Technology Won't Fix America's Neediest Schools -- It Makes Bad Education Worse 150
theodp writes: In an adapted excerpt from Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology, Univ. of Michigan prof Kentaro Toyama begins: "'Technology is a game-changer in the field of education,'" Education Secretary Arne Duncan once said, and there was a time when I would have agreed. Over the last decade, I've built, used, and studied educational technology in countries around the world. As a computer scientist and former Microsoft employee, I wanted nothing more than to see innovation triumph in the classroom. But no matter how good the design, and despite rigorous tests of impact, I have never seen technology systematically overcome the socio-economic divides that exist in education. Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else. Many people believe that technology 'levels the playing field' of learning, but what I've discovered is that it does no such thing."
Shouldn't this be obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've yet to see any technology that can overcome bad process, bad practice, and bad planning. Why should education be any different?
Marketing may try to sell a magic fix, but reality seems to always win.
Re:Shouldn't this be obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shouldn't this be obvious? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the underlying thinking behind most educational technology is take the work out of the hands of the local practitioner, deskill the teacher. While the sellers and developers of edtech will never admit this is the case and my not even realize it themselves it basically amounts to central planning.
If a computer program is going to teach a kid math the pedagogical approaches it takes will be more or less fixed and ones designed at some central facility somewhere. It wont be the paradigm the local instructor was using and it may or may not add to clarity.
I am in my early 30's depending on who you ask I am either the last of the gen X'ers or among the first of the so called millennials. Outside of some of the education television experiments tried in classrooms on boomers, I saw most of the early experiments in edtech. I had a number of older teachers who had spend years drawing their own little cartoons, crafting their own little narratives to help us understand. I also had younger ones who wanted to try out all the new MECC stuff. I was in Minnesota. If that worked for you great, if not the instructors were mostly caught flat footed with no alternative ideas about how to convey the lesson, unlike the other teachers that had taken the time to develop their own materials.
Central planning isn't any better for education than it is for economies. When edtech stops trying to teach and really starts trying to make teachers more effective it might work. A better hammer will allow a good carpenter to get his framing done faster and possibly even done better. A better hammer isn't a robotic carpenter though, but most edtech attempts to be a robotic teacher.
My sister teaches Highschool math subjects. She loves Mathmatica. She says it lets throw up a visualization on the screen the really helps some of her students get it. Its faster and better than anything she could scribble on the whiteboards. She is using it though in the context of her own lessons to explain her own contrivances that show how to apply the math. Its a generic tool though, while lots of educators use it isn't designed only for education and it isn't designed to teach any specific lessons.
Edtech needs to focus on giving teachers quality general use tools and class room appropriate hardware on which to run them. It does not need to be trying to create a digital textbook equivalent or play instructor on its own.
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Edtech needs to focus on giving teachers quality general use tools and class room appropriate hardware on which to run them. It does not need to be trying to create a digital textbook equivalent or play instructor on its own.
Then problem then becomes one of training time. A teacher with a pad of paper and a pen can follow whatever workflow he or she likes, but operating software tools needs an understanding of the program logic. All edtech starts with the right goals, but then responds to operator (ie teacher) difficulties in the wrong way.
Take, for example, question banks. I mentioned them to my dad (a retired chemistry teacher) and he immediately started ranting about how they were useless because if you didn't put the questi
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Platforms such as Moodle are supposed to by style-agnostic, but doing anything other the basics leads you to have to code up arcane and esoteric dynamic pages, so everyone ends up with static multiple-choice question sheets online.
I'm a Moodle admin, and there are quite a few options for quizzes other than just multiple choice. The problem is that's what most publishers offer. If you're lucky, you'll get a test bank already set up for Blackboard or WebCT, which can be imported directly into Moodle. The worst though are Microsoft Word documents that I have to modify into something else. Thank God for regex! Aiken format [moodle.org] is my go-to format if it's all multiple choice, but I'll also use Gift format [moodle.org] if there's any fill-in-the-blank, mult
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For my money he was "cheating" by not writing his own tests to begin with. His student merely used publicly available information to enhance their studying. It's not like they knew which of the 500 questions he was going to use on his 120 question test.
