The Broad-trained superintendent decided to go all-digital in Huntsville, Alabama.
So he purchased 22,000 laptops and a Pearson online curriculum.
The going has been rough.
Students, teachers and parents are complaining about glitches. A student says that it takes her longer to do her homework because the computer loads slowly. When she saves, her answers disappear. A father complains his son watches pornography, despite the filters. Teachers say the Pearson curriculum is the problem.
Maybe schools will one day be all-digital. But first fix the bugs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They’re not bugs, they’re features.
Love the kid watching porn. Talk about self motivation.
“Parents are either supportive of this initiative or we are anti-technology, anti-progress, anti-anything good for our kids,” Claflin said. “This is ridiculous and I am tired of being vilified so that the district office and Wardynski can distract everyone from the fact this digital initiative has been a negligent disaster at best.”
I think this quote sums up one of the biggest, and to my experience one of the most unaddressed, issues in education–Are we starting to identify technology, really computers, with education? This in turn leads to a bigger question: Just what is an education?
Currently the school board on which I serve is interviewing for a new superintendent. While we have been very fortunate to interview many excellent candidates, I am troubled by the near uniformity in the almost robotic answers we get when the subject of using computers in the classrooms comes up. The typical answer has been to recite such hoary technological platitude as: “computers are here to stay”, “things have changes, and we need to change to”, “kids today are different and needs these things”, and “wow! I saw a kid download a video of ____”. There is No Alternative. Resistance is Futile. Never do any of these most senior school leaders explain just how they view the role of the computer in education; the stories the all tell just somehow equate this machine called a “computer” with an education.
I’ve worked with computers for many years, having first learned to program in a high school class back in the late ’70s. I’ve used them in scientific research, in business, where I have managed computer networks and data management projects, and in my work with the software inventors. I really enjoy the machines, but I also respect their capacities and limitations. Yet I’ve seen repeatedly an attitude that we must buy these devices (usually the hottest Apple product) for all the kids, and then somehow we’ll figure out how to use them; but don’t fret: our satisfaction will be guaranteed. And a year later nothing seems to have changed, except the requests for more and newer machines.
Trying to point out that computers are just machines that really do little that’s actually NEW (as opposed to just faster) has been futile. Nor does it help trying to explain that having computers present the sounds, images, and text introduces a whole set of issues and complications that are relevant to what the student learns. For example, having students make videos for lessons (should) introduce questions about how we express our understanding using moving images and sounds as well as in writing. In fact, what’s the point in making a video on a subject that the student doesn’t understand? Traditionally, we gauged understanding by having the student provide a written assignment or a verbal presentation, and we probably would expect some sort of script or other document from the student in the first place. How do we gauge that with an iMovie? If the understanding isn’t clear from the video, then do we attribute that lack to the video presentation, an underlying misunderstanding of the subject matter, or both? In short, it seems to me that using computer technology intimately in education makes the teachers’ and students’ jobs far more complicated but with little real added benefit to anyone. And few students learn how a computer works, or how to program one. Nope, using computers is essential. Full stop.
In reality, of course, I’ve heard privately that many teachers and administrators are frustrated with the machines. The students often learn how to evade lock-out mechanisms and play games or view porn or use social media (which often includes bullying). To counter this, we thus spend more money on software, hardware, and IT support. And so, the cost ratchet of our budget rack increases another notch towards snapping each year. We have to replace and maintain the machines and purchase software and other paraphernalia each year.
The idea that somehow computers are so complex and so vital that we must define our education around them, even now to the point of defining education completely in terms of a computer’s capabilities, is inane. Having e-mail, video, word processors, and music and drawing software is useless if the user can’t think or write clearly, or understand drawing, music, and video composition. Without these, the computer is just at toy to occupy time. The vast majority of adults who were not raised with computers learned how to use them to great effect on their own; they didn’t need an entire school curriculum designed around–even defined by–these machines. Kids today don’t need this either. And we can use the money that we throw at the likes of Apple and Microsoft to better effect.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Someone who puts the computer in its place as a tool/resource which may help and/or hinder learning depending on the way in which it is used. When I taught in a high rent district, kids used to use computer glitches as an excuse for not doing their homework. Usually, the homework that had stymied them without computer access only required a pencil and a piece of paper. My low rent students had varying levels of expertize with desk top computers. Since most of them relied on cell phones (families do not have land lines), however, they had the fastest thumbs in the known universe. Unfortunately, as we all know, their facility was not primarily devoted to their education. Whenever you see a line of adults standing outside a store waiting to purchase the latest incarnation of a communication toy, you know that the push in the schools for computer literacy has more to do with money than learning.
