School Swaps Math Textbooks For iPads

MexiCali59 writes "Four of California's largest school districts will be trying something new on eighth-grade algebra students this year: giving them iPads instead of textbooks. The devices come pre-loaded with a digital version of the text, allowing students to view teaching videos, receive homework assistance and input assignment all without picking up a pen or paper. If the students with iPads turn out to do improve at a faster pace than their peers as expected, the program could soon spread throughout the Golden State."

Comments

In unrelated news...

[elrous0]

Apple announces free iPad program for school administrators in California.

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[Niris]

California is in the middle of a hiring freeze for the State, and a huge deficit. Where exactly are they getting the money for these iPad projects for these districts, let alone for the rest of the State if they decide to advance it?

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[Darkness404]

Because California, like the rest of the USA is immune to the laws of economics!

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[techwrench]

If you have lived there, you would know that trivial things like deficits are to looked down upon with disdain..... Think of the Children!!!!!

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[kevinNCSU]

Between the cost of a textbook and the rate at which they become 'obsolete' for the state testing I'd imagine with an educational discount from Apple (no need to make the state pay taxes to itself and can prolly write off some of it as a donation) they probably aren't whole lot more expensive than your regular schoolbook in the long run. Course I'd be interested in knowing what the policy is for broken iPads. Do the kid's parents have to shell out the money for a new iPad? you would for a replacement book.

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[Niris]

Worse than living there, I've worked for the State as an intern . laid off twice, ftw.

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[diskofish]

Same as here in NY. School districts are bitching about the state withholding funds. In reality, they waste money on unnecessary crap like in TFA. To make the bitching even more egregious, most districts have plenty of money saved in "rainy day" type funds to cover budgets shortfalls.

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[guruevi]

From the money they hope to save in providing books on the long term I guess. At $50-150 (or more once you get to college) per book these costs really add up. I believe the current average textbook expenses in the US is somewhere near $1000/student/year and you have to take into account that in that number, many rent or buy second hand books and many more simply can't afford the books (like in my city school district where nobody has textbooks). Add to that the gigantic logistics cost of tons (literally) of books that have to be printed, transported, distributed and at the end of the year picked up, transported and recycled (as they are usually useless the next year).

Hopefully they haven't locked themselves in again with certain publishers so teachers can just go ahead and give them a link from Apple's or Amazon's e-book store ($5-15 for a decent math book).

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[VTI9600]

Isn't it obvious? The money will come from the parents who have so much spare cash to throw around. Supporting a family in this economy practically pays for itself, right?

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[copponex]

Because the USA, unlike the rest of the world, is immune to the idea that investing in education and infrastructure yields tangible benefits for society!

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[VTI9600]

No...Think of the environment!!! No costs must be spared to save the dozen or so trees that would have otherwise be converted into textbooks.

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[mark72005]

Well, dire financial straits should be allowed to affect taxpayers and other areas of state and local budgets, but damned if the big-spending boards should have to worry about getting paid.

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[cgenman]

400 students for a pilot program? That doesn't sound like too much money to prove (or more likely squelch) the theory that more computers = smarter students.

Also, I'd guess these are being provided either free or at-cost by Apple, with partner Hughton Mifflin bearing the brunt of other costs. By the wording of the article, they seem to be the ones having commissioned the study, not the other way around.

As a side note, why is it always that "something is going bad here, so we shouldn't do anything about anything else until that is fixed." I've heard that people are starving, so why send people into space. We're at war with Russia, why do we need a civilian network. This isn't an A or B choice. When the state is broke, you have to find ways to make basic research continue to happen. Maybe the study will prove that, as I suspect, throwing money at technology is less effective than throwing money at smaller class sizes. Maybe it will show that the extra expense is worth it, especially as it can be amortized over several classes. Students cost thousands of dollars per year anyway. Or maybe there will be a little bump, and California will jump in with India's $100 tablet effort.

Or maybe we need a giant K-12 edu-wiki, which can be drawn from by all teachers and students across the state, and across the country. Oh right, somebody stubbed a toe, so we should just go home until they feel better.

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[mark72005]

I want to know how the spotted owl and the delta smelt will be affected.

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[mark72005]

Collegiate textbooks cost around $100, and most high schools are re-using books for 4-5 years (or, these days, stretching them out even longer). I highly doubt this is a cost savings.

(as if any new government program ever results in cost savings anyway)

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[Darkness404]

But it doesn't. You can't just throw money at a problem and find a solution, in fact the most worthwhile solutions are the ones that cost the least. The US government has no problems tossing money in education/infrastructure but its all worthless because they are simply redistributing wealth that is more efficiently done in the private sector. Consider a private school, barring some of the weird religious schools which specialize in fascism and indoctrination, private schools are in general better because they don't get the money thrown at them every which way. Yeah, private schools are expensive, but add in how many -millions- of dollars go to public schools that don't perform. Why is it that almost every single privately educated student is better educated than a public school educated student despite massive redistribution of wealth? With a private school, they have to make every dollar count. A private school can't just ask voters for an extra million, they can't take money from people who don't use the service like public schools can. Yet they have a higher quality.

Governments breed waste, inefficiency and tyranny and can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution.

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[BobMcD]

Between the cost of a textbook and the rate at which they become 'obsolete' for the state testing...

Are you asserting that books last less than three years? Because I'm relatively certain that there will be nearly no usable iPads in that same amount of time. They're simply not designed to outlive their replacement models.

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[mark72005]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal_schools

LA unveils $578M school, costliest in the nation

LOS ANGELES – Next month's opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools will be auspicious for a reason other than its both storied and infamous history as the former Ambassador Hotel, where the Democratic presidential contender was assassinated in 1968.

With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation's most expensive public school ever.

The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of "Taj Mahal" schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities.

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[Niris]

Yeah I saw that article on /. too. Meh.

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[nosilA]

If it is, in fact, more effective at teaching students, it could potentially lead to larger class sizes, which could easily pay for the device. I am skeptical that it will be effective, but it could be - that's why they do pilot programs. I'm sure they will quickly begin to use it for other courses, too. I can see it being particularly useful for foreign languages (where being able to hear the text is important). I think the interactive textbook idea can also be really useful in science (especially at the early levels of biology, chemistry, and physics, where animations are so useful), geography (being able to pinch and zoom thousands of old maps, and being able to play games to reinforce learning), civics (being able to actually pull up the essential documents immediately). In fact, it's hard for me to think of a class that couldn't benefit from an iPad.

I think this will really turn out to be best for the students who want to move faster than the class and/or learn the material more thoroughly than required. For those students, this could help counter-balance the modern trend to dumb down the curriculum to produce high standardized test scores, rather than deeply examining the subject and teaching students to appreciate learning and thought. For most students, though, I expect this to be an overpriced toy with little educational value.

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[Compholio]

Same as here in NY. School districts are bitching about the state withholding funds. In reality, they waste money on unnecessary crap like in TFA.

For a lot of places the "tech" funds are independent of their general budget. As you are likely aware you generally do not replace computers every year; however, if on the years you don't replace equipment you don't spend your tech money then you lose it for when you do need to buy new equipment.

To make the bitching even more egregious, most districts have plenty of money saved in "rainy day" type funds to cover budgets shortfalls.

Those funds are reserved for temporary budget shortfalls (such as an unexpected drop in enrollment for a year), they cannot handle a sustained loss of funding. Also, many places will ratchet your funding to your worst year - so even if budgetary conditions improve for the next year you won't get your budget back.

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[spazdor]

Collegiate textbooks cost around $100

...And you need a separate one for each class you're in.

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[mea37]

Well, someone still has to buy the textbook content (and other software) to put on the iPad. I'm not sure the expected lifespan for an iPad, but I'd argue that textbooks are more durable in the face of handling by a highschool (or younger) student who doesn't own it. Also consider that Apple designs its products to be used for a certain duration and then discarded (so you'll buy the new one).

The concept may have merit if the software adds value above and beyond what you get from a textbook. I cannot see it being cheaper than textbooks unless/until it can replace multiple textbooks for a given grade.

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[froggymana]

Better teacher lounges are not a waste of money in the school's teacher's minds.

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[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

There's been only 1 iPad out, what are you basing this assertion on?

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[Anonymous Coward]

As in the past, I'm sure Apple is giving them away to schools for free in the hopes of creating future consumers of their overpriced Steve Jobs thought controlled products. Just like cigarette companies using cartoon logos and candy cigarettes to try to create a new generation of smokers.

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[Anonymous Coward]

With a private school, they have to make every dollar count.

But they don't have to take every student who shows up. And it's not just the schools but also the parents who have an interest in making every dollar count, and it's the parents who can have the biggest impact on a student's success. Sorry, but this isn't as simple as you make it out to be.

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[Anonymous Coward]

...and the digital ones aren't free. I seem to recall they cost about the same as the paper version. So this really is just an extra 500 dollar fee on top of the already expensive books.

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[Anonymous Coward]

The logic of the bureaucracy is simply lunacy.

"Why are you blowing your full budget?"

"I do not want to have my budget cut for next year."

"But you didn't need it all this year."

"Yeah, but I want more next year."

That's what is happening in every government agency. If the idiots in charge were not all collectively doing this, then, for starters, there would be a rainy day fund when they really needed it. Agencies would actually be able to request bigger budgets when they really needed it, and, this is crazy, we'd actually have money to give them.

It should be criminal to blow a budget simply to try and get the same amount or more for the next budget cycle.

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[natespizer]

One important fact is that if a parent is paying for the education there is a good chance they will be more invested in making sure their student does a good job rather than just blaming everything on the teacher or school. You will get much more parent participation in event and activities and in most cases it is mandatory.

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[BobMcD]

Years and years of experience with consumer electronics.

Or is the iPad made of magical pixie dust and will therefore not be subject to industry norms? I can see Jobs now, "Profit be damned! There will be only one iPad, and no one will ever want to upgrade it, EVER!"

Yeah, no.

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[kevinNCSU]

I feel like the jury is probably still out on the average lifespan of an iPad, but what I'm wondering is if the schools see this as a way to always pass the cost of a replacement on to a student. iPad breaks because it's just plain old? Well, your kid must have broken it, it was working when we gave it to him, so you'll have to pay for the new one! Now all the school has to pay for is updates to the online textbooks.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Little good it does them (USA), for all the money they spend.

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[initdeep]

there are very few high school text books which are useless the next year.

in fact, per the local school district, they EXPECT to get at least 5 years per textbook of life span.

some are even longer.

and per the article, this is for a GRADE 8 CLASS. Meaning these aren't even high school students in most districts.

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[tophermeyer]

And how much is the cost of that electronic textbook's license per student? Probably less than $100, but definitely not free. Plus that electronic license probably won't be recycled for 4-5 years like a paper book might be.

I looked at the numbers a few weeks ago for some textbooks for Grad school. My numbers came close without even the cost of an iPad (in my case a Kindle). I can't imagine it would be economical for 8th graders, who will probably not be extremely careful with those iPads.

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[noidentity]

Don't worry, we'll be sure our high-tech DRM'd textbooks last even less time than their physical counterparts.

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[dangitman]

Are you asserting that books last less than three years? Because I'm relatively certain that there will be nearly no usable iPads in that same amount of time. They're simply not designed to outlive their replacement models.

Uhh, what? My iPhone is over two years old and still working very well, there have been two subsequent models of iPhone, and it is still getting software updates. I plan to use it for another 1-2 years if I don't lose it. My laptop is approaching three years old, and there have been many updated models released since. Still works fine.

What are you basing your dubious assertion on? Do you buy really shitty products that break easily, or do you not treat your equipment well or something?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, private schools are expensive

I see your point

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[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Building an iPad right means that when the new shiny one comes out, you can sell the old one on eBay or Craigslist. :)

I still have a 1st Gen nano that still works. Some of my friends refuse to give up their iBook G4s. I've seen some 2nd Gen iPods still kick around.

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[BobMcD]

How many school children have had unsupervised access to your devices?

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[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

...and the digital ones aren't free. I seem to recall they cost about the same as the paper version.

You might want to Google the "California Free Digital Textbook Initiative". They already have the digital textbooks, so no they aren't paying for anything other than keeping them up to date.

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[Sulphur]

That is fortunate because they did not read the book.

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[copponex]

Private schools perform better because of selection bias. Parents who care about their child's education will go the extra mile, including spending extra money that doesn't always yield results. Stable families and finances are the determining factor in academic success, not the source of the funding for the school.

As someone who went to a private and a public high school, the only difference was that everyone at the private school never wanted for anything and most never had jobs other than school, while in public school a few miles away, they had night jobs just so they could make ends meet for their family. One major problem is that high schools in the US are treated like minimum security prisons for teenagers. Ending truancy laws once they turn 15 could solve the biggest problem of teachers being forced to control students who won't want to be there in the first place.

But really, your entire argument rests on the belief that anyone born poor or with learning disabilities does not deserve an education. That's a pretty low moral standard to aim for, and one you are strangely proud of.

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[craighansen]

I'd rather see California do a trial of $200 netbooks running Ubuntu and accessing KahnAcademy.org and a variety of free textbooks that students could use and own for the rest of their professional life. But I guess Apple, Microsoft, and Houghton-Mifflin wouldn't profit from that. I've personally seen hundreds of bucks go down the drain buying multiple overlapping editions of Stewart Calculus for my kids.

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[Darkness404]

Are you a salesman for Apple or something?

Note that these benefits are specific to devices like the iPad and not PCs. PCs are much more expensive, delicate and difficult to set up, maintain and use.

PCs are a hell of a lot easier to batch set up and load. AFAIK you can't just remotely load up 200 iPads, on the other hand its pretty damn easy to do that with PCs, just network boot them then push all the stuff in from the network.

And the problem isn't the paper, its the publishers. Without copyright you'd pay $2-3 for a textbook, not $50-100 for one. eBook editions of things really aren't all that cheap. Plus, there is a durability/resale question. A textbook is pretty easily readable in 10 years, especially a math book, things aren't going to fundamentally change. History books, science books? Yeah. Math, English, etc? No. But they used this for math and not the other subjects. Will an iPad even hold a charge in 10 years? Won't publishers simply screw schools out of books because with digital ones you can remove the older ones and make them pay for all new books whenever you want to upgrade, etc.

As far as I can tell, yes, this is throwing money at a problem to get in the headlines. Any return on investment is minimal because the iPad doesn't eliminate the need for many things, plus, iPads are fragile. Drop a book in the hall? No big deal. Drop an iPad and you are out ~$500, lose a book and you might be out ~$50-100, lose an iPad and you are out ~$500, someone steals a book? No huge deal. Someone steals an iPad? It lands in a pawn shop somewhere. Etc.

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[Anonymous Coward]

who said ebooks are going to be less expensive than the DTB? Have you seen the ebook prices in amazon or B&N now?
They will spend the device cost and still end up paying the same as before for the books.

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[mark72005]

Just saying - "expensive" is relative in California.

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[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

And how much is the cost of that electronic textbook's license per student? Probably less than $100, but definitely not free.

Free.

Schwarzenegger launched a program in 2009 to create digital textbooks in math and science owned by the state board of education. At the end of 2009 they had ten texts, including math through Calc 1 and 2.

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[dangitman]

They don't really have a choice in the matter. According to California law, all citizens must be issued with bellybutton and/or nipple piercings, an Apple product, and a copy of The Gay Agenda (may be pre-loaded onto said Apple product in eBook form.)

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[Sponge Bath]

Governments breed waste, inefficiency and tyranny and can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution.

Never? Taking that at face value you must advocate the elimination of laws, courts, police, and military (all government institutions) to be replaced with the might makes right anarchy of every man for himself (the ultimate private institution). To me that sounds like a net loss for society.

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[Anonymous Coward]

You know, you can bloviate all you want, but it doesn't make it good argumentation. How's this one: many private schools have to make a profit, and so have to keep expenses down, even if that effects the quality of education. It's as valid as any of your statements, because there's no evidence for any of them.

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[DragonWriter]

California is in the middle of a hiring freeze for the State, and a huge deficit. Where exactly are they getting the money for these iPad projects for these districts

From textbook maker Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which developed the curriculum being used and is conducting an "academic study" in which the 400 students given the iPads and the students they are compared against are the test subjects.

Most of that was pretty clear in TFA.

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[suomynonAyletamitlU]

No, you can't throw money at it, but at the same time, that's not necessarily what the GP is talking about.

Invest is a transitive verb--it's usually used to refer to money, but you also invest time and effort. In particular, investing in education and infrastructure is as much about allowing or encouraging people to invest their efforts as it is about the money--when you are investing in a non-established company, you are giving them money yes, but you are giving them an opportunity to try new things that might not work, and refine their technique over a period of months or years until they find a solution.

Investing in new technology in order to see if the students, or the teachers, can do more with them is investing money in their potential. It may be smart, or foolish, depending on what the students and teachers are like, but that's mostly to say "we haven't figured out how to do it yet."

Governments breed waste, inefficiency and tyranny and can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution.

Government, in my mind, has a singular purpose: to do with economies of scale what would be either impossible for a single entity (social security, medicare, disaster relief), or which it would be unreasonable to assume someone would do (charity, police/military, waste management).

I'm not saying it isn't very often a bad thing, or that it doesn't open up lots of bad opportunities for people, but go find somewhere on this planet where trash, septics, fresh water, etc are not even touched by government of any level, then compare it to the first world, and tell me government has nothing to offer.

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[farble1670]

private schools are in general better because they don't get the money thrown at them every which way

i really doubt that *not* having money makes them better in some way. money might not fix the problem but it doesn't make it worse.

private schools rate higher because in general the children are attending because their parents are involved and interested enough in their education to pay a premium for their schooling. that weeds out the bottom scrapers that bring down test scores, the ones that are bottom scrapers because their parent's don't give a crap.

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[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing how there are ever new editions of text books for kids. Calculus was invented in the 1700s, and we are teaching long division.

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[DragonWriter]

Between the cost of a textbook and the rate at which they become 'obsolete' for the state testing I'd imagine with an educational discount from Apple (no need to make the state pay taxes to itself and can prolly write off some of it as a donation) they probably aren't whole lot more expensive than your regular schoolbook in the long run.

Of course, if you would RTFA, you would learn this pilot is a part of a study being conducted for textbook seller Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which has designed a "textbook-as-a-service" system delivered via the iPad, so (while the pilot probably won't cost the district anything) there is only the slimmest chance that this will have anything to do with less expensive content, and a lot more chance it will have something to do with building a market for more expensive content.

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[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I will personally kill with an axe one spotted owl for every 10 iPad sold to California's School districts. That way the balance of nature will be maintained. I feel it is important for me to do my part.

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[farble1670]

and therein lies the problem. ipads aren't exactly durable, and when you pair them with clumsy pre-teens who are prone to dropping things and will in general just be jamming them into their backpacks with a half eaten cookie and some dirty sweat sox, and couple that with the fact that they aren't the owners of these devices and have very little incentive to take good care of them ...

i'd expect these ipads to have a very short life.

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[nomadic]

I have an ipod I got in 2003 that still works, but I still have to agree with the parent; something like an iPad won't make it that long, too complicated, too many moving parts, and knowing Apple there is some design flaw in there arising out of some aesthetic decision that will eventually cause the machine to break.

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[nine-times]

the idea that investing in education and infrastructure yields tangible benefits for society!

But it doesn't. You can't just throw money at a problem and find a solution...

I just want to point out that your response doesn't match what you're responding to. The idea was not "throwing money at the problem of education yields tangible benefits".

Or do you think that money spent on education is a waste? A society should not bother educating their citizenry? Is it all that simple, that investments in education are all simply waste?

Or would it be fair to say that education costs money, but an effective and efficient education system will ultimately be worth the resources directed toward its operation? Let's assume for the sake of argument that you're right, and that private schools are better. So let's say I spend $120,000 putting my child through private school. Is that $120k not well spent? Could you not conceive of the possibility that, over the course of my child's lifetime, society will gain more that $120k worth of added societal value and productivity from my child's education?

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[Tetsujin]

They didn't just throw money. They bought an electronic device that proved to be much more effective than what they replaced.

No, the results of this test aren't in yet. A salesman for the education firm pushing this program says that it's effective. This deployment is a test to see if it's true. Even the initial results of this experiment won't be ready for another few months.

Personally I don't believe this is the best use of that kind of money, but I'm open-minded. Maybe it'll work out. Who knows?

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[BJ_Covert_Action]

Governments breed waste, inefficiency and tyranny and can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution.

Only the Sith deal in absolutes....

I don't disagree with any of your points regarding private education, but stating that governments can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution seems like a pretty broad brush stroke. For instance, my dederal government bred both the FDA and EPA. While both agencies have their flaws, and waste, and inefficiency, I trust both of those agencies to regulate poison in my food and pollution in my water far more than any private business (for example, take note of the private business of selling radioactive isotopes as medicines and elixirs back in the late 1800's, early 1900's).

I would say that, while government certainly can breed tyranny, it can also do some pretty cool stuff (like, say, Apollo, interstate freeways, gas and electric utility regulation, etc.). Similarly, while private institutions can do some very impressive stuff (like computers, software, electronics, and making music) they can also breed oppression, destruction, and tyranny. Watch those generalities buddy.

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[Darkness404]

But really, your entire argument rests on the belief that anyone born poor or with learning disabilities does not deserve an education. That's a pretty low moral standard to aim for, and one you are strangely proud of.

Um, how does it? Lets imagine a scenario with no public schools at all. The world wouldn't suddenly collapse, people would just learn more efficiently. People would have a greater deal of specialization which would allow them to better perform in the workplace. Lets face it, why should Joe Sixpack who is really great at, say, diesel mechanics have to read Shakespeare when he can simply be learning how to be a better mechanic? Its silly that we've put people on a treadmill to "higher education" that basically screws the poor and the working-class. Because of government-run schools, a high school diploma is basically worthless, its not a qualification. If you walk into almost every job interview situation and proudly proclaim you graduated high school you will get laughed at. So what happens? Even for entry-level positions employers now want a college degree and that screws the poor.

Consider Joe Sixpack, he is a great diesel mechanic but bad at English, Algebra and History. So rather than Joe Sixpack being able to really study mechanics and being a better worker, he has to sit through classes that are boring for him and cost taxpayer dollars. Not only that but thanks to a high school degree being basically worthless, Joe Sixpack now has to go to tech school or a university at his own expense basically screwing him financially for the next ten years of his life unless he magically finds a job that doesn't require that, which is rare these days.

Most people should not go to college its silly that its so forced on people, we now have people only being productive from 22+ years or older and piled on with debt, or too poor to get into college and have a door slammed on them by potential employers for not going to college.

The elimination of the public school system would allow for greater specialization, better workers, better innovators who aren't wasting their time and my money.

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[spazdor]

Exactly this. Why the crap should the state be depending on owned, licensed IP, particularly for subjects which are old enough and broad enough to have an actual body of work in the public domain?

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[uberdilligaff]

You are right on the money. Despite the noble intentions, this expensive experiment will not turn out well.

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[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

WTF are you smoking?!

It has zero moving parts! ... okay there's the lock switch but christ, it's not like a 1964 Buick Skylark.

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[farble1670]

That doesn't sound like too much money to prove (or more likely squelch) the theory that more computers = smarter students.

if anything, that's been disproven, or very close to being so. what happens is that the computer becomes much more a distraction than a learning aide.

loading text books on the ipad is great. can you shut off facebook, twitter, instant messaging, the thousands of available games, etc, etc, etc? if not, these kids will be seriously distracted.

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[lopaka1998]

from the liberals... where else? didn't you know they could make money out of thin air?!!

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[Anonymous Coward]

Are you asserting that books last less than three years? Because I'm relatively certain that there will be nearly no usable iPads in that same amount of time. They're simply not designed to outlive their replacement models.

That's funny. My wife still uses the iPhone I purchased in 2007.

My company still has users on Powerbooks made in 2003 and Power Mac G4s made in 2001.

If you are speaking about planned obsolescence, then I would disagree with you. Apple products IMHE last and are useful for many more years you would expect in this day and age. If you are talking about consumers getting the urge to upgrade to the next big thing coming from Apple, well, I don't think that is appropriate given the user base here. They aren't the consumers with the pocketbooks, the education system is, and the California education system is happy to continue using technology from the 1990s in many cases.

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[Missing.Matter]

Or is the iPad made of magical pixie dust

I believe the word "magic" made it to the stage more than a few times during the launch keynote.

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[VTI9600]

What exactly would constitute a good educational discount from Apple? 25%? 50%? Even half the $500 cost of their low-end model is $250, which is still greater than the retail price of most eBook readers (Kindle 3G now $189)...and I didn't even need an iPad to figure that out.

The average lifespan of a textbook in California is 6 years. How does the iPad stack up? There's no way to tell since it's been out for less than a year! Plus, textbooks can be kicked around, stepped on, dropped etc. This is a clear case of using unproven technology in a capacity for which it was not designed.

After some Googling, I found an interesting proposal for an eBook reader specifically designed to be used in the classroom. A well-thought and researched idea like this deserves serious consideration, however, we are not dealing with a genuine movement toward improving education, but rather the "I want cool gadgets and I want them now!" mentality.

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[DeadboltX]

I completely agree with this but, on the other hand, college text books are often worthless after 3 years, since a new revision is out and a professor forces using that revision.

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[OverlordQ]

Are you asserting that books last less than three years

Books may last more then three years, but they're obsolete in a semester when the new revision with 2 word changes comes out.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly federal money. I was on course with some Floridians who install IT for some county school boards there, and there's full on telepresence rooms, critical reliability telecom systems, and stuff big business on real world budgets can only dream of, based on the "if we dont spend gov't money, we lose it" mentality.

Either way, ipod/iphone/ipad are great, but Apple needs to open up and let business/school boards do their own thing and deploy their own apps independently of Apple. Otherwise, if the company that made the app textbook pisses in Steve's cheerios, the curriculum gets wiped

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[Darkness404]

So instead of having private firms that you could trust because they would be competing for your trust in food safety, we instead have a massive government entity which has denied things based on political reasons. Just what I want! For example, due to pressure by the sugar industry the FDA denied the Miracle Berry (a fruit with a chemical that makes things taste sweet) the ability to be in foods (it would essentially allow for a sweeter with no calories that actually tasted sweet).

As for the EPA, its a joke. Take for instance the BP oil spill, thanks to government intervention, BP had a liability cap! Had there been no government intervention, the people of the gulf could have sued BP for all their damages, and perhaps BP wouldn't have let such a thing happen in the first place.

As for radioactive isotopes, they simply weren't considered dangerous back then, otherwise do you think people would have drank them? The advertisers weren't exactly sneaky about what it contained....

it can also do some pretty cool stuff (like, say, Apollo, interstate freeways, gas and electric utility regulation, etc.).

Apollo was "cool" but it was a dead end. We wasted a shitload of money to just say "hey we made it to the moon" and that was it. Plus, all this info we got on how to build Apollo is classified so even though we paid for it, private companies can't get the blueprints to recreate it. So yeah, we've been to the moon... And wasted a bunch of money doing it.

Interstates are nice, but were there more efficient ways of doing it? Cheaper? Etc. My guess is, yes and had the government not done anything about it, we might have good private rail/air/subway transport or something to that degree.

Gas/Electric utility regulation is actually a terrible thing. Ever tried to contest a bill with an electric company? Its nearly impossible because thanks to a government-granted monopoly, you can't switch.

And private corporations can never breed tyranny because you have the choice to support them or not don't agree with Wal-Mart's labor policies? Don't go there, they won't get a dime of your money. Frustrated about the Sony rootkit? Don't buy Sony products. Don't like Intel's stance on IP? Don't buy Intel products. Etc. On the other hand that is impossible to do with the government for 2 reasons:

A) You can't not pay your taxes. Don't like the war in Iraq? Well, too bad, you are still paying for their bullets! Don't agree with Obama's policies? Well, too bad you have to fund them. Don't like the bailout? Too bad, you are paying for them. With companies its different, if you don't like them, they don't get your support, simple as that.

