Giving kids iPads won't solve the education challenge

[Renew Deal]

You've no doubt read the news that Los Angeles is distributing 640,000 iPads to K-12 students, which is a big win for Apple and yet another sign that the PC is in decline. At the same time, Dell touts the wonders of its Windows 8 tablets for schooling. Now, it's great that students are getting current technology. However, technology doesn't teach -- and it often doesn't help teach, either.

I've been in the business of covering technology since 1982, back when the IBM PC was new and the Apple IIe was the great hope for schools. Yes, our schools are always struggling, or at least that's the perpetually popular wisdom. Apple focused on the education market out of a mixture of belief in technology as an educational aid and to indoctrinate kids into the Apple brand. Early in the IBM PC era, IBM did the same. And ever since, Apple, IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and so on have touted educational use of their computers to save students from poor schooling. Regardless of the device or platform, it hasn't worked, has it? In fact, there's a ton of research showing the lack of correlation between computers and learning.

Along for the ride came all sorts of education software, from the Logo turtle-based programming language to the cornucopia of courseware that was supposed to help reading, science, and other lesson areas. Some were grounded in education theory -- which as any classroom teacher will tell you often bears little resemblance to reality -- and others in, well, naïveté or carpetbagging. In other words, like most software, some is really good and a lot is not.

I don't mean to suggest that using technology in education is bad. To the contrary, it can be quite helpful both for students and for teachers. Just think of how useful search engines and websites are for not only finding information, but also for teaching how to make the critical distinction that just because something is published (whether digitally or on paper) doesn't mean it's true, unbiased, or relevant.
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http://www.infoworld.com/d/consumerization-of-it/giving-kids-ipads-wont-solve-the-education-challenge-224485

[Nay]

1. Of course it won't. But that's never been the purpose. The purpose is to enrich the tech

companies and establish a brand in children's minds. Period. Oh, and bankrupting schools even further by the purchase, setup, and maintenance of all these tablets -- that's another benefit, so the tech companies can further the aims of their friends' companies that set up charter schools to replace the 'failing' public schools. It's a win-win for the assholes.

Am I the only one who remembers how TV, at its inception, was talked up incessantly for its ability to educate children? It was supposed to lead to a golden age of kids who did nothing but learn math, social studies, etc., from the TV. Now, even back then, the TV was a way for the elite to sell its junk, and these days TV could rightfully be called the main impediment to learning (see "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" by J. Mander).

So, all the tech solutions that purport to teach kids are bullshit. This does not mean that the thoughtful student can't do meaningful work on a tablet that helps him learn; but all our recent experiences with tech is that it quickly devolves into lowest-common-denominator crap like porn, the Kardashians, Honey Booboo, etc. There is no reason to believe that a different platform for the same old shit will educate even one child about anything except what hookers look like.

The farther away we get from personal and constant interaction in a small-size classroom, with distractions and tech 'noise' eliminated as much as possible, the less children will learn. Period.

[Igel]

2. No, that's not the purpose.

Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.

There's this huge achievement gap between whites, "traditional" African-Americans, and Latinos. Sorry about the "traditional," but it needs to be there. In many instances if you look at top colleges you find that the ranks of their African-Americans are the children of immigrants. The children of black immigrants often pattern very much like the children of non-black immigrants. It's really African-Americans whose ancestors were here in 1950 that have an achievement gap. And yes, it's huge.

The question is, What to do about it? Nobody wants to just ignore it. That's a huge civil rights issue. It's one of the main goals of NCLB. Cosby's been weighing in on it for decades and it's what his dissertation was about, in a kind-of/sort-of way. 'Fat Albert' as a way of helping to close the achievement gap. Whatever.

The achievement gap is across the board. It's in reading, although it's often smaller there. It's in math. It's in science. It's there in writing. And it's there in technology.

Some is access--that's true for technology as well as math. Not in the classroom, but at home. I've seen schools where every kid gets a laptop and you know what? It hasn't done a damned thing to close the achievement gap--even in technology. Some of it's just that giving a 9th grader whose seldom used a computer a laptop when their middle-class white peers have had a computer since they could push the on button doesn't help them catch up without direct instruction and insanely boring exercises. It helps for individuals, but we're all about the group.

It doesn't matter that poor whites have pretty much the same achievement gap. It matters very little that the Latino achievement gap is also impressive--and distressingly bimodal (but hey, we only use averages--all that standard deviancy ... deviariousness ... deviashessness ... deafness ... whatever, let's just stick to the mean). Screw individuals. It's the group achievement scores and grades that matter and since there's a group difference and we define groups by skin color it must be racism. If we don't look at standard deviations we have no chance of looking at skew and run terrified from ANOVA like it's a supernova.

It's all about closing the achievement gap. Give the AA kids iPads and you give them all the technology-literacy tools that they need to become fluent writers and math whizzes. They're empowered with the latest thinking tools.

Heaven help the poor teachers. And I can only imagine what the insurance bill's going to be.

[HiPointDem]

4. the gap had been closing for decades until education deform. now it's growing again.

the education gap is just a talking point for the deformers. They are systematically destroying the factors responsible for closing the gap.


Addressing the disparity in test scores between black and white children remains one of the greatest social challenges of our time. Between the 1960s and 1980s, tremendous strides were made in closing the achievement gap, but that remarkable progress halted abruptly in the mid 1980s, and stagnated throughout the 1990s.

https://www.russellsage.org/publications/steady-gains-and-stalled-progress

[Nay]

5. But we're not talking about education gaps here. The essay says absolutely nothing about

such gaps. It discusses the relevance/non-relevance of computers/iPads to the actual learning process in all kids. From your comments, it's hard for me to discern whether you like the idea of iPads or hate it -- paragraph 5 suggests giving kids iPads is dumb, but paragraph 7 suggests you think iPads will help AA kids.

Personally, I have no idea whether it will help AA kids specifically, but past experience has shown that TV/computers/iPads don't help kids learn much except how to be a more idiotic consumer of useless shit. Certainly, anyone who grows up and has never touched a computer will be at a disadvantage, but knowing how to turn a computer on and use it superficially is not education. The idea that children will search out serious information in order to educate themselves is, in this culture, pretty damned absurd, and I don't care what color the kid is.

[HiPointDem]

3. +1. i'm old enough to remember all the hype about tv & education too. nothing new under

the sun. technology is all about who owns it.

[knitter4democracy]

6. That's the purpose of the companies, sure, but not the teachers' purpose.

What I could do with a class set of iPads... *stares off dreamily*

There are great teaching tools available online these days, simulations that help kids see how things really can be, great social networking tools they can use to practice a second language or their writing, and so much more. Technology is a great tool, and there's no reason to give up a great tool if we can get it.

[Nevernose]

7. Our district distributed several thousand iPads

They were looking for a way to spend federal tech grants. I wonder if that weren't at least part of the motive here.

[TBF]

8. Using technology can be great -

my daughter really got into an on-line math game our district had last year. The kids competed against each other & she was always on there trying to get her point total up (by doing math problems). So, that was ok. If there are specific tutoring programs etc. it can be a fine tool. Just for the sake of having an iPad - no. Like anything else it's just a tool.