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NEC Admits To Ripping Off Schools Through E-Rate Program
MAurelius writes "The New York Times (regist. req'd) is reporting that NEC now admits to ripping off multiple low-income school districts by connecting them to the internet with equipment more advanced and expensive than necessary. Several orders of magnitude more expensive. All paid for by telephone rate-payers. That would be you."
Maybe this snuck through because it was done in a separate program funded a different way, but it still amazes me that they thought they wouldn't get caught.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Justice has been served.
Multimillions for a school lan? The school that I was at up until 2 years ago seemed like i could have bought all the IT equipment for a couple of hundred dollars. If that.
It must have been all the computers running Win98 and the IT guy wishing he hadn't moved to Win2000 on his main computer. And servers that don't run Linux!!! NT Server 4? Since I left, apparently they ended up having to install software on every second computer, with the costs and all.
That's M$ for you. Not that this is the case this time, except for the servers. The CAL idea though, the servers would have been expensive though...
Cough...oversight...cough
Wake up!
As a European I believe you'd better hve such a program run by independant beaurocrats than For Profit commercial interests.
And than elect thrustworthy officials to contral the beaurocrats.
But with so few going to the polls, who can complain about the politicians?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
You raise a good point. Executives are able to steal, lie and embezzle pretty much with impunity. They might just get a slap on the wrist if you get caught. I am still outraged over the CitiBank-Enron collusion that joe bloggs had to foot the bill for. Some of the high profile 'white collar' criminals need to spend a few years in a confined with large (in more ways than one) powerful gentlemen of ambivalent sexuality who are being fed tripple doses of viagra in their meals. It might not bring the money back but the revenge factor will be priceless.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
espo
...with a smaller fine and less legal bills than they otherwise would have faced. The evidence was there, and against them. "Big companies" will generally do what is in their best interest and have remarkably little "pride". Pleading guilty in this case was in their best interest.
I worked for a company contracted to ibm to write the content management software for a 10 million$ project to provide ohio public schools with "video on demand". as i understand it, ohio public schools aren't doing so hot. i'm sure all that money will make a big difference, since the kids won't have to wait for the teacher to stick the tape in the vcr...
the best part is, they were very concerned about having very good DRM to prevent all those teachers from warezing reading rainbow or something i guess.
anyway, i'd be this little boondoggle was paid for with erate money, and will come to the surface in the current brouhaha.
http://www.joannejacobs.com/mtarchives/014084.html t io n=article&articleID=2893
http://www.parentadvocates.org/index.cfm?fuseac
What NEC did is bad, but don't forget a lot of school boards are just as responsible if not more so. They don't have accountability until after they do something wrong. The problem in Atlanta is really horrid as the per pupil expenditure for education in Atlanta is one of the highest yet produces some of the worst results (we are in the 12k per student range)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It was about paying off Al Gore's supporters in Silicon Valley. NEC was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
In all such cases that you make the persons were being abused for reasons entirely beyond their control. What a lot of these CEOs do is literally intentionally hurting a lot of people.
If its money that they love so much than take that away. We need an interesting punishment. Never allow them to make more that $18,000 a year or accept handouts from anyone or have any accumulated value worth more than say $30,000. Any of his buddies found to be helping him cheat can have the same punishment (cause you know they wont help him then). Or at least something along these lines.
Quit listening to the libertarians. Those people are regular neo-cons. Hell, the Republican party is more liberal than the libertarians.
As an American I think we'd have a better program if the school system wasn't controlled by the government.
Really? Well, keep in mind that there is already an extensive network of non-public schools that you could go to if you have the money. How exactly does it solve the problem?
Do you think a for-profit private school would have wasted their budget money like this?
Yes. If the money was earmarked for buying network equipment, which it was, they might as well get all the network equipment they could possibly want. If I give you 10 million dollars for the sole purpose of upgrading your internet connection, wouldn't you try to spend it all? Possibly on stuff you will never need?
But Unpossible, how will poor kids go to private schools?
Quit deluding yourself. Private schools have no interest in letting poor people attend. So they will most likely simply disallow them. As in Brown vs. Board of Education.
And if you want to know how well for-profit public education works, read this.
Those that have good parents and want to be educated will be educated.
Do you think some poor kid in an inner-city ghetto is going to have good parents and the drive to succeed? Hell no. Maybe if you weren't so ignorant you would know why most civilized countries, including the US, have mandatory schooling.
More Info
Jason
"FORMAT C:" - Kills bugs dead!
Having spent my recently-ended high school career at a top private school, I can honestly say that you don't even need to pay teachers that much more. Hire more teachers, build more classrooms, and give them things like paper and Xerox machines.
My school pays teachers thousands less than what they would be getting at the public school next door. Yet, teachers still flock to my school. The head of their english department took a job as a bottom rung english teacher at my school. Why? Cause the environment more than makes up for it. My school has no more than about 20 people per class. We don't have to walk through metal detectors on the way into school. We don't have random police searches for drugs. And teachers get all the Xerox and paper they want. One of my history teachers, who used to work at the public school, told us as he handed us each out a reading packet that the amount of paper he used making us each a packet would have depleted his entire allowance for the year at the public school.
I agree that schools need to become better run, more efficient, and less susceptable to fraud. And I agree when you say that "a good lecurer [sic] with chalk and a blackboard is far more valuable then [sic] some hack with power point [sic]." I'm just unsure how the situation is ever going to get better so-long as there are administrators out their who will screw over a school of children for a new car or three, a boat, and 7 properties.
No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
I agree with the poster who questioned how the local government would be much superior to federal. Any time you ask government to solve a problem that the free market can solve itself, you will find the problem solved inefficiently and often with corruption such as this article points out. The reason is, an individual will be cautious with his own money and investments. Government, which takes its wealth by force, is like a rich son who, not having to work for his money, squanders it thoughtlessly.
The Free State Project (http://www.freestateproject.org) proposes to take education out of the hands of government, precisely because it too important to be left to that rich philandering son, the state. Already we have in place private means to fund schools in New Hampshire. The Liberty Scholarship Fund (http://www.lsfund.org/) has been set up as a first step to providing privately funded alternatives to the public schools.
It's time to trim back government to its properly constitutional bounds. It's time to take back our schools. It's time to vote with our feet.
Live free or die! New Hampshire!
Kat Dillon