Baltimore Sun reporter Gina Davis' story on an information system that shows student progress towards proficiency on individial state standards forces us to think hard about our faith in the labor saving attributes of technology.

[T]he (Articulated Instruction Module) is being made available on a voluntary basis to all of the county's teachers this coming school year, and the superintendent hopes it will be widely used.

In addition to the traditional reports with letter grades that measure students' mastery of a given subject, participating teachers will give parents progress reports that will tell them whether their children can, for instance, convert fractions to decimals or determine percent of a number. Until it is mastered, a skill or objective follows a student from grade to grade....

"As test scores show, too often children are failing, and no one responsible for their education seems to know why, and there is no other evidence in the student's folder other than a bunch of papers with letter grades," said Barbara Dezmon, assistant to the county school superintendent for equity and assurance, who created the program. "At the end of an education, we just know that the student is not adequately prepared."...

[T]he president of the county's teachers union said preparing the progress reports - which would be done quarterly in addition to report cards - will burden overworked teachers. She also worries that instructors will be blamed when a child fails to master a skill.... Doing such reports, in addition to regular report cards, "would create an enormous amount of work for teachers," Cheryl Bost, president of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County, wrote in a July 10 letter to school board members and schools Superintendent Joe A. Hairston.

Whether technology is labor saving depends a great deal on the system you are placing it into, and the scale of society that you choose for the analysis.

The School System. Ms. Bost is almost certainly correct for the Baltimore County publc school system.  If, before ART was installed, teachers' didn't really know about students' specific problems, and the problems weren't identified for all to see, it's a pretty good bet they received little or no teacher time. If "what gets measured gets done," then these problems will require more teacher time rather than the reallocation of teacher time. More important, unless the teachers have new means of addressing the individual needs of students on a class/school/district-wide scale (call it the "mass customization" of instruction), they will spend more time without getting appreciably improved results.

AIM does allow us to start thinking about how much of the burden of a child's education we want to place on the parent. This system could permit educators to reduce teacher "time on task," by holding parents accountable for certain activities that will improve student performance. It also goes to the union head's concerns about the extent of teacher responsibility for outcomes. The idea raises issues of equity - given the wide variation in parent capacity and interest, but it is one way to lessen the load on teachers.

Society. If we change the analytical lens from the school system to the full range of taxpayer supportede activities however, it's almost certainlk the case that spending more time and money to bring each student up to proficiency on state standards, no, will not only save the taxpayer money that would otherwise be paid into various antipoverty programs and the criminal justice system later, it will result in a net increase in tax revenues from more and more productive workers, and better citizens, later.

For school improvement providers, this suggests two challenges: One, the need for integrated strategies to make the whole school system more productive - clearly an argument the publishers selling end-to-end solutions ought to be working. Two,  the need to invest in studies that show the payoff of investment in school improvement as measured by net impacts on government spending and revenues over time.  Something the trade groups ought to doing to improve the legitimacy of the school improvement industry.