With all due respect, your opening sentence referenced my name as if I opposed your point of view. I fail to see that we oppose one another. If your strange reaction to my comments was not due to an interpretation, perhaps it was just because of a distortion or a misreading.

My comments were not an interpretation but rather point out that Dr. Paige's actions as Superintendent appeared almost wholly irrelevant to the Administration's stated objectives.

I do not understand James Adams' interpretations of my comments about Paige -- that he treated students like so many rats in Skinner Boxes -- or my comments about science and mathematics education -- in which I pointed out that Paige/educational establishment were using identical vocabulary with technologically sophisticated audience to talk about different things (This is the meaning of "talking past one another"). Perhaps my literary allusions (which were all derogatory towards Bush educational objectives, and compared them with Soviet bureaucrats under Stalin) were too abstruse. I promise to use simpler vocabulary in the future, and will avoid the assumption that my audience is well read.

With respect to Burrows' comment about Dr. Paige, my own observations differ. My wife was an experienced teacher in HISD during Paige's tenure as Superintendent in Houston. He was paid over $250,000 per year during a time when teacher salaries in Houston were well below state and national averages and HISD funding for classroom related activities was quite poor. Fraud and corruption within the HISD administration continued unabated under Paige, including fraudulent reporting of standardized testing scores. Indeed, to many in Houston, it seemed that Paige was primarily interested in self-promotion and was a rather ineffectual Superintendent. Paige spent large sums on personal junkets, gave many speeches, but did little to turn around a typically flawed large inner city public school system. Kind of reminds one of Carly Fiorina's stint at HP.

One key problem with American public education is that it is top heavy with overpaid administrators who attempt to micromanage the curriculum while indulging in wild intellectual fads to justify their salaries and benefits. "It doesn't matter if the students understand the material, you must cover the curriculum."

A second problem is simply that public education was intended to produce a literate electorate, not serve as free vocational training for a corporate workforce nor as a preparatory program for academia. Contemporary public education is trying to be all things to all people, a clearly unsustainable goal. Add social engineering to the mix with antidrug, "pro-family-values," abstinence, creation-vs-evolution, and every other flavor du jour of political correctness and you have a system whose very topology defines failure.

Yes it is sad. When my son was in the NYC Public School system teachers told me they weren't allowed to communicate with parents via email.

Now in parochial school the story is the same. They won't or they can't. "Computer Teachers" teach kids how to use application programs and when I inquired when they would be teaching basics like input, output, storage, and how a computer works I got a blank stare.

I've volunteered my services and money to put together a useful school website only to be rebuffed. Administrators are smitten with their brochure-ware sites.

Science education is an afterthought. As an IT professional with school-age kids I am terribly frustrated.

I think you are right to ask a lot from our schools, but imparting a sense of scientific inquiry or of technical fluency is not what our schools are about -- even if politicians of both parties claim that is what they want "for the jobs of the future." For the past thirty years, we have been teaching science and mathematics as if it were something to be memorized, mastered, and tested; not experienced, played with, and proved. We have reached the point in science and mathematics education where the equivalent of "Mr. Wizard" is the Discovery Channel -- as if the world were playing reruns of Ernst Mach, as parodied by Solzhenitzyn in "First Circle": how do you view science to yourself? do you say to yourself, "O magic steed, build me a castle by morning and it is done?"

Until we can change the model of science and mathematics education from one of rote memory and drill, to one of excitement and experiment, Rod Paige will be talking past you forever. The only thing this guy believes in is measurable performance, and his only model of achieving it is rats and levers.

"...ask a teacher to explain what an application server is..."
Ask many a programmer to do so.

Politicians like to throw money at problems. Programmers like to throw technology at them.

Sorry geeks... technology is not the answer to the most fundamental problems our schools face today. Many countries have lower tech and turn out great results. Ask any of your Indian programmer just how much technology they had in their schools. If the answer ("nearly zilch") shocks you, you're a confirmed geek.

You expect teachers to be up on the tech flavor-of-the month (XML, application servers, IT, whatever)!? This is just silly. Technology is a means to an end. It is important that teachers (or anyone for that matter) know how to *use* the technology. There is some value in teaching how to use technology (but nothing too specific - no "how to use MS Office 97" lessons, please).

My view is very similar to that of Andrew Wolfe and John Broglio.

Wasting time teaching teachers useless detail about technology is not going to improve education. Remember that
computer technology changes radically in the time between early school years and graduation. By the argument presented in the article, my teachers have learned and taught about key-punching and batch jobs -- a very silly notion.

