Imagine that an ordinary American family — let’s call them the van Winkles — fell asleep in 1959 and awoke today. Technology would have changed much of their daily lives. To do his old job, Dad needs to learn how to operate a computer. Finding that her new microwave, electronic dishwasher, and robotic vacuum cleaner have left her little to do at home, Mom decides to seek work herself. Even Rover’s days have changed: An invisible fence keeps him from running away, and an electronic feeder dispenses his lunch, now that no one is at home to keep an eye on him.
But for Junior, a fourth grader, little seems unfamiliar at his school. Just as before, he’s one of about 20 kids, their textbooks are opened on their desks, and they’re sitting opposite their teacher as she gives the day’s lesson. What little technology he encounters simply makes the old seem new — there are no meaningful differences between blackboards, overhead projectors, and PowerPoint presentations.
Why is Junior’s classroom strangely immune to forces that have transformed every other aspect of American life? It can’t be because the education system was perfected long ago. Rather, the public-school classroom has resisted the valuable innovations that technology brings because the powerful adults who run the system want it that way.
In Liberating Learning, political scientists Terry Moe and John Chubb tell us that our hidebound schools cannot hold out much longer. In this engaging and highly assertive book, readers will learn a great deal about how technology can improve teaching — and why the forces standing in the way are so difficult to overcome.
The idea most likely to garner attention is that today, it’s actually possible for software to take over instruction. Unlike conventional, collectivized instruction, which is typically geared to the class’s lowest common denominator, software can diagnose each student’s level of proficiency and provide lessons customized to his own needs. When a student has a problem that the computer can’t solve, he can contact a flesh-and-blood instructor via instant message or videophone. Because the computer will have assumed so much of the teacher’s traditional duties, the instructor will have time to provide more personalized attention. The student, not the teacher, is the center of the virtual class.
Moe and Chubb also introduce readers to technology’s ability to generate data about teacher and student performance. Although robots teaching kids might sound sexier, I’d argue that the numbers nerdy economists can coax out of mainframes are more immediately important. These data systems, a concomitant of the modern testing-and-accountability movement, cast much-needed sunshine on the relative quality of public schools and can be used to identify the most and least effective teachers.
Moe and Chubb do an expert job of explaining the power of technology, and they argue that technology will insist on its own adoption. Because this apparently fanciful assertion does not stem from ignorance — for years Moe and Chubb have written insightfully about the influence of teachers’ unions — it deserves some consideration. They write that the combination of students’ familiarity with computers and school systems’ budgetary stresses will lead to ever-wider adoption. Once parents have been exposed to data on individual teachers’ performance, they will agitate for the removal of the poorest ones and a general reduction in the size of the teaching staff. Eventually — 20 years seems about right to the authors — all of this will destroy the unions’ power and open the door to comprehensive education reform. “Success gives way to more success, and it is essentially self-propelling once it gets going,” they write confidently. “This may seem like wishful thinking. But it is inherent in the logic of the situation.”
Unfortunately, there has never been anything logical about an employment system that hires only teachers who graduate from education schools (which do not educate them properly), pays them on the basis of only two factors (experience and number of advanced degrees) that research unquestionably shows are unrelated to classroom effectiveness, and grants unbreakable job protection to almost everyone after only a few years of employment.
As Moe and Chubb correctly point out, the unions’ special political power derives from their ubiquity. Mandatory universal education extends their influence to every U.S. political district. They have gained an effective veto over Democratic-party initiatives by combining the length of their reach with the nearly infinite resources that come from collecting union dues from nearly every public-school teacher in the nation.
Naturally, the unions have an easier time defending the status quo that than reformers have attacking it. For one thing, it is hard to convince Americans that they must rethink the system that formed them. The reformers have more than made their case in academia, but still struggle in the policy world. Partly that is because dubious evidence and weak arguments, when backed by overwhelming influence and publicity, are more than a match for overwhelming evidence and strong arguments. How else can we interpret the public’s penchant for reducing class size, a formula for bloated teacher payrolls and technology’s marginalization?
In order to make real and lasting changes to the system, the sunshine of technology must be coupled with a political phenomenon capable of weakening the teachers’ unions. In a curious twist of history, the advent of Barack Obama may already have altered the political calculus. The unions actively supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary, and by the time they jumped on his bandwagon, Obama’s monumental success at fundraising had freed him from dependence on union dollars. Hence the reformist noises we have heard from Obama himself and his Department of Education.
It is possible that the efficiency of the Democratic-party machine and the diversification of its funding sources will have a corresponding impact on the voting habits of sympathetic Democrats in Congress. The more flexible statements of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten since the election may be a straw in the wind. Contra Moe and Chubb, change is not inevitable, but it suddenly seems more possible — because of political breakthroughs, along with the technological ones.
– Marcus A. Winters is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.