Making school worse, faster

This post appeared in a series titled: The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Global Teacher Blogs that answered the question: What are the biggest mistakes teachers make when integrating technology into the classroom.

“Before the computer could change school, school changed the computer.”

-Seymour Papert

I love technology, and I use it every single day. I teach with it, and I learn with it. Without technology, my teaching and learning would suffer.

However, too much of what is being sold as “Education Technology” merely shoehorns technology in a way that supplements traditional, less-than-optimal teaching and learning practices which ultimately leads the classroom to revert to the way it was before.

Here are three mistakes schools and teachers make when integrating technology:

1. Technology is used to prove, instead of improve: Test and punish accountability regimes have convinced (and often mandated) that technology be used to mine students for spreadsheet friendly data. For too long, teachers have been lured by the efficiency of multiple-choice tests, and with the use of technology, it is easier than ever to reduce learning to tests and grades.

Psychologist Carol Dweck reminds us to ask, “Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?” Proving and improving are not the same thing and if we aren’t careful, technology can be used in wonderful ways to prove the quality of our schools and teachers without improving learning.

2. Technology is used by the teacher, not the students: Interactive White Boards (Smartboards) are the definitive example of how schools can spend a lot of time, effort and money on technology that is almost exclusively used by the teacher while students sit passively, waiting to be filled with knowledge.

In his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire called this the banking concept of education where, “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor”. Too much of our school’s technology demands that students simply sit and do nothing.

3. Poor Pedagogy + Technology = Accelerated Malpractice: Classroom management and tracking programs like ClassDojo are used to elicit compliant behaviour and are sold as a daring departure from the status quo when really they are a tactic taken from the same behaviourist strategies that have been strangling the life out of classrooms for decades.

Schools and teachers who ignore technology risk becoming irrelevant to their students, and this is unacceptable. However, it is equally wrong to use technology as a 21st century veneer on the “sit-and-get, spew-and-forget” model of learning that has dominated our schools for too long.

Teachers and schools must be mindful of their pedagogical practices, because if they are not, technology will only make things worse, faster.

Beautiful Evidence of Learning

Here are my favourite parts from this 5 minute video.

• Evidence of student learning may not be the same as evidence of great public education.
• Standardized testing does not measure the ability to think creatively or deeply.
• In the industrial model, teachers are given scripts, they are given frameworks so it doesn't matter who is teaching this class or who is sitting in those chairs. You make the teaching teacher-proof -- you make the learning student proof and pretty soon you don't have any proof of anyone learning anything.
• Children can not be standardized.
• Standardized testing reminds us of the old x-ray shoe fitting machines. X-rays show us the bones of the foot but not the soft-tissue that actually matters. It turns out that the best evidence you need is to ask someone, "How does the shoe feel?"
• Learning should be framed around projects, problems and questions.
• We need to educate teachers very well and then trust them to do the complex work that is real learning and good teaching.
• Children need to be encouraged and inspired to be change agents in their own lives.

Can computers replace teachers?

Let me be clear: I love technology, and I use it everyday single day. I teach with it and I learn with it. Without technology, my teaching and my learning would suffer.

Let me be clear: Too much of what this video purports can and is being done in a way that is destroying public education.

Even though I am a staunch supporter of Public Education, I am very aware of the problems that plague traditional schooling. I believe that school needs to look a lot less like school. Like Sir Ken Robinson, I too am a supporter of a learning revolution where the goal is public schools that provide students with an opportunity to pursue their passions while nurturing competency, creativity and critical thinking.

However, there is more than one revolution afoot.

The promise of technology and personalization is being co-opted by the perils of profiteers and privatization where one goal is "an education revolution in which public schools outsource to private vendors such critical tasks as teaching math, educating disabled students, even writing report cards." Another, more ominous goal is to use technology to cut costs by replacing teachers.
The first half of the video focuses on K-12. Here are my thoughts:

• Do we really want someone who prefers computers over humans to influence our education system?

• Too often technology is being sold as personalized learning when really it's nothing more than digitized standardized learning. 

• Authentic personalized learning occurs when the teacher and student have a relationship that leads to them interacting in meaningful ways where the learner plays an active role in constructing their own understanding. 

