The Revolution That Fizzled

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt.

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.

With reporting by David Bjerklie/New York and Robert W. Hollis/San Francisco