What's going on: Efforts to deliver computer networking to schools
The United States has made significant strides toward achieving President Clinton's objective of connecting every classroom to the Internet by 2000. Between 1994 and 1996 the portion of the nation's schools that were connected almost doubled, to 65 percent. The National Center on Education Statistics, which compiled those figures, said that all but 5 percent of schools expect to be online in the next few years. The much bigger task--of connecting individual classrooms as well as central offices--is going more slowly. In 1996 just 14 percent of classrooms were wired for Internet connections. Still, that was more than quadruple the number just two years earlier.
As the deadline for establishing network links draws closer, many participants in the education technology effort are starting to emphasize concerns that go beyond installing hardware and network connections. Can we sustain a vision of Information Age education even after the infrastructure is in place? And what can we do to ensure that the effort to link schools produces a sustained improvement in the quality of education provided to our children?
From Washington, D.C., to communities all over the country, many people are wrestling with these questions.
President Clinton has promoted computer networking aggressively since he was first elected in 1992. To "bring the power of the Information Age into all of our schools," he says, "will require connecting every classroom and library to the Internet by the year 2000; making sure that every child has access to modern, multimedia computers; giving teachers the training they need to be as comfortable with the computer as they are with the chalkboard; and increasing the availability of high-quality educational content."
The federal government took a big stride toward helping schools sustain the networking effort on May 7, 1997, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a plan that will make schools and libraries eligible for basic and advanced telecommunications services at discount rates.
The discounts, which will apply to all commercially available telecommunications services, Internet access, and internal connections, will range from 20 to 90 percent. Schools serving larger portions of children from poor households will qualify for larger discounts. The discounts will also be weighted in favor of rural schools. The FCC set a $2.25 billion annual cap on the rate subsidies, which are scheduled to take effect in 1998.
Public interest advocates viewed the FCC action, which was required under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, as a watershed event. "Schools are important stepping stones to a truly networked community, and society as a whole needs to take responsibility for keeping them connected," said Andrew Blau, director of the Benton Foundation's Communications Policy Program. "The commitment to schools becomes a benchmark for a broader social commitment to equity, access, and realizing the social benefits of this technology."
The discounts won't cover the entire cost of maintaining school Internet connections, though. In a 1995 report prepared for the U.S. Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure (NIIAC), McKinsey & Co. estimated that the full cost of maintaining network links would range from $4 billion to almost $14 billion a year, depending on whether schools seek connections just for computer labs or for every classroom. But schools will have other ways to reduce their costs. For one thing, they may persuade state regulators to require that they receive the same discounts on intrastate rates as the FCC has ordered on interstate rates. Just as significantly, the FCC has urged schools to join other organizations in creating buying consortiums so that they can qualify for volume discounts on their telecommunications services. That would reduce the base rates from which the FCC-ordered "universal service" discounts would be calculated.
Vice President Al Gore called the FCC's decision the "cornerstone" of the Clinton administration's push to connect every U.S. classroom and library to the Internet by 2000. "We now can go from a world where most teachers don't even have phones to a world where all teachers can help their students talk to the world," he said.
Because the federal government lacks the resources to accomplish this on its own, however, the Clinton administration has encouraged schools to find partners to help networking efforts. The Technology Literacy Challenge Fund, which provides grants for school technology programs, requires states to develop technology plans that provide for collaboration with outside partners. It also says that states must address how to facilitate access by poorer schools to advanced telecommunications. The administration will announce the first $200 million in grants in September 1997, and is seeking $245 million more for the fiscal year beginning October 1, 1997. President Clinton has said that he would like Congress to appropriate a total of $2 billion over the next five years. Similarly, the separate Technology Innovation Challenge Grant program seeks to encourage the formation of consortiums--consisting of local school districts, museums, software designers, universities, libraries, and state agencies, for instance--to encourage innovative teaching techniques that integrate technology with the school system. Each grant runs for five years and pays from $250,000 to $1.5 million a year.
The administration is also trying to move away from an exclusive focus on technology toward emphasizing the broader context in which the new teaching tools are used, according to Tom Carroll, director of the Technology Innovation Challenge Grant program. "We still see people coming to us asking just for the technology because they don't have any," he notes. "Then there are groups who have the equipment, and want money to figure out what to do with it. And then there is a third group who begin with an educational need, such as `Here's how we would use technology to improve reading.' This is the group that gets funded."
