The charter-school movement lost much of its first decade to faulty educational designs. Will digital learning follow that precedent?
The charter-school movement lost much of its first decade to faulty educational designs. Will digital learning follow that precedent?
With the passage of the first charter laws in the early nineties, hundreds of school entrepreneurs rushed to open schools fashioned on the usual progressive pedagogies. Many focused on creativity and collaboration, often to the detriment of core subject knowledge. These new schools, their founders effused, would be child-centric and engage the whole community. Students would learn “authentically” and would “discover” the knowledge that “they need.” Teachers would act as “facilitators.” Never mind that there was scant evidence that this sort of thing worked, especially for children in poverty.
After the doors of these new charters opened came a long and painful reckoning. Mismanagement and poor execution were widespread, and the pedagogical choices, so compelling on paper, often proved heartbreaking in practice. In too many schools, classrooms were unruly, learning activities chaotic, and test scores an embarrassment. At many, parents pulled their children; founders were pushed out. To stay in business, boards of trustees drove a wrenching process of remaking the schools around proven practices.
A decade into the charter movement, as states and the federal government ramped up their results-based accountability policies across public education, charter advocates strained to find evidence of the outsized educational effects they had so confidently promised. Yet the damage was done. Policymakers began to lose faith in the promise of charters as a tool of school reform. The fault, however, lay not with charter policy itself. After all, charter laws were a vehicle for creating strong schools, not a guarantee. In large part, the problem was one of educational design. (Only years later did “no excuses” charter schools marry the opportunities that this school model provides with sound instructional designs.)
Today’s reformers widely herald digital learning as the “disruptive innovation” that will transform schooling. And well it might. But digital-learning entrepreneurs risk squandering critical years on faulty designs, too. Their products have rarely been rooted in education science or rigorously evaluated, and the technologists and educators who design them seem especially susceptible to education-school fads and prevailing ideologies (as are the industry’s target consumers). Many vendors, for instance, cater to students’ supposed “diverse learning styles,” although recent research finds no empirical evidence that students learn more when curricula are customized accordingly. Among digital-learning providers, progressive designs, where concepts are “discovered” through interactions with artifacts or other students, rather than presented explicitly, are a must. Didactic instruction is seen as hopelessly retrograde.
What actually works? The U. S. Department of Education commissioned a systematic review of the empirical research on online learning. This 2010 report, which examined more than a thousand studies, categorized the “learning approaches” of digital learning programs into three types: expository learning (the didactic approach); independent or “active” learning (the student “builds knowledge through inquiry-based manipulation of digital artifacts, via online drills, simulations, games or microworlds”); and interactive learning (the student “builds knowledge through inquiry-based collaborative interaction with other learners; teachers become co-learners and act as facilitators”). Buried in the report was the finding that the greatest achievement effects were not from active learning (it fared worst) or interactivity but from the unfashionable expository approaches.
But science has never counted for much in education technology. The evidence apparently didn’t give pause to the industry’s leading membership organization, the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL). Products only meet its latest standards when they “provide students with multiple learning paths to master; the content is based on student needs.” (Take that, E.D. Hirsch!) Digital instruction must include activities that—sure enough—“engage students in active learning.” To meet that standard, courses must include “meaningful and authentic learning experiences” such as “collaborative learning, groups, student-led review sessions, games, [and] analysis or reactions to videos….” When it comes to testing students’ knowledge, developers must ensure that “student-selected assessment options, enabling learners to demonstrate mastery in different ways, are available.” To gauge student progress, “alternative evaluation methods”—never defined—must be used to gauge student progress, and only “authentic”—also undefined—assessments are used to demonstrate mastery.
By promoting standards that reflect such progressive biases, iNACOL, an association working to advance the digital learning movement, in fact imperils it. Digital-learning entrepreneurs should resist such seductive pedagogical fads, and focus on what is known to work: lucid, explicit, and engaging instruction in the liberal curriculum.
But would students tune out? On the contrary. The largest online learning site, Khan Academy, offers 2,700 video lessons, structured and issued in an expository manner, that students around the world have viewed more than 100 million times. Salman Khan, who recorded most of the lessons himself, presents topics from addition to differential equations explicitly and with extraordinary clarity. With simple tools—an electronic white board, his recorded voice, and engaging assessments of student mastery—he helps educate millions of students around the world.
Without gimmicks, one could add.
