Schools of the Future

In the intro to the 1980’s TV show The Jetsons, the eponymous futuristic family is shown traveling in a bubble-like flying car, walking on floating moving walkways, and being shuttled to their destinations in little flying saucers. But when the son Elroy and the teenage daughter Judy are dropped off at school, their saucers fly into a brick and mortar school—it may be floating several miles above the Earth, but it would be identifiable by someone from the 1880’s as a school.

The former Edison Schools, now edisonlearning, is betting that the TV writers for the Jetsons are wrong. As Tom Toch writes, Edison is now joining the education software world and intends to become a player in the crowded field of companies offering curriculum and instruction online. I sat in on a conference call about Edison’s recent change and noted that the “future” came up several times, along with anecdotes about teachers sitting in a warehouse in front of computers, teaching and advising students remotely, and visions of highly differentiated instruction fostered by technology.

If this education future is coming to traditional school systems—Clayton Christensen is betting on it, and as Bill Tucker notes below, the growing number of students learning online is an indicator that change is happening—it has some powerful implications for school reform. Virtual education and highly differentiated instruction allow for a much more customized learning experience in which students have more control over how their instruction is delivered—fully online, in a hybrid classroom/computer-based system, etc.—but with that control, accountability needs to follow. Our current accountability system is based on the premise that brick and mortar schools will continue to exist—that there will be principals and teachers to hold accountable for the entirety of a students’ learning. But what if a student learns algebra online from a teacher in the UK, and English literature in a storefront classroom near home? How should accountability be distributed to ensure that students are getting quality instruction? As choice increases and students have more control over where and how to learn algebra or English lit., accountability for results will need to be distributed more widely than it is today, and more of the accountability burden will need to fall on the students and parents making those choices.

Or perhaps all of these questions are moot, and—as 1980’s TV writers envisioned—brick and mortar schools won’t fundamentally change. There’s no question that Edison understands the often slow, laborious process of reforming the traditional public school system, but they're betting, along with many others, that change is coming to education—the only question is when this "future" will happen. According to The Jetsons, it'll be sometime after we get those flying cars.