When former governors Jeb Bush and Bob Wise strode to the stage at the 2011 Excellence in Action National Summit on Education Reform in San Francisco last October, Sal Khan had just shown the 750 attendees his vision of the digital future.

Khan is the former hedge-fund analyst turned education rock star who started Khan Academy, a nonprofit that reaches millions through its free online lessons and assessments. Tools like these, said Khan, can catapult education from its time-based roots toward a competency-based model in which students progress upon actual learning—mastery—instead of seat time.

At the same conference a year earlier, the two former governors, cochairs of Digital Learning Now!, released “10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning.” This year, Bush and Wise said they had evaluated each of the 50 states against the elements and explained the assessment methodology they had used: states were judged against 72 individual metrics. (Disclosure: I was one of many who provided feedback on how different states ranked on the criteria and serve as a “digital luminary” for the Digital Learning Now! effort.) Rather than announce where the states fell in the ranking, the governors gave the crowd a preview of their “Roadmap for Reform,” a guide to help states navigate different paths toward changing their online education policies (see sidebar).

With the road map in place, one might assume that moving into the future will be a straightforward exercise: the pieces are all there and model legislation is forthcoming, so state policymakers just have to enact the 10 Elements.

Of course, things are never so simple, and many questions remain.

Some questions reflect legitimate disagreement over Digital Learning Now!’s recommendations, even among those who agree with its broad vision. An obvious flash point will be the idea that states require students to take at least one college- or career-prep course online to earn a high school diploma.

One argument in favor of the requirement is that the outcome from taking an online course—gaining the skills to succeed in a digital environment and perhaps become more self-driven—is valuable in a world in which postsecondary education and workforce training are increasingly done online. Yet some see this as yet another input-based requirement in a system already overburdened with mandates, and in conflict with the spirit of digital learning: if the experience is so important or compelling, won’t students naturally flock to online learning, particularly given Digital Learning Now!’s recommendation that dollars follow students to the online course of their choice?

Another consideration is that elementary-school students don’t take courses—at least in the sense that high-school and middle-school students do—and so ensuring that elementary-school students have access to online learning at the course level seems to miss some fundamental principle. According to the state report cards, though, several states have achieved their goals at the elementary-school level, which only raises more questions.

Many of the pieces that Digital Learning Now! casts as critical to the endeavor are not yet in place, and therefore no one actually knows how they will work in practice. For example, Digital Learning Now! has hitched its wagon to the enactment of the Common Core standards and accompanying next-generation assessments that should be in place by 2014. Whether these assessments will facilitate a competency-based learning environment unburdened by time—or lock in today’s system—is yet to be seen. States may abandon the digital effort when they see the up-front costs of implementing an online assessment system. And if they do, what will that mean for a plan that rests on paying for achievement instead of seat time? Valid, reliable, authentic, on-demand, and independent assessments are critical to moving to a system based on student learning outcomes. What about those courses that don’t fall under the Common Core? Does an outcome-based funding system require extending the Common Core to all subject areas, or will states create unique standards for subject areas other than math and English? Could entrepreneurs develop competency badges for their students that the public would recognize as legitimate? How would such competency measures be accredited?

A number of operational challenges need to be worked out as well. Utah, for example, passed in the spring of 2011 Senate Bill 65, based on the 10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning. Utah state senator Howard Stephenson declared that the bill ends the “tyranny of time and place” in education by allowing dollars to follow high school students to their online course of choice. The legislation calls for the state to withhold 50 percent of the provider’s fee until the student successfully completes the course.

Not surprisingly, the devil has been in the details. Crafting a viable funding model for online courses that makes sense for districts and providers alike has not been easy. Even more challenging is helping schools and districts transition to a world in which students still need some of the services they provide but take most of their courses online. How does funding work in this model? How do schools create the flexible schedules and offer the critical services—many of which may be nonacademic—to accommodate students’ varying needs? How do they transition to this service—or community center—model?

A related set of issues plagues the funding model from the state’s fiscal perspective. If students progress based on competency instead of cohort, the state should presumably reward schools and providers that help students progress faster. And Digital Learning Now! suggests that it should reward those providers that help students make the most growth. Set aside for a moment the demands on state data systems created by an outcome-based system that rewards growth and the fact that these systems are not in place today. If this policy were in place, the state would be on the hook for paying for a student who masters, say, 20 half-semester courses in a given year, rather than a more conventional 12 or 14. How will states deal with this fiscal uncertainty? Holding back students seems like a poor choice, as does punishing schools that can educate students faster with less revenue.

And what if a student masters the high school curriculum by the time she is 15, as many students undoubtedly could? Does she go to college? Does she take time off? Or does she stay in high school with her friends but take college courses? If so, who pays?

Suggesting that a road map document could tackle such complexity isn’t fair. But a glimpse into the exciting— and uncertain—future presented by Digital Learning Now! does raise many legitimate questions. That’s no reason to delay implementing its recommendations though; innovation is never perfect right out of the box. Iteration in practice is critical. With the “Roadmap” coming on the heels of Khan’s conference presentation, surely some in the audience wondered whether innovations yet to come might even clear away many of the familiar roadblocks.

Michael Horn is cofounder and executive director of education at Innosight Institute.

It’s called “the flipped classroom.” While there is no one model, the core idea is to flip the common instructional approach: With teacher-created videos and interactive lessons, instruction that used to occur in class is now accessed at home, in advance of class. Class becomes the place to work through problems, advance concepts, and engage in collaborative learning. Most importantly, all aspects of instruction can be rethought to best maximize the scarcest learning resource—time.

Flipped classroom teachers almost universally agree that it’s not the instructional videos on their own, but how they are integrated into an overall approach, that makes the difference. In his classes, Bergmann says, students can’t just “watch the video and be done with it.” He checks their notes and requires each student to come to class with a question. And, while he says it takes a little while for students to get used to the system, as the year progresses he sees them asking better questions and thinking more deeply about the content. After flipping his classroom, Bergmann says he can more easily query individual students, probe for misconceptions around scientific concepts, and clear up incorrect notions.

Counterintuitively, Bergmann says the most important benefits of the video lessons are profoundly human: “I now have time to work individually with students. I talk to every student in every classroom every day.” Traditional classroom interactions are also flipped. Typically, the most outgoing and engaged students ask questions, while struggling students may act out. Bergmann notes that he now spends more time with struggling students, who no longer give up on homework, but work through challenging problems in class. Advanced students have more freedom to learn independently. And, while high-school students still occasionally lapse on homework assignments, Bergmann credits the new arrangement with fostering better relationships, greater student engagement, and higher levels of motivation.

Once Bergmann’s and Sams’s lessons were posted online, it wasn’t long before other students and teachers across the country were using the lessons, and making their own. Across the country in Washington, D.C., Andrea Smith, a 6th-grade math teacher at E. L. Haynes, a high-performing public charter school, shares Bergmann’s enthusiasm, but focuses on a different aspect of the flipped classroom. Smith, who has taught for more than a decade in both D.C.’s public charter and traditional district schools, immediately saw the benefit for students, but says she was most captivated by the opportunity to elevate teaching practice and the profession as a whole. As Smith explains, crafting a great four- to six-minute video lesson poses a tremendous instructional challenge: how to explain a concept in a clear, concise, bite-sized chunk. Creating her own videos forces her to pay attention to the details and nuances of instruction—the pace, the examples used, the visual representation, and the development of aligned assessment practices. In a video lesson on dividing fractions, for example, Smith is careful not to just teach the procedure—multiply by the inverse—but also to represent the important underlying conceptual ideas. Like Bergmann, she makes it clear that the videos are just one component of instruction. She’s keen on the equivalent of a motion picture’s “director’s cut,” where a video creator might explain the reasoning behind the examples chosen and how she would extend those activities into class time.

“Flipping” is rapidly moving into the mainstream. Bergmann and Sams have completed a book, are in high demand across the country at educator conferences, and even host their own “Flipped Class Conference” to train teachers. The chief academic officer at Smith’s school, Eric Westendorf, is taking the tools he has piloted at the school and building them into a platform for teachers everywhere to create and share videos. Most notable, though, is the emergence of the Khan Academy, an online repository of thousands of instructional videos that has been touted by Bill Gates and featured prominently in the national media.

