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Bond Oversight Committe, Common Core, Common Core Technology Program, ipad deployment, ipads, ipads in schools, John Deasy, Monica Ratliff, Smarter-Balanced, State Standards, Stephen English, vacation pay
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The new LAUSD district 6 school board (BOE) member, Mónica Ratliff, is being blamed – personally and explicitly and completely unfairly – for at least one school’s pedagogy-free “deployment” of ipads.
Following problems earlier this year, ipads were “grounded” at the school site, although the reasons for this decision were never clarified. Several complete and sufficient explanations for this repercussion seem possible. For example, liability and responsibility of families and the district have yet to be worked out explicitly and in contingency-free writing (“willful” damage is the responsibility of families, but who decides what is ‘willful or deliberate’? how many times?). Another example might be the controversy around originally justifying long-term construction bond money to fund these ephemeral purchases. As “part of the infrastructure”, the ipads could be justified as electronics upgrades. But as soon as the ipads go home they become more like textbooks than like onsite hardware, invalidating the bond funding justification.
Yet for ipads to remain at school they must be secured and tracked. There must be a system to check them in and out daily. And there must be a place to store and charge a vast volume of electronics in even more massive (and expensive) carts within already-overcrowded classrooms overstuffed with 50 pupils and more.
The logistics are mind-bogglingly cumbersome; costly in terms of equipment, time and the actual purpose of our children at school: education.
Some of the 47 schools in the initial phase I “rollout” of the ipads have yet to “deploy” any devices for reasons that remain unclear but presumably relate to onsite infrastructure wiring.
So now, deploying the devices so late in the school year, under such restricted circumstances, requires such painful school-site juggling that the entire utility of the devices is negated. Entire pedagogical utility that is.
Because the logistics are so cumbersome these devices cannot be used by teachers in the classroom, or pupils at home, for the purpose of any actual learning. Instead, the utility of these already-dated devices has contracted to gratifying the testing needs of a gigantic, national testing consortium, “Smarter Balanced“, and the meshuggeneh federal Department of Education’s misnamed stepchild “Common Core State Standards” (the federal government cannot by law have anything to do with state curriculum and instruction, but they have manipulated its acceptance in the background all the same). Which is from the district’s point of view, apparently just fine as that is all they really wanted the ipads for anyway: testing.
Responsibility for this travesty of technology implementation should lay at the feet of the managers tasked with it. Responsibility does not lie with either watchdog committee properly monitoring the country’s largest technology purchase ever, or more inaptly still, with either committee’s chairs. It bears repeating that neither the citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee chair Stephen English, nor the BOE’s Common Core Technology Program committee chair, Mónica Ratliff, — that is neither political body nor individual constituents thereof, is responsible for turning Los Angeles’ 1:1 ipad program into a national disgrace. It may be the collective responsibility of the school’s board of directors, but they are tasked with trusting and nominally agreeing with the recommendations of their staff in the program’s implementation.
Fault should lie with the BOE decision, perhaps, to continue and even augment the employment of their superintendent at whose desk this buck should stop. But no individual board member, in a proper, duly elected and appointed effort to scrutinize a troubled and troubling initiative, should shoulder the blame for kindly and responsibly drawing attention to legitimate questions of safety, responsibility, implementation, value and utility surrounding LAUSD’s ipad program.
Indeed, there could be no better justification for urging continuation of the CCTP committee’s mandate. Dr. Vladovic take note: Reinstate the vital voice of Mónica Ratliff’s CCTP committee please!!
4 Comments
March 11, 2014 at 7:55 pm
It is regrettable that Ratliff appears to be scapegoated here when all she’s really after is accountability and to get it all straightened out before iPads go home to avoid another debacle. After watching hours of board meeting tape it’s obvious she’s not a roadblock. And neither is Mr. Gertner – I work with him, and he wants to get the devices out as much as anybody. Our problem at RHS is the same old problem of unfunded and under-resourced mandates. Some of the kids I’ve spoken to are sick of the whole thing and really don’t give a hoot about iPads at this point. As the RHS Title One coordinator I will say that I need our allowance for buying paper and toner increased at this point, especially if we are giving CST replacement tests on paper.
March 10, 2014 at 2:20 pm
I’d be interested which other schools have sent out similar robo calls or letters regarding Ratliff. If they’re in subdistricts outside Roosevelt’s, that would be a strong indication that the anti-Ratliff campaign has been orchestrated by Beaudry.
With each successive school board and CCTP ad hoc committe meeting it becomes increasingly apparent that Deasy, Inc. will stop at nothing to push this boondoggle through. And that in itself is a sure sign the entire process of acquiring the iPads is corrupt.
March 6, 2014 at 5:37 pm
The Roosevelt High School web site has posted a letter wriiten by Assistant Principal Ben Gertner.
The letter states that in a conversation between Roosevelt and District staff, LAUSD blamed the School Board, notably Ratliff, for blocking the Phase I distribution of iPads to students’ homes.
Considering the initial confusion at LAUSD about whether the devices would be allowed to go home, the multiple versions of parent liability letters that were handed out at various schools, whether parents would even be accountable for damaged or lost devices, and the lack of an established policy surrounding security issues, it’s extremely unfair and disingenuous of the District’s administration to pin the delay in students being allowed to take iPads home on Ratliff. On the contrary, the hold up appears to be the fault of poor District planning and their general ineptitude in the rolling out of this project.
I’d really like to know which District employee(s) placed the blame on Ratliff during that phone call with Roosevelt. I think that person or persons’ identity should be connected with the accusation in print.
March 6, 2014 at 5:49 pm
I agree that the source of this disinformation should be identified by the district. Could this not be understood as insubordination at best?
While that Roosevelt letter is buried in the article as a hyperlink, here it is for easy clicking: http://rooseveltlausd.org/cctp-ipads-not-released-to-go-home-distribution-again-delayed/
Note that other schools have similarly directed accusations of blame inappropriately toward boardmember Ratiliff, suggesting a pattern of explicit malice.