Technology Won't Fix America's Neediest Schools -- It Makes Bad Education Worse

theodp writes: In an adapted excerpt from Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology, Univ. of Michigan prof Kentaro Toyama begins: "'Technology is a game-changer in the field of education,'" Education Secretary Arne Duncan once said, and there was a time when I would have agreed. Over the last decade, I've built, used, and studied educational technology in countries around the world. As a computer scientist and former Microsoft employee, I wanted nothing more than to see innovation triumph in the classroom. But no matter how good the design, and despite rigorous tests of impact, I have never seen technology systematically overcome the socio-economic divides that exist in education. Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else. Many people believe that technology 'levels the playing field' of learning, but what I've discovered is that it does no such thing."

Comments

Shouldn't this be obvious?

[schklerg]

I've yet to see any technology that can overcome bad process, bad practice, and bad planning. Why should education be any different?

Marketing may try to sell a magic fix, but reality seems to always win.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Vermonter]

It's like saying that handing out new hammers to a bunch of carpenters will make the bad ones good. A tool can only enhance quality, not create it.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, and of course the biggest factor in educational outcomes has nothing to do with what happens at school--it's parents.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[blueshift_1]

and some of the worst cases is when you have brilliant teachers and parents who could care less. Many children see that there parents don't care about their schooling and they develop the same attitude. It's sad to see this problem so prevalent in many of our low-income schools.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Rei]

But, based on this part:

Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else.

Couldn't technology help facilitate that, potentially at lower cost? "Hello my name is Sanjay^H^H^H^H^H^HBrian and I would be glad to assist you with your maths lessons today, what seems to be the problem?"

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[cdrudge]

That's pretty racist and stereotypical. Sanjay helps with tech support. Ming helps with math.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[JenovaSynthesis]

Exactly. I used to teach at a community college and my colleagues and I would ask that question constantly to the people who thought throwing technology at something would fix it. Essentially a bad process is like driving a car into a brick wall at 35mph. Throw in some technology and we now hit that wall at 70mph. We're still hitting the brick wall!

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

More accurately the biggest determiner is how much the student invests in the education they are receiving.

So overcoming bad parents would require the student investing heavily on their own absent or contrary to parental guidance on the matter. That occasionally happens but is extremely hard for teachers to make happen.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

And some of the worst cases is when you have brilliant teachers and parents who could care less.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

In poorly run schools, there is also the problem of students being too disruptive. In some districts, they've even stopped punishing students for most infractions because it's racist in its results. Without enough order, classes can't be taught.

Home life is half the problem, but the worst school are broken where a good home life can't help.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[DarkOx]

I think the underlying thinking behind most educational technology is take the work out of the hands of the local practitioner, deskill the teacher. While the sellers and developers of edtech will never admit this is the case and my not even realize it themselves it basically amounts to central planning.

If a computer program is going to teach a kid math the pedagogical approaches it takes will be more or less fixed and ones designed at some central facility somewhere. It wont be the paradigm the local instructor was using and it may or may not add to clarity.

I am in my early 30's depending on who you ask I am either the last of the gen X'ers or among the first of the so called millennials. Outside of some of the education television experiments tried in classrooms on boomers, I saw most of the early experiments in edtech. I had a number of older teachers who had spend years drawing their own little cartoons, crafting their own little narratives to help us understand. I also had younger ones who wanted to try out all the new MECC stuff. I was in Minnesota. If that worked for you great, if not the instructors were mostly caught flat footed with no alternative ideas about how to convey the lesson, unlike the other teachers that had taken the time to develop their own materials.

Central planning isn't any better for education than it is for economies. When edtech stops trying to teach and really starts trying to make teachers more effective it might work. A better hammer will allow a good carpenter to get his framing done faster and possibly even done better. A better hammer isn't a robotic carpenter though, but most edtech attempts to be a robotic teacher.

My sister teaches Highschool math subjects. She loves Mathmatica. She says it lets throw up a visualization on the screen the really helps some of her students get it. Its faster and better than anything she could scribble on the whiteboards. She is using it though in the context of her own lessons to explain her own contrivances that show how to apply the math. Its a generic tool though, while lots of educators use it isn't designed only for education and it isn't designed to teach any specific lessons.

Edtech needs to focus on giving teachers quality general use tools and class room appropriate hardware on which to run them. It does not need to be trying to create a digital textbook equivalent or play instructor on its own.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[wonkey_monkey]

So what you're saying is, eventually we'll smash through the brick wall, so we just need to use more technology?

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It isn't; but there are still some people who think we haven't yet failed hard enough to declare the experiment concluded.

The one arguable exception(which, unfortunately, serves to help the deluded cling to their delusions) is that technology does(and long has) have a great deal to do with how easy generating and distributing documents(and more recently sound and video) is.

If(and only if) you are already ready to learn on your own, or are receiving suitable assistance from competent teachers, technology has revolutionized the hell out of how easy and cheap it is to get your hands on information. If it hadn't, 'education' would still be something that only priest and scribes received, so that they could keep records on clay tablets. Something like mass literacy just wouldn't be economic (or worth very much, given how little there would be to read) without cheap printing and cheap paper.

Trouble is, barring fairly radical advances in computer-human interaction, technology is fairly poor at helping you turn 'information' into 'knowledge'(especially at lower levels, obviously a statistician or epidemiologist or GIS guru would note that being able to shuffle huge datasets is quite handy, and this is true; but that's a different problem than the fact that the kid not reading his textbook is not learning at exactly the same rate as the kid not reading the copious library of texts on all areas of knowledge on his ebook reader). It is also poor(in practice, often worse than useless, thanks to youtube and every other distraction on the internet) at motivating the unmotivated to stay on task.

Technology has its points; but most of its virtues accrue to people who already have good teachers and/or atypically good motivation and autodidactic habits. Few are fully immune to its vices; but they'll hit the weakly motivated, ill-taught, and otherwise least promising the hardest. This makes it a very poor silver bullet for attempting to 'close the achievement gap'.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Well... the elimination of artisan labor and the rise of mechanized production processes was effectively a process where a (complex set of) tools enhanced quality so much that it made the bad carpenters and the good carpenters more or less indistinguishable.

Of course, the day we get technology capable of doing the same for education will also be the day where we have technology sufficient to render obsolete all educated workers, so the fact that technology has finally fixed schools will be a footnote in a much more dramatic restructuring of basically everything.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[ScentCone]

I've yet to see any technology that can overcome bad process, bad practice, and bad planning. Why should education be any different?

But you're implying that the problem here is bad process, practice, and planning by the teachers (or other layers of the school system). While that's marginally true in some cases (vis a vis the problem of essentially unfireable bad teachers protected to absurd degrees by overly empowered public employee unions with too much control over state and county policies), the issue is - leaving aside genetics/damage - elsewhere. This is cultural. It starts and ends at home. Kids are primed to be productively educate-able and want it (or not) by what parents, family, and their immediate daily social environment does to them in those key years before they ever set foot in a school.

