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March 4, 199
8 Gates Plays to Friendlier Audience at Manhattan School
By PAMELA MENDELS
day after he faced grilling before U.S. senators investigating whether the company he heads is abusing its power in the marketplace, Bill Gates appeared before a considerably more hospitable audience of teachers and children on Wednesday at a Harlem public school, where he defended the role of technology in education and stumped for a national program to place laptop computers in students' hands.
But even in a classroom 200 miles from the nation's capital, Gates could not escape questions about whether Microsoft exercises an unfair dominating role in the marketplace.
After chatting with the schoolchildren in a crowded science classroom filled with administrators, teachers and two dozen or so television crews and journalists invited to the photo-op-cum-town-meeting-with kids, a small number of reporters were allowed to lob questions of their own — and one asked if Microsoft was unfairly stifling competition. Gates's answer? No.
"Anyone," Gates asserted, "can go out there and write a piece of software," adding: "More money is being invested in software start-ups than at anytime in history. The software industry is doing well."
The setting was the Mott Hall School, a public school for gifted students and one of about 250 schools and school districts across the nation participating in a laptop-for-students project sponsored by Microsoft and Toshiba.
As television cameras whirred and still cameras clicked so loudly that it was sometimes hard to hear soft-spoken children, Gates told a group of sixth graders at the school, which serves many poor and minority students, that computers today are far smaller and cheaper than the complicated $1 million or so machine he was first allowed to work on as an eighth grader. And, he said in answer to one of the children's questions about his career goals, he was dedicated to making software even easier to use.
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Gates also said he hoped to see the laptop project expand greatly. "This laptop program is one we want to spread everywhere," he said.
Under the program, the two companies sell laptops loaded with Microsoft software to schools at discounted rates. According to a study of the program, conducted during its pilot phase last year, teachers are enthusiastic about the laptops, saying they boost both cooperative learning and student motivation.
Nonetheless, the program has come under some criticism. For one thing, it is expensive. In the case of Mott Hall, for example, the cost of the laptops is divided between the school district and parents. Parents pay $35 a month over a three-year period to lease the machines, which they can then buy for another dollar.
Another concern is that there is still no hard research indicating that working with laptops boosts student achievement.
Those facts have led people like William L. Rukeyser, coordinator of a Learning in the Real World, a group pushing for greater skepticism about the role of technology in education, to question the laptop project, as well as other education programs being promoted by software, telecommunications and computer companies that stand to gain from selling products and services to the multibillion dollar education market.
"Shouldn't people be saying: 'Hey, folks, Isn't this just a gimmick — and a pretty expensive gimmick — and where's the proof that this helps children learn?" Rukeyser said earlier this week, when asked to comment on Gates's visit to the school.
Microsoft representatives at Mott Hall on Wednesday defended the program, however, saying that just as computers had transformed so many aspects of modern life, they could change education as well — as long as all schoolchildren could use them. "One of our areas of focus is to increase access to technology," said Mary M. Stephenson, group manager in the K-12 education customer unit of Microsoft. "This [the laptop program] is another way to increase access."
The laptop program also received support from Janice M. Gordon, a Mott Hall humanities teacher who uses laptops with her sixth graders. Gordon said that she had found that students who compose on laptops write more thoughtfully, because word processing programs free them from cumbersome mechanics of drafting and redrafting on paper.
"Microsoft and Toshiba are not in my classroom," she commented, when asked about the companies' economic interest in the laptop program. "I can tell you without a doubt that these computers are having a positive effect on teaching and student achievement."
For his part, Gates was clearly interested in how laptops are being used in the classroom. He watched over students' shoulders as the children showed him how they had used their laptops to do everything from research a science project on the Internet to write a book report.
He asked them if they had trouble with batteries running out. (He was told the children recharge them frequently.) And he expressed surprise that the children use not only word processing software, but PowerPoint, a program to create multimedia presentations. "I think of it as for corporate use, but it makes sense," he said.
As for the children, they had been carefully prepared for the meeting with Gates, saying they had done background research on him on the Internet and had learned, among other things, that he had written a book, had left college early and that, in the words of 12-year-old Carolyn M. Urena, "he's really important."
So important that the classroom blackboard was covered with a huge poster welcoming Gates to the school and featuring a drawing of him by students. The science lab skeleton wore a Mott Hall hat, and in addition to the normal institutional lighting, special ceiling lighting had been installed, presumably for better picture snapping.
"It's a little bit set up for Bill Gates," explained 12-year-old Michelle Angeles.
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Pamela Mendels at mendels@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.