THE COST OF COMPUTERS IN A SCHOOL: PAYING MORE THAN DOLLARS

INTRODUCTION

The uninspiring, pragmatic issue of paying for technology in schools often gets lost in the discussion (usually promotion) of all the various benefits it will provide. I recently participated in a year-long process of developing a technology plan in my school district, Des Moines Public Schools, which brought to my attention not only the direct financial complexities of bringing high tech into schools, but a whole range of social, political and pedagogical issues that those financial matters generate as well. As the committee work proceeded, I came to realize that most everyone I encountered - even the "experts" (especially the "experts") - were naive about both the enormity and the nature of the costs of infusing computer technology into a large school district. Most were unaware of the ecological character of technologies (Postman, 1993) and the resulting complexity of dealing with the distribution as new as one so powerful as computers. Certainly no one in my school was aware of the argument put forth by Ellul that the adoption of a new technology generates more vexing problems than those it was intended to solve (Ellul, 1990), or his more widely accepted claim that the benefits of a new technology tend to be immediate and direct while the problems tend to be "long-term and are felt only with experience" (Ellul, 1990, p 73). Few people involved with the process recognized in the beginning that the most crucial issue we would have to contend with is what Winner describes as "the many ways in which technologies provide structure for human activity"(1986, p. 8). In this paper I will discuss the costs of computer technology with an eye on how it can change the "structure for human activity" in the school environment, using my district's experience as a concrete anchor for what is too often viewed only through the abstract printouts of a financial spreadsheet.

THE CONTEXT

Des Moines Independent School district serves approximately 31,000 students, employing some 5000 full and parttime staff to provide all of the services needed for 63 buildings. It is a fairly large enterprise as schools go - by far the largest in the state of Iowa. The district has chronic financial problems, as do most urban districts, and for some time it has been criticized by local citizens and business groups for not keeping up technologically with wealthier suburban schools.

Two years ago the district began taking steps to try to remedy that situation. $4 million was budgeted for a new enterprise system to integrate all of the business and recordkeeping chores. A new technology plan was devised (the third in four years) but this time with hope that it could be fully implemented. This hope grew out of action by the state legislature to fund technology purchases in schools for the next five years - in our case to the tune of about $1.8 million a year. The Technology Plan was developed around this infusion of funds. We are now coming to the end of the second year of the implementation of this plan.

INFUSING COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY INTO A SCHOOL - THE SIMPLE SOLUTION

There has been no shortage of advice on how to go about putting computers into our schools. Much of the "expert" advice came with a hefty price tag attached. Nearly all of them reduced the issue to getting the merchandise in the door and (perhaps) setting up the administrative structure for organizing its use. I'm going to describe here, briefly, two very different approaches that I dub "Simple Solutions." The first actually constituted a previous district technology plan. The second is a sketch of an approach offered by one of the most creative thinkers about computers and education in the academic world - an approach suggested in several variations during our deliberations. Each constitutes a certain way of looking at the process of bringing schools up to computing speed.

THE SIMPLE BUSINESS SOLUTION

In 1995 the Des Moines school district paid a consulting firm to advise us on how to upgrade our pedestrian computer operations. We were plodding along with about 2000 Macs, mostly of the vintage SE variety, along with about an equal number of "ancient" Apple IIs.

This firm applied its expertise in the business realm and devised a business-like plan of action for the district. This plan was, from a business perspective, quite comprehensive. It included a quantitative analysis of platform issues, a breakdown of application needs at the three different levels of schooling, networking recommendations and a formula for cycling computers out of use to prevent another round of binge buying just to get caught up again. It did not address the issue of costs, other than to recognize an enormous investment necessary to "catch up," something that it considered at least feasible through such actions as a bond issue. Nor did it discuss ongoing costs of training and support. Its focus was on getting a state-of-the-art computerized environment established. From that point on it would be up to the district itself to determine how to support the operation.

There was nothing irrational about this plan. In fact, its functional rationality was what eventually doomed it. It did not take into any account the uniqueness of school culture, a culture in which making do with few resources generally demands considerable personal investment in what resources are available. Most computer using employees in the district were self-trained and to a great extent self, or at least mutually, supported. At the time of the study the district only employed three computer support technicians. Thus, those using computers in the district had invested considerable time and energy into becoming more than just computer application users. Yet among the recommendations made by the firm were the following:

1. Declare all of the Apple IIs and half of the Macs obsolete immediately and replace them;
2. Recognize that half of the rest of the Macs would be obsolete within two years and start replacing them as well;
3. Since we would be replacing nearly everything anyway, this would be an opportune time to junk the entire Mac platform and move over to Windows. Again, there were good rational arguments for doing this, but they completely ignored the unique context in which computers had entered and were being used in the school environment.