I agree completely - as I said, test banks are supposed to be databases of the teachers' own questions.
On a similar topic, I'm pretty appalled at the lack of time and attention given to numerical values in a lot of modern maths texts. My lecturers at uni always went out of their way to construct problems that has numbers manageable by mental arithmetic, right up to final step of solving for x -- and typically we weren't asked to do that final step. They took pride in making sure that the task tested our kn
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I think the underlying thinking behind most educational technology is take the work out of the hands of the local practitioner, deskill the teacher.
I don't know if this is the intent, but it is certainly the (predictable) result.
I remember when my daughter was struggling with one of the New Math algorithms for subtraction. Naturally, I was only taught the traditional algorithm in elementary school, so my helping her was out of the question. As good fortune would have it, I had a parent-teacher conference scheduled with her math teacher the following morning, so my plan was to take 2 minutes and have the teacher demonstrate the new algorithm so that I m
Re:Shouldn't this be obvious? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, the day we get technology capable of doing the same for education will also be the day where we have technology sufficient to render obsolete all educated workers, so the fact that technology has finally fixed schools will be a footnote in a much more dramatic restructuring of basically everything.
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so much that it made the bad carpenters and the good carpenters more or less indistinguishable.
Not at all. Mechanized production requires skilled labor too. The level of skill needed or responsibility for the final product isn't as extensive as someone who needs to maintain their own workspace and is completely responsible for the end product. After all, the factory owner and/or management provides the environment that the factory worker works in and is responsible for most or all of the workflow and end product.
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Very much this. Any competent educator knew this already, of course and any actually smart person suspected.
This matches other completely unfounded beliefs in technology being able to fix people though, see for example the constant stupid claims that the right choice of programming language will turn bad coders into good ones.
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Well, and of course the biggest factor in educational outcomes has nothing to do with what happens at school--it's parents.
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More accurately the biggest determiner is how much the student invests in the education they are receiving.
So overcoming bad parents would require the student investing heavily on their own absent or contrary to parental guidance on the matter. That occasionally happens but is extremely hard for teachers to make happen.
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If I attend a good, or at least reasonable, school; the ROI is both better and more visible: If I do a d
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Kudos for actually trying to think through the situation as it might appear in the minds of the students. One of the big advantages that upper middle class students have is that they have easy access to many, many living and breathing examples of why there is likely to be a good payoff to hitting the books. In a very poor neighborhood, a good job that you have seen around the neighborhood might literally be a janitorial job, running a register, mowing lawns for a landscaping contract outfit, or running a
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Do you have a source for any of that BS you typed?
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Obviously, evil has triumphed a long time ago.
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In poorly run schools, there is also the problem of students being too disruptive. In some districts, they've even stopped punishing students for most infractions because it's racist in its results. Without enough order, classes can't be taught.
Home life is half the problem, but the worst school are broken where a good home life can't help.
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This is hugely ignored. My first and biggest notice of difference from going from a public to private school school was the level of discipline.
I grew up in school where I sat in the back because I was quite. The teacher would spend literally 80% of he time keeping 4 students from talking/fighting/disturbing the rest of the class and 20% on 3 other kids who couldn't read. My grade school education was wholly self taught.
My first day of private school, we were taken in small groups to meet with the principal
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Re:Shouldn't this be obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day, my own anecdotal experience was that disruption is a big deal. I sat in both honors classes and "regular" classes back in the day. There was a huge difference in how much you learned based on how disruptive the class was. When I was in a class filled with kids who were dedicated to getting good grades and learning things, you got shit done. I learned less, had less taught to me, and was less able to concentrate in the regular class. I still personally got good grades, but that was because the class was dumbed down so much, it was hard to understand how anyone could have done poorly, let alone failed those classes, even without being a nerd.
