ASU Prep Digital

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Amy McGrath. Amy is the chief operating officer at ASU Prep Digital and associate vice president of education outreach at Arizona State University. And we're here today to talk about ASU's unique pipeline program, which involved starting both bricks and mortar school and an online school.

[00:37] Announcer:

And now our feature presentation.

[00:39] SPEAKER_02:

So, Amy, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:41] SPEAKER_00:

Thanks, Justin. Glad to be here.

[00:43] SPEAKER_02:

So this is kind of a unique program and I think our audience of school administrators will be very interested in this idea of a high school to college pipeline and the intention of Arizona State University to kind of fill that pipeline with students who were interested in attending Arizona State and academically ready to do so. I wonder if you could give us a little bit of a sense of how this came to be, like what What was some of the discussion happening at the university? And how was that decision made to fund a school and to run a school to prepare students to become ASU students?

[01:18] SPEAKER_00:

Yep, great question. Everyone always asks, why is ASU in the high school space? So that sort of the genesis of this really lives with our president, President Crow of the university, who's an extremely progressive thinker and is leading the sort of the charge for innovation at ASU and doing that through our commitment to universal learners. And so what that looks like is not just being committed to the students that come to campus and that we can serve in the traditional college age group, but creating sort of a community of learners, PK, so pre-kindergarten through career. We call it cradle to career. And so Our charter for the university is really measured by whom we include rather than whom we exclude.

[02:07]

And so that idea of believing that everyone can learn, but creating sort of the right support mechanisms to do so, not again just for the higher ed age group, but dipping back into high school and blurring the lines between high school and college so that we can prepare more learners to go to college and hopefully change trajectory of lives. in that way. So about 10 years ago, the president asked us to look into how we could serve the community through brick and mortar. And so we have a community of charter schools throughout the Phoenix area where ASU is located and K-12 serving about 2000 students and various campuses. Some of them on the ASU campus, this really kind of school without walls kind of model where students can take high school and college courses in person. seen a lot of great success there.

[02:58]

And so, of course, we challenge ourselves to take it further and say, how can we reach more students and not be bound by geographics? And so that is, of course, digital learning. So we've done some due diligence and worked with university faculty and taken what we've done in the high school space in person and moved that logic into our digital platform where we've launched an online high school To do just that, combine high school and college and really kind of give students this accelerated pathway because kids are so different now and it's really difficult to serve them in a personalized way in the traditional manner. So we're working with districts all over the state and all over the as we grow all over the country to offer the innovation of ASU anytime a student is ready through the ASU online digital platform.

[03:51] SPEAKER_02:

So I want to circle back to kind of a flip that you highlighted this shift from looking at a group of students as. a pool to winnow down or a pool to narrow down and just pick the most qualified students or to reject as many people as possible. And I know there's a lot of talk about rejection rate and how some of the Ivy League schools pride themselves on rejecting 90 or 95% of their applicants. But it sounds like ASU really was taking kind of the opposite approach and saying, how can we make our school uphold our rigor and uphold our standards and everything, but how can we make our school more accessible to more students? Was that kind of the intent there?

[04:29] SPEAKER_00:

without lowering standards. And I think that part is really important. So there's a baseline of standard to be an A or a B student to be able to get in. But as many of us know, once most universities have that pool of qualified students, then there's additional filters, be it race or location or all sorts of different qualifiers to where there's only a certain group of students that can be though several of them beyond the accepted meet the admissions criteria, but don't get in. And it's that kind of, hmm, why didn't I get in? So ASU takes a completely different approach, again, measured not by whom it excludes, but whom it includes, but then it takes it further and how they succeed.

[05:17]

So though we're casting a wider net of qualified students, really anyone that reaches the A, B requirements and the state of Arizona Board of Regents requirements. If you reach that baseline, you're welcomed to the university. And then we really jump in to wrap those students with different mechanisms of support because we care about obviously how they succeed as well. So it's part of the charter. It's why the university has seen huge growth and there's just been a real shift in the way that ASU is doing things and that's also why ASU's kind of been sort of the matriarch in the innovative schools models and really is leading the charge to what it looks like to create a new university model.

[06:06] SPEAKER_02:

And in the process, creating somewhat of a new model for high school as well. So I understand the virtual aspect is also a big deal. So talk to me about how the decision was made to add a virtual academy. Obviously, we're all familiar with high schools and charter schools and how a university could start a local university. charter school to better prepare a pipeline of students to attend the university. But how does that work online and how does that play into ASU's strategy?

