Instructional Technology and Education Policy:



Instructional Technology and Education Policy

By

James W. Guthrie[1]

American schools are integrating instructional technology into conventional K-12 classrooms at a glacial pace. Public schools’ reluctance to embrace technology is itself an important issue. However, concentrating on the discouraging rate of K-12 technological adoption may be looking through the wrong end of the microscope. The longer run and more important consequence of modern electronic technology might not be found in the manner in which it enhances what regular classroom instructors do.

Rather, technology’s impact may come from it enfranchising a set of instructional agents. outside of conventional K-12 schools.

Technology may empower a set of competing instructional providers. This is a dynamic that simply has not emerged significantly from private providers, i.e., charter schools, home schooling, sectarian private schools, independent schools, contracting, and vouchers. By threatening the hegemony of conventional public schools, particularly secondary schools, technologically-enabled providers may intensity competition for students in a manner that elevates public school quality in the same way that Asian and European imports spurred Detroit to build better automobiles.

This paper proceeds in two parts. The first section concentrates on conventional K-12 schools and explores hypotheses regarding their reluctance to adopt instructional technology. The thesis here is that both current advocates for and critics of technology are misguided. Neither is pursuing a line of reasoning that will infuse technology into schools. They see only half the equation, the supply side. The only dynamic that will trigger widespread technology is to create a “demand” for it on the part of K-12 principals and teachers.

The second part of the paper explores the prospect of modern instructional technology empowering a set of providers who might compete with conventional public schools. It is this technology-enabled competition that might propel improvements by all providers. For example, if twelfth grade students had an option widely available to them of completing Advanced Placement or community college level courses on line, perhaps from a private provider, and not attending their regular high school, public schools might feel the consequences of reduced revenues as a result.

Part I: Conventional K-12 Schools’ “Techno Phobia”

Why do not schools embrace modern electronic technologies for their core activities? Or, at a minimum, why do not more schools actively explore its application to the same extent and in the same aggressive manner as most other sectors of the American economy? Is the impediment money, training, incentives, lack of evidence regarding effectiveness, or something else? Is what many teachers do day-to-day so remote from attempting to propel higher levels of student academic achievement that they do not see instructional technology as relevant to their purposes?

What if anything can counter this condition? What should policy makers and managers do to induce administrators and teachers to adopt or at least openly explore productive application of instructional technology?

Advocates contend that low rates of technology adoption are best addressed through “supply” side actions. more and better machinery, more Internet connections, and more training. Critics of current technology enhancement strategies argue that existing supply side measures fail to realize the professional sanctity and gate- keeping responsibilities of principals and classroom teachers. They remind us that no matter how many computers and electronic services are rammed into classrooms, teachers can shut their doors and ignore the machines capabilities. Thus, these critics contend that, to reverse this situation, policy makers must include teachers in the decision making loop, taking their aspirations, preferences, and the structure of their work into account.

This paper asserts both points of view are increasingly irrelevant. Supply is no longer a pivotal problem. Most of America’s schools, generally, have plenty of computers, Internet connections, video sets, etc., much of it unused. Further, it is unnecessary and inappropriate for policy makers, maybe even administrators, to solicit teachers’ views regarding instructional technology. Public officials do not, and should not, tell surgeons when to use laproscopes and when to resort to pharmaceutical treatments. Such is a professional choice, not a policy decision. Similarly, policy makers should not be dictating when teachers should use electronic means for instruction relative to some other medium.

The instructional technology issue is more likely to be resolved through a different dynamic. Simply put, if policy makers want a wider application or more intense exploration of technology, they must more forcefully address the ‘demand” side of the equation.

If educators viscerally felt the need, were more persuaded of the utility, or became threatened by realistic competition for their clientele, then they, administrators, teachers, and other education professionals, might seek to use technology that improved teaching and learning.

Under these latter scenarios, educators might come to view instructional technology as an asset, not an albatross.