Is there a way that technology might marginally boost the efforts of a beleaguered single parent working two jobs to somehow play a more constructive role in launching an education-hungry kid into the world? Maybe. But it can't overcome the reality of kids having kids, or the disadvantages facing kids who are being (more or less) raised in a household that's lacking the time and energy that are present when two fully-engaged, supportive adults with high expectations pool their efforts and their resources to that end. Taxpayers, by way of hugely expensive social programs and sky-high per-student spending in troubled areas, can't haven't made up for what's happening on the ground, socially, in the places where a cultural of education and sustained effort has been killed from within.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[ShanghaiBill]

Well, and of course the biggest factor in educational outcomes has nothing to do with what happens at school--it's parents.

Blaming parents is a cop-out. Sure, parental attitudes matter, but many government policies exacerbate that problem. The worst results are in schools that have a concentration of dysfunctional families. The kids have no role models, and the teachers are overwhelmed by so many poorly performing students. Housing vouchers, that enable parents with young children to move out of dysfunctional neighborhoods, can make a big difference, and can pay for themselves in reduced crime and other social changes. Evidence based educational policies would also help, where policies are driven by data showing they actually work, rather than political sound bites. For instance, we have spent many billions on reducing class size, but there is little evidence that actually makes much difference for most kids, and can actually be detrimental for the brightest kids, who are compelled to follow along with the class instead of reading ahead. But smaller classes (and quieter classes) can make a big difference for dumber kids in the first few years of school. So we should focus spending for smaller classes in schools with concentrations of struggling kids. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what we actually do. Another policy should be to recruit more men, and especially black men, to be early education teachers, to provide discipline and role models. Boys do better with male teachers, and girls do no worse. Female teachers are four times as likely to refer a fidgeting boy for ADHD medication, where a male teacher is more likely to make the kid run some laps around the playground.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that students aren't rational actors(humans in general aren't nearly so rational as the 'homo economicus' model likes to pretend, and kids are just dumb sometimes); but this suggests the possibility that the part of the problem, especially for the students from the most screwed demographics, might be an accurate perception of return on investment (likely along with a bit of time discounting).

If I attend a good, or at least reasonable, school; the ROI is both better and more visible: If I do a decent job, I can graduate with a GPA that will actually get me into a decent college; possibly even a really good one if I bust my ass. Plus, I observe students in grades ahead of me achieving these outcomes, and adults(ideally for me, including my parents) enjoying reasonably successful lives thanks to their own investments.

If I attend a really shitty school, concluding that the ROI just doesn't justify investment in education might actually be correct(it could also be incorrect; but persuasive because of the human tendency to aggressive time discounting and just drawing conclusions from others nearby in the absence of good data). If my effort isn't going to improve my expected outcome, I might find a better ROI somewhere else; even if it's still a pretty grim one.

It is undeniably the case that you can't usefully educate a student who doesn't give a fuck. Some mixture of individual idiosyncrasies and social messaging seems to account for a substantial portion of how much of a fuck is or isn't given, with teachers in the frustrating position of often caring a lot but having limited power; but it's worth remembering that demanding an investment of effort is actually demanding irrational behavior unless you can deliver an educational environment good enough to reward that investment. Irrationality isn't too hard to come by, so it still might work from time to time; but it certainly won't help your cause.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Half-pint HAL]

Edtech needs to focus on giving teachers quality general use tools and class room appropriate hardware on which to run them. It does not need to be trying to create a digital textbook equivalent or play instructor on its own.

Then problem then becomes one of training time. A teacher with a pad of paper and a pen can follow whatever workflow he or she likes, but operating software tools needs an understanding of the program logic. All edtech starts with the right goals, but then responds to operator (ie teacher) difficulties in the wrong way.

Take, for example, question banks. I mentioned them to my dad (a retired chemistry teacher) and he immediately started ranting about how they were useless because if you didn't put the questions in yourself, you weren't going to be able to use them effectively. I responded that the whole point of question banks was precisely that -- for teachers to manage their own questions over their careers. Prepopulated question banks were requested by teachers, because getting questions into them was time-consuming.

Platforms such as Moodle are supposed to by style-agnostic, but doing anything other the basics leads you to have to code up arcane and esoteric dynamic pages, so everyone ends up with static multiple-choice question sheets online.

So OK... both ease-of-use and education are required.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is hugely ignored. My first and biggest notice of difference from going from a public to private school school was the level of discipline.

I grew up in school where I sat in the back because I was quite. The teacher would spend literally 80% of he time keeping 4 students from talking/fighting/disturbing the rest of the class and 20% on 3 other kids who couldn't read. My grade school education was wholly self taught.
My first day of private school, we were taken in small groups to meet with the principal. The short lecture went something like the following: Your parents are paying a shitload of money for you to go here (there was a lot of work/study and scholarships going on) and if you make any problems I will fucking beat you, then you'll go home and your parents will beat you. It's very simple. Don't fuck up. It was a private school so they could say that to you.

Classes were larger than public schools, but organized, quiet and teachers were rarely disrupted. It was wonderful.

Re: Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

Class size or teacher-pupil ratios have not decreased, but rather the apparent decrease is a byproduct of increasing numbers of special ed teacher assistants. I taught briefly (Latin): I had thirty to thirty-five kids in most classes. That was a problem, because I could not give kids much individual attention. On the other hand, the special education department made up half the faculty in our school, and the SPED kids would have special study-hall "resource" classes of three to six students. When you average that out across the school, we ended up with wonderfully low teacher-pupil ratios, but, if your kid wasn't "special," he was lost in the crowd. That's really where education has been failing: we have programs to address both ends of the bell curve, including Advanced Placement on the one hand and remedial courses on the other, but we fail to address the majority clustered around the mean.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Jason Levine]

My wife was a teacher. Her three biggest complaints were:

1) Parents who just didn't care. The child could be failing and my wife could try contacting them multiple times to try to help the child out, but the parents just couldn't be bothered. The parent sends the signal (both to the teacher and to the child) that the child and the child's education isn't important. Of course, the kid is going to pick up on that. (Kids are often smarter than we give them credit for.)

2) Parents who cared too much. This might be more of an issue because she taught in a private school. The parents would think that because they paid tuition, their kid deserved an A no matter what the quality of the kid's work. They wouldn't even bother looking at the child's work, but would march into my wife's classroom to demand that C-level work be graded as an A because "she works for them."

3) Administration that gets in the way. Sometimes the administration can help teachers out. They can assist in the previous 2 cases to back the teacher up and let the teacher do his/her job more effectively. All too often, though, administration comes up with "ideas" on how to improve teaching without consulting the teachers. This is analogous to a PHB deciding on a new coding strategy without consulting the programmers. When this happens, the teachers find themselves trying to be effective teachers while jumping through more and more useless hoops.

After my wife left the profession, a fourth obstacle really kicked into high gear as well:

4) Politicians/Private Companies. These people come in - either with a desire for profits or to draw in votes - with big ideas for how to improve education. They don't consult with teachers - and often will vilify them to silence any teacher objections - and will push their plans through. Like #3 above, teachers find themselves having to jump through increasingly complex hoops which render them incapable of teaching effectively. This, then, "proves" that teachers are no-good so that politicians and private companies can fire them to make way for more profitable employees who will stick to the private company provided teaching scripts.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[ScentCone]

For example: if I'd been raised better, I wouldn't have made as many typos in that post.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[tnk1]

Back in the day, my own anecdotal experience was that disruption is a big deal. I sat in both honors classes and "regular" classes back in the day. There was a huge difference in how much you learned based on how disruptive the class was. When I was in a class filled with kids who were dedicated to getting good grades and learning things, you got shit done. I learned less, had less taught to me, and was less able to concentrate in the regular class. I still personally got good grades, but that was because the class was dumbed down so much, it was hard to understand how anyone could have done poorly, let alone failed those classes, even without being a nerd.

