Argumentative Writing Performance Task Number Two: Technology in America

Argumentative Writing Performance Task Number Two: Technology in America

The Task:

Thus far in United States History/Civics, we have examined how the United States developed from a small collection of states in the early 1780’s to an industrialized nation that gradually became a global economic power by the early 20th century. Contemporary historians often marvelabout the role that technology played in this process. This revisionism reflects the essential role of technology in helping to shape the lives of modern Americans. The state assembly willbe meeting to decide whether or not to increase investment in technology in Connecticut’s schools. This change in statewide technology investment would also include the increase in online classes for high school students and the purchasing of a tablet computer for every middle school student in the state. This effort would also increase the number of cameras in schools, along with the creation of a statewide system to track students during their time in school. The state board of education wants students to participate in the process and contribute their perspectives. As part of your initial research, you have found the following sources about technology in America’s past and present.

After you have reviewed these sources, you will answer some questions about them. Briefly scan the sources and the questions that follow. Then, go back and read the sources carefully so you will have information you will need to answer the questions and finalize your research.

In PART TWO, you will write an argumentative essay on the topic of technology using the information in the sources to use as evidence.

PART ONE: The Sources

You will now examine several sources. You can re-examine any of the sources as often as you would like. After looking at the sources, use the rest of the time in PART ONE to answer the questions about them. Your answers to these questions will be scored. Also, your answers will help you think about the information you have read and looked at, which should help you write your argumentative essay. Feel free to highlight the sources or take any notes down that you want.

Sources for PART ONE of the Performance Task:

Source One:

How Do We Fund Our Schools?

By Judy Woodruff (PBS)

“Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty,”
- President Lyndon Johnson, 1965

It’s a little known fact that when it comes to the funding of our schools, the U.S. Government contributes about 10 cents to every dollar spent on K-12 education – less than the majority of countries in the world. And it wasn’t until 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as part of his War on Poverty, that the federal government created a lasting program to fund K-12 education.

So where does the bulk of the money for our 14,000 public elementary and secondary school districts schools come from? State and local governments. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, state and local funding accounts for approximately 93 percent of education expenditures.

What’s the source of these funds? In most states, it’s sales and income taxes (both corporate and personal). But on a local level, these funds usually come from property taxes, which are set by the school board, local officials or citizens. It’s this system that causes the most dramatic differences between states, and even within districts.

Depending on the property wealth of a community, its schools might boast gleaming buildings and equipment, or they might be dilapidated – struggling with the burden of outdated equipment and unpaid bills.

According to the most recentFunding Gapreport by the non-profit group The Education Trust, many states still provide the least amount of funding to school districts serving students with the greatest needs.

In 1999, for example, Illinois’ funding gap was the second-largest in the nation. By 2005, the Illinois gap was still the second-largest, and had gotten worse. Illinois is joined by Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin at the top of the list of states in which the funding gap between high- and low-poverty districts grew between 1999 and 2005.

Jonathan Kozol, the education activist, teacher and author, famously described these “gaps” in his 1992 book, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. That same year, he told an interviewer: “We need to have urban schools that are so good that they will not be abandoned by white people, and this is impossible without equitable funding. Until we have equitable funding for our urban schools, there’s no chance in the world that white people in large numbers are going to return.”

These inequities have led to court challenges in almost every state. And in the majority of them, the court has ordered the states to overhaul their system to fund public schools more equally. These challenges began in the 1970’s, with a landmark case in California –Serrano v Priest(1971). In that case, the state’s high court ruled that a child’s access to public education cannot be based on the wealth of his or her parents.

Source Two:

Technology in Public Schools

By Grace Chen at publicschoolreview.com

In recent years, the technology investment in public schools, ranging from K-12 institutions, has grown astronomically. According to Equity Review research, in 1998 alone, “the level of spending on educational technology at the national level was estimated at over $5 billion,” and it has grown each year in the last decade.

While each school’s budget is diverse and unique, programs have been implemented to balance the rising costs of technology and education, aiming to provide all students with equitable access to a learning environment with modern and interactive equipment.

