Our schools in the year 2030: how will they be different?

The past few years have seen a whirlwind of developments in school reform. Dramatic efforts to upend the 20th-century model of local schooling--among them, increased accountability and charter schooling--have made considerable advances. What if we look a little further out? To the near future, a place we can almost touch. What will it take to create schools that are efficient, effective, and equal to the challenges of the 21st century? In this forum, two veteran observers--one a savvy entrepreneur, the other a leading scholar--take a look at the world of schooling circa 2030, sharing two widely different perspectives on what education is likely to look like and what that means for school reform today.

Dramatic Growth Is Possible

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Untangling education's Gordian knot 

Until Thomas Friedman recently discovered otherwise, we believed the world was round. We also thought that phone calls had to travel through Ma Bell wires, and that your operator would be in Des Moines, not in New Delhi. Remember when we had just three daily television news programs, one with father Walter, and all at precisely the time when only our grandmothers could watch? And are you bothered that now anyone can see what's on your rooftop or in your driveway, anytime, via Google Earth? Does all this change, turmoil, even progress, concern you? Is your world being rocked?

Don't worry; if you need a fetal-like retreat to times gone by, there is a place you can find respite: your childhood school is still here. Even if the old buildings are gone, your old daily routine within them has been superbly, if unconsciously, preserved to a degree that would make King Tut beam brighter than the gold in his tomb. And not only can you return to your school-day experience just by visiting your children's schools; at the rate change is occurring in education, your great-grandchildren will attend the same ones!

The point is simple: how we educate our children today is remarkably similar to how we educated them decades ago. Perhaps more than any other modern-day institution, schooling is nearly impervious to change. If our "old school design" was working with a high degree of consistency and reliability, such inflexibility might be fine. But decades of facts say that it isn't fine. Results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that roughly 15 million American children--more children than reside in all of England--are achieving below basic levels of literacy and numeracy. If the scale of this number concerns you, you should find it even more troubling that it has been that way for decades. And our problems don't stop with the children most in need. Even our best students are falling behind, in international comparisons and at home. Among the "talented tenth," those in the top 10 percent of NAEP test-takers, reading scores have dropped four points since 1971, and math scores have not budged since they were first measured in 1978 (see Figure 1).

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Simply put, we are not making the grade at the bottom or the top.

Why Things Stay the Same

Why does America seem so unresponsive? Let me suggest three reasons.

First, because "numb" is the root word of numbers. We have lost our outrage (if indeed we ever had it) about the deplorable statistics noted above. Education inadequacy is not sexy. Illiteracy is not sudden in its cause nor quick with its solution and thus lacks the "production values" highly desired by our ratings-craved media. Illiteracy can't compete with Katrina, 9/11, Iraq, or even a good Supreme Court nomination fight. Sure, there's the obligatory annual story in most news vehicles about "our education crisis," but contrast that to, say, round-the-clock, multiple-week coverage of a devastating hurricane. Our sound bite--oriented media find it far too complex to connect what is going on in our schools with the possibility of a 21st-century, full-eclipse of the American economy, imported from the Pacific Rim. Let C-SPAN or PBS do that kind of dull coverage.

A second reason is the colossal, $400 billion per year status quo that makes the military-industrial complex look nimble by comparison.

The third reason for our inaction is even more important: America does not believe there is a "next" generation of schools. What, we think, could be that different in schools of the future? We might change the calendar around, pay teachers a little more, update the curriculum, but none of those things is that big a deal. After all, schools are schools are schools.

A Failure of Imagination

I've now been involved in the world of public education for 15 years, as the founder and CEO of Edison Schools, one of the country's first private companies to take on the challenge of improving public schools. If Edison, which now works in various ways in nearly 1,000 schools and serves more than 300,000 students, were a public school district, I would be one of the longest-serving heads of a major school system in the United States (average tenure for the superintendent of a major system is less than four years). I've seen and heard a lot. And one of the things I've seen is stunningly uncharacteristic of America, earth's creative capital. We've had a national failure of imagination when it comes to what our schools can and should be. We don't believe there is anything particularly new to discover in schooling, so, as a society, we don't set out to find it. Columbus believed. NASA believed. When it comes to schools, we don't. For sure, there are pioneers here and there, but our national mindset does not embrace the possibility that our schools could be and should be radically different.

