Detroit porkulus dump: $49 million for laptops
Criminey.
The Detroit Public Schools are overrun by corruption, violence, and incompetence.
Test scores are rock-bottom.
The teachers’ union sabotaged classroom instruction and denied schoolchildren an education through an apparent illegal work stoppage.
Yet, Washington went ahead and forked over $530 million in federal porkulus funds to reward yet more Detroit government school failure and bail out the reckless-spending boobs who mismanaged the DPS budget and engineered a fiscal crisis.
Today, we learn that $49 million of that money will go toward…laptops and computers:
Detroit Public Schools will spend $49 million in federal money to push technology in the district, including distributing 40,000 new laptop computers to students in grades 6-12 for use in class, as well as more than 5,000 new desktop computers.
…The district already has started distributing the computers and expects to deliver them all by the end of this school year, said Kisha Verdusco, a DPS spokeswoman.
The massive technology infusion totals 50,000 pieces of equipment — including 4,300 printer/scanners and more than 500 HP desktop computers for the 138 early childhood classrooms in the district.
These technology infusions have turned out to be gesture-driven boondoggles and political payoffs that squander precious educational resources — and with little, if any, measurable academic benefits.
More on the laptop boondoggle here and here and here, via reader Robert.
“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”
Liverpool’s turnabout comes as more and more school districts nationwide continue to bring laptops into the classroom. Federal education officials do not keep track of how many schools have such programs, but two educational consultants, Hayes Connection and the Greaves Group, conducted a study of the nation’s 2,500 largest school districts last year and found that a quarter of the 1,000 respondents already had one-to-one computing, and fully half expected to by 2011.
Yet school officials here and in several other places said laptops had been abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased pressure to meet state standards. Districts have dropped laptop programs after resistance from teachers, logistical and technical problems, and escalating maintenance costs.
…Those giving up on laptops include large and small school districts, urban and rural communities, affluent schools and those serving mostly low-income, minority students, who as a group have tended to underperform academically.
Matoaca High School just outside Richmond, Va., began eliminating its five-year-old laptop program last fall after concluding that students had failed to show any academic gains compared with those in schools without laptops. Continuing the program would have cost an additional $1.5 million for the first year alone, and a survey of district teachers and parents found that one-fifth of Matoaca students rarely or never used their laptops for learning. “You have to put your money where you think it’s going to give you the best achievement results,” said Tim Bullis, a district spokesman.
Everett A. Rea Elementary School in Costa Mesa, Calif., where more than 95 percent of students are Hispanic and come from low-income families, gave away 30 new laptops to another school in 2005 after a class that was trying them out switched to new teachers who simply did not do as much with the technology. Northfield Mount Hermon School, a private boarding school in western Massachusetts, eliminated its five-year-old laptop program in 2002 after it found that more effort was being expended on repairing the laptops than on training teachers to teach with them.
And now, $49 million down the drain in Detroit for more of this high-tech profligacy.
Criminey.
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Perfect: DPS says teacher tried to pawn laptop
And remember this: Philadelphia school uses laptops to spy on children at home
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Yet another example of dangerous fools’ thinking that form is more important than substance.
not completely down the drain, there was a local news story where a school teacher was trying to pawn hers at a local pawn shop, they turned her in, last I heard she was suspended WITH PAY….
Story…http://www.detnews.com/article/20101231/SCHOOLS/12310369/-1/ARCHIVE/Pawn-shop-stops-DPS-laptop-theft
Union rule…she will be on suspension with pay status until she retires.
twiggman – thanks, already added link in update
The real story should be to find out which computer consultant(s) gets paid and what his/her link is to the DPS decision makers.
Desks (excuse me,….student work stations), Blackboards (um….visual aids panels) and notebooks (no, not the electronic type) last for years and years and years.
A laptop computer is obsolete by the time you get it out of the box.
Besides, you can’t carve Latin Sux into your laptop.
All you people who don’t want Detroit’s underprivileged to have laptops are racist.
