By Richard Sousa — Mr. Sousa is senior associate director and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Last month, the College Board, which administers the widely-used college admission Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), and the Khan Academy, whose mission is to provide a “free world-class education for anyone anywhere,” agreed to a partnership in which the Khan Academy will cooperate with the College Board to provide free, online SAT prep software. There are many SAT prep courses, books, camps, and tutors but none is cooperating directly with the College Board.
The Khan Academy, with ten million users visiting its web site every month, is at the leading edge of digital education. The Khan-SAT partnership will allow for self-paced learning and will level the playing field by providing access to those who are unable to afford proprietary preparation courses.
Digital education has been embraced by the College Board, and it should be embraced in the classroom as well. Since the 1983 clarion call to fix a nation at risk, the United States has gone through thirty years of varying degrees of change in its K–12 education system. A series of reforms, for example, increased access to pre-K classrooms, vouchers and charter schools, high stakes testing, and No Child Left Behind legislation, has not moved the needle. However, digital education is a movement that might get US K–12 education out of its malaise.
Blended learning, flipped classrooms, and, at the higher education level, massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide self-paced instruction, allow students to instantly review course material, provide the option to review lessons as often as necessary, and gives students the opportunity to explore related topics to provide a broader knowledge base.
But digital learning also helps teachers. They can assign online lectures specifically tailored to support and augment in-class teaching on specific subject matter. Online testing and problem review provide teachers with instantaneous assessment and diagnostics. Teachers can identify student strengths and adjust their education plans, and they can detect student weaknesses where additional work and remediation is needed.
Failing students sometimes just need more time and repeated attempts to overcome a particular hurdle holding them back from fully grasping a concept. Digital diagnostics help teachers identify those hurdles.
In flipped classrooms, students’ homework assignments are viewing the lectures, and classroom work is solving problems (if necessary, with the help of teachers and peers) and critical, evidence-based writing. This is far from the traditional classroom model.
But if the use of technology is to have differential impact, technology must be made integral to teaching, not supplemental to teaching. Past attempts to integrate new technologies have been half-hearted, at best. Embracing technological change is no longer optional, it is essential.
Human capital development through education must be enhanced. After all, some 60 percent of our nation’s $16 trillion GDP is in labor costs. The United States is still the largest and most innovative economy in the world, but others are climbing that hill—some very rapidly. At the same time, our students are slipping.
In 2012 international comparison, US students ranked below the average of thirty-four countries in math and science and barely above average in reading, and these relative rankings have not changed much over time—US students are not catching up. Something has to change in the K–12 education landscape.
The education industry, which is supposed to prepare us for the future, has been among the slowest to adopt technological change. That has to change.
