Doomed from the get-go. That’s the rudimentary finding from a new Federal report (by the U.S. Education Department) exploring exactly what went wrong (and everything went wrong for that matter) with the infamously botched “1.3-billion iPads-for-all program” in Los Angeles schools.
The L.A. Times is out with a new report highlighting what Federal investigators have uncovered. All signs point to the program having launched without adequate planning or resources. There was no real understanding, the research shows, with regard to how the devices would really be put to good use for students in the classroom. The program almost seemed to prioritize getting the iPads to students rather than fashioning a plan to make the devices integral to their education.
Per the findings of the U.S. Education Department, the L.A. Times explains that the iPad distribution program at 47 schools in 2013 was plagued out of the gates. “Teachers were ill-trained, schools had spotty Internet connections and students quickly bypassed security filters,” today’s report notes.
Perhaps even more embarrassing is that there was never any framework in place to subsequently evaluate how iPads were aiding in the learning experience, which would have made it virtually impossible to tell if there were any real benefits to the program, and if so, what those benefits specifically were.
To read the full L.A. Times coverage of the utterly-disheartening new federal report, click here.
