Education Week - October 15, 2014 - 23

reanalyzed, and meta-analyzed. In fact, as the Nobel
Prize-winning economist James Heckman and others
have concluded: The evidence is unassailable that every
dollar invested in early-childhood education produces a
return on that investment of at least $7.
If we are going to invest additional resources in earlychildhood
education, we must also consider what works
best. Although children receive some benefit from programs
that prioritize direct instruction of traditional academic
skills, an impressive body of reliable comparative
data now shows that the most effective programs employ
social-constructivist practices. In social-constructivist
early-learning environments, educators encourage children
to develop their natural capacity to build knowledge
by developing meaningful relationships with their families,
caregivers, teachers, peers, and surrounding communities.
Inspired
by the world-renowned early-learning centers
in Reggio Emilia, Italy, educators in exemplary social-constructivist
programs in the United States entrust children
with the freedom to form relationships, to engage
in role-playing and shared projects, and to represent and
communicate their knowledge through multiple forms of
expression.
Educators in these programs also provide an excellent
model of authentic assessment and accountability
PAGE 24 >
MICHAEL J. KAUFMAN is the dean for academic affairs, a professor of
law, and the director of the Education Law and Policy Institute at the
Loyola University Chicago School of Law. SHERELYN R. KAUFMAN is a
member of the adjunct faculty at the Erikson Institute Graduate School
of Child Development in Chicago. She practiced education law privately
and at the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights. She
also has taught, advised, and directed early-childhood-education
programs. ELIZABETH C. NELSON is a member of the adjunct faculty
at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Previously, she taught
3rd grade in Chicago and practiced law in the Illinois State Office of
the Attorney General. Together, the authors of this essay wrote Learning
Together: The Law, Policy, Economics, Pedagogy, and Neuroscience of
Early Childhood Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
"
Every dollar
invested in
early-childhood
education
produces a return
on that investment
of at least $7."
Technology Is Not the Answer:
A Student's Perspective
By Benjamin Waldman
W
The data must allow analyses of instructional
strands from formative assessments.
This enables teachers who need support to get
what they need to strengthen their pedagogy
and content knowledge.
5. Administrators and teachers must be able
to make easy and quick correlations, conduct
cross-referencing, and access comprehensive
student profiles in an on-demand, data-rich
environment.
When a new data point becomes available, it
must be accessible to educators quickly (within
24 hours) for there to be any hope of using instructional
and developmental time well.
6. There must be ways to present historical
and trend data in various motifs-graphs, matrices;
aggregated, disaggregated. The lessons
embedded in historical and trend data often
help explain current conditions and performance.
The visualized data must allow for
queries that can be answered by mining various
data fields.
7. The data must elevate conversations with
and between stakeholders. Assumptions and
feelings must be informed by real-time analyses
of relevant data.
8. Teachers and administrators must be empowered
to do the data mining that is critical
to student achievement and growth.
Information-technology professionals must
focus on data fidelity, end-user support, and
technology infrastructure instead of being confined
to managing data and generating reports
with marginal utility.
9. Real-time data mining must support the
development of strategies and tactics to close
achievement gaps.
Queries about the data on individuals or
groups are essential to understanding achievement
gaps and what might be done to eliminate
them. Correspondingly, all objectives to
improve achievement must be informed by
highly nuanced data.
10. Effective teaching must be the object
of analyses of observations and evaluations,
which would have to be anchored in timely
qualitative and quantitative data.
11. Analytics should modernize and transform
the use of student-information systems
from static warehouses to information resources.
The goal is to get data into the hands
of those working in schools and classrooms.
To build meaningful personalized learning
experiences from data, educators must have
a deep understanding of every student's circumstances-including
academics, behavior,
demographics, growth and development, and
history.
With such insights, teachers and education
leaders can target issues with appropriate
interventions and personalize teaching and
learning effectively.
This new frontier in big data must be integrated
into education to accelerate achievement
for all students. I
IRVING HAMER is an education consultant. He
is a former deputy superintendent for academics,
technology, and innovation for the Memphis, Tenn.,
school system.
hen does
technology
become too
prevalent
in education?
