Sophie Howard, a third-grader at Lowell School, works on her Web page in the computer lab. • Education Review (Keith W. Jenkins) _____Education Review_____ • In the Beginning... (The Washington Post, Sep 16, 2001) • The Search for Intelligent Life Online (The Washington Post, Sep 16, 2001) • Not Your Father's Shop Class (The Washington Post, Sep 16, 2001) • Taking Classes To the Masses (The Washington Post, Sep 16, 2001) E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Version Subscribe to The Post

By Bob Thompson
Sunday, September 16, 2001; Page W18

The laptops have names like Snickers, Nelly, Fraggle, Goku and Blue Sister 2. They're encased in industrial-strength green plastic, the same kind that's used in the manufacture of football helmets. On this fine spring afternoon, they're sitting on a corner table in a classroom at Lowell School, an independent pre-primary and primary school in Washington near the border with Silver Spring, waiting for the fourth-graders to burst in and claim them for their own.

"Okay! This is what we're going to do today," says their teacher, Stephanie Heynderickx, a minute later, after the children have grabbed their machines and settled in. "I've been reading all of your book reviews, and the main goal today is to finish up revisions and editing."

Kim's way ahead of her. She's already got her Apple eMate open -- she's named it Tote 29 -- and is quietly tapping away at a new short story she's been writing. "I started one for a week and then I didn't like that one," she explains. So she started over.

Mokie is reviewing Stone Fox. Colin is working on Freedom Crossing. Sophie, like Kim, has finished her review and moved on to a short story. On the wall in front of them, a handmade poster lists the five steps of the writing process: rehearse, draft, revise, edit and publish.

Heynderickx interrupts them for a mini-lesson on putting book titles in italics. Who remembers how to do that on an eMate, she asks?

"Oh! Ooh! Ohhh!" A boy's arm waves frantically. "You have to do the whole little, when you hold it on there and then you . . . "

"You have to block."

"Yeah, block!"

A girl's hand goes up. "I just want to say something that it will help a lot of people to know," she volunteers. "Just hold the apple key down for maybe four seconds and a pop-up of shortcuts will appear."

"That's not a function I was familiar with," Heynderickx admits.

Over the next three hours or so, some of the children will still use pencils and paper to write with ("I'm not good at the touch-typing," one explains, "so I usually start with this and then the next draft I'll use the eMate"). Most, however, will go straight to their laptops, which they will manipulate with practiced ease. They will navigate the word-processing program by touching on-screen menus with a plastic stylus. They will type in corrections to the drafts that Heynderickx hands back. They will use infrared technology to "beam" their reviews to one another's machines -- no messy wiring required -- and then huddle together for peer editing sessions. Every now and then, someone will dart over to the printer, which will whir and hum and spit out a fresh draft.

To an adult observer, especially one who didn't interface with his first computer until the ripe old age of 32, it seems an astonishing display. But near the end of the afternoon -- as his classmates carefully pack up Snickers, Goku and company so they can continue their work at home -- an especially computer-literate fourth-grader named Grenville puts what I've seen in its proper perspective.

An eMate is just an "oversized PalmPilot," he says. At Lowell, you don't get your real computer until fifth grade.

For at least a decade now, it has been impossible to discuss the subject of education -- even at the elementary school level -- without reference to the potentially transforming power of computers.

To the most computer-friendly educators, the machines are nothing short of pedagogical miracle workers, heaven-sent tools that can multiply resources and reinvigorate troubled schools. Even to those less sanguine about computers' benefits, they nonetheless loom as an inescapable feature of the modern landscape, one that schools simply cannot ignore without being left in the silicon dust. Many fear that a widening gap between technological haves and have-nots -- the infamous "digital divide" -- could render a core American value, equal opportunity, even more of a myth than it already is.

For these reasons and more, the central question about technology and education in this country has most often been framed as: How can we get more computers into more schools -- now? But along the way, a few other questions have been raised.

