Editor's note: "Fox News Reporting: Fixing Our Schools" hosted by Juan Williams airs Sunday, August 19 at 9 pm ET and 12 am ET on Fox News Channel. For more information, visit foxnews.com/specials.
“Waiting for Superman,” “The Cartel,” and “The Lottery” are among the best known of documentaries, books and news stories sounding the alarm about the failures of America’s public schools.
But where are the stories, the documentaries about the solutions?
Join me on Sunday night, August 19 at 9 pm ET (reairing at 12 am ET) on the Fox News Channel, and I’ll show you a solution.
As a new school year begins, this documentary features happy students and inspired teachers. The students are learning, getting good test scores and look ready to take the next step forward in their lives. The teachers are excited by their success with students.
The show is called “Fox News Reporting: Fixing Our Schools.”
The documentary reveals how the answer to troubled schools is allowing teachers to teach to one child, catering to the student’s strengths and weakness with the help of computers.
The results are evident in dramatic improvements in student performance in several schools nationwide. From the “Carpe Diem” school in Yuma, Arizona to the “School of One” in New York City and the Mooresville school district in North Carolina, pilot programs using “Digital Learning” have reported a marked increase in student performance and sharp decline in drop-outs.
The key is making learning materials from texts, tests and even assignments available electronically. That allows the students, their parents and teachers to track a student’s performance in real time.
It enables teachers and parents to identify a student who is falling behind and give that young person extra help, specifically tailored to get them back on track and moving up.
It also allows teachers to reward the best students. Top students no longer have to wait for students who are struggling before the class can move ahead. Instead with customized or “Digital Learning” teachers can challenge the best students to achieve their full potential with advanced coursework.
But more importantly, in each of the schools we visited, I noticed high student morale. I saw happy children with a positive attitude towards learning who seemed genuinely glad to be at their schools. In some cases the infamous ‘Achievement Gap,’ between minority students and white students was eliminated with the help of “Digital Learning.”
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has been one of the leading intellectual architects of education reform. He made digital learning a cornerstone of the “Florida Formula,” his educational policy during his time as governor.
“There are new technologies to make it easier, perhaps, to have an accurate assessment. There's movement to make it so one test won't be the end-all and be-all. There's a way to test now that if you've mastered the information, you can move on to the next information, so we're not holding kids back” he said.
“Given the technological advancements, [opposition to] testing, I think, will be less of a political tool by those that resist change” he added.
In an interview for “Fixing Our Schools,” Michael Horn, co-author of the book “Disrupting Class,” points to the large number of remedial classes in even the best colleges for students that have graduated high school but failed to learn the basics of writing and math.
The answer, Horn argues, is the combination of good teachers and technology – “Digital Learning.”
“It’s the Swiss Cheese problem – that’s what we call it in education,” said Horn. “They [students] move on even though they have big holes in their understanding. If you customize [curriculums for each student by using computers] and allow them only to move on once they’ve actually mastered something…whether it is through projects, lectures [computer programs] you give them a chance to actually succeed…this is what every child needs so they can succeed in the 21st century economy.”
Out of 65 countries around the world measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), students in the United States ranked 30th in Math, 23rd in Science, and 17th in Literacy.
Civic and political leaders -- most recently former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein -- are pointing to the decline of public education as a threat to America’s national security – with so many students failing to qualify for the military or diplomatic corps. And schools that fail to prepare students to be capable works as well as innovative thinkers are also challenge to America’s global economic competitiveness.
Talk of the need for overhauling our school—“No Child Left Behind” to “Race to the Top,” -- has gone on for too long with too little result. Generations of American children have grown up and lost their way while unions, politicians and foundations have talked, thrown around money and failed to make any big change.
One million students drop out of American public schools every year. Thirty percent of all American high school students drop out and never graduate. For black and Hispanic students, the number is above fifty percent.
When the tragic scale of damage to minority communities is considered, the education crisis has rightly been called the “greatest civil rights challenge of the 21st century.”
My main take-away from reporting for this documentary is that “Digital Learning” shows tremendous promise as an immediate solution for helping American students to succeed immediately.
And it helps America’s teachers, parents, students, employers and political leaders regain their trust and enthusiasm for our public schools.
As Joel Klein, the former Chancellor of New York City Public Schools who now works for News Corp. [the parent company of Fox News Channel] told me the computer revolution has touched every part of our lives but our schools.
“I think about how different the world is today in terms of the media, in terms of medicine, in terms of the way people really experience their lives,” Klein said. “But education is stuck in a 19th-century model. So I’m convinced that we can change the way we educate our kids.
“Use technology not [just] by giving a kid a computer but by really improving instruction, by helping teachers do their work in a much more effective way” he added.
I hope you will tune in on Sunday night, August 19 and become engaged in this new, solutions-oriented frontier in the education debate.
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