Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops (New York Times)

An interesting development in the "one laptop per student" initiative...

LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — The students at Liverpool High have used their
school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and
hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a
10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step
instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Narayan Mahon for The New York Times

Chris Barry, 16, carrying his laptop at Liverpool High School in Liverpool,
N.Y., where they are being phased out.

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other
morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes
because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting
help from teachers.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has
decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other
schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are
now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

To read the rest of this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html?_r=1&oref=slogin