Over the years, readers and students have asked me about the work I have done on school reform and especially new classroom technologies. I answer some of those questions in this post. But first some background.

I began doing research and writing on teacher and student uses of technology in the early 1980s when the first personal computers appeared in classrooms. That writing turned into Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920 (1986). I then began working on a larger study of teacher and student uses of new technologies in preschool and kindergarten, high schools, and universities. That study became Oversold and Underused: Computers in Classrooms (2001). In Hugging the Middle: How Teachers Teach in an Era of Testing and Accountability (2009), I devoted one chapter to teacher and student uses of technologies across four school districtsin the San Francisco Bay area In The Flight of the Butterfly and the Path of the Bullet (2018), I described 40-plus teachers who, in my opinion, had mastered the technology to the point where it was in the background, not foreground, of a lesson.

Over three decades, then, those writings on teaching and technology put me squarely in a bin labeled “Skeptic.” Early comments on these writings were testy. Promoters of new technologies, were they vendors, practitioners or policymakers, would curtly dismiss concerns I and others raised by calling us “Luddites.”

No more. Public scorn for anyone who would probe prevailing beliefs in the magical efficacy of computers in schools has become unfashionable.  I have found educators and non-educators who deeply believed in classroom computers as engines of learning, now willing to listen to critics when concerns are raised about the many goals of schooling in a democracy, implementing new technologies, and insufficient research to support purchases of new devices and software. More and more parents now ask questions about screen time in lessons. I find these changes encouraging but hardly a game-changer.

Why? Because there have been fewer skeptics than true believers in new technologies. Since I am in the minority, the questions that I have been asked are more of a personal character seeking elaboration of why I have explored the use of classroom technologies and their links to school reform and disclosing what technologies I have used in past decades as a teacher and administrator.

1. Why did you begin writing about using technology in classroom lessons? In the late-1970s, I began doing research and writing about the history of classroom instruction. In 1984, I published How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890-1980. In that book, I tracked the repeated (and failed) efforts of Progressive reformers over a century to change classroom practice in urban, suburban, and rural classrooms from teacher-centered to student-centered lessons. In doing the archival research, parsing photos of teachers teaching, and reading accounts of how teachers taught different lessons, I saw the classroom use of different technologies from blackboards, stereopticons, and textbooks to overhead projectors, films, radio, instructional television, and laptops. The idea that reforming teaching was linked to the introduction of new technologies intrigued me. Was introduction of new technologies another way that reformers believed could move teaching away from traditional lessons? I discovered that the answer was yes.

2. Do you personally use any electronic technologies?

At home I have a desktop computer, laptop, and a smart phone. The desktop I use at home; the laptop and mobile phone I have used when I did research and traveled to school sites. I have used all of them for personal, business, and professional work such as this blog. Please do not ask me how many times I check my email.

3. When you taught high school history and social studies in high school and graduate classes at Stanford, did you use technologies in your instruction?

Yes, I did. I used regularly (daily and weekly) both old and new technologies in high school teaching between the 1950s and 1970s such as 16mm films, film strips, overhead projectors, and videocassettes. As a professor for twenty years I have used my laptop in seminars to do quick polls of students, show video clips, etc. I rarely, however, made PowerPoint presentations.

4. If you are (and have been) a regular user of technologies, why are you skeptical of their use in classrooms?

I am allergic to hype. Vendors and enthusiasts have promoted past electronic technologies as ways to solve problems from low academic performance to alienation among students and over-reliance upon traditional teaching practices. Hype is over-promising. Over-promising inexorably leads to disappointment. And frequent disappointment often produces cynicism; cynicism, too often, leads to inaction.

Second, companies that invent new technologies often persuade school districts to use their products by offering them at low cost because they are initially experimental–either alpha and beta versions. Companies want to find out whether these products work and are useful to teachers and students. Combine hype and experimentation to a captive audience (after all, children and youth are compelled to be in school until a certain age) and that could become a toxic combination. Thus, both professionals and citizens have to ask hard questions of policymakers who buy and deploy electronic devices for classroom instruction. Such questions as: what’s the evidence that students will do better academically as a result of using these devices? What’s the evidence that teachers using these devices will be more efficient and effective using the company’s product?

Third, the enormous amount of money spent on new technologies without much evidence of their effectiveness on teaching and learning means that other options such as investing budget dollars in hiring more teachers, providing more professional development, and lowering class size are lost. That is not only inefficient but it is also evidence of data-free policymaking.

Given these reasons, I remain deeply skeptical of those companies touting new technologies for both school districts and parents that will improve teaching and children’s academic achievement.