A boon if done right: Technology — like the iPad this Chicago preschooler is using — can’t replace teachers, but can improve student performance. (MCT via Getty Images)
We need to approach the education industry the way my friend Steve Jobs approached every industry.
At the top end, our public schools are producing fewer graduates who have the skills necessary for the world’s best jobs. In the middle, too many children float from grade to grade in schools that never challenge them. These kids could soar but are instead held to the ground because of a mediocre education.
At the bottom, more than a million Americans a year — that’s 7,000 every school day — drop out of high school. This is a human tragedy, in terms of how it all but guarantees these individuals a life of poverty. And it is a national tragedy, in terms of the huge social costs it’s imposing on our future.
It’s a crime against our children. It’s especially galling because we have the technology to change it.
Our children are growing up in Steve Jobs’ world. They’re eager to learn and quick to embrace new technology. In what they read, in how they listen to music, in how they shop, they take it for granted that people will compete to meet their needs and expectations.
But the minute they step into their classrooms, it’s a different story. It’s like going back in time — in the essentials, most American classrooms haven’t changed much since the days of Grover Cleveland. You have a teacher, a piece of chalk, a blackboard — and a roomful of kids. If they’re lucky, you might see a whiteboard off to the side — or some computers in the library.
Ask teachers how that’s working out. Ask them about dealing with 30 kids with different needs and different ways of learning.
This top-down, one-size-fits-all approach frustrates the kids who could do more advanced work. And it leaves further behind those who need extra help to keep up.
Teachers are likewise stunted. Some excel at lecturing; some are better at giving personal attention. With the right structure, they’d work together like a football team. With the present structure, they’re all treated like interchangeable cogs.
Steve Jobs wouldn’t have accepted this. And he didn’t.
Shortly after he died, the mom of a 3-year-old posted a note about how his iPad had allowed her autistic son — who doesn’t talk — to find his voice. In a similar way, a North Carolina school district had only 26 percent of its students go on to college — until it adopted programs for the Mac. Now a majority go on to college.
The point I’m making isn’t about Apple. It’s about our complacency and failure of imagination.
The education industry continues to sell its tired wares into a failing status quo. It settles for mediocre charter schools. And its answer is simply throwing more money at the problem.
I have a different view: We need to take what is working so well outside the classroom and use it to shake up the classroom — to make mathematics sticky, to micro-target the eighth-grade girls who might want to be physicists, to personalize reading for each child.
Put it this way: If you were designing a classroom to give our children the skills they need for the best jobs of the 21st century, what would it look like? A typical public school? Or one of Steve Jobs’ Apple stores?
The iPod compelled the music industry to accommodate its customers. With the right technology, we can do the same for education.
Let’s be clear: Technology is never going to replace teachers. What it can do is give teachers closer, more human and more rewarding interactions with their students. It can give children lesson plans tailored to their pace and needs. And it can give school districts a way to improve performance in the classroom while saving their taxpayers money.
Jobs was a Silicon Valley liberal who believed that monopolies like our public-school system do not work — and therefore that parents deserved school vouchers for their children. He was a man who spent his life on technology yet knew that the teacher was more important than the computer.
He once explained our public school system this way: “I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the telephone company was all one. I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell logo on it and it said: ‘We don’t care. We don’t have to.’ And that’s what a monopoly is. That’s what IBM was in their day. And that’s certainly what the public-school system is. They don’t have to care.”
Well, we have to care. Our children are our destiny.
Put simply, we must approach education the way Jobs approached every industry he touched: to be willing to blow up what doesn’t work or gets in the way and to make our bet that if we can engage a child’s imagination, there’s no limit to what he or she can learn.
Rupert Murdoch is chairman of News Corp. Excerpted from a speech Friday at the Foundation for Excellence in Education Summit.