by Todd Rose
The managers of these new ventures are driven by an awareness that our nineteenth-century Prussian education system is neither adequately engaging the majority of students nor preparing them for a world so recently transformed by an instant and endless supply of information. Among the most obvious measures of that failure is the high U.S. rate of high school dropouts that I told you about in the Prologue, plus recent data revealing that close to half of all students entering college quit before getting their diploma. America’s rapidly declining rate of college grads, compared to other nations, helps explain why many leading U.S. firms have been going abroad to fill high-paying jobs in science, engineering, and computer programming. Modernizing our education system simply must be a priority, in other words, if we want to remain competitive in the globalized, digitized, twenty-first-century economy.
High-tech Highs and Lows
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Here’s what I see as the game-changer in this grand scenario: by the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the prices of software and computing devices, such as the iPad, finally fell to a point where they were competitive with textbooks. That simple change has been transforming the consciousness of government bureaucrats and entrepreneurs alike.
For example, in 2009, when then-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger revealed this country’s first state-sponsored plan to develop e-textbooks for high school math and science classes, he promoted the high-tech upgrade as a budget-cutting move. Whereas once schools had to argue for extra funds for computers and software, the idea now was that these digital books would help substitute free, open-source content for increasingly expensive, quickly outdated texts that have been weighing down both students’ backpacks and state coffers for too long.
Schwarzenegger’s switch put the old-fashioned publishing industry on notice, while firing the enthusiasm of a new class of e-entrepreneurs. California had been spending nearly $400 million a year on textbooks—a chunk of change that can inspire a lot of innovation. And, as no surprise, several of California’s Silicon Valley corporate titans, including people with experience at companies like Google and Facebook, are starting to lead the evolving global market in e-education. Nonprofit ventures are also pushing the digital education envelope. In Palo Alto, California, the C-K12 Foundation has pioneered an open-content, Web-based collaborative “Flexbook,” with which it hopes to reduce costs of textbooks throughout the world. In 2010, the foundation partnered with NASA to produce an innovative physics textbook.
At this writing, several states have been following California in transitioning to e-books. Even my own home state, Utah, is making plans to offer “virtual vouchers” for high school students to take a wide range of digital classes.
Given what I know about the promise of educational technology, and also because I’m hopeful by nature, I’m looking at these trends optimistically. It’s entirely possible that the painful recession still lingering as I write could be fortuitous for education, if it serves to accelerate the adoption of new digital technologies, combined with the new complex-systems view of learning, that will help each and every student get more engaged in learning.
As I’ve mentioned, however, there’s a big potential downside to this exciting moment, with the risk that we’ll do worse than merely squander our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. What worries me the most, as I watch the rush to digitize classrooms, is not so much the lure of the vast profits to be made (indeed, I think profit, free-markets, and competition will be key for genuine progress), but rather the nature of some of the businesses pursuing them.
Utah’s leading online educational content provider, for instance, is a Virginia-based for-profit firm called K12, established in 1999 and already claiming to be the biggest company in its field. Its founding CEO, Ron Packard, is a former mergers and acquisitions officer at Goldman Sachs, while a co-owner is the former junk bond billionaire and securities fraud convict Michael Milken.
These recent investments reflect the obvious: that educational technology is a potentially high-profit pursuit. Still, there are no shortcuts when it comes to genuine learning. As much as we all love to believe in simple answers, I urge you to keep in mind that technology, in and out of the classroom, is no more than a tool. It’s not by any means the solution to our problems, which are wide-ranging and complex. We still have a lot to learn, and if we end up chasing short-term profits—and even short-term test-score improvements—at this point, we’ll lose our unique opportunity for a genuine learning revolution.
I worry about losing that revolution, in particular, when I hear how private companies have been increasing their influence in schools, both through the rapid increase in charters and the newer push for online content, at a time when the influence of the teacher—by far the most important determinant of educational outcomes—has been dangerously weakened. That’s why, much as I admire the achievements of programs such as San Jose’s Rocketship, I was concerned to hear that the school has been cutting costs by hiring people without teaching certificates to monitor the computerized learning. I sincerely doubt that a high-quality education can be had without a quality teacher.
Left unchecked, these sorts of trends could indeed lead to the nightmare vision that Ravitch suggests, of students studying “in isolation, sitting in their basements at home, not having to learn how to deal with people, how to cope with cliques, how to work out problems with other children, how to function in a group.”