Given education’s long history of fascination with new instructional approaches that are later abandoned, there’s a real danger that flipping, a seemingly simple idea that is profound in practice, may be reduced into the latest educational fad. And, in today’s highly polarized political environment, it also runs the risk of being falsely pigeonholed into one of education’s many false dichotomies, such as the age-old pedagogical debate between content knowledge and skills acquisition.

But the ideas behind flipping are not brand new. For over a decade, led by the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), dozens of colleges have successfully experimented with similar ideas across math, science, English, and many other disciplines. NCAT’s increasingly impressive body of practice shows that thoughtful course redesigns lead to improved learning. Carol Twigg, NCAT’s president and CEO, says there is no magic: course redesign is “a hard job.” She’s not assuming students love homework. But redesign offers an opportunity to reengage students and improve their motivation, while setting proper expectations and monitoring to “push school to the top of the list.” And while many course redesigns focus on incorporating more project-based learning opportunities, Twigg’s experience leads her to quickly dismiss pedagogical extremes: “If you don’t have basic math skills, you can’t do an interesting physics project.”

There is also some danger that the flipped classroom could be seen as another front in a false battle between teachers and technology. Yet Bergmann and Sams emphasize that the “only magic bullet is the recruiting, training, and supporting of quality teachers.” And while Khan Academy’s prominence engenders fear of standardization and deprofessionalization among some critics, Bergmann, Sams, and Smith see instructional videos as powerful tools for teachers to create content, share resources, and improve practice. Smith admits that if such tools were available when she first started out, she “would have run to this every week when planning.”

It seems almost certain that instructional videos, interactive simulations, and yet-to-be-dreamed-up online tools will continue to multiply. But who will control these tools and whether they will fulfill their potential remains to be seen. As Scott McLeod, one of the nation’s leading thinkers on educational technology and the director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education, observes, the “reason Sal Khan is so visible right now is that nobody did this instead. It would have been great if the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics had been doing this, but someone from the outside had to fill the vacuum.” His guidance to educators: “Start making!”

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

If this sounds alien to you, clearly you haven’t signed up for Twitter. This five-year-old phenomenon allows individuals to dash off short comments to their friends, families, professional colleagues, and whoever else might be interested in their stream of consciousness. The technology has already been credited with bringing down oppressive regimes and creating whole new ways of reporting breaking news. It’s a truly open marketplace of ideas, with no editors, gatekeepers, or quality control. So what does it mean for the education debate?

The first thing to understand about Twitter is that most of its messages amount to, “Hey, check this out,” followed by a link to a newspaper article or blog post. It’s a handy device for telling the world (or at least the people in your own world) about news or columns that you find compelling. It’s also a form of self-promotion; quite a few tweets announce posts the tweeter herself has written.

But in the hands of a gifted provocateur, Twitter can be so much more. Take scholar-turned-reform-apostate Diave Ravitch, who according to Klout.com is the most influential tweeter in the education policy space (see sidebar). As Alexander Russo, a freelance writer and blogger, remarked sardonically, “a 72-year-old grandmother has won the Internet.” She’s done it not only by linking to columns and articles she agrees with, but by offering bumper sticker–style statements that tend to set the web aflame. For instance, “Accountability is only for teachers and principals, not for students, families, elected officials, district leadership.” Or: “Last places to go to find out how to ‘reform’ schools: Congress/State Legislature/US Dept of Education.”

Want to follow the top tweeters in education?
Twitter lists made up of the Top 25 Education Policy/Media Tweeters and the
Top 25 Education Tweeters may be found at the Education Next Twitter page.

This might not exactly be H. L. Mencken, but it surely provides raw emotional relief for educators and others who feel besieged by the modern-day reform movement. They “retweet” Ravitch’s rants and, thanks to the multiplication effects of networks, soon tens of thousands of people receive them. In fact, Ravitch’s tweets are so influential that an anonymous someone has created the Twitter handle “@NOTDianeRavitch” to argue the positions held by the education historian before she changed her mind on most education policy issues.
Not that reformers don’t have their own Twitter heroes. Former District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee is within striking distance of Ravitch’s influence and serves up a steady diet of can-do reform truisms. Tom Vander Ark, an entrepreneur formerly of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, offers an optimistic take on the burgeoning field of online learning. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan promotes his administration’s policies via @arneduncan. And @EdTrust offers its patented progressive take on education and social justice.

It’s hard to know whether all this tweeting adds up to anything significant. Of course, much the same was once said of blogs; now it’s well-accepted that a well-written blog post can be just as influential as a newspaper op-ed. Twitter offers a nonstop stream of views, ideas, opinions, and emotions; get yourself in the flow or be left behind.

Now, a host of new web sites, from A to Z Teacher Stuff to Lesson Planet to Lessonopoly, are trying to solve that problem and make it easier for teachers to share, find, and make better use of lesson plans and accompanying materials. One, TeachersPayTeachers, a sort of Craigslist for educators, says it has paid more than $1 million in commissions to teachers, who have sold everything from classroom hand puppets to lesson plans on the Civil War. The site even hosts a “lesson plan on demand” auction, in which teachers advertise for, say, 4th-grade materials on Texas history and other teachers bid to fulfill the request.

But context matters. Teachers want to know whether something will work with their instructional style, in their classroom, and for their kids. Trust matters, too. While the sites offer ratings by users and rankings of the most popular items, these may not identify the highest-quality offerings. So how do novice teachers, who lack experience developing lessons and stand to benefit the most, know that a lesson plan will actually be effective? The answer may not lie in cyberspace, but in real communities.

One of the most promising new entrants to the growing online market of lesson plans is BetterLesson, a small Cambridge, Massachusetts, company started by former educators that has been called the “Facebook for teachers.” Any teacher can join for free, manage her lesson plans, organize teaching materials, and share (or not) with her school, a wider professional learning community, or the entire world. As with Facebook, the site’s technology and user interface are sharp, and users can easily register a positive reaction, in this case by clicking “Helpful.” But more important, BetterLesson shares Facebook’s initial focus on social networks and trusting relationships that already exist. While the site is currently open to any teacher, the company wants to leverage existing communities—school networks, alumni groups, and grade or subject affinity groups—that already share an identity and language around teaching.

BetterLesson’s Intranet package targets existing school networks. One early adopter, Achievement First, the highly regarded network of public charter schools in Connecticut and New York, is tailoring BetterLesson to extend the work of its instructional coaches and teacher learning communities. A coach working with a teacher can share concrete examples from the lesson plans and videos of effective teachers. “Remember what we were talking about at our last professional development session?” she can say. “Well, this is what it looks like.”

Since the examples are drawn from schools with similar cultures, expectations, and records of achievement, they are more likely to be trusted and used. As of February 2011, Achievement First had logged 15,000 downloads. KIPP and Rocketship Education (see “Future Schools”) have also signed on. In the first semester of use, KIPP teachers downloaded more than 20,000 lessons and related materials. But in the wider teaching community, BetterLesson has plenty of competition (see Figure 1).

Dan Cogan-Drew, Achievement First’s director of digital learning, emphasizes that the BetterLesson tools build on school cultures that are already collaborative. They are “an extension of the relationships that coaches are building with teachers,” he says, adding, “If it works for us, it’s because of the people and structure we have.”

Andrew Mandel, a vice president in charge of Teach For America’s Resource Exchange, a similar set of tools for TFA members, agrees with the importance of extending existing relationships. He says that TFA’s successful site is “not so much about the technology. [We’re] much more concerned with the user side.” This past fall, 75 percent of TFA’s 8,131 members downloaded materials from its site. And more than half of Achievement First’s 19 schools were active on BetterLesson in its first full year of use.

It is these real-world ties, along with recognition from their peers, that motivate successful teachers to spend the time and energy to organize and upload their materials. The site’s ease of use, as well as the tools to organize a teacher’s own lessons, is also critical. But sharing lesson plans is not just a one-way exchange. Teachers can also get feedback to ensure that their lessons are always improving.

There are other rewards, including one not normally associated with teaching but always possible on the Internet: fame. While teachers can keep their lessons within their trusted networks, they can also share them in such a way that they end up “going viral.” Alex Grodd, BetterLesson’s founder, former 6th-grade English teacher, and Teach For America alum, says it’s important for these networks to live on the same platform so that teachers can share beyond their individual networks, between districts and charters, and even across countries. The site can also offer outsiders a glimpse inside the classroom, notes Cogan-Drew; he says it lets prospective Achievement First teachers “step into our world.”

