PACKET EDITORIAL, Jan. 11
By: Packet Editorial, Jan. 11
For the past decade or so, just about every school district in the country has been jumping through hoops to get computers into as many students’ hands as humanly possible.
Long gone are the days when computers were esoteric pieces of hardware programmed by people with doctorates in applied mathematics and used as high-speed replacements for calculators (and, before that, slide rules) by a handful of technology "geeks." Today, with the size and cost of computers steadily dropping and the speed and scope of their information-gathering capabilities rapidly rising, computer literacy is as important to the present generation of schoolchildren as the 3R’s were to their parents’ and grandparents’.
So when educators talk about providing every student with his or her own computer, they don’t think of it as any more of an extravagance than giving every elementary school kid a Weekly Reader or every high school history student a textbook. In today’s classroom, as in tomorrow’s world, a computer isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity.
That’s why school districts cast about for every computer they can find. Used ones that would otherwise be thrown out by corporations. New ones donated by foundations and nonprofits. In less affluent districts, jerry-rigged PCs cobbled together from spare parts by enterprising techno-types. And, in more affluent districts, wireless laptops paid for by taxpayers.
Not many districts reach the goal of one computer for every student. But the Montgomery School District stands at the threshold. Members of the Board of Education are scheduled to choose tonight among several options for supplying the new high school with computers. One of these options, supported by Superintendent Stuart Schnur, is to lease 1,750 laptop computers one for each student over the next four years.
The price tag for this option is about $2.1 million. The other options are providing each classroom with five student laptops and one teacher laptop station (about $640,000), or providing each classroom with a teacher station, two desktop computers and a laptop cart shared among four classroom ($1.1 million) or two classrooms ($1.6 million).
Given the rather wide range in costs, it’s perhaps not surprising that some board members and parents don’t necessarily share Dr. Schnur’s enthusiasm for the one-student, one-computer option. What is surprising, however, is that most of the concerns they’ve expressed appear to have little to do with cost.
To some, the issue is whether teachers, because of the presence of the laptops, would feel pressure to use technology when it isn’t necessary. To others, it’s whether the teachers would be able to incorporate the laptops into every lesson, which might justify their cost, or use them only occasionally, which would not. To still others, it’s whether students would use the laptops for educational purposes or to surf the Web, instant-message their friends and play video games.
Then there’s the if-it-was-good-enough-for-me, it’s-good-enough-for-you school, which holds that, just like in the old days, a kid needs a sturdy desk, a thick book, an attentive teacher and not much else least of all a shiny computer to get a good, solid education.
We hope none of these arguments persuades a single board member to vote against the one-student, one-computer option. From an educational perspective, we agree with Dr. Schnur; it is without question the best option one that every other school district in the state, if not the country, would adopt in a heartbeat, if it had the wherewithal. If a majority of the Montgomery school board decides tonight that the district doesn’t happen to have the wherewithal this year that the combination of negligible state aid and a tightened budget cap makes the cost of this option momentarily unaffordable we’ll have no quarrel with that decision. But if the board chooses for other, more spurious reasons not to offer every student in the new high school daylong access to a laptop computer, it will be a black mark on the report card of an otherwise exemplary school district.