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Temple University Center for Research
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Technology in the Mid-Atlantic Region Schools
States, districts, and schools are complex and dynamic organizations faced with the challenge of planning, deploying, and maintaining technology resources to support their diverse activities. These challenges extend from teachers collecting multiple measures of student performance to students storing and analyzing multimedia portfolios, and to administrators and leaders mining data to inform decision-making processes.
Effectively integrating learning technology innovations is not a trivial task. Hardware and software issues must be resolved and teachers and administrators must be able to navigate through the programs to realize the real power of technology. To do this, qualified personnel must be in place and effective professional development opportunities and programs must be available.
A complicating issue is the fact that not all school districts, schools, classrooms, teachers, or students have equal access to the latest and most powerful technologies. The term "the digital divide" has been coined to capture the unequal access to hardware and software and should be extended to include unequal access to professional development opportunities. One outcome of these differences is that students suffer, and differences in achievement result. Addressing and understanding the role of technology is one important factor in turning low-performing schools into high-performing learning communities.
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The five jurisdictions differ in the degree to which technology has been successfully incorporated into their educational efforts (see Table 5). Two important points can be made with respect to the number of students per Internet-connected computer. First, there is wide variation within the mid-Atlantic region on this variable, with students attending high-poverty schools in Washington, DC and Maryland suffering the most. Secondly, in three of the four jurisdictions for which data were reported, students attending high-poverty schools were at a disadvantage in that there are fewer computers available to those students than to students not attending these high-poverty schools.
When the number of students per instructional multimedia computer is considered, in three of the four jurisdictions for which there are data, students attending high-poverty schools are at a disadvantage over students within the same jurisdiction who attend other schools, as well as students in the nation attending high-poverty schools. Washington, DC and Maryland are especially problematical, but for different reasons. Maryland acknowledged its problems in this area two years ago, and established priorities and plans to address its technology problems. The conditions in Washington, DC are characteristic of the very large cities which are plagued with multiple problems and where conditions are the most extreme.
The data on teacher characteristics are not easy to interpret, as there appear to be inconsistencies. Nationally, it has been reported that, in 69% of the schools, at least 50% of the teachers report using a computer on a daily basis for planning and/or teaching. Within the mid-
Atlantic region, the reported percentages are all below the nation. When percentages of teachers using the Internet for instruction are considered, all but one of the jurisdictions for which data are available are below the national figure. Yet, only three of the jurisdictions report percentages below the national figure for the percentage of teachers classified as "beginners." In these three states (Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania), the teacher usage percentages are also low. The figures in Delaware, however, are interesting. In this state, apparently the use of computers on a daily basis is not occurring, despite the facts that there is a high percentage of schools with teachers using the Internet and a very low percentage of teachers being classified as "beginners."
In the three jurisdictions for which there are data, the percentage of school districts offering incentives to teachers for integrating technology into their teaching is higher than the national percentage. Indeed, the figure in Delaware is 30% higher than the national figure. Also, although the absolute numbers are very low in all of the cases, in the jurisdictions for which there are data, two of the states offer one more hour of technology training than is the case for the nation.
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