Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 2 | Transforming Teaching and Learning Through Technology, page 3 (low bandwidth)

The Grow Network also gives teachers detailed suggestions for classroom activities and teaching strategies for each skill. For example, if students can’t follow complex sequences, it suggests teaching them “sequence signals” like “then” and “while.”

A recently launched project of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Teaching and Learning—which is exploring ways to strengthen the links between teaching and research findings—is even more ambitious: it plans to track student progress weekly and even daily, providing teachers with “just-in-time” online resources to meet student needs as indicated by the data. It will also bring comprehensive information management systems to several schools. Although the project began in elementary schools, Network members are now designing a high school prototype with teachers, administrators, software experts and university researchers. Their aim is to fashion and implement systems that are easily replicable. To that end, “All the stakeholders are part of the process, trying to document and make public what they do,” says Louis M. Gomez, a principal in the project and a professor of learning sciences and of computer Science at Northwestern University.

Such uses of cutting-edge technology to shape and speed student assessment exhibit “really exciting potential,” says Constancia Warren, senior program officer and director of Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Urban High School Initiatives. “The issue is, really, how you get it into ‘the water system’.”

One school district pouring state-of-the-art data management into its “water system” is Boston. The Boston Plan for Excellence (BPE), an education foundation that catalyzes school reform in that city with the help of a grant from Carnegie Corporation’s Schools for a New Society initiative, has developed FAST Track, a database program allowing principals and teachers to easily manipulate test data to analyze their school’s strengths and weaknesses, says Kristan Singleton, BPE assistant director.

FAST Track is the precursor of an all-embracing Internet/Intranet portal system called MyBPS (My Boston Public Schools). Rolled out in November 2002, MyBPS provides a “statistical snapshot” of student performance on state curriculum standards as measured by the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests. This snapshot allows educators in the district’s 135 schools to see how many students gave the same wrong answer to a particular question on the MCAS. Or it can help a teacher to plan a year’s curriculum: if 60 percent of her entering class aced the statistics and probability section on the test, she can plan how to teach the 40 percent of students who didn’t get it. Like the Grow Network and the MacArthur project, MyBPS also provides resources to help teachers address student weaknesses pinpointed by the test data.

By next spring, MyBPS will allow teachers to enter and access daily assessments, such as the reading evaluation of one student. “It’s an information system that puts students’ performance data within easy reach of teachers as part of the regular classroom routine,” says Singleton.

Such handy sliced-and-diced test data is only one part of MyBPS, now beginning a five-year rollout. This year its web site will include school bulletins, event calendars and individual student schedules, says Albert Lau, the district’s director of information services. It also records student attendance, report cards and test scores.

In the 2003-04 school year, Boston students will be able to complete “homework modules” online, and parents will be able to check their children’s work. The district will also post immunization records, and data entered by school nurses, so that a parent could check a sick child’s temperature from a home or work computer.

By 2007, teachers will use MyBPS for taking courses online, as well as collaborating on lesson plans and sharing successful teaching strategies with colleagues nationwide. The district’s 65,000 students will be able to access the Internet, work jointly with each other, look at their past efforts, and post current portfolios of their work. Employers and higher learning institutions will access student portfolios and recommendation letters. Students will also be able to learn online by, for example, taking an algebra tutorial—and eventually accessing the electronic textbooks now contemplated by publishers. “Anyone in the BPS community will be able to access information related to their work anyplace, anytime,” says Lau.

The Houston Independent School District (HISD) is similarly aiming to use testing not simply for accountability, but also for improving learning. Along with the Corporation’s Schools for a New Society initiative, the Houston Annenberg Challenge has helped the district install a data system called Profiler which can “aggregate and disaggregate” test data for teachers, says Houston Annenberg Challenge Executive Director Linda Clarke. Principals and teachers thus can tell whether 10th graders are up to par in algebra, whether one class understands quadratic equations, or which skills a given student hasn’t yet mastered. A teacher can look at a child’s school history, which, explains Clarke, “is really important as we personalize learning for kids.”

Another program, Apollo, offers a free laptop to every teacher in the HISD, and will create a common information management system that can be used across school districts—extremely valuable in an area where about 40 percent of the students move every year, adds Clarke.

Overcoming Barriers
Why doesn’t every high school use technology for the kind of innovative teaching and learning now taking place at schools like High Tech High, New Technology High School, and Robert F. Wagner?

The barriers are several, and as one might guess, a lack of money is the first. It’s not only the cost of the technology: schools also must upgrade their electrical systems to support computers. Furthermore, they need money to maintain their computers and upgrade them periodically, not to mention networking and integrating them with each other. It’s no accident that superbly equipped schools like High Tech High and New Technology High School receive funding and equipment from businesses or foundations, usually from both.

While urban districts increasingly have web sites, online information databases or encyclopedias, and even online learning standards or sample lesson plans, some urban high schools still have computers only in the school library or computer lab. Where there’s a computer in every classroom, the equipment is likely to be a hodgepodge of MACs and PCs from bygone eras, running antiquated software. “The technology is so old that kids don’t want to use it,” says Susan Schilling, who visits many high schools as CEO of the New Technology Foundation, which was created in 1999 as a vehicle to fund, support and ensure the continued development of New Technology High School as a national model.

The prospect for urban schools is not completely bleak. In 1996 Congress voted to give schools $2.25 billion every year for internal wiring and for telecommunications and Internet monthly service fees. But every year schools request more than twice that amount—$5 billion annually.

One solution, suggests the Department of Education’s Bailey, is to make technology part of every funded program, such as those for literacy and testing, as well as Title I, the federal program that funds high-poverty schools.

School culture and organization also block progress. Strong, visionary leaders are needed to achieve the school-wide transformation that technology often entails. It’s not simply a question of automating old ways of instruction points out Bailey, but more like rethinking teaching from scratch.

Next page: Strong, visionary leaders are needed to achieve the school-wide transformation that technology often entails.

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