Finally, the Clinton administration is working to expand the government's role as a provider of educational resources. On April 18, 1997, President Clinton ordered federal agencies to review their information resources and take steps to package them in ways that will be useful to students, teachers, and parents.
"People expected to have to redo phone lines, but no one realized that many of these schools need to have all their electric wiring redone."
--Connie Stout, director, Texas Education Network
Some federal agencies already have become valued educational resources. NASA allows students to interact with astronauts and gather information about space. The Department of Education supports the Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC), whose AskERIC program maintains a library of more than 900 lesson plans and uses a nationwide network of experts and databases to answer questions posed by educators. Vice President Gore's Global Learning and Observation for a Better Environment (GLOBE) project enlists students in collecting environmental data and using the Internet to share, analyze, and discuss it with scientists and other students. And the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, with support from several federal agencies, has developed a program that allows high school students to obtain information collected from professional telescopes.
States are grappling with a wide range of issues involving education technology, but they lack sufficient resources to do the whole job. Texas, for instance, has made a substantial commitment to promote networking in schools. Two years ago, it established a flat, $260 monthly rate for schools to obtain Internet access over high-speed T-1 lines. In addition, it has established a $150 million Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund to help pay for connections and school remodeling needed to support advanced communications services.
While nobody can estimate the actual need for infrastructure building, it is generally agreed that $150 million falls far short of what the state's 7,000 elementary and secondary schools need. "School buildings in Texas are, in general, old," says Texas Education Network Director Connie Stout. "People expected to have to redo phone lines, but no one realized that many of these schools need to have all their electric wiring redone."
Texas provides schools with $30 per student per year for technology. But the state would have to provide at least $100 to $150 per student to ensure that poorer schools keep up with wealthier ones, says Craig Foster, director of the Equity Center in Austin.
Inequities in school funding exacerbate the problem for poorer schools. Texas provides schools with $30 per student per year for technology. The "technology allotments" can be used for professional development or acquisition of hardware and software. But wealthier districts are spending as much as six times that amount, says Craig Foster, director of the Equity Center in Austin. Foster says that the state would have to provide at least $100 to $150 per student to ensure that poorer schools keep up with wealthier ones.
Teacher training is also a big concern in the states. Many officials believe that traditional methods aren't working. "Schools' efforts to integrate information technology in recent years have been less than effective due to inadequate planning for professional development, as well as limited access to information technology for teachers and students," the state of Vermont says in its technology plan. "Both pre-service preparation of teachers and in-service activities have not provided consistent opportunities to learn to use information technology in general and in curriculum areas."
States haven't found any silver bullet to solve the training problem, but they are investing substantially in search of answers. Illinois, for instance, maintains seven regional learning technology hubs. Each hub has full-time staff who provide technical assistance and training, curriculum ideas, technology development plans, and more. As teachers and school officials have become more knowledgeable about technology, the hubs have been able to concentrate on tougher issues such as curriculum development.
"Initially, the hubs were providing a great deal of instruction on the basics of the Internet and technology," says Ricardo Tostado, Illinois Board of Education staffer. "Now, enough teachers and administrators have been trained so that the hubs can let superintendents take over this initial training and focus on more advanced applications of technology."
Along with the federal government, state and local officials are putting increased emphasis on the need for partnerships among different players in the education technology arena. The result has been some creative arrangements. In Clark County, Nevada, for instance, the public school system has forged an alliance with local community colleges. The colleges organize and administer computer systems for the public schools, and in exchange the schools let the colleges use their classrooms at night.
Similarly, Broward County, Florida, allows cellular telephone companies to build towers at the edge of school football fields in exchange for free wireless access to the Internet.
It isn't always easy to form partnerships, however, especially when they involve public sector institutions and private industry. "Some people have a fit when they see a business logo on a promotional brochure for a program," says Tostado. He argues that many businesses "just want to be associated with a good program so they can appear as good corporate citizens." But experiences with programs such as Whittle Communications' "Channel One," which brought advertiser-supported television news into classrooms, have raised serious concerns about commercialism in schools.
Telecommunications providers and computer companies are among the most generous contributors to the effort to wire schools for computer-based communications. That isn't surprising. Such giving is a no-lose proposition for them, an opportunity to embrace an issue that is unquestionably popular even as they prime what promises to be a very large new market. Still, a number of companies have demonstrated a commitment to more than just making short-term sales. They may not be totally selfless, but their approach is consistent with the views of many educators who believe that children won't benefit much from new technology if companies simply give away hardware or wires without also providing for support services, teacher training, and community building.