[06:33] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's really interesting, especially as we grow across the state. So of course we could have students in the homeschool capacity or, you know, as students change, there's more students looking for flexibility that are not in traditional schools. That's still a smaller population, likely going to be about 20 percent of the students that we serve in the full time realm where we're their school of record and they're on the diploma track with us as ASU Prep Digital is their high school of record. But where we see a lot of impact is in partnership with districts. And so around the state of Arizona specifically, because that's where we live and that's what we're committed to in terms of impact in the community. We are not taking any state funding as we serve the students.

[07:18]

We're just partnering with school districts to ask, how can we help? Teacher shortages are a real issue all over the country, but very much so in Arizona as well. Augmenting a course catalog. We've got rural, tribal. even urban districts that are not able to find highly qualified teachers for subjects like Latin or physics or some of these hard to hire areas. And because when you bring in an online teacher, you have a larger pool.

[07:46]

Our teachers are sitting all over the country. So we just listen and talk to superintendents, to principals and say, what are your challenges? And then we kind of build a partnership model often through labs. So if a district, I can give you an example of We're working with Yuma Unified District in southern Arizona, an urban school district that wants to look at doing math differently. So they're partnering with us. We're training lab facilitators and their teachers, and they're using our digital platform to deliver a personalized math solution for all of their grade-level students.

[08:21]

And we are, you know— working with them to impact like testing grades. And so that's a way that we can go in and partner with a school district. And that would be for a service fee as opposed to us entering into taking any of the state funding for those students.

[08:35] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think that's really important because anybody who's heard about some of the scandals with online schools, especially in the state of Pennsylvania, where there are all these online providers and who knows kind of what's behind them, what expertise, how many actual human beings are behind them versus who are kids talking to, what kind of supports are there. And yet these online schools were taking all of the per pupil funding that otherwise would have gone to their districts. And in some cases, many, many, many times more than it actually costs to educate a student online. And then alongside that, you have the huge problem of not actually educating those students and not providing the support that they need. So that essentially the student is a source of cash for the company. And in many cases, these are private companies that are enrolling these students, getting credit for them, but not really educating them simply because it's not a setup that works for the students that are enrolled.

[09:30]

So I'm excited to hear that this is a different model that's much more of a partnership with school districts and much more about preparing students to enroll in Arizona State. And actually, you said there are dual enrollment courses that students can take online as high schoolers that give them college credit. Is that right?

[09:47] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. And just to touch on your last comment, I so agree. We're constantly fighting the headwind of poor online mechanisms, models all over the country. And this is a college prep program, so it's highly rigorous. It's not credit recovery. And so that's difficult to be in the space where often school administrators are rightfully so very concerned and a little trepidatious to go into a partnership.

[10:13]

And so I think that's part of this is having conversations and letting school administrators know in a partnership type model of this is not a, it'll take two weeks and you can get a credit. This is completely different. We work with Cambridge International to have a framework of preparing students to sit for Cambridge, which can offer college credit as well. So it's just very, very different in that way. So I just wanted to touch on that. And then like you said, in addition to the rigor, it is college in many cases.

[10:44]

So if a student... wants to be on an accelerated pathway to university, they can take, we call it concurrent credit for all sorts of different reasons, but often dual enrollment implies that there's a high school teacher that's certified and or it implies community college. And so this is sort of elevated above that and is a concurrent program with a research one university. So the students are When enrolling, when appropriate, we offer both high school and college credit.

[11:16]

We've done a crosswalk to standards. So an example of that would be English 4 correlates with Comp 101 and Comp 102. So that's an easy win, but we really take it the depth. Once we find, you know, through our digital platform, we figure out, you know, this is a STEM type student. Maybe they want to be an electrical engineer and we can put them on an accelerated pathway to be taking courses within their discipline and offer high school credit as well. So The goal there, and we do that at a really discounted price, it's $600 all over the country to take a college credit course with us, and that's with an ASU transcript.

[11:53]

So again, just a very unique model, not like dual diploma, more of the concurrent enrollment. When you apply and get into ASU Prep Digital, you also are a non-degree seeking student at ASU. And that gives you access to ASU faculty and all of the 100 plus ASU courses that the students can take.

[12:14] SPEAKER_02:

Well, let's talk about student success because, again, that seems like it's really at the heart of making something like this work. If we have students who can log in and do their work and be happy working at a computer and all that, great. But the kind of mixed history of online high schools has shown us that that does not work for a sizable number of students, at least as it's traditionally practiced and carried out. So what have been some of the insights and some of the approaches that ASU PrepDigital is using to actually reach kids and make sure that it's not just a website that they fail to log into, but it's actually something that results in high quality learning. What are you guys doing differently?