The good news, however, is that there are plenty of people—and I proudly count myself among them—working hard to prevent this education doomsday and make sure that technology actually improves life in the classroom, both for students and teachers. We believe that the true potential of these new technologies comes not in the opportunity to cut back on teachers’ time (and pay) but to free them up for the kind of high-impact activities they love most and do best. For example, technological innovations are already sparing some teachers hours of rote tasks, such as taking attendance, and relieving them of the mindless crowd management duties that now take up so much of their days. In this way, technology becomes an extension, not a substitute, for human abilities and relationships.
There are many examples of this smarter, innovative approach to technology in progress throughout the nation. Many of the schools that I have in mind are known as “hybrids,” which manage to combine high-tech and up-to-date teaching approaches sometimes referred to as “high touch.”
Hybrid Havens
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The school that may best exemplify this ideal is San Diego’s High Tech High, the public charter school system where principal Larry Rosenstock has set clear limits on his schools’ digital content. For example, High Tech High schools use the widely acclaimed online Rosetta Stone programs to study foreign languages, while some also receive limited online tutoring in math. But Rosenstock recently rejected a proposal to bring students to campus just one day a week, with the other four days spent at home online, arguing that he wants to keep the emphasis on high-quality human relationships.
Luckily, hybrid models like High Tech High are catching on—again, not just at charter or private schools but at many public schools as well. Rosenstock’s own charter, at this writing, was expanding to include eleven schools, while also dedicating substantial resources to replicating its success in other districts throughout the country.
Another pathbreaking project, the national Big Picture Learning organization, has had striking success with its high-tech and high-touch approach, particularly with so-called at-risk students, ever since its first school, the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (the “Met”), opened in 1996 in Rhode Island. Currently, more than seventy Big Picture public and charter schools are active in fourteen states, with more than nine thousand students. While the schools take advantage of new technologies, their main emphasis is on the emotional component of learning, with classwork designed to address the interests and goals of each student, in order to build motivation. Class sizes are
small, while each student is assigned to a mentor who guides them through real-world-focused internships. With considerable financial backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Big Picture schools have racked up stunning records, with on-time graduation rates on average topping 90 percent and a college acceptance rate of 95 percent.
Make no mistake: I consider myself an evangelist for much more rather than less high-tech tools in the classroom, as long as we make sure that the systems genuinely improve the classroom experience, as demonstrated so well at High Tech High and the Big Picture schools. Among other things, this means we must remain alert to the impact that all curricula, digital or not, is having on students’ emotions—including their sense of achievement and mastery, so important in driving their motivation to learn.
Disruptive, in a Good Way
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As Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has so brilliantly pointed out in his book Disrupting Class, digital content has become a “disruptive” force in education, challenging antiquated strategies that have been marginalizing far too many children over the past two centuries. As I’ve suggested above, the best way this can happen is if technology supports instead of attempts to replace the talented teaching in evidence at places like High Tech High and Big Picture Learning.
As I’ve collaborated over the past several years with educators, academics, and nonprofit and for-profit groups engaged in the education revolution, I’ve zeroed in on what I see as three keys to the future success of this hybrid model. Specifically, it will depend on: an understanding of variability, improvements in the way we test, and a democratic approach to content. Let’s take them one by one.
Since I’ve already talked your ear off about variability all through this book, I’ll keep this section short. The bottom line: Parents and teachers should assume tremendous variability in how children learn and behave, owing both to inborn influences and the powerful role of context. And it’s entirely fair to expect that new digital learning technologies be capable of actually supporting these differences. Decade after decade, textbook publishers have been able to get by with creating material for the “average” student, who, as we now know, has never existed. Yet as I’ve described in the case of the science notebook, recent innovations offer huge new potential for more flexibility in this regard. We already have both the scientific knowledge and technologies to make this breakthrough in a cost-effective way—and we simply can’t afford to let this opportunity pass us by.
That’s good news for you, and for literally millions of kids—especially if we can build on the advances we’ve made to counter the forces of mediocrity that are embodied, most dramatically, in the pervasive practice of standardized tests. These tests have become wildly unpopular in recent years, for good reasons. They were never designed to provide the real-time feedback that students need to learn effectively; instead, they were meant to rank and sort.
Under the banner of “accountability,” they force teachers to race through material and favor superficial insights rather than genuine engagement and deep knowledge. They encourage a teaching-to-the-norm approach that alienates many students. And if all that weren’t enough, research has shown the tests truly do not measure how well most students are learning. Given what we know today about students’ variability when it comes to learning, I believe that there is no justification to continue the practice of standardized testing.
Now, testing per se isn’t so bad—quite the contrary. Scientists have found that being provided with frequent and relevant feedback is a remarkably effective way to learn. Students need to know when they’re making progress, and reviewing under some pressure is helpful, provided the assessment is focused on measuring learning, not ranking students. As long as it’s done right, such testing offers a classic example of a positive feedback loop.
