On March 2, 2011, Arne Duncan joined a group of moderate Democratic Senators at Walker Jones Education Campus in Washington, D.C., to tour the K-8 school and call for education reform through the re-authorization of ESEA, Title I. One of the visitors, Senator Michael Bennet (D. Colorado), former Superintendent of Schools in Denver, Colorado, said, “We know the results of doing nothing, and they are catastrophic. The time for bold action is now.”

The re-authorization of ESEA, Title I (also known as No Child Left Behind or NCLB), established in 1965, has been pending since 2007 and represents more than $11 billion to $15 billion in federal funding to schools, the second largest amount next to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Free and Reduced-Price Lunch Program. The federal program provides funding based on the percentage of low-income children in school districts and pays special attention to struggling students.

• 25% of kids drop out of high school.
• Students from low-income households are most likely to drop out.
• Dropouts are more likely to go to prison than to college.

Many of us read about the plethora of education research studies. But one recent report may cause legislators who are looking at the re-authorization of ESEA/NCLB to say, “Here’s something that can make a difference.”

The Project RED Team has released its latest report, The Technology Factor: Nine Keys to Learning Achievement and Cost-Effectiveness. At the top of its findings is that students in intervention classes—special education, remedial reading, Title I, and English Language Learners—with technology integration do better on almost every measure of education success.

• 29.4% of the reduction in dropout rates
• 8.0% of the improvement in test scores
• 25.7% of the improvement in graduation rates
• 24.8% of the reduction in disciplinary actions

Let’s look a little more deeply at just what the predictive modeling of the Project RED Research Team tells us.

The team asked respondents, primarily principals in public schools, to report frequency (daily, weekly, etc.) of use of technology in a variety of classes, including math, science, English, and social studies as well as in intervention classes (special education, remedial reading, Title I classes, and English Language Learners). Separately, they asked these principals what education success measures (ESMs) had improved through the use of technology. These measures included four areas that could be measured objectively and are most often recorded by schools:

1. Dropout rates
2. High-stakes test scores
3. Graduation rates
4. Disciplinary actions

Through predictive modeling techniques (including data reduction and neural networking), the Project RED team isolated those uses of technology that best predicted education success in these four areas. In the case of dropout rates, here are the data:

As you can see, the factors improving dropout rates are both personal and technical:

1. Having technology integrated into intervention classes is the first factor.
   
   Technology is not the cure to all things education, but one thing we all know: time on task is a critical way for students, especially struggling ones, to learn. They must be spending time on the right task, however, not just “what everyone else does.” John Bailey, the then head of technology at the U.S. Department of Education, said eight years ago, “What a computer can do better than anything else is personalize instruction.” Personalization of instruction is far more than the rote “drill and kill” worksheets of the past. Through good technology, the learner gets immediate feedback and the ability to adjust the difficulty level to match his current learning level.
   
   
2. The second factor is the principal actually leading professional development, including change management and collaborative learning.
   
   We all know that instructional leadership at both the district and school levels is a critical factor as is the quality of teachers. This finding suggests that principals who focus on collaborative learning and change management in their schools drive real results.
   
   
3. The third factor is technology integrated frequently into core classes, such as math, science, English, and social studies.
   
   The research found this to be surprisingly infrequent; even in schools with computing devices for every student, as many as 43% of the principals reported that math classes didn’t use technology every day.
   
   
   
4. The fourth factor, the use of virtual field trips, may seem surprisingly trivial, but educators recognize that this is a proxy for student engagement, which is the way to keep students in school.
   
   
5. A good student-computer ratio clearly allows the frequency of use that is needed to improve skills.
   
   
6. Principal training in best practices and technology-transformed classrooms exemplifies the importance of leadership being trained in new ways of thinking that are research-based.

A software program can figure out where a student is deficient and work on those skills. The program can also provide the teacher with student progress reports to help adjust instruction. How engaging the program is and how well it works is up to talented instructional designers who strive for product efficacy. That’s the job of industry.

The job of Congress is to tinker with ESEA, Title I, to incorporate known best practices along with other modifications. One best practice highlighted by this report is to incorporate technology into the daily practice of education, especially for struggling students.

This non-debate is over. Technology helps personalize instruction so that kids can figure out what they don’t know and what they need to learn. As a 4th grader in Mooresville Graded School District in Mooresville, North Carolina, said when pointed to his test scores on a continuum of improvement, “I’m here now and I want to be there.” If our students know where they are and where they can go, what a Dr. Seuss moment to be off to great places with “brains in your head and feet in your shoes.”

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The Project RED Report may be ordered at www.schooldata.com/reports. For more information, go to www.projectred.org. The Project RED Team is also known to many of you as Tom Greaves of The Greaves Group, Jeanne Hayes of The Hayes Connection, and Leslie Wilson and Mike Gielniak of the One-to-One Institute.

Jeanne Hayes is Co-Author, Project RED and President, The Hayes Connection, Inc. She has 25 years of experience in tracking the ed tech market—first, in her role as Founder and CEO of Quality Education Data and second, in her current role as a consultant to publishers and producers of ed tech products and services.