In old Chinese script the word crisis consists of two opposing characters, one symbolizing danger, the other opportunity. The tension in this duality embodies what has been happening lately in schools as politicians and education leaders have been making their largest investment ever in state of the art technology. This past year, as school officials were dealing with budget cuts by laying off teachers and librarians and closing school libraries; spending on city schools was increasing in another area, classroom computers. Their goal is to make sure there is at least one computer for every 10 students in fourth through eighth grades. These subsidies come on top of the many billions spent in recent years in the United States.
According to national estimates, U.S. schools have spent roughly $80 billion on school computing just in the last decade, approximately the amount required to hire 170,000 qualified teachers (Oppenheimer). This, at a time when other activities aren't available outside school the way computers are. Programs such as art and music classes, shop and physical education are being cut back or eliminated. Shifts of this sort have made for a drastic and worrisome change in today's classrooms. Throughout the country, computer technology is ruining the academic experience, corrupting schools' financial integrity, cheating the poor, fooling people about the job skills children need for the future and furthering the illusions of state and federal education policy. The education system must cut back on technology expenses; the money should be used for school programs and qualified teachers.
Computers Are Too Expensive for Schools
As any adult knows, system crashes are a fact of high-tech life. Computers are unstable and unpredictable at best. That's why nearly every professional analysis tells organizations to reserve the bulk of their technology budgets for maintenance, future upgrades and training. Schools obviously don't have that kind of money; only 10 to 15 percent of their technology budgets are typically devoted to these nettlesome demands. This is why many schools have to cut back on more and more traditional funding, to fix and upgrade new computers. All computers eventually become obsolete as computers become more advanced and efficient. In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a single chip would double every 24 months.
Critics have predicted the imminent demise of Moore's law ever since he stated it. But to this day electrical engineers continue to defy physical challenges, because transistors have essentially followed this rule. Because of unreliability and the need for replacement every several years, schools must limit their spending on computers and apply it to longer lasting programs.
But technical hassles are just the beginning of the schools' troubles. Take the much-vaunted effort to close the "digital divide." Popularized by the Clinton administration, this initiative was aimed at the poor, who were supposedly being shut out of social and economic opportunities because they had fewer computers than wealthy families. This campaign has been so appealing that, according to a recent U.S. Department of Education report, computers are now more prevalent in poor schools than in wealthy ones. Yet political and education leaders haven't stopped crying about this terrible divide. Meanwhile, the schools' new technology riches took the real divide between rich and poor children, the educational divide, and widened it.
In Harlem, for example, teachers have their hands full just trying to maintain order and pass on a basic level of knowledge. Now, they have to spend much of their time managing technical hassles the schools can't afford to fix and watching for cheating, instant messaging tricks and illicit material on screens that teachers cannot control or even see. Forcing poorer schools to spend more money on technology and less on the fundamentals has created an educational divide. These schools must fix this divide by limiting their spending on technology.
Software Is Just As Big of a Problem
Hardware problems are the tip of the iceberg, because it is the software that computers run that is being utilized in education. At Congress' request, schools have been rapidly installing filtering software to block offensive Internet sites. Unfortunately, filtering technology is inherently flawed and extremely costly, and students regularly hack through it anyway. When the filtering software does work it often blocks sites that are not offensive that might have been used by students. In both poor and wealthy schools, educators have invested millions in costly software packages now pitched as the answer to President Bush's call for education initiatives that are proven, through "scientific research," to increase achievement. Unfortunately, the research behind many, if not most, of these claims is questionable. Consider one popular software package for reading, called Accelerated Reader, or AR, which is used in more than half the nation's public schools. AR is made by Renaissance Learning Inc., an aggressive Wisconsin company that stakes its educational reputation on the volumes of research suggesting that its products raise academic achievement. But the quality of that research is another matter.