In the end, I realized that I worked to get in honors classes as much to simply not be in the regular classes as I did to excel. You literally could not learn even easier things very well in a disruptive class.

Personally, I think we need to pick out the disruptive cases, get them in smaller classes with more structure, and get them out of the way of people who want to learn. Then everyone, including the disruptive kids, will probably be more successful.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[XxtraLarGe]

Platforms such as Moodle are supposed to by style-agnostic, but doing anything other the basics leads you to have to code up arcane and esoteric dynamic pages, so everyone ends up with static multiple-choice question sheets online.

I'm a Moodle admin, and there are quite a few options for quizzes other than just multiple choice. The problem is that's what most publishers offer. If you're lucky, you'll get a test bank already set up for Blackboard or WebCT, which can be imported directly into Moodle. The worst though are Microsoft Word documents that I have to modify into something else. Thank God for regex! Aiken format is my go-to format if it's all multiple choice, but I'll also use Gift format if there's any fill-in-the-blank, multiple answer, essay, etc. formats included. It's not too bad, but something's telling me there has to be an easier way.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[volmtech]

Perfect example. The hammer was perfected centuries ago, as was education. Specialist can use a framing nailer but a simple hammer is more versatile.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Kudos for actually trying to think through the situation as it might appear in the minds of the students. One of the big advantages that upper middle class students have is that they have easy access to many, many living and breathing examples of why there is likely to be a good payoff to hitting the books. In a very poor neighborhood, a good job that you have seen around the neighborhood might literally be a janitorial job, running a register, mowing lawns for a landscaping contract outfit, or running a quasi legal sandwich cart. Beyond very minimal reading skills, what does school offer, from this point of view?

Is this gap rectifiable? Possibly. But education software does not address the heart of the problem.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Among other things, the private schools can fire their students. In the Good Old Days, the public schools had that power implicitly, too, because we as a society accepted drop out rates that would be considered sky high today.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[pete6677]

Do you have a source for any of that BS you typed?

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[pete6677]

Blaming parents is a cop-out.

No it isn't; it's the crux of the problem. In school districts with lots of involved parents, the schools are good because the parents insist on it. Kids that come from homes where parents do not value education hardly ever succeed academically. There are always occasional exceptions, but by in large parental involvement is the single biggest predictor of academic success.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[gweihir]

Very much this. Any competent educator knew this already, of course and any actually smart person suspected.

This matches other completely unfounded beliefs in technology being able to fix people though, see for example the constant stupid claims that the right choice of programming language will turn bad coders into good ones.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[jshackney]

#1, #2 are mere nuisances compared to #3. Administrative interference caused my wife to quit early in her career. The only thing keeping my mother in teaching is that she's close to retirement.

#4 is evil and the roots are deep. Increasingly, teachers are incapable of teaching (either by training or policy).

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[gweihir]

Obviously, evil has triumphed a long time ago.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[gweihir]

Very true, but, you know, this has two problems: 1.) It cost money and 2.) it creates educated, knowledgeable citizens that may just form their own opinions of things. Especially 2.) seems a valid reason why the ruling class does not want this to happen.

Re: Shouldn't this be obvious?

[DrLang21]

1.) It cost money

I don't see this being a reason given the vast sum of money being spent on technology for the classroom.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[stabiesoft]

Spot on. A friend teaches in a tough area. The only time the parents interact is when little johnny or susie get anything less than a B. He has a notebook he carries at all times. When the parent calls/shows up, he rattles off the child did not submit a single piece of homework, or could not be bothered to show up, etc. I remember one story where the parent is there with child, and the parent says to the child, "I am trying to be angry with your teacher, but your making it difficult". He can't fail them, because if he did, he'd get fired. The system is so broken at this point it infuriates me. We spend on average 9 thousand dollars per student. 9 THOUSAND dollars. For a class of 30 that is over a quarter of a million bucks. For kids that cannot tie their shoes. The school he teaches at has a squadron of guards who really cannot do much because if they do, they get fired. Case in point, a pair of girls are having a knife fight. Two guards restrain the girls and one gets cut in the process. Net result, the girls are suspended for 2 days. For aggravated assault, a two day suspension. Really, I know I am old but in my day, they'd be gone to juve for the rest of the year. Other fun facts are he is not allowed to give homework for weekends or especially holidays, would not want to spoil the child's weekend/holiday. He cannot send problem students to the vice principle, he gets reprimanded. The school has day care for all the single mothers.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[ShanghaiBill]

Blaming parents is a cop-out.

No it isn't; it's the crux of the problem.

In aeronautical engineering gravity is the crux of the problem. But would you hire an AE who blamed all his problems on excessive gravity? Just like gravity, bad family environments are not going to just magically go away, so we should have policies that deal with that.

parental involvement is the single biggest predictor of academic success

Baloney. Family income, and parental IQ scores are much more accurate predictors of academic success. Parental involvement is correlated with academic success, but there is surprisingly little evidence for causation. The authors of "Freakonomics", famously found that children were much more likely to be successful in school if their parents read to them, and they had a lot of books in their home. But once they corrected for the wealth and intelligence of the parents, they found that the reading/books made almost NO difference. The kids were successful because their parents were rich and smart, not because they read to them.

Re: Shouldn't this be obvious?

[gweihir]

Ah, but for technology being bought, the money goes to very powerful technology companies that often have huge profit margins for this sort of thing.

Re: Shouldn't this be obvious?

[DrLang21]

The point is that lack of money is not the problem. Priority of the school board and administration maybe, but not lack of money. At least in many cases. Every school district is a bit different.

Re: Shouldn't this be obvious?

[gweihir]

I think you argument is too simplistic: Availability of money in the public sector depends very much on what it is going to be spent.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[khallow]

so much that it made the bad carpenters and the good carpenters more or less indistinguishable.

Not at all. Mechanized production requires skilled labor too. The level of skill needed or responsibility for the final product isn't as extensive as someone who needs to maintain their own workspace and is completely responsible for the end product. After all, the factory owner and/or management provides the environment that the factory worker works in and is responsible for most or all of the workflow and end product.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[munrom]

I'd like to add a number 5 to your list. Teachers promoted to administration because they are good teachers. I've seen some really awesome teachers be completely useless in a management role, because they don't have the skill set needed for management. Good teachers != Good Managers

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[RalphSlate]

Here's something that many people don't realize; children need more parental support today than they did 25 years ago. I see what my kids have to do in school, and there is so much more learning that takes place outside of the school. Projects, independent reading, and between 5-10 hours of homework per week.

That is a great-unequalizer between good families and bad families. At least when most of the learning was done in school, the results depended on the kids' willingness to learn. By extending the reach backward into the home, it makes more kids fail because their families are not capable of providing such support.

