Fables of School Reform
OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS, more than $13 billion in venture capital has been sunk into education technology startups. But in spite of all the money and political capital pouring into the sprawling ed-tech sector, there’s precious little evidence suggesting that its trademark innovations have done anything to improve teaching and learning.
Perhaps, though, that’s never really been the point. Rather, it may be that all the interest in education technology has been an extension of a long-running campaign to make over American schools into the image of corporate endeavor—to transform education into a marketplace for buzzword-friendly apps and instruction plans, while steadily privatizing public institutions of learning for the sake of enhancing the bottom lines of the business interests promoting investment-friendly school “reforms.”
Viewed in this light, the boom in ed tech has ideological roots that stretch back to the first wave of modern school reform in the Progressive Era. Even pre-internet efforts to upgrade the technological prowess of American schools came swathed in the quasi-millennial promise of complete school transformation. The vision of more efficient classrooms and more “personalized learning” thanks to various kinds of teaching machines appeared in virtual lockstep with the Taylorite quest to impose a new gospel of efficiency on American factory floors. But as a matter of policy, the tech-based overhaul of our schools became firmly enshrined as reformist orthodoxy in the wake of the Reagan-era publication of A Nation at Risk. The report, issued with great fanfare by the ominously named National Commission on Excellence in Education, argued that American schools were failing and, as a result, the prospects for the country’s future economic growth were dire.
To drive this point home, A Nation at Risk seized on a recent decline in SAT scores. But as is often the case with alarmist factoids, this one was wrenched out of historical context: since the 1960s, more students were taking the exam than ever before—and what’s more, SAT performance had actually increased among all subgroups. But these mere empirical concerns were no match for an alarmist media narrative. What mattered was the story, not the research: the system was broken, and business should fix it. The rhetoric of A Nation at Risk helped justify a number of education reform CONTINUE READING: Fables of School Reform | Audrey Watters