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FBI Seizes Los Angeles Schools' iPad Documents

Posted by Soulskill on from the fingers-in-the-cookie-app dept.

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."

7 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. Duh. What did you expect? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  2. A Plan without a Plan by DERoss · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. Re:A Plan without a Plan by Pumpkin+Tuna · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Good points. I'm a former classroom teacher whose job now is to help integrate technology into the classroom. We do it slowly, deliberately and with a lot of thinking and planning. We never roll out anything to every kid at once. We study, pilot, review, pilot again if needed and then implement. When I first heard about LA's plan, I was horrified. It was too big, too fast, and not well planned. It was doomed to fail, and at the time, I figured that the fix was in, probably with Pearson. They scare me. Technology in the classroom should be used to create, to collaborate, to innovate. Instead, Pearson and other companies like them want to use it to drill and kill while making a mint off of taxpayer dollars.

  3. Investigation a Crapshoot by Kunedog · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:IPad is an insult to technology by AJWM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    An iPad is a more power computer than any I had access to all through school

    Yep, if you're talking about the innards.

    It's also a more capable general-purpose computer than those Apple II-series computers and early MacOS 6/7/8 machines

    Nope.

    An iPad is an appliance for running apps, not a general-purpose computer. Go ahead, just try to program on it, or hook it up to manipulate some random gizmo.

    Sure, it can be done -- by someone with the right development tools (which wont run on the iPad) and skills. A far cry from what school kids could teach themselves to do with Apple Basic or Hypercard.

    --
    -- Alastair
  5. Re:When we give money to the schools ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's actually not that hard to figure out where the costs of educating our students go (buildings, transportation, fuel, energy, maintenance, books, supplies, etc.), but you have to actually be willing to *look* instead of just blowing a fuse about some imagined problem.

    Yes, there are bad teachers. Yes that sucks. But teachers, in general, don't get paid what they would if they were in *any* related industry. As a result, most of the people you get who teach do so because they *want* to be teachers.

    Your own math shows the problem with teachers' wages. You have (well paid) teachers being paid $2333.33 per student per *year*. That's just $1.08 per student per hour, assuming (falsely) that teachers don't actually work outside of school hours. You can't get a *babysitter* for $1.08/hour (it's actually illegal to pay them that little), much less someone who is expected to *teach* the kids something useful. When you account for the time teachers *actually* spend working, it's closer to $0.65 per student per hour.

    That also doesn't account for what many teachers (especially those in poorer districts) actually have to pay in order to actually do their jobs. I grew up in a thoroughly middle-class district, and at least *two* teachers I knew of spent roughly a quarter of their take-home pay on supplies students needed that the school didn't provide, and they couldn't afford. As I understand it, that's not atypical for teachers in poor districts, so you're now looking (using your own numbers) at a teacher who is earning $0.50 per student per hour of actual work.

    The best part about your bitchy, self-entitled rant about how coddled teachers are? You're not even responsible for a whole $0.01 per student per hour. You just have a bug up your ass about how expensive it is, even though you don't realize how *cheap* it actually is.

    Teachers want the technology to be able to prepare their students for a world in which technology is the *life blood* of the economy and the labor force. You want students who can enter college, trade schools, or even the work force who are *already* familiar with computers and technology, because if they're not they'll be behind the curve, and very likely stay that way.

  6. Re: When we give money to the schools ... by meerling · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You aren't really paying for other peoples kids to get an education, you're paying back for yours.
    Besides, would you rather have other peoples kids in school learning enough so they might qualify for a job, or running around the neighborhood finding "alternate means of obtaining funds"?