The Education Gadfly Weekly

This eighth edition of Keeping Pace—digital education’s yearbook cum encyclopedia—offers promising statistics for online-learning proponents: All fifty states and D.C. now offer at least some sort of online or blended learning opportunity, with digital course enrollment jumping 19 percent in the last year alone. Good news. But there’s more. At an average per-pupil expense of about $7,000, full-time online learning can cost thousands less than the average brick-and-mortar experience. Other trends are interesting. Notably, single-district programs have grown the fastest this past year—with consortia programs greatly expanding as well. (Implementation of the Common Core standards will likely spur states to adopt this consortium model as well, say the authors.) Yet other trends serve as reminders that we have yet to unlock the full potential of online learning: Digital programs are serving a disproportionately low percentage of minorities, free and reduced-price lunch students, English language learners, and students with disabilities. For those looking to winkle out digital-learning statistics, get a lay of the digital-learning landscape, or see how their own states fare in this realm, Keeping Pace won’t disappoint.

John Watson, Amy Murin, Lauren Vashaw, et al., Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning: An Annual Review of Policy and Practice (Durango, CO: Evergreen Education Group, 2011).

This iNACOL (International Association for K-12 Online Learning) report, a follow-up to its 2006 survey, profiles the digital-learning status of fifty countries from Albania to Thailand. It documents global trends, issues, and challenges relating to digital learning—and shows that the questions and concerns surrounding digital education in the U.S. permeate national borders, much like the internet itself. Atop the list of challenges: Survey respondents cited a lack of public knowledge of (and thus an interest in) digital learning. Lack of funding was also a key barrier to online-ed proliferation, survey respondents said. Unfortunately (though understandably, given the scope), the report’s broad brush strokes offer little by way of detail and even fewer international lessons for the States—even in the nine country case studies. For more specifics, we’ll have to look elsewhere.

“Most changes in the ways schools operate can be thought of as tools,” write Gene Glass, Kevin Welner, and Justin Bathon in their recent policy brief. “Used well, such tools can be beneficial; used poorly, they can be harmful.” Agreed. The problem is that these authors seem convinced of online learning’s malevolence. Their evidence is the presence of for-profits in the digital-ed sector. Behind the proliferation of online schools—usually charters—the authors see corporate interests determined to squeeze dollars out of a poorly regulated yet potentially vast market with few consumer protections. Private companies, they charge, will reap fortunes by offering inferior products at inflated prices, enabled by cozy relationships with lawmakers. Further, they assert, research on the effects of digital learning is minimal, arguing that this “evidentiary void” is reason enough to slow expansion of online-ed programs. (As if any innovation came with an issued-in-advance “proof of quality” guarantee!) The conclusion is thus drawn: In all but the most limited and tightly regulated forms, digital schooling will only wreak havoc on the American education system. For those with even a modicum of faith in school choice and the free market, theirs is an exasperating argument—which is why the general reasonableness of Glass’s, Welner’s, and Bathon’s policy proposals is so surprising. They recommend that states: authenticate student work, accredit online schools, audit their finances, and regulate aspects of instruction and function. OK! Of course digital learning could go off the tracks without thoughtful oversight and planning; advocates would be wise to lead the charge for rational (yet minimal) regulation before the fear mongering of digital learning’s critics gains traction.

Gene V. Glass, Kevin Welner, and Justin Bathon, Online K-12 Schooling in the U.S.: Uncertain Private Venture in Need of Public Regulation (Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center, October 2011).

We don’t doubt that the digital future will transform education—along with practically everything else. But rather than seeing it as a painful (and politically volatile) trade-off between technology and teachers, we propose that digital education needs excellent teachers and that a first-rate teaching profession needs digital education. Schools will not require as many conventional teachers as they did yesterday, but those they need will be crucial—and will be able to tap top-notch technology and instructional support teams to achieve excellence at scale. These teachers will get paid more, too, potentially a lot more. And all this can be done within tight budgets so long as education systems judiciously blend technology and people.

Digital learning has the potential to transform the teaching profession in three major ways:

• Extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students.
• Attracting and retaining more excellent teachers.
• Boosting effectiveness and job options for average teachers.

