no child left untableted

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September 12, 2013

No Child Left UntabletedBy CARLO ROTELLA

Sally Hurd Smith, a veteran teacher, held up her brand-new tablet computer and shook it asshe said, I dont want this thing to take over my classroom. It was late June, a month beforethe first day of school. In a sixth-grade classroom in Greensboro, N.C., a dozen middle-schoolsocial-studies teachers were getting their second of three days of training on tablets that had been presented to them as a transformative educational tool. Every student and teacher in 18of Guilford Countys 24 middle schools would receive one, 15,450 in all, to be used for class work, homework, educational games just about everything, eventually.

There was, as educators say, a diverse range of learners in the room. Some were well on the way to mastering the tablet . Ben Porter, for instance, a third-year teacher who previously worked as an operations manager for a Cold Stone Creamery franchiser, was already adept atloading and sharing lesson materials and using the tablets classroom-management tools:quick polls, discussions, short-answer exercises, the function for randomly calling on a studentand more. Other teachers, including a gray-bearded man who described himself astechnologically retarded, had not progressed much further than turning it on.

Smith, the most outspoken skeptic among the trainees, was not a Luddite she uses her Website to dispense assignments and readings to her students but she worried about what might be lost in trying to funnel her teaching know-how through the tablet. I just dont like the ideaof looking at a screen and not at the students, she said.

A couple of seats over from her, I was thinking the same thing. I teach college students, notmiddle schoolers, but I count on being able to read their faces and look them in the eye, and I would resist O.K., freak out if obliged to engage them through a screen in the classroom. And as a parent of middle schoolers, I would strenuously oppose any plan by their school to

add so much screen time to my childrens days. The tablets, paid for in part by a $30 milliongrant from the federal Department of Educations Race to the Top program, were created andsold by a company called Amplify, a New York-based division of Rupert Murdochs NewsCorporation, and they struck me as exemplifying several dubious American habits now ascendant: the overvaluing of technology and the undervaluing of people; the displacement of face-to-face interaction by virtual connection; the recasting of citizenship and inner life as acommodified data profile; the tendency to turn to the market to address social problems.

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Still, I came to Guilford County, I hoped, motivated by curiosity and discovery rather thankneejerk repudiation. I try to be on guard against misrecognizing complex change as simpledecline, and I acknowledge that my tendency to dismiss the tech industrys marketing might blind me to the Amplify tablets genuine potential as a teaching tool and to major new developments reshaping not just the nature of schooling but also the world in which my kidsare growing up.

The first time I met with Joel Klein, the chief executive of Amplify and an executive vicepresident of News Corporation, he checked his e-mail on his phone a lot, even as we talkedabout the concern that technology isolates rather than connects people. I pointed this out, andhe, in turn, expressed wonder that I dont even allow the use of laptops in my classroom.

We were discussing his frequently stated view that education is ripe for disruption.Entrepreneurs sound boldly unconventional when they talk about disrupting an industry, butthey also sound as if theyre willing to break something in order to fix it or just to profitfrom it. Klein, who was chancellor of New York Citys public schools from 2002 to 2011, beginsfrom the premise that our schools are already broken.

K-12 isnt working, he said, and we have to change the way we do it. Citing globalassessments that rank the United States well behind the leading countries in reading andmath, he said: Between 1970 and 2010 we doubled the amount of money we spent oneducation and the number of adults in the schools, but the results are just not there. Any system that poured in as much money as we did and made as little progress has a real

problem. We keep trying to fix it by doing the same thing, only a little different and better.This is about a lot different and better.

He was talking about the curriculum and games being developed by Amplify, as well as itscustom-built, open-platform Android tablet. Klein thinks the moment favors his enterprise.The new common-core standards, adopted so far by 45 states, define educational goals forschools and present commercial opportunities for companies like Amplify. The initial priceof a tablet has dropped to $199, including support and training, making it feasible for school

systems to buy large numbers of them. And generational turnover in the teaching profession will help, too, as what Klein calls digitally sophisticated millennials replace retiring boomers.

