 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | Praise for Liberating Learning "Moe and Chubb have delivered a truly stunning book, rich with the prospect of how technology is already revolutionizing learning in communities from Midland, Pennsylvania to Gurgaon, India. At the same time, this is a sobering telling of the realpolitik of education, a battle in which the status quo is well defended. But most of all, this book is a call to action, a call to unleash the power of technological innovation to create an education system worthy of our aspirations and our childrens' dreams." —Ted Mitchell, CEO of the New Schools Venture Fund "As long as we continue to educate students without regard for the way the real world works, we will continue to limit their choices. In Liberating Learning, Terry Moe and John Chubb push us to ask the questions we should be asking, to have the hard conversations about how far technology can go to advance student achievement in this country." —Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of Education for the Washington, D.C. schools "A brilliant analysis of how technology is destined to transform America's schools for the better: not simply by generating new ways of learning, but also—and surprisingly—by unleashing forces that weaken its political opponents and open up the political process to educational change. A provocative, entirely novel vision of the future of American education." —Rick Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University "Terry Moe and John Chubb, two long-time, astute observers of educational reform, see technology as the way to reverse decades of failed efforts. Technology will facilitate significantly more individualized student learning—and perhaps most importantly, technology will make it harder and harder for the entrenched adult interests to block the reforms that are right for our kids. This is a provocative, informative and, ultimately, optimistic read, something we badly need in public education." —Joel Klein, Chancellor of the New York City schools |
Average Customer Rating:   A Repititious Political Diatribe I guess I should have paid more attention to the title of this book because it provides a big hint about the theses of the authors and the content. It is long on ideology, directed especially against teachers and our school system, and short on how to begin to implement good ideas about use of technology to improve American education. The authors do present an interesting outline of the general ways that schools may change because of technology and the advantages that may accrue to American education. But they leave specifics to a few examples, and the constant drumbeat against teachers and their unions is a distraction, attributing self interest rather than legitimate pedagogical issues to the challenges presented by technology to American education.
The underlying assumption of the authors seems to be that teaching is not a social activity involving an important social interaction between students and one another and their teachers, despite the fact that they acknowledge the increasing relevance of social networks and the like to students and the importance of good teachers to the learning process. They also say that future schools will involve some classroom time. Nevertheless, they focus on the political process as dominated by an evil monopolistic empire bent on keeping the classroom as it is today. This regime is to be conquered by the new heroes of choice and technology.
I would have liked to have seen some concrete ideas based on the authors considerable research, as evidenced by the end notes, about how the political process can accomodate technology in schools as well as their thoughts and recommendations about how specific technologies can influence education in the future.
I am not a teacher or school administrator or school board member. Great Book! Disparate reviews reflect preconceived views of readers I think the disparate reviews reflect the preconceived views that readers are bringing to the book.
To grossly simplify the current education debate, on one side you have supporters of teachers unions who believe they can incrementally improve K-12 education within its current structure of political control. This side tends to support greater funding, changes in curriculum, smaller class sizes etc... while opposing more fundamental reform. For this side, the largest problem with education is funding.
On the other side you have those that see the system as fundamentally broken, riddled with poor incentives for success. This side wants to find ways to radically increase competition and choice in the structure of schools. This side supports charter schools, school vouchers, performance linked pay, rewards for success and consequences for failure. For this side, the largest problem with K-12 education is the structure of K-12 public schools and the teachers' unions die hard opposition to real reform.
If you're in the second camp, you'll likely love this book. If you're firmly in the first camp, you'll likely disagree with it. If you're unsure and/or open to persuasion, this book might convince you of the potential for technology to deliver quality education outside of the structure of many of our failed public schools, rendering many of the old political wars over education irrelevant. Missing good opportunity to create a movement Liberating Learning missed an opportunity to engage the hard issues (solve Politics) and instead was too repetative in pushing down teachers and up a 'technology tool" that Teacher are generally against. Also 1: There should have been a real disussion about the levels of metrics across the different users of the metrics including those that would help the teachers (ref: The goal-question-metric paradigm, discussed by Dr. Vic Basili (1992)) 2: not all student are "turned on" by technology and there should be bridging and support for them, 3: needs to value the need for students to learn cooperation and cross learning among students. I read the whole book and I was left wanting and felt it was waste of time. A partisan ideological hack job on the teachers unions This book is a sloppily argued partisan, diatribe against the teachers unions and a heartfelt profession of faith that technology will save our public schools from this bad, self-interested organization. The authors seem to be chagrined that the teachers unions advocate for their dues paying members even when this is against the interests of school children. One wonders if they are equally chagrined when the AMA advocates for doctors even when it is against the interests of patients, or the banking lobby advocates in the interests of banks against the interests of consumers or, for that matter, when Hoover Institute fellows advocate for their wealthy Republican patrons against the interests of working class people. That is the way the system works and, if there is transparency and if you have faith in the democratic process, none of that should be cause for concern.
