American education both costs far too much, and achieves far too little. "Liberating Education" markets itself as a cure for both, but at this point credibly only offers progress on reducing costs. However, it also provides useful up-to-date data on how inadequate our education system continues to perform, reminding readers of the need for substantial change.
Moe and Chubb's focus is on communicating how online technology enables students anywhere to take any course they like, from the best instructors in the world, and to customise that learning to their own schedules, interests, and academic growth. Internet-supported learning also allows teachers more time to respond to student questions and work, and they can typically support 4-5 students doing so at a time. The teachers also have greater flexibility of hours, and can work part of the time at home. Meanwhile, administrators are much better able to objectively evaluate teachers and learning programs/textbooks. In 2006, nearly 750,000 pupils completed courses online. The authors then reinforce their points through examples from India and the U.S.
National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests have been used since 1969 to evaluate U.S. student progress. The authors summarize some of the data to compare performance of 12th graders from 1990-96 to 2005-07 in reading, science, and history. Reading performance fell from 37 to 34 (percentage achieving expected performance), science from 21 to 17, and history from 10 to 2. Mathematics comparisons were not possible due to changes in the test. Meanwhile, the high-school on-time graduation rate in 2003 was 70%, down from 72% in 1991. So much for more than doubling the inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending over the last three decades.
Meanwhile, international comparisons continue to show the U.S. performing relatively poorly - even when focusing on the highest achievers (95th percentile pupils in each nation) or highest socioeconomic groups. Wait - there's even more - Japanese graduate students are 4X as likely as Americans to major in science and engineering! (Similarly for Chinese students.)
Why are we still in this situation - after all, "A Nation at Risk" pointed out these same basics some 26 years earlier! Moe and Chubb lay the blame squarely on American teachers' unions - among the top five political campaign contributors in most states, and #1 in many. ("Liberating Learning" also points out that 90% of their contributions go to Democrats.)
What about Bush 43's "No Child Left Behind?" Moe and Chubb believe it has simply become window-dressing. We now have 51 accountability systems conforming to NCLB, but no mechanism to weed out mediocre teachers, student performance data is not used to evaluate or pay teachers, and schools rarely suffer sanctions.
"Liberating Learning's" Achilles heel is that it is almost totally devoid of pupil achievement data supporting their proposals. Two examples were offered, but both are suspect: 1)Identifying the impact of "good" teachers on NYC pupil performance - "Huge - half a point on a 4 point testing scale." Unfortunately, that is meaningless without knowing anything about the testing scale used. (Moe and Chubb also allege that most Chinese teachers are poorly prepared, yet their pupils outscore ours regularly - eg. teacher characteristics are unimportant. Sorry, you can't have it both ways.) 2)Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School students scored 97 points higher than the state average. Here, we lack assurance that the pupil characteristics involved were equal.
Online charter schools employ 2-3 teachers/100 students, vs. 6.8 in public schools. They also require far less in bricks and mortar, and utilities, etc. Thus, an opportunity to reduce costs by billions and billions.
What about improving quality? International comparisons also show that foreign pupils, especially in Asia, work far harder than in the U.S. A longer school day, school year, and more homework. That would explain why American performance vs. other nations starts out well, and steadily deteriorates with ascending grade levels. It's also a key to KIPP's successes. Thus, we need to work both smarter (Moe and Chubb) and harder (KIPP, China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea).