When I asked Klein, who routinely characterizes current debates about education asideological, not evidence-based, what evidence supports spending tax dollars on educationaltechnology, he boiled it down to three things. First and most important was the power of customizing. Plenty of research does indeed show that an individual student will learn more


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if you can tailor the curriculum to match her learning style, pace and interests; the tablet, hesaid, will help teachers do that. Second, educators have not taken full advantage of studentsenthusiasm for the gadgetry that constitutes an important part of their experience. Lastly,teachers feel overwhelmed; they need tools, Klein said, to meet ever-increasing demands toshow that their students are making progress.

Amplify has tested preliminary versions of its tablets and curriculum in a dozen small pilotprograms, but Guilford County is its first paying customer. By next fall the company intends tohave its products in middle schools across the country, with high schools and perhapselementary schools to follow. Competition for this market is growing more intense. Majorcompetitors like Apples iPad are scrambling to get in on the sales bonanza created by what educators call 1:1 technology programs, those that provide a device to every studentand teacher. And so potential customers 99,000 K-12 schools spend $17 billion annually oninstructional materials and technology will be looking closely at Guilford County, a district

with a modest budget and a mix of urban, suburban and rural sections that makes it aplausible proxy for school systems nationwide. They will want to see teachers enthusiasm forthe tablets, as well as increased time on task and other signs of students greaterengagement. Most important, of course, theyll be looking for higher test scores in two orthree years.

When Klein says things like, If you just stick a kid in front of a screen for eight hours andhope it works, its not going to work, he means that the success of his tablet depends aboveall on how teachers exploit it. They might begin by transferring to it what they already do now existing lessons, homework, tests but it can only make the hoped-for difference in how and what students learn if teachers come up with new ways to use it. If its nottransformative, Klein told me, its not worth it.

Robin Britt , the Personalized Learning Environment Facilitator (PLEF) leading the all-day training session I sat in on, acknowledged the anxiety in the room but encouraged the traineesto focus on the possibilities. Britt made an ideal recruit for the corps of PLEFs, tech-savvy educators hired by the school district to help teachers adjust to the tablet. A native of

Greensboro who previously taught at local middle and Montessori schools, he holds an M.B.A.and a J.D. from the University of North Carolina and also started a company that designssoftware for teachers. Youthful, dynamic, earnest, Britt radiated sympathy and confidence ashe explained how technology could help transform not only their classrooms but also theirprofession.

His before picture was the typical 19th-century classroom, the original template for ourschools. He likened it to industrial shop floors designed for mass production: People sitting


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in rows, all doing the same thing at the same time, not really connected to each other. Hecontrasted that with a postindustrial workplace where temporary groupings of co-workerscollaborate on tasks requiring intellectual, not physical capabilities. We need a schoolhousethat prepares students to do that kind of work, he said.

The key, he said, is personalized learning breaking free of the mass-production model,

tailoring the curriculum to the student and redesigning it around proven competence ratherthan accrued face time, so that each student can go at his own pace. Now your job is not todispense knowledge, Britt told the trainees. Its to facilitate learning. No longer is theteacher the bottleneck between students and knowledge. Rather, the teacher architects theenvironment in the classroom, on the tablet, online, everywhere.

In the after classroom Britt envisioned, some students might be working together on anassignment appropriate to their shared level of competence. Others would be ranging aheadon their own, catching up, exploring a special interest. A small group might be gatheredaround the teacher, who, having instantly scanned the responses to a short-answer exercise just given to the whole class on the tablet, decides to spend some extra time with thosestudents still hazy about the lesson. Britt repeatedly made a fluid gathering-and-pushinggesture with both hands, as if demonstrating a basketball chest pass, as he said: Then youmove that group out, theyre off practicing to reinforce what you just taught them, and youpull together another group, or you go to an individual, then you flow them out to the nexttask. Gather and flow.

