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Will Technology in Education Circumvent "Political Blocking?"

By Robyn Bagley, Board Chair, Parents for Choice in Education

While attending the recent iNACOL (International Association for K-12 Online Learning) conference in Austin, I had the good fortune of hearing featured speaker Terry Moe. Professor Moe began his speech with, "You are the Revolutionaries in education." You might be asking, how so? That is what I intend to answer with a short synopsis of an obviously well received speech to a crowd of passionate K-12 education innovators. A little background first.

Terry Moe is a Stanford University Professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He and John Chubb have co-authored a very popular book in the circles of education reformers entitled "Liberating Learning". The main focus of their book was nicely summed up in a recent Wall Street Journal column "The Cyber Way to Knowledge" wherein it states, "Despite much public rhetoric about the urgent need to improve American education, despite the investment of billions of dollars in schools, little progress has been achieved. Why? Messrs. Moe and Chubb blame the "politics of blocking" -- the thwarting of such simple reforms as paying teachers for performance. Many states prohibit even gathering data that link individual teachers to the test scores of their students. Technology, the authors say, may enable the circumvention of political blocking."

It is this concept of "political blocking," or rather the Trojan horse that will finally have the power to circumvent it that Professor Moe focused his remarks on to the iNACOL attendees. What is political blocking and why will technology be the Trojan horse that circumvents it?

He began by listing the benefits technology has to offer education:

• Technology has the capacity to customize learning to individual kids while allowing them to move at their own pace
• Technology breaks down the constraints of geography
• Technology is the key to productivity and efficiency, impacting labor
• Kids learn "at least" as much if not more in an online setting 

It is quite easy to establish the transformative nature technology will pose to the future of education. The more difficult question he posed had to do with, "Where is this going to go?" That's when he brought up what he called the "Dark Side"... "All of this takes place within the public sector." Because it's so transformative, it threatens. What does it threaten? Money and jobs. In other words powerful interests have incentive to stop this, powerful interests best known as the Teacher's Union. They are the political blockers. Professor Moe minced no words when he talked about the fact that too often politicians protect the status quo instead of doing what's best for kids in order to safeguard their careers. It is that threat to the careers of politicians that makes the Union so powerful at stopping education reform.

Online education, therefore, is most threatened by the politics of blocking to technology. However, technology has the power to transform politics. "It's so huge it's going to seep in," he said. Try as they may to stop it (and there are many current examples of how unions are), the dynamics of online education will circumvent. The "How's" listed by Professor Moe are pointedly honest and will rock the very core of the jobs and money protectors:

• Technology becomes a substitute for labor - the role of teacher changes, requiring fewer and providing fewer prospective union members
• Technology has the capacity to blast apart geography, making it more difficult to organize teachers
• Technology provides more alternatives, more kids move out of traditional settings and the jobs follow
• For the first time a focus on performance is empowering Democrats (traditional allies of the Union) to adopt reform, technology is playing a huge role in that 

"Because of this range of effects brought about by technology, we have entered 'A New Era'," said Professor Moe. Technology will weaken unions, weakening the 'politics of blocking'. This will allow other reforms to go through, giving us an education system much more productive and dynamic. "For 30-plus years reformers have been butting their heads - because of technology that wall will come down, bringing the liberation of learning and allowing us to do what's best for children for the first time."

Terry Moe concluded by saying, "We are at the forefront of this historic moment." "Technology will be the single biggest force for school choice in this Country."