Both Advocates and Critics Currently are Misguided

Electronic technologies have not yet had a profound effect on formal instruction. A mid-20th Century student might still feel at home in many and maybe most 21st Century classrooms.[2] In selected locations, even a resurrected 19th Century student might be surprised only by hemlines and haircuts, midriffs and manners, not by instruction[3].

The glacial pace of technological impact on conventional schooling and instruction is frustrating to advocates who contend that modern era computers, Internet dynamics, and various video arrays could, if harnessed appropriately, significantly elevate student learning and prepare graduates better for the workplace.

This seeming techno phobia is also frustrating to those who would like to render education more efficient economically. Kindergarten through twelfth grade schooling now costs the United States $2 billion a day and the upward spiraling spending trajectory show no sign of achieving a plateau. Thus, technology advocates would prefer greater reliance upon capital in what remains a remarkably labor intensive endeavor, classroom teaching.

Schools’ reluctance productively to deploy modern technologies that otherwise are transforming America’s way of life is perplexing to those outside of education.

Silicon chips, video, and Internet endeavors are ubiquitous. From the moment one’s modern alarm radio starts the day and begins remotely to prepare coffee until one’s outside house lights turn off automatically at bed time, personal lives are assisted, maybe even shaped, by modern electronic technologies.

Similarly, it is a rare 21st Century assembly line employee, craftsman, professional, or service worker who does not depend crucially upon electronic technology to produce goods and services and communicate with or care for customers and clients.

What is going on with schools? Why do they not rely upon technology for their core activities as intensely as the remainder of modern society? Is there a Luddite frame of mind operating here?

Two principal hypotheses have evolved to explain the reluctance of schools to adopt technology for instruction. One of these hypotheses, issues of technology supply, has strongly motivated the policy community. The other hypothesis, the failure of technology to address the structure and work place dynamics of the teacher’s job and career is endearing to professional educators. However, when examined more closely, both these hypotheses are irrelevant to the issue at hand, enhancing the use of instructional technology.

The longest standing explanation has centered upon supply. Modern electronic technology costs money and policy makers have been persuaded from the outset that more of it will be needed to help school purchase technology and train teachers to use it.

The second hypothesis, put forth most persistently by education historian Larry Cuban,[4] is that schools and teachers can easily assimilate modern technology into their environments without having to incorporate it fundamentally into what they do. The argument here is that structural components of a teacher’s core of instructional endeavors are insufficiently affected by modern technology. Teachers’ workdays, allocation of time, career rewards and incentives, day-to-day interactions with each other, superiors, parents, and students are simply not altered in any meaningful manner by computers. Hence, computers and other modern technologies remain on the periphery of classrooms and isolated in special “laboratories” in schools because teachers see no need to alter what they do to accomplish what is routinely expected of them.

This paper has a different thesis. Explanation number one, lack of money and insufficient teacher access to technology and related training, is simply no longer true. Reason number two, technology as an irritant in the ecology of the teacher workplace, however attractive as a description, is insufficient as an explanation. It begs another question. How is it that technology alters human interaction in virtually every other workplace, professional as well as blue collar, but not in schools?

A more powerful explanation, one that technology advocates and critics alike have yet fully to recognize, is that the adoption of technology is also a matter of “demand,” not solely an issue of supply or organizational dynamics.

The Already Fulsome Supply Side of Education Technology

America has not been lackadaisical in its efforts to supply technology to schools. Cuban reports that there were 125 students per public school computer in 1981. By 1991, this ratio had become far more favorable, 18 students per computer. By 2000, there was a computer in American schools for every five students.[5]

Not only has the number of computers mushroomed, a student’s access to the Internet has also burgeoned. In 1994, three percent of American classrooms had computers allowing students access to the World Wide Web. By 1999, this figure had risen to 64 percent. By 2000, it had risen to seventy-seven percent.[6] In less than a decade, of the nation’s schools had direct access to the new Internet highway.

