Customer Reviews

Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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).

I think the disparate reviews reflect the preconceived views that readers are bringing to the book.

To grossly simplify the current education debate, on one side you have supporters of teachers unions who believe they can incrementally improve K-12 education within its current structure of political control. This side tends to support greater funding, changes in curriculum, smaller class sizes etc... while opposing more fundamental reform. For this side, the largest problem with education is funding.

On the other side you have those that see the system as fundamentally broken, riddled with poor incentives for success. This side wants to find ways to radically increase competition and choice in the structure of schools. This side supports charter schools, school vouchers, performance linked pay, rewards for success and consequences for failure. For this side, the largest problem with K-12 education is the structure of K-12 public schools and the teachers' unions die hard opposition to real reform.

If you're in the second camp, you'll likely love this book. If you're firmly in the first camp, you'll likely disagree with it. If you're unsure and/or open to persuasion, this book might convince you of the potential for technology to deliver quality education outside of the structure of many of our failed public schools, rendering many of the old political wars over education irrelevant.

Rarely have I ever read a book so consistent with my own thinking on the same subject. Here, of course, the subject is the evolving role of online instruction in K-12 education.

Over the past six years I have worked in this same field as a small entrepreneur ([...]) developing business plans, services, etc. and I am amazed that I find nothing to criticize in "Liberating Learning."

But I would come across as too much of a sycophant if I could not offer just a little adverse commentary.

One of the chapters, entitled "The Politics of Blocking," could have been followed by a chapter on the strategies for unblocking. Sometimes battles that can't be won inside a bureaucracy can be won on private turf- much in the way Federal Express took on the Post Office. If private educational alternatives can be made sufficiently inexpensive, then they may gain market share and grow without much political interference. Thus I would be somewhat more optimistic than the authors regarding the time frame for overcoming the "inertia" in our educational systems.

I also believe that assessment systems may be the Achilles Tendon of public education. The corruption within most of them should be relatively easy to expose and publicize. That, in turn, may drive customers towards alternatives and/or put more political pressure on the public systems.

Maybe Moe & Chubb will write a sequel or second edition. That would be a good opportunity for them to extend the content of their excellent book.

WHAT I LIKED ABOUT THE BOOK

Moe and Chubb's book can be summarized by two quotations from page 145:

1. "To the powers that be, innovations of true consequence are not attractive. They are threatening - and they need to be stopped, whatever advantages they might offer to children and the nation's education system. That is why, in state after state, what we see . . . [is] political action by the defenders of the system - mainly the unions - to defuse change and keep the system pretty much as it is."

2. "There is . . . something unique about technology that sets it apart from the other sources of education reform. It is a social force that is essentially out of control. No one is in charge of it. No one can really stop it."

Chapters 3 and 5 elaborate most fully on the first premise. Chapter 6 is where the authors explain most of their second premise. I agree with the authors' assertion that technology is "an exogenous social force that originates from outside the education system, is transforming nearly every aspect of American . . . life, and will keep transforming it in the decades ahead." (p. 151)

I liked the authors' discussions of both virtual schooling and data-informed teacher evaluation. I didn't always agree with what the authors said on these topics but they gave me much food for thought.

I also appreciated learning more about the two charter schools in Dayton, Ohio that the authors profiled. I'd like to learn more about those schools' day-to-day operations in order to get a better sense of the students' experience.

The authors gave me LOTS to think about in this book. Several of their perspectives on educational technology are ones to which I hadn't given much attention. I'm not informed enough yet to have a definite opinion about some of their assertions, but at least I now know that I've got some new cognitive roads to travel.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE ABOUT THE BOOK

I was really excited to read this book after Chapter 1, which was a short, 12-page introduction. Chapter 2 was fine (and expected): a restatement of international test results and other indicators of American schools' current struggles. Then I read Chapter 3, which was essentially a 27-page rant against teachers unions:

"if anything is stone-cold certain about the current structure of power, it is that technological change is destined to be resisted by the teachers unions and their allies. This is "their" system, and they are compelled by their own interests to preserve and protect it. They will go to the ramparts to see that technology does not have real transformative effects." (p. 55)

Although I got the authors' point (quite clearly!), and even agreed with some of what they said, I thought that the tone and overall approach of the chapter was over-the-top. Many educators will not make it through Chapter 3 because they're too disgusted - not with what the authors say but how they say it. This is too bad because I think the book is definitely worth reading.

The other main problem I had with the book is that the authors seemed to make a large jump from correlation to causation in Chapter 5. They had several graphs that are intended to illustrate teacher unions' resistance to desired reforms. However, I would have liked to have seen more concrete examples of teacher unions' opposition to various educational technology initiatives. Although they do this somewhat within the contexts of virtual schooling and data-informed teacher evaluation, those are only two of the many, many issues related to P-12 educational technology. It's a leap to say that unions' objections to certain aspects of these specific reforms are equivalent to an overall resistance to technology integration in the classroom. I have yet to see many teachers unions at any level come out with explicit policy statements or bargaining actions against classroom-level uses of technology (if you have some, I'd love too see them).

