As I research material for the book I’m writing, “Kettering Public Education In 2030,” I’ve discovered that a distinguished and well funded “think tank,” The Hoover Institute, last year published an e-book, “American Education In 2030,” and also posted a series of videos with the same theme. In future posts, I intend to analyze this material, maybe incorporating some of these thoughts about twenty years in the future into my own project.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. serves as chair of the the Hoover Institute’s “Task Force on K–12 Education.” He is also president of the Fordham Foundation, originally a Dayton based foundation. Fordham has been an active supporter of charter schools in Dayton.

In this video, Finn predicts that by 2030 all American children will be able to choose from a wide variety of educational options. “Districts will no longer be operated by a single bureaucratic school system,” he says, “(parents will choose from) dozens of providers, operators of schools and learning institutions that have all kinds of contractual relationships with the district.” Here is a partial transcript:

It’s the year 2030 and world of school choice in American primary and secondly education has evolved dramatically from the old days of 2010. Almost every child in America is now able to exercise some kind of school choice. That’s up from about one-half of the kids, back in 2010 and they go to an astonishing rich variety of schools in 2030. …

Let me illustrate with Columbus Ohio, which has about 50,000 students in 2030:

• About 5000 (10%) students study at home, mostly on-line, occasionally with their parents. They have a wide variety of providers they can tap into from home
• About 10,000 (20%) attend what we might call old fashioned brick and mortar schools. They look like schools, they smell like the old fashioned schools with a teacher at the head of the class providing instruction.
• The rest of the students in Columbus, 35,000, (70%) attend an amazing variety of hybrid educational institutions in all sorts of physical facilities with partly on-line and partly face-to-face instruction. Some of these are akin to old fashioned schools by the way they look, but when you walk in the door they don’t feel that way. A lot of learning is taking place in a lot of different formats. And these schools are not operated by a single bureaucratic school system, but by dozen of providers, operators of schools and learning institutions that have all kinds of contractual relationships with the Columbus city and with the State of Ohio.

What has made this kind of change possible are six historical developments.

Six historical developments in the United States:

1. National standards and tests have made transparent the performance of each school as well as a lot of other information about it, so it is possible to get more and better information than it used to be, and many families are making better choices than they use to do.
2. School finance is now piggybacked on the back pack of each child in America. The money travels with the kid to the school of his or her choice — the State, local and federal money, too. Different amounts per child, depending on special needs, etc.
3. Charter schools take hundreds of different forms, all kinds of operators can contract with communities and states to operate different kinds of schools. School systems are no long big bureaucratic behemoths … rather they enter into these contractual relationships with educational providers of many different kinds.
4. Venture capital has become available for educational entrepreneurs. It wasn’t in the old days, but now with a whole lot of valuable changes in state and federal tax law, venture capital is now rewarding investment, just like it used to be in the old days when it was used for green technology and energy efficient cars and things like that.
5. Federal education policy has changed. Children who are eligible for help from the federal government — for example, disabled or very poor kids — the money travels with the kid. It no longer is sent to a district to be administered centrally. It is now part of that backpack that stays with the child as he or she attends a school of choice.
6. States have rewritten compulsory attendance laws., the rules that say you must go to school. Well, what is a school? It used to have a homogeneous definition. Now those laws have been liberalized so that many different educational providers qualify as “schools” for the purpose of satisfying the compulsory attendance requirement.

The upshot of all of this is that choice is now universally available to all American children and lots are taking advantage of those option, particularly poor and minority kids. And the remarkable news is that student achievement is beginning to inch up and achievement gap that has troubled us back in 2010 is beginning to narrow

This has been a promising and fruitful development for American education, and I’m really glad it’s happened between 2010 and 2030.

 

Conservative “Think Tank” Predicts And Welcomes A Future Where Teaching Machines Dominate Public Education, May 17th, 2011

Republican Governor John Kasich seems to be getting everything he wants from the Republican controlled Ohio Assembly. Kasich calls Ohio’s new biennial budget a “Jobs Budget.” Policy Matters Ohio calls it a “Seize, Slash and Sell Budget.”