Think back to when immigrant families had 10-12 kids and they all went to the local public school. Do you think a mother, illiterate in English, helped each of those 10 children with homework? No way. But they still all did good because they didn't need parental support to learn. They also had superior teachers in the form of all the talented women who were prevented from working in engineering, finance, science, marketing, and business. We have compensated for a general downshift in the talent of the teacher pool by loading more work onto families, and when the families can't provide this, the kids fail.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[ranton]

Blaming parents is a cop-out.

No it isn't; it's the crux of the problem. In school districts with lots of involved parents, the schools are good because the parents insist on it. Kids that come from homes where parents do not value education hardly ever succeed academically. There are always occasional exceptions, but by in large parental involvement is the single biggest predictor of academic success.

Here is the software developer version of teachers complaining about parents:

My users are too stupid to figure out my user interface. When my coworkers and customers with similar technical prowess use the software they find it very usable, but the rest of my users are just too dumb. Its not my fault they can't use a computer properly.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Slashdot Parent]

I think the underlying thinking behind most educational technology is take the work out of the hands of the local practitioner, deskill the teacher.

I don't know if this is the intent, but it is certainly the (predictable) result.

I remember when my daughter was struggling with one of the New Math algorithms for subtraction. Naturally, I was only taught the traditional algorithm in elementary school, so my helping her was out of the question. As good fortune would have it, I had a parent-teacher conference scheduled with her math teacher the following morning, so my plan was to take 2 minutes and have the teacher demonstrate the new algorithm so that I might help my daughter with it.

Well, the teacher took several minutes just trying to contrive a subtraction problem that this specialized algorithm would apply to, and when she was unable to do so, she admitted in frustration that she doesn't understand the new algorithm either and that only the computer teaches that algorithm. I sat there with my jaw on the floor for what felt like an eternity and said not to worry about it and that I was sure I could find a YouTube to explain it.

So yes. What you say is true. The teachers are slowly but surely becoming little more than glorified exam proctors. It's pretty sad.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Half-pint HAL]

For my money he was "cheating" by not writing his own tests to begin with. His student merely used publicly available information to enhance their studying. It's not like they knew which of the 500 questions he was going to use on his 120 question test.

I agree completely - as I said, test banks are supposed to be databases of the teachers' own questions.

On a similar topic, I'm pretty appalled at the lack of time and attention given to numerical values in a lot of modern maths texts. My lecturers at uni always went out of their way to construct problems that has numbers manageable by mental arithmetic, right up to final step of solving for x -- and typically we weren't asked to do that final step. They took pride in making sure that the task tested our knowledge of specific mathematical concepts, and not on managing to keep all the significant digits throughout. No 3.753579x, but plenty of 5x/4 etc. This was questions just for their classes,mincluding test questions only ever answered by 50-150 students, and yet people writing books to be used by thousands of students across the world year after year can't be bothered to do it properly.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[pete6677]

You know what they say - make an idiot-proof system and then somebody will make a better idiot.

False early advantage

[Dareth]

From what I have seen, children with early access to technology treat them as just another toy. They may be more familiar with some interfaces and know how to do some basic tasks but do not have a great advantage over someone introduced to computers at a later age who is interested in learning about them. You need some basic skills to use a computer. You need to be able to read and write. Some basic math skills and typing are helpful. Once you have the basics you can add technology as a supplement. It is not a replacement for the basics of learning which can still be done with a simple piece of paper and a pencil.

Re:False early advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I have seen, children with early access to technology treat them as just another toy. They may be more familiar with some interfaces and know how to do some basic tasks but do not have a great advantage over someone introduced to computers at a later age who is interested in learning about them.

I agree. With all due respect, I have interviewed a lot of young people for IT work who (like most millenials) are highly convinced that they're the most tech-savvy and technology competent of anyone. Truth is, 'tech-savvy' means they know how to use Twitter or post pics from their iPhone onto Facebook. There's no real understanding (or care, really) of what's going on behind the scenes.

It's not their fault of course- Many of them grew up with computers that were more on the nerfed and 'user-friendly' end that hid all the workings with shiny interfaces.

Re:False early advantage

[Vyse of Arcadia]

When I was a kid, I had a book called the Young Naturalist, or something like it. Published probably sometime in the mid-80s. It was full of nature activities: building a bat house, setting up a freshwater aquarium with fauna from your local creek, how to distinguish and identify bird calls, that sort of thing.

Towards the end of the book, there was a chapter on computer-aided nature observation. The book claimed that if you had a microcomputer, with a little BASIC know-how and a little bit of math, you could get the computer to do things like predict what birds were around in a given time of year based on your bird-call observations. At the time we had a Packard Bell Windows 3.1 machine, and I really wanted to be able to do this, and I was just crushed that apparently computers don't come with BASIC anymore. I eventually settled on using some kind of spreadsheet software.

But I never forgot the feeling of power I had when I learned that with a handful of commands and some math I could get a computer to do anything. My rural community had a local access number by the time I hit middle school, and I learned after some AltaVista-ing that Windows (or MS-DOS, really) had qbasic all along. So I finally got to write my bird observation program.

Mostly I wanted to tell this story. But also, I feel like a lot of kids just aren't exposed to the notion that the computer is something other than a Facebook and games machine. A lot of kids probably think "computer programmer" is up there with "rocket scientist," when it used to be the case that any 12-year-old with a microcomputer had to learn a little programming to get a computer to do anything outside of running purchased software.

I don't know enough to advocate programming classes for kids, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to make programming more accessible. I wish Microsoft or Apple would include a "hey kids, make the computer do anything you want!" entry in a menu somewhere.

Re:False early advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an old millenial. I agree. Although I suspect that they're telling you they're tech savvy not because they believe they are, but because they believe you want them to be. For everyone in hiring like you, there's someone who thinks all that jazz about twitter is tech savvy: He'll hire them if they just lie.

I say this because in private my peers admit that they don't know much about tech. And I always find myself baffled, and then I think "yay job security."

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Tools not crutches

[blueshift_1]

This is definitely obvious. Children that come from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds tend get technological expose at a younger age - allowing them a shorter learning curve when things like this are implemented at young age. While these boundaries are certainly surmountable, we just have to consider it when implementing them. Technology has to be used as tool for further engagement & interactivity in the classroom. Too many use them as a crutch to - and nothing is worse for education than poorly executed PowerPoint presentations. Of course PP gets a bad rap because people don't generally understand how to use it as a tool for creating engaging & interactive content - but that's a whole different can of worms.

Re:Tools not crutches

[Anonymous Coward]

PowerPoint in Classroom (con'd)

• o Bad use: random information dump
• o Good use: engages students
• o Presenters need training!

Re:Tools not crutches

[sinij]

Children that come from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds tend to be more able than disadvantaged children. Why? One reason is that privileged background afford them better support system and more stimulating environment. Another reason, is that contrary to the prevailing social narrative, not everyone is born equal or could achieve anything. There are very practical limitations imposed by intelligence that cannot be overcome by motivation alone. Intelligence also happen to be highly heritable trait and it is strongly correlated with "privileged socioeconomic background". Unfortunately, we don't yet have technology capable to compensate for the lack of ability, motivation, and impulse control that are associated with intelligence.

