WV Executive

These are exciting times in the educational arena. Even with the economic downturn, there is still a very real sense of hope and optimism as visionaries look at the possibilities to catapult education forward. For many years, research was focused on reforms to meet the educational challenges; however, with the growing awareness of the global economy and global competitiveness, reform is no longer an option.

There are endless lists of options indicating where education needs to change in order to provide the skilled workforce for the 21st century. From the schoolhouse to the state house, there are ongoing discussions around accountability, assessment and rigor. This discussion has certainly gotten louder since President Barack Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan have verbalized the education agenda, which is substantiated with direct stimulus money. This has moved the context from reform to transform, now allowing those very innovative thinkers and doers to be heard.

One of this century’s creative minds is Dr. Curtis Johnson, co-author of an intriguing book, Disrupting Class. Johnson has visited West Virginia multiple times and spoken before diverse groups of individuals around transforming education, specifically transforming the classroom. While there is no one answer or simple solution, there are cultural and attitude adjustments that, once made, will begin to unravel the time-honored classroom.

It has been a great pleasure for me to have the opportunity to meet, listen and receive inspiration from Johnson, and so I am thrilled and most appreciative to him for sharing with West Virginia Executive magazine an article that I hope will invite disruption into West Virginia classrooms for the sake of our children.
—By First Lady Gayle C. Manchin

How young people learn is racing toward the biggest revolution since Gutenberg’s best idea. But, to look at most classrooms, who would guess anything much has changed?

Students in most schools are still arrayed in neat rows of desks, all oriented to a focal point where a teacher will provide the content of the day. The unexamined assumption is that knowledge is scarce and difficult to access, so expert adult help is required.

Behind that assumption another endures, equally at odds with reality: that the knowledge young people need should continue to be organized by subjects and assembled into courses, the content of which, in proper sequence (don’t try taking chemistry before biology), is then transmitted from a teacher to students through a phenomenon professionally labeled as “instruction.” Students are expected to absorb this knowledge and confirm that it stuck with them through some exam, usually in the form of a standardized test.

The schooling industry, over the past decade, took the noble notion of having rigorous standards and turned it into a preposterous pattern of standardization of schooling practices. Look closely. In most schools we still expect every student to learn the same things on the same day at the same pace.

This situation is neither fair nor realistic. The consensus from brain research is that children have at least five different types of intelligence, not to mention all the different learning styles. Some do fine with the traditional teacher-centric model, using abstract, verbal communication. Others do best by making things or doing projects, where they encounter everything from physics to electronics to what it takes to work in teams. Still others learn best through arts, such as music or dance.

By allowing schooling to be, in most places, confined to the traditional classroom model, we are condemning up to half of our children to not reaching their potential. All too familiar is the pattern of students falling behind, growing discouraged and dropping out; less attention is paid to what happens with many talented young people who find they have to power down when they enter the school. They are natural learners but find school rigid, hierarchal, boring and disconnected from the real world they know is full of learning adventures.

The truth is as a nation we have never lost sleep over not succeeding with half the students in school. The U.S. has long been dominant. Young people could get jobs that did not require advanced learning. But those days are gone. The era of America’s easy superiority has evaporated. No young person will do well in this century without mastering basic content areas and pursuing in depth something of enduring interest that the market will honor with a paycheck. Neither does the nation have any chance of stability, not to mention prosperity, if we waste half the talent of the emerging generation.

The only chance we have to reach all—even most—of today’s youth is through radical personalization of learning. And the only practical, affordable way to customize the learning opportunity is to build new forms of schooling on the platform that technology now makes possible.

Oh, haven’t we heard this before, some say? Yes, and the nation as a whole spent some $60 billion putting computers into classrooms—without changing the learning model much at all. Fifty years ago, the dominant manufacturers of electronic appliances did something similar, spending billions in their labs trying to make the emerging transistor technology fit into their vacuum-tube dominant appliances. Transistors prevailed quite well without those vacuum tubes.

It is merely human to resist change, to hold on to ways of doing things that have become routine and comfortable. But when a powerful disruptive force comes along, even the best managed enterprises find themselves swamped by the change.

And that is exactly what is underway today in schools. Every disruptive product or service shows up at first not being of very high quality. Remember, the Toyota car company did not start with a Lexus. The first Toyota marketed in the U.S. was a Corona—a cheap tin box with bad seats and a weak engine. It got better and better, and we all know how the story ended.

Schooling on a technology platform is no different. The first generation of software, on disk or online, was primitive; it seemed to mimic the traditional classroom experience—talking heads, a few illustrations. Over the years, quality and imagination improved while advances in technology were breaking through frontiers in simulation and interactivity.

Online learning is now about to break into the “Camry” phase of improvement. Offerings from a growing number of companies, from Apex Learning to K12.com to Connections Academy, are increasingly robust alternatives to traditional teaching. The emerging generation of products is more differentiated by learning style, more interactive and of very high quality. A student might never know the aroma of a Bunsen burner, but the grasp of the principles of chemistry will be first-rate. Without travel cost any student could tour the British Museum with lifelike images or explore the waters of the Great Barrier Reef.

As budgets squeeze school districts, courses considered discretionary get lopped off. German and French go this year. Next year it’s economics and statistics. Into the wake of this curricular shrinkage steps the online option, already well-established now for home schooling and young people making up lost credits. This is the way disruptive innovation works—by appealing first to people who are not being well-served, who will jump at the chance for an alternative that is convenient and affordable. Over time the innovation becomes better and becomes dominant in the market.

In the 2008 book Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn and I pointed to a couple of decades of research across multiple industries—from plows to steel, from autos to disk drives. So predictable is the growth pattern of disruptive innovation that it is possible to plot the point in time when it will become the majority player in an industry.

Online learning, and all the new forms of schooling made possible by it, will command the majority of high school level enrollments in less than a decade. In states where policy makers see this coming and welcome an innovative sector within the system, more young people will do well with the challenges of a 21st century economy and society.