NCREL Policy Issues
Issue 15, January 2004
Making Educational Technology Work: State Policies in the North Central Region
By Chris Dede, Ed.D.
Introduction
In recent years, resources historically awarded and administered by national government agencies have increasingly passed instead through federal channels to states and localities, where decision makers at those levels have determined how to spend these funds. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 has continued this trend, moving a substantial amount of technology monies from specialized federal programs into block grants to states and even to large cities.
As the responsibility for allocating resources for technology shifts from federal administrators to state and local education agencies, state and local policymakers face greater accountability for making fiscally and educationally sound decisions. North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL), the research and development arm of Learning Point Associates, is committed to assisting state and local education agencies with understanding the many issues related to developing and implementing technology programs. This policy study presents findings from an analysis of the educational technology policies of the seven states in the North Central region: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The analysis was conducted through the lens of the State Policy Framework for Assessing Educational Technology Implementation, developed by the author (Dede, 2002b). This framework delineates a menu of ways in which state policies can enhance educational technology usage to improve student learning and standards-based educational reform.
The policy categories in the framework span the spectrum of potential state policy actions and provide a common template for comparative policy discussions among policymakers. Each category has a set of essential questions that highlight the issues involved in policies of this type. These questions are followed by indicators that depict an evolutionary path for the progression of state policy. These indicators allow for variation among states, depending on individual circumstances and political philosophy. The more indicators satisfied by a state and its local education agencies in their implementation of educational technologies, the more complete and aligned the state's policies are in ensuring effective usage to improve student learning and standards-based reform. For more details, please see Chapter 5, "Enhancing State and Local Policymaking About Educational Technologies" (Dede, 2002a) as well as the actual framework in Appendix A (Dede, 2002b) in the Benton Foundation report Great Expectations: Leveraging America's Investment in Educational Technology.
The framework is intended as a means of self-assessment for state education agency staff and other education decision makers, as well as a comparative mechanism for discerning patterns of policies across states. The State Educational Technology Policy Implementation Rubric was developed to help states use the framework to assess their educational technology policies.
Feedback by state policymakers on the framework and the rubric indicated that although successful practices in other states often offer insights for adapting those policies, each state has its own unique politics, culture, and local implementation challenges. The individual variability among states is so large that decision makers should not use this type of analytic strategy to identify a single "best" model for technology policies. Instead, the framework and rubric are best used as a menu of possible policy actions, a map of interrelationships among policies, and a means of self-assessment—rather than a comparative measure of states' conformance to a single constellation of policy choices.
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