Date: Jan 6, 2012 1:34 PM
Author: Jerry P. Becker
Subject: [ncsm-members] Questioning Our Mania for Education Technology
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From Education Week [American Education's Newspaper of Record],
Wednesday, October 5, 2011, Volume 31, Issue 6, p. 24. See
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/10/05/06schneider_ep.h31.html?r=514444060
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COMMENTARY --- Tech for All?
Questioning Our Mania for Education Technology
By Jack Schneider
The solution to the nation's education problems is as simple as
binary code: a smartboard in every classroom, an iPad in every
backpack, and wikis across the curriculum.
That seems to be how the logic works these days, as reformers in
foundations, government, and school districts pour billions into
educational technology projects.
There's only one problem: It doesn't work.
A recent front-page story in The New York Times on the Kyrene school
district in Tempe, Ariz., is the latest tale of heavy investment and
slender results. Since 2005, the district has invested roughly $33
million in technology, using money secured under a ballot initiative.
But even as statewide scores have risen, Kyrene's scores in reading
and math have stalled. And how have district leaders responded?
They're ready to head back and ask taxpayers for more. Even if
standardized-test scores aren't the most perfect measure of student
learning, such faith in the power of educational technology seems
unwarranted.
Yet it seems these days that everyone is in on the act. In 2009, for
instance, the U.S. Department of Education awarded $270 million via
its Enhancing Education Through Technology, or EETT, grants program,
with another $650 million coming through the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act. The national economic slump and the looming budget
crisis resulted in reduced appropriations for fiscal 2010, but the
EETT grants program still received $100 million.
And the public purse is hardly the only funding source school leaders
are tapping for technology funding. Private foundations cut seven-
and eight-digit checks for educational technology projects with
stunning regularity. Foundations like Dell and Gates, with their
computer roots, get much of the press; but grocery-store money is
just as green. The state of Idaho was happy to accept $21 million
recently from the Albertson Foundation for so-called "21st-century
classrooms." Yet Kyrene is hardly an outlier in its failure to
produce results that merit such spending. Even technology boosters
like Tom Vander Ark, formerly of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
admit that the research is weak. As he put it in the recent New York
Times article, "It's very difficult when we're pressed to come up
with convincing data." But not that difficult, obviously, because the
money continues to flow for educational technology projects even as
thousands of teachers lose their jobs because of budget shortfalls.
So what gives?
Americans, and particularly those interested in school reform, have
long sought to bring technology into the classroom. Experiments with
radio, television, film, and early computers were all pitched as
major breakthroughs in the process of education. Yet because they did
not fundamentally alter the core processes of teaching and learning,
such innovations made modest or marginal contributions.
In the past two decades, the interest in educational technology has
developed into a full-blown obsession. Not because technology is more
deeply affecting the work of teaching and learning. Rather, because
of a shift in the way that America's most ambitious and
well-resourced reformers see the world.
For most of the 20th century, reformers fell into one of two camps.
Those concerned with social efficiency made the case that the
educational pyramid should be grown higher-that American
competitiveness depended on identifying future leaders and pushing
them to their intellectual limits. Those concerned with social
justice argued that a pyramid was the wrong shape entirely.
Resources, they contended, should be channeled into low-income and
minority neighborhoods long underserved educationally.
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SIDEBAR: "Funding projects to improve teacher training, development,
and retention is less sexy than cutting the ribbon on a lab full of
lightning-fast computers. But it's also more likely to help kids
learn."
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By the end of the century, however, an emerging corps of reformers
began to fuse these traditionally separate aims in a new,
entrepreneurially oriented theory of change. Their aim was to promote
excellence for all students by discovering "what works" and taking
those solutions to scale. In so doing, they would increase
opportunity and advance equity without undermining national strength
or resorting to heavy-handed government intervention. Excellence for
all, they argued, was not only a politically expedient approach to
reform-appealing to those on both the left and the right-but also, in
an age of an increasingly global economy, a necessity. The vision was
as simple as it was ambitious: identify high-leverage reforms, fund
them to scale, send all kids to college.
This approach to educational change is the working credo of the
nation's reform VIPs-from Arne Duncan to Eli Broad to Joel Klein. As
such, it makes perfect sense that, even in a time of budget
shortfalls, money is raining down on educational technology projects.
Why? For one thing, it can be easy to credit technology for what
makes a class "work." Head to a thriving school where every student
has a tablet computer, and you might be tempted to think that you've
stumbled on a solution: Tablet PCs help kids thrive! You are also
likely, however, to be on campus at a well-resourced school with lots
of other things going for it. Working to pinpoint a particular
practice that makes a good school work, in other words, is to deny
the deep complexity of the educational environment.
The other reason that the reform elite loves technology is that it
can be taken to scale. Great teachers, after all, are also easy to
credit for a school that works. But how do we get one in every
classroom? The iPad, on the other hand, requires only a checkbook.
If money were no object, it would be hard to take a position against
educational technology. Especially in less privileged neighborhoods,
students do benefit from hands-on experience with the kinds of tools
that are standard in white-collar workplaces. At worst, kids like new
gadgets, and it doesn't hurt to give them what they like once in a
while.
This, however, is a zero-sum game in which money that goes to
technology could just as easily have been spent on other approaches
that, though perhaps not scalable, are directly connected to the
processes of teaching and learning. Funding projects to improve
teacher training, development, and retention, for instance, is less
sexy than cutting the ribbon on a lab full of lightning-fast
computers. But it's also more likely to help kids learn.
"If we know something works," Kyrene's director of technology asked,
"why wait?" His point underscores the urgency of working toward
school improvement. We can't wait. But simple-minded thinking about
what works and the obsession with scale have turned our penchant for
educational technology into a national mania. We can't wait. But we
also can't afford to get it wrong.
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Jack Schneider is the Robert A. Oden Jr. postdoctoral fellow for
innovation in the liberal arts at Carleton College, in Northfield,
Minn., and the author of the forthcoming Excellence for All: How a
New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America's Public Schools
(Vanderbilt University Press).
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--
Jerry P. Becker
Dept. of Curriculum & Instruction
Southern Illinois University
625 Wham Drive
Mail Code 4610
Carbondale, IL 62901-4610
Phone: (618) 453-4241 [O]
(618) 457-8903 [H]
Fax: (618) 453-4244
E-mail: jbecker@siu.edu