TECHNOS

January 6, 2009

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Summer 1996 Vol. 5 No. 2

Realizing the Promise of Technology in America's Schools

By Edward M. Kennedy

Senator Edward M. Kennedy has been a champion of education for 34 years in the United States Senate. He served on the Labor and Human Resources Committee in 1965, when it passed the first federal aid to education programs for both elementary and secondary education and college student aid. As Chairman of the Labor Committee in the 1993–1994 Congress, often called the “Education Congress,” Senator Kennedy spearheaded the passage of six major education initiatives from preschool through adult learning: the expansion of Head Start; Goals 2000; the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including the Technology for Education Act; Direct Student Loans; National and Community Service; and School-to-Work. In the current Congress, Senator Kennedy is a leading defender of schools and colleges across the country. This year he led a successful effort to maintain federal support for education at 1995 levels, against heavy pressure for deep budget cuts.

Personal computers and the Information Superhighway are rapidly transforming America. Already, the Internet is making large amounts of information available at unprecedented speeds. When this revolution makes itself fully felt in schools, teachers and students will have virtually instantaneous access to vast amounts of information and a wide range of learning tools. If we guide the information revolution wisely, these resources will be available not only to affluent suburban schools but also to rural school districts and inner-city schools. Broad access can reduce differences in the quality of education and give children in all areas new opportunities to learn. Used well, this transforming technology can play a major role in school reform.

This promise, however, is still a distant hope for the vast majority of American students. A U.S. Department of Education survey shows that 50 percent of schools in America now have access to the Internet—but only 10 percent have the high-speed connections that would allow access for more than one user at a time. Continuous upgrading of this technology in schools is, therefore, an important part of improving education.

NetDay, which originated in California, is a new model for achieving and expediting the needed changes. It is a partnership among schools, businesses, volunteers, and government to bring schools onto the Information Superhighway. This fall, NetDay comes to Massachusetts, and volunteer support for elementary and secondary schools is likely to reach an all-time high in the state, with the active participation of students, parents, business leaders, educators, and public officials. The event is part of MassNetworks, a campaign to use technology to support school reform in Massachusetts.

The first NetDay took place in California on March 9, 1996, and generated impressive attention. President Clinton participated and called it a “high-tech barn raising.” Underlying this activity was an essential goal—to give schools the internal wiring they need to connect their classrooms to the Internet.

The new technology will enable students to acquire the skills that are essential to succeed in modern society. Exposure to computer technology in school will permit students to become familiar with the necessary tools at an early age. By using the technology well, they will also acquire better thinking skills to help them become informed citizens and active community members.

Better training for students today will also prepare them for the workforce of tomorrow. More and more jobs in the United States require employees to have higher levels of skills than ever before. This need arises in part from the increasingly global marketplace, which has transformed the environment in which American companies do business. According to a 1990 report by the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, American businesses must become “high-performance work organization[s],” in which the average worker is expected to make decisions, use good judgment, and take greater responsibility for the final product of the firm.

Companies are willing to pay for increased job qualifications. Recent research indicates that employees reap an 8 percent average increase in income for each additional year of high school, college, or graduate school they complete. The average high school graduate in 1992 earned $6,000 more than a high school dropout, and the average college graduate earned $14,000 more than a high school graduate.

These emerging needs present a dual challenge to America's public schools. We must raise academic standards for students and help them acquire the skills they need to function effectively in the modern workplace. Our success in meeting these challenges can be increased by making technology, including the Internet, available to all schools, and by using it effectively.

Technology can also help us focus our energy on improving education. To reach our goal, three shifts in the way we think about computers, networks, and learning must take place. Some of these changes are already underway.

Shift 1—Helping all students: a challenge to teachers and software developers
The ability to retrieve information from anywhere or to communicate with anyone on the Internet amplifies the information, interactions, and computing power available to teachers and students. This phenomenon makes computers especially useful for research. Previously, students would go to the library to find out about what crops are grown in a particular foreign country. Now, they can get those facts and many more in the same amount of time on the Internet.

Computers are more than just information retrieval devices. They are also tools to help us communicate and think more effectively. Harnessing this power calls for new ways of examining how computers can help us learn.

Classroom software today has not yet reached its potential to fill these needs. Often, it attempts to engage students through drill-and-practice. In Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Superhighway, Clifford Stoll refers to this generation of computer educational programs as “uninspired—they work remarkably like flash cards.” Too often, the only features added by computerized instruction programs are animated pictures and buzzing sounds—far from full use of the computer's capabilities.

Today's computers can offer exercises that teachers cannot provide, or that would be prohibitively expensive to make available on an individual basis. One sophisticated example is “glasses for the ears,” a tool for dyslexic children. This approach was developed by research groups headed by Dr. Paula Tallal at Rutgers University and Dr. Michael Merzenich at the University of California at San Francisco. Using slow, clear computer-generated speech, dyslexic children learn to recognize differences in sounds that they could not hear before. With successful practice, the sounds are gradually accelerated until they reach normal listening speed. After just four weeks of practice, the children advanced two years in their verbal comprehension skills, and the improvement persisted even after they stopped using these “glasses.”

In addition to teaching basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, the new technology can help students “learn how to learn.” Some of the best new classroom computer applications demand that the student construct a model and strategize, in order to solve complex problems.

These qualities make the student an active participant in learning, with a clear stake in the outcome of a program. The similarity of good computer applications to dramatic interactions has been pointed out by computer game designer Brenda Laurel. In her book Computers as Theater, she lists features shared by the most effective software: a clear task at the beginning; a struggle and dialogue between the user, other users, and the computer; and a satisfying ending at which the user's performance is clearly evaluated. The dramatic and social nature of computer interactions is what makes the Internet so attractive. Students often express the greatest satisfaction not from fancy graphics but from text-based interaction through e-mail.

