The productivity of learning technologies: a school and learning policy review; it's time to sing the productivity praises of our educational technologies - Statistical Data Included

Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Spring, 2002 by Dale Mann

Arizona is the first state to apply an application-service provider (ASP) to all of its schools. Rather than installing individual copies of software on every desktop, 252 titles--with an additional 7,000 titles available at reduced costs--are available free to every school in the state (the state assumes the subscription costs of about $8 per student or teacher user). The "rent, not buy" initiative fills the pipe previously created with the statewide wiring contract through QWEST.

The hardware examples demonstrate how technology and telecommunications can stretch public dollars and get to equity and ubiquity faster and with less pain.

A Dollar Recovery Example: Data Mining

One version of data mining software tracks the eligibility of students for federal Medicaid benefits. After installing 4GL, Inc.'s software, Baltimore's Medicaid recovery went from $2.5 million to $25 million; Detroit's went from $3 million to $15 million (Elizabeth Guerard, "Schools Use Software to Track Special Ed Services," eSchool News, 4:6, June 2001, p. 1).

A Foregone Expense Example: School Dropouts vs. Phone-Card Theft

Think about a 14-year-old ninth grader. She may have all the warning signs of dropping out: falling grades, dysfunctional home life, police encounters, no co-curricular involvement, too much time in paid employment. The downstream costs for not intervening will be hundreds of thousands of dollars in remedial education, increased social dependency, decreased lifetime income, and decreased taxes. Different "child serving" bureaucracies hold different data about the ninth grader that might flag her for help, but no agency tracks her comprehensively and thus no agency intervenes.

But, if one of your credit card numbers gets used to make three phone calls to Belize, and if you have no prior history of calling Belize, your home phone will ring with a company representative asking if you authorized the calls. Falcon, Inc. software (HNC Software, San Diego) and an Omaha call center start protecting the company from unrecoverable charges at $20. Falcon checks 12 million credit card transactions a day and saves $500 million a year in fraudulent credit charges (Barnaby J. Feder, "Artificial Intelligence for the New Millennium," New York Times, June 30, 2001, p. C1). Similar technology could be used to help students at risk.

An "Other Educators" Example

With state standards, accountability, and other sanctions in place, it is hard to imagine that there are many gains from pushing schools harder.

Laurence Steinberg writes in his book, Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform Has Failed and What Parents Need to Do (Simon & Schuster, 1996): "[S]tudent achievement is due more to the conditions of students' lives outside of school than ... within school." He feels that we have disregarded "forces that, while outside the boundaries of the school, are probably more influential."

Fortunately, schools are not alone. In 1966, James S. Coleman et al. (Equality of Educational Opportunity, Washington DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1966, p. 77) documented that, from most to least powerful, the sources of education in a child's life are