Will education technology · technology. Twenty years ago, this duo coauthored the debate-changing Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. Their new book, Liberating Learning:

www.educationnext.org W I N T E R 2 0 0 9 / EDUCATION NEXT 43

forum

EDUCATION NEXT: How likely is itthat technology will make advancesin education in the next decade thatgo far beyond any changes that havetaken place in the past?

John Chubb and Terry Moe: The world-wide revolution in information technologyhas globalized the international economy,made communication virtually instantaneous

and costless, put vast storehouses of informa-tion within reach of everyone on the planet,and in countless other ways transformed howlife is lived. Technology is destined to trans-form American education as well. The driverof change is simple enough: technology hasenormous benefits for the learning process,and they promise to change the nature ofschooling and heighten its productivity. Cur-ricula, teaching methods, and schedules can

Will education technology change the nature of learning?

VirtualSchools

Education Nexttalks to

JOHN CHUBB,

TERRY MOE,

and

LARRY CUBAN

JOHN CHUBB

Can new education technologies short-circuit change-resistant politics and

remake our schools? Or are well-intended advocates once again overhyping the abil-

ity of electrons and processors to solve thorny problems of teaching and learning?

In this Education Next forum, John Chubb of Edison Schools and Stanford Univer-

sity political scientist Terry Moe make the case for the transformative power of today’s

technology. Twenty years ago, this duo coauthored the debate-changing Politics,

Markets, and America’s Schools. Their new book, Liberating Learning: Technology,

Politics, and the Future of American Education, lays out a bold vision of the future.

A more skeptical view of technology’s potential impact on education is offered by

Larry Cuban, professor emeritus of education at Stanford University and author

of Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom. TERRY MOE

ILLUSTRATION / THIRD EYE IMAGES, LONNIE BUSCH/CONRAD ZOBEL

LARRY CUBAN

all be customized to meet the learning stylesand life situations of individual students;education can be freed from the geographicconstraints of districts and brick-and-mor-tar buildings; coursework from the mostremedial to the most advanced can be madeavailable to everyone; students can havemore interaction with teachers and oneanother; parents can readily be includedin the education process; sophisticated datasystems can measure and guide perfor-mance; and schools can be operated atlower cost with technology (which is rela-tively cheap) substituted for labor (whichis relatively expensive).

But the advance of technology is alsothreatening to powerful education groups,and they will resist it in the political process.Precisely because technology promises totransform the core components of school-ing, it is inevitably disruptive to the jobs, rou-tines, and resources of the people whoselivelihoods derive from the existing system.And these people are represented by orga-nizations—most prominently, the teachers

unions—that are extraordinarily powerful inpolitics, and are even now taking action toprevent technology from transformingAmerican education.

Such resistance is not new. Technology isjust the latest target of their politics of block-ing. The key question is whether this resis-tance can be overcome. And the answer, as wewill later explain, is yes. Technology is goingto have transformative effects not only oneducation, but also on politics—effects thatwill weaken the opponents of change andopen the political gates. This is the real cruxof the story. In the years ahead, it is the polit-ical transformation that will make the edu-cational transformation possible.

Larry Cuban: Technology is linked toprogress in the American mind and has arich history in the culture. Because bothpublic and private schooling have beendeeply embedded in society for the pastthree centuries, educational technology (bywhich I mean the various communicationand information devices and processes that

44 EDUCATION NEXT / W I N T E R 2 0 0 9 www.educationnext.org

Technology is going to have

transformativeeffects not only

on education, butalso on politics—

effects that willweaken the

opponents of change and open

the political gates.

— JC and TM

Virtual School,Real Growth (Figure 1)

The Florida Virtual Schoolhas seen course enroll-ments grow dramatically,from 77 at its 1997 incep-tion to 113,900 courseenrollments in the2007–08 school year.While nonpublic schoolstudents account for mostmiddle-school enrollments,the much larger enroll-ment in high schoolcourses is driven by publicschool students.

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ED TECH CHUBB, MOE, & CUBAN

NOTE: Values are based on pooled enrollment data from the 2004–05 and the 2005–06 school years.

SOURCES: Florida Taxwatch

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U.S. school reformers have

a tradition of overselling and

underusing technological innovations.

