Kids, Turn in Your Federally-Funded Laptops for Imminent Destruction

Bureaucrats love to throw fancy
technology at schools and expect it to magically improve students’
learning outcomes. That’s easier than hiring, training, and fairly
compensating good teachers, right?

A New Jersey school district has admitted that it’s
every-seventh-grader-gets-a-laptop plan was a dismal failure,
however, and is preparing to destroy the devices.

The school district was able to obtain the laptops five years
ago through federal stimulus money. The intention was that kids was
use them for homework and teachers would design internet-involved
assignments and lessons. Instead, calamity after calamity ensued,
according to
The Hechinger Report:

By the time Jerry Crocamo, a computer network engineer, arrived
in Hoboken’s school system in 2011, every seventh, eighth, and
ninth grader had a laptop. Each year a new crop of seventh graders
were outfitted. Crocamo’s small tech staff was quickly overwhelmed
with repairs.

We had “half a dozen kids in a day, on a regular basis, bringing
laptops down, going ‘my books fell on top of it, somebody sat on
it, I dropped it,’ ” said Crocamo.

Screens cracked. Batteries died. Keys popped off. Viruses
attacked. Crocamo found that teenagers with laptops are still . . .
teenagers.

“We bought laptops that had reinforced hard-shell cases so that
we could try to offset some of the damage these kids were going to
do,” said Crocamo. “I was pretty impressed with some of the damage
they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back to us
completely destroyed.”

The devices were also frequently stolen, and Crocamo spent much
of his time filing police reports and appearing in court. Students
quickly figured out how to crack his security software and spent
time visiting unauthorized social networking and porn sites:

“There is no more determined hacker, so to speak, than a
12-year-old who has a computer,” said Crocamo.

Students spent more time playing games on their laptops than
using them for school work. Wi-fi became another problem. So many
people in the vicinity of the high school had the internet password
that they could steal it by bringing their own laptops near the
school. The internet eventually became so bogged down that it was
unusable.

In other words, the program was a complete disaster from start
to finish. The district is now taking back the laptops and intends
to destroy them.

Los Angeles Unified Schools
experienced similar problems when administrators attempted to
give every student in the district an iPad. According to Allison
Powell, vice president for state and district services at iNacol,
International Association for K-12 Online Learning, such programs
are common—and commonly end up causing more headaches than they
solve:

“Probably in the last few months I’ve had quite a few principals
and superintendents call and say, ‘I bought these 500 iPads or
1,000 laptops because the district next to us just bought them,’
and they’re like, now what do we do?” Powell said.

Bureaucrats in districts with failed technology programs
typically bemoan the results while maintaining that the initiative
was motivated by good intentions. They should Google “what the road
to hell is paved with.”

Too bad Hoboken’s internet isn’t working.

Hat tip:
Chuck Ross / The Daily Caller