I'm a graduate student in geographic information systems. Because my field is, by its nature, technical, I have to learn and use technology (geography, geodesy, cartography, remote sensing, mathematics and statistics, database design, GUI design, application development, usability engineering and testing, etc, etc, etc). But, the users of my deliverables don't need to know all that stuff. They just need to know how to use it ... not make it. So, what teachers are you talking about? English teachers? Social studies teachers? Chemistry teachers? Biology teachers? Math teachers? Come on ... they are *users* of IT, not teachers of it. Walker, Wolfe, Broglio, and Adams got it right. The rest of you, Phd's and all, got it wrong. Knowledge of technology is not the same thing as the technology of knowledge.

If the Sec of Ed spent as much time working to get technology and (teacher) training of that technology into the classrooms as he does filling up the atmosphere with hot air (Do not we have enough Global warming already?) then this would be a moot discussion. This problem will only be resolved by serious and intelligent people facilititing serious and unconventionial action. Unfortunately imcompetent leaders beget incompetent employees. And we have four more years of the present occupant of the White House.

I agree with John Broglio's comments about the value of Google in education (learning independent research tools). Too much of modern education is about ephemeral buzzware and implementation details (how many WebSphere developers know the x86 ISA or the VHDL code necessary to tape out a CPU wafer?). It would be more valuable if teaching returned to fundamental principles like basic math, science, writing/oral expression and independent research. A student (or app developer) who understands from first principles can grow and adapt, not have to be retrained from scratch on every new software version or task.

From the IT perspective, instead of XML and n-tier architectures, it would be more useful for high school teachers to explain to students how to manage and understand the impacts of business process virtualization on their lives and society at large. XML will give way to something else, but virtualization is here to stay and is vastly more important to career planning.

Jim Adams

I second Andrew Wolfe's comment. Based on what I see in schools, Paige is hyping vapor-ed (shades of John Poindexter gushing about abandoned 1970's AI technology). Kids are getting better at video games, but as my daughter's bumper sticker says (about anime) "crack is cheaper", only somewhat more addictive and about as intellectually beneficial.

U.S. education is still pretty much in the toilet, because of crappily-written textbooks that teach kids lousy writing style, flavor-of-the-day "feel-good" math programs, history that just ain't so, etc., all the work of political and administrative manipulation, federally mandated increased services with perenially reduced funding and, alas, parents that think their child was born with infinite wisdom that just has to be "nurtured", by which they mean coddled.

Martin misses the point about IT in education. I don't really care if a teacher knows diddly about current IT buzzware. The most useful IT tool for education is still Google -- it is the catalog of catalogs for the biggest library ever. I would build teacher IT training around Google with two fundamental lessons to be learned: 1) much of what you read read is false, but you can usually check it, 2) how to find whether your student cribbed his homework. Teachers who learn more about IT than that tend to give up teaching, because IT is much less stressful and more lucrative and respected.

Magical thinking is the belief that teachers are somehow going to overcome genetic endowment or solve societal problems created by unbridled greed, parental over-indulgence, too much stimulation with too little challenge and the illusion that learning should be sweat-free. It's like asking your mechanic to turn your rusted out '85 Escort into a new BMW (without spending 40 thousand dollars).

Happily, the Einsteins teach themselves -- they just need decent books and a good university handy when they are ready for it. At that point only 5-10 people in the world will understand what young Einstein is talking about anyway...

Just imagine what could happen if teachers could explain the basics of string theory and black holes.

Maybe just maybe they could inspire an other Einstein or Newton.

Being teachers are not albe to explain Application servers and XML that leads to the concept of magic thinking.

Understanding the operation of a cars catalytic converters is also important. Auto emmisions are one of the 3 leading causes of death in the world. I think that is important too being we live in a world domiated by the interal combustion engine that people learn at a early age that what comes out of them has a very good chance of being what end kills them.

Arvind's comments are right on target. The author must be extrapolating that what's the case for richly funded suburban school districts is also true for the many scandalously under-funded inner-city urban school districts (where the prospect of simply having an adequate number of up-to-date pc's [or library books or competent teachers] is rarely more than a distant dream).

So let me get this straight -- Martin's journal article essentially swipes Schmeider's title, and then Schmeider's is the first comment to laud it? The word "disgruntled" comes to mind. (So does "ventriloquist.")

Neither of them manifests any clue about the real use of technology in learning. If these teachers should be understanding XML, application servers, and grid computing, they also need to understand the operation of their cars' catalytic converters -- because they drive to school! Or to take an older example from education, the teachers of my youth were wrong to use filmstrips without understanding photosensitive emulsions in color film.

Hello??

The idea is to USE technology to teach OTHER subjects!

Now Mr. Holme's point about not being able to use attachments in e-mail is germane. E-mail is a fundamental tool. Neither Martin nor Schmeider picked up on this -- which is a REAL technology problem. And again, the teacher shouldn't need to know about mime types and text encoding of binary attachments, just use them!

What a waste of space.