Recently, officials in Massachusetts urged smaller school systems to look at merging or sharing resources with other schools to save costs as the state looks for ways to cut more than $1 million in state funding to 23 school systems. The idea is that this approach would free up more money for textbooks and other teaching resources.
This is a good start, but we need to get over the idea that education is somehow about textbooks.
I'm not saying this for the painfully obvious reason that there are better ways to access information and keep it fresh. Forget about the Internet for the time being. (We'll get back to that later.) Education has never been about textbooks. In addition to access, two things will decide the quality of your students' education. Parental involvement is one of them. The other is teachers. Good teachers respond to the needs of individual students and find ways to bring the subject matter to life. Administrators and parents must do whatever they can to empower teachers.
Textbooks aren't doing it. The system itself is broken. Textbooks are commoditized to ensure that everyone gets the same thing. A worthy goal, but what that does is effectively prevent innovation. Have an idea for a better text? Forget about it.
Two things will decide the quality of your students' education: Parental involvement and good teachers.
For full disclosure, I should probably say that Sun Microsystems, the company where I served as CEO until April of this year, has always been active in the education market. The company was born on a university campus, after all, and it's never lost its passion for discovery and innovation. That said, I'll understand if you think I'm biased when I say technology trumps the textbook.
But consider this: One of Sun's employees was touring a school in California awhile back, visiting a classroom full of students working on computers, when the county superintendent opened up the closet and started counting textbooks. Why? Because it's the superintendent's responsibility to validate that there is a textbook for every student in the class. The books had never been opened, but they were there. It's estimated that each textbook costs an average of $100 and that the state of California spends $400 million annually just updating books.
My point is that we'd be better off giving teachers the electronic building blocks to assemble a curriculum that works for the students in their classrooms. That's what they're good at. That's what we pay them for. In fact, when we move curriculum online, we should take the money we're spending on updating books and pay the teachers more.
In the technology business, we understand the importance of standards. They give everyone the opportunity to participate equally. We also understand the importance of innovating around those standards. That's how things get better. So we must give teachers the flexibility to innovate around our educational standards, so education can get better.
Free content
That's the idea behind the nonprofit Global Education and Learning Community, or GELC-provide teachers around the world with free, "open source" content that they can add to and localize. What this community is about, basically, is opening up a new way to develop, distribute and evaluate curriculum (based on achievement) at low or no cost.
Free access to open content will allow teachers to address more styles of learning-visual, auditory, hands-on, project-based, whatever works best. If you look at material prepared against a standard set by a state, it assumes a linear path of learning as opposed to the zigzag path or dynamic path that most students like to take.
Of course it's more difficult to evaluate nonlinear media, more challenging to assess a model that's designed to be constructed and explored, but that's where the network comes into play. With the global reach of the Internet and a growing online community of teachers sharing content and best practices, we could be approaching a real change in education-a change ensuring that no teacher is held back.
Scott McNealy is chairman of Sun Microsystems and chairman of Sun Federal Government.
