rate at a given school? What types of credits do they tend to earn?
* What is the credit award rate at a given neighborhood or district?
And don’t forget that for a much more qualitative analysis, stakeholders have all the media segments themselves. There is a deep trove of qualitative data representing a particular credit, a specific student, a school, a district, and so on.
A Level (and Relevant) Playing Field
Today, only students at elite schools have access to an elite transcript of respected credits. That means that they had to have attended an elite elementary school and thus we close doors to the middle class as early as First Grade. By allowing any student at any school to upload their work for evaluation, we make gold standard credits equally available to any student regardless of whether they struggled in school only to get serious during their Sophomore or Junior year.
Credits defined by a decentralized community of educators, paid to protect the academic reputation of a set of credits, are far from perfect. But they measure project-based learning instead of multiple choice thinking. These credits also evolve over time with incentives designed to drive culturally relevant critical thinking. By contrast, the Common Core and prior standards were designed to be static and universal. A few well connected white men in a conference room, endorsed by state politicians, decide what students must learn in all grades with no room for improvement or relevance to local communities. As is the case with many digital innovations, the top down standardized model is replaced by a massive marketplace of competing standards. This flips industrial command-and-control by crowdsourcing credits. The key to implementation is establishing financial incentives with favor critical thinking (unlike social media platforms which favor popularity).
All stakeholders end up with a better experience within a high school community. For teachers, the CCLS tell them what will be on the tests, but they don’t help teachers get students there. Teaching in a culture where “will this be on the test?” is what everyone cares about, from the students to the district leaders, is educational malpractice. Crowdsourced credits, by contrast, compete to offer the best curriculum for teachers which help to set expectations that the credit experts use to evaluate resulting uploads of student work. The massive diversity of available credits allows for cultural relevance not only for each unique school community or region, but also across time—a credit that is relevant in 2020 is not the same as one that was relevant in 2019!
In the summer of 2020 we saw a culture of protests take shape across the country. A relevant 12th grade credit would then ask students to research history and prepare questions to ask at a protest. The resulting primary source footage is edited by the student and uploaded for credit at the end of the month after multiple revisions. By having students go on location, they spend less time in the classroom which helps social distancing and streamlines outdoor learning without having to build tents and move furniture. The act of creation rather than consumption of academic content is ideal for a blended schooling model. Project-based learning must take students away from the screen and even out of the school building into the real world to conduct interviews and do experiments. Can you imagine how different the pandemic would have felt for 11th and 12th grade students if their school day was spent interviewing people at a protest instead of falling asleep at a Zoom meeting?
A normalization-focused strategy puts the definition of high school learning in the hands of a community of educators rather than politicians. Again, even if teachers are not perfect, they will not have the 4-year election cycles and crippling politics to worry about. Earning $180/hr to be the gatekeepers of a “brand” of credits that they regard with pride is a strong incentive, too.
Teaching to high quality student videos and podcasts which are researched, revised, and academic/professional in nature is clearly a step up from training students to ace standardized tests.
Minting Academic Capital
Capital is a measure of influence. Consider social capital. Those with a sizable Twitter following become “influencers” who are able to inject their narrative into the national conversation, turn their private jokes into memes, and even convert their social capital into financial capital through ad placements.
So what does academic influence look like in a digital context? At the level of credits and the credit studios that author them, brands, governments, unions, and other educational stalwarts will have an early advantage earning the trust of parents given that they have access to professional educators. As discussed in the next section of this essay, they will face some competition from podcasters and video channels which benefit from high quality, pre-screened youth content, made to order by students in a particular area or by students across the nation.
Those traditional brands and some new curriculum authors compete to define what students are expected to achieve. That is at the level of defining gold standard credit awards. However, as any educator knows, a strengths based approach to academic culture is the path of least resistance. More specifically, holding regular award ceremonies to honor the best academic performers is a high leverage practice (as long as the awards are meaningful to students). For this reason I assert that units of academic capital, as such, should be limited to an elite bundle representing student leaders at each and every school.
The factor which selects which awarded credits go on to earn the academic capital award is defined by the students, not any adults! In this model students who win the award hold a 3-month seat on a voting board (like the Academy does for the Oscars), seats which control the operation of a cryptocurrency by the students and for the students.
As an educator, I know that we always want students to be in charge of academic awards—any professional educator knows that the best students are much tougher critics than any teacher will ever be, and having students lead the academic culture helps increase buy in.
To recap, every three months a number of students from each school (or at least each zip code) find their work bundled into a block of newly minted academic capital. They earn a subsequent basic income payment into their digital wallets for 25 years in a cryptocurrency controlled by these students. Each block award is a collection of approved credits selected based on an anti-bias criteria—the requirement that every school be represented so that no set of schools dominates control of the academic capital awards.
From the perspective of a media outlet, this ensures that the podcasts and videos earning the award every three months be representative of the diversity of students in a given city, using zip code as a proxy for diversity. (If you have the stomach for even more detail on this subject, check out my recent book on this subject).
This is how students at elite schools are incentivized (with magic internet money) to collaborate with students at all other schools so that they are all earning these gold standard credits. If an affluent school wants to have 20% of the students at their school earn the basic income award, they would have to ensure that as many students at each school across the city are able to earn the same types of credit (thus normalizing opportunities across the city).
Adding the cryptocurrency aspect teaches students about digital finance (the exchange of their sweat equity for a unit of abstracted value) while making the awards every three-months meaningful (with $$).
The Birth of Credit Studios
Normalization is the practice that maintains a credit’s reputation over time. Quality can be easily verified by any stakeholder by watching or listening to the actual student work being produced. An exemplar stream goes a long way toward establishing academic expectation even before the curriculum is reviewed for detailed guidance, tutorials, activities, graphic organizers, and circle feedback protocols during a calendar month. That is how normalization works.
For those that don’t have time or interest to watch or listen to student stories, they simply rely on the certification by a particular school, district, or respected organizations like Harvard or The College Board which leverage their own brand by offering their stamp of approval to those credit streams that meet their definition of critical thinking. There is no reason why The College Board could not easily transition from offering standardized tests to offering a podcast or video option of an “AP Credit.”
I use the term media studio to define the organization that uploads curriculum to define a project-based high school credit. If they can normalize grading practice by offering quality documentation for teachers and students, more guidance counselors will authorize use of the credit and with that more student work would will be uploaded at the end of each month as teachers make use of the curriculum. The media studio does not have to worry about grading incoming work beyond selecting teachers who have used the credit in their classrooms to serve as credit experts, paid $180/hr to evaluate incoming work. Teachers ultimately drive which credits have value (i.e. which have a stream of youth media) by choosing which credits to use with their students and thus demanding of their administration to approve the credit at their school.
The media studio does not see any money directly, although their employees are likely earning money as credit experts (so they benefit indirectly via approving employees to earn an income on the platform). Where a credit studio stands to benefit is that they have 1 month of exclusive rights on all youth media approved by their credit experts. For a podcaster or YouTuber or PBS or NPR producer, the platform offers a curated stream of media which meet their internal production requirements. In essence, this app gives The Fourth Estate an army of young reporters serving out of local high schools in exchange for high quality curriculum.
The approach of trying to standardize the thinking of students by gathering a group of wealthy white men to set rigid expectations that can be captured on bubble sheets is perverse, once you see that there can be another option.
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