The one thing that surprised Louise about entering the teaching profession was how unstable schools were. As a student, Louise had always seen school as her rock. It never changed. And it would always be there. As an adult, her schooling in education had shown her that schools faced challenges and trends. But the challenges and trends just interested Louise, without unsettling her. It was only when she started to teach that Louise saw just how dynamic a school had to be to respond to the constant challenges. For a while, she just focused on the students, trying to ignore the pressures of change. Yet then she realized that the students were changing, too, rapidly responding and in some cases succumbing to their own challenges.
Challenges
Every industry, profession, and field has its own challenges. Nothing really stays the same. Every entrant in every field must respond to the challenges or find itself shunted aside, left behind, and headed for the scrap heap. Indeed, change is so dynamic that whole fields go extinct, either consumed by a better iteration or left entirely unnecessary by changes in consumer needs and tastes. Schools of some sort still look like they’ll always be here. But they’re already looking quite different, and the pace of change accelerates rather than slows. The advent of distance education, remote learning, massive open online courses (MOOCs), and, for the adult consumer, instantly available online videos to instruct in everything, highlight our ready ability to capture, enhance, promote, and deliver online instruction. Everyone in education, from teachers to principals, directors, administrators, aides, and operations personnel, can rightly wonder whether education will soon be so online and distributed that we won’t even need physical schools anymore.
Responses
Educators don’t have the luxury of looking the other way, ignoring the challenges, and just going about their jobs. The jobs of teachers, administrators, and other school staff, and the roles, nature, and methods of schools, are changing or must change to meet the challenges facing education. Thousands of schools nationwide have already closed over the past decade, including dozens of colleges and universities. The reasons include mergers and acquisitions, enrollment declines, high costs, financial instability, regulator action, legal changes, and poor academic performance. In the big picture, the closing schools did not or could not respond adequately to the changing landscape of education. Struggling schools that manage to keep the doors open still face painful layoffs and restructuring. Far better to look out and look ahead to manage the challenges as best one can than to let change crush a school. The following paragraphs list some of the bigger challenges schools currently face, with brief suggestions as to how schools may respond.
Population
For decades, even centuries now, America’s grade school population steadily grew. While regions grew at different rates and the population shifted locally, regionally, and nationally, schools in general had a steady and growing pipeline of students. The continual increase in the sheer number of students pretty much ensured that schools of all qualities, with both strong and weak academic programs, survived. That long-standing trend, though, reversed at the start of the current decade. The nation has already seen a decline in overall grade-school enrollment over the decade’s first half, especially in the lower elementary grades. Educators predict the decline to continue for at least the rest of the decade, as it works its way through elementary and secondary school. Schools simply have fewer students to attract and instruct, directly impacting their per-pupil and tuition funding. Schools dealing with fewer students must either reduce labor, program, and facility costs with layoffs, program trimming, and campus closures, or find new efficiencies within their existing programs.
Demand
Not only did the student population steadily grow for decades, but the demand for education also steadily grew. The expectation among families of all socioeconomic levels gradually grew from substantial grade-school education to high school graduation, then to college education, then to graduate education. The last decade, beginning in 2010, though, saw a nationwide enrollment decline in higher education, as the workplace demanded more-specialized skills, and students questioned the value of an increasingly expensive four-year general-education college degree. Worse, educators are currently predicting an enrollment cliff around 2030, corresponding to a decline in birth rates. Reduced demand for general education, high education costs, and low birth rates augur further enrollment challenges, to which schools must prepare to respond. Reducing tuition through cost-cutting measures, focusing programs on specialized training for the workforce, and downsizing campuses and programs may help schools to survive the trend.
Enrollment
Schools have always watched enrollment. And enrollment has always fluctuated, even if the overall trend until now has been steady enrollment growth. Yet in an education market with decreased demand and an excess supply, students and their parents have more choices. And they are making those choices, moving from school to school as they see the benefits of different programs. School enrollment is thus more volatile, with bigger swings over shorter periods. A single crisis or a combination of a few factors and events can send students rushing in a herd from one school to another. School enrollment that once fluctuated by at most five percent from year to year may now fluctuate by ten, twenty, or thirty percent within just a couple of years. Schools can generally manage small enrollment-driven revenue fluctuations year to year with tuition adjustments, cost controls, and drawdowns on fund reserves. Not so with large and rapid revenue swings. Schools may be able to respond by building larger cash reserves and keeping a sharp eye toward efficiencies even in good times.