In the end, I realized that I worked to get in honors classes as much to simply not be in the regular classes as I did to excel. You literally could not learn even easier things very well in a disruptive class.
Personally, I think we need to pick out the disruptive cases, get them in smaller classes with more structure, and get them out of the way of people who want to learn. Then everyone, including the disruptive kids, will probably be more successful.
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Very true, but, you know, this has two problems: 1.) It cost money and 2.) it creates educated, knowledgeable citizens that may just form their own opinions of things. Especially 2.) seems a valid reason why the ruling class does not want this to happen.
Re: Shouldn't this be obvious? (Score:2)
1.) It cost money
I don't see this being a reason given the vast sum of money being spent on technology for the classroom.
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Ah, but for technology being bought, the money goes to very powerful technology companies that often have huge profit margins for this sort of thing.
Re: Shouldn't this be obvious? (Score:2)
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I think you argument is too simplistic: Availability of money in the public sector depends very much on what it is going to be spent.
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Well, and of course the biggest factor in educational outcomes has nothing to do with what happens at school--it's parents.
Blaming parents is a cop-out. Sure, parental attitudes matter, but many government policies exacerbate that problem. The worst results are in schools that have a concentration of dysfunctional families. The kids have no role models, and the teachers are overwhelmed by so many poorly performing students. Housing vouchers, that enable parents with young children to move out of dysfunctional neighborhoods, can make a big difference, and can pay for themselves in reduced crime and other social changes. Evi
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Blaming parents is a cop-out.
No it isn't; it's the crux of the problem. In school districts with lots of involved parents, the schools are good because the parents insist on it. Kids that come from homes where parents do not value education hardly ever succeed academically. There are always occasional exceptions, but by in large parental involvement is the single biggest predictor of academic success.
Re:Shouldn't this be obvious? (Score:4, Interesting)
Spot on. A friend teaches in a tough area. The only time the parents interact is when little johnny or susie get anything less than a B. He has a notebook he carries at all times. When the parent calls/shows up, he rattles off the child did not submit a single piece of homework, or could not be bothered to show up, etc. I remember one story where the parent is there with child, and the parent says to the child, "I am trying to be angry with your teacher, but your making it difficult". He can't fail them, because if he did, he'd get fired. The system is so broken at this point it infuriates me. We spend on average 9 thousand dollars per student. 9 THOUSAND dollars. For a class of 30 that is over a quarter of a million bucks. For kids that cannot tie their shoes. The school he teaches at has a squadron of guards who really cannot do much because if they do, they get fired. Case in point, a pair of girls are having a knife fight. Two guards restrain the girls and one gets cut in the process. Net result, the girls are suspended for 2 days. For aggravated assault, a two day suspension. Really, I know I am old but in my day, they'd be gone to juve for the rest of the year. Other fun facts are he is not allowed to give homework for weekends or especially holidays, would not want to spoil the child's weekend/holiday. He cannot send problem students to the vice principle, he gets reprimanded. The school has day care for all the single mothers.
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Blaming parents is a cop-out.
No it isn't; it's the crux of the problem.
In aeronautical engineering gravity is the crux of the problem. But would you hire an AE who blamed all his problems on excessive gravity? Just like gravity, bad family environments are not going to just magically go away, so we should have policies that deal with that.
parental involvement is the single biggest predictor of academic success
Baloney. Family income, and parental IQ scores are much more accurate predictors of academic success. Parental involvement is correlated with academic success, but there is surprisingly little evidence for causation. The authors of "Frea
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Blaming parents is a cop-out.
No it isn't; it's the crux of the problem. In school districts with lots of involved parents, the schools are good because the parents insist on it. Kids that come from homes where parents do not value education hardly ever succeed academically. There are always occasional exceptions, but by in large parental involvement is the single biggest predictor of academic success.
Here is the software developer version of teachers complaining about parents:
My users are too stupid to figure out my user interface. When my coworkers and customers with similar technical prowess use the software they find it very usable, but the rest of my users are just too dumb. Its not my fault they can't use a computer properly.
