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Ann Arbor Schools Want $45M For Tech, Partly For Computers To Run Google Docs
An anonymous reader writes "The Ann Arbor Public Schools defended their request for a $45 million bond for new computers by claiming that Apple eMacs aren't good enough for their Advanced Journalism class. A teacher told reporters that new PCs are needed to run WordPress, Google Docs, and Adobe InDesign CS6. WordPress and Google Docs are server-based applications that can be accessed with nearly any web browser. InDesign CS6 has not been released yet and its system requirements are unknown. As a web developer, I am impressed by the online newspaper published by the journalism class, but I question the need for new hardware. The district previously claimed that the old computers couldn't run its standardized testing software, although they far surpass the vendor's specifications. Does modern education really require cutting-edge computers, or are schools screaming 'think of the children' to win over tech-illiterate voters?" Whatever the answer to that question, exaggerated system requirements aren't the only driving force; the $45 million bond sought would not be dedicated only to replacing journalism program computers, note; it would also be used to fund other infrastructure upgrades, including some lower-tech updates, like new sound amplifiers in the district's classrooms. Ann Arbor schools' web site says that the district has (as of 2010, at least) 16,440 students. What are tech outlays like in the public schools where you live?
$2700 and change per student seems a little high for a tech budget...
Apple stopped production on the eMac line back in 2006. Assuming they got the last one for sale, that means a 6 year lifespan. Sounds like they're due for a replacement.
The eMac line uses G4 chips (not Intel) and was discontinued in 2006. Mac speed 700mhz. Probably not much RAM. They were very nice machines in their day. That day has passed. Now much software requires Intel, and they can't run the latest version of the Mac OS (Lion). So yeah, it's time for new hardware.
From there, you could argue how cutting edge the new stuff should be. But if they are buying on a 6+ plus replacement cycle, it's best to at least buy at today's hockey-stick price point where you get maximum power CPUs at the best bang-for-the-buck -- i.e. just a bit short of the overpriced bleeding edge chips.
They're now using #3 pencils instead of #2.
There is not a chance in the world the county government where I live would float a bond anywhere close to that size for technology upgrades, especially when those upgrades might by obsolete in 3-5 years. For the size system we have, with the same spending per student, that would be roughly $22 million. Even if we hadn't just floated $100M worth of bonds for building 2 high schools and a middle school, there would be zero chance of that passing. Typically, technology here is funded at the school level though PTA fund raising. It was quite the big deal when they announced that all of the elementary school classrooms in the county were not equipped with Smartboards, after 7 years of fundraising. The school board would be run out on a rail for suggesting such a bond.
As TFA says, "more than half of the $45.8 million, about $25 million, would be spent to replace the district’s computers — both laptops and desktops.". So that comes down to 1520/student. More importantly, this is for a program of improvements over the next *ten years*, not an immediate replacement job - as the article argues that the >3 years old computers currently in use are obsolete, I assume the money might fund more than one cycle of improvements. At one cycle per 3 years, we're talking ~500 dollars per student, not accounting for inflation, which seems pretty sensible. Anyway this all seems like a storm in a teacup.
They really are pretty much useless these days, I have just retired an office full of them that have been soldiering on for years but the number of websites that were simply not available to them became too great.
The new $999 MacBook Air to education buyers is to small screen and under powered for CS 5 / CS 6 (2 GB RAM max).
eMacs not good enough? But I never know vi costs so much!
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Voters get conned into voting for higher school budgets because they want better schools and higher property values, but the truth is much of the money is wasted. I voted against several school budgets that had over $1mil set aside for landscaping.
... it's about the children, it's never about the children.
Be seeing you...
The eMac OS support tops out at either 10.4 or 10.5 depending on processor speed, and uses a PowerPC architecture. I'd imagine that current-generation browsers are starting to get harder to get hold of for PPC, and web apps tend to demand up-to-date browsers.
The last eMac was released almost seven years ago. Seven years is not a short upgrade cycle even for educational machines by any stretch of the imagination.
Thus the upgrade is not unjustified (heck, even if the web app was unjustified, you'd still need new machines for a current version of Indesign, which is kind of a requirement for an "advanced" journalism class). Whether the budget allocated for the planned upgrade is justified is another matter, though.
In all cases such as these, look to the people in charge... either a powerful teacher/board member/it lead/administrator has it in their head that these purchases are necessary and have gathered hoards behind their cause. Wether or not they do need them is not necessarily an issue, it is the IDEA that they need them that counts in these minds. Politics is everywhere. Also, someone should alert Redmond, as there is a school district using other than Microsoft Produkts with which to compute.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I think it's premature to rule one way or the other without looking very carefully at it.
