May 2003 — Features
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Testing Time: The Need for a New Focus On Technology and Results
Whatever your feelings are about No Child Left Behind, you cannot mistake its serious intent - relentlessly focused on the need to raise student achievement for grades 3-8. Students will be assessed in English and math, and in subsequent years the results will be used to make some high-stakes decisions. Test data must be reported by economic background, race and ethnicity, English proficiency and disability. The idea of measuring progress by subgroups is not only to demonstrate that overall student performance is improving, but that achievement gaps are closing between disadvantaged students and other students.
The pressure is on, and it's not surprising to see many administrators wanting to grasp all levers to help raise the scores as if their schools were underperforming factories that only needed to get their workers to produce more. And "all levers" surely includes technology.
John Bailey, the U.S. Education Department's director of educational technology, gave a speech at the National School Boards Association's Technology + Learning Conference last November in which he talked about the "productivity paradox" analogous to the one that affected the business sector in the 1980s when people wondered whether the heavy investments the private sector had made were making any difference. Bailey's reasoning was that education was still waiting for its 1990s boom with a growth in the universal marker of student achievement: test score increases.
The jury is clearly out on whether education will soon experience an equivalent bump in student achievement to the one realized by industry as a result of educational technology investments. The most important reason is that at a deep level, the analogy between education and business is flawed. The type of business transformation by technology that occurred during the 1980s was made possible because the business sector was clear about what specific processes it needed to automate.
Small and large firms found high-quality software purposely designed for their needs, reducing expenses through-out the production and distribution chains so that such revolutionary ideas as just-in-time ordering of products were possible. This allowed warehousing, transportation and labor costs to be radically slashed. For anything close to that to happen in education, technology would have to help students better manage the time they spend on learning in school, as opposed to shuffling through monotonous tasks and the hundreds of other things that take up time in school.
Filling the Knowledge Gap
The problem, however, is that education technology was never designed with the purpose of replacing any learning activity. It has also never posed a serious threat to the textbook industry. Despite all the rhetoric, the main ways computers have been used in the classroom have been to develop computing skills, for word processing and for the use of the Internet; with Microsoft PowerPoint and graphing thrown in for good measure. There has been excellent software developed - most notably in elementary school reading and math, as well as in engineer drafting at the high school level - but these have been on the margins. No "killer app" for math, social studies or science has emerged despite all of the titles produced.
