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LA Schools Seeking Refund Over Botched iPad Plan
SternisheFan sends news that Los Angeles Unified School District is asking Apple for a refund of the district's effort to equip students with iPads. The project was budgeted at around $1.3 billion to equip its 650,000 students, though only about 120,000 iPads have been purchased so far. After the program went bad, the FBI launched an investigation into their procurement practices. The iPads weren't standalone education devices — they were supposed to work in conjunction with another device carrying curriculum from a company named Pearson. But the district now says the combined tech didn't meet their needs, and they want their money back. Lawyers for the local Board of Education are looking into litigation options. They've also notified Apple and Pearson they won't pay for any new products or services.
They wasted the money fruitlessly and want a mulligan. No. Give someone in procurement a pink slip and eat some humble pie. Own your mistakes.
The iPads weren't standalone education devices â" they were supposed to work in conjunction with another device carrying curriculum from a company named Pearson. But the district now says the combined tech didn't meet their needs, and they want their money back.
So... They didn't test the iPad / content combo to establish usability / feasibility / usefulness prior to dropping all this cash?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
We realized spending 1.3 billion on toys for kids was a bad idea. We're going to makeup excuses why we should get our money back.
These people had no idea what they were getting into and obviously just wanted to have their students carrying tablets around so they'd look like Starfleet Academy. In addition to the corruption that went on, this project was doomed from the start. I doubt they were able to express any clear requirements to the vendors they were working with and probably didn't have any actual plan for how the technology would be leveraged in the classroom. I've seen it a dozen times in schools with inept management. Those who can, do. Those who can't....
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Get nothing in return.
But they can learn. I think they should next equip all kids with an iWatch running a "Clipit"-like teacher app to enhance their school experience.
LA got apped by apps, so now they're demanding apps for their apps.
Apps!
If teens cared about having a better education during high school, the will would formulate the plan. The ipad idea for all students is truly one of the dumbest ideas I've ever seen. Unfuckingfathomable
Back that train up to the point where they initially picked iPads over Rockchip, Google Nexus, Avatar, Dell Venue, anything from ASUS, the Samsung note series, and about 5 other solid competitors. All of those were cheaper, sufficiently fast, cheaper, more durable, cheaper, more serviceable, and CHEAPER. That's how you know the entire project was crooked and completely derailed from the System Development Life Cycle process.
Whether the guy in charge was a criminal-level Apple fanboy bordering on mental illness or getting some sort of crooked kickback is still being determined in court but if they want a refund, look to the guy who fucked up the whole project in the first place. The vendors certainly won't give you anything. They'll just blame him.
The exec who signed off on it should get the pink slip. Not the person in procurement.
If you don't understand the plan, don't sign off on it.
So wait, you fucked up, and now you want us to pay for it?
No, see, here's what happened: School decides they want product X which works with product Y. Product X sucks; product Y is not defective. School has legitimate claim about product X not delivering; product Y is your fault, and you don't go back to the supplier and make them eat the cost.
The school may have a claim against Pearson, since they delivered shoddy, half-ass work. The school has no claims against Apple, since Apple supplied a device not designed to do what the school wanted, and the school intended to extend it with Pearson's product.
There's a real lesson about bad project management and buyer's remorse here; and, looking back, they're ignoring old and proven lessons about not trying to fix education with unrelated technology. The only technology that belongs in education is education: education methods are a technology, and they are the technology for education.
Until you have an education methodology that shows good, scientific basis and utilizes your fancy toys, you're just throwing toys into education. For example: Japan uses a mathematics curriculum teaching students to use complementary number computation techniques, driven by the exemplary platform of a machine called a Soroban; a Soroban would be a ridiculous toy to bring into the classroom if you were not teaching using these computation techniques and trying to leverage the visual and mechanical aspect of learning by soroban (I've done some self-teaching without the soroban, and learned the same techniques; there are, however, scientific reasons to bring a soroban to the table). If they're just doing workbook activities BUT ON AN IPADZ!!!! and not doing anything known to improve education when an iPad is involved, the iPad is a fucking toy not appropriate in education.
It's worth noting there's a school of educational research suggesting that introducing young children to high technology is actively bad, and that high technology should be taught outright after age 10-12 rather than used as a platform to deliver old teaching methods. Small children need most to learn socialization; they need to interact with other children, and not isolate themselves to curriculum. I have my own educational theory which extends this: small children need most to learn techniques of utilizing the brain effectively, set in an environment of free socialization, so as to develop their social behaviors while also giving them tools to rapidly and effectively learn curriculum. In all of these advanced schools of thought, and in mine, you see that pattern: humans need to learn human behavior first, then learn high technology as a tool; wrapping books in fancy electronics won't suddenly make education better.