In the light of the above, it is by no means certain that these boundaries are surmountable.

Re:Tools not crutches

[blueshift_1]

I didn't mean to imply that we should expect everyone to overcome these hardships and be hugely successful. I just meant that there are some who certainly can overcome their conditions. However, these are absolutely far and few between. Many people would not be able to achieve what they've done without the advantages they received from the start. Be it race, gender, socioeconomic condition, etc, etc. It doesn't make them any less deserving of their merits, but I've always found it's important to be aware of what systemic advantages I've reaped.

Re:Tools not crutches

[Half-pint HAL]

Children that come from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds tend to be more able than disadvantaged children. Why? One reason is that privileged background afford them better support system and more stimulating environment. Another reason, is that contrary to the prevailing social narrative, not everyone is born equal or could achieve anything. There are very practical limitations imposed by intelligence that cannot be overcome by motivation alone. Intelligence also happen to be highly heritable trait and it is strongly correlated with "privileged socioeconomic background".

Correlation is not causation. You started your post with a possible mechanism not involving genetics, then suggested another hypothesis built on the same data. Tthe last time I saw any data on correlations between genetics and intelligence, the identified genetic markers only accounted for about 2 IQ points between them, which is hardly better than the standard error in the mean. Furthermore, need I point out that rich successful mrn often marry trophy wives? How does that leave us in terms of heredity...?

Re:Tools not crutches

[sinij]

>>>The last time I saw any data

I can definitively state that you haven't spent any time looking in the past couple decades. Start with Wikipedia article on Heritability of IQ. Pay attention to twin studies.

Re:Tools not crutches

[Half-pint HAL]

Sorry, Inwas talking about direct genetic markers. Twin studies are interesting, but they are hampered by an unusually small sample set. There's also the issue of in utero development that can't be eliminated. The are rules known to pig farmers, for instance, about how feeding a pregnant pig affects the physical characteristics of their piglets. Extra feeding at certain times results in increased brain development, whereas at other times, it results in a larger pig with more meat. Farmers prefer meaty, stupid pigs to skinny, clever ones. We don't have a lot of data on how this pans out for humans (experimental studies would be more than a little unethical), but it's fair to assume it happens to some extent, making twin studies quite unreliable for establishing genetic causality.

Re:Tools not crutches

[itsenrique]

Impulse control and intelligence are not the same thing.

Re:Tools not crutches

[sinij]

You are correct, impulse control only highly correlates to intelligence. Interestingly enough, low intelligence has a lot of comorbidity - low impulse control, poor health and obesity, magic thinking, inability to delay gratification, poor reasoning skills... All of these combined makes escaping poverty almost impossible. All of these also highly heritable. As such, indirectly, poverty is also highly heritable.

Poverty could not be solved unless we are willing to provide guaranteed income. No matter how fit (or if you prefer dystopian Idiocracy view - unfit) average member of our society, someone going to lose when compared to the rest. With existing automation, top % can be productive enough that bottom % labor is simply unneeded.

Actually helping poor children

[Kohath]

If you're interested in actually helping poor children, the example to look at is Louisiana.

A lot of people are interested in maintaining the current system because it works for them, regardless of how much it harms poor children.

Learn from the wealthiest

[Anonymous Coward]

The wealthiest forbid their kids to use tablets and smartphones. They know very well that it hampers attention and ultimately intelligence.

Accessing teh Google is not how you are going to learn things. At best you will learn how to search things with Google. But the ability to retain, analyse, syntethise and assimilate information is a completely different matter.

Remember guys: "Smartphones, Dumbpeople !"

Re:Learn from the wealthiest

[Enry]

Saying no to google is like saying no to a card catalog. That's all Google (search) is - a way to look information up. Determining how to find information is a very useful skill.

Re:Learn from the wealthiest

[rockmuelle]

Huh? Can you back that up with some evidence? I'm not in the super wealthy class, but do know some of them. They all let their kids use smartphones and tablets. Just as I let my kids use them and so do all my friends. Sure, there are the occasional families that don't allow access or restrict access, but those are few and far between - much like the families without TVs when I was growing up in the 80s.

Re:Learn from the wealthiest

[Half-pint HAL]

Sorry, but infomation is useless if you don't know how to handle it. When we learn something, we build a "schema" to model that information. Any analogous new information can then reuse that schema to retain and manipulate the information. Students must deal with enough material in depth to acquire the schemata needed to manipulate new information. If your entire education is done via websearch, there will be no schemata to work with.

Re:Learn from the wealthiest

[ColdWetDog]

Saying no to google is like saying no to a card catalog. That's all Google (search) is - a way to look information up. Determining how to find information is a very useful skill.

And I raise Rule 34 here.

Google is nothing like the card catalogs I was raised with. My head asplode.

Re:Learn from the wealthiest

[Half-pint HAL]

Sorry, but infomation is useless if you don't know how to handle it.

I could give you the information to help you see your way out of the fallacy you have constructed for yourself, but I'm sure you wouldn't know how to handle it. Therefore, I won't even bother. It is, after all, for your own good.

Woo. AC responds to a post discussing education theory with no substantive information. I must be wrong, patronising AC says so!

Money and technology cannot replace what's missing

[blackt0wer]

It's sad that people feel that the combination of money and technology will fix the classroom issues, what no one seems to realize is that the human factor has more to do in a classroom. Instructors who can inspire confidence in pupils make the difference in the classroom. The human factor cannot be replaced, the idea that no one understands this continues to befuddle me. Forget dumping money and technology into classrooms. Fire all the bad teachers, abolish the idea of tenure in public schools, and then things can start to think about improving.

You mean parents?

[LWATCDR]

" Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else."
Those are called parents. I would bet good money that children with a stable home with both parents tend to do better in school. Teachers and tech can only do so much.

Re:You mean parents?

[jeremiahstanley]

You cast the pot with the clay you have, not the clay you want.

Yes, parents are immensely important - and kids that have two (or more) good ones have an advantage. This doesn't mean that you can throw your hands up in the air and give up on marginalized kids. Teachers do a lot more in schools than just show off the pythagorean theorem or bloviate about what old dead white men did. They also teach social skills and fill in the gaps that parents can't always get to. This is another "social good" of public education.

Re:You mean parents?

[Kohath]

But anyone who tells people to avoid having children without first forming a family is name-called. Because politics and social signaling are important to the name-callers, and children aren't.

Re:You mean parents?

[abramovs]

If you are interested, the data shows that parental involvement isn't all that big of a factor in determining learning gains. http://visible-learning.org/ha... Which kind of makes sense since their are plenty of individuals who achieve large learning gains despite having terrible parents. But I'll be the first to note that parental involvement is likely super important in an indirect way.

Re:You mean parents?

[Bengie]

Privately funded research by owner the company I work for pretty much concluded that parents are so important, that the are the single indicator of how successful a student will be in life. All other metrics were dwarfed to the point that they didn't matter at all. Pretty much a child from a poor family with no access to good education that has good parents, would do better than someone from a well-off family with access to great education.

