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A Costly Gift

The rush to implement technology in general has often been half-baked, with too little effort to identify effective practices and belated consideration of how much technology the schools can afford to sustain.

By Alan Warhaftig

You know the story. Four years ago, the boxes and wires were installed. The boxes were speedy G3 iMacs running OS 9 with 128 megabytes of RAM; the T1 connection was wicked fast, boding a limitless future. Today, those nifty boxes are, well, G3 iMacs with 128 megs of RAM, at least $200 shy of being able to run Tiger, the current Macintosh operating system—and, even then, running it slowly. Upgrading would demand more than $100,000 for a school with 500 computers, an impossibility in an...