Ed tech is not the answer or the problem

Look to the structural incentives shaping the whole school system.

Ed tech isn’t “good” or “bad.” It depends on how it’s used. (Photo by Ijeab)

A parent’s complaint about his child’s experience with a popular piece of education technology called i-Ready went viral recently, seemingly earning applause from two of the major education schools of thought: parents upset that schoolwork isn’t challenging enough for their kids and people on the left upset about the education reform consensus of the Bush/Obama years.

I was a little taken aback by this because my son’s school uses i-Ready and, while he has various complaints in life, it has never been a big source of grievance for him.

So I gave him Ryan Moulton’s article to read. He offered to write a whole response column himself, but I decided to stay on the safe side of child labor laws and do some reporting on his views rather than have him write the take.

Broadly speaking, I would say Moulton’s characterization of his family’s experience with i-Ready did resonate with my kid; he just saw the irksome parts as less irksome,¹ and he felt the adaptive features were not as inept as depicted. Generally speaking, i-Ready time is not his favorite thing about school, but he doesn’t see it as this monstrous imposition.

But it also seems like his school uses it less than was described — it seems like a common failure mode of this particular piece of software is relying on it too heavily to eat up kids’ time rather than using it judiciously for assessment or screening.

And without going through the entire punch list of possible problems with any particular software platform, I think that’s my verdict on the ed-tech situation as a whole.

There was a time when vendors were making a lot of unrealistic utopian promises about the ability of their technology to transform education and solve everyone’s problems. Those problems have not been solved and now there’s a huge backlash. But asking whether ed tech is “good” or “bad” is like asking whether schools should have desks or whether teachers should use erasers. In both cases, they almost certainly should!

But the presence or absence of erasers is not what’s making the difference between effective and ineffective schools. If you had a building full of good teachers who were using a good curriculum and had adequate support from administrators and other stakeholders but for some reason they weren’t allowed to use erasers, they would find that annoying, but I’m sure they’d figure it out.

Meanwhile, any given family’s experience of the education system is going to be very object-level. You attend such-and-such school. It has the staff it has. They have the facilities they have. They use the curriculum they use. The teachers either do or do not adhere to it strictly. The experience of any given child might be good or it might be bad.

But the policy questions are much more second- or third-order. What are we trying to accomplish? And given how many distinct human beings there are, each working largely alone in a classroom, do we have the structural conditions and incentives in place that make it likely we will achieve what we’re trying to accomplish? I think right now the answer to that latter question is “mostly no,” and you’re not going to get good ed-tech decisions until the right structural conditions are in place.

What are we doing here?

The central fact looming over all education discussions is that if you want to understand why outcomes vary between School A and School B, the single largest explanatory factor is always going to be the kids themselves. If School A has brighter kids, that school is going to get better outcomes than School B. Some of this is down to the kids themselves and some of it is that the brighter kids have (on average) brighter parents who do more out-of-school enrichment.

And because parents generally care more about average outcomes rather than school-level productivity, you can get crazy equilibria.