Why schools keep losing the technology bet
A computer in every classroom was supposed to revolutionize education. Now AI is making the same promise.
It’s hard to remember, in our age of despair, cynicism, and parents fighting to opt their kids out of laptops in school, but the age of ed tech began with high hopes.
Technology was supposed to level the playing field between poor kids and rich kids: All of them would have identical access to the tools they needed to develop computer skills, which would make them more employable in the modern economy; they would learn how to research and have a whole library at their fingertips.
One prominent book argued in 2008 that half of high school classes would be fully online, at a third of the cost and with better educational outcomes. Read some early coverage of “laptops in schools” initiatives, and the only real objection raised is that it might be too expensive to be feasible; even the critics agreed that it would obviously be good.
There were high hopes, too, that in developing countries, computer access would mean that kids in the world’s poorest places could get an education on par with kids in the richest countries. In practice, while some interventions in some contexts seem to help a little, the hoped-for large-scale gains haven’t been realized internationally either, with the OECD finding “no appreciable improvements in student achievement … in the countries that had invested heavily in ICT for education.”
Today, there is a laptop at very nearly every desk, in very nearly every classroom in the United States — 88% of public schools say they have a 1:1 computing program that gives each child a laptop or tablet — and American students are worse at reading and worse at math than they were in 2015, and no better than they were in 2005. It’s been a long time since anyone has called the internet the great equalizer; racial and socioeconomic gaps in performance are widening.
One recent large study on the effects of Khan Academy, one of the flagship online learning programs, found that typical use produced math gains of 0.03 standard deviations. That’s not nothing, technically. But, as Justin Reich, director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, put it, “If 20 years and $100MM+ in research and development builds an online math practice problem system that supports typical learning gains of 0.03SD, what can we expect from other edtech products?”
