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The New York Times offers today a story about school districts that are reversing earlier decisions to make laptops available to all of their students for little or no money. Laptops at places like Liverpool High School, near Syracuse, have been causing more problems than they’ve been solving. They break down often, the school’s network can’t handle heavy traffic, and there has been no discernible improvement in student performance on standardized tests since the laptop program began a few years ago. What’s worse, some of the machines have been abused by students, who use them for gaming, music swapping, and to collect pornography. As the author, Winnie Hu, notes:

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums.

This piece does not detail or directly ask what type of instructional support and training schools that have instituted laptop programs provide for their teachers, though it does hint that resources that might be devoted to those efforts are tied up repairing broken machines. It also seems to assume that proponents of laptops in schools make the argument because they think laptops will help students raise test scores. Mark Warschauer, an education professor at UC-Irvine and the author of Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom, who is quoted in the story, redirects the conversation when he says:

Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research. If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful.

While I’d argue that a school needn’t have such a lofty goal to find uses for laptops, I think Warschauer makes the right point. Of course laptops won’t improve learning if they’re dumped into an environment and grafted onto existing pedagogical goals and methods of assessment. This article seems to be about challenges to an assumption that was faulty in the first place. These school districts blame students for using laptops poorly, but the author didn’t ask administrators why it appears that they never considered the very simple question that should begin any educational engagement with technology, no matter the scale: why are we doing this? You have to be able to clearly answer that question and trace how it will change the playing field before you use technology effectively in education, and it’s socially irresponsible to throw millions of public dollars into a program that hasn’t made its rationale clear. That “laptops do not improve learning” seems to me to be the wrong conclusion to take from this story, especially if your measurement tools are grades and a standardized test. I think a better conclusion would be “bad programs do not improve learning.”

An important though somewhat-buried element of this story is the recurring cost of technology, which is an issue all institutions have to address, and which is particularly troublesome for those that depend upon public money. Technological devices slow down and become out of date as they age, or sometimes just plain malfunction. They regularly need to be fixed or replaced. We’ve all been in classrooms or libraries that have bad machines. It seems disingenuous or maybe just alarmingly naive for a school to lend laptops and then to groan about having to fix them, and is yet another example of how poorly considered some of the programs in this article seemed to have been. I’d be interested to see how schools are dealing with this issue, and which schools prioritize keeping their technology up-to-date and fully operational. I’d be willing to bet that those are the schools where students get the best guidance in how to use technology in their learning.