[IAEP] [Marketing] Los Angeles ditching Apple/Pearson iPad program

[Ron Feigenblatt]

Gee, I had forgotten about the scandal surrounding the Birmingham, AL
mayor who had massively deployed OLPCs in his city schools until you
raised this LA Apple program. When will some enterprising politician
drive a stake into the heart of this monster we call public education
and replace it with an education program which leverages the amazing
low-cost "generic" digital technology we now enjoy to connect
home-based learners with a nation/world-wide "cafeteria" of service
providers who have to compete with one another or go bust?

On 4/17/15, Caryl Bigenho <cbigenho at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Wow!
> Thanks for gathering this all into one place Sean. My family has long-term
> ties to LAUSD as both teachers and students for 3 generations so we are
> always interested in what is happening there.
> When I was still working there I received several technology grants and I
> can tell you that the bidding and purchase problems have been going on for
> at least 30 years! When we had grant monies to spend we were given a list of
> approved devices and vendors we could use. If we wanted something else, the
> bidding process was rigged in such a way that sometimes funds were lost
> because they delayed too long in approving an order. If an item wasn't
> delivered by a certain date, the money went back to the state!
> There was a time when Apple was not on the approved list... you had to buy
> only IBM! Then, suddenly Apple managed to sell the district thousands of the
> Apple iic+ (which were about to be discontinued... a practice Apple also
> used when selling about to be discontinued models to teachers at an
> "educator's discount").
> Those iic-pluses had what everyone called a "Chiclet" keyboard, and the keys
> popped off very easily. At most schools they were installed in the typing
> room, replacing typewriters. Classes in "keyboarding" (instead of "typing"
> were offered). Bored students soon discovered that the keys could be popped
> off and, before long, most of the machines became pretty useless.
> Caryl
>
>
>
> From: sdaly.be at gmail.com
> Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2015 14:39:02 +0200
> To: iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org; marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org
> Subject: [IAEP] Los Angeles ditching Apple/Pearson iPad program
>
> A large-scale ($1.3 billion budget for iPads, pearson software, wifi
> infrastructure, target 650K students) education ICT project started in 2013
> and meant to eliminate the digital divide which has gone awry. The
> superintendent resigned and is under FBI and SEC investigation for corrupt
> bidding process, although the board stated they did not believe there was
> wrongdoing, only mismanagement.
>
> Only 5% of the students (in 2 of the 69 schools) are able to use the Pearson
> software on an iPad.
>
> Interestingly, it seems many of the problems were related to wifi/networking
> infrastructure (see last link for gory details).
>
> Sean.
>
> http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ipad-curriculum-refund-20150415-story.html
> http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/04/15/51027/lausd-ipad-program-ditching-pearson-software-reque/
> http://www.laweekly.com/news/lausd-chief-john-deasy-resigns-5152268
> http://www.pearsoned.com/news/pearson-lausd-statement/
> http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/08/27/343549939/the-l-a-school-ipad-scandal-what-you-need-to-know
> http://laschoolreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Instructional-Technology-Initative-Pearson-Update.pdf
>
>
>
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