My mission...

In 2006, the National Center for Education Statistics released "Internet Access in US Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2005" proclaiming that the percentage of instructional rooms with Internet access had increased from 51% in 1998 to 93% just seven years later in 2005. Furthermore, there had been a corresponding decrease in the ratio of students to instructional computers of 13:1 to 4:1. To the casual reader, this sounds like amazing progress that demonstrates the commitment of the U.S. educational system to infuse our country’s schools with the same technology that has bolstered its businesses to ever growing levels of production and efficiency. The report does neither, however, detail where within those schools the computers are deployed nor does it detail how much access the average student has to those computers.

Deployment Matters
Imagine a 1,000-student school divided into 40 instructional rooms with 250 instructional computers (4:1 ratio), two very different scenarios could emerge.

Scenario 1:
The school may have 1 instructional computer per classroom room and six 35-computer labs.

or…

Scenario 2:
The school could choose to deploy 6 computers per classroom, leaving enough for one 40-computer lab.

One would assume enormous pedagogical and usage differences between the lab-based vs. in-class models given here. (This is something I hope to explore in later posts.)

Access Matters
In “No Access, No Use, No Impact” Cathleen Norris, et al., begins with the most strongly worded assertion of the reason why the enormous infusion of technology into K-12 schools has not made more of an impact. Simply put, the author cites a lack of real access to the technology. She also states something important to our discussion, which is, “having one computer in a classroom is not access nor will it lead to any significant student use.” She claims that “almost without exception” the strongest predictor of technology use is technology access.

Using an online survey tool, 3,665 respondents from four states (both rural and urban) responded to the survey which is much more granular than the NCES survey. This study asked individual teachers how frequently their students use computers for both online and offline activities.

The author discovered that up to 45% of students used computers offline for less than 15 minutes/week and a full 67% used them less than 15 minutes/week online.

Such low numbers caused the author to look at students’ access to computers with Internet access both in the classroom and in computer labs. These numbers were equally alarming. 63% of classrooms have one or fewer computers while 94% have five or fewer. So they must be going to a shared lab, right? Unfortunately, 67% who went, went only two times/week or less, 39% of which went “seldom” or “never.” When cross-tabulated, 26% of students go to a classroom daily that has only one computer and seldom visit a lab. Finally, only 21% have either more than 10 computers in the classroom or visit a lab more than 2x/week.

That’s a lot to statistics, so let me summarize. Almost 100% of students in today’s schools have access to arguably the most revolutionary technology since the printing press, but only about 10% are given access to it on a regular basis.

How is that going to produce the change we expect?



Norris, C., Sullivan, T., Poirot, J., & Soloway, E. (2003). No Access, No Use, No Impact: Snapshot Surveys of Educational Technology in K-12. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 36(1), 15-28.

Wells, J., & Lewis, L. (2006). Internet Access in US Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2005. Highlights. NCES 2007-020. National Center for Education Statistics, 83.