
L.A. school district ditches iPad curriculum - prostoalex
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ipad-curriculum-refund-20150415-story.html
======
tomswartz07
I'm currently working at a school district in Lancaster, PA.

We have gone with Linux laptops for all of our students. Even more, we've
given them root access.

We chose this because of exactly the points that many people are bringing up
in these comments.

What does the iPad offer to the pedagogical process? Not really that much
outside of the sanitary iOS enviroment. Are they teaching kids about
programming or computer skills? Probably not.

However, with a laptop (and root access), students are able to, and encouraged
to play around and experiment.

Yes, we have some students that don't care about it at all, but there are
others that have created some genuinely interesting projects. We've actually
modified and used one of their projects to help support the linux laptop
deployment.

More info:
[http://www.pennmanor.net/techblog/?cat=69](http://www.pennmanor.net/techblog/?cat=69)

My boss did an amazing TEDx talk regarding the subject:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Co37GO2Fc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Co37GO2Fc)

~~~
mwcampbell
Have you had to deal with accessibility for disabled students (e.g. blind,
low-vision, or mobility impaired) yet? As I understand it, assistive
technologies on desktop Linux are much less mature than on Windows or Mac. And
AFAIK, the only desktop environments that are accessible to blind users in
particular are GNOME and Unity.

~~~
tomswartz07
I'm not certain.

Although I work in the district, I'm typically stationed at buildings other
than where the current 1-to-1 deployment is happening; so I miss out on a lot
of the day to day details.

That being said; the computers run stock-ish Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity. The
students are able to install whatever accessibility tools they wish.

~~~
mwcampbell
Maybe you guys should challenge one of your student apprentices to use one of
the laptops with their eyes closed (or with the screen turned off if that's
feasible), try to get through tasks that a student typically has to do, and
fix any problems that come up, even if that involves contributing to the
relevant open-source projects. The Orca screen reader is written in Python and
supports application-specific scripting. The process could be quite
educational.

~~~
click170
I just want to say that contributing can sound daunting, but its honestly as
simple as proof reading docs or filing bugs. No coding required.

------
jimhefferon
Public discussion of education is always hampered by the fact that people not
professionals in it have no sense of how complicated it is. Some students are
genuises, some are cognitively low. Some students have personality disorders.
Some students will soak up everything they see. Others don't care. Some
students need to be a medical treatments at various times during the week.
Some pray five times a day. Some are so stoned they cannot hold a pencil. Some
really only care about what they need to do in this class in order to to play
basketball.

When a vendor comes in and says, "We know how to solve your problems," there
is reason to be doubtful.

I'm not saying that such efforts have no promise, but there typically needs to
be a long growth period during which the tools have to be adapted, sometimes
radically. In this complicated a sphere, bottom-up may well work better than
top-down.

~~~
ams6110
Are you an education professional? I'm not, but I wonder why we don't go back
to the model of segregating students by ability/need. It seems like the trend
today is to "mainstream" everyone into a common classroom, so you have high
achievers, low ability, as well as genuinely abnormal (mentally retarded,
severe behavorial problems, etc.) all together. I see no way that can be
effective for any of them because you will not be able to provide the style of
instruction that each of these constituencies need.

~~~
keithpeter
I am a teacher.

Ability/need isn't a scalar quantity and real students don't distribute
themselves in a way that can be described by a couple of parameters.

I don't know what the answers are either but I think we need to be very
explicit about any assumptions underpinning proposed models. I also agree with
the 'bottom up' part of the gf comment.

Now, what discrete 'styles of instruction' are there do you think?

~~~
ovulator
When I was in elementary school, we had different classes that were segregated
by ability. We had different subjects with different teachers and different
students, and students were moved to different classes as their abilities
changed. So if I were good at reading I could be in the more advanced reading
class, but if I were bad at math I would be in the lower math class. If I
improved at math I would be moved to a more challenging math class.

Is this no longer the case? This was 3rd-6th grade, I don't remember much
before those grades.

------
threatofrain
Aside from how Pearson performed, I'm rather surprised that they choose to buy
so many iPads.

What does the iPad offer to the pedagogical process? Are they teaching kids
about programming or computer skills? Probably not.

Did they expect Pearson to produce an entire curriculum just for the iPad? Why
not a website instead, which is so much more easily accessed and maintained?
Did these schools want to be "technological" for the sake of it?

And for general student tasks, is the iPad really a good fit? As opposed to a
conventional computer running Microsoft Office or a browser with Google Drive?
And that computer could do other things too?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _Did they expect Pearson to produce an entire curriculum just for the iPad?_

More or less, yes: "Under the contract, Pearson was to provide English and
math curriculum."

> _Why not a website instead_

The article says "Deasy had said the technology effort was a civil rights
imperative designed to provide low-income students with devices available to
their wealthier peers." It's easy for you and me to assume that every man,
woman, and child in America has easy access to the web, but it's not
necessarily so. Giving a tablet to every single student does seem like a
reasonable way to level the playing field. In theory, it would be more
portable, simpler to use and maintain, and less abusable than, say, a laptop.

It's unfortunate that things broke down along the way. This could have been a
really good idea, if it was implemented properly.

