American Education in 2030

Simple extrapolations of current trends suggest that public education costs will rise sharply, pupil-teacher ratios will fall, and control over the education system will shift from families and localities to higher levels of government. Courts and collective bargaining agreements will also gain in influence. Meanwhile, high school graduation rates will fall, and learning will stagnate. Fortunately, those trends will be disrupted by an enormous rate of change in curriculum design and information dissemination made possible by technological innovation.  PDF | View related video

In 2030 curriculum is at the fore of education rather than serving as it did 20 years ago in the shadow of reform efforts involving teacher performance, choice, standards and accountability, and school governance. Students engage with curriculum in web-based environments that include virtual social agents. The curriculum and its delivery are the products of the field of cognitive technology that marries cognitive science with powerful information technologies. The power of curriculum means that differences among schools and teachers are no longer important determinants of learning outcomes for students.  PDF | View related video

It seems self-evident that we can improve schooling if we tune education to the students' minds. But what about teachers? Teachers are expected to write curricula, write lesson plans, cope with enormous student diversity, and improve their teaching although they are given no opportunity to practice. This essay argues that those place unreasonable cognitive demands on teachers and pose a formidable problem in American education.  PDF | View related video

The achievement gap is not quite a thing of the past in 2030. But African American students are now achieving at levels approaching those of white students in the late twentieth century. All but 10 percent are graduating from high school; 25 percent are completing college. Public schools in the inner city have improved sharply, through twenty-first-century innovations-sophisticated technology and better teachers. Follow that progress through the story of Rasheed, an impoverished Philadelphian who faced long odds at birth but just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.  PDF | View related video

American students devote more time to learning in 2030 than at any other time in history. Students attend school about seven hours a day, two hundred days a year. Homework averages two hours per night in high school. Private tutors are hired to shore up academic weaknesses, and schools offer Saturday workshops for remediation. The nation has come to realize that more time devoted to learning leads to higher achievement. And higher achievement leads to better lives for children-and to a better nation.  PDF | View related video

In 2030, Americans benefit from K-12 academics that are rigorous, but not stultifyingly uniform. This pluralism emerged in the aftermath of President Obama's ill-fated project of creating a monolithic, inflexible set of national standards. A half dozen rivalrous standards soon evolved from the bottom up out of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, Core Knowledge, Common Core, the New Standards Project, state standards from the 1990s and 2000s, and other efforts. States now call on public school districts or schools to adhere to one of these sets of standards. PDF | View related video

Although testing and accountability were contentious issues in the past, the school system of 2030 relies heavily on data. Schools, teachers, and parents all see better data as leading to improved schools. This change reflects the development of better and broader tests and a movement to evaluations based on learning gains by all students. The movement to better uses of information has led to raised student achievement, although U.S. students still lag the best international students. PDF | View related video

The federal government in 2030 foots more of the total bill for public education than ever before. National standards and tests in core academic subjects are used in all but a handful of states; a substantial share of federal money is allocated to states based on student outcomes; and the feds have increased spending on education data gathering and research and development by an order of magnitude. State legislatures, in turn, have shifted power away from dysfunctional school boards and are empowering parents and the public at large to exercise more control over their local schools. On the surface, these changes represent the culmination of a century-long trend toward more centralized control of U.S. public education. Yet this latest round of centralization has yielded more variety in governance arrangements and more responsiveness to local needs throughout the nation's school system. In short, it has revitalized educational federalism. PDF | View related video

School districts will no longer manage all schools, hire all teachers, and assign students to schools. Instead, "portfolio school districts" will manage the mix of schools to meet the needs of all local students, hiring many different school providers, some from local providers-colleges, teacher groups, museums, and professional school management organizations-and some from statewide or national organizations. Some schools will rely heavily on online instruction and employ few teachers. To promote continuous improvement, portfolio school districts will hold all to the same student performance standards. PDF | View related video

In 2010 the American education system was doing what it did best. It was surviving. For decades, it had been subjected to blistering—and well-justified—criticism for its relentlessly poor performance. But thanks to powerful defenders in politics, it had weathered the storm like a rock, virtually immune to the efforts of reformers to bring about major change.  PDF

By 2030, vouchers (publicly or privately funded scholarships awarded directly to families to pay for private school tuition) had substantially displaced many failing public schools. Parents strongly preferred private schools, which provided superior achievement outcomes in the agreed-upon content of standard school subjects, as well as a diversity of additional subject matter, content, and methods of teaching and learning. The competition brought about by vouchers forced traditional public, parochial, and independent schools to improve their offerings, achievement, and appeal to parents. PDF | View related video

In 2030, nearly two-thirds of U.S. children benefit from school choice, up from half in 2010. Charters enroll 5 percent of students, and four more states have voucher programs; but the greatest expansion has taken place in cyberspace (half of all high school courses are now online), in homeschooling (6 percent), and in hybrid institutions. "Catholic charter schools" offer religious instruction early and late in the day. National "brand-name" schools are flourishing, and vastly improved data systems make it far easier to navigate among these options. PDF | View related video

Despite its vast inertia, U.S. education can change dramatically in two decades. Consider these seismic alterations between 1990 and 2010: (1) standards-based reform, (2) major alterations in the federal role, (3) the reinvention of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), (4) the advent and grown of charter schools, (5) enormous expansion of other choices, (6) alternative certification, (7) school governance innovation (e.g., mayors), (8) cyberlearning, (9) finance reforms, (10) greater integration of primary-secondary schooling preschool and higher education as well as data systems that enable individuals' progress to be tracked. PDF