The Big Picture

The United States was built, in no small part, by investment in education: Our common schools of the 19th century and the high school movement of the early 20th century were essential engines of economic and social progress in those eras.

Today, our education system is failing to make enough additional progress fast enough, even as the rest of the globe catches up and many nations are passing us. Our future depends on our investing and innovating in education: Education investment and innovation is the American economic development and civil rights agenda of the 21st century. And technology sits at the center of much of that investment and innovation agenda:

• Technology continues to replace jobs that require little education with jobs that require more education, raising the bar for our students.
• Technology has, famously, “flattened” the world and invited the whole world to compete with our students for those jobs – again raising the bar.
• Technology continues to change the nature of work –and of our civic and social lives – requiring changes in the skills, knowledge, and attitudes our students must learn.
• Technology continues to increase the relative cost of traditional education, by increasing productivity and driving down costs across the rest of the economy (i.e., teacher salaries become ever-higher relative to the cost of computers, and you can’t improve teacher productivity by adding more students to their classes).
• Technology has made one traditional role of teachers – information-provider – obsolete. Students can now access in seconds more information on any topic than any teacher can learn in a lifetime.
• Technology tools to support student learning increasingly “think” and act, offering legitimate alternatives to teacher-driven and even teacher-led instruction.
• Technology offers many ways to improve the productivity and reduce the costs of education, including: operational efficiencies (bus routing, environmental controls, purchasing and supply management, etc.); automating transactions and information management; shifting work to students and parents, replacing textbooks and supplementary materials with “open curriculum” resources from the web.
• Technology is forcing and supporting changes in the way schools and their supporting organizations are run and even in the way they themselves are organized. It does this by changing what students need and what teachers do (as explained above), and it provides new ways to get things done.

We don’t know the details of what will come of all of this. We do know change is real and appears to be accelerating on every front, even as the demands on schools increase and the need for more resources becomes more acute. And we know the three central themes are: A shift from what’s taught to what’s learned, the use of technology to personalize the process and empower stakeholders, and the opportunity to use technology to increase efficiency and effectiveness across the board. SchoolOne works on the cutting edge of many of these issues every day, and offers this blog as a place to talk about the specific daily challenges that face schools as they work to create the future.