They Are Willing To Profit From It

It was over a decade ago when our family toured kindergartens, searching for the right place for our daughter. I made a sort of hobby of it, visiting some 40 schools over a two year period. I feel like I got pretty good at it, informally interviewing teachers and parents about their experiences. I developed a whole list of questions I liked to ask, things I thought probed to the core of what really went on at the schools. One thing I never asked about where computers, yet many of these private schools seem inordinately proud of their "computers labs" or that they had a "computer in every classroom." I patently listened as my guides enthused about their digital classrooms, but at the end of the day we were not impressed and none of those school wound up on our short list.

Our reaction was purely instinctual back then, but I really didn't see the point. I remember asking my wife, "How do they know that all these kids are going to want to work for Microsoft?"

I know, I know, it's not supposed to be about the computers per se, but rather it's an "education revolution." It's not just the private schools any more. It started with Bill Clinton's education department, who wanted to see "computers in every classroom," then George Bush's, and now Barack Obama's, all of whom have jumped on the bandwagon of "learning powered by technology." It's one of the few issues upon which all of our elected and corporate leaders seem to agree: get those kids in front of computer screens and, Shazam!, we'll have a generation of Bill Gates clones running the world.

Now don't get me wrong, I appreciate this tool that allows me to do so many things, so much faster than I could before. The internet is an amazing, important place: hey, here we are together right now. But can technology really improve education? That there is little or no evidence to support the assertions being made from the highest places should make us deeply suspicious.

Last fall the New York Times ran an investigative piece of the use of technology in the classroom, reporting that school districts that invested most heavily in technology since 2005 now lag behind more traditional school districts when comparing standardized test scores. And in this article there is this startling quote from Tom Vander Ark, the former executive director for education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and investor in educational technology companies:

"The data is pretty weak. It's very difficult when we're pressed to come up with convincing data."

Despite this, he's still trying to sell it, using a sort of faith-based approach, I guess. You see, all he has is a hammer, so of course the whole world looks like a nail. (Should we ignore the fact that as an investor he also hopes to get even richer by selling this particular snake oil?)

Of course, as anyone who reads here knows, I'm just as skeptical about the ability of standardized tests to measure anything other than test taking ability, but here are the education reformers being tripped up by their own tool. Not only that, but the Times article goes on to say:

Some backers of this idea (technology in the classroom), say standardized tests, the most widely used measure of student performance, don't capture the breadth of skills that computers can help develop.

This is exactly what I've been trying to say: standardized tests don't tell us much, if anything at all, about real learning. 

Just as everything else in the corporate education reformers agenda, this too, this fixation on technology, is simply an article of blind faith. But apparently not too blind, at least when it comes to their own kids. 

The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school . . . So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard . . . But the school's chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

It seems that these guys aren't so stupid after all: they do look at the real research when it comes to educating their own children, the data that is not "weak." Instead they listen to guys like Paul Thomas, former professor of education at Furman University and author of 12 books on education:

". . . a spare approach to technology in the classroom will always benefit learning . . . Teaching is a human experience. Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking."

Proponents of heavily computerized classrooms reveal their true agenda, I think, when they argue that computer skills are only going to become more important in tomorrow's job market. Of course they're right, but it's not like these are such complicated tools to use that we need 13+ years of rigorous training in order to use them. No, these titans of industry don't see a need for their children to get this kind of education because they expect them to have more "important" jobs, ones that require creativity and critical thinking: it's those other kids who will be populating the cubicles of the future, and they're going to need to be conditioned to spend long hours staring at screens without going insane. 

It goes without saying that these titans of technology also stand to make a lot of money selling both hardware and software to our increasingly technological public schools.

In other words, it is about computers per se, because it appears that the guys selling this technology in the classroom agenda all know that it's emphatically not about education.

They aren't willing to make their own children guinea pigs in this massive experiment in technology, but they are willing to profit from it.

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