Just as Mastering the Art of French Cooking can’t magically transform a kitchen rookie into Julia Child, great lesson plans won’t turn novice teachers into experts. But the plans can help those novices lighten their load, allowing them to focus on other areas like classroom management and student engagement. As for the great teachers, they now have a way to capture tangible artifacts of what’s working and to spread them across hundreds of classrooms. And even the best chefs borrow recipes from each other. Highly effective veterans are constantly looking for ways to improve specific components of their instruction, such as opening up an explanation of quadratic equations. Perhaps sometime soon, we’ll see great lesson plans join the Star Wars kid, piano-playing kittens, and sneezing pandas as Internet sensations.

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

Then, in the 1990s, New York City introduced CompStat, and this equation changed forever. The NYPD compiled and continuously updated reams of crime data, which were used to identify hot spots and problem areas. In weekly meetings, precinct commanders were held accountable for quickly addressing crime spikes. Suddenly “management by results” became possible—not just in the Big Apple, but in police departments nationwide.

But something else also happened in the ’90s: video cameras were installed in thousands of patrol cars all across the country. The rationale was simple: people who got pulled over could be told that they were under surveillance, making dangerous behavior during traffic stops less likely. Moreover, if cops knew that they, too, were being observed, they would be less likely to engage in brutality or unjust searches. Maybe their supervisors couldn’t ride along with them, but video cameras could serve as partial surrogates.

Wilson also pointed to schools as prime examples of coping organizations. “A school administrator,” he wrote, “cannot watch teachers teach (except through classroom visits that momentarily may change the teacher’s behavior) and cannot tell how much students have learned (except by standardized tests that do not clearly differentiate between what the teacher has imparted and what the student has acquired otherwise).”

As with police, education reformers have spent the last two decades trying to change these assumptions. On the “managing by results” side, there has been the big battle over the use of test data for accountability purposes (CompStat for schools), culminating in the fight over value-added measurement of teacher performance. Perhaps now we can finally “differentiate between what the teacher has imparted and what the student has acquired otherwise.” Yet even advocates acknowledge the imperfections of this approach. What if a teacher gets great results in student learning, but does it by “teaching to the test,” or, worse, cheating? What if she ignores important parts of the curriculum that aren’t easily assessed? Or, on the flip side, what if her value-added scores show lackluster student progress, but it’s due to factors completely outside her control?

Understandably, teachers and their unions don’t want test scores to count for everything; classroom observations are key, too. But, as Wilson pointed out two decades ago, planning a couple of visits from the principal is hardly sufficient. These visits may “change the teacher’s behavior”; furthermore, principals may not be the best judges of effective teaching. Some just aren’t much good at that.

So why not put video cameras in classrooms, and use the recordings as part of teachers’ evaluations? That’s a question Tom Kane has been asking. Kane, an education and economics professor on leave from Harvard University, leads a massive initiative supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that is developing new approaches to evaluating teachers, with high-definition, 360-degree cameras at the center. Three thousand teachers in six cities are participating; for doing so, they receive stipends and lots of feedback from experts.

“There are a number of huge advantages to video,” Kane told me. “One is it gives you a common piece of evidence to discuss with an instructional coach or supervisor. Second, it will prove to be economically much more viable because you’re not paying observers to drive around to various schools to do observations.” Furthermore, he contends, “If a teacher doesn’t think that their principal is giving them a fair evaluation because of some vendetta, they can have an external expert with no personal ax to grind watch and give feedback.”

The Gates project is focused on using video only for teacher evaluation, not regular monitoring. Teachers are videotaped only four times a year, not every day. But why not go further? “That right now for us is a bridge too far,” said Kane. “When the camera rolls out of the room, teachers know it’s rolled out of the room.” And in many places, including Washington, D.C., collective bargaining agreements explicitly restrict the use of “electronic monitoring equipment.”

But it feels like just a matter of time. Already one company—WatchMeGrow—sells Internet video-streaming services to child-care centers; parents can log on to their computers at work and watch little Johnny or Cassie all day long. (Cameras are placed in classrooms, on the playgrounds, and in other common areas.) It’s not hard to imagine these parents wanting the same opportunity once their kids graduate to kindergarten and beyond. And think about the possibilities for curbing school violence or guarding against child abuse.

Teachers may scream about infringements on their “professionalism,” but effective teachers will have little to fear. Already, their expectation of complete autonomy—that they close their doors and do what they want—has been undermined by standards, tests, and other reforms of the modern era. Why not watch teachers in action? Sooner or later, that little video camera, always on, will just fade into the background.

The darling of reformers, data have clear potential to help educators make better decisions. But however much they are touted, most data initiatives remain far from realizing their potential. Historically, the collection of data has been top-down, designed almost exclusively to show compliance with state and federal regulations. And while the amount of data collected continues to grow—Texas school districts respond to 104 data collections by the state each year, costing the districts in excess of $300 million—their quality and usefulness are questionable. Thus many state data systems function as de facto data morgues, used more often in autopsies of failed programs than to help educators and policymakers improve existing ones.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that while Texas is data-rich, it is still information-poor. A 2008 TEA study found it likely that some state data are erroneous, even if the same data are accurate in the district systems. It also found that districts must constantly reformat their data to meet state requirements, adding to the cost and to the opportunity for introducing errors.

More important, once districts submit data, they receive little if anything of instructional value in return. Much of the information the state collects, such as the number of 7th graders eligible for Title I funds at a particular school, governs the flow of dollars, but it is not on its own useful for improving school operations or performance. Other data, such as Lubbock’s results on state assessments, could be useful. But that information arrives at the district office late each summer on computer disks, and it must be integrated with the district’s own system for storing student information, along with a third system that houses interim assessment results. By the time school personnel are able to compile reports for teachers, the information is “already cold,” says Kelly Trlica, Lubbock’s chief academic officer.

Because of experiences like Lubbock’s, when it came time to update the state’s 25-year-old data system, officials decided to make some big changes. Instead of gathering a group of technicians in Austin, state education officials talked to 2,200 educators and administrators across the state about the data they needed. Overwhelmingly, they said that the information had to be directly accessible to and relevant for educators. Middle-school teachers, for example, need access to special education identifications, test results, and other information to create appropriate instructional groupings and interventions. And they need that information well before school starts. Principals, for their part, want data to evaluate the many instructional software and intervention programs that are purchased each year. Moreover, frequent educator use is an important means of preventing, or catching and correcting, data errors. If those people closest to the data—teachers—are actually using the data, they will update class rosters and other student information on a regular basis.

To enable schools, districts, and state officials to more easily share and use data, the TEA is developing a more flexible information-system platform. The platform will offer smaller districts a shared, state-sponsored student-information system. It will also make it easy for districts with existing systems to connect to a new data platform that will serve as the hub for district-specific data, feeding relevant student, classroom, and campus information directly to educators and enabling seamless reporting of compliance data to the state. For example, the district might enter attendance data just once. That information would then be available to teachers and counselors, in real time and in dashboard formats, where it would flag students with potential problems. That same attendance data would be automatically reformatted for easy transmission to the state. If successful, the new system will not only reduce costs and streamline the existing accountability process, but will also equip educators with relevant information they can use to help their students.

Building a student-centric system that serves the diverse needs of the state’s 1,235 local education agencies, which range from districts with fewer than 500 students to those with more than 150,000, will not be easy. But this year, educators in Lubbock’s five high schools are getting a start. They will be the first to test-drive the early-warning dashboard, a tool that provides easy access to student attendance, assessment, and credit attainment records, as well as other data that will allow educators to quickly identify potential dropouts and get them back on track.

More than 160 educators are serving as advisors to ensure the system delivers what teachers need. And, true to the spirit of TEA’s new open approach, the public can read the specifications, make recommendations, and watch the system unfold at www.texasstudentdatasystem.org.

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

Even to the casual observer, this sudden celluloid absorption with schools seems less than serendipitous. Surely, there’s a master strategy at work? A clique of wealthy funders who have decided that reaching the masses through film is the next arrow in the school reform quiver? Clear evidence from other documentary successes, like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, that the movies are a great way to change public opinion?

