WHAT WILL LIMIT SCHOOLS OF THE FUTURE?

 

Sixteen years ago an editorial in the New York Times promised that in the schools of the future:

• "students will use free internet applications to complete their classroom assignments on school-issued laptops that also substitute for text books"
• "educators will track students' academic growth with sophisticated software that allows them to better tailor lessons and assignments to each youngster's achievement level"
• "parents will use instant messaging to chat with teachers about their child's progress"

In a few schools all of this has been realized and more besides. But in many others a fundamental limitation is nullifying it all. It's the kids, their parents, and the world they're growing up in. Youngsters still have to buy into schooling before technology can even begin to transform their education. And kids with all sorts of education-stultifying problems weren't buying into schooling before the advent of digital technology, they aren't buying into it now despite the promise, and they won't buy into it in the future. Similarly their parents have to be capable. Many aren't. And, lastly, the neighborhood surrounding each school seeps in and inevitably transforms the educational process for good or ill . 

This is particularly true of schools that most urgently require transformation. Schools in our inner cities. Technology hasn't transformed these schools. They haven't become more successful delivering instruction. They aren't doing better communicating with parents or fostering their interest. With rare exceptions, these schools remain the same educational wastelands they were before the advent of the digital age.

Here is a brief tale that illustrates the point. A teacher I know very well was trying to teach in a Philadelphia inner city middle school that was technologically impoverished. Through some miracle one solitary classroom had been equipped with brand new computers at every desk. One morning while classes were changing, two adolescent boys began chasing one another around the computer rich classroom. Soon they were leaping from one desktop to another, trampling keyboards and kicking over computers. Perhaps the boys had that intent before they even started. We'll never know. In any event they wrecked utter havoc. There was no money to replace or repair the damaged equipment. The computerized classroom was defunct before its promise was even beginning to be realized. 

The vandals were never identified, much less dealt with. Disorder was so rife in this school that this particular destruction just blended into the customary chaos. Whatever promise the new computers offered was lost to all. Students could not, as the Times article promised, "use free internet applications to complete their classroom assignments" had they even wanted to. Worse still, kids who actually wanted to complete their assignments were in surprisingly short supply. On nice days as many as a third of the youngsters were either hours late reporting for class, or failed to show up at all. 

So far as teachers being able to "track student's academic growth with sophisticated software that allowed them to better tailor lessons and assignments to each youngster's achievement level," that's not just impossible now, it will be in the future — at least at the secondary level. Teachers there are trying to teach upwards of 150 kids spread over five different periods, each with 30 or so kids. Keeping track of all 150 is impossible now and will be in the future. In fact, it will remain impossible so long as we organize public education on a factory like, mass production basis to make it affordable. And we're not about to stop doing that because tax payers, particularly those without school-age children, are already fed up with school taxes.

So far as "parents using instant messaging to chat with teachers about their child's progress," that pipedream requires their parents to have the necessary technology, interest, sobriety, time and freedom from the thousand and one problems that poverty brings. Good luck with that!

What is one to make of all this? That schools and school kids do NOT exist in a vacuum. The world surrounding the school creeps into each classroom mirroring the neighborhoods in which the school is submerged. IF that neighborhood is impoverished, dangerous and dysfunctional no amount of technological innovation is going to save that school from the consequences. If the school is submerged in a neighborhood of affluence, safety and functional families technological innovations will only widen the gap.  

 

For more detailed realistic considerations of educational issues such as this, visit newfoundations.com AND/OR newfoundations.net