These barriers fit into three categories: Redesigning teacher roles that meet state policy and union contract provisions, purchasing and managing technology, and recognizing online classes as valid for admission to California university systems. A report from the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation lays out both the barriers and workarounds in an effort to help superintendents share their ideas.

Three of the most important workarounds center around teacher licensure requirements, BYOD and online course approval.

“There is some real creativity and leadership among the superintendents in California, and several of them are not content to take the California education code as-is when they think that there’s something they can do to benefit students,” said Michael B. Horn, co-founder and executive director of education at the institute.

Creative workarounds for teacher licensure requirements

With blended learning, teachers often need more flexibility in terms of which subjects they teach and how they work with students. Some models work best with a teacher who is certified in a single subject in elementary school, while others work better with a teacher who is certified in multiple subjects in high school, the opposite of what typically happens.

But the California Education Code requires teachers to be credentialed in whatever subject they’re teaching at the time, which means that school districts need to get creative with how they manage staff in these different models. And they also have class size requirements to deal with.

In the Milpitas School District, an initial State Board of Education waiver for elementary class sizes and credentialing helped them overcome these barriers. But then the district changed its model. Now grade level teams of two to three teachers shuffle elementary school students back and forth next door. They’ll also have students rotate within a classroom.

“I see the teacher doing small group instruction with five to six kids, and the rest of the class is completely engaged in their own learning,” Superintendent Cary Matsuoka said.

Myth buster: BYOD and a free education

As the Santa Clara and San Mateo County superintendents threw out barriers, it turns out that one of them wasn’t an actual barrier at all, just a perceived one. The California Education Code requires schools to offer a free education, and some superintendents didn’t think they could have students bring their own devices to school for blended learning because of that requirement.

But they could shift to student devices as long as they don’t require students to bring them. The trick is in the wording, Horn said. They can allow students to bring them and provide devices for students who don’t.

Creative workarounds for online course approval

Along with local culture and policy barriers, school districts have to deal with college admission requirements, which they didn’t always think were barriers in the past. With the rise of online classes, the University of California and the California State University systems have many online high school classes to review for college admission requirements. The process is time consuming and doesn’t necessarily result in course approval, so it leaves student schedules and school course offerings in limbo for a time.

As a result of this approval process, school districts must be careful about how they handle online learning in the context of college admission requirements. One district didn’t say a course was online or in person. It’s staff just provided transcripts with the title of the course, and that helped them get around this issue.

Key takeaways

As blended learning and technology change the way students learn, states need to be tighter on student outcomes and looser on how they get there, Horn said. Smarter regulations can give schools more creativity and flexibility so they can generate better student outcomes.

And while these superintendents came up with a number of barriers and workarounds, superintendents in other regions and states may face different barriers. Horn encouraged superintendents in other counties to come together for a day to hammer out some of these issues with their collective knowledge and experience.