— LC

administrators and teachers use to makeschooling efficient and effective) also has arich history (e.g., textbooks, chalkboard,film, radio, computers).

U.S. school reformers have a traditionof overselling and underusing technologicalinnovations. Thus the chances of widespreadadoption in schools of new classroom tech-nologies in the next decade are in the 70 to90 percent probability range, but the prob-ability of routine use in most schools forinstruction is much lower, in the 10 to 20percent range. Through social networks ofpolicymakers, researchers, practitioners, andtech promoters, pace-setting urban and sub-urban districts adopt innovations and thenadapt them to fit the local context and goals.Over time, laggards go through the sameprocess, retaining parts of the innovation,and then move on to the next one. In pub-lic schools, changes occur piecemeal andincrementally. Regardless of what technolog-ical enthusiasts predict, no “revolutions” intechnology use have occurred in U.S. schoolsand classrooms. But evolution does.

EN: What can we learn from tech-nological adoption in education inthe past?

LC: In tracking such technological innova-tions as film, radio, television, videocas-settes, and desktop computers over the pasthalf century, I found a common cycle. First,the promoters’ exhilaration splashes overdecisionmakers as they purchase and deployequipment in schools and classrooms. Thenacademics conduct studies to determine theeffectiveness of the innovation as comparedto standard practice; they survey teachersand occasionally visit classrooms to see stu-dent and teacher use of the innovation. Aca-demics often find that the technologicalinnovation is just as good as—seldom supe-rior to—conventional instruction in con-veying information and teaching skills. Theyalso find that classroom use is less thanexpected. Formal adoption of high-techinnovations does not mean teachers havetotal access to devices or use them on a dailybasis. Such studies often unleash stinging

rebukes of administrators and teachers forspending scarce dollars on expensivemachinery that fails to display superiorityover existing techniques of instruction and,even worse, is only occasionally used.

Few earnest champions of classroomtechnology understand the multiple andcomplicated roles teachers perform, addressthe realities of classrooms within age-gradedschools, respect teacher expertise, or con-sider the practical questions teachers askabout any technological innovation that aschool board and superintendent decide toadopt, buy, and deploy. Is the new technol-ogy simple to use? Versatile? Reliable?Durable? How much energy and time willI as a teacher have to expend to use the newtechnology for what net return in enhancedstudent learning? Will the innovation helpme solve problems that I face in the class-room? Providing teachers with economicor organizational incentives to use technol-ogy won’t answer these practical questions.Were policymakers, researchers, designers ofthe innovation, and business-inspiredreformers to ask and then consider answers

to these questions, perhaps the predictablecycle might be interrupted.

JC and TM: It is a mistake to view previ-ous technological innovations—television,say—as telling indicators of how informa-tion technology will affect the nation’sschool system. Yes, television has done lit-tle to change public education. And yes, thefailure to put it to more creative uses doeshighlight how weak the incentives areamong educators for throwing off the chainsof tradition.

But television is a simple, one-way con-veyor of information that allows for no inter-action or input. Its potential for educationwas limited from the outset. The fact is, tele-vision and other technological innovationsof the past are in a different league—by manyorders of magnitude—from the revolution ininformation technology. This revolution isnot a reform. It is a new social reality.

Today’s public educators are part of soci-ety. They want to use computers and mod-ernize their schools, and evidence suggeststhey have been moving in this direction.


Technological innovations of

the past are in a different league—by many orders of

magnitude—fromthe revolution in

information technology.

—JC and TM

College Students Learning Online (Figure 2)

The percentage of students at U.S. postsecondary institutions taking at least one online coursedoubled between 2002 and 2006.

SOURCE: I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, “Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning,” Babson Survey Research Group, October 2007

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But absent competitive pressure, they haveincentives to make only the most incremen-tal of changes, those that don’t threaten any-one’s jobs or disrupt established routines.Their approach to information technologyis rooted in the status quo: it is about mak-ing the existing system work better withoutreally changing it. In the new social reality,however, this isn’t going to cut it. There willbe competition. There will be pressure. Therewill be change.

EN: What, if anything, can we learnfrom the processes of technologicalchange in other industries?

