Captain Obvious writes in to the Washington Post today to report that throwing technology at schools does little for education. The gist is that poorly-performing schools, afraid of failing standardized test requirements, thought they could skip the hard work of hiring and training better teachers by buying educational software. A bunch of more-or-less corrupt companies sprang up to sell it (does it surprise anyone that Neil Bush owned one?). Now the Department of Education has released a study finding that the software doesn't help.

Educational software, a $2 billion-a-year industry that has become the darling of school systems across the country, has no significant impact on student performance, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Education.

The long-awaited report amounts to a rebuke of educational technology, a business whose growth has been spurred by schools desperate for ways to meet the testing mandates of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law...

[T]he industry has also been plagued by doubts over the technology's effectiveness as well as high-profile bribery scandals, including one that led to the resignation of the Prince George's County schools chief in 2005.

My own experience with educational technology has been that it's either fun but not educational (shooting bears in Oregon Trail was awesome), a corporate Trojan horse (Channel One), or quickly set aside (Sun Blades for the undergrad lab). That's not to say that educational software and other technology can't be useful. But the initiative needs to come as a solution to particular problems or a response to teachers' demands. Otherwise, it's like housing the homeless by handing out plywood.