Sidebar
At McKinsey & Company, Inc., we developed a fact base and perspectives to help policymakers and educators address these and related questions.* This report, which was prepared as a submission of information to the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIIAC), summarizes our analysis of options for connecting the nation's public K-12 schools to the information superhighway. The report incorporates insights on connecting to the NII drawn from visits to schools and interviews with educators, policymakers, and technology experts around the country, as well as from a review of the available literature on the educational uses of technology and connectivity.
The report begins with a summary of the principal applications and benefits of connecting public K-12 schools to the NII. (See also the sidebar "What Is the NII?" which briefly describes the key elements that make up the information superhighway.) Then, to illustrate the costs and highlight the challenges of capturing those benefits, the report describes a series of models for deploying the required technology infrastructure-that is, for putting into place the needed connections, hardware, content, and human resources. The next section identifies the three major challenges to successful deployment-funding, professional development for teachers, and courseware development-and outlines a number of potential ways to clear those hurdles. The report concludes by highlighting some of the leadership challenges posed by technology deployment, underscoring that success will ultimately depend on the creativity and sustained commitment of leadership at all levels-school, district, community, state, and national.
This report does not attempt to lay out a national blueprint for infrastructure deployment, nor does it recommend specific public policy goals. Each school or district has its own unique needs, opportunities, and challenges; no one blueprint could possibly address them all. Accordingly, successfully deploying the infrastructure will require an approach flexible enough not just to allow individual schools to set their own pace and priorities, but actively to encourage local experimentation and innovation. In addition, this report does not evaluate the relative merits of competing demands on educational funding (e.g., more computers versus smaller class sizes). We recognize that educators and policymakers will have some difficult choices to make in determining the appropriate budgetary priorities and tradeoffs. To assist such deliberations, this report provides an economic analysis of various options for connecting schools to the NII. We hope that this analysis will inform the public debate on actions to take at the school and district level as well as provide a useful fact base for analyses and recommendations developed by the NIIAC.