The Best Investment
Remarks on Bill Gates’s Discussion of Education and
Technology in The Road Ahead
Warren Buffett, the richest man in the world, is famous for his investment
savvy. Therefore, a book on investing with Buffett’s name on it is bound
to be a bestseller. The second richest man in the world is, of course,
Buffett’s friend Bill Gates. Gates
doesn’t lend his name to books on investing, but in The Road Ahead he
does offer some investment advice. The chapter on technology in education
in Gates’s book is entitled
Education: the Best Investment
As we enter the twenty-first century, it is clear that education is, indeed,
the best investment that we can make, for an information economy depends
upon a knowledgeable, skilled, educated workforce. As Gates says,
Today, at the end of another century, change is in the air again. People
are wondering whether schools are giving their children the skills they’ll
need to succeed, this time in the Information Age. A new technology revolution
is transforming business and putting new demands on our educational system—even
while the technology itself is providing the means for meeting these demands.
The people who resist change will be confronted by the growing number of
people who see that better ways of learning are available thanks to technology.
. . .
In the U.S., demand for a competitively educated workforce is high. Parents
are insecure about their children’s employment prospects, having read repeatedly
that there will be “two societies” in the future: high-paid knowledge workers
and low-paid service workers. (212-13)
Obviously, education is the best investment that we can make in such a
situation. The better educated our students are, the better we will perform
economically.
Gates makes a strong case for making new technology part of our investment
in education. He cites the example of the Christopher Columbus Middle School
in Union City, New Jersey, where the local telephone company, Bell Atlantic,
conducted an experiment in computerization and networking. The school was
in trouble. Dropout rates were high and test scores were low. Bell Atlantic
funded the installation of networked computers linking students' homes
to classrooms, teachers, administrators, and the Net. Teachers, parents,
students, and administrators were trained to use the computers. Two
years later, “The dropout rate and absenteeism were both almost zero” (233).
Gates tells of a company named Academic Systems, in Palo Alto, whose interactive
Algebra courseware brought about pass rates among college students that
were “20 to 38 percentage
points higher than with traditional methods” (220). He explains that the
fit between computers and education is “just too good to ignore: The PC,
like education, is devoted to information—how to get it, how to organize
it, how to evaluate it, how to use it, how to keep it at hand, how to disseminate
it” (214). And he eloquently describes high-tech scenarios explaining the
myriad ways in which elementary and college students can benefit from working
in networked environments. Because the fit is so good and because the need
is so great, Gates describes himself as optimistic that in time we shall,
indeed, make the necessary investment to provide good technology to our
schools.
What Gates does not address is where that investment is going to come
from. On the contrary, he points out that no good business case exists
for selling hardware to schools:
The
rapid rate at which hardware becomes obsolete isn’t a good fit with the
school purchasing model: Buy once, use forever. When schools buy new PCs,
they often buy behind the price/performance curve to save money—which puts
them in the position of owning obsolete machines that much faster. PCs
are still considered budgetary “extras,” so the cost of providing enough
hardware to really make a difference seems huge, insurmountable. (210)
Preparing
high-quality educational software is expensive, costing hundreds of thousands
or even millions of dollars, and there isn’t, at present, a way for companies
to recoup the cost. Schools’ major funds are allocated for payroll, plant
maintenance, and textbook purchases, not for technology, and the other
market for educational software, the home market, is not large enough and
cannot command high enough prices. People are willing to plop down ten
to fourteen dollars for a copy of Reader Rabbit 1, but not several
hundred dollars for software that will enable their kids to take state-of-the-art
virtual journeys through American history. Development of educational
software for colleges is hampered by the fact that professors prefer to
develop their own courses, structured in their own ways, so that no two
calculus courses or freshman composition classes are alike. The sad fact
is that there is no incentive for developers to invest heavily in new software
tools for education.
So, we are left with a paradox that Gates does not specifically address. Educational
technology is one of our “best investments” for the future, but it is a
lousy investment for individual companies, like Microsoft, looking to reap
immediate rewards from product sales. What can be done about this situation?
What could encourage companies to begin pouring dollars into development
of hardware platforms and software tools specifically tailored to educators’
needs? Small, private initiatives—parents who hold bake sales to raise
money to install Internet hookups—are not enough. Neither is an occasional
philanthropic gesture on the part of a given business in a given community,
like the Bell Atlantic experiment at Christopher Columbus Middle School.
The answer could lie in enormous government investment, but generating
the political will to make such an investment is difficult. Even the very
much pro-education and pro-technology Clinton/Gore Administration hasn’t
managed to pull it off. It is still easy enough to find a hundred million
dollars here and there to fund research into new ways of killing people.
Consider, for example, the billions of dollars being spent to develop teraflop
supercomputers for conducting simulated nuclear tests (a teraflop is a
trillion floating point operations, or flops, per second). In contrast,
finding the money to assist a startup company in developing a classroom
flat-panel wall display with Internet and whiteboard capabilities isn’t
possible. Even if such a product were developed, and one is sorely needed,
schools wouldn’t have a budget line to cover purchasing it. Until a way
is found to cut through this Gordian knot, our schools will lag behind.
And if they lag behind long enough, then all of us will suffer.
Reference
Gates, William, et al. The Road Ahead. New York: Penguin, 1996.
|
