from the questionable-ethics-still-gets-you-a-golden-parachute dept.
KTLA TV reports:
Beleaguered Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. John Deasy announced [October 16] that he had tendered his resignation. Deasy would stay on with the district on a special assignment through the end of the year, according to a join[sic] statement from the superintendent and the school district. [...] As part of the severance agreement, he would receive about 60 days' pay, which would equal about $60,000, according to the paper.
Deasy, 53, has led the nation's second-largest school district for 3.5 years. During that time, he has faced much scrutiny and criticism, particularly over a technology program that he pushed for which would have spent more than $1 billion to provide an iPad to every student, teacher and administrator at LAUSD schools.
The program was suspended in August after it was discovered that Deasy and his top deputy had ties to Apple executives and the company that was providing the curriculum for the iPads.
He also came under fire after a new student information system called MiSIS malfunctioned upon making its debut at the start of the school year. The $130 million program was blamed for scheduling blunders that left some district students without classes for weeks, according to the Times.
The Los Angeles Daily News has other details on Deasy's tenure including:
The headwinds for Deasy [...] grew heavier with two developments this summer: the revelation that Deasy and former right-hand man Jaime Aquino had talked about the iPads project with executives from Apple and the software firm Pearson before bidding had officially begun, raising the possibility of favoritism; [there were also] glitches in the district's new MiSiS student record-keeping system.
You may remember that, within days of receiving them, the kids had hacked past the school district's restrictions on the devices.
Related: Los Angeles Schools Halve Email Retention after Scandal
Related Stories
Techdirt reports
In a set of strange coincidences not unlike those surrounding the IRS/Lois Lerner email disappearance, the Los Angeles Unified school board has decided it will only retain internal emails for one year going forward.
The Los Angeles Unified school board voted Tuesday to buy a Microsoft email archiving service programmed to automatically destroy staff emails after one year.
Why only one year? According to the Chief Information Officer of the school district, the one year limit is mandated by district policy(PDF) -- which is handy, but likely not the real reason. (Keeping all those bytes is considered "too expensive.") After all, if this policy was already in force, why the vote on retention limits?
More likely, this decision was prompted by recent events -- namely the publication of emails more than a year old.The decision comes less than three weeks after KPCC published two-year-old internal emails that raised questions about whether Superintendent John Deasy's meetings and discussions with Apple and textbook publisher Pearson influenced the school district's historic $500 million technology contract.
Update: Los Angeles Schools iPad Program Target of Federal Criminal Probe
No sooner had I submitted about the previous development ($500 Chromebooks or $700 iPads) [Eds Note: See Below] when the defecation contacted the rotary ventilator again.
The Daily Breeze reports:
LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines is scuttling the district's iPad curriculum contract with Pearson in the wake of an FBI probe of the deal.
According to documents released December 2, as part of a criminal investigation being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a federal grand jury will weigh information pertaining to Los Angeles Unified's plan to buy $1.3 billion in iPads.[1]
The federal probe--which dispatched FBI agents to collect 20 boxes of records from LAUSD's headquarters Monday afternoon--along with a report from LAUSD's inspector general, prompted Superintendent Ramon Cortines to ditch the controversial deal with Apple and Pearson.
[...]While Cortines had hoped students at 27 schools in the next phase would have the devices this school year, they will now have to wait until fall 2015.
[1] I can't believe that the Daily Breeze editor allowed that sentence to go through in its original form.
Apple is ready to fight Google's Chromebooks with cheaper iPads
Apple has a big problem. Just five years ago, its iPads and Mac laptops reigned supreme in US classrooms, accounting for half of all mobile devices shipped to schools in 2013. Apple has now slipped behind both Google and Microsoft in US schools with Google's Chromebooks leading the way in classrooms, securing nearly 60 percent of shipments in the US as overall iPad sales declined for three straight years. Apple is now ready to strike back against Chromebooks with some cheaper iPads.
Apple is holding a special education-focused event on Tuesday that promises "creative new ideas for teachers and students." Rumors suggest Apple is preparing to launch a $259 budget iPad model this year, while Bloomberg reports that a "low-cost iPad" will be announced alongside new education software. The new iPad could even support a stylus, like the Apple Pencil found on the more expensive iPad Pro models.
The article notes a cancelled $1 billion program to give iPads to students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Administering the iPads back then wasn't easy, but Chromebooks store their data in the cloud. If a student forgets their Chromebook at home, they can log in to another device using their Google account. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticized Google's G Suite for Education for storing students' personal information in the cloud without their knowledge or consent.