B) Our money is not real money rather it is slips of paper. The government can print all of the money it wants to fund whatever because our currency is tied to nothing so until the world wakes up and fiat currencies go back to their intrinsic value, the government can fuck with our economy all they want.

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[neurocutie]

If this is true, then why isn't California just printing out those "free" digital textbooks and cutting out existing textbook companies from the equation, saving the state 80% of the costs of textbooks...

There is no magic here. There is content and there is format/media.

The cost of a textbook media is VERY small: cost to print a book must be less than $10 and it is durable and not a target for excessive loss or theft or selling by the students. This compares with $400-500 for the iPAD, which is VERY fragile, and frankly, it would be astounding if students (parents!) didn't sell them off immediately.

The content cost can be viewed as separate and no reason not to be equal with either format...

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[neurocutie]

just print those free ones, then... solves both problems and saves a ton of money... it is orthogonal to the issue of ipads and format...

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[kaiser423]

With a private school, they have to make every dollar count. A private school can't just ask voters for an extra million, they can't take money from people who don't use the service like public schools can. Yet they have a higher quality.

You've obviously never sent a kid through private school? Tuition/rate increase nearly every year or semester. Not to mention I received 5 bottles of garlic olive oil from my friend's this year that send their child to private school; the kid has to "fund raise" an extra ~$1k on top of the tuition, and the parents ended up "fund raising" about $500 of it buying their kid's olive oil because the whole community was drowning in thousands of kids trying to sell 50 bottles of olive oil. It became everyone's Christmas gift for that year.

private schools are in general better because they don't get the money thrown at them every which way.

It also helps that you can just not accept the worst students. Every private school I know of has academic requirements for *entry* which weed out lots of problems. they can also just kick trouble kids out and let them fend for themselves; public schools are required to keep kids enrolled because everyone deserves an education.

There are lots that I like about private schools, and lots of it should be applied to public schools, but to assume that a private school that doesn't need to service everyone in the community would b a workable model for a school that does is just burying your head in the sand.

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[Pirate_Pettit]

See, that's the thing - I like this idea... hell, every time I lug 5 books on campus I fantasize about just having one thin, readable ipad in my satchel along with a notebook or two. But this is still a new product...I can't imagine that this is fiscally responsible - especially since I don't think the primary benefits are going to show up in test scores ( which doesn't mean it isn't beneficial). I suppose in the long run this might encourage more licensing from the academic publishers and benefit everyone in the long run, but this just doesn't seem like the ideal testbed.

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[Americano]

The program is part of a study funded by Houghton-Mifflin. It is entirely likely that they are footing the bill for the hardware on this study because if it proves to be more effective than traditional books, they will be able to make a lot of money providing ipads & digital content to school systems.

Apple may also be donating a significant portion of the hardware - I don't see anything in the article to indicate that, but getting a study supporting your device as a "more effective textbook" for young, impressionable students? That'd be worth a short-term investment of a few hundred units of the hardware if it means you can start pimping your device to the thousands of educational institutions across the country afterwards.

I doubt that the school districts participating just went out and decided to buy 400 ipads for shits and grins with the kids' milk money.

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[DragonWriter]

If this is true, then why isn't California just printing out those "free" digital textbooks and cutting out existing textbook companies from the equation, saving the state 80% of the costs of textbooks...

I suspect that the reason that this textbook manufacturer is conducting a pilot program in California of a new, online interactive multimedia program that includes (but goes beyond) a digital edition of their existing textbooks is that the textbook manufacturer is concerned that otherwise, California school districts might otherwise be inclined, as they need to replace their existing textbooks, to take advantage of the free digital content that the state is assembling rather than paying textbook manufacturers.

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[Darkness404]

iPads are much more durable than laptops or netbooks. We've been evaluating them at my company. They are also much easier to set up.

Um, ok. So, battery dies in an iPad, what do you do? You can't just put in a new one, the batteries aren't user replaceable. Flash chip goes bad in an iPad, what do you do? You can't just take it out like you could a standard SSD and load up a standardized image on it. Screen breaks on an iPad, what do you do? Its certainly not as easy as changing a laptop's screen.

Also, you can't easily set up limited user accounts. Yeah, there are "parental controls" but that isn't going to be as safe as individual accounts.

You seem to think that there is no problem with a textbook being 10 years old. Well, a lot you (don't) know about textbooks. Not only do they need updating much more frequently then that, many schools don't have enough to give to students. They have to share them in class and cannot take them home. It's a huge problem and a huge expense.

Um, throughout high school I regularly used textbooks that were 10 years or more old for subjects that don't change Math, English, Keyboarding, etc. other than parts in the math textbook talking about a record store, it was just fine.

And so, you mean to say that somehow a school can't afford a $50 book, but can afford a $500 device + $50 book?

As for the $500 for a device. Well, that's as cheap or cheaper than all the texts a middle or high schooler uses and you didn't include all the other teaching content - interactive and all - that can be included. You can make parents share financial responsibility or assume all of it. We used to have to pay for lost or damaged textbooks. Why not iPads?

paper is not the main cost all the iPad is, is just the thing to run it. The book isn't free. You are still paying $50 a book on an iPad, the difference is that the book is electronic and not physical. If the paper was the main culprit I'd have my nook loaded up with all best sellers and would be saving a ton of money. You still have to buy the books. Yeah, there might be a slight discount, its not free though.

Like it or not, the publishers are all moving fast in this direction. Where you see that its because they can make more money I see it as they can provide more value and replace some more expensive assets.

What the fuck don't you get?

A) School pays $500 per student for an iPad

B) School pays $50 per student per book for the iPad

Is the digital model. The paper model is

A) School buys a paper book for $50 per student per book.

Yeah, e-books have some nice extras. Do they justify an extra $500 per student. Hell no.

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[DragonWriter]

Free.

Schwarzenegger launched a program in 2009 to create digital textbooks in math and science owned by the state board of education.

While the second sentence is true, I doubt that that makes the first an accurate assessment of the cost (once it is commercially available, rather than part of a pilot program conducted by the manufacturer) of the interactive learning curriculum being demoed by a textbook manufacturer in the pilot program described in TFA, which has nothing to do with the free digital textbook initiative except in the sense that it is a response to the threat posed by that initiative to the textbook publishing industry.

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[dmartin]

I agree that you cannot simply throw money at a problem and hope that it just goes away. However I don't think that comparing public and private schools demonstrates the superiority of the private sector to redistribute wealth, at least not in the way that you think it does.

First, private schools are expensive. The parents sending their children to private school do not get to opt out of the taxes that support the public education system. Instead they are paying the government and the private sector. This shows these parents are willing to support their children's education; and having a home environment that understands the value of an education and is supportive of it is a really big piece of the puzzle.

Secondly the private schools are allowed to be more selective. You could argue, correctly, that this is a demonstration of the private system being more efficient: they will not accept known troublemakers, and discipline can be enforced more rigorously. The public school system is tasked with providing an education for the entire populace on the assumption that a society in which everyone is educated to at least a certain standard is beneficial to all. For example you want people who are voting for president to have the ability to think through the consequences and implications of the policies that person is advocating. We can argue the degree to which the public school system fails at its task, but it is quite different from that of the public school system. If we wanted a fair comparison we could look at research universities (both government and private) and compare them, as in both cases the institutions are trying to produce the best results possible and do not have to try a one-size-fits-all model.

I am certainly not debating that this particular initiative is successful, or that the education system is okay as it stands. However I do want to live in a society of people that have a basic knowledge of history, logic, mathematics and literacy. I think that is worth paying for. In particular your comment

Governments breed waste, inefficiency and tyranny and can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution.

does not seem to ring true. There is a reason why firefighters are not private institutions, after all!

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[DragonWriter]

I'd rather see California do a trial of $200 netbooks running Ubuntu and accessing KahnAcademy.org and a variety of free textbooks that students could use and own for the rest of their professional life.

Sure, but who is going to provide the test units for the pilot? For this pilot, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the textbook maker that developed the educational package being tested and wants to sell it has a profit motive to underwrite the cost of the pilot.

Its not exactly like school districts in California are rolling around in money to test radical new ideas on their own.

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[dangitman]

What does that have to do with anything? You claimed that consumer electronics are designed so they would fail shortly after a new product is released. Not only do you provide no evidence of this, you ignore the vast number of devices out there that prove it wrong.

You claim vast amounts of experience with this, but you must live in an alternate reality. Companies would not get repeat customers and the levels of customer satisfaction that they do if this were the case. Your claim is just ridiculous, let's find some more examples of consumer electronics around me:

• TV set: 5 years (the old one still works and was about 20 years old)
• Microwave oven: 15 years
• Game console: 3 years (old one still works after 10 years)
• Surround sound receiver/amplifier: 5 years

Even if we narrow it to just the area of portable computing, I know plenty of people who still use 5 year old laptops with no problems. Given that 1 year is a pretty typical update cycle for Apple, your claim of planned obsolescence is just absurd. I know very few people who replace their laptop every 12 months outside of power users or tech obsessives. At work we have a standard 3 year replacement cycle and there's even talk of extending that out to 4 years in some cases. I don't think they'd be doing that if stuff became unusable whenever new models came out.

So apparently, your vast experience is at odds with the rest of reality's. Perhaps we didn't get the memo?

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[VTI9600]

I did as you suggested and came to this page. Though they look promising, you will note that these are not the textbooks that ever have been used or (most likely) ever will be used for classroom instruction.

Try Googling "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt". They are the publisher that, according to TFA, provides content for the iPads. Their website does not list price information, but its not unreasonable to assume that there will be per-iPad licensing fees for their HMH Fuse(tm) Algebra I program. All that flashy multimedia content doesn't pay for itself, you know.

It would be great if classes all over the country used open-source courseware, but that's not what's happening here...not by a long shot.

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[Americano]

You know, I generally consider myself "libertarian-leaning," but I think you're oversimplifying this to a frightening extent in your pursuit of an ideal.

Why should mechanics read Shakespeare? Because communication is important - probably even more so than the mechanical knowledge, the basic skills of every day interactions - talking, reading, writing - are critical skills for living. Reading other people's writing, especially those who are good communicators, educates you in how to communicate more effectively. Writing your own thoughts down, and practicing expressing your thoughts & opinions has value, no matter how much you, personally, hated English class back in high school

You see, nobody exists in a completely insular little vacuum. Mechanics don't wake up, pork their wife (also a mechanic), and send their kids off to mechanic school (mechanics-to-be!), then go to the garage, where they do mechanic stuff all day without talking to a single other soul. Then come home, eat some Mechanic Cuisine tv dinners, and go to bed, and maybe if they're lucky, pork their mechanic wife again.

A purely utilitarian view of people like you've expressed - where we're all specialized widgets who have "no need" for any learning outside their narrow specialized niche is engaging in overly reductionist thinking, and it's probably not a society that any of us would care to be a part of for long.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Good post. The GP's last time in a classroom seems to have been as a child, 30 years ago. I don't know why he feels that he can effectively compare teaching methods. 10 years? I lol'ed. These days it's rare to see a 4- to 5-year-old book. Pure case of ideology coming before thought. "It's Apple; automatic disagreement time."

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[MaWeiTao]

That's a ridiculous statement you make considering the US spends more per student, by far, than any other country on Earth. The small city where I live spends more than the next highest country which is in Northern Europe. And it's not a little more, it's thousands more they spend. The city has had budget problems for decades now. A significant portion of the population is low-income.

The problem is that too many schools in the city are still crap. But the money ends up going to garbage. If it's not a gimmicky program then it's an overpaid administrator sucking up that money. These idiots hired some administrator from some big city. Her income is well over $250k a year and she's refused to forgo raises claiming she needs them for cost-of-living increases. And she's done next to nothing to improve the educational system in this city. Of course a huge part of the problem are irresponsible parents who don't discipline their kids and instill the value of education in them, so things are never so simple.

The problem with Americans, particularly when it comes to social programs, is that they think simply throwing money at the problem will fix it. When people start talking about needing money for schools what they actually mean is that teachers want significant pay increases and cushy benefits. I'd love to have the job security and generous benefits some teacher friends of mine enjoy. The money never goes to directly improving education for students. When it does trickle its way down too often it ends up being something stupid like these iPads.

How will these iPads improve education? They wont improve a thing. In fact, they're going to be a massive distraction. Kids already are easily distracted, they don't need yet another toy to make things worse. And given how careless they will be with these things schools are going to be replacing them every few months. Money flushed down the toilet.

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[sudnshok]

How does an algebra text book become obsolete?

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[xenapan]

In what part of today's world would Shakespearean English even be RELEVANT?

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[dcollins]

"Why is it that almost every single privately educated student is better educated than a public school educated student despite massive redistribution of wealth? With a private school, they have to make every dollar count."

That's, like, one of the dumbest and most disingenuous arguments I've ever seen. The actual answer is simply: Because private schools are rich and spend about twice as much money on average.

The secular private schools analyzed in the study spent $20,100 on each student in the 2007-08 school year vs. $10,100 in public schools. [Washington Post, "Per-Student Spending Gaps Wider Than Known", Aug-31, 2009]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/30/AR2009083002335.html

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[Americano]

too complicated, too many moving parts

By which you mean, zero internal moving parts, and 4 external, right? The four external being: On/Off, Volume up/down rocker, home button, and orientation lock switch?

Will iPads obsolete over time? *Of course* they will. New models will come out with new features and capabilities. That doesn't mean the other ones will automatically break. I still have a perfectly serviceable original-model iPhone. I have a Macbook Pro that was purchased in early 2006 that works just fine still. I have an iPod (40GB monochrome display) that was purchased in late 2004, and which travels with me everywhere I go - still going strong.

Your FUD is weak.

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[Blakey Rat]

Ambitious teacher filing for grants. Of course, that doesn't explain who handed the grant money over...

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[copponex]

Instead of "Joe Sixpack" try imagining a mother who just lost her husband with three kids, one of whom suffers from severe learning disabilities. In your fucked up world, not only would she be looked down upon for receiving "government handouts" to make ends meet, but also for wanting to see all of her children get the same opportunities as any other family in her society.

My own sister went to public school and had a multitude of support options that my family could not afford otherwise. Now, instead of pushing the cash machine at a Wal-Mart or McDonalds, she's also doing work helping the developmentally challenged overcome their own obstacles. Hopefully they will also become productive members of society, producing more wealth for the economy at large, instead of languishing in some bare bones charity warehouse for the poor on the outskirts of town, as is common in much of the third world. If you consider that a waste of money, I can only say a prayer for what used to be a human conscience, now an empty space occupied by some classical dogmas that have long been invalidated.

Your version of reality exists entirely inside of an Ayn Rand novel.

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[Americano]

As an example of well-constructed communication & written thought? Every part.

You see, we can learn from examples, even if we don't speak now like people did in Shakespearean times.

But if it makes you feel better, let's eliminate Shakespeare from the curriculum, but agree that reading well-written poetry, prose, and drama from modern writers has an educational benefit far beyond how quickly you can rebuild a V6 Toyota engine?

And good luck learning anything from a technical manual in the brave new world where mechanics don't have to learn to express their thoughts in written or verbal form. After all, if fundamental literacy is irrelevant to mechanics, who's going to be able to write down how to fix the engine, and who's going to be able to read it even if someone did?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! The government run military wastes tons of money, lets privatise that too.

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[nomadic]

By which you mean, zero internal moving parts, and 4 external, right? The four external being: On/Off, Volume up/down rocker, home button, and orientation lock switch?

I meant metaphorically; too many complicated components I should have said. The moving parts are irrelevant, while in theory actual moving parts are supposed to break down more often, in practice I just haven't noticed that is the case. I've found it far more likely to have bad memory or other non-moving component go bad on a portable computer, than the hard drive, for example. Apple has a history of bad wiring. There will still be iPads working 10 years from now I'm sure, but they will be in the minority.

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[Darkness404]

...And opportunities would be available via private groups. Its been shown time and time again that people will donate when they believe they are actually making a difference, and private groups would be able to use decision making to give support to people who actually need it unlike the government. For example, I worked at a grocery store all through high school, and do you know how many people who use food stamps buy unneeded items with cash? A lot of them. I can't tell you how many times I saw people go in there, buy food then hand over cash and buy things like booze, TVs, electronics, etc. Government programs benefit those who game the system rather than people who actually might need it. Private programs can deny people which makes it a whole lot easier to give help to those who need it.

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[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

It would be great if classes all over the country used open-source courseware, but that's not what's happening here...not by a long shot.

This is a pilot program though. California does have e-books and are still creating more. This makes them an alternative going forward for licensing. I'm supposing that HMH is funding part of this as a way to try out and promote their own technology, but it will be hard for them to stick it to CA on licensing fees given the alternatives.

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[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

just print those free ones, then.

Printing costs money, as does reprinting when things change. The subject matter is fairly static, but learning methods are not. Changing the texts from multimedia e-books to flat files will cost. And then there's the ability to take tests and get and submit homework and communicate with the teachers, perform research online, and have access to a library of other works, use multimedia to present info in more four dimensional ways, etc. Really, why kill trees and give kids back pain while spending money on technology that's being phased out?

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[turbidostato]

"Lets imagine a scenario with no public schools at all."

There's no need to imagine. That *was* the case in the whole world not so many ages ago.

And you know what? Alphabetization levels were horrible.

"People would have a greater deal of specialization which would allow them to better perform in the workplace."

Of course yes. Everybody knows people are not human beings with a soul to be enlighted but ants or replaceable machines.

"Lets face it, why should Joe Sixpack who is really great at, say, diesel mechanics have to read Shakespeare [...] Most people should not go to college"

Ok, ok, I resign.

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[jargon82]

It should be criminal to base next years funding on what was spent last year and little else. This needs to be fixed before any of these depts are going to address the other side of it (spending in order to have access in the future to similar funds). I've seen some downright insane wastes as a result of end of year surpluses.

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[h4rr4r]

No you are making it more complicated than it needs to be. Public schools should be able to get rid of the troublemakers. Tell them to attend another school or homeschool, if the parents fail to do that lock them up.

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[allusionist]

>college textbooks
>not a target for theft

That sounds like the exact opposite of my experience. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I went to a state school, or the average income in my area, or some other factor, but textbooks are a very common target of theft here due mostly to their fairly high resale value and relative difficulty tracking.

>it would be astounding if students (parents!) didn't sell them off immediately.

Assuming sane policies in place by the school (yes I know that's a stretch, but if they don't take a step like this it's their own fault) students/families would be responsible for replacing lost or stolen devices, so selling them would leave them with a best case net gain of zero, most likely a loss as they won't be able to sell for full price. That or the student has no textbook, which will have repercussions itself (and likely won't go unnoticed by staff)

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[coryking]

Yeah, and even ones a few decades old have elementary school kids adding the number of cigarretes in a carton.

Basic math may not have changed, but they way we teach it has.

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[turbidostato]

"So instead of having private firms that you could trust because they would be competing for your trust in food safety"

Who the hell tells you they would be competing for my trust?

In first instance those firms would be competing for MONEY; not even my money, but money. If they get more money by covering the irregularities of [big producer] than by getting my trust, so be it. That's not a supposition; that's a fact (tobacco companies, anyone?).

If that wasn't enough, private firms wouldn't even be competing for money, because firms have no will. Their CEOs would be trying to get money -for them, not the firms. So if a given CEO thinks it can get more of it by not only fucking me but even fucking their own companies in the while, so be it. That's not a supposition; that's a fact (Enron, anyone?).

And if you think "oh, no, that wouldn't happen", please go out the cavern you have been into for the last two centuries and get in touch with reality.

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[tibit]

At the expense of losing my mods here, I must intervene.

You're a lunatic to think that textbooks need "updating much more frequently than that". Textbooks need to be decently done, and then you can keep using them. Exceptions would be perhaps history/social study textbooks. The problem is that no grade level textbook is ever methodically worked on and improved. This used to be the case in the times long forgotten, but not nowadays, not in the U.S.

Textbooks are mediocre to start with, they get superficial changes made to them to warrant new editions, and then somehow all bridges are burned and we get a newly written textbook. Newer, but just as mediocre, or worse. And so the mediocricity is maintained. Noone wants to seriously edit, expand and improve upon "old" texts.

Feynman did some rather methodical reviewing of certain California textbooks in mid-1960s. I'm an optimist, so I thought that things have improved. So, a couple years ago I borrowed a bunch of mid- and highschool physics/science textbooks used in Ohio, and I read through them. The quality is rather uniform -- that of bovine manure. I still have nightmares about that -- drowning in manure pits and such. All of the authors, every single one of them, had absolutely no effing clue what they were writing about. I have no excerpts handy, but it was disgusting. Superficially, it all "made sense" and was seemingly fine. But as soon as you started reading and paying attention, it was all crap. A text that others depend upon for learning, without prior experience of the subject taught, must adhere to pretty high standards. The way it is, though, is exactly the opposite. Mistakes, falsehoods and demonstable lack of understanding abounds in those books.

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[turbidostato]

"Building an iPad right means that when the new shiny one comes out, you can sell the old one on eBay or Craigslist."

I think Steve Jobs will beg to differ: one device sold at eBay is one less prospective shiny new device sold by him.

Building an iPad right means for him that it will fall appart into pieces exactly the same day Steve announces the new shiny model.

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[Old97]

Battery dies on your iPad - Apple gives you a new one. Yup, that's their policy. BTW, this isn't about iPads. The rest of your argument. You are completely ignoring the cost of labor. Labor costs go up faster than other costs. At some point we can't afford it either we reduce the amount of labor by investing in capital or we reduce production. We cannot sustain ever rising costs. So what do we give up - textbooks, class size and teaching quality, what? We can introduce some automation, yup that is what IT does best, and reduce the cost of labor by reducing the amount of labor we need per unit of output. Basic economics. In this case we are talking about reducing the amount of time kids need to spend with a quality teacher in person. Your teacher costs a hell of a lot more than $500 per student.

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[turbidostato]

"okay there's the lock switch but christ, it's not like a 1964 Buick Skylark."

Surely corporations have learnt how to build better devices since 1964... "better" meaning much less durable, around the time they need to launch next model.

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[Anonymous Coward]

It sometimes gets even crazier. In a Government contract we once came in under budget. Our company actually returned money to the Government at the end of the year. Hooooo boy was that a bad move. The director of the program on the Government side got crap for not having properly allocated his money, the Government manager got crap for having planned incorrectly, my group got crap from my company for leaving money on the table we could have turned into profit, and the business development guy got crap for having over-sold the contract. No one's going to make that mistake again. We get allocated money we find a way to spend it.

Re:Expensive

[tibit]

I dig your point, but Shakespeare is not a particularly good example for kids. Guy couldn't spell if his life hung on it, for one. Never mind that -- for us -- an ancient dialect of English is not particularly conducive for conveying thoughts; it presents an unnecessary barrier to entry. Kids who grew up in black neighborhoods and speak nothing but ebonics (African American Vernacular English) are told, that they supposedly should learn standard, "proper" English -- or else! Well, I don't see how you can tell it to those kids while insisting that Shakespeare is a good way of demonstrating whatever it's used to demonstrate. Shakespeare's writings are used as examples, they are teaching tools, and in grade schools they are not usually used to teach ancient English!! They are used to teach poetry, drama, whatelse. I see no reason not to use more modern texts, where at least the social and language context is easier to understand.

Re:Expensive

[Shadow99_1]

I worked as the Director of Technology for a charter school for 3 years and I looked at pretty good reporting on how one-laptop-per-child programs saw a 15% gain in performance on standardized testing. So I'd lay pretty good odds they will see some sort of increase from this, but probably not as great as they expect since they are doing a weird one-subject parallel.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, the nerds have something better than lunch money. Woo-hooo!!!!

Re:Expensive

[Old97]

So I'm a lunatic to suggest that textbooks need updating more frequently than every 10 years and then you go on to complain that all the textbooks suck and they have for years. So if you don't replace or update them do you expect they will improve themselves while on the shelves?

I don't disagree that textbook quality is a big problem, but you've missed seeing a potential solution here. One reason they are bad is that they are expensive to replace. Also, the schools spend their money on textbooks instead of non textbooks and other content that might be more effective. When content is electronic the logistics are cheap and simple At that point it boils down to a negotiation. With physical texts its more like buying a house. It's such a hassle and the logistics are so onerous (distribution, warehousing, check out, check in, inspect, etc.) that the buyer is in a disadvantageous position. The expense of creating and distributing textbooks prevents smaller, possibly more competent companies from entering the field. And, as referenced in the article, you are not limited to textbooks. Video lectures and demonstrations, shorter articles, links and such can now be incorporated. If textbook publishers don't improve, the will obsolete themselves.

Need proof? What has the internet and electronic distribution done to newspapers, music and multi-media entertainment?

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Schwarzenegger launched a program in 2009 to create digital textbooks in math and science owned by the state board of education. At the end of 2009 they had ten texts, including math through Calc 1 and 2.

Huh. Arnie's not as dumb as he looks, not that that's saying much.

Re:Expensive

[VTI9600]

California does have e-books and are still creating more. This makes them an alternative going forward for licensing.

I think we are comparing apples and oranges here. No way can a dry, open-courseware eBook written by academic longbeards be considered an alternative to the flashy iPad app that HMH is trying to sell. If this program gets out of the pilot phase and schools really do start providing iPads to their students, they sure as heck won't want to use them solely as expensive PDF viewers. If they don't license their courseware from HMH, they'll get it from another vendor, most likely under similar licensing terms and at a similar price point.

Re:Expensive

[longhairedgnome]

Thank god for (more or less) lack of multitasking!

I know about the pushing and the alerting and whatnot, but still..Thinking about that a bit more, it can probably be locked out?

Re:Expensive

[russotto]

Or is the iPad made of magical pixie dust and will therefore not be subject to industry norms? I can see Jobs now, "Profit be damned! There will be only one iPad, and no one will ever want to upgrade it, EVER!"

It's hard to see that happening, but it's not hard to see Jobs saying it, as a very similar statement appeared in early editions of _Inside Macintosh_

Re:Expensive

[RightwingNutjob]

Obsolete? What, does 2 + 2 = 5.4 now to account for inflation? If it were a history text, maybe I'd be less skeptical, but all the math I learned from K to junior year of college had been invented and well-understood for at least the better part of a century. And in high school, I don't think we ever made it past the 1850's.

Re:Expensive

[RightwingNutjob]

Poorly chosen solder tends to grow whiskers and short stuff out. Granted, most of the big chipmakers have their process control down to the point where 20+ year old CPUs still work just like new, but this isn't a box that sits on a desk for its entire lifetime that we're talking about. It'll be abused, battered, vibrated, and sat on (just think what you did to your backpack when you were in school and what your shiny new textbooks looked like at the end of the year). Short of paying technicians $250/hr to inspect every solder joint under a microscope to make sure there's not cracks or shorts or nothin' that'll become a problem, I don't know that we're that good at mass producing microelectronics that are meant to stand up to that kind of punishment yet.

Re:Expensive

[rah1420]

>

This.

I make fun of people who carry around their life in their PDAs while I use paper and pencil. I take them to the parking lot, put my "PAA" (Personal Analog Assistant) under one wheel and dare them to put their PDA under another one as I put the car into drive and step on the gas.

At least I did until Motorola retired the ST7868 and my daughter gave me her cast-off iPhone. I then got assimilated. Someone shoot me.

Re:Expensive

[Nemyst]

I also doubt they're designed for the rough treatment some students can do. I've seen laptops with pencils in the screen or shattered keyboards within a few months, and the parents had bought the laptops.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, as in the article, you can provide much more effective content than plain (out of date) text.

Except for minor alterations, the majority of K-12 textbooks don't go out of date for decades. Education at that level is pretty far from cutting edge.