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You know what they say - make an idiot-proof system and then somebody will make a better idiot.
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Here's something that many people don't realize; children need more parental support today than they did 25 years ago. I see what my kids have to do in school, and there is so much more learning that takes place outside of the school. Projects, independent reading, and between 5-10 hours of homework per week.
That is a great-unequalizer between good families and bad families. At least when most of the learning was done in school, the results depended on the kids' willingness to learn. By extending the reach
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And some of the worst cases is when you have brilliant teachers and parents who could care less [pinimg.com].
Re:Shouldn't this be obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
My wife was a teacher. Her three biggest complaints were:
1) Parents who just didn't care. The child could be failing and my wife could try contacting them multiple times to try to help the child out, but the parents just couldn't be bothered. The parent sends the signal (both to the teacher and to the child) that the child and the child's education isn't important. Of course, the kid is going to pick up on that. (Kids are often smarter than we give them credit for.)
2) Parents who cared too much. This might be more of an issue because she taught in a private school. The parents would think that because they paid tuition, their kid deserved an A no matter what the quality of the kid's work. They wouldn't even bother looking at the child's work, but would march into my wife's classroom to demand that C-level work be graded as an A because "she works for them."
3) Administration that gets in the way. Sometimes the administration can help teachers out. They can assist in the previous 2 cases to back the teacher up and let the teacher do his/her job more effectively. All too often, though, administration comes up with "ideas" on how to improve teaching without consulting the teachers. This is analogous to a PHB deciding on a new coding strategy without consulting the programmers. When this happens, the teachers find themselves trying to be effective teachers while jumping through more and more useless hoops.
After my wife left the profession, a fourth obstacle really kicked into high gear as well:
4) Politicians/Private Companies. These people come in - either with a desire for profits or to draw in votes - with big ideas for how to improve education. They don't consult with teachers - and often will vilify them to silence any teacher objections - and will push their plans through. Like #3 above, teachers find themselves having to jump through increasingly complex hoops which render them incapable of teaching effectively. This, then, "proves" that teachers are no-good so that politicians and private companies can fire them to make way for more profitable employees who will stick to the private company provided teaching scripts.
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#1, #2 are mere nuisances compared to #3. Administrative interference caused my wife to quit early in her career. The only thing keeping my mother in teaching is that she's close to retirement.
#4 is evil and the roots are deep. Increasingly, teachers are incapable of teaching (either by training or policy).
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But, based on this part:
Couldn't technology help facilitate that, potentially at lower cost? "Hello my name is Sanjay^H^H^H^H^H^HBrian and I would be glad to assist you with your maths lessons today, what seems to be the problem?"
Re:Shouldn't this be obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
That's pretty racist and stereotypical. Sanjay helps with tech support. Ming helps with math.
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Exactly. I used to teach at a community college and my colleagues and I would ask that question constantly to the people who thought throwing technology at something would fix it. Essentially a bad process is like driving a car into a brick wall at 35mph. Throw in some technology and we now hit that wall at 70mph. We're still hitting the brick wall!
Re:Shouldn't this be obvious? (Score:4, Funny)
So what you're saying is, eventually we'll smash through the brick wall, so we just need to use more technology?
it's not bad process (Score:5, Insightful)
I love the way everyone in America tries their best to ignore the disadvantages of poverty and the privilege that comes with money
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It's a lack of money. The class sizes are too large and they mix the special ed kids in with the other students so that they are constantly getting interrupted while an undertrained teach tries their best. Meanwhile the parents are broke so the kids game tons of problems at home.
I love the way everyone in America tries their best to ignore the disadvantages of poverty and the privilege that comes with money
The problem is that while I'm sure there are plenty of legitimately disadvantaged people who are trying their best to get an education but can't due to underfunded or incompetent schools, there are also people that just don't try in school. Whether it's plain immaturity, a "doing well in school is for " attitude, bad parenting, or something else entirely, the number of people that simply aren't there to be successful is astounding.
