So much for technology revolutionizing American education. Since the late 1970s, billions of dollars–and perhaps even more words–have been spent to make your kid more wired than Bill Gates. In the current academic year alone, some estimates put technology spending in K-12 public schools at $4 billion, twice the amount spent on textbooks. Just as Herbert Hoover once promised a chicken in every pot, today politicians pledge a computer in every classroom. To show their commitment, the president and vice president of the United States even spent a recent Saturday running Internet wire through a California high school. But after years of hype and hope for electronic education, despite the best of intentions, the revolution isn’t upon us.
The problem isn’t computers themselves. “If a child can’t read and do his math at the end of the year,” asks Apple vice president Terry Crane, “would you blame the pencil?” Nobody except a Luddite doubts that age-appropriate technology can open new vistas, promote communication and even assist traditional rote learning. The Internet can give any student, even in the innercity, a digital field trip: access to explore a worldwide network of libraries and vast amounts of information presented in text, sound and graphics. The Net also can allow students and teachers to talk to their counterparts around the globe, maybe piping in the best physics teacher in the state for a demonstration. CD-ROMs and multimedia software offer “self-teaching” programs on reading, math, music and any subject a clever designer can dream up. Sure, some of this material can be learned with a book, but anyone who’s ever played solitaire on a PC knows that digital interactivity is more engaging.
No, the crisis of computers and education isn’t the lack of a millennial vision, but the good old 20th-century problems of lousy planning and bad management. For starters, many teachers don’t know how to use the gadgets. “All over the country overhead projectors sit on shelves because a bulb burned out and nobody knew how to change it,” says Richard White, technology administrator for Chicago’s schools. “Teachers will have to get as comfortable with computers as blackboards, or it all will be a waste of money.”
The larger difficulty is that both the sugar-daddy companies that make the equipment and the educators who want it usually have no clue about the best use of computers. They know that making students proficient players of “Doom” isn’t the goal. But what is? Drill-and-kill memorization in arithmetic and spelling? Learning how to design a warm house in Antarctica? Or just making fourth graders more computer-literate entrants in the job market of 2010? And then how do you measure and quantify success? “A lot of people advocating the new technologies haven’t thought real hard about the goals,” insists Martha Stone Wiske, codirector of Harvard’s Educational Technology Center. “They’re well-meaning folks who simply think computers are a stepping stone to modernity.”
At the Riviera Middle School in suburban Miami, for instance, one class of students devoted its 20 new Macintoshes not to gathering information but to designing cooler report covers. Term papers came in with gorgeous typefaces. But the writing stank. The teacher blamed herself. “If I don’t say, ‘Save graphics until the very end,’ they’ll spend the whole time playing with fonts,” says teacher Roxanne Senders. Educators agree that computer literacy doesn’t necessarily generate the traditional kind. Indeed the Internet may breed a kind of intellectual laziness. The Net’s ability to find and list mountains of data, says Sherry Turkle of MIT, is no substitute for figuring out how to organize that information.
To show students how to exploit the computers, teachers need training. But they’re not getting it. As Wiske reports, “Teachers say, ‘Don’t hand me the bare tool. I need curriculum to connect it to my life in the schooland I haven’t got the time to invent that’.” A 1995 federal study found that states put roughly 15 percent of their edutech budgets toward staff development, and recommend that the percentage be doubled. In West Virginia, the budget figure is 30 percent, and test scores have improved. But that statistic has a wrinkle: it’s impossible to separate the effect of computers from the effect of better-trained teachers generally.
Then there’s the issue of what to buy. Neither the physical nor the administrative in- frastructure exists to help the poor purchasing agents. One school gets Apple, another IBM. The technology changes so quickly that by the time the bureaucrats make a decision the equipment they buy is obsolete. And the schools’ buildings themselves? Few were constructed with raised floors, dropped ceilings, optic fiber coursing through the walls, phone jacks and multiple outlets in every classroom, and other electronic accouterments of the 21st century.
That’s not a problem at Du Sable High in one of the poorest sections of Chicago. High-tech is in full bloom. The school is the first in town to be fully wired, and every student has an Internet account. On a recent morning, the assignment was to write a report on a famous artistsomething that could’ve been done with an encyclopedia. Students found themselves cruising sites like the Cline Fine Art Gallery in Santa Fe and the Arta Gallery in Jerusalem. One student was more curious. He wanted to find NBA standings on the Net and see how his Bulls were doing. The teacher, in keeping with the project, told him to explore on and find out who created the Bulls logo. It was a doable assignment. But the kid wasn’t interested. That’s not the computer’s fault.
Your kid’s school just got computers. But does anyone know what to do with them? Questions to ask:
Sounds obvious, but many educators don’t have enough training. They need to be computer-literate and know how to integrate software into the curriculum.
Skip “drill-and-kill” applications. Look for problem-solving and exploration.
A commercial online service like Prodigy isn’t enough. Get unlimited service–and supervise it to keep kids off the Penthouse page.
You need speed, memory and a CD-ROM. Old won’t do.
