Wiring Schools for Success

Federal program spurs grant makers to help tap the Internet for education

SUSAN GRAY

Under a sign that says “The Future Starts Today,” seventh graders at Summers Middle School here work at five computers donated by I.B.M. as part of its $35-million “Reinventing Education” program. Their teacher, Deborah Clark, has aroused the youngsters’ interest in a math lesson by asking them to use the Internet to track down the 10 fastest cars in a professional auto race and determine their median speed.

The computers — and access to the Internet donated by Bell Atlantic Corporation — have turned out to be “an opportunity of a lifetime” to lift student achievement rates in this poor rural school in the hills of Appalachia, says Ms. Clark.

Many more schools and libraries may soon have the same opportunity. A growing number of corporations and private foundations are expanding their educational-technology grant making in response to a new federal program that is expected to provide $10-billion over the next four years to help schools and libraries obtain Internet access.

International Business Machines, for example, announced in October that it would provide $10-million more than the $25-million it had initially committed for its “Reinventing Education” program. Because more schools will gain Internet access now, company executives say, the increase made sense.

“The federal fund is a terrific tool,” says Robin Willner, a director of I.B.M.’s charitable-giving programs.

Not only has the federal program caused a burst of new private grant making, but it has also prompted many charities to develop new materials for their Internet sites — which are likely to be used more extensively as schools and libraries begin to obtain on-line access more cheaply.

Meanwhile, numerous grant makers and charities are working to help schools and libraries deal with the complicated process of applying for the new technology subsidies.

The subsidies, often referred to as “universal service discounts,” were created as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which overhauled telecommunications regulation. Schools and libraries in rural areas, as well as those in other areas that serve a large number of poor children, will see the biggest savings from the federal program, which reduces the cost of Internet access by 20 to 90 per cent. Private schools are eligible as long as they do not have an endowment that exceeds $50-million.

The subsidies have the potential to bring Internet access to millions of Americans, but educators, government officials, business executives, and charity leaders all agree that the federal program will be a failure unless new money is put into the development of sound educational materials for the Internet — and into programs that train educators how to use it. As a result, many of the new grant-making programs are aimed at improving the Internet’s use as an educational tool.

Computer, software, telecommunications, and other high-technology companies have been especially eager to use their philanthropic programs to develop model educational efforts. They hope that doing so will help prove the value of their own technology — and help them win a big share of the school and library market.

Federal officials in charge of the “universal service” program have been urging grant makers to expand their technology programs to complement the government subsidies, which are limited to paying for Internet connections. Vice-President Gore met with about a dozen leaders of high-tech philanthropy programs in Washington last fall to implore them to make grants that will insure the success of the federal effort.

Ira Fishman, executive director of the Schools & Libraries Corporation, a new non-profit organization set up by the Federal Communications Commission to administer the $2.25-billion in annual subsidies that will go to schools and libraries, also attended the meeting.

“We hope universal service will be a catalyst for a lot of involvement from grant makers and the corporate grant-making world,” he says. “The universal-service discounts cover a substantial amount of — but not by any means all of the costs of — infrastructure or other needs of the schools and libraries to make sure that they use technology well.”

Gail McClure, vice-president for programs at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and the official who oversees the foundation’s grants for information technology, says philanthropy has a responsibility to help make sure the technology is used effectively> in the classroom.

Parents and educators, she warns, will pull the plug on expensive technology if they do not see results. “A backlash is going to happen if this high-tech stuff doesn’t demonstrate its potential,” she adds.

Private and corporate foundations and many charities are working to insure that that does not happen. Among the efforts:

* The AT&T Foundation has committed $150-million in product and cash donations to create the AT&T Learning Network, a five-year program started in 1995 to help 32,000 schools gain access to the Internet and to develop on-line educational materials. While the foundation initially expected to spend most of the money on wiring schools and subsidizing Internet access, it says the new federal subsidies mean that it may shift money into efforts to come up with educational tools and to train teachers. “There may not be the same need for us to provide Internet access any more,” says Timothy McClimon, executive director of the foundation.

* The W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Mich., has committed $16-million in grants for information-technology programs, primarily for schools and libraries. Much of the money is going to “train the trainers,” officials say, or to teach librarians and teachers how to use the Internet effectively in their work.

* The MCI Foundation in Washington is giving $1.2-million to education-oriented institutions to develop Internet-based curricula for schools. It is also pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into a series of “Smart-Surfing Workshops,” where educators and parents can learn to use the Internet and get information about ways to keep children away from inappropriate sites.

* The Hitachi Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Japanese semiconductor and telecommunications company, will make $1-million in grants this year to reward groups that have designed exemplary Internet-based curricula. The Washington foundation will follow up with additional grants to help spread those model programs nationwide. It is also spending $275,000 on an Internet course for future schoolteachers run by the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education in Charlottesville. Students around the world will be able to log on to their computers to participate in the class, receiving on-line lessons that show them how to incorporate the Internet into the classroom.

* The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami has awarded $300,000 to California Neuropsychology Services in San Rafael, Cal., to further develop “Read, Write, & Type,” a high-tech teaching tool. The computer-based course teaches students to read and write and can adjust to each student’s learning pace and special needs. The goal is to allow teachers to work one-on-one with students rather than having to teach an entire class at a time.

* America Online in Dulles, Va., is starting a new corporate foundation this spring. All of the grants will support innovative projects that incorporate the Internet into school lessons. The on-line company has not yet said how much it will spend on grants.

