If there's a bright side for anyone to the Chicago teacher's strike as it continues to victimize (for no good reason) hundreds of thousands of kids and parents alike (except for the charter school students who are still in class), it's that it will provide the opportunity for many Chicago-based entrepreneurs and education start-ups to demonstrate that more and more effective out-of-class and self-directed (or computer-enhanced) learning opportunities are becoming available to students of all ages and, even more importantly, that the flexibility, ease of access, cost-effectiveness, scale and appeal of these novel approaches to young learners suggests the direction that all education needs to move toward.
Even more importantly, the new educational technologies being brought to market by so many start-ups have another crucial attribute which really goes to the heart of the union strike as well. These new systems, in addition to offering differentiated learning capacity for each and every student, provide extensive measurement, accountability, and testing tools to permit far more robust determinations of whether the students are really learning and, of course, that's the whole point.
The fact that the real sticking issue in the union strike is the reluctance of the teachers to be measured and evaluated and the ridiculous demand that even teachers laid off for incompetence be automatically rehired before newer, better-trained and more tech-savvy new teachers are hired b y concerned principals simply shows how out-of-touch and out-of-date with today's new tech realities the union leadership and many of the older teachers are.
The strike has unwittingly opened the doors to expose parents to new tools, technologies and learning environments that will make it very hard for them (as well as their kids) to ever settle for the same-old, tired, "I talk, you listen" industrial education model that the teachers' union is trying to prop up. They've erected a white picket fence in front of a tsunami and they will soon be swept away.
