Honey, I shrunk the promise of education! (Or, “How is public education like a box of cereal?”)

First of all, let me get this out of the way: I know the difference between a simple preterit and a past participle. No comments, therefore, about why the verb in the title should be “shrank” and not “shrunk.”  If you missed the pop culture reference, I forgive you.

That bit of housekeeping aside, I want to discuss something that I have noticed lately while grocery shopping, let’s say over the last 5 years or so.  As is increasingly the pattern in my posts, I will use that to segue, rather hamfistedly perhaps, to an actual point about education or pedagogy.  It might take a thousand words, but I’ll get there.  It will be worth it, though, I promise.

I love grocery shopping.  It is almost a zen-like experience for me.  There is something calming about walking down lengthy supermarket aisles stacked 2+ meters high in colorfully packaged merchandise that just makes me smile.  I have always been this way – as a child, I used to help my mother clip coupons, and my special joy was finding great deals, even as a child, at stores that offered double, and even sometimes triple, coupons.  As such, I have always been aware of what groceries cost. Also, because I have always been a bit of a math geek, I have always comparison-shopped by “unit price.” In other words, I don’t look at the price tag on the package, I figure out the price per ounce, or liter, or serving.  This is, of course, the smart way to shop, usually.

When I see people at the grocery store filling their shopping carts full of boxes of cereal – “They’re on sale 4 for $8, that’s only two dollars a box!” – they often do not notice, and I do not tell them, because nobody appreciates a smartass, that the cereal boxes they are buying are in the 8.9 to 11.5 ounce range, much lower than the 12 to 18 ounce range they would normally purchase, so they’re actually getting significantly less food for their “great price,” making the unit cost (cost per ounce, in this case) just about the same, or in many cases, even a little worse.  Cereal companies design their boxes in such a way as the area of the front-facing panel of the box looks large, suggesting a box of cereal that contains much more product than it actually does, but the box’s front-to-back depth is reduced, or the inner bag full of cereal is not sufficiently large to use up the box’s inner volume.  In many cases, they’d be better off buying the larger box, even at the higher price. 

In fact, this is a trend on grocery store shelves.  Perhaps you have noticed it in the States as I have?
 
Do you remember about five or six years ago when a carton of ice cream was one half-gallon (two quarts)?  Try finding a half-gallon carton of ice cream nowadays. The major brands all started using 1.75-quart cartons, and now they are mostly using 1.5-quart cartons.  The prices have stayed relatively the same over the years, however; people just don’t notice often that for the same output, they’re getting less.

My favorite pasta sauce just switched from a 28-ounce package to a 24-ounce package, but the price at most stores stayed the exact same 99 cents.  For the same output, I’m getting less.

And has anyone noticed that Coca-Cola and Pepsi have started selling 1.5-liter and 1.25-liter bottles? How long do you think it will be before the 2-liter bottle is a thing of the past?

I think candy bars have gotten incrementally smaller as well – I’m pretty sure that most major American candy bar brands were around or just slightly over 2 ounces in weight; now they hover around 1.5 to 1.8 ounces.  For the same output, my sweet tooth is less satisfied, an observation only perhaps Michael Bloomberg could celebrate.

Nickels and dimes?  Hell, no.  These are very real percentages being shaved off here:

•    2 quarts ice cream to 1.75 quarts (- 12.5%)
•    2 quarts ice cream to 1.5 quarts (- 25%)
•    28 oz. pasta sauce to 24 oz. (- 14.3%)
•    2 liters soda to 1.5 liters (- 25%)
•    2.2 oz. candy bar to 1.8 oz. (- 18.2%)
•    12 oz. Cheerios to 8.9 oz. (- 25.8%)

By comparison, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for food has gone up only 9.6% in the last 5 years.  The rate of clandestine product-shaving greatly exceeds what the rise in CPI would call for.  Consumers think they’re getting the same product for the same amount of capital outlay, but in fact, for their money, they’re getting less, even after taking into consideration the steadily rising CPI.  This deception is achieved by a process that alarmist political pundits refer to as “creeping gradualism,” the inexorable crawl towards an undesirable end, achieved in such barely detectable incremental stages as to go wholly unnoticed, even by the victims.

Okay, we have reached the segue. See, it only took 800 words! Not even a thousand.

I believe the same thing is happening in public education, courtesy of two cardinal sins educators routinely commit.

The first cardinal sin is the lowering of overall standards, resulting in the same “grade” for less effort, less work, less quality, less objective mastery of content. This is well documented, but a couple of ways this has manifested itself in my personal observation is in the substitution of so-called “alternative assessments,” typically high on creativity, but low on content and rigor.  They “look” impressive, but that parts that look impressive are often the parts that have less to do with the actual purpose of the assignment, and are more typically the “window dressing” aspects of the completed work.