[12:53] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and that's really all that matters, right? It's not about having an online program. It's about actually making a difference in the success and the academic achievement of students. I so agree with you. One of the things that we found is that students need extra support. And so beyond a teacher who is pushing them on the academic side, sometimes you lose students.

[13:14]

And though they are digital natives and really, really good at being online, it's a bit distracting there. So we have, in our model, added a learning success coach who is more on the qualitative side to help ensure that the student's engaged, that the student is making the appropriate progress through the course according to their pace charts, the goals that they've set for themselves, asking them, hey, how was the soccer game? Are you able to log in? Really that piece of sort of a mix between a guidance counselor who's tracking them to their course progression, but also just a coach in that they are ensuring that the student has the appropriate support in their physical environment and helping them to connect there. That's been a big game changer for us as we know, you know, as the model has grown so that we can, you know, if a student doesn't have a learning success coach, we can sometimes lose them.

[14:10]

And inter-learning success coach and the engagement is much higher and there's just a dual accountability model to get them back into the courseware.

[14:18] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. And it seems like you're really taking seriously the kind of ghosting problem, you know, as the kids say, you know, if a kid signs up for an online school, and then ghosts that school and just never responds to emails or to messages through the platform or whatever, you know, so do you actually call them on the phone? Or what do you what do you do if a kid just kind of drops off and doesn't respond?

[14:38] SPEAKER_00:

So that's another thing that speaking to fighting the headwind, there's lots of models that are sort of like MOOCs, those massive online open courseware where you can just be like an anonymous user and kind of pop in and out. This is not that model. This is video chatting weekly with your learning success coach, with your teacher. We have an online platform where all of the students meet for both synchronous and asynchronous lectures. And so it's, the accountability measures are woven within the student experience, but still flexible so that a student doesn't have to be at science class at nine o'clock every morning. It's a little bit different.

[15:17]

They have a lot of options and it's that rolling model of master and move on when ready. So there's, you know, that's a little bit of a dance. It's really hard to do that. But what I, you know, what we are making sure that we are not allowing is that ghost student. And that does happen. I mean, we have students that are just sort of hedging their bets.

[15:36]

If they don't get into the course that they want to at their local district, they're going to sign up for an online one. And then they're kind of gone two weeks in. So we have admissions advisors calling them and saying, hey, what's going on? Can you let us know? Do you still need us? And then After a certain amount of time, if we don't hear from them, then we know that they've been placed somewhere within their district.

[15:56]

So again, it's not just a sign up and see how it goes. It's, you know, we really have to be in pretty consistent and constant communication to know that they're learning.

[16:04] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I know a lot of our listeners have something along the lines of a credit recovery program going in their school, especially in smaller districts where there may not be kind of a large alternative school, bricks and mortar alternative school. There may be a small program that connects students with online resources and learning opportunities for credit recovery. But ASU Prep Digital is a college prep program by design. Does that factor into admission? And do you kind of counsel students as to whether this is a good fit or whether they're going to need more of a face-to-face environment? Because I know one of the things that some of the schools that have gotten in trouble for their recruiting practices were doing was really not being thoughtful about who would succeed in that environment versus needing a different kind of support.

[16:51] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and to your point, credit recovery is a real issue and there needs to be a solution there. It's just how often it's not done well and it's sort of a credit mill of sorts. So we could fill that solution to help a student recover a credit. So just by nature of what the definition of credit recovery, absolutely. But that looks like the same expectations, the same rigor. They can do it faster if they have more time to devote because it's all about input, right?

[17:21]

But it's how much time can you put in for what you're going to get out. So I will say that we are helping districts in a credit recovery capacity, but in a very different way than many vendors and models have been in the past. But to your question, it just looks a lot different. And so I think that's just what is very unique in the conversation with school-level districts officials who are making decisions is, you know, how will this fit? And they let us know if we're talking to the district, how much time will we have with the students? How much access do we have with the students?

[17:51]

How can we come in and train and or create a physical environment to support you in? And then when we have conversations with students coming directly to us, you can get into the program. But we're very, very straightforward and honest about how much time it's going to take. And this is a college prep program, like you mentioned. So it's not going to be just coasting through. And so we have sort of a contract of sorts that they and their parents agree to.