Pacific Telesis is one of the most aggressive corporate promoters of education technology. In 1994 Phil Quigley, the company's chief executive, launched the Education First program. Its goal: to connect 9,000 Californian schools and libraries by 2000. Pacific Telesis promises to provide each library or school with 100 students or more with up to four ISDN lines free of charge for one year; by March 1997 the program had supplied 4,800 lines. The company also gives computers, modems, and multimedia software to the schools and libraries at a special discount. The company's Pacific Bell subsidiary recently announced that it would provide 50 percent discounts on high-speed Internet access services to more than 9,000 schools, colleges, universities, and libraries.
Pacific Telesis also has helped develop curriculums and resources for teachers interested in using the Internet. Pacific Bell has provided funds for three fellowships at San Diego State University's Department of Educational Technology. The fellows are creating Internet and videoconferencing applications, projects, resources, and lesson plans, including the two China "web quests" featured earlier in this report.
IBM also takes a comprehensive approach, encouraging schools to use the technology it provides to fundamentally restructure themselves. The company's Reinventing Education program provides grants to 10 school districts that commit themselves to using technology as part of an effort to achieve systemic reform. IBM provides the schools with both hardware and software, guarantees them substantial technical assistance, and trains teachers. In exchange, schools must agree to put up some of their own resources.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, IBM is working with schools to build a computer network over which parents will be able to gain access to their children's homework assignments or communicate with teachers. In Chicago it is supporting the creation of an online collection of science and math resources. In Vermont it is backing the development of software for portfolio assessment of students.
IBM emphasizes the importance of teacher involvement in technology planning. "The goal of these partnerships is not to deliver a simple list of equipment, but instead, to join with educators and help them figure out how technology can solve existing problems or even lead to entirely new approaches to traditional school operations," the company says.
Microsoft says its education projects are designed to help create a "connected learning community"--among other things, by encouraging better communication among parents, students, and teachers with email and the Internet. The company provides free software for communication between parents and schools to any school that buys an NT Server 4.0 package. It provides computers and training to teachers and supports the development of online resources and collaborative projects through Libraries Online! and the Global SchoolNet Foundation.
Few companies have invested more in education technology than AT&T, which has pledged $150 million for the effort. Its Learning Network, created in October 1995, provides 100 schools with five months of free unlimited Internet access via AT&T's World Net service. In addition, the schools receive three months of free voicemail service and two years of wireless phone service on school grounds. After the initial free period, the schools receive discounted service. AT&T also plans to offer online mentors to schools.
The second part of the Learning Network is called Learning Points. In this program any AT&T customer can sign up and receive five "learning points" for every dollar they spend on their AT&T phone bill. These points can be donated to the registered school of the donor's choice to be used toward the purchase of computer hardware and software, including many programs and resources offered by Scholastic, Inc.
A number of companies have demonstrated a commitment to more than just making short-term sales. They may not be totally selfless, but their approach is consistent with the views of many educators who believe that children won't benefit much from new technology if companies simply give away hardware or wires without also providing for support services, teacher training, and community building.
Other companies are also moving beyond the industry's traditional emphasis on simply providing hardware to schools. Netscape, for instance, encourages development of online resources for schools by sponsoring, among other things, "K-12 World," whose website provides information and links dealing with subjects as varied as virtual libraries, technology planning, and curriculum assistance.
More conventional, though significant, corporate efforts include work by Bell Atlantic to wire the town of Blacksburg, Virginia, or a demonstration project in which Cox Communications of San Diego, California, provides a two-way interactive fiber-optic link allowing videoconferencing between Clear View Elementary School in Chula Vista and San Diego State University.
But analysts say today's students need human capital, more than hardware, from businesses. "Businesses and other organizations in the community have what schools to date largely lack--a concrete set of purposes that would make a difference in people's lives, a set of tasks requiring experienced and skilled individuals for accomplishing them, the human and material resources for getting those tasks accomplished, and a skilled managerial staff for orchestrating that human activity," notes Henry Jay Becker, an education professor at the University of California at Irvine and a leading analyst of the role of technology in schools. "What schools need from businesses and community organizations--more than modest financial donations or contributions of used equipment--is their meaningful activity systems and their managerial talent."
