Education's Shiny Toy Syndrome

It's elementary. Public education bureaucrats do the darnedest, stupidest things. Clever kids are ready, willing and able to capitalize on that costly stupidity in a heartbeat. Within days of rolling out a $30 million Common Core iPad program in Los Angeles, for example, students had already hacked the supposedly secure devices.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the disastrous initiative has been suspended after students from at least three different high schools breached the devices' security protections. It was a piece of iCake. The young saboteurs gleefully advertised their method to their friends, fellow Twitter and Facebook users, and the media.

"Roosevelt students matter-of-factly explained their ingenuity Tuesday outside school," the L.A. Times told readers. "The trick, they said, was to delete their personal profile information. With the profile deleted, a student was free to surf. Soon they were sending tweets, socializing on Facebook and streaming music through Pandora, they said."

Goodbye, Common Core apps. Hello, Minecraft! The district spent untold millions of taxpayer dollars on iPad "training," but many teachers still couldn't figure out how to sync up the souped-up tablets for academic use in the classroom at the start of the school year. In less than a week, though, teens were able to circumvent the locks for fun and playtime at home faster than you can type "LOL."

The Los Angeles Unified School District school board shoveled $30 million to Pearson for the leaky iPads, but nobody foresaw this glaring security weakness. Where's the fiscal accountability? Where's the adult responsibility?

Remember: These "reform" programs are not about stimulating brain cells. It's all about stimulating the Benjamins. Pearson is the multibillion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate at the center of the federally driven, taxpayer-funded "standards" racket. For Pearson, ed publishing and ed computing are a $6 billion global business. For nearly a decade, the company has plotted a digital learning takeover. According to industry estimates, Pearson's digital learning products are used by more than 25 million people in North America. Common Core has been a convenient new catalyst for getting the next generation of consumers hooked.

As I reported last week, Pearson sealed its whopping $30 million taxpayer-subsidized deal to supply the city's schools with 45,000 iPads pre-loaded with Pearson Common Core curriculum apps earlier this summer. I repeat: That works out to $678 per glorified e-textbook, $200 more than the standard cost, with scant evidence that any of this software and hardware will do anything to improve the achievement bottom line.

The abysmal history of federal investments in ed technology is as crystal-clear as an HD touch screen. Take President Obama's $49 million technology initiative for the Detroit public schools, funded by federal stimulus money. The city is bankrupt. The urban school system is overrun by corruption, violence and incompetence. The federal ed tech program showered some 40,000 new (foreign-made) ASUS netbook computers on Detroit, plus thousands of printers, scanners and desktop computers to teachers and kids from early childhood through 12th grade.

The district budget is $300 million in the hole. Meanwhile, the board slashed special education buses and shut down 70 schools. Have the devices helped students "compete in a global marketplace," as champions of the program promised? SAT scores in Detroit remain "stagnant." High school graduation rates are rock-bottom. According to the most recent data, just 3 percent of Detroit fourth-graders are proficient in math; 6 percent are proficient in reading. In 2010, 11 people were charged in connection with a lucrative fencing scheme involving hundreds of DPS computers, which they stole and sold on eBay or peddled to friends and family.

Nothing has changed. As I've reported previously, in both urban and rural school districts, large and small, these technology infusions have turned out to be gesture-driven boondoggles and political payoffs that squander precious educational resources -- with few, if any, measurable academic benefits. The Obama administration plans to dig even deeper into the FedEdTech hole through a furtive $5 billion "fee" on cellphone users for "ConnectEd" -- another progressive, FedEd boondoggle to subsidize high-speed Internet installation throughout the U.S.

Like districts across the country, Detroit and Los Angeles are infatuated with fancy electronic devices, glossy new textbooks and DVDs "aligned" to top-down Common Core "standards, and other whiz-bang gadgetry to stimulate "21st century learning." Education's Shiny Toy Syndrome is the result of a toxic alliance between big government and big business. In the words of Robert Small, the Maryland dad who was arrested last week for daring to raise questions about Common Core: "Parents, you need to question these people. ... Don't stand for this!"

The only use I see for technology in the classroom is to educate students on the *use* of said technology. Granted most will pick up the basics on their own, but additional tech training would still be beneficial. Give them good computing habits while they’re still young (elementary-age), and maybe they’ll keep them as they move forward.

But to use them as a teaching tool without properly locking them down is idiocy. The teacher has to be *at least* as proficient in the use of the tech as the students are, or they’re going to find every single mistake and exploit them to the fullest.

For some disturbing reason I see images of students downloading computer games and porn while the teacher thinks they’re looking at wonderful pictures of diversity and inclusion. At least the students will be feeling good about themselves.

In this the article is spot on — too much money and too much effort will be required to aquire and maintain and achieve meaningful results with in classroom computers for K-6 grade.

Money and effort that would actually be put to better use spending it on traditional K-6 teachers and classrooms.

Last fall I was teaching in an inner city school when the incoming freshmen were given taxpayer funded iPads. Within 24 hours the kids had figured out how to bypass the building WIFI with its controlled content. They used their taxpayer-funded O-phones to hotspot. They were watching football, facebooking, surfing, etc. Anything but learning. We teachers were told that we had to let them use the ‘tools’ and the kids were encouraged to take notes on them. Of course they weren’t taking notes, but in a crowded classroom, it was difficult to move around quickly enough to catch them when they were off-task on them. It was a mess. After I left, I heard that some of the kids were caught taking pictures of each other in sexual poses and acts in the building and sending them around, using their iPads. Sheer idiocy.

> Computer usage in schools should be a reward for learning and mastering the 3 R’s.

You are correct
Another name for second place is first loser.
These young mush heads need to learn this.

The latest gizmos and shiny new gadgets are used by school administrators to mesmerize and distract the overburdened tax payers from the fact that the "students" can't read or write or think.

I have to cut some of these city school admins a little slack, though. Most of their "students" are as dumb as a box of rocks so they have to at least act like they are doing something to earn their inflated salaries.

There was 5 BILLION in the Stimulus to fund the technology and other things for Common Core. Beck in the video below shows the government documents and how they will be collecting biometric information by using ipad technology.
Skip to 19:34 min in the video for info on the use of technology to collect DATA.

April 22, 2013

The Glenn Beck Program: Common Core and Education

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Oz7XOKcyRE0

Common Core: A Lesson Plan for Raising Up Compliant, Non-Thinking Citizens

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/common_core_a_lesson_plan_for_raising_up_compliant_non_thinking_citizens

Common Core: Subversive Threat to Education

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X0EFeH25bw

"I have to cut some of these city school admins a little slack, though. Most of their "students" are as dumb as a box of rocks so they have to at least act like they are doing something to earn their inflated salaries"

Some students truly lack basic ability. Others have the innate ability but do not develop basic skills in their primary school years. I was dealing with incoming high school freshmen whose reading was averaging a 3rd grade level. It's a big problem. They can't read their text books, and abstract thinking and connections are nearly impossible for many of them. These are deep problems that reflect home environments, peer values, and even natural selection. It's not something that is easy to fix.

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