Todd Oppenheimer wrote about this in his book The Flickering Mind, in a stand-alone excerpt published online that he aptly titled “Point, Click, Duh.” (I also blogged about it here.)  In it, he describes the scene in a New England classroom a decade or so ago when students in a history class were given the option to create a Power Point presentation in lieu of writing a standard research essay.  The predictable result is a perfect example of the phenomenon illustrated by my earlier cereal box comment – our willingness, eagerness, even, to be duped by appearances:

“The reports were nearly finished, and the teacher was feeling pleased with the results. When I asked to see one, she steered me to a young man whose report she felt was in particularly good shape. Sure enough, as the student clicked through the presentation, I was immediately struck by the clean graphics, the strong colors, and the digestible writing. Then, suddenly, he was done. This was the extent of his report. But its content was no deeper or more complex than what one commonly sees in civics papers done elsewhere, with pencil and paper, by seventh and eighth graders. Mystified, I asked the student how he'd used his time. He estimated having spent approximately 17 hours on the project, only seven of which had been devoted to research and writing. The rest went to refining the presentation's graphics.”

If this first sin of pedagogical “clandestine product-shaving” is the diminishing of required rigor and lowering of acceptable standards to promote the awarding of higher grades, then the second cardinal sin is its inverse. (Converse?  Contrapositive?  Crap, I should have paid more attention in Mr. Zalewski’s Geometry class back in 9th grade.  Little help?)  Namely, if a student doesn’t get the grade the teacher would like to have given him or her, since the teacher cannot go back in time to modify the standards upon which a student was graded, the teacher will simply contrive a means to modify the grade itself, to achieve the superficial illusion of having, retroactively, earned a passing grade. 

This focus on a single, final, summative datum alone is devastating to public education.  I have blogged about this before as well, here (I know, here I go again, quoting myself):

“We have become a nation of pure data, of test scores and dropout rates, ciphers which are at best simplified abstractions of critically important ideas – but raw numbers do not tell the whole story.  Any educational process or notion that has at its heart the notion that it is the data that needs to be treated, and not the students, is fundamentally flawed.”

 This second cardinal sin manifests itself in many ugly ways.

One is very simple: The teacher just gives a student an unearned passing grade in the class by fiat.  This happens all the time.  In New York, a 65 is considered passing. But if you look at the transcripts of high school students, you will see a curious and highly disproportionate number of students who managed to score exactly a 65 as their final grade in their courses.  In my experience, fully 50% or more of all grades of exactly 65 are round-ups, i.e. the student actually failed, but it was close enough to a 65 where the teacher vetoed the student's actual performance and progress and awarded a passing grade anyway. One student I had my first year teaching in New York State had seven such 65s in three years. What are the odds?

A second is more insidious – teachers teach to the borderline kids only, trusting the “smart kids” to pull through on their own grit, to boost their personal “passing rates.” As a teacher, I had many administrators and even some fellow teachers tell me that they were “not worried" about the smarter, more hardworking students in their classes – "they'll be fine” – so they spent all their time trying to get the kids with 40s and 50s (many, though not all, of whom have those grades by choice because they just don't give a hoot, or try, or care) up to a "passing" 65 so their (the teachers') pass rates could look better, because there were consequences for teachers whose pass rates seemed out of whack.

The end result of this can be seen in a single snapshot. At one high school in which I taught, in a single administration of the Algebra Regents Examination (the State Standardized Algebra final exam), NOT A SINGLE STUDENT in the whole school scored in the 90s. Contrast that with the year that I took algebra as a student: In three classes in our district that took the exam that year, perhaps total 75 students or so, not a single student scored BELOW the 90s. When the focus is “doing what you have to do to get students to pass,” the focus is not on learning, building understanding, or scaffolding for continued study. The focus is instead on a short-term, quick-fix, half-assed solution that benefits NO ONE, and the illusion of the higher pass rate, suggesting a much higher quality of education that what is actually transpiring, is convincing enough for education stakeholders to look the other way, ignorantly happy with their smaller box of cereal.

And by the way, with regard to the New York State Algebra Regents, WYS is not WYG.  This leads me to a third example of our data-cravenness and how we use it to dupe ourselves into thinking we’re getting more than we actually are: the phenomenon of the “raw” score and the “scaled” score, which exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to create a curve to mask actual performance data. 

For example, on the New York State Algebra Regents exam again, students are given a score out of 100, a "scaled score," and it is very easy (and most people, even many teachers and guidance counselors make this mistake) to think of this as a percentage – an 83 on the Regents means you got an 83% on the test, a low B, right?

That is SOOOOOO not the case.

View this chart – this is a conversion chart for the June 2011 administration of the NYS Algebra Regents.  A total of 87 points were available to be earned by students on the exam.  65% of 87 is about 56.5, the number of points out of 87 that would need to be earned by a student for the Regents Exam score to actually reflect the percentage correct that the student achieved.  But oh, no.  A passing grade of 65 is granted by a student’s successfully earning a whopping 31 points (the "raw score").  That’s a passing grade for UNDER 36% correct.

And what’s worse, standard policy in New York State is that even if a student fails the entire course, all four academic quarters, a passing grade on the Regents Exam is de facto full passing credit earned for the course.

