The biggest problem with the iPad plan isn't the hands-on misuse of the tablets by students, however. It's that no one can explain what educational problem the iPad is supposed to fix.
Resources? Did it really make sense to use a school construction bond to buy 10,000 fragile, inevitably obsolescent electronic devices instead of, you know, building or upgrading school facilities? Or buying books (which don't tend to go astray even when they're taken home)?
As we've pointed out before, school administrators are often fascinated by advanced technology because they're technological rubes. Teachers, who have to deploy these things in class, are often less impressed, for good reason.
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In 2009, the Education Department studied how math and reading software influenced student achievement. The study found that the difference in test scores between the software-using classes and the control group was "not statistically different from zero." (I'd link to the study, but it's offline -- government shutdown, you know.)
The factor that always gets forgotten in the misty glow of educational tech is how to pay for it and keep it upgraded. It's also forgotten who really benefits from the expenditures -- the manufacturers. Is it any surprise that the most relentless promoter of tablets as learning tools is, um, Apple?
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What's needed for educational progress is good teachers, and more of them, with adequate supplies and comfortable school environments.
And not just any technology, but the right technology. As former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Austin Beutner observed Wednesday in an Op-Ed in The Times, some 250,000 L.A. schoolchildren need eyeglasses. Without them, they can't read a blackboard.
Do you really think it'll be better for them if they're squinting at an iPad instead? Teachers attest that equipping a nearsighted child with glasses makes an instantaneous improvement. Give that child an iPad, and you've accomplished almost nothing.
