Modern Schooling on a Shoe-String Budget
By Alan Shusterman
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan recently vowed to invest nearly all of their fortune -- a staggering $45 billion -- in philanthropic causes over the rest of their lifetimes.
They highlighted education -- personalized learning in particular -- as a key area of focus. That's great news. Their money, however, isn't even necessary to provide the changes desperately needed in K-12 education in this country.
The United States has plenty to spend on education -- roughly $950 billion this year alone. Instead of throwing good money after bad, it's time for us to turn our ample resources toward capitalizing on the power of technology and evidence-based methods to customize learning for every student.
American children are underperforming. In a recent international assessment, the United States ranked 27th out of 64 nations in science and 35th in math. One in five children who enter our K-12 system fails to graduate.
That failure is thanks largely to a top-down learning structure that forces every student into the same rigid curriculum. But research has shown time and again that students can and should learn at their own pace, in their own way.
A recent study from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation tracked almost 5,000 students from more than 20 different schools with personalized-learning approaches. Some featured tailor-made lesson plans. Others determined student progress according to how much knowledge they gained, not how much time they spent in class. Others had flexible classroom environments where students could choose how they learned.
These methods drove students' math and reading scores up significantly. In fact, their impact was larger than those found in 95% of other educational intervention studies.
Technology can facilitate personalized learning more than ever. Consider the case of a school district in Huntsville, Ala., which recently began an ambitious digital-learning initiative that provides each student with a laptop to use in school and at home. Two years after implementation, math scores improved 27%, reading scores grew 18%, and the overall graduation rate jumped 14%.
Some critics, particularly teachers, have been slow to embrace personalized learning. The head of Connecticut's largest teacher's union recently cautioned that the strategy learning "is not the transformational silver bullet public schools require."
But teachers' fears about effectiveness -- and, implicitly, about job security -- are unwarranted. Personalized learning works. And in classrooms that implement it, teachers still play an incredibly valuable role. That role is just different than the one they play now.
Teachers in personalized classrooms spend minimal time lecturing and micromanaging and instead focus on facilitating students learning on their own, from each other and with each other.
Customizing education, and the up-front costs of technology and teacher retraining, might appear cost-prohibitive. But the immediate and long-term benefits these reforms deliver are worth the investment.
Customized approaches directly target struggling students and reduce the chances they'll be held back. In total, repeated grades cost America more than $12 billion annually, according to the Brookings Institution.
Improving student engagement and performance could also increase graduation rates. And that would boost kids' likelihood of succeeding in college and the workforce. High school dropouts are 72% more likely to end up unemployed and significantly more likely to end up in jail.
Our current educational system is failing. It's time we stop fanning the flames. Customized learning offers an exciting, and economically smart place to start.
Shusterman is the founder and head of School for Tomorrow (SFT), a Silver Spring, Maryland nonprofit, independent school for grades four through 12.
