Is School Choice Passe?

What if educational choice meant every student could have a personalized educational experience? Today and tomorrow, our panelists debate the premise that our current focus on choice between schools (Public or private school? Charter or neighborhood school?) is a very limited way of thinking about educational choices.

Tom Vander Ark, of Vander Ark/Ratcliff Partners and former executive director of education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, states his case:

We’re headed for radical choice….Choice between physical schools will increasingly be about the learning community they create in terms of the application and extracurricular opportunities and guidance and support systems. In some states, families will gain the ability to construct a series of learning experiences that fit family needs, schedules, preferences, and interests.

Julie Evans, CEO of Project Tomorrow, which runs the annual Speak Up survey of hundreds of thousands of students, tells us that our youth are already there:

Yes, folks, while we are discussing the opportunities, the students are already in many places harnessing that power directly for themselves.  In many ways, the students already believe that they have “choice.”  It is in fact a form of self-directed learning facilitated by the vast resources available on the Internet.  For many students the traditional school is no longer the center of their learning world, nor is their teacher the bastion of all knowledge.

Courtney Bell of ETS cautions us to dig deeper into the mechanisms by which these choices will play out:

The challenge that puzzles me most about how to make customization equitable is the mechanism by which options become available to families….What we want is not always good for us and it is not always very innovative.  Being the parent of young children I am barraged by toys, music, and videos that are supposed to make my preschoolers smarter.  Many parents want smart children, so people make things to support children’s cognitive development.  But are the toys, music, etc. good for my preschoolers?  Do they really make them smarter?  Are they innovative?  Are they different from the classical music I already play for them or the sorting games my kids dream up on their own?  It is hard to say.  This second mechanism – responding to families’ preferences is a tricky mechanism.  It can produce really powerful innovations but it can also produce more things that look like innovations but are not.  More worrisome, it can produce innovations for certain people and not for others.

My response? I borrow from science fiction author William Gibson’s famous line: “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” I see it all coming with great promise, but fear that unless educators respond affirmatively to incorporate these new options into public education, then we could see even greater equity challenges.

What’s your take? Follow the discussion and submit your questions today and tomorrow. Or, comment below.

Tagged as: Equity, Open Education, School Choice, Virtual Schools