David Lyell–a classroom teacher and UTLA officer– here describes the ongoing iPad fiasco in Los Angeles.
Why did the district commit to spend $1 billion on iPads? To test the Common Core.
Are tests more valuable to students than smaller classes, experienced teachers, and the arts, all of which are being sacrificed for iPads?
Was the Pearson content reviewed?
Who is investigating how decisions were made?
Why, the board. No, not the board. The Inspector General. Does he report to those who made the decision he is investigating?
He writes:
“The district only reluctantly admitted to paying for a three-year software license before it had even actually seen what it was purchasing (L.A. Times: http://lat.ms/1akJZgA).
“It was also recently revealed that some staff members were given free iPads a year before the board voted for Phase I of this project, at a pitch meeting by software peddler Pearson. (KPCC: http://bit.ly/1dKDm7S).
“So, who’s investigating? LAUSD’s Office of the Inspector General. In other words, when possible impropriety arises, the district has authority to investigate itself.
“As if all of this isn’t alarming enough, LAUSD announced this past week that the only committee charged with overseeing the iPad rollout is set to be disbanded. (LATimes: http://lat.ms/1aFsYeO).”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When to the law suits start? It only takes one parent or a coalition of parents. Law suits have been filed by parents over much smaller issues.
It seems like every property tax payer in Los Angeles has standing to sue.
Let’s hope that someone or a group will stand up and there will be a lawyer/s willing to take this on pro-bono or for a percentage of a possible win in court.
Maybe the ACLU will step up or some high profile civil rights lawyer.
Lloyd…many in LA, and around the State, have been pressing for a law suit, but the grounds are shaky and still unclear, and the Board with the exception of Ratliff, seems to continue to collude with Deasy in this hush hush coverup full of elaborate rationales. Board Prez Vladovic abruptly shut down the entire investigative process recently after Ratliff repeatedly demanded to see the full Pearson curriculum. Deasy contracted for a ‘pie in the sky’ fantasy when he signed taxpayers up for not only Construction Bond paid iPads, but for renewal contracts every 3 years for the Pearson, still undesigned, software. Fraud and/or ignorance seem to abound but without a dedicated BoE to ferret it out, it becomes and exercise in futility.
Many of us are searching for a pro bono law firm to take this on…since the parents, teachers, and the public do not have access to the vast sums of money needed to press such a suit. It is only our adversaries, the Billionaires striving to kill off public education, who can hire the nation’s most prestigious law firms to do their bidding…as with Vergara v. California (and the CTA).
There are old line civil rights groups with legal departments who complain, but none that I know of have stepped forward to take leadership in fighting back in court. Where is the ACLU, or CORE, or Common Cause?
If anyone wishes to step forward and voluteer to create perhaps a class action suit, I am certain that many in LA would sign on.
Please contact me at
joiningforces4ed@aol.com
if you are a community minded attorney who is willing to take this on.
Where is John Edwards when we need him? He was not afraid to tackle the tobacco companies, and it is that kind of focus we in California, in LA, need right now.
I understand maybe more than many, because CTA/NEA provided lawyers to advise and defend me against the school district where I worked when I wouldn’t force my students to admit they had libeled another student in a story about ballot-box stuffing during an ASB election at the high school where several witnesses wrote what they saw and signed statements before this story ran in the high school paper.
The story made the news and was included in a study of high school censorship by a student at the University of Alabama.
According to what I’ve read, we are not able to review the software. Not even the district has access to it according to the contract it signed with Pearson. The LA times recently reported that the district is going to have to pay an additional $400 million, so that makes $1.4 billion altogether.
Charlotte..Ratliff has been trying to get ahold of this curriculum for some time and they keep putting stumbling blocks in her path. It is outrageous to be forced to buy such expensive software and have it be a totally blind item. Pearson sells LAUSD a pig in a poke…and Deasy ok’s it.
Of course he’s okay. He’s happy. People like him wreak havoc wherever they go and blame their victims.
Same old, same old. Almost as suspicious as Hillary on Benghazi and the IRS targeting of Tea Party organizations. Connect the dots, folks. What you condemn in LA, you praise (or let pass) in DC.
Harlan, are you the Harlan Underhill who’s the drama club adviser and writing tutor at Washtenaw International High School in the Greater Detroit Area?
Out of curiosity, I Googled your name. Feel free to do the same for me. I’m sure you’ll find some interesting stuff out there both pro and con.
If you are this Harlan, then your stance on this issue makes sense, because your LinkedIn profile has you teaching for the Greenhills School for 33 years.
Greenhills School is an independent college preparatory school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States that was founded in 1969, a few years before you started there in 1971.
You spend thirty-three years teaching in a private school. What does that say about your thinking about public education?
I’m also interested in the funding for your latest position in education with Washtenaw–that is if you are the same Harlan Underhill.
It says, “The per-student state funding will follow each student to WIHS. Each district pays 100% of the state foundation allowance for each student enrolled in the program from their district on the September student count day. In addition, Washtenaw Intermediate School district is advancing start-up costs to WIHS in its first three years. Lastly, foundation and grant funding helps with specific captial improvement and programmatic needs.”
And when I used Mackinac.org to access information about Washtenaw International, there was no listing.
http://www.mackinac.org/depts/epi/performance.aspx
Also couldn’t find it here:
Click to access ED541512.pdf
If you are the same Harlan, would you please explain what “a consortium high school for Washtenaw County students” is.
http://www.mlive.com/news/jackson/index.ssf/2013/07/former_willow_run_high_school.html
I did find this:
We decided to visit the Washtenaw International High School, which is a consortium program that lives at the former Ypsilanti East Middle School. [It’s a consortium which excludes some of the west-side-of-the-county districts, but people in those districts can go by choosing to enroll as a school of choice student in a district like Ypsilanti.
http://a2schoolsmuse.blogspot.com/2013_01_01_archive.html#.UwE6jYW26iA
School of Choice?????? And why is there no school report card—at least I can’t find one?
Harlan..you have no insight or understanding of what is happening in LA…and you do not know who the activists are…nor how they/we look at DC…so please do not add to the uninformed hyperbole.
I hear that there is a little private industry being engaged in by the students to hack these devices so that the students can use them for general access to the Internet.
That’s a very positive sign.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57605091-71/la-schools-give-kids-ipads-kids-hack-them/
Thousands of years ago, one of the Ptolemies dreamed of a universal library that would house in one place all that was known. Thus was born the Library of Alexandria.
Then, various Persians and Greeks put together various compendia of knowledge. Their compendia flowered, eventually, in work by Diderot and his fellow encyclopedists, who imagined a compilation, in summary form, in a few volumes, of the knowledge of the world.
In 1898, Mark Twain wrote a short story–an early example of a science fiction tale–in which he imagined a device for communicating, instantaneously, across vast distances, sound, text, and images.
In 1903, H. G. Wells wrote about a future in which people would be about to connect to the sum of the world’s knowledge “instantaneously, over wires.” He later expanded, enormously, on this idea of a “World Brain.”
In the 1950s, President Truman’s science advisor, Vannevar Bush, dreamed of a device that would read a library of magnetic cards on which was stored the sum of the world’s knowledge–all the books, for example, ever written. He called this device the Memorex.
And now, today, that ancient dream of instantaneous, universal access to the whole of the knowledge of the world is close to being realized.
Want to know the formal characteristics of a bouree or a sarabande?
Interested in learning how egg tempura is made?
Wondering about what influences led the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley to conceive of Frankenstein?
Wondering what the major arguments are for libertarianism, compatibilism, and determinism about free will?
Curious about how a neuron works?
Curious about how relatively efficient plants and animals are as calorie sources?
Forgotten how to generate Pascal’s Triangle or what Bayes’ Theorem says?
Want to learn a few words in Tamil to impress your new friend from Sri Lanka?
Want to practice your Latin conjugations?
Need a translation of ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέστατος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ?
Want access to the full text of any of 20 million books published before 1923?
Need help with that geometry homework on a Sunday afternoon?
Want to have a look at the major works by Artemisia Gentileschi?
Wondering what effects the invention of agriculture had on average human health?
Want to learn how to do macrame? how to wire the pickups in an electric guitar?
Want a table of mudras so you can figure out what that hand gesture on that statue of Ganesha you just saw in the shop down the street means?
Want advice on planting and tending to cruciferous vegetables?
Need to conduct a survey among you classmates?
Want to learn how to edit a video presentation?
Interested in learning the etymology of the word porcelain or what a nominative absolute or a correlative conjunction is?
Wondering how AC and DC differ from one another?
Want to know how to build a wind turbine?
Interested in exploring what Einstein or Dylan Thomas was writing his his notebooks at the age of 14?
Want a complete course in introductory statistics? game theory? macoreconomics? early twentieth-century philosophy?
Wondering what a dirigible driver does?
You name it–whatever it is–it’s a click or two away. And that’s just the PROBLEM, say the Philistines.
In the name of “protecting” kids against bad stuff on the Net, they are willing to KILL THE REALIZATION OF THE DREAM OF UNIVERSAL, IMMEDIATE ACCESS TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD and lock kids’ computers–to turn PULL devices into PUSH DEVICES–pathetic, stunted devices for pushing canned materials at kids.
FOR IF YOU LOCK KIDS’ COMPUTERS, THEN THEY WILL HAVE ACCESS ONLY TO WHATEVER INANE EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE THE EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS MONOPOLISTS HAVE PEDDLED TO THE SCHOOL DISTRICTS.
So much for the ancient dream. So much for teaching kids to be responsible users of technology–as if they are not going to find other access, elsewhere, and don’t need practical experience with that and guidance about that from their teachers and counsellors.
What a terrible thing it would be to teach our kids about freedom of thought and expression! They might start thinking that they ought to be living in a democracy.
How much better, in an educational system geared toward the creation of obedient, subservient proles, to to burn down that electronic Library of Alexandria!
My dear esteemed colleague Robert, you are missing the point here.
No one that I know of wants to keep students from using the internet. It is the terrible decision making of Broad’s puppet Deasy, who seems to be in our midst in order to bankrupt LAUSD, that is the issue. This discussion is about the ostensible sweetheart deals he made, and continues to make with Apple and Pearson, to be able to purvey Common Core for free market enrichment, not academic enrichment…which all figures into their privatization goals.
Almost every LAUSD public school has computers, and students use them generally every day to expand their studies…so please focus your amazing insights on how we can overcome the manipulation of our school district and BoE by the billionaires….not on all the surrounding distractions.
David Lyell, a classroom teacher, is shouting out for our help.
I am appalled by the fiasco in LA. And the fact that these are locked devices with preloaded curricula just compounds the idiocy of this decision.
David is certainly right in saying what all of us know in Lausd, this deal stinks. At no time have teachers supported this program and when the board extended deAsy’s contract it bound us to this fiasco,
And… Utah is getting into the act! The Speaker of the House, Becky Lockhart, is running a bill to get 200 million dollars in order to have “one to one technology” for every student in Utah. Not nearly as egregious as LA, of course, and not nearly as expensive. BUT, Utah has either the lowest or second lowest per pupil expenditure in the nation and the enormous student growth has not been adequately funded in five years. Furthermore, class sizes, which were already the largest in the nation, have grown. The legislature is balking at giving a 2.5% increase to the WPU (which would be about 265 million dollars), and yet all excited about this technology initiative. I’m all for technology, but shouldn’t a state that gives so little to students be investing in PEOPLE, not MACHINES, first?
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865596569/Public-school-technology-plan-has-200M-price-tag.html
The California legislature enacted a special law authorizing LAUSD to establish its own Office of Inspector General (“OIG”). See Ed. Code sections 35400–35401. In theory, the OIG is authorized to investigate whenever “he or she has a reasonable suspicion that a law, regulation, rule, or district policy has been violated or is being violated. For purposes of this section, ‘reasonable suspicion’ means that the circumstances known or apparent to the inspector general include specific and articulable facts causing him or her to suspect that a material violation of law, regulation, rule, or district policy has occurred or is occurring, and that the facts would cause a reasonable officer in a like position to suspect that a material violation of a law, regulation, rule, or district bulletin has occurred or is occurring.”
There is more than ample “reasonable suspicion” that the IPad fiasco should be investigated. However, the OIG is under the control of the School Board. In a recent hearing, an investigator testified that the IG can “deem” it appropriate to ignore LAUSD’s whistleblower protection policy by asking the target of the complaint if the allegations were true and by refusing to talk to 13 identified witnesses. This same investigator also testified that the OIG is required to comply with the auditing standards utilized by the “Green Book, Principles and Standards for Offices of inspector General.” However, this “experienced” investigator with more than 30 years of “experience” did no know what the word “exculpatory” means.
Section 35401. (a) requires only “reasonable cause to believe” and uses the mandatory “SHALL” to require the IG to report the “suspciious activity” to law enforecment: “If the inspector general determines that there is reasonable cause to believe that an employee or outside agency has engaged in any illegal activity, he or she shall report the nature and details of the activity on a timely basis to the local district attorney or the Attorney General.”
Mr. Lyell’s complaint is well taken. However, my question is why does he not use his position as an officer of the union to use UTLA’s influence and resources to advocate for a full investigation?
Since the OIG reports to the school board and there appears to be at least some evidence that bidding procedures not been followed, the Board should direct the OIG to take charge. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that the Board will authorize the OIG to investigate the Board’s own questionable conduct.
Perhaps it is time for the Attorney General to step in and find out the truth — Right, Governor Brown?
It’s doubtful it will happen, Maybe if Broad was a Republican, but Democrat or Republican, they’re all Corporatists and, money is the tie that binds.
Thanks for this valuable explanation Ron.
Will you be at the conference at U. of Texas on March 1? I would like to get together with you to discuss various aspects of our common problem.
You can reach me at
joiningforces4ed@aol.com
Please let me know how to contact you. Thanks.
Ellen
What is needed in this case are STUDENTS to organize and make a real story out of this. Adults will continue to weave a web of lies and power brokers to protect them as this goes deep into the underbelly of corruption at the government level. Perhaps if STUDENTS start to bring forward the conditions they are forced to exist in at school, the adults and the public will get on board and expose this $1,000,000,000 TAX PAYER FRAUD. Maybe they need to start posting their own pictures of school conditions on Facebook. Nothing will go viral faster than teenagers posting at their own schools.
Hopefully we can get one STUDENT to start this.
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.