Cathy Davidson responds to an essay in the NYT, which wonders why high tech enabled education does not deliver better test scores:

“We cannot keep educating kids for the efficiencies of 1914 (when the multiple choice test was invented). We must, if we are responsible, educate them for the world they already inhabit in their play and will soon inhabit in their work. The tests we require do not begin to comprehend the lives our kids lead. A great teacher has to come up with a workaround, finding creative and challenging ways to teach despite being saddled with the testing apparatus invented for the immigrants coming into America during World War I. [For a fuller discussion of standardized testing, read this excerpt from Now You See It: http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2011/09/02/where-did-standardized-testing-come-anyway}

It is not the test scores that are stagnant. It is the tests themselves. We need a better, more interactive, more comprehensive, and accurate way of testing how kids think, how they learn, how they create, how the browse the Web and find knowledge, how they synthesize it and apply it to the world they live in. As long as we measure great teaching such as Ms. Furman’s by a metric invented for our great grandparents, we give kids not just the limited options of A, B, C, and D in a world where they can Google anything, anytime. Worse, we are telling them that, in the world of the future, the skills they need, they will have to learn on their own. For, after all, they are not on the test.

To my mind, that is not an option. It is a system failure for our current educational system and the way we measure.

At the same time, the issue Richtel raises about costs and investments is exactly the right one. I am as highly suspicious of just dumping expensive technology into the classroom as I am of spending hundreds of millions each year on the grading, preparing, creating, and prep-school cramming for the current end of grade multiple choice tests. The industrial-educational complex is to be regarded, always, with great suspicion. And “technodeterminism” (thinking of technology as an answer instead of a tool) is just as dubious as “test-determinism”: thinking a test score reveals real learning). And just as costly.

No school should invest in technology without investing in substantial, dedicated retraining of its workforce—which is to say its teachers. If IBM pays the equivalent of $1700 per employee per year to help them keep abreast of new technology, new methods, new tools, shouldn’t we be investing that kind of funding in supporting the professional development of our teachers who are training the next generation of IBM workers? To dump technology without supporting the teachers who are responsible for teaching with that technology is a terrible disservice and an insult to teachers and to our kids.

The point I am making in response to this very long and often exceptionally thoughtful essay by Richtel is that the issue of “technology” is inseparable from all the ways we think, communicate, and interact today. Of course we need to teach kids how to be successful in their world. That also means not “teaching to the test” but working with teachers to teach this technology in the best ways possible. In studying how to do this in the course of my research for Now You See It, some of the most brilliant and inspiring teaching I observed prepared students for technology with things like scissors, construction paper, popsicle sticks. It taught them to think structurally and interactively, not just to Google the right answer. That’s the deal. We are wasting our money and the time our kids spend in school if we just throw a bunch of technology into the classroom without helping them to understand that technology. As Steve Jobs likes to say “technology itself is not enough.”