Computers and technology. (Introduction).

"A technology revolution is about to sweep America's classrooms." So runs the subhead of Business Week's September 25, 2000 article, "Wired Schools." We've heard one big claim after another on this theme, 'til the mind goes numb. Still, when Business Week proclaims a "revolution" we'd better listen, because its corporate readers depend upon it to help them make decisions, and do not like hokum. Anyhow, we all know that something important is happening, whether it deserves the name "revolution," or only, "new facade, same old rip-off." The call for this special issue posited that "the introduction of computers into education at all levels, along with the use of the Internet, is one of the biggest changes in recent decades." We noted that much discussion on this subject had tended toward "utopian hopes or Luddite fears," and proposed to carry it forward differently here: "reflectively and without prejudging its outcome." In this Introduction the editors try to do a little of that, and consider what progressives can do in the present context.

"Gee whiz" is the desired response to much news on computers in education. The Business Week article tells us that schools in Union City, NJ went from failure and a threatened state takeover to the highest scores of any New Jersey city on state tests, partly by becoming "one of the most wired" urban school districts in the U.S. (1) Students at the tiny high school in Hundred, W Va., leapt across the digital divide and now rank "above the national mean in every subject," after the superintendent found grant support and paid NetSchools nearly half a million to reorganize education around wireless laptops for every student. The Roosevelt-Edison Charter School in Colorado Springs put computers in the homes of almost all students, and now volunteerism and parent involvement have "skyrocketed."

Similar stories bounce around in the media, and in spite of cautions like those mentioned in footnote 1, it's easy to get the impression that computers can save U.S. education. Colleges and universities as well as public school districts have been acting as if that were so, with schools budgeting three times as much on technology in 2000 as in 1992; the typical college doubling its I. T budget in the 1 990s; universities rushing to start up distance education programs; ambitious consortia of elite universities such as UNext.com and the Global Education Network; more than three-fourths of public school classrooms connected to the Internet by the year 2001; the Virtual High School (a non-profit) offering specialized and advanced placement courses online to students around the country; and so on. Certainly investors have acted as if educators believed in the vision, or could be made to believe in it--they put nearly $1 billion into digital learning companies in the 18 months leading up to Business Week's analysi s.

But this movement is by no means triumphantly linear, in spite of widely broadcast hype about a new era, "New Economy schools" to prepare kids for it, and the democratizing or ruin of education, depending on your point of view. Even the bottom line is murky. A lot of that venture capital vaporized in the dot.com debacle. Edison, which goes on taking over schools for profit and lacing them with computers, has still not made a nickel. Perhaps a couple of million students (mostly adults) are taking courses online, but the distance learning spinoffs that many colleges and universities looked to as an easy source of income remain dicey propositions. Temple's president scrapped its subsidiary as unlikely to make a profit, and a Chronicle of Higher Education article called "Is Anyone Making Money on Distance Education" (February 16, 2001) showed how hard that question is to answer. (2) The Western Governors' Virtual University, a multi-state collaboration that was announced with brassy fanfare a few years ago, opene d with ten students, not the predicted 5,000. No fortunes are yet being made in e-books, and a former head of the Open University in Britain and then of its counterpart in the U.S. reports that students go online for all kinds of services and transactions but not much for course materials -- they prefer a variety of media, especially old fashioned books (Sir John Daniel, "Lessons from the Open University: Low-Tech Learning Often Works Best," Chronicle, September 7, 2001, B-24).

If the profitability of these investments remains uncertain, the educational results are still more in question. Thirty percent of college courses had websites a year and a half ago, and sixty percent used e-mail "as a tool for instruction," but only 14 percent of the administrators surveyed on this subject held that "technology has improved instruction on my campus" (Chronicle, October 27, 2000, A46). Anecdotal evidence of nugatory or contrary effects is plentiful (you will find some in this issue). An especially nice bit comes from a Chronicle story on business schools that have wired classrooms and doled out laptops to all students, but are now giving professors "kill switches" to shut down students' access during classes (read lectures). Why? Because "students are tuning out their professors while they send e-mail messages, check company Web sites, trade stocks, and otherwise multitask their way through their M.B.A's (September 7, 2001, A43). The moral: bright new distractions will defeat crappy old peda gogies every time.