How could such dramatic increases occur? From where did the funding come?

Of course, states and local school districts put forth some of their own funds. However, a large portion of the technology capital resulted from federal government efforts. This included a $2 billion Clinton Administration hardware purchase matching fund program[7] and, in addition, so-called “E-Rate” revenues.

The “E-Rate” was enacted as a provision of the 1996 Telecommunication Act. As part of this legislation, the Federal Communications Commission funds technology and web access for schools and libraries up to a national total of $2.25 billion annually. Poverty is taken into account and funding is inversely proportionate to community or school wealth.

As of February of 2000, $5.8 billion had been distributed throughout the nation for this purpose.

The purchase of hardware is only half the story. Most contend that even recently prepared teachers are insufficiently informed regarding the use of computers and the Internet for purposes of classroom instruction.

This may be an accurate portrayal. However, if it is, it is not for lack of funding for retraining teachers. U. S. schools do not keep precise records regarding professional development expenditures. However, by extrapolation from what is known regarding school spending, it is possible to assert with confidence that the nation spends a minimum of $5 billion annually for the advanced academic and inservice pedagogical preparation of teachers. The proportion of this amount allocated to technology training is not known. However, if school districts believed such professional preparation to be important, than literally all of it could be focused on preparing teachers better to use their classroom computers and the Internet.

School districts spend approximately $6 billion annually on instructional supplies. The proportion of this amount allocated for the purchase of computer software can only be estimated. However, this is likely to be large portion, especially as districts increasingly can substitute “E Books” for conventional textbooks and workbooks. Cuban reports that school spending on electronic technology, hardware, software, and networking, amounted to $75 per pupil in 1995 and escalated by 59 percent to $119 per pupil by 1999.[8]

Aside from whatever are the precise dollar amounts, America’s schools are not critically short of technology or money to purchase technology. The funds may not yet be deployed in a sufficiently equitable manor, and such issues should not be overlooked.[9] Still, on the national level, America has been willing to supply its schools with electronic technology and its accoutrements.

But what About Cuban’? Have Teachers’ Views and Working Circumstances Been Neglected?

The short hand answer is “yes.’ Teachers’ views regarding instructional technology have been neglected by policy makers and managers, but such is not really the issue.

Admittedly, Cuban reaches his conclusions having examined only a narrow and unrepresentative selection of secondary school classrooms. He found teachers simply did not incorporate technology into their fundamental instructional activities.

To Cuban’s credit, however unscientific his sample, he visited classrooms in “the belly of the beast.” He observed schools in California’s Silicon Valley. If schools anywhere are likely to be icons for technological deployment, one would think it would be in the Mecca of the chip and principal home of the Internet.

Henry Becker’s 2000 explanation of national technology application survey results buttresses Cuban’s thesis. Becker’s conclusions are based on a U.S. sample of 4,000 teachers in 1,100 classroom, selected for their representative nature. He reports that, as of 1998, instruction in America was not significantly influenced by electronic technology.[10]

Nevertheless, if Cuban’s overall observation is accurate regarding the failure of American schools to integrate technology into instruction, his explanation as to why leaves one vexed.

Cuban contends that teachers’ reluctance or refusal to integrate technology into instructional activities is best explained by a series of structural conditions and occupational norms. They teach many students often over many subject areas. They are isolated in their classrooms, unlike many professionals who work in teams. They are paid as a uniform cohort based on personal qualifications, not as individual performers.

Cuban’s further argues that the present technology deployment strategy inappropriately overlooks teachers and is blind to the fact that they are gate keepers who decide what goes on in classrooms. One can place computers in classrooms, but one cannot necessarily make teachers use them.

Cuban’s suggests that:[11]

Implied in the contextually constrained choice explanation then, is (sic) the following policy recommendations:

Policy makers and administrators must understand teachers’ expertise and perspectives on classroom work and engage teachers fully in the deliberations, design, deployment and implementation of technology plans.

