The Outstater
Return of the 1-Room Schoolhouse
SCHOOL CHOICE, an issue championed by the Indiana Policy Review Foundation since its beginning, has taken root. Thirty-four states including Indiana have adopted some form of school choice, with 1.5 million students participating. Now another of the foundation’s early recommendations, micro schools, is gaining attention as well — a high-tech version of the one-room schoolhouse.
Micro schools were the dream of the late Ron Reinking, an adjunct scholar of the foundation and a Fort Wayne accountant. He would use donated space combined with Internet teaching packages, to offer a customized learning environment for pennies on the dollar compared with public schools.
Reinking’s plan would allow a mid-sized church, say, to open a school with an experienced, certified teacher in each classroom earning well over the average salary. Most important, the teacher could use the Internet teaching packages to more closely monitor the progress and needs of each individual student.
Utilizing volunteer teacher aides, in-kind contributions, donated classroom space and equipment grants, Reinking’s Micro school of 50 students would pay its headmaster 115 percent of the average public school salary allocation, including pensions (see worksheet above). Moreover, per-student cost would be one-seventh of the typical public school.
That was in 1998. Artificial Intelligence now magnifies the learning potential of the Reinking model while even lowering per-pupil costs. There is no reason, Reinking would argue, for schools to still be organized on even a semblance of the 19th-century classroom — rows of desks facing a blackboard.
AI-equipped micros would allow students to move through the curriculum at their own pace, allowing them to master the material and to advance to the next grade on completing their current grade’s coursework — a home-school/parochial-school hybrid.
Here is Jonah Davids, writing in the current City Journal: “As AI advances, the cost of pure instruction — unbundled from childcare, mentoring, and other human services — will fall dramatically. AI tutors like Khan Academy’s Khanmigo and SpaceX’s Synthesis cost just $4 and $29 per month, respectively. Tools like these will empower leaner models of education — such as micro-, home- and hybrid-schooling — and help build out the growing school-choice movement.”
That is, if the market is allowed to work. “Much as parents have had to educate themselves on phonics, critical race theory and other pedagogical topics to evaluate what their children are learning in school, parents will also have to learn about AI when choosing a school for their children,” Davids says. “If parents demand it, the market will provide AI tools and programming tuned to various value systems: liberal and conservative; secular and theistic; strict and supportive.”
Reinking anticipated that challenge as well. From his prospectus: “Whenever parents are given choices, we see an exodus from failing schools. (With micro schools) we are dealing with tried-and-true concepts: good people, good settings, a morally healthy environment, the best of high-tech equipment at the lowest cost.”
His model, however, was presented to a half dozen failing parochial schools in Indiana and Michigan, schools running in the red and facing closure. There were no takers. The problem, as in so many areas of public policy, was summoning the political will. The prospect of systemic change with its uprooting of staid practices and its offense to entrenched personalities is daunting for many.
That is true, sadly, even when dealing with something as precious as the next generation. — tcl
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