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MA High School Forces All Students To Buy MacBooks
An anonymous reader sends in this excerpt from the Salem News:
"A new program at Beverly High will equip every student with a new laptop computer to prepare kids for a high-tech future. But there's a catch. The money for the $900 Apple MacBooks will come out of parents' pockets. 'You're kidding me,' parent Jenn Parisella said when she found out she'd have to buy her sophomore daughter, Sky, a new computer. 'She has a laptop. Why would I buy her another laptop?' Sky has a Dell. Come September 2011, every student will need an Apple. They'll bring it to class and use it for homework. Superintendent James Hayes sees the technology as an essential move to prepare kids for the future. The School Committee approved the move last year, and Hayes said he's getting the news out now so families can prepare. 'We have one platform,' Hayes said. 'And that's going to be the Mac.'"
Suppose I were the parent of an underprivileged child. Suppose I live paycheck-to-paycheck, and don't have room in my budget for this. What the hell is the school going to do when I refuse to adhere to this absurdity? Fail my child? This wreaks of something illegal.
My other sig is clever.
A new program at Beverly High will equip every student with a new laptop computer
Odd, from reading the summary, it sounds more like the parents will do that, while the 'program' will just require it.
Is it really necessarily to require every student to have a laptop in order to learn? Are they saying it's nearly impossible to correctly teach students without this technology?
And sure, while technology makes things easier to do, it almost feels like they're blaming the lack of technology for not being able to properly teach the students. But, that's my opinion.
Probably a far better idea to get them all netbooks. They're cheaper and they will draw less irk from parents. Besides, what can a Mac do that Linux can't when it comes to schoolwork? And I'm not going to even mention using Windows and how much a joy that could be.
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High schools have a strange sense of "voluntary."
Macs are at least a step up from Windows in terms of viruses...
Yes (popularity).
...and security
Lol. No.
Last I checked, every child in the United States is entitled to a free education up to the 12th grade. If one has to pay even $0.01 a month to get an education, then the education is not free.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Sorry teacher. I'm not rich enough to do my homework.
And then they'll get a project, or a homework assignment, or just plain harassed and abused in one way or another until they cough up the $$$.
This is a SCHOOL we're talking about.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
EVERY employer requires M$ Office experience...
This isn't always true either. I doubt the largest employer in the city where I work require any computer skills for the assembly line workers. Neither do the construction companies whose employees are expanding the building I am sitting in. If you are talking about white collar jobs, you might have a point but most of these require a degree of some sort. Anyone graduating with any sort of degree is going to have used Microsoft Office at least a little so what students use in High School is irrelevant to the real world.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
Kudos to your daughter for willing to be the weird kid with the oddball computer.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Who was the Apple sales rep on this account? Huge WIN - to FORCE parents to buy a kid a new machine when they might well ALREADY HAVE ONE that works perfectly well.
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Real world: Employer pays you for your work, and provides you with any work materials.
School World: You pay the school in order to do work, and provide your own materials.
If they instead opted for a Windows laptop it would be nearly impossible to standardize
it's not like they will be writing device drivers or hooking up exotic peripherals. they need a browser, email, IM, and maybe an IDE. they'll need to standardize on those anyway, but windows wouldn't make it any harder.
I assume you've never sent a kid to school. They constantly come home with lists of required purchases. Tossing a laptop onto the list is a larger scale, but no different in spirit than requiring: 5 spiral bound notebooks, 2 sewn binding composition books, a hand-held pencil sharpener, 10 number 2 pencils, etc...
Sorry teacher. I'm not rich enough to do my homework
See? They ARE teaching kids real-life skills... just maybe not the ones they intended.
If this was a private school, I'd have no problem with it. Private schools can do what private schools want. This is a public school, and they are requiring students & their parents to pay out extra money for laptops. And it's not just any laptops, but they must be MacBooks.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for teaching kids about technology. But requiring them all to have MacBooks, even if they already have their own non-Apple laptops, is absurd. What can they teach about technology at large, using a MacBook, that they cannot teach using Windows? Furthermore, it is likely that when these kids graduate high school and go to college, they will find Windows machines far more readily accessible than Macs. After college, most of these students will find that prospective employers won't even give them the choice to work on a Mac.
I could possibly get on board with the school requiring laptops, but requiring them to buy (or lease or borrow) new machines, and not giving them the choice of which OS they can use, to me, crosses the line.
PS - How long until the first pics of some kid popping Mike & Ike's surface on the net?
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
How can you expect Americans to have aristocracies if you stand in the way of holding back or penalizing the poor!?
Damn right. I'm glad that my school was forward-thinking enough to teach me Windows 3.11 and Microsoft Works and Word 2. All that other time that they spent teaching me the concepts underlying the systems was completely wasted, because when I got out into the real world I found that everyone used Window 3.11 and Word 2.
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This is just as bad as mandating all Microsoft software - I feel like I'm back in the 1990s.
