The School Revolution (10 page)

There will be retired teachers who are effective in front of a video camera. They will be able to post comprehensive courses online. This means that they will be able to generate income based on their years of classroom instruction. There is no question that the number of such courses
will proliferate when word gets out about the income potential for online education.

What about athletics? For parents who send their children to a high school campus so they can enjoy an organized athletics program or cheerleading or other activities, campus-based education will still be popular and will offer benefits. But for parents who are concerned most about the content, quality,
and structure of their children’s academic curriculum, online education is going to be increasingly popular.

There will be price competition. There will be ideological competition. There will be new technologies. There will be top-flight lectures. There will be alternative forms of certification, such as the CLEP exams, which enable a student to get college-level credit for work done
in high school. All this benefits homeschool families.

What about shop classes? A school district can pay local businessmen to bring in students as unpaid apprentices. The student studies at home for half the day and works for half a day. This might cost $1,000 a year per student for a half day’s work, which is cheap. It costs over $10,000 per student in most cities. The businessmen
get paid twice: customers and the school district. Or a district can farm out this work to a charter school, which will train students. The district retrofits one high school for this purpose. It sells off the others.

With online education, the teacher can combine lecturing, an outline, readings in primary sources, links to videos, and links to classic materials in the public domain—and
all of it can be delivered free of charge or at low cost. Students will not have to face the challenges that exist on every high school campus. The student will be able to go at his own pace. He will not have to interact with bullies and other negative aspects of compulsory education. He will not have to spend time on a school bus. He will not be tempted by sellers of illegal drugs or other peer
pressure. He will be able to get up in the morning, pace himself in terms of his alertness, take a nap in the afternoon, and hold a part-time job during hours in which his peers are attending a campus-based high school. He will become far more competitive, and will be far more ready for a college experience, because of the fact that he did not set foot on a high school campus.

If he
likes this kind of learning, he never has to set foot on a college campus, either. He can earn a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college for $15,000 or less. He will not have to pay for room, board, or $150 textbooks. He can buy old textbooks on eBay or Amazon, and pay under $20. He can learn at his own pace. He can take examinations locally. He does not have to go off to college in order to
get the benefits associated with an accredited college degree.

I want to tell you the story of Bradley Fish. He lives in Marietta, Georgia. He beat the collegiate system. He is the oldest of ten children, and his parents homeschooled him. At the age of fourteen, he decided on a plan of action. He would graduate from college on his eighteenth birthday. He went to work. He began taking
CLEP exams and DSST exams, another way of earning college credits. He would study a homeschool course, study extra for the exams, and take them. One by one, he completed his college requirements. He paid for the lower-division exams out of his earnings from a lawn-mowing business. He borrowed some money for the upper division. For about $13,000, he completed his BA in business management the month
he turned eighteen. The college that issued it is fully accredited. He repaid his loan from his parents within one year after his high school graduation, which was also his college graduation. He now makes a living showing students how to do what he did. He writes study guides on how to pass CLEP exams, and he manages a website where students can interact with one another as they prepare for the
exams.

This is the wave of the future. The West’s educational system did not adjust much to the invention of the book, but the Web is a far greater challenge to traditional means of classroom education than the printed book ever was. Online education provides most of the advantages that classroom-based education provides. The one exception is the science laboratory. Students can get
most of their education online, at low prices, before they enroll in a campus-based program that offers them science laboratories. Not that many students major in science, however. In every other field, though, online education delivers an equal or better product than classroom education, and at a far lower price.

Classroom educators are going to have to adjust. This revolution of communications
is not going to show any mercy to classroom teachers who are incapable of adjusting to these new technologies and implementing them in the lives of their students. When students finally learn that online education offers benefits equal to classroom education on a distant campus, there will be a shift to online education.

There is this risk: parents spend $50,000 to $200,000 on a campus-based
education for their child, but the child fails to graduate. This happens in 50 percent of all cases. Then the student is at a disadvantage. He probably is in debt. The job market is tight. His years in college do not carry weight in the job market. At that point, the ex-student moves back in with the parents. These are called boomerang kids. Even if they had stayed in school all four years,
they probably would have come home with $25,000 or more in personal debt. In some cases they come home with $100,000 in debt. With that amount of debt, they have then hurt their chances of getting married.
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This is a terrible situation. But it is not necessary if the student and the parents know about the online alternatives.

By now, you understand why the revolution in education is imminent. The technology is now so inexpensive, and the cost of digital information delivery is essentially free of charge. It is now possible to produce highly creative educational materials with relatively little money. (It takes creativity, not money, to prepare a comprehensive, effective curriculum today.) Because it is possible
to get high-quality materials online, there is no way a typical campus-based high school can compete. There may be one or two teachers on campus who are quite good, but most of them will not be, because most of the people in any organization are not that good.

Because of the Web, you can pick and choose among the best materials available. There will be more materials available over the
next few years, and the quality will improve dramatically. Students are going to be able to be taught by the best teachers in the world. This has never happened before, and it’s going to change everything. It is going to take time, but it is going to happen.