So in other words, a student could do absolutely-feckin’-nothing  from September through May, cram for the Regents exam in June, do a 40% job, and PASS THE WHOLE YEAR based on that 40% on that one end-of-year assessment.  Guess what grade the school must put onto their transcript for the final course grade?  You got it – 65.  And the Algebra teacher gets to brag about how high her passing rate is.  And she will, no doubt.

How’s that cereal tasting, shoppers?

The high-stakes, do-or-die importance we place on that final binary – pass or no pass – sometimes makes us do things we normally might not do.  By this, I refer to my final observation (for this post) on the negative effects of wanton gradelust: outright fraud.

Empirically, grade fraud is no different than the rampant grade inflation that goes on on a regular basis in our schools, it's just more tangible and identifiable, as it is a discrete, single act, as opposed to a modus operandi. Really, how is "Teacher x erased and changed two multiple choice answers so Johnny could get a 65 instead of a 61" any different or worse than "Teacher y gave Jenny a 65 in the course even though she only earned a 61 because s/he felt bad for her?" Doomsday fiction?  Not so much:  Read and weep.

If you have children in public schools (or private schools, or charter schools, it makes no difference), then please, if you value their education, as opposed to their grades, be wary of "creeping gradualism," and don’t walk away smiling with the 8.9 ounce box of Cheerios in your cart, thinking you got a great deal.

It will only leave you, later, when it’s too late, wanting for more. 

Or am I just an alarmist?  I dunno (actually, yes, I do, but this seems to have become my regular sign-off, so I guess I’m stuck with it), I’m just A.S.K.ing…

“Open hailing frequencies, Mr. Worf.”

A year or so ago, I applied for a job, an administrative position, at a nearby private school.  This was a position I really wanted;  it wasn’t just a job for the purpose of receiving a salary and benefits (though the benefits – including tuition waivers for my children – were a major inducement).  My two decades of professional preparation in education seemed to have prepared me for this exact position, almost as if its appearance in the online want ads was preordained.

Does anybody still call them “want ads” anymore?  But I digress…

I submitted my vita, cover letter and a number of references.  And I was quite gratified when, from what I can only imagine must have been a national pool of candidates, I was contacted about setting up an interview.  This was good news, though it was not without its special set of stressors.  As a “corpulent American” (are we a protected class of citizen?) I am incredibly aware of the fact that clothing, even proper, businesslike formalwear, does not sit on me the way it does on, say, George Clooney.  My body makes the fabric do things it normally wouldn’t, and probably, if you asked it, would not wish to.  That, plus, men are generally expected to wear ties.

Oh, dear.

I love ties.  Every time I’m in Macy’s (which happens often, as I have to walk through it to get to the stores in the mall that I actually shop at), I hover droolingly over the Jerry Garcia ties, wishing: a.) that I could afford them; and, b.) that my neck were more human-sized.  For even if I spent $200 on eight gorgeous Garcias, I would not have the shirts to wear them with.  Oh, I have plenty of shirts; all of my shirts have 18-½ or 19 inch necks.  And the shirts fit me fine, relatively speaking.  Except up there.  For me to wear a tie requires a shirt with a 20-inch neck, and that means specialty stores, and that means $50-60 for a shirt, and those are the sale prices.

To put this in perspective, an adjunct college instructor in upstate New York who teaches a full load – three classes in the fall, three in the spring – grosses, if he or she is lucky enough to land at a better-paying institution, around $23,000.  Extra-duty assignments (tutoring, paid exam grading, etc…) can bump that up to around $30,000.  There are no benefits.  Adjuncts do not get asked to teach summer sessions.  Sixty-dollar shirts ain’t gonna happen.  Ixnay on the Arciasgay.
 
But then, on top of that, I found out that the interview was going to be a Skype interview.  My first.

The concept is simple enough.  Every Star Trek episode ever, where captain Kirk, or Picard, or whoever the spin-off shows’ captains were (I gave up after a while) barks “On screen!” to have a video chat with some alien life form aboard another ship – that’s Skype.  It’s a pretty simple principle.  And aside from the fact that the starship U.S.S. Enterprise was never cursed with Windows Vista, it should work pretty much the same – smooth, seamless and natural, like talking to a person sitting across the table from you.

Not so much.  Webcams are small, with a very limited field of vision. I was interviewed by a committee, which meant that they had to, whenever a different person wanted to question me, physically lift and re-orient the webcam so that I could see that person.  It’s also unusual to have such artificially limited feedback; not only is the field of vision limited, but the resolution, both audio and video, is less than optimal.  There is a lot of subtle information, signals and other cues –subvocalizations, body language, proxemics, not to mention whatever may be going on off-webcam – that gets missed on Skype.
 
But the worst part is that humans, when speaking with other humans, like to look each other in the eye, and it seems that no matter what you do with Skype, you can never actually achieve this.  If you look straight into the webcam, you cannot track the facial expressions of the person to whom you are speaking.  If you look straight into the monitor, you are looking the person in the (virtual) face, yes, but your own face will show up as looking somewhat askew or aslant.  (When I catch my own image in the inset picture myself and see that, I tend to subconsciously make a slight corrections to “straighten myself out,” and this of course has the effect of making it even worse.)