Instead, because "the way school is" was imprinted on all of us with Intel-like precision by our own 12 years of schooling, America believes that schools are governed by a set of immutable, almost physical, laws, which include:

1. In schools, adults must supervise children virtually all of the time (Dickens would feel right at home).

2. The school day must be rigidly organized, generally chopped up into 45-minute or one-hour blocks (changing this to longer periods of time was, some years back, viewed as a grand breakthrough).

3. The smaller the number of children in a class, the better the education results (never mind if a smaller class might mean a teacher who is paid less and is less prepared).

4. Adults must run all aspects of the school--and do all the work within it (that many teenagers now work after school and on weekends is a fact to ignore).

5. There are no efficiencies, economies, or new qualities to be found in "design breakthroughs"; greater spending is the only way to improve education (disregard more or less flat education results after two decades of real-dollar annual spending increases).

What if all of the above "truths" are incorrect--truths that we will some day regard as myths, artifacts of a forgotten era? What if we approached the organization of a school without any of these "truths" as cornerstones? Where might simple logic and our own real-life experiences take us?

Let me suggest what some of the new truths of school design might be:

1. Learning accomplished through individual effort, or through working in small teams, is as "sticky" (well retained) as that served up in a classroom group, no matter what its size.

2. Learning can come in many forms, and the size of the learning group can vary greatly without any penalization of effect.

3. Children are capable of tremendous focus and responsibility, and they can be taught these traits at a much younger age than many people might think.

4. Variety matters in learning; too much of any one thing, like sitting passively in a classroom for 12 years, has rapidly diminishing returns; and lack of variety negatively affects teachers as much as children.

5. Students can teach as well as learn. Has your child ever taught you anything? Has one of your older children ever taught something to one of your younger ones?

The Future

Working from these potential new "truths," let's imagine what a school of the future might look like. In fact, in key respects, the best school of the future might share some aspects of the school of the past, the 19th-century past that existed in many places of America up to the 1920s: the schoolhouse where older students were instructors, teaching under the guidance of a highly qualified adult. Indeed, we can reconstruct a school of the past that is appropriate to the modern era, where teachers' salaries are competitive with other professions, where students are taught by older peers under the supervision of master teachers who can use technology for pedagogical purposes.

Suppose, for example, that beginning in the 1st grade children spent an hour a day learning on their own, not under the direct supervision of a teacher (although perhaps watched over by an older peer). Let's presume that by the 3rd grade, the amount of time students were "on their own" increased to two hours per day. By the 6th grade and throughout middle school, let's assume that only half of a student's time was spent in what we now think of as a classroom. Finally, imagine that by high school only one-third of a student's time was in a traditional classroom setting. If this sounds overly radical, consider that many college students are in class fewer than 15 hours a week, half the time of a high-school senior. College freshmen are only 90 days older than high-school seniors. Did something magical occur in that short period to make them more capable of independent learning? Remember that fully half of all high-school seniors enter college.

If students are not in a classroom, where are they? Sleeping at their desks? Playing video games on school computers? Well, the answer is that they are learning--just not at that very moment with a teacher, just not in a class, but still "in school." More often than not, they will be reading! Educators believe deeply that students should read, but there is very little time in the school day for that to happen. And after a long day at school and with other homework and important activities, how much time is realistically available in the evening? They also will be working with a small group of other students. And they might be on their computers, writing, researching, exploring, mining that almost endless, great new ethereal library--the Internet. All the while, they will be monitored by their somewhat older peers, just as graduate students supervise and aid undergraduates in college environments. Though they will not be in class half of their day, they will be in a school building all of it.

