In Walled Lake, Michigan, superintendent William Hamilton touts the success of his district's one-to-one program, which is still going strong after ten years. "Because of the economy, we wondered if the program would fizzle out, but it just hasn't," Hamilton says. "A significant part of our community thinks this is a top priority, and they've hung in there" — in spite of the recession that has hit Michigan harder than most states in the country.

Parents of Walled Lake sixth-graders have the option to buy a $784 laptop and enroll their child in the program. Those not in the program have access to 7,000 district-leased laptops that teachers share on rolling carts. School officials say laptops improve grades, boost critical-thinking skills and increase collaboration among students. Since the Walled Lake district implemented its laptop program about a decade ago, the officials say, achievement in all subjects has increased in grades 6-8.

Walled Lake isn't the only U.S. district that's staying the course when it comes to laptop computing, according to a recent article in USA Today. In Clovis, California, the Reyburn Intermediate School has watched their test scores go up for the 350 seventh and eighth graders who work daily with a laptop. And in Maine the statewide one-to-one program initiated several years ago continues in many districts with the state distributing 70,000 laptops to middle and high school students in the past year.

According to Jeff Mao of Maine's Department of Education, the goal is a laptop for every student in grades 7 through 12 by 2013. The program costs $242 per student, or about $17 million each year. "Some people will say, 'Wow, that's a lot of money,' but that represents less than 1.5% of the total education budget," Mao says.

For the educators behind all three programs, 21st century technology is not a frill, it's a necessity. "We would never send our own kids to pediatricians that were practicing medicine from the '70s or '80s," says Mark Hess, principal of Sarah Banks Middle School in Wixom, Mich. "Why would we send our kids to schools that are practicing instructional techniques that are decades old? If we did that, it'd be educational malpractice."

Source: Bring your books? Lunch, Laptop? USA Today, retrieved from the iStockAnalyst web site.