Closing Achievement Gaps with the Free Flow of Information: Challenges Posed by America's K-12 Public Education System

Since the influential 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, commissioned by the Reagan administration, political and social focus on the disparity of educational outcomes among various racial and socioeconomic groups -- termed the "achievement gap" -- has sharpened. Although debates continue over the cause of, and measurement validity behind, the achievement gap in America, the ongoing effort to close the achievement gap is universally acknowledged as the primary goal of education reform. From one perspective, a critical prerequisite of creating an environment in which every human brain is able to learn is the extinguishing of intellectual property rights afforded to makers of software and authors in general. If this were reality, teachers and students would have entirely free access to textbooks, curriculum plans, educational software, and an endless variety of reading materials. The sections outlined below attempt to explain how various complexities within the American public education system might inhibit these free-access privileges from working their magic in closing the achievement gap.

Free Textbooks & Curriculum Plans

The presentation of educational material to students in American schools is largely guided by two things: textbooks and curriculum plans. More so than in some other countries, "textbooks are ubiquitous and widely used in classrooms" and are the primary educational crutch of teachers. See How Do Teachers Use Textbooks? Given this entrenched reality, the educational success of a school as a whole (given a normal distribution of teacher quality) largely depends on the quality of available textbooks. When such is the case, it is then exceedingly important to be confident that the absence of monetary incentive to create textbooks, due to lack of property protection, will not reduce the quality of available textbooks. Assuming that "Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law" is correct in that creating things for others is an emergent property of human minds, the broader question is whether this holds true for textbooks as it does with respect to educational software. While software programming is fundamentally creative in the sense that manipulation of language in certain ways produces distinctly new interactive capabilities, textbook authoring is arguably much less creative in the sense that manipulation of language in writing is just that -- manipulation of language -- nothing new is spawned. On this front, then, the narrower question is whether this creative difference between textbooks and educational software is a meaningful one from the perspective of Moglen's Law.

On the assumption that quality of textbooks would not be an issue, the benefits of a free textbook market are fairly obvious: associated costs would no longer be crippling to schools in low-income neighborhoods, and, at least theoretically, more variety would de-handcuff teachers. At the same time, a free database of more creative curriculum plans, as textbook supplements, would allow teachers to experiment with methodologies at no cost.

Challenges arise, however, not because of theoretical flaws but because of legal and administrative constraints. Particularly since the passage of NCLB, education in the United States has become a large-scale enterprise in which the achievement gap is monitored through implementation of uniform standards, evidence-based practices, and strict quality controls. With such a pervasive force necessitating the near universal standardization of educational practice, serious feasibility concerns arise in terms of organizing, evaluating, and distributing an over-flowing free supply of textbooks and curriculum plans. In a regrettable sense, the smaller the political stranglehold over textbook and curriculum markets, the easier it is to evaluate the educational inputs employed to close the achievement gap. Such a large-scale demands a simple formula despite an exceedingly complex problem.

Free Educational Software

Given a legal regime in which all software is free, it is reasonable to anticipate a re-vitalized software programming environment where are larger pool of programmers have the freedom to collaborate in producing a greater assortment of educational software. While it is difficult to imagine how this could have a negative effect on education as a whole, there are undoubtedly complications in terms of leveraging educational software in a way that could narrow the achievement gap. Beyond the fact that those on the losing side of the achievement gap are typically poor and often lack homes/home-computers, children with inherent neurocognitive deficits and/or unsupportive parents generally present the most complicated educational challenges. Without a sufficient supply of programmers who are cognizant of, and sufficiently understand, these challenges, it is plausible that a free software market would become inundated with programs that are remarkably adept at enhancing the education of natural born learners but less adept at untangling the roots of the achievement gap. In other words, if an educational software market neglects students who are 1+ standard deviations below the mean (in a general sense), educational achievement may be enhanced on average, but the achievement gap may be untouched or even widened.

Free Reading Material

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