Remember as a school leader bragging about your school’s one-to-one computer ratios as if that was some kind of badge saying we had entered the 21st century? How mistaken we were!
Schools are notorious for using such frivolous measures of quality and status. It’s like bragging that your school has a 98% attendance rate, yet, if what students do during that increased presence is no more instructionally sound and effective, it is a meaningless statement.
The same applies to technology. We get tangled in the numbers like computer ratios and numbers of teachers trained in AI, like that really tells us anything.
We like to call that data-driven, but in reality, it is frivolity-driven leadership and education.
School letter grades are mostly derived from this frivolous data, so they are basically a measure of frivolousness. Well, one thing school letter grades do well is provide a pretty good indicator of our students’ sociodemographic status.
So what really matters about technology and how can we measure it so we can boast about it?
I am not really sure on this one. All measures can be used in a frivolous manner too, even test scores. I suspect there isn’t any one measure worthy of being a bragging point by itself, but we often do it anyway.
In a world where schools are constantly trashed by various industries and tech companies for the purposes of generating a market, education suffers from low self-esteem, so we listen to any critic offering their latest take.
If a person who has an interest in selling you a technology or any product for that matter and tells you schools suck and I can help you, most of us already are listening.
Our mistake as school leaders we use frivolous data to justify our existence, and we allow others who want to use us a market to use frivolous data. Educators need to be much more critical and ask the tough questions of any claims made by tech companies and their boosters.
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