No need to pack a lunch: Online learning in K-12 education

Usually urban school systems are trying, often desperately, to recruit new teachers, but Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City schools, wants to reduce the teaching force by 30%. It is not the economy. Unlike Los Angeles and other parts of the country, no one has been laid off in New York yet. Yet, Klein has said a long term of goal his is to reduce the city’s teaching force. While TIME magazine encourages young people to choose teaching as a career, the city’s largest teaching force may be shrunk by almost a third.

Klein does not want to fire teachers but to implement a distance learning model which he claims would enable more students more access to education. Inspired by a new book by Terry Moe and John Chubb called Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics and the Future of Education, which advocates for online teaching. On page 7 of their book, Chubb and Moe list the benefits of online instruction:

1. Curricula can be customized to meet the learning styles and life situations of individual students, giving them productive alternatives to the boring standardization of traditional schooling.

2. Education can be freed from geographic constraint: students and teachers do not have to meet in a building within a school within a district, but can be anywhere, doing their work at any time.

3. Students can have more interaction with their teachers and with one another, including teachers and students who may be thousands of miles away or from different nations or cultures.

4. Parents can readily be included in the communications loop and involved more actively in the education of their kids.

5. Teachers can be freed from their tradition-bound classroom roles, employed in more differentiated and productive ways, and offered new career paths.

6. Sophisticated data systems can put the spotlight on performance, make progress (or the lack of it) transparent to all concerned, and sharpen accountability.

7. Schools can be operated at lower cost, relying more on technology (which is relatively cheap) and less on labor (which is relatively expensive).

Sounds great, right? It seems to solve some of the problems for public schools, like cost.  Not so fast though. First of all, since most online education exists at the college level, very little research has been done on online learning for K-12 students, let alone any research that has shown its effectiveness. Second, online schooling presumes that all K-12 students have computers at home, which is not the case for low income students. Not to mention the costs of technology upkeep for these virtual schools.

Thirdly, who are Chubb and Moe? Why should we trust their ideas? As early advocates of market-based school reforms like charter schools and vouchers, Chubb and Moe claimed opening schooling to the marketplace would solve educational inequality. We still have an achievement gap, in spite of the implementation of market-based reforms. So, why should we trust their latest reform idea especially when it suffers from the misguided belief that technology will solve all of our problems? I am no Luddite, and believe in the power of technology to do great things, but Chubb, Moe, and Klein are looking for a cheap and simple solution to a complex problem.

Moreover, they discount what is important about having physical schools- as expensive as they are- and that is their culture. Schools provide a space for students to cultivate relationships with people who share a common experience.  For children, who are just developing their social skills, even an occasional face to face meeting, which Chubb and Moe say should be part of K-12 online schooling, is no substitute for a school culture. Call me old fashioned or sentimental, but as a teacher in public schools, I found relationships between teacher and student and among students to be vital. It was what got many students out of bed and into the classroom every day. Chubb and Moe might say that kids would not have to get out of bed for an online school, but they miss an important point. Ask anyone what got them to love learning a particular subject, and they will often say it was a particular teacher. A person, not a computer. Even if you have a MacBook to cozy up to, there is no replacing a great, inspiring teacher. So, to Klein and friends, I ask: Why not put some funds into cultivating more great teachers? If you’re going to try only one reform, that’s where I’d put my money.