Why Technology Hasn't Lowered Costs or Improved Quality in Education

Below is an article that was published in the Spring of '06 that I wrote for Threshold magazine, a publication of Cable in The Classroom. I am on their Advisory Board. In short, in every other industry, technological innovation is an effort to increase productivity. Productivity is greater output with the same input of labor or the same output with less input of labor. No matter the case, productivity is dependent upon integrating technology with labor -- something that education at every level has willfully ignored.

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OUTSIDE HELP: IMPROVING PRODUCTIVITY IN SCHOOLS

After capital expenditures, instructional labor is education’s biggest expense. Yet, despite the enormous potential of technology for improving the quality and quantity of instruction, and the enormous pressures on schools to reduce spending, little has been accomplished to enable greater teaching productivity. Put simply, to improve productivity, either more or better instruction must be provided to the same students or more students must be taught with the same resources.

Schools that expect technology investments to drive quality improvements and cost reductions would do better by focusing on products and services that answer questions such as:

* How do we free up more time for our most skilled teachers to perform the most complex instructional activities?

* What parts of the educational process are best done by computers instead of people?

* Are there parts of the educational process that could be performed more cheaply by others?

* What services does my school provide that cannot be done better or more cheaply by someone else?

The answers to these questions are neither simple nor easy, and they threaten traditional notions of appropriate student:teacher ratios, quality control, classroom design, funding formulas, salary structures, and job responsibilities. However, every successful technology innovation in the history of humankind has enabled people to do more with less. Education should be no exception.

PRODUCTIVE APPROACHES
Though these questions may be thorny and difficult, the traditional 20:1 student:lecturer model is giving way to more productive ways of offering instruction. While most examples are in higher education, they do offer models for K–12 education as well. Schools are combining their own instructors with other instructional services to create programs that are cheaper, more effective, and more scalable. For instance:

To free up professor time for course management, course design, and student intervention, the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) contracted with a commercial company to grade student essays within 24 hours and adopted a textbook that included an essay-review service. The benefits? For the students, they receive suggested grades within 24 hours, have a third-party review, and the graders have more consistent training and provide more consistent assessment than could be provided in a traditional structure. For KCTCS, one instructor can teach more students, the per-student cost is lower, and some of the cost of providing the service is borne by the textbook provider.

After deciding to offer a program focused on math and writing for underprepared students, Kaplan University partnered with an online tutoring company to provide the assessment, content delivery, and tutoring components. The students receive tutoring access up to 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The school is able to shorten the development time of a program, reduce its risk and development costs, and rely on the expertise of a partner company for specific instructional activities such as online tutoring.

The National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) has worked with more than 50 colleges to redesign high-enrollment courses. NCAT results demonstrate that, by rethinking instructional labor strategies, schools can increase student success and decrease per-student costs. When schools make greater use of digital content and courseware and rethink student: teacher ratios, staffing patterns, and faculty roles, students need less intervention from live instructors, and more of what they do need can be provided by tutors, teaching assistants, or course coordinators.

The Baltimore City School System is one of many public school systems nationwide to hire teachers overseas to affordably meet the “highly qualified teacher” requirement
of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The system hired as many as 50 Filipino teachers to teach in the city’s schools. Additionally, many online Supplemental Education Service (SES) providers under NCLB use tutors located overseas. Whether in person or online, tapping the global market for educational labor allows more flexible staffing, and either lower-cost or more-qualified staffing.

WHY NOT?
Opponents might argue that the intimate teacher/student relationship is lost if grading is outsourced. However, the reality is that the intimate teacher/student relationship is an ideal that is far less common than we would hope and is far more expensive than we would admit. Initial results from most of the NCAT’s projects and from the Kentucky grading project show that student performance actually improved, while per-student costs decreased. Another argument against such models is that outsourced instructors will have different teaching techniques and standards than those taught at a particular school. While there certainly are some teaching functions that are best not outsourced—particularly those that require
a high degree of socialization, such as most teaching of elementary students—there are many functions that can be easily outsourced. For instance, math, science, and writing fundamentals are essentially the same across schools, states, and countries. Most schools are already comfortable with outsourcing at least some elements of education—many schools that offer distance-learning courses do so through third-party providers, and textbooks and courseware are the result of outsourcing content development and delivery.

Every year, the cost of education outpaces inflation with no increase in overall student performance. In "The World Is Flat," the best-selling book that attempts to define trends and technologies in the global marketplace, Thomas Friedman describes how companies in almost every industry are “insourcing” their logistics—letting partner companies manage the tracking and delivery of their products and services—and outsourcing elements of their production process. These trends are increasingly part of education as well.

No matter how it’s defined, education, like other hidebound industries before it, is about to become part of a global market. In other industries, this has resulted in products and services that are cheaper and of higher quality. Viewed one way, this threatens the cost and service structure of American education. Viewed another, this is an opportunity to rethink the components and functions of a school and all of the political, economic, and accountability structures that surround it. If doing so can improve productivity in schools, more students will ultimately receive more opportunities to learn, achieve, and succeed.