The Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI are both investigating the ambitious plan to provide an iPad to every child in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Meanwhile the school district is asking Apple to refund millions of dollars that the district paid for curriculum software that did not meet expectations.
The FBI has seized documents related to the $1.3 billion contract and turned them over to a grand jury, while the SEC has launched an informal inquiry into the school district’s use of public funds.
Apple agreed to provide an iPad for each of the 650,000 children in the L.A. school district and contracted with educational publisher Pearson to provide the curriculum software for the tablets. Problems developed when the students were unable to access the online curriculum and teachers reported that the content contained errors.
Although some of the curriculum was hard to access, students did manage to use the tablets to reach websites that were supposed to be blocked by the iPad security software. In December, the LAUSD said it would cancel its existing contract with Apple and work toward a new contract.
Meanwhile, investigators are trying to understand the relationship between school district officials and Pearson, the company that created the curriculum for the iPads. The district agreed to purchase that curriculum before it was complete. Contract negotiations began several years ago under then-superintendent John Deasy. The current superintendent, Ramon Cortines, initially wanted to abandon the plan but eventually decided to go through with it.
Move to Chromebooks
The school district is buying Google Chromebooks for some students to use for testing this spring. Students are taking tests aligned to the Common Core curriculum that was the cornerstone of the iPad-based curriculum.
Chromebooks outsold iPads in U.S. schools for the first time during the third quarter of 2014, and the trend looks set to continue. For schools, Chromebooks have three distinct advantages over iPads: they are cheaper, they have keyboards and they are less of a temptation for thieves.
Network problems?
Much of the controversy surrounding the iPad contract has been focused on the quality of the curriculum, but accessibility was also an issue. Some schools may not have anticipated the impact of dozens of students trying to connect to the Wi-Fi access points at the same time.
“Network quality was part of the problem,” said Bruce Miller, VP of product marketing at Wi-Fi access point maker Xirrus, which counts K-12 as its most important vertical market. “It comes down to setting realistic expectations, good implementation, appropriate buy in of constituents, timing, etc. And the connectivity element is often overlooked in the process. In the end, this project was so massive, it became untenable.”
Miller added that many smaller districts and schools have successfully implemented iPad-based curriculum. “We have many, many K-12s running successful 1:1 iPad/tablet curriculum and have for years, so it is not a matter of the technology not being there,” he said.