If anything this should allow you to be equally effective with fewer teachers ...

Perhaps.

and administrators.

Never. That is antithetical to the whole concept of bureaucracy. It is far more "important" to lay off all the workers than one administrator.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes by all means, let's teach all subjects with out of date material. That will improve our competitiveness.

Re:Expensive

[Darkness404]

Basic economics don't work when the government and unions are involved. Teachers are salaried and someone needs to be in there watching kids at all times. A teacher is going to get paid the same if the teacher actually teaches for an hour a day, or if the teacher teaches all day or if the teacher just babysits. You aren't just going to leave a classroom full of kids with iPads alone, there has to be a teacher there, that teacher gets paid the same amount of money if they sit there on Facebook or if they lecture the entire time or whatever else. Reducing teacher jobs is also generally counterproductive because of unions, in most schools it is the teachers who have been there the longest that are generally the worst at their job, kids hate them, etc. but a union isn't going to let you fire their most senior members which are really the ones that need cut.

Re:Expensive

[neurocutie]

ok, if textbooks ARE the target of theft, then so much more so a $500 ipad...

c'mon use a bit more imagination. You just said that these sorts of things are targets for theft. Then 1) you really think that parents are going to be willing to assume liability for $500 stealable, fragile ipads? 2) that kids won't let other kids "steal" their ipads or whatever combo of force, peer pressure, barter, etc, etc won't come into play? 3) any time an expensive, valuable, commodity-like resource is put into play at a state, gov't, admin level, it WILL be the stuff that abuse and corruption is based on.

Re:Expensive

[tftp]

I believe the GP was saying that nobody should be forced to study things that go against the grain of his nature. That rarely helps.

Why should mechanics read Shakespeare? Because communication is important

I don't know what Shakespeare or other classics you were reading, but art of clear communication is not exactly the primary goal of fiction literature. Quite opposite, a lot of writing depends on things that are not said, on things that the reader completes in his head and acts out internally, as if he were one of the actors in that scene. Fiction books are written not to educate (that would be textbooks) - fiction is written first & foremost to entertain. Very few authors want write clearly (like Mark Twain; and compare to his well known critique of Cooper.)

And here comes another problem - the age of the reader. Shakespeare wrote his plays for adult audiences. Leo Tolstoy wrote his "War and Peace" for an adult, even bilingual audience. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote his "Crime and Punishment" for an [initially] sane, adult reader. I'm sure you can add tons of books like that that are part of school courses in various countries. Invariably these books are far more complex than what a 12- or 14-year old student is ready for. This causes boredom and other problems.

When I was in school (which was quite a while ago) I hated literature classes the most. Not "language" classes as such - those were easy; but classes that asked you to read a book and then answer questions that are not answered in the book. For example let's take that "War and Peace." A general walks the field before the battle. Then he comes close to a tree and stands still for 10-15 minutes. Question: what did he think about during this time? I don't recall what was the officially blessed answer to that, but my answer would have been simply "Insufficient data." You can answer this question (probably incorrectly anyway) only by trying to relive these hours *as* the protagonist. But a school student can't relive a life of a 40-year old man who was a filthy rich, married aristocrat, with friends and enemies in high places.

Are there books that are more suitable for children? Most certainly so. Just to name a big name, Andre Norton has quite a few books written specifically for children, and even more in the genre of fiction. Children can associate themselves with protagonists of those books. Good and evil are easy to see, and often the hero is a young boy (or a girl, in Norton's case.) But those books are not studied. Instead, some heavyweight adult fiction that can easily hurt an adult's head is selected. (Dostoevsky is a great example in this department.)

So you were saying something about communication? There is precious little of that in those books. Implied inferences rule. "Martin's hand accidentally touched Kate's, and both felt a spark of electricity." I say, get proper antistatic gear before you put your hands where they don't belong :-) This is not the stuff that a school student should be personally familiar with, and that's just a fictitious example. In real books (like "Anna Karenina") the action unfolds about the marital conflict in a family of an aristocrat. Yes, that's the stuff a 14-year old pimple-faced boy knows all about, especially the part where the man *doesn't want* the woman.

Re:Expensive

[neurocutie]

yes, but printing a book is VERY cheap (less than $10) compared with an iPad that is fragile, stealable and only has a life of a few years at best...

perhaps a $100 ereader, then it makes more sense, ideally a Kindle with color, but not an iPad...

Re:Expensive

[Old97]

I think you are being too pessimistic. Right now teacher unions have enough people convinced that we need 1 teacher per x students in order for their kids to learn. And until we have better alternatives to teaching/learning they may be correct. We do have teacher aides already, so the idea of someone with less status and pay than a teacher watching their kids is already accepted and has been for at least 50 years. If you can demonstrate that kids can learn as well or better with 1 teacher per 30, 40 or 50 kids versus 20, then parents (taxpayer/voters) will be less willing to cave and will demand that administrators reduce the teacher/student ratio in order to cut costs. First, they have to be convinced. The unions would not be able to do anything about that. They depend on public opinion for their influence.

As a parent, if I thought my kid was getting a better education by being given access to better content with less student/teacher direct interaction, then I'd demand that. Do we really always need a live teacher lecture in order to impart information? I'd say that some subjects work better with in person teaching and others are less dependent on that. I'd say that much of what we consider fundamentals can be taught with less personal interaction than we have now if we had the tools. Other subjects may always be labor intensive and I'd rather shift my labor expenditures to keep that going than try to save money by providing only a narrow curriculum.

Re:Expensive

[pandaman9000]

.....So..... You are NOT in favor of a single payer Obama Care? This is Slashdot, where we support bigger government for great justice!

Ok, I don't, and hope you don't either. As you indicated, the government has issues in controlling costs, and saving money is completely outside of scope.

Re:Expensive

[pandaman9000]

In the public school system, every added child is added budget. It IS that simple. School board members make obscene amounts of money for making stupidly simple decisions.....stupidly. I may be off track, and even wrong, but I seriously doubt that anywhere near 20% of all public school districts are anywhere near efficient or even learning focused. I see more and more emphasis on salaries, and budgets for extracurriculars/field trips, multicultural BULLSHIT, politically correct BULLSHIT, and sex education BULLSHIT, and less emphasis on actual learning.

I may be wrong. I do only have 3 kids in public schools, grades 3, 7, and 9

Re:Expensive

[Joce640k]

...and the new sports stadium is essential, how else are they going to attract students?

Re:Expensive

[pandaman9000]

More invested != usefully involved. I got treated like a terrorist when I questioned the focus of an entire MONTH on black history, plus various individually focused black days. I was trying to figure out how, with so many races and cultures, they ever made it though the school year learning math. As it turns out, only the squeaky wheel races and cultures get anything more than cursory attention...... No, they didn't consider Irish worthy of note, despite the practical enslavement of indentured servitude as it was actually played out. Turns out my kids weren't even taught about indentured servitude, or the plight of the Irish.

Good times, in the not inclusive, inclusive public schools. My money pays for my kids to think that only blacks were oppressed.

Re:Expensive

[tftp]

You actually have great examples. They show that short-sighted policies destroy the business. Where is that Enron today? How is that new tobacco business going?

A company that ignores or alienates their own customer base (like RIAA) will only dig itself deeper into the hole. RIAA can afford a pretty deep hole, but they can't see the future from down there.

Only companies that respect their partners (supplies, workforce and customers) can survive in long term.

Re:Expensive

[pandaman9000]

As a parent of REAL HUMAN STUDENTS, I say oh, hell, FUCK NO, my kids aren't toting around a $500 device that can be stolen, dropped, stomped on, or otherwise damaged. WTF world do these people live in?!?!?!? I don't want it if it's $100. Spend the money on TECAHING, and quit dicking around with $400-$500 devices, and trips to fucking D.C.. Fuck this shit. We are in a recession. Yes, my language is harsh. I am going to be harsh, when I have to live beyond my means to send my kids to FUCKING PUBLIC SCHOOLS!

Thanks, and have a nice day.

Re:Expensive

[pandaman9000]

I know a few mechanics. I do IT work for local shops. I am completely laughing at you right now. Not WITH you, AT you.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

The US government has no problems tossing money in education/infrastructure but its all worthless because they are simply redistributing wealth that is more efficiently done in the private sector.

Yes, the private sector redistributes wealth from the poor to the rich.

Governments breed waste, inefficiency and tyranny and can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution.

Oh, you're a teabagger - that explains it.

Re:Expensive

[Americano]

So you were saying something about communication? There is precious little of that in those books. Implied inferences rule.

You realize that "implied inferences" and "understanding body language" and "nonverbal communication" are a major part of how we communicate, as human beings, right? So tell me again why learning empathy, understanding how to infer things, picking up on and interpreting nonverbal cues, and so on aren't skills that can be taught in books where "Implied inferences rule"?

The post I was responding to wasn't saying "Don't read Shakespeare, read Andre Norton." The post I was responding to was saying, "Don't read Shakespeare, learn how to be a better mechanic" -- in other words, we should skip things that are "non-essential" to the trade we've decided a kid has the most aptitude for, and simply focus on making them the best cog we possibly can.

My basic response to that is: By studying Shakespeare (or, for sake of the overly literal-minded, WHICHEVER author you feel is appropriate literature for a high schooler), one becomes a better person, and by as an incidental benefit, a better mechanic. Though for what it's worth, I think you vastly underestimate the mental capacity of high schoolers by claiming that they need "easy to see" depictions of good and evil, and heroes they can easily identify with, and that they can't handle the challenge of stepping outside their own experiences to imagine what someone else's life might be like. Sure, they may still need guidance, but a 15, 16, 17, 18 year old high schooler is capable of handling "difficult" topics, even if they have no direct experience of those topics.

But a school student can't relive a life of a 40-year old man who was a filthy rich, married aristocrat, with friends and enemies in high places.

It's called imagination, or empathy. You may not get it right, but you'd be surprised at how much a student *can* get right. Shit, 5 year olds play cops and robbers all the time, and invent all kinds of imaginary games and scenarios. It's what they do. Should we stifle that because they might not "get it right"? It's part of the learning process to project, and if you go off-course, the teacher should be there to help guide you back on track, and discuss with you where you went off course, and how. As I said, I think you're underestimating the imaginative ability of young people.

Re:Expensive

[Americano]

I'm guessing they don't like you very much, either, huh?

Re:Expensive

[dunng808]

Without copyright, old son, you'd likely not have a textbook. People still generally have this whole "pay me for my knowledge" defect, you see. I know you think information "wants to be free", but it's actually "freeloaders want information to be free", and the producers of information have a lot more value to society than the freeloaders do.

The Internet, by which we participate in this conversation, was created by people willing to think and plan and code not for personal monetary gain but for the betterment of society. Fame and glory. There is no reason this will not work for textbooks. The Open Slate Project advocates fully integrating tablet computers into secondary education, and open source content ranging from Ebooks to apps. The content piece is called Chalk Dust.

If this sort of thing appeals to you, consider joining our SourceForge mailing list.

MIT has been doing great work with Open Courseware.

Re:Expensive

[CodeBuster]

They're simply not designed to outlive their replacement models.

Also, have you seen what sort of condition the textbooks are in after a few years in the average California public middle school? The books are absolutely thrashed because the kids have no respect for them. Contrast this with private schools where parents often have to pay for the textbooks out of pocket along with the tuition; the books are often covered with protective paper and treated with respect so that they may be resold or traded in excellent condition at the end of the year towards next year's books. I predict that schools that waste money on these iPads will invariably find most of them lost, stolen, or broken by the end of the year. The last thing that students here in California need is an iPad at the taxpayers' expense and especially not now while the state budget is drowning in red ink.

Re:Expensive

[dangitman]

I've found it far more likely to have bad memory or other non-moving component go bad on a portable computer, than the hard drive, for example.

That's weird, I've found the exact opposite. Hard drives are the most failure-prone component in a computer. Over time, they have 100% failure rate. The solid-state components, on the other hand usually keep working indefinitely, unless they are bad when shipped from the factory.

Apple has a history of bad wiring

[citation needed]

Re:Expensive

[ShakaUVM]

What the fuck don't you get?

A) School pays $500 per student for an iPad

B) School pays $50 per student per book for the iPad

Is the digital model. The paper model is

A) School buys a paper book for $50 per student per book.

What the fuck universe do you live in? Textbooks are $200 now. (http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Early-Transcendentals-Stewarts/dp/0495011665) At $50 for an e-copy, the iPads will save money.

I think the iPad is a bad choice though. Nooks are a lot cheaper, and a local community college uses them very successfully as replacement textbooks.

Re:Expensive

[dangitman]

Building an iPad right means for him that it will fall appart into pieces exactly the same day Steve announces the new shiny model.

Sure... that's why Jobs is notoriously obsessed with quality, and they do things like mill laptop cases out of a single chunk of aluminum, rather than using the cheapest possible flimsy plastic like most of the others do.

Do you even think before posting, or are you just trolling? As much as any company wants to sell new products, it would be utter stupidity to do what you would describe, as the company would quickly gain a reputation for selling shoddy products.

Re:Expensive

[tftp]

So tell me again why learning empathy, understanding how to infer things, picking up on and interpreting nonverbal cues, and so on aren't skills that can be taught in books where "Implied inferences rule"?

Perhaps because such a book would be called a movie? The book is limited to direct and indirect verbal communication. That Martin can steal a look at Kate, and you can do your best to write about it, but it will never be the same as seeing it, or being part of the live scene. Books work the best when the reader is sufficiently associating himself with the act. I can write a book about trepnung of amilatsies on the 5th planet of Proxima Centauri, but you will not get any entertainment or social skills from reading it - it would be meaningless (unless you an amilatsi yourself :-)

The post I was responding to was saying, "Don't read Shakespeare, learn how to be a better mechanic"

Those Slashdot comments, they tend to branch and the discussion sometimes flows in all directions. I do not support the theory of "skipping things that are "non-essential" to the trade we've decided a kid has the most aptitude for" for many obvious reasons. But sometimes that "not skipping" transforms into "force-feeding", and that is bad, IMO. My opinion is based on my own experiences, and I do not pretend to speak for everyone. But I'm sure I'm not alone in the world with such an opinion.

Sure, they may still need guidance, but a 15, 16, 17, 18 year old high schooler is capable of handling "difficult" topics

I was 16 when I graduated from high school (after 10 years there, 8+2.) When I was 18 I was in a university already, pretty well understanding [at that time] technical electrodynamics and some quantum effects within certain microwave devices. I simply don't comprehend why in the USA anyone is still in school after 16. But sure, if you keep your "children" in school until their beards turn grey then indeed they can be taught a lot.

That reminds me of a good scene in one book, where 35 years old children petition for their emancipation.

Shit, 5 year olds play cops and robbers all the time, and invent all kinds of imaginary games and scenarios.

They certainly do that; however nobody judges them on accuracy of their act. Literature studies do.

It's called imagination, or empathy. You may not get it right, but you'd be surprised at how much a student *can* get right.

These are not qualities that all people are equally and plentifully endowed with. Kirk and Spock, for example. You, when in school, may be able to jump over a plank at 10 feet, but I can't jump over anything. However I can devise a complicated Rube Goldberg machine to raise me over Mount Everest if I want to. People are different, and it hurts when a teacher tries to hammer a square peg into a round hole.

Forcing a child to not study something is just as bad as forcing him to study it. Traditionally it was one of teacher's responsibilities to discover what the child has leaning toward. But the 20th century adopted the conveyor belt education system. Teachers are just operators who speak their part, verify responses against the government-approved standard, and calculate scores. You can't sing? "YOU VILL SING, WE WILL MAKE YOU." You can't catch a ball? FAIL. You can shoot a fly at 50 yards with a .22LR? OMG, VERBOTEN!!1! I'm not sure if such an educational machine is much better than the one you warn against.

Re:Expensive

[IICV]

Actually, it's far simpler than "private school parents care more" - private schools get to pick who they accept. Not only that, but they can kick kids out. I'm sure some public schools have those two abilities, but the vast majority do not; they have to take all comers, and except in very rare cases they can't expel children (and if they do expel a kid, the kid still has to go to some other public school).

I bet you that if public schools were allowed to pick which children they taught and to expel children as easily as private schools can, their performance would be equivalent to that of private schools - even without increased parental involvement.

Of course, that would also lead to at least half our population growing up uneducated because they either didn't make the public school cut or were kicked out, but I think you could really work with that - just ensure that school is always freely available to all people who qualify, and do some social engineering so that there's not much stigma to going back and finishing high school when you're 30 and know better.

The thing is, in the modern educational system we are literally cramming several hundred years of human development and experience into the course of twelve to sixteen years. There are always going to be people who just aren't mature enough to do it, so why not let them grow up a bit more in order to actually have a positive educational experience? Why force a cookie-cutter K-12 educational system on everyone, when we could almost certainly be more efficient by letting people learn at their own rate?

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

You, my friend, have been reading waaaaaaaaaaaay too much Ayn Rand.

Re:Expensive

[colinrichardday]

iPads are much more durable than laptops or netbooks. We've been evaluating them at my company.

How long have iPads been out? How do you know how long they'll last?

You seem to think that there is no problem with a textbook being 10 years old.

Except for some superficial changes (new editions), most textbooks are more than ten years old.

Maybe a lot of small classrooms with unionized teachers aren't as needed if we can put devices into the hands of the little darlin's. Maybe fewer teachers and some baby sitters to keep them in line would do the trick. If you think an iPad is expensive, try a teacher. A lot of them make $100,000 here in Chicago plus pensions and you can't fire them. Get rid of one teacher and you've paid for aroung 300 iPads. Fewer teachers means fewer administrators and book warehouse employees, etc. One great teacher and a production studio can produce a lot of instruction that can be used all over the country. Think about that versus tens of thousands of mediocre teachers trying to cover the same material? What is the savings there? How about the potential for home schooling? It would work better if you could get more and better content to help the parent doing the schooling. What does that save when we are spending $15,000 per student per year now?

Can this one good teacher compensate for the lack of personal interaction with students?

Re:Expensive

[Modern Primate]

I don't have numbers to offer, but they could be banking on the iPad being cheaper in the long run than having to update dead-tree textbooks year after year. Also many of the open courseware digital textbooks are as good as, if not better than ye olde paper texts. And almost any school could easily replace their literature textbooks with e versions, so maybe they're looking to extend this beyond math. If so, they will almost certainly be saving money.

Besides, textbooks are sooo 20th century.

Re:Expensive

[Americano]

That Martin can steal a look at Kate, and you can do your best to write about it, but it will never be the same as seeing it, or being part of the live scene.

Numerous studies of the benefits of visualization exercises would differ with this conclusion, and have shown that visualization exercises can absolutely improve "real world" performance, both alone, and as part of a "real world" training regimen. And the visualization is exactly the imagining that can go on when reading a book - imagining yourself, projecting yourself, into a scenario. Thinking about how you would handle certain things, how you would respond, what you would do, or say, or think, if you were in the place of someone else in the story, or scenario. Of course it's easier to to imagine yourself in a role you have lived, but that doesn't mean there is no value in stretching the visualization and thinking beyond the specific things you've lived.

But sometimes that "not skipping" transforms into "force-feeding", and that is bad,

I would agree with that - but I think people also tend to say "anything I didn't really like was force feeding," and engage in a bit of revisionist history when they look back at their schooling. Developing competence in any skill requires practice - again, numerous studies have shown that with many (and perhaps even most) skills, number of hours spent practicing that skill have a quite strong relationship with development of expertise in that skill. Sure, there will always be the outliers who just "get" how to sit down and fix a car, program a computer, play an instrument, speak a language... but for the vast majority of people, the more you practice and drill, the better you perform. Pairing this with the studies that have shown that people who tend to agree with the notion that "practice makes perfect" learn better than people who believe "some people are just naturally talented at things," and you get a pretty compelling picture that suggests that that the "boring repetition" and some level of 'force-feeding' is a necessary part of the learning process.

If we can agree that education has, as its ultimate goal, the development of a core set of skills (above and beyond the "Jimmy's gonna be a mechanic" skills) required to 'succeed' in life (for some negotiable definition of 'succeed'), you have to sort of force the issue, and drill, repeat, and practice. This means that yes, some kids are going to absolutely hate every moment of their math class. But they should still be expected to develop a certain basic level of competency. In much the same way, the kid who's a math whiz should be expected to develop a certain basic level of proficiency in written and verbal communication. I went to school with a lot of engineers who - frankly - sucked at written communication. Surprise surprise, they generally felt that their English classes were a complete drag, hated them, and wished they could have skipped 'all that stupid reading and writing bullshit, since it doesn't matter anyway - I'm a programmer."

Now, if by force-feeding, you mean "kids should have the life crushed out of them until they understand high level calculus, can write world-class poetry, and deliver a speech to put Martin Luther King to shame," sure, I agree - force feeding is bad. But drill & repetition has a place in education, even though it sometimes feels (to the kids) like a "boring waste of time" that's just "force-feeding them a bunch of shit they'll never use."

They certainly do that; however nobody judges them on accuracy of their act. Literature studies do.

And this is why I indicated that the teacher should be there to guide them in these things - help them learn to project & empathize & imagine within realistic constraints.

Traditionally it was one of teacher's responsibilities to discover what the child has leaning toward.

Certainly, ed

Re:Expensive

[node 3]

Because the USA, unlike the rest of the world, is immune to the idea that investing in education and infrastructure yields tangible benefits for society!

But it doesn't.

Congratulations on just proving his point.

Re:Expensive

[copponex]

Its been shown time and time again that people will donate when they believe they are actually making a difference, and private groups would be able to use decision making to give support to people who actually need it unlike the government.

Pure horseshit. Call my bluff and link to a peer reviewed study.

There's a reason roads aren't private, and power is regulated, and water is a public utility. That reason is because you cannot trust a corporation with needs, unless those needs can be plentifully produced and naturally lend themselves to real competition. That means MP3 players and apples need very little regulation, because it's pretty easy to tell what these things are, what they are made of, and what purpose they serve.

Hell, when the founding fathers were talking about what the government should run, the latest technology at that time - the post and road systems - was something they all wanted folded into the government. The reason is because under government supervision it could be properly accounted for and equitably distributed across America, and not subject to the whims of aristocracy or price gouging by private entities. That cheap, reliable, price-regulated infrastructure is the bedrock of all modern economies. The intelligence and capability of the workforce is a vital part of that infrastructure, and shouldn't be left to chance by some entity who is only concerned with that quarter's profit return instead of the well being of American society for the long haul.

You want a place where money rules and weak government is powerless to regulate commerce? Pick just about any place in Africa and see how you like the income distribution there. You'll quickly learn that it's pretty tough to have a middle class when the majority of your population can't read or write. But hey, the market said they should just dig in the dirt and have all of their natural resources sold out from under them and funneled into the hands of the tiniest sliver of their upper class. And if the market did it, it's got to be right.

Right?

Government programs benefit those who game the system rather than people who actually might need it. Private programs can deny people which makes it a whole lot easier to give help to those who need it.

Your ideas on economics are fatally childish and unrealistic, unless you have no problem with old women dying in hospital parking lots for lack of kidney dialysis, or a vast population of uneducated and unskilled workers roaming the slums, or kids selling their bodies for their daily bread if they happen to be unlucky enough to be an orphan. Those are all realities right now across the undeveloped world. And true, some of it is due to government corruption, but that just shows you how important a strong and legitimate government is to the well-being of a society.

If all of this libertarian horseshit were true, than the weak states across the world would be drowning in money and happiness. They are not.

Re:Expensive

[Mongoose Disciple]

the government has issues in controlling costs

It does, but then, private industry has issues in letting people die if it's cheaper than keeping them alive.

The reason health care is a complicated debate instead of something you can resolve into a talking point is because it IS necessary to control costs, and yet, any system of health care that puts controlling costs first is by definition a failure because saving money isn't the object of it.

Re:Expensive

[Compaqt]

Rather than an iPad, an open-architecture Linux-based tablet PC might make more sense at $250. Also, this should be paired with the free and open textbooks movement.

Instead of paying millions for textbooks over and over again, California should just pay some junior academics $100,000 to compile (and edit and proofread) existing free materials to create science textbooks.

Science is the only subject you really need up-to-date books in. Don't say history because most history classes start from 1492 and are somewhere in the 19th century when the schoolyear runs out.

High school math hasn't changed since the traumatization of mathematicians in the Godel affair English? Use free books off of the Gutenberg project. For 21st century English, kids'll pick that up by themselves just fine sms'ing.

I don't know why teachers can't be expected to come up with lesson plans by googling for material on current events and using it in class the next day.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow are you dumb. How do you explain the success of kids that get to private school via vouchers.

The NEA is the biggest union in this country, and it protects incompetent teachers from being fired.

No selection bias there buddy.

Re:Expensive

[Mongoose Disciple]

You claimed that consumer electronics are designed so they would fail shortly after a new product is released.

No, he didn't. Rather, he said they're not designed so they won't. It's not the same thing.

Your version of the statement is that the manufacturer is malicious and wants the item to fail once a new item is available.

The version of the statement from the poster you were responding to is that the manufacturer just doesn't care if it fails after that.

Against your invincible iPhone, I'll put my two iPods that failed within a month of their warranty expiring.

Re:Expensive

[tftp]

I agree, that we shouldn't be hammering every kid into the same mold

Good morning, The Worm, Your Honour,
The Crown will plainly show,
The prisoner who now stands before you,
Was caught red-handed showing feelings.
Showing feelings of an almost human nature.
This will not do.
Call the schoolmaster!

(Here is the link, if anyone dares to confess that he needs it :-)

Re:Expensive

[drsmithy]

That's what is happening in every government agency.

It's hardly isolated to government agencies. Most every private company I've worked in functions the same way, with the exception of startups - who simple don't worry about silly little things like budgets at all.

Re:Expensive

[drsmithy]

Why is it that almost every single privately educated student is better educated than a public school educated student despite massive redistribution of wealth?

Because they nearly all come from middle to upper class families and can concentrate on their education, rather that silly frivolities like eating, babysitting their brothers and sisters, and not being shot.

And, most importantly, because they can kick out anyone who might negatively affect their averages or is disruptive to others.

With a private school, they have to make every dollar count.

Your understanding of how private schools function is not in line with reality.

Governments breed waste, inefficiency and tyranny and can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution.

Private industries breed greed, selfishness and corruption and can never result in a society of equal opportunity because they are inherently divisive.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an idea afoot that specialists make more money than generalists. This is true, at any particular point in time. But then conditions change, and the specialists who were riding high are suddenly out of work until they learn new skills. The generalists are ready for another job immediately.

This also applies to free trade; if a country concentrates on improving production on goods and services that it's good at, and outsources the rest to countries that are good at those, then everybody makes more money. Of course, if a country suddenly floods, or their main medical nuclear isotope plant shuts down for safety reasons, or a tsunami or earthquake flattens them, then anybody else that depended on them and their products is up a creek. Any country that specializes in horse-and-buggy whips is doomed when technology changes. Specialization destroys self-sufficiency.

There are examples in evolution as well: the cockroach and the rat are generalists, and can survive a nuclear war, as they can eat just about anything. People, aren't as flexible, and aren't as likely to survive.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a ridiculous statement you make considering the US spends more per student, by far, than any other country on Earth.

US spending pr. pupil, varied between 13,187 and 4,890 in 2001/02 averaging at 7,648(source, http://www.epodunk.com/top10/per_pupil/)
Danish spending, pr. pupil varied between 38200 dkk and 67400 dkk, at at the rate at the time, (about 1/6) equals 6367$ to 11233, with the average being 8,394 (source http://www.da.dk/default.asp)

The rest of your claims are pure conjecture.

*I chose Danish spending pr. pupil, because that's where I live.

Re:Expensive

[drsmithy]

Um, how does it? Lets imagine a scenario with no public schools at all.