Similarly, according to the Business Week article, K-12 teachers use the Net a lot for e-mail, record-keeping, and preparation of materials, but not much for planning lessons; and seventy percent of students are on the Web an hour or less a week. Readers interested in a careful study of computers in public schools should consult Oversold and Underused (Harvard University Press, 2000) by Larry Cuban, who concludes that there is little evidence so far of gains in student achievement owing to use of this technology. The computers are there in large numbers -- one for every five students in 2000, and proliferating -- but are not well integrated into curriculum and pedagogy, and when integrated, are often used to prepare for standardized tests or for other kinds of drills.

Analysts cite a number of causes for such indifferent results from large investments. Some instructors are reluctant to learn new techniques. In public schools, investment in professional development for teachers lags far behind investment in hardware. Crashes, confusion, and breakdowns frustrate teachers and deter them from heavier reliance on the technology--a problem amplified in the public schools, at least, by hard use and by inadequate funds for tech support, upkeep, and replacement. Many students, from those fancy B-schools to 7th grade at Centerville, would rather use the Net for horsing around or meeting extracurricular needs than for research. Lots of them, at least in colleges, have also discovered how to plagiarize more effectively off the Net than from libraries or fraternity archives. (3) And so on.

There are deeper causes. With encouragement and incentives From governments and tech companies, and in vague terror of being left behind in the New Era, school and college administrators have rushed to buy computers without figuring out, in advance, why. Stanley N. Katz, former president of the American Council of Learned Societies, says I. T. "emerged on campuses with little broad discussion of its larger educational implications, and even less of its relationship to the fundamental purposes of colleges and universities. Indeed, educational goals have generally been secondary to organizational and financial concerns (Chronicle, June 15, 2001, B7). Think about it: do any of you on college faculties remember a great time when you brainstormed and planned with colleagues, clarified your aims, identified a curricular or pedagogical need, then realized, "wow, we could use computers to do that; let's ask the president for some"? Larry Cuban makes a similar and broader point at the end of his book about public sch ools: they are not organized in such a way as to articulate educational needs and methods through the collaborative work of teachers, then seek the best new means (maybe including computers, but maybe not!) to achieve new and old goals. Not to mention the suffocating pressure on teachers from state legislators and bureaucracies to follow rigid guidelines, prepare kids for tests, Be Accountable.

There are still deeper causes (hey, we're radicals, no?). Deepest: this electronic revolution takes place within and through markets, for profit, and on behalf of such goals as good education and a decent society only insofar as those goals can be expressed via market mechanisms, and by those with enough leverage (= effective demand) to attain their dreams and shape the dreams of others. This principle, though always worth reciting aloud in moments of stress or confusion, is too general to explain what's happening with computers and education. It needs detail and complexity. The articles that follow offer a good deal of both, but here, in summary, are a few applications of the principle that seem to us important for the task at hand.

1. Education is big business. Schools and universities and students buy tons of stuff Even the spoils from sale of textbooks and other old fashioned educational materials were and are enough to sharpen the marketing skills of companies in this area and grease palms when necessary and possible: see for instance, Stephen Metcalf's "Reading Between the Lines" (The Nation, January 28, 2002, 1822), on how ties with McGraw Hill influenced the Bush education policy and legislation. Needless to say, the current revolution has been great for computer and software makers. They have promoted it with lots of hype and freebies, and without sharing the ideals for schooling that most teachers cherish (not to mention most radical teachers).

2. Education is big business, part II: universities sell lots of stuff, most notably, credits and degrees. OK, to be less crude about it, they sell (often at below cost) the chance to work for credits and degrees and have that work validated by experts, turned into credits and degrees by institutions most of which are themselves accredited. That work and those degrees are--through alchemy that is hugely and hierarchically complex yet understood pretty well by most of us--turned into credentials, qualifications, income, wealth, prestige, and power. Public schools do not sell this stuff directly to students, but to taxpayers. Either way, the providers must compete to win customers, funding, and respect for their product. It would be hard to convince customers, today, that a school's or college's brand was worth much, unless experience with and competence in the use of computers was part of its package. Note: this does not mean a good liberal arts education or competence in critical thinking. That disjunction i s intensified by the next two applications.

