Why Technology Won't Fix Schools

Kentaro Toyama is a professor at U. Michigan, a fellow at MIT, and a former researcher for Microsoft. He's just written a book titled "Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology" (although I'd quibble with the title in one way: practically all geeks I know consider the following to be obvious and common-sense). He writes:

But no matter how good the design, and despite rigorous tests of impact, I have never seen technology systematically overcome the socio-economic divides that exist in education. Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else. Many people believe that technology “levels the playing field” of learning, but what I’ve discovered is that it does no such thing.

And, oh, how much do I agree with the following!:

... what I’ve arrived at is something I think of as technology’s Law of Amplification: Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces. In education, technologies amplify whatever pedagogical capacity is already there.

 More at the Washington Post (link).