How Could The Parkland Shooting Impact Digital Education?

Parkland was the 208th school shooting in America since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. If “enough was enough” and “never again” were slogans to herald in change, why did our society not put those words together at Sandy Hook, or Virginia Tech, or Red Lake, or SuccessTech, or Northern Illinois University, or any of the other random acts of mass gun violence at a school in the nineteen years since Columbine? Let’s not forget that Columbine was not even the first mass school shooting in America. Our society has always found a way to wiggle out of the problem: that person had a mental illness, those students bullied the shooter, that school did nothing to prepare for that situation, etc.

So why has Parkland become the rallying cry? How is Parkland different? Why do so many people expect change now? 

• Parkland is different because the school was prepared for the situation: the gunman had been repeatedly reported to authorities by multiple individuals, the students of the school had tried to be inclusive of the student turned gunman, and the school had an active shooter plan in place. 
• Parkland is different because it is an academically rigorous school—a good school with a diverse, inclusive population. The school has strong culture with structures in place to support and care for its student body. 
• Parkland is different because, by all prescriptive measures, it was doing everything right.
• Parkland is different because, in the aftermath, its educated student body began to speak out in the way that educated citizens should do to bring about change. Students organized and used all the tools at their disposal to peaceful speak to the world about their situation. They are a group of victims deserving of sympathy and are hard to discredit because they are our “everyman” or “everyteen” if you will.
• Parkland is different because legislators were given the opportunity to hear the victims, to be advocates for the victims, but legislators did not listen. So, the Parkland survivors spoke louder, and the legislative system still didn’t listen. 
• Parkland is different because in a world of over-reactive police officers who shoot innocent black teens in the streets, the school resource police officer stood outside of the school building taking no action at all. 
• Parkland is different because it happened to the iGeneration, or iGen-ers, who are upset, plugged-in, vocal, connected, and resourceful.

iGen-ers are jaded by traditional institutions in general. The institution of Parenthood routinely fails them or they see the parents of their friends failing as parents. The institution of Government in its current incarnation seems fail to listen to any of its constituents, act in the public’s best interest, or take any action at all. Education, Justice, Church, Journalism: the list of failing civic institutions goes on. Community pillars of morality, protection, truth, and wisdom are crumbling and iGen-ers are watching it happen from the cell phones in the palm of their hands. iGen-ers openly expect to be taken advantage of by the Financial System while buying their cars, attempting to access higher education, financing a home, and planning for retirement. They are watching their Millennial counterparts graduate college more in debt than ever in history and less likely to find a job than ever before. While they maybe losing faith in traditional institutions, iGen-ers still see the need (and desperately want) for law and order, wisdom, knowledge, faith, truth, and community. However, these children live in a world which shows them they may die at random for those values.

But Parkland is different because iGen-ers now have options, endless options. Their society allows them to choose even the most concrete, non-abstract, cultural norms like sexual preference and gender identity. This generation does not have to live in any box previously created for teenagers and that means the social construction of school as well. They can attend virtual school from the safety of their home, have more control of their curriculum and pace of learning, and define their friend group without the geographic confines of which of their peers are zoned to go to school with them.

So in a Post-Truth Era, is the future of education digital for the iGeneration?

We are staring into a future in which that paradigm is likely to be the reality of education. Americans may feel there is a great deal, culturally speaking, to be lost in a purely digital public education platform; but considering the problems currently plaguing American public education, it seems like digital education is the only viable solution for all involved. Digital education, of course, has all sorts of benefits from a political stand point: affordability, efficiency, improved curriculum control, clear accountability, etc. Those benefits have been discussed ad infinitum. 

For the past twenty years, virtual school platforms have been in trial phases steadily enhancing their services, improving their curriculum, and growing their reach. Students and parents are more and more reliant on virtual school platforms for credit recovery, curriculum acceleration, and access to elite courses which may otherwise be unavailable in the student’s traditional school setting. Virtual schools have allowed parents to increasingly home-school their students with better fidelity to state and national curriculum standards. State legislatures have begun to accept the necessity that students must learn how to learn from digital platforms to become competitive workers in the future and have mandated current cohorts of students graduate from traditional public schools with at least once course taken in an online format. Best practices and district curriculum decisions have directed brick-and-mortar teachers to incorporate online learning platforms into their curriculum like Khan Academy, Edmodo, Blackboard, and Canvas. 

However, the hurdle to get over has been parent and student willingness to make the digital transition to engage full time with digital education. Lots of factors contribute to this resistance: online platforms are more difficult to learn from with few appeals to various learning modalities, increased accountability for purely right or wrong answers with limited critical thinking involved, and decreased opportunities for collaborative learning. Additionally online platforms limit a student’s social and emotional development with stunted opportunities for students to interact with their peers in educational, creative, or social contexts. 

The times are proverbially changing on these fronts as well though. iGen-ers are more reliant on digital platforms for spreading information than ever before—their learning modalities seem tailored to digital education. Explosive growth and development in digital education have greatly improved the ability to allow for accurate scoring of open, critical responses and have widened the opportunities for collaborative learning by incorporating social media ideology into software design. Over the last twenty years in research and development, virtual school platforms are responding to concerns about social and emotional development as well by creating “campus cultures” of their own with extracurricular options ranging from National Honor Societies, to Fine Arts Club,s to Literary Magazines, and even digital theatre performances. Still, however, the transition to digital education is incomplete. While the tide is swelling, digital education is still not at mass market appeal.

Until Parkland. 

If parents are unable to create the change they feel is necessary to provide a safe learning environment for their students, it is likely that digital education will see ballooning enrollments with parents’ hope to keep their children safe.

As an educator, my heart is broken at the news of every one of these tragedies. I graduated from Winter Haven High School in 1998. My professional career has always been steeped in the fear of “what if” in my own classroom. I know I do not have the answers for the societal problems contributing to these atrocities. I just know that thoughts and prayers are never enough.

Amanda McCallister is the Co-Founder and National Advisor of Sigma Alpha Sigma, Inc a non-profit organization dedicated to building educational excellence and opportunities for student leaders.