• Too many uses of technology doubles down on the assumption that the learner is a passive receptacle that knowledge must be dumped into.

• Substituting paper flash cards for a Flash Cards App is not progress. It's kind of like replacing the chalkboard with an Interactive Whiteboard. To argue in favor of such a move is to reveal a primitive understanding for how children learn.

• School and work have two very different purposes. At work, the product is the point. In school, the process is the point. When we lose focus of our purpose, our practices and policies are likely to become misguided and rigidity is likely to set in.

• Using KIPP as an example of innovation and success is problematic. KIPP notoriously suffers from large attrition rates amongst their staff and students. They also subscribe to a pedagogy of poverty which can be accelerated with technology.

• There are many impressive reasons for using technology in schools, and increasing class sizes is not one of them.

• In the future, poor children will get a computer while affluent children will get a computer and a teacher. See the problem?

• Too often when people talk about technology collecting data, they mean nothing more than test scores. Reducing something as magnificently messy as real learning to a number always conceals far more than it reveals.

• It's true that there are bad teachers, but this is true of all professions. There are bad doctors, lawyers, accountants and education pundits, but you don't make people better by plaguing a profession with fear and punishment. The solution to bad teachers is to talk about how we make more good teachers. Little good will come from talking about replacing teachers with computers.

• If you listen carefully, the only way this speaker, and others like her, can define success in a school is by superficial test scores.

• Merit Pay is the bad idea that won't die.

• Technology can be justified in three ways: data collection, assist teacher instruction or help children learn in a very personal way.

• Things go very bad when we let computers grade essays so why would we think allowing them to replace teachers would be a good idea?

• Too often technology is nothing more than a fancy way of doing what we've always done. YouTube tried to make multiple choice quizzes for their videos, but I hardly consider this to be innovative. Too often technology is used as a "shoehorn" -- that is, in a way that merely supplements traditional, less-than-optimal teaching and learning practices which ultimately leads the classroom to revert to the way it was before. 

• Sometimes we mistake something like the Khan Academy and mistake it for something new when really it's just a slightly new spin on what we've always done -- this is called improvement without change.

• Poor pedagogy + technology = accelerated malpractice.

• Technology is absolutely the wrong driver for education reform.

• There are many reasons why learning needs to be personalized for students and achieving higher test scores is not one of them.

• In 1954, B.F. Skinner talked about replacing teachers with "the teaching machine". There's nothing innovative about this idea.

• The dream of having learners intensely concentrate on using technology quickly becomes a nightmare when it is the technology that is using the learner. When children are mined for data, education becomes something done to them rather than by them.

• There is a reason why Seymour Papert said, "Before the computer could change School, School changed the computer."

• Sometimes technology is about the pupils and sometimes technology is about profits. Can you tell the difference?

Process of Inquiry

This was written by my friend and colleague Larry Hartel who is principal of Glendale Middle School in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. Larry blogs here and tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Larry Hartel

“Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand” is the foundation for why inquiry based learning is so important. Inquiry based learning involves seeking truth, information, or knowledge by questioning.

What is the process for inquiry? This question may in fact not be a straight forward answer. As I will share there are a few common features of all plans and a variety of models being used in school.

Inquiry involves the human senses: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. Infants make connections to the world by inquiring. They observe faces that come near, they grasp objects, they put things in their mouths, and they turn toward voices. It is natural. Although it is most often associated with science, inquiry-based learning is used to engage students of all ages, in all subject areas, to learn by exploration and discovery.

Memorizing and regurgitating information and facts is not a critical skill in the world today. Facts change and will change rapidly and information is available anywhere, 24/7. Inquiry based learning allows students to learn how to build their own understanding of a problem and thus produce deeper connections. Because the connection to the learning is deeper the chances are that the student will remember the concept and then be able to apply the understanding to new situations as they arise.


There are a wide variety of models for what “Inquiry” looks like in the classroom. It seems that most have five things in common, questioning, planning and predicting, investigating, recording and reporting and reflecting.

Here is an example from the Inquiry Page.