Two years later, when the district developed its own Technology Plan, the committee on computer standards tried to address this issue in its report:

The setting of standards is a process of rationalizing the selection and support of technology throughout the district. But the computer itself tends to become an intensely personal device, evoking strong emotional and psychological ties. In addition, the investment of time and effort needed to reach a comfort level with a particular computer adds to this sense of loyalty and often results in an unwillingness to go through the process again. This affective aspect of the computer environment was not addressed in the [consultant's] report. Indeed, to simply follow the personal inclinations of each individual user essentially defeats the idea of standards. However, to completely ignore this aspect of the computer environment doesn't just subordinate distinctly human characteristics to a mechanical process, it denies them. We should expect a rather heavy price to paid in resentment, demoralization and alienation if some accounting of these human concerns are not addressed in our standards procedures. (Technology Coordinating Council, 1997 Appendix E, p. 7)

This argument may be applied in any computer environment, but in the school culture, where concern for individual well-being runs high, it becomes a critical issue, as we will see later. In the Des Moines Schools this denial of any concern for the human part of the human-computer relationship, was decisive in preventing the business-oriented recommendation from even being reported to the board for consideration.

THE SIMPLE (and Cheap) STUDENT SOLUTION

A second approach to computerizing the learning environment draws on the more realistic understanding that schools generally have to make do with less than state-of-the-art equipment. Seymour Papert, in his latest tome to computers "The Connected Family," takes a stab at sketching out what is a fairly common vision for establishing a strong computer presence within current financial constraints. His argument overcomes any potential resistence to change by proposing a way to saturate a school with computer technology. In his book he sets up a hypothetical straw man school administrator and begins by recommending that the administrator's school provide a computer for every student in the school. In the following passage, Papert (1996) argues with a School Administrator:

SA (School Administrator): Your microchange has a megaprice. We'd have to buy hundreds of computers.

Me: Well, so what? You could do it for an increase of one percent in the cost of school.

SA: What nonsense! How do you figure that?

Me: Your average spending per student per year over the next five years will be $7000. You could buy very adequate computers in big bulk for well under $700 each. Amortized over ten years, this comes to $70 per year, or one percent of $7000. So you could give *every* student a whole computer for a one percent increase in your total cost. And this calculation is a wild overestimate of the cost. You could achieve a significant change with a computer for every two students. (Not that I recommend that, but just to make my rhetorical point.) And if this were done on a national scale with competitive bidding, somone in the industry would certainly produce a $400 computer.

SA: I never heard an argument so full of holes. How can you say "amortized over ten years"? Long before then they'll all be obsolete. Even now a computer you could buy for $700 is far from the best.

Me: That's like saying let's walk barefoot if we can't buy a new Cadillac every two years. You can't be seriously saying that kids should write with pencils if we can't afford to buy them the latest Pentium computer.

SA: OK, so we'll use old computers. They'll break down and it costs $70 an hour to get a serviceman.

Me: Now we are getting somewhere. When I talk about mere *microchange* I do not mean simply injecting computers into an otherwise unchanged school. The students would also learn to *understand* computers. Those who are interested will learn to repair them and learn a great deal more (including a sense of social responsibility) in the process.

SA: But we'd have to change curriculum and let teachers learn new things!

Me: Now we are really getting somewhere. (p. 157)

This exchange is, of course, quite contrived. But it does lay out the kind of argument that was heard repeatedly during the course of the year in which the Des Moines Schools developed their technology plan. Apart from the fact that there simply are no $700 computer systems available that can meet all of the needs of a school, Papert's suggestions seem to provide a means of combining the infusion of technology into schools with some serious pedagogical reform. Unfortunately, it turns out that, at least in the case of Des Moines schools, when these ideas undergo close scrutiny, they just don't hold together. As we will see in the discussion that follows, Papert's ideas, though educationally oriented, are also educationally simplistic.

