No Child Left Untableted

theodp writes "Made possible by a $30 million grant from the Dept. of Education's Race to the Top program, the NY Times reports that every student and teacher in 18 of Guilford County's (NC) middle schools is receiving a tablet created and sold by Amplify, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The tablets — 15,450 in all — are to be used for class work, homework, educational games — just about everything. With a total annual per unit lease cost of $214, Amplify was the low bidder of those responding to Guilford's Race-to-the-Top RFP, including Apple. Touted by Amplify as one of the largest tablet deployments in K-12 education, the deal raised some eyebrows, since Guilford's School Superintendent once reported to an Amplify EVP when the latter was the superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, coincidentally a proving ground of the Gates Foundation. Amplify and the Gates Foundation are partners on a controversial national K-12 student tracking database that counts the Guilford County Schools among its guinea pigs. Getting back to the hardware, after putting their John Hancock on a Student Tablet Agreement and the Acceptable Use Guidelines for Tablet, students are provided with an ASUS-made tablet "similar to ASUS MeMO Pad ME301T" ($279 at Wal-Mart). The News & Record reports on some glitches encountered in the first week of the program, including Internet connectivity issues affecting about 5% of the tablets."

Comments

Could you have gotten any more links in there?

[jayhawk88]

Maybe linked to the Race to the Top website, a link to the definition of "annual"?

Re:Could you have gotten any more links in there?

[marcello_dl]

In other word, you visit a page using http, aka hyper text transport protocol, you got served some hypertext, AND YOU COMPLAIN???

If the author of the web were here, it would get mad. What was his name, Steve Jobs or something like that....

Re:Could you have gotten any more links in there?

[Mitchell314]

Usually it's more much annoying when the submitters don't use links, particularly when using jargon and acronyms that aren't common knowledge to slashdotters. It's really not much harm to overdo it. So I'll say pass.

Re:Could you have gotten any more links in there?

[istartedi]

The more links, the better the story. Just like more technology makes for better educational outcomes.

Re:Could you have gotten any more links in there?

[hawguy]

In other word, you visit a page using http, aka hyper text transport protocol, you got served some hypertext, AND YOU COMPLAIN???

Yes. Because too many links make the article hard to read and obscure the most relevant links.

Re:Could you have gotten any more links in there?

[I'm New Around Here]

Well done.

(Safe for work or home view.)

Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions.

[Anonymous Coward]

What we really need is well paid and highly motivated teachers with small class sizes. Not yet another way for students to play angry birds.

Of course the ones making decisions know this, but they're happy taking the tech sector money. And a class full of little kids with tablets make good press and website pictures.

No Child Left Untableted

[ColdWetDog]

That headline fills me with unease. Sounds vaguely improper.

Maybe I'm just getting old but in my days, children were simply never verbed. It isn't polite.

Re:No Child Left Untableted

[Mitchell314]

"Today in class, we are going to learn how to English! Please pull out your copy books."

Re:No Child Left Untableted

[marcello_dl]

> Now kiddies, Ritalin yourselves!
Fixed that for you.

Newspeak, here we come! UNTABLETED!!!!!

Re:No Child Left Untableted

[SoftwareArtist]

The whole summary is a mass of vague insinuations trying to make you think something bad is going on. The deal "raised some eyebrows". The company selling the tablets is part of a "controversial" program using students as "guinea pigs". 5% of the students had "glitches" with internet connectivity during the first week. Gasp! Clearly this whole program is evil and corrupt!

In short, this is someone trying to push their own opinion about something while disguising it as news

Re:No Child Left Untableted

[Bite The Pillow]

The "raised some eyebrows" link actually removes suspicion, since Amplify was the lowest bidder and responsive, making that whole phrase completely flamebait. The "partners" link does not show how Amplify is involved, and the "guinea pigs" link shows that Gates, Carnegie, and Amplify funded the inBloom project, which was initiated by the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Governors Association. In other words they just provided money, apparently.

I popped in to call you an idiot, but it's actually even more trollish than you made it sound.

I'm personally against these sorts of initiatives, but I suppose that without some guinea pigs we won't know if I'm right.

Re:No Child Left Untableted

[SoftwareArtist]

I popped in to call you an idiot, but it's actually even more trollish than you made it sound.

Thank you. ;)

Re:No Child Left Untableted

[Jason Levine]

Verbing weirds language.

(Obligatory Calvin and Hobbes.)

3.3 million down the drain

[Lawrence_Bird]

per year out of tax payer pockets. Please stop doing it for the children because everything you do sets them back even further. Smaller class sizes? Boon for teachers union, bane for tax payers. Students? Show me the improved test scores. New math? Fail. "Smart" classrooms? Fail.

It remains fact that students pre WWII were better educated in every discipline. The US has sunk hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, over the decades to "fix" education with absolutely no positive results. Perhaps it was not broken in the first place.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[iggymanz]

Testing proves it. Inability of average student to perform basic functions proves it, such as finding New York on a global map.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[MacTO]

The [i]fact[/i] is that students [b]pre[/p] WWII were better educated in every discipline because people dropped out of school. Prior to the second world war, the high school graduation rate was virtually always below 50% (contrast that to over 70% today). Even citing a figure that high is misleading because the graduation rate had been consistently increasing from 10% to 55% between the wars and there were a substantial number of drop-outs as early as the elementary grades. And all of that assumes that they were better educated. Much of the knowledge that we feed to students today was being developed during WWII, so those pre-war students could have hardly learnt it.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[stewsters]

I'd wager a highschool kid with a computer and a programming course could do more math problems per hour than a million pre WW2 students. Things people learn change as the importance changes. Most college students know more calculus than Archimedes, does that make them better at math? Measuring knowledge across time is not a valid test.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[Mitchell314]

[citations needed]

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[Anonymous Coward]

An average student today would browse to Google Maps, search for "new york", and be presented with the information they need.

Rote memorization is really a useless skill these days, especially for facts that are retrieved infrequently.

It's a lot like the situation with those Indian Java "programmers" who can quote you namespace-qualified class names and method signatures, yet they can't write even simple loops or conditionals correctly. Yeah, maybe they can regurgitate API facts better than an American or European programmer, but they can't get any real or useful work done. The ability to do, which the Americans and Europeans tend to have, far outweighs the ability to memorize.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[mysidia]

Amplify was the low bidder of those responding to Guilford's Race-to-the-Top RFP,

So being the low bidder is all that matters?

