EDUCATION EQUITY

In what should surely stand as the finest example of wishful thinking in recent Maine history, then-Gov. Angus King last November cut $5.7 million from the Maine Learning Technology Initiative – the laptop fund, the program he had been vigorously defending for more than two years – to help reduce the latest budget shortfall. He reasoned that when better times came, new state revenues could be found to restore the fund to the minimum level needed to meet its promises.

Gov. John Baldacci, having experienced as a legislator the prolonged shortfalls of the early ’90s, decided not to indulge in such fantasy and properly put the money back into the MLTI for the next biennium. But once the money was removed, the cash looked more like an opportunity than an obligation, and advocates for other programs have offered alternative uses for the $5.7 million. To their credit, several lawmakers on the Education Committee aren’t suggesting anything frivolous; they want to use the money to expand General Purpose Aid to Education, a worthy cause. But it should go where the current governor directed it and where it is badly needed: To the now-underfunded technology initiative, which even in its first year is proving to be a powerful motivator for learning.

David Silvernail of the University of Southern Maine has been following the early effects of the laptop program and the results are remarkable. In a report Wednesday to the Legislature, Dr. Silvernail said, “As the students begin to use the laptops more with their classes, they report an increase in interest in their school work and an increase in the amount of work they are doing both in and out of school.” There’s more: “Parents report that their children are more focused and more interested in school.”

And more to come: “Finally, even more positive changes resulting from MLTI are anticipated by school principals and superintendents, although these impacts cannot yet be measured.” It is too soon to tell what this increased focus on schoolwork will yield, but chances are excellent that, as a learning tool, the program will pay for itself many times over.

Maine has more money riding on the question of what lawmakers will do with the technology fund than is immediately apparent. More than $6 million in private-sector pledges are committed to the fund – committed but not paid. And they will not be paid if Maine continues to renege on its commitments. More importantly, the opportunity for Maine to seek even more private support, in this program or others, would be jeopardized if lawmakers prove fickle on the technology fund.

Referring to an earlier time when lawmakers were thinking of slashing the fund, Attorney General Steven Rowe put it this way: “[F]ailure to fund a program after a contractor has expended considerable resources in fulfilling its obligations under a contract may adversely affect the state’s creditworthiness as well as its ability to contract in the future, undermine its credibility at the bargaining table and-or increase the costs of its agreements.” The contractor referred to, by the way, is Apple – precisely the kind of company that Maine should seek to impress, just as MLTI already has attracted grants worth tens of millions of dollars in support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, EDS, Verizon and GWI.

The desire to fund GPA is well-placed; doing so improves equity by providing a fair opportunity for all Maine students to learn, no matter where they come from. The technology initiative, however, is equity defined. It gives students in the poorest school districts the same access to technology as students in the wealthiest. It invests in students by broadening their reach a thousandfold in science, math, social studies, literature. And early results show students are responding enthusiastically.