TECHNOS

August 21, 2008

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Spring 1992 Vol. 1 No. 1

Equity and the ‘Big Picture’

By Henry Jay Becker

Equity issues surrounding the use of technology in our schools go beyond just counting who has access to how many machines. What good will it do to supply schools with the latest technological wonders if their potential isn't realized? Sociologist Henry Becker says Americans can't afford the price we'll pay if we don't address quality of use as well as access—and soon.

It began with the telephone and the radio. Then the television. Then photocopiers, videotape recorders, personal computers, videodisc players, fax machines, CD-ROMs, and computer networks. A seemingly never-ending panoply of electronic devices exists for everyday people to receive and share information, ideas, attitudes, and emotions. Such devices are transforming not only our lives but also our consciousness itself—what we think about ourselves and our world and, more important, how we think, learn, and communicate. It seems apparent that our lives are structured ever more closely around activities that derive at least part of their essential character from these information and communication technologies.

Equity Is Elusive Everywhere

Yet all societies, and the various social strata and social institutions within American society, are not equal participants in the cultural transformation that is occurring. On an international scope, televisions and telephones are still luxury commodities in the overwhelming majority of the world's communities. Indeed, we use our access to visual and print technologies to learn and in some sense to experience the limited resources and perspectives of other peoples in faraway parts of the globe. And although our own society provides nearly universal access to an immense variety of visual entertainments through electronic media, most consumers are largely passive participants. They use primarily one-way, receive-only technologies and select only marginally enriching content.

Unequal participation in this cultural transformation is also illustrated by the contrast between Western economies and formerly Soviet-dominated economies. During the last two decades, computer, telephone, and xerographic technologies have unmistakably transformed the operation of private and public enterprises in the West. In sharp contrast, the use of these technologies was carefully confined and restricted in Eastern European countries. This tight control may have been partly responsible for those nations' declining economic competitiveness as well as a widespread belief among their citizens that their societies were falling irreversibly further behind the West. As we now witness the loss of legitimacy of the existing regimes and the political collapse of the Soviet Union, we are seeing, in part, the result of withheld and unused capacity to use modern information and communication technologies.

Economics, Communication, Education

A similar contrast could be drawn between the extent to which information and communication technologies have affected the operation of government and business in the “modern” nations of America, Europe, and the Far East and the extent to which they have affected the operation of teaching and learning in schools in those countries.

In all of these countries, including the United States, a fair description of technology use by teachers and students would report that few classrooms have direct access by telephone to the outside world and only a small minority of classrooms have regular and sustained access to full-motion video or television. Furthermore, although much has been written about the invasion of microcomputers and the spread of computer laboratories in schools, a typical classroom where students get most instruction still lacks any computers at all. Where computers are present inside the classroom rather than in a separate computer lab, there are so few that students must take turns over a course of a day or week or be content most of the time to watch others use the computer keyboard.

We will be more likely to understand the impact of technology if we ask the right questions. Rather than asking how many schools have VCRs, we should ask, “At any one time, what portion of students are engaged in learning based on the material viewed through video?” I expect the answer would be a very minimal fraction. The same could be said for computers, televisions, and, of course, telephones.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that, based on any statistical snapshot one might take of activities that occupy students and teachers at any one time, as an institution the American school is about as much based on the use of 20th-century technologies as are the economies of Eastern Europe. And that raises what may seem at first to be an absurd question: Will the same fate happen to our schools as befell the polities of Eastern Europe? Will they become seen as structures that are hopelessly outdated and uncompetitive for providing the kinds of educational experiences needed to prepare our youth for the next century?

But, Can They Use It?

Of course, the parallel cannot be drawn too far. In contrast to the leadership of the communist states which feared disbursing information technology throughout their economies and societies, administrators of schools and school districts dearly desire to have their organizations become modernized through technology. Indeed, the presence of such media serves as a public indicator of “up-to-dateness” important in the school administrator's political context. More defensibly, technology's presence appears to be useful as a focus of school pride and as a motivator to students and teachers alike.

But whether schools will survive the challenge to their competitiveness as educational institutions depends on more than the “show” value of their technology apparatus. The real question is whether technologies are providing distinct academic benefits to the students in school. Are they focusing students' attention and effort on intellectual questions? Are they helping them understand ideas or create intellectual products? Are they providing a medium through which they can develop the skills needed to function in an organizationally complex world?

