High-Tech Programs Are No Substitute for Quality Education
While parents and taxpayers look upon our public schools and despair, America’s software entrepreneurs and investment bankers can scarcely wipe the drool off their double chins. “Educational multimedia will be the investment opportunity of the ‘90s,” asserted investment banker Paul Stephens of Robertson, Stephens & Co., the San Francisco-based investment house, at a recent educational technology conference. “Computer technology will help make students and teachers more productive.”
It is that oh-so-rare investment opportunity to do well by doing good. Everyone from Chris Whittle’s Edison Project to the prestigious National Academy of Science now champions technological innovation as essential to profitably transforming America’s public school system. Just give the little kiddies their computers and watch those test scores skyrocket.
“School is where all the really neat stuff in computers is going to happen,” says John T. Kernan, chairman of Jostens Learning Corp., one of the largest educational technology vendors. “There are 46 million students in (kindergarten) through 12th grade in America; average per pupil expenditure is $5,000 per year. . . . The schools have plenty of money.”
Taxpayers and parents beware. Rather than improving schools, the computers-in-education technocrats are likelier to become the welfare queens of the Information Age.
California, Texas and Florida are actually funding computer curriculum development with taxpayer dollars rather than relying on private investment. In about 20 states, educators are exploring how to make computer technologies required, just like textbooks.
Consequently, this aspiring multibillion-dollar “market” for educational computing is growing less as a function of dire need and demonstrable performance than pie-in-the-sky promises and public subsidies.
This is all going on despite one plain fact: Computers are irrelevant to the quality of education.
Consider the International Assessment of Educational Progress survey released last year; in science proficiency, American 13-year-olds placed behind those of Canada, England, France, Hungary, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Scotland, Slovenia, the former U.S.S.R., Spain, Switzerland and Taiwan. Math proficiency was even worse.
Other cross-country evaluations consistently rank American students beneath their Asian and Western European counterparts.
Not one of the countries with higher-performing students relies on computer technology in any way, shape or form.
Somehow, the students in Italy, Taiwan and so forth manage to do well without being connected to a multimedia Intel chip or wired to an Apple-generated mathematics simulation.
In other words, in an increasingly global marketplace, technological endowment has nothing to do with the quality of public education. Only in America do we seek technological solutions to problems that are manifestly not technological.
Of course, organizations such as the Software Publishers Assn. issues reports like “The Effectiveness of Technology in Schools,” which purport to demonstrate how vital computers can be to improving educational performance.
But if you really look at these studies, what you find isn’t that new technology has made a fundamental difference--it’s all the new attention being paid to the students that has made the difference.
Should anyone be surprised that students perform better when more people who care pay more attention to them?
Even when computers can help, merely installing them isn’t enough.
“School systems think that buying computers will solve their educational problems, when it’s actually a much bigger process,” observes Connie Connors of Connors Communications, a marketing firm specializing in educational technology, “They simply don’t understand the level of human resources required to make the process work.”
For example, Connors points out that most of the school systems that bought scads of personal computers in the 1980s paid top dollar for machines that would soon plummet in price.
She says the schools didn’t even have the internal resources available to effectively use the machines they bought.
Any school board that would import computer technology without insisting on explicit guarantees for improved student performance richly deserves to be impeached, voted out of office or sued for malpractice.
But the real waste here is the pathetic hope that American hardware and software has any significant role in improving school quality. It’s a sad commentary indeed that our belief in the potential of our technology exceeds our faith in the potential of our children.
That respected educators such as former Yale University President Benno Schmidt and leading public officials such as Vice President Al Gore invest their reputations in supporting educational technologies show just how warped our education policy dialogue has become.
Issues such as school choice, mainstreaming, bilingual education, class size, community participation, day care and so forth each matter more to the future of American education than any piece of software hacked out by some profit-seeking company.
If we really cared about a successful public school system--which we clearly do not--we would forbid computers in the schools and force educators, parents, taxpayers and teachers to face reality. We can’t profitably computerize our problems away.