So this intrepid analyst surmised, until I started digging into the back stories of these documentaries and found that what drove their development wasn’t a strategic plan but something much simpler: the creative impulses of the filmmakers themselves.

Take Kelly Amis, the writer, director, producer, and sometimes videographer of Teached, a forthcoming film about inequities in education. A former Teach For America corps member, Amis has spent most of her career in the education reform world, including a stint overseeing policy and research at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (one of the sponsors of Education Next and my employer). She wrote her documentary six years ago, “just had it on the shelf,” she told me. “Just over a year ago, the stars aligned.”

What motivated her was a fervent belief that film could reach new audiences beyond the policy elite—and with emotional storytelling that would be much more powerful than anything written on the printed page. “The information we know in the education policy world gets stuck in ivory towers. Even the way we discuss it keeps it in ivory towers.”

A similar sentiment drove Bob Bowdon, the writer, director, producer, and financier of The Cartel, an exposé of the teachers unions and other special interests in education. A television reporter-turned-filmmaker, he relayed moviegoers’ reactions to his film. “People all the time come to screenings and thank me. They tell me that everyone is afraid to say these things. ‘I had no idea that a janitor could make six figures. That superintendents could make 470K. Thirty-million-dollar football fields.’ Or, ‘really, there’s a teacher that reads on a 4th-grade level but worked for 17 years? I had no idea this could happen!’ It feels like I’m changing minds.”

Yet convincing reform-oriented foundations that moviemaking is a worthy investment has been a tough nut to crack. Bowdon shot his whole film, entered a festival, and even won an award before getting a dime of outside help. Amis managed to raise a modest amount to help cover her direct expenses, but has volunteered her own time for the better part of a year.

But the reason that these funding woes haven’t been deal breakers is because the cost of shooting a documentary has plummeted in recent years. “The quality of high-def video cameras has gone up as fast as the prices have gone down,” Bowdon said. But that’s not all. “When I first got into TV, people would rent these editing rooms with big leather couches and fancy equipment. Nowadays you can find college kids who sit in apartments and work on laptops and edit films. That has changed the gatekeeping equation such that the quality of an idea is the determiner of a project rather than fundraising ability.”

But even though the funders weren’t enthusiastic supporters of projects like Bowdon’s at the outset, they are starting to climb on board. The Gleason Family Foundation, for instance, is now helping to distribute The Cartel nationally. Tracy Gleason explained that movies fit well with her foundation’s focus on marketing school choice. “This is a very neglected area of the movement. We have no trouble connecting with the elites. But with average people we are sort of pathetic.”

Education Reform Now, a spin-off of the well-funded Democrats for Education Reform, has also seen the light (of the theater projector). It’s currently helping to promote The Lottery, which follows four families as they try to get their kids into one of the Harlem Success charter schools (see “Luck of the Draw,” cultured), with special screenings for targeted audiences. (It will likely do the same for Waiting for Superman, a big-budget documentary by An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim.) Van Schoales, the group’s executive director, reiterated the potential for reaching beyond the “usual suspects.” His group will aim for “low-income families that are most affected by terrible urban schools, suburban/urban (mostly moms) that are for the most part satisfied with their schools, and, finally, business leaders,” he said. “Each of these audiences will be critical in building a broader-based education reform movement that goes beyond the wonks, advocacy groups, and charter folks.” Plus, as he pointed out, documentaries like these will soon be available to tens of millions of home viewers through various on-demand services.

But for all this enthusiasm for transcending the “echo chamber,” what’s the evidence that movies can actually do so? Everyone points to the success of An Inconvenient Truth in creating a sense of urgency around the global warming issue. But, as Rick Hess (an executive editor of this journal) wrote on his blog recently, that film had little long-term impact on public opinion. NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls found that about one-quarter of respondents in 1999 agreed that “Global climate change has been established as a serious problem, and immediate action is necessary.” It went up to about one-third of respondents after the film came out in 2006, but returned to one-quarter by 2009.

Still, with the expense of producing full-length documentaries at a fraction of the cost of sophisticated research studies, expect to see more philanthropic support for these efforts in coming years. They might not transform public opinion writ large, but even if they energize a few thousand activists, they will be worthwhile investments.

Please join me on a short, visionary tour circa 2025, and let us glimpse the central role that data have come to play in American K–12 education.

Perhaps the most profound advance since 2010 is that individual achievement and attainment records for every subject are saved (with elaborate safeguards) in cyberspace and secure state databases, where “unique student identifier” numbers make it possible for data to be readily aggregated without revealing individual identity and for analysts to investigate things like learning gains by pupils in various schools and circumstances.

Student assessments (formative, summative, informal) are completed electronically, many through adaptive online programs. Software automatically analyzes the resulting information to create a data dashboard for each pupil, showing what has been mastered and what still needs work. Most assessments are graded by computer, although teachers read essays and occasionally offer separate “hand-graded” scores on other assignments. Instant preliminary feedback is the norm, and the official results, checked over by a data team, are available soon thereafter.

An artificial intelligence program periodically “sifts” each student’s cumulating education record to answer—especially for parents, teachers, and counselors—such key directional questions as whether the student is on track for college when she completes high school. Are there any warning signs of academic (or other) problems that warrant a change of course, maybe even a swift intervention?

Parents can log on and view their child’s cumulative report card, which is continually updated, not just with test results but also with sample work, attendance data, and teacher comments.

Multiple teacher web sites offer resources for planning lessons and obtaining supplementary materials. These include most everything an instructor might need, from student readings, workbooks, assignment ideas, web links and mini-tests to audio and video snippets for classroom use. The online curriculum vault includes thousands of videos of master teachers delivering lessons, and interactive web sites host discussion groups (most enable participants to view as well as hear and read each other). Increasing portions of students’ days are given over to virtual education: watching lectures, participating in online discussions, making productive use of software programs, e-mailing or conversing with distant experts, and teaming up with peers as much as half a world away.

Principals keep electronic files of data (as well as eyewitness impressions, pupil and parent and peer ratings) on individual teachers’ pedagogical strengths and weaknesses. Linked teacher and student databases are used to formulate professional development activities for each teacher. Classroom sessions are periodically recorded and viewed by online mentors who offer quick feedback to new or struggling teachers. Pupil achievement consultants review students’ data files and advise teachers on working with challenging students.

Schools regularly calculate gain scores for each pupil and every state has a Tennessee-style value-added scoring system that spits out data on the effectiveness of its teachers, schools, and districts. Analysts can now control for outside factors affecting achievement. Districts and schools can also use them to evaluate the effects of particular textbooks, teaching units, and professional development activities.

Information about individual performance is aggregated across pupil populations at the classroom (and teacher), school, district, state, and national levels and cumulated over time. Such data enable principals, superintendents, and state officials to determine which institutions, programs, and individuals are on track to attain their targets. The public gets data, too, and can gauge the return on its education investments. Media outlets faithfully publish England-style “league tables” showing raw scores, value-added results, and change over time for every school.

The progress in education data over the past two decades surpasses that made during the entire previous century. Considering the size and decentralized nature of U.S. education, the sluggishness with which it has reacted to many demands for reform, and the modest political oomph behind such mundane activities as crafting data systems, the gains are remarkable. The best explanation seems to be that the millions of people in public education have finally come to realize that the more you know the better off you are.

Chester Finn is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and senior editor of Education Next.

This is a topic that excites editorialists, who are, of course, members of the journalism profession themselves. Many bemoan the demise of the daily newspaper, arguing that it signals the end to the educated citizen. Others worry that Americans will retreat to ideological safe havens—cable TV channels, Internet sites, and blogs that conform to their strongly held views—which will lead to even greater divisiveness in our politics and culture (see Figure 1).

Are these concerns valid when it comes to coverage of education? To find out, I interviewed some of the smartest minds in education journalism, including Richard Lee Colvin of the Hechinger Institute; Richard Whitmire, president of the National Education Writers Association (EWA); Jim Bencivenga, formerly the education editor of the Christian Science Monitor; Virginia Edwards, the publisher of Education Week; and Elizabeth Green, an editor of the online upstart GothamSchools.

They all agree that the demise of the daily newspaper is bad for the local “conversation” around education. And even if papers survive, already the education beat is being squeezed. Those reporters who remain on the job (see Figure 2) are asked to cover higher education as well as K—12 schools, meaning they have less time to develop expertise in specific areas. They are pushed to write shorter articles, leaving little space for in-depth reporting. And editors want stories that are hyperlocal, at the school level, not missives about the latest school board policies, or dry accounts of state regulatory actions.

