Fred Barnes interviewed Jeb Bush for the Wall Street Journal’s weekend interview, and in the article Barnes reveals what Florida’s former governor is reading at the moment on his Amazon Kindle—Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.
This is yet again another flattering moment for us, but the whole interview is worth reading. As Barnes says it, “[Bush is] an unorthodox Republican who latches onto reform ideas wherever he finds them.”
Bush makes some thought-provoking points throughout the piece. He says rightly that education should move beyond Carnegie units to a mastery-based system. This is one of the most promising things online learning can bring, and it is something that should be embedded in policy for all online learning programs. He also recognizes the potential of online learning to move us toward a customized, student-centric system:
“‘It’s not based on seat time,’ he says. ‘It’s whether you accomplished the task. Now we’re like GM in its heyday of mass production. We don’t have a flourishing education system that’s customized. There’s a whole world out there that didn’t exist 10 years ago, which is online learning. We have the ability today to customize learning so we don’t cast young people aside.’”
Bush also praises Meg Whitman later in the piece as someone who would be a good governor because, among other things, she “lived and managed and led through the disruptive changes that are going on in our lives.”
As the governor during the initial growth of the biggest disruptive innovation in education policy in the form of the Florida Virtual School, he is probably in one of the better positions to know.
– Michael B. Horn
