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

iPad too fucking expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy a Pi for every kid. Education is what the Pi is for.

Apple was the cheap option for schools 35 years ago, not now. Now they only sell trendy shit to snobs.

Re:iPad too fucking expensive

[Frosty Piss]

Buy a Pi for every kid. Education is what the Pi is for.

The original initiative was not about learning to code or build electronic devices, it was about putting educational resources in kids hands in the hope that kids would use these resources to become smarter.

In my opinion, this is a misguided, technology is not the most efficient way to impart "The Three R's", classroom interaction with a human, as well as parents that support the idea of the importance of homework over xBox.

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

[Rinikusu]

Buy every kid a pad of paper, some pencils, and a slide rule...

Re:iPad too fucking expensive

[Dutch Gun]

Buy a Pi for every kid. Education is what the Pi is for.

A Pi is great for learning about computers and technology. A tablet is more useful when learning about general subjects, and has a more appropriate form factor, since they need to be carried home.

Tablets are not a bad idea for the classroom. They could replace the students physical books and eliminate a lot of paperwork. There are also significant educational advantages. Each tablet can carry a small library of books, not just a backpack-full. And data is easily cross-referenced - the definition of any word can be looked up in an instant just by holding your finger down on it, for instance. Hyperlinks to additional topics of interest (like in Wikipedia), reward curiosity and exploration. I've found such features be very helpful on my own e-reader.

But frankly, they'd need to come down in price quite a bit first, probably with low-end models that are more appropriate for mass distribution. Apple devices are decidedly high-end, and as such, aren't really the best choice for a mass market deployment. The devices don't need to be sexy. All they really need is large-screen color e-book readers, with just enough horsepower to show static text and images. The ability to surf the web is an unneeded distraction, not a benefit for these devices. Laptops can be made readily available for research purposes. I'm thinking something between the current generation of e-book readers and tablets would be ideal. Also, perhaps most importantly, the schools need the proper infrastructure, training, and management systems in place to take advantage of these devices - which is may be the hardest part.

It's really only a matter of time before this sort of thing happens on a large scale, but I just don't think we're quite there yet. I'm guessing that within a decade we'll hit a technological and economic sweet spot that will make it happen for real. I think the LA school district jumped the gun, and was focused on the wrong things that are important for actual learning.

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.

Re:iPad too fucking expensive

[bigfinger76]

It doesn't require superior intellect to understand that each child you produce will cost you about a quarter of a million dollars to raise. I'm of average intelligence I guess, but I'm well aware that I don't have that kind of scratch, or the time to do it properly. It's simple math, kids. This nonsense about "haves" and "have-nots" is going to be a problem for you one day. I'm not saying it's fair, but life is not fair. If you don't understand that yet, your parents and your teachers have failed you.

It was dumb at first glace

[ADRA]

Its still dumb now. Just have good public access to computers for educational purposes (for all) and maybe a few set aside for people with specifically high enough permissions for programming and such. 95% or higher computer work in school is research, and everyone should absolutely have access to use it. Do kids need them at home? Nope, but it'd help. If a family is willing to get a cheap computer / tablet / etc. for their kid, that's their imperitive. But for those unable/unwilling to pay for a computer, they should still have access to materials. But assuming unlimited portability is more of a pipe dream unless you're footing the bill. My libraries have had computers for going on 2 decades now, and they've worked great for what they do, supply people with access to information.

Pearson: No profit left behind

[theodp]

No profit left behind: Across the country, Pearson sold the Los Angeles Unified School District an online curriculum that it described as revolutionary - but that had not yet been completed, much less tested across a large district, before the LAUSD agreed to spend an estimated $135 million on it. Teachers dislike the Pearson lessons and rarely use them, an independent evaluation found.

Just throwing computers at kids isn't a good idea

[ErichTheRed]

I have 2 kids, one who is ready to hit kindergarten next year. From my extremely limited parenting experience, it seems to me that just putting computers in the classroom or in students' hands isn't going to fix long standing education problems. This (in my opinion) goes double for locked down tablets like the iPad.

