Computers Won’t Fix Schools

California has launched a megabucks project to equip its public schools with computers: the four-year, $1-billion Digital High School Initiative. And last year a state task force recommended total spending of $11 billion. “Computers,” the task force concluded, “offer the greatest potential to right what’s wrong with our public schools.” Now there’s a statement to be taken with a load of salt.

It’s true that California has fewer computers in its schools than some other states, but there are good reasons to guard against a headlong rush to spend, spend, spend. Educators are just beginning to understand the role of computers in learning, but it is clear that they are far from cure-alls. Two recent national studies have shown that students in the most technologically advanced classrooms perform no better on standardized tests than their peers.

Those findings should persuade California’s recently formed Educational Technology Office to be rigorous in funding schools’ computerization requests. The state’s spending decisions to date have often been scattershot. Earlier this year, a lottery, not an evaluation of requests, was used to distribute the first $100 million in the Digital High School program.

Even Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, whose donations of computers to schools in the 1980s helped inspire their use in education, believes that educators have been too quick to embrace computers as a panacea. “What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology,” Jobs said in an interview in Wired magazine last year. “We can put a Web site in every school. None of this is bad. It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re doing something to solve the problem with education.”

A prudent and overdue first step would be a national study to determine what kinds of computer-assisted learning work best. Preliminary studies show, for instance, that some computer reading programs offer students more individual feedback than teachers could provide, while others help little. Right now, federal funding for any kind of education research is woefully low--less than 1/10th of 1% of Washington’s spending on grades K-12.

In Sacramento, teacher training should be a priority. State law, as of 2000, requires that teacher candidates must demonstrate basic computer skills to qualify for a credential. But this will not affect current teachers, who sometimes have no experience in computer use.

There’s no doubt that computers will be daily tools of the 21st century: A federal task force has estimated that 60% of jobs will require computer skills by 2000. But it must not be forgotten that they are just tools. The key is not simply to haul more machines into the classroom but to integrate them into an evolving, improving educational curriculum.