When it comes to digital technology, educators and school systems haven’t historically been fleet of foot. But artificial intelligence is partially bucking the trend. Many teachers are embracing it, even as school systems follow form and are moving slowly, or barely at all.

Among the myriad ways school systems can respond, there are two obvious poor choices. On one end of the spectrum, they could turn entirely away from AI—which districts like New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle initially moved to do. On the other, they could rush to use AI for its own sake rather than for a clear educational purpose. There’s plenty of pressure to put AI in the classroom—both from vendors hawking AI products and superintendents wanting to show bold leadership. It would be all too easy for districts to jump on the AI trend and repeat the mistakes of the past. Remember fads like open classrooms in the 1970s and whole language in the 80s?

AI isn’t like CD-ROMs—it’s a rapidly evolving, transformational technology. School systems should act quickly but strategically to find a sensible, educationally sound path. The best policies will integrate AI with intentionality and help students and schools make progress over the long haul.

What’s the best way forward? Don’t focus on AI. Focus on the problems that matter—and see where AI can help.

Initially Adrift

District responses to AI have been all over the map, and many districts have lurched from one approach to another. Several big-city districts banned ChatGPT almost immediately after it was launched in November 2022. But months later, most had rolled back their bans and instead started to encourage the use of AI.

For example, Walla Walla Public Schools in Washington State initially banned ChatGPT. Then, the district repealed the policy and trained its teachers in how to use AI tools.

“[I was] a little bit red-faced, a little bit embarrassed that we had blocked [ChatGPT] in the spring,” Keith Ross, the district’s director of technology and information services, told a local-news outlet. “[It] really shed light that we need to not wait on this and get moving and find out how to supply the tool to the students.”

Recent surveys of teachers and administrators reveal similar contradictions. In an EdWeek Research Center survey conducted in late 2023, about one in five teachers said their district lacked clear policies regarding AI products, and the same share reported that students are not allowed to use it. That same survey also found that more than half of teachers believe that AI usage in school will grow next year.

A survey of district technology leaders by edtech company eSpark in November 2023 found that only 4 percent of districts had a formal, documented policy governing the use of AI. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said their districts were working on one, but 58 percent said their districts had yet to start developing such a policy. Meanwhile, 87 percent of district technology leaders reported they participated in a webinar or presentation about AI in schools in the past 6 months. Some 52 percent said their teachers were independently incorporating AI into their practice, but only 9 percent said they were doing something systematic with AI.

It’s no wonder why. The AI product landscape is teeming with new options for teachers to try, and few have been thoroughly evaluated by their districts. The barriers to entry to creating an AI education startup are extremely low right now—even if the sustainability and impact of such efforts are open questions. According to Reach Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in education companies, there were at least 280 education tools that “incorporate generative AI as a core engine of their product” as of September 2023. More are emerging every month, and many offer “freemium” access so that teachers can try them for free.

Along with ChatGPT, free AI tools for teachers like MagicSchool and Ethiqly have become integral to the daily work of Rachel Morey, who teaches English Language Arts at Walnut Creek Middle School in the suburbs of Erie, PA. She has used these programs to “brainstorm lesson plans, write tests, create worksheets, adapt texts to meet the needs of diverse learners,” she said, as well as to support students in writing essays and delivering feedback. One of the biggest appeals of AI, she said, is how it helps her save time.

Tools and Guidance Emerge

How can districts close the policy and practice gap? An important first step is safeguarding sensitive student and teacher data and ensuring that clear guidelines are in place regarding plagiarism and academic work. These are separate issues from how schools actually use AI and draw on sophisticated technological and legal expertise. Right now, rather than focusing on detailed specifics—which is almost impossible given how quickly AI is evolving—districts need to level-up and focus on key principles to help educators, students, and administrators use AI-powered products responsibly.

These are complex questions, but districts do not need to figure it all out on their own. In October 2023, the Consortium for School Networking, a professional association for school technology administrators, and the Council of the Great City Schools jointly published a “K–12 Generative AI Readiness Checklist.” The detailed questionnaire covers AI readiness from a half-dozen views, including leadership, data, operational, and legal readiness, and was developed in partnership with Amazon Web Services.

That same month, TeachAI published its “AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit.” The initiative was created by more than 60 individuals, governments, and organizations, including Code.org, ETS, the International Society for Technology in Education, Khan Academy, and the World Economic Forum. Its three-part framework for implementing AI in schools, which starts with guidance and policy to address the risks to learning that AI poses, notes that “the first step should be ensuring that AI use complies with existing security and privacy policies, providing guidance to students and staff on topics such as the opportunities and risks of AI, and clarifying responsible and prohibited uses of AI tools, especially uses that require human review and those related to academic integrity.”

States have gotten in the game as well. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, for example, released guidance that prods districts to “review current EdTech providers deploying generative AI to vet their safety, privacy, reliability, and efficacy, to determine if they are appropriate to be used for your school, and which users they will be open to based on their Terms of Service and school or district policies.” Ohio published a five-part AI Toolkit for school districts, which it created with the aiEDU nonprofit organization.

Principles to Design a Path to Progress

Despite the slow pace of district-level policies, it’s also reasonable to worry that districts may move too quickly and rush to use AI without intention, just to say they are doing something with it. According to Scott Muri, superintendent of Ector County Independent School District in Texas, “What’s missing from [several of the frameworks and conversations] around AI is the vision. What are we trying to do or achieve? Where are we going?”

As education thought leader Tom Vander Ark said, “Schools need to shift the primary question from ‘how do we do integrate AI into our school’ to ‘what does great learning look like and how can we use AI to support that? And what kind of work can students do with smart tools?’”

The Readiness Checklist framework thankfully starts there, as the first question asks, “Does the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) align to achieving your district’s mission, vision, goals, and values?” This isn’t a rhetorical question. The answer may be no.

The risks here are great. Far too often, districts base edtech questions on a search for technology for its own sake. School systems should not frame their efforts as an “AI initiative” unless the focus is how to prepare students for a world with AI or to make sure that schools know how to safeguard against its downsides. Instead, leaders should follow a tried-and-true design thinking process to successfully innovate and put AI to its best use.

That means starting with the problem the district needs to solve and the goal it seeks to achieve. Leaders should ask, is what they’ve identified a priority? Some problems relate to serving mainstream students in core subjects, while others arise because of gaps at the margins, such as not offering a particular elective. Both areas are worthy of innovation. But schools shouldn’t embrace a classroom technology unless it’s saving teachers time, extending their reach, or deepening their understanding of their students.

With the problem or goal identified, school systems then need to be specific about what success would look like. How would they know if they had made progress? What’s the measure they would use?

From there, the focus should be identifying the student and teacher experiences needed to make progress toward the goal. And only then should schools consider the physical and virtual setup to deliver those experiences. In other words, the “stuff”—the content, curriculum, analog and digital technologies, including those powered by AI—should come at the end of the process, not the beginning.

By considering a potential role for AI within this greater context, schools can avoid succumbing to a short-lived fad without sitting on their hands and watching the world pass them by. In these early years of our AI-powered futures, the goal should be measured investments that will stand the test of time.

Michael B. Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of From Reopen to Reinvent.

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2024). AI Is Officially Here, There, Everywhere, and Nowhere: Districts playing catch-up can still adopt sound policies for artificial intelligence. Education Next, 24(3), 80-83.

In a little more than a year, freely available artificial intelligence technology has evolved from generating half-right passages of slightly awkward text to creating artistic original images, generating error-free computer code, and even passing an MBA exam at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. If a user-friendly computer assistant like ChatGPT can already do all of that, AI seems poised to upend traditional work practices and hiring patterns—even when it comes to knowledge-economy jobs.

There are signs that high school and college students around the world are anxious about AI and this uncertain future. While educators fret about plagiarism, cheating, and how to use AI to improve instruction, students are wrestling with more fundamental questions about what they are learning and why. They are looking at the fast-changing world and wondering if their coursework is properly preparing them for the workplaces of tomorrow.

“We’ve seen an increase in… nervousness around students. All of us have moments in school when we’re like, ‘When are we ever going to use this?’,” said Keeanna Warren, CEO of the Purdue Polytechnic High School network of university-affiliated charter schools. “And so now with ChatGPT, students are asking themselves about that with everything. ‘You’re teaching me to write an essay? When am I ever going to use this? You’re teaching me to make a presentation? We’re never going to use this.’ And then they take it to the next level, ‘What am I going to do?’”

At a recent panel discussion at Harvard University about students’ perspectives on generative AI, law student Yusuf Mahmood said he has serious concerns about how well the school is preparing future lawyers to use AI tools for work, especially at big firms. Musicology graduate student Siriana Lundgren said that introductory-level research courses need to change to keep pace with AI’s rapid rise.

High school students share these same worries. Sam Cheng, a junior at Design Tech High School in Redwood City, Calif., said in an interview that AI is just one more technology causing schools to be out of step with what students need. “This problem has been around for a really long time of students feeling like school isn’t preparing me for the real world,” Cheng said. AI, in his view, only adds to that pervasive problem.

Attitudes and Impacts

Despite common assumptions to the contrary, students don’t appear to like or use AI more than parents and teachers. A 2023 survey by the Walton Family Foundation found that 61 percent of parents and 58 percent of K–12 teachers report favorable views of ChatGPT compared to 54 percent of students aged 12–17. Teachers are more likely to use ChatGPT than students, at 63 percent compared to 42 percent.

Recent graduates report feeling threatened and worried by the rise of AI, according to the 2023 edition of the Cengage Group’s annual “Employability Report.” Among 1,000 graduates who had finished a degree or non-degree program in the past month, roughly 46 percent said they felt threatened by AI, and 52 percent said it made them question their preparedness for the workforce.

Meanwhile, workers are voicing the same worries. A 2023 Gallup survey found that 22 percent of U.S. workers are concerned that technology will make their jobs obsolete. That’s a rise of 7 percentage points since the 2021 survey, in a measure that had changed little since Gallup started tracking it in 2017. It’s striking that the increase is due almost entirely to a rise in anxiety among college-educated workers, which suggests that those trained for the knowledge economy don’t feel all that secure.