In 1997, for example, the Atlantic Monthly published a skeptical article by Todd Oppenheimer titled "The Computer Delusion." There is not much real evidence, Oppenheimer wrote, that computers as commonly used in schools actually improve children's education, especially in the elementary years. So instead of throwing billions at unproven technology, wouldn't we do better to invest that money in the "impoverished fundamentals: teaching solid skills in reading, thinking, listening and talking . . . and, of course, building up the nation's core of knowledgeable, inspiring teachers"?

A year later came educational psychologist Jane Healy's Failure to Connect, a book-length investigation of the effect of computers on children's learning. In it, Healy -- who takes care to point out that she was once an unrestrained computer enthusiast -- cites a number of examples of what she considers the positive use of technology in schools. But overall, she paints a disturbing portrait of a "vast and optimistic experiment . . . well financed and enthusiastically supported by major corporations, the public at large and government officials" that ignores the developmental needs of young children and brushes aside questions about the emotional, social and health effects of early computer use.

Last September, a Maryland-based group of educators, psychologists, physicians and other professionals -- Healy among them -- issued a provocative hundred-page report titled "Fool's Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood." The group, part of an international movement calling itself the Alliance for Childhood, linked its conclusions about an overemphasis on technology in education to a deeper concern: that childhood itself is under attack these days, from a host of cultural and commercial forces that appear to be intent on rushing children through it as fast as possible.

"Fool's Gold" argues that early childhood is a time when a full range of emotional, social, sensory and physiological experiences -- rather than purely cognitive and academic ones -- are crucial both to children's overall well-being and to their ability to thrive in school. It points out that a young child's prime need is for "close, loving relationships with caring, responsible adults," and that such relationships are directly linked to successful learning ("Face-to-face conversation with more competent language users, for example, is the one constant factor in studies of how children become expert speakers, readers and writers"). And it underlines the essential developmental benefits of such familiar low-tech activities as the hands-on manipulation of three-dimensional objects -- think Legos, think wooden blocks -- and pretend play.

Reading through the "Fool's Gold" report as I began to research this story, I realized that these arguments -- and the overall educational philosophy behind them -- sounded extremely familiar to me. And as I continued reading, the origins of that familiarity became clear:

It came from my experience as a parent at Lowell School.

My daughters started preschool at Lowell in 1994 and continued there for five years. (At the time, the school ended at third grade; we moved on just as it was beginning the expansion that would add grades four through six.) Computers were not much in evidence back then. There were a few scattered about, but they were mainly for use by the teachers. In fact, I once asked Lowell's strong-minded director, Abigail Wiebenson, if the school had plans to do more with them. She explained to me, in no uncertain terms, that this would not be in the children's best interest.

It's a bit unfair of me to bring this up, of course. What has happened since has clearly had more to do with the addition of the three higher grades than with any fundamental change in Lowell's philosophy. Still, I thought it might be interesting to see how an institution whose values seemed so thoroughly in line with those of the computer skeptics had evolved to the point where it handed out eMates to every kid in fourth grade.

Lowell is a school -- I'm happy to declare my bias here -- that has a long history of doing things thoughtfully and well. What lessons could be learned from its digital-conversion experience?

"You'll all get to make a personal Web page," the technology coordinator says cheerfully. "So let me show you how to get started."

Jim Heynderickx is the man to see when it comes to computers at Lowell. He is Stephanie's husband -- their name is pronounced like the legendary rock guitarist's -- and he has spent the last three years setting up the school's computer systems and facilitating their integration into the curriculum. (Translation: He's supposed to make sure the teachers use their shiny new toys.) This afternoon, he's gathered eight Lowell staffers in the school's computer lab, with its four rows of iMacs and its Apple-promoting "Think different" posters on the walls, for the final session of a technology workshop he offers.

Topic A is a page-making program called SiteCentral, which Heynderickx says is designed to be usable by second-graders. The grown-ups seem a little apprehensive. "Are you ready to try it?" he asks.

A few minutes later, he's leaning over the shoulder of Lowell librarian Terry Blackwelder, who has successfully created her own page and is now trying to link it to another Web site. "It worked once," she says, but for some reason, it's not working now.

