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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."
Schools often tell us that they are lack of fund to give our children top flight education, so we give money and more money and some more money to the schools hoping that they will have enough $$$ to properly educating the children
But when schools get the money, where do they spend it on?
On iPADs !
Instead of spending more money paying high salaries to much better quality teachers, teachers who are more resourceful, more dedicated teachers, and so on, the schools waste money on iPADs !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Let's look at the premise:
1. Students usually know WAY more about technology than their teachers.
2. Students also have usually WAY more interest in it than their teachers.
3. They also know WAY better how to use the internet than their teachers.
4. Students have WAY more time to spend on breaking security than their teachers have time (and money) to spend on security.
5. Information flows VERY freely on the schoolyard, especially when being able to transmit that information ups your social status.
Am I really the only one who is not only not surprised that this happens, but who would have been SEVERELY disappointed if it hadn't?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I can't understand why schools are in such a massive rush to buy iPads before they've even figured out how to use them, and where they fit into the curriculum. ...and the fact they were hacked... but yeah. We all had fun doing that on the Apple IIs educational software and with game disks we brought to school back in the 80s. Probably more valuable education looking back. It was fun to strip the "mathbooster" mathematics space-invader game of the actual maths and then play it as Taito originally intended ;)
They all chase after the "new-shiny" and plop down a bucket of money before considering or testing the impact, much less training teachers.
READY.
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This is what the FBI should be doing with our taxpayer money instead of going after individual software pirates or trying to push for easier backdoors into consumer devices. Teachers often get handed expensive devices that they don't really need - and they get denied funding on simple things like books, crayons, and copies. Meanwhile, teachers get paid shit and county officials get paid 3-5x as much.. The FBI should be cracking down on these corrupt jackasses.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
That comes out to $1538.46 per iPad, in case you were too lazy to figure it out and checked the comments to see if it was already done.
IPad is not a computer. It's a dumb appliance or toy. Just because the kids can use doesn't mean they know anything about real technology.
Not sure if my math is correct but it looks like the ipads are running 1500 each.. I would rhink they would be a bit cheaper
When we learned about computers in school it was not on locked down, corporate monitored, carefully controlled computers. They were OPEN systems, fully and 100% controlled by the student at the keyboard, who were trusted with that responsibility.
The real lesson these days is how to be a good little slave to your masters. Don't worry about the personal data collection, don't worry about it being locked down, because you aren't trusted and will never be. Someone else will decide what it's acceptable for you to read, what software it's acceptable for you to run, what it's acceptable for you to say. Be a good little consumer now, will you?
Gets people ready for buying corporate-controlled consumption devices once they get into the real world.
How the heck are they spending 1 billion for 650k students? That's $1500 per ipad. If the average class size is 26 that's $39,000 per class. There are so many better ways this money could be spent.
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
"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.
Education may be run locally, but there are lots of federal programs that help pay for it. The federal government has an interest in seeing its money spent well, and has an interest in anticorruption enforcement that might be hard to achieve at a city or state level.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Was Deasy's ego justification. He actually started well when he pushed teacher accountability, then it went downhill fast. The iPad decision was bad enough; forget the botched roll out and the you-never-get-fired for buying $INDUSTRY_LEADER procurement. Then there was teachers serving breakfast to kids in class and finally the MiSiS debacle that finally forced him out. One of the few times one could agree w/the teacher's union.
We may never know what they're investigating, or who, or why, or how it will cause or affect any criminal prosecution. There's certainly no integrity to the process.
Remember when a school was caught installing malware on students' macbooks that covertly took pictures of the children in their bedrooms, almost certainly producing child porn? And we even had correspondence that showed faculty used this capability for entertainment?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
The feds investigated but simply decided not to file charges against the school for illegal surveillance, hacking, peeping at kids, etc. I guess that would have set a nasty precedent for the NSA activities that were going on, but only discovered a few years later.
