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The technology excitement continues as heavy hitting free market edvocates Terry Moe and John Chubb recite the hip research of Christensen, Johnson, and Horn’s Disrupting Class and take on Larry Cuban, the author of Over Sold and Unused: Computers in the Classroom. I have to agree with Cuban’s skepticism, I think the new technology movement as it has been forwarded by the “disruptive innovation” marketing group, really reveals the insensitive core and negligence that may underlie the opinions of some school choice edvocates. That is we would hope that the aim of education reform is education. As Chubb and Moe take the disruptive innovation side, they really, unfortunately, show themselves to be fans of market theories rather than education strategies. The memory of their legendary work on school choice is lowered significantly when they refer to Christensen’s absurd education/marketing ploy which essentially compares Apples to children:
An illuminating perspective on how these changes have come about in private industry can be found in Clayton Christensen’s work on “disruptive innovation.” Apple, for instance, successfully introduced its personal computer as a toy for children, thus not directly competing with DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and other established makers of mainframe and minicomputers. Its market was “nonconsumers”: people not being served by the big manufacturers, and for whom the alternative was nothing. In so doing, Apple did not provoke the opposition of the big boys, and personal computers soon flourished.
This is very disappointing. Like many others who have fallen in with this technology set, the two distinguished authors fail to see that they are evaluating an educational theory based not on the fact that it provides greater choice, instruction, and socialization to underprivileged children but because it is easier to sell. No one seems to see the corruption of reason represented by the alignment of Apple’s success in the market with a child’s success in school. Macintosh’s success has done very little for its consumers and quite a bit for its stock price. Deployment of an educational product is categorically different from the quality of an educational product: why should anyone need to say that? What is probably most convincing about this theory—that is, what probably convinces most people—is the notion that this product is presented as the natural and necessary commodity of the underprivileged, tactfully called “nonconsumers” above: “people not being served by the big manufacturers, and for whom the alternative was nothing.” Disruptive innovation education (DIE), being directly correlated with computers, thus installs itself as the necessary consequent of no education at all. It seems elegant, like choice, but it is not. What is it?
Indeed, the disruptive innovation business model has broad applications. Christensen and friends have thought to market their model in this way, kind of like a tonic that cures fatigue and poverty all at once. This is a sexy new market ethos, like leveraged buyouts and credit default swaps. Different from these other ideas, the education-applied model commits a fundamental error of logic—it identifies effective marketing with successful education. In a sense, the disruptive education model is perhaps the most insensitive of all innovative education ideas as it risks draining underfunded school districts, at which DIE is aimed directly, of the rest of their money. It also lets all the administrators off the hook and replaces the instructor with an automation. Empirically, automations can be deemed infallible. Failure will then shift to the children or possibly to the software company who may respond with talk about the variations between sample data and software calibration. Larry Cuban tells EdNEXT:
Schools are held publicly responsible for achieving those ends; industries are responsible to shareholders only. Second, in deciding policies, schools are accountable for democratic and public deliberations; even with recent revelations of corrupt practices among CEOs and boards of directors and meltdowns in the mortgage lending community, minimal public oversight of corporate governance currently exists.
Christensen’s model, like Moe and Chubb’s, should be considered but that is all. There is no reason to fire all the teachers because “now we know” that school teaches itself. Throughout the history of this issue, no one has ever said anything so definite about teaching. Christensen’s account and the idea of disruptive innovation has only to do with deployment. This is an infrastructural suggestion that has to do with making delivery cheaper. It has nothing to do with the cost of pedagogy which continues to be a most troubling and inestimable figure. Some scholars, in fact, have pointed to the increased costs of development associated with automated or online education. Though online education cuts overhead in the form of facilities and resource consumption, developing lessons and interface for students can be a lot of work for teachers as well as administrators. Text book companies have recently been responding to this changing demand, though the change is still unsteady.
Many who think that R&D in the education network described is a onetime cost should give this some more thought. Those who believe that once the automation is set up the initial development cost will be overtaken by the long run payroll savings should look to the general lack of a standard curriculum in our ever changing and state specific education system. Effective software will require the integration of exhaustive research with well designed user interfaces and complete content flexibility. Each state—and perhaps municipality—may have to retain a staff of programmers in order to respond to mandated curriculum changes and technical issues that have become commonplace in the American education landscape. A High school Teacher’s median salary is about $38, 646. A software engineer’s median salary is about $62,033. How many programmers could service, say, 593 school districts with 2,430 schools? The new school teachers or computer programmers, who will essentially become computer re-programmers, stand to make a killing in a DIE system.