That's easy... put Linux on it; or make it out of paper

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[glueball]

So you're honestly expecting us to believe that little Johnny and little Jenny knew how to use modern PCs, laptops, mobile phones and tablets back in 1925? Blah blah blah

No, they didn't know about it while in school. They invented it.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[iggymanz]

Wrong, lack of basic information between the ears, not being on readily "on tap", means a person can't form a proper mental model to understanding any issue where geographical configuration is key. They won't understand why Russia, for example, would be much more interested in not having external forces involved in a civil war in the nearby trading partner. They wouldn't understand why a hurricane making landfall from state A to state D would also involve states B and C.

You are deluded that education in prior decades was solely focused on rote memorization, as writing, speech making and speech, and solving problems from principles was also taught.

Today's java programmer, to use your example against you, relies on frameworks instead of understanding the basic construction and implementation of the basic objects of the language, and so fails to recognize bad code in an interview. This is what I see at work with interviewees. Yes, they *could* "google it", but they won't when sitting and writing code.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[iggymanz]

No, your average US high school student lacks basic principles to do math, let alone make algorithms to automate the doing of math. You imagine an average student could automate the finding of a square root with just addition and subtraction and multiplication and branch after compare being the only operations allowed? The average student has no idea how to find a square root by any means other than pushing a button on a calculator, but even then could not give any situation where a need for a square root would be useful.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[fermion]

First, money down the drain. In any corporate venture acquisition costs are only part, and often not the majority cost, of utilizing a capital item. For instance, when I was working at a University about 50% were added to most purchase orders to pay for acquisition and running costs. At schools, which tend to pay for future costs, such as maintenance and supplies, out of the current budget, initial purchase prices always seem a bit high.

Second, I would strongly argue that pre WWII people were better educated than we are, or than the current generation of kids are. I know many many kids who know more Calculus than I did when I was in high school. Kids now much more about genetics, astronomy, physics that I did at there age. Kids were so dumb back then that, assuming they knew the planets, they thought Pluto was one of them.

Specifically talking about technology, all money invested is well worthwhile. In my high school we had a mainframe. Best investment the district could have made. We all left high school with skills that were in demand, and with the basis to acquire the skills that would soon be in demand. I am sure everyone was saying 'but can they read' and 'how are the test scores'. But no cared. We were going into the work force to make a lot of money or to the top colleges.

The key thing was that we were using, what at the time, was pretty advanced if not cutting edge technology to not only learn but to use as a tool to complete tasks. Is your argument that when kids graduate they are going to use pencils and slide rules? Are the females going to be sequester in a room to be human calculators? Maybe they will be manually flying airplanes?

The thing is that we are educating more kids in more complex techniques and skills that we ever have. Sometime people look at the educational outputs and see some kids that would have traditionally been successful and see them less so and from that infer that education is doing worse. But is it not. On the whole literacy rates have risen. Kids can do simple tasks, like program a DVR, while their parents cannot. The need for the trivia based educational system has been completely proven obsolete by the problem solving tasks that kids need to do know. Machines are so complex that a user manual is too inefficient, and knowing the vernacular of the machines is the only way to be successful. Oxford reports that in 20 years half of todays jobs will be gone. You will not be able to make a living in construction or sales. Technology has already significantly reduced the need for lawyers, the age of the massive law firm and large number of high earning partners is gone.

Tablets are the way to get machines into every students hands. It is affordable and practical. This is what kids will doing in 20 years. Don't you think it is what we should be teaching them?

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[Jeremy Erwin]

Integrate geoguessr into the curriculum. Problem solved.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[rubycodez]

How is the education in such communities now? Have you heard a black teacher from the south side of Chicago speak on TV? They only use one vowel (a schwa?) and horrible grammar. Throwing money at the problem has not solved anything.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[rubycodez]

The "chiners", as you call them, value education and hard work, like white people used to do. And as blacks should do. Go ahead and call me racist, for wanting people to have a good education and and opportunity to use it.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[Nerdfest]

It's not race, it's culture, and it can be changed. First, people need to stop thinking it's about race and understand that some cultures have very damaging elements to them.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[istartedi]

How was education in black and minority communities pre-WWII?

The first thought that occurred to me was that education in pre-WW2 segregated schools might actually have been better than education in today's "integrated" inner-city schools.

That's not an argument that segregation was good. It's an argument that today's system is that bad. It's de facto segregated due to White flight. It's also part of a system that cares more about the Democratic Party machine and re-electing politicians than it does educating.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[AliasMarlowe]

The average student has no idea how to find a square root by any means other than pushing a button on a calculator, but even then could not give any situation where a need for a square root would be useful.

You touch on a topic that has come up in our own home more than once. I learned how to calculate a square root to arbitrary precision at school some decades ago. It was part of the curriculum for 5th or 6th grade then. Our kids do not learn it at school, even though one is presently doing her matriculation (final exams). It's apparently not in the curriculum any more, and I doubt whether many of the teachers could handle it. I taught our kids how to extract a square root myself. They know how to do it in decimal, and the eldest can do it in other number bases as well.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[argStyopa]

Or perhaps the answer's not (as the teachers' unions have asserted) simply to keep pouring more cash into the system - particularly when they're going to waste it on ipads.

Personally, I'd rather see more arts and humanities programs in schools than another class equipped with ipads.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[nbauman]

OK, you're a racist.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/wp-content/blogs.dir/470/files/2012/04/i-56483a6e9716d73ba0369eb27a275548-sci_racism.jpg

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[nbauman]

Jesus fucking Christ! Do you think there is one black person in America duplicated 10 million times? Black people are different. I had a black science teacher in high school, the best teacher I had, and she taught me stuff I use every day. I had another black teacher who was worthless. Some black people are really smart and some black people are really stupid. If you knew more than one black person, you'd know that.

Now let's have your 1930s-era stereotypes of Jews, Italians, Chinese and Irishmen.

(BTW, it's amazing what happens when a black person gets a job that pays well, with advancement in exchange for doing the job well.)

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[LandDolphin]

Teachers Unions don't want "more money" for the sake of "more money". They one one of the few things to actually have shown to generate better student improvement: Smaller Class Sizes. Now, that means more classrooms, and more teachers. Which, does tend to cost more money.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[dk20]

We do the same thing here (Canada). Year after year we are told part of the problem is "large class sizes" and how we need to hire more teachers and reduce this.

My kids were sent to school in China for a few years.
While China may have the largest primary class size (37.1 per class) the kids found it much much easier when they came back to Canada.

Class size wasn't the issue, the work was challenging and the environment was strict.