This diagram based on John Dewey’s model uses a spiral path of asking good questions, Investigating solutions, creating new knowledge, discussing and sharing our discoveries and experiences and then reflecting on the new-found knowledge.

There are many models for inquiry learning. Great inquiry learning will never be linear. Inquiry by its very nature is all about insights and making connections. The learner will revisit steps along the process and scaffold as they build the learning.

This model from Inquirylearn.com has similar steps to the process that Dewey uses. The observation that they make that I find interesting is:

“If the question, investigation, and outcome(s) are truly meaningful to the learner, she or he will apply this newly-acquired knowledge in her or his own life by sharing knowledge and by taking concrete action in the world.”


Great questioning is the key to inquiry. To start the inquiry cycle the question, or questioning is key. Asking the right questions at the right moment in a lesson or activity will turn up the learning, or slow it down. The art of questioning is an area that one needs to explore further to really build a successful inquiry project. Here is a great wiki that I find has some fantastic information on questioning.

So in the true spirit of inquiry we should continue to ask, "what are the questions we need to be asking to become the inquiry based, science and technology school we dream of?"

Boldly going where only a few schools have gone before.

Khan Academy: Improving school by changing nothing

I came across Jonathon Martin's post that praised the Khan Academy:

I think Khan is a true transformer, a visionary, activist, architect and engineer of a new form for teaching and learning that will raise the educational prospects of millions, perhaps billions of students.

While Jonathon is entitled to his opinion, I whole heartedly disagree. And I was thrilled to find Will Richardson's comment:

Education will only truly be transformed when we stop trying to jam content into our kids’ heads and start allowing them to explore and learn in contexts that feed their desire to keep learning. To that end, I don’t think Khan Academy does or can change much at all.

There is nothing revolutionary or transformative about how the Khan Academy encourages educators to "shoehorn" technology in a way that merely supplements traditional, less-than-optimal teaching and learning practices which ultimately leads the classroom to revert to the way it was before.

At best, saying the Khan Academy is transformative is to admit that education reform is blind drunk on technology, and at worst, the Khan Academy is an instrument for the likes of Bill Gates implicitly and explicitly attack public education.

One might think it a stretch to accuse the Khan Academy as an attack on public education, and it is, but here's where I'm coming from:

In regards to Sal Khan, Gates has commented, "this guy is amazing" - leaving many to identify Khan as Bill Gates's favorite teacher.

At the same time, Gates has commented on the do's and dont's for policy makers faced with a financial crunch:

Gates spoke to the nation's governors mindful of the severe financial woes that many of them face as they try to bridge deficits totaling about $125 billion in the coming fiscal year. He said there are some clear do's and don'ts. Among the do's: Lift caps on class sizes and get more students in front of the very best teachers. Those teachers would get paid more with the savings generated from having fewer personnel overall.

While many educators have lost the capacity to be outraged by the outrageous, Gary Stager has not:

You would think that nothing else could surprise me, but now, Bill Gates has descended into the delusional world of Charlie Sheen. Gates told the nation's governors (they seem to speak with Bill more than their caddies) that the critical cuts to public schools could actually improve education if class sizes were increased so that we can "get more students in front of the very best teachers." That's right, Bill Gates is now advocating for larger class size! Since when do philanthropists call for the deprivation of children?

Gates' crazy plan to raise class sizes FOR THE CHILDREN is one thing, but his desire to get more students "in front of the very best teachers" reveals his ignorance on how learning occurs. Learning is an active process constructed by each learner. It is not simply the immediate result of being taught.

If Bill Gates's favorite teacher is Sal Khan, and he is encouraging policy makers to "save money" by "lifting cap sizes and get more students in front of the very best teachers", I can't help but see a disturbing connection.

Look, the Kahn Academy is not a direct threat to public education, but Sal Kahn, perhaps inadvertently, has become an accomplice to those like Bill Gates who very much are a threat.

Chris Lehmann puts it this way:

What concerns me when I listen to folks like Bill Gates wax rhapsodic about Khan Academy is that it seems to me to be one more moment when people who should know better are, essentially, saying, "See! We don't need teachers anymore!" As if every student could learn from a pre-packaged delivery model of content. 

It doesn't work that way. 