If it's 45M for journalism classes and only that... then I feel it's probably a waste because we don't have a pressing need for huge numbers of journalists. The industry is already saturated.
If they wanted 45M for programming classes or something more practical then I might see it differently. But for journalism? Page layout is not that complicated. Why do high school students need to learn how to layout a newspaper when in all likelihood only one student out of a thousand will actually be a journalist. And of that, probably one out of a hundred thousand will actually lay pages out. And even then how long does it take a professional journalist to learn how to lay a page out?
The whole concept of a highly digital modern journalism class with expensive materials in this economic climate seems extremely wasteful and pointless.
My mind isn't closed on the issue but they'd have to make a REALLY good case for getting that kind of money for that kind of class.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Screw it, I'll bite.
Your salary could probably feed the entire country if you use their rates. What's your point? They've already banked a few million from their pirating and are still starving - what's that tell you?
More aid in that general direction doesn't seem to really help those groups in the long term. There's a lot of "feeding them fish" instead of "teaching them to fish" going on that's creating codependence, not self-reliance.
You couldn't GIVE them away today. You would literally have to pay someone to come and dispose of them as eWaste.
We're not talking cutting edge - we're talking 40 gig hard drives, 128 meg of ram, 16" viewable area CRTs. Some of them are still only usb 1.
Would it be worth upgrading them? Not really - even if you did stuff 2 gig into them, it can only use 1 - and that old-style slow ram is getting expensive.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
They were Apple's very last system to use a standard CRT monitor instead of a flat panel. That alone relegates them to the realm of "antiquated hardware" in many people's eyes, no matter what else they're capable of doing.
I'd venture to say the Apple eMac is generally looked upon as the least desirable Mac Apple released ever since the dawn of OS X. Not sure that's really a fair assessment -- but it's the reality of the situation.
There are so many factors in the state of the education system, it's hard to pick any one of them as the keystone. A bajillion dollars is not enough to substitute for parents who don't participate in their kids' education. A bajillion dollars is not enough to correct a society who tells kids it's more important to be a football star than learn math. A bajillion dollars won't make a dent in a stodgy, horribly outdated pedagogical culture that is protected and perpetuated by entrenched interests (teacher's unions, colleges offering degrees in education, textbook publishers, testing companies, etc etc). A bajillion dollars won't improve the performance of obese kids too whacked out on high-fructose corn syrup, junk food, and ritalin to pay attention.
It is true that it is hard to teach a computer class without computers. It is not true that you cannot teach a computer class with old computers. It is not true that you cannot teach a computer class without expensive computers.
In the end putting outsized requests like this in sounds like the timeless bureaucratic game of, grow your budget with ridiculous requests to SAVE THE CHILDREN, then point out how big the budget is that you're now managing, and cry about how much more work it is to manage that large budget and how you can't possibly handle it without a 25% increase in the size of your staff and a 25% bump in your pay.
If /.'s minds can come up with an effective way to unwind that dynamic (and, no, crying 'small government' doesn't and hasn't worked because they just grow different parts of the government, not shrink the total), then it will have performed a greater boon for mankind and done more for its advancement than nearly any other achievement in human history.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
This is a reasonable concern not just locally but globally. Has our educational system lost its ability to spend/request/use tools for the right reasons? Are our educators qualified to make these kinds of decisions? Personally I try to help my local district make some decisions about technology - hopefully other technology experts are doing this too.
Some side points:
1 - Check your geography. Ann Arbor is in Michigan - adjacent to Wisconsin but not the same STATE. Obviously education dollars were not spend well wherever you live.
2- RTFA/RTFQ - There is a bigger question here about how much is your school district spending on technology for education - you arrogant bastard.
3 - You should be concerned because if this is happening in Ann Arbor, it is probably happening in your backyard too. Unless you don't care where your tax dollars are spent - if that is the case mail a money order to "SPEND A TON on COMPUTERS", c/o Ann Arbor Public School District, 2555 South State Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104....
My daughters in the Academy Program, they don't have eMacs, or the latest iGadget her school, they have 4 year old computer systems that run whatever they need perfectly well. The do have the next to latest edition of Office, but the school allows projects to be turned in that were done in Open Source formats as well, and this is for one of the top rated public schools within 100 miles.
This seems more like someone that is anti-apple and just wants the latest and greatest gadgets to play with. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that some of that software found it's way onto the teachers' home computers as well, "we have to know how to use it to teach the children".