Put a Chinese student up against any other and measure the results for yourself.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[rubycodez]

call it anything you want, point is throwing money at that issue has not solved anytihng

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[rubycodez]

funny, another group of people went through something worse than that for much more than 100 years, and do much better than most. their culture and mindset made a difference

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[dk20]

Not sure how its done in other areas of the world, but in Ontario (Canada) we started doing this. My daughter is in such a program and loves it whereas when she was in the "mainstream" program she was miserable.

The main concern we had was your point about bullying. She was somewhat of an "outcast" in the mainstream program and it made going to school difficult (she was only 10 at the time). Once she was tested and transferred to the gifted program her life changed dramatically (both socially and academically). Without the program i'm not sure what would have happened to her but we are thankful for the program and opportunities it presents.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[vux984]

I learned how to calculate a square root to arbitrary precision at school some decades ago. It was part of the curriculum for 5th or 6th grade then.

And when i went to school we "learned" how to do trig functions from angles to 3 to decimals by looking them up in tables in the back of the book. Some things are obsolete. That's been replaced by calculators, and so has square roots.

Square roots are one of them, the masses have a calculator to do that for them. And the subject of finding roots manually is now grade 12 advanced placement calculus where they do it with newtons method after learning a tiny bit of calculus. (And not just square roots, but other roots as well.)

The square root methods you and I were taught in 6th grade is now more of a mathematical curiosity that belongs in a higher level mathematics course that explores -why- it works, rather than presents it as a practical method to actually use.

If I we're on a desert island and was going to find roots (any root, not just square roots) manually today, I'd probably use newtons method if i needed precision, or an intuition guided "binary search" if I was trying to do it in my head and just needed to be in the ball park.)

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[nbauman]

We need an education major who knows all those statistics -- oops! We sent them all off to study hotel management instead.

Anecdotally, there was an article in I think Slate that looked up old prewar high school exams, and I couldn't pass them today. Some people got a very impressive education before WWII, other people didn't. I found my father's old prewar college math textbooks down the cellar, and his freshman math course was covering stuff I had done in high school, like basic algebra.

The best data I know of offhand is from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tested a good national sample of students every year since 1970 for math and reading. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_12b.asp

According to those data, the test results were about level since 1970, with no more than 1-2% variation, not consistently up or down.

The impressive exception was among black students, who had very low scores in the 1970s (when many of them were attending segregated schools in the South, and even in the north). The scores steadily increased, and the gap steadily diminished, from 1970 to the latest data.

If you want more data, you can look up the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education, which finally outlawed segregated schools, at least on paper. As I recall, they submitted lots of evidence that black students attending segregated schools did much worse than white students or black students attending integrated schools. They also showed that the "separate but equal" schools weren't equal.

I don't think people realize the extent of segregation and discrimination up to as late as the 1960s, when black people couldn't vote in much of the South, much less go to equal schools. The effects are still with us today.

Back to your original question, I think the good schools 100 years ago were very good. The bad schools were very bad. A a lot of people think that Catholic schools were very good, but Catholic schools too actually varied greatly in quality, some teaching by rote and some teaching critical thinking. I don't know if you can get valid test data from 100 years ago.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[nbauman]

When George W. Bush visited England, one of the British tabloids printed a map on the front page with a big arrow pointing to London, and the headline, "WE'RE HERE!"

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[iggymanz]

your cartoon is trying to make an incorrect point. those remaining people in africa, in general, also score low on IQ tests. the problem has a different source having nothing to do with the experience of african-americans.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[nbauman]

You are deluded that education in prior decades was solely focused on rote memorization, as writing, speech making and speech, and solving problems from principles was also taught.

Yes, and to prove it, look up the Apology of Socrates or Euclid's Geometry on Project Gutenberg (I'm fine with online resources when they make sense).

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[F. Lynx Pardinus]

The parent post asked for a citation, which you haven't provided.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[iggymanz]

You're avoiding the core issue, most of today's students have absolutely no idea what for what purposes in the real world the square root is useful. We won't even talk about ignorance of basic trignometric function uses. A person who can only look up any answer to a single fact can't connect facts in their head to understand an issue or solve a problem, because there is nothing there.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[nbauman]

How was education in black and minority communities pre-WWII?

The first thought that occurred to me was that education in pre-WW2 segregated schools might actually have been better than education in today's "integrated" inner-city schools.

No, there's data on that, and it was submitted in the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education. The southerners claimed that their schools were "separate but equal," so the lawyers proved they weren't. The schools got far less money, the teachers were less qualified, and the textbooks were hand-me-downs from white schools (30-year-old science and history textbooks).

If you look up the NAEP data, you'll see that there's been a steady increase in test scores in math and English for black students from 1970 to today, when they're almost equal. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_12b.asp

It's also part of a system that cares more about the Democratic Party machine and re-electing politicians than it does educating.

I've got news for you. The Republican Party machine cares more about re-electing politicians than it does educating, or anything else. Grover Norquist said that he wanted to destroy the government, as long as he can cut his taxes.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[iggymanz]

It would be more accurate to say useless knowledge for mostly useless people.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[vux984]

You're avoiding the core issue, most of today's students have absolutely no idea what for what purposes in the real world the square root is useful.

Not at all, my daughter's in grade 6. The year has just started but square roots and trig in are in the curriculum -- she wont' be calculating them manually, a scientific calculator was on her school supplies list. She'll be answering problems like "what is the length of a square field 5184 m^2, what is the length of a cube shaped box with a volume of 225 cm^3...

Being able to perform the manual process of finding a square root using the method the OP suggested is little more than magical incantation for a 6th grader. My daughter can do long division manually, but even that, she doesn't -really- understand WHY it works. And I don't recall knowing either when i was in elementary school either. Its just the ritual we were taught.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[NJRoadfan]

The "official" way of finding a square root in school was to use a calculator. My teacher at the time said that it is one of the few things in math they prefer to completely automate since it is time consuming to do it by hand. Solving by hand went by the wayside before affordable electronic calculators, its one of the reasons why the slide rule was invented.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[iggymanz]

square roots and trig are not in most United States public school curriculum, your daughter is going to private school?

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[NJRoadfan]

Three semesters of Calculus in college and I don't recall solving any square roots. Checking my textbook (I saved it for some reason), its covered in chapter 3. Just goes to show that I haven't used it since then and that I tend to block out the bad memories of taking Calculus (I barely passed it).

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[dk20]

Are you sure?

see my post:
My kids were sent to school in China for a few years.
While China may have the largest primary class size (37.1 per class) the kids found it much much easier when they came back to Canada.
Class size wasn't the issue, the work was challenging and the environment was strict.