For me, it all heightened the anxiety of the experience.  And I hate most interviews, even on a good day.  I find them trite and formulaic. Even interviewers I’ve spoken with hate the generic boilerplate questions that they are directed to ask.  The format itself is in no way an organic conversation, and is of limited value in assessing the worth of a candidate.  Skype makes this even worse, for me anyway, and I think in my case, it shows.  This does not bode well for my prospects with any would-be employer that wishes to interview me via Skype.  (If you are a would-be employer, please disregard this paragraph.  These aren't the sentences you're looking for.)

I get it. I know why employers do this.  It’s not to be trendy for the sake of trendiness; let’s leave that to grade-school educators and their stupid keep-up-with-the-Joneses mentality towards tech adoption.  In a national search, you simply have to extend the same privileges to all of your applicants equally.  I lived only 20 miles away from the school, but other applicants may well have been in other states, or even other countries.  It would not have been fair to offer me a face-to-face interview, and not offer it the other candidates.  And these days, in this economy, I suspect only schools with 9+-figure endowments are willing to pay to fly in interview candidates.  No hard feelings.  "Bygones," as Ally McBeal's  Richard Fish would have said.

I did not get the job.  Was it because there was a more qualified candidate?  Sure, that’s a possibility.  I’m good, but I’m not so hubristic as to think that I de facto trump anyone that a national search would turn up.  (Yeah, I kind of am.)  All I’m saying is that the interview didn’t help.

Maybe Q (of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame) had a point:

"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."

Fast forward to this year.  One of my colleges announced openings for two tenure-track positions in my department.  I love this particular school (anybody on the Committee reading this?) and am desperately hoping I get one of the two positions.  I left teaching in secondary schools two years ago, and if I can afford it, I do not expect to go back.  (Click and read here for more on that choice.)  English, however, is a nasty discipline in which to try to find full-time work.  In the nine or so years that I have been teaching and applying for college English positions, I have learned that it is perhaps the most competitive of the disciplines, often with well over 100 CVs submitted for each tenure-track position at the community college level.  Time for that hubris to kick in.

When I was informed that I had been selected for a first-stage interview, I was ecstatic. (I had applied last year, and the year before, and not even been granted a preliminary interview!)  I have no numbers, but I’m guessing they would have whittled down 200 applicants to perhaps 20-30 for that first round.  Then I got the email:  “Please send the Committee your Skype contact information and select one of the available time slots.”

To quote “Ashes to Ashes” by David Bowie, “Oh no, not again.”

The interview was, in my opinion anyway, a train wreck.  For all of the reasons I mentioned above, and more.  However, I made it through to the next round, a fact I credit to the various Jedi mind tricks I surreptitiously employed to bolster my chances.  (Yes, I know, I pulled an Obama, crossing over between Star Trek and Star Wars.  What of it?  While I'm on the subject, however, do any Star Wars geeks out there know if Jedi are able to use their mind-control techniques over electronic communications media?)

The second round was a teaching demo.  I would imagine that perhaps half, or slightly fewer, of the Skype interviewees landed teaching demos, I’ll guess 8-12.  This is more my element.  I think I performed pretty well in the sample lesson, though I had to wait a week to find out I had made it through to the next round, which was a references check.  I was pretty sure that no one on my references list had any grudges or vendettas to fulfill against me, so I thought that would go well.  It took nine or ten days for me to for me to come home from work and find this message on my machine:  “Hi, Andrew, this is so-and-so from the Provost’s office.  We’d like you to contact us to set up an interview for the English position.”

Woo-hoo! Hot damn!

I just got off the phone with the Provost’s executive assistant a couple of hours ago. She tells me that it’s going to be a Skype interview.

*facepalm*  Damn you, Q.

Educational Technology: Purchase Should Not Pre-date a Plan.

[Updated August, 2017]

This is (sort of) a sequel to my lighter, fluffier post from earlier.  That was the jab, this is the uppercut.  This will read better after having read that one.  Warning: This post is a bit more dense than most.  Educators will be fine, laypersons might need a Jolt Cola or something to get through it...

I noticed technology’s real and tangible impact for the first time as a teacher in the realm of mathematics.  When I was a student in high school and college, all math textbooks had an appendix consisting of various tables and charts.  When I needed the sine or cosine of a certain angle, or had to calculate a logarithm, I would consult a chart in the back of the book, and the figures would be there for me.  If the precise figure that I needed was not there, I would perform a mathematical interpolation to calculate the number I needed.  One day, sometime in the early 90s, when I was a new-ish teacher, I had the opportunity to work with students in mathematics, and I noticed that these charts were not in their (newer) textbooks.  I searched everywhere in the book, and then I realized the hard truth: Of course they weren’t there. Every student had a scientific calculator to more quickly and precisely do the job for them.  I also noticed, however, that none of the students really understood the relationships between sine and cosine, what interpolation was, or the greater mathematical context of logarithms.  They only knew how to “get an answer.”  I became very fearful for this generation of young students.

