Your donation will help us produce journalism like this. Please give today.

Aspire Public Schools, a nonprofit charter school operator with 12 schools chartered through LAUSD, announced this morning that it will expand its blending learning curriculum to all of its elementary schools in the Los Angeles region by the end of the 2015-16 school year.

The expansion is supported by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and comes after the organization’s blended learning model — digital content, instruction away from school and classroom instruction — showed early signs of success at its Titan Academy in Huntington Park. According to Aspire, the percentage of K-5 students reading at grade level at Titan Academy rose to 80 percent from 66 percent over the past year.

“Because of blended learning, students are getting more quality time with their teacher in a smaller, focused setting,” Mark Montero, a second grade teacher at Aspire Titan Academy, said in a press release. “This is an incredibly powerful instructional tool that would not be possible without technology in the classroom.”

A spokeswoman for Aspire Public Schools said the organization’s blended learning programs all use laptops, not iPads, for their instruction, but added that the LAUSD locations would be receiving the tablets by the end of the district’s technology rollout.

Previous Posts: DC Think Tank Touts “Blended” LA Charter School; Ratliff is seeking alternatives to using iPads in LA Unified’s future