No Child Left Untableted 214
theodp writes "Made possible by a $30 million grant from the Dept. of Education's Race to the Top program, the NY Times reports that every student and teacher in 18 of Guilford County's (NC) middle schools is receiving a tablet created and sold by Amplify, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The tablets — 15,450 in all — are to be used for class work, homework, educational games — just about everything. With a total annual per unit lease cost of $214, Amplify was the low bidder of those responding to Guilford's Race-to-the-Top RFP, including Apple. Touted by Amplify as one of the largest tablet deployments in K-12 education, the deal raised some eyebrows, since Guilford's School Superintendent once reported to an Amplify EVP when the latter was the superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, coincidentally a proving ground of the Gates Foundation. Amplify and the Gates Foundation are partners on a controversial national K-12 student tracking database that counts the Guilford County Schools among its guinea pigs. Getting back to the hardware, after putting their John Hancock on a Student Tablet Agreement and the Acceptable Use Guidelines for Tablet, students are provided with an ASUS-made tablet "similar to ASUS MeMO Pad ME301T" ($279 at Wal-Mart). The News & Record reports on some glitches encountered in the first week of the program, including Internet connectivity issues affecting about 5% of the tablets."
No Child Left Untableted (Score:4, Interesting)
That headline fills me with unease. Sounds vaguely improper.
Maybe I'm just getting old but in my days, children were simply never verbed. It isn't polite.
Re:annual of $214! (Score:1, Interesting)
Then again, if the material is not being standardized by Texas, that's a win win I suppose.
Re:3.3 million down the drain (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrong, lack of basic information between the ears, not being on readily "on tap", means a person can't form a proper mental model to understanding any issue where geographical configuration is key. They won't understand why Russia, for example, would be much more interested in not having external forces involved in a civil war in the nearby trading partner. They wouldn't understand why a hurricane making landfall from state A to state D would also involve states B and C.
You are deluded that education in prior decades was solely focused on rote memorization, as writing, speech making and speech, and solving problems from principles was also taught.
Today's java programmer, to use your example against you, relies on frameworks instead of understanding the basic construction and implementation of the basic objects of the language, and so fails to recognize bad code in an interview. This is what I see at work with interviewees. Yes, they *could* "google it", but they won't when sitting and writing code.
Re:3.3 million down the drain (Score:4, Interesting)
No, your average US high school student lacks basic principles to do math, let alone make algorithms to automate the doing of math. You imagine an average student could automate the finding of a square root with just addition and subtraction and multiplication and branch after compare being the only operations allowed? The average student has no idea how to find a square root by any means other than pushing a button on a calculator, but even then could not give any situation where a need for a square root would be useful.
Re:3.3 million down the drain (Score:4, Interesting)
see my post:
My kids were sent to school in China for a few years.
While China may have the largest primary class size (37.1 per class) the kids found it much much easier when they came back to Canada.
Class size wasn't the issue, the work was challenging and the environment was strict.
Do you have any empirical evidence smaller class sizes pays off? Here (Ontario) they state 90.1% of classes have 20 or fewer students.
When the kids came back to school here they found it a joke. What they were teaching in Ontario was at least one year behind what they were studying when they were in China.