It has only gotten worse.

As a former foreign language teacher, I have likewise found auto-translators, computerized dictionaries, spelling-checkers and grammar checkers to be double-edged swords. A fun exercise:  Take your favorite short story, essay or article.  Copy the fist 2-3 paragraphs into Google Translate.  Translate to any common high school second language (Spanish, French, whatever…).  Then cut the foreign-language translation and paste in back into the translation engine, and re-translate it back to English.  Behold the mutated crap that the process yields.  This is what it looks like to a Spanish teacher when a kid turns in something in Spanish that has been auto-translated instead of organically written.

As an English teacher, I have found the Internet to be an incredible source of content, but also a tempting opportunity for plagiarism in what seems to be an increasing tendency towards immediate gratification and lazy shortcut-taking.  Just this semester [Spring 2013], I have logged six egregious incidents, one of which resulted in an expulsion (the student was apparently a multiple offender).  I explored the dark side of human nature with regards to plagiarism in an earlier post.

To successfully incorporate technology, a teacher must therefore know what to incorporate, when to incorporate it, how to incorporate it, and most importantly, must know what technology can and cannot do. Teachers need to know their students’ needs, and be able to merge the technology seamlessly into a carefully wrought educational plan; computers are not like sprinkles on a cupcake – just putting them there does not make things sweeter.  (Or maybe it’s better to say that it is like sprinkles on a cupcake; they make things look better and fancier, but actually do nothing to improve the quality of the cake itself.)  Lastly, it is crucial for teachers to know how to educate themselves about technology – where to go for resources, questions, information, and help. 

Technology is not a panacea, nor can technology swoop in and save the world for teachers, programs, schools and districts in peril.  As a teacher, lack of funding is often blamed for lack of success in the classroom; similarly, lack of resources is often invoked as a cause of woe.  The problem with the way that these complaints are framed is that the clear implication is that more money and more resources would miraculously clear up the problem(s).  And given that educational technology can be very cost-intensive, an axiom is set up that does not necessarily compute:

        (Fig. 1)  More money --> More technology --> Better education

A number of studies show that this statement, though perhaps intuitive, is utterly unsupported, the outcome of which is all too commonly visible in schools everywhere: “…an overemphasis on hardware with scant attention paid to the pedagogical and curricular frameworks that shape how the computers are used is common in educational technology projects throughout the world” (Mark Warschauer, “Demystifying the Digital Divide”).

Warschauer tells of two situations where merely throwing resources at a perceived problem did little to resolve it. An effort by the government of India to provide computer and Internet access publicly to children, in what was dubbed a “minimally invasive education” (Warschauer, “Reconceptualizing the Digital Divide”) project, failed when the social structures were not put into place to monitor and instruct and collaborate in the effort.  A more poignant example perhaps can be found in the town of Ennis, Ireland, population 15,000, which was awarded some $20+ million in 1997 as part of digital grant program to help bring technology-starved Ireland, rapidly emerging from the third world to the first world, into a level to technological sophistication befitting a country on the world stage.  Warschauer reported:

“The prize money that Ennis received represented over $1,200 US dollars per resident, a huge sum for a struggling Irish town.  At the heart of Ennis’s winning proposal was a plan to give an Internet-ready personal computer to every family in the town.  Other initiatives included an ISDN line to every business, a website for every business that wanted one… Ennis was strongly encouraged… to implement these plans as soon as possible.”

Alas, a 2000 visit to Ennis revealed that many of the programs had been disbanded or abandoned, and many of the computers had ended up on the black market.  The technology had been imposed upon the people, and had not been integrated into the people’s social structure.  Warshcauer paints these as cautionary tales for American schools and school districts newly aglow in the warm light of technology, and stresses what he calls “technology for social inclusion.” (The concept of social inclusion is tied in to Freire’s critical literacy, and the notion that educational processes should to some degree invoke, validate, utilize and incorporate those social practices, values and priorities to make the process salient and meaningful for the language learner, but that’s perhaps a blog post for another day; I applaud the general concept, but not the extent to which many Freireans tend to embrace the notion that education is somehow synonymous with hegemony.) 

The goal then, is not to merely heap technology on a people, as if technology were a grand paradigm-leveler that would “even out” or somehow render more manageable all societal, cultural and traditional differences in the world.  Likewise it is folly to assume that technology may be equally applied to all areas and all people without special consideration of how to integrate it. Warschauer pleads for what he calls “culturally-appropriate interaction” (Warschauer, “Language, Identity and the Internet”). Citing difficulties encountered when computerizing schools in deeply traditional Hawai’i, Warschauer makes an observation that must be applied to the educational realm at large: “A number of patterns of Hawaiian interaction have been identified, and these patterns are all too often at odds with how classroom instruction is organized.”
 