Even though there is a soft correlation between being richer and trying har
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It's still pretty unlikely.
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You have no idea how schools are funded, do you? (Score:2)
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The one arguable exception(which, unfortunately, serves to help the deluded cling to their delusions) is that technology does(and long has) have a great deal to do with how easy generating and distributing documents(and more recently sound and video) is.
If(and only if) you are already ready to learn on your own, or are receiving suitable assistance from competent teachers, technolo
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I've yet to see any technology that can overcome bad process, bad practice, and bad planning. Why should education be any different?
But you're implying that the problem here is bad process, practice, and planning by the teachers (or other layers of the school system). While that's marginally true in some cases (vis a vis the problem of essentially unfireable bad teachers protected to absurd degrees by overly empowered public employee unions with too much control over state and county policies), the issue is - leaving aside genetics/damage - elsewhere. This is cultural. It starts and ends at home. Kids are primed to be productively educ
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False early advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I have seen, children with early access to technology treat them as just another toy. They may be more familiar with some interfaces and know how to do some basic tasks but do not have a great advantage over someone introduced to computers at a later age who is interested in learning about them. You need some basic skills to use a computer. You need to be able to read and write. Some basic math skills and typing are helpful. Once you have the basics you can add technology as a supplement. It is not a replacement for the basics of learning which can still be done with a simple piece of paper and a pencil.
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From what I have seen, children with early access to technology treat them as just another toy. They may be more familiar with some interfaces and know how to do some basic tasks but do not have a great advantage over someone introduced to computers at a later age who is interested in learning about them.
I agree. With all due respect, I have interviewed a lot of young people for IT work who (like most millenials) are highly convinced that they're the most tech-savvy and technology competent of anyone. Truth is, 'tech-savvy' means they know how to use Twitter or post pics from their iPhone onto Facebook. There's no real understanding (or care, really) of what's going on behind the scenes.
It's not their fault of course- Many of them grew up with computers that were more on the nerfed and 'user-friendly' en
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When I was a kid, I had a book called the Young Naturalist, or something like it. Published probably sometime in the mid-80s. It was full of nature activities: building a bat house, setting up a freshwater aquarium with fauna from your local creek, how to distinguish and identify bird calls, that sort of thing.
Towards the end of the book, there was a chapter on computer-aided nature observation. The book claimed that if you had a microcomputer, with a little BASIC know-how and a little bit of math, you coul
Tools not crutches (Score:4, Insightful)
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PowerPoint in Classroom (con'd)
Re:Tools not crutches (Score:5, Insightful)
In the light of the above, it is by no means certain that these boundaries are surmountable.
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Children that come from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds tend to be more able than disadvantaged children. Why? One reason is that privileged background afford them better support system and more stimulating environment. Another reason, is that contrary to the prevailing social narrative, not everyone is born equal or could achieve anything. There are very practical limitations imposed by intelligence that cannot be overcome by motivation alone. Intelligence also happen to be highly heritable trait and it is strongly correlated with "privileged socioeconomic background".
Correlation is not causation. You started your post with a possible mechanism not involving genetics, then suggested another hypothesis built on the same data. Tthe last time I saw any data on correlations between genetics and intelligence, the identified genetic markers only accounted for about 2 IQ points between them, which is hardly better than the standard error in the mean. Furthermore, need I point out that rich successful mrn often marry trophy wives? How does that leave us in terms of heredity...?
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I can definitively state that you haven't spent any time looking in the past couple decades. Start with Wikipedia article on Heritability of IQ. Pay attention to twin studies.
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Poverty could not be solved unless we are willing to provide guaranteed income. No matter how
Actually helping poor children (Score:3)
If you're interested in actually helping poor children, the example to look at is Louisiana [washingtonpost.com].
A lot of people are interested in maintaining the current system because it works for them, regardless of how much it harms poor children.