As a result, says Whitmire, decisions go unchallenged. “What is lost is that the superintendent will bring in a new program, and nobody will be there to explain to the community whether similar programs have worked or failed in other places.” Colvin goes even further: “We hear from superintendents that the coverage is worse than ever.” All the reporters seem to want is a “couple of quotes” for a “sensationalist” story. So when it’s time for leaders to make the case for, say, budget increases, they have no credible vehicle through which to explain their rationale to the broader public, beyond their own communication outlets, and no independent third party to present opposing views in a fair manner.

“The people who will be excluded from the conversation will be people without kids in the schools,” explains Bencivenga. Those with a vested interest—the teachers unions, realtors—will continue to get their message out. But there will be no one to counter these self-serving opinions. As Edwards argues, “An ill-informed public will benefit people who can push an agenda without accountability and public scrutiny.”

The national scene is unlikely to look so bleak, argue the experts. In part that’s because everyone expects a few of the great national papers to survive. But it’s also because of the well-developed community of think tanks, blogs, and trade publications that follow the education issue, and aren’t disappearing anytime soon. “National will always be the easiest to do,” says Whitmire.

But even at that level, there are signs of trouble. Right now a CEO or university president might skim an education editorial or op-ed while flipping through the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. But imagine if such elites stop getting newspapers and only read articles online that are of immediate interest. The larger public that engages in the K—12 education debate could shrink dramatically, to just partisans engaged in the war of ideas around schooling.

Still, nobody expects high-quality education journalism to disappear without a fight. Already new models are starting to emerge. One of the most talked about is Green’s GothamSchools, an online site that follows New York City’s education scene, and also covers national education happenings. An initiative of the nonprofit Open Planning Project, GothamSchools aims to be a “one stop shop in New York City for education news,” according to Green. It covers education the way newspapers used to, with its two reporter/editors showing up at every meeting of the city council and the state assembly that touches on the public schools. But it also dives in to do more in-depth analyses and investigative pieces.

There are similar experiments up and running in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago. Plus a growing number of cities, such as Minneapolis and San Diego, are home to new online nonprofit newspapers that feature strong education reporting.

Meanwhile, the national players are tweaking their approach. Hechinger is going into the content-production business, with a growing staff that will write original, long-form articles about key education trends. The EWA has a new “public editor,” former Washington Post reporter Linda Perlstein, who helps cub education writers around the country hone their craft and offers high-level feedback to more-seasoned pros. And Education Week is contemplating how it might distribute its content to daily newspapers.

All of these “business models” have promise, but also big question marks. First, they depend on philanthropic support for start-up revenue; with the stock market, and thus endowments, down some 30 percent, it’s not known whether there will be enough grant dollars to go around. Even Education Week, which has attracted foundation support for years, only receives 25 percent of its revenues from such sources and must bring in the rest from subscriptions, advertising, and elsewhere. Second, it’s unclear whether any of these approaches are sustainable once the grant money inevitably runs out.

So should education reformers try hard to help solve these problems? Would the further diminishment of the newspaper be bad for the cause of change? That’s not quite clear, either. On the one hand, newspaper editorial pages have generally been friendly to supporters of greater accountability, transparency, and parental choice. They have been particularly bullish on charter schools (“Opinion Leaders or Laggards?” what next, Summer 2008). And to be sure, the organized interests of the status quo—particularly the powerful teachers unions—will always find a way to get their message out to core audiences. They would only profit from a world without the fourth estate playing referee.

On the other hand, reporters have never been particularly astute at covering “change,” particularly the variety that causes pain for adults. In this way, the media have not been very friendly to reformers. Colvin puts it best: “Journalists never get out front of reform. They are always the trailing entity. Anyone whose ox is gored by reform is going to be outspoken and resist it. Journalists must understand that there’s always pain and disruption in great change. But they rarely frame it that way.”

Now that it’s the journalists who face pain and disruption, the question is whether they will get out in front of the changes happening in their own industry. No doubt you can follow this developing story in a local newspaper—if you still subscribe to one.

Imagining life far off in the future is the stuff of science fiction. Imagining life a few decades from now, however, is a subject of serious inquiry for military strategists, urban planners, and marketers. Why not for educators?

In the following pages, we sketch a vision of learning that may seem “gee whiz” but which is grounded in technologies—for visual display, interaction, content creation, learning science, virtual reality, and more—that exist or are in development today. (See Technology Notes for a sample of companies and products.)

We envision 10-year-old Jevon learning, in his home, a history lesson that is suited to his learning level yet has the capacity to challenge him, creates opportunities for interdisciplinary study of critically important content and skills, and encourages independent thinking and exploration. This 2025 immersive learning environment is not unlike interactive globally connected games such as World of Warcraft, Second Life, and others that today engage children and teens in roleplaying, strategizing, and mock battles. Students in each 3D world speak, type, touch the screen, and use handheld controllers to explore and become part of the eras and subjects they study, interacting with real and synthetic people, places, and scenes.

Within a wide array of these worlds, learners master common core sets of objectives at a pace that suits them, guided and encouraged by an avatar (an appealing virtual character operated by a computer) who engages the student in ongoing conversation. In our example, Jevon has fashioned his teacher avatar from a character named “Yoda” he had seen in an old movie.

As they work to mastery, students can explore related side topics via hyperlinks and interactions, while the pacing and guidance systems ensure a complete curriculum is covered in an effective sequence. Using the tools of artificial intelligence together with data gathered from watching this learner and millions of others, the system over time comes to “understand” the style, capability, and learning history of each student, and uses that understanding to adjust activities and pacing.

Jevon’s Experience

Regardless of students’ physical location, they can learn with friends and peers from around the world. Yan, an 11-year-old girl from a city near Beijing, China, joins Jevon as he listens to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. Automatic language translation enables the two students to interact in real time. Jevon and Yan position themselves in the crowd to converse with virtual characters in the audience. In the side bar, we continue the dialogue, imagining how Jevon and Yan might interact with each other, with characters from the history they are studying, and with the teaching avatar Yoda.

After one set of objectives has been met, the system can use the same 3-D environment for other goals, such as learning to estimate. Any single objective can appear in many contexts, promoting creative and flexible triggering of ideas and skills, exactly how instructional expertise is supposed to benefit learners in the real world.

Students can work together via webcam and avatar, all monitored and recorded for security and analysis. They can work in groups of a particular age or learning level, sharing and manipulating materials together, discussing what they are learning. The use of avatars may ease the potential awkwardness of a particularly advanced 10-year-old, for example, working with older students in some subjects.

The system can be accessed anytime. Younger children, teenagers, and adults all have different sleep and learning cycles; a teenager may prefer literature discussions at 4 PM and math at 11 PM. There will always be countless students available for collaboration.

Periodically, depending on Jevon’s progress and needs, an educator-advisor or academic “coach” spends time reviewing his results, monitoring his system usage (perhaps targeting particularly difficult and important concepts and skills for Jevon), and sending feedback to Jevon’s parents.

A System That Learns

The system leverages data from millions of learners individually experiencing thousands of learning activities each year. Similar to how today’s Google, amazon.com and Last.fm work, after each of Jevon’s interactions with Yoda, the system can compare his responses to those of his peers within this vast database. If Jevon had struggled with estimating the size of the crowd, the system would add this to the database. At the same time, the system would draw on information about similar learners to help Jevon master the material; the avatar would use an educator’s guiding question that had helped similar students apply estimation techniques.

Driven by Educators

Educators create content and activities for the system based on the targeted skills and concepts in each subject area, what is known about how children learn (from neural imaging and studies of typical development sequences), and what is understood to be effective for teaching specific topics (from deep databases of histories organized by learner characteristics). The content is peer reviewed and field tested. As information flows in from hundreds of thousands of children, educators are able to see what activities work best for children with different learning histories, and adjust the content (who sees what, and what they do) to optimize instruction for each type of child. There is no “standard” learning sequence, although each version targets the same underlying objectives.

