L.A. School Superintendent Folds on Laptops-For-Kids Program

In an announcement yesterday reported on by Ars Technica, [Los Angeles school superintendent] Ramon C. Cortines said that the city can't afford to buy a computer for every student. The statement comes after intense controversy over a $1.3 billion initiative launched by Cortines' predecessor, former superintendent John Deasy, in which every student was supposed to be given an iPad loaded with content from educational publisher Pearson. (That controversy is worth reading about, and sparked an FBI investigation as well.)

Comments

Technology is not an answer to education

[gweihir]

Education, as needs to be done to make people fit for today's ever more complicated world, needs to be done in an individual, customized form that recognizes the learner and his/her personality. Anything else just lead to failure. In the absence of true/strong/real AI (and we are not going to get that in the next few decades and possibly not forever), this has to be done by qualified, motivated and talented teachers. There is no other way. Instead it is being done far too often by those left behind, but those lazy and by those that value conformity over everything else.

This "technology in education" issue is a diversion, nothing else. That includes computers for kids, teaching programming, etc.

Re:iPad too fucking expensive

[Squash]

A pi on its own is cheaper, but each student would need a display, keyboard/mouse, SD card, power supply, and presumably a usb wifi stick. If these devices are intended to be left at school, that's still not totally unreasonable and will clearly undercut the price of an ipad.. Certainly the educational capability is much higher, at least for students interested in engineering. But if they are intended to be taken home, they're just not suitable.

Something like a Chromebook could do the job, and still undercut the ipad cost... But if they want to lock these devices down, they'd have to buy the Education models (which also gets them other features such as no hassle replacement if one is broken), and those models cost more.

The scary part to me is the school's efforts to restrict what students can do with these devices, and allowing the school to track and monitor them. Your school's influence should end at the gate. We've already seen a case where a school passed out laptops to students and were then using the laptop's webcam to spy on those students at home. That was totally inappropriate just a few years ago, but now everyone is fine with assigning a pretty gps and internet tracking device to every child? Any smart parent would require their child to leave such a device in their locker, and never bring it home.

Re: iPad too fucking expensive

[guruevi]

The problem wasn't the iPads - with edu discounts those things are cheap. The problem was the fact they went with Pearson - the mother of all rip-off scams. I think in this instance the 'software' came at a $1000+/student/school year price tag or something like that. They are the same people that cause a standardized test to come in at $1200.

Re: iPad too fucking expensive

[Zontar The Mindless]

As an author and editor who has had the dubious pleasure of dealing with Pearson on more than one occasion, I hereby verify that they suck.