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

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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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?

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: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: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: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.

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.

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!

[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.