On occasion, a publishing company will send me a copy of a book to reflect on in my blog at no charge (and, I’m about 3 books behind thanks to other commitments). I usually have no reservations about reviewing the book, but one that recently came by that I found initially offensive (but later changed my mind), was Terry M. Moe’s and John E. Chubb’s book, Liberating Learning.

The book makes some great assertions in the beginning that anyone could love but later…it then moves into other areas that I object to…so much so that I immediately put the book down on my first read-through. I let it stay there until I attended the iNACOL Virtual School Symposium 2009 in Austin, Texas recently (gosh, I haven’t processed the podcasts from that yet!).

That feeling of “push away” was intensified by Moe’s keynote at the recent Virtual Schools Symposium held in Austin, Texas this past November, 2009. The reaction among participants was particularly negative and everywhere I turned, Moe’s words ate like acid through the conversation. It’s not that technology isn’t praised and held up as a power for transformation, but rather, the focus on the forces that OPPOSE technology. In this sense, it appears the authors built up the power of technology to better demonize anyone who doesn’t jump immediately to the cause.

The more I reflect on the authors’ points, the more I’m convinced. But so many assertions are made, these will have to be “unpacked” and reflected on individually.

Over the next few days, I’ll add to the lists below…so this blog entry is very much in a state of flux so expect it to get updated.

Some of the points I was intrigued by, if not captivated by entirely:

1. School need not mean one teacher and twenty-five students in a series of classrooms…in 2006, the most recent year with authoritativ data, nearly three quarters of a million public school students completed courses online.
2. Electronic instruction is changing convention schoolhouses as well.
3. Teachers had new electronic assignment books and gradebooks to keep track of what their students were accomplishing electronically as well as traditionally.
4. In the modern world, economic prosperity cannot be secured through high school diplomas and basi skills, the nation’s recipe for most of the twentieth century. It takes much more than that: analytic thinking, problem-solving, independence, the ability to seek out and assimilate new knowledge.
5. The force of technology is up against a counterforce: resistance by groups that do not want the traditional education system to change. Precisely because technology promises to transform the core components of schooling, it is inevitably disruptive to the jobs, routines, and resources of the people whose livelihoods derive from the existing system–and these people are represented by organizations that are extraordinarily powerful in politics. They are trying to use that power to prevent technology from transforming American education. And, they will continue to do so in the future.
6. Technology…is a double-barreled agent of change. It generates the innovations that make change attractive, and at the same time it undermines the political resistant that would normally prevent change from happening.
7. As the modern world grows smaller, flatter, and more competitive, the achievement of American students must be measured not only against national standards, but also against international ones. Work and jobs quickly shift around the globe to whoever can perform them at the highest quality and the lowest price…the Internet has enabled the instantaneous sharing and internationalization of work.
8. The greatest economic returns will go to the best educated, to those who can keep pace with rapid technological change, those those who can create the industries that have not even been thought of today.
9. Online learning is a $6.2 billion enterprise for higher education and its business partners. Once freed from traditional school system rules, public education meshed with technology can innovate very swiftly. Teachers can play new roles, lessons can be presented in creative ways not possible in a traditional classroom, students who are poorly served by traditional arrangements can be reached in large numbers.
10. Students, parents, and eucators interacting online create new knowledge every day. Teachers participate in online professional learning communities that may help them become more successful–interacting with colleagues in real time–than traditional workshops or college courses.
11. Free access to content and technology online will further accelerate the pace of innovation, as potential participants face no costs to contribute.
12. As technology picks up the pace, education will face unbearable pressure to adapt and improve through technology–a pressure that almost every other industry in the world has already faced.
13. “Students use computers more outside of school than within it.” (Elliot Solloway)
14. The technology experience [of students] is more sophisticated than what they typically have at school.
15. Research has demonstrated that a highly effective teacher–one in the top quartile of effectiveness–can raise a student from the lowest quartile of the national achievement distribution to the highest quartile, up to 50 percentiles, in just 3 years.
16. If students take whole courses online, schools can reduce the number of teachers they require.
17. The quality of teachers would benefit from the increased use of technology in 2 ways: a) Schools would have funds from staff savings to increase teacher pay and to provide more time for teacher training and planning; and b) Added pay would help attract and retain better talent.
18. In public education, innovations are not unleashed. They are resisted, fought, and crippled.
19. For real technological innovation inevitably means changes in jobs, operating routines, organizational cultures, and much more–and these sorts of changes are threatening. Left to their own devices, then, the public schools are unlikely to be hotbeds of technological innovation.
20. Summary of Clayton Christensen’s book (Disrupting Class): The notion is that the successful innovators tend to be new firms that target constituencies not being served by the established firms, and whose new-wave products thus do not compete against–and do not threaten or provoke the resistance of–the major players, who themselves have strong incentives to continue doing what they are doing. The new firms get a foothold in the market by moving into these novel niches, and over time they (and other entrants that jump on the bandwagon) are able to get established, develop the quality and power of the technology, create a massive new market–and the innovations take over, swamping the status quo.
21. Christensen and his colleagues argue that technology will triumph in public education in the same way that it has triumphed in the private sector.

Points I disagreed with:

1. Teacher unions have fundamental interests–interests not aligned with those of children–that drive them to oppose almost all consequential changes in the educational status quo. And they operate in a political system that is literally built to make it easy for them to block.
2. A simple way to increase teacher quality is to test all veteran teachers for competence in the subjects that they teach.
3. Another obvious reform is to pay for performance. If teacher pay were to depend (just in part) on performance in the classroom, good teachers could be paid more than bad ones.
4. Unions want teacher pay to have nothing to do with how well they perform in the classroom, and thus with how much their students actually learn.
5. In general, teachers unions disparage standardized test as inadequate measures of student or school performance, and call instead for broader criteria…they are also opposed to using standardized tests to evaluate the performance of teachers themselves.
6. The idea that data on student learning should be relevant to teacher tenure seems woefully obvious. Who could disagree?
7. Technological change is destined to be resisted by the teachers unions and their allies. This is “their” system, and they are compelled by their own interests to preserve and protect it. They will go to the ramparts to see that technology does NOT have real transformative effects. They will try to block.
8. New schools would promote innovation directly, because they would themselves be based on new technology. They would also promote innovation indirectly, because the regular public schools would have to compete with these new schools for kids and money–giving the existing system much stronger incentives to innovate, if only to keep what it already has.
9. Teachers and administrator in the regular public schools know that if new types of high-tech schools were created, they would attract children and money away from their own schools…they have every incentive to stop this from happening and they are represented by powerful interest groups fully capable of taking political action on their behalf.
10. The “system” has embraced technology with cool reserve, adopting only those aspects that allow for safe, incremental change…changes that are helpful but don’t threaten anyone’s jobs or established routines.

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure