Despite all this activity, however, examples of schoolwide use of technology are comparatively rare and isolated. Use of technology in instruction tends to be by individual teachers. Few schools as a whole have embraced technology and used it to transform the content and mode of instruction. Evidence that technology can enable instructional practices that yield significantly improved outcomes or that promise greater efficiency in schooling is sparse. While parents strongly support introducing technology into schools, this support seems to reflect a belief that skill in the use of computers and telecommunications is key to success in the workplace rather than that such technology can lead to fundamentally improved schooling.
Funding is said to be a problem. Some communities have succeeded in passing
special levies to support acquisition of technology, and a few states have
appropriated funds to help schools connect to tele-
communications services.
More than a few teachers have purchased computers and software themselves to
use in their classrooms. However, when schools are urged to modernize by
reformers, business people, parents, or policymakers, teachers and
administrators complain that they simply do not have the resources needed to
acquire and learn to use technology in schools.
This report examines the issues surrounding the growing school acquisition and use of modern information technology. Its goal is to provide a base of information that will inform policymakers and others who are seeking strategies by which the nation can effectively use modern technologies to improve learning in classrooms, schools, and homes. The emphasis on educational improvement is the central organizing principle of this report. We certainly believe that all students in the modern world should possess at least basic abilities to use computers and telecommunications services. We also believe that such objectives will be easily achieved as both networks and computers become more ubiquitous. The more difficult question is whether technology, suitably implemented, has the potential to enable schools, students, and parents to make a significant improvement in the level and relevance of learning.
Thus, inevitably, policies related to technology become intertwined with the larger national efforts now under way to reform and restructure our schools. Components of these efforts include
Table 1.1 suggests some of the numerous potential uses of technology in educational settings. What is striking about this list is its similarity to lists that can be constructed for uses in many workplaces. Computers and telecommunications technology, in general, have substituted for (and usually improved upon) much of the routine communication in a workplace. They have provided enormously improved tools for analysis of data and for presentation of those analyses by a significantly widened group of workers. They are changing the manner in which information is delivered to customers and clients in the workplace. For many educational tasks, technologies play analogous roles to those of the workplace.
Some Examples of the Use of Technology in Support of Elementary and Secondary Education
__________________________________________________________ Type of Educational Examples of Technology Use Activity __________________________________________________________ Support for Stand-alone drill and practice individual learning units for particular skills activities CD-ROM- or Internet-accessed resource bases Assistance in searching for information Communication with experts Computational and writing tools (word processors and spreadsheets) Simulations that help visualize systems or mathematical or scientific concepts Support for group E-mail supporting group learning activities communication Presentational software to allow group to collaborate on presentation Video to support presentation of community-based projects Communication allowing collaboration among schools for collection and analysis of data Support for Integration of curriculum, instructional standards, and assessments management Management of student portfolios and exhibitions Support for development of individual student instructional plans or contracts Communications Communication for remote locations (such as rural schools) that permit access to expertise, resources, and improved learning environments Improved communication among students, teachers, and parents Administrative Support for attendance, functions accountability functions, and other administrative activities __________________________________________________________
The first extensive uses of computers in schools took the form of support for individual learning activities. These provided drill and practice for individual students and, as they were developed and refined, came to include extensive instructional management features that helped to guide students through extensive bodies of instructional material. Modern versions of these systems, known as integrated learning systems (ILSs), are found in about 30 percent of the nation's schools and have found widespread use in programs for the educationally disadvantaged and for remedial instruction.[2]
These large educational systems often span several years of curriculums and
were originally sold with associated hardware and net-
working. Because of
the system's cost--upwards of $30,000--each is generally sold directly to
central offices that procured them on behalf of schools within a district.
Teachers frequently participated in the system's selection, and training for
teachers was (and is) usually an important component of the purchase.
In many ways, these systems are reminiscent of the time-shared computer systems that were introduced into workplaces in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While offering enormous potential for delivering services to workers or students, they were costly and rigid by today's standards. The continued rapid decline in the cost of computational power and mass storage soon allowed the introduction of the personal computer and the independence and autonomy that is associated with it. A whole new market for software that catered to individual needs and enthusiasms began to appear, and information systems managers began to lose their control over the manner in which computational technology was used in the workplace.
Left unchecked, the growth of autonomous computing might have introduced disparate computational and writing aids in the workplace but might not have led to fundamental changes. However, these computers were soon linked with one another and client servers in immensely flexible ways. Many workers could access databases. Networks began to serve as substitutes for intra- and inter-office memos, or as proprietary networks, and then the Internet emerged, with clients and suppliers in distant locations. Decentralized computing power coupled with effective software and networks vastly enhanced the ability of "frontline" workers to acquire, analyze, and use information. Considerable restructuring of the workplace was possible and desirable in the interest of greater effectiveness and efficiency. Indeed, in many cases, existing patterns of organizational behavior were undermined and forced to restructure.
The same qualities of computing and telecommunications equipment and service that made it possible to restructure the workplace make it possible to restructure and reengineer the workplace called school. Technology allows students or teachers to perform traditional tasks with a speed and quality that were not easily attainable in the past. It allows individual students and teachers to work both individually and collaboratively. Connected to the nation's information infrastructure, it provides access to fellow teachers and students as well as a vast store of information that is increasingly available on-line. Technology provides the possibility for massive shifts in the ways in which students, teachers, and administrators use their time and for new and better forms of accountability to parents and the community. This is the message behind the examples in Table 1.1. Technology is no longer found in the form of a few well-developed tools to be introduced more or less intact into schools but in a whole raft of capabilities that can serve the ends of teaching and learning. And, as has been the case in many businesses, introducing information technology into the schools may provide the catalyst that enables and forces the restructuring necessary to meet our national education goals.
The improvement of the effectiveness, efficiency, and equality of opportunity in public education has been an important object of federal and state policy for many decades. In the mid-1980s, A Nation at Risk[3] forcefully argued that the United States needed an improved education system to survive and prosper in a world that was increasingly competitive and interdependent. States and localities moved to increase the quality and rigor of elementary and secondary education, but with results that continued to be found inadequate.
The perception that these reform efforts had failed to achieve the desired level of improvement led the nation's state governors and the president to establish a set of national goals to guide local, state, and federal efforts. These goals were subsequently amended and made a part of federal law by the Congress in the Goals 2000 legislation.
Technology can clearly assist schools, and the nation generally, to more effectively meet many of the goals contained in the legislation. Perhaps most important is the goal that calls for all students to possess demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter and be prepared for productive citizenship, continued learning, and productive employment. Because all students do not learn at the same rate or respond effectively to the same styles of instruction, educators have for years called for tailoring educational methods to learner needs and abilities to deal with these differences. This ideal has not often been reached. Most teachers and schools have, instead, tended to provide a common program of instruction for all students with some enrichment for the fastest learners and some remedial attention for the slowest. Tracking students, explicitly or implicitly, has also provided a crude form of individualization by allowing students of differing skills and interests to be grouped so that a common curriculum and instructional strategy can be developed for these groups. While popular with parents, particularly parents of the better students, tracking has been widely attacked for failing to meet the educational needs of many other groups of students and thus as inconsistent with the vision that all students should master challenging subject matter and skills.
Educational technology can make an important contribution to the ideal of tailoring education methods more closely to individual learner needs and abilities. It can provide additional specialized tutoring to those that need more time to master a subject area, both in and outside of school. It can create learning environments that engage large groups of students, freeing teachers for more intensive work with other small groups of students with common interests or needs. It can provide enrichment and extended learning opportunities to students who have mastered the core subject area and are anxious to move on to more challenging material. Perhaps most important, technology can provide the instructional management systems to support individual student educational programs by allowing teachers to guide the student's learning activities and keep track of the student's mastery of subject matter.
Technology can and clearly does contribute to other national education goals as well, including the support of life-long learning, the professional development of teachers, and the achievement of high proficiency in science. But while technology can clearly serve these instrumental purposes, it is also important to recognize the role technology can play in breaking down traditional bureaucratic schools and school systems, thereby fomenting productive change. This opportunity was clearly articulated by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Chairman and CEO of IBM, in a speech to the National Governors' Association. After calling for higher and more meaningful standards, an increased focus on investment, and greater use of technology, he said,
[I]nformation technology is the fundamental underpinning of the science of structural re-engineering. It is the force that revolutionizes business, streamlines government and enables instant communications and the exchange of information among people and institutions around the world.
But information technology has not made even its barest appearance in most public schools. Look around. The most visible forms of technology remain the unintelligible public address systems, which serve largely to interrupt the business of learning, and the copier in the principal's office, which spews out the forms and regulations that are the life blood of the education bureaucracy.
Before we can get the education revolution rolling, we need to recognize that our public schools are low-tech institutions in a high-tech society. The same changes that have brought cataclysmic change to every facet of business can improve the way we teach students and teachers. And it can also improve the efficiency and effectiveness of how we run our schools.[4]
We share Gerstner's sense of the potential importance that technology has for the improvement of American education. However, realizing that potential comes at a cost. Both the potential and the cost are explored in this report.