Although many believe that AI will likely be most powerful when it complements humans, not replaces them, students aren’t wrong to ponder whether schools are preparing them for the futures that will still exist when they leave school. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, because of generative AI “almost 12 million occupational changes will need to take place between now and 2030, with over 80 percent of those jobs falling into four occupations: customer service, food service, production or manufacturing, and office support.”

While students worry about tomorrow, their teachers are applying AI in the classroom today (even if that’s just to check for cheating or plagiarism). But schools have not yet grappled with the broader issue of whether or how curriculum should change.

“I’m concerned that my schools aren’t embracing AI or teaching us how to use it,” said Jared Peterson, a senior at Allen High School in Allen, Tx. “For example, all eight of my teachers have warned us that we can’t use AI for any of our schoolwork. Only one of the eight has encouraged us to experiment with AI, but not on schoolwork. … [And] one of my teachers did a presentation on both the benefits and the dark side of AI technology, but focused more on the dark side of AI.”

The Question of Curriculum

Some forward-looking educators, however, believe that the opportunities associated with AI—and the influence those opportunities should have on curriculum—are more important topics of conversation.

According to Martin West, academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and editor-in-chief of Education Next, when generative AI burst onto the scene, faculty at his school identified three areas to tackle. First, define a policy on appropriate use to address concerns about cheating. Second, redesign assignments to give students experience using AI in productive ways. And third, consider how course learning goals need to change. Harvard faculty believe that students should be prepared for a professional world where AI use is not just permitted, but expected.

This last priority is ultimately the most important, West said, but it is also the most daunting, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise. After all, rethinking standards and curriculum was fraught even before AI. Just witness how hard it is to alter the K–12 history curriculum or the heated debates in California around what is taught in math.

Yet this is precisely the conversation that needs to take place, said Paul J. LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, one of the largest universities in the country. In a recent essay written with Forward College founder and CEO Boris Walbaum, LeBlanc noted that machine learning will be used for many procedural jobs, such as basic accounting and administration, but workers whose work surpasses results from AI will prosper. “Therefore, universities must drastically raise the cognitive bar for students. Less accumulating knowledge and more metacognition: that is, the fundamentals of interacting with knowledge. Learning will move from worrying about what one knows to how one knows it.” In Inside Higher Ed, LeBlanc wrote that the threat posed by AI to high-paying, seemingly secure knowledge economy jobs calls for a paradigm shift and wholesale changes across institutions. “Curricula across a wide range of fields are being rendered out of date at this very moment; we just don’t know in what ways yet.”

Not everyone agrees. If the widespread availability of knowledge means that learning knowledge is no longer important, wouldn’t the emergence of tools like Google and Wikipedia more than two decades ago already have caused that shift? After all, as technology writer Ben Thompson has observed, “It’s important to keep in mind that ChatGPT is a large language model, not a knowledge repository. It has no knowledge of right or wrong, or truth or untruth; it is simply predicting the next word.”

Or, consider this perspective from computer science professor Charles Lee Isbell Jr., an interactive AI expert who is University of Wisconsin–Madison provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs. In response to those who point out that occasionally ChatGPT “hallucinates” and starts “making things up,” he noted: “It’s always making things up. It just so happens that the things that it makes up sound reasonable most of the time.”

And as E.D. Hirsch has previously argued, Google clearly didn’t end of the importance of mastering knowledge. “The Internet has placed a wealth of information at our fingertips,” Hirsch wrote. “But to be able to use that information—to absorb it, to add to our knowledge—we must already possess a storehouse of knowledge.” The ability to think critically relies on having factual knowledge in a given domain.

This observation points to a middle ground of how curriculum may need to change.

New Roles for Knowledge and Experience

One of the biggest changes in work will be knowing how to work alongside generative AI tools, according to Ryan Craig, an author and managing director of Achieve Partners, an education-focused investment firm. To do that, workers will have to know which prompts and questions will generate the right outcomes. And knowing what to ask will require subject-matter expertise. Or, as Craig said in a recent blog post:

If your job’s in claims management, you need to have some understanding of how the insurance industry works and its lexicon. If you’re a digital marketer, you need to know industry-standard platforms, tools, and metrics. Underscoring all this is an ability to understand the subject matter. As specialized LLMs [large language models] evolve for every industry and job function (and likely for each industry-function pairing), experience and pattern recognition will become even more important.

But subject-matter expertise won’t be enough. Individuals will also need to learn how and when to ask the right questions. And that requires a sense of why they are asking the questions they are and what problems they are trying to solve.

Craig’s argument boils down to this: given the rapidly changing nature of work, traditional academic learning from static content is unlikely to make the grade. Instead, academic learning needs to become much more tightly integrated with real work experience given the unpredictable interdependence between the two right now. He noted that a 2023 IBM report on AI predicted, “AI won’t replace people, but people who use AI will replace people who don’t.” Craig concludes: “As a result, keeping students penned in classrooms will impede career launch. While digital transformation has already put a premium on learning-by-doing, AI will make work experience mandatory for every learning journey.”

What does that mean in the classroom? According to Cheng, the California high-school junior, it’s less about teaching “how to use AI” and more about how to take the information and skills that they’ve learned and use them with AI to think critically, creatively, and consciously. “Then even when we’re out of school, even when new technology comes around, we’ll have a toolkit for how to interact with it,” he said.

Beckett Miller, a senior at Design Tech, concurred. “It’s important to have enough knowledge about things and how things work,” he said. But then he argued it’s important to learn how to use tools like AI with conscientious intention. He cited the example of using ChatGPT to help him iterate far faster on an essay he was writing, which ultimately helped him deepen and clarify his thinking, as well as improve the communication of his ideas.

To create opportunities that are connected more tightly with the workplace, high schools could source projects from actual employers as part of the curriculum through companies like Riipen, which pairs college students and curriculum-related internships and jobs. Schools also could allow students to take part in curated internships and externships as part of the regular school year, like the Summit Public Schools charter network in California and Washington State has done with its expeditionary learning blocks. Schools could also turn to organizations like the CAPS Network, which organizes onsite, work-based learning experiences for high school students, to integrate career and technical education for all students. Or schools could offer apprenticeships, akin to what Coweta County in Georgia is doing for sophomores through the Georgia Consortium for Advanced Technical Training. And when schools want to teach about AI itself, they could use up-to-date online courses from places like Coursera rather than seek to reinvent the wheel.

AI is more than a homework helper or fast-track to cheating. It is a transformative tool, and students know it. These sorts of innovations could start to address the concerns of students like Peterson, who worries that high schools “are more focused on cheating and stopping AI usage than on how they can use AI to make education better.”

Michael B. Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of From Reopen to Reinvent.

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2024). Artificial Intelligence, Real Anxiety: How should educators use AI to prepare students for the future? Education Next, 24(2), 72-75.

Just as there’s no one-size-fits-all way to educate students, perhaps there’s no one-size-fits-all-way to get them to school either.

That’s the argument behind HopSkipDrive, a startup that is seeking to complement and redefine the traditional bus model of taking students to school. Instead of kids making their way to the pre-determined route of a 72-passenger school bus, HopSkipDrive creates customized pick-ups in cars and vans based on individual students’ needs. It’s a rideshare-like model with similarities to and major differences from Uber and Lyft.

The company provides an app that connects families and students with highly vetted drivers, all of whom are also experienced caregivers who either currently have a child at home or have cared for children in the past. They use their personal, pre-approved cars to drive students to and from school or after-school activities, while families and the contracting agency—such as a school, welfare office, or group home—can track the car’s movement in real time. Rides are scheduled well in advance but can be changed with a few hours’ notice.

When three parents launched the app in 2015, “it had nothing to do with school transportation,” said Chief Executive Officer Joanna McFarland, a cofounder and mother of two. “It really had to do with creating options for full-time working moms and families like mine, who were really struggling to just make the logistics of running a family work.”

But safely transporting kids turned out to be a widely shared challenge. Today, Los Angeles-based HopSkipDrive contracts with schools, districts, counties, and nonprofit partners in eight states and Washington, D.C., with a focus on meeting the transportation needs of students who fall outside traditional school-bus norms.

A Widespread Problem

The initial idea for HopSkipDrive was hatched at a child’s birthday party, and the original intended market was parents like McFarland and her cofounders, who wanted to get their kids to after-school activities safely without interrupting their own workdays. But company leaders soon realized there was a broader need for more flexible student transportation options, fueled by phenomena such as open enrollment within districts, students attending out-of-neighborhood “choice” schools, the less-predictable needs of students experiencing homelessness, and varied start times within districts. Within about two years, HopSkipDrive started to work with counties and school boards that were struggling to meet transportation needs because of a growing shortage of bus drivers.

After the abrupt closure and eventual reopening of schools due to Covid-19, those shortages grew more severe. Many districts initially furloughed drivers during school-building closures, and many of those drivers did not return to the job after schools reopened. A 2021 survey by the National Association for Pupil Transportation found that every region of the country was experiencing driver shortages, and at least two-thirds of districts had altered service as a result. Some 51 percent of respondents described shortages as “desperate.”

With fewer school-bus drivers, districts have consolidated routes and lack back-up options when a driver calls out sick. Some districts in Georgia cut bus service for students attending charter schools or schools of choice. Service gaps have caused many students to arrive late or miss school if their parents and neighbors are unable to carpool on the fly. Some state and district leaders have gotten creative in their responses to the problem: Massachusetts called on National Guard troops to drive students, and Washington, D.C., launched a free school-bus driver training program for city cab drivers.

HopSkipDrive, which initially laid off much of its staff and launched an adult ride option during the pandemic, proved another ready solution—and one that had been designed by parents with children and family needs in mind.

“Caregivers on Wheels”

HopSkipDrive rides are performed by what the company calls “CareDrivers”—adults who are vetted both for their experience with children and driving abilities. CareDrivers must have five years of caregiving experience as parents, guardians, nannies, teachers or paraprofessionals, or in other childcare roles. They submit to a 15-point certification process, which includes a fingerprint-based background check, motor vehicle history search, and ongoing monitoring for new driving infractions. The driver must use a vehicle that is less than 10 years old and seats four to seven passengers. New drivers go through a live orientation with a member of the HopSkipDrive team.

