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FBI Seizes Los Angeles Schools' iPad Documents
An anonymous reader writes: The Los Angeles Unified School District had a bold (and expensive) plan to outfit its students with top-of-the-line technology: its 650,000 students will be given Apple iPads to use for school work. The cost? $1 billion. Unfortunately for them, the project has been plagued with problems. Now, the FBI has seized 20 boxes of documents regarding the district's procurement practices and confirmed an investigation. "Hundreds of students initially given the iPads last school year found ways to bypass security installations, downloading games and freely surfing the Web. Teachers complained they were not properly trained to instruct students with the new technology. And questions were raised after emails were disclosed showing that then-Superintendent John Deasy had been in communication with vendors Apple and Pearson before the contracts were put to bid."
If they hired better teachers, what would the teachers' unions do with the worthless teachers?
In this case I'd like to know what the FBI is investigating. Graft? Or are they investigating the students' "cybercrime" of unlocking the iPads?
"Hundreds of students ... found ways to bypass security installations, downloading games and freely surfing the Web."
"Teachers ... were not properly trained to instruct students with the new technology."
It sounds to me, like the children didn't *need* to be instructed, as they found some other pretty good uses for them, above and beyond what the teachers could ever hope to instruct them on. Unless by "instruct" they meant, how to curtail children's exploratory curiosity and make them fall in line, then sure.
But here's a tip for all the dumbfuck parents and teachers out there trying to do that. Don't give your kid something that *can* do those things, because no matter how tight you think you've locked it down, short of crippling the thing entirely, kids will figure it out.
The iPads were distributed without any planning about accountability. No one knew who would be responsible if an iPad were lost. (Without a parent's approval, the minor student could not be held legally responsible.) No one knew who paid for repairs. No one knew what was to happen to the iPad when the student moved to a different school district. No one even knew how the iPads would be used within the curricula.
For 8 years, I was an elected school board member in a quite small but high-performing school district. At the closest, we are about 1 mile from the Los Angeles Unified School District. Ours is a rather affluent community. We do not give our students personal electronics. We make PCs available in our high school library, which also serves as a public library where adults can also use PCs.
+1. Our kids' middle school also jumped on the iPad bandwagon. For the most part, the kids hated it. The iPads didn't displace any textbooks, so it was 2 lbs of extra deadweight in their backpacks (tablet+mandatory case & keyboard). It was a source of stress, because on the rare occasions they were actually used in class, you got marked down if your iPad wasn't charged. Assignments still had be printed out and turned in on paper, so a separate PC/Mac was still required. The tablets were supposedly locked down to prevent loading games, etc. but tech-savvy students usually found work-arounds. And some of the edu-ware screw-ups were truly appalling - like the "spelling test" app that didn't disable the iOS dictionary feature. Fortunately, the high-school principals are saner. Quote one: "No, I won't bring tech like tablets into the school just because it's new shiny. It really has to fulfill a serious purpose or solve real problems". Amen.
We lost most of the great teachers in the United States when we embraced gender equality. It was definitely the right move, but it cost our country untold billions in terms of the price to education.
Not many decades ago, women could not go into most high-earning-potential fields. Teacher was one of the few fields of instruction open to them, and as a result, a LOT of the smartest women in the country went into teaching. And there are a *lot* of smart women in the country.
You still have smart women teaching, but not nearly as many.