This book recounts in painful detail the political battles that have taken place in education over the last 30 years, highlighting selectively when Republicans and Democrats have been on the "right" and "wrong" side of the education fight. The authors seem convinced that if only we could hold teachers accountable for their student's performance on state assessments, all the problems with the public schools would be solved. If you are the type of Republican looking for ammunition for your ongoing ideological war, this is the book for you. If you are someone that wants a more insightful view concerning why our schools are not globally competitive, I recommend that you pick up The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner instead.
For the record, I am not, nor ever have been, a member of a union.
Important and Timely Information on Education! American education both costs far too much, and achieves far too little. "Liberating Education" markets itself as a cure for both, but at this point credibly only offers progress on reducing costs. However, it also provides useful up-to-date data on how inadequate our education system continues to perform, reminding readers of the need for substantial change.
Moe and Chubb's focus is on communicating how online technology enables students anywhere to take any course they like, from the best instructors in the world, and to customise that learning to their own schedules, interests, and academic growth. Internet-supported learning also allows teachers more time to respond to student questions and work, and they can typically support 4-5 students doing so at a time. The teachers also have greater flexibility of hours, and can work part of the time at home. Meanwhile, administrators are much better able to objectively evaluate teachers and learning programs/textbooks. In 2006, nearly 750,000 pupils completed courses online. The authors then reinforce their points through examples from India and the U.S.
National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests have been used since 1969 to evaluate U.S. student progress. The authors summarize some of the data to compare performance of 12th graders from 1990-96 to 2005-07 in reading, science, and history. Reading performance fell from 37 to 34 (percentage achieving expected performance), science from 21 to 17, and history from 10 to 2. Mathematics comparisons were not possible due to changes in the test. Meanwhile, the high-school on-time graduation rate in 2003 was 70%, down from 72% in 1991. So much for more than doubling the inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending over the last three decades.
Meanwhile, international comparisons continue to show the U.S. performing relatively poorly - even when focusing on the highest achievers (95th percentile pupils in each nation) or highest socioeconomic groups. Wait - there's even more - Japanese graduate students are 4X as likely as Americans to major in science and engineering! (Similarly for Chinese students.)
Why are we still in this situation - after all, "A Nation at Risk" pointed out these same basics some 26 years earlier! Moe and Chubb lay the blame squarely on American teachers' unions - among the top five political campaign contributors in most states, and #1 in many. ("Liberating Learning" also points out that 90% of their contributions go to Democrats.)
What about Bush 43's "No Child Left Behind?" Moe and Chubb believe it has simply become window-dressing. We now have 51 accountability systems conforming to NCLB, but no mechanism to weed out mediocre teachers, student performance data is not used to evaluate or pay teachers, and schools rarely suffer sanctions.
"Liberating Learning's" Achilles heel is that it is almost totally devoid of pupil achievement data supporting their proposals. Two examples were offered, but both are suspect: 1)Identifying the impact of "good" teachers on NYC pupil performance - "Huge - half a point on a 4 point testing scale." Unfortunately, that is meaningless without knowing anything about the testing scale used. (Moe and Chubb also allege that most Chinese teachers are poorly prepared, yet their pupils outscore ours regularly - eg. teacher characteristics are unimportant. Sorry, you can't have it both ways.) 2)Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School students scored 97 points higher than the state average. Here, we lack assurance that the pupil characteristics involved were equal.
Online charter schools employ 2-3 teachers/100 students, vs. 6.8 in public schools. They also require far less in bricks and mortar, and utilities, etc. Thus, an opportunity to reduce costs by billions and billions.
What about improving quality? International comparisons also show that foreign pupils, especially in Asia, work far harder than in the U.S. A longer school day, school year, and more homework. That would explain why American performance vs. other nations starts out well, and steadily deteriorates with ascending grade levels. It's also a key to KIPP's successes. Thus, we need to work both smarter (Moe and Chubb) and harder (KIPP, China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea). |  |
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