Do you have any empirical evidence smaller class sizes pays off? Here (Ontario) they state 90.1% of classes have 20 or fewer students.
When the kids came back to school here they found it a joke. What they were teaching in Ontario was at least one year behind what they were studying when they were in China.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[istartedi]

No, there's data on that, and it was submitted in the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education. The southerners claimed that their schools were "separate but equal," so the lawyers proved they weren't

Re-read what I wrote. I didn't say that Black and White schools were equal during segregation. I said it was possible that Blacks attending segregated schools before WW2 were getting a better education than Blacks attending dysfunctinoal inner-city schools today.

...increase in test scores in math and...

So you're on the record that test scores are the measure to use? I'm sure some people would argue against that, but that's beside the point. I'm assuming it's the chart at the bottom of that page you wanted me to look at. It only goes back to 1982. It shows Black scores consistently lower than White--a pattern virtually unchanged from 1982 to 2008, which isn't even the comparison I was discussing in the first place.

I tried finding data for the relevant period, and it's hard to come by. To reiterate--there's no getting around the fact that Black schools in the South were underfunded, in run-down buildings, with old texts and worse teachers. The question is, is that any better than today's schools in the cities that are also underfunded, run-down, with iPads, tenured mediocrity, students whose parents are drug users vs. oppressed field workers, etc.?

A real answer to that question seems hard to come by. You're going to get anecdotes at best. I think the opportunities for Blacks are definitely better today than they were then; but if it were possible to chose a Georgia segregated school in 1935, or a Detroit inner-city public school in 2013, which would you pick? That's the question.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[davester666]

Phone me when they let us fire the bad ones.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[dkleinsc]

It remains fact that students pre WWII were better educated in every discipline.

It remains a *fact* that in the 1930s 1 in 20 adults were completely illiterate. By 2000, that number was closer to 1 in 1000, and concentrated among people who are over 65 years old. In the 1930s, well over half of all teenagers dropped out of school, in 2013 that number was down to 22%.

The US has sunk billions of dollars over the decades to fix education, and as a result the population is much better educated today than it was 75 years ago. That's part of why the US has the most productive workforce on the planet. It was arguably one of the best investments the US has ever made. And it's cost us peanuts compared to the 3 big-ticket items in the US budget, which are (and have been for decades) Social Security, Medicare, and the military.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[immaterial]

Squares and square roots (along with area/volume) and basic pre-algebra are covered in 5th and 6th grade public school, at least here in California. I haven't noticed any trig though.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[vux984]

applications of squares and roots are part of the public school curriculum here (via calculator for calculation)... i overspoke when i mentioned trig... it won't be the periodic functions, just geometry (180 degrees in a triangle, finding the other angles from 2 or 1 in a right triangle; sin/cosine/tangent are apparently junior high, although tangent lines to a circle are covered in geometry.)

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[Dragonslicer]

If I we're on a desert island and was going to find roots (any root, not just square roots) manually today, I'd probably use newtons method if i needed precision, or an intuition guided "binary search" if I was trying to do it in my head and just needed to be in the ball park.

I think you'd be better off using a shovel.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[drinkypoo]

Being able to perform the manual process of finding a square root using the method the OP suggested is little more than magical incantation for a 6th grader. My daughter can do long division manually, but even that, she doesn't -really- understand WHY it works. And I don't recall knowing either when i was in elementary school either. Its just the ritual we were taught.

I have a (crappy two-year) college degree, and I don't understand why it works either. If a student gets out of public school with mathematics ability, it's not because the school gives a crap.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[nbauman]

I read Charles Murray's articles when The Bell Curve came out. I used to read the Wall Street Journal editorial page and also Science, Scientific American and New Scientist, so I got both sides of the argument. I don't remember the details any more but I do remember that not many psychologists agreed with Murray.

The basic problem was this: If you want to compare the IQ of two "races," you have to get a group from each race that was brought up in the same environment and test them. (You also have to get a valid test in the native language of each group.)

How can you get a group of native Africans who were brought up in the same environment as whites? If you think it out, it can't be done. How do you get a representative sample of Africans? How do you correct for education? Blacks and white in Africa have different opportunities, occupations, education, income, etc.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[iggymanz]

yes, but was replying to a person about seeing that in 6th grade. It's not there in public school, I'd know.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[nbauman]

I said it was possible that Blacks attending segregated schools before WW2 were getting a better education than Blacks attending dysfunctinoal inner-city schools today.

...increase in test scores in math and...

Since you're actually taking it seriously I'll look it up. I can't find the chart that would have expressed it clearly but the data here shows that blacks improved significantly from 1970 until today. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2008/2009479.asp

When you talk about "dysfunctional" inner-city schools you're begging the question. If they're dysfunctional then by definition the functional segregated schools, to the extent that there were any, were better. There may have been some segregated schools that were better than inner-city schools, but I think this data shows that overall the segregated schools were worse than the center-city schools.

So you're on the record that test scores are the measure to use? I'm sure some people would argue against that, but that's beside the point.

For the record I'll say that well-designed, statistically valid test scores measure what they're intended to measure. The NAEP was designed to measure educational achievement to evaluate the educational system as a whole, and break it down by certain categories, including race. I think the NAEP data demonstrates that blacks had lower educational achievement in math and reading in 1970, and that their educational achievement increased dramatically from 1970 to 2008. This was contemporaneous with the desegregation of a lot of schools (and workplaces), and I think desegregation was a major cause of the increase.

The best data says that, overall, black educational achievement increased from 1970 to 2008. The schools that black kids went to in 1970, including a lot of segregated schools, were not doing better, overall, than the schools that black kids were going to in 2008.

To reiterate--there's no getting around the fact that Black schools in the South were underfunded, in run-down buildings, with old texts and worse teachers. The question is, is that any better than today's schools in the cities that are also underfunded, run-down, with iPads, tenured mediocrity, students whose parents are drug users vs. oppressed field workers, etc.?

A real answer to that question seems hard to come by. You're going to get anecdotes at best. I think the opportunities for Blacks are definitely better today than they were then; but if it were possible to chose a Georgia segregated school in 1935, or a Detroit inner-city public school in 2013, which would you pick? That's the question.

I don't know Detroit but I do know New York, and there is a wide range of quality among the public schools. There are millionaires who send their kids to the public schools. There may well have been a segregated school in Georgia whose teachers and parents were so dedicated that they gave a good education. All those black lawyers must have come from someplace. My Gunnar Myrdal books are packed away, so I can't look it up. There probably are teachers and parents in Detroit who are so dedicated that they're giving their kids a good education.

