Articles
Laptops of the World
In inner-city Philadelphia, a pilot program is arming its high schoolers with laptops. But in countries like Norway-and increasingly in the developing world-that's the norm. Why is the United States so behind? And is it worth it to play catch-up? "You can learn so much from the bathrooms," muses Bing..
03.10.09
In inner-city Philadelphia, a pilot program is arming its high schoolers with laptops. But in countries like Norway-and increasingly in the developing world-that's the norm. Why is the United States so behind? And is it worth it to play catch-up?
Skeptics might suspect the school is just an elaborate PR stunt-arguing the company contributes expertise not outright funding, and that home office's accounting means some years it pays no federal income tax at all, a key source of funding for public schools-but the company didn't take the easy route in creating the School of the Future. Initially, it considered building the school on its corporate campus in a wealthy suburb of Seattle but ended up collaborating with then-Philadelphia schools superintendent Paul Vallas to build in the high-poverty area of Philadelphia. And the School of the Future isn't a magnet school, plucking the plumest students from a city of one and a half million."The thinking in Philadelphia, with the decision to do a neighborhood school not a magnet school, was to try to find a way this could be replicated," says Stacey Rainey, an academic program manager for Microsoft. "If you put it in an affluent neighborhood and choose the best 10 percent of the kids, that's pretty easy. We wanted to create a new model for education. If we can be successful with the kids who live in West Philadelphia, that's a pretty strong statement."Admissions to the School of the Future is purely by lottery. (Parents or legal guardians must enter their children if they want a shot.) Three-quarters of the students must live in West Philadelphia-a largely poor section of the city with a few pockets of affluence-the rest from the remainder of the city. The students at the school are almost exclusively poor and black. Though there is some diversity within the black student body-a significant minority are immigrants or the children of immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean-there is only one white student and one Latina at the school. Ninety-eight percent of the students qualify for free breakfast and lunch, so many that the cafeteria is entirely cashless. It would be more trouble than it's worth to charge the 2 percent of non-poor students for meals.Opened three years ago, the school has added a class of new freshman each year. It now has juniors, sophomores, and freshman; next year it will have a full four years of students. It is too soon to have any hard data on whether the school is successful but preliminary indications are good. In a district where fewer than 60 percent of students graduate, in three years the School of the Future has yet to have a dropout.
In the world's largest economy and leading technological innovator, the laptops-in-schools concept is still rare.Of course, the one-laptop-per-child concept is not unique to the School of the Future. The eponymous American nonprofit has famously distributed thousands of low-cost laptops everywhere from Peru to Cambodia. What is notable is that in the world's largest economy and leading technological innovator, the concept is still so rare. America, after all, is the country that invented the computer. (ENIAC, arguably the first true computer, was built just a few miles from the School of the Future, at the University of Pennsylvania.) But while the United States integrates computers on the patchwork, pilot-program model of developing countries like Peru, many of our economic peers-especially in technophilic Scandinavia-are embracing them as universal, an essential part of 21st century education. As an American high school student might ask: What's up with that?
Skeptics might suspect the school is just an elaborate PR stunt-arguing the company contributes expertise not outright funding, and that home office's accounting means some years it pays no federal income tax at all, a key source of funding for public schools-but the company didn't take the easy route in creating the School of the Future. Initially, it considered building the school on its corporate campus in a wealthy suburb of Seattle but ended up collaborating with then-Philadelphia schools superintendent Paul Vallas to build in the high-poverty area of Philadelphia. And the School of the Future isn't a magnet school, plucking the plumest students from a city of one and a half million."The thinking in Philadelphia, with the decision to do a neighborhood school not a magnet school, was to try to find a way this could be replicated," says Stacey Rainey, an academic program manager for Microsoft. "If you put it in an affluent neighborhood and choose the best 10 percent of the kids, that's pretty easy. We wanted to create a new model for education. If we can be successful with the kids who live in West Philadelphia, that's a pretty strong statement."Admissions to the School of the Future is purely by lottery. (Parents or legal guardians must enter their children if they want a shot.) Three-quarters of the students must live in West Philadelphia-a largely poor section of the city with a few pockets of affluence-the rest from the remainder of the city. The students at the school are almost exclusively poor and black. Though there is some diversity within the black student body-a significant minority are immigrants or the children of immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean-there is only one white student and one Latina at the school. Ninety-eight percent of the students qualify for free breakfast and lunch, so many that the cafeteria is entirely cashless. It would be more trouble than it's worth to charge the 2 percent of non-poor students for meals.Opened three years ago, the school has added a class of new freshman each year. It now has juniors, sophomores, and freshman; next year it will have a full four years of students. It is too soon to have any hard data on whether the school is successful but preliminary indications are good. In a district where fewer than 60 percent of students graduate, in three years the School of the Future has yet to have a dropout.
Even if it is successful, is the School of the Future truly the pilot program it claims to be?With its international reputation, the school has attracted a corps of young teachers excited about technology and education. When the school hires teachers-or even a new principal-students take part in the interview process. Interdisciplinary learning and team teaching are standard operating procedure.But even if it is successful, is the School of the Future truly the pilot program it claims to be? The school is clearly acting as a magnet school for teachers if not students and the building came in $15 million over-budget. "I'm not a fan of spending $62 million on one school," Temple's Ketelhut says. "There's an equity issue. It's one thing if it's a pilot and if it works we'll do it elsewhere. But is there money to do it elsewhere?"Even Tony Franklin admits that given the budget constraints of inner-city education, "a one-to-one laptop program in every school in the district is not realistic."