[18:17]

Specifically, if they're taking college courses, they have to have some prerequisites. So there are a few different sort of safety nets to make sure we find the right kids. But we do try to not have blanket policies because it's kind of different for every student or every district we're serving.

[18:33] SPEAKER_02:

Well, let's speak to the needs of, say, a high school principal or a superintendent in a district that maybe isn't quite big enough or isn't in an area where it's feasible to consistently attract teachers to offer all of the subjects that we'd like to, like Calculus 2 and French 4 and all those courses that we would love to be able to offer to our students, but we just can't make the numbers work face-to-face or we can't attract the staff that we need to. What does it look like for a partnership to develop between ASU Prep Digital and a school district or a high school in order to provide those opportunities to students? What's the process look like and how do people get in touch?

[19:11] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you asked. I've talked a lot about Arizona. That's just sort of, you know, naturally where we're spending some time, but we're really trying to grow this model naturally or organically rather throughout the country. So we have conversations and various partnerships set up to start this fall in various states around the country. And it's about awareness right now.

[19:34]

A lot of districts, specifically at this time of year, are already in motion and didn't know we existed. So, you know, from a marketing perspective, we're trying to make sure we activate the fact that ASU is in the high school space and we can help. And so we're what a superintendent or principal or school administrator would do is just reach out to us. You can visit asuprepdigital.org and there's a school page where you can find out, okay, who do I talk to? And it gives kind of the linear steps there.

[20:05]

But the conversation just starts with, you know, what's going on with your school? What, how, how can we help? What do you need? It's very different from school to school, as you can imagine. I kind of, outlined our partnership with a rural district in Arizona with the math solution, but there could be a district that's really struggling with, like you said, the higher level languages. That's a big one for us.

[20:29]

So French 4, as you said, that's something we're actually helping a school with French, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese right now. And so we go in and we've got our teachers, but we physically train the lab facilitators, which are usually lower paid, non-certified teachers that are easier to find for the school district. And they set up the lab and we have blended learning specialists train them and our teachers kind of set up shop. We've got maybe, you know, usually it's about 25 students in a lab and they all have their own computers and they have their sign in and they're kind of classroom of one. The 25 students are working at their own pace and the teachers on the virtual side are monitoring them, but the lab facilitators are in charge of the classroom management piece. There are some times that are synchronous, where they call all of the students virtually together into a platform.

[21:19]

There's often phone calls, which we call discussion-based assessments, so that they can, you know, academic integrity measures, ask them how it's going, especially with language, that verbal assessment is incredibly important. So the lab facilitator at the school site really kind of fills that physical gap of an adult that needs to be present for a larger group. But the online teacher and the online success coach is doing their job just as they would if the student was at home. And they're progressing as they need and sort of not having to wait for their classmates because they're in their own little platform and trudging through.

[21:52] SPEAKER_02:

I'm thinking about our audience of international school administrators. We're in over 50 countries around the world at the Principal Center. And a lot of our listeners are administrators at American international schools or other kinds of English-speaking international schools or universities. bilingual international schools. And I'm thinking about, you know, possibly referring a parent. Let's say a parent, you know, is happy to have their child enrolled in our school in their, you know, in their city, wherever we may be around the world.

[22:18]

But they're also interested in, you know, say an American high school diploma or access to some of these courses that maybe we don't have the opportunity to offer, you know, on our campus. So I understand you also have an enrollment option for international students as well.

[22:32] SPEAKER_00:

Oh, so glad you said that. Yeah, so international peace is a big passion play for us. Really hoping to connect with school leaders that are looking for a pathway to American University. So that's the genesis of that dual diploma program that you're probably looking at. And we're accredited and NCAA approved and all of that good stuff where we check off all of the boxes. But we work with international schools to provide an option for a couple things.

[23:01]

One, English language learning. So we have that ability. But then once we've identified we've got English language learners that are ready to take courses, they can take six credits with us and get a dual diploma, an American dual diploma. And what's really even kind of taking it to the next level is those six credits can also be concurrent credit with ASU. So they can have a U.S. dual diploma as well as ASU credits, which we would love for them to come to ASU campus.

[23:31]

And we have some physical summer programs that we can bring them to. But these credits can also transfer to leading universities around the country, which is unique.

[23:38] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Amy, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio to talk about the approach and the work that ASU Prep Digital is doing. Again, the website is asuprepdigital.org. And Amy McGrath, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[23:54] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you, Justin. It's a pleasure.

[23:56] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.