Related: L.A.'s iPad-Friendly School Superintendent Resigns Under a Cloud
Los Angeles Schools Halve Email Retention after Scandal
Los Angeles Schools iPad Program Target of Federal Criminal Probe
NH School District: One Chromebook Per Student by 2018; Paper Textbooks Going
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22 2014, @04:33PM
The "Related: ..." link does not work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22 2014, @05:41PM
I don't know what technique azrael is using to cause that, but this is not the 1st time [soylentnews.org] that this has happened. [soylentnews.org]
I'm not understanding why links can't simply be copied and pasted intact from the submissions.
The link should be
http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/09/17/2023214&mode=nested&threshold=0#articles [soylentnews.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:01PM
This is the simple version of the link:
http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/09/17/2023214 [soylentnews.org]
Not sure what happened in this particular case, but slash does mess around with the URLs. I edited the story and changed that link to the above, but it still cut off the "http:" and appended the "&tid=6".
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 23 2014, @06:21PM
As I explained in previous posts, the reason I use the more specific URLs in summaries is so that search engines will get the **entire** page with lots of comments (since search engines don't use cookies).
Like this (with ALL the comments expanded and readable--and indexed by Google) [googleusercontent.com]
rather than this (with most comments collapsed and not readable--AND NOT INDEXED BY GOOGLE ON **ONE* PAGE). [googleusercontent.com]
If I am understanding correctly, in the summaries, all links are accepted as-is EXCEPT FOR S/N LINKS which are magically altered for some unknown reason.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Horse With Stripes on Wednesday October 22 2014, @04:47PM
Would that could be iCloud?
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday October 22 2014, @11:10PM
Damn dude is getting $30K a fricking month in pay and he's STILL taking kickbacks? Just shows there is greedy and there is piggie pie and this douche is firmly the latter. And why isn't anybody investigating Apple for this? Last I checked bribing officials is...ohh what is the word? Oh yeah ILLEGAL. Sounds like there is more than enough evidence to at least do an investigation.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Thursday October 23 2014, @08:27PM
Greed knows no bounds.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday October 22 2014, @05:47PM
The key word here is Pearson, a major (maybe -the- major with all the consolidation that's going on) educational publisher, which wants to switch to digital books and needs Apple's DRM. Why sell a school a textbook once that can last for decades when you can rent them digital books and charge them each year? This iPad thing has nothing to do with students and technology. You can't even run your own program on an iPad without paying Apple. It's driven by the need for secure DRM to have a way to deliver content to students. If you dig deep enough, you start seeing Pearson is behind Common Core too. What would be better for a publisher than a whole new curriculum for schools to purchase, and a national one at that? This stuff has nothing to do with education, it's just a money grab. This kerfuffle with Amazon and Hachette is penny-ante versus the stakes in educational publishing. I read once that the education market is bigger than the entire big five book publishers put together. I'm kind of surprised that news outlets don't give this angle more attention. If you lifted the rock, who knows what would scurry out from under it?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 22 2014, @06:19PM
Not disagreeing in theory, but in practice at the mid K12 and lower level, my kids mostly use their school issued ipads to screw around.
Probably 20 hours of youtube videos for every hour of doing math drills. And the kids do ALL their reading on paper for "tradition" reasons.
The ipads drive my wife completely crazy "if you play that skylanders unboxing video one more time so help me ..." The ipads have spent many days locked in our bedroom away from the kids. And minecraft lets play videos... yeah thats a problem too.
I hesitate to say issuing the kids ipads has been useless, but it approaches that level.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Wednesday October 22 2014, @07:30PM
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday October 23 2014, @03:34PM
Really? What if they don't?
Hell I'm 24 and I still have friends that don't own a computer of any kind...unless you count an iPhone. When I was in highschool bringing a laptop to school automatically made you popular -- because nobody else owned one. Also could potentially lead to being given detention depending on which teachers saw it. And I mean...that was only about 6 years ago.