Extending the reach of the best. In the digital future, teacher effectiveness will matter even more than today. As digital learning spreads, students worldwide will gain access to core knowledge and skills instruction. What will increasingly differentiate outcomes for schools, states, and nations is how well responsible adults carry out the more complex instructional tasks: motivating students to go the extra mile, teaching them time management, addressing social and emotional issues that affect their learning, and diagnosing problems and making the right changes when learning stalls.

The top 20 or 25 percent of teachers already meet these challenges. But in traditional classrooms, they only reach 20 to 25 percent of students. That’s where digital learning can help.

Digital technology, along with changes in teacher roles and schedules, should make it possible for top teachers to assume responsibility for all students, not just a fraction of them.

	America’s education leaders will need courage to make bold changes in a profession that has remained static as other enterprises have advanced.

For example, by replacing a quarter to a half of initial instruction and practice in some subjects, digital instruction can free excellent teachers’ time, enabling them to take responsibility for more students—while keeping similar class sizes and gaining planning time. These “time-technology swaps” are already used in top-performing schools that combine digital learning with excellent teachers to boost results.

Digital tools can also connect excellent teachers working live with students across the hall, state, or nation—using web cameras and email. Shy instructional masters can help design smart software to personalize learning. Star-performing content masters can go viral on digital video, and someday holograms, to millions of students anywhere, who, with excellent teachers, can convert that access into stellar learning.

Attracting and retaining the best. Digital learning will also transform career opportunities for excellent teachers. As they reach more students, they should earn more out of the per-pupil funds generated by the expanded number of students. Greater opportunities for advancement and  pay will, in turn, make the profession a more attractive long-term career for top performers, wooing unfulfilled engineers and lawyers into a better life.

Boosting effectiveness and job options for average teachers. Digital tools will also help average teachers by freeing their time, providing frequent data about their students, serving up tailored professional development, and letting them play focused roles tapping their strengths. They’ll be able to join teams that support fully accountable excellent teachers, with the chance to develop and become excellent instructors themselves.

Of course, not all of today’s teachers will benefit from these transformations. As we require fewer lead teachers per pupil, schools will be able to shed their least effective teachers. Some of today’s full teaching jobs will be replaced by new roles, such as digital lab monitors, tutors, and positions performing non-instructional duties. Such positions will likely have shorter hours but lower pay. The net effect will be a smaller but much stronger and better paid teacher workforce supported by an array of support staff and digital tools, just as we see in most other professions.

Employing technology to transform the teaching profession in ways that benefit students holds enormous promise. That promise will go unrealized, however, without significant changes in policies and management systems, in the allocation of funds, in technology infrastructure, and, perhaps most importantly, in the demand for better outcomes.

America’s education leaders will need courage to make bold changes in a profession that has remained static as other enterprises have advanced. Without that, our children—and our teachers—will forfeit the enormous opportunities made possible by digital technology while other nations seize them and soar beyond us.

Futurists have long regaled us with predictions about technology dramatically improving education by giving millions more students access to the very best teachers and deploying computer-based systems that allow students to learn at their own pace at whatever time and place works best for them. This vision is now becoming a reality, partly because tight budgets are forcing K-12 schools to employ fewer teachers and boost the productivity of those who remain.

Saving money is only part of technology’s educational potential, however. More important is individualization and rapid adaptation to what a student is learning, leading to the possibility of greater and more consistent growth. Managing equipment, web links, and vendor contracts is also far nimbler than reorganizing people.

	Our current education-finance system doesn’t actually fund schools and certainly doesn’t fund students.

All this potential notwithstanding, however, plenty of policy and structural barriers stand in the way of widespread adoption of technology in K-12 education. Perhaps the toughest of these is our traditional approach to school funding.

Simply put: Our current education-finance system doesn’t actually fund schools and certainly doesn’t fund students. Rather, it pays for district-wide programs and staff positions. Much of it is locked into personnel contracts and salary schedules—and most of the rest is locked into bureaucratic routine. It’s next to impossible to shift resources from established programs and flesh-and-blood workers into new uses like equipment, software, and remote instructional staff. Yet to foster and maximize technology-based learning opportunities, we must find ways for public dollars to do just that—and to accompany kids to online providers chosen by their parents, teachers, or themselves.