This is Blackwelder's 15th year at Lowell, and she remembers the day the very first computers arrived. It was in the spring of 1990, after the school had applied for and won (to its great surprise) a grant from Apple, and the machines just showed up on a truck: five primitive Macintoshes, five printers and a scanner. Nobody had the slightest idea how to set them up. But a second-grade teacher had a project in mind, Blackwelder says -- she wanted to use them to print up her students' Mother's Day poems -- "and that's how you really have to get started. You have to have a reason to overcome the hurdles."

Eight years later another, much bigger reason came along. Lowell, which was founded in 1965 as a nursery school for a dozen children and by 1998 had grown to roughly 125 students from pre-K through third grade, had seized a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire a huge new facility, the former Marjorie Webster Junior College on Kalmia Road. This allowed it to expand through sixth grade -- the plan was to add a grade each year for three years -- and meant inventing a whole new curriculum to serve the older students.

The words "computer" and "technology" don't appear in the school's description of its educational philosophy. "With a positive self-concept and the guidance of teachers who respect individuality, each child will be motivated to learn," it reads in part. "When offered a stimulating environment and the necessary time and space, each child will develop to full capacity." "Respect" is the key word here. "Consistent, respectful communication," as Wiebenson writes in the school's curriculum guide, "nourishes emotional literacy and self-esteem, the basis for all effective learning."

But by 1998, it seemed clear to everyone involved that a "stimulating environment" for the new fourth grade would of necessity include technology. How could it not? The upper grades needed a "signature that would make them different from K-3," Wiebenson says, one "that would take advantage of a different cognitive age and stage." Meanwhile, the explosion of all things digital had made computers impossible to ignore. "It would be so stupid not to take a technology which is revolutionizing the world."

There were practical considerations as well. Lowell was far from rich, at least by independent school standards, and it had just taken on a frightening amount of debt. "As the school expanded," Blackwelder explains, "it was like we needed a hook," something to "separate us from the pack of other schools that kids might go to." Because "to stay solvent on this gorgeous new campus, you need students to fill it up."

Enter Jim Heynderickx, bearing a laptop. Heynderickx, who was then working at Trinity College, had experience both in the teaching of writing and in computers, and he had definite ideas about what worked and what didn't work in schools. For the most part, these ideas meshed well with Lowell's. During his interview, for example, Heynderickx told Wiebenson that he wouldn't take the job if what she wanted was a "computer teacher." Many schools had gone this route, isolating most technological instruction from the regular classrooms, but he felt that a curriculum could never be truly integrated -- and the machines' full educational potential realized -- unless the classroom teachers took the lead. His job would be to put a system in place, train the teachers and provide support.

He spent much of his first year going over plans, because the new building was still under renovation. This turned out to be a blessing, because it was far easier to wire the school properly than it would have been if it were already in use. Also, he had time to get to know the teachers and to talk to them about how they wanted their classrooms set up. The new fourth grade, meanwhile, was plunging ahead in temporary quarters, and even before he was hired full time, Heynderickx had helped make what proved the crucial decision: to purchase enough Newton eMate 300s for each of the 18 fourth-graders to have one of his or her own.

The eMate is "a very basic laptop," he says, that is mostly good for word processing but offers a few other things such as limited spreadsheets and typing practice. Built to be used by kids, eMates are very tough, and at roughly $600 apiece in 1998, they were expensive but not prohibitively so. Heynderickx's idea was to phase in computers over time, not try to buy them all at once. In part this was because he knew the school would have to get used to spending a significant amount on technology every year: Computers have a life cycle of three to five years, so the reality is that you never stop paying for them.

In Lowell's case, this means an annual technology budget that is now around $65,000 (not including his salary). Two-thirds of this came from a $200 tuition increase for the roughly 225 students in grades K-6. Including all the laptops, the 19 machines in the computer lab and other desktops for teacher and student use in the classrooms, the school now has between 90 and 100 networked academic computers for a total population of almost 300 students.

The teachers' workshop, which was Heynderickx's idea, is a bit of a carrot/stick affair. The school offers $400 "mini-grants" to staff members who complete it. But as part of the workshop, each must come up with a computer-based project that he or she will actually do.

