June 2007 — News
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ATTAIN: The Means for a Mandate
And the implications were clear: If we're going to mandate technology in education, we need to make sure that teachers and students are at least prepared to use it.
To this end, a couple weeks ago legislators introduced a bill to the U.S. House of Representatives called ATTAIN (Achievement Through Technology and Innovation). What it seeks to do is to revamp Part D of title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to enhance professional development for teachers, improve technical proficiency in students, and otherwise support technology in various ways to advance student achievement.
The bill, introduced by U.S. Representatives Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX), Judy Biggert (R-IL), and Ron Kind (D-WI), states, "Increased professional development opportunities are needed if teachers are to be highly qualified and effective in a 21st century classroom with today’s digital native students, including in the use of learning technologies to deliver innovative instruction and curriculum and to use data to inform instruction."
ATTAIN was not developed in a vacuum, but with input from major ed tech and other industry trade groups, including CoSN, SETDA, and ISTE. It does not simply put out new technology mandates for districts to try to fulfill on their own. It puts forward the means by which schools and districts can attain the achievement and technology mandates that are already in place, especially those in NCLB.
And it does this by allocating $1 billion to support the following (cited from the bill itself):
- To improve student academic achievement on State academic standards through the use of professional development, research-based and innovative systemic school reforms, and other technology uses and applications.
- To improve teacher professional development to ensure every teacher and administrator is technologically literate, including possessing the knowledge and skills to use technology across the curriculum, to use technology and curriculum redesign as key components of changing teaching and learning and improving student achievement, to use technology for data analysis to enable individualized instruction, and to use technology to improve student technology literacy.
- To ensure that every student is technologically literate by graduation, regardless of the student’s race, ethnicity, gender, family income, geographic location, or disability.
- To improve student engagement, opportunity, attendance, graduation rates, and technology access through enhanced or redesigned curriculum or instruction.
- To more effectively use data to inform instruction, address individualized student needs, and support school decision making.
- To improve the efficiency and productivity of the classroom and school enterprise toward the ultimate purposes of improving student achievement.
It's our position that this bill is an excellent solution to some of the problems schools face in the implementation of technology. And we urge all of our readers to support this bill by writing to legislators and contacting your association representatives to lobby on its behalf. We simply can't keep throwing new technology requirements at teachers and expect them to grasp (or even want to grasp) the benefits of technology.