Beyond creating content, educators participate in various ways: reviewing student performance that the system has flagged as needing attention, giving one-on-one or one-to-many instruction, either virtually (mostly) or in person for children for whom in person learning is optimal. Teachers can take up roles within simulations or inhabit virtual tutors for specific topics; they can also manage “community time” activities, in person or virtually. Like today’s busy children, learners schedule real world social interaction into the school day or week. Kids from the local area may play games and sports, practice music, or put on skits and plays.

An education system such as we have envisioned here is closer than you might think. Growing understanding about how students learn, together with technologies that are already engaging children and technologies now in development, will soon enable educators to customize each child’s learning experiences to make them more enjoyable and more effective.

Gerald Huff is director of the Technology Innovation Group at Intuit, Inc. Bror Saxberg is chief learning officer at K12, Inc., a creator and manager of online learning curricula and programs serving both public and private customers.

Likewise, if I asked what Diane Ravitch, Jack Jennings, and Kati Haycock have in common, you would say they are all contributors to K–12 education policy debates, oft quoted in the nation’s leading newspapers. But what about Will Richardson, Joanne Jacobs, and Eduwonkette? If these names are unfamiliar to you, it’s time to visit the education blogosphere. As a relatively new education bloggermyself (at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog), let me be your guide.

Blogs burst onto the scene in the late 1990s and gained major momentum in the middle of this decade. By some estimates there are now more than 100 million blogs worldwide. But while reading and writing blogs is extremely popular—two blogging sites (blogger.com and wordpress.com) each receive more web traffic in the United States than the number-one online newspaper (nytimes.com)—no single blog is reaching a mass audience. For example, Daily Kos, one of the most prominent political blogs on the net, pulls in only 0.027 percent of the global web audience in a given period, versus 0.87 percent that read nytimes.com. More than 1,600 web sites in the U.S. get more traffic than Daily Kos; nytimes.com, meanwhile, is ranked number 24. (These data all come from alexa.com.) Blogs represent the “long end of the tail” of the media; a new form of mass communication this is not.

And at the far end of that long tail sits the education blogosphere, a niche within a niche, with as many as 30,000 blogs. Joannejacobs.com, written by a former San Jose Mercury News reporter and columnist, is among its leading lights, yet is ranked lower than about 140,000 other web sites in the U.S. (Compare that to edweek.org, which is ranked about 40,000th.) But Jacobs is a big fish in this small pond. Table 1 shows that her site, along with Richardson’s weblogg-ed.com, significantly outplaces all competitors when measured by the number of other blogs linking to them recently. This isn’t a perfect indicator of a blog’s influence (while daily or monthly readership measures might be better, they are not available for all blogs) but it does show the “authority” given to a site by other bloggers. In this world, links are the coin of the realm, and the more the better.

So what are these education bloggers blogging about? Will Richardson, whose site is the top education blog, informs teachers about how to integrate technology into the classroom. That’s a common theme: 6 of the top 10 education blogs focus on technology-related topics. Joannejacobs.com is more ecumenical, linking to and commenting on daily newspaper articles and other blog posts and providing a forum for others to do the same. Some write about instructional practice, typically with a clear progressive bent. The Fischbowl, for instance, describes itself as “a staff development blog for Arapahoe High School [CO] teachers exploring constructivism and 21st century learning skills.”

Perhaps the most interesting among the top 10 education blogs is Students 2.0. As its name implies, the site is penned by pupils from around the world who submit entries to the blog’s editors. In some ways, its credo is radical, decrying the expectation that students be “widgets for the vast machine of industry.” Yet the site is also refreshingly committed to high standards. Consider this statement. “Every post is reviewed for quality: not just anything will be accepted. You will find no improper grammar or truncated ideas here. In fact, you may well learn a thing or two about excellence in writing; we certainly hope you are willing to learn from a generation of student teachers.”

If none of these blogs is familiar to you, don’t fret. Readers of Education Next are probably more likely to be drawn to education policy sites, none of which reach “top 10” status among education blogs overall (see Table 2). Here the masters of the (blog) universe are all wonks: Eduwonkette, Eduwonk, and The Education Wonks, and two of the three are anonymous wonks, or used to be. The story of Eduwonkette is particularly illuminating; she was recently revealed to be Jennifer Jennings, a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University. Rather than merely toiling away in the vineyards of the American Educational Research Association, writing papers for fellow academics, she recently overtook Eduwonk as the top education policy blogger, even though her competitor is a former Clinton White House aide and cofounder of a major Washington education think tank. It’s clichéd to say that the Internet evens the playing field and makes the traditional trappings of power and influence obsolete, but so it is.

Further to that point, it’s also striking that the major education interest groups aren’t yet bigtime players in the blogosphere. While the United Federation of Teachers, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National School Boards Association all have active blogs, none makes the top 10 lists.

And while the teacher-oriented blogs seem to skew toward a constructivist worldview, the policy blogs are more balanced between Left and Right. Eduwonk and the Quick and the Ed write from the center-left; Intercepts, Flypaper, and Jay P. Greene come from the center-right. (The latter two were launched this past spring and are steadily moving up in the rankings.) In this way, the blogosphere seems to mimic real life, where most teachers skew progressive intheir educational philosophy, but policy debate is more evenly balanced.

There’s one other way that the Net mirrors reality: the lack of a prominent parent blog. This isn’t to say that parents aren’t blogging; there are plenty of local or issue-specific parent blogs around. But there’s no significant parent voice in the national online conversation, just as there’s no national parent advocacy group in Washington. That’s a real shame; someone should blog about it.

So it is with adult learning. Most professionals would rather develop their skills online, on their own schedule, at their own pace, than sit in daylong, mind-numbing “workshops” that bring a lot of boredom and frustration but little intellectual stimulation. So it’s not surprising that as long ago as 2006 (eons in Internet time) the American Society for Training and Development reported that across all sectors almost 40 percent of professional development (PD) was delivered via technology (See figure 1). (Surely the numbers are even higher now.)

One would think that our elementary and secondary education system would embrace online learning for teachers and administrators, too. Traditional professional development for educators isn’t exactly winning rave reviews; in 2006, for example, the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher found that only half of teachers thought that “providing more opportunities for professional development would help a lot in keeping good people in teaching.”

It’s not hard to understand why: as with other professionals—or even K–12 students—individual teachers don’t want or need homogenized training. They need “differentiated instruction,” targeted to where they are in their careers and focused on the subjects they teach, their own strengths and skills gaps. None of this is easy to deliver in traditional settings.

And school schedules make face-to-face training logistically challenging. Some districts have created special “professional development” days for their teachers (likely not popular with working parents); others try to cram PD into the heads of exhausted instructors as soon as the closing bell rings.

As in so many other areas, our education system appears to be lagging behind in exploiting the Internet. Last year the National Research Council (NRC) published Enhancing Professional Development for Teachers: Potential Uses of Information Technology. It reported on a recent survey by Leah O’Donnell of consulting firm Eduventures, which found that six in seven teachers had participated in “conventional” professional development experiences, but a “markedly lower” proportion had access to online training.

This is particularly perplexing, given that teachers could be receiving targeted training in the comfort of their own homes, on their own schedule, and without the hassle or frustration of face-to-face PD. And the offerings of online teacher training are growing—and growing better. For example, PBS’s TeacherLine offers more than 100 interactive courses for pre-K–12 teachers, who can earn PD credits or (for a nominal fee) even college credit for completing them. Or consider CaseNEX, an online professional development company that spun off from the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. Via online video, teachers can engage with real-life “case studies” of classroom challenges and participate in an interactive online community of professionals. And yes, they can earn credits for doing so.

So why aren’t K–12 educators embracing online professional development in greater numbers? The NRC report suggests several possible reasons, including a lack of knowledge about such opportunities among teachers and administrators; a bias among principals for more traditional methods; and institutional resistance from district professional development staff who might see their own jobs disappear if teachers bypass their programs and engage in training created from afar.

This institutional resistance appears to be the most likely explanation, but it’s not limited to central office staff. As with so many things in life, the problem comes down to money. Traditional professional development providers (including colleges of education) have a lot of dollars at stake in the face-to-face model. They are likely to be outcompeted by national providers in the purveyance of customized teacher training.

And teachers themselves have come to expect to be compensated for the time they spend in professional development activities. A recent study by Education Next executive editor Frederick M. Hess for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that the collective bargaining agreements of more than half of the nation’s 50 largest school districts mandate that teachers be paid stipends for participating in PD outside of the regular school day. If these teachers participated in online professional development instead, at home, at night or on the weekends, would they have to be paid for their time? It’s not clear.