In the end, there’s not much to say about a theory that has yet to move out of its fascinating account of deployment and to create an articulate plan for instruction. What is probably most interesting about this DIE fad is that the DIE manifesto, Disrupting Class is primarily full of provocative anecdotes that explain that this massive technology deployment is ripe to happen. However, it never really moves from the idea that this reform might happen to the idea that it should happen. It might happen. So, what?
If anything should happen, school officials like those in New Jersey should prepare but not over prepare for the wheels of progress to roll through their states. Construction projects should be forward looking and seek to integrate the most expandable technology infrastructure possible—while the money is still there. One of our contributors, AJ Kelton, has noted that “All too often, technology is tossed in at the end, once all the plans are already in motion. Everything, from network traffic to electrical supply and jack availability to standard computer hardware, needs to be planned and budgeted for at the onset and with the same maintenance considerations as other essential infrastructure” (Education is Changing Oct 23, 2008). I would go Mr. Kelton one further and recommend that schools be fitted for anything from improvements in wireless technology to new classroom response systems. Having the capability there is important. However, replacing teachers with computer lab space because you read a provocative marketing pamphlet is a bit silly, though I don’t think anyone is really doing that.
Of course I have been relating this approach to students in school zones that are undergoing improvement projects and growth. Yet,the authors suggest that “nonconsumers” of intellectual products are, oddly enough, the best consumers of this product. A more affectionate and cost wise means of educating these nonconsumers is available. Also, DIE is only a delivery plan which seems to favor the HOW of education and to ignore the WHAT—and even the WHO. Therefore, it is irresponsible and negligent to set up the animatronic teachers and walk away from the problem—though, of course, these intellectuals may not mean to do so. A magazine that has covered education technology since well before many of us had email accounts, Educause Review has often published the work of contributors who take on the practical issue of technology infrastructure or “cyber infrastructure,” an important prerequisite to a technology based shift in education. To my mind, Cyber infrastructure may mean hardware, running communications infrastructure into high poverty areas, and making computers more available to “nonconsumers.” Sounds like a good excuse for urban development. In this sense, disruptive innovation seems like a real plan. It just isn’t being discussed correctly. Educators should look upon technology with excitement but also moderation.
If you haven’t checked Edweek in the past couple of days, the online school K12 Virtual School is drawing negative publicity over its outsourcing of essays to India. Apparently an Arizona blogger named David Safier revealed this on a blog site called Blog For Arizona and directed readers to investigate their local school for the same business practices. The core issues reviewed by Edweek are the possible lapse in grading quality and the issue of the privacy of those students whose information has been sent overseas.
Having categorized his post as an “Irony Alert”, blogger Safier seems to think the charge of phoniness and lack of transparency is enough and that K12 Virtual Schools are taking their virtual students for a ride. K12 spokesperson Jeffrey Kwitowski maintains that the outsourcing was not to cut costs but rather to give virtual teachers more time with their students. Kwitowski maintains that the outsourcing, to qualified and degreed teachers of English abroad, actually costs the company more.
I say, and I’m sure many people agree, that there are easier and less perverse ways to spend more money that don’t involve sending thousands of English papers overseas. Indeed, I would have charged them twice the price if they had just come to me—what American wouldn’t!? That, however, would have been a stupid thing for a profit seeking business to have done. Yes, it is usually the case that people outsource things these days because it is in fact cheaper. Why? Well, I’d say that it is because in some other countries there is a dearth of well paying jobs and an abundance of skilled labor. Also, it’s capitalism.
Once we privatize the stuffing out of Education, rather, once McCain begins to hack away at our public school systems, prepare to see education businesses do business. Education is becoming, has become, a hollow ritual of certification. If you think an online degree will get you the job you want, go on and get it. Hire a company to certify you but don’t be surprised about common shifty American business practices like outsourcing—and really, I wonder if anyone really is.
Last month, Edweek did a story about online education, in fact about K12, called “Teachers Go to School on Online Instruction” which almost cast the movement online as the next best thing and added an almost absurd amount of complexity to the concept. Perhaps they were too charitable. And perhaps I was the only reader chuckling when they inventoried the new woes of retired and home-bound teachers who had now to learn the complexities of email, digitalized grading and viewing student statistics on a computer screen while somehow juggling the many complexities of their lives outside of work. The tasks, it seemed, were not so daunting.
So, as Kwitowski mentioned that the purpose of outsourcing tests was to free up a teacher’s time for students we ought to be asking how much free time these people need. It actually seems that, since these teachers don’t teach but rather “must forgo lectures and become more like coaches, while students, who are generally at home, have considerable latitude in directing their own learning” (“Teachers Go to School on Online Instruction”, Aug 14) what K12 pays their teachers for is nothing more than coaching and encouragement. First they banished the sage from the stage to guide thereafter from the side—K12 has now launched the guide into space, and then to India. But do not fear because the guide is back from India, Edweek reports, and K12 is done with outsourcing. It was apparently just an experiment.