Khan Academy is great if you need a refresher... or if you need another look at an idea. But watching a video about a concept isn't the way you necessarily learn it... even when you have a somewhat drill-and-kill quiz system behind it. Khan Academy will work well for the kids whose teachers still spend 80% of the time lecturing at the front of the room. But it won't do that much anywhere where teachers have learned how to present ideas concisely and then spend their class time working with kids.

Sixty years of research tells us that we don't internalize knowledge by simply being told to do so. Real learning is constructed from the inside while interacting with others. While examining technology with a constructivist's lens, we must discriminate between the prolific and poor uses of technology.

Far from being transformative or revolutionary, the Khan Academy is an ingenious way of improving school without changing a thing.

My brain is full

If the banking model of education was a credible metaphor for learning, we would have to eventually excuse most of the population... leaving phrases like life-long learning nothing more than a myth.

If you haven't already, perhaps its time to question the idea that learning is something given to you by others in rigorously prescribed quantities.

I refuse to subscribe to a system whose ethos is built on such a fraudulent foundation.

Legacy of Traditional Education

I started reading Ted Sizers book Horace's Compromise where I came across this excerpt:

And yet Americans underrate the craft of teaching. We treat it mechanistically. We expect to know how to teach fractions as though one needed only a formulaic routine to do so, a way to plug in. We talk about "delivering a service" to students by means of "instructional strategies"; our metaphors arise from the factory floor and issue from the military manual. Education, apparently, is something someone does to somebody else. Paradoxically, while we know that we don't learn very well that way, nor want very much to have someone else's definition of "service" to be "delivered" to us, we accept these metaphors for the mass of children. We thus underrate the mystery, challenge, and complexity of learning and, as a result, operate schools that are extraordinarily wasteful.

The more I think about all that is wrong with school...

...the more I recall all the things I hated when I was a kid...

...the more I read about school reform...

...whether it's Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Martin Haberman's Pedagogy of Poverty or Ted Sizer's compromises, I'm starting to see a common thread that is the undoing of traditional education.

Because school defines learning as passive, learners come to see education as something done to them. When students are stuck in the middle of a problem, they don't try and figure out what makes sense to do next; instead, they try to remember what they are suppose to do. If this is the premise for learning, is it any surprise that learners become less autonomous, more dependent and ultimately mindless?

If this is the recipe for K-12 schooling, disengagement on behalf of the students is as predictable as it is problematic.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I'm reading Paulo Freire's book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and I am struck by how accurately he describes the oppressive nature of what he labels the banking concept of education which the rest of us know simply as school:

Worse yet, it turns them into "containers", into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away throughout the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.

Such a banking system that treats children as empty vessels to be filled requires a certain kind of teacher-student relationship. Because the student is considered to have an absolute ignorance, the teacher must define their existence as the opposite. Freire describes this relationship as a narrative where:

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

In this model, learning is passive and only the teaching requires action. Like the carpenter preparing to hammer the nail, the teacher would prefer it if the student would just sit still.



What does this look like? Friere shows us:

The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem." The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of "capital" in the affirmation " the capital of Para is Belem," that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil.

So what's wrong with this model of education? Again, Freire explains:

Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the worlds, with the world, and with each other.

In other words, children must be afforded the opportunity to openly and actively construct their own meaning while interacting with others. 


So how do we fix this factory-model of education? How do we unschool school? Before we can do so, we must first acknowledge the practices that perpetuate oppression. Freire offers a powerful indictment:

Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole: 

1. the teacher teaches and the students are taught;

2. the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;

3. the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;

4. the teacher talks and the students listen - meekly;

5. the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;

6. the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;

7. the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;

8. the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;

9. the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;

10. the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

If your schooling was anything like most people who inhabit this planet, this list is likely to be a familiar one. While there is nothing we can do to change the past, we had better be able to learn from it and aspire to something far better.

School simply has not changed very much since the turn of the century - and I'm not referring to 1999-2000. I would wager Paulo Freire's description of school would ring just as true for my grandfather who was born in 1916 and my father who was born in 1953, as I who was born in 1978.