This is like the 90s when everyone's answer to everything related to computer security was "ENCRYPTION!" Now everyone's answer to every education problem is "COMPUTERS!"
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Did they even attempt a small scale roll out to see if it would met their needs? If not: epic fail.
So... They didn't test the iPad / content combo to establish usability / feasibility / usefulness prior to dropping all this cash?
Correct. As it says in the LA Times article, "The district selected Pearson based only on samples of curriculum — nothing more was available."
They were actually unhappy with Pearson.
The article makes this very clear. It wouldn't matter if the Pearson Curriculum were on an iPad or an Android device, they'd still be unhappy with it. The attachment of Apple to the story is a means of click-baiting it. Pretty clear in the quotes from their attorney:
L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines “made the decision that he wanted to put them on notice, Pearson in particular, that he’s dissatisfied with their product,” said David Holmquist, general counsel for the nation’s second-largest school system. He said millions of dollars could be at stake.
In a letter sent Monday to Apple, Holmquist wrote that it “will not accept or compensate Apple for new deliveries of [Pearson] curriculum.” Nor does the district want to pay for further services related to the Pearson product.
Pretty ringing condemnation of Pearson's products by the school district; note that the Pearson products might not eve be at fault, given that the complaint was that it didn't help with the standardized testing scores.
I am saddened and feel I want to kick something. From the summary: -
"...But the district now says the combined tech didn't meet their needs , and they want their money back..."
Emphasis mine.
Is it just me who sees something wrong here? So, no feasibility study was done? Who approves these things? It was very evident that this whole thing wouldn't work. Look, we hire lots of foreigners in this country, who do so well not because they were using these educational gimmicks wherever they came from, but because most of them put pen to paper and wrote something.
Heck, our students can't even write [English] well despite it being their first language! Then there is the damage done by the so called Common Core. What is wrong with these United States? You know what? When it comes to the way we teach, I am not surprised the products of our educational system go on to make such shortsighted decisions. God save us.
no iphones, no ipads, no imacs, oh my.
sadly, they'll go with surface tablets next try, instead of I dunno...... education methods that have worked for generations prior to the development of the handheld tablet computer.
I work in education, and the idea that you'll just roll out a new tech to hundreds of thousand of kids is just asinine. Start small, work the bugs out, then go big. Especially if you're deploying tablets, trying to manage them is like herding cats. Apple's made some progress in that area, but they're still a huge PIA to manage. I hope there's a serious, ie external, investigation into who drove this fiasco. While incompetence on this scale isn't unimaginable, I suspect shenanigans. Follow the money.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Sell the iPads at auction and sue the 3rd party software vendor for failing to deliver on their promises. Not sure if the news article is just daft or the school really thinks Apple should take back 120,000 used iPads because of what amounts to a case of very late (the article says this project started in 2013) buyer's remorse.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Summary didn't mention this but Pearson is a huge global education player. Just a few of their brands: Addison–Wesley, BBC Active, Bug Club, eCollege, Fronter, Longman, MyEnglishLab, Penguin Readers, Prentice Hall, Poptropica and Financial Times Press. So I don't see how LA Unified is going to avoid them.
As for this not meeting their needs... Reading the article LA Unified seems completely clueless. The contract was $768 / iPAD (I assume this includes warranty) + $200 / content & software license for 3 years. They according to the article are demanding that Apple fix the application, Apple didn't create the application nor does it own the content. They bought 43,261 iPads with the Pearson curriculum and 77,175 without. AFAICT Apple delivered their part. Their problem is the Pearson curriculum.
I can get that they don't like the app, but at this cost they can just write an app. The whole thing sounds like they don't know how to buy or deploy technology when it comes to a custom solution. Which is potentially understandable for a small district but inexcusable for a $1.3b contract.
This was an Apple scam from the start, with lots of handshakes from politicians to go around, no one in their right mind would allow a corporation to educate their young.
Including the government corporation.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Technology does not necessarily lead to a better educational atmosphere. Technology, just for the sake of technology, without a real plan, will always fail. LA Unified should just keep it simple. Some school actually shun technology and this is happening in the heart of Silicon Valley. Ref: http://waldorfpeninsula.org/
The article very clearly states that their issues involve poorly written software by Pearson, and the school itself apparently didn't have any idea how to configure the iPads with a secure configuration.
