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.

Comments

Deflection

[halivar]

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.

Re:Deflection

[NotDrWho]

Usually in these school procurement cases there is some third-party company behind the mess when you dig into it. And you find that either they sold some gullible school officials on a bunch of bullshit promises or they bribed them, or both. Either way, the company walks away with the money, the gullible officials are never reprimanded, and the only ones who pay the price are the taxpayers who have to foot the bill and the students who have to use old books because they were supposed to be using the SuperPad-Gonna-Solve-All-Your-Problems-Learning-WonderDevice instead of new ones.

Re:Deflection

[LWATCDR]

Wait I have a solution to this problem.
1. Run a test.. You could call it a pilot program in one school.
2. The company that wants the contract pays for the pilot or at least half of it.
When it fails you do not have a missive program fail and it costs a lot less.
This is brilliant. I wonder why no one thought of this before.

Wow. Just wow.

[Frosty Piss]

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?

Re:Wow. Just wow.

[Hognoxious]

Testing is what those square old mainframe daddies - the ones who witter on about aida and cowbell and 4tran - do.

It's not agile.

Re:Wow. Just wow.

[Overzeetop]

Based on what's been posted, Pearson (and, presumably Apple) promised a product/curriculum combination with essentially a custom use case in mind, the district purchased based on the sales literature, and then Pearson couldn't deliver what they promised. It's called false advertising and Pearson may be left holding the bag if the allegations are true and hold up in court.

Re:Wow. Just wow.

[MightyYar]

This is common in education. You rarely see any kind of pilot project or scientifically valid feasibility work. Education as a field is mostly a philosophy-based practice and is only now starting to dabble in evidence-based decision making.

Re:Wow. Just wow.

[rudy_wayne]

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..

Re:Wow. Just wow.

[orasio]

Here in Uruguay, they got the OLPC. There is no market, and it works great.
All kids in public school have their own, you see them using them on the streets, public squares. It has its application in classes, and most importantly, it was instrumental in connecting all schools with quality internet service, allowing for remote classes, that kind of thing. It was a success in many regards.

Private schools, on the other hand, are subject to market forces and stuff, but are usually pretty poor in their decision making. For example, my kids goes to a private kinder, and their usage of computers is pretty dumb, they still have a computer lab kind of thing, mainly because they weren't wise enough to get a complete solution. Public spending was a lot better around here.

Re:Wow. Just wow.

[TsuruchiBrian]

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.

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's the school's fault

[MetalliQaZ]

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....

shocker

[slashmydots]

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.

Re:shocker

[Mr D from 63]

My kid's STEM school used Dell Chromebooks. They are very useful for doing what is needed, creating reports, researching information, submitting homework, and occasional collaborative activities. They are not a mainstay of the educational day, but a tool used at the appropriate time.

Sign off.

[Dr. Evil]

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.

Re:Sign off.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The superintendent at the time 'resigned' over the controversy; but depending on the outcome of the FBI's ongoing investigation into the circumstances of the bidding process, he may or may not be looking at further consequences.

Pearson is a company that brings a sort of defense contractor vibe to the educational sector. They are huge, superb at landing contracts, excellent at writing contracts that promise somewhat less than they appear to; but not so hot on delivering, much less on time or on budget.

Anyone buying a zillion ipads for school children without realizing that they'll be using them mostly to screw around on the internet within about five minutes is certainly an idiot; and Pearson certainly can't take the blame for that; but their failure to deliver some curriculum slurry and a terrible textbook app or two within the agreed upon time? That's the sort of thing they do.

Re:Sign off.

[TsuruchiBrian]

As a general rule, LAUSD will do which ever option is worse. If you are unsure of which option is better, the safe bet is to just pick the opposite of what LAUSD decided to do.

Re:Sign off.

[i.r.id10t]

Which is why when a vendor asks us to enable integration for their stuff - and Pearson is one of 'em with their myFooLab emporium, I always tell 'em three things.

1) I don't work for $vendor - so no, I don't "have to" or "need to" do anything for them

2) We only accept requests from faculty or departments who have decided to adopt the resource, not from the sales person or vendor tech support folks. Again, see #1

3) The product must not be in beta or "brand new last week", and I must see it work on their system, our course management vendor's system (used for demos), or get good reports from other LMS Admins at other schools

Have had several unhappy vendors/sales folks, but have had minimal issues about promised features not working, existing, etc.

Re:Sign off.

[hey!]

Well, until the details of how the contract was awarded and how the vendor failed have been thoroughly investigated, it's premature to fire anyone.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for accountability and decisiveness, but picking someone plausible and throwing them under the bus isn't accountability. In fact that may actually shield whoever was responsible.

Buyer's remorse

[bluefoxlucid]

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!"

Re:Buyer's remorse

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I can't digg up the original contract to check; but some of the stories state that they are going to Apple because the deal was to purchase 'iPad+software', as a packaged product, from Apple. By all accounts Pearson was the significant weak link (not a shock, that's pretty typical for them), while Apple's stuff suffered only from the fairly pitiful state of iOS management; but the school district didn't structure the deal as 'Contract #1, buy ipads, Contract #2, buy textbook apps'; it was a package, and their claim is that half the package was rotten and the other half is of little use to them without the underdelivered component.

Given that Apple is reputed to be a brutal and efficient taskmaster of its suppliers, I'd imagine that either the school district will fail, or Apple will gouge it out of Pearson; but to the best of my understanding there is logic behind complaining to Apple, given the terms under which the devices were purchased.

That's correct.

[Pollux]

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.

[tlambert]

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.

Something is surely wrong with us...

[bogaboga]

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.

And that's why we have pilot programs, kids

[Radical Moderate]

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.

Pearson

[jbolden]

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.

Was never going to work

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The previous Slashdot story?

[galabar]

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.

But the reports say...

[Ecuador]

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...