Warshcauer’s comments go to the heart of the difficulties that many have with technology’s incorporation into the classroom and into society in general:  It is so prevalent, so powerful, and very quickly growing so important, that either you’re with it, whether or not it fits into your traditions or experiences, or you must abstain from it altogether.  In this he speaks of what some have called “intellectual colonialism” (Anatoly Voronov).  This is the “progressive” (read: “guilt-fueled self-flagellation”) notion that the Internet itself, with the vast majority of its sites in English, and the text-based, literacy-dependent format of its presentation all speak to a subversive re-colonization of the world by White Euro-American cyber-literati. Even Warschauer struggles with this dichotomy:  “To use the Internet fully usually requires access to resources … which are only available to a minority of the world’s people.  In that sense, the Internet can heighten unequal access to information and power.  But in other senses, the Internet is the most liberating medium ever invented” (Warschauer, “Does the Internet Bring Freedom?”). And true, it is well worth it to consider that your students may well cut across all cross-sections of language, culture, poverty, upbringing, custom and expectations. Still, the indictment is a telling one, suggesting on the part of the accuser the errant and overzealous belief that technology is education, as opposed to just one component of a full educational experience.  My advice?  Recognize the “liberating” aspects of technology, as Warschauer calls them, and embrace those aspects even, but never forget that it is the educational process in toto that can and will liberate youth.

Calling technology a highly liberating medium might seem to reinforce the idea that the “poorer” areas are more in need of technological enhancement, and all poor schools need is a nice fat educational technology grant and all will be solved. This, however, makes the faulty assumption that the so-called Digital Divide is an economic Divide.  In Warschauer’s writings, he claims that the so-called Divide is not one of access to technology or techno-dollars.  It is, rather, a divide in literacy, both in general and literal sense, but also in the sense that in lower-performing schools – which also tend to be poorer schools, hence the common confusion – technology tends to be seen as a fix, and is thrown at a problem, not carefully and fully integrated with the pedagogical infrastructure and nurtured with proper teacher training and support.  (Though, I should point out editorially, it is not unreasonable to surmise that this type of training/consultancy is cost-prohibitive in poorer schools, hence its conspicuous absence.) This idea of the problem being not the lack of technology, but the lack of successful implementation of existing technologies, is pervasive.  The lesson for any new teacher is clearly to learn and understand the various applications of available software, hardware, media, platforms, devices, sites, and services, and become fluent in their use.  There is and always will be something new and more modern or flashy, so the alternative is to always be unsatisfied with what you have, and attitude that can only taint a teacher’s daily work with its pessimism.  Remember that money, like technology is a way to get to a destination, not the destination itself.
 
Case in point, Warschauer has suggested that an approach involving “a combination of well-planned and low-cost infusions of technology with content development and educational campaigns targeted to social development is surely a healthy alternative to projects that rely on planting computers and waiting for something to grow” (“Demystifying”).   The United States has its share of poorer areas; one does not need to travel to India or rural Ireland to find abject poverty.  One also does not need to leave the United States to see tragic wastes of technology dollars on classroom situations not ready for the jump to hyperspace:

“The reports were nearly finished, and the teacher was feeling pleased with the results. When I asked to see one, she steered me to a young man whose report she felt was in particularly good shape. Sure enough, as the student clicked through the presentation, I was immediately struck by the clean graphics, the strong colors, and the digestible writing. Then, suddenly, he was done. This was the extent of his report. But its content was no deeper or more complex than what one commonly sees in civics papers done elsewhere, with pencil and paper, by seventh and eighth graders. Mystified, I asked the student how he'd used his time. He estimated having spent approximately 17 hours on the project, only seven of which had been devoted to research and writing. The rest went to refining the presentation's graphics” (Oppenheimer, “Point. Click. Duh”).

In this case, a Massachusetts 11th grade classroom in a relatively well-off area, the millions of dollars that had gone into funding for computers had not gone into adequate training for instructors, who in turn were having students use the computers to do little more than high-tech mimicry of the functions of the pens and pencils that they used to use.  Computers had no higher purpose; there was no gestalt quality to the instruction or the learning, post-technology.  Clearly my earlier axiom (Fig. 1) is revealed to be bogus. The Massachusetts scenario is a delicious, though tragic, example of Warschauer’s characterization of the Digital Divide, which I described earlier.  There was adequate funding in the Massachusetts example, but that clearly did not solve the pedagogical problem of incorporating technology to enhance the learning experience.

Again, the key is well-trained, careful, and skillful planning and incorporation of these technological elements into instructional practices.  Skill, care, and planning are not economically-driven characteristics, and a motivated and industrious teacher can make technology work for him/her. Warschauer simply says, “The key issue is not unequal access to computers but rather the unequal ways in which they are used,” (“Demystifying”).  This is followed up dramatically with a comparison of two studies conducted in California’s Anaheim Union High School District, in which it was clearly demonstrated that, with a nod to Bernie Poole’s Eight Pillars (see below), the program in which online content was supported with and supplemented by “face-to-face teacher and peer interaction” was much more successful than the programs that relied entirely upon students’ intrinsic motivations and auto-tutorial sense of responsibility in the face of little or no feedback or support.

