TECHNOS

August 21, 2008

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Fall 1992 Vol. 1 No. 3

Reflections on Equity

By Asa G. Hilliard III

Every child has the right to play on a level playing field with other children. But in education, the field often is tilted in favor of the affluent, white suburban child. Technological hardware and software and well-paid, well-trained teachers are hard to come by in the inner city. Asa Hilliard thinks we can change that. First, he says, educators must raise their expectations for cultural minority children.

Equity issues in instructional technology are very simple and straightforward: Who gets to play? What is the impact on students of the game that is to be played?

There is nothing in the characteristics of cultural minority children that requires that they be analyzed to determine their fitness to be served by technology. Rather, it is the delivery system that must be examined to determine if the distribution of high quality services is indeed equitable.

Attitude Adjustment

For years I have been involved in the study of the education of low-performing groups, most of whom tend to be cultural minority groups, as well as economically impoverished groups, minority or majority. During the entire course of those years, I have observed a fundamental paradigm problem among educators. The problem is that, in general, educational thinking has been driven by invalid and scandalously low estimates of the basic intellectual capabilities of the mass of our students, especially those from cultural minority groups.

Most educators have assumed that most of the things schools teach in the college preparatory curriculum are beyond the intellectual level of the majority of students. Therefore, they have designed structures to fit the low expectations they have of children. The evidence for this assertion is to be found in the almost universal use of tracking and in the over-enrollment of students from some cultural minority groups into special education programs. Not surprisingly, the existing structures do produce the results that are expected. As Thomas Skirtic points out in his 1991 article, “The Special Education Paradox: Equity as the Way to Excellence,” in Harvard Educational Review, the existing structures provide neither the quality of exposure nor the quality of nurture that would guarantee the kinds of achievement and socialization outcomes that children are capable of reaching.

I have argued in other places that we can explain most of the variations in children's academic and social performance by reference to the quality of instruction and nurture they receive from home, school, and community. I have further argued that even if home and community are unable and sometimes unwilling to meet their obligations, schools can and have filled in to meet the education and socialization needs of children. This is not a matter of speculation but a matter of record.*

(*See Unusually Effective Schools: A Review and Analysis of Research and Practice (1990), by Daniel U. Levine; and Barbara Sizemore's chapter, “The Algebra of African-American Achievement,” in Effective Schools: Critical Issues in the Education of Black Children (1989).)

Many of us have seen children of all colors, shapes, sizes, and income levels as they descend upon commercial video arcades and consume, within the limits of their income levels, the “educational” challenges there. Yet I know of no one who has suggested that cultural, racial, economic, or other differences account for the child's learning or enjoyment of these technological applications. Children are quite equal in the arcade, as they could be in the schools. They need no “head start” or “handicap.” They only need a chance.

When the appropriate quality of instructional services is provided, excellence-level outcomes appear. For the mass of our children, an intellectual genius exists—even under conditions of extreme deprivation—that will enable them to master all of the intellectual tasks that constitute an excellence-level education agenda. To be specific, virtually all students are capable of achieving the level of excellence reflected in such statements of objectives as found in The College Board's Academic Preparation for College: What Students Need to Know and Be Able to Do. All that is required is appropriate professional service, not extraordinary service. The simple fact is, the mass of our children never are exposed to the quality of service that all have a right to expect.

Questions of Access

As we view the wonder of technology unfolding before our eyes, it is clear that some homes, as some schools, are loaded with the latest in high-tech hardware and software. Of course, very few of these serve African-American, Hispanic-American, or Native-American children. Well-prepared teachers of advanced technology and its applications are simply too expensive for even the largest school district to acquire in numbers sufficient to serve all students who can benefit from such technology and its applications. So, as Jonathan Kozol points out in his 1991 book, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, what we have, purely and simply, is an access problem. And that is a public policy issue. I fear, however, that the paradigm problem, with which we continue to suffer, will leave too many educators to argue that some children, such as the gifted, are more “ready for”—and therefore are more entitled to—high technology than are others.

The schools are already heavy consumers of technology. I am highly impressed with the increases in student achievement with appropriate use of IBM's Writing to Read and Writing to Write programs. I am often taken aback as I discover how quickly these and other software packages are being developed and applied on a wide-scale basis in schools.

Some of the interactive videodisc programs, such as Ulysses by IBM and the encyclopedia by Jostens Learning Corporation, are nothing short of awesome in their potential for use by skilled teachers to enhance the quality of instruction. This powerful teaching and learning has emerged in some cases totally outside the formal school system. Many of these and other advanced technologies, such as simulators, have been used widely in industry and in the military for teaching and learning.

