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What concrete, implementable steps must be taken to fix our K-12 education system? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Joseph Philleo, USC Undergraduate, on Quora:
The main problem with our K-12 education system is that school is closer to a daycare than an academy.
Because the primary focus of administrators, budgets, and curriculum is monitoring student behavior and safety, schools are saddled with severe constraints that inhibit learning.
For instance, forcing curious, energetic children with a disparate range of capabilities, backgrounds, and interests to sit in isolated desks and listen to a common lecture for seven hours is obviously not the most efficient, effective way for students to learn. Nor is it the cheapest. Yet, because schools are responsible for keeping kids safe, they organize themselves into structures where adults can best monitor, control, and moderate their behavior (i.e. one teacher per classroom of ~25 students).
As long as schools have this daycare constraint, K-12 education cannot become radically better. Throwing more money at education may create marginally improved teaching methods, lower teacher:student ratios, and fund newer pencils and textbooks, but it will not help realize or implement the highest-impact solutions (e.g. personalized learning, adaptive testing and curriculum, etc.), because such solutions are in fundamental conflict with the daycare constraint.
How can schools effectively use digital books, leverage the Internet and MOOCs, employ personalized learning, or foster problem solving and creativity while also requiring students to be sorted by age, locked into classrooms, seated in rows, physically oriented toward teachers, and have their behavior monitored and controlled at all times?
They can’t.
Therefore, the only way to fix K-12 education is to free its constraints. The best way to do that, I think, is to build a technology platform that helps educators and administrators more effectively ensure student safety and participation without severely limiting their freedom.
Creating a software workflow that significantly reduces administrator workload and helps identify students at risk of dropping out, skipping class, failing a grade, harming peers, or committing suicide is the first step.
After that, the software system must be expanded to empower teachers with its insights. There are a lot of really interesting ways to do this (e.g. identifying which students are struggling and excelling in class, recommending individualized homework sets based on concept mastery, etc.), but the point is to leverage technology to help educators, not replace them.
The last foreseeable step in fixing the K-12 school system is converting this software system into a software platform that lets other ed-tech applications function on top of it. Building a platform allows developers to easily create and distribute great products to thousands of schools, thereby lowering the barrier to entry and inducing an explosion of progress in education technology.
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