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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.
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"
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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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.
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.
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?
Anyone with half a brain could see that this whole thing had FIASCO written all over it in bright red letters. The whole thing reeks of one giant scam.
-- The school district signed an initial $30 million deal with Apple in a program that was supposed to eventually cost up to $1.3 billion. As part of the program, the LA School District would buy iPads from Apple at $768 each
You can go into any store an buy the most expensive iPad for $699. The school system is spending a billion dollars and didn't negotiate a discount on the price? They're actually paying $79 over retail !!?? What the fucking fuck.
-- and then Pearson, a subcontractor with Apple, would provide math and science curriculum for the tablets at an additional $200 per unit.
$200 per unit for some shitty software? You've now jacked up the price to nearly a thousand dollars per iPad. Again, they're spending a billion dollars and don't negotiate a discount?
-- Less than 2 months after the program started, the school district reported that one-third of the 2,100 iPads distributed during the initial rollout of the program, had gone missing.
Seriously? You didn't see this coming from a mile away?
-- And best of all, the schools district's Assistant Superintendent, essentially the number 2 person in charge of the entire school system, is a former executive with Pearson, the company providing the software, and he was heavily involved in helping Pearson land the contract..
The best way to make sure the person taking care of something does their job is to allow them to own it and force them to compete in an actual market.
You mean the kind of competition that had U.S. banks handing out mortgages to anyone with a pulse a few years ago? Yeah, capitalism in action! Just watch the free market benefit us all!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It's all relative. Private schools are bad at decision making because people in general are bad at decision making. The only thing worse than a human making a decision, is when the human making the decision is not bound by the costs and benefits of his/her decision. Humans that only suffer the costs of a decision will fail to make good decisions that have reasonable costs. Humans that only receive the benefits of their decisions will not filter decisions with unreasonable costs.
Yes it's true that when people's own profit is on the line, they sometimes cheap out and end up worse off.
What is far more prevalent is people spending other people's money and not giving 2 shits about whether the money is being well spent, because it doesn't effect them.
True, but this doesn't actually negate NotDrWho's point. Capitalist purists often imply, or outright say, that Capitalism will produce the right outcomes, regardless of any other factor. This is an example of where it did not.
I'd also point out that one financial institution was allowed to fail: Lehman Brothers.
Almost immediately, many prominent persons and financial commentators roundly criticized the Fed for not saving Lehman. They said the financial crisis could have been stopped, or greatly reduced, by propping up Lehman Brothers. These were, to a man and woman, great "believers" in the purity of capitalism. Prior to the collapse all of them spoke strongly against any regulatory control, government oversight, capital reserves, and all the rest. The Market will Resolve Everything.
Their belief system proved to be both shallow and insubstantial.