Techlash: Bringing back human-to-human learning
More people are asking the right questions about ed tech, says Harvard education professor Jal Mehta in a conversation with AEI's Rick Hess on the "techlash" in Education Next. The world is realizing that "giving every young person a highly addictive device to carry 24/7 may not be such a good idea."
Growing up isn't virtual, Mehta says. Children need a variety of in-person experiences. "One effort that I particularly like is Kidsburgh, a collaboration among organizations in Pittsburgh with the goal of having an after-school activity available for every child. I could see many different cities creating their own Kidsburghs."
Red and blue states are banning phones in classrooms, says Hess. "Heck, even AFT President Randi Weingarten and Moms for Liberty have found common cause teaming up against Big Tech." The pendulum swing is understandable, he says. "The tech sector talked big and underdelivered."
What were we thinking?, Hess asks. "Only now — after billions spent on millions of devices and thousands of applications — has it occurred to anyone that schools should demand evidence of efficacy or that devices be used in moderation?!"
"The answer to bad ed tech isn't no ed tech," argues Amplify's Alexandra Walsh, chief product officer at Amplify, a K-12 curriculum and assessment companies, in a Washington Post op-ed. "It’s higher standards, better tools and a philosophy that keeps teachers at the center."
Technology can give teachers "a real-time picture of where each student is so they can adapt instruction accordingly," Walsh writes. "Digital tools can help students visualize and interact with math as it appears in the world, receive immediate feedback that deepens understanding and run a science simulation that a static page simply cannot replicate."
"Research shows that students who receive immediate digital feedback on their work can learn significantly more than those using traditional methods," she writes.
Anti-tech laws tend to cap minutes of screen time, Walsh writes. The real issue is quality. If ed tech is proven to "deepen learning" and help teachers be more productive, then use it, she argues. If it's just a distraction, pull the plug.
A small Pennsylvania school district near Pittsburgh is scaling back screen time and emphasizing pencil and paper, reports Lauraine Langreo in Education Week. "Students in grades K-2 won’t have regular access to school-issued laptops or tablets, students in grades 3-8 will have limited access through Chromebook carts, but high school students will continue to have their own school-issued devices to use in class and take home."
"If you look at the research, it says the number one in-school determining factor for student achievement is the teacher," says Canon-McMillan Superintendent Greg Taranto. "So why are we doing things to take the student away from the teacher?"
Letting parents opt their kids out of edtech "will create an absolute nightmare for the classroom teacher," writes The Principal. Parents should advocate for guard rails on technology use in public schools -- and school administrators should listen to parents. But individual opt-outs won't work.
When we see that children even in US schools had better outcomes in the recent past, let alone the more distant past, it's hard not to feel that "tech in schools" was way oversold, and returning to some of the older methods (using books, handwritten work, and teachers instructing classes or individuals) may be a good idea.
There's too much simple-minded thinking on this topic, as with so many others in education. Besides considering children's ages, we ought to consider subjects: Singapore was one of the few jurisdictions in the world to raise its students' competencies between 2013 and 2023, and edtech plays an absolutely central role to their learning of mathematics and Chinese (the most commonly studied second language in that city-state); if ham-handed American school boards were suddenly allowed to govern Singaporean education, learning would decrease, and investments would be wasted, a common outcome in the USA, but not in Singapore or Estonia, whose leveraging of edtech has led to it now leading compulsory educational achievement in Europe.