It was a great idea but the fundamental issues barring it from being successful were completely ignored. Organized Labor always wants training and work studies to be completed and approved before anything gets rolled out. I've dealt with this working with Airlines and trust me, you don't change work rules or add tools to the environment without Union buy-in. The training issue keeps coming up and to be fair, the support structure and training should have been thought out well before the first tablets were rolled out. Of course the school district paid way to much for the tablets and that's another investigation point. Finally we have the students who if they're like most kids want to play games and do whatever they want with the devices. You can't give a walled garden experience to an 9 year old kid, he's going to figure it out and bypass what you've put in place or get his older sibling or friends to get him access to whatever he wants. Shit all the kid has to do is google it "how do I jailbreak an iPad" and "how do I sideload apps on an iPad" and at that moment all of the useful school district supplied controls disappear. You've now given 10s of thousands of tablets to kids so they can watch youporn all day. Congratulations LA Unified School District.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
But we don't just give them money, we give them money dedicated to specific items. If there is grant money available for computer equipment then you have to write a proposal for computing equipment and you can't spend it on ordinary teachers salaries. If you turn down a grant because it is too specific then you get your budget cut because you obviously have enough already.
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.
Where's the initiative for this investigation emanating from, it wouldn't be One Microsoft Way, by any chance .. link
This was clearly what was going to happen, from the beginning. I think I got modded troll for suggesting it was a bad idea way back when. lol
The only place a school should have a computer that students have access to is in the computer lab (or other classes that would require them like typing or whatever) Sure, there should be classes that prepare students for the rudiments of computer use in case they don't have a computer at home. But when it comes to the rudiments of what should be taught in highschool: English, Math, Science... they are nothing more than expensive distractions.
No, it's a small subset of black people, just the ones that Fox News loves to showcase. Most black people, like most white people, are decent people. There's a small group of black people, like the small group of white people you belong to, who are unmitigated assholes.
There's an extra couple problems that he didn't state:
1. There's a lot more students than there are teachers and faculty. Probably around 20:1. Still, consider these two numbers: out of 15k students in the initial release, 'almost 200' bypassed the security(followed sources). That's under 2%. Of course, it'd still spread. That was the first week cracks.
2. The students have nearly 24/7 physical access to them. That's never a good recipe for continued security.
Of course, given the incidents of faculty spying on students in places to include their bedrooms using the built-in cameras on computers, I'd SUPPORT disabling functions like that.
I don't read AC A human right
Didn't this same type of thing happen with Apple in New Hampshire back in the 80s? The state bought all the schools Apple computers on a no compete bid.
Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't find out how these iPads were connected to the Internet or even if they are connected. Do they use WiFi as well as Wireless telephony or just WiFi? If the latter, though most folks have WiFi at home, some do not. So do the students need to be near a hot spot to get school work done or is Internet connection unnecessary for educational use? If the iPads have Wireless connection then the cost of the contract with telephony carrier is an extra cost and who pays for the use beyond data caps? The articles indicate that the location of the iPads can be monitored by school district but I assume they can be turned off. In any event this seems to be a complete violation of the students' privacy.
Questions, Questions, Questions....
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
The Federal government most definitely has an interest in anti-corruption enforcement. A vested interest. They don't want other operators on what they regard as their turf.
These ipads smack of the same mindset that too many people have about losing weight. They don't want to work for it.
Teaching kids these days is tough. Parents are doing less so schools are expected to do more.
then-Superintendent John Deasy had been in communication with vendors Apple and Pearson before the contracts were put to bid
I read this as: it's now illegal to be a biased mac fanboy. It's about time!
Government purchase procedures for purchases over a small amount typically require large amounts of paperwork from vendors, submitted in various stages to ensure transparency and fairness. "Run down to Walmart and get it for one-third the price" isn't an option specified in the procurement process.
The idea is to make sure they don't just run down to their brother's shop and pay five times the going rate. Unfortunately, it means buying mainly from middleman companies who are in the business of getting government contracts. It can be REAL lucrative to contract for computers - you put in a bid for to top of the line computers at $3500 each, installed. The process takes 18 months before you win the bid. You meet with the government agency and the start planning their migration process. Eventually delivery is scheduled, around six months after you won the bid. At that point you buy some computers that meet the specs you bid two years ago, paying $600 each. Six months after that you collect the $3500 each from the government.
Some corporate entity must have made some rather significant Federal-level campaign contributions in order to trigger this level of concern....
Let's look at the premise:
Better yet, let's look at your premises and see how many of them are true.
