Hello fellow educators welcome to podcast #77. Most of us in North America are now at least a week into our school year. I hope to continue to use this podcast to be a means of professional development and connection with our own staff and families at Heritage Christian Schools. If you are new to the podcast we have four different school programs. There is our campus school that is entering its 25th year, a preschool that continues to be a great place for new families to join our community, the Online School which is reaching out to home school families and distance learning students all over the Province of British Columbia and our cross enrolment program, BC Online School which is helping high school students from BC to supplement their education with online options.  Last year we had students from more than 185 different, mostly public,  secondary schools take our courses which are written from a Christian Worldview and taught by Christian teachers.  We have also begun to have listeners from different places around the world. We continue to get comments from educators in faraway places such as New Zealand, South Africa, Korea and Russia. Of course we have a quite a few listeners in the US as well. On a side note, I will be participating in the iNACOL conference. iNACOL stands for the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. I will be speaking in a pre-conference event to faith based Online Schools educators. I consider it a great honour to speak to you each week on the issues of discipleship-based Christian education.

2009-2010 will prove to be a pivotal year for many of our schools. It is a time of declining enrolments in most regions of North America. In British Columbia we are experiencing a 2-3% decline in the student population every year and most social scientists are predicting that this won't level out until 2016. The economic downturn is also dramatically affecting enrolments in our independent schools because we rely on tuition for school funding.  And, for most schools, there is an enormous wave of disruptive technological innovation beginning to directly impact the traditional methods of education.  This is creating a triple threat of challenges for most Christian Schools.  As we start the year we are seeing the significance of these challenges in dramatic fashion in our educational programs.

The most difficult challenge we have faced in our campus school is a 5% decline in enrolment the last two years. This is the direct result of a declining population of students. In the 2006-07 school year BC had its largest enrolment of students in its history as a Province but the younger new students were not there to replace the older graduating students. In that year one school district on Vancouver Island graduated 1100 students and only enrolled 550 kindergarten students. Those numbers were not as dramatic in the Kelowna area but it helps to illustrate the inverted pyramid of student decline. North Americans are just not having enough children to sustain our population levels. We have to look to immigration to maintain our current population. This is nothing new to people who live out east or up north where there has been a decline in various industries but it is a phenomenon that we are entirely unprepared for here in prosperous western Canada. Last year, in a strategic planning meeting with my friend and mentor Ann Rauser, we realized that if we are going to even maintain our enrolments we have to be putting in place strategic plans to, as Ann put it, "gain more of our market share." We redoubled our efforts in recruiting and enrolling our Pre-school families for kindergarten with some success. We have also looked abroad to bring more international students to our campus school to help offset the decline in the upper grades, so far both of these initiatives are having measured success.

In the midst of this decline in the school age population we also are facing the most serious economic times since the great depression 80 years ago. We have seen a record number of our families either lose their employment or are forced to move away.  In our campus school this has increased the levels of tuition assistance we have been giving families.  A small number of our home school families are also struggling to live on one household income. In some cases students have gone to public schools because Mom has had to go out and provide a second income for the family.  Our budgets in the campus school and in our church, Kelowna Christian Center (remember that we are Church run schools) are tighter than they have been for many years. This is putting the squeeze on many of our programs. We have to find new ways to fund some of the innovative programs and projects that has made our campus school so popular. It also puts greater challenges on staff as we have reduced our campus school staff by two teachers these last two years.

Our perspective and attitude in this challenging time is extremely important. As we face both enrolment and fiscal challenges we can be tempted to complain or worse, we can panic. On the other hand, we can use this as an opportunity to refine and redefine who we are. As we streamline our programs and cut the fat away we can actually come out the other end of these challenges with a far better educational model than when we started.  Let's not forget that God is in the trenches with us and he is truly our source. One of the most important concepts in our Christian life is learning to walk in contentment regardless of circumstances around us.

Phil. 4:11-13 I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am.  I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going  hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.

There is a secret to be learned in times like this.

You may note that I have only talked about the first two of the triple threat challenges. The third challenge is the enormous wave of disruptive technological innovation that is beginning to impact the traditional methods of education.  In our schools we don't see this as a threat but rather an amazing opportunity for educational reform. Unfortunately, for many other schools education technology will bring a third wave of disruption that could eventually mean their ultimate demise. In last week's podcast I spent some time reviewing the book Disrupting Class by the Harvard Business Professor, Clayton Christensen. In this book he applies the theory of Disruptive Innovation to our present day Educational Systems. He shows how certain types of innovation can have a completely disruptive affect upon various industries to the point that the strongest and most stable companies will eventually fail because of the innovation. Last week I gave the examples of how the Freon compressor completely  destroyed the ice industry and how the micro computer completely altered the main frame and minicomputer industry. And we pointed out how the same conditions are beginning to exist in Education. 

Christensen shows in his book over and over that the existing stake holders in an industry are not the ones who will bring innovative changes into their industries if it means that these changes will undermine and disrupt their markets and controls over the industry.  It was a few geekie innovators who created micro pc computers in their garages because they wanted to have access to computers. The big main frame computer companies did not see the market for these little machines and continued to ignore them until the late 80's and early 90's. By then it was too late and the desktop computer completely replaced these monolithic computers and the companies that built them. The traditional educational system and methods are entering into the beginning stages of this disruption. Things will change dramatically in the next 10-15 years and we are beginning to see this more and more in our own region of the world.

In British Columbia our political leadership had the vision, some fifteen years ago to encourage some projects that would incorporate new computer technologies to solve some of our distance learning challenges. They funded a pilot public school project in one of our northern communities and called the school E-Bus. This program began to grow and over the next 8 years many other public school districts started their own Distributed Learning schools using technology. Notably, E-Bus, Kool School and  the BC Open School began to use computer technology and the internet to reach students and some schools with online courses and classes. Seven years ago the BC Ministry of Education opened the opportunity to independent schools to run a small pilot project with five hundred students spread among five different schools. After two years the project showed success so they opened up the opportunity for distance learning to independent schools. Since then the proverbial genie is out of the bottle.  I'll come back to our part in this story in a minute.

This disruption will not happen without a fight. In the book Liberating Learning,  written by political scientist and educators Terry Moe and John Chubb, they document the difficulties and political challenges that U.S. schools are having in bringing about true reform to their schools. They agree with Christensen that technology is a key factor in creating this reform. Here is a quote from their chapter entitled the Politics of Blocking:  "Technology can be of enormous benefit in the quest to improve student learning.... The fact that it offers enormous benefits is not enough to guarantee that it will be embraced by the public schools and its potential fully realized.  Technological change will run into the same political roadblocks that all major reforms have run into, and for exactly the same reasons. Powerful groups will try to block it. As we look ahead and try to get a sense of where American education is headed, this political reality needs to be firmly understood. Technology is the force for change. Get ready to meet a counterforce." He goes on to show how the traditional methods of schooling and the teacher unions are two forces that are opposing these changes.

These political blockages are also emerging in British Columbia. Over these last 15 years Distributed Learning reached the underserved communities of distance learners and more significantly, home schoolers. Home schooled students now had an opportunity to connect into the BC educational system and everyone was happy. This fits Christensen's model of how disruptive innovation takes root. The innovation begins its development in what he calls a "non-consumer" market. In BC education that was the home school population. When Heritage Christian Online School began its DL program more than half of BC's homeschoolers were in a DL school. At the same time the dozen public schools that were providing DL education were put on notice that they could not continue allowing religious curriculum and instruction to home school students. The government also clamped down a couple of schools that were abusing their funding. As a result the independent schools received a  huge surge in enrolment. This caused us to quickly emerge as the leading school in Distributed Learning. Still through all of this the BC teacher's Federation and the school districts did not see anything that would threaten the status quo until  changes were made in the BC School Act giving DL education a legitimate place at the educational  table. Since then the politics of blocking have begun. The Teacher's Federation is becoming more and more concerned with the public DL's and has filed well over two dozen grievances against the schools.  DL education threatens teacher tenure, class size limits and traditional methods of delivery. The union has built their organization around preserving these values and technology is challenging these on every front. The districts and public DL's are taking note particularly of our successful enrolment of hundreds of students in cross enrolment courses. Last year we cross-enrolled 1000 students from 185 different schools and this year that number will probably double.  School districts and particularly secondary schools are struggling to keep students from taking too many online courses lest they lose their funding.  Remarkably our Provincial government has given the freedom to the student and not to the school authority if they are considering taking courses online. We experienced this disruption last year in our campus school as well. Many of our students opted to take online courses and this has created both funding and scheduling challenges.  What educators have to see is that the changes in this digital world are too pervasive to avoid. We will have to innovate and change. Let me quote again from Liberating Learning, "Technology is different from accountability, choice, and other educational reforms. It is not really a reform at all. It is an exogenous social force that originates from outside of the education system, is transforming nearly every aspect of American social life, and will keep transforming it in the decades ahead. The educational system is unavoidably caught up in all this, resistance notwithstanding. It lives in a larger social environment, it depends on that environment for survival-and the environment is rapidly changing, due to the impact of an exogenous force that educators cannot control." This sounds very familiar to those who have read my book Discipling the Generation for a Digital World. Believe me, I am not just trying say, 'I told you so.'

Over the next 10 years, I believe, this third challenge will prove to be the greatest for our schools. Our population appears to be levelling off in the next 10 years and the economic downturn is already showing signs of recovery. BC is and will continue to be one of the best places on terra firma to live. What will continue to develop and change is the digital world technologies that have already so altered out cultures and social structures. This upheaval of change is only just beginning to impact education.

Heritage Christian Schools are perfectly positioned to ride this wave of change. We are committed on several fronts, we will continue to reach out beyond or brick and mortar boundaries and impact home school , distance learning students as well as provide the benefits of online education to high school students Province wide and beyond. We are also committed to our campus school program and want to build a hybrid school that incorporates the best from class room instruction and technological innovation.  It is my passion to create systems, programs and curriculum for the Christian School movement that will empower us into the 21st century.  I don't believe that it is God's will for us to cling to educational systems and traditions just because this is how we did it in the past. If we are going to prepare the next generation for a world that is transforming into something completely different then we must also look closely at the systems and methods we are using for this preparation. We have to have the courage to look beyond our present way of doing things and envision a future that will keep us relevant and effective. I hope to continue this idea next week and talk a bit about this hybrid approach to our campus school.

I look forward to another great year of podcasting. Please email us your comments and thoughts on today’s podcast. Also, if you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book or send you the download link for the audio version of, Discipling This Generation for a Digital World, simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address. Thank you for listening and thank you for your commitment to discipleship-based Christian education.