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Curiously enough, Ann Arbor is in Michigan, not Wisconsin. Wisconsin is sorta near Michigan, though...
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
I grew up and now work in Ann Arbor. Posting as anonymous, for obvious reasons. First, some background. Ann Arbor Public Schools has become a reference model for how not to run a school district. The district routinely has nationwide searches at great expense to find a new superintendent, simply because (1) the average tenure of a superintendent in Michigan is less than two years and (2) none of them are stupid enough to come to a district as dysfunctional as Ann Arbor.
The current superintendent came from a rural district in Pennsylvania, and was old enough to actually retire from her old district to take the job here. But hell, at least she was available.
The tech crisis is at least real. Those really are eMacs being used in the classrooms... yes, the eMac that Apple stopped making in 2005. The district has a budget deficit of $14 million, due to a perfect storm of decreasing state funding (Michigan is not exactly a bastion of tax revenue), decreasing local property values, and fewer students (the #1 local tax payer and #2 employer, Pfizer, pulled out in 2007).
The odd thing is, the district is, by many measures, not bad. But that's due primarily to high student achievement due to the relatively educated population (over 70% of Ann Arbor residents have a 4-year degree or more). Meanwhile, we have high schools that are too big, middle schools that are a disaster, and elementary schools that are actually OK (but not great). On a side note, did I mention that my father teaches for AAPS, and I went to private school? Yeah...
"this is my last post to Slashdot."
If I had a nickle every time I read that....I'd have a buck 65.
You're not leaving and you know it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I personally don't live anywhere near Wisconsin ...
Geography FIAL. Or perhaps just an inadvertent non-sequitor.
Ann Arbor is in Michigan. In the corner of the state farthest away from Wisconsin.
Ok, agreed. But perhaps learning about what happens in other school districts can prepare people for similar situations in their own?
What arrogance. this is my last post to Slashdot. Cya. Unbelievable.
So long. Thanks for all the ghoti.
Well, I for one, know that you will be missed. Although I'm not sure what Wisconsin has to do with Ann Arbor, which is in a different state, I know that a lot of people will agree that only people in Wisconsin should have any say on what happens in AA.
IIRC, didn't I read something about Ann Arbor and Slashdot having some sort of relationship? Friends, FWB, Exes, or something like that?
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
I, on the other hand, used to live in Racine County Wisconsin, and despite paying ridiculous property tax rates the school systems were crap. I paid 2% of my homes value every year in taxes, which is even higher than DuPage county, Illinois (1.67%), even though that county is often touted as having the highest property tax rates. Yest, the schools sucked. Standardized scores sucked, the bus system sucked, the teachers were paid less than national average. There was no money for band, sports or activities. The money was clearly all going into somebodies pocket.
I still think that people who didn't live anywhere near there are allowed to have a say. Personally, I think $45 million is way too high for a computer overhaul in a public school. That is $2700 per student in the district, and probably less than 1/3 of the students in the district will end up in a class in which they need to use a computer. There are districts that only spend $5,000 for the whole budget per student, not just on the computer allotment.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
At $1000 per machine, that would be 4,500 PCs in their budget. One machine for every 4 students.
At $500 per machine, a reasonable price for such a bulk-volume purchase, that would be 9,000 PCs, or one machine for every 2 students.
Methinks that kind of money would be better spent on hiring better TEACHERS than buying equipment.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The first article is about Ann Arbor Community High School, and they are the ones with the eMacs. I doubt Pioneer, Huron, or Skyline are still using ancient computers which were pieces of crap when they were new. So, while AACHS might get some new computers, upgrades could be made for some of the other high schools.
Also, new servers would be needed, and on top of the actual hardware cost, you have to pay someone to set up all of the machines, install the software (or at least create the master image and set it for automatic distribution), etc. You can't just go out and buy inexpensive Dell machines for $600 a piece and be done with it. Hardware cost is probably the least expensive part of the equation. Software licenses, set up, installation, etc would easily be more than that.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
As a Computer Science teacher from Michigan, I am disappointed by the lack of resourcefulness exhibited by the Ann Arbor school administrators. Currently, I am in a room filled with equipment from:
Selfridge ANGB
U.S. Navy
Corporations
Universities
Many local sources
All of this equipment was acquired for FREE. All that I have had to occasionally pay is shipping. The lowest end equipment that I have is P4 2.8Ghz. We run Untangle as an Internet gateway through Comcast for FREE. I suggest that Ann Arbor Schools look to the following to reduce their costs:
U of M
http://computersforlearning.gov/
Meijer
etc.
