Laptop turf war

I wrote earlier about the NY Times story: Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops.

But it seems that NY Times reporter Winnie Hu may have missed the real story about the Liverpool High School decision to discontinue 1:1 laptops.

The real story is one of political of intrigue and infighting. It seems that a major power struggle and was raging behind the scenes. The story is not one about students and learning but about adults and political control.

The details of this turf battle appear in the summary remarks of the detailed 171 page evaluation of the program by Kenneth R. Stevenson that was published in January 2004.

The program was doomed from the start; the laptops were pawns in the power struggle:

At the school: “If the superintendant…isn’t willing to put control of the Laptop Program at the school-level the laptop program will not continue at this school.”

And

“The frustration is not with the technology (laptops), but with the administration of the program outside the school.”

Versus

At the District: “Schools often have to be pushed to accept new things…”

In his report Stevenson admonishes the adults for their failure to focus on students. The summary outlines how the program was sabotaged by passive, and not so passive, resistance to top-down decision making from outside the school. The laptops became the pawn in a turf war and teachers were drawn into the power struggle.

“As one student related in an interview – ‘one of my teachers told me not to bring my laptop to class. We weren’t going to use them and they’d just be in the way.”

Meanwhile – the good news in the midst of all this adult misbehavior is that according to the evaluation student attendance, behavior and test scores did not suffer.

Hu quotes Mark Warschauer, an education professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of “Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom” (Teachers College Press, 2006) as saying, “Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research…”

Innovation? Creativity? Autonomy? Independent research?

In school? For learners of all ages?

Sounds OK to me.