COUNTING COSTS - FINANCIAL

To understand the impact of the infusion of computers into The Des Moines School District it is necessary to briefly describe the financial aspect of its latest Technology Plan. The district has embarked on a program to increase the number of serviceable computers in the district from 2000 to about 9000. The nearly $2 million a year of specially allocated state funds mentioned earlier is designed to get the district through this acute financially draining period. But due to the rapid obsolescence of computers this massive expansion itself creates a chronic financial dilemma. Once the goal of 9000 computers is reached (and the state funding expires) the district will have to begin replacing them at a rate of at least 1300 per year to keep from slipping back into technological poverty. Papert's suggestion that computers be amortized over a ten year period has already proven unrealistic, not only from a keeping-up-with-the-suburbs strategy, but from a strictly financial one as well. Our technical support department recognized long ago that trying to replace motherboards and diskdrives in seven year old machines was an exercise in financial and labor waste. More recently we have found that even obtaining parts for some computers nearing that age has become a problem. Even more troublesome from a management perspective is that each year brings at least one, often two, different models into the evironment. Maintaining parts and expertise to deal with all the different kinds of systems across a ten year spectrum is an organizational and inventory nightmare, as is trying to maintain compatibility with printers and other peripheral devices that are purchased over that period of time. Moreover, the idea that repairing machines will save money just doesn't seem to be true in the our experience. In most cases, after about five years, replacing an old machine with a new one is, in the long run, less expensive than the cost of parts and labor expended to keep an old one limping along.

A replacement schedule of seven years has become a frugal compromise between the business standard of staying current with a five year replacement cycle and inviting financial and organizational disorder by extending it to ten. Even at this, 1300 computers is far more than were purchased during the 1996 97 school year, when the district began receiving extra state funding. It means spending around $3 million a year just to replace computer equipment each year even after the state funds run out. Given that the entire accounted for technology expenditures of the district in 1994-95 was less than $2 million, this alone represents an enormous increase in computer costs.

It is just the beginning, however. Recent industry studies have shown that the purchase cost of computers is a relatively small portion of total ownership costs (Tenner, 1997). Our own technology department, relying on an analysis provided by The Gartner Group, has estimated that the total costs of maintaining a networked computer environment in the business world average about $7000 per year, per computer, which would yield an annual technology cost of over $60 million for the Des Moines schools.

Studies specific to education tend to place the cost somewhat lower than this, but still far above the 1% increase predicted as a "wild overestimate of the cost" by Papert. Henry Becker's studies produced a figure of $1932 per student per year for an environment in which there is a ratio of one computer for every two students (President's Council, 1997). Given the Des Moines goal of about one computer for every 3.5 students, we could use a proportionate figure of approximately $1200 per student per year. This would yield a total cost of about $36 million per year.

Whether we choose the high end, the low end or somewhere in-between, it is clear that computerizing the educational environment is extremely expensive. To put this expense into perspective we need only look at the Des Moines district annual budget: For the 1995-96 school year the budget was slightly under $200 million dollars, of which only about $2 million was categorized as expenses associated with computer technology. Assuming normal growth of the district budget, during the five years it takes to complete our computer goals, technology costs will have grown from less than 1% to around 20% of the total budget, if we provide the kind of support, training and material needed to make it work effectively.

Obviously, this creates a huge financial problem for the district. Unlike corporations, which offset the equally massive costs of technology with reductions in labor costs (Aronowitz 1994), DMPS is strongly opposed to computer-induced teacher reductions. Computers are seen as an educational adjunct to the teacher, not as a replacement. Currently, 90% of the district budget goes to salaries, most of it to teachers. Thus, there is little savings that can come from areas other than labor costs (a 1993 study predicted the district could cut $2 million from current operational costs through heavy investment in technology - a sizeable sum, but hardly significant compared to the projected increase). If it is to maintain its current teacher/student ratios, DMPS, unlike corporations, must absorb nearly all of the costs associated with computer purchases or find permanent new funding sources (it is difficult to imagine that we will be able to find the kind of continuous stream of financing necessary given the other pressing needs - like building renovations - that require attention).

This difference between business and educational means of paying for technology is a crucial one. It means that a business approach cannot be imported unmodified into the school environment. My district has had to find other ways of compensating for the enormous expense that technology brings with it. And it has. Though expenditures for technology has grown to well over $5 million for the 1996-97 school year, this is far short of what even Becker's figures indicate the costs should be at this point. Even though we can be sure that not all financial costs are being funneled through accounts that can be traced as technology expenditures, the discrepency between what the analysts estimate we should be spending and what is being reported is too wide for that to account for the entire difference. The Des Moines school district almost certainly is getting by much cheaper in strictly accountable terms than either industry or educational standards suggest. The next sections are intended to explain how it has been able to do this and the impact it has had on the school culture.

