Will the rich get smarter while the poor play videogames?
Students in dirt-poor Hancock County, Ga., have always had to make do with less. They have no art teachers, no speech therapists and no full-time physical education program in the elementary schools.
One thing they do have is computers. A pair of Apple II Plus micros was delivered to the high school two years ago, gifts of the Southeastern Consortium for Minorities in Engineering, a group of 22 colleges and universities that helps predominantly black high schools. This fall, impressed with what the new machines were doing for their students, county officials sprang for six more. "If we hadn't gotten the first two for free," says Superintendent M.E. Lewis, "we wouldn't have any at all."
Hancock County, deep in the cotton belt, is a lucky exception to a disturbing modernization of an old saw: the rich are getting a richer dose of the new technology, while the poor get left further behind. Computers are starting to appear in schools in large numbers. The total, which more than doubled in the past year, is approaching 130,000, or an average of 1.6 classroom computers for each of the nation's 82,000 public schools. But the number of machines available to each school varies widely. A survey by Market Data Retrieval Inc. found that 80% of the country's 2,000 largest and richest public high schools now have at least one micro, while 60% of the 2,000 poorest schools have none. Says Market Data President Herbert Lobsenz: "If computers are the wave of the future, a lot of America is being washed out."
In Menominee (pop. 10,000), a manufacturing town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, 2,400 high school students must share just three Apple computers. Downstate in Ovid, teachers at the town's elementary school had to hook their only computer to a television set because they could not afford the standard video monitor. "We have a sense of panic," says Principal Tom Van Deventer. "A year ago, a computer was a luxury. Now it is a necessity." But there are competing necessities. In New Orleans, where fewer than 7% of the schools have computer classes, one school district administrator contends, "Kids here need a lot of other things. They need counselors, basic textbooks, a bathroom that works."
Even when poor rural and inner-city schools elect to spend their limited funds on computers, the teachers are often inadequately prepared. Pressured to improve basic skills quickly, they take the most direct route, using computers as electronic flash cards for simple drill and practice. By contrast, specially trained teachers at more sophisticated schools are introducing ever younger children to the art of programming. In Georgia's affluent De Kalb County, 445 teachers a year take four-hour instruction sessions one night a week. Says Frank Barber, the training coordinator: "We believe the nicest thing that can happen to a child is to have a teacher who really understands what computers can do."