Education and The Red Queen Effect: Is it Time to Worry?
By: Doug Antin
Tags: Education, Innovation, Personal Development, Society, Digital Life

Inconsistent and Bad Learning Outcomes

Many students don’t even have access to the same equipment at home. In fact, nearly 20% of students don’t have reliable ways to connect to online learning. One study indicates that there is a significant learning loss associated with online education during COVID. Ie: students are more likely to forget what they learned than they otherwise would. This creates an uneven experience.

“Preliminary COVID slide estimates suggest students will return in fall 2020 with roughly 70% of the learning gains in reading relative to a typical school year.”

Higher Education is Breaking Under the Weight of Debt

Student debt from college education is above $1.5 trillion. As classes move online during the pandemic, many students are questioning the value of higher education. Many colleges were already under pressure from ballooning student debt and negative job prospects.

As job opportunities fall, students struggle to pay down their debt over their lifetimes. This is a more severe issue during a recession and the pandemic. Combining these facts with the push to exclusively online class format, the college path may no longer be desirable by many.

Experimenting with New Skills & New Education Formats

So what are the alternative options? The standardized education process doesn’t work for everyone but there are alternative ways of building skills. The new digital class is separating from the industrial era class structure. This group is characterized by it’s shifting preferences based on the ability to conduct digital work from anywhere in the world.

Here are some examples of alternative models already in progress.

HomeSchooling Pods

One new method of teaching is a type of homeschooling sometimes called homeschooling pods or microschools.

These schools are building workarounds for students to get good in-person instruction. But laws are inconsistent across states and many of these laws weren’t built for the reality of schooling during a pandemic. “In the DC area, for example, laws in Maryland make it illegal for homeschooling parents to hire someone else to teach kids, but not in neighboring Virginia.”

Microschools present an interesting opportunity to alter curriculums and avoid online instruction. But they may not scale well and there is a fear that they offer advantages to wealthy families over low-income students.

ISA’s

Lambda School is another interesting method of teaching digital age skills. This program teaches programming skills through a remote learning curriculum. The goal is to provide students with the necessary skills and experience to get an entry-level programming job.

It also empowers students of all income demographics to participate through its unique Income Sharing Agreements (ISA). Tuition is deferred until course completion and in the event, a student cannot afford the tuition, they can pay a percentage of their future incomes.

One drawback to this model at scale is that it does not provide a well-rounded education. It focuses on providing the skills needed for a specific subset of jobs. This is significantly different from traditional models of well-rounded education. Lambda School also does not currently provide early childhood or high school level educational opportunities. The program is intended to retool adults.

Certification & Vocational Programs

Organizations are launching their own education programing. Examples include Google’s recent certificate program in partnership with Coursera. The program offers IT Support and Automation with Python certificates.

There are also vocational and apprenticeship style programming similar to Lambda School but without ISA’s. One example is Drone Forward, a unique vocational program partnering with drone organizations to teach the technical skills required for professions in the industry. Through the program, students as young as 10 years old can participate remotely to learn core business concepts and technical skills through real business projects.

Certifications and vocational programs are frequently industry-specific although they frequently provide a well-rounded education.

The Bottom Line

Many people are operating as if our educational needs are going to stay the same forever. This is illogical. We cannot assume that the skills students to learn now will be the same 10 years from now. The COVID-19 pandemic presents the ideal opportunity to implement drastic change. The reality is that we cannot assume that the parents won’t seek to provide alternative education for their children to maximize their future success.

So I pose a question: can we use the pandemic to experiment with what we teach and how we teach it? Providing multiple options: some in the form of standardized education from the state and some tailored towards individual tools available for self-education. Or hybrid models of both.

The common argument against allowing experimentation is the lack of fairness and equity. But this is a moot point because none of the current students are experiencing a fair and equitable opportunity under the given circumstances. Should all suffer?

There is no one size fits all approach

School districts must take a rational approach to education under an indefinite pandemic and changing societal needs. Governments should focus on building systems that allow parents to make the best choices for their children. Simultaneously they should free up resources to provide additional support to lower-income communities.

Taking a one size fits all approach is a methodology that is breaking. Instead, we should assume sovereign individuals will take personal responsibility for their education and support them in making the best choices. For those not able to do the same, governments should focus on solutions that support them in making a better life for themselves.

Instead of pushing harder for an average and uniform outcome, we should push harder for ideal individual outcomes.