Learn from the wealthiest (Score:3, Interesting)
The wealthiest forbid their kids to use tablets and smartphones. They know very well that it hampers attention and ultimately intelligence.
Accessing teh Google is not how you are going to learn things. At best you will learn how to search things with Google. But the ability to retain, analyse, syntethise and assimilate information is a completely different matter.
Remember guys: "Smartphones, Dumbpeople !"
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Saying no to google is like saying no to a card catalog. That's all Google (search) is - a way to look information up. Determining how to find information is a very useful skill.
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Saying no to google is like saying no to a card catalog. That's all Google (search) is - a way to look information up. Determining how to find information is a very useful skill.
And I raise Rule 34 here.
Google is nothing like the card catalogs I was raised with. My head asplode.
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Huh? Can you back that up with some evidence? I'm not in the super wealthy class, but do know some of them. They all let their kids use smartphones and tablets. Just as I let my kids use them and so do all my friends. Sure, there are the occasional families that don't allow access or restrict access, but those are few and far between - much like the families without TVs when I was growing up in the 80s.
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Sorry, but infomation is useless if you don't know how to handle it.
I could give you the information to help you see your way out of the fallacy you have constructed for yourself, but I'm sure you wouldn't know how to handle it. Therefore, I won't even bother. It is, after all, for your own good.
Woo. AC responds to a post discussing education theory with no substantive information. I must be wrong, patronising AC says so!
Money and technology cannot replace what's missing (Score:1)
You mean parents? (Score:3)
" Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else."
Those are called parents. I would bet good money that children with a stable home with both parents tend to do better in school. Teachers and tech can only do so much.
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You cast the pot with the clay you have, not the clay you want.
Yes, parents are immensely important - and kids that have two (or more) good ones have an advantage. This doesn't mean that you can throw your hands up in the air and give up on marginalized kids. Teachers do a lot more in schools than just show off the pythagorean theorem or bloviate about what old dead white men did. They also teach social skills and fill in the gaps that parents can't always get to. This is another "social good" of public edu
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But anyone who tells people to avoid having children without first forming a family is name-called. Because politics and social signaling are important to the name-callers, and children aren't.
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Thanks. Your comment makes a political point and provides a social signal to like-minded peers. It obviously does not help any children. You have provided a valuable example.
Begone, foul troll. (Score:2)
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Of course there are correlations between being well off or poor an
"...marginalized kids." (Score:2)
"...marginalized kids."
And once again, we blame everyone but the kid themselves for the kid. It had to be something that was DONE to them. There's no such thing as a marginal kid, only good kids who have been marginalized through no fault of their own, because they were helpless in the throes of a marginalizing situation.
Cluebat: There's such a thing as marginal kids.
Before all other lessons, we should likely be teaching personal responsibility. You do not "give a kid a good education". A kid *takes* th
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But sometimes you only have enough for a cup.
A teacher with a classroom full of kids that have parents that make little to no effort to be parents can only do so much. The simple truth is it is dumb to expect anyone to do more to educate your child or care more about your child than you do.
This is not throwing up my hands at the problem but point out that the solution are the parents as is often the problem.
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I'm not against contraception, but I am against just pulling a rubber over the major issue of what leads to that many children: the inability to control yourself.
We're telling everyone that its all natural and awesome to have sex, but we've also managed to turn sex into a purely recreational activity, which it is not.
Its not purely a recreational activity, but it is also a recreational activity. And in a modern society, it is primarily a recreational activity. Sex being primarily a procreation activity is as ancient as life being primarily a search for food.
Humans, like almost all animals, are meant to have sex as often as possible. Evolution "made" it so fun so we would do it more. For most animals frequent sex is necessary to have a sufficient number of offspring. That is no longer the case for humans, but our bodies
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"Some parents can be successful at brainwashing their children into being obedient and subservient enough to forgo sex, but any children with a mind of their own who are able to find a partner are going to have sex."
