What schools become depends on which of two very different visions for change prevails. Both visions are based in technology, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. The first is about doing what we currently do “better.” It operates on the faulty premise that information, knowledge, teachers, and an “education” are still scarce commodities. The second suggests we do things “differently” — that the new opportunities for learning require us to articulate a fundamental revision of the value of school and the roles of teachers and classrooms.
The first narrative around “reform” is being written primarily by businessmen and policymakers like Bill Gates and former Florida governor Jeb Bush. They see schools as places where technology is increasingly a tool to better deliver content, where a growing emphasis on passing the test becomes a business proposition, one tied to competing against other countries, schools, classrooms, teachers, and students. In this view, we focus on the easiest parts of the learning interaction — information acquisition, basic skills, a bit of critical thinking, analysis — accomplishments that can be easily identified and scored. Learning is relegated to the quantifiable: that which is easy to rank and compare. We have to beat Finland, right? These “corporate reformers” consistently cite the relatively low performance of U.S. students on international tests as a way to drum up support for reform. (What they don’t tell you, by the way, is that if we just looked at test results from U.S. kids living in high-income homes, we would be first in the world in just about every category. Our scores reflect our very deep issues with poverty, not inherent problems with schools.)
In a nutshell, proponents of this view believe that education can be improved by identifying and getting rid of teachers whose students underperform on the test, by privatizing schools, and by “personalizing” the curriculum via computers that deliver content and problems to individual kids based on their assessed skill level. The path forward is to vilify teachers, bust their unions, increase choice through charter schools, and promote online learning environments, all of which creates opportunities for businesses to claim a larger part of the education pie. This is already playing out in states like Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, where new education directives and the Common Core curriculum (now adopted by 45 states) are raising the stakes on “student learning,” tying test results to teacher evaluations, whole-school ratings, and all sorts of other things the tests were never created to assess.
As a bit of background, the Common Core standards, for which a de facto national assessment is currently being written, are rife with problems. For one thing, they fail to recognize in any meaningful way that learning and literacy are changing radically in the Internet age. But more, the original push for the standards came largely from organizations and people who aren’t educators, and their adoption was a prerequisite for individual states to receive stimulus money under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top education initiatives. (Money is always a good reason to adopt new standards, right?) In addition, the guidelines focus narrowly on traditional content in math, English, social studies, and science. At an implementation cost of more than a billion dollars, publishing companies (like Pearson and others) stand to make huge profits along the way. And, more disconcertingly, neither the standards nor the assessments slated for 2014–15 have been field-tested at all. I could go on.
So, in this Common Core–framed reform narrative, we focus on the efficiencies that digital delivery and assessments can bring to schools. Last year, the Hewlett Foundation ran a $100,000 competition, the Automated Student Assessment Prize, for companies to develop computerized essay-scoring software. Some of the resulting software supposedly can score more than 10,000 essays a minute. And presidential candidate Mitt Romney has wondered aloud why a good teacher can’t instruct a hundred students at a time, using the innovations becoming available. Though I may be cherry-picking here, the fact remains that, in this narrative, we simply reduce our focus on the whole child so we can meet the standards in less messy, more quantifiable ways. While discussing current expectations for writing in schools, David Coleman, the Common Core initiative’s chief architect, told a group of New York State education officials, “Forgive me for saying this so bluntly: The only problem with those two forms of writing [personal essay and narrative] is as you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
If you really want a sense of where this vision of doing it “better” ends up, have a taste of a recent Wall Street Journal essay by Yale professor David Gelernter. While what he describes may seem extreme, don’t be surprised if we start seeing more of these “reforms” come to fruition in the name of efficiency and “higher standards.”
A local Internet school sounds like a contradiction in terms: the Internet lets you discard geography and forget “local.” But the idea is simple. A one-classroom school, with 20 or so children of all ages between 6th and 12th grade, each sitting at a computer and wearing headsets. They all come from nearby. A one-room Internet school might serve a few blocks in a suburb, or a single urban apartment building.
In front sits any reliable adult whom the neighbors vouch for — often, no doubt, some student’s father or mother, taking his turn. He leads the Pledge of Allegiance, announces regular short recesses to clear everyone’s head, proclaims lunchtime. He hands out batteries and Band-Aids and sends sick children home or to a doctor. He reloads the printers and futzes with malfunctioning scanners, no doubt making any problem worse. But these machines are cheap, and each classroom can deploy several.
Each child does a whole curriculum’s worth of learning online, at the computer. Most of the time he follows canned courses on-screen. But for an hour every day, he deals directly, one-to-one over phone or videophone with a tutor. Ideally there’s a teaching assistant on an open phone line throughout the day, each assistant dealing with a few dozen students.
Read the whole thing.
This, then, is what schools look like to those who see abundant content and connections through the “let’s deliver the old curriculum through new tools” lens of reform. It’s old wine — or, in this case, old thinking about education — in new bottles. How does this serve our kids at this moment of abundance?