JC and TM: Dramatic advances in infor-mation technology have transformed theproducts we buy and the business firms thatmake them. An illuminating perspective onhow these changes have come about in pri-vate industry can be found in Clayton Chris-tensen’s work on “disruptive innovation.”Apple, for instance, successfully introducedits personal computer as a toy for children,thus not directly competing with DEC (Dig-ital Equipment Corporation) and otherestablished makers of mainframe and mini-computers. Its market was “nonconsumers”:people not being served by the big manufac-turers, and for whom the alternative wasnothing. In so doing, Apple did not pro-voke the opposition of the big boys, andpersonal computers soon flourished.

In Disrupting Class, Christensen andcoauthors Curtis Johnson and Michael Hornargue that technology will triumph in pub-lic education in the same way. Virtual schools,for example, can offer AP physics or remedialmath or Mandarin or whatever else localdistricts are not offering. And they can caterto constituencies—students who are gifted,live in rural or inner city areas, need extracredits for graduation, and so on—that areunderserved by the current system. In sodoing, virtual schools can compete againstnothing (see “How Do We Transform OurSchools,” features, Summer 2008). Andbecause of budget constraints and parent-stu-dent demand, districts and states will wel-come these new suppliers and won’t see themas threats to be snuffed out (see Figure 1).

We agree that these forces will allow vir-tual schools to get a foothold in public edu-cation, and thus that there is something tolearn from private industry. But public edu-cation is part of government, and is not sub-ject to the competitive dynamics of the mar-ketplace. The teachers unions and their allieswill be wary of contracting out educationalservices, even to help groups that are cur-rently underserved, because they know whereit all leads. Their incentive is to resist. Andthey will try to use their power to keep thelid on, and maintain control over, the num-bers and types of cyberschools that can moveinto the field. That’s why, in the end, it allcomes down to politics—and whether theopponents can block.

LC: Manufacturing, banking, and commu-nications are a few of the industries thathave been transformed technologically.While public schools and such industrieshave common characteristics (e.g., leaders,headquarters staff who coordinate and con-trol people, bureaucratic rules, planning forthe future, building budgets, providing ser-vices), they differ in substantial and funda-mental ways. First, their purposes differ.Industries seek profit while tax-supportedschools are expected to convert children intoadults who are literate, law abiding, engagedin their communities, informed about issues,economically independent, and respectfulof differences among Americans. Schoolsare held publicly responsible for achievingthose ends; industries are responsible toshareholders only. Second, in deciding poli-cies, schools are accountable for democra-tic and public deliberations; even with recentrevelations of corrupt practices among CEOsand boards of directors and meltdowns inthe mortgage lending community, minimalpublic oversight of corporate governancecurrently exists. Finally, the criteria for suc-cess differ. Businesses have earning reportsand stock prices as measures of success;schools seeking multiple purposes—seeabove—are expected to show immediate,midterm, and long-term results, many ofwhich are hardly reducible to numbers.

One industry that is outside of K–12education yet similar to it in its multiple

Few earnest champions

of classroom technology

understand the multiple and

complicated rolesteachers perform.

—LC

public purposes and has unreservedlyembraced computer-based technologies ishigher education (see Figure 2). Becausehigher education is not compulsory andadults enroll voluntarily in colleges and uni-versities, market incentives come into play.Colleges and universities look for a com-petitive edge that will give them an advan-tage in their market niche. Both public andprivate institutions seek to attract studentsand faculty and increase their prestige amongsimilarly situated schools. Moreover, highereducation is largely nonunion.

Whereas some of these institutions go forthe working adult market (e.g., University ofPhoenix) with extensive online course offer-ings, most colleges and universities remainresearch and teaching organizations withonline courses that are marginal to theircore operations. Still, nearly every professorand student has at least one computer avail-able daily (many have two or more). Foruniversities and four-year colleges, comput-ers have transformed academic research andanalysis in the natural and social sciences,humanities, and professional schools.

The puzzle is teaching, which has notbeen transformed. Classroom instructionfor large groups of students (25 or more)across community colleges, state universities,and elite institutions differs little from whatoccurs in secondary public schools. Thatfact suggests that even with abundant accessto new technologies, competitive marketpressures, no union interference, and enor-mous encouragement from institutionalpolicymakers, constancy in patterns of teach-ing sets the education context apart fromthose industries that have experienced top-to-bottom technological transformation.

