The Brack Report

By Andy Brack

Imagine a tool that could radically change the way students learn and open floodgates of opportunity, particularly for students in rural areas who don’t have access to the variety of coursework available in richer school districts.

This tool is readily available. It is the laptop computer.

Imagine what would happen if every South Carolina middle school student had one to use for a year or two.

That isn’t as far-fetched as it may first sound. In 2002, Maine Gov. Angus King spearheaded a pioneering one-to-one learning program that provided a notebook computer to every seventh- and eighth-grade student in his state. For $37 million, the state bought 34,000 laptops.

In the years since, the program has been an unqualified success, according to a variety of reports.

Students say they are more organized, efficient and interested in their work. Teachers say students are more engaged in learning and are developing more sophisticated thinking skills.

Teachers also say, because laptops allow students to explore the Internet, they are actually able to have more individual contact with students. Administrators say they see less absenteeism and fewer disciplinary problems.

Having a laptop in South Carolina classrooms isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Based on Maine’s cost of $1,088 per laptop, South Carolina would have to spend about $61 million to get a laptop for the state’s 56,160 seventh-graders.

To do it across two grade levels for every student in the state’s public schools would cost about $120 million. (Good news: Researchers at MIT say the cost of a bare-bones laptop soon could drop to $100, which would mean the cost to outfit every seventh- and eighth-grader in S.C. would drop to $12 million.)

If either figure is too big of a chunk, the state could conduct a pilot program targeted to schools in the 13 districts that are underperforming or below average. These districts provide schooling for 2,388 seventh-graders in 20 different middle schools.

Districts include Allendale, Bamberg 2, Clarendon 1, Fairfield, Florence 4, Hampton 2, Jasper, Lee, Lexington 4, McCormick, Marion 7, Marlboro and Orangeburg 3.

For students in these districts to get laptops in the seventh grade, the state would have to spend about $2.6 million, based on $1,088 per laptop.

But imagine how it would change education in those areas—places where students don’t have access to advanced courses or training available in wealthier school districts.

In short, laptops would revolutionize rural education.

In light of a pending school funding lawsuit brought by several of the school districts in the above list, buying a laptop for kids to use for a year or two in poor districts is a relatively inexpensive way to open up new worlds of possibilities and to equalize educational experiences.

But buying a laptop for seventh-graders in poor districts wouldn’t be all that would be required.

Teachers would have to be trained on how to integrate laptops into classrooms, and administrators would have to figure out new ways of doing business.

So let’s say that it might cost $4 million to buy the laptops and provide the training to help teachers explore new ways to teach in rural, below-average districts. That seems like a small price for the state to pay to fundamentally change the lives of kids who don’t have the same chance as others.

As one wag observed, classrooms don’t have a “classroom pencil” for kids to share these days. So a laptop per kid makes sense because it is an electronic tool they can use at any time.

State lawmakers should seriously consider investing in a laptop program as a way to improve education for all South Carolina students. But if the price tag is too much at the beginning, even though common sense and research say the program will work, then they should at least try it for students in neglected districts.

King, who started his state’s pioneering laptop program, says it is easy to tell it works.

“You cannot grasp the power of this idea until you go into one of these seventh-grade classrooms,” he said in a recent article published by Edutopia.org. “You can almost hear ‘Eureka!’”

Wouldn’t it be great if South Carolina had a governor who could say that?

Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the S.C. Statehouse Report (www.statehousereport.com), a forecast of business developments in the South Carolina Legislature and state government. E-mail him at brack@statehousereport.com.

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