They should be using the web to get any content out to students, and then students could use whatever sort of computer (or device!) they want, including ipads, thinkpads, or smartbooks or their latest phone which they use instead of a computer. Then in five years time when the next hot new thing comes along or their mac software is broken by a new OS, or Apple drops Mac OS completely (the last WWDC was almost entirely taken up with iOS), they will not be left stuck on an abandoned platform dealing with bit rot in old applications and wondering why they mandated that everyone must use this. You know, like those companies that still use Windows 2000 because they are tied to binaries on that platform and they don't want the hassle of moving on.
This is exactly what the web was made for. If they used platform-agnostic html to deliver their student content (no active-x, no binary plugins), they would have an always up to date resource which students could access from anywhere, and which did not mandate any particular technology to access it (every platform nowadays has a browser). Students could deal with their own tech support, and the school could issue free (far cheaper) web devices to those who needed them.
The question nowadays is not mac or PC, it should be binary or markup, and the answer is pretty obvious for the needs of a high school.
Yes but they're using Macs. Why not just use netbooks w/Windows 7 Starter? Cheaper for taxpayers and parents alike, and Windows 7 at least prepares them for the corporate world.
>>>They just get the option of paying for the school's crazy Macbook program either directly or via taxes.
Yes. They also pay taxes when they don't send their kids to school at all (i.e. homeschool). Or for Amtrak even if you've never set foot on a train. That's the unfairness of a monopoly in a nutshell. It's the government equivalent of having to send $1000 to Microsoft every year, even if you never use MS operating systems.
In European countries the money follows the kid, so if they choose to go to Apple Elementary or Montessori Ed, or wherever, then the dollars go there. So if the parent decides this MacBook idea is stupid, he can just quit that school and go somewhere else. There's no negative consequences of that decision.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
and his cronies in IT without pay and start investigating whatever sweetheart deal the superintendent made with Apple or with an Apple VAR instead, including any kickbacks paid or to be paid to the superintendent. For instance, is the guy now driving a car far more expensive than superintendents usually drive? Is he moving to a wealthy, upscale neighborhood? Basically, the only justification I can see to require parents to buy their kids Macs is either dishonesty or incompetence... while the superintendent isn't required to know anything, he is required to be able to obtain honest, competent IT advice and it's obvious he didn't even try.
I can see requiring a laptop for students in the 21st Century. It's a lot cheaper to deliver textbooks on that platform and it's easier for students to carry a dozen textbooks if they're all on a hard drive and weigh nothing over and above the weight of a laptop.
If the IT people are incapable of delivering platform-agnostic documents and applications, they're either incompetent or should be under suspicion of participating in a conspiracy with the superintendent of defrauding the taxpayers.
Tech Public Policy stuff
You mean: a lot of places charge employees for parking, because a lot of places are cheap bastards. Lot space doesn't come for free ...
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Having worked with school districts let me tell you there is some supreme incompetence that goes on there. Also there's the simply Mac fanboy cognitive dissonance at work. What probably happened:
Superintendent gets a shiny new Macbook because it is cool looking and stylish. It works great for him/her because all they do is surf the web, read e-mail, simple stuff. A new, powerful machine without crap will do that blazingly fast and easy. Goes double because he has a nice new cable modem connection that is just super fast (or in reality more like 10mbit).
At work, however, they have old PCs running even older software to handle student records, grades, etc. These have problems, as old computers are wont to do, in particular when running software designed for even older architectures. Also, as with most schools, they have a slow network connection. The whole school has a connection maybe as fast as the superintendent's home connection, so simple tasks like web browsing feel slow.
Rather than looking at the situation logically, the superintendent believes everything is because of his shiny new Mac. Clearly that Mac is the reason everything is so good. Thus the solution is for everyone to have one! Things would be so much better. Nothing would ever break, because his never has. There'd be no problems, because he hasn't had any.
That's my bet. Nobody bought him/her off, it was just a case of someone who knows fuck-all about enterprise computing. They figure since their sample size of one is perfect, that will hold true for all the rest.
There were techies bitching about buttons being moved in Ubuntu, and you expect normal people to go from OS X after three years of likely exclusive use to Windows? People react poorly to change, and Mac users least of all due to the sticky nature of Apple's product line. You're right, they ARE going to have some big problems later when they need to use a computer at work, and it requires something more than drag-n-drop to work.
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Actually, in this type of situation, going with Windows would be better. If students already have Mac laptops, they could run Windows using bootcamp on them, and they'd only have to buy a copy of Windows, not a whole new laptop. By going with Mac laptops it forces parents of students who already have a Windows laptop to either need a loaner, or buy a second laptop.
Actually requiring any specific platform is stupid. The best idea is to identify the tasks to be performed then allow the people to make their own choice as to how to perform the task. And MS Word or Office isn't the task, word processing, presentations, spread sheets, and databases are the requirements. Allow people to use whatever tool will do the job.
Falcon
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