Passionate About Personalization

Profile

CEDERICK ELLIS’ EPIPHANY came when he was a young computer science professor at Coahoma Community College in Clarksdale, Miss. He saw students arriving in his program without basic math skills.

“I thought it was criminal that high schools were graduating students with the false sense of what they needed to be successful at the next level,” he says.

Ellis considered it a crisis. He decided he could have the most impact by switching gears and focusing on younger students. He had a computer science degree and an MBA, but hadn’t taken a single education course, so he went back to school and eventually earned a Ph.D. in education administration.

Now as superintendent of the 2,600-student McComb School District in southern Mississippi, Ellis is taking dramatic steps to prepare his students for college and career.

When he arrived in McComb in 2013, the high school had an ‘F’ rating, and the state education agency was threatening a takeover. Ellis and his team, working closely with the wider community, completed a strategic plan in 2014 that would alter the structure of education throughout the district. The district’s personalized learning program is now in its third year and growing.

Already, one elementary school has jettisoned traditional grade levels. Students are grouped by age, but they are identified not by grade level but by their individual math and reading levels. Much of their work is completed on mobile devices, which hone in on their specific learning needs. Parents receive two report cards — one with traditional grades and a second skills-based report tracking the child’s individual progress.

While personalized learning has been criticized by some who say the hype of personal technology outstrips the data on learning results, Ellis points to his own district’s experience. During the first year of the program, just 61 percent of 3rd graders in McComb passed the state’s gateway reading exam required for promotion. The next year, 96 percent passed, and the personalized learning students saw double-digit gains.

Ellis says children aren’t simply glued to their screens. They get quality time with their teachers every day. “We can never replace the most valuable experience that a student will have, and that valuable experience is their interaction with their teacher,” he says.

The McComb district is 90 to 95 percent African American, which is nothing new to Ellis, who grew up in Mound Bayou, a small town in the Mississippi Delta founded by former slaves. From kindergarten through high school graduation, he never saw a white student in his classes.

Ellis’ first superintendency was in the since-merged Shaw School District, 20 miles south of Mound Bayou. Judy Nelson, a former administrator there, says Ellis was “the calm in the storm” after a 2011 school bus accident in which one student died and others were badly injured. Ellis was deeply affected by the tragedy, traveling to hospitals in Jackson and Memphis to visit the injured students while keeping the district focused on its mission, she says.

“He’s very passionate about what he does, but he has such a loving and caring spirit about himself,” Nelson adds.

Ellis’ passion now is focused on McComb’s personalized learning initiative, which he believes could eventually become a national model for tackling what he continues to see as an educational emergency.

“It is a crisis,” he says, “and if we continue to do what we were doing, nothing is going to change.”