The Amplify tablet helps make personalization possible. It provides immediate feedback tothe student and to the teacher, who can then make timely decisions about working withindividuals and groups. Entire units of curriculum can be loaded on the tablet in advance orsent out as an instant update, accommodating students working at drastically different paces. An expanded set of tools for research, discussion, practice and demonstration of mastery allow students to come at their studies from various angles and let the teacher move into the role of a mentor who meets each student where she is. The teachers tablet also has an app blockerand monitoring functions that can see and control whats happening on student tablets, and a

one-touch classroom-control feature to lock their screens, replacing whatever was on them with an eye symbol and the phrase Eyes on Teacher.

Sally Hurd Smith appeared to be coming around. Its like I design the flow chart, she said,and the kids follow their own path through it. She worried, though, that their greatertechnological sophistication would allow them to game the system.

Then have them teach you , Ben Porter, the former operations manager, told her. On the


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using bonds to finance the spending of $500 million on iPads. And privacy issues can arise because school systems lack the experience to negotiate data agreements that anticipate allthe ways technology companies could put student information to use.

When youre talking about Rupert Murdoch and his empire, says Josh Golin, the associatedirector at the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, there are a number of ways that

data could be valuable to his companies beyond instruction. Klein, who has grown used toaddressing privacy concerns, says flatly, The data belongs to the district. The agreement withGuilford County, he notes, requires Amplify to secure the districts permission if it wants touse any of that data in anonymized form to improve its products. The more you rely on big data to improve the human experience, the more risk there is, Klein says. But weshouldnt be able to freelance with the data. Im not Amazon. The only reason I need to know about you is the school district needs me to know these kids are struggling with X and theseothers with Y.

Apart from privacy issues, Golin says, its still not clear that cutting-edge educationaltechnology justifies its cost with results. Companies with vested interests are pitchingthemselves as the solution to the countrys educational problems, he says, but we dont haveresearch proving its true.

I ran that criticism by Greg Anrig, vice president of policy and programs at the Century Foundation and the author of Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That CollaborationBuilds Effective Schools. The research on successful schools and good teaching, he said,

highlights the importance of relationships among the people in a school: administrators andteachers and students. None of these studies identify technology as decisive. Wheretechnology makes a difference, it tends to do so in places with a strong organization dedicatedto improving teaching and where students closely engage with teachers and one another. A device that enhances such interactions is good, Anrig said. But kids focused on the device,isolated, cuts into that.

With that caveat, Anrig was enthusiastic about the personalization made possible by

technology like Amplifys tablet. That qualified enthusiasm is shared by Jonathan Supovitz,director of the University of Pennsylvanias Consortium for Policy Research in Education, whostresses that individualizing instruction does lead to better outcomes if teachers canmanage the environment to make that happen. Among other things, teachers will need bettertools for processing and interpreting all the additional information they have to handle. They used to have too little data from students, Supovitz says, and now theyre going to get toomuch, and they need to be ready.


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Justin Leites , Amplifys vice president in charge of games, works in the companys Brooklynoffices, in a converted paper-goods factory with open-plan spaces and high ceilings a modelof the postindustrial workplace. Its 652 employees tend toward youth, body art and fixed-gear bikes, which are stored during the day in hanging racks. When I visited Leites in July, the whiteboards lining the walls of his office were covered with lists and diagrams in black, brown,green and purple marker. Directly behind his desk chair, framed by converging arrows in all

four colors, was written DATA, and below, Thats what I want!

Amplifys variety of reading, math and science games, like its curriculum, are calibrated to thenational standards, but the games are meant to feel like free play, not more schooling. Theobjective is to recapture for educationally worthwhile purposes some of the seven-plus hoursper day the average middle schooler spends gazing at a screen outside of school. The logic of games lines up well with personalized learning. Sophisticated commercial games already setthe standard in responsiveness to what a player does, and the convention of arranging a game

world as a series of increasingly difficult challenges fits the sequencing of curriculum. When you conquer the fractions level, you move up to the algebra level .

