Is the Cobb County Board of Education laptop plan better defined as a clusterfuck or a quagmire? Either way, it’s a mess that’s not going to be cleaned up anytime soon, and another embarrassment for the Board following its “theology as science” textbook sticker program.

Former county commissioner Butch Thompson had sued to stop the program. He and his lawyer, former Gov. Roy Barnes, argued in a hearing July 8 that school officials participated in a “bait and switch” when they promised that the 1 percent sales tax would, in part, “refresh obsolete [computer} workstations.”

Barnes argued that school officials should be held to information they distributed at the time of the vote, when they estimated they could buy 30,000 computers for students for about $32 million, as well as use tens of millions of dollars more — for a total of $76 million — to “refresh” things like printers and servers and buy every teacher a “computing device.”

School officials later decided they could eventually distribute 63,000 Apple iBook laptops to all teachers and all students in grades six through 12. About $25 million of the sales tax money was to be used for the program’s first phase, which the school board approved in April.

Read the article here (login). I agree with Barnes’ argument, which sounds accurate based on what I’ve read the past few months. The plan was and is harebrained from top-to-bottom, and that reality is tough for me to accept as someone who is a technology advocate in general and an Apple advocate specifically.

My new employer and I discussed this situation the other day, and he said there are two primary points of attack for opposing forces against any plan that uses public dollars: 1) attack its merit, or 2) attack its process. In this case, there is fodder to attack the plan from either angle, which makes it especially vulnerable.

For those who haven’t been keeping up with this, the merit angle is nobody seems to be able to explain why all 63,000 middle and high school students need laptops, aside from a fluffy belief in the magical transformative power of technology. Results from pilot studies in other school systems conducting similar programs have been inconclusive, and there was no pilot study performed here.

As for the process, it has lacked transparency and given off an image of bait-and-switch, as suggested by the article. There was also a dash of possible cronyism thrown in for good measure. The appearance of impropriety — whether true or not — is more damning than questions about the merit of the program.