Ricky Yean's List: STS Education Research

• The present system was designed for 19th century industrialism and it's overheating in a dangerous way. Reforming education isn't enough. The real task is transformation. America urgently needs systems of education that live and breathe in the 21st century.
• I said that the premise of the act is flawed. Actually there are three flawed premises. First, NCLB promotes a catastrophically narrow idea of intelligence and ability. The result is a terrible waste of talent and motivation in countless students. Second, it confuses standards with standardizing. The result is that schools across the country are becoming dreary and homogenized. And third, it assumes that education can be improved without the professional creativity and personal passion of teachers. The result is that too many good teachers are streaming out of the very schools that urgently need them to stay.

• This vision for the classroom of the future is not new. It's one that people have talked and dreamed about for years in a variety of forms: Students partake in interactive learning with computers and other technology devices; teachers roam around as mentors and individual learning coaches; learning is tailored to each student's differences; students are engaged and motivated.
• Schools have done what virtually every organization does when implementing an innovation. An organization's natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing operating model to sustain what it already does.

• To convey what we mean, we need to briefly explain the disruptive-innovation theory. In every market, there are two trajectories: the pace at which technology improves and the pace at which customers can utilize the improvements. Customers' needs tend to be relatively stable over time, whereas technology improves at a much faster rate. As a result, products and services are initially not good enough for the typical customer, but, over time, they improve and pack in more features and functions than customers can use.

    

  We call innovations that sustain the leading companies' trajectory in an industry sustaining innovations. Some are dramatic breakthroughs; others are routine. Airplanes that fly farther, computers that process faster, and televisions with incrementally or dramatically clearer images are all sustaining innovations.

• On occasion, however, we see a disruptive innovation. A disruptive innovation is not a breakthrough improvement. Instead of sustaining the leading companies' place in the original market, it disrupts that trajectory by offering a product or service that actually is not as good as that which companies are already selling. Because it is not as good as the existing product or service, the customers in the original market cannot use it. Instead, the disruptive innovation extends its benefits to people who, for one reason or another, are unable to consume the original product -- so-called nonconsumers.

    

  Disruptive innovations tend to be simpler and more affordable than existing products. This feature allows them to take root in simple, undemanding applications within a new market or arena of competition. Little by little, disruptions predictably improve. At some point, disruptive innovations become good enough to handle more complicated problems -- and then they take over and supplant the old way of doing things.
• There are many areas of nonconsumption within schools where this method is already taking place. For example, online learning is gaining hold in the advanced courses that many schools are unable to offer, in small, rural, and urban schools that are unable to offer breadth, in remedial courses for students who must retake courses in order to graduate, with homeschooled students and those who can't keep up with the regular schedule of school, and for those who need tutoring. Online enrollments are up from 45,000 in 2000 to 1 million today, as organizations like Florida Virtual School and Apex Learning lead the way.
• We think there will be a second stage to this disruption as well that allows users themselves to create learning software modules. A student struggling with a certain concept, or her parent or teacher, will be able to log on to a Web site where she can find a software solution that another student, parent, or teacher developed for that specific challenge. Parents and teachers will be able to diagnose why children are not learning and find customized instructional software written to help students who closely match their children in learning style. As content is used over time, users will rate it, just as they rate books on Amazon.com and movies on Netflix.

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• Many leaders of schools use the classical organizational theory of management that proposes a hierarchical top down management approach to organizing and leading. This approach has its roots deeply imbedded in the mechanistic, bureaucratic organizational theories that were endorse by organizational theorists such as Max Weber and Frederick Taylor. This theory of management helped to shape the concepts of efficiency and effectiveness needed to turn the cottage industry of the ninetieth century into the modern factory system of the twentieth century. The adoption of this bureaucratic theory using the Carnegie units of grades and specializations adopted by the modern school system has resulted in the modern factory schools where the product is the student prepared for the work force to fuel the economy.
• When the rejects or second reach a significant proportion of the population the system often switches from the factory model to the prison model and instead of preparing students for the economy we guard them from any influence on the society.
• Another much older model for school is the concept of “school as community” a learning community. This concept of school was prevalent in the Greek academies and the Roman lyceums and the monastic schools of the Middle Ages. This alternative to the factory school is widely used in many of the countries best private schools. The notion of school as a learning community is based on shared beliefs, values, and attitudes.

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• At the dawn of the 20th century, educators were faced with a huge influx of children from foreign-immigrant families and families coming to the cities from farmlands. Educators turned to America’s signature dynamo at the time, the factory, after which they modeled America’s comprehensive secondary schools.

   

  Critically important to public-school designers at the time was judicious use of tax dollars. Spending public money on other people’s children was, and still is, a dicey thing to do. Educators could not justify spending money on frills like the leafy campuses, broad course-offerings or personal attention that characterized private schools for the well-to-do. Inefficiency was not an option, because it would threaten the whole project of educating a democratic citizenry.

• The solution, as expressed by Ellwood P. Cubberly, an early 20th-century historian of education, was to create “scientific” schools that would be “factories in which the raw materials [children] are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.”

   

  High schools and junior highs — the latter were invented around 1910 — put students on a self-propelled conveyer belt that moves from classroom to classroom to get a rivet of English, a bolt-tightening of math, and so forth. To improve efficiency, schools sorted students into “tracks,” grouped according to their economic prospects — college, general, vocational. The final product at the end of the line was an educated student, which in today’s terms means acceptable test scores.

• In the late 18th and early 19th century, such "slateboards" were commonly used in schools in the United States and other countries. These small pieces of slate would be bound in a wooden frame to help strengthen the board and keep them from cracking. In those days paper was expensive and hard to come by, so these mini slate blackboards provided a good substitute.

• Much of slate mining in the United States occurred in the Northeast, places such as Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and a bit further to the South in Virginia. As Americans began to expand to the West, the new railroads were able to bring slate for blackboards from these states to schools across the Great Plains and prairie lands by the 1840's. No matter where Americans went, slate followed for use in public schools.

• As technology progressed, the old pieces of slate finally began to be replaced by chalk. The soft limestone chalk was easier to use on the boards, and easier to clean as well. The old rag erasers have been erased by new felt chalkboard erasers, which are able to absorb more of the chalk dust and keep it out of the air. The boards themselves are no longer made of slate, but instead are a steel sheet with a porcelain enamel.

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