Did you know that every phone bill you pay contains a tax with one purpose to it: wiring/digitalizing classrooms. On my bill it shows up as Federal Universal Service fee, and it goes back to the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Here’s what one proponent said of it: “Because of the e-rate,” gushed Vice President Al Gore in May of 1997, “our children will not be stranded in the high-rent districts of cyberspace. We now can go from a world where most teachers don’t even have phones to a world where all teachers can help their students talk to the world. Our nation has taken a great step forward in closing the gap between the information haves and the information have-nots” (quoted in this article from Education Next).
Any government program so endowed, of course, is going to have its abuses, and one of the best commentators on the issue, Todd Oppenheimer, wrote of a few of them in The Nation. Note the magnitude of it in one case in which “federal auditors killed an $18-million e-rate job with IBM in Ysleta, Texas. They concluded that IBM had set up the job in such a way that it precluded bids from competing Internet contractors. IBM denied the charges, but government regulators said, ‘The record reflects that the overriding goal of the IBM-Ysleta relationship’ was to maximize the federal subsidy, ‘not necessarily to promote educational goals.’ IBM, which offered the same ‘sole source’ option to many districts around the country, was not a small player in this game. Up until the Ysleta contract, it had received $351-million of e-rate money. For 2003, IBM sought nearly $1-billion in e-rate projects — nearly half the program’s annual budget. Most of that money is now being held up while the problems with IBM’s bids are investigated.”
Apart from the machinations, there is another item to consider, and that is whether the learning outcomes of the so-called e-rate justify the expense. How much do students improve their academic achievement with laptops instead of notebooks, PowerPoint instead of chalkboard.
In the Education Next article above, researchers examined California’s program in detail, comparing e-rate subsidies with outcomes. Here’s what they conclude:
“For all six subjects, each of our estimates of the effects of the subsidy was very small; none was statistically different from zero, indicating that e-rate did not have a large effect on student test scores. For schools in the typical district, which was eligible for a 63-percent subsidy, we can reject with 95-percent confidence the possibility that e-rate increased test scores by one-tenth of a standard deviation.
“But could improved access to the Internet have improved education with more than a one-year lag? In fact, when we looked at the program’s impact after two years, the estimated effects go down, not up. At least in the short run, there is no evidence whatsoever that schools with e-rate subsidies learn over time how to use Internet technology in a way that improves test scores.”
And in the months since, I’ve followed every large-scale scientific study of digital programs that has come across the education newswires, and I have not seen a single one that demonstrates — all other things being equal — that a digitalized classroom produces more academic achievement than a pencil-and-paper classroom. There are some studies showing gains in student attitude in class and self-reported interest, but when we get down to actual performance, the advantages disappear. In fact, several school systems, such as this one, are dropping their laptops because the cost/benefit ratio just doesn’t line up.
Maybe there is a large study justifying the massive expense of digitalizing schools. But until we see a proliferation of reports showing learning gains from digital classrooms, skeptical statements such as this one by Mark Herring are worth heeding.