EN: Do you think that technologicalchange is likely to increase signifi-cantly the amount of home school-ing? Why or why not?

LC: Cyberschools and distance educationhave increasingly connected isolated ruralstudents and home-schooled children toteachers and resources that were heretoforeunavailable to them. Slight increases in homeschooling may occur—say from 1.1 million

students in 2003 to 2 or 3 million by the endof the decade. The slight uptick would be dueto both the availability of technology and afar broader menu of choices for parents.Online college curricula and offerings fromfor-profit entrepreneurs give home-school-ing, anxious college-driven, and rural par-ents new options. Even though cheerleadersfor distance learning have predicted whole-sale changes in conventional site-basedschools for decades, such changes will occurat the periphery, not the center. Most parentswill continue to send their children to brick-and-mortar public schools and expect thoseschools to achieve the many goals men-tioned above. I do not predict that mosthigh school students will enroll in onlineschools. Yes, many will take a course here andthere, but the comprehensive high schoolin most suburban districts and prolifera-tion of small high schools in urban systemswill continue to enroll the vast majority ofeligible teenagers.

JC and TM: With the advance of technol-ogy, home schooling is destined toincrease—and decrease. It will increasebecause distance learning will offer a vastarray of new opportunities, and learningfrom “home”—from anywhere but theschool building—will gain dramatically inpopularity. Many more students will takeall their classes through virtual schools. Butmore important, the great majority of Amer-ican students will ultimately choose to takesome of their classes remotely and somethrough brick-and-mortar schools.

On the other hand, far fewer kids will behome schooled in the traditional sense. Inthe past, home schooling meant that parentstaught their kids at home. But in the com-ing years, almost all the kids who studyentirely “at home” actually will be “going toschool”: schools that have well-developedcurricula and bona fide teachers and admin-istrators, but operate at a distance.

In the future, then, home schooling as weknow it will largely cease to exist, and theboundaries between learning at home andpublic schooling will essentially break down.American education will become a blend of“home schooling”—differently construed—


In the future, American educationwill become a blendof “home schooling”

—differently construed—and

brick-and-mortarpublic schooling.

—JC and TM


forum


and brick-and-mortar public schooling. Moststudents will do some of their academiccoursework outside the brick-and-mortarsetting—making home schooling a verymainstream activity—and traditional homeschoolers will be more fully integrated into thelarger education system (see “Home School-ing Goes Mainstream,” features, p. 10).

All of this will be resisted by the unionsand their allies, because today’s home school-ers are not part of current education budgets,and as they join the system they are competi-tors for scarce resources. But long term, astechnology changes the balance of politicalpower, the resistance will fail.

EN: Are charter schools, privateschools, or afterschool programslikely to adopt innovations morerapidly than traditional districtschools?

JC and TM: The early adopters will arisefrom outside the traditional public schoolsystem. Most important are charter schoolsthat deliver education entirely over the Inter-net. Nearly 200 of these virtual schools havealready sprung up in 19 states, serving almost200,000 students, and the trajectory issharply upward. Some individual schoolshave grown spectacularly fast, such as PACyber, which enrolls 8,000 students onlyeight years after opening.

As students enroll in cybercharters, theystimulate a growing market for more andbetter online technologies and content.They also put competitive pressure on tra-ditional public schools to innovate or losestudents and revenue. These high-tech new-comers add to the competitive pressurealready created by some 4,000 brick-and-mortar charters operating in 40 states,broadening the constituency for charterschools beyond families disaffected withinner-city public schools.

Competition from early adopters, cou-pled with performance pressures arisingfrom accountability reforms, will force allschools—including private schools andlow-tech charter schools resting on theirlaurels—to consider technological solu-tions. Change will not be even or uniform.

It will occur faster and more consequentiallyin districts and states where unions areweak, where parent demand and involve-ment are high, where unmet needs aregreatest, and where budgets are tightly con-strained. But as the tide begins to rise, andas the balance of power in politics begins toshift with it, the other districts and stateswill eventually follow.