Competition
The education market is simultaneously increasingly competitive, as schools position themselves to survive population decreases, decreases in demand, and falling enrollment. Schools are responding to the competition. Schools that once did little or nothing in response to what nearby schools were doing now watch one another’s programs like hawks, ready to pounce on any potential marketing advantage. Schools are looking to special programs like outdoor learning, maker spaces, and foreign-language immersion to attract and retain students. Those special programs, though, cost money in a time when enrollment declines are making finances tighter than ever. And so schools increasingly need leaders with entrepreneurial and management skills, and boards with visions to elevate the school’s standing or manage the school’s decline.
Demographics
Student demographics are also challenging schools. Schools once could expect relatively predictable student profiles, from families with relatively common commitments and expectations. Schools could staff, program, and instruct accordingly. Yet increasingly today, populations and their cultures, values, and commitments are shifting, not integrating and cohering but splintering. Schools find it increasingly difficult to rally students, faculty and staff members, and the school community around patriotic, historical, religious, cultural, and social norms. Even instructing in common morals and values can prove dauntingly difficult, with the prospect for instant division of the school community over what would recently have been no conceivable cause at all. Schools today need leaders, administrators, and instructors with keen sensitivity to the cultural waves and wars, and the ability to navigate them without undermining confidence in the school.
Students
Students themselves have also changed and continue to do so. Schools once expected a reasonable degree of composure, stability, and resilience among their students. Instructors designed instruction and administrators configured programs to challenge students so that they could grow, mature, and develop strong constitutions and sound character. Today, students can be vastly more anxious, fragile, sensitive, and lacking in resilience. Their parents can be either vastly more protective or, on the other hand, oblivious to their student’s emotional condition and needs. Instructors must prepare and administrators must staff to support students emotionally throughout the day, inside and outside the classroom. School personnel must watch for students to mentally freeze and emotionally decompensate, to draw them aside to recover privately, while setting up and implementing plans to get them through the next day. Schools walk a fine line between coddling students unwisely and harming them emotionally, while trying to implement the instructional program with a reasonable degree of challenge and rigor. Skilled school personnel need to show special student sensitivity without unduly indulging psychosis.
Devices
Students, parents, and educators are all increasingly realizing the negative impact of cell phones, tablets, and other technology devices, and the impact of social media and video and graphic images, on student attention, concentration, identity, self-image, and mental health. The statistics on the decline in student mental health and cognition are enough to stagger the conscience. Electronic devices in school are a gross distraction from healthy social interaction and consistent academic engagement. Electronic devices outside of school deplete student mental energies and consume student study and recreational time. Schools are rightly responding with device bans for other than emergency communications and other tools to prevent or discourage students from accessing social media on campus. Schools are also partnering with parents in initiatives to limit student overuse of social media and screen time.
Disabilities
Vastly larger numbers and percentages of students are also qualifying as disabled, up to a quarter or even half of the students in some classes and schools. The disability label can instantly medicalize their school programs, while removing standard forms of behavioral and instructional accountability. Instructors must vary the instructional format, content, and delivery to meet the peculiar needs of each disabled student according to elaborate plans, creating stark inequities in the treatment of students. Schools need to staff, train, equip, and account for special accommodations and services, in accordance with the plans, which school administrators must negotiate with parents. School officials cannot discipline disabled students with any change in their placement, accommodations, or services, without first conducting a review to determine whether the misbehavior was due to an underserved disability. Schools need to manage their student-disability programs both sensitively and wisely.
