Editor’s note: This commentary is by C.B. Hall, a freelance writer who lives with his family in Northfield.
[T]he Green Mountain state’s educational spendathon offers many points of attack for a commonsense person who objects to so much money being spent so freely. Class size, heavy administrative structures and employee health insurance costs have invited plenty of fire. But as the Legislature wrestles with how to finance the state’s schools and Town Meeting Day approaches, many less conspicuous elements of education, large in their combined impact, also warrant attention.
The computerization of education provides one good example because its costs so blatantly outweigh its benefits – if any. Our local high school, enrollment 162, has a “one-on-one” computer program that offers every student a laptop for work in school and at home. This costs $239,000 yearly, by my best extrapolation of the district’s fiscal data. Most of that figure goes towards maintaining and servicing the computers. The figure, about 2.3 percent of the pre-K-12 school district’s entire budget, approaches a back-of-the-envelope estimate of what our school district would save if – to cite a widely discussed possibility — it shifted its employees’ health insurance to Vermont Health Connect.
Over the last three years, the one-on-one program has cost almost 20 times the high school’s expenditures for textbooks. A textbook might cost $100. If that textbook lasts five years – a conservative estimate – it costs $20 a year, less than half the $43 that the district pays annually just to insure each student’s computer against damage.
A textbook’s cost doesn’t include such a damage-protection agreement, of course, and a book also offers certain other less-than-obvious advantages: no nasty websites to reckon with, for example. To prevent students from visiting such websites on school computers, our school district utilizes filters, which attempt to keep pace with Internet abuses — playing cat-and-mouse with their adversary’s latest iteration. Some cyberslime slips through, however; and, being computer algorithms incapable of exercising subjective judgment, the filters meanwhile block legitimate and academically useful sites that fail the algorithm.
The teacher’s “get out your laptops” is very close to “get out your private television sets,” and creates a climate of passivity and isolation comparable to television-viewing, and far removed from the ideals of education.
What makes student computers a good example of overspending is their counter-productiveness. In a 2014 paper, researchers at Princeton University and UCLA concluded that “empirical research tends to support the … view … that students using laptops are not on task during lectures [and] show decreased academic performance. … The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand.”
Having sat in the back of our son’s classes a few times, I agree. My visits have also revealed that the teacher must consume valuable time resolving questions about how to use the laptops. Anyone who has ever used a computer can appreciate the labyrinthine confusion that one goof can lead to. Computer skills, keeping pace with software “advances,” call for retraining every time a software developer blasts the latest you’ve-gotta-buy-this innovation onto the market. But why should schools complicate instruction with the continual need to learn – or, rather, re-learn – the very mechanism of learning? How much time do high-school teachers spend, by contrast, with students who can’t read a book, or can’t find the right page? And while the teacher coaches the students on the subtleties of the computers they’re using, the textbooks sit handsomely on their shelves, collecting dust, almost pleading to be used.
The academic classrooms should be a place of vigorous discussion, of ideas bouncing from mind to mind, of engagement with the ever-expanding wonder of learning. The teacher’s “get out your laptops” is very close to “get out your private television sets,” and creates a climate of passivity and isolation comparable to television-viewing, and far removed from the ideals of education. For that, we are paying good money.
Student computers represent but one example of our educational system’s non-frugality. I support paying good teachers good salaries to provide a good education. That is, or should be, a school’s core business. But beyond that, a burgeoning periphery of waste awaits some serious attention from Vermont’s school districts – and voters. Student computers are part of that periphery, and should not escape our notice.