LC: Except for those public charter schools,magnets, and theme-driven schools thatadvertise themselves as using technology,including those operated by for-profit andnonprofit organizations such as High TechHigh, Edison, and Mosaica, I have not foundcharter or private schools (a highly diversesector made up of elite independents andsectarian and nonsectarian schools) moreopen (or closed) to technological innova-tions than public schools. Increased compe-tition from charter schools may have mod-est to strong effects in urban districts (butnot suburban or rural ones), where a criti-cal mass (one-third or more) of studentsattend these schools full-time. The samerationale for adoption of computers (e.g.,improve achievement, transform teachingand learning, and as preparation for an ever-changing labor market) prevails across pub-lic and private school sectors. The criticalissues remain teacher involvement in deci-sions about buying and using devices andavailable funding, rather than openness totechnological innovation. Afterschool pro-grams are another category, since they aretangential to regular public schools and oftenuse technology as an inducement to get stu-dents through the door once the last school-day bell rings.

EN: How much of schooling cantechnology really displace?

LC: It is a mistake to assume that if schoolsjust adopt classroom technologies, acade-mic achievement will improve, teaching willchange dramatically, and students will bebetter prepared for the 21st-century work-place. Evidence for each reason to adopttechnology is at best skimpy and at worstmissing altogether.

The bedrock ofschooling remainsan organizational

structure introducedin the mid-19th

century: the age-graded school, where

each teacher has her classroom and

students of roughlythe same age have tolearn a chunk of the

curriculum beforebeing promoted

to the next grade. —LC

Many administrative activities can be (andhave been) computerized (e.g., purchasing,scheduling, accounting, personnel data).Collecting student performance data andmaking it easily and readily available toteachers and principals has potential fordelivering lessons and individual help tostudents “just in time.” But to achieve theimportant purposes of tax-supported pub-lic schooling, especially in urban districts, thebedrock of schooling remains an organiza-tional structure introduced in the mid-19thcentury: the age-graded school, where eachteacher has her classroom and students ofroughly the same age have to learn a chunkof the curriculum before being promoted tothe next grade.

Advances in new technologies havehardly made a dent in this permanent struc-ture. Charters, for-profit schools, cyber-schools, and private schools embrace thesame organizational format. All of the pre-dictions for a technological Nirvana assumethat the age-graded school will melt away. Ithasn’t so far because strong social beliefsabout schooling and deeply embedded polit-ical and economic structures keep it alive andkicking. It is within the age-graded schoolthat the individual teacher’s knowledge, skillrepertoire, and experience matter in con-necting to her students. That relationshipcontinues to be the moral, social, and cog-nitive centerpiece for teaching and learningto occur and cannot be replaced bymachines, however cleverly constructed.Until the age-graded school and fundingmechanisms change, the use of new tech-nologies for classroom instruction willremain peripheral.

JC and TM: Technology will do more thanbring high-quality information to bear on theeducation process. It will change the educa-tion process itself, transforming and some-times replacing the role of the teacher, andaltering the core means of instruction. Mostschools of the future will be hybrids, with stu-dents still taught by teachers in classroom set-tings—for parts of the day. But students willspend much more time learning directly andoften remotely through technology. Youngstudents will require more personal attention.

But as students grow up and gain the skillsto work independently, the time with tech-nology will increase and the time with teach-ers will decrease.

Technology will differentiate segments ofthe learning process. Teachers will often be thefirst source of instruction, helping kids mas-ter core concepts and skills. Then, technologywill provide customized remediation for stu-dents not able to grasp the core and acceler-ation for students ready for specialized andenriching extensions. Programs to teach liter-acy skills, from the essentials of decoding onup, already exist. So, too, do programs to teachmath skills, from basic to advanced. Moreeffective differentiation means narrower gapsin achievement. It also means a far greaternumber and variety of course options—AP,IB, and even university-sponsored—availableto all kids, regardless of the community inwhich they live: technology as equity.

For some students, particularly thosewho are older, who have special learningneeds or academic interests, or whose sched-ules or locations make it difficult for themto attend brick-and-mortar schools, the coreinstructional process will be online. Schoolcommunities, with lots of interaction amongstudents and teachers, will be built virtually.Brick-and-mortar schools will be very dif-ferent places than they are today: using moretechnology, staffed by fewer but more ableteachers, working with much better informa-tion, and delivering instruction bettermatched to student needs.

EN: What are the most promisinginnovations in education technology?