Paying for Free Computers

There has been no direct decision to replace school staff with computers, but it appears that the end result may be the same. The changes taking place as a result of this dissociated shift is simply being made after the fact. In almost every area of schooling new uses of these "free" resources are now being explored to compensate for the shortage of personnel. For example, the first goal of the technology plan was to provide workstations for teachers in their classrooms. As pressures to reduce staff has increased, the purpose of these machines has expanded. They are now being spoken of by some policy makers as "administrative workstations," in reference to the growing desire to move data entry dealing with student records out of the clerical offices into the classroom. Of course, this promises to not only reduce the number of clerical staff needed in the buildings, it also changes the nature of the teachers' work. Thus, the structure of human activity, which Winner asked us to pay attention to earlier, begins to realign itself with the possibilities, and demands, of the technology.

Mass Mobilization as Method of Payment

The shift of administrative activities into the classroom via networked computers also represents an example of the more general strategy being used to overcome the inability pay for adequate computer support in the district - the mass mobilization of existing staff. With over 200 instructional positions being eliminated, district policy makers are not inclined to increase technology support staff, either in the realm of repair and maintenance or training. We have the same number of computer technicians now servicing 6000 computers as we had when there were 4000 computers in the district. The number of staff development personnel training computer using staff has remained constant as well. This holds down accountable technology costs, but it shifts the burden of training and support onto teachers and administrators, few of whom had an abundance of idle time to begin with. This is not an uncommon occurance in computerized environments. Peer support of computer operations is extensive throughout industry, but it has recently come to be recognized as a major cost. Tenner cites an industry research report by Nolan, Norton & Co. which found that when organizations add workstations without increasing support staff "peer support increases to fill the gap. While journalists continue to celebrate the ever-lower prices of computers, the total costs of *computing* suggest that there is no such thing as a free menu" (Tenner, 1997, p. 198).

Their study found that, generally, peer support costs are two to three times as much as the costs that appear on the organization's service budget. More troublesome for the school environment is that the issue of what is being given up in order to provide this peer support is not even being raised. Undoubtably, some of what is being given up is instructional and preparation time of teachers. I'll site just two of many examples from my district as evidence.

Teachers and machines

Each school in the Des Moines district releases students on a regular basis during the year so that staff can collaborate on planning. Ever since the state money started arriving the focus across the district has been on computer training. In my school, Central Campus, none of this training has had anything directly to do with curricular issues - it is strictly of the how-to run-the-machine variety. All of it has been provided by teaching staff, not technicians or staff development personnel. A tremendous amount of time and energy is being spent by teachers planning, training and helping each other just to operate the machines. On top of all of this, staff development is now devoting nearly half of its out-of-school classes to basic computer training.

Each school is also finding it necessary to shift responsibilities in order to find ways to internally provide formal technical help beyond the informal peer support. At my school this has meant cutting a library assistant to half-time, and reassigning a half-time staff person to help manage computer operations. Similar shifts have taken place in nearly every building in the district. Several high schools have freed at least one teacher for an extra period a day to do computer trouble-shooting. In the elementary schools ten teachers were reassigned to provide "technology curriculum support," which includes providing the first level of technical support in the 30 schools they service. It all adds up to an enormous shift of attention away from students and issues directly associated with learning toward managing machinery. Yet none of it shows up on the district financial statement as a cost of technology.

Justification for all of this activity tends to border on the fatalistic. Of course, there is a general assumption that this will all pay off in much better learning, though this is taken more as a matter of faith than conclusions of research - which to date show little if any success in using computers over even the most traditional methods of teaching (McKenzie, 1995). Perhaps this is why the general administrative attitude seems to be reflected in the comment made to me by a high school principal that "With as much money as is put in [to computers] we need to make it top priority."

Students and Machines

Of course, Papert provides an elegant solution to this problem. Actually, his proposal for using students to help support computer operations is nothing new. In fact, it is common knowledge that ever since desktop computers entered schools students have provided a large portion of the peer support required to keep them running. The students from my Advanced Computer Technology class have provided the first line of trouble-shooting support for Central Campus for the past seven years. This system worked well when there was a relatively small number of computers in the school controlled by fairly knowledgeable staff. Problems that eventually reached my students were challenging and educational. As computers have proliferated I have found it necessary to send many of the problems on to district tech services, not because they are too difficult but because they provide no educational value to my students. Spending an hour reinstalling an operating system may be valuable once, but doing it over and over is mind-numbing, as are many of the other problems that now cross my desk. I worked for several months with the tech service department trying to design a program that would involved students district wide in computer support. We found that security issues, logistical issues, supervisory issues and the very mundane nature of much of the work all worked against the educational benefits of student involvement in computer support. Tech services needed people who could get work done (mostly repetitious work), not trainees who needed supervision and a structure that assured them of engaging in educational experiences. Eventually it became clear that the district would benefit far more than the students in any support arrangement that didn't pay them for their expertise and time.

