Arizona's Schools Get a "C" in Technology

Education Week Magazine has put out their ninth annual report on educational technology evaluating each state's schools and how technology and education policies are evolving to support the use of data to improve student achievement.

The report, Technology Counts 2006 gives Arizona an overall "C". This grade is a compilation of the following grades:

Use of Technology: A-
Capacity to Use Technology: C
Access to Technology: D

Not an inspiring report card, really. It could be worse, though. We could be Nevada, the only state to score a D- overall.

Looking deeper, the A- in "Use of Technology" comes because we can check off three of four criteria: we have technology standards for students, we test students on technology skills (or will, this year) and we have established a virtual school. We fall short of a perfect score because we do not have a computer-based assessment.

The C in Capacity to Use Technology is due to having only two out of eight capacity criteria. We have technology standards for teachers and for administrators. However, we fail to require teachers or administrators to to complete technology coursework, we don't require technology testing for teachers or administrators, and we don't have technology requirements for teacher or administrator recertification.

The low D in "Access to Technology" is primarily due to higher than average number of students per instructional computer (and high-speed internet connections) in the classroom.

Though it isn't clear how it factors into the overall grade, the report notes many areas in which our State Data Systems and Data Access and Analysis Tools could be improved.