Education Transformation

How K-12 Online Learning Is Bringing the Greatest Change to Education in 100 Years

Ron Packard

• Publisher: Beyond Words
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781582704760
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education Transformation, authored by the leading expert in customized online education, Ron Packard, shows why technology is critical to the future of education and the future of our nation's children. We can no longer afford to lag, the benefits of technology must be harnessed for the benefit of students nationwide and around the globe. It is an imperative. One size does not fit all in education – Education Transformation shows us how technology can be used to accommodate individual's needs rather than making each student force fit into the traditional classroom model which works for many but not for all. Like so many other modern conveniences, education can benefit from technological advancement, and only technology can provide personalized instruction affordably. Education Transformation has never been needed more than today. It is the future of education and of our nation's children.

1

WHY WE CAN'T WAIT ANY LONGER

The rallying cry for American education reform traces back to a slim report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education released in 1983. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform warned that “the educational foundations of our society are...being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”¹

One other memorable line still resonates: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”²

The sixty-five-page report, with its explosive rhetoric and dire conclusions, touched a national nerve and unleashed an unprecedented wave of education reform efforts and actions.

In the intervening years, the United States has poured billions more dollars into schools, hiring new teachers, offering more incentives for professional development and more pay for teachers who stay longer. Average class size in the United States dropped by more than one-third—from twenty-three students per teacher to fourteen—between 1991 and 1999. Between 1971 and 2001, the percentage of teachers holding advanced degrees more than doubled, from 27.5 percent to 56.8 percent. The average teacher in 2001 had fourteen years of experience, compared with eight years of experience in 1971. It was an impressive—and extremely expensive—effort.³

A Nation Still at Risk?

Unfortunately, all the spending does not seem to have significantly raised student achievement. This is not a surprise. There are no studies that strongly correlate money spent with improved student performance. Indeed, most studies show little relationship at all.

From 1971 to 2001, overall student achievement stayed more or less the same. It’s possible that, in the absence of the increased spending, the results would have declined over that period, but it’s also possible that the money did little to improve educational outcomes. What’s clear is that progress was not proportional to the money spent.

Scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which is often referred to as the nation’s report card, have been flat since the 1970s. The average seventeen-year-old student’s score on the NAEP reading test was 285 in 2004, exactly the same as in 1971. Math results are no different, going from a score of 304 in 1973 to 307 in 2004. “Despite twenty years of agitation and reform, much of it sparked by the Risk report,” said Paul Peterson, of Harvard University, “student achievement has at best stagnated, if not declined.”⁴

Similarly, scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (the infamous SAT), taken by college-bound high school students, have not improved much. SAT scores in reading dropped from 537 in 1970 to 507 in 2003. Math SAT scores have inched up from 512 in 1970 to 519 in 2003.⁵ Given the reduction in class sizes (and thus more individualized attention from teachers), these results are unimpressive. While SAT scores are not a comprehensive measurement of a quality education, they are a valuable indicator of how students are performing and also an indicator of college headlines.

There are other concerns besides standardized test scores. Many students enter college unprepared. According to the 2008 NAEP test, a significant percentage of twelfth graders were not proficient in math or in reading.⁶ More alarming, said Jay Greene, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, is the fact that almost half of the students who do graduate from high school are essentially ineligible for a four-year college because they have not taken the minimal coursework required for admission to virtually any four-year institution. According to the American College Testing (ACT) program, which has been administering a math, science, and English test to high school seniors since 1959, the nation has a “college readiness crisis”: only one-fourth of the students who took the test recently met the readiness benchmark.⁷ (The remediation is already beginning online, as that forum is less expensive and can be done before the student matriculates.)

Perhaps more troubling is that the United States is falling further behind other countries where school systems are improving. In fact, the Risk report exclaimed rather bluntly in 1983 that “what was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.” Unfortunately, this report prediction has come true.

This is an enormous blow because the United States at one time led the world by a large margin in educational attainment and achievement. The International Association for the Evaluation of Education Achievement (IEEA) has administered tests of math and science in countries around the world since the 1960s. And while our scores have remained pretty constant (the same flat line as indicated in the NAEP and SAT), other countries have charged ahead. American students are now scoring below those from Singapore, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and other international exams.⁸

The United States was the first country to offer universal elementary education and the first to make an attempt to offer secondary education to all citizens. As late as 1970, a higher percentage of US teenagers completed secondary education than did their peers in any other nation. Today, the United States falls in the middle of the pack.⁹Even those who do go to college are, increasingly, not finishing. Nationally, fewer than 20 percent of high school freshmen will go on to finish college. No wonder the Education Trust concluded that the United States is alone among industrialized countries whose children will not be better educated than their parents.

America has fallen into a vicious cycle. As the country loses ground to other countries on test scores, we have also lost the ability to keep children in school. High school dropout rates are appalling, approaching 70 percent in some of our inner cities. While the 2012 report showed some improvement, the rates are still too high.¹⁰

US Dropout Rate in 2005

Source: America’s Promise Alliance, Cities in Crisis 2009: Closing the Graduation Gap, Editorial Projects in Education Research Center (April 2009).

Highest Dropout Rates in US Cities in 2005

Source: America’s Promise Alliance, Cities in Crisis 2009: Closing the Graduation Gap, Editorial Projects in Education Research Center (April 2009).