Policy Matters Ohio is a “nonprofit policy research organization founded in January 2000 to broaden the debate about economic policy in Ohio.”

About Ohio’s new budget, Policy Matters Ohio says, “The budget seizes funding that usually goes to local government, libraries and schools, instead using it to fill gaps at the state level. It makes deep cuts to public education and diverts more public money for private schools. And it gives this governor and the administration much more power to privatize, reducing legislative oversight. The slash, seize and sell budget sells state assets financed by generations of Ohioans without assuring savings, a market rate of return or adequate service delivery.”

Policy Matters Ohio reports, that the biennial budget slashes:

• $2.1 billion from K12 education over the biennium
• $490 million from higher education’s state share of instruction.
• Kinship permanency program, which helped 8000 kids stay with grandparents and other kin, reduced by $2.7 million.
• Funding to counties for services for families who have adopted special needs kids.
• Early learning initiative cut $24.4 million.
• Child, family and adult protective services cut by 10%, $1.5 million.
• More seniors may receive care in their homes but face 23% cut in home service levels, 15% cuts to the Area Agencies on Aging that manage their care, plus cuts to provider rates.
• Low-level offenders are expected to serve sentences in the community instead of institutions, but the budget for community and parole services is reduced.
• Local government funds cut by 25% in 2012 and an additional 25% in 2013, reducing allocation by 50% and taking $441 million from municipalities, counties and townships.
• Another $563.4 million is seized from tax replacements for local governments, compared with prior biennium.
• $1.1 billion seized from tax replacements for schools, compared with prior biennium.

The budgets calls for the sale of state assets:

• Six prisons are to be sold.
• The state’s liquor wholesale business will be privatized.
• Provisions to privatize the turnpike are placed in the budget
• Privatization of economic development services is already in place through JobsOhio; actual outsourcing of funds and services pending.

Policy Matters notes In Ohio, “The largest tax cut in 70 years preceded the Great Recession. This tax cut took $2.1 billion a year from Ohio’s budget, but it did not bring jobs and economic activity.” Policy Matters says that Ohio needs to raise taxes on the wealthy and on businesses and should close tax loopholes. See report here.

Last year, 2010, the Hoover Institution, a conservative “think tank,” challenged its members to think twenty years ahead, and to imagine public education in the year 2030. They responded with a number of videos. According to Hoover, “The changes outlined here (in the videos) would yield a more responsive, efficient, effective, nimble, and productive K-12 education system than we have today.” Hoover offers a thoughtful conservative POV. Interestingly, the institute was started in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, years before he became president.

It seems to me, what separates a liberal POV from a conservative POV is a basic disagreement over purpose. The big picture, the central questions — What is the purpose of government? What is the purpose of public education? — deserves thoughtful public discussion.

“Conservatives” have pushed the idea that the aim of education is academic mastery and that this aim can be accomplished via demanding mastery of a rigorous academic curriculum. Confusingly, although “liberals” and teacher unions have disagreed over how this aim for public education could be best accomplished, they largely have agreed with the conservative POV that the aim of public education is the mastery of an academic curriculum.

This failure of progressive educators to articulate a strong progressive POV concerning the aim of public education, as an alternative to the conservative POV, has big implications for the teaching and education profession. As I warn here: The Dumbing Down Of What It Means To Be A “Great Teacher” — Will Lead To Machines Replacing Teachers:

The inexcusable dumbing down of what is meant by “great teachers” and “excellent schools” is the foundation for the destruction of the current teaching profession, the foundation, in fact, for the destruction of meaningful public education.

It seems clear that in only a very few years, if the purpose of education is so shallow, the professionalism of its practitioners so diminished, sophisticated computer programs will replace teachers. Such programs will do what effective teachers now do — everything that works to get students to score high on objective tests.

