[Return to ED Homepage]
I'm delighted to be here with all of you today, to have a chance to talk with leaders of one of the most visionary segments of our society. This morning, I want to ask you to examine one of the persistent questions confronting American education -- what role could technology play in the classroom, and in education generally? That question is more crucial to the future of education than ever. We have reached the point at which technology could propel learning onto new frontiers, or it could fall short of its promise as an educational tool.
First, I'd like to offer an overview of the nation's technology- related goals for our schools, and the steps being taken by the Clinton Administration in pursuit of those goals. Then, I will direct the rest of my remarks to what I think that the technology industry -- working with support from schools, government, and other sectors of society -- can accomplish to further these same goals.
Over three decades have passed since the first significant attempts to introduce computers into the classroom. Since that time, your successes have made computers a ubiquitous presence -- used in offices, homes, dorm rooms, coffeehouses, airplanes, nuclear submarines, movie sets, baseball dugouts -- virtually every workplace in our society. And yet, computers remain an elusive, untapped force in education, especially elementary and secondary schools.
I remember vividly the high hopes for using computers in the classroom in the 1960's. I programmed my first computer in 1960 -- a RCA 501 -- initially in machine language in Octal, then a primitive assembly language, and finally in the first version of COBOL.
In the late '60s, when I was at Harvard, Tony Ottinger and Sema Marks wrote Run Computer Run -- a short, thoughtful book documenting the promise and the failures of the use of computers in K-12 classrooms. Much of their book would sound familiar today. Much of it could have been written in the '90s.
How do we not repeat the failures of the past? The Clinton Administration's national strategy in this area is summarized in a report published earlier this year called "Getting America's Students Ready for the 21st Century: Meeting the Technology Literacy Challenge." That report sets out four specific goals to be met by the turn of the century:
Those are noble goals. It is in both your economic interest and our collective national interest that we meet them, and indeed, there are many encouraging developments in this area to date. The last two annual surveys conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics show that the proportion of schools with Internet access grew from one-third to more than one-half. The Net Day phenomenon -- thanks in large part to the leadership of the computer industry -- is a manifestation of the tremendous support that schools enjoy at the grass roots level. Following California's lead, citizens in as many as 40 other states are organizing their own Net Days for next month.
And yet, as of the fall of 1995, a decade and a half after the PC entered the marketplace, only 4 percent of the nation's classrooms meet the desirable ratio of a computer for every five students. As of last fall, only 9 percent of the nation's classrooms are connected to the Internet, although we expect that figure to go significantly higher this fall.
More importantly, the equipment available to students is as likely to be an obsolete Apple II as a Pentium chip or PowerPC. The ratio of kids to modern computers in our schools is 35 to 1. As Mario Cuomo said here in Chicago two weeks ago: "It is shameful that the most sophisticated technology in some of our schools are metal detectors." We have a lot of work to do.
As an aside, I should note that the bar will continue to be set higher in our pursuit of that ratio of one computer for every five students. This fall, the nation set a new record for K-12 enrollment of 51.7 million students -- a number that eclipses the record set by the Baby Boomers in 1971. Enrollment levels will continue to climb for another decade, topping out at 54.6 million students by the year 2006.
The Clinton Administration is working for progress in educational technology through a number of means -- some involving money, others fueled through public dialogue. Regarding money, a 1995 study by McKinsey & Co. estimated that the cost of meeting the goals over the next decade would take upwards of 4% of the national K-12 education budget by the year 2005, assuming a phased-in buildup. In the 1994-95 school year, the share of the public K-12 education budget that went to technology was only 1.3% -- a third of that target amount. The McKinsey results could be high as the costs of computers drop, but the implications are clear.
The funding issue is a challenge, but it is not insurmountable. Parents are showing the will to take on this challenge -- a Public Agenda survey last year found 80% of Americans consider the teaching of computer skills to be "absolutely essential."
The financing of computers for schools is not a mission for the federal government to take on alone, but the government can be a catalyst. The federal government now finances one-fourth of all public school technology expenditures. That proportion is substantially greater than the federal government's share of national spending on K-12 education. You know the current mix of efforts -- Titles I and II, Chapter II, the NSF all contribute.
In the coming years, the core federal initiative in pursuit of the goals will be the President's new Technology Literacy Challenge Fund -- a $2 billion, five-year fund to spark state, local, and private sector efforts in pursuit of those four goals. Much of this investment will be seed money to leverage hardware and software acquisitions -- a move that we hope will stimulate faster growth in the educational software market.
On a related front, a cost factor that schools must plan for is the expense of monthly telecommunications charges -- the cost of staying on-line. It serves no purpose to install computers and modems in a classroom if the school cannot afford to access the Internet. Vice President Gore, Secretary Riley and FCC Chairman Reed Hundt have been building support for universal access to the Internet for the nation's schools and libraries. We are making progress in that area, and Corporate America is heeding our call.
