Laptops can’t buy a better future

Although the laptop fantasy seems to have become an irreversible reality, the debate continues on the pages of the Bangor Daily News. Recently Alan Bain of New Hampshire presented the somewhat one-sided argument that computers are public education’s salvation even though educators don’t know how to use them. Maybe he means the laptops are a good idea whose time has not yet come.

If so, he is exactly right. Few people think seventh-graders should not have laptops. If all Maine schoolchildren had laptops, the possibilities for education would grow; anyone who thinks clearly knows this. And problems about the laptops’ misuse and neglect, while real, are probably manageable. They’re not the point, as Bain correctly observes.

The actual point all along has been this: If in the midst of many financial problems we are going to allocate $37 million for education, then that money can go to educational problems far more urgent than laptops.

. Many Maine school districts are facing crippling budget shortages. SAD 3, for example, faces a huge shortfall requiring major cuts and the cancellation of some teachers’ entire supplies requests, and Bangor is dropping teachers because it can’t afford to keep them. Just one-thirtieth of the $37 million that’s going into laptops would significantly help SAD 3, and with less than that, Bangor could keep its teachers, not to mention other districts facing similar troubles.

. Few teachers in Maine can support their families on what they make. I know a high school teacher who, including his summer jobs, doesn’t make enough money to meet his modest mortgage payment, small car payment, heating bill, insurance and food costs each month, and has to sell his house. He would like to buy his son a computer, but is postponing it until he can afford it.

. Many school buildings in Maine desperately need repairs, despite the governor’s dismissive ignorance of the situation. In recent years buildings in towns like Charleston, Calais and Dexter have been in such bad shape officials have considered condemning or vacating them because there isn’t enough money to fix them. The Mount View complex in Thorndike has for years packed hundreds of students into makeshift trailers because it

doesn’t have the resources to buy itself out of a Catch-22 spiral of costs. Washburn, Machias, Belfast and other towns have had to grapple with serious facilities problems they can’t afford.

. The state burdens schools with expensive special-education, facilities-upgrade and curriculum-revision requirements, but at the same time fails to abide by its own law requiring funding for education. The Legislature’s behavior in this is at least unethical, but voting millions for “technology” in the same session that it fails to fund its own mandates involves behavior probably exploitable by lawyers.

These problems are more important than the purchase of laptops, and several further points clearly indicate the laptop scheme should have been postponed.

One is that Maine’s schools already have computers. Even though there is not one for every student and the hardware is not all state of the art, they nonetheless exist and work. And some teachers will let slip that a lot of terminals are unused a lot of the time.

Another point concerns the argument that laptops are the key to Maine’s future economy. The notion that businesses will start emigrating to Maine when they notice our commitment to training keyboard labor is, frankly, ridiculous, and it’s hard to understand why people fall for it. Maine’s economic problems have little to do with our work force, which is generally acknowledged to be unusually capable. Our economic trouble involves first, our geographic location; second, absurd overtaxation; and third, the fact that there’s not enough money here to attract anybody in the first place. Laptop computers are going to have no impact whatsoever on any of these problems.

A final point lost to enthusiasm-blinded administrators is that computers cannot teach. Only human beings can teach. Because of this, teachers are far more important than computers. Contrary to Alan Bain’s insinuations, small class sizes are critical to good education. They enable teachers to give kids individual attention, the single indispensable ingredient in high-quality education. A teacher of mediocre talent with a class of 15 and a sense of security and support (from administrators and public alike) will accomplish magnitudes of order more than will a truly gifted teacher with a class of 30 staring into laptop screens. This is just a fact of human reality, and no amount of crowing about technology will ever change it.

Maine needs more teachers, not more computers.

The laptop mistake reminds me of something you see when driving the back roads. Coming up on the right, you notice parked in a driveway a big new pickup truck with $400 tires, gas-eating engine, four-wheel drive transmission, running lights, the shiny new works. It would be great to have such a truck. Then as you pass, you see where the owners live: in a low, unpainted, run-down shack with holes in the walls, sheets of plastic falling off the windows, a half-broken door, and discarded toys, fallen roof shingles and other trash littering the yard.

Why is so much money spent on the truck when the house where the people actually live is falling apart? And what’s going on inside that better management of their limited finances might help?

We can’t afford laptops right now. But we’re buying them, and what a deal, the shiny new works.

Dana Wilde, Ph.D. is a U.S. Fulbright Senior Scholar, adjunct assistant professor at the University of Maine, and copy desk editor at the Bangor Daily News.