Well, you'd expect my answer to be "no", wouldn't you -- otherwise why would I bother to ask the question in the first place? It was prompted by an email I received this morning from the Ed Tech Action Network (ETAN), exhorting me to do the right thing and lobby Congress to pay for more ed tech in schools. The letter includes this paragraph, in bold:
"Now is the time for all ETAN members to contact Congress with their support for President-Elect Obama’s vision for our nation’s schools and request that Congress include funding for classroom technology and school broadband access in the economic recovery package. Congress is at the initial stage of drafting this legislation. It is crucial that they hear from YOU and YOUR COLLEAGUES NOW!"
Well, from my experience in the UK, I would say that government funding is not necessarily unequivocally good.
Back in 1997 the new Labour government in Britain made money available on a hitherto unprecedented scale. There were different funds for different things, all linked to targets.
Thus, there was a target for secondary schools to achieve a ratio of 5 pupils to 1 computer, and for primary schools to achieve an 8:1 ratio. All schools were to achieve internet access. There was funding for software, in the form of e-learning credits (which had the dubious distinction of being neither a form of credit nor necessarily to be spent on e-learning, but let's not quibble). At some point there was a separate fund for broadband access.
I would say that on the whole the result was a positive one, for the following reasons.
Firstly, it marked a dramatic departure from the old ad hoc (though still welcome) initiatives of the past. For example, every ed tech educator of my generation remembers the modems-in-cupboards scheme. It wasn't called that at the time, of course, but what happened was this. The government arranged for every school to receive a modem to help boot them into the new internet age. Many ICT co-ordinators and headteachers received their modem and put them in a cupboard, because they didn't know what else to do with them. Even now, there are schools in which a new Head of ICT decides to clear out some long-forgotten cupboard in the corner of the main computer lab, only to discover an historical artefact in the form of a 9600 bits per second modem. Still in its box.
I could cite other bizarre examples of this sort, but the point has been made I think. At least the new approach represented an attempt to put the whole thing on a logical, progressive, footing.
Secondly, it did trumpet, loud and clear, the government's belief that ed tech had a lot to offer -- indeed, was crucial in a modern education system.
Thirdly, of course, it provided schools with much-needed funds for this purpose.
Nevertheless, it was not without its problems, which seemed to take the following forms:
Firstly, issues of interpretation. For example, when interactive whiteboards started to become affordable, there were endless debates about whether they counted towards the hardware targets mentioned earlier. Was one whiteboard "worth", say, 10 computer workstations? I think these arguments are ridiculous. I even thought they were silly at the time: whiteboards and workstations do different things, although obviously there is going to be some overlap in a whole-class teaching context. The issue arose because of the targets.
That brings me on to the second problem: targets. Some targets were observed in name only. For example, I came across one school that had achieved the required internet access: via a computer in the office of the school librarian, who worked 3 days a week. The rest of the time the office was locked.
Some schools had plans of their own which rendered the targets a restraint rather than an enabler. For example, one of the endless debates was about what a computer is. At some point, if my memory serves me well, someone in the department of education decided that portable devices that only had limited functionality, like word processing, could not be counted in the targets. Now, that's understandable, because the government wanted kids to have the best and most modern equipment. However, the lack of flexibility meant that if a school had a long-term strategy of, say, making sure that every child had some kind of handheld device, they couldn't use that pot of money to buy hardware that would have served that purpose yet cost a tenth of the price of a laptop.
Thirdly, there were rules and regulations about what exactly schools could spend their e-learning credits on. For example, what most schools needed was money to buy Microsoft Office, at a time when there was no cheap and viable alternative. The e-learning credits could not be used for that.
Fourthly, there was confusion amongst ICT co-ordinators about what exactly their entitlement was each year. Although the funding came from different central budgets, it appeared in the school's budget mixed in with everything else. I think I managed to make myself quite unpopular amongst head teachers in the local authority in which I had quite a senior position (Head of E-Education) by taking it upon myself annually to inform each ICT Co-ordinator not only of the exact amount of money they had coming to them (and I mean "exact", eg "£1,203.46p"), but the exact date on which it would appear in the school budget!
Perhaps I am benefitting from hindsight, but I think a better approach might have been to have given schools a certain allocation of money, and local authorities a certain allocation of money, and told them to spend it on ed tech, with the proviso that they be prepared to (a) share what they've done and (b) justify what they've done in terms of tangible benefits -- a bit like a latter day version of the parable of the talents.
Whether one agrees with my point of view or not, I think the key issue is that asking government for money for things they don't completely comprehend is always going to be fraught with difficulty, no matter how well-intentioned the government may be. And I'm not being patronising: I don't think any of us fully understood all the ramifications of what we were doing, but many of us, including people in high-up positions in the government, had a strong vision and commitment and a lot of faith.
There is no doubting any of that, but once a state of maturity has been reached, the need for such stringent constraints starts to fade (which is why we no longer have them in the UK, thank goodness). What colleagues in the USA need to ask themselves, I think, is whether their education set-up has reached a state of maturity, in ed tech terms, in which it can confidently ask for government money without all the strings attached.
Good luck!
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