In July, the National Cable Television Association pledged to install high-speed Internet service to 3,000 public and private schools in 65 counties around the country. The association declared this a first step toward ultimately providing free access to all schools. This sort of action makes good corporate citizenship a matter of good business.
We have other new initiatives that stimulate further progress toward integrating computers into America's classrooms. We created the first-ever federal Office of Educational Technology to serve as an information clearinghouse and to raise public awareness about efforts to make wider use of technology as an educational tool.
Our Technology Challenge Grants support partnerships involving schools, school districts, software designers, universities, cultural institutions and others in the development of new interactive learning tools. Next month, we will announce the grant recipients for 1996, the second year of the program. In the first two years of the challenge grants program, we will award more than $47 million in grants that serve more than 300 school districts in 26 states. The average grant will total almost $1 million a year for five years. These are important opportunities for the public and private sectors to collaborate in the development of new products, and I encourage all of you to seek out these grantees and join in their partnerships in you have not already done so.
Our Regional Technology Consortia are helping states, school districts and empowerment zones to acquire equipment, integrate technologies into the curriculum, and cultivate community and business support for continued progress. A segment of our Blue Ribbon Schools Program recognizes the cutting edge schools that are doing more with computers -- schools like Mainland High School in Daytona Beach, Fla., which has almost 500 computers and a small library of software units. Our efforts are directed at making Mainland High the norm rather than the exception.
Those projects are worthwhile, and they will go a long way toward getting computers plugged into classrooms and linked to the Internet. But then what? Will those computers be equipped with software that teachers find useful, not to mention user-friendly? Will it move their teaching goals? Will the software create new models for learning, or will they be merely enhanced books? Will the software applications be viewed by teachers as integral to the academic mission of the schools?
School reforms can be classified into one of three categories: those that change the core, those that are on the periphery, and those that are irrelevant. Only those that change the core last. And by the core, I mean teaching and learning. That is one message of Run Computer Run. The question now is: Will we move computers to change the core? If the answer is anything less than a resounding Yes, the educational tool for the 21st century won't even get turned on.
It is our collective mission to make it happen. To attack this as a market-oriented problem, I believe we must create more incentives for the primary school customers of these computers. In order to create a vibrant, booming market for educational technology, your product development must focus on the person who must make a commitment to use it. That person is the teacher.
Most teachers, like most of us, are creatures of habit. They are reluctant to change their practices without a compelling reason to do so, and that compelling reason must be directly related to their job -- to their success in teaching their students. Teachers need stronger incentives to incorporate computers into their classroom. You must meet teachers on their terms.
Understanding this requires each of us here to remove ourselves from our own experience. All of our workplaces acknowledge that technology is the future and that the future is now. The computer is already central to our daily operations. But, for a teacher, the presence of a computer does not make it easier to teach a bored adolescent about the components of DNA if that teacher does not find it necessary or easy to incorporate the computer into his or her practices.
It is our task to figure out how to make computers indispensable to teachers and to learning. That means making the most out of the instructional features of the technology, maximizing the benefits that human teachers cannot duplicate. Potentially, computers offer teachers tremendous advantages that teachers cannot produce by themselves. For example, whether it is due to their level of expertise, limitations on their time -- whatever the reason, teachers cannot explore a topic with the depth that top-quality educational software can offer. Students excited by examples of simple probability can explore conditioned probability using a software program. More importantly, by offering new levels of depth in subject areas in the curriculum, you can give teachers the incentive that they need to make use of your technology.
There are lots of other potential advantages and incentives. Computers can expand learning time for topics in the curriculum - - and increase the odds that all students will master the material. They can vastly expand the nature of the content that a teacher can cover, and the teacher's and students' access to experts in the field of study. And they can empower teachers to relate their lessons to the lives of their students -- something that teachers are constantly striving to do. A middle school physics lesson on friction comes to life if, by using a computer, the teacher can demonstrate the aerodynamics of a racing bicycle, or why an Olympic swimmer moves faster underwater than on top of the water.
The possibilities are limitless. I'm talking about simulations that allow for the dry run of an experiment that would be too expensive or dangerous to run in a wet lab. I'm talking about students in California learning about the volatility of the San Andreas Fault through software that demonstrates the concept of plate tectonics. But through it all, I'm talking about taking what teachers are teaching and pushing your software up a notch to help them do a better job.
This is why the importance of quality teacher training cannot be overstated. And that is also why you must gear your products toward the tougher academic standards that states and local school systems are adopting to guide the curriculum and the teachers. These standards can be your greatest guide to product development -- not only for the school but also for the home -- because the standards also let parents know what to expect from their students.