My fear is that my daughter, who was born in 2008, will grow up and be all too familiar with Freire's list. If our children grow up and react to this list with anything less than shock and unfamiliarity, we will know that we failed them.

Pedagogical Blank Cheques

I know too many teachers who simply won't even engage in a conversation. There are a lot of topics that are simply off-side.

Teaching is a sensitive topic.

We own our teaching, and so it is easy to personalize it all. And if our teaching is that personal, it's not easy to admit that we are less than perfect - especially if we've done it for more than 10 years.

If you've taught for 10 plus years, and if you haven't figured things out, what have you been doing?

And yet, deep down we all know that time and experience shouldn't solidify a false confidence; rather, the best teachers teach year after year because they know they'll never really stop learning. They'll never stop improving because there is no finish line.

If the kids change year after year, and they do, then there is no one way of doing things. Standardization was just as wrong in 1910 as it is in 2010.

But does that mean anything goes?

Is there such thing as bad teaching?

Are teachers given a pedagogical blank cheque?

While it is true there is more than one way to skin a cat, it's also true that cats don't really have a say in how their skinned, while kids should have a say in how they are educated.

In other words, the inconvenient conversations we educators shy away from the most are the very discussions we need to have the most. And if our educational leaders prefer to avoid these conversations, real reform is a long way off.

Alberta's new math curriculum

Alberta Education recently released its new Math Curriculum, and I want to highlight how progressive this new curriculum really is.

I am relatively new at teaching math; however, my professional development in this area has led me to appreciate constructivism, so you can imagine how excited I was to see Alberta's new beliefs about students and mathematics learning:

Students learn by attaching meaning to what they do, and they need to construct their own meaning of mathematics. At all levels, students benefit from working with a variety of materials, tools and contexts when constructing meaning about new mathematical ideas.

The learning environment should value and respect the diversity of students’ experiences and ways of thinking, so that students are comfortable taking intellectual risks, asking questions and posing conjectures.

Students need to explore problem-solving situations in order to develop personal strategies and become mathematically literate. They must realize that it is acceptable to solve problems in a variety of ways and that a variety of solutions may be acceptable.

This video on math is also featured on Alberta Education's web site:

Keep in mind though that its one thing to say these are our beliefs about math and quite another to have teachers and students actually experience math this way. 

Walking the talk is the real challenge. 

Making the shift from teaching math as a behaviorist to a constructivist will prove very challenging. Many educators will be reluctant to give up their right answer and algorithms focus. Frankly, many students who have been convinced math is simply a game that requires them to follow the rules may too be reluctant to give up the behaviorism approach. However, if we want to save math from the depths of education hell, we have to fight this good fight, and I'm proud to see Alberta Education lead the way towards a better way of learning math. 

So what's next?

Teachers in Alberta are going to need a significant amount of professional development if this curriculum is to come to life, because I know far too many teachers who scoff at things like whole-language and constructivism while wearing behaviorism as a badge-of-honor.

Shoehorning technology

When it comes to integrating technology, a lot of educators will say that everyone has to start somewhere. What this implies is that sometimes in the beginning, educator technology usage may not be very pretty.

I fear this statement gives credence to the idea that as long technology is provided for teachers they will in time figure it out. So how well have teachers done with the time we've had with all this cool technology?

The Alberta Teachers' Association published a research document titled Using Technology to Support Real Learning First in Alberta Schools that provides some insight:

Since the early 1980s, the Government of Alberta, school districts and individual schools have invested more than $1.5 billion in information and communications technology (ICT). The preponderance of this funding has been used to acquire hardware and soft ware and to keep it up to date. Spending on professional development and collaborative inquiry to help educators take advantage of these technologies has been paltry by comparison. Even less time and money have been spent on making the kind of deep cultural changes at the jurisdiction and school levels that are necessary to implement technology in a way that truly enhances student learning.

After reviewing the educational policies in place in several countries, it was concluded that most attempts to integrate technology into the classroom take place according to one of four scenarios:

Scenario 1: Policymakers attempt to “shoehorn” technology into the existing regulatory framework governing curriculum and assessment, thereby augmenting the government’s bureaucratic, centralized control over schools.

