U.S. tech availability stellar, despite reports.

The United States is not doing so badly in the world of technology in schools.

Unlike a previous report in the recent Technology Counts 2004 survey by Education Week, which compared countries around the globe oil the availability of educational technology, and reported that only 39 percent of U.S. schools were connected to the Internet, the numbers are nearly 100 percent.

"We have connected 99 percent of our schools to the Internet and 92 percent of our classrooms to the Internet," says Susan Patrick, the new director of the Office of Educational Technology in the U.S. Department of Education. Patrick gets the figure from an annual study conducted by National Center for Education Statistics that has measured the educational Internet connections since 1994, with the latest data available from 2002. The 39 percent comes from statistics that were about four years old. In fact, all of the global comparative data in the Education Week report comes from the same 2000 student survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

"I'm sure there has been growth since then, but it is interesting to compare to the other countries; that's the only other data we had across the other countries," says Education Week researcher Jennifer Park.

But there are valuable lessons for U.S. educators in the case studies and examples found in the globetrotting reportage to support the study.

"I think there are some very interesting lessons across the globe in terms of using the technology for professional development, also using technology for areas they have a hard time finding teachers that are qualified to teach," Patrick says.

Perhaps the most alarming reliable statistic in the study was taken from the market research firm Market Data Retrieval, which found that technology spending in U.S. schools dropped more than 24 percent between the 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 school years. Observers attribute this downward trend to both a poor national economy and the resources drained by compliance with No Child Left Behind requirements.

"In many countries technology initiatives are national priorities," says Don Knezek, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education. "I think what's happened in the U.S. is we have seen at least a diffusion of that priority, and at worst a backing off, in ensuring that our human capital is able to use digital tools."

Of course all numbers are open to interpretation, based on political agenda. "We spend more per pupil as a nation than any other nation except Switzerland," Patrick says. "And the federal percentage of technology spending has continued to increase, while state and local spending has decreased. That's a trend we're concerned about."