Of course there are correlations between being well off or poor and how decent the parents are. Education starts at home.

Re:You mean parents?

[Kohath]

Thanks. Your comment makes a political point and provides a social signal to like-minded peers. It obviously does not help any children. You have provided a valuable example.

Re:You mean parents?

[ranton]

I'm not against contraception, but I am against just pulling a rubber over the major issue of what leads to that many children: the inability to control yourself.

We're telling everyone that its all natural and awesome to have sex, but we've also managed to turn sex into a purely recreational activity, which it is not.

Its not purely a recreational activity, but it is also a recreational activity. And in a modern society, it is primarily a recreational activity. Sex being primarily a procreation activity is as ancient as life being primarily a search for food.

Humans, like almost all animals, are meant to have sex as often as possible. Evolution "made" it so fun so we would do it more. For most animals frequent sex is necessary to have a sufficient number of offspring. That is no longer the case for humans, but our bodies are likely millions of years from adjusting to this change in environment (if it ever even happens naturally).

This is why teaching abstinence as public policy is idiotic. Some parents can be successful at brainwashing their children into being obedient and subservient enough to forgo sex, but any children with a mind of their own who are able to find a partner are going to have sex.

Re:You mean parents?

[LWATCDR]

But sometimes you only have enough for a cup.

A teacher with a classroom full of kids that have parents that make little to no effort to be parents can only do so much. The simple truth is it is dumb to expect anyone to do more to educate your child or care more about your child than you do.
This is not throwing up my hands at the problem but point out that the solution are the parents as is often the problem.

Re:You mean parents?

[LWATCDR]

"Some parents can be successful at brainwashing their children into being obedient and subservient enough to forgo sex, but any children with a mind of their own who are able to find a partner are going to have sex."
Gee because no kids would decide that delaying gratification is a good plan...
Don't generalize much do you?

"high-quality adult guidance"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else."

I believe we call them PARENTS !

Emphasis on the plural.

Poor children (and Americans in general -more out of wedlock children than ever) often don't have two parents.

Re:"high-quality adult guidance"

[Anonymous Coward]

An example of Hillary's "It takes a village". Big Brothers helps, but with one parent you had heard half the number of words (and more foul language) and been read to half the number of times that a child in a normal family would.

Completely wrong. And I wouldn't categorize this as "It takes a village". It only takes ONE person. My mother didn't read to me. I read to her. No foul language. My vocabulary was above average (though not stellar, as I had other aptitudes that I developed instead); still I did well in writing, got ~650 on vocabulary/comprehension. Poverty? Yes, but I didn't know it until I was nearly an adult (my mother made $13,000 a year and received $9,000 a year in child support). For experiences/knowledge she couldn't provide herself, she made sure I had access to people who could.

There are several two-parent kids in my daughter's class who perform poorly in school, regularly act out in class, and in general are a distraction to a good learning environment. I'll agree that with two parents in a stable home, the odds are better of having at least one of them show an interest in their child's education, but the generalization that single-parent homes are at fault is wrong.

Re:"high-quality adult guidance"

[Bengie]

Having a father and mother figure is more important than a father or mother. Both roles are important. children with access to one role but not the other grow up with much increased rates of personality issues, like lack of confidence or sympathy.

The first piece of technology you have to master..

[John Allsup]

is your body and brain. Skimp on these, and you'll be hamstrung for anything else.

Education requires intelligence

[gurps_npc]

And not machine 'intelligence', but creative, human intelligence.

Kids at heart want to learn the cool stuff. But to get to the cool stuff, you have to learn a whole crapload of boring stuff.

The thing is, the 'boring stuff' can be made fun - with a lot of creative work by a human teacher.

Technology can't do that.

Throw in the fact that wealthy parents encourage their kids, assure them of the opportunities, and give them extra resources that poor parents don't.

So no, technology can't cure the problem.

Re:Education requires intelligence

[jader3rd]

The thing is, the 'boring stuff' can be made fun - with a lot of creative work by a human teacher. Technology can't do that.

Think about the actions you do when having fun with technology. If it wasn't a game, smashing the same four buttons over and over would not be fun. But the technology has made it fun. Once someone figures out how to make teaching a certain principle fun, technology can replicate that solution the world over, instead of being bottled up in a single classroom.

it's not bad process

[rsilvergun]

It's a lack of money. The class sizes are too large and they mix the special ed kids in with the other students so that they are constantly getting interrupted while an undertrained teach tries their best. Meanwhile the parents are broke so the kids game tons of problems at home.

I love the way everyone in America tries their best to ignore the disadvantages of poverty and the privilege that comes with money

Re:it's not bad process

[itsenrique]

I agree with this, the salaries of a lot of these useless administrative types is sky-high, meanwhile the very talented get out of K-12 fast because they can make more money elsewhere. Many of these administrators have never taught a single class in their life! They have masters and PhDs in, "Higher Ed Management" and other such bullshit. College is the same way, but possibly worse.

Re:it's not bad process

[itsenrique]

The total amount of money thrown at the "the problem" does not mean it is being utilized correctly. Where I grew up and went to school the teacher salaries are terrible but the administrative salaries are way too high. Lots of money is wasted on shiny, instead of giving good teachers raises. They recently stopped paying for teachers to get their national certifications here, subsequently the % of teachers getting the cert went way down, and they laid the blame on the teachers for not jumping up and down at the chance to spend their own (limited) money on training.

Re:it's not bad process

[mattventura]

It's a lack of money. The class sizes are too large and they mix the special ed kids in with the other students so that they are constantly getting interrupted while an undertrained teach tries their best. Meanwhile the parents are broke so the kids game tons of problems at home.

I love the way everyone in America tries their best to ignore the disadvantages of poverty and the privilege that comes with money

The problem is that while I'm sure there are plenty of legitimately disadvantaged people who are trying their best to get an education but can't due to underfunded or incompetent schools, there are also people that just don't try in school. Whether it's plain immaturity, a "doing well in school is for " attitude, bad parenting, or something else entirely, the number of people that simply aren't there to be successful is astounding.

Even though there is a soft correlation between being richer and trying harder in school, a poor person who actually tries in school can easily outperform a rich person that doesn't.

Re:it's not bad process

[Hognoxious]

Even though there is a soft correlation between being richer and trying harder in school, a poor person who actually tries in school can easily outperform a rich person that doesn't.

It's still pretty unlikely.

Technology has greatly improved education

[penguinoid]

In my experience, recent advances in technology have greatly improved education. You got your paper, made in bulk from fast growing trees, now cheap enough that it's basically free. You got your printing press, now an advanced printing press that can be changed easily enough to keep all your books modern, probably less than 5 dollars per textbook plus the copyright cost. You got your pencils (I prefer the mechanical ones, no more sharpening pencils for me) and erasers. You got your ball point pens (no more inkwells for children to be children near). And you got chalkboards and whiteboards. And calculators, whose invention has made simple arithmetic no longer the ultimate in school mathematics. And you got your vaccines, so no more fear of catching deadly diseases in class.