I'm actually not pushing computers, tablets or other electronic stuff too much on the kids. There are so many fundamentals to work on (reading, numbers, vocabulary, learning to act like a normal human) that electronics can't solve or make worse. They watch movies, watch a little too much YouTube for my taste, and play a couple of educational games. The older one knows a little about navigating around the computer, and of course every kid knows how to use an iPad/iPhone. Ask me in 14 years whether I screwed them up too badly, but it's working out pretty well just reading to them. playing with them, answering all of the 29 million 4 year old questions they have, etc.

Computers can't fix the real problems -- crappy parents, crappy home situations, low pay and low respect for teachers, etc. Every kid should be computer literate...not just phones and tablets, but able to use an office suite, look stuff up, etc. If they express an interest in coding or IT, great -- but the fundamentals of logic and scientific reasoning should take precedence. It's no reason to dump a computer or tablet into a kid's hands without a good curriculum to back it up. And from the article, it sounds like Pearson just sold the LA school district a bunch of slideware.

The primary advantage of not planning ....

[Anonymous Coward]

is that failure comes as a complete surprise, and is not preceeded by a period of foreboding or woe.

Introducing change, at a large scale, into any large system, without a well thought out, holistic plan is going to, at best, be sub-optimal, and very likely fail.

It is very likely, that the driver for this was to achieve lock-in to Pearson Education's electronic textbooks, with a strong side effect of "hey look at me, shiny thing" from the senior leadership. (iPads are the lowest cost platform that Pearson's DRM textbook system - they call it "eText" - can be deployed on). It is possible, that also they were simply recommending Apple devices, to use Apple's brand to draw attention away from the relationship between the deputy superintendent, and Pearson, where they were previously a VP.

Are iPads a great educational tool ? Hell yes. If you plan for how they will be used, and you have the right sets of software on them, and if you develop the teachers to be able to use them. Otherwise its basically giving laser rifles to cavemen.. Apple's Education sales team has significant resources, including lots of teacher training, but also IT staff training, that they make available to customers. The fact that the LAUSD program didn't make much, if any use of this, suggests that LAUSD senior management weren't really interested in the educational outcomes, but rather the publicity.

Are they just a consumption device ? Not by any means at all, and "you need a physical keyboard to produce information" is a largely, bullshit argument made by vendors who make devices with hardware keyboards. Here's a hint : "content creation" does not always equal "lots of typing". There are many forms of content creation where typing is a peripheral activity, that have real educational value, and help students express in more ways than how many WPM they can achieve on a keyboard.

Should students only have access to a single vendor ? It depends on what functions you are trying to accomplish, but usually no. There are economies of scale in having a single platform for certain functions . But when you get to the area of "we want to teach kids about technology" then absolutely not - there should be iPads, Macs, Android, Linux machines, Windows machines, Rasberry Pi's, 3 D printers, etc etc etc. We wouldn't teach children "English" as a subject, and then only make them read Harry Potter, or only make them read Harold Robbins.

Did LAUSD screw up ? Hell yes. At many levels, from the lack of teacher development effort - i.e. teaching the teachers how to use the tools; lack of infrastructure like Wi-fi networks, content management systems etc ; technical ineptitude over issues like use of ActiveSync as a "device management" protocol (FFS - ActiveSync is opt-in/opt-out by the end user, and the server believes everything the device tells it - it is totally unsuitable for an educational environment as a management tool. The ridiculous thing is that Apple HAS stuff that largely works in this space, mostly pretty well - Device Enrolment Program to completely configure devices over the air, supervision to shift the breadth & depth of policy controls from a BYOD style scope to greater depth & breadth, mandatory, non-removable mobile device management, restricted iTunes accounts for under 13's, and LAUSD appears to have chosen to ignore what was sitting on the shelf ready for them to use)

Note that this kind of ineptitude isn't unusual at large scale in the education system - Australia had a state education department deploy half a million netbooks running Windows into schools in another "computer for every student" deployment a few years before this and it also was an epic disaster - perhaps without quite the same whiff of corrupt behaviour by senior management, but it was epically mismanaged and failed to address almost all of the infrastructure and teacher development aspects that LAUSD also failed at.

Change at this scale is hard and there are many moving parts. Very few educational systems , anywhere in t