By Steve Sailer
09/04/2011
From the NYT:
In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores
By MATT RICHTEL
CHANDLER, Ariz. — Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” — but not in any traditional way.
In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius.
The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of education’s future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies.
The digital push here aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom, turning the teacher into a guide instead of a lecturer, wandering among students who learn at their own pace on Internet-connected devices.
“This is such a dynamic class,” Ms. Furman says of her 21st-century classroom. “I really hope it works.”
Hope and enthusiasm are soaring here. But not test scores.
Since 2005, scores in reading and math have stagnated in Kyrene, even as statewide scores have risen. …
First of all, 7th-graders shouldn’t be reading Shakespeare. He’s too hard for them. Maybe 9th graders should read Julius Caesar, a play with a much simpler style. But Shakespeare’s comedies are hard. Also, they aren’t very funny. King Lear is still really, really sad, but As You Like It is not really funny anymore.
Larry Cuban, an education professor emeritus at Stanford University, said the research did not justify big investments by districts.
“There is insufficient evidence to spend that kind of money. Period, period, period,” he said. “There is no body of evidence that shows a trend line.”
Some advocates for technology disagree.
Karen Cator, director of the office of educational technology in the United States Department of Education, said standardized test scores were an inadequate measure of the value of technology in schools. Ms. Cator, a former executive at Apple Computer, said that better measurement tools were needed but, in the meantime, schools knew what students needed.
Okay, but why is Ms. Cator a former executive at Apple Computer? If the K-12 market is as promising as she thinks, wouldn’t her former boss Steve Jobs have made sure to keep at Apple? After all, he has a pretty good nose for the next big thing. Moreover, a quarter of a century ago, Apple was, to a large extent, the chief K-12 technology company. That was its strong suit in 1985. Since his return to Apple in the mid 1990s, Jobs has largely abandoned K-12 for the well-educated grown-up market, with vast success.
On the other hand, I think there are opportunities to help kids learn better in K-12 with technology. Intelligent drilling is what computers can do well. And the iPad looks like a particularly good form factor. But most of the software currently for K-12 is lousy, and most of the people buying K-12 software aren’t very good either.
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