The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) recently commended the Peruvian government for providing children with access to technology through the One Laptop Per Child program (OLPC). OLPC began in 2007 with a powerful G1G1 (“Give One, Get One”) campaign as an innovative and promising way to “change the world.” The results of the IDB’s evaluation of 319 primary schools implementing the One Laptop Per Child program reveal the Peruvian children with the laptops showed no improvement in math or reading neither did the laptops increase their motivation to learn or spend more time studying.The IDB also concluded that the OLPC program does not provide enough guidance for teachers to show students how to effectively use the computers in class.
These results are disappointing, but not surprising as we continue to struggle with similar issues of access here in the United States. A week after the release of the IDP report, the Schott Foundation for Public Education released a report indicating that poor and minority students have fewer opportunities to attend New York City’s best public schools largely because of where they live. The main author of the report, Michael Holzman, states: “What we have is a situation where children who are most in need of what New York City public education can offer them are the least-likely to be able to have access to it.” Once again, those who are more affluent are afforded more choices than those who have not. The educational balance weighs in favor of bureaucratic realities and administration of schooling rather than democratic practices.
The history of teachers and technology illustrates a paucity of professional development while simultaneously blaming teachers for failing to integrate technology into their teaching and/or locate a direct linkage between its use in the classroom and student achievement, as defined primarily through standardized test scores. The hyperbole or what Larry Cuban calls “hype” of educational reform perpetuates the myth that technology will solve our educational ills. Similar thinking fixates on the notion that one laptop per child is the solution to educational challenges in less developed countries. While the OLPC program can be a gateway, the IDB report once again reinforces the necessity of professionally developing teachers in integrating the use of laptops into the classroom in ways that are meaningful for both teacher and student. Indeed it is difficult to nurture teachers in this way while simultaneously blaming them for everything that is “wrong” with schooling in the United States.
The success or failure of the OLPC program is important for all of us, as it is a microcosm of technology-driven educational reform in the United States, where we still experience a digital divide in the quantity and quality of educational technology in schools. Although in 2008 an estimated 100 percent of public schools had one or more instructional computers with Internet access, the ratio of students to instructional computers with Internet access was 3.1 to 1. Issues of access are complicated, however, and I have already addressed at length the degree to which technology is important to urban educational settings. What is worth noting here is the paradox that in the United States (a nation founded on individual liberties) issues of universal access and equity of resources and opportunity continue to be a main source of our greatest social and political challenges—poverty, hunger, achievement gap, and racial profiling to name just a few.
If/when we close the digital divide and achieve universal access to computers and high speed internet, then we as leaders are charged with moving beyond mere technical skills and empower even the most vulnerable with powerful, critical ways of thinking and communicating. Lingering in the turmoil of inaccessibility provides an excuse to not move forward with that for which we are truly responsible with regards to education in the United States: “to develop the habits of inquiry and skills of expression that all people need to be critical thinkers, effective communicators and active citizens in today’s world.”
While the original goal of OLPC is admirable and arguably democratic by design, so was the original premise of No Child Left Behind. Implementation of them is another story—especially when we know that top-down (bureaucratic) reform does not take hold as effectively as bottom-up (democratic) reform. Hyper-focusing on the ratio of students to computers is one example of diverting much-needed attention away from the more complicated and essential challenges associated with teaching. It is understandable that this attention is driven by the high-tech industry; yet the built-in obsolescence of our technological devices yields much collateral damage to grass-roots educational efforts. In the long run, teachers and students who learn how to access, analyze, evaluate, produce and communicate information that has purpose beyond the technology itself, will be successful in and beyond standardized testing.
Education and social change must be re-positioned yet again as the purpose of using technology and not the other way around. Let’s lead through example by showing that our classroom technologies are a means to a democratic end and not an end unto themselves. As educational leaders, we must scaffold research and practice/praxis using the best and brightest who are committed to educating all children even in the most challenging settings.
K-12 teachers and teacher educators: Learn how to privilege information and media literacies while integrating technology and curriculum standards by reading this brief article, “4 Steps to Standards Integration.”
Do you want to explore integrating technology across the curriculum in more meaningful ways? Feel free to download assignments/activities from my open online course at Montclair State University.
Get involved in national leadership by joining the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE).