Schools Do Need A Weatherman
by John Merrow
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
So sang Bob Dylan in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” but the public schools are in desperate need of a weatherman, someone to point out that they are moving in the wrong direction. I grant that K-12 education is tougher and more complex than higher education, but that’s no excuse for what’s going on. It seems to me that most of the world is moving one way — and American K-12 education the other.
Some parts of higher education have figured out which way the wind is blowing and are moving aggressively to adapt to a changing world. Tamar Lewin of the New York Times provided a solid overview of the rapid expansion of massive open online courses (MOOCs) recently. The eye-opener was Stanford’s free artificial intelligence course last year; it attracted 160,00 students from 190 countries.