LC: Since the 1990s, school boards and super-intendents have generally moved swiftly toadopt technological enhancements to admin-istrative functions by placing them onlineand automating many routine procedures.The collection of individual student achieve-ment data is now possible technologically,and its dissemination to teachers swiftly offersmany opportunities for intervention, reme-dial work, and enrichment. For classroominstruction, many school boards have alsoadopted interactive whiteboards, studentclickers, and handheld devices for teachers and


Brick-and-mortarschools will be very

different places thanthey are today: using

more technology,staffed by fewer butmore able teachers,working with muchbetter information,

and deliveringinstruction better

matched to student needs. —JC and TM

students to collect data for field projects or forwhat is happening in a classroom. Somehighly motivated individual teachers havecreated imaginative uses of computers forstudents to learn. Such efforts are promisinginnovations that can incrementally improveteaching and learning. For-profit schools,that is, schools run by businesses (e.g., Edi-son Schools), often give students and teach-ers abundant access to machines and integratetechnology use in their overall school design.

The majority of public school teachers,however, view technological innovations asburdensome add-ons. Teachers need to bedirectly (not as tokens) involved in adoptingand using technological innovations and inestablishing on-site technical assistance andfacilitating teachers-helping-teachers useexisting technologies in daily lessons (e.g.,Apple Classroom of Tomorrow experiencein the 1980s and 1990s; Berkeley [CA]Teacher Led Technology Challenge projectin the late 1990s). Such involvement canlead to teachers creatively integrating theinnovation into routine classroom instruc-tion. Unfortunately, this approach remainsdistant from the current mind-set amongpolicy elites and vendors anxious about get-ting new devices into classrooms.

JC and TM: The most promising innova-tions can be grouped into two broad cate-gories, instruction and information. As itis, schools are universally organized for kidsto get all of their instruction in classes of 20to 30 led by a teacher. Technology is treatedas an add-on to this structure. Elementarykids typically visit a computer lab once aweek. A few computers also sit at the backsof classrooms, for kids to use, if time allows,after the teacher is finished teaching the corelesson. At the secondary level, computersare largely for word processing and Internetresearch and have little to do with corecourses. It need not be this way.

Every educator knows that kids need indi-vidual help. Each student is not going tounderstand material through the same pre-sentation, with the same exercises, or at thesame pace. Technology can teach from mul-tiple angles and with multimedia—anima-tion, simulation, online teachers—and very

interactively, with students constantly engagedand providing input. Technology can cus-tomize instruction literally for every student.Kids could have substantial amounts of cus-tomized remediation or acceleration, andeven entire courses. Education could be dra-matically differentiated.

Until recently, schools were in the StoneAge of information—knowing almost noth-ing about the achievement of their studentsor the success of teachers in promoting it.Today, accountability systems require annualstudent testing in reading and math, andprovide objective and reliable (if limited)measures at least once a year. Moreover, tech-nology is fast making it feasible to monitorstudent progress with online assessmentsthat can be integrated with curriculathroughout the school year. Information sys-tems can help teachers adjust their instruc-tion on the fly, reteaching skills that haven’tbeen learned, easing up on skills that studentsmaster quickly, and customizing by student.

Administrators can become more effec-tive as well. Information systems can imme-diately show principals and district officialswhich classrooms are succeeding and whichare struggling, which parts of the curriculumare being learned and which are going overkids’ heads. Sophisticated statistical pro-grams can help administrators draw vitalinferences about the learning process, espe-cially about the extent to which each teacheris providing “value-added” to students (afterallowing for differences in student back-grounds and other influences on learningthat teachers can’t control). As informationbecomes available, it will be impossible toignore, even if it speaks the unspeakablesecret that some teachers are highly effectiveand others are not. As schools are forced todeal with the truth—and pressured toimprove—students will benefit.

EN: What role will school boards andteachers unions play in using tech-nology to reform schools? In short,what are the politics of adoptingtechnology?