Here are some things to remember from part 2:

The educational reform I am proposing
is revolutionary. It will transfer authority back to parents. This was unheard of as recently as 1960, except in certain religious subgroups. But the digital technologies that have appeared since 1990 have begun to drop the cost of educating students to levels undreamed of before 1990. This is the crucial factor: falling costs. This means falling prices. The old economic rule is taking hold
in homeschooling:
when the price falls, more is demanded
. So, with respect to pricing, the revolution is already in a full-court press against traditional classroom-based education.

Public schools keep getting more expensive. Taxpayers are beginning to rebel. The cost of paying pensions and healthcare benefits to retired schoolteachers threatens every school district. As public
schools get more expensive, homeschooling gets less expensive. There is no question where the United States is heading: away from tax-funded education and toward homeschooling. This is why my proposal is revolutionary institutionally but quite conventional economically.
The free market is going to foreclose on tax-funded schools.
There is no way that traditional education can survive the price
pressure. As surely as paper-based newspapers are going under, so will campus-based education. This includes public school campuses. Forecasters who predicted the death of paper-based newspapers were correct. One by one, they are going under. The schools will be next.

Again, just look to the U.S. Postal Service. It cannot compete with FedEx, UPS, e-mail, and Facebook. It is
a dinosaur. It is loaded with huge pension obligations. It cannot afford to make payments into this fund. This venerable monopoly has gone the way of all flesh. It recently announced that it may have to halt all mail delivery on Saturdays, but that is also only forestalling the inevitable. The USPS looked eternal in 1970. It looks like a candidate for a hospice today.

This is the way to conduct a revolution: supply a better service or product. This takes no political revolution in the early phase. It takes only time. The free market can produce superior service to government non-enterprise. After a while, when most voters have stopped using the government’s services, they can move on to the next stage of the revolution: refusing to
pass any more bailouts. The voters tell the politicians to hold the line on all budget increases. They freeze spending. Then price inflation will cut costs.

This process of steady replacement is economically irreversible in education. Therefore, I am proposing a market-based systematic replacement for a state-funded bureaucratic system that will inevitably close its doors. The sooner
parents have cost-effective alternatives available, the sooner they will decide to pull their children out of tax-funded schools. The sooner they pull out their children, the sooner there will be a tax revolt against the rising cost of public education. District by district, voters will elect politicians who will put a cap on spending. Then they will elect school board members who will vote to reduce
the next year’s school budget.

There will be fierce competition in education. One size does not fit all. I have no illusion that all the new online academies will teach a common curriculum. They won’t. That is what freedom brings: diversity. We will get to see how committed to diversity some so-called open-minded people really are. We will see if some of them attempt to regulate the
online programs in an attempt to force them to conform to a unified set of criteria proposed by the Department of Education in Washington.

The nation’s most prestigious universities are going online. They are offering courses free of charge. They are declaring that online education is effective. How will local school districts resist the extension of online education? They won’t. They
will join the online revolution. They are already doing this in rural districts. But the day a district does this, it surrenders the argument that online education is inherently inferior to campus-based education. At that point, private-sector programs will gain acceptability.

Every reform must involve a change in funding. This change is now
in progress. A family’s out-of-pocket cost of educating a high school student online today is moving toward zero. The Khan Academy has blazed the trail in zero-tuition education. Any high school curriculum that has a program of instruction that sells for under $1,000 a year, including books, can undermine a school district, which spends at least $10,000 and may spend $14,000 per student.

The local public school districts have accepted state and federal funding. They have therefore been forced to surrender control over local education. This was a bargain that removed the last traces of parental authority. But as the schools centralized, they alienated more parents. The principle of the lowest common denominator cannot be overcome by centralization. It is made even more unbreakable
by centralization. Parents began pulling their children out of tax-funded schools.

As the price of online education falls, this exodus will accelerate. There is nothing like price competition to speed up institutional change. We have not yet begun to see the spread of low-cost educational alternatives. There will come a day in every school district when the exodus will become a flood.
Call it a tipping point. Call it the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It will come. The bureaucrats who run the public schools are as oblivious to this event as the bureaucrats who ran the Post Office were in 1970 (pre-FedEx) or 1995 (pre-Web).

This revolution is not merely about a shift in costs from high to low. It is also about a shift
in benefits: positive for parents and students, negative for teachers and administrators.

The lecture method is traditional. It goes back to ancient Egypt. It could have been replaced by Gutenberg’s printing press. But the tremendous hold on the literate elite that the lecture method enjoyed was not broken. Teachers have stood behind lecterns, lecturing to students who dutifully write
as fast as they can. Unless students review their notes before the day is over, they begin to forget. Few students have ever reviewed their notes on the day they took them.

The online video/screencast is vastly more efficient than the traditional lecture. There is an outline, or charts, or items that cannot easily be communicated verbally. The student can watch it twice. He can pause
it. He can back it up. If it is really good, it will still be teaching students in a year or a decade. It will survive. The lecturer will not.

The Internet will undermine the classroom lecture in ways the printed book did not. The book was expensive. The Web is essentially free. The book sometimes required a teacher to make it clear. The classroom was where students got help. The Web
provides the teacher 24/7, anywhere a cell phone is. Who needs a campus? Who needs a lecture hall?

You may get only one lecturer per course on a college campus. In any case, you must juggle your schedule to get more. In high school, you are assigned a lecturer all year: no choice. But on the Web, you get as many lecturers as have commented on a topic, as long as a search engine can locate
them.