Gee because no kids would decide that delaying gratification is a good plan...
Don't generalize much do you?
"high-quality adult guidance" (Score:1)
"Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else."
I believe we call them PARENTS !
Emphasis on the plural.
Poor children (and Americans in general -more out of wedlock children than ever) often don't have two parents.
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The first piece of technology you have to master.. (Score:3)
Education requires intelligence (Score:3)
Kids at heart want to learn the cool stuff. But to get to the cool stuff, you have to learn a whole crapload of boring stuff.
The thing is, the 'boring stuff' can be made fun - with a lot of creative work by a human teacher.
Technology can't do that.
Throw in the fact that wealthy parents encourage their kids, assure them of the opportunities, and give them extra resources that poor parents don't.
So no, technology can't cure the problem.
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The thing is, the 'boring stuff' can be made fun - with a lot of creative work by a human teacher. Technology can't do that.
Think about the actions you do when having fun with technology. If it wasn't a game, smashing the same four buttons over and over would not be fun. But the technology has made it fun. Once someone figures out how to make teaching a certain principle fun, technology can replicate that solution the world over, instead of being bottled up in a single classroom.
Technology has greatly improved education (Score:3)
In my experience, recent advances in technology have greatly improved education. You got your paper, made in bulk from fast growing trees, now cheap enough that it's basically free. You got your printing press, now an advanced printing press that can be changed easily enough to keep all your books modern, probably less than 5 dollars per textbook plus the copyright cost. You got your pencils (I prefer the mechanical ones, no more sharpening pencils for me) and erasers. You got your ball point pens (no more inkwells for children to be children near). And you got chalkboards and whiteboards. And calculators, whose invention has made simple arithmetic no longer the ultimate in school mathematics. And you got your vaccines, so no more fear of catching deadly diseases in class.
Re:Technology has greatly improved education (Score:4, Interesting)
This.
I like to think of technology as a rising tide; it raises all boats. It doesn't make dinghies into yachts.
Technological improvements in teaching tools don't help underprivileged children more than privileged children. They improve things equally for everyone.
This doesn't mean that everyone will get the same benefit. There are at least four factors that will still affect the success of children in school, regardless of technological tools:
1) Parental involvement and investment (temporal, emotional and monetary).
2) Community culture. e.g., gang activity, health of relationships with local authorities.
3) Individual intelligence.
4) Teacher skill and investment.
Properly applied (using experimentally proven methods), new technology improves school learning. Giving children new tools will not, however, improve the performance of uninterested children more than interested ones.
the bullshit it strong with this one (Score:2)
If that's a goal, you want to change education so that it improves the performance of students coming from poor backgrounds, while not improving the performance of students who come from middle class and above backgrounds, because otherwise, the "divide" remains. That may fit your political predilections, but it certainly isn't a goo
Enablers of disengagement (Score:3)
Every new teaching tool that comes along is used as an excuse by many parents and other adults to spend less time engaged with children. The advent of television and educational programming has allowed at least two generations of parents to feel better about letting their television raise their kids.
The changing expectations of the scope of responsibility public schools have in raising children has allowed parents to disengage, believing that it's someone else's job to talk to their kids, to counsel them, to provide good examples.
Now we have the false premise that better access to technology is going to solve the same problems that haven't been solved by all the other parental surrogates that haven't worked before.
Meanwhile, kids who have more accessible and better engaged parents continue to do better in school despite the best efforts of less available and disengaged parents to fill that gap with money, objects and government.
Totally agree (Score:2)
Technology alone can't fix education problems. Applying it where it's useful is a good thing, but school districts shouldn't be wasting money on tech just for the sake of having it. That money can be better spent paying teachers a decent salary.
Public schools have to take everyone who comes their way, a problem charter and private schools don't have. Therefore, it stands to reason that you're going to get a close-to-normal distribution of abilities in your students. Some just aren't going to be as successfu
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly this. Technology enhance education wonderfully, but it isn't One Size Fits All. My son had issues writing due to muscular issues. He was given a Netbook to use and his writing improved dramatically. Give the same Netbook to another kid and their writing might not change at all. You can't just toss the same technology at every kid and expect miraculous improvement
Tech is a tool to teach (Score:2)
Yes.