In the past decade, we have seen a majestic growth of the linking of institutions and individuals in intricate communications networks. The world of bulletin boards, of Prodigy and CompuServe, of library search services, such as Lexis/Nexis/Medis, has democratized the whole information enterprise among those who have access to it. Yet this spectacular expanded national and even international networking is an invisible world to most Americans.

Designing a Level Playing Field

Hardware combined with software can help educators to level the playing field for the millions of children that we serve. A spell check or a grammar check on the computer provides consistent, nonarbitrary feedback to writers from the most expert teachers. In fact, I am more impressed with the innovations in software than I am with the hardware itself.

I was excited, for example, to find a software package that teaches calculus and enables me to review my mathematics (some of it poorly learned in the first place), and to do so in the privacy of my own library, at my own pace. Frozen into this pedagogically sophisticated software is the work of a great mathematical mind and a skilled teacher, available 24 hours a day on an equal basis to any student who has access. The work of the minds of designers of software for the 1990s is something to behold.

Content of the software is a major concern**. Who is writing the software? What is their choice of content? What is their background for selecting content to be included? Neither the computer hardware nor the software format can allow distortion of the material. The make-up of the design group is of critical concern if equity issues are to be confronted.

(**See Bowers, C.A., The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing: Understanding the Non-Neutrality of Technology, New York: Teachers College Press, 1988.)

There is a fantastic potential for technology if the software is based on sound pedagogy, as Paul Pipitone argues in a recent article in Headlines. If pedagogical specialists do indeed understand the dynamics of mental functioning, and if they respond to these applications in a sophisticated way, we may actually be able to raise the general level of intelligence of the whole population. Knowing patterns and preferences of thinking, the designers of software can make their products not only user friendly but also user natural. Therefore, cultural sophistication must be a requirement for designers.

Teachers as “Software”

Equity and software must be thought of at another level having nothing directly to do with either the hardware or the commercial software, for those who guide the uses of those things are themselves “software.”

Teachers, the decision makers about the use of technology in the schools, present a whole other array of potential equity problems. Perhaps the greatest problem in this area has to do with staff development to ensure that equally talented teachers are available to all the children. This is certainly not the case now. Many teachers, though well-endowed intellectually, often experience more problems than their students do because they harbor a long-term fear of technology.

It is absolutely essential that we respond as we did in the 1960s and 1970s to urgent national instructional needs. This nation must mobilize to provide training opportunities for teachers to learn, among other things, the vast range of educational software that is available to them. They must learn strategies for using this technology effectively in their classrooms. Unevenness in the exposure of teachers to instructional technology will result in an even greater unevenness in results of the use of technology with children in schools.

Fearful and unprepared teachers will misuse or will fail to use available technology. They, like their students, are an important audience for whatever it is that we have to say.

Challenge to Change

Educators have been too slow to mobilize. I know that this sounds unduly critical, especially in view of the wide expansion of the use of technology in the schools. Yet, in my opinion, what we have done so far is merely a drop in the bucket compared to what we must do. The child of African, Hispanic, Asian, Native, or European descent, whether rich or poor, must have an equal opportunity to be exposed to the intellectual wealth that resides in the practice of technology. All of these children—not some—must experience technology at all of its levels, from drill and practice to systems analysis.

The great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget described an intellectual world in which learners developed to the point of thinking about thinking. Those who shared a pessimistic paradigm then began to separate the world into those who could think and those who could think about thinking; there were “concrete” and “abstract” thinkers. Of course, these are false dichotomies in the real world. Similarly, in the case of technology, those children normally falling on the bottom must be engaged in the use of advanced technology at levels normally thought to be the exclusive preserve of the gifted.

With technology as a partner, we now have the language and the vehicles to confront some of the perennial equity issues in a new way, a way in which deliberate or unconscious inequity is hard to hide.

The children I see in the ghettos of America don't need therapy and remediation. They need dedicated mentors, advocates, friends, and peers who will collaborate with them in unleashing their intellectual hunger and capabilities. As we draw closer to these children, appropriate uses of new technologies can make us less mechanical and more human. Inappropriate uses will make us slaves of ignorance or prisoners of algorithms.

Asa Hilliard is an educational psychologist and historian and professor of urban education at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He writes and lectures on issues concerning educational equity in assessment, curriculum, and teaching quality. Hilliard is editor of Testing African-American Students (1991) and Infusion of African and African-American Content in the School Curriculum: Proceedings of the First National Conference, October 1989 (1990), both published by Aaron Press. He has received the Candle in the Dark Award in Education from Morehouse College and the Distinguished Educator Award from the National Alliance of Black School Educators. Hilliard is a consultant to the Agency for Instructional Technology on its Every Child Can Succeed professional development series for teachers.

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