~~~
Nullabillity
If you want to level the playing field then giving out devices that are
effectively only useful for consuming content is not the way to go.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
There's a lot of reasons why the plan didn't work out, but your objection
seems more like a knee-jerk anti-Apple catchphrase. An iPad with the proper
software (which these obviously did not have) is quite capable of presenting
indexed, hyperlinked course material, distributing schedules and assignments,
helping students communicate with the teacher and each other, and so forth.

If you want to argue that there are better ways to do all these things, that's
fine, but the "only good for consuming content" thing is awfully shallow.

~~~
Nullabillity
It's not just about Apple (though they did a lot to start the trend), I'd have
the same objection if it was an Android/Windows/whatever tablet.

I suppose it depends on what your goal is. If it is to give people a device to
use for reading texts then I suppose it's fine. If you want people to reply,
or to provide a level playing field outside of school then what I said still
applies.

------
BuckRogers
They've just kept Apple on the hit list because they know they had more money
than brains to attempt to purchase an iPad for each student. If they want to
add more technology to the classroom, hire some programmers to build
educational software with a committee of teachers. Make it a webapp so the
district can use whatever array of hardware they already own.

This was just a school district looking to waste money as far as I can tell.
"Deasy had said the technology effort was a civil rights imperative designed
to provide low-income students with devices available to their wealthier
peers."

And what a civil rights effort. Slow clap.

If you want to do something to help equalize them with their wealthier peers,
buy them all Learn Python the Hard Way. Which would satisfy their need to
waste money, because that book is free online.

~~~
FleshGordon
Contrary to popular belief everyone REALLY doesn't need to be a programmer.

~~~
seanp2k2
Nope, but everyone doesn't need to be a mathematician, biologist, geologist,
historian, or any of the other primary subjects in school either. I think that
in 2015 it's hard to argue that a basic grasp of computers / software won't
have at least as big of an effect on your quality of life after graduation as
being able to work quadratic equations by hand, without reference.

~~~
borgia
I've personally been pretty irked by the whole "EVERYONE SHOULD LEARN TO CODE
ASAP" narrative being pushed basically everywhere recently, but I agree with
you here.

Sticking something like python onto the school curriculum would only be a good
thing. The vast majority who do it won't become programmers, just as the vast
majority who sit math don't become mathematicians, etc. but it would give kids
a fun and interesting way to learn logic, create things on the computer for
themselves, etc.

They have problems unique to them that they may be able to spin up little
desktop apps or similar to solve, which could then go on to inspire them to
become entrepreneurs, tech product creators, etc.

Regardless, there would be absolutely no harm in making it available to them.

------
4927a15fe7b0c35
This is almost 100% about Pearson. The article even has this gem buried toward
the end:

 _Although the threatened legal action applies to Apple and Pearson, the
district also sent letters Tuesday to two other companies: Lenovo, a device
maker, and Arey Jones, a computer distributor. These companies also have
included the Pearson product on some devices purchased by L.A. Unified._

So, they had problems with non-Apple devices as well?

There's also this statement:

 _Pearson could offer only a partial curriculum during the first year of the
license, which was permitted under the agreement. Teachers and principals
never widely embraced the product._

Okay, so the product they bought wasn't embraced. And there aren't any real
reasons given other than a vague: _“Any given class typically experiences one
problem or more daily. "_

What does that even mean?

~~~
pjc50
_“Any given class typically experiences one problem or more daily. "_

It means there is a complex system that isn't reliable enough for its target
usage and the end users have no way of pressuring for its improvement.

~~~
4927a15fe7b0c35
My issue with the statement is two fold:

1) "Any given" really isn't the same as "every". It's vague and ambiguous, and
generally means it happens often, but is not a useful measure of incidence. 2)
A deployment of this number of devices + custom software will have problems,
that has to be accepted. One problem, without knowing what it is, really isn't
enough to say the thing is a failure. In fact, it's not even close. Is the
problem that someone has to restart their iPad? That the content freezes? The
content is inaccessible? The content is incomplete? The Wi-Fi goes down? The
teacher's materials aren't working? We really have no idea, and that kind of
comment in this kind of story is adversarial and unnecessary.