Many educators reading this are probably saying, perhaps in less kindly terms, "This idea is hopelessly naive. Students cannot be entrusted with their own education; they cannot be expected to manage their own time. Students don't understand the importance of education and, therefore, can't be expected to manage it."

My response: schools have failed to make students the masters of their own learning, and we have the results to show for it. We are still operating in an 18th-century mindset, believing that these young, half-civilized things called children must be literally whipped into shape, if not with a stick then with a never-ending schedule. If students don't understand the importance of education enough to take charge of their own, it is because the schools we have designed don't spend any real time helping them understand this.

A huge side benefit of this "independent learning" model--and I am talking here mainly about middle- and high-school programs--is that it would double teachers' compensation in the United States. If students spent half as much time in class, then half as many teachers would be needed. And we could pay those remaining twice as much--without increasing taxes by one cent.

I introduce the concept of large-scale, independent learning in America's middle- and high-school communities and the corresponding increase in teachers' pay to suggest that there may be a more powerful school design "out there" that is radically different from what we now know. My example is only one idea of what education might be like. There are many more concepts worthy of serious consideration and development. However, most of these will never achieve meaningful scale unless America takes a fundamentally different approach to how it brings about change in its schools.

Focus on Education

This year, the federal government will spend $27 billion on healthcare research and development (R & D) through the National Institutes of Health. The Department of Defense recently invested $9 billion just on the prototype of the next generation of fighter planes. These investments are precisely why we have one of the finest health-care systems on the globe (providing our citizens one of the longest life spans of any country) and an unparalleled military. We have exceptional health care and national security because we constantly invest in change--above and beyond what we spend to merely operate our military and health-care systems. Our health care and national security may not be perfect, but there is little question about our international placement in these fields.

By contrast, we invest virtually nothing in changing our schools. Education research-and-development spending at the federal government level is 1/100th of what we spend in health care. Why, then, are we surprised when our K-12 schools are far from the envy of the world? We spend a staggering sum, $400 billion a year, to run the schools we inherited from one hundred years ago. At the same time, we are investing, by modern R & D standards, only a pittance ($260 million) to design and test the next generation of schools. As a result, we get exactly what we pay for--out-of-date school designs.

Our local school districts don't have the scale to take on these R & D initiatives. The private sector of K-12 education, which is still in a fledgling stage, does not have the resources, either. And if you expect philanthropy to come to the rescue, think again. The endowment of just one Ivy League college is more than ten times all the annual giving to our public schools. Only one institution in America has the scale required to fund the invention of our next generation of public schools: our federal government. If 15,000,000 less-than-literate students are not enough to move it to action, let's hope, for the sake of our children, that the looming threat of second-class economic citizenry in the 21st century does the trick

Chris Whittle is founder and CEO of Edison Schools and author of Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education.

BY CHRIS WHITTLE

On the Henry Levin Commentary

Editors' note: Since Henry Levin considered, in some detail, the record of Edison Schools in his essay on the future, Chris Whittle responds here to Levin's essay.

Henry Levin's essay criticizes the involvement of the private sector in public education, Edison Schools, and my vision of public education's future. These responses to selected points are intended to provoke thought on the overall thrust of his argument.

Economies of Scale. Superintendents struggling with the loss of scale resulting from enrollment declines would strongly disagree with Levin's contention that there are few economies of scale in education. Economies of scale occur at the system level-not the school level. As in well-run, large, public-school systems, Edison's central costs have improved significantly, in percentages, over time, which is a key reason Edison is now profitable.

Academic Results. Levin calls Edison's academic results "mediocre" and cites a recent RAND report and his view of results in Baltimore and Philadelphia. Readers can draw their own conclusions with data in hand, but this much we know: In the fall of 2002, Edison was assigned to manage 20 schools in Philadelphia with an average proficiency of only 6 percent. Proficiency has nearly quadrupled in 36 months. These schools-among the district's most challenging-have kept pace with a district achieving the highest gains among America's major urban systems. Edison was recently asked to manage two additional schools in Philadelphia.

