Former L.A. schools chief calls iPad program illegal

A former L.A. schools superintendent has stepped forward to criticize a $1 billion effort to provide every student, teacher and campus administrator with a tablet or laptop computer. William J. Johnston, 87, did not object to the goal, but focused instead on using school-construction bonds to fund the project, which, so far, has involved purchasing iPads.

“I  believe the current purchase of iPads from school bonds is illegal,” Johnston wrote in a Feb. 6 letter to the committee that oversees the spending of the voter-approved funding. The bonds are paid back through increases in property taxes.

The letter was included in materials for the committee's Thursday meeting. 

“iPads are known to last for approximatey three years,” Johnston wrote. “New developments and technology will make them obsolete, requiring replacements. School bonds are designed to buy property, build schools, equip schools with lasting equipment. School bonds are paid for over a 25-year period.”

He added: “Voters approved the school bonds because they needed schools built, schools repaired, school equipment updated. They did not vote for iPads, a three-year consumable product.”

Johnston, who served as superintendent from 1971 to 1981, is hardly alone in his concerns, which the district recently addressed publicly. Officials have maintained that state law, over time, has been clarified to affirm that bonds can be used for technology. And bond measures specifically list funding for technology.

A Los Angeles Unified School District legal opinion asserts further that portable computers that can be taken home are a logical, updated extension of technology, which used to be available to students only in computer labs with bolted-down desktop devices.

Via: LA Times

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Developing Obamacare's Health Care Exchanges Has Cost More Than Apple's Original iPhone Comment Now Follow Comments

This is a stunning number from Farhad Manjoo over at the Wall Street Journal. The development cost of the health care exchanges necessary under the ACA (aka Obamacare) is larger than the development cost of the original iPhone at Apple. Indeed, by some estimates it might be four times the cost:

If users found a few bugs in their iPads, she argued, most wouldn’t consider them a complete disaster. Instead, they’d recognize that technology is complicated, that errors are common, and they’d wait for an update. Apple Inc., she added, has “a few more resources” than her department, so “hopefully [citizens will] give us the same slack they give Apple.”

That argument is as clueless as it is misleading. While it’s true that Apple is fantastically wealthy, its product-development costs aren’t necessarily greater than those of the federal government. As Fred Vogelstein reports in his coming book, Apple spent about $150 million developing the iPhone. The health-insurance exchange—which, let’s remember, is merely a website meant to connect citizens to insurance companies, something quite a bit less complex than Apple’s groundbreaking miniature computer—so far has cost at least $360 million, and possibly as much as $600 million.

That’s a pretty bad indictment of the way those health care exchanges have been built: the most egregious problems being with the Federal one that covers the 36 states that did not decide to build their own. After all, the iPhone was not just a new product category, it was also a new operating system and a new paradigm for how to do computing. One would expect this to cost rather more than what is, at root, just a website calling on a few databases. But apparently not so it’s worth trying to work out what went wrong here. Manjoo gives us one reason here:

Today, any company looking to work with the government must navigate an obstacle course of niggling, outdated regulations and arbitrary-seeming requirements. For instance, your technology must be Y2K-compliant just to get in the door. The process locks out all but a tiny handful of full-time contractors—companies who also happen to be big federal lobbyists.

Via: Forbes
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LAUSD Another Brainless Organism

Some species of jellyfish can grow to be very big. They are also said to be brainless and, to the unwary, can be hazardous. To taxpayers, this is also a fair description of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The massive district, geographically the nation’s largest and second in enrollment, covers all or part of 31 communities in addition to the city of Los Angeles. Its budget is larger than a least 18 states and, unfortunately, possesses a well-earned reputation for horrible management. One has to look back only a few years for prominent examples.

In the late 1990s, the district set about building the nation’s most expensive high school on real estate that turned out to be contaminated with hazardous chemicals. Mitigating this problem added years to the completion of the project and millions to the taxpayers’ bill. Although the evidence suggested that this boondoggle was the result of incompetence, ignorance and outright corruption, LAUSD officials uniformly asserted the Bart Simpson defense: “I didn’t do it, nobody saw me and you can’t prove a thing.” Incredibly, no one was ever held accountable for this fiscal fiasco.

Since then, with the support of campaign funds from contractors who profit when schools spend money, the district has been able to convince voters to approve 5 separate bonds totaling $20 billion, with a repayment cost of close to $40 billion, to fund a massive school building program. While the district was placing bonds on the ballot at a rate of almost one every two years, enrollment has actually declined by 10 percent, raising the question of what will be done with the vacant classrooms if this trend continues. But as usual, no one in authority seems to want to address the possibility that the district may be building, and taxpayers are being charged for, classrooms that aren’t needed.

The latest prominent example of LAUSD’s brain dead management style is the $1 billion program to supply all students with iPads. Before evaluating the wisdom of this move, it should be noted that even though the district would need hundreds of thousands of units, officials failed to negotiate a better than retail price.

Now that the program has begun, officials are actually surprised that some of the $700 iPads have gone missing and students have shown the ability to “jailbreak” – a term describing the process of removing limitations on the use of these Apple units. These students are now able to play games and surf the net freely, instead focusing on assigned studies.

Via: California Political Review

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