I ruffled a few feathers with my friendly critique that the Digital Learning Council recommendations were “light on details for ensuring that innovation actually leads to more high-quality educational options.” So, it’s nice to see today’s Bush/Wise/Horn op-ed in The Hill begin to confront this issue:
But seeing the majority of high school students taking online courses and providing every student with access to digital learning 10 years from now will not constitute a victory in and of itself.
The real goal is ensuring these digital opportunities are of a high quality for each individual. That means that we cannot simply focus on extending access, we must also drive quality. That is why the DLC’s other recommendations are focused around student outcomes — from student learning being the metric to define the quality of content and instruction to instituting a state-funding model that pays providers in installments to incentivize completion and achievement.
Attempting to halt growth, as some opponents of virtual learning suggest, will not help to solve these challenges. Nor will laws that limit funding or constrain the possibilities for virtual learning’s promised innovations. It’s only through trial and experience that many new virtual learning practices will improve. There is tremendous potential for online learning, digital content, etc.
But let’s also be humble about how hard this will be. Across all of education, from pre-k to higher education, it is very difficult to get high quality experiences (not just the content, but the actual delivery of instruction and learning outcomes for students). Smart, dedicated folks across all sectors have not yet figured this out at scale and importantly, for all students. We must think carefully about the structure of a new market and system — how it incentivizes, regulates, measures, and corrects for quality outcomes — and have the mechanisms to adapt along the way. Earlier this year Rick Hess got it right when he wrote in a long post about school choice and accountability:
…these kinds of structural reforms are means, not ends. Nobody should expect them to magically boost learning or improve outcomes….The problem, as I see it, is not that choice or accountability “don’t work”–but that the naïve faith that they constitute “fixes” has led us to skip past the hard work necessary to take advantage of the opportunities they can provide.
So, let’s work on both fronts: carve out the space for innovation with digital learning and do the hard work to build the necessary elements to take advantage of the opportunity. Next week I’ll flesh out a few additional elements and details that we need to add to the Digital Learning Council’s ten.
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5/11/2012 | U.S. News & World Report highlights ideas from "Moving On Up: How Tuition Tax Breaks Increasingly Favor the Upper-Middle Class." 
5/11/2012 | In Diverse, Steve Burd comments on the Obama administration's plans to address student debt. 
5/11/2012 | Kevin Carey talks to Salon about the government's role in rising student debt.
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Bill, I agree with you that many of these reports touting K-12 online learning are silent or weak on the issue of quality. One of the reasons for that is the mistaken believe that online learning or blended learning automatically equals high quality. If you read the Wise-Bush report, that is the implicit message. If you listen to any of the leadership of iNACOL, that is the often their main takeaway.
I mean how many times have you heard someone from iNACOL use the US DOE meta-analysis as evidence that online and blended learning at the K-12 level is as or more effective than face-to-face learning (even though there are no K-12 blended learning studies in the sample and the authors of the report specifically state “Despite what appears to be strong support for [online and] blended learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium.”).
The problem is that K-12 online learning has become a politically motivated solution to the education problem, as opposed to an education solution. The same thing happened to the charter school movement, where school choice automatically equals a better quality of education – when the research consistently shows that about a third of charter schools do better than traditional public school and about a third of them do worse. It is a nuanced solution that doesn’t work in a political environment that rewards “buzzwords”, but fails to deliver in the end.
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