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

* the family

* the media

* the peer group

* the school

In 1966, "the media" meant black-and-white TV and stick figures on a computer screen. By 2005, households with broadband access will likely increase by 900 percent, from 5 million to 47 million (David Lake, "The Five-Year Forecast," The Industry Standard, March 26, 2001, 4:12, p. 83). And children are already sending us signals about how they learn: 60 percent of the preferred sources in Figure 3 are digital.

How does this power learning? Lightspan Achieve Now! is a CD-ROM and Web-enabled K-6 reading, language arts, and mathematics curriculum, linked to state standards, launched in the classroom but (critically) completed at home. Multiyear, multisite research indicates that for every minute that the teacher spends with Lightspan Achieve Now! in the classroom, families spend six minutes at home. Compare the cost-free service of the parent-as-educator to the cost of providing home visits by teacher aides (if you could amend their contract to require home visits).

School people can add other, practical examples to this review. Why, in the presence of evidence about the contributions of learning technology, is the topic so little discussed?

Inattention to Productivity and Teacher Unions

Schooling is the most labor intensive sector of the American economy. A higher proportion of teachers belong to labor unions than auto workers, steel workers, or coal miners. Discussing productivity is so unacceptable to teacher unions that prior to the negotiation of a New York City teacher-union contract in his first administration, even Mayor Rudy Giuliani instructed his team not to raise the issue.

Productivity measures the output per worker. What is productivity in schooling?

* Increased amounts of learning by students;

* Increased number of students learning ...

--with the same number of adults, and/or ...

--with fewer adults.

The last definition is the showstopper for unions. If more technology means fewer employees, teachers will stuff their wooden shoes in the expansion slots. Economists like capital-for-labor substitutions, but educators revile them as threats to employment. And the specter of being replaced by a machine may have something to do with the rates of teacher use, which lag far behind the growth in installed base and connectivity.

Here's a telling example: A tech director for a Long Island school district spent the proceeds of a bond issue on hardware, software, and sustained professional development for teachers. Curious about utilization, he installed meters on the middle school classroom desktops. A month later, he had determined that the fans were blowing 100 percent of the time but the average desktop ran executable code seven minutes a month.

Teachers determine more of the reality of what students experience in classrooms than do any other class of actors in school policy. We believe them to be "closest to the children"; we grant them tenure; and there are simply too many teachers to be closely supervised, even if that were desirable. As a result, teachers are the final arbiters of all classroom improvement policies, including learning technology (in the schools). Learning technology must make them more successful, or it will not be used.