Federal Funding in Public Schools

According to the “Resource Guide to Federal Funding for Technology in Public Schools,” a five year, $2 billion dollar grant was established in 1998 to provide support at both the state and local level for meeting national technology goals. National goals for all public schools include: “modern computers, high quality educational software, trained teachers, and affordable connections to the Internet.”

To further support the successful fruition of this goal, the “Technology Literacy Challenge Fund” was launched in 1997, with over $200 million dollars in funding—this later doubled to $425 million by 1998. The millions of dollars in funds were dispersed to all fifty states, where local communities and public schools were to collaborate to integrate technology into teaching and learning.

The National Education Association (NEA) and Tech Support

As NEA supports, “every student needs the ability to navigate through the 24/7 information flow that today connects the global community. For students to thrive in a world enabled by information technology, we must give them the skills to make sense of and use the information that engulfs them. They need to know how to learn new skills as quickly as technology creates new challenges.”

In order to provide students with access to the constantly evolving technologies, NEA is working to support the implementation of devices such as “laptops and pocket PCs, digital cameras and microscopes, Web-based video equipment, graphing calculators, and even weather-tracking devices.” By integrating these tools, NEA hopes to foster the opportunity for students to “become responsible and savvy users and purveyors of information. They need to need how to collaborate successfully across miles and cultures.”

Laptop Programs

While funding is not realistically available to provide every student in public schools with a laptop, experimental programs have provided various schools across the country with access to “laptop programs,” where whole classes are provided with laptops so that teachers can experiment with the implementation of technology into their lessons and activities.

According to the Boston News, Maine is the first state in the nation to promote a state-wide technology plan that has provided every middle school student with a laptop—and they’re seeing incredibly academic results, especially in students’ writing. The program, which was designed to eliminate the “digital divide” between wealthy and poor students, has distributed more than 30,000 computers to each seventh and eighth grade student in public schools in 2002 and 2003.

With the rising access to this technology, schools found that “despite creating a language all their own using e-mail and text messages, students are still learning standard English and their writing scores have improved on a standardized test since laptop computers were distributed.”

Other studies support that eighth graders’ standardized test scores, after the implementation of the laptops in Maine, actually improved. As one teacher explains, “Laptops make it easier for students to edit their copy and make changes without getting writer's cramp […] (and) those skills translated when the test was taken with pen and paper.” Ultimately, Maine Education Assessment scores show marked improvement, when only 29 percent of students were ranked as “proficient in writing,” while over 49 percent of eighth-graders soared to proficiency in 2005.

How to Promote a Laptop Program at Your Local School

While funding for schools’ technological opportunities, like the laptop program, is nationally, state, and locally driven, parents can be involved in the decision making process by attending the public school board meetings, creating petitions for technology funds with community support, and by meeting with individual teachers to communicate potential plans for change.

While this particular avenue for change is often long and tedious, one public school’s parents took the initiative for providing laptops into their own hands—and pockets. According to the Digital Chalkie, one anonymous public school, with a population of only 120 students, had a group of parents who worked to provide students from grades 4-7 with laptops; to achieve this, parents collaborated with Apple to work on leases, financing options, and discounts for members of the community.

The parents, however, did not discount families who may be facing financial hardship; in this case, approximately 20% of families were provided with a laptop for student use during school hours only, allowing every child to have access to a computer, without creating any form of financial or class divides. Ultimately, while parents had to collaborate with school leaders to implement this plan, one parent explains how the “staff, parents, kids and Principal understand and support what we are trying to do”—even though this particular school is not considered to be wealthy, and does not have excessive funding allowances.