By the way, if I were a noble businessman as the K12 people may be I would have either fired the American virtual faculty and left the cheerleading to telemarketer types who earn minimum wage, or cut down faculty heavily leaving only a few with the burden of professional encouragement.Is this how capitalism works? Yes, yes it is. Why are we still so shocked about this?
See David Safier’s follow up on the K12 outsourcing here
On the 12th of this month, June, The Economist ran an interesting article on technology in America. Using the results of RAND Corporation’s National Defense Research Institute report, “US Competitiveness in Science and Technology” they inferred that “the world’s brightest people are gravitating to the world’s best opportunities. A higher proportion than ever of these paragons want to make their homes in the United States.” RAND’s findings:
-America “accounts for 40% of total world spending on research and development”;
-“produces 63% of the most frequently cited [science and technology] publications”;
-“employs 70% of the world’s living Nobel laureates”;
-“scientists and engineers continue to earn on average more than non-S&E workers (about 25 percent more) and continue to have lower unemployment than the non-S&E workforce for similar levels of education. The salaries of U.S. citizens in S&E have grown in line with those of U.S. citizens in non-S&E positions, suggesting that, on average, the relative attractiveness of S&E careers has not changed much”;
-“within each percentile category of S&E salaries there is little difference between the average salaries of U.S. citizens and noncitizens […]. The similarity in salaries across the salary spectrum suggests that the quality/skill range of noncitizen S&E workers is similar to that of citizen S&E workers”;
Is the funding importance of math and science over verbal skills and literacy simply a fact of life in America? Considering RAND’s findings, science and engineering fields provide a remarkably equal opportunity for immigrants – and probably the children of immigrants – to flourish. Does American public policy owe anything to English education or will America be fine without it? Perhaps English education, literacy, verbal ability and other characteristically similar skills should be optional like art or music rather than tested and touted as standard and indicative of intelligence. Or maybe the science/verbal imbalance is fine the way it is. If you can create your own markup language or write Java code in your sleep is it so important that you can’t decide where a semicolon is appropriate or you can’t conjugate the verb “nuke”? Perhaps not.
Link to the Economist article
Link to RAND report
In the June/July 2008 issue of Miller-McCune, researchers Norman Nie and Saar Golde frame their findings in a way that finds education to be nothing more than a system of filtering, more a means of demonstrating one’s inborn talents rather than developing them. In “Does Education Really Make You Smarter?” researchers Nie and Golde found that, counter to the popular belief that there is a positive correlation between verbal ability and the level of a person’s educational attainment, when vocabulary scores over the past century were actually charted alongside levels of educational attainment the latter rose significantly while the former stayed in a plateu. This observation, say Nie and Golde, demonstrates that there is now less reason to support the popular assumption that more education is causally responsible for better scores. On the contrary, more education does not improve our verbal abilities. For the authors, it follows that particular instances of public funding dedicated to increasing educational outcomes may actually be better spent somewhere else.
As they only provide data about verbal scores, their argument is significantly limited to conjectures about verbal skills. So, in order to make their results more compelling, the authors declare verbal skills to be one of the strongest determinants of both intelligence and employability: “Verbal ability serves as the foundation for interpersonal communication and the transmission of ideas, both of which are necessary for success in the job market, and for other positive outcomes we mentioned […] There is also substantial literature asserting that verbal ability is the single most important indicator of general intelligence.” If verbal scores qua intelligence are equal to employability, it follows that class is also a function of intelligence and therefore people may be unemployed or unemployable because they are immutably stupid. The researchers, however, have not themselves produced any evidence to support this idea that verbal scores are markers of intelligence, or perhaps more concerning, that employment is a function of verbal scores.
As someone who studied English in college, I must say that I would have been much better off had I undertaken a course of computer studies and science rather than the literature and writing classes that, in the end, must only have increased the clarity and eloquence of my communications. My peers in English most often use their communication skills in the service industry, or, ironically, in education where, if we take seriously the reasoning of Nie and Golde, they teach mean things to no useful end and probably should be fired for producing low verbal scores. I often think upon my self-indulgent choice to major in the subject of English as the cause of my indelibly maimed salary. I am just as often led to dream of a better life in finance. I think about law school, a lot. What I mean to say is that vocabulary has not been a marker of competence or employability, for employers at least, for quite a while.
