I was invited to contribute an article of 500 words to a special issue of Scientific American. I assumed that most of the other articles would be unalloyed cheerleading for the wonders of technology. So I decided to talk about both the promise and the perils of technology.
I have seen teachers doing amazing things with the Internet. I have gone to conferences where thousands of teachers were learning how to use technology creatively. I know that technology, in the hands of inspiring teachers, can bring learning to life and empower students to self-direct their studies.
But it is in my nature to look at questions from all angles. That is what is known as critical thinking.
So I wrote about three ways in which technology may be a danger to education.
First is the for-profit online charter school, which provides a poor substitute for real education but is quite profitable.
Second is the use of computers to grade essays, which severs the teacher-student relationship and mechanizes what should not be mechanized.
Third is the effort to impose Big Data on school issues, assuming that inputting enough data will somehow tell teachers what each student needs.
I end thus:
“Here is the conundrum: teachers see technology as a tool to inspire student learning; entrepreneurs see it as a way to standardize teaching, to replace teachers, to make money and to market new products. Which vision will prevail?”
Please commit me now before technology commits me.
If teachers are not careful and parents don’t speak up about the overuse of technology in schools today,
it is possible that the entrepreneurs will win. Even as an adult though, I would have a hard time with on-line courses. I need the one to one interaction and still consult my advisor from grad. school when I have question/concern related to teaching. Is it Silicon Valley where parents are saying they are not interested in their children’s classrooms having SMART Boards? I watched a demo. of a Smart Board lesson for my grade level’s math book when we first adopted the Go Math series last year. It featured Curious George who was demonstrating how to subtract. Later on, I told my Mom about it and said I could imagine if that lesson had been presented to me as a first grader she could have asked me about what happened in school that day and I would have mentioned Curious George and she would have asked me what C.G. was doing and I would have replied, “I don’t know, but he’s a cute monkey,”. My mom agreed with me and commented that my brother would have started climbing the walls to imitate C.G. and she would have completely tuned out because she didn’t care for C.G.. None of the three of us would have leaned how to subtract from this Smart Board lesson.
Diane, you have a rare talent. Your ability to cut through to the core of an issue, and then express your thinking regarding that issue in simple but succinct terms, is a wonder to behold.
Technology should be used only as a tool, NOT as a substitute for teachers and teaching.
Or, for that matter, real, hard copy books.
I think it important to distinguish between
entrepreneurs attempting to bring new products to market that will succeed or fail in the market based on the merits of those products and
monopolistic corporate giants attempting to rig the market for educational materials so as to shut out new competitors.
A little history:
When I started working in educational publishing back in the early 1980s, a basal literature program consisted of a student text and a softbound teacher’s guide containing lesson plans and answers to questions in the text. That’s it—a student edition and a softbound teacher’s guide.
Then, over the course of many years, the big educational publishers competed with one another by adding new components and features, including many “give-aways,” to their product lines. So, for example, many years ago, one publisher of a K-12 basal composition program added to its product a “free” Teacher’s Resource Binder (a 3-ring binder containing lesson plans, answer keys, tests, correlation charts, planning guides, and the like). The other big ed book publishers rushed to follow suit, to create their own “free” Teacher’s Resource Binders. And then, of course, all the publishers upped the prices of their student editions and teacher’s editions to cover the cost of the “free” binder.
Over time, the big ed book publishers added many, many more components to their basal programs—annotated teacher’s editions, test banks, multimedia CDs, materials in various languages, transparency sets, blackline masters, diagnostic test booklets, test prep booklets, manipulatives, handheld student response devices, leveled readers, cross-curricular readers, various web-based components, etc. —and whenever one publisher innovated, the others followed suit, and the costs of the student and teacher editions went up and up and up to cover all these “free” materials.
In parallel, state departments of education in adoption states like California, Texas, and Florida started issuing lists of adoption criteria that REQUIRED programs submitted for adoption to contain these various “supplemental” materials. Where, in the past, when a school ordered a literature text, it would receive student editions and softbound teacher’s guides, it would, after all this change in the textbook publishing racket, receive, with each classroom set, several very large boxes containing supplemental products—boxes that came to be known as Teacher’s Resource Kits. In addition, the sizes of the student and teacher texts also increased enormously as the big publishers competed with one another by adding features and components to those.
