PIE Network Blog
By John Chubb
The long awaited and hotly debated “disruption” of public education may finally have begun. Technology, the force that has transformed one industry after another, from the industrial revolution through the information age, is on the cusp of reshaping our schools fundamentally. This is heady talk. Historically, schools have been quite adept at absorbing new technologies—television, computers, the Internet—without changing how they provide instruction, use teachers, or cost taxpayers. Schools have proven one futurist after another dead wrong.
Economists say schools suffer from Baumol’s disease. Technology cannot make them more efficient or effective because schools are an enterprise that depends inevitably on labor—meaning, teachers. Like a string quartet, William Baumol observed, some enterprises are inherently labor intensive, and do not become more efficient with technological progress. Indeed, schools become less efficient as teachers are asked to instruct fewer students to improve effectiveness.
Stanford education scholar Larry Cuban has made a career of explaining why schools reject reforms that threaten the essential relationship between teachers and students. Teachers need to be in control of their students and their work, and find ways to navigate around reforms that threaten that relationship. Cuban has been right time and again in predicting dismal results for school reforms.
So, why is technology this time around going to be different? Why will schools be transformed? Several years ago, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who coined the term “disruptive technologies,” predicted that schools would eventually be reshaped as other industries he had studied have been. Online technologies, in particular, would allow students to learn at their own pace, guided by interactive multi-media, with curricula customized to their personal needs. Teachers would not become superfluous but fewer would be necessary. Online technology would enable schools to overcome Baumol’s disease, becoming more efficient and effective.
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