No doubt, part of the problem is one of numbers. Without a density of technology that is sufficient to support classrooms of students in systematic and frequent work, what we have is merely a taste of what is possible with technology. But even with enough equipment and high quality software and programming, it is quite possible for teachers to use technology without any academic benefit. They may show videos or have students use computers simply because it is a manifestly “educational” activity. Whether or not they have important consequences for student learning, such activities occupy a good bit of time and can be done with little preparation or effort. The impact of computer or video use on student understanding and competence is likely to be minimal if that use is not related to ongoing organized lessons and other learning activities.

Transforming Culture Through Technology

It is only when technology becomes a seamlessly integrated part of organized lessons that a cultural transformation within schools will be accomplished. This cultural transformation is now under way in some classroom settings where teachers use video materials to introduce and to structure subsequent active learning tasks and where computer software is used as a tool in a larger non-technology-centered effort to help students accomplish understanding or to produce a shareable intellectual product. But such integral uses of technology are hardly the norm.

From this point of view, the question of equity of access to technologies is not adequately addressed merely by examining whether black and white children or rich and poor adolescents are equally likely to be schooled where computers or televisions or video recorders are present. The critical questions about equity are about equal access to effective uses of technologies.

We know, for example, that U.S. schools in poor districts or schools with a majority-black student enrollment have 10 to 12 percent fewer computers than other schools. We know that high school vocational classes in those schools are less likely to involve computer use. And we know that elementary and middle school teachers in poor-district/majority-black schools focus more student effort on math facts and language arts mechanics and spend less time teaching students word processing or how computers work.

Even more significantly, perhaps, a 1989 Center for Social Organization of Schools survey of school computer coordinators found that only half as many elementary teachers in poor district/majority-black schools were judged to be “expert in using instructional software” as in other elementary schools. In addition, at the high school level, only half as many teachers were reported to be “competent at using software for their own professional use.” The greatest discrepancy in this survey data was that at the elementary level, a truly “exemplary” computer-using teacher could be found among teachers in poor-district/majority-black schools only one-third as often as in other elementary schools. No data gathered since has refuted these findings.

But the more critical fact is that this survey of computer use found only 3 percent of all elementary school teachers to be “exemplary” computer users at all—and that was using a fairly liberal set of criteria. Should we worry that the percentage in predominantly black or poor elementary schools was only one-third as much? Isn't it more important to be concerned that the overall percentages are so low? Perhaps we should be satisfied that the percentage of “exemplary” computer-using teachers among secondary science teachers was actually a bit higher in poor and majority-black schools than it was overall. But how can we be unconcerned when the overall level, a disappointing 2 percent, was so low?

Making the Case

We must remember that the vast majority of schools are yet at a very early stage in their ability to make information and communication technologies an important tool in teaching and learning. Few teachers and classes have access to information-rich technology-based resources such as huge libraries of videodisc compendia of 20th century events, encyclopedias on CD-ROM that are searchable at comparatively lightning speeds, or national and international linkages for conducting cooperative learning projects in which real-world data are used. Even more important, efforts to build useful lesson plans and curriculum units that profitably make use of all of these information and communications resources—as well as the staff development efforts required to demonstrate to teachers how this can all be used with clearly beneficial effects on student learning—have hardly begun at all.

It is certainly true that there are major resource inequalities among schools in the United States and that these inequalities are reinforcing rather than ameliorating the differences in private wealth that exist among different groups in this country. Indeed, the likelihood is that these differences will grow even larger in the current political climate which favors private aggrandizement and narrowly defined communities of common interest over a concern for the less educated and less viable segments of our society, such as the poverty-stricken older inner cities of the Midwest and Northeast.

But the most important issue confronting the technology advocacy community is to demonstrate—with the kind of strong evidence that would convince a skeptical audience—that these exciting media do have important consequences for student competencies when they are intelligently used in schools. Yes, it is important for schools to become more active participants in the technological revolution imbedding itself in our culture. Yes, it is important to attend to issues of inequality of opportunity that differential access to technology brings. But it is most important that we build and demonstrate successful consequences for investing in technology. For it is that demonstration and proof that makes the other two concerns significant.

Henry Jay Becker is principal research scientist at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. During the 1980s he conducted national surveys at the Center that provided concrete data about how representative samples of schools and teachers used computers for instruction. The 1989 survey he refers to here was conducted by the Center in the United States for the international survey of Computers in Education, under the auspices of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. Becker's current projects include a large-scale evaluation of computer-based integrated learning systems and the development and testing of lesson plans for middle grade mathematics teachers in the inner city.