Since the fall of 2000, Edison has managed three schools in Baltimore. The average ranking of those schools in 2000 was 101 out of 117 district schools. Today, their average ranking is 57 out of 115 schools, with one school going from 107th to 24th. Our contract there was recently extended.

The RAND report says, "From 2002 to 2004, average proficiency rates in currently operating Edison schools increased by 11 percentage points in reading and 17 percentage points in math. Meanwhile, average proficiency rates in a matched set of comparison schools increased by lesser amounts, 9 percentage points in reading and 13 percentage points in math (although the Edison advantage is statistically significant only in math)."

Greater Funding. Levin incorrectly says that Edison receives more funding than typical public schools. Edison on average receives resources below those of public schools in the cities where it works. Exceptions are rare. An excellent report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Institute shows charter-school funding well below comparable public school funding.

The Model. Levin uses a 40-year-old study to support his view that our current education model cannot be changed. However, a miraculous technological leap occurred on the way to the 21st century: the invention of the Internet and the PC. Levin correctly states that early uses of such technologies in classrooms have not worked well, but Wright's first flight did not go very far either.

Hope vs. Pessimism. Mr. Levin foresees the "struggle of incremental reforms in a system designed to conserve rather than transform society." While America's public educators want to conserve democracy and freedom, they do not want an education design that dooms 15 million children to near illiteracy. We can change this outcome by transforming a model that may have once served us well but is now out of date.

--Chris Whittle

Deia Vu All Over Again?

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Schools will operate in the future as they do now

My vision of where education will be--and where it must be--overlaps with Chris Whittle's to some extent. But it also differs in significant ways. Whittle's essay, drawn from his cheerful book (Crash Course), tells us that most of our education troubles will be over in just a quarter century. I disagree. His assumptions often differ markedly from the available evidence on what works and ignore the complexity of the witches' brew of politics, unions, bureaucracies, immigration, economics, and the social sciences. He implies that his vision is inexorable when it is merely wishful.

Chris Whittle's projection for 2030 is an elaborated echo of the 1990s, when for-profit education-management organizations (EMOs) proposed a mission and rationale for transforming American education. The standard fare promoted by those EMOs and their venture-capital sources was that the education industry was the next big opportunity for private capital, following the profitable example of the earlier HMO transformation of health care.

The lead financial actor at the beginning of that EMO era was Merrill Lynch, advisor to Whittle's company, Edison Schools. Merrill Lynch published The Book of Knowledge, a 193-page report on the $740 billion education and training market. Distributed widely to potential investors, The Book identified five "Big Ideas" that would transform the education and training industry over the next decade. But the book's story begins with the ostensible failure of public education and its rapidly rising costs, mediocre student achievement results, poor high-school graduation rates, and limp international rankings. The reason given for this miserable showing was the inefficiency of government.

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Business enterprise efficiency would rescue the schools through organizational improvements; selection, training, assessing, and rewarding of principals and teachers on the basis of performance; and adoption of promising education technologies. Sophisticated business projections were conjured to assure potential investors that these enterprises would be highly profitable (doing well) while serving society (doing good).

The Wrong Assumptions

Not all has gone well, and Edison is a good case study, having lost more than six hundred million dollars of its investors' funding. Edison has one of the most complete models among the EMOs. It has truly attempted to deliver a quality school, but the evidence on raising student achievement shows no revolution in results. According to a recent evaluation by the RAND Corporation and comparisons in Philadelphia and Baltimore, Edison's record is not very different from that of similar public schools, though it has received greater funding than its public counterparts.

Somehow, in projecting to the future, Whittle posits a large number of changes in the basic institutions for delivering education, education research, and education personnel, based on the "success" of the EMOs, especially Edison. And despite the financial losses and mediocre achievement results, he believes that schools should be turned over to large businesses--with "economies of scale." Teachers' salaries would be double those of today to obtain the best professional talent; new training institutions for principals would arise through collaborative efforts of top business and education schools to churn out exemplary leadership; and government would increase funding for education research by a factor of ten or more.

