As seen on TV.(The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved)(Book Review)

Todd Oppenheimer The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved. Random Home, 481 pages, $24.95

Remember the digital divide, the alarm spread by the White House, governors, and advocacy groups in the mid-1990s? The advent of the Internet created fabulous wealth, mingled tech savvy with bobo lifestyles, and sparked visions of antiauthoritarian commerce in an age of instant data and personal empowerment. But it never takes long for anything to acquire a race/class consequence. The downside, President Clinton and others warned: not everyone was connecting. Minority and underprivileged households weren't going online at the rate of white and middleclass households, and, because of the acceleration of skills and knowledge enabled by the Web, black and brown kids in particular were falling further and further behind. What seemed so promising, in fact, aggravated income disparities and social injustice.

The solution was clear: more computers in classrooms, more wiring in schools. Amidst prophecies of how computers would reshape human intelligence and cure education's ills, in the 1990s states spent $70 billion on computer-related programs. In a race for the cutting edge, districts took pride in conspicuous consumption. Union City, California, spent $37 million on computers in 1996 and $5 million more in 2001 for only eleven schools. Oliver High in Pittsburgh created $1,300 workstations outfitted with Dell computers, scanners, and digital cameras. The shortfalls of recent years forced some hard choices, but the fervor didn't subside. I.S. 275 (a middle school in Harlem) earmarked only $4,200 for books in 2002, but $350,000 for computers. Administrators in Mansfield, Massachusetts dropped teaching lines in art, music, and physical education, but saved $333,000 for online access. Kittredge Elementary in Los Angeles dropped its entire music program in 1996 to hire a tech specialist. In the school budget for New York City, computer spending rose from $19.7 million in 1997 to $118 million in 2000. A $406 million deficit in 2001 killed after-school and arts programs, but didn't touch $250 million for technology. (Keep these numbers in mind when districts complain that they have no money to implement No Child Left Behind.)

The Flickering Mind is the journalist Todd Oppenheimer's 450-page survey of what resulted. That sounds like a straightforward issue--What did students learn?--but anyone experienced in the workings of the public school system knows that blank questions and answers quickly dissipate. From the direct evidence of the classroom, one slides into a Gordian machinery of administrators, school boards, state offices, ed. schools, ed. theory, teachers' unions, the textbook business, parent groups, and a rout of entrepreneurs trying to work the system.

Oppenheimer reverses the process. He relates all the hype, money, politicking, and promises of digital learning, interviews tech moguls and gurus, and talks to teachers fired up and disappointed with hi-tech tools. But the key reportage begins with firsthand reports of what he saw and heard at ground level. In hundreds of classrooms, the student reality belied the teacher/administrator/techie claims. Oppenheimer explains, "First I would follow the teacher as he or she perused the class. Then I would walk the room by myself. In virtually every computerized classroom, the differences between what the teacher saw and what I saw on my own were so dramatic that it was sometimes hard to keep from laughing." Under one teacher's eye, students do spread sheets and download articles, but a second pass by Oppenheimer shows them checking out the website of the Dallas Cowboys. Technophiles praise the group interactivity of computer projects, but Oppenheimer observes rooms of twenty heads each sunk in a screen of their own, silent and otherworldly. Advocates insist that computers foster literacy, but one student reveals the actual process. Oppenheimer reports:

 
   Henry told me about the way they're using 
   laptops to do research on the Internet in social 
   studies classes. 'You don't have to read ...