Perhaps accountability is an issue, too. Under the traditional model, teachers get credit just for showing up. In an online setting, they would probably have to demonstrate mastery of a subject via an assessment. And almost nothing stirs up a faculty lounge more than the dreaded words “teacher testing.”

Still, judging from the Internet’s success in revolutionizing other fields, eventually the resistance to online professional development will crumble. How long that will take will be a decent indicator of just how calcified our education system has become.

What about newspaper editorial boards, the original “opinion leaders”? Their writers have the luxury of time to follow important public-policy debates (as well as their own paper’s daily coverage), to interview key players, and to form well-honed views. How do they come out on these issues?

To find out, I asked three of my colleagues at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute to review all of the editorials written about or touching on charter schools or No Child Left Behind from 2006 and 2007 for the nation’s 25 largest-circulation papers. They had no shortage of reading material. Editorial boards commented on each subject extensively, with 201 editorials written about NCLB (an average of 8 per paper) and 183 about charters (an average of 7).

For both issues, the reviewers rated each newspaper on a Likert Scale, from negative 10 for “strongly opposed,” to positive 10 for “strongly supportive.” In every instance, at least two of the three reviewers agreed on the assessment and this was the value assigned to the paper. (In a majority of the cases, all three agreed.)

What did we find? As a group, the editorial boards share the general public’s views. The newspapers are much more supportive of charter schools than of No Child Left Behind, with charters receiving an average score of 4.1 (meaning the papers are “somewhat supportive” on average), compared to 1.2 for NCLB (meaning the papers are slightly better than neutral on average). Weighting the results by circulation gives the average ratings a small bump (to 4.3 and 1.3 respectively), but doesn’t change the story line.

Figure 1 shows how the individual papers scored. The charter school advantage is clear: 19 papers are somewhat or strongly supportive, versus only 3 that are somewhat opposed. (One is neutral and 2 did not write any editorials about the subject.) Meanwhile, the papers are split on NCLB, with 15 somewhat or strongly supportive, 9 somewhat or strongly opposed, and 1 neutral.

Taking into account the national papers’ political bent, the results are hardly surprising. USA Today and the Washington Post support both No Child Left Behind and charter schools, in line with their reputations as centrist or center-left papers. The New York Times supports the federal law but not charter schools, again not shocking for a liberal paper. (The Times titled one of its five editorials on the latter, “Exploding the Charter School Myth.”) And the conservative Wall Street Journal supports charters, but has misgivings about NCLB. Local context clearly has an impact. The Los Angeles Times is one of three papers to be “strongly supportive” of charter schools, which makes sense considering the frustrating pace of reform within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and the exciting development of L.A.-based charter management organizations such as Green Dot. Hence the paper’s stern admonition to LAUSD that it “learn from charters.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is one of three papers to oppose charter schools, and their implementation in the “Gateway to the West” has been far from stellar. One editorial was titled “Charters Flunk.”

So are the “opinion leaders” driving the public’s views in a certain direction, or is it the other way around? It’s hard to know, but one thing’s for sure: the future of charter schools sure looks brighter than the future of No Child Left Behind.

In the workaday world of elementary and secondary education, however, these philosophical musings seem less to the point. The questions are simpler: Can an online encyclopedia that’s edited by anyone, and thus no one, be trusted as a credible information source? Should students be encouraged to tap this tool as a supplement to their textbooks? And is it even possible to discourage its use?

To find out, my research intern and I performed a simple experiment. We selected 100 terms from prominent U.S. and world history textbooks (Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present and World History: Connections to Today—The Modern Era). We chose a mix of items that students might be asked to research for a test or paper, from the Mayflower Compact to the War Powers Act, from the Protestant Reformation to Anwar Sadat. And we entered each term into Google to find out which web sites the ubiquitous search engine suggests as the most useful links.

The results are astounding. Google listed Wikipedia as the number-one hit a remarkable 87 times out of 100. The encyclopedia came in second 12 times and third once. In other words, the Wikipedia site was listed among the top three Google hits 100 percent of the time.

Several conclusions can be drawn from this finding. First, people searching for information about these historical terms are finding the entries from Wikipedia helpful; that’s why Google is listing them so prominently. As a result, even if students do not seek out Wikipedia, Wikipedia will find them. Second, “banning” the use of Wikipedia appears hopelessly naive. As Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, told the New York Times, “They might as well say don’t listen to rock ’n’ roll either.” (Blocking Wikipedia isn’t so hard; some older “child-safe” Internet filters block the entire site because of its occasional objectionable pages.) But are students likely to find good information once they reach the site? We randomly selected 10 of our 100 terms and compared the treatment given to them by Wikipedia, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the textbooks themselves. The entries from Wikipedia sure are comprehensive, or at least verbose. At more than 3,000 words, the Wikipedia write-ups are more than twice as long, on average, as those of Britannica, and almost eight times as long as the passages from the textbooks.

And, to our admittedly untrained eyes, the information from Wikipedia appeared just as reliable. (A 2006 Nature article found roughly the same number of errors in entries from the two encyclopedias on various scientific topics, so our “findings” are consistent.) We certainly didn’t notice any discrepancies. (See below for a list of the ten terms if you’d like to test them yourself.)

The reason the content is relatively reliable is probably because these terms are fairly mainstream. “The high-traffic areas are going to be the cleanest,” Wiki expert Alexander M. C. Halavais told the Chronicle of Higher Education. Thus high-school level content is likely to be less error-prone than arcane subjects studied in graduate school.

As a K–12 educational tool, then, Wikipedia appears to pass the test, at least to the limited degree that any encyclopedia assists the learning process. Still, that doesn’t mean the site is perfect. As a resource about hot-button political issues, Wikipedia is notoriously subject to manipulation and spin. This is apparent in its treatment of education policy issues.

For example, its entry on “school voucher” (which comes up first on Google) gives twice as much ink to opponents as supporters. Furthermore, it includes spurious and unsupported claims such as this: “Opponents also claim that the vouchers are tantamount to providing taxpayer-subsidized ‘white flight’ from urban public schools.” (The vast majority of students receiving taxpayer-subsidized vouchers in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and the District of Columbia are, of course, nonwhite.)

So here’s a rule of thumb: When elementary and secondary students are researching history, Wikipedia is a decent place to start. When they or others are researching education policy, though, tapping another resource is in order. May I suggest educationnext.org?

This shift could have big implications for public policy debates, including those regarding education. A segment on the Rush Limbaugh Show (the nation’s most popular, with 13.5 million weekly listeners) apparently reaches more people than an op-ed in the New York Times (with a daily print circulation of 1.1 million, and a monthly online readership of 12 million). Of course, this assumes that radio shows talk about education. But do they?

The short answer is yes, but not much. Consider Rush. Its online archives only allow searches going back a month, so my summer research intern scoured the July 2007 programs for any discussion of K–12 education. The topic came up a paltry five times, versus hours of airtime for the Iraq war and immigration.

Limbaugh’s treatment of education was mostly as you might expect, with several segments focused on “culture wars” issues rather than weighty policy debates. For instance, one day he interviewed a 13-year-old who doubts that global warming is man-made, even though his teacher taught him that it is; another day the host ranted about Democrats’ support for sex education for kindergartners. Still, some of his monologues hinted at core education debates. For example, a teacher called in to argue that we shouldn’t try to produce a nation of “Einsteins,” that we’ll always need bricklayers and so forth. Limbaugh responded, “A lot of people that are out laying bricks or whatever the manual labor you’re talking about, building roads and so forth, a lot of them got decent math scores when they were in school. It was required. It was called well-rounded education.”

On the same day, he ridiculed the Pittsburgh school system for dropping the word “Public” from its name. “Let me tell you people in Pittsburgh something. It has nothing to do with what you call it! Gee! It’s called results! You just have to marvel at bureaucrats in the way they tackle a problem—they don’t fix the problem. They fix a name—that may get rid of the bad image—but it doesn’t fix the problem.”