3. Education is for business. Well, not entirely, not yet. But the pressure to train students for employment has never been greater. The CEO Forum on Education and Technology sums up what many business leaders and groups have been saying: today's schools "do not prepare students to prosper in tomorrow's workplace" (the Business Week article). If schools elsewhere are doing that better, then companies recruiting workers in the U.S. will not prosper against global competition. The president of Cisco Systems warned President Bush and the rest of us, "if we don't fix [U.S. schooling], the jobs will move to where the best-educated workforce is in other countries (quoted by Tracy Staton in "New Economy, Old Schools" [American Way, September 1, 2001]). As for post-secondary education, which is more directly subject to market forces: Yale, Stanford, and the like, having famous "brands" and a secure place in the class structure, can almost ignore those pressures, but everyone else had better pay attention, or students will flock to DeVry, the University of Phoenix, and dozens of other proprietary universities selling what's needed for job searches or upgrades--not to mention competition from the 2,000-and-counting corporate universities (GE started the first in 1955), that provide just-in-time education and skills for their own workers. So if business needs computer-savvy recruits, the schools and colleges had better provide them. And if market forces aren't working fast enough, well, we know who calls the political tune, right?

4. Business calls the political tune. When the previous Bush sent Congress his education bill in 1989, he offered just four benefits to be had from "educational excellence": increased productivity for businesses, "sustained economic growth," American competitiveness "in world markets," and "higher incomes for everyone. Wait a minute, we sentimental types might say, what about happier living, an enriched culture, hearty citizenship, and all the old, dependable ideological supports for public education? The educational program of the current Bush rests on the same foundation as that of his dad. We know to read "no child left behind" as "no child without economic value." The emphasis on phonics, rigid pedagogies, and testing until every child is comatose, makes school sound like boot camp for a future army of adequately skilled and pretty much uneducated workers. Computer literacy fits right into this design. It is a marketable skill in itself, and computers can also be deployed along with drill-and-kill softwar e to prepare kids for constant testing.

It's important not to understand this scheme as a right wing putsch, though thirty years of work in right wing think tanks and political circles have prepared and promoted it. Witness Senator Kennedy cosying up with the President to celebrate the new act. More to the point, witness liberal Massachusetts, along with most other states, sternly imposing a regime of mandated curricula and high stakes tests over the past decade, in an effort without historical precedent in the U.S., and virtually without grounding in research or in learning theory, to Taylorize the work of teachers and schools on a model that business has championed. See Larry Hanky's article in this issue on the parallel movement in universities, and the role of computers in it.

Yet regimentation is far from the whole story. Simultaneously, we see charter schools, voucher schemes, e-learning, individualized retraining, and a turmoil of alternatives to the "one best system." So, one last point:

5. Business is privatizing whatever it can--creating the "universal market" that Marx forecast but could hardly have imagined. The knowledge that universities make, formerly treated as a public good, is now commodified through a dazzling variety of spin-offs, subsidiaries, and deals with corporations. Public and private universities themselves become more and more like profit-making companies. Mark Taylor, the e-learning pioneer from Williams College who co-founded the Global Education Network with multimillionaire Herbert Allen Jr., put it nicely "Education is the oil of the 21st century. We're sitting on the reserves" (James Traub, "This Campus is Being Simulated," the New York Times Magazine, November 19. 2000, 93). GEN is about teaching, not research, a reminder that when investors and corporations look greedily at higher education and see there a $250 billion business, they are imagining ways to privatize what we offer to students. That's where computers, the Internet, distance learning, and individualiz ed education come in, especially for adults with who want to refashion their skills and their resumes to gain promotions, change jobs, or change fields.

Needless to say, the further casualization of academic labor is a critical part of this vision. The biggest university in the country (Phoenix) has no tenured faculty at all and makes a nice profit. Here's a utopian idea of the future university: "the time may not be far off when a small number of academic celebrities, a larger number of 'content providers,' and a still larger number of 'learning facilitators' create and administer 'learningware products' for 'an array of for-profit service companies' who in turn sell these products to students" (Traub, 91, quoting former Michigan president James Duderstadt). If this comes to pass, do you think the "learning facilitators" will have job security, full-time work, good salaries, and benefits?

Public schooling, perhaps almost as "inefficent" and clunky as higher education, looks to investors like a still bigger business opportunity. The effort to privatize it is familiar to all--a battle whose outcome won't be clear for a while. We can be sure that the privatizers will depend on computers and the Internet for labor shortcuts, while selling the technology as essential to new state-of-the-art pedagogies.

