Sunday’s New York Times story broke the news that Stanford University, one of the world’s most prestigious research institutions, is putting its brand squarely behind a full-time, degree-granting online high school program. It’s just one more reason to set aside the silly debate about whether online education can possibly be effective for high school students.
Stanford’s move is significant. But, unless it goes further, Stanford University Online High School is still just a small, selective program for gifted students. Here are two ways to have real impact:
- Scale the program, allowing tens of thousands of students to participate. At this point, though, the university seems reluctant to grow the school much beyond the size of a typical elite independent school.
- Generate research and knowledge, helping to define what quality high school online education looks like, what works for whom, what implementation practices matter, and why.
Perhaps Stanford’s move will push other institutions to consider the real game-changer – offering elite quality education, at an affordable cost, on a more massive scale. When will the University of Michigan, UVA, UNC, Berkeley, or any of our other great public universities do this for an entire state?
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Well, that’s the rub, isn’t. Society doesn’t get much out of education “innovations” that can’t be scaled, does it? Right now, this is an experiment for rich kids. At best, in the future, it aspires to be an alternative for gifted kids of all incomes and geographies. Gifted kids and rich kids already have some pretty great education opportunities, though, so this doesn’t amount to much. BTW, you can’t “turn anything in WalMart”–just ask Kmart, Sears, Best Buy, etc. Just because a service is aimed to serve the needs of the masses rather than the elites doesn’t make it ignoble. I agree that it is hard to do this well, but I’d argue that providing quality education *at scale* is the only education challenge that’s really worth a damn to society these days.
The notion that a richly developed social enterprise that depends on human capital can simply be “scaled” is simplistic. If you’re thinking that Stanford can just increase the enrollment and hire some extra people to look at the student work, you haven’t taught, or taught well. There’s a reason they’re charging almost $15k for this school– the reason is that high quality programming is expensive. I can see how it is tempting to shout, “Scale it up!” from the wings, but in the trenches, quality teaching is dependent on relationships, community, and a host of commonly understood beliefs about people and learning. You can turn anything into WalMart, but then it won’t be Stanford any more.
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