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Basic engineer math. $49 million bucks divided by 45 thousand computers equals $1088 per system. I saw good HP computers with a LCD monitor at Walmart for about $400 bucks on a 1 computer basis. When 45 thousand computers are sold I would expect the price to drop to $200 to $300 each. The $1088 price looks like a ripoff to me–Deja Vu all over again.
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And the rest of the $530 million–it might be better spent in providing real job skills to high school students. Two year community college courses in air conditioning and electrical skills. Practical nursing skills. Not everyone will be using a laptop or computer. School should provide immediate employment improvement when students graduate.
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Or real preparation for those who will go on to University.
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John Bibb
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Looks like payback has over ruled common sense.
The pawn shops will be overrun with laptops and thus the street value will be next to zero. And don’t forget Craig’s List will have to create a sub-catagory called “DPS Laptops”.
PERIOD 1 HOMEROOM NOTES:
OMG! kameisha U C wut keeshondra wearing? sad yeah? holla back
I wonder how many will be equipped with webcams?
On January 4th, 2011 at 1:49 pm, Hangfire said:
Besides, you can’t carve Latin Sux into your laptop.
Latin taught in Detroit public schools !? That’s rich !
Henrico County Virginia has had laptops in their schools for years. No academic gains that I could observe. My son and his friends use them for everything except schoolwork.
Oh yes you can!
4300 printers for 138 classrooms?
Ebonx suc
Maybe the students are too busy surfing for webporn or just playing solitare.
Don’t forget – these are foreign-made ASUS Eee notebooks. Total waste of $$. But given that the majority of Detroit is a dump, it is only fitting they outfit the children to be forever losers. Wait until they start crashing, viruses, etc.
Just curious, how much “crack” can you get for one of these laptops?
Will Detroit’s power grid support the extra electrical load? Are these energy-efficient laptops? Solar powered by any chance?
“Where’s your assignment?”
“Uh…the dog ate my laptop.”
$49 million here, $49 million there, after a while, we’re talking real money.
Ah, a play on “a billion here, a billion there,” etc, attributied to Everett Dirkson.
Considering the quote dates to the ’60′s, a billion isn’t even “real” money any more to the federal gov’t.
Its all going to turn into funny money soon at the rate our federal government is tossing around economic stimulia at many of the wrong targets.
[Brian is writing graffiti on the palace wall. The Centurion catches him in the act]
Centurion: What’s this, then? “Romanes eunt domus”? People called Romanes, they go, the house?
Brian: It says, “Romans go home. ”
Centurion: No it doesn’t ! What’s the latin for “Roman”? Come on, come on !
Brian: Er, “Romanus” !
Centurion: Vocative plural of “Romanus” is?
Brian: Er, er, “Romani” !
Centurion: [Writes "Romani" over Brian's graffiti] “Eunt”? What is “eunt”? Conjugate the verb, “to go” !
Brian: Er, “Ire”. Er, “eo”, “is”, “it”, “imus”, “itis”, “eunt”.
Centurion: So, “eunt” is…?
Brian: Third person plural present indicative, “they go”.
Centurion: But, “Romans, go home” is an order. So you must use…?
[He twists Brian's ear]
Brian: Aaagh ! The imperative !
Centurion: Which is…?
Brian: Aaaagh ! Er, er, “i” !
Centurion: How many Romans?
Brian: Aaaaagh ! Plural, plural, er, “ite” !
Centurion: [Writes "ite"] “Domus”? Nominative? “Go home” is motion towards, isn’t it?
Brian: Dative !
[the Centurion holds a sword to his throat]
Brian: Aaagh ! Not the dative, not the dative ! Er, er, accusative, “Domum” !
Centurion: But “Domus” takes the locative, which is…?
Brian: Er, “Domum” !
Centurion: [Writes "Domum"] Understand? Now, write it out a hundred times.
Brian: Yes sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir.
Centurion: Hail Caesar ! And if it’s not done by sunrise, I’ll cut your balls off.
