Now that Arne Duncan, President Obama’s new education secretary, has presented the administration’s $150 billion plan for reviving our education system, it’s time to start separating Obama’s smart ideas for schools from his dumb ones. The first folly Duncan could dispense with – at an enormous cost saving – would be Obama’s desire to outfit the nation’s classrooms with new computers. His big push for this idea occurred in December, when he said, “Every child should have the chance to get online,” Obama said, “and they’ll get that chance when I’m president – because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world.”
Really?
Educators have been trying to improve schools with every technology we’ve ever invented, beginning with Thomas Edison’s promise, in 1912, to create “100 percent efficiency” in the classroom through the medium of “the motion picture.” Since personal computers and the Internet first arrived in classrooms, in the early 1990s, schools have spent approximately $100 billion on technology. Throughout this campaign, educators and the technology industry have been searching madly for solid evidence of whether the computers were boosting achievement. So little has been found that this data has become education’s WMD.
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Ok, so I agree that boosting achievement is important but that isn’t actually what President Obama states in this quote. He says nothing about achievement. His words are “…strengthening America’s competitiveness…”
While student achievement is definitely a goal and would certainly be necessary I see the President as suggesting that our students need to be familiar with today’s tools in order to enter the global economy and boost competitiveness in the global market place.
He isn’t saying that today’s technology will necessarily make them achieve more or better in school. However, if they don’t know how to interact safely in social networks, use blogs and wikis, … all of which can be introduced within the context of a discipline they are studying, they won’t be able to work well in the kinds of jobs that will be available to them when they finish school or when they move from HS to college.
These are technology skills that students may acquire while at the same time they are acquiring knowledge in a variety of disciplines that will parepare them for jobs that we today may not even be able to imagine will be in existance by the time these students are adults.
Improving the technology available in our schools won’t alone make students better achievers. This has to come as a result of the teaching and learning that happens inside and outside of the classroom. The technology isn’t meant to replace the teacher or the curriculum. I don’t believe that the President suggested that it would do that either.