To summarize: thirty years ago, a Grade 10 basal literature program consisted of a 340-page student text and a 150-page, softbound teacher’s guide. Now it consists a 1,200-page student text, a 1,400-page annotated teacher’s edition, and about a hundred crappy ancillary products shipped out in big, colorful boxes.
In the past few years, every teacher I’ve talked to about this has told me the same thing—he or she uses ALMOST NONE of the great mountain of supplemental material that comes with the basal text and skips ALMOST ALL of the junk in the annotated teacher’s edition. At the same time, the school districts pay HANDSOMELY for all these “free” supplementals because the cost of developing them, plus a pretty profit, is rolled into the cost of the student and teacher editions and because, when one publisher starts charging for a key supplemental component, the others quickly follow suit.
The upshot of all this is that textbook production has gotten much, much more expensive than it was in the past. Where a couple decades ago a publisher might develop a new literature program at a cost of, say, 6 million dollars, it will now cost 100 million or more to do this. And those state adoption requirements, along with the customer expectation that programs will have all these “free” supplemental components, effectively lock would-be competitors out of the business. Only a few large companies with deep pockets can play.
And so, where in the past we had lots of small educational publishers with sizable market share, now we have, basically, four big players in the U.S. And what that means is that teachers and schools have fewer products to choose from, and those products have a terrible sameness to them because publishers with monopolistic positions have no incentive to innovate. To the extent possible, they now “repurpose” old material, change the headings and correlations to accord with the latest educational fads, do some new design work, and call that a new edition. But they don’t innovate, really, when it comes to what matters—in the areas of pedagogical approach and curricular design.
The last thirty years have seen an enormous amount of consolidation of the educational publishing industry—a few large publishers buying up all the smaller ones, and that consolidation also works against real pedagogical and curricular innovation. Ed book publishing is now a monopolistic business, and state departments of education, with their adoption requirements, have inadvertently helped to make that happen—their well-intentioned pages and pages of adoption guidelines have served to decrease real innovation in educational products while dramatically increasing their cost.
So, basically, that’s how ed book publishing became a monopoly business.
However, the Internet presented a great threat to the emergent monopolies. Almost all of the cost of producing a textbook program was, traditionally, in paper, printing, binding, and sampling of products to potential customers. The high cost of producing physical basal textbook programs with large numbers of supplementary/ancillary materials effectively shut out any new competitors. However, pixels are cheap, and some college professors even started SELF PUBLISHING respectable introductory textbooks, in subjects like statistics, philosophy, logic, history, business, economics, etc.—online for FREE. Really for free.
This presented an enormous threat to the ed book monopolies. They had to do something to ensure that they could maintain their monopolistic market share and continue to lock out new entrants, new competitors. Well, one way of making it difficult for new competitors to emerge is to create national standards that every program must follow slavishly. That keeps a new competitor from doing a better job than the large publishers do of following the unique standards for a particular state AND keeps new entrants from creating alternative curricular designs that accord, better, with new, alternative, or competing standards. Another way to shut out new competitors is to create a single national database of student scores and responses that serves as a gateway for delivery of content. Those who can afford to be connected to that system for content delivery can play, and those who can’t will be shut out.
Teachers, students, parents, and other stakeholders would be much better served, of course, if small publishers with innovative ideas could compete on an even playing field—if there were room, again, in educational publishing for real entrepreneurship. The Internet can help to make that possible—for small entrants, again, to have a chance to compete against the big textbook companies. Mountains of federal and state requirements serve not the cause of the small entrepreneur but of the existing monopolies, making it easier for them to shut the small entrepreneurs out. And the big companies pay lots of money to lobbyists at the state and federal levels to ensure that there are plenty of requirements on educational products that will make it difficult for new, entrepreneurial competitors to emerge.
Here’s how to fix all this: Return to site-based management. Allow individual groups of teachers at individual schools to make their own decisions about what products they will purchase and what characteristics those products will have.
This is a very helpful article. Private schools don’t buy those products because they can’t afford to.
AMEN!!! Just give me a wide range of children’s literature–some in packs of six for Guided Reading work–and I’m good to go with my first graders. Not only am I not technology dependent, I’m not text book dependent either. I just make sure that I teach objectives/now CCSS.
Many of us in so-called higher ed are asked to teach both on-line using latest technology as well as face to face. Both can be done well or poorly but makes for a delicate dance to do both well particularly in an environment that is defining education as a competition.