The company facilitated more than 400,000 rides for children and families in 2021, with a group of more than 4,000 active CareDrivers serving about 350 school districts. Over 2 million children have been driven safely over the company’s brief history. These rides totaled more than 7 million miles in 2021, and 99.7% concluded without a safety-related issue. In all, HopSkipDrive rides have traveled more than 20 million miles to date, with no critical safety incidents.

The company keeps close watch on drivers during rides. Using telematics—the long-distance transmission of digital data—HopSkipDrive tracks the whereabouts of drivers and children. It also checks for unsafe driving behaviors by monitoring phone usage, speeding, acceleration, hard braking, and hard turning. This technology provides visibility without installing in-vehicle cameras, which pose privacy concerns. In addition, the company also provides districts and parents with backup drivers in case of a last-minute cancellation, as well as real-time location updates.

Other innovators in this space use similar driver vetting and real-time location tracking via apps, but with different focuses. For example, Zum contracts with schools and districts to modernize routes and fleets, enhance efficiency, and provide carbon-neutral transportation in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. TaxiMom offers a subscription-based transportation service for families in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston markets.

Part of the Transportation Puzzle

HopSkipDrive is not looking to replace the school bus. In a densely populated area, filling a 72-passenger bus is still the most efficient way to get students to school. Facilitated ridesharing is instead one part of a more comprehensive transportation solution for school districts, two-thirds of which own their fleet of buses.

But the company does look like a disruptive innovation relative to the school bus. It is bringing a more affordable and customizable technology-based solution that isn’t as good as the status quo, judging by historical measures of performance, to non-consumers for whom the alternative is nothing at all. In this case, HopSkipDrive is using technology to reach students who previously had no district-provided ride or who were over-served by a large school bus in a lightly populated area.

For example, one of HopSkipDrive’s larger partnerships is with the Aurora Public Schools in Colorado. The district uses HopSkipDrive to provide school transportation for about 70 students who are experiencing homelessness, are in foster care, or have special needs or disabilities that make riding a school bus challenging.

“These are kids who don’t fit neatly on a school bus route or kids who are highly mobile and moving frequently,” McFarland said. “If you are a child in the foster system who moves placements at 10:30 at night, you can’t reroute a school bus to get that child to school. And yet HopSkipDrive can get them to school the next day with no change in schooling. And we know that every time a child moves—and the average child in foster care might move three to five times a year—that might mean switching schools. Credits don’t transfer. It can take several weeks to change schools. What one district teaches in fourth grade, another district teaches in fifth grade… We have federal mandates to fix that, but transportation is one of the biggest barriers. And a service like HopSkipDrive really helps districts provide transportation for those hardest-to-serve students in a really flexible way.”

At Rocky Mountain Prep, a charter school in Colorado, the arrangement works differently. There, HopSkipDrive helps specific students who are struggling to get to school, buying time for the school and families to develop longer-term solutions to the attendance challenge. In one instance, Rocky Mountain Prep provided HopSkipDrive to a parent who had recently given birth to help get her older child to school for a few weeks.

HopSkipDrive may also lead to better optimization of school transportation in the longer run, said McFarland.

“Some of our more innovative districts are really starting to think in a much more holistic way, and we are helping them really think about: ‘What does your fleet size need to look like? How many buses do you need? How many drivers do you need?’” she said. “Because we’re operating in this world of shortages, but when you think about it as a utilization problem, maybe the number of bus drivers that we have is actually sufficient. Maybe we can … save money and use that money to increase bus driver salaries and retain drivers.”

Driving into the Future

The question for any transportation innovation now is whether it can scale. Regulation will play a role.

Many states have antiquated regulations around who can drive students to schools, according to McFarland. For example, Massachusetts requires a driver to have a certification that is close to a commercial driver’s license—a rule designed for safety back when a school bus was the only transportation a district would have provided for students to get to school. Similarly, many districts require their own unique background checks for potential drivers, a roadblock for vetted CareDrivers who want to drive for multiple districts.

States are updating their laws, however, to make room for new transportation solutions. A 2021 Maryland law allows districts to transport students in vehicles other than official school buses, and new regulations in Georgia permit the use of “alternative vehicles” for students who receive special-education services, are in foster care, or are experiencing homelessness.

The ultimate solution seems to be to update transportation regulations to focus on outcomes—namely safety and reliability—instead of inputs. That means setting a baseline for safety consistent with different vehicle types and using technology to enforce safety and create accountability.

Looking beyond once-in, once-out traditional school busing will be especially important in states where educational options are proliferating, through charter schools, education savings accounts and micro-grant programs, microschools, and other flexible and innovative schooling arrangements. Today, somewhere between 1.1 and 2.1 million students are enrolled in microschools or learning pods, for example.

But these options aren’t real choices if students don’t have a way to get there.

“We see over and over again, parents would choose a particular school for their kids, but they don’t enroll in that school because it’s across town or it requires two hours on a public bus or they just can’t get their kids there,” McFarland said.

Some states aren’t just modernizing their transportation regulatory framework, they are seeking to spur innovation. The Arizona Transportation Modernization Grants Program, for example, awarded $19 million in its first year to 24 schools and nonprofit education agencies with novel transportation solutions. That included the Black Mothers Forum, a nonprofit that operates microschools in Tempe and South Phoenix, which developed a community carpool app and provided transportation for all students. And it included Tolleson Union High School District, which contracted with HopSkipDrive to create a hub-and-spoke model to provide transportation to out-of-district students that want to attend one of its specialized programs.

The models are different, but the goals are the same: Reduce the time in transit for students and get them to their educational options on-time, safely, and ready to learn.

“You might have a bus that is full in the morning but in the afternoon is empty because kids are doing different activities,” McFarland said. “So, when you start to think about that, you can open up so many opportunities both inside and outside the classroom. Just thinking a little bit more holistically and a little bit more creatively.”

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of From Reopen to Reinvent.

This article appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2023). Beyond the Big Yellow Bus: Can transportation apps reinvent how students get to school? Education Next, 23(3), 76-79.

For all the speculation about ChatGPT’s potential to upend K–12 writing instruction, there has been little investigation into the underlying assumption that the AI chatbot can produce writing that makes the grade.

We put OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the test by asking it to write essays in response to real school curriculum prompts. We then submitted those essays for evaluation. The results show that ChatGPT produces responses that meet or exceed standards across grade levels. This has big implications for schools, which should move with urgency to adjust their practices and learning models to keep pace with the shifting technological landscape.

Background

When it burst onto the scene in November 2022, ChatGPT’s clear and thorough written responses to user-generated prompts sparked widespread discussion. What it might mean for K–12 education was one area of speculation. Some worried about the potential for plagiarism, with students dishonestly passing off computer-generated work as their own creative product. Some viewed that threat as particularly formidable, pointing to three attributes that make ChatGPT different from past tools. First, it generates responses on-demand, meaning that students can receive a complete essay tailored to their prompt in a matter of seconds. Second, it is not repetitive. It tends to answer multiple submissions of the same prompt with responses that are distinct in their arguments and phrasing. And third, its output is untraceable, as it is not stored in any publicly accessible place on the Internet.

Education decision makers are already moving to respond to this new technology. In January, the New York City Department of Education instituted a ban on ChatGPT by blocking access to it on all its devices and networks. Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and Baltimore school districts have imposed similar prohibitions. As leaders in other districts, schools, and classrooms grapple with if, when, and how to make changes in response to this technology, they need a read on how well ChatGPT, in its present form, can deliver on the threat it is purported to pose.

To help answer this question, we took three essay prompts per grade level from EngageNY’s curriculum for grades 4 through 12, which are the grades in which students produce long-form essays. For each grade level, the three essay prompts covered the three main types of writing —persuasive, expository, and narrative—that students do. The tasks ranged from creating a choose-your-own-adventure story about an animal and its defense mechanisms to selecting a central idea common to Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess,” William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” and explaining how the texts work together to build an understanding of that idea. We then asked ChatGPT to produce an essay response in the voice of a student from the respective grade level. With the essays in hand, we commissioned a K–12 grading service to assess ChatGPT’s writing. The human graders evaluated each essay using rubrics from the Tennessee Department of Education that were tailored to the grade level and writing task. The graders assessed the essays across four categories of criteria—focus and organization, idea development, language, and conventions—and produced a numerical grade.

There is a caveat to our approach in answering this question. The way in which we asked ChatGPT to write its essays would likely differ from the way in which a discerning student using ChatGPT to plagiarize would use it. We provided little reworking of the essay prompts—just enough so that ChatGPT could understand them. Nor did we edit the chatbot’s output. In contrast, students would likely evaluate the AI’s writing and resubmit prompts that coached it toward a better product or edit its work to improve it where they saw fit. A student seeking to have ChatGPT write them an essay could likely take this cyborg approach to their assignment—presuming they did the work with more than just an hour of lead time—and earn higher grades than in our approach of using the chatbot on its own.

ChatGPT Clears the Bar

ChatGPT earned passing marks on each essay type at each grade level. It performed especially well in response to the writing tasks of the lower grades. Figure 1 depicts its average essay scores across the range of grades. Even at the upper grade levels, ChatGPT is a solid B or C student. Although its performance on high school prompts would not land it a spot at the valedictorian’s podium, it would still get it to the graduation stage, which has important implications for schools.

 

Figure 1

Figure 2 compares ChatGPT’s abilities across the four criteria categories: organization, idea development, language, and conventions.

 

Figure 2

ChatGPT’s strength in language and conventions show that it is a clear writer, capable of crafting fluent, grammatically sound prose. The chatbot either met or exceeded standards in both these categories for all 27 essays submitted.

The AI has the most room for improvement in its development of ideas. The graders’ written feedback reveals that it sometimes fails to support its claims with reasons or evidence and, in a few instances, makes assertions that are flat out false. It struggles the most to develop its ideas in response to literature. All five of the instances in which it earned a D+ —its lowest grade—were those in which the chatbot was asked to demonstrate its understanding of long-form prose, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Joy Luck Club. This calls into question if and how closely the chatbot has “read” these materials.

Now what?

These findings suggest that ChatGPT is already powerful enough that educators must change the status quo of writing instruction. Schools should evolve their practices, pedagogy, and policies to address the underlying forces that compel students to use technology like ChatGPT in counterproductive ways without resorting to blocks and bans that limit the use of this potentially powerful learning tool.

