Why Hoboken is Throwing Away All of its Student Laptops
Inside Hoboken’s combined junior-senior high school is a storage closet. Behind the locked door, some mothballed laptop computers are strewn among brown cardboard boxes. Others are stacked one atop another. Dozens more are stored on mobile computer carts, many of them on their last legs.
That’s all that remains from a failed experiment to assign every student a laptop at Hoboken Junior Senior High School. It began five years ago with an unexpected windfall of stimulus money from Washington, D.C., and good intentions to help the district’s students, the majority of whom are under or near the poverty line, keep up with their wealthier peers. But Hoboken faced problem after problem and is abandoning the laptops entirely this summer.
“We had the money to buy them, but maybe not the best implementation,” said Mark Toback, the current superintendent of Hoboken School District. “It became unsustainable.”
None of the school administrators who initiated Hoboken’s one-to-one laptop program still work there. Toback agreed to share Hoboken’s experiences so that other schools can learn from it.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnyc.org ...
Here's the executive summary:
Inside Hoboken’s combined junior-senior high school is a storage closet. Behind the locked door, some mothballed laptop computers are strewn among brown cardboard boxes. Others are stacked one atop another. Dozens more are stored on mobile computer carts, many of them on their last legs.
That’s all that remains from a failed experiment to assign every student a laptop at Hoboken Junior Senior High School. It began five years ago with an unexpected windfall of stimulus money from Washington, D.C., and good intentions to help the district’s students, the majority of whom are under or near the poverty line, keep up with their wealthier peers. But Hoboken faced problem after problem and is abandoning the laptops entirely this summer.
“We had the money to buy them, but maybe not the best implementation,” said Mark Toback, the current superintendent of Hoboken School District. “It became unsustainable.”
None of the school administrators who initiated Hoboken’s one-to-one laptop program still work there. Toback agreed to share Hoboken’s experiences so that other schools can learn from it.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnyc.org ...
Here's the executive summary:
- The students smashed the laptops.
- They got specially reinforced laptops, and the students smashed those too.
- The laptops were used to view pornography. When anti-porn software was installed, it caused the laptops to crash.
- The laptops were used to play on-line games. When anti-gaming software was installed, it caused the laptops to slow down and crash.
- The laptops were stolen. The administrator of the program had to spend time testifying in court in theft cases brought by the school district.
- The only teacher who would talk about something positive that he wanted to do with the student laptops (a math teacher) said that the laptops were so slow - due to all the anti-porn and anti-game software that had been installed - that the graphing calculator app he wanted to demonstrate wouldn't work.
- Every person involved with launching the program and implementing it has left the school district.
- Now it's going to cost money to throw away the laptops that are left.
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