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South Carolina To Give 1 Laptop Per School Child
ruphus13 sends in an OStatic article outlining the plans of the state of South Carolina, inspired by the One Laptop Per Child project, to provide laptops to local elementary school children. "The South Carolina Department of Education and the non-profit Palmetto Project have teamed up to get a laptop in the hands of every elementary school student in South Carolina... The OLPC/SC hopes to distribute as many as 50,000 laptops this spring to eligible students. The effort is underwritten and managed by the Palmetto Project, whose mission is to 'put new and creative ideas to work in South Carolina.' While low-performing school districts with limited resources are a special focus for the OLPC/SC, the group is adamant on one point: There are no free laptops. In order to receive a laptop, children need to give a small monetary donation — the project coordinators say a dollar or two is sufficient."It's not obvious from browsing around the OLPC/SC site what software the XO laptops will be running; but by following links one gets the impression that they will be powered by Linux, not XP.
Most of the teachers suck at what they do, and in poor places like South Carolina there are many parents who discourage their kids from being successful. Case in point, when we lived there, my mom tutored a kid at my school. You know what happened when he got an A on a test? His piece of shit excuse for human trash mother said to him "you actin' white now?" Technology is no solution for bad schools and students with parents who pull them down because they have ego or race problems (both apply in the case of the black mother who ridiculed the kid my white mother was trying to help succeed).
There is so little incentive now to get an education AND for schools to compete to hire people who have an education in something more than "education." Throwing around millions of dollars to buy laptops for kids who can barely read is more likely to have the state subsidizing the gaming, movie and porn industries than actually teaching these kids anything.
And here's the thing. People will crawl out of the woodwork in most cases to attack comments like mine about how I'm unfairly judging the public schools or am a closet racist for saying such harsh things about that black bitch who tore her poor son down everytime he succeeded. It's easier to make excuses for why the public schools are failing and why parents, especially poor parents, are often roadblocks to their kids' success than to start making hamburger out of the sacred cows and fixing the problem by introducing more competition and making an education more critical to just being able to get by in America.
Human psychology is rather quirky in its relation to perceived value. Homo Economicus' valuation of things might exactly match their monetary value; but humans exhibit significant discontinuities at the boundary between free/given and paid for/owned. Even minimal buy-in(though a few bucks, for a child in a low-income/underperforming SC school district may well not feel minimal) will likely substantially increase care for the laptops.
You see the same phenomenon elsewhere: People are often willing to do volunteer work for a wage of zero dollars; but would refuse to do the same work for an insultingly low wage, even though, theoretically, if you are willing to do something for $0/hour, you should be more willing to do it for $1/hour. A similar effect is seen with cash vs. non cash transactions. It is easy to get friends/students/volunteers to do things in exchange for, say, pizza, that they wouldn't be motivated to do in exchange for the value of the pizza given to them in cash.
My wife teachers here in SC, 3rd grade. I PRAY they don't try to incliude these things in lessons in any way!!! A BEST these would be forced into convoluded lesson plans. The applications ("activities") available on the XO are not really classroom usable. Sure, it can access Wikipedia, but that's not exactly something we need to be doing in a classroom when they typically already do that in the computer lab. These also don't run true Linux or Windows without being hacked, so using them to connect and interact with the smartboards, run applications the school curriculum teaches to, heck even using a traditional word processor is not viable.
What we're really doing here is simply giving each of these kids a basic educational toy. It;s somthing they can play with to learn on their own outside of the classroom, and to interact with other kids. They have very little interactive classroom value.
Also, advanced kids will hack them, so having them fully able to do what a teacher wants when they plan a lesson is questionable at best.
It's GREAT that they're giving these things to kids, but if the SC school board thinks they can use this as a marketing springbourd, and ask teachers to 1) learn a new OS, 2) learn the associated apps, 3) update their lesson plans to accomodate these systems (In SC each teacher writes their own plans, nothing is provided by the district or state, it's a MASSIVE amount of work!), then they're going to have a lot of teachers quit on them, or damand compensation or assistance.
The school system can NOT afford ANY increased costs. They've already lost (thank to our asshole govornor) $250 million in assistance funds, and have on top of that experinced budget cuts that care eliminating nearly all special programs, dramatically cutting field trips, and cutting 3,000 teachers. As it is, teachers are expect to buy THEIR OWN classroom supplies (glue, paper, consumables for science expereiments, etc) My wife is limited to 100 pieces of printed paper per week, but is required by state regulations to hand out nearly tripple that amount in required tests, quizzes, handouts, and communications. We go through a printer about once a year simply wearing it out. We go thorugh 300-400 pages a week printing at home, and several hundred dollar in ink anually. We do NOT get compensated for that. ($250 a year total compensation, for 2008 I have receipts for $1700 in classroom expenses we filed on ourt taxes). If they're THAT tight, how do they expect to afford the infrastructure and man power including these systems will require.
Thanks for giving me something for free that will cost me more money than not having it...
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I know of a blind boy, who suddenly lost his sight at age 14. The state (social services department, I think) gave him a special mobile phone -- full voice navigation through menus, it read out text messages etc. A couple of days later and he complains to one of his teachers that his mum has sold it. How many parents are so mean that they'd take their blind son's special phone? (And they weren't so poor that they needed the money.)