In Chapter Two of this report, we review what is known about the current use of technology in education. Drawing on several national surveys and papers prepared for OTA, we describe the current use of technology in schools in quite broad terms. The picture is of rapid but uneven growth in the use of technology over the past decade. We also describe a sample of pioneer schools nominated by experts and compare them with the broader national picture. The amount of technology and the uses to which it is put in these pioneer schools stand in marked contrast to the typical school that is described by the national data. Moreover, the testimony of both participants in and observers of these schools suggests excitement and high performance.
We conclude this chapter with a review of what we know about the effectiveness of educational activities and schools as a whole when they are supported by extensive technology. Obviously, with the rapid development of new applications of technology, much remains to be learned about the effectiveness of technology-enabled instruction and schools. However, we judge the evidence shows that, properly implemented, such instruction and schools show great promise.
In Chapter Three we turn to an examination of what we know about the costs of technology in schools. The rapidity with which technology is changing and its use is evolving makes pinning down these costs quite difficult. Using data from several sources, we estimate the existing expenditures for educational technology. We then go on to create a range of costs for schools with ubiquitous computing, telecommunications, and video support. We base these estimates on the small sample of schools mentioned above.
The bottom line is that if all schools had technology-enabled environments similar to schools in the midrange of those we examined, the costs would be on the order of 5 percent of total current expenditures for K-12 education. While this cost seems modest--it is well below the proportions for many service businesses--it is four times the estimated current level of K-12 expenditures for technology.
In Chapter Four, we consider three national, systemic challenges to the widespread adoption and effective implementation of technology in the schools:
The individual school or school district faces the additional challenge associated with the peculiarities of school finance. While the steady state, annualized costs of technology may not be overwhelming, the schools need to make sizable initial investments in equipment, renovations, and training; investments that are large relative to current school budgets. Unfortunately, schools do not have an "investment mentality" nor, frequently, the access to financing mechanisms that enable them to deal with this problem. Moreover, the political milieu that schools find themselves in makes targeted investment very difficult.[7]
To finance these expenditures, either significant restructuring of school budgets is required or the public will have to agree to increased levels of spending. In either case, educational leaders, policymakers, and the public will no doubt continue to want evidence that the use of technology will lead to more effective (and perhaps more cost-effective) schools.
The second barrier poses an equally difficult challenge. Most teachers now in classrooms have had little formal instruction on how to use technology or on how to teach in the sorts of learning environments made feasible by technology. Even new teachers have received little training in these areas from their colleges and universities. Developing capabilities to make effective use of technology is a major task for education policymakers.[8]
The third barrier concerns the development of content software for use in schools. The nature of the market for content materials in elementary and secondary education has been shaped by decades of interaction between textbook manufacturers and school systems. The market is shaped by adoption practices, often set by law, and by the ways in which school budgets for materials are allocated and committed. While a burgeoning educational software industry is developing, it is largely independent of traditional content providers with their large sales forces and finds marketing its products to schools a daunting and unrewarding task.
In Chapter Five, we draw out of our analysis a set of broad findings. With these as background, we suggest a number of strategic principles that should govern the nation's efforts to bring technology to the schools. We conclude with recommended actions by the federal government.
[2]Many modern educational technology advocates view the ILS with disdain. While currently the largest single component of educational software in the schools, the ILS is seen as difficult to integrate into the activities of the school as a whole and inconsistent with the type of instruction that these advocates seek. It is also, in retrospect, seen as absorbing resources that could be more effectively used in a decentralized system. Our view is more tolerant: The ILS is simply one of many tools that can be used (or misused) in instructional settings. For a discussion of these issues see Newman, 1994
[3]National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983.
[4]Gerstner, 1995.
[5]Summaries of each of these workshops are available separately. Participants are listed in the appendix.
[6]U.S. Congress, 1995.
[7]As with the development of teachers' skills, this problem is not really restricted to technology. The transformation and restructuring of a school requires incremental resources. RAND's work for the New American Schools Development Corporation suggests that increments in funding of perhaps 10 percent annually over a two to three year period may be required for transformations that do not necessarily have high technology content. There are many indications that school systems find it enormously difficult to marshal resources to make such investments in a few schools. Instead, schools are implored to restructure themselves, often with the "sweat equity" of their staffs.
[8]The problem of teacher competency is not primarily related to technology but rather to the larger issues of content knowledge and classroom management skills required by pedagogical strategies dealing with the individual needs of students.