Amplifys games are still at the pilot stage, but a year from now the company will be offeringthem for sale to schools, and they will contribute to the feedback students and teachers getfrom their devices. In the near future, Leites said, the flow of data will expand enormously asthe costs of better tablet cameras, faster connections and other features come down. Soon,games that know what a student has read (the tablets library will contain 1,000 books) will beable to strategically sprinkle a particular word in his path based on how many times theresearch says you need to see a new word in order to learn it. In a few years, according toLeites, advances like gaze tracking and measurement of pupil dilation will revolutionizethe gauging of cognitive response by making it possible to determine exactly what students arereacting to on the screen.

This growing stream of information, which can be analyzed down to individual keystrokes, yields a picture that will eventually progress in complexity from, say, a list of words a studentlooks up to a profile of metacognitive skills like the ability to concentrate and in time to a

full-blown portrait of a developing mind. In theory, each student will generate the intellectualequivalent of a fantastically detailed medical chart.

My antipathy to this kind of faith in big data tended to abate whenever I visited AmplifysBrooklyn building, which is full of smart, well-intentioned people doing interesting things.That was especially the case when I spoke with Leites, a former doctoral student in philosophy at Yale, staff member in Clintons White House and speechwriter for Madeleine Albright andStrobe Talbott.


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development in ways that will show up in 20 years in ways we didnt expect?

Sherry Turkle, an M.I.T. professor and a prominent Cassandra who writes about theunanticipated consequences of our immersion in electronic technology, described someaspects of tablets in the classroom to me as the dystopian presented as the utopian. She said,We become smitten with the idea that there will be technological solutions to these knotty

problems with education, but it happens over and over again that we stop talking to kids.Thats the root of what she calls the crisis in the ability to talk. High-school teachers arealready complaining, she said, that their students are fixed on programs that give the rightanswer, and theyre losing the notion of talking and listening to each other, skills that middleschool is supposed to teach.

I told her stories from Amplifys pilot programs about previously marginal, quiet students blossoming: the boy in Georgia whose tablet-troubleshooting skills made him popular; the tallgirl in Connecticut who blew away her classmates with an essay about what its like to be 5-foot-11 in middle school. The tablet also includes features like discussion groups that letstudents engage one another directly. Theres a reason they call them discussion groups andnot conversations, Turkle said. You learn how to broadcast, which is not the same thing as what you and I are doing now. Posting strong opinions isnt a conversation.

Responding to her criticisms, Joel Klein said, This is an important issue, and shes obviously an important mind at work. When I confessed to my own reaction to students staring atscreens, he said, I understand that; I have some of that same emotional response. His near-

affectless delivery made it hard to tell whether he was dismissing, simply acknowledging orgenuinely sympathizing with these points of view. He did go on to say that he wouldnt putfourth graders in a MOOC a massive open online course and that he would exercise greatrestraint in introducing technology into a kindergarten classroom.

But he wasnt conceding much ground. The world is living in this tech-driven experience, hesaid. Maybe we all should be concerned about it, but think about how empowering its been,and the notion that a device is going to make us less good at producing citizens runs counter to

how democratizing this technology is.

In a room down the hall from Robin Britts social-studies teachers, a group of Englishteachers appeared to have fallen into a post-lunch professional-development coma, brought on by too many videos and too much jargon. Across the hall, math teachers were methodically proceeding with minimal discussion through the checklist of tablet skills. Only Britts group,led by a virtuoso, was wrestling with the big questions that resonated in the details of thetablet training. As he told them more than once, Its the teacher, not the technology.


