Over the weekend, I listened to my friend, Jon Kiger, broadcast a radio show from the studios of WPEA in Exeter, NH where he was playing music and interviewing the Academy’s principal who requested that Jon play the disco classic “Stayin’ Alive.” I would not have chosen the Bee Gees, but in the matter of tastes, there is no dispute. Jon introduced me to WPEA many years ago and it was a great treat to hear him broadcast again through the marvels of Internet technology.
I began to ruminate that it would have been absolutely impossible for me to have enjoyed Jon’s show just a few years ago. So much has changed in the world and in many markets since I received my high school diploma and yet so little has changed in the delivery of education at the secondary school level. I attended a prestigious boarding school – Phillips Exeter Academy – and although the Exeter experience is an extraordinarily rich one, the delivery of education at even Exeter has changed very little relative to the changes in products and services since I left campus in the 1980s.
Unfortunately, over the past generation, educational institutions (especially primary and secondary ones) have not made the transformative changes made in other industries. Expenses have skyrocketed and students appear to get less and less for dollars spent on a relative basis when compared to almost everything else in society since my commencement. I recently compared the quality of work that I completed in fourth grade versus what my daughter had been assigned and prepared; there is sadly no comparison. On an objective basis, the work assigned a generation ago was more challenging and rigorous. But the bigger problem is that I do not believe that children today should even be following a “light” version of the same curriculum that I was given.
When I consider the amazing changes that have occurred in the quality of a variety of products and services since the 1980s – computers, autos, electronics, cable TV, cell phones, medical diagnostics, healthcare technologies and services, LED light bulbs, internet shopping, electronic trading, banking and communications, internet grocery delivery, and video on demand -- the list goes on and on. And still I have yet to see many significant changes in primary and secondary education. Technology has opened up opportunities for schools that never existed previously. When I attended high school, only a handful of schools could afford their own radio stations. With today’s technologies, there is really no reason why almost every high school cannot have its own online radio station. Costs to do so are now very low and the educational experience would be great. Multimedia communications grows in importance with each passing year. Mastery of the ability to convey (and also parse) a story with words, data, sounds, pictures and video is an increasingly important skill. Students should have the opportunity to practice these skills across multiple media channels as early as possible.
Technology opens up the possibility of an Exeter-like experience (similar to the experience available to classes a generation or two ago) for millions of students today. Such an experience could become affordable for millions (instead of about 1,000 students today) and with better uses of technology the Academy itself could make tuition more affordable for the students who currently attend. Indeed, the campus of Exeter itself has the capacity to take the “Exeter experience” even a leap or two beyond the possibilities open to these millions of students. Sadly, I think, our pedagogical practices remain solidly grounded in the 20th century. That statement holds as true for the so called “reformers” all over the country as it does for Exeter. The forces of the status quo are lined up very solidly against any change movement.
Primary and secondary education will change because they have to change. The current “system” no longer serves the students and does not serve the best long term interests of the teachers either. Everything was fine and dandy in Greece until that unsustainable economic model fell apart. Home prices always went up in the US until they no longer did. Learned individuals relied on these truisms backed up by solid statistical data. Well, according to the Department of Education, educational spending has outpaced GDP growth and never had a down year in the US; I predict that streak will soon end. This is a contrarian view. I am not one of the learned individuals relying on solid historical data.
Earning higher degrees leads to higher incomes is another commonly accepted adage. Yet it is not clear in a world of Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg whether this adage will continue to remain true. Education and training matter, but it may not necessarily be the education and training that children are learning in primary and secondary schools unless we change our approach and curriculum.
Almost all careers and jobs today are being dramatically altered and even transformed by technological changes and are vastly different from what they were a generation ago. Yet what is being taught in schools and what and how schools test children are not much different from what I experienced. It should be much, much harder to take students from a generation ago and drop them into classrooms today than it would be if it were possible to do so; students would have a more difficult time adjusting outside of the classroom than inside it. It would be very difficult to take office or factory workers from 1975 and drop them into the working world of today. The world of work has transformed at a far greater pace than the world of the classroom and the classroom must catch up.