Today’s school funding arrangement developed haphazardly, a product of politics and advocacy, not design. Some of the money comes from the state, some from Washington, and some is generated locally. This translates into a labyrinth of rules and regulations connected to a maze of separate funding paths, each with its own “allowable uses” and reporting requirements. Education innovators get trapped in this maze—which is even harder to escape when budget totals are flat.

An innovative way to handle school monies.
Photo by Michael Ocampo

This is a particular problem for digital learning, because today’s funding arrangements assume that a student will attend a specific school, where salaries and other costs are paid by the district. Little money actually flows through the school itself. Most of the budget is accounted for by staff positions that are centrally allocated according to school size.

Because funds cannot easily be channeled into new uses, promising innovations cannot be fully developed or persuasively demonstrated in K-12 education. Which is good reason for visionaries and innovators to take their best technological applications into realms other than education.

What would it take for education funding to be transformed into a system that promotes digital learning and technological innovation? Public dollars would have to go to the best possible instruction for students, utilizing any means that can work. That means our system fur funding public education would need to:

• Fund education, not institutions;
• Move money as students move;
• Pay for unconventional forms of instruction as readily as for conventional schools;
• Withhold funding from ineffective programs; and
• Encourage innovation by ensuring people who have new ideas about instruction can, if families want to use them, access public funding.  

If states and localities (and Uncle Sam) would combine all the money they now spend on K-12 education and divide it up by enrollment, with the same or a weighted fraction of the total assigned to each child, and then distribute these dollars to schools in the same way, they would sweep away the major obstacles to innovation and improvement in today’s funding system. They would also compel a dramatic reduction in overhead. Money would not be held centrally to preserve particular schools, job slots or programs, but would go wherever children are educated. This would allow new uses of funds, an essential precondition to innovation and widespread use of digital learning.

A technology-friendly funding system would apply to all students no matter where they receive their education and no matter how many instructional providers serve them. To make this happen, some government entity—probably the state—would need to assemble all of the funds available from all sources, keep an account for every student, and faithfully allocate its contents to whatever school or education program a student attends. Each student’s account would, in a sense, constitute a “backpack” of funding that the student would carry with her to any eligible school or program in which she enrolls—wherever it may be located.

If her family decided to rely on one school or instructional provider for all of that child’s education, all of the money would go to that school or provider. Some youngsters, however, would enroll in courses provided by different organizations, in which case the funds would be divided. Students and families would be free to shop for the best combination of courses and experiences their backpack of funds could cover. Providers would compete, both on the quality and effectiveness of their services and on cost. States could create a list of ineffective providers that were ineligible to receive public funds.

Every school or independent instructional provider would have to post its prices. No school or online provider could charge more than the full amount in a student’s backpack.

This portable, flexible, student-based funding system would instantly impact the budgets of existing schools and create powerful incentives for them to improve their offerings so as not to lose pupils to other institutions or course providers. At the same time, innovators (educators and social-service professionals with new ideas) would be encouraged by knowing that they could get full funding for every student enrolled in their school or program.

To be sure, funding systems can’t cause innovation—they can only interfere with or foster it. Whether innovation occurs, at what pace, and to what ultimate benefit, depends on other factors. But a finance system such as that described here would make promising breakthroughs much more likely—and much more likely to scale rapidly. School finance would be placed into the service of improved learning rather than left as a major impediment to it.

Get your scissors, we'll show you how it's done.
Photo by Antonio Gonzalez Tajuelo

Like a bonsai, digital education must be cultivated—with policies that foster its growth and trim its unruly branches. Yet, too few are ready or willing to tend—and bend—this growing plant. Instead, divided camps have emerged. One group—balking at the potential loss of rigor, loss of teachers, loss of interpersonal connections associated with online schooling—stands ready to uproot the fledgling digital-learning initiative. It even seems to have the Wall Street Journal convinced: A WSJ piece from this week starts off with a vignette of an unmotivated online student who sets aside only three hours a day for schoolwork, offers critique of the level of student-teacher communication at Florida Virtual School, and hints at the fear of for-profit takeover of the digital-ed realm. In the other camp are those blind proponents of online ed, who extol its rigor, instructional prowess, and its intrinsic quality-control mechanisms. Responding to the Journal’s piece, Tom Vander Ark personified this movement. In his rebuttal he avers the rigor of online school (but he fails to address credit-recovery programs, a habitual perpetuator of the “easier online” stereotype) and swears that online learning won’t replace teachers (it will). Like charter-school advocates of the mid-1990s, Vander Ark and co. sit contented to overwater and under shape digital ed, allowing it to grow unfettered, creating a free-form—and potentially ugly—product. Both these extremes are wrong. Digital education can and should become a valuable alternative to traditional education. But this cannot happen without a smart sharpening of our policy scissors, and the application of a deft hand to its sculpting. Bonsai!

