LA Schools’ $1 Billion iPad Fiasco Ends After Corruption Revelations

Los Angeles Unified School District is
ending its billion-dollar iPad program, which has drawn
widespread criticism for distributing expensive devices to teachers
who didn’t know what to do with them and students who kept losing
or breaking them.

The costly program was considered a total failure, and it’s
little surprise that district officials have finally relented and
scaled back. More surprising, however, are revelations that
District Superintendent John Deasy may have engaged in some crooked
bargaining to arrange the deal in the first place.

According to
The Los Angeles Times, Deasy’s previous connections to
Apple and Pearson—the companies contracted to supply the iPads and
instructional materials for them, respectively—amount to a conflict
of interest. In hindsight, the bidding process that Apple and
Pearson won to score the contracts seems biased in those companies’
favor, The LA Times notes:

Last week, a draft report of a district technology committee,
obtained by The Times, was strongly critical of the bidding
process.

Among the findings was that the initial rules for winning the
contract appeared to be tailored to the products of the eventual
winners — Apple and Pearson — rather than to demonstrated district
needs. The report found that key changes to the bidding rules were
made after most of the competition had been eliminated under the
original specifications.

In addition, the report said that past comments or associations
with vendors, including Deasy, created an appearance of conflict
even if no ethics rules were violated.

Emails obtained by The LA Times show Jaime Aquino,
Deasy’s deputy superintendent, advising Pearson officials on how to
win the bid.

I should not that this isn’t the first Pearson has been
accused of something like this. Pearson, a British company, is
the largest publisher of education materials in the world, and its
efforts to lockdown contracts for Common Core-aligned testing
material have drawn scrutiny.

Still, the iPad fiasco hasn’t dampened the district’s enthusiasm
for forcing costly new technology on unprepared students and
teachers. Select LA schools will be trying out other devices this
fall (some of which are actually more expensive), and Deasy is
fairly pleased with that:

“We will incorporate the lessons learned from the original
procurement process,” he said.

“We look forward to refining our processes and ultimately
achieve our vision to equip every one of our students with a
personal computing device to help them succeed in the 21st
century.”

I don’t run a bunch of schools, but this sounds like the exact
opposite of learning our lesson to me.