The featured article on the front page of the Sunday New York
Times a couple of years ago was entitled “In Classroom of
Future, Stagnant Scores: An Arizona School District Embraces
Technology, to Uncertain Effect.” The premise of the article was
that a particular district that had spent significant sums on
increasing their technology and placed great emphasis on
integrating technology into the classroom, experienced flat test
scores on the state standardized tests. Various educators
weighed in on why this might be so – that teaching technology
has taken away valuable time from math and language arts, that
this is a very high performing district and that their scores
predictably should have had incremental increases at best. Some
saw it as remarkable that the scores stayed flat rather than
declining. The most vocal detractors felt that the enormous
expenditures for technology was premature since there was no
adequate data to support this effort. Advocates argued that the
investment in technology has allowed gr