No One Ever Learned From a Free Laptop

Several years ago, giving away laptop computers to high-school and younger students was all the rage. The economist and former Harvard President Lawrence Summers once said that no one in history ever washed a rented car, and it turns out that people don’t get much use from or take very good care of laptops that they get for free. Alas, for that and other reasons, the big laptop giveaway seems not to have worked out as planned. The New York Times has the scoop:

The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.
So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

The output of education depends on numerous inputs, some of which schools can provide and some of which must be provided outside the school. The inputs that come from the school – lower student/teacher ratios, free laptops, whatever – can be substitutes or complements for the inputs that come from outside the school – parental emphasis on education, neighborhood norms that reinforce or stigmatize learning, etc. They are assumed to be complements, and I think this is reasonable. However, the degree of complementarity is probably very small.

An acquaintance of mine who does research on public-school performance once said that 90% of what public schools turn out depends on what goes on in the home. Shattered family structure, lots of television, parents who themselves do not value education much and thus expect the school to do all the teaching – no amount of “school reform” or computer giveaway or increased funding will make up for this. I suspect that if we account for such problems, there are probably a lot of proposed education policies for which there is “literally no evidence it [has] any impact on student achievement.”