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Trends make education's future a mystery Education 2000: Reforming Schools for a New Century Sunday, September 03, 2000 By Carmen J. Lee, Post-Gazette Education Writer
When it comes to forecasting what American schools will look like in the future, educators and analysts steeped in the history and current events of education in this country don't agree on every point.
Charter schools are here to stay, and the push for vouchers won't end, many predict.
But there's much less agreement over whether Americans will ever get really serious about teaching children more than one language -- despite the anticipated increase in the country's Hispanic population.
And while hardly anyone disputes that the use of technology in schools will only increase in future decades, there's a debate over how often a real teacher, textbook in hand, will be replaced.
"I don't believe the futurists who say that new technology will transform teaching. The history of American education suggests the opposite," said Jonathan Zimmerman, an education historian at New York University.
"Thomas Edison thought the motion picture would change [the classroom]. Others said the same thing about radio. They were very wrong. If the past is any indicator, computers won't change the way most classroom instructors go about their business. Instead, the teachers will incorporate computers into their old regimens."
So what will schools of the 21st century look like?
Here are some possibilities.
The shape of buildings
Because of the high cost of construction, Zimmerman doubts that in the next 10 to 20 years there will be a dramatic change in the range of old and new school buildings we see today.
Part One: The high stakes of assessment testing
Part Three: Technology closes distance between teacher and student
Part Four: Is it safe home alone after school?
Part Five: Teachers unhappy tying pay to results
Duquesne University President John Murray Jr. insists parents won't continue to tolerate inequality in school building conditions, with some beautiful and others disastrous, but he believes that communities will have to become more united if they want change.
What if there is a huge infusion of money for school buildings? In that case, Mike Griffith sees clusters of three or four small buildings on a campus, rather than the traditional one-building school.
The idea, said Griffith, a policy analyst with the Education Commission of the States in Denver, would be to create a setting that provides the advantages of large schools while at the same time offering the sense of security and community found in small schools.
"We're hitting the point where the useful life of the school buildings built [just] after World War II is about over," Griffith said.
"The new school buildings will be in the suburbs and the newer large cities, and they'll be as modern as any office building."
Wired for the Net
These new school buildings will be wired for technology, Griffith added, and he envisions classrooms where the focus will be a large computer screen that could also be used for distance learning.
But Griffith believes that distance learning and the opening of cyberschools, which rely heavily on students taking courses by computer, will occur more in remote areas where schools and communities are losing population.
While he and Murray foresee more use of technology than Zimmerman does, they agree that, no matter what, classroom teachers will remain the backbone of education.
"You can have a cyberschool, but at some point you have to have live teachers," Griffith said. "When a student gets stuck, he or she needs a human being and someone who is there, not just over the phone."
Murray added that technology wouldn't replace the need for students to master reading and writing and to learn how to think critically.
"We know technology is going to change. But the question is whether we're going to have the fundamental mental skills and intellectual curiosity to be able to use this technology as it should be used," he said.
Magnets and vouchers
The education forecasters agreed that traditional public schools will see increased competition from charter schools, and that there will be at least some continued interest in publicly funded vouchers to private schools.
Griffith said he believed that the use of magnet schools would decline as charter schools increase. That's because charter schools can offer educational themes, as magnet schools do, but aren't as restricted by regulations.
"Magnets have had problems competing with charter schools," Griffith said. "Charter schools are where magnets were 10 years ago."
What will be interesting to follow over the next few decades will be the various mutations of charter schools, he said. Charter home schools also could boom, he said, where home-schooled students meet part of the time in a group as a charter school so they can have social interaction with other students and take advantage of opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities such as sports.
The picture for vouchers is less clear, but Griffith and Zimmerman agreed that for vouchers to take off, the dollar amount attached to them would have to increase.
Currently, most publicly funded vouchers won't cover the cost of private school tuition, and some schools have been grumbling about having to accept voucher students who are paying lower fees, Griffith said.
Zimmerman said he believed that part of the future for vouchers would depend upon whether the political left in this country would sign on. In the 1950s and 1960s, some liberal political activists supported vouchers as long as the poor were given ones that could pay their way at elite prep schools and the rich were given vouchers of much lower value.
"They thought the vouchers would give a hand up to the underprivileged," Zimmerman said, adding, "You're not hearing anyone talk about that type of voucher."
What might happen, Griffith said, is that for-profit schools will start to spring up that will accept vouchers of any amount.
Courses and tests
What will go on at the desk of the average student in the future?
Murray believes that they'll be studying more Spanish, but Zimmerman and Griffith doubt there will be a big push in the coming years for students to master any foreign language.
The country may be diverse in makeup, Zimmerman said, "But in terms of our linguistic culture, we're incredibly uniform, and I don't see that changing."
Griffith said current high-stakes tests in schools didn't include foreign language; instead, they focus on reading, math and science.
"As schools start to worry about test scores, they will be putting their money toward those subjects," he said. "In California, Hispanic students who were forced to take English tested better. ... That was just the opposite of what everyone expected."
Griffith predicts that students will take even more standardized tests, but Zimmerman believes less will be riding on those exams. He believes that emphasis on high-stakes testing will decline as middle-class families become disenchanted because their youngsters aren't doing well on them.
"High-stakes tests may have peaked now," he said. "Originally, lots of poor kids were failing, but now middle-class kids are failing. I think the middle class is turning away from them."
More education
While there's currently much talk about "school-to-work" programs, the forecasters said more and more students would have to pursue some type of post-secondary education in the future.
"I don't care what the profession or job. You're going to have to continue to go to school in some fashion," Murray said. "We're in a time where you go to school for life."
Griffith said he drafted a school-to-work bill three years ago when he was on staff with the Michigan state Legislature, but he said the measure failed because masses of parents were outraged that the state would suggest that their children might not be college material.
"Not all kids are going to college, but almost all parents want their kids to go to college," he said. "There's a mentality in this country that you need to go to college. We don't envision ourselves as a country that works by the sweat of its brow anymore, but one that works behind a desk. And if you want a desk job, you need college."
Griffith said there could be a push for greater coordination among preschools, elementary and secondary schools, technical schools, community colleges and universities to create so-called preschool through 16th-grade programs, or P-16.
Such a system would place more importance on early childhood programs getting children ready for school and would give high school students the opportunity to take the college or technical school courses that they are prepared for, he said.
To create the schools many Americans want, Zimmerman believes that more federal money will have to flow into public education -- and with that will come more federal control.
"Everyone wants the bucks, but one always comes with the other," he said. Griffith, on the other hand, predicts large private corporations will move into education as they did with health care in the previous decade, marketing themselves as providers of the educational choices parents want.
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