So when does the bad news show up?

Sooner, rather than later, I am afraid.  I intended to start of this week’s post with another success story that involved the use of technology in a classroom with low monetary support, but my first search today pushed me in a different direction.  I came across an article on the Hechinger Report which examines how the lack of technology and/or funding in certain classrooms disallows certain teaching techniques that have been successful in more affluent school districts.  The method in question was that of the ‘flipped’ classroom, where teachers create videos and web content which students are instructed to view at home and classroom time is instead devoted to what would normally considered homework – the application and practice of learned materials.  The good news that came out of the article is that evidence suggests the ‘flipped’ classrooms had a much higher success rates on the end-of-semester tests when emulated in schools with high poverty rates.  The unfortunate part of that is simply that there simply isn’t enough funding to reach every classroom or every school in poorer school districts.  The result is that, when taken as a whole, poorly-funded schools that can’t use this new teaching strategy are going to fall behind educationally as compared to well-funded schools who have the means to implement new teaching methods.

To get some thoughts from teachers’ perspectives, I looked at a report conducted by the Pew Research Center concerning how teachers perceived the use of technology in the classroom.  One of the interesting things that was discussed in the report was that technology was used with different degrees of effectiveness in affluent and poor school districts, in the opinion of the teachers.  Teachers in poor school districts not only thought that they were underfunded, but that their kids’ familiarity with technological devices fell behind that of students in affluent schools.  As a result, students were less likely to utilize the wide range of programs and avenues for learning that can be brought about with technology.  Additionally, teachers in poorer school districts also had less confidence in the training that they received with regard to use of technology.  I hadn’t really thought about this too much until now, but it makes sense to think that students unfamiliar with technology in the home would be more limited in their knowledge of how to utilize the same technology in school.  On that note, another part of the report indicated that a higher percentage of teachers in low-income schools felt that their school’s firewall presented a barrier to learning than teachers in affluent schools.  To me, this seems to indicate that classrooms with low-income students who are likely less familiar with technology are relying too heavily on the Internet for gathering resources.  Instead, they should be looking at other ways to reach beyond the classroom for learning.  That being said – I have no statistics to back up my assumption.

The last article I want to look at for tonight is a piece that suggests that bringing technology into the classroom will not, by itself, bridge any educational gap between rich and poor schools.  It is important to consider that at the time this article was published, the report that is mentioned was a working report, and the conclusions in the article did not come from the researchers.  As an experiment, researchers placed over a thousand children from fifteen schools into two groups – a control group where children had no computer at home, and an experimental group where students were provided with a computer by the research team.  After a year of having the computers in half of the homes, the researchers examined grades, disciplinary actions, attendance, and other factors and found no discernible difference among the groups.  Methodologically I think it is a little careless to say that this research disproves the effectiveness of computers in bridging the education gap, but what it did hit on was that giving students access to the technology alone will is not the solution that we need to be looking for.