No Child Left Untableted Blog Post

No Child Left Untableted Blog Post

            In “No Child Left Untableted”, a piece written for the New York Times,Carlo Rotella works to accurately describe both sides of the argument for and against spending tax money to buy privately funded tablets for public school students. The piece’s springboard is the testing of these tablets in Guilford County, NC –who, within a month of the piece’s release, sent back almost all of the tablets, cancelling the program, as they simply broke to easily –where different teachers were having different reactions to the technology. In Guilford County, the consensus seemed to be that the tablet was a fine device, but only when in the right hands, an idea that Rotella more or less sticks to, while qualifying the statement pretty deeply.

            Rotella uses the piece to mount the pros and the cons of using these technologies, with a fairly heavy bent toward the con end. Using personal interviews with supporters of this technology (from Arne Duncan to the VP of the company that makes the tablet), he presents the biggest argument in support of the technology as being the possibility of “tailor[ing] the curriculum”, providing students with a level of differentiation in topics that plays to their individual strengths. This topic of individualization is one that has been touched upon before in our readings, notably in the Van Dijk piece, although not necessarily in an educational context. Here, Van Dijk’s worries of cutting oneself off too much others through this specific tailoring is one that Rotella does not necessarily cover explicitly, but he hints at it strongly. Although Rotella argues and relays these points well, he is often unable to hide his obvious disdain for some of the concepts discussed, using terms like “cool new gadgets” to describe the tablets, and “well intentioned” as the maximum credit to those who create them (the latter being a slightly more coded attack). To Rotella’s credit, he’s open about his bias early on, so moments like his small jibes regarding Joel Klein’s personality, and the tablets efforts, at least have a context.

            Using more varied personal interviews with researchers and educators, he explains that although a curriculum could be better specified to its students through these tablets, they depend completely on the teacher using them, which he believes is being ignored by those pushing the program. He believes that the introduction of the tablet is based on the fallacy that every teacher both wants and is able to use a tablet, and that as all the money is going towards these devices, no money can be given towards getting teachers who can actually implement these devices. He believes it’s a two-step process, and we’re skipping the first step.

A professor at Boston University, and the writer of multiple books about education, this is a subject that is obviously vital to Rotella, and that comes through in his subtly polemic rhetoric. This is bolstered by the more conversational, information based, tone that is more possible in a widely read newspaper like The New York Times, than it may be in an academic setting. In fact, in many ways the piece recalls previous NYT reading “Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014”, by Isaac Asimov. Both pieces make similar points about the isolation that technology brings, however, even more interesting is how both seem to be writing as if the next great age is right before it. Asimov and Rotella both recognize they can only theorize about what can happen next, and that they write in a period of flux (although Rotella is at least able to support his theories with some previous research).