Becker is referring to various mentoring arrangements, school-to-work programs, apprenticeships, and other programs through which businesses can help students draw closer connections between what goes on in the classroom and the "real life" of the workplace. He cites, for instance, the Cocoa High Academy of Aerospace Technology in Florida, a career program in which students at a Florida high school combine class work with experience as apprentices and interns in the aerospace industry. The program has eliminated traditional classes. Instead, students work in teams of five. Each team has one computer workstation. Teachers help the teams integrate their academic studies with the real-life experience in the workplace. More conventionally, Hewlett-Packard encourages its employees to participate in mentoring programs using email.
"What schools need from businesses and community organizations--more than modest financial donations or contributions of used equipment--is their meaningful activity systems and their managerial talent."
--Henry Jay Becker, education professor, University of California
As these examples indicate, schools need everything from hardware to technical assistance to help with teacher training and curriculum. It is difficult for any one company to meet all these needs. But a group of companies have joined an unusually elaborate partnership with nonprofit groups to help students in Washington, D.C. BTG, Inc., a Vienna, Virginia, information technology company, agreed to donate and install computer equipment at Ballou High School in the District. Bell Atlantic and Potomac Electric Power Company said that they would upgrade the school's electrical circuits and telephone connections. Novell, Inc., an Orem, Utah, company, said that it would provide computer networking software and other teaching and student materials. Novell also offered to let students take its standard exam to be certified as computer network administrators. And both BTG and Electronic Data Systems Corp. pledged to hire graduates who complete the program.
The project, which was organized by former IBM employee Archie Prioleau and backed by a grant from the Commerce Department's Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program (TIIAP), has attracted considerable support. Now, armed with a grant from the Fannie Mae Foundation and other donations, Prioleau's Foundation for Educational Innovation is working with some 40 business, community, and government officials, including Federal Reserve vice chair Alice M. Rivlin, to establish technology training courses and computer networks in other schools and community organizations in the nation's capital.
Prioleau told the Washington Post in late May that installing the technology is the easy part of the project. The hard part involves designing courses that will make high school students employable and persuading school officials and teachers to embrace the programs. "If this becomes just a hardware program, we've failed," Prioleau said.
While government and corporate school-technology programs have recently started edging away from a traditional emphasis on hardware, the nonprofit sector has long emphasized issues such as the need for quality educational materials, professional development, and integration of technology with educational programs.
Nonprofits hold a rich store of information that could be useful in classrooms, and new communications technologies are giving them an unprecedented opportunity--and responsibility--to make their research, analyses, and databases available to a new generation of learners. "In an information society," says Robert Loeb, president of the Telecommunications Cooperative Network, "nonprofits produce what everybody wants."
The National Audubon Society, for example, has repackaged much of its information for schools. It recently created "Audubon Adventures," a packet that includes a CD-ROM, books, videos, and a teachers' resource manual. Another CD-ROM available from Audubon is "Paul Parkranger and the Mystery of the Disappearing Ducks," which examines issues involving wetlands.
The Franklin Institute, a Philadelphia science museum that emphasizes kids' learning, devotes an entire section of its website to resources teachers can use to enhance their science curriculum. Visitors to the website can learn, for instance, how to teach a course on wind. Critical thinking and inquiry-based methods of learning are emphasized, and a background section includes an online photo gallery, a page of other Internet wind resources, tips for how to introduce a class to the subject, and lists of "windy stories."
The National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., offers teaching guides and lesson plans at its website built around the museum's exhibits. And San Francisco's Exploratorium, which specializes in science, art, and human perception, offers kids an online look at one of its most popular demonstrations--the dissection of a cow's eye.
Information can flow both ways, of course. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has a section on its website called "You're the Expert." Visitors are asked to pretend that they work at the museum. They then have to make various decisions about exhibitions, such as how to light a sculpture or what name to give a new exhibit. This gives visitors a behind-the-scenes understanding of the museum, and helps the museum get a better sense of what interests people.
Pacific Bell's Education First program helps nonprofit organizations make information that they have collected available to students--and, with the help of students, to the public at large. In a project called Nonprofit Prophets, students investigate community or global problems that concern them and create web pages that explain the extent of the problems, how they started, and what people can do to help. Aimed at ninth and tenth graders, the project helps students connect with adult researchers and experts from around California and with local nonprofit groups. Students have contributed to such projects as the Rainforest Action Network, Sperm Whale Project, and Animal Rights Resource Site.