The solution is well paid, professionally trained teachers in well-funded classrooms.
We know this. Now we have another study telling us so in quantifiable terms.
I went to some pretty crappy schools (Score:3)
How this would have helped would be somewhat vague. But it would have done at least four things. One, it would have made up for the horrifically terrible edcation we were getting. Two it would have given us the confidence to say that we actually knew a few things and to strive for something such as aiming for top tier schools. Three it would have filled a huge gap that our schools were leaving that we crudely filled by teaching ourselves to program using the crap we could find in libraries. And finally it might have actually impressed someone enough in higher education that we could have all made the leap into good schools.
Now this doesn't necessarily translate to success for massive amounts of children in schools. We were fairly self-motivated so we could do things then and would have done more with access to the resources of today.
But for the average kid today with full access to Coursera and all the Khans etc the path still isn't very clear as to where it could take them. I don't think that many people have a clear idea as to where all this is leading. For instance if a teenager were to do very well with MITs offerings does that improve their ability to get into MIT one iota; or any other school for that matter?
Then there is the whole other matter of who is putting education into the schools themselves. That tends to be wildly corrupt companies that have massive sales forces with bizarrely incestuous relationships with the school systems administrators. So to look at any failure of those technologies is meaningless as success was never to be measured by actual educational outcomes. The success that was aimed with those systems was to embed themselves as financial parasites through proprietary data strangleholds and contractual lock-ins.
Therefore I go back to examples of Coursera which is the type of system that I see doing an end run around the entire school educational system. I envision a day when online organizations are able to offer a certificate that has a known value and is held in some regard. I then see some of the best and brightest from the public school system starting to get that certification and then moving on to higher education without the consent or blessing from the public school system. If anything I foresee resistance where the public school system will try to insist(and generally fail) that the higher education system reject these certifications and not accept kids who have struck out on their own.
At this point I can see a generation of kids going into higher education and slowly push for the best of breed education that they were exposed to in the online education system from their higher education institutions. Here the change will be slower and will be more of an incorporation rather than a revolution.
But the moment the online systems start to have any value is exactly when I see the facade of terrible public education finally being forced to reform. People call for all kinds of things such as standardized testing, killing the unions, charter schools, testing of teachers, performance based pay, etc. I then hear all kinds of arguments and counter arguments for these changes. But what is very clear is that regardless of any of them actually working that the school system will never allow them as it is. What all the calls for these changes makes clear is that there is a huge demand that the school system be fixed. Online educationa
A++++ straw man headline!!! (Score:2)
Would read again!!! You totally destroyed all those nonexistent people arguing that technology will take bad education and make it good education.
Most people in EdTech are major supporters of reform and are hoping their technology helps enable that reform. Nobody is thinking their technology fixed education absent reform.
"...not...overcome the socio-economic divides" (Score:3)
I've seen technology 'systematically overcome the socio-economic divides'.
That technology was called "the printing press".
A simple test for judging an educational scheme. (Score:2)
I have a simple test for judging the sincerity of an educational scheme: I ask whether the elite in this country use it on their own offspring.
For example a lot of people argue that class size doesn't make any difference to educational performance. However if you look at a prep school like Phillips Andover, where the Bush's send their scions, classes are three or four students sitting around the table having a discussion with a PhD teacher. This tells me right away that class size and teacher qualification
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, as someone said above, it doesn't have to be parents. It can be grandparents, cousins, or even non-family members who are friends, rather than professional educators. Anyone who takes an interest in the child and who can earn the trust of the child.
The one thing we don't have as much of, now that we don't have close extended families, is support for children from people other than parents.
Do you think that parents who were gone for 12 hours a day is some sort of new normal? It's as least as old as