Technology Funding Policy in Practice: Revisiting the Hidden Curriculum in the 21st-Century Classroom

• In Event: Remembering Jean Anyon: Radical Possibilities in Research, Policy, and Practice With and for Vulnerable Populations

Abstract

In her seminal five-school study, Jean Anyon (1980) established that curriculum reinforces social class. Schools identified as “working class” in her study produced mechanical and rote responses from students that required little critical thinking, while schools that she termed “executive elite” encouraged students to reason, conceptualize, and analyze in the process of learning. I argue in this analysis of technology funding in New York State that in the nearly forty years since, little has changed in practice, despite rapid changes in technology and access to information. While the standards and accountability movement of the last nearly twenty years has created a distraction with its leave-no-child-behind rhetoric, the technological revolution has quietly and simultaneously reinforced a structure of inequity.

In 2015, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) implemented the Smart Schools Bond Act, a $2 billion funding policy “to finance improved technology infrastructure to improve learning and opportunity for students throughout the State” (NYSED, 2017). This paper makes the argument that while the funding will undoubtedly improve educational technology infrastructure for some, improved learning and opportunity for students across the State cannot be achieved for two fundamental reasons: 1) lack of funding for teacher training, and 2) no renewal of funds. In other words, while SSBA will undoubtedly bring technology to students who did not otherwise have access before, it will push historically marginalized groups of students further to the margins of a systemically inequitable system when funding inevitably runs out.

The main theoretical perspective framing this paper is a political economy of education that suggests social-movement-building as the primary way forward for systemic, sustained change in public schooling (Anyon, 1980; Apple, 2006; Lipman, 2013). This paper will consider the contradictions inherent in SSBA as a funding policy for equity. While SSBA is largely responsible for recent technology purchases and infrastructure improvements in school districts throughout New York State, it is funneling proprietary, for-profit technologies directly into the public school pipeline. A political economy analysis of this process reveals the extension of a long-term paradoxical relationship between policies as they exist on paper and the reality of their implementation in the classroom.

Using a combination of thematic and content analysis, this paper will report on how SSBA funds are being used throughout New York State.

Each school district in New York State must complete a Smart Schools Investment Plan (SSIP) in order to unlock their allocation of funds. SSIPs are publicly available documents, and this paper will analyze those that have been approved by NYSED (to date, there are 299 approved SSIPs).

Preliminary results reveal that school districts’ allocations do little to close the funding gap and equal the educational playing field between affluent schools and those that have been historically underfunded.

To date, no research has been written on the SSBA, the primary funding policy for technology integration in New York State’s schools. It is the author’s argument that SSBA will silently help preserve the social class status quo as Jean Anyon wrote about it nearly forty years ago.

Author

• Kiersten Greene, SUNY - College at New Paltz