Howard Blume and Teresa Watanabe update the Los Angeles iPad scandal and note growing demands for a full investigation.
This doesn’t look good for Deasy. Aquino bailed out and took another job earlier. Dan Schnur calls Aquino’s email “the smoking gun.”
Deasy has defended the bidding process as proper and added that he and his staff talked to vendors in pursuit of good deals and good products. The focus on Aquino, who worked for a Pearson affiliate before his hiring at L.A. Unified, sharpened Tuesday, when General Counsel David Holmquist confirmed that the district was looking into whether he had violated ethics rules.
Those ethics rules required Aquino to avoid dealing with Pearson contracts for a year. But he sent emails to executives with the international education-services firm before the end of his first year with L.A. Unified.
“I believe we would have to make sure that your bid is the lowest one,” Aquino wrote to Pearson executives in one email, dated May 24, 2012.
“The Aquino email is the smoking gun. Even if no laws were broken, the appearances are absolutely horrible,” said Dan Schnur, director of the USC Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics. “It’s hard to interpret what Aquino said in any other way than that he wanted to fix the bid process before it even got started.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is anybody curious why students got iPads and not teachers? We were supposed to get them years ago. But wait why am I asking such a silly question?? I should know better! teachers don’t get anything! screw the teachers screw the teachers and then please screw the teachers over some more, right? Of course we give kids technology and not give the teachers. this country makes no sense anymore
Peace, beats and beauty sleep,
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It’s been clear for some time that Deasy’s interests are with the money and not the children. What I’d love to know is this: Why did the Los Angeles Times cover for him until now?
Many of us are calling for an external independent audit and a Grand Jury investigation of all Deasy’s mismanagement at LAUSD.
Hope all of Diane’s readers will support the furious LA taxpayers who must foot the bills for this mess. Please write to the LA Times, the BoE, and even to Governor Jerry Brown demanding a rapid investigation to all the inept and potentially fraudulent secret deals.
And who has the power to utilize the information derived from the ‘smoking gun’ to change decision making in the LAUSD? It is one thing to have vital information, it is another thing to use it.
Reporters do not want to be sued. Until the emails were shared, there was no hard and fast evidence. Clearly, the district stalled on sharing the emails as long as it could. Now we know why. The internal report that was leaked is now public and a link is provided in the LA Times article. The bidding process is just one of many other lies and misrepresentations detailed in the report.
The accusations against the deal have been heard loud and clear for almost a year, but Deasy was able to circumvent his critics while claiming that “this is a civil right” and that the district needed to purchase devices for testing. I think it’s also time for the State Board of Education to revisit this requirement and to admit that the ramping up of technology in schools is trumping decisions on the best way to deliver a quality education.
What is so telling to me is that the Inspector General at LAUSD had to know about this and yet nothing perceived by him as wrong. The LA district attorney, counseled by board member Tamar Galatzan, found nothing criminal. Both agencies now want to take another look. Are you kidding me? If a real investigation is done it must be independent of the district and by a neutral party. Otherwise, we are just spinning our wheels.
YES…all true. This is why the informed public, now seeing evidence in the form on the emails leading to the contracts, all signed by Deasy, must call for an external independent audit, NOT and internal audit, and a Grand Jury investigation.
They didn’t have the emails, but if they weren’t so busy supporting Deasy and bashing the union, they might have noticed that the district was overpaying compared to other districts. This deal has smelled from the start.
iPads: a solution in search of a problem.
The emails are being used to implicate Aquino only. It appears that they are trying to make him the fall guy. Believe me, he was not the only one and Deasy has his fingerprints all over this. There is an emerging story in my opinion and it is the MSIS debacle. Also steered by Deasy to a nonbidded vendor who supposedly is an expert on managing large data systems like MSIS. According to LASchool Reports, this vendor asked for an enormous amount of money which Deasy and the Bd of Ed gave her. Almost from the beginning everyone internally in the district said it wasn’t ready to be implemented and yet it was. This expert perhaps had trouble duplicating her success in corporations and couldn’t handle the MSIS system. Now what do we do? Well, we allow Deasy to pick another crony to advise him on the proper course to take(shouldn’t that be done in the beginning) and another salary on the old LAUSD payroll that does not have to be approved by the BOE. Putting Deasy(the fox) over district procurement(the hen house)will achieve the same results. Insanity I say.
Yes, Paula, they have attempted to make Jaime Aquino the single fall guy from day one last year when this iPad fiasco broke. And now the Deasy spin is blame Jaime and that he himself was not the one who set it all up. This is why there must be an EXTERNAL independent Audit.
“Bid Pro Quo”
Your bid is not the least
So simply bid again
To join us at the feast
Re-re-submit to win
[repeat until least]
The people who are cheering the L.A. Times editorials by Steve Lopez and other writers regarding the iPad fiasco wouldn’t be cheering if they had seen another op-ed that ran on the same day. It’s the op-ed “Who’s Minding Public Pensions?” It talks about Gov.Brown’s frustration with how CalPERS is run. In 2012 Brown tried to reduce the influence of government retirees and employees on the pension board by adding his own appointees to the board. The legislature refused. Recently CalPERS added 99 more ways that pensions could be spiked. Apparently if you are a fireman, then keeping physically fit entitles you to a bonus that can be figured into your pension amount. Other states like Texas have the same problem. Taxpayers in New Orleans pay for a pension fund run by firemen, which may be why the firefigher’s fund has $80 million in assets and $420 million in liabilities. It’s like paying for a credit card that somebody else can charge. The writer Steve Malanga calls for Brown to renew his efforts to reconstitute the CalPERS board. Given CalPERS/CalSTRS $1 trillion in unfunded liabilities, the legislature just might go along this time.