Can New Technologies End Age-Graded Schools?

Using high-tech devices smartly can customize the age-graded school out of existence. Every student with a personal device at hand daily in classrooms can transform schooling into a 1:1 learning experience with teachers as guides has been the dream of enthusiasts for decades. No more six year-olds entering first grade and 12 year-olds in sixth grade finishing elementary school. Goodbye to the age-graded school. Technology dreamers have imagined this Nirvana for decades.

Doubt what I just wrote, then read the words of former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein, now CEO of a high-tech division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation:

As someone who led America’s largest school district for 8 years, serving over 1 million children, I believe technology can radically transform the way students learn by customizing instruction, and by helping teachers focus on each student’s areas of greatest need. But the key to capturing this potential lies as much inside our own hearts and minds as it does in any hardware and software we’ll deploy…. Technology’s greatest potential is as a vehicle for students to learn more deeply and individually, unleashing them from the limitations of learning in step with 25 or more peers with different needs and strengths. How much a student learns is defined by two things: the quality of the teaching curriculum and the amount of knowledge students absorb from it. Those are the critical things, and, fortunately technology has the potential to significantly improve both instruction and engagement. It can leverage world-class experts in teaching math, for example, exposing students around the country to the best teaching. It can engage students, by using analytics to direct them to particular lessons that relate to their specific needs. The possibilities are enormous if we apply true discipline to our tools and demand that they help students learn.

Champions of online learning and customized lessons, like Joel Klein, see high-tech as a “disruptive innovation” that will eventually lead to the disappearance of traditional schooling–yes, even the age-graded school. The New Schools Venture Fund has shifted from funding charter start-ups to more technology in schools. Liberated Learning and a host of other books, articles, and bloggers tout how online instruction and its toddler cousin–blended learning–will transform schools, end teacher unions, and bring an educational Nirvana to all Americans.

High-tech is the vehicle for transformation; it will upend the age-graded school. It will replace self-contained classrooms where teachers dole out chunks of curriculum in bite-sized pieces every day for 36 weeks with multi-age groups of students in ungraded schools where students learn individually and at their own pace from lessons tailored precisely to their intellectual needs.

Or 1:1 high-tech devices can simply have students learn at home. No more schools. No more teachers preparing lessons for 25 to 35 students. No more end-of-year high stakes test. No more kids failing a grade. No more social promotion. No more 8th and 9th graders taking algebra . No more age-graded school.

Klein is one sharp fellow. Yet in his paean to the revolutionary potential of high-tech does he take the next logical step of saying that age-graded schools can be replaced with ungraded organizations where lessons can be customized, even individualized, to meet the needs of each and every child. Unimaginative or forgetful, the former New York City Chancellor falls short of linking high-tech to fundamental changes in schooling.

Like installing a jet engine in a Model T Ford, Klein’s “revolutionary” use of technology to alter teaching and learning keeps the traditional age-graded school in place. Hardly a fundamental change when the lockstep of traditional schools continues to prevail in organizing how teachers teach and students learn.

So what’s up among reformers when it comes to new technologies that can, in their favorite word, “transform” the Model T Ford of schooling?

“What’s up” is that age-graded schools are here to stay. Why? In previous posts, I identified the social beliefs of most Americans and the political importance of “real schools” to parents and voters. There is more, however. Every single policy touted by “no excuses” reformers from Common Core State Standards to NCLB to Teach for America to charter schools to teacher pay-for-performance–each reform is married to the age-graded school.

That is why CEO Joel Klein and many other high-tech enthusiasts among federal officials and the nation’s governors and state education chiefs, vociferous in applauding technology,  say nary a word about ending the organizational structure of the age-graded school.