The Silicon Classroom — Week 5

This week, we had the pleasure of discussing the complex politics of Edtech with John Snyder, the executive director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. Among the issues we discussed were centralized vs. less federal standards-oriented approaches regarding the regulation of education standards, New Hampshire’s successful recent reforms in education, as well as the flaws of the No Child Left Behind legislation.

Snyder presented contrasting examples of how both governmentally regulated and community regulated school systems have been both successful and problematic. Centralized systems, such as the school system in Finland, have proven themselves to have the potential to provide students with high quality education. The very same style of education policy also has the potential to lead to broken and flawed systems, such as the US education system. We also discussed the successes of the performance based assessment put in place in New Hampshire, in which the application and synthesis of knowledge is valued over simply teaching from a set of federally mandated standards. We discussed how these complex issues meant that Edtech by itself won’t magically solve everything that’s wrong with education — we must also take into account changes that need to be made regarding policy while discussing the issue of equity in education.

In order to better understand the more policy-related issues regarding education reform, during the second half of class, we split into two groups: one that represented a group of high school teachers that wished to incorporate Edtech into their curriculum and another that represented the executive leadership team of the school whose main role is to manage the school’s budget.

Acting out this scenario gave us more insight into the complex and important debates and discussions surrounding education policy. Although Edtech has the potential to empower students and teachers, there needs to be a system put in place to make sure it goes to good productive use.