If there is any message that I leave with you today, I ask you to really look at how much you know, or how much you think you know about what goes on in the classroom, and the nature of the curriculum. It is one thing to bring teachers into your R&D labs to meet with software developers. It is quite another to visit schools and study how teachers and students interact.
If you've done the latter, you will see a professional educator who must motivate a throng of 30 kids, each with different abilities, different needs, different attitudes toward learning. That teacher does not have the time to learn a new piece of software or to develop a list of appropriate Web sites the night before incorporating it into an in-class presentation. The software must be geared to support the teacher -- it should not be the teachers supporting the software.
And you must develop products that keep costs as low as possible for schools and for home. That route may not offer the greatest profit margins, but I believe that approach will build the foundation of a high-volume universal market and serve the educational needs of our students. Low cost is compatible with the notion of simpler equipment and with attractive but straightforward programs. Don't compete over the glitz -- compete over the content and usefulness of the product.
That's the crux of the challenge that I'm making to you. In this campaign to integrate computers into the classroom, there are three basic concerns that must drive our efforts.
The first area of focus is utility. If we are to bring this technological revolution to the classroom, the tools must evolve in directions that meet and extend their usefulness to teachers. Every product that you roll out should offer something that you can point to that enhances its value to the teacher. A product should be attuned to the challenging academic standards that states are setting for their students. It should be affordable and easy for teachers to use at home. Products should address the core of the school -- the academic subjects. They should also make possible what teachers need to do but need help in doing. And, they should seek to improve the teaching of specialty subjects like art and music and calculus and Chinese, which some school systems (especially rural ones) have dropped for cost reasons.
Beyond that, there are a number of steps that need to be taken to enhance the relevance and user-friendliness of educational technology. The software industry needs to look at providing more training opportunities for teachers, and at standardization across the industry. As I said earlier, teachers do not have time to constantly master new software with varying command protocols. They need predictable interfaces to give them the confidence to use new products in front of a classroom of 30 squirming kids. A little effort by the people assembled here could have a big payoff. Just as the World Wide Web has exploded because of its universal language and its user-friendly structure, educational technology could blossom in the same way.
A second broad area of focus is on the assessment of student outcomes. The extraordinary promise that technology offers in this area comes in several different forms. One is instant feedback to the student on a weekly examination. Another is the use of the computer for assessments that cannot be carried out using paper and pencil, or even in the classroom. Simulations, group projects, some science experiments are all potential areas for assessment. As you all know, the GRE will be mostly computerized by the year 2000, and the SAT and the National Assessment of Educational Progress are not far behind.
Another area is the use of digital portfolios that contain a student's work and reflect their progress over a longer period of time. Yet another related area is the need to evaluate the effectiveness of the technology itself. Most of the current evidence about the merits of technology now used in the classroom is from ad hoc cases or small, uncontrolled studies. A longitudinal study on the effects that technology is having in classrooms could help us better understand where we need to take development of the next generation of products. All of these items can help lead to well-designed tools that enable a teacher to function like a coach, motivating teams of students in each class.
In stressing issues of utility and user-friendliness, it is worth noting that teachers are not technophobes -- to the contrary, teachers are more plugged into the on-line world than the public at-large. The National Education Association surveyed its members earlier this year, and they turned up several interesting findings:
Yet, while they are not technophobes, neither are most teachers technology wizards. They are hard-working, busy people. Usefulness, predictability and quality are the criteria that they will employ.
My third and final focus of concern is equity. We live in an age in which education is a stronger predictor of professional and economic success than ever before. It's also a time in which we cannot leave any children behind -- with the ratio of workers to retirees continuing to drop, our nation will need every worker to succeed if we are to maintain the quality of our democracy and the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed.
You all know the demographics of the computer market better than I do. Let me present that data in terms of kids -- a child from a home with income of at least $70,000 is seven times more likely to have a computer at home than is a child from a home with an income of less than $30,000. That may not be surprising. It should be frightening. We must ensure that we do not exacerbate the education-related income gap by creating a technology gap. The hunger for computers is not limited to the kids in the suburbs. Just last month, Time magazine found a glimmer of this desire at the Brooklyn Public Library, where inner-city kids and adults are clamoring for access to the computer lab that Microsoft installed. The energy and excitement is out there -- it simply needs to be tapped.
The Clinton Administration is committed to addressing this and the other issues that I have discussed. But, we know that we will fail without your leadership. We are all in this together. I, for one, do not want to dust off my copy of Run Computer Run again to see what went wrong. Thank you.
-###-
[ Return to Speeches and Testimony ]
[Return to ED Homepage]