Why imagine it ? Just go back a hundred-odd years in history then look at everything before that.

The world wouldn't suddenly collapse, people would just learn more efficiently. People would have a greater deal of specialization which would allow them to better perform in the workplace. Lets face it, why should Joe Sixpack who is really great at, say, diesel mechanics have to read Shakespeare when he can simply be learning how to be a better mechanic?

How do you propose he figures out whether he's better at fixing diesel engines or standing on stage ?

Its silly that we've put people on a treadmill to "higher education" that basically screws the poor and the working-class.

Right. Because having them grow up illiterate and uneducated - or in the best case class-stratified and railroaded into whatever jobs their families already do - wouldn't screw them in the slightest.

Because of government-run schools, a high school diploma is basically worthless, its not a qualification. If you walk into almost every job interview situation and proudly proclaim you graduated high school you will get laughed at. So what happens? Even for entry-level positions employers now want a college degree and that screws the poor.

That has nothing to do with government-run schools and everything to do with a badly run education system.

Consider Joe Sixpack, he is a great diesel mechanic but bad at English, Algebra and History.

How does he know ? Without public schools he's never had the chance to even *try* English, Algebra and History because he's been working 12 hours a day down at the local subway station with his dad shining shoes for a dollar each since he was 5.

So rather than Joe Sixpack being able to really study mechanics and being a better worker, he has to sit through classes that are boring for him and cost taxpayer dollars. Not only that but thanks to a high school degree being basically worthless, Joe Sixpack now has to go to tech school or a university at his own expense basically screwing him financially for the next ten years of his life unless he magically finds a job that doesn't require that, which is rare these days.

You've described a poorly run education system, not any fundamental problem with a publicly funded education system. I'll admit to not being familiar with the American system, but in the systems I am familiar with students are free to start choosing most of their subjects and specialising (outside of a few core requirements like English and Maths) as of about 14 years old.

Post-highschool study is always going to be required if you want to be a skilled worker, of any stripe. In some cases you get this at a University, in others you get it at a trade school, and in still others you get it on the job. The point is that nobody outside of unnatural prodigies can acquire the necessary skills by 17 to be finely skilled at anything, without grossly neglecting the rest of the education and going back to the days of class stratification.

Most people should not go to college its silly that its so forced on people, we now have people only being productive from 22+ years or older and piled on with debt, or too poor to get into college and have a door slammed on them by potential employers for not going to college.

Now you are describing a broken hiring culture in a addition to a broken education system. Again, the problem here has nothing to do with government, it is solely the fault of private enterprise's unrealistic expectations.

The elimination of the public school system would allow for greater specialization, better workers, better innovators who aren't wasting their time and my money.

Bullshit. It would result in the same thing it resulted in previously. Child labor, class stratification, dramatically reduced class mobility, an illiterate, ignorant public and the inaccessibility of education to anyone except rich or extraordinarily lucky individuals.

Public education is, quite possibly, one of the greatest achievements and defining features of modern civilisation.

Re:Expensive

[Homburg]

And yet, the UK government spends less money per capita to provide health care for 100% of its population, than the US government spends to cover the 30% in the US who receive some form of government provided care, and no country with universal, government provided healthcare spends anything close to as much on healthcare as the US spends in total. I'll take governments cost control over that of the private sector, thanks.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

My money pays for my kids to think that only blacks were oppressed.

You're an idiot.

Re:Expensive

[DavidD_CA]

Are you suggesting that books last MORE than three years?

Besides wear-and-tear, and students writing answers and profanities into the pages, schools replace their textbooks far more often than they should. Text books are often replaced every 3-5 years as new editions come out.

Where do the old ones go? I have no idea.

And let's also not forget how static text books are, compared to everything you can do with a digital device.

Re:Expensive

[HereIAmJH]

You are NOT in favor of a single payer Obama Care?

Nothing Obama proposed, was, is, or likely will be single payer. Single Payer is a proven system, but that doesn't fit into a little sound bite or the "that's my money" mentality of US politics.

Re:Expensive

[Zencyde]

Darkness404 (1287218)
Old97 (1341297)

Eck, it's a close race, folks. But it looks like Darkness404 is winning by a hair!

But seriously, do you think IT can batch out data on an iPad? Maybe someone will make an "app for that" but I doubt it as that would likely violate a lot of Apple's policies. Apple would have to make special modifications before this would require "less labor".

Oh yes, speaking of, what is this labor you're talking about? The cost of manufacturing books, perhaps? Either way, what matters here is the cost to the school, since that is the budget in focus.

In this respect, the way we're going to see changes is by pulling power away from the publishers. With all the money that schools spend on books, it would be better to group that money on a national level and have it all invested in writing books that are distributed freely (through our tax dollars*) to any and all. This would be particularly effective for subjects that change slowly over time.

Which leads me to my next point. There's this trend that school boards seem to follow in which they believe that newer material is somewhere necessarily written better. While it MAY be written better, this is seldom the case. Why are there so many new textbook revisions for math books? It's all to make money. And that money comes straight from the school's budget.

The point being, there isn't any money to necessarily be saved here. This experiment seems to be one of effectiveness. Though, unfortunately, there don't seem to be any real benefits to giving every kid an iPad outside of Apple's stock going up, every kid knowing how to play games on an iPad, and the weight of the average backpack dropping by an order of magnitude. But outside of that? Nada. This isn't a fiscally intelligent move. This is an experiment.

Also, Kindles would have been cheaper and more useful due to battery life. ;)

Re:Expensive

[HereIAmJH]

college text books are often worthless after 3 years, since a new revision is out and a professor forces using that revision.

But that generally isn't because the subject has changed. Simply that the school has chosen to make them obsolete. From the professors I have talked to, it tends to come down to a couple things; a textbook committee has chosen something new and shiny, the publisher has come out with a new edition and the school can't guarantee availability of the old edition for new students.

Thinking back through most of the textbooks I had through primary school and college, very few would need more than minor updates during a 20 year lifespan. Civics, recent history (current events), digital electronics, and computer courses are the only ones that I have taken that would need yearly revisions.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

You're clearly not a teacher, and you're clearly not a student either.

Re:Expensive

[dangitman]

No, he didn't. Rather, he said they're not designed so they won't. It's not the same thing.

Uhh, yes it is. Even so, this is false, demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority don't fail after 1 year.

Your version of the statement is that the manufacturer is malicious and wants the item to fail once a new item is available.

That's the subtext of his statement.

The version of the statement from the poster you were responding to is that the manufacturer just doesn't care if it fails after that.

No, he says that it's by design, not by accident.

Against your invincible iPhone, I'll put my two iPods that failed within a month of their warranty expiring.

That's far from the norm.

Re:Expensive

[turbidostato]

"You actually have great examples. They show that short-sighted policies destroy the business."

I know. My point is that acting against the customer is not deterrent for companies; even self-destroying practices are not deterrent for CEOs as long as there's benefit for them. And there *is* benefit for them.

"Only companies that respect their partners (supplies, workforce and customers) can survive in long term."

So what? It seems you imply that companies not respecting their partners shouldn't worry us in the grand scheme of things because they tend to self-destruct. My point is that not only they should worry us because of the damage they incur short term but that without regulatory bodies (the government) they'd be a majority (a changing majority, maybe, but a majority). Shouldn't we worry about suicide terrorists because they won't be able to make a second attack?

Re:Expensive

[lsatenstein]

E-books are 1/4th the price of paper books. And typically, the schools spend up to $90 per year on paper books. The savings (taken for 3 successive years), more than covers the costs. Also, a lost iPad would mean student pays to replace it.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers are much less expensive than teachers. They will pack the class with students and save a lot of money by not using as many teachers. I'm shocked, but it is California. It is detrimental to the low to average students especially. Learning a new way of doing math will be difficult when you can't get the individual attention you need.

Re:Expensive

[Mongoose Disciple]

Uhh, yes it is.

No, no it's not. They're clearly two different concepts.

Not to be inflammatory, but did you actually manage to get so much of Steve Jobs in your mouth that it hit your brain?

Re:Expensive

[daem0n1x]

That's the fundamental contradiction in the right-wing free-market bullshit. Pundits are against State intervention in the economy, for privatisation of public services, for deregulation of business and, last but not least, for lowering State expenses and therefore taxes.

Except when the same State gives you a few millions of pork dollars, buying useless stuff you sell. In that particular moment, you're all for state-intervention. But since taxes for businesses and the rich are always shrinking, it's up to the common working citizen to support all these parasites.

Of course, this is completely unsustainable and will all blow up one day. But until then, let's milk some more from the State budget. Isn't freedom great?

Re:Expensive

[dangitman]

No, no it's not. They're clearly two different concepts.

How so? If something is not designed to last more than a year, then clearly it is a deliberate decision.

You interpret BobMcD's comments incorrectly. He does mean that Apple has made their products with deliberately shortened life spans. He has said so much more clearly in previous posts. Even if you there is some ambiguity in his statements in this thread, look at his posting history and you will find there is no ambiguity. He is a believer in conspiracy theories.

Not to be inflammatory, but did you actually manage to get so much of Steve Jobs in your mouth that it hit your brain?

"Not to be inflammatory"? You are outright trolling. What the fuck does this have to do with Steve Jobs? I mentioned a lot of products in my previous post that aren't made by Apple. This is about logic and reason. Somebody makes stupid comments unsupported by evidence, and I call them on it.

How stupid do you have to be to think that companies are totally unconcerned about the quality of their products beyond the next upgrade cycle? Sure, there might be some fly-by-night companies who deliberately make poor quality trash, but that's not the norm with established companies.

Re:Expensive

[DarthVain]

The lunacy is at the top, where these budgets are decided. If they knew how to run one, the the people below wouldn't have to try and alter their decision by inflating budgets.

To use Star Trek (hey its slashdot) as an example, in the original series, Kirk would be "Scotty, I need Warp 8!" and Scotty's response would be "I canna do eet Captin' she has a broken quantum exchange unit, it'll take me at least 12 hours to fix".... to which Kirk's response will be "You have 6 hours!".

Now what Scotty should say is "No, it will take 12 hours like I said, in 6 hours I can give you warp 5 but no more!"

Now what I am trying to illustrate here is that government is always seemingly under "fiscal restraint", so anytime budget time comes around, the guy at the top, usually politically affiliated, will be like "OK, your budget was 50 million last year, this year your going to take a 10% cut, now do the same job as before", which in many cases, unless you built in a buffer (by say inflating your budget the year before), you cannot offer the same service at the lower price tag, its just not going to happen. If fact you start to let long term requirements go such as system maintaince, in order to meet short term obligations. The fact is, your going to get cut just about every year, yet be asked to continue to offer every single service you have provided in the past. It just doesn't make any sense. Its the same thing, as no one wants to pay taxes, but wants all the perks that are provided. Sorry, it ain't free.

Another example is places like futureshop that raise prices by 10% and the a week later have a sale for 15%. The customer gets the impression that they are getting a deal, and futureshop gets to sell stuff.

Basically people don't like to say no, particularly to their boss. Its always "we'll get it done somehow..."

Anyway the whole situation is ridiculous really. It really comes from politicians trying to save money without having to make hard decisions. In the previous example the response should be, "OK, here is a list of 30 programs, you get to now cut 5 that will no longer be offered to the public. Some are required by Law so be careful lest we get sued. Also you get to lay all those people off, and the Union will sue us for breach of contract. Have fun next election."

Of course that person would be fired (or moved), and they would find someone else who would be more "flexible" who would tell the politician what he wants to hear yet at the same time try to fix it so the downward spiral isn't noticed.

Re:Expensive

[bufordt13]

aren't we doing that already?

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of all the money they can save by not needing teachers! This concept will not work, not because it is a bad idea (although it may be) but because it could cut the need for teachers and iPads will not pay into the Teachers Union.

Re:Expensive

[tehcyder]

California is in the middle of a hiring freeze for the State, and a huge deficit. Where exactly are they getting the money for these iPad projects for these districts, let alone for the rest of the State if they decide to advance it?

Duh, if everyone can learn everything they need from an iPad, you can do away with the bricks and mortar buildings, teachers, administration staff and the rest. You just need a website that kids can download that year's work from and upload their homework to (where it can be validated by computer, probably).

So it's all just a money-saving exercise, especially if they can con Apple into giving them a big discount for the publicity value.

Re:Expensive

[tehcyder]

You can't just throw money at a problem and find a solution, in fact the most worthwhile solutions are the ones that cost the least

That is a moralistic rather than an economic or technical argument.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad that you want a peer-reviewed study to call your bluff. Peer-review does not make something correct, it only makes it reviewed. In the 17th century, any peer-reviewed article on blood-letting would have been published.

I'm quite shocked that you can't trust a corporation with needs - I trust corporations with my need for food all the time. Government doesn't grow, transport or retail any of my food. If we're going to go that far, we trust a private corporation for controlling our money, and most people (rather insanely) are okay with that.

I'm curious, at what level do you think government becomes a noble guardian of the public interest? Do you think your federal senators sit around thinking about how their actions will effect Americans in 20 years? Or do you think they are more worried about their next election? Do you think that your governor is concerned with how his decisions will effect his state's economy in 10 years? Or do you think that he is concerned with how to run for the Senate next year, and what ads his enemies will be running in 6 months based on his last speech? Perhaps you think your city leaders are worried a great deal about how to administer city ordinances to maintain a high standard of living for the denizens of your city? Or am I wrong there, and you notice that most city leaders use their position to surround their homes with golf courses and parks rather than industry?

To think that government employees are some magical type of creature that is constantly looking out for their fellow man's best interest is a mistake made by many who support greater governmental power. The truth is that all humans are self-interested in their own spheres - from the CEO to the mayor - and they will use their power and influence to do what is best for them. The major difference between a mayor and a CEO, however, is that the mayor can use the police, who can use violence, and the CEO is just left with normal human powers.

There are other reasons places in Africa are the way they are. If we assume that either 1) lack of government oversight and power leads to 3rd-world stagnation or 2) 3rd-world stagnation is exclusively caused by a lack of 'strong' government, we can no longer adequately explain 1) the rise of the American system before the close of the War of Northern Aggression (Civil War) and America's transformation into an empire or 2) why despotisms are generally incapable of improving their countries, even when they are 'legitimately' put in power by the people.

Re:Expensive

[tehcyder]

Bullshit, parents either care about their children's education, or they don't; they are either involved with their children's education, or they're not. An uninterested rich parent sending their kid to an expensive private school will blame the school rather than the kid just as much as a poor parent whose kid is at a normal school.

Paying for a school doesn't necessarily involve "mandatory" parent participation anyway, do you think expensive boarding schools insist the parents come and visit each week to help with their homework?

Re:Expensive

[Drogo007]

You also missed that private schools get to select students to avoid all the problem students that suck down lots and lots of resources in the public school system, so Private Schools can more efficiently use their resources.

Re:Expensive

[tehcyder]

I don't know what Shakespeare or other classics you were reading, but art of clear communication is not exactly the primary goal of fiction literature. Quite opposite, a lot of writing depends on things that are not said, on things that the reader completes in his head and acts out internally, as if he were one of the actors in that scene.

You may not have noticed, but in real life, "communication" is seldom as simple as person A telling person B to do action C.

Re:Expensive

[copponex]

Peer-review does not make something correct

Peer review means it has received documented critical analysis by people in the same field, which makes it much more difficult to pass off simple assertions.

I trust corporations with my need for food all the time

No you don't. The FDA (when properly funded and empowered) is the entity that keeps you from dying of salmonella and ecoli. The libertarian solution is for your child to die and for you to "learn" that you shouldn't buy food from the same vendor again.

The rest of your comment ignores the simple truth that YOU are in control of YOUR government, if you live in a functioning democracy. All of the whining and hand wringing about powerful politicians is pathetic apathy, masquerading as a red herring about imagined injustice.

It is your job to make sure that your politicians are acting in your interests, through your vote and your participation in politics. Once you hand that sort of power over to a private entity which doesn't even have to pretend to have your interests in mind, or be afraid that you have any way to fire his ass, you'll quickly find yourself living in an oligarchy with no rights.

we can no longer adequately explain 1) the rise of the American system before the close of the War of Northern Aggression (Civil War) and America's transformation into an empire or 2) why despotisms are generally incapable of improving their countries, even when they are 'legitimately' put in power by the people.

1) I do not see a point to comprehend - are you really trying to compare the offshoot of British imperialism with tribal societies under the thumb of British and European imperialism?

2) There's an entire section of history concerning enlightened despotism. It's the most effective form of government, but far too dangerous to give any one person that much power in the event someone like Stalin or Hitler becomes that person.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_absolutism

Re:Expensive

[ikeman32]

Use it or loose it, that's the mentality.

Re:Expensive

[Tetsujin]

I worked as the Director of Technology for a charter school for 3 years and I looked at pretty good reporting on how one-laptop-per-child programs saw a 15% gain in performance on standardized testing. So I'd lay pretty good odds they will see some sort of increase from this, but probably not as great as they expect since they are doing a weird one-subject parallel.

That's cool. The skeptic in me still wonders whether the study was over a long enough period for the novelty of the laptops to wear off - and also whether other uses of the funds might have seen better improvements - and whether standardized tests are really what we should be gunning for in the first place. (But then again, how else do you measure whether something is effective, except by testing it? And how can the test be valid if it's not standardized?)

Re:Expensive

[Mongoose Disciple]

I submit to you that the degree to which I am trolling does not exceed your own and probably is somewhat less.

Unless you actually believe what you've written in this thread, in which case I genuinely feel sorry for you.

Re:Expensive

[fyngyrz]

The Internet, by which we participate in this conversation, was created by people willing to think and plan and code not for personal monetary gain but for the betterment of society.

Yeah, actually, the Internet was created by the US military funding mechanism, as applied to the university system, with the intent of creating a redundant communications medium that would not completely fail in the case of losing large portions of the network. The initial network was paid for by taxes.

After that, it was enhanced by commercial interests, who sold connectivity to people and corporations alike.

Now, if you want to argue that trying to see to it that we had communications post nuclear holocaust by spending our tax money equates to "not for personal monetary gain but for the betterment of society", I might buy it, but that really has zip to do with copyright.

Finally, in the early days, when the Internet really didn't have a lot of attention by rights owners, a lot of obviously illegal activity went by the boards for no more reason than it was, essentially, sub-rosa; then, once that was discovered, when the self-entitlement crowd started screaming about losing their free music, that's when this whole "information wants to be free" meme got started. It's no more than self-serving nonsense, and it has never been more than self-serving nonsense.

And mods, by the way, thanks for the cowardly and self-serving "troll" mod. I always love a good "-1, disagree" from the inarticulate and clueless.

Re:Expensive

[Darinbob]

My prediction is that those with the iPads will do worse than those with the textbooks.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

The question isn't if someone should read Shakespeare, its whether they should be denied an education because they don't, won't, or can't.

Try and get an education whilst refusing to or being unable to keep up with the demands of the teachers (who many, many believe couldn't cut it IRL) in the classes you think are worthless and you will discover you are no longer allowed to attend your other classes (in University, because you've been denied enrollment) or that you cannot attend University in the first place (because you've been denied your diploma).

The age old notion you should be forced to do certain things or suffer the consequences is outdated and wrong. The notion led to the rape of many young girls throughout the ages, and still leads to the denial of a fulfilling life for many modern students. Quit deciding what I need; you're not my parent, and I'm not your slave.

A purely utilitarian view of your own life like you've expressed - where your own specialized widgets who have "no need" for any learning outside your own narrow specialized niche is engaging in overly reductionist thinking, and it's probably not a society that any of us would care to be a part of for long.

FIFY.

Re:Expensive

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Baltimore city schools work this way for high schools with the exception that everyone has a guaranteed fall back. Students have to apply to a high school and there are high school fairs. The caveat is that no one wants to go to their fall back since it is usually a garbage heap.

Re:Expensive

[dangitman]

Under what possible definition am I trolling? Are you actually willing to have a rational discussion, or are you just here to throw around insults?

Re:Expensive

[DeadboltX]

This is true, the books are majorly the same. Unfortunately, as a consumer, there is not much difference between natural obsolescence and forced obsolescence

Re:Expensive

[LordLimecat]

but that just shows you how important a strong and legitimate government is to the well-being of a society.

To be more fair, no, it doesnt. It shows you precisely how harmful a government gone wrong can be.

Dont get me wrong; I agree that a legitimate government is necessary. But it is not a panacea, and your examples in africa entirely ignore the fact that their problems are generally CAUSED by the government. A better government would likely fix things, sure, but thats not a terribly good argument for an expansive government. As has been said so well in the past, "absolute power corrupts absolutely". Anyone who knows anything about human nature knows that people are power grasping and not to be trusted with power unchecked. I see no reason to give more power to a government than absolutely necessary-- for every good that it can do with that power, there are about 3 bad things it will be tempted to do with that power.

Your ideas on economics are fatally childish and unrealistic

You cannot deny that a good many government systems (food stamps?) are unmercifully gamed. Private businesses DO have that benefit that they tend to watch their bottom line, and so if theyre being ripped off, they actually do something about it. Government does not; decisions made tend to be (in my experience consulting for gov't) arbitrary and based on how much money the gov't employee thinks he will get, and how much he wants to get budgeted next year. NOT the kind of attitude i want for someone handling my money....

If all of this libertarian horseshit were true, than the weak states across the world would be drowning in money and happiness. They are not.

Im not sure I've ever heard anyone defend the idea that a weak government leads to societal success, nor why you feel it necessary to argue with such absurdities. I HAVE heard (and to some extent, agree with) the idea that governments should be given extremely limited power sufficient to keep people from taking your life, property, and trampling on your rights. My thoughts would be, beyond that, any concessions should have to be backed up with some serious justification. I would agree, for example, that in the case of utilities (and possibly internet?) government has pretty good reason to get involved.

There are a lot of things I dont trust big businesses with, but for many of the same reasons I have a degree of mistrust for any government as well. Anyone who thinks the government can be unconditionally trusted with anything is naieve.

Re:Expensive

[Shadow99_1]

Non-standardized testing is not universal... and therefore very hard to measure except within a very small sub-set... So that isn't done much except internally for a school. Mine did informal non-standardized testing throughout the year to measure progress.

But schools with programs tracked performance from inception to current. I was usually looking at 5-10 years with of results from schools with such programs.

I should also note that this was what administrations and those who work on the 'back end' of education IT were seeing. These studies weren't done by any companies that sell anything. So the results are fairly reliable. Most laptop companies loved to sell schools laptops, but had no real interest in pushing 1:1 laptop programs.

Unless you work in education, you don't really see what work goes into improving the current education system. Now some administrations go off into la-la land because they saw an article about 'X', but others actually invest around and experiment to try to constantly improve the education they offer. Those track results and see how good an investment their ideas have been. That becomes the solid basis for other schools to look into similar experiments until so many schools are doing it, that it becomes just 'good sense'.

Re:Expensive

[Tetsujin]

Unless you work in education, you don't really see what work goes into improving the current education system.

I don't, and therefore I believe that most of the time, my interest in making sure the school system is providing a good education is more often than not best served by staying out of the way of the people doing the work. :) Still, I am a bit skeptical about the idea that giving computers to students is a good use of funds. Among other things, hardware goes obsolete in a relatively short period of time... As I said, though, I try to keep an open mind about it.

Re:Expensive

[Shadow99_1]

lol, keeping ancient (in computer terms) hardware running was part of my job... I had started detailing a program to replace hardware on a fairly typical 5 year cycle like business, but their was 9 and even 10 year old PC's in use in the building still. The 'mobile lab' of laptops was the first to go (8 years old when replaced and useless).

Btw as for what 15% really means in perspective... A tutoring program such as school-wide title 1 (and which requires a person for about every 3-4 classrooms as it's usually done) provides ~10% improvement in the topics tutored. The average such person makes 30k a year and costs the school ~60k including benefits. How many laptops can you fit in 60k?

If you want some more real world examples, I know a scientist studying education in India (originally, he's now in the UK). He did some amazing work showing that with pure access to information (even in another language!) kids can teach themselves anything they are interested in (up to and including microbiology!). Really amazing stuff to see. And really very traditional when you look at the origins of 'college' where students would wander around listening to what they felt like form lectures given by teachers.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

No you are making it more complicated than it needs to be. Public schools should be able to get rid of the troublemakers. Tell them to attend another school or homeschool, if the parents fail to do that lock them up.

Children with learning disabilities are troublemakers? Disabled children are troublemakers? Children who need extra attention are troublemakers? Should we just lock up parents who aren't able to pop out acceptable children?

Wait...

[Robert Zenz]

...wasn't California bankrupt?

Re:Wait...

[mark72005]

They were. Washington has the U.S. Mint's presses spinning, and all will be well in a few days.

Re:Wait...

[geekoid]

No. Of course Republican and tea party fear mongers would have you believe otherwise.
They are having budget issues. Issue that are the end result of prop 13.

Re:Wait...

[deepthoughtless]

They were. Washington is selling debt to the Federal Reserve at a stunning rate, and all will be well in a few days. Fixed that for ya ;)

Re:Wait...

[froggymana]

Sure, but think of the children and how much better they will be able to learn under Lord Jobs.

Re:Wait...

[DragonWriter]

...wasn't California bankrupt?

No, California has never been bankrupt.

California has a budget deficit, but that's not bankruptcy.

Re:Wait...

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Meh, we've been bankrupt for 22 years of my 24 year long life. So far that hasn't seemed to stop us from expanding things, spending money, and generally continuing with a broken economy. Now I don't know how my state does it, but we've managed to spend money that we don't have for the majority of my life so I don't see why that habit would change any time soon.

iPad FAIL ( +1, Helpful )

[Anonymous Coward]

"If the students with iPads turn out to do improve at a faster pace than their peers as expected, the program could soon spread throughout the Golden State."

FAIL

As expected from what prior evidence?

We all know that computers will make illiterate and innumerate Amerikans literate and numerate.

Yours In Osh,
K. T.

Re:iPad FAIL ( +1, Helpful )

[WrongSizeGlass]

Since the iPads have a calculator pre-loaded and other calculators available in the iStore these students should really excel at math ;-)

Re:iPad FAIL ( +1, Helpful )

[nomadic]

As expected from what prior evidence?

Isn't that the point? They don't have evidence, so they're trying this out to see what happens.

Re:iPad FAIL ( +1, Helpful )

[mangu]

We all know that computers will make illiterate and innumerate Amerikans literate and numerate.

In the Middle Ages, the perfect gentleman was illiterate, but he knew how to read icons, "baton sinistre on azure field", etc. No one had much use for reading and writing because books could only be found in the very few libraries that existed. Literacy was the field of experts only.

When the printing press was invented, books became available to everybody. People became literate. The perfect gentleman was expected to know the intricate details of spelling, calligraphy, grammar, punctuation, syntax, prosody, etc.

In the middle twentieth century programming computers was the field of experts only. No one had much use for programming skills because computers could only be found in the few data centers that existed.

When the personal computer was invented, computers became available to everybody. The perfect gentleman forgot how to read and write and went back to icons. WTF???

Re:iPad FAIL ( +1, Helpful )

[Locutus]

exactly. Receiving homework assistance and entering your assignments without picking up a pen teaches nothing so they should not improve any skills there. Maybe adding some extra tutorial materials in videos might help but from what I remember, it was doing the work which made it stick. So it's all about the curriculum and how it's taught and not so much the device. The device, or any laptop, netbook, or table could save the school and students lots of money by using electronic course materials instead of paper books.

The problem I see is that almost all of the teachers I've seen around or heard of and the recent students I'm in contact with all show they know very very little about how to really use a computer. They know only how to click on a few things and if you change an icon or move something, they are lost. That lack of skill with the device at the educator level is why nothing changes and I doubt this iPad math class is going to be successful.

LoB

Re:iPad FAIL ( +1, Helpful )

[am 2k]

Since the iPads have a calculator pre-loaded

Actually, that's not true. The iPhone has one, but not the iPad. The mind boggles.

Re:iPad FAIL ( +1, Helpful )

[ceoyoyo]

Have you heard the word "hypothesis?"

Re:iPad FAIL ( +1, Helpful )

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? This is the basis of the scientific method...

1) Propose Hypothesis
2) Test Hypothesis

I'd say K.T FAIL.

Re:iPad FAIL ( +1, Helpful )

[tenco]

tl;dr

Free from apple right?

[Dyinobal]

I hope those Ipads were free from apple, because last I checked there was some sort of budget issue over in California.

Re:Free from apple right?

[M. Kristopeit]

have you looked at the cost of math texts lately?

i worked on a mathematics teaching expert system under a grant from the national science foundation... interactive homework helps students grasp concepts much much faster, not by telling them how to do things right, but by understanding how and why the student did things wrong, and conveying that knowledge on to them.

for example, the most basic arithmetic assignment might ask a student "what is 2 * 4?"... if the student answered, "6" it's pretty obvious they are getting the "+" and "*" symbols confused.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked, California had a MASSIVE budget crisis.... yet they have money to blow on iPads? Jesus... what's next?

Re:Wow

[techwrench]

GPS bracelets for Parolees. Wait....

Re:Wow

[elrous0]

Now you're just nitpicking. Next you'll be complaining about their gold toilets and gourmet chefs in the cafeteria. Hello, that gold is an INVESTMENT, and those chefs help student morale!

Re:Wow

[Robert Zenz]

I still don't get why Gold is an investment...especially if the world breaks down. It's always said that if the civilazation ends, Gold will be the last thing worth something. If the world is at it's edge, the last thing I'd want to carry around would be gold.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked, California had a MASSIVE budget crisis.... yet they have money to blow on iPads? Jesus... what's next?

A high-school for over half a billion dollars?

Budget crisis? What budget crisis?

Re:Wow

[BobMcD]

I still don't get why Gold is an investment...especially if the world breaks down. It's always said that if the civilazation ends, Gold will be the last thing worth something. If the world is at it's edge, the last thing I'd want to carry around would be gold.

People have held it as valuable since the dawn of time. Why would anything change that?

Besides, all the 'really valuable' stuff is either completely intangible (like knowledge) or transient (like food/water). You simply cannot carry these things in any appreciable quantity...

Re:Wow

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I can't eat gold, I can't drink gold, gold doesn't entertain me, and it won't protect me.

Gold requires a certain level of civilization for it's OOOH SHINY effect to be worth while.

I guess if you had a gold bar you could beat someone senseless with it though.

Re:Wow

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Worse. The article you linked shows 3 learning centers in the LA area that costs a total of $1.187 Billion.

Re:Wow

[BobMcD]

You didn't read what I wrote, did you?

You cannot carry enough food to matter. Either you are going to locate a long-term supply of it, or you're going to die.

Same for water, but much worse.

Gold requires a certain level of civilization for it's OOOH SHINY effect to be worth while.

Even monkeys understand economics. Google it.

Again, as far as portable wealth goes, rare metal isn't too bad an option.

Plus if you need a replacement tooth-substance that your body won't necessarily reject, you're good to go.

Re:Wow

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Yes but if I have no use for gold, and it has no intrinsic use, why would it at all be interesting to someone else for trade?

Re:Wow

[BobMcD]

As dental material, at a minimum.

Again, that was in the post above.

Adornment isn't likely to stop overnight either.

Re:Wow

[slinches]

You have no use for a metal that doesn't corrode, is a good conductor and is easily formed or cast without the need for specialized skills or tools? I'd have a harder time thinking of something I couldn't use it for.

Re:Wow

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

If the world goes to shit, adornment will go away overnight.

Re:Wow

[Archangel Michael]

Not to sound too "religious" but people 2000 years ago said the same thing ....

Rev 6:6 And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and [see] thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

Eze 7:19 They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be removed: their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the LORD: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels: because it is the stumblingblock of their iniquity.

Re:Wow

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

If my available tools are my leatherman and my only source of fire is a lighter, I doubt I'll have any need for any raw material.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Gold is and will remain scarce (so your hoard won't devalue by a sudden increase in supply), is fairly easy to test for genuineness (so you don't get ripped off when you accept it in trade), and doesn't degrade over time, or require special storage considerations, and is almost always more easily transported than what you're trading for.

You see it as being subject to devaluation in crisis because it has no inherent use, but you miss the inherent usefulness of a trade good that won't disappear (barring theft) and won't become worthless. Anyone having any sort of productive employment (which will be the people offering in trade whatever food, clothing, or weapons you'll need at some.point) needs a way to convert their goods into stored, transportable value that they can later trade for their raw materials/upstream supply, and gold is one of the best. What do you think they'll do when you offer gold? Turn down a possible trade? Demand barter directly for their raw materials? Use some other valuable item (and if so, what?).

Honestly, guns and ammunition are the only other thing I can think of that's directly useful and comes even close in quality as a trade good, but (if the crisis is long-term), the ammo supply will decrease as people use it; guns will suffer devaluation, since they're useless without ammo, so nobody wants to accept them, and ammo increases in value, so you're better off hoarding than trading it. And there's also the obvious benefit of gold that it's less hassle to stay clean with the law while investing in gold, and that it's easier to recover that investment (should you need to) before TEOTWAWKI.

Re:Wow

[BobMcD]

If the world goes to shit, adornment will go away overnight...

...and will make a comeback the following day.

What's your point?

Re:Wow

[Vaphell]

You know, a gold watch could buy you a life in the times of WW2 (pretty much the definition of world going to shit) which can't be said about everything else you owned.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

For some suggestions, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Use_and_applications

And, failing all of that, I hear it makes a nice toilet seat.

Re:Wow

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

No, it probably won't.

What are you basing this on? Gold hasn't been historically used as an item of trade. Historically it's been skins, meats, salt, crops, and other things you use to get by. Gold is a relatively recent good and if the world goes to hell, the last thing you'd want.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Gold requires a certain level of civilization for it's OOOH SHINY effect to be worth while.

But not a very high level. Gold/shiny metals have been valued by fairly low levels of civilization. Even small hunter-gatherer societies generally have the concept of "money" (cowrie shells, for instance).The "if the world breaks down" scenarios aren't terribly likely to actually break down civilization below those levels, and concepts of what is valuable to use for currency is unlikely to completely flee the minds of survivors. Although not guaranteed, by any stretch (people do get inventive).

Re:Wow

[cbhacking]

I can carry quite an appreciable amount of 'really valuable' knowledge, thank you. I can carry the knowledge of how to build shelters, build fires, catch fish, treat a variety of wounds and illnesses, avoid still more, and diagnose many of them. I can carry the knowledge needed to plant crops, build and fire a bow and arrows, find clean water or purify unclean water, and smoke, freeze, salt, or otherwise treat food so that it keeps longer. I can carry the knowledge to communicate long-distance via Morse code. With the right bits and pieces I can assemble a simple radio, even a transmitter if there's a power source. I can turn an old car alternator, some wood or metal scraps, and a river *into* a power source.

People have held gold as valuable since the dawn of civilization, but I assure you that the average hunter-gatherer would not be terribly likely to trade you food or animals for it. If civilization all falls in the crapper, I'll trade the skills I have for the skills I don't have, the manpower I need to improve all our lives, or the resources of those who have something I need. Gold would be very, very far down that list of desirable resources, probably above today's currency but below, say, dried cow shit (which makes decent fuel for a fire that can cook food and keep people warm).

Uh Oh.

[darien.train]

If iPads do to the classroom what they've done for my office conference calls those kids are doomed.

Re:Uh Oh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Angry Birds could be good for Geometry.........

Re:Uh Oh.

[Anonymous Coward]

If the students with iPads turn out to do improve at a faster pace than their peers as expected, ...

So, a pre-determined result is in the works! Or; do they have a reason for their expectation?

There are cheaper alternatives

[GodfatherofSoul]

I've seen Android devices for a fraction of the price. When you consider how much text books are going for nowadays, the thought that a student or school can rent textbook access could be a major game changer. I had semesters in college where textbooks alone were $300+ and that was 15 years ago.

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[GodfatherofSoul]

I should add that when I worked in the university's library, I was always told that the rapidly increasing costs for texts and periodicals was attributed to the cost for paper (just as for comics).

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[Darkness404]

But the problem is with the publisher, not with the educational institution. Textbook publishers regularly screw students/schools for what is essentially public domain material.

In all honesty, using free primary sources and teaching the class from that would be a lot cheaper than textbooks for most classes.

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[ceoyoyo]

Free primary sources? Of what kind?

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[Lost2Home]

But the problem is with the publisher, not with the educational institution.

I'll take issue with that, at the college level at least. Go back and look at your college texts, how many of them were written by some professor at the school? If institutions didn't insist on using using the textbook from "their professor", you could have significantly larger printing runs of the textbooks which would greatly reduce costs.

Not saying the publishing companies aren't making a profit, but both sides are responsible for gouging the students.

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[Archangel Michael]

It would also be less consistent. CONFORMITY of results is the goal, not education of children to their potential.

That is why bad teachers are tolerated, good ones ignored (let alone not rewarded).

In order to get better results, one must be willing to risk 'worse' (as if that is possible), and reward success. Cue the hysterical rant of the union about fairness (code word for socialism) and what not.

As it is, I've been calling for a Open Source like initiative for generating and creating teaching materials for at least four years. Using the model of Open Source Software as an objective, why aren't there "open source" text books?

The pointy headed ministers of Education (religious institution if there ever was) dictates what texts are "approved" for the whole state (or even region), Why? They are furthest away from the students, furthest away from accountability and furthest away from reality.

I don't have a problem with iPads going into schools as a replacement to dead tree material. But I wish to hell that the texts we used were FREE, UPDATED, and peer reviewed material that was freely updated, corrected, enhanced and cooperative work of MANY MANY hands, licensed under some CC license.

Let's get moving people..

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[DragonWriter]

I've seen Android devices for a fraction of the price.

Presumably, those Android devices do not include or support the educational platform and content that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has developed for the iPad and is testing in this pilot study it is sponsoring in the schools at issue. So they probably wouldn't do much good for this study.

When you consider how much text books are going for nowadays, the thought that a student or school can rent textbook access could be a major game changer.

Certainly. It means that textbook manufacturers can assure that no one will ever be able to use a used textbook, and that a new license to the curriculum will be need to be paid for each student for each term that the access is used.

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[Jonathan]

Published papers in open access journals. Why read the interpretation of a third-rate academic (the type who actually have the time to write textbooks because they don't have grants funding research that needs to be done) when you can you can read the real cutting-edge stuff th

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[Idbar]

I guess Apple convinced them that they wouldn't be able to play pr0n on their devices, yet they would be able to watch videos.

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[alvinrod]

Aren't a lot of those Android devices forthcoming? If this proves effective with an iPad it'll likely be just as effective on a similar tablet device whether it's running iOS, Android, Windows, MeeGo, or WebOS. You can't conduct research using many of those other operating systems because there aren't yet physical devices running them.

Hell, Apple could have donated them and used it for a tax write-off. Let's see if this is even effective before we worry too much about finding the cheapest alternative.

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[ceoyoyo]

To start with, the story is about elementary schools. The stuff they learn isn't published in any journals, open or not. When you start working up to specialized senior undergrad courses you might find things that are published in journals. Not everything, but a few things. There are some grad courses that can be taught entirely from journal papers. And guess what? They frequently are. The vast majority of courses that are taught with textbooks don't address "cutting edge stuff." The rest generally do teach from journals because the stuff they're covering isn't in any textbooks yet.

There's also the issue students understanding the journal article. For grad courses students might as well get used to it, because they're going to have to know how to do it anyway. For others, textbooks are an invaluable resource that gives background information and simplifies explanations.

Finally, I don't know much about elementary textbooks, but the ones I used in university were written by leaders in the field who most certainly did have lots of grants. Now, as a working scientist, I see that this is still the case.

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, text book prices could be forced down. If you think no one will write any books for a guaranteed audience of, dunno, 50k people each year for 10 years if his profits in each book will "only" be 10 dollars or less each, think again...

Even so, actual computers could definitely replace Calculators (CAS are more powerful anyhow and can have more documentation and/or explanation what the CAS itself does) and text books. Add a pen tablet and some optical mouse/trackball and you have pretty good options with such devices (touch screens are rather imprecise and silly for much, hour long interaction).

The problem may be, you also need to reeducate teachers when and how to use computers, figure out how to make backups and do computer service... which somehow always seemed to become a big deal. And of course, you need to get over written tests that require kids NOT to reference any materials. 'cause kids will be good at operating computers at some point soon, not paper-based writing.

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[Subura]

In California, the school district is required by judicial order to have at least one textbook per student per class (exempting arts and gym) regardless of their use.

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[ouachiski]

I had a class my freshman year of college the the textbooks where $300 and that was 10 years ago.

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[Paul Fernhout]

Please see my other comments to this article on the need for fundamental paradigm change. Better learning materials (while a nice thing) won't fix the overall problems that people like John Taylor Gatto or John Holt have written about. Schools as they are seem very good at subverting good content (see the history of Lego/Logo), which is part of why they so naturally take potentially liberating computers and turn them into surveillance systems...
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/webcam-spy-scandal-broadens/

Still, I agree with you that more open source text books and other materials would be a good thing.

But see also:
"Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Mass-Instruction-Schoolteachers-Compulsory/dp/0865716315

Or "The War on Kids":
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlnwm11d6II

Until schools lose the compulsion and become more a mix of all-age learning community (more like public libraries and craft centers) they will have deep, deep problems as far as what we need to have a healthy democracy...

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[MrCrassic]

I've seen 'em too. They all suck.

Don't believe me? Read this, this and this. Enjoy.

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[ShakaUVM]

Gatto's also a paranoid schizophrenic.

I've been working as a consultant to educators for the last decade, and, well, he's completely wrong about teachers *wanting* to stifle intellectual curiosity and creative thinking. That might be the result, but it's not the intent. Our teachers and our schools *love it* when kids become independent thinkers - the rub is that the methods they use are often counterproductive.

Let me pull out just one example: You're an average 11th grade kid sitting in a history class. The teacher is talking about Bacon's Rebellion. You don't know anything about it, except maybe that the name makes you hungry. The teacher starts lecturing on it, then asks a question: "Anyone know where Bacon's Rebellion took place?" Some smarty-pants raises his hand in the row next to you, and answers it correctly. The teacher nods happily (my kids know their stuff!) and then moves on, potentially even skipping this fact because his class apparently knows it already.

This is de rigor, but there's a number of problems with it. Let's see how many we can list:
1) The question was a fact check. It didn't engage any higher thinking skills. He could have asked, after explaining what it was all about, if the kids thought it was justified or not, for example.
2) He asked for a fact the kids shouldn't know. (Nobody *just knows* where Bacon's Rebellion took place, unless you're cheating and looking it up on Wikipedia.)
3) This makes the "stupid kids" feel stupider, and the good student that read the chapter the night before smug. Neither benefits learning.
4) It encourages students to not raise their hands and guess, because they might be wrong. And the smart kid will know it anyway.
5) The teacher gets a false sense of accomplishment because an obscure question was answered correctly, even though the other 29 students don't know anything about it.
6) When teachers fact check, they use it to quickly assess how much their students know. Because it came back positive, he will breeze over the content, potentially hurting the students who don't know anything (the 29 out of 30).
7) Some other kid answering a trivia question is not going to result in the fact getting stuck in the head of the other students. Our brains just don't work that way. They've never mentally processed it and worked with it. By contrast, if they have to answer a question that needs them to make use of the facts taught in that class ("Where do you think Bacon moved next?"), they'll tend to remember it.
8) The kids might not even know where Virginia (the right answer, BTW) *is*. It's doubly meaningless to him - an imaginary event taking place in an imaginary colony. You have to have a mental framework to fit facts in in order to retain them. The kids need to know first where Virginia is, and ideally see on a map, where the rebellion took place.
9) Ditto for the context of the time the event took place in. No kid knows what the context of the whatever decade in the 1600s the Bacon Rebellion took place in.

I could go on, but in a nutshell, this is my point: This is how history is taught, but it's not conducive to higher level thinking, or even remembering bare facts. They might cram for a test, and remember the specific date (whatever it is), but a month later they'll have completely forgotten the whole thing. And then when they take their AP test and get a 1, their teacher will be confused - "But they did so well on the quiz questions!"

In other words Gatto is confusing effect for intention. The effect is that we're failing to teach our students history (or whatever), but teachers absolutely do NOT want that to happen. He's right about structural issues that can happen due to administrators or district policies, but your man on the ground, the person actually working with kids, absolutely wants kids to be higher level thinkers. They'd have a moment of bliss if a kid in that class were to raise their hand and say, "But is that why they switched from white indentured servants to black slaves? To make them

Re:There are cheaper alternatives

[ebuck]

But you would have to teach teachers how to make a lesson plan again. Administrators are so concerned that their employees are incompetent or overworked that they push the book's pre-packaged lesson plans on the teachers. This oddly creates the scenario they fear. Many teachers haven't touched a lesson plan in years, so they are rusty at drafting them.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

good to know americans are screwing up children's education at a younger age. Nothing beats a text book, its job is to teach, not give the ability to go online, but simply show math.

dont try to re-create the wheel, text books are the best way to get a basis of knowledge!

Good time to read/re-read...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the right to read

replace an $80 textbook with a $400 iPad, wow!!

[Anonymous Coward]

replace an $80 textbook with a $400 iPad, wow!!

Re:replace an $80 textbook with a $400 iPad, wow!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, replace 12-20 years worth of $80 textbooks with a $400 iPad.

Re:replace an $80 textbook with a $400 iPad, wow!!

[brainboyz]

If you think an iPad will withstand even 4 years of the abuse textbooks go through, you're crazy. If I assume that they replace the textbooks every year (they don't) and assume the iPad can last 5 years (they won't), then they will break even if the publishers don't charge for electronic updates (they will).

Re:replace an $80 textbook with a $400 iPad, wow!!

[cowscows]

You might be right about a lot of that, but if nothing else, moving to electronic formats has the potential to open up the textbook field to more competition, because the cost of entry with digital distribution is so much lower than having to publish hundreds of thousands of big hardcover books.

Re:replace an $80 textbook with a $400 iPad, wow!!

[Anonymous Coward]

If the digital textbooks are offered at a reduced price (say $30 since you're just pulling numbers out of your ass) and assuming the typical primary school curriculum contains six subjects, then the $580 total cost with the iPad is not prohibitively higher than the $480 total cost of textbooks, especially given the opportunities for additional educational enrichment on a tablet device.

As for longevity, teaching a little responsibility can only be a good thing. That can start with financial responsibility for damage. People should be capable of not destroying fairly robust objects, and considering that computer lab equipment in schools lasts a decade or more (including high-abuse items like keyboards and mice), I doubt it's as huge a problem as you make it out.

Students are already responsible for loss or destruction of textbooks--and in some places pay exorbitant fees each year to use them in public schools. This would not be terribly different.

Schwarzenegger's ebook program

[rsborg]

Maybe it has something to do with this?

Personally, the idea of an impersonal video showing boring math material would be even worse than have an instructor do it, but perhaps this will allow the more "advanced" students to go at their own pace.

I did attend an "open classroom" for several years and in one of those years, I was allowed to race ahead and finished the english and math curriculum several months ahead of schedule so I could spend more time on that wonderful TI-99 4A hooked up to the beautiful color monitor.

I don't think the iPad based curriculum will work for every child.

Re:Schwarzenegger's ebook program

[Man On Pink Corner]

iPads are great and all, but the fact is, any cheap generic tablet or netbook can access khanacademy.org. That's all a motivated kid needs to learn almost anything in the STEM areas.

If I were a traditional textbook publisher I'd like to think I'd be smart enough to use my last $50 to put out a hit on that guy...

Re:Schwarzenegger's ebook program

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, the idea of an impersonal video showing boring math material would be even worse than have an instructor do it, but perhaps this will allow the more "advanced" students to go at their own pace.

Or maybe it's so they can lay off more teachers. Who needs teachers when you can sit your kids, all glassy eyed, in front of a video and ignore them?

Re:Schwarzenegger's ebook program

[Gilmoure]

I still have a Ti-99/4a (plastic case). Need to get it out of storage and show daughter what real computing is.

Khan Academy.

[0100010001010011]

http://www.khanacademy.org/ really does kick ass. I'm using some of his 5-10 minute videos to supplement my graduate level Linear Algebra stuff. Most of it's straight to the point and if I need clarification on a subject I don't have to turn to the book.

Now how this saves money. I won't know. Then again text books aren't cheap. What ever happened to the OpenSource textbook that I thought CA was assembling to be 'free'?

Re:Khan Academy.

[NevarMore]

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!

Re:Khan Academy.

[0100010001010011]

It just occurred to me they're probably not going to just replace the text books. Probably looking at replacing the Math teachers too.

Why pay someone with experience or an education when you can get a babysitter for minimum wage and force all the kids to watch Khan Academy on their iPads?

Re:Khan Academy.

[16K Ram Pack]

http://www.khanacademy.org/ [khanacademy.org] really does kick ass. I'm using some of his 5-10 minute videos to supplement my graduate level Linear Algebra stuff. Most of it's straight to the point and if I need clarification on a subject I don't have to turn to the book.

Sounds good, but I can't seem to find the Kobayashi Maru on there.

Re:Khan Academy.

[VTI9600]

The key word here is "supplement". I can't count the number of times I've been frustrated by being made to watch a video after Googling around for a tutorial on something or a solution to some technical problem. Reading is simply faster and more efficient than watching videos (unless of course you're dyslexic), yet, "instant access to more than 400 videos" is the major selling point of this program.

I could maybe see the value of providing iPads to kids with learning disabilities...that is, if such a program weren't so obviously prone to abuse (kids pretending to be disabled) and the whole "me too" mentality. Reading used to be fundamental...Why is this no longer the case?

Re:Khan Academy.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.khanacademy.org/ [khanacademy.org] really does kick ass.

His series on banking is required viewing for all our service reps. The quality and sheer bredth of his videos is amazing

Re:Khan Academy.

[DragonWriter]

What ever happened to the OpenSource textbook that I thought CA was assembling to be 'free'?

Why do you think this textbook manufacturer (this pilot is being conducted by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, one of the biggest textbook publishers) is so keen on demoing their subscription-based digital alternative to traditional textbooks in California, and proving (or at least "proving") that it is superior to static texts?

Re:Khan Academy.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are three things that some people may not know

• Most of the videos seem to be on Youtube
• Most school districts block Youtube
• School districts tend not standardize on free resources that is of unspecified content

There are many free services, yet schools still use pay services. For example, Renzuli is a paid services that links to free web content. It is arguably useless, yet districts will pay for it because they will guarantee that some content will be available, and will screen for content. The world wide web is just world wide scary for a district official.

Re:Khan Academy.

[Anonymous Coward]

my graduate level Linear Algebra stuff.

Say what? Linear algebra is definitely an undergrad class... in any case I don't think Khan Academy has much in the way of Banach spaces...

Re:Khan Academy.

[rolfwind]

It's a great website.

Textbooks aren't cheap. And also, they're heavy. In Japan, (and a lot of asian countries) they don't have the tomes we do for students, but instead have booklets that are usually 120 pages give or take that is used for 6-8 weeks. It's all the material they cover in that time span and yes, the kids can write in it, as they keep it. They're probably cost the school just a few $$ each.

Heavy tomes are great for reference but what's the point of including everything and the kitchen sink? A reference book in the classrooms are good enough. American schools really need to pay a one time fee to have these books written up and just keep using them. Or have some type of open textbook initiative where people can contribute (not necessarily for free). Algebra isn't going to change in 100 years and neither are many subjects. The ones that do can be upgraded periodically.

I think the iPad is a great market idea. But this is thowing money at an issue and schools need to get back to basics and not use gadgets to better themselves. In 50 years, I can see many subjects being taught in some quasi-Rosetta Stone way (not the greatest or most extensive software - just the idea of kids getting individual attention from a computer, instant feedback, and going their own pace, and not being boring).

Re:Khan Academy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, I'll have to check it out. Starting in banking soon!

Re:Khan Academy.

[jmerlin]

His stuff is helpful with graduate level Linear Algebra? I don't immediately see mention of bilinear and multilinear forms. I don't see mention of Cramer's rule (and proof) or the Cofactor Expansion Formula (and proof), which is striking considering how common they are. Most of what I see would cover an undergraduate course or series of undergrad courses on linear algebra, sadly it looks more engineering oriented as well. I'm not attacking Khan, his stuff is great for its intended audience, but I don't see it being helpful in an appropriately placed graduate level course on the subject except as a refresher of basics that one might forget as it's not often used.

Re:Khan Academy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus it is really hard to use a video as a reference. Video's don't have an index. It's much easier to flip pages back and forth than forwarding and reversing. You can read a book at your own pace you can't watch a video at your own pace.

Re:Khan Academy.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.khanacademy.org/ really does kick ass.

Khaaaa .... OK, I am voluntarily stopping my self mid-way.

Re:Khan Academy.

[martin-boundary]

Say what? Linear algebra is definitely an undergrad class...

Well, unless he's talking about natural transformations and Hom functors... (not that I'm expecting this).

Not necessarily expensive

[PapayaSF]

Done right, this could make economic sense. Textbook prices have been rising far faster than inflation, nearly doubling in 20 years. Some math textbooks can cost over $100. Even assuming they cost only $50, an electronic device at a cost 10 textbooks, but which does much more and can be easily updated, could be a bargain. (In theory, that is. I'm assuming the school district plans well and the kids don't trash them.)

Re:Not necessarily expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh. You still have to pay for the ebooks. It's not like the content is free once you get the device.

Re:Not necessarily expensive

[DragonWriter]

Done right, this could make economic sense. Textbook prices have been rising far faster than inflation

If one read the fine article, one would discover that this is a pilot program demonstrating a new interactive learning platform developed by textbook manufacturer Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

One might, at that point, surmise that reducing the amount of money flowing into the pockets of textbook manufacturers is not likely to be a major goal of this project.

Re:Not necessarily expensive

[MaWeiTao]

We're talking about elementary schools here, not universities.

I don't recall ever having to pay for my text books in elementary or high school. But I did have to return the books at the end of the year.

That said, I agree that text books are seriously overpriced. So why isn't that addressed? Why are schools willing to overpay for books? Why are publishers so lavish with printing? We don't need these books printed on high quality paper stock in full color. Print them in black and white, on the cheapest paper they can find like I've seen in Asia. Text books are to learn, not to wow kids with pretty pictures.

Re:Not necessarily expensive

[harry_one]

you don't have to pay for it. But the school have to & using your tax dollars.

Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might work

[perpenso]

California is in the middle of a hiring freeze for the State, and a huge deficit. Where exactly are they getting the money for these iPad projects for these districts, let alone for the rest of the State if they decide to advance it?

This is a pilot program, Houghton Mifflin and/or Apple are probably subsidizing it.

A pilot program is designed to measure the effectiveness of the device and the costs. It is plausible that a reusable digital device loaded with numerous textbooks could be less expensive than the corresponding set of paper textbooks. Also keep in mind that today's $500 iPad will probably be around $250 in a couple of years. and those are retail prices not educational institution prices.

Doesn't replace books

[Sonny Yatsen]

Maybe I'm just a Luddite, but half the appeal of learning from a book (especially for a subject like math) was the ability to quickly flip between half a dozen pages to get to the right charts, reference sheets, and examples, and being able to scribble my illegible notes in the margins. I guess you could do it with an iPad with bookmarks and annotations, but I can't imagine it being anywhere near as natural or as easy as you can with a regular old textbook.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[AndrewNeo]

I don't know about in California, but when I was in 8th grade I would sure as hell have gotten in a lot of trouble for writing in my books.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[Anonymous Coward]

Get with the program, gramps. Now you can have your math equations with updated Facebook status! Think of the progression here. Pretty soon, it won't matter if X equals Y, but whether X is in a 'complicated' relationship with Y. Yes, sir, the South is gonna change. Everything’s gonna be put on electricity and run on a paying basis. Out with the old spiritual mumbo jumbo, the superstitions, and the backward ways. We’re gonna see a brave new world where they run everybody a wire and hook us all up to a grid. Yes, sir, a veritable age of reason. Like the one they had in France. Not a moment too soon.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[FunPika]

I agree with that...my teachers offer online versions of our textbooks as an alternative for doing homework for people who don't want to carry their books home...but I HATE using the online versions. It feels so much harder to get to the page I'm looking for (especially if it comes to an assignment where you will want to frequently swap between the actual section your studying and things like the glossary/index at the back of the book). Of course assuming the IPad books are stored on the IPad itself and not just being downloaded everytime it is used...it might not be as bad. Sometimes the online textbook sites were also being slow as heck to load pages for me.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[Zerth]

Maybe I'm just a Luddite, but half the appeal of learning from a book (especially for a subject like math) was the ability to quickly flip between half a dozen pages to get to the right charts, reference sheets, and examples, and being able to scribble my illegible notes in the margins. I guess you could do it with an iPad with bookmarks and annotations, but I can't imagine it being anywhere near as natural or as easy as you can with a regular old textbook.

I'd rather have an electronic book with a notebook feature that lets you clip out sections and arrange them right next to each other so you don't have to flip at all. Plus a clickable index, "jump to page X", bookmarks, and searching.

That'd beat the hell out of dog ears and page flipping.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary says "allowing students to view teaching videos, receive homework assistance and input assignment all without picking up a pen or paper."

The problem with iPads is that they don't LET you use pens. There is hardly anyone who can learn maths without lots and lots of writing on paper (or blackboard), and it's impossible to assess students without looking at their written work. Doing maths on an iPad would be like writing a novel with crayons. Maybe the assignments are all stupid multiple choice questions?

IAAM (I am a mathematician). I've been a maths lecturer for 10 years. I use a tablet PC for a lot of my rough working, and an interactive whiteboard, and I even do maths on my N900 mobile phone when I'm on the move. Technology can be very helpful. But if it doesn't have a pen/stylus, it won't help you learn maths (unless you have a brain like Stephen Hawking).

Re:Doesn't replace books

[initdeep]

to be fair, it does let you use your finger.....

you can write with it, erase with it, etc all just like a pen.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[Hatta]

quickly flip between half a dozen pages to get to the right charts, reference sheets, and examples

eBooks are searchable.

being able to scribble my illegible notes in the margins.

Good god no! Writing in books is evil.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[Sonny Yatsen]

to be fair, it does let you use your finger.....

you can write with it, erase with it, etc all just like a pen.

It just doesn't feel natural to me. Rather than feeling like writing with a pen, it feels like I'm writing with finger paints.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[tophermeyer]

Maybe I'm just old and bitter about having received my primary/secondary education in a very rural part of Maine, but any "book" that requires electricity to read is inherently limited.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[lwsimon]

Wait, what? Did you just seemlessly go from mocking a poster over being a Luddite to insulting the Southern US for no apparent reason?

I'm impressed. Impressed and confused.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[RightwingNutjob]

Not just learning either. I sometimes find myself plotting data in MATLAB just to print it out and take a ruler and pencil to it if I don't feel like spending 5 minutes tweaking a recursive least squares filter to reject outliers that I can see with my own eyeballs.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[Anonymous Coward]

Any book that doesn't come with its own light source is inherently limited.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[Reality Master 101]

If you want to see a preview of the future, look at the period table app on the iPad. You can touch the element samples, spin them around, even bring up a 3D viewer. You can pop up Wolfram Alpha and get various information about the element.

It's not a perfect vision of the future (there's a lot more they could have done), but it definitely gives hints about why a fast, color, touch interface on a slate just really is the Right Thing for learning.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[ignavus]

Maybe I'm just a Luddite, but half the appeal of learning from a book (especially for a subject like math) was the ability to quickly flip between half a dozen pages to get to the right charts, reference sheets, and examples, and being able to scribble my illegible notes in the margins. I guess you could do it with an iPad with bookmarks and annotations, but I can't imagine it being anywhere near as natural or as easy as you can with a regular old textbook.

Back in my day, we wrote in cuneiform on clay blocks. None of your flipping over pages to view graphs or reference sheets.

Damn kids these days and their newfangled books!

Re:Doesn't replace books

[ShakaUVM]

>>half the appeal of learning from a book (especially for a subject like math) was the ability to quickly flip between half a dozen pages to get to the right charts

I hate e-books, too, but mainly due to their craptastic form factors, flashing screen refreshes (on e-ink displays), and slow page turning, just as you say.

But I have several books in both physical copies and scanned PDFs. It's usually faster for me to pull up the PDF and ctrl-F find something than it is to go pull the book from the bookshelf and flip through it looking for stuff. I make sure all of my PDFs are OCRed, and I heavily annotate them with notes and bookmarks as well, so I find them much faster to search through than physical books.

Physical books are easier to read for long durations though.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, if Fermat had hyperlinks available, we could all have saved ~358 years of our time.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[m50d]

Yeah, you're a Luddite all right. The very act of writing is intrinsically unnatural; there's no reason to assume using a computer would be any harder or easier.

I spent over an hour a day latexing up all my maths notes while at university; it was well worth it for the ability to ctrl-f any given subject/theorem/etc. and jump to the notes for it instantly, rather than rummaging back and forth.

Re:Doesn't replace books

[ebuck]

quickly flip between half a dozen pages to get to the right charts, reference sheets, and examples

eBooks are searchable.

being able to scribble my illegible notes in the margins.

Good god no! Writing in books is evil.

For those who are morally repelled at the concept of writing in books, there's this new technology called "Post-It Notes". They make decent book marks too, enhancing the ability to flip to the right charts.

It better with my taxes

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope is not a public school. I live east L.A. and our schools don't get shit it seems like we get the hand me down books from the beverly hills high school. I hate it that the poor kids here don't get a proper classroom compared to the other kids, and is the poor people who pay the most taxes. Sometimes I feel like the government here just tries to keep people dumb in purpose. I mean somebody has to wash the dishes after we deport all the illegal immigrants.

First Line

[VTI9600]

The first line FTFA was what got me:

A pilot project in four California school districts will replace 400 students' eighth-grade algebra textbooks with Apple iPads in an attempt to prove the advantages of interactive digital technologies over traditional teaching methods.

Didn't we prove that computers have educational value back in the 80's? Then, wasn't it proved a hundred more times throughout the 90's? I guess sometimes you can never have quite enough proof.

Re:First Line

[robot256]

Yup, all the proof you need: http://scienceblog.com/35508/children-with-home-computers-likely-to-have-lower-test-scores/

Re:First Line

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the only thing we proved in the 80's is how computers can be used to make money from the educational system. I've visited plenty of classrooms with antique computer equipment that was used mostly as a prop to give the appearance of a modern classroom.

Here's a novel idea. How about in return for decent wages for teachers, the teachers union abolish the tenure system? I'm tired of incompetent teachers sand bagging the school boards by forcing them to pay their wage while at the same time trying to hire competent teachers to keep the testing score high enough to allow for federal funding.

Here's another novel idea. Use the textbooks longer. Algebra is still algebra 5 years from now.

Re:First Line

[shawnap]

In the late 90's some education researchers did a randomized controlled trial of gift laptops on test scores somewhere in post-soviet eastern Europe. The details escape me (I can't remember who did it or where it was published), but in the end there was no significant difference in test scores between treatment and control.

As an interesting aside, the pregnancy rate of the control group dropped way below trend for the treatment period and the rate for the treatment group fell off a cliff (something like a ~%70 reduction.)

Re:First Line

[initdeep]

STOP USING LOGIC!!!!!!

THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!!

after all, when it comes to completely useless and overly powerful groups, the teachers union is rivaled only by the united states congress.

Re:First Line

[wonkavader]

Computers in the 80's required real thought to use. We fixed that.

We proved in the late 90's and the first decade of this century that computers are a huge detriment to learning in many schools. Grades go down when computers come in, particularly for economically poorer students.

(Also, we know that the more video children watch, the dumber they grow up to be. This includes how much Baby Einstein they watch -- chuck those tapes and DVDs in the garbage can today.)

Computers are not the answer. Attention from mentors, thinking, reading and writing are the answer, and computers tend to give us low-value versions of all but the last (and thanks to the wonders of plagiarism, undermine the last as well).

Re:First Line

[Archangel Michael]

Putting computers in a classroom doesn't do anything for the kids. I know, because I work for a school district in IT. To get computers to help kids, the teacher needs to be trained to use them for instruction, the software has to be chosen and lesson plans need to be updated to use them appropriately.

Putting kids in front of a screen while a story is read to them is NOT instructional, it is entertainment.

Re:First Line

[DragonWriter]

Didn't we prove that computers have educational value back in the 80's? Then, wasn't it proved a hundred more times throughout the 90's? I guess sometimes you can never have quite enough proof.

They aren't trying to prove that "computers have educational value".

They are trying to prove that a specific an online interactive subscription service developed by a textbook maker and which replaces a traditional static textbook has sufficiently greater educational value that the static textbook to warrant school districts purchasing both the hardware and the subscription service in place of traditional textbooks.

This is a rather different proposition.

Re:First Line

[Anonymous Coward]

[101 citations needed]

Re:First Line

[VTI9600]

I think the only thing we proved in the 80's is how computers can be used to make money from the educational system. I've visited plenty of classrooms with antique computer equipment that was used mostly as a prop to give the appearance of a modern classroom.

That's kinda the point I was trying to make. We've been hearing forever that [insert organization name here] needs to get out of the stone age and embrace technology, but in this case, its all just a lame rationalization for playing with cool gadgets, not true improvement of our educational system.

Here's a novel idea. How about in return for decent wages for teachers, the teachers union abolish the tenure system?

A lot of schools in California fire 100% of their teachers every year and then hire them back the next year for this very reason. I agree that its all pretty silly.

Re:First Line

[VTI9600]

They are trying to prove that a specific an online interactive subscription service developed by a textbook maker and which replaces a traditional static textbook has sufficiently greater educational value that the static textbook to warrant school districts purchasing both the hardware and the subscription service in place of traditional textbooks.

...a task at which they will surely fail (but will probably declare a success after the fact). I guess I should have surrounded the word "proof" with sarcastic double quotes, since my point is that they are speciously using the argument that this is a great social experiment to justify playing with cool gadgets.

Re:First Line

[robot256]

So, why aren't the abstinence-only crowd promoting video games as a way of distracting kids from having sex? Sounds like a good policy to me and has research to back it up.

Re:First Line

[shawnap]

It's outside of my department, but two effects that spring most readily to mind are: availability of pornography and availability of accurate information on reproduction. Availability of accurate information seems like an open and shut case for downward pressure on unintended pregnancy (which, of course, leaves out intended ones). As for porn; possibly the availability of porn results in boys putting less pressure on girls to put out and illustrates to both genders a host of alternative sex acts that are, if you'll pardon a euphemism, non-reproductive.

If I had to guess, I'd say these effects are probably strong, but I'd pity the poor soul who tried to sell them politically.

Re:First Line

[Anonymous Coward]

"Didn't we prove that computers have educational value back in the 80's? Then, wasn't it proved a hundred more times throughout the 90's? I guess sometimes you can never have quite enough proof."

Proof?!? Have you been smoking crack? The value of computers in education below the university level has been in question since they appeared in the classroom. The cost of equipment that rapidly becomes obsolete takes far too much of the budget: witness the computer labs in some less affluent school districts. I bet there are some Commodore PETs sitting in cubicles or on desks in a disused classroom in less affluent school districts. Technology is not an educational panacea, regardless of 30 years of prosthelytizing from industry execs and starry eyed futurists.

Re:First Line

[robot256]

I can see it now: "John Q Smith for County Council: Fight Teen Pregnancy! Encourage Your Children to Masturbate!"

Re:First Line

[DragonWriter]

my point is that they are speciously using the argument that this is a great social experiment to justify playing with cool gadgets.

No, they are using the argument that this is a great social experiment to get people to cooperate in the advertising campaign for a commercial product designed to address the threat to the textbook industry's revenue posed by open-content texts.

Just put it

[geekoid]

online. Anyone with any reasonable device should be able to access it.

Re:Just put it

[betterunixthanunix]

+1 insightful

Seriously, why limit the students to iPads? When did the school system suddenly become a venue for creating lock-in where it doesn't need to exist? And with all the DRM on iPads, I really do not want to see textbooks on that platform -- textbook publishers pull all sorts of evil tactics already, why give them even more options for trampling on students?

Re:Just put it

[PocariSweat1991]

Agreed. But someone has to find a use for unreasonable devices like the iPad.

Re:Just put it

[macshit]

Of course, this program almost certainly has nothing to do with improving education or lowering costs.

There's a lot of incentive for apple and the publishers to try and get school systems locked-in to their proprietary DRM-laden yearly-subscription-fee-encrusted formats and standards before the schools figure out that they could do much better with more open materials and formats, and cheaper more generic hardware. Given that, it seems pretty likely there were "incentives" involved ("the first one is free"...)

Mix that with gullible school administrators that aren't really up to speed on this whole "technology" thing, but have been exposed to the ipad hype-machine, and...

The students, meanwhile, will be happy (if not better educated), as they'll have a shiny toy they can show off at the mall and use for games and chatting during class.

Re:Just put it

[TooMuchToDo]

Yep. Notice that a publishing house is providing the materials instead of the awesome CK-12 organization. Farking. Scam.

http://www.ck-12.org/

Re:Just put it

[twotailakitsune]

Have you been in a hole over the summer? They CAN'T use the Kindle. The Kindle unlike the iPad does not support the blind. Many blind students use text-to-speech on there text books, but some of the readers can not read off of a screen. So they are not allowed to use the Kindle. I have not looked into the nook or any of the other e-book readers.

for those laughing

[fermion]

Textbook expenses are obnoxious. Not only does one have the cost of the book, but one must pay for storage to hold the books. At the central facility one must pay for people to manage the books. Check in and check out of text books is generally a multiday process that take an administrator, so just in pay we are talking at a couple thousand dollars per year per school. Books get lost and there is really no way to get kids to pay for books anymore. It is voluntary. You see this in the school library. Many kids only check out one book a year, the book that their english teacher makes them check our at the beginning of the year, which they promptly lose.

There are an increasing number of open source textbooks that are quite suitable for the classroom. Most of the classics taught in school can be downloaded for free or very cheap. Many libraries have electronic books, which reduces the loss at the library.

Why an iPad instead of a Kindle? The iPad has tools the kids can use. For instance, some schools use individual white board for in class assessment. The iPad will do that. Some schools give out calculators, at the cost of thousands of dollars to replace damages and lost machines. The iPad will do this, only need calculators maybe for testing and practice for testing. I would love to see the 9th grade kids play Gravity HD, or use Osmosis for end of the year. There is even a circuit simulator that can be used in any number of classes.

Of course the kids will lose them, break them, and sell them. But we have to not be so afraid of new things that we are held hostage by the old. Ideally, kids would be asked to buy the iPads through fund raising activities so they have some interest. Make them available to everyone, but not everyone has to have one. It is like other supplies. Lose it, then have to do things by hand.

Re:for those laughing

[initdeep]

great, all of those arguments may have merit.

why do they require an iPad?

why not a dedicated tablet device running an open source operating system, using open source books (after all, it's not like a special algebra book is required to learn algebra)?

why does it have to be a particular device?

Re:for those laughing

[DragonWriter]

Textbook expenses are obnoxious.

Yes, I'm sure textbook maker Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who developed the online multimedia educational platform for the iPad being tested in this pilot, are very very concerned about how obnoxious textbook expenses are, and is very, very concerned about reducing the amount of money school districts spend on textbooks.

Or maybe not.

There are an increasing number of open source textbooks that are quite suitable for the classroom. Most of the classics taught in school can be downloaded for free or very cheap. Many libraries have electronic books, which reduces the loss at the library.

Yes, that's exactly why HMH is trying to establish the market for a paid online services as the replacement for textbooks, so that schools will choose that instead of free, open-content static texts.

Re:for those laughing

[Anonymous Coward]

We generally require specific device to provide support. For instance, many schools require a Windows PC machine, and will only begrudging allow another. Some school require a Mac, and won't accept a PC. If a students wishes to have another machine, and agrees to support it themselves, including finding apps and books, then that should be allowed.

The reality is that most teachers still come from humanities, or, at best, life sciences. Their technical skill is not that great. Most of us have no problem moving between OS, but I have seen teachers have problems when moving to a new version of MS Office. They are trained on what they need to be trained on, and often cannot do anything more. I have seen tech ed teachers have problem plugging in an ethernet cable.

These teachers will be the greatest obstacle to moving to a pad based teaching environment. One might be able to get them to learn one machine, especially if it an iPad, but they would likely not be any buying if they had to allow other machines. They would be afraid that the kid would use it some strange way, not because it is more open device, but because it is unknown.

Re:for those laughing

[coryking]

Because that would cost a hell of a lot more money to build, develop and maintain.

What open book format?
How will the school convince publishers to use that format?
Who will ensure the system in the Childs hand remains secure?
If you propose a heterogeneous environment where this whole thing runs of varied platforms, who will test it?
If you propose the kids use their own setup, what if that setup is not supported?

Or you can just buy a crate of ipads, shove a bunch of ebooks on there and call it a day.

Administrator abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't we just go through a round of schools getting busted for snapping photos of students at home in various states of undress? Or expelling them for eating candy? The potential for abuse is equal for an iPad.

Also, considering there public schools are free, how will the State recup the cost of iPads that don't come back, much less damaged ones? They cannot deny a child an education if the parents refuse to sign a damage waiver so how will they manage cost?

Oops, I'm working in the real world...I forgot about the fantasy world of the Peoples Republic of Californistan.

Re:Administrator abuse

[DinDaddy]

Even worse, because no one will know about the invisible camera built into it.

Re:Administrator abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Missed this one apparently...

http://www.intomobile.com/2010/08/03/more-ipad-camera-evidence-uncovered-in-apple-internal-docs/

Why should this work?

[Aviation Pete]

when all they do is replacing textbooks with PDFs of textbooks, there is no reason why pupils should advance more quickly. Even throw in all of Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org/), and the ony difference is they will watch it on a tab instead of a PC - if they watch at all.

How about putting content in which could really enlighten you where dry and outdated paper books couldn't? Just an example: Look at Gapminder (www.gapminder.org/world/)!

But doing this for all topics would be a massive programming job ...

What I do expect: After having sold iPads to all early adopters, the industry will now flog tablet computers to a wider audience, and the school market is a logical choice. So this experiment will be labeled as a success, regardless of the outcome.

Re:Why should this work?

[am 2k]

I couldn't agree more. The problem is that teaching institutions see a big degradation in student attendance and test results, and struggle to adapt to a modern life in any way. They see that tablets are the wave of the present, and so they try to hop on the train by copying their current material verbatim, completely missing the whole point of a computing device (the interactivity and networkability).

The real problem behind that is that it's still the same people, who learnt themselves in school that way and apparently can't think outside the box. It will probably take a whole (failed) generation to get schools onto the right track.

Re:Why should this work?

[DragonWriter]

when all they do is replacing textbooks with PDFs of textbooks, there is no reason why pupils should advance more quickly.

But that's not what theyare doing. While the online platform that is being tested includes a digital test, it also includes various other interactive features.

Not yet there

[Coopjust]

I could buy an iPad with the money I have but I'll take a regular textbook any day, namely because they can't take the book away from you.

Additionally, the hardware is more of a novelty than anything else at this point- too expensive, too fragile (especially for middle schoolers), too much of a target for theft, and not advanced enough.

The textbook companies love this concept, since it kills secondhand ownership. You can sell licenses to eBooks just like software!

Also, math input without a stylus or keyboard (and I doubt they're teaching LaTeX for any sort of efficient math input) can't be fun.

Re:Not yet there

[Pirate_Pettit]

They've already killed secondhand ownership by publishing updates every year that colleges insist on forcing students to purchase. Besides, if there's any kind of product that is appropriate for a rent/license business model, it's textbooks - Do you really care if you can keep your Calc 1 textbook, or one of a half-dozen literature compilations that you'll read before graduation? Keep the cost and weight down (easier to do when they don't have to fight the used market for share), and I don't really care if I can only use the dry instruction of 6 bored PhD contributors for 3 months.

Re:Not yet there

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, I like this concept too, since it kills duplication costs. You can distribute textbooks for free just like software!

(And you could take "free" to mean free as in "free speech", or free as in "free pirated grog mateys! the ship we just looted was hauling' first-rate booze for the king o' redmond!", if you know what I mean... )

Of course, if education was controlled by a rational entity with direct responsibility for costs, then my vision could actually work -- the state school board could figure out what the total expenses for textbooks in a year is, figure out how many top-notch teachers you can hire for that, and sit them down with the task of writing new/improving existing free textbook projects, and releasing the result in the public domain.

(And yeah, math is the wrong subject for this, although with a decent tablet PC with Wacom digitizer instead of a fat-fingers iPod, even that can work out.)

Steve Jobs quote

[Anonymous Coward]

"I used to think technology could help education. Now my inevitable conclusion is that no amount of technology will make a dent."
-- Steve Jobs

The Oops Factor

[b4upoo]

And who will pay for the lost, drowned or bashed Ipads? Eighth grade kids are rougher than boot camp at Paris Island!

Re:Cheaper would be....

[gr8_phk]

Much as I dislike them, why not a Kindle loaded with text books. That would be much much less than iPads and less likely to be used for other purposes (like watching YouTube during class).

At last

[Ukab the Great]

For the ADD/ASD kids in class who

could not write down notes fast enough because their fine motor coordination was shot to hell and the idiot teacher didn't understand that their 8 x 11 piece of paper wasn't as wide as a 16ft whiteboard

couldn't follow said teacher half the time because the kids whispering behind them drowned out the teacher's loud voice

who were denied the copious examples they needed to understand how stuff worked due to the easy-odd-problems-with-answers-hard-even-problems-no-answers BS that math textbook authors kept pulling

who could have just understood matrix math if they could have seen an interactive demonstration where the matrixes rotated and the numbers one-by-one multiplied themselves by each other

the digital replacement of math textbooks with interactive instruction that can be replayed over and over again in a quiet area and can on-the-fly create copious needed examples is long overdue.

Re:Cheaper would be....

[perpenso]

Much as I dislike them, why not a Kindle loaded with text books. That would be much much less than iPads and less likely to be used for other purposes (like watching YouTube during class).

1. Color is extensively used in modern textbooks.
2. Textbooks are incorporating more software and multimedia.

I had the opportunity to work with a textbook publisher regarding the software bundled with a chemistry textbook. This software included chemical diagramming (2D - for reports and such) and 3D model building and visualization. We also had a few movies illustrating some basic principles. All of this could easily be done on an iPad and be bundled with the textbook. Not so for today's Kindle. I hope future Kindle's offer color and touch to make such things feasible.

Re:Cheaper would be....

[Jerf]

You want them to be useful for the other tasks, though. The revolution in education will not come from simply digitizing the old ways of educating, it will come from using computers to do things you couldn't do without them. Kindles won't permit that.

In fact, the studious inability for the education world to realize this and act on it is a significant part of the reason why they disgust me so.

Re:Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might wo

[am 2k]

Also keep in mind that today's $500 iPad will probably be around $250 in a couple of years. and those are retail prices not educational institution prices.

That's not how Apple (and other companies aiming at higher priced products) works. They decide on a price point, and develop a product that is as good as it can get for that price. When the components get cheaper, they add more stuff to the device (like the better camera, more RAM and faster processor on iPhone 4) and keep at the same level. The only times when they lower it is when they decide that they made a mistake with the initial judgement (see Apple TV), or when they perceive a change in the market they have to follow.

For example, the price for the Mac Mini actually went UP over time. Same for the entry-level MacBook.

Re:Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might wo

[kimgkimg]

Wasn't there some university trial on Kindles similar to this?

The education textbook industry needs to die

[HawaiianToast]

The textbook for my engineering analysis class was a brown envelope with nothing but a lottery ticket style scratch off license key inside. The key grants you access to the publisher's website. No refunds and no buy back when the class is over. The price was still over $100. It's the most disgusting thing I've come across since returning to school. I'm required to have a license from this publisher in order to turn in my work. This is at a fairly old public university too, not some online degree business where i might expect to take up the rear. In contrast, my chemistry text, bundled with a ton of other material, was $4. It was written by the department open course ware style and is far better than the former mentioned math text. These publishers really need to go to hell, and more universities need to get their shit together and provide their own materials.

Unknowns - that's why you have a pilot program

[perpenso]

I feel like the jury is probably still out on the average lifespan of an iPad, but what I'm wondering is if the schools see this as a way to always pass the cost of a replacement on to a student. iPad breaks because it's just plain old? Well, your kid must have broken it, it was working when we gave it to him, so you'll have to pay for the new one! Now all the school has to pay for is updates to the online textbooks.

I'm sure durability is one of the things that this pilot program is going to measure. This program is essentially an experiment designed to answer many of the questions being offered here today.

Makes Perfect Sense

[am 2k]

"Four of Alexandrias's largest school districts will be trying something new on eighth-grade algebra students this year: giving them books instead of scrolls. The devices come bound with separate pages of text, allowing students to flip through pages and scribble notes on in the margins. If the students with books turn out to do improve at a faster pace than their peers as expected, the program could soon spread throughout Egypt."

The Perfect Accessory

[JoelWink]

Those fancy new iPads will be the perfect accessory for the lucky students at L.A.'s new $578M K-12 school.

Cognitive Load FTL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because if anything has taught us more is better, it's cognitive load!

Who modded this libertopian crap insightful?

[spazdor]

Governments breed waste, inefficiency and tyranny and can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution.

Private institutions breed greed, cartels and perverse incentives and can never lead to a decision-making process which would choose a net gain for society over a greater gain for itself.

Yes, both of these sentences are moronic oversimplifications.

It'll be Government Subsidized Internet Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/21/1353241
Remember this nerds?
I predict it will be just like that for these 4 schools... in addition, since these are "school property" I wonder if privacy issues such as this will be an issue as well?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/02/18/1846222/PA-School-Spied-On-Students-Via-School-Issued-Laptop-Webcams

Misleading subject

[krupicka]

No I'm not new here, but the grammar of the subject indicates that iPads were being replaced by math textbooks which to me is much more newsworthy than the fact that some school administrator thinks that they need to replace a $100 text book with a $500 electronic device with roughly half the shelf-life.

Improv?

[Anonymous Coward]

That should read "do improv" rather than "do improve", I presume.

Improve at a faster pace?

[DrNico]

Why on earth would they be expected to "improve at a faster pace than their peers"? Does reading off a screen somehow enter and remain in your brain better than a printed page? The only 'advantage' over the printed page in the project would appear that they get to watch videos on the iPads. But passively watching a video is unlikely to improve outcomes.
I predict they'll actually do worse than the other students. The iPad is an environment full of distractions and passive consumption of media. The students will spend most of their time mucking about with apps like the rest of us.

Re:Improve at a faster pace?

[Taibhsear]

It's apple. I'm sure they'll have a way to lock down everything but the text book files.

Re: The Oops Factor (Frankly I'd sell my "lost" .)

