The unbundled frontier
Are there any limits to what the education marketplace can provide?
Traditionally, at least since the industrial revolution, schools have been full-service operations.
Parents drop their kids off in the mornings, pick them up in the afternoons, and over the course of twelve years, students learn everything they’re supposed to know: Long division, the Pythagorean theorem, how to conjugate a Spanish verb in the preterite tense, how to write a five-paragraph essay, the themes of The Great Gatsby, the process of photosynthesis, and the three branches of government.
This is what has been called bundling. Brick-and-mortar schools as the central distribution centers of academic knowledge. Certain schools may specialize in one area of the academic experience. For example, a school might have a highly competitive sports program, or a well-regarded music program, or a magnet STEM program. But the concept of bundling still holds that students show up to school for a whole package, including extra-curriculars.
These days, school reformers and entrepreneurs are excited about the concept of unbundling.
Education Next magazine recently published this feature article: The Great Unbundling: Is the parents’ rights movement opening a new frontier in school choice?
The Great Unbundling is now influencing the education marketplace, as a broad set of nonschool vendors have responded to this unprecedented demand by pitching their education services directly to families: “microschools,” online courses, private tutoring, learning pods, and outdoor learning experiences. A family might purchase reading instruction from Sylvan, world language instruction from Rosetta Stone, math tutoring from Kumon, and a physical education course from the local YMCA, while having the whole package curated by an organization such as Coursemojo.
The unbundling phenomenon is emerging in the wake of the pandemic, when school closures sent parents scrambling for supplemental options. The Education Next article explores the political and policy implications of this new frontier.
The concept of bundling vs. unbundling is familiar to those of us who have switched from cable television to streaming entertainment services, or have stopped reading magazines and instead subscribe to individual Substack newsletters1.
In general, bundling allows for convenience and predictable levels of quality control. Unbundling allows for customization and creativity.
Let’s look at some dynamics that are particular to education.
The unbundling advantage
The unbundling phenomenon has the opportunity to disrupt the status quo by offering new approaches to learning and forcing the education industry to adapt.
The education industry could use some disruption. Teacher training is filled with jargony fads that have built up over the years. For every useful teaching tool learned in professional development, there are five silly mandates imposed by politicians or educational bureaucrats.
K-12 teachers are often expected to implement time-consuming tactics — catering to learning styles, writing complex and differentiated lesson plans, creating ‘exit ticket’ assessments for each class period — despite a lack of evidence that these tactics increase student learning.
Maybe the unbundling phenomenon will cause traditional schools to sharpen their focus. Maybe Congress will finally pass something like the More Teaching Less Testing Act, allowing states to implement better and more flexible state tests.
Imagine a company that specializes in teaching a foreign language, and pairs individual or small-group tutoring with an interactive computer program. Would this be more effective than traditional classroom instruction? It probably depends on the motivation of the student, but these are the kinds of options the market will provide.
Traditionally, the education marketplace has been dominated by district-level school administrators who make decisions about what curriculums to use and which professional development strategies to implement.
With unbundling, private educational vendors will go directly to families, side-stepping policy mandates that have accumulated haphazardly over the past few decades.
Without the mandates, without the jargon, without the fads and folklore, what would teaching and learning look like?
Unbundled schooling offers a glimpse into this imaginary world.
There will undoubtedly be gimmicks and scams that pop up, but we might also discover new methods that revolutionize the way students learn.
This is why I am optimistic about unbundling: the inevitable process of creative destruction.
The benefits of bundling
One problem with creative destruction is that private vendors are detached from the values that traditionally govern a public or private school.
The mission of a bundled school is to form citizen-students at the end of graduation. The mission of an educational vendor is to make money.
Let’s take sports for example. On a school team, a basketball coach will impose discipline, expect effort on the defensive end, and bench a player (even a star player) who disregards team strategy. The team is an extension of the school; athletics is an extension of the educational mission.
On a club team, players pay for the opportunity to be showcased in front of college coaches. If a coach imposes discipline or benches a player, the player can easily find a different coach who will be more indulgent.
What is the purpose of sports in American education?
If the answer has something to do with learning discipline, teamwork, and other life lessons, then attaching sports to schools might be a good idea.
There's no reason why a club sports team couldn't emphasize teamwork and discipline, but quality control — or values control — will be more trustworthy under the banner of a brick-and-mortar school.
Another benefit of bundling is that subject-area teachers can thrive only in a bundled environment.
An individual teacher can perhaps make more money with educational savings accounts (ESAs) by opening a micro-school that enrolls twenty students, but he would need to cover the whole gamut of academic topics. Students are not going to pay $7,000 per year for one history teacher.
A subject-area teacher in a traditional school might teach a hundred students — five classes of twenty students each day. In this bundled system, students get to experience a diverse curriculum taught by subject experts, and teachers get paid to teach a subject.
Students wouldn’t be able to afford a year’s worth of subject-area teachers without bundling their funds into a brick-and-mortar school.
If a family splurged to pay for a teacher or two in an unbundled market, they wouldn't be able to afford music lessons, or sports teams, etc.
Final thoughts
Some families will embrace the opportunity to customize the learning experience. I think it’s good to have the option.
But at the end of the day, I don’t think most parents will want to do a Google search, read Yelp reviews, and check their ESA account balance before they purchase each individual element of learning. Most parents will continue to want a good school that provides a well-rounded educational experience.
More than anything, the unbundled frontier is an opportunity to rethink the fundamentals of our education system, and to adjust our priorities accordingly.
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