Nie and Golde have reported that, for a good portion of the century, verbal scores have been in a plateau while education attainment scores have increased phenomenally. It is important to note that Nie and Golde, “to avoid complications caused by changing demographics and questions about the validity of such tests with minority and immigrant populations, […] included only the native-born, white American population 30 to 65 years of age, using information collected over the last 35 years of parallel surveys.” From data collected from a sample of white Americans over 35 years, they conclude that education has no effect on verbal ability/intelligence. They fail, however, to notice that government money and attention has never been as dedicated to the purpose of raising our nation’s verbal scores as it has been to the project of our nation’s defense and that the effects of this attention have influenced the incentives for educational attainment for white Americans, minority Americans and immigrants alike. Government subsidies have been applied to education both from within, as direct departmental funding, and without, as employment opportunities in the public and private sectors. They have not noticed that the greatest increases in education were increases in government subsidy leading up to and spanning the Cold War era. For instance, in 1944 the G.I. Bill increased college enrollment exponentially and most likely fed into the growth in military and technological interests, rather than verbal scores, in various ancillary ways. Also, 14 years later, the passage of the National Defense Education Act of 1958—widely assumed to be the direct result of the launch of Russia’s Sputnik, an unprecedented technological feat—forced English/verbal related departments to play second fiddle to math and science. This move in American policy to science and technology has led to astounding technological advancement, the birth of private industries that were inconceivable only 60 years ago and significant distinction among American researchers in fields related to science and math. Since 1951, Americans have won over 50% of Nobel Prizes in math and science related fields—a significant achievement.
English verbal ability cannot compete with math and science in the realm of American education funding, however, it is interesting to see how many have used the American education system to become fluent in Russian or Arabic languages since the presidencies of FDR and Eisenhower. FYI: enrollment in Arabic language courses has gained 126% between 2002 and 2006; Chinese, 50%.
American industry has not actually prohibited the study of English but, due to a dearth of employment opportunities, it has produced generations of fairly literate gas attendants and Olive Garden waiters—all the while funding and incentivizing the fields most important to national defense and to a specific definition of progress. Said differently, little has been done to support fields which develop verbal ability.
The inequality between educational attainment and verbal scores can therefore be accounted for without the wholesale and rudimentary rejection of the link between funding education and educational outcomes. Public and private subsidy and attention have not been wholly applied, either directly as education funding or indirectly as employment opportunity, to the growth of fields for which verbal skills are important. It follows that in an environment where college has become a mere means to economic stability and national defense and where English verbal ability can provide neither of these things, there are simply no economic incentives and therefore no compelling reasons for students to develop their verbal skills. We are more than a century removed from the time when higher learning was considered an end in itself.
The most important point I wish to make is not that the authors underestimate the value of education subsidy in educational outcomes, but that they drastically overestimate the importance of verbal skills in the job market. According to The College Majors Handbook, although there have been recent increases, the average English graduate still earns 10% below the national average. Payscale.com reports that the median American salary for less than 1 year of experience in the field of Communications is $32-33,000; in Journalism, $33-34,000; in English, $34-35,000. In contrast, a Science major will begin at $40-41,000; Science/Computer Information Systems, $43-44,000; Computer Science, $48-49,000. Salary caps are understandably lower for English than for science or math-related fields.
Rather than simply assuming that verbal ability is essential to communication in the workplace, which is a correct assumption, the authors might have added the verbal scores of college graduates who make the median American salary to their data. This might have caused us to examine the true causes of the plateau in verbal ability.
If we are to assume that progress is generally dependent upon verbal ability, then we might look for a solution that enables job seekers from English/verbal backgrounds to compete with those employed based upon their backgrounds in math and science. A positive solution might be to increase the incentives for job seekers with developed verbal skills in the job market. These new incentives would add competition to this field that might help to raise mean verbal scores, more so than direct funding to English or communication departments. If these kinds of incentives existed in both public and private sectors, demand might cause better education funding to flow into these areas.
A negative solution might be to cut down the numbers employed in the science and technology related industries by somehow mandating that employees be held to a more rigorous and holistic assessment of both math and verbal abilities. This would root out people with poor verbal skills, ensure clear communication in the workplace, and indirectly raise mean verbal scores. This absurd negative solution, apart from its obvious problems, has a less apparent downside; it is not very representative of our American democracy.
Although verbal aptitude is great for communication in the workplace, it may not actually be an essential component of our modern American definition of progress. In fact, assigning it too much weight may actually have political and economic side effects. By suggesting that verbal skills have played or ought to play such a significant role in the hiring process, as Nie and Golde have suggested, we are led to absurd negative solutions like that above. Also, historically speaking, if verbal skills had been as important to employment as the authors suggest, then American industry would not have enjoyed the labor of so many highly competent first and second-generation immigrants. In turn, these immigrants would not have had a place or chance to succeed. Historically, our science and technology related industries could not afford to lose the human capital that has fueled our phenomenal success to this point. Perhaps then, verbal ability is not essential to our American definition of progress and perhaps real progress is not something that requires definition.
Popular Sovereignty 