A new education digital divide

Most Americans can’t remember when smoking was allowed on domestic flights in the United States, because it was banned in 1990.
 
But the Federal Aviation Administration just got around to updating a rule that had required that airplanes “No smoking” signs have an off switch, meaning the sign could be turned off to allow smoking. An off switch hasn’t been needed in 34 years.
 
Is this just an example of an outdated regulation that had no real impact? Not exactly. The New York Times reports that United Airlines had been unable to use some new planes because they didn’t have the off switch, causing some flight delays. In the larger picture maybe a few flight delays isn’t that big a deal, but if you can remember the last time you were inconvenienced by a flight delay, you can imagine that how much worse it might have felt if you’d known that the delay was due to the FAA’s inability to change a policy that has been outdated for three decades.
 
The other element of this anecdote that’s telling is that the FAA issued dozens of exemptions when airlines needed them. Most of the time, the problem was the time and effort wasted on exemptions (which we shouldn’t assume to be trivial). But every so often, a larger problem occurred.
 
Innovative educators live in a parallel world of outdated regulations, exemptions, and confusion. Most people don’t fully understand this, and the situation is poised to get a lot worse because of AI and education savings accounts.
 
Am I overstating the case that most people don’t understand these issues? No. Case in point, this article from The Dispatch discusses falling enrollment, rising competition, and what public schools should do: (emphasis added)
 
“American families have more options than ever. The rise of homeschooling and private school choice—combined with charter schools, open enrollment, and other forms of choice—means that public schools will increasingly have to compete for students and their funding…
 
Public schools must also embrace a competitive K-12 marketplace…
 
In the post-COVID era, public schools must examine their shortcomings and find ways to serve families better, especially as there are fewer students and the education marketplace becomes more competitive. This will become increasingly important as states adopt policies that give families more options.”
 
The Dispatch is a smart, thoughtful, right-leaning publication. Yet not once does that article touch on the idea that public schools are shackled in their efforts to innovate and compete. There’s no sign that the authors recognize that innovating is far easier for a private school than for a traditional public school.
 
The last post argued that public schools are over-regulated. As noted above, the situation is about to get worse for two related reasons: AI and ESAs (educational savings accounts.)
 
Let’s start with AI. There’s a major gap in the current discourse about AI in education. Many sources suggest that AI is already transforming education. Others counter that it’s not.
 
I’m on the side that believes AI-driven transformation isn’t happening yet. But most arguments are looking only at the current status, which is a mistake. AI isn’t transforming education yet, but it’s also advancing at crazy fast rates. Keep in mind that the free versions that many educators use are behind the paid versions, which are behind the versions being used by developers, which are behind the versions that haven’t yet been released. The day when an AI can be close to indistinguishable from a human, except by being more consistent perhaps, may be just a few years away.
 
When that happens, private schools will be poised to truly reinvent education. The marginal cost of some forms of tutoring will drop to near zero. Human teachers and tutors will still have a role, but that role is likely to be very different than it is now.
 
The combination of shackled public schools, AI, and publicly funded private schools, threatens to create a new digital divide between the families sending students to fast-moving private schools, and families sticking with neighborhood public schools.
 
Some readers who have been in the field for a while are thinking “I’ve heard this before” – and they are correct. But despite the ed tech hype over the last couple of decades, the technology wasn’t there yet. It’s still not—but it’s very close.
 
Which brings us to the second issue: Educational Savings Accounts.
 
Private schools have always had the ability to be more flexible than traditional public schools, for better or worse. But private schools and homeschooling, despite recent growth, have never exploded in popularity. My assumption is that is because most families aren’t willing to pay for a full-time school when there is a publicly funded school available. But ESA laws are being passed in more states, and are available to more students than ever.
 
So, we have a situation where private schools can receive public funding to race ahead using AI, while public schools are running in sand.
 
The solution isn’t to slow private schools; we want them to succeed! Instead, we need to push policies to unleash public schools, to allow them to compete. It’s not going to be easy to get such policies passed, but our digital learning community is better situated to do so than any other educational sector. That’s because our field is made up of educators who are innovative and entrepreneurial, working across the private, charter, and traditional public sectors.
 
Steps that those of us in the digital learning field—including you—can take include:

1. Tell your stories:In some ways this is the easiest, because all that’s required is for our members, readers, and DLAC attendees to talk more about themselves.

Traditional educators, policymakers, and the general public still know little about what online, hybrid, and blended schools do, how they teach, and the students they serve. This means that when we talk about restrictive policy issues, they don’t have a deep understanding of the challenges, and how they constrain options and reduce outcomes for students. As a field, we need to A) be present in more venues and B) tell success stories more often—so when we talk of policy needs, the audience has some prior feel for the students being harmed. 

2. Band together as a field: Sometimes the digital programs in districts see charter schools and private providers as enemies, and vice versa, and there’s no question that different schools and sectors are competitive in some ways.

But everyone in the field are allies in some way even if they are competitors in others. Everyone is fighting the inertia, apathy, carelessness, and risk-aversion that keeps poor policies in place. You can be allies on policy issues while being competitors in other areas. 

3. Go on offense: Online and hybrid schools and providers have been playing defense and accepting partial improvements for the entire history of our field. For example, in online student funding discussions, online learning proponents have often been forced into accepting the premise that online students should be funded at a lower level than traditional students—the haggling is over how much lower.

Going on offense in that context means starting with the question—why is the government putting its thumb on the scale of how students and schools choose the instructional modalities that families prefer? Why should online student funding be lower when an online school must provide nearly all the same services as a physical school? 

4. View K-12 online, blended, and hybrid learning more like some of the advanced higher education institutions. K-12 educators tend to view online, hybrid, and blended schools and courses as somehow separate from traditional or “regular” education. This distinction is breaking down, and we need to accelerate that process such that the learning modality isn’t a key issue. In this area, we can look to some of the innovative universities which are combining online and hybrid learning with traditional lecture halls, creating a much more seamless experience for students.

These steps are a start, and they are not going to transform restrictive policies on their own. But they will set a foundation for a change in public understanding and opinion of what our schools and programs offer, and make it much easier to push through the changes that we need.