If you wanted to remodel your house, you wouldn't do it all at once. Instead, you would do it room at a time. School reform, like home remodeling, ought to be done room at a time. Any that aims to reform a whole school all at once is a dubious one. After all, kids do not learn from schools. Kids learn from teachers in classrooms. A whole school is too large an increment of change. Building high-tech schools is a similarly dubious idea. Trust me. I have helped to build five of them. Only of these two-to three-year projects was really successful. So if I were to do it all over again, my goal would be radically different. I would shift the focus from the traditional model of creating a high-tech school to a model of creating a high-tech schoolroom. The traditional model for a high-tech school is to simply put four to six networked computers in every classroom and on every teacher's desk. The hidden assumption is that teachers will be flexible enough to integrate these computers into their instructional This is generally not the case, and no amount of staff development will make it work. Teachers in elementary schools have highly Structured--or routinized--days, consisting of activities like calendar time, board work, silent reading, story time, paired reading, author's chair, journal writing, math instruction, center time, and resource time (library, PE, art, etc.). About the only time elementary teachers are willing to let students use computers is during center time or while they are waiting to go to lunch or to go home. I know this picture is accurate because I have sat at many school network hubs and used network monitoring software to track computer use. Generally speaking, there is a surge of activity from about 10:45 a.m. to 11:45 a.m., depending on the lunch schedule. Rarely do students get to use classroom computers at other times. This has led me to say often in this column that one computer used four hours a day is equal to four computers used hour a day. The high-tech school model doesn't work all that well in secondary schools either. Teachers in secondary schools tend to use a lecture or lecture/discussion model of instruction. Secondary teachers seem to believe that every student needs to hear everything they say. Sending some students to work on the classroom computers while the teacher is is not often done. Apart from the teachers' reluctance to integrate computers into their classes, a real problem with the traditional high-tech school model is that in a 40-classroom school, you would need about 250 computers--all aging at the same rate. In three years, these 250 computers would need to be replaced at a cost of about $250,000, plus a lot of labor. School districts often do not have a currency plan for computer replacement every three years, so the computers get to be four, five, or even six years old. When computers get this old, they fail, and the school's technology gets a black eye. In addition to the computers in each classroom, the high-tech school model often includes a 30-seat computer lab and sometimes sometimes calls for a small television production studio. My experience has been that computer labs need a full-time computer resource teacher to be successful. Expecting every faculty member to schedule the lab and to know how to use it productively with students is simply unrealistic. Moreover, a school with 250 computers, all the network equipment, and several servers needs a full-time technician. My experience with small television studios is that they are usually in rooms that can accommodate only a dozen or so students. If I were going to install a teaching television studio, I would design it in such a way that some 30 students could use it at once. But that would require a double-sized room. As I mentioned above, only of the five high-tech schools that I helped build was really successful. …