Principle 3—Use ICT to support data-driven decisions

Many decisions about school ICT projects are made based on electoral needs, partners' offerings or other factors. These factors will not disappear. But decision-makers should use available information about what's really happening as their primary guide: What % of teachers has completed teachers college? What's the ratio of textbooks to kids? If these areas pose problems for schools, check the feasibility of using ICT to address them. And, given the fact that we're introducing information tools, think about collecting and reviewing more comprehensive and nuanced information.

OK, the core sub-principles are as follows: 

• Keep tools simple at the school level.
• Collect data that address goals.
• Ensure that data can be easily accessed and shared.
• Develop information-management tools in stages. 
• Support the use of data in schools and communities

These sub-statements all touch, at least tangentially, on theEMIS report card developed for Georgian schools idea that schools themselves should benefit from data. School report cards (there's one from Georgia, the country not the state, below) should help school personnel see where they fall in relation to quality-assurance standards (like, class size, textbooks-per-kid, and so on) and in relation to other schools like theirs. 

But what's interesting (and this links to one of the sub-principles addressed previously, "focus on learning outomes") is that new tools for data collection might open more complex and authentic fields of learning to developing-country researchers and decision-makers. If, for example, teachers were trained to recognize collaborative interactions in small groups, they might be able to use smart phones or tablets to assess kids' interactions in real time. This potential renders a soft, 21st-century skillset, comprised perhaps of cooperation, communication and empathy, into something measurable at both the school level and nationally. 

And in education in developing countries, if you can measure it, and you can pilot-test it, you increase the chances that you can, eventually, maybe, make it happen at scale.

Why review the First Principles anyhow?

I ask myself this question repeatedly. Why? You wrote 'em, you wrote the short version of 'em, why are you writing about them?

The First Principles are intended, primarily, to guide education officers at USAID as they work with country governments, other donors (not USAID) and private-sector partners (like, for example, Intel, Microsoft and Cisco, who are everywhere) to design, plan and support technology projects in schools in the developing countries where USAID works. Education officers have a good general grasp of education, and of the systems in the countries in which they are working, but they are not specially cognizant of issues in relation to the use of new tools.

So. The FP document is written, despite my best efforts, in my own version of "development speak." That it's my version means that I'm trying as hard as I can to avoid using jargon and acronyms, I'm trying to say things plainly and to make sense to everybody, and yet I'm aware that for my main audience, "ICT" is more meaningful than "technology" or "computers," and "implement" is more compelling than "do" or "make happen" (or than "knife," fork" or "hammer," for that matter.)

The commentary that appears on the Natoma Group blog is my effort to move the FP writing further away from development-speak. My effort to make the principles a bit more usable. I'm aware that for teachers and planners in the US and other countries with mature school systems, all of the FP information is far too simple, far too axiomatic. There are established practices, there are regulations and constraints. But in developing countries the administration of rules and requirements is less stringent, and the use of technology is deeply retrograde. If we could just get ministries of education to work within the FP parameters we would impact millions of students (that's development speak for help a lot of kids learn;).

Principle 2—Use ICT to enhance students' knowledge and skills

This principle seems obvious, doesn't it? (Perhaps all principles should seem obvious.) But the key, if there is one, is that programs should enhance students' knowledge and skills. I think we know (no citation, in other words) that as students increase their understanding and awareness of the world around them, including some concepts and information that appear in school curricula, they increase their capacity to build literacy, numeracy and other basic skills. (As E.D. Hirsch says.) 

When you're planning an ICT project in schools in a developing country, there will be plenty of gaps to fill. Even when basic skills and schools' abilities to teach 'em are lacking, look for ways to build conceptual and contextual knowledge. 

As usual in reviewing these principles,* it's best to go straight to the core sub-principles. And those are: 

1. Help students build literacy skills & basic skills in all subjects 
2. Help students build 21st-century life and learning skills 
3. Focus on learning outcomes

Statements 1 and 2 aren't mutually exclusive, or contradictory. 

(*And why, you might ask, review these principles at all?)

This display dresses up the Armenian alphabet

In schools that are really low performing—one teacher shows up, for example, there are few books, kids have nothing to write on or with—ICT can be used to mitigate teachers' lack of capacity and to facilitate PD by providing direct instruction to students in one form (IRI) or another (e-learning). Depending on students' needs and the system's capacity, ICT can support instruction (of students and teachers both) across a range of skillsets running from basic to complex. Students can use an MP3 recorder to listen to phonics instruction; and they can use the same MP3 recorder to make podcasts for their classmates or to share messages with members of a distant team. Don't make the mistakes of assuming that without basic skills kids can't learn anything, or that basic skills will if all else fails and kids leave school be sufficient. 

