Charles Sosnik 
Americans are voting in a nationwide referendum on public education. But it’s not on any ballot. And curiously, it hasn’t made the national news media. It’s the number of families leaving traditional public education for homeschooling, unschooling, private schools, charters, and even no schooling. One in four school-aged children currently does not attend a traditional public school. Even with all the positive changes made by the dedicated men and women working in schools across our nation, more than 25 percent of American families are just saying no. And that percentage is increasing. Is it possible that the public no longer wants a typical public education? Shouldn’t our schools be Student Centric and Digital First?
In its present form, school is outdated and prepares children for the world of their parents, not the world they’ll enter. But perhaps it’s not too late to remake the institution of education.
If so, the first thing we need to do is remove the word institution from our thinking. Institutionalizing children to be cookie-cutter learning models is antithetical to a world that rewards self-directed thinking and entrepreneurialism. The second thing we should do is rethink the authoritarian nature of the school. Given a choice between my way or the highway, more and more families are choosing the highway. Schools now need to be a service business – with the student as a customer. A publicly funded school’s function is to ensure every student can learn. We are only graduating 80 percent of our learners. And most high school graduates are not proficient in math or reading.
In the United States, four million children are counted as homeschooled or unschooled, 3.2 million are enrolled in charters, and 5.7 million are in private schools. And those numbers may not tell the whole story. According to data from the World Education Forum USA, there are 6 million children in the U.S. not enrolled in public or private schools. Even if this data includes all homeschoolers and unschoolers, it still brings the number of children not in traditional public schools to 14.9 million. That’s more than a quarter of all school-aged children. Some districts have experienced as much as 30 percent enrollment loss, with rural districts losing even more students than urban ones. As a result, consumers are now spending more on learning materials than schools are. Last year, U.S. schools spent $10.5 billion on digital curriculum, while straight-to-consumer sales were $18 billion, a 20 percent increase over the previous year.
Like every other industry, education consumers now expect an experience and consumer-like choice online. Today’s learners are smart. They have the sum of the world’s knowledge at their fingertips. We can’t expect them to live in a world of amazing video games and professional media at home and then enter an archaic world of 40-student classrooms. The smart kids are dropping out from sheer boredom. Teachers too. In South Carolina last year, 25 percent of new teachers left after their first year. Other states are experiencing similar retention challenges.
The latest report, “Designed for Digital,” introduces a model that reverse-engineers schools to be student-centric and digital-first. The model proposes to reinvent the teachers’ role so that what teachers do best, connecting with children and diagnosing problems with learning, is cast alongside a sophisticated software model that executes personal pathways. Teachers are then leveraged for what they can do that machines cannot.
From the report, “This is a model that also transforms the physical environment of schools to be more flexible. It untangles the roles of teachers so that their humanity shines through as their best and most used asset, rather than getting bogged down with deciding what to teach, doing data entry, analytics, project staging, and more. We’re proposing some teachers may even get to work at home in their pajamas sometimes, just like many other industries.”
The report says the difficulty with such a massive paradigm shift lies in understanding what software can do for learning through high-end navigation and animation, algorithmic inference, repetitive questioning, automatic alerts, and analytics to teachers. These are things that were missing in the early stages of online learning. The answer isn’t one silver bullet but a mosaic of the current commercial offerings. One App for reading, another for math, yet others for science that also interact with robots and hands-on experiments, different for different ages, all in a landscape of some 7,000 vendors.
We all believe we know what school should look like based on our experience. That is as true for school policy-makers and government officials as it is for you and me. It makes it difficult to understand that we no longer need a better version of school, but a more modern version of education. When Henry Ford introduced the automobile, he said, “If I’d left it up to the people, they’d just want faster, bigger horses.” Ford was saying people don’t know what they don’t know.
Today, we need visionaries as well as big thinkers from other industries. And we need to be asking tough questions. This isn’t about politics. We need to help our schools transition into a more modern approach that can meet the needs of learners now and in the future. It doesn’t make sense to continue as is. But it also doesn’t make sense to scrap our present system. The answer lies in the middle, perhaps the “reverse-engineering” concept. But tough decisions need to be made.
If we don’t realize this soon, all our students may be gone, and we’ll be the last ones at the party. Like King Louis, we may find “The people are revolting.” But then, the people probably thought the same thing about the king.
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