Scenario 2: Policymakers and educators acknowledge that infusing technology into schools is a complex and uncertain process. To encourage innovation and research at the school level, they relax controls and accountability mechanisms.

Scenario 3: Schools deploy technology as a way of reconceptualizing the curriculum. For example, teachers may use technology to help students understand how their community fits into the global context and what it means to be a responsible citizen. 

Scenario 4: Policymakers undertake a series of initiatives to integrate technology into schools, all of which fail. In the end, the teaching–learning process largely reverts to what it was before.

Because the education systems in the United States and Canada tend to be very controlling with their persistence for bureaucratic accountability regimes, it should be no surprise that large-scale testing programs and other command-and-control mechanisms tend to narrow curriculum, stifle technological innovation and reduce teaching to little more than an effort to boost test scores. Rather than encouraging teachers to develop innovative instructional practices, such regimes encourage educators to "shoehorn" technology in a way that merely supplements traditional, less-than-optimal teaching and learning practices which ultimately leads the classroom to revert to the way it was before. Scenarios 1 and 4 are the rule while scenarios 2 and 3 are the exceptions.

Let me be clear:

I'm not saying technology is bad just because some people misuse it. We absolutely should utilize the mind-blowing benefits of technology.

I'm not saying we can't talk about technology. We need to talk about technology. To ignore it would be to risk becoming irrelevant to our students.

I am saying that we had better talk pedagogy at least as much as we do technology. Whether we should or should not use technology in the classroom is not the real question anymore (if it ever was); instead, I believe we need to focus intensely on how we should use technology. Sixty years of research tells us that we don't internalize knowledge by simply being told to do so. Real learning is constructed from the inside while interacting with others. While examining technology with a constructivist's lens, we must discriminate between the prolific and poor uses of technology.

To accomplish all this both government and teacher unions/associations will need to devote some serious time, money and expertise to teacher professional development.

More of the same

I want to continue the discussion around technology and pedagogy. 

When I wrote my critique of using Google Docs to create self-graded quizzes, my premise was:

TECHNOLOGY + POOR PEDAGOGY = ACCELERATED MALPRACTICE

Scott McLeod then wrote a follow up post titled In the beginning, educator technology usage may not be very pretty, where he asked some thought provoking questions:

If teachers are engaging in instructional behaviors that we might consider less desirable, does showing them how to do those more efficiently with technology help them transition out of those practices or reinforce the status quo? Does introducing the technology tools potentially open the door to better practice or does it simply further solidify current practice? Do we hook technology onto what they already know and do – even if it’s not the greatest pedagogy - with the end goal of getting to a different place, or do we reject those practices and advocate immediately for something new and different?

I think Allan's comment answers some of Scott McLeod's questions:

In my honest opinion, the type of assessment drives teaching and when computers start to make life easier, it will not stop at multiple choices but using programs to assess essays etc (there are already such programs). These types of programs are so appealing to those in control of education because it provides data and fast. It won't free up time because there will be just more of it to come.

See this post if you want to see how technology is being abused and misused in assessing students' written work even at the post secondary, Masters level.

Bad pedagogy

What can be done without thinking usually is done without thinking.

-Alfie Kohn

Old School traditionally confuses the importance of product with process. 

In math, we teach computation as if all that mattered was that the student bark 12 upon hearing the stimulus "4 times 3". We teach literacy as if all that really mattered was that kids can identify the silent 'e'. Science has been reduced to a glorified vocabulary exam while social studies has been defined by some as simply a series of given truths.

When the teacher's role is less about artfully guiding students to thinking and reasoning for themselves in a kind of logic gymnasium and more about dispensing right answers and disciplining wrong ones, we openly choose to ignore the roots of real learning. Sixty years of research tells us that we don't internalize knowledge by simply being told to do so. Real learning is constructed from the inside while interacting with others. 

And yet, if you look at textbooks, canned lesson plans and achievement exams, you will see that osmosis is the primary method most classrooms use to transmit knowledge.

Old School never concerns itself with engaging kids and can only condemn those who (rightfully) disengage. And when Old School doesn't work, the best it can offer is to twice the dose of a pedagogy that didn't work in the first place.