Arne Duncan was right when he recently told an assembly at the American Enterprise Institute that it’s time to innovate in the schoolhouse, that the century-old, industrial-age factory model of education is wrong for the 21st century. But even the education secretary may not fully understand the implications of his remarks.
When Duncan talks about pursuing transformational productivity improvements that “personalize instruction,” he could be talking about the aviation academy at a Milton High School in Pensacola, Fla., the Florida tax credit scholarship that offsets a private school tuition for a low-income student, or the RCMA Wimauma charter academy in rural Hillsborough County, Fla., where children of migrant workers earn the highest marks on the state’s accountability measures.
These options already embody the “New Normal” that Duncan articulates:
It’s time to stop treating the problem of educational productivity as a grinding, eat-your-broccoli exercise. It’s time to start treating it as an opportunity for innovation and accelerating progress.
Indeed, public education is transitioning into a post-industrial era that is founded on customization. The educators in the examples listed above are creating more diverse learning options and families are matching their children to the learning options that best meet their needs. As customization becomes more prevalent, educators and policy makers will need to rethink how they fund, regulate, and define public education — just as Duncan demands.
But we’ll need to move beyond the dated rhetoric of “public” versus “private” before doing so. There is little difference between the educational inputs and outcomes between the RCMA Wimauma charter academy and the Anointed Word Academy 30 miles away in Tampa. And both schools serve a student population that largely lives at a level of poverty that few of us can recognize. But one is a charter school. The other is faith-based. That’s usually enough to stop the progress of any debate over policies aimed at personalizing instruction for children, even a debate where Duncan commands the greatest attention.
In a post-industrial public education system, parents are empowered to find the right school, no matter their ZIP code and no matter their income level. Duncan has defined the “New Normal.” Let’s allow that to frame our debates.