There is a trust issue here. Once the public knows that the schools are working hard to rein in costs, then they can reasonably ask for what they need. A tech wish list without due diligence and fiduciary constraint is just asking to be flamed.
I don't find it unreasonable that computers made in 2006 (which were underpowered at the time) are due for a replacement. There are reasons (for and against) to pay the Apple tax to get their hardware. That is completely secondary to the main issue.The problem I have is using bond money for this expense. The real issue here is the horrible mismangement that led to the need for a bond issue to replace depreciable assets. Bonds are supposed to be for capital improvements. This means new schools, major rennovations or upgrades. Bond money is not supposed to be used for rountine repair, replacment, or basic expsenses. Building a new wing for [whatever reader thinks is worthwhile] is good. Paying for teacher salaries with bonds is bad. I consider this to be the same as using bond money to buy new books. Book are a depreciable short term asset that need frequent replacement: they should not be considered a capital expense. Likewise computers.
After all, the company probably needs to make a big donation to make up for CEO Jamie Dimon's assertions that journalists make too much money,. . .
And who is going to support these "changing every week because we can't source the same components this month that we did last month" monstrosities built with little to no quality control by teenagers in training? Who's going to make sure that they have consistent software loads when an image is good for for all of a month before a new one has to be made due to significant hardware change?
Also, have you ever done work in a build factory? Back in the day when I was first getting into this industry, my first job was doing tech support for an early Dell/Gateway competitor. Back when there were dozens of mom and pop operations doing mail order whitebox systems. As part of my "training" I spent a week on the line building computers. Talk about useless. Once you see how motherboards screw in, how you slide in PCI cards (actually they were ISA and PCI at the time), how you seat CPUs and RAM; well, you've seen it. Do it once it's an experience, two or three times it's a novelty. After the fourth time you've learned all you need to. And you need thousands of computers for a school district. Either every kid builds a few, or a small number of kids who take the wrong elective become slave labor.
Meanwhile, what have they been "trained" for? Building PCs in industry is largely an automated process now, or done by cheap Chinese workers for a dollar an hour. There's no "good jobs" in building PCs. There's money to made as a skilled IT person or a development engineer, but building computers isn't even 2% of what people like that do. The only computer I've built in the last 10 years is the one I use at home. Very occasionally I put in a PCI card or add RAM to a box, but there's not really much "skill" there. You can't learn valuable IT or programming skills when your class is tasked with providing the school system 1000 computers this year either.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I sat on a school board (until last year) and ran the Technology subcommittee. We budgeted and spent about $45/student/year on technology. I think this was reasonable and provided a complete computer classroom used by every student every year teaching them solid computer skills, along with equipping classrooms with reasonable computer and AV equipment. Each teacher got their own laptop replaced every 3 years. In this Ann Arbor situation assuming a 5 year lifecycle to IT equipment. $45M over 5 years over 16440 students, works out to be $547/student/year. In my experience this is absurdly high. I pulled it off for $45/student, why do they need $547/student? A closer review is required before sent to the voters.
I've yet to see a well done study that shows that technology of any kind advances education. Besides enormous hardware and software costs, the planning, architecture, design and implementation of a strategy that properly integrates the technology into the lesson planning is complicated, expensive, and frankly requires more smarts than the average school IT guy can muster.
A great example of stupid school spending is happening in California schools all over the state right now. We're in the middle of a huge budget crunch. The governor plans to cut all school transportation. Our school superintendent says we'll be cutting PE and library headcount to zero soon. We're laying off teachers and class sizes are ballooning.
Whats the solution you say? Buy ipads for every class room! A running program right now is equipping all California class rooms with 5 ipads! Thats approximately $100K per school.
Why arent the ipads helping? First off, the schools break up the classes into reading groups. As far as I know, none of the schools in CA have 5 kids per reading group, ours has six. So when I volunteer, one kid has to wait for the other 5 to finish with the ipads, then they can go. The kids have to log into an account with a long complex user name and password, for security you know. Of course they cant remember it. The kids also easily get out of the testing applications and start playing games.
The mechanics are thus: we read the book and then answer a quiz on the ipad, which gives a score. That information then has to be transcribed onto paper because its not integrated into the other school education systems, and then re-entered elsewhere.
So the bottom line is that our nice relatively calm reading courses are now filled with "I dont wanna be the one who has to wait", half my time is spent fixing technical shenanigans, and the outcome is everyone doing the teaching is working harder for a lesser outcome.
