“Blended learning.” “Customized education.” “Student-centered.” It’s hard to write about what’s possible in the future of education without getting stuck in a morass of jargon and buzzwords.
William Mattox of the James Madison Institute has produced a new policy brief that paints a clearer picture of what those mind-fogging terms aim to describe.
Imagine middle and high schools that look more like college, where students set flexible course schedules. Picture community institutions offering individual courses, and parents working with school administrators to create unique educational paths for each child.
Mattox, the director of the Tallahassee think tank’s J. Stanley Marshall Center for Educational Options, writes that these things are already happening at institutions like Circle Christian School, which was founded by a group of Central Florida homeschool parents. It now serves roughly 700 students in multiple locations, and boasts alumni with stories like this:
When teen golfer Abbey Carlson speaks of “flight time,” she could just as easily be talking about the timespan one of her drives stays in the air as she could the aviation schedule for her next solo excursion in the plane she helped build.
Carlson, you see, is a 2016 graduate of an innovative “school of the future” in Central Florida that has offerings in both golf and aviation. Yet, the “school of the future” tag probably has more to do with the school’s unique structure than it does the diverse array of courses and extracurricular activities that helped Carlson land a full scholarship to Vanderbilt University.
To understand this structure, think college – not high school. Carlson took classes three days a week instead of five. She had friends who took a number of courses at the school, and others enrolled in just one course. Some of Abbey’s classmates studied at her campus; others learned at one of the school’s two other locations in Central Florida.
All of this flexibility perfectly suited a competitive golfer like Carlson, who often plays in weekend tournaments that require Friday travel. And Carlson believes her high school experience will help ease her transition to Vanderbilt’s School of Engineering.
This is one example of how home schoolers and their innovations could usher in changes that affect the broader public education system.
Circle Christian is not the only K-12 educational institution headed in this direction. This past spring, we profiled a Florida Episcopal school that recently transformed itself by embracing blended learning and turning Downtown Fort Pierce into an extended classroom.
Mattox writes that it’s not yet clear how many students will embrace an “unbundled” approach to education, but the ones who do could help unleash new education providers. Museums, bakeries or marine science institutes might never operate their own schools, but they could offer a few individual courses that provide students with rich experiences that traditional schools couldn’t create on their own.
The new policy paper explains how, once enough families and schools take this approach, the infrastructure they create could ultimately make these learning options available to all students. It also helps translate a mountain of future-of-education jargon along the way.
