Computers Meet Classroom: Classroom Wins

The question often generates swift objections. What about the $19.6 million Quince Orchard High School in Montgomery County (Maryland), where there are 288 computers for 1,100 students? Or the Juan Linn School in Victoria (Texas), where a computerized integrated learning system (ILS) provides instruction to 500 students and records daily their work? What about the thousands of elementary and secondary school teachers who have students work together on computers to write, tally figures, draw, and think? Are there not many experiments under way such as Apple's Classroom of Tomorrow, micro-computer laboratories, and exciting software that tutors students in academic subjects and skills? The answer to all of these questions is that such instances do exist but they are scattered and atypical among the 80,000-plus public schools across the nation, where over 2 million teachers teach over 40 million students.(n1)