This week, Robin Lake, Executive Director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, wrote an article for The 74 online titled, “10 Predictions About Learning Recovery, Innovation in Public Education in 2024.” According to the article, “Robin Lake looks into her crystal ball at a possible future of state takeovers, school staffing shifts, personalized AI, and political upheaval everywhere.”
Yesterday, we learned about Lake’s first five predictions. Today, let’s explore the rest.
Lake continues her predictions,
6. “School boards will have to withstand political upheaval everywhere, from both the left and the right. Who doesn’t love an election year? National politics will play out in local school board agendas and continue to pull school leaderships’ focus away from teaching and learning. Watch out for AI as a hot-button privacy issue! Schools and districts that project calm and focus on instruction will succeed, despite growing political agitation.”
Although school boards are considered by many as a foundational piece to our democratic way of life, is it time to ask if decision-making, especially when it comes to young learners, is best if executed closer to the young learners themselves? Honestly, in my 45-year educational career, the amount of time I witnessed school boards discussing how to get kids smarter and stronger was minimal compared to “debating the price of hot dog buns until midnight.”
7. “States will take charter schools more seriously as it becomes clear that many families don’t want to attend district-run schools anymore, and that largely unregulated education savings accounts and ad hoc instructional programs produce a lot of failures, abuses and inequities. Common-sense solutions will be needed to make charters and ESAs work for the families most in need, and to help school districts adapt and compete in states with many forms of school choice.”
It’s been said that regulation is the enemy of innovation, and nothing could be more true when it comes to offering young learners and their families better options for those interested in moving away from traditional school. It will be interesting to see how learning pods, microschools, and other learning innovations spawn and grow this year. Not every learning innovation has to fall into the category of a “charter.”
8. “Good instruction will come back into vogue as central to achieving equity. But it will not be easy. As districts struggle with high levels of educator burnout and fewer high-quality applicants for open positions, innovative schools that balance rigor with 21st century skills and use new educators strategically will thrive. This is a huge opportunity for the charter sector, with all its flexibility.”
I’m not so sure about this one, because I don’t know what “good instruction” really means anymore. It seems like everything has to start with the individual learner, and how that learner defines, plans, executes, and evaluates their personalized learning plan. From there, “good instruction” can be utilized to assist in meeting each individual’s learning goals. I do like Lake’s comment about “innovative schools that balance rigor with 21st century skills and use new educators strategically will thrive,” but how many of those schools are out there, especially schools serving black, brown, and poor kids?
9. “College access will be cool again. The post-pandemic trend of declining college enrollment and attainment among low-income students will push the reform community to reconsider strategies for getting kids to higher ed. But career-relevant learning is not going away. Strategies for college access and attainment will necessarily involve more flexible, customized and relevant high school models. Instructional strategies will shift as the role of the teacher changes and as more educators orient themselves to technology-driven solutions and AI-enabled tools.”
If you just hang around the traditional public school system long enough, “the worm will turn.” When I was in the K-12 system, it was “college for all.” Then it wasn’t. States started to introduce “career pathways” so that every student had an end goal to reach through their K-12 experience. What Lake is talking about here, I think, is a balance between college readiness and career-relevant learning. What most schools miss the boat on is that the skills needed to be college ready and career ready are nearly one in the same.
10. “Barring collective action, public education (and pandemic learning losses) will fade from view as a key voter concern, even during a presidential election year. It may take a decade or more for the U.S. to recover from pandemic learning losses if districts don’t remain focused on learning recovery interventions. CRPE’s latest State of the American Student report showed that schools are not on track and called for an immediate course correction. Now more than ever, researchers, policymakers and advocates must find new and more powerful ways to convince people that addressing learning loss is critical to our nation’s future.”
Exactly. And that’s why we need a new learning system.
Tomorrow, I take a stab at predicting what should happen for young learners in 2024.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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