Is The Ed Tech Bubble Ready to Burst?

For anyone who still believes the Ed Deform movement is entirely motivated by compassionate individuals who just want what’s best for our children, a recent article on the burgeoning Ed Tech Bubble posted on Geekwire.com ought to set them straight.

The push to get more technology into the classroom started almost immediately with the advent of inexpensive personal computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with high tech magnet schools sprouting up in many districts. I even attended one of these early adopters in middle school and have fond memories of playing the primitive fantasy game, Adventure, during class time. However, I have no memory of learning anything practical and didn’t even own a computer until after I graduated from college. More disturbingly, this magnet school was located in a poor, African-American neighborhood with a few middle class white kids bussed in to take advantage of its new computers and science equipment. During my time at that school, it was only these middle class carpetbaggers who had access to the new technology, perhaps a consequence of the naïve assumption that only middle class students could bring profits to the tech companies who sold the equipment.

By the late 1980s and early 90s tech companies started to push for desk top computers, computer labs and internet access for all students, recognizing that all students, regardless of class, could bring them profits because the school districts, rather than individual parents, were purchasing the hardware, site licenses, tech support and software. They also started to realize that even poor people were purchasing cell phones and apps—an indication that perhaps they could also be sold education technology products for personal use.

Over the last few years, however, things have really taken off, with a plethora of companies squeezing districts for millions of dollars in service contracts, data analysis packages, communication software, online courses, ebooks and myriad other snake oils they argue will solve districts’ academic problems. They are also jumping into political campaigns, especially for school board races and state initiatives, hoping this will increase sales. For example, Bill Gates, the Walton Family and Amazon were large funders of Washington’s recent ballot initiative to increase the number of charter schools in the state, while  Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch were large funders of candidates for the Los Angeles school board race. While Gates’ connection to technology is obvious, the Waltons, Bloomberg and Murdoch are purveyors of information technology and also stand to profit from the increased use of technology in the schools. The focus on charter schools might also seem obscure. However, because they are less restricted by district regulations and procurement rules, charter schools are seen by many tech companies as an easier sell than traditional public schools, particularly with the growing number of online charter schools that rely on technology hardware and software to deliver their curricula.

Of course some of the ways technology is being incorporated into the classroom reflect its changing role in society as a whole. It would be absurd, for example, to expect students to continue using typewriters when most of the rest of the world abandoned them years ago. Similarly, communication, collaboration and inexpensive web design software facilitate communication between teachers, students and parents. However, much of the new technology is of dubious benefit to students and teachers, but immensely profitable to the people pushing it. Some school districts, for example, have purchased expensive site licenses for software that they don’t even use or that serves no purpose. Even technologies which increase efficiency (e.g., LCD projectors, which replaced overhead/transparency projectors, which in turn replaced chalkboards), do not necessarily improve learning outcomes.

Geekwire notes several indications that the bubble may be ready to burst, including a quote by Susan Wolford, Managing Director of BMO Capital Markets, who said that too much money is being spent on ideas “that should have been left to die.” According to the Geekwire piece, “record numbers of companies are receiving venture funding” for educational technology projects and the Consumer Electronics Association recently named education technology as one of five “prominent technology trends expected to influence the consumer electronics (CE) industry in the years ahead.”

Larry Cuban identifies another potential reason for the bubble to burst: the exaggerated claims or assumptions that simply dumping technology into a school will magically transform academic outcomes for students. This has contributed to massive spending on technology that rapidly becomes obsolete or that gets ignored because teachers and students find it burdensome or useless. He points to several notable cases, including instructional television in the 1960s and desktop computers in the 1980s. Even the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative (OLPC) has failed to deliver its promised outcomes for poor children throughout the world. So far, the laptops have gone primarily to rural Peruvian children and the outcomes have been mixed, at best. According to an evaluation of the program by the World Bank, there is no evidence that OLPC has improved learning in math or language.

Art Teacher Threatened for Refusing to Force Students to Buy eBooks

After tuition and housing, textbooks are one of the biggest expenses for college students. Even back when I was in college, when tuition at the University of California was a “reasonable” $600 per semester, textbooks still took a serious chunk out of my budget. They were (and still are) large and expensive, especially for the sciences. For many classes, you are expected to buy several books. In some cases, the books are supplemental—not even necessary to succeed in the course.

The current trend toward electronic or digital books (ebooks) has reduced the burden on students’ backs and bookshelves, but not their pocketbooks. Reducing this burden ought to be simple: make the supplementary books optional. However, when Mike Tracy, a teacher at the Art Institute of California-Orange County, refused to make students buy an e-book they didn’t need, he may have jeopardized his job.

The Art Institute is part of a national chain of more than 50 for-profit schools, according to Good Education. Goldman Sachs has a 41% share in the company. Since ebooks are a significant part of the chain’s profit stream, compelling students to purchase as many as possible is in the company’s financial interest. School policy requires students to pay a $50-70 fee to download temporary copies of the books, regardless of whether they purchase a hard copy of the book. According to Tracy, some of these books are completely unnecessary and are required only to increase the school’s profits.

There is a  Change.org petition demanding that the Art Institute of California-Orange County keep Tracy on staff.

The One Laptop Per Child Deception

Audrey Watters, writing in Hacked Education, provides an interesting critique of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) movement, starting with the recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank in rural Peru which indicated that providing laptops does not improve test scores.

This should be no surprise. Test scores and academic success are influenced most significantly by socioeconomic factors that affect children well before they have even started school (see here and here), like malnutrition and poor health; exposure to smoke, lead and other environmental insults; and lack of early exposure to reading.

Nevertheless, one might wonder why anyone would believe that computer technology would provide more bang for the nonprofit buck than investing in nutrition- and poverty-reducing programs or building water treatment plants. These investments would not only save children’s lives but help improve their health and nutrition, thus reducing premature births, cognitive impairment and learning disabilities. Furthermore, when one considers that the laptops were not allowed to be taken home, that many of the families lacked electricity and internet access anyway, and the teachers were provided little or no professional development on integrating technology into the classroom, the program seemed doomed from the start.

The mission of OLPC was never about raising test scores or even improving learning. Rather, they believe that providing low-cost technology will “empower” children, make education more “joyful” for them, and provide them a “brighter future.” As with testing, there is no evidence that laptops do any of these things.

The idea of placing fancy, high tech toys (er, tools) into the hands of disadvantaged and marginalized people has the same sort of appeal as winning a shopping spree or the lottery. It’s exciting to imagine computers in the hands of children for whom classrooms and slate and chalk are luxuries. It is absurd, however, to think that this will erase years of hunger and privation or replace quality teaching.

Now let’s move on to the U.S., where the notion of a laptop (or tablet or iphone) in every hand is also a popular notion. Will this save districts money? It depends on whether they are maintaining and replacing the hardware and if students treat the hardware with the same carelessness and abuse with which they treat their textbooks. It will bring in millions of dollars to the big four textbook publishers—Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company) and NCS Pearson—which will be producing the majority of the ebooks, and tech companies like Apple, which will gain greater access to public K-12 revenues and which will lock districts into lucrative service contracts.

Will it improve learning? Not likely. The bulk of the material that will be available will be the same or similar to what is already produced by the big 4 publishers (i.e., digital versions of their existing textbooks). Will students suddenly improve their vocabularies and reading comprehension by virtue of having ebooks and tablets? Also unlikely.

Will it be a boondoggle that will hamstring districts and cut into scarce resources? Most definitely. They will have to purchase the laptops or tablets AND new ebook licenses, with an initial cost that will likely far exceed that of new textbooks alone, even though new textbooks are not even necessarily needed in electronic or hardback versions.