Public education's silver bullet: school reformer Terry Moe argues that technology will finally accomplish what vouchers never could.

• Author: Dalmia, Shikha
• Position: Interview

WITH THE PUBLIC-SCHOOL documentary tearjerker Waiting for Superman stunning audiences from coast to coast, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty losing his re-election bid largely because of his support for education4 reform, and NBC devoting an entire week of primetime coverage to the nation's ongoing K-12 crisis, many Americans are newly focused on the negative impact teachers unions are having on student performance. Terry M. Moe has been considering the problem for more than two decades now.

Moe, a professor of political science at Stanford University, has been one the most intrepid critics of the unions ever since his first book, Politics, Markets, and American Schools, came out in 1990. Co-authored with John Chubb, the book offered a devastating account of how unions thwart reform and trap children in a dysfunctional education system. Chubb and Moe made an emphatic early plea for school vouchers and parental choice. "We believe existing institutions cannot solve the problem because they are the problem," they wrote.

The book "rocked the education world," as the Chicago Tribune put it in 1990. The conservative Philanthropy Roundtable counted it among the eight most influential books of the time, along with Milton Friedman's Free to Choose and Charles Murray's Losing Ground. Its influence was party due to Moe's extensive research on public bureaucracies. But it was also because of who Moe was not: a right-wing hack. The book was published by the center-left Brookings Institution, where he was a senior fellow at the time, making it hard for defenders of the status quo to discredit it as a conservative screed.

Two decades later, Moe and Chubb have taken up the cause of school reform again in Liberating Learning. The school choice movement has not lived up to its promise of wholesale reform, Liberating Learning laments, although it had a notable success in mainstreaming the cause of charter schools. Still, Moe optimistically argues that the education monopoly's days are numbered. He says the revolution in information technology, which has placed huge amounts of information at everyone's fingertips, will do to teachers unions what a meteor did to dinosaurs: wipe them out and make way for new life forms.

Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia interviewed Moe in his office at Stanford, where they discussed the radical new shape of 21st century schools, the "sheer power" of teachers unions, and how Barack Obama has delivered on his campaign promises of education reform.

reason: What do you think the classrooms of the future will look like?

Terry M. Moe: When people think about the schools of the future, they think about kids sitting in classrooms using computers or maybe in a computer lab doing online research. But some future schools will be virtual charters, meaning they will enroll children on a full-time basis from anywhere. The children can be at home; they can be at the library; they can be anywhere, and they will take a full-time curriculum from these schools. They don't have to physically be in one place.

Most kids will continue to go to a physical place called school. But these schools too will be hybrids. They will be partly traditional in the sense that there will be face-to-face interaction, but a lot of their learning will take place online. As a result, there will be many fewer teachers per student. Our entire education process will be far less labor-intensive.

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Yet we will be able to accomplish more with the kids. Teachers in a classroom standing in front of 30 children can only do so much. They have to deliver a standardized curriculum. They cannot customize education to every child. Some kids get way behind; some kids are way ahead and bored. Other kids, in the middle, are staring out the window, unmotivated, needing personal attention. With online learning and technology in general, we can customize education to the individual child.

reason: You will get more personal attention and customization with fewer teachers? How?

Moe: In a labor-intensive industry, customizing education meant having one teacher for every child. That's impossible, so instead you have 30 children and one teacher. You can't customize. You have to standardize. But we have a method now that personalizes every child's education. They can move through at their own pace.

That's because there will essentially be a division of labor between teachers and computers, where computers are doing a lot of the teaching and teachers are participating, facilitating, but most of the load is being borne by computers. And kids can go through the material at their own pace. If they don't know something, the computer knows they don't know it. It can then immediately provide them with remedial help. They can work on things that they don't know until they do...