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L.A. School District's 30,000 iPads May Come With Free Lock-In
lpress writes "The Los Angeles Unified School District will spend $30 million over the next two years on iPads for 30,000 students. Coverage of the announcement has focused on Apple winning over other tablets, but that is not the key point. The top three proposals each included an app to deliver Pearson's K-12 Common Core System of Courses along with other third-party educational apps. The Common Core curriculum is not yet established, but many states are committed to it, starting next year. The new tablets and the new commitment to the Common Core curriculum will arrive around the same time, and busy faculty (and those hired to train them) will adopt the Pearson material. The tablets will be obsolete in a few years and the hardware platform may change, but lock-in to Pearson's default curriculum may last for generations."
iPads are okay for grandmas, but giving them to kids is just mind numbing. With a real PC or even a netbook or a hybrid, atleast the kid can do more as get tired of Angry Birds. Not all will, but some will definitely venture out to programming and alternate OSes, even if only in a VM. Give them an iPad and it's nothing more than a glorified iPod Touch. Not to mention that the lack of a physical keyboard discourages thoughtful writing of even a few sentences and instead encourages texts-like writing. The Chromebook isn't much better either.
The people and the stories all focus on the device. The device is not inherently educational. People think of these devices as fun things... entertaining things. They are, in fact, designed mostly for entertainment. Why is this good for schools?
Now, if some educational software system out there which makes especially good use of iPad as a student interface, then great! Let's hear about this great software system. To put out "students get consumer device" followed by "students are easily distracted by social media and entertainment" makes me wonder what they have in mind for the educational system.
...and this is why our schools are failing.
A local school was complaining that they'd have to lay off a bunch of teachers recently.
They always complain about that. Then they send out pink slips. Then they don't lay anyone off. It's a scam by the teachers union, where your career path exits teaching and moves into administration so that you can make 2-3x the money while parents are forced to buy paper and pencils for their students.
BTW, the student/teacher ratio is about 2X larger in Utah, and their SAT scores are in the top 10 of the nation, rather than in the bottom 10, as in California. So throwing money or teachers at it doesn't fix what's wrong with education in California.
I'm not seeing posts here addressing the more serious issue, which is the lock-in to Pearson. I know people who work at Pearson, and they do have an intentional policy of moving into schools, taking over curricula, evaluation, and eventually eliminating teacher jobs. I think that it's good to have plenty of teachers, fewer students per teacher, and I'm skeptical about the value of the new shiny, whether it's a gadget or some theory of fixing everything cheaply, but--by far--the more worrying concern is allowing a single corporation have such a large sway over public education. Especially as, in my opinion, Pearson provides some of the shittier textbooks out there. And that's saying something, given the general shittiness of textbooks.
Forget the iPads - Pearson, and these other parasites are going to do more to cripple education in this country than anything else. Private profits from the public taxpayer's dime, they're going to be unaccountable. We'll certainly blame the teachers when this canned curriculum crashes and burns, but Pearson and their ilk? They'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
You know what's worse than government? Government contractors and suppliers.
Free Macs for the staff for buying Apple probably.