(If your project is based on IRI [Interactive Radio Instruction—direct instruction in basic skills using audio], include stories. How hard is that?)  

Cram-school grey market: Siphoning off funds for schools

The costs exacted by high-stakes exams in national education systems frequently include substantial fees for tutoring and test preparation. If you look at these fees in terms of market economics, you might conclude that public education is "under-priced": there are potential revenues (OK, taxes and fees) that instead of being collected go to private-sector providers. A case in point...

South Korea is attempting to crack down on private test-prep services. Bounty hunters, known as the "hak-paparazzi" because they are busting "hakwon" or test-prep schools, earn payments when they deliver evidence that a specific hakwon is charging prices that are higher than those the government allows. The government controls prices and pays bounties as part of a program to:

...tame the ballooning cost of private education—a particular burden for citizens in a country laser-focused on education achievement.

By "private education," in this instance, we're talking about cram schools. These schools are offering, essentially, supplementary education services intended to improve clients' performance on high-stakes tests.

My elementary grasp of economics, however, suggests that there are a few other conclusions that can and should be drawn in societies where high-cost tutoring emerges to meet the need for test preparation.

• Demand for effective (i.e., career-advancing) education is high
• Supply of same is low
• The additional funds spent on education would be more beneficial if they were re-directed to public schools

Why the last? Because private test-preparation runs precisely counter to implied goals of high-stakes tests. Those tests serve, at their most benign, as a mechanism for allocating scarce resources comprising the opportunity to continue on to higher education (or in lower grades, to continue on an academic track rather than being routed to TVET). Students who perform well on tests are rewarded with better placement. From the point of view of a national social and economic system, accurate placement entails correctly predicting those students who will succeed academically and in later life. 

Test-prep services, especially when they are priced beyond the means of most citizens, distort the functioning of tests as mechanisms for resource allocations. 

(I once interviewed an administrator at Bilkent University in Ankara who said that he paid more for his kid's tutoring fees than for tuition at the college where he eventually matriculated.)

What to do?

Governments in these circumstances might, to address the situation, use progressive means such as income tax to increase public revenues (e.g., taxes, fees) supporting the improvement of schools' resources and teachers' skills. If most public schools can successfully prepare their students for exams and for later success—21st-century skills by day, drill-and-kill by night?—a country's overall productive and innovative capacities increase over time. The key however is to structure revenue-collection so that 1) enrolment in cram schools declines; 2) the rich pay a higher share of costs.

It's also critical that public schools build confidence in the effectiveness of their test-preparation courses.

The alternative? 

“Day after day we are cornered into an unrelenting competition that smothers and suffocates us,” the council said. “We couldn’t even spare 30 minutes for our troubled classmates because of all our homework.

“We no longer have the ability to laugh freely.”

Young people in South Korea are a chronically unhappy group. A recent survey found them to be — for the third year in a row — the unhappiest subset among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Banned websites impede learning

The Times' portrayal of Banned Websites Awareness Day, an offshoot of Banned Books Week,  (brought to you by the American Association of School Librarians!) demonstrates among other things that in savvy schools the Internet, computers and social media have become thoroughly intertwined with students' learning and with student-teacher interactions. 

The article highlights different activities supporting unrestricted Internet and social-media access in schools, including email campaigns, debates over the pros and cons of censorship (Would you want your kid accessing Tea-Party websites at school?) and, at New Canaan HS in Connecticut, a 'social-media solidarity blackout.' The upshot of the blackout? 

“It’s not even lunchtime, and I’m already dying,” said Michael DeMattia, 17, a senior, who carries a laptop to school.

In his Advanced Placement Biology class, where lab groups have created a Facebook thread to collaborate and share data, he could not log in. In honors comparative literature, his classmates were unable to show a YouTube video during a presentation.

The Internet, Michael said, has “made cooperation and collaboration inside and outside of class much better and faster,” adding, “It’s really has become an integral part of education.”

Indeed. 

Just so we're clear, Michael is talking about using social media in his AP biology class and his honors comp-lit class. A lot of kids—a lot—aren't enrolled in classes or in schools where their teachers have the skills, support and opportunities (including access to hardware, prep time and professional development) to integrate FB, Twitter, YouTube or other trending tools. 

But the critical quote, underplayed perhaps in the middle of the article, is the teacher who frames the real reason that web censorship is self-defeating: 

Deven Black, a librarian at Middle School 127 in the Bronx, also said that filters had blocked a range of useful Web sites.... “Our job is to teach students the safe use of the Internet. And it’s hard to do that if we can’t get to the sites.”

Would you want your kid accessing Tea Party websites without critical-thinking skills?