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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
(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.