Digital divide data now searchable

Digital divide data now searchable

How does your school stack up? New Web site offers data
This chart on the OnTarget Web site shows Allenwood Elemtary School in Maryland has a long way to go before it reaches the state average for computers to students ratio.

By Bob Sullivan MSNBC


May 3 — Wondering how your school’s computer systems stack up? A new family of Web sites coming online soon allows easy side-by-side comparisons between school districts, cities and even individual schools. The data is being published with the hope that it will shine a bright light on the “digital divide,” and offer clear evidence to parents and teachers trying gain funding for more computers or a better technology curriculum.

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LET’S SAY you’re a parent of a student at Allenwood Elementary School in Prince George’s County, Md., and you want to know if your child’s school has enough computer equipment. You dial up the new "OnTarget” Web site, select the school, and up pops some pretty concerning information.
First off, you learn the computer-to-student ratio is 18:1, far below the state average of 5:1 and the county average of 6:1. You also find out the school has no computer projection devices, while a typical Maryland school has nine. But at least every classroom has Internet access.
Armed with that information, you’re in a position to make more informed complaints at the next school board meeting.
Case No. 2: Your child attends Frost Elementary School in Allegany County, Md., and you’re pretty sure the computers are there, but still, you’re wondering how they are being used in the classroom. You call up the school report on the OnTarget Web site, and you get mixed results. There’s plenty of hardware — the computer to student ratio is 3:1.
But you learn the school could probably be be doing a better job of using the computers to teach more complex tasks. For example, Frost students don’t yet use PCs to aid in certain science classroom experiments. More than half of Maryland’s schools do. Kids at Frost aren’t learning how to use spreadsheets, either, while 70 percent of other Maryland students are. And robotics, being studied in 22 percent of Maryland’s schools, isn’t part of the Frost curriculum.

A WAKE-UP CALL
The data might seem overwhelming, but it’s exactly what parents need to know about how computers fit into school life, said Barbara Reeves, Director of Instruction Technology at the Maryland State Department of Education. Maryland has been testing the OnTarget service for two years.

The data presented on OnTarget gets pretty detailedHere, viewers find out students at Frost Elemetary school regularly gather information from the Internet, but don't perform measurements and collect data with computers.

“In some places, it was a wake-up call,” she said. Like in Prince George’s County, where $9 million in extra school technology funding was approved by the legislature soon after the data was made public.
While technology surveys have been conducted before, the data was never made available in a user-friendly way, Reeves said.

"It’s really interesting. When you make data public, you don’t know what the reaction will be. But rather than negative consequences, we were able to use it in a timely way to make funding decisions based on schools’ needs. We were able to show concrete numbers to the legislators, and encouraged them to check out their own school districts,” Reeves said. “I’ve become a believer in data and data-driven decisions.”

SOFTWARE AN ACCIDENT
Maryland was the first to offer the OnTarget system; Mississippi will be online within a few weeks, and about a dozen other states should be offering the school technology data by the end of the year, according to Bob Marshall, CEO of AWS Convergence Technologies Inc. AWS created the OnTarget system and is now marketing it to states and school districts around the country.

AWS is in the business of selling weather data to television stations and local schools; it got involved in the school technology data business a bit by accident. Marshall chairs the Maryland State Technology Committee, which oversees school technology funding. When he asked for data on school high-tech spending, he ran into trouble. So he had his company create OnTarget for free, just for use in Maryland. School districts report their own data, once a year, using a password-protected part of the the Web site, and the data is made available to the public after review by school officials. But the system worked so well, other states were quickly interested, and now AWS is selling OnTarget.
“I knew we needed for better information to base our decisions on, so we built the system” he said. “We didn’t intend for this to be a product.”

RESISTANCE FROM SCHOOL OFFICIALS
Both Marshall and Reeves concede there were some pockets of resistance when the system was first put in place. Some school superintendents, for example, are worried their districts will look bad if the data is published.
“There’s definitely been a reluctance to do it in some cases,” Marshall said. “But why I’ve had success as chair of the committee is the business perspective I bring. I said, ‘Look we’re going to measure things.’ And the reality is that once we did it, the legislators saw it, community members saw it, and support flooded in to fill the holes.”

THE REAL DIGITAL DIVIDE
In fact, both Maryland and Mississippi education officials say so much attention has been paid to the digital divide that the amount of hardware inside schools is rarely a problem any more. The disparity now comes from how the computers are being used.

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