There are numerous scenarios in which a fully computerized classroom can be a benefit.  It is important, however, in situations like this to recall that it is not $60,000 in laptops (or iPads, or tablets) that makes a program work for the students; it is the careful and thoughtful preparation by a team of dedicated teachers and technology specialists who do more than merely offer the computers of as divine sacrifices.  Proper integration of technology into the classroom, ironically enough, requires a human component, offered by Bernie Poole in the form of eight “pillars,” or commandments:

1. Active support must come from the top.
2. A non-dictatorial approach is best.
3. Every school should have a core of teacher-computerists.
4. User-friendly technical support must be available, ideally onsite and on demand.
5. Teachers must come first.
6. Parents and students must be involved in the evolutionary process.
7. An ongoing technology training program must be in place.
8. Teachers must be given the time and freedom to restructure the curriculum around the technology.

Poole’s Eight Pillars are part of an entire online book that is available for free download.  I would strongly recommend that any teacher who is to have a strong technological component in their instruction read it first.  [What is amazing is that even though the piece has not been updated in 11 years (2006), the eight pillars are just as valid now, in 2017, as they were then.] Poole does a respectable job of satisfying both skeptics and devotees, and finds a safe middle ground where technology can be discussed on its merits, rather than focusing on the dizzying potential costs of implementing a “dream” technology set-up which, without proper training and management, would be a squandered investment anyway. 

And so, remembering that we reject utterly the quick-fix notion of more money equals more technology equals more success, we come to the issue of how schools that do not have the means to “fully” computerize can “keep up” in the 21st century.  But even this has been answered in the literature countless times.  The so-called “one-computer classroom” or “single computer classroom” is a reality in many parts of the United States.  The Internet is replete with resources that can serve as a springboard for discussion within a department on how best to maximize the use of available technologies, as opposed to how to maximize the budget for purchasable technologies.  Put another way, a purchase should not pre-date a plan.

America’s diversity is a strength, and technology in the classroom can help us tap into that strength.  But merely throwing technology at the classroom, or merely throwing money at schools and ordering them to “acquire” technology… well, that’s no better than throwing language textbooks at a child and asking him or her to “acquire” English.  Whether the school has one computer per classroom or per student, it is in teacher training, teacher education, strong supportive measures and good quality instruction that technology will find its most useful home.  New teachers should greet this technology not with a healthy curiosity and legitimate desire to test the efficacy of available programs. If nothing else, this exploration on the part of a teacher will confer a comfortable familiarity with educational technologies that can only serve to broaden the teacher’s palette of experiences from which to draw upon in the classroom, and make it much less likely that s/he will be sold on the first flashy thing a tech salesperson suggests, which would only serve to perpetuate the technological travesty of more = better. 

Educational research traditions are constantly in motion, always changing and being upgraded.  Much like our technology.  One thing all educators have in common is the desire to engage their students in the learning process.  Technology, though it be a valuable component in that process is not itself, by definition, the process.   And so above all, teachers should remember that, as Warschauer (“Demystifying”) says, technology must become “a means, and often a powerful one, rather than an end in itself.”

Note:  The above is an only slightly modified version of a treatment I wrote in 2005.  I took it out, dusted it off, and much like my recent revisiting of The West Wing, still seems downright prescient, in that it still feels incredibly timely.  Sure, much has changed since then, and the leaps in technology in the seven years from 2010-2017 far outstrip the gains of the seven year period 1998-2005, from which my initial research sources originally largely came. That this commentary is still vital and applicable is itself noteworthy.

Disclaimer: I myself am a slow adapter and a slow adopter, so maybe I am not (or maybe I am) a choice representative of all of teacherdom.  I love technology’s promise, even as its incursions make me uneasy. I’m not anti-tech, but I often find myself reflexively anti- the people who push tech. 

Do I just need to evolve into the twenty-teens?  Or is education losing its humanity in the face of a technological onslaught?

The Prisoner - What Classic TV Can Teach Us About Tech

[Updated August, 2017]

I have a love-hate relationship with technology in education. 

I love to use technology in my classroom.  In fact, in some ways, I can’t do without it.  Not long ago, I arrived to an 8:00 class all ready to do a scintillating lesson that required use of the computer and LCD overhead projector in a so-called “smart classroom.” The tech didn’t work; there was a problem with the toggle that switched the feed from the Elmo to the computer, and I could not get the computer monitor’s contents displayed on the big screen. For a few minutes I tinkered with it to no avail.  Then I shut down and restarted everything. No dice. I even tried to go all “The Fonz” (you younger teachers fresh out of school will have no idea what I mean by that, and believe me, I weep for you…) and aside from a few chuckles out from my students, reaped no positive results. I glanced up at the clock and realized I had wasted a good 6-8 minutes, out of a 50-minute class, on this pursuit. I paused, uncertain for a few moments. More time wasted. For a short while, I felt quite stupid that my brilliant and carefully choreographed lesson was dashed against the rocks of fickle fate.

See? Technology makes me so crazy, even my metaphors are stupid.