------
WalterBright
I've always been skeptical that computers would make learning effortless. It's
like expecting that driving a car would make one better at running marathons.
Learning requires effort, one way or another, just like exercise.

------
eXpl0it3r
I can't stand when writers artificially lengthen the article and only after
the first half get actually to the point:

> _“Only two schools of 69 in the Instructional Technology Initiative ... use
> Pearson regularly,” according to an internal March report from project
> director Bernadette Lucas. “Any given class typically experiences one
> problem or more daily. Teachers report that the students enjoy the
> interactive content — when it’s available. When it’s not, teachers and
> students try to roll with the interruptions to teaching and learning as best
> they can.”_

------
skywhopper
I don't know the history of this deal, but I'm entirely unsurprised that this
didn't work out. Digital tools are just not up to snuff. Experiments like this
are worth doing, but not with an entire school district. And jumping in when
there's no actual curriculum yet is completely irresponsible. Blaming Pearson
and Apple is disingenuous of the district. Of course salespeople are going to
lie and overpromise. Anyone who's spent any time in any business knows this.
The administrators and board members who agreed to this deal are the ones who
are responsible. That $768 for each iPad and software could have bought a lot
of books and classroom supplies for these kids that would have enriched their
lives a lot more. The overhead of supporting all these new devices likely
drained a lot of operational money from other areas as well. And there's
absolutely zero evidence that tablets or computers are better ways to teach
kids than traditional methods. Turning over all the responsibility for
educating our children to a corporation with a magic solution sounds like a
brilliant plan because we want to believe there's an easy way to solve the
problem, but there's not one, and this is so much snake oil, and the people in
charge should be wise to this stuff by now.

~~~
panzagl
Our school district does this regularly with non-digitized curricula- drops a
couple $100K, threatens teachers with penalties if they don't teach 'to
fidelity', gives it about a year, scores don't magically skyrocket, teachers
start abandoning the curriculum (they're still responsible for the scores),
then it ends up in the resource room and the process starts again. It's
ridiculous how often school districts keep buying magic beans, then blame the
teachers when they don't work out.

------
upofadown
>The district selected Pearson based only on samples of curriculum — nothing
more was available.

So they bought hardware to run software that didn't exist.

~~~
greedo
Pearson is horrible, but the educational software field itself is just as
horrible. In 2000 I worked for a small startup that created online courseware.
Our roots were as a spinoff from a Federal grant to a big name university. Our
task was to commercialize the courses the university had developed, and to
develop additional courses.

Granted that technology in 2000 was not as advanced as today, but the pedagogy
behind online/computer based courses was still in its infancy. It would take
us 6 months to develop a basic Biology course, using programmers, SMEs,
editors, and graphic artists. We turned out what was a pretty good course all
things considered.

Where the real problem lay was the selling/marketing process. School districts
are by nature conservative, and new ideas/technology that threaten established
teaching methods are viewed with a gimlet eye.

Textbook publishers had a lock on the market and didn't want to give up any
ground to an intruder. Teachers were afraid of being replaced by computers,
leading to widespread skepticism of distance learning. And the technological
competence of teachers and administrators at the time was bad; they had too
much other things to worry about than to understand the difference between
Java and Javascript.

So to me, it doesn't seem like a lot has changed in 15 years. The established
vendors want to protect their market, the buyers, though pushed to embrace
technology don't know how to use it well, and the students are left holding a
bag of shit.

------
neovive
I've been running a coding/tech club in a K-5 school and find the iPads work
very well for younger students (K-2). Most are uncomfortable with trackpads
and lack typing skills. The iPad is very intuitive and productive for them.
I'm currently working through a short curriculum for K-2 using the Scratch Jr.
app. Grades 3-5 use 11" Macbooks running the full Scratch application.

The iPad's are a great way to prepare younger students for "real" computing. I
would not recommend tablets as a primary computing device beyond 2nd grade as
"creation" capabilities are limited; the iPad turns into a media consumption
device at that age.

------
a3n
> She said although there have been challenges in carrying out “a large-scale
> implementation of new technologies ... we stand by the quality of our
> performance.”

New? What's new about it? It's a computer with stuff on it.

------
hanlec
tl;dr There wouldn't have been enough eyes on this article if it correctly
stated the issue is with Pearson and not the iPad or Apple.

------
shams93
The thing is no one is going to rob a kid for a $150 chromebook, some parts of
LA are not so friendly and a kid walking home with $1000 in hardware is not
just in danger of losing the ipad but of being injured or killed in the
robbery. Ultimately chromeos does a much better job, and gives kids a platform
to learn javascript which is the language of the future anyways. Nobody is
going to risk prison for a chromebook but robbery for apple gear is not
uncommon.

