LA schools iPad project: How it started ... before the bidding began
Superintendent John Deasy was a year into his tenure at the Los Angeles Unified School District when he started talking to the largest publishing company in the world, Pearson PLC, about working together on a digital transformation in public education.
He had inherited a school system in crisis: Thousands of Los Angeles teachers, counselors and librarians had lost their jobs during the recession; fewer than half of students were reading at grade level; more than 10,000 dropped out of high school every year. For Deasy, transformation was not just possible; it was an urgent mandate.
“I’m not going to be interested in looking at third-graders and saying, ‘Sorry, this is the year you don’t learn to read,’ or to juniors and saying, ‘You don’t get to graduate,’" he told KPCC in May 2012. "So the pace needs to be quick, and we make no apologies for that.”
That same month, emails show Pearson’s CEO and a sales rep met Deasy for lunch to pitch him on software under development that would harness the power of tablets. Using games, videos and other interactive elements, they said, it would revolutionize education and help struggling students like his.
Deasy jumped right in, documents show.
“Needless to say we have been in furious and exciting conversations since last Friday,” Deasy wrote in an email to Marjorie Scardino, then Pearson’s CEO, on Tuesday, May 22, 2012. “Looking forward to further work together for our youth in Los Angeles!”
He thanked her for lunch and said he was working with his staff on a “concept paper” on using her software and would have it to her in a week.
Scardino’s response was equally enthusiastic.
"Dear John, It's I who should thank you. My mind was racing all weekend, and I was so impressed by your intelligent and committed and brave hold on the moving parts of the opportunity. I really can't wait to work with you. I would love to think that we could together do this so well that in your Sunday visits to prisons you won't see one person who has been educated in LAUSD rather, you'll be meeting them as teachers, as contractors, as bankers (well, maybe not bankers), as poets all around the city. I'll stay by the mailbox. Sincerely, Marjorie”
Dozens of emails
Those emails and dozens of others obtained by KPCC through a public records request show Deasy directed his staff to figure out how to incorporate Pearsons’s software into the school system’s plan to transition to the Common Core standards.
Officials with Pearson were copied on communication between Deasy and Jaime Aquino, the district’s head of curriculum at the time, who expressed reservations at some of the costs and the speed with which the district was moving. Emails show Pearson weighed in on questions of how to finance software purchases.
Deasy also personally pitched Apple on working with Pearson, according to the emails.
Those meetings and conversations began nearly a year before L.A. Unified put the project out to public bid. Apple and Pearson won the contract on June 24, 2013, after committees made up of school district staff members picked them from among 19 bids.
Deasy and other school district officials have declined KPCC's requests for comment. In a written statement, a district spokesperson said they are still reviewing the emails.
L.A. Unified board member Steve Zimmer said he plans to question district staff about the emails at Tuesday’s board meeting. He obtained his own copies after KPCC first reported their contents on Friday.
“We have to make sure this is completely ethical and above board,” he said.
Deasy told the L.A. Times over the weekend that he was only discussing a pilot with Pearson in the emails.
After reviewing a report by L.A. Unified’s inspector general earlier this year, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office declined to prosecute anyone at L.A. Unified regarding the iPad and software purchases. Two high ranking school officials told Infographic: LA schools iPad project: How it started ... before the bidding began | 89.3 KPCC: