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June 22, 2006
Angus King: A Brief History of Maine's Laptop Program
Here are my notes from former Maine Governor Angus King's AALF keynote about the Maine middle school laptop initiative. The notes aren't verbatim, but I tried to capture some of his more colorful and entertaining remarks word-for-word. I also hope to have a podcast online soon, but I'm waiting for the governor's permission to post it since I didn't get permission before recording it.
How did Maine's middle school laptop program happen? It started with a data point, three insights and a lunch.The data point: Maine was stuck in 37th place for per-capita income. We hadn't been able to break out of this rut.
First insight: I don't know where the hell the economy is going. Tom Friedman talks about teaching Indians how to speak with a Minnesotan accent to provide better service at India's call centers. We don't know where the jobs are gonna come from or be like, but they'll probably involve two things: more education and technology. That's the only thing you can predict about the jobs of 20 years from now.
Insight number two: We're all chasing the same thing, we governors. We all want more jobs, better jobs. And everybody thinks they know the formula: cut taxes, encourage R&D, international trade, etc. But if we're all doing the same thing, how are we ever going to get out of 37th place? That was a scary insight, because I thought I was pretty good. We couldn't win that race. You don't get ahead of the competition by merely keeping up.
Insight number three: I realized that everything we did was incremental. Everything was baby steps. Like giving a teachers a half-percent raise. One year we paved 820 miles of road, compared to 780 miles the previous year, and we treat it like a major accomplishment. We act like these are big deals but they're just incremental.
The Lunch: with Seymour Papert of MIT. I said to him we have five kids for every computer. What if we could have three kids per computer? Seymour shook his head. What about two kids per computer? Wouldn't matter, Seymour said. Then he said, "It is only when it is one to one that the power occurs." But this was 1996 and we didn't have money to do this.
By 2000, our finance people said we'd have a $70 mil surplus in the state budget that no one anticipated. It hadn't been earmarked for anything. So I put these insights together and said I want to do something that helps people compete, isn't incremental, and should involve edtech. We could have used the money for anything, but I wanted to do this. My chief of staff said that we could create an endowment to give laptops to every 7th grader forever. And I said, wow.
We worked on this idea and announced it six weeks later. Other people plan projects like this for more than a year - that's better. But if we had waited, the legislature would have spent the money. If we didn't get our mitts on that money, it would get parceled out and been used incrementally.
A reporter then asked a question we hadn't thought of - will the kids or the schools own the laptops? I had no idea. I could have said I don't know, but I blurted out, "the kids." Wrong answer. Huge political mistake. People hated the idea that the govt would give these tools to kids. Seventh graders became the most hated minority in the state. So that was a big mistake. It was referred to as Governor King's Laptop Giveaway. Why don't more politicians try projects like this? It's because I got the shit kicked out of me. Ten to one of all emails were against it. "Governor, what were you smoking?" "Governor, we are a poor state, let someone else lead." Yes, and they will still lead. One guy even suggested it would be better to give kids chainsaws.
(The governor's Bill Gates joke. I was on the way to meet him the first time, and was talking with a trooper about what I should say to him. The trooper said, "How about, 'Dad, don't you recognize me?'")
So people hated the project, but I knew it was still the right thing to be doing. We had a two-prong strategy: deal with the legislature, and deal with the public. I had the legislators come in and see a mock classroom with laptop. Finally, one of my allies in the legislature - and as an independent, I don't have many - came down and said we're not going to be able to get this through. Instead we should put the money in a fund and create a taskforce. I said "sold" - because I knew that was the only way to keep the money. After a year of taskforcing, they came back with a recommendation - stick with one-to-one computing.
We then built whatever alliances we could. But people were against it simply because it was my idea. Welcome to the world of politics. Then I went on a teaching tour, to help people understand what we were talking about. We had a dog and pony show, working with Apple, handing out iBooks, then I'd come in and teach US history. And all the cameras would be rolling in the background. So I taught the Battle of Gettysburg and Pickett's Charge, using a website that had a collection of relevant sites and source materials, including the Gettysburg Address, in Lincoln's own handwriting. The depth of content blew away anything you could find in a textbook. Really deep stuff. I did this routine all over the state.
