Today, Starbucks will be announcing a change in one of their benefits to their employees. Originally, the coffee company offered tuition reimbursement up to $1000 for employees working 20 or more hours. Now, they are offering a program to pay for much of an employees degree to Arizona States online degree programs–including degrees that are not related to anything Starbucks or business. While in terms of education reform this isn’t the biggest deal in the world, it is a significant and subtle step towards where I think education has to inevitably head.

Education has to leave the traditional confines of being on the teacher’s time and instead be on the student’s time. We should make teacher’s time AND student’s time complement each other, instead of one submitting to the other.

I think to say the internet has changed society is about as obvious as saying water is wet. However, its impact is so massive, its very hard to see its influence unfold all at once. In one sense, the internet has given people the freedom of will to accomplish tasks on the time of their own choosing, instead of someone else’s calendar. What I feel online education can do is liberate people’s time to learn and achieve their learning goals in concert with their other obligations in life. These obligations are/used to be formidable obstacles to getting a degree: taking care of a family, working to earn money (usually to pay for a degree AND living expenses at the same time). Starbucks’s move here is very interesting in that in enables their employees to grow (with no strings attached besides working at least 20 hours at Starbucks) without having them sacrifice their job for college. As someone who had to juggle nearly full-time hours at a part-time job while going full-time to college, this would be a great option.

I am intrigued by this because I wonder: What if high schools adopted this attitude? What if instead of having semesters and breaks and grade levels, schools went to advancement attached to achievement of performance-based standards. What if instead of breaks, teachers work hours where spread over what would have used to have been the breaks and their time to teach was given more flexibility along with their students?