The structural constrains that limit teachers’ choices in high schools and universities must be reduced, and a more relaxed schedule with large chunks of uninterrupted time for joint planning, crossing of departmental boundaries, and sustained attention to different forms of learning must be implemented.

The infrastructure of technical support and professional development would need to be redesigned and made responsive to the organizational incentives and workplace constraints teachers face.

No doubt Cuban’s notions endear him to teachers. However, his ideas are baffling in a policy setting. Just how would policy makers and administrators “...understand teachers’ expertise and perspectives on classroom work...?.” With which teachers should policy makers confer, effective ones who already use technology or ineffective one who, perhaps for many reasons, refuse to use technology?

The questions could continue, but the point would be the same. Cuban’s policy prescriptions have little connection to the problem of instructional technology exploration or adoption. He appears to want to bargain the introduction of technology into classrooms. “If you reduce our work load, we will accept computers.” Obviously, this is precisely in the opposite direction preferred by policy makers who want productivity elevated.

Employees, be they professional, semiprofessional, or something else, will not automatically adopt new means of performing their jobs, technological or otherwise. If new techniques require acquisition of added skills, threaten the comfort of routine, are absent clear evidence of effectiveness, or are connected with little apparent reward or threat for adopting them or not doing so, then why change?

No amount of policy maker jawboning with teachers or reducing teacher workloads is likely to alter these assertions. Something more fundamental is in operation regarding the adoption of instructional. What are missing are the essential ingredients of “demand.”

Part II: Creating a “Demand” Side of a Technology Equation

If supply alone is unlikely to propel exploration and adoption of instructional technology, then how can policy makers stimulate demand?

Creating “demand,” or an organization’s willingness to change, requires a set of preconditions on the part of management and workers. Among these are (1) a perception of need, (2) a motive to change, and (3) a sense of solution. Can these conditions be applied to the exploration of and adoption of instructional technology?

“Yes,” probably. However, no single component is easily achieved. Here is the current lay of the policy landscape when it comes to incenting demand or motivating change.

Perceptions of Need. Elected officials and members of the public routinely place education improvement at or near the top of the policy agenda[12]. However, America’s mind workers seem less persuaded of the need to change. Many teacher leaders and professional education writers criticize the reform movement for making ill founded accusations of a crisis[13], for serving ends unrelated to the needs of children, or for using overly narrow performance measures, standardized testing, to judge the breadth of purposes expected of schools[14]. In short, the public may think schools need to change, but educators are not yet uniformly persuaded. Making schools better through the use of instructional technology is not now a high priority for most professional educators.

Incentives for Change. Selected teachers and administrators are unquestionably dedicated to render instruction more effective. However, they are almost always motivated from an internalized and individualized sense of professionalism. The institution’s reward structure provides little motivation to change fundamentally. Frequently, in large systems, the organizational culture actively discourages change.

In starkest terms, American public education rewards teachers and administrators for only three conditions, no one of which is related to student performance. The system rewards professional employees for getting older or serving longer, acquiring added college units beyond a bachelors degree, and putting distance between one’s self and students, gaining an administrative, supervisory, or academic appointment. Propelling higher achievement, satisfying parents, exciting curiosity, creating social cohesion, and reducing dropout are not conditions for which rewards are typically issued.

Moreover, if a school persistently exhibits low rates of achievement, high amounts of violence, etc. there is little professional threat to those who work there. In low performing schools, everyone, or at least all the teachers, keeps his or her job, and everyone keeps getting paid. Only parents and concerned pupils lose something.

Not much motive here for exploring the application of instructional technology.

