Article of the Week: Larry Cuban's "Connecting School Reform to Online Instruction in K-12 Classrooms: The Next New Thing"

This week's article focuses on how online education is frequently being referred to as the "next new thing" in school reform, although Larry Cuban is skeptical of how this transformative technology will reform education.

In this article, Cuban argues, "those high expectations for online schooling, like earlier incarnations of technological  'new things,' will fade as the political realities of wholesale restructuring of schools and classroom practices without widespread cooperation of teachers become apparent."

From the article:

... bringing high-tech devices in schools to transform teaching, learning, and bring schools into the 21st century must be seen within the larger picture of U.S. public schools as targets of structural reform for the past two centuries. Here is the place, then, to note that K-12 online instruction is being promoted as a “disruptive innovation” that will transform, even eliminate, the age-graded school–introduced over 150 years ago–into places that will permit students to proceed at their own pace in learning and achieve at higher levels than in self-contained classrooms with one teacher and 25 to 30 students. Online instruction in K-12 will revolutionize teaching and learning. Again, the technology is the lever that will upend the traditional world of schooling, the overall target of reformers.

To read this article, visit Larry Cuban's website:
http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/connecting-school-reform-to-online-instruction-in-k-12-classrooms-the-next-new-thing/