Re:Technology has greatly improved education

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

I like to think of technology as a rising tide; it raises all boats. It doesn't make dinghies into yachts.
Technological improvements in teaching tools don't help underprivileged children more than privileged children. They improve things equally for everyone.
This doesn't mean that everyone will get the same benefit. There are at least four factors that will still affect the success of children in school, regardless of technological tools:

1) Parental involvement and investment (temporal, emotional and monetary).
2) Community culture. e.g., gang activity, health of relationships with local authorities.
3) Individual intelligence.
4) Teacher skill and investment.

Properly applied (using experimentally proven methods), new technology improves school learning. Giving children new tools will not, however, improve the performance of uninterested children more than interested ones.

the bullshit it strong with this one

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

But no matter how good the design, and despite rigorous tests of impact, I have never seen technology systematically overcome the socio-economic divides that exist in education.

If that's a goal, you want to change education so that it improves the performance of students coming from poor backgrounds, while not improving the performance of students who come from middle class and above backgrounds, because otherwise, the "divide" remains. That may fit your political predilections, but it certainly isn't a good measure of improving education.

heard many teachers complain that computers in the classroom doubled their workload. Not only did they have to design lesson plans involving computers, they also had to write low-tech backup plans in case of technology failures, which were frequent.

Ah, so in different words, teachers are apathetic, lack computer skills, are burdened with unreliable technology (Windows), and don't want to change the way things are done. Apparently, the problem isn't with technology in the classroom, it's with teachers and using bad technology.

Law of Amplification: Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces. In education, technologies amplify whatever pedagogical capacity is already there.

Ah, so in different words, technology in the classroom does actually help after all!

This is exactly what economists Robert Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson found in a randomized controlled trial of laptops distributed to some California students but not others: Those with laptops saw no improvement “on a host of educational outcomes, including grades, standardized test scores, credits earned, attendance, and disciplinary actions,” though they did use the laptops for social media and video games

Note how Toyama's entire world is built around the idea of public education, narrowing gaps, and giving stuff away for free? Maybe the real problem here is not an intrinsic problem with technology, maybe it is with the context he wants to deliver it in and the wrong goals he sets.

But there is sure one thing this stuff works for well: selling Toyama's books to a technophobic crowd of social science majors who just get off on the message that "pencil and paper" are really all an educated man/woman/other needs.

Enablers of disengagement

[Mycroft-X]

Every new teaching tool that comes along is used as an excuse by many parents and other adults to spend less time engaged with children. The advent of television and educational programming has allowed at least two generations of parents to feel better about letting their television raise their kids.

The changing expectations of the scope of responsibility public schools have in raising children has allowed parents to disengage, believing that it's someone else's job to talk to their kids, to counsel them, to provide good examples.

Now we have the false premise that better access to technology is going to solve the same problems that haven't been solved by all the other parental surrogates that haven't worked before.

Meanwhile, kids who have more accessible and better engaged parents continue to do better in school despite the best efforts of less available and disengaged parents to fill that gap with money, objects and government.

Re:Technology is but a tool...

[pigiron]

Using a fixed width font is useful for source code as the indentations line up nicely. For everything else it interferes with the train of though one is trying to inspire in the reader.

Totally agree

[ErichTheRed]

Technology alone can't fix education problems. Applying it where it's useful is a good thing, but school districts shouldn't be wasting money on tech just for the sake of having it. That money can be better spent paying teachers a decent salary.

Public schools have to take everyone who comes their way, a problem charter and private schools don't have. Therefore, it stands to reason that you're going to get a close-to-normal distribution of abilities in your students. Some just aren't going to be as successful as others. On top of that, some of your students with the potential to do well can have horrible home lives that make concentrating on school impossible. How is buying an iPad for everyone and subscribing the district to an expensive electronic curriculum platform going to solve these problems?

Two things predict student success - involved parents (minus the helicoptering) and good teachers in good schools with solid infrastructure. My son is about to enter kindergarten, and we have intentionally been limiting his and his sisters' interactions with tablets/phones/computers as much as is practical. They still watch plenty of YouTube and stuff, more than I'd like, but we've focused on giving them other experiences. Am I a Luddite? Nope, I'm a happy IT person and my wife's in a technical field as well. I just see what happens when parents let their kids sit and stare at the tablet for hours on end. I can't imagine that gets better as the kids age, so why dump technology into a classroom that needs other things more urgently? I'd rather the kids spend this pre-kindergarten time learning to be good humans and picking up skills they'll need when it is time to sit down and learn something.

Re:Totally agree

[Jason Levine]

Applying it where it's useful is a good thing, but school districts shouldn't be wasting money on tech just for the sake of having it.

Exactly this. Technology enhance education wonderfully, but it isn't One Size Fits All. My son had issues writing due to muscular issues. He was given a Netbook to use and his writing improved dramatically. Give the same Netbook to another kid and their writing might not change at all. You can't just toss the same technology at every kid and expect miraculous improvements. Evaluate every situation, determine whether technology will help and, if so, which technology will work the best, and then give that child that technology. If no technology will help, use non-technological methods to assist the child.

Of course, nuance like this doesn't play well for politicians and businesses who want to proclaim "$TECHNOLOGY_X will drastically improve every childs' education!!!"

Tech is a tool to teach

[globaljustin]

Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else.

Yes.

The solution is well paid, professionally trained teachers in well-funded classrooms.

We know this. Now we have another study telling us so in quantifiable terms.

Obvious

[back2scool]

/Rant on... To all who say 'this should be obvious', it may be to those familiar with technology. It is NOT obvious to those looking to 'fix' education in public schools. They seek a simple solution to a complex problem that involves family, society, educators and economics. Politicians can NOT fix families, WILL NOT address issues of long term poverty (economic disadvantage), nor will their corporate sponsors allow them to address economic inequality. If you wave a shiny piece of technology around, or scream 'charter school' (Publicly funded, privately operated school), or 'adaptive technology' which 'adapts to the students' needs' that gets attention and money. Teachers have been vilified, degraded, and burned out (me) rather than address the root issues of education. The 'business model du jour' style of educating people continues to be plagued by students who are apathetic, parents who are too busy trying to support a family to be parents, poverty, and in may inner cities, crumbling infrastructures of ancient schools. Perhaps this is not as obvious as Chromebooks or iPads for everyone. They are great tools, aid some forms of instruction, but also make toys of distraction for many students who are already tuned out or far behind in the classroom. Technology helps politicians 'feel better' about 'helping education'. /Rant off...

Re:All the tech means squat

[tnk1]

Well, as someone said above, it doesn't have to be parents. It can be grandparents, cousins, or even non-family members who are friends, rather than professional educators. Anyone who takes an interest in the child and who can earn the trust of the child.

The one thing we don't have as much of, now that we don't have close extended families, is support for children from people other than parents.

Do you think that parents who were gone for 12 hours a day is some sort of new normal? It's as least as old as the industrial age and probably longer. It's only now that we have no one else other than a parent to fill the role when the parents are off working that this has become a crisis. That's not because the parents are working, it's because there are a) children with one parent (frequently a father) who is missing, and not just working and b) there's no one else to raise the children while the parent is working.

Having parents out working is nothing new, and it used to be critical in the olden days when physical labor was much more important than our much automated present. We just happened to have structures that could handle that in the past. Now we don't.