Use ChatGPT to Help Students Go Beyond its Capabilities

Some of the early actions taken in response to ChatGPT have focused on catching students misusing it or preventing them from accessing it altogether, such as the districts banning or blocking the AI. Elsewhere, teachers are now requiring students to do their writing with pen and paper in an effort to thwart copy-and-pasting from the chatbot. Developers are also creating new plagiarism detection software designed to identify AI-generated writing.

Each of these options comes with its own set of tradeoffs, but one drawback common to all of them is the cat-and-mouse dynamic they establish between schools and students. Each sends the message that students cannot be trusted with technology.

There’s another approach, however. By inviting ChatGPT into the classroom instead of locking it out, schools can push students toward independent thinking in a way that doesn’t signal mistrust. There are indications that, despite some of the high-profile bans, many teachers are thinking along these lines. According to a survey of more than 2,000 teachers commissioned by the Walton Family Foundation, 40 percent of teachers report already using ChatGPT at least once a week. Thirty-eight percent of teachers report allowing students to use ChatGPT, whereas only 10 percent say they have caught the students using it without their permission. And 72 percent say that “ChatGPT is just another example of why we can’t keep doing things the old way for schools in the modern world.”

One way to leverage ChatGPT is by intentionally using it in class. For example, teachers can have ChatGPT generate writing samples in response to different essay questions, which they can then use with their class to dissect the quality of the writing. Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of writing examples is a commonly used teaching tool. It can force students to think deeply about what constitutes good prose. Doing this with ChatGPT’s output has multiple potential benefits. Because ChatGPT can generate writing on-demand, teachers can produce samples tailored to the needs of their lesson without sinking valuable time into crafting the examples themselves.  In addition, by using ChatGPT in this way, teachers can show students where the chatbot falls short and how they are expected to go above and beyond its capabilities. Doing so disincentivizes inappropriate use of ChatGPT—not by threatening punishment or imposing bans but by communicating high expectations.

Teachers can also use the essays that ChatGPT produces to help check that their own prompts are asking enough of students. If not, they may want to consider revising their assignments. This approach encourages students to think outside the bot and, in doing so, helps them build writing skills that cannot already be automated away.

Teachers can also allow students to bring the AI in as a writing aid for certain assignments. Students could use it to conduct research, refine their prose, and test their ideas to see if they make sense to ChatGPT. Some have characterized ChatGPT in this role as a calculator for writing. Like the calculator, the technology’s efficiencies and enhancements could be leveraged to push student work to levels of complexity and quality that would be otherwise outside the realm of possibility.

Flip the Classroom to Support Students Throughout Their Writing Process

In a traditional classroom, students sit in whole-class instruction during school hours and do most of their writing assignments at home. Under this model, students who do not master the skills taught in class have little recourse when it comes time to apply them on a graded take-home assignment. That, along with time management, can lead some students to resort to academic dishonesty. By flipping the classroom—which often entails students learning the content at home online and then spending class time practicing the skills taught in the digital lessons—teachers can support students in turning that confusion into understanding.

In a flipped English Language Arts classroom, a teacher might send students home to watch a video on how to organize their ideas in writing. The following day’s class could start with an activity analyzing the flow of a sample essay. Then, in the next part of class, students take time to work on their own outlines for an upcoming paper as the teacher moves around the room to help address misconceptions and to provide support to those who need it. Under such a model, students receive more intentional writing instruction. If they feel lost, they can turn to a teacher for guidance instead of looking to a chatbot for the answer.

Realign Incentives Toward Learning

More broadly, in today’s zero-sum education system, some students will likely feel tempted to turn to ChatGPT as a way of getting a leg up on their competition—their classmates. This stems from the traditional time-based grading system, which relies on one-shot assessments to award students term grades that are used to rank and group them. These marks are unchanging and follow students around for years, no matter how much learning they demonstrate after the fact. By placing such steep and long-lasting consequences on grades and such little emphasis on actual understanding, schools are communicating clearly that they value scores earned over skills learned. Given the priorities of this system, we shouldn’t be shocked that some students are willing to sacrifice a learning opportunity for a chance at a better score.

Today’s seat-time based school system, in which students advance from concept to concept after an allotted amount of time, regardless of whether they demonstrate understanding of the topic, is responsible for this traditional, one-shot assessment model. Contrast this with a mastery-based model, in which students advance only when they show they have a concept down pat. This means students are allowed multiple attempts to demonstrate their mastery through assessment. In doing so, mastery-based learning reduces the do-or-die stakes that can drive students to dishonesty. This may help more students gain the confidence to put their own thoughts on the page, even if that means risking failure on that attempt.

Technological advancement will continue to grow AI’s effectiveness not only as a writer but also as a writing coach for students. Even between the time we wrote this article and its release,  OpenAI released GPT-4, which does better on standardized tests than the previous version. Khan Academy announced it will use GPT-4 to power “Khanmigo, an AI-powered assistant that functions as both a virtual tutor for students and a classroom assistant for teachers.” It is unclear how or in what instances the work of a student guided by an AI tool can be inputted in the gradebook to spit out a letter that conforms to old-fashioned principles of grading. But in a classroom where students are evaluated on their ultimate mastery of a concept, they are free to practice in the ways that best build that mastery. More conventional schools should also rapidly adjust their pedagogical practices, including grading systems, to make full use of this new technology.

Conclusion

With ChatGPT already capable of producing prose that earns passing marks across grade levels, schools must adjust to make sure that students will learn how to write effectively and think critically. Some of the earliest actions taken by districts have missed the mark by trying to stuff the ChatGPT genie back in the bottle. Technologists predict that numerous professions – including those requiring advanced skills – will leverage ChatGPT in their day-to-day work in the near future. Lawyers will look to the chatbot instead of their more junior colleagues to create summaries of case notes and relevant laws. Journalists will use it to generate checklists of points to cover for articles on given topics. In these professional use cases, it will be critical for workers to accurately evaluate ChatGPT’s output and put it to effective and ethical use. The best place and time for a worker of tomorrow to learn how to do that is in a classroom today.

As a result, blocking ChatGPT is not only futile, but also counterproductive for students who will be forced to use this tool and others like it in a working world where they are ubiquitous. By rethinking classroom practices and restructuring learning models, schools can give students the tools, guidance, and incentives to grow their writing skills in the age of artificial intelligence.

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of From Reopen to Reinvent. Daniel Curtis is a Master in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

For more, please see “The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2023.”

In recent conversations, educators and state policymakers have expressed shock to me that district schools aren’t innovating more. With microschools growing and test scores floundering, why aren’t districts seeking permission to reinvent themselves?

As evidence of the opportunities to innovate, many bureaucrats and think tanks point to the vast number of waivers that states offer. The opportunities to move beyond traditional structures and processes do exist, the argument goes.

Yet waivers help far less than most policymakers believe. Until regulators create frameworks where innovation in pursuit of student outcomes is the default and doesn’t require permission, don’t expect a sea change.

Public schools today operate under a morass of policies, regulations, and contractual requirements at the local, state, and federal level. These policies often dictate the resources and processes—or inputs—a school may use to teach students.

These inputs range from things like the number of minutes students are required to be in school each year to student-to-teacher ratios and the credentials teachers must possess. The problem is that none of these policies equate to learning outcomes.

To take one example, think of the student who masters the material in a math course within half a year. Does the requirement that they sit in a course for a full year benefit them? What about for the student who needs more time?

Rather than support learning, inputs lock a system into a set way of doing things and inhibit innovation. Focusing on outcomes, on the other hand, encourages continuous improvement toward a set of overall goals without constraining how a school achieves them.

To get around these burdensome regulations, many states have created waivers—the ability for districts to apply for relief from certain policies that constrain their ability to innovate. Some of the more popular waivers lift seat-time requirements.

In Michigan, for example, there are different waivers to which a district can apply for permission to operate different kinds of “innovative” programs that escape the traditional seat-time requirements. The waivers must be valid for the current school year.

And yet, policymakers moan that all-too-often, despite all the waivers, schools aren’t taking advantage of them. So what gives? Is it that schools really don’t want to do things differently? Although there’s some truth to that, it’s not the whole truth.

First, although states have created many waivers from policies, these waivers typically aren’t comprehensive. That is, while they clear some barriers out of the way, they don’t clear out other demands and requirements or change how schools are funded.

As a result, a waiver may not allow a school nearly as much freedom as a well-intentioned bureaucrat in a state’s department of education or a legislator thinks it’s giving them. That often means that after receiving a waiver, innovation halts in its tracks.

Second, transforming a legacy school model that has done things relatively the same way for decades takes a lot of dedicated work from many individuals. There’s a reason why organizations—in business and public education—struggle to reinvent themselves.

Research shows the only way an organization can truly reinvent itself is to launch a separate organization that has the autonomy to rethink its value proposition, resources, processes, and financial formula.

This takes significant effort in schools, as these autonomous efforts typically take the form of things like launching brand-new schools or operating a school within a school, a microschool, or a learning pod.

The Kettle Moraine School District in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, for example, authorized three charter schools on its high school campus and one at one of its elementary schools to implement a mastery-based learning model. That level of innovation was challenging to sustain within the traditional operations and pressures of a district.

School districts have limited capacity and capabilities to begin with. For a state to offer relief from restrictive policies and regulations through a set of waivers adds more effort and complexity to what’s already a heavy lift.

Some states are trying to tackle this by streamlining the process for waivers. Rather than submit an application for every single waiver a district needs, for example, the district can submit one application for all the waivers it needs.

Certain state departments of education also provide support to inform districts about the waivers available and help them write the applications.

South Carolina, for example, does both. It offers a set of more streamlined waivers for everything from “schools of innovation” to “competency-based education.” Districts that qualify then receive relief from specific statutes and regulations that pertain to the specific waiver. The state also helps districts apply for the waivers.

But none of these efforts reduce the work of innovation itself. And that speaks to the bigger problem.

Innovation to help students make progress should be the default, not an act of permission granting from bureaucrats. After all, if a new idea doesn’t help students, then it may be inventive, but it’s not innovation.

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of From Reopen to Reinvent.

One of the hottest developments in education technology is schools banning technology.