I know the reason the public school students in Detroit can’t spell cat if you spot them the c and the t is because they only have paper and pencils, just as the reason we had rampant crime in our former public housing was because they were highrises with elevators, but 49 million bucks is 70,000 $700 dollar laptops. Are there really 70,000 students in the detroit public school district in the middle to high school, or are they giving laptops to kindergarteners also. I paid $700 this past year for my new laptop from Best Buy.
As if computers are the answer for the liberal education system which produces a literacy rate second to none. Of course, it’s hard to beat number one, when number one is at the bottom of the heap!
Now they be havin’ compooters fo’ wich to be Facebookin’, downloading def tunes, and sich!
Now we can look to the future when the next Kwame Fitzpatrick emerges from the mean streets to lead this backward, liberal bastion of humanity…Should be able to figure out how to make money off the public dole, racketeering, and thuggery by then!
No wonder why the federal debt is now over 95% of GDP.
Do they come with solar panels?
I wonder how many of those 40,000 laptops are going to mysteriously disappear over the next year or two?
We can’t even trust the State Department to hang onto its notebook computers, why should we be any more optimistic about the Detroit publik skools?
As it is, chasing technology to somehow “explain” decades of sub-par academic performance is just a variation of the old lib favorite, “Throw more money at the problem.” No doubt there’ll be a big uptick in traffic to pre-literate Websites in the Detroit area soon…
Anything would be preferable in the minds of big-city liberal school administrators to having to face up to the dual truths:
1. Most parents and school children in Detroit (and most any other big city as a general rule) don’t hail from cultures that put any value on education, and
2. The teachers and their unions in the “Blackboard Jungle” schools in cities like Detroit are mainly concerned with keeping their jobs and benefits. If the kids learn to read and to count above the number of their fingers and toes, that’s a happy coincidence.
I’m betting that the best outcome for all those soon-to-disappear notebooks will be that some of the kids will learn how to sell things on eBay.
Give the little critters their laptops, then close down the schools. Everything so-called students are supposed to learn can be taught online with some really great test scores coming in from those that do it. Some have to show up quarterly for testing by real live humans. If the students don’t complete their assignments, we’re still looking at the same results we’re getting now. We could break the back of the teacher’s unions in one fell swoop.
The Queens Library here is the largest library systen in the U.S., and most every black child and teen who has managed to own or “appropriate” a wide screen (rarely ever small) laptop from their parents or the luckless, use the Queens branches for the primary great scholastic purpose of downloading rap videos and movies and games (the librarians for the most part are too intimidated by the kids to correct them). It’d be exactly the same if they just handed out “free” laptops to the poor kids here, like the Facebook feely-good fool with Newark. It’s one total embarassment outside the greater black community here in southern Queens because the Asian children in Flushing and northern Queens have the least recreational downloads in the branches there as well as some of the top academic scores in NYC. It’s NEVER been an issue of lack of access; it’s an issue of instilling your young with the work-study ethos from day one, and no “Head Start” or other such cheats to self-incentive and self-esteem can replace plain old parental involvement in their kid’s sense of worth and values and motivation. Money better spent on vocational school programs.
James Greenidge
Queens NY
Dems throwing more money at a problem for which they have no solutions. You can lead a horse to water, but…..
…you can’t make them wear knee pads (Chuck Barris, The Gong Show, 1978)
We should give Detroit to Canada.
Cool! I’ll have to drive over to the city and see if I can’t get a good deal on a slightly used laptop.
Of course if history is any indicator, they’ll be found in unopened boxes in an abandoned school in a couple of years.
That’s what happened with the last batch of books they bought, not that the guy they bought them from cared.
What’s the over / under for the number of days before every one of these 45,000 computers is either destroyed or “lost?”
Laptop worth more than a house in Detroit.
The money would go further to remove tattoos and teach the men how to wear a ballcap. (Psst…the bill goes in the front.) OH, and buy belts.
Florida schools are firing teachers while money is spent on butterfly gardens. None of these “public employees” value the money they spend.
“….distributing 40,000 new laptop computers to students in grades 6-12….”
WOW! I may have to consider stopping by Detroit. I will be able to buy a laptop on the street as they start being sold to buy crack.