Because of their strong community ties and history of social services, nonprofits also can serve students in a more active way. A growing number of schools require students to perform community service, and nonprofits are well positioned to organize such real-life learning experiences. The International Education and Resource Network (I*EARN) has helped organize a number of educational projects that enlist students in community service efforts. For instance, students participating in a collaborative investigation of how land clearing and development affect natural water flow have been working with the Global Rivers Environmental Education Network (GREEN)to make some of the research results available to the public. I*EARN also collaborates with the Red Cross on community service projects dealing with disaster relief, HIV/AIDS education and prevention, and environmental awareness.
Nonprofit organizations also have substantial experience with training and professional development. The Washington-based McGuffey Project recently assumed the lead role in organizing the Twenty-first Century Teachers initiative, in which such major education organizations as the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are seeking to encourage more networking among teachers. McGuffey is developing a website and plans to arrange opportunities for teachers to share ideas about the use of technology in schools.
In a similar vein, the Rockefeller Foundation has created the Learning Communities Network to improve professional development for teachers. Recognizing that the quality of a student's learning is directly connected to the quality of a teacher's teaching, the two-year old project works with four school districts to develop resources and services aimed at improving teacher training. It maintains a website that serves as a networking opportunity for participants as well as a means of disseminating the resources that are developed. "Our hope is that the strategies developed by each of these sites will become models for other districts," says Marla Ucelli, associate director of Rockefeller's Equal Opportunity division.
Ucelli is also co-chair of Grantmakers in Education (GIE), a group of foundations that support education. GIE has a technology subgroup that, among other things, educates other foundations on technology issues. This group is composed mostly of corporate foundations from the technology industry.
One of these, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, is supporting efforts to create a National Education Telecommunications and Technology Information and Resource Center, which will help states, regional agencies, and school districts implement the universal service components of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The center will help match available equipment and services to local needs, negotiate with vendors, integrate new purchases with daily routines, provide related professional development, and interconnect with other learning environments.
"While state and local education agencies are doing much to plan and implement technology and telecommunications at the local level, they report having difficulty finding out about and integrating these new federal resources into the local efforts," says a report put out by Packard. "In the absence of a national program or National Education Telecommunications and Technology Information and Resource Center . . . many education and library agencies will not have the necessary information and support to assist local schools and districts. The result could be that important national programs and initiatives designed to benefit teachers and learners are not implemented and consequently misconstrued by the Congress as unnecessary."
Another important set of players in the school technology drama demonstrates that teaching kids isn't the responsibility of schools alone. In a number of places community technology centers are helping people in predominantly low-income neighborhoods gain access to the new information networks. In some cases these centers are helping schools introduce children to information technologies. And because they are grassroots organizations, they are serving as models for how schools can excite children, engage adults, and involve entire communities in networking.
In Los Angeles, for example, Break Away Technologies serves a wide range of community members. Each weekday between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. about 400 elementary school students from the West Angeles Christian Academy come to the center for workshops. Each afternoon between 75 and 100 teens come to the center for classes or just to surf the Internet. A teen development group, Rites of Passage, also comes in for classes. And on Saturdays, Break Away offers classes for adults.
Joseph Loeb, Break Away's founder, says the center seeks to make students "visible examples of leadership in the community." While computers aren't essential to achieving that goal, they do attract kids, and exposure to technology helps prepare youth for the labor market, according to Loeb. "If someone is computer literate and well mannered, then he or she can go anywhere and be comfortable," says Loeb.
Plugged In, a technology center in East Palo Alto, California, offers 30 different classes ranging from beginning Macintosh to desktop publishing, web page design, and virtual cross-country trips. It operates a for-profit arm, Plugged In Enterprises, that has four main branches: a community drop-in center for people who need help with everything from writing resumes to designing flyers, a design group that creates web pages for local businesses, a division that monitors a teen channel on American Online, and a division that develops multimedia applications and programs. Plugged-In Enterprises is run primarily by teens from the community who are paid from $7.50 to $15 an hour.
Some 200 computer-access centers like Break Away and Plugged In belong to the Community Technology Centers' Network. CTCNet says its member organizations are committed to developing a society in which each member is "equitably empowered by technology skills and usage."
| Intro | High hopes | Agenda | What's going on | Schools & communities
Last updated: 21 July 1997 jss
http://www.benton.org/Library/Schools/three.html