Sense of Solution. If instructional technology could rather easily be demonstrated either to (1) effectuate higher student achievement, (2) make a teacher’s work life more comfortable, (3) vastly reduce the cost of providing instruction, or (4) or preserve one’s employment when threatened by intense competition, then it might overcome the impediments imposed by the discouraging conditions described in the above two paragraphs. However, most of today’s technology advocates are motivated as much from zeal as from results that are real. The amount of systematic inquiry demonstrating superior results from electronic enhanced instruction is slender[15]. Certainly the costs of delivering instruction have not declined. Finally, the use of computers to assist instruction seems presently to make a teacher’s work life harder, not easier.[16]

What should Policy Makers Do?

Many of the steps necessary to create demand, to generate a sense of need, and to construct incentives for change, are underway. They are primitive. However, if efforts to perfect them continue, eventually a “demand” for technological exploration will forcefully emerge. Thus, a policy imperative for elected officials is staying the course on several systemic reform fronts.

Specifically:

Targets. Legislatures, governors, state boards of education, school boards, superintendents, principals, and teachers should all be engaged in establishing performance targets progress toward which is accurately measurable.

Testing. Continue efforts, state by state, to construct standardized tests that are (1) linked to a broad range of performance expectations for students and schools, including learning with technology, (2) are effective in measuring the “value added: by individual schools, (3) can link performance of individual students to their individual classroom teachers, and (4) measure student subsets such as low income or minority achievement.

Accountability. Continue efforts to construct accountability systems that (1) accurately align responsibility with authority and (2) involve fair but effective performance consequences. There is no effective accountability when principals have too little control over the resources and personnel in their schools, when teachers have insufficient resources to perform tasks expected of them, and when there are neither rewards nor punishments for meeting performance goals.

Data Distribution. Few policy steps can more effectively create a sense that schools need to change than distributing school performance results widely. “Data Democratization” has dramatic potential for altering public, parental, and professional perceptions of the need to change schools. When parents and local officials can see the performance of students they care about relative to the performance of other similarly situated students, then they can ask more sophisticated questions of their local professional educators.

Research. State and local agencies most appropriately take all the above steps. However, there is a policy role that is uniquely national in nature.

Accumulating added research and development evidence of the effects of instructional technology is a responsibility that rightly falls to the federal government. This includes development of the technical measures by which the effects of technology can be appropriately assessed. States and local school districts have few incentives to invest in R & D because of ‘free rider” problems. For them to expend their scarce resources only to see the advantages flowing beyond their boundaries is discouraging.

Competition. The advent of web enhanced and interactive instructional media offers an opportunity to construct competitive alternatives to conventional schooling. This is much less true of the elementary years when schooling serves a custodial as well as instructional mission. However, for students who are in the eight or ninth grade and beyond, the easy availability of Internet provided instruction through unconventional sources might well enhance students’ understanding and simultaneously bring pressure to bear upon conventional schooling to adapt.

Here is a hypothetical example. The provision of Advanced Placement courses is uneven across the nation. A few schools have faculty capable of offered rigorous advanced instruction in selected subjects. However, large city districts and selected rural areas are less well positioned. Imagine if the federal government, perhaps in collaboration with a consortium of states, funded the construction of a full spectrum of rigorous Advanced Placement courses in which a student could enroll, and if performing satisfactorily, received college credit, without having to enroll through one’s high school.

There is increasing discussion in the policy community of the existing 12th grade in high school being wasteful. The provision of courses on the Internet would enable student more readily to take the final units they needed for graduation or for college credit, without having to attend school exclusively in a conventional setting. They could simultaneously be employed and take courses.

The financial implications of hundreds of thousands of high school students enrolling for credit in courses through an outside agency, and no longer attending their public school full time, are enormous. Most schools could not withstand the deficits that this would create without having to downsize their faculties and administrative staff. A solid sense of competition might result, with students, parents, and the public purse being the beneficiaries.

