TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052091/0520120.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10KB | 214 lines

                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 48

The Revolution That Fizzled


Computers have not lived up to their promise to transform
America's  struggling schools, but it's not too late to redeem
the failure

By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT -- Reported by David Bjerklie/New York and
Robert W. Hollis/San Francisco


    The tiny Belridge school district in McKittrick, Calif.,
seemed to have everything going for it. Classes were small,
parent involvement was high, and equipment was state of the art.
The school boasted its own low-powered television station
(students broadcast a twice-weekly news show), and it was the
only district in the state to provide every student with two
Apple IIgs computers, one for school and one for home. Its
innovative education program, which reshaped the curriculum to
make use of computers in all subject areas, was featured on
national TV and in Apple's promotional literature.

    Then the annual standardized-test scores came in. The
parents of McKittrick learned to their dismay that the entire
first-grade class -- along with more than a third of the
64-member student body -- had scored below their grade level for
both reading and math. "My child was more than a year behind,"
complained Kathy Bledsoe, one of a group of angry parents who
picketed the school board carrying placards that read CAN YOU
READ THIS? MY CHILD CAN'T. School officials argued that students
had scored even worse in previous years. But by the time school
reopened last fall, the Belridge superintendent, the teacher who
coordinated the computer project and three other teachers had
retired or quit.

    The Belridge school is an extreme case of what might be
called computer failure, but it is not unique. More than a
decade has passed since microcomputers began appearing in large
numbers in U.S. schools, accompanied by heady predictions that
the new technology would soon transform education just as
society had been transformed by the automobile. But the problems
that beset the U.S. school system 10 years ago -- rising
illiteracy, declining math skills, dwindling comprehension --
still bedevil it today. There is a growing sense among educators
and parents that as an educational cure-all, the computer has
fizzled.

    Now that America has patted itself on the back for its
high-tech prowess in the Persian Gulf, the country faces an even
more daunting technological challenge back home: how to make
educational electronics achieve its potential. Today 2.7 million
computers have been installed in the nation's 100,000 schools
-- roughly 1 for every 16 students -- along with an avalanche
of disk drives, modems, laser printers and videodisk players.
Estimated cost: $4 billion a year. But experts say the impact
of all this technology on the basic operation of most classrooms
is practically nil. Effective and innovative uses of computers
in the classroom can be found, but they are about as rare as
whale sightings.

    What makes the situation especially puzzling is that there
seems to be plenty of evidence that computer-aided instruction
can work. A 1990 University of Michigan study reported that
children can gain the equivalent of three months of instruction
per school year when computers are available to them. Electronic
drill and practice programs make children better spellers.
Intensive preparation programs raise SAT scores. So-called
integrated learning systems, which deliver entire curriculums
to students sitting at workstations in a learning laboratory,
practically guarantee that grade-point averages will go up, at
least for a time.

    But these systems are not very popular with teachers and
students, who generally prefer controlling computers to being
programmed by them. Moreover, studies show that children learn
their math tables faster, and more cost-effectively, when
drilled by fellow students rather than by machine. Some
educators are even starting to re-examine such well-established
instructional packages as IBM's Writing to Read program. Since
1984, IBM has sold more than 8,500 copies of the $16,500 system,
which uses tape recordings and personal computers to teach
language skills to kindergarten and first-grade students.
Several research articles, including one last summer in the
well-regarded Journal of Computer-Based Instruction, have
suggested that any benefit kindergartners get from Writing to
Read derives more from the extra attention provided by
supervising adults.

    Judging by these efforts, says Alan Kay, a techie
visionary whose design work led to the Macintosh's easy-to-use
screen display, "the computer revolution hasn't happened yet."
Kay maintains that the computer is not a tool or an instrument
but a medium, and he cites communications guru Marshall
McLuhen's dictum that all new forms of media take their initial
content from what preceded them. "Everything that we do on a
computer is a simulation," says Kay. "Right now, we're still
simulating paper."