[neurocutie]

you means "Oops, I lost it (i.e. I sold it for $400), please give me another..."

in these discussions, people are assuming that the digital textbooks are FREE, kinda like assuming that digital music (e.g. MP3) is free and that all the costs are in the CD media (in the book format itself)... WRONG...

all you're doing is trading $10 worth of a pretty rugged yet not very steal/lost-susceptible format with a 5+ year life (a book) for a $400, fragile, VERY steal/lost prone format (ipad) with an at-best 2 year life... the costs of the content is going to be similar.

Re:Cheaper would be....

[DragonWriter]

Much as I dislike them, why not a Kindle loaded with text books.

Because this isn't a static digital textbook, its a digital educational multimedia subscription service being tested that happens to also include access to a textbook.

Its pretty much the textbook manufacturer's way to compete with the drive toward free (libre) static digital textbooks as alternatives to traditional textbooks, by building a market for a subscription service that:
1) Provides something that free static text doesn't, which justifies paying something for it, and
2) Which, because its an interactive, subscription-based service, can't be kept and reused for free once its purchased for as long as the physical media lasts, like a traditional textbook, but must be paid for, each year, for each student, for continued use, so that once a district has gotten into it (likely on a discounted initial plan, the way many consumer services are sold) and built teaching practices around it, they'll pay whatever it takes to keep it up year after year.

Re:Not necessarily (you forgot content $COSTS)

[neurocutie]

Again, in your calculation of $50 x 10 = $500 you are assuming that the electronic textbooks are FREE. WRONG! they are going to be at least $40 of the $50 of a real textbook. The media (printing costs) are only a small part of the textbook cost. Look at digital music, just how much cheaper is an MP3 album than a CD of the same content?

So the actual calculation is $50 x 10 vs $500 + ($40 x 10), nevermind the cost of replacing broken, stolen and SOLD(!) ipads...

Re:Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might wo

[Idbar]

Sounds great, but who's going to pay for the books? Someone will still have to pay for the books if they don't pay for the iPads. Worst case scenario, they will have to pay for the iPad AND the books. Sounds brilliant, when we all know that electronic copies of the books have a somewhat similar price to the printed ones.

Re:Not necessarily (you forgot content $COSTS)

[PapayaSF]

Both of you are correct, that should be factored in, though there are free math ebooks. And of course a countervailing factor is that ebooks don't physically wear out or get marked and unusable, but physical books do.

Ideally one iPad could replace at least several years worth of physical books, so I still think it wouldn't be hard to make it economical in the medium term.

hmm

[buddyglass]

If the iPad group does improve at a faster rate, this could potentially be due to the novelty of the iPad vs. traditional textbooks. Remove the novelty factor (i.e. deploy them state-wide and wait a few years) and the faster improvement rate may disappear.

Re:hmm

[cheekyjohnson]

I think books (the paper ones) are huge wastes of paper, time, and effort. If it wasn't for money problems, and a lack of computers in some places, I would suggest that all books be digitized. Then anyone could freely read these books and not have to waste a bunch of money on a bunch of paper that could be available to everyone. I don't know about the improvement rate, but I suspect that students would 'improve' and better their worthless grades if they gave them some choice in school instead of forcing them to take 50 useless classes that teach them information that they won't use for their career. If they fail these classes currently, it could make them fail the entire year. If they want to see real improvement, they need to reform the poorly thought out educational system instead of just giving students more and more mandatory worthless classes each year, and more work, thinking it's going to somehow make them more 'intelligent'.

Re:Not necessarily (you forgot content $COSTS)

[neurocutie]

if there are "free" ebooks, there can also be ultra cheap textbooks, simply by printing out those "free" ebooks.

the cost of content should be the same for both formats, so it becomes an issue of format/media itself.

cost of ipad is $400-500... PLUS cost of replacement of broken, stolen and sold iPads.
cost of each textbook PRINTING/DISTRIBUTING is probably about $10, and it lasts longer, so it takes somewhere between 40-100 textbooks worth to make an iPad to be cost effective...

Re:Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might wo

[perpenso]

Also keep in mind that today's $500 iPad will probably be around $250 in a couple of years. and those are retail prices not educational institution prices.

That's not how Apple (and other companies aiming at higher priced products) works. They decide on a price point, and develop a product that is as good as it can get for that price. When the components get cheaper, they add more stuff to the device (like the better camera, more RAM and faster processor on iPhone 4) and keep at the same level. The only times when they lower it is when they decide that they made a mistake with the initial judgement (see Apple TV), or when they perceive a change in the market they have to follow.

For example, the price for the Mac Mini actually went UP over time. Same for the entry-level MacBook.

A far better example is the iPod Classic. Introduced at $500. Later more capable and better configured models were introduced and price points were $300, $400, and $500 give or take. What was the $500 configuration at one time worked its way down to $300 after a couple of product refreshes.

Like that original iPod classic, the current iPad is offered as a single model at a high price point suitable only for early adopters. This is won't last, the iPod Classic pattern used for many years will probably be applied to the iPad.

Re:Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might wo

[am 2k]

Did you miss that there are 6 iPad models available?

However, there are some rumors about an iPad nano, that's true.

Re:Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might wo

[perpenso]

Sounds great, but who's going to pay for the books? Someone will still have to pay for the books if they don't pay for the iPads. Worst case scenario, they will have to pay for the iPad AND the books. Sounds brilliant, when we all know that electronic copies of the books have a somewhat similar price to the printed ones.

For consumer books, but textbooks don't have to follow that pattern. And if this pilot program shows no advantages the state can stick with paper.

That said I expect publishers want to go digital and will make it attractive in some manner. Keep in mind that the digital book can be bundled with software and movies. Going digital also solves one of the publisher's nightmares at the college level, used textbooks.

Spare a thought

[Anonymous Coward]

for the kids with palmar hyperhidrosis

Cue ADA lawsuit in 3 ... 2 ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Universities already tried with this with Kindle. Result: ADA lawsuits.

Re:Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might wo

[perpenso]

I am referring only to the iPod Classic and it's pricing history over many years, not the current product lineup. The Classic is where the pattern originated. If you look at the other iPod families you see Apple reusing the old Classic pattern to some degree, price points obviously being very different.

Californian logic

[OrangeTide]

There are two good programs for free etextbooks here in California. If we could replace a highschool student's four $40 textbooks with an iPad and some free textbooks, we'd be saving money by Californian logic.

ps - yes, HS texts are less expensive than college textbooks, especially when the state is ordering millions of them. at least we hope the state negotiates a competitive price!

Re:Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might wo

[jmerlin]

Quite right. For educational institutions that get a lot of their money from local taxes, you can expect a markup of 50% to 250% on the cost of a textbook. Gotta love those sweetheart deals that still aren't illegal.

What a waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

And explain to me how a gadget is supposed to increase learning?

Want to use technology to help kids learn? Do this: Set up a simple website where a teacher can log in, post a few notes for assignments, then provide parents with access to this site (and hell make the system send out an email to parents for those too lazy to check in) . This would cut out all the kids' excuses for being lazy like "I didn't know", "I forgot", "teacher didnt tell us", etc, etc, etc. Empower the parents, fix the parent-teacher information gap, and the kids reap the (future) rewards from actually studying and getting their homework done.

Writing by hand is good for the brain...

[Anonymous Coward]

The interactive features might be helpful, but if they plan to remove pencil-and-paper work altogether it could be problematic. I once took a course on pedagogy for university instructors where they advised us to do what we can to get students to write out their notes, citing a number of studies that have shown that the act of writing stimulates learning in the brain more effectively than other methods of recording the same content. Anyone who took math or physics courses as an undergraduate should be able to relate to the benefits of doing algebra by hand.

iPad has no camera

[flipper9]

But, the iPad doesn't have a camera. How are the school administrators going to be able to see the children undressing in their rooms or doing naughty things?

Re:Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might wo

[Anonymous Coward]

It is plausible that a reusable digital device loaded with numerous textbooks could be less expensive than the corresponding set of paper textbooks.

I just got done telling my Calc 3 Students that Steward's Calculus "Nook" edition is $99.25. The big bundle with a paper book and associated crud (including the ebook) is $250. It's less, sure, but still hyperinflated.

Apple

[serbanp]

either knows how and who to bribe or their brand name got out of hand.

Whose monumentally idiotic idea was to throw away textbooks and replace them with general-purpose electronic gadgets? Was it EVER demonstrated that this works? Of all the issues the sorry California Public school system is riddled with, the lack of enough electronic things floating around the students is the least important.

fallout from CA free digital textbook initiative?

[bcrowell]

This is a pilot program, Houghton Mifflin and/or Apple are probably subsidizing it.

This may be partly a reaction to California's Free Digital Textbook Initiative. I went to a symposium about the FDTI last summer (more about that symposium here. The people interested enough to come were an odd-bedfellows mixture of free-information enthusiasts, commercial textbook companies, and computer hardware companies. The ones with a really, really strong pecuniary motive for participating are the hardware companies. This is a gigantic potential gold mine for them. From the point of view of the book publishers, it was clear that they were about as enthusiastic about it as they would be about a skunk at a bridal shower, and the only reason they were there was to gauge how horrible the threat was.

This pilot program would then represent the perfect confluence of interests between the publishers and the hardware companies. Once you get rid of the pesky idea of having the textbooks become free, it becomes a wonderful potential gravy train for all of them.

A pilot program is designed to measure the effectiveness of the device and the costs. It is plausible that a reusable digital device loaded with numerous textbooks could be less expensive than the corresponding set of paper textbooks. Also keep in mind that today's $500 iPad will probably be around $250 in a couple of years. and those are retail prices not educational institution prices.

Not so sure about this. My kid just started high school, and she had IIRC 30 lb of books. Since she sometimes walks to and from school, we bought her her own copies of some of her books to keep at home. They were actually surprisingly inexpensive, especially compared to the exploitative cost of college-level textbooks.

But computer companies have a long-established practice of being willing to lose money in order to get impressionable K-12 kids used to their hardware and software, on the theory that the kids will then be loyal customers after they grow up. Apple has done this using educational discounts on their hardware. MS did it in their early history by winking at piracy. Amazon has of course been losing money hand over fist on the Kindle in order to build market share.

Insightful !!??!?

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of brain dead morons took your post as insightful?

It should be +5 Funny, not Insightful.

Schools are doing what they were designed to do...

[Paul Fernhout]

which is dumbing us down: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
Give them more money, and as NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says, they will only do that job better... We need to change the whole paradigm...
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
http://www.holtgws.com/
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

Nothing changes because Power ÷ 22...

[Paul Fernhout]

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
"""
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than print)
6) Text publishers
7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers
Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are served whether children learn to read or not.
There is little accountability. No matter how many assertions are made to the contrary, few penalties exist past a certain level on the organizational chart—unless a culprit runs afoul of the media—an explanation for the bitter truth whistle-blowers regularly discover when they tell all. Which explains why precious few experienced hands care to ruin themselves to act the hero. This i

How much online learning could US$1 billion buy?

[Paul Fernhout]

Considering how much this one guy has done on a shoestring: http://www.khanacademy.org/

The whole paradigm is broken, see my collection of links starting here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

And also:
"Academic Bankruptcy"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/opinion/15taylor.html?_r=1

The real problem...

[Paul Fernhout]

is, beyond what you suggest, also, from: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."

See also:
"Sustainable Education"
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1
"Nevertheless, there is an education revolution going on, and it is long overdue. It is moving in the diametrically opposite direction of the "testing" push. The latter comes from the bureaucrats from within that dying system, who do know there is something wrong. But since they can't think "out of the box," the only remedy they can come up with is longer hours, more homework, and "teaching to the test," in other words, more of the same. The education revolution is coming from people who have created alternative schools and programs, thousands of them, and from others who have checked "none of the above" and have decided to home educate. There are now nearly two million people home educating. The first charter school was started in 1991. Now there are 2500 of them! And there are over 7500 additional alternatives in our database and many thousands more we have yet to discover. All of these fall in the general category of "learner-centered" approaches. We list many of them in our book, The Almanac of Education Choices. These people are steadfastly OPPOSED to the governmental thrust for more "standardization" and testing. "

Have you bought school book lately?

[crovira]

That's one semester's worth of books (and those are the crappy ones like Poetry or Spanish or Phenomenological Art.)

If the iPads are usable for two semesters, which they would be, the students actually save money.

Its not as if these students are nerds.

They're just schmucks who are never going to write a single program in their entire lives.

Let 'em have iPads.

Its cheaper than killing trees.

sub moronic

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't eat paper money, drink paper money, or anything else. It's fucking paper. Governments can inflate the hell out of it and *they always do*. Every single time, then their out of control economies collapse, and you have a bout of "social unrest". There are no exceptions. Every paper money styled currency has ultimately been inflated into worthlessness by governments. It will happen to all of them out there now as well, except for the ones that will be based on commodities, including gold. Energy sources, manufactured goods, and a hefty dose of gold bars socked away will be the only successful "backed" currencies in the not too very far away now world.

The US ridiculous currency is "backed" by IOUs! It's an IOU backed by more IOUs, the "full faith and credit" of the biggest liars and thieves on the planet, a currency reflected in an economy that is quad trillions in debt already, and will NOT be able to meet even a fraction of their "entitlements" and debts without massive "quantitative easing" and outright default combined with hyper inflation. This is ALWAYS the end game with bullshit backed currencies. The FRN is another example of what has become known as "liar's paper". And with you same "enlightened" economists, you have shipped off most of the real wealth production, to be replaced with ..crap.."services" and government make work jobs, and an unemployment rate which if it was tallied correctly is close approaching great depression levels, with no way to ever get all those jobs back! Meaning all these IOUs that are being issued based on some fairy tale wish that in the future everyone will be working again and making gobs of real money..Are you serious, are you fucking serious? Do you think that is going to happen?

And you think that paper bullshit lie backed currency is better than gold and other valuable stuff backed currencies?? HAHAHAHAHHAA-HA!

You "paper bug" luddites-yes, backed by nothing currencies are proven old fashioned and full of fail, crack some history books to find out- are stupidly amusing in the "short bus and my, that is a lovely helmet you have" way, you simply refuse to read any history and learn from it.

Re:sub moronic

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Gold is backed by precisely magic and wishes.

Fiat currency skips the shiny fucking rocks and goes right to the magic and wishes.

Oh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do the IPuds come with a spy cam?

Re:Expensive and valuable

[CrankinOut]

Private schools are not necessarily rich, but it is true that there's an economic selection going on. The $20,100 per student comes from some parent paying that out of after-tax dollars, and some of those tax dollars went to public education and therefore not expended by the public education on their child. In essence, the parents are selecting a higher expenditure on their child's education. The benefits of private education can be (1) more highly qualified, experienced, and motivated teachers, (2) students for whom their parents and teachers have higher expectations and involvement in their performance, (3) smaller class sizes and less distractions, and (4) more resources for education. If a student doesn't want an education, they are dismissed from private school, and their slot taken by someone on the waiting list who ( and whose parents) does want that education.

In public schools, non-performers become disciplinary problems which take away from teaching and learning, but the public school has to retain them and deal with them.

I was fortunate to go to a great public school system, and my school district had tracks for students with different abilities-- the more academically inclined got the teachers who were more academic, and the less academically inclined got the more discipline-oriented teachers and more supportive educational process. Sadly, in an effort to provide "equal education to all students," many school systems believe that stratification by ability is discriminatory and therefore have eliminated tracking. As a result, the brighter students are slowed down, and the slower students are frustrated or embarrassed, in stead of enabling challenge for the academic, and support for the lesser academic.

Equal opportunity and identical treatment are not the same thing, and fails to recognize the different needs of individuals. The equal opportunity is to provide stratified educational tracts that challenge and don't frustrate every student.

Back in my day...

[SwampChicken]

...schools used to try and *minimize* distractions in the classroom.

Re:Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might wo

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless the cost per pupil is competitive with textbooks the issue is moot. Public education is in crisis throughout the US and California is no exception. There is too little money in the system to acquire and retain textbook supplies. Kids drop books all the time, leave them places and abuse them: are they going to provide a free replacement for every lost iPad? People don't tend to steal textbooks left on tables but an iPad? Putting them in the hands of pupils at this stage is marketing pure and simple.

Re:Not necessarily (you forgot content $COSTS)

[Anonymous Coward]

if there are "free" ebooks

There are free ebooks, there's no "if" about it or a need to put "free" in quotes.

Hold on

[ledow]

So the iPad just has a copy of the textbook. There may be other, collaborative tools, but then surely any difference is due to the extra tools, not the electronic textbook version. Thus what you're actually testing is "does having an iPad make the student better?" not "does having an electronic copy of the textbook make the student better?".

And, working in schools since I left university, as the IT guy, I can tell you the result now. The IT-literate ones will work wonders and maybe perform slightly better with such tools. The rest will stay the same or even decrease. Blanket-applying such technology in the expectation that it makes everything better for everyone is like saying that giving everyone a lesson in quantum physics from a German-speaking teacher makes us all experts in quantum physics and German. People are different, learn differently, and can't be blanket-taught. Teachers, the real ones who know how to teach, have been saying this and using differential techniques for DECADES. And then some idiot, who normally has little or no experience in education, or who can learn only in one particular method themselves, suggests such things and demonstrates a tiny, short-term gain while the students are taking part in a prototype trial and then announces that everyone, everywhere can do the same for ever.

Giving a kid a pen instead of a quill does not make them a better student.
Giving a kid a lined book does not make them a better student.
Giving a kid a homework diary does not make them a better student.
Giving a kid a computer does not make them a better student.

Expand for other unnecessary gumph. A student, by definition, is someone who is being taught. In the early stages of their education, this is *all* via outside influences (e.g. school) that are required to be compulsory for the majority of students to actually achieve anything (i.e. left to their own devices, 99.9% of people would not go to school if they didn't have to). That teaching must be done by a teacher, who they are in contact with for 8 hours a day, every working day, and who needs to be specially trained, good at imparting information in lots of different ways, and quite intellectual. This is how schools have worked since the very first one, until recently. Now they are lucky if one of the several staff in the classroom pays them attention for more than a minute at a time. Guess what - improving that teacher (by removing bad teachers, re-training mediocre teachers, and paying good teachers what they are worth) makes a *million* times more difference than any gadget you thrust on the kids. In the UK in the past 20-something years, only a handful of teachers have actually been removed from the profession because they were inadequate - this is statistically extremely unlikely and is due to *nobody* in education wanting to push bad teachers out - terrible teachers are given fabulous references so that "some other sucker" (i.e. another school with kids requiring an education) takes them off their hands.

The ancient Greeks had teachers, the Romans had teachers, the Victorians had teachers. In previous generations, kids were made to sit in classes all day long. Bad behaviour and any distractions were not tolerated. The kids learned because they had to, whether they had gadgets or not. They did not have the excuses of dyslexia, ADHD, or irritable bowel syndrome. They were taught. Yes, there were still a load that "failed", there was still trouble, still people leaving school without an adequate education, but they were required to be there for many years LESS than students currently are, were taught much more to a higher standard, and actually "failed" on exams at the time with work that would now be marked as B or A grades. Go take a look at any 1960's "O"-level (the O stands for "ordinary" - no political correctness here) Maths paper and compare it to a modern A-level (the A stands for "advanced" - and O-levels are now called "General Certificates of Secondary Education") - which the kids now ta

Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[Paul Fernhout]

"In other words Gatto is confusing effect for intention. The effect is that we're failing to teach our students history (or whatever), but teachers absolutely do NOT want that to happen. He's right about structural issues that can happen due to administrators or district policies, but your man on the ground, the person actually working with kids, absolutely wants kids to be higher level thinkers."

Well, if we can move past your medical diagnosis of Gatto's mental state, you have just restated his main point.

He never says teachers are all evil. Most of them are, like you say, well-meaning. What he says is that the system itself is evil in terms of the goals behind it and how it operates as a system (relative to our current needs -- he says it may have been a reasonable tradeoff when it was invented in Prussia in the 1800s).

To cite the most famous example of authoritarianism gone to extremes, was Nazi Germany filled with 100% evil Germans to make it work? No, most Germans were well-meaning people, and nice to their children and neighbors, very patriotic, and so on. It was the equivalent of some weird sort of social storm, and also a bit of a pyramid scheme. It was just the overall system that was insane from a human perspective (even granted it had some very nutty people at the top, but that's part of the problem too, how it got that way).
"How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head."

So, sure, every aspect of school that does not work to the child's obvious benefit is "regretted", as you outline examples of how it is regrettable that how children are taught has no relation to how kids learn or how they need to learn to be active participants in a democracy.

But the end result is to turn schools into a form of prison at this point. Granted, children are not physically gassed or worked to death like in Nazi concentration camps (even if some do die from the mental equivalent, as demonstrated by the high teen suicide rate or even now the obesity rate, probably partly from stress).

As Gatto suggests here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

So, really, you've just made Gatto's point. And perhaps you've reflexively done an ad hominem attack on him so you did not have to think about what he says in detail? S

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[ShakaUVM]

>>See also, for another crazy guy (Chomsky):

Chomsky IS also crazy. For a lot of the same reasons - he believes in secret evil plots lurking behind every curtain in America, and contrawise minimizes the evil of anything not-American. He's a nutcase. Smart, but a nutcase.

>>What he says is that the system itself is evil in terms of the goals behind it

Precisely. I can attest from personal experience that there are no "evil goals" behind the school system. It's overcomplicated and ineffective, but not evil. From the top to the bottom, everyone in the school system wants their kids to do well.

Gatto implying there's Secret Masters of the Earth or whatever (Rockefellers? Jews?) is why I call him a paranoid schizophrenic. I read enough of his stuff to become completely disgusted with his nightmare delusions.

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[Paul Fernhout]

I think you are still missing Gatto's main point here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.htm
"Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that students go mad trying to escape it."

And the same might be said about Chomsky.

If there are no "evil goals" behind the school system, then what about this?
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done. The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte--one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different. In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one's life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1 lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling. ... The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed. The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the experience of animal husbandry and equestrian training, and also taken from past military experience. Much later, in our own time, the techniques of these assorted crafts and sullen arts became "discoveries" in the pedagogical pseudoscience of psychological behaviorism. Prussian schools delivered everything they promised. Every important matter could now be confidently worked out in advance by leading families and institutional heads because well-schooled masses would concur with a minimum of opposition. This tightly schooled consensus in Prussia eventually combined the kaleidoscopic German principalities into a united Germany, after a thousand years as a nation in fragments. What a surprise the world would soon get from this successful experiment in national centralization! Under Prussian state socialism private industry surged, vaulting resource-poor Prussia up among wor

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[ShakaUVM]

>>Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators

In other words, it IS a conspiracy. He's paranoid.

>>The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian.

And WAS REJECTED when evaluation efforts revealed that these methods were less effective than others. See for example the Factory model used in WWI-era New York, which were explicitly designed around these principles. They sucked, evaluators found that they didn't work, and the city rejected them.

>>Do you say this is not a more or less accurate assessment of that history?

Gatto's screed only resonates with people who don't know the history or practice of education. No offense.

>>They never get to practice democracy, as they might in, say, a "democratic free school".

All sorts of kids get to practice democracy and freedom. They're called Alternative Schools. They have the highest dropout rates of any schools in our system. (Unless you count schools in Juvenile Hall, I guess, but that doesn't really count.)

>>Let's take 'em out with an ad hominem until the phasers are back online. :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Read your own link. Ad Hominem is a valid criticism when it is relevant to the argument being made. Stating that a guy is a flat-earther is a valid criticism of his bold new math on calculating Satellite orbits. Gatto being paranoid is a completely germane criticism of his twisted viewpoint on education. Because it is exactly a reflection of his paranoia.

>>Anyway, it might take years to decompress after being in such an environment. Thanks for trying a little.

I'm not *in* the environment. I'm an evaluator, so I assess what elements of education are effective, and which are not. Which is why I can state with certainty Gatto is batshit insane.

>>Years worth of reading if you want to do it:

All anarchistic links, it appears. Which is great, except anarchy fails, in education. Miserably.

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[Paul Fernhout]

"All anarchistic links, it appears. Which is great, except anarchy fails, in education. Miserably."

How can you call Alfie Kohn or John Holt or Jeff Schmidt anarchistic?

I'd say those links were about trying to find a more appropriate balance between meshworks and hierarchies than authoritarian schooling represents. From Manuel DeLanda:
    http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."

BTW, if Gatto is insane, how was he selected as NYS Teacher of the Year and how did he teach for so many years in public schools? :-)

Also, it seems like you are admitting kids don't get to practice either freedom or democracy in mainstream public schools. So, how are they supposed to learn to do those things when they turn 18 and can vote?

If the schooling idea is so great, why is creativity plummeting?
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1159241/The-Creativity-Crisis

Is this guy, knighted by the Queen of England for services to education, an anarchist?
"Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

How can you say that the Prussian model was rejected when just about everything about schools reflects it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
"The Prussian system instituted compulsory attendance, specific training for teachers, national testing for all students (used to classify children for potential job training), national curriculum set for each grade and mandatory kindergarten."

A link from there to a documentary on Prussian Schooling:
http://www.quantumshift.tv/v/1198046178

How come the people who started Google went to Montessori schools?

Did you go to school? Do you spend much of your time talking to school people? Then you are in the system...
    http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict “ideological discipline.” The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional’s lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."

Have you looked at this?
    http://www.thewaronkids.com/
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlnwm11d6II

How do you evaluate schools on how creative or cooperative or democratically-oriented or critical thinking or kind or helpful or healthy or resilient most kids are after they come out of them?

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[ShakaUVM]

>>How can you call Alfie Kohn or John Holt or Jeff Schmidt anarchistic?

In this context, yes. Dispensing with grades, etc., and they're anti-authoritarian by nature.

>>BTW, if Gatto is insane, how was he selected as NYS Teacher of the Year

While I know you're joking, it's a reverse ad-hominem fallacy. It's quite possible for very smart people to also be crazy. (http://www.cracked.com/article_18638_4-nobel-prize-winners-who-were-clearly-insane.html)

My AP English teacher (Jan Gabay) was Teacher of the Year for the entire country in 1990. She had very strong opinions on what works and doesn't work in education, but they're different from Gatto's.

This is kind of one of the points I made a few posts back - there's a plethora of opinions on how to fix education. It's not like everyone is walking around saying everything is fine - there's clearly a problem, but people can and do disagree on what exactly is wrong, and on how to fix it. There's literally thousands of solutions floating around out there, most of which don't have rigorous evaluation supporting their claims.

You seem to think that I think the system is fine ("If the schooling idea is so great..."), when I think my first post here is quite clear that I believe the way school is being taught currently is badly broken. However, I believe part of the problem is having *too many* solutions - teachers are told to forget everything they know on a yearly basis. So they more or less ignore the reforms and keep doing their traditional, failed, way of teaching most of the time.

The anarchistic model doesn't work. If you give kids freedom to do work, or not... they don't do it. And then they drop out. Simple as that. There's ample evidence supporting this. I'm not saying that kids don't need *more* freedom - just that giving them too much freedom is pretty much proven not to work.

>>How can you say that the Prussian model was rejected when just about everything about schools reflects it?

Sure, things like teacher certification and mandatory education are still around, but that's not what the Prussian system was all about. The Prussian system was ultimately designed to produce students for industrial work. For repetitive regimented work, with just enough critical thinking skills to be able to build stuff. This is the part that Gatto is fixated upon, not realizing this hasn't been true in the American educational system for quite a while. I believe the Factory School model was tried and rejected circa-WWI. Rejected because kids weren't learning as much as with traditional schooling.

If you've been keeping abreast of overarching goals in the educational system, Gatto's paranoid fantasies are laughable. Currently, one trendy thing to talk about are "21st Century Skills". (http://www.p21.org/) Take a look at the goals for this movement (http://www.p21.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=254&Itemid=120):
1. Core Subjects and 21st Century Themes

2. Learning and Innovation Skills

        * Creativity and Innovation
        * Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
        * Communication and Collaboration

3. Information, Media and Technology Skills

        * Information Literacy
        * Media Literacy
        * ICT Literacy

4. Life and Career Skills

Does this seem to match, in the slightest what Gatto is talking about?

