I’ve taken an interest in cyber schools, that is thinking
about what the impact of the digital revolution will be on education. I’ve have
just finished reading “Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the
Future of American Education” (here) by Terry M. Moe and John E. Chubb.
Let me offer two quotes. First, on the changing ratio of
teachers to students (p. 157):
As we’ve seen, the new computer-based approaches to learning
simply require far fewer teachers per
students – perhaps half as many, and possibly fewer than that. Here, in
fact, are some figures we collected from a few of the nation’s larger,
better-established cyber charters (whose names we will keep confidential):
school A has 3.2 teachers per hundred students; school B has 2.4 teachers per
hundred students; and school C has 1.2 teachers per hundred 
students. Compare
these figures to those that prevail in the public schools – where the ratio is
now about 6.8 teachers per hundred students, and has been rising steadily for
decades – and the opportunities for real change in the educational “production
function” are clear. The long-standing idea that there is something intrinsic
to school that makes it immutably labor intensive and immune to technological
change is simple not true. Maybe it was in the past. But it isn’t now.
Second, on “The Schools of the Future” (p. 172);
Most school will be hybrids of the traditional and the high-tech.
There will be many schools in which teaching and learning occur at a distance
and follow the pure cyber model – some educating the whole students as cyber
charters do now, some enrolling part of the 
student as state-level virtual schools
now do, and some doing both. Most schools, however, will be hybrids: bringing
students together (at least for part of the day) for face-to-face interactions
with one another and their teachers, yet also very much organized around
computers, software-driven course work, Internet-based research, and distance
learning for many courses that are specialized or costly for individual schools
to provide on their own. The typical American child will not be attending
school by sitting at home on a computer. He or she will be going to school,
just as now – but the school will be very different, and many of the courses
will not be taught by on-site teachers.
Comments