education

Steve Jobs on Technology and Education, 1996

/ Hans Moleman

From an interview with Steve Jobs in Wired, published 15 years ago:

Q: Could technology help by improving education?

I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I’m one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I’ve seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers – so it’s not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, “Let’s start a school.” You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they’d start schools. And you’d have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

They’d do it because they’d be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don’t learn until you’re older – yet you could learn them when you’re younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?

God, how exciting that could be! But you can’t do it today. You’d be crazy to work in a school today. You don’t get to do what you want. You don’t get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn’t it. You’re not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school – none of this is bad. It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re doing something to solve the problem with education.

Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.

It’s not as simple as you think when you’re in your 20s – that technology’s going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won’t.

President’s Proposed FY 2012 Budget

/ The Old Crank

The Administration’s proposed spending plan for 2012, which was released on Monday, was sort of a mixed bag for adult literacy. It included a small increase in the state block grants to local adult literacy and basic education programs; it proposed the creation of a Workforce Innovation Fund (WIF) (this was also proposed last year) a competitive grant programs for new, innovative adult education and job training projects; and called for reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), the largest source of federal funding for adult literacy (via Title II). But it also cuts some programs outside the education budget that have provided some funding for many adult literacy programs in recent years.

The proposed budget includes $635 million for state grants to local literacy programs, an increase of $6.8 million over the 2010 appropriation and the adjusted 2011 Continuing Resolution. But $50.8 million from this line item will be used to support the WIF, which will also include $30 million in funding from the Rehabilitation Services and Disability Research account, and almost $298 million from the Department of Labor.

This leaves $584.2 million for formula-based state grant money for adult literacy programs (of which $75,00,000 is set-aside for English literacy and civics education grants, also managed at the state level), a figure that is still short of what is needed.

Especially when you take into account that state budgets for adult literacy have been cut significantly over the last several years, and I expect that funding for adult literacy will continue to be on the chopping block as states grapple with their own budget challenges over the next year.

At a Department of Education briefing on the budget held February 14th, Department of Education officials told me that eligible grantees for the WIF would include programs, consortia of programs, and/or states. So it appears that this money will eventually get out to programs in the field. Essentially what they’ve done is take away some of the funds that would normally go to states via formula funding and made it competitive. Some states could end up doing better under this scheme. But it appears that there is definitely a chance here that some states will end up with less federal funding.

In addition, the proposal wants to more than double the amount of money going to the Office of Vocational and Adult Education at the Department of Education by providing an additional 12 million dollars for national leadership funds to evaluate the impact of college bridge programs and build technology infrastructure.

Again, during a period where states are cutting funding, some may raise concerns about the fact that the bulk of the President’s proposed increase for adult literacy stays (at least initially) at the Department of Education, and not out to the states that need the help now.

What concerns me more, though, is the proposed cuts to the community development block grant program and the community service block grant program. Many adult literacy programs have supported instructional services in part through these programs. And finally, the President’s budget also does not include funding for Even Start, the program that integrates adult literacy and early childhood literacy instruction.

But there are a few other positive things in the proposal: first, during a conference call briefing on the education budget held February 16th, administration officials noted that the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which has been increased by $100 million dollars, support partnerships with adult education programs. Adult Education projects could also receive funding through a proposed public-private financing program called “Pay for Success,” an innovation that is designed to encourage private investors to support education projects that would receive public funding only once the projects have met performance targets and generated successful outcomes.

Finally, it was encouraging to see the administration’s ongoing support for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). CNCS engages more than five million Americans in service through Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, and Learn and Serve America. Many AmeriCorps members serve as instructors and in other capacities at adult literacy programs across the country. The President’s FY 2012 budget requests $1.26 billion for CNCS, a $109 million increase over current funding levels.