After successive years of remote or hybrid learning, you might imagine tech-weary educators would be going after laptops and Zoom. But they are focused on cellphones, driven by three major concerns: students’ mental health, ability to stay engaged and learn during class, and struggles to focus for long stretches of time without task switching.

There’s an irony here. These bans are proliferating even as there are more useful, engaging, and instructionally sound mobile-learning applications than ever before. That suggests that cellphone bans, while useful in many school settings, shouldn’t be universal. We risk barring teachers, schools, and districts from productively using these apps to drive learning gains.

Where the Phones Aren’t

Some bans are blanket ones at the country or state level. In 2018, France passed a law that prohibited students under 15 from using phones, tablets, and smart watches in schools. The Australian state of Victoria bans phones in primary and secondary schools.

Some schools in the United States have taken similarly dramatic actions. Public schools and districts in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Maine, and New York State have instituted bans, often citing the devices’ ability to distract students from learning. And the Buxton School, a boarding school in Western Massachusetts, instituted a total ban on smartphones on campus after one of its students live streamed two others engaged in a fight. Students now are allowed “dumb” phones, but the constant alerts and capabilities of the smartphones are gone.

Other educators have counseled more moderate approaches to the same effect. Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion, wrote recently in Education Next that restricting cellphone use doesn’t “mean banning phones, it just means setting rules. These can take different forms, like setting up cellphone lockers at the main entrance, requiring students to use cellphone-collection baskets at the classroom door, or limiting use to cellphone-approved zones in the school building” (see “Take Away Their Cellphones” feature, Summer 2022).

One common method requires that students check their phones when they enter the school building. At several middle and high schools in and around Springfield, Massachusetts, phones are stored in a magnetic pouch that only educators can open until the end of the day. These metal pouches—like the one developed by Yondr, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2014—are commonly used at concerts and comedy shows to eliminate the distraction of mobile phones and allow people to engage fully in the experience before them. That same sales pitch has made pouches popular at many schools.

Although publications like the Boston Globe have editorialized in favor of these bans, not every school system is on board. Tragedies like mass school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Florida, have given many parents pause about banning phones. The New York City Department of Education, for example, ended a ban on cellphones in schools in 2015, citing parents’ wishes to reach their children during the school day.

According to the federal education department, more than three quarters of public schools prohibited the non-academic use of cellphones during school hours in 2019–20. The phrasing suggests that in that number are schools that are outright banning phones, as well as those who have restricted phones but are consciously leveraging them for academic reasons.

Worries about Mental Health and Focus

Momentum to moderate cellphone usage stems from concerns about students’ mental health. American teenagers are experiencing a significant mental health crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2021 44 percent of U.S. high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in the past year—up from 26 percent in 2009. Visits to emergency rooms for mental health emergencies and attempted suicides are up as well.

What is causing the crisis is disputed. Many pediatric groups and researchers—most prominently psychologist Jean Twenge, the author of the book iGen—have cited correlations in the rise of social media and smartphone use with teenagers’ increasing depression and anxiety to suggest that excessive smartphone and social media use is damaging a generation. But the reality appears more nuanced. One set of studies published in Child Development, for example, used a randomized design to tease apart the emotional impact of receiving fewer likes on social media. It found that although all students suffered a relatively immediate disappointment, it was only teenagers who were more vulnerable to social rejection that suffered a more enduring and significant negative impact.

Still, as Atlantic writer Derek Thompson observed, Twenge’s point may be misunderstood. “Social media isn’t like rat poison, which is toxic to almost everyone,” he wrote. “It’s more like alcohol: a mildly addictive substance that can enhance social situations but can also lead to dependency and depression among a minority of users.”

The other challenge with social media that Twenge cites isn’t the social media itself, but that it replaces sleep and in-person social interactions to such a high degree. Although some have argued there are silver linings to this—such as declines in binge drinking and sexual activity among teens—the impact on adolescents’ loneliness may be contributing to their decline in mental health. And if isolation is the true driver, of course pandemic-related lockdowns and school closures likely contributed to and accelerated some of these trends.

During class, student cellphones present two pressing challenges for teachers: disruption when students use their phones for non-academic purposes during class, and teenagers’ struggles to maintain the deep focus that rigorous academics demand. Sustained attention is unlike many students’ more typical mode of frequent task switching, where they toggle between different apps, which frequent smartphone alerts encourage.

As Lemov wrote, “This is no small thing. … The more rigorous the task, the more it requires what experts call selective or directed attention. To learn well, you must be able to maintain self-discipline about where you direct your attention.”

A lack of practice in focusing could damage students’ abilities to learn and do difficult work, in other words. And some studies have suggested that cellphone bans lead to better learning. One study of high schools in the United Kingdom, for example, showed that schools that banned mobile phones had improved test scores on a year-end test.

It’s All About the Learning Model

Yet while these concerns have led to more cellphone bans, there also has been an explosion in useful learning applications for mobile devices. Think of Duolingo for learning language, or ABC Mouse for learning elementary school subjects, or Quizlet for checking understanding. The ability to learn nearly anything from a phone is better than it’s ever been for all ages of learners.

With the active learning methodologies at the heart of these apps, the learning opportunities on mobile devices are in many ways superior to many of the more passive, video- and text-based ones built for laptops and personal computers. Cellphones may distract from traditional lectures or whole-class instruction. But they also command and can hold individual students’ attention—a precious resource that fuels learning, even if that learning doesn’t look like what we’ve seen before. Phones also may get in the way of students mastering required academic standards, while also connecting students to the information about which they are most curious.

How to explain the paradoxes?

In many learning models, there simply isn’t a productive place for smartphones. But is that the fault of the phone or the model?

Take a case-study classroom, for example. In it, all students are expected to participate in a group discussion to work through a specific situation with a joint set of case facts. If students are instead paying attention to their own devices, the conversation suffers and student learning slows as well.

Contrast that with a foreign-language class where all students work on personalized language modules on Duolingo, for example. They then put their phones away to participate in small-group conversations. (Even before smartphones, a version of this called “language lab” put individual students at headphone stations to work independently with the education technology of the day before rejoining group conversations.) The phone is central to the design of the learning experience. Of course, there’s a risk that students will work on tasks outside of the one assigned. But schools and teachers can use technology to block access to other apps or build on the social dynamics of the classroom to incentivize students to stay on task.

This phenomenon has been true with Internet-connected laptops as well. A 2016 study about a set of West Point classrooms showed that allowing computers when there wasn’t a key purpose for them diminished learning (see “Should Professors Ban Laptops?” research, Fall 2016). On the other hand, a blended-learning model like New Classrooms’ Teach to One relies on laptops to personalize math instruction for middle school students. Research has found students make outsized gains on math tests after successive years of participating in Teach to One classrooms.

One last argument for maintaining cellphones is that schools must teach students to use them responsibly. But many educators’ retort is that they are simply helping show students that there is a time and place for such devices—and school isn’t it.

In that respect, cellphone bans are following the larger trend of banning many things in schools—from books to speakers to certain kinds of speech or topics of debate. Cellphones may make for another easy bogeyman, but blanket bans are ill-informed and regressive. Though we might not see a big reversal in phone bans anytime soon, we should. Educators on the ground should choose for themselves when and whether to allow their students to carry cellphones to class, so they can leverage learning apps to help students make progress.

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of From Reopen to Reinvent.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2023). Ban the Cellphone Ban: Blanket policies ignore the potential of app-powered learning. Education Next, 23(1), 76-77.

Educators preach about growth and grit to children, but the system itself fails to encourage perseverance and curiosity. Instead, it does the opposite by affixing labels to students, sorting them into relatively static groups, and signaling to the students that that their effort doesn’t matter. This learning model is an outgrowth of a dangerous zero-sum mindset. That mindset creates winners and losers among students before they turn 18, and it causes society to miss out on unique talent that could have been developed. A better alternative is reinventing school culture as a whole and reorienting it toward a mastery-based, positive-sum system that will allow students to embrace their strengths and flourish.

Under today’s system, time is held as a constant and each student’s learning is variable. Students move from concept to concept after spending a fixed number of days, weeks, or months on the subject. Educators teach, sometimes administer a test, and move students on to the next unit or body of material regardless of the class’s results, effort, and understanding of the topic. Students typically receive feedback and results much later and only after they have progressed.

The system signals to students that it doesn’t matter if they stick with something, because they’ll move on either way. This approach undermines the value of perseverance and curiosity, as it does not reward students for spending more time on a topic. It also demotivates students, as many become bored when they don’t have to work at topics that come easily to them or when they fall behind because they don’t understand a building-block concept. Yet the class continues to progress, and students develop holes in their learning. This fixed-time, variable-learning system fails students.

Contrast this with a mastery-based—or competency-based—learning model in which time becomes the variable and learning becomes guaranteed. Students only move on from a concept once they demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills at hand. If they initially fail, that’s fine. Failure is an integral part of the learning process. Students stick with a task, learn from the failures, and work until they demonstrate mastery. For core knowledge and concepts, success is both required and guaranteed.

Mastery-based learning systematically embeds perseverance into its design. It showcases having a growth mindset, because students can improve their performance and master academic knowledge, skills, and habits of success.

Even if teachers today talk about the importance of perseverance and growth mindset, today’s system doesn’t reward those habits. It undermines them.

Similarly, by not providing timely, actionable feedback, schools demotivate learners. Research shows that when students receive feedback but cannot improve their performance with that feedback, it has a negative influence on student learning. Conversely, when students can use the feedback, it has a positive impact on learning. It also opens the door to more positive and personalized interactions with teachers. Those interactions build trust.

Our school structures are built on a historical legacy of sorting students out of the education system at various intervals. This stems from a scarcity mentality—that there are only a few opportunities, so we must select those students who will benefit the most and discard the rest. These structures make judgments about students’ capacities before the students have had a fair chance to prove themselves.

The Perils of the Zero-Sum Mindset

This zero-sum mindset—that for every winner there must be a loser—means that, by age 18, before people have lived most of their lives, we have labeled the vast majority of students. Instead of helping them understand their strengths and make decisions about potential career paths, we have signaled to many that they aren’t good enough for certain pathways or that they are “below” others.

