Technopolicy and School Reform: Privatization and the Governance of American Education

• In Event: 35.045 - The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can't Be Businesses — Revisiting Larry Cuban's Book 15 Years Later

Abstract

Background and purpose

At all levels from kindergarten to twelfth grade, American schools are making huge investments in digital education – with proponents often touting digital tools as a way to close achievement gaps and improve learning opportunities for economically and academically disadvantaged students. Digital instruction – using computers, netbooks, or handheld devices – is rapidly spreading in classrooms and supplemental areas of instruction. Big money is in play: One estimate values the U.S. school market for education software and digital content at nearly $8 billion. Advances in technology allow digital tools to offer the promise of broad access at low cost, competing with face-to-face methods of instruction for shrinking funds.

Historian of education, Larry Cuban was one of the first to anticipate the policy and business press for schools to do more with technology (Cuban, 2007). Cuban observed then and again in a more recent study (Cuban 2017) that the new technology had yet to change the fundamentals of how teachers teach. Cuban's groundbreaking work focused squarely on the effects of technology on classroom practice. It helped frame a decade of work which cautions that the more schools purchase technology, the more remains the same. Institutionalized policies and practices in schools (for example, tracking by race and class and standardized forms of instruction) will not automatically disappear even as the goals and sophistication of that technology evolve.

Research Design and Findings

We have studied digital learning programs in large urban school districts across the country. Our research examines differences in both implementation and impact between providers of educational services using digital tools and those not relying on digital tools at all. Using a standardized observation instrument, we have been able to examine the quality of instruction in both non-digital and digital settings. In general, our analyses found that digital tools do not regularly add value to instruction, even when the technology is readily accessible and working well (which often is not the case).

Then, and now, the question remains, has the education industry assumed a central place in the day to day governance and administration of public schools as schools' use of technology expands? Drawing on over a decade's research on publically funded, privately designed digital education, we consider the rise of technopolicy networks in American education and the effects of these networks on policy design and implementation. Using tools from financial accounting analysis, we describe the rise technopolicy markets in education and how businesses are developing software to sell in these markets, software that is paid for in large part with public funds. Our analysis provides further support for Cuban’s argument that aspects of institutionalized environment of schooling persist in the face of new technology. However, our analysis also suggests that technopolicy networks within and outside of education are contributing to broader shifts in long-standing principles of education governance - who decides how public funds should be used, whose children should benefit, and what counts as knowledge.

Authors

• Patricia Burch, University of Southern California

• Neha Miglani, University of Southern California