The California school system spends thousands of dollars per year per pupil. But if Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy has his way, that number will skyrocket. Deasy wants to purchase iPads for some 660,000 LAUSD students. According to Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times, “people with ties to tech companies were among the major donors to a political action committee that supports Deasy-friendly school board candidates …. Deasy appears in a promotional video for Apple in which he says tablets are ‘phenomenally going to change the landscape of education.'”
The facilities in LAUSD have long been a wreck thanks at least in part to poor student behavior. And iPad programs have, in the past, ended with a good number of broken iPads: when Honywood Community Science School in Coggeshall, Essex handed out free iPad2s, 489 of the 1,200 handed out were shattered beyond recognition. The Daily Mail reported, “Pupils said in some of the younger classes, around half the class had broken their tablet at least once, and some as many as three times. Despite the threat of confiscation after three tablets, ultimately none were taken away from pupils.”
Just another way for LAUSD to spend cash it doesn’t have without upping the educational standards of students.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.