Of course this technology does speed us toward some fulfillments and pleasures. It eases some work that we choose to do; enables some to do work they could not otherwise do at all; allows fast communication among students; facilitates some kinds of liberatory teaching helps troublemakers organize against the WTO, GATT, NAFTA, the World Bank, the IMF; lets deviants and subversives like us circulate counter-propaganda fast; and so on. But on the other side of any such ledger would appear some big time costs. There is the strong feeling of speedup that many teachers share: are we not just being more efficient with our e-mail, but doing more work? There is the shallowness of Internet culture, where knowledge dwindles into "information," research into plagiarism, and pedagogy into a search for trickier software to catch the plagiarists. There is the apparently irresistible drive to figure out classroom applications of a new technology rather than decide what kind of teaching we want to do and then finding ways to do it. There is the danger that the least egalitarian and most oppressive traditional pedagogies will prove easiest to transplant (and market) in cyberspace. Beyond such considerations, there are large, sobering truths such as that, through the wondrous era of the microchip, inequality has deepened both within the United States and across regions and nations of the world (as our RT colleague Paul Lauter has argued). And along a different line of thinking, it's always good for teachers to remind ourselves that most education takes place outside of schools and colleges--what, for instance, are millions of kids learning from computer video games? (4) from chat room make-believe? from online shopping binges? From all the enticements of late capitalist patriarchy? Who's doing what to whom on the information superhighway, and whose highway is it anyhow?

In sum, the colonization of schools and universities by computer technology is going forward in a time of buoyant expansionism on the part of capital (including globalization, but that's another story--see the previous two issues of Radical Teacher). That does not mean that each use of the technology and each innovation serves the interests of capital. Progressives work in this context in a variety of supple and creative ways (See Hanley and Falsafi in this issue, for instance). But keeping the big historical and economic picture in mind does encourage caution about romantic dreams of guys in garages reinventing the world, about cyberspace as a liberated zone, about the inevitable democratizing force of the Internet, and so on (see Werry's critique of such rhetoric). It should also raise questions about the neutrality and pliability of the technology. Mullen's article in this issue notes some effects of adapting commercial software to educational purposes: social relations--politics--are built into all technologies, by those who had the resources to imagine and develop them. See David Noble's America by Design and Raymond Williams' Television for classic analyses. Technological determinism will serve us no better than e-uphoria (a new word, meaning the giddy perception of technology as a genie that can bless all our desires).

But finally, the point is not to total up pluses and minuses of the new technology as if it had dropped from the sky. The point is to understand it economically and historically, and work politically with, against, through, and around it at all times. Struggle over social relations, not computers. If administrations are replacing on-campus faculty with distance ed piece-workers, that's an issue of labor and work conditions. If the bosses want to sell your "courseware" or even give it away, that's an intellectual property matter. If girls and women are discouraged from learning higher level computer skills and shut out of the best high-tech jobs, that's a gender issue of a familiar kind.5 The Internet is probably as saturated with inequalities of race and dass as is the educational system. Radicals can call attention to these injustices in daily work, and think them through in class. Internet Studies (what else?) are appearing in university curricula. Let them be historically and politically informed.

Radicals will of course also exchange progressive ideas for teaching and organizing that make good use of computers and the Internet. The work of TecsChange and the Visible Knowledge Project described in this issue (Falsafi, Hanley) are good examples, and we hope to print more such articles in future. We don't mean to sound a rejectionist note about the web. There's a wealth of material out there that we can appropriate for our purposes. A language teacher at a rural school told one of us how eye-opening it has been for her eleventh graders to read daily accounts of post-911 1 events in El Pais and Le Monde, as a counterweight to the story put out by mainstream U.S. media. That's a small victory, enabled by this technology, and not managed by Rupert Murdoch or the IMF. The pages of RT are open to such cheerful stories, as well as to dismal tales of corporate control.

NOTES:

(1.) Read on to Business Week's sensible editorial, and you find that the "revolution in Union City involved a lot more than dumping computers into classrooms: a "doubling of the school budget, 40 additional hours a year of teacher training, restructuring and lengthening of classes, and remaking the curriculum...." But we'll set aside such complexities until later.

(2.) The head of distance learning at the famed University of Phoenix says it often costs more than traditional education. See "The Promise and Perils of E-Learning," by E. Wayne Ross, Z Magazine (December, 2000, 38).

(3.) Though the software for catching plagiarists races along, just a step or two behind the ingenuity of students.

(4.) See Thad Williamson, "Millions Mull Social Utopia--But Within Limits," Dollars and Sense (November-December, 2001, 40-41).

(5.) We are well aware that it and other questions of computers and gender are almost absent from this issue, and that all our cluster authors are male. This is a shortcoming we would like to repair in future issues. We welcome prospectuses and draft articles on gender, computers, and education--as well as on ways that people with disabilities, lesbian and gay people, and other communities work with the new technologies.

Dick Ohmann worked on this issue with Liz Clark, Marilyn Frankenstein, Louis Kampf and Bob Rosen.