Page 80 - Education in a Digital World

National Policymaking 67

Educational Technology Policymaking in the US
The United States also boasts a long history of educational technology policy
activity. After a series of relatively modest initiatives during the 1980s, the first
concerted educational technology policy efforts coincided with the launch of the
Clinton/Gore administration’s ‘US National Information Infrastructure’ (NII)
initiative during the early 1990s. The broad aim of this initiative was to create a
nationwide information and communications network connecting homes, busi-
nesses and public institutions to the so-called ‘information superhighway’. Although
the Federal government took responsibility for promoting the NII and creating
the market conditions for private providers to flourish, the development and
implementation of the NII was left largely to the private sector. In educational
terms, the promise of an internet connection to every classroom in every school was
a central tenet of the official promotion of this ambitious policy drive. These efforts
were bolstered by the launch in 1996 of the country’s first ‘National Education
Technology Plan’ under the title of ‘Getting America’s students ready for the twenty-
first century’. In order to facilitate these plans, the Federal Government issued a
Technology Literacy Challenge that made available $2 billion of funding to provide
every classroom with internet access and ‘modern multimedia computers’, technology-
related training and support for all teachers and the establishment of a network of
‘effective on-line learning resources’.
This interest in educational technology continued throughout the Clinton
administration. The 1998 E-Rate initiative provided a further $2.25 billion per
annum to the Universal Services Fund, effectively offering means-tested discounts
for schools to purchase internal and external network connections. In practice, the
connection of US schools to the internet varied from state to state with many
business-led voluntary Net-Days taking the place of any centralised approach. A
second National Education Technology Plan was released towards the end of the
Clinton administration with the title of ‘E-learning: putting a world-class education
at the fingertips of all children’. This impetus continued (albeit at more modest
levels) through the George W. Bush administrations between 2001 and 2008, primarily
via the inclusion of a requirement within the ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act that all
students should become technology literate by the end of the eighth grade. The
Bush administration also oversaw the introduction of a third National Education
Technology Plan in 2004 with the exhortative title ‘Toward a new golden age
in American Education – how the internet, the law and today’s students are
revolutionizing expectations’.
The Democrat administration of Barack Obama then oversaw the introduction of
an extensive fourth National Education Technology Plan in 2010 – titled ‘Trans-
forming American education: learning powered by technology’. This outlined five
areas of development: using digital technology to support ‘engaging and empow-
ering learning experiences’; technology-based assessment and data collection;
ensuring ‘teachers’ access to data, content, resources, expertise and learning’; making