“Could you do some of this stuff before ESSA?” asks Richard Culatta, Rhode Island’s chief innovation officer and the former director of educational technology at the U.S. Department of Education. “Certainly it would have been possible, but it would have been harder to do. With our additional flexibility, we are up at the front of the line taking advantage of it.”

Rhode Island is accepting applications for its new Lighthouse program, giving schools the opportunity to apply—through a challenge process—to serve as school-wide personalized-learning models. Already in that pipeline are the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies, a public charter-school network that uses the Summit Basecamp learning platform at its Blackstone Valley Prep. The free digital-learning platform, created by Summit charter schools and Facebook, provides curriculum, student projects, and teacher resources and support to some 130 schools, 1,100 teachers, and 20,000 students.

“Our goal is to meet the kids where they are and help them be their best; that has been our charge from the beginning,” says the Blackstone executive director, Jeremy Chiappetta. “In order to meet them where they are, you need to understand where they are across a broad spectrum, and you have to be able to track it and push people.”

Chiappetta points to Blackstone as a key incubator that will inform and shape the state’s larger personalized-learning vision. “We need to be a proof point,” Chiappetta says, “an open door for others to learn from us and give feedback to the Rhode Island initiative. It is really powerful and we are helping fulfill the vision as others are exploring.”

The Lighthouse program is funded in part by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a three-year $3 billion investment by the pediatrician Priscilla Chan and her husband, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, to advance science and education. Other funders include the Jaquelin Hume Foundation, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, and the Overdeck Family Foundation.

Rhode Island hopes to have the pilot schools vetted and chosen by this summer, with the goal of implementing a personalized-learning program by the start of the 2017-18 school year.

“We are providing resources to help them build out their plans,” Culatta says. “We will select a couple of schools to win the challenge and want to help a broader number of schools to build plans. Even if we can’t fund them [all], it leaves them with a solid step to build out a plan on their own.”

Culatta is working closely with Daniela Fairchild, the director of education for Governor Gina Raimondo’s office of innovation. The office, a quasi-governmental agency working with educators across the state to spur, seed, and accelerate innovation through technology, released a paper in late February that tackled the uneasy task of defining personalized learning for every educator in Rhode Island, further solidifying the three essential components that have been laid out by the U.S. Department of Education: pace of learning, definite learning objectives for each student, and defined instructional approaches.