If you read Diane Ravitch, a former conservative Republican who nonetheless followed the data, you'll see that the main factor associated with educational achievement was family income. Lifting people out of poverty would do a lot of good. Just giving handouts to the poor does a lot of good. But giving handouts to computer consultants or following the latest education fads doesn't seem to do much good.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[iggymanz]

I have to provide source of standardized testing for the past few decades? no I don't, look it up yourself you lazy git.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[Bite The Pillow]

" Perhaps it was not broken in the first place."

Yes, it has been broken for quite some time. It is a hard problem to solve, since the population is roughly "everyone from 6 to 18 years old" regardless of their home environment, socioeconomic status, genetics, and community. There is not one general solution that works for everyone, and what works one place may be a failure elsewhere for a number of reasons. Fixing it will take lots of trial and error.

I'm not sure what your problem is with smaller class sizes. About 3.8 million teachers at $50k average (according to census.gov and the BLS for 2011), with about 6 percent coming back as federal taxes (the lower than average probably don't pay much back at all, or it would be closer to 10). 55.5 million grade school students. That averages 14 kids per teacher (quoted as pupil/teacher ratio, 15.1 for 2013 on http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372) , but only if teachers get no planning periods. A rough estimate of reality would be closer to 19 in each class.

That comes from state money mostly, with a combined state and local budget of $3,233.6 billion, the $211 billion in teacher salary was 6.5% of the spending total. Getting enough teachers for 15 student classrooms would probably need 825 million teachers, adding another 1.625% of spending. This is a problem for you because... teacher's unions? Is 1.6 percent really going to break the bank?

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/state_spend_gdp_population

I see people have eviscerated the remainder of your lunacy. New math was tried and then backed off, "smart" classrooms are not mainstream (unless you mean just having computers), and the rest of what you say just makes you sound like an ignorant crazy person.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[drkoemans]

It must have made it back in at some point because 3rd graders in my son's language immersion elementary school are doing square roots and long division while instruction is given in either Japanese or Spanish. This is not a gifted school, this is your plain old neighborhood public school that happens to be language immersion. In kindergarten, students were doing multi-digit addition and subtraction and expected to know the numeric value of currency and be able to add and subtract multiple units (12 pennies + 3 quarters + 5 nickles + 3 dollars = ?). I was stunned. We were doing multiplication tables in 3rd grade when I went into public school and that was a big deal.

From my limited perspective I don't know what all the noise is about regarding the curriculum getting soft in our public schools.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[Lawrence_Bird]

Lets be honest about class size and teachers. Why is it good for teachers? Easier to control the class. Fewer exams and homework to grade. More teachers required means those already in place are more senior and less likely to be fired should there ever be cuts (gasp!)

It has nothing to do with little Johnny.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[Lawrence_Bird]

What you cite is purely a function of enrollment rate and not the actual process of educating the students (and in particular enrollment of minorities).

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[Lawrence_Bird]

I wonder how many students can tell you anything about European history? US history? Ancient Greece? And where are you getting this 'rote memorization' from? Given that math problems had to be solved by hand, data collected and recorded by hand students of that era had to do more than just memorize the multiplication table (and is there something inherently wrong with doing this?) What about literature and writing? Are you seriously going to compare what passes for composition today to those earlier generations?

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[Lawrence_Bird]

Teachers are paid for primarily out of local school/property taxes and not only do salaries vary, so to do benefits (pensions, health care, etc). These taxes are paid by everyone, not just those with children in the system. That means granny has been paying school taxes for 50 years after her kids got out of school. These taxes are often larger than the combined town, county and state taxes on a home owner. And like all government workers, underfunded pension plans are a norm and a looming financial dagger. You seem to think that state money and federal money which supplements local school budgets come from the fairy god mother.

What remains unsaid is you offer no evidence that class size matters. As an example, the school I graduate from now has a class size in the mid teens. When I was a student, our typical class size was near 30. Yet test scores, graduation rates and college acceptance are not changed. The best that research on the topic can say is that it may have a benefit for K through 3. I don't think it takes a genius to figure out this is likely a result of the teacher being better able to maintain discipline over children who generally lack any at that age.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[LandDolphin]

Hmm. That must be why smaller classroom size actually HAS an effect on student performance. But hey, don't let facts get in your way!

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[dkleinsc]

So, if I read you correctly, you're basically saying that the money spent to educate minority teenagers is a waste? I'm sure folks like Colin Powell, Barack Obama, and Herman Cain would not agree with you.

Re:3.3 million down the drain

[F. Lynx Pardinus]

It takes chutzpah to make an extraordinary claim, then when people ask you for evidence of your claim, call them lazy gits for not debunking you themselves.

Re:annual of $214!

[wjcofkc]

That's just the hardware. Now, at $214 a pop, that is orders of magnitude less expensive than textbooks. This leads us to the question of the educational software running on these units, who makes it and how much it costs. I also need convincing that school books on a tablet are at least as effective as textbooks. Not to mention, while we may be sparing children of back problems, what is the long term affect on a students eyes when they are staring at back lit tablets all day and far more than the average tablet user?

Then again, if the material is not being standardized by Texas, that's a win win I suppose.

Re:OLPC

[cookYourDog]

OBSSPC (One Brain Stem Stapling Per Child) is already being touted as the next big thing.

No Correlation

[craigminah]

I don't see how politicians think a tablet/laptop/computer/ebook reader will make students better. Our students are getting worse because of the pervasive attitude that's it's not cool to be good in school. We need to change this perception and reward students who try really hard and/or do well in school...right now it looks like they're just throwing money at a problem to see if it helps and it also seems like they're helping out one of their buddies who's benefitting from this ludicrously expensive lease plan.

Re:No Correlation

[Livius]

I don't see how politicians think a tablet/laptop/computer/ebook reader will make students better.

Manufacturers have lobbyists.

Students do not.

Whose lives do you think politicians are really trying to make better?

Re:No Correlation

[dfghjk]

"We need to change this perception and reward students who try really hard and/or do well in school..."

That won't be successful as long as the rewards "we" offer are not the ones students want. Education is a cultural issue and our culture is one of lives getting easier and lazier. It will never be "cool" to pursue what your peers don't want.

Good education requires the expectation of achievement that children take as a given. Instead, we publicly value ignorance over education and today's parents were spoon-fed on that pathetic value system. Using tablets in place of books is entirely beside the point; that are a tactical consideration only.