What Papert and other proponents of student support fail to recognize is that there is a huge difference, both financially and in terms of learning goals, between an apprenticeship program that is geared toward educating students and one that merely plugs students into a maintenance shop for the purpose of saving money. The priorities are not at all the same and neither will be the results. As we tried to come to grips with the former we realized that it could provide some technical assistance to the district but to be managed properly as an educational endeavor it is unlikely that it would save much, if any money. The latter case simply smacks of slave labor, abusing the interests of students in order to hide the true magnitude of the expense of supporting computers in schools.

Restructuring the Institution to Fit the Machine

I do not suggest that there are no adequate answers to the problems raised by these examples. But solutions are not the issue in this discussion. What I am trying to indicate is the extent to which the attention and energies of nearly everyone within the district is being redirected as a result of this infusion of computer technology. Just the time and expense of searching for these solutions is becoming a significant expense. Winner gives this redirection of attention a name - reverse adaptation. "Our institutions have engaged in a continuing process of reverse adaptation, in which things are reshaped to suit the technical means available" (Winner, 1986, p. 174). In the Des Moines School district this reverse adaptation involves a massive effort by all members of the school community to see to it that the machines are put to good use. In the process it has been very difficult to keep the educational objectives at the forefront of our attention.

Getting Used to It

This adaptation process has not gone uncriticized. Counselors, who have been especially hard pressed to intensify their use of computers for student data entry and retrieval with the new enterprise system, raised strong objections early in this school year to the amount of time they were now required to spend with the machine at the expense of students. Several that I talked to echoed the observation of former Apple Fellow Donald Norman that,

...technology has decided that machines have certain needs and that humans are required to fulfill them...Machines need precise, accurate control and information. No matter that this is what people are bad at providing, if this is what machines need, this is what people must provide. We tailor our jobs to meet the needs of machines. (1993, p 223)

It is likely that this is what will continue to happen in the Des Moines Schools. One counselor who decided to retire early because of the ever increasing demands to work with data rather than students acknowledged to me that after she leaves the increased proportion of time spent processing student data will be established as the new baseline in her old job description. Anyone not willing to do that need not apply - this concrete requirement will be a given, around which personal involvement with students will have to be arranged. How many potential applicants with exceptional counseling skills - in the human sense - that will exclude is impossible to say. But it is almost certain that the amount of time the new counselor will spend with students will continue to shrink as the amount of information about them residing in our now massive capacity data bank continues to grow.

As the computers make their way into all the classrooms in the district we can expect a similar reverse adaptation to take place there. Indeed, some see it as a justifiable means of transforming our school system into a more business like environment. One administrator told me that people in the district are too used to being dealt with according to individual needs. That just doesn't happen in the business world, she said. "The culture is going to have to change."

Indeed it will. It remains to be seen whether changing the culture to accomodate the computer will somehow result in better education for our children.

References

Aronowitz, S. and DiFazio, W. (1994). The Jobless Future - Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Becker, H. (1993). "A Truly Empowering Technology-Rich Education--How Much Will It Cost?" Educational IRM Quarterly 3, pp. 31-35.

Ellul, J. (1990). The Technological Bluff. Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

McKenzie, J. (1995). Did Anybody Learn Anything. From Now On, 5(4).

Norman, D. (1993). Things That Make Us Smart - Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine. Reading: Addison-Wesley.

Papert, S. (1996). The Connected Family - Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. Atlanta: Longstreet Press.

Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books.

Technology Coordinating Council (1997). Technology Plan for 1997-98. Des Moines, IA: Des Moines Independent Schools.

Tenner, E. (1997). Why Things Bite Back - Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Winner, L. (1986). The Whale and the Reactor - A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lowell Monke is Manager Advanced Computer Technology for the Des Moines Public Schools. He is a frequent contributor to the online newsletter NETFUTURE that is edited by Steven Talbott. Currently, his Web Site called Confronting Technology (http://www.public.iastate.edu/~/monke/ has valuable links to articles and discussions that critically examine the relationship between humans and computer technology. Email: lm7846s@acad.drake.edu