In Douglas County technology is also being used to determine a child and teacher’s learning style. Then teachers and students are grouped according to this.
tutucker, no evidence of “learning styles.” http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/learning-styles-debunked-there-is-no-evidence-supporting-auditory-and-visual-learning-psychologists-say.html
I was curios to see if a poster would take this position. Do others agree that there is no such thing as a learning style?
Yeah, Cindy,
This district doesn’t really do a lot in regards to evidence based decisions. And I’m now learning that kids take this computerized test, are assigned a color. The classrooms are being painted that color and that’s where they’ll be. . . . And we’re also doing niche schools, which will lead to an all charter model. Each school will have a niche and then we get to pick what school best fits our child. . .
This is the letter to the editor I wrote to the local paper that was published in June.
(person’s) letter to the editor around parent options for schools, takes away from the idea of community and best practice. All children deserve neighborhood schools that offer a wide range of learning opportunities
On April 16th, our school district shared its ideas around expanding ‘choice’ through the concept of niche schools. Each public school would have a specialty such as dual language, project based, expeditionary learning and so on.
Instead of marketing our schools in their special niches, let’s ensure that every school does everything to make all of these specialties’ a part of their comprehensive learning environment.
Can you imagine parents realizing that their child doesn’t fit with their parenting style? Do we then start sending our children to different parents that fit our child’s parenting needs? Of course not. Parents and teachers (when given the professional ability to do so) are constantly paying attention to children and how to best to meet all children’s needs. When teachers have smaller class sizes, as well as the ability to teach to students and not to tests or programs, they are able to observe each child, thus helping each child reach his/her full potential.
My child’s learning is strengthened by a variety of options and through diverse human interaction. Our community deserves well-rounded schools for all children. Let’s get back to community values that honor all children.
1 – Open resource all classrooms and subjects according to master teachers’ knowledge and experience.
2 – Get rid of all paper-based text-books older than five years.
3 – Give each student 1:1 tablets/chromebooks.
4 – Give teachers access to technological ability to iAuthor and Flipping video skills.
5 – Watch classrooms come to life.
…some Stern Advice
SA,
#1. What does “open resource all classrooms and subjects” mean? Please explain.
#2. No way! They’ll have to pry my cold dead fingers from real blood and guts books.
#3. No, a technological and financial boondoggle that suggestion.
#4. What ever !Author and Flipping are. Please explain.
#5. Good teachers make a classroom come to life when needed. Everyday doesn’t have to be a massive technological production wonder day. I’m a teacher not an actor/video production artist etc. . . .
People have been touting technology as the next best thing since sliced bread since at least Gutenberg.
PS – watch newer and more “connected” teachers innovate the process, thereby driving students to innovation.
1. Watch teachers get replaced by technology.
2. Watch students “taught” by a teacher for 300 or more students, mostly doing rote work that can be easily graded.
3. See students in enormous computer labs with “facilitators” who are mostly bouncers.
4. See students plugged even further into technology and demanding instant information, whether it’s actually factual or not.
5. See technology companies and “reformers” laugh all the way to the bank.
Your point 3 is a class that I teach every semester. Technology actually helps to make the class more personal. It allows me and my TA’s to spens more time doing what only teachers can do: having meaningful conversations with students.
By doing rote learning? That’s the type of learning I’ve seen on every “online school.” No creative learning or in-depth thinking. Perhaps your’s is different, but it would be the exception, not the rule.
The goal is to establish the foundation outside the class, build on it in the class.
Wrong number. Point two. Point three brings to mind students in large rooms filled with rows of desks and and rows apron rows of books.
Welcome to my world. HOWEVER, I know my kids and they know me. When my son “took” his online “class,” we never even saw a picture of the instructor.
When my son took his online class he did not see his instructor either, but it did allow him to take some other classes that he would not have been able to take.
I have added video to the online class that I teach and do many screencasts, so at least they hear my voice.
Oh, except that I group my students in groups of four desks (I have 9 “tables”) instead of rows. I also don’t use textbooks for the most part.
By the way…what happens when most if not all the computes have a virus? I guess a mid day power outages would result in an early dismissal?
What happens when the power goes out in a school now?
In our district, we must go for four hours after the outage before we can be released, unless it’s closer than four hours to the end of the day. Then we just finish. You should have been there the day the power went out when I was in my theater class. The room had no windows and it took quite a while for us to find the door!
