Too often, neither research findings nor evaluation data including test scores guide most major policy decisions. Political and practical reasons do.

Consider the case of classroom technology. Politically smart state and local policymakers have believed since the 1980s–-here is where ideology enters the picture–-that buying computers, laptops, and tablets loaded with software, deploying them to K-12 classrooms, and watching how the devices engage both teachers and students will produce desirable classroom outcomes; it is considered “best practice” because, well, “we believe in it.”

The theory is (and has been) that student engagement with electronic devices and their software will dramatically alter classroom instruction and lead to improved achievement. The problem, of course (you no doubt have guessed where I am going with this) — is that evidence of these devices transforming teaching practices and raising test scores is not only sparse but also unpersuasive even when some studies show a small “effect size.”

That’s what I mean by “secret” in the title of this post..

So, if the research pantry is nearly empty and evidence for raising student test scores or transforming teaching practices are sparse, how do policymakers and administrators justify buying new devices and software?

Here are three reasons that I think explain why decision-makers allocate scarce budget dollars for new technologies.

First, keeping up with the rest of the changing world. Call it “modernization” or recasting schools as less like museums and more like fast-paced companies using technology in daily work. No more jokes about educators being technological slow-pokes. Use of new technologies is considered modern, being with-it, even an unadulterated “good” that all children and youth in age-graded schools should embrace.

Second, because new technologies are highly valued in the culture, school boards and their superintendents feel strong pressures to keep up with usage in other sectors–both public and private–undergoing technological changes. If those leaders do not act, they fear that taxpayers and voters will lose confidence in public schools. And public confidence is like money in the bank since tax-supported public schools are politically and fiscally dependent on taxpayers’ good will.

And there is a less obvious third reason for school leaders to purchase new technologies: increase efficiency in students taking tests and scoring the results. Schools have to have computers because most U.S. students take tests online. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s fiasco with iPads over a decade ago was triggered by demands to implement required standardized testing due to adoption of Common Core Standards. Just as the move from quill pens to pencils to testing-by-computer required no research studies but were done on grounds of cost-saving efficiency, so it was when the LAUSD School Board and Superintendent authorized buying iPads.

Note that the three reasons I offer are both practical and political–not in any negative sense–but ones that are realistic in the world that policymakers and practitioners inhabit. Research findings and student outcome data to support promises that school leaders make for the outcomes that high-tech purchases will produce, are simply not there. And that pattern of pursuing policies and innovations without much evidence to support school board and superintendent decisions is plain to see.

It is an open secret.