With the closing of Zuccotti Park, Rick is back with the podcast in full force—shorts, Birkenstocks, and all. He talks with Mike about Fordham’s new digital-learning papers, union/school-board incest, and our parenting problem. Amber reads from the digital-learning encyclopedia and Chris gives corporate sponsorship an A-plus.

This eighth edition of Keeping Pace—digital education’s yearbook cum encyclopedia—offers promising statistics for online-learning proponents: All fifty states and D.C. now offer at least some sort of online or blended learning opportunity, with digital course enrollment jumping 19 percent in the last year alone. Good news. But there’s more. At an average per-pupil expense of about $7,000, full-time online learning can cost thousands less than the average brick-and-mortar experience. Other trends are interesting. Notably, single-district programs have grown the fastest this past year—with consortia programs greatly expanding as well. (Implementation of the Common Core standards will likely spur states to adopt this consortium model as well, say the authors.) Yet other trends serve as reminders that we have yet to unlock the full potential of online learning: Digital programs are serving a disproportionately low percentage of minorities, free and reduced-price lunch students, English language learners, and students with disabilities. For those looking to winkle out digital-learning statistics, get a lay of the digital-learning landscape, or see how their own states fare in this realm, Keeping Pace won’t disappoint.

John Watson, Amy Murin, Lauren Vashaw, et al., Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning: An Annual Review of Policy and Practice (Durango, CO: Evergreen Education Group, 2011).

This iNACOL (International Association for K-12 Online Learning) report, a follow-up to its 2006 survey, profiles the digital-learning status of fifty countries from Albania to Thailand. It documents global trends, issues, and challenges relating to digital learning—and shows that the questions and concerns surrounding digital education in the U.S. permeate national borders, much like the internet itself. Atop the list of challenges: Survey respondents cited a lack of public knowledge of (and thus an interest in) digital learning. Lack of funding was also a key barrier to online-ed proliferation, survey respondents said. Unfortunately (though understandably, given the scope), the report’s broad brush strokes offer little by way of detail and even fewer international lessons for the States—even in the nine country case studies. For more specifics, we’ll have to look elsewhere.

“Most changes in the ways schools operate can be thought of as tools,” write Gene Glass, Kevin Welner, and Justin Bathon in their recent policy brief. “Used well, such tools can be beneficial; used poorly, they can be harmful.” Agreed. The problem is that these authors seem convinced of online learning’s malevolence. Their evidence is the presence of for-profits in the digital-ed sector. Behind the proliferation of online schools—usually charters—the authors see corporate interests determined to squeeze dollars out of a poorly regulated yet potentially vast market with few consumer protections. Private companies, they charge, will reap fortunes by offering inferior products at inflated prices, enabled by cozy relationships with lawmakers. Further, they assert, research on the effects of digital learning is minimal, arguing that this “evidentiary void” is reason enough to slow expansion of online-ed programs. (As if any innovation came with an issued-in-advance “proof of quality” guarantee!) The conclusion is thus drawn: In all but the most limited and tightly regulated forms, digital schooling will only wreak havoc on the American education system. For those with even a modicum of faith in school choice and the free market, theirs is an exasperating argument—which is why the general reasonableness of Glass’s, Welner’s, and Bathon’s policy proposals is so surprising. They recommend that states: authenticate student work, accredit online schools, audit their finances, and regulate aspects of instruction and function. OK! Of course digital learning could go off the tracks without thoughtful oversight and planning; advocates would be wise to lead the charge for rational (yet minimal) regulation before the fear mongering of digital learning’s critics gains traction.

Gene V. Glass, Kevin Welner, and Justin Bathon, Online K-12 Schooling in the U.S.: Uncertain Private Venture in Need of Public Regulation (Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center, October 2011).