Long story slightly less long, I called an audible, lateral-tossed the football to an alternate me (stupid metaphor #2), and got on with the class, and my extemporaneous lesson was fine. Why?  Because as much as I was hoping to be able to use the technology, I still was well-prepared and conversant in the subject matter, I knew where I was in the course sequence, I had good personal relationships and rapport with my students, and I built the course to be responsive to their needs, as opposed to dragging them kicking and screaming through the course on some pre-determined and inflexible pace. In short, when the tech failed, the human element was there to save the day.

I’m not so sure we’re headed in a good direction with tech. It’s bad enough standardized tests have become practically the gold standard for educational assessment. It’s worse that rigid adherence to bullet-point lists of standards are all that is required to “prove” to an observer that the education is sound and of good quality. In fact, in many schools, as long as your lesson plans have the appropriate sections, list the links to the State Standards, and as long as your instruction follows a particular sequence of steps and a designated format, and as long as you incorporate all the relevant trendy buzzwords from the district’s educational philosophy du jour – probably the product of the ministrations of some high-priced and charismatic outside consultant – you are a “good teacher,” and it doesn’t really matter if your students are benefiting or not: as long as your instruction at least superficially follows the prescribed norms; there just simply isn’t time to provide more thorough analyses of teacher performance, so superficial indicators have to do.

But the superficiality does not stop there. An onslaught of trendy new technological platforms, gadgets and processes are threatening to take the human element even further away from the educational experience.  Now, when most people talk about integrating technology into the classroom, they’re talking about much more than simply projecting traditional content or using web-based communications to interact with students.  Now, students can do class "presentations" with no content, but they look good, and that's just as good as an essay, right? (Buzzword of the day: "alternative assessment.")

Now there’s talk of “a tablet for every student,” or “an iPad for every student.” Wot?

Have you ever seen how well students take care of textbooks? Notebooks? Their own papers? A school I worked at recently didn't even have procedures for being compensated for lost materials such as books, and used to lose some $20,000-$30,000 per year in unreturned supplies.  Just sayin'.

How bad has our love affair with tech gotten? Now, out of expediency (I say laziness, stupidity, and is there an adjectival form of "bandwagon?"), some institutions are even starting to computer-score essays. No, not multiple-choice tests... essays. For the record, I once submitted an essay to be machine-scored.  It got a perfect score (a 6, top score on a six-point rubric).  And it was a very well-written essay. (Duh.) Except for one thing – the essay was total nonsense.  Not only was it not even remotely related to the assigned prompt, but it was not internally consistent. If an Alzheimer’s patient wrote a paper while high on cocaine (yet somehow managing to maintain good grammar, syntax, punctuation, etc…) that would have been my essay.  I did it on purpose. I wanted to see what would happen.

Never put all your trust into something that cannot trust you back.  Except my ’04 Camry.  Love that thing. [Edit - As of August, 2017, it has 294,000 miles or so on it, and is really showing its age. It will not last to the new year, alas.]

I don't think tech is necessarily a bad thing, but I do get the distinct sense that tech is being forced into classrooms because of its "cool" factor and not because students (or faculty, for that matter) are developmentally ready and primed to receive the changes. I think that can and will have disastrous effects.  Too much tech without the human element and you basically have, well… The Matrix.

At just 17 episodes, the British TV series The Prisoner was short-lived, especially by modern standards.  The fact that it’s not a title that’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue might further lend one to think it irrelevant or – gasp! – a failure.  Make no such mistake.

Number Six, the show's ex-secret-agent protagonist, does have a lot to teach us.  My last post on this illustrious television show answered that age-old question: Can’t we all just get along?  (Correct answer: What are you selling?)  In this post, I direct my gentle reader to the episode entitled “The General.”  In it, Number Six learns that a fellow named “The Professor” has created a revolutionary educational process that, by hooking students/subjects up to a sophisticated machine (called “The General”) they may be given the equivalent of a three-credit college course in a matter of minutes.  Soon, The Village (the setting of the show, basically a black site for interrogating and breaking rogue agents) is aflutter with newly erudite scholars of “Europe Since Napoleon,” the title of the first such “course.”  Number Six quickly realizes that everyone who tries to describe what they have learned in the course does so word-for-word each the same as everyone else he encounters.  Realizing that the machine completely eliminates the normally clearly demarcated line “between knowledge and insight,” Number Six correctly deduces that it is intended to be used as a form of mind control in order to control the denizens of The Village and extract information from them. The Villagers’ apparent trust in the process makes them even more susceptible, and Number Six reasons he must destroy The General (which he does, of course) in order to save both himself and his fellow Villagers.

View the full episode here. 

My very next post will be a research-based look at my general angst about our rush to over-technologize American public education.  It will be longer and denser, but more “scholarly.”  And it will read rather as a “Part II” to this post.  Read it!

For now, I leave you with this question: Are we going too far, too fast? Should we not pace ourselves a little bit more? Will upping the tech really change the culture, which is perhaps the real source and reason for school failure? And what exactly is meant by “change the culture,” anyway?  And why am I asking so many questions, when I only said I was going to ask one?