Teaching with and about computers in secondary schools

3. While technology should not be a focus of our educational system, because it removes constraints of time and distance, and because it provides students and teachers with access to information and to tools for digesting, manipulating, and processing information, it is an essential e lement in any intelligent plan to restructure our schools. 4. Based on unpubl ished work by Gholson, 5 the total economic cost of school dropouts is as much as $300 billion per year. The cost of equipping every student in the U.S. with hardware, software, and welltrained, well-supported teachers is a comparatively modest $44 billion per year. As Gholson has said "We can pay now to improve our educational system, or we can pay later for its failures."