How to Grade the Los Angeles Students who Hacked School Computers?

In this last session of our month long seminar on American education we consider a story about Los Angeles high school students being smarter than their tech teachers. I imagine teachers in every nation want to use more computer technology in classrooms, but this story seems so American…..  

(I haven’t been writing about US political news for a while because it is so depressing and predictable; the Republicans are doing all they can to shut down the government, defund or repeal Obamacare, cut off food stamp assistance to millions of hungry citizens, and simply avoid governing.  

 (But I will try to force myself to write something about what happens when Obamacare goes into effect next week.  Our friend Ed Kilgore recommends a good primer on what might actually happen, contra all the lies and scare tactics of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and others. ) 

An IPad for every student K-12!  That’s 600,000 IPads that the Los Angeles School district bought from Apple and started handing out (free) this month. (The whole project, with IPads and wifi upgrades and embedded education material, cost the district $1 billion.) 

The second largest school district in the nation (NYC has just over a million students) has the usual challenges facing a large multi-ethnic urban educational system: over 2000 schools, a $7.3 billion budget that’s nowhere near enough, some problem teachers (big scandal of a molesting teacher at one school, the whole faculty reassigned), over 25% dropout rate, huge income gaps between students, who are 72% Hispanic, 10% African America. 

No one said IPads would solve all these problems, but it does seem that Americans (and others?) just love throwing technology and money at problems that seem a lot more complex than anything a tool and cash can solve. 

So the happy students took their IPads home, as assigned, to do homework, but were chagrined to find they couldn’t go on Facebook or play music or games.  The school had blocked their computers from entertainment and social media sites.  

What the f****!? was the general response.   So the students did what their teachers encourage, what Apple encourages: they got creative, they thought outside the little box the IPad came in.  It only took a week for quite a few of the first 47,000 pilot program recipients to figure out how to delete their personal information and hence break the handcuffs of the Big Brother school district.  Voila!  All their favorite websites free for the taking.  Some students even started a black market, charging other students to unlock them also. 

Until the school district found out and ordered the IPads brought back, could only be used at school.  Most of them came back, not all; 50 or so are missing.  

What’s so American about this Los Angeles high school hacking scandal? Faithful readers of my column (are you out there?) will remember that in my very first column a year and a half ago, I described America as individualistic, materialistic, big, young, diverse and segregated, practical and entrepreneurial, musical, religious, violent and criminal.  This story exemplifies practically all of those adjectives.

 My favorite letter to the editor in the LA Times was from a retired LA school teacher, responding to a story headlined “Give Students an A+ in Hacking.”  He wrote, “As a former high school teacher of technology going back to 1978, I would have given these students no better than a ‘C.’ What took them so long?” 

He goes on to say, “A computer is a tool, just like a pencil is a tool.  It is not possible to prevent the misuse of either.  The school district should expend less resources on policing and blocking usage and more on making students smart and safe users of all tools.” 

Education, especially public education, has long been touted as the great equalizer in US society, giving less advantaged students a way out of lives of poverty and few choices. School administrators argue that the IPad project equalizes access to educational technology across the student population.  Upper income kids have computers, lower income don’t. 

Indeed studies show that the ever increasing income inequality in America extends to how much parents spend on education for their kids; in 1972 upper income parents spent five times as much as low income parents.  By last year it was nine times as much. 

I looked at those racial ethnic stats for the LA students; 72% Hispanic, 10% African American.  Where do all the white kids go to school?  Oh, I found out that LA has an additional 250,000 students in private schools, 1500 private schools, almost as many as public ones. 

Is that where the children of all the creative Hollywood folks go?  They’ve had IPads since birth.

Copright @ 2013 Deborah Streeter