An item from a neo-liberal… This one is an item from a business professor with little direct experience in education, but who believes free market economic principles are the answer to education’s (and pretty much all other society’s social) problems.
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Just as there’s no one-size-fits-all-way for a child to learn, there’s no one-size-fits-all-way for them to get to school either.
That’s the argument behind HopSkipDrive, a startup that is seeking to complement and redefine the traditional bus model of taking students to school. Instead of kids making their way to the pre-determined route of a 72-passenger school bus, HopSkipDrive creates customized pick-ups in cars and vans based on individual students’ needs. It’s a rideshare-like model with similarities to and major differences from Uber and Lyft.
My latest What Next column for Education Next tells HopSkipDrive’s story and the broader set of problems within schools that it’s designed to solve.
The company provides an app that connects families and students with highly vetted drivers, all of whom are also experienced caregivers who either currently have a child at home or have cared for children in the past. They use their personal, pre-approved cars to drive students to and from school or after-school activities, while families and the contracting agency—such as a school, welfare office, or group home—can track the car’s movement in real time. Rides are scheduled well in advance but can be changed with a few hours’ notice.
When three parents launched the app in 2015, “it had nothing to do with school transportation,” said Chief Executive Officer Joanna McFarland, a cofounder and mother of two. “It really had to do with creating options for full-time working moms and families like mine, who were really struggling to just make the logistics of running a family work.”
But safely transporting kids turned out to be a widely shared challenge. Today, Los Angeles-based HopSkipDrive contracts with schools, districts, counties, and nonprofit partners in eight states and Washington, D.C., with a focus on meeting the transportation needs of students who fall outside traditional school-bus norms.
Please read the whole piece here. COVID accelerated the challenges of school transportation, as well as brought into sharp relief that families need different types of schooling options. Solutions like HopSkipDrive are uniquely positioned to not only help solve bus driver shortages, for example, but maybe more importantly to help schools create a range of educational options that better serve students and families with widely varying needs—from different learning options to different hours and childcare.
One big thing standing in the way of HopSkipDrive’s expansion are state policies.
Many states have antiquated regulations around who can drive students to schools, according to McFarland. For example, Massachusetts requires a driver to have a certification that is close to a commercial driver’s license—a rule designed for safety back when a school bus was the only transportation a district would have provided for students to get to school. Similarly, many districts require their own unique background checks for potential drivers, a roadblock for vetted CareDrivers who want to drive for multiple districts.
States are updating their laws, however, to make room for new transportation solutions. A 2021 Maryland law allows districts to transport students in vehicles other than official school buses, and new regulations in Georgia permit the use of “alternative vehicles” for students who receive special-education services, are in foster care, or are experiencing homelessness.
In what’s perhaps no surprise to those of you who have followed my work, the ultimate solution in my view is to update transportation regulations to focus on outcomes—namely safety and reliability—instead of inputs. That means setting a baseline for safety consistent with different vehicle types and using technology to enforce safety and create accountability. Read more here at Education Next.
Acronyms Galore: TPS, OPM, and K12 ESAs
For better or—more often—worse, education makes up acronyms all the time.
When you read “TPS” many of you probably think of the movie Office Space and their “Test Program Set” reports.
But in education land these days that acronym means “Third Party Servicer” for institutions that receive federal financial aids. And as readers of this newsletter know, the Department of Education recently used their regulations over third-party servicers to dramatically increase the scope of organizations that it oversees. In our latest episode of Future U., Jeff Selingo interviews me about these recent changes and how online program managers—or OPMs—figure into this tale.
In the second half of the episode, Jeff returns to our theme this year exploring the schools that prepare students for higher education—K–12 schools. He asked me about David Brooks’ recent column in the New York Times in which he wrote, “You would think that education would be one of the most talked about subjects in America right now. This moment of disruption should be a moment of reinvention.”
Given my latest book, From Reopen to Reinvent, is all about the question of reinventing K–12 schools, Jeff naturally wanted to know what I thought of the column. Listen to why I said Brooks had it both right—that there isn’t enough reinventing going on—and wrong. That’s all in our latest episode of Future U., right here.
Review From Reopen to Reinvent
A ChatGPT Ban Is ‘Ludicrous’
As I mentioned, AI in education is going to be a hot topic in this newsletter for some time to come. I joined Harvard’s Paul Peterson on the Education Exchange podcast recently to discuss it, along with my recent piece in Education Next on the topic with Daniel Curtis. You can listen to the episode with our conversation here.
Reflections, Insights, and Lessons Learned from Leading Summit
Finally, as some of you know, my cohost on the Class Disrupted podcast, Diane Tavenner, is stepping down as CEO of Summit Public Schools at the end of this academic year after 20 years. As she prepares to step down, I interviewed her to ask her to share some of her lessons from which educators, policymakers, and parents can all learn. I hope you enjoy her reflections here.
As always, thank you for reading, writing, and listening.
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