iFiasco in LA's Schools: Why Technology Alone Is Never the Answer
The opening sentence to a recent Los Angeles Times article says it all: It took exactly one week for nearly 300 students at Roosevelt High School to hack through security so they could surf the Web on their new school-issued iPads, raising new concerns about a plan to distribute the devices to all students in the district.
When educators and policymakers assume that simply investing in technology will “level the playing field” in schools, it’s clear that those of us in the DML community have a lot of work to do. As educational researchers who were teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, we want to discuss some of the biggest problems unfolding in the poorly designed technology plan.
Los Angeles Unified School District’s rollout of iPads has played out in an all too predictable fashion. The $1 billion venture into providing the tablet devices was ill-conceived from the start. And yet LAUSD’s top brass stubbornly holds on to the idea that they can reboot schools by thrusting students, particularly poor youth of color, into the 21st century by handing over shiny new digital gadgets emblazoned with a partially eaten apple.
In our research on the incorporation of smartphones in classrooms we see a strikingly and unfortunately similar pattern to LAUSD’s venture. The story routinely begins with adults who have