This particular afternoon, he's helped them play around with both SiteCentral and Adobe PageMill, which he calls "the quote unquote adult Web page-making software" (this means it's what he expects the fifth-graders to use). When they're done, and after he's run through a few software glitches they may encounter, he asks for an update on the projects they've planned.

Blackwelder wants to do a library Web page, filled with things like summer reading lists, information about library resources and links to useful Web sites. A classroom teacher says he hopes to do a page that would, among other things, lay out homework assignments for parents to see. Another teacher mentions a long-term effort to archive student artwork using digital photography.

"My goal is an environmental science Web page," says Cecilia Hage, who already has her environmental studies classes using the Internet to submit bird and weather observations to national data collection programs featuring "real live scientists."

"Just get on my schedule," Heynderickx tells her, offering additional help.

"You'll be flying in in September?" someone asks.

The teachers laugh nervously. They know that Heynderickx has accepted a new job in Oregon, his home state. He assures them that his replacement will be equally knowledgeable. But Hage has a more foolproof plan for ensuring the assistance she'll need.

"I'm thinking that the sixth grade could do it for me," she says.

"Devon, could we borrow you for a second?"

"Sure."

It's a Tuesday afternoon in Annie Tinnesand's sixth-grade class. Fourteen kids and 14 laptops are scattered about the bright third-floor room with its comfortable L-shaped corner couch, its student portraits of "Heroic people from history" -- Steven Biko, Joan of Arc, Geronimo and Davy Crockett among them -- and its "word of the day" list on the front board. (Today's word is "tenacious," as in, "Are you a tenacious student?") There are no eMates here. The sixth-graders are wielding $1,500 iBooks, the "real computers" that Grenville and his fourth-grade friends can look forward to inheriting next year.

At the far end of the room, Tinnesand huddles over a screen with three girls who are writing an article for a local community newspaper. She's trying to show them how Microsoft Word can check for passive-voice sentences, but she can't get the program to perform. Eventually she calls over the class computer whiz -- a tall boy with his dark hair parted in the middle -- to help.

"Ha. I got it," Devon says a minute later. He explains the problem, then goes back to his own machine.

"Okay, so how did we do on passive sentences?" Tinnesand asks the girls. "Ooh, 11 percent on that one. So we'll go back and make some changes."

Tinnesand arrived in August 1998, just before these same kids were issued the very first Lowell laptops; in addition to teaching this class, she serves as the curriculum coordinator for the three upper grades. Writing, she says, is the thing for which the computers get used most, and along with just about everyone else I spoke with at the school, she believes they have produced "a phenomenal, phenomenal gain."

"Some of our kids are hampered by the fact that they can think fast enough but they can't write fast enough," says Wiebenson, mentioning one former student who struggled painfully with the written word but who "could bring a group together around an idea faster than anybody I knew." Slow fine-motor development, which makes handwriting difficult, can be part of it, she says, but there are also "the really smart kids whose minds work 90 miles an hour and their hands don't match it, so they get really frustrated." For these children, word processing -- and especially the ease of revision that comes with it -- can feel like getting out of jail.

But writing is not what the sixth-graders focus on this afternoon. They've just started a stock market project -- it's part of the math curriculum -- and after they organize themselves into investment groups, they pore over online stock listings, research companies, select portfolios to purchase with their imaginary $5,000 stakes, and calculate prices and brokerage fees. Tinnesand plays the broker, and she gleefully lays on extra accounting charges when they make mistakes.

The room buzzes with stock talk.

"It went up by 12 cents," a boy says. "Actually, no, it went up 12 percent."

"It's rising like a rock!" another says, then waits for the rest of his group to appreciate his joke.

"Yeah, but we bought when it was high. So we have to keep waiting."

"Sam, we're going on the Internet, right?"

"Yeah. And then you go to the New York Stock Exchange Web page."

"On one of the sites, you can customize your own ticker."

There are a few distractions -- a girl's computer keeps crashing, and needs a jump-start; a boy clicks his way from stocks to sports at Washingtonpost.com -- but the overall engagement level stays high for an hour. Then the iBooks get folded up and the class moves on to a lengthy discussion of A Girl Named Disaster, a book the students have been reading and summarizing in their journals.

