This is part two in a Guest Post series on Common Core.  Read Part One.
This is an important look behind the Curtain of Common Core in North Carolina.

The writer is a School Counselor in NC public schools.  Part 1 will detail the implementation of Common Core into the School Counselor’s school. Part 2 will detail Technology. Part 3 will be SIS and Part 4 will be testing.

Part 2 Technology

2012 was a different school year. This was the year we rolled out the laptops. Every student and every teacher would have a Lenovo laptop. We will spend less on books and copies. This will save us money. Kids will be more engaged because this is the 21st Century and technology is the thing. As a school counselor, my desktop was removed from my office and I didn’t get a laptop. I used an old laptop from the media center that they were going to ship down to the elementary schools. It took me a couple of days at the beginning of the school year to get my hands on it. Then they realized there wasn’t a computer checked out in my name and brought my desktop back and I told them to keep it. Everyone got Google accounts. I don’t know what the students’ spam folder looks like, but as a professional I regularly purge mine from penis enlargement ads.

At first it was pretty neat that all the kids had laptops. As a school counselor, it made it easier for students to contact me to request meetings without disrupting the classroom or drawing a lot of attention to themselves. Math teachers could use websites that could generate hundreds of math problems for students to work at their own pace. It was better than worksheets that kids would finish at different times, leaving advanced kids with time on their hands. Homework didn’t get lost because teachers could see when you logged in to the course or not.

Then the problems developed. First it was kids being kids being off task. They were downloading programs that would run games in the background and when teachers weren’t looking they were playing games. Girls created Google documents that insulted other girls and emailed them out to an entire class or grade level. Laptops break, cords get lost, students were spending time out of class to go to the help desk to get a loaner until it could be fixed. Boys looked up pornography. Girls wrote erotica and published it on websites. Girls met unknown strangers and engaged in conversations with them in chat rooms. Students downloaded illegal copies of books that they found online for free.

Parents would request to opt out of the laptop initiative. They would meet with me and I would have to send them to an administrator. They were either talked out of opting out because of the instruction their child would miss or they were told they could have their child just pick up a laptop to use during the day and not take home. Opting out is clearly not an option. Some kids temporarily lost privileges to the laptops for misusing them. But everyone gets a laptop to use. Period. Currently the debate is how to make sure that elementary children have the same type of access to laptops as middle school and high school students.

If you are a parent who doesn’t allow your 6th grader to have a cell phone yet because it’s too much responsibility, the school will force you to allow them to have their own laptop that will provide them with more access to the world than a cell phone ever would. Even if it’s just during the school day, because after all they will be monitored by professionals during that time. All in the name of education. To put it more simply, we as educators know more about what’s best for your children. Behind closed doors, parents who don’t want their children to have these laptops are made fun of by “professionals”. Those parents are weirdos, archaic, back woods, etc.

Guess where most of the misuse of laptops occurs? At school. Under the supervision of professionals.

When your child connects the laptop to your wifi at home and then comes back to school and connect to ours, we know every site they looked at while they were in the privacy of your home. If someone else used it real quick at home to pay a bill because it was conveniently there on the counter – your public school knows first thing the next morning.

Let’s go back to the debate on how to make sure that elementary children have the same type of access to laptops as middle school and high school students. This was one of the main questions at the last school board election debate. All of the candidates – except 2 – were in favor of making sure that elementary school students had access to their own laptop. One even mentioned that a toddler can use an iPhone so naturally we need to get as much technology in the hands of our students as soon as possible.

The lesson I have learned from the 1:1 technology is that the school is not ashamed to over step the boundary of parental rights. There’s no such thing as opting out. The school has decided that this is the right thing for your child and you as a parent don’t have much of a say.

I have encouraged parents to opt out of the technology piece if they want. Here’s how – at the beginning of the year they give you some very important paperwork to sign. It’s all the rules and regulations of the laptop 1:1 initiative. Don’t sign it. Your child will not be issued a laptop. They can still have access to school computers and information at home. The school will call you for several weeks and say we need to do this or we need to do that. Pull a Nancy Reagan and just say “no”. There will even be teachers that will tell you that they can’t teach your child if they don’t have a laptop. Which is interesting, because we have been able to educate people for decades without laptops. Some of the best educators I know didn’t have the internet when they were learning to become educators. Does that mean that they didn’t actually learn?

Here’s a key – if someone interferes with your child’s access to PUBLIC education it’s against the law. If a child has dyslexia we provide them extra time. If a child practices a religion that requires certain attire – we let them wear that attire. We can’t pick and choose who we educate and we can’t discriminate. If you as a parent decide you don’t want your child to have their own laptop and the school says we can’t teach them or treats them differently in the classroom – it’s flat out discrimination. Educators lose their license to educate over that stuff folks.

Educators, remember why you chose this career. Remember the teachers that you had that influenced you – the ones who’s face you couldn’t wait to see each day because that meant something new was about to happen. Remember the look on a kid’s face when they get it for the first time. Remember the look on a child’s face when they have worked really hard and have the scribbled out pages to prove it and they make the grade. That look of success, satisfaction, and internal reward is what counts. By allowing students to not make eye contact and hide behind a laptop screen you have disconnected from your greatest teaching tool – your relationship with that child.

Counselors, how are students becoming college and career ready if they don’t know how to interact face to face with a human? Did you know that folks are more likely to get an interview for a job if they hand deliver their resume rather than email? How are students supposed to be successful in an auditorium of college students when they don’t know how to be assertive and meet face to face with those who teach them?

 – END OF PART TWO –