Archived Information
The State of Charter Schools 2000 - Fourth-Year Report, January 2000
Computers for Instruction
Computers are essential tools in today's technological workplaces. One way in which schools can help prepare their students for the future is to provide significant exposure to computers at an early age. The varied nature of each school's educational vision in combination with often limited finances may determine the extent to which schools view technology as a priority. Most charter school classrooms were equipped with computers for instruction, student-computer ratios were low, and the majority of computers were capable of running advanced applications. These findings are similar to the findings reported last year, although this year there was a decrease in the percentage of schools reporting no classrooms with computers used for instruction.
Averaging across schools, the estimated mean student to computer ratio in charter schools was 8.9 students per computer, which was slightly lower than the estimated average (10.0 students per computer) for all public schools in 1996-97.1 Two-thirds of our sample of charter schools had a student to computer ratio of fewer than 10 students per computer and almost one-third had student to computer ratios of less than 5 students per computer. Of the charter schools that reported having computers, the estimated median student to computer ratio was 6.2 students per computer.
Of those charter schools that used computers for instruction, nearly two-thirds (66 percent) had at leastthree-quarters of their computers capable of running multimedia applications. Only a small proportion of charter schools (6 percent) did not have any computers capable of running advanced applications.
The majority of charter schools made student use of computers a part of classroom instruction--96 percent of charter schools had classrooms equipped with computers. Approximately two-thirds (67 percent) of these charter schools had computers available for instruction in more than three-quarters of their classrooms. Only 13 percent of the schools with computers available for student instruction had no classrooms with computers.
Estimated Student to Computer Ratio for a Selected Sample of Charter Schools
Estimated Percentage of Charter Schools Using Computers in their Classrooms and Percentage of Computers Capable of Running Multimedia Applications
1 Computers and Classrooms: The Status of Technology in U.S. High Schools. May 1997, Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service, Policy Information Center. This average represents all 50 states.
2 The distribution of schools with multimedia or advanced capacity is similar across charter schools without regard to the number of computers at the school with one exception, schools with 10 or fewer computers are less likely to have multimedia capacity than schools with more than 10.
Estimated Student to Computer Ratio for a Selected Sample of Charter Schools
Estimated Percentage of Classrooms in Charter Schools with Computers Used for Instruction
Proportion of classrooms
NOTE: These data are based on responses from 921 of the 975 open charter schools that responded to the survey and provided information on computers for instruction (4 schools were excluded because their student to computer ratios were too high to be considered valid). The second table relies on the 888 open charter schools that reported they had at least one computer. In columns 2 and 3, 6 schools did not report on percent of classrooms with computers, and in columns 4 and 5, 12 schools did not report on the percentage of multimedia computers.
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