.6 Technology, Finances, and Guidelines

We also need experimental technologies: everything from Internet to PowerPoint presentations to computer generated images to video and self-instructional materials. One of the issues is the fact that schools have not even got their budget together to buy the technology. Let me tell you the story about Ruffner, which is the technology school in Norfolk. It is a middle school that is very technologically oriented. When it opened three or four years ago, it was really state of the art in terms of all the new technology. The teachers went there and they didn't know what to do with all this technology, so maybe ten percent of the technology was used. The other ninety percent just sort of sat there and collected dust. Meantime, we've been kind of training the teachers and teaching them how to deal with the technology. Teachers, they're smart, able and competent people, they just didn't have a clue about the technology, so it took awhile and they are now getting organized. Guess what? The technology in Ruffner School is now hopelessly outmoded. So the Norfolk public schools had a choice. Notice this ugly choice. They could either upgrade the technology at Ruffner, which was now obsolete, or they could put the first round of technology at a place like Lake Taylor which has no technology. So which is better? Let your whizzy-bang school become obsolete, or bring another school on-line a little bit. The choice was made to upgrade the technology at Ruffner. I happen to think that was a good choice because someone somewhere has to learn what it's going to take to keep schools up-to-date with technology. It means that after you've had this huge investment in technology, you have to expend about thirty percent a year of that huge amount to keep the technology up-to-date. Anything else is unrealistic. I would rather have Ruffner become a model including upgrading their technology regularly and letting some folks get some notion of what is involved to make something like that work, even though in the meantime you have Lake Taylor sitting over there that doesn't have a clue in terms of any technology. This is one of the reasons we need experimental schools to show the way, and this is why when you get an experimental school like Ruffner in a school system like Norfolk.

Let's look at the cost of the experimental school system. I estimate to finance one percent of the schools in the country it would be about a billion dollars a year for direct support and administration. A billion dollars a year really isn't much in the grand scheme of things. Another billion dollars would allow us to develop experimental curriculum. The first billion is for things like the buses to take people to other schools if they need it, to actually give the schools that parallel staff, and to work with the development, experimentation and evaluation things. That's the first billion. The second billion dollars is to develop a national curriculum, a new curriculum in whole language learning or a new curriculum in global studies or whatever. Then a third billion dollars for the application
of educational technology. What kind of experimental school system would we have if they couldn't model the kind of technology that we would like to have in all the schools over time? Three or four billion dollars a year would be the cost of this kind of national experimental school system. It would be well worth it.

Now what kind of guidelines? Well, I'd like these schools to have a minimum of a twenty year mandate. The reason for that is one of the problems with experimentation in the past has been that anytime the wind blows, someone gets mad at the experiment and pulls the plug so you never learn anything. However, if you have a twenty year mandate and the experimental school has a really lousy program that no one likes so all the parents in the experimental school system send their kids to the paired schools, then they'd have to build new facilities over in the paired school. Fair enough. Do whatever it takes, but the experimental school will go on even if nobody is home, and we are going to pay to do that because we want to make sure that there is continuity in the experimentation. But that
would be an absolute extreme. Now I am not expecting to give an experiment and have nobody participate, but in the extreme I'd rather pay for that and let the experiment go on than pull the plug even if it is a bad experiment because sometimes it is not a matter of being a bad experiment it is just temporarily in hard times. We would have the local and state financial support continued at the same level. We'd have the experimental costs born by the experimental school system. We'd have the local and national experimental school boards for governance. So in other words, you'd have a national school board to direct the national experimentation and the local experimental school board to run the local experimentation.

	Discuss the estimated costs of an experimental school system. Explain what the money would be used for.	Answer Here
	Mrs. Andrews teaches English in a school that has recently decided to go with an experimental curriculum. Considering the costs of doing so, Mrs. Andrews decides that as part of this new curriculum she would like to amend the reading lists for her department's classes. What sort of costs and guidelines should be set for this change in the curriculum?	Answer Here