KEY QUOTES

"Teachers and administrators . . . are subject to expectations all around that they modernize their schools and keep up with the times. They also live in the same technologically oriented society that parents, students, and public officials do. . . . they have good reasons to seek out technology on their own, and not to remain permanently stuck in the outdated pencil-and-paper mode of yesteryear. The problem, however, is that they only have incentives to make the most incremental of changes - changes that are helpful but don't threaten anyone's jobs or established routines. Their approach to technology is rooted in the status quo. It is about how to make the existing system work better without really changing it." (pp. 104-105)

AND

"The common theme [of student surveys] is one of frustration. Students complain that there are too few computers, too many limits on computer time and Internet use, and too little reliance on computers for class assignments and research. . . . What they want is a technology-rich educational environment in which they have the freedom to roam and discover and interact. What they get . . . are limited computer and Internet resources, lots of restrictions, teachers who lack knowledge and interest in technology - and an approach to education that looks pretty much as it always did." (pp. 105-106)

AND

"The long-standing idea that there is something intrinsic to schooling that makes it immutably labor intensive and immune to technological change is simply not true. Maybe it was in the past. But it isn't now. Technology can be substituted for labor." (p. 157)

QUESTIONS I HAVE AFTER READING THIS BOOK

1. Are teachers' unions really against educational technology generally or do they only oppose specific aspects of specific reforms?
2. Are teachers' unions really against educational technology generally or are they mostly ignorant of / apathetic about the true issues?
3. Are most teachers' unions thinking or talking about educational technology issues and the potential impact on their classroom practice or job security? [I'm guessing not]
4. How long will it take for the elimination of geography and time as barriers to learning to truly impact most teachers' jobs or school systems' day-to-day practices? [the authors guess 20 years or more]

RATING

I give this book 4 stars (out of 5). Although the incessant bashing of teachers unions gets old pretty quick, the authors also gave me many new lenses through which to view educational technology policy and reform. Take Chapters 3 and 5 with a grain of salt, but don't avoid the book because of them.

** See some other quotes from this book - and my other reviews and recommended reading suggestions - at my blog, Dangerously Irrelevant.

After reading a blog by Bill Gates, I bought the book he was discussing, Liberating Learning. I'm already a fan of virtual schooling when it is well done and able to maintain academic integrity, but this book's main contribution is helping me better understand some of the politics surrounding education and virtual schooling.

I was delighted and intrigued to be reading accolades about a Florida school I'm quite familiar with, Florida Virtual School (FLVS), as in the following quotes from the book:

"Although the data don't allow for easy comparisons across schools, one thing is abundantly clear: the Florida Virtual School is by far the largest, with an enrollment in 2007-08 of almost 100,000 unique students. It is in a league of its own." (Moe and Chubb, 2009, p. 114).

"...It is not only large and well developed, but it is also a pioneer of the virtual school movement (started in 1997) and highly regarded on academic grounds - and for these reasons it is likely to serve as a model that encourages the diffusion of similar innovations across states." (p. 115)

Liberating Learning missed an opportunity to engage the hard issues (solve Politics) and instead was too repetative in pushing down teachers and up a 'technology tool" that Teacher are generally against. Also 1: There should have been a real disussion about the levels of metrics across the different users of the metrics including those that would help the teachers (ref: The goal-question-metric paradigm, discussed by Dr. Vic Basili (1992)) 2: not all student are "turned on" by technology and there should be bridging and support for them, 3: needs to value the need for students to learn cooperation and cross learning among students. I read the whole book and I was left wanting and felt it was waste of time.

I guess I should have paid more attention to the title of this book because it provides a big hint about the theses of the authors and the content. It is long on ideology, directed especially against teachers and our school system, and short on how to begin to implement good ideas about use of technology to improve American education. The authors do present an interesting outline of the general ways that schools may change because of technology and the advantages that may accrue to American education. But they leave specifics to a few examples, and the constant drumbeat against teachers and their unions is a distraction, attributing self interest rather than legitimate pedagogical issues to the challenges presented by technology to American education.

The underlying assumption of the authors seems to be that teaching is not a social activity involving an important social interaction between students and one another and their teachers, despite the fact that they acknowledge the increasing relevance of social networks and the like to students and the importance of good teachers to the learning process. They also say that future schools will involve some classroom time. Nevertheless, they focus on the political process as dominated by an evil monopolistic empire bent on keeping the classroom as it is today. This regime is to be conquered by the new heroes of choice and technology.

I would have liked to have seen some concrete ideas based on the authors considerable research, as evidenced by the end notes, about how the political process can accomodate technology in schools as well as their thoughts and recommendations about how specific technologies can influence education in the future.

I am not a teacher or school administrator or school board member.

This book is a sloppily argued partisan, diatribe against the teachers unions and a heartfelt profession of faith that technology will save our public schools from this bad, self-interested organization. The authors seem to be chagrined that the teachers unions advocate for their dues paying members even when this is against the interests of school children. One wonders if they are equally chagrined when the AMA advocates for doctors even when it is against the interests of patients, or the banking lobby advocates in the interests of banks against the interests of consumers or, for that matter, when Hoover Institute fellows advocate for their wealthy Republican patrons against the interests of working class people. That is the way the system works and, if there is transparency and if you have faith in the democratic process, none of that should be cause for concern.

This book recounts in painful detail the political battles that have taken place in education over the last 30 years, highlighting selectively when Republicans and Democrats have been on the "right" and "wrong" side of the education fight. The authors seem convinced that if only we could hold teachers accountable for their student's performance on state assessments, all the problems with the public schools would be solved. If you are the type of Republican looking for ammunition for your ongoing ideological war, this is the book for you. If you are someone that wants a more insightful view concerning why our schools are not globally competitive, I recommend that you pick up The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner instead.

For the record, I am not, nor ever have been, a member of a union.