The Promise of Access by Daniel Greene

Author:Daniel Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Digital divide; neoliberalism; technology; poverty; inequality; hope; internet; access; skills gap; technology policy; economic policy; cities; labor; race; gender; political economy; ethnography; Marxism; social reproduction; startups; schools; libraries; Washington, DC; institutions; communications; organizational studies; science and technology studies; cultural studies; information studies; technology transfer.
Publisher: MIT Press

Technology for a High-Performance Academic Culture

Like MLK’s librarians, Du Bois’s teachers worked hard to define and enforce the correct way to use a PC as part of their efforts to build a high-performance academic culture. This pedagogy appeared in two ways. First, implicitly and throughout the year, teachers modeled a high-performance academic culture through their own technology use and encouraged a culture of constant connectivity in their students—similar to InCrowd’s 24-7 workstyle. These experiments in a hidden curriculum were largely under teachers’ control and they are the focus of this section. Second, it appeared through explicit data-driven discipline that used SchoolForce to “penalize phone use other bad academic habits.”

Data-driven discipline picked up pace after the leadership team’s January ultimatum and, because this infrastructure crossed the whole school, it was ultimately under the leadership team’s control. This is the focus of the next section. As in MLK, these efforts to discipline personal computing prompted a debate on the nature and purpose of the institution: What was schooling supposed to accomplish, for whom, and how?

The first class of seniors had been through three distinct implementations of Du Bois’s one-to-one laptop program: from personal Dell netbooks to personal Acer Chromebooks to laptops in carts that rotated through classrooms. In ninth grade, students had received Dell 2120 netbooks.11 They put down a fifty-dollar deposit and signed a rental agreement dictating the rules for responsible use during the school year.

Dell stopped producing 2120s, so the following year, ninth graders were issued Acer Chromebooks, optimized for the Google software most classes already used. Sophomores who had lost their laptops the previous year were issued Chromebooks. Teachers reported having no training or consultation for the new machines. By the time I entered Du Bois, most seniors no longer had their Dells; they’d been lost, stolen, or just broken. Chromebooks still circulated, but at least half the seniors lacked any computer. Those few (five or six) seniors with the family resources to do so brought fully featured laptops or iPads from home.

The school replaced the computer the first time it was lost, stolen, or destroyed, but required a $500 replacement fee the second time. This is what happened with senior Martin, who spent most of his out-of-school hours working at Chipotle or using the camera he had bought with Chipotle wages. He had his netbook for two years, until a friend sat on it and shattered the screen. Many families were unable to come up with $500 on the spot, and some struggled for the initial fifty dollars. Other computers were simply lost on the bus or at the library, stolen, or, enterprising students told me, sold once their serial numbers were scraped off.

Principal Carroll told me Du Bois had absorbed a nearly $35,000 loss on school computers in the 2013–2014 school year. Du Bois was small, but even a traditional public school of similar size would have struggled to bear that loss. Du Bois’s grants, donations, and bond sales helped it to survive.12 Still, Principal Carroll and other administrators knew that change was needed.

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