At first glanece, the recent Matt Barnum interview with Richard Culatta, the CEO of ISTE, might seem to feature the head of that tech-pushing giant backpedaling (or maybe even backpeddling) on the big tech push that has drawn such backlash lately. But let's look at what he says again:
On the backlash:
You know, in some ways I’m surprised it’s taken this long. I was watching how we were managing technology in the wake of COVID, and we were not doing it very thoughtfully. When you start handing out devices very quickly without preparing teachers, without carefully selecting the tools, without monitoring them for quality, stuff starts to go off the rails.
On bad tech in schools:
People very quickly want to focus on the tools, on the screens, and it just doesn’t line up with what we see. It’s almost entirely about how the technology is used. In some cases, we have kids just clicking next through PowerPoint, and that’s terrible learning. That’s just the equivalent of a worksheet on a screen.
So I think we just need to have a moment where we go back and say ‘we did things wrong.’ Unfortunately, what we’re hearing are far less effective strategies. I mean, our friends in L.A. are doing the worst possible approach to trying to course correct.
He's referring to recent policy decisions in LAUSD calling for limits on screen time. Which Culatta thinks is a bad idea.
But is he saying here that we made a mistake putting all those screens in front of youthful eyeballs?
He is not. He is, in fact, using one of the most popular dodges in the annals of bad education policy ideas, fully recognizable to anyone who was teaching during the Common Core backlash.
Our product is awesome! You're just implementing it wrong.
Culatta admits that somebody, somehow, might have overpromised with ed tech, but, hey now-- let's not get crazy:
I don’t think it was oversold. It was oversimplified, and so this idea that you could just put some software in front of a kid with no need for a teacher anymore — I mean, we’d hear stuff like that. What happens is when there are big sweeping statements like ‘oh technology will solve everything’ and then it doesn’t — of course it doesn’t — then people think technology is garbage, and we should ban it.
Yes, it was absolutely oversold. Hell, it's still being oversold. And not in a "we'd hear stuff" from who-onows-where way, but in a pushy deiberate ed tech company marketing way. We've got entire schools (looking at you, Alpha School) selling themselves as "No teacher needed-- magical AI ed tech will do it all, and in only two hours a day."
Notice that he also skips right over the question of whether there is something fundamentally problematic about ed screens. It is true that not all tech packages are created equal, that software (like paper books) come in both well-designed and stunningly crappy varieties. But it is also true that we haven't dealt nearly enough with the ways in which parking a student in front of a screen turns a process that rests of social and human dimensions into a process that is isolating and humanity-deprived. I don't care if you have the best damned software in the world-- I still don't want my child spending a huge chunk of his school day staring into the electronic abyss.
Screens are inevitable. Screens are good. You just have to make sure you do screens the right way. This practice is as old as a Studebaker dealership-- it's called assuming the sale, and it gets the customer to talk about how they're going to buy your product rather than question whether or not they ought to. Ed tech just layers on "Well, if it's not working, that's because you're using it wrong." None of this is particularly helpful right now. I get that, to edit a phrase, there's no point in hoping someone will ask questions when his livelihood depends on not asking those questions. But somebody has to ask them, and we all have to pay better attention to the answers we get.
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