The Whittle scenario also assumes that school districts would retain only a tiny percentage of federal, state, and local revenues, perhaps 1 percent, and limit themselves to "monitoring and quality-control" oversight of schools; private contractors would receive the other 99 percent. National and international education firms will compete for these contracts, and their retention by the district will depend on their performance. Teachers will be chosen by contracted schools, but will be employees of both districts and contractors (opening up districts to liability for personnel whom they neither select nor supervise). Teachers' salaries will reach numbers like $130,000 (adjusted for inflation) at the highest ranks. Principals will earn up to $250,000 with a base of 60 percent of this amount and the remainder in bonuses.

Back to the Future

The complete shift of schools to for-profit contractors seems to be based on the old business claims of the 1990s and Whittle's selective interpretation of Edison's record. It is also based on the argument that the contracting firms will benefit from economies of scale that are unavailable to the average school district in the United States. This is a strange and stubborn argument for Edison, which persistently claimed that annual losses in the tens of millions of dollars were due to insufficient numbers of schools. Subsequent expansions led only to larger losses.

Research has shown that beyond very small schools and school districts, there are few opportunities for economies of scale in education because most of the costs increase with enrollments and are not fixed costs that decline with additional clients. In fact, the number of teachers and other employees per student has increased in recent decades (see Figure 1). Further, size tends to depersonalize education. As a consequence, the leading edge of school reform is the promotion of smaller rather than larger units.

Whittle supports his assertion on scale economies with a table (page 180 in his book) that contrives the appearance of economies of scale by comparing a school district spending $28 million in 2030 with a hypothetical contractor receiving $25 billion in revenues. The table purports to show where contractors would experience scale economies and how they would yield a profit of 10 percent of revenues. As Yogi Berra would say, It's deja vu all over again. It hasn't worked in the past; there's no reason to believe it will work in 2030.

Even more puzzling is how schools would prosper with half the teaching personnel. According to Whittle, this would be done largely through replacing teachers with student labor. Educators have long argued for greater participation of students in the education process, but not as a way of reducing costs. Four decades ago, noted economist William Baumol argued that the idea of reducing costs in education and similar labor-intensive industries by substituting capital for labor or less-skilled labor for higher-paid professionals was impractical, at best. According to Baumol, education, by its very nature and its intransigence to change (whether public or private), is a teacher-intensive activity and so cannot benefit from standard approaches to increasing productivity. Equally, it is not possible to eliminate half of the opera singers in a classical opera or to replace two members of a string quartet with music synthesizers as a cost-effective way of improving quality. To this point no one has succeeded in disproving Baumol's thesis, nor has anyone discovered methods of providing the same education with half the number of teachers.

What Else Won't Work

Whittle's prime example of assigning students to peer tutoring is already used widely in public schools. I don't know a single situation where this method has reduced teachers' responsibilities. It is a form of supplementary instruction for selected students who are far behind other students (particularly for those with learning disabilities), not a substitute for regular teachers. And peer tutoring is not "free." The cost of effective peer tutoring is higher than alternatives, such as computer-assisted instruction or smaller class sizes or longer school days, because of the needs for adult personnel to coordinate, train, and monitor the student tutors. If peer tutoring has the capability of replacing half of our teachers, why wait until 2030?

Whittle suggests that charters and EMOs would do well to establish demonstration schools to show how we can use student chores to reduce the teachers by half. But it is remarkable that at present he can promise a sweeping future based on this phenomenon without dredging up even a single example as a proof of its existence.

Whittle also assumes (in his book) that the "wireless revolution" will contribute to independent learning and a reduction in the need for teachers. But even if this claim were supported by evidence, the record shows that technology did not reduce teacher cost significantly enough to make Edison profitable or to create superior student achievement. Larry Cuban's history of the overblown promises of education technology (in his 2001 book Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom) provides a concrete picture of why we cannot count on technology. Of course, even as astute an observer as Bertrand Russell got this wrong in predicting in 1933 that instruction by motion pictures would require only large auditoriums with low-paid classroom monitors. Whittle is in good company in his zeal for a strategy that has always generated more vision than reality.