I'm also willing to bet that Pearson did a bad job because they were mismanaged by the school, with requirements being written on cocktail napkins and whatnot.
This school district was sold swamp land in Nevada... Anyone who works in the education IT industry (I do: And part of that is supporting iPad deployments in education every day) knew there was no way in hell this was going to work. Apple has done a terrible, awful, horrible job of enabling iPads to work in an education environment. They are a complete nightmare to configure, deploy and maintain. If you are going to put these things in a school, just use them for internet browsing and use real computers for everything else. It isn't that they are bad devices for individual users, it's just that the integrate horribly with existing networks. One of the most difficult things is simply accessing data on the network / computer accounts. For example, Apple *still* doesn't support users logging in to their network directories (other than using the incredibly-confusing-for-the-ipad-users and also incredibly buggy WEBDAV functions) and simply opening and saving files to those locations. Upshot? Pages doesn't get used, Keynote doesn't get used... Blah blah blah. It's just a nightmare. Great, wonderful, single-user devices. Horrible, awful devices in terms of multiple-users and network integration.
...and I'll share some insights into the situation. (I'll post this anonymously for good reason.)
School board members get all their information regarding what's happening inside the district from one person: the superintendent. If the superintendent treats their board members like mushrooms (keeping them in the dark and feeding them nothing but manure), it becomes difficult for board members to make informed decisions. If the superintendent wants to influence board members into making "the right choice," all he or she needs to do is limit the amount of criticism board members hear regarding "the wrong choice". Add lots of confidence and optimism regarding "the right choice," and it's easy to influence board members' perceptions.
That's not to say that board members are always innocent. I've seen board members that run for all the wrong reasons; hate the sup; hate one teacher; promote gay rights / native rights / special ed rights; want to be taken seriously in the community; want to run for state senate / governor / congress; etc. Then they suddenly discover all the responsibilities of a board member, and they don't take it seriously. Then all sorts of strange things can happen -- at my last district, one board member won the election, came to the first meeting, then never attended another meeting for the remainder of his two-year term. The board never went through the motions to dismiss him, because it was "too much work." And motives can make all the difference when voting. If this big iPad project was one board member's baby, and everyone else had nothing but apathy for it, it would be easy to pass.
About a week prior to a meeting, board members receive a "board packet" from the district office containing all documentation relevant to the meeting...personnel reports, enrollment numbers, discipline issues, contracts, union negotiation information...everything. For my district, which is only 1,000 kids K-12, the board packet averages 200 pages. Use your imagination to determine the size of LAUSD's. Considering how much information they are presented with regularly, it would not surprise me if those board members were biased in favor of their superintendents and their recommendations (perhaps group-think plays a part in it as well) over giving the public information the due diligence it deserves. In addition, the superintendent and the chairperson of the board have the closest relationship of all; perhaps the two colluded to influence votes regarding this project.
My daughter (freshman in an Ohio high school) is required to take a number of aptitude tests this year. Biggest waste of time ever!!
Our school district is forcing everyone to take the tests on iPads, even though not all school districts are requiring this. At the end of one 2.5-hour test, administrators discovered that the iPads didn't send the students' answers to the server, so they made the students all retake the test -- right then and there. No bathroom breaks, nothing. Five hours of continuous testing. And during these tests, the entire school schedule is arranged around the test, so that every student in the school had one five-hour period and 6 ten-minute periods. For lunch, there was no time to serve anything hot, so the students lined up and were given sack lunches and told to hurry up to their next class.
Second round of testing, the teachers were told not to plan any lessons until the testing was over. For four days, my daughter went to school and did literally nothing because "the computers were down" so no testing was possible.
The teachers all hate it, of course. And, of course, school administrators around the state are reporting that testing "went well."
All the ipads died of dysentery
School districts are notorious for having just enough tech staff to keep end users functional, but absolutely no staff to "think ahead".
This district needs tech leadership that can look forward at technologies that may or may not be useful, then it needs implementation and testing staff to make sure those tech plans become reality.
I suspect this district thought they could simply sign a contract with Pearson - and like magic, the tech would deploy itself and the staff would automatically learn the tech and integrate it into the curriculum.
Our schools have moved away from iPads - management tools are sparse and the tech simply isn't that great in the classroom. We've settled on Chromebooks. The management tools are great, the devices are cheap - and Google Apps is free for schools and non-profits.
If LASD had competent technology leadership, they would have known about all of these challenges and limitations during their pilot phase - before dropping a ton of coin on a half-baked solution.