Technology *is* an equalizer of a sort

[CrankyOldEngineer]

Technology not only makes bad schools worse; it makes good schools worse too. The school board at our kids' school is enamored with tablets, laptops, 3D printers, and more. At each introduction of new technology, they had no idea how to use it to enhance learning. They just took it on faith that you put a tablet in a classroom, and magic happens. All they did was create a crutch for the mediocre teachers and distractions for students who already have too-short attention spans. Then they had the nerve to ask for a tax increase because they claimed they couldn't afford a much-needed salary increase for the teachers. What putzes.

I went to some pretty crappy schools

[EmperorOfCanada]

I went to some pretty crappy schools and would have relished an opportunity for some actual education. Things like coursera are in their very earliest days but if they had been available when I was around 15 I would have jumped in with both feet. It was about that time that I was realizing that the education I was receiving was so shockingly sub par that it was basically a joke. Now at this point in time nobody can exactly say what a coursera certificate is worth but I am certain that I would have joined together with like-minded friends and blown through many of the computer and math related ones.

How this would have helped would be somewhat vague. But it would have done at least four things. One, it would have made up for the horrifically terrible edcation we were getting. Two it would have given us the confidence to say that we actually knew a few things and to strive for something such as aiming for top tier schools. Three it would have filled a huge gap that our schools were leaving that we crudely filled by teaching ourselves to program using the crap we could find in libraries. And finally it might have actually impressed someone enough in higher education that we could have all made the leap into good schools.

Now this doesn't necessarily translate to success for massive amounts of children in schools. We were fairly self-motivated so we could do things then and would have done more with access to the resources of today.

But for the average kid today with full access to Coursera and all the Khans etc the path still isn't very clear as to where it could take them. I don't think that many people have a clear idea as to where all this is leading. For instance if a teenager were to do very well with MITs offerings does that improve their ability to get into MIT one iota; or any other school for that matter?

Then there is the whole other matter of who is putting education into the schools themselves. That tends to be wildly corrupt companies that have massive sales forces with bizarrely incestuous relationships with the school systems administrators. So to look at any failure of those technologies is meaningless as success was never to be measured by actual educational outcomes. The success that was aimed with those systems was to embed themselves as financial parasites through proprietary data strangleholds and contractual lock-ins.

Therefore I go back to examples of Coursera which is the type of system that I see doing an end run around the entire school educational system. I envision a day when online organizations are able to offer a certificate that has a known value and is held in some regard. I then see some of the best and brightest from the public school system starting to get that certification and then moving on to higher education without the consent or blessing from the public school system. If anything I foresee resistance where the public school system will try to insist(and generally fail) that the higher education system reject these certifications and not accept kids who have struck out on their own.

At this point I can see a generation of kids going into higher education and slowly push for the best of breed education that they were exposed to in the online education system from their higher education institutions. Here the change will be slower and will be more of an incorporation rather than a revolution.

But the moment the online systems start to have any value is exactly when I see the facade of terrible public education finally being forced to reform. People call for all kinds of things such as standardized testing, killing the unions, charter schools, testing of teachers, performance based pay, etc. I then hear all kinds of arguments and counter arguments for these changes. But what is very clear is that regardless of any of them actually working that the school system will never allow them as it is. What all the calls for these changes makes clear is that there is a huge demand that the school system be fixed. Online educationa

A++++ straw man headline!!!

[mattwarden]

Would read again!!! You totally destroyed all those nonexistent people arguing that technology will take bad education and make it good education.

Most people in EdTech are major supporters of reform and are hoping their technology helps enable that reform. Nobody is thinking their technology fixed education absent reform.

"...not...overcome the socio-economic divides"

[tlambert]

I've seen technology 'systematically overcome the socio-economic divides'.

That technology was called "the printing press".

"...marginalized kids."

[tlambert]

"...marginalized kids."

And once again, we blame everyone but the kid themselves for the kid. It had to be something that was DONE to them. There's no such thing as a marginal kid, only good kids who have been marginalized through no fault of their own, because they were helpless in the throes of a marginalizing situation.

Cluebat: There's such a thing as marginal kids.

Before all other lessons, we should likely be teaching personal responsibility. You do not "give a kid a good education". A kid *takes* their education, and a non-marginal kid will do that over your objections.

Begone, foul troll.

[L. J. Beauregard]

"Never argue with a fool."

A simple test for judging an educational scheme.

[hey!]

I have a simple test for judging the sincerity of an educational scheme: I ask whether the elite in this country use it on their own offspring.

For example a lot of people argue that class size doesn't make any difference to educational performance. However if you look at a prep school like Phillips Andover, where the Bush's send their scions, classes are three or four students sitting around the table having a discussion with a PhD teacher. This tells me right away that class size and teacher qualification are the most important factors, not computers or testing, both of which probably play some role in instruction but neither of which is the centerpiece.

If you want to improve school performance then, don't micromanage or replace teachers; reduce class sizes and increase teacher qualifications, paying whatever is necessary to attract someone with the absurdly high qualifications you demand for the job. That'd be fabulously expensive, but only if you don't count opportunity cost. There's practically no social investment that could pay higher dividends than education, at least over the lifetime of anyone who's relatively young. Naturally if you're 70 your hedonic planning horizon is closer than if you're 40.

You have no idea how schools are funded, do you?

[rsilvergun]

Their money comes from property taxes, federal grants and the occasional donation from a rich man ( Harvard just got $400 million). The federal stuff is mostly gone after 30 years of supply side economics, you can guess how often the 1% donate to the v poor and so that leaves property taxes, which means that the lions share of money goes to wealthy school districts. This is also why a poor woman who gamed the system to send her kids to a wealthy school district did jail v time for it ( Google it )

Culteral problem and NOT racial.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else."

Ah, the nail is hit squarely on the head this time. That statement neatly sums up the fact that we cannot throw money, tech nor teachers, at low performing communities and expect results. The problem is cultural and I repeatedly find myself verbally bitch slapping people who confuse the culture based problem with that of race. Limiting women on social programs from having more babies for the sake of income is a start. Children need a good environment to be raised in and succeed in life; this is an irrefutable fact. For power/money hungry politicians to perpetuate the cycle is a crime against humanity.

President Infamy likes poor people so much he keeps them poor and creates more poor people as well.

Anon due to mod points....

[Dripdry]

It was also a process which mostly eliminated artisan work. Now the work just has to be "good enough".
Have you *seen* the things that get made these days? Some might say they're not exactly beautiful.

Same with, say, math. Math skills will be "good enough" and no more. It could spell the end of advancing fields of study.

Mechanization may make things take less time, but they also no longer are studied and refined, only copied. The same could prove true with the mechanization of knowledge. A piece of information can only copy itself, but (in general) cannot add anything useful.

otoh, maybe this will finally spell the demise of "everyone goes to college" and people who are going to pursue an actual course of study will be able to do so. Those with aptitude can grow their aptness, and those without or with no interest can go elsewhere.

In a sense, while some may cry "doom!", I wonder if this isn't actually the beginning of a solution to a number of problems?

Black parents are homeschooling their children

[NewYork]

Black parents are homeschooling their children to avoid racism
http://qz.com/380153/black-par...