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Asked how to handle students goofing off on the tablet in class, Britt reviewed the mechanicsof the app blocker. But, he added, thats a case where maybe you want to use proximity instead. Proximity? A couple of the trainees started scanning their tablets apps in the hope of finding that feature. Maybe it controlled a miniature drone. But Britt moved up the row of desks to stand right next to the questioner and said to everyone: You already know how to dothis. You keep going with the lesson but you move closer, you show him you can see what hes

doing. While talking, he gave the questioner a look I remember well from middle school, theone that says, Both you and I will be much happier if you stop doing that before I have tointerrupt the lesson to make the choice for you. You dont need a technological solution foreverything, Britt said. All that stuff you already know about teaching still works, and youneed it more than ever.

To get the most out of educational technology, teachers must combine those traditionalclassroom skills with new ones. And their repertoires will have to expand as the tablets

powers grow. This fall, mastery might mean giving a quick quiz, then breaking up the studentson the fly into groups based on their answers and sending each group a different exercise fromthe teachers tablet. In not too many years, it might mean using sophisticated pattern-recognizing algorithms to analyze data from homework, games, leisure reading, social mediaand biometric indicators to determine that one student should be guided to an interactivesimulation of coral-reef ecology, another to an essay exercise built around a customized set of coral-reef-related vocabulary words and concepts, and others to something else.

Throughout the training day, Britt addressed the deep worry, voiced by Sally Hurd Smith andothers, that technology can undercut the connection to the student that makes teaching feelrewarding and worthwhile. Once you develop familiarity with this kind of teaching and yourstudents catch on to the routines, you find you can actually give each student a lot more of yourself, Britt said. Instead of talking at a group where one-third are bored and one-thirdare lost, I can have everybody working at their level, and I have time to give the love to youand then you and you. He pointed around the room at individuals, dispensing the force of hisconviction in concentrated bursts.

Someone asked Britt, who had used laptops and Kindles in his classroom for years, how long ittook him to develop those teaching routines. Three years to really get it, he said. In a month,the trainees would begin the real work of adjusting to the new ways, day by day in theclassroom. Another PLEF, Wenalyn Bell, told her group, Its like building a plane while itsflying.

At my second interview with Joel Klein, during which he barely looked at his smartphone atall, I asked if he felt technology was essential to improving American education or if we might


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be better off committing our resources otherwise. Weve spent so much on things that havent worked, he said, making a list that included underused computers as well as obsoletetextbooks, useless layers of bureaucracy and smaller class sizes. We should have spent thatmoney on preparing higher-quality teachers. So there was at least one other way to do it a lotdifferent and better.

Take Finland, Klein continued, citing everyones favorite example of a country that puts itsmoney on excellent teachers, not technology, and routinely finishes at the top in internationalassessments. Theres a high barrier for entry into the teaching profession, the kind that letsin the Robin Britts and keeps out weaker aspirants. Teachers there are also well paid, held inhigh esteem and trusted to get results without being forced to teach to the test. But Americaseducational system is a lot bigger, messier, less centralized and more focused on market-basedsolutions than Finlands. Also, our greater income inequality and thinner social safety netmake for much wider variation in student performance, and a toxic political climate has

encouraged our traditional low regard for teachers to flower into outright contempt.

Still, if everyone agrees that good teachers make all the difference, wouldnt it make moresense to devote our resources to strengthening the teaching profession with betterrecruitment, training, support and pay? It seems misguided to try to improve the process of learning by putting an expensive tool in the hands of teachers we otherwise treat like the poorrelations of the high-tech whiz kids who design the tool.

Are our overwhelmed, besieged, haphazardly recruited, variably trained, underpaid, not-so-

elite teachers, in fact, the potential weak link in Amplifys bid to disrupt American schooling?Klein said that we have 3.5 million elementary- and middle-school teachers. We have to putthe work of the most brilliant people in their hands, he said. If we dont empower them, it wont work. Behind the talking points and buzz words, what I heard him saying was Yes.

Carlo Rotella is the director of American studies at Boston College and the author, most recently, of

Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles and Other True Stories.

Editor: Dean Robinson
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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