As with the fourth-graders, I can't help but be impressed by the confidence and technical skills these kids display. But the more time I spend hanging around at Lowell, the more I'm inclined to wonder if I'd be just as impressed if there were no computers in the picture.

Tinnesand, to take just one example, is the kind of teacher who could make even the most unwired classroom come alive. One of the things she introduced to Lowell was a program called "design tech," in which the older students tackle a series of engineering problems without benefit of computers. Fourth-graders build bridges out of straws and Popsicle sticks and discuss the relative merits of truss, beam, arch and suspension design. Fifth-graders design "one-minute clocks," mechanical devices that must run for precisely 60 seconds. Sixth-graders work on rockets, hot air balloons, roller coasters and the classic "egg drop" problem, in which they attempt to package their eggs to survive a three-story fall onto concrete.

It's tough for even the most creative computer projects to compete with this. And "digital" doesn't always translate as "creative."

One evening, I find myself at something called "math/science/design tech night," an event intended to familiarize parents with the kind of work their children have been doing in these areas. For an hour or so, I watch the fifth-graders show off their very first PowerPoint pres-entations, and while I see some charming stuff go by -- the kids' topics are their favorite activities, from soccer to figure skating to a fantasy game called Warhammer 40,000 that's popular with the boys -- I find myself underwhelmed. There are too many distracting sound effects, too many random words and letters zipping across the screens, and there's a disturbing lack of overall coherence.

Later, Tinnesand will explain that this exercise was intended mainly to teach the kids how to use PowerPoint. I've been told again and again, however, that Lowell doesn't push technology for its own sake, only if it enhances part of the curriculum. This feels like a violation of that principle, and I find myself wishing that I'd checked out the one-minute clocks instead.

I'm not alone here. Not everyone at Lowell welcomed the influx of computers, and a number of teachers still have strong views about ways the machines should not be used.

"I refuse to have lower school children in my presence actually create art on the computer," says Barbara Mandel, who teaches art and believes that artistic creativity should flow "through your body, out your fingertips, down the brush and onto the paper." When Kid Pix stamps and clip art started showing up as illustrations on student projects a few years back, Mandel cringed, though she has since come to see the benefit of other Kid Pix applications "where the kids can actually put in their own artwork and their own voices."

Jim Heynderickx says he learned more about the best way to use computers at Lowell from teachers like Mandel who resisted the machines than he did from the early adopters. One skeptic was longtime math/science coordinator Theresa Anderson, a pioneer in the use of concrete, hands-on experience to lay the foundations for abstract mathematical concepts. "I saw Theresa's math department, all these boxes and boxes of fantastic manipulatives," Heynderickx says, "and she said, 'Why on earth would I have them do it on the computer, when we can have them using the actual shapes with their hands?' "

Point taken. The manipulatives stayed.

The third-grade teachers, meanwhile, told Heynderickx they didn't want their students keyboarding, because they weren't physically ready; it was more important for them to concentrate on handwriting at this stage.

Point taken again. Keyboarding isn't introduced until fourth grade.

Which, of course, is when those astonishing leaps in writing progress start to appear, more than justifying the computer decision all by themselves.

Or do they?

After spending a week at the school, I bounce some of my impressions off the author of Failure to Connect. Jane Healy has lectured at Lowell, and Wiebenson consulted with her as the early decisions about the use of technology were being made. She hasn't been back to see things for herself, but from my description, she says, it sounds like the computers are being used precisely as they should be used. "They're integrated into the curriculum, and not driving anything."

Healy strongly approves of the fact that computers are de-emphasized until fourth grade, which is around the time, she believes, that their positives start to outweigh their negatives. She is glad to hear that the school has paid attention to health issues -- installing tables at the correct ergonomic height, worrying about proper lighting and teaching children the right way to sit at their eMates -- though she does point out that no one knows what the long-term health effects will be, so having kids use computers on a regular basis must still be seen as "an experiment." In passing, she dismisses PowerPoint as mostly "a flashy way to impress parents."

What about the writing improvement everyone talks about? I ask.

She answers by citing a Lowell-like school in New Jersey that conducted an experiment on the subject. The Montclair Kimberley Academy assessed the writing skills of its fifth-grade students, gave a group of them laptops as they entered sixth grade, then measured their skills against a computer-deprived control group.