LC: The politics of adopting new tech-nologies remain a top-down (school board


forum


The majority of public school

teachers view technological

innovations as burdensome

add-ons. —LC


and superintendent), elite-driven (civicand business leaders, vendors) operationlargely determined by the district’s historyof innovation, available resources, andresponsiveness to key stakeholders. Unionshave played a largely peripheral role ineither endorsing (some union chaptershave gotten district approval for schools inwhich new technologies are central) oropposing classroom technological inno-vations (cybercharter schools, for example).School boards and parents, however, willfight efforts to substitute machines forteachers, even when champions of reduc-ing labor costs dress up the purchase of newtechnologies as overall savings and a tech-nological Utopia. They will resist suchmoves because they see the purposes ofpublic schools as more than efficiency andworking to bolster a growing economythrough supplying skilled graduates.

JC and TM: Unions will resist technology.Their mission is to protect the jobs of teach-ers in the regular public schools, and realtechnological change—which outsourceswork to distant locations, allows studentsand money to leave, substitutes capital forlabor, and in other ways disrupts the exist-ing job structure—is a threat to the securityand stability that the unions seek. Fordecades, the unions and their allies havebeen the major obstacles to educationreform, regularly using their formidablepolitical power to block or weaken thereforms they do not like, from accountabil-ity to school choice to pay for performance.No surprise, then, that they are alreadyworking to kill or limit virtual charters, andto ensure that technology fits neatly intothe status quo.

But this time they won’t succeed. Tech-nology has a far-reaching capacity to trans-form politics. As distance learning prolifer-ates, for example, teachers will be lessgeographically concentrated in districts,considerably more dispersed, and muchmore difficult for unions to organize. Thesubstitution of technology for labor willlower the demand for teachers. The teach-ing profession will become much more

diversified and less conducive to samenessand solidarity. There will be many newschools and a dramatic increase in choiceand competition. All these developments,operating together in mutually reinforcingways, will work to sap the organizationalstrength of the teachers unions, underminetheir political power, and weaken their abil-ity to block in the policy process. As they areless and less able to block them, reforms ofall kinds—not just those that are high tech—will begin to flow through.

School boards are a bit more nuanced.They clearly do not want to lose studentsand revenue to cyberschools or othersources of competition. Many board mem-bers are also beholden to the unions, whichare influential in local elections, and schoolboards have regularly joined forces withthe unions—in the courts and state legis-latures—to oppose competitive threats. Yetschool boards in districts with especiallyactive parents, weak unions, limited bud-gets, and kids whose needs are going unmetmay have incentives to embrace techno-logical change and become early adopters.In rare cases, school boards may see that, byacting entrepreneurially, they can set uptheir own cybercharters and win over stu-dents and revenue from other districts,thus using competition to make themselvesbetter off; indeed, a small number of dis-tricts around the country (in Pennsylvaniaand Wisconsin, for example) are alreadyblazing this trail.

Technology is a double-barreled agent ofchange. It generates the innovations thatmake change attractive, and at the sametime it undermines the political resistancethat would normally prevent change fromhappening. There will be struggles and set-backs, and the process will take decades.But the forces of resistance will ultimatelybe overcome, and American educationtransformed. This will mean real improve-ment for the nation, its children, and itsschools. It will also bring the dawning of anew era in which education politics is moreopen, productive changes are more readilyembraced, and learning is liberated fromthe dead hand of the past. �

Unions will resisttechnology.

Their mission is toprotect the jobs of

teachers in the regular public

schools. —JC and TM

School boards andparents will fight

efforts to substitutemachines for

teachers, even whenchampions of

reducing labor costsdress up the purchase

of new technologiesas overall savings

and a technologicalUtopia.

—LC

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RECENT RESEARCH FROM THE CATO INSTITUTE

“Markets vs. Monopolies in Education: A Global Review of theEvidence,” BY ANDREW J. COULSON. SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

B U Y Y O U R C O P Y A T B O O K S T O R E S N A T I O N W I D E ,B Y C A L L I N G 1 - 8 0 0 - 7 6 7 - 1 2 4 1 , O R V I S I T I N G C A T O . O R G

“The Fiscal Impact of a Large-Scale Education Tax Credit Program,” BY ANDREW J. COULSON. JULY 1, 2008

“Dismal Science: The Shortcomings of U.S. School Choice Researchand How to Address Them,” BY JOHN MERRIFIELD. APRIL 16, 2008

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Will education technology · technology. Twenty years ago, this duo coauthored the debate-changing Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. Their new book, Liberating Learning:

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