Medication
Schools at the elementary and secondary school levels also face substantial challenges medicating students. Schools must maintain dispensaries and train and assign staff to hand out medications to students for administration at specific times throughout the day. Where school officials once treated behavioral issues largely as disciplinary issues, today school officials may instead find themselves compelled or invited to address behavioral issues as medical issues, for which school staff frankly lack the medical education, training, and experience. Instructors and administrators may find themselves subtly suggesting or openly urging parents to medicate their student when the student fails to concentrate, listen, and obey, and is instead rebellious or boisterous. Parents themselves insist that schools administer their student’s prescribed medications at the proper intervals to maintain their student’s concentration and poise. Schools must manage medication issues with attention, diligence, and care, while exercising their instructional expertise rather than adopting a medical framework for instruction.
Skills
Schools must also respond effectively to the changing workplace. Qualifying for a rewarding job and career can increasingly take specialized skills. Schools at the secondary school level must consider the vocational skills their graduates will need, especially those graduates who will proceed straight into the workforce to take on jobs that often require relatively substantial technology skills. At the higher-education level, program leaders must know how their related industry, profession, or field is changing and the new skills that those changes require. Even in traditional fields like medicine, law, engineering, and education itself, the changes are so fast and vast that instructors must constantly update content and redesign instruction to foster new skills. Administrators need to equip instructors with the time and budgets to stay abreast of field changes and develop new content and instruction.
Technology
New technologies also challenge schools. Technology isn’t just a solution. It’s also a challenge. Just keeping pace in updating computers, networks, devices, software systems, and applications can be a huge budgetary and administrative challenge for schools. But new technologies are also undermining academic programs. Students can and do use mobile devices for instant tutorial assistance on papers, problem sets, and exams, often without authorization, in direct violation of instructor rules. Technology makes cheating not just easier but more effective and more difficult to detect. Artificial-intelligence apps have accelerated the trend. When an AI-chatbot can do a student’s work instantly and far better, students face new challenges in striving to do their own work. And instructors face new challenges in holding students accountable to that work. Schools must help their instructors use AI-detection software and clearly articulate to students technology-use rules and expectations.
Organization
The shifting landscape of school organization is also challenging both public and private schools at all levels. At the elementary and secondary school level, the rapid growth of the charter-school movement has impacted enrollment and programs at both traditional public schools and private schools. Charter schools themselves, though, have faced challenges as their programs matured. Authorizers focusing their chartered schools on underserved populations have discovered unexpected challenges in producing acceptable performance at those schools. Surprisingly large numbers of charter schools fail in their first few years, when they fail to show the expected learning gains among their disadvantaged students. At the higher-education level, for-profit schools suffered severe losses due to regulatory actions limiting their students’ access to federal loans, leading to consolidation and closures. Private non-profit colleges and universities have recently suffered similar challenges and closures. These swings have buffeted public school programs. School boards and administrators at all schools must closely watch the organizational and regulatory landscape, ready to respond.
Reflection
What are your school’s biggest challenges having to do with outside trends and changes? How effectively is your school planning and preparing to meet outside challenges? Is your school suffering or facing enrollment declines? How does demand for your school’s program of education look, whether increasing, decreasing, or stable? What schools are your school’s primary competitors? To what degree does your school plan and program to meet and beat the competition? What challenge does your school have in finding common commitments and values to celebrate, around which to rally the school and focus its instruction? How healthy and resilient are students at your school? Does your school do a good job of accommodating student disabilities? If so, at what financial cost and cost to accountability and equity? Are instructors at your school keeping abreast of the new knowledge and skills employers in their fields demand of your school’s graduates? Are instructors at your school clear in their policies and rules for student use of artificial intelligence and other technology services and aids? Are the charter school or for-profit school movements affecting enrollment or programs at your school? What other challenge does your school face?
Key Points
Schools face significant challenges in a changing education landscape.
Schools must respond to those challenges or face closure risk.
School-age population declines are impacting school enrollments.
Decreased demand for higher education is also impacting enrollment.
Enrollment declines severely challenge school budgets and programs.
Competition among schools has increased with enrollment declines.
Demographic changes challenge schools to find common values.
Students are also changing, showing less resilience and greater anxiety.
Disabilities among students have exploded, requiring accommodation.
Elementary and secondary schools maintain medication programs.
Schools must equip students with specialized new workforce skills.
Technology is making it easier for students to cheat and avoid studies.
Schools are changing among charters, for-profits, and non-profits.