------
CodeWriter23
LAUSD parent here. At our school, we have been successfully using iPads for
instruction in certain grades. MacBooks and Airs in higher grades. The
software used is pretty much the stock iPad selection, reinforced with some
pedagogical offerings through web SaaS products. In Kindergarten, my daughter
made a Ken Burns-style presentation using iMovie, researched building a
parachute with a gondola to compete in the egg drop competition (her and her
partner's egg broke), and has been drilled in numerous ways on spelling,
counting, addition and subtraction. I am unsure how tech is applied in other
grades, but I have seen the movie making and egg drop competition themes at
the other grade levels, so I assume there is some iterative rigor year over
year. By 4th grade, I expect my daughter to be participating in curriculum
sourced from the Hour of Code program.

In my view, Director Deasy's persecution is politically-motivated. The choice
to go Apple was the result of successes in various Magnet and Lab Schools,
conducted prior to the service agreement with Apple. Multiple vendors were
evaluated during the Magnet / Lab development process. There was no
opportunity in the process to put it out for three bids during the actual
procurement process, because the other vendors were eliminated prior to
procurement.

Our technology program is funded by our PTO, which is a becoming a common
trend in many public schools. It's much easier for our PTO to raise $80K/yr
for tech (we raise more than that, to fund other programs) than it is for
LAUSD to indemnify the purchase or lease of tech on a district-wide basis. We
will likely continue to choose Apple products, with the primary motivation for
that decision coming from the instructors, and secondarily, the build quality
being able to stand up to student use at school and home.

------
smoyer
"Pearson defended its product."

This is a company whose business model is being disrupted and whose life will
be getting a lot worse if they don't recognize that students (particularly
college students) will no longer be cash cows they can milk via
textbook/curriculum sales.

------
pyvpx
I want to know more about the 800MM on "improving" Internet access. that seems
absurdly high, even for one of the top three school districts in the nation
(by size)

~~~
jv22222
I work in a k12 ed tech company.

In most schools I've seen, by the time the internet gets to the users device,
the quality of service is astonishingly bad. Even in schools that purport to
have a big pipe coming in.

Low bandwidth per user, bad access points, frequency clashing, broken
switches, aggressive content filtering and firewalls all add up to making it
really hard for a student to stream even one educational video from youtube.

5 students in the same class, forget it!

~~~
dinergy
We have none of those issues. We block Youtube because when opened students
don't stream "educational" videos. They sit in the library watching sports,
anime, and inappropriate content.

Aggressive filtering, unfortunately, is a necessary evil because students are
kids who, en mass, are irresponsible and make dumb choices.

------
bko
In a 1996 Wired interview, Steve Jobs was asked whether technology could help
education in the US. I think his answer was spot on.

> Could technology help by improving education?

I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably
spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else
on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the
problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with
education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a
dent.

It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are
unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and
the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems
are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people
who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years
before high school. This private school is the best school I've seen in my
life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal.
The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But
the teachers were paid less than public school teachers - so it's not about
money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what
California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was
$4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year,
there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting
right and left. People would get out of college and say, "Let's start a
school." You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to
be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with
somebody else, and they'd start schools. And you'd have these young,
idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

They'd do it because they'd be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids
you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study
in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don't
learn until you're older - yet you could learn them when you're younger. And
you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?

God, how exciting that could be! But you can't do it today. You'd be crazy to
work in a school today. You don't get to do what you want. You don't get to
pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization.
Who would ever want to do that?

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately,
technology isn't it. You're not going to solve the problems by putting all
knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school - none of this
is bad. It's bad only if it lulls us into thinking we're doing something to
solve the problem with education.

Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-
schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows
that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also
shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.

It's not as simple as you think when you're in your 20s - that technology's
going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won't.

[http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html)

------
zaroth
More like seeks refund from Pearson? The body of the article directly
contradicts the headline. I'm hope that FBI investigation turns up some dirt,
Pearson is a name that comes up too often in public education, and seems like
universally negative reactions. How do such shit companies manage to gain such
a stranglehold, particularly when it comes to government contracts? Across 50
states and the innumerable local governments which enter into these contracts,
is it literally graft all the way through?

Clever seems like the one breath of fresh air into the system. Maybe they will
get into actual curriculum development in the future.

~~~
chaostheory
The misleading title involving Apple is really just to get more eyeballs.

~~~
roel_v
The article says clearly that Pearson was a subcontractor to Apple. Seems that
Apple was leading the deal. Not sure how the schools would even take this up
with Pearson. If Pearson really is a subcontractor, the real party to have a
beef with is Apple.

