Retrofit in reporting or delivery? That’s precisely the effect I’m interested in. Even if it doesn’t impact what you deliver to students there is still a chilling effect and possible blockers to developing novel approaches.
The juice may still be worth the squeeze for larger/funded ventures. Your efforts to translate what you do to what regulators want to see is probably worth it. However, smaller outfits might be inclined to avoid that work by following the regulatory ruts and deliver exactly what they are looking for to avoid these costs/complexities/risks.
For example, we use mastery-based progression, where students don't move on to the next unit until they've demonstrated mastery in the unit they're currently in, even if it takes longer. It's super expensive to do, but incredibly, incredibly effective.
When a student repeats a week we call that a "flex."
Regulators ask us how long a course is and what exactly the curriculum is for every week. As you can imagine, building in mastery-based progression into the program wasn't on anyone's mind when they created all the regulations.
Interesting, glad you are able to still operate how you like.
My wife is an instructional coach in a public district in Ohio that went from traditional curriculum to a personalized, mastery-based approach. The mastery model has taken a few years to get traction but seems to be catching its stride. One of the challenges is the loss of nuance in a binary grading system, another is the tendency to fall into retry loops with assessments and wasting lots of educator/student time.
The personalized learning is just starting and this past year their data in standardized testing took a hit across the board. My guess is that the teachers are just overwhelmed and its going to take a bit of time and possibly some technology to really dig deep into personalized learning.
The regs you are describing seem far too prescriptive. If you can define measurable goals it seems like they should back off one step in the regulation and try to find a way to just pin you to your promises.
Not sure if you’re in Ohio yet but it might be worth a look.
The juice may still be worth the squeeze for larger/funded ventures. Your efforts to translate what you do to what regulators want to see is probably worth it. However, smaller outfits might be inclined to avoid that work by following the regulatory ruts and deliver exactly what they are looking for to avoid these costs/complexities/risks.