It seems like only yesterday the New York Times magazine published a lengthy article about the powerful and transformative tablets that Joel Klein’s company Amplify had sold to the Guilford County, North Carolina, schools. The writer, Carlo Rotella, was appropriately cautious in assessing what it meant when students had most of their lessons on a tablet, but nonetheless there was a tone (encouraged by Joel Klein)
of “this is the future, get used to it.”

Well, maybe it is the future, but not yet. On Friday, the Amplify tablets were recalled because of multiple technical glitches. The schools are suspending their use until problems can be ironed out.

According to a local business blog,

Guilford County Schools is suspending the use of 15,000 tablet computers that are part of its signature learning technology initiative because of cracking screens and potential safety problems. Those tablets were supplied by a company called Amplify, which is a collaboration betweenNews Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS) and AT&T(NYSE: T).

The district said it turns out those tablets were not manufactured with the proper damage-resistant screens, and about 10 percent of the district’s devices have had to be returned to the company because of broken displays. Another 2,000 tablet cases supplied by Amplify have also had reported defects.

Also, at least one student turned in a charger that had overheated, melting its plastic casing. That’s a potential safety problem, and it prompted district officials to go ahead and suspend the entire program until Amplify and its suppliers can fix the problems.

The Amplify tablet was heavily marketed as the Next Big Thing, with profits unlimited, but it was not adequately tested. The success of the marketing campaign seemed to assure the success of the product.

This brings to mind two other heavily marketed, expensive products that were not properly tested or implemented.

Los Angeles continues to struggle with its $1 billion iPad problem. The kids cracked the security code in no time, using the expensive devices as toys. Some were withdrawn, some were lost. Meanwhile, the district has crumbling buildings (that should have been repaired with the money from the 25-year construction bond that was used to pay for the iPads), and classes are overcrowded.

And then there are the Common Core standards. The Gates Foundation assumed that if it gave a few millions to every significant organization inside the Beltway, the whole country would quietly acquiesce and accept the product that Gates paid for. That venture is experiencing meltdowns in state after state because it was hurried into production and deployed without trial runs and without consultations with the end users.

At some point, all this “creative disruption” will run into a wall. Perhaps it already has. Parents, students, and educators can take just so much at one time. Then “reform fatigue” sets in.