Then a crucial thing happened. I was talking with a business group, and they said, "Let's just do this in our own town of Guilford, and not wait for the government." So in this poor, rural town, we suddenly had a pilot project. Instead of arguing with people, I'd tell people to go to Guilford and watch how engaged the students are. And that probably sold it as much as anything else.
The legislature, meanwhile, insisted on funding more pilots. We'd still have only pilots today if we had stuck with that. I said we'd do it now, state wide, because of equity. This is an incredibly powerful tool for equity.
Then comes the Constitution - God bless the Constitution. In the end, they needed a budget, and guess who had to sign the budget? Me. I said, if you want to have a state budget, you know what had to be in it. It was simple as that. Pretty straightforward. You've got persuasion, but then you've got power.
Now the laptop program is finishing its fourth year. The endowment got spent in that time. It's hard to hold that money when you're also cutting Medicaid. But now it's being renewed for another four years, because it's proved itself. It's worked. The teachers, parents, students, convinced the legislature that it was successful and should be continued.
What did we learn? If you're thinking of doing something like this, go to one vendor. Don't spread it around - you want one throat to choke. When something goes wrong, you don't want the computer company blaming the network company. Get one vendor who can deal with the whole issue and be your partner. For us, Apple was a real partner. They moved people to Maine, were fantastic with repairs, a real partner.
Things also have to work. If you're gonna do this, the damn things have to work. If something doesn't work more than once or twice, the teachers will fold up the laptops and go back to the book. Reliability is a huge factor in this. A teacher just isn't going to put up with it otherwise.
Third - you can't spend too much time or money on professional development. The best thing we did was focus on professional development from the very beginning, starting with a grant from the Gates Foundation. This is not a hardware project. It's an educational project. This device is something that assists teachers, not replace them. So you need to help teachers integrate it into the curriculum. If all you're doing is buying hardware, it's going to be a failure, and I don't want that to happen because my name is associated with this kind of project.
Fourth - assessment. This obsession with testing is focused on rote knowledge. It's not capturing what these tools can really do. It's a tool that helps you solve problems, which is what life is all about. It's not for memorizing what year Columbus discover America. But the tests are testing that kind of knowledge. So do not - do not - promise your school board that one-to-one laptops will improve test scores, or you'll be out of a job. You can say they improve writing skills - all the research is showing this. But it's really about problem solving.
The model of education for 500 years has been a teacher becomes an expert and dumps data on kids. Thomas Jefferson could know everything, but now, no one can, because there is so much more knowledge out there today. We should look at law school as a model, because there's too much damn law. Nobody can learn all of it. Instead, you learn how to ask the right questions, identify the issues, and find the law. That's a much better model for kids to learn in a knowledge-rich society. It's a different kind of learning. Like they say, we've gone from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. We're not going to beat the rest of the world on rote learning.
Innovation is the only thing America has. Natural resources and capital can go anywhere, technology can get zapped around the world. Innovation is something we have had historically - a confluence of experience, education and technology. Yet we as a country are frittering it away. Currently the federal govt has zero dollars budgeted for education technology. Zero. We're like England in 1900 - the most powerful country in the world, but for how much longer? We've had an incredible run for 60 years, but it's only going to continue if we're going to innovate.
My two favorite philosophers are Darwin and Gretsky. God said why, and Darwin said how. We all learned about survival of the fittest. I always used to think it was the ones with big claws who survived. But if that were true, the dinosaurs would be in charge. But the fittest are those who are most adaptable to change - and we're in a period of the most rapid change in human history. Those that change will survive. Resist and die. Then Wayne Gretsky - greatest scorer of all time, but he's not the biggest or fastest. How? "I skate to where the puck is going to be; everyone else skates to where it is." I don't think you have to be a genius to know where things are going to be in 10 years. It's going to involve technology, digital literacy - and that's where innovation will come. The next Bill Gates may be in a rural Maine town, but would have never had a chance if the state hadn't put a tool in his hands.
Final Thought: The Five Ps for Success:
Plan
Partnership
Perseverance
Persuasion
PassionThose of you who are trying this, know that this is the right thing to do - but you've got to have these five Ps for it to work.
(Another gubenatorial joke: What's a Canadian? A Canadian is an unarmed north American with health insurance.)
"Oh, and come to Maine," he said while leaving the conference. "It's really nice this time of year. I used to get five percent of everything spent there." :-) -andy
Posted by acarvin at June 22, 2006 8:25 PM
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