Re:No Correlation

[Jason Levine]

We need to change this perception and reward students who try really hard and/or do well in school

This (sadly) reminds me of a tale I heard during New York's horrid round of testing last year. Kindergarten students were being tested on the computer and the kids noticed that as they answered the questions correctly, they got harder questions and the test took longer - often resulting in them missing lunch. However, if they answered 5 questions wrong, they were given games to play. Guess what the kids began doing? If you answered "purposefully got the answers wrong to play games" then you win! (Personally, I think they aced the true test of recognizing when the system is stacked against you and finding a way to beat it.)

It kind of makes me wonder how much of the 30% passing rate is from the tests being absolutely NOT age appropriate, how much was from the tests requiring the kids to answer way too many questions in too short of a time, and how much was from kids saying "Forget this! I'll just answer all B's and get this over with!"

Re:annual of $214!

[khallow]

Now, at $214 a pop, that is orders of magnitude less expensive than textbooks.

Per year. It isn't orders of magnitude less expensive than textbooks, even if one leases the textbooks like one is leasing the tablets.

Re:Teacher Layoffs

[plopez]

It's called "The Wisdom of Crowds".

Wow!

[jones_supa]

The summary has 15 hyperlinks! *head explodes*

Re:Wow!

[hammeraxe]

That's ok, nobody's going to click on them anyway.

Rupert Murdoch?

[plopez]

Will they only be allowed to visit the Fox News site for current event assignments?

Hopeless

[dcollins]

I've stopped even trying to address the absurdity of these initiatives. There will always be administrators looking to get attention with big splashy purchases for no particular reason. I don't see any way to stop it.

proper e-books maybe?

[metalmaster]

A tablet per child sounds like a ridiculous way to spend money, but a valid point brought up in a previous article suggests that perhaps a donation is/was made that cannot be spent on any other budgetary concerns. So....kids get tablets.

Perhaps this can be a good thing though. If we can get a gadget in to every child's hand maybe we can force the hand of major textbook publishers and get them to put out electronic copies of their books that are actually usable. I dont mean "Here is the foreword for the book get a dead tree copy to read the rest" or webpages for chapter objectives that refer back to a 5lbs hard cover book for the rest of the work.

Re:proper e-books maybe?

[DogDude]

Oh, just stop with the "dead tree" and "5 lbs" garbage. Not everybody is a fussy little primadonna that is afraid to carry around a few pounds of real books. There's nothing wrong with using actual textbooks for teaching children. The last thing kids in modern society need are *more* gadgets.

Student remember best by writing notes

[Joshua Fan]

This is a well known fact. Personal electronic gadgets can only distract, or make the learning process more efficient, reducing mnemonics that help retention.

Re:Student remember best by writing notes

[silas_moeckel]

Funny I got tested years ago as a child and retain much less while taking notes.Some kids learn that way they really need to stop pushing the one "true" method as there is none.

Re:Student remember best by writing notes

[Jason Levine]

My son has muscle tone issues that make writing difficult. He can do it but will quickly tire and get frustrated. And when he's frustrated, he is NOT learning. (Depending on how frustrated he gets, everyone else in the class might not be learning either.) If he's allowed to type up notes or assignments, however, he flourishes. He's insanely bright but limiting him to "only pen and paper" would mean limiting his learning experience.

I definitely don't think tablet computers are magical cure-alls for education. In the hands of some students, they might prove to be expensive distractions. However, for other students, they might vastly improve learning. Like anything, this should be evaluated on a case by case basis. Give the tablets to the students who need them and lock them down so they are used for education, not mere entertainment.

Wait a sec... LEASING?!

[NegroponteJ.Rabit]

The federal government is *leasing* tablets from a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation at a cost of $200 per year.. Not buying..... LEASING!!! For $200 per tablet. Let's see how Fox News deals with this WASTEFUL GOVERNMENT SPENDING!

Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions.

[contrapunctus]

Someone once told me "the further you get from the classroom, the more money you make"

Re:Wait a sec... LEASING?!

[TheRealMindChild]

If you follow the money trail, you will likely find one of the decision makers on pushing this forward has a monetary interest in this whole scheme. Sort of like how the biggest opponents of drug legalization have shares or outright own prisons and drug testing facilities

XXX

[horm]

Great, let's give a bunch of horny, hormonal middle schoolers a way to easily watch porn at school.

Re:annual of $214!

[dfghjk]

"Now, at $214 a pop, that is orders of magnitude less expensive than textbooks."

You don't know what an "order of magnitude" is. Textbooks do not cost $20,000+ per year per student in K12 or anywhere else.

$200 could buy a tablet outright rather than lease for a year. eBook software won't change that equation and other educational software is value-add a book can't offer.

And, of course, the horrors of exposing children to display screens. We couldn't possibly know the effect of that by now!!!

Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions.

[TheRaven64]

Only two factors have consistently been shown to positively correlate with student performance: parental support and teacher enthusiasm. But, hey, throwing technology at the problem might work this time...

Re:OLPC

[rubycodez]

One basic education in reading, writing, arithmetic, speaking and science per child, using paper and pencil and no computers, would be a superior solution. That's all the education I had as child. I've had no difficulties putting computers to work on engineering, financial, and scientific problems since then. What a fallacy, to think children need "computer skills"; they need thinking skills.

Re:Wait a sec... LEASING?!

[NegroponteJ.Rabit]

Maybe, but I'm assuming that this company did in fact come in with the lowest bid. To be fair, having parents who've been teachers, schools spend A-LOT of money on *CRAP* - CRAP standardized programs, CRAP books, CRAP software, CRAP consultants, CRAP tech, CRAP CRAP CRAP CRAP CRAP! I was amazed to hear what one school paid to have specialized desks built, each with an embedded CRT and a PC with a RealMagic Hollywood card to play DVDs, and a huge 64-port Cisco router for the 15 or so machines, apparently none of which got much use. Money that could've gone to better things. Still, $200 to lease a tablet? Just buy the freaking tablets! Get Nook HD's - they're cheaper and keep Barnes and Nobles in business. Seriously, If I were in charge, I'd put Apple IIs, Atari 800's and TRS-80's back in classrooms. Maybe give a Raspberry Pi to every kid. There was something to using a device that essentially gave you a blank slate and you had to learn and create to make it do stuff. Now, everything comes flying at you with bright colors and stupid, condescending, badly drawn cartoon characters. By the way, remember that Neil Bush's No Child Left Behind program was a pretty nice deal for Neil Bush's IGNITE! company, formed the very same year that his brother ran for president. Gotta love family connections.

