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?

[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]

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]

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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.

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[account_deleted]

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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

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

[tlambert]

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

That technology was called "the printing press".