Corporate grant makers have long been ahead of other foundations in providing money for education-technology programs, but the new federal subsidies to defray Internet-access costs have given them even more motivation to help schools and libraries.

The money for the new subsidies for schools and libraries comes from a fee that large telecommunications companies are required to pay to the federal government.

Companies can bid to be the Internet providers to schools, libraries, and other organizations that the government says are eligible for low rates. Using the money collected from the telecommunications companies, the government will subsidize the providers for the difference between the low rates paid by schools and those the companies typically charge.

The fees charged to telecommunications companies have been challenged by many of those companies. They say it is unfair for them to absorb the financial burden of the program. It is possible that the courts will force the government to come up with a new way to finance the program — or to even abandon the idea. The companies have already persuaded the government to phase in the subsidies at a slower rate for the first six months, with only about a quarter of the annual amount of subsidies awarded, rather than half.

In spite of the protests about the fees, telecommunications companies are eager for the chance to obtain contracts from schools or libraries. Contract winners could receive many years of business — plus win potential customers among students, teachers, and librarians who want Internet service at home.

“We all hope that we’ll be the one being called upon by schools and libraries to provide them with service,” says Leslie Graitcer, executive director of the BellSouth Foundation and head of a group of grant makers that support programs to integrate technology and education.

Ms. Graitcer’s foundation, which is operated by the BellSouth Corporation and a BellSouth subsidiary that provides Internet service, last year announced that it would spend more than $5-million over five years to help schools ease into using the Internet in classes.

It spent $100,000, for example, to underwrite a conference last fall for administrators to learn how to apply for the new universal-service subsidies and seek other resources to help defray the cost of maintaining computers. It has also given $100,000 to the Miami Museum of Science to expand the museum’s development of Internet-based curricula.

Those kinds of grants, says Ms. Graitcer, “help schools feel favorable about companies like ours.”

Private foundations have tended to be much more skeptical about financing educational technology than have their corporate counterparts. But that is beginning to change, partly because the new federal subsidies make the integration of technology into education nearly inevitable.

The Knight Foundation, for example, had made many grants to improve education but had stayed away from technology — until recently.

The foundation had little choice but to join the crowd, says A. Richardson Love, Jr., director of education programs. “It’s become so embedded in what everyone is doing that you can’t ignore it,” he says.

Like corporate grant makers, private foundations have undertaken numerous efforts to make sure that schools and libraries take advantage of the new subsidies.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation in Los Altos, Cal., for example, made a $100,000 grant to help create the National Educational Technology & Telecommunications Center, or NETT Center. The new center will help schools and libraries get information about the new federal subsidies. It will also provide leads on additional financial resources to help schools incorporate technology successfully into their classes.

The Kellogg Foundation has offered to assist Michigan schools that want to apply for universal-service discounts but need help with their applications, which require detailed information about technological needs.

To be sure, a number of grant makers were already devoting resources to wiring schools, libraries, and hospitals. The Gates Library Foundation, which was created by Bill Gates, the head of Microsoft, and his wife, Melinda, has been donating millions of dollars in cash, equipment, and technical assistance to poor urban and rural libraries to acquire computers, Internet access, and training for librarians.

While many grant makers are optimistic about the ways the Internet and other forms of technology can be used to improve education, some are also fearful that it cannot bring about the changes some expect.

Ms. Willner, director of corporate social policy and programs at I.B.M., says she is careful to warn educators not to treat technology as the solution to all teaching problems.

“You have to start with the education, what you want to do instructionally, think it through — and technology is the last piece,” she says. “Institutions are going to use the Internet just to print things out. The idea is really how to use the Internet to do things that couldn’t be done before.”

“It’s like anything else,” she says. “If you leave it at the back door and say, ‘Here, make a difference,’ it’s not going to make a difference.”

A number of observers are already skeptical of what computers and the Internet can do for education. Last summer, The Atlantic Monthly ran a cover story with the headline “The Computer Delusion: Cutting Other School Subjects to Make Room for Computers may be Educational Malpractice.”

Belridge Elementary School in McKittrick, Cal., is a case in point of how technology for technology’s sake can fail. Eight years ago, the school spent about $5-million to equip every youngster with a computer. The children regularly used the Internet, CD-ROM’s, and video- and audio-production technology. But two years after the technology was in place, the students’ standardized-test scores showed no signs of improvement, and parents campaigned against the use of computers. Today, most of the computers have been removed.

Here in Hinton, Ms. Clark has faced her own setback. One of her students dropped her math class this year because the student’s parents said computers were frivolous. “They told me, ‘You’re not teaching math,’” she says.

Ms. Clark says she is convinced nonetheless that the Internet is improving her ability to teach — and increasing students’ eagerness to learn. Using a laptop that I.B.M. provided her to take home to devise lesson plans, Ms. Clark gets ideas from Web sites developed by teachers around the country. The plan to teach medians by using auto-race results came from a teacher in Texas.

In 29 years of being a teacher, Ms. Clark says, she has struggled to teach math successfully. Her Hinton students rank in the bottom half of all West Virginia youngsters.

But technology, Ms. Clark says, has given her the “shot in the arm that I needed.” She is putting off retirement because of the computers, she says. And she thinks that when tests are taken again this spring, the results will prove the effectiveness of the new methods of instruction.

“I know it,” she says. “My students have a better understanding of math.”