    Despite Kay's enthusiasm for future electronic
breakthroughs, the fact is that good teachers will always be the
heart and soul of good education. Some social scientists worry
about something they call technological inequity, a condition
in which youngsters at richer schools get all the advanced
computer gadgetry and kids at poorer institutions go without.
Others are less concerned about the distribution of hardware
than about the distribution of good instruction. Tom Snyder,
creator of a series of popular educational games, is worried
that "in the year 2000 poor, black inner-city kids are going to
be taught by computers, while the rich white kids in the suburbs
will get human teachers."

    Those are apocalyptic scenarios, but in the meantime, what
should the students who have computers be doing with them? There
is no single correct answer, yet a survey completed last fall
by the Center for Technology in Education offers some
intriguing clues. The federally funded research center, operated
by the Bank Street College in New York City, located some 600
teachers who seemed particularly successful at weaving computer
use into their classroom activities, and took a close look at
how the instructors did it.

    The classrooms described in the Bank Street report are
rarely quiet, well-mannered showcases. Instead, they tend to be
noisy, chaotic places where computers are used not so much to
deliver instruction as to do the computational spadework for
students engaged in practical, concrete tasks. The
computer-friendly classes are busy publishing miniature
newspapers, designing model cities, writing operas or gathering
data on acid rain. Once the tasks have been set by the teacher,
students are generally free to pursue them as they see fit. In
these settings, knowledge tends to travel across the room like
a rumor, as students, hearing of a new discovery or computer
application, drop whatever they are doing to gather around and
watch. The learning, in computerese, is hands-on.

    Free-form classrooms take some getting used to, but they
offer multiple benefits. Not only are students more motivated
to learn, but teachers are usually more motivated to teach. Many
instructors report that they are able to cover subjects, from
adjustments to the tax base of imaginary cities to complex
astronomical equations, at a depth they could not have reached
in a traditional classroom. "Your role shifts drastically," says
Michael Hopkins, lead teacher at the experimental Saturn School
in St. Paul, where students track their own progress on desktop
computers and fashion programmable robots out of specially
designed Lego blocks. "You go from being the presenter, the
disseminator of learning, to being a facilitator and a coach."

    These changes do not come cheaply. Most of the model
teachers have had five or six years of practice in teaching with
computers, often beginning with simple drill programs and moving
slowly to more sophisticated applications. Many have had to go
through a painful process of self-education, supplementing
in-service classes with seminars, night schools and computer
clubs. Nine out of 10 bought their own home computers. And even
though these teachers have access to considerably more equipment
than colleagues in other schools, they are the ones crying
loudest that they need still more.


    Moreover, the most skilled teachers seem to be reaching a
critical juncture: they know where they want to go with the
technology, but they cannot get there without fundamental
changes in the way their educational time is organized. Karen
Sheingold, co-director of the Bank Street study, explains, "If
your students are collecting information about their community
for a complicated local-history project and are using the
computer to organize and present it, they can't work in
40-minute periods. By the time they sit down and start getting
their thoughts together, it's time to move on."

    Any tampering with the structure of the school curriculum
is fraught with peril. But there are some powerful reform
movements afoot, not the least of which is President Bush's own
"Education Strategy," announced last month. The thrust of the
President's plan is to overhaul schools by setting clear
educational goals, giving teachers greater autonomy in how they
reach those goals and then holding them accountable for the
performance of their students. In one form or another, those
changes will eventually percolate through the system, and for
once, the demands of educators and the challenges posed by
technology may be headed in the same direction.


________________________________________________________________
UPDATING THE CLASSROOM PROGRAM

    1. Give computers to teachers before making them available to
       students.

    2. Move the machines out of computer labs and into classrooms.

    3. Provide at least one workstation for every two or three
       students.

    4. Use flash cards for drill and practice, not Apples and
       IBMs.

    5. Give teachers the time and freedom to restructure their
       curriculum around the technology.

    6. Expect to wait five or six years for real change.