Los Angeles, which was teaching the nation what not to do with technology, is getting a new deal from Apple for its iPads.
Apple will cut the price.
Apple will sell L.A. new iPads instead of obsolete models.
The iPads will not be loaded with pre-set Pearson curriculum.
Howard Blume of the LA Times writes:
“The Los Angeles Unified School District will pay substantially less for thousands of iPads under the latest deal with Apple. The cost of the tablets that will be used on new state tests will be about $200 less per device, although the computers won’t include curriculum.
The revised price will be $504, compared to $699 for the iPads with curriculum. With taxes and other fees, the full cost of the more fully equipped devices rises to $768.
“The iPads are part of a $1-billion effort to provide a computer to every student, teacher and administrator in the nation’s second-largest school system. In response to concerns and problems, officials have slowed down the districtwide rollout, which began at 47 schools in the fall.
“L.A. Unified has also been under pressure to contain costs; it recently became clear that the district is paying more for devices than most other school systems. The higher price results mainly from L.A. Unified’s decision to purchase relatively costly devices and to include curriculum.
“District officials recently restarted negotiations with Apple and achieved two concessions. The first is that Apple would provide the latest iPad, rather than a discontinued model for which L.A. Unified was paying top dollar. The second is that Apple agreed to consider a lower price on machines for which curriculum was not necessary.”
The reason that L.A. is spending $1 billion on iPads is for Common Core testing. This raises the question as to how much Common Core testing will cost the nation. If Los Angeles alone–with about 670,000 students–will spend $1 billion, how many billions will the nation spend? $80 billion? How often will the tablets and iPads need to be replaced? What will be cut to pay for them? Does this vast new outlay explain the energetic support of the tech industry for Common Core?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
LAUSDeasy, Watch out, It’s coming!
http://www.examiner.com/article/lausdeasy-watch-out-it-s-coming
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Edudeformer re-entrenchment is what this move is, nothing more nothing less.
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The real story here is that to buy iPads for giving tests is obscene.
The iPad is a powerful, multipurpose device with potential to change learning.
For testing alone there are much more cost effective, more appropriate devices, especially laptops.
When iPad was introduced as “magic and revolutionary”, testing had to be far from that characterization.
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Peter says, “The iPad is a powerful, multipurpose device with potential to change learning.” NOT.
My building is infested with iPads, Peter, and they are just mental noise machines. You can’t text edit, if you take notes on them, you have layers of buggy apps to navigate to get back to them, so they are never looked at again.
They’re trying to make us use Schoology to make and collect assignments, and everything is just lost in the shuffle and bedlam. My sophomore honors kids, on their second year, are frantically obsessed with exact log-in procedures for turning in disjointed fragments for grading. They never got the abstract and overview skills they need to assemble a mental outline, and the cloud-based portfolio program makes them cry. Many talented, content-centered kids who won’t (or can’t!) comply with the faith-based marketing drive were pushed down from the honors track last year.
There is a kind of object-permanence in the real world that anchors rational thought. Being held accountable to a little glass touch screen is undermining the step from object-permanence to abstract concept formation.
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Hilarious video!
“American children rank monkeys in object permanence.”
Ah, our obsession with testing and ranking.
The onion?
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They’re over-selling it, just as they oversold it in health care.
I don’t even think it’s smart from a money-making perspective because it will inevitably disappoint. From a public policy perspective it’s a disaster, because the people who paid for it (the public) will feel ripped-off and they won’t allocate 1 billion to public schools again.
I don’t know why one would want to discredit their own idea or product. This language they’re using to promote this is ridiculous, the “civil rights” nonsense. Can they BE more over the top? Why always, always such a hard sell obscured with such vague, broad themes?
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Absolutely agree. Top down, mass dumping of technology ends up this way. The vendors sell “uses” no one really wants. And especially schools and districts don’t give teachers time or resources to embrace the technology.
Whether laptop, tablets, or Smartboards, it takes innovative teachers, and support to find the ways to use he stuff. One teacher at a time.
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Listening to the propaganda spewing forth by Obama’s chief of staff right now about how their agenda to “wire schools.” This seems to their dog and bone strategy now. He is saying that no longer are the days when there is a computer lab where students go once a week. Now, everyone will be sitting and staring at a tablet. What progress! Oh, how much money to be made from common core testing and crappy aps!
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I hate to be so nitpicky, but we’re not getting the full cost of these programs in ordinary news coverage. They’re covering only the device and the curriculum, but the programs have many more associated costs.
This is a review of a Fort Bend, Texas IPad program, done, inexplicably, after they spent the money, not before:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/805310-fort-bend-iachieve-report-by-gibson-consulting.html
I would think they need all the costs revealed because the staffing and consultancy costs are substantial. Not the device or the programs- the people they have to hire.
Does any of this sound familiar?
“I felt they were rushing it—they only did a one-month pilot,” says Bailey, a school trustee elected during the iAchieve backlash. “Everyone knows you can’t really measure anything in a month. I felt like it was being pushed out for some odd reason.”
The man running the district through all this was Timothy Jenney, who’d been superintendent since 2006. Jenney was one of the first to graduate from the Broad Superintendents Academy, a training program infamous for turning out leaders hell-bent on big, disruptive school reforms.
iAchieve was actually a more modest reinvention of an earlier plan for a regional science education center, the sort of signature initiative that’d get Fort Bend ISD recognized as a nationwide leader, for the low, low cost of $25 million.
So iAchieve looked like a real steal at just $16 to $18 million. The district would still get its recognition as a leader in science instruction, but could save millions by doing it virtually.”
So Jenney is now down the road and needless to say, they didn’t “save millions”.
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“The cost of the tablets that will be used on new state tests will be about…”
Well, the price drop is good, but here is yet another cost that is really about all the tests. My district got tablets also. We were all excited about using them for instruction, but like most of our technology, they are frequently unavailable due to pre tests, post tests, benchmark tests, STARR reading tests, student surveys, etc.
Endless testing = money pit
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This is happening in DCPS too.
My school just received about 1000 new computers to update their decade-old computers. But, the impetus for this had little to do with giving students access to updated technology. Instead, it was to ensure that there were enough machines available for students to take the new computer-based tests this spring.
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Another waste of good money and a desperate attempt to fix education. The kids will wreck these expensive toys in due time.
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Yes, they’re very fragile. We’re closing in on a 25% breakage rate.
They actually aren’t touted as “fixing” anything, just completely revolutionizing and reinventing education in some unspecified, nebulous way. The clumsy glass touchscreens are real, but the little virtual emperor on them is strutting around naked, while the tech promoters .rake in our education budgets.
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If they want to save money, they should simply buy three-ring binders with filler paper and lots of great books. Extra cash? Buy all the kids healthy snacks, breakfast and lunch. School boards across the nation are wasting money on digital technology. Children learn to read and write by reading and writing–no fancy technology required.
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Hello, Vermont. There is something to simplicity, but actually I would love it if we had laptops for chemistry, because the Vernier probeware is truly wondrous. Does anybody even remember what “data” is supposed to mean? Or technology?
We got some Labquest units, finally, and have a lot of quantitative capabilities. I’m putting them in my kids hands as much as possible, but we are writing the numbers down on data tables. It’s ragged, because the iPads won’t interface with them; they say their app attempt has failed, they need to get back to us. I think maybe the people who ordered them didn’t really understand what they are. We have no time for training or exploration, because it’s all taken up with Pearson’s own bogus “Flipped Learning” professional development.
If there was a rational decision tree anywhere in the procurement process, we could incorporate real technology where it will really make a difference. Instead, people have threatened me for arguing that Chromebooks would be a better choice for science.
The decisions have all been made, in the passive voice, and nobody will even say by whom.
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I can’t “like” this post enough. Right on!
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At least we have figured out how to use three-ring binders in instruction.
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I am wondering why the LASD must pay taxes on the purchase of these iPads?
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School district almost always do, except on actual instructional materials.
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The only thing that can make an impact on learning is an effective teacher.
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And a willing student.
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This information is not entirely correct. While LAUSD is paying too much for iPads and the cost for the Pearson CCSS app is outrageous ( there is an alternative to the doatly program that no one in LA was apparently aware of until recently that allows teachers to adapt the standards to serve the unique of their students) , the billion dollars of bond money being used for the iPads is justified by the fact that school infrastructure has to be upgraded to accommodate the wifi Deasy says in necessary for the iPads to access the test. The problem is that LAUSD has been REMOVING the wifi accommodations for the last few years because the board banned it when it became quite apparent that schools with wifi present a threat to students through the extreme concentration of radio waves which are a carcinogen, particularly for children whose bodies and brains are in the processor developing. In other countries, Austria, Australia, Canada and throughout Europe, schools have outlawed wifi in schools for this reason, the research is extensive and compelling, particularly in light of the number of students ad staff who have already fallen pray to cancer in Los Angeles schools.
So the bond oversight committee justifies the use of these funds by deferring to the need for construction to make schools wifi ready. I think we can all agree tha the 1/2 billion for iPads — no matter what ” generation” they are, is way too high , but the more urgent issue is the installation of wifi after the board banned it in 2009 . Vladovic, Galatzan, Garia and LaMotte were on the board at this time. Garcia was the only one who did not vote to remove the wifi as she was absent on the day they voted.
I will add that it is unwise to trust the word of Deasy or press releases that are issued from LAUSD . Frankly, I find this news to be far from “good” . It is just more distraction that keeps us from dealing with the reality of Deasy’s goals, which include bankrupting LAUSD and potentially LA as well. If you doubt me, check out the action in Detroit and Philladelphia where Broadie superintedent’s have destroyed schools and left the cities broke. With the Breed vs. LAUSD case emerging to expose the recklessness of the district’s legal offices and the plight of risk management, I believe we must mobilize now or face a monumental disaster.
http://www.hemlockontherocks.com
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Thanks Rene for jumping in here with many facts. Your research on all this is invaluable.
As to the WiFi, that alone will cost the District hundreds of millions of dollars to install in schools, and then what about all the inner city students who cannot afford to connect at home? And yes, the BoE first banned WiFi starting in 2003 I believe when so many scientific reports elucidated the health risks particularly for younger children…and many reports show the exponential rise in brain cancers in this same population of students.
The Construction Bond committee was overruled by Vladovic and his seemingly ‘bought’ Board at the last meeting (when they said to the BoE to slow down on the purchase of more iPads using the bond funding) and when Vlad also set aside Monica Ratliff and her Finance investigation committee. The public perception of this is that the Board was instructed by Deasy and Broad and their lawyers that they must set aside all investigation of the iPad fiasco.
As we see all over the US, many school districts are using Android pads that cost around $150 and are effective teaching tools. This sham of a drop in price of the LAUSD iPads is nothing more than a publicity stunt by Deasy with his purported sweetheart deal with Apple. California taxpayers are still being scammed into paying the freight for these still overpriced iPads. And the software costs by Pearson are now no longer factored in…but will be huge. So please do not believe any of this deceit and media spin.
I am glad Rene that you brought up the Breed v. LAUSD case of 2012 and suggest you expand on it here. I am currently writing an article on this key case and will publish it in the next few days. Anyone here who wants to know more, for instance Mercedes, can google the case and/or contact Rene and/or me.
Ellen Lubic
joiningforces4ed@aol.com
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A train can be used to link two communities and to take people to work and to play. Or it can be used to transport people to death camps.
A tablet can give students unprecedented access to resources for study and research. Instead of having access to 4,000 books in the school library, for example, a student can have access to 21 million books in an online library. And the Internet, of course, is that free, universal repository of the knowledge of the world dreamed of by scholars for millennia. Want to understand how a gamma ray burster works? Want to know about how Galvani and Godwin influenced the work of Mary Shelley? Want to understand the identifying characteristics of a sarabande and a bouree? Your answers are a couple of clicks away.
A computer app can have infinite patience; can be available anywhere, at any time; can provide immediate feedback; can link to additional help with particular material; can provide information or experiences in the appropriate format (e.g., a rotatable, 3D graphic of a running AC motor, showing its parts and their functions; a chart of data–an actuarial table, for example–that can be manipulated statistically); can provide immediate access to a tutor or coach; can create a learning community with no spatial boundaries.
Or the tablet can be locked down, and access to the universal library that is the Net can be closed off in the name of protecting kids from unacceptable material, and the tablet can be used to push onto kids extraordinarily idiotic, dumbed-down learning apps that consist of little more than Powerpoint-style bullet lists and worksheets on a screen–textbooks transformed into bullet points and animated cartoon graphics.
The lousy currently available online curricula is a HUGE problem. Curriculum creators are doing a LOT of dumbing down these days to fit info on a screen. Edward Tufte did a comparative study of information on Powerpoint slides and in print charts and tables and found decreases in the amount of information conveyed of several orders of magnitude!!!! See his brilliant essay The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint for a revealing look at this issue.
I’ve reviewed an ENORMOUS number of online instructional material for K-12 over the past few years. Most of the stuff I’ve seen is total crap. Fancy, colorful, slickly produced EDUJUNK. But it generates data and reports. Lots of data and reports, which, if you listen to the deformers, is some sort of end in itself.
Call it the data for data’s sake movement.
Of course, pixels are cheaper than paper is. Far, far, far cheaper. For that reason, educational materials WILL INEVITABLE migrate online.
And, for that reason, the Common Core State Standards were paid for by a certain monopolist in order to have a single set of national standards that the computer-adaptive educational apps of the very near future could be correlated to so that he turn his national database of student responses and scores into a monopolistic gateway for such apps and generate BILLIONS. The whole idea is incredibly Orwellian, but few even recognize how the national standards, the national tests, the national database, computer-adaptive curricula, and a computer in every students’ hands are related–that all this move toward immediate computerization was part of one guy’s business plan.
ALMOST NO ONE DOES.
Computers can, indeed, bring about a revolution in learning. Or not.
It all depends on what you do with them.
So, caveat emptor.
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cx: an enormous amount, of course, not an enormous number
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cx: INEVITABLY, not INEVITABLE
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Perhaps the thing to grasp here is that the iPads were never really intended for instruction as teachers see it.
Their actual purpose was/ is testing and connecting the testing ” data” to the ” cloud”, as well as virtual classes where assignments/ performance becomes more ” data” used to track students.
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“the cloud”–meaning the inBloom national database of student responses (and monopolistic gateway for computer-adaptive curricula keyed to those responses and to the standards)
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My sincere gratitude to all those who commented in this thread.
Krazy props.
And a special shout-out to Ang for nailing the edufrauds to the wall by using a minimum of effort and words to create a maximum educational effect.
😎
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Yes, Ang…as with Murdoch and Gates’ inBloom data mining cloud business model…and Murdoch’s Amplify which was so defective and broke so easily that he took it off the market.
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The Tech Blueprint issued by Arne Duncan’s Dept of Ed at the beginning of his tenure called for this massive shift toward computerization of our schools, including wiring all schools; putting a device in the hands of every student; creating computerized, national tests of standards; movement toward computer-adaptive curricula; and a national database of student responses and test scores.
In other words, it’s the Duncan blueprint was the inBloom strategic plan.
All hail the Data god.
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Duncan’s most recent tech blueprint calls for hooking kids up to galvanic skin resistance bracelets and retinal scanners to monitor, in real time, their affective states to ensure that they are demonstrating grit, tenacity, and perseverance when doing their Powerpointed lessons and worksheets on a screen. I wish I were making this stuff up.
Total Information Awareness hits schools.
All hail the Data god.
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One word: DISGUSTING.
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In Los Angeles, we are still in shock that a project of this size was passed by both the Bond Oversight Committee and the Board of Education. Now, both entities are trying to show their concerns, but are still unwilling to take responsibility for not demanding a long and thorough pilot program. LAUSD will always be remembered for the Belmont fiasco, where environmental and earthquake issues where ignored. How many hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted that could have been used to meet other educational needs? If you think Belmont was bad, the iPads will be much worse. The reason is because LAUSD did not bother to consider the ongoing costs of sustaining this program and no one on the BOC or BoE bothered to ask and demand answers.
So, while Deasy remains in shock that so many people are still “against” students in poverty having access to technology, no one ever asks him where the money will come from in the future? Already, millions to fund this program are coming out of the general fund, and this is only going to grow as bond money will not be able to be used in the future.
There is no doubt that spring testing will be a disaster on many fronts. Superintendents across this state could have and should have organized and challenged the efficacy of pushing out computer testing, knowing full well that California was hit hard in the recession and has not begun to recover.
We also need to take just as close or a closer look at the half a billion dollar cost of infrastructure. Did anyone take a look at whether or not those costs are reasonable?
