Jason is right about everything all the time

Go read Jason Jones' blog. It's consistently excellent and he is right. About everything. All the time. Not only does he keep a great blog, Jason teaches full time. I'm jealous!

Okay, enough fawning. Jason is a good friend of mine and I like when there's some dialogue between writers. He wrote a reply to my recent post about technology education which I though made an excellent point. There's a tension in education which forces everyone involved to constantly prove they're somehow doing something amazing and new and different. Technology is a kind of low-hanging fruit which allows administrators and policymakers to point to an investment they're making. This is not technology's fault, which is, I think, part of the point of responding to my soapbox post. 

When there are a seemingly infinite number of answers to the question "how do we improve education?" but many of them involve expensive processes like implementing massive social reforms to relieve poverty, it's much easier to just buy a few thousand iPads. Jason makes other points and I do recommend the post in its entirety but analyzing his argument is not why I'm posting. Instead, I ran across some reading today which made me realize Jason is right about everything all the time. 

Academic Interventions for Elementary and Middle School Students With Low Socioeconomic Status: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis does what its title suggests. Dietrichson, Bøg, and Jørgensen reviewed 101 studies, a third of which were quantitative analyses. I want to stress that quantitative part because so few studies in education are quantitative. There are a number of reason for this ranging from the benign (it's hard to have blind and double blind experimental designs in scholastic settings) to the malign (quantitative analyses are racist/sexist/classist/otherist and reinforce white privilege, only qualitative and descriptive research is allowed). Clearly I think there is a place for quantitative analysis in education regardless of its history or present abuse by policymakers. This study of studies is a good example of how illuminating the inclusion of quantitative analysis can be. Moreover, 76% of the studies (so, umm, 76 of them?) were randomized controlled trials. This is also very rare in the education field. The studies selected by Dietrichson, Bøg, and Jørgensen are supposed to hold to the highest standards of good studies.

The authors (please don't make me find the unicode for ø anymore!) find that most interventions have small impacts on student performance across a variety of measures. Some are not even statistically significant. A few do, however, stand out as being both significant and of higher effectiveness than other interventions. Among the best interventions is something as simple as providing students with tutoring. Among the least meaningful interventions is, as you might have guessed, technology. Computer-mediated instruction performs no better in the analysed studies than no computer-mediated instruction. 

So, Jason is right. Schools, especially school systems, pour money into education technology because it's an easy way to look like you're doing something meaningful. They spend millions on interventions we know don't work. Why? Because the interventions we know do work, providing tutors, for example, are expensive and not very flashy. Afterall, how often do we see articles about schools who try to turn things around by bringing on more staff or offering to pay for kids' tutoring? Why give intelligent, caring, qualified individuals the chance to interact on a personal level with students when we can pay Google $30 per Chromebook? It's cheaper. Parents like when their kids use technology because they feel it prepares them for the modern workplace. Teachers like the convenience of managing classwork online. It's a win-win. Except for the students who forego better alternatives for the quick fix. Jason is spot on when he writes:

There’s a real tension between people who badly want it to be that silver bullet (typically administrators who are working with a limited budget and want to be able to point towards something that they’re doing to improve the educational experience) and people who think it’s just a mess that complicates the business of getting students to learn.

I count myself among the latter group in this tension with the exception that  I don't think education technology is deployed with student learning even remotely in mind. It's a political decision beginning to end. Perhaps that's my cynicism showing a bit and I should be more like Jason. I should give the benefit of the doubt to the people who clearly are trying their best to improve a flawed system. Jason is, after all, right.