1/ There’s an opportunity to turn remote education from a weakness to a strength — from a badly rendered “sage on a stage” (constant in education for 100s of years, but *worse* online!) to individualized instruction. To see why, let’s take a trip to 1984 — not Orwell, but Bloom
2/ Prof Benjamin Bloom wrote a seminal work in 1984 showing that individualized instruction lifted outcomes by 2 standard deviations — outperforming 98% of regular students:
web.mit.edu/5.95/www/readi…
But he remarked, it was “too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale”
web.mit.edu/5.95/www/readi…
But he remarked, it was “too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale”
3/ But the Internet has solved this problem, conceptually! What we need(ed) was a forcing function to abandon the status quo, which Bloom showed is demonstrably worse than individualized tutoring. We potentially have that in Covid, which has incredibly made the status quo *worse*
4/ Homeschooling was “weird” and “dangerous” (news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…) but now parents get to see (Zoom-spying!) how ineffective the “status quo” is — and speaking as a parent who knows the Bloom data and the traditional/dumb homeschooling stigma, I now care only about the data
5/ Schools have (had?!?) one big thing going for them — kids learn how to socialize, to get along with other people, to deal with adversity, unfairness — side note, but this (school!) graduation speech by Justice Roberts is the best ever: time.com/4845150/chief-…
6/ But Zoom school has none of this. It’s worse in every way than what was already a proven-to-be-suboptimal model for education!
7/ I hope some forward thinking schools will try to go on remote education offense, whereas most are just going on “how do I turn this thing on?” defense.
8/ I encourage everyone to read the Bloom paper. We now have the means (so many great tutoring platforms for a fraction of the cost of private school). We have the motive. And with Covid, we have the opportunity. Fin.