And on another day, he attacked Hillary Clinton’s preschool proposal: “Now, what you have to remember about this, she’s saying that the government should take over small, independent preschools. What are small, independent preschools? They are independent and private businesses. A preschool is a private business. You send your kid to a preschool that’s not part of the state education system, and you’re paying for it, you obviously know you’re sending your kid to a private business. Hillary Clinton wants to come in and essentially nationalize them all, under state control. I’m telling you, these people, if they get power, if they win the White House, the first thing that they’re going to do is go after and outlaw home schooling. It’s going to happen so fast it will curl your hair.”

How does this compare to the other side of the dial—and the other side of the ideological spectrum—on National Public Radio? Consider Neal Conan’s Talk of the Nation, the most popular call-in news show on NPR. Including comments from listeners, it handled education just eight times during July 2007, hardly better than Rush.

Most surprisingly, its coverage wasn’t terribly different. Examining shows from August 2006 to July 2007, we spotted a handful that would appeal to policy wonks (such as one on mayoral control, and another on the “future of science education”). But most of its education segments focused on hot-button kitchen-table issues. Contemplate these titles of Talk of the Nation shows: “‘Unhooked’ Author Warns Against ‘Hooking Up’”; “Does Zero Tolerance Make Sense for Toy Guns?”; “Schools and Childhood Obesity”; and “Parent Sues School Over Student’s Poor Grades.”

What’s the lesson? While talk radio rarely wades into the minutiae of education policymaking—in part because education isn’t high on the public’s agenda right now—those of us concerned with school reform ignore this medium at our peril. All policies, to stand the test of time, must connect with a citizenry’s core values, and these values are increasingly reflected (and shaped) by talk radio. Limbaugh might not mention “universal proficiency,” and Conan might not take up “persistently dangerous schools,” but by discussing a bricklayer’s need to know math, or the appropriate discipline for students bringing toy guns to school, they are laying the foundation for the policy debates we wonks find so riveting.

-Michael J. Petrilli is executive editor of Education Next, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Other products aim to enhance classroom instruction directly. For decades this has been the Holy Grail of the education technology industry. And for years the market has offered products like lesson-plan banks, tools to align lessons to state standards, and more recently, subscriptions to digital content providers (such as Discovery Education) that allow instructors to embed high-quality video, music, or graphics into their teaching. But early applications of this technology forced the teacher to play writer, director, and producer for each set of digitally enhanced lessons. That’s a lot to expect from the average teacher and reinforces the inefficient practice of asking every teacher to reinvent the wheel.

Enter companies such as Agile Mind, which produces fully developed lessons in math and science that are rich with visualizations and simulations. This new generation of content providers shows potential, says Adam Newman, a vice president at the consulting firm Eduventures, because their products are “crafted with an understanding of the challenges and constraints of the classroom.”

Some of the most important parts of the education process happen after the school bell rings, when teachers grade student homework, papers, and tests. Why can’t English essays, for example, be zipped off electronically to be marked up and graded overnight by English majors or graduate students around the country (or even around the world), then handed back to the student the next day? A company called EduMetry is pursuing exactly this business for large-scale courses at the higher education level. EduMetry works with professors to create common grading rubrics; tests are graded online and feedback is provided electronically, creating a digital record of student work along the way. K–12 teachers might like similar homework-grading help, and students would receive feedback faster than they can from their teacher alone.

All of these products and services cost money—money that has to be squeezed out of an education system that plows almost all of its resources into personnel. Of course, there is another way. As Chester E. Finn Jr. first explained, in the past half-century our K–12 public education student population has grown 50 percent while our teacher corps has grown nearly 300 percent, largely in pursuit of smaller classes. If the size of our teacher force had merely kept pace with student growth and we spent the extra money attracting more-accomplished individuals to the field, today’s average teacher salary would be close to $100,000 per year.

If teachers unions find the new technologies demeaning or threatening, perhaps they will finally get serious about working to raise teacher pay, compensate high performers accordingly, and give up their small classes in return. Should education technology push our system to finally choose teacher quality over teacher quantity, it will have a transformative effect indeed. But as long as it costs less money and political will to enhance legions of mediocre teachers than it would to compensate fewer highly talented ones, these technologies should find a market.

What is the allure of charter schools for celebrities? For one, the schools need the money; a report last year from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute showed that the average charter school receives 80 cents on the dollar compared to traditional public schools.

But as nice as it is for stars to visit charter schools, the biggest payoff is when charter schools themselves become the stars. The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) hit the lottery when its founders, Michael Feinberg and David Levin, appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show in April.

The new Google Trends feature shows the rise in public interest following KIPP’s Oprah debut. Google searches on “KIPP” (the top line in Figure 1) remained relatively steady throughout 2004 and 2005, and then spiked in April 2006—exactly when the Oprah episode aired. The immense interest indicated by web searches translated into serious benefits for KIPP, as Steve Mancini, KIPP’s spokesperson, explained. “Oprah has a large and loyal national audience. Student enrollment jumped up at many KIPP schools after Oprah’s TV profile because parents saw elements of KIPP that excited them—articulate students, inspired and dedicated teachers, and a nationwide track record of results with kids.” Teacher applications and volunteer offers also accelerated after the show.

Apparently it was positive print coverage that first led the Oprah folks to KIPP. Do news stories also translate into greater public interest, at least as measured by Internet searches? In October 2005, the New York Times ran a column by David Brooks that mentioned KIPP, and in June 2006 it ran a news story featuring the program. Yet, on these dates, the Google Trends data show nary a blip. And in May 2004, KIPP was featured on the CBS Early Show. That appearance didn’t lead to much new interest, either.

What’s the lesson? If charter school networks and other retail-level education reforms want to attract the attention of potential clients, teachers, or donors, nothing beats the glitz and reach of talk and entertainment shows—and no one is bigger than Oprah. News stories—in print or on the air—might occasionally pave the way for TV appearances, but their reliable value is in reaching elite audiences such as editorial writers and policymakers.

Long-term charter school success will require both growing consumer demand for individual schools and support in principle from governors and legislatures. Even if some standout charters find themselves on television, that alone is unlikely to translate into greater support for charters as a reform idea. Take the Oprah episode. Famously, no one articulated the words “charter school” on the show—the term is much too wonky for Oprah’s audience. There was no spike in Google searches for “charter schools” (the bottom line in the graph) after the show aired, even though KIPP and most of the other schools featured were charters.

As long as celebrity attention brings cash and publicity to star charters like KIPP, it’s all good. But hangin’ with the stars is no substitute for the hard work of ed reform; Fiddy and his posse are unlikely to start rapping about better charter-school policy anytime soon.

What can be done? What should be done?

One of the greatest frustrations for reformers so far has been the government’s eagerness to put these failing schools on life support rather than forcing them to radically change their ways. According to Center on Education Policy case studies in California and Michigan, officials are using an NCLB loophole, opting for superficial interventions—such as hiring improvement “coaches” or changing the curriculum—over implementing the bold reforms envisioned by the law’s crafters.

Which bold reforms? Two strategies are particularly attractive: reopening these schools as charter schools, or contracting with a for-profit or nonprofit manager to run their day-to-day operations. A combination of the two could be especially powerful. Imagine a school district shuttering a failing school for a year. Meanwhile, a company such as Edison Schools or a nonprofit such as KIPP applies for a charter to run a replacement school out of that very facility. A new, effective school has been transplanted into an old, failing one.

Of course, there are numerous impediments to that sort of fresh-start approach. Districts jealously guard their facilities, even when they are underused or decaying. Teacher unions fight to block new charters, especially the vast majority that do not fall under collective bargaining. And neither the feds nor the states are forcing districts to head down this promising but politically painful road.

But the biggest impediment may be that there aren’t enough school-management organizations to go around. Not by a long shot. Over the past five years, the number of schools operated by for-profit education-management organizations (EMOs) grew at an annual rate of about 9 percent. Nonprofit charter-management organizations (CMOs) are just now scaling up; the sector increased 30 percent over the past two years. With similar growth trends going forward, only 250 additional privately managed schools will come online by 2008–09, while more than 3,000 schools will likely enter restructuring.

Can philanthropy help close that gap? The Charter School Growth Fund, seeded by the Pisces and Walton foundations, among others, aims to create 100,000 seats in high-performing charter schools by 2015. Still, assuming 400 students per school, that only works out to another 250 schools—and not for almost a decade.

Although transplants for failing schools should be attempted and then perfected, reformers are going to need to come up with Plan B for the vast number of schools in restructuring; they are going to need to get healthy on their own.