Designers of school software applications can learn from this important point and make software that enables students and teachers to participate actively with the computer and each other. An experimental project at MIT's Media Lab, “Cocoa,” will help children become active, creative participants in the World Wide Web, rather than merely casual surfers. Modeled after the new Web-design tool Java, Cocoa is a simplified language that lets children create their own Web sites. A possible analogy is the difference between watching television and creating your own television programs.

Learning often takes place as work is revised over time. Yet hardly any educational software permits students to save their work on a disk for later use. Allowing a student's interaction to extend beyond a single session would be valuable. Anyone who has seen a child carefully save drawings and essays knows the power of such motivation. Like adults, children are interested in preserving what they have done, whether for posterity or for the refrigerator door.

Another major challenge to curriculum developers is to use computers effectively to help all students. Some students will take on a computer and dive eagerly into all it has to offer, overcoming almost any barriers. In fact, as Bill Gates has suggested, it is from young people that the most unexpected new uses of computers are likely to originate.

How can we expand the range of computer teaching software to help the vast majority of students? One promising example is Boston's Computer Clubhouse. Students, primarily from underserved communities, go there after school and work with the Media Lab's experimental software. In one exercise, students assemble virtual LEGO parts to make complex machines and robots, and simulate their behavior. They learn basic engineering principles and use their new-found knowledge in the laboratory to build real, functioning devices. Other students use computers to record their own music or to compose three-dimensional architectural layouts. These students are doing more than acquiring knowledge. They are learning in new ways that are made possible by computer-aided design tools.

Shift 2—Ensuring universal access to technology and the Internet: a challenge for public policymakers
Effective educational technology will not be available to all students without specific and coordinated efforts by both the public and private sectors. Accessible sites such as the Computer Clubhouse are rare. It is more common to find computers in affluent homes than in public schools. Underserved students in inner cities and rural areas also deserve access to these opportunities.

Federal aid to public education is an essential cornerstone of our modern democracy and has been since the G.I. Bill of World War II. The federal government can and should play a strong role in ensuring universal access. An overriding public interest exists in ensuring that the benefits of new and powerful technologies are available to more than a privileged few. There is a federal obligation to ensure that improvements in education are accessible to all students. The Technology for Education Act, which Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and I sponsored in 1994, established national challenge grants—competitive five-year awards to communities across the country. To qualify for these grants, school districts must work with parents, local industries, libraries and other organizations to develop innovative approaches to bring technology into the classroom. In 1995, 19 challenge grants totaling $25 million were awarded to underserved districts. This year, the amount available has been nearly doubled—to $48 million.

In his Education Technology Initiative, President Clinton has asked for $2 billion over the next five years to fund these challenge grants and other state and local initiatives, as federal seed money to help schools and students across the country. If this initiative is funded by Congress, the country will be taking a giant step forward in modernizing the nation's classrooms.

The federal government can help in other ways as well, by using its regulatory authority to benefit schools. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 requires firms to sell advanced telecommunications services to schools and libraries at discount rates. NYNEX, Continental Cablevision, and other companies have responded by proposing new services and rates to the Federal Communications Commission, including free service for schools in some cases. As the definition of advanced telecommunications evolves, this regulatory authority will do more to help schools meet their needs while reducing the strain on their budgets.

At a local level, public-private partnerships such as NetDay can give an extra boost to these efforts. This support can make a difference at a time when schools face other competing critical needs such as textbooks, teacher training, and the renovation of facilities. In the end, however, a genuine commitment means support by long-term budgeting. In Massachusetts, a $60 million education technology bond initiative, which will help schools take this path, is under consideration. Efforts like these are essential for technology to assume its rightful place in education.

Shift 3—Bringing people into the process: a challenge to teachers, parents, communities, and businesses
New approaches are promising, but they are useful only if teachers and parents embrace them. Many students require extensive personal attention in computer instruction. For this reason, the most important shift that must happen for technology to take root in school reform is a human one: teachers and parents must take the lead in making it happen.

Teacher training is an essential part of realizing this goal. Teachers have many demands on their time and energy and may view these new, unfamiliar approaches as an additional burden. Dale Lestina, president of Organizations Concerned about Rural Education and director of Congressional Relations for the National Education Association, has said that teacher training must be given the highest priority, if new technology is to succeed in improving education. Adequate training will give teachers a practical vision of technology's potential, opportunities to use it, sufficient support services, and time to experiment.

In California, NetDay was a highly visible opportunity for parents and volunteers to participate. The commitment extended beyond wiring to general improvement of schools. In some cases, so many volunteers showed up that they did not have enough to do. Enterprising principals with cans of paint on hand put the volunteers to work on buildings and classrooms.

NetDay gave California parents, teachers, and businesses a tangible opportunity to help improve their schools. As the idea spreads to other states and communities across America, it will become a visible commitment not just to wire schools but to strengthen schools in other ways as well.

The advent of the Information Age gives us powerful tools for improving education. Their power does not come solely from their computing capacity; it comes in part from the opportunities they provide to help students learn in new ways. Meeting and mastering this challenge involves far more than technology. We should seize this priceless opportunity and rededicate ourselves to supporting teachers, schools, parents, and students.

Click here to access the NetDay: A Partnership to Bring Students, Teachers, and Schools onto the Information Superhighway Sidebar that accompanied this article.

Click here to access Senator Kennedy's Home Page: http://www.senate.gov/~kennedy/