"There are things we hold near and dear about what school is, but we’re asking people to reimainge it," said Christopher Rush, co-founder of a revolutionary new learning system called School of One.
So imagine this: A student arrives in school in the morning and answers five questions that will be calculated in a customized algorithm to figure out what she'll be doing that day. That algorithm will decide which teacher she'll work with, her level of learning based on what she learned the previous day, and her specific activities.
The system completely subverts the traditional classroom model of one teacher for 25- 30 students per classroom. And each student learns in different modalities throughout the day: individually with computer software, with groups, with a virtual tutor, with a live tutor, and so on.
"There are so many ways that kids can learn," Rush said. "It could be the best way is with a teacher, but that's not the only way. There have to be choices."
Based in three public schools in New York, the School of One system is ripe for scaling -- but only when the algorithm is as smart as it could possibly be, Rush says.