As seen on TV.

Bauerlein, Mark

Todd Oppenheimer The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved. Random Home, 481 pages, $24.95

Remember the digital divide, the alarm spread by the White House, governors, and advocacy groups in the mid-1990s? The advent of the Internet created fabulous wealth, mingled tech savvy with bobo lifestyles, and sparked visions of antiauthoritarian commerce in an age of instant data and personal empowerment. But it never takes long for anything to acquire a race/class consequence. The downside, President Clinton and others warned: not everyone was connecting. Minority and underprivileged households weren't going online at the rate of white and middleclass households, and, because of the acceleration of skills and knowledge enabled by the Web, black and brown kids in particular were falling further and further behind. What seemed so promising, in fact, aggravated income disparities and social injustice.

The solution was clear: more computers in classrooms, more wiring in schools. Amidst prophecies of how computers would reshape human intelligence and cure education's ills, in the 1990s states spent $70 billion on computer-related programs. In a race for the cutting edge, districts took pride in conspicuous consumption. Union City, California, spent $37 million on computers in 1996 and $5 million more in 2001 for only eleven schools. Oliver High in Pittsburgh created $1,300 workstations outfitted with Dell computers, scanners, and digital cameras. The shortfalls of recent years forced some hard choices, but the fervor didn't subside. I.S. 275 (a middle school in Harlem) earmarked only $4,200 for books in 2002, but $350,000 for computers. Administrators in Mansfield, Massachusetts dropped teaching lines in art, music, and physical education, but saved $333,000 for online access. Kittredge Elementary in Los Angeles dropped its entire music program in 1996 to hire a tech specialist. In the school budget for New York City, computer spending rose from $19.7 million in 1997 to $118 million in 2000. A $406 million deficit in 2001 killed after-school and arts programs, but didn't touch $250 million for technology. (Keep these numbers in mind when districts complain that they have no money to implement No Child Left Behind.)

The Flickering Mind is the journalist Todd Oppenheimer's 450-page survey of what resulted. That sounds like a straightforward issue--What did students learn?--but anyone experienced in the workings of the public school system knows that blank questions and answers quickly dissipate. From the direct evidence of the classroom, one slides into a Gordian machinery of administrators, school boards, state offices, ed. schools, ed. theory, teachers' unions, the textbook business, parent groups, and a rout of entrepreneurs trying to work the system.

Oppenheimer reverses the process. He relates all the hype, money, politicking, and promises of digital learning, interviews tech moguls and gurus, and talks to teachers fired up and disappointed with hi-tech tools. But the key reportage begins with firsthand reports of what he saw and heard at ground level. In hundreds of classrooms, the student reality belied the teacher/administrator/techie claims. Oppenheimer explains, "First I would follow the teacher as he or she perused the class. Then I would walk the room by myself. In virtually every computerized classroom, the differences between what the teacher saw and what I saw on my own were so dramatic that it was sometimes hard to keep from laughing." Under one teacher's eye, students do spread sheets and download articles, but a second pass by Oppenheimer shows them checking out the website of the Dallas Cowboys. Technophiles praise the group interactivity of computer projects, but Oppenheimer observes rooms of twenty heads each sunk in a screen of their own, silent and otherworldly. Advocates insist that computers foster literacy, but one student reveals the actual process. Oppenheimer reports:

 Henry told me about the way they're using
 laptops to do research on the Internet in social
 studies classes. 'You don't have to read it or
 anything like if you looked it up in a book. All
 you have to do is use your fingers and just
 look.' What did he do when he found sections
 he wanted to include in his written report?
 That's one of the best parts: He simply hit
 select and copy commands, pasted it into his
 own file, then reworked a little of the language
 to put it in his own words.

The depravities multiply. Student-centered approaches maintain that the computer motivates students to "learn to learn" (a progressivist byword). But in one exercise in which seniors used the Internet to investigate and present a libel case involving a newspaper ad, a student in the audience "asks what the original ad ... actually said. 'I don't know,' Peter [the presenter] says. 'We weren't given the ad,'" Computer learning, we're told, lifts self-esteem, but what Oppenheimer beholds is a false sense of accomplishment, as with the student who built a Web project filled with thin platitudes about simulation games, while her website registered tidbits of self-approval such as "I think I demonstrate a lot of critical thinking." Of the teachers who notice the lazy habits of computer-learning, some have returned to books and blackboards, but others shrug them off as the mores of the Information Age. Why worry about basic numeracy skills, one argues, when computers execute them for us and we can graduate to higher tasks? Ultimately, a slogan of New Tech High in Napa, California, affirms, "It doesn't matter what you know. It matters what you show."

Oppenheimer's portraits provide anecdotal support for what the test scores say. Despite billions in education funding since the landmark 1983 report "A Nation at Risk," most students fall short of grade-level math and reading standards, and their historical knowledge is abysmal. Technophiles peg computers as the answer, but they have yet to prove it. Oppenheimer documents one school-improvement-by-technology program after another that produce little or no progress in student learning. Steve Jobs, who led the charge for wiring schools, now admits that "what's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent." Lev Gonick, a distance learning leader at Case Western Reserve, sighs, "The truth is that e-learning technology itself, and those of us who represent the e-learning environment, have thus far failed."

But the bandwagon rolls on. Too many taxpayer funds await a school savior, and no industry embraces the new with such ardor and abandons the tried-and-failed with such reluctance as the education system. Politicians with an eye to glory know that putting a laptop on every desk looks better than good books and back-to-basics instruction. In the New Economy, too many "e-lusions" (Oppenheimer's coinage) circulate without question, the main one being that computers are always the solution, never the problem. A 2003 report by The National Commission on Writing, "The Neglected 'R': The Need for a Writing Revolution," documents the poor quality of writing by high school graduates, then calls for "a National Educational Technology Trust to finance hardware, software, and training for every student and teacher in the nation."

The Flickering Mind uncovers the waste and credulousness, but what should replace digital learning isn't so clear. Oppenheimer bypasses the issue of school choice, disdains standardized tests, and favors multicultural curricula and progressivist pedagogies even though both partner well with the very practices he abhors in the computer lab. Indeed, in his occasional praise of experimental learning environments, Oppenheimer seems unaware that progressivist ideas dominate most schools and share the blame for sliding student achievement. But these are minor themes in the book and shouldn't distract from the central expose. The school system has become a contest pitting skeptics such as Oppenheimer against software firms, gullible politicians, Internet addicts, overworked and remiss teachers, and slacker students. The latter have the money and the Zeitgeist on their side, but the former have the discouraging facts.