SB89: A Constrained Vision for the Digital Classroom in Georgia

Leave it up to the Georgia General Assembly to take a promising concept, "The Digital Classroom Act," and ruin it with a purely reductive concept of digital learning coupled with a blatant disregard of what Georgia has been achieving with digital resources. The massive unfunded mandate contained in this bill further shows how out of touch our legislators are with the fiscal realities facing our schools.

The legislative approach is that of the middle school child who has discovered the "replace" command in Word. Let's just take out "textbook" and replace it with "digital materials and content"--because what the hey, it's the same thing, right? Replace all, tweak a little, and BAM, we have reshaped instruction in our state for a generation. Except we haven't.  If the intent is to replace textbooks with just electronic forms of textbooks, with linear, packaged materials that "constitute the principal source of study" for a course, then we are missing the pedagogical boat. The digital classroom our students deserve is one in which the teacher can connect students with a broad variety of digital content, selecting for each student the most appropriate resource for each individual's need.

Georgia has been working to that end to establish the Learning Object Repository with thousands of digital resources. Thanks to the hard work of Dr Christina Clayton and the staff of Georgia Virtual School, Georgia developed a massive repository of vetted digital resources. [Their work was accomplished on a shoestring at GaDOE, and it's a damn shame that GaDOE has since lost Dr Clayton's leadership in these endeavors]. Oblivious of this accomplishment, SB89 proposes to create an adoption process with committees of no more than 5 "educators actually engaged in public school work in this state."  And in their spare time, these five individuals are to chart the course for a statewide digital classroom?

Which brings us to "THE UNBELIEVABLY SWEET ALPACAS!"

Let's say a teacher of economics discovers the WetheEconomy series of 20 short films on economics--edgy enough to spark conversation in a high school econ class but founded in economic principles. Do the authors of SB89 intend for a teacher to wait for a resource to be approved by this committee of five educators?  Or that this same teacher be obligated to lobby for 20 or more teachers from 20 or more different school systems to request (in writing) for the resource to be added to the "approved list?"

From Curriki's repository of teacher-created resources to CK12's "roll-your-own" FlexBooks, open educational resources are the future for education. SB89 represents an unimaginative attempt to apply the moribund textbook adoption process to the dynamic explosion of digital resources. That tired and futile approach will fail Georgia's teachers and students.  

The state would be better served if the state hosted a platform on which teachers, students, and community members could recommend resources, tag them to a standard, and then the community of educators could vote resources up and down to collectively discover the best digital resources for our students. The state could build on what it already has in place with its Teacher Resource Link.  It's a rather radical idea, but let's just try trusting teachers this time--allow them to propose materials, to determine what is best for their respective students, and for the state to provide a framework to enable this to happen.

NOW ABOUT THAT UNFUNDED MANDATE

My school system--like most across the state who have endured years of austerity cuts--has made compromises to keep our budgets balanced. Computer hardware purchases were put off, as were network projects. The federal eRate program is promising some serious dollars for wireless networks, but that funding could take five years, with the out years still not yet funded.  On top of that, we are scrambling to build the infrastructure to support a statewide online testing program.

It takes tremendous gall for our legislators, who have provided barely any funds for technology in a decade to REQUIRE local boards of education to provide a device for every student by 2020. The Governor's Office of Student Achievement this past year asked school systems to estimate the cost to provide each student a device.  Let's have the legislature ask GOSA how many hundreds of millions of dollars this statewide mandate would impose on school systems.

I have seen schools that are making great strides toward implementing one-to-one device plans with their students, but those systems are, for now, the exception. Each system should be encouraged to develop a plan for meaningful integration of technology in a manner that best meets the needs of its students on a timetable that is determined by local boards of education--not by legislators.

Senators Albers, Beach, Hufstetler, Black, and Williams should explain this gem too: "All digital

instructional materials and content and any computer hardware, software, and technical equipment necessary to support such digital materials and content purchased by local units of administration with state Quality Basic Education Program funds or any other means of acquisition shall may remain the property of the local unit purchasing or acquiring them." Why strike "shall" and replace with "may"? At least we knew a local system could keep the textbooks it bought.  What is the implication here for devices purchased with state or even local funds?

To say that SB89 is a good faith effort would be to discredit the word "effort." This is an ill-informed, unimaginative proposal that would serve our students poorly and which imposes an enormous unfunded mandate upon local systems who are still struggling fiscally. These senators should venture out into the schools to see how innovative teachers use digital resources on a daily basis, and then they will realize that we need more than a textbook cliché to move forward in our state.