The reality distortion field truly makes you fanboys blind.
Just because one solution is cheaper than others does not mean it will win the bid.
(Background note: technology director for a school district, and have been for ten years.)
For example, just today, I completed a competitive bid matrix for our district's eRate program. For the first year, the program is reimbursing school districts for wireless access points. In our district, we currently use Ruckus as our vendor of choice. They've done a good job, but a few software bugs have caused some glitches, plus the rollout hasn't been complete, so there's coverage holes in some areas of our buildings.
We have a new superintendent, and she's convinced that no one uses Ruckus. Cisco is the only true solution, and she has a vendor she's very cozy with that she has worked with before and trusts. She has refused to pay any more money for Ruckus and insists that Cisco replace it. But Cisco is more expensive, so how do we make the bid work? If we don't elect to go with the lowest bidder, we need to do a "competitive bid matrix" that lists our criteria that is used to choose our vendor. Price has to make up the "largest percentage of points awarded", but other criteria can be included. So, despite being 60% more expensive, Cisco won, because of "locality", i.e. the vendor supplying it was a closer distance from the school than the Ruckus vendor, even though both vendors were over an hour's drive away. And thank you, Joe Taxpayer, both for the taxes you pay to the school and the USAF fees you pay to the FCC to make it happen!
If a school leader has a preference, and he/she directs everyone in charge to make it happen, then a way is found to make it happen.
Can we pull up the previous Slashdot story on this (when they were just starting)? While most folks agreeded that it would fail, it may be useful to recognize those folks that were vehement supporters for this and ridicule them mercilessly. Here's the original article: http://news.slashdot.org/story... Looking through that link, I'm challenged to find even a single supporter.
Yep, you're right, $1.3 billion divided by 650,000 is almost $2500 per student.
I guess you are a journalist, or is there another reason you would inflate $2000 per student to "almost $2500 per student"
My school district has about 5000 students give or take and currently issues iPads to all middle and high school students. The students use their Ipads for virtually all assignments and this is achieved through an app called notability, this works in conjunction with another app called iTunes U which organizes assignments and courses. This program seems to be successful when deployed on a small scale as seen in my school district. However, successfully enacting this program on a scale the size of L.A could prove extremely difficult to say the least.
For this number of devices they could have paid for a deployment, training and device management service. Though obviously that sort of thing costs.
That is what I used in school. And they worked just fine.
I remember reading the original announcement and thinking "this is a big waste of money"
Dear LAUSD,
No.
-Steve
Sent from my iPad
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Mt. Diablo School District decided to buy a bunch of Chromebooks.
It seems most school districts are generally technologically-illiterate and do not have personnel that even have a clue regarding computer hardware and software.
They do know how to spend money though.
Pearson was Apple's subcontractor. Apple was supposed to get $780 out of every ipad (yep, you heard right, retail+ price) and Pearson $200. I haven't seen the contract, but if the various news sources is correct, it is Apple who is basically making the offer by bundling software of their choice...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
You think they actually paid such a price? Much of that money is funneled away to cronies.
This is how government works.
Pearson said they'd produce a product, it was ordered,they now cannot deliver. It's called fraud, but because this is the government via schools vs "private" industry, the problem will be placed at the customer, because you can't blame companies for the customer being dumb enough to believe the contract claims by an industry, buyer beware, after all! Never buy anything! Oh, hang on if you do that, you're killing private industry.
Ask Apple for a refund? That's funny. HA! HA! HA! BTW: Fuck Apple.
They're putting pressure on Apple to put pressure on Pearson. This can only look bad for Apple; Pearson doesn't give a fuck.
I don't think Apple owes anyone any refunds in this situation. They provided the products that were ordered, and apparently, in good working condition.
Pearson *may* have misrepresented what they were actually selling on the software side of things, but that would be an issue for the courts to decide, should they get challenged on it.
The ridiculous thing is that the school district spent all this money, approving a plan that they clearly didn't test well enough in advance. Personally, I do think iPads could have a legitimate place in school as learning tools. But like any electronic device, they're only as good (or bad) as their implementation. For starters, I think they're expensive enough so any school purchasing them for a large group (or all?) of their students should have a cost justification plan in place as part of the project. (Basically, you'd have to get all of your physical textbooks in e-book format, negotiated as part of a deal so it's much cheaper to get them and keep them current in digital format on the iPad vs. buying the printed textbooks.)
I think you'd also have to have your school's wi-fi network in order, ensuring the iPad users can't just get online and surf random web sites. The iPads would also need to be centrally managed to protect against theft and to control which apps were installed on them, etc.