The result?

"There was no difference," Healy says.

One tiny study doesn't prove much, of course. I'm willing to take Lowell's word for it that computers have helped at least some of its students become better writers. But Healy has underlined an important point: that a healthy skepticism must be a part of every educator's tool kit when it comes to evaluating claims of high-tech miracle working.

Much more important, I think, is a basic argument that underlies both Healy's work and "Fool's Gold" and that is reinforced by my time at Lowell. Educational computing has become such a trendy and hypermarketed phenomenon that it has been diverting scarce resources and attention away from fundamental school needs -- needs that are far more essential to quality education.

Lowell, clearly, is already blessed when it comes to these fundamentals. The school already has a corps of skilled and dedicated teachers, and it provides the supportive environment they need to do their jobs well. It already has small class sizes, perhaps the single most important prerequisite for effective teaching. It already has a beautiful, safe, newly renovated building; an extensive library; and a full range of programs in art, music, dance, drama and physical education. Equally important, at least in my view, it has decades of experience in fostering the kind of social and emotional development that is essential for children's well-being.

Now it's got computers, too.

Big deal.

Why on earth, I find myself wondering, would anyone worry about a "digital divide" when there's such a gaping non-digital chasm between the education available at schools like this -- whether public or private -- and the shabby, overcrowded, undersupported "education" we see fit to serve up to the nation's least privileged children?

I call Ed Miller, an educational analyst and consultant who was one of the principal authors of the "Fool's Gold" report, to talk about this. "There are two things going on," Miller says. "One, there's a real displacement of resource distribution between rich and poor schools. And two, there's a push to spend money disproportionately on technology instead of on the other ways of improving school environments. Put these two things together, and you get the argument that okay, if you're going to spend more money on poor schools, let's spend it on technology."

Technology companies love this argument, Miller says, but it's important not to fall for it. "Our view on the digital divide is that it exists, sure, but we should be spending money mainly on things we know can improve schools." Chief among them are getting good teachers into the classroom and providing the conditions -- reasonable class size, necessary support systems -- that will keep them there.

Asked what's truly essential to a good school, Abigail Wiebenson echoes Miller's point.

She's in the midst of an enthusiastic description of her computer-conversion experience, during which she overcame her initial disgust with standard-brand educational software -- "this horrible cartoony crap that they put out in the name of learning" -- and realized that, once you learn to use computers properly, "you really can't live without these things." She sings their praises not only as writing tools, but also as boosters of crucial organizational skills and enhancers of creative thinking. Yet she is careful to make it clear what computers cannot do.

"There's never going to be a replacement for good teaching," she says.

In talking about what that means, one of the names that comes up is that of third-grade teacher Kathie Clements. When Wiebenson was considering whether to take a job at Lowell, "watching Kathie Clements teach" was one of the main things that influenced her decision. More than a decade later, Clements remains one of those teachers both kids and parents rave about. She's also someone who showed zero interest in using computers in her classroom. She and her third-grade teaching partner balked at having their students start keyboarding. They thought the kind of software Jim Heynderickx kept showing them was a waste of time.

"We were dragging our heels a little bit," Clements tells me with a laugh. She's sitting in a tiny classroom chair next to a table covered with patches of colorful cloth; they're from a pillow-making project that's part of the third-graders' study of the Colonial era. "Jim finally gave up when I said, 'I don't like anything that's out there! Can't we make something here at Lowell?' "

What they ended up with was an extension of an autobiography project that has long been part of the third-grade curriculum. After completing a conventionally "published" version -- a carefully written, bound and illustrated book -- each third-grader now gets to make his or her own Web page, to be put up on the school's internal Web site. The pages incorporate handwritten poetry (scanned in, not keyboarded) and wonderfully evocative self-portraits done without benefit of drawing programs.

Clements was thrilled, she admits, and so were the children. But now she gestures at the table full of cloth squares.

"I'm not going to do nine-patch pillows on the computer," she says.

Bob Thompson is a staff writer for the Magazine. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 1 p.m. Monday on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.