Although this might be easier administratively than the alternative, it is devastating. This overlooks talent that could be developed. And it ignores that so much of our society—like capitalism, when it works properly—is built on a positive-sum mindset. Schooling and its scarcity mindset are anomalies today.

As Todd Rose, author of The End of Average, told Diane Tavenner and me on our Class Disrupted podcast, the opposite of a zero-sum game is a positive-sum one in which the pie grows larger as individuals achieve success. One of Adam Smith’s central insights in the 1700s, Rose said, is that “the mercantilist idea of zero-sum economies was just fatally wrong” and that society should instead create the correct conditions for self-interest to engender positive-sum outcomes. A big benefit from moving to a positive-sum system is that instead of competing to be the best—as you would in a zero-sum game—you compete to be unique.

“The last thing you want to do is be competing with some other people on the exact same thing. It limits you. It limits your value,” Rose said. He said his research shows that trying to be unique “translates into much higher life satisfaction.”

That’s the opposite of those who compete to be the best, “in which even higher levels of achievement do not correlate with higher life satisfaction or happiness. So there’s something about understanding how to compete, to be unique and achieving on that uniqueness. That matters both for personal fulfillment and the life I want to live, but also ultimately my greatest contribution to society.”

Competition can be good. Social comparisons can help an individual realize certain things are possible that they would not have imagined otherwise. But when we shrink the definition of life success and only value people on a few uniform and narrow dimensions, competition is problematic. Competition is also a problem when we declare, prematurely, that the game is over.

People don’t learn in a linear way, all on the same path and at the same pace. People develop at different rates. They have different strengths and weaknesses, with different contexts, background knowledge, working memory and cognitive capacities, and social and emotional learning states. It’s vital that we do not sort students off of a pathway too soon . Instead, we’d be better off creating and illuminating a variety of viable pathways. Customizing is critical to helping every child fulfill their human potential.

A Better Way Forward

Moving to a mastery-based system offers a path to escaping the traditional zero-sum system.

In a traditional education system, teachers often subconsciously compare their students. They do this explicitly when they use a curve to grade the class. Under such a system, there is a cost for a given student to help and support their peers. At worst, providing such help undermines the helping student’s own chance for success and opportunity. When schools are sorting students, comparing them to one another, and doling out scarce opportunity in the form of selective-college admissions, there are few incentives to cooperate rather than compete. All of this works against helping students have fun with each other as they learn.

Competition for extrinsic reasons—out of a desire to be the best for its own sake, not for the intrinsic value of the experience—has clear downsides. Experts ranging from the New York Times’s Frank Bruni to Harvard’s Michael Sandel have offered observations on the current system and raised questions about how healthy this is for the individuals themselves, as well as for society writ large.

“Our credentialing function is beginning to crowd out our educational function,” Sandel said in an interview with the Chronicle for Higher Education. “Students win admission to [exclusive institutions] by converting their teenage years—or their parents converting their teenage years—into a stress-strewn gauntlet of meritocratic striving. That inculcates intense pressure for achievement. So even the winners in the meritocratic competition are wounded by it, because they become so accustomed to accumulating achievements and credentials, so accustomed to jumping through hoops and pleasing their parents and teachers and coaches and admissions committees, that the habit of hoop-jumping becomes difficult to break. By the time they arrive in college, many find it difficult to step back and reflect on what’s worth caring about, on what they truly would love to study and learn.”

Rose said this competition to be the best for its own sake is counterproductive and nonsensical.

“Literally you gotta be the same as everyone else only better,” he said. “Take the same test,” but get a higher score. “Take the same classes. Get better grades.”

The problem, according to Rose, is that our current system of education—and selective higher education in particular—is zero sum.

The good news is that moving to a mastery-based system and measuring students against a standard instead of each other can lift students and teachers into a positive-sum system. The success of some students would no longer be at the expense of others. Incorporating projects and small-group learning where students are actively giving each other feedback and supporting each other also helps lift students and educators into a positive-sum system.

As students seek to carve out their own pathways in life and be the unique individuals they are, comparisons can shift from trying to label someone’s ability on a narrow set of measures to instead understanding who they are becoming. Where comparison is still important, we can look at students’ depth of learning to understand where their passions are, their progress against their goals, or even their rate of learning to see which areas are truly their strengths and aptitudes. This offers a better way for educators to help all students build their passions, fulfill their potential, and understand how they can best contribute to society.

Transforming Physical Education

An example from outside traditional academics—in the realm of fitness in schools—helps illustrate some of the principles.

Although fitness can bolster students’ academic success, the place where fitness should occur in most schools—physical-education class—is all too often focused on teaching organized sports and games rather than ensuring that each student is moving daily and improving their fitness. Far too often, PE class makes some individuals feel like failures.

Peter Driscoll, a PE teacher at Hartford High School in the Hartford School District of Vermont, has spent much of his teaching career changing that dynamic. An avid CrossFitter, Driscoll brings an ethos of CrossFit into his classes, with a focus on building a foundation of fitness in each individual. Other teachers in the building have told Driscoll that they notice the students are in a much better space for learning after his class.

But Driscoll hasn’t just helped students be successful in other areas. He’s changed the methodology of his class so that all students can experience success in PE itself.

The first change he implemented was when he was teaching elementary school. At the start of each class, he had the children do a “Tabata Workout,” in which an individual works out for 20 seconds,  rests for 10 seconds, and then works out again for a total of four minutes. In many cases, that working out was just running back and forth across the gym. Because it was time based, no child finished before any other child. The students loved it.

This practice changed what Driscoll had observed previously. “The kids who really loved PE were the kids who were innately good at fleeing, chasing, and dodging, and they had the coordination and agility skills, and they were just supersized,” he told me. “And the other kids didn’t. They didn’t have that self-confidence from our class that I wanted them to. So when I switched to kind of a fitness-based approach and got away from team games and the competitive side of team sports, the program has blossomed, and the kids would go home and rave about what they did in class. And I got a ton of support from the parents.”

Driscoll has since expanded his work.

His high school students now set personal fitness goals with clear numbers attached to them. This is to ensure a student is competing only against that particular student’s own prior performance and future goals, not anyone else in the class or school.

Students plan how they will tackle the workout of the day. What’s their strategy, and how will they pace themselves? Where do they need to scale a given movement, for example, so that they can safely and successfully complete the workout?

Finally, after the workout, the students receive immediate feedback on how they did. They use the information to reflect with Driscoll on what they can do better to realize their personal goals.

The result is one where each student is essentially enjoying a personalized PE class.  This allows students to experience the feelings of daily success along with the endorphins and dopamine produced by both sweat and authentic accomplishments.

Reinventing Culture

As schools seek to reinvent themselves, caring about culture is critical. But in the current zero-sum education system, it’s impossible to create a culture where every single child is valued.

The current time-based system focuses on sorting students. That compels teachers to judge students relative to others, rather than focusing solely on how to support each child so that all can be successful. Until schools move to a positive-sum system centered around a mastery guarantee rather than time, it won’t be possible to create a true culture that prioritizes every child. That is a sobering thought. Some educators in schools that sweat the small stuff for every child will undoubtedly protest its validity, but, writ large across the system, it’s true.

The road to positive-sum schooling system starts with small steps, not big leaps. Rather than impose a big vision of systems change that doesn’t help individuals with their specific challenges, we should encourage each child, teacher, and parent to make progress as they define it for themselves. This will ameliorate their struggles, improve morale, ensure mastery for each child, and move us to a positive-sum school system over time. In such a system, the measure would not be time, but progress, as individual children chase their most daring dreams.

Adapted from From Reopen to Reinvent: (Re)creating School for Every Child, coming from Jossey-Bass in July 2022. Michael B. Horn is executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and senior strategist at Guild Education.

This article appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.R. (2022). From Zero Sum to Positive Sum: In the current system, some students succeed at the expense of others. It doesn’t have to be that way. Education Next, 22(4), 44-49.

It’s hard to decide which recent “metaverse” headline has felt more unreal.

On one hand, consider Facebook’s rebranding itself as Meta—a nod to the shared virtual spaces where the company believes its future lies. In this vision, large groups of individual users will meet in an immersive, simulated, digital environment, where they’ll work, study, create, and form relationships that mix avatars and real-world elements to varying degrees. On the other hand, there was Meta’s subsequent 60-second Super Bowl commercial, which featured an animatronic dog reuniting in virtual reality with its animatronic friends, and which cost the company an estimated $13 million.

Either way, both showed that the hype behind the metaverse is real, even if the metaverse itself does not yet actually exist. Within two months of Facebook’s transition to Meta, Google searches for “metaverse” increased by roughly 20 times and the term was mentioned in 12,000 English-language news articles. The year before, it had been mentioned just 400 times.

Educators excited about the future of technology haven’t missed a beat, and they’ve jumped on the metaverse bandwagon too. The Brookings Institution released a policy brief warning that “when education lags the digital leaps, the technology rather than educators defines what counts as educational opportunity.” The authors recommend that researchers, educators, policymakers, and digital designers should get ahead of the trend while the metaverse is still under construction.

What is the Metaverse?

The exact definition of the metaverse is still up for debate. The term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash. The most widely used definition today is from venture capitalist Matthew Ball, who has boiled it down to seven elements.

In this understanding, the metaverse:

• Is always present and has no ending

• Can be experienced synchronously by multiple people

• Does not have a population cap and can be shared by everyone, while each individual retains their agency

• Can offer a fully functioning economy

• Can span both the digital and physical worlds, as well as open and closed platforms

• Is interoperable, so digital tools and assets from one app can be used in others

• Contains content and experiences created by a range of contributors.

According to technology writer Ben Thompson, the Internet satisfies all these requirements. “What makes ‘The Metaverse’ unique,” he writes, “is that it is the Internet best experienced in virtual reality. This, though, will take time; I expect that the first virtual-reality experiences will be individual metaverses, tied together by the Internet as we experience it today.”

There are active debates about this. Some wonder just how interoperable does the metaverse need to be. How important is it, for example, for a digital tool that works in one video game to be usable in a different application? Do we need standard protocols like those that apply to blockchain, or the open-source databases that form the foundation of the current “open web”?