Even more alarming is that these numbers do not include the students who drop out before high school or are not officially listed as dropouts. Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten wrote about the City of Angels’ Unified School District in July of 2008.

We’ve all become so inured to the unending stream of dreary and dispiriting news that Thursday’s horrific report on the high school dropout rate came and went with barely a civic whimper.... In an economy that increasingly rewards participation in knowledge-based industries, failure to graduate from high school is a virtual guarantor of perpetual helotry.¹¹

As Rutten pointed out, the social cost of our dropout crisis is monumental: a high school graduate is 20 percent less likely to commit a violent crime than a dropout is, 11 percent less likely to commit a crime against property, and 12 percent less likely to be arrested for breaking the drug laws.¹²

All of these numbers hit African American and Latino students much harder than Caucasian students, which is why so much of education reform is about civil rights. “Despite concerted efforts by educators,” reported the New York Times in 2006, “the test-score gaps are so large that, on average, African-American and Hispanic students in high school can read and do arithmetic at only the average level of whites in junior high school.”¹³ The US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, rightly called this gap the modern era’s civil rights challenge. The infamous digital divide, which refers to the gap between different racial and economic groups in accessing digital and information technology, is more important than ever.¹⁴

As grim as these statistics are, there is a larger peril. American schools are not producing the skilled labor and lifelong learners with twenty-first-century skills that are a cornerstone of America’s future prosperity. In 1950, when most of American jobs were unskilled, failing to graduate from high school might have been less consequential. Today, with only a small percentage of jobs being unskilled, the consequences could be catastrophic—we are essentially committing millions of children to a lifetime of poverty.

According to a study by the Alliance for Excellent Education, “The nation would save approximately $45 billion if it could cut the number of dropouts in half.” The Alliance study showed that “if high school dropouts who currently head households in the United States had earned their diplomas, the US economy would have benefited from an additional $74 billion in wealth accumulated by families.”¹⁵

The Need Is Greater than Ever

It’s increasingly difficult to realize the American dream without a quality education, particularly for children from impoverished areas and rural areas, and all of us should find it appalling that a good education is the exception, not the norm. The effect is to leave these kids far behind their counterparts in higher-performing schools. If underperforming schools can improve (and closing the digital divide can spark the improvements), the benefits will be felt in communities throughout the world. Absent these improvements, countless children will be ill prepared to seize the opportunities of the knowledge economy.

There have been many harsh critics who say the US education system is steadily sliding into mediocrity. While I don’t believe we are in a state of absolute decline, we are clearly in a state of relative decline. The facts are that we were quantum leaps ahead of the rest of the world; now that education is more important than it ever was, the world has caught up. This is a frightening realization for Americans in an increasingly flat world—a realization compounded by the fact that the United States may no longer be the benefactor of the world’s brain drain. More and more students and entrepreneurs stay in China, India, and other fast-growing nations because they believe the opportunities there are perhaps more promising than they are in the United States. Plus, it is difficult to obtain a visa to stay here. Having highly educated foreigners leave the United States is a dramatic change from where we were twenty years ago. If we can no longer import or produce high quality human capital, our economic prosperity is in peril.

In an era of global economic competition, America’s schools need—at a minimum—to measure up to those in other nations. There is a need to take a quantum leap akin to the launch of universal free education a century ago, which built one of the most skilled and powerful engines of human capital in history.

If America is going to remain a great nation—that “shining city on a hill” that President Reagan alluded to—a world-class education system is essential, so this dream that many of us have lived will be possible for the next generation of Americans. The next generation of entrepreneurs impacting our world will be created by our current education system, and we need a system that equips them with the knowledge, talents, skills, values, drive, and vision to be entrepreneurs—or anything they want to be. Nations that fail to do this will not remain globally competitive.

2

WHY WE DON’T CHANGE

In the services-driven, information-age economy, the premium attached to a rigorous education is greater than ever. The increasing value placed on skills is the major factor in increasing income disparity, yet the American public school system isn’t keeping pace with the dynamism of the US economy. While the United States spends more per student than any other country, SAT and NAEP scores are flat, and other nations are moving forward as the United States remains stagnant. On almost every indicator of student achievement, American students are falling further behind. Almost 30 percent of children don’t even finish high school. Productivity in education has fallen almost 50 percent.¹ In a nation that has achieved so much progress over the past fifty years, what is truly remarkable is that education has failed to advance at the same rate. The reasons why are complex and not always clear.

What is clear is that the money and effort pumped into the US public education system over the last twenty years has altered the course of the ship a few degrees, but it has not turned the ship around nor sped it up. Why? This is the crucial question for any education reformer—teacher, parent, and policy maker—to ask.

The first thing to know is how big the ship is. After healthcare, public education is the largest single part of our economy and of government expenditures, accounting for over $500 billion in expenditures, before the recent Obama stimulus.² There are so many well-entrenched interests and so many ingrained habits that it is difficult to find the engine room, much less the bridge.

Total Government Spending: $6.3 Trillion for Fiscal Year 2012

Source: The Office of Management and Budget and the United States Census Bureau, compiled by http://www.usgovernmentspending.com.

There are now 3.3 million teachers in some ninety-seven thousand elementary and secondary public schools teaching over fifty million students—all of it regulated by fourteen thousand different ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Copyright