The Future Schools of America

            "We cannot cut back on the very investments that will help our economy grow and our nation compete and make sure that these young people succeed.”  These are the words of American President Barack Obama.  This was in regards to the great success enjoyed by the recently established TechBoston school.  The aim of the school is to provide a strong learning environment in the fields of science, math, and technology.  Classes in each of these fields are taken for the full four years there.  Students are also each given their own laptops to help bolster their technology education.

            The school itself is a pilot school in hopes of proving the benefit that a curriculum that heavily involving technology will yield better results.  While the school is still controlled by the district, it enjoys a partnership with many different technology companies including Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, and Google.  This mix of private and public school elements allows it to operate more like a charter school.

            The statistics regarding the success of the school during its first few years are incredible.  The statistics show, “when compared with others in the district: 82 percent of its students graduate, 92 percent of its first graduating class in 2006 went to college, and today, 94 percent of TechBoston graduates are in college - the first in their families to attend college, for 85 percent of them.”  This shows the impact that technology can have on a struggling school district.  These are what would be the same students and yet almost all of them continue on to higher education.  This figure is higher than most schools in district that achieve well academically.

            Unfortunately, I wonder how easy it would be replicate this sort of success story.  In Obama’s own words, he says, “we'll need a national education policy that tries to figure out how do we replicate success stories like TechBoston all across the country."  The question is indeed how do we do that, how do we take what we have learned from the TechBoston school.  While Obama would continue on to his proposal to add 90 million to the education budget for technology research, we haven’t seen much money swung that way until just recently.  According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, “Typically, only about 0.2 percent of K-12 funding goes to research and development (R&D).”  A boost in research funding could continue to yield success stories like this one, but I remain reticent and wait for our government to practice what they currently preach.

        The article, President Obama calls for high-tech education solutions while visiting TechBoston, a Boston secondary school lauded for its high graduation rate illustrates how technology can greatly help the world of modern education.  The article’s writer, Amanda Paulson, clearly feels that this is a great thing for education.  I would mostly agree, but the element of commercialism sort of worries me.  I know that commercialism has been a huge part of American education for a long time, but I wish that I could feel that the private companies investing in schools like this are solely hoping to help students.  That could be regarded as a pessimistic viewpoint, but I feel that it must be said.  Other than that, I whole heartedly appreciate the opportunities that have been given to the students of TechBoston and hope that future schools learn to implement technology in the classroom in a similar way.