I think all of this could be done, but I'm not so confident anyone has ever successfully done all of it properly, to date? (I see so many schools who don't even seem to have a good handle on their wireless security. They'll claim students aren't allowed to use it to get to sites they're not supposed to be on, and 10 minutes later you have a student laughing because he's using their network to access porn sites via a proxy or VPN tunnel they didn't account for.)
It appears that Pearson could not deliver. Pearson is also the BIG driver behind Common Core... Hmmmm.
Pearson is one of the profitable companies that makes large amounts of money by influencing educational standards at the state and federal level to essentially require their curriculum products. Even though I know people who worked and might still work there, I'd love to see it destroyed.
It should be. But it is not.
http://www.dailytech.com/Apple+in+Court+Case+No+Reasonable+Person+Would+Believe+Our+Ads/article13583.htm
They should never have gone for the iPad in the first place, only if it were for the reason it's a very closed system with only one company controlling everything on it.. There were a lot of other cheaper devices which work just as good (at least for schools)..
Like it or not, the nation's public indoctrination system is in a terrible state. It's a morass of political correctness, CYA, and favoritism towards the modern Democratic Party.
My brother and I watched with a mixture of horror and hilarity as my nieces tried to enter their math homework on these stupid iPads. They were given their math homework on paper, and required to DRAW THE SOLUTIONS WITH THEIR FINGERS on the iPad. It was the dumbest process we'd ever seen.
Democrat controlled blue city, democrat controlled blue state, and Apple the darling of what passes for modern liberalism.
sigh..after about 50 of these fanboy comments Slashdot really has gone downhill. Can anyone left here read above 3rd grade level?
PERHAPS it has something to do with the fact that they paid APPLE for the iPads AND the software. The contract was with APPLE. Thus the dispute will be with APPLE.
You don't just hand a kid a tablet and wish him luck. Apple has done quite a bit of work to allow central administration of app deployment, security, and OS configuration that, to my understanding, Android can't match. They're far from perfect, two years ago they had next to nothing, but it's evolving pretty quickly. But as bad as iPads are for this use case, Androids would be worse, albeit cheaper.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I had the grave misfortune of getting stuck in a computer "literacy" course as a grad student. Of course, it had nothing to do with being computer literate and everything to do with the laughable Office 2007 pile of shit.
The course used Pearson software that emulated 2007 so it could grade student performing mundane tasks.
It was such a buggy piece of shit it was rarely usable and it cost the students $60.
I complained to the Pearson rep and she responded by buying us poor instructors subway. I told her she should refund every penny they stole from the students.
Fuck Pearson and fuck MS.
They hope you'll never notice. Nothing to see here, move along...
Who knew L.A. schools have 1.3$ billion in spending money...The F.B.I. needs to be looking into that, I know they voted in higher sales tax but...1.3$ billion?
When you are big, you get to get stuff for a discount. At work we are a Dell partner and it means, at a minimum, that we get a 3 year basic warranty on their stuff for no charge, even for one off orders. If we are doing a big order, like a few hundred computers, you get additional discounts.
I realize Apple doesn't like to offer this kind of thing which is a reason NOT TO GO WITH APPLE. If they aren't willing to give you a price break when you are ordering tens of thousands of units then they aren't worth being a vendor.
This reeks of someone who is a complete fanboy deciding everyone has to have a shiny toy rather than any kind of consideration about what product might work well.
What does putting an iPad in the hands of every school age child do to our carbon footprint? (that's inaddition to the smartphone they already carry) I mean if its a good idea for SanFran, wouldn't it be a good idea all-around? I think we're breaking the 'banks' with our push to faster, better, smarter, and just plain more.
What ever happened to a text book, a chalk board and a teacher who knew the material?
We don't need to bombard kids with technology, we need to bring them up with essential skill such as literacy, printing / handwriting, math, science, history and in general all the basic skills that allow them to learn and develop WITHOUT getting technology involved. I would go as far to say that students shouldn't even hand in word processed assignments, unless it's absolutely necessary.
I'm not saying we should have no technology involvement, I'm saying we should limit it. If you want to offer a computer basic course, awesome! If you want to accept typed / word processed assignments, awesome! Just don't mandate it. Kids need less technology and more quality, this entire plan from the get go was to offload the responsibility of teachers and subvert known, good, working practices for teaching.
The school board got bit by trying to fool around, well lesson learned, next time don't try to reinvent the wheel, that wasn't broken and didn't need updating.