It’s hard to internalize all the questionable and obviously flawed aspects of the LAUSD iPad project. Deasy obviously feels that he has the backs of philanthropists and certain politicians, but when more of the truth comes out, Deasy may indeed wind up in a position not unlike Governor Christie. But the public has its limitations when it comes to misrepresentations by those in power.
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Just found this Android pad on sale at a major online shopping network for about half the price of the great new Deasy negotiated deal ‘bargain’ with Apple.
Samsung Garnet 7″ plus many perks. $239.95
I do not want any more of Deasy’s amazing negotiation skills wasting my tax money with his ‘pay to play’ Broad Academy business models.
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There’s a lot of irony in calling this “good news.”
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Insanity downgraded to delusion. This is progress?
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Smyth, Ang and Chemtchr have got it right. iPads (and other computer technology) properly developed into individual diagnostic assessment and alternative presentations of curriculum have the potential to exponentially increase learning for students of all ages and intelligences. But the uses of computers for those purposes is being researched and tested in only a very few places in the country. It is time-consuming and expensive so the profit possibility is limited. Meanwhile the nations’ financial oligarchs (Say Gates and Broad among others), politicians, private corporate test manufacturers, and mainstream media swam the schools into using computers with largely useless and sometimes harmful computer purposes for high stakes testing and aggregated data reporting.
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That is a superb summary, billknaak!
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key word: expensive
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I’m betting that Apple is not happy, despite the profit. Education and especially support for their technology goes back a long way. Now one of their flagship products is tied to a growing fiasco. They love to show off their successes like the 1 to 1 initiatives in places like Mooresville, NC. But using iPads for testing and shoddy curriculum goes against how they have long tried to place their products.
It’s almost like years ago when IBM pushed its PC Jr. Into schools.
This can’t turn out well for Apple.
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Our LAUSD Superintendent Deasy was the face that Apple used when the initiated the iPad into the marketplace. He was also a stockholder until some weeks ago. You find the Deasy/iPad ads on YouTube.
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Has anyone in power in LASD stopped to consider the fact that the iPad is NOT actually A COMPUTER? It’s a tablet without USB ports, or the capacity to download and run basic MicroSoft office programs such as Word or Excel or Power Point.
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David…this frivelous purchase was made by Deasy and then Asst.Supt.Jaime Aquino…both are Broad Academy grads…and they are supposed to be the best of Eli’s CEOs…but they did not think any of this through. It is all in old posts to this site which you can find starting last Spring, in March. Aquino fell on his perard…but is still getting paid. Deasy had his contract renewed for 3 more years. Shameful.
BoE member Monica Ratliff headed a committee to ferret out the info but she was shut down…because we all assume, she was successful in finding the faults and placing the blame. Many, including Ratliff and her group, suggested that laptops would be a better solution…but they are now burying her in a “curriculum committee”….our BoE is beyond redemption. They do what they are told by Deasy and Broad…parents, students, teachers, administrators, and the taxpaying public be damned. They do NOT represent their constituents.
If you want to learn more, just google Ravitch/Deasy where many of our local educators have posted the whole bitter story. All of this is a political fix.
Ellen Lubic
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I’m sure if I spend enough time here, I’ll find this, but are there districts and/or states (guessing Vermont, maybe?) that are NOT making these mistakes? Making these decisions more slowly and carefully, and getting better results because of it? I would love to learn more about places that are doing this right, so we can keep turning the people in LA and DC in that direction and say, Look, over there…do what they’re doing. Maybe the people currently in power wouldn’t look, but the voters?
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Yep, found it. Just did a search for “Vermont” on this blog, and…duh. Okay, so Vermont. Anywhere else? Are there rogue districts in other states?
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Jennifer Gonzalez,
Kentucky is one of a small number of states with no charters.
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Did Gates spawn Desay? If so, why did LAUSD buy from Apple? Just curious? Here’s where I cannot exactly follow the money.
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Thomas…if you google my name you will find many of my articles which explain how this has been developing at LAUSD, blow by blow, since early last year.
Ellen Lubic
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Why does the testing have to be done on a tablet instead of other kinds of computers that schools may already have?
This whole thing stinks of vendors trying to squeeze every possible taxpayer dollar out of us.
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Gates and Pearson happy together!!
$$$$$$$&&&&
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Imagine me and you, and you and me.
No matter how they throw the dice, it had to be.
The only one for me is you, and you for me,
So happy together!
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