So how about we hire teachers, buy books, if we're going to buy tablets buy 25 of the $69 or $99 ones and outfit it with apps that actually make life easier so every kid in the class has one? Maybe when the economy is flush and we have more money than we know what to do with, then we can buy overpriced apple do-dads for a small number of kids.
The first argument I get on bringing up the stupidity of this whole thing is that these are allegedly donated. Fine. Then one of the hundreds of education and political people involved with that size donation should have educated the donor on how he or she was wasting an awful lot of money on something that would actually be a negative as far as education of the children go. But I dont think they'd give a crap. Someone with a big heart and no understanding of education thought you could just throw ipads out there like Johnny Appleseed and the kids would just get smarter. Just like the ads say. Buy an ipad and your kid will instantly become a creative genius and learn automatically!
Ehh...no.
The e-Macs are really long in the tooth...modern software will not run these machines (even Firefox 4... and FF is now up to something like 10). The OS is no longer supported (Macs have a very short OS support lifetime). I don't think CS5 runs on PowerPC. The CRT monitors are power, space and A/C hogs. The harddrives are about to go. No the request for new machines isn't unreasonable....Whether to replace with Macs or PCs is another discussion.
I can see complaining about the pixel count -- that's comparable to many laptops these days. But complaining about it being a CRT? I'd rather have a CRT for serious graphics works with all other things being equal. And until Apple went to the glass-front LCD screens, I wouldn't have put an LCD in a classroom as they're so obnoxious to keep fingerprints off 'em.
If you're going to complain about CRTs, at least complain about the power consumption vs. LCDs with LED backlighting.
What's going to be the killer is that if they have to upgrade the hardware, odds are they haven't upgraded software in years ... and there's no Rosetta in 10.7, so they can't run PPC software on the latest released OS and I don't know how easy it is to put 10.6 on the current generation of hardware.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
There's a lot of "feeding them fish" instead of "teaching them to fish" going on that's creating codependence, not self-reliance.
Whilst I largely agree with you, it's an unfortunate choice of metaphor, since overfishing by foreign trawlers is often cited as one of the things that has made Somalia less self-reliant.
Lets see wordpress doesn't need much power, Google Docs is a waste of time, just use Libra Office, Linux is free and so is the Gimp so just get good solid computers and install Linux, I just saved 40 Million.
Discontinued 6 years ago. Have PPC not Intel CPU and are therefore are pretty much obsolete. Can't run any up to date browsers and a lot of software. So, yes, they need to replace these computers.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Touche`!
Why not have the shop kids maintain the district school busses? You know, oil changes, transmission flushes, brake jobs...etc....by the way, the kids need those very same busses to get to school.
Learning on production infrastructure is not a wise operational decision.
Kids and teachers in schools have their own jobs to do. Teachers are expected to teach, students are expected to learn - those are their jobs. We, the taxpayers of society, are responsible for giving them the facilities and infrastructure to do both. Expecting students and teachers to build and maintain that infrastructure while trying to learn is nothing more than slave labor.
If I was hired at a company to do a job unrelated to IT, I would be pretty upset if I had to roll my own IT stuff to get my real job done. Apart from being unfair to the employee, it's a stupidly inefficient way to operate any business or organization.
-ted
Ann Arbor property taxes are currently about 2.2876% of property value per year. This includes lots of money for Garbage Collection, State ED Tax, the Public Library, Mass Transit, and the Community College. Currently I'm already paying about $950 a year for the Ann Arbor public schools, and that doesn't include the State ED Tax.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
nothing close to what you asked for. Asking for anything in the public sector is much like negotiating a salary, or selling an item: Ask for the world, your original offer will be cut back to a percentage. Of course the instructor knows he doesn't need supercomputers to run software X...he just knows that if he aims high, he will get closer to what he knows he needs.
Bonds are voter approved which means that you have to play politics. Our district needed to make structural improvements on a few of our campuses that hadn't been touched in 50 years. We also needed to overhaul our network infrastructure, especially with a couple of our sites still communicating with the data center over T1. However, buildings and network/data center improvements are not sexy. Not one bit. So we also put interactive whiteboards, doc cams and projectors in every classroom. The Interactive classroom tech came out to about $3 million. It was a $175 million bond. Guess what all the publicity/propaganda was focused on.
I expect a graduate of a specialized, applied university art to be able to handle the up-to date tools.
a few thousand dollar Student is not much if this happens only every few years. Tutorial classes and supervision are most likely more expensive.