Here again, digital technology offers the promise of something better. What’s coming your way soon—under the name of “learning analytics”—are assessment and feedback systems that can monitor and evaluate not just the student, but the curriculum itself. Students will be able to “talk back” to the material, noting when they don’t understand it. The curriculum authors will get rapid streams of feedback alerting them when they need to modify the material. I’m excited by this progress, which makes so much more sense than today’s practice of assuming that any student’s failure to learn is purely the student’s fault. Instead, by embedding these new feedback loops in the curriculum, the instruction method will constantly improve as the students also get smarter.
It’s still early days for this system, and it’s far from perfect, but I think that it is an important step toward genuine personalization, and one bound to be widely replicated. Now, how can we guarantee that the digital tide sweeping through U.S. classrooms actually improves learning for as many students as possible? Ideally, as this revolution unfolds, it will resemble the path of the Internet itself, in which open-source democracy has fostered an amazing amount of creativity. In this way, America’s best teachers, or even people who might never have thought of themselves as teachers, can become the next generation’s teaching “rock stars” by devising innovative ways to explain and demonstrate material.
Consider the disruptive work of Salman Khan, a former Boston hedge fund analyst and the son of immigrants from India and what is now Bangladesh. Several years ago, when Kahn was still in his late twenties, his seventh-grade cousin in New Orleans asked him for help with her math homework. Using a notepad software program, he tutored her over the Internet on how to convert kilograms to pounds, and in the process discovered his calling. He subsequently launched the nonprofit Khan Academy, originally headquartered in his converted closet, and which to date has produced more than three thousand free educational videos on topics ranging from trigonometry to banking to biology. (It also offers free, comprehensive preparation for the SAT.) At last count, Khan’s site was getting millions of visits every day, while Bill Gates has praised it as “a glimpse of the future of education.” Google has given Khan $2 million, citing the academy as one of several projects that “would help the world most.”
It’s a vivid measure of the mounting frustration with conventional education that Khan has so quickly achieved such acclaim with so simple a formula. His videos, each just a few minutes long, follow a Spartan format, with Khan’s energetic, disembodied voice giving instructions as a piece of chalk draws diagrams on a blackboard. The key, Khan explains, is that viewers can speed him up when they get bored or slow him down when they need to review the material, without worrying about looking impatient or stupid—making the Khan Academy the closest thing yet to Tim Blair’s dream of a device that can remotely control your teacher.
Khan’s approach sends a loud warning signal to stuck-in-their-ways, brick-and-mortar schools. While, as critics have pointed out, his “academy” is really something less than that—more like educational booster shots—the basic idea is so good that it’s bound to spread quickly, allowing the most skillful teachers a much wider audience. That’s why I love what Khan has done so far, while I’m even more excited to think of it as barely scratching the surface of what’s possible.
Expert Learners
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I hope that by now you can appreciate both the breadth and speed of the learning revolution on its way. Still, that doesn’t mean you can afford to sit back and wait for it. There is plenty for you to do to help prepare your child for the future. The job starts by remembering the famous exhortation on the walls of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. Know thyself.
The motto is a helpful reminder for anyone, but essential for challenging kids like I was, and their parents, who recognize that homes are just as powerful learning environment as schools. Knowing yourself—and your child—as I’ve suggested all through this book, means understanding how you operate as part of a complex system—how different environments help or hinder your behavior, and what kinds of supports and resources you need to ask
for to succeed in those environments that aren’t a good fit. This is how you start to gain control, to make the most of your particular strengths and weaknesses, and move on to achieve your goals. More specifically, this is how you can learn to navigate the new digital learning environments that are going to be offering you unprecedented flexibility and options. Scientists can build the best learning environments in the world, yet people are still going to have to work out how to make the most of them, a task that involves becoming expert learners.
I’m confident that lots of kids will step up to this challenge. What keeps me hopeful about the learning revolution under way is that today’s battles aren’t just being fought only by big companies like Google and Apple, or even by Harvard scientists. The most energetic rebels are students themselves, who in just the past few decades have recognized their inalienable rights—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of a quality education, without having to get tortured by boredom in the process.
Tim Blair, the young advocate I mentioned earlier, belongs to the advance guard. To date, Blair hasn’t thrown any stink bombs, like I did back in Utah, although, as he confides, he did once take part in an aborted plot to sabotage his fifth-grade musical with fart spray. While other kids like him, who were so often misunderstood, got “sad,” Blair says, he got angry. He believes he has as much of a right to be educated as “normal kids,” and that, in fact, society needs his kind of out-of-the-box energy.