I wholeheartedly agree. Computers are tools. Tools are only useful for people who have acquired knowledge and skills. Handing me a top-of-the-line oxy-acetylene torch does not make me into a welder. Handing Jeb Bush a milking stool does not make him a dairy expert. Handing a kid a laptop does not make her a better reader, writer, or thinker.
Like you, I’m a tech person who sees the computer as a tool, one that has some promise but also some very definite downsides. I want our kids to have access to computers for specific purposes – but not be sitting in front of them 100% of the time, especially not at the lower grades.
Who here thinks sitting their kid in front of an episode of Reading Rainbow is the same as reading to the kid or taking her to the library for story hour? No one I know.
Computers won’t save money. They do open certain possibilities, some of which are very exciting. Our small school with only a tiny library is very excited about using it for new opportunities for the kids.
I want my kid doing hands-on science experiments in a lab… but not all day every day. Same with the computer.
The infrastructure issues are huge. Schools aren’t used to hiring full time IT staffers. We don’t have enough outlets, power, or air conditioning to support the kind of computer usage in the story at our school. We only got bandwidth this year, and it’s still problematic.
When one of the staff members brought a technology plan that included goals like “each teacher should give x hours of lessons using the computer lab,” I pushed back. Why would that be a goal, I asked? And why would your goal be the same for the kindergarten teacher as the 6th grade teacher? What is important is that teachers who want to do computer-aided lessons have access to infrastructure they need and that all the teachers have opportunities for training in use and ideas for it. But if the 4th grade teacher never uses the computer lab and the 5th grade teacher uses it instead, that’s really just fine in the grand scheme of things.
The goal is the learning, not the mechanism. No one writes, “A minimum of X hours of instruction using photocopied worksheets.” 🙂
Right on, David.
I have noticed an interesting trend among my colleagues, both at the building level and in the broader network of teachers I communicate with nationwide: The teachers who have the greatest expertise with computer technology and who use it most effectively are exactly the first ones to insist that the technology is merely a tool.
The biggest cheerleaders for technology in education I know are rarely teachers, and when they are, the more they are in love with technology for technology’s sake, the less effective they are as teachers.
I have not a shred of solid evidence to back this up, but my experience is filled with strong anecdotal hints at this trend.
Teachers say the Pearson curriculum is the problem
A curriculum appropriate for schoolchildren would be a great advance. Perhaps NEA members could develop one, copyright it, and license it only to unionized schools. The licensing fees could replace dues as a source of revenue–voila! No more need for “fair share” contract provisions.
The problem is with using computers in lieu of live teachers. I can just see massive, massive cheating with online “schools” since there is no surefire way to monitor against it. Parents can simply do their kids’ work. Online education for K-12 should be under severe restrictions (for credit recovery and with some remote students) and under the close supervision of school districts. This is just a nightmare of monumental and tragic proportions, as online “education” for K-12 goes against everything we know about learning and child development.
I think the very very best part of the article is the postscript:
“Editor’s note: Superintendent Casey Wardynski’s responses to the concerns over the technology issues were e-mailed to The Times late Friday, but were not received, possibly due to a technical problem. Subsequently, Wardynski’s responses were not reflected in Sunday’s newspaper. A follow-up story with his responses will be in Monday’s newspaper.”
Left me ROTFL.
I teach at a “laptops for everyone” school. The tech gets in the way of memorizing, othographical skill, attentions span, and a whole host of things (check out Bauerlein’s book, The Dumbest Generation).
I got a laugh at a recent parent night when I announced that we would be focusing on building “19th Century skills” this year.
Wow! You’re a real hard….! Back to inkwells and slate boards and stoking the fire before school each morning.
More seriously, it saddens me to see this happen, because pretty much any IT professional would tell you to expect these kinds of glitches with such an enormous rollout. The thing is that most IT people are used to working in the world of business, where it’s no big deal if a small percentage of employees lose a day or a few hours – it’s maddening but not the end of the world, usually.
In a classroom, there are no spare minutes and there is no slack for “oh, we were unable to work for half the period two days this week” and I assume no one thought about having a dedicated computer support tech in every classroom of 30 kids for the rollout at least, which would be a pretty typical ratio in a business situation.
And the idea that you can’t do your homework without a live internet connection? Uh, yikes.
So… the district and its employees are experiencing a learning curve as it implements a massive infusion of learning technologies into its operations. Given what we know about school change, that probably would be expected, no? Sounds like every single other curricular / instructional / change initiative that schools implement. We rarely hold perfection up as the standard for any organizational reform.
But you’re not anti-technology, right? 😐