>>Did you go to school? Do you spend much of your time talking to school people? Then you are in the system...

Snort. By that definition Gatto is still part of the same system, because he "went to school". Believe it or not, there's a lot of people that study the problems of education, and I've had long conversations with a lot of them. When you study something, and not participating in it, you're effectively outside of it.

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[Paul Fernhout]

"The anarchistic model doesn't work. If you give kids freedom to do work, or not... they don't do it. And then they drop out. Simple as that. There's ample evidence supporting this. I'm not saying that kids don't need *more* freedom - just that giving them too much freedom is pretty much proven not to work."

First off, you don't have to be an "anarchist" to say what is happening to children in most mainstream compulsory schools is very wrong, between the extreme authoritarianism, the drugging (even though through prescription), the violation of civil rights, the rampant bullying, the lack of privacy, the prison-like atmosphere, the lack of choices, and so on:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/

It's not anarchism to say that some place smells like fascism and we can do better in a democracy...

Citations as to drop out rates for alternative schools? And also think it through. What is even the problem of "dropping out"? What are kids missing that has any relevance to their lives these days? Having access to more schooling? Having a "good job" when most jobs are becoming obsolete? Something by an anarcho-socialist: :-)
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Do kids "drop out" of going to the public library or using the internet?
My comments on that:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

On your point on 21st century curriculum goals, as Gatto says here:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. ... After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life. ..."

So, your outlining a good curriculum in terms of aspirations means very little... That's why it is incorrect to say society has discarded the model of schooling designed to make human beings into machine-like reliable workers, soldiers, and consumers. It's still there, in the medium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

Let's go point by point through what you quote:

Creativity and Innovation -- how can you learn that in what is essentially a prison atmosphere with a weird mix of authoritarianism and intense peer pressure you can not avoid (like by staying home or going to the library or picking who you want to hang out with), whatever the course work entails?

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving -- how can you learn that when every question has a "right" answer, and you are not even allowed to get any significant practice about deciding what questions are worth studying because the curriculum has it all laid out for you on a schedule, and you have to pass a standardized test on it?

Communication and Collaboration -- As I linked to for Alfie Kohn, the process of grading damages any attempts at that...

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[ShakaUVM]

First of all, let me preface this by saying that I enjoy talking about education. The trouble is, it's very easy to have an opinion about what works and what doesn't work without having rigorous evaluation results supporting your premise. And it's very hard to get good results, because people are so complicated - it's not like administering a drug to someone and seeing how much their rash decreases (http://xkcd.com/790/).

It's important to evaluate claims for merit, otherwise the situation of having *too many* solutions just gets worse. For example, Gatto et al think the problem with schools is that they're part of a secret conspiracy to turn students into docile sheep for the Secret Masters of the Universe to exploit. To use your summation of his stance, he thinks that students need more freedom, and more chance to exercise their freedom, in order to not become these mindless factory slaves. So that's a claim. What evidence is there for it that this approach works?

1) You mention home schooling, and imply that I am against it or something (I'm not - in fact, I'll help my sister out with math and science if she home schools my niece.) This isn't an especially useful alternative, though, since aside from offering vouchers to parents to home school, you can't really implement it in a widespread fashion. Two-working-parent households means you still need to have to have traditional schooling.

2) You mention that students are held at gunpoint and forced to go to school. Well, there's a reason for that. =) Even before the Prussian model was adopted, parents would force their kids to go to the local schoolhouse, if they didn't just have a private tutor. It didn't seem to turn them into mindless drones.

3) The efficacy of private schools and charter schools is also hard to assess cleanly, since by their very nature parents who are actively engaged in their students' education are going to go to the extra effort of researching different educational options in their area, and involved parents are one of the most powerful indicators for educational success. If you disaggregate achievement data just by the socioeconomic status of the parents (rich parents tend to be more engaged in their students' learning than poor parents), this is one of the most consistent predictors of success for students, regardless of if they go to Montessori schools or the local public school. School culture is also important, and even poor kids going to La Jolla High are going to do better than their peers in the ghetto.

4) You claim that giving students more freedom to self-direct studies (such as with the Montessori method) will improve student learning. The trouble is that giving too much freedom (which I've alluded to before), such as Independant Study Plans and with Alternative Schools are known to have the highest dropout rates. Yes, as you say, these kids are already the kids that have been kicked out of the normal system, but if they're failing in the normal system due to the "prison-like" environment, should they not respond positively to being given more freedom? You asked for a reference for this, but you can pull the data yourself, if you'd like. The CDE STAR reporting system is all online: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/ For example, Chaparral High (an alternative school - http://star.cde.ca.gov/star2010/ViewReport.asp?ps=true&lstTestYear=2010&lstTestType=C&lstCounty=37&lstDistrict=68130-000&lstSchool=3732559&lstGroup=1&lstSubGroup=1) has a pass rate of between 0% and 16% on the standardized tests, compared with rates that are two or three times higher at Grossmont High (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2585597/posts). You can use the dataquest system on CDE's website to pull dropout rates to study yourself, if you'd like. It c

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[Paul Fernhout]

Pointing to one specific school that has low test scores doesn't prove much about all alternatives being worse.

Numbers can help, but they can also mislead. If I say this school has high college acceptance scores, but this school has kids who are kind to each other, which school is "better"? Which school would you send your kids to? We lived for a time in a "top ten" school district (Chappaqua, thankfully before we had a kid, and at first before the Clinton's moved in and it went downhill faster), and the Realtor said, I don't know why he did unless it was to be nice, that we could tell the school district was in the top ten because the teen suicide rate was so high... It's a more general issue now, perhaps.
"Teen Suicide Rate: Highest Increase In 15 Years"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070907221530.htm
And for every kid who does complete a suicide, you can be sure there are many, many others who are in deep distress. So, if you want an important quantitative statistic on modern schooling (and the system it is embedded in), that is one that is easily accessible (even if, like any statistic, it may have its issues, since sometimes things are covered up etc.).

Also:
http://www.edutopia.org/loss-prevention
"Suicide rates among youth have increased threefold in the past half-century, and suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people ages 10-24."

There they question whether schools should get involved in labelling at risk kids or offering prevention programs, but they don't ask whether school contributes to the problem, or whether a better wholistic education process would give kids deeper roots to help keep them from toppling over in life's storms.

And probably most schools approaches miss key points about improving health (vitamin D and whole foods), as well as the real psychological and spiritual side of all that:
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" by Thomas Moore
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
"Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy" by Bruce Levine
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C

The first book is mostly about adults, but the second was written by a psychologist who has treated a lot of adolescent patients and has a lot to say about schooling in that context.
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C&q=school

Beyond those sorts of statistics, which you may rightfully question as to whether they are school's fault, the evidence Gatto cites includes that the USA had (ignoring the genocide against the natives, black slavery, women not voting, etc.) a very vibrant and literate democracy one hundred and fifty years ago, one that inspired the world, back before schooling, back in the time when private family business (usually farm) ownership was widespread and people had a lot more sense of control over many aspects of their lives (ignoring small town privacy problems, racism, sexism, lack of physical mobility, disease, famine, and bad weather, which granted, we have improved on in dealing with in many ways). Again though, correlation does not prove causality. But it can be suggestive...

Still, in general, I'd agree with you, as would someone like John Holt, that people learn best from some mix of guidance and exploration, so one can make a case that people should not just flounder. I'm happy to agree on that, and to the extent free schools deserve some criticism, I've heard people say that self-motivated introverted-leaning children often get more out of them academically (while feeling left out socially), whereas ex

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[ShakaUVM]

>>Pointing to one specific school that has low test scores doesn't prove much about all alternatives being worse.

I know. That's why I provided a link to the front end to the database so you can drill into it to your heart's content, if you're really curious. They have the data available in excel format, too, if you prefer not using a web frontend.

>>If I say this school has high college acceptance scores, but this school has kids who are kind to each other, which school is "better"? Which school would you send your kids to?

It's a good question, and I don't think there's one answer for everyone. We actually chose to buy a house next to the top high school in the area, even though the kids have reputations of being spoiled elitist bastards. Hopefully my wife and I can mitigate the negative while gaining the benefits of the positive for our hypothetical children.

>>Suicide rates among youth have increased threefold in the past half-century

There's a lot of confounding factors in this, and you can't just say it's because schools are more prison-like. As you say, some schools resemble minimum-security facilities these days. And some don't. It would be an interesting study to compare suicide rates / suicidal thoughts by physical appearance of the schools to see if it makes a difference - but since the prison-ish schools are uniformly poor and troubled already, it will be hard to control for all the different factors.

>>Vitamin D and Whole Foods

I know you're hung up on these issues, but the hour of sunlight kids get a day in PE is enough, unless you're living in Alaska or something. They also all drink Vitamin-D enriched milk with school lunches. The nutrition issue is a hot topic in schools these days, with a lot of schools now banning all sodas (even diet sodas) and sugary drinks on campus. Kind of a pain in the ass for people like me that travel to a lot of schools. =)

>>Still, in general, I'd agree with you, as would someone like John Holt, that people learn best from some mix of guidance and exploration, so one can make a case that people should not just flounder. I'm happy to agree on that, and to the extent free schools deserve some criticism, I've heard people say that self-motivated introverted-leaning children often get more out of them academically (while feeling left out socially), whereas extroverted leaning children often miss out academically (while they have a great time socially)

The thing is, there's a real role for teachers to play - it's much easier to learn from someone than it is to teach yourself. By 5th grade, I'd mastered all of the math available in my elementary school, so in 6th grade (it was a K-6 school), they bought an algebra textbook for me, and told me to have fun with it. My teacher couldn't teach algebra, so even though I did quite fine in the first semester of school, when I got stuck on something more complicated, I couldn't get any support, and I floundered the rest of the year.

That's perhaps an extreme example, though. A more common example would be teachers turning their students loose on the internet to "go learn". Without direction, students end up learning a lot less than if they'd just sat down for a lecture by their teacher. There's plenty of papers supporting this, too. Your notion that it's the lack of freedom that's hurting education just doesn't stand up to actual examples with giving kids total freedom.

I do agree with you, though. I do think kids are treated with a certain degree of contempt and lack of trust - teenagers especially. In my high school years, they banned off-campus lunches, for example, and instituted tardy sweeps and other, rather strict policies. I was more than happy to bail out of school at lunch every day my senior year to escape to UC San Diego for advanced math classes (I'd exhausted high school math by the end of 10th grade, and took community college calculus in 11th). But it did have a real effect on reducing truancy and tardiness, which were cutting

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[Paul Fernhout]

I've enjoyed this discussion including your most recent comment here; thanks.

At this point, we may continue to disagree about whether the ends justify the means, and whether the ends should be a person with a lot of skills or a person with a lot of self-direction. No doubt, the truth will be somewhere in the middle (some ends justify some means, and people need both skills and some degree of self-direction to have a happy life). I'm indeed glad that you paint a better picture of people in schools very seriously trying to consider substantial reforms (even if I may still think the entire paradigm remains broken).

Although I would add that schools might improve a lot when we accept that not only should adults try to shape kids into civilized creatures, but also adults should let them be shaped back into joyful creatures by (re)learning many things from children. :-) Something I learned from a comedian (Michael Pritchard), from his video "Making the World a Better Place: Commit Random Acts of Comedy and Create Inverse Paranoids":
http://www.humorproject.com/bookstore/2010.php
as he was quoting Kahlil Gibran:
http://www.katsandogz.com/onchildren.html
"""
On Children
by Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
"""

Just something to think about. That video is really great. I got it at a "humor conference" I went to a couple years ago.

A couple factoids, for you to make what you will of:

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.speregen/physical_education_and_school_performance
"Despite the wealth of knowledge concerning the benefits of physical education and physical activity, only 8% of elementary schools, 6.4% of middle schools, and 5.8% of high schools provide daily physical education to all of its students (SHPPS, 2000)."

http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDPhysiology.shtml
"Studies show that if you go out in the summer sun in your bathing suit until your skin just begins to turn pink, you make between 10,000 and 50,000 units of cholecalciferol in your skin. Professor Michael Holick of Boston University School of Medicine has studied this extensively and believes a reasonable average of all th

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[ShakaUVM]

>>Which brings us back to what, at the moment, we are probably not going to come to agreement on. We can't agree on "What works?" unless we can reasonable agree on "What are we trying to achieve?". I think we agree on some aspects of that, but we still emphasize, or accept, different goals and side-effects.

All other things aside, I think we all (including teachers, parents, and administrators) want the same things for our students. That's where I think Gatto is wrong - he's hung up on a paradigm that is years out of date in a system that reinvents itself a couple times a decade. It's like dog-years, or CPU aging in the 1990s. Saying that our educational system is designed to produce factory drones is like saying that modern CPUs are too complicated to speed up because they have a CISC architecture.

In general, I think the most important factor in education is to get kids engaged. When I teach (I guest lecture at the local community college a few times a year), when I ask questions, it's never, "Does anyone know what year George Washington was born?" because, honestly, they don't know, and I don't know, and it's not really important anyway. A much better question about George Washington would be to ask, "He's known as the father of our freedom, but he kept slaves - do you think he's a hypocrite?" or "Do you think companies should follow voluntary environmental codes, even if it means the company might go out of business?" And using the questions to drive conversation, and to get people to think.

The way the human brain works is that it remembers facts that it knows it's going to use. I could tell you every week what day George Washington was born on, and you'd forget it. UNTIL, and this is the key point, I explain that President's Day Holiday was originally based on Washington's Birthday. Since which days you get off from school are very memorable to you, you'll always remember it is in mid February some time. Likewise, if you get into an ethical discussion over George Washington's treatment of slaves, you're never going to forget the fact that he had slaves. And so forth.

I personally think that cognitive science people should take all their lessons on memory and apply it to the educational realm. Some are doing it already.

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[ShakaUVM]

BTW, if you pick up this week's edition of Time, it has a good series of articles about the problems facing education, and goes right along with what I was talking about in regards to needing evaluation in order to really tell which ideas work in the classroom. It also goes into the issues of teachers unions harming education, which is another pet peeve of mine.

Re:Is Gatto a "paranoid schizophrenic"?

[Paul Fernhout]

When I was learning to fly gliders at the Princeton University airport (sadly now given up to development), as I was circling to land and had right of way some helicopter flew across my path at a very fast rate and landed there. It was some executive from Time I guess (and they had copies of the magazine you could see through the bubble canopy). Anyway, when Time says non-mainstream stuff, it is interesting to me. When they echo a mainstream line, I can wonder.

Is this the article?
"What Makes A School Great"
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20100920,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2016978,00.html
"But the film succeeds because it also lays out the solutions, something no one could credibly attempt to do until very recently. Today, several decades into America's long fight over how to upend the status quo in public education, three remarkable things are happening simultaneously. First, thanks partly to the blunt instruments of No Child Left Behind, we can now track how well individual students are doing from year to year -- and figure out which schools are working and which are not. Second, legions of public schools -- some charters, some not -- are succeeding while others flounder. These schools are altering fundamentals that were for so long untouchable, insisting on great teachers, more class time and higher standards. The third novelty is in Washington, where a Democratic President is standing up to his party's most dysfunctional long-term romantic interest, the teachers' unions. ... It's worth noting that these are early days. The vast majority of American kids have yet to be affected by any of these changes. But the drumbeat is hard to ignore. We may be on the cusp of running schools -- brace yourself -- according to what actually works."

As I said, you get what you measure. Are people measuring how happy kids are during school or during their lifetime? Saying schools are good because some kid does well on a test is like saying some drug like Vioxx is good because it works in the short term (and we don't care what it does to anyone ten years down the road).

So, if you want to measure, you should measure a lot of things. :-) But how do you measure someone's soul? So there are limits to measurement too. As Einstein said, our goals need to come from some process outside of what we are measuring in some way.

Which just gets back to the goals of education. If a goal is to get people participating in our democracy in a healthy way, then common sense suggests making them spend thirteen years of their life in a day-prison is probably not the best way to do it, whatever the numbers say. We know how most kids learn, and learning by doing is very important.

Again though, this is not to dispute the value of learning communities, good role models, tutoring, mentoring, well-equipped labs, and so on.

Anyway, I guess another aspect of this is to separate the term "schooling" from "education". The two are just not the same, even if there is sometimes some overlap. And you may never fix the social problem that the people who have become and stayed schoolteachers are those willing to jump through hoops on demand and make other staff as well as students do the same. Because you are a self-starter, that may not be so obvious to you, because you, like I, have probably enjoyed jumping through those hoops because we were good at it and did get something out of it. But that is not true for most people, and even for us, it may not have been very healthy in the long term.

Really, what is the justification for schools at all, as opposed to better libraries and a network of other learning opportunities (with families having enough to afford tutors through a basic income)? Locking children away for their entire youth is just a dim vie

Does IPad Teach English?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is stevej6x7 the Anonymous Coward. The author of this entry could benefit from some English lessons. That last sentence attempt was a doosie. Although, in all fairness, it makes the point.

Re:Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might wo

[Anonymous Coward]

Been there. Done that. Apple put laptops in the hands of schoolchildren in similar pilot programs years ago. Apple and the schools are far more familiar with such issues than you suggest.

Yeah, durn them GUBMENT byoorecrats!

[Benfea]

If only they did things like the corporate world... where the exact same thing happens.

The first time I encountered this phenomenon was in a corporate setting. The end of the fiscal year approached, and each department seemed to be competing with the others to see who could blow the most money on the most useless crap. In fact the only organizations at which I have not seen this phenomenon is at smaller companies and smaller non-profits.

Re:Its a pilot program, an experiment, it might wo

[celesteh]

If this actually works and students learn more / better, then certainly it would be a worthwhile experiment. God knows, California seems to have money for prisons. You'd think they could spare a bit for schools.

cfhhh

[lokmm1452]

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The education revolution towards a peaceful word

[Paul Fernhout]

From 1991: "Educating for a Peaceful World" http://www.forums.alliance21.org/d_read/pax/articles/Deutsch.htm
"This article outlines a program of what schools can do to encourage the values, attitudes, and knowledge that foster constructive rather than destructive relations, which prepare children to live in a peaceful world. It describes four key components of such programs: cooperative learning, conflict resolution training, the constructive use of controversy in teaching subject matters, and the creation of dispute resolution centers in schools. ...
Families and schools are the two most important institutions that influence developing children's predispositions to hate and to love. Although the influence of the family comes earlier and is often more profound, there is good reason to believe that children's subsequent experiences in schools can modify or strengthen their earlier acquired dispositions. In this article, I outline a program that schools can follow to encourage the development of the values, attitudes, and knowledge that foster constructive rather than destructive relations, which prepare children to live in a peaceful world. ...
Many schools do not provide much constructive social experience for students. Too often, schools are structured in ways that pit students against one another. They compete for teachers' attention, for grades, for status, and for admission to prestigious schools. Being put down and putting down others are pervasive occurrences. Many of us can recall classroom experiences of hoping that another student, who was called on by the teacher instead of us, would give the wrong answer so that we could get called on and give the right answer.
In recent years, it has been increasingly recognized that schools have to change in basic ways if we are to educate children so that they are for rather than against one another, so that they develop the ability to resolve their conflicts constructively rather than destructively and are prepared to live in a peaceful world. This recognition has been expressed in a number of interrelated movements: cooperative learning, conflict resolution, and education for peace. In my view, there are four key components in these overlapping movements: cooperative learning, conflict resolution training, the constructive use of controversy in teaching subject matters, and the creation of dispute resolution centers in the schools. I discuss each briefly, with more emphasis on cooperative learning and conflict resolution because I have worked more extensively in these two areas and because they provide a valuable base for education in constructive controversy and mediation."

Twenty years later, how much of that do schools embody? Why keep giving schools second, third, and fifty-third chances? Why should we continue to hope, after decades of failures of attempts at reform, that a social system called compulsory public schooling that was very carefully designed to produce compliant soldiers for 1800s-era Prussian Monarchy could ever be reformed to fit the educational needs of healthily-engaged citizens of 21st century democracies? As opposed to, say, just providing the same amount of money to the public library system or even directly to parents?

Instead, almost all public schools still emphasize "grading", which Alfie Kohn explains to be destructive to human relationships:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
"You can tell a lot about a teacher's values and personality just by asking how he or she feels about giving grades. Some defend the practice, claiming that grades are necessary to "motivate" students. Many of these teachers actually seem to enjoy keeping intricate records of students' marks. Such teachers periodically warn students that they're "going to have to know this for the test" as a way

Re: education revolution towards a peaceful world

[Paul Fernhout]

Just as a caveat, and to clarify my own beliefs, I believe in the importance of both meshworks and hierarchies as Manuel DeLanda talks about:
    "MESHWORKS, HIERARCHIES AND INTERFACES"
    http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
we need to be careful not to turn the oppression of people against each other into the oppression of the group against the individual. So, it is a dynamic and creative balancing act...

An example of the other side of this that people rightly reject:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Change_of_Mind
"This episode deals with conformity, methods of enforcing it, and the consequences of its rejection.[2] In particular, it has been said that the episode addresses both McCarthyism (in which "unmutual" is equivalent to "communist") and the show trials of Stalinist Russia (which often featured coerced confessions), as well as the ethical issues of lobotomy.[3] At one point, some of the other prisoners are shown going through "self-criticism", which was common in China at the time."

So, to the extent social institutions can help people find that balance, they can be good things. But, that does not mean schools-as-we-know-them are good at that, or ever would be.

Re:The education revolution towards a peaceful wor

[ShakaUVM]

At a certain level though, a student has to be able to do arithmetic, be able to read, and write, in order to do anything in our society. If he's going to be an engineer, he needs math (especially algebra) and the fundamentals of science.

Waiting for Superman makes one point clear - American kids are not lacking on confidence. So perhaps focusing more on building up their self-esteem, at the cost of a more rigorous education in math, science, and ELA, is not really the right way to go.

Turning loose a kid in a library is just a recipe for disaster, and this is from a kid that spent a large chunk of his childhood reading everything that interested him in the library. You need a structured learning enviroment, and kids need to be able to prove they've learned something at a certain level.

Does this mean the current system of standardized testing is ideal? Certainly not. Do grades always make sense? Especially in classes like Journalism or Art, which mainly grade merely on attendance, instead of quality? - no. But kids do need, ultimately, to be able to prove they can do certain basic skills.

Re:The education revolution towards a peaceful wor

[Paul Fernhout]

"Turning loose a kid in a library is just a recipe for disaster..."

According to whose goal? What goal? And where are the parents? Where is the librarian? Where are the neighbors? Where are the other community members? All too busy to help? Well, then maybe we have a *community* problem and not a *library* problem?

"But kids do need, ultimately, to be able to prove they can do certain basic skills."

Prove to whom? Why? When? How?

When they get their engineer's license? Sure...

But since no one in the USA seems to want to be an engineer anymore (sadly, see a recent New Yorker article on Dyson where this is lamented by someone at NSF), why focus on them? Or maybe we need to change other aspects of the culture first, so people want to be engineers again, maybe with having more freedom somehow to design new and useful things? (I've seen a lot of engineering nonsense in many years of work around corporations, including IBM Research...)

By the way, discussion on Gatto:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:John_Taylor_Gatto
"At the time this criticism was added, the scholar in question (Wade A. Carpenter) had already changed his views on Gatto: "I saw the book as basically factual, but one-sided and angry. I believed then that Gatto was correct but wrong: that there was far more good going on in our schools than harm. Over the past year or so,my opinion has changed.I’ve encountered the most despicable miseducation I’ve seen or even heard of in thirty-three years of teaching—so bad, in fact, that I’m no longer willing to be tactful.""

The link on Wikipedia is broken, but Googling around I found this:
http://www.newfoundations.com/Carpenter/NCLB.html

Again, I'm not disagreeing with you on the value of some structure. I'm just asking, what kind of structure? And when? And for who?

And why should "compulsory public schools" have anything to do with whatever the solution is, as opposed to the public library or a public internet (and sites like Khan Academy)?

Even if kids at some time need to "prove" something (like pass a drivers test) why do we need compulsory public schools for that, at great expense, and with all sorts of demonstrated pathologies?

I have no doubt the school buildings could be repurposed to good use as bigger libraries, craft centers, meeting places for tutoring sessions, get together places for learning communities, and so on. As I suggest here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

Still, as I wrote there, there would be downsides to letting the parents decide how to spend the dollars now going to schools: :-)
"So, ironically, if schools were to give in gracefully to this idea, they might even get bigger as they got more voluntary and broadened their missions to include people of all ages learning anything. :-) So, the current school superintendents would become more like college campus presidents, and thus get more prestige, bigger offices with larger staffs, and of course, bigger salaries to go with that all. :-) Naturally, as schools expanded, this might cause various urban planning problems, and parking issues, and demands for more local public transit to get to them, and so on, but presumably we have a lot of good urban planners in NYS who could help with that, even as they might quickly feel pressured. Likewise, a rapid increase in construction and renovations around schools might cause various local shortages of construction workers and other tradespeople and so on. Likewise, all the families with young children moving to the state would strain the capacity of real estate agents, and overload the malls, and create traffic jams near supermarkets and toy stores. The new bus

On humans as makers and schools ignoring that

[Paul Fernhout]

One more thing just in the news that relates to my point the the problem with measurement is precisely that you get what you measure:
    "School for Hackers: The do-it-yourself movement revives learning by doing."
by Mark Frauenfelder
    http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/school-for-hackers/8218
"When a kid builds a model rocket, or a kite, or a birdhouse, she not only picks up math, physics, and chemistry along the way, she also develops her creativity, resourcefulness, planning abilities, curiosity, and engagement with the world around her. But since these things can't be measured on a standardized test, schools no longer focus on them. As our public educational institutions continue down this grim road, they'll lose value as places of learning. That may seem like a shame, but to the members of the growing DIY schooling movement, it's an irresistible opportunity to roll up their sleeves. "

Also, with a five minute video about Mark Frauenfelder's journey into making more of his own stuff, including how when you make things yourself they have stories, and linking this to a change in our culture after WWII and losing an important part of human existence as tool makers and tool users:
"Boing Boing Co-Founder Mark Frauenfelder on Maker Education"
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/boing-boing-co-founder-mark-frauenfelder-on-maker-education/63017/

The education revolution towards making stuff

[Paul Fernhout]

"At a certain level though, a student has to be able to do arithmetic, be able to read, and write, in order to do anything in our society. If he's going to be an engineer, he needs math (especially algebra) and the fundamentals of science."

In terms of continuing to try to reconcile our common interests to the greatest extent possible, consider, and connected with the previous item on Mark Frauenhoffer's comments on schools and the Maker/DIY movement, consider this by Seymour Papert:
    http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
"I have had a lot of flack from people who read this column (and other things I have written) as advocating taking the hard work and discipline out of learning. I don't blame them. I am a critic of the ways in which traditional school forces kids to learn and most attempts to introduce a more engaging, less coercive curriculum do indeed end up taking the guts out of the learning. But it is not fair to hold me guilty by association. My whole career in education has been devoted to finding kinds of work that will harness the passion of the learner to the hard work needed to master difficult material and acquire habits of self-discipline. But it is not easy to find the right language to explain how I think I am different from the "touchy feely ... make it fun make it easy" approaches to education.
    Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language that helps. The Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged neighborhood of San Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own enough computers for students to spend significant time with them every day. Their introduction, for all grades, was learning to program, in the computer language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one child using these words to describe the computer work: "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo." I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.
    Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to the individual and to the culture of the times. These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world. ..."

Which also relates to this story (from the 1950s but presaged the web):
    "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon
    http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1

And this essay by from 1985 that presaged the ongoing DIY/Maker/Open trends:
    "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

And also this other item I just posted related to the DIY/Maker/OpenManufacturing scene:
  http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/70fec0838320517b