Making such a technologically facilitated competitive market possible is unlikely without the intervention of public subsidy. Here is a target for the estimated $4 to $8 billion now being spent in education on electronic technology. A consortium of states, perhaps cooperating through the Education Commission of the States (ECS), and with federal financial assistance could probably develop the infrastructure and content for web enhanced high school courses with a three to five year period. Such an arrangement would simultaneously motivate competition and still permit states to maintain their constitutionally mandated roles as education providers.

Conclusion

When provided with information regarding the performance of their students relative to those of a similar nature who perform better, teachers will be positioned to see the need to change. Once parents have better information, they will be positioned to demand change and request alternative paths for their children. An effective accountability system can provide educators with motives to change. A federally overseen research and development program, perhaps developed collaboratively with state representative bodies, can begin to provide answers and guidelines regarding which instructional technologies are deserving of wider application.

Widespread provision, through technology channels, of competitive out-of-school instruction, that permits unrestricted access to advanced learning and networked information, might threaten conventional schooling clientele and funding sufficiently to galvanize change.

Finally, Congress is again debating the remaining components of the Bush Administration’s education reform proposals. This would appear to be an excellent vehicle for the federal government to empower states and multi state consortia to begin to undertake the research and development activities surrounding instructional technology as suggested above.

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[1] Professor of public policy and education, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. A paper commissioned for the U.S. Department of Commerce “Transforming Enterprise” conference, January 28, 2003 in Washington D.C. The author wishes to express his appreciation for the constructive criticisms of Arthur Sheekey. Remaining errors and omissions are the author’s alone.

[2] In a 1998 National Center for Education Statistics survey of public school teachers, only computer course and business teachers reported using a computer more than 20 times in the course of an academic year to instruct their students. See Becker, Henry J,” Findings from the Teaching Learning, and Computing Survey Is Larry Cuban Right?,” 2000 State Education Technology Conference Papers, Council of Chief State School Officers, May 2000. pp. 23-53.

[3] A reader should understand that there are exceptions to this generalization. There are instances of exciting application of electronic technologies to instruction as documented, for example in the 1999 Editorial Projects in Education publication Technology Counts. However, as documented later in this paper, these are isolated exceptions that presently do not appear to be evolving into a pattern.

[4] Cuban, Larry, Oversold & Underused: Computers in the Classroom, Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2001. The latest statistical report provided by Quality Education Data indicates that 97 percent of America’s public school classrooms are now connected to the Internet and 84 percent of public school classrooms are online. Authors of the report attribute the high connection penetration to the “E-Rate” program, that provides approximately $2 billion annually (most of the sums collected each year from telephone service consumers). The report states that the average ratio of students per computer is now believed to be 5 to 1, and 64 percent of those computers use Microsoft Windows software and 32 percent of the computers were Apple McIntosh machines. Among schools surveys, 22 percent specified that they were offering hand held computers to teachers, technology coordinators, and principals. (Communication from Arthur Sheekey.)

[5] Cuban, Op Cit., page 17.

[6] “U.S. Public School Classrooms with Web Access hit 77% in 2000, Wall Street Journal, Wednesday June 6, 2001, page B2.

[7] Technology Literacy Challenge Fund

[8] Cuban, op cit.

[9] The previously referenced NCES technology survey determined that schools populated with lower socioeconomic students still did not match their more fortunate counterparts in the number of computers per pupil or access to the Internet.

[10] Becker, ibid.

[11] Cuban, op cit, page 183.

[12] Peabody Center for Education Policy, “Voter Perception of Education Issues,” forthcoming.

[13] See Richard Rothstein, The Way We Were, New York: Century Fund, 1998.

[14] See Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and ‘Tougher Standards, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

[15] On page 178 of Oversold and Underused, op cit, Cuban asserts, “As for enhanced efficiency learning and teaching, there have been no advances (as measured by higher academic achievement of urban, suburban, or rural students) over the last decade that can be confidently attributed to broader access to computers.”

[16] See Charles Fisher and David Dwyer, (eds.) Education and Technology: Reflections on Computing in Classrooms, San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1996.

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