Family Playlists

Family Playlists use mobile technology to help increase learning while improving connections between students, families, and teachers. 

Family Playlists address a problem of great magnitude and severity across the United States: the large percentage of high-need students (those whose family income level qualifies them for the federal Free or Reduced-Price Lunch program) who are advancing from the 4th and 5th grades with very low levels of math proficiency and are therefore lacking the foundational math skills they need to succeed in algebra. Nationwide,75% of high-need 4th grade students are not proficient in math, per 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Between 4th and 5th grade, the average level of math proficiency drops, suggesting that math proficiency becomes a bigger problem nationally as students advance.

Family Playlists are a sequence of interactive digital activities that help students master a skill being taught in class while, at the same time, strengthening the learning relationships between students, families, and teachers. When students work on a Family Playlist, they first complete a few activities on their own; then they teach what they learned to a “Family Partner;” and then the Family Partner provides feedback to the teacher on whether their child seemed to understand what they were teaching. Family Playlists are available via our online learning platform, PowerMyLearning Connect. 

Family Playlists are designed to improve the math performance of fourth- and fifth-graders by focusing on teacher and family practices around homework—a part of the learning process that can have a big effect on student achievement. We believe that homework is a very promising place to intervene in the algebra readiness problem because it's an additive intervention (meaning it easily complements classroom instruction) and because it's ubiquitous (and often not rigorous), it can be implemented at scale. 

Although they have only been used in classrooms for 18 months, Family Playlists have already shown promising results on important intermediate outcomes, including family engagement and teacher-student and student-family relationships. PowerMyLearning piloted Family Playlists during the second half of the 2016-17 school year with the 6th grade at South Bronx Preparatory, a New York City district-run public school located in a high-poverty neighborhood that had historically struggled to engage parents. 

Key data from the pilot includes the following: 91% of families participated in the initiative; 84% of participating families chose to submit personal feedback to their child’s teacher—a choice that was offered to families as optional; 93% of students and 100% of participating family members stated that Family Playlists helped them learn together; 100% of the participating teachers agreed that Family Playlists helped them feel closer to their students and gain a more holistic understanding of their students as individuals. 

These results were so promising that we have now expanded Family Playlists to more than 20 schools in the 2017-18 school year and have been making product refinements as well as collecting additional data on usage and adoption. 

We believe Family Playlists can greatly impact algebra readiness among high-need elementary students and therefore help increase the number of students able to access post-secondary courses in math, science, technology, and engineering. 

Family Playlists are designed to replicate the most successful elements of the “Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork” (TIPS) program from Johns Hopkins University. TIPS is a paper-based program that is among the most cited in family engagement research literature worldwide. Like TIPS assignments, Family Playlists prompt students to share what they are learning in class through an interactive home activity with a “Family Partner,” who then provides feedback to the teacher. However, its digital context distinguishes Family Playlists by enabling real-time qualitative and quantitative feedback for teachers, bypassing language barriers for families, and encouraging maximum participation through mobile technology. 

First, access to Family Playlist functionality is provided through PowerMyLearning Connect: School Edition, which includes the ability to create and assign Family Playlists to students, send families notifications, and view reports on completion rates and family feedback. Second, because research shows that 50% of households earning less than $30,000/year own a computer yet 92% own a mobile phone, PowerMyLearning designed Family Playlists to use mobile technology, ensuring maximum participation from students and parents. This combination of mobile technology and web-based platform use enables teachers to “see” and measure the learning interactions that adult family members have with children at home. 

As part of our Strategic Evidence Plan developed with Project Evident, over the next 12 months we aim to explore various measures related to three specific learning goals related to Family Playlists' implementation: Teacher Adoption (factors that help or hinder it), Learning Relationships (fact that drive their successful formation), and Impact on Social-Emotional Learning and Content Mastery (identifying measures and well as correlations between student outcomes and aspects of Playlists implementation, process, or content). 

Over the next three to give years, we will have determined answers to research questions around our three learning goal areas for Family Playlists: Teacher Adoption, the Triangle of Learning Relationships, and Impact on Academic Mastery and SEL outcomes. Answering these questions will ensure  a high level of quality as we scale Family Playlists across various types of schools in different communities. 

PowerMyLearning plans to implement Family Playlists in our four service regions (Greater Atlanta, Greater Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and New York City) as well as in schools and districts across the country. Our customers are school leaders, district leaders, and nonprofit partners, while out beneficiaries are students, teachers, and families. We plan to reach out to new customers and beneficiaries using a combination of marketing and thought leadership tools. Through our previous marketing efforts for Family Playlists, we have earned media features in the New York Times and EdSurge, amplified our message through various social media influencers.

In 2017-18 we reach 70 schools (direct) and 180 schools (train-the-trainer) with PD services. We also have a paid version of our platform (the free one has registered teachers from >30,000 schools).

We plan to work with more than 50 schools in 2018-19, and although we estimate working wit between 1 and 5 teachers at each of these schools, we cannot yet say how many students and families this will impact. 

Our core package of services may be implemented either schoolwide or starting with up to 5 teachers, and includes elements such as easy system setup, low-touch training, and ongoing teacher support. We have additional services that schools can opt into as well. 

We hope in three years' time we will have significantly increased this footprint. 

• Elisabeth Stock (CEO): Elisabeth served as a Pahara-Aspen Education Fellow, a White House Fellow, and a high school teacher. She holds four MIT degrees.
• Mark Malaspina (President): Mark co-founded an education company that conducted impact studies with nationally recognized research organizations.
• Karuppiah Ganesan (Managing Director of Technology and Architecture): Karuppiah led Kaplan’s engineering team, which developed and managed Kaplan’s Test Prep learning platform. He manages the architecture and software development of PowerMyLearning Connect.
• Meghan Wells (Director of Family Engagement): Meghan directs the conceptual work and pilots for Family Playlists while managing our advisors for the project. 

We are confident that our organization will be financially sustainable over time. The proportion of our Fee For Service work as a percentage of revenue (excluding in-kind) has grown from < 5% four years ago to 21% this fiscal year. PowerMyLearning also has a track record of raising philanthropy from blue-chip foundations (Gates, CZI, Carnegie, Robin Hood, etc.) and our board continues to grow stronger with the addition of new board members.

This is a time of tremendous learning and growth related to Family Playlists, during which we hope to learn how to optimize teacher adoption and signal to schools and districts that Family Playlists are not just leveraging the evidence base from the Johns Hopkins, they are building upon it to contribute to the field’s understanding of effective family engagement approaches. Having access to Solve's network of educational problem-solvers as well as its resources and knowledge related to testing and evaluation would significantly help us advance these aspects of our work. 

Although we do not foresee any major risks to achieving our objectives, there are some smaller risks we may need to manage—such as competitive risk and new customer costs. We are mitigating competitive risk by prominently positioning Family Playlists on the national stage through vehicles such as our recent and positive feature in the New York Times. We also enjoy a first-mover advantage within the K-12 family engagement space. Lastly, we are mitigating the risks associated with new customers acquiring costs by engaged a Task Force of private-sector advisors.