This week begins a new year for students here in our overly-large school district.¹ And for the first time, all high school students will be given a laptop to use in an initiative being called FCPSOn.

But, beyond the basics like how much money is being spent,² it’s not at all clear how this project will improve student learning. Spokespeople like the assistant superintendent will tell you that “equipping students with laptops is not about boosting standardized test scores” and that the devices will help kids “develop skills such as critical thinking, collaboration and communication”.On the other hand, the writer of the Post article correctly notes that “[R]esearch examining the effects of classroom laptop use on student achievement is mixed”, although she also doesn’t explain that elusive term “student achievement”. At the risk of being a little cynical, I’m pretty sure it has something to do with those standardized test scores.

However, this is not the first 1-1 initiative undertaken in FCPS, and I do have a little history with projects like this.

During my long involvement with instructional technology in the district, I’ve seen and worked with three major programs that attempted to incorporate personal devices into the classroom. Plus at least a dozen smaller efforts, going back to the mid-90’s when the principal of an elementary school I worked with scrapped together enough funds to give Apple Powerbooks to her 5th and 6th graders.

That particular program fell apart a few years later when she retired and the new principal decided to use the money earmarked for expansion and replacement in other ways.

While those efforts, and 1-1 programs in other districts, failed for a variety of reasons, money is the one most often cited. Paying to give a computer to every student, even in a single school, plus budgeting for support and long term replacement, is not cheap. Especially if administrators and teachers are not willing to give up something else in exchange.

But it’s not really about the cost anyway, is it? For as long as I’ve been working in the education business, we’ve managed to find the money to put flashy new technology into schools. Giving a laptop to every student is part of the history that has included computer labs (in which there is no experimentation), interactive whiteboards (that very few kids interacted with), and connecting classrooms to the internet (which is then heavily censored “filtered”).

The devices are new every few years, but we never seem to actually change the learning process to take full advantage of those devices, software, and networks.

If every student has a computing device connected to the world, do we still need the same formal textbooks used for generations? (Shouldn’t kids be learning how to evaluate information, more than just collecting it?)

Will students still be doing the same work, completing the same assignments, writing the same “research” papers, as their non-computer using parents did during their time in school? (And very possibly the same as their grandparents.)

Are we going to assess student progress using the same standards and tools? (You can say it’s not about standardized tests but in Virginia, the SOLs, the state Standards of Learning³ assessments, hover above everything like the spaceships in Independence Day).

Do students need to be physically present in a building, grouped by age, for a set amount of time for learning to take place? (I thought technology was going to enable a flexible, personal approach.)

Since I’m not in the middle of all this anymore, I don’t know the details of this latest project or about any internal efforts to create meaningful change. I certainly wish them well, especially since I have many friends and former colleagues working hard to make it a success.

I just wonder whether the latest version of a 1-1 project in the overly-large school district is aiming high enough in it’s goals. Going far beyond simply mixing technology into the traditional school structure, just as we’ve been doing for decades.

The image is of a computer lab in a school I used to work, circa 2010 (not that long ago in the scheme of things). I always found it puzzling that you would create a fixed space using computing devices that were designed to be easily moved.

1. Also known as Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), supposedly the 10th largest system in the country. And it seems to be getting even more overly-large.

2. The article says the “five-year rollout” will cost $30 million, although I doubt that number includes the cost of technical support, software, and the likely too-small amount being spent on teacher support and training.

3. We’re all well aware of another popular meaning for the acronym SOL. I wonder if the people who originally selected that name now wish they had thought it through a little more. :-)