When asked how I got interested in the uses of technological devices in classrooms, I answer that I was the target for a quarter-century of high-tech innovations and classroom reforms when I taught high school history and served as a district administrator in different urban school systems.

I then say that I have been trained as an historian and studied many reform efforts to improve schooling over the past century in U.S. classrooms, schools, and districts. I examined how teachers have taught since the 1890s. I investigated policymakers’ constant changes in curriculum since the 1880s. I analyzed the origins of the age-graded school and the spread of this innovation through the 19th century. And I parsed the utopian dreams of reformers who believed that new machine technologies (e.g., film, radio, instructional television, desktop computer) would alter how teachers teach and students learn. I then end my answer by pointing out that these electronic devices are in the DNA of all innovations aimed at altering how teachers teach and how students learn.

What surprises me is that these questioners had not viewed high-tech devices as having either a history in schools or as blood relations to constant efforts to improve schools. Instead, they saw (and see) innovative high-tech devices as singular, even exceptional, ways of transforming teaching and learning completely divorced from previous efforts at improving classroom practice through curricular reforms in math, social studies, science, and other subjects or instructional reforms such as project-based learning, team teaching and Direct Instruction.

And that is a huge conceptual error. Why? Because, school and classroom reforms including technological ones, are part of the same genetic code–they are kissing cousins, so to speak.

Teachers using iCell App, Khan Academy videos, Google Classroom, Kahoot, and other software programs are implementing curricular reforms and trying to shape instruction. Technological innovations, then, are blood cousins to curricular and instructional reforms. Consequently, to stretch the metaphor, they share similar genes.

For example, all reforms come bathed in rhetoric. Take the “21st Century Skills” effort, organized by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), a reform coalition whose members include Verizon, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Dell. Their mission is to prepare the current generation of children and youth to compete in a globalized economy. Their words, like the rhetoric of so many other reformers—past and present—portray a economic, social, and political crisis for U.S. competition in world markets unless today’s youth leave school fully equipped with the skills of creating, innovating, collaborating, and critically thinking. And don’t forget: a repertoire of technological skills. The rhetoric must not only create a sense of crisis, it must portray existing institutions as woefully deficient. Read the stuff.

If patterns emerge from analyzing reform rhetoric over time so can patterns be observed in the journey of a policy from its rhetoric to becoming formally adopted and then appear as an actual program in schools and classrooms. Designing the policy and program means frequent revisions as they go through the political vetting process to get funded. Think of federal laws such as No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds Act and a spanking-new whole language software program for district schools.

Ditto for finding patterns in the degree to which those adopted policies get implemented and changed as the design wends its way into schools and eventually classrooms (e.g., e.g., Success for All, Maine’s 1:1 laptop initiative, ClassDojo)

If reform rhetoric, policy adoption, and putting innovations into classroom practice can be examined for regularities so can the criteria used to assess the reform (e.g., test scores, satisfaction of teachers and students with innovation, rates of graduation, etc.). Once assessed, determining whether or not the reform should be sustained across the entire district is a judgment call that authorities make on the basis of political, ideological, and evidentiary grounds.

In viewing technological innovations as a sub-set of curricular and instructional reforms, teachers, principals, and parents can identify patterns, determine consequences for the adoption of the innovation, track the journey as it goes from policy to classroom practice, and expect certain outcomes while being open to unanticipated outcomes as well.

Too many policymakers, practitioners, and parents see technological innovations as unique initiatives unrelated to historic patterns in school reforms. They err.

My experiences as a practitioner and historian have taught me to see technological devices as being blood relations, even kissing cousins, in the history of school reform in the U.S..