Mastery of a basic level of core facts and methods for life-long learning in school remain important. But many areas in the current curriculum are less important and must be de-emphasized or dropped to make room for new programs. Spelling has grown less important with spell check, but speed reading for content and precise vocabulary for communication of ideas have become more important. Studying a foreign language and communications are critical in a more global world as are the uses of statistics, data and analytics. And there are many curriculum items near and dear to some educators’ hearts that absolutely must go. Yes, we must kill long division and geometric proofs. We must teach word problems, algebra and basic programming to students earlier than we do. And science has to be about passion and discovery and inquiry-based with greater emphasis on science fairs and student led research. Moreover, physical education and health have become increasingly important in a sedentary world of ever-increasing obesity, heart disease and diabetes.
The pedagogical changes of the 21st century can take hold if educators are willing to throw off the shackles of the 20th century and embrace the changes occurring in the worlds of work and leisure today. To be successful educators will need to become revolutionary. They need to rethink the curriculum for the 21st century along the lines of what some of the homeschoolers (not the whacked out ones, however) are doing to make a real difference. Marginal changes are not going to get the United States where it needs to go, however.
To bring my educational ramblings back to WPEA and to Exeter. I believe most private educational institutions in the US are at the same point today where the US auto industry was in the 1980s. The products are too big, too expensive and not well suited for what consumers want and need. If they stay on their same course, I believe these institutions have less than 20 years before they will run into a wall of irrelevance. Indeed, perhaps they only have 10 to 15 years because everything is happening at a faster pace today. Costs and tuition are not under control. The institutions do not utilize technology effectively and efficiently. They desperately need to rework the curriculum to become more relevant before their current trajectory launches these schools into unchartered waters where they do not wish to go. There will always be some very wealthy parents willing to spend whatever it takes to give their children the “best” education on the planet. But unless private institutions are willing to put 80 to 90 percent of the student body on something close to full scholarship, they will not attract the same caliber of students as in the past. Their definition of “best” will have to be adjusted.
There is no law that states Exeter has to be the hallowed institution it has been since World War I or arguably even since the Civil War. The Academy cannot spend its way to success. It does not have the Milton Hershey school endowment and even if it did, the amounts spent on public education should serve as a warning. On the public side, we have doubled and tripled spending on education without any increase in output or performance. Education spending is a giant sinkhole unless we take an entirely different approach.
Exeter has spent increasingly large amounts per student in the years since I departed. I visited campus, met with students and had dinners with them for many of the 10 years between my 15th and 25th reunions and saw no discernable increase in the quality of education delivered. I could almost make the argument that students today are less articulate than they were a generation ago. I believe this situation has nothing to do with Exeter and perhaps more to do with the rise of isolating “personal communication” devices. The Academy touts the increase in standardized test scores among students over the past generation, but I think that statistic is as irrelevant as it is in the public schools. Teaching to the tests does not make us any smarter. Elite college admission rates have gone down with every year as global competition increases. We are not preparing students as well for a globally competitive world. This is fact not fiction. I am on the Board of Education for the Bedford Central School District and I see this played out every day. We need to outthink educators in India and China for there are four times as many students in those countries against whom we will have to compete.
At an 8% rate of increase, tuition doubles every 9 years. This growth rate is simply unsustainable and represents the trajectory the Academy and other private institutions have been travelling on for some time. The University of the South just instituted a decrease in the tuition rate for next year. This is the direction Exeter and other institutions should be considering – decreased tuition and significant cost cutting with substantial technology investment for the future. We should be making changes in our public school system as well, but our hands are hopelessly tied by the laws of the state of NY and our contract with the teachers’ union. It is a coming battle which will be fought in the media and perhaps also at the ballot box. Exeter has the luxury that such a battle can be waged behind closed doors in the board room if only there were the courage to do so. Nevertheless, I know the challenges in changing an institution – especially a not-for-profit with a large board. It is extraordinarily hard to do so.