We had a couple computer labs and a couple mobile laptop stations which were the only computers ever used for class.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Friday October 24 2014, @07:00AM
I don't know, actually. They might have cheap ones available. The required specs aren't that high. I don't think state schools require parents to buy laptops for their kids, but this is a private school (can't think of other things we need to buy, though, besides pens and pencils and stuff).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 22 2014, @06:59PM
Bill Gates wants to get in on this too with his "charity foundation". [google.com]
Again, for those who have read the Gates-purchased propaganda by "journalists", his "philanthropy" is merely a tax dodge and a way to strengthen and spread "intellectual property" memes and to increase his tax-free wealth.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Interesting) by SecurityGuy on Wednesday October 22 2014, @07:24PM
Truly, if there's a thing that needs to be open sourced, it's textbooks, and I mean all the way from K-college. So much of this stuff simply Does Not Change, and yet every year legions upon legions of college students have to buy the latest edition of the text. Schools certainly don't buy the latest and greatest, but they suffer in not actually being able to buy the things at all. Stuffing schools with technology would make a ton more sense if the actual content was free/cheap, and centuries old knowledge (most of the math you're learning if you're not in graduate school, for example) should absolutely be free or cheap.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:50PM
Let iApple sell their DRM stuffed stuff to a price lower than manufacturing. Then release a jailbreak and root app that makes a free curriculum and future updates possible?
(Score: 1) by ibennetch on Friday October 24 2014, @02:35AM
It feels like "+5 Informative" isn't enough for your comment; I think you've hit a very good point here.
It feels like everything is switching over to a licensing rather than purchasing financial model. Adobe wants you to rent Photoshop, the movie studios want you to rent their movies -- or even if you actually purchased, say, a VHS tape, they want you to have to buy a DVD (rather than copy it yourself), then if the DVD scratches because that's what kids do, buy another, then buy the Blu-Ray. The digital book revolution falls right in to this pattern, and you perfectly described the situation with textbooks. In my high school modern history class, the textbook was old enough that it didn't contain the past eight or ten years of recent history. For some reason, that wasn't a big deal; we talked about it in class and had lived through it so we already had a good understanding. What about chemistry and algebra...oh, right, those didn't change in the past ten years[1], so the textbooks were fine for our uses. I'm glad that my school did not feel a need to update the textbooks every year and the students somehow managed to take good enough care that the books lasted. At the time, I did not fully appreciate this small miracle, heck, even now I can barely keep an IP address or phone number on a Post-It note for an entire afternoon without losing it.
In college, the used bookstore was a staple..except those few classes where the textbook changed every year, but the content was the same. Sometimes the chapters were in a different order, but always the assignments were reordered. The same questions, just with different numbers, so we were forced to buy the new version instead of the used one. As you said, it's just a money grab.
All in all, I couldn't have said it better than what you did. I don't often take the time to reply to comments here, but think your comment deserves some thought and recognition. The down side of it all is that I don't see a way to change this behavior. Clearly licensing a digital book is going to bring in more income for the publishers -- and reliable annual income, not just "we don't have the budget for new calculus books this year but maybe next year." How can we (as consumers or taxpayers) push back against this?
1 - in a way that would affect our high school classes; I'm certainly not saying there haven't been advances in the fields.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Wednesday October 22 2014, @10:12PM
Why do schools always fall for these flashy new devices? I think that it's still vital to teach students proper keyboarding skills, not tapping away at a screen while pretending to work. I wouldn't type a paper on a tablet even if it had a keyboard just due to the awkwardness of the whole interface (and the fact that a netbook would do the same job better and for less money.)
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday October 22 2014, @11:02PM
A lot of people don't understand when to use a technology and when to not. Tablets are very nice for consumption purposes -- laying back on your couch and watching cats or car crashes is way more comfortable with a tablet than a laptop, eating breakfast and browsing the headlines is another great tablet use (especially considering the damaging liquids around, tablets being so much cheaper generally) -- but I can't think of much serious work they're good for -- I'm sure there are a couple things with special apps for workerbees, but as a general work tool, tablets ain't it. If you're writing a paper it is awfully nice to have a couple monitors with your citations as well as the draft document opened up and spread out. If you're making a web app, to have your IDE on one monitor, a database connection on another, and a browser on a third, and a real clicky keyboard to type on at a rapid rate.
Of course, there are times when it makes sense to compromise. I've been working on an arduino project that requires being out in an open boat, and while I don't mind the rain, my laptop does (I make major modifications to the program at home, then minor ones in field testing). I got to thinking that using my tablet might be a better plan and give me more testing day, not because the tablet is easier to use, but because it costs 1/10th what my laptop cost and I'll cry a lot less when it goes overboard. It turned out to be such a hassle to get things set up, file transfers being a major pain as I haven't rooted the device and the arduino IDE kept files in a location I couldn't get to, requiring a whole series of copy here, import there, and such type actions -- then it wouldn't compile because of missing libraries but at that point, I was so frustrated with what should have been a no-effort copy and paste I said "screw-it" and went back to taking extra care with my laptop and staying home when it rains.