Thinking (only) of the children again

[macraig]

No Child Left Untableted

Right, and to hell with the homeless and other chronically underutilized who have already endured so many years of frustration and unhappiness? Too late for those fuckers so screw 'em, right?

It's ageism again.

Re:Thinking (only) of the children again

[macraig]

Many of the homeless and "underutilized" are thus not because they made a litany of bad choices but because they were simply dealt a raw deal by circumstances beyond their practical control. After enough years of raw deal, many people are mentally ill at least by circumstance. They may not be as technically helpless as a cute five year old, but their need for help is no less real. It really IS ageism behind these decisions where to focus remedial resources, just as it's an ageism choice to focus primarily on hiring young people in certain fields.

Here you go

[rsilvergun]

Two Seconds of googling. That said, have been going down because we're admitting more people, and those people aren't as wealthy so they don't have access to a full time parent, a nanny, and tutors. They're often more or less on their own. Basically, we expanded education to everyone but we didn't expand all the advantages afforded to the rich and powerful to them. If you think about it it's common sense. Dump a bunch of under privileged kids into underfunded schools and what do _you_ think will happen?

As for the Charter & Private schools, don't make me laugh. They get to pick and choose their students. If a kid starts under performing or is disrupting class it's back to the public school for them. Not that I think we should abandon those kids.

On a side note, +5 insightful? Really /.? We're better than this.

Re:Here you go

[g01d4]

Really? You might have spent three seconds and found something a little less biased.

Class-size reduction has been shown to work for some students in some grades in some states and countries, but its impact has been found to be mixed or not discernable in other settings and circumstances that seem similar. It is very expensive. The costs and benefits of class-size mandates need to be carefully weighed against all of the alternatives when difficult budget and program decisions must be made.

Giving tablets to the snowflakes...

[0m3gaMan]

is beyond stupid.

"When your only tool is a hammer..."

Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Gerry Sussman is enthusiastic enough and the electronic media allows him to influence many more people that it would be possible in brick school settings. And I'm sure there are more such people...now if only the mediocre regional drones who only think that they can prepare good teaching materials and deliver good lectures stopped deluding themselves.

County Ed Budget Too High

[CaptainOfSpray]

Obviously they've got money to burn, the fools.

For their "total annual per unit lease cost of $214" they could buy 5 Raspberry Pis at Adafruit, and OWN THEM OUTRIGHT instead of the devices still being on lease so they have to pay $214 every year till the supplier is fat and happy.

Re:annual of $214!

[slick7]

You don't know what an "order of magnitude" is. Textbooks do not cost $20,000+ per year per student in K12 or anywhere else.

... We couldn't possibly know the effect of that by now!!!

Sure we do, we can watch them on the installed video camera, watch what they type on the installed key-logger, listen to what they say on the installed microphone, and when necessary, alter the text material ala 1984.

HR-ification

[mx b]

I call this the "HR-ificiation" of our society, because of the mindset I see in business/HR type people that unfortunately run the country right now. They do not seem to have thinking skills themselves, hence cannot identify it in others. Instead they rely on checklists that were "created with input from our business partners". Sounds great on the surface to most parents and students -- they worked with industry to get relevant job skills! -- but the downside is that the educational curriculum is now reduced to a checklist of "skills" rather than a comprehensive education in how to reason about problems. I see this in tech schools too (where I currently work), where the focus on business skills is taking such priority (so that they can advertise that they prepare for jobs) that they have lost sight on the actual important material in the program.

Re:Where's the link?!

[colinrichardday]

(15!)

15! is roughly a trillion.

Edison promoted phonograph as teaching aid

[peter303]

Said pre-recorded lectures would revolutionize education. Every home should have one. Hwever his competitors discovered that entertainment was more commercially viable.

Every new media invention in the past 140 years has been promoted as an education aid with varying success.

P.S. Edison originally invented the phonograph as a means of cramming more information onto a telegraph. You'd record message on a phonograph, send them at high speed across the wire, record them at the other end, and play back at human readable speeds. Wires were a precious resource in those days.

Re:annual of $214!

[gmuslera]

Should be at the very least cheaper to make and distribute than the paper ones, if not just free in a way or another. And textbooks are not the only way to teach, there is a lot of educational resources on internet, from Khan Academy videos to Wikipedia.

The no-privacy policy.

[Animats]

The "Tablet privacy policy:

No Right of Privacy
tablet technology users have no right of privacy in their use of tablet technology or the content they access using tablet technology

Review and Monitoring of Usage all tablet technology use may be reviewed and monitored without notice by GCS administrative staff for any reason, even use that occurs on personal time or off school property.

Re:The no-privacy policy.

[the eric conspiracy]

All your soul are belong to us.

Re: annual of $214!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure he does. The original post said orders, implying more than one.

Re:BYOD?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Read "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow ...

Please don't post these sorts of things anonymously, Cory.

First they laugh at you:

[Hartree]

Remember when Newt Gingrich was so roundly ridiculed for wanting to buy laptops for schoolkids?

Now school districts worry about the price and fairness of the contract, rather than whether we should or not.

Re:First they laugh at you:

[gmhowell]

Remember when Newt Gingrich was so roundly ridiculed for wanting to buy laptops for schoolkids?

I think he earned greater ridicule for his plan to have children earn their free lunch by sweeping and mopping the schools.

Re:annual of $214!

[Anonymous Coward]

But we all know that won't happen. Yes, there are many free resources available that are better than a grand majority of these expensive, low-quality textbooks, but they won't use them; the textbook companies would stand to lose too much money over such a thing.

The government could have hired experts, made textbooks, and released the books into the public domain years ago, but they didn't, and it's because of pure greed.

Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions.

[AlphaWoIf_HK]

What we really need is to get rid of standardized tests and realize that one-size-fits-all educations have their limit.

Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions.

[TheRaven64]

Nope, most of the long-term studies judge success based on degree and employment. Try again.

Update: Guilford Has Pulled Out of InBloom

[theodp]

INBLOOM OFF THE ROSE?: "Another state has pulled out of using the Gates Foundation's $100 million technology service project, inBloom. The withdrawal further shrinks the project after other states pulled out in part because of concern about protecting studentsâ(TM) privacy. Guilford County, N.C. told POLITICO on Wednesday that the state decided to stop using the service, which is designed to hold information about students including names, socioeconomic status, test scores, disabilities, discipline records and more in one place, and ideally, help in customizing students' education."

Why why why?

[erroneus]

You know, we love our tech. I love mine. But back in the day, there was a reason they didn't allow students to use calculators in math class. Basic skills mastery are needed. How to use your hands to write is necessary. How to count and do basic math is necessary. How to spell is necessary. These basic skills most of the 40+ here take for granted is in serious trouble for those younger. When you see actual business reports contain "RU" instead are "are you" you have to face-palm at the very least.

