Treading New Ground in Teacher and Technology Policy: Implications for Resource Deployment

Abstract

While all industries were forced to transform themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps none were so affected as education. Within days, teachers, schools, and districts departed from instructional models that had been in place for decades and instead were pushed to a new technologically driven pedagogical system. Such a transition required considerable investment in educational technology that was perhaps overdue in the educational sector. The three waves of Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds, which totaled over $100 billion in money to districts, have given school systems millions of dollars that they plan to invest in educational technology (Jordan & DiMarco, 2022; Turner, 2021). Concurrently, attitudes toward technology in education are shifting. In the summer of 2020, 87% of teachers in a survey believed their ability to use educational technology improved in spring 2020, and 58% felt more positive about educational technology than before COVID-19 closures (Bushweller, 2020). While the impact of remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic was not beneficial to student well-being or learning (Engzell et al., 2021; Lewis et al., 2021; Pier et al., 2021), particularly for those already-disadvantaged groups who were less able to transition to a remote and home-based learning environment (UNCESCO, UNICEF, & WORLD Bank, 2021), there remains an opportunity to look forward in how a more technologically developed educational system can continue to evolve. It is also abundantly clear that there is an urgent need to develop and implement innovative policies to promote equitable student learning. The pandemic has amplified social inequalities and widened the achievement gap between white and wealthier students and their less advantaged peers. While learning growth rates were lower during the 2020–21 school year relative to pre-pandemic rates, these relative learning rates were especially low for economically disadvantaged students, English learners, and non-white students (Domina et al., 2022; Domingue et al., 2021; Pier et al., 2021). Funding from the three waves of ESSER holds potential for addressing these disparities and restructuring education to increase equitable educational opportunity as society takes steps back to normality. Educational technology holds promise for helping to close expanding learning gaps, but it also runs the risk of exacerbating systemic inequalities. In an increasingly internetand device-rich environment, survey data continues to show that low-income, rural households, and students who are black, Hispanic, or Native American are less likely to have access to smartphones, computers, broadband, and tablet computers at home (NCES, 2018; US Census Bureau, n.d.; Vogels, 2021). And black and Hispanic students were also more likely than white students to learn remotely at the start of the 2020– 21 school year (Dorn et al., 2020). This association between non-white students, remote instruction, and relatively worse technology may help to explain some of the findings that learning growth was slower for students in remote or hybrid instructional environments than in fully in-person instruction (Domina et al., 2022; Halloran et al., 2021). All devices are not the same. Many low-income families rely exclusively on phones for internet access, which come with data limits and time and technical limitations that hinder student engagement with educational technology (Joan Ganz Cooney Center, 2016). Ensuring broadband access at