Marc Tucker explores why educational technology has failed to deliver on its promises of raising student achievement. When I began my study of instructional technology in the early 1980s, I was convinced that digital technology could unleash an enormous improvement in learning for very large numbers of school children all over the world. I still think that. But that will not happen unless countries and states make very large investments in their teachers. Not, I might add, to teach them how to use technology. That will get us nowhere. Their lack of knowledge about how to use technology has never been the problem. It is their lack of deep knowledge about the doors that the technology can open that is the problem. Teachers will help young children develop an intuitive feel for the connections among algebraic formulas, abstract geometric forms and the rhythms of everyday life when teachers themselves understand those connections and see them in everyday life and marvel at them for their beauty and elegance. They will teach their students about the ubiquity of dynamic systems and the nature of their control when they themselves not only understand such systems and how they work but understand, too, the crucial role they play in the fabric of the lives we lead. Then they will be thinking like engineers, and that will enable them to help their students think like engineers. What I am describing is a very different kind of education—I am speaking of education, not training—than the kind that teachers ordinarily get. But this sort of change in their education is hardly all that is required. The whole curriculum must be rethought. And the standards to which that curriculum is set. And the way student performance is measured. And the things for which teachers will be held accountable. Only then will teachers be both able and willing to look at a brilliantly conceived piece of software that enables students to play with complex systems as a vital aid and not a distraction.

Graduation rates topped 83 percent in the 2014-15 school year. High school graduation rates inched up for the fourth year in a row, by nearly one percentage point to 83.2 percent in the 2014-15 school year, the Obama administraton announced Monday. And while there are still significant graduation gaps between black, Hispanic, and Native American students and their white and Asian peers, those gaps are slowly closing.Graduation rates have now risen for students overall from 79 percent in the 2010-11 school year—the first year all states used the same method to calculate graduation rates. But over that same period graduation rates for black students rose even faster, by 7.6 percent. And graduation rates for Hispanic students grew by 6.8 percent. What's more, the rates for English-language learners, students in special education, and disadvantaged students also grew faster than for students overall.