I do not believe that primary and secondary education in the United States is going to fall apart in the next year or so. But I also believe that America does not have 10 or 20 years to figure out what to do and get it right. And I sincerely believe that if my high school does not begin to make dramatic changes today, by 2030 Exeter will remain too recognizable to alumni and alumnae and be a far wealthier place, but much less rich for it.
I began to ruminate that it would have been absolutely impossible for me to have enjoyed Jon’s show just a few years ago. So much has changed in the world and in many markets since I received my high school diploma and yet so little has changed in the delivery of education at the secondary school level. I attended a prestigious boarding school – Phillips Exeter Academy – and although the Exeter experience is an extraordinarily rich one, the delivery of education at even Exeter has changed very little relative to the changes in products and services since I left campus in the 1980s.
Unfortunately, over the past generation, educational institutions (especially primary and secondary ones) have not made the transformative changes made in other industries. Expenses have skyrocketed and students appear to get less and less for dollars spent on a relative basis when compared to almost everything else in society since my commencement. I recently compared the quality of work that I completed in fourth grade versus what my daughter had been assigned and prepared; there is sadly no comparison. On an objective basis, the work assigned a generation ago was more challenging and rigorous. But the bigger problem is that I do not believe that children today should even be following a “light” version of the same curriculum that I was given.
When I consider the amazing changes that have occurred in the quality of a variety of products and services since the 1980s – computers, autos, electronics, cable TV, cell phones, medical diagnostics, healthcare technologies and services, LED light bulbs, internet shopping, electronic trading, banking and communications, internet grocery delivery, and video on demand -- the list goes on and on. And still I have yet to see many significant changes in primary and secondary education. Technology has opened up opportunities for schools that never existed previously. When I attended high school, only a handful of schools could afford their own radio stations. With today’s technologies, there is really no reason why almost every high school cannot have its own online radio station. Costs to do so are now very low and the educational experience would be great. Multimedia communications grows in importance with each passing year. Mastery of the ability to convey (and also parse) a story with words, data, sounds, pictures and video is an increasingly important skill. Students should have the opportunity to practice these skills across multiple media channels as early as possible.
Technology opens up the possibility of an Exeter-like experience (similar to the experience available to classes a generation or two ago) for millions of students today. Such an experience could become affordable for millions (instead of about 1,000 students today) and with better uses of technology the Academy itself could make tuition more affordable for the students who currently attend. Indeed, the campus of Exeter itself has the capacity to take the “Exeter experience” even a leap or two beyond the possibilities open to these millions of students. Sadly, I think, our pedagogical practices remain solidly grounded in the 20th century. That statement holds as true for the so called “reformers” all over the country as it does for Exeter. The forces of the status quo are lined up very solidly against any change movement.
Primary and secondary education will change because they have to change. The current “system” no longer serves the students and does not serve the best long term interests of the teachers either. Everything was fine and dandy in Greece until that unsustainable economic model fell apart. Home prices always went up in the US until they no longer did. Learned individuals relied on these truisms backed up by solid statistical data. Well, according to the Department of Education, educational spending has outpaced GDP growth and never had a down year in the US; I predict that streak will soon end. This is a contrarian view. I am not one of the learned individuals relying on solid historical data.
Earning higher degrees leads to higher incomes is another commonly accepted adage. Yet it is not clear in a world of Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg whether this adage will continue to remain true. Education and training matter, but it may not necessarily be the education and training that children are learning in primary and secondary schools unless we change our approach and curriculum.
Almost all careers and jobs today are being dramatically altered and even transformed by technological changes and are vastly different from what they were a generation ago. Yet what is being taught in schools and what and how schools test children are not much different from what I experienced. It should be much, much harder to take students from a generation ago and drop them into classrooms today than it would be if it were possible to do so; students would have a more difficult time adjusting outside of the classroom than inside it. It would be very difficult to take office or factory workers from 1975 and drop them into the working world of today. The world of work has transformed at a far greater pace than the world of the classroom and the classroom must catch up.
