Page:The battle for open.pdf/131

 It may well be that there is insufficient creativity in K–12 education, but some of this is a result of scale. Any alternative would need to operate at the scale of a nationwide system and encompass all types of learner. One often sees claims that schooling has remained unchanged for hundreds of years or that it is a system designed for the industrial age; Sal Khan in an interview with Forbes claims that education became static over the past 120 years (Khan and Noer 2011). Such claims vastly underestimate the change in pedagogy to more project and group based work that has occurred in schools. As Watters (2012) states, ‘To jump from 1892 to ­2000 – f­rom the "Committee of Ten" to Khan Academy – ­ignores the work done by numerous educators and technologists to think about how computers and networks will reshape how we teach and learn.’ There are undoubtedly ample opportunities to change how subjects are taught, to engage children and particularly to take advantages of new technology, and one should not underestimate the obstacles in achieving any of this, but it hardly justifies the label of broken.

A point of evidence sometimes claimed for the broken education argument is that truancy is at an all time high (e.g. Paul 2013); therefore, schooling isn't working; therefore, a radical solution is required. However the manner in which truancy rates are recorded varies considerably, and any unauthorised absence, such as a child going on holiday with parents, is now counted as truancy. So before using truancy as evidence that education is fundamentally broken, it is necessary to ask questions such as: Is any change now a statistical one or within the realms of normal variation? Are historical comparisons valid (i.e., are they comparing the same measures)? Can an increase in truancy rates be accounted for by an increase in population or targeted school attendance (e.g. if you are working harder to make sure certain