If you hand a kid a gadget he or she has never seen before, it is likely that he or she will fearlessly and successfully figure out what to do with it in short order without the slightest thought to reading instructions or seeking help. Kids are growing up with all the wonderful devices and applications that stymie their elders.
Yet these same kids are likely to give little thought to the most efficacious or safest ways to use technology. Part of being young is to ignore warnings and directions. This combination of intuitive ability and lack of examination can lead to less productive and even dangerous use of technology by Digital Natives.
Here are some examples of what I mean:
Kids don't know how to search.
Kids don't know how to evaluate.
Kids don't know how to stay safe.
Kids don't know how to search
The simple process of varying search terms is not common to many young searchers: 10.2% responded that kids 'never' do this, and 71.2% said they 'sometimes' do. Only 2% could boast that their students always know to do this. Narrowing a search is another simple skill utilised far too seldom, with 20% reporting this never happens.
As to Boolean searching, the gap was the greatest: 56.2% said students never use these methods, which suggests to me a lack of instruction. No one reported that students always know to employ these techniques.
But here is a bigger problem: 'bouncing'. David Loertscher, PhD, used this very appropriate label to describe...a common practice: moving quickly from one resource to another without closely reading any material. Granted, this type of skimming may be used early in a search to find promising information, but it is not productive if a reader doesn't carefully follow up on that information.
Kids don't know how to use technology for learning or productivity
It is not enough for youngsters to be masters of their sophisticated cell phones, social networking sites, and gaming devices. Yet these are the three primary areas where kids concentrate their interest and use. Teachers are assuming too much if they take it for granted that students are experts at using applications that are available at school such as office suites, mind-mapping software, graphics tools, etc. Granted, they are likely to be quick to learn, but they do still need instruction and guidance.
Kids can use Excel for all kinds of great graphs, timelines, tables and other projects, but only if they are exposed to the software.
Kids do not know how to be smart and safe online
Because [content] filters offer a false sense of security, the teaching of safe internet searching and communicating is often given short shrift. After all, the filters are keeping out all the bad stuff, right? Wrong. Here are some problems with this line of thinking: Filters both over- and under-block. Even the 'tightest' filter can sometimes let objectionable material pass through. At the same time, a great deal of valuable information can be blocked. I have within the last year asked students to search for terms such as 'triggerfish' , 'sperm whale', and 'breast cancer', only to be blocked.
Teachers and administrators often have a false sense of security because the filters are in place. Thus, they do not actively teach students about safe internet use. When these youngsters go home, to the mall, to the public library, etc, they may be babes in the woods due to the lack of instruction about safety.
What kids know (and don't know) about technology
Yours obviously was.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
. . . a carefully-timed momentary disconnection of the ethernet cable during startup to provide uninhibited exposure to all the illicit material our developing minds could lust after. Even at the time I was filled with a sense of awe & pride to witness our secret resistance in action.
This is a useful skill in the real world. In no fewer than three AD workplaces, I've seen people's accounts get locked (for one reason or another: IT had the wrong end date for the term position, too many failed login attempts, etc). Unplug the cable, log in, then plug the cable back in. Network drives won't work, but anything stored on the hard drive will, Email works, and internet works (even when you need to authenticate on the proxy). Good workaround when waiting for IT to unlock.
We have iPads at our school, and they do help dyslexic kids learn how to read with apps like Lexia and Learning Ally.
That said, iPads - like most Apple products, are difficult to manage in a corporate environment. Apple's configuration tools are sparse, and they simply have no native MDM solution.
Third party solutions like Airwatch are a joke. They count on the end user to keep policies applied to the device under threat of not accessing corporate resources. Unfortunately kids don't care about that stuff and gladly remove the policies.
Things have gotten a bit better with iOS 8, but the fact remains that these devices were designed for a single end user, not for widespread, managed, multi-user environments.
We've slowed our adoption of iPads in favor of Chromebooks. They are much better for management and control of the end user experience.
Kids don't WANT to use technology for learning or productivity. They want to use it for having fun. What's your point?
The one billion dollars spent on tech meant for educational use. You want to buy all these kids their high-tech toys, fine. But do it of your own pocket, not the taxpayers,