I should emphasize that it’s a four hour or more outage. We don’t get to go home at all if the power comes back. I have to emphasize that every year to my students, who begin cheering as soon as the power goes out. I have only had the power send us home early once, either as a teacher or student: I was in the 2nd grade. It was 1980.
We keep teaching.
Half the rooms at my local high school are interior rooms and have no windows, so they would be completely dark. I will have to ask folks at the school about their plans for a power outage.
If we’re already at school…I just keep teaching. I don’t have a SMART Board or even a projector,, and my room had really nice windows so I get a lot of sunlight in it. The class above my room is a slightly different story though. That teacher has become SMART Board dependent. She is not in a good mood on days when the power goes out! And…none of the teachers at my school are dealing with 300 something students who were working on the computer when the power suddenly went out. Along those lines…just what the kids taking high stakes tests on computers need to have happen in the middle of the testing session. Wonder if anyone in charge has thought of that. (NOT!)
No air conditioning?
Good to know you have good natural light. Half if the classrooms in our local high school are interior rooms without windows at all. My guess is that they would dismiss early, but perhaps they would teach in the dark.
Dude. Where have you been? Most schools nationwide don’t have air conditioning. It gets to be 90 degrees or more in the upper level of my school in August. Charming for concentration.
LP,
Here in the Show Me State, the vast majority of schools do have air conditioning in the classrooms. Although I had to teach in a basement room with two very small windows with no AC. They installed window units the year after I moved to another room.
I did my student teaching in a classroom that only had a small sky light. It was fall semester and at first, I would work outside after school checking papers, making paper books and writing lesson plans, but gradually, it got dark too early for me to be able to do that. I would have to think hard about teaching in a classroom like that again. I spend all the time that I can outdoors! My kids do get to have recess time, and for some of them that is the only time they really get to play outside because there neighborhood is too dangerous.So sad in more than one way.
My son is found of pointing out that his high school was designed by the same architectural firm that also designed the county jail. There is a family resemblance.
I swear that one of the high schools in our district looks like Alcatraz, except not so broken-down.
Oh, I didn’t realize until after posting that I was asked about air conditioning. I can only speak for my class…I am on the first floor and am shaded by several, huge oak trees. My building is always cold when the AC is on (We have one AC for the whole school) and everyone in my building (we have 2 buildings) agrees that my room is always the coldest even if I turn my thermostat up. Some days, no AC is not such as bad thing!
Wish we could be cold like that. Well, we freeze in the winter (I’m in Utah). I told my first two periods last year to bring coats or blankets because it was so cold in my room. The heat didn’t turn on until 45 minutes before school, and the outside air temperature was in the single digits. It often taught in my coat and gloves last winter.
And then we roast in the spring and summer. It gets to over 90 degrees in parts of our building, especially on the west side.
Another technology concern is unbalanced screen immersion.
http://musicalmediaforeducation.tumblr.com/post/949083859/caution-homo-sapiens-sapiens
Second is the use of computers to grade essays, which severs the teacher-student relationship and mechanizes what should not be mechanized. I totally agree .
One year I was in charge of the readings of 10,000 essays at middle school level. It was a very valuable staff development year because ETS helped us and teachers in the region attended the ETS workshops. All in all the results paralleled the same results that were obtained from bubble in multiple choice tests (standardized not state developed). The staff development was worth the cost and the experience. Teachers learned a lot and shared what they knew which contributed to the development of MCAS (very early in the process). It was a useful experience but costly. There is a purpose for both the teacher scored essays and the standardized assessment — Woodcock Johnson is very valuable in a school setting; Myklebust wrote a considerable volume on the “Picture Story Language Test” that proved to be invaluable for the time…. I am not sure that these experiences are in the general practice or knowledge base but they should be and these experiences/practices cannot be totally assumed through computer technology. ( I have run Scott Brown’s language /letters through a technology computer grading system , however, to show his content/abstraction level after reading them. It gave details for my impressions. S. Brown — the former senator MA replaced by Elizabeth Warren).
I am curious about your distinction between a “standardized” test and a “state developed” test. Wouldn’t a state developed test be a standardized test, just not one used nation wide?
Thank you Dr. Ravitch for your informative article. I use technology everyday in my classroom. It is a tool that I control (right now). Teachers must have autonomy in the classroom. We know our students and our content better than any administrator or “reformer”.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.