In his infomercial on behalf of for-profit education enterprises, there is a technological determinism that assumes no opposition from or conflict with special interests such as teacher unions, administrators, and education bureaucracies. Every projected change is in the interest of all groups, a harmonious solution to what ails the schools. Even teacher organizations that would lose half of their membership and half of their collegial help at the school site will capitulate to the siren song of higher salaries. And new approaches to teacher training will enable them to get better results with half of the labor force and student assistance.

What Can and Should Be Done

Whittle's assertion of the dominant role of for-profit firms in 2030 and the feasibility of halving the teaching force are not demonstrated to be feasible or desirable. Of course, the education system will be pressed to improve, especially on behalf of children from families in poverty, minorities, and immigrants, who will eventually compose a key component of the labor force. We will also need to find ways to ensure that all students master basic skills and that a substantial portion master the thinking skills and collaborative methods that will ensure a productive polity and prosperous economy. It should be noted that there has never been a golden age in education in which these goals were met, and the future will represent a struggle of incremental reforms in a system designed to "conserve" rather than transform society.

What types of reforms?

I agree completely with Whittle that we must improve the selection and training of teachers and principals, and increase funding for education research. Raising teachers' salaries is absolutely necessary to get the best talent into teaching. At the same time, the system needs better career ladders for teachers and far more effective approaches to selection, mentoring, and evaluation in order to enlist such talent productively. Teacher turnover, a high-cost item, must be reduced. Almost half of the teachers in Ohio's charter schools quit their schools in the four-year period between 2000 and 2004, in comparison with about 8 percent in conventional public schools and 12 percent in high-poverty, urban public schools, suggesting that new organizations are not a magic formula for school stability. Although technology is unlikely to replace many teachers, it is still a powerful tool for raising education quality by providing a vehicle for topic enrichment, student research, more challenging student projects, and greater student engagement. At the same time, the education community must be open to new forms of enterprise wherever it can make a contribution, such as contracting of specific instructional services, teacher cooperatives, and information technologies that enhance evaluation of students' knowledge and capabilities.

If present evidence is to be used, two potent contributions to raising student achievement will be widespread: effective preschool programs for all children and intensive interventions that build capacities of families to support the education of their children. I believe that both of these will be prevalent by 2030 because they show evidence of great promise even today. If I had my druthers, I would also add that education of at-risk students will shift from remediation and "drill and kill" to enrichment and acceleration, as we have tried to accomplish with the Accelerated Schools Project over the past two decades. The instructional approaches used in the best gifted and talented programs, with their emphasis on engagement, depth, and real-world applications, reinforce both basic skill development and more advanced learning. And the implementation of powerful and widespread approaches to building parents' capacity to support out-of-school learning will gain support from community organizations.

Where will the money come from? By recouping funds that are "lost" to society because of poor education we can easily fund the improvements. Recent work by economists and other academic researchers--some of it presented at a recent symposium at Columbia University ("The Social Costs of Inadequate Education")--concluded that such investments have large payoffs in raising national income and tax revenues and reducing the cost of public services. For example, improvements in the availability and quality of preschool education would save large expenditures on special education and grade retention and improve high-school graduation rates and college attendance, especially among the poor, minorities, and immigrants. Just the loss in state and federal tax revenues from the 23 million high-school dropouts has been estimated at $50 billion a year. High-school dropouts pay about one-half the taxes of high-school graduates, and about one-third the taxes of those with more than a high-school diploma. Public health costs for the estimated 600,000 high-school dropouts in 2004 totaled about $58 billion. Some $10 billion could be saved each year in public assistance through universal high-school graduation; a mere 10 percent increase in the high-school completion rate would shave about $14 billion from the cost of crime. By investing in more productive educational practices, we can recoup magnitudes of investment that can easily fund the improvements set out above. And we don't have to wait until 2030.

Henry Levin is professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

BY HENRY LEVIN

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