Students need technology, but not at the cost of face-to-face with teachers

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Staff Editorial
January 28, 2012
Filed under Opinion

Much controversy has been stirred up with Tom Luna’s Plan, “Student’s Come First”. What we need is a balanced combination of technology and face-to-face interaction between students and teachers.

Idaho’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Luna, has proposed a bill that puts technology into classrooms and into the hands of students. According to the State Department of Education, the bill would provide laptops to all incoming freshmen and require all high school students to take online classes and have four online credits to graduate.

The laptops we receive would be adequate, and we will be able to take the computers with us when we graduate. However, the planned laptops would not carry us through college, because they lack space and memory due to the limited budget available for them.

To balance the cost of the computers, Luna plans to cut 770 teaching positions, as well as put the remaining teachers on merit pay. Merit pay is basically the teachers getting paid based on how well their students are doing, and how much students learn.

To make matters worse, the cuts in teaching positions will increase the number of students in a class. Luna’s bill states the average ratio of students to teachers is 17-to-1, but he is sadly mistaken; the actual average is much higher. Luna estimates with the increase of class size, the ratio will be 18-to-1, but the number will continue to grow if teacher positions are cut.

If teaching positions are cut, then it is bad news for those of us who want to go into that profession, like senior Megan Gehrke. “It makes me angry,” she commented on the plan.

”If teachers are the most critical component of the student’s success, as Superintendent Luna has repeatedly said, then we should be providing teachers with more opportunities for input and not less,” Brian Smith, President of the local teacher’s union said in an interview with the Daily Bee.

According to  the Idaho Statesman, the computers alone will cost $7 million a year and $6 million for support and maintenance, and Luna wants to save $200 million in the first two years.

More money will also have to be spent on making the schools wireless to accommodate the number of computers, preferably without having the system crash when everyone is online.

Another issue is charging the computers. The classrooms will need to be fitted with a charging station or we will have to charge them at home, that is, if we are allowed to take them home, which has not been clarified in the bill.

“Education is changing . . . and it is difficult to change it when people deal with it everyday,” said Tony Quilici, sophomore English and AVID teacher.

By giving laptops to every high school student and cutting 770 teaching jobs, Luna plans to save Idaho $500 million over five years. However, in this economy, it seems like a highly unlikely way to get Idaho out of the recession. Instead we need a combination of technology in the classroom as well as face-to-face interaction to help education.