As a result of the complexity, it’s easy to default to extended reality—virtual reality and augmented reality—when talking about the metaverse. But much as the mobile Internet has built upon the infrastructure of the Internet, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and others argue that the metaverse will simply be the successor to the mobile internet.

More Than Web 3.0

This isn’t the first time educators have gotten excited about virtual reality—nor the first time I’ve written about it in these pages (see “Virtual Reality Disruption: Will 3-D technology break through to the educational mainstream?” What Next, Fall 2016). Remember educators’ short-lived obsession with Second Life, the online platform in which people create avatars to navigate a 3-D online world? That excitement faded fast, and Second Life was laid to rest alongside many other educational fads.

What’s different this time around?

For starters, interest in the metaverse is rising amid a long, deeply disruptive pandemic that kicked off an unprecedented, rapid-fire deployment of virtual learning around the world. According to the Digital Learning Collaborative, in the 2018-19 school year, 375,000 students were enrolled in full-time, statewide virtual schools. By the 2020-21 school year, the number had nearly doubled to 656,000 students. That count does not include virtual schools run by local districts, which also grew dramatically during the pandemic. And many students enrolled in traditional brick-and-mortar schools now regularly learn online for parts of their day, either in school or at home.

That has smoothed over one of the main barriers to using virtual reality in class: the equipment. In the past, logging on to a laptop and wearing a virtual-reality headset were viewed as an intrusive ordeal. But the game has changed, according to Thompson. If students are doing significant amounts of work online already, why couldn’t they have a headset on for most of that time as well?

In this vision, a virtual-reality headset is just a workaday accessory, like a computer mouse. But with it, students can “walk” into different education seminars and co-working spaces for projects and experience a range of virtual-reality environments, learning applications, lectures, and more. Just as the rising popularity of now-familiar learning technology tools like laptops fueled the creation of online learning applications and environments, this dynamic, coupled with a broader interest in the metaverse, seems poised to spur the creation of more learning environments that take advantage of virtual reality and 3-D.

Under Development

There are dozens of metaverse-type experiments underway in K-12 education.

For example, American High School touts its virtual-reality offerings on its website. The accredited, private online school has operated since 2004 and enrolled more than 8,000 students in grades K-12. Later this year, students and teachers at Optima Classical Academy, an online charter school based in Florida, will meet as avatars in a social virtual-reality platform created for the school that its founder described as a “metaverse.” It is set to launch in August for students in grades 3-8, who will follow a great books curriculum. Women Rise NFT, a collection of unique pieces of digital art by artist Maliha Abidi, was formed with the ultimate goal of building a school in the metaverse to serve the 258 million children around the world who cannot access traditional schools.

Then there are plans to support educators through the metaverse. The company k20 launched the Eduverse, a “metaverse hub for educators,” to connect teachers and administrators in a shared virtual world, where they can learn, network, and advance in their careers.

Finally, there are an array of enablers and supplemental providers that provide virtual-reality experiences for students and educators. Companies like Labster offer virtual-reality laboratories and FluentWorlds allows students to learn English in a variety of virtual worlds. Kai XR offers “360 degree” virtual field trips and EDUmetaverse has over 35 virtual worlds that educators can use.

And consider Dreamscape Immersive, a virtual-reality company founded by computer scientists and former Disney leaders. While its main funders are from the entertainment world—major Hollywood studios, Steven Spielberg, Nickelodeon, and AMC Theaters, which is planning to co-locate Dreamscape virtual-reality experiences in some of its theaters—the company also has partnered with Arizona State University to create Dreamscape Learn. Its first offering, a series of virtual-reality labs called “Immersive Biology at the Alien Zoo,” was created by Spielberg and company CEO Walter Parkes as an alternative for conventional lab work in college-level Introductory Biology. A high-school course is planned for later this year.

And even Meta has a team dedicated to developing education applications in the metaverse.

Looking Ahead

As metaverse mania continues, three things appear true.

First, innovation theory suggests that the early successful instances that apply elements of the metaverse will be proprietary in nature. They will be optimized initially to maximize the performance and reliability of an immature technology at the expense of scale and interoperability. That immediately suggests a problem. Many of the instances that are called a metaverse won’t meet a key criterion of Ball’s definition: interoperability. Indeed, much of what passes for metaverse hype right now is still virtual reality clothed in new marketing language.

This may not be a bad thing, however, given concerns about whether the metaverse will be a safe and healthy place for children. Experiences in walled-off gardens—think Prodigy and America Online, not the whole of the World Wide Web—could be safer, at least initially, even though that might temporarily undermine the vision of innovating instruction or skill development through the blockchain or decentralized autonomous organizations.

Second, the metaverse seems more of a sustaining than a disruptive innovation for full-time virtual schools. Unlike disruptions, sustaining innovations improve the performance of an existing product or service to better serve users who already exist. Full-time virtual schools that have sometimes struggled to engage students would likely benefit from a more immersive, social experience. Combining their programs with the metaverse, as well as with in-person learning pods, could create a more robust and accessible schooling experience. Alongside the flexible models of learning that took root during the pandemic, such as pods and hybrid online and in-person programs, a socially rich, immersive metaverse could, eventually, disrupt traditional, brick-and-mortar schools.

Finally, metaverse applications can create educational experiences that are otherwise impossible in a traditional environment. Virtual reality can bring content alive with dynamic images and hands-on digital exploration. It can bring real people and knowledge from other parts of the world into classrooms everywhere. Consider the potential for science labs, language learning, internships, cultural exchanges, and field trips (see “The Educational Value of Field Trips,” research, Winter 2014).

When the metaverse comes to class, these are the areas where you’ll want to point your virtual-reality goggles.

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of the upcoming book From Reopen to Reinvent.

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2022). Meet in the Metaverse: A new frontier in virtual learning. Education Next, 22(3), 76-79.

In a Historic House museum in Newton, Massachusetts, nine children seated at three tables configured in a U-shape are each working on their own online lesson. After their 25-minute “Pomodoro” cycle—a time-management technique designed to optimize one’s ability to focus on a specific task—they break for a variety of outdoor recreational activities, from badminton to Bananagrams.

The children are enrolled in KaiPod Learning, a program that offers small-group learning pods with access to virtual schools, in-person tutoring and support, and a variety of student-driven enrichment activities. The day I visited, many, but not all, of the students planned to join a yoga session in the afternoon.

KaiPod is among the startup pods that emerged from the height of the pandemic and that have so far survived.

In the summer of 2020, the frenzy around learning pods—also called microschools and pandemic pods—was high. As described in “The Rapid Rise of Pandemic Pods” (What Next, Winter 2021), families—including mine—were frenetically assembling or joining them out of a desire to preserve some in-person support, community, and normalcy in an otherwise abnormal year.

At the same time, equity concerns and parent shaming ran rampant. Educators, researchers, and the media worried about who would have access to these pods and whether low-income families would be left out of them.

A year later, the scene looks different. While the Delta variant has kept plans changing, people seem more interested in a return to in-person schooling. The conversation around pods hasn’t vanished, but it has quieted. Many families, including my own, pulled out of their pods last year because they found them unsustainable for any number of reasons.

And yet many pods that have an institutional structure behind them, rather than being fully parent-run, have survived. They are finding their niches and growing. Despite fears that pods would benefit only people in prosperous suburbs such as Newton, some of the most robust pod experiments have taken place in school districts disproportionately serving low-income and minority students. According to the Center for Reinventing Public Education, which collected information on 372 different learning pods during the pandemic, 36 percent of the largest urban school districts operated or sponsored learning pods during the pandemic, for example, with the majority of these focused on explicitly serving the most vulnerable students. According to CRPE, nearly 39 percent of these pods operated throughout the 2020–21 year. Only 12 percent definitively closed; it was unclear what happened to the remainder.

Some districts are seeking to continue to make use of pods to create alternative schooling arrangements that better support those children who need it the most. It’s worth monitoring to see if something more durable persists from this movement as the nation moves through a third year of interrupted schooling. Case studies from Cleveland and Boston, as well as DeKalb County in Georgia, Edgecombe County in North Carolina, and Guilford County in North Carolina, help give a deeper sense of how the pods performed and what they may facilitate in the years ahead.

Cleveland

When Cleveland declared in July of 2020 that the school year would begin remotely, community organizations—including the Cleveland Foundation, MyCom, Say Yes Cleveland, and the United Way of Cleveland—sprang into action alongside the Cleveland Municipal School District. As documented in a report, “Building Community-based Academic Learning Pods for Cleveland’s Children,” the organizations worked to open 24 pods that served 808 of Cleveland’s most vulnerable students, all but 32 of whom were enrolled in kindergarten through 8th grade. The funds were largely from philanthropic sources, although federal CARES Act funds also supported the effort.

The top reason for which parents and guardians reported enrolling students in the pods was educational support, followed by needing safe care while they worked. For some students, the pods served as an option of last resort, without which they would not have been able to attend classes online, despite the district’s distribution of computers and internet hotspots. This is because many students lived exclusively with their grandparents, who were unable to help them log on. Students in grades K–5 were particularly in need of such assistance. Other students were challenged by homelessness or utilities that were disconnected at home. Attendance at the pods was relatively high at 75 percent overall and 85 percent among the K–5 students.

Students and parents were overwhelmingly satisfied with the pod experience, with 98 percent of parents expressing appreciation. At the same time, 55 percent of parents said the pods didn’t meet students’ academic needs, but it’s hard to know how that compares to expectations or the counterfactual of what students’ academic experience would have been without the pods. Academic data from the pods hasn’t been released yet to shed light on this topic, but there are a few preliminary bright spots. The district’s data, for example, showed that the pod students logged into the district’s learning-management system more and completed more assignments than the non-pod students. Judy Willard, one of the staff members at one of the pods, reported that students were on track with their academic learning despite many having started the year 65 lessons behind.

The pods in Cleveland are not in operation for this 2021–22 school year, but the district is exploring using a pod-like structure to facilitate student-led peer-tutoring efforts.

Boston

In Boston, as in Cleveland, a group of community organizations—the YMCA of Greater Boston, Latinos for Education, Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, and the BASE—came together through philanthropic funding to stand up 12 pods that enrolled over 165 students, 82 percent of whom identified as Black or Latinx. Eleven of the pods were in person for K–8 students, and one was virtual for high school students.

