Adequate Funding for Educational Technology

Abstract

Public schools are currently operating in a pressure-cooker of accountability systems in which they must teach students to high standards and meet ever increasing targets for student proficiency, or face increasingly severe sanctions. Into this mix is thrown educational technology and the funding for that technology. The literature espouses the benefits of technology for engaging digital natives and preparing them for the 21st Century workplace. But what about the more important and pressing issue of increasing student achievement? While technology, in and of itself, is unlikely to raise student test scores or play more than a supporting role to key educational components such as class size and quality of teachers, expenditures on technology do play a role in achieving an overall adequate educational system. The purpose of this study was to use a successful schools model to survey site principals and site teachers to seek their professional opinions and answer the following research questions: (1) Overall, does the utilization of educational technology resources support school level efforts to raise student achievement and exit from program improvement? (2) What types, amounts, configurations and uses of educational technology resources support school level efforts to raise student achievement? (3) What additional support, funding, and budgets should be provided to support school level efforts to raise student achievement? (4) Do state technology surveys and state achievement test data indicate a positive correlation between spending money on technology and high student achievement? The successful schools population selected for this study consisted of the 25 California public elementary schools which exited from Year 4 or Year 5 of Program Improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2006 and 2008. To reach these levels of Program Improvement, these schools did not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for at least 5 years as measured on the annual California Standards Test (CST). After writing an Alternate Governance Plan to document how they were going to reorganize how the school was run and the new instructional practices which were going to be implemented to increase student achievement, these 25 successful schools significantly increased student achievement and met federal mandates for Adequate Yearly Progress on the California Standards Test for 2 successive years in order to exit from Program Improvement. The sample for this study consisted of the 11 out of 25 schools that agreed to participate in the study and complete the surveys. The overall findings as related to the four research questions were: (1) The utilization of educational technology resources is indeed supportive of school level efforts to raise student achievement and exit Program Improvement. (2) LCD projectors and document cameras represented the most effective technology hardware resources for increasing student achievement, followed closely by high speed internet connectivity and wireless internet connectivity. In terms of technology software resources, technology proved invaluable in analyzing student achievement data and in supporting data driven decision making (DDDM), and many respondents believed in the efficacy of leveled reading programs and computer based learning programs. (3) Regarding technology support, teachers indicated that staff development and hands-on training in technology was the most important factor in helping to raise student achievement. Less than half of the surveyed principals felt the $250 dollars per student proposed by Odden and Picus was adequate. (4) Results from the California School Technology surveys were mixed, but positive correlations between technology and student achievement were found. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone [phone]. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]