Mastery of a basic level of core facts and methods for life-long learning in school remain important. But many areas in the current curriculum are less important and must be de-emphasized or dropped to make room for new programs. Spelling has grown less important with spell check, but speed reading for content and precise vocabulary for communication of ideas have become more important. Studying a foreign language and communications are critical in a more global world as are the uses of statistics, data and analytics. And there are many curriculum items near and dear to some educators’ hearts that absolutely must go. Yes, we must kill long division and geometric proofs. We must teach word problems, algebra and basic programming to students earlier than we do. And science has to be about passion and discovery and inquiry-based with greater emphasis on science fairs and student led research. Moreover, physical education and health have become increasingly important in a sedentary world of ever-increasing obesity, heart disease and diabetes.
The pedagogical changes of the 21st century can take hold if educators are willing to throw off the shackles of the 20th century and embrace the changes occurring in the worlds of work and leisure today. To be successful educators will need to become revolutionary. They need to rethink the curriculum for the 21st century along the lines of what some of the homeschoolers (not the whacked out ones, however) are doing to make a real difference. Marginal changes are not going to get the United States where it needs to go, however.
To bring my educational ramblings back to WPEA and to Exeter. I believe most private educational institutions in the US are at the same point today where the US auto industry was in the 1980s. The products are too big, too expensive and not well suited for what consumers want and need. If they stay on their same course, I believe these institutions have less than 20 years before they will run into a wall of irrelevance. Indeed, perhaps they only have 10 to 15 years because everything is happening at a faster pace today. Costs and tuition are not under control. The institutions do not utilize technology effectively and efficiently. They desperately need to rework the curriculum to become more relevant before their current trajectory launches these schools into unchartered waters where they do not wish to go. There will always be some very wealthy parents willing to spend whatever it takes to give their children the “best” education on the planet. But unless private institutions are willing to put 80 to 90 percent of the student body on something close to full scholarship, they will not attract the same caliber of students as in the past. Their definition of “best” will have to be adjusted.
There is no law that states Exeter has to be the hallowed institution it has been since World War I or arguably even since the Civil War. The Academy cannot spend its way to success. It does not have the Milton Hershey school endowment and even if it did, the amounts spent on public education should serve as a warning. On the public side, we have doubled and tripled spending on education without any increase in output or performance. Education spending is a giant sinkhole unless we take an entirely different approach.
Exeter has spent increasingly large amounts per student in the years since I departed. I visited campus, met with students and had dinners with them for many of the 10 years between my 15th and 25th reunions and saw no discernable increase in the quality of education delivered. I could almost make the argument that students today are less articulate than they were a generation ago. I believe this situation has nothing to do with Exeter and perhaps more to do with the rise of isolating “personal communication” devices. The Academy touts the increase in standardized test scores among students over the past generation, but I think that statistic is as irrelevant as it is in the public schools. Teaching to the tests does not make us any smarter. Elite college admission rates have gone down with every year as global competition increases. We are not preparing students as well for a globally competitive world. This is fact not fiction. I am on the Board of Education for the Bedford Central School District and I see this played out every day. We need to outthink educators in India and China for there are four times as many students in those countries against whom we will have to compete.
At an 8% rate of increase, tuition doubles every 9 years. This growth rate is simply unsustainable and represents the trajectory the Academy and other private institutions have been travelling on for some time. The University of the South just instituted a decrease in the tuition rate for next year. This is the direction Exeter and other institutions should be considering – decreased tuition and significant cost cutting with substantial technology investment for the future. We should be making changes in our public school system as well, but our hands are hopelessly tied by the laws of the state of NY and our contract with the teachers’ union. It is a coming battle which will be fought in the media and perhaps also at the ballot box. Exeter has the luxury that such a battle can be waged behind closed doors in the board room if only there were the courage to do so. Nevertheless, I know the challenges in changing an institution – especially a not-for-profit with a large board. It is extraordinarily hard to do so.
I do not believe that primary and secondary education in the United States is going to fall apart in the next year or so. But I also believe that America does not have 10 or 20 years to figure out what to do and get it right. And I sincerely believe that if my high school does not begin to make dramatic changes today, by 2030 Exeter will remain too recognizable to alumni and alumnae and be a far wealthier place, but much less rich for it.
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