The Impossible (Tech) Dream

Bill Gates talked to Congress yesterday and assured the nation that educational reform is crucial as the state of education in the country is in dire straights.

No duh.

Classroom teachers having been saying that for … decades … but no one listens. It takes a politician to make change, and politicians don’t listen to the troops: they listen to the generals. A general who is the richest man in the world may be heard, but classroom teachers with 30+ years of experience are disregarded as obsolete and quietly urged to let the next generation take their [rightful] place.

Generally, education is in whatever state it takes to maintain the status quo or climb aboard the latest bandwagon. If we need more tech, we write a grant and get more tech. Nah, there isn’t a plan to use it wisely to benefit the kids, but we get it, install it, tout it—and let it die a death of benign neglect because the grant never has follow-up money attached to it. At my site, we’re still using the classroom computers and printers from the original grant, which was awarded a decade ago.

How have the schools become so technologically savvy? Teachers, those who had given up teaching in core content areas, started dabbling with personal computers, so when computers became the latest educational “get,” some teachers were poised to become the IT departments of school sites and district offices. No training; no certification; no credentialing. They were there, they knew more than the next guy, and, suddenly, they were out of the classroom and into the computer arena.

In the past 5 years, training at the colleges and universities has caught up, so now we have competent personnel with appropriate training and credentials—at the district office. Those individuals aren’t at the sites: the sites are still manned with the self-taught employees who keep the whole thing afloat. The district people only show up on campus when it’s a district problem, so the classroom computer sits idle for endless months if fixing it isn’t a priority and replacing it is an impossibility.

Because all record-keeping is now done using tech, one would assume that the first computers to arrive at the site 9 years ago have been upgraded to handle the new usage requirements: not. There is no money to replace what was purchased with the initial grant, so we are limping along with dinosaurs. Imagine the leaps and bounds of tech progress in a decade, and then imagine not having access to any of it: that’s education.

Teachers just this year have been granted limited access to the website for posting grades from home, a theory that is much more applicable than the practice due to the restrictions on access from one's home computer. Teachers have been begging for laptops, rather than desktop computers, so we can carry the system with us when we leave the site and still have access to the website for recordkeeping. No can do: not only are the laptops too expensive, but the district cannot handle the volume of traffic that would generate, though Lord only knows how that argument works as we have to access the system one way or another, and the machine we use for the access has no bearing on the alleged problem.

Next year, the new guy has decided to implement computers for at least half of the incoming freshman class. Now picture the district servers every class period as teacher after teacher after teacher logs onto the system to input attendance: it can’t handle the usage load. Add to the daily workload another approximately 500 students just at my site also logging on for the computer/ internet-based instruction that is being promised.

Can you say CRASH?

Education isn't a business, and it isn't managed as a business. Put Gates in charge, a man who sees big pictures, analyzes problems, and offers real-world solutions, and we could probably stop the downward plunge of our educational system in this country.

Continue to allow the system to limp along school-by-school and it's bound to implode.

65 days and counting.