It is a
widely held
belief among
school administrators that technological
innovation enhances education by providing
students with personalized attention
and technological literacy. Consequently,
schools have eagerly increased the presence
of the Internet and devices that utilize
it. As a current high school junior, I
see signs of this push everywhere.
The Internet has become ubiquitous in
classrooms across the nation; almost 100
percent of public schools had access in
2005, up from a mere 35 percent in 1994.
Ninety-eight percent of "computers for instructional
purposes" in elementary
and secondary public schools
were connected to the Web
in 2008, according to
the National Center
for Education Statistics.
In
the past, a
common technological
tool
in schools has
been the shared
desktop computer.
More recently, however,
"1-to-1" initiatives-one
device to
one student-have become
prominent. In these programs,
each student is given a device to use for
educational purposes. For example, Central
Middle School in Hartford, Wis.,
began a 1-to-1 program in 2011 that lent
a laptop computer to each of its incoming
6th graders. The program now includes
the entire middle school.
One-to-1 programs are also taking
place in earlier grade levels. The 2011
announcement from the school district
of Auburn, Maine, that it would provide
Apple iPads to each of its kindergarten
students was met with widespread
media attention.
The Los Angeles Unified School District,
the country's second-largest district,
began a controversial $1 billion initiative
last year that aimed to provide each student
in the district with an iPad. Similarly,
the Greenwich, Conn., public schools'
1-to-1 initiative calls for personal devices
to be issued to all students by the 2015-16
school year; two K-5 schools have already
received 800 devices.
However, the rush to expand educational
technology, to become advanced or
"forward-thinking," has produced results
that not only can be unhelpful, but also
can be detrimental to the goal of assisting
in students' educations.
It seems that the spread of technology
in education is founded on the idea that
the benefits extend to every level of the
educational system.
Yet this "race to adopt" mentality,
whereby more technology at earlier ages
and grade levels is viewed as better, ignores
the fundamentally different educational
objectives for kindergartners vs.
older students.
These initiatives, especially those at
early grade levels, portend a future in
which personal devices of infinite distractions
and potential danger permeate the
very foundations of education. Students
enrolled in the Los Angeles iPad initiative
managed to bypass security features to
browse the Internet without restrictions,
according to the Los Angeles Times.
Kindergarten is a time when children
"
Excessive technology
at too young an age poses a
serious threat to the
continuation of a personal
education."
develop personal relationships with
teachers and interact socially with other
students. A screen does not afford any of
these benefits; in fact, it inhibits them.
Perhaps educational institutions go
through with these expensive plans because
they feel it makes their schools
more appealing to potential families.
Nevertheless, excessive technology at too
young an age poses a serious threat to the
continuation of a personal education.
Of course, some technology does have
a place in the classroom, but it
should not be so prevalent
that children just learning
to read have access
to tools one associates
with high
school or collegelevel
students.
For example, in
2nd grade, I was
placed in front
of a computer for
a large part of the
year to study math.
Even though it was an
attempt to allow for more
advanced learning, I found
that mindlessly adding numbers together
and typing the answer were too
monotonous for me to remain enthusiastic
about a subject I had previously
loved. Supportive interaction with my
teacher was missing.
Although applications on devices like
the iPad are certainly more interactive
than they were on the desktop in 2nd
grade, the principle remains the same:
A good score or "thumbs-up" on a screen
cannot provide the same level of motivation
as a traditional teacher, especially for
younger students.
Even leaders in technology from Silicon
Valley seem to realize that an education
of social skills and human relationships
in elementary school is far more valuable
than immediate technological literacy.
The Silicon Valley branch of the Waldorf
Schools (an international association
of K-12 schools) enforces a complete technological
prohibition on students through
7th grade, yet it has attracted the children
of technology executives, such as those
employed by Google, eBay, and Apple, as
pointed out by The New York Times.
Given that those creating the future of
technology believe pens and pencils are
the most beneficial tools for elementaryage
children, school systems should reconsider
instituting far-and-wide technology
changes that represent a possible threat
to imperative educational goals. I
BENJAMIN WALDMAN is a high school junior at a
coeducational nonsectarian preparatory school in
West Hartford, Conn.
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Education Week - October 15, 2014

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