Incorporating laptops and technology into the classroom can significantly improve the entire school’s reading and writing levels – not to mention their technical savvy. By working with your child’s school, or taking matters into your own hands, you can ensure that your children are getting the exposure to computers they deserve

Source Three: Political Cartoons

Source Four:

Technology and Culture in the United States Today:

A Brief Essay by Chris Wanamaker

Humans andtechnologyhave existed along side of each other since the beginning. Technology is anything that is manmade that’s purpose is to solve some problem or make something easier. From the earliest stone tools, clubs, and arrow heads to the fastest and most complex computers and particle accelerators, technology has allowed us to prevail as the dominant species on the earth. Man has been given the intellect to design, build, and construct these devices, which improve the overall quality of life, and expand the knowledge base for the whole of humanity.

Technology has played a huge role in human culture. It has become a very integral part of our lives; many people could not do without it. The modern conveniencesand the power and freedom that technology provides us has changed the way we think, act, and socialize. Technology enables the disabled, empowers the powerless, and educates the uneducated.

In today’s world, the younger generation is growing up with the Internet and computers. This has a significant impact on their culture. The impacts can already be seen. No teen is without a cell phone, instant messaging, or social networking. This enables them to have instant anytime communication with all of their friends. The generations of old did not have that option. Kids today also have thepower of the Internetat their fingertips. Just about any information can be found within minutes, sometimes seconds, with the Internet. This enables them to learn at their own pace, perform research on topics, and keep informed about world events from a wide range of perspectives.

But no piece of technology comes without consequence. There are two sides to every coin. Modern convenience has been a key player in the obesity of America. Computers, Television, and other forms of technological entertainment have leadAmericansto seek an ever more sedentary lifestyle. There are many people today that are addicted to computer and video games. These individuals play the games for as long as is physically possible and may never leave the house. The relationship that modern people have with the outdoors is also crumbling. Research suggests that a good number of people don’t venture outside of manmade structures for recreation anymore. This has lead to disconnect and sometimes even disgust with nature and the natural world.

Even so, a world without technology would be a primitive and possibly a sad one. Humans could not possibly sustain the current population levels without technology, nor could we maintain any sort of economy. On the other hand, the future looks to be an interesting one. New technologies emerge everyday that may somehow improve our quality of life. New developments in cognitive science, nano-technology, and virtual reality may one day allow us to transcend what it means to be human today. One day people may become immortal or live their lives completely in a virtual world. The possibilities that humans may have in the future are unknown, but technology will always be with us, and it's not going away.

Source Five:

High-tech school monitoring: safety vs. privacy

ByStateline.org, adapted by Newsela staff

WASHINGTON — Does your school know exactly where you are? In class?On the bus? Paying for lunch in the cafeteria?

Principals in thousands of the nation’s schools know the answer. They get the information from radio chips embedded in student ID cards or biometric scanners that identify a student’s fingerprint, the iris of an eye or a vein in a palm.

Schools use them to take attendance, alert parents where their children get off the school bus or speed up lunch lines.

But those tools, which are supposed to make schools safer and more efficient, have become controversial. Several states are now banning or restricting their use in schools, as worries increase over student privacy and computer security.

Some States Begin To Push Back

This year, Florida became the first state to ban the use of biometric identification in its schools. Kansas said the information cannot be collected without student or parental consent. New Hampshire, Colorado and North Carolina said their state education departments cannot collect and store biometric data in student records.

New Hampshire and Missouri lawmakers said schools cannot require students to use ID cards equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. RFID technology tracks students by means of badges or tags with embedded computer chips. The chips either broadcast a radio signal or are read when students go near a radio-frequency reader. These tags also are used by government and businesses for security and to track packages.

The laws reflect a growing worry among parents and lawmakers about the new technology. They are questioning how it’s being used, what student data is being collected and stored, and how the information is protected.

Fast-Moving Technology

In all, 36 states considered 110 possible laws this year on the collection and security of student data, according to Data Quality Campaign, a group in favor of using data to improve student achievement. At least 39 of the proposed laws dealt with biometric data, and 14 of them passed.

“Technology is moving so fast,” said Paige Kowalski, who works forData Quality Campaign. “I think that’s why you’re seeing these new laws. I think people are nervous about it. It’s new. It’s different from when we were kids.”