The organizations had been coordinating prior to Covid to reimagine schooling to close the opportunity gap for Boston students of color. When they launched their pods in September 2020, they had four principal goals: to offer a safe and supportive environment; create a daily structure to help students stay on track; demonstrate the benefits of students working with Black and Latinx staff; and set up a broader infrastructure to support students.

Bellwether Education, an education consultancy, studied and advised the intervention relative to those goals. There were positives and negatives. Attendance was lower than expected, and Bellwether’s forthcoming report doesn’t provide quantitative academic outcomes. On the other hand, with 95 percent of the staff identifying as Black or Latinx and 100 percent holding previous educational experience, 76 percent of parents said their child’s connection was stronger with the pod staff than with their regular school teacher. Ninety-two percent of parents further reported that they were informed by staff about their child’s day. This kind of family engagement could be a harbinger of greater academic connection and progress, although it’s hard to know given the limited data released so far.

Given the lack of a virtual schooling option in Boston for the 2021–22 school year, the pods are not continuing, but the leaders of the community organizations are seeking to find novel ways to partner with the local schools to continue providing the full set of child supports that, based on the survey data, parents appreciated.

The Future of Pods

Unlike Boston and Cleveland, some districts are actively continuing their pods.

Along with TNTP, a nonprofit education consultancy, CRPE created more in-depth partnerships with six school districts to try to create something more lasting and transformational out of the pods movement. DeKalb County School District in Georgia, for example, is using the pods to reinvent alternative schools. Alternative schools, which serve students who have dropped out or transferred from traditional schools, have historically struggled to show the value they add for students.

Edgecombe County Public Schools in North Carolina launched learning hubs last fall to help students connect to online classes and get in-person support. District leaders discovered that families valued increased flexibility around where and when learning happened, so they worked with students and teachers to design a “spoke-and-hub model.” Long-term, the district hopes this model will offer a new approach to school that builds stronger connections between school and community. In this more hybrid future of schooling, students would enroll in a brick-and-mortar or virtual school for the “hub” of their experience and then elementary and middle school students will join “spokes”—or interest-based groups—for the other time. High school students will receive tutor-like support and work at paid positions or internships.

Guildford County Public Schools, also in North Carolina, is looking to craft school days in which high school students learn for three hours in person and then have more flexible time out of school to engage in a variety of activities, including completing assignments, working, or receiving tutoring or other enrichment opportunities. The district envisions this as part of a greater overhaul of their high schools that weren’t serving many students effectively, even before Covid.

It seems unlikely that pods will be a dominant force in American schooling anytime soon. They will likely fade in influence relative to the 2020–21 school year. Yet many parents and district leaders remain intrigued by the possibilities pods create—enough so that this option will persist in some localities as one schooling choice in a broader set. Indeed, Tyton Partners, an education advisory firm, estimates that 1.5 million children are enrolled in microschools this fall. Based on the reported parent satisfaction, the pods seeded in some of these localities may continue to grow.

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and senior strategist at Guild Education.

This article appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2022). Some Pods Will Outlast the Pandemic: Students, parents say they appreciate the support. Education Next, 22(1), 84-86.

Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning
by Audrey Watters
2021, MIT Press, $34.95; 328 pages.

As reviewed by Michael B. Horn

For nearly a decade, Audrey Watters has cast herself as a snarky and skeptical writer about education technology. From theories of personalized learning to new education-technology companies, Watters attempts to cut down the hype and to dash hopes.

In her writings, she frequently covers the history of education, and argues that many of the ideas behind education technology and innovation are neither new nor good.

Her new book, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, rests on these two pillars. The book presents two compelling microhistories of teaching machines sandwiched between a preface and a conclusion that attempt unsuccessfully to use those histories to contextualize—and cast doubt upon—personalized learning and today’s efforts to deploy new technology in that effort. Her big objection to personalized learning and education technology is that the two inevitably entail a crude behaviorist approach to instruction that deprives students and teachers of freedom.

Although the teaching machine is most associated with Harvard psychology professor B. F. Skinner, Watters takes the reader back to the era of President Calvin Coolidge and Ohio State Professor Sidney Pressey’s efforts to build and commercialize an “Automatic Teacher”—a machine that would allow students to answer questions, receive feedback, and, at the switch of a lever, progress only after they correctly answered the question.

Pressey’s background was in the field of standardized intelligence testing, which had become popular at the time. Although he knew much about standardized tests and textbooks, “the manufacturing of a piece of scientific equipment was something quite different,” Watters writes.

Watters presents a lengthy description of Pressey’s foibles and frustrations in commercializing his invention. It’s a history that foreshadows Skinner’s experience, and Watters makes sure the reader doesn’t miss the echoes by pointing out that would-be innovators such as Skinner ignored the past and seemed to believe that, in Watters’s words, “Surely this time, things would be different.”

Indeed, Skinner’s dramatic and futile efforts to commercialize a teaching machine weren’t much different from Pressey’s. Watters captures everything from Skinner’s behaviorist philosophy to his tone-deaf dealings with former Harvard President James Bryant Conant, as he tries to convince Conant that his teaching machine will fix American education in the wake of Sputnik. Readers also learn of Skinner’s emotional and highly erratic dealings with the Rheem Manufacturing Company, with which he had signed an agreement to produce his machine.

At times the narrative delves too deeply, in my estimation, into the minutiae and details of primary sources. Yet overall, Watters uses these sources well, and her sharp writing propels the story forward.

What Watters paints ultimately is less a story of Skinner’s device failing in the commercial marketplace for educational reasons and more a tale of flawed business models and missteps in production.

This distinction is at the root of the book’s problems, which start with its subtitle, “The History of Personalized Learning.” A book that fully covered this topic would focus not just on the history of the teaching machine—something more education innovators would do well to understand—but also on many other personalized techniques and approaches, from tutoring to Montessori education. Watters does helpfully explain why she doesn’t tackle computer-based and online education and keeps her primary focus on the era of teaching machines, but equating the movement to personalize learning with machine technology is reductionist.

The history that Watters presents is solid, but her commentary around it is at times flawed. For instance, she misunderstands why many people call traditional schools the “factory model” of education. Yes, many of the features of American education that critics often compare to factories were in fact imported from the Prussian education system. However, as David Tyack and Larry Cuban demonstrate in their timeless volume Tinkering Toward Utopia, the push to incorporate standardized testing into American schools and the use of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of scientific management there were clearly inspired by America’s factories, which themselves were seen as the latest in technology. Watters acknowledges this movement but still castigates those who would call them factory-model schools.

What’s more, her extensive discussion of behaviorism could use more grounding, as her analogies break down in several places. One of her critiques of behaviorism is that it doesn’t work well. Yet she writes about how these techniques are used at Google to create personalization for individuals. It’s hard to argue that Google hasn’t been successful in this pursuit. So if personalization works in the realm of the consumer internet, as at Google, and if that success is based at least in part on behaviorism, then this would suggest that behaviorism works—which is at odds with part of the story Watters tries to tell.

She would still argue that this sort of personalization based on behaviorism is bad because it limits freedom, but research on creativity suggests that in order to be creative, one must first build knowledge and understand the rules of a domain before one can begin usefully breaking rules—particularly in adjacent or orthogonal fields. That would suggest, then, that behaviorism, while not a complete education theory, would serve certain learning purposes such as building knowledge. This, in turn, would allow for the use of skills like critical thinking and creativity.

With that said, there are significant reasons to doubt the direct transferability of behaviorism to education from the consumer internet world—which renders some of Watters’s analogies less useful. Nudges, for example, have a mixed track record in education (see “Nudging and Shoving Students Toward Success,” features, Spring 2021). Civitas Learning, a student-success company based on predictive analytics that Watters references, has largely failed, because its algorithm struggled to be useful as it scaled. At least one challenge with using artificial intelligence in education is that any mistakes an algorithm makes can derail a student’s learning and self-efficacy, whereas on the consumer internet a mistaken recommendation from Amazon or Netflix has little downside, at least for an individual customer. But these aren’t the challenges that Watters raises. Indeed, her dislike of behaviorism because of its limits on freedom leads her to recast Seymour Papert, known as a pioneer of constructionist learning, as a behaviorist.

This suggests that Watters is primarily just ranting against the use of any and all digital education technology. That sort of protest seems akin to sitting on top of a moving train and yelling stop.

Watters doesn’t get into the topic of how some of the competitors to Skinner’s teaching machine have fared. In fact, some of today’s technologies that she belittles have seen massive adoption. Khan Academy, a foil she writes about in the book, has over 100 million users—in dramatic contrast to Skinner’s experience. Age of Learning, the maker of the popular ABCmouse app and website, serves more than 50 million children. Indeed, the digitization of America’s schooling curriculum is well underway and has likely accelerated since the pandemic. Even longtime education publishers like McGraw-Hill, for example, are majority digital, not print, companies now. Whether they are successfully personalizing learning is a different question.

In her conclusion, Watters writes that the adoption of technology in education has ebbed and flowed over time; it’s “not a short-lived fad but rather a recurring trend.” This portion of the book is, in many ways, a statement of her professional career as a critic protesting technology as a detriment to individuals’ freedom. Watters cites the Freedom Schools that arose from the 1964 civil-rights project Freedom Summer as “a network of alternative education centers that offered the kind of teaching and learning that the public school system of Mississippi had refused to provide its Black population.” She goes on to say, “If we reject teaching machines and technologies of behavioral control in education, we certainly won’t be the first to do so. . . . From the history of refusal, we can see when students and teachers and communities protested attempts to engineer them, into either enlightenment or submission. From the alternatives they imagined and built—most notably, perhaps, the Freedom Schools, we can glean ways to construct and share knowledge that depend on humans rather than machines, liberating us from the efficient control of the ‘Skinner box.’ These practices privilege the much messier forms of teaching and learning, forms that are necessarily grounded in freedom and dignity.”

It is all fascinating history. But contrary to the author’s contention, the historical examples stop well short of demonstrating that today’s innovative practices will impede freedom rather than advancing it.

Michael B. Horn is executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and senior strategist at Guild Education.

This article appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M.B. (2022). The Quest for an “Automatic Teacher”: A compelling narrative marred by flawed commentary. Education Next, 22(1), 82-83.