We don't need computers, tablets and multimedia edutainment for our children. We don't. We need, in fact, to isolate them from these things until mastery of the basics are demonstrated.

And here's a thought... just a mild paranoid question to consider. By connecting our childrens' minds to 'the net' are we exposing their psychological profiles to government for evaluation and selection? Enabling them to more easily select the best or the most 'dangerous' from the sea of young minds out there? As the Snowden secrets continue to trickle out, we are seeing the wildest conspiracy theories get proven right and a few which even the theorists didn't dare to dream are coming to light. It's out of control. We need rational control back.

Privacy

[Windwraith]

How convenient, considering tablets have almost no security and are ripe for the NSA to observe.
Of course it's important to have every child tableted, it's easier to spy on them that way.

Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions.

[Windwraith]

Ever tried to do multitasking in a tablet? It's not gonna be easy for the kid to do something else and quickly close it before the teacher notices.

move to a digital freedom respecting county

[keneng]

Do not sign the student tablet agreement. Move to another county where digital freedoms are respected and students are encouraged to open up hardware and experiment with what's under the hood.

Guilford County's student tablet agreement as mentioned above reduces the students' digital freedoms.

Once again this shows you can't trust big media or big gov or big school to defend your freedoms. EFF and GNU are good points of reference to understand what I am talking about. Be careful before buying any hardware and never buy hardware on a lease or a plan because companies use that excuse to lock down the computers, tablets, phones while you don't completely own the hardware. This is a perfect example of that. They think they can stop you from opening up the tablet hardware by signing some piece of paper. REFUSE to sign by all means. Everyone must remain vigilant to preserve their rights to fix/tweak things to their liking for anything they own.

Stupid title...

[techprophet]

I read it as 'untabled' and was thinking someone had screwed up the wording trying to say that they're scrapping it.

Re:Spy on them early on...

[lxs]

Good mindless cetacean? You mean like Flipper?

Re:annual of $214!

[glassware]

My daughter's school just purchased a few classrooms full of iPads, and received a gift from the parent teacher association for electronic whiteboards with projectors.

Yet on the opening day of school I was sent home a list of art supplies (markers, crayons, glue sticks, construction paper) that the school couldn't afford to buy, and they wanted each parent to buy and contribute supplies to the classroom.

Re:annual of $214!

[Belial6]

Sure, but where would the government find people who know the subject, and are experts in the field of teaching?

Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions.

[Peterus7]

Another idea, train teachers on how to actually use technology for learning. I remember being approached outside a local library by a middle schooler asking if I wanted to buy a laptop. It still had school stickers on it, and I declined. I'm expecting similar fates for these tablets.

Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions.

[rtb61]

With a remotely activate able microphone and camera, a wireless connection to the schools servers controlled by school admins, with ability to monitor all activity on the tablet when ever the tablet is on and reporting of all unauthorised activity reportable. Personally if I were at that age, the very last thing I would want to accept is a school supplied and controlled computing device. If stuck with one, definitely throw in faraday and sound shielded case and bring along a matching appearance unit that didn't connect to the school server and regional administration beyond that. Google plus M$ plus News Corp, why does the 'EWWW' in privacy invasion come to the fore.

Re:annual of $214!

[P-niiice]

'Experts' don't matter to the approximately 50% of Americas who would believe that the government textbooks would lead to kids brainwashed into communism. At least until a president of the correct party got into office.

Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions.

[P-niiice]

States are cutting school funding. Gotta have more prisons!

Re: BYOD?

[iamhassi]

Students bring whatever calculator they want for calculus, why not whatever tablet they want? If all the classes are accessible through a browser what does it matter? But then do you really want to connect your personal tablet to the schools network?

Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions.

[Jason Levine]

Sadly, my state government seems to think that the best path to increase student performance is:

1) Tests, Tests, and more Tests - Pearson has been given a multi-million dollar contract to implement said tests, parents/teachers are forbidden from seeing anything on them, and Pearson gets to decide how to score them. There was a 30% passing rate in NY after the new - much harder - tests were implemented. But don't worry because Pearson sells a line of teacher training programs, textbooks, etc that can help raise students' scores.

2) Charter Schools - The governor recently said that the "death penalty" should be implemented for public schools that don't pass. Note that I said "public schools." Charter schools can admit who they want (no special ed or special services kids in there if they don't want them) and don't need to take the tests. So they wouldn't be eligible for the "death penalty." However, charter schools pull their funds from the public school bank just like public schools. So public schools are left with less money and more students with special needs. This effectively means that the "death penalty" for public schools will mean more charter schools (and possibly some private schools). Charter schools are also run by businesses, don't require their teachers to have teaching degrees, etc. It would be very interesting to see if the companies that run charter schools in New York contributed to Governor Cuomo's campaign and, if so, how much they gave.

Re:BYOD?

[Shirley Marquez]

If the school is planning to develop apps for the tablets, it's much easier if all the students have the same model of tablet. Having multiple OSes involved would be even more of a challenge; suppose some showed up with iPads, some had Surfaces, and some had Android tablets? (And throw in the stray Playbook or two if you want to be obscure.)

Re:BYOD?

[Shirley Marquez]

I'd mod this "funny" but I already commented on this topic. Cory isn't the sort to be anonymous, ever. And Little Brother is a wonderful book that can be downloaded for free: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

Re:Yes, exactly what we need. More distractions.

[AlphaWoIf_HK]

Yeah, having good teachers might also be a good idea...

But it's not going to do any good if you don't let them teach. Right now, they have to teach to the test or the schools lose funding if students do poorly on the useless standardized tests.

Re: BYOD?

[Joining Yet Again]

I really want to not use a "cloud device" at school at all. And certainly not as a substitute for real textbooks, which I like to feel and scrawl on and hold open at awkward angles.

And I say that as someone who brought a Psion palmtop computer to school when everyone else was still on pen+paper and thought me a dork for doing so.

Re:annual of $214!

[PodcampWhit]

The issue in our school district is that text book replacement has historically been on a ten year cycle(!) and that new ebooks or texts with ebook components aren't always ready when the text book purchasing cycle comes up, leaving school between a rock and a hard place in making both tech and text purchasing decisions at the moment. Add in tight school budgets, and you have a lot of short term decisions made in what should be a longer term strategic investment.

Re:annual of $214!

[s0nicfreak]

Well kind of. You use the internet to wirelessly download them.