New pre-released data from the Learning Counsel’s 2019 Survey indicates that 58 percent of schools now rate their highest pressure is their student’s social and emotional needs. Alongside this information is the Learning Counsel’s new research that a whopping 27 percent of students nationally have left traditional public education for alternatives, including private schools, charters, online schools, homeschooling and a mix of these. Some States like California are experiencing 30 percent attrition, with 107 districts losing more than 15 percent of their enrollment in 2018, rumored to be accelerating in 2019. This data is “hidden” inside governance claims that include charters as if they are traditional public schools and underestimate the homeschooling movement.
This new data suggests that many schools are living a cascading failure with seemingly no way out. Student rights to equitable education sometimes mean the district can’t even close costly small school outposts to consolidate into central locations.
Schools and districts themselves are starting to feel the burn from a lack of systemic innovation. First came the cries for accountability resulting in increasing numbers of required reports. Then a rewrite of academic standards that had to be mapped to teaching and learning, constantly in revision. Then massive numbers of testing requirements to disrupt and create heights of anxiety for all involved in a political appeasement move by higher policy makers.
Alongside this, professional-grade digital curriculum started to overtake the playing field, pulling the attention of parents and students to apps and websites that could offer learning without the intermediary of an institution. Like a river, tech started to flow around the immovable boulders of centuries-old traditional schooling. Then ever-more disaggregation of the field into alternate schooling choices accelerated.
The river is a now a flood, with districts all over the nation laying off teachers, dealing with imponderable pension debt, closing what schools they can and struggling to innovate-in-place.
The Learning Counsel’s 2019 Digital Transition Survey of America’s schools and districts showed additional concerns by school leaders.
In a question asking the 462 responding schools and districts to assign a value to a list of possible pressures being experienced as an institution, using a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest, the findings also show that:
45 percent gave a high-pressure rating of 8-10 to the “ever-changing academic and technical standards (demanding to be kept up with).”
42 percent gave a high-pressure rating of 8-10 out of 10 to “increasing technology complexity.”
35 percent gave a high-pressure rating of 8-10 out of 10 to “a sense of growing educational disequilibrium.”
Another finding was that the largest districts were disproportionately citing the most concerns with “student attrition due to homeschool, charter or private school options,” or “other student attrition for any reason.” Many of those districts cited these concerns with a 9-or-10-level of pressure.
Something is going on, and the defining of it has been arduously pursued by many. What hasn’t been done is to draw together all the competing elements outside education to look at where education must inevitably go to “fix” it.
If the starting “why” was technology and ubiquitous information accessible anytime and anywhere disrupting everything, and those things are at a faster rate of change than human systems that education can keep up with, it is simple logic to see that failure-to-adapt-using-technology is both the villain and fix.
It’s a bold thing to say, but the surge shorting out the education system is technology, not only by inadequate use inside education but its rate of impact on all other aspects of human industry including its insistence that humans are ready to be employed to further serve it (technology-as-industry). It’s a vicious total transformation requirement because technology in its present state already can do a full disintermediation with fully individualized digital pathways, and people are aware that it can, yet schools don’t use it that way.
One machine can keep track of, and calculate statistics of millions of students at once to provide recommendations for each specifically. One program can inexhaustibly redirect lessons with slight alterations to lines of questioning and examples and exercises, with infinite patience, until a student gets the right answer. Teachers cannot do these things, but are not being reengineered to do what they can do best, and this is absolutely vital – to be human and meet the urgent need of social and emotional development of our students.
Being human should be what is most important, and yet most schools are focused on teachers’ subject knowledge and delivery methodologies in complete disregard of the sheer scope of the Internet and majestic, professionally scope-and-sequenced fully automated courseware.
Our highest-level political officers, perhaps our actual system itself, has either blocked or not led a new corollary of refined humanity needed to match the explosion of technology. Friction of inconceivable proportions has resulted.
The tinkering, the playing with definitions and methods of teaching and learning, is proving inadequate to the task because it simply does not acknowledge the breadth of technology’s capacities, nor greater world stages of economics, culture, and politics. True personalization is being done in nearly every other industry, but not in education, at least not at scale.
Of course, it is a positive thing that the tinkering continues, that the strivings of millions still aim to create order and purpose out of the circumstances of our complex environment for students.
To really come to grips with what we need to do as individual learners, as teachers and school and district and government leaders, we need to fully analyze the real villain of this cascading failure and come to grips with what would actually solve it. We need to understand the sum of the effect and what technologies are missing and as yet unapplied.
The villain in this story (technology) may also be the savior as well, allowing teachers to conquer and command the wide world of social and emotional expertise. In transformed schooling that blends individualized student workflow with lively hands-on experiences, teachers will be challenged to have as their raison d’etre, the interweaving of humanity around and in service to an otherwise technology-laden personalized student journey, thus allowing screen learning to be complemented by a cultural revival.
About the Author
LeiLani Cauthen is CEO of the Learning Counsel and author of The Consumerization of Learning.