The more narrow the aim / purpose of public education, the easier the accomplishment of this aim can be computerized. A progressive aim is one that defines teaching in human terms and the definition of educational purpose in terms of human terms and human purpose.  A progressive aim is one that goes beyond simply the delivery of curriculum.

To listen to Hoover speaker, Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, the rise of the increasing prominence of machines in education will cause good results. Whitehurst sees the aim of education in narrow terms — the delivery of curriculum. Whitehust says that in the near future, curriculum, “will be designed through cognitive science and delivered through powerful technologies.” The most interesting sentence in this conservative thinker’s prediction is that in 2030, “Unobtrusive brain imaging sensors monitor learning in real time and determine the curriculum sequence for individual students.” He says:

By 2030 … breakthroughs in curriculum that have fundamentally transformed the nature of schooling in U.S. public schools.

In 2030, technology has taken over. Most instruction is delivered in virtual learning environments. Students go to school only to have a safe and supervised environment in which to engage in interactions that require social interaction such as sports and music and to use new technology that is still too expensive to be deployed in homes. Curriculum is developed and continuously updated using software applications that determine the logical skill and knowledge prerequisites of any particular learning goal. Unobtrusive brain imaging sensors monitor learning in real time and determine the curriculum sequence for individual students. There are no more committees of experts, sitting in hotel rooms, deciding what math students need to know to learn Algebra. Curriculum is personalized. and students move at dramatically different paces and sequences through a curriculum until they demonstrate mastery of various way points and end point. Those way points and end points are themselves personalized and students can decide which topics they may wish to dive into deeply.

The curriculum makes extensive use of social agents — both real peers and adults — who interact with student on line as well as avatars who realistically mimic social experience …

Each student receives a unique curriculum. …

You only have to look at the dramatic advances in what students learn and are able to do to see that it is by far better today than it was in 2010. Curriculum designed through cognitive science and delivered through powerful technologies is a lever that has allowed the the U. S. to leapfrog its international competitors and regain its position as a world’s education leader.

Wow. Dr. Whitehurst believes that in just 20 years, students will be so connected to a computer teaching machine that the machine will make curricular decisions based on variation in the student’s brain image. This is an amazing prediction that suggests the aggressive use of a technology that has big possibilities for authoritarian mind control. This conservative thinker says such machine control will be a good thing, because it will allow dramatic academic accomplishments. He says such use of technology in education will provide, “a lever that will allow the U. S. to leapfrog its international competitors and regain its position as a world’s education leader.”

A conservative POV concerning the purpose of public education defends the funding of public education as necessary because preparing a workforce to make the nation more economically competitive is in the public good. Defenders of this POV, like Dr. Whitehurst, foresee and welcome a future where machines dominate education and where professionally paid teachers are much fewer and where they do exist, serve, when needed, as “coaches.”

Conservatives defend their POV concerning education in terms of economics, in terms of international competitiveness. They seem so one sided in their view of educational purpose that their thinking seems aligned with what the leaders of North Korea would want for their own system. After all, highly trained slaves are more valuable than poorly trained ones. The preparation for citizenship in a democracy, it seems, should be very different from the preparation for citizenship in a totalitarian state. Yet, conservative ideas about public education, so far as I can tell, make no distinction.

So far, one premise of my book, “Kettering Public Education In 2030,” is that, as it becomes apparent that machines will become billions of times more intelligent than humans, the whole point of human education will necessarily be transformed. In the future, the point of education will no longer be academic accomplishment, it will be human accomplishment — If humans, by that time, are still in charge, that is. By 2030, the general public will fear the approaching Singularity and will seek to develop an education that will respond to this fear. More on this later.

• In The Future, Education Will Seek To Develop Character More Than Intellect
• Our System Of Public Education Should Be Centered On Advancing “Liberty And Justice For All.”
• When Computers Are Billions Of Times More Intelligent Than Humans — What Should Be The Aims Of Education?
• In 2030, What Will Be The Aim / Purpose Of Public Education?
• What Is The Educational System That Would Empower An Explosion Of Virtue?