Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Back in his younger days Poor Elijah resolved to live without modern technology. His grand plan consisted of kerosene lamps and not taking aspirin, a noble crusade that was somewhat undermined every time he drove to work or raided his refrigerator. Eventually he decided that his proper ambition shouldn’t be to live without technology but rather to use it wisely.
Nobody would disagree with that. Nobody would knowingly advocate the stupid use of technology, excepting people who are addicted to it or who make money from it. As the rest of us decide what constitutes stupidity and wisdom, we need to bear in mind that what we hear about technology from those who profit from it isn’t necessarily false. It is, however, necessarily suspect, the same way what Ford and Chevy dealers tell you about Fords and Chevys has to be considered with proper skepticism.
As for technology addicts, I don’t only or even primarily mean those caricatured silicon fiends hunched in the half-light, glued to their video games. I’m talking about all those normal children of all ages who constantly finger their latest iPhone, feel compelled to text their minute-by-minute location to each other, consider Wii tennis an athletic event, and generously tweet their sage, 140-character opinions to the entire world, most of whom are too busy tweeting their sage, 140-character opinions to find time to listen.
That same wisdom and skepticism is at least as crucial at school as it is in our homes. That’s partly because most of us keep closer track of how we spend the dollars in our wallets than we do of how our school officials spend our tax dollars. With every respectable tech company boasting its own education foundation, it shouldn’t surprise us that there’s a surplus of press releases touting the benefits of everything they sell, and the customary mob of school officials eager to leap onto this latest bandwagon.
In the United States, for example, Google sells 60 percent of its Chromebooks to schools. Fans see Google’s Chromebooks as “appealing alternatives” to Apple’s iPads. And these are only two of the behemoths competing for our public schools’ dollars.
While boosters bill digital technology as the “golden key that will unlock students’ motivation and engagement,” critics warn that classroom tech has been “overhyped” and delivered mostly “unfulfilled promises.” A 2015 study conducted by OECD, the people who publish international comparisons, found that while “moderate” use of computers can produce “somewhat better learning outcomes,” students “who use computers very frequently at school do worse” than those who use them “rarely.” A 2015 National Education Policy Center report, principally authored by a UCLA education and information studies professor, similarly found that classroom tech’s “results do not justify the enormity of the investment or the effort to upend traditional classroom environments.”
This enlightened move, initiated by the city’s mayor, will not only permit students to text classmates, play video games, and access the websites of Nobel laureates, but also more conveniently harass each other and traffic in drugs.
Tech proponents, mouthing education reform’s four-decades-old apostles’ creed, counter that classroom computers transform teachers from “distributors of knowledge” into “facilitators” of “how to use that knowledge,” a baseless claim which falsely presupposes that good teachers haven’t always been both. Tech advocates further celebrate that “no longer must students memorize facts when they are at their fingertips,” a ridiculous assertion that ignores the existence of books and explains why so many students subjected to reform practices don’t know many facts or how to use them.
Knowledge, after all, is defined as “facts, information, and skills” that you know. You can’t “use” knowledge when you don’t have much.
Consistent with this commonsense expectation that inexplicably and consistently escapes education reformers, NEPC’s critique concluded that “the evidence that computer-based personalized instruction produces improved student outcomes is at best minimal or even nonexistent.” As a result, the study urged that policymakers “take a more incremental approach” to introducing classroom technology and “also be more skeptical” of tech companies’ “hyperbolic claims.”
Apparently unfamiliar with the less than profitable tweets that regular people and presidential candidates typically exchange, and the invaluable material posted on most Facebook pages, school officials and tech gurus now advocate the extensive use of social media in America’s classrooms. New York City, for instance, recently lifted the “city-wide ban on in-school cellphones.” This enlightened move, initiated by the city’s mayor, will not only permit students to text classmates, play video games, and access the websites of Nobel laureates, but also more conveniently harass each other and traffic in drugs.
Unfortunately, yet another 2015 study, not surprisingly, credited “keeping phones out of the classroom” with a “positive academic impact.” Eliminating phones resulted in “adding an hour of instructional time every week.” In addition, data demonstrated that “test scores rose following implementation of the bans.” The report urges officials to consider “the potential for phones to be a distraction from, rather than an enhancement” to learning. Again, tech proponents speciously argue that smartphones uniquely promote “higher-level learning” in ways that teachers, books, discussions, and ordinary mortals can’t. Apparently, however, keeping students “focused on the lesson at hand” can “yield even greater benefits” than “texting” and “video games.”
The news is likewise “dismal” for the ultimate in education technology, online virtual schools. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes concluded that as a direct result of the “online aspect” of their schools, public school students “who take classes over the Internet” make “dramatically less progress” than their peers in “traditional” schools. According to the CREDO report, schooling via the Internet has an “overwhelmingly negative impact,” with annual progress so “limited” that online students “learned the equivalent of seventy-two fewer days” per year in reading. CREDO found that online math instruction was even more catastrophic, “literally as though the student did not go to school for the entire year.”
None of this will likely discourage tech corporations and most of their education allies. They’ve got too much invested in their bottom lines and their expert reputations.
The rest of us, though, are invested in something pretty important, too – our children.
We need to slow the tech juggernaut down before its reforms cost us yet another generation.
The post Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Hold the phone appeared first on VTDigger.