A LAPTOP FOR EVERY STUDENT?
SCS wants to buy a computer for every pupil, but that may present challenges
Ann Mclean has zero qualms about her 13- and 14-year-old daughters Nina and Emma not having cellphones. “We are just fine,” she said. “We are not fine,” Emma quips back playfully. “We are suffering.”
But Mclean sees how much they already interact with technology, from the television in their Collierville home to the iphones the girls occasionally “borrow” from their parents. They also often have to be in front of a screen for school. Nina is in the seventh grade at Collierville Middle and receives an ipad from the school that comes home with her at the end of the day. Emma is enrolled in a home-school program that also includes group classes. She uses a computer in classes with other home-school students, and uses the family’s desktop at home.
Ann Mclean would just as soon opt for a full paper and pencil option for their education.
“It’s a brave new world out there, and I hate it,” she says, adding that she feels undermined as a parent trying to control her children’s access to technology when their schools give them devices to take home with them for required work.
Her struggle to monitor and limit her children’s use of devices highlights a growing tension between parents and
schools that are trying to ready students for life in the 21st century.
Schools nationwide, including in Shelby County, are arming students with digital devices at a rapid pace, with leaders often touting the technology as the key to improved performance.
But research shows it’s not as simple as giving students a device. And in some cases, giving low-income students technology to take home can actually widen the achievement gap instead of closing it.
In Shelby County, all of the six municipal districts have either fully implemented, or are in the process of implementing, what’s known as a 1:1 initiative — one device for every student.
Teachers work the technology into their classroom instruction, and students in middle and high schools often take those devices home. In some schools, laptops or ipads are completely replacing textbooks. In others, they supplement the books, providing ways for teachers to communicate with students, and for students to work together in class and at home.
Shelby County Schools is considering a similar initiative, but going all the way down through the elementary level. The program would pilot this fall in nine high schools, and the district would phase in other schools and grade levels over the next six years.
The proposal is part of a plan to address inequities in the district, ensuring that all 90,000 students, no matter their economic status, have what they need to be successful students.
“We want to give our students every advantage to succeed,” SCS Superintendent Joris Ray said.
‘Large potential for it backfiring’
But it’s not that simple, especially in high-poverty areas, warns researcher Jacob Vigdor of the University of Washington. Vigdor studied the impact of home computer access on reading and math test scores in one North Carolina school district in the early 2000s, when technology was less ubiquitous than it is now.
“The pattern that we picked up was a decline in test scores,” Vigdor said. “The adverse effects seemed to be most concentrated among disadvantaged kids.”
That was correlated, he said, with less availability of parents in those households to monitor their children’s computer usage, not just for their safety but for focus and productivity.
Antonio Burt, SCS’S chief of academics, said the devices would be programmed to limit students’ access to distractions like Youtube and online games. In some cases, work could be loaded onto the device through software, meaning students wouldn’t need the internet to complete their work.
Natalia Powers, chief of communication for the district, said at one SCS school that already has takehome laptops, Kirby High, parents had to sign an agreement that provided guidelines around using the devices at home. That included recommendations about monitoring students’ use, as well as restricting the amount of time students spend on screens.
Vigdor said the growth of school districts implementing 1:1 initiatives is like a “tidal wave” that doesn’t seem likely to stop, and often comes from “noble” motives like preparing students for the job market.
“But there is a very large potential for it backfiring,” Vigdor said.
Teachers get creative with technology
There is no textbook to be found at Lakeland Middle Preparatory School.
That’s because when the school opened in fall 2017, the two-campus suburban Lakeland School System didn’t purchase any physical textbooks. It instead invested in a lease-to-own program to equip every student with a Chromebook, a basic laptop with a Google operating system.
School and district leaders tout the successes of the program, now in its second year, including teachers’ innovative ways to integrate the technology without letting it take over their classrooms.
In one sixth-grade science class, the teacher played a short video about ecosystems for the class to watch together, and then the students used their laptops to complete an exercise on food webs. They dragged images of animals and plants to their proper place on the web, thinking through what eats what — or whom — and then reviewed their work together as a class.
“We’ve just been amazed at how creative the teachers have been,” Lakeland Superintendent Ted Horrell said.
In the already high-performing district, a bump in test scores was not necessarily the goal of the added technology.
“We want students to learn the way that they are going to work,” Horrell said.
The program works, Horrell said, because of the nine months of planning that went into it, and the controls that are in place to make sure students aren’t watching videos during class or for hours at home after school. The school strictly limits what students can access on their laptops.
Horrell said he told parents and students, “these will be the least fun digital devices they ever have.” But parental involvement has still been key, he said. The school also uses the laptops for lessons on research and media literacy.
“We’re trying to teach them to ask the right questions and learn how to be digital citizens, and folks that can access the right information in the way that the world’s going to expect them to,” Horrell said.
Not counting professional development for staff, Horrell estimated the cost per student at about $150. That includes just under $100 annually for the Chromebook lease, an information management system and about $45 of online textbook materials.
‘Computers do not raise test scores’
Shelby County Schools has not released cost estimates for its planned 1:1 initiative. The district is completing a technology audit to see how many devices would be available to redirect from classroom carts to students to be able to take home.
The district previously piloted a technology program, supported by millions of dollars from the Plough Foundation, in 16 schools around the practice of “blended learning,” where students have laptops in class but do not take them home. The last year of that pilot was 2016-17. Data from the district shows students in the program met their growth goals for reading at a rate about 5 percentage points higher than students who did not participate in blended learning.
Burt, the chief of academics, said the goal of the take-home pilot is not necessarily to see a bump in test scores.
“It’s also tied to overall student engagement, the current rate and method of how kids are learning and gaining information,” he said.
The nine-school pilot is designed to identify gaps in infrastructure, staff preparation or the curriculum before take-home devices are rolled out everywhere, Burt said.
Burt said even by replacing textbooks, students are “not going to be on the device the entire seven hours of the school day.”
Ray, who baked the laptop initiative into an overall equity plan for the district, said the laptops will not replace teachers.
“Computers do not raise test scores,” he said. “Teachers raise test scores.”
Reach Jennifer Pignolet at jennifer.pignolet@ commercialappeal.com or on Twitter @Jenpignolet.