Beam Me Up, Students Satellite

By Susan Tifft

In public education, geography has long been destiny. Crippled by limited staffs and tight budgets, rural districts have often found it impossible to offer courses such as Russian and physics that are considered standard by their more cosmopolitan counterparts. Now all that is changing, thanks to the arrival of the electronic classroom. By using interactive video, even small, disadvantaged schools are gaining access to the most sophisticated instruction available, and all without losing the human touch.

The formats and course offerings are as varied as the sponsors, which include federal and state governments, universities, public-television stations and commercial networks. Unlike Whittle Communications' Channel One, however, which beams news and ads into schools on regular television, the electronic classroom enables instructors and pupils to hear and interact with one another much as they would in any normal setting. But the visuals are still one-way: students can see the teacher, but not vice versa.

Televised courses can be a bargain for financially strapped schools. A district may pay as much as $8,000 for a satellite dish, cordless phones and the electronic keypads or computer terminals needed for students to communicate with their long-distance teachers. That one-time outlay amounts to far less than a conventional teacher's annual salary. Like network anchors, video teachers submit to screen tests and often conduct their classes without a studio audience.

The tele-classroom has been especially valuable in states with small populations and struggling economies. Last year, when 15 of the 28 students at Maine's Allagash High School protested the dearth of humanities courses, the University of Maine decided to fill the gap. This fall the university will offer more than 20 courses, including elementary French and algebra, to 23 Maine schools.

Other states are scrambling to enter the video age. Last January the Kentucky Education Network began beaming probability-and-statistics classes into 65 far-flung high schools. By September Virginia expects to have earth stations at every one of its 289 high schools. Private networks, such as the Texas-based TI-IN Network, go even further, sending instruction to more than 750 school districts in 29 states.

Most students seem pleased with long-distance learning. Ninth-grader Vanessa Bryan, one of only 700 residents on Ocracoke Island, N.C., could not have taken Spanish if her school had not tapped into the TI-IN Network. Now she and "classmates" in 18 schools across the country receive instruction from a teacher based in a San Antonio studio. They accept TV tutelage as routine. Says Vanessa: "It's a good course."

Some public school administrators are concerned, however, that the new technology will erode their control. Principals have little leverage over teachers who live hundreds of miles away and do not teach exclusively in one district. Adolescent daydreaming carries less of a penalty when students know they can view a lesson on tape. "We don't play the typical games," says David Benke, who teaches computer science to pupils from San Isidro, Texas, and Prescott, Iowa. "You've got to have a student who really wants to learn."

But in many respects -- even socially -- TV classrooms are comparable to traditional ones. In Texas, Ramona McDaniel of Thorndale and Tim Williams of Sabine Pass, more than 250 miles away, became acquainted through a satellite German class and began corresponding two years ago. This week Williams